WILD SURMISE

June 1986 #5

AN ALMOST ANONYMOUS INFORMAL NOTE

BOOT, BELT AND BONNET

When Arthur saw that his sword was broken, he was dismayed, for this was the sword that had proved him rightful king when he had drawn it from the anvil in the church yard in the presence of the barons of the realm. Arthur said, "I have no sword." Merlin was heavy with thought, but he said, "There is another sword." Hard by was a tarn and a small boat at the edge of the tarn, and the two took the boat out upon the dark water. Behold, there arose from the tarn an arm clothed in white silk and gold, and in the hand was a sword with its sheath. So Arthur took the sword with its sheath. As the boat moved through the mist toward the shore, Arthur looked upon the sword and upon the sheath, and Merlin asked, "Which do you like better, the sword or its sheath?" Arthur said, "I think I like the sword better." Merlin said, "You should like the sheath."

Among the many layers of meaning in the scene from Mallory is the simple psychological one. Many men are pleased to have a sword even though the absolute best one can ask of a sword is a chance to put it back in the sheath. Similarly, many a safe and well fed lad has dreamed of being a knight in shining armor, even though the only purpose of the armor is to provide a degree of safety. The appeal of armor is not in the use but in the notion that it is somehow possible to arrange things so that one is safe from any threat. Although such an arrangement is not possible, personal body armor has its uses even in this late age.

There are three things armor ordinarily protects one against: shock, missiles and stubbed toes. There are a number of other hazards (radiation, chemicals, fire, poison gases, germs) but it is the big three that armor is usually designed against.

The purpose of any military action is the imposition of will through the use of force. Thus the fundamental tool of any government is shock. The soldier or policeman simply pushes or drags the dissident and makes him behave. The enforcing agent may be armed with a stick, a sword, or a pole weapon. History has seen the idea elaborated into the chariot, the squad of men with spears, the armed knight on horseback and the armored tank.

The missile is a secondary weapon. It cannot be used for the imposition of will except through some proposition; like, "Stop that or I will throw this stick at you." The missile is such a highly efficient means of resisting shock that usually whoever wins the missile exchange dominates the situation. It has not always been so. Missiles have been elaborated through stick, javelin, flung stone, arrow, bullet and bomb.

Stomping a bare toe is also an excellent way to resist shock force, if one gets the chance. A quick kick to the shin or higher may help on occasion.

The body is not without armor of its own. However, the body's armor is optimized against a different kind of threat; that of being bitten. The most obvious armor in the body is the skull. Supporting, in the human, nothing more than a hat, the skull is not needed for ordinary daily use. It is only needed in case of accident. Somehow, a bite to the brain is a more serious threat to survival that a bite to other bits of the anatomy. The American football helmet is simply an addition to the skull. The collar bone also serves no architectural purpose. Men born without one shovel coal about as well as anybody else. But the curve of the collar bone follows the curve of the jaw bone quite nicely. Raise one shoulder and lower the chin on that side and the vulnerable anterior neck, with its vital blood vessels, lung apex and airway, is sheathed in bone. It's a good trick to remember the next time your neighbor's dog tries to rip your throat out. The shoulder pads worn by the American football player are an addition to his collar bones. A third belt of armor, at least on the well nourished adult male, is the ever popular middle-age spare tire. While the pelvic girdle and rib cage protect the upper and lower parts of the body, the kidneys and the viscera of the abdomen are unguarded by bone. Bone armor around them would seriously limit flexibility. So the body claps on a layer of fat too thick to snap through. And the feet are well armored against a bite, at least over the heel, which is the part of the feet properly directed at anything that threatens to make a meal of one.

Before undertaking to add to the body's already excellent, flexible, light, low maintenance armor, one asks certain questions. Just what are we protecting against? What part of the body is threatened? What is the mechanism of protection? What will the protection cost (initial expense, upkeep, weight, loss of flexibility, noise, conspicuousness)? And how will the weight be carried?

For the stubbed toe, the answers are obvious. We are protecting the foot against objects the body's own weight landing on it, against the foot striking a solid fixed object, and against stepping on something sharp. In the first instance, the force of the object is to be transmitted from above the foot to the ground so there is no force on the foot itself. In the second instance, the energy of the moving foot is to be absorbed into the material of the armor. In the third instance, the integrity of the not-sharp armor keeps the foot away from the sharp peril. We can afford to give up a little stealth and a little flexibility. It should cost little and take almost no upkeep. And of course we would much prefer it carried its own weight by resting on the ground.

All these and more, like a handy place to keep a knife, are available from a good stout pair of leather boots. So successful is the leather boot, that any proper construction worker will wear a pair. Indeed, pictures of classical warriors running around in sandals seem a bit fanciful. Why would one bother with bronze greaves and not wear shoes? The technology of tying a leather bag over the foot cannot have been beyond reach.

For missiles, the answers are about as obvious. We are protecting the head from flying and falling objects. We might like to protect the whole body, but the head is most important. First, it contains vital things like the brain. Second, the head is up top there, where anything flying around is likely to hit it first. And last, the soldier generally puts his head up in order to use his weapon.

