Warday

California P.O.E

The old Superliner clicks along the tracks. Jim and I are sitting in the observation car, staring out the wide picture windows at the desert. I haven’t been to Los Angeles since 1983. In those days I used to do a certain amount of business with the film companies, and I made occasional trips west. I never cared much for Los Angeles; people who are consciously trying to be relaxed make me nervous. Jim has been to L.A. more recently, but not since the war.

So we have no real way of knowing what to expect of the 1990 immigration controls. We’ve heard hard rumors of meticulous police searches and detention pens and people-smuggling out of Kingman, Arizona. Passing through there, as a matter of fact, we saw the largest hobo camp we’ve encountered so far. It made the little encampment outside of La Mesa seem positively orderly. It was a vast jumble of tents, abandoned vehicles of all types, and human beings. Its residents, the people on the train were saying, were all California rejectees. If so, the border controls must be brutal.

I know a few things about L.A. First, with nearly nine million residents, it is by far the most populous city in the United States.

Despite the general population decline, it has grown by nearly a million since 1987. It is more than four times the size of the second largest city, San Francisco, and larger than New York was before the war.

The conductor comes through, calling, “Needles, next stop Needles.” There is stirring in the car. Needles is one of the infamous California ports of entry. To get into the state, you’ve got to show twenty gold dollars or an equivalent amount in goods or paper currency, and a valid entry permit. The only way to get such a permit is to have business in the state or a job waiting for you there.

We do not have any permits. And between us we have eight hundred paper dollars, the equivalent of only eight gold.

None of our fellow passengers have talked about entry, but we sense that we are not alone. There are all kinds of stories about getting into California; few of them involve the possession of papers and astronomical sums of money.

“Needles,” the conductor shouts. “Everybody stay in the train, stay in the train!”

We slow to a crawl and draw up to the platform. I’m shocked.

There are soldiers armed with submachine guns every fifteen feet.

Behind them are huge signs:

An amplified voice can be heard: “Do not leave the train. Have your entry permits ready. Do not leave the train.”

We decide to obey. Around us a few people are pulling the precious green forms out of purses and wallets. But most are sitting passively, waiting. This is only the first step in their journey. They have timed their arrival carefully. There isn’t an outgoing train for another six hours. For that much time they will be in the holding pen. They have staked their lives and their money on the possibility that they will be able to escape and somehow cross mountains and desert to the Los Angeles basin, there to disappear into the golden horde.

California State Police officers in white crash helmets, face masks, black leather boots, and khaki uniforms come across the platform in formation. They carry pistols in holsters. At a barked order, half of them draw their weapons. The other half have clipboards. These are some of California’s notorious Processing Officers. When they catch people trying to escape the holding pens, they mark them with indelible green dye.

Suddenly a man in full radiation gear comes into the car from the side opposite the platform. He is carrying a small black device with a digital readout. It has a long, thin probe attached. He waves it back and forth as he moves down the aisle, touching some of the passengers with it, inserting it down the collars of others. He squirts a bright red aerosol on the back of one man’s hand, and tells him that he’s got to go take a detox shower and get an issue of paper clothing before he can even get port-of-entry processing.

Jim and I are examined without comment. Apparently this device only measures present radiation. My high lifedose is still my own business, unless I try to enter a hospital without a health card.

At the far end of the car he blows a whistle. Immediately, Processing Officers appear at both doors. Behind the man at the front is one of the clipboard carriers. “California registered citizens,” he shouts, “show your colors.” Four people pull out red plastic cards.

Captain Clipboard runs them through a device like a credit-card verifier and reads something in the screen of a portable computer.

One after another, the citizens are given the precious right to stay on the train.

One man is not as lucky as the others. “You aren’t computing,” Captain Clipboard says affably. “You’ll have to step over to the customs shack for manual verification.”

“What’s the problem, officer?”

“You don’t come up on the computer. Maybe your card’s defective. Go over to customs—it’s the yellow door.”

Uncertain, nervous, the young man rises from his seat. He goes to the rear of the car. As he is leaving, Captain Clipboard calls out, “Arrest him, he’s a jumper.”

The young man leaps down and dashes across the platform, heading for the chainlink fence that separates it from the parking lot. A voice calls in a blaring monotone, “Stop, or we’ll have to shoot.” Then, more gently: “Come on, kid, take it easy.”

When he is three-quarters of the way up the fence, two of the U.S. Army types raise their machine guns.

“Look, kid, you’re going to die in ten seconds if you don’t climb back down.”

The young man stops. He sags against the fence. Slowly he climbs down, into the arms of two other soldiers, who handcuff him, then connect the handcuffs to leg irons and lead him clanking away.

“Okay,” Captain Clipboard calls out, “everybody hold up their entry permits.” Hands thrust up full of green paper. “Hey, good car! This is gonna be a nice day.” He casts a frown at Jim and me.

From another car there rises the sound of female screaming. It goes on and on, trembling into the heat.

Captain Clipboard works his way along the aisle. One after another, he puts the green forms on his clipboard and goes over them with a lightpen. Two people are sent to the yellow door. They walk quickly across the platform, pointedly ignoring the chainlink fence, carrying their green forms and all of their belongings in their hands. Others, from other cars, straggle along as well. Finally there is nobody left in the car but us illegals.

“All right, now it’s joker time! All of you displaced persons off the train, line up along the white line on the platform, and don’t make sudden moves. You’d be surprised how nervous those dumb army boys get, standing out there in the sun. Let’s go!”

Sixteen of us shuffle off the train, mostly threadbare, eyes hollow, about us all the furtive look of the new American wanderers.

We are facing the toughest port-of-entry system in the United States. The odds are that all sixteen of us will be on the outbound train later this afternoon.

“Hey, Sally,” Captain Clipboard calls, “you recycle fast, sweet-heart.”

“I’m working on a tunnel,” one woman mutters in reply, her head down.

I wonder how many of us are repeaters. But, watching the soldiers across the platform watching us, I decide not to strike up any conversations. At a barked command, the soldiers move forward until they are facing us. “All right, folks,” the giant voice says, “single file to the pen, please. Move out. Double time!”

As we shamble away, the train gives a long blast on its horn and starts to roll. Not a few heads turn back, watching it pass the open track barrier. The lucky few inside are already reopening their newspapers and settling back for the run to L.A.

We are herded into a fenced-off area about three acres square.

There is a cyclone fence twenty feet high, topped by razor wire. At all four corners of the enclosure there are guard houses. Fifty feet beyond the fence there is another barrier: a run occupied by six huge hounds. I see light towers stretching off into the distance, wonder if the whole California border could be lit. As we won’t be here past 4:00 P.M., when the outbound train arrives, I’ll never know.

“Bomb-out,” I say to Jim.

“Maybe. I think we ought to try to talk our way in.”

I assume that as a newsman, he’s more practiced at this sort of thing than I am. “What do you suggest?”

“We can try the reporter gambit. I’ve got my News Herald ID.” We walk over to the gate.

A soldier, smoking a cigarette, closes his eyes for an instant and then regards us with a blank expression.

“I’m a reporter for—”

“No talking.”

“—the Dallas News Herald.” Jim holds up his press card.

The soldier stares, his eyes glazed with boredom.

“This man is also a writer. We’re on our way to interview the Governor of California.”

There is a flicker of interest. “You have any verifying documentation?”

“I’d have to make a call.”

The flicker dies. “Then take the afternoon train to Kingman, which is the first place you can get off, and make your call from there. They’ll mail you letters of entry and give you an access code for the border police.”

He starts to walk away. I decide to try another approach. “How long have you been doing this?”

I can see him sigh. “I was drafted in ’91. Six weeks of basic and a month of crowd-control training and here I am.”

“You’re with a U.S. Army unit?”

“That’s right. Regular Army, 144th Military Police, to be exact. And I ain’t supposed to be talking to you.” Again, he starts to walk away.

“Look, is there any way out of here?”

“Sure. People get out all the time.” He laughs. “Two, maybe three in the eighteen months I been here. And they were caught within the hour. I got to tell you, all those signs you see warning you about gettin’ shot? They’re for real. I’ve seen it happen. I’ll tell you another thing. Captain says, soon as he sees you two, ‘We oughta just go ahead and paint those assholes. They’re gonna be trouble.’”

This time he does walk away, smartly. An officer is approaching, a tall, gray man with sparkling, sad eyes. On his chest is a nameplate that reads O’MALLEY. He wears the oak leaves of a major. “Keep this area clear, Private,” he says. His voice is dry and quick.

“Yessir!” The private snaps to attention and salutes his superior officer. There is a spit-and-polish about these men that I don’t remember from the prewar army. But under the surface, they’re still American. I suspect that I could get a good laugh out of both of them if I could remember a decent joke.

“You know what I think?” Jim says.

“What?”

“It’s a pain in the neck to travel in this country. Frankly, I can’t see how we’re going to get through this without illegal assistance. For which I guess we’ll have to go back to Kingman.”

When the afternoon train comes in, we go along with the rest of the thirsty, sweating mob that has been kept standing for hours in the sun. For those who can’t pay the price of a ticket, there are two “state cars” at the end of the train, ancient and filthy. These people will be able to get to Kingman by train, but then they’re on their own. It’s a tragedy for them. There is no more romance to being a hobo in America. It means starvation, sometimes slow and sometimes fast.

We reach the outskirts of Kingman at eight o’clock at night.

The hobo city seems even larger, transformed as it is into an ocean of flickering cookfires.

As the train stops, dirty children run up with cups of water, shouting, “Penny, penny, penny,” at the thirsty travelers. Their shrill voices mingle with the barking of skeletal dogs.

It doesn’t take long to find the people-smugglers. The moment we jump down off the train to the dirt siding, we see a man in a cap and dark glasses, far better dressed than most. We catch his eye and he strolls up to us.

“Get you all the way, three golds apiece.”

Another man trots over, lean and quick, wearing a clean white T-shirt, jeans, and hand-tooled boots. “Five for both. And watch out for that turkey, he flew right into an ambush last week.”

“Oh yeah? I’d be in prison camp if I’d done that. Why don’t you tell ’em the way you piled up that Tri-Pacer in June, asshole.”

Suddenly a woman’s voice interrupts from behind us. “One gold each. And I’ll take folding at a hundred to one.”

“Shit, Maggie, you can’t even cover your gas!”

“Maggie—look, you guys, she’s got a rotten plane and a worse copilot. I don’t wanna influence you, but as a professional pilot—”

“I’m better’n no copilot at all, which is what you got, George,” snarls a nine-year-old boy. He and the woman come closer. She is pretty in the gloom, her eyes flashing, her lips edged with a smile.

“We fly a Cessna 182, gentlemen. It’s clean and safe.” The smile develops. She nods toward a decrepit pickup parked just down the track. We bring out our money, then follow her and the boy.

“That’s the last time you undercut us, Maggie,” one of the other smugglers says. “Your prices ain’t worth the risk.”

The truck is rusty and the engine sounds like it’s only firing on about three cylinders, but it runs. “You’re lucky you didn’t go with those two. Likely as not, they’re California agents.” The airport is unlighted, just a dirt strip in the desert and a single ramshackle shed. The only sound, as we get out of the pickup, is the humming of a lighted Coke machine. “How d’you like our runway light?”

Maggie says as we pass it on the way to the flight line. I don’t know about Jim, but I don’t like it very much at all. For a nervous flyer like me, things are beginning to look kind of grim.

A coal-black Cessna 182 awaits us. Maggie and her boy start a flight check, walking around the plane, moving creaky flaps and rattling what seem to be loose propeller blades. Or maybe they’re supposed to be that way.

“You guys ready? We want to get moving in case the competition informs on us. This is a cutthroat business.” She smiles. “You got ID cards?”

We don’t, of course, or we wouldn’t be here. I get set to spend some more money.

“You got to be able to show IDs, or you’ll be in the pen inside of twenty-four hours. All California citizens have them.” I remember as much from the train. “We can give you fakes. They won’t work in a computer, but they’ll pass an eyeballing.”

“Is this part of the service?”

“No way. It’s another sawbuck apiece. We had to pay fifteen hundred for the Polaroid machine. Them things are hard to get. Go in there without cards and you’re wasting your plane fare. You don’t want to have that happen.”

We pay our money and get our cards.

The plane bounces along the “runway,” at last shuddering into the air with a horrible popping from the engine. I almost wish it aloft, but it continues to stagger along at an altitude that could not be more than fifty feet. My heart begins to pound. The plane can’t be working. It’s going to crash.

Suddenly the kid starts counting backwards from ten. He has a stopwatch in his hand, just visible in the dim light from the dashboard. At the count of one, Maggie guns the motor and pulls her stick into her belly. We shoot upward, all except my stomach, which remains hanging, sickeningly, at our previous altitude.

“Power lines,” Maggie comments as we dive back to the altitude of my guts. I look at Jim. His eyes are wide.

“They’re flying low,” he mutters, “to avoid radar. Since they can’t see, they’re measuring ground speed against the stopwatch so they can tell when to climb over obstacles.”

“More or less.”

“If that’s a question, the answer is less.”

We fly like this for what seems like hours. In fact, we go through the mountains literally at treetop level, with the boy counting and making check marks on a yellow pad, and the plane popping up and down almost continuously.

When I get airsick, the boy hands back a bag without ever missing his count.

Suddenly, just when it seems that the worst will never end, we are droning along straight and level, approaching the Los Angeles basin. “Palm Springs off to the left,” Maggie comments. The lights of the town are beside us rather than below us. I decide to close my eyes until we land.

But there is no chance. I see L.A. then, and I almost burst into tears. Ahead and a little below are beads, strings, fountains of light It is a vision from the past, wealthy and mysterious and wonderful.

“I’m gonna leave you near Colton Airport. You know L.A., either of you?”

“I don’t,” I say, “but I don’t think we want to be left at an airport. We’ll have to deal with customs, won’t we?”

“I didn’t say at Colton airport. Near it. We drop people various places. We ain’t used this particular spot in a month. I’m gonna land on Interstate 10, just west of the airport. I’m not even gonna turn off the engine. You just pile out and I’ll give ’er the gun and that’s it. You’re on your own. There’s an interurban station right near the airport. Go there. There won’t be anybody around this time of night. Last trolley comes through at midnight. It’s a dime.”

