Famine

by Graham Masterton

  ‘We are being attacked from without, rather than within,’ said the Director of the FBI, Charles Kurnik. ‘I don’t think we need more than three guesses to answer the question by whom?’

  With instructions from the President to use the utmost diplomatic discretion, the Secretary of State began to put out feelers in Japan, in China, in Soviet Russia, in Iran, in Germany, and in Britain. Without revealing the seriousness of the isotope crisis, he was supposed to vibrate the web of international diplomacy, and see if he could detect in which corner the spider was sitting.

  By noon on Tuesday, the President and his cabinet were faced with the question of what to do about the billions of bushels of highly radioactive grain still stored in elevators all around the country – grain which was still being happily used to bake bread, brew beer, feed animals, fill out hamburgers, and to make anything and everything from children’s cereals to bourbon whisky.

  Five nuclear experts were brought to the White House just after lunch as special advisers, but as Tuesday afternoon wore on, they were unable to agree amongst themselves how dangerous the radioactivity in the grain and the flour was actually going to be. Certainly, the levels were way above those which the FDA would normally consider acceptable, but these weren’t normal times. Almost all of this year’s crops were dying of blight, and now it looked as if the stockpiles from last year were going to be contaminated beyond use.

  Dr K. E. Salkeld of Minneapolis stood before the President – a tall, ascetic man with a reputation for facing up to the bitterest scientific facts – and took off his spectacles in a gesture of defeat. ‘Mr President,’ he said, ‘this radioactivity is of sufficient strength to have the same effect as a nuclear bomb, without an explosion. Our children will eat it in their diets, our adults will drink it in their beer, and it will work its evil way into the very bones of our population. Many millions will almost certainly die in terrible agony. Those who are left will face pain, loneliness, and the horror of living in a society where a very high percentage of the population is outrageously deformed.’

  What worried the President more than anything else, however, was the immediate prospect of another night like Sunday, with more rioting and burning. It was quite possible that millions of Americans might be affected by radioactive poisoning if he were to keep the crisis quiet for a few more days, until he had worked out some kind of contingency plan. But the effects of the cobalt-60, although threatening, were still largely hypothetical, whereas it was almost inevitable that thousands of people would die tonight if he were to announce at once that there was a total ban on bread, cereal, cake, cookies, beer, spirits, and pastries – and if Dr Salkeld was right, meat as well, since so many American animals were fed on grain. The Cabinet had already left most of their turkey sandwiches untouched, and at six o’clock the President had turned down the offer of a steak.

  At nine, a report was brought into the Oval Office from the State Department. At an emergency meeting of the European Economic Community in Brussels, all the member countries had guaranteed to supply to the United States, as much surplus meat, cereal, dairy produce, and vegetables as they could muster, They realised that whatever they could supply would fall ‘far below the day-to-day needs of a country of 250 million inhabitants’, but they appreciated the President’s co-operation in halting emigration from the United States to Europe, and they believed that ‘one-thousandth of a loaf is better than no bread.’

  With the help of hundreds of officials from state capitals and county seats all over the United States, who had industriously filed reports on how much canned and frozen food was being held in commercial warehouses and supermarket storerooms, the calculation was that America could ‘just about survive the winter, at subsistence level.’

  The President read out the report to his Cabinet as twilight fell across the White House lawns outside. ‘In the space of a few days,’ he said, ‘this nation of plenty has been reduced to the economic level of a country as poor as Cambodia; and all those pitiful scenes which we have witnessed in Cambodia are going to be witnessed here.

  ‘There is no question that the blight which has so swiftly destroyed our crops, and the radioactive material which has so effectively contaminated our stores of essential foodstuffs – there is no question at all that these have been deliberately introduced, with the single intention of destroying our country.

  ‘We do not yet have adequate evidence to pin the blame for these criminal actions on any known adversary. Our first suspect, of course, must be the Soviet Union, but the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation tells me that it would have been possible for as few as a hundred agents to have blighted our crops and to have planted those isotopes. Our unknown adversary could have been Iran, or Palestine, or even an unknown political pressure-group from an ostensibly friendly power.’

