Quatermass (29 page)

Maybe it was having the sun the colour of sick that did it.

For the whole of that day Quatermass hardly knew whether he was in protective custody or just custody.

“In de kwela-kwela,
” ordered the lieutenant, and he found himself bundled aboard a Contract Police truck. “Just to be safe,
meneer,
” said the man, “while I break up that little prayer-meeting.”

The squad ran to disperse the Planet People. “
Donder
’em good!” yelled the lieutenant. “
Blerrie opstokers!
” They paid particular attention to the women, setting about them with gun butts. One was left lying on the ground as the rest scattered. She did not seem to be wearing a poncho but ordinary clothes.

Quatermass tried to get out and protest but he found the doors were locked. He was still rattling at them in a fury when the pay cops returned. The action seemed to have restored their shaken nerve. They bundled in beside him, plastic armour clashing like the shells of beetles. He found himself shoved along the bench seat to make room.

The lieutenant was trying to make radio contact with his base. Failing, he took the decision himself. They would quit Wembley.

The mercenaries’ good humour rose high.

One of them thumped Quatermass jovially on the back and bellowed in Afrikaans. The others roared at the joke.

“Not so,
Oupa,
not so?”

Hard, grizzled creatures to a man. He wondered at their reputation for cowardice. More likely a calculated concern for their skins.

The sun shone its new brown colour on all the streets they drove along. It seemed to cast over everything not so much light as a kind of glowing darkness.

Seventy thousand . . . that had been guessing, of course, but say fifty thousand or even thirty . . .

You could not think of numbers.

They shrank down to one person, and number that one a hundred thousand billion shattered cells . . .

“Trek swarm!”

They were passing a line of trudging figures. The first few were unmistakable with their P-marked faces and ponchos. Then ragged creatures in blue, or with dreadlocks, and young soldiers who had thrown away their guns—the pay cops pointed at these and yelled in derision—and then other followers, people of every kind except the old. Quatermass peered past the driver to see them. They looked like unwilling refugees as they hurried along with their bundles of belongings. They had caught the wild look but in them it seemed different. They had joined a cause that frightened them.

“Pas op! Pas op!
” yelled the driver. “You want to get tramped?” He twisted the wheel to avoid them, not trying too hard.

Another street, another shuffling column. Mouths opening and shutting in a chant. Quatermass could not hear the words but he could guess. They would know that rhyme. They would have taught it to their kids. There were children running with them now, panting alongside, excited as if it was the start of an adventure.

It was the same in the next street, and the one after. All the roadways were brown with the dun sunlight. Like driving through faded photographs.

Quatermass drowsed.

From time to time he panicked awake, and wondered whether his exhaustion was from shock or something worse. He stared at the skin of his hands but found no sinister change there.

At last the truck stopped.

They were outside a towering slab of a building, windowless on the lower floors, its entrance fortified with concrete blocks and sandbags. It was vaguely familiar, but for a moment the words he read there failed to convey any meaning,
NEW SCOTLAND YARD
. . .
POLISIE KOMMANDO HOOFGEBOU.

“Come along,
meneer.
”

Quatermass hesitated on the truck’s step. “But I don’t—I have to go on—”

“Inside, please.”

He followed the lieutenant in a daze. Yes, he had been been here before, and recently. He had come searching for a missing-persons bureau and had encountered only these brutal armoured beetles. Now he was in a muddle. Was there such a bureau after all? Was that why they had brought him here, to help him?

“This way,
meneer.
”

In every passage there were bi-lingual touches, notices in Afrikaans as well as English.
Inlisting . . . Nooduitgang.
The lieutenant pushed open a door marked
Wagkamer
above the
Waiting Room.

“In here.”

All that Quatermass saw were the padded benches. Gratefully, he lay down on one of them and was asleep in seconds.

It was a big red London bus of the old, proper sort. The sight of it warmed his heart. As it drew in he saw that the word
SPECIAL
had been wound up on its destination indicator. From every window faces looked impatiently out. Nearly all of them were young faces.