This last is an example of appallingly bad weapon design, beyond its obvious lack of a recoil spring and shock absorber, range finder and usually a silencer. Any child knows what a periscope is. It would be duck soup to design a weapon that could be fired by a person lying face down behind a log. He would only need a little handle to hold the thing over his head, and a fiber optic device and a zoom lens hooked up to the sights, so he could aim the thing or scan the field while keeping his head buried the way an ostrich is supposed to. But the most modern rifle requires that the head go up when the weapon goes up. Perhaps the psychology is such that a person using a rifle is little concerned with his own welfare, that he is content to be hurt if he can only get his own lick in.

This last attitude may not be so irrational as it seems. If one compares the number of soldiers who were counted coming back from Vietnam with the number counted by the census in 1980, there was a huge loss. The number who vanished after returning approximates the entire number that actually saw combat. There is reason to fear that exposure to combat is so devastating that the actual risk of death in combat is a small proportion of the risk of dying because of that combat. Still the notion of using a weapon that does not maximize ones chance of surviving is very irrational. So the first part of the body to protect from missiles must be the head.

There was a time when a steel helmet could deflect a rifle bullet. The bullet at such times often would penetrate the helmet, skitter around the inside, and make a hole to leave on the other side. The soldier often looked at his helmet and found holes on opposite sides but no hole in his head. (Or in the fiber helmet liner.) Modern high velocity rounds are not so obliging. They go straight through.

Modern helmets are designed on the principle of absorbing the energy of the bullet or other fast flying object with sheets of very strong fabric. Myself, I should not be sorry to see them put a layer of titanium in. It is light, very strong, does not corrode, and might be able to deflect objects that the fabric had already slowed down. Flexibility is no object in a helmet. A hard liner would produce little noise.

Speaking of noise, it should be possible to improve a little on the human ear, excellent though it is. A high sensitivity microphone could be built into either side of the helmet that would give the wearer hyper-acute hearing unless a really loud noise went off, in which case his ears would be electronically protected.

The cost of all this would be substantial, and an electronic device would need batteries. But it would be worth much.

The weight, of course, would have to be carried on the head. That means more work for the neck muscles, but in just about every century throughout history, the protection has been judged worth the weight. In fact, the construction worker that wears the boots will also generally wear a helmet.

That leaves armor against shock. This is by far the most problematic. In this day and age, if someone uses a shock force on you, you throw a missile at him. If he comes at you with an armored tank, you still throw a missile at him.

There was a long time when shock dominated missiles. The only question was the virtue of cavalry over infantry. The ancient empire of Egypt and Persia used horse drawn chariots. Often these carried archers, but the real threat was the disruption of the battle line caused by the mass of the chariot itself. Alexander the Great seems to have dealt with them by the ploy of stepping out of the way.

For a long time after Alexander, European battles were decided by heavy infantry, armored men with long pikes. The Romans used them from beginning to end, using archers and pelters only as auxiliaries and hiring Gothic cavalry only as a last resort. The use of heavy infantry went through a sort of evolution. Introduced by the Greeks as a defense against the great empires of Asia, it was at first the weapon of the free man. By the fall of the Roman Empire, heavy infantry was the tool of empire. That empire fell before lighter more mobile armies, far more loosely organized. The marauding band in its turn began as a form of resistance to empire but then became so successful as to be a form of oppression in its own right.

Then in the Dark Ages, the horse made a comeback. The near mythical Arthur used cavalry to drive out the Anglo-Saxons. Perhaps more importantly, somebody in central Europe introduced the stirrup. Suddenly the rider was no longer at the mercy of the first person to grab his foot. From the fifth century to the fifteenth, the mounted knight on horseback was the dominant fighting force. During all that time, he never completely became the tool of his emperor. He never totally lost an air of independence or individual initiative and of personal identity. And by the end of his era, he had become the most heavily armored force that was seen until the ironclad warship.

In designing armor against shock, it is obviously the front of the body that is subject to attack, either by overhead blow or a thrust. It has been observed that during shock warfare, wounds to the head and shoulders are far more common than wounds lower down. The overhead blow with sword or axe is more common because it serves both as offence and as defense. The head and shoulders can be armored, but the head already has a helmet, and the shoulders are not particularly vulnerable, so long as the collar bone is not broken and the subclavian vessels are protected. But a thrust to the lower abdomen is quite deadly.

Not only does the lower abdomen contain great blood vessels that can cause the blood pressure to crash in moments, not only does it contain viscera that will produce fatal blood poisoning if torn, the lower abdomen is just about the center of gravity of a man with his arms raised. As Hector of Troy once remarked, the true accomplishment of a shock soldier is being able to swerve aside to avoid a blow. The center of gravity is the hardest part of the body to move. While immobility is a disadvantage, it does suggest the area can be armored.

