Quatermass (3 page)

It was after that they must have changed the rules, tightened controls, enforced quarantine. They had got away with it once. Everybody had.

Except Quatermass. The stigma stayed on his name.

He found the old man still in his chair in the corner of the studio. He looked better. The makeup woman had stuck a patch on the cut and was powdering his head. Her treatment made him look unreal but healthier. “There now, love, won’t hardly show,” she said, and shuffled away.

Quatermass turned solemnly.

“Dr. Kapp, you saved my life.”

“Did I?”

“I think you did.” As if he had been picking it over and had made up his mind clearly. Then he shook his head. “I simply had no idea—”

“Things are bad,” agreed Kapp.

“They don’t tell you. You have to see it for yourself, hear and smell—”

“They’re just bland about it,” said Kapp. “Call it the Urban Collapse—then it’s nobody’s fault, it’s just a phenomenon.”

“But the savagery—!”

“You ought to see Paris. Or Rotterdam. Or New York or Moscow for that matter—I believe they’re just as bad but there’s no way to go and look. It’s everywhere, not just us.”

Quatermass kept on shaking his head. “Suburban streets with dead bodies! I’d never have believed—till I came down here last week—”

“Where do you live?”

“Eh?” The old man seemed to be having a struggle to recapture the reality of the place he had left. “Oh, quite out of all this. It’s possible, you see, not to be aware—if you’re old enough, and selfish enough. I mean, if you’re content to cut yourself off from everything, and not listen or read—” He broke off. “I live by a loch in the west of Scotland.”

“Go back there,” said Kapp.

“As soon as I can.”

“Go now if you like,” Kapp said. “I’ll help you. I’ll try and get you on a train north. If you’ve got some bribe money—”

“A train?” Quatermass stared at him. “You know, there were people hanging on the outside. Perhaps I’ll be one of them next time, eh?” Then Kapp’s meaning got through to him and he stared harder. “You mean—
now
? Walk out on all this?”

“They don’t care. Why should you?”

“Oh, no!” The old man sounded unexpectedly emphatic. After a moment he said: “I’m looking for my grand-daughter.”

The non sequitur was enough to make Kapp wonder. Perhaps, after all, that blow on the head—

“Your grand-daughter?”

Quatermass was delving in a side pocket of his heavy tweed suit. The pocket was a big one and bulged full of something. He pulled out a handful of photographs, all identical. He offered one to Kapp.

“That’s her.”

A girl in her mid-teens. She looked pretty but more than that she showed character. Something of the old man himself in her eyes. Through the change of male to female, and two generations, it still plainly came out.

“My daughter’s daughter,” said Quatermass, “Both parents killed on an autobahn. She came to stay with me in Scotland but—” His eyes took on an expression like anger, snapping with it, but it was anger turned inwards. “She—she ran away. Have you any children, Dr. Kapp?”

“Two, a lot younger.”

“She’s only sixteen,” said Quatermass. “Do you know, they won’t list them, they gave up years ago. So many gone without trace, and the way things are—” He drifted through a little pause. “I went to Edinburgh first. No help there and—the Assembly Building had just been bombed so, so then I thought if I could get to London, just find some effective person, the right one—”

“You’re talking about the past.”

Quatermass nodded. “I’ve found that out.”

Empty buildings, burned buses, the dreadful shanty town in Hyde Park with its swarms of aggressive beggars. The reek of blocked sewers.

“Even the hotel I got into. It wasn’t just the phones going dead, and the rubbish. It was what went on there. All night you could hear it. I don’t mean brothel activity, that’s only to be expected. This was, well, fear. Up above the tenth floor, they said—” But he had not wanted to know. Up there, it seemed, the place was no longer a hotel. It was reserved. Express lifts ran from the basement and they worked well. He had heard them busy in the night, and he had heard the screams, high above. He had pulled the patched blankets over his head and shivered.

“Then I went to Scotland Yard.”

Kapp knew what would come next. “And you found the pay cops?”

“Pay—?”

“Contract Police. They took it over.”

“They weren’t very helpful.”

Kapp could imagine, since they included the most vicious bunch of mercenaries ever to come out of South Africa. But of course there were the better ones, who were merely shiftless, venal and thick. The old man might have encountered some of those.

“So you got nowhere?”