He pulled himself aboard. “Excuse me, is this the right bus for—?” he started to ask.

But then he knew it was. He could see Annie inside, about halfway along. There was a child standing with her, holding on to her hand. It must be Isabel. For the moment neither of them seemed to have noticed him, but that was all the better. He would surprise them.

“You just got on?” It was the conductor clattering down the stairs from the upper deck. “Right, let’s have it.”

Quatermass fumbled in his pocket.

“What the hell’s that?” said the conductor. “That’s no bloody good!”

Quatermass stood holding it out. It was his old-age pensioner’s pass, his entitlement as a senior citizen to reduced fares. It even had his photograph on it to prove so. He waved it at the man. “It’s all right,” he said.

The conductor shook his head. “You’ve got to have one of these,” he said. He pulled something out of his leather bag. It was a big colourless crystal. It lay in the man’s hand and glittered.

Quatermass shivered at the sight. He could hear others rattling in the conductor’s bag as he shook it. It must be full of them. Passengers were looking round at him, calling out: “Hurry up!” But their faces were no longer clear. He could not make out their expressions. He seemed to see through them.

“Annie!” he shouted, before it was too late.

She started to turn her head but there was something wrong. The shine was there too. He did not want to see. He wanted her but not that.

“Off you get!” cried the conductor, pushing at him.

Quatermass found himself stumbling about in the road. The bus was pulling away and he could see now that no part of it was as it should be. Its shapes were altered. It wasn’t red any more.

It was moving very fast. Soon it was out of sight.

He turned back to the bus stop. The others were still waiting there patiently, Jack and Arthur and Jane and Edna and the rest. “I tol’ you, guv,” said Jack, “there wouldn’t be no point.”

“But I saw her,” Quatermass said. “She was on it.”

“They wouldn’t take you,” said Arthur. “Not you, not with that. They wouldn’t reckonize it.”

The pensioner’s pass.

“It’s a crying shame, love,” said Edna, “but that’s how it is.”

He looked at them standing there in line, all so passive.

“What are you waiting for, then?”

“What else can we do?”

“Just wait here?”

“What else?”

“But if another bus comes along, that won’t take any of us either?”

“It might.”

Hopeless. Too foolish to be anything but a dream. None of these things had been said and the bus had not come with Annie in it. Yet . . . he had stood inside it, physically, with the feel of his shoes on its floor and cold metal under his hand. He had seen her. The illusion that he had been dreaming all that was a trick of the mind, a lapse. Surely . . .

“Come on now. Time to brush up.” He was being shaken awake. He sat up, gasping with cramp. A man in the rough uniform of an orderly steadied him and held a cup of brown fluid under his nose.

“Get this down you and you’ll feel better.”

For once not a South African. A cockney, good enough for menial work.

Quatermass swallowed some of the brown stuff down his cracked throat. He submitted to being led across a passage to a washroom.

“Don’t be too long,” said the orderly.

That face in the mirror. It was a vagabond, the looter who nearly got shot on sight at Wembley. Hair plastered with dried slime, heavy white stubble, bruises, cuts, filth.

If it was only filth—!

With a swell of anxiety he peeled off the remains of his jacket and examined his arms and chest under the strong light. There were bloody abrasions, pores like little pits full of forced dirt. He filled a basin with water and began to work on it, sluicing the muck away and rubbing fiercely and peering at the result. Until he was sure of his skin.

He was more presentable when the lieutenant came to find him.

“The commandant’s waiting.”

“Who?”

“Commandant Van Gelder. He wants to see you.”

No further explanation. Quatermass followed the lieutenant along corridors and up a dozen floors by lift. He was set to wait again at the side of a large office. Or it might have been a rest-room since no work was being done in it. Half a dozen pay cops were sitting there, muttering idly. “They’re just a span of blue-bummed old
bobbejaans
!” . . . “It’ll be Hottentots next, I’m telling you!” . . . “True as God, you either get some small little nothing or you bloody well sneezing into an aardvark’s burrow!” They were grumbling about the women supplied to their barracks.

