The Aftermath

by Samuel C. Florman

  It so happened that both of these sites were among the places that had been mentioned by Pieter Kemm and Kelvin Marshall in their original briefing of the Governing Council. One was at Dundee, seventy miles northwest of Ulundi. The other was near Empangeni, just twelve miles north of Engineering Village. Dundee was more distant than Alf would have liked; but the coal and iron were known to be suitable. The area had been badly burned by the fires, but this would not now impede a mining operation. The Empangeni site was centrally located, and provided ample coal. But the iron would have to be extracted from laterite, a weathered rock, rich in iron oxide, but far from what one would call a high-grade ore. It would tax the professional skills of the engineering experts. In the end, both sites were approved, and served very well, the engineers being equal to the technical challenge.

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  When, the next day, they gathered for their third session, the members of the Joint Planning Subcommittee were in high spirits. Several of them had brought items that began to give the meeting pavilion a lived-in quality—odd-looking chairs; maps and charts; and even a few whimsical decorations, most notably a Boston Red Sox cap atop a driftwood giraffe.

  "I think we are actually making progress," said Lucas Moloko, a government official from Ulundi who, from the outset, had been openly skeptical of the group's ambitious approach. He had been rather quiet during the first meetings, but now felt a bit looser and more confident that they were moving in the right direction.

  "Can do, Lucas," responded Commodore Harry Presley of the U.S. Navy Seabees, whose specialty was the planning and construction of military bases. "That's our motto."

  Yet, as deliberations continued, the mood began to darken. Repeatedly, good ideas seemed to be foiled by the problems inherent in transportation. It was increasingly clear that even the best laid plans—for making bricks, quarrying stone, mining coal, or whatever activity—would be frustrated unless the new society had the capacity for moving large quantities of material from one place to another. In this crucial sphere of activity, prospects looked bleak.

  The transmission of information, surprisingly, was not as serious a problem as some had feared it might be. In the first few weeks, the Pony Express between Ulundi and Engineering Village was working as well as could be expected. Messengers to other locations—some on horseback, some on foot—were dispatched on the basis of spontaneous decisions by various ad hoc groups. It wasn't exactly the Internet, but it was adequate to the needs of the moment. The subcommittee formalized this success by commissioning a Courier Corps made up of a hundred persons.

  Heavy cargo, however, presented a more intractable problem. Horseback riders and youthful marathoners—no matter how willing and fleet of foot—could not ship tons of freight across many miles of rugged countryside.

  Where, historically, the Industrial Revolution began and flourished—especially in Britain, France, and the United States—water transport had been an essential element of progress. Rivers, supplemented by man-made canals, were the lifeblood of industrial development. In KwaZulu Natal, although there were many wonderful resources, a network of navigable waters was not among them. So land transport it must be, entailing enormous obstacles. But recognition of this fact prompted Commodore Presley to quote the second part of the Seabee motto.

  "The difficult we do immediately," he said with a hearty chuckle; "the impossible takes a little longer." This braggadocio seemed to revive flagging spirits. As several subcommittee members noted, they were, after all, in the land of the Boers, whose forebears had carried out the Great Trek in ox-drawn wagons. Americans, also, could look to a tradition of pioneers who traveled long distances in their heavily laden prairie schooners.

  "We know a lot more about building good roads and maintaining them than did those folks in early days," Alf Richards reflected. "If they had had decent roads, they wouldn't have bothered building all those canals."

  But roads were not the main problem. Nor were oxen, of whom an adequate number had survived. The desperate need was for vehicles—wagons, trams, carriages—anything with wheels that could carry sizable loads. Very few such conveyances had survived the Event.

  On an emergency basis, critical materials were being conveyed on patched-together carts, makeshift sleds, the backs of animals, and even on the backs, shoulders, and heads of human bearers. The Planning Subcommittee decided to endorse this spontaneous arrangement, as they had with the couriers, by designating one hundred individuals as transporters of material. They were to be known officially as the Teamsters. The subcommittee anticipated that, as more wheeled vehicles became available, these workers would indeed become drivers, transporting freight to every corner of a growing realm.

  "I can hardly wait for the next Jimmy Hoffa to rise up among us," Richards commented in a momentary lapse into bitter humor.

  Alf then directed the discussion into a historical mode. This was strange territory for the self-confident hardhat, who for the moment sounded positively wistful. "Dammit. We need a lot of wagons, and I suggest we allocate one hundred workers—no, make that two hundred—to produce them. But where in the world are we going to find wagon builders?"

  More generally, the problem was: how were the skills of yesteryear to be recaptured?

  For example: candles. As the batteries expired, making lanterns and flashlights useless, the humble candle suddenly became an object of great importance. One of the first requests made by Captain Nordstrom to the Ulundi Indaba was to send a supply of tallow— rendered animal fat, a material used at least five thousand years ago in making this precious light-giving device. The three women in Engineering Village who knew exactly how to go about dipping candles, and also making them in molds, were among the earliest community heroes.

