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.