Quatermass (26 page)

Caraway liked Kickalong but not always. Not when he came and grabbed Bee and took her off for a while. All night once. Bee didn’t mind, she just laughed afterwards and kept rubbing herself as if she remembered something. But she was like that. The times when Kickalong took her, Caraway got really up and he had to go off and find something else. Not Sal, he had had enough there, but there was generally somebody.

Kickalong was looking across at the soldiers. He was grinning. He twanged his guitar that he had found.

He started singing something.

You would never have guessed what it was. It showed he was really crazy because crazy people have a bit of kid about them, and this was kid. It was that old rhyme, the sort they taught little baby kids when they could just talk a bit and it was old-fashioned, the sort of silly words they had in the old days.

“Huffity, puffity, Ringstone Round,

If you lose your hat it will never be found . . .”

Kickalong just sang that bit straight at the soldier, who was only a sort of kid himself, about seventeen. And the soldier must have thought it was about him, something about his hat. Maybe he didn’t know the rhyme, or he was just thick or something, because he put his hand up and touched his cap thing as if to make sure it was still there. And old Kickalong nearly bust laughing.

The others started then.

They all got a bit nearer, crawling and squiggling along on the grass. And the ones that knew the rhyme joined in with Kickalong singing it.

“So pull up your britches, right up to your chin,

And fasten your cloak with a bright new pin!”

They were all making faces at the soldier. He looked round at one of his pals as if he didn’t know what to make of it or what to do. And the pal just grinned because it wasn’t happening to him.

Caraway ran with his plumb-bob and waved it right in the soldier’s face.

“And when we are ready’, the People were singing now, as loud as they could, “then we can begin, Huffity, puffity, puff!”

Caraway kept on waggling the plumb-bob. And the other People were on their feet. Kickalong started stamping and thrashing his old guitar. Bee spun herself round till her poncho lifted.

“Huffity! Puffity! Huffity! Puffity—!”

The young soldier was in a mess. He pointed his gun at Caraway and then he pointed it down again because he felt silly.

Kickalong suddenly yelled: “Puff!” and did a kind of leap in the air and turned away.

The People started following him, all of them thumping their feet down on the earth and turning themselves round and round and yelling the rhyme as if it meant something. Maybe it did.

“Huffity, puffity, Ringstone Round! Huffity, puffity . . .”

The soldier had his eyes glued on them all, the swinging plump-bob, the guitar that Kickalong was whirling round his head.

“Huffity, puffity . . . huffity, puffity . . .”

He looked across at his chum as if he was in a muddle. Then he did the oddest thing. He threw his gun down and jumped to his feet and ran after the People. His chum shouted to him but he took not one blind bit of notice.

Caraway gave him a grin when he caught up.

“Huffity, puffity, puff!” shouted the young soldier. He was grinning like anything and he looked nearly as crazy as Kickalong.

At a magnification of two hundred thousand it was clear that every smallest particle of the dust had a crystalline structure. Quatermass saw for himself in the electron microscope.

Sublimation had been the problem, the steady evaporation of the substance. Carbonic and other replicas were attempted, skinned on to the crystals and removed for examination. A kind of answer began to emerge. If living cells had been put to a final agony of existence, turned inside out as it were, destructured and restructured, something like this might be expected to appear.

It was research at a furiously forced pace.

Quatermass had found a base for it in the laboratories of Westminster School, only a few hundred yards from the Parliamentary Annexe. The ancient school had been requisitioned long ago, the boys removed to what was thought to be a safer area, and its site in Dean’s Yard converted to an armoured precinct. Medieval gateways had been fortified with concrete blocks. But plans had changed and it had never been put to use.

Whatever the intention had been, a useful amount of equipment remained, probably overlooked. There were beds stacked in one of the dormitories and the telephones had been made to work.

It was staffed by a tiny nucleus. There would be more. Even some high-technology apparatus had been located and was on its way.

