Justine sat in an old claw-foot tub that was big enough to hold all of Lake Pontchartrain, and the water was even warmer than that big brackish Louisiana lake. She wanted to soak the evening away, but every woman on the hall needed time in the bathroom. Taking the time to soak the stiffness from her muscles would have earned her some enemies. Also, she needed to get ready for her date. Regretfully, she got out of the cooling water and drained it, dried off, put on her bathrobe and house shoes, and shuffled down the hall to her room.
Georgette was already there, staring balefully at the clothes hanging in one of the battered walnut chifforobes that Mrs. Guidry provided for each room in lieu of a closet. It was just a narrow, tall, double-doored piece of furniture that didn’t hold much, but then Justine didn’t own much.
“D’you even know how to dance?”
“Some. My mother taught me the foxtrot. And some other things, like—”
“Can you Jitterbug? Because I don’t even want to hear about them other dances.”
Deflated, Justine shook her head.
“Where are they taking us?” Georgette asked, still staring into the closet. “Jerry didn’t say.”
“I think Martin called it the Ticky-Tacky. Something like that.”
“Ooh. The TickTock Club. I’ve heard about that place. The owner goes to New York every year, just to find out how they’re doing things in Harlem. The decor, the music, the costumes…they’re all the latest. These clothes ain’t even a little bit right for The TickTock. Mine ain’t great, but they’ll do, so let’s spend our time on figuring out what to do about you.”
She stuck her head in Justine’s chifforobe again and considered the dresses inside, one by one. Justine could hear each wooden hanger sliding along its wooden bar and clacking into the next one. “Nope. Nope. Goodness, no. Nope. Um…maybe?” She held up a plain black silk dress with a short bolero jacket and studied it. “I say we ditch the jacket. I hope you got a ruffled slip or two to go under the skirt. With the cute cut of that bodice, your waist’ll look so little he’ll be worried that you might break in half.”
Georgette yanked the bolero off the coat hanger, leaving a full-skirted dress that was very simple, yet with a certain austere elegance. It also had narrow straps that would show all of Justine’s collarbones and shoulders. She felt cold looking at it.
“It’s a lot better than your coveralls, and that’s all these men have ever seen you wear. Anything’s a big step up from baggy, dirty coveralls.”
“I can’t argue with you there.” Justine set up a mirror on her table and sat in front of it, ready to set her hair in pin curls. Georgette’s hair was already tied up in rags.
“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” Justine said. “It’s not going to dry in time.”
“Sally down the hall has a hand dryer. I borrowed it for the both of us.”
“I’ve heard about those. Never seen one.”
“I’ll go get it while you twist your hair up. And, for goodness sake, eat something. You can’t go to a nightclub on an empty stomach.” She shuffled through the food on Justine’s shelf and found the last piece of a loaf of bread. “This’ll do.”
Opening a jar of peanut butter, Georgette dipped a case knife deep into the brown goop and spread a thick layer on the crumbly white bread. “Here you go. It’ll keep you sober. Well, sober enough.”
As Georgette headed for the door, she said, “Get a move on. I gotta have time to teach you to dance.”
“I told you I could foxtrot. And my mother taught me how to do the Lindy Hop.”
“The Lindy Hop? Is this 1929? You’re gonna Jitterbug because I’m gonna teach you. I ain’t gonna let you embarrass yourself, and I sure ain’t gonna let you embarrass me. Let me go get the hair dryer before you and your foxtrotting give me a conniption.”
Georgette was out the door, but Justine could hear her mumbling. “She can do the Lindy Hop. Heavenly mercy. I bet her mother taught her the Charleston, too.”
Justine did indeed know how to do the Charleston, but this was a fact that she would not be sharing with Georgette.
She cast a nervous glance at the top shelf of her bookcase. She’d tucked the coded screen securely behind the books on that shelf, and she’d planned her to spend her whole Saturday alone with it, but now she was going to have to work. Maybe she should have turned Martin down and stayed home instead of going dancing, but how could she have known that Sonny was going to make her work on her day off?
Besides, what if there really was a spy watching her? Nothing would set off louder alarm bells than a woman turning down an evening at The TickTock and sitting home alone. This shameless bit of self-justification made Justine laugh at herself.
Nope. She was going to go dancing because she wanted to go dancing. It would be a great big joke on her if she stayed home, only to find out that she was wasting her time on a beat-up piece of window screen that was worth nothing more than any piece of scrap metal. She twisted up another curl and pinned it in place, promising herself that she would at least stay up late enough to transcribe the screen’s punched pattern onto a piece of paper before she went to bed. That way, she could carry the paper to the plant and work on it whenever she had a spare minute.
Her pin curls were done when Georgette returned with the hand dryer, a sleek, teardrop-shaped device made of powder-blue sheet metal and fitted with a wooden handle. Justine flipped its switch and pointed the nozzle at a pin curl just in front of her right ear.
