Quatermass (23 page)

And now this new horror.

He had summoned a meeting in the Big Bunker. They sat assembled round the table, already exhausted with fractious, frightened discussion. He glanced round the faces caught by the low lamplight and despised them.

The only one for whom Grock felt any regard was David Hatherley, Secretary of State for Home Affairs and his own nephew, at least the son of a first cousin. A fine young man with a good, tough mind, which was unfortunately having to be applied to some filthy tasks. If the idea of becoming Protector ever went ahead, Grock Jervis intended to make a will nominating him as his successor. There were precedents for it. And he had had two heart attacks. Full recovery each time. But if he had a third . . .

“It seems, then, there’s nothing to be done?”

The man Quatermass rose to it.

“Isolate the megalith sites,” he said.

“By force?”

“Yes, sir—if you can. Use the severest measures. You’d be justified.”

A spry old creature, thought Grock. All his wits about him in spite of what he was reported to have gone through. Well, this was a question for the Home Office. “Apply severe measures” sounded all right till you came to try it, and then it usually turned out to be like swatting flies with a hammer. Which in turn was revealed as a rubber hammer that bent when used.

He turned to his nephew the Home Secretary. “David?”

“I don’t agree.” David’s voice was louder than usual and a bit higher pitched. It made his top lip lift up from his teeth, an ugly expression that reduced his charm. He had the sort of mouth that could be used with style. It ran in the family, a family mouth, though it did not seem to have reached Greek’s own branch of the family tree. It was good sincerity that made David look unlovely now. He didn’t like old Quatermass and made no bones about it. A case of instant dislike, cat and dog. A handsome cat and a squalid old dog, grey round the muzzle and with questionable faculties.

“Then what do you suggest?” asked Quatermass. Yes, dog he was, even growled like a dog.

“This shuttle mission is the right move,” said David Hatherley. “I believe that most profoundly.”

“And if it fails?”

“Well, let’s just see, shall we?” The clever cat studying his claws, ready to give his natural enemy a terrible swipe with them if he persisted.

“But if it does?”

Patient cat, not to be baited. “Then there must be a second attempt. And if necessary a third. Even a fourth.”

“This is ludicrous!”

David Hatherley’s eyes blazed with anger at that, and Grock cut in quickly before he set on the old man across the table in a full verbal assault. In action David could be terrifying. Grock had seen him demolish people. But that must not happen now, not to old Quatermass. He was desperately needed, at least until they found out whether he was on the right track. Grock himself had at first speculated on simpler explanations, nearly as upsetting but simpler, such as some mysterious form of mass suicide. It was always a struggle with disbelief; fighting off the more freakish elements in any rumour. Only a couple of years back there was that Second Coming of Christ in Liverpool, when He was firmly reported to have been seen walking on the waters of the Mersey . . .

“Professor Quatermass,” said Grock, “I doubt in any case that your suggestion is practicable. I mean the use of force.” He looked from the map on the table in front of him, on which had been marked many bold stars, to the woman sitting beside Quatermass. “Mrs. Morgan,” he said, “I see a lot of megalith sites are in your area.”

“Yes, sir,” said Annie.

“Do
you
think it would be possible to seal them all off?”

She looked embarrassed. “If we had more army units—”

“More!”

“It’s the only hope,” she said. “The pay cops are useless. You know that.”

Grock drew a sharp, annoyed breath. The Contract Police were to be written on his heart where the faulty valves were. They were his creation and he had created them out of the wrong material, disaffected renegades from a rotting republic—

“How many sites are there?” asked somebody.

“Hundreds,” Annie Morgan said.

Grock pushed a swatch of photographs along to the questioner: stone circles, Cornish quoits, sarsen avenues. “At least they’re easily spotted,” he said.

Quatermass objected again.

“Not always,” he said. “As I tried to explain before, the real signal may be deep underneath.”

“Then what are the stones?”

“I think they mark the danger spots. Or . . . were put there to . . . appease something.”

Grock swallowed.

“What about Silchester?” asked Hatherley. “There were no megaliths there.”

Silchester! The Prime Minister shivered at the word, so violently he actually felt the flesh tremble over the greater part of his body. To distract himself from it he turned and asked: “Look here, isn’t it about time?”

