Famine Read Free Page A

to the side of the nearest wheel. It was like a child, a minute child – or a dwarf. Certainly it looked human, although so small. It appeared only for a moment, then vanished. Fordham had not caught sight of its face, only the top of a head, and the curve of a tiny body. Like his wife, although for a very different reason, he wondered if this were an hallucination, and he was seeing things which were not there.
    The squealing continued.
    He thought automatically: I must help them. My God, there are a lot of kids under there! He forgot the risk of treading on hollow ground, felt his right foot break through the crust of stubble-covered earth, tried to save himself and failed. Arms waving, a strange dread tearing at his heart, he dropped downwards.
    The fall was not far. When he came to rest, he was about waist deep in earth; he could stretch out his hands and touch stubble without effort. He must get out of here; the ground beneath him seemed firm enough. But the groaning and the squealing were louder, and before he made any attempt to move he realised that they were in fact coming from beneath the earth at its normal level.
    He put his arms out to haul himself up, and almost at once the earth about him collapsed beneath his weight. As it crumbled the other sounds grew louder, shriller, more piercing. Chaff from the cut grain rose, half-blinding him, increasing the feeling of nightmare. Gradually, as the dust cleared away he was able to distinguish one thing from another.
    It was as if he were looking out at the after-effects of a bomb; or an earthquake. Small pieces of brick and rubble, stones and earth, were piled in a heap in front of his eyes. Hands and feet, heads and arms, of dozens of tiny people appeared everywhere. Some of the creatures were clawing at the rubble to free themselves. Hands and cheeks were streaked with blood, fear, terror, showed on the miniature faces.
    It must be a dream, Fordham thought wildly.
    He felt like Gulliver in the world of Lilliput, but Gulliver had never set eyes on such a tragedy as this. The hideous thing was the number of people beneath the debris, although the collapsed area was really quite small – not much more than the size of one of his sheds.
    I must go and get help, he thought.
    I don’t believe I’m seeing straight. I can’t be.
    Then he noticed two of the midget creatures staring at him, with a glare of malevolence.
    He must get away and fetch help. All of the ground couldn’t be hollow. He turned from the dreadful sight, and then said aloud: “I can dig ‘em out with my hands!”
    The moment the thought entered his head, he began to work, and suddenly the tiny creatures seemed to realise what he was doing, and to stop struggling. He dug his hands into the rubble near one of them, eased it away, and lifted the creature out. His mind rejected the evidence of his eyes. It was like handling a doll, a beautifully made, beautifully formed doll, naked except for a loin cloth. The smooth, pale body was scratched here and there, but not seriously.
    Fordham put it down very carefully on the earth at waist level.
    â€œTake it easy,” he said. “You’ll be all right.”
    He moved to rescue another, and another; thinking stupidly: “They are men.” Certainly they were perfectly formed models of grown men, handsome in a way, although their size still made him think of them as dolls. He soon had twenty or so of them free, but worse was to come, for some were buried beneath the rubble. He groped for and found one, and when he brought it out, the dirt falling from it in streams, he saw that it was dead.
    He placed it on the other side, away from the living creatures. Still unable to grasp what was happening, feeling as if it were a prolonged nightmare from which at any moment he would awake, he worked mechanically. There must be as many dead, now, as living creatures. He was tiring rapidly, yet could not stop, for there