Ten minutes later we are sitting in the brightly lit trolley stop.

There is an ad on the back wall for Yamaha bicycles and a placard announcing,

Penciled in below this are Colton’s local laws: curfew is midnight or last trolley. The area commandant is Colonel William Piper, U.S.A., address GPO Colton, phone number 213-880-1098.

Suspicious persons should be reported at once.

Hello, sunshine.

POLL Opinions from the Two Americas

There really are two Americas now, the first nation being California and its satellite Western states, the second being the rest of us folks—dirty, tired, and radioactive.

Out West, the public impression of the state of the rest of the country is very much worse than actual conditions would warrant.

“Outsiders” are looked upon as contagious at best, and probably downright lethal.

The West believes that

• America is recovering from the war.

• The West is helping the East as much as it can.

• The War Zones ought to be abandoned.

Naturally the East thinks otherwise, and though the War Zones are not broken out separately, they presumably feel that they should be rehabilitated.

Surprisingly, neither East nor West feels that long-term martial law in the War Zones is a threat to the Constitution, though the East has a stronger opinion in this matter than the West.

Do you believe that the United States is continuing to make a recovery from the 1988 war?

A significant East-West split is reflected in the response to this question. As first noted three years ago, marked differences appear between the states of the so-called War Zone and the remaining states. When asked this question in 1993, these two regions responded:

In terms of assistance for recovery, do you believe that the federal government should abandon the War Zones permanently in order to concentrate resources on those marginally affected areas that could more fully benefit from the assistance?

As in last year’s survey, there were sharp regional differences:

Do you believe that the regions of the United States unaffected directly by the war are doing everything they can to assist in the full recovery of the War Zones?

Again, there were substantial differences between East and West:

When asked what more the Western region could do to assist in recovery, or in what different ways it could do so, the responses were as follows:

Are America’s allies doing all they can to assist this nation to recover?

As in 1992, there were significant regional differences in response to this question:

Does the continued use of the U.S. Armed Forces to control the War Zones (approximately .7 million servicemen) pose a long-term threat to the return of constitutional authority to state and local governments in these areas?

Significant differences again appeared between regions:

Should the center of the national government once again be reestablished on the East Coast, that is, moved from Los Angeles?

Do you support the recent demands made by some groups for dividing the United States into two permanent regions, e.g., West and East?

Los Angeles

It is the greatest city in the United States. In size, San Francisco isn’t even close.

Jim and I found it nostalgically complex, a vast mechanical toy full of buses and clanging trolleys and more cars than either of us have seen in one place in years.

It looks like fun, and the tension in the air reminds me a little of New York.

As much as there are things that are here from the past, there is something from the present that is missing. It is the sense of having suffered—the subtle tension that hangs between friends and strangers alike, everywhere else we have been so far. California didn’t suffer too much from the famine, and few people here were weak enough to be killed by the Cincinnati Flu. Radiation sickness is almost unknown, except among refugees.

On our first night in the bright streets of Los Angeles, I found myself returning to my old metropolitan habits, moving with quick anonymity and never meeting anybody else’s eyes.

There is a much stronger Japanese influence than ever before.

The streets are packed not only with Japanese businessmen but also with clerks and factory workers and children with American nannies. And there are cars: new Nissans that whistle when they accelerate and get 130 miles to a gallon of gas, sporty Toyota Z-90s, Isuzus and Mitsubishis and the occasional Mercedes-Benz.

There are also a few Fords, big and beautifully made at the new plant in Fullerton, and a great improvement over the notorious Consensus with the plastic windows. Despite its size, the new Thunderbird gets sixty miles per gallon. It also has a sensor that sounds an alarm if any radioactive particles should be taken into the air-conditioning system.

More, though, than its prosperity, L.A. has the feeling of prewar America, the cheer, the confidence, the cheek that one associates with former days.

I indulged myself shamelessly. In Little Tokyo there are dozens of open-air fruit and vegetable stands where melons and tomatoes and lettuce and carrots and squash and dozens of other things are stacked in abundance. Little Tokyo, by the way, now extends all the way to Sixth Street. It must be four times its prewar size. In Little Tokyo I bought an enormous vine-ripened tomato for two cents and ate it like an apple. I have not eaten such a thing in years. It was rich beyond belief, dense with a flavor that swept through my nostrils, heavy with juice. If I could design hydroponics that would grow tomatoes that flavorful, I’d get rich.

For fifteen cents we spent half an hour at an open-air sushi bar, sampling the catch and burning our nostrils with Japanese horse-radish. Then we strolled on, satiated, only to be tempted a few minutes later into a beautiful ice cream store, which sold a new brand called Sweet Sue. I had a double-dip cone of cherry vanilla and, in honor of my son, pistachio.

I wish that my family could enjoy the life here. No wonder the P.O.E. is so strict. If immigration was free, California would be drowned in people.

As illegals, we were faced with a number of very serious problems. The first was transportation. There are ten long-distance trolley lines and many more buses than there were before the war, but a car is still a terrific convenience in L.A. We did not have one and couldn’t rent one without revealing that our IDs were bogus.

So we were condemned to trying to figure out the intricate system of buses, minibuses, trolleys, and Aztlan-like pesetas.

Beyond transportation, we had the difficulty of finding a place to stay. I have enjoyed some extraordinary hotels in Los Angeles: the Beverly Hills, the Chateau Marmont, the Bonaventure.

But you can’t register in a hotel without an ID that will pass the computer. In every bus and trolley, posted in stores and in post offices and pasted on every available public bulletin board, of which there must be thousands, is the following sign:

We decided to assume a hostile population and made a few basic rules. First, we had to keep moving. Second, we had to sleep under the stars. We couldn’t even risk a rooming house—assuming we could find one with a room to rent. Housing is a nightmare in L.A. I saw ads in the Times offering small homes in the Valley for eight hundred in gold, no paper accepted and no mortgages given.

Dallas has whole neighborhoods where all you have to do is move in, bring your new house up to code, and it’s yours.

Our third rule was that we had to look as happy and well fed as the rest of the Angelinos. Considering our other rules, this one was damned hard to keep. But we dared not look “road-weary.” Angelinos know that overpopulation will strangle their prosperity, and they are generally avid to turn in illegals. We couldn’t risk arousing suspicion, especially not among our interviewees and in the offices Jim was visiting to get government documents.

We spent our first night in a carport at the La Mirada apartments. Immediately after dawn the next day, we had our second taste of conflict between government and members of the Destrueturalist movement. Shouting began echoing up and down La Mirada Avenue from the direction of El Centro. Then there were people running frantically through the carport, breathing hard, followed by battle-dressed officers on black mopeds.

One of the escapees dove under a car just beside us. Her gasping was so loud that we could hear it over the buzz of the passing mopeds.

One of the cops waved his pistol at us. “You don’t see this,” he called. Then he sped off.

“Halt,” echoed an amplified voice from the far end of the alley, “you’re all under arrest!”

Then there came the dismal mutter of capture, the gear-grinding approach of a small black schoolbus with bars welded across the windows, the quick disappearance of the little band of the desperate.

Then silence. Not a window opened in any of the houses that lined the alley, not a curious face appeared. We kept to the dim interior of the carport, listening to the breathing of the person under the car. We stayed like that for some little time. Once somebody came out of the La Mirada, got into a gleaming blue Consensus, and drove away.

“It’s quiet,” Jim said at last. “You can come out now.”

We then had our only contact with the Conspiracy of Angels, and learned a little more about the nature of Destructuralism.

A Statement by an Anonymous Member of the Conspiracy of Angels

People cannot continue to hide from the fact that this civilization is totally bankrupt. Society needs a whole new way of doing and being if we are not going to build up all over again and wind up with an even worse war.

That is where the Destructuralist Movement comes in, and the Angels are militant Destructuralists.

What is Destructuralism, you might ask, and what’s in it for me and my family? First off, Destructuralism says that your person and those you make your family are the only valid social unit, and the maintenance of that family is the only valid economic activity.

We say that the whole social edifice, from the Boy Scouts right up to the Army, is essentially an addiction, that it is more than unnecessary, it is dangerous. Social structures are the breeding ground of ideology, greed, and territorialism. Agricultural communities are peaceful communities, and families bound together by need and love do not go to war.

No matter how benign a given structure seems, it will inevitably lead to the same consequences all social structures lead to, namely, war and death. Real social harmony comes not from law-books but from the human heart.

If that is too high an ideal, then it is perfectly obvious that we are eternally condemned to the slavery of warfare, and probably also to extinction.

Government is institutionalized dehumanization. People who deal with paper instead of other people lose the all-important thread of contact from heart to heart. Here’s a story about a social structure that all of America loves, the British Relief. A man who joined our movement got eye cancer and the Relief did triage on him and sent him home. People wait in line for days, only to be told by some English nanny that they can’t even get an aspirin. And if you go black market for medicine and get caught, it is not a jury of your peers that tries you, it is the Relief. And they forced you onto the black market in the first place. This man with eye cancer bought black-market chemotherapy, got caught, and had to pay a fine, even though he was dying.

He became an Angel a month before he took henbane from a witch. He did not die of cancer, he died of structure, or at least suffered from it. There is no shortage of painkillers, for example. The Relief could have given him Brompton Mixture on an outpatient basis, but the rules reserve it for inpatients only, and he couldn’t be an inpatient because he was triaged!

So the structure—simply because it was there—at the very least condemned him to unnecessary agony. If his family had been in control of his fate, instead of some bureaucrat in the Relief office down at the civic center, he would have been spared the torment and indignity of the pain.

People say thank God Europe didn’t get in the war, what would we do without them, but the Angels say we are just suffering more because of the structures that are now being imposed on us from the outside. When Washington was destroyed, we had a golden, historic opportunity to free ourselves from the age-old slavery of government. Instead, we are having both economic and political structure imposed on us from the outside—colonial exploitation, as a matter of fact, very similar to what the Europeans practiced on the Chinese in the last century. The foreign presence on our shores is nothing more than a prescription for more structural enslavement, with the added problem that we don’t even control the structure.

Also, they take crops from the few viable growing areas and allocate them not only to North America but also to themselves. Remember, if we weren’t feeding Europe too, we wouldn’t be starving ourselves. The story is that they have gone into Argentina and taken it over to make sure the crops are not held up for high prices. Argentina is no longer even a country. If you read the English papers, they always call it “the Argentine” or some such thing. We believe that most of the population south of the border is dead of starvation, and the Europeans caused it by taking the only food our Latin sisters and brothers could get their hands on, the Argentine wheat. That is hundreds of millions of deaths.

We call ourselves Angels because we help people in need and because we remember the dishonored dead of the world, those who died on Warday in the United States and the USSR, and the billions who have died since. We represent the living, the ordinary men and women and children who see that, in order to survive, mankind needs a whole new way of being.

There is inherent in Destructuralism the concept that people can remake their own hearts to include a new valuation of their fellow human beings. By refocusing our energies on our families we can learn never to forget for an instant how it feels to be the other person. For example, the American President and the Russian Premier could not have done what they did to the rest of us on Warday if they had been trained from birth never to forget for an instant that all human beings are partners in life and that everybody is as important to himself or herself as they were to themselves—that the death of the average Joe was going to be as much of a catastrophe for him and his family as the death of the great leader would be to his own precious self and his relatives. Instead, they sat in their command posts and talked numbers. To Destructuralists there are no numbers, there are only names and faces and hearts.

Only in a truly destructured, rehumanized social milieu can the kind of maturing growth that people need take place, because only if there are no distancing structures can the individual come to realize, through his identification with his own family, that every other life on earth is as precious and valuable as his own.

You might argue that Destructuralism is old-style anarchy all over again, but it isn’t. Destructuralism is based on the caring of mature human souls for one another and for the planetary body, too. It is government by putting yourself in the other man’s shoes.

The bible said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

That is all the government the world needs.

Remember this: If you love life and think that big government is big poison, and you are willing to stand hand in hand with your brothers and sisters on this earth, do not scorn the Angels, for you are one.

Fugitives

As soon as she finished her statement, our friendly Angel got into the nearest American-made car, reached under the dashboard, and hotwired it.

“You want a ride?”

We didn’t. We just wanted to disappear. She backed out into the alley and was soon off down La Mirada. Not ten seconds after the car had disappeared, there came a roar from about thirty feet overhead and an ultralight aircraft darted past in the direction she had gone. There are large numbers of these planes in Los Angeles skies, used by police and fire departments to keep detailed tabs on rooftops and backyards. Soon, more of the moped cops shot past on La Mirada.

We were scared. The penalties for being an illegal immigrant in California are severe. Capture could mean years in a work camp.

Maybe all the years I have left.

“Let’s get out of here,” Jim said. “Half the police department’s in the neighborhood this morning.”

I did not reply. I was thinking of Anne and Andrew, wondering what they were doing. It was a quarter to six in Dallas. I could imagine my family out in the henhouse, Anne collecting eggs while Andrew did the cleaning. I could hear the hens clucking and smell thick henhouse odors mixing with the aroma of morning coffee floating across from the kitchen.

Another ultralight appeared and began circling us as we walked along La Mirada. It was all I could do not to break and run as the damned thing soared round and round overhead, its engine whining like an angry wasp. Jim stopped and looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun.

“Don’t do that!”

“It’s more suspicious to ignore him.”

The policeman’s amplified voice crackled down: “IDs, please!”

We held up our red plastic cards. He peered down as he made another sweep, then flew off, talking into his radio.

“Do you think that did it, Jim?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.” We walked on, heading for the Santa Ana Freeway. If we could catch an interregional bus there, it just might take us all the way to Burbank.

Suddenly a black car pulled up, and behind the wheel was an unexpected but welcome sight: a priest in a Roman collar. “Get in,” he said.

The thought crossed my mind that he might be a police agent.

Then a siren began wailing. I could see the lights of a squad car far down La Mirada. “Get in,” the priest repeated. “Hurry up about it!”

