Quatermass 4 - Quatermass by Nigel Kneale

Author:Nigel Kneale [Kneale, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0099207702
Publisher: Arrow Books
Published: 1979-09-01T07:00:00+00:00

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.”

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