It was a dry, hot, windy morning. The sky over southern Kansas was already the odd mauvish colour of burned notepaper. Ed drove Season and Sally along Highway 54 into Wichita with the air-conditioning in his Caprice stationwagon right down to freeze. Every time he glanced in his rear-view mirror he could see the three Gucci suitcases packed in the back, with the tags that read LAX.
Season was wearing a smart camel-coloured suit, and her hair was tied back with a scarf. Sally had brought along her favourite dolly, a floppy and unsavoury rag creature with bright pink hair. Its name was Merry, for reasons that Ed and Season had never quite managed to understand.
They didn’t talk much. There wasn’t very much to say. He had tried this morning to ask her not to go, as they lay – side by side in their soft curtained bed; but she had kissed him, and said that it was necessary for her own survival. He had made love to her, more doggedly than passionately, and afterwards she had lain there amongst the rose-patterned sheets and smiled at him gently, but still without changing her mind. He knew she had to go, too. She needed to remind herself that Kingman County wasn’t the whole world, and that South Burlington wasn’t the sum of her life and her intelligence.
All he had said to her over breakfast was, ‘You’ll come back, won’t you, when you’ve made up your mind?’
Sally had looked up from her bowl of Grape Nuts, puzzled. Season had touched her lips with her fingertip to tell Ed that he shouldn’t say any more. But a few minutes later, she had said, gently, ‘You know I will.’
The early sun had shone through the window across the breakfast table, and with Dilys bustling at the stove in her gingham apron, the kitchen had taken on all the appearance of one of those happy 1950s television series, the ones where hearty neighbours kept popping in through a swing door, and everybody ate heaps of bacon and sausage-links and wheatcakes, and never suffered anything worse than an occasional misunderstanding.
‘I’ll call you when we get there,’ said Season, as they approached Wichita Airport. A DC10 was making its approach over on their right and it flashed silver in the morning light before it sank towards the runway. The going-away smell of airplane fuel penetrated the car’s air-conditioning, and Ed suddenly felt very lonesome and even frightened, as if he would never see Season again. Not to hold anyway, and not to love.
He turned right into the airport, and drove them up to the terminal building. ‘I didn’t buy you anything to take with you,’ he said. ‘Do you want a book, a magazine, something like that?’
Season shook her head. ‘I believe I’ll have quite enough thinking to do. And Sally’s never flown over the Grand Canyon before. We’ll keep busy.’
He turned to her, and placed his hand over hers. ‘Well,’ he said hoarsely, ‘there’s one thing I’d like you to take with you.’
She looked at him, but didn’t say anything. He lowered his head, because somehow that made it easier to hold back his emotion. ‘I’d like you to take my love with you,’ he said, wishing the words didn’t sound so much like a Valentine card. ‘And I’d like you to take my best wishes for everything that you do. I love you, Season, and there ain’t two ways about it.’
She kissed him, and her lips were very warm, and she smelled of Joy. ‘I love you, too, Ed. Really dearly I do. And I’m going to miss you badly. But I know that when I get back, I’m going to have my head straightened out and everything’s going to be fine.’
‘Why don’t you come. Daddy?’ asked Sally. ‘You could take me swimming and everything, and Auntie Vee says we’ll go to the ocean.’
Ed turned in his seat and took her hand. ‘I’ve got to harvest all of our wheat, honey, or we won’t have any food to eat for the next year. But maybe I’ll be able to come next time.’
‘I love you. Daddy,’ said Sally. ‘And Merry loves you, too.’
Ed kissed her. ‘I love you, honey.’
He got out of the car. The day was roastingly hot, even though it was only ten o’clock, and the sun rippled off the sidewalk in corrugated waves. He opened the back of the stationwagon, and hefted out their cases. A sky-cap with a bright red face and prickly hair was waiting to collect them.
‘Los Angeles?’ the skycap asked.