We got into the old Buick. “Down, down, you darned fools!” As the squad car roared past, we dropped to the floor of the back seat.

“They’re on foot,” a voice rattled from the front seat I was astonished to realize that the priest had a police radio. “Two-four-two to Air Six. We do not, repeat, do not have them in our sight.”

The priest started his car. “That’s a relief, anyway.”

“Father—”

“Keep down!”

He drove us to his rectory, where we got a shave, a shower, and a much-needed change of clothing. He never referred to the Destructuralists, or why he had been in that particular neighborhood at that time, or why he had so mercifully helped us.

He believed strongly in the value of human freedom, though, and in the old Bill of Rights. You can read that between the lines of the interview he gave us.

INTERVIEW Reverend Michael Dougherty, Catholic Priest

I was afraid we wouldn’t have time to do this, but I think you’re probably safe here for another half hour or so. I’m glad to get the chance to speak for publication. We’ve forgotten a few basic human freedoms out here in sunny California. We need to rediscover ourselves as Americans—as people, really. As children of God.

Sometimes I think of the world—is that thing on? I don’t see the red light. Ah, okay. Sometimes I think of the world as a little lost bit of dust in the middle of nowhere, and it is deathly ill, and there is nobody to help us. But then I feel the presence of Christ, as if He had taken the world in His arms and was hugging us to Himself the way a father might hug a hurt child.

I think that we Americans are feeling terribly guilty about ourselves. Especially the older generation. I see the effects. One of them is that priests like me have gotten incredibly busy, and one of the things that keeps me busiest is ministering to the sad and the guilty. We’ve got three priests here at St. Francis, me and two newly ordained, as well as three deacons and four nuns. I’ve been a priest since 1975, so I’m an old hand. That rarity, the prewar religious. The rest are all new. Since Warday, my parish has more than quadrupled in size. In the past five years, I can hardly remember a Mass that wasn’t full. Even at six o’clock on Saturday morning, it’s full. Many, many kids. The children of secularized parents, rebelling against the indifference of their elders. And the elders too, now, fumbling with the St. Joseph’s missals we have in the church, saying their prayers as best they can.

But it’s in the confessional that I hear the motives people have for returning to the Church. It isn’t piety or love of God, not among the older folks. People are coming back to the Church because they feel that their own indifference, just letting things happen, was a big part of what caused the war. Remember, back in those days it just seemed like there was nothing you personally could do. The solutions now to our problems then seem obvious.

But in those days we were all very different people. We were dulled by living under the Sword of Damocles for nearly half a century. We had done the worst possible thing—gotten used to an incredible and immediate danger. The nuclear mechanism was far more hazardous to each one of us individually than, say, pouring gasoline on our clothes would have been. But it didn’t feel that way, not in those sunny, treacherous days.

We understood how absolutely deadly the bomb was, but we did not understand how helpless we were in the face of the mechanism of war. The mechanism began to run quite mysteriously, and went on until it broke down. It could as easily have destroyed the world. Only faulty design prevented that. We thought that people dickering about arms control in Geneva mattered, when what we really needed all along was a massive change of heart. How absurdly outmoded the elaborate diplomacy of the prewar period now seems. There could have been a massive shift of heart, toward acceptance and understanding and away from hostile competitiveness and ideological obsession.

The whole business of the United States and the USSR squandering their resources on territorialism seems incredibly silly now.

Our prewar mistake was to believe in rubble. We visualized ourselves as crawling out of the basement and putting brick back on brick. Places don’t just cease to exist.

You know, they say that a person set down in the middle of the Washington Dead Zone would have died within hours. Just keeled over and died. Birds died flying across it. That was in the L.A. Times after the war. It’s a forty-square-mile desert of black glass dotted with the carcasses of sparrows and larks and the occasional duck.

Before the war there weren’t even intellectual references for such things. No comprehension. The message of Hiroshima wasn’t understood. We thought that it meant devastation. But ruins have to do with the past. Modern nuclear war means life being replaced by black, empty space. It means ancient seats of government evaporating in a second. The moral question is almost beyond asking.

What are we, that we can do this? What is evil, that it can speak with such a voice? We no longer know what we are, we of the Holocaust and Stalin and Warday. We unleashed hell on ourselves by pretending that diplomacy, of all things, could control its fires. The heart, and the heart alone, is more powerful than hell.

Am I preaching? Excuse me. I run so fast, give so much advice, quite frankly I think I’ve forgotten how to talk without a degree of pontification. Sometimes I wish I had a wife to have a private life with. Someone who would say, “You’re preaching, Mike,” or “You’re talking through your hat.” But I don’t have time for a wife. Or children. I couldn’t raise kids in a life that doesn’t have ten free minutes a day. So I’m no longer uptight about the celibacy rule.

Before Warday I was well on my way to losing my vocation. I wanted to get married. I think I might have become an Episcopalian. But then came Warday and, afterward, the Reunion with the Anglicans and the Episcopals. Then, most of all, the tremendous upsurge of need for my services. I got the feeling that Christ was very close to us religious people, full of forgiveness and need, asking for our help. I want to be Christ’s servant. Now when I’m feeling alone I take my soul to Mary, who is His mother and therefore the mother of all mankind. She’s what the witches call the Mother Goddess! I just kneel before her altar and say the rosary.

She never fails me, Mary. The rosary is far better for me than, say, meditation. It’s not only meditation, with all the repetition, it’s humble and it’s a request for help. She was once a human being.

She knows what we suffer. She is always there, anytime, for anybody. Mary doesn’t care a fig about the details. She loves and respects you because you exist.

The witchcraft movement talks about taking personal, individual responsibility for the condition of planet Earth as if they invented the idea. But it’s also a Christian and very specifically Catholic notion. At least I think it is. My saddest, guiltiest parishioners say that they sinned terribly by not taking some kind of personal action on behalf of peace between the United States and the Soviet Union. They say they should have demonstrated against this or in favor of that. But I tell them no, the sin was that we did not accept one another in our hearts, neither side. Our leaders hardly even knew each other. The two greatest nations on earth, with almost total responsibility for the fate of planet and species, and they hardly even spoke! They should have made it their business to be close personal friends. And there should have been as much commonality of policymaking and government as possible.

Instead the two countries were separate islands, distant from, and mysterious to, each other. That was the sin of pride, doing that.

What a price has been paid for the pleasure of such indulgence.

When I think of what our generation did, I pray very, very hard that the future will somehow accept us and find in the Body of Christ the love and understanding that will enable them to say, “Our ancestors chose foolishness over wisdom and hostility over acceptance, but we understand and we forgive.”

Now I’m not your deep thinker. But I do try. I’ve read the Catholic philosophers, and the Greeks, and most of the moderns. I mean to say, I’ve read my Whitehead and my Hegel, my Aristotle and my Plotinus.

You know, throughout history, philosophy centered on the concept of being rather than the ethics. That was fine until recent years, when we began to try on some pretty bizarre concepts, and to hell with the ethics of it all. Nazism and so forth, I mean. And the concept of nationhood that allowed us to think we had the right to build such things as nuclear bombs.

The American and Russian peoples should never have allowed their leaders to play the game of overstating the threat to justify exorbitant military expenditures. We were supposed to be seeking a balance of terror, weren’t we? But the United States in fact got so far ahead of the Russians technologically that we were about to send up a satellite that would have made their missiles useless against us. And they had no similarly effective weapon. So they were forced to start the war. They were backed up against the wall.

I’m just a priest in a medium-sized parish. Nobody on high would ever have listened to me. Before the war I had eight hundred in my parish. Now I’ve got close to ten thousand frightened and suffering people. In some ways I’d rather have had eight hundred and the old world than ten thousand and the new.

Let’s see now, you asked me for an idea about how my day goes. What I do. Well, I get up at five-thirty and I run like a madman until midnight, then I sleep like the dead until five-thirty the next morning. I’ve got my schedule for last Wednesday. I’ll read it into the record:

5:30 A.M. Arose and said breviary.

5:45 A.M. Breakfast of corn soup and milk.

6:00 A.M. Said Mass. Gave out communion to 230 people.

6:30 A.M. Meeting with my staff. Discussed the reroofing project. Looked over Father Moore’s report to the bishop on the feasibility of splitting St. Francis into two parishes. I hope that this is done!

7:00 A.M. Met a parishioner who has just been diagnosed as having stage-three Hodgkin’s and has been triaged. Has a wife and three teenage children. Is fifty-two. We prayed together and he cried. He paced like a trapped lion. Prayed for him and put him in the Mass list for Sunday.

7:20 A.M. CCD leaders met in my office to plan a bake sale.

They have thirty pounds of flour, six pounds of sugar, some apples, some molasses, and so we are very excited. Thank God they also have Sister Euphrasia, who is one good baker.

7:45 A.M. Had coffee and listened to the Vatican U.S. Service on the shortwave.

8:00 A.M. Went to Holy Cross Hospital for my visitations. I’m glad I took Father Moore, as my list was sixty names long! I had an hour there, and because he took half my people, I was able to spend two minutes with each patient. I blessed, I prayed, I heard eighteen confessions and gave out thirty Holy Communions. I gave the Last Rites to twelve patients on the critical list.

9:15 A.M. Returned to the rectory. Did youth counseling until noon. We have seventy young people who are converting, and an active Sodality and CYO. But these were all special cases. I gave each kid half an hour. Saw six troubled kids. A girl who is pregnant. A boy who is in love with a younger boy. A girl who says she sees visions of the Virgin, and indeed may. Another girl who has beaten her mother and father so badly that they want her out of the house. Where does a petite girl of sixteen get such titanic anger? Two boys who steal. I warned them very sternly. They must remember, these children, that we have a looting law here in California, and they are liable to be shot on sight if they’re caught. It isn’t like the old days. There is no due process at the end of a gunsight.

12:15 P.M. Lunch of soybean soup, lettuce with vinegar and oil, and a delicious Budweiser.

12:30 P.M. Met with Parish Council. We are going to try to expand our food program this winter. Last year we distributed 31,280 meals to the hungry. This year we are going to try for fifty thousand. Mrs. Cox said that the baby boy found behind the rectory last week was just fine, normal in every way, and has been placed with the Tucker family. They are at risk for having children, so they are terribly grateful.

1:00 P.M. Met with Joe O’Donnell, who is thinking about running for chief of police. The most powerful job in the Valley. Will he do it? He’d do a very creditable job, I feel sure. I promised to call the bishop on his behalf. There is certainly nothing wrong with having a Catholic in that job, and Joe is a good man.

1:15 P.M. Back to the church for fifteen minutes of prayer.

Spent it with Mary and had wonderful, intimate communication with her. Has our need somehow made our connection with deity stronger? Sometimes I feel as if Christ and Mary are here, alive, almost in the flesh. This, I suppose, is faith.

1:30 P.M. Catechism with my eighth-graders. Fifty kids. What a bunch of jokers! I love that class. We might be in hell, but kids are kids, always. What did I find in the question box? “Father, if you couldn’t consummate marriage any other way, would it be permissible to use an Erector Set?” Kid’s humor. We are into sex education. Some of these children are sterile.

2:30 P.M. Adult counseling for two hours. I took a Charismatic study group for half an hour, then a disturbed couple, then a woman who has bone cancer and is contemplating euthanasia. Personally I detest the practice, but I can see if I get a really rough cancer I might want to turn to it myself. His Holiness and the Archbishop of Canterbury have agreed that it’s no sin to withdraw life support if the person is beyond hope. I promised to attend her.

4:30 P.M. Spent ten minutes with my breviary.

4:40 P.M. Went to the church and said Benediction. Our choir is just wonderful. Who would have thought ten years ago that I would have a full choir for weekday afternoon service? Not to mention two hundred people in the church. Christ has not failed us.

He is awakening our hearts.

5:00 P.M. Heard confessions for an hour. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” How I love them, my dear parishioners. I will not speak of their sins, except to say that they are good people, and I know they are forgiven their little transgressions. I tell them to make penance a sacrament of self-discovery. Confession should be a joy.

6:00 P.M. Supper. Vegetable goulash with nice big pieces of sausage. Another Bud. Much laughter and joking around our big table of men and women. We have a lot of fun together.

7:00 P.M. BBC Overseas Service News. The U.K. has recognized the Kingdom of Azerbaijania. We looked and looked on the map, but we couldn’t find it. Somewhere in the former Soviet Union, but where?

7:30 P.M. “Moon Over Morocco,” a cigarette, and a cup of coffee. My half hour of indulgence! That’s a delightful radio show. I must admit that I miss TV. Boy, what I wouldn’t give to feast my eyes on “M*A*S*H” just one more time. As a semipublic institution, we have some chance of getting a TV before too much longer.

The BBC is already beaming shows over here by satellite, and Ted Turner is getting organized again in Atlanta and L.A. Also, HBO and the networks are coming back. Soon, please, and don’t neglect the half-hour format, because that’s all I have time for!

8:00 P.M. Meeting of the Charismatics in the basement of the church. I’m glad that Sister Euphrasia and Father Booth are both members of this movement! I can’t begin to speak in tongues. I can’t keep up with their intensity. Their faith is like fire. These are God’s people, these Charismatics. We are going to have to move our group upstairs. Three hundred people are too many for the basement. Might even be a fire hazard.

9:00 P.M. Meeting of the Knights of Columbus in the school cafetorium. Full-dress affair. I led prayers. We are making elaborate plans for the Christ the King procession upcoming.

10:00 P.M. A call from the man who was diagnosed as terminal Hodgkin’s yesterday. Met him in the church and we said the rosary together. He told his family over supper. He says they spent the evening singing and talking about how close the Lord is to them now. I suggested they go to the Charismatic meeting tomorrow night. They heal each other all the time, maybe they’ll heal him.

But I didn’t say that to him. I said, if he feels Christ in him so strongly, he belongs among them, and so does his family.

11:00 P.M. Breviary for fifteen minutes, and another fifteen reading the new Mailer book. Ghost Dance is a great statement on our lives now.

11:30 P.M. My five minutes in the shower. Father Moore snapped me with a towel. How I would like to be twenty-three years old again! These old bones…

12:00 A.M. Lights out at the St. Francis rectory. Silence. My cross, a darker shadow on my dark wall. The wind moaning past the eaves. Sleep, and a dream of long ago.