Armor that deflects a blow would be rather ineffective for a large area like the abdomen. And armor that absorbs energy would not work, since the blow of a shock weapon carries more energy and far more momentum than the blow of a missile. What is needed is a way to carry the force of the blow to the center of gravity of the body, relying on the mass of the body itself to stop the blow and the fat girdle to absorb any energy that is delivered. A good wide leather belt with a large metal buckle will do the job quite well at modest cost. As far as the weight goes, a belt rides on the hips. The force goes from the skin to fat to pelvic girdle to femur. Weight carried so is born more easily by the body than any other distribution, feet, shoulders, head. Remember where you put the grocery sack while you fumble for the house keys.

Along with his boots and hard hat, the construction worker is also likely to wear a leather belt with a metal buckle, the larger the buckle the better. He probably doesn't think about it a lot, but the belt and buckle make him feel secure.

Any more armor for shock warfare is just as likely to get in the way. It is easier to move the knee out of the way of a spear when occasion arises than to spend the rest of ones life carrying around enough metal on the knee to stop or deflect the spear. And getting out of the way is easier the less armor that is carried. Yet during the days when the armored cavalry dominated the field, we see a steady increase in the amount of armor. Two dates may give a clue as to what was going on. First is the date when the first Gothic armor was completed, an entire suit of plate steel, shielding the man at all points. It had slip joints of loose rivets and hinges of leather. Its lines were long, spike like, and fluted for strength; its aspect gruesome. It was light, flexible where needed, form fitting and its finish was an efficient dull metal. It was built around 1400. Second is the date of the battle of Agincourt, October 25, 1415.

At the battle of Agincourt, Welsh archers under Henry V defeated a much larger French army. The French fought on horseback, wearing armor that was state of the art. The Welsh, with some English, used long bows. It seems ironic that the Middle Ages should have begun and ended in Wales. Certainly there was no particular innovation in the long bow. It was only a simple bow that was a bit bigger and was drawn to the ear instead of to the sternum. The recurve bow had been around a long time and delivered more penetrating power, more range and could be shot more quickly, although it lacked accuracy. The crossbow was also an antique that had more penetrating power, greater range, more accuracy, but could not be reloaded and shot again quickly. The long bow had good range, good penetrating power, good accuracy, a good repeat rate and also was innocent of catastrophic structural failure that plagued the crossbow and to a lesser extent the recurve.

The secret, of course, is the arrow. Since the bowstring moves toward the center of the bow, and the arrow must move toward the arrowhead, the arrow must bend as it is shot. And it must bend exactly the right amount, depending on the force of the bow string, the width of the bow and the distance from the bow that the string stops accelerating the arrow. So each arrow in the quiver needs to be the same weight, length and flexibility as well as be straight. Or else the archer needs to know how to allow for the change. In flight, the arrow continues to quiver, since its resistance is mostly from in front of its center of gravity. There was nothing magic about the longbow. The magic was in the skill and interest of the man who used one.

At Agincourt, for the first time, a missile force totally dominated a shock force of greater size. Missile force has been supreme ever since. The time between the logical peak of evolution of the shock force, the mounted knight in Gothic armor, and the day shock force was rendered obsolete was only fifteen years.

Although the coat of plate armor had only a brief period of real usefulness, it continued to be manufactured and used, often as a status symbol or for going to parties, for centuries. On the other hand, the longbow was very quickly supplanted by gunpowder even though it would be centuries before a rife with the same range, reliability, speed of reloading, accuracy and portability was developed. The reason was that not just anybody could manage a longbow. There has, after all, always been only one Wales.

While the mounted knight was a shock force, his conspicuous armor was more and more not armor against a shock force but armor against missiles. Protected by his coat of proof, he was expected to advance rapidly against his enemy any overwhelm that enemy by brute force. With the recognition that no reasonable amount of armor would assure protection against missiles for the time it took to reach the enemy, the use of armor declined until by the beginning of this century even the helmet had been discarded. During World War One, interest in armor returned. The helmet was reintroduced. Armored tanks were invented.

Except for the boots, modern armor is just about strictly designed to defend against missiles. Against an exploding warhead, it does not seem personal armor would have much of a chance, nor against fire from a powerful rifle at close range. But against stray shots, bits of shrapnel, ricocheting bullets and so forth, the modern soldier wears a bulletproof vest. The vest is used, since it is the upper part of the body that is to be protected. Like the head, it is up there where all the nasty stuff is flying around. Besides, with modern surgery, a wound to the lower abdomen that spares the major blood vessels and nerves is not the catastrophe it would once have been. A wound to the chest is more likely to be fatal before it can be repaired.

A vest may either absorb or deflect a missile. Deflecting armor, the old breastplate, is probably not due for a comeback. Steel is too easily penetrated at any weight that could be carried. Beryllium is lighter and stronger, but too toxic to be used. Titanium again would be a good choice, although its use would still mean loss of flexibility.

