Famine (14 page)

“Did you realise what would happen?” Beth asked.

“The lassitude, you mean?”

“The fact that everything would stop.”

“No,” said Palfrey. “Not really. I should have, though. Food's the only fuel to create human power, and we simply can't work without it. A few slaves might, until they drop in their tracks, but not a society like ours. No one has the strength left to do anything. Everything has stopped.”

And it was so. The factories and the farms were still. The life of the nation, of the world, had come to a standstill. All public work had stopped, save for a few basic necessities. There was no transport, in the air, on the ground, or below the surface. There were no great assemblies, no race meetings, no sporting gatherings. The theatres and the cinemas had closed. By superhuman effort, a programme was maintained on one television and one radio channel, and hospitals stayed open, although there was little they could do. The whole energy of the nation was concentrated on distributing the rations to the main food centres. Often, it took ten men to do the work of one. The schools were closed, but there was no sound of voices in the streets, for even the young were listless and subdued.

“Will they ever get it back?” Beth demanded.

“If we can find a way to feed them,” Palfrey said simply, and then he laughed, remembering what the Prime Minister had said about triteness.

“Isn't that like you,” Beth remarked, a wondering note in her voice.

“Whatis? Inanity?”'

“Nonsense, that wasn't inane. That was profound.”

“Now, don't be absurd, Beth I—”

“Listen to me!” Beth interrupted, almost angrily for her. “How can you learn if you won't listen? Everyone else talks about killing the
Lozi,
you're almost the only one who ever thinks in terms of finding enough food for them. If there were enough for everyone and the
Lozi
it would be all right, wouldn't it?”

“Not quite all right,” Palfrey said, mildly. “But better. Yes, better.”

They walked past the side of Buckingham Palace, beneath the shadow of the Victory statue. The appalling irony was not that they should not kill but that they could not. As they crossed Hyde Park Corner, once a seething, noisy mass of traffic, a single small car driven by a grey-haired woman passed them. Just beyond was the one place which held the hopes of England, perhaps the hopes of the world.

It was now known as the
Camp of Lozi.

 

 

Before the mood of helpless despair had settled on the land, the Camp of
Lozi
had become known as the Camp. There were a few who felt bitter towards its very conception, because in a way it was so reminiscent of Belsen and Dachau, and similar concentration camps of ill-fame. This site, behind St. George's Hospital, had been selected because there was an extensive clearance and rebuilding scheme on foot, and London's councillors had extended the huge underground car park in Hyde Park so that it now covered – or would have, had the work been finished before the days of the famine – nearly a square mile. This had been selected as the Camp because the foundation, walls and ceilings were of reinforced concrete, and consequently the
Lozi
could not burrow their way out.

Under a crash programme, while men still had energy, and material was available, it had been divided into chambers and departments with fireproofed doors, electronically controlled, so they had been able to segregate certain groups of
Lozi.
The only major addition necessary had been observation windows of very thick glass. Part of this huge underground Camp had been equipped as a laboratory, and the whole of the resources of St. George's had been turned over to the desperately urgent work of research.

As they walked down the ramp towards the offices, Palfrey reflected ruefully on what Beth had said, and how right she was. All the equipment, all the research, all the efforts here, were devoted to finding ways of killing off the
Lozi,
not of the constructive task of growing more food. That was the pass to which society had been brought in this emergency. Looking back over his fifty-odd years, Palfrey saw with great bitterness, how true this was of society over the ages.
“Thou Shalt not Kill”
had been turned into the awful adage:
“How Best to Kill?”
Under the pressure of the invasion by
Lozi,
men of all nations had joined together, only to find that the awful weapons of destruction with which they had been prepared to destroy one another were useless.

Was
it too late?

Had the years of blindness led mankind to the ultimate disaster – a means of being annihilated which they could not overcome? If nuclear research had always been for peaceful purposes, then Lozania would never have turned to the awful experiments which had created the
Lozi.
Now death would come in the way familiar to prehistoric man, to tribes, to cave-man communities: by starvation.

The oddest, in some ways the ultimate, bitterness was in the fact that in order to experiment on how to kill them, the
Lozi
had to be fed and kept in good health; for if they died of starvation here in the Camp, how could the chemists find means of destroying the countless millions now over-running the earth?

Palfrey said aloud: “I must stop moralising.”

“You'll moralise to the day you die,” said Beth, in her most matter-of-fact tone.

