Famine (10 page)

“I owe you an apology, Dr. Palfrey. I was quite wrong to doubt what you told us this morning. Please sit down.”

“So you've heard what happened in Piccadilly and Green Park.” Palfrey said.

“I have, and may I say that I am greatly shocked.”

“Do you know why it happened, your Excellency?”

“No, I do not.”

“Then I will tell you. It happened because one of my agents brought a tape recording of a conversation you had with your first secretary, away from here. It was being brought to me. Those creatures I warned you about destroyed it, incidentally causing the death of at least thirty people and grave injury to many more.”

Taza said, very quietly, “You cannot expect me to believe that.”

“I know it to be true, sir. The man who smuggled the tape out of the Embassy is alive. He is prepared to swear to everything he knows. We can establish beyond any doubt that the trouble started here. It will save us a great deal of time and a lot of unpleasantness if you will accept the situation and tell me all you can.”

“And if I refuse to accept the situation?” demanded Taza.

“I would be extremely sorry,” Palfrey said, “but I would use my influence to have all your diplomatic privileges withdrawn. And I would use all the resources of Z5 to make you tell the truth. I do not believe you would be able to resist the pressure which would be brought to bear.” As the other's colour faded and his lips tightened in anger, Palfrey went on. “And at the same time I would inform all governments that I could prove Lozania's association with the emergency, so that very great pressure indeed would be exerted on your government. I don't think it could be resisted.”

“This is blackmail,” Taza said hoarsely.

“I hope you understand this, your Excellency,” said Palfrey in a hard, unemotional voice. “There is nothing in this world I will not do to make you talk. It is not simply that some of my friends have been torn to pieces, alive, by these demoniac creatures. I have reason to believe they could cause terrible sickness to mankind, as well as ultimate starvation. Neither you nor anyone else who helps to conceal the creatures will get any mercy at all from me or from those who work for me.”

 

 

Taza did not respond, did not look away from Palfrey. It was difficult to define or understand the expression in his fine, bold eyes. Hatred? Palfrey did not think so. Rage? It was anger, but controlled. Fear? In a way, perhaps that was it. Two spots of colour now burned on his cheeks, as the silence dragged on and on.

At last, he drew a deep breath and said: “You make yourself very clear, Dr. Palfrey. However, you understand that I have instructions, and I must obey them.”

“I understand,” Palfrey said, quietly, “but it will take longer to learn the truth, and the danger will be greater because of it. Have you really calculated the danger?”

Taza said in the same tense voice: “At best, I can consult my government.”

“By telephone?”

“Yes.”

“What will you do? Ask their permission to tell us the truth?”

“Yes.”

“Will you telephone at once?”

“If you will leave me here,” Taza said, “I will speak to His Highness the President as soon as the call comes through.”

Would he? wondered Palfrey. Or was he simply playing for time. When Palfrey had left this room, would he go out of another door and flee the country? Would he even kill himself? These risks were obvious, but so were the advantages. Whatever course he took, Taza would virtually make an admission for the world to see. As a fugitive or a suicide, he would be admitting his country's complicity, and so ensure a swift and searching enquiry. It was practically certain that he would in fact talk to his government. Palfrey was on the point of saying he would wait, when a telephone bell rang. Taza, glad of release from tension, picked up the instrument.

“Yes? … Yes, he is here … One moment.” He held the receiver close to his chest. “It is an urgent call for you, Dr. Palfrey.”

Palfrey smiled very faintly.

“Let me take that, while you make your call.”

Taza handed him the telephone, gave a stiff little bow, and went out. Palfrey watched the door swing to, and wondered whether anyone was listening outside it, whether there were microphones concealed in this room, perhaps in the telephone itself. At last, he said: “This is Palfrey.”

“Sap, Professor Copuscenti and Dr. Walsh are here and want to see you urgently.” It was Joyce. “The Professor is very agitated – in fact he's frightened. How soon can you be here?”

Swift as light, Palfrey thought: “Copuscenti is frightened.” The Professor was one of the world's leading specialists in the field of the effect of atomic radiation on the human body, on blood cells, on hereditary influences. Palfrey, who understood so much more than the man in the street, could never follow the complexities of Copuscenti's mind, of his research, or of the subject. He did know that no one else in the world had a greater grasp of that subject, that his voice had long been raised, sometimes strident and alone, sometimes as the leader of a frightened chorus prophesying the effect of atomic radiation on the future of the human species.

Now this great physicist had seen the body of one of the little creatures and was frightened.

“Sap,” Joyce said. “Are you there?”

“I'll be back within the hour,” Palfrey said. “Is—anything else in?”

