Warday

Jim showed him his Herald News press card. “We’d like to arrange an interview with General Briggs,” he said.

The young man looked at us. “Okay,” he said, “you’ll find him over at the armory. You know where it is?”

“You’ll have to direct us.”

“We’re goin’ over there ourselves, now that the train’s come in.

You can come with us.” He turned to the knot of soldiers lounging nearby. “Okay, guys, excitement’s over. Time to get back to the Tire Palace.”

The Tire Palace?

We rumbled through the streets of White Plains in, of all things, a massive, roaring, turbine-driven armored personnel carrier. “What the hell is this?” I asked. “We could’ve used a few of these in ’Nam.” It was like riding in a safe—massive steel doors, quartz window slits.

“This is the Atomic Army,” Sergeant Hewitt said. “You could blow off a hydrogen bomb right on top of this thing, and you know what’d happen?”

“What?”

“We’d be vaporized.”

We rode on for a few minutes. Sergeant Hewitt pulled the lever that opened the door. Before us was a Gothic building of fairly massive proportions, designed to look like a castle, with towers and parapets and narrow windows set in red brick. Soldiers came and went. The convoy we had seen on the parkway was now parked across the street. Beneath the tarps I could see that the trucks were loaded with rusted steel beams and stacks of aluminum sheathing from buildings. One truck contained nothing but intact windows, each carefully taped and insulated against breakage. A soldier was walking along with a handheld computer, taking inventory.

This scene was my first experience of the work of the famous salvors, who are methodically dismantling Manhattan. Salvage is the latest business in which Great American Fortunes are being made, and the salvors, in their dashing khaki tunics and broad-brimmed hats, were romantic figures, lean men who stood around and gibed the neat officer with the computer.

A helicopter landed on a pad in the small park in front of the armory, disgorging five men in white radiation suits, who began to examine the salvage with geiger counters amid a good bit of derisive laughter. A peacock, standing in the patch of grass in front of the building, gave throat and spread its tail.

“General’s office is the second door to the right… Hewitt said.

“It says ‘Commanding General’ on the door. At least that’s what it said the last time I looked at it.”

Even though I knew you couldn’t see New York from the streets of White Plains, I found myself looking south. The sky revealed nothing.

The moment we entered the armory, we found out why the soldiers called it the Tire Palace. The place reeked of rubber. The central foyer was stacked with tires. There were tires in the hallway.

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.