  Just before dark, the President left the Oval Office, and went for a walk in the White House gardens by himself. He smoked two cigarettes, although nobody apart from his wife and his closest friends knew that he was a smoker. After his walk, he closeted himself in his small side office and placed a telephone call to Alan Hedges, the chairman of the Agricultural Committee.

  ‘Alan,’ he said, ‘I want you to give me an update on the emergency supplies you’ve been shipping in for the administration.’

  Alan Hedges said, ‘Pardon me one moment, Mr President… the figures are right here. That’s it… we’ve completed all the shipments of canned goods and stored them in three separate warehouses around the city, as well as five truckloads of special emergency rations out at Anacostia Naval Annex. The rest of the refrigerated goods are arriving by rail just after nine o’clock tonight.’

  The President ran his hand tiredly through his thatch of grey hair. ‘That’s okay, Alan, you did well. But I’m afraid we may have an extra problem. You’re going to have to check through those rations and make sure that none of them were produced within the last three weeks.’

  There was a short silence, and then Alan Hedges said, ‘Is this on the level?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. I can’t give you all the details yet, but it appears any food containing any kind of cereal ingredient which was prepared and canned within the last three weeks may have to be considered a hazard to human health.’

  ‘You can’t tell me anything more than that?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. But I can assure you that when the time comes to make a public statement, you’ll be the first to know.’

  ‘Well,’ said Alan Hedges unhappily, ‘I appreciate your confidence in me.’

  ‘Thank you, Alan. Now will you check out those supplies for me?’

  ‘Yes, Mr President. Whatever you say.’

  Neither the President nor Alan Hedges heard the extra click on their telephone line as Alan Hedges’ secretary Wanda Kaminski put her receiver down, too. And neither of them knew that directly afterwards she dialled the Washington bureau of The New York Times and asked to speak to Bill Brinsky.

  The news on early evening television on Tuesday was grim, but less hysterical than before. The networks had all been personally requested by the President to ‘Keep the tone down.’ The crop blight was still spreading, although ‘great and urgent efforts’ were being made in Washington to prepare an antidote. The research had been seriously hampered by last week’s violent killing of Professor Protter, who had carried most of the information he had gleaned from his analysis of Vorar D in his head. Nonetheless, the Department of Agriculture hoped to be able to issue fanners with their first supplies of some kind of antidote ‘within two or three weeks.’

  Most major cities in the United States were still under the watchful eyes of the National Guard, the Army, and the Marine Corps. So far, over five thousand men and women had been arrested for looting or for breaking curfews, and twenty eight had been shot dead. Food was being sold only from certain major supermarkets, and each customer was being rationed to twenty-five dollars worth of food at the checkout, although there were no strict checks on how
many supermarkets any one customer went around to visit, or even how many times he went through the same supermarket’s checkout in one day.

  The front-page photograph of the New York Daily News had shown a two-mile line of shoppers waiting outside the A&P on Third Avenue at 51st Street, some of them with camp-stools and even sleeping-bags. The headline read FOOD LINE BLUES.

  At seven o’clock, the President appeared on television again to ‘thank the American people for their calm, their dignity, and their brave acceptance of one of the greatest natural disasters of our time.’ He explained that America’s allies were airlifting food which would be stored all around the country, and sold to the population on ration ‘when the time for such extreme measures eventually comes.’ He was giving out no hints yet that the crop blight had been started on purpose – despite what Ed Hardesty had said on Sunday night – and he deflected questions from the press that the approaching famine might have been caused by Soviet sabotage.

  Another question he ducked was, ‘Where is Senator Shearson Jones? Have you talked to him yet? Has he answered Mr Ed Hardesty’s allegations that the blight was allowed to spread so that he could line his own pockets? And, come to that, where is Mr Ed Hardesty?’

