On September 14, 1985, residents of the Polish city of Toruń watching the popular James Bond ripoff 07, Call In (in which a blond and ideologically correct Citizen's Militia officer fights crime from within a series of tight sweaters) were surprised to see the show briefly overlaid with block white letters reading "Solidarity Toruń: Boycotting the election is our duty," and "Solidarity Toruń: Enough price hikes, lies, repression". Twelve days later, the same slogans appeared superimposed on the hated evening news. The dissident radio astronomers had struck again.

You can see a recreation of the broadcast (and experience the exciting production values of advanced socialism) in this brief YouTube video. The doctored images could only be seen over a small area of central Toruń, but they caused a sensation. The police caught the perpetrators after the second screening. Jan Hanasz, Zygmunt Turło, Leszek Zaleski and Piotr Łukaszewski served four months in jail for the stunt.

This photograph, taken from the police file on the exploit, shows the homemade transmitter they to commit their heinous crime:

While looking for a key to the numbered items in the photo, I learned that the apparatus had been built by a Professor Eugeniusz Pazderski, who is still alive and well and teaching at the University of Toruń. I sent Professor Pazderski a brief email asking for technical details about the transmitter, and in response received a most wonderful letter, which Prof. Pazderski has graciously allowed me to translate and publish in full.

In the second half of the 1970s, the observatory where I work joined the elite club practicing the extremely difficult and costly technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). The basic idea is that you can observe a radio source in the sky using a number of radio telescopes on different continents as if they were a single radio telescope 10,000 km in diameter. This requires superprecise atomic clocks so that each station will keep the same time and local oscillators in the radio receivers can maintain a constant phase difference across observatories over long time scales (~1000 seconds). Today we use GPS satellites for global clock synchronization, but back then we had to use television broadcast frame signals. We would convert a television receiver to extract the frame signal and measure how many microseconds elapsed between a one second tick of our atomic clock and the nearest frame signal. We did this using signals from the transmitter in Poznań, our colleagues in Borowiec near Poznań would pick up the frame signals from Poznań and Berlin, astronomers in Potsdam would catch the signal from Berlin and Munich, and the ones in Munich from Munich and Paris. In Paris there was a reference clock that all of the observatories in Europe tied into, and this in turn was synchronized somehow with the reference clock in Washington.

So right under our nose we had a television with an externally exposed synchronization signal. When we found out about the underground Solidarity radio broadcasts during martial law, we figured why just do radio, why not do television? We couldn't broadcast on our own frequency, because for one thing you needed an audience, and for another it would have required a lot of power, which is hard to conceal. We had to broadcast on the same frequency as official programs and ensure ourselves a large number of viewers by piggybacking on popular films or series, overlaying our own texts over the official images.

To do this with a low power transmitter and have good range we couldn't emit a complex video signal, but only pixels of text at appropriately calculated time intervals relative to the vertical and horizontal synchronization signals.

We discussed such a solution at the Astronomical Observatory in Piwnice (more precisely in the Department of Radioastronomy), essentially just three people, Bogdan Wikierski, Andrzej Kępa and me. At a certain moment Jan Hanasz came to see me and asked whether I would be able to build such a device. I replied that I could make a transmitter, but that I would have problems building the digital interface, since the only ZX Spectrum available to me in the department was occupied day and night by colleagues (more for fun than for work), so I wouldn't be able to conceal my particular interest in that computer. Back then I wasn't very expert at digital devices either, so I preferred that someone else do it.

I only worked on the transmitter at night, when there was no one else in the observatory building. It consisted of a carrier signal generator (around 50 MHz, channel 1 of Polish television), as well as a multistage class D amplifier. When in use the transmitter would only connect to the amplifier when the driving signal from the digital interface was in the 1 state.

I had serious problems tuning the amplifier, since I did not have an artificial load with a dissipative power over 5 W. The one I used would overheat badly, so I had to tune very quickly in order not to destroy it - it was the only one in the observatory and I would have trouble if it were damaged. Haste dictated that I tune the amplifier with the lid open, which did not serve my health.

