Грэм Мастертон - Famine

She looked at him wide-eyed. ‘How do you know I’ve ever made love to Shearson Jones?’

‘Have you?’

She smiled at him. Not too broadly. She didn’t want to antagonise him. ‘Would it matter to you if I had?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’m being ridiculously jealous, the way most new lovers are.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Shearson Jones has plenty of enviable things in his life. Money, power, influence, and scores of women. But you have plenty of enviable things, too. A farm, and a beautiful wife, and a lovely daughter.’

‘What are you trying to do?’ Ed asked her. ‘Make me eat ashes for what we just did?’

‘How could I? We both wanted it and we both enjoyed it. And that’s as far as it has to go. No guilt. No recriminations. No nothing.’

‘Are you really that blasé?’ he wanted to know.

She shook her head. ‘I’m not blasé at all. If I was blasé. I’d cling on to you for all I was worth. I wouldn’t care about who you were, and what your farm meant to you. I wouldn’t care about your wife or your daughter.’

‘You don’t care now. Don’t give me that.’

‘I do care, as a matter of fact, because I think you’re somebody special. You’re a nice man. Good-looking, hard-working, and prepared to fight for what you believe in. I wanted to make love with you because I wanted to please you and I wanted to please myself. Now, it’s over.’

‘You mean we’re never going to make love again?’

‘How do I know? I thought it was up to the man to do all the chasing.’

He frowned, and rubbed the back of his hair with his towel. Then he grinned, and chuckled.

‘You know what you are, don’t you?’ he asked her.

‘What am I?’

‘You’re beautiful. That’s all. Just beautiful.’

On Friday morning, the president called a delayed news conference and informed the White House Press Corps that he had been holding ‘urgent and concerned meetings’ with the Department of Agriculture, and that he had also talked directly on the telephone with the governors of nine states, including Kansas, Iowa, Montana, Washington, California, and Florida. The damage to crops caused by various blights and diseases was ‘difficult to assess in terms of the nation’s foreseeable lunchpail’ – a phrase which he would later have cause to regret he had ever spoken, and not just for grammatical reasons, either. But most of the governors had believed that the blight situation was ‘containable’ and that food stocks were generally high enough to see them through until next year’s spring crops.

What none of the governors realised was that the blight crisis was already well beyond disaster level. Most of their state agricultural departments had sent samples of the mystifying disease to Washingon for assessment, but Washington had so far given them nothing in return except the words of Shearson Jones – that the federal researchers were ‘on the brink of solving the problem’ and that ‘the agricultural cavalry is on the way.’

By Friday, the truth was that the blight had spread so terrifyingly quickly over crops of all kinds that some kind of antidote treatment would have to be applied by the following Tuesday at the latest to save even fifty per cent of the nation’s expected food production. And despite the reassuring words of Shearson Jones – on which the state governors had based their opinion that the situation was reasonably under control – there was no chance at all that an antidote could be manufactured in sufficient quantities to meet that deadline, even if an antidote were discovered at all.

The media, too, had been lulled into thinking that the blight story was nothing more than a passing problem – like a hurricane, or a snowstorm. It was beyond the imagination of most newspaper and television editors to interpret American life as anything more than a series of transitory crises – headlines that were fresh one day and stale the next. They still hadn’t been able to grasp that the blight could irrevocably alter the whole structure of western society in the time it usually took for the average American to work up an appetite for his next meal. Shearson Jones said nothing to disabuse them, and for lunch on Friday he ate turtle soup, two roasted squab, and a peach crab lantern.

On Friday afternoon, CBS News reported in a special bulletin that the president was now ‘carefully optimistic’ about the national shortfall in food production. Senator Shearson Jones was going to Kansas for the week-end, and he would make a full broadcast about the crisis on Sunday night, when he had been able to judge the effects of the blight first-hand.

Early on Friday evening, a California wine grower went out into his blighted vineyard in the Napa Valley and blew most of his own head off with a 12-bore shotgun. His distraught wife told police that they had struggled for fifteen years to cultivate their own distinctive wines, and that this year had been ‘make or break’ year for their winery.

In Washington, the Federal Crop Insurance Programme announced that ‘very careful screening’ would have to be given to claims for blighted crops. It was possible that claims would be so heavy this year that the programme would not be able to meet all of them out of its own resources.

In Washburn, North Dakota, a farmer called his local radio station to say that the crop blight was caused by ‘bacteria from the moon rocks.’ All the moon rocks should be gathered up at once and fired back into space he insisted.

In Georgetown, shortly after six o’clock, Shearson Jones’s telephone rang, and Billy, his manservant, went to answer it.

It was Peter Kaiser. He wanted to know if Shearson was still on schedule for the nine o’clock flight from Dulles to Wichita Mid-Continent Airport. Shearson had just come out of the shower, and he was wrapped in a silk Chinese robe with an electric-blue dragon twisting its way around it. He was smoking a large cigar and he smelled of Signoricci II.

‘I’ll be there,’ he told Peter Kaiser. ‘Barring an act of God, or an unforeseeable disaster.’

‘What about a foreseeable lunchpail?’ asked Peter Kaiser.

Shearson chuckled. ‘Wasn’t that the worst speech ever? I’m surprised the TV people haven’t picked it up already. If we didn’t have this Blight Crisis Appeal going, I’d have gone right in there and torn it to shreds myself. A chicken in every pot, and a mirage in every lunchpail. How that stuffed dummy ever got to be president is beyond me.’

‘He was voted in,’ said Peter.

‘No, he wasn’t. His opponents were voted out. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about him. Tell me how the fund’s going.’

Peter paused as he shuffled through his accounts. Eventually, he said, ‘As of this afternoon, when the banks closed, we had seven million dollars already credited to the Blight Crisis account by special clearance. There were still two million dollars outstanding, and the bank doesn’t expect that money to be through until Tuesday or Wednesday.’

‘What about the Michigan Tractor contribution?’

‘That could take longer. You know what they’re like. Their board hardly ever agrees to meet in emergency session; and when they do, they’ve got five major subsidiaries to take into account. We’ll be lucky if we get their cheque for a week, maybe longer.’

‘But they’ve offered us two million.’

‘I know. Senator. That’s why they’re taking so long about it.’

‘Damn,’ breathed Shearson. ‘I don’t know how much longer we can keep this whole balloon flying. Seven million is a hell of a lot less than I was counting on. And we’re going to lose a million at least in administrative expenses and commissions.’