Warday

I noticed that some of the traders wore green hats with what looked to be a bite taken out of the rim. Later I found out that this had to do with the war. Traders so decorated had been present on the day after Warday. (The Board had already shut for the day when the nuclear exchange took place.) On that day, with no electric power and the Board’s electronic devices out of commission, trading was active but extremely difficult. About noon, the Bond Pit closed for lack of information. Then arumor swept the pits that there had been a nuclear exchange the afternoon before. Communications were so bad that Washington had been destroyed and New York burning for eighteen hours before Chicago learned about it.

The rumor precipitated a massive run-up in prices until one of the Board managers sounded the gong and entered the pit. The exchange was closed. At that moment the pit’s oldest trader, Willie

“Eat My Hat” Dobbs, collapsed and died of a stroke.

The hats are in memory of him.

We stood in the gallery, watching the wild action. By twelve-thirty the price of wheat had gone to fifty-six-and-a-quarter cents.

As we left, it reached sixty cents. The dust storm had flattened hundreds of thousands of acres of wheat just on the point of being harvested, then buried it in dust.

By the time this book is published, the consequences of the Great Dust Storm of 1993 will be old news. An Agriculture Department official at the Board said that it would lead to a tripling of bread prices by Christmas, and probably spot shortages until next year’s harvest. As to the chances of another famine, he did not feel that the loss of a crop in just one grain would lead that far. But he couldn’t be sure.

Interview P. Chandler Gayle, NSD Specialist

My name is Chandler Gayle. I am a medical doctor. I was educated at Ohio State University Medical School. I was licensed by the state of Ohio in 1980 and the state of Illinois in 1992. I engaged in the practice of medicine in Cincinnati until June of 1992. I lost my wife, brother, and four children in the flu of 1991, and after that I decided I was willing to accept a greater level of risk in my career.

I had heard that there was a dearth of research specialists working on Nonspecific Sclerosing Disease, due to what was thought to be the contagious nature of the disease. I applied to the University of Chicago for a research fellowship in this field and was sent to London to study. I was confirmed by the Crown Medical Establishment in January of this year as an NSD specialist, after a six-month residency in war-related diseases at Middlesex Hospital in London.

I will tell you what I know of NSD in layman’s terms, but before I do that, I will outline for you my experiences during the flu epidemic.

In November of 1991 we were sure the worst was over in our area. It was by then clear that we were not going to be affected much, if at all, by radiation. Our main war-related problems were malnutrition and economic disruption. Of course, we knew that the population was debilitated. We Cincinnati doctors had organized into teams and groups to attempt to cope with the tremendous demand and the lack of communications. It was at a group meeting that I first heard of an unusual case of flu. We were very concerned. From the beginning, we saw a high potential for disaster.

The etiology of the disease was suggestive of a produced, rather than a natural, factor. It occurred to us then that the Cincinnati Flu might have been released by enemy action or by an accident at a military facility in the area. It is also possible that there was a radiation-induced mutation of the common flu strain known as Influenza A. This is the sort of flu most often associated with pandemics. The serotype was unusual; usually each new serotype of this disease follows a pattern of extrapolation from the previous serotype. Only when a new serotype is radically different from the one previous can a pandemic occur, because only then is the entire population of the planet susceptible.

The Cincinnati Flu was a radically different serotype, at least four generations removed from Delhi-A, the previous serotype. We still have no way to explain this. The Spanish Flu of 1918 was probably a similar radical serotype. It could be that the presence of large, weakened populations encourages the proliferation of new influenza serotypes. We just don’t know.