Quatermass (10 page)

“I had to try,” said Quatermass.

Kapp nodded. “You did your best. But what the hell, they’re mad.”

The black truck ahead was moving faster. Kapp speeded to catch up, before its wake could close up and cut them off. But the mob seemed to be thinning. He drew a slow breath. “I think . . . yes, I think we’re out of it.”

All in a moment they drew clear, and the only Planet People about were a few stragglers.

The black truck was drawing away but it no longer mattered.

Kapp slowed. He was glad to. The ground was uneven, full of treacherous twists. His waggon’s suspension was having a bad time.

Clare peered back. “What d’you think’ll happen?”

“That boss cop!” Kapp’s disgust showed. “He’s scared out of his skull.”

“But he’s got all those guns—”

“You saw his eyes,” said Quatermass. “Yes, he’ll start shooting.”

“He may not,” Kapp said. “He may just decide his contract time is up and quit. That’s your pay cop. You get what you pay for, or a bit less—”

They lurched up and over a crooked rise.

There was the black truck. It was lying on its side with wheels in the air, still spinning. Right in their path.

“God!”

Kapp swerved violently and they nearly went over in the same way. They were flung out of their seats as the waggon bounced and skidded and plunged. He managed to get control of it before it cut straight through a trotting line of ponchoed figures. Planet People, still arriving. They scattered in panic. The waggon jolted about and came to a stop.

Caraway stood glaring in fury.

That waggon could have killed them all. He had a mind to swing up his plumb-bob at the driver’s window and smash it. No good, though, there was all that protective mesh. Bits of iron all over the waggon. In fact there was something nasty and familiar about it altogether. It was exactly like the one they had met on the road where the old man talked crazy. And in fact when you looked it had the same old man inside it, too, so it was the same one.

It had nearly hit Sal. Being fat, she couldn’t dodge out of the way of things so fast, and it had come close to getting her. She was crying with fright and clutching her old baby so hard she made it squeal.

Bee had got over it.

She was running straight on towards the other truck, the black one that had crashed. They had heard it, thump-bang-thump! No doubt about what it was, with those big yellow letters on its side. They were a bit hard to see at the moment but when you made them out they spelt
CONTRACT POLICE.
The driver was a pay cop, or had been. He was a bit of a mess now because he was half out of the truck and it was on him. He was just squirming a bit.

Inside the truck somebody was banging and thumping about. Shouting like mad. “Help me! Get me out!”

His face showed through the bars on the back window. A lot of blood on it and mixed in his hair too. But when Caraway got near he saw the most remarkable thing about him was the P-marks on his cheeks. They were tattooed there. It was the first time Caraway had seen it done like that. It was something really special.

“Hurry up!” yelled the bloody man. “Bust the lock!”

Nobody wanted to stop. Ringstone Round was so close you could see the big stones, and even a bit of the crowd that was all round them, jumping and chanting. It sounded like millions and it drove you crazy to listen, just wanting to get there and join in.

“Come on!” shouted the locked-up man. “Bust it!”

They flung themselves at the cop truck. They rocked it and they kicked at it. Bee hit the door with a stone but that didn’t do much good, so Caraway found a far bigger one and battered the lock till it gave. The door flew open. The bloody tattooed man jumped out and he was truly enormous. There were two other People in there with him, two men, and they got out too. They just hadn’t been saying much.

When the tattooed man saw the other waggon he sort of growled. The old science man was standing there looking bothered, as if he had half a notion to come over, maybe to try and help the squashed driver-cop. But if he had, he was the one who would have got the next squashing, Caraway could tell that from the way the tattooed man was shaking with hate.

“Let’s go!” shouted Caraway. They were wasting time.

Bee and the others turned to run on with him—and then, right at their eyes, it happened.

The light.

It was so blinding Caraway thought the truck had exploded.

Bee shrieked.

A column of fire coming down out of the sky.

Like a huge slow spark as thick as a tree and then thick as a tower. It kept fattening all the time, throbbing and quivering blue.

Its sound hit them then. A kind of crackle so loud it pushed eardrums in and seemed to shake bones loose in the body.

Caraway fell down flat. So did others. And the noise came up through the ground at them, too. It shook every bit of thought out of their heads except one, that this was it, this was what they had been running all the way to find. It was really happening but they weren’t in it.

They screwed up their eyes to peer at Ringstone Round.

The dazzling beam had fixed there. It seemed to wash over the standing stones, and for an instant their big shapes could be made out in it, before the brightness became too much and blurred out everything. It was never still. It quivered and probed like the searching fingers of an enormous hand.

All the time the sound of it came rolling down. The steady, massive crackle of untold power.

Quatermass clung to the car door. He covered his watering eyes, unable to look. The reflected brightness beat up at him from the very ground. It grew fiercer, as if about to spread out and engulf them all.

He cringed.

Then it was dimming, he could tell, and the sound of it slackened.

He could bear to look.

The beam was still there. It extended upwards, he saw, into the sky and out of sight. A slash of brilliance like a bolt of lightning that had somehow stuck and stayed burning.

Now it changed again.

The base of it shifted, shrank. It rolled upwards. Fast, too fast for human eyes, which still thought they saw it after it had gone.

The sky was empty. Shredded clouds boiled about.

Little winds came, gusting all ways without direction, tugging at the trees and bushes, whirling up dust. The watchers rubbed at their eyes as the dazzle-spots faded from them.

On Ringstone Round the great megaliths had been pushed asunder. Some had fallen from the places they had kept through millennia. Some had split, riven like old trees.

