Quatermass (32 page)

“We use it,” said Quatermass.

They would use anything that seemed to be a likely factor. He was remembering Ringstone Round, the first time he had seen the screeching and leaping, the chanting that sent them into shaking, sweating heaps of humanity. Sub-humanity. He could smell the sweat now. Perhaps all that activity was just to excite, to stir up glandular secretions, make them betray themselves.

“The unique smell of the human species.”

“Not us,” said Gurov.

“What?”

“Not the old. We stink.”

Yes, right. It had to be right. “That’s our advantage, Pavel Grigoritch. The only one we’ve got, that we’re outside its programme. It should make us . . . invisible.”

“Like ghosts.”

“Yes, like ghosts,” Quatermass said. “We’re nearly that anyway. You and I and these others. We’re free to haunt.”

Nobody could possibly look older than Harold Chisholm, thought Misru.

He had installed him in the place assigned, a jobbed-up compartment of plastic sheeting to isolate him from fumes and dust. The ancient man had complained immediately about the smell of the plastic, which impressed Misru because it was remarkably odourless. Then he got down to sniffing the phials. There were hundreds of them in the racks, all meticulously labelled.

“Pure, perfect zibetone,” nodded Chisholm over one of them. He sniffed again. “However did you manage to isolate it?”

Misru smiled. The ancient person was good on the nose, less good on modern techniques. “I will show you,” he said.

“The Spanish once used it,” murmured Chisholm, “Used civet, that is, for perfuming glove leather. Mm . . . mm. There were some unusual practices employed to obtain it.” He would go into detail, Misru knew. “The civet cats were so closely confined that they could not turn in their cages. The substance was secreted at the posterior end. It was removed with a special spoon. Rather cruel.”

“I was not cruel,” said Misru. “I made it.”

Chisholm was incredulous.

“Not this quality!”

“Synthetic.”

“Never!”

Some other time Misru would explain it to him. At present it was a matter of putting it to use. He slipped from the compartment to find his extended notes, and encountered Quatermass. Perhaps he had been listening. He seemed to be everywhere.

“All right?”

“Admirable. His score is still over a thousand odours.”

Quatermass nodded and moved on. Poor civet cats, he thought, that had no ghosts to help them.

A clatter out on the staircase.

A cry of pain.

A man had fallen and cracked his hip joint. Teddy Devitt of sound synthesizers. Words of comfort for old Teddy, shocked and shivery now, while the stretcher came. Teddy would do no more for them, unless from his bed. They had all been warned about such injuries that were special to themselves. Dry bones, ready to fail. Teddy had been careless.

Old Jack arrived with the stretcher party. Hurrying, not running. The casualty was borne off to the infirmary.

“Now, guv, come and see what I got.”

Jack had become invaluable. He wore his thief’s harness openly, its deep pockets loaded with spanners, recharged batteries, cables, calculators, anything there might be call for.

“I got everything on your list, bar niaouli oil. That beat me.”

He led Quatermass to the latest loot. Trolley-loads of it, from vacuum distillation apparatus to feathers. Stone jars, cameras, headphones, fibreglass, watches, springs and sardines. “Sardines is for the cats,” he explained. “Got to ’ave cats or you’ll ’ave mice in among your electrics, shortin’ things out. Extra beddin’, that’s in the passage. The old girls are settin’ it up.”

The old girls were Edna and Jane and one or two others from the metal catacomb who were still able. They had found plenty to do. Meals to help with, beds to look after in the passages so that people could stay close to their work.

Once Quatermass had gone foraging with Jack. Once was enough. The old thief could take the risks he warned others against. He leapt across gaps where floorboards should have been. He crashed doors in. Then he would turn, grinning. “Come on, guv, it’s safe!” Holding out a hand.

But ghosts were fragile.

When spectacles got lost and deaf-aids finally expired, senses were lost with them. He had watched memories fail.

There was O. T. H. Harness in the conversion unit.

This was an original cross between the chemical and the electronic. It was the key to everything.

