Quatermass (15 page)

The Stumpy Men . . .

“We’ll be there soon,” said Annie. He nodded. That was what had to matter now. The reason was behind him, trembling among the blankets.

Marshall’s face was on the monitor screens again. This time the images refused to hold. Contact had only been established late in the satellite pass.

His voice was an intermittent croak. “That incident you’ve had—how many casualties?”

“I don’t know,” Kapp said. “Thousands.”

The spattering images showed signs of hasty off-screen conference. “Joe, we’re plotting others now. Strictly first reports. Stuff about lightning bolts and mass casualties.”

“Where?”

“One in Indonesia, one in Brittany, France. We could be mistaken because the times are crazy—they were practically simultaneous. Within two minutes.” Off-screen interruption. “Yeah, okay. Joe, we’re leaving you now. Out.”

A splutter on the screens, then darkness. Only the sense of alarm remained.

Roach considered. “Think they wanted to involve us?”

Chen was nodding. “Start a search, radar mode.”

Kapp was hunched in his chair. “Two minutes apart, across a third of the world’s surface! At any conceivable orbit the velocity would have to be—” He covered his eyes.

“So it’s more than one,” said Chen.

Roach shook his head.

“Must be!”

“Not necessarily,” said Roach.

Chen protested: “Tommy, it’s plural!”

Roach still shook his head. “Doesn’t have to be. I can imagine—” He broke off. What he could imagine was suddenly clearer than he wanted it to be and he was not going to talk about it.

“Tommy, for God’s sake, what’s up there?” Kapp jumped to his feet.

“Do we start finding out?” said Chen.

“I don’t know. If we did hit it . . . make contact . . . !” Kapp sucked in a sharp breath. “No!”

Roach came back to them. “All right, we play safe,” he said. “Stick to reflector mode. Then we’ve got to increase the spread. Can we use Dog Dish?”

Kapp was firm. “No, Dog Dish stays on the Americans, so long as they come through. Essential.” He turned to Chen. “The outer units? Status, quick.”

“West’s okay,” said Chen. “East’s still out.”

“Very efficient vandals,” said Roach.

“I thought you were going over there to—”

“No chance,” said Chen. “You had the waggon.”

“A lot to do?”

“It’s a mess.”

“Think I’d manage a lash-up?” Chen nodded. “How’s the emergency bag?”

“Ready,” said Chen. He ran to get it.

“Tommy, calibrate West and Cat Dish. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Silly words seriously meant.

Chen had found the big, heavy fibre case that held the emergency repairs pack. He was already on the way out.

“When you’re back we’ll talk concepts,” said Roach.

“You really have thought some up?”

“They’re all nasty.”

In the old ticket office he turned aside. “Better take this, Joe.” He lifted a shotgun from its rack and a bandolier of cartridges. Kapp nodded and took the gun.

Chen was heaving the emergency pack into the back of the waggon. On the point of doing the same with the shotgun, Kapp changed his mind. He kept it with him, put it on the seat beside him.

He started up.

The engine fired reluctantly. Wind whistled through the holed screen and the steering felt slack in his hands. Ringstone Round had left its mark.

As he neared the hut he saw Clare coming out.

She had a small spade in her hand. Going to the vegetable patch. He felt glad of that, it was the only way. Find something routine to do. Put everything else out of your mind.

Then he saw the other things. He quickly pulled in.

A surveyor’s tape, a clip-board, a pointed plumb-bob. He leaned across and called from the car window: “What’s all that for?”

Clare said: “I thought I’d go to the mound.”

There was something wrong with the way she said it.

“Now?”

“I got my old gear out.” She held the things up to show him. “I could start to dig. I always meant to.”

Joe Kapp’s skin crept a little.

He swung the door open. Everything in him told him to get out and stay with her. But there was no time.

“Listen,
bubeleh,
” he said. “I want you to go back and stay with the kids.”

Clare looked in a troubled way at the instruments and tools she was holding.

“Put them away,” he said. “It’s not a good time, you know that. Okay? I’ll be back soon.”

“Where are you going?”

