Ed said, ‘I hope you know what you’re saying, Dr Benson. If I lose this crop, then the chances are that I’m going to lose the farm altogether. I had to borrow thousands of dollars this year. I had to work my butt off, until my marriage went to pieces. I had to get up at five in the morning and stay on my feet all day until ten at night.’
‘Farming’s a risky business,’ said Dr Benson. ‘It always has been, and it always will be.’
‘That’s my family farm!’ Ed told him, and his voice was quivering. ‘My daddy created that spread out of nothing! My daddy died for that farm, and I gave up everything outside of Kingman County! My career, my wife, my daughter – everything!’
Dr Benson said, ‘I’m sorry. I really am. But it doesn’t look as if you’re going to be the only one. I’ve had samples in from all over, and they all tell the same story. What’s more. I’ve been talking on the telephone to some of my friends in Des Moines, Iowa, and Corvallis, Oregon, and worst of all in Modesto, California.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Ed. ‘What are you talking about?’
Dr Benson opened and closed his desk drawer again. ‘The blight is appearing on all kinds of crops in all kinds of regions. Not just on wheat in the plains states. But on apples and pears and broccoli and peas and tomatoes and you name it. Every region is concerned about it, but so far it doesn’t appear to have spread widely enough for anyone in the Federal Department of Agriculture to have twigged on to what’s happening. So the grape growers lose a few table grapes. So the tomato growers lose a few bushels of tomatoes. Every farmer has his problems, and farming’s an industry with plenty of natural wastage.
‘But,’ said Dr Benson, walking across to the window and staring out at the shadowed courtyard below him, ‘all my conversations yesterday afternoon and early this morning with research staff in six states – just to ask for ideas to begin with, just to seek opinions – all my conversations seem to have led me to one very uncomfortable conclusion. Which is why I started wondering about a Soviet conspiracy. The one very uncomfortable conclusion is that all these crop disorders are caused by manifestations of the same basic virus. Maybe a slightly different version for celery. Maybe a specially high-powered one for potatoes. But all the same fundamental malignancy – all causing the same kind of effect. Blackness and decay and a rot that spreads like a forest fire.’
Ed could hardly believe what he was hearing. ‘You mean, all of these states are suffering the same sort of problem – and nobody’s taken an overview? Nobody’s realised that it’s the same thing?’
‘Why should they? It’s all happened in the space of a few days. Maybe a week or two at the most. And you have to remember that most state agricultural departments work in a very bureaucratic way. They have no reason to operate otherwise. It takes a long dime for one farmer’s complaint about a few blighted nectarines to filter its way through the office structure and then the research structure and finally arrive on some responsible officer’s desk, so that he can connect it with another farmer’s complaint about blighted celery. That’s if he ever connects it at all.’
Dr Benson turned around, and the light from the window made a crescent of reflected whiteness in his glasses. ‘You also have to remember that many of our agricultural research people aren’t exactly – well, to put it quite charitably – they aren’t exactly hotshots. The fellow I talked to in Modesto had examined twenty-eight samples of blighted fruit and vegetables, and he wasn’t even considering the possibility of a virus.’
‘Supposing he was right and you’re wrong?’ asked Ed. Dr Benson smiled. ‘I don’t think there’s any chance of that, Mr Hardesty. I may have my problems and I may have my reputation, but I’m the best damned agricultural scientist in the Middle West’
Ed rubbed his eyes. There was nicotine on his fingers, and it stung. ‘What are we going to do now?’ he asked. ‘What am I going to do?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Dr Benson, ‘but the first priority is to hand over all this information to the Department of Agriculture in Washington. Then – if we’re lucky, and they don’t shilly-shally too long – we might see some concerted action to find a preventive.’
‘More bureaucracy?’ asked Ed.
There’s nothing else that we can do, is there? I don’t have the facilities here to deal with a nationwide virus. And if you project the effect of this blight to its ultimate conclusion – well, it’s terrifying. We could survive the loss of one year’s wheat. We could survive the loss of one year’s corn. But everything? Fruit and vegetables and grain? We’d end up with a nation-wide famine.’
Ed reached into the pocket of his shirt. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘It so happens that my father was a close buddy of Senator Shearson Jones. In fact, I was talking to Jones on the telephone last night, trying to work out if I could get some extra compensation for the damage at South Burlington. I have some clout there – not much, but maybe enough to have him pull out some of the bureaucratic stops.’
‘Shearson Jones, huh?’ asked Dr Benson, with a grimace. ‘Not exactly my favourite representative of the people.’
‘Nor mine. But I think we’re going to have to pull whatever strings we have to hand, don’t you?’
‘I had a hell of an argument with Shearson Jones once,’ said Dr Benson, reflectively. ‘Have you ever been to his house out at Fall River? It’s an incredible place. Overlooks the lake. A friend of mine in the agricultural department told me it cost him one and a half million dollars.’
Dr Benson slowly shook his head at the memory. ‘There was a party out there for everybody in the state agricultural department who had helped him push through his special wheat prices programme. I was invited, too, because I did some background research. Well, I was drinking pretty heavily in those days, and when I saw Shearson Jones I just had to tell him what I thought of people who ran the farming economy from behind a desk, and got fat on the proceeds. I nearly lost my job. I certainly lost any chance of promotion. You don’t breathe whisky fumes over Senator Shearson Jones and tell him he’s an office-bound profiteer and get away with it. No, sir.’
Ed stood up. ‘I think I’ll call him all the same. If you’re right about this virus—’
‘Oh, I’m right about it. I wish I wasn’t. And you go ahead and call him. I don’t suppose he remembers one boozed-up Kansas has-been from five years ago.’
‘Can I reach you here?’ asked Ed.
Dr Benson checked his watch. ‘Sure. I have to drive out to Garden City late this afternoon, but you can catch me here until four.’
‘I’ll call you,’ said Ed.
He left the laboratory and stepped out into the hot mid-morning sunshine again. He paused by the statue to put on his sunglasses, and for a moment he stood looking at the smiling family who were sprouting out of the giant ear of wheat. Then he walked across the plaza to the parking-lot, and his shadow followed him like a nagging doubt that wouldn’t be shaken off.
Seven
In the cold air-conditioned offices on Independence Avenue which Senator Jones’s fifteen-strong staff probably knew better than their own houses and apartments, Peter Kaiser was completing the complicated groundwork for the Blight Crisis Appeal, and completing it fast. Throughout the windowless, fluorescent-lit warren of partitions, telephones were ringing and typewriters were nattering and girls were hurrying backwards and forwards with messages and memos and files.