Грэм Мастертон - Famine

‘You’re joking. Are you joking?’

‘You think I go around shooting people for fun? I never hurt anybody in my life before, until tonight,’ Ed snapped at him. He was shaking, and if he could have done, he would have slung the pump-gun right off into the trees.

Shearson Jones pushed open the passenger door of the wrecked Lincoln. ‘Would someone help me out of here?’ he demanded. ‘And would someone tell me what the devil’s going on?’

Della came up, brushing pine needles from her robe. ‘We’re getting out of here, that’s what,’ she said, in a clear voice. ‘We’re going to leave Muldoon here for the moment, and we’re going to drive into Wichita and turn in these papers to the FBI. And if you’re innocent enough to think that we’re in trouble, Mr Kaiser, just think what kind of trouble you’re in. Fraud, embezzlement, tax evasion, carrying unlicensed firearms, attempted murder of a federal agent. You’ll be lucky if they let you out to see the turn of the century.’

‘Is there room in that wagon for all of us?’ wheezed Shearson, plodding up the hill towards them.

‘There should be, with Muldoon gone,’ said Peter. ‘I have Karen with me, too, though.’

‘You brought Karen? Why?’

Peter Kaiser looked embarrassed. ‘Kind of insurance. In case we had to do a trade – her freedom for Shearson’s.’

‘My, my,’ said Della, shaking her head. ‘You do get your money’s worth out of your girlfriends, don’t you?’

With Ed staying a little way behind to keep Peter covered, they slowly made their way up to the road again. Karen was standing by the wagon in bare feet, jeans, and the white puffy-sleeved shirt she usually wore in bed. When she saw them coming – Peter and Della, Shearson and Ed, she couldn’t work out what had happened at first – who had captured whom. But when Ed said, ‘It’s okay, Karen. Everything’s fine,’ she came walking across the blacktop bare-footed with tears running down her cheeks.

‘Oh, God, I was frightened,’ she said, holding Ed’s arm. ‘Oh, God, I can’t tell you how frightened I was.’

Ed put his arm around her and held her close. Della, beside the wagon, gave him a mocking little raise of her eyebrows, and a smile that could have meant anything at all.

During the weekend, an intensive search by fifteen volunteers from the St Louis Fire Department had revealed five radioactive isotopes in grain elevators along the waterfront, and ‘perceptible’ radioactivity in almost every grain and flour store within a six-mile radius of the city. The isotopes had been taken to the National Nuclear Research station in Kokomo, Indiana, where tests showed by late Monday afternoon that each of them contained over 4000 curies of radioactive cobalt-60.

At 11.43 p.m. on Monday night, the President was informed of the discovery, and he issued immediate instructions for the contaminated cereals to be destroyed. They were to be taken out to sea and jettisoned in deep water off Miami, under the supervision of experts from the Navy, the Bureau of Atomic Energy, and the FBI. The President emphasised that it was ‘essential, at this time of threatened shortage, not to let these radioactive foodstuffs go astray, or to fall into the hands of those who might not be so scrupulous about where they go to.’

Geiger-counter searches of grain elevators and flour warehouses all over the country were put into motion a few minutes after midnight, and by seven o’clock on Tuesday morning, officials had discovered isotopes in Chicago, Duluth, Milwaukee, and Seattle. Whoever had planted the isotopes had shown no discrimination. They were found in grain stores at breweries, amongst oats and bran in animal-feed factories, and in flour warehouses at kosher bakers. The nuclear laboratories were unable to tell where the isotopes had come from, since their casings bore no serial numbers or manufacturer’s marks, but three out of the seven analysts working on them expressed an opinion that the cobalt was of European origin.

‘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.’