‘Yes, Senator.’
Senator Jones cleared his throat, and sniffed. Then he said, ‘There are two things you have to do, Peter. You’re right about the Blight Crisis Appeal. We have to get as much of that money into our bank account as we can, before people start to panic. How are you doing so far?’
‘Nine million dollars promised, as of three o’clock. If I really hustle, I guess I can get hold of most of it by the weekend. Say seventy per cent. We’d have to arrange for special clearance on the cheques, of course.’
‘Just lay your hands on as much as you can,’ grunted Shearson. ‘It may only be a fraction of what we originally planned to raise, but it’ll do. The second thing you have to do is put maximum pressure on Professor Protter. Maximum, do you hear? It’s Protter’s job to come up with an antidote, and real fast.’
‘But if we find an antidote, and announce it publicly, won’t that slacken off contributions?’
Shearson sniffed. ‘It’s a question of picking the right moment. The right political moment, the right scientific moment, the right psychological moment. We may find an antidote tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean we have to announce we’ve found it tomorrow. What we do is, we hold it back while the contributions are still rolling in, and we only announce it when the blight has become so critical that contributions are falling off in any case. The media are going to bust the blight situation wide open sooner or later. They’re bound to. But it’s then that we say we’ve discovered the answer to everybody’s problems, and pick up all the political credit for saving the day. Some people call it brinkmanship. I call it the Lone Ranger syndrome. Don’t shoot that silver bullet until you really have to.’
‘Supposing Protter draws a blank?’ asked Peter. ‘I mean – supposing we can’t stop it, and the crops really do get wiped out?’
‘Well, there’s another little job for you. Call Frank Edison, and check the nation’s food storage situation. Government stocks, private silos, military supplies – anything and everything. Then talk to some of the top supermarket people, and work out an estimate of how long their shelf supplies would be likely to last under crisis conditions.’
Peter jotted down a few notes. ‘You want a picture of the worst that could possibly happen?’
‘That’s right,’ said Senator Jones. ‘But don’t go scaring anybody. If they want to know why you’re asking, just tell them it’s for a federal contingency plan, in case of freakishly bad weather.’
Peter said, ‘Isn’t anyone else getting reports of this blight? I would have thought the president would have wanted a brief by now.’
‘Oh, that’s already been done,’ said the senator. ‘I sent him a personal memorandum this morning, telling him that, yes, we had problems with a new and unexpected blight in Kansas and North Dakota, but that all of our top agricultural scientists were working on it, and they were only hours away from cracking the problem wide open. I admitted there were outbreaks of blight in Iowa and Oregon and parts of Washington, but I told him that considering the humidity, they weren’t unexpected, and we didn’t anticipate a serious shortfall in output.’
‘So you’re not getting any flak from the White House?’
‘Not yet. It’ll come, but not yet.’
‘Don’t you think you ought to do something about Dr Benson? I mean – he could be talking to the newspapers now.’
‘I’ve been considering that,’ said Senator Jones. ‘I think I might send Della over to Wichita to have a quiet word with him. Tell him how important it is for scientists not to scuttle around panicking everybody. I was going over to Fall River at the week-end in any case – I can send her on ahead.’
‘And Hardesty? What about him? If he doesn’t get any response from you, he’s likely to blow the whistle.’
‘Hardesty is a professional pain in the ass,’ breathed the senator. ‘But I still want to have him as my Kansas Farmer figurehead. He’ll be good copy. The young, dedicated, second-generation wheat farmer. And if he’s been as hard hit by this blight as he says he has, he’s going to be glad of a few extra dollars. Maybe I’ll get Della to talk to him, too. She’s good at sizing people up.’
Peter was tempted to answer, ‘You can say that again, Senator,’ but he held his tongue. ‘Do you want me to call him back?’ he asked Shearson.
‘Yes, do that. Do that right away. I made a mistake once, years ago, in some political scandal you won’t even remember. I took care of all the big people but I forgot about the little people. And if you’re not careful, it’s the little people who can put you under.’
Peter wrote down two more fines of notes, and then he said, ‘Okay, Senator. I’m sorry I disturbed you. Maybe we can meet up later and I’ll put you in the picture on the food supplies.’
