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bombs and artillery, with buckled sidewalks and pavements everywhere. Here a pushed-up mound, there a gaping pit.
    The small county fire and sheriff’s departments of Twentynine Palms were inundated by frantic callers demanding information. Half-dressed people milled in the streets, looking toward the Marine base and the rising pall of darkness that drifted on the high-altitude air currents, blotting out the stars and dimming the moon. Clusters of excited, gawking neighbors impeded authorities who were trying to reach and assess affected areas, repeatedly asking the same questions.
    “Was it a plane crash?”
    “Did the Marines explode a bomb?”
    “I nearly bit my tongue off; I’m gonna sue somebody!”
    “When will the power come back on?”
    “My trailer house is tilted off its blocks, and the water pipes are broken. Everything I have will be ruined.”
    Similar chaos erupted on the Marine base as bugle calls pierced the night and cursing marines hurriedly dressed for formation.
    Except for a few portable units, emergency generators had to be jacked back onto concrete mounting pads before they could be started. In many cases, electrical distribution transformers and broken utility poles lay scattered along streets and highways like ninepins, and restoration of power to some areas would take days. The base and town were a pandemonium of activity as engineering and maintenance personnel in trucks and heavy equipment scattered over their respective areas of responsibility, tackling the highest priority problems first, trying to restore power and communications, and isolate broken water mains.
    The flash was recorded by Defense Department Milstar satellites, NASA Observer and NOAA weather satellites over half the northern hemisphere. Seismic stations as far north as Fairbanks, Alaska, and as far west as the University of Hawaii recorded the thump of the solitary blow.
    The Eidermann site had consisted of seventy or eighty abandoned buildings, mostly decaying, Quonset-type barracks, storehouses, workshops and hangars, and a cracked and weed-grown runway that was still occasionally used by Marine and National Guard personnel for “staging” exercises. The Eidermann post proper, including buildings, ammo bunkers, streets and utility works, and an old, rusting tank farm that had once stored aviation fuel, covered about ten square miles. It had lately served as an equipment storage depot for the California National Guard, and had been home to a couple of thousand pieces of moldering equipment—old “deuce-and-a-half” trucks, “water buffalo” trailers, World War II and Korean War howitzers, tanks, crates of shelter-halves, field tents and other miscellaneous gear. These items, along with the buildings, facilities, scrub brush, cactus and anything else aboveground, now comprised six thousand acres of smoldering ash.
    The Marine Corps personnel and the invited city and county officials from Twentynine Palms who were picking over the area the following day, save for a few pieces of exposed underground piping, could not positively identify a single artifact. Molten metal from the armored tanks and equipment had exploded like pellets from a shotgun, to dot the area with solidified slag. Rubber, wood, cloth and paper had been vaporized without a trace. Concrete, glass and stone had exploded into fragments. The very ground itself, to a mean depth of half a meter, had exploded from the sudden thermal expansion, as the meager moisture in the desert soil flashed to steam. Clumps of shiny, vitrified sand covered the site. The result looked like the earth had been turned over by a gigantic garden tiller and scorched by flames, and all outlines of buildings and streets were gone.

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    Two days after the Eidermann incident, a Los Angeles television station came forward with a cassette tape which had been delivered the week before. They had thought the message on the tape to be from “just another nut” trying to attract