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.’