  In the quest for pioneer skills, help came providentially from three unexpected sources. First, there were a number of proficient hobbyists among both Inlanders and Outlanders. They provided precious expertise in glassblowing, papermaking, blacksmithing, and candlemaking.

  The second valuable resource was Millie Fox and her Peace Corps experience. Millie had intended to chair a session on "Intermediate Technology" as the most desirable way to achieve progress in underdeveloped nations. In addition to useful technical literature, she had brought along several young engineers with field experience in just such conditions as those the survivors now faced. They provided an excellent counterbalance to the high-tech professionals who were learning the hard way what it meant to cope with Stone Age realities.

  The third resource was a contingent of specialists from "living museums," including those of Sturbridge, Massachusetts; Shelburne, Vermont; Old Salem, North Carolina; and Williamsburg, Virginia. In those institutions the old trades had been kept alive by actual practice. Wilson Hardy, Jr., had urged his father to incorporate the history of technology into his plans for the seminar; the elder Hardy had accomplished this by inviting museum people in addition to several academic historians. And so it happened that from the Queen of Africa community there were several talented blacksmiths, millers, printers, and weavers, along with excellent plans and specifications for forges, waterwheels, mills, printing presses, and various workshops of eighteenth-century America.

  Equally precious was the collection of prints and photographs brought along by another museum invitee, Foster Tillinghast of the National Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. Pumps, plows, threshers, reapers, spinning wheels, forges, steam engines, sawmills, power looms, cotton gins, clockworks, lathes, rifles, sewing machines, telegraphs ... the whole cavalcade of American technology laid out to be seen, admired—and copied if so desired. There were also some historical museums in KwaZulu Natal that contained valuable information on the early technology of the native Africans, as well as the pioneer Boers.

  This treasure trove was so remarkably comprehensive that it even evoked a backlash of mild hostility.

  "I hope that we're not planning merely to repeat history," said Tom Swift, one of Hardy Junior's Focus Group.
He looked askance at the pictures and records that so excited the young historian.

  "Do better if you can, Tom," Wil Hardy said. "More power to you. But I'm mighty happy that we have the genius of the past to fall back on." He promptly dubbed the museum professionals and the workers skilled in the pioneer crafts the "Museum Mavens."

  Once the Planning Subcommittee got to talking about these technologies of earlier times, several members began to voice new misgivings.

  "You know," Harish Kahar said, "we've been arbitrarily assigning hundreds of workers to one task or another, assuming that centralized factories are the way to go. But wouldn't some of this work be better performed in a cottage industry setting?"

  Millie Fox also challenged the group to think seriously about technological work that could be accomplished in the home, or the tribal compound. "Remember," she said, "in Colonial America, before the rise of factories, the farmer-artisan played a prominent role. Many farm families made their own tools, furniture, clothing, and processed foods. Beyond this, some functioned as part-time craftsmen, providing trade goods or services for the market. Hats, shoes, and pottery, for example, were products of an active hearthside production. Many country gristmills were run by farmers, operated only when customers brought in grain to be ground. The same was true of sawmills. At least this is how it was before the idea of the centrally located factory took hold."

  "Starting in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793." Wilson Hardy, Jr., the enthusiastic historian, could not restrain himself.

  Such debates lasted well into the evenings. Decisions sometimes entailed a choice between all-out industrial development and cottage industry manufacture, and sometimes a mix of the two. The "small is beautiful" approach won out with textiles—which young Hardy found ironic, since in the Industrial Revolution that was one of the first technologies to which the factory system was applied.

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  Little by little, the Planning Subcommittee covered the main areas of technological activity, allocating human and physical resources to each. Several times it was suggested that the use of metals be considered; but on each occasion Ichiro Nagasaka demurred, recommending that this topic—which he considered to be the capstone of the entire enterprise—be left until last.

  After the sixth day of meetings there was some talk about taking a break, a Sabbath of sorts, but Alf Richards ruled against it. "God might have rested on the seventh day," he said, "but He saw everything that He had made and beheld that it was good. The Joint Planning Subcommittee can hardly make such a claim."

  For example, health care was one key field that had not yet been addressed. Medical groups had been working since the very first days of crisis, but it was important that the subcommittee formally endorse these activities and provide necessary support. The health care community consisted of doctors and other medical professionals, both Inlanders and Outlanders, numbering one hundred twenty. They had established a hospital center in Ulundi, and clinics in several other small population centers, as well as Engineering Village. The assembled pool of talent was impressive by any standard; but the shortage of equipment and drugs was worrisome.

