Quatermass (7 page)

“Okay, Frank?”

“So far. You must be driving better.”

“So don’t drop them.”

Chen smiled: “The last of the wine.”

As they went on Kapp said: “His father was Chen Teh.”

“The physicist?”

“Genius. So is Frank.”

They passed a hugh old water tank, high on brick pillars. It must have replenished many a steam locomotive. Then outbuildings with liberal defences of barbed wire. A heavy generator thudded somewhere.

Kapp said: “Am I fiddling while Rome burns?”

“No.” Quatermass had no doubt.

“Not even a fiddle, just a couple of tin trumpets,” said Kapp. “But, my God, they make lovely music.”

The shanties were just ahead.

Until now Quatermass had not fully absorbed the fact that Kapp lived in one. A tar-blackened hut that appeared to be made of odds and ends of corrugated iron and clapboard. Creepers had been trained over it to take off some of its ugliness, but had not managed to cover the square, slitted gun-emplacement at one end. There was a healthy vegetable patch. Flowers grew there, too.

A woman appeared. She wore a scarf round her head. Her body was shapeless in clumsy garments and boots.

She halted as she saw them.

She called through the doorway and the two little girls came running out. The Alsatian was with them. The smaller girl made straight for Kapp, squealing as he picked her up.

“This is Debbie,” said Kapp.

A bright, determined little face. He pulled the straw figure from his pocket and gave it to the child. The gift was clearly expected. She held it up to show her mother and sister as they approached. Kapp set her down to run again.

Clare Kapp’s eyes suddenly flooded. She clutched her husband in relief.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean—!” She was fighting her breath so that the weeping would not actually happen in front of this stranger and the children. “Oh, Joe!”

Kapp kissed her. “It wasn’t so bad there,” he said.

“What happened last night—”

She had watched with the others. He looked at Quatermass. “Then you know who this is.”

“Yes.”

She was that sort of beauty, Quatermass decided, whose intelligence seemed the most striking feature at first. Then the warmth came through, and the physical presence that had been overshone by the eyes.

“You’re welcome,” Clare said.

Inside, the hut gave him a shock.

It was alive with colour and invention. Bright rugs had been knotted out of cloth scraps. There were vivid curtains, one of them still on its loom. Home-made pots, paintings, jars of jam, books, improvized toys, a wooden rocking-horse they must have made themselves, too. There was something personal in every item, a kind of fondness.

“You’ve made so much,” said Quatermass.

“Had to, what else?” Kapp said. He smiled at his wife. “Clare’s a real
baleboosteh
.”

She had got rid of the padded things and the muddied boots. She was slim. Only the tanned face confirmed hard work out of doors. That and her scratched, thickened hands.

“I like your home,” Quatermass said. She nodded. If he had not, he knew, he was the one who would have been found wanting.

“I’ll make supper,” she said.

“I’m sorry to tell you, Puppy, he’s going to eat you up!”

A child’s voice. For some seconds Quatermass was quite lost. He was in his study—his bedroom—by the loch—in a hotel—in his first house. A child’s voice. A girl. But which?

Then it came together.

He was deep in a chair and he had been asleep. One of the swift naps that came upon him so easily.

Little Debbie was lying almost between the great dog’s paws, pushing the straw figure at its face. Her other hand clutched deep into the animal’s fur. Quatermass watched uneasily. Alsatians could be undependable. She looked sure of herself but—

“This is a fierce London man. Daddy got him.” The straw shape was jabbed into Puppy’s eye. He shut it calmly.

Kapp was watching with the older child, Sarah, on his knee. She must be about seven, judged Quatermass, and already growing to resemble her mother. The little one took after Joe.

Debbie was frowning at her present. “It’s like the ones Alison makes.”

“Yes,” agreed Kapp. “Quite a lot like.”

Sarah gave him a secret smile. He smoothed her head for not telling.

Quatermass found Kapp’s wife beside him.

“What’s her name—your girl?”

“Eh?” He was not quite awake yet.

“You showed her picture last night. Have you got any more of them?”

No more prompting needed. Quatermass was delving in his pocket. Clare studied the young face in the photograph.

“Yes, I thought so. She does take after you.”

“Her name’s Hettie.”

