Warday

The Journey Begins

It is a bright August morning, the air dense and full of the smell of the wisteria that grows around our back door. I have been up since five-thirty, watching the sky go from gold to white. Jim will soon arrive, and I am beginning to count my minutes. There has been wind from the west, dusty wind, but I don’t mind; west of Dallas lie the South Plains, and, unlike the Corn Belt, their dust is low-content.

Anne has given me a breakfast of eggs and a glass of goat’s milk. Our eggs are small and brown, from our own bantam hens.

Good town birds. The goat’s milk is from the Perrys, across the street. Their son Robert keeps three goats. On the table there are hard, tart grapes from our arbor.

Anne sits across from me, her chin in her hands. Though she is only forty-six, her hair is white and as soft as down. There is about her face a nervous look that is new. It comes, perhaps, from the difficulty she has believing that our life will remain as tolerable as it has recently become. But there is also hardness in that look, a kind of determination that has developed over the years. You can see it in her eyes, a sort of flintiness. We have been married for twenty-three years and we know that our remaining time together is quite limited, and so she sees my journey as a family tragedy. But she understands my motives. I was a writer for many years, and I did not voluntarily give that up.

Anne will not stop me from doing something of real value with my skill.

“I’m going to miss you,” I say. She smiles, tight-lipped. “I’ll write,” I add. Her hand comes up, touches my face. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Loving and being loved is the great thing, I think. My love for Anne is as much a part of me as my eyes or my voice. For the first time in perhaps ten years, I will not tonight sleep in the same bed as she. After all we have been through to get to this peaceful corner of the world, it seems almost a travesty to leave her bed, no matter what the reason.

Andrew comes in, his eyes alight, his hands and T-shirt smeared with grease. He is really an artist with machines, my son, and he has kept our ancient Dodge in superb order since we bought it in ’90. It is a ’75 model with a beautiful old-fashioned electric ignition of the type that survived EMP. More modern cars, with them electronic ignitions and microchip-controlled carburetion systems, were rendered inoperable. Jim says that there was an AP wire story to the effect that fourteen million electronic ignitions were destroyed on Warday. Since Warday, an average of a million replacements have been made each year. At this rate, close to half of the disabled cars will have been ruined by weathering long before they get new ignitions.

Our precious Dodge cost us twelve gold dollars, a sum it took me two years to raise. But it runs, and the highways aren’t crowded, and sometimes in the dead of the night one or the other of us has the trapped dream, and then we like to get in it and drive westward, toward cleaner land, along the dark, empty Interstate.

I am leaving the car behind. It is too expensive and difficult to journey by private vehicle.

“You’ve got a dozen hardboiled eggs in your backpack,” Anne says. “It’s all I could get out of the banties.”

“It’s a lot.”

“I made some bread.” She hands me a loaf, and my heart almost breaks. Flour is hard to get these days, and she must have hoarded this carefully. It’s quite a surprise.

“What a nice gift. I had no idea.”

“Just remember that there’s more where that came from.”

All her life, Anne’s been insecure about her ability to keep me.

But it is I who should worry. I feel she is a better wife than I am a husband. We kiss and she is fervent. Her fingers are linked at the back of my neck. “I love you so,” I whisper into the soft white hair.

We stop at last.

I take the bread and put it in my backpack.

Andrew has washed his hands and sat down at the table. He is a tall, rangy thirteen-year-old. His memories of prewar America are fading, and I regret that. On Warday he was six weeks away from his ninth birthday. He remembers New York chiefly as a place where you could get a chocolate-chip cookie or a danish at Cake Masters whenever you wanted it. I know that this is an awfully small memory of that glorious place, but so far I have been unable to discuss with him the true nature of our loss. That city was part of my soul. Despite its size, its loss seems a deeply personal thing. I did not lose the towers but the view of them from the roof of my building, not the museums but my own personal experience of the great works there, the paintings that were looted from Manhattan museums or rotted there, and the ones that burned in Brooklyn.

I felt comfortable working in New York. I wrote all my prewar novels there. My films were set there.

How anachronistic those books seem now, those light entertainments that were my life’s work in the last days of the old world.

I was rich in New York, and there also I knew the shuddering poverty of starting out. I find, though, that my memories return to it less and less often now. As I grow older, my mind jumps back further, to the San Antonio of the 1950s and 1960s, in the fine days of my boyhood.

Andrew is looking at me. Our eyes meet. For a moment he is grave, his face full of unexpected tension. “Good luck, Dad,” he says. We have talked at length about my journey, and he approves.

He also knows the risks. “I’ll take care of Mom,” he says. “I can do it.” I believe that. At the age of ten, this young man kept his head about him when he was starving. He organized midnight forages to abandoned warehouses, learned at the library how to recognize edible plants, and never spoke a word of complaint through all those terrible months. At twelve he helped on a disinfecting crew during the flu, then faced that disease himself, and lay in this very house between life and death. “What happens, happens” he said then. “I know that God’ll keep me.” He has seen the dead stacked in heaps, being dealt with by bulldozers and lime; he has lost friends many times, and seen this neighborhood all but emptied, then refilled again by people more like us than the original residents who had been here before the war. Our newer neighbors are leather-hard.

I reached my maturity in a world of electronic ease. Andrew remembers my Apple and our RCA TV, but he is saving for a radio and eagerly awaiting the day we get listed for a Japanese computer. He has it all picked out: an Epson 221 with so-called artificial intelligence. But he has little concept of the electronic village. When he wants to reach a friend, he is more likely to write a letter than to try to telephone. It isn’t that Andrew is totally deprived of the advantages of electronics now, but that they were unknown to him during his most impressionable years. Until this year he has experienced telephones as bulky, unreliable things. Before the war, we placed what now seems a fantastic level of reliance on the most fragile electronic webbing.

I think of the Japanese. Even their immense productive capacity has not been enough to rewire the United States.

There is a sound of footsteps outside, and Jim Kunetka comes in the back door. He is blade-thin, smiling, looking rather haggard.

When I ask if he slept last night, he only smiles more. Anne gives him oatmeal and grapes, and he eats eagerly. He has been my friend since we were children. Lately he has been working as a journalist, while I have gone into microfarming and indoor garden design. I can build you a hydroponic garden sufficient to supply a family of four with vegetables year-round, and locate it indoors so you don’t have to worry about fallout or residual buildup. Before the war I was a middle-range novelist. We were happy and fat then. My horror stories were successful, because happy people crave the luxury of artificial fear. I wouldn’t write one now—the very idea is loathsome. (Although, I must admit, I’ve begun to get a trickle of royalties from Europe and Japan. It is strange to see the computer printouts from my British agent, like ghostly documents from a world that is gone.)

“Our appointment is at eight-thirty,” Jim says in his most brisk manner.

I swallow the last of my milk and get up. Anne and Andrew and I hold each other for a moment, our faces touching, our arms around one another’s shoulders. We have always hugged like this, the three of us. For me it is a symbol of our endurance as a family and as civilized people, and of the truth of our love.

We say good-bye in the hug. Anne’s expression remains firm and calm. It’s not that we ignore our tears. I remember a time when people were embarrassed by such displays of emotion, but no more. We need our luxuries, and tears are cheap, but this is not the moment for them.

Jim and I leave. The hourly Dallas Transit bus will stop out on Forest Lane in ten minutes. We refuse Andrew’s offer of a ride to the bus stop. I’d rather he and Anne stayed together, and, in truth, I don’t think I can bear to prolong this parting.

The sun is already hot. We pass through the neighborhood and turn onto Piano Road. Abandoned condominiums line both sides of the street. Chateau Versailles, Woodridge, Oak Park II—names from the past. There is no longer a housing shortage in this country, not with a thirty-percent population decline in five years.

Our little nuclear war was not about ultimate and final ends at all. The issue was not Armageddon, it was consequences. Seven million people died on Warday. My family and I were twelve miles from Ground Zero of one bomb, and we survived.

We are used to death, though. All of us know how easy it is to die. Not an American lives who has not lost somebody—friend, family member, lover. More than sixty million people have died in the years since Warday, of malnutrition or diseases brought on or made worse by weakness. Some have died from radiation poisoning. Others have given their lives to cancer and the new disease, NSD.

Jim tells me that the British Relief estimates that there are still a quarter of a million war-related deaths every month. If I die of cancer, I will be counted among them one of these days. Warday was a flicker of hell. The rest has been consequences.

Only the first ragged salvos of missiles were actually fired. Immediately upon their detonation, both sides experienced the collapse of their elaborate command, control, and communications nets, and the war went out like a carelessly struck match.

I don’t think anybody ever seriously considered that a limited nuclear war would be as brief as it actually was. God knows what would have happened to us if there had been another exchange, or if the two sides had been able to carry out even the smallest part of their plans for each other. Consequences only have meaning when you are living in them.

In New York I learned how it felt to get caught in a “trivial” nuclear war. Here in Dallas I have learned every agonizing detail of the consequences—the long, unforeseen drama of the aftermath.

No planner ever dreamed that it would be as small as it was. No doubt some prewar strategists would have felt confident about a nuclear exchange like the one we had. I can see the memo now:

As many died on Warday in this country alone as in all of Hitler’s gas chambers. And afterward—all I can say is that the death of friends no longer surprises.

On this fine Dallas morning Jim walks along beside me, silently. He was like this years and years ago, on patrol in Vietnam, his eyes seeming to look inward, his face in almost meditative repose.

I remember the day we got on that Pan Am jet to come home. The moment the plane was in the air he changed back to his old self, voluble, full of laughter, his wit at turns fierce and gentle. Now the silence is customary. Jim has killed to stay alive, and he has seen hard things. Because he got the flu early, he was able to come and go as he pleased during most of the epidemic. To this day he is short of breath from the scarring on his lungs, but he survived. A week after his recovery he took his camera and notepad and traveled through the Midwest on behalf of the Dallas News Herald. It was the height of the epidemic. He walked the streets of Cincinnati during the Ten Days, and saw what a modern American city in the grip of an uncontrollable plague was like. He took the classic photograph of the stacks of dead burning in Eden Park. Never once has he spoken about his experiences there, and nobody asks him to.

His pictures and published account are sufficient testimony.

People greet us at the bus stop. Winnie Parker embraces me, so does John Gordon. I can understand why modern custom has replaced the handshake. To hold others is to maintain something. A handshake confirms distance, and we don’t need that anymore.

The bus comes at 8:12, right on time. We get in, jamming to the back as best we can. Because of the cost of parts, it can be very expensive to run a car, but the bus fare is two cents here in Dallas.

The bus soon reaches the Central Expressway and turns in toward the downtown area. The only time it leaves the expressway is to stop at the Meadows Building, where the Centers for Disease Control has its regional office. I suppose that it is the largest non-military agency of what remains of the United States Government.

Maybe the Agriculture Department is larger, but I doubt it. CDC is heavily supported by the British. U.S. tax collection procedures are still too minimal to guarantee the kind of budgetary consistency a massive operation like CDC requires. What the English do is simple: they pay CDC’s salaries out of their general exchequer, then bill the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta, which transfers gold down at Fort Knox from the American pile to the British pile.

Half the passengers on the bus get off at CDC. The rest of us continue on into downtown. A group of girls in Rat Patrol uniforms sing a familiar song, made popular by the rock group Sunshine.

I must confess that I don’t like Sunshine’s relentless good cheer any more than I liked the facile anger of The Bad back before the war. I was a Bach fan back then, and I am a Bach fan now.

But the Rat Patrol girls are fresh-faced and full of the winsome joy of their song. To a man my age, the young are so beautiful to see.

“Hey, Whitley, we’re here.”

“Sorry.” I follow Jim out of the bus. We are at the Adolphus Hotel, which is the Southwestern headquarters of the British Relief. And some say, also, the true seat of government of the Southwestern United States.

The Adolphus is in superb repair, unlike many Dallas structures, which have suffered mainly from this country’s continuing glass shortage. There are no cracks in the facade of this beautifully restored old hotel. I can remember, dimly, coming here with my father, driving up from San Antonio in his black Cadillac, when he was doing business with a prewar billionaire named H. L. Hunt.

Dad and his partners were trying to interest Hunt in drilling for oil in Lavaca County in South Texas, but I don’t think they ever succeeded.

The Adolphus of today is much more elegant. We pass through big doors elaborate with polished brass, and confront at once a receptionist behind a wide desk. To her right is a Phillips computer, its screen glowing. To her left is a communications console. She is wearing the summer uniform of the British Emergency Medical Relief Organization, a white peaked cap with blue trim, white shirt with blue-and-gold epaulets, white skirt, and white shoes. Altogether, she radiates health and a kind of deep, interior confidence I remember well. It was commonplace in the prewar United States.

Behind her, two blue-uniformed bobbies stand at parade rest in front of the elevators.

“May I help you, please?” she says quickly.

“James Kunetka and Whitley Strieber to see Mr. Shandy.”

Jim’s voice is smooth, his manner calm and affable. He comes here often, looking for news. I cannot help but be uneasy in this foreign-controlled enclave. Like most Americans, my trust in massive central governments is nil. I am uneasy around these British civil servants with their paramilitary pretensions, though I know that their contributions to our welfare have been enormous.

The receptionist types our names into the computer. In a moment the communications console beeps. She picks up the receiver, listens, puts it down. “You can go right up.” She presses a buzzer and one of the bobbies steps forward. By the time he reaches us, she has filled out two green tags. We are expected to put them in our shirt pockets so that, folded out, they can be seen at all times.

We are accompanied to the sixteenth floor by the other bobby.

