Famine

by Graham Masterton

  ‘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 ha
d 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.

  Seven

  In the cold air-conditioned offices on Independence Avenue which Senator Jones’s fifteen-strong staff probably knew better than their own houses and apartments, Peter Kaiser was completing the complicated groundwork for the Blight Crisis Appeal, and completing it fast. Throughout the windowless, fluorescent-lit warren of partitions, telephones were ringing and typewriters were nattering and girls were hurrying backwards and forwards with messages and memos and files.

  Peter Kaiser was tall, black-haired, and good-looking if you liked men who wore permanent-press suits and striped ties and grinned a lot. His friends said he resembled George Hamilton. He had been a promising junior in the early days of the first Nixon administration, and it showed. He still believed that Nixon could make a comeback. Pierre Trudeau had, Mrs Indira Gandhi had – why not the most competent and misunderstood president of all time?

  On Independence Avenue, Peter was known as ‘The Machine’. He was never inspired, and rarely original, but once Shearson Jones had set him a task, he went through it like something inhuman. Nobody ever saw him eat in the office, although he grudgingly permitted the rest of the staff to send out for Big Macs and shakes when they had to work through their lunch-hour; and Karen Fortunoff, one of the prettier and wittier secretaries, said she had once seen him take a covert swig from her can of typewriter oil.

  The only sign of real life which Peter ever exhibited was when he touched the girls’ bottoms – always slyly, and always quasi-accidentally, so they were never absolutely sure if he meant it or not. He dated one or two of the girls occasionally, but his affairs rarely lasted. One girl had complained that he was ‘all boxed roses, Frank Sinatra mood music, and fumbles under the table.’

  These days, Peter lived with his sixty-two-year-old mother in a stuffy, high-ceilinged apartment in the old Wellington Hotel. Or rat
her he slept there: like most of his staff, he spent most of his waking hours in the office, particularly when there was a panic project on, like the Blight Crisis Appeal.

  During the morning, Peter had called Joe Dasgupta, the brilliant and expensive Indian constitutional lawyer, and Joe Dasgupta was already working on a legal structure for the fund and considering how it should be registered. Peter had also called Fred Newman, the chairman of the Kansas Wheat Growers’ Association, at his home in Palm Springs. So far, Fred Newman’s own farm had suffered little damage, and he agreed with Peter Kaiser that the financial interests of Kansas farmers would best be served by ‘soft-pedalling the blight, media-wise’. He also accepted Peter Kaiser’s invitation to act as expert adviser to the Blight Crisis Appeal, in return for ‘necessary expenses’. Shearson Jones had recognised the importance of having Fred Newman attached to the fund from the beginning, since most of the suitcase farmers who owned land in Kansas were strong Newman supporters.

  Fred Newman had always argued that ‘Just because a man doesn’t actually dig the soil with his own bare hands, that doesn’t mean his heart isn’t in farming,’ and that sentiment had won him the votes of almost every wheat grower who preferred to spend fifty weeks of every year in New York or Los Angeles – in fact, anywhere except out in tedious Kansas, amongst all that tiresome wheat.

  While Peter Kaiser had been making those calls, his staff of eleven girls had been canvassing major industries all over the country – particularly those industries connected with farming, farm machinery, fertilisers, and food transportation. By lunchtime, they had rustled up pledges of more than five million dollars in contributions, and by mid-afternoon, after CBS and ABC news had both run stories on the Kansas wheat blight, with serial footage of the blackened crops, they had jumped to eight million dollars, all tax deductible.