  The President left the lectern, with its Presidential seal and its screen of bulletproof plastic, and waved to the press as he left the room without even turning back to look at them.

  George Bannon, of the Washington Post, said, ‘Something tells me we’re being strung along for some reason or other. My nose itches, and when my nose itches, that means trouble.’

  ‘When my nose itches, it means hay fever,’ replied Bill Brinsky, tucking his notebook back in his pocket. Then he left the press room to go back to his typewriter, and his half-finished story for tomorrow morning, which began, ‘Sources close to the President have revealed that the nation’s food crisis, already worsening by the hour, may be exacerbated by yet another problem… apart from the continent-wide crop blight. It appears that for reasons yet unexplained, any food containing cereals that was prepared in the last three weeks may be dangerous to human health. This leak, although still unconfirmed, comes from a highly reliable quarter; and if the White House does confirm it, the nation will be facing not only the total destruction of its crops and livestock, but anything up to forty per cent of its existing food stocks.’

  That Tuesday evening, ignoring the imposition of a curfew at sundown, thousands of ordinary families, both black and white, marched along St Paul Street in Baltimore to City Hall. They carried burning torches and home-made banners which read SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST? and OUR FIRST CIVIL RIGHT – FOOD. The National Guardsmen who watched them shuffling silently through the warm darkness, men and women with confused but determined faces, babies in strollers, old people in wheelchairs, had been ordered not to shoot until the parade had dispersed. One of the Guardsmen, interviewed by a roving television camera, appeared on the screen with tears running down his cheeks. ‘They can order us not to shoot our people,’ he said, ‘but they can’t order us not to cry for them.’

  In New York, where the Mayor had been making every effort to keep the city as quiet and as normal as possible, there were new fires in Queens and in Harlem, and nearly three hundred black youths broke into the Four Seasons Restaurant on 52nd Street, bludgeoning police and security guards and stabbing two waiters. They rampaged across tables, splashed in the ornamental pool, and strewed oysters and roast game and wine bottles all over the floor. ‘It was like something out of a Fellini movie,’ said Norman Cramer, the movie producer, whose wife suffered a dislocated shoulder. ‘There were all these savages out of the streets, dancing on plates of veal and asparagus in filthy sneakers, and sluicing themselves with Dom Perignon.’

  In Muskogee, Oklahoma, twenty men and one woman tried to break into a supermarket and steal boxes of canned meat, vegetables, and fruit. They were almost through loading when they were surprised by a National Guard patrol who machine-gunned all of them without warning. Their bodies were littered across the supermarket parking lot, and a reporter for the Tulsa Herald-Bulletin said. There was so much blood it was gurgling down the storm drains like crimson bathwater.’

  One of the most vicious firelights of the night was in Los Angeles, where nearly 100 residents of the Palms district banded themselves together into an armed ‘food-looting force.’ They successfully raided two supermarkets with a convoy of seventy station wagons and trucks, and they were about to attack a large Quik-Serv store on Culver Boulevard when they were ambushed by 150 officers of the Los Angeles Police. Fifteen of the looters were shot dead, twenty-eight wounded, and nine policemen suffered serious bullet-wounds. At one time, the crackling of gunfire across the front of the supermarket was so loud that it could be heard in Westchester.

  There were plenty of profiteers, of course. In San Francisco, where the Mayor had so far only imposed a midnight curfew, stores were brightly lit and wide-open, and selling cans of corned beef at six dollars and fifty cents a can. Canned vegetables were at a premium, with a single can of spinach selling at anything from four dollars upwards, and fresh vegetables, from the few farms which had been left unscathed by the blight, were Mike diamonds.’ One fresh lettuce, at a supermarket on Stockton Street, was selling for twelve dollars and fifty cents. A middle-aged man was shot dead by San Francisco policewomen when he tried to escape from a small neighbourhood store with three cans of lima beans in his pockets.