The children came to look. Little Debbie asked: “Who’s that?”

“My grand-daughter.”

Debbie was puzzled. “That’s a lady!”

Yes, a lady, but a very young lady. She’s here to stay with me now, he had said to himself. A responsibility I didn’t ask for, didn’t want, at my age stuck with a mere child. Give it time, we’ll get to know each other, she’ll have to fit in with my ways. He felt little in common with her. “She’s a close one, young lassie,” Maire had said, and he had agreed. She appeared not to grieve for her parents. Callous, he had thought. Only afterwards he recognized doing the same himself. Long years before when his wife died, Hettie’s mother’s mother. He had hidden himself in his work. But Hettie had no work to hide in so she turned stony. Perhaps she had cried on her own. Then one day she came to his room. She dawdled. She must have wanted to talk but he did not. He was in the middle of an argument. On paper. A fascinating dialogue with old colleagues. He couldn’t break off. He was impatient with her. Next morning she had gone.

“She looks nice,” said Sarah.

Debbie grabbed the photograph. “Can I have it?” she asked.

Quatermass nodded.

“Does she live in your house?”

“Sometimes,” he said.

Quatermass discovered a ravenous appetite. It was a long time since he had eaten.

Barley bread and soup, potatoes and cabbage, some stewed fruit that Clare served from a rough pipkin. Probably she had made the pipkin too.

Little Debbie was staring at him.

“You eat a lot.”

“Well, I’m hungry,” he said, “and it’s good.” He passed his bowl for another helping.

“Are old men always greedy?” Debbie asked.

He did not look at her parents’ faces, only at hers. Round eyes, wanting to know.

“Always,” he said. “They’ve tasted so many things in their lives they know which are best.”

Debbie nodded. She thought that was reasonable.

A jar in the middle of the table kept catching his eye. There were flowers in it but there was something alien about it that the flowers could not overcome. It was a squat earthenware thing with an impressed pattern of zigzag lines.

“That jar,” he said to Clare at last. “You didn’t make it?”

“No,” she said, and smiled.

“Mummy dug it up,” said Sarah.

Then he knew. “It’s a beaker, isn’t it?”

Clare nodded. “A beaker made by the Beaker Folk. Five thousand years old, give or take a few.”

He stroked the ribbed surface. “It’s perfect.”

“Not bad. Whoever made it must have been pleased,” she said. “It should have gone to a museum but they burned the museum down.”

“Where did you find it?”

“In the field behind here.” Then she laughed. “Oh, I wasn’t digging potatoes, not that time. I’m trained, you see. It was going to be my work but . . . the way things are.”

The gone days.

“I’m lucky,” she said. “I can keep my hand in. There’s a Neolithic burial ground out there. And our stone circle. Shall I show you?”

Afterwards Kapp went back to the observatory for the equipment check. It might take many hours but it would have to be done. Quatermass could not help. Not yet.

He went with Clare to the mound.

The two little girls ran ahead with Puppy, playing a version of hide-and-seek round the standing stones. It seemed to be the dog’s invention as much as the squealing children’s.

The stones were not large. There were less than a dozen altogether, and the biggest was not five feet high. They were tilted like crooked teeth in a mouth. One lay flat. Beneath the crusts of lichen most showed signs of ancient handiwork, some shaping and smoothing. A few had a touch of grotesquely human form, the merest suggestion of a head on a crooked body.

“The locals used to call them the Stumpy Men,” said Clare.

That was usual. Dancing Men, Seven Sleepers, knights, ladies, giants. The megalith legends nearly always credited them with having once been magically mobile.

“They don’t look very athletic,” he said.

“They go incredibly deep,” said Clare. “I made a test on one.”

“Find anything?”

She shook her head. “Some day I’ll do it properly. Some day.” She pointed down the slope. “All I’ve done was down there. A Beaker grave. There were a dozen pots like the one you saw, mostly broken. Some arrow heads. Buttons. They had
buttons.
” Her voice changed, shy and private. “One day I put some fruit wine in that pot. And I drank it, and I thought, somebody else was drinking like this, out of this, five thousand years ago. And—it was as if they were standing right next to me, waiting for me to pass the cup. Perhaps they even had fruit wine.” She smiled. “I’m Jewish. My mother used to say, if you’re Jewish you think old.”

