Famine Read online

  “Or what you know as the truth,” Palfrey said. “Half the ills of the world would never have come about if people had realised what they were doing when they were doing it. There’s nothing new about the failure to accept responsibility. If we all accepted ours all the time we would have much less to worry about.”

  “We’ve plenty to worry about now,” Copuscenti growled.

  “Yes. Our responsibilities. All of us, not to moralise, or cast blame. Yours specially to get ready to experiment on the Lozi with poisons and gases. Mine to find out how many colonies there are in the world, and how long the food supplies will last in each area. Dr. Walsh’s – to try to find a way to immunise human beings against the malignancy. Every military authority’s – the responsibility of capturing as many of the creatures as they can for experimental purposes. I’ve another – to get back to England and send out a general report.” He hesitated, and then actually smiled at President Mortini. “Mr. President, I am not sure whether the world need know how the Lozi began – not yet at all events.”

  “You’re very kind,” Mortini said stiffly. ‘’However I am going to broadcast to the world, Dr. Palfrey. There is nothing more to be served by hiding the facts. You will have to advise UNO, and the World Health Organisation to prepare for severe shortages of food. Food must be husbanded from this moment on. I will make a statement on television tonight. May I suggest that you help me prepare my speech?”

  “If you wish,” Palfrey said, and turned to Andromovitch. “Will you look after the other messages, Stefan? That we need some of these Lozi urgently but they mustn’t be injured in any way which might make them bleed?”

  “I will do that,” Andromovitch said.

  He left Palfrey and the President together.

  Seven hours later, Andromovitch, Beth, Palfrey and his party were flying back to England. Copuscenti and Walsh had left earlier, to make all the necessary preparation; the request for living specimens of the Lozi had already gone out. Reports of newly discovered colonies had come in by the dozen; it was almost impossible to keep count.

  Palfrey, Beth and Andromovitch sat together in the military aircraft, listening to a radio pick-up of Mortini’s television speech. Palfrey could imagine the handsome face, the sadness, the self-reproach. He had known this man only for a few hours, yet had recognised in him the quality of greatness. This very quality had led to a disaster so awful that even Palfrey did not yet fully comprehend.

  Mortini was saying: “It is a simple fact that I, like so many other patriots before me, placed the interests of my own country before those of the rest of the world. We ignored the advice of other great leaders of men, one of whom is Dr. Palfrey of whom I have already spoken. These men of vision warned us that each nation was dependent on its neighbours, just as each human being is dependent on other human beings.

  “So, every man and woman on this planet is in danger, because of my mistaken patriotism. I am truly sorry.

  “The truth now, as you will be told very often, is that time is needed desperately. The question is, whether there will be enough food for human-kind and for these parasites who now live off the earth. There is no danger left of nuclear war – for these parasites are proof against nuclear attack. So, the danger is that we may starve, because there are too many mouths to feed.

  “I did not mean to release this horror upon the world. I did it out of ignorance and folly. I do not ask forgiveness, for it is too great a sin to forgive. What I do ask, what I beg of you, is that from this moment on you do everything in your power to prevent these parasitic demons from multiplying. And this you can do only by obeying the orders of those in authority.

  “In this dreadful adversity, the world is as one. The shortage of food because of this phenomenal growth of an unwanted population truly makes all men brothers. My last wish is that mankind may survive the horror which has befallen it, and will emerge in a world truly at peace.”

  He stopped.

  The jet engines droned on.

  There was a sharp report from the radio, and a gasp.

  “He has killed himself,” Andromovitch said heavily.

  “Oh, dear God,” Beth said, in a hopeless voice. “Dear God.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Beginning of the Famine

  The famine began in a tiny corner of India.

  It began as famines have begun since the beginning of the world, with the failure of rice crops due to a typhoon.

  There were no reserves of food to avoid the crisis.