Its benches held the familiar sight of bubbling flasks, and fluids that winked their way through assemblies of glass and rubber tubing. But there were also stranger pieces that looked like medieval alembics crammed with microcircuits and light-emitting diodes.

O. T. H. Harness sat at the control desk with its displays and monitor screens.

The sight of him aroused instant apprehension. The man was red, as if he had been shaped out of some hot substance that did not cool. On top of his head the white hair was like a powdery exudation. He sat and panted with tension, shifting his body about as if he could find no comfort.

His chief researcher, Frances Makins, and his technical assistants, working to bring the desired images on to the monitor screens, knew it was a race. Sometimes it seemed like two races run simultaneously. One by Harness against his own death, the second against the death of others. But really they were the same race.

He looked at Quatermass and said one word.

“Blackdown . . .”

Quatermass nodded. He put a hand on Harness’s shoulder and felt the substance he was made of shaking under the cloth. He left him watching the screens and waiting.

Blackdown had become another of the terrible places. The big army base where eleven thousand young soldiers had waited for their fate. For once the number was known. But others had joined them. Girls and gang-boys and Planet People. Dancing on the drawn-up tanks and screaming.

Until it came.

And there were just the rows of blistered tanks.

He found Gurov slamming a window to cut out the distant chanting. “Across the river,” he said. “Not many, I think.”

Planet People still.

At moments like that one felt, why go on? Let them gather, follow them, watch them, encourage them, set it up! A hundred thousand all in one spot, that would be about enough!

“Why not use them? It’s what they want anyway!”

“You could not.”

No, of course not. It would have to be done this way, the hard way.

He turned to the window.

It was an appalling sunset, brown sky seared with bands of green and purple. The clouds too were in shapes he had never seen before, loaded with what was in that sky.

“Quatermass . . . do you still say harvest?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps we mistake. What sort of harvest gets thrown away like that?”

“Discarded. But something is taken.”

“You think what?”

“Some . . . trace. A flavour. To enrich the life style of . . . inconceivable beings. Perhaps not even that. Just . . . amuse them . . .”

A ghost.

The idea possessed him that this was what he had become. Moving through the ancient school at night, along flagged passages, it was all too easy.

Old faces met his. Hands offered analyses, computer readouts. The work of other ghosts. He found himself marvelling and grateful. It was better than he had ever hoped. Only echoes of their strongest times, but echoes were what ghosts knew how to handle.

Their brains were better than their arms. Half an hour ago a great lathe had burst loose in the Lower Boys’ Hall. It had not been bolted down securely. Damage and injuries, blood and distress. The infirmary doctors would deal with it as they had dealt with Teddy Devitt’s hip and would deal with others soon, the fits and strokes and fractures to come.

There were camp beds in the passage. Practical old Edna was tightening sheets on those not in use. Hospital style. Some long-dead matron would have approved of Edna’s remembered training. Jack was snoring in a chair. He had grown used to sleeping like that in the car dump, could rest no other way. Winnie, curiously revived, was brewing hot drinks.

He saw them as old but not himself. He could feel the stiffness in his joints but as a temporary indisposition. The remarkable thing was that, by the concern in their eyes, they saw
him
as old.

He had had a cat in the manse. A working tabby that had done long, skilled service as a mouser and ratter. But at sixteen years its belly prolapsed. Its hindquarters gave. It became incontinent, fouling carpets. Yet it was amazed, unable to believe that it had offended. He had given the word for it to be put down. He still remembered its eyes, clear to the last, young and troubled.

They were ready for that too, the sudden shaking weakness that stress might bring on. Appliances were in store.

He had caught himself looking hard into eyes, searching for ringed corneas, the stigmata of senility he might have missed before. Noticing sudden bewilderments. Once or twice he had seemed to hear laughter with too wild an element. Note it and wait. The confusion of being in an unfamiliar place, put it down to that for the moment.

Old Susie was a touchstone. She was installed with some other old people who had nothing to contribute, in one of the houses on the far side of Dean’s Yard. Transfer from the catacomb had given her the final nudge. She was crazy and helpless and happy.