“The newspapers and television are going mad,” Joyce told him. “The Prime Minister has been trying to get you for the past half hour and wants you to call him at once. And …” Joyce hesitated, as if even her dispassionate mind was almost overcome by the horror and the magnitude of this situation. “And,” she repeated, “more and more reports are coming in from overseas, about serious food losses. In Cambodia, they are down to a month's supply of rice, in Ireland supplies of flour and potatoes are already dangerously low. God knows how long this had been going on.”

Palfrey thought:
Taza might.

“Hold the fort,” he said. “I won't be long.”

“You mustn't be,” Joyce said. Her voice was nearly despairing.

Palfrey rang off, a picture of Copuscenti in his mind. The physicist was a short man with a big head, a leonine head; a popular image of a prophet spoiled by his stubby legs; but for his fine torso and broad shoulders he would have been a dwarf. Palfrey shivered. He seemed to see Copuscenti's fine eyes, to hear his dry impersonal voice with its ironic undertones. “All I am being asked to do, Dr. Palfrey, is to preside over the destruction of mankind so as to make it painless for the individual.” Dr. Walsh, whom Palfrey had met only once, was the Professor's colleague and an expert on toxicology and immunology.

Was there a clue in his presence?

The door opened, startling Palfrey. He swung round, to see Taza coming in; it was difficult to imagine a man who looked more different from Copuscenti.

“Dr. Palfrey, I have a most important request to make,” he said without preamble.

The mental image of Professor Copuscenti faded.

“Yes?”

“Will you fly to Lozania to discuss this matter with President Mortini? I have spoken to him, and the request is from him. You will of course be guaranteed safe conduct. You will have nothing to fear.”

Nothing to fear, echoed Palfrey bitterly.

He said: “Will President Mortini be able to help in this emergency?”

“He will acquaint you with certain facts.”

“Will he understand that I will have to have others with me?”

“That will of course be for you to decide.”

Palfrey played with his hair, twisting strands round and round. It would take ten hours to fly to Lozania, and a special plane could be made ready in two hours or less – a military jet was always at his disposal. He could take two or three people with him. If Baretta were alive – he gritted his teeth. He would need an interpreter, and someone with a basic understanding of the problem. He thought: Copuscenti knows Portuguese.

“Thank the President and tell him I hope to leave London before midnight.”

“He will be very glad,” Taza said, and as Palfrey moved towards the door, he added, “Dr. Palfrey, what happened at the Embassy today was without my knowledge. I am sorry.”

So he admitted having some control over the cat men.

 

There was so much to do, quickly. Arrange the aircraft, decide who was to fly with him to Lozan; have the Lozanian Embassy cordoned off and all of its visitors screened, the staff watched and followed; leave instructions for other embassies to be closely watched too. Leave instructions for summaries of the reports to be sent to him …

And there was Professor Copuscenti to see.

 

The Professor was afraid.

This man with the noble face, the near-Socratic calm and objectivity, this man whose intellectual brilliance was laced with ironic wit which so often earned him disrepute, this man who could conceive of the destruction of the human race with a Jove-like detachment, was nervous and afraid. His hand was warm and moist; his lips were twitching. It was almost as if he were suffering from the effects of a stroke. He was with Walsh in a small room with lead walls, off the main laboratory at Z5's headquarters. Never still, he moved from chair to chair, and desk to chair incessantly, while Walsh, a small, compact man with a clipped moustache and pointed beard, sat near, still hardly blinking.

“I've told no one yet,” he stated. “No one. But these creatures—my God, how does one understand? How does one talk of the impossible. Come.” He marched out of the room towards a bench where what was left of one of the creatures was lying. It was inside a glass container of a kind Palfrey recognised; it gave him his first shock, although Copuscenti's manner should have warned him. Atomic reactors were customarily kept inside such boxes. Over by the wall were other boxes, containing the shapeless remains of ordinary men; and of the ‘rabbit' and ‘cat' men.

Copuscenti handed Palfrey a pair of thick rubber gloves. As Palfrey drew them on, the other put a pair of lead-coated manipulators in his hand. In their jaws was a tiny Geiger counter. None of this was new to Palfrey but never had he felt so appalled as he did now.

“Go on.” Copuscenti ordered raspingly.

Palfrey began to manipulate the Geiger counter, and, as it hovered above the mangled flesh and blood, a cracking sound came so sharply and suddenly that although he had expected it, Palfrey drew back.

“You see,” Copuscenti muttered. “The blood is radioactive to a degree I have seldom known except in reactors themselves. I have examined men and women who have been subjected to radiation during a nuclear explosion. I was one of the first men in Nagasaki after the bomb was dropped. Few of the bodies I examined were so radioactive as these remains.”

