INTRODUCTION 13

There were cans of beans and soup, but the only meat was the six freeze-dried hamburgers Anne had brought. There was no longer any gas pressure, but we worked out a method of using the stove anyway. We found that we could heat food by building a fire from paper and pieces of chairs on top of the burners and hanging the pots up in the exhaust flue.

Our first meal consisted of spaghetti with marinara sauce from cans, and pork and beans. It was washed down with fruit juice. Not much, but I suspect that it was better than many got in New York on that day. We ate in the gym, off paper dishes saved from last year's May Fair and intended for use at the Christmas party.

All during that day, neighborhood people had been congregating in the church. Our food situation improved rapidly. Everybody brought canned goods, so the increasing numbers were no drain on those resources. We began to worry instead about water, and drew up strict regulations about those long showers we had been taking.

No baths unless you made an "approved excursion."

We were determined to live through this, somehow, even though most of us felt that the rest of the world had been destroyed.

Falling water pressure rapidly became a more and more serious problem. Already high-rise apartment buildings were uninhabitable above the sixth floor because of a lack of electrically pumped water. Low-rises were suffering too, as was Grace Church School.

Broken mains in the bombed boroughs were draining the system dry. Soon our rooftop tank would be all we had left.

More even than the lack of water and power, though, people were scared because of the lack of news. Those who had ventured as far east as the river confirmed that there was a holocaust going on in Brooklyn and Queens. They had been able to feel the heat on their faces even on this side of the river, and the wind being pulled into the fire was stiff enough to make it hard to stand up. People reported that the conflagration made a great, hissing roar. They described it variously as sounding like a railroad train, a hurricane, or the voice of an angry crowd.

The electromagnetic pulse generated by the huge bombs the Soviets had detonated in near space was the answer to the mystery of why even portable radios wouldn't work, and why people with 14 INTRODUCTION

recent-model cars couldn't get them started. The vast majority of electronic devices—computers, televisions, radios, microwave stations, radar, avionic devices on airplanes, electronic car ignitions—

had been shorted out by Soviet bombs detonated in outer space.

The explosions had been invisible and had had no effect except to blanket the country with a brief, massive burst of electromagnetic energy. Certain military equipment had been shielded, and even some computers owned by big banks and corporations.

They shielded such devices, during the mid-eighties, to resist a 50,000-volt pulse. So the Soviets simply generated a larger one. Recent estimates are that it exceeded 150,000 volte. Thus they overcame billions of dollars' worth of shielding with bombs worth at

most a few million. An efficient means of destruction.

Because of the electromagnetic pulse, we had no access to broadcast news.

I will never forget the moment when somebody outside started yelling about the Times. The next thing I knew, there was a man coming in with a paper. It was the famous sixteen-page extra, which was the last news we were to see for a long time. I still don't know how the Times managed to get that paper out. Someone told me it was produced in New Jersey before local electric power was lost.

I remember the headline: NUCLEAR ATTACK BY A T LEAST THREE

MISSILES DEVASTATES CITY. And the lead: "Nuclear weapons detonated over Queens and Brooklyn on October 28 at approximately 4:45 P.M., causing catastrophic devastation and leaving both boroughs in flaming ruins. An estimated two million people lost their lives."

It was there also that we read of Washington. We were stunned, confused. Washington no longer existed. There was no President, no Vice-President, no Congress, nobody. We had no government.

"Washington, D.C., the seat of government of the United States of America since 1800, has been destroyed by a surprise nuclear air tack. Reports from the area indicate catastrophic destruction on a scale previously unknown in human affairs. The city was swept away in a sea of Are. Not a building remains standing, not a monument intact. Observers are unable even to approach within ten miles of the city. Baltimore, Maryland, is also burning, as are the