Georgette had changed into a burgundy taffeta dress with a swingy skirt that stopped just below the knee, and she was carrying a couple of hemmed scraps of green taffeta that she held out to Justine. “Once you get the dress on, tie this long one around your middle. It’ll make a right pretty sash that’ll perk up that black dress.”
The other scrap of fabric had been twisted into an elegant rosette. Georgette balanced it on her palm, and the light caught its emerald softness. “This one will be real nice in that red hair of yours.”
“Oh, thank you! I’ll take good care of it for you.”
“I made it for you. Keep it. Now get that hair dry. I still need to show you the difference between the Lindy Hop and the Jitterbug. You do pretty much the same thing with your feet, but the Jitterbug’s all about what you do with your rear end.”
***
Justine quickly learned that holding a machine next to her head while it blew hot air on her wet hair was boring, even while munching on an open-faced peanut butter sandwich. Georgette had gone back downstairs to put makeup on her face and legs, so Justine couldn’t pass the time by talking. Moving the blast of hot air to another pin curl, she stretched her arm out and grabbed her mother’s copy of The Theory of Spectra and Atomic Constitution by Niels Bohr off the bookshelf. She was immediately captivated by the essay on atomic structure and the physical and chemical properties of the elements, so she said only “Hmmm?” when Georgette returned, wearing a head full of brunette ringlets waiting to be brushed and styled. She was carrying a hairbrush and a cloth bag full of hairpins.
“Doing a little light reading again, I see. Care to tell me what that book’s about? And do you maybe care to tell me why you’re reading something like that when you’re supposed to be excited about your date?”
“Is Martin exciting? Sometimes I think he is, but I can’t decide.”
Georgette shrugged. “He might be a little more of a thrill if the two of you were on the same side of forty, but there’s a war on. When it comes to men these days, you take what you can get. Anyway, you’re just gonna dance with him. You don’t have to marry him.”
“You think he’s that old? I knew he was older than me, but I wasn’t sure.”
Justine stopped to consider the men she saw from day to day. It was obvious that Sonny’s foot had kept him out of the military. Jerry’s wheelchair had done the same, and so had Charles’s hearing. How old were any of them? She thought Sonny was in his late twenties, but Charles and Jerry might be past thirty. And maybe Georgette was right that Martin was over forty.
Georgette was still speculating about Martin’s age and physique. “I couldn’t tell you how old he is, but there’s gotta be some reason he ain’t in the Army or on a ship someplace. Or flying a plane. Either he’s too old or he’s 4F. And if he’s 4F, it ain’t for any reason you can see with your eyes. He’s got quite a body on him.”
Justine unpinned one of her curls to see if it was dry. Not yet. She coiled it back up and clipped it to her head. “Well, like you say, I’m just going dancing with him.”
A knock sounded, and the door opened before Justine could say, “Come in,” or “Who is it?” or even “Go away!” Mrs. Guidry was the one opening it, and Justine was not surprised. The woman had no concept that her tenants’ monthly rent gave them any claim to privacy.
“I looked in your room, Georgette, and you weren’t there. All the other girls said that this is where I’d probably find you. You’ve got a phone call from somebody named Sonny,” she said, then she waited for Georgette to follow her downstairs as if she had no idea where the telephone was.
As she left Justine’s room, Georgette was muttering, “He wants me to come in tomorrow. I just know he does. We’re both gonna lose our day off. But does that mean that I’m not gonna kick up my heels tonight? No, it does not.”
Justine sighed in solidarity and aimed the hair dryer at the next pin curl. Then she went back to reading what Niels Bohr had to say about the Stark effect.
***
“Still got your nose in that book?” Georgette’s shoulders were slumped as she trudged back into the room, so Justine knew that she, too, had lost her day off. “Maybe you should try drying those curls while you’re lying in the bed. You’re gonna wish you did tomorrow, when you’re working all the day after dancing all the night.”
Justine patted her head all over with the palm of her hand. “Too late. I’m dry. Time to do my makeup.”
She spread the contents of her makeup bag across the table, starting with a shiny metal pot of pancake makeup to cover her freckles and even out any pinkness, plus another pot of cream rouge to put pinkness in the right places. Beside it, she set a smaller compact of cake mascara and her two tubes of lipstick, Pink Champagne for daytime and Red Coral for evening. All of her pots and tubes were encased in the same golden metal. A matching palm-sized compact held face powder to set all the other makeup so that it would hopefully stay on all evening. Another small compact held dark-brown powder for her pale-red brows. The best part of all was the tiny cut-glass bottle full of real perfume that she had so few occasions to wear.
“Holy Mother of God,” Georgette said, brushing her fingers over the gleaming tubes and pots. “You go out every day with a bare face when you got all this stuff?”
