In a special newsflash on Wednesday evening, at nine o’clock Central Time, the President of the United States confirmed that ‘all food produce containing cereals — and that includes processed meats, breads, cookies, pastas, beers, and spirits – must now come under suspicion of having been contaminated with heavy cobalt radiation. As a general rule, foodstuffs produced more than three weeks ago can be considered safe – provided, of course, they are canned, or frozen, or still fresh. But if you are in doubt, a more detailed explanation will be broadcast immediately after this message on your local television station, and on your local radio. You will also be able to obtain leaflets from your City Hall or local citizens’ centre.’
The President, looking twenty years older than he had the previous week, and with a pronounced stutter, went on to say that ‘everybody should stay at home unless essential business takes them out.’
He was asked if he could now confirm that there was a Communist plot to overthrow the United States by ‘starving us out.’ He said tiredly: ‘I can neither confirm nor deny such a plot at this stage of the crisis.’
After the newsflash, the President was called urgently back to the Oval Office. A top-secret report had just arrived from the office of the Secretary of Health and Scientific Affairs. The President read the report slowly, watched by his two closest friends and personal aides. When he had finished reading it, at 10.13 p.m., he said: ‘I—’ and collapsed. He was rushed at once to the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre where he was confined to an oxygen tent. His doctors agreed that he was suffering from ‘overwork, high blood pressure and severe stress.’
The health report revealed that there had been thirty-five cases of fatal botulism throughout the preceding forty-eight hours. They had occurred all over the continent, from New Jersey to Arizona, from Texas to Alaska. In each case, the carrier had been a canned food product – not necessarily from the same manufacturer, and not necessarily the same variety of foodstuff. But every can that had been inspected by government health researchers had been punctured by a tiny hole – so small that the contents did not even leak – and in some cases the hole had been resealed by a dab of candle-wax.
The Secretary of Health concluded that ‘it must be beyond serious doubt that some malevolent agency has deliberately and in a calculated manner introduced Clostridium botulinum into a random variety of canned foods throughout the nation. Therefore – as grave as I realise the implications of such a recommendation must be – I have to put forward the urgent suggestion that the sale of all canned foods in the United States be immediately suspended pending more detailed investigation.’
Acting alone, the Vice-President sent desperate appeals for canned, dried, and frozen foods to the EEC nations, to Japan, China, and even to the USSR. The first response, even from our allies, was guarded. If the United States was really on the verge of economic and social collapse, then it was almost inevitable that the future of world politics would be heavily centred on the Soviet Union, and few nations were keen to mortgage their future by helping the United States too enthusiastically.
The Soviet Union ‘regretted the crisis in the United States of America, but unfortunately had no surplus foodstuffs to spare.’ The Vice-President ripped up their telegram, but conceded that at least they had shown the good grace not to mention the Afghanistan grain embargo.
At seven o’clock on Thursday morning, the Vice-President announced on television that the sale of all canned foodstuffs was banned, although he was humane enough to suggest that ‘those who have no other food whatsoever’, and who were obliged to eat canned foods, should ‘exhaustively inspect the exterior of any can for pinholes, possibly concealed by wax.’ Over seventy-six new cases of botulism had been reported during the night, all of them fatal.
For the first time in its history, Time magazine was published that week with a black border around its cover, instead of its traditional red. It was probably appropriate, because it was the last-ever edition. Its cover story: Famine, USA.
Federal experts now estimated that even the best-stocked American homes had only sufficient usable foodstuffs to carry their families through three more weeks. Most poorer urban families, however, were down to their last few cans – and now cans were under suspicion, too, they virtually had no food to eat at all.
