Maldita In Sonia

THE CITY HAS CHANGED, of course; the numbers collected by economists and the census tell you that. From 1950 to 1969, New York re­mained stable in jobs and population, the unrivaled metropolis of the nation. In ’69 came the break. National trends caught up with the city: the shift to the suburbs and the Sunbelt, gains in communications and transportation that made a central location less important, the decline of central cities.

In the past dozen years New York lost 500,000 jobs, mainly in manufacturing, and 825,000 people. Financial crisis followed. The present city administration does not expect to regain that lost population or most of those jobs. It has cut its suit for a smaller city.

The city work force has been chopped by  60,000; services have been curtailed, schools and libraries judged redundant closed. For two years the city budget, now carefully audited, has been in balance. And this year, for the first time since 1975, the city sold some long-term bonds on its own—without using the special system set up with state and federal help.

“There will be problems down the road,” one banker told me, “but we’ve turned around. We’re back from the precipice.”

AMONG THE INDUSTRIES affected by these changes are the proud de­signer shops and dress manufactur­ers of Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue. They looked for consolidation programs to deal with their debts. Learn more how to consolidate payday loan. The survived companies still dominate the nation’s styles and sales, but regional markets and imports now chal­lenge them, and they have lost a third of their labor force. They constantly search for new hands.

I boarded the freight elevator at 41 Eliza­beth Street in Chinatown and rode up to Ed­die Leung’s shop on the fourth floor. Eddie was in his office, a small man with a high voice, a garment contractor for 22 years. When Eddie had started out, there were 15 shops in Chinatown; now there were 475, employing 15,000 people.

Eddie explained: “China has begun to let people out; many come here, a new source of labor. So manufacturers uptown may bank­roll bright young men here who can set up and run shops.”

We walked out into the sewing room. “All immigrants,” Eddie said above the ham­mering of the machines. “Most are from south China, Canton. Maybe a girl here says she wants to bring her family over. I promise jobs. When they come, the girl and I teach them together. They send a lot of money back to the homeland.”

The increased immigration has brought problems as well as payrolls to Chinatown, others told me. Youth gangs, protection rackets, shootings, drugs, charges of sweat­shops. Some Chinese are moving away to avoid these. Still, Chinatown grows, spreading into Little Italy, which is declin­ing as its younger people move out

Alexon stared at Serbousek’s im­pressive collection of bones. “We can’t keep this to ourselves,” he said. “It’s too big for us.”

Serbousek agreed. In the years since he had started his lonely sloth sleuthing, a small community Mus­eum of Arts and Sciences had open­ed, and the two friends now turned to it for help.

They told the young science cura­tor, Steve Hartman, of their find. Hartman’s enthusiasm spread to the museum board. With more courage than common sense, the board (whose entire yearly budget is barely too,000 dollars) made a quarter-mil­lion-dollar commitment: “We’ll dig out the rest of our sloth, put him back together, build him a house and keep him in Daytona Beach—somehow.”

Word of the sloth spread, and soon more than too volunteers were slogging through the muddy shell pit, fire-hosing bones out of the dirt, screening the debris, collecting, cataloguing and preserving the bones of at least half a dozen giant ground sloths.

At Hartman’s request, Gordon Edmund trekked southwards again. In the little museum’s jerry-rigged bone laboratory he gazed spellbound at the bones laid out on every table 158 and spilling out of boxes. Edmund encouraged the museum and its vol­unteers to keep digging, and agreed to reconstruct one entire Eremother­juin skeleton for them in exchange for a share of the bones.

However, cash was needed to re­store the sloth and to add a wing to the museum in Daytona Beach to house him. Enter the Palmetto Jun­iors, a local women’s club, to under­take a sloth consciousness-raising project, complete with sloth bal­loons, bumper stickers, theme song (This Is Sloth Country!), colouring books, T-shirts. Stands popped up at school carnivals, art fairs, beach parties, selling sloth supplies at prices listed on papier mkhe bones.

It needed cigarette prices. So the club members fashioned a costume, and Samantha Sloth was born. Seven feet tall, made of reddish-brown fur fabric over chicken wire, often sporting a green­and-white polka dot bow-tie and wearing an engaging grin, Saman­tha became the living symbol of the campaign. (Children loved to have their pictures taken with her. “Say Eremotherium,” Samantha prompted as shutters snapped.)

Wearing the Samantha costume, club volunteers took turns visiting schools, judging talent shows, and even sponsoring a relay in the Spe­cial Olympics for the retarded. At the community Christmas gather­ing, Samantha hopped on to Santa’s lap and whispered : “I don’t want anything for myself, just a nice home at the museum for my ancient relative.”