Ed nodded. Then he went around to open the car doors for Season and Sally.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I won’t wait. I have an appointment with Dr Benson at the agricultural laboratory.’
Season held him close. ‘Goodbye, Ed,’ she said, and she was crying. She took hold of Sally’s hand and the two of them walked quickly across the sidewalk and into the reflecting doors of the terminal. Ed stood watching them go, and then he slowly took out his handkerchief and rubbed the sweat from the back of his neck, and maybe some of the tension, too. He climbed back into his car and started the motor.
For a moment, he closed his eyes.
He hadn’t said much to Season this morning about the wheat blight. It was a little worse, he’d admitted, but he was sure they could get it under control. What he hadn’t told her was that Willard had come knocking at the kitchen door at six-thirty in the morning, while Ed had been sitting at the table drinking his first cup of coffee of the day and reading the papers, and that Willard had already been out with Dyson Kane on a circular helicopter tour of the whole spread.
Willard had calculated that almost an eighth of their total wheat acreage had been blighted during the night, and that the disease was spreading even faster than before. If they didn’t find some way of curbing it by Monday or Tuesday, they were going to lose everything.
Ed had shown Willard the news story in the Kansas City Herald-Examiner. Considering how widespread the blight had been, and how many major Kansas farms had been hit, the coverage had seemed almost offhand. It had rated only a second lead on page three, and ‘Our Agricultural Desk’ had simply reported that ‘several Kansas wheat farmers have noticed an unidentified blight on their late crops’, while ‘Our Washington Bureau’ had remarked with distinct unconcern that ‘federal researchers are busy analysing the blight and working on new methods for bringing it under prompt control.’
In fact, Ed had been so disturbed by the paucity of the news story that he had already called Walter Klugman, who owned the neighbouring Penalosa Farm, and checked if his crops were just as seriously affected.
‘Oh, you bet,’ Walter had said. ‘If anything, mine’s worse than yours. I’ve got thirty per cent of my wheat crop turned rotten, and if the state don’t come up with something soon. I’m going to burn the whole damned spread.’
Even when Ed and Willard had turned on the television for the early-morning news, the stories about the wheat blight had been dismissive and superficial. ‘Not a good year for the wheat farmers of Kansas and North Dakota,’ ABC had reported. ‘They’re bothered by a mystery disease which is turning hundreds of acres of harvest-ready crops into black, stinking decay. But federal scientists are said to have the problem in hand, and there’s also news that Kansas Senator Shearson Jones, known for years as the “Farmers’ Friend”, is planning on setting up an appeal fund to help those farmers who might face financial hardship because of the blight.’
Willard, helping himself to a cup of coffee, had shaken his head and whistled. ‘Financial hardship? The way things are going, we’re all going to be wiped out.’
As he drove over the Wichita Valley Flood Control gully, and along Douglas Avenue to the civic centre, Ed tuned into the news on his car radio. But there was nothing at all about the blight – just some long-winded story about a teacher from Wellington who was trying to bring back compulsory prayers. ‘We’ve been without God for nigh on thirty years,’ she was saying. ‘It’s time we turned our faces back in his direction.’
Ed parked the stationwagon in the civic centre parking lot, and took his brown-tinted sunglasses out of the glove-box. Then he walked across the wide, glaring pedestrian precinct, until he reached the shiny office building which announced itself as the Kansas State Agricultural Laboratory – not only with a plaque of brushed stainless-steel, but with a bronze statue of a smiling family growing out of a giant ear of wheat.
Inside, it was cold, echoing, and smelled of polish. A girl receptionist with bright red lipstick and a Titian-tinted beehive hairstyle directed Ed to the ninth floor. He stood in the elevator next to a man in a white lab-coat who was carrying a cardboard box marked ‘Infected Rodents’ and humming Peace In The Valley. There were times when he agreed with Season about Kansas. If you came from New York, or any city larger than Cleveland, you could quite readily believe that the Kansas state mentality was solid cereal from ear to ear.