In any case I achieved an output power of 7 W, which I estimated would allow for the signal to reach Toruń and environs.

Jan Hanasz would sometimes stop by, which made me suspect that someone else was working on the digital component at the same time. Knowing the capabilities of my colleagues as well as certain social ties I suspected it was Zygmunt Turło, but I never discussed the subject with Jan. I would just pass along certain suggestions, for example that the text on the screen should continuously change position, so that a clever policeman would not be able to calculate where the transmitter was by triangulating the signal1.

At a certain moment everything was ready, I gave Jan the transmitter and considered the matter finished. The stress that came from the risk of detection went away.

Some time later I happened to hear people talking about how text had appeared on TV screens in Toruń. Unfortunately I didn't see it myself. I had left on a month-long official trip to the observatory in Holland, where for 250 guldens (all my spending money) I bought myself a ZX Spectrum so that I could have my own computer for any eventual further underground work. Some time later one of the Dutch radio astronomers, a friend of mine, was supposed to visit Poland. I was in charge of organizing his visit, so I went one day to see my fellow astronomers in Torun to pass along the date and topic of our Dutch guest's seminar. One of the people I visited was Jan Hanasz. As I was walking out of his office, some girl looking at an Art Department exhibit on the same floor as the astronomy offices took my picture. This was a little puzzling but it didn't make me uneasy; after all, who understands artists!

That same evening right after 8:00 PM I saw the Solidarity TV logo on my own television screen. I was bursting with pride, but I also felt very uneasy. And with good reason, since around midnight four plainclothesmen and a uniformed policeman knocked on my door. They spent several hours ransacking my apartment - doing it so quietly that neither my wife or my kids woke up. They found cassettes with ZX Spectrum programs on them and underground publications, they also took my computer. In the end they made me wake up my wife to find out what she had in her sofabed. My dear late wife behaved very courageously, no panic, she asked for her dressing gown, got off the sofabed and then only watched as the sad men led her husband off to who knows where.

I spent about 40 hours under arrest in my precinct in the company of a bandit who had robbed priests in their parishes and an activist from the Union of Socialist Youth who had stolen pornographic video tapes from the cultural center2. Every once in a while they would call me in for interrogation, asking about underground television and radio as well as about my colleagues from the observatory (I didn't know that they had been arrested). I did not admit to anything, I said that I barely knew my colleagues because I lived in Piwnice, 12 km north of Toruń, while they lived far away in the center of the city. After the Security Service was done interrogating me a man from military intelligence took over, trying to get me to collaborate. I didn't show any enthusiasm; gently but firmly I refused. Finally after two days they let me go. I returned home to the great joy of my wife.

During my absence, Mr. Antoni Stawikowski visited my wife; he was an astronomer and regional leader of Solidarity in Toruń. He handed her 5000 zl3 and told her where I was as well as which lawyer she should turn to. To this day I don't know how to give him back that money! It turned out not to be necessary after all!

After several months my colleagues under arrest regained their freedom. Not long afterwards Jan Hanasz reached me again. I had prepared additional documentation on the transmitter for him in hopes of starting mass production of the transmitters. He had gotten his hands on an artificial 50 W load for me as well as transistors of comparable power. I started building a prototype of a new transmitter that could reach the entire district (Jan Hanasz has it now) with a tunable carrier wave generator so that it could be used anywhere in Poland or neighboring countries. The Round Table talks [in 1988] made me stop work on this, but I kept my activities a secret for five more years, just in case. During the last years of the previous regime I also thought up an undetectable radio communication scheme for Solidarity. By that point I could write assembler and build computer interfaces in my sleep, so the number of people required for these kinds of undertakings would have been very limited.

It was supposed to be just a couple of words, but it came out pretty long. You'll find documentation on the web pages mentioned above.

Wishing you happiness across the ocean,

Eugeniusz Pazderski

---

One of my earliest childhood memories is the peppy Solidarity stickers that were ubiquitous in Poland in 1981. A third of the population had joined the first indepenent trade union in the Eastern Bloc, and the country was still flying high from John Paul II's 1979 visit, when crowds in the millions had greeted the new Pope. There was the sense that something finally had to give, partly because things couldn't get much worse. In the 1970's the Polish government had performed the macroeconomic equivalent of maxing out its credit cards on shoes, and the country was about to slide into default.

