Dyson Kane suddenly said, ‘Jee-sus! Take a look at that!’ He angled the helicopter away from the track without waiting for Ed’s instructions, and took it out across the same stretch of field that Ed and Willard had visited the previous evening. Below them, Ed could make out the tracks of their Jeep through the wheat – but instead of the tracks running around the edge of the dark and blighted crops, they had now been overtaken by the darkness and swallowed up. Everywhere around, like a company of sad, arthritic widows, the rotting stalks hung their heads in the morning wind.

‘It’s spread,’ whispered Jack. ‘Fifty or sixty acres at least. Maybe more.’

Dyson took them low over the field, so that their down draught left a flurrying trail in the wheat. They were flying at sixty or seventy knots, but as Ed peered through the purple-tinted plexiglass ahead of them, it seemed as if the ocean of crops had been stained by the blight as far as he could see, and as far as they could fly. He opened the air-vent, and the cockpit of the helicopter was filled with the warm, sour stench of decaying wheat.

Willard said, ‘This disease sure knows how to eat up a crop, and that’s no mistake.’

Ed told Dyson, ‘Higher. Take her up higher. I want to see how far this stretches.’

The helicopter climbed into the shining sky. Ed slipped on his aviator sunglasses, and looked around in all directions. The dark stain on the wheat now spread all the way southwards from the north-western trail to the banks of the Mystic, in an irregular shape that roughly resembled the state of Idaho. Jack’s estimate of fifty or sixty acres was conservative. From up here, Ed would have guessed a hundred.

‘We’ve got ourselves a real bad one here, Ed,’ said Willard. ‘I think we’re going to have to dust, and dust quick.’

‘Even before we know what it is?’ asked Ed. ‘We could end up doing more damage with crop-protection compounds than the blight’s doing on its own.’

‘We could end up with eighty-five thousand acres of rot,’ retorted Willard.

Take it south,’ Ed told Dyson. ‘Let’s make a circuit round the whole farm, and see if there’s any more of this stuff.’

‘You bet,’ said Dyson, and the helicopter turned away from the blight-stained areas of wheat and beat its way noisily over the Mystic River and out across the silvery-golden stretches of South Burlington’s south-western acres.

‘What did Charlie Warburg have to say for himself?’ asked Jack, taking out a stick of gum.

‘He was pretty inconclusive,’ Ed replied. ‘He admits that all the loans we took out for equipment and farm facilities are covered by insurance, but he isn’t certain if an unknown blight is going to go down very well with the underwriters.’