That leaves the flexible vest, one that absorbs the missile's energy. Since modern missiles are relatively light, it seems a reasonable choice. There is a wide range of flexible fabrics. The one used now is made by Du Pont under the trade name Kevlar. It is highly effective at stopping bullets, although I hear that a plastic coated bullet may slip through. There are other kinds of fabric that could be used. For centuries, they made chain mail, linking little rings of metal together into a net. The result was a fabric that combined some of the strength and toughness of metal with the flexibility of cloth. It was not strong enough to turn aside a fair strike with a spear, arrow or axe, but did a good job against a deflected blow from a sword. Tougher sorts of chain mail could be made using titanium again, or perhaps carbon and epoxy compounds. There is also the possibility of using silicone woven through the links. Silicone has the property of stretching when pulled slowly but being stiff when pulled quickly. Hit very hard, it shatters, absorbing energy. Properly engineered, it could give chain mail the property of being flexible when the wearer moved but being very hard when struck, so as to distribute the force over a large area, and shattering so as to absorb the energy of the missile. Silicone is rather toxic but not so dangerous as beryllium.

There are other traditional ways of making a flexible armored vest. Little plates of metal can be slipped into pockets in a vest or fastened to the fabric with little rivets. This produces the swashbuckling appearance of the brigandine; perhaps you have seen some young fellow in medieval dress wearing a quilted jacket with brass studs. The Japanese achieved great strength and lightness along with a very sinister appearance by using overlapping plates, each of which had a great number of little flutes like a corrugated iron roof.

The cost of a bulletproof vest is not considerable and upkeep is simple. Compare the job of maintaining a suit of Gothic armor with its sliding joints, brass hinges and hard-to-polish corners. A bulletproof vest contributes little to weight and is adequately flexible. But it has a design flaw. The same flaw is found in the modern vest as in the renaissance party armor, the Gothic coat of proof, the medieval shirt of chain mail, the ancient cuirass and the biblical breastplate.

If you look at a strong man, you will be impressed, if such things impress you, by his shoulders. A horse may have more muscle, an orangoutang may have bigger arms, but nothing else has the big level shoulders of a man, save perhaps a woman, and then only in the exceptional case. The reason for those big shoulder is, of course, that the collar bone holds them out. Mechanically it is a disadvantageous position, but the cost in ability to lift things is less than the advantage of being able to protect the neck. The man's physique makes up for the mechanical problem by putting on a little extra muscle. So your first glance at a man shows you those big muscular level shoulders. Surely they ought to be good for something. Perhaps they are meant to carry things on.

Indeed, men carry things on their shoulders, but not for long if they can help it. A man who must carry a heavy pack will usually either try to hook the pack on his belt or use a thump line, a pair of cords that go from his pack to a band over his forehead to lift the weight from the shoulders. The proper thing, of course, is to use both and shift the weight from hips to forehead and back occasionally.

Time out of mind, designers have looked at men's shoulders and decided they were a dandy place to hang an armored vest from. It seemed so simple. The vest need only be built like a shirt and those big shoulders would take the strain. But the shoulders have problems. First, they must maintain their position by positive muscular action. Under a load, they must burn energy just to stay where they are. Second, the shoulders are poorly padded with fat, so the skin is vulnerable to abrasion. (It is easier to lounge on ones fat posterior than to pray on ones skinny knees.) Third, if the shoulder starts to sag, that tough collar bone is brought down onto the very subclavian vessels it should protect and compresses those vessels against the first rib, cutting off the blood supply to the arms and to the shoulders themselves. Fourth1 the absolute best the shoulders can hope to do is to transmit the downward force of the armor to the thoracic spine from which it goes straight to the lumbar spine, which is just about the most overtaxed part of the body in the first place. The lumbar spine responds with early fatigue and loss of flexibility and spontaneity, like reluctance to look around and see what is out there.

The problem is that the vest is treated as an extension of the helmet. It should be treated as an extension of the belt. The armor sheathing the body should be hung from a belt around the hips. From there it should extend down at least to cover the muscle mass of the upper thighs. It should extend up as far as the neck. It should be stiff enough to support its own weight, but flexible enough to be pushed around when the body moves. And it should have enough extra fabric so that if it seems prudent for the wearer to lie on his face, there is no substantial part of his neck, body, shoulder girdle or pelvic girdle that is uncovered. It should also have a place to hook the thumbs.

One is at this point disposed to ask, what of it? Assuming, and it is by no means clear, that such armor would really be safer and not simply be another nuisance and another hazard, what difference would it make? If successful, the device would soon be used by everybody, and any effect would be canceled. Would it be anything more than another round in the endless and desolate history of warfare?

Let me describe two ideas or rather feelings as phrased by two men born in adjacent states within fifty years of each other. Contrasting in looks, intelligence, education and family background, they probably would yet have agreed as to right and wrong in most matters. They had in common the gift of direct, luminous, candid prose. History cast them in opposite roles in similar dramas.

Jefferson said that humans "are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Lincoln said of those who had died at the battle of Gettysburg, "But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated in far above our poor power to add or detract." He invites us to "resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth (of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.)"

