John Frederick Walters, who always gave his name as ‘John Frederick Walters’, was thirty one, and a skilled electrician. At least, he used to be a skilled electrician, until 1972, when he was rewiring a house in the better part of Fort Wayne, and the owner came back half-drunk from a business reception, pulled the main switch, and electrocuted him. He was lucky to be alive. But there was a twisted burn all the way down the right side of his chest, and even after months of hospitalisation his left hand still felt a little numb, and he still dragged his left leg in an odd, teetering walk that made people in supermarkets give him a wide berth, in case he collided with their carts. Until the famine crisis on Sunday, he had worked in a Thriftee Superstore on Paulding Road, but it had been burned to the ground in the early hours of Monday. Now he was holed up with his family at Number 8, with no electricity, no telephone, no mail, and only a transistor radio with weak batteries to keep him in touch with the horror that was sweeping the outside world.

He was still sitting in his yellow-papered living-room at midnight on Thursday, listening to an extended news bulletin about the day’s disasters. Thirty-six people had died when their overloaded airplane had snagged power lines over Columbus, Ohio – turning their attempted getaway from the United States into a mass cremation. Anything up to 100 people were feared dead after fire had swept a condominium in Miami from a looted supermarket next door. Washington was almost unapproachable – the US Marines had sealed off every highway from the outside world, and were threatening to shoot interlopers on sight. The President was out of his oxygen tent, but his doctors had told him he had to rest for two or three more days at the least. It was ‘expertly estimated’ that between seven and eight hundred Americans had died during the day from violence directly related to the food shortages.

From the outside world – from Europe, from the Far East, from the Third World – there was awkwardness and hesitation. They stood by while America slowly collapsed from within, like unwilling witnesses to a coronary. The Queen had sent a message expressing ‘the grave concern of the British people’, but the reluctance of America’s erstwhile allies to assist her was becoming increasingly and embarrassingly obvious. Already, trade envoys from Italy, Sweden, and West Germany had made special visits to the Soviet Union, and the dollar was no longer being quoted on the world money markets. The Secretary of State, in a rare fit of temper, talked of alliances that had taken ‘fifty years and one hundred fifty billion dollars to build; and only fifty minutes to tear down.’