Quatermass (13 page)

The two Kapp children came running, drawn by the novelty of a strange vehicle.

“Look who’s here! Hello, my loves!” She embraced them both, rattling on, unwinding her nerves. “You’re not going to be like them when you grow up, are you? You mustn’t turn foolish, promise me! I’ve come to ask your daddy—Joe, the phones! They’re always bad but since yesterday—!”

“It’s different this time,” said Kapp. He nodded Quatermass over from the doorway.

“Even the radio, out! And then I got something through on my hot line—
that
still works, well, as far as anything works—and I came rushing over here. But on the way—”

Kapp stemmed the tide. “Annie, this is Professor Quatermass.”

“Well!” She looked hard at him.

“District Commissioner Anne Morgan.”

The title was like something from the days of Empire, Quatermass thought. Evening dress in the jungle and putting down the natives. Perhaps that was why they revived it. Regional officers for putting down the natives, looking for arms caches, sniffing out incipient riots and insurrection. The idea had gone wrong somewhere, as usual.

“So this is him! Oh, what a relief!”

“Relief?”

“They wanted me to find you, professor. They thought you might be here.”

Quatermass recalled it from a distant age. “I’m in trouble?”

“Eh?” She looked surprised. “Oh, I don’t think—”

“Yesterday I landed myself in some official hot water.”

Annie Morgan shook her head. “That hot water . . . must be water under the bridge by now. This is something else, don’t ask me what. They want your help. And they want you too, Joe, that is, your machinery, your antennas. I took down some numbers, they may make sense to you—” She broke off and asked the question she had been aching with: “What’s happened at Ringstone Round?”

There was a little silence. Kapp turned to the listening children.

“Sarah, take Debbie and—why don’t you feed Nannie?”

Sarah looked at the fat brown goat grazing fifty yards away at the end of its tethering rope. “She’s feeding herself.”

“Pick something she can’t reach,” said Kapp. “Give her a treat. Go on.”

The children moved away, knowing they were being got rid of.

“
Something
did!” said Annie. “I heard one or two rumours—it’s my job to hear, after all—and I drove past there a while ago and it’s all—blasted. You wouldn’t believe it, some of the stones are actually broken! And a sort of rubbish on the ground I’ve never seen before. Have you any idea?”

“We were there,” said Kapp.

He turned to make sure the children were out of earshot. He took Annie by the arm and started to talk.

Debbie was stroking the goat. “Pick something then,” she said to her sister.

“You pick it.” Sarah was watching the grown-ups.

“What would you like, Nanny?” She looked into the slatted pupils. “Sarah, you said Nanny could talk.”

“I was teasing.”

“You’re horrible. I bet she could. That’d show you.”

“You teach her, then.”

“I will! It’s easy to talk!” Debbie clawed up a green handful. “What’s this called, Nanny? It’s called grass. Say grass.”

Sarah saw Annie Morgan turn away from the others as if she had had a shock. She leaned on the side of the Land-Rover. She covered her face.

Debbie had lost interest in teaching the goat to talk. It was not really trying. She picked a dandelion clock and demolished it with spitty breaths. “Huff . . . huff . . . huffity . . . puffity . . . huff . . .”

Annie Morgan, it appeared, had walked up to the Round but had seen no bodies or parts of bodies anywhere. Perhaps Kickalong and the others had buried them before they left, or had even carried them off. There was a still more unsettling possibility.

Should they go back? Later, perhaps.

While Kapp hurried off to the observatory, Quatermass took her to see the sole survivor.

He was even surer now. For the wizened little creature in the bed it was no longer a question of recovery. The tremors had worsened. No sight or hearing, and even touch contact was fading. During the night she had taken sips of water. Now they were refused. It was as if she had surrendered.

Clare had soaked and applied precious bandages in an attempt to control the swellings, had even persuaded herself it was working. There was still no apparent pain. Her touch on the deformities brought no wince. But one glance at them made Annie cry out: “You can’t treat that!” It was worsening steadily, and the other foot was now as bloated and shapeless as a bladder.

“I can,” Clare insisted.

