Quatermass (6 page)

The faces of the small children were different, pinched and uncomprehending as they were towed along. They were the only ones to give Quatermass a glance.

The file was changing direction again, scrambling over a rough stone wall and off across another field.

“But why—?”

Kapp gave a snort of disgust. “Don’t be sorry for them.”

“I don’t understand why—”

“They can’t explain because they don’t know either. Their mystery is a zero.”

“So many of them—”

“They infest the land. Like bloody lemmings in search of a sea!” Kapp started towards the waggon.

Quatermass followed. “I thought you’d understand them.”

“Oh, I do!”

“You’re not so much older than they are.”

“It’s enough,” said Kapp. “I
want
a generation gap between me and them. I hate them. Because they’ve given up!”

He swung the door open. The dog stuck its eager muzzle out, growling.

“No, Puppy, they’ve gone. Sit.”

They got aboard.

“It’s not a world to be young in,” said Quatermass.

“Was it ever?”

“Perhaps not. But it couldn’t often have been like this.” Quatermass peered through the mesh. The file was making its way up a slope now. Fragmenting and wandering as if weariness were setting in again. And there had been babies. Well, one at least, belonging to that fat young woman. He could see her now. She had fallen back to the tail of the column.

Kapp started the engine.

“Bernard,” he said, “I’m last in two hundred generations of learned Jews. I mean, not all so perfectly learned but by God they tried! They knew it was the only way.” He added after a moment: “To beat the dark.”

3

Q
uatermass caught his first glimpse of the antennas through the trees. The trunks parted and there was a great silver bowl angled at the sky. A chalice, he thought, a chalice with a bent stem. The drinking cup of some enormous, careless creature that had dropped it there. Shining, transparent. Then he saw its twin standing a short distance aside from it.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” More than pride in Kapp’s voice, a kind of husky relish, as if he were moved by the sight of them again.

But as they approached closer it was what stood between the huge dishes that caught the eye. A comically ugly building with tall twisting chimneys and wrought-iron decoration. A tiny Victorian railway station, a relic of the great steam days, a scrap of flotsam washed up by a long-gone tide. A sign read:
GRATTON HALT
.

Kapp pulled in beside the entrance, as gothically ornate as the doorway of a church. A blank noticeboard for train times. A paling fence kept neatly painted.

Quatermass got out. Beyond the little station and the antennas there was nothing. Only a few rough shanties of tin and scrap a short way off.

Kapp despatched the dog. “Home, Pup. Tell her I’m back.” The huge creature bounded off, Quatermass was surprised to note, in the direction of the shanties.

“This way to the trains,” said Kapp. Quatermass followed him past an ancient ticket grille on to the platform.

There was a single railway line. On it were mounted the massive bogeys that supported the two antennas. One stood each side of the little station, dwarfing it. Fifty feet in diameter, with the breeze humming through their lattices and fine mesh covering.

“I can take them two miles apart,” said Kapp. “The line was almost dead straight. It wasn’t hard to make it exact.” He pointed. “That way up to Castle Compton. This way down to Frowminster.”

“You go farther now.”

“About seven hundred and fifty million light-years.” Kapp smiled. “Come and meet the station staff.”

He turned across the platform. A faded sign read
STATION MASTER
,
PRIVATE
. As they passed through the doorway Quatermass noticed it was an air-lock.

The whole inside had been cleared.

Now it was a dust-free computer room. Gothic windows had been covered, the walls entirely clad with plastic screening material. Along one wall stood a row of tall correlation receivers. Monitor screens hung suspended.

A hugely fat man was working at the control desk, his glasses perched on his forehead while he frowned at the small read-out screens in front of him. His head jerked up irritably. “That door again! Look, I distinctly said nobody—” He pulled his glasses down. “Oh, Joe. Already. I didn’t expect you—”

“This is Tommy Roach,” said Kapp, “who runs us all as you notice.”

“Professor Quatermass—” The fat man rose.

He had seen the programme during the night, had realigned one of the dishes on the satellite link in order to eavesdrop. He had done it before. His two assistants had watched with him. He called them forward now. Alison Sharpe, a plain heavy girl in her twenties, and a young man who looked at least half Chinese and whose name confirmed it, Frank Chen.

“You were right to say what you did,” the girl said.

“Was I?” Quatermass felt less sure about it.

“They were just playing politics up there! All these years, bidding each other up to waste resources, just for show. I agreed with every word.”

“Nevertheless—”

“Your timing was bad, that’s all,” Kapp said. “In the circumstances.”

Trying to make him feel better.

“How many died?” he asked.

“Twenty-seven,” said Chen.

The cause of the disaster was still unknown, it appeared. At least nothing was being admitted.

Roach said cannily: “So until they stop yelling sabotage and looking for scapegoats, this gentleman is our guest?”

Kapp grinned at Quatermass. He nodded at the fat man and said: “He’s my double. You wouldn’t think so but he is. In essentials.”

“I think just possibly we can help,” said Roach. “We found something that . . . well, it’s not much but . . . Frank?”

Chen was already busying himself with sliders and knobs.

“It was between the two dishes,” Roach explained.

“An anomaly?”

“Don’t think so, Joe. Anomalies always make me itch and I didn’t itch. Now, we had one of them lined up on your show.”

“Dog Dish,” said Chen.

“That’s right.” Roach turned to Quatermass. “We call them Dog Dish and Cat Dish—got to call them something. So, while we were sitting there being an attentive audience for you, Cat Dish was on duty elsewhere, watching that black hole in Cygnus Z. Oh, there we are—”

Quatermass saw his own face flash up on a monitor screen. Impassioned, pop-eyed, ridiculous it looked to him now. He hated the recorded voice that came with it, foolishly shrill:

“. . . diseases . . . and their infections are too strong for us, the small countries . . . !”