  In the first days after the Event, nobody gave much thought to the question of Pharmaceuticals. There were some medical supplies that had been salvaged from the ship and from a Ulundi hospital as well. And since, in recent years, most drugs had been prepared by chemical synthesis, and since the Engineering Village community included some of the world's greatest chemical engineers, as well as several professional chemists and even a couple of pharmaceutical scientists, it seemed that the situation could be dealt with satisfactorily. But when the experts reported that it would probably take at least three years to establish pharmaceutical factories, and that the available supply of drugs would not last nearly that long, the Joint Planning Subcommittee suddenly had an emergency on its hands. As a first measure, the medical people agreed to tighten their controls even more than they already had, only dispensing medication in the most critical situations. At the same time, a program was put into effect to produce, on an urgent basis, three items that were considered essential: an antiseptic, an antibiotic, and an anesthetic.

  The antiseptic problem was readily solved with ethyl alcohol— ethanol, or grain alcohol, as it is generally called. While making fuel, the chemical engineers could at the same time be making a germicide. The process is simple: boil corn in water, and after adding sprouted barley for malt, let the solution ferment. Concentration of alcohol in the liquid can be increased by distillation.

  For an antibiotic, the most quickly attainable product was the first and most famous: penicillin. The chemists—like Alexander Fleming so many years ago—cultivated some awful-looking stuff that they call mold, and from this they proposed to secure the precious curative.

  As for anesthetic, it turned out that there was throughout the Ulundi Circle a bumper crop of coca leaves, marijuana, and even opium poppies, to answer this need. There were ample amounts of cocaine from the coca, hashish from the marijuana, heroin and morphine from the poppies, plus every other conceivable derivative to be gleaned from these magical plants. The requirements of the doctors were met, and needless to say, many other purposes were served as well.

  The topic of drug use was addressed once at a meeting of the Coordinating Committee and the decision was to do nothing— nothing, that is, other than for the medical people and social workers to provide counseling when and where it seemed warranted. The almost unanimous view was that, while the community was struggling to survive, it could not afford to expend energy on policing behavior that was not manifestly harmful to the group. In fact, some of the leaders expressed sympathy for those individuals who, totally distraught over losses suffered in the Event, found solace in the mood-altering substances. There was also a side benefit of not having to worry about a crime problem based upon a narcotics trade.

  For a general anesthetic, the doctors asked their pharmaceutical colleagues if they could manage to prepare some nitrous oxide, the famous laughing gas once beloved by dentists, but also used in past years by medical surgeons. Following the technique developed by Humphry Davy in the late eighteenth century, the chemists proposed to obtain the gas by combining zinc with dilute nitric acid, which in turn could be derived from saltpeter.

  The native healers were also kept busy; and a number of individuals—blacks and whites—harvested curatives, and supposed curatives, from a variety of indigenous plants.

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  On the seventh day, the Planning Subcommittee turned its attention to Research and Development. The future: How were survivors, having barely escaped with their lives, to think about a high-technology future? In the effort to rebuild a suitable habitat, to bring order out of chaos, and to establish a basic industrial society, long-term planning could not be the center of attention. But—another one of those ambiguities with which they had to live—neither could it be forgotten. The Planning Subcommittee had assumed from the beginning that, although technological development would occur in several sequential stages, planning for each of the various stages should commence immediately and proceed in parallel. Even as elemental everyday needs were being addressed— food, shelter, health care, transport, and basic manufactures—design for a second stage should be underway, and also a third.

  Gordon Chan set forth the strategy in these terms: "Let us commit our second stage of recovery to the creation of a chemical industry. Most of the essential raw materials are available to us, particularly considering that we know how to synthesize just about any material we want from carbon-rich materials such as coal. Researchers, guided by the formulas and techniques painstakingly developed through the past century, will embark on such syntheses, beginning with those chemicals deemed most important for our evolving society. Prioritizing will be a difficult but essential part of the process. Then chemical engineers will develop pilot plants to test manufacturing methods, and this will lead eventually to full-scale production plants."


  Chan held up his hands as if to forestall the wave of protest he knew was building.

  "Simultaneously—let me say it quickly, before I anger my mechanical and electrical colleagues—there must be development of sources of power: steam engines, internal combustion engines, and electric generators. Also, of course, reestablishment of instant communications; perhaps we will skip the telephone and go directly to radio. After that comes what I consider the third stage, featuring the products of the electronic revolution—with television and the computer in the spotlight."

  There was a sudden restlessness among the group, evidence both of excitement over high-tech prospects and uneasiness about looking too far ahead when present needs were so great.

  "There will inevitably be frustration," Chan continued, "particularly as the electronics people wait for power, materials, and manufacturing capacity. I would expect, in general, that we'll have to repeat most of the industrial revolutions through which our forebears passed once before, only greatly accelerated because our knowledge base is so far advanced; but slowed down in some areas because of our limited material and human resources. This is what I expect. But we should also expect the unexpected. We should allow for—in fact, encourage—technological advances that will permit us to 'jump over' the established ways of doing things. I don't know what these advances might be. But I would be surprised if they didn't come along sooner rather than later. After all, we are engineers."