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of barley, fourteen million of oats, fourteen million of corn, twelve million of rye, and the remaining twenty million of a mixture of rice, millet, buckwheat, and leguminous grams. The giants of the crop are wheat and barley.”

    He rose and came around the desk to where the map of the Soviet Union was still spread. Taylor flicked off the television and resumed his seat.

    “About forty percent of the annual Soviet grain crop, or approximately one hundred million tons, comes from here, in the Ukraine and the Kuban area of the southern RSFSR,” Poklewski continued, indicating the areas on the map. “And it is all winter wheat. That is, it’s planted in September and October. It has reached the stage of young shoots by November, when the first snows come. The snows cover the shoots and protect them from the bitter frosts of December and January.”

    Poklewski turned and paced away from the desk to the curved ceiling-to-floor windows behind the presidential chair. He had this habit of pacing when he talked.

    The Pennsylvania Avenue observer cannot actually see the Oval Office, tucked away at the back of the tiny West Whig building, but because the tops of these south-facing tall windows to the office can just be observed from the Washington Monument, a thousand yards away, they have long been fitted with six-inch-thick, green-tinted bulletproof glass just in case a sniper near the monument might care to try a long shot. As Poklewski reached the windows, the aquamarine- tinted light coming through them cast a deeper pallor across his already pale face.

    He turned and walked back, just as Matthews was preparing to swing his chair around to keep him in vision.

    “Last December, the whole of the Ukraine and the Kuban Steppe were subjected to a freak thaw during the early days of the month. They’ve had them before, but never as warm. A great wave of warm southern air swept in off the Black Sea and the Bosporus and rolled northeastward over the Ukraine and the Kuban region. It lasted a week and melted the first coverings of snow, about six inches deep, to water. The young wheat and barley stems were exposed. Ten days later, as if to compensate, the same freak weather patterns hammered the whole area with frosts going fifteen, even twenty degrees, below zero.”

    “Which did the wheat no good at all,” suggested the President.

    “Mr. President,” interjected Robert Benson of the CIA, “our best agricultural experts have estimated the Soviets will be lucky if they salvage fifty percent of that Ukrainian and Kuban crop. The damage was massive and irreparable.”
    “So that is what you have been showing me?” asked Matthews.

    “No, sir,” said Poklewski. “That is the point of this meeting. The other sixty percent of the Soviet crop, nigh on one hundred forty million tons, comes from the great tracts of the Virgin Lands in Kazakhstan, first put under the plow by Khrushchev in the middle fifties, and the black-earth country, butting up against the Urals. A small portion comes from across the mountains in Siberia. That is what we have been showing you.”

    “What is happening there?” asked Matthews.

    “Something odd, sir. Something strange is happening to the Soviet grain crop. All this remaining sixty percent is spring wheat, put down as seed in March and April after the thaw. It should be coming up sweet and green by now. It’s coming up stunted, sparse, sporadic, as if it had been hit by some kind of blight.”
    “Weather again?” asked Matthews.
    “No. They had a damp winter and spring over this area, but nothing serious. Now that the sun has come out, the weather is perfect—warm and dry.”
    “How widespread is this ... blight?”
    Benson came in again. “We don’t know, Mr. President. We have maybe fifty samples of film of this particular problem. We tend to focus on military concentrations, of course—troop movements, new rocket bases, arms factories. But what we have indicates it must be