When you're a People's Democratic Republic, having your workforce join an independent trade union is socially awkward, a bit like when guests order pizzas at your dinner party. The Communist Party was in an untenable position. Moreover, with Brezhnev's reanimated body still running the Soviet Union, there was always the risk that further social turmoil would lead to fraternal assistance of the kind that had left such an impression on Czechoslovakia. With the strategic ham reserve running dry and fresh strikes imminent, the government decided to begin with the crushing.

On the morning of Sunday, December 13, small children racing to the TV to get their morning dose of Teleranek were instead treated to three hours of static followed by General Wojciech "Shades" Jaruzelski reading from a proclamation:

A wave of bold crimes, attacks and break-ins is spilling over the country. The sharks of the underground economy have amassed millions. Chaos and demoralization have taken on the dimensions of tragedy. The nation has reached the limits of its psychological endurance. Many are being overcome with despair. Not days now, but hours separate us from nationwide catastrophe...

Operation "Piss All Over Christmas" had begun.

It was a pretty scary time. For a few days, communication with the outside world was cut off. There was no television, no radio, no telephone service, no way of knowing what was happening or whether the Soviet tanks had rolled in. I was in New Jersey at the time and recall learning "martial law" (filed as mar sza lo by my kid brain) before I even had a chance to pick up "he" and "she". My mother and I also discovered the delightful American innovation called the infographic. A blonde newscaster would read something in moon language, while next to her head hovered a giant tank wrapped in barbed wire, riding over an all-caps POLAND.

The coup turned out to be pretty gentle as these things go. There were lots of arrests but not a lot of bloodshed, and for all his faults Jaruzelski had a light dictatorial touch. Nevertheless, martial law traumatized the country. Poles were used to having their quixotic uprisings crushed by foreign superpowers; having the Polish Army do it was devastating.

Many people debated what to do that glum winter. Strikes and attempts at demonstrations were quickly suppressed by detachments of police thugs. There were spontaneous displays of civil disobedience - everyone would go out for a walk during the evening news, to demonstrate their contempt for Party propaganda - but organized dissent was difficult.

It was in this discouraging context that the radio astronomers of Toruń (a Hanseatic city in north central Poland) decided to stick it to the man, Maxwell-style.

Jan Hanasz, leader of the Toruń chapter of Solidarity, describes the operation in an interview:

As physicists, radioastronomers, and electronics engineers, we were all struck by the possibility of doing independent broadcasts, if nothing else because that was our profession. My colleagues took part in broadcasts in Warsaw and other cities. Rooftop transmitters had low range. And they were easy for the security services to locate. We had to think of something else.

Our colleague Andrzej Jeśmanowicz, son of the noted Toruń mathematician Leon Jeśmanowicz, was an electronics engineer and an ardent glider pilot. He determined that even a weak radio transmitter in an airplane flying at great height could be heard perfectly well over a significant area. That was an idea. Jerzy Wieczorek, a physicist (later president of Toruń) pointed out that we could attach the transmitter to a balloon. It would make the transmitter harder to find while enabling us to reach a wide audience. We couldn't use a weather balloon, however, since it would be easy to check where it had come from.

The plastic beach balls that were popular back then had rubber inner tubes inside them. You could buy them in sporting goods stores. A group of six inner tubes looped together with string could lift a transmitter weighing around three hundred grams. We would get hydrogen from a chemist colleague, Jerzy Tomaszewski, and transfer it from a large cylinder into a fire extinguisher, the kind you find in public spaces. Dr. Zygmunt Turło, a fantastic physicist and radioastronomer, for whom the intricacies of radio wave propagation as well as transmitter and receiver design held no mystery, built the transmission apparatus. The American embargo on advanced electronics limited our technical possibilities. Later we made contact with a colleague, the French astrophycisist Jean Pierre Lasota, who would send us the necessary components through trusted couriers. Jurek Wieczorek would rip most of the innards out of an automobile tape deck, leaving just the motors and casing. We used the acoustic signal from an audio tape to modulate a transmitter in the UHF band. Wieczorek created a superlight antenna out of thin copper foil that required extraordinary care in assembly.