There, a third policeman shows us to Room 1620, which is marked simply CONTAGIOUS DISEASES. There is a faint smell of sausages and coffee in the hallway.

Another secretary shows us into a cramped outer office, which is dominated by a communications console and computer identical to the ones downstairs. The next moment Jim is introducing me to the inhabitant of the more commodious inner office, a man of medium height with a badly sunburned bald head and a sort of blustering joviality about him. He is in a summer uniform with large wet spots under the arms. He gets right down to business. “I can give you an hour,” he says.

Jim takes off his backpack and pulls out his recorder. “The idea is that you simply talk. We won’t ask many questions. Just tell about your job. Your life here. Whatever you want.”

Shandy regards us. “I’d anticipated questions.”

“Do you feel you need them?” Jim asks.

“Well, I suppose not. It’s just—more convenient, you know.”

His eyes meet mine. His gaze is blue and direct. “Before we start, I want to know a little bit about your plans.”

Jim smiles. “We’re still going to Aztlan, Mr. Shandy.”

Shandy’s lips tighten. “We don’t recommend it.”

The Hispanic Free State that has come into being around El Paso is notorious in this part of Texas. People are terrified of Aztlan. Our visit there will be the first great challenge of our journey.

“Aztlan is extremely dangerous,” Shandy says. “We’d really prefer that you stay in Texas.”

“Who is ‘we’?” I ask.

“The U.K. contingent,” he snaps. Then he picks up the little Sanyo recorder. “You have a disk in this thing?”

“All set. Just start talking.”

Shandy settles back. After a moment, he begins.

INTERVIEW Charles Shandy, U.K. Relief Official

My work as a public health officer has taken me to many parts of the United States, but I have spent most of my time in Texas, being attached to the United Kingdom Emergency Medical Relief Organization, Southwest Region (HQ) in Dallas, as Director of Contagious Disease Control. I have been here in an official capacity for three years. Prior to the war, my experience in America was limited to a three-week vacation in San Francisco. We exchanged our house with a couple living there, the Mannings. I remember it as being a beautiful city and formed a very favorable impression of the American people from my experiences in California. When the King and the Prime Minister described the situation in America on the telly in the winter of 1988, I was among those who volunteered for the relief effort. One cannot fail to remember the American response during and after World War II, or the close ties between the two countries. I was then assistant managing director of the Albert Doring Company. We specialized in the transport of live vaccines to tropical areas, so I knew a good deal about contagion.

At least, that was what I thought at the time.

During our prewar vacation, my wife and I traveled up and down the West Coast on a train called the Starlight, and really had a great deal of fun. California was beautiful, and the Queen’s having been there the previous spring—that was the summer of ’83—meant that the people were more than usually kindly disposed toward us English.

I have been once to San Francisco since the war, and found it quite a tattered and crowded version of its old self. But certainly recognizable. I went to call on the Mannings, but nobody in the road knew what had become of them. The family occupying their house would not talk to me.

My primary job is to identify outbreaks of treatable contagious disease and allocate appropriate Relief resources to them so that the problem will be minimized. It is not generally understood, but our main function is to supplement existing American services.

The ordinary citizen views the country as being without any internal authority, but this is not the case. There is still a strong federal presence. Certainly in health care. All surviving physicians have, for example, been recorded in a new central registry maintained by the Centers for Disease Control. Hospitals can, as of last year, report their supply needs to the Centers also, and get fairly rapid allocation of medicines and equipment. The loss of records and trained bureaucratic personnel that occurred when Washington was destroyed was certainly damaging to health care, but it has not proved fatal.

I work very closely with the Centers for Disease Control. My experience with the CDC has been very good. The Centers have grown tremendously since the war. There has been great advance in identifying the numerous mutant disease factors that have appeared among the American population. The progress with pseudomonas plague, which has become a significant cause of death in the Southwest since the war, has been spectacular. The death rate from this illness has been reduced to forty-five percent, primarily as a result of the development of nonantibiotic prophylaxis, which was done at CDC. We have helped in educating the population to identify and report plague cases so that isolation and treatment can be effected.

In the past year we have not had the continuous round of problems that were encountered at first. Certainly nothing on the scale of the Cincinnati Flu in ’90. Worldwide deaths from that disease are estimated at approximately two hundred and thirty million, twenty-one million of them in the United States and two million in Europe.

But the U.S. population is better fed and stronger now, so we expect the next pandemic to be less damaging here than was the last.

We anticipate another expression of this hybrid flu, and are relying heavily on CDC results in the development of a treatment regime.

Actually, one of our major projects at present is to teach CDC pneumonia prophylaxis, the construction of steam hats, the various means of assisting the breathing-impaired, control of circulation with hot and cold spots, and such things. CDC has really worked miracles with the very simplest materials and procedures.

The objective of their work is to develop effective medical treatment for serious disease, treatment that can be applied at home by family members and by the victims themselves. On another front, we are underwriting the medical faculties at the new University of Texas Medical School here in Dallas, and providing British doctor-professors so that local medical personnel can concentrate on hospital work.

Despite all this effort, we are not out of the woods. Frankly, however, the drop in U.S. as well as world population is also going to mean a long-term reduction in pandemic disease, if only because the remaining population groups are obviously going to be farther apart and have fewer contacts with one another. Despite this, it must be recalled that, worldwide, health systems remain frail. Supply lines are long and subject to extraordinary stresses. Fuel may be unavailable to move a shipment of drugs from the U.K. to America, for example. On the other hand, the lack of communications—a situation that is really improving fast, by the way—may simply mean that a disease outbreak goes unnoticed by us until it reaches an area where we have a permanent station.

This was the case with the cholera epidemic that created such suffering in South Texas last summer. We consider this to be a deeply damaged area, with the extensive residual radiation contamination from San Antonio, the uninhabitable zones, and the presence of an ill, malnourished, and restless Mexican population to the south. There was an unnoticed migration from Mexico into Texas all summer—more than three hundred thousand individuals were involved, virtually all of them starving. Many of these people moved right through the San Antonio Red Zone and began arriving in Dallas and Waco not only dying of starvation and radiation sickness, but carrying cholera. Neither of the first two problems is contagious, fortunately, but the cholera did spread to the local population. There were eight thousand deaths among registered inhabitants of the state, according to the Statistical Services Office.

Our treatment regime consisted of oral electrolyte replacement and treatment of exposed populations with tetracycline. The outbreak was quelled, but the real solution lies not in prophylaxis but in the restoration of sanitary facilities to prewar condition.

To communicate the extent of health problems in Texas, it is only necessary to talk about birth rates. The Southwest shares with the Northeast the dubious distinction of having a death rate four times in excess of its birth rate. And the number of mutations per 100,000 live births is 1,018, the highest in North America. In the Southwest we have placed birth mutations on the epidemic list and have put priority on obtaining working sonogram and amniocentesis equipment, so that parents can have some warning that their child may not be normal. In addition, the Relief has established criteria for abortion and mandatory destruction of nonassistable live births, to relieve parents of this difficult responsibility.

We encourage relocation of individuals out of the Yellow Zones south and east of San Antonio, and routinely triage those who refuse to move. The population of these counties has dropped roughly ninety-one percent since the war.

Since the beginning of my tour I have dealt with Cincinnati Flu, cholera, the first Nonspecific Sclerosing Disease panic in Dallas, a massive outbreak of brucellosis in Amarillo, apparently caused by the ingestion of contaminated milk smuggled up from Gonzales County, and numerous other smaller crises. I cannot say that my job is less than exceedingly challenging.

When my four-year tour of duty here is up, I expect to be posted back to England for six months of R-and-R and then down to the Argentine, where we have an extensive operation contending with malnutrition and its associated diseases.

You have asked me to be as personal as possible. What is the life of a Relief officer actually like? Do I meet with any hostility on the job? Of course, a certain amount. And I have emotional difficulties of my own. I must often make decisions that shorten and even take life. When I must isolate populations to prevent the spread of disease, and sometimes even withdraw medical assistance to allocate it to areas where help will still matter, I all but sweat blood.

On the other hand, I have been able to help enormous numbers of people. We have a large number of burn cases in Dallas, many of them scarred to the point of crippling: refugees from the South Texas firestorm, some of them profoundly crippled. I was a part of the committee that decided to allocate sufficient social resources to these people to prevent their dying of starvation or neglect and also to house them in public facilities. We do make decisions in favor of life whenever we can.

I live in an apartment at the Adolphus Hotel, along with the rest of the British here. Our government purchased the hotel because its large number of small suites are ideal for housing single public officials. Only our Commissioner has his family with him.

Until the Southwest Area is reclassified as safe, the rest of us may not bring our families in. So I have two lonely rooms with a long view to the south. The hotel service has been maintained quite well, so I am comfortable. Most of our foodstuffs and all of our liquor is imported. The food is all tinned, unfortunately, because we cannot risk building lifetime dosage to dangerous levels if we are to remain in our jobs for any length of time. So we cannot eat local food or drink local water. Dallas’s water supplies are from lakes, so there is a definite radiation problem, persisting even now. In the summer, long-half-life particles blow up from the south, and in the winter they come down from the north.

There is one saving grace here, though, and that is the people themselves. These are terribly determined people here. In fact, we have encountered few Americans who have not responded to the catastrophe in some positive manner. For example, Dallas normally works a six-day week now, and goes from eight to six. I have met some of the bravest and most wonderful people I have ever known here. I will never forget their calm courage in the face of death, nor their willingness to expose themselves to danger for the sake of others.

During the flu, for example, our main problem was keeping victims isolated from people who wanted to help them and were willing to endanger themselves to do so. At present we are turning away three-quarters of the applicants for paramedical training, because the teaching staff must concentrate on doctors. People in the paramedic job are exposed to contagious disease and radiation as a matter of routine. Another example of the high morale involves farmers. When we must condemn produce—which happens less and less often now, I’m glad to say—you would expect anger on the part of the farmers. We have come to anticipate complete cooperation. When crops are suspect, the farmers themselves are the first to tell us. “I got in a thunderstorm on the way in, looked like it had blown up from the south,” they might say, and assist us in checking the shipment for hot particles. They can be trusted to give the food to the disposal teams for burial if necessary. And these are all people who have known starvation in the most personal terms.

I recall that we sent out an emergency call for cleanup teams after the hot thunderstorm in April of 1989. There were hot spots all over Dallas. And by ’89 it was all long-half-life stuff. This radiation was not going to dissipate. We got more volunteers than we had gear for them to wear. People who were already triaged volunteered to work without protective clothing, which was in short supply. I think that the city was probably saved as a viable human community by the men and women who gave what remained of their lives during that cleanup.

Fortunately, most of the local thunderstorms are generated over Oklahoma and North Texas, so a hot storm coming up from the south is rare. There is the problem of radiation being carried down from the Dakotas, but this is not too severe. Most of that flow is southeastward, and affects the Midwest.

I was a part of the South Texas Emergency Relief Project in May of ’89. There were many people living between Houston and San Antonio who had been out of touch with the outside world for seven months. As it did throughout the country, the electromagnetic pulse destroyed most of the televisions and radios, along with computers, radar stations, medical equipment, and car ignitions.

Add the bombing of San Antonio to the general chaos, and one can see that the conditions would be truly terrifying.

Initial reaction in rural communities was to go toward the cities. We must recall that in less than a second a silent and invisible EMP burst had plunged people from the twentieth century to the Middle Ages. So they knew absolutely nothing of what was happening beyond the borders of their own towns. People who could have direct-dialed Tokyo one second could not telephone the county sheriff the next. The disorientation was extreme. So they went toward the source of communications, which was the cities. But in South Texas this was a terrible error, because San Antonio was in flames. In fact, the city survivors were streaming into the countryside—not many from San Antonio, but hordes from Austin because of the fire and Houston because of fallout. Many Houstonians, in their confusion, went toward San Antonio, not away from it. Apparently the traffic jams to the east and north of the city were so bad that escape westward was the only alternative. The sheer massiveness of the attack on San Antonio created damage and injuries previously unexpected. There were large numbers of people with sight loss due to flash effect even miles from Ground Zero. Others suffered not only burns but toxic reactions to synthetic-fiber clothing that had melted into their skin. Like the other cities, San Antonio was struck with airbursts and groundbursts, creating a massive dust cloud. The large number of huge weapons detonating simultaneously at first blew immense quantities of dust into the air, then created updrafts that drew it upward where it mingled with particles created in the fission phase of the explosions.

Conditions in such places as Lavaca, Gonzales, and DeWitt counties were appalling. The populations had quadrupled in the first days after the war. Gasoline and food ran out very quickly.

Radiation sickness was virtually epidemic and was followed shortly by all the diseases we have come to associate with large groups of undernourished, debilitated people.

Although we arrived in Dallas three months after Warday, it was not until three more months had passed that we were organized enough to arrange an overflight of San Antonio and South Texas. We were in an SC-7 Skyvan loaded with extra fuel tanks in the rear of the passenger compartment so that we could accomplish a round trip to and from Dallas if ground conditions were too unstable to permit us to land. You must recall that we had been broadcasting into this area on all available bands for some months, and getting no response. Military recon flights indicated an extensive population. So we did not know what to expect. The Commissioner wished to determine whether or not to extend British Military Rule to the area. This has not been done in many parts of the United States, but it is generally considered for areas where the population is in a state of confusion or upheaval, and the local authorities are not able to cope.

We flew as far south as Seguin, which is thirty miles from San Antonio. To avoid ground radiation we did not go below three thousand feet, but rather observed through binoculars. Seguin proved to be largely burnt.