“What have you got, a few family medicines? Things you’ve made out of roots and herbs?”

“I’m willing her,” said Clare.

Quatermass got Annie out of the room. “For the others it was quick,” he said. Twenty point two seconds as measured on Roach’s instruments all these miles away. “They wanted something to come and take them. And something did.”

Frank Chen had been searching for Alison since dawn. He had just returned, nearly out on his feet, his clothes torn and soaked. He had walked for many miles. He had encountered groups of Planet People but she was not with any of them.

They had just been sitting about huddled in their ponchos, he told Kapp. No chanting, no excitement. As if it were all over.

“Then don’t worry about her,” said Tommy Roach. “She’ll turn up.”

There was much to do.

One of the antennas was moving along the track. The great dish was swinging round into a fresh alignment.

“Joe, is she sure about this?” Roach called. “I don’t see how, unless they’re bringing that Satellite right down to the deck—!”

She was just coming in with Quatermass. Kapp snatched the sheet of co-ordinates. “Annie, these orbital figures—”

“I did my best, Joe.”

“Did they say why?”

“They tried. I’m not an expert. The things that come over my hot line these days—!”

It was suddenly too much for her.

“Joe, look,” said Chen.

Identical spatters of dots were flashing across the two slung monitor screens.

“This could be something,” said Roach. As Kapp and Chen drew the screens down to useful height, a jerky succession of images appeared, tearing and streaking. A face . . . machinery of some kind . . . another spatter . . . a momentary caption in an unfamiliar language.

“What the hell’s wrong with it?” Kapp muttered.

“Low orbit, moving very fast,” Roach said. “It won’t be with us for long. At least it’s a signal. We’re dodging the ground noise.”

More flashes. A jabber of technical jargon, unmistakable in manner.

“What’s that, Bernard? Spanish?”

Quatermass frowned. “I don’t think so. There! That was Chuck Marshall!”

The face had come and gone. Now it reappeared on the screens. The American looked grey and unslept. He was talking but the words were lost.

Kapp raged: “Come on! Let’s have sound!”

“Nothing I can do,” said Roach. “It’s them.”

It came then in a blast from the speakers. “Have we any contact yet?” Marshall was asking. “I’m trying for Dr. Joseph Kapp.”

Kapp sprang to the desk microphone. “Chuck, this is Joe, I’m with you. We’ve got your picture but you can’t see us. A matter of facilities.”

“Okay, fine.” Marshall was brisk. “First of all, a warning. It is possible that we’re . . . attracting attention by this. We just don’t know. But be ready to cut and cut fast. That’s why we’ve re-orbited the satellite, for what it’s worth. Now, can you locate Bernard Quatermass?”

“He’s here, Chuck.”

“What, you mean
with
you? Put him on quick.”

Kapp made way at the control desk.

“Hello, Chuck,” Quatermass said. “I’m sorry we had angry words at the last—”

“Angry?” Marshall looked confused. “Oh, my God, I’d forgotten, totally forgotten. Listen, what we have here now is so . . . so urgent and so . . . frightful—”

Quatermass frowned.

“You heard about it?”

“Heard about it? I’m going to show it to you. I want you to watch this, Bernard. I need your opinion.” He called to an unseen colleague. “Okay, run it.”

Quatermass turned to Kapp. “How can he possibly—?”

But Kapp had already guessed. “I don’t think he means—”

One of the screen images changed, cutting to what appeared to be an aerial view. It wobbled as if it had been shot by nervous hands from a bucking helicopter. It showed green landscape.

From the other screen Marshall kept talking. “We just got this in from Brazil. State of São Paulo, some place known as . . . what the hell . . . O Papões.”

Quatermass was conscious of the others crowding closer to see the fuzzy screen landscape.

“Some thirty hours ago,” Marshall was saying, “when we were all so occupied with our disaster in space . . . what was really going on . . . was there!”

“I knew it, I knew it!” A horribly gratified whisper from Roach.

“Some kind of youth gathering. Thousands and thousands of kids, nobody knows how many because they were wiped out! Obliterated without trace! Bernard, do you believe me?”

