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whispered.
    “No, wait. What does it mean to be Planet People? What do you really believe?”
    Caraway swung the plumb-bob for a moment. He might have been consulting it. “You wouldn’t understand.”
    “I might.”
    It was Bee who thrust herself forward and cried: “We’re going there! We’re going to one!”
    Quatermass could only stare at her. “To another planet, is that what you mean?”
    Caraway turned on him and shrieked in a voice that frightened even some of his followers: “We are not mad!”
    Kapp waited for the twitching angry face to recover itself. “Then tell me,” he said, sounding gently reasonable, “where in the whole solar system? Where you wouldn’t be frozen solid or fried alive?”
    “Not there,” said Caraway.
    Kapp looked disgustedly along the line of closed faces. “I give you up,” he said.
    “Among the stars!” Bee again.
    Kapp glanced at Quatermass. The look he got from the old man had a kind of appeal in it: you can demolish them all too easily, don’t do it.
    He spoke quietly.
    “Okay, the stars. A good place to look. You might find a planet going round one of them. Only catch is this—it’ll take you a hundred thousand years to get there.”
    “By his rocket?” said Caraway.
    Kapp nodded. Not quite so stupid, and in a way that annoyed him even more. “How else?” he demanded. “Come on, let’s hear it. By meditation? Occult transference out of the body? I want to know—where’s the launch pad? This is one lift-off I want see!”
    No reply.
    Caraway’s plumb-bob was pointing the way again. He started walking and the Planet People were off, too, the whole line of them. Passing close to the two men but quite oblivious, as if they had become invisible. The concentration was returning. Mouths gave a soft, sighing: “Hah! Hah! Hah!” Eyes rolled and jittered in their sockets, blurring vision and causing stumbles that seemed only welcome.
    The faces of the small children were different, pinched and uncomprehending as they were towed along. They were the only ones to give Quatermass a glance.
    The file was changing direction again, scrambling over a rough stone wall and off across another field.
    “But why—?”
    Kapp gave a snort of disgust. “Don’t be sorry for them.”
    “I don’t understand why—”
    “They can’t explain because they don’t know either. Their mystery is a zero.”
    “So many of them—”
    “They infest the land. Like bloody lemmings in search of a sea!” Kapp started towards the waggon.
    Quatermass followed. “I thought you’d understand them.”
    “Oh, I do!”
    “You’re not so much older than they are.”
    “It’s enough,” said Kapp. “I want a generation gap between me and them. I hate them. Because they’ve given up!”
    He swung the door open. The dog stuck its eager muzzle out, growling.
    “No, Puppy, they’ve gone. Sit.”
    They got aboard.
    “It’s not a world to be young in,” said Quatermass.
    “Was it ever?”
    “Perhaps not. But it couldn’t often have been like this.” Quatermass peered through the mesh. The file was making its way up a slope now. Fragmenting and wandering as if weariness were setting in again. And there had been babies. Well, one at least, belonging to that fat young woman. He could see her now. She had fallen back to the tail of the column.
    Kapp started the engine.
    “Bernard,” he said, “I’m last in two hundred generations of learned Jews. I mean, not all so perfectly learned but by God they tried! They knew it was the only way.” He added after a moment: “To beat the dark.”

3

    Q uatermass caught his first glimpse of the antennas through the trees. The trunks parted and there was a great silver bowl angled at the sky. A chalice, he thought, a chalice with a bent stem. The drinking cup of some enormous, careless creature that had dropped it there. Shining, transparent. Then he saw its twin standing a short distance aside from it.
    “Aren’t they beautiful?” More