At that time I got a look at the condition of San Antonio. I remember being astonished that this little city had been so terribly devastated on Warday. People had hardly even heard of it in Britain. One would have expected Los Angeles or even Houston before San Antonio. Of course, it has since come out that a good part of the planned Soviet attack didn’t go off, so in a sense San Antonio was simply unlucky. The Soviets had given it first-strike priority because of the extensive U.S. Air Force repair and refitting facilities there, and the huge complex of military hospitals, the atomic supplies dump at Medina Base, and the presence of a mechanized army that could have been used to preserve order across the whole of the Southwest as well as seal the Mexican border.

Perhaps, also, they knew that American intelligence did not expect this particular attack, and considered that there was value in surprise.

It is no wonder that the American military prohibits photography in such places. The effect on national and indeed worldwide morale would be very negative. From a distance there is nothing to see but the black landscape and the gleaming fused earth around the Ground Zero points. The land is mostly flat, with some rolling hills to the north. Although I never went to San Antonio before the war and had never met anyone from there, my first experience of that blasted corpse was, quite frankly, shattering. I sat at the window of that plane unable to move, unable to speak.

The cabin was silent. After a time we simply flew away.

We soon found ourselves over the town of Yoakum, Texas, which showed on our charts as a population area of approximately eight thousand people.

There were two tent communities to the south of the town. The fields roundabout were planted in corn and various vegetables, but looked to be in poor condition due to post-blast weather effects.

There were numerous horses about, many of them hitched to cars and pickup trucks from which the engines had been removed to lighten them.

Our appearance caused a great deal of excitement in the town.

People rushed out of houses and buildings waving sheets or articles of clothing or just their arms. We were able to land on State Highway 77 on the outskirts of town. There was a local airfield, but the runway was too cracked to justify the risk of using it, and the road seemed solid.

The first to meet us were a man and a woman on horseback.

They had rifles in holsters on their saddles, and as they came to a stop they drew them. I’ll never forget the first question, from that lean, bewhiskered man with the hollow eyes: “Y’all from Russia?”

They thought they had lost the war. This was, we were to find, generally the assumption in isolated populations. I explained that we were British. We were at once escorted into town. We had various emergency medicines, and our orderlies soon set up an aid station with the equipment we had brought. Our station was placed in the showroom of a local Ford dealership, the Wendell Motor Company. This offered us a large floor space and limited access via two doors. At the same time, the people waiting outside could see for themselves that we were working as quickly as we could. Ampicillin, keflex, and tetracycline were our main supplies, along with morphia and heroin for pain sufferers. We also carried cyanide and copies of the euthanasia rules. Cultural resistance to this program is very strong, especially in rural America. But people usually come to understand that truly unspeakable suffering ought to be relieved by death if the victim has no scruples of conscience, or is indeed begging for it.

On that first day in Yoakum, our three doctors and six medical orderlies treated 211 of the thousands who presented themselves.

The actual local population was approximately fifteen thousand at that time. In my estimation, there were no able-bodied individuals.

It was fortunate that we brought the four soldiers, because violent disagreements kept breaking out among the patients, especially as to whose dying children were to have the first chance at the antibiotics.

On that day we performed sixteen pediatric euthanasias, for the most part on children suffering both pain and brain damage from radiation or other poisoning.

We found numerous cases of mental breakdown. Paranoia, schizophrenia, catatonic withdrawal were all present in the population. Our psychological pharmacopoeia consisted of a little Thorazine and Valium. We dispensed what Thorazine we could to the schizophrenics. We recommended that the mentally ill who were unable to function be euthanized, with the consent of their families. Nobody volunteered their psychotic relatives at first, but the prospect of being free from the burden of their presence caused people, as is usually the case, to come to us in the night to get the cyanide capsules.

We also faced numerous cases of partially stabilized radiation sickness. These individuals were usually covered with sores from secondary infections and were in great agony. Upon being told of the hopelessness of their situation, most of them willingly accepted the death alternative.

Because of their oaths or religious objections, many British doctors have refused to dispense euthanasia treatment, so this aspect of the program was left to me. I spent my days living out tragedies with the victims, and my nights in dreams of indescribable horror, where I heard them calling me from the grave, and imagined that I had accidentally buried them alive. But it wasn’t true, I was not the shadow of death. To these people, with their burns and their sickness and their tormented bodies, I was mercy.

Among the problems with which we could not cope were the various parasitic diseases. They are not much of a problem in Britain, and we simply failed to anticipate their presence here. Hookworm, tapeworm, ascaris, and giardiasis were the most serious of these. These diseases were in adults unattractive and debilitating, but in children they were devastating. The acuteness of the problem can be realized when one reflects that these people, forced to live on a below-starvation-level diet, one almost absent of proteins, were being consumed from within by their own worm loads. We instructed on the use of saline enemas, developed by the CDC as a means of temporarily reducing infestation, especially in the cases of hookworm and tapeworm. But the only real relief, namely proper medication and a good, clean source of food and water, simply was not available at this time.

Our contamination specialist surveyed the area in some detail, and found it seriously affected by radiation. Most of the population was radiation-poisoned to some degree at least. There was also malnutrition. Only a few children were free of rickets. Pellagra, the old curse of the South, had reasserted itself.

We realized, during that first day, that we were in the presence of a whole world, small though it was, that was dying before our eyes. There were only two babies under the age of six months. One had been blinded and had lost a hand, and the other was suffering from a severe systemic infection.

The county sheriff, Mr. Weaver, reported that they buried five or six people a day, generally in shallow graves in a field near the old town graveyard. The local Catholic priest, Father Menendez, and the Baptist minister, Mr. Harold, officiated at the brief ceremonies.

Our one overwhelming wish was to radio out and somehow get great loads of food and clothing and, above all, medicines for these people. But we knew exactly what would come: little, and too late.

Instead we settled on a recommendation, which we presented to the sheriff and the two religious leaders the next day, that the whole population start moving north. A hundred miles closer to Dallas there were communities that were still very much intact.

We also offered to send what supplies we could down from Dallas, but we couldn’t provide much.

The situation was stark. If they stayed, all of these people were going to die. As the sheriff pointed out, a lot of them would also perish on the journey.

After we had dispensed all of our drugs and held as many information meetings as we could on every subject from personal hygiene to the three signs of terminal malnutrition, we took our leave of the people of Yoakum and returned to Dallas.

Eventually a column of these refugees did set out. Along the way they had lost about two thousand stragglers, with five thousand dead or unable to continue. Only six thousand people arrived in North Texas, of whom three thousand were placed in isolation due to their infectious disease status. All three thousand of these eventually died.

Of the fifteen thousand people alive in Yoakum on the day we visited, approximately two thousand remain alive today.

POLL What We Expect, What We Fear: American Opinion in 1993

About six weeks ago there arrived in the offices of the Herald News a familiar brown manila envelope that brought cheers when it was opened.

It was a production of the Consolidated American Polling Group, made up of former staff members of the Harris, Gallup, and Sindlinger organizations. After two years of reorganization and preparation, they were finally beginning to distribute national polls once again. Two documents were enclosed, one a poll of attitudes about the present state of the country, and the other concerning future expectations.

We will be presenting sections of these two polls throughout the book at points where they seem germane.

The samples used in the surveys each consisted of more than 1,400 American adults eighteen years of age and older. The samples are statistically representative of the nation in terms of geographic and demographic design. For comparison purposes, 1992 data are given where appropriate.

Naturally, neither the polls nor our use of them in any way reflects the opinions of the Consolidated American Polling Group Inc.

Do you think that the destiny of this country is presently in the hands of other nations?

When queried about which regions or nations of the world were most influential, the responses were:

When asked about specific nations, the responses were:

Will the United States ever again emerge as a world economic power?

Will the United States ever regain its status again as a military power?

Documents from the Emergency

The first test of my ability to get sensitive documents from official sources came immediately. Both Whitley and I wanted to have a selection of documents that had been produced in the months following Warday.

Most people were too busy dealing with blown out radios, televisions, and telephones, and trying to understand what had happened to us, to worry about bureaucrats and their pronouncements.

But they were there, and they were pronouncing.

Many times since Warday I have imagined the places where the postwar planning and thinking took place, the quiet offices at the edge of the fire. I have wondered who the men—or the women—were who divided the doomed from the saved, who conceived of triage, who looked upon the rest of us with cold eyes.

Much of what I did to get documents was “illegal” in the old sense of the word. I not only took things off desks, I opened files that were supposed to be sealed. But the documents in those files cannot be stolen, especially not the two collected here, which relate to the most fundamental of wartime experiences.

Like the people behind the numbers and the places in the radioactive zones, they belong to all of us.

INTERVIEW Wilson T. Ackorman, Undersecretary of Defense (Ret.)

I did not know that we were in a war situation until the Secretary telephoned my office and told me in a brusque tone to activate Case Quick Angel. I then set in motion the series of actions that were designed to disperse upper echelons of the Executive Branch during a nuclear war. This order was given by me at exactly 1530 on 28 October 1988.

Shortly after that I joined the Secretary, as per plan, on the helicopter pad. We left the Pentagon via helicopter at once, heading for Andrews Air Force Base. With Secretary Forrest was Air Force General Potter Dawes, who was carrying the backup codes.

We reached Andrews at 1545 hours and found that the White House contingent had already entered the E-4B aircraft. Under the Quick Angel basing protocols, the E-4B had recently been returned to Andrews from a base in Indiana. Donald Meecham informed us that the President was aboard and the National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP) was ready for takeoff.

We then entered the aircraft and proceeded directly to the Presidential suite. The President greeted us and we sat down to a briefing from SAC General Joe Point. General Point indicated that there had been a Soviet response to the Space Shuttle’s deployment of the first satellite in the Spiderweb warhead-killer system.

This response was to open the doors of a group of SS-18 silos in central Siberia. Altogether they were preparing a launch of twelve missiles containing a total of fifty-four warheads in the 5- to 10-megaton range. At that time they had not launched any missiles.

As our aircraft took off, we received telemetry from NORAD indicating that there had been an explosion, probably nuclear, in near space over the western Pacific Ocean. NASA then announced that the Space Shuttle had ceased to communicate with Houston due to this detonation, and had probably been destroyed.

As the Spiderweb satellites were radiation hardened, the one deployed remained operational, but it was far from its intended orbit, and we now had no means to transport it. It was effectively useless, and in any case, formed only a small part of the total system. At that point the President decided that it was probable that we would soon be in a hot war. He therefore authorized Defense to transmit a War Warning to all U.S. military commands. I carried out that order at 1550 hours. Here is the text of the document:

This caused SAC and the U.S. Navy Submarine Command to go to One Alert status, and the other services to respond by entering their highest states of readiness. It was at this point that war became inevitable, but at the time there was still a sense of control in the NEACP. The President activated the hot line to Moscow. The telephone at their end was not answered. At last the President put the instrument down. “Gentlemen” he said, “I am afraid that the Premier will not talk to me.” We then instructed Ambassador Underwood in Moscow to call on the Premier at once and inform him that the United States was willing to negotiate a settlement of the question that had arisen between us. We further attempted communication by the hot line teletype on the chance that the telephone system might be out of order.

There had been a massive failure on the part of Western intelligence to correctly evaluate the Soviet response to the deployment of Spiderweb. This system, utilizing ultra-high-power laser beams, which targeted and destroyed warheads in space after they were ejected from their missile buses, was intended to render the United States invulnerable to land- or sea-based attacks. As the target acquisition system was optical, the Soviet low-radar-profile systems were no defenses. We did not know at the time how far in advance of existing Soviet weaponry this system was, or deployment would have been evaluated differently.

It was our stated intention before the deployment to begin dismantling the American offensive missile force once we were protected by the Spiderweb system. The Soviet leadership had given us no indication that they did not believe this, and had not even protested the deployment of Spiderweb.

In retrospect it is obvious that they were so far behind technologically that they were afraid to so much as whisper a protest, lest their weakness become known to us.

Although I was not a party to the decision to deploy Spiderweb, I am trying to come to grips with the fact that I was assisting in the management of a system of defense that had drifted into a state of extreme brittleness, in the sense that our own technological superiority was making our enemy increasingly desperate, and thus was actually causing the very war it was intended to prevent.

As per plan, the NEACP proceeded due south toward its intended operational area, approximately 100 miles SSW of the Cape Charles Lighthouse, over the Atlantic Ocean.

At 1555 the National Security Agency informed us that three Soviet satellites had begun unusual orbital maneuvers. NSA said that these were designated as unusually large communications relay satellites, and that there had been optical and electronic surveillance confirming this. However, this remarkable maneuver capability made them highly suspect. The President then ordered SAC to destroy these satellites, utilizing the ground-based Slingshot missiles, which are a classified weapons system. The Slingshots were fired. Less than two minutes passed before the threatening satellites were destroyed. But it was too late. We were soon informed that they had successfully ejected four large weapons, which were dropping to an altitude level of 100,000 feet over California, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Manitoba. The President made a sighing sound, as if he had been struck in the chest. We all knew what terrific damage the country was soon going to sustain.

It is far easier to create high-level electromagnetic energy in pulsed form than it is to shield against it.

We were aware of the classified studies on this. We knew that a vast number of electronic circuits in the United States would be damaged, most of them beyond easy repair. Even those shielded to resist a 50,000-volt pulse would be destroyed by the explosion of such large bombs in near space, as the pulse each generated would far exceed 50,000 volts.