“On a bit, Frank,” said Roach.

Then they were further along the tape. As it had done last night, the image came back flickering, then holding the space observatory as it began its first stately movements into disintegration.

“Any guesses?” asked Kapp.

Roach seemed to have made up his mind. “Simple gross malfunction, too fast for the safety cutouts.”

“That’s fast, Tommy.”

Think small, think in picoseconds, in millionths of a millionth of a second. Or even minuter fractions, depending on the technology of the Spacelab, which they didn’t know, and what speed might beat it.

“. . . It’s out of control! . . .” Quatermass heard his own horror again on the recording. And Kapp’s and Gough’s, overlaid on the tide of faint helpless distress from Houston. And the unseen cameraman jabbering into incoherence.

“Oh, look at them! Look!” Alison peered closer at the drifting, spinning figures in pressure-suits. “Every time I watch it I wonder . . . were they still capable of . . . knowing?”

“It wouldn’t take long,” said Kapp.

“It might, Joe.” The girl seemed to be trying to make herself suffer on their behalf.

The picture began to break up.

“That’ll do, Frank,” said Roach. “Now, during the first twenty seconds or so—”

“Twenty point two,” Chen said.

“As he says. During that time we got indications of some heavy disturbance. Alison found it later, making routine checks. Show them, Alison.”

Like a lot of the apparatus here, the oscillograph was old fashioned. Alison pointed out the inked track that went suddenly into a burst of wild scribbling.

“A strong trace,” Kapp said. “Violent. I suppose that could be it.”

“That
is
it, Joe. Think we haven’t checked times?”

“All right,” said Kapp. “I’m not arguing. You’ve picked up a record of the worst stage of it, the primary bust, whatever it was. After that the thing just went on disintegrating. But I don’t see—okay, Tommy, it’s interesting, a lot stronger trace than I’d have thought, but in itself it doesn’t help to—”

Roach’s hand was on his arm.

“Joe, bear with me.”

Kapp was impatient. “If there’s anything more, hurry it up. This man needs some rest. He’s just about out on his feet—”

“Joe. No problem so far?”

“No, none.”

“Here it is, then. While Dog Dish was gathering all that faithfully in, Cat Dish—facing in a totally different direction, got the same trace. Identical!”

Kapp was first to examine the other inked track.

“I mean, we often get discrepancies,” said Roach. “But this time there should have been one and there isn’t!”

Kapp’s face had sharpened.

“Nasty, Joe,” Roach went on. “A thing like this, I don’t itch, I wheeze. It’s just not acceptable.”

“Then we don’t accept it,” said Kapp. “It’s a fault. It must be.”

He looked at Quatermass as if he needed confirmation.

“Your apparatus,” said Quatermass. “A lot of it’s . . . far from new.”

Kapp nodded. “Junk.”

Tommy Roach worried on. “It’s not just the timing, it’s the sheer spread. If you study the arc the dishes were covering between them—”

Kapp waved at the battered racks that surrounded them. “If you study the cracked PCBs and dud relays in there, Tommy! That’s what you’re getting—spurious signals, feedback, you name it.”

He threw his car keys across to Chen. “I picked up those modules, Frank. I got five. Not new, but what’s new? They’re the best I could get and if you do some work on them—well, unload ’em and see.”

Chen hurried off.

Of course, Quatermass remembered, those crates in the back. They must have been the main reason for Kapp’s going to London.

It would probably turn out as Kapp said: when the replacement units were in, some electronic fault would declare itself. He had seen it happen so many times in his own work at the Rocket Group. Days of bafflement and then an infuriatingly simple answer, the treacherous diode or defective microcircuit.

Not always, of course. Not quite always . . .

There had been the other times when all rules snapped. Men in a spacecraft crew who had been invaded and made over, to return as a single, obscene carrier of alien disease. That had been the worst because it was totally unexpected. No one had been ready for it. Perhaps no one could ever really be. One guarded against a future eventuality, only to be struck in the back by the past. That other time . . . an organic machine dormant in the ground since the Pliocene, warmed back to its purpose and activity of nightmarish irrelevance . . .

Those things had happened. When one tried to recall the events clearly to write about them one suffered too much. One took to one’s bed for a day or two and, going back to it, one abandoned that whole section, knowing that one would never complete it because one could never bear to.

Yet in the thousand other cases it was the humdrum fault, the defective item that started alarms through the system—

“All right?” Kapp asked.

“I was remembering,” said Quatermass. He wondered how much Kapp knew about him. “I remember too much.”

“Let’s go.”

As they started towards the door the girl called: “Joe, did you get her anything?”

“What?”

“Debbie.”

“Oh, my God, I’d no chance.”

There was a comical expression on Kapp’s face. It pulled things back to a sane level.

“Anyway, what the hell is there? No toys any more.” He turned to Quatermass. “Debbie’s four. Very acquisitive.”

“Here, Joe.” Alison extracted something from a drawer. “Give her this—it’s for her, anyway.”

A small straw figure. Kapp took it gratefully. “But she’ll guess you made it,” he said.

“Let her.”

Through another air-lock was the old ticket office, which Kapp had evidently taken pleasure in preserving. Gothic windows . . . racks for left luggage . . . a high narrow desk against one wall, its sloping top scored with blackened initials. There were printed rail regulations nailed up, and even tattered posters urging the excitements of London, the beauty of its palaces. One declared:
Skegness Is So Bracing
! and showed a stout boatman dancing on the sands. Quatermass remembered that from a very long time ago.

There was also a rack with shotguns in it.

“Tommy Roach had his own outfit once,” said Kapp. “It got vandalized to hell.”

Outside they found the young Chinese carefully unloading and checking the crates.