I don't own Quatermass. I wish I did, believe me. If I did then there would be a series and more conspiracies, and aliens.
Hmm, so many possibilities.
Anyway, enjoy.
Experimental Saucer.
Bernard Quatermass was used to experiencing the strange and the bizarre - he had witnessed a plant-like being possess one of his astronauts, learnt beings from Mars had influenced the occult while experimenting on humans - but as he stood at the launch platform on the British Rocket Group compound, he was certain this was one of the most bizarre things he had ever seen.
Flying saucers were becoming more widely seen nowadays; Bernard had no idea what was attracting them to Earth, and like many people he considered them to be alien spaceships, but unlike those same people he had actually seen an alien ship, so he knew they were possible. Thinking of the incident at Hobb's Lane, Quatermass hoped any alien ship that did come to Earth was peaceful; it did not make any sense to the scientist every species in the galaxy would want to destroy them for some reason.
Bernard pushed that aside as he walked around the saucer. It was beautiful, like his rockets, only this one was vastly different employing different techniques and materials in order to construct it. He and his team had been working on this for a long time now. Ever since Hobb's Lane, Bernard had taken back the crude sketches of the alien ship, and taken them to the British Rocket Group compound, and had his people come up with new ways of explaining how alien technology got a ship off the ground and into orbit, never mind to other worlds.
He only wished the research being poured into trying to understand how the Hobb's Lane ship worked had yielded some kind of result.
He wished such a successful study had answered some of the mysteries surrounding the civilisation who'd constructed such a craft and sent it to Earth while some could theorise the reasons behind the aliens' actions.
Why elevate human intelligence in the first place? Wouldn't it have made more sense to increase the intelligence quotient of the humans and make them into basically higher slaves? Oh, Quatermass could understand the aliens had been struggling, desperate to survive and beat the odds, but they had been unable to survive on Earth so they'd passed down ideas and concepts to primitive humans through processes too advanced to contemplate for today so they could build a colony on Earth which would be by proxy, but surely it had occurred to them if their plans had worked, the human race would have found some manner of overthrowing them?
Perhaps they had, and the event was lost to time.
The British Rocket Group had spent the last three years developing the technologies needed to build this saucer. During the business in Hobb's Lane, Quatermass had secretly brought in a small group of scientists and engineers who were mostly propulsion specialists and metallurgists to study the ship behind Colonel Breen's back although the arrogant and narrow-minded military idiot.
Thinking about Breen made Quatermass grimace; he might be dead now and Quatermass did feel bad for disrespecting him and his memory, but Quatermass did not miss the other man's inability to see that not everything was down to the Nazis. He had already been annoyed with the decision to turn the plans to colonise the moon to the military, where they would have placed missile bases on the lunar surface. Quatermass had naturally protested this; the moon should have been a place of study, and there should have been observatories and laboratories on the moon studying the effects of gravity on the human body, hydroponics and seeing what needed to be done out there in the vacuum while the moon was used as a launchpad for numerous missions out into the void, taking advantage of the lower gravity in order to launch probes and ships into the solar system while transmitting its findings to Earth.
The whole purpose of the lunar exploration project was not only to put people on the moon but to explore it and discover what living in space could do to the human body, while at the same time sending out probes and ships into the solar system with the purpose of furthering Mankind's knowledge of the universe.
But no, the British government had decided to transform the moon into a large gun platform overlooking the Earth. What a wonderful future they were leaving behind for their children.
While he could very well understand the logic, Quatermass couldn't see it; how could a Nazi bomb have buried itself so deeply underground? How could it generate such a profound malign influence over everything in the vicinity, although knowing Breen, Quatermass could not understand how the Nazis could have done it, but then none of it was really easy since the alien technology was far beyond anything found on Earth, but that didn't mean they wouldn't be able to make observations and take photographs while they tried to examine the strange but fascinating material of the hull which reminded Quatermass of glass.
It had needed to be done carefully and quietly as well; not only was the alien ship filled with fantastic and miraculous technology, but it seemed to have a malevolent intelligence to it as well. It had a malign effect on the local vicinity as well, so the crew had to be careful and they needed to keep their nerve. The memory of seeing that police constable lose his nerve had been bad enough, but the near devastation of London…
Quatermass shook the memories off as he looked at the saucer. The saucer was a large disc with a 'bump' made from transparent material for the pilot and the co-pilot; just behind them was a short but prominent stabiliser fin. Next to the fin were two jet engines for pushing the saucer out of Earth's atmosphere before rockets engines located in the back pushed the small ship even further out. Once the saucer was away from Earth, it would then be propelled by the ion thrusters built into the back.
The whole point of the saucer was to provide Earth with a renewable space vehicle, and while Quatermass would have preferred using a rocket ship for the task, he could see the point behind the saucer - it would show new ideas were taking place.
An assistant technician approached. "We're ready, Professor Quatermass."
Bernard turned and nodded. "Alright, I'll be there presently," he smiled at the young man.
When he went to the control room, Quatermass watched on the closed-circuit television screens mounted along the walls the different views of the launch; he observed the three-man crew for this prototype - the pilot, the copilot, and the navigator - boarding the experimental test saucer. He watched them get inside the cockpit with some trepidation, remembering the whole mess which had taken place a few years ago during an experimental rocket launch, but he was hopeful this launch was going to be more successful.
Quatermass watched as the saucer took off much like a conventional plane - he hoped that jet engines were just the first step to perfecting space travel, and nothing permanent; he didn't like the thought of space travel being dependent on jet engines or rockets, but it was a start and headed off into the atmosphere.
"How are they doing?" He asked a few minutes later after the takeoff.
The radio technician was silent for a moment before he lifted his head with a grin on his face. "They are leaving the atmosphere now, Professor," the technician reported with a growing smile, "their rocket engines have just kicked in…. They're entering space!….Wait…," the technicians' smile faded a little as he continued to listen in to what the co-pilot was saying, "they're activating their ion engines, and they've set a course for the moon! The crew are currently taking pictures but they'll be going out of contact soon."
Quatermass let out a deep breath. "Good," he managed to force out of his mouth, "I want the radio equipment kept under constant surveillance. When they come back in range, I want to hear it."
"Right, professor."
When contact did come through two days later, there was nothing but tension within the British Rocket Group; all of them knew this project was vital, and many of the scientists and engineers had put their best efforts into the saucer project so it gave them renewable space travel.
If any of that equipment or knowledge was lost…
Fortunately, when the saucer crew got back into contact with the BRG two days later, the tired but excited crew got out of the ship and allowed the scientists on the base to examine the flight data and the photographs accumulated over the past two days. As he studied the photographs in his office, Bernard felt himself growing increasingly excited.
They'd done it.
They had managed to build a spaceship that was renewable and powerful enough to get them into space for short periods, but short periods eventually led to longer periods of time, and with all of the data accumulated it would take the Rocket Group time to come up with more advanced saucer-spaceplanes, but the way was there.
The stars would soon offer up their secrets.