Quatermass and the Pit

Professor Quatermass is resisting the planners of a rocket project known as the Dead Mans Deterrent. Meanwhile excavation is going on at Hobbs Lane, long the site of reported imps and devils.

The shell of the object is so hard that even a borazon drill makes no impression, and when the attempt is made, strange vibrations cause severe distress in the people around the object. Quatermass interviews the local residents and discovers that sightings of ghosts and other poltergeist activity have been common in the area for decades. Meanwhile, a soldier is carried out of the object in hysterics — he claims to have seen a dwarf-like apparition walk through the wall of the artefact, a description which matches a 1927 newspaper account of a ghost sighting. Following the drilling attempt, a hole has somehow opened up in the wall which allows Quatermass and the others access to the interior chamber.

Quatermass plans to use an invention of Roneys, an "optic-encephalogram", to see these visions. The device will record impressions from the optical centres of the brain, in effect showing whatever the subject is seeing, hallucinatory or not. He wears the device and goes into the craft, but it is Roneys assistant, Barbara Judd, who is affected most. Placing the device on her, they record what she "sees"—a violent, bloody purge of the Martian hive, to root out unwanted mutations.