At 1620, we watched our entire fighter escort, consisting of six F-15s of the 113 TAC Group out of Andrews, corkscrew into the sea. The Soviet EMP weapons had just detonated. The fighters’ shielding had clearly proved insufficient, and these aircraft had undoubtedly lost their on-board computers, without which the F-15 cannot fly. At the same time, most of the commercial airliners in the air over the United States and Canada began to crash or became dangerously disabled. Approximately three hundred million radio and television sets, and most radio and television stations, ceased to function. All microwave relay stations in the United States and Canada ceased to function, meaning that long-distance telephone and telemetric communications were no longer possible.

The ignitions of many automobiles built after 1977–78 were rendered inoperable. Many local power systems failed due to fused relays and subsequent overload. A staggering number of computers, and most of the automated factories used to manufacture them, were destroyed. Of course, repairs began at once, and some AM stations such as WOR in New York were on at low power within a week, but isolated cases of resiliency did little to ameliorate the overall effect of the pulse. Generally, the negative synergy of technological breakdown and economic chaos has meant very slow recovery from this damage. WOR, for example, ran for eight months, but was closed down when New York was abandoned.

Our NEACP aircraft was also damaged in a number of ways, and the pilot soon informed us that he would prefer to return to an over-land situation.

SAC called, using the still-functional UHF communications channel, which was designed to be proof against any level of EMP.

The President then ordered Case Dream Eagle to be activated. At 1625.12, six bomb-carrying satellites were armed to detonate automatically as they reached their target positions over the Soviet Union. To compensate for their greater state of EMP readiness, we generated an ambient voltage level of 120,000 volts with each bomb. This probably caused the destruction of ninety percent of all electronic devices in the USSR, as even their best shielding was not effective past 100,000 volts. Our own decision to limit protection to the 50,000-volt level had been the classic wargame mistake of assuming that the other side would hit us with whatever maximum force we could conveniently defend against, and not with the maximum force they could muster.

We now went to our emergency communications systems, which consisted of the UHF channel to SAC, and an infrared laser communicator to keep us in touch with Washington. These were effective devices, and the NEACP maintained its essential communications despite the enemy’s best efforts.

CIA came on the laser communicator with an evaluation to the effect that the Soviets would release their SS-18s within three to five minutes. The President then opened the code boxes for Minuteman and unlocked the switches. I remember that Mr. Forrest put his hands over the President’s hands, because the President was shaking.

The Defense Intelligence Agency then pulsed via UHF an analysis of the targeting of the Soviet weapons that had been rendered operational. While I was having this downloaded to screen for the President, he activated Minuteman. There were three flights containing a total of 56 warheads planned for the first wave. It was our intention to remove the Soviet government without excessive loss of life in the population. We intended to destroy Moscow, Leningrad, and Sevastopol, and hit the administrative capitals of all the republics. This would result in destruction of only eight percent of the population, but would cause the USSR to lose the means of government.

The NEACP System Commander then informed us that the EMP damage had compromised the ability of the aircraft to maintain trim, and it was now in a nose-low attitude, and was unable to maintain altitude indefinitely. We could expect to be on the ground, one way or another, within the half hour.

At that time the President again tried the hot line. It was inoperative. An attempt to reach Mr. Underwood in Moscow failed.

The President was informed that the British Prime Minister and the French President were both on the phone. The secret NATO Omninet communications system had also survived EMP.

The President spoke briefly with each of them. The French President told him that he and the Germans and the British had informed the Soviets of the existence of a secret treaty between the three nations, under which all American military installations in those countries were in the process of being entered by local nationals. The treaty had been designed to go into effect in the event that a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the USSR occurred without the prior knowledge of NATO and France.

So we found ourselves alone. Our European allies had abandoned us, or so it seemed then. I hope that the Treaty of Coventry proves to have been a wise one. If it had not been in place, the exchange of 28 October 1988 would undoubtedly have escalated into at least four more salvos, two of them against the NATO allies and France. Inasmuch as the eventual damage done by the limited war we did have was so very much greater than we imagined, an exchange on that scale would have rendered humankind a minor species, or perhaps an extinct one.

The President begged the European leaders to inform the Soviet Premier that we would in no case fire our missiles unless he first fired his, even at this late time. But the EMP exchange had caused them to lose contact with him. To this day his fate is not known.

The DIA targeting analysis had been downloaded, and I briefed the President. The indications were appalling. Washington, D.C., was going to receive a total load of sixty megatons. New York would get seventy. This was enough to cause the land itself to melt, which is what actually did happen in Washington. The remaining missiles were all targeted for Minuteman, SAC, and the USAF refit and supply center at Kelly Air Force Base in Texas.

So the Soviet first wave was primarily a military targeting.

Even so, we were going to take a serious population hit. Nearly twelve million Americans lived in target areas. It was now 1630 hours.

I had an episode of angina pectoris at that time and was not present at the meeting with the NEACP Commander. When I returned to the Presidential suite, it was to find that the aircraft would have to land in fifteen minutes, and this landing would have to be accomplished on a beach off the coast of North Carolina, due to our inability to reach an airfield. If the NEACP was destroyed on landing, the United States would lose its ability to respond properly to a Soviet attack. If this plane was forced to keep the command, we would have to fire Minuteman before crash landing, whether or not the Soviets had fired. The vulnerability of this one aircraft could force us to use our missiles or risk their loss.

The President then ordered NEACP transferred to the alternate aircraft, which was operating out of Offutt AFB in Nebraska.

This aircraft reported severe EMP damage and refused the command. The President then attempted to raise HQ NORAD/ADCOM Combat Operations Center in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex and transfer to them, but this communication was not encoded properly and was also refused. We could not find the proper coding card, and to this day I wonder if the war could have been averted if we had found it.

The President had a key to turn to fire Minuteman. He put his hand on this key and ordered the NEACP Commander to inform him when we were within one minute of touchdown. We commenced placing the command to Cheyenne Mountain every ten seconds, hoping against hope that the transfer of authority would eventually be accepted. We attempted to relay the transfer via the alternate airborne command post, but there was no protocol established for that, and the available chain of command did not have the authorizations necessary to create one. We began to try to communicate with the Vice-President, but he was en route to the U.S. Government Emergency Command Control and Communications Center in Maryland, from which he was supposed to govern the country if the President became a casualty. We did not yet know that the EMP pulse had caused his helicopter to crash, with the loss of all aboard.

It was agreed that Secretary Forrest would replace the President at the key, should the President experience a physical problem in the next few minutes.

Soon we began to see a long, narrow island below us. We were informed that this was our destination, and we would be landing not far from Kitty Hawk.

The President ordered a check of the Minuteman communications system, and the arming of the proper missiles. We were told by SAC that fourteen B-52s were holding at their fail-safe points despite EMP damage, and could proceed with their mission. They were ordered to do so.

NSA then informed us that a suspicious satellite, also previously thought to be a communications device, was ejecting devices over South Dakota that, astonishingly, might be nuclear warheads.

Without a word, the President then turned the key and initiated the Minuteman firing sequence. The time was 1636.28. At 1636.51 we received confirmation via UHF that the missiles were away. At 1637.06 Cheyenne Mountain told us that twenty-one nuclear devices had detonated in the missile fields in South Dakota. The Mountain then ceased to signal. The Soviet warheads had been fired from satellites. We had no knowledge of such weapons. Another few seconds and Minuteman would have been destroyed on the ground. Our alternative would then, as the Soviets well knew, have been to go to the city busters aboard our submarines and risk escalation to the destruction of our own population centers, or surrender.

At that point the President had to be attended by his physician, due to difficulty breathing.

At 1641.11 NORAD informed us that the Soviet SS-18s were launched from forward soils on the Kamchatka Peninsula. At 1642.40 we received a pulsed load showing the exact targets and throw times. Washington. San Antonio. New York. More for the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana. Oddly, Omaha was not on the list.

We were then told by the NEACP Commander to fasten our seatbelts, as the huge aircraft would be attempting a landing in the sand in two minutes. We left the command post and sat in the briefing room, where there were fewer sharp objects and access to the outside was quicker. We were given fire-resistant coveralls and breathing apparatus.

A few minutes later the pilot began counting down from twenty. There was a sort of soft, surging sensation, then a stronger and stronger pull to the left, then the sound of equipment breaking far below as the belly of the aircraft was torn out. I left my seat, thinking that the plane had stopped, only to find myself hurled against the ceiling. I then fell amid a cascade of ceiling panels. I was in the aisle beside the President. I was covered with blood. I got to my feet and began trying to make my way down the aisle, which was full of plastic ceiling panels. Then a hissing sound started, and foam fire-extinguishing chemicals began pouring out of nozzles in the front of the cabin. There was another abrupt shift of position and we were almost on our side. There was a strong smell of kerosene.

I reached up and attempted to rouse the President. He was lolling against his seatbelt. Two airmen came in and began cutting him loose. Others led me and Mr. Forrest and the various other White House officials from the aircraft.

Moments later we found ourselves in a hospital tent that had been inflated by the plane’s medical orderlies some yards from the aircraft, which lay on its side, its left wing bent and leaking kerosene, its right wing washed by the sea.

The President was brought in just behind us and laid on a tarpaulin. When his face mask was removed, it was discovered that he was dead, from a broken neck.

At 1654 we heard a long, crackling rumble from the north. I knew that this was the sound of the Soviet weapons detonating over Washington, two hundred miles away.

I remember that a big crowd had gathered, and the local volunteer fire department soon arrived.

Zone of Nowhere

People change when they see a Dead Zone. Once observed, a Dead Zone becomes a kind of personal secret, like a private disfigurement. There is something awesome and terrible about the sheer power it takes to create such destruction. It is impossible not to change when you have the first-hand experience of seeing a vast wasteland where a city of a million people once existed.

One Dead Zone was San Antonio, the city where I was born and spent my youth and where my family lived before Warday.

In 1990 I pulled enough strings with the military to be granted a flyover of San Antonio. After two years, radiation levels were sufficiently low to permit aircraft to approach the cratered areas without much danger. The U.S. Army—South Texas Military Area Command—apparently makes such flyovers several times a week, sometimes for officials and foreign visitors, but also, I think, for a deeper reason. Even when the aircraft are empty of visitors, there remains the need to continue some human presence.

Entering a war zone—so called, I suppose, because it is a special place produced by war—is usually not possible overland. Radiation is only one problem; navigating rubble and half-collapsed buildings is by far the greater difficulty. Only the centermost circle of the blast area is smooth—the result of the vaporizing effects of the explosion.

San Antonio is not going to be cleared. There is no need. No one wants to live there, and the potential for salvage is limited. Nonmilitary visitors are confined to helicopter flyovers. To take the tour, I had to travel to Austin and then down to San Marcos, which is a combined Army and Air Force installation. It is the command headquarters for the San Antonio War Zone. After half a day of having my paperwork processed, signing waivers of liability, and undergoing low-level interrogation about my journalistic interests, I was put on a jeep and driven to the flight line. I boarded a six-passenger helicopter with Army markings.

My escort, the only other passenger on the flight, was a cheery captain who had made the trip dozens of times before. He kept up a mostly one-sided chatter all the way to the zone: “You’re not going to believe this place. It’s a symbol of immense, total power. And the bombs used weren’t even the largest the Soviets could have used.” He sounded like a schoolkid reciting from memory.

He made sure I was aware that no photographs were allowed. I knew that; my camera had been impounded before we left.

Why no pictures? Certainly there were no secrets to be revealed. The extent of the damage was well known. But I could understand the restriction. There is a pornography associated with such wanton, total destruction.

Since the war, a new terminology has emerged to describe the areas of nuclear destruction: Dead Zone, Red Zone, Orange Zone, Blue Zone, Green Zone. Painted signs, each with a skull at the center, reflect the varying levels of invisible death.

What Army photographs the captain showed me were curiously bland. Each had apparently been taken at a high altitude and showed only a flat, empty San Antonio, devoid of detail. Emptiness says little. It is the remaining detail that reveals the devastation.

Just ten miles out I noticed the first signs of the war: huge areas of rolling land devoid of any standing vegetation, blackened by what must have been a massive fire. Another few miles and there were collapsed heaps of charcoaled rubble, the remains of houses and barns that had stood in the rural areas outside the city. Then, to the right of the aircraft, we could see in the distance the uninhabited town of New Braunfels, a burned jumble of structures.

The captain told me that former residents often tried to return and resettle. They would go to the edges of the restricted zones and camp there, sometimes for months. I saw one such camp, a clutch of threadbare tents, and thought they are the people at the edge of the ocean.

As we headed for the first Ground Zero, or GZ as my guide called it, the last of the rubble passed beneath the helicopter. There were few buildings or houses left fully intact, though the contours of the land were varied enough to have made the destruction erratic. Closer to the center of the city there was only rubble. The downtown area, which had consisted of twenty or so tall buildings, now looked like a forest that had been reduced to haggard stumps.

For the first time the impact of a Dead Zone struck me: there was incomprehensible madness here.

Scattered through the rubble were remote stations installed by the Army to monitor radiation and intruders. With their metal roofs painted bright orange, they looked like toys left by a child on a gray carpet.

We quickly came up on the first of three GZ craters, which, even two years after the explosion, still shimmered in the sunlight from the fusion of soil, metal, concrete, and other melted materials. In the distance, perhaps eight miles away, we could see another GZ casting its own eerie dazzle.

“You should see them at night, under a full moon,” the captain said. “You’ll never forget the sight.”

We circled around and around, but I couldn’t identify a single landmark. Where were the parks, the schools and universities, the shopping centers? And what about the Alamo?

Though I stared out the window of the helicopter, I saw nothing. Instead, a flood of memories came back to me. I remembered summers in San Antonio, the backyard cookouts with my family and drive-in movies on warm evenings. I remember thinking as a child, as children do, that nothing would ever change and that my parents would live forever. Now I wondered what had happened to my bedroom, to the house I had lived in, to my old high school?

