Quatermass (11 page)

“There’s another one,” said Bee, and ran to look.

And then others. Human fragments, all along the edge.

The Planet People stared at them. Quatermass waited for revulsion and terror. There was neither. Kickalong picked up a plumb-bob, cordless now, from beside one. Then he dropped it again, as if restoring it to the ruined thing’s possession.

“These didn’t make it,” he said.

Quatermass could hardly believe it had been said. “They were destroyed!”

“They were unlucky!”

Caraway chimed in. “Like an accident—you always get accidents.”

“What about all the rest?” cried Kickalong. “They got away. They went to the Planet, all of ’em. Nothing you can do to bring ’em back! They’ve gone!”

He waved triumphantly across the sea of grey dust. The Planet People picked up his words: “They’ve gone! They got away!”

“Us next,” Kickalong promised. “Soon—it’s going to be soon!”

“Soon!” they cried. “Yes, soon!” It was the re-affirmation of faith. Kickalong looked up at the sky and howled: “You just went on ahead! We’re coming too! Make the land ready till we get there!”

“Make ready! Make ready!”

The little group were staring into the sky as if expecting to be swept up there at any moment. Quatermass shivered.

He rejoined the Kapps. Clare was holding on to her husband and whispering over and over: “I don’t understand, I don’t want to understand.”

Kapp said: “They knew it would happen, and it did.”

The Planet People were stepping one by one across into the blasted area. They moved carefully, respectfully, as if they were on holy ground. Their feet stirred the dust, riffling it and fluffing it aside. There were little personal things among it, adornments and shoe-buckles and the like. But nothing more that had been human.

The little ticket office was still standing. Or part of it was, and that only until Kickalong touched it. Then the boards flaked as if they had been centuries in a tomb, and scattered round him into crystalline dust.

Kickalong ran among the great sarsen stones.

He saw where they had been shivered. A whole section of the hanging stone had been broken off and lay on the ground. Pieces of it lay scattered about, with raw edges. Other megaliths had been displaced, had spilled their lintels down. Some had split, yet still stood.

Kickalong found the pay cops’ armour. He kicked savagely at an empty helmet, sending it bouncing away like a skull.

“Cops!”

“They shouldn’t have been here,” agreed Caraway. “They weren’t meant.”

Bee glared down the slope behind them. “And
them.
I know them. On that road, they talked to us. Asking things.”

“That old science man,” said Caraway.

“They’re going,” said Bee.

As Kapp started with Clare towards the waggon she stiffened and pointed. Though the grass was still green here, a drift of dust had formed, and it was moving.

“Something still alive!” She turned so that she would not see it.

A thin hand appeared out of the dust, and an arm, then an emaciated face with smudged letters painted. It was the face of a child, Quatermass decided as he went towards it. Boy or girl, it looked as if it was just starting to come back to consciousness. The head fell weakly sideways as he reached it. A whimper as he raised the frail body. The eyes opened wide and blank. The skin was grey with the dust, as if it had been driven in. Most of the clothing had been torn away. He saw small unformed breasts.

She began to shiver slightly. Brief fits of returning life. But the shock must have been devastating. She felt icy cold.

He turned to the others. “A blanket? Anything warm?”

Clare ran to the waggon.

“You’re all right,” he said to the girl. “You’re safe.”

“Tom, what happened?” A surge of fright. “Tom?”

“You’re all right,” he said again.

“I don’t think she can hear you,” said Kapp.

The child clutched Quatermass’s hand, finding it strange. She tried to see it, then put up her own hand to her face. A whimper of panic.

“I can’t see out of me eyes!”

Clare came with a rug. Between them they wrapped it round the convulsed little creature. Quatermass actually had her in his arms, about to lift her, when the interruption came.

“What are you doing?”

It was Kickalong, with the dust scattering in his wake, and the other Planet People panting down from the Round after him.

“She’s hurt,” said Quatermass.

“Leave her!”

“I want to find out how.”

“For your science?” yelled Caraway. “That what you want her for?”

And Bee screamed: “Stop trying to know things!”

“Give her here,” said Kickalong.

Quatermass glanced at Joe Kapp. They were surrounded and the waggon was too far away. He let Bee crouch beside the stunned little figure and touch its face.

“Tom? Where’s Tom?”

“He must have gone,” said Bee.

“She can’t hear or see you,” said Quatermass. He looked for some reaction to this but there was none. Neither awe nor fear.

Kickalong put his tattooed face to the girl’s and shouted: “He’s gone! They’ve all gone!”

That got through to her. “Gone—?”

“Yes!” yelled Kickalong.

She moaned. “I got left. It was the lightning. I never meant to be scared.” Kickalong stroked her face, comforting her. “It was lovely, the lightning.”

They all picked the words up.

“Lightning . . . lovely lightning.” Hands caressed the wizened little face as if she had suddenly become special to them.

“You’ll go soon!” promised Bee.

“I can’t see,” whispered the child, not hearing either.

“Stay with us!” cried Bee. “We can go together! We’ll take you!”

“Lovely lighting, lovely lightning!” muttered like a prayer over the maimed creature. Clare was unable to take her eyes off them, fascinated and sickened. Kapp moved quietly towards the waggon.

“It’ll come again,” promised Kickalong. “It’ll take us too!”

“Soon! Soon! Soon!” they cried.

The girl was aware of their hands on her face. She gave a trembling smile. Kickalong looked up and shouted: “We’re waiting! We won’t be long! We’re coming out of the blackness of this world!”

“Soon! Soon!”

There was a roar from the waggon as Kapp backed it towards them at full throttle. The tail door was open.

As the Planet People scattered Quatermass made his effort.

