The Year of the Jackpot

The story touches on recurrent Heinlein themes of survivalism and the prudishness of social mores of the time.

Potiphar Breen is a middle-aged bachelor with a settled, orderly life, and a rather unusual hobby.

We meet him first at breakfast in a Los Angeles diner, where he orders his usual meal, takes notes of various apparently unrelated items in several newspapers, and carefully counts out his payment, adding an exactly calculated tip.

He drives her to his house, lets her dress, and after explaining that he is not trying to take advantage of her, interviews her.

The news has been carefully hushed up, just as Breen himself called a friend at the newspaper and fed him a phony account of this incident.

Meade's striptease, along with the commonplace public transvestism, the new churches with their ceremonial nudity and all the other pieces of minor insanity are simply symptoms of the inexorable trends.

Meade and "Potty" grow close,[1] and as the weeks pass and the craziness increases, both abandon their jobs and prepare for when it will be "time to jump."

There has been a full-scale nuclear exchange, but the weather was so bad that few bombs reached their targets.

Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction described "The Year of the Jackpot" as a "frightening classic".