This is the script of the third television serial involving Professor Bernard Quatermass. The Quatermass Experiment and Quatermass II have already been published as Penguins. The same central character appears in all these, but otherwise they are not connected.

When this story opens Quatermass is in London for conferences at the War Office. His rocket research station, hitherto purely scientific in its objects, is being taken over by the military for the furtherance of a terrible space-war project to be known as the Dead Man's Deterrent.

But the nation whose destiny they are discussing has its attention on the past. The news topic of the moment is a building site at Knightsbridge, where excavations have uncovered fossil bones of man-apes estimated to be five million years old. Then, at a still deeper level in the pit, something else is found which is soon claiming Quatermass's expert attention. It leads him through encounters with superstition, ritual, and magic — to a new and alarming conception of the very nature of humanity.

Hobbs Lane, in central London, has been the scene of mysterious incidents for centuries past. Stories of hauntings and of strange apparitions abound...and now an excavation crew have discovered parts of a skeleton that contradict all previous theories of Man's ancestry.

Professor Quatermass is in London for top-level talks on a military project for the furtherance of space war — an enterprise to which Quatermass is violently opposed. But his attention is drawn away from the battle with officialdom, when the Hobbs Lane site yields an even more startling find — a vast rocket made of metal unknown to science. And soon after that, the terror begins...