Quatermass Read Free Page A

still in his chair in the corner of the studio. He looked better. The makeup woman had stuck a patch on the cut and was powdering his head. Her treatment made him look unreal but healthier. “There now, love, won’t hardly show,” she said, and shuffled away.
    Quatermass turned solemnly.
    “Dr. Kapp, you saved my life.”
    “Did I?”
    “I think you did.” As if he had been picking it over and had made up his mind clearly. Then he shook his head. “I simply had no idea—”
    “Things are bad,” agreed Kapp.
    “They don’t tell you. You have to see it for yourself, hear and smell—”
    They’re just bland about it,” said Kapp. “Call it the Urban Collapse—then it’s nobody’s fault, it’s just a phenomenon.”
    “But the savagery—!”
    “You ought to see Paris. Or Rotterdam. Or New York or Moscow for that matter—I believe they’re just as bad but there’s no way to go and look. It’s everywhere, not just us.”
    Quatermass kept on shaking his head. “Suburban streets with dead bodies! I’d never have believed—till I came down here last week—”
    “Where do you live?”
    “Eh?” The old man seemed to be having a struggle to recapture the reality of the place he had left. “Oh, quite out of all this. It’s possible, you see, not to be aware—if you’re old enough, and selfish enough. I mean, if you’re content to cut yourself off from everything, and not listen or read—” He broke off. “I live by a loch in the west of Scotland.”
    “Go back there,” said Kapp.
    “As soon as I can.”
    “Go now if you like,” Kapp said. “I’ll help you. I’ll try and get you on a train north. If you’ve got some bribe money—”
    “A train?” Quatermass stared at him. “You know, there were people hanging on the outside. Perhaps I’ll be one of them next time, eh?” Then Kapp’s meaning got through to him and he stared harder. “You mean— now ? Walk out on all this?”
    “They don’t care. Why should you?”
    “Oh, no!” The old man sounded unexpectedly emphatic. After a moment he said: “I’m looking for my grand-daughter.”
    The non sequitur was enough to make Kapp wonder. Perhaps, after all, that blow on the head—
    “Your grand-daughter?”
    Quatermass was delving in a side pocket of his heavy tweed suit. The pocket was a big one and bulged full of something. He pulled out a handful of photographs, all identical. He offered one to Kapp.
    “That’s her.”
    A girl in her mid-teens. She looked pretty but more than that she showed character. Something of the old man himself in her eyes. Through the change of male to female, and two generations, it still plainly came out.
    “My daughter’s daughter,” said Quatermass, “Both parents killed on an autobahn. She came to stay with me in Scotland but—” His eyes took on an expression like anger, snapping with it, but it was anger turned inwards. “She—she ran away. Have you any children, Dr. Kapp?”
    “Two, a lot younger.”
    “She’s only sixteen,” said Quatermass. “Do you know, they won’t list them, they gave up years ago. So many gone without trace, and the way things are—” He drifted through a little pause. “I went to Edinburgh first. No help there and—the Assembly Building had just been bombed so, so then I thought if I could get to London, just find some effective person, the right one—”
    “You’re talking about the past.”
    Quatermass nodded. “I’ve found that out.”
    Empty buildings, burned buses, the dreadful shanty town in Hyde Park with its swarms of aggressive beggars. The reek of blocked sewers.
    “Even the hotel I got into. It wasn’t just the phones going dead, and the rubbish. It was what went on there. All night you could hear it. I don’t mean brothel activity, that’s only to be expected. This was, well, fear. Up above the tenth floor, they said—” But he had not wanted to know. Up there, it seemed, the place was no longer a hotel. It was reserved. Express