‘Good,’ said Shearson. ‘And for Christ’s sake keep this as quiet as you can. Until those donations have cleared the bank, we’re still running on the skyline. You understand me?’
Peter glanced at the anti-bug light beside his telephone. ‘Yes, Senator,’ he said, crisply.
Peter put down the phone, and as he did so, Karen FortunofF put her phone down, too. Within a few seconds, there was a buzz from Peter’s office, and a fight flashed on her handset.
‘Yes, Mr Kaiser?’
‘Ah, Karen. Get me my mother on the phone, will you?’
‘Now, Mr Kaiser?’
‘Now, Karen. That’s if you don’t mind.’
Karen dialled the Wellington Hotel, and waited while the dialling-tone warbled. Then she heard Peter’s mother say, ‘Mrs Kaiser’s suite. Who’s calling?’
‘It’s your son for you, Mrs Kaiser. Hold on, please.’
She put the call through to Peter’s desk, but again she clamped her hand over the mouthpiece and listened in.
‘Mother?’ she heard Peter asking.
‘What’s the matter, dear? I have Mrs Kroger here for tea.’
‘Mother, this is very important. I want you to listen, and I want you to do exactly as I tell you.’
‘Peter, dear, what on earth’s the matter? You sound quite peculiar.’
‘Listen, Mother, I sound quite peculiar because it could be that something quite peculiar is just about to happen. I’ve got wind that we could be suffering some very severe food shortages over the coming winter.’
Mrs Kaiser sounded perplexed. ‘Food shortages? What do you mean? I haven’t heard anything about food shortages. I don’t eat much anyway. I’m on a diet.’
‘Mother, I know all about your diet. But you still have to eat something. And the way these shortages are shaping up, it looks like there may be hardly anything to eat at all, except canned stuff, and frozen stuff, and maybe meat.’
‘Peter – are you sure?’
‘I wouldn’t be calling you if I wasn’t sure. Now, listen, will you, and stop asking questions. I want you to call Mr Parker at the general store in Connecticut – yes, that Mr Parker – and I want you to ask him how much he wants for all of the foodstuffs in his store. Yes, Mother, all of them. Canned foods, dried foods, flour, TV dinners, everything. The whole damned stock, except for the toys and the corn dollies and the cigarettes. Right. Then I want him to drive the whole lot up to the house at Litchfield and get the key from Mrs Lodge and store everything in the cellar. Tell him to buy a couple of new deep-freezers if he needs to. Just make sure the whole contents of that general store are tucked away in our house, that’s all.’
There was a long silence. Then Peter’s mother said, ‘Are you feeling all right, dear? You’re sure you’re not running a temperature?’
‘Mother!’ snapped Peter. ‘Will you just do what I tell you to do? It could be a matter of life or death! Your life or death!’
‘Peter, I hardly think—’
‘What you hardly think and what’s actually happening are two different things, Mother. Sixty per cent of the wheat crop in Kansas has been wiped out by disease in two days. A third of the corn and soybean crops in Iowa are going down with the same blight. We’ve g
ot tomatoes rotting in Florida, grapes rotting in California, broccoli dying in Oregon, potatoes going mouldy in Idaho… this whole damned country’s been hit by the biggest crop failure ever.’
‘Well, dear, I’ve heard about the wheat. That was on the news today. But nobody’s said anything about tomatoes, or broccoli. I’m not particularly fond of broccoli, in any case.’
‘Mother—’ said Peter, in a bottled-up voice.
‘Oh, very well dear. I’ll call Mr Parker. I’m sure he’s going to think that I’m quite mad. Shall I tell him to make sure to stock up again, because of the shortages?’
‘Don’t tell anybody anything. The whole reason I want you to call Mr Parker is because he doesn’t know I work for Senator Jones. It’s important we don’t start a panic, otherwise everybody’s going to start stock-piling food and the shortage is going to be even worse.’
‘I see, dear. All right. Can I tell Mrs Kroger?’
‘Don’t tell anybody. I’ll call you later.’
