Quatermass (5 page)

A huge stack of old books. “Guaranteed to burn! Keep warm this winter!” Quatermass jerked his head back as one of them thudded against the window mesh.

Resentful howls were following them.

Kapp put his foot down.

“Now we steer clear of Hounslow. Very nasty. One of the biggest no-go areas of the lot.”

In the distance Quatermass saw towers, round-topped towers that looked somehow familiar.

“Yes, that’s Wembley Stadium. Once upon a time the home of innocent sport!”

It eluded Quatermass. “Now what did I read—?”

“They call it the killing ground.”

That was it! “They actually encourage—!”

“Contain it, that was the notion. What the hell, they said, for the price of a few bodies!”

“It didn’t work.”

Kapp grinned. “What works?”

Passing through Ealing they struck a road block. A squat figure waddled into view and held up a gauntleted hand. The mass of plastic armour, helmet, visor, riot shield dehumanized it completely. It also had a gun.

“Pay cop,” said Kapp. “Got your ID?” He slipped a banknote under their cards and lowered the window.

“Let us through, officer?”

The pay cop lowered his gun, palmed the note. “We got a sniper here giving us trouble.”

Quatermass recognized the clipped nasal accent. South African. He knew enough about them. He hoped Kapp had slipped him enough. The bit about a sniper sounded like a demand for more.

But confirmation came with the sound of a shot.

The pay cop grinned at them. “You want to risk it, hey?”

“Yes.”

“That way then, man. Make it fast.”

Kapp swung the waggon. Glancing back, Quatermass saw more pay cops trundling clumsily between abandoned cars their guns at the ready. As their man ran to join them he jerked, then stood quite still.

Why doesn’t he get under cover, fool, get down! But the pay cop sat down in the road like a toddler whose feet had gone from under him. Then he rolled over. His plastic mask was full of blood and it spilled out.

Always death.

The crow-picked skeleton of some animal, a sheep perhaps, lay in the middle of the motorway. Kapp swerved gently to avoid it.

The road surface was rough and crumbling for long stretches. Speed was out of the question even though there was no sign of other traffic. The road stretched empty for miles ahead.

“Like the Romans,” whispered Quatermass.

“What?”

“The roads the Romans made for their system. Their empire. And then . . . they went.”

A motorway signboard, all its directions obliterated, covered with graffiti,
WHO DONE IT
?
THE SANE ARE MAD
,
THE MAD ARE SANE
!
FEEL NOT THINK
!

Badders? Blue Brigade? These struck a different note.

“Planet People,” said Kapp. Quatermass nodded. He had guessed as much.

Kapp switched his radio on for a news bulletin. You always knew what to expect, not so much lies as a kind of twisted truth. At the end of it you would feel falsely cheered up, persuaded that things were worse in other countries. Like this one now. There was a reported promise that a serious attempt would be made to restore the North Sea pipelines by the end of the year. A robust official denial that four bodies found in Birmingham City Centre were those of kidnapped councillors. There had been a severe explosion with hundred of lives lost . . . but that was in Brazil.

Then a late item on the space disaster. “The Government has firmly dissociated itself from the unauthorized statements made by a British scientist last night”—Quatermass looked quickly at Kapp—“which have led to a Soviet demand for a sabotage probe.”

“I knew it!” shouted Kapp. He snapped the radio off in the middle of the power-cut rota.

“They may not have meant—”

“It’s you! They’re dropping you right in it!”

A scapegoat. The ritual offering a pitifully weak country could make to a powerful, angry one. He would fill the bill. He should never have said those things he did, fatuous posturing. Days spent in indignant preparation, ridiculous now. Senile. If they said that about him, they would be right.

“We’ll find out what really happened last night,” Kapp said. It was a promise, made with a young man’s vigour. “We’ll keep the stones off you.”

Quatermass nodded. Soon he dozed.

It was a deep pot-hole that woke him by sending him six inches up off his seat.

Kapp was cursing, concerned for his tyres. The waggon was on a minor road now, winding and undulating. Along a wall of a burned and roofless transport café he saw the painted words:
TO THE PLANET
!

So they were here too.

The first of them came in sight a few miles further on.