Quatermass sighed. “They put me on to an agency. But it turned out to be only a man in a cellar. He made the photographs but that was all.” He pointed to the one in Kapp’s hand. “Please keep it. I’ve written her name on the back, see? Hettie. Hester, but she was always Hettie to us. Hettie Carlson. If you should ever happen to—I mean, you might see her somewhere, pure chance, anything’s possible.”

“I’ll remember,” Kapp promised.

“Thank you. I’m afraid it’s become an obsession. Forgive me, Dr. Kapp.”

“I’d feel the same,” said Kapp.

There was some activity in the studio now. Lamps had been switched on and the disordered camera seemed to have been kicked back into life.

“I did meet one or two people in the end,” said Quatermass. “People I’d known. Of course they couldn’t help me but they did suggest . . . well, that’s how I come to be here.”

Two scene hands approached carrying a large model between them. It was a geometrical assembly of spindly girders and docking sections, with winglike solar panels. They set it down on a table without much regard. One of them knocked a fragile panel off. He picked it up and flicked it into a corner with other rubbish.

“So that’s Spacelab Ten.” Kapp crouched beside the shiny model.

Everything about it looked disappointingly familiar. Simplifications of previous enterprises, short cuts, lopped development. It was already old-fashioned. It smacked of compromise.

“Political fakery,” said Quatermass.

“Of course,” Kapp agreed. “Shop window stuff.”

“It was out of date before they started,” Quatermass said. “But the amount they’ve wasted on it, the resources!” He turned to Kapp with suddenly sharpened interest. “What about you? Your radio telescope? Did you ever get it set up?”

Kapp nodded. “And working.”

The old man was genuinely, hugely pleased at that. “It’s good to hear of something that is. Where?”

“Out in the wilds, the only possible. I just come to London to sing for my supper. Like tonight.”

“You get government help? Still?”

Kapp smiled. “A few pennies. Well, pounds, but they’ve turned into pennies anyway. I don’t need much. Just as well. Why don’t you come to see it?”

“I might. Some day when—”

He jumped. A grotesquely amplified voice was shaking the studio. An American voice calling him by name.

“Bernard Quatermass!”

He looked about in quick confusion, saw a camera pointing at him with its red lamp on. And now a monitor screen flashed up the image of an athletic man running to fat. He was grinning.

“Chuck!” the old man cried. “Chuck Marshall, where are you?”

“New York,” said the image. “I’ve got to link you into the big show tonight.”

Quatermass turned to Kapp. “Chuck was an astronaut. The Apollo missions—”

Marshall chuckled. “That really dates me. Say, who’s there with you? Joe Kapp, isn’t it? I’ve met Joe. Hi, Joe.”

Kapp nodded and smiled as he found the camera on him. This man had been good once. Old astronauts never die, but just the same—the Big Show, said with capitals. Did he really believe it?

“Five minutes, gentlemen,” called Toby Gough as he came towards them.

The man on the monitor screen frowned. “Bernard, what have they been doing to you? What happened to your face?”

Gough saw the annoyance spring into the old man’s eyes, that it should have been so noticeable. He cut in lightly: “On his way to the studio tonight—”

“Mugged? Oh, hell!”

“The common lot of mankind, Chuck.”

Marshall played it lightly back. “Over here they’ve run out. The muggers are mugging each other. Oh, I guess we’re ready. Here’s the picture from the satellite camera. Everything looking good—”

They saw it. The model again, but on the screen now it had no pieces broken off by careless hands. This was the observatory itself . . . Spacelab Ten, bright against the black star-dotted sky of space. The toy shapes of shuttle craft clung to its docking points or lay in orbit as if stationary, oddly angled there. And tiny human figures, tubby pressure-suited clowns, could be picked out here and there as they worked on it. Or more likely made a pretence of working, for the Big Show.

But the thing was truly gigantic, hundreds of metres across. Even on the jittery, ill-adjusted monitors of the studio it was exciting to see. In spite of himself Quatermass felt the old thrill.

The Show began. A blare of triumphant music introduced it. Shostakovitch. It might have been Bernstein but evidently the Russians had had their way.

Then Chuck Marshall, veteran and hero. “. . . So there it is at long last, the Hands-in-Space Project, after all the delays and occasional disagreement, complete! Russian cosmonauts and U.S. astronauts putting final touches to their joint work, twenty-two thousand miles above our heads!”

