Quatermass (35 page)

“Leh-leh-leheh—loh-loh-lohoh—lah-lah-lahahah!”

The faces round Kapp had taken on a blankness. Open mouths and dry flicking tongues. They were creatures in ecstasy but it was a purified despair.

“No!” shouted Kapp.

He pulled free, tearing at their clutch on him.

“No!”

He was sprawling. The chant went on but broken, interrupted. Kickalong stooped over him.

“You can’t be made fit!” said Kickalong. “Them too. Your woman and your kids—they’re spillings!”

The chant was a whisper.

The others were as frightened as the man on the ground, who turned his face down to it so they they wouldn’t see him.

The girl who was the grandchild had even ceased to whisper. She put her hands to her face as if to share something.

Kickalong turned.

He raised his arms high like flapping wings of fur, to urge them out. The grandchild girl was swept along with the rest.

Kickalong sprang aboard the mule-cart and they were away. Caraway and Bee and all running alongside. The woman with the terrier ran, feeling its little heart beating with excitement. The man, whose bowler hat had fallen, snatched it up from the sparkling dust and put it back on his head and ran faster. Untangling dreadlocks were shaken out of faces. Bare feet ran and soldiers’ boots.

They had only gone a few hundred yards when fat Sal broke away.

“Hey you!” shouted Kickalong.

“I’ll stay with him,” Sal called.

She turned and started slowly, heavily, back towards the station.

Kickalong aimed. He shot her down like a rabbit.

His followers hardly seemed to notice. The mule-cart rumbled on. Kickalong snatched up his plumb-bob and swung it round his head. The whole wild gallimaufry went pounding down the road.

When the moon came up it too was always discoloured. Kapp had noticed this as it shone through the high gothic windows. Not the mellow look of a harvest moon but a greenish tinge, a metallic khaki.

Even this sick glow was enough to pick things out. For the past hour he had hardly moved except to lean himself against the wrecked control desk. He had been lying there imagining things. There was the crumpled metal shape a few yards away. At last he had identified it as the casing of some small electronic parts and crawled across to check. It was the tin bucket, considerably trodden. He began, very carefully, to pull it into shape. The thin metal was rusted badly and it cracked.

He listened.

All the time he had been lying here he seemed to hear sounds in the distance. At first he thought it was them, coming back again, and that this time they would not leave him alive. But the sounds stayed distant.

A metallic sound, barely perceptible.

He put the bucket down to concentrate. He turned this way and that, trying to direct his hearing. It seemed to be low down. It was louder now.

It was outside in the rails . . .

He sat upright. A sudden gusting that came back to him out of childhood. It was the puffing of a steam engine.

He waited. It came again, louder, and he shivered at the clarity of the delusion. It was one thing to will such things, quite another when they arrived unbidden.

The rails hummed. The heavy puffing and chuffing approached steadily. Now he could hear the wheels on the metals and the thudding clank of coupling rods. The whole station shook with the power and weight of what was coming.

The puffing speeded up. It was outside, shuddering to a halt. A searing blast of exhausting steam, it seemed only yards away.

Then—men’s voices.

Orders were being shouted. Running footsteps outside on the platform. Lights flashed across the broken windows.

A beam from the doorway blinded Kapp.

“One man in here, sir!” shouted a voice.

Kapp peered. There were more lights now, reflecting on faces. There was one he knew. He pulled himself to his knees.

“Quatermass.”

The old man helped him up and across to the doorway. He stared out, hardly able to believe it.

Belching white clouds across the platform was an old steam engine. It had stopped close to the first of the antenna bogeys. It seemed to have its own bright lamps, and by their light equipment was already being unloaded from the trucks it had hauled here.

There was an old-fashioned magic about it, the twisting steam and the smell of fire.

Kapp whispered: “They never went on a train.”

He turned away and moved a few steps along the platform.

“They’re dead,” he said.

1 6

I
t was a military rocket of the heaviest type, designed to operate its multiple warheads against enemy cities or bases or satellites. Even with its boosters spent and discarded, it was of forbidding size. The instruction panels and stencilled warnings along its side were in Russian cyrillic.

It had left the Earth far behind, a glowing disc with its blue-green dusted brown. The rocket seemed not to be moving but in fact had a velocity of twenty-seven thousand miles an hour. It was strangely tilted, out of line with its flight path. With infinite slowness this pitch went on until the great rocket was pointed towards the way it had come, and continued steadily round. It was performing sluggish cartwheels, end over end.

Fifty miles away another, identical rocket had turned itself sideways, to point at ninety degrees from the angle of flight . . .

“Mr. Gurov!”

The wiry old orderly was yelling from the doorway of the ticket office, trying to make himself heard above the din.

The control room was in temporary chaos. Its ruined apparatus had been ripped out and dumped. Now grizzled sappers were wheeling in the new, opening up the bulky crates under the anxious supervision of the team from Dean’s Yard.

“Mr. Gurov—I’ve managed to get that call through, sir!”

This time Gurov heard. He hurried to the ticket office.

Quatermass marvelled at Frances Makins. She seemed to have taken over. Grey hair straggling across her face, she was ordering the sappers about as if she were one of their own officers. “Look out for the marked crates! They shouldn’t be opened up yet! Yes, that one over here! Now, where’s Mr. Misru? Mr. Misru—!”

Quatermass left her to it. He followed Gurov.

The Russian was clutching an army field telephone of the simplest kind. They had decided to work with plain wire and sturdy connectors whenever possible.

He was speaking in his own language but not saying much. His queries seemed to break off after a few words each time. He was listening with increasing and obvious stupefaction.

Quatermass turned to go but Gurov had seen him and signalled. At last he put the phone down.