Were the students and teachers vaporized on Warday, or merely crushed by flying stone and metal? What had happened to my family? What had happened to Whitley’s?

My family and friends have stayed in my thoughts all these years. I lost my mother and a dozen other relatives in San Antonio on Warday; perhaps a dozen more disappeared or were lost in the postwar migrations to safer parts of the country. My wife, Vivian, disappeared in the exodus from Austin. I haven’t given up my belief that she is alive somewhere, looking for me, as I have been looking for her all these years.

The fact that I had lost a home, a car, a career, and a thousand small possessions didn’t even occur to me, especially as I looked at what was left of San Antonio. Instead, like most people in America, I thought of faces that were no longer there. And of family histories and small treasures burned away.

The landscape came back into view again. I could see the outlines of shopping centers, portions of streets, and enough of a building here and there to guess that it had been a school or a church or a store. One large shopping center, at the edge of a blast area, was a flattened ruin surrounded by a vast field of congealed cars melted into the asphalt of the parking lot.

I had intended to take notes or record impressions as I flew, but I just sat there. My silence seemed to disappoint the captain. Without realizing it, he had begun to take a certain pride in the drama of his tour. He asked if I wanted to see more. “How about Kelly Air Force Base? You can see the shadows of twenty B-52s and four C-5As on the runway. Really weird.”

I shook my head.

Back in San Marcos I was given a color enlargement of the San Antonio zone taken from three miles up. On the back in red letters was stamped, WARNING, NO PUBLICATION. There isn’t much detail; it is a dark gray moonscape.

“Sorry it’s not from a lower altitude,” the captain apologized, “but at least you have a memento of your visit.”

RUMORS The Road to Aztlan

Jim and I are on a train between Dallas and Austin, passing through Waco. I remember Waco as a small, intense city in the heart of the cotton-growing country. The parents of our friend Jay Westbrook lived there in the sixties, and the three of us used to be invited up for occasional weekends—usually after Jay’s mother had been to the apartment we all shared in Austin and had become concerned that we were too thin.

The train rattles along at about forty-five. It’s clean, but pretty worn. Twelve Amtrak chair cars and a baggage car. There is no diner and no snack bar, and air conditioning is provided by keeping the front and rear doors of the cars open. The windows cannot be opened, for these prewar cars were built with many assumptions that no longer hold true. The trip will take two hours and thirty minutes station to station, with four stops.

Most of our fellow passengers are business people. The cotton industry in Waco is booming. With the collapse of cotton imports from Egypt and other countries, the local growers are finding their product much in demand. Jim tells me that Governor Parker is hoping to make cotton and cotton products a net export item in the Texas economy soon.

We are asking our fellow passengers about Aztlan, the Hispanic Free State that stretches roughly along the Texas–Mexico border from Piedras Negras to New Mexico. We intend to go there via Austin, San Angelo, and Odessa, with a stop in Austin to interview the Governor. But our fellow passengers are not encouraging.

MRS. TOM MULLIN: “I had a sister lived in El Paso and all of a sudden one day she turns up at our house in Waco with everything she owns in a shopping bag. She just got kicked out by the Mexicans, she says. And a lot of people weren’t so lucky. They got hanged from street lights. And in Roswell—the Indians went in there and just about tore the place apart, the way I hear it.”

JODY PICKEREL: “It’s probably not really a separate country from Mexico. The way I see it, Mexico went in there and started something. We mighta forgot the Alamo, but they never did. They remember the Alamo and they want all of Texas back. Unless Parker gets on the stick, they’ll be in Austin before too long, or maybe even up here in Waco.”

LIZ PICKEREL: “He’s right, it’s a Mexican thing. You have to remember that they didn’t get touched by the war. They still have an army and everything. They’re in good shape down there, except for the money troubles and the food troubles and… well, I take that back, they’re in bad shape. But that just makes them all the more dangerous.”

CARLOS GONZALEZ: “I am on my way to Aztlan right now. You know what I am doing there? I am selling clothes. That’s right, clothes I bought in Atlanta. I have them on this train. Seven hundred good, strong pairs of overalls. You think I’ll get a nice price?

You bet I will! Fifty Aztlan pesos each, and you know you can change them things for good Japanese yen. Americans don’t want to trade with Aztlan. Everybody’s scared. Like, this train doesn’t go south of Odessa. You’ll find out. I have to take a truck down from Odessa. The train goes on that old Santa Fe freight track up through to Albuquerque. They fixed up those tracks last year. Before that they ran buses.”

MINDY SCHWARTZ: “I don’t really know much about it. I live in Odessa, and we don’t much go to El Paso anymore. I really don’t think about it.”

TOM LEGAN: “You two gringos are going in there? Lemme tell you, they cleaned house last year. No gringos allowed. They hanged ’em if they stayed. You’re a couple of assholes, you know that? They’ll hang you if the bandidos don’t get you first. Fifty miles south of Odessa the trouble starts. You try to stay on I-20 down there the other side of Monahans, and them bandidos are going to carve up your asses. That’s all I got to say about it”

The train pulls into the station in McGregor, which serves as the stop for Waco. There is a lot of bustle, people getting off and on, men wearing weathered jeans and straw hats, carrying duffels full of possessions, people pushing carts loaded with baggage, children crying, voices rising in joy or sorrow at the partings and returns.

About three-quarters of the passengers get out. We buy Cokes on the platform. We will eat out of our backpacks, to save money.

Five minutes later the train is full again, with a few people sitting in the aisles. We pull out exactly on time. Like many of the other passengers, Jim and I have our homemade lunches. The train is due in Austin at 4:07. It had better be on time, because our interview with Oliver Parker is scheduled for 4:30.

When the wind is from the south, I understand that the corrupt odor of San Antonio is sharp on the Austin air.

INTERVIEW Oliver Parker, Governor of Texas

You know, Whitley, the fact is that some of the states are becoming separate countries. We have the beginnings of a military structure right here in Texas. I’m pushing a bill that will place the U.S. Third Army, the Twelfth Air Force, the state national guard, and the highway patrol under the overall authority of the governor’s office. I consider this the most important single thing I’ve done so far in my administration.

We are going to restore authority in the areas of Texas where there’s a problem. Especially down in South Texas. Those people have suffered enough. They’ve really had it much worse than in most of the rest of the country, what with the destruction of San Antonio and the sickness and all. Plus there has been a tremendously high level of illegal immigration. All authority in Mexico has broken down. Without any significant oil income, with the collapse of trade and tourism, and our inability to export foodstuffs, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mexico hasn’t experienced a greater population decline than we have. I’d put it at forty to fifty percent in five years. I know from personal friends that there have been eight revolutions in Mexico City, and when we were suffering from the famine here, they were absolutely and totally destitute. They had no corn, no bread, no soy products, only their own beans. They lacked cooking oil. In Mexico City there was no potable water because their U.S.-made sewage treatment system failed. Mexico City was hit as bad by dysentery and cholera as it was by the Cincinnati Flu. You had whole huge areas of the city where there was nobody left alive at all.

If people wonder why in the world they’re still coming north in spite of what we’re going through, that’s the reason.

You said you wanted me to say what I was doing on Warday.

Well, I was in Dallas trying to get my campaign for the Senate together. I was going to get that seat from the Republicans. Mary was with me, and so was Elizabeth. The other kids were in San Antonio, I’m sorry to say.

After we’re finished, we can go over to the house and you can see our war baby, Oliver Junior. Perfect formation. He looks just like his mother.

I don’t live in the Governor’s Mansion, by the way. The state doesn’t have the money to keep it up. We’re just barely staying solvent as it is, so I live in a raised ranch over on Red River. Maybe next year we’ll reopen the mansion.

I deal with real basic issues: defense, disease, food, shelter, crime. I classify this whole Aztlan thing as a crime. As far as I’m concerned they’re rebels, no different from the Confederates. I consider Texas a part of the United States, and Aztlan a part of Texas. If there’s ever a new Constitutional Convention, Texas will certainly be sending delegates.

Other crimes we have, mainly, are crimes of desperation. There is still a lot of hunger. Real, raw hunger. Hell, people are dying of hunger and a lot of other things down in South Texas every day.

The area between Houston and San Antonio is blighted. I guess you could consider that whole area depopulated.

You know, from the roof of St. Edwards University south of here—you remember St. Edwards? Well, from the roof you can see the start of the San Antonio Dead Zone. The horizon to the south is charcoal gray. And the sky is brown. It’s a weird sight, like looking across to the surface of another planet.

You remember my house in San Antonio, Whitley? We finished that bathroom, and we were going to put in a pool.

I was meeting with the Dallas County Democrats at the Anatole Hotel when the war happened. The lights went out. That was because the EMP killed the hotel’s computer. As it died, it turned off all the lights and sent the elevators to the lobby. I thought it was an internal thing. After a while we continued our meeting in the lobby, which is skylit.

Mary came in with the news that there were planes crashing all over the place. We went outside and looked up and there was this American Airlines jet wobbling around. It kept banking first one way and then the other. Then we found out my brand-new Lincoln wouldn’t start. I had a lunch scheduled at the Adolphus with Bob Rossiter of Rossiter Industries. We tried to phone him and found out the phones didn’t work. I said to Mary, “Something big’s happened.” We tried to find a working TV. Couldn’t do it.

We ended up walking all the way from the Anatole to the Adolphus, only to find that Rossiter wasn’t there.

It was in the Adolphus lobby that we first heard the rumor that San Antonio had been bombed. Mary burst into tears. We held each other. We didn’t know what to believe. Finally we went back to the Anatole. It was almost a year before we left Dallas. We lived with the Clint Rossiters, and I did legal work to pay our board.

I’ve been governor for three years now. The Senate campaign was canceled, of course. When Mark White announced that he wasn’t going to run for another term, Rossiter and the Dallas County Democrats got me to take it on. Mark’s not at all well. He flew over San Antonio three days after the war and got a hell of a dose. I did it too, last year, at three thousand feet. The way I look at it, that’s not a place anymore. It’s a hole in the world.

One of our problems in Texas is that we haven’t got the banking technology available to run the state at a deficit. We’re limited to straight-line budgeting. I’ve been thinking of issuing a Texas currency, but I don’t see the underlying assets to do it. I could peg it to the state’s proprietary oil holdings, but with oil at eleven cents a barrel, I wouldn’t get very much out of it. And full faith and credit aren’t going to wash, especially not overseas.

Look at this. Isn’t this beautiful? A Texas dollar. It’s an engraving, done for us by an outfit in Lubbock. For a while we were dreaming of Texas currency. We’d have bills denominated from a quarter to ten dollars. Sam Houston’s on the one, Austin’s on the two, Davy Crockett’s on the five. We haven’t had the others made up, because Texas hasn’t got any underlying assets that would support a currency, as I said. Texas got hurt so bad in the war, sometimes I’m surprised that it’s still here at all, that everybody didn’t just move.

But we are still here. You travel around this state as much as I do, you’d end up with a deep feeling of confidence and reverence.

Texas is the land of the strong. People are working to rebuild. You know who really runs this state? Volunteers. People see something that needs doing and they just do it. Fill a pothole. Pull down an abandoned house. You name it. When we censused in 1990, every single census taker was a volunteer. That project of mine, naming the dead—you must remember it, Jim, you wrote a tiling about it in the Dallas paper—that was all volunteers. I know you didn’t think it made sense, Jim, and maybe it didn’t. But it means something to name the dead. I think it does. Here’s what they did.

There’s over a million names in these books. Handwritten, every one. Over a million.

San Antonio was so pretty. God, I remember when I had my Austin Healey and we were running the Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Youth, right? We were a bunch. Who was that priest in charge of the thing? Oh yeah, Martin. Father Edwin Martin. I remember him well. He always had high hopes for us. We put on some pretty good things, really. For a bunch of overheated intellectuals we did a good job.

Is that thing running? Lemme see it. Sanyo. You got this from the paper? I’ve never seen one like it. Two hours of recording on that? It looks like a quarter. That’s amazing. Well, let me get back to business. You’ll have to edit this tape a little.

Another thing we’re doing is working very intensively with some of the other states. California, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona. We’re going to form a sort of loose coalition. California will lead it. That’s got to be. They’re ten times the size of Texas. You know that California is almost like the old days? You been out there? Well, it’s just beautiful. One thing, the Japanese are everywhere. And electronics are a good bit easier to get. I don’t think there’s any conspiracy to deprive America of electronic devices, by the way. That’s a subject the Legislature’s been farting about an awful lot lately. They don’t want to debate Aztlan. Don’t want to think about the rough stuff. Can’t say as I blame ’em. But I’m going to have to get the Speaker to get the House off its ass on my military bill. Trask’s got the Senate wrapped up tight. No problems there. I need an army to go after Aztlan. Or they’ll come after us. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find them on their way to Midland–Odessa within a year if we don’t take some very damn decisive action.

Anyway, getting back to the electronics. This thing is really beautiful. How big is it—let’s see—yeah, I could put two of these inside a cigarette pack. Three of ’em. Nice to see a Japanese thing like this again. Beautifully made. Running flat out, the Japs can build fourteen million televisions a year. If we bought ’em all, we’d be back to prewar standards in about 2000. But we can’t afford the foreign exchange. We imported six million last year and made eight hundred thousand here in the States. We managed to get a hundred and thirty thousand of those sets in Texas. That tells me we now have a million televisions in Texas. Here’s a piece of sweet news. Starting next July, we are going to be getting HBO via the new communications satellite California sent up from Vandenberg in June. And NBC is starting up again in the fall, broadcasting from Los Angeles. It’s going to be all reruns at first, but who the hell cares? Maybe you ought to go back to writing, Whitley. Somebody told me you’d become a gardener. Well, I’ll bet you could make some money in television. A growth industry all over again.