They reached the offices and Stefan Andromovitch came to meet them. He was leathery lean, and this made his great height even more noticeable. He had to duck beneath the doorways, and keep his head bent in the rooms. There was something a little reminiscent of Beth in his manner, in the gravity and yet the warmth of his smile. “Is there any special reason for your coming here?” he asked.

“Sap simply can't keep away and do nothing,” Beth said.

“Every time I come I'm teased by the feeling that there's a solution, and it's staring us in the face.” Palfrey said. “It's like a word on the tip of my tongue. Have you time to come round with us, Stefan?”

“Yes, of course.”

They began to tour.

It was always the same, filling Palfrey with a sense of horror and yet hope. Here, at their most naked and malevolent worst, were the
Lozi,
pitiful little creatures when locked in, and, all but the fighters, helpless and harmless except for their voracious appetite. Some pressed tiny fingers and faces against the thick glass of the observation windows, some beat the glass with their beautifully-formed hands. None seemed to realise that they were breathing in gases and germs which would kill human beings.

No gas, no germ, had had as yet, the slightest effect.

They came to a large windowless laboratory, in the middle of these chambers, where several men were working, including Copuscenti. The physicist was one of the few men Palfrey knew who had not lost a great deal of weight, and the laboratory assistants were obviously better fed than most. When he saw Palfrey and Beth, Copuscenti raised his hands and lowered them slowly.

“Sap, it is wrong.
You
should not starve.”

“I can manage on a lot less than I get,” said Palfrey.

“I still say it is wrong. I cannot go on, eating my fill while you—”

“Nonsense!” Palfrey interrupted. “If we've any hope, it's from you. If you don't eat you can't work properly. Get that idea into your head. Is there any change?”

“None,” said Copuscenti.

“None anywhere in the world,” confirmed Andromovitch.

“Fire?” Palfrey made himself say.

“How can we burn them without burning ourselves?” demanded Copuscenti. “There are too many of them.”

“Do they perish in flames?”

“Yes,” Copuscenti said gruffly. “Yes.” He took Palfrey's arm and led him to a chamber in a corner. As they approached it Palfrey saw the red hot glow inside, and felt the heat radiating even from the thick asbestos cover about it. Inside were bones … “We have experimented fifty times,” said the physicist. “They resist fire at ordinary temperatures, but a flame thrower—come.”

He led the way again, to a small room, so crowded with the
Lozi
that for a moment Palfrey thought of the first time he had seen these little creatures as maggots. On the door was a note, saying:
A male and female were placed together here on August 7th. None has been added.

It was October – and the room teemed with the tiny, human-like creatures. As Palfrey watched he saw some bread and potatoes fed into the room by some mechanical means. Immediately a surging mass of the
Lozi
appeared; struggling to get at the food, each eating as if ravenous. Fights broke out as those behind tried to push their way to the front.

Copuscenti said, “Watch.”

He pressed a button, and a tongue of flame leapt out, straight at the mass of
Lozi
battening on the food. On that instant, a path was cleared; a hundred must have been burned to ash on contact with the flame. There were the burned and the blinded, reeling, writhing, mouths open as if screaming. Some died, as the others watched; and suddenly those who had not been injured surged forward over the charred remains, and fell upon the food and upon their dead fellows.

Beth said in a low pitched voice: “Oh God. It's awful.”

“Human beings have always had cannibalistic tendencies,” Copuscenti said. “Driven to desperation they have proved this countless times. But all the flame throwers in the world can't cover more than a few square miles. To try to destroy them this way would only drive them underground, and mean reducing the world on the surface to a molten hell.” He was turning away from the chamber. “We have tried everything—everything.''

“You see what this means, Sap,” Andromovitch said. “These
Lozi
are proof against all known human ailments, against atomic radiation, against electricity and ordinary fire. Any amount of electric current can be passed through their bodies.”

“I can demonstrate,” Copuscenti said almost eagerly.

“No more demonstrations,” Beth pleaded. “Sap, please take me away.”

“Yes, Professor—has Dr. Walsh made any progress?”

“Only to prove that the infection is from contact with spilled blood, not from the breath,” Copuscenti answered. “There is no further indication of the cause and no clue to immunisation.”