Two great men, and one cannot call one good and the other bad, yet what a contradiction is here. For Jefferson, only God is hallowed. The government is only a club, a committee, a contrivance built for a purpose and without legitimacy beyond that purpose.

For Lincoln, the government has an identity, a value in its own right. The government is hallowed by the sacrifice of those who have served it, and so hallowed deserves further service.

This last is the spirit of empire. In its worst excess, it is the spirit of idolatry, the worship by people of human handiwork, the claim of divine guidance by mortal officials. Lincoln himself once complained that in the fighting of the War Between the States, he was only being obedient to a oath he had made before God that he would protect and uphold the United States (as, of course, he understood it), while the Confederates were bound by no such oath to destroy that United States (as Lincoln understood it.) It is easy to get into the mind of those who support an empire. The call is highly moral, highly personal. You have heard the words, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." The appeal is powerful, gut level, unforgettable. It calls us to be, in one way of understanding it, our best selves. Only there are other ways of understanding.

Jefferson's is the spirit of independence. In its worst excess it is the spirit of the mob or an invitation to endless pointless bickering. It is hard to get into the mind of a Jefferson. What does it take to turn against an empire and say, "Not only do you lack the right to do this, you lack the force to make it stick." Moral force and brute force are things on which empire has almost a monopoly. What kind of nerve does it take?

Think again about some of those moments of history. The Persian Empire, standing in lineal descent from the great empire of Sumer, still using chariots, sweeps down upon Greece. The Greeks (who, by the way, had already traded for tin in Britain, already met the people who would become the Scotch Irish) respond by introducing the heavy infantry and wins, if only briefly, the chance to found the first republic. Centuries later, Roman heavy infantry marches across Britain until it is struck a numbing blow by the unrecorded tactics of marauding Picts and Scots. Centuries later, the cavalry of Arthur stuns the marauding Anglo Saxons.

Another thousand years and the cavalry of France is laid low by the Welsh archers.

The pattern is that the empire always uses established tactics and has greater resources. The empire almost invariably interprets any setback as a sign of its own moral degeneracy, a sign that it is not making great enough sacrifices.

For the opposition to win is, of course, by far the exception. One does not expect it to happen in every thousand years. If the empire cannot win by moral superiority, it can muster greater resources, and if they fail, the empire can at least spread disease epidemics among its enemies. In order to win, the opposition must come up with two things. First there must be a group of friends, of partisans whose loyalty to each other is at least as great as the loyalty of any hero to any empire. There must be a fellowship. You will remember the words from the American Revolution, Gentlemen, let us all hang together or we will all hang separately." Or as Hotspur said, "Our plot is a good plot as ever was laid; our friends true and constant: a good plot, good friends, and full of expectation; an excellent plot, very good friends." Second, there must be a technological breakthrough. Some have been named. The technological advance, of course, will eventually fall into the hands of an imperial power. Nor does the possession of new technology assure success. The ironclad, the submarine, the protected firing line, the ice machine and the tactics of Robert Lee combined were not sufficient for the Confederacy.

It must have been a strange feeling to have stood with ones fellows among the pike men of Greece or among the archers at Agincourt, among the Picts of Scotland or the knights of the Table Round, stood and trusted an untried technology against a superior force using the technology that had always won before. I think the feeling may have been, "I've wanted to do this for a long time." High hearted, high handed madness. Yet it took such courage to keep some empire from swallowing the earth, and putting an end forever to the independent spirit.

There are exceptions, of course. The sturdy Dutch defied the Roman Empire and over a thousand years later the Spanish Empire. In South Africa they defied the British Empire, and now they are defying us. They have done it all without memorable technological advance. We, of course, are enjoying the usual imperial sense of moral superiority in imposing on them.

We speak, of course, of throwing down empires, not emperors. Emperors come and go rather quickly, as each is found in turn to be unworthy. But the idea that there ought to be an emperor goes on. The last great and greatest war, World War Two pitted an axis of three typical imperial powers against the rest of the world. The axis powers were highly centralized, highly popular, and commanded tremendous loyalty.

In winning that war the resistance, alas, invented the nuclear bomb. Already it has become the tool of a typical centralized, highly self righteous imperial power. Russia has more nuclear explosive power and means of delivery than the rest of the world combined. A highly controversial move is already being made to develop the technology to thwart those weapons. It is a logical next step.

The spirit of empire is not an evil thing. It is a very human desire. But the spirit of independence is not evil either, and Jefferson was right that it cannot exist in the heart of an individual alone. He will ultimately sell out to the empire. Independence must be institutionalized. And that institution is established at great cost.

Small wonder that when Arthur lifted the sword which at one level of meaning was a military strategy that would terrify the world for a thousand years, small wonder that when he said he liked it, Merlin's brow darkened with thought.

Editor's Note: WILD SURMISE is an occasional newsletter on speculative matter. The next issue will be on justice, and then Booty will talk about cars Thanks again to all who have helped keep us anonymous.

