Quatermass (25 page)

Quatermass sat for hours looking out into the darkness. He expected at any moment to see a dazzling band spring to earth, somewhere along the horizon. Not wanting it but in a way needing to know. He despised himself for that. Another mark of old age, the feeble, greedy garnering of bad news, the chimney-corner gloat that came before the final disorder. He felt grey and heavy, as if he were filled with clay.

Annie came at last.

She had brought food, and she made him eat before she told him what news she had. After the fiasco of the shuttle rocket, Moscow had cut itself off from the Americans. From now on it would act alone. “In the matter of the spatial threat,” it had declared, “it is now time for unilateral initiative.” Whatever that meant.

Meanwhile the incidents had gone on, in many parts of the world. It was likely that there were far more of them than were ever reported, since they invariably brought about a failure of communications. Often they had occurred in remote areas, but not always.

“The worst was on Disneyland,” said Annie.

He was the more shocked because of the place. He had never seen it but the very thought of it had always struck him as ridiculous. Confected turrets and the celebration of Mickey Mouse. That it should have been blasted had a special grotesqueness. Thousands of young people again, the very fact that they had gathered there should have been warning enough. But why there? What drew them? He struggled with the connection. Donald Duck and Goofy and megalithic beacons. What had that land been in former times, south of Los Angeles? Red Indian country? Apache? And before that, before even the Indians came? Who was there then?

He felt a frightening blank in his mind, a kind of
petit mal.
Without realizing it, he found himself clinging to Annie.

He was old, an old man to be held like a child. She got him to bed.

“Don’t leave me,” he said.

In the end she got into the bed beside him, to warm him.

He fell asleep for a time. Then during the night he woke and she realized he was trying to make love to her. But it came to nothing. He slept again with his head on her breast.

“Hello, Bernard,” said his wife.

He was surprised and delighted to see her. She had returned sooner than he had hoped. But for a drowsy, confused moment he could not quite remember where she had been. She had gone into town, he knew, for some medical purpose. To consult a gynecologist about what had been troubling her, that must be it. No—his head was clearing now—no, she had been in hospital. And now she had been discharged. She had had the operation and they had sent her home. No, that was wrong too. It was the baby. Of course, why hadn’t he realized that before? They had sent her home with the new baby.

He ought to have fetched her. He had no business to have left her to drive herself home like that, with her newly born baby.

“Where is it?” he asked. “Where’s the baby?”

But she only smiled as if that was a secret for the moment. Or a surprise for him to find, the child tucked up in the cot they had bought. That’s where she must have put it.

He should have fetched her home. He had no excuses, lying here in bed like this at a time when she needed him. But he had completely overlooked it.

She looked tired, he thought. Her face was drawn and thin. That must be from the effort of the birth, which was only days ago. But then she turned again and the weariness had all gone. So quick to change. She looked as she had done in her pregnancy, the glow back again, the slight rich plumping of the skin. She was very desirable and he wanted her, wanted to pull her over to him and make love to her—

There was somebody in the bed.

Lying there beside him, a woman.

In some unbelievable way he had forgotten her. She was asleep, breathing heavily, a woman with fine features and greying hair on the pillow. He did not know her name.

His wife had not noticed her yet, the bedclothes were heaped so high. But in another moment she must. She would catch sight of Annie—that was it, Annie, that was the woman’s name—and then he would see pain come into her face. The bloom would go from it and it would turn thin.

Where she had just been, they had hurt her. He remembered now. And there was to be more hurt here in her home.

She still hadn’t realized, standing there with that incredible glow upon her. At any second it must hit her. The hurt would come from him—

Quatermass woke with a jolt.

He found himself shaking.

Annie was there beside him, moving, murmuring as if he had broken her sleep.

It must be dawn.

The dream was dispelling fast, as his always did. He could only remember the feeling of it, the vivid guilt—it was because he had attempted Annie, of course, those hours before. And failed. Shameful, that, shameful.

