Quatermass (28 page)

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C
oarse dust in the mouth. Grit beneath the tongue, hard to spit out. Eyes clogged, pick at them and pick, peeling away strips of tacky crust. Would vision come, would anything show? Fear now. The girl Isabel, I can’t see out of me eyes, she said.

Eyelids open, and swimming light through the good clean tears. Then shapes. I
can
see out of me eyes.

Quatermass pulled himself round, uncurling like a grub.

He gasped. He made out little bone-creaks, the soft scrape of his shoe leather. So he could still hear.

For a little while he lay still. He was cold and all his extremities ached, fingers stiff, feet that felt as if they had been clamped in a crushing device. He rubbed his eyes till the last of the grit was out of them. Now he could see more.

He was in a place with columns. There were numbers on the columns. There were ancient car bodies.

It came back with a rush.

They were going to shoot him, men with guns. The crash, Annie’s broken neck, Annie crying. Running, slithering, the light.

He listened. No sound of any kind. The heavy roaring of the crowd in the stadium above was the last thing he remembered. None now.

He could see the Land-Rover, half hidden behind a pillar. He started pulling himself to his feet. It had to be done in gasping stages, with pauses. He was caked with dried slime and grit. His clothes were torn.

He started towards the Land-Rover. Almost immediately his damaged ankle failed and he flopped down in the pasty slime. On again and the slime crackled dry. The concrete was cracked where the beam had struck through.

There was a gun on the ground. A rifle without a butt. Steel helmets scoured bright. A plumb-bob. Then the car still jammed backwards into a concrete pillar, all paintwork powdered away, its tyres gone.

He creaked the door open. Nothing but raw metal inside, the skeletons of seats, springs. No sign that a human being was here.

For an instant a wild thought that somehow she had escaped. Recovered enough, fast enough, to have got clear.

Something patted into the slime-dust.

He looked up.

A few feet above the concrete roof bore a wide patch that sparkled. Hanging there in a dense agglomeration like the eggs of fishes . . . crystals of every size. As he watched, more of the sparkling grains dropped.

For a moment he found no meaning. His brain was still protectively numbed.

Then it came to him.

He turned and broke into a knee-stiff shambling run towards the ramp.

He was outside and clawing his way up before he came to himself. Shock, of course. That was why the parts of his brain seemed not to synchronize.

“Annie,” he said.

Speak, he could do that too. He rubbed at his wrist. There was little light to see by, but he must know. He blinked at the skin to find any trace of what he suddenly dreaded, miniscule crystals forming. There was none. He tore at his trouser leg and rubbed his shin. None there either. He pulled out his shirt-front and stared at his grey-haired stomach like a man in dread of leprosy. No sign. So far.

There was just a glimmer in the sky.

It had been dusk when they came to the stadium—vivid now, the din and the chanting and Hatherley and Torrance and the guns—had all that happened in a few minutes?

At the top of the ramp he saw crystalline dust thick on the ground.

And beyond it, pay cops. Just a few of them standing fearfully in the half-dark while one with the helmet-stripes of a lieutenant poked about in the dust with a stick. He had a torch. He flashed it across as he caught sight of Quatermass. He yelled: “Hey, you! What the hell you doing? Come here!”

He was frightened and dangerous.

Sparkling dust curled under Quatermass’s feet as he made his way across. Without waiting, the man shouted again: “Looting, is it? Filthy
bliksem
!”

Guns were being levelled. Quatermass raised his hands.

“I think I’ve been down there all night.”

“Liar!”

“Yes—”

“Nobody was down there all night!” yelled the lieutenant. “You know what happened,
toppie
? Here, in this place?”

Quatermass looked up at the great black bulk of the stadium.

“Don’t turn your back on me, old rockspider! Get him! Get him!” Quatermass gasped. They were using their gun butts to turn him round, as if he was too filthy to touch.

“You’d better . . . see my ID.”

The lieutenant sounded half hysterical. “ID! He’s got ID! I don’t want to see your
pasbrief,
uncle! I might catch something! Hey, just take him round the back and—”

“Here.” Quatermass had his wallet out.

“Where’d you steal that?” The lieutenant grabbed it from him. If he threw it away in the dust the next item would be a burst of shots. Quatermass put all the authority he could into his cracked voice.

“Look at it!”

The lieutenant shone his torch. He had the ID card in his hand. He glowered. He pushed the wallet back to Quatermass.

“How was I to know!” His anger hardly faltered but it switched sides. He screamed at his squad: “Go and look, see who else down there!”

“There’s nobody alive,” said Quatermass.

He started towards the turnstiles.

“Come back, I didn’t give permission!” The lieutenant trotted after him. “
Meneer
—whoever you are, I can’t permit—please!”

He stopped unhappily to look back at his squad. They were watching him lose face. He did not wish to go up there again. Bloody old mealie cruncher, pulling it on a man like that! In another few seconds he’d have put him right with a bullet, like a lot of others. Pity he hadn’t. And now look at him, up there like a springbuck in spite of the bad light and what was underfoot.

He caught up with Quatermass in a passage and stayed with him.

They looked down from the terrace. The vast bowl was empty. Sight of it was obscured by a weblike sparkling drift. It was caught everywhere about the stands, a thick flocculence. The Afrikaner shrank from contact with it.

“It’s only . . . dust,” said Quatermass.

The Book of Common Prayer had found the word good. In sure and certain hope . . .

It was everywhere, covering the stadium like a veil. Here and there showed a shine of metal . . . the crush barriers . . . a helmet . . . a haversack frame.

The lieutenant was moving uneasily about. His boot disturbed a bottle in the debris. It rolled over a step and broke.

No other sound.

“How many were there?” Quatermass asked.

“Hey?”

“Do they know?”