“My embassy contact,” he said. He looked dazed with the impact of too much all at once. He shook himself. “Kolpakov, he did it! Like I say. He did deploy against
that
. . .” he waved a hand at the ceiling “. . . greatest part of strike force of Soviet Union. Hundreds of rockets.”

“Well? What happened?”

Gurov threw his hands wide. “Useless!”

“He had no target, of course.”

“Some did locate,” said Gurov. “Went into instant malfunction. Most located nothing, went out into space.”

It was unbelievable even so. “Not one? Not a single one?”

Gurov made a wry face. “Oh, a number of them successfully found the Moon, and attacked that!”

Quatermass felt himself pulled about by contradictions. One would wish it to have worked. One knew it couldn’t have.

“So we were right,” he said.

But Gurov seemed to have something even more astonishing on his mind.

“It was a last throw,” he said.

“What?”

“The government has lost control.”

For a moment Quatermass failed to understand him. “You mean,
your
government?”

Gurov nodded slowly. “This, on top of all. In Soviet Union, revolution.” Something else dawned on him. “I can go back,” he said, and then: “If there is anything . . .”

Joe Kapp was used to strange awakenings. Finding himself drifting back out of delirium or in the shuddering hollowness of having eaten nothing for days. This was different. He could taste the chemical in his mouth, feel it in his head.

He was in a tent. He was lying on a low bed hearing the canvas drumming in the wind. There were other beds too. Orderlies, a white-haired officer. The officer was a doctor, preparing something. He came across to Kapp with it in his hand. A hypodermic.

“I’ll give you another shot.”

Kapp shrank.

“Sleep till it’s time to evacuate.”

Evacuate . . . medical term . . . like, have you had a motion?

“You’ll go out with the last group,” said the MO. “Don’t worry, it’s all under control They’ve just about cleared the area.”

“What area?” Kapp found the words stuck so he said it again. “What are they clearing? Why?” He waved the needle away. “I don’t want that.”

He sat up and threw the blankets off. They had cleaned him up. His head felt strange. He touched it and found it bandaged.

“I really would advise—” said the MO.

But Kapp was outside the tent.

His station had been taken over. It was full of people and equipment. The old engine was blasting steam across the platform, just pulling to a halt with a load of flat trucks loaded with tarpaulined shapes. Searchlights had been set up, and what looked like enormous loudspeaker systems. His antennas had been moved along the rails and riggers were up there working on the mesh of the dishes.

“Where’s Quatermass? Where is he?”

They seemed to have no time to answer a question, no scrap of energy to waste on somebody who did not know what he was about. Brief headshakes were all he got. White heads, strained faces. They were all old, he saw, old men and women. Forklift trucks swung crates on to the platform, and gnarled hands seized them to drag away. They went at their work with a ferocious concentration.

“Have you seen Quatermass?”

This time he got an answer, from an old man who had fallen out and leaned against the wall. He nodded and pointed.

And there was Quatermass coming out of the ticket office with another man, a bent-backed Indian with a clever face who hurried off, hands full of plans.

“Quatermass!” Kapp shouted. “Tell me!”

“I tried to tell you—”

“Tell me now!”

The chanting of Planet People burst from the loudspeakers, magnified to the point of pain and then beyond. Kapp clamped his hands on his ears. Technicians were working on the control panel that had been set up on the platform, testing.

Quatermass steered Kapp along. An enormous roller of cable, yards high, was being manoeuvred by two sappers and a man Quatermass was not surprised to see was old Jack. “That’s it—to me, now—easy!” he was shouting. Jack, the weight expert. Quatermass had insisted on including him and two or three others from the catacomb. They were lucky, he said. This was a time to call on luck.

“ ’Ello, guv.”

“Where did you find that?” As he was supposed to say.

Jack winked. “You got to know where to look!”

The train was pulling out. Steam seemed to blast from every part of the engine. Quatermass pulled Kapp round a corner, past the water tank, to where he could be heard.

“All this talk about evacuation?”

“I’m sorry, Joe . . .”

“They tried to get me out—”

“. . . Sorry I had to take you for granted,” said Quatermass. “I’ve got to use this place. “It’s the only possible.”

Kapp couldn’t understand. “But, it’s been hit—”

“That’s exactly why!”

Kapp shook his head. “I can’t seem to—”

“It means there’s a marker,” said Quatermass. “Somewhere deep, we think.”

“Marker?”

“A marker beacon left about fifty centuries ago. That’s why it was hit and why I can use it. Why I can use those.”

He pointed up at the antennas.

Kapp looked at the riggers busy on the lattices. “Then—you
are
going to try and signal?”

“I’m setting a trap,” said Quatermass.

Another brain-curdling bellow from the loudspeakers, as if a whole multitude of Planet People had been brought to one point and set chanting at the same instant. The air shook. Laser projectors were being set up, aimed skywards. Behind the station there were generators, big ones, more than Kapp had ever seen assembled in one space.

“A trap?”

“If you’re after a wild beast,” Quatermass said, “You don’t chase it all over the landscape—you bring it to you. You bait a trap for it.”

“A beast—”

“A machine-beast, a man-eater. I’m going to put out the analogue of a human presence here. The sound of them, the smell of them, their blood and their secretions, hormones, pheromones. Human young, about a million of them. How’s that for bait?”

“And the poison?”

Quatermass nodded. “There’ll be poison.”

Kapp turned away and walked while he took it in. Quatermass walked with him.

It was quieter now.

The loudspeaker din had stopped for the moment and the train had gone. There was some shouting on the platform, a short chorus of anxiety, then laughter. A whistle blew for help, according to instructions. One more casualty.