Quatermass by Nigel Kneale Page B

was smeared. They must have helped themselves from the pantry.
    The dog came towards her, wagging its tail but not certain of her either. It sniffed. The acrid air of that place must have clung.
    She hugged the children tightly. It felt like breaking a spell.
    “Where did Alison go? Did she say?”
    “She just went,” said Sarah. “She said, Puppy’ll look after you.”
    “And he did!” Debbie turned to the Alsatian and dug her hands into its coat. “I love Puppy. When I’m big I’m going to marry him!”
    Sarah was watching her mother. “Did you see Ringstone Round?”
    “Yes,” said Clare. The strangeness closed in again. “We’ve brought somebody. She’s sick, so . . . I want you to take your plates out to the back now. Sarah, take Debbie.”
    She hurried them away just in time.
    Quatermass appeared in the doorway with the whimpering girl in his arms.
    “Which way?”
    Clare hurried ahead up the few steps. He steadied himself and hefted the frail body in the rug. His breathing came fast, just with carrying her from the waggon. He mustn’t slip on the steps. He jabbed his heels down.
    There were few rooms in the hut. The door that Clare held open must be Debbie’s. A tiny child’s bedroom with a litter of treasures hung on the walls . . . beads, strange twigs, straw figures, knitted toys that had been long in use and were pulling apart.
    He lowered the child into the opened bed. Clare drew the car rug away.
    The saw the leg.
    Elephantiasis was the word that sprang into Quatermass’s mind. The wrong word, memory throwing it up, playing tricks. The word for slow tropical disease. And now that he looked again it was less shocking. He was sure of only one thing—it had not been like that when he found her.
    “So swollen,” Clare said uneasily.
    Distended, that was the word. Swollen was wrong, inaccurate.
    “A lot of pain,” he managed to say.
    But there seemed to be none. No reaction to the touch of the sheet or the weight of bedclothes, or to being moved and settled. She was quiet now.
    “I’ll dress it,” said Clare. “I’ll manage.”
    A confident crispness now.
    “A hospital?”
    “What hospital?” she said. “I’ll just move Debbie in with Sarah. It’ll be all right. I’ll look after her.” Her voice sounded almost bright. “I’ve had a lot of practical experience with my own two. Seeing them through . . . childish illnesses.”
    As if neither of them had seen what was under that sheet. She was reducing it to what she could bear, Quatermass thought.
    He watched her crouch beside the low bed. She stroked the girl’s thin cheek. “You’re safe,” she said, “I know what to do.”
    Quatermass turned to the door.
    Telling it had been almost too much for Kapp. He stood silent while Tommy Roach went to the first-aid cupboard and found the emergency bottle.
    But the glass slipped from Kapp’s hand and the precious whisky was spilt, wasted. He stared at his stiff fingers.
    “Look at that. Bruised right through to the bone. On the wheel.” They were gripping again, as when he was driving.
    “Whatever you saw,” said Roach, “I think we did too.”
    “You?”
    “The dishes picked it up. A massive overload.”
    “It seemed to cheat the fail-safe,” said Chen.
    “We could have lost the lot.”
    Joe Kapp nodded. It tallied. He turned to the familiar apparatus as if it had the power to save sanity. Whatever facts it had managed to hold on to, it would not forget them now. They could retrieve them.
    “All right, we’ll run all it got,” he said. “Heuristic mode, ask it for some guesses.”
    “A lot of data wiped out,” said Roach. “It was the sheer weight—”
    “Something to build on, that’s all we need at the moment.”
    Roach had already been busy. He had processed much of the usable material. Now they could include a new parameter, the direct observations, on site, of Dr. Joe Kapp. There were some elegant ways of translating sense experience to the