Palfrey's throat felt hot and dry.

“And there's no doubt?” he asked.

“None at all. The blood is radioactive to an alarming degree, and yet—” He gulped, and his lips were working. “Understand me, Palfrey. Anyone who touched that blood would suffer from the most acute wasting disease – a malignancy I cannot explain in terms of radioactivity. Walsh here —” Copuscenti turned almost despairingly to the other man—”has terrified me.”

Walsh, the toxicologist ? Palfrey, puzzled until then by Copuscenti's fear, began to understand; and his own earlier doubts of the significance of the radioactivity were strengthened.

Walsh had a hard voice and a clipped way of speaking.

“I don't know what it is, Dr. Palfrey. I do know that the tissues of these—ah—things contain a substance that accounts for their phenomenal rate of growth. Phenomenal. I have dissected and analysed these tissues. They are, by human standards, malignant. Cancerous. And humans are vulnerable to this condition. One of my assistants has just died – three days after being infected by a creature's blood entering through a scratch on his finger. A second assistant is dying.”

“Now
you see why I am terrified,” Copuscenti muttered.

Palfrey felt as if he were made of ice.

“I doubt if anyone who actually touched the blood could survive for more than a day or so,” Dr. Walsh went on. “Whether it affects the atmosphere so that it can spread its poisonous effect widely, I don't yet know. There are indications that it does not, also indications that the skin of the creatures might be insulated so that there is no danger until the blood is spilt. I do not say this
is
so; only that it might be.”

“Dreadful!” Copuscenti said.

Palfrey pulled the Geiger counter away, and the rattling stopped.

“Go on,” he said flatly.

“The blood of the two people whom Walsh and I examined at Salisbury shows advanced stages of leukaemia, or blood cancer. One of them, your agent Anderson, recently underwent a routine medical examination in which a blood test was carried out. I have seen the report. There was no sign of leukaemia, nothing to suggest anything abnormal in his blood condition. The general health of the farmer who died was known to be excellent.

Palfrey's voice hardly sounded.

“Yes?”

“We have just finished a preliminary examination of the blood of two victims of the latest attack,” Copuscenti went on. “There's evidence of leukaemia – very thin blood indeed. We are having hourly examinations made, and can report that the condition of the blood deteriorated rapidly in the first hour. I think you must accept that these animals cause a form of leukaemia when they poison human beings. The poison appears also to be secreted under the nails or the tips of the fingers, and can be injected through the talons.

“It is hideous—hideous. Far worse than smallpox or the bubonic plague.”

“There is infinitely less chance of survival,” Walsh went on. “This could develop into a world-wide epidemic which would create conditions even worse than those of nuclear explosion.
I am not exaggerating, Dr. Palfrey.
A scratch from those creatures does cause acute leukaemia. So does contact with their blood. And there appear to be great numbers of them.”

Palfrey said stiffly: “I think there are.”

“How many? Hundreds? Thousands?” demanded Copuscenti.

Palfrey thought: “There could be millions.” He waved a hand. “We're trying to find out.”

“Palfrey—I know of no defence against them,” Copuscenti said.

“There is none,” Walsh put in. “It is possible that infection can come by breathing in a few living cells from the creatures. Such people as you and I, with medical knowledge, can protect ourselves. The man in the street could not.”

“I realise that,” Palfrey said, stiffly. “If we attack them and cause bleeding, then the infection could begin, at once.”

“Yes. And is deadly.”

After a long time, Palfrey said almost in a sigh: “Gas.”

“First find the creatures. We must know how many there are, Palfrey!” Copuscenti clenched his fists and glared, as if Palfrey were refusing to do what was so obviously necessary. “What plans have you?”

Palfrey thought: if he's so distraught, can he be objective enough to come with me to Lozania? And he thought: where did they come from? What created them? He looked dispassionately into Copuscenti's eyes.

“If we can find from where they originate, then we might stop them.”

“At the source, you mean.” Copuscenti said. “At source, perhaps.” He closed his eyes and moved back a pace, and when he spoke again it was in a very different tone. “You shame me, Palfrey. I was so shocked, I felt as if I were going mad. But you are right. Where do they come from? They have human characteristics and human intelligence, Miss Morgan tells me. They are in the shape of humans. I have discussed this at some length with Dr. Campson, who confirms the anatomical closeness as we know them to human beings. Find where they come from, and perhaps you can stop them – but suppose they come from one of the other planets. We can now send our intelligent creatures through space. So it is no longer absurd to consider the possibility of intelligent human beings coming to us through space. What protection is there against such a contingency? Answer me that.”