By four o’clock that afternoon, the news media were beginning to smell a bigger story. Whatever reassurances the Department of Agriculture had been giving them over the past two days, it was inevitable that small-town reporters were going to visit the blighted farms all across Iowa and Nebraska and Kansas, and see the crops for themselves. From all over, they began to file human-interest stories about farmers who had been digging and tilling and ploughing for twenty years or more, only to lose everything they owned to the wildfire spread of the blight.

On the early evening news, there were pictures of blackened spinach crops, decaying com, rotting oranges, and wilting lettuce. Later editions of The New York Post were running a front page which proclaimed: BLIGHT KOs CROPS – A LEAN YEAR AHEAD?

At six, the president called Alan Hedges, the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, into the Oval Office. Alan Hedges was a slow-speaking, white-haired, dignified old man from Alabama; while the president was short, clipped, and energetic, a liberal Democrat from New Hampshire.

The sun was falling across the White House lawns outside the Oval Office windows as Alan Hedges settled himself fastidiously into the studded leather chair facing the president’s desk. The president stood with his hands clenched behind his back, staring out at the evening sky.

‘Alan,’ said the president at last, without turning around, ‘I feel that you’ve been less than direct with me.’

‘Oh?’ asked Alan Hedges. He lifted a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles out of the breast pocket of his dark-grey suit, and wound them around his large red ears.

‘The latest briefing that Shearson sent me about the wheat blight in Kansas suggested that the blight was restricted to the Mid-West, and that any outbreaks of blight in other areas were purely seasonal and usual. From what the newspapers and the television channels are now saying, it appears that you and Shearson have somewhat underestimated the extent of the blight Wouldn’t you say that was true?’

‘Well, Mr President…’ Alan Hedges began.

The president tinned around. His iron-grey hair was cropped very short, and his face was as rugged as a boxer’s. ‘From what the newspapers and television channels are now saying, it appears that you and Shearson have been deliberately playing this whole thing down. Wouldn’t you say that was true?’