  The wind hurtled and cavorted, whirled and roared, and the rain hissed and smashed and pattered and turned even the dry uplands to mud. The floods submerged the young rice and tore it from the soil and carried it into the new- made rivers of rain into the swollen rivers from the mountains of the Himalayas. And as the waters ran into the sea, the horror was born.

  The local stores of rice and wheat were also destroyed.

  With the floods, came the creatures from the secret subterranean cities, whom the world now called the Lozi. The stores they had stolen from the paddy fields were gone, and the water was flooding their cities, so they were driven out of the earth by the fear of the floods and the fear of starvation, and they emerged to a land already ravaged by nature at her most violent, to a people stunned and shocked and hungry and helpless.

  Here and there a village had its stores of food intact. As each long line of famished men and women and children gathered, the creatures came. At first the killer Lozi, attacking and terrifying, scattered the waiting crowds, the helpers and the helpless; and then the hordes descended like locusts, devouring all the food there was, and passed on still hungry, still ravening.

  As they spread over the flooded earth, they ravaged. As they came to villages, they ravaged. As they came to the uplands they ate the green crops of corn and tea, of citrous fruits, of beans and all the foods of the earth. They left behind them the devastation of the floods and the devastation of their passing, and they did not burrow into the earth until they had sated themselves in a gluttony never known to man.

  They covered an area as large as the State of New York, thrice the size of England, and soon disease was rife. There were the familiar diseases: smallpox, cholera, yellow fever, typhoid; and there was the new sickness which fell upon those whose blood was thinned after the creatures had bitten and clawed them. Many teams of rescue workers went in by air and road and rail, and for the time being, the famine was eased, but those who even touched the blood, or garments soiled by it, were ravaged by the leukaemia, and quickly died.

  The next famine was in Southern China, in the province of Canton.

  As the Lozi came out of their subterranean cities, they found a land scarred by the sun, the crops failing, the people already hungry and despairing. The dreadful pattern was repeated. Refugees fled out of the famine stricken land over the border fence and the dried up river which led to Hong Kong. The people of Hong Kong, already overcrowded, remained cheerful and confident, for they had survived countless crises before.

  They had never suffered the Lozi before.

  These creatures from the Isle of Lozan swam the river from the mainland, and swam the straits between the island and Macao, swam in the harbour from Kowloon to Hong Kong island itself. The junks and sampans, tiny craft and tramp steamers, were overturned into water seething with the Lozi who battened on to all food as it sank slowly through the sea.

  The Lozi invaded the island of Hong Kong, and Kowloon in ever-increasing numbers, and soon terror filled the land of plenty. It was as if, overnight, the population had become not four but forty million.

  “He didn’t mean it,” the British Prime Minister said bitterly.

  “The fools,” said Copuscenti, hopelessly.

  “What are the chances of stopping them?” asked the newspapermen who besieged 10, Downing Street.

  “Is the
re any hope?” screamed the headlines.

  “How many are there?” The Prime Minister demanded “Do you know, Palfrey? Tell me, do you know?”

  In the awful week which followed the flight of the Lozi and the first of the famines, the truth of the extent of the invasion was brought home. The English colonies were small. The hordes of Lozi spreading over the famine areas could be calculated in hundreds of thousands, perhaps in millions, and there were dozens of such colonies.

  The famine spread so fast that the horror was upon the whole of the Orient, and fear of famine struck at the heart of the West. A hurricane in Florida first hit the Keys and then Fort Lauderdale, missing Miami and Miami Beach in some miraculous way, but as the emergency kitchens were set up, and the help poured in from neighbouring states, the Lozi emerged from the swamps in the Everglades, from the reclaimed land itself, and fell upon the food. In panic a company of State Troopers released tear gas, which infuriated the Lozi but did them no harm. Another unit, of the marines, isolated hordes of the creatures on an island in the middle of Indian Creek, and used nerve gas. The effect on the Lozi was negligible but wind carried the gas up to Hollywood and whole residential areas were wiped out.