Documents from the Civil Defense

You probably don’t know about Bluegrams. I certainly didn’t see any in Texas during the war, and Whitley doesn’t remember them from New York.

They are apparently called Bluegrams because they are printed on light-green paper.

There is an element of practicality about Bluegrams. Their distribution, however, appears to be limited to areas where they aren’t needed.

So, in case you might find them useful, I include here the two most practical ones we picked up.

One sees Bluegrams in all sorts of places, pinned to community bulletin boards or left in stacks on the counters of luncheonettes.

We could have included Bluegrams on control of radioactive roaches or on the washing of hot cars with sponges attached to fishing poles, but we decided to limit ourselves to material of at least some interest to people who live in the communities for which they were obviously intended in the first place.

Why don’t areas of genuine need get Bluegrams? Maybe the Civil Defense officials responsible don’t want to upset us, or—more likely—they’d rather stay in California than set out with their little blue trucks to that softly glowing world beyond the Sierras.

RUMORS Mutants and Super-Beasts

Jim and I heard our first rumor on the trolley into L.A. Since then, we’ve found that rumors run in the blood of this city.

RUMOR: There is a gigantic beast with bat wings and red, burning eyes that has attacked adults and carried off children. The creature stands seven feet tall and makes a soft whistling noise. It is often seen on roofs in populated areas, but only at night.

FACT: Of all the rumors we heard, this was the most persistent.

Claiming that we were L.A. Times reporters, we called Dr. Edward Wagner of UCLA, a biologist, and asked him to comment on the possibility that some sort of radiation-induced mutation could have produced a new species of giant bat. Dr. Wagner stated that giantism is a fairly well understood evolutionary phenomenon that is caused by space-competition among species. He doubted that something as fully developed as this could have come about in the thirty-odd bat generations that have elapsed since the war.

A Glendale resident, who was attacked in August of ’91, recorded his experience in the weekly Glendale Courier:

The individual who told this story to the paper was also reported to have extensive scars on his neck and head, of the type that long fingernails or talons might make.

We have no further information about this story.

RUMOR: Radiation has caused many terrible mutations, such as babies who claw their way out of the mother’s womb just as the first contractions of labor start. Also, babies who are born with the genitals of adults, or women having animal children, usually monkeys or pigs.

FACT: We have great difficulty getting used to the high level of mutation that is an inevitable side-effect of high ambient radiation.

Naturally, mutations occur with greatest frequency in areas most seriously radiated. A mother in California, for example, has little more chance of bearing a mutant child than before the war, but a mother in Dallas is many times more likely to bear a mutant.

Mutations take two basic forms, degenerative and progressive.

Ninety-nine out of a hundred degenerative mutations involve some sort of destruction or malformation of the fetus. They never involve atavism, such as a woman giving birth to an animal child.

Such a mutation is probably not possible. Nor are they likely to involve such farfetched nonsense as babies with claws or babies with fully developed genitals. The truth is much more prosaic, and much sadder. Common mutations are malformed limbs, bones, or eyes, brain disorders, and malfunctioning organs, such as improperly formed hearts. In cases where the mutant is declared non-viable on the Hexler Function Scale, the parents may elect euthanasia.

Progressive mutations are much more rare, but they are not unknown. The most usual progressive mutation we are aware of is so-called hyperintelligence syndrome (HIS). Babies displaying this syndrome exhibit certain common characteristics: they are extremely aware even at birth and are generally capable of lifting their heads, smiling, and making organized sounds within a few hours of being born. This initial precociousness is not followed up, however, at least not evenly. There are HIS children three years old who can read Shakespeare but are still mastering the art of walking. A common problem in HIS children is difficulty acclimatizing to extreme stimuli such as loud sounds or bright colors. HIS children generally learn reading and mathematics by passive assimilation by the age of two or three. The oldest known HIS child, Charlie B., is now four. He was born in Philadelphia eleven months after Warday, six months before that city was temporarily evacuated due to high radiation levels caused by the Washington and New York strikes. Charlie B. is physically developed to the size of a normal four-year-old. He is the clear intellectual superior of all adults who work with him. He has no formal education; indeed, there is no educational system yet devised that can help him. He reads four languages, is conversant in the most abstruse mathematics and physics, and has what his parents describe as a “vast” memory. He is often despondent. His family has plans to move from its present home in Los Angeles to England if Charlie is accepted, at the age of seven, by Oxford.

There are eighteen identified HIS children in the United States.

Twenty-four are known to have been born, but one was killed in a home fire and five have died for other reasons. Poor reporting and record-keeping may mean that there are undiagnosed HIS children.

These two are the basic “mutant/super-beast” rumors that are current in California. Variations are many, including the Hopping Devil rumor that seems to be a variant of the Giant Bat story, and the story of the secret think-tank at Cal Tech where Japanese scientists exploit HIS children in the development of ever more extraordinary technologies, which they do not share with the Americans.

Since there cannot be any HIS children older than four, this last rumor appears to be without real substance, though the exploitation of HIS children is something that the Relief or some responsible U.S. agencies should certainly examine very closely.

The Immigrant Quickstep

Father Dougherty explained to us that the only way to evade the California authorities was to keep moving from city to city or, even better, to leave the state at once. He warned us that we were taking great risks staying in L.A. even long enough to go downtown so Jim could gather documents from the remains of the old federal government, which has its offices in the L.A. Federal Complex.

When it became clear to him that we weren’t going to change our minds, he insisted on driving us. He felt that, without help, we had no chance of staying out of the hands of the police.

On the way into the center of the city, Father Dougherty told us that, like it or not, he was leaving us at Union Station after Jim got his documents. He briefed us about how to contend with the various travel zones.

“You have Red Zones, Yellow Zones, Blue Zones, and Green Zones. Stick to the Greens. They lead to the intrastate tracks, which will be on your left as you pass through the main waiting room. Yellow Zones are for incoming trains from our sister restricted-immigration states, Washington and Oregon. Red Zones are for trains arriving from abroad, which means the rest of the United States. Don’t even look as if you might be interested in them. Remember that the IPs are just dying to check you out. Need I add that there is also a White Zone in the waiting room? It’s for the outgoing Southwest and Sunset Limiteds, and the Desert Wind. Nobody will bother you in the White Zone.”

We arrived at the Federal Complex and parked. There were plenty of empty spaces. Father Dougherty and I would wait while Jim looked up a few likely parties in the government. He had some contacts he had met during the years he researched and wrote about atomic weapons and the community of men around them.

The federal government takes up only the lower floors of the federal building. Most of the structure is given over to the California State Department of Small-Scale Agricultural Control (Southern Region), an organization devoted to the licensing and regulation of private gardens.

According to Father Dougherty, Jim had at all costs to avoid straying into any part of the complex controlled by the state. “The President and the Governor aren’t friends,” was the way he put it.

“This is a state in name only. Within five years it’s going to be accrediting ambassadors. Already there’s an Embassy Row in Sacramento. But as far as the Feds are concerned, you’ll be subject to their laws on their territory—which means you’ll have full constitutional rights below the eighth floor of the building. If somebody on the federal floors asks for your ID, ask for his warrant. But, for God’s sake, don’t go upstairs.”

As he crossed the parking lot, I could see that Jim was edgy. I did not envy him this duty. We hoped for the chance of an interview with the President, or at least with some senior officials. So little is known nowadays about the federal government, we felt that anything we could get would be of enormous value.

The silence of waiting settled into the car. Father Dougherty turned on the radio, a new Sony. There were about ten stations up and down the dial. Twisting it, I heard the Beach Boys. Their voices, the tone and feel of the music, evoked the past, summer weather. How anybody can bear to listen to the Beach Boys for very long these days, I cannot imagine.

It is interesting that the past has come to seem so beautiful. I wish we could remember it clearly enough to avoid its mistakes.

But I am coming to recall it more for its laughter than its danger. I remember how Anne and I used to enjoy SoHo, and the East Village galleries that were gaining a foothold by about ’84. Extremes in art spoke to us then, though I cannot now remember why. America was sunshine, wasn’t it?

It was also excitement. I remember, for example, space exploration. At the time I took at most mild interest, but now I’m fascinated. What wonders we accomplished: the moon landings and Viking, and the Space Shuttle. Most of all, the confirmation by the Infrared Astronomy Satellite in ’85 of the planetary system around Barnard’s Star, with a fifth planet that might be very like Earth.

Suddenly Father Dougherty started the car. Jim was hurrying toward us, a thick manila envelope under his arm.

“I didn’t manage to see the President,” he said as he got in, “but I got good stuff. Some Presidential papers on radiation, and a report on the state of the upper atmosphere.”

“Meaning you two will finally do the sensible thing and leave Los Angeles?”

Jim nodded. “I still don’t have many California state documents, but maybe I’ll pick some up in San Francisco.”

“So you still intend to remain in California, do you? I can’t bear the thought of people getting arrested for nothing. I wish you’d reconsider. The moment you buy a White Zone ticket, the IPs will leave you alone.”

We had been through this at the rectory. We didn’t need him to convince us of how poor our odds were. But the book could not be complete without a visit to San Francisco.

“We’ve got to try, Father.”

He sighed, then got out of the car and opened the trunk. He brought out a small suitcase, opened it on the front seat. “These are clerics’ suits. Get into the darned things and God go with you.”

I am not sure how convincing we were as priests, but the collars and jackets certainly changed our attitudes. To cops we would now seem a lot more confident, a lot more normal.

My black suit fit well. Jim’s was a bit too short. “Well now, Fathers,” Father Dougherty said, “you look like a couple of rascals if ever I saw them.” He showed us the priestly blessing. “People will ask for it, so be ready to give it. God will forgive you for this little impersonation, since it’s in a good cause,” he said. Then he drove us to Union Station and blessed us himself. “Take my advice and buy your tickets on the White Zone trains.” He laughed. “I sound like a broken record, I know. But please. For your own sakes.”

We thanked him and said good-bye.

There was an atmosphere of subdued intensity in Union Station. Along one wall of the waiting room, a high cyclone fence enclosed a makeshift holding area. In it, the morning’s suspects sat on benches, most of them going through their purses and wallets before they appeared before the examiners to verify their right to be in California. These were people who had gotten through the P.O.E. nets, only to be tripped up just when they must have thought they were free.

It does not take long for such scenes to seem normal.

We bought tickets on the Coast Daylight, which was leaving for Oakland in thirty minutes, and sat ourselves down in the Green Zone waiting area with our tickets showing from our top pockets, like everybody else. The economy sections of the train were already full, so we were forced to buy First Class Ultras, which are four times as expensive as normal coach seats. We consoled ourselves with the thought that a police spot check of two priests in the VIP cars was unlikely.

Documents from the Acting Presidency

The federal government has been in transit since Warday.

Though diminished in size, it is still a complex institution. Because the current President has not been legitimized by the ballot, he considers himself more a caretaker than a leader.

For example, he would not grant me an interview on the premise that it would not be in keeping with his “custodial” role, as he described it. Acting President White is in office simply because he was vacationing at Key Largo on Warday, and had the good sense to stay there for a month rather than attempting to return to Washington. He was Undersecretary of the Treasury, and as such was the highest federal official to both survive the war and agree to serve as President.

I have collected here a sampling of the sort of documents that might cross the President’s desk on a given day. They reflect, more than anything, a government trying to grapple with what happened to it, and to identify the direction of the future.

There was resistance to my getting these documents. Even some recently appointed federal officials are nervous that there will eventually be trials. I think not. I suspect that the people are beyond placing the details of blame.

When I found resistance to my requests, I reminded my contacts that the government has a long tradition of disclosure. The present bureaucracy is very concerned with traditions, right down to the painting of the few government cars with the exact L.A. motor-pool designations they would have had before the war, and the meticulous use of the old bureaucratic forms for every functional detail.

These three documents are about the one effect of Warday that is hardest to grapple with—in a way, the most consistently surprising effect: radioactivity.

It is what worries the acting President the most.

Coast Daylight to San Francisco

The Super Chief, the Broadway Limited, the Twentieth Century—these legendary trains came to mind as the sparkling Coast Daylight left Union Station and picked up speed past the Los Angeles County Jail. Soon we were heading toward Santa Barbara and the north.

We were on a super deluxe train—or at least in the super deluxe part of it, in a beautifully refurbished Superliner observation car. It was decorated in tan, with luxurious club-style seating and a view of the California coast so spectacular that we almost missed the appetizer tray.

“Father,” the tan-uniformed waiter said, leaning forward to present me with an array of shrimp, oysters, crab claws, and raw vegetables to go with my Bloody Mary.

These wonders were part of the ticket price—a hefty eleven dollars. Lunch in the spacious and spotless dining car behind us was included as well. I suppose we could even have taken the roses on the table, had we wanted them.

Also included, as it turned out, was conversation with Mr. Tanaka, a Japanese rail official, who happened to be sitting beside us, watching the passing view of the ocean.

On our train trip to Needles, people had not been willing to talk much. But that was another world. Those were refugees; here in the first-class section of the Coast Daylight were the new prime movers, and they were not afraid to speak their minds.

“This train’s barely doing sixty,” Mr. Tanaka scoffed, apparently his way of starting a conversation.

“How do you know that?” Jim asked. I saw him turn on his recorder.

“Simple. Each rail is thirty-three feet long. Each ‘click’ you hear means one rail. I count the number of clicks over sixty seconds and thus calculate the train’s speed.”

“Are you a trainman?”

Mr. Tanaka gave Jim a card that read

“I’m Father William,” Jim said. “This is Father Brown.”

We exchanged handshakes. “What’s a Japanese railroad man doing here in California?” I asked.

“Ah, a great deal. This is the land of opportunity. Things need to be done here! We’re working with your government to create the most modern train system in North America. L.A. to Oakland in an hour and twenty minutes, and that includes a five-minute stop in Bakersfield. How do you like that?”

“Extraordinary.”

“It’s because of a revolutionary new transport system we call a magnetic-cushion tube train. Top cruising speed potential of five hundred miles an hour. Of course, this run is too short to reach that speed. But one day we’ll be going all the way to Seattle. Then you’ll see some speed.”

