This is the script of the second Quatermass serial, as presented on television. The Quatermass Experiment has already been published as a Penguin (see inside back cover), and Quatermass and the Pit will follow shortly. The same central character appears in all three, but otherwise the stories are not connected.

The title of this volume is the code name for a giant rocket, which forms the basis of Professor Bernard Quatermass's ambitious Moon Project. While working on its technical faults at his research station, he is interrupted by a disturbing discovery: here on earth, at a lonely point on the English coast, something weirdly suggestive of his own project is already in an advanced stage of construction.

Quatermass determines to investigate — and finds he has to break through every kind of barrier, from barbed wire and armed security guards to what seems the most perverse brand of Whitehall bureaucracy. What he gradually uncovers is something infinitely more sinister than any of these.

For some time, Professor Quatermass has been aware that a series of inexplicable events are the subject of a Whitehall cover-up.

Reports of UFO sightings have been suppressed; no explanation has been given for the extraordinarily high incidence of meteorite strikes on the earth; and an entire village has been razed to the ground to make way for a clandestine Government project.

Quatermass determines to penetrate the web of secrecy — and is soon involved in a desperate race to preserve life on earth.