On launch day we would drive the hydrogen-filled fire extinguisher, the balloons and transmitter to some out-of-the-way place far upwind from the city. [...] We would fill the balloons with hydrogen and attach a transmitter, which had a built-in timing device that would turn it on 15 minutes after takeoff. That way we could easily disappear without worrying about anyone pinpointing the signal. Despite its low power, the range of a balloon transmitter was enormous, several dozen kilometers. Broadcasting time was effectively limited by the kind of batteries we could get back then.

Of the many things that fill me with joy in this story, the idea of a fire extinguisher filled with hydrogen has to be at the top of the list.

Other scientists got into the mix. A chemist (Eugeniusz Myśliński) created a special heater to keep the device working as it rose into cold air. Someone else engineered an ejection mechanism to spit the audiotape out of the player after the broadcast ended, so that the tape and the balloon would not be found together. The first episode of balloon radio aired on November 9, 1982.

One reason you don't want to cross Eastern Bloc scientists is that they are by necessity handy people. Operating in a barter economy, even the most unworldly theoretician learns certain marketable skills. Besides the inevitable need to jury-rig spare parts for their own experiments, scientists have to horse trade for basic conveniences like anyone else. And so it was not uncommon to see ultraprecision machine tools and other laboratory wonders take on a second, clandestine life under advanced socialism. The local plumber who needed a new piston rod for his Fiat 126p certainly didn't mind if it happened to be machined out of elemental titanium to a tolerance of 0.05 microns, and the next time a pipe froze you could count on him to show up bright and early. In this context of creative craftsmanship and mutual aid the government had only itself to blame when illegal transmitters started floating by overhead.

The underground press would announce broadcasts in advance. Sometimes they pasted flyers on walls. People knew to scan the UHF band at a certain hour. We didn't announce a specific frequency range so that there wouldn't be interference.

The broadcasts would start with a long call signal: "This is Radio Solidarity Toruń". People needed time to tune their radios. Then there would be fifteen minutes or so of programming. We had a lot of trouble with recording. Sometimes it was just hard to find a good microphone. We would record in various places to avoid making noise, to not get caught. Toruń is a small city and everyone knows about everything. It's hard to remain discreet.

The broadcasts were audible in Grudziądz, Inowrocław, Bydgoszcz, Golub-Dobrzyń [roughly a 40km radius]. The wind carried the balloons a long way. We found out from the Security Bureau that one had landed in Belorussia. Another made it to Silesia. Press reports of that event gave us great publicity.

It was a really safe undertaking - no one got caught. The SB guys knew about the broadcasts in advance because of our flyers. Radio direction finding vans would rove around the city but they couldn't pinpoint the transmitter. We were able to watch them search. Once they even landed on the banks of the Vistula, completely lost. The helplessness of the security bureau brought laughter and satisfaction to people who were tired of the repression of martial law.

During the January 1983 broadcast, they used a helicopter to patrol the rooftops. The next day the SB guys even climbed the chimney of the heating plant in Grębocin. They didn't find anything.

To put this in context, in 1982 the Ministry of the Interior announced that it had destroyed 360 production facilities for illegal literature, confiscated 1196 copying devices and 468 typewriters of various kinds, and saved the population from the malign influence of 4,000 posters and 730,000 flyers. Eleven clandestine Radio Solidarity radio stations had been shut down across Poland. Of the 10,131 people interned at the outset of martial law, 317 were still in camps as of December 1982, while a further 3,616 had been arrested for violations of martial law in the interim. The scientists who cooperated in the balloon project were risking serious jail time in addition to the loss of their career and livelihood.

