“You have an understanding of what I was trying to do,” Turalin lied.
“I submit to you, Comrade Turalin, that the facts, as we have come to know them yesterday and today, simply do not support the third phase of your scheme.”
“I see,” Turalin said noncomittally.
“What Comrade Brezhnev would like, then, is a clear explanation.”
Turalin laughed again. He moved over to the table and stubbed out his cigarette.
“Don’t be a fool,” Shumayev hissed. “In less than five minutes you will be marched out of here and executed. Have you no concern for the welfare of your country?”
“None,” Turalin snapped. His hands shot out and grabbed Shumayev by the throat. The man’s eyes bulged; almost instantly his face began to turn purple.
Actually, it didn’t matter one whit whether or not the entire world knew of the ultimate plan. One part of Turalin’s demented mind understood that. Turalin didn’t care.
Shumayev was beating on Turalin with his fists. In an effort to avoid the blows, Turalin lost his balance, and both men fell to the floor.
Bormett had done what he was supposed to do. Although Turalin had heard nothing since the initial green light, he could envision the damage being done out there. Once the BTP-12 had been sprayed on the field, on any field, there was nothing that would stop its rapid spread. Across an entire continent.
Someone was at the door, and Turalin could hear the lock turning, but Shumayev’s face was almost blue-black now and his tongue protruded grotesquely from his mouth.
The corn crop across America was composed of half a dozen hybrid varieties. BTP-12 attacked them all. A natural strain would have been immune, but not the hybrids.
Someone was shouting behind him, and then there was a thunderclap in his head, and everything began to go dark.
But that didn’t matter, either. He had won. After all, he had won.
THE VALLEY OF THE DYING STARS
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and — sans End!
It was a few minutes after three in the morning, and Michael McCandless was dead tired. His eyes felt as if there was sand in the sockets, and his mouth tasted like a dirty old sock. He had come down to TELEMETRY AND ANALYSIS around ten last night. Now he sat at one of the monitor consoles, sipping coffee as he looked across at the satellite display maps.
The tracking chart showed that SPEC–IV was coming up over Novosibirsk. Something new had been added to the display. Infrared and heat-sensing equipment aboard the satellite, hundreds of miles above the Soviet farms, had been switched on. Vast areas of farmlands showed up bright pink, the cooler mountains in dark blue.
“Heat,” the chief analyst, Joe DiRenzo, had explained when they first began noticing a change. “Certain forms of root rot, stem rust, and other crop disorders produce abnormal amounts of heat. We’re picking it up as pink.”
That had been one week ago. Then the pink areas had been confined to a small corner of the Ust-Urt Plateau. But all through the week they had spread, like some insidious monster creeping across the land.
“No chance of a mistake here, Joe?” McCandless had asked hopefully.
“I’m afraid not. We showed Williams the heat traces. He was the one who came up with the enhancement idea. We took the heat readings of normal crops and compared them, in the computer, with what we’re coming up with over central Europe. There is no mistake.”
“The temperature difference has to be minute,” McCandless argued, even though he knew he was beating a dead horse. But he felt he owed the President an explanation.
“In each plant, yes, the temperature rise is minute,” DiRenzo said. “But cumulatively, over tens and hundreds of thousands of square miles, our instruments can easily detect it.”
All week they had watched the pink spread, until there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that they were witnessing a complete failure of the Soviet wheat crop.
Coincidence? McCandless wondered. There had been no operation by the Central Intelligence Agency to damage the Soviet crop, he was one hundred percent sure of that. He and General Lycoming had told the President so, as well.
“But how about a Chinese operation? Or a British deal? Or some other independent?” The President had asked yesterday. “Christ, this could end up in a war.”
Gene Wilson, who was head of the Department of Agriculture at the University of Illinois, and who had worked on government analysis projects in the past, had sat forward. They were in the Cabinet room. “From the information I’d been given — if it’s accurate — I’d say their problems were foreseeable.”
“Could you be more specific, Gene?” the President had asked. He had looked very old; all used up. Everyone in the room had been concerned that he would have a heart attack in the middle of all this.
“Inadequate soil preparation, for one. And a general lack of chemical pesticides and blight inhibitors,” Wilson said. He looked around, taking the pipe out of his mouth. “They may have had the hybrid seed, and certainly they have the land. But they simply have not committed the money they need for proper chemical farming.”
“Then you suspect their entire crop will fail?” Lundgren had broken in, incredulously.
Wilson had turned to him. “Hard to say, Curtis. But if I had to give an educated guess, I’d have to say yes. A major portion of the Soviet wheat crop will fail, and a lot of the corn as well.”
He had leaned forward for emphasis. “It’s not like our problem, one of an airborne bacterial organism spreading on the wind. With the Soviets it’s simply lack of pesticides. A lack of treatment across the board is producing similar results across the board.”
Everyone in the room was silent for a long time, all eyes on the President, who finally nodded. “We’re going to have to come up with a solution, of course,” he said.
“We have the money,” McCandless said. “We can buy the grain.”
“Where?” the President asked. “We have to keep our wheat to start to compensate for the failure of our corn.”
“That’s a question better asked of someone like Newman,” Lundgren suggested. Everyone looked at him. “After all, he was right in the middle of all this from the beginning. He was the one dealing with the Russians.”
“He is a grain merchant,” McCandless said hopefully.
“One of the best,” Lundgren said.
“That may be true, gentlemen,” the President said, “but where the hell is he going to get the grain?”
30
The Newman Company 707 touched down for a landing at Washington’s National Airport, its golden flanks and red twin-eagle logo on the tail flashing in the sun. Near the end of the runway, the pilot expertly turned the big plane around and brought it down the taxiway toward the business aviation terminal.