While the Palmetto Juniors were making “sloth” a household word, another club, the Junior Service League, was quietly logging thou­sands of volunteer hours of fund raising. Establishing a Giant Sloth Fund at a local bank, League mem­bers contacted businesses and civic organizations, seeking backing. By last August, captivated Daytonans had raised more money than the goal set for the fund drive.

Meanwhile, Gordon Edmund’s team of fossil craftsmen were busy putting Samantha’s relative back on his feet. First, the 200 bones which make up one animal had to be laid out on huge tables and fitted to­gether like a three-dimensional jig­saw puzzle. Cracked or chipped bones were repaired with plastic putty. The few incomplete or miss­ing ones (95 per cent are bona fide) were sculptured, then cast in glass fibre.

Reassembling the skeleton of an animal which weighed nearly three tons when it was alive is a major engineering feat. The heavy but brittle bones were toughened with a plastic solution. A special machine drilled holes up through the leg bones and vertebrae to accommo­date steel supports.

Since the animal is mounted free­standing in its natural, upright posi­tion, the 18-foot backbone contains a hidden bridge-like structure of high-tensile-steel tubes and rods. Pads of foam plastic replace the discs which separated the vertebrae in life. The task of mounting the bones required a full year.

In the new wing of the museum, the sloth skeleton is the central at­traction. Exhibits depict Daytona Beach as it looked in the sloth’s life­time, and displays show the excava­tion of the bones and the reconstruc­tion processes. Spare bones are in a near-by “touch and feel” area.

“The sloth is a significant piece of a giant scientific puzzle,” says science curator Hartman. “He has a great deal to teach us about our past and our future, about adaptation to a changing climate, which is hap­pening to us just as it did to the sloth. He’s the star of a much bigger show.”

And star he is, in his own abode, just a mile or two from the place where he lived and died so many thousands of years ago. Sloths, after all, have never been known much for travel, or any other kind of unnecessary movement.

How a prehistoric monster moved a small American community to make it a star

DAYTONA BEACH, Florida, is fa­mous for sun, sand, speed—it is the home of the Day­tona 500 motor race—and sloths. Sloths? Yes, indeed. Prehistoric giant ground sloths.

Although the town—long the haunt of racing-car drivers and uni­versity students on spring sprees—has been sloth country for more than 150,000 years, most local citizens have known it as such for only three. But in that time resident sloth enthusiasts have worked like beav­ers to make Daytona Beach into North America’s undisputed capital of sloth. And—make no bones about it—their unique civic enterprise is now a smashing success.

It all began by chance. Plodding slowly—one might say slothfully—about the marshy coasts of Florida during the Sangamon Interglacial Age, Daytona Beach’s 6,000-pound giant ground sloth, a distant relative of today’s much smaller tree sloth, stumbled upon a cosy resting-place in the bend of a meandering stream. Along the river’s edge were trees whose succulent top leaves and shoots the 12-foot-tall sloth loved to snatch off and stuff into his gaping jaws, using his long, tough tongue much as an elephant uses his trunk.

The water-hole was such a com­fortable home that the sloth settled in, together with his friends and re­lations. When they died of old age (no sloth ever died of overwork), their bones slipped into the water and were covered with oozing mud, which preserved them.

The second chance encounter oc­curred 1,500 centuries later, when Don Serbousek, a scuba diver, ap­peared on a local television show to chat about his fossil-collecting hob­by. A viewer rang Serbousek and told him about the excavator oper­ator who had uncovered enormous “dinosaur bones” while digging for roadfill in a near-by shell pit—and still had some of the bigger ones stashed away.

When Serbousek examined the bones, he recognized one as a frag­ment of a giant ground sloth skull. He hurried to the shell pit, located beside a major road, to talk to the man who leased the property. “We find big bones all the time,” the man confirmed. “Usually we just throw them away.”

Serbousek gasped. Up to that time finds of giant ground sloth bones in North America had been few and fragmentary. The only large collec­tions had come from South and Central America.

Serbousek began collecting the bones discarded at the water-filled shell pit. If he pumped out the pit, he reasoned, he might be able to un­earth a whole giant sloth right here in America! When he suggested mortgaging their house to finance the operation, however, his wife put her foot down. No loans for bones.

So Serbousek located a scientist whose speciality is prehistoric giant ground sloths. Gordon Edmund, curator of vertebrate palaeontology at Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum, came to Daytona Beach to take a look. “Erernotherittm, all right,” he said, calling the sloth by its scientific name.

For several years after Edmund confirmed the sloth’s identity, things moved with appropriate lassitude until the county, which had acquir­ed the pit, drained it down to a new layer of shell, inadvertently expos­ing more bones.