“Who needs powder in the morning when you’re just an hour away from getting dusted with black carbon?”
“You got a point.”
“My mother got this set for me for my eighteenth birthday, only a couple of months before Pearl Harbor,” Justine said.
She did not go on to say, Only a couple of weeks before she died.
“This was her favorite brand. The company stopped packaging makeup like this when the war made metal so hard to get. Fortunately, I don’t use it much, so it’s going to last me a long time.”
“And that’s one of her books you’re reading?” At Justine’s nod, Georgette said, “She must have been quite a lady. D’you think I might be able to understand that book if I read it real slow?”
Justine considered, then shook her head and said, “Someday, but not yet.”
Instead, she pulled another volume off her shelf and handed it to Georgette. “This is the book my parents used to start teaching me physics. Simple machines, ballistics, heat and light, thermodynamics. Things like that. You’ll need to keep practicing your algebra, but I think you can work on this at the same time.”
Georgette flipped through the pages. “Simple machines, you say. ‘Simple.’ Huh. Well, I’ll give it a try. You’re gonna be surprised at how friendly I’m getting with them little x’s and y’s.”
Georgette clutched the book so hard that her knuckles were turning white. Justine could see how badly she wanted to understand what was in it, but the book in Justine’s hand, the one that lay out of her reach for the time being, drew her like a candle draws a moth. “You’re reading this one particular book why? Out of all them books you’ve got to choose from, I mean. Why this one and why today?”
Justine took a second to answer as she colored her lips with Coral Red lipstick. After pressing them together and blotting them on a handkerchief, she said, “I’m just flailing around. My parents and their friends were doing some interesting work in using spectroscopy for separations. Everybody but Mama, Papa, and Gloria got jobs and moved far away, some of them right before the war started and some of them right after. I thought it was weird that they were so hush-hush about what they were going to be doing. Don’t you think most people would be chattering away about a new job that was so much better than their old one that they were willing to move across the country and start their lives over?”
Georgette’s big laugh bounced off the walls. “I talked the ears off of everybody in Des Allemands when I got this job. ‘I’m goin’ to the big city! And they’re gonna pay me so much!’ Everybody got sick of hearing it.”
“Exactly. I remember hearing Gloria say something once about the government scooping everybody up, but Papa elbowed her and she stopped talking. And I’ve been remembering something else lately. About 1940, there was a big stink about a paper on neptunium written by McMillan and Abelson. Physical Review published it, and why shouldn’t they? I mean, they’d identified a transuranic element, for goodness’ sake. Neptunium.”
Georgette’s mouth was full of bobby pins, but she managed to say, “I know I always publish my neptuniums.”
“Yeah, well, the British government got all upset about that paper giving away what they called ‘nuclear secrets.’ At the time, I thought, ‘Every atom’s got a nucleus. What’s so secret?’ Rumor has it that Seaborg wrote a paper about another transuranic element that got pulled and still hasn’t been published.”
Georgette was shaking her head. “I ain’t even gonna ask what ‘transuranic elements’ are.’”
“They don’t occur in nature, and they’re really, really big.”
Georgette nodded sagely. “That’s what I thought.”
“Anyway, the same thing happened to us a couple of months later. Papa was an associate editor for another journal, and Mama helped him with it. When she lost her vision, I helped her. Somebody submitted a paper about using carbon as a neutron modulator in fission piles. Uranium fission, I think. The British didn’t like that article, either. We had to pull it just before the journal went to press.”
“I only understood one word you just said, and it was ‘carbon.’ Does that connect this transuranic stuff to what us Carbonites do?”
“Exactly. Well, maybe. So while we’re dancing tonight, just imagine me thinking about using carbon for neutron modulation in uranium fission piles.”
“You’re gonna live alone for the rest of your life. You know that?”
Justine flashed her a brilliant Coral Red smile and batted her blackened eyelashes. “Look at me. He won’t be able to tell I have a brain in my head.”
“Repeat after me. ‘I’m supposed to think about the man I’m dancing with, not about transneuroniums.’”
“What’s wrong with thinking about both?”
Using a tiny brush cut to razor sharpness, Justine darkened her eyebrows, one stroke at a time. “Your hair’s so dark, I bet you don’t have to do this.”
“Yeah. Not my eyelashes, neither. Saves me some money on eye makeup. Just like them silk stockings sitting there on the bed save you money on leg makeup, but good lord. Where’d you get ’em?”
“I’ve had them since before the war,” Justine said, knowing full well that she was admitting that she hadn’t done any dating since before the war.
Georgette missed the opportunity to tease her about her scintillating social life, because she was still fascinated with the Bohr book on spectra. “You said that people are doing separations with spec-TRAH-scopy. Did I say that right?”
“You did.”
