Quatermass (2 page)

A single street lamp picked out writing on the window boards. The remains of an official poster:
CURFEW
in huge black letters, followed by a joking couplet to take the taste away:
LISTEN FOR THE SIREN SOUND
!
DO NOT RISK A NASTY WOUND
!

Savage paint streaks,
BADDER-MINDOFF RULE OK
. Even that looked old. Baader-Meinhof, Badder-Mindoff, the attempt to anglicize the name of the German gangs. Borrowed plumage.

His feet crunched in the rubble and he tried to pick his way more carefully, to make less noise.

BADDERS RULE LONDON
. That looked more recent. And then
KILL
! Just that, just kill. Anybody would do.

He tightened his grip on the case. Don’t hurry, he told himself, keep calm.

Shots. Three or four of them. But they were distant. Another one. Yes, very far away. Silence after that. No rumble or throb of a living city.

“Hello, there.”

The voice was polite, well-spoken. As Quatermass jerked round it flashed into his mind that this was a helper, a vigilante perhaps, somebody concerned for law and order.

Then he noticed the young man’s deliberately ragged garments, hair woven into a shock of stringlike dreadlocks. But this was a white youth.

“Hello, grandpa.”

Quatermass felt his heart rate rising. He tried to speak firmly.

“Get out of my way.”

His upper arms were suddenly gripped from behind. He managed to get a look at another grinning face. Then a third came at him from the side and wrenched the case out of his grip.

Give in, that was the advice, let them take whatever they want. Papers, money, clothes.

“All right, you’ve got it,” he said.

They all smiled at that, as if he had made a joke and they were showing themselves politely amused.

“We’ve got you, mate,” said the first youth. His accent was still unplaceably correct. Public school or an imitation of it. The “mate” jarred.

Quatermass saw his case open on the pavement, clothes being pulled out of it. He had brought everything with him, having no intention of going back to that filthy hotel.

“What’s he worth?”

Quatermass chilled. He was not being robbed but evaluated. “I’m not worth kidnapping if that’s what you—”

Something hit him in the face. “That’s for us to say!”

Such pain as he had not felt for years. But he knew, through it, that he had only been hit lightly. He saw brass knuckles, but there had been no sound of cracking. Cool intelligence somewhere was reminding him that an old man’s bones are brittle, that if nothing had shattered it wasn’t so bad. Not yet.

“Get his teeth out.”

“Grandpa’s still got his own. Haven’t you?”

“So get ’em out!”

This time he saw the knuckles flash. He twisted and the blow grazed his temple. He cried out. His eyes were squeezed shut. He felt himself being swung round, held ready. He knew what came next: the pummelling and kicking that he would not survive.

Now it was time to plead. He said: “Please—please don’t—”

He waited for the blows. They were making him wait. Tormenting.

“Please!”

A screech filled the street. Light flashed across his lids.

The hands changed their grip.

Headlamps. A car horn blaring continuously. Some kind of heavy vehicle crashing through the barricade.

Quatermass found himself on the pavement. Moments of complete confusion before he realized his attackers were running. A big dog was barking.

Hands again. Friendly hands, supporting.

“Easy now.”

He tried to speak but the words came out as an unintelligble whisper. He had to say it again: “Have they gone?”

“My dog’s seeing them off.”

“They were enjoying it,” whispered Quatermass.

“Of course they were.”

Quatermass peered at him, feeling blood run into one eye. A quick, intelligent face that he seemed to have seen before.

“Can you stand up?”

Quatermass took the proffered hand. No bones cracked.

“That’s better. Where d’you live?”

The question was incomprehensible. What was he supposed to say? His address in Scotland?

“Eh?”

“D’you live round here?”

Of course. Natural to think he was a local victim. He looked down and saw his filthy hands, a sleeve ripped and hanging. He found his voice.

“I . . . I’m looking for the television studios. I’m supposed to be in a programme.”

“So am I.”

The young man smiled. And that face was puzzlingly more familiar.

“Oh?”

“It could just be the same one. What’s your name?”

“Quatermass.”

“I’m Joe Kapp.”

Of course. They’d told him. Dr. Joseph Kapp. And he’d remembered and been pleased. Quatermass found himself curiously self-conscious. He tried to wipe the blood out of his eye.