Quatermass explored.

There was a doorway, he found, that led from the quadrangle of Dean’s Yard into the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. It might be safer to have it blocked up.

He walked through the dark cloisters and found himself inside the abbey itself. It had been stripped of all movable furnishings and at some recent time had evidently been used for storage. There was damage to the throng of memorial statues along the walls. Marble noses had been brushed off. Weeping cherubs had lost their hands.

He made his way to the south transept, his footsteps clicking and echoing.

Poets’ Corner.

This was the exact point. This was where he had stood then.

He looked up from the tombs of Chaucer, Spenser and Kipling to the high arches of the triforium. Dark gothic hollows, elegant stone tracery.

Once there had been something else up there. He had stood on this very spot and he had seen it . . . a being that was not a being, men gone wrong . . . an incarnation that had wrapped not hands but fronds round the columns of Purbeck marble. An invader. A disease out of space, picked up like a virus by a drifting rocket, it had adapted itself to Earthlife. What had been three men had become a single, spreading fungoid mass, and it had dragged itself here to hide. Or for sanctuary, responding to the human part of itself. He had found it growing at a hideous rate, budding spores from its leathery plates. Its tendrils dropped nearly to floor level, licking about the heads of the stone poets.

Yet it had gone. It had been made to go. Not destroyed, made to go. The destruction of such a presence was impossible but it had been made to go.

He could see some paler, newer stonework above there. It must be where they had restored the damage done by those moving, searching fronds that were as thick as birch trunks.

It had been made to go.

The agency had been death, the subtraction of its human element. Human will and human death.

Nothing now . . .

Not even the momentary presence of an anxious verger or watchman, no living presence of any kind, nothing to feed a rat. A great empty shell full of monuments, the stone people.

He turned back towards Dean’s Yard.

He was in the cloisters again when he heard the curfew sirens sounding. It was long before their proper time, still the middle of the day.

He started to run.

When he reached the outer gateway he saw vehicles pass—a couple of army patrol pigs moving faster than usual, then a pay cop truck heading in the opposite direction. The usual confusion of purpose. He saw the nut seller on the corner had packed up and was running with his barrow.

A Land-Rover came squealing in, and there was Annie looking frantically about. She saw him and waved. She must have been searching for him.

“It’s the gangs!” she shouted. “They’re all on the move!”

The young Badder shook the dreadlocks out of his blue eyes to get a better aim. He drew his bow full and he could feel the beginnings of a tremble in his biceps as they fought against the steel spring.

Then something happened he had not meant to happen.

He was falling backwards off the barricade. His aluminium arrow shot away wasted. Hands caught him and he found bright blood on himself. He was too numbed to wince at the blast of the burpgun that was fired off in revenge, right by his ear.

It was a crossroads. Barricades had been flung up on opposite sides of it and the other street passed between them, a no-man’s-land.

It had begun as a raid into Blue Brigade territory to recover prisoners. It was nearly always hopeless. If you had any sense you just didn’t get taken in the first place, because you could guess what would happen to you. This time the Blues had a couple slung up on a lamp standard with the usual ruderies daubed underneath on placards. At least it might be possible to tear those down for the sake of honour. The prisoners were dead anyway, as was all too clear down-wind of them. So there was a good chance the Blues had lost interest.

The guess proved right. There were only a few Blues there, lying half-heartedly in wait.

Barricade-making started with the usual scramble for material. Sheets of corrugated iron, a couple of car bodies. Some started dragging mattresses out of a house and they turned out to be full of fleas. The things must have bred in billions. The Badders were soon smarting and scratching themselves all over. They threw the mattresses aside and ran to find others but it was a bit late. The bugs had boarded them good and proper. Gang life was like that, nothing but itches of all kinds, lice, crabs, bugs, skin-scale, scrofula. You got used to it until a real drench like this lot happened.

