In Florida alone several hundred thousand families were on the move, few with provisions for more than one day and some with nothing at all except a car and money. So of necessity they were voracious and all-consuming as army ants. The roadside shops, restaurants, filling stations, bars, and juice stands along the four-lane highways were denuded of stocks, or put out a sign claiming so. Only the souvenir shacks, with their useless pink flamingos and tinted shells, were not picked clean. This is why strangers, swinging off these barren highways, invaded Fort Repose and other little towns off the main traffic streams.

Those people in Fort Repose who remembered rationing from the second World War also remembered what goods had been in short supply, back in ‘forty-two and ‘forty-three, and bought accordingly. There were runs on tires, coffee, sugar, cigarettes, butter, the choicer cuts of beef, and nylon stockings. Some proprietors, realizing that these items were vanishing, instituted their own rationing systems.

The more thoughtful wives bought portable radios and extra batteries, candles, kerosene lanterns, matches, lighter fluid and flints, first-aid kits, and quantities of soap and toilet paper.

When news spread that armed convicts, escaped from road gangs, had been seen near the town; Beck’s Hardware sold out of rifles, shotguns, pistols, and very nearly out of ammunition.

By afternoon the cash registers of Fort Repose were choked with currency, but many shelves and counters were bare and others nearly so. By afternoon the law of scarcity had condemned the dollar to degradation and contempt. Within a few more days the dollar, in Fort Repose, would be banished entirely as a medium of exchange, at least for the duration.

Sitting alone in his office, Edgar Quisenberry was aware of none of these facts, nor could his imagination anticipate the dollar’s fall, any more than he could have imagined the dissolution of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve System in the space of a single hour. Methodically, he read through the last batch of mail. There was nothing of any great importance, except heartening items in the Kiplinger Letter, predicting another increase in FHA mortgage rates, and better retail business in the South during the Christmas season. Also, from Detroit there was notice of a ten percent stock dividend in automobile shares in his personal portfolio. He’d certainly got in on the ground floor of that one, he thought. He hoped nothing happened to Detroit, but he had a disquieting feeling that something would, or had.

At two o’clock, as always on Saturdays, he left the bank, first setting the time lock on the vault for eight-thirty Monday morning. His car was a black Cadillac, three years old. He recalled that during the last big war automobile production had halted. He decided that on Monday, or perhaps this very afternoon, he would drive to San Marco and see what sort of a trade he could make on a new Caddy. Henrietta would be pleased, and it would be a hedge against long disruption of the economy.

When he started the engine he saw that his gas was low, and on the way home stopped at Jerry Kling’s service station. He was surprised that there was no line of cars waiting, as there had been early that morning. Then he saw the big cardboard sign with its emphatic red lettering: SORRY. NO MORE GAS.

Edgar honked and Jerry came out of the station, looking worn and limp. “Yes, Mr. Quisenberry?” Jerry said.

“That’s just to keep away tourists and floaters and such, isn’t it?” Edgar said.

“No, sir, I’m not only out of gas, I’m out of tires, spark plugs, batteries, thirty-weight oil, vulcanizing kits, drinks and candy, and low on everything else.”

“I’ve got to have gas. I’m just about out.”

“I should’ve put up that sign an hour after I opened. You know what, Mr. Quisenberry? I sold plumb out of tires before I got to thinking I needed new tires myself. I just let myself be charmed by that bell on the cash register. What a damn fool! I’ve got nothing but money.”

“I don’t know that I can get home,” Edgar said.

“I think we’ll all be walking pretty soon, Mr. Quisenberry.” Jerry sighed. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You’re an old customer. I’ve got a drum stashed away in the stockroom. I’ll let you have three gallons. Back that thing up by the ramp, so nobody’ll see.” When he had his three gallons, Edgar brought out his wallet and said, “How much?”

Jerry laughed and raised his hands in a gesture of repugnance. “Keep it! I don’t want money. What the hell’s money good for? You can’t drive it and you can’t eat it and it won’t even fix a flat.”

Edgar drove on slowly, hunched over the wheel. He knew, vaguely, that in the Second World War the Greek drachma and Hungarian pengo had become utterly worthless. And in the War of the Revolution the shilling of the Continental Congress hadn’t been worth, in the British phrase, a Continental damn. But nothing like this had ever happened to the dollar. If the dollar was worthless, everything was worthless. There was a phrase he had heard a number of times, “the end of civilization as we know it.” Now he knew what the phrase meant. It meant the end of money.

When Edgar reached home Henrietta’s car was gone. He found a note in the salver on the hall table. It read:

1:30.

Edgar—tried to get you all morning but the phone is still out of order. The radio doesn’t say much but I am frightened. Nevertheless, I am off to do the grocery shopping. I hope the stores aren’t crowded. I do think that henceforth I will shop on Tuesdays or Wednesdays instead of Saturdays. Hadn’t we better have both cars filled with gas? There may be a shortage. You remember how it was last time, with those silly A and B ration cards.

You didn’t leave any money when you rushed off this morning, but I can always cash checks. It may be hard for a while, but life goes on.

HENRIETTA

Edgar went up to the master bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. What a fool she was. Life goes on, she said. How could life go on with no Federal Reserve, no Treasury, no Wall Street, no bonds, no banks?

Henrietta didn’t understand it at all. How could life go on if dollars were worthless? How could anybody live without dollars, or credit, or both? She didn’t understand that the Bank had become only a heap of stone filled with worthless paper, so his credit would be no better than anybody’s credit. If dollars were worthless then there was nothing they could buy. You couldn’t even buy a ticket, say, to South America, and even if you could how would you get to an airport? Grocery shopping, indeed! How would they shop a week, or a month from now?

Henrietta was a fool. This was the end. Civilization was ended. Of one thing, Edgar was certain. He would not be crushed with the mob. He had been a banker all his life and that was the way he was going to die, a banker. He would not allow himself to be humiliated. He would not be reduced to begging gasoline or food, and be dragged down to the level of a probationary teller. He thought of all the notes outstanding that now would never be paid, and how his debtors must be chuckling. He scorned the improvident, and now the improvident would be just as good as the careful, the sound, the thrifty. Well, let them try to go on without dollars. He would not accept such a world.

He found the old, nickel-plated revolver, purchased by his father many years before, in the top drawer of his bureau. Edgar had never fired it. The bullets were green with mold and the ham mer rusted. He put it to his temple, wondering whether it would work. It did.