A thin discoloured mist shifted about them. The ground beneath sparkled with a curious dusky glitter.

All the people had gone.

5

E
very instrument in the radio-observatory had gone to its peak reading. Needles vibrated at the top of their scales, as if to force a way past. All indicator lamps burned brightly, regardless of function.

Roach sat horrified.

“We’re being swamped! The cutouts, the safety cutouts—!”

But you couldn’t rely on them. They had never been put to a test like this—

“We’ll lose the lot!”

Instruments designed to distinguish between the faintest radiation sources at the other end of the universe were being sledge-hammered.

“Frank, screen in quick!”

Chen, with faster reactions, was already doing it. “Down by ten—”

It made no difference. A klaxon set to warn of the direst electrical calamity started into grating honks.

“And ten . . . and ten . . . and ten . . . !”

At a logarithmic reduction to one millionth of the incoming load, the readings began to sag. Then suddenly everything seemed to collapse. Indicator lamps died. Every needle dropped to zero.

“Blown!” Roach was panicked into complete confusion. “We’ve lost them! Oh, Christ—!”

“It’s over,” Chen said.

“What?”

“It stopped, it just stopped. I think.” Carefully, coolly, Chen switched out the screening factor stage by stage. Needles and lamps started to respond again.

Roach wiped messily at the sweat that was streaming down his face. “For a second there I really thought—!”

“Back to normal.”

“But what the hell—? Frank, those replacement modules?”

“I went over every one,” Chen said.

“Just the same—”

“I did!” End of argument. He was the most meticulous second Roach had ever worked with.

Chen said: “This came from outside.”

Roach stared at him.

As if unaware of the question he had just raised, the younger man was starting on a rapid routine of apparatus checks.

“Damage?”

“None so far.”

If they’d really got away with it . . . there might be some recorded traces, some that survived that massive dumping into the hardware. They could try to analyse them.

A team job if ever there was one. It needed Joe, but Joe had unaccountably driven off somewhere. It needed Alison Sharpe, and she was sitting over in the Kapps’ hut looking after their kids. It was bloody lunacy! He grabbed the house phone to summon her.

He frowned. A thick hiss came from the receiver.

“Frank, listen—”

But Chen was busy with his own discoveries. “D’you know how long that lasted?” he said. He looked round for the inked tracks of the Spacelab catastrophe, the blurs in space and time that coincided when they should not have done. “It’s the same,” he said.

20.2 seconds.

Alison Sharpe had switched the radio on. She had expected only the usual cracked records, and the bland news flashes that you weren’t really meant to believe, but she thought it would do to distract the children. She felt she was no good to them today. She was still shaken up by her encounter with the Planet People.

The radio was playing its anti-music when a blast of interference broke in, so loud and harsh that it made the children jump. Debbie clapped her hands to her ears and looked round for sympathy, ready to cry if she got any.

Alison turned the radio off.

She went to the window and looked across at the observatory. The trouble could have come from there, some major fault flaring. But everything looked quiet. No running figures.

“I can read it!” Debbie’s boasting voice.

She had the battered Kate Greenaway book open on the floor. With a restraint that always surprised Alison, her sister said: “You can’t read.”

“I can
say
it!” cried Debbie. “. . . Lose your hat but it won’t be found, so pull up your britches . . . What’s britches?”

“Pants,” said Sarah.

Alison was still staring out of the window as if she expected to see something. Looking along the skyline now.

Kapp drove slowly forward across the turf. Through the waggon’s open window a thin acridity seemed to bite at the nostrils. Clare sat bolt upright beside him. He was aware of her trembling but she did not speak.

“Better stop,” said Quatermass. “We’re getting close.”

They could see the line of it now, about fifty yards ahead. It ran irregularly like a broad singed swathe. Everything it enclosed had gone. From there they could make out detail halfway up to the stones, and it was obvious that there were only slight undulations, a few inches high at most, and those seemed to consist of dust. It rippled and shifted here and there, but the movement came from the eddies of wind. It had blown strongly as they first approached, then quickly died away.

Clare said in the small stubborn voice of a child: “I won’t believe it.” And then: “Let’s go. Let’s get away.”

It was impossible.

Kapp looked at Quatermass and found the same obligation in his face. He threw the door of the waggon open and got down. Quatermass followed. After a moment so did Clare, to be with them.

“Oh God!” she said. “You can hear the earth!”

The ground was seething with shock, literally singing like a big fruit cake just out of the oven. They moved forward slowly, sensitive to everything about them. Particularly above them.

Kapp said: “How many do you think were here?”

“Thousands.” Quatermass had no real idea.

The dust sparkled strangely. He picked up a handful and was surprised at its weight. It had something crystalline about it, flashing light back from minute facets. It was hard to hold, dribbling between his fingers like quicksilver. Yet on the ground it seemed to bind into a sort of flocculence.

Metal things showed like islands in a grey sea. A backpack frame, a water bottle, a plumb-bob.

Quatermass walked along the edge of the terrible place.

“They did it!”

The cry came from the great gaunt man they called Kickalong, as he came panting up. The Planet People who had set him free were straggling behind.

“They got away!” he shouted. Tears were streaming down the bloodstained face. “They’re all gone!”

Wails from Caraway and the rest. Bee’s thin body was shaking with the bitterness of it.

“Not quite all of them.”

Quatermass was staring at something on the singed perimeter line. He had taken it first to be a thicker drift of dust, but it was more solid. A shapeless mess of jellied flesh and bent bone. Teeth were scattered in it, and vertebrae. It still seemed to tremble a little, perhaps from the movement of the ground.