They would have to be careful with the ammo today. It was running a bit low. There would be more tomorrow. Somehow there always was. Shotgun stuff was easiest. You could make your own if you had the makings, the cases and black powder. It didn’t have to be pellets, little stones were better and tore more. Burpgun ammo was the kind that always ran out, because the kids naturally shot it off when they had it. Even that turned up regularly. Out of old army dumps that had been raided silly a long time ago, people said. Others said it was by barter from the Arabs, though it was hard to think of anything the Arabs could ever want in return. Unless they sent ammo anyway, just to stir things.

And there were the bows. Steel ones were best if you could get hold of a bit of spring that wasn’t too heavy, and grind it down. The girls were good at that. They had the patience. They would grind away at a bow-spring for weeks, and then polish it and string it and paint it pretty. They often turned out the best shots with them, too. They would just take that extra bit of time aiming. Risky but they didn’t care. And if they hit they would take off screeching and jumping up and down and waving their tits at the Blues, who were all queer. They couldn’t all have been that way but people said they were. If they had girls, and of course they must have done really, they kept them out of the way, reserved for sex. Their girls never showed up on the barricades. They were missing something good. A Badder girl who had killed, or thought she had, usually went completely wild. She would take on anybody who could get it up. Guys would go crawling back to the barricade empty, and their minds on nothing else. The Blues knew it too. They would time it from a female’s kill screeches and make a rush about ten minutes later. They knew that was when to catch the most guys with their pants down.

You would have plenty of time to regret it when you found yourself hanging from telephone wires or lamp posts. All wrapped up.

Today they had fired a few good bursts into those two prisoners, just in case they were still faintly alive. Since there was no hope of getting them down it was the next best thing.

After that things got draggy, while more and more material was hauled out of houses and back yards to toughen the barricades, and the best shots kept up covering fire. Somebody found a lot of steel radiators stacked in a cellar, the flat kind that practically nothing could get through, and they started sticking those in the barricade. It was going to be a beauty. The Blues had got some reinforcements and they loosed off a lot of stuff to try and interfere. In no time it was battle conditions.

In the middle of it the Planet People arrived.

Nobody could believe it. Most kids were keeping their heads down but then a girl saw them. She screamed at the fools to go back. There were about a dozen of them and they just kept on walking, straight down the road between the barricades. The one in front was whirling his plumb-bob, the way they always did, and the others were stamping their feet and going “Hah! Hah! Hahah!” One or two spinning round with their nighties rising up and showing all they had to offer, which wasn’t much.

Of course it had to happen. The guns got turned on them instead. Three or four of them dropped down dead. The rest started running, looking surprised as if they hadn’t thought till this instant that it could possibly happen. But bullets came from both barricades and got them. They just lay. The twitching ones got more attention until they stopped twitching.

There was a quiet time then. Everybody had been taken by surprise, interrupted, and they were having to get down to it again. A few who had missed the fun got up on the barricades to see. They could hardly believe anybody could have been that stupid, even Planet People.

Then they heard more chanting.

“Hah! Hah! Hah! Leheh! Leheh! Leheheh!”

It was too good to be true. Everybody started reloading and stringing bows.

It was the luxury of shooting at idiots who wouldn’t shoot back or take a piece out of you while you were just aiming. It was a novelty and everybody liked it. They started scrambling up both barricades to get the best positions. The funny thing was that they could see each other well, all exposed, and it could have been a deadly match only both lots were waiting for something better.

The chanting got louder.

A Badder aimed his rifle. But the girl next to him knocked his gun up and shouted. She couldn’t believe what she saw coming round the corner. None of the rest could either.

It wasn’t just Planet People. There were dreadlocks waving, and those that had them leaped and stamped. Badders! Blues, too, in their raggedy do-it-yourself uniforms. They were all mixed up together with the Planet People, all waving and shouting together.

It was insane.

The ones in front started singing some words that for a moment nobody knew, but of course then they did. From their days as kids.