  “I do not believe the figure at the end of the month can be less than a thousand million,” Palfrey said to a conference of diplomats, a month after the first meeting. “I have now had the rate of increase estimated by the Family Planning Research Physicist. He confirms that in less than six months there will be no food left.”

  “Can we hold the position in Europe?” the German ambassador demanded. “We in Western Germany have already imposed strict food rationing.”

  “So have we,” said France.

  “We also,” the Italian put in.

  “We can last six months,” the Dane reported.

  “Four,” said the Swede.

  “Six weeks,” said the Hungarian.

  “Four,” the Czechoslovakian reported.

  So it went on, all over Europe.

  In Washington, the Senate was in special session, and a senator from each state was ordered to report. Some were calm and resigned, some impassioned and angry, none could really believe the simple truth, and the truth was much the same as that in Europe.

  “We have food supplies at subsistence level for twenty-one weeks,” reported Connecticut. “And we know of large colonies of Lozi.”

  “Twenty weeks,” reported West Virginia. “And four colonies of Lozi.”

  “Nine,” said Washington. “And two.”

  “Twelve,” reported Oregan, and the first hopeful note came next. “We have no known colonies of Lozi.”

  “We can survive for nine months,” boasted Texas. “We have the largest colony of Lozi in the world.”

  As the figures were reported, new reports came in, of efforts to contain the Lozi, by digging beneath their cities and pouring concrete into mammoth fissures so that the creatures could not tunnel through. But there was no way of stopping them coming over the top, and they were still more dangerous dead than alive. Their blood spread the infection further and further.

  All over the world armies and navies, air forces and civil defence groups worked like demons to contain the hordes, and all over the world the experts in chemical warfare and the experts in bacteriological warfare, and the research workers into nuclear power, and physicists and doctors, were striving without ceasing to try a gas or a poison which would kill the Lozi yet bring no harm to man.

  Next they began to search for a method of killing the Lozi no matter what happened to mankind.

  “And that looks like the beginning of the end,” the British Prime Minister said to Palfrey.

  In the past few weeks, he had become an old man, his hair nearly white, his face thin and deeply lined. He was at a window on the first floor of 10, Downing Street, looking along towards Whitehall. A silent crowd stood outside. Palfrey recalled his first meeting, the way Mason had reacted, not losing a moment. No one could blame him for what had happened and was about to happen, yet he shouldered all responsibility as if he blamed himself.

  The people stared.

  They too had aged, even the young seemed to have lined faces, and clothes which sagged about their bodies. Food rationing was so severe that none had more than one meal a day and for many the meal was insufficient. All the war time emergency measures had been put into effect; no one actually starved, but the day of starvation could not be far off.

  “The beginning of the end,” Mason repeated, in a hopeless voice. “Don’t you agree, Palfrey? The only possible way to kill these brutes is to kill the people too.”

  Palfrey began to toy with his hair.

  “It’s the only way we can think of as yet,” he remarked.

  “There’s so little time left,” Mason said bitterly. “I have to go out soon, and speak to those people, and lie to them by giving them hope.”

  “Can that be a lie?” asked Palfrey, almost absently. The Prime Minister looked at him a little oddly. Palfrey smiled faintly in return. His cheeks were so thin that the bones showed sharply beneath an almost transparent skin. “I simply don’t believe it, sir.”

  “Don’t believe what?”

  “That there’s no hope.”

  “I didn’t expect futile optimism from you,” the Prime Minister said, then caught his breath. “No, I didn’t mean that, Palfrey. I shouldn’t have said it. You’re the one man in the world who has never believed a single thing to be utterly impossible.” After a pause, a look of expectation, faint, ready to be rebuffed, crept into his eyes. “You haven’t grounds for hope, have you?”

  “No,” said Palfrey. “Not really. I’m going over to the Camp now.”