He lay still.

His brain was racing but in confusion.

Annie’s eyes were open and watching him. The faint light in the room picked up their glisten, a soft wetness. Perhaps she was sorry for him. He wanted no pity from her. Better have resentment or even contempt.

He was wide awake now. His brain was curiously busy. Nervously active in an undirected way, excited as a dog hunting rats in a field, jumping all over the place. Ideas kept popping up and vanishing, getting away from him before he could catch them. Then small, logical sequences came. And in a sudden rush, lucidity.

“It’s a machine!”

Perhaps it was being with her that had done it, had provided an arousal that worked itself through in an unexpected way.

She turned to him. “What did you say?”

“A machine—”

She whispered: “My dear, you’ve been lying there tormenting yourself and worrying. You’ve got to rest now.”

“No,” he said. “It’s true.”

“Tell me, then.”

He couldn’t explain it to her, yet he felt complete certainty. “Just give me a minute,” he said. It took longer than that.

At last he said: “I’m going to tell you a story.”

She smiled.

“I know it’s—well, it’s the wrong end of bed time,” he said. “But I used to be quite good at it once.”

Good at something, anyway.

“What about?”

“Martians.”

She frowned. Either puzzled or concerned for him. There wasn’t enough light to make out which.

“Bernard, you don’t actually think that all this—?”

“I said a story.”

“Because—there really isn’t anything alive there, is there? I mean it’s been proved, hasn’t it? I know that much.”

It was concern.

“Just Martians that there might have been. Story Martians. About as likely as rabbits in trousers and mice wearing hats. No more, no less.”

She was still watching him. “Disneyland got through to you, didn’t it?”

“I’ll tell you what they were like. Very, very tiny, like midget woodlice, flat and grey and frayed-looking. Not really much alive. And they hibernated a lot. Often they dried up completely for a year or two and only thawed out again when they got a drop of moisture.”

“That’s alive?”

“It was enough. They stayed under the gravel and rock fragments, because that’s all there is on Mars. Sheltering from the sun and the dust storms. If they were lucky they found bits of lichen to nibble.”

“Poor little creatures.”

“And then one day—they got a fearful shock.”

“I should have thought they’d welcome it.”

“Well, they didn’t. It was a monster that appeared amongst them. Far, far bigger than they were. The braver ones crawled out to have a look. It was squatting there on enormous legs and swinging its terrible head about and swaying and digging its long claws into the earth and fetching up huge mouthfuls of it and actually eating it. The little Martians trembled because they’d never seen anything like this. The monster was far greedier and fiercer and faster than they were, or had ever imagined. Far more alive.”

“Can I guess?”

“All right.”

“One of those things they used to send. A probe. A space probe.”

He smiled. “Got it first time. There was a plate on the side of it saying ‘Made in USA. If found, please return.’ But the little creatures couldn’t make it out.”

“They couldn’t read.”

“If they’d gone on watching long enough—if they’d had time before their wits withered up in one of the dry spells—they’d have seen it for what it was. That it was only a machine and not alive at all.”

“Bernard, I don’t mind it as a story but—”

“Don’t you see?” He turned in the bed. “It’s a matter of recognition. A machine always gives itself away.”

After a moment she said: “And you can tell?”

“I think I can.”

There were technical arguments but he was not going to attempt them. Not here, not now, for God’s sake.

He drew the bedclothes back and he was looking at her body. She lay still. Her breasts had not dropped. They were firm. He put his hand gently upon one of them. The nipple stirred under his palm, engorging.

“That’s what life is,” Quatermass said. “That’s alive, that’s what it means.”

He stroked the soft areola, feeling it swell.

A tiny moment in huge, subtle, continuing processes, infinitely variable.

The colour was rising in her face. He was reminded of the dream but there was nothing here of that bright bloom. This was a greying woman, starting to move into his own age.

She had managed to keep her body well.