“So what’s the government wanting to separate?”
Justine was once again impressed by the way Georgette’s raw intellect cut straight through to the heart of things. She figured she should get just as quickly to the point.
“Do you know what an atom is?”
“The littlest, tiniest piece of stuff that there is?”
Impressed again, Justine said, “Basically, yes, but atoms are made of even smaller parts. Not long before the war, Niels Bohr announced that he’d broken a uranium atom in two.” She waved Bohr’s book so that Georgette could see the connection between their conversation and the essay she’d been reading.
“So that’s what you mean by ‘separation’? Breaking an atom?”
“No, not actually. Breaking an atom is usually called ‘fission,’ which comes from the Latin word for ‘split.’ You know…splitting an atom. But before you can get to the fission part, you’ve got to decide what atom you’re going to split, and Bohr used uranium. If I understood everything I heard right, there’s a particular isotope—”
Georgette gave a frustrated sigh.
“Just think of two uranium isotopes as different kinds of uranium. One kind doesn’t weigh as much as the other one, and it splits better. Because life is hard, the easy-to-split kind is really rare and it’s all mixed up with the regular kind. Don’t breathe a word of this, because all those scientists probably shouldn’t have been talking about top secret stuff in front of their friends’ little girl, but I think a bunch of spectroscopists got hired by the government to figure out how to separate uranium isotopes.”
“Honestly, Justine. I like hearing about this stuff, but guys can be…limited. Please try to be more interesting in front of the fellas.”
Justine dipped her fingers in the pot of rouge. “Splitting an atom releases an incredible amount of energy, way too much energy to be boring.”
Her words were met with a blank stare.
Justine tried again. “If you could control that energy, you could do a heckuva lot of things. You could power trains and cars and airplanes and boats. You could heat a city all winter long. You could make electricity. You could—”
Justine had been taught to follow every idea to its logical conclusion, but speech failed her when she reached the end of this train of thought. Slowly, she was able to make her lips frame the words. “Nuclear fission releases so much energy that you could use it to build weapons. You could build a bomb.” She tried to say, “You could build the biggest bomb you could ever imagine,” but her words failed her again.
Ever reasonable, Georgette said, “But we’ve already got bombs, and they do a real good job of blowing things up. Or so the newspapers say. What’s so special about a bomb that’s made out of atoms?”
It was a perfectly reasonable question. Skipping the opportunity to muddy the waters by telling Georgette that all bombs were made out of atoms, Justine said, “You’ve seen newspaper stories about whole squadrons of planes—lots of squadrons of planes—dropping bombs on a target, one after another after another? Right? Maybe you saw newsreels about it when you went to the movies that time. Every time that happens, hundreds of pilots risk their lives. Hundreds of factories like ours build the planes. And the bombs. Some of those pilots and planes don’t come home.”
“Well, sure. Everybody knows about all that.”
“What if it only took one plane carrying one bomb to do all that damage and more? What if you could wipe out a whole entire city with one bomb, one plane, and one crew? Maybe the enemy’s capital city?”
Georgette, who knew only one city that was a fraction of the size of Tokyo and Berlin, could still picture that level of destructive power. She paled.
“If we had a bomb like that, we could drop it on Hitler and on Emperor Hirohito and on everybody around them. This would all be over.”
Justine said, “Yes, it would,” and then she caught her breath at how easily they were both speaking of uncountable deaths. Then she said, “Or they could wipe out Washington, DC.”
“Not to mention our military bases. And every port we got.”
Both of their faces turned involuntarily to the Mississippi River not half a mile away. Just a few miles in the opposite direction was Lake Pontchartrain. The two bodies of water floated away everything Higgins could build, all the way out to the Gulf of Mexico and then to the world. The lake and river floated in raw materials to make more.
More, more, more. There was always a need for more materials, more planes, more boats and ships, because the war was a ravenous thing that ate planes and ships and human beings, always asking for more.
“We’re a target,” Georgette said. “Right here in New Orleans. We’re a target.”
Justine could see that this was the first time that Georgette had given their peril any real thought. She envied Georgette that innocence, which must have taken some perseverance for her to hold on to, considering that New Orleans had endured blackout drills to prepare its citizens for an enemy attack.
“Yes. We are a target. And that’s why we have to be first.”
“The first to kill a city with a single bomb,” Georgette said, her voice rough.
“If we’re not first, then the enemy will be. They’ll pick one of our cities and destroy it. Maybe a lot of our cities.”
The details weren’t clear to Justine, not yet, but her gut said that carbon parts would be very useful in separating the uranium isotopes that an atomic bomb would require. She came home every day and washed carbon dust off her hands, but she wasn’t sure she could ever wash off the blood of a pulverized city. She grabbed her compact and brushed blindly, fluffing powder over her whole face as she tried to brush away her horror.