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.’

The New Mexico Highway Patrol located Mary’s Diner within twenty-three minutes of being called from Phoenix. Mary, bewildered and shocked, confirmed that the Abbott family had eaten hotdogs there on Saturday evening. Eight airmen and a truck driver had also eaten there, but they had all chosen hamburgers, cheeseburgers, or reubenburgers. The Highway Patrol officers took away all the fresh meat from Mary’s Diner, sealed it in plastic, and sent it to Phoenix for tests.

On Monday morning, at 10.30 a.m., Donald Abbott died of botulism.

*

The death of Donald Abbott and his family had yet to make news, however. What was news, as Sunday became Monday, was that a Kansas wheat farmer had stood in front of the cameras on live coast-to-coast television and announced that Americans were facing a whole lot more than ‘a noticeable percentage of inconvenience’ from the crop blights which had struck all over the country. They were facing nothing less than the total destruction of their agricultural economy, and possible starvation.

The television people hadn’t pulled the plug on him, as Ed had expected them to. The director had recognised good hard news material when it was handed to him on a plate, and Shearson Jones had wrathfully decided it was better not to intervene. If he had ordered the transmission to be killed, he would only have given Ed’s comments more public credibility. But he had sat on his throne and glared in fury at Ed with a face like a malevolent blancmange.