An irrational thought seized him—that if he could enter it and succeed, everything would be somehow proved. It was like accepting a gigantic bet.

“Annie—”

She pulled the covers over them both because the room was cold. Her arms went round him. He looked down at her and it was like seeing half the human race.

She seemed to guess the awe.

“I’m me,” Annie said. “I’m only me.”

He was moved at that, filled with a rush of tenderness for her. He was young enough. And sure enough.

Ringstone Round was under military guard. It had been declared dangerous.

Certain of the stones were cracked, as if their angle had subjected them to the full power. One was riven completely. It might have been struck by a great cleaver, sending the halves apart at an acute angle. Others had been curiously shivered. Large flakes of sarsen hung ready to drop away. A few seemed quite unaffected, as solid as they had stood before visitors through the centuries.

Now barbed wire circled the whole site, right outside the blackened perimeter line.

There were half a dozen young soldiers on guard, all that could be spared for this duty. Young men, trained and adequately armed, they crouched at their posts beside the wire.

The Planet People watched them.

They had drifted back to the Round just to see it again, Kickalong and Caraway and a few others. They had walked among the great stones, feeling all the time that they had missed their chance, but Kickalong got very certain. Because it had come here once didn’t mean it wouldn’t come a second time, he said, in fact it was all the more likely. This was a sure place, he said. He seemed to know about it, that all it needed was enough People to come here again.

But nobody had, only the soldiers.

Sal had been a fool again. She had kept frightening herself and going on about the people at the edge that got melted and said she didn’t want that to happen to her baby. In the end Kickalong got so mad with her he hit the baby right out of her arms. It fell on the ground but it hadn’t even cried. It was a thin baby with not much cry ever in it, but it looked a bit grey after that. It wouldn’t suck from Sal, as if it had lost interest, and Bee said something about it wanting a new flavour that made them all laugh. Except Sal, that was.

She still carted the baby round but nobody knew if it was still alive. Sal was too stupid to know the difference. It would be warm with her holding it so tight. Not that it mattered much about the baby anyway. Sal was probably going to have another one. She was so fat you couldn’t tell. If she did the new one would do instead. So long as she had something to hold, that was all she needed. Like a kid with a dolly.

Then the soldiers came.

They were shits. They slung everybody out of the Round and waved their guns about and used them to thump you if you didn’t run. Then they started putting barbed wire all over the place, truckloads of it, unwinding it and staking it until the ends met right round everything so you couldn’t possibly get through. Then sat down beside it as if they’d done something clever.

Bee hated them.

She kept running at them and spitting in their faces for a bit, but in the end one of them did something to her and she ran away crying. Caraway hadn’t seen what he did to her and she wouldn’t tell him. But he had a few guesses. There were several things you could do to girls that were particular just because they were females. It must have been one of those kind of things.

The People weren’t going to go.

An officer had yelled at them for a bit and they pretended they would, but really it was just to get some berries and stuff to eat, and they went back. The officer had cleared off by then.

Kickalong wasn’t bothered. He said that if it came again it wouldn’t care about the wire. It would find its People wherever they were. The only thing was, it needed more of them to see them and find them properly, and take them. Caraway could see the sense of that. You needed to make it worth its while.

So they waited.

Kickalong was good to explain things. He really seemed to know. He was a bit crazy, Caraway thought, but crazy people were the ones that often had a better understanding of really unusual things like the Planet. That’s why you wrote on walls
THE MAD ARE SANE
. Which meant the ones they said were crazy were really the cleverest, and it was all the others that had lost their marbles. Well, that’s what it did mean. Caraway had never felt particularly crazy but sometimes he tried to be, and certainly the chanting and breathing could get you right out of yourself. But that wasn’t really being crazy. Crazy was what Kickalong was. He had that look you never knew what he was going to do next, and he didn’t either. And when you followed his talk for a bit, then you could feel it getting really into you, the crazy.