We’ve got the Texas State Network, of course. I think the Hunt brothers bought two prints of every John Wayne picture ever made. I do a program once a week, “The Governor’s Desk.” I think people need to feel that the governor’s there. Without a President, the governors are that much more important.

You know, the amazing thing is, when we’ve polled the citizens, we’ve found that they aren’t too interested in having a Presidential election. There just isn’t all that much interest. Concerns telescope when people are having trouble. Somebody who has a sick kid or is facing cancer or NSD, or just living in these times, they don’t care about the Israelis slaughtering the Arabs or the South Africans marching into Zimbabwe or the Poles into the Ukraine. They’re indifferent to world affairs. And about all they remember of the U.S. is the flag and taxes. We still have the flag, so they figure the hell with the taxes.

I just think one thing, though, and it’s the message I want to leave at the end of this tape. Aztlan is a serious problem, and the only way Texas can deal with it is by going in there and establishing strict martial law. If we don’t, Aztlan will get stronger and stronger, and we’ll soon be facing an army. The Legislature has to act on my military bill. That’s the key issue in Texas right now.

Documents on the Triage

The most feared and controversial medical decision of this century has been the CDC’s triage recommendation.

Both Whitley and I have been especially eager to include as much information about the triage as we can, since it affects American life so profoundly.

I don’t have any really good sources at the CDC headquarters in Dallas, so I was very glad for our stopover in Austin. It gave me a chance to visit a friend who works for the CDC here, and who was willing to give me the kind of documents that would be useful.

I wanted information that few people had seen before.

I hit a vein of gold, as it turned out. My friend gave me the three documents reproduced here. For this I thank him and I guarantee his anonymity. It is ironic that more lives have been affected by these three short memoranda than by any number of critically important medical discoveries.

Because of these memos, millions of people have been denied even rudimentary medical care. But the triage has also guaranteed that those who can be helped are given what they need.

During the flu, twenty percent of the population needed emergency help. This occurred against a background of chaotic supply problems, high doctor mortality in affected areas, and a tremendous demand for drugs at a time when the industry was having trouble even maintaining normal production levels.

Perhaps one in ten of the flu victims saw a doctor, one in a hundred entered a hospital.

There is no way to tell if triage saves lives. Not only the triage, but so many other things that we now take for granted—home care for the dying, euthanasia, black market and alternate medicine, the British Relief—came about because the demand for care simply overwhelmed the nation’s medical system.

The existence of the triage means different things to different people. For me it means the constant, niggling fear that my lifedose will creep up and I’ll find myself suddenly denied medicine for some small ailment that will therefore become large and finally kill. For Whitley, the triage means a shortened life. He cannot legally enter a hospital or consult a licensed physician.

Like so many triaged people, he has learned a great deal of medicine. Doctors who can’t treat a triaged person can and do organize seminars for ten or twenty such individuals at a time. And then there are the underground medicals—the witches and the doctors who practice illegally.

And there is always the balance of hope.

These three short memoranda seem innocent enough. But they are not innocent. They are the foundations of postwar American medicine.

INTERVIEW Hector Espinoza, Aztlan Leader

We in Aztlan have created a new nation, stretching from Texas to the California border. There is a constitution, and a national government, the only one presently active in the former United States.

Aztlan is recognized by many countries. We have here in El Paso ambassadors from Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Cuba, and Japan. Many other nations are favorably inclined toward Aztlan. We have received an agricultural team from the People’s Republic of China. Great Britain is providing medical help. Officially, Britain, France, and Germany have not recognized Aztlan. But we are confident that they will one day do so.

Aztlan is a Hispanic country. The official language is Spanish.

This must be understood. As U.S. citizens, you have the right to enter and leave without showing a passport, but you do not have the right to vote in our elections, or remain here more than thirty days without a visa.

We have an army of four divisions, nearly forty thousand men.

We have a national police force, which is why, when you crossed the border, there were suddenly no more bandits on the roads.

Also, the Japanese have sent road-repair teams to Aztlan, so we have no more potholes in our interstates. And Japanese medicine has kept our disease rate low. We have not been affected by fallout. In fact, we drew the border through Fort Stockton rather than including San Angelo and San Antonio, because of the destruction and the radiation.

You must understand that, as a new nation, Aztlan has had its share of growing pains. We have had to relocate many Anglos across the border in Texas, and there has been a certain very small amount of violence, inevitable when a new nation is formed.

Aztlan is a strong, civilized, and free country. We have no political prisoners in our prisons, and nobody has ever been tortured in Aztlan. We do have a policy of encouraging Hispanic and Indian settlement of the territory. We are very frank about that. For five generations this land belonged to the Anglos, and look at the result. For ten generations before that it was Hispanic land, and before that, Indian for twenty generations.

We practice the same sort of enlightened socialism that is found in progressive countries across the world. We follow the Chinese example to some extent, but we also guarantee personal freedom as the Swedes do. And we do not keep people in prison because of their political views. There are many cooperative concerns in Aztlan, farms and factories and power establishments.

When a farmer sells his holdings to the cooperative, he gets in return lifetime free medical care with no triage, an income based on his production capabilities, and the support that comes from being a part of our wonderful cooperative farm and ranch system.

The Japanese have provided us with millions of dollars’ worth of advanced trickle-irrigation equipment, so we have been able to add many thousands of acres to the area cultivated in Aztlan. This acreage is planted with soybeans, which has become our largest export crop. We also sell oil and peanuts and wheat and corn and, of course, beef. Aztlan is a prosperous country. There is no unemployment here. If you want to work, you can work. If you don’t want to work, you can go to Texas or California.

Officially, both of those states are part of Aztlan. But we do not want the part of Texas we don’t already have, and we would have to fight a war to get California. We are not yet prepared to do that.

If we were ever to gain California, Aztlan would become one of the most powerful countries in the world. Not a superpower—we don’t want that. But a great power, perhaps as economically powerful as, say, Sweden.

Do you know that we gave foreign aid last year? Can you imagine it? We sent five hundred thousand bushels of soybeans and two hundred thousand of corn to Mexico. Of course, you know that they are all dying down there. Officially, the border between Aztlan and Mexico is open. And in the past three years, perhaps a million immigrants have come here. Now we have an agreement with Mexico. They get our food aid, and in return they process all potential emigrants to Aztlan. Since we cannot take the sick and they will not let the able-bodied leave, the immigration from Mexico is presently very small. If they wish to enter North America, the Mexicans must cross the Rio Grande into Texas, not Aztlan.

I am myself the Foreign Minister and official spokesman for Aztlan. We have a full portfolio of ministers. Our present capital is the Marriott here in El Paso. It has been renamed La Capitola, and contains our administrative apparatus. Our government is not organized around a president or prime minister. Instead, the two parties run against one another, and the party that gets a simple majority forms the governing committee for the next four years.

We have the State Socialists and the Social Democrats. The SD is part of the International Social Democratic Movement, and is the less radical of the two parties, as they believe that private ownership of national industries, such as power and transport, should be allowed. At the present time, my party, the State Socialists, is in power.

We believe in cooperatives but not in central planning. We do not want to repeat the disastrous mistakes of the Soviet Union and create a repressive and counterproductive bureaucracy. So we are not a rigidly planned community. Our socialism is strictly voluntary. If you join, you get the benefits of cooperative living. If not, then you go it alone, but nobody interferes with you. And the co-ops compete with one another in a free macromarket. Each co-op is autonomous. In soy farming, for example, there are sixty co-ops and fifty-one private farms, some owned by big international agricultural corporations, one by Central Soya, and eight by Japanese firms. The co-ops have an association that sets prices and provides a system of mutual assistance. Thus they are much more efficient than the private farms.

We have our own currency. The Far Eastern Bank Note Company in Hong Kong makes the notes. They are backed by an equivalent amount in Japanese yen. Of course, this makes the currency very valuable, as it is exchangeable at any bank in the world for yen. Ten Aztlan pesos to a thousand yen. Better than the dollar!

Our economy enjoys a balanced current account, which means that our exports pay for our imports. We have no inflation, as all prices are controlled. There is no hunger in Aztlan. And there is racial equality. Even Anglos, if they want to stay, are welcomed into the community of the Aztlan people!

Our Indian population is free to live and worship as it pleases.

We have Hopi, Apache, Pueblo, and Navajo tribes living in Aztlan.

Their tribal areas are self-governing. We do not keep records of their activities, nor do we have any sort of Bureau of Indian Affairs. We just let them do as they please in their own territories.

But, unfortunately, we cannot grant you safe conduct into the Indian lands. Among the Indians there is, frankly, a good deal of hostility toward Anglos.

Now I suppose I ought to talk about what happened at Roswell, because you’ve probably heard about it from others. You must understand that we view the Mescalero Apaches as a separate, sovereign nation within Aztlan, and Roswell is within the boundaries of their tribal state. They took over the town about six months after the war, as soon as it became clear that the central government had collapsed. When we declared Aztlan in 1989, we went to the Mescalero, they did not come to us. All I can tell you is that the incident was overblown. Those Anglos who were killed had formed an armed resistance movement. People were not tortured or burned. And nothing like a thousand were killed. It was no more than half or at most two-thirds of that number. And there were trials, you understand. The whole process took months. All of it was before Aztlan. If it happened now, we would try hard to persuade the Indians to let the Anglos leave Indian lands peacefully.

I am glad you suggest that this book will be distributed in England. We have to get an awareness among the British people that Aztlan exists. British recognition would confirm us as a permanent nation, and a British guarantee of sovereignty would mean that our chief worry of war with California or Texas would never come true. If we had such a guarantee, even a reconstructed United States would have to think very carefully about invading us or destroying this serene and happy nation.

The territory we call Aztlan was originally part of the Spanish Empire and the Republic of Mexico. You must remember that Mexico was then a perfectly ordinary nineteenth-century republic, no more or less violent or repressive than the United States.

But the United States first encouraged Anglo colonization of Texas and California, then supported internal insurgencies. When the Anglos won the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, less than one-third of the population of Texas was Anglo. And California was simply stolen. Mexico was forced to accede to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and give California to the United States. It was theft!

As a result of the loss of its territory north of the Rio Grande, Mexico was emasculated and her people lost their sense of personal pride. The image of the lazy “Meskin” and the “Frito Bandido” was born, but it was not laziness, it was sorrow. We Hispanics are not lazy and we are not bandidos and we are not stupid. If we are so stupid, how come we have the only happy, safe, and well-organized nation north of the Rio Grande? While the Anglos fight bitterly among themselves for the rancid bits of the old United States, we Hispanics have quietly created this beautiful country, this beloved Aztlan!

We even have our own poets, our own writers, our own film stars. Chito Hernandez, “El Nino,” Gabriela Jaime Nunez, all names of which you know nothing. But they are our stars! We make ten films a year in Aztlan, and when you combine those with the ten made in Mexico and the twenty in Spain, you have a new Hispanic movie almost every week. And we have a television and radio industry. The Japanese sell us more radios than we can possibly use. They put up a new station right here in El Paso. Radio “A,” it is called.

We also have Japanese cars and a new Japanese train running on the Santa Fe tracks from Monahans all the way to Tucson, where it connects not only with the Sunset Limited but with the El Costero, which provides super-express service down the Pacific coast of Mexico. We are on the world map, I assure you. People want our soybeans and other farm goods, not to mention our oil and gas and uranium, even coal.

For many people in the old United States, the confusion that resulted from the obliteration of Washington was unbelievably destructive. But for us, the people of Aztlan, it was really almost a blessing. Of course, we are very sorry for all the death and suffering. But Warday also brought some good—our Aztlan.

I do not want to lie to you, though, nor seem too bombastic. I suppose I can’t help it. I’m a natural enthusiast, and I’m excited by what we’re accomplishing here. Still, the way has not been as easy as all that. And Aztlan is far from perfect. You might find things wrong here. But you will also find love and a powerful sense of community. This is the great Chicano state, this Aztlan, and I love it so much that sometimes it hurts my heart, you know, when things are not as I would wish.

We have to rely a great deal on the Japanese, and they are certainly exploiting us. But we have the brotherhood and sisterhood of our nation, and our great heritage. I trust our isolated little country to survive. Anyway, I hope it will.

El Paso

Hector Espinoza is afraid for his infant state, and so tries to hide its weakness behind bold words. But Espinoza does not know his own people. Whatever happens to Aztlan, the eager confidence of its citizens will not be utterly lost. They have created something new here, and it will have its effect. Obviously there have been excesses. There are no Anglo faces in the streets. The Mobil refinery that one sees on the way into town is closed. There are many Japanese soldiers about. Although we were not allowed to visit Fort Bliss, Jim and I both had the impression that it is now a Japanese enclave. No doubt they intend to protect the vast soya plantations that have sprung up in the desert, which must be providing essential foodstuffs to their homeland.

But these facts tell nothing of the feeling of this new El Paso.

The streets are no more full of cars than Dallas or Austin, perhaps even less so. Yellow schoolbuses have been dragooned for street service. Each bus is apparently a small cooperative venture between its drivers and mechanics. At least, all are decorated differently, painted with flowers and slogans, loudspeakers blaring the music of Radio “A” from their roofs.