Peter banged the phone down. Karen, biting her lip, replaced her own receiver. She could scarcely believe that any of what she had heard was real. Surely, in a country like the United States, with all those newspapers and television stations, somebody would have realised what was happening and warned the public? Surely one man like Senator Jones couldn’t suppress the news so easily? Yet it seemed as if nobody really cared – as if reporters and politicians and government experts were all quite happy to take whatever they were told as the gospel truth, provided it was couched in reasonable-sounding language. Even the president had accepted Shearson Jones’s waffle about ‘cracking the problem wide open’, and ‘not anticipating a serious shortfall.’
Karen’s telephone light flashed again. She picked up the receiver and said, ‘Yes?’
‘Karen – can you try to get me Mr Ed Hardesty, at South Burlington Farm, near Wichita?’
‘Yes, Mr Kaiser. I won’t be a moment. I have one other call to make first.’
‘Okay, Karen. But don’t make it too long.’
‘No, Mr Kaiser.’
Karen pushed a button to get herself an outside line, and listened to the dialling tone for a moment. Then she punched out a number with a 218 code. The phone was answered almost immediately.
‘Mom?’ she said. ‘It’s Karen. Yes, it really is. I know. But, please. Mom, I’ve got something terribly important to tell you.’
Eight
As the sun set over South Burlington Farm, Ed and Willard and Dyson Kane stood waist-high amongst the blackened wheat, smoking in silence and watching the smoke drift diagonally across the decaying reaches of the south-eastern fields. Usually, smoking was totally forbidden in the crops, but now it didn’t matter any more, and they had lit up in the same way that Hitler’s staffhad all lit up, once the Führer was dead and the Third Reich was over for ever.
The Hughes helicopter rested a few yards away on a slight slope, white and clean and shining amidst all the oily and stinking devastation in the fields around it. A flock of birds wheeled and turned overhead.
Ed was tired and unshaven, dressed in jeans and a red plaid cowboy shirt. Beside him, Willard stood with his arms folded, his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, but his whole posture betraying how defeated he felt.
‘I just never saw anything like it,’ he said, after a while. ‘We didn’t even get the chance to try to fight back.’
Ed turned towards Dyson. ‘How much of the crop do you think we’ve lost up to now?’ he asked him. ‘Sixty, seventy per cent?’
‘Hard to tell exactly,’ said Dyson. ‘But I’d say near on eighty. There won’t be anything worth saving by the weekend.’
‘Did you have any luck with Senator Jones?’ asked Willard.
‘I had a bad connection. He’s supposed to be calling me back. To tell you the truth, I feel pretty embarrassed about using that wheat-dumping scandal against him.’
‘I shouldn’t,’ said Willard. ‘He’d use it against you, if you were in his place, and he were in yours. The way I see it, this farm is pretty damned important to you, and if you want to keep it going, then you’re going to have to play the same dirty tricks as everybody else.’
Dyson Kane hunkered down, and picked one of the rotten ears of wheat. The smell in the wind was sour and unpleasant, but by now they’d grown almost used to it.
‘You know something?’ Dyson said. ‘These crops don’t rustle any more. It doesn’t even sound like summer. In summer, that’s all you ever hear, usually, out in the fields. That rustling sound, of ripe wheat.’
‘Dr Benson thinks it’s a Soviet conspiracy,’ said Ed. ‘He reckons the Communists found a way to poison our wheat when we weren’t looking.’
Willard shook his head. ‘I don’t think poor old Dr Benson has ever been quite the same since he dried out. He used to see giant ladybugs, when he had the DTs. Now, he thinks everybody’s plotting to overthrow Kansas.’
‘There’s no way that anybody could have spoiled this kind of acreage without spraying,’ said Dyson. ‘And if you’re going to spray poison, or something of that kind, you have to do it real low. Nobody could have flown over this farm without my knowing about it. Not that low.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Ed. ‘I think Dr Benson’s probably right when he says it’s some kind of a virus, but it looks natural to me. I just hope he finds some way of curing it.’
‘You’re going to burn these fields?’ asked Willard.
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you’re going to have to. It looks like a pretty smoky finish to the summer. I’m sorry.’
