"And have you heard from the President since the sixth?" Loevy's voice was smooth.
"I have not."
"Perhaps that's because the President was hanged on the White House lawn the day after he called you. Quite a mob was there. The food pinch was just beginning to be felt. And that was forty-seven days ago—" He glanced up at the Colonel's white face. "Oh, I'm not lying to you. It happened. Have you had any communications recently?"
"How could I? They cut the telephone cables, and we can't get anything but hysterical nonsense from our radio sets—"
"Has it occurred to you that many things may have happened in the course of this last month?" Loevy's voice was sharp in the still room.
"I'll hold this Ship until things get straightened out," the Colonel snapped.
"Colonel—things aren't going to straighten out. This isn't just a little depression we're in now, it isn't a small business recession that will just up and stabilize soon. This is an economic crash that has thrown the world back a thousand years. We may never recover from the crash that came on the first of July. The government is gone, Colonel. There isn't any government. The army has dissolved into the hills, hunting for food. The only money with any value is being paid out by the hospitals for blood to restock their banks. And without money there isn't any food. The people in the cities are starving—standing in the streets starving because food isn't coming in. Communications are out, there isn't any commercial traffic—"
"I have a stockpile of emergency rations a mile high, and I have four hundred men who aren't running around in the hills," the Colonel snarled. "I have a job to do, and I'm doing it—"
"But you're guarding an empty shell! Look, the people don't know all the reasons for the collapse. They don't know the whole picture—but they know one thing. They know they've been taxed beyond endurance, their gasoline has been requisitioned, their boys taken for military and labor service, their money devaluated again and again so that the government could get a Rocket off the Earth before the Asians did. And they know that now the whole world has fallen in a heap, and they're starving to death. And they know that this Rocket was being worked on when the crash came. They want it, Colonel. They are going to get it, too. They need a scapegoat for these fifty-four days, and this Rocket is it! And there won't be any recovery as long as the ship stands."