The Wild Surmise staff returned from Australia in a state of terminal jet shock. At one point on the way out, most of the party was in the San Francisco airport waiting for the plane to Honolulu, where they expected to meet M' '5 mother. Some one slipped up behind M and grabbed him with a hold that covered his eyes. His reflex try to break the hold did not succeed, but by main strength he managed to squirm around and get a glance at his assailant. "Mother!" "You were very determined to get loose," she said approvingly.

At the Great Barrier Reef, the locals decided M was some form of large scaleless fish. The official laboratory assistant ventured to the reef, but wouldn't let go of M. M's mother got rescued by six of the cutest diving instructors. Cooter complained that the salt water gummed up his VCR. Booty vomited into his snorkel. In the outback, M won the long distance cross country straight line boomerang throwing disaster. On the laboratory assistant's third try, her boomerang went straight out, came straight back, skipped once and came to rest against her toe. M's mother took over the cooking from the Aborigine who was going to show how to cook a "damper," a traditional sort of soda bread. Cooter recorded hours of the back of the bus seat in front of him with eucalyptus trees bouncing by in the background. Moneybags tried to figure out how water could be brought in in substantial quantities. Booty decided that, if the Aboriginal tjuringa stones recorded tribal myths and history, they amounted to a written literature.

At Ayers rock, Cooter failed to get a picture of the comet, so Moneybags bought one. M and the laboratory assistant climbed the rock with Cooter's VCR and came back with a recording of one hour of bouncing blue sky. Like Achilles, M's mother found she had a heel problem and sat the climb out. All had a splendid time in Perth and frolicking in the Indian Ocean.

In Sidney, the tour guide stated that the area had been settled by a lot of "Irish and Scotch." Booty decided that there were probably a lot of Scotch Irish around and asked the others if there weren't a lot of people with red hair. The beautiful laboratory assistant said she thought it looked like everybody had blue eyes and light brown hair just a lot of people. M, who seldom will say anything about anybody he hasn't met, and who hadn't met the majority of Australia or even of Sidney, conceded that while in the united states his chest size in the stores is large with an inclination toward very large, in Australia he is medium. M's mother said, "These are blunt, straight forward people. They tell you what they think and what they feel. They are not accustomed to subtle, cute, complicated or artificial relationships." Certainly the whole staff found the Australians very warm and friendly. Strangers would wave from so far away it was quite difficult to see them. Of course, as Booty pointed out, it may have partly been the heart-stoppingly beautiful laboratory assistant that produced the reaction.

M went to Melbourne alone. He found opals for sale at the airport that were better quality for the price than anything Moneybags had turned up the whole trip. He was given strict instructions to get pictures of adorable little wombats. He found the wombats, platypuses in a platypussary and a "butter-fly" full of butterflies, which would hover about in front of you or settle on your head. As usual, his pictures didn't turn out, so they all had a good time picking on him.

Moneybags says buy Australia.

Editing an obscure publication gives one a special feeling for people who take an interest in obscure publications of the past. According to Booty, the people of Sumer used to make little clay balls that contained little counters. These were used as bills of lading and amounted to the first written documents. They were also the first balls, thus giving rise both to books and ball games. It is said that the university is the memory of a culture. Not so. Universities are concerned with ball games, including reading in libraries. The memory of the culture is the antiquarian book dealer.

Missing At Home

About a year ago, we started talking about the mystery of the missing veterans. Hundreds of thousands who were counted as having returned safely from Vietnam were not found at the time of the 1980 census. The last official statement we have is that they must have been miscounted. The New England Journal of Medicine has published an article that indicates men who were drafted are still dying faster than their contemporaries who were not drafted, but their numbers are far smaller. They also do not take into account the commonplace observation that veterans have a high likelihood of becoming homeless wanderers, and thus not falling into the particular study that was done. It remains a mystery.

Ponderous Spheroids of Conflagration

A physicist friend who has been following the radiation levels in this part of the world says that the excess radiation due to the catastrophe at Chernobyl rose last week to a level that was about one percent of what we were getting around here back in the 1950's and 1960's when they were still doing atmospheric testing. While that went on for years, the radioactivity from Chernobyl has already started to taper off. I suppose we shouldn't be too concerned; the reactor that burned up was making plutonium for nuclear bombs, so it was all intended to come this way sooner or later anyway.

He went on to suggest that even though the radiation levels in the adjoining reactors might well be incompatible with life, and although the other reactors have the choice keep-working-or-burn, that in all likelihood there will be no repeat of the burning of the first reactor. It will be possible to keep sending skilled people in to operate the remaining plants even though they do so at dire risk. We request that none of you prized Wild Surmise readers who have training in nuclear engineering accept any job offers in Russia in the near future.

Most of what we hear seems to compare the calamity at Chernobyl with the trouble at Three Mile Island. The unspoken implication is that the two are somehow comparable. As if their disaster was worse than ours, but ours was worse than anything that had happened before.