Ed nodded. ‘I’ll talk to the senator one more time, just to make sure that nobody wants to look the crop over before they start paying out compensation. Then I guess we’ll set it all alight.’
The radio-telephone in the helicopter bleeped. Dyson walked over to it and picked it up.
‘Yes. Yes, he’s here. Ed, it’s for you. Somebody from Senator Jones’s office.’
Ed took the receiver, covered one ear with his hand to cut out the sound of the breeze, and said, ‘Ed Hardesty speaking.’
‘Mr Hardesty? Hi, my name’s Peter Kaiser. May I call you Ed? It seems from what the senator’s been telling me that we could all be working together quite soon.’
‘Did you get my message about the virus?’ asked Ed. ‘Sure. We told Senator Jones straight away. The only trouble is, Ed, that we’ve been doing some pretty thorough tests on the wheat right here in Washington, at the Department of Agriculture’s own laboratories, and we’re not at all sure the cause is a virus at all.’
‘Are you close to finding out what it is?’
‘Oh, yes. Right on the brink. But we don’t want to give out any public releases on the blight until we have a more definitive idea. If we said it was a virus, you see, it could cause unnecessary panic; and we might find that farmers were destroying their crops without any real justification. It’s one of those situations we have to handle with kid gloves, if you know what I mean.’
‘Dr Benson is convinced it’s a virus,’ said Ed. ‘What’s more, he thinks all these other blights are caused by different versions of the same basic infection.’
‘We-e-ell,’ said Peter Kaiser, ‘without being unfair. Dr Benson has pretty limited facilities over at Wichita, compared with what we have here, and he isn’t exactly renowned for his personal stability. Don’t get me wrong. He’s a talented man. But the last thing we need in a serious situation like this is for anybody to jump to conclusions.’ Ed said, ‘Okay. I get your point. Did Senator Jones get very far with his ideas for federal compensation?’
‘Haven’t you been watching the television news today?’
‘Only once. I’ve been tied up here at the farm for most of the afternoon.’
‘In that case,’ said Peter, ‘I’m happy to be the first to tell you that we’ve already set up a Kansas Wheat Farmers’ Blight Crisis Appeal, legal and official and ready to roll in the money. We have full backing from
some really heavyweight people in the Senate, including the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, and the whole structure’s been arranged by one of Washington’s top lawyers.’
Ed looked towards Willard and pulled an impressed face. ‘I didn’t know Shearson Jones could work so fast,’ he told Peter.
Peter gave a synthetic chuckle. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘outward appearances can be deceptive. He’s overweight, sure. But I can tell you one thing. When any single person in Kansas of any political persuasion is threatened by fire, or drought, or crime, or you name it, Shearson Jones can be pretty damned nimble on his feet. He’s a caring man, Mr Hardesty, whatever people say about him. WTiy, here at the office, behind his back, they call him the Fat Samaritan.’ Ed frowned. ‘Is he going to be able to persuade Congress to vote the fund any money?’
‘Oh, I’m sure,’ said Peter. ‘But meanwhile we’ve been taking pledges from industry. So far today we’ve chalked up nearly three million dollars, and we’re sure we’ll get more.’
‘Well, I’m amazed,’ said Ed. ‘And pleased, too. I thought politicians were all foot-dragging and red tape.’
‘Not Shearson Jones,’ Peter told him. ‘And I want to assure you of something else, too. As soon as the first donations to the Blight Crisis Appeal have cleared the bank, they’ll be paid straight out. No waiting, and no arguments. All you’ll have to do is satisfy the appeal board that your farm meets the legal requirements for compensation – which I’m quite sure that yours does – and you’ll be eligible for your share of the three million.’
‘I’m gratified to hear it,’ said Ed.
‘I’m gratified you’re gratified,’ Peter told him. ‘You see, Senator Jones believes that we’ll be able to collect a lot more money for the appeal if we have a figurehead – one person who represents the whole plight of every unfortunate farmer. Somebody who can talk on television about what’s happened in Kansas, and how difficult life can be on a wheat farm. Somebody who represents the best in American farming. A young man, struggling against the weather, and fluctuating prices, just to keep up the traditions that made this country what it is today.’
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