Gough moistened his lips and straightened in his chair, waiting for the cue.

“Just minutes until the joint switch-on by the Chairman of the Soviet Presidium and the U.S. President,” came Marshall’s voice. “Meanwhile, let’s grab a quick reaction from our English friends. Over to Toby Gough in London.”

Gough took it smoothly.

“Thank you, Chuck. First I’ll ask Dr. Joseph Kapp, radio astronomer.” He turned expectantly.

Kapp sang for his supper. “I suppose I’m sad,” he said. “In this country we can only sit and watch.”

“You’d like to be up there?”

Kapp could answer that honestly. “With all that beautiful apparatus? Yes, I would.”

Gough turned briskly. “And now a father-figure of space research, Professor Bernard Quatermass.” A camera swung to the old man. Its lamp blinked on. With a show of respect Gough said: “Sir, after all the shocks and setbacks of your own career, what are your thoughts now?”

Something simple required, like amazement or humility.

“I’m ashamed,” said Quatermass.

He saw the blink of surprise in Gough’s eyes, not quite sure what to make of this, then instant adjustment. Kindly concern shot into his voice.

“Oh, I don’t think you’ve any need to—”

Quatermass drove straight on. “Ashamed to think I might have contributed in any way to this . . . disgusting charade!”

“Charade?” He saw Gough’s jaw actually drop. Then the lightning recovery again. “An understandable note of bitterness, but I doubt if Dr. Kapp would agree—”

He turned away and Quatermass addressed his back. “You asked for my thoughts. You’re going to hear them!”

“Dr. Kapp, if you could just enlarge for a moment on—”

“Let him talk.”

Fury in Gough’s eyes, hidden fast. He had met this before, chat show guests ganging up on him. There were ways out. He addressed the camera in concern.

“I must explain the professor suffered an accident—”

“Not an accident,” said Kapp.

“An injury—”

“Stop it,” said Kapp.

“What we’re being asked to celebrate is a wedding!” said Quatermass. “The symbolic wedding of a corrupt democracy to a monstrous tyranny! Two super-powers, full of diseases—”

He’d rehearsed it, of course, thought Kapp. Chosen those words. A bit heavy but it suits him. He found himself nodding encouragement.

“Professor Quatermass—!” choked Gough.

“Political diseases, social diseases, economic diseases—they’ve got them all—and their infections are too strong for us, the small countries! When we catch them we die! We’re dying now!”

Gough was looking appealingly up to the control gallery. No reaction. Perhaps she was enjoying it, thinking it controversial, dear God!

“And now they mock us with that thing!” cried Quatermass. “Well, their diseases are in that too. It can’t live!”

Gough spluttered.

“It’ll come to nothing!”

“Please—”

“Sooner than they think!”

His anger seemed to have expanded itself. Gough made a last effort. He let his anger show now. “Let’s leave it at that. You’re evidently a man of extreme views—and you’ve managed to—”

Quatermass was on his feet, shouting.

“I’ll tell you what I am! I’m an old man trying to find a child!”

Kapp saw him pulling the photographs from his pocket. So that was it, that’s what Quatermass had meant to do all along. He was holding one of them up to the camera.

“That’s all that matters to me now. A human face. The child of my own child. I want to see her again—and to hell with all this!”

He stayed a moment more, appealing to the dusty lens. It was the dismissal of an entire technology. A world effort, misspent, misguided.

“I’m old enough to know.”

He sank back into his chair. His eyes closed.

The monitor screens were blank.

Gough said: “I think we’re off the air. Have they cut us off?” Nobody seemed sure. He turned to Quatermass. “Thank you, sir! In all my career I’ve never known such—!”

“All right, it’s over,” Kapp said.

Gough’s raw eyes turned to him. “Did you put him up to it?”

“No.”

“From the way you were talking before—”

“It’s over,” said Kapp.

He looked across at the exhausted old man in the chair. He’s done what he came for. It won’t get him anywhere but he’s done it. Now he can go back to Scotland. He’s had his go, as he had goes in the past. He’s tried. Kapp pushed his chair back and moved to speak to him.

But it was not over.

The monitor screens were lighting up again, spluttering. The American’s face was there. “I, uh, I guess we lost some of that—well, it sounded like controversial comment from the English end but—”