Quatermass (24 page)

Quatermass glanced at Jervis. A tiny bead of sweat was making its way down the great pale face. Yes, it truly was the face of a clown. No wonder he had the nickname. Whatever happened, there was not much to be expected from that quarter. They said he entertained notions of declaring himself Lord Protector and spent hours deliberating what uniform he would wear if he did—

“Hey, we got something!” Marshall’s voice jumped from the loudspeakers.

The Prime Minister spluttered: “They’ve found it! My God—!”

“Wait!” said Quatermass.

Marshall again, sounding less certain. “Unless . . . I guess it could just be an indication of . . . Houston, hold a second.”

Quatermass agonized.

Without any sight of the controls, the indicator lamps that must be flashing in front of Marshall’s eyes at this moment, he knew. “Malfunction! Chuck—!”

Bleeps.

“Houston here. Mother Bird, our computer says you got a minor on-board malfunction. Check it out, would you?”

Malfunction . . . malfunction . . . !

“Sorry, Houston.” It was Marshall, soberer now. “Blame Giorgi, he got it wrong for a moment there. I guess he’s not overly familiar with some of the American-type controls. I’m checking.” Then, more slowly: “I don’t know, though. We are getting some kind of generalized . . . I’m not sure
what
we’re getting.” A cry. “Hey, Giorgi, did you see that? That was outside!”

Bumping, blurred sounds of the two men moving within the shuttle’s crew compartment.

“Yes!” Marshall’s voice again, choking with excitement. “A huge kind of . . . it’s all over the sky—a kind of faint, thin aurora . . . now it’s drawing together! My God, it’s responding, I think it must be—letting us see it! Now—now it’s a point—a fireball—”

A fireball, responding?

The voice from the loudspeaker was shaky. “It’s gone. No, no, it hasn’t. It’s changed. It’s—it’s the beam! Like a laser beam only it pulsates!” Marshall was fighting shock. “Impossible to estimate distance—it could be ten miles or a hundred. It’s pointing straight to Earth.”

Hatherley was on his feet, transfixed.

The voice went on, straining to keep factual. “That is, in one direction. And in the other—right away out! I’m going to try and record—get a camera on it—”

There wouldn’t be time. Quatermass knew. Once the beam struck, twenty point two seconds total.

“Roger, Mother Bird. We’re reading you loud and clear.” The gritty voice from Houston was steady and supportive.

Vague sounds of movement in the crew compartment.

“Gone.” Marshall’s voice, husky and uneasy now. “The beam’s gone. No sign of anything now. The sky’s black.”

“Roger, Mother Bird. Listen, you still figure it was responding to your signals?”

“I don’t know, Houston, I just don’t know any more.” Deeply uneasy now.

“That beam—”

“I know. We’ve got to remember it wasn’t just a beam of light. It was targeted.”

“With you on that, Mother Bird. It must have struck down here some place. Any report we get in, we’ll let you know right away.”

“Roger, Houston. I guess—”

“Mother Bird?”

“I guess out here we’re getting . . . well, a touch of culture shock.”

“As expected, Chuck.”

“It’s not quite the same thing as, well, jumping around on the Moon’s surface in a nice, friendly vacuum. When you’ve actually made . . . a contact, a sighting anyway.”

“Would you like to go over the sighting?”

“Okay, Houston. It happened so fast it was hard to keep up just now. The problem is to describe a kind of movement I’ve never seen before. As first it was like sheet lightning, only very faint and swirling about the way no lightning ever did. Did I say aurora?”

“You did, Chuck.”

“That’s not right, either. More like . . . gigantic faint bands of . . .” Marshall’s voice broke off for a moment. “Somebody used the word web. A power web.”

“That was me, Mother Bird,” said the Houston voice.

“A web. Say, isn’t there some kind of spider—a South American fruit spider or something like that—that makes a hell of a size web that can even catch birds? Small birds?”

