Quatermass (33 page)

T
he army pig rumbled past the mound with the standing stones. In the brown sunlight they looked even uglier than Quatermass remembered. All round them the ground was dead.

Then, peering past the driver, he saw the huts. For a moment they seemed intact and he found himself looking for the goat and the running children.

But nothing moved.

A little closer and he took in the dreadful blistered glitter. Just the same, he must look. He tapped the driver’s shoulder. “Stop for a moment,” he said.

“Getting out, sir?” Corporal Mildmay, on the seat opposite, grabbed his gun. He had orders to stay with Quatermass wherever he went. He threw the rear doors open with a clatter and got out first. Quatermass followed, stiff from hours on the hard seat. It was like release from a steel safe.

He waited while the corporal ran ahead to check. He was a tough little creature with grizzled hair. Corporal “Tosser” Mildmay. He might have done some wrestling in his younger days, unless the nickname had some ruder connotation. Old enough now. Lines in the face, whitening of hair, loss of it, these were what one had to look for and value.

“All clear!”

Mildmay was signalling. Quatermass went to join him near the hut.

It was a shell of tin and shattered glass. Some crystalline dust lay in small drifts. There was something frozen about it, like a shelter left by a polar expedition and rediscovered after many years.

“You wouldn’t think it was really ever in use, sir,” said Mildmay.

“Oh, it was.”

“Must have been. You can tell by the old stove and stuff.”

Quatermass found himself more moved than he had meant to be. He turned abruptly.

No trace of the vegetable patch, not one cabbage stalk. Of course it would have been trodden flat in any case, when the swarm came.

“Let’s get on,” he said. They went back to the pig.

The station, as they drove towards it, seemed in better shape. The dish-antennas looked almost intact and below them he could see grass sprouting. A tree with some leaves left, that must have been clear of the affected area.

Once again Corporal Mildmay went first. They left the pig with its engine running and the driver ready for a quick getaway if needed. As well to be sure, since the gang kids had spread so far afield.

They went through to the platform for a closer look at the antennas. It was reassuring. Here and there the mesh covering hung in strips, but the big dishes were secure in the mountings, the bogeys still on the tracks. He took a few photographs.

“I think we may be in luck, corporal.”

“Don’t seem too bad, sir. Let’s have a shufti inside.”

He kept his submachine gun high as he made for the door and kicked it open. It had remained in one piece.

Quatermass followed him in.

The control room had suffered. Plastic sheeting had been torn down from the gothic windows and brown light streamed in. Every piece of apparatus was blackened, lids and covers and doors blown open. Inside were fused, melted electronics. All circuits burned out. That was only to be expected.

“Look at this, sir.”

Fused modules had been lifted out of the control desk and laid aside. There were coils of bright wire, pieces of cable.

“Yes, somebody’s been here.”

“Having a go at repairs. What a hope!”

Quatermass picked up a partially rewound coil. It had been done with skill and knowledge.

He called out: “Hello? Is anybody there?”

He started towards the old ticket office. Where the glass door had been only a frame remained, with shivered fragments clinging. Beyond it there was a faint flicker in the brown light.

The corporal moved quickly ahead of him through the doorway.

Candles.

Three of them in the branched menorah where it stood on the floor of the ticket office. The silver looked scaly. The candles were crude, made out of something like rushes, oiled.

There was a tangle of straw, flattened like the nest of some large animal. A pile of gnawed roots, turnips and potatoes, food for whatever lived in the nest.

A bucket of water, a tin cup. A scatter of personal things, a tin box, a woman’s jewellery. And the beaker, of all things. The beaker made by the Beaker Folk.

Mildmay motioned with his gun.

He had his eyes on the steel cupboard, scoured of paint and rusting. Its door stood wide open. In a single bound he was across the room and knocking it aside with his gun barrel.

Pressed against the wall was a rigid figure.

“Joe!”

Kapp was hardly recognizable. He was bearded and filthy, his clothes rags.

“Are you hurt?”

No answer. “Seems more like shock, sir,” said the corporal. “You know who the man is?”

Quatermass nodded.