In fact, the worst prior civil nuclear disaster was not Three Mile Island at all, but another Russian one. It seems that in 1957, the Russians hastily evacuated about thirty towns in an area about twenty miles across near Kyshtym, where, of course, once again they were making stuff for bombs. That would be the right event to compare with Chernobyl. And there are differences. Kyshtym is in the mountains; Chernobyl is in marshy land, where there is a far greater opportunity for the searing hot mass to melt its way down to the water table, whereupon live steam ought to bring it right back up again.

Cheers.

MILD SURPRISE

Starting a motorcycle is quite simple. You turn on the gas and ignition, screw in the choke, set the transmission in neutral, push a little extra gas into the carburetor, jump as high as you can into the air and come down with one foot on the start pedal. It helps if you pull up on the handle bars, if you have a particularly powerful machine. My sturdy old Triumph Thunderbird usually fired between kick one hundred and one hundred fifty. That doesn't count missing the pedal. Once the motor comes to thunderous life, and the choke is out, you squeeze the clutch lever with your left hand, lift the shift lever with your right boot toe, give her a tad more power with the twist grip throttle in your right hand, slowly ease out the clutch and start away in a cloud of dust, grease, flying chickens, joyous dogs, furious peasant women and auditory Pandemonium. Or you may be sitting at an intersection, looking at passing traffic, revving your engine with the transmission engaged, and have your clutch cable break. That's the poor way to get started.

Stopping is a drill you weld into your reflexes and your soul. Throttle down. Touch front brake with right hand grip. Open clutch. Lift gear shift with right toe. Close clutch. Come down solid on rear brake with left boot. Open clutch. Rev engine.

Grab front brake handle like it was a woman, too weak and it may ignore you, too hard and the cable may break. Raise shift lever with right toe twice. Release clutch. Throttle down. If you aren't stopping fast enough, release front brake. Lock rear brake. Lie on right side, away from the brake pedal. Approach obstacle wheels first. If a way opens, be ready to get off the brake. Steer into the skid. Stand up and slide through. It all sounds like a lot of steps, but it's real easy to concentrate.

Turning is the challenge. Slow down before you get to the turn. Enter in a low gear with the engine revving a little high and accelerating just enough to throw some weight onto the back wheel. Grab the seat (The seat on those old machines was always crooked. It never seemed to be pointed in the same direction as the wheels were rolling.) firmly between the buttocks. For a left turn, treating the machine as if it were your tail, swing the motorcycle toward the left and then sweep it well out toward the right, so that you are lying well over on your left side. Your shoulders stay in line with the machine, but you may hold your head up a little, the better to see. Or you can go around the curve with the motorcycle upright and your body leaning way out toward the left, as if you had a side car. That's the poor way to get around a curve.

I packed my things and carried them from my room down to the front desk of the Hotel Alhambra. The fellow behind the desk regarded me benignly. He was a big man with a round silhouette who regarded the world as amusing but slightly dangerous. The fact that my Spanish was limited mattered little. He deigned speak nothing but Catalan. Standing there in a gold helmet, angled RAF goggles, white wool scarf, gray duff le coat cinched with a belt, black boots, dungarees, with saddlebags in hand, I somehow managed to give him the notion I was going somewhere. At last his eyes lit up at the word "Valencia."

He produced a map of the country from behind the desk and proceeded to give me a briefing on the way. Even without Catalan, I could follow his account. I also couldn't help noticing that it was the same map I had had in my hand when I checked into the hotel a week before. With an air of regal generosity, he indicated that I could have my map back. Then he started to sing. I am not sure that is the local custom, but he began to sing in low melodious Catalan, punctuating his words with occasional hand clapping. Sometimes he would gesture with his hands as if he were holding onto the handlebars of a motorcycle. Once he made a whirling gesture with his two index fingers. Either he was indicating the rolling of the front wheel or indicating the whole machine going end over end. At last I managed to get away from the odd scene, not knowing if he had wished me well or ill. All in all, I think he wished me well. The people there had been friendly interested and good humored the whole time.

I loaded up the motorcycle, kicked her a hundred times and rumbled off to find the Aveniedo Generalissimo Franco. That's the "avenue of the most generalistic Franco." I swept out among the cars, the ox carts, the trucks, the buses and the scooters and sought the traffic circle and the road to Valencia.

A few miles out of town, the road goes over a series of short steep hills. After the first couple hills, I found that by really revving the motor on the way up, I could jump completely off the pavement and then land on the descending part of the hill. The total airborne distance with each leap cannot have been very great, however far you go in a couple seconds at fifty miles an hour, but it seemed like flying. The landscape was harsh, desert tan, dry, rocky. I quickly got exhausted.

At the end of the row of hills, the road takes a sharp left and then a less sharp but more protracted right. I made the left turn all right, but I was too slow leaning back into the right. The motorcycle crossed the center line and made for the left edge of the pavement. Something told me that if I just leaned over hard, the machine would skid into the ditch. Then I noticed a little ridge of dirt on the berm of the ditch just past the pavement. I think there is a rule: don't give up the pavement at speed. I broke that rule. When my wheels touched the little ridge, which looked like baked clay, it turned out to be nothing but dust. It vaporized. As I went into the ditch, I was just able to sling the machine around so that I dropped both wheels into the bottom instead of going in at an angle. I continued tearing around the bend, bouncing over the stony bottom of the ditch. I was just about to congratulate myself when a two foot boulder came around the curve. It filled the bottom of the ditch. There wasn't anyplace else to go.