Palfrey nodded and went from the Camp with Beth, leaving Copuscenti in the laboratory with the interminable round of experimental failures, and Andromovitch in the offices. They did not speak for a long time, until in fact they were near Green Park station. Palfrey remembered the way the
Lozi,
then unnamed, had attacked Baretta, and could recall the crowds of people suddenly appalled by what had struck at them out of the blue.

He saw a group of
Lozi
tearing at some tufts of grass in the park. No one else seemed to be aware of them. Hand firm on Beth's he went down in the lift. Here at last there was freedom from the creatures themselves, and what food there was would be safe from those sharp teeth and hungry bellies. Here was food stored against nuclear war and other emergency; at least those at the headquarters of Z5 would not starve.

There were two guards at the foot of the lift, as there were at each lift, to make sure no
Lozi
could escape.

“We'll be safe enough here when there's nowhere else to look after,” Joyce Morgan said. She was coming out of her office as Palfrey and Beth approached, Beth to go along into a small apartment where she had been living for some weeks. Palfrey had an unhappy impression that these two women did not really like each other, but remained politely tolerant for his sake alone.

“I'll make some tea,” Beth said.

“I'll be in the Operation Room,” Palfrey told her.

This room, on the floor below his office, was a square almost empty chamber, with relief maps of the world round the walls, and a centre table supporting an enormous globe. Electronically operated, it could take reports from Z5 agents everywhere, and at the moment there was a clearing house for specific kinds of messages only. They had been carefully coded, and reception was automatic. There was no need for any operator in the room.

 

The numeral 1 meant: No change in situation.

The numeral 2 meant: No result from today's experiments.

The numeral 3 meant:
Lozi
have made no further advances.

The numeral 4 meant: Food stocks further reduced.

The numeral 5 meant: Famine conditions reached. Supplies desperately needed.

The numeral 6 meant: Medical help desperately needed.

The numeral 7 meant: Town or village or city, about to be evacuated.

The numeral 8 meant: Rioting out of control.

The numeral 9 meant: All inhabitants dead.

The numeral 10 meant:
Lozi
in complete control.

10, the ultimate despair.

Palfrey's agents still moved about the world as best they could, some used aircraft, some travelled by car, some on foot or by bicycle. Reports which had come in by the hundred when the cyphers had first been arranged, now came slowly, one at a time. In the East, district after district was illuminated by that numeral: 10. In Bombay, in Canton, in San Paolo, in Acapulca, in Alexandria, in a dozen other huge cities there was the nearly as ominous 8. Palfrey had learned to expect 9 to follow within days.

In some hill districts, particularly where there were thick rock strata, the
Lozi
had not made great inroads, and life was more or less normal except for lack of contact with the rest of the world. Radio and television, by Telstar and similar satellites, was now almost the only means of communication, and travel had stopped except for journeys by scientists and others who might be able to make some contribution to the solution of the problem. A few huge liners, stocked with canned and frozen foods, were at sea, but most of these were now in need of refuelling, few could cruise much longer. All of these showed 1 or 3. All without exception showed 4.

Now, Palfrey saw 5 – Famine Conditions reached – in a dozen new places, and with a fresh touch of horror he read this of vast expanses of the Argentine and of Australia, the granaries of the Western world.

Hungary showed two big areas, also at the point of famine. But of them all, the worst numeral was 10, which meant:
Lozi in complete control.

The 10 glowed in most of the great plains and valleys of the East, in North Africa, in Arabia, in the Middle East, in South America, in the Deep South of the United States, over vast areas of Russia, on either side of the great European rivers, the Danube, the Volga, the Rhine, the Rhone. Wherever food grew most freely, there was the starkly horrifying: 10. It was dotted about the sugar producing areas of Queensland, Australia, Zululand, South Africa; it showed in all the river basins and in the reclaimed land of the world's oceans.

Whole islands were blank except for that dreadful 10.

The military and civilian authorities had been working at furious pressure for weeks, but the pressure had now slackened because of lack of food and, consequently, of stamina; but there were islands or oases of security in some parts of the world – like ghettos, with high walls and deep foundations, inside of which human beings crowded with their precious food stocks, surviving only because they were able to keep the
Lozi
out.

The food would not last long in any of these places; the moves to conserve it had started too late. There were millions upon millions of
Lozi,
doubling their number every other day, doubling their need for food which the world could not supply.

Palfrey was comparing numbers of the different countries with the figures of that morning, when the door opened and Beth came in, with tea.