“Maybe . . . seventy thousand.” Fear crept back into the man’s tone. “They shouldn’t have been let! All they came for was trouble, ripping each other to bits, not so? Last night we was put on stand-by!
Pas op,
I say, here we go! But then—” His voice went quiet. “It’s not all dust,
meneer.
You do find other—kinds of—”

He turned away looking sick, and clung to a rail. “Sun coming up,” he said. “I tell you, I can do with that. Worst night I ever had.”

He turned to face the first rays. And stayed staring.

“The sun!” he whispered. “It’s turned colour.”

It was obscene as the rising of a corpse out of the ground. A dead, dull orb without radiance moving up into a sky like bile.

It was an exciting and terrible thing to see. When he could take his eyes off it Caraway turned to the others and they were all gawking too.

“It’s a sign,” Kickalong said.

“Sign of what?” said Bee. Her face was shaking. “Maybe it’s over and finished and we won’t ever go now, it’s too late!”

“Bee!” Kickalong shouted. As if she had no business to be talking like that. But she had, a bit, thought Caraway. They had come all through the land. And when Kickalong got them near to London they saw the great lightning come down and they knew they had missed it again. But just the same they kept on running and hurrying, as if they couldn’t stop till they got to the place. Now there it was, the biggest stadium in the world, and the shining dust all about.

“We should’a been quicker,” said Bee. “It was Sal’s baby!”

The baby had held them up with dying. Sal had gone and sulked in a wood and the soldier that came with them, he was called Mike, he went after her and got her out and made a fuss, that they had got to get the baby away from her and bury it. It all took time, but not that much time, an hour or two maybe, not enough to make them miss.

Kickalong was staring at the funny sun.

“It don’t mean that,” he said, as if it had just told him.

Caraway asked: “What does it mean?”

Kickalong turned and his eyes were completely round, a bit of white all round the edge of the seeing part. “It means everything’s okay.”

Bee was flopped out on the ground. “What about us?” she said.

“Us too. Bee, don’t worry—we miss this time, we go next time sure.”

But a kind of oldness had got into Bee. She didn’t get set off so easily any more.

“That sky is a message,” Kickalong said. “Don’t you see, it’s made of sickness. It says this world is sick, it’s done for. But
that
is waiting. You see now?”

Bee nodded but she didn’t look so sure as he did.

Kickalong had this way of giving you a surprise, turning something right inside out on you. But if you were so dog-weary as this, it didn’t always work. You couldn’t follow.

Sal was weeping. “My baby,” she said, “he won’t go there.”

“That baby was too little,” Kickalong said.

And it was true, Caraway thought. Sal’s baby has been really no use for anything except to drink the milk out of Sal, and slow things up. You couldn’t imagine it going anywhere good.

Kickalong still had that guitar. He’d brought it all the way but now he dropped it on the road and knelt down. He looked into the sky. Not at the rising sun this time but straight up.

“You harness the lightning!” he shouted out.

He was talking to the Planet.

“You turn the colour of the sun! You make it shine to tell your People! You call us soon! We’re waiting!”

They all feel down on their knees, shouting “We’re waiting!” and “Call us!”

“We know that we come soon!” yelled Kickalong.

Bee was gathering up handfuls of the dust and rubbing it on herself. She was always rubbing herself somewhere, Bee, but this time it seemed the thing to do, so everybody did. A bit of magic, to bring it nearer. Even Mike that had been a soldier and didn’t join in much. She scuffed some of the dust over him and he went at it too.

Then Bee started chanting, and the rest got caught up in that too, puffing out their breath “Hah! Hahah! Hahah!” till they could feel their lungs sizzling and their brains jump.

All of a sudden Kickalong yelled out: “Look!”

He was pointing at an old raggedy man that was coming out of the turnstiles with a cop. Caraway thought it was somebody that had been pinched.

“It’s the science man,” said Kickalong, “come here to try and stop it all!” The others had a good look and they saw it was him all right. He was just as surprised as they were. “But you didn’t stop it!” Kickalong shouted at him. “There was nothing you could do, with all your science! Hear me? They got away!”

“Got away, got away!” shouted everybody.

“In every bit of the world, it’s happening! We’re going, we’re leaving you, old science man!”

And Bee screamed: “We’re leaving you, we hate you!”

“We’ll leave you in the blackness you made!” shouted Caraway. He was remembering about the rockets.

Even Sal. “We’re going soon! Next time!”

“Huffity, puffity, puff!” shouted Kickalong. It was the song that had gone through the land ahead of them, but this time he just talked the rhyme, not sang it, as if the old man wasn’t anybody to be sung to. “Huffity, puffity, Ringstone Round—”

“If you lose your hat it will never be found,” shouted the others.

“Lose your
head
!” yelled Kickalong.

“So pull up your britches right up to your chin—”

“Lose your
mind,
science man!”

“And fasten your cloak with a bright new pin—”

“We’re losing
you
!”

The old man turned away but they all went on yelling it after him: “And when you are ready, then we can begin—”

“Not you, grandpa, you can’t come!”

The pay cops were all round him now as if they were taking him in charge, but it wouldn’t be that. They’d be looking after him. Fussing over some old man, that was about their limit.

Caraway turned.

Some people were standing there watching it all. Not gangs or anything, just ordinary mother-and-father people. A woman with a pram, that might have been a looter because that was the sort of thing they often used, but she wasn’t running off at the sight of the pay cops so it was probably a baby she had in it. A man with a bike. And some other woman that suddenly ran towards Bee. Caraway thought she was going to hit Bee and he was making a grab at her when down she went on her hunkers, right alongside Bee, holding up her hands as if she was saying prayers. And joined in with Bee, chanting. Trying to do it properly.

Then the man did the same. He dropped his bike and ran over. And the woman with the pram knelt down. All of them looking up into the sky.