Warday

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