As the figures show, the Toruń balloon launches weren't the only Radio Solidarity broadcasts in Poland (you can hear others here [1,2], including a snippet of the zesty disco music the Security Bureau favored for jamming [3]), but they were certainly the most ingenious. Once the balloons went up, there was basically nothing the Security Bureau could do. It wasn't until the radio astronomers tried their hand at television that the police finally caught up with them.

But that's a whole other story.

Who can imagine New York City without the Mission burrito? Like the Yankees, the Brooklyn Bridge or the bagel, the oversize burritos have become a New York institution. And yet it wasn’t long ago that it was impossible to find a good burrito of any kind in the city. As the 30th anniversary of the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel approaches, it’s worth taking a look at the remarkable sequence of events that takes place between the time we click “deliver” on the burrito.nyc.us.gov website and the moment that our hot El Farolito burrito arrives in the lunchroom with its satisfying pneumatic hiss.

The story begins in any of the three dozen taquerias supplying the Bay Area Feeder Network, an expansive spiderweb of tubes running through San Francisco’s Mission district as far south as the “Burrito Bordeaux” region of Palo Alto and Mountain View. Electronic displays in each taqueria light up in real time with orders placed on the East Coast, and within minutes a fresh burrito has been assembled, rolled in foil, marked and dropped down one of the small vertical tubes that rise like organ pipes in restaurant kitchens throughout the city.

Once in the tubes, it’s a quick dash for the burritos across San Francisco Bay. Propelled by powerful bursts of compressed air, the burritos speed along the same tunnel as the BART commuter train, whose passengers remain oblivious to the hundreds of delicious cylinders whizzing along overhead. Within twelve minutes, even the remotest burrito has arrived at its final destination, the Alameda Transfer Station, where it will be prepared for its transcontinental journey.

Ever since Isaac Newton first described the laws of gravity in 1687, scientists have known that the quickest route between two points is along a straight line through the Earth’s interior. Through the magic of gravity, any object dropped into such a “chord tunnel” at one end will emerge exactly 42 minutes later at the other end, no matter the distance. But for hundreds of years, the technical challenges of building such a tunnel were so daunting that it remained a theoretical curiosity. Only at the start of the 20th century did the idea become technically feasible, and to this day the tunnel linking the East Bay with New Jersey remains the only structure of its kind in the world.

From the outside, the Alameda facility looks like any other industrial building. Behind a chain link razor wire fence sits a windowless white hangar some three stories tall, surrounded by a strip of green lawn. If you could see underground, however, you’d see that the building sits at the center of a converging nexus of burrito pipes. High pressure pneumatic tubes from all over the Bay Area emerge in the center of the facility, spilling silvery burritos onto a high-speed sorting line. The metal-jacketed burritos look like oversize bullets, and the conveyor belts that move them through the facility resemble giant belts of delicious ammunition. Within a few seconds of arrival the burritos have been bar coded, checked for balance and round on a precision lathe, and then flash-frozen with liquid nitrogen.

The mouth of the tunnel is a small concrete arch in the side of a nearby hill, about as glamorous as an abandoned railway tunnel. Yet if you could open the airlocks and stare down its length with a telescope, you would see airplanes on final approach to Newark Airport, three thousand miles away! To reduce drag on the burritos to a minimum, the tunnel must be kept in near-vacuum with powerful pumps. At the tunnel’s deepest point the burritos will be traveling nearly two kilometers a second - even the faintest whiff of air would quickly drag them to a stop.

The launch tube for the burritos lies just under the tunnel mouth and looks like what it is: an enormous gun. Every four seconds a ‘slug’ of ten burritos, white with frost, ratchets into the breech. A moment later it flies into the tunnel with a loud hiss of compressed gas, and the lights dim briefly as banks of powerful electromagnets accelerate the burritos to over two hundred miles an hour. By the time they pass Stockton three minutes later the burritos will be traveling faster than the Concorde, floating on an invisible magnetic cushion as they plunge into the lithosphere.