As he went closer he saw how thin Kapp was. As the muscles of his face moved, little sinews picked their way to the surface. And it was not just their raggedness that made his clothes dangle. He had been starving.

“If I’d had any idea that you were . . .” don’t be too blunt “. . . were here. The place was reported hit. Joe? Your family?”

Kapp spoke for a moment. “Alive,” he said.

“They escaped?”

No answer. Kapp had turned his face to the wall.

“I’m glad,” said Quatermass. It might be true, in spite of the hut, the menorah and the other things. “Where are they?” he asked.

“Alive,” Kapp said again. “All . . . all alive.”

He moved at last. He made his way past them with weak loose-jointedness, glancing down at the candles as if he thought they might in some way betray him. And into the control room.

“Corporal, it might be better if you wait outside,” said Quatermass.

“Sure, sir?”

“Don’t worry.”

Quatermass found Kapp standing by the control panel. He had hidden the coil with the bright wire. He had a private, slightly offended look.

“You can go too,” he said.

Quatermass found himself wondering if he had even been recognized. He nodded at the control desk. “You’ve been working on this.”

Kapp nodded. He looked at Quatermass and, yes, it was recognition.

“There’s less damage than I thought,” he said.

Less damage!

“I’ll get it all going,” said Kapp. “I’ve got to try and communicate.”

Then Quatermass knew.

“Simple signals,” Kapp said. He was less hesitant now. “Just enough to indicate we’re capable of understanding . . . a simple signal it sends back. I know it won’t be easy but—”

“Joe—”

“But I’ve got to try!”

“Joe, it’s been tried!” Kapp shook his head so he moved closer. Kapp kept his distance, not wanting to hear it. Was there any point? “Chuck Marshall died in the attempt.”

Kapp just kept shaking his head. Was he denying it or was it despair?

Quatermass talked. He could not humour this man. He kept talking, just pouring out the dreadful facts. Addressing the Kapp brain as it had been, quick and direct and curious and honest. What had happened around the world since Ringstone Round and Gratton Halt . . . the sheer numbers . . . what could be guessed of the process . . . its programming.

At the end Kapp was still shaking his head. In a small, withheld voice he said: “No. They aren’t destroyed. They’re all alive. I’m going to find them.”

Quatermass felt his skin stir.

Better if Kapp had screamed it wildly, beyond reach. This was Joe Kapp rational, but moving away on some separate track.

“Come with me, Joe?”

Kapp was patient. “I told you.”

Call Mildmay and the driver and have him dragged out to the pig? Not that.

“I’ll be back,” said Quatermass.

Kapp stood quite still, listening. Hearing the old man’s footsteps move out and along the platform, and his voice talking to the soldier. And quite soon the engine roar of whatever they had arrived in. It sounded big and heavy and slow. He had to be patient, waiting for the noise of it to die finally away.

Only then did he move.

He picked up a screwdriver and went to the banks of correlation receivers that stood with their covers blown open. He started digging at a blackened module to prise it free.

It was a little while before he heard the voices.

He had got them going well in the other room, the ticket office, when he lit the candles. The candles always helped. The old man’s coming had broken it all up. He was always afraid that next time it would fail to happen. It was like setting up a very delicate circuit.

The smaller voice came first. It always did. It gave one of its impatient, emphatic sighs.

“What are you doing
now,
daddy?”

Kapp smiled. “Fixing,” he said.

“Always fixing.”

Then the second voice, old enough to know what it might be missing. “Let’s go somewhere, all of us.”

“We will,” he promised.

“Somewhere we’ve never been?”

“How about the seaside?” said Kapp.

“Yes,” said Sarah. “Oh, yes please! Say when!”

Careful now. “When you’re bigger,” said Kapp.

“Oh, Joe, that’s cheating—”

“Listen,
bubeleh
—”

“When you make a promise to kids—”

“I know, I know! Don’t get at me about it!”

“We’ll go soon, won’t we?”

“Okay,” he said.

“Soon,” said Clare. “Very soon. There now, daddy’s promised and it’s all fixed. This time we’ll really go. Oh, you’ll both love it. The sea for the very first time.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Sarah, when did you?”