“Could be, Chuck.” Mission Control was careful, even avoiding use of the code name. “Nobody here seems to know much about them. It was only a term to use, know what I mean? Forget it, forget the whole image.”

There was a pause.

Those round the bunker table could almost feel the effort being made in the shuttle cabin 110,000 miles away.

Marshall’s voice came again, brisk.

“Houston, what did
you
see?”

“Practically nothing, Chuck—as you well know, it’s got this faculty of keeping a very low profile. Up until the point when you yelled fireball. There
was
something then.”

“Roger. I meant a kind of . . . concentration . . . pulling in, shrinking of that whole huge . . . right down to a dot of brilliance . . . and then it seemed to blink out and there was the beam instead. Like something had reversed, see what I mean? Gone inside out. Makes you think about collapsing gravity and all that stuff!”

Quatermass had already been thinking about it.

“Down here we’re trying to keep our speculations simple, Chuck.” The Mission Control voice was gruff. Strain was showing there too.

“Something on that pattern—”

“Okay, that pattern. Chuck, I guess we were right in our estimation of the likely zone.” The Houston voice waited.

Marshall’s reply was so quiet the shuttle microphone could only just pick it up. “Yes. We’re there.”

“Roger, Chuck. What I mean is, if you two boys are ready—”

“It’s time for the braking manoeuvre.”

“Soon as you like, Chuck.”

“Let’s do it.” The relief of action in Marshall’s voice, a briskness. “As agreed, starting with attitude control thrusters—”

“Just go careful, Mother Bird.”

“Four-second burn—”

“Four-second burn. You’re looking good.”

As the routine checks went on, people looked at each other across the table of the Big Bunker. Trying to imagine.

Bleeps.

Suddenly a yell from the loudspeakers. “It’s here again! Close! All round us!”

If it was close—

A scream: “We’re into malfunction—we’re spinning! I’m trying to—! Total malfunction, all systems!” Deafening thumps as something hit the microphone of the shuttle. A coughing cry.

Every person in the Big Bunker was on his feet.

There was a rush of sound from the loudspeakers. Then only the dry-mouthed voice from Mission Control. “Houston to Mother Bird! Mother Bird, are you receiving me? . . . Mother Bird, are you able to receive me? . . . Can you hear? . . . Mother Bird . . . Houston to Mother Bird . . .”

In the end Grock Jervis gave a small desperate signal.

Somebody cut the relay off.

Quatermass said slowly: “I don’t think . . . it even knew they were there.”

He sat.

Knew. Not knew, he shouldn’t have said knew. That implied faculties. That was anthropomorphism. Their presence had not registered, he should have said.

Those last seconds . . .

They had not been wearing helmets. One could tell that from the acoustics. Not pressure-suits either, perhaps, one didn’t need them in a shuttle. But if the shuttle systems blew, if the protection went . . . instant explosive decompression . . . blood foaming out . . .

“Well, professor?”

It was Hatherley.

There was a hubbub of voices in the bunker. People were conferring in worried twos and threes. Now he saw the expression in Hatherley’s eyes. It looked like exhilaration. It must be a trick of the light.

“Professor—that beam?”

There was no doubt about it. A hysterical, inspirational edge to the voice. Quatermass could not look at him. He started pulling his papers together.

“A great beam reaching out to infinity!”

Quatermass said: “I think we imagine something different, you and I.”

There was a grunt from Jervis. The Prime Minister was sitting in his place with his eyes fixed on Hatherley. He looked like a prisoner with an uncertain hope of rescue.

Annie Morgan butted in. Her shock was turning to incredulous anger. She said to Hatherley: “Have you read the report on the child? The one who survived for a single day?”

“No,” said Hatherley.

“What!” Annie was even more astonished. “Surely—we had them rushed out. The report on Isabel. Her name was Isabel. I’ve got copies here—”

She was searching for her case but Hatherley waved the offer away. “It’s irrelevant,” he said.

