‘Not so far. But I’ve been kind of incommunicado today. My walkie-talkie’s been on the fritz for a week, and I put it in for repair.’

‘I think we’d better take the chopper out at first light, and see if there’s any more of it,’ said Ed. ‘If it’s spreading as fast as you say it is, we could finish up with only half a crop, or maybe no crop at all.’

He turned around to Jack, who was sitting in the back seat. Jack gave him an uneasy grin, almost as if the blight was his fault.

‘You’ve taken samples, I suppose?’ said Ed.

Jack nodded. ‘I took about twenty or thirty while Willard was going down to the farm to get you. I’ll try to analyse some of them myself, but the rest of them can go to Dr Benson, down at the State Agricultural Laboratory.’

‘You think Benson’s capable of finding out what it is?’

‘He’s as capable as anyone. I mean, sure, he’s a little eccentric, but there’s nothing wrong with his technique. He isolated that seed fungus way before the Federal people came up with anything.’

‘All right,’ said Ed. ‘But I don’t want to have to wait for a week while he fiddles around with crackpot theories, the way we had to with that boosted fertiliser.’

‘I’ll tell him to play it straight.’

‘And sober, I hope.’

‘Sure.’

They had reached the crest of a gentle rise in the ground, and now, by the light of the moon, they were looking down on the five-mile slope that took the northern wheatfields of South Burlington as far as the Mystic River, a tributary of the South River, itself a tributary of the South Ninnescah. Ed felt the skin on the back of his neck tingle at what he saw. Across the silvery wheat, a dark corroded stain had already spread for a mile in each direction, and westwards it reached as far as he could see.

He touched Willard’s arm and whispered, ‘Stop.’ Then, when the Jeep was halted, he climbed down into the wheat and stood there silent, unmoving, like the witness to an accident which he was helpless to prevent.

Willard and Jack watched him as he knelt down and studied the ears of wheat all around him. Some were blighted, some were still clear. But even as he watched them, the clear wheat gradually began to darken, and within minutes it was as rotten as the rest. He stayed where he was for a while, and then he stood up and came back to the Jeep.

‘What do you think if we burn a circle around it?’ he asked Willard. ‘Isolate it, like a fire with a firebreak?’

‘We could try,’ said Willard. ‘Do you want to go back to the farm and round up the men?’