“What about air travel? Aren’t planes coming back?”

“Don’t talk to me about the competition! I’m telling you, we can move more people faster and with greater efficiency than the best airline in the world. Our energy costs are thirty percent less than the most efficient jet engines now under development back home. Planes can never compete.”

“But all those miles of track—”

“Prefabricated above ground tunnel segments with magnetic cushions inside. Built in Japan very cheaply and shipped here for easy installation. The roadbed is a circular magnetic field in the tunnel. The train floats in it. Our cost per mile is about three million gold, and if California can’t get the money directly, it can find a way to obtain it from the Feds.”

It seemed a lot to me.

“This thing is creeping,” Tanaka scoffed. “Bullet trains do better at home with dead birds on the windshields.”

“How long have you been in the United States?”

“Since 1990. I’ve got my whole family here now. We bought a house in Beverly Hills last year. Lovely house. Pola Negri used to live there. Or maybe Theda Bara, we’re not sure. We are redoing the gardens and installing a complete computerized home security system. It’s lots of fun, because such huge houses are unobtainable in Japan.”

“How do you find working here?”

“I love it! There’s so much to be done. A whole new world is being built in this country, and it’s starting with California.”

“Do you approve of California’s immigration policies?”

“Not my business. I’m a foreigner. My interest is in getting people from place to place fast. I don’t care why they make their journeys.”

“How about the rest of the country? Have you done any traveling?”

“Well, Japan Air lines operates an all-America tour, but we haven’t taken it I don’t want to fool around with radiation.” He lifted his left hand. Two of the fingers were grown together, a thick stump. “My mother was at Nagasaki.” There came silence between us. “The road can be very hard,” he said at last. “This we Japanese have learned.”

After a moment he settled back, contemplating the black cliffs and the slow blue sea.

Golden City

The Daylight reached Oakland at 8:36 in the evening. As soon as we got off the train I went to a phone booth and called my one contact in the area, a writer named Quinn Yarbro, whom I had known before the war.

Quinn wrote historical novels back when such things were popular. I haven’t seen her name on anything in the Doubleday bookstore in Dallas in years, so I had no idea what had happened to her.

There seemed to me a risk in using long distance in California, so I had delayed trying to call her until we were actually here. I dialed the last number I had for her.

After five rings an older woman answered. “Yarbro Locators,” she said.

“May I speak to Quinn, please?”

“This is she. May I help you?”

“Quinn? This is Whitley.”

“Oh God, where are you calling from?”

“Oakland. I just came up from L.A. I have a friend with me. We’re doing a book on America together. We’re here to see San Francisco.”

“Whitley, this is—I mean, I’m in the locating business, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised—but—”

“I lived, Quinn.”

“Oh God, Whitley, I assumed—with you in New York and all.”

“We’ve been living in Dallas. Anne and Andrew too.”

She told us to take the BART to Market and Powell in San Francisco. “I—well, I’ll wear something recognizable. If I must, a blue fedora.”

“Quinn, we’re dressed like priests.”

“Ah. Okay. Shall I expect to pray?”

“Just look for two middle-aged priests with backpacks.”

“I’m sure I won’t have any trouble. And you can forget the darned fedora. I’ll find you.”

We traveled on BART for fifteen cents. The highest fare is a quarter, the lowest a penny. The trains are jammed and not particularly frequent, but they work. Like so many things in California, much EMP-related damage sustained by BART has been repaired.

There are ticket clerks, however, instead of computerized machines, and my impression was that the trains were directly controlled by their motormen rather than by a central computer. I noticed signal lights along the tracks much like those in the old New York subway system.

Even past nine at night, the Powell Street station resounded with the footsteps of a swarming crowd. Like Los Angeles, the San Francisco area has sustained a massive population influx in the past few years—despite the efforts of the immigration police.

“Hello, Father Whitley.”

She was older, very much older. “Quinn.” There were tears at the corners of her eyes. Finding old friends alive hurts. It is a pain one at once seeks and fears. I embraced Quinn. I touched her hair, which was still red but struck with gray. Her eyes, looking at me, were wide. Jim stood nearby, silent, not intruding, waiting.

“Quinn, this is Jim Kunetka.”

“Father Jim?”

“Simply Jim. This is a disguise.”

“I’m glad. You both look too thin to be priests. I’d peg you as robbers.”

“Is there much crime in California?” Jim asked, ever the newsman.

“More than before the war. People are so desperate. We have rich and poor and not much in between.”

“It looks so good.”

“It’s still got the best weather in the world, anyway.”

“Quinn, we’re fugitives.”

She laughed. “I gathered that. You want to get off the street?”

“Exactly.”

She offered to put us up at her apartment on Russian Hill. We rode the Powell-Hyde cable car for two cents each. There was an “I Stop at the St. Francis” sign on the front of the car, and the familiar yellow destination sign: Powell & Market, Hyde & Beach. We had to hang on all the way. The gripman was a master with his bell, and he needed to be—the streets were jammed with pedestrians. On the way, Quinn asked if we’d eaten dinner. We had not.

Lunch on the train had seemed sufficient for a month. I can remember very long periods of my life without so much food. And the freshness of it was unforgettable, as was the menu: lima beans cooked in real butter, a thick lamb chop with the juice running in the plate, mashed potatoes with pan gravy, an endive salad, two different wines, and, for dessert, frozen pecan balls.

It is no wonder that people are willing to risk prison to come to California.

Despite the danger of the streets, we could not resist seeing if we could tuck in a dinner in Chinatown. I thought at once of a certain restaurant. “Dare I ask if Kan’s is still there?”

“Kan’s is still there.”

We hopped off the cable car and went looking. Kan’s had not changed at all. The restaurant had opened in 1936, and it retains the comfortable spaciousness of former times. If I was impressed by lunch on the train, I was delighted by dinner here, even though I couldn’t eat much. A stomach used to a simpler diet cannot adjust quickly to the richness of California food.

In a way, being at Kan’s made me sad. Anne and I had taken five days in San Francisco in the summer of ’87. Andrew was at camp and we flew out for the chance to be alone together, to see a few good friends, to enjoy the city. It was our last vacation, and we had our last meal in San Francisco at Kan’s.

Over dinner, the three of us traded lives. As soon as Quinn understood what we were doing, she had an idea. “I know a man you’ll want to interview. If you’re trying to understand things, he’s somebody who probably knows. He’s an economist, and he teaches at Berkeley. He’s also somebody I love. He’ll be over to the apartment in the morning. You can meet him then.”

Neither of us had heard of Dr. Walter Tevis. I doubt, however, that we will ever forget him.

I asked her what she was doing. “I’m a gumshoe,” she said.

“A what?”

“A detective.”

Jim went pale. I was stunned. It wasn’t possible that we were in the hands of the police.

“I’m not a cop,” she said, “so you can redirect some blood into your faces. I find lost people. I’ll try to locate anybody you’re missing. If I succeed, I get a fee.”

“You must be incredibly busy,” I said.

“Very.”

Jim leaned forward. “My wife—I lost her in Austin right after Warday.” His face was suddenly sharp, his eyes boring into Quinn’s.

“Give me her name and description and last known address. I’ll see what I can do. It might take some time, you understand.”

Jim gave her the information.

After dinner she took us to her apartment, on a hidden Russian Hill byway called Keys Alley. “I warn you, I still have cats,” she said as she let us into the single cluttered room. A huge red furball came up and began protesting.

The room was jammed with the tools of her trade. There were stacks of old telephone books from dozens of cities, city directories, maps, old newspapers, census tracts, Zip Code directories, copies of birth certificates in lettered stacks, card files and Rolodexes identified by colored tags, and hundreds and hundreds of photographs in thick black albums.

I could see how she carried out her trade, working from the telephone and through the mails. It must have been a frustrating and difficult job.

“Sorry about the mess.” She sat down. She looked, then, very small and tired and somewhat lost herself. “A lot of people are missing,” she said.

Jim and I slept on the floor. Just as I was dropping off, the cat woke me by flopping down on my face. I moved it aside and sat up.

The little room was quiet. Quinn was a shadow on her couch. On the table beside her was a Princess telephone attached to an answering machine whose power lamp glowed red. I wondered how she managed. She must be besieged with clients. Names and names and names.

A trapped feeling came upon me and made me get up and put on my collar and my black suit and go out to get some night air.

Keys Alley was silent, lit through the leaves of trees lining the street. Music drifted in the dark, a radio playing an old, old song I could not name, but which drew me back to childhood summer nights, watching my bedroom curtains make shadows on the walls and listening to my parents and their friends talking in low voices under the trees outside, talking of the cares of forty years ago, Truman and the cost of the Marshall Plan and Stalin’s health.

I stepped softly as I left the silent alley. I went up Pacific Street to the crest, then turned and looked down across the roofs of Chinatown to the Bay. The view is not one of San Francisco’s most spectacular, but it satisfied me. Far out in the Bay I heard foghorns beginning to sound above the subdued rumble of the city.

The hour was late; midnight had come and gone.

Slowly, nearer horns started sounding. A fog was coming through the Golden Gate. Soon I could see it slipping up the streets and across the roofs, dulling lights, drawing the dark close around me.

When it swirled up Pacific, cold and damp, transforming crisp night sounds to whispers and making me shudder with the cold of it, I returned to the stuffy little flat and the sounds of Quinn and Jim sleeping, and the cat purring.

Sometime in the night the phone gave half a ring and the answering machine clicked. I heard a voice talking quickly into the recorder, quickly and endlessly, droning, filling my sleep with a tale of loss I no longer remember.

INTERVIEW Walter Tevis, Economist

What happened to the economy on Warday was quite simple. Six out of every ten dollars disappeared. The Great Depression of the thirties was caused by the stock market crash of 1929, when three out of ten dollars ceased to exist. Simultaneously, we lost the ability to communicate. We lost all our current records. Chaos was inevitable. We’re fortunate that the continuing deflationary process hasn’t been worse.

All the money that was somehow in process in the computer systems of the government and private banks simply ceased to exist because of electromagnetic disruption or, in the case of Washington, permanent and total destruction. That was about one dollar in ten, but it was all hypercritical money, because it was in motion.

It was the liquid cash, what people were using to pay other people.

The other thing that happened was that records were thrown into chaos. Records that had survived, but only on magnetic media, might as well have been destroyed because they couldn’t be read.

The destruction of the computers was exactly like the failure of a nervous system in a body. All of a sudden there were no messages getting through. The body lost contact with itself. Storage companies such as the Iron Mountain Group preserved a great deal of data in underground facilities. Without the machines stored underground, as a matter of fact, there wouldn’t have been a single functional computer left in the United States after Warday. The wisdom of those storage and preservation programs is now obvious. Without them, for example, there couldn’t have been the gold distribution of ’90. Even so, most people had only about fourteen percent of the dollar value of their prewar cash holdings restored.

Between the cash lost in transit and the inaccessible records, we were out about three dollars in ten. The collapse of Social Security, Medicaid, and the whole federal entitlement system meant another two dollars gone when those checks stopped arriving from Washington. The loss of the rest of the federal budget was another dollar gone. In a few hours the cash economy of this country was more than cut in half.

And there was more to come, of course. This sudden loss of cash meant that thousands of banks and businesses were bankrupt. But they were also without the means to communicate, or the records to communicate about. So people didn’t get paid, or if they did, the banks couldn’t cash their checks, and the next thing we knew, most nonessential businesses were shutting down.

Add to that the complete anarchy that reigned in the stock market, with people frantic to escape New York City and the electronic records in mayhem and the sell orders roaring in—it meant the end of Wall Street, essentially.

The next thing was the calling in of loans by foreign banks. In the mad scramble to leave the dollar, the whole delicate Eurocurrency market trembled and then collapsed.

By this point the state of the world monetary system made the Great Depression look positively healthy.

It will take years to recover. It’s a funny thing that before the war the great economic bugaboo was inflation. God knows, deflation can be worse. Money’s so damned hard to get because there’s so little of it around. I’d rather work an hour for twenty inflated dollars than a day for fifty deflated cents! And in terms of buying power per hour worked, we Americans are operating at about a sixth of the prewar efficiency level, meaning it takes six times as long as it did before the war to earn the same amount of buying power.

You’d better believe that goes for economists, too!

I was vacationing on St. Bart’s on Warday. I’d been there for three days and planned to stay another eleven. A few days after the war, the police rounded up all the tourists and put us aboard a passing cruise ship, the Canberra. There was a great deal of trouble. The Canberra wasn’t prepared to take on over a thousand extra passengers. The first thing that happened that made this feel like a war was that a man refused to leave the police launch he was in. He said he had rights; he had prepaid his vacation. The police threw him into the water and sailed off.

That, more than anything, brought home to me the fact that the world had changed. We were not affected by EMP, so we still had radios. We were glued to them, listening mostly to the BBC. There was this curious, terrifying silence across most of the dial. The United States was silent. Cuba was silent. The BBC reported massive fires in New York and Washington, and said that flights from England had been forced to return without landing because of unsettled conditions in other American cities.

My daughter was in school at Colgate. My wife was at our home in New York. At that time I was working for the Chase Econometric Institute, forecasting flow of money, which is my specialty. I had taken some time off to be alone and to think about the consequences of the massive IMF refunding that had been proposed the week before by the Saudis. This was critical to Chase because it affected the viability of our Nigerian loans, and thus our whole African exposure. Not only that, our failure to support the proposal could call into question our relationship with the Saudis.

But with free-market oil soft at twenty-two dollars, and the Mexican and Brazilian debt moratoriums creating cash-flow problems for the bank, we were concerned that we would not be able to sustain the additional loan demand the refunding would create.

So I was alone on an island with my computer and all the data I needed, quietly developing flow analyses and projections based on various cash/loan levels.

I never dreamed that the bank I worked for was about to become a part of history, and the computer I worked with worth considerably more than its weight in gold. My initial concern was just to get home. I kept thinking, standing at the rail of the Canberra on that warm October afternoon, feeling the reassuring hum of the ship beneath my feet, of my wife and daughter and that measured BBC voice saying, “New York is burning”. For some reason I just assumed the Russians had won. I felt that as an employee of a capitalist bank, I would not have much of a future.