“What a way to meet,” he said.

Kapp started gathering his scattered possessions from the pavement. Quatermass told him about the taxi.

“Setting you up for them?”

“Oh. I don’t think so. I think he was frightened.”

Kapp whistled, harsh to the old man’s crawling nerves, and the dog came bounding out of the darkness. A huge brute, an Alsatian with a wolf’s mane. Saliva dripped and hung as it investigated him.

“Good puppy,” Kapp was saying. “This is a friend, puppy.” Quatermass wondered foggily why he addressed it like that, a creature bigger than a Highland calf. It scrambled ahead of them into the waggon, which looked like something strayed from an armoured column. It might once have been built as a delivery van, but it was now smothered under steel mesh and crash bars and deflector plates. Inside it was just as rough.

They had not far to go.

Floodlamps switched on as they approached the massive ram-proof gate. BTV said the sign above it, and all round were threats:
HALT
!
PRODUCE IDENTITY
!
DO NOT PROCEED WITHOUT PERMISSION
!
GUARDS AUTHORISED TO SHOOT
!

One of the guards came ambling out of the gatehouse munching a sandwich. The carbine hung across his chest lent little conviction.

“What d’you want?”

“You’re expecting us. Professor Quatermass, Dr. Kapp.” Kapp passed their plastic identity cards across.

The guard peered in. “Had trouble?”

“Yes, so please get on with it.”

“Badder gang?”

“Muggers.”

“Oh, muggers. Them’re just hangers on.” There was a curious pride in his voice as he added: “We got some big Badder gangs round here. They’d’a shot you up.”

“What about you? Don’t you do anything?”

The guard grinned. “We don’t go out.”

He signalled. The gate swung open. Kapp drove into the almost empty car park.

The studio Quatermass found himself in was a cramped mess. He became aware of it as the shock began to wear off and returning circulation made his wits tingle.

Squalor.

British Television. BTV. The result of a shrinkage of all networks into one, a stellar collapse of red giant into white dwarf.

They had sat him alone in a dark corner and given him a glass of water to sip. The blood was drying on his face. It tickled. He saw dust, split cables, overflowing bags of rubbish. An engineer was probing into a camera that hung tilted on its tripod, hissing and muttering at it. A second camera seemed to be in use, its red lamp on and its lens pointed up at a large painted backdrop. Quatermass twisted his aching neck to look at this. It was of black sky studded with stars, against which two huge unconvincing hands were clasped in friendship. One hand had red stars round it, the other white ones, with attendant Stripes and Hammer-and-Sickle.

All it conveyed to him was its own crudeness, that it had been drawn by someone who could not draw hands. Only slowly did the intended symbolism dawn. The Hands-in-Space Project, of course. That’s what he was here for.

“How d’you feel now, Mr. Quatermass?”

A big balding, soft man.

“I’m Toby Gough. I’m leading the chat.”

Quatermass nodded. “I’ll manage.”

There was a woman with Gough, clutching a little tray of bottles and sponges. But makeup girls ought to be young and bright. This was a down-at-heel sloven.

She frowned. “Is he meant to be like that?”

“He’s been mugged,” said Gough.

“Oh.” She started rummaging in her tray.

“Happens to all of us,” said Gough.

“You too?”

“Broken jaw last time.” He touched it reminiscently, as the makeup woman dabbed at Quatermass’s bloodstains. “Just lean on me. Talk if you feel like it but frankly if you don’t . . . well, nobody’s going to . . . I mean . . .”

Quatermass felt a surge of irritation. “Care? Notice? Give a damn?”

Gough took no offence. He seemed relieved at this show of life. He smiled. He said: “You’ll be just fine.”

Kapp had found his way to the control gallery. The producer was a thin, nerve-shattered woman it seemed unfair to tax with anything.

“A doctor? At this hour?” She grimaced. “I can never find one even in the daytime.”

She looked in need of one. From the way her eyes bulged her thyroid was all wrong.

“How bad is he?” she asked.

“He was hit on the head,” said Kapp.

The eyes swelled at him and she was off: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! It’s not my choice putting on a programme in the middle of the night! It’s the Americans, their show, their peak hour. Peak hour! Imagine having one, imagine having an audience!”

