tour of the complex, which he is told has been built to manufacture synthetic food. Slipping away from the visiting party, Broadhead gets inside one of the large domes dominating the skyline. Quatermass later finds him dying, covered in a poisonous black slime, warning about what he discovered inside the dome. Shot at by guards as he exits, Quatermass escapes and rushes to Inspector Lomax, explaining that he believes that the complex is indeed making food, but not for human consumption. Its purpose is to provide a suitable living environment for small alien creatures being housed inside the huge domes. Lomax attempts to alert his superiors, but when he meets the Commissioner of Police, he notices that he, too, is sporting the V-shaped mark; the aliens have taken control of the government. Quatermass and Lomax then turn to journalist Jimmy Hall, who is skeptical of their story, but asks to visit Winnerden Flats. At the local community centre, they receive a hostile reception from locals employed to do heavy construction and other work at the complex but not told anything more than they need to know. The mood changes, however, when one of the meteorite-missiles crashes through the building roof, injuring barmaid Sheila. Armed guards arrive and gun down Hall as he telephones his newspaper. The villagers form a mob that marches on the complex. Rushing the gates, Quatermass, Lomax and the villagers barricade themselves inside the pressure control room. Realising that Earth's atmosphere must be poisonous to the aliens, Quatermass sabotages their life support system, pumping pure oxygen into the large domes. Simultaneously, Quatermass' assistant, Brand at the rocket complex, is killed by invading Winnerden Flats guards after he is able to launch an atomic rocket toward an asteroid believed to be alien's staging point. The individual aliens combine their small bodies to create huge 150-foot tall creatures that soon burst from their atmosphere domes. The rocket destroys the asteroid with a nuclear explosion. Their space base destroyed and now fully exposed to Earth's atmosphere, the giant masses of combined creatures collapse and die. The V-shaped marks disappear from those affected, leaving them with no memory of having been under alien control. As they head back to the village, Lomax wonders aloud how he'll make a believable report about all that's happened, and more pointedly, Quatermass questions just how final will that report be ... Production The first Quatermass