Грэм Мастертон - Famine

‘I told Dr Benson you were coming,’ said Ed, as he pulled out into the airport traffic. ‘He was out at Garden City last night, at the state experimental farm. Apparently they’ve been making some interesting progress on breaking down the blight.’

‘Really?’ said Della. ‘You told him I wanted to meet up with him as soon as possible?’

‘He says tomorrow evening. He has to go to Hays, too. That’s where the agricultural experimental station is located. He doubts if he’s going to be able to get back to Wichita until seven or eight.’

‘He won’t talk to the press before then?’ asked Della. She pulled down the sun-visor in front of her, and inspected her face in the mirror.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Ed. ‘Is it important?’

‘Senator Jones thinks it’s important,’ Della told him, fussing with her hair. ‘He doesn’t want anybody to panic about this blight’

‘Oh, no?’

Della glanced at him. The blight’s serious, but it’s not that serious. Senator Jones believes the most important priority is for Kansas farmers to get their compensation. If there’s a panic, it won’t help to bring in the contributions. That’s all.’

‘I see,’ said Ed.

‘I hope you do,’ Della told him. ‘Particularly since your whole livelihood depends on it.’

‘You’re trying to tell me what my livelihood depends on? If I gave up farming, I could quite easily go back to being an actuary.’

‘An actuary? Are you serious?’

‘Never more so. You used to be a newspaper reporter, didn’t you?’

‘I was until two days ago.’

‘Peter Kaiser said that Senator Jones had won you over to the cause of helping us Kansas farmers by the sheer emotion of his appeal. Is that right?’

Della shrugged. ‘You could call it sheer emotion.’

Ed brought the wagon to a halt at a red light. ‘What else could you call it?’ he asked her.

‘Influence,’ she said. ‘Senator Jones is a very influential man.’

‘Is he really serious about helping us? I mean – is this Blight Crisis Appeal genuine?’

‘Oh, yes. It’s genuine, all right.’

They headed out on Route 54 westwards, into Kingman County. The highway was almost deserted except for occasional trucks.

Ed said, ‘You come from Kansas?’

‘Oklahoma originally. I’m a one hundred per cent natural Okie.’

‘How come you got yourself mixed up with a man like Shearson Jones?’

She smiled. ‘Nobody gets themselves mixed up with Shearson Jones. If Shearson Jones wants to have you around, then he’ll have you around. If he doesn’t, you could no more get to see him than the Pope. Even the president doesn’t get to talk to Shearson Jones whenever he wants to.’

‘Sounds like a biggie.’

‘Oh, yes,’ grinned Della. ‘He’s a biggie, all right.’

The telephone rang in Peter Kaiser’s office. Without taking his eyes off the reports he was reading, Peter picked it up and said, ‘Yes?’

Karen’s voice told him, ‘It’s Professor Protter for you, from the Federal Laboratories.’

‘About time too,’ said Peter. ‘Put him through, will you?’

‘Yes, Mr Kaiser,’ said Karen, in a tone that only slightly reproved him for what had happened last night. She didn’t want to make him feel too bad after all. But his clumsy attempt at seduction couldn’t go completely without comment. He could easily have driven her back to her apartment, and tried to make a play for her there, instead of trying to scramble on top of her in the car. She had stopped petting in pull-offs when she was sixteen, and she had told him so.

She listened in to the telephone as Professor Protter said, ‘Peter? I’ve got some preliminary results for you.’

That’s excellent,’ said Peter. ‘What kept you?’

‘Nothing kept us,’ Professor Protter retorted, testily. ‘We’ve had a staff of ten people working on the samples all night. I don’t think you quite understand what’s involved in these tests.’

‘I understand that Senator Jones asked for the results urgently.’

‘Well, that’s all very fine. But Senator Jones doesn’t know one end of an electron microscope from the other.’

‘He does know who pays your salary. Professor. He also knows who used to pay your daughter’s salary. Now, what about these results?’

‘They’re not definite, by any means. Only conjecture, based on the broad outlines of what we’ve been able to discover so far.’

‘In other words, you’re not prepared to stand by what you say?’

‘In other words, Peter, they’re the best that scrupulous and conscientious scientists can do when they’re put under pressure by a politician whose motives are mainly financial.’

Peter Kaiser sighed. ‘All right, Professor. You can spare me the puritanical rhetoric. What have you managed to conjecture so far?’

‘The samples we were sent by Dr Benson in Kansas have almost certainly been affected by a species of crop virus. The virus has been isolated under the electron microscope, and although we’re not sure exactly what it is, or where it comes from, there isn’t any doubt that it’s extremely active and extremely dangerous to cereal crops. It can spread as quickly as the most virulent of human diseases, and we’re surprised that it didn’t sweep through the wheatfields in Kansas more quickly.’

‘You don’t know how it originated? Whether it was natural or not?’ asked Peter.

Professor Protter hummed for a moment in uncertainty. ‘I’d hate to commit myself,’ he said, ‘but several of the wheat samples from Kansas had traces of some thin gelatinous substance on them – partly decomposed. Professor Gulaski has been running several tests on it, and he thinks it could be some kind of base material in which the virus was carried, and sprayed on to the crops. He’s only guessing, of course, but one of his experiments indicates that the substance slowly breaks down under the influence of ultra-violet light.’

‘What are you trying to suggest?’ asked Peter. ‘This virus was sprayed on to the crops on purpose ?’

‘That’s a remote possibility, yes,’ Professor Protter told him. ‘Depending on how slowly the base substance was designed to deteriorate, it could have been sprayed sometime during the spring, when the first shoots of the wheat were coming up. Whoever did it could have easily prepared the gelatinous base according to the average number of hours of sunlight expected in Kansas, so that when the wheat was ripe, the virus broke out. It wouldn’t even have been necessary to spray every farm at the same time to have the virus break out simultaneously. All they had to do was alter the composition of the gelatine to break down more quickly, or more slowly, or whatever they wanted. Anyone with a reasonably expert knowledge of virology and the preparation of photographic emulsions could have done it.’

Peter sat back in his seat. ‘You know what this means, don’t you? You know what you’re saying?’

‘I fully understand all the implications of everything I’ve suggested,’ said Professor Protter. ‘But I must repeat that so far it’s only guesswork – and by my usual standards, pretty wild guesswork. We may still find that this gelatinous material is completely unconnected with the virus.’

‘What about the samples from Iowa? The corn, and the soybeans? And all that stuff they were supposed to be sending you from California?’

Professor Protter paused for a moment, while he consulted his notes. ‘We haven’t run tests on everything yet. We just haven’t had the time. But we’ve examined some grapes from Bakersfield, California, and there isn’t any question at all that they’ve been attacked by a similar species of virus.’