Farther back I could see a vast, dim room, also filled with the tall, shadowy stacks.
Nobody ever explained to us what they were there for.
As we entered General Briggs’s office, a bell tinkled above the door. A master sergeant, lean and moist with nervous sweat, labored at a brand-new word processor, his fingers flying. I saw Jim’s eyes glaze with envy. I suppose mine did too. No writer who has ever used one can forget the joys of the word processor. I couldn’t resist a look at the brand name. It was an Apple, a new model called an Eve. The Eve had a nine-inch screen no thicker than a pancake. I noticed that the sergeant typed normally, but directed the word-processing program by speaking into a microphone around his neck. He said, “File two-four-two,” and the disk drives blinked.
How beautiful! Ever since I saw it, I haven’t been able to get the Eve out of my mind. What wondrous capabilities it must have.
I used an Apple II Plus from ’79 to ’84, and a Lisa after that, so I have an affinity for Apple machines. Nowadays I am a pencil-and-paper man.
We had no trouble getting in to see General Briggs, and he was willing to give us a short interview. Most of our respondents have agreed to an hour, but General Briggs gave us only ten minutes, which, as it turned out, was a generous amount considering how busy he is.
Manhattan is almost free of radioactivity. It is still a Designated Red Zone, though, because of the city’s other problems. First, there is no water supply. By Warday-plus-ten, the city’s reservoir system was drained dry because of thousands of uncontrolled leaks in Brooklyn and Queens. The old water mains couldn’t stand the stress of losing pressure and drying out, and in subsequent months many of them collapsed. It would take years to repair the system.
It is contamination that prevents this work from being done.
Ironically, radiation is only a small part of the problem. The serious pollution is chemical. Hundreds of thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals were burned in the Brooklyn-Queens firestorm.
Dioxins were produced, PCBs from insulation were released into the air, and deadly fumes mingled with the radioactive fallout.
Over the years, untended chemical-storage facilities deteriorated, especially along the Harlem River and on the New Jersey side of the Hudson. The whole of southern New Jersey is now uninhabitable, and Manhattan and the Bronx are severe hazard zones. People cannot remain in the Bronx for more than a few hours at a time, nor live in Manhattan north of Twenty-third Street.
Despite the dangers, we felt we had to go in. We asked for and obtained General Briggs’s permission to enter the city. I suspect that he knew we would go in, even if he didn’t give us the necessary papers. We were lucky to have gained his confidence. Had we not been under the guidance of Army and city personnel, we would not have lived through our trip to Manhattan.
Rumors from the Northeast
RUMOR: The complete records of the United States government were preserved in a mountain in Colorado, and officials are just waiting for the right moment to put them to use in getting the country reorganized.
FACT: This is one of the most persistent stories we heard in this part of the country. In fact, there was and is a redoubt in the Rockies. It is the NORAD Aerospace Defense Command in Cheyenne Mountain, and it is back in operation despite battle damage. It is being run by a joint U.S.-U.K.-Canadian command. But it contains only military equipment and electronics, most of it preserved by the mountain from EMP effects.
RUMOR: There is a Council of State Governors that will soon meet to appoint an interim Congress, which will in turn appoint an interim President, whose primary responsibility will be the reorganization of the federal government.
FACT: The federal government in Los Angeles gave no hint of any such plan, nor is there any functional national governors’ organization.
RUMOR: Even though it was terribly damaged, the Soviet Union remained in one piece while the U.S. did not. Thus the Russians won the war, but they need time to rebuild before they occupy America. Stories to the effect that the USSR has broken up are planted by Soviet intelligence to lull the Americans into complacency and create a false sense of security.
We think this rumor is false, and here’s why: First if Russia were still intact, Europe and Japan would be arming themselves as quickly as possible. There is little evidence of this. And the Russians apparently do nothing to resist the Royal Navy’s attacks on isolated Soviet submarines, of which we have an excellent account elsewhere in this book.
Second, an intact Russia would already have invaded western Europe. The Russian armies in Poland and in some of the other Eastern Bloc countries disintegrated after the war because they had no orders from Moscow and no idea what had happened at home.
Third—the smallest but most telling fact—during the clothing shortage in 88–89. the British brought in freighters loaded with uniforms. Everybody remembers them because we were all wearing them. They were dyed black, but they were Soviet summer uniforms, apparently liberated and sold to the U.K. as surplus by the Poles when the Soviet armies stationed in Poland collapsed.
General George Briggs, New York Military Area
What the U.S. Army is engaged in here is the mission of protecting the property of American citizens and managing the most massive salvage operation in the history of the human race.
This salvage will continue until everything of value is physically removed from this area. And I mean everything. Let me read some statistics. In the past four years we have salvaged, among other things, 816,000 typewriters, 235,561 automobile parts, 199,021 kitchen appliances, over seven thousand tons of steel, four thousand tons of aluminum or other sheathing, more than three million meters of copper wire, eighty-eight thousand windows, 199,803 business suits and 204,381 articles of women’s clothing from stores and factories, 9,100 toupees, 6,170 pieces of bridge-work and artificial teeth, and one set of prosthetic rear legs suitable for a medium-sized dog, which were found at the Animal Medical Center. We have also saved 14,126,802 books, 2,181,709 phonograph records, and enough video and audio tape to stretch to the moon and back twice. Working in association with various art galleries and other types of museums, we are aiding in the salvage of such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, the Museum of Natural History, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Frick, and many others. Among the items we have saved are the entire contents and paneling of the Fragonard Room at the Frick, which was transferred to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. We have also saved the embalmed brain of a Mr. A. J. Carnegie, which was found in a closet at New York University. The how and why of that one remains a mystery. If you wish, you can see the brain. It’s in our collection here at the armory, along with a number of other especially unusual exhibits.
The decision to salvage New York rather than attempt to repopulate it was made by the Joint Chiefs of the Continental Military Command, which consists of General Youngerman, USA, General Joe Point of the USAF, Admiral Whitaker, General Sir Malcolm Law of the British Continental Military Advisory Command, and General Topp of the Canadian Army.
Their decision was made as a result of the water and pollution problems I outlined to you earlier. The chemical spills have created an effective Dead Zone in eastern New Jersey every bit as lethal as any nuclear-impact area. Thus this region, in which most of New York City’s primary petrochemical, food, and fuel supply points were located, has been evacuated. There is also the matter of the abandoned nuclear power plants, and the possibility that one or more of them could emit radioactive materials at some time in the future. Also, whenever the wind comes in from the east, Manhattan receives a dusting of thousands of particles of strontium 90 and cesium 137. Unfortunately, the bombs were so designed that the primary issuing particle was strontium 90 which has a half-life of nearly thirty years. Of the particles we collect, fifty-six percent are this element, thirty-one percent are carbon
