Quatermass by Nigel Kneale Read Free Book Online Page B

threw his car keys across to Chen. “I picked up those modules, Frank. I got five. Not new, but what’s new? They’re the best I could get and if you do some work on them—well, unload ’em and see.”
    Chen hurried off.
    Of course, Quatermass remembered, those crates in the back. They must have been the main reason for Kapp’s going to London.
    It would probably turn out as Kapp said: when the replacement units were in, some electronic fault would declare itself. He had seen it happen so many times in his own work at the Rocket Group. Days of bafflement and then an infuriatingly simple answer, the treacherous diode or defective microcircuit.
    Not always, of course. Not quite always . . .
    There had been the other times when all rules snapped. Men in a spacecraft crew who had been invaded and made over, to return as a single, obscene carrier of alien disease. That had been the worst because it was totally unexpected. No one had been ready for it. Perhaps no one could ever really be. One guarded against a future eventuality, only to be struck in the back by the past. That other time . . . an organic machine dormant in the ground since the Pliocene, warmed back to its purpose and activity of nightmarish irrelevance . . .
    Those things had happened. When one tried to recall the events clearly to write about them one suffered too much. One took to one’s bed for a day or two and, going back to it, one abandoned that whole section, knowing that one would never complete it because one could never bear to.
    Yet in the thousand other cases it was the humdrum fault, the defective item that started alarms through the system—
    “All right?” Kapp asked.
    “I was remembering,” said Quatermass. He wondered how much Kapp knew about him. “I remember too much.”
    “Let’s go.”
    As they started towards the door the girl called: “Joe, did you get her anything?”
    “What?”
    “Debbie.”
    “Oh, my God, I’d no chance.”
    There was a comical expression on Kapp’s face. It pulled things back to a sane level.
    “Anyway, what the hell is there? No toys any more.” He turned to Quatermass. “Debbie’s four. Very acquisitive.”
    “Here, Joe.” Alison extracted something from a drawer. “Give her this—it’s for her, anyway.”
    A small straw figure. Kapp took it gratefully. “But she’ll guess you made it,” he said.
    “Let her.”
    Through another air-lock was the old ticket office, which Kapp had evidently taken pleasure in preserving. Gothic windows . . . racks for left luggage . . . a high narrow desk against one wall, its sloping top scored with blackened initials. There were printed rail regulations nailed up, and even tattered posters urging the excitements of London, the beauty of its palaces. One declared: Skegness Is So Bracing ! and showed a stout boatman dancing on the sands. Quatermass remembered that from a very long time ago.
    There was also a rack with shotguns in it.
    “Tommy Roach had his own outfit once,” said Kapp. “It got vandalized to hell.”
    Outside they found the young Chinese carefully unloading and checking the crates.
    “Okay, Frank?”
    “So far. You must be driving better.”
    “So don’t drop them.”
    Chen smiled: “The last of the wine.”
    As they went on Kapp said: “His father was Chen Teh.”
    “The physicist?”
    “Genius. So is Frank.”
    They passed a hugh old water tank, high on brick pillars. It must have replenished many a steam locomotive. Then outbuildings with liberal defences of barbed wire. A heavy generator thudded somewhere.
    Kapp said: “Am I fiddling while Rome burns?”
    “No.” Quatermass had no doubt.
    “Not even a fiddle, just a couple of tin trumpets,” said Kapp. “But, my God, they make lovely music.”
    The shanties were just ahead.
    Until now Quatermass had not fully absorbed the fact that Kapp lived in one. A tar-blackened hut that appeared to be made of odds and ends of corrugated iron and clapboard. Creepers had been trained