I don’t want to go into my whole life story over the past five years. Suffice to say that it has been sad in some ways, but in others lucky. I have been preserved from the suffering and upheaval that have blighted so many lives. Of course, I lost my wife and daughter, but since I met Quinn here in San Francisco, I have found that I can contend with the hollowness inside me, and the awful sense of having deserted them. Quinn hasn’t been successful in finding them. In looking for them I found her, I guess.

The Canberra eventually docked at New Orleans. Since the war, I have not gone north of Atlanta. I put my name in the Red Cross National Finders, but nothing ever came of it. And of course, Quinn’s scoured the earth. Even so, I still look at the lists every month, when they post them in the Student Union. But Berkeley is a world away from the war.

Hell. I’m a goddamn coward, is what I am. My little girl could be anywhere and I’m afraid to go look for her. I’m so scared of radiation. Even while it’s killing you, you don’t know it’s there. I wake up in the night when the wind blows down from the mountains, thinking maybe some microscopic bit of plutonium from the Dakotas has found its way here, and is aiming for my lungs. I get these weird, nonspecific sicknesses. So I go to the Medical Center and they tell me I’m fine. Once I heard them showing a man on triage how to manage lung cancer by breathing steam!

I went to a psychologist. I went to an osteopath. I went to a witch.

Now listen, I’m really getting off on a personal tangent. I think in a sense that I’ve developed the habit of being a patient. Half the world is starving and I’m worried about my own damn guilt trip.

This interview method is cunning. You guys find the people who want to talk, don’t you, and then just let ’em rip. Get a man’s secrets right on disk.

What are you, a couple of State Intelligence or MI-5 types?

We’ve got both around Berkeley, believe me. The British are good friends to this country. The best friends. But they are also very interested in using the current crisis to solidify their international position, shall we say.

One thing I’m sure of. There will never be another United States as free, as powerful, as magnificent as there was before.

From a statistical standpoint, we regressed too far. Now outsiders can control how much reconstruction we do of our technological base industries, and thus make sure we stay just far enough behind not to be a threat. The tendency of Japan and Europe is to look upon the U.S. and Russia as two countries that went kind of mad. By 1980 or ’81, both nations were effectively insane. The accession of Reagan the actor and Andropov the human computer were the first sure symptoms of the war madness, according to the poolside theories of my friend Dr. Hideo Hayakawa, who is a psychopolitical theorist.

We have about a hundred and seventy-five million people in this country, and the death rate still exceeds the viable birth rate by two to one. So we’ve had a net loss of fifty-five million people.

That’s twenty million births and seventy-five million actual deaths.

We have lost as many people as there are in England. Yet look at the English. They’re all over the place. Two thousand British bureaucrats are running this country through the blind of the Relief, which is really a colonial government disguised as a sort of Red Cross with teeth. The provisional U.S. government in L.A. is gaining strength every day, but so far it’s mostly paperwork and planning.

The Capital Replacement Program, where the government prints money to replace the capital of corporations that lost it in the banking catastrophe, has been effective here in California, but so far it hasn’t spread beyond the borders. Thus we’re dealing with a three-percent inflation rate out here, which is really only reflation of the deflated currency, while the rest of the country is still deflating.

I recall my own personal sense of panic when I discovered that I had no money. None. Even my MasterCard was meaningless. My bank account was simply another lost record among billions of lost records. Our economy was electronically erased, really.

One of the great acts of economic heroism—which, as usual, nobody outside the profession understands at all—was the creation of the Gold Tier in the currency. Barker Findlay, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, is responsible for that idea. If he hadn’t been in Atlanta on Warday—if he had been in Washington—I hate to think about it.

We have experienced an economic situation with no known parallels. We’ve been in uncharted territory. At home we had dollar deflation due to scarcity, while abroad our currency was becoming as worthless as if it had inflated itself out of existence. So you had a situation where a house in the States might cost a thousand dollars, while in Italy, say, a thousand dollars wouldn’t buy a cup of coffee. This has hurt trade very badly. If it weren’t for the gold, we’d be dead in the water as a trading nation. But we’re doing pretty well—and out here on the Coast we’re beginning actually to thrive—because we’ve been able to pay in gold for foreign products. By the time the gold gives out, it’s to be hoped that we’ll have enough independent production to be able to offer goods for trade.

What we are doing is supporting ourselves on gold transfers to foreign companies. The National Mint in Atlanta makes all those beautiful double eagles we send abroad in return for the few and astronomically overpriced televisions and radios and computers the colonial powers will send us.

Around the economics faculty here, it’s popular to say that the undamaged powers need our markets. The hell they do. You didn’t see Belgium developing the Congo. They do not need our markets, they need our resources, and they will encourage American economic development just enough to get our agricultural system running on a stable base, and then they will put the brakes on.

Our First World friends want to develop their own technological economy without reference to us. They want America to be an agricultural nation. We supply the corn and wheat and soybeans and they give us an occasional stripped Toyota. And yet, we have the plant and equipment here. Detroit is three-fourths idle, but it didn’t get bombed. And EMP did not damage it that much. You can build cars without computers. Hell, we did just fine at it, right up until the seventies. So why aren’t the plants in Detroit running?

Oh, I’ll grant the flow from American plants out here on the Coast, but look at the cars—a mess. Plastic doors, for God’s sake. Look at the difference between a Chevy Consensus and, for example, a Leyland Star or a Toyota. It’s ridiculous. We don’t even have any chrome! And yet a Consensus costs more than a Toyota! You can get a Toyota 4xD Timbre for thirty gold dollars, but no paper currency accepted. A Consensus costs three thousand one hundred paper. With a hundred paper to one gold, that’s still a hundred dollars more for far less car. Of course, if you’re like most people, you can’t get gold to buy a Toyota, so you end up with the Consensus.

Now let’s see. What haven’t I covered? Ah yes, debt. The federal debt, of course, has ceased to exist, largely because of the failure of so many records. And the moratorium on remaining prewar debt will be made permanent within the year, in my opinion. Or at least restructured to new dollars. I mean, you can’t expect a man who earns a thousand dollars a year to pay off a hundred-thousand-dollar mortgage, can you? That would have to be pared down at least ten times. Besides, it’s unfair to a man whose debt records survived to penalize him with responsibility for them when another man, whose records were lost, gets off scot-free.

I wish you guys would talk to me. I know I agreed to do this solo, but I’m really very uncomfortable with two heavily disguised roadies sitting across from me with a very expensive-looking disk recorder, no matter if you’re Quinn’s friends or not. I don’t know what I’ve been saying. Maybe I’ve been a bit subversive. The British have been a tremendous help to us. So have the other Europeans. And the Japanese. I think we would have gone back to the barter level without access to their technology and services, and our economic efficiency would have declined too far to enable us to adjust to the continuing condemnation of farmland in the Midwest.

Famine would have become a permanent institution. And, just for the record, I adore California and if anything I may have said implied otherwise, it was a misstatement.

I think I can lay my hands on some figures. Yes—these come from the U.S. Census Bureau, by the way, the Statistical Abstract of the United States, extrapolated to 1991 from original 1987 data, and taking into account war damage.

First, to say that nobody understood the effects of EMP would be superfluous now. We lost, in about three seconds, approximately a hundred and fifty million television sets; five hundred million radios; ten million computers; three hundred million electronic calculating devices; fifty-six million electronic telephones; all television, radio, and microwave relay stations; all electronic business exchanges, such as stock and commodity exchanges; millions of electronic automobile ignitions; most electronically dependent aircraft, either crashed or permanently disabled; all communications satellites, either traversing or in geostationary orbit above the United States, Canada, and the USSR; and something on the order of two hundred trillion pieces of information held in computers.

The war burned down the electronic village, is what it did. What we had not understood was that our financial system depended on that village. All of our destinies were contained in fragile electronic superbrains, and so we have been deprived of destinies. I guess that’s the real point of war, isn’t it? To create intolerable deprivations and induce deaths.

Since the war we’ve been like a great lobotomized beast, flopping and struggling in the trackless void, unable to control or comprehend even the smallest shred of its own destiny.

After 1983 the government and many private companies began shielding against the highest level of EMP pulse they could, without spending intolerable sums. That was fifty to a hundred thousand megavolts, depending on the type of system being shielded.

So the Russians simply used larger bombs and tripled the power of the EMP pulse generated. A few extra warheads made billions and billions of dollars’ worth of shielding useless.

Because of the ease with which the pulse strength can be increased, EMP shielding is essentially impossible without a vast amount of investment and effort.

Before Warday, we were living in a dream world.

Christ, sometimes I think I’ll get up and just walk into the river. Thinking about what mayhem our little bitty nuclear war caused makes me crazy. For example, there’s this extraordinary place down the Coast. I know people who’ve been there. Undreamed-of technologies! A European preserve of ultimate luxury.

Shuttles to luxurious space stations we are told nothing about A new world, and we are being left out of it. I know people who say they’ve seen that port. Somewhere between here and Baja, I don’t know where. They want to send us back to the Stone Age so they can have the stars to themselves.

Oh no, that’s paranoia. Rumors. I doubt that the Europeans even have any space shuttles. They suffered too, economically.

I hear about this European plan to create zones in the United States. A British Zone, a German Zone, and so forth. I know that the federal government in L.A. is opposed to that sort of thing. But there’s never anything about forming a second Continental Congress and appointing a new electoral college. Or elections. They say we’re too electronically disorganized. The last time this nation had a population of a hundred and seventy-five million was 1955, and we managed to vote quite well then without computers. We had no four-lane interstate highway system then, but we traveled freely, and we had a thriving steel industry, a thriving auto industry, a powerful military, a strong and effective government, and a reasonably content population. Remember the Eisenhower years? You guys must have been kids then. There was no sense of dislocation. Not like now.

Of course, there’s the fact that we’ve had a war. But now these little European states are trying to tie down the giant with a million threads! After World War II, Germany and Japan were far more devastated than we are now, but we poured on the aid and they revived.

Oh, what the hell. You can’t blame them for being fed up with superpowers. All they probably want is to see the U.S. broken up into a number of small, independent nations. Can’t blame them, damn it.

You know, the problem with being a person like me, at the center of a big university economics department, is that I get too much low-grade information. Although I must say one thing, the British have been very free and open with their statistics. Also, we are beginning to see real bureaucratic reorganization in the U.S. government.

Now that I think of it, perhaps I’ve painted too black a picture.

I’m overwrought because I need facts in my profession, and I never get facts anymore. Conjecture. Rumor. Estimate. That’s my problem.

I think there is a panic state in this country so deep that people don’t even acknowledge it. Subconsciously we’re panicked, all of us, and some of us are worse than that. Some of us seem fine on the surface, but inside ourselves we are insane. Take that quack medical group, the Radiant Exercise people, the ones who expose themselves to radiation to acclimatize themselves. They’re mad.

Mad as hatters. And the Positive Extinctionists. And above all the Destructuralist Movement. That one’s really dangerous, because it’s so darned seductive. Give up. Live hand to mouth. Become a goddamn caveman. That’s what the Destructuralists are saying.

Despite all that has happened, I don’t think humanity would do a service to the planet by voluntarily rejoining the apes, which is what Destructuralism is really all about.

Another thing that’s mad is the movement in Europe to make us pay reparations. For what? Both combatant powers lost the war. By staying out, Europe won it. Now it turns out that the whole European peace movement, the Greens and such, were secretly supported by the very governments they were opposing, to give the Soviet Union the impression that Europe was too divided to be dangerous. Meanwhile, the Secret Treaties—you’ve heard about those? Don’t look at me with such blank faces! What are you, a couple of idiots? I’m not a political science professor. The English and the Germans and the French and probably the Italians and the Japanese all had secret treaties to the effect that in the event of a sudden and unexpected nuclear war between the two superpowers, they would seize American nuclear components on their soil. So the Russians had us isolated and didn’t even know it.

It’s pitiful. If they had but known, they wouldn’t have felt nearly so cornered by Spiderweb.

Let me tell you something. There’s a school of thought that the Europeans tempted the Soviets into getting trigger-happy by revealing those treaties to them and making the Western Alliance seem disastrously split. Their real purpose was to trick the superpowers into crushing one another. And they succeeded brilliantly.

We’re in a state of advanced confusion. And the Soviets! My God, from what I’ve heard, they’ve dissolved. We got a report from the London School of Economics to the effect that the Soviet’s Eastern European empire is gone. Poland, Rumania, Hungary renounced COMECON. Czechoslovakia broke off diplomatic relations with the Russians. Now the Czechs are under United German protection, whatever that means. Russia lost Moscow just the way we lost Washington. And there were those purple bombs in the Ukraine. Nobody knows what they were, but they killed every stalk of wheat, and now nothing will grow there. The LSE report estimates that the USSR has lost close to half of its population. It’s divided into republics, military areas, communist states, even a White Russian enclave. A madhouse of starving, diseased inmates that nobody can help. Then there’s China. India. Bangladesh. Do you know about them? About the fate of the world, my friends?

There has been a great reduction in the numbers of humanity on this planet.

When the fallout blew south and east out of the Dakotas, we lost most of the stored grain in the Midwest. And we had to abandon crops on about twenty-eight percent of our grain-planted acres. Smoke blotted out the sun for so long the temperature dropped in the Midwest. Add to that the cash crisis, the collapse of the banking system, the disruption of transport, and you have a net farm output down fifty-five percent by 1989. And in 1990 we dropped to thirty-eight percent of 1987 levels. Farm machinery broke down and spare parts were hard to get. People couldn’t get their land tested for radiation, and they abandoned it rather than breathe the dust of their own soil. You had hundreds of thousands of good acres abandoned, and then the great dust storms. That’s not over yet. That’s going to be a problem. If we don’t get in there and at least reseed the land with grass, we’re going to see the bare topsoil in the Midwest blowing all the way to the Atlantic and the Gulf. Of course, that would be the end of this country as a farming entity. We’d then have another famine.

