The police stopped him on Anthony Boulevard, trudging north. His fingers were stuck together with dried blood. They held him up against the car while they searched him, and then they sat him down on the curb and subjected him to an impromptu interrogation. He admitted murdering his family, and offered to take them back to Number 8 so that they could see for themselves. They sat him on two spread-out sheets of week-old newspaper in the back of the car, and drove him south again.

Under the emergency powers granted to the Indiana police during the state of national crisis, patrolmen were permitted in what they considered to be ‘extreme circumstances’ to administer summary justice and execution. The two patrolmen who had picked up John Frederick Walters were in little doubt that the homicides at Number 8 were (as they later put it) ‘extreme in the extreme.’

At seventeen minutes past two on Friday morning, they asked him to kneel in the middle of his back lawn, which he did. They asked him if he had any last wishes, and he told them that he had one Lark left, in the living-room, next to the radio, and that he would appreciate the chance to smoke it. They conferred, and then said no, they didn’t have time to watch him smoke a cigarette. Then one of the patrolmen lifted a .357 Python revolver and blew John Frederick Walters’ brains into the peonies.

*

Just before he went to bed at dawn on Friday morning, the Vice-President was handed a lengthy and detailed medical report on the long-term effects of severe dietary deficiency in the United States. He was reminded that a moderately active male between thirty-five and sixty-five required 2900 calories a day; and that a woman between eighteen and fifty-five requires 2200. An estimate of available food supplies showed that even with careful conservation, and even with an intensive programme of agricultural revival, there would be less than one quarter of the necessary calories available to each American man, woman, and child during the coming six months.

In practice, there would be far less. There was no question at all that ‘approximately 85 million people’ would have to go without food supplies altogether, and live off whatever they could scavenge. ‘We are going to have to face up to the fact that the world’s most technologically sophisticated society; a society capable of visiting the Moon; a society which only two weeks ago measured its anxieties in terms of breast-enlargements, jogging, psychological self-acceptance, and Howard Jarvis; is now going to have to accept the degrading spectacle of nearly a third of its citizens digging like hogs for roots.’