No one who built the Alameda-Weehawken tunnel had quite this future in mind for it. The tunnel had its origins in the early 1900’s as an ambitious project for speeding mail delivery between New York City and the booming Pacific port of San Francisco. The telegraph and railroad had linked the city to the East Coast, but transferring documents, currency, securities and diplomatic correspondence across the country was still a slow affair fraught with danger. In 1911, the celebrated British civil engineer Basil Mott approached the plutocrat Andrew W. Mellon with an audacious plan to build a straight-line tunnel 2500 miles long connecting New York City with San Francisco, allowing packages to be sent between the two cities using only compressed air and gravity. The tunnel would resemble the pneumatic tube systems that had served New York City and Paris so well for mail delivery, but on an incomparably vaster scale. Cylinders containing up to sixteen pounds of mail would be able to make the continental transit in less than an hour.

Construction on the tunnel began in 1913, and it quickly grew into the largest public works project in the young nation’s history. Not until the Eisenhower Interstate system in the 1950’s would there be a bigger or more costly civil engineering project. Drilling the tunnel required over 19 years of continuous effort by thousands of miners, often working in conditions of intolerable confinement and heat. Over 22 million tons of rock had to be removed, much of it from unprecedented depths, all while keeping the tunnel perfectly straight over thousands of miles. Just keeping the tunnels cool required more water each day than flows over Niagara Falls.

The tunnel opened to great fanfare in 1933, with a congratulatory message in Morse Code flashed by powerful searchlight from the San Francisco end to waiting dignitaries on the New Jersey side. It was already obsolete. The first regular mail shipments sent from San Francisco in the spring of 1934 had to compete with the sophisticated air mail system that had grown up during the tunnel’s long construction. To make matters worse, breakdowns in the tunnel were frequent, especially in the central “hot zone” where temperatures could exceed 900 degrees Centigrade. Mail would frequently arrive singed or deformed from the intense heat and pressure. While they could never beat the speed of the tunnel, airplanes could deliver documents at far lower price and risk in just a few dozen hours more. In 1936, at the height of the Depression, the tunnel ceased operation less than three years after it had opened.

In the years to come all kinds of schemes would be floated for how to put the tunnel to use. For a brief time after Pearl Harbor there was serious thought given to using it as an enormous gun barrel that could fire artillery shells across the Pacific at Japan (the risk to life in San Francisco if a charge went off prematurely was deemed too great). In the early days of the Cold War, both ends of the tunnel, along with the Chicago and Cedar Rapids access shafts, were considered as enormous fallout shelters. The low point in the tunnel’s fortunes came with a 1971 proposal (mercifully never enacted) to use the Weehawken side of the tunnel as the world’s deepest garbage chute. On the San Francisco end, meanwhile, squatters from the thriving San Francisco countercultural scene had begun using the tunnel as an easy place to take shelter.

By the early 1970’s the tunnel was a derelict, a mostly forgotten relic of a more adventurous time. The turning point came when Robert Cavanaugh, a New York financier with a serious taste for Mexican food, happened to come across a mention of the tunnel in a zoning proposal. The globetrotting Cavanaugh was a fanatic of the recently-invented Mission burrito but bemoaned being unable to get it anywhere outside of San Francisco. Examining blueprints of the defunct mail tunnel on a flight home to New York, Cavanaugh became intrigued by the coincidence in size between a foil-wrapped burrito and the diameter of the old transcontinental mail tubes. By the time the plane landed, he had come up with an audacious plan.

Cavanaugh realized that the intense heat of the transit that had so beleaguered mail service would actually work to his advantage in a burrito tunnel. The burritos could be stored frozen on the Western end and arrive fully heated through in New Jersey. Furthermore, advances in electrical engineering meant that containers would no longer have to be propelled by compressed gas. The burritos already came conveniently wrapped in aluminum foil - it would be trivial to accelerate them with powerful magnets.