He grabbed the girl up, grateful for her lightness, and threw himself towards the waggon. Clare moved too, the spell broken. Between them they got her in and slammed the door behind them.

As the cries of anger rose, Kapp let in the clutch.

He jerked at his door to shut it and found it jammed. Kickalong was clinging there. As Kapp drove off the big tattooed face was thrust into his and they were fighting for the wheel.

“Let her go,” yelled Kickalong. “She’s ours!”

He was stronger as well as bigger. Kapp found himself veering helplessly in a circle. They were well into the blasted area now. Dust belched up round the waggon.

Kickalong made a grab at the mesh that covered the windscreen. He hauled himself on to the bonnet and clung there, kicking at the mesh until the glass crazed. Kapp swung the wheel desperately, trying to shake him off, trying just to see.

“The stones!” shouted Quatermass.

They were plunging into the Round. The wheels thudded and the whole heavy vehicle bucked in the air. They had hit the fallen sarsen.

Kickalong was flung to the ground. But in a moment he was up, reeling on his feet. He snatched up a stone fragment and hurled it.

“You took my chance!” he screamed. “You stopped me! I could’a gone to the Planet!”

He was weeping with rage. He turned to the pay cop wreckage and grabbed a long machine gun. Kapp fought to reverse free of the sarsen. Kickalong aimed. He pulled the trigger but the bolt clicked dead. He hurled the gun with all the strength he had left, shattering a side window and showering glass inside.

The waggon backed away.

In another moment it was zigzagging down the slope. Clare was clinging among the rubbish in the back trying to protect the injured girl. As Kapp drove at full speed down the slope a shower of stones hit the side. There were furious screams from the little group of Planet People, in total contrast to their gentle keening minutes before.

“They want her!” gasped Clare.

Kapp said: “They want us!”

He kept his foot hard down. As they thumped over the turf they heard a burst of fire behind them.

Kickalong had found a gun that worked.

“Keep down!” yelled Kapp.

Another distant burst. Bullets slashed a corner off the waggon. They waited for more but none came. Perhaps that gun had jammed too.

Incredulity, said the cool small voice, is a protective device. When the senses overload a safety cutout says enough is enough. After it operates everything that does not match the norm gets rejected. So now. Those thousands, they were not there, how could they have been? None of it happened, we didn’t see it. The safety cutout is trying to trip but it can’t quite manage it. A bit of grit in the mechanism. It takes the form of a small thin girl lying in the back of this waggon.

Quatermass looked round.

Clare had the girl’s head on her lap. She was stroking her face. Now that was a normal thing to see, a woman comforting a sick child. The cutout trembled again towards the safety position. But there was something wrong even in that. Other hands had performed that same service. He had seen them only a few minutes before. To sustain a belief that was totally insane. Was Clare consciously imitating them? She looked stunned. Did she realize?

The safety cutout failed. Quatermass felt a trembling inside his spinal column.

He glanced at Kapp, glaring out through the starred glass and mesh of the windscreen. His hands were clamped so hard on the wheel that the veins rose.

It was a pleasant evening. In another time they might have been driving home after a drink with friends. The hour when wild creatures came out to feed, feeling the safety of dusk. Rabbits, hardly to be distinguished from stands of fat brown thistle.

The cutout was nearly there . . .

A screech of brakes as Kapp stamped. The waggon swerved. There was a frightened straggle of figures on the road.

“Bloody glass, I can’t see a thing!” Kapp raged.

Quatermass glanced back. More of them, yes, in their ragged ritual ponchos. Running. But they were too late.

One or two of the Planet People stood staring after the waggon that had nearly hit them. Then they ran to catch up with the others.

A small party of a dozen or so, they had only come together that day, the joining of two smaller groups. They had hardly spoken to each other, had not felt the need, their sense of purpose had been so strong. It had swelled to a kind of ecstasy, the certainty of a great wonder just ahead.

Now it had left them.

The fever had died. They looked in each other’s faces and found nothing.

The girl who was leading them halted yet again. She swung her plumb-bob. They all stood watching it move in a slow circle, unchanging, offering no direction.

One of the watchers was a girl of sixteen. Pretty to a degree, it was more a face of quirky determination that would never do what was expected of it, whether those who expected it were young or old.

Even in her commitment she stayed uncommitted. Beneath her springy poncho she kept a small leather pouch. It hung between her breasts and in it were personal things. There was a lucky stone she had found as a child, a pebble that seemed to have something growing in it. She had kept it not for the luck but to remind her of the holiday when she had found it. There was a tiny photograph of her parents who were dead, killed in a car crash in the days when cars still ran on motorways. It had been in Germany and if she had been with them she would certainly have been killed too, she had been told. There was a ring with a tiger’s eye. It was better not to wear it. And a wadded letter she had kept less from affection than from canny sense that it might be needed some time. She had re-read it once or twice when she looked at the other things. “My dearest Hettie . . .” it began, and went on like that, an old man trying to show concern, choosing simple words in a way she had found patronising and hated him for. But then, in a low time she had cried over it, had taken it as it was meant and had forgiven the clumsiness, right down to “I remain, your loving Grandfather . . .”

6

I
t was turning full dark when Kapp pulled in by the huts. For a moment nobody spoke. It was as if they had not expected to get back here again, and were surprised.

Scrambling out, Kapp almost fell. He was so stiff he had to jerk himself free of it. The waggon was in a bad state. The collision with the stones had buckled the whole front, forcing protective bars loose and springing welds. One mudguard was missing.

Frank Chen came running from the hut.

“Alison’s gone!”

It seemed important to Frank but Kapp could hardly focus his mind. “What?”

“I came over just now. She’s taken off.”