“Don’t you have any?”

“Oh, yes! For two or three hours a day, between power cuts! If their sets haven’t been stolen, and if they haven’t been terrorized out of their houses, then oh, yes, we have an audience!”

“You keep going.”

“God knows why! D’you know why they let us go on? Why they
insist
on us going on? Make-believe! To pretend this is still a civilized country, everything quite normal, etcetera, etcetera!” She sniffed. “Well, we were the best. The best in the whole world.”

“Television?”

“Of course television, what else did you think I meant?” Another sniff. “But now . . . peak hour three a.m. And the Russians go along with it because for them it’ll be dawn and it’ll get the bloody masses up early!”

Toby Gough came in.

“He’ll survive,” he said. “Tough as an old boot.”

Kapp disliked the big soft face. He asked: “How did you get him into this?”

The producer shrugged. “Somebody remembered his name.”

“He seemed quite willing,” said Gough.

“Glad of a few pence, the usual thing.” Suddenly conscious of tactlessness. “Oh, sorry dear—”

“Don’t talk like that,” said Kapp.

“Present company excepted, of course—”

Kapp was angry. “I mean about him! Do you know who he was?”

“Well, we’d hardly have asked him on this—”

“D’you know what he did?”

In the offended voice of one who had done his homework and wasn’t being given credit for it, Gough said: “Quite enough, I think. Grand old space boffin, to use a term current in his time.”

“He was the original.”

“All right—pioneer, then.”

More anger would do no good, Kapp knew. “That’s what he was. And some of the real firsts should have been down to him. He earned them in his BRG days.”

“BRG?” She raised her eyebrows.

“British Rocket Group.”

She giggled at that. “Christ, I don’t believe it.”

Gough nodded. “Yes, there was.”

“Oh dear, I can imagine—all strikes and subsidies.”

“No,” Kapp said. “He practically made it with his own hands.”

“It was a long time ago,” said Gough.

“All the harder.”

Gough said with a surprising touch of acuteness: “P’raps he was
too
soon. You can be and I think he was. His nuclear-powered rocket, for instance—that was way ahead of existing technology. There were far too many things he didn’t know. The thing hadn’t a hope.”

“What happened to it?” she asked.

“It blew up. In the Australian desert. Just as well, all things considered.”

“And that finished him?”

“No, it didn’t,” said Kapp. “What finished him was politics. The government took his outfit over to make missiles, simple stuff, ground-to-air. Handed it to the military.”

“But that wasn’t all,” said Gough, “was it?” He looked at Kapp as if expecting him to pick this up. When Kapp didn’t he went on himself: “There were some much odder items on file.”

“Setbacks of a pioneer?” said the producer. “Well, if you’re always trying to be first—”

“Not just setbacks. Horrors.”

“What?”

“I wanted you to read those reports.”

“Sorry, no time,” she said.

“I think you should have.”

“He wasn’t to blame,” said Kapp. “Nobody can possibly pin any blame—”

“He took appalling risks: he must have done. The very first crew he sent up—when they returned to Earth they’d all been, well, they were completely—according to those reports they’d ceased to be—” It stuck in Gough’s throat.

Human, that was what he meant.

Gough turned to the producer. “You remember. You
must
remember . . . well, hearing about it?”

“Christ!” She was remembering all right now. She looked through the thick glass out into the studio. “Christ, that was
him
? That was
his
fault?” Her hands started to tremble. She turned to Gough and said: “Toby, you’re not going to . . . I mean, tonight . . . ?”

“No, I shan’t bring any of that up.”

“I mean,” she said, “this is supposed to be a jolly celebration. Jolly for somebody, anyway. Oh, look, it’s nearly time, I’ve got to check the satellite link—”

Kapp left them to it.

Before his time, too, all that. Or almost. He did remember a happening that might have been it. When he was very, very small, three or four years old, a day of great panic. Being snatched away from radio and television by his weeping mother, as if that would make him safe. His father in a rage that must really have been helpless fear, swearing in furious Yiddish, which he had never done. Yes, that must have been it. The time would have been right, he had worked it out once. About a week after the rocket returned and the world nearly caught a fatal cold. Her crew become monstrous, turned to a spreading blight.