At last, someone answered. The safety inspector said, ‘Fred? It’s Nelson. Listen, I’m sorry to call you now, but I’ve got myself a red alert down here. No, nothing like that. We’ve got the City of Belleville here, loading up with wheat from number seven silo, and some from number eight. Well, one of the crew members came into Errol Marx’s office a few minutes ago with something they’d turned up in the wheat. I kind of recognised it – I mean. I’ve seen something like it before in science magazines so I checked it over with the geiger counter. Yes, right – and it went way off the scale. I’m sure of it, Fred, no mistakes possible. Right. Well – we’re going to need the fire department down here, I guess, and an ambulance, and someone who knows something about radiation. Sure, I’ll have the ship and the dockside sealed off right away.’

Herman interrupted him. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘what are you talking about, radioactive? You can’t seal my ship off. I have to sail in an hour.’

The safety inspector held his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. ‘There’s no way. No way at all. Your ship, your cargo, and most of your crew – especially you, because you’ve been handling that thing – you’re all highly radioactive. You’re not going any place tonight but hospital.’

‘Then what the hell is that thing? And what the hell’s it doing in the wheat?’

‘The second question I can’t answer,’ said the safety inspector. ‘As for the first question – well, I believe it’s some kind of radioactive isotope.’

‘Isotope?’ queried Herman, looking at Errol Marx.

Errol said, ‘Search me.’

*

During the evening, Donald Abbott and the bodies of his family were flown from the sanitarium at Cannon AFB to an isolation hospital on the outskirts of Phoenix, near Scottsdale. Donald Abbott was scarcely alive, and the medics at Cannon had given him only a one per cent chance of survival. ‘I never saw anyone so close to death without actually being dead,’ one of the doctors said later.

The first diagnosis was food poisoning, and when it was discovered that the Abbotts had spent the past two days with Mrs Abbott’s mother in Santa Fé, police and health officials were urgently sent to her home to check on the food that the family might have eaten – and on the safety of Mrs Abbott’s mother herself.

For two or three hours – until it was given a full medical clearance – the chief suspect was a tub of chocolate maple ice-cream, which only the Abbott family had eaten. Then the coroner’s report came in on the contents of Mrs Abbott’s stomach, and it was clear that she had consumed a frankfurter sausage and a quantity of bread sometime during Saturday evening. The coroner’s comment was bald and devastating. ‘The frankfurter sausage was analysed, and found to contain sufficient botulin to poison a horse.’