The report warned of rickets – a softening of the bones caused by a severe lack of vitamin D and calcium. ‘This can lead to a bending of the bones under the weight of the body and the application of normal muscular pressure. Hence the bow-legged appearance of children suffering from malnutrition, and the flattening of their ribs, which can contract their chest cavity, so that their liver is pushed outward, causing the distinctive “pot-belly” of the underfed.’ Rickets, the report continued, was also responsible for the high, square, intellectual-looking heads of starving children, along with their small-featured faces. Their teeth generally appeared late, and rotted away early.

Scurvy, or scorbutus, was another risk. Although it was very well known that scurvy was caused by a deficiency of vitamin C, and although in normal times it could rapidly and easily be cured, there was now a danger that many Americans would have to go without fresh fruit and vegetables for anything up to six months, and that would leave them ‘wide open’ to infection. The symptoms included bleeding gums, stinking breath, extravasations of blood in the skin, and even bleeding from the eyes, nose and anus. Scurvy patients were liable to suffer anaemia, agonising ulcers on their arms and legs, and, if they were still untreated, exhaustion, chronic diarrhoea, and fatal failure of the lungs or kidneys.

The medical report remarked that ‘the United States is now inevitably entering a period of disease and death that can only be described as medieval.’

At 6.35 a.m., the Vice-President took two sleeping-pills and went to bed on a cot in the small room adjoining the Oval Office. He asked to be woken at 10.35 a.m. precisely.

Through the bullet-proof glass of the White House windows, with their unreal submarine tint, he was unable to hear the brief rattles of heavy machine-gun fire over by the Arlington Memorial Bridge.

Eleven

Season Hardesty opened her eyes and tried to focus. She had taken three of Vee’s little green pills last night, and her vision was blurred, like five melted varieties of ice cream. Then the pink blurs resolved themselves into price tags, and the white blurs resolved themselves into empty supermarket shelves, and the yellow blurs became posters, advertising six-packs of Ale-8-One.

Season lifted the blanket. Next to her, cocooned in a large blue bath-towel, Sally was still sleeping, her thumb poised a half-inch away from her open mouth. Ever since they had left Kansas, Sally had taken up sucking her thumb again, and no amount of nagging or cajoling had been able to stop her. She never said out loud that she missed her Daddy, but there was something in her eyes which Season couldn’t fail to recognise.