At five o’clock CBS News began to bring reports from London that all passenger flights from the United States had been held on the runways at Heathrow Airport without the passengers being allowed to disembark. There had been four hours of ‘crucial discussions’ between Her Majesty’s Foreign Office and the State Department, and eventually the passengers had been allowed to leave the aircraft, but only to assemble in the departure lounges, and not to pass through Customs.
By nine o’clock, all flights to England from the United States had been cancelled, and by seven o’clock all flights to destinations in Europe, Scandinavia and the Middle East had been wiped off the board, too. In London, more than 2000 Americans were reboarded on to their aircraft, and sent straight back to the United States – despite the fact that many of them had left America before the riots of Sunday night.
Lord Carey, the British Foreign Secretary, said that ‘much as I regret the course of action we have had to take in relation to United States citizens arriving in the United Kingdom, it is apparent that the tragic events of the past twenty-four hours would have led many of them to seek to stay in the United Kingdom indefinitely… And while I wish to the bottom of my heart that we had the facilities and the finance to cope with a massive influx of American refugees… the fact remains that we have not… and therefore with the understanding of the President, we have regretfully been obliged to turn away, for the time being, any United States citizen who arrives at a British port of entry.’
Germany, France, Holland, and the rest of the EEC countries quickly followed the British example. They were all sorry. They all spoke of their regret. But even ‘special relationships’ could not overcome the impossibility of accepting refugees who might eventually arrive from the United States in their tens of millions.
Watching the television in his room, Shearson Jones said to Peter Kaiser, ‘Don’t you ever wonder why we fought for those sons-of-bitches at all? I mean, don’t you wonder?’
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But as Monday drew to a close, there were more important questions than that, and they were still unanswered. The looting and the arson had been so devastating that most of the networks had forgotten why they started at all, and nobody was asking if the threat of a famine was real, and how serious it was, and what the President was going to do about it.
Of course, nobody in the administration had yet been told about the Abbott family, of Portales, New Mexico. And nobody had yet been officially told about the isotope that Square had found in the grain elevator in St Louis.
And that was one of the reasons why the Duncan family, of Willingboro, New Jersey, sat around their kitchen table that evening for a supper of canned salmon and salad without any feelings but feelings of family closeness and good appetite, and gratefulness to the Lord for providing their daily sustenance. There were four of them – Emmett Duncan, a telephone engineer, his wife Dora, and their two daughters, Jenny and Kate. If you had asked any of them what Clostridium botulinum was, they wouldn’t have been able to tell you. But the salmon they ate that night was swarming with it.