Грэм Мастертон: Famine

Willard said, ‘This disease sure knows how to eat up a crop, and that’s no mistake.’

Ed told Dyson, ‘Higher. Take her up higher. I want to see how far this stretches.’

The helicopter climbed into the shining sky. Ed slipped on his aviator sunglasses, and looked around in all directions. The dark stain on the wheat now spread all the way southwards from the north-western trail to the banks of the Mystic, in an irregular shape that roughly resembled the state of Idaho. Jack’s estimate of fifty or sixty acres was conservative. From up here, Ed would have guessed a hundred.

‘We’ve got ourselves a real bad one here, Ed,’ said Willard. ‘I think we’re going to have to dust, and dust quick.’

‘Even before we know what it is?’ asked Ed. ‘We could end up doing more damage with crop-protection compounds than the blight’s doing on its own.’

‘We could end up with eighty-five thousand acres of rot,’ retorted Willard.

Take it south,’ Ed told Dyson. ‘Let’s make a circuit round the whole farm, and see if there’s any more of this stuff.’

‘You bet,’ said Dyson, and the helicopter turned away from the blight-stained areas of wheat and beat its way noisily over the Mystic River and out across the silvery-golden stretches of South Burlington’s south-western acres.

‘What did Charlie Warburg have to say for himself?’ asked Jack, taking out a stick of gum.

‘He was pretty inconclusive,’ Ed replied. ‘He admits that all the loans we took out for equipment and farm facilities are covered by insurance, but he isn’t certain if an unknown blight is going to go down very well with the underwriters.’

‘It isn’t going down very well with me, either,’ said Willard, caustically.

Ed said, ‘The whole crop’s protected, of course, under the Federal Crop Insurance Programme. That’s as long as we can convince them that this blight is officially a peril of nature, like a drought, or a hailstorm. But all they can do under the law is compensate us for the cost of putting in the crop. They can’t pay us for any profits we might have made.’

Dyson looked out across the farm. ‘Looks like your first year at South Burlington won’t be too happy, then. All work and no profit.’

Ed nodded. ‘It could be worse than that. If we can’t isolate this blight, and find out how to lick it, then I daren’t plant again next year.’

Willard leaned forward in his seat. ‘With respect, Ed, have you tried to think what your Daddy might have done, under the same circumstances?’

‘I’m not my daddy, Willard.’

‘No, I know you’re not. I don’t expect you to be. But your daddy was never averse to calling on his friends, whenever he needed a helping hand, just like his friends were never averse to calling on him.’

‘You’re trying to tell me something, aren’t you?’ said Ed, raising his voice above the roaring of the helicopter’s motor.

‘I’m trying to suggest something,’ said Willard. ‘I’m trying to suggest that when we get down, you might put in a call to Senator Shearson Jones.’

‘Shearson Jones? That old twister?’

Willard shrugged. ‘He may be a twister, but he’s got himself some pretty powerful friends in the Department of Agriculture. What’s more, when your daddy died, he still owed your daddy for two notable favours, one of which was covering up for him over that wheat-dumping scandal in seventy-eight.’

‘Why should Shearson Jones still think he owes this family anything now that Dad’s dead?’

Willard grinned. ‘Because this family still remembers, that’s why. And as long as there’s just one Hardesty around who knows what the upright and honest Senator Jones tried to do with a hundred and forty-two thousand tons of best Kansas grain, then the upright and honest Senator Jones is going to continue to smile whenever a Hardesty asks him to.’

‘That sounds like blackmail to me,’ said Ed.

Willard grinned. ‘You might call it blackmail in New York City. Here in Kansas we call it mutual assistance.’

‘Hm,’ said Ed.

‘You don’t believe me?’ asked Willard. ‘You call him when you get back, and see if I’m not speaking the truth. You ask Senator Jones if the Department of Agriculture maybe can’t find some extra compensation for the victims of new and unusual crop diseases.’

‘Willard,’ said Ed, ‘you should have been a politician, not a farmer.’

‘Being a farmer and being a politician are one and the same kind of talent,’ said Willard. ‘Everything you do, you do by careful planting, and careful fertilisation, and watching and waiting – so that when the right moment arrives, you can go shhhklukk! and the ripe ears of wheat fall straight in your hand.’

Jack suddenly frowned. ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘Look – up ahead there. Just over to the right.’

Ed turned in his seat. Far in the distance, maybe three miles away, he thought he could make out a shadow on the wheat. A brown, irregular stain that covered five or six acres at least.

‘Well, I’m damned,’ said Willard. ‘There’s more of it.’ The helicopter banked in a wide circle around the field, and approached the stain from the south-west. There was no question about it. The blight had spread here, too – almost five miles to the south of the first outbreak. Ed told Dyson to hover by the edge of the dark area while he took a long look at it. Dust and wheat flew up all around them, but Ed could see for himself that the blight was creeping from one stalk to another, from one acre to the next, and that only quick and decisive action was going to save South Burlington from the most disastrous crop in its entire history. That was if any action could save it at all.

‘Okay,’ Ed told Dyson at last. ‘Let’s go check the eastern acres.’

It took them until two o’clock in the afternoon to make a thorough airborne check of the whole farm. By the time Dyson brought the helicopter back into the pasture behind the farmhouse, they had counted seven major areas of blight, and three smaller outbreaks.

The helicopter settled on the grass and the rotor blades whistled slower and slower. Ed opened the door and climbed out, followed by Jack and Willard.

‘Well,’ said Jack, cleaning his glasses on his shirt-tail. ‘What are we going to do now?’

Ed said, ‘I don’t know. Nothing, right now. First of all I want to hear what Dr Benson’s got to say.’

‘And then you’ll call the senator?’ asked Willard.

Ed glanced at him. Willard was brushing his moustache with his fingers and looking exaggeratedly innocent.

‘I may,’ Ed told him. ‘Just to make his acquaintance.’

‘Okay,’ said Willard. ‘I’ll make the call to Dr Benson, if you like, and see if he has any ideas yet. I can reach you at the house?’

‘Yes. I should be there for most of the afternoon.’

Ed walked across the pasture, vaulted the split-rail fence, and made his way around to the front of the house. It was a neat, well-proportioned house, with white carved balconies and shuttered dormer windows and a shingle roof that sloped all the way down to the roof of the front verandah. It didn’t look like the kind of house that Dan Hardesty would have chosen for himself, but only recently Ed had discovered that it wasn’t. An early partner of his father’s called Ted Zacharias had constructed it, and sold it to his father along with twenty thousand acres of arable land. Ed hadn’t been surprised by the discovery: his father had always been a man of business, not of taste.

As Ed crossed the yard, he saw the grey Cadillac Seville parked in front of the steps, and the buff-uniformed chauffeur leaning against it smoking a cigarette. His mother was here. He rubbed the muscles at the back of his neck as he walked through the verandah and opened the gentian-blue front door. His mother always gave him a feeling of suppressed tension, and it sometimes took Season an hour of gentle talk and a massage to calm him down after the old lady had gone.