Quatermass (31 page)

“. . . this indicates that it is not sensible.”

Gurov raised his head with a look of profound conviction. Time to get in fast before somebody says they don’t think it sensible either, getting into bad habits like stripping the Earth of its inhabitants. And write him off as an idiot. What did he mean? He must have been at a dictionary, a rather old one.

Of course.

“Not . . . sentient,” he said carefully. “Academician Gurov now believes, as I do myself, that we are facing not an intelligence but a machine. Of unbelievable sophistication but still a machine.”

“Da! Da!”
said Gurov. And had the sense to keep quiet.

Helen Peacher leaned forward. “Professor, surely a machine must have a maker?” Not contradictory but helping with a leading question.

“Of course.”

“An intelligence?”

“The intelligence that made it is quite beyond our reach . . . and our understanding.” He let that sink in for a moment. “It’s probably thousands of light-years away. This is . . . call it a probe they’ve sent, just as we’ve sent probes to other planets in the solar system to bring back soil samples. This must be programmed to sense . . . living human protein. And to take it.”

Gurov was nodding till his jowls jumped. “I agree! Now I do agree! In Moskva they think it alive. Kolpakov say! He is fool but he say and they believe—it alive!”

“Marshal Kolpakov,” Quatermass filled in. “Extreme hawk.” He had met the man once, he thought in Gurov’s company. Face like a boxer.

“He prepare now to send rockets,” said Gurov. “Many! Kolpakov wish to kill it. He can not. It will not kill!”

Quatermass saw puzzled faces. The idea of attacking it appealed. The idea of doing anything at all. They must be feeling that in Kolpakov’s shoes—

“He’s got no target,” he said.

Gurov agreed. “How can he?”

“Only if he knew in advance where the beam was to strike—”

“Not possible!” from Gurov.

“And he could manage to hit it during the twenty point two seconds that it lasts—”

Wrong!

In that instant he knew that it could be found and it could be hit, and exactly how.

“Impossible to shoot at a william-of-the-wisp!” Gurov was saying, and God only knew what sort of a dictionary he had, and nobody was smiling. He was aware of Gurov at his side, nodding away and explaining something. His own mind had gone somewhere else.

He knew how to do it! The idea had hit him like a bullet, as they always did when they were going to work. When they were right.

“That, therefore, was my decision which I have made.” Gurov reading from his statement again. “I find I agree with Quatermass, so I must work with him. I leave Soviet Union for this purpose.”

Yes, the plan was still there. Still coherent, as neat and finished as the paper in Gurov’s hand. A lot neater. That looked a mess, but he must have composed it under difficulties. All corrected and blotched, probably with his own tears.

But the plan . . . it would work because it had to. There could be no other.

He coughed. Gurov had just thumped him approvingly on the back. He had not realized the weight of those hands.

“I will join him in the struggle,” said Gurov.

Struggle. Yes, it would be that.

Helen Peacher was looking steadily across the table at him. A handsome face they would have called it; impressive, not loved.

Now she was old. That was the point. In the last few seconds it had become the main point.

“Have you any idea at all,” she asked, “what can be done?”

“I think I have.”

That made a stir.

“Time,” she said. “We haven’t any, have we?”

“None at all.”

“The Earth is losing of its young,” said Gurov. “It can die.”

Quatermass said, “I need facilities but there won’t be enough of those either. So I want people.”

“List them.”

“They must have their wits about them,” he said to her. “As much as you . . . and Gurov here . . . and myself. Like us, they must be old.”

She looked at him strangely. Perhaps it wasn’t a word a woman liked to hear at any time, even now.

“The older the better,” said Quatermass.

He put his idea to Gurov, who seemed at first not to understand and then to spill over with enthusiasm. Quatermass wondered whether he had really taken it in.

The Russian kept to the cramped quarters he had been allocated, as if he felt safe there. He appeared to be undergoing successive waves of shock from it all. More than once Quatermass found him weeping helplessly. He spoke of the Soviet Union with hatred, and then with love as if he had been unwillingly torn from it. He sobbed over his wife who had died long ago in ill-managed childbirth; his
dacha
in the birchwoods outside Moscow, a prized retreat that had been burned by vandals; and of course his son, Major Yuri. Even processions through the Red Square were fondly remembered from the old days, and the cultural life the capital had had then. One one occasion he had been called in to give technical advice to the Bolshoi Ballet, for what must have been a curiously mechanistic production.

Quatermass used that.

“The same now,” he told Gurov. “We’re going to put on a show.”

Try, at least.

1 4

T
he wrinkled skin of the cheeks tightened and tightened until it seemed it must split. The mouth drew wide in a rictus.

For a moment Quatermass suspected shock, that his words had caused some fatal distress. He reached to pull away the layered covers and see if old Chisholm’s heart had given out. But a surprisingly firm hand met his. From the parted jaws came a kind of clicking that he realized must be a chuckle.

“Back among the perfumes of the world,” whispered Mr. Chisholm. “I can’t wait!”

Quatermass stepped out into the passage and signed to the men waiting there. It was best to be quick. Second thoughts crept in all too easily.

The stretcher-bearers were two reliable, tough old fellows he had used before. In a few seconds they had Chisholm wrapped up like a parcel and were carrying him along the narrow passage. No chance of using a stretcher down here. “He don’t weigh nothing, sir.”

Quatermass led the way between the walls made of van doors.

He found Jack looking angry. He had been talking to the others and they had not understood either.

“Where d’you think you’re taking him?” demanded Jack.

“I need him.”

“What d’you want with him?” Edna turned protectively. “Mr. Chisholm, love, if you don’t want—”

“I need his help,” said Quatermass.

Disbelieving looks. None of them could see how old Chisholm could help anybody. Edna gripped the ancient man’s hand to comfort him.