The Agriculture Department is pushing hard to do this reseeding from the air. The trouble is, we can’t get enough grass seed!

There isn’t enough, not in all the world, to get cover on all the fallow acres before next spring. The past few years we’ve had long, wet winters. We’ve had dry springs, but not dry enough to cause more than local dust problems. But time is against us.

Let’s see now, which of my peeves and beefs haven’t I covered?

Well, there’s the state of the industrial economy. The fact that most Americans are traveling in trains when we could easily be flying. The fact that the Japanese will not provide us with the equipment to build microchips on our own. Short-term, that’s a sensible policy for them, but in the long run the vision of America as an agricultural society, industrially backward and politically castrated, just isn’t going to work.

We’re seeing one good thing, though, and so far it hasn’t been interrupted, except by Japan. This is the return of American technology from abroad. We’ve recently seen RCA’s whole Singapore and Taiwan manufacturing facilities returned. They’re in Los Angeles now, in twelve bonded warehouses, the equipment we need to start producing a whole new generation of computers on American soil. And we’ve kept our intellectual base intact. Our schools are still damn good. We’ve had IBM equipment returned from Europe, Pan Am and TWA planes from all over the world, U.S. military equipment coming back, all sorts of things like that.

But we could easily absorb millions of small computers, and hundreds of thousands of large ones. Not to mention radios and televisions in the hundreds of millions. Net import of televisions in 1991 was exactly six million units. You know what a Sony TV costs, of course. Ridiculous, that the average American would have to put in six months’ work to buy a television set—if he can convert his paper to gold. Of course, I understand the Japanese problem. They can’t possibly produce enough electronic equipment to satisfy U.S. needs. What’s more, we can’t afford it. All the gold we’ve got won’t be enough to rewire the electronic village.

By the end of this century, either Britain or Japan will be the most powerful nation on earth. I was taken to England last year.

The London School of Economics offered me a chair, with about triple my current salary, free medical care, and the same kind of life we were used to here before the war. Hell, I would have taken it if I hadn’t been such a stubborn old curmudgeon. I like these goddamn United States. My family emigrated from England to get work. The Golden Door. I am not going back, it’s as simple as that.

But my trip there was a hell of a surprise. First off, you have the Conservative Party and the Social Democrats. Labor is dead. The Liberals are a strong third. That is one vital, alive, active country. The Thames is jammed with shipping. The airports are full of planes. They’ve built a high-speed, magnetic-cushion train system between London and their various other cities. Planes, trains, cars.

I never saw so many Rolls-Royces and Bentleys in my life. My God, London is like some kind of a high-tech jewel. You can talk to your goddamn TV set to order goods and services. Talk to it!

I was shown the Royal Space Center, where they’re planning for eventual interstellar travel. They hope to reach Barnard’s Star, which they believe has an Earthlike planet.

I came home on Concorde II. Seven hours, London to San Francisco, and no sonic boom, not flying as high as it does. I came back to Berkeley. Back to my damned Consensus with the cracked rear window and the permanent pull to the right. I came back also to Quinn, and Russian Hill, and the slow process of rediscovering myself as a person and a Californian. Also an American, of course.

Documents—California Dreams

Long cars on long roads; restaurants and bars open round the clock; supermarkets that sell everything from toothbrushes to pasta machines pina coladas and pink silks compete with Coors and Steam Beer; enormous flounders served in light, bright, Muzaked restaurants; Pinot Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon; sun-bleached hair and the thick scent of Ray-Ban Coconut V Aloe.

America, in other words, ten years ago.

California today. But also: illegal immigration warnings posted on every wall and in every bus and trolley; Whitley and I on the run; holding camps and returnee camps and prison camps and four new gas chambers in San Quentin; military uniforms everywhere; black market Sony and Panasonic televisions; meatless Fridays and the wonderful red interurban trolleys; “finder” columns in the Los Angeles Timesand the San Francisco Chronicle; the Beach Boys; Meryl Streep defying the police by producing and acting in the banned play Chained.

I am dazed by California. Sometimes, walking the streets with Whitley, I get a joy in me, and I think to myself that the past is returning like a tide, and soon all will again be well. There is energy and movement here—danger too, of course—but there is a little of something else that I think is also an important component of the American spirit—frivolity. Not much, I’ll grant you, but it isn’t dead yet.

Of course, the place is also tension-ridden. In Los Angeles, militant Asian Returnists whose native countries won’t let them come back compete for barrio space with Chicanos and hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from the other states. The American illegals are by far the worst off. Because they are de facto criminals, they are helpless and are ruthlessly exploited. The division between rich and poor is exceedingly sharp. Beverly Hills and Nob Hill glitter with Rolls-Royces and Mercedes-Benzes.

In California, the rest of the United States is thought of as a foreign country, poverty-stricken and potentially dangerous. The local press reports it only incidentally. A bus plunge killing a hundred in Illinois will appear at the bottom of page forty of a Times that headlines the discovery of strontium 90 in Anaheim.

It is possible to be greedy here. It is possible to be blind. Impressions:

A movie is being made at the corner of Market and Powell as we leave San Francisco—massive reflectors, Brooke Shields looking like a goddess as she steps from her air-conditioned trailer.

There are casting calls in Billboard West and The Hollywood Reporter Street-corner newsstands, which used to line up the porno papers, now feature half a dozen small-time political journals, state and Chicano separatist papers, the Aztlan Revolution, and Westworld and Ecotopia, the journals of two geographical separatist movements.

In California, more than anywhere else, you hear talk of dividing the United States. “California First” and “Forget the Rest” are common T-shirt slogans.

There is also a lot of radiation paranoia. Vendors commonly advertise their fruits as “radiation-free.” There are walk-in clinics where for fifteen cents you can get a whole-body scan or have objects checked. The government regularly warns people to avoid the black market because of the danger of contaminated goods from “abroad”—which must mean the rest of the United States.

Immensely wealthy Japanese move about in tremendous Nissan limousines with curtains on the windows.

You can buy all the Japanese and English papers: Asahi Shimbun in Japanese, English, and Spanish editions; the London Times and Express in English, and something called The Overseas Journal for British residents. It’s all about where to get English cars fixed in California, and how to avoid the embarrassment of old-fashioned American hairstyles by going to local branches of chic London salons.

I found it difficult and dangerous to get into state government offices to obtain documents. In fact, I couldn’t do it. But there were vast files of them at Berkeley, in the archives of university departments that shall go nameless. They reveal something about the inner structure of California’s immigration policies.

They say more than their authors realize.

The Prison Bus

Jim had noticed that San Francisco International had flights by the dozens to every imaginable destination. The idea of getting a closer look at that airport fascinated us. Quinn objected so strenuously that we had to give her the slip. But we couldn’t very well visit the West Coast without obtaining a first-hand report of the condition of air travel in the area.

To make a long story short, if an illegal goes to the airport, said illegal is going to be caught.

The Immigration Police are a fearsome crew, especially when they appear out of nowhere, their dark glasses glittering, their scorpion faces expressionless, and say, “ID, please”. We were on the concourse, passing an exhibit of new Ford Americars when it happened. We hardly even had our wallets out before there were two military police trotting over, and another three cops.

The reason? We didn’t have stamped airline tickets “visible on our persons at all times,” to quote the regulation.

The cop put our cards into a processor about the size of a recorder. The alarm flashed green (no doubt to con the criminal into thinking he’d passed the test and thus prevent a struggle). We were made to stand against the wall and searched. Jim’s recorder and his precious box of diskettes were left alone. California actually wanted us to keep our possessions. They don’t want potential deportees to leave so much as a used toothpick behind to give them a possible reason to return to the state after they have served their sentences and been ejected.

We were marched out of the airport, past the long rows of ticket counters. Japan AirLines, All-Nippon Airways, Singapore Airlines, Cathay-Pacific, Philippine Airlines, Thai Airlines, British Airways, Caledonian, Lufthansa, Alitalia, Aer Lingus, Air Prance, South African Airways, Pan Am, TWA, Delta.

You can fly from San Francisco to Tokyo ten times a week, to London, Singapore, or Paris eight times, to Bonn five times, to Taiwan four times, to Milan twice.

There is no American city except L.A. with near the service.

New York, Washington, and San Antonio are not on the schedules, of course, and most other American cities are barely there.

You cannot fly from San Francisco to Minneapolis at all, but you can go nonstop to Buenos Aires on British Airways or Pan Am, twice a week.

Just being in that airport—despite the cops and the handcuffs—made me long for the magnificent ease of jet travel as I remember it. I even have dim recollections of flying in pre-jet days from San Antonio to Corpus Christi with my father, and the hostess handing out mint Chiclets in cellophane packets. I remember my amazement on learning we were a mile high. I feel equally amazed now that I am earthbound.

Things one took for granted never quite seem lost. I suppose it’s a defense mechanism, but somewhere in the back of my mind I always assume that things will one day return to normal, which means life as it was in about 1984.

I remember when Hershey bars got bigger.

And the Ford Tempo, and Chinese restaurants with menus ten pages long, and they had it all.

I remember inflation, and how happy everybody was when it ended—and how unhappy when it started up again, right after the ’84 election.

And OPEC. I wonder if it still meets, and if the Israelis send representatives or allow their Arab client-states to continue the pretense of independent participation.

Walking along in that spit-and-polish gaggle of officers, I considered the idea of just breaking and running.

But I want to live. Badly.

Ticket clerks glanced curiously at us as we passed, and I thought of light on wings and how small the ocean seems from a jet.

I thought of the magical land of Somewhere Else.

They don’t have Immigration Police Somewhere Else.

They don’t have Red Zones and Dead Zones and British civil servants.

Somewhere Else the corn is always safe to eat and you don’t see cattle vomiting in their pens.

They never triage Somewhere Else, and they don’t write Bluegrams.

They don’t love each other as Anne and I do, either, not Somewhere Else, where the sky is clean and death is a hobby of the old.

Somewhere Else they assume that they have a right to exist and do not stop to consider that it may be a privilege.

California needs the rest of America. It must not be allowed to become a separate nation. If there is such a thing as a geopolitical imperative in our present society, it is to prevent this from happening. The current California immigration laws are an affront to the very memory of the Bill of Rights—and in most parts of this country it is much more than a memory.

We were taken to a holding pen right in the airport, an airless, windowless room jammed with miserable people and booming with fluorescent light.

We remained there, without food or water or access to counsel, for fifty hours. We slept as best we could on the black linoleum floor, entwined with the other captured.

I was the first to appear before the magistrate. He was a cheerful young man in a blue Palm Beach suit and one of the raffish gray panamas that California’s affluent class wear nowadays.

They are gray because they are dusted with lead.

He was perhaps thirty. “Let’s see, you’re one of the ones dressed as a priest. Funny. This is funny too: By the power vested in me by the state of California, I sentence you to two years at hard labor, to be followed by transportation out of state.” He banged a gavel. “Next case,” he said, absently shuffling papers.

My mouth was dry. I was too shocked to make a sound. Two years in prison, just like that. No jury, not even a chance to ask a question. And where was my lawyer? What the hell happened to my side?

I didn’t hear Jim’s sentencing, but I could see by his expression when we entered the prison bus, which was waiting at the far end of the main building, that he had been hit too. I held up my hand, indicating the number two. He nodded and held up first one finger and then another, then another.

Jim had done worse than I had; he was in for three years. Why the stiffer sentence? I found out later that he had asked the judge for a jury trial.

The bus was an old model with cyclone fencing welded into the windows. It rattled and shook along. There were ten of us, men as well as women, all handcuffed, seated on narrow steel benches.

When I realized that no guards were back here in the un-air-conditioned part of the bus, I began to talk.

“Maybe we can get word to someone in the federal government,” I said. “Perhaps they can help.”

Jim stared at me as if I had gone completely mad. “Look,” he said, “I’ve still got my recorder and my disks. Once we get to the prison, they’re going to be locked in a property room. Maybe stolen or erased.”

Obviously there was no time to fool around with government officials. “So we break out of the bus. How?”

“Not too hard, it isn’t very secure. I think they expect illegals to be passive. You remember how to fall?”

My mind went back to basic training. I had fallen then, often enough. “I guess so.”

“We’re gonna jump and hope for the best.”

“Jim, we’re wearing handcuffs.”

“That’s not much more of a problem than that door.”

The rear door of the bus, once the fire exit, was welded closed.

“How can we possibly jump?”

With an angelic expression, Jim raised his eyes.

Right above us was a ventilator. It was pushed open. Jim passed the word that he and I were going out on the roof if we got the chance, and we’d pull anybody up who cared to follow.

We waited, then, for the bus to leave San Francisco proper. We had no idea of our destination, but we were soon across the Bay Bridge and going through Oakland on Route 80, heading toward Richmond.

We passed Richmond, moving at about forty miles an hour. The bus slowed as we reached the Hercules exit. We turned off and took a right beneath the railroad tracks onto a two-lane blacktop called Crow Canyon Road. It was 9:15 A.M. The Zephyr would be leaving San Francisco at noon.

I prayed that I would see Anne again.

We passed the Crow Canyon golf course and a big truck depot, then began climbing a hill. Soon our speed was dropping and the gears were making a lovely racket. Jim wasted no time. He raised his cuffed hands above his head and grabbed the edge of the ventilator. In a moment he had pulled himself up and hooked one arm over the edge. With his free hand he unsnapped the plastic armature that held the vent in place. It began to bang against his arm and I heard him stifle a scream. Then his legs were up to his chest and he had rolled out onto the roof. A second later he opened the vent for me.

Now we were passing an abandoned kennel. People don’t keep many dogs these days, not even in California. The road cut the edge of the hill, which rose steeply to our right. On the left was a horse farm and open countryside and a chance to get to Richmond and intercept the Zephyr.

We jumped and rolled into the grass at the roadside.

All up the hill, that bus leaked prisoners. By the time it got to the top, I don’t think there were three left inside!

“Maybe we can find something to cut these cuffs at that truck depot back down the road,” Jim said. “If we don’t get them off, we might as well forget the train.”

We moved quickly. A lot of people were going to be trying to break into that depot today, all wearing handcuffs, all looking for shears. The place was open, so after the first ones came, the workers there would be on their guard.