Heavily-guarded food distribution centres were set up in the major cities, giving out packages that had been flown into New York, Boston, Washington, Los Angeles, Houston, Seattle, and Chicago from Britain and Denmark. American families who just two weeks ago had been eating steak, sweet potatoes, corn, fresh fruit, and any variety of ice-cream they wanted, now found themselves reduced to dried eggs, British chocolate, malt extract, margarine, and small cans of Danish processed pork. In Houston, three men were shot by National Guardsmen when they tried to break into the food distribution centre on Harrisburg Boulevard with machine-guns.
Time said, ‘This week, Americans are feeling their first real pangs of hunger. After only two weeks of blight and catastrophe, they are actually beginning to understand what it means to go without.’
During the three hours that followed the Vice-President’s announcement of a ban on canned foods, there were more than 17,000 suicides or attempted suicides throughout the United States. The Harvard psychologist Dr Leo Wolpers called it ‘the Total Despair syndrome.’ He said: ‘People have lost their confidence in tomorrow.’
Hundreds of thousands of Americans tried to escape the country by boat and a harrassed Coastguard spent hours trying to turn back dinghies and catamarans and fishing smacks, all overloaded with desperate people with suitcases. Many of the boats were so overcrowded that they sank as soon as they reached the open sea. The Boston Globe printed on its back page, without caption and without comment, two photographs side by side – one of the Vietnamese boat people and one of the American boat people.
In the House, Representative George Meacher of Tennessee asked in an emotional speech how this ‘magnificent democracy of ours, founded on liberty, freedom, and honour, could be brought low in two weeks by a virus, an isotope, and a disease of the gut?’ Nobody could answer him.
Looting, homicide, arson, rape, and cases of ‘crazy and suicidal driving’ were reported ‘by the thousand.’ Most police forces could do nothing more than patrol the streets and try to keep their cities and suburbs as quiet as possible. A woman died in childbirth on the sidewalk outside the Waldorf-Astoria in New York because there were no doctors available, no ambulances, and most of Park Avenue was blocked with abandoned cars. In San Quentin prison, eighty-six inmates who attempted to escape because they were mad with hunger were shot dead. Two half-naked teenage girls from respectable Back Bay families were found wandering around downtown Boston in a state of shock after being kidnapped from outside their homes and raped more than twenty times each by marauding white hoodlums.
Thursday was the day that most newspapers stopped printing, that the last few gas stations closed down, that power blackouts began to darken thousands of square miles of the eastern seaboard. There was a terrible wildness in the air, a terrible panic, that nobody who lived through the first days of the famine could ever forget. One journalist remembered climbing Coit Tower in San Francisco and staring out for hours over a city that ‘flowered with foes, and echoed with shots, and howled with the sirens of the helpless police.’ Above everything, though, he said ‘I could hear the cries and shrieks of a people who felt as if they had been abandoned by democracy, abandoned by capitalism, abandoned by peace, and abandoned by plenty… a people who more than anything else felt they had been deserted by God.’
During Thursday, the phone rang again and again at the Snowmans’ house on Topanga Canyon. Nobody answered it until late on Thursday evening, when a motorcycle cop who had been checking houses for squatters and looters picked it up and said, ‘They’ve all gone. This is the police.’
‘Are they all right?’ asked the voice at the other end.
‘Who knows, friend? We’ve got chaos here, a bad brush foe burning. They could be anyplace at all.’
‘Nobody’s left a forwarding address?’
The cop gave a cursory look around. ‘Not that I can see,’ he said. ‘It looks like they just lit out. They didn’t even lock the doors.’
There was a pause, and then the voice said, ‘Can you do me a favour?’
‘Sure, you name it.’
‘Can you write on the wall someplace that Ed Hardesty called, from South Burlington Farm in Kansas, and that I’m going to try to make my way to LA?’
The cop took out his pencil and jotted the message down. ‘South Burlington?’ he asked.
‘That’s right.’
‘Okay, then, I got you. I’ll do that.’
‘Thanks a whole lot. If this situation ever mends itself, come around to the house you’re at and claim yourself a case of whisky.’
The cop grinned. ‘To tell you the truth. I’m a vodka man.’