Half a dozen young people hurrying in a ragged file. Men and girls were dressed alike in long garments they must have made themselves, as simple as ponchos but of every colour and pattern, and often trimmed with scraps of fur or feathers. They drew aside for the waggon to pass. Quatermass glimpsed resentful faces, oddly modified by a large letter P each had painted on both cheeks, producing the effect of cartoon grins. What was strangest about them, though, was their movement . . . an angular jerking and twitching of their legs and arms, a rolling of eyes. A sort of tense, shambling run. The youth in the lead swung a curious device as he went, shining metal at the end of a string.

Quatermass peered round in his seat. “It’s a kind of plumb-bob.”

“To bring on the magic, what else!”

“Magic?”

“That’s what they believe in, isn’t it?”

Quatermass squinted through the mesh. Another party was straggling along the skyline, ponchos flying. The leader was swinging something.

“At least these don’t seem violent.”

“They’re violent a different way,” said Kapp. “To human thought!”

Caraway was the leader of a big group. More and more had added on in the past days, appearing in twos and threes from the tracks or across the neglected fields. Or drifting in at night when the People rested. Now there were about sixty, including a few young kids. Caraway resented the kids. They distracted and they slowed up the march, but their parents could never be persuaded to set them adrift. They would have made out all right, Caraway was sure of it. Kids did. It wouldn’t have been cruel.

Babies were the worst of all. Fat Sal’s was a couple of months old and she always had it hung about her, suckling it from her big breasts or slung across her shoulder as she ran with it, trying to keep up.

Caraway himself might have given her that baby. He wasn’t sure. It could have been a lot of people’s. Sal was a natural ewe. She’d given birth on the Glastonbury trek, before things really got started. Sometimes they lost her but she always turned up again. Sal had a feeling for the earth-lines.

Caraway was eighteen. His own talent for earth-lines was exceptional. That’s why he was the leader.

He stood swinging his plumb-bob round and round in a lazy circle, waiting for it to settle. You didn’t really need the bob. The tingling in your nerves and bones was enough, you could always tell by that alone. But it helped. It concentrated you.

Bee stood watching. Funny, she felt nothing at all, ever. She thought it was magic and it worried her. It fiercened her. She would scratch and claw at you to get at the magic and that made her something special. Not like Sal, the ewe. Bee was frantic.

All good Planet People were frantic, getting more so. You had to get the feeling. He could always help them there.

He lifted the shining bob high in the sunlight.

The girls first, as always. Sal’s jaw dropped and her eyes went wide as if she’d got some personal message from it. She dropped the baby in her lap where she sat. Her fat shoulders twitched. She breathed: “Hah! Hah! Hah!”

Bee spun. She turned about and about. Another girl was doing the same, and now a boy too. The stone weights fastened to the bottom edges of their ponchos tugged and spread them out. They whirled and whirled. “Hoh! Hoh! Hoh!”

When after a while they came to a panting, dizzy halt, others picked it up. Their ponchos made wheels round them, all the different colours. Sal, too, with her baby squealing across her shoulder as she lumbered round and round.

Caraway’s plumb-bob settled into an ellipse, and then to a firm swing back and forth. As if it was telling them which way to go.

But it was only confirming. Caraway knew which way.

He led off, lips parted beneath the painted P-grin. Bee ran beside him. The rest broke off their gyrations to follow. Most of them were staggering and dazed from the forced breathing. They were high on it already. Practice did that. They were getting so they could send themselves fast, with only a few wild breaths. If there was time, they could go on and on for hours, and then the high was incredible. It was like acid and speed and all that old-days junk thrown in together. You could break right through and pull your mind inside out. It was like going to the Planet. Once Caraway had thought he was there, that he had really made it. Bee had talked him back that time. And it had all been done with his own self, just the natural molecules of his mind. And breath.

Soon they had stretched into a long hurrying line. Those who had children dragged them along by the hand. They crossed a rough meadow. Caraway flung a gate open and they poured through behind him. Tension soon rose in them again. They blinked. Their mouths twitched. Hands clenched and shoulders jerked as if a nervous illness had taken them all. Some People ran aside, and spun for a little and then ran again.

