I’m a Kansas wheat farmer. You’ve just heard Senator Shearson Jones asking for help on our behalf. All I want to say is that in Kansas we’re not the kind to go begging. We wouldn’t be asking for your assistance if we hadn’t been struck by the worst natural crop disaster for nigh on forty years. It’s hit us hard, and it’s hit us fast, and there was no way in the world we could have stopped it.

I want you to contribute to the Kansas Blight Crisis Appeal because my fellow wheat farmers and I want to go on growing wheat for this great country of ours. Every dollar you give will be sowed in the Kansas soil like a seed, and out of it we’ll be able to harvest a new economic strength and fine cereal foods for future generations of Americans.

I give you this personal promise. We’re tough, hardworking people. We don’t normally ask for handouts. And with the donation you send us, we’ll work ten times as hard as usual to make sure that we get back on our feet again fast. Thank you for listening. My name’s Ed Hardesty.

‘This is gibberish,’ said Ed, as the lighting technician came across the floor and tilted his head slightly to one side.

‘Face that way,’ said the technician. ‘If you face the way you were, your nose looks shapeless.’

‘If I face the other way, I can’t read the gibberish.’

‘You may think it’s gibberish,’ said the director. ‘But if you write sense for television, it comes out sounding weird. The first criterion is it has to sound like sense. Whether it is or not, that’s irrelevant.’

‘All right,’ said Ed. He had promised himself that he wouldn’t create any difficulties. If he created difficulties, they might not ask him to speak on the broadcast. The lighting technician switched off the spots, and he saw swimming coloured shapes in front of his eyes.

A few minutes before air time, Shearson Jones appeared, wearing a dark grey suit that would have swamped Orson Welles. He lowered himself carefully into a leather-backed throne of a chair, and the make-up lady fussed around him and mopped away the perspiration which had popped out on his forehead and around his mouth.

‘These lights are goddamned hot,’ he complained. ‘I feel like I’m losing pounds, just sitting here.’

Ed waited in the cool and the shadow behind the lights. He watched quietly as the television people straightened Shearson’s lapels, and shifted a potted yucca a few inches to the left, so that it wouldn’t look as if it was growing out of Shearson’s head. He was so tense and intent on what was going on that he didn’t notice Della approach him from behind until she put her arm around him.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Are you nervous?’