Elizabeth, Jeff, and eight other demonstrators had piled in an old Volkswagen bus, riding out over the Oakland hills in the predawn darkness. She stared out the bug-spattered windshield, watching the river of headlights coming in the opposite direction as people streamed toward the San Francisco Bay for work.
The Volkswagen bus was a dull primer-coat gray, but the driver told her it had once carried elaborate paintings and peace signs. “All that stuff is passé now,” he said. “Nobody takes you seriously.”
Unable to sleep well the night before, she and Jeff had held each other, talking, running finger touches along each others’ backs, until finally they made love; exhausted, they managed to get a few hours of sleep before getting up for the demonstration. Elizabeth had gulped several cups of coffee at the headquarters, and she sipped another from the thermos beside the driver.
The other demonstrators had arrived outside the Livermore Lab, parking their vehicles up and down East Avenue or Vasco Road, in open areas by the vineyards. She saw people milling about in the darkness. Someone had a Coleman lantern set on the hood of his pickup truck. Others carried candles, but the breeze kept gusting them out. One woman filled small helium balloons and handed them to anyone who walked by.
Many people had painted their own signs and banners, but some had made extras, looking for volunteers to carry them, stop livermore Auschwitz or work for life, not death or teach peace. A woman in a lavish fur coat looked out of place, but it didn’t seem to bother her. One man in a wheelchair wore a cowboy hat and held a handful of little stick crosses in his lap. Around him milled a dozen or so other protesters with T-shirts that proclaimed them as bay area baptist peacemakers.
The Livermore Challenge Group acted as a rallying point for numerous clubs and organizations—many with wildly different political views, but all of whom had found the Livermore Lab a suitable target. United we stand. We shall overcome.
The businesslike and gentlemanly procedures of the Livermore Challenge Group surprised Elizabeth. She had her preconceptions of what a demonstration would be like, concerned citizens battling the establishment, like a spillover from sixties news clips. But the Livermore Challenge Group had composed a formal, considerate letter to the Director of the Livermore Laboratory, informing him of the date of the demonstration and giving details about how many people were expected to attend, how many had volunteered to commit civil disobedience. This allowed the Laboratory to have adequate security forces on hand and adequate facilities to hold the detainees.
Elizabeth had even seen a bootlegged videotape shown to Lab security guards on How to Arrest a Nuclear Protester, demonstrating proper handholds, procedures, and what not to do. To counter that, the Livermore Challenge Group had also given each volunteer special training in how to get arrested, what to do, what their rights entitled them to. She looked at the yellow armbands worn by some people, designating them as volunteers to be arrested. The armband gave them a certain status among the other protesters.
Elizabeth envied them. She had discussed with Jeff the possibility of volunteering, but he had talked her out of it. Since leaving her nuclear work behind, Elizabeth had jumped into the protest movement headfirst; Jeff told her she was going overboard, that she should wait and maybe get arrested next time, when she could make a rational, cool-headed decision, rather than charging ahead without thinking of the consequences. She had grudgingly agreed.
Full daylight had seeped into the sky as Elizabeth wandered about. The excitement kept building in her. Jeff held her hand, and she could feel the tension in his muscles. The collective emotions here charged the air, tingeing everything with unreality.
Already, roving cameramen for the Lab’s closed-circuit televisions walked among the protesters, chatting. It all seemed very cordial. Reporters from two local TV stations had also showed up with minicams, carrying boom microphones and looking for something interesting to videotape. Dan Fogelberg’s song “Kill the Fire” permeated the camp.
Several people obliged with appropriate theatrics. A bearded man appeared in hiking boots and a white anti-contamination suit made from an old bed sheet. Three people—Elizabeth couldn’t tell if they were men or women—came out, dressed completely in black, their faces painted like skulls. Two held flags high showing the three-bladed radiation symbol obscured by the circle-and-slash universal No sign. The middle figure carried a sign that said you can’t run from radioactive wastes.
Elizabeth got another lukewarm cup of coffee from a community thermos and sipped it as she walked along the chain-link fence. Traffic picked up on East Avenue as people came to work at the Lab, each passing through the main gate as a security guard—no, she corrected herself, they called themselves “protective servicemen”—checked the employees’ badges and waved them ahead to the entrance station.
A few of the banners—we oppose your work, not you!—served to maintain relative goodwill between the employees and the protesters. They didn’t really expect Lab employees to read the banner slogans, turn their cars around, and refuse to come to work. When she had worked at United Atomics, Elizabeth would never have done that herself. She had always ignored the few protesters, thinking that none of it concerned her, that the demonstrators just didn’t understand she wasn’t doing anything wrong. Or so she had thought at the time. She wondered now how she could have been so misled.
“Won’t be long now,” Jeff said. “Are you doing okay?”
Elizabeth saw by her watch that it was seven-thirty. She felt the butterflies in her stomach take flight. “Sure,” she said.
The full complement of Lab security guards lined up, marching out like Nazi storm troopers. Most wore tan uniforms, others dark blue; she didn’t know what the difference meant. Reinforcements from the California Highway Patrol joined them. All had white helmets and transparent race shields. She counted four German shepherd dogs. The female guards all looked extremely tough, as if it were a matter of pride. Elizabeth wondered how much this one demonstration would cost the government, but it didn’t bother her—it was money that couldn’t be spent on nuclear weapons.
Along the fence line people started singing an endless chorus of “Give Peace a Chance.” Looking at the security forces in their crisp uniforms and weapons, and the protesters in a kaleidoscope of jeans and T-shirts, headbands and bright skirts, Elizabeth thought this was a culture clash as much as anything else. Like the sixties all over again? She had missed most of the demonstrations then; she’d been too young.
She felt overwhelmed by the power of all the people gathered together. From the outside it might have looked like chaos, but here, a part of everything, she felt herself to be a vital piece of a very strong machine. They would overcome. It didn’t seem possible they could fail, not when it felt like this. Couldn’t the guards sense it too?
Four demonstrators had used a garden chain to attach themselves to the outer fence, forcing the security guards to find a pair of bolt cutters to remove it and arrest them. But that was merely a diversion.
The first group of people wearing yellow armbands lined up on the corner of East Avenue and Vasco Road, the main intersection near the Lab’s front gate. Others cheered them on. Elizabeth raised her fist. Tears sparkled in her eyes. It seemed such a magnificent sacrifice. Jeff put his arm around her. The first group of seven marched into the street as soon as the light changed. Together they sat down on the pavement.