“One of the outer units. I’ve got to. I’ll be back in an hour.” He slammed the door of the waggon. “Back soon—I promise.”

“Soon,” Clare said.

He looked at her again through the rear mirror as he drove off. She was not even facing in his direction. Why should she? No reason at all, he told himself. Except that Clare would.

The steering was worse than he thought. He hadn’t noticed it driving back last night. He hadn’t noticed anything then. It must have happened when he hit the fallen sarsen. To allow for its slackness he drove slowly and kept to the middle of the track. The surface was bad, broken up by the winter rains and now getting heavily overgrown.

“Leh-lehe-leheleheleh!”

Bolting straight across in front of him. Planet People.

He braked and swerved, but the steering was sloppier still and he found himself thumping across tussocks at the side of the track. He yelled in fury at the oblivious runners.

Forty or fifty of them, he judged. Dusty, ragged figures. They were all past him now, streaming after their leader across the derelict fields.

The engine had stalled. He got it going again and jolted back on to the track.

He kept a sharper lookout. He saw groups in the distance, one of them very large indeed. There must have been several hundred in it. The Planet People were on the move again.

A few miles further on another straggle ran before him. He blasted his horn at them but made no attempt to avoid them. They had to take their chance.

He was in trouble.

The engine was gasping and misfiring. He suspected an oil leak. He might have hit the sump when he ran off the track, but if he stopped he might not get started again.

If he could just get to the outer unit—

The waggon made the last hilltop in a cloud of steam. At last he was able to switch the suffering engine off. Just in time. It sounded as if it was on the point of seizing. When he peered beneath it he saw a tell-tale drip of black oil.

He could see his destination half a mile away down a low slope. Squat as a blockhouse, with small dish-antennas on top. He could coast that far.

The waggon rolled in silence, gathering speed, then running level to within a few yards of the building. He was about to jump out when he remembered and reached back for the shotgun.

He made sure it was loaded before he started cautiously forward. A bird flew up from the hedge. Nothing else stirred. There always used to be sheep on the land behind but they had gone, driven off for barter. Or stolen.

The antennas looked undamaged. That tallied with what Frank had reported. Just a bit of casual malice, the sort of damage you would find anywhere.

The padlock had been smashed and torn off the gate.

His heart sank.

Black smeary letters on the concrete walls,
KILL SCIENCE
! The steel door had been forced and pulled wide. Smudged on it the words
TO THE PLANET
!

Inside, every item had been laboriously smashed. Electronic modules had been prized from their frames and shattered. The frames themselves had been twisted out of shape. The small control panel had been ripped loose, all its automatic response-systems thrown on the ground and trampled. The floor was thick with fragments.

The walls were daubed with more graffiti,
THE TIME TO GO WILL COME
! He could imagine the angry, violating hands, the fatuous chanting,
FEEL NOT THINK
, said their smears,
THE MAD ARE SANE
!

The unit must have been heavily visited since Frank saw it. More than once, probably, by passing bands. Repair was out of the question.

He picked up the phone but of course it had been torn loose.

The problem now was to get back. It was only after some serious thought on the best route to walk, to keep as far as possible out of the way of the idiot swarms, that he grasped the meaning of what he had seen. Black paint, it couldn’t be. Even Planet People weren’t crazed enough to carry pots of paint on their wanderings.

He touched the daubs. Sticky wet.

Oil.

They had found some here. Generator diesel, drainings, whatever. Unless they’d thrown it to waste, there could still be some.

He started a frantic search.

The very thought of vandals made Tommy Roach smart. The sight of their activities gave him asthma. He could not have borne to go with Kapp. According to Frank Chen the damage to the east unit was slight, and by now Joe had probably got it almost back to function. But he could not have gone there himself.

He kept an eye on the control desk, waiting for the indicator blip that would show Joe had done it.

