Quatermass (19 page)

But Trethearne refused to take Quatermass seriously. He kept grinning over his glass and saying things like: “Bernard, don’t be such a kid! You can’t rush new techniques.” Which was stupid. There was Goddard in America, with money Lindbergh had got for him. And in Germany Fritz von Opel’s outfit had a new man who was reported to be very good indeed, called Wernher von Braun. In a very few years now somebody was going to produce serious results, assuming there wasn’t another war. Somebody was going to make a real, workable space rocket.

Not old Trethearne. He kept insisting the rocket should have a tail, and then it would have to be suspended so it wouldn’t snap its tail off, and a suspended rocket had to be a small rocket, and a small rocket wasn’t serious, as Quatermass had seen from the start. “Bernard, boy, don’t suck eggs, I mean don’t teach your grandmother.” Three or four sixpenny scotches and Trethearne was away, useless. He was a Great War man. That had been his time and he’d never learned anything since.

Quatermass started arguing. That’s what he had come to do: to talk shop, technicalities, whether Trethearne wanted to hear them or not. It wasn’t easy. His mouth felt furred and thick from all the drinks. What was more, he was having to shout above the noise of the raucous singing from the Public Bar. They were all bawling at the tops of their voices in there, and of course it was always that same bloody song, the big seaside hit, the hit of the season—

“Whoa! He’d fly through the air with the greatest of ease,

A daring young man on the flying trapeze—”

Quatermass woke.

He smelt damp earth and oil. In front of his eyes dangled a tin lamp. It was feeble but it dazzled him. His limbs were stiff. His ankle ached distantly. He was lying in some kind of bed, covered up with a patchwork quilt. On the wall beside him there were photographs, brown and faded: a woman, a couple, a wedding group. He licked his furred lips. The singing went on, so it wasn’t just in the dream but on the other side of the curtain.

“His movements were graceful, all girls he could please—”

Old voices. Some of them no longer sure of the words, humming and giggling their way through the gaps. But at least they could still giggle, and even laugh. They were enjoying themselves.

“. . . And my love he had stolen away!”

They had reached the end. He could guess what they would be doing now. Nodding to each other, settling dentures that had slipped in the vigour of the song, or just hazily content to think about the past.

“The past is more important.”

That’s what she had said, quoting. Joe Kapp’s Clare. And he had denied it, meaning that it ought not to be. But it was. In the end, it was all a person was made of, like the skeleton he had grown.

There were whispers just the other side of the curtain.

“ ’E’s been a well-to-do man. Feel that cloth.”

Cloth. His jacket. He remembered it being taken off him. They must be picking it over.

“The wallet, Jack?”

“Show ’e’s got a ’ome. Money too but that’s just rubbish.”

What were they after, then?

“ ’E’s got to contribute,” Jack muttered.

“He doesn’t want to stay, he said so.” That was Edna, the strong woman who had done nursing.

“In there now, isn’t ’e?”

So it wasn’t charity. Strictly business. He was still a candidate for the place of the late Dick.

“Tell you what, ’e’s got that gold watch on ’im.”

“I seen your eye on it.”

“And I could’a took it, couldn’t I?”

“Oh, Jack.”

“But I never. Now that’ll do.”

“Leave him be.”

“It’s a rule,” said Jack.

“That’s right.” Arthur chipping in at last. “A rule’s a rule. Always has been.”

After a moment Quatermass heard the curtain slither open. He twisted his head. It was a sheet of pale blue plastic, probably from one of the larger Fords. Jack looked in at him for a moment, then came to sit beside him.

“ ’Ow now, mate?” he said. “Fuzzy? She give you something to knock the pain out. Won’t do you no ’arm.”

“I’m grateful.”

Jack nodded. He caught Quatermass’s wrist to look at his watch. “Listen, I got to explain something. We got rules down ’ere, we got to ’ave. And one rule is everybody got to contribute. Understand?”

He waited for it to sink in.

The old people out there were starting into another song, joining by twos and threes.

“Tiptoe to the window, by the window, that is where I’ll be,

Come tiptoe thro’ the tulips with me . . .”

“You want my watch?” said Quatermass.

Jack made a subtly evasive gesture. It had style. Another walk of life might have made him a politician, a big-business fixer. God only knew what he had been.

“Well, it’s got to be gold or silver, not cash,” he said. He smiled. The thickened muscles of his face took on an expression that could only be called reasonable. “We got a soft gang round ’ere, see. Know what a soft gang is?”

Quatermass waited to be told.

“Well, they let us ’ave stuff. They see us right. But only if we pay.”

It made sense. This was an old folk’s home that would survive just so long as they could make it worth somebody else’s while.

He pulled the watch off. He could see the inscription on the back, though he could not have read the tiny letters without his glasses. A replica of his wife’s writing. She had had it engraved there.

“Take it.”

“It’s just a rule, like I said.” Jack weighed it in his and gave it a glance that was less casual than he made it seem. “Ta. That’ll do nice. You rest now.”

There had been only one real reason to hand it over. Quatermass said: “Your soft gang . . .”

“They’ll take this, don’t worry. They’ll play fair, they generally do. Not like the others, the gun gangs, them’d just grab this and shoot yer. But my little chums, they’re sort of . . . caught in between, if you take my meaning.”

Quatermass nodded. “So they’d know how to find their way about?”

“They know ’ow to look after theirselves, don’t worry.”

It took Quatermass a drowsy moment to see they were at cross-purposes. “I didn’t mean that,” he said. “Listen—d’you think they’d do something—?”

But Jack had gone. The plastic curtain flopped shut behind him.

Quatermass heard him talking to the others, the hard grinding voice that was curiously not insensitive. But the renewed sing-song made it impossible to pick out any words.

He swung himself carefully off the mattress.

He managed to keep the injured ankle from touching anything. He put a hand to the rusty wall and took shuffling hops. And balanced himself to draw the plastic curtain.

“Listen to me,” he shouted, “all of you!”

Startled faces turned. Jack and Arthur picking over his possessions. Edna with them, guilty.

The last of “Tiptoe Through The Tulips” faded away.

The singers were in the seats round the oil heater. Mouths hung open as if they had been switched off, crooked dentures, toothless jaws. Some looked unsure of what the interruption was or where it came from. Yet they were not so much older than himself. Susie was well into her eighties and turning foolish. She was giggling now. Jack was the strongest through natural endowment, not by being younger. He would have been a tough kid running wild when Quatermass was still in his cradle.

They were waiting. He wondered how much they could grasp.

“There’s a place you must have heard of called Ringstone Round.”

Frowns and vague nods.

“What did ’e say?”

“I know it,” said Jack. “I been there. Huge big stones.”

Arthur was knowledgeable. “One of the wonders of the world. It was built by the Druids.”

“Well—” Quatermass decided to leave it to the Druids. The faces in front of him looked as if they could take in only so much, and he needed all that capacity.

He told it as simply as he could.

At the start old Susie shook her head and uttered little cries of amazement at every other word. Then she lost interest. He was relieved to find the others did not.

They drank up all he said.

As he described what had happened at Ringstone Round, old Edna’s eyes were popping like marbles.

“You watched it?”

“Yes.”

“All them?”

“Kids!” said Arthur. “Planet People!”

“We know about them,” said Edna.

“Oh, yes!” Arthur said. A kind of secret annoyance crept into his face.

“They’ve always believed,” said Quatermass, “that somehow they’re going to be taken away to another planet.” He had better make that clearer. “Another world, somewhere out among the stars, belonging to a different sun.”

“Wicked!” said Susie meaninglessly. Her head was twitching again.

“It always seemed like nonsense,” said Quatermass.

Jack’s pouched eyes were sharp. “But it happened, guv.”

“Something did.”

They were all looking at each other. He felt as if he had lost their attention completely. Then old Arthur, who had turned his back, swung round.

“This planet—what d’you reckon about it?”

Careful now, no jargon. “There’s no harm in the belief. If people want to believe the Moon is made of green cheese, there’s no harm in that either. But as scientific fact, there isn’t the slightest—”

Arthur gave a curious cry. “Why should it be for them?”

“What?”

“The bloody kids!”

He was right, they hadn’t heard, they were no longer listening. He looked from face to face and met the same aggrieved expression. They were actually jealous.

“Always kids!”

“You’re right, Arthur.”

“Why does it always have to be them? It’s bloody wicked!” Arthur shouted. “They want everything, they get their way! They got the lot off us, didn’t they?”

“Listen,” protested Quatermass, “you haven’t understood—”

“They busted it all for us!” wailed Arthur. “Their gangs and their vi’lence! They got us living down here in a hole!”

“That’s true!”

“Not fair, I always said!”

“They done it on us!”

“You tell ’im, Arthur!”

Old stored misery bursting out. Arthur moved closer, and the hard flicker from the tin lamps made his face even thinner.

“If there
is
anything like that, the planet, why can’t it be us? Why can’t we go there? Tell me that, Mr. Professor!”

Shrill echoes from all the rest. They all wanted to go, but even this was to be taken from them. The kids always knew, always got the first chance. They were shakily, angrily, on their feet. All, he noticed, except Jack, who seemed to have detached himself. Suddenly old Jane burst their yearning for them. Her beautiful voice throbbed into song.

“There’s a long, long trail a-winding,

Into the land of . . . my dreams . . .”

They were all off:

“Where the nightingales are singing,

And a white . . . moon . . . beams!

There’s a long, long night of waiting . . .”

Quatermass could stand no more of it. He lurched to the table and hammered his fist on the metal top. A vase of plastic flowers jumped and fell.

“There is no planet!”

Gradual silence. Jane looked hurt, as if he had torn the lovely sounds from her.

“I read in a book once,” said Arthur slowly, “there could be lots. Hundreds of thousands of planets.”

True, of course.

But only as mathematical speculation, a playing with random factors and probabilities. The book Arthur read would have been juicier stuff, the kind that used to fill racks on station platforms with their gaudy jackets, and inside the same giddy mix of magic, UFOs, Great Pyramid, Loch Ness Monsters, the Bible and extra-sensory perception, as if somehow they could all be added up. How to explain that if there were those hundreds of thousands of planets in the universe, they would come in hundreds of thousands of kinds? The regions of tolerance from a sun, pressures and atmospheres, the innumerable criteria that must be satisfied before a single gob of matter could wobble into what could be called life, or one blade of grass grow. It would have looked simpler in Arthur’s book.

“The planet wouldn’t be like ours,” he said.

Arthur glared.

“And that wouldn’t be the way to get there.”

Arthur looked to Jack for support and got none. The thickset man was studying Quatermass. “Well, we got the silly talk done,” he said.

“Silly talk!”

“All that planet stuff’s crap, Arthur! Anything them kids’d go for
must
be a load of crap.”

He and Joe Kapp would have got on, thought Quatermass.

“It sounds like something bad,” said Jack. “I got a nose for that. Now then: you’ve met us. We’re not much. What the ’ell do you think we can do?”

“Get me through.”

Jack considered. He did it impressively, the chairman of the board taking a weighty decision.

“All right, we’ll look after you. And you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to try that soft gang.”

So he had taken it in. Quatermass had thought so. And now he was claiming it as his own idea. A typical boardroom trick. No wonder he’d taken charge down here.

“Could they do it?”

“I reckon,” said Jack. “Maybe right through to the centre zone. So you get yourself fit. You got to be able to walk.”

That might take days. Precious days.

“I like to walk,” said Susie. She was smiling at him. “I like walking in the country. I’ve always been a country girl.”

Annie Morgan had found a hospital.

It was so small and dilapidated, with all its windows boarded up and a sign-board blasted with bullet-holes, that she thought it was abandoned and nearly drove on. Then she saw chinks of light shining between the boards.

When Quatermass was dragged from the car she hardly knew what she was doing. His ordering her to go must have pushed some automatic button and she had driven on without thinking. After half a dozen bombed, shot-up blocks of houses had sped by she stopped and leaned on the steering wheel. What to do—go back and attempt a rescue? But he would be dead. The Blue Brigade were killers. Alternative—do what he wanted.