They were on a road now.

An unusual thing happened. They were overtaken by a motor van. It was so rare that some of the People jumped in the ditch. An ugly machine with steel mesh all over its windows, and an old man peering out.

It came to a stop not far ahead.

Uneasiness spread down the column, which drifted to a halt. Any vehicle on the road was liable to be official and that was bad.

The old man got out. He started trotting towards them and as he came he was pulling something out of his pocket.

“I just wanted to ask you,” said the old man. “Has anybody seen her?”

He held a photograph out to Caraway.

“Why?”

“I’m her grandfather. I don’t know where she is.”

Bee giggled at that, as if she had hardly ever heard anything so funny. Her mad streak. The plumb-bob in Caraway’s hand swung in silence for a moment. Then he raised it like a signal and they all started to move again. The old man stood helplessly holding out his pictures as they passed him by.

He was like a beggar.

“Please help me! I’ve got to find her. Take them and look at them—you might have seen her. Her name’s on the back. Hettie. And my name too. Will you please—?”

He managed to push three or four of them into a child’s hand but the young mother struck them scattering away. He picked them up and hurried alongside the column.

“She talked about Planet People. I think she wanted to—to belong. I only want to meet her, that’s all—” He was running now. “I want to talk to her and tell her—I’ve so much to tell her—” He thrust prints at Bee. “You’re about her age. Take some of these, I’ve got plenty more. Pass them on, you never know—”

Caraway halted. He was angry. A few yards away was the waggon with the other man and a big guard dog inside it.

“What are you?” Caraway wanted to know. “Cops?”

“No.”

“What then? What kind of old man are you?”

Truth now. Quatermass knew it was necessary to speak to them honestly if one were to gain any trust. “I’m . . . I was a scientist.”

He said it quietly enough but it seemed to be the wrong thing. There was dead silence. The Planet People were crowding round him. Even those who had shunned him were pushing forward. Joe Kapp called uneasily across from the waggon: “Leave them.”

“What kind of scientist?” asked Caraway. “Some are worse.”

Say it. “Space research,” said Quatermass.

“Yes, that’s worse.”

An angry whisper ran down the column. Caraway bellowed shockingly into the old man’s face: “Rockets make holes in the skin of the world! Did you know that? They tear it open!”

Quatermass fell back.

Kapp was at his side, grabbing him by the arm to get him back to the waggon. But he resisted. He had to talk to them.

“Is that what you believe?”

“Come on!” Kapp whispered.

“No, wait. What does it mean to be Planet People? What do you really believe?”

Caraway swung the plumb-bob for a moment. He might have been consulting it. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“I might.”

It was Bee who thrust herself forward and cried: “We’re going there! We’re going to one!”

Quatermass could only stare at her. “To another planet, is that what you mean?”

Caraway turned on him and shrieked in a voice that frightened even some of his followers: “We are not mad!”

Kapp waited for the twitching angry face to recover itself. “Then tell me,” he said, sounding gently reasonable, “where in the whole solar system? Where you wouldn’t be frozen solid or fried alive?”

“Not there,” said Caraway.

Kapp looked disgustedly along the line of closed faces. “I give you up,” he said.

“Among the stars!” Bee again.

Kapp glanced at Quatermass. The look he got from the old man had a kind of appeal in it: you can demolish them all too easily, don’t do it.

He spoke quietly.

“Okay, the stars. A good place to look. You might find a planet going round one of them. Only catch is this—it’ll take you a hundred thousand years to get there.”

“By his rocket?” said Caraway.

Kapp nodded. Not quite so stupid, and in a way that annoyed him even more. “How else?” he demanded. “Come on, let’s hear it. By meditation? Occult transference out of the body? I want to know—where’s the launch pad? This is one lift-off I want see!”

No reply.

Caraway’s plumb-bob was pointing the way again. He started walking and the Planet People were off, too, the whole line of them. Passing close to the two men but quite oblivious, as if they had become invisible. The concentration was returning. Mouths gave a soft, sighing: “Hah! Hah! Hah!” Eyes rolled and jittered in their sockets, blurring vision and causing stumbles that seemed only welcome.