The disintegration was personal and, at the same time, international. The fear that paralyzed the emotions of men and women in their lonely rooms also poisoned the reaction of nations to one another. As each solitary human sought to preserve his own integrity, so each nation strove to ensure its survival at the expense of all others. The fragile webs of a planetary economy frayed apart in an ever-intensifying struggle for the resources to support a worldwide industrial system. One breakdown in a small Mideastern nation led to massive dislocations, anger and panic in great nations thousands of miles away. War became continuous, limited in scale but never ceasing, breaking out in a new locality as it subsided into chaos and civil war in another. Nuclear weapons were used, as they had been used once before by the first nation to develop them, not on the grand and universal scale envisioned by the most fearful, but in local and regional strife, a practical application of means always available, for ends deemed reasonable by military and diplomatic minds. The unthinkable had always been thinkable. In the effort to compensate for losses abroad, each industrial nation attempted to supply its needs by exploiting to the limit—and then beyond—its own resources of land and forest, water and metals and minerals. The fuel needs of the machine were considered paramount, but the effort to keep the machine operating led to destruction of basic resources needed for the production of food. Agriculture itself had long before been mechanized, industrialized, assimilated into the corporate empire, the farmland submerged beneath the growing cities or mined and stripped to produce the power needed to keep the cities functioning, the machines in motion, agribusiness alive. The immediate result, as certain cities vanished, was the economic strangulation of others. Religious fanaticism joined with nationalism and secular ideologies to destroy and sometimes to self-destroy the sources of power on which the overindustrialized nations depended. Invisible poisons spread through the atmosphere, borne by the winds from the guilty to the innocent. But all were innocent, all were guilty.

The majority of nations had lost the ability to be self-sufficient, even to satisfy the elementary needs of their people for food. Now every nation was losing this ability. The cities could not feed themselves; they were largely abandoned as urban millions spread into the countryside in search of food. Those who suffered least were those accustomed to poverty and hunger; those who suffered most were the inhabitants of the rich nations. And in the richest nation of them all the harshest changes came to the few but precarious, monstrous cities that had once appeared, briefly, in that nation’s arid West; in those desert lands where, as the cautious had foreseen, “cities were not meant to be.” Most of the people had disappeared, fleeing to the greener regions from which, as everyone knew, their packaged food came. But even in the most desolate and devastated of the remote cities a few men and women survived, clinging to the ruins, trying to rebuild the simple farming and pastoral economy that had been destroyed by the triumph of the city, trying to re-create a small society of friends in a community of mutual aid and shared ownership of land. For a few years they were left in peace, forgotten by a world that seemed, for all they could tell, to have forgotten itself—and then the gates of the citadel were opened and certain men came forth with aspirations far more grand than those of farmers and herdsmen and hunters. The oldest civil war of all, that between the city and the country, was resumed.