Quatermass Read Free

Gough.
    “Glad of a few pence, the usual thing.” Suddenly conscious of tactlessness. “Oh, sorry dear—”
    “Don’t talk like that,” said Kapp.
    “Present company excepted, of course—”
    Kapp was angry. “I mean about him! Do you know who he was?”
    “Well, we’d hardly have asked him on this—”
    “D’you know what he did?”
    In the offended voice of one who had done his homework and wasn’t being given credit for it, Gough said: “Quite enough, I think. Grand old space boffin, to use a term current in his time.”
    “He was the original.”
    “All right—pioneer, then.”
    More anger would do no good, Kapp knew. “That’s what he was. And some of the real firsts should have been down to him. He earned them in his BRG days.”
    “BRG?” She raised her eyebrows.
    “British Rocket Group.”
    She giggled at that. “Christ, I don’t believe it.”
    Gough nodded. “Yes, there was.”
    “Oh dear, I can imagine—all strikes and subsidies.”
    “No,” Kapp said. “He practically made it with his own hands.”
    “It was a long time ago,” said Gough.
    “All the harder.”
    Gough said with a surprising touch of acuteness: “P’raps he was too soon. You can be and I think he was. His nuclear-powered rocket, for instance—that was way ahead of existing technology. There were far too many things he didn’t know. The thing hadn’t a hope.”
    “What happened to it?” she asked.
    “It blew up. In the Australian desert. Just as well, all things considered.”
    “And that finished him?”
    “No, it didn’t,” said Kapp. “What finished him was politics. The government took his outfit over to make missiles, simple stuff, ground-to-air. Handed it to the military.”
    “But that wasn’t all,” said Gough, “was it?” He looked at Kapp as if expecting him to pick this up. When Kapp didn’t he went on himself: “There were some much odder items on file.”
    “Setbacks of a pioneer?” said the producer. “Well, if you’re always trying to be first—”
    “Not just setbacks. Horrors.”
    “What?”
    “I wanted you to read those reports.”
    “Sorry, no time,” she said.
    “I think you should have.”
    “He wasn’t to blame,” said Kapp. “Nobody can possibly pin any blame—”
    “He took appalling risks: he must have done. The very first crew he sent up—when they returned to Earth they’d all been, well, they were completely—according to those reports they’d ceased to be—” It stuck in Gough’s throat.
    Human, that was what he meant.
    Gough turned to the producer. “You remember. You must remember . . . well, hearing about it?”
    “Christ!” She was remembering all right now. She looked through the thick glass out into the studio. “Christ, that was him ? That was his fault?” Her hands started to tremble. She turned to Gough and said: “Toby, you’re not going to . . . I mean, tonight . . . ?”
    “No, I shan’t bring any of that up.”
    “I mean,” she said, “this is supposed to be a jolly celebration. Jolly for somebody, anyway. Oh, look, it’s nearly time, I’ve got to check the satellite link—”
    Kapp left them to it.
    Before his time, too, all that. Or almost. He did remember a happening that might have been it. When he was very, very small, three or four years old, a day of great panic. Being snatched away from radio and television by his weeping mother, as if that would make him safe. His father in a rage that must really have been helpless fear, swearing in furious Yiddish, which he had never done. Yes, that must have been it. The time would have been right, he had worked it out once. About a week after the rocket returned and the world nearly caught a fatal cold. Her crew become monstrous, turned to a spreading blight.
    It was after that they must have changed the rules, tightened controls, enforced quarantine. They had got away with it once. Everybody had.
    Except Quatermass. The stigma stayed on his name.
    He found the old man