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Ghosts of the Past.

Professor Bernard Quatermass stared at the letter in his hands. He had been staring at it, sitting in his office chair at the British Rocket group like a statue while he hoped and prayed the letter was a dream, that it wasn't real. But each time he pinched himself and closed his eyes, and then reopened them again, Quatermass realised it was not a dream.

It was real.

The letter was from the government, the Ministry of Defence. They were planning on taking over the rocket program, and although they didn't say precisely what they planned to do, the fact it was coming from the Ministry of Defence was telling; they planned on using his rocket research for military purposes, but the letter was not clear on what their work would entail, what they would do, but one thing was clear. They planned on turning his work inwards, caring more for military might than scientific truth.

Instead of reaching for space, instead of looking outwards into space and seeing a wonder to explore with the solar system's secrets laid bare in front of them, and maybe even beyond the solar system, the MoD wanted to just focus on blowing the planet up. They might not have said it, but ever since the atom bombs that blew up in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the last war, it was becoming increasingly obvious, that science was a slave to destruction; the more knowledge that was used and discovered, the greater the military potential.

Quatermass shuddered at the thought of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings; his field of science was rocketry and physics, not nuclear physics, but Quatermass understood the science well enough and had worked with it to know if the nuclear side was joined with rockets, it would cause more destruction that the Blitz would look like a summer breeze.

Closing his eyes for a minute, Quatermass once more wished this was a bad dream; the person who wrote this letter didn't know what he had been through during the War, how he had worked with the War Effort, but there were likely a few people behind the writing of this bloody thing who remembered how he had tried and failed to build an experimental war rocket as the V2s dropped on London, and the deaths of the people who paid the price for his efforts, killing him with the guilt.

The British government had known about his interest and involvement with the rocket research programs in the past, how he had even visited Nazi Germany (he would not think of the deplorable things he had seen underneath the molecule thin layer of respectability underneath the gleaming Nazi facades, or how that innocent Jewish family were persecuted) to meet Werner Von Braun and the German rocket programme and exchange ideas and theories; sometimes Bernard thought about the lives killed in the war by the doodlebugs, and he wondered if he had contributed to them, and if the blood of the people lost was on his hands.

When he had gone to contribute to the war effort, Quatermass had been willing to help, but when people died because the equipment they were using and the chemicals and fuels needed for the rockets were substandard. The damn U-Boats were sinking ships carrying foods and materials and chemicals Britain had needed for their war effort against Nazi Germany, so they had been forced to work with what they had. Make do.

But where people would make do with materials for guns since they'd been around for decades, rockets were too new and required specialised technology. An accident was inevitable and it left him guilt-ridden for years afterwards.

Quatermass had never told anyone about his experiences working for the government, and ever since the war, he had sworn never to tell anyone about his guilt, his pain and he had buried himself in the pursuit of using rockets for good.

He knew they could be good; that mess with the alien plant aside, they had learnt a great deal by sending probes into space armed with highly advanced cameras and different scientific instruments built for withstanding the rigours of outer space so they could expand humanity's knowledge of the universe.

He didn't want to build robots for warfare.

This was really happening, but at the same time, he wasn't truly surprised that the letter had come from the government. He didn't have much time or need for politics; to him, governments changed, they came and they went and they kept promising things they couldn't keep, but for some time now his friends had been warning him for years since he had started the Rocket Group with foresighted government backing to not expect the direction of his work, that into space exploration, for science, to continue.

It looked like they were right, but at the same time in the back of his mind, Professor Quatermass had known from the moment the Rocket Group was founded, that this could happen. The applications for the rocket technology were tremendous, and the British government had a long memory when it came to rockets; the scars left over from the German rockets used in the last war was still there, but it also made the government desperate; the mindset behind such thinking was if an enemy had something, they had to have it themselves or to possess a weapon nobody else possessed. It was a mindset Quatermass despised.

The good news was there was a meeting between himself and the military, and the government officials behind all of this. Quatermass planned on attending that meeting; he didn't know if it was worth it, but they would listen to him if it was the last thing he did. He needed to make it clear to them that all they needed was to explore space rather than exploit it for military use. It might do no good, ultimately, but it would need to be said.

Now all he needed to do was to exorcise the images that were haunting him, of the people lost in the war because of his help with the German rocket programme, and the people who had died during the early experiments.