We have been billeted at the Granada Royale on MO, newly named Paseo de la Revolución. The hotel is a delight. Its large rooms surround an atrium garden full of flowers. There is an in-door-outdoor pool. The atmosphere is quiet and unhurried. Most of the other guests are Japanese, some of them obviously long-term residents. It is strange to hear somebody speaking Spanish with a thick Japanese accent. We were served breakfast in our suite and spent the next hour trying to arrange a tour of the city. First we used the old Yellow Pages to call Hertz, Avis, and the local car rental agencies. Hertz, now called Autocars Liberidad, was open.

They were taking reservations for November. As this was August, we decided to give up on car rental.

There are no longer conventional taxis in El Paso. By law, they have all become “pesetas,” traveling fixed routes on the smaller thoroughfares, essentially supplementing the buses.

Our last option was to take a bus tour, but we soon found that both Gray Line and Golden Tours were booked for the day, or claimed to be.

Perhaps somebody didn’t want us to tour the city.

We ended up spending the morning in the hotel. I observed the city from the rooftop restaurant, which commands a fine view of the whole area. I saw no planes take off from the airport, which is not far away. Here and there I could see sooty scars on a building, but beyond that there were no obvious signs of the revolution. Senior Espinoza appeared just before noon, his thin body swallowed by a seersucker suit. He was full of brightness and what I can only describe as punch. As soon as we saw him, we requested a tour of El Paso. He said that he would suggest something even better: we should have lunch with him. We could always see the town later, he assured us. He added that he had, by the liberal application of governmental authority, gotten us precious tickets on a “Super Express” bus that left for Las Cruces at three. Tickets on another could not be guaranteed for weeks.

It was becoming clear that we were not intended to make any detailed reconnaissance of this community. Senior Espinoza was, in effect, throwing us out of his country. Given his position of power, we decided to let him do exactly as he pleased.

We were left to swallow our questions about such things as the condition of hospitals and prisons, and what was happening to the homes and property of the Anglos.

The Isabella penthouse restaurant in the Granada is now called Casa del Sol Norte. The food is Tex-Mex, what Senior Espinoza described as “superb Aztlan cuisine.” Actually, his hyperbole was in this case not far from the truth. I used to enjoy Mi Tierra and La Fonda in San Antonio, and Casa Rio on the river. I can also recall going to this restaurant’s namesake, the Casa del Sol in Juarez.

When I lived in New York, I sought good Mexican food constantly, but what I found only increased my hunger for flavors like these.

I will repeat the menu in detail. We had cheese enchiladas, cabrito chili, chicken tacos, rice, and refried beans. The tacos were generously garnished with tomatoes, lettuce, and onions, and the seasonings were uniformly excellent. We drank Carta Blanca beer from Mexico. The menu showed that the meal was five pesos “A” to privates, two pesos to comunistas.

After lunch, we were not too surprised to find we had barely enough time to get to the bus. Senior Espinoza claimed to have forgotten the time and left, pleading an urgent appointment. We soon found out the reason for the abrupt departure. Without the use of a private car, we were going to have to struggle to get to the station on time. Neither of us wanted to find out what would happen if we missed our connection.

Jim stood beside me outside the hotel as we waited for a bus.

He was silent and withdrawn. Aztlan had saddened him, because it seemed to him a failure of the racial harmony that had been growing in Texas before the war, and yet another doomed ideological attempt to alter blood and land with words.

I felt much better about it. There was energy and optimism there, and the powerful spirit of cooperation was something that we would do well to import into the United States. I suspected that Aztlan was going to work, though not in the way foreseen by Senior Espinoza, nor in the way feared by Governor Parker. That bee-hive of little cooperative enterprises was going to grow, spreading its new economic ideas in all directions.

I also suspected that Senior Espinoza’s caution was not based so much on a desire to hide his problems as it was on a fear that we might be spies for Governor Parker. After all, a letter from Parker preceded us here, probably by just a few hours. Espinoza was terrified of Parker, and probably also of us.

Before I went to Aztlan, the word cooperative suggested to me rural electric power on the one hand and vast, spiritless Soviet communes on the other. I was not prepared to meet such a strange new economy as the one we found: thousands of tiny co-ops, each dependent solely upon its own success to pay its members, none larger than the smallest economic unit necessary to perform its particular function.

This means that the motel where we stayed, for example, was run by two separate co-ops, the restaurant workers and the hotel staff. The state does not pay them, nor does it plan for them. They keep their own books and split their profits weekly. If there are no profits, nobody gets paid that week.

A brightly painted schoolbus jammed with people finally came down Paseo de la Revolución. Radio “A” got louder as the bus got closer. Buses are supposed to stop whenever somebody hails them—there are no fixed stops in El Paso. But this one passed us by. It was full.

As we watched one jammed bus after another pass us by, we began to get nervous. The big purple Super Express tickets Senior Espinoza had given us were valueless if we couldn’t make it to the bus station.

Finally a half-full peseta came along. We were almost surprised to see it stop when we hailed it. The fare is ten centavos “A” for holders of yellow co-op cards, which most people wear pinned to their shirts and blouses. These cards identify their bearers as part of Aztlan’s network of cooperatives. Capitalists must pay one peso “A” to ride. We paid our pesos happily.

I got in the front seat of the massive old Buick station wagon, repainted many times, now the bright red of the flag of Aztlan. In fact, Aztlan’s red flag with the gold radiant sun in the center snapped from both front fenders and the radio antenna. Jim was jammed in the back with three other people, all wearing yellow cards. “Estacion de la autobuses del norte, por favor,” I said. My Spanish is less than minimal.

As we traveled into the center of town, I collected these impressions of El Paso:

The cemetery beneath the complex tangle of the Spaghetti Bowl where I-10 intersects the Expressway is in prewar condition.

Unlike the situation common in Dallas, new graves have not been dug in among the old. But there are many empty buildings, empty houses, and abandoned cars. Just before we turned onto Piedras, we saw along the side of MO the glittering aluminum ruins of a jet, cracked plastic windows in the few bits of intact fuselage, the plane’s markings no longer readable.

Japanese soldiers passed us in squat Toyota military vehicles. Their light khaki uniforms were spotless, the Rising Sun on their shoulders. As they rode along they shot pictures of the distant Franklin Mountains with Minoltas as small and thin as credit cards.

Earlier we had noticed a restaurant with the odd name “Gunther’s Lotus Blossom.” A closer look revealed that the sign had once read “Gunther’s Edelweiss.” Before Warday, the U.S. Army used to train soldiers of the German Federal Republic at Fort Bliss, which is just up the road from here. We wondered if Gunther was still around, or if he had left only his name behind.

Japanese military planes flew low overhead. They were odd-looking things, with their wings canted forward instead of swept back, so that they appeared to be flying backwards. Instead of a jet’s familiar scream, they made a low drumming noise that seemed almost to thump your chest. I recall the strange cant of the wings from NASA designs for future hypersonic aircraft.

We had ridden in silence for some time when the driver decided to try striking up a conversation.

“Hey, gringo,” he said with a big smile. “Let’s talk norte americano! See if I can still do it!”

His name was Carlos León, and he was from San Antonio. “I’m from there too,” I said. “So is he.” I nodded toward Jim.

“Hey! Compadres! I grew up there. Left in ’86 to get a job out here. Once the Mexican economy started to recover, there were lots of jobs here again. I was managing a McDonald’s. Kept at it, too, until the meat stopped getting delivered. Then I said the hell with the franchise, sold the equipment, and signed up as a cooperator. They assigned me to pesetas and gave me a permit to buy a station wagon. Our co-op consists of me, my wife the bookkeeper, and my cousin the mechanic.”

“Where did you live in San Antonio?”

“West Side! I lived on South Zarzamora. My dad was a garbage man—but not in his own neighborhood! We had to take our garbage to the dump ourselves until the fifties. My mom and dad died in San Antonio.”

“I lived in Terrell Hills,” I said.

“Rich, eh?”

“My dad was an oilman.”

“Oh boy! You’re poor now, eh? I see you work with your hands!”

“I’m poor now.”

From one of the passengers: “Good for you! Join the rest of the world.”

I laugh. “No more oilmen.”

“Hey, that’s good. No more oilmen! Just British and Israeli oil import agents, right?”

I did not mention that Texas oil was flowing again, and that refineries were opening up all over the United States. There was a razor edge of anger among these people. This was their place, their time at last, and these their days of sunshine.

Walls pockmarked with bullet holes were a common sight as we neared the center of town.

“Jim and I went to Central,” I said, hoping Carlos might also be an alumnus. This is not as unlikely as it sounds: Central Catholic had a substantial Hispanic population when we attended.

The sudden silence tells me that my suspicion is correct. Carlos stops the car. “Well, goddamn.”

“Brother Halaby?”

“Shit, yeah!”

“Brother Arana?”

“The Spider! I haven’t thought about him in years!”

The Spider taught world history and his real name was Brother Gordon, but his thin, six-foot-four frame gained him the nickname Brother Arana. So total was his identification with us that he was known to get mean when freshmen called him Brother Gordon.

“I’m Brother Arana,” he would snarl, “and don’t you forget it.”

Carlos had been five years ahead of us at Central. “You remember Brother DeLoach?” he asked.

“He was principal our freshman year. He retired.”

“He taught me a hell of a lot. I was a real bad kid when I went there. Angry, you know? And so damn stupid. I’d been a year at Southton already! They hit me with a razor strap there. I was down for selling grass. Shining shoes and dealing grass to the soldiers on Alamo Plaza, then going to the Alameda to see Cantinflas movies. You know what we got for a joint—we called them Mary Janes—back in the fifties? We got a dollar. But they cost us eighty-five cents apiece. So we were risking years of freedom for fifteen cents! Sure enough, the next thing I knew I was down for a year and my mom and dad were thinking they had raised a rotten kid. When I got out I applied to Central. No way I’m gonna get in, my parents figure. I’m fourteen and already a jailbird. But DeLoach, he lets me in. ‘You stay away from the Mary Janes or I’ll paddle your behind’ he says. ‘You’re a smart kid, that’s your problem. We’ll give you a little something to do with your mind, you’ll stay out of trouble.’”

“Did it work?”

“I loved that school! One of these days I’m gonna go back. I’m gonna see—”

Silence. We are suddenly very still, we alumni. Night has just touched us in the middle of the afternoon.

The Dream Bandidos

The Trailways sign had been taken off the wall of the station, and the newsstand carried papers with names like Revolucion and Viva Aztlan! There were also Mexican and Spanish papers, El Diario and La Nota. The Japanese Asahi Shimbun en Espanol was prominently displayed, as was the London Times—in English, of course. I would have bought a copy, but it cost the equivalent of three dollars.

Jim was delighted to find that the candy counter was well stocked. Last year, M&Ms and Hershey bars reappeared in Dallas, but here in El Paso you can get all manner of colorful locally made confections as well. We stocked up on fresh pralines and other indigenous sweets in the fifteen minutes we had before the bus left.

It was a brand-new Japanese Hino, very comfortably appointed and efficiently air conditioned. In El Paso in August this is a definite plus. It was about ninety degrees, and would probably be a hundred before the end of the day. The driver was wearing a spiffy green uniform. He carried a .38 in a gleaming holster.

We settled into our plush tan seats and prepared for the one-hour journey to Las Cruces and the border. In the bus around us were well-dressed travelers, the men in light summer suits and dark glasses, some of the women even in silk dresses. These people were Aztlan’s elite. Apparently the common folk go to Las Cruces in something other than Super Express buses, if they go at all.

Across the aisle from me sat a man in a magnificent suit, perhaps even a Savile Row creation. Beside him, his wife was wearing a designer dress of light blue silk. I tried to engage them in conversation, but they turned to each other and began to speak animatedly together.

The bus was soon on its way up the long, straight road to Las Cruces. There were trucks on the highway, many of them filled with farm produce. Sometimes we saw cars too, mostly the Toyota and Nissan limousines that are the modern hallmark of the Japanese businessman. A Chevy Consensus or two passed, and the usual sparse collection of prewar jalopies.

We were about twenty miles from Las Cruces, just south of the town of La Mesa, when the bus slowed and turned off the interstate. “La Mesa,” the driver called, and a couple of passengers began to take their baggage down from the overhead racks. All along the roadside into town, there were makeshift dwellings. Derelict GM buses with Sun City Area Transit (SCAT) markings had been made over into shelters. There were tents and even geodesic domes. I saw some blond children toddling about, and an Anglo woman working on a truck. Anglos in Aztlan? Jim and I agreed at once: we would interrupt our trip in La Mesa. We’d take potluck on the final miles into Las Cruces and just hope the nervous Senior Espinoza wasn’t having us followed.

We got out at the brand-new La Mesa bus station and began walking back along the highway. A clump of Japanese in white coveralls came out of a restaurant and watched us for a time. “Momento, por favor,” one of them called at last.

“Yes?”

“Ah. A moment, please.”

We stopped.

“You are—tourists?”

“We’re writers. Doing research for a book about America.”

“Ah!” Bright smiles. “You write about us?” Even brighter smiles.

“What do you do?”

The smiles become fixed. “We agricultural specialists.”

“Helping out with the soya plantations, eh?”

“That’s right. This is soya country!”

They let us walk on. When we passed the outskirts of La Mesa, it became obvious that there were no soya plantations in this area.

You could see all the way to the Portrillos across the desert. “They were uranium workers,” Jim said quietly.

“You’re sure?”

“Those pouches at their waists—you saw them?”

“Yeah.”

“They contained face masks. I’ve seen people wearing them at Los Alamos. And those blue plastic strips on their collars. If they get a dose, those strips turn red.”

