‘But if we find an antidote, and announce it publicly, won’t that slacken off contributions?’

Shearson sniffed. ‘It’s a question of picking the right moment. The right political moment, the right scientific moment, the right psychological moment. We may find an antidote tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean we have to announce we’ve found it tomorrow. What we do is, we hold it back while the contributions are still rolling in, and we only announce it when the blight has become so critical that contributions are falling off in any case. The media are going to bust the blight situation wide open sooner or later. They’re bound to. But it’s then that we say we’ve discovered the answer to everybody’s problems, and pick up all the political credit for saving the day. Some people call it brinkmanship. I call it the Lone Ranger syndrome. Don’t shoot that silver bullet until you really have to.’

‘Supposing Protter draws a blank?’ asked Peter. ‘I mean – supposing we can’t stop it, and the crops really do get wiped out?’

‘Well, there’s another little job for you. Call Frank Edison, and check the nation’s food storage situation. Government stocks, private silos, military supplies – anything and everything. Then talk to some of the top supermarket people, and work out an estimate of how long their shelf supplies would be likely to last under crisis conditions.’

Peter jotted down a few notes. ‘You want a picture of the worst that could possibly happen?’

‘That’s right,’ said Senator Jones. ‘But don’t go scaring anybody. If they want to know why you’re asking, just tell them it’s for a federal contingency plan, in case of freakishly bad weather.’

Peter said, ‘Isn’t anyone else getting reports of this blight? I would have thought the president would have wanted a brief by now.’

‘Oh, that’s already been done,’ said the senator. ‘I sent him a personal memorandum this morning, telling him that, yes, we had problems with a new and unexpected blight in Kansas and North Dakota, but that all of our top agricultural scientists were working on it, and they were only hours away from cracking the problem wide open. I admitted there were outbreaks of blight in Iowa and Oregon and parts of Washington, but I told him that considering the humidity, they weren’t unexpected, and we didn’t anticipate a serious shortfall in output.’

‘So you’re not getting any flak from the White House?’

‘Not yet. It’ll come, but not yet.’

‘Don’t you think you ought to do something about Dr Benson? I mean – he could be talking to the newspapers now.’