Encouraged by his back-of-the-envelope calculations, Cavanaugh formed a consortium and, in a stroke of genius, convinced the Carter Administration to subsidize the tunnel’s operation in exchange for access to the geothermal heat it would produce. Convincing skeptical businessmen to buy into the plan proved more of a challenge - it took six months to persuade suspicious taqueria owners to switch to a salsa with lower magnetic permittivity. Finally, in July of 1979, all the pieces were in place. After a successful July 2 dry run with a sawdust mock burrito, the tunnel ceremoniously opened on Independence Day. The inaugural burrito (carnitas with lettuce, salsa and avocado, no beans) was loaded into the breech at the Alameda terminus at 10:05 AM and was served to a beaming Cavanaugh, Vice President Walter Mondale and New York mayor Ed Koch in Weehawken 64 minutes later. Two hundred burritos followed that same day; by the end of the decade the tunnel would be delivering over two thousand burritos an hour.

In the early days of the burrito tunnel workers on the Alameda side would sometimes use it to send small packages or letters, inking the code words sin carne on the wrapper to alert those on the other end that the ’burrito’ required special handling. This changed after September 11, when strict security measures went into force. Homeland Security officials have been quick to recognize the unique threat of a tunnel that could give terrorists unimpeded access to the entire underside of the nation. They’ve also been alert to the danger a “dirty burrito” could pose if it made it into the New York food supply. Director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff would not comment on specific measures his department has taken to protect the tunnel, but he said his office does take the potential threat very seriously. “We’ve known since the first World Trade Center bombing that New York is a top target. We’re taking appropriate measures to make sure the tunnel and the burritos that pass through it remain safe and secure.”

The greatest risks to the tunnel, however, are likely to come from Mother Nature herself. During the 1989 Loma Prieta quake the tube misaligned by over four inches, requiring extensive redrilling, and experts estimate that an earthquake of magnitude 6 or greater on the Hayward Fault could put it out of commission for months. An ambitious expansion plan to begin next year will address some of the seismic hazards while also widening it enough to allow super burritos to make the transit for the first time ever.

Burritos speeding through the tunnel fight a constant battle against friction. At the start and end of their journey they hover in a powerful magnetic field, seldom touching the sides of the tunnel. Past the Colorado border, however, the temperature of the surrounding rock exceeds the Curie point of iron and the burritos must slide on their bellies in their nearly frictionless Teflon sleeve, kept from charring by pork fat that slowly seeps out of the burritos as they thaw. By the time the burritos reach Cedar Rapids (traveling well over a mile a second) they are heated through, and anyone who managed to penetrate into the tunnel through the Cleveland access shafts would find them ready to eat.

Remarkably, people do descend into even the deepest sections of the tunnel, though with a far more serious goal in mind than lunch. Geologists from around the globe have been flocking to the tunnel for five decades. “People in our profession get excited about new road cuts,” says Adam Rifkin, Dean of the Geology Department at the University of Nebraska. “You can imagine what it’s been like for us to explore the world’s deepest tunnel.” Indeed, the Alameda tunnel is the only place in the world where scientists can directly study the aesthenosphere, the boundary layer separating the earth’s crust from the hot mantle. The trip down through the access shafts is harrowing - the descent takes the better part of a day, and temperatures can rise to nearly a thousand degrees Centigrade. Most of the work at the depth of the tunnel is done by robots, but geologists must occasionally descend in person to make repairs or to do work that is too difficult to automate. “It’s a lot like standing in an oven,” Rifkin says. “At the lowest point we’re nearly as far from the surface as the Space Shuttle, and in many ways it’s a less forgiving environment.” Still, he adds, “I wouldn’t give it up for the world. This is probably one of the dullest places, geologically speaking, in the whole country. Under our feet are five miles of silt from the Rockies before you even get to the first rock. Thanks to the tunnel, though, we can punch right through that. It’s like a time machine through the planet’s history.”

“Are you ever tempted to sneak a burrito while down there?” I ask Dr. Rifkin, and he laughs. “At the speed those things are going it would probably take your hand off. But really for us this is serious business - we’re fine not having access to great Mexican food as long as we can do the geology. The tunnel has been an absolute godsend.”