“Five minutes to go, sir,” said a voice from the shadows. One of the technicians.

Hatherley kept on: “Professor, I would rather like an answer to my question. The special case of Silchester, please?”

Grock fought to keep pictures out of his mind. That was half the battle, to keep them from forming by day so that they wouldn’t strike at you in the night, and wake you up sweating and with your heart jumping. Silchester was an unimportant dot on the map, that was all. Quite a few miles from the nearest town, from Basingstoke, where gangs fought over the empty viaducts and tower-blocks every day and night and made real trouble. Silchester had been a nothing, a mere tract of grassland with a square surround of ancient Roman wall, crumbling brickwork half smothered under brambles. But keep away the pictures—!

“I think there would have been megaliths there once,” Quatermass was saying. Bloody man wouldn’t leave it alone but it was David’s fault really for stirring him up. “Silchester was one of the great nodal points in ancient times—the junction of every road and track in the area. That’s why the Romans built their city on it.”

“And the stones?”

Quatermass was very quiet. “Perhaps they were moved. Perhaps the Romans smashed them up to make something else—the steps of a temple, perhaps, or just to mix into concrete. The fate of quite a lot of sarsens. Then later their city went, their temple went, but what was underneath it all . . . stayed. Under the open fields.”

“And yesterday those poor kids found it!” said Annie Morgan.

Grock held his hand up. “Please—please—!”

“How many were there?” she demanded. “Do they know yet? Two thousand? Three?”

The woman had no need to say that, shuddered Grock. Bad enough to have had to live with it through the past twenty-four hours. It was a matter of personal survival to him now, sustaining blow after blow from these reports. One tried to keep one’s sanity by contemplating remoter prospects . . . like the possible Protectorate . . . or even danger so long as it was on a purely human scale, like the rumours that the Russians had been supplying the Irish junta with landing craft. Even a few of those might present an invasion threat when the forces of order were in such a fragile equilibrium. Ireland had always smelt of danger, right through the ages. There were references in the Venerable Bede to barbarian attacks from that quarter. Grock had found great comfort in reading Bede’s contemporary account of the Dark Ages. It was the demonstration that it had all happened before, that was the warning factor in Bede. The collapse of all social structures after the Romans left the country—oh God, the bloody Romans again!—the ignorance and misery and starvation, and yet we had come through, or rather our ancestors had, at least some of them had, presumably enough of them—

But now!

The voice of the nephew was rasping again. “A meadow. Yes, that’s all Silchester is today, and I suppose that you, professor, would find that most appropriate for part of a human harvest! If that’s what you seriously believe is going on?”

“I do. I have to,” said Quatermass.

Young Hatherley threw himself back in his chair, out of the light.

His comment on it, thought Grock. He wondered what counter-theory was developing in that clever young head to explain all the terrors. Something was, he could tell. He longed to ask.

“So we can forget these?” said a woman’s voice.

The megalith photographs were pushed back to him along the table. It was Helen Peacher, in charge of the reconstituted Ministry of Supply. Grock disliked the woman and had wished the job on her for its sheer impossibility. “In fact,” she went on, “the danger points may be almost anywhere?”

Bastard bitch, to say that! Grock’s heart gave a sickening twist.

Quatermass nodded, actually agreeing with her. “Sometimes traditional gathering places will be the only sign.”

“You mean—people are drawn there, drawn towards them?” Grock’s mind was blazing with pictures. “But in that case, here in London—the great parks, places like Tyburn, Cheapside—or even right where we are at this moment! Is that what you’re saying?”

Hundreds of feet beneath the old Horse Guards’ Parade, that’s where they were in the Big Bunker. Dug to be one of the safest spots in the world, proof against anything. But if what this man implied about deeply placed markers—beacons or whatever word he’d used—! If such a thing existed they might be close to one at this moment.

The same thought seemed to have occurred to most of those round the table. There was a stir of nervous whispers.

“No!”

It was David Hatherley, suddenly leaning forward into the light. “Let’s stop frightening ourselves.” His face was angry as he turned to Quatermass. “Professor—this harvest theory of yours, I don’t like it and I don’t buy it!”