  “If there were any news from there, I would be told,” said Mason. “I have a direct line.” He gave a croak of laughter. “As if you didn’t know. Have you noticed everybody is talking in clichés or repeating themselves over trifles? I’ve a direct line. Well!” He braced himself, and held out his hand.

  Palfrey touched the bony fingers, which were icy cold.

  “I’ll keep you informed, sir.”

  “Do that,” said Mason. Palfrey suspected that he was half-forgotten already, there was so much for this lonely man to do, too great a burden on his shoulders.

  Joe Richardson, shrunk to a wraith, pathetic compared with his once great physical strength, opened the door for him. As they went downstairs, Palfrey heard that rare thing: a laugh. It was remarkable that laughter should sound so unusual, should appear to be almost wrong.

  A door opened, and Beth came out. She was much thinner, yet still a fine woman, and the brightness of her eyes had not dimmed. It was characteristic of her that she was one of the few who had troubled to remodel her clothes, so that they fitted reasonably well.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Fordham.” The Prime Minister’s wife came to the door, smiling. She looked at Palfrey. “Mrs. Fordham and I have just agreed that if you and James were the last two men alive, my husband would be making a policy speech to you, and you would be reproving him for considering the national and not the international implication of it.”

  Palfrey was startled into a chuckle.

  “Beth,” he said as they stepped outside of Number 10. “I don’t believe there is another woman like you.”

  “There isn’t another woman in the world like any other woman,” Beth said off-handedly. She was still smiling, but the smile faded when she saw the silent, hopeless crowd in the street. Policemen whose uniforms sagged about almost fleshless bodies, whose helmet straps dangled almost to their chests, were watching the crowd listlessly. There was a path for vehicles in the middle of the street, and Palfrey and Beth walked along it, watched idly. There was a stir of interest as they neared Whitehall, and someone in a cracked voice shouted: “Listen!”

  Palfrey paused, another voice sounded over a loudspea
ker, recognisable as the Prime Minister’s although very weak compared with the firm, resonant tone which had once captivated and fascinated tens of millions on television and radio.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen,” James Mason said, “I am grateful that so many of you have come here to support me at this time of great crisis. It is a great help indeed. And perhaps I can help you a little. We shall not need to make any further reductions in any of the basic food rations this week. In fact we may increase it a little next week, if the sugar beet crop in East Anglia is as good as we believe it might be. Meanwhile, every possible effort is being made to find a way of coping with the Lozi. In this age of great scientific and medical wonders, I for one simply do not believe that a way will not be found. The moment there is news, the moment there is hope, I will tell you.”

  As the voice faded a pathetic cheer arose, a desultory clapping. Palfrey and Beth moved on, a few others following them.

  “Five minutes ago, he sounded absolutely hopeless,” Palfrey said. “I’ve never known him so despairing. Remarkable how he can pep himself up.”

  “He’s a remarkable man,” Beth remarked. “Where are we going?”

  “The Camp.” “Must we?”

  “I must. You needn’t.”

  “Would you prefer me not to come ?”

  Palfrey walked on a few steps in silence, and then turned to her, and said quite truthfully: “I am always less troubled when you are with me. You’ve given me a composure I haven’t had for a long, long time. But I know you hate the Camp. Don’t make yourself come.”

  She tucked her arm into his: “We’ll walk through the park,” she said.

  They turned into the Horseguards, where only a few people stood and two guards, mounted on horses which looked too fragile to stand even their riders’ light weight, stared unseeingly at parked vehicles which had become derelict. Only here and there did they see a moving car or taxi. Palfrey and Beth, walking quite quickly for their weak condition, but slowly in fact, neared St. James’s Park and then Buckingham Palace. An uncanny silence reigned over London. On this bright, clear day, no one was in the park, the deck-chairs were empty, the flowers untended and bedraggled, the grass uncut. The few people in sight drooped, or shuffled along. There was a big crowd outside the palace, watching, waiting. Once each day the Queen came and spoke to her people, and still they waited.