‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m checking.’

The safety inspector switched the geiger counter on. Immediately, without him having to hold it anywhere near the black baton, it began to click as loudly and wildly as a migration of locusts.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said the safety inspector, switching it off. ‘What’s wrong?’ demanded Herman. ‘What is that thing? What goes on here?’

The safety inspector didn’t answer him. Instead, he picked up Errol Marx’s telephone and dialled a number. Errol glanced at Herman and shrugged as the safety inspector waited to get through. They both watched him biting his lips in anxiety.

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.