I looked back into the quiet town. The bus was long gone, and there wasn’t a car in the street. In the distance, a motor rumbled.

Cicadas screamed in the trees.

We caused an even greater stir in the tent community than we had among the Japanese. People began shouting, then running, and in a few minutes at least seventy or eighty had gathered along the roadside. A young woman came forward. She had an enormous .357 Magnum strapped to her belt. She was perhaps twenty-five, tall and sleek, her face weathered, her hands red from hard work.

One hand rested firmly on the pistol.

“May we help you?” she asked. Her accent was familiar, the broad twang of West Texas.

Jim spoke, his eyes on the gun. “We’re writing a book about postwar America. We’d like to talk to you, if you don’t mind.”

“Where you from?” a man asked from the crowd.

“Dallas. And we’re on our way to California.”

Surprisingly, this revelation caused general laughter. “You got entry permits?”

Jim frowned. “We’re writers. Surely they’ll let us in.”

“Hey,” the man shouted, “y’all hear that? All we gotta do is go up to the Yuma P.O.E. and say we’re writers. We’re in!”

This was not a friendly crowd. But I felt sure they had a story.

“Could we buy some supper?” I asked.

The girl with the Magnum nodded. “You got pesos ‘A’?”

“Five. Will that do it?”

“Ought to, if you like rice. That’s what we got. Rice and soybean soup.”

The group began to disperse back into the camp. The girl, our guard, stayed close. Her hand remained firmly planted on the pistol. She had a soft, open face, but the way she held her lips told me that she could be dangerous. The gun was serious.

Up close, the camp was a hodgepodge. There were L.L. Bean tents arranged with old cars to make shelters, the buses we had seen from the highway, trailers, and even a few portable buildings.

Why, in a nation of empty housing developments and abandoned apartment buildings, anybody would be living like this was beyond me.

“You don’t have homes?”

“No, we don’t have homes.”

“Go to Dallas. You can take over a couple of neighborhoods.”

She snorted, tossed her head. “We’re on the wanted list in Texas. Don’t you ever go to the post office?”

“A lot of wanted posters at the post office. I never saw one with your face on it.”

“It’s there.”

I was afraid to ask why. Jim sat in the dust, very quiet, his eyes sharp. He did not speak.

“We’re robbers,” the girl said. “Espinoza let us stay here when we got chased out of Texas by the highway patrol.”

“Robbers?”

“We live by our wits,” an older woman said. “You’ve heard of the Destructuralist Movement?”

I had indeed. They believed that there should be no social structure beyond the extended family. Even tribes were too much for them. “Destructuralists tried to burn the Dallas Civic Center.”

“That was us,” the girl said simply.

No wonder they had left Texas. “People were outraged.”

“People are addicted to social structure. Warday has given us a historic opportunity to break the boundaries of social control. To be free.”

“We can’t rebuild the economy without social structure,” Jim said.

The faces around him went hard. I wondered if we might not be arguing for our lives here. I hoped that he realized it. “We don’t need the damn economy,” a man said, his voice full of bitter sarcasm. “The economy’s worse than an addiction, it’s a curse!”

“People are dying because the economy’s in such a mess,” I said. “At the rate of two hundred and fifty thousand a month, to be exact. That’s about eight thousand a day. Nearly a hundred just since we started this conversation.”

“You’re real smart,” the girl said.

“I’m a human being. I love other human beings.”

“People are dying because nature is rebalancing the earth’s ecology.”

“They’re dying because of Warday.”

Another voice intervened: “Rice’s ready!” This was a lean young man with bright gray eyes and a dusting of beard. People lined up before a big stainless-steel pot. They carried their own utensils. Each was given a smallish serving of rice topped with cooked soybeans. I thought of my lunch with Hector Espinoza. In fact, I longed for it. I still do. I would give a lot for another taco as crunchy and perfectly seasoned as that one, full of juice and chicken, just the other side of hot. The rice and soybeans were a pitiful meal. It reminded me of the famine, and made me feel frightened.

The sun was making long shadows when we were finished. I sensed that Jim was as eager as I to get away from this place.

When I die, I want to be given the grace to go for a good reason. I didn’t want to die to serve the frustrations of some very unhappy and confused people.

“We have a vision,” the girl said, “of a true Jeffersonian society in America. This could be a nation of farmers, where everybody is self-sufficient and God-fearing, and the family is the center of things.” Her voice rose. “I had a family, you guys! I had a little girl. She was taken from me by heathens. She was taken for no good reason, and she was killed out in the backyard by people who had decided that my family no longer belonged in Roswell, New Mexico.”

A man put his hand on her shoulder. She turned and kissed him in what seemed to me a private way. “We all lost people,” he said.

“That’s why we come together. This is a family.”

Another voice was raised. “If you’re writers, write that another world like the world we had before Warday is going to mean another war. We have to change. We have to turn aside from the hypnosis of politics and the addiction of vast economic systems that eat this beautiful planet and spit out garbage. We need to turn to one another instead. What counts is the person in bed beside you, and your children, and the people next door. The rest is all addiction and hypnosis and more Wardays.”

My impulse was to try to comfort them, to make all the horror and the suffering of the past few years go away. But I couldn’t do that. All I could do was eat their poor meal and look across their fire at them.

The girl with the gun sighed. “Okay,” she said, “here’s what’s gonna happen.” She nodded at Jim. “You’re gonna go wherever you’re goin’. But you aren’t sending anybody after us, like from Texas.” She put her free hand on my shoulder. “You’re stayin’ here for a while, just to make sure he doesn’t send anybody.”

I felt the blood drain out of my face. I really did not care to end up trapped in the worst place we had thus far encountered. What would they do with me? Lock me up in one of those stifling, filthy, derelict buses?

“Three months,” Jim said.

“Six.”

“Let him go in three months. If you don’t, I’ll assume he’s dead and tell the Texas police where to find you.”

“Four months.”

“Four.”

With that, Jim got up. I was appalled. Apparently he proposed to just leave it like this. I was going to spend four months with this bunch. “I’m triaged,” I shouted. “I gave up precious time with my own family for the book we’re writing. You can’t take even more of my time, not if you love the family the way you say you do.”

“We didn’t invite you here.”

Jim turned without a word and walked to the road. He soon disappeared toward La Mesa. At that moment I hated him.

I screamed after him. I flung my empty plate at his departing shadow.

“You’re lucky it didn’t break,” the girl said. “You’d have to figure out how to mend it. And we don’t have a lot of glue.”

A great woe overcame me. I was facing four pointlessly wasted months. “I swear to you, I’ll keep your secret.”

“The Texans would kill us.”

“I’m not even going in that direction! I’m on my way west.”

“California’s just as dangerous. Radical Destructuralists have been executed there.”

How odd that the terrorists of our time would hate authority but believe in what used to be its core symbol, the family. The old anarchists would have been very confused by these people. But, in a way, they made sense to me. I could understand their dream of a peaceful, agricultural America, where the horizon ended with the next farm.

I could see something more than violence and rage in these people. They weren’t just inept terrorists or starving road people or fanatics. They had their wounds too, like all of us. And because of that, I could make a case for tolerance and understanding.

As soon as night fell, the camp went to sleep. As we have all found out, it takes a high level of nutrition and lots of artificial light to keep human beings awake after sunset. They were still like the rest of us were during the famine—dead to the world as soon as the sun went down.

I heard the wet rhythm of sex in the shadows, and sensed stirring here and there in the silence. Birds made their evening calls as last light disappeared behind the Portrillos. Heat lightning flickered. A young woman’s voice, calm and pure, softened the murmuring of the children with a lullaby:

When Jim woke me in the middle of the night, I was at first astonished. But not enough, fortunately, to cry out. He can move more quietly than a shadow; he learned his moves in Asia. We had gone together in the jungles of hate; escaping this camp of exhausted, sleeping people was not difficult.

“They might have killed us if they’d seen us,” he said, once we were out on the Las Cruces highway.

“I know it,” I said.

Desert nights are always cold, and that one was no exception.

We walked north for hours. No cars passed. Toward morning we came into the little town of Mesquite. A neon sign and three pickup trucks identified an open diner. We had American-style eggs and bacon, and big mugs of coffee.

“Is this New Mexico or Aztlan?” I asked the waitress.

She laughed. “You guys hitching up from ’Cruces?”

“El Paso.”

“Well, you’re out of Aztlan. It peters out between La Mesa and here. Just past where the Japs are doin’ their uranium mining.”

We had seconds of coffee and bought some salt beef and Cokes for the road.

Los Alamos

It was nearly dark when Whitley and I reached the outskirts of Santa Fe, in northern New Mexico. In the distance, beyond the thin line of awakening city lights, lay the Jemez Mountains. Hidden there, on the mesa, was the city of Los Alamos.

We felt that a visit there was essential.

It took a long time, however, to find a ride to the mesa. There was no bus service, and the Santa Fe taxis wouldn’t take us out at any price. Finally we got a ride with a Los Alamos resident, in his gleaming new Toyota.

Los Alamos was always a company town, and the company was Uncle Sam. Warday would seem to have ended the need for all that. We really expected to come upon a scene of abandonment.

Since the war, scientists have not been well treated in the United States, and this is especially true for nuclear scientists. And there isn’t any funding for their work. We couldn’t imagine the state of New Mexico, for example, spending money to keep Los Alamos in operation.

Our driver, whose name is best left unsaid, explained some fundamental truths of current life. The people of the mesa had been sealed off from the outside world on Warday. Units of the New Mexico National Guard had blocked all entrances and exits, followed by regular Army troops.

Then there was a black year, when the economy of Los Alamos failed due to the absence of government checks. The Army guardianship was abandoned and the unpaid soldiers drifted away.

Most of the scientists and their families left, too, choosing to make their way in some less hostile environment. The others created a miniature farming community, using their technological skills to develop viable desert agriculture. We saw the results of this work—trickle-irrigated crops, strange-looking greenhouses made of plastic, and an elaborate hydroponic system.

We crossed the Rio Grande and made our way up onto a plateau called Parajito, which resembles a large hand divided into finger-like mesas. There had been rain earlier, and the air was heavily scented with fir and spruce. A peace lay on the land, almost as if it were uninhabited. But after a few miles we came upon the administrative complex. I felt an odd fear, seeing the absence of bustle among these familiar buildings. The library building and its classified papers archive were empty, doors swinging open, windows dark.

Our driver told us that there had been a serious attack by local residents right after the soldiers left, and some of the damage to the library had been done then. Local people had also talked of trials for the Los Alamos scientists, but there had been no arrests.

Nevertheless, the scientists had been glad to leave when they could.

Which, it seems, is the central reality of Los Alamos. It is a place of leavings and departures, empty houses and abandoned lives. Nuclear science is a disliked religion in this area. Los Alamos people never spend the night in Santa Fe, and prefer to go in with Japanese guards when they can.

As we moved across the mesa, we saw that more buildings were gutted. I recognized these structures. On my last visit to Los Alamos, highly classified work on particle-beam weapons had been going on here. The labs have been moved in their entirety to Japan.

And their scientists have gone with them. There is a new “Atomic City,” it seems, being built near Osaka. Los Alamos is a place of caretakers.

The plutonium fabrication plant was still standing, though hardly intact. It was as warm with technicians who were dismantling it and crating its exotic innards as reverently as doctors might pack living hearts for transplant.

I wanted to go up to one of those Japanese workmen in his white coveralls and shake him and tell him that he was infecting himself and his people. I thought, Japan, Japan, surely you have learned. Let this place be a museum, and let these people be its caretakers.

We crossed the bridge that connected one mesa with the other and drove into what had been the main residential and commercial district of prewar Los Alamos. Most buildings were boarded up.

But there was a lively open-air market and an astonishing atmosphere of prosperity. The families of the “Japanese friends,” as they call themselves, live in many of the houses vacated by American scientists who have already gone to Atomic City.

I asked whether they had any choice. Our guide smiled. “We’re going, that’s all I know. The scientist is part of the laboratory.”

Were they paid?

“Listen. We’re treated like gods. Paid? That isn’t the word for it. You get cars, housing, schooling for your kids, all food and medical care free, and enough yen to buy the whole damn state of New Mexico. I don’t know what would happen if anybody refused to go. Nobody does!”

I found in myself a kind of desperate urgency. Skill and intelligence are such valuable resources, and America needs them so badly now. I wanted to say to him, please don’t go. Then I saw a gleam down in the canyon—a car that had been pushed off in the night by angry locals.

Can you blame them, though? This is the central station of the nuclear age.

Our guide sensed our discomfiture at what was happening here, and explained that scientific study had come to a standstill in America. Science was to some extent blamed for the war. But even where this wasn’t true, there was no money, as he put it, for contemplation.

“That’s what you need,” he added. “Without contemplation there is no science.” I felt the vast silence around me and heard the wind whispering in the pines and realized the depth of that truth.

I thought about the friendships I had made in Los Alamos before the war, and the combination of awe and apprehension that I had felt when I first interviewed the scientists and first heard them tell of their work on weapons. I wondered then if it was possible to be divorced from the consequences of one’s work. It seemed to me that no matter how subtle the problem a given weapon presented or how artful its contemplation might be, the ashes and the bones in the end would be the same.

It wasn’t until we were returning across the Rio Grande, on the same bridge that brought Oppenheimer and his men here in 1940, that my mood began to lift. Despite all the thoughts that have hung electric in this air, the cottonwoods are still full and green. Across the way, the pueblos of San Ildefonso and Santa Clara gleamed in the sun. There were Indians working the land there, as they had for centuries. Los Alamos, for all its modern history, is returning to ancient ways.