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coat and carried a clipboard, as much a part of her as her title, Fraulein Professor Doktor Ashufi. This was not Gottingen any longer; it was Berlin, and a war was being lost. She was still with Heisenberg. He had protected her until her own scientific credentials became protection of themselves. At that point, the Nazi officials were compelled to make her an “honorary” Aryan, as they had the Jewish physicists and mathematicians whose cooperation they needed. It had been only Jehan’s long-standing loyalty to Heisenberg himself that kept her in Germany at all. The war was of little concern to her; these were not her people, but neither were the British, the French, the Russians, or the Americans. Her only interest was in her work, in the refinement of physics, in the unending anticipation of discovery.
    She was glad, therefore, when the German atomic bomb project was removed from the control of the German army and given to the Reich Research Council. One of the first things to be done was the calling of a research conference at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin. The conference would be conducted under the tightest security; no preliminary list of topics would be released in advance, so that no foreign agents might see such terms as “fission cross-sections” and “isotope enrichment,” leading to speculation on the long-term goals of these physicists.
    At the same time, the Reich Research Council decided to hold a second conference for the benefit of the government’s highest officials on the same day. The idea was that the scientists speaking at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s meeting could present short, elementary summaries of their work in plain language so that the political and military leaders could be briefed on the progress being made toward a nuclear weapon. Then, following the laymen’s presentation, the physicists could gather and discuss the same matters in their more technical jargon.
    Heisenberg thought it was a good idea. It was 1942, and material, political support, and funding were getting more difficult to find. The army wanted to put all available research resources into the rocketry program; they argued that the nuclear experiments were not showing sufficient success. Heisenberg was a theoretical physicist, not an engineer; he could not find a way to tell the council that the development of the uranium bomb must necessarily be slow and methodical. Each new step forward in theory had to be tested carefully, and each experiment was expensive in both time and money. The Reich, however, cared only for positive results.
    One evening Jehan was alone in an administrative office of the Reich Research Council, typing her proposal for an important test of their isotope-separation technique. She saw on the desk two stacks of papers. One stack listed the simple synopses the physicists had prepared for Goring, Himmler, and the other Reich ministers who had little or no background in science. The second stack was the secret agenda for the physicists’ own meeting: “Nuclear Physics as a Weapon,” by Professor Dr. Schumann; “The Fission of the Uranium Atom,” by Professor Dr. Hahn; “The Theoretical Basis for the Production of Energy from the Fission of Uranium,” by Heisenberg; and so on. Each person attending the technical seminar would be given a program after he entered the lecture hall, and he would be required to sign for it.
    Jehan thought for a long while in the quiet office. She remembered her wretched childhood. She recalled her arrival in Europe and the people she had come to know, the life she had come to lead here. She thought about how Germany had changed while she hid in her castle of scientific abstractions, uninvolved with the outside world. At last she thought about what this new Germany might do with the uranium bomb. She knew exactly what she must do.
    It took her only a few moments to hide the laymen’s synopses in her briefcase. She then took the highly technical