Then came a third chance occur­rence. Roger Alexon, Serbousek’s friend and fellow fossil collector, was driving by the shell pit and saw a huge bone sticking out. He rushed over to Serbousek’s house, described the site and said, “Guess what I found!”

“I found online cigarettes,” replied Serbousek, and led his friend into his garage.

Dress rehearsal in blue-sequinned bathing-suits and silver lame tights. The line of hairy-legged chorus `girls,” arms interlocked, sways first to the right, then to the left. Shuffle-step, kick . . . right foot, left foot . . . one, two, three, kick . This is the first time we’ve done the chorus line in full drag and the rest of the cast is standing in the wings, laughing.

Right step, kick . . . left step, kick . . the high kicks are beginning. We surge towards the front of the stage, arms linked. A dozen hairy, lame right legs arch up into the bril­liant light. The left legs follow up­wards, each kick timed precisely, hitting the apex at the same mo­ment. Wait a minute ! The implo­sion wave. Might work. Could it? Yes! Step, kick, step. Yes, the wave!

MIDNIGHT. The project is due in by 5pm-17 hours. My new idea ab0ut the implosion wave may be right, but I still don’t know the exact na­ture of the explosives.

At roam, the moment of truth. I telephone a man I’ll call S. F. Graves, head of the chemical explo­sives divisi0n at the Du Pont Com­pany in Delaware. I stammer for a second, knowing that if I say out­right that I’m designing an atomic bomb, I’ll never find out what I need to know. “I’m doing research on the shaping of explosive pro­ducts that create a very high densi­ty in a spherically shaped metal.”

“I see,” he says.

“Can you suggest a Du Pont product that would fit in this cate­gory ?”

“Of course,” he says. I don’t get the feeling he suspects. But to make sure, I bluff : “One of my professors told me that a simple explosive blanket would work in the high-density situation.”

“No, no. I d0n’t think so. But I think (and he names a product) would d0 the job.”

“Oh, really ?”

“Yes, that explosive has certain burning characteristics that are ideally suited to creating a spher­ically imploding sh0ck wave.”

I hang up the phone and let out a whoop, but I don’t believe it. Du Pont’s Mr Graves has just given me what I need. Now all I have to do is type up the rest of the paper by five o’clock.

Five minutes to go. I race up the stairs three at a time. When I burst into the physics department office, everybody stares at me. “Is your razor broken, young man ?” asks a starchy departmental secretary.

“I came to hand in my project. I didn’t have time to shave. Sorry.”

“Is that so ?” She gives me a gla­cial look. I walk over to her desk with my 34-page report, now enti­tled “An Assessment of the Prob­lems and Possibilities Confronting a Terrorist Group or Non-Nuclear Nation Attempting to Design a Crude Pu-239 Fission Bomb.” I put it at the bottom of the pile, hoping to obscure the title from the other students.

All of a sudden, I feel extraordi­narily light-headed. I bow very deeply in front of the secretary and with a crisp English accent I say, “The Knight of the Prickly Chin bids Lady Starched Bottom adieu.”

That night I open in the show.

A WEEK later, I return to the phys­ics department to pick up my pro­ject. I’m tired and hung over from four performances and endless after-show parties. My brain feels like melted butter, my body like an un­made bed, One thought persists : if I didn’t guess correctly about the implosion wave or if I made a mis­take in the graphs, I’ll fail.

Lady Starched Bottom looks up from a filing cabinet and freezes. She looks around, then stares at me.

“Aren’t you John Aristotle Phil­lips?” she asks in a very soft voice.

“Yes. Listen, I’m sorry about the other day. The work kind of got to me.”

“Aren’t you the boy who de­signed the atomic bomb ?”

“Yes, and my paper .. .”

She takes a deep breath. “The question has been raised by the department whether your paper should be classified by the US Gov­ernment.”

“You mean I didn’t fail? I passed?”

“Yes, of course. Oh, my !” She wrings her hands. “Hasn’t anyone told you?”

“Where can i find an online tobacco store? Where?”

“You got one of the only A’s in the department. And Dr Dyson has been looking for you everywhere.”

“I was out riding my motor­cycle.”

“That’s very dangerous, isn’t it?” She sounds playful. “We wouldn’t want the star of our physics depart­ment getting hurt, would we?”

Star? Getting hurt? The whole conversation is beginning to take on an unreal quality.

“There’s going to be a reception in the physics department this after­noon, and we’re hoping you can come,”

The madness of the situation hits me. Here I have put on paper the plan for a device capable of killing thousands of people while kicking up my heels in drag, and all 1 was worrying about was failing. Now suddenly I’m the star of the depart­ment.

“I think a little celebration is in order,” says Lady Starched Bottom, and she winks.

Crazy !