“I believe you,” Quatermass said.

“Watch it closely.” The aerial shot showed a grey blasted area among the green, moving in lower and closer. It was all too familiar.

“Bernard,” said Marshall on the other screen, “way back in the past you and your Rocket Group tangled with some . . .” Quatermass could see him struggling for a reasonable description and finding none because there was none “. . . some hellish powers. Now the question. Does anything about this remind you? Is it anything you recognize?”

The question was confusing.

“Recognize? Yes.”

The aerial shot had ended. Marshall’s anxiety glared from both screens. “You do?”

“Not from my past experience, no, but—”

“Tell him!” said Kapp.

“From yesterday, Chuck. Yesterday.”

The satellite image fluttered. It was starting to break up.

“Go on quick,” said Marshall. “We’re losing you.”

“It happened here, the same thing—”

But the images were crazing. Quatermass turned to Roach, busy at the control desk. “Hold them, can’t you?”

Roach shook his head.

Marshall’s face reappeared for a moment. He seemed to have heard and to be asking a question. But the sound had broken up unintelligibly.

“It was here too!” Quatermass shouted. “Here in England at Ringstone Round!”

The screens were blank.

“You can’t get them back?”

“Not till the next pass,” said Roach.

They looked at each other. “So Ringstone Round wasn’t the first one,” Kapp said.

“I said so, didn’t I say?” from Roach.

“You’ve no idea what this is,” said Annie Morgan. She waited. Nobody argued. “And the Americans haven’t either and they were desperate enough to take the risk—they thought there was a risk but they took it, so they
were
desperate—”

It was the old man who broke the silence.

“I want to get that girl to London!” His voice was sharp. “She’s the only evidence we’ve got, the only specimen. The proof of what this does to living tissue.”

“Use her?” said Annie Morgan.

“Yes.”

Kapp was only concerned with practicalities. “My car’s damaged. We could try to organize some kind of—”

“No time,” said Quatermass. “Mrs. Morgan, what’s your authority worth? Could you get us through—and then to the right people? If you rate a hot line—”

She was still taken aback. “I’ll try my best.”

“Right.” Quatermass turned to Kapp. “Joe?”

“Do it,” said Kapp.

“You’ll deal with your wife?”

Kapp had no compassion. He said: “I want that kid out.”

There was a stimulant in the mere act of decision, Quatermass found. It meant action and that made adrenalin flow. Unless it was the other way round, the adrenalin stirred by the fear that of course one had, and that provoked the decision. Cause and effect, effect and cause. No matter, he was in charge of a situation for the first time in years.

He did it himself.

He gathered the blankets round the distorted figure and lifted her off the bed. To his relief she did not cry out. She seemed to be past reacting.

Clare stood blocking the bedroom doorway till Kapp pulled her aside. “It’s got to be done,” he said.

“As if you were putting down an animal!”

“No, Clare!”

“I’ll get her to a hospital,” said Quatermass.

“You’ll do what they said—you’ll experiment on her!” Clare’s eyes were wild. “They were right!”

Pain or not, he tried not to let the puffed legs touch anything. “A hospital,” he promised.

“You’ll kill her!” Clare cried again. “She said her name, Isabel . . . She was able to tell me—”

Annie Morgan was waiting.

She had the back of her Land-Rover open and was arranging pillows.

He lifted the girl in. Isabel, if she really had said it. If she had. A name made her more human, made it harder to do this. Clare would know that.

She was following from the hut’s doorway, Kapp catching her by the arm.

The little girls were watching. Debbie ran to her mother, crying indignantly: “That’s my blanket! Mummy, she’s got my blanket!” On the edge of angry tears.

The sound of her own child’s voice seemed to pull Clare together. She drew Debbie close to her and said: “She’s sick.”

Sarah moved close to her father. “I didn’t like her.”

The car doors slammed. Quatermass called: “Joe, I’ll get through to you tonight. One way or another.”

“Take care,” said Kapp.

Annie Morgan threw the Land-Rover into gear. It swerved jerkily away.

“Daddy, the old man,” said Sarah. “He’s stopped looking so old.”

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