The lieutenant had disappeared. Quatermass could stand it no longer. He called: “Which way do I get out of here?”

Surprised faces turned. “What you hooting about,
toppie
?”

“I want out of this place! Immediately!”

They frowned. “You for the commandant, not so?”

But it was only when Quatermass set off angrily down the passage that they made any move. They ran after him and brought him back and ushered him, checking with each other and shouting all the way, to a more impressive office from which came a cry of “
Kom binne
!”

Inside, the walls were covered with heroic, bad paintings from the old country, of Table Bay and labouring ox-waggons and the Battle of Blood River. There was a huge map of England so plastered with stars and pins and ribbons that it looked like a conquered country. The total effect was gaudy enough to make Quatermass miss, for the first instant, the man who was there.

Commandant Van Gelder was surprisingly unimpressive. He was not tall and the superior cut of his uniform, intending elegance, only made him look skinny. His eyes were so blackly ringed about that they might have been hit, but it was probably sleeplessness. He almost ran from behind his desk.

“Professor—I’m glad you’re here. You’re the man to help us.”

He grabbed Quatermass’s hand. An unpleasant touch of nails that been almost chewed off.

“Oh, I heard all about you but they stopped us meeting, not so? Typical, completely typical! You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?” He kept twisting his face about as he spoke, as if to confuse anybody who might be trying to read his lips. “The army, the regulars! They do dirt on this service all the time! Just because they got their bloody oath of allegiance and we go by contract! We’re scum,
uitlander
scum! They bad-mouth us and they got everybody believing it!”

He broke off, glaring at Quatermass as if he expected him to argue.

“And now what happens? The bastards are falling apart! Mass desertions, not so? All their young men running off and joining the gangs, what about that?” The little commandant was grinning now. “Always knew it would happen, they got no discipline. All the same, this!”

Quatermass was at a loss. “Commandant, why did you bring me here? If you’ve nothing more to—”

Van Gelder grabbed him by the arm. “It’s our time now! When the main attack comes, it’s us that’s going to be ready! True as God, this is going to be the hour of need, and the Contract Police are going to bite their teeth and stand fast!”

Main attack? “Commandant, just what do you imagine—?”

“They come soon, not so? They must!”

“Who?”

The black rings blinked at him in surprise. “After all these raids—man, wasn’t last night enough for you? I’m told you were there by Wembley.”

“Yes, I was.”

“Well, then—!”

Quatermass’s heart sank a little lower. He knew what it was going to be. It showed in the stupid gleam of the man’s eyes.

“Professor, I bet you a lot of vodka’s flowed in the Kremlin since that!”

“Commandant—” It was pointless, he knew. He remembered drivelling arguments in the Big Bunker on this same theme. Perhaps they found it more bearable than the reality. He managed to say: “Commandant, I detest their politics but they’re not responsible. You’re wrong. The Russians are being hit as hard as anybody.”

“Fake! All fake!”

Of course, that came with it.

“First rule, confuse your enemy,” cried Van Gelder. “So that’s what they give out. What else would you expect them to say? Professor, those army shits may have swallowed it but not us—not this service!” His eyes were shining with what must be pride. “We face the facts,
meneer.
And now we’re going to step into the breach!”

Quatermass found it hard even to raise the image of those lumbering beetles squaring up to Red Army tanks.

“Now then, in this situation,” the little commandant was babbling on, “we mustn’t let ourselves get carried away by loyalty. That’s too easy. We must have regard for our worth. We’ve got to remember that we’re the
Contract
Police.”

As if they ever forgot it.

“Professor, we must act very quickly to secure our rights. You may not be aware of it but there’s a new basic contract under negotiation at this very moment. Now if we’re going to be called upon for additional risks—”

“You want more pay.”

The disgust in his voice should have have been enough. But the little commandant seemed beyond offence. His lip contortions only become more complicated, like bent and unreadable smiles.

“Professor, it’s not so simple. For us cash is no good. It’s got to be barter-warrants and transferred credits, above all guarantees against collapse of contracting parties—half of them are up shit creek!”