“It’s a trick,” said Jack, “to get him away. I dunno what you’re up to but I bet—”

“No trick, believe me.”

Old Chisholm seemed to have a clearer grip on what was going on. “I’m going to be stretched,” he said.

“What did he say?” Jane cried.

“Stretched!”

“Oh, no!”

The thin lips were grinning. “Put to use, my dears. I find it exceedingly gratifying.”

“If you hurt him—!”

A clawlike hand patted Jack’s arm. “Jack, my friend, nobody will do that. I want to go.”

He was borne off happily towards the ladder.

“Jack,” said Quatermass. “Come too. I need a good thief.”

Jack said nothing. But there was panic from the others.

“Don’t take Jack away.”

“Is Jack going to jail?”

“What’ll we do!”

“Oh, please don’t!”

Edna’s face was red. Arthur was searching his wits for an argument. Susie was crying without understanding why. Jack was muddled too, but he was tempted. It showed.

There was only one thing to do.

“Very well,” said Quatermass. “I’m going to take you all . . .”

Dean’s Yard, Westminster, had become the centre of operations. The concrete defences on the ancient gateways had been broken down to admit vehicles. Generators had been set up on the grassed quadrangle. Cables ran from them into Little Dean’s Yard, snaking through the school buildings there. Lasers shone in darkened form rooms. The fives court was filled with carboys of acid. College Hall trembled with the powerful sound of extraordinary and unbalanced frequencies.

Every hour more equipment arrived. It was the result of ceaseless foraging.

A deserted factory, a burned-out research centre, a forgotten store of spare parts, all of them could yield essential items. There had been infuriating discoveries too. A huge cellarful of priceless vacuum tubes, every one of them carefully and individually smashed in. Computers that had been hammered to fragments.

People had been vandalized as well.

So many of those he tried to trace had gone missing. Houses were found boarded up, the inhabitants long since fled or suicided. A nightmare journey to Cambridge in an army pig driven by a fumble-fisted pensioner ended in further horrors: a half-crazy Nobel Prize winner locked in a house full of wild dogs that had devoured his wife; empty colleges; the charred shell of King’s Chapel; the graffiti,
ALL TO ELY
!
ELY SOON
! And it
had
been soon at Ely, the town that jutted like a ship from the plain, a clean target. Taken with how many thousands no one knew, as usual. Its great cathedral must have been on one of the most ancient sites of all.

But somehow he had found his people.

Now it was old Chisholm who was being rolled in a wheelchair to the main laboratory. His parchment face was pale as a creature brought up from underground should be, but it showed relish. The darkened sunlight shone in through the big windows on to white or naked heads. All the men and omen at work here were old, some like Chisholm very old indeed. It was their apparatus that was younger . . . electron microscopes, centrifuges, mini-computers, all powered from festoons of cable. Lined faces looked up from inventive breadboards, lash-ups, improvized arrangements of wire and string.

“Over here,” Quatermass directed.

Chisholm was wheeled to a bench where a quick-eyed Indian was at work. Much younger than himself, a mere seventy or so.

“This is Banamali Misru, our authority on pheromones. Harold Chisholm.”

As they shook hands Chisholm was struck by doubt. “Pheromones. I’m afraid that’s new technology—”

Misru beamed. “Say animal scent secretions.”

“Ah!”

“In his heyday,” said Quatermass, “Chisholm could distinguish one thousand and thirty separate odours.”

“One thousand and thirty-two,” corrected Chisholm.

“And now?”

Chisholm tightened himself in the wheelchair, eager as a toddler. “Let’s find out!” he whispered.

Quatermass left them to it. He crossed the passage to where Gurov was sitting at a computer terminal struggling with an increasingly baffling programme. He was surrounded with torn-up notes.

“I got our olfactory genius,” said Quatermass. “I wondered if he’d survive. Now I think he may.”

Gurov groaned.

“What use? Those here already, they don’t remember or they remember bad! They don’t know what they do!”

“We’re managing to co-ordinate—”

“Co-ordinate? You can’t even read my cyrillic writing!”

Quatermass picked up some of the notes. “I can read your equations,” he said.

It was like changing parameters. Replacing a formal parameter with an actual parameter. They didn’t talk parameters in Trethearne’s day. Trethearne would have enjoyed this moment. He was the original defeated man. “Bernard, boy,” he would have said, “none of this is going to work, you know that.” Like the time they tested the rocket on Camber Sands, the first one, the little one, the T-1. It must have been in the early thirties, yes, nineteen thirty-two. T-1, T for Trethearne to keep him interested. Their mail rocket, three feet long, but it never carried any mail. It blew up. “I could’a told you, boy,” Trethearne said. “The bloody thing’s designed all wrong from the inside out!” Angry because he’d burnt his fingers picking up bits of it, and he stamped off along the beach. But the thing wasn’t all wrong. There’d been just one error in the design. He only realized it years later. If they’d kept on they could have fixed it in a week. A new T-1 would have flown.

Gurov had taken something out of his pocket and he was flicking and clicking at it like a Greek with worry-beads. It was an abacus, small and very old.

“When computer beat me,” he said, “I go back to this. All my life I use it, since child. Draws picture in mind, you can see problem.” He sat back and covered his eyes. “So now. We must keep problem clear in mind. How this thing attacks. It attacks on place marked from ancient time, but only when also a big number of crowd is there.
Da?
So, it must detect crowd like heat-seeking missile.”

“Body heat. I don’t think it’s that.”

They had been through this a dozen times. But go through it again if it helped Gurov. He was for ever prowling round the outside of the problem. Perhaps that was a mental discipline in Russia. Perhaps they were right.

“Forgive that I think of missiles.” Gurov was oddly sensitive about his profession. “What about sound? Decision on ordinary noise of personnel? Do we use it?”