Now a motorcycle has a low center of gravity. You can pull on the front brake lever as hard as the cable will allow you to, and the machine will not flip end over end. But hitting a boulder in the bottom of a ditch at high speed is another matter. The front wheel stopped. The frame went down on the front shocks. I flopped over my sleeping bag, which was shock-corded over the gas tank. The back end rose. The whole machine cartwheeled over and lay on top of me.

I had a momentary sensation of dark, of silence, of weight, or the whole world gyrating slowly. Then I thought, "What if it catches on fire?" My helmet and sleeping bag, my thick duff le coat and at least average luck had carried me through the wreck without a scratch. Panicked seconds later, I was out from under with a maimed left leg. I lay against the side of the ditch and looked up at the wheels. Truck brakes sounded.

I could not remember any traffic for miles. Now the road seemed full of stopped trucks. Drivers, looking urgent and concerned scrambled into the ditch and carried me out. After a brief consultation among themselves they tried standing me on my feet. That seemed to work all right. They pulled the motorcycle out and stood it up too. Then they lifted me onto it. They stood back

and beamed in satisfaction at the effect. After a little more discussion, they gestured I should start the machine. That wasn't so easy with a game leg, but for once it fired on the first kick. They applauded. There didn't seem much to do but to put it in gear. I never even learned their names.

It was long limping into Valencia. When I was stopped and the machine leaned left, I wondered if I would get it back up. Once along the way, the machine began to handle oddly. I slowed down to find out why, but it flipped over the instant I touched the front brake. The fault turned out to be a flat front tire. I pulled the wheel off and hitchhiked to a place to get it repaired. This truck driver was delighted to have a chance to show off his rig, demonstrating how the transmission got hotter as it went up hills. Once I fell in with a German cyclist, but our machines would not let us travel at the same speed. That night, I slept out.

In Valencia, I got my knee x-rayed, and a helpful doctor bandaged my ankle after covering it with a layer of something that looked like peanut butter and smelled like oil of wintergreen. I got the machine worked on, but not truly put to rights. Days I would sit in my hotel room, recovering, watching the trolley cars roll by. They carried jaunty little flags on their trolleys. One car had a bad wheel on the trolley, and it sparked, throwing showers of yellow light to the pavement behind. Nights, other guests would sleep in the same room. They arrived late, left before dawn, always seemed to be carrying enormous burdens and all breathed like a teenager in love.

The first day out of Valencia, I ran into air force cadets in San Javier. They insisted I sleep in their dorm, which beat sleeping out again. They managed to get my machine fixed, although the mechanic siphoned gas out and then sold it back to me. One night when the cadets and I were having coffee at a local tavern, one mentioned some acquaintance who had such fortitude he crushed lit cigarettes in his fingers. With a shrug, I put out my own cigarette against the back of my left hand. I hope they were impressed the first time, because I do not plan to do that again. A burning cigarette is very hot.

Leaving my friends the cadets, I stuck out for Grenada. On the first bend, I kept the motorcycle upright and leaned into the turn with my body. I chided myself for being a coward and having poor form. Next turn, I did it again. I criticized myself again for my timidity.

Finally I said to myself, "Look. Motorcycles don't mean anything to you. You don't care about motorcycles. But right now you are thousands of miles from home, alone in a foreign country riding a very powerful motorcycle. So you'd better care. Because if anything is going to get you out of here alive, it is this machine. So settle down and drive it the way you know how."

I went around another turn wrong, leaning so far away from the machine I could hardly control it.

"I know it scares you to lean the machine over. But it should scare you even more to do it wrong."

My driving wasn't impressed.

"Think about Rikki Tikki Tava. His last thought as the cobra Nag tried to thrash him to death was that if he was going to be killed at least he wanted to be killed in good mongoose form, with his jaws properly locked on the snake."

I wobbled through another bend.

"All right. Form is everything. Form is more important than fun. More important than feeling good. More important than life itself. So stop worrying about surviving and just do it right."

About this time, the road had started to parallel a river on the right. Ahead, the road turned right onto a bridge across the river. On the other side was a little town. The bridge had high sides, I suppose to keep horses from shying at the water. it kept a rider from seeing the road very far ahead.

Accelerating gently, leaning into the turn, I started around onto the bridge. The turn was longer and a lot sharper than I had estimated. The machine lay over farther and farther until the foot peg began to drag on the pavement. Sparks flew from the iron peg, but the big old machine held the curve. Once on the high arched bridge, I had only a little time to hit the brakes hard before I was into a left turn, this one even sharper than before. The left foot peg put up a rooster tail of fire all the way around, while the roar of the engine alarumed and re-echoed off the high stone walls close on either side.

From then on it was easy.