“That picture in daddy’s office. A boat man dancing by it.”

“That’s right,” said Kapp. “ ‘Skegness Is So Bracing.’ Got him so excited he had to dance. But the real sea is even better.”

“Can we take Puppy?”

“If daddy says—”

“Daddy, can we? He likes going in water. The river—”

“Oh, let’s take Puppy!”

Puppy . . .

Kapp was frowning. He shouldn’t have let them say that. It broke in. The fur and the bones showing. The skull that had got in the wrong place. The leaves and the dust that sparkled.

He pressed his forehead against the cold steel casing and gritted his teeth hard . . .

“You know what I reckon, sir?” Mildmay did not give up easily. “That feller’s round the twist. I mean, I don’t blame him. I’ve seen a few sights lately . . .”

They detoured to inspect the old railway track, the long curve where it had once descended to join the main line. Quatermass got his maps out.

There was a little farm not far away. Mildmay reconnoitred and found it deserted apart from some pigs which appeared to have the run of the place. He reckoned they had been hunted out of it some time and had come back of their own accord. Now they were in and out of the farmhouse itself.

He suggested bringing one or two back. A matter of food supplies.

It was hard to refuse him.

While Quatermass pored over his figures the two soldiers set about it. The pigs were almost wild and proved surprisingly good runners. Mildmay used his submachine gun to shoot three. He had little finesse.

The journey back was indescribable.

“Ghosts could not do this!” said Gurov.

“No.”

Quatermass felt awed. All that was in them was being spent, generously and accurately. Old men ran in Dean’s Yard. Weak hands forced themselves to grip. Limbs lost their tremor in this last renewal of energy. It was as if they had all decided to expend themselves, but not pointlessly. When thin blood spilled it would be on the sharp edge of the correct lever. Burns came, but only from essential tests. The infirmary was filling up.

Now there seemed to be faces Quatermass had never encountered before, had not sought out. Yet here they were acute, concentrated, brought to Dean’s Yard by some chance or instinct.

He recognized it. It was a human phenomenon that happened under certain pressures.

He had seen it once in the Rocket Group, a sudden surge that broke down every problem as it showed. A huge certainty, an elegance of energy. As if order were the natural condition of things and they had broken through to it for a little while. For long enough. To do what was needed.

But for his companions now, in their age, it was more wonderful. It was a rejuvenation.

When King David was stricken in years they brought unto him a virgin to lie in his bosom so that he might get heat. This time the rejuvenator was not lying close, not in the bed oiled and fondling. It was light-years away and it bore no love.

But these old, for the sake of the young, got heat.

It was, suitably, old Chisholm who provided the final breakthrough. “That Chisholm!” marvelled Misru, “Such faculties of discrimination, and they actually increase! No machine could do it! Quatermass—!”

He threw back the flap of the plastic-clad compartment. The old creature inside it snapped out of a doze.

“Mr. Chisholm—”

“Ah yes.” He came to life. “Ah yes, you see. I remembered, you see, the first girl I ever lay with. Her body odour, the precise constituents. Seventy-four years ago . . . mm . . . mm . . . I was nineteen at the time, I dare say a little retarded by later standards. Mm. It was in a field, a field of barley, during a charabanc outing organized by the Rechabites, a teetotal organization to which I was happy to belong in my apprenticeship days. Her name was Madge . . .”

His saurian smile was utterly happy.

The request was dealt with in the Big Bunker. To give it full authority, Helen Peacher attended. No one else but the two specialist officers, a lieutenant-general and a brigadier. Both men had been dragged back from the safer obscurity of age. They looked uneasy.

Quatermass explained at some length what he intended. He would use every form of transmitted impulse . . . radar, lasers, radio and light waves, even direct sound.

“That sounds like a lot of guessing,” said the brigadier.

He agreed. It was a crash programme of the most extreme kind, untested because untestable. But if they were to have any chance to stop mankind becoming an endangered species—

“What precisely are you asking for, professor?”

“A focal bomb.”

The officers looked at each other in concern, as he had expected. The brigadier began to explain to Helen Peacher. This was one of the most heavily classified items ever to be included in the country’s arsenal. It was still a major secret—