He walked along the ninth-floor corridor until he reached a half-open office door marked Dr Nils Benson, Head of Disease Control. He knocked.
Dr Benson was standing by the window, peering at a 35mm colour slide. He shouted, ‘Come in!’ very loudly, and then swung around on his heels to see who his visitor was. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘It’s Mr Hardesty, isn’t it? Mr Hardesty of South Burlington Farm.’
‘You came around at Christmas when I was having that seedling problem,’ said Ed. ‘How are you doing?’
Dr Benson shook his hand. He was a tall, sixtyish man with a marked stoop of the shoulders – mainly brought on by his chronic shortsightedness and his habit of attacking anything that interested him like a Greater Prairie Chicken. He wore large round eyeglasses, and his hair was fraying and white, but whenever he took his glasses off, he looked strangely boyish and young. It was common knowledge in Wichita that Dr Benson had lost his homely but vigorous wife to an interstate truck driver, and that for years he had suffered an alcoholic problem. Some of his unkinder colleagues called him ‘Booze Benson’.
‘Sit down,’ said Dr Benson, lifting a heap of Scientific Americans off his desk, hesitating a moment, and then dropping them on to the floor. The floor was already littered with stacks of alphabetical files, graph paper, magazines, books, and empty Kentucky Chicken boxes. On the walls there were federal information posters on the comparative effects of various fertilising agents.
‘You mind if I smoke?’ asked Ed, taking out one of his small cigars.
‘Why should I? Everybody’s entitled to kill themselves whichever way they want. I’ve got some early results for you, incidentally. We did some chemical and ultra-violet tests on those samples your fellow brought in, and it looks like we might be having some success.’
‘You know what it is?’
‘Well, not exactly. But we know what it isn’t.’
‘I see,’ said Ed. ‘And what isn’t it?’
‘Sit down,’ repeated Dr Benson. ‘Make yourself comfortable, at least.’
Ed, awkwardly, sat on the edge of a small bentwood chair that was already piled with newspaper cuttings and tom-open letters. Dr Benson picked up pieces of paper and flung them systematically into the air as if he were performing some arcane manufacturing process.
‘It isn’t powdery mildew,’ he said. ‘Nor any from of powdery mildew of any kind whatsoever. Erysithe graminis, that’s the technical name for it. And it’s not that. Which is quite a pity.’
‘Why is it a pity?’ asked Ed. ‘I thought you would have been relieved.’
‘Oh, no, I’m not relieved at all. If it had been powdery mildew, even in its worst form, we might have been able to spray for it. I’m not saying we could have done very much good, but it would have been better than nothing at all. As you know, federal regulations only give us the option of using sulphur, but I’m sure a little bit of political finagling could have given us an emergency exemption to use Vigil or something like that.’
Ed nodded. ‘My crops manager mentioned Vigil. Do you think it’s still worth trying to get a clearance to use it?’
Dr Benson stopped flinging paper, stared at Ed for a moment, and then shook his head. ‘Not worth it. Wouldn’t do any good at all. The tests we’ve done so far indicate some runaway kind of virus infection – not at all simple and not at all ordinary. In fact, if I didn’t think that it was completely impossible, I would hazard the opinion that it was a cultured virus, specially developed for the purpose of destroying cereal crops.’
Ed frowned as he lit his cigar. ‘What do you mean – “specially developed”?’
‘Genetically engineered,’ said Dr Benson. ‘Created by human intention in a virus laboratory, for the specific task of destroying our crops.’
‘That can’t make sense,’ said Ed. ‘How the hell would anybody be able to spread a virus all over Kansas and North Dakota without being noticed?’
Dr Benson took off his eyeglasses, and attempted to wipe them on a crumpled piece of notepaper. ‘My thoughts exactly. Kansas covers something like ninety-two thousand square miles. Nobody could go around to every wheat farm in the state with enough virus-carrying compound to cause this kind of damage within the space of a week or so, not by car. And if they tried to overfly all those farms in an airplane – well, they’d have to fly very low, and somebody would have noticed them.’