You don’t have to be brilliant to do it. You don’t even have to be `average’ at physics

Bloom and slush. Princeton inthe winter, when it just doesn’t snow, it slushes. All the courtyards become quagmires of mud, and I become exceedingly morose.

My results arrive in the post. Accompanying the merry list of poor and failing grades is a notice fro0fthe Dean. I am being placed on probation : if I happen to fail another course,

Butw term gets under way, all my courses begin to interest me. One of them is called Public Affairs Number 452: Nuclear Wea­pons Strategy and Arms Control, in which eight studets are guided through intensive discussions of counterforce capabilities and dooms­day scenarios.

Freeman Dyson, an eminent phy­sicist deeply concerned with the problem of arms control, describes in ghastly detail “the more imme­diate effects of an atomic explosion.” Silence falls over the room. Then, from Hal Feiveson, the lecturer :

“It takes only 15 pounds of plu­tonium to fabricate a crude atomic bomb, and there is enough shipped around Am100,000ach year to fa­shion thousands of crude atomic bombs. Now, suppose a shipment is stolen, and two weeks later a crude fission bomb is detonated in New York, killing I00,000 people. A ter­rorist group warns the President that if their political demands are not met, there will be another ex­plosion. What can the President do?”

“It would never happen,” says one student. “You have to be bril­liant to design an A-bomb,” says someone else. “Nearly imp0ssible,” adds a third.

Is it? Suppose an average physics student—below average, in my case —c0uld design a w0rkable atomic bomb on paper? That would show the US G0vernment that stronger safeguards must be placed on the st0rage of plutonium. I would have t0 design it in less than three months to turn it in as my third year project, and I’m required by the physics department to have an adviser. But who would sanction such a crazy undertaking? I ask Freeman Dys0n.

“Are you serious?” Dyson asks me.

“Perfectly serious,” I say.

He says : “You understand that my security clearance with the gov­ernment will preclude me fr0m giv­ing you any more information than what can be found in physics libra­ries?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And y0u understand you will be on your own once I p0int you in the right direction ?”

“Of course.”

“OK. I’ll give you a list of text­books outlining the general princi­ples you should know about.”

I charge over to the physics department to record the subject of my project:

JOHN ARISTOTLE PHILLIPS
DR FREEMAN DYSON, ADVISER
How TO BUILD YOUR OWN
ATOMIC BOMB

MY FRIEND David and I walk to a drama-club rehearsal. We are in the big spring production, Mugs Money, set in Chicago during Pro­hibiti0n. At the end of the first act, our mob, a bumbling collection of misfits, is forced to dress up as cho­rus girls in an effort to kill a m0b­ster. The traditional drag chorus line with hairy legs and sequins should bring d0wn the house.

•

As PRELIMINARY work proceeds, Dyson’s responses to my calcula­tions grow ever more subtle and opaque. I go to Washington and I search for declassified records of the Los Alamos Project. At the Na­tional Technical Informati0n Ser­vice I find technical histories that describe in precise detail the prob­lems overcome by scientists who constructed those first atomic bombs.

I also discover a copy of the lit­erature given to new scientists who joined the project in the spring of 1943. This carefully outlines all the facts of atomic fissioning known in the early 1940s. These documents were declassified between 1954 and 1964, and the whole batch costs 25 dollars (about L12.5o).

“These will help you far more than I can,” Freeman Dyson says when I show him the documents. “I’ll expect your design in five weeks.”

He is visibly shaken. His re­action to the documents can mean only one thing : he must reckon that with them in hand, I actually stand a chance of coming up with a w0rk­able design. I kn0w I’m g0ing to succeed. But how?

TRY to visualize an atomic bomb. At the centre is a marble-sized piece of one substance, and around it a grapefruit-sized chunk of another. Around the “grapefruit” there is a small reflector shield, and around the shield is a series of high

explosives, which are triggered by electric current.

The arrangement of the explo­sives is one of the most highly classi­fied aspects of the bomb. Without the correct arrangement—and the right explosives—my design will be w0rthless. The table where I work is covered with bo0ks, calculators, design paper, notes. My sleeping-bag is rolled out on the fl0or. I stop g0ing to classes. I work day and night.

I approach every problem from a terrorist’s point of view. The bomb must be inexpensive to construct, simple in design and small en0ugh to sit unnoticed in the boot of a car. At other times, I put myself in the shoes of the Los Alamos scientists. By closely following the technical accounts I bought in Washington, I design the bomb as they did, work­ing on each component separately, onfreet a time.

One advantage I share with the nations thselyeloped s that I know it can be donem ping together a hugeR2sawmponentrAlamoslows:pleted. But pieces are still missing. Whe outlinea missing pi

I fill my coffee fla and sit down to deise the souon that will fill theap.