Not everyone is as delighted with the tunnel as the geologists. Old-time San Franciscans will be quick to point out that the comestibles in the tunnel flow strictly one way. “In the old days you’d go to a place like Pancho Villa and get yourself a steak burrito in five minutes, maybe ten if it was near lunchtime,” says lifelong Mission resident Howard Washington. “Now the line is out the door even in the morning. And some of those places down in the South Bay won’t even take customers anymore. If you want a burrito in the daytime you have to get it first thing, or else you go to one of the places that isn’t hooked up to the tunnel.”

Taqueria owners have tried hard to cope with the additional demand, but even they admit that it can get hectic. “The New York metro area has fifteen million people,” explains Javier Corrientes, manager of Cancun Burrito on Valencia Street. “San Francisco is barely a tenth of that size. You got all those people out drinking on a Friday night who want a burrito at ten o’clock, just when the dinner rush is starting here, there’s no way we can keep up.” The secret, he says, is to order tacos. “It’s the same fillings, except it’s quicker to put together and you can’t put it through the tunnel.”

The raw economics of the burrito trade suggest San Franciscans won’t be getting quicker service any time soon. Even before tolls and taxes, a burrito sold in New York brings in ten times the profit of one sold over the counter. John Laplace chairs the Northern California Burrito and Burro Council, an industry group representing Bay Area taquerias. “The tunnel is an incredible economic engine for the region,” he says. “Every burrito that goes through the tunnel represents over two dollars in direct tax revenue and over four dollars in indirect revenue through job creation, research stimulus and geothermal energy. I can understand why people get frustrated, but that tunnel has given us far more than it’s taken.”

Of course, it would be best if the tunnel could give back in a more tangible way. Over the years there have been numerous attempts to send New York staples in the reverse direction - operators have tried sending knishes, bagels, pickles and even Brooklyn-style pizza. None have proven as resilient as the humble burrito, and in the end the two cities have bowed to the inevitable. Both tunnel tubes now carry only burritos.

By the time they reach Cleveland the burritos are fully heated through and traveling uphill at about twice the speed of sound. A series of induction coils spaced through central Pennsylvania repeats the magnetic process in reverse, draining momentum from the burritos and turning it into electrical power (though Weehawken residents still recall the great blackout of 2002, when computers running the braking coils shut down and for four hours burritos traced graceful arcs into the East River, glowing like faint red sparks in the night).

At the tunnel exit, a final puff of air slows the burritos to a stop and they are placed in insulated bags. These are whisked to a fleet of waiting trucks, which pass through the Holland Tunnel (this time at a more stately thirty-five miles per hour) and then onward to restaurants and cafeterias throughout the five boroughs.

Is it worth it? Enrique Alnazar, burrito sommelier for Nobu Fifty-Seven, smiles at the very question. The restaurant recently installed a dedicated high-speed pneumatic line to the Weehawken facility, shortening the arrival time for its prize Los Charros burritos from just over two hours to under fifty minutes. Alnazar won’t say how much the new line cost (estimates run into the millions of dollars), but he insists it was worth every penny. “We’ve had people come in and order a magnum of 1978 Château Margaux on the strength of our burritos. They know that we’re phoning in their order to Mountain View the moment they walk in the door, and they know we’ve done everything in our power to keep them from waiting. A lot of restaurants are happy racking up a few days’ supply in the burrito cellar, but that’s not the same as getting a fresh burrito straight from the tunnel - you can taste the difference. The only way to get a fresher burrito than at Nobu is to fly to California, and our customers appreciate that.”

The success of the burrito tunnel has encouraged no end of imitators - whether the Reagan-era attempt to construct an intracoastal barbeque pipeline, the perennial political deadlock over allowing tomatoes in the Northeastern Chowder Viaduct, or the recent fiasco of high-speed BagelRail. But as Chairman Laplace argues, it’s unlikely such a project could succeed anywhere else. “We really have a unique situation here - a population of fifteen million people without access to high-quality Mexican food. There’s no place else in the country like it, and that makes the economics of a transport tunnel from the country’s finest burrito region workable. On top of this you have the burrito itself, which is a really marvelous food — resilient to overheating, isotropic, compact, able to tolerate high G forces.” Here Laplace smiles. “And delicious. Who would want to live in a New York City without it?”