  As Tuesday turned to Wednesday, the confusion and the terror grew. Only the President’s continual reassurance that ‘everything will work out’, along with the forced optimism of the television news programmes, kept the nation from total hysteria. Shortly after midnight, though, the President issued an Executive Order that all banks and savings banks would be closed until further notice, and that the public sale of silver and gold bullion was to be suspended. No financial assets could be sent out of the United States in any form whatsoever, except to meet previously-contracted debts. On the stock exchange in Tokyo, where the time was already 2.30 p.m. in the afternoon of Wednesday, the dollar collapsed against the Yen to 102.30, and it was only after ‘limitless guarantees’ from the Federal Reserve Bank and the International Monetary Fund that it steadied at ¥ 120.25.

  A thoughtful and dignified editorial in the New York Times balanced the frightening story from Bill Brinsky on the front page by saying, ‘We are all about to live through this nation’s most testing days. Let us show the world at least what our courage is made of, what our resolve is made of, and how the great ideal of a free democratic society can meet up to the most tragic and disastrous circumstances that Nature or Man can devise.’

  As those words were flying off the presses in a special late exclusive edition at two o’clock Wednesday, a friend of the Duncan family in Willingboro, New Jersey, was returning home from a late shift at the telephone company when he passed by the Duncans’ house and noticed that the Duncans’ kitchen light was still lit. At first he thought that maybe Emmet had sneaked downstairs to raid the icebox, especially the way that everybody was rationing out their food now, and he thought nothing of it. But two hours later, he looked out of his own bedroom window across the street and saw that the light was still burning.

  In green pyjamas and a blue towelling bathrobe, he crossed the street, walked up between the laurel bushes by the Duncans’ path, and rang the doorbell. He rang five times, but there was no reply. After a few minutes, he went around the back, and tried to look into the kitchen, but the drapes were drawn across. Eventually, he shook the handle of the back door. To his surprise, it was open.

  He saw them almost immediately. Emmet Duncan was lying curled up on the floor, in a sticky sea of vomit. His wife Dora had managed to drag herself through to the living-room, but had collapsed behind the sofa. Jenny and Kate were both sitting with their faces against the kitchen-table, as if they had fallen asleep. Only the whiteness of their faces and the diarrhoea caked on their legs showed that they had died.

  The
stench in the kitchen was hideous, and when Emmet’s friend took one step forward, a seething cloud of blowflies rose up from the bodies and battered around the kitchen like some kind of nightmarish hailstorm.

  Eight

  Up in the hills, in Topanga Canyon, Wednesday morning was as quiet and sunny as any other day. Only when Season stepped out through the french doors to join Carl and Vee on the pooldeck could she see the distant dark plumes of smoke which hung over Los Angeles like the black feathers of an old-fashioned funeral. And there was the smell, too – like burning cushions.

  Carl was dressed in a white safari suit, and he was already halfway through a large tumbler of tequila, with salt around the rim. Vee was wearing a pink sun-dress and sandals, and she looked as if she hadn’t slept.

  ‘No calls?’ Season asked. ‘I didn’t think I was going to get to sleep at all, until you gave me those pills. They’re amazing.’

  ‘You feel better?’ asked Carl. Then he glanced at Vee, and said, ‘No, there were no calls. They mentioned Ed on the news once, but only to say that there wasn’t any sign of him yet. I should think the police have got their hands full without looking for people who can usually take care of themselves.’

  ‘Well, that’s Ed all right,’ said Season, rubbing her elbow as if she were cold, and giving Carl an uncomfortable smile.

  ‘Do you want breakfast?’ asked Vee. ‘I’ll have to cook it myself. Maria hasn’t arrived yet.’

  ‘Has she phoned you? I mean, she’s all right?’

  Vee shook her head. ‘I don’t know. There was a whole lot of shooting last night, especially around Palms and Culver City. I just hope – well, I just hope I didn’t make a mistake, letting her go see her mother.’