They could only stare at him.

“She didn’t go with them,” said Hatherley. As if the remark had not only been perfectly reasonable but had proved an important point, he turned and stalked away out of the conference room.

Soon everyone had gone.

All but Grock.

He sat alone rubbing one of his great jug-ears and nodding to himself. He felt himself to have been saved. In the last few minutes the huge terror that had threatened to consume him so utterly had grown smaller. He supposed it was what was meant by the comforts of religion. He had never been a religious man but he respected that of others. He liked to hear hymns and incantations. He rejoiced in other people’s rituals. It was like watching workmen through a fence.

Whatever it was that uplifted young David Hatherley, he was glad of it.

The young held the key to this mystery, he was surer and surer. He had always kept the society of young friends and this showed the soundness of his instinct. He had seen himself sometimes as a Socrates amongst them. He had the homely features but not the brain, so he would not put them to question as the Greek would have done. He would have lost them. Most of them had no great intellectual gift. They did not talk much to him or even to each other. But they had intuition. There was a secret in them which he, old Grock, respected. When some of them drifted off to join the Planet People he had been saddened to lose them, not surprised. Dan and Keith and Simon . . . they were the real youth of the land. The gangs were nothing but a horrible aberration. They would burn each other out.

That shining beam . . . perhaps it led away to . . . Grock knew little science but wondered if it might not be such a thing as a black hole. The concept had always alarmed him. Gaps in space that could consume matter, even light. Perhaps the scientists who propounded the idea were inspired by a religious idea and found it fact. Perhaps that was the true explanation of immortality. Some cosmic magic, molecular transubstantiation, to dissolve a clownish body and snatch it along a beam of light and through a blackness that shivered all dimensions . . . to an unknown planet. To meet those who had gone before. Keith and Simon and Dan perhaps. If it had happened to them as they thought it would. And Friedrich and Peter and little Terry . . .

One must desire it. Earnestly desire it.

The report on that poor wretched girl lay under his hand. He had done no more than glance at it. He would not read it now.

He pushed it away across the table.

A hundred thousand miles from Earth the shuttle rocket was spinning like a leaf caught in an eddy. Its attitude thrusters had sent it into a yawing motion before they expired and it was still continuing, even though without power. Every device aboard was dead, as were the two men in the crew compartment. Behind them, the long doors of the cargo bay stood open to expose the transmitter. The flimsy antennas had snapped under the inertial strain of the shuttle’s gyration, and now trailed from the bay. They looked like the intestines of a smashed sea creature.

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T
he entrance to Downing Street was blocked by a heavy tank, which squatted there on permanent guard. It was rarely if ever seen to move. In fact, said Helen Peacher, there was some suspicion that there was no crew inside it. A cat was often to be seen playing with her kittens in the shelter of its tracks, and the kittens might well have been born there.

If it made the Prime Minister feel safe in Number 10 it served its purpose.

Helen Peacher despised her boss deeply. It was she who, as Minister of Supply, had found accommodation for Quatermass and Annie Morgan in the Parliamentary Annexe, the huge block built for MPs and their staffs. It had no such use now. The long recess had become indefinite under the Emergency Regulations.

From his room Quatermass could look down on the Embankment. From here it had a spurious normality. A few trucks and cars could be seen on the move, and there were people on the pavements, clerks and the like with some apparent purpose. One or two stopped on a corner where a barrow-man was selling nuts. Beyond the bridge he could make out part of the superstructure of HMS
Arbalest,
the old missile frigate moored protectively alongside the terrace of the House of Commons. Above everything loomed the burned-out tower of Big Ben with its clock faces all stopped at three-fifty—a.m., of course, that’s when they would have struck.

After the curfew siren there was little movement on the streets below, only an occasional army pig on patrol or a car carrying some of the Prime Minister’s catamites home to Number 10. According to Helen Peacher.