Ed moved the letters off his seat, laid them on the floor, and then sat back. ‘You’re presupposing that anybody would have a motive for destroying our crops.’
Dr Benson pulled a face. ‘Of course. But don’t you think the Soviet Union would be likely? “You held your wheat back from us, now we’re going to make sure that you can’t have it either.” Maybe I’m talking baloney. I don’t know. I’m not what people call a political animal.’
There was a difficult silence. Ed respected Dr Benson’s scientific talents, but he wasn’t at all sure about some of his wilder theories of political conspiracy. Last year, when Ed had asked him to evaluate a new boosted wheat fertiliser for him, Dr Benson had suggested that the compound was deliberately designed to weaken the growing crops in such a way that yet another of the same company’s strengthening agents would be needed. He saw a dark and elaborate plot behind everything.
Ed said, ‘All right – let’s leave aside any idea that this virus might have been spread deliberately – and let’s think about how serious it is.’
Dr Benson opened one of his desk drawers, and then slammed it shut again. Perhaps, a long time ago, that drawer had contained a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s very serious indeed. It’s a highly sophisticated, highly selective, highly virulent aerobic virus. It could have developed naturally, the same way that Chinese influenza develops naturally, or it could have been sprayed on your crops in some technically calculated way which released it when the weather conditions developed into what they are at the moment.’
‘Dr Benson—’ said Ed. ‘I’m not really interested in how the virus arrived on my farm. What I’m really interested in is how to get rid of it.’
‘That’s the whole point,’ said Dr Benson. ‘Although I may be proved wrong – and I hope to God that I am – there is no way of combating this virus until we find out whether it’s natural or manufactured – and who manufactured it. I find this terribly difficult to explain to anyone without a basic understanding of DNA and genetic structure – but these days it’s quite possible to develop viruses that are so complex and malignant that almost nothing can be done to destroy them.’
Ed ran his hand through his hair in exasperation. ‘And you think it’s the Russians?’ he asked, incredulously. ‘What did they do – drop it by satellite?’
Dr Benson shook his head violently. ‘No, no, they couldn’t have done that. If they released a virus from a satellite in orbit, the whole global atmosphere would wind up polluted, and every crop on Earth would die. And if they tried to send the virus to Earth in directional capsules, they would be spotted at once. I do read my news magazines, you know.’
‘So what did they do? Hang around at Lubeck’s Seed-Dressing Factory, and squirt a bit in every bag?’
Dr Benson held up his hands. ‘They might have done. Who knows? I’m only trying to make an educated guess.’
‘Well – let’s put it this way,’ said Ed, ‘if anybody ever tried to overfly South Burlington Farm and dump anything on my crops, I’d sure as hell get to know about it. I know there are miles of wheatland in Kansas where somebody could do it unnoticed. But right now we’re talking about farms that are well-kept and supervised. They’re just as badly hit as any place else.’
Dr Benson nodded. ‘You’re right, of course, and if this virus has been spread on purpose, then I just don’t know how. But I think you ought to know that in my opinion, based on the broad tests that I’ve been able to make so far, the virus is unstoppable. At least for this year’s harvest.’ Ed looked at him carefully. ‘You’re trying to tell me that I can’t do anything about it? That it’s going to wipe out my whole crop?’
‘I’m afraid it is.’
‘But you’ve sent samples to the federal agricultural research laboratory – surely they’ve got people there who can isolate it?’
Dr Benson smiled. ‘I wish they did. I only sent the samples there out of scientific protocol. They don’t have anyone there who knows as much about wheat as I do. If you want expertise, you should never go to the federal people. You should come here, or to the State Experimental Farm at Garden City. They’re doing some more tests for me, I might add – longer term stuff. Give them ten years, and they might discover what it is.’
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.