There was no reaction from Quatermass. He sat as if waiting for the others.

After a moment Helen Peacher said quietly: “These are terrible incidents. They’re occurring all over the globe. Surely all he’s doing is seek to explain—?”

“Terrible?” said Hatherley. “Terrifying? Those
are his
words. I feel we should stop using them.”

“David—?” Grock frowned.

“They’re the right words for countless thousands of deaths,” said Quatermass.

“Deaths?”

There was a remarkable expression on young Hatherley’s face, Grock saw.

“What d’you mean, David?”

“How do we know they’re deaths?”

“But surely—!”

“What right have we to make that assumption?” said Hatherley. Now he turned with pity on the old man hunched in the chair. “I believe we’re in the presence of something that
he
doesn’t begin to understand.”

“And you do?” said Quatermass.

Grock licked his lips, watching his nephew.

“This is something . . . momentous, I agree. A process so infinitely . . . awesome that . . .” Hatherley was picking his way most sensitively, but now he turned. “Yes, professor, I think I do understand. I’m still young enough. I can just begin to grasp what those kids instinctively feel must be—”

“The planet?”

“Yes!”

Grock Jervis was as startled as everybody else. And then came a swift lightness, as if something unspeakable were being gently lifted from him.

“I’d like you to be right,” Quatermass said to David Hatherley.

Typical, typical! Grock found himself hating the cold negativeness of it. He put a hand to his heart, conscious from faint referred pains that it was misbehaving again. Excitement, of course, but this had been good excitement and it should know the difference. For the first time in days, good.

“Here we are now, sir.”

It was the technician in the corner. Routine contact-talk had started from the loudspeakers. “Mission Control, Houston . . . Mission Control, Houston. Status report from shuttle indicates it is now in estimated zone. Stand by for direct transmission from the shuttle.”

It was to be a radio link only, just enough for bare information, to avoid interference with the special signals that would be transmitted from the shuttle rocket.

Bleeps . . .

“Who are in the crew?” Grock asked. “How many?”

“Two men,” said Hatherley, “and about a ton of apparatus. I understand most of it’s Russian. They’ve always had a belief in the possibility of space contacts.”

“Ah!” Grock respected the Russians. He was deeply frightened of them but he respected them too.

“I know the mission commander,” said Quatermass. “Chuck Marshall. Very experienced. There was some last-minute dispute and he had to take over.”

“He’s not a young man?” said Grock. Not if Quatermass knew him.

“He’s good.”

More bleeps, then the voice of the mission controller again. “Houston to Mother Bird. Mother Bird, do you read me?”

Grock pulled one of his faces. “Mother Bird?”

“The mother bird draws attention away from her chicks,” said Annie quietly.

“Ah!”

Bleeps. Then, in a burst, Marshall’s voice.

“Mother Bird reporting. Ground elapsed time is six hours and forty minutes. Distance from Earth approximately one hundred and ten thousand miles. We have at this time no sighting of any kind.”

“Houston. Roger, Mother Bird, we read you loud and clear. Telemetry report confirms no contact but you are now within the estimated zone of this . . . power web, to call it that. You could be closing on it. We suggest you start signals now. Good a time as any.”

“Okay, will do.” Marshall’s voice sounded oddly elated.

Quatermass glanced across at David Hatherley. The young man was listening intently, his fingers pressed to his face. Elation there too.

“Giorgi’s got his box of tricks ready,” came Marshall’s voice. “For the benefit of anybody who missed out, we’re not trying to talk to it in Russian. The language is mathematics. In the load bay behind us we’ve got a transmitter the size of a gasoline truck. Two thirty-metre antennas are now fully extended—and it’s all go. Giorgi confirms. We’re transmitting at full power now.”

Quatermass found his hands were giving him pain. He discovered they were knotted, straining together. He pulled them apart.

“Roger, Mother Bird. Telemetry confirms. So all we’ve got to do is wait.”

“Roger, Houston. If it should respond in any way, we’re ready. Looking back now . . . I get a clear sighting of Earth. It’s real small. Hard to believe that anything could make a precise fix on any part of it from this far out.”