The depot stood on the roadside in the heat, a broken semi blocking one driveway. In the other driveway, a new Mercedes truck was parked, getting diesel fuel. Behind it, an ancient eighteen-wheeler awaited its turn.

We went far up the hillside that backed the depot, and came around behind it. There was a door into the rear of one of the metal buildings. Inside, two men were working on a magnificent ’87 Thunderbird, a sleek red dream of a car with gleaming black leather upholstery. It was a breathtaking joy to see, that prewar car, and judging from the polished beauty of the engine compartment, we weren’t the only ones smitten by it.

I am a law-abiding man, but when Jim found those big metal shears and cut my cuffs, and I cut his, and I realized that we were both fugitives, it occurred to me that it would be an awful lot of fun to steal the T-bird.

“Too conspicuous,” Jim muttered. Just then, three more prisoners came in the rear door. I thought I heard a siren off in the mountains. It was time to leave.

We crossed the road and headed out into the countryside, moving back toward Route 80. It was eleven-thirty by the time we saw 80 in the distance. We had come about five miles. All during this time we had heard sirens, and seen an occasional police vehicle back on Crow Canyon Road.

There was a bus stop in the little town of Pinole. The schedule on the wall indicated that we should see the next Richmond bus at 12:10.

According to our timetable, the Zephyr would pull out of Richmond at 12:22.

If the bus was right on time, we would make our connection with exactly one minute to spare—assuming that the Immigration Police had not thought to extend their dragnet to cover the Richmond depot. Our Roman collars had become advertisements of fugitive status.

The bus came, and wheezed up onto Route 80. We would be in Richmond in a few minutes. The depot was the first stop. When I told the driver we were trying to make the train, he nodded and promised to do his best.

We sat there sweating, reading the aisle cards: the ubiquitous immigration warning; the Soyquick cereal ad; the BubbleRific poster with the sunny Valley Girl blowing a big yellow bubble; an appeal to orphans that read, “Don’t join the gangs. California has a home for you”; an ad for Shearson/American Express, “Tomorrow is going to work! And we know how.”

A man was humming an old song: “Jimmy Crack Corn.”

And a beautiful prewar car, as exotic as a Maharajah’s coach, hidden in a nondescript garage.

California is fresh food, and lots of it.

It is also a very nice place to leave, if you don’t belong there.

The train was sitting in the Richmond station as the bus came to a stop out front.

We ran fast through the tiled lobby, past the ticket windows and directly to the train. A single Immigration Policeman lounged against the wall of the station.

The train was already in motion when we slung into the door a conductor was holding open for us.

“Come on, Fathers! You can make it.”

The Zephyr at last.

Soon it was picking up speed.

We went into the lavatory to change from the clerical clothes to our more ordinary jeans and shirts. We threw the incriminating clothes onto the roadbed somewhere between Richmond and Martinez.

Back in our seats, Jim began checking his disks to be sure none were damaged.

I leaned back, realizing how deeply tired I was. Despite the handicap of our illegal entry, we had done fairly well in California.

In Martinez, three Immigration Police came through the train fast, but they didn’t spot us. I suppose their eyes were going from throat to throat behind those mirrored sunglasses, looking for clerical collars.

I bought a soybean salad and some milk in the snack bar and sat watching the world go by. As we rounded Suisin Bay, I saw vast, empty docks that in the past would have been jammed with imported Japanese cars. Now there were perhaps a hundred of them standing in the afternoon sun, protected by chainlink fences.

Somebody began to play a tape of David Bowie’s new album, Dream Along, and I did just that.

I didn’t wake up until long after dark. There was a strong smell of salami. Jim was eating a sandwich that had been offered him by a magnificently uniformed British naval officer who now sat across the aisle from us, ready to give us what proved to be a truly extraordinary interview.

Jim glanced at me. “We’re in Nevada,” he said.

All I did was nod.

INTERVIEW Captain Malcolm Hargreaves, Sub-Popper

I am on a five-day leave, on my way to see the Rocky Mountains.

I’ll shift in Ogden to the Rio Grande Zephyr for the scenery and go down to Denver. Then I’ll fly back to base.

We have been in California for eight days. The Royal Navy has enjoyed learning about the famous California lifestyle. I’m from Yorkshire, and I believe I’ve seen more sunlight in a week here than we do in a whole Yorks’ summer. And every time you turn around, there’s another swimming pool. Not to mention an aspect my men have particularly enjoyed, which is meeting some of your wonderful girls. I confess to being unattached myself, so this hasn’t been without interest for me, either.

Now I did tell you at the outset that I would not be discussing details of the range or speed of my ship, or exactly how our weapons operate. But of course we are what is popularly called a “sub-popper,” and that is not a completely inaccurate name. It does describe our mission very well. As you know, the war left a large number of unidentified submarines, armed with nuclear missiles, sailing about the oceans of the world. They are all what we call “code blind,” which is to say that there is presently nobody to send them the codes they need either to fire their missiles or to come home. So they continue on station, generally, until they get low on nuclear fuel or some essential supply, or break down in a critical part, whereupon they either return to base and are disarmed, or they sink.

If you are like three-quarters of the people we naval types encounter, you’ll want to know something about the present naval situation. GHQ Pacific Office of Information gives us a prepared summary, which I can read into your machine.

Now that’s the lot from the Office of Information. I’m supposed to give copies of that to any reporters who approach me, so here are two copies.

So, what can I say about myself? I am captain of the Type 12 antisubmarine frigate Ulysses, operating in cooperation with Fleet Air Arm antisubmarine forces and U.S. Navy antisubmarine forces based in Hawaii, Midway Island, and San Diego. Our theater of operations is the western Pacific. We are attached to STANAVFOR-PAC, the Standing Naval Force Pacific of the International Treaty Organization countries. Our mission is to destroy unidentified submarines.

I am invariably asked, when I am on shore leave, whether we destroy American nuclear submarines. I can only repeat the aim of our mission. We do destroy all unidentified submarine craft. That means that we may or may not know what countries those submarines are from. Perhaps some are American, although that would surprise me. Since they lost communication with their bases, most American submarines have returned to U.S. waters and surfaced, or are in communication with us in some way. The mission of the Royal Navy with regard to submarines is not to destroy the remaining nuclear capacity of the United States and the USSR, or to impede them in the reformation of government in their countries, but to remove the threat of the unknown—submarine crews, loyal perhaps to governments that no longer exist, under severe psychological pressure, suddenly firing their missiles in the mistaken belief that they are obligated to do so. There is also the possibility that both sides left “long-trigger” ships with orders to hide for a period of years, then suddenly attack. These ships must be sunk before they open their orders.

I suppose the greatest engagement of my career was with a pack of one Typhoon-class submarine and three smaller vessels in the Aleutians about a year ago. These ships had been hiding under the Arctic ice for approximately forty-four months and were making a run for Vladivostok, evidently unaware that this port no longer exists. We suspected that they were there because of persistent reports from isolated communities in Alaska and Canada of raiding parties who spoke Russian to one another and who appeared out of nowhere to steal food. Sometimes these reports took as long as six months to reach us, because of unreliable communications, but we felt that they certainly indicated the presence of Soviet vessels under the ice cap. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that there are not still Soviet and American submarines on station there. Present long-range detection techniques do not offer us as reliable an indication of submarine activity beneath ice as we would like.

At any rate, we got a very good signal on these boats just as they were coming round the island of Umnak in the Pox Islands.

Why they were there, and not hugging the coast of Siberia, we do not know.

As you might or might not know, a Typhoon-class submarine was the Soviet equivalent of a Trident, displacing twenty-five thousand tons and armed with twenty missiles of intercontinental range. We identified the presence of a Typhoon-class vessel by the emission signature of its reactor. Naturally, we were eager to destroy this ship, as it was one of four remaining Typhoons and, next to the three Tridents still unaccounted for, is certainly the most dangerous vessel on the high seas. This one ship would, for example, be capable of reducing your California, in its entirety, to the present condition of Washington or San Antonio.

So we were very eager to get a kill while avoiding even the suspicion of detection ourselves. We found that we were out of range of the only Royal Navy carrier operating in the area, the old Hermes with its complement of Harriers. Thus we determined that the Typhoon would have to be located very precisely and then destroyed by Ulysses. The job was quite an exciting challenge, I can assure you.

It was one of those gray, cheerless days common in the North Pacific, when the wind blows with massive force and the sea birds fly before it. When I went on deck, bits of ice quickly formed in my beard. In addition to the winds, we had blowing fog. Earlier we had passed through a vast fleet of Japanese fishing vessels, including a huge automatic whaler. As fish meal is now the primary source of protein for that nation of ninety-seven millions, you can well imagine the size of this fleet. It was operating in INTO-foreclosed waters, meaning that fishing operations there are illegal except to signatories. In this case, the Gulf of Alaska. We had detached a frigate to check the papers of the Japanese fishermen; there have been many reports of Chinese fishing vessels operating illegally in American waters in recent years, and they are to be sunk if they are found. Only the Japanese, the British, the Danes, the Icelanders, and the Norse may fish former U.S.-controlled waters.

We found ourselves approximately 420 nautical miles south-southwest of the target. The Soviet ships were deployed across an area of twenty square miles, with the Typhoon in the center of its group of four support submarines. The pack was moving in a southerly direction at a speed of 20 knots. We were able to deploy a Nimrod aircraft from San Diego and maintain a continuous exact fix on the Soviet ships. Our objective was to destroy all five submarines simultaneously. We began closing at flank speed and prepared our weapons, which consisted of Harpoon missiles delivered via helicopter and directly from shipboard.

As the target was moving in our rough direction, closing time was fairly rapid. We were able to gain a positive identification of the support submarines about two hours after contact. These were E-1 class boats, attack submarines. Their purpose would be defense of the Typhoon, and they could be assumed to be carrying nuclear-tipped surface-skimming torpedoes. We had to assume that we were already in range of these vessels. Our Nimrod assistance began relaying satellite data to us at about this time, and we were able to project the exact position of each boat on our maps and supply our computers with all necessary coordinates. I then ordered our helicopter complement to the attack and stood back with the ships. It is known that Soviet aircraft-detection equipment has a much shorter range than the equipment that detects ship noise.

We released all five Harpoon-carrying helicopters, and waited the next two hours while they flew within range of the submarines. The moment they released their missiles, we activated our classified weapons aboard ship. Of this total firing, a classified number of missiles reached their targets, but all of the Soviet submarines were impacted. The E-1 class boats all sank. The Typhoon-class boat surfaced dead in the water.

Some hours later we boarded this boat. I recall vividly my ride across the sling between my ship and the sluggishly rolling submarine. She was an enormous vessel. By the time I went aboard, all the Soviet crew were off except the first officer, who had agreed to act as our guide. He spoke fluent English. His name was Benkovsky, and he informed us that his unit had been continuously at sea for nearly four years! They were only returning to base because their nuclear fuel was running low. As our missiles home on running reactors, the major damage to this boat, the Teplov, was to the engine room and rear crew compartments. The reactor was out of action but the enclosure was intact, so radiation levels aboard ship were normal. There was a powerful stench of burning electrical insulation in the boat, but the crew had contained the fire. We found American tinned foods, much from the prewar era, including Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Spaghetti Dinner and A&P Brand pork and beans with bacon, with prices in prewar dollars. The ships had been replenishing themselves by raiding grocery stores and larders in Arctic Canada and Alaska. Our reports from coastal towns had been correct.

We found this ship to be cramped and dangerously constructed, with much evidence of new welding and repairs of all kinds. Many of the electronic instruments were not operational, and never had been. It is not likely that this boat could have done much to defend itself, despite all the publicity its class received before the war. In addition, it was in poor condition and no longer capable of ultra-deep diving. Although it is a very silent-running vessel, the quiet was achieved at the expense of speed and power. By our standards, this boat was hardly seaworthy.

There was much evidence of low morale aboard, and crew members later indicated that there had been six executions for attempted mutiny or desertion.

One system on the ship that was built up to the highest standard was the missile fire-control system. After this boat had been towed to Hawaii and examined, it was determined that its complement of SLBMs was armed and on firing sequence when the boat was disabled. Another minute or so and the missiles would have been away. Evidently our presence had been detected, or, more likely, our incoming Harpoon missiles. The Soviet weapons were targeted against Seattle, Portland, and various communities along the California coast. They included three EMP weapons, which would have once again destroyed all the electronic devices in the United States and created every bit as much disruption as occurred before, not to mention ruining what communications systems your country has so painfully managed to reconstruct since the war.

The ground-targeted missiles would have delivered a total of one hundred megatons to their targets, and killed outright nine million of the area population of twenty-two million. Residual radiation would have caused severe contamination throughout California.

After an encounter like that, we sub-poppers of the Royal Navy feel that we are doing a job vital to the security of the world.

POLL The Grand Old Feud—Do We Still Believe in It?

Looking back, it does not seem strange or even improbable that the United States and the USSR were rivals. Even without the ideological differences, geopolitics would seem to have made it inevitable.

But what does seem strange is the way the rivalry became so formalistic toward the end, almost a kind of ritual, which continued along its traditional lines despite the enormous changes in the two countries and the world around them.

It is not possible to assess blame; both sides were at fault, and both sides were trapped. Nobody knows what normal relations between the United States and the USSR would have meant because they never had normal relations, not at any time in their history. They either hated one another beyond reason or pretended to unrealistic friendship, such as during the Second World War or the “Detente” period of the seventies.

With hindsight, we can see that they should have been neither mortal enemies nor fast friends. Some things about them suggested partnership, and others suggested competition, but nothing suggested the murderous war that occurred.

Do we think that the old rivalry will be rekindled in the future?

The polls say no. Perhaps the war has finally put the seal on the anguish of the old superpowers. Perhaps.

Do you believe that the Soviet Union will emerge once again as a world power?

Should the Soviet Union emerge again as a world power, do you believe that it will start another war?

Do you believe that an unfair portion of international war relief is being sent to the Soviet Union?

Do you believe that the United States should attempt to rearm itself militarily?

Some interesting differences appeared in response to the preceding question among age groups: