Quatermass (22 page)

Johnny Ingrams took pride in it. He peered past the monitor screens, through the thick glass to see exactly what was going on down there on the studio floor. Huge papier-mâché breasts were being swung vigorously about by their invisible, black-clad operators. Tassels whirled from light-up nipples. Sorbo bellies bulged and rocked. Fibreglass buttocks swayed, and pubic hair made in great shocks of gaudy synthetic swirled extravagantly.

But that was only the background. In front, live dancers dressed as comic animals were prancing through elaborate choreography. To maintain internal logic they too were fitted with outsize genitals, a cat with vast breasts, and elephant with a phallus like a drainpipe.

It was a family show.

The formula had been nicely calculated to appeal to all ages, in whatever audience might be left. Puppets and porn. It even managed to include an instructional element. The cat went through a quiz routine while engaged in sexual congress with a jolly fox.

Johnny called camera directions through the desk mike. “In a bit, in a bit—oh, keep that shot, I love it.” He turned to the woman sitting beside him at the control desk. “Note for Charles. A touch more co-ordination between tits three and four—they
must
seem to belong to the same entity. I mean organism. Living creature, you know what I mean.”

He smoothed his grey hair.

Action had slowed to a halt on the monitor screens. He turned to the microphone again. “What’s happening, Vic? What’s the hold-up?

A voice came back. “It’s Liz. Got hit by a backside. She’s okay.”

“Oh, poor love. Quick as you can.” Johnny turned to his helper again. “Note. The new rumps are far too heavy. And hard. They lack sensuousness.” He shut his eyes, grimacing as he concentrated. “Yes, sensuousness not sensuality.”

He was tired. Tired of sleeping on the premises. Tired of being too frightened to go outside.

He called again: “Vic, hurry them up. We’re getting close to power-cut time.” He turned. “Another note. Power cuts. Emergency generators have now let me down three times in a row. Please,
please,
will somebody somewhere take action!”

But she had stopped taking the note down, he saw. She was pointing through the window into the studio. “There’s something wrong down there,” she said. “I mean really wrong! Look!”

“Soldiers!”

Men in camouflage jackets, carrying guns, were moving through the beams of gaudy light.

As they came, the animal-dancers shrank back squealing in alarm.

Captain Torrance turned to Quatermass, who was limping in behind the squad with Annie Morgan’s help. “They don’t seem ready for us, sir.”

“Sorry, gentlemen—”

Quatermass turned to see a half-familiar face. Round and soft, glib-lipped. Of course, from that former, primeval time of several days ago . . . Toby Gough.

“Usual lack of co-ordination, chaps,” said Gough. “Won’t be a sec.” He ran off towards the production gallery.

The dancers were huddling together in alarm. One or two had pulled off their animal heads to see better what the danger was. As the black-clad operators emerged from behind their huge props, bellies and buttocks sagged to the ground.

“You’d better have a seat, sir.” Torrance commandeered a papier-mâché breast, its scarlet nipple pointed at the ceiling. Quatermass sank gratefully down on it, to ease his aching ankle.

Toby Gough reappeared, shrugging off the protests of the indignant director, who trailed behind him down the ladder.

“Toby, they can’t! Not my show!”

“It’s an emergency, Johnny.”

“What isn’t!”

“It has to be done through land-lines and we’ve got them.”

Gough left Johnny Ingrams to wander off to the camera crew and mouth protests to anyone who would listen. He raised his arms. “Listen, everybody! Stay calm, please—this is an emergency of a sort but there’s no danger to you. You may stay and listen if you want. But stand clear, please—and dead quiet.” He came over to Quatermass. He added: “It’s their lives, too, I suppose.”

A camera trained itself on Quatermass.

Within seconds, it seemed, the link was in, and there was Chuck Marshall’s drained face on the monitor screen. There were no preliminaries this time.

“We now have thirty-seven recorded instances all around the globe,” said Marshall. “The same pattern each time. Some big gathering of younger-age human beings . . . lost.”

“Destroyed,” said Quatermass.

There was a stir in the studio. People deft on their feet, drawing closer. The elephant was nervously removing its head.

“Bernard,” said Marshall’s image, “let’s keep it at ‘lost’ for now.”

“Just the provable.”

“There’s not much of that,” Marshall said. “We still have no clear idea what we’re into. Tracking devices tell us nothing. They say there’s nothing there, nothing discernible in Earth orbit. All we’ve got is what we
know
we’re getting—these power blasts out of the blue! Literally!”

“Chuck,” said Quatermass. “Put aside ‘what’ for a second. Think about ‘when’.”

“When what?”

“These strikes. How many of them were on crowds close to standing stones?”

Marshall seemed unsurprised, as if it confirmed discussion at his end. “We think about half the total.”

“And those megaliths date back—what—four or five thousand years?”

“So that’s your ‘when’,” said Marshall. “But just one thing—are you trying to make out the stones weren’t put there by human agency?”

“Oh, yes, they were. No doubt about it.”

“Well, then—”

“I think men may have raised them to mark places that have become . . . terrible to them. Because they’d been . . . visited.”

A dancer in a poodle costume clutched the hand of a friend.

“You reckon it came at that point in time?” said Marshall.

“And left traces behind. Perhaps deep beneath the surface. In our terms, guidance beacons set in the earth. For next time.”

“And this is next time.”

Somewhere in the studio there was a snuffle of fear. Toby Gough glared round and waved a hand for silence.

Quatermass licked his lips.

“Now for the ‘what’,” he said. “Try this. An immense, invisible skin.”

“A
skin
?”

It was Tommy Roach who had put the thought into his head that day. He had said something that might have been ‘skin’ or ‘skein’, and Quatermass hadn’t known which. A skein, a web . . . but skin seemed a better idea.

“It’s just to get some kind of image. Call it a film, a membrane, a bubble . . . about a million miles round. Completely enclosing the Earth but at a great distance. Halfway to the Moon, say. A sphere of energy so diffuse that our detectors can’t find it. They look right through it. And yet . . . organized, able to concentrate all its power in an instant and . . . do what we know it does.”

Marshall’s face on the monitor was oddly unsurprised.

“You’ve gotten ahead of us in certain respects, but—any guesses about ‘why’?”

“Its purpose?”

“We’re obviously facing an intelligence of some . . .” Marshall hesitated “. . . some order. It seems to us here that the primary need is for . . .”

Marshall broke off and turned aside. He asked: “What is it? What the hell?”

Annie clutched Quatermass’s arm but her eyes stayed on the screen. He had a feeling of not being really involved, just a relay in an exchange of data. Like the land-lines the Americans had insisted on as a precaution. He was needed, not noticed. The dancers and technicians were pressing closer to see the screen.

“Okay, okay, let him take it then!” Irritably, Marshall turned. “Bernard, we’ve got this Moscow link now. Somebody you know. Academician P. G. Gurov.”

For a moment the name meant nothing. Then it came to him, that deplorable session at Geneva over the exchange of information on space activities. It must have been twenty years before. He had found himself publicly attacked for moving full disclosure, denounced as an imperialist of the Solar System. The principal instigator was this man Gurov.

The screen image flipped over, and there was the blurred, distorted image. Unmistakable, though. He recognized the jowls, heavier now, but even in the Geneva days good for shaking in threat over a conference podium.

“Quatermass?” said the image. “This is tragedy, a cosmic error.”

His accent was as thick as ever.

“An error?”

“Terrible misunderstanding!”

For a moment Quatermass could not tell what the man was talking about. He must make some effort himself.

“Pavel Grigoritch—”

The sound of his patronymic seemed to help the Russian. He began to talk quickly. “All my life I dread this, Quatermass—that some advanced form of life should appear, and fail to comprehend us! Now it happens. Here! In Volgograd Province, in Kursk, Uzbekistan! Today a mass gathering of the Pioneers, the Young Communist League—children—”

“Oh God, oh God!” cried Annie.

On the screen the Russian was wiping his eyes, overcome by emotion. “When it came before it found savages! You see, I agree with you, Quatermass, with your dating hypothesis—”

“In the Bronze Age.”

“Yes.” Gurov was nodding. “But now it comes again—and it mistakes. We are advanced society!”

He sounded indignant, personally offended. For about a thousandth of a second it was funny.

“It might not think so,” said Quatermass.

Gurov was oblivious. “Planned society, Marxist-Leninist, is ours! And even you in the West—” He burst out desperately: “We must reach it! We must communicate!”

“You mean—with
that
?”

Gurov was nodding hard. “In Soviet Union we have much prepared method—code and radio emissions—trans—trans—perevodit—teknika of—I mean, govorit!—talk to it—we can—!”

It was the stress. The image snapped back to Marshall.

“Gurov’s out of his mind,” protested Quatermass.

To his astonishment Marshall said: “We’re going to try it.”

“
You
are!”

“We’ve got a shuttle in the pad right now,” said Marshall. “The Russkies have come through with a lot of cross-communication stuff. It’s clever. We’re using it.”

Quatermass was on his feet, turning, limping, trying to collect his thoughts. “Wait a minute, Chuck, wait a minute—”

“Bernard, there’s no waiting time left. I want your evaluations, any last-minute suggestions. That’s what this contact is about. I want them quick. We’re into countdown.”

Quatermass looked helplessly round the dark studio, finding frightened faces. To be forced to debate the fate of the world in this ridiculous place, full of the flounces of the Tittupy Bumpity Show—

The director pushed his way through, white as a sheet.

“Go on, help them! If they’re trying to save us from this—this—!”

Gough fended him off.

Quatermass swung round to face the camera. “My evaluation, Chuck—here it is. Forget about trying to communicate.”

Marshall looked taken aback. “Listen, we got to—”

“The ripe crop can’t appeal to the reaper,” said Quatermass. He was aware of Ingrams spluttering beside him. “I think this is the gathering time. The human race is being harvested.”

1 1

“I
t seems, then, there’s nothing to be done?” said Grock Jervis.

It was his favourite challenge line. Uttered in the right tone of voice, suggesting confusion of purpose, mild despair and desperate need for help, it nearly always brought in a shoal of vigorous suggestions, even some good ones. The fact that people had heard it before seemed to make no difference. He had used it in committee for years before he became Prime Minister of the National Coalition. It seemed to stir some irresistible impulse. It made them pity him without actually wanting to throw him out.

It was his funny face, of course, that made the difference.

He had been nicknamed Grock at school, where his long countenance, blubber lips and jug ears were held to resemble those of the famous German clown. By the time he was thirty most of his hair had gone—some said he had pulled it out, which was not true—and the likeness was complete. He became a cartoonists’ politician.

He had been brought to what power he had by calamity, and knew it.

Now there was no foreseeable risk of elections he sought guidance, with a studiousness that belied the clown image, in the history of other calamitous times. In particular he studied Oliver Cromwell. He toyed with the prospect of taking the same title, the Lord Protector. It might inspire some confidence. Obviously it would depend on the attitude of the King, with whom he had yet to discuss it. His Majesty had been confined to the safety of the central keep of Windsor Castle from the time of the assassination attempt. His injuries had been severe.

Grock had something else in common with Cromwell. Anxiety over Ireland. Ever since Colonel Billy Corcoran had marched his Protestant army, laden with Russian weapons, south to conquer Dublin and unite the whole country in a way it had not expected, there had been unease in London. Colonel Corcoran’s junta might be ready for foreign adventure.

The social collapse had had its own curious gradualness, like the descent of steps shaped with a very wide tread. A long teeter to the edge, and down, and another slow teeter. There had been doubt for a time about the relation of violence to breakup, whether the collapse of welfare had led to the gangs’ savagery because they felt themselves deprived, as the apologists had argued, or the other way round. Grock had no doubt. It was the guns that shattered everything.