‘I heard something else, too. I heard Senator Walsh from California was thinking of raising a similar fund for vegetable growers in his state and that Representative Yorty was planning on a compensation programme for soybean farmers in Iowa. I also heard that Senator Jones reminded both of those gentlemen that they owed him a favour for the help he gave them during that big commodity scam on the San Francisco stock market. And the result of that reminder was that Walsh and Yorty both agreed to delay launching their funds until Senator Jones’s Blight Crisis Appeal reached pledges of twenty million dollars, with at least fifteen million dollars cleared through the bank.’

‘You hear fairy tales,’ said Peter, flatly.

‘I do? Well, maybe I do. But what if I were to print those fairy tales exactly like fairy tales? “Once upon a time, there was a magic kingdom which was stricken down by a terrible blight… all of its crops died away on the branch… but the wicked viziers who ruled that land decided to make a whole heap of gold out of the disaster… they pretended that only three poor farmers had been stricken by the blight… and they asked everybody in the land to donate gold to these poor farmers… with every intention of keeping the gold for themselves.’”

‘You print anything like that and we’ll sue you to death,’ said Peter, in a totally cold voice.

‘Are you going to try to stop me?’

‘Listen to me. Bill, you don’t have any substantive evidence and you know it, otherwise you wouldn’t be talking fairy tales. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you give me your word that you’ll hold back on all this innuendo you’ve heard – if you give me your word that you won’t print any of it – then I’ll guarantee you an exclusive copy of the federal laboratory report on the virus as soon as I get it. That’ll be Monday morning, at the latest.’

‘Virus?’ asked Bill Brinsky. ‘Did you say “virus”?’

Peter bit his tongue.

‘Nobody said anything about a virus to me,’ said Bill. ‘Has somebody told you something I don’t know?’

‘All right. Bill,’ said Peter. ‘The federal laboratory has run some preliminary tests, and conjectured – only conjectured – that the Kansas wheat blight is a virus. You can print that if you like.’

‘What about die other crop failures? Are they caused by a virus too?’

‘Bill, the other crop failures are nothing more than natural wastage. I keep telling you.’

‘All right,’ said Bill, less aggressively, pleased with the tidbit of information that Peter had accidentally let slip. ‘But don’t forget that lab report on Monday, okay? I’ll hold you to that’

‘You’ll have it,’ Peter told him. ‘You know how straight we play the game here.’

‘That’s what I’m worried about,’ said Bill.

*