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wall of a burned and roofless transport café he saw the painted words: TO THE PLANET !
    So they were here too.
    The first of them came in sight a few miles further on.
    Half a dozen young people hurrying in a ragged file. Men and girls were dressed alike in long garments they must have made themselves, as simple as ponchos but of every colour and pattern, and often trimmed with scraps of fur or feathers. They drew aside for the waggon to pass. Quatermass glimpsed resentful faces, oddly modified by a large letter P each had painted on both cheeks, producing the effect of cartoon grins. What was strangest about them, though, was their movement . . . an angular jerking and twitching of their legs and arms, a rolling of eyes. A sort of tense, shambling run. The youth in the lead swung a curious device as he went, shining metal at the end of a string.
    Quatermass peered round in his seat. “It’s a kind of plumb-bob.”
    “To bring on the magic, what else!”
    “Magic?”
    “That’s what they believe in, isn’t it?”
    Quatermass squinted through the mesh. Another party was straggling along the skyline, ponchos flying. The leader was swinging something.
    “At least these don’t seem violent.”
    “They’re violent a different way,” said Kapp. “To human thought!”
    Caraway was the leader of a big group. More and more had added on in the past days, appearing in twos and threes from the tracks or across the neglected fields. Or drifting in at night when the People rested. Now there were about sixty, including a few young kids. Caraway resented the kids. They distracted and they slowed up the march, but their parents could never be persuaded to set them adrift. They would have made out all right, Caraway was sure of it. Kids did. It wouldn’t have been cruel.
    Babies were the worst of all. Fat Sal’s was a couple of months old and she always had it hung about her, suckling it from her big breasts or slung across her shoulder as she ran with it, trying to keep up.
    Caraway himself might have given her that baby. He wasn’t sure. It could have been a lot of people’s. Sal was a natural ewe. She’d given birth on the Glastonbury trek, before things really got started. Sometimes they lost her but she always turned up again. Sal had a feeling for the earth-lines.
    Caraway was eighteen. His own talent for earth-lines was exceptional. That’s why he was the leader.
    He stood swinging his plumb-bob round and round in a lazy circle, waiting for it to settle. You didn’t really need the bob. The tingling in your nerves and bones was enough, you could always tell by that alone. But it helped. It concentrated you.
    Bee stood watching. Funny, she felt nothing at all, ever. She thought it was magic and it worried her. It fiercened her. She would scratch and claw at you to get at the magic and that made her something special. Not like Sal, the ewe. Bee was frantic.
    All good Planet People were frantic, getting more so. You had to get the feeling. He could always help them there.
    He lifted the shining bob high in the sunlight.
    The girls first, as always. Sal’s jaw dropped and her eyes went wide as if she’d got some personal message from it. She dropped the baby in her lap where she sat. Her fat shoulders twitched. She breathed: “Hah! Hah! Hah!”
    Bee spun. She turned about and about. Another girl was doing the same, and now a boy too. The stone weights fastened to the bottom edges of their ponchos tugged and spread them out. They whirled and whirled. “Hoh! Hoh! Hoh!”
    When after a while they came to a panting, dizzy halt, others picked it up. Their ponchos made wheels round them, all the different colours. Sal, too, with her baby squealing across her shoulder as she lumbered round and round.
    Caraway’s plumb-bob settled into an ellipse, and then to a firm swing back and forth. As if it was telling them which way to go.
    But it was only confirming. Caraway knew which way.
    He led off, lips parted beneath the