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someone would be waiting for me.
    I looked at the ticket. Knoxville? Tennessee? That made no sense. How could anything important be happening in Knoxville? How could I possibly do significant work with uranium – no, that word is not allowed – tube alloy. How could I expect to make a valuable contribution if they were shipping me to the middle of nowhere? But, maybe – maybe – it was just another stop on my route to someplace else. If it was my final destination, was I being banished for the duration of the war? Was it my punishment for being a woman?
    It was nearing midnight as the train pulled into the station. This time the man holding a sign with my name on it was wearing a suit. And he wasn’t holding an envelope. I tried not to let my shoulders slump and telegraph my disappointment that this backwoods place was the end of the line. All the uranium talk must have just been a ploy to keep me interested and excited about the work ahead. After the devastation of the depression, I should have known better than to trust any corporation. Eastman Kodak had a good reputation, but it seemed now that it was only a charade.
    ‘Miss Clark? Miss Elizabeth Clark?’ the man in the suit asked.
    ‘Yes, I’m Miss Clark,’ I said as I reached out to shake his hand.
    ‘Charlie Morton. I’m head of Analytical Chemistry here at Clinton Engineer Works. You’ll be helping me set up our lab. But not until tomorrow. Because of the late hour, you’ll get to experience the best Knoxville has to offer: the Andrew Johnson Hotel. After breakfast, we’ll head out to the facility.’
    Morton claimed my bags and we drove off to the hotel on Gay Street, the tallest building in town. ‘The local radio station is up on the seventeenth floor,’ he said. ‘Not my kind of music – it’s all hillbilly music to me but they call it country. I was raised in the countryside but that was Massachusetts. No one there sang like they do here.
    ‘The area feels very primitive,’ Morton continued. ‘A lot of the scientists call this place Dogpatch, but it’s the home of the Tennessee Valley Authority and gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It really does have a lot to offer. But don’t count on anything but formal southern hospitality from the natives here – you won’t be making any friends. There’s a bit of bitterness about the land the government took from farmers to build our little experiment in the sticks.’
    By the time I’d climbed into bed, my future seemed a bit brighter than it had when I arrived at the Knoxville station. It certainly sounded as if there might be potential to do something significant, no matter how unlikely the location. The next morning, I was too excited to eat. I just moved my food around the plate with my fork as I drank coffee from a thick, white mug.
    We set out for Clinton Engineer Works and in a few miles, the paved city streets gave way to a dirt and gravel road running through rolling, lush, green and cow-filled countryside that reminded me of the hills of Virginia. Despite their primitive composition the roads were smooth and free of ruts. Things changed when we crossed a bridge. It was jarring to travel through all that natural beauty only to confront long barbed-wire-topped fences which ran for as far as I could see. Even more intimidating were the ponderous tanks squatting like all-powerful trolls, their turrets pointed straight at the entrance – straight at us. And not just tanks, I also spotted a machine gun barrel poking out of a pillbox-shaped shack.
    A uniformed man emerged from that little building with a pistol prominently displayed on his hip. Charlie showed his identification badge to the soldier and the gate opened. Once inside, the smooth dirt and gravel road we’d travelled up to that point turned bumpy with a sparser smattering of stones and a plentiful supply of potholes.
    We passed naked dirt fields littered with upturned stumps not yet cleared away. The earthy