Think old, yes, but nothing to do with being Jewish. A place like this always dragged at one’s mind, demanding it imagine what manner of people had raised the stones, and by what strained means, and why. Why, most of all. There had been so many ingenious theories, speculations about megalithic yards and ley lines. That a certain set of stones, if viewed from certain angles at certain times, that those half-hewn things could provide observational data on eclipses and equinoxes of the same order as Joe Kapp’s shining antennas. Computers had been used to prove it, and that was the catch. Those pretty mathematical fantasies depended on the megalith men having had computers too. And they hadn’t. QED.

What then? Crude open-air temples? Perhaps not even that. Perhaps the stones were put up by people who were good at shifting heavy weights and enjoyed it for its own sake. Neolithic self-expression. Why not?

“I don’t believe it was magic.”

It startled him. The coincidence was so exact he could hardly believe she had said it.

“Maybe they just thought in an entirely different way from us,” Clare added. “A kind of . . . sensuous thinking.”

“And we can’t grasp it.”

“No.”

“Somebody may.”

“Who?”

“Our descendants. If things get bad enough, and they hit the same pressures. They might grasp the meaning.”

“Our descendants—” Her breath seemed to catch.

“On the other hand it may have gone for ever.” Quatermass felt the familiar tickle of speculation. “When everything we’ve made has rusted or rotted or crumbled away, the stones will still be here. And in a million years’ time the boys from Alpha Centauri drop by and find them and put them down to us.”

Tears on her face. Her eyes on the children.

They had tired of their game now and had sat down to pick flowers. The dog was sniffing about on its own.

He cursed himself. Stupid, tactless old man, unaware. Dotage. Babbling Polonius.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

She wasn’t listening, perhaps hadn’t heard, so no harm done.

“Sometimes when we’ve made love, lying by Joe in the bed and it’s so good and I think . . . all this is going to go. We’ve been the lucky ones, we’ve had this. Our home, his work, a richness. And then I think, what’s for my kids, what’s for Sarah and Debbie? I can’t wish them what I’d like for them, full lives, seeing their world, love, achievement. None of that.”

Why tell this to a stranger? Of course, just because he was.

Hard as stone, her eyes.

“D’you know what I wish for them?” Whispering. He had to cup his ear. “Just that . . . whatever happens to them . . . and it may be terrible, I know that . . . just that they live long enough to have babies. And pass it on.”

Not hard, fine. No trace of tears now. He knew what she meant, what was to be passed on.

“My dear—!” But he mustn’t insult her with sympathy.

“I’m going to teach them,” she said. “If I can. It’s up to me. Teach them to survive. When the time comes.”

Quatermass felt cold.

She turned quickly because the two children were coming now, scampering in excitement. “Mummy, look! It’s Puppy—he’s all funny! Come quick!”

Clare ran with them.

The Alsatian was standing by one of the stones, its hackles on end and its great teeth bared. It was giving frightening growls. Its eyes were on the trees a short distance away.

There was a curious sound.

A kind of bubbling exhalation, as if some vast dying creature were in there, fighting for breath.

Figures began to come out of the trees. Their leader swung a shining ball on a string. His limbs jerked, angular as a beetle’s. Behind him the ponchoed marchers followed in irregular groups, threes and fours at a time. Their knees were buckling. Eyes were as glazed as marathon runners’, nearing the limit of exhaustion. But they were managing to keep up a ghostly, panting chant, forcing the last breaths out of themselves.

“Planet People,” said Quatermass.

“Are they? I’ve never seen any before. They’ve never come here. Joe’s talked about them. He hates them.” She clutched the dog by its collar as it snarled again.

“Puppy doesn’t like them, too,” said Sarah.

There would be over a hundred in the straggling procession, Quatermass judged. They were clear of the trees now. There were children among them, tottering along like little blind things. One was being carried on his father’s shoulders, slumped forward over the young man’s head.

It was like a trail of ants. Almost undeviating, it was heading straight towards the observatory.

“Joe!”

Kapp had appeared in the station doorway with young Chen. Tommy Roach followed a moment later, holding something.

“Oh God, he’s got a gun!”