In the East, he believed, it was looked on as sinful to waste a grain of rice, the fruit of human labour. It was a principle Roach had clapped to his heart. As a boy he had been painfully thin, for the simple reason that he did not get enough to eat. He had been one of a large family, whose poverty in those days of the Welfare State should not have been possible. Father Roach gave priority to his alcohol habit. Mother Roach was battered and in dread of him. The children, when eating off plates and not out of occasional paper bags, learned to lick them very clean.

When he grew up and was able to display his cleverness, Tommy Roach kept eating. He made a joke of it but it told on his shape. He was only happy when fat. It was a way of casting off his past. And he always cleaned his plate, polished it with bread. In hall at Cambridge or later at official luncheons he persisted cheerfully in this vulgarism, shrugging off the disapproval of waiters and diners, knowing only that unless his plate shone like one unused he would be unable to live with himself. He was compulsively greedy. No snack that came his way was ever refused. A slot machine on a station platform would empty his pockets of change. Friends shook their heads, doctors warned. Tommy ate. He had been thin, and he would never be thin again. By the time he was twenty-five his metabolism had taken a permanent tilt. Even when the privations came he stayed fat. He accounted himself instinctively wise, like animals which put on weight and fur before a severe winter without knowing why.

Oddly, he was no cook. “All I can make,” he said pompously when asked, “is food for the mind.”

He was still a young man when he was made head of the Western Astrophysical Observatory.

“Mr. Roach, sir, they’ve got in!”

That was the cry that could still spring him panting and puffing out of bed in a dream. The sight of priceless instruments in ruins was imprinted deep. Fire had broken out later, started in some shattered electrical circuit, they said. It had destroyed computer tapes, vital records, the lot. He later had a breakdown, a kind of catalepsy of incomprehension. He simply could not grasp why any human being should want to destroy the means to, ultimately, wisdom. Anything that did proved itself under-human.

“They’ve got in, Mr. Roach!”

The middle, low part of the night, that was the hour for barbarians to act, the totalitarians’ time for hauling victims off to torture. For Roach the truncheon-blows on his kidneys had been the sight of patient discoveries burning.

A faint sound. He turned quickly to the control desk. There had been no contact from the Americans when the last satellite pass was due, and now it was the wrong time. He waited.

Not a flicker on the monitors.

He looked at Frank Chen. The young Chinese had his face down on his hands, exhausted. Frank was sound, very sound, with an instant flair that he suspected was at the root of the legend of oriental inscrutability. But this time Frank could be wrong. It might not be numbers they were up against, not plurality but complexity. A form of life that broke all rules. It was better to bid high, to take your first concepts to extremes and then cut back. Better than stretching and patching small ideas. It was the Irish in him, that needed extravagance as a working basis.

A skein.

That was the word. It had popped into his mind and he had thrown it at the old man before he went. Quatermass had just looked at him. Hard to know if he’d taken it in or not. There’d been no time to discuss it—the old man was obsessed with getting his survivor away—and of course the face at that age was a lot less expressive. The mask settling. You didn’t get much back from such a one.

Another faint thread of sound. Its source was hard to place. He started checking the controls again.

Frank Chen stirred.

He sat shaking his head as if trying to clear his wits.

“Alison,” he said. “I think she’s come back.”

He still looked half asleep. It could get remarkably oppressive in a computer room, sealed from all sight and sound.

An odd thing to say, though.

“Well,” said Roach, “perhaps she has. She might have by now. Why don’t you go down to the huts and see?”

Chen nodded. He pulled himself to his feet.

“Don’t be too long,” said Roach. “The Yanks gave us a miss the last time but—”

Two wild figures burst in.

Young men in ponchos. As they pushed through the air-lock a great gust of sound followed them. A host of voices chanting outside.

“Heh! Heh! Heh! Heh! Heh!”

Roach was out of his seat, frantic. The young men were between him and the shotguns—

But they were running straight out again. One look had been enough for them. There was nothing they wanted here.

Roach forced his tubby body along past Frank Chen. As he got to the old ticket office the full din hit him. Through the open outer door he saw them, a whole boiling mad movement of them. He grabbed a shotgun.

“No!” It was Chen, a strange squawking cry. He pushed the gun down, almost out of Roach’s hand, and ran through the doorway.