Chisholm was still on the job, he noticed. Light glowed through the misty plastic of his dustproof compartment. Perhaps even he had the delusion of being young.

Quatermass listened. He could hear the weary Indian yawning. And Chisholm, immortal, declaring: “I never sleep. I have not slept for . . . let me see . . . oh, quite a number of years.”

Move on.

Quatermass, ratter and mouser, past his time but not as old as that.

He glanced into the conversion unit. Lights still burning there. They were having one of their recurring crises. Inside one of the alembics a spot of luminance moved. Frances Makins was frantically adjusting some botched-together assemblage of wires. O. T. H. Harness was knotting his hands. She was distressed: “My God, I can’t tell which of these—!” He was desperate: “There—the digital filter—!”

Sometimes this would go on for hours. He left them to it.

Tomorrow he would make an expedition. It would be good to leave Dean’s Yard. A necessary reconnaissance, to be performed in an iron box on wheels, with guns ready.

“AA Service, sir—can I help you?”

A man in cavalry trousers on a motorcycle combination, saluting.

His first car, and a tyre had blown. Squatting there by the roadside, sweating. Grateful to hear that voice. “Can I help you, sir?” His wife on the hedge, watching. Not his wife, not yet. His girl. Going somewhere for the day, to find a place on their own to be lovers in . . .

“How long will you be gone?”

It was Gurov. He looked exhausted, depleted to the point where one organ would subtly steal strength from another and disorder came.

“A day should be enough,” said Quatermass.

He found a bag under his desk and began to put things in it. A camera to record the extent of damage. The first report had said it was limited, but that had only come from pay cops.

Ghosts.

The peculiar misery of ghosts must be that they had no existence but thought they had. They deceived themselves. They had no influence on real events. They could do nothing, only watch. Their time was past.

It was like a metallic taste in the mouth, the feeling of futility.

“Who is that?” asked Gurov.

He was nodding at the small photograph Quatermass had pinned on the wall.

“My grand-daughter.”

“Grand—?”

“The child of my child.”

“Gone?”

“I’m afraid—”

“She was like you,” said Gurov.

There was a piercing screech somewhere. It was inside the laboratory. A woman’s cry.

Quatermass ran, nearly colliding with Misru as he emerged wide-eyed from the plastic compartment and ran too. Other people were stumbling in from the passage.

It was the conversion unit.

Frances Makins and her technical assistants were struggling with the helpless shape of O. T. H. Harness, who had turned from red to a dreadful grey, as if he were cooling at last. His eyes might or might not have been taking in information, and his breaths had become gulps.

“He collapsed!” she was crying. “It was too much for him! Help him—oh, help him!”

Quatermass yelled: “Jack!”

Jack had anticipated him. He appeared dragging a stretcher. In a matter of seconds he had superintended Harness’s heavy form on to it.

“Infirmary—quick as you can.”

It had resuscitation equipment of all kinds. If there was anything to be done for Harness they would do it. But one thing was clear. He would not be coming back to the conversion unit. A vital link had gone.

“This is bad,” said Gurov.

Frances Makins was sobbing, holding hysteria down as she watched her boss lifted away.

“All right, Frances,” Quatermass said. “Calm now. This is the sort of setback we had to expect. I hoped it wouldn’t happen. Still—”

“Setback?” Her voice was suddenly as wild as when she had screamed. “But we
did
it!”

She grabbed Quatermass, roughly, out of self-control, and pulled him along.

“Come and see!”

On one of the monitor screens by the control desk an eerie pattern was quivering. It was brightly coloured and in constant motion. Not wholly unlike a thermographic image but far more tenuous.

Frances Makins’s mouth was open as she watched the screen, as if it were a shrine.

Then she said: “That’s formaldehyde.”

Quatermass could feel the excitement rising in him too, tingling up from the stomach. He turned to Gurov and saw the pale eyes bright.

“The electric image of a smell,” said Quatermass. They were looking at it.

Full conversion in fact, no longer theory.

Gurov said: “Now we begin!”

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