Despite his warnings, the media event occurs, and the power cables that string into the craft fully activate it for the first time. Glowing and humming like a living thing, it starts drawing upon this energy source and awakening the ancient racial programming. Those people of London in whom the alien admixture remains strong fall under the ship's influence; they merge into a group mind and begin a telekinetic mass murder of those without the alien genes, an 'ethnic cleansing' of those that the alien race mind considers impure and weak.
Breen stands transfixed and is eventually consumed by the energies from the craft as it slowly melts away and a holographic image of a Martian "devil" floats in the sky above London. Fires and riots spread, and even a passing aircraft is affected and crashes into the city. Quatermass himself almost succumbs to the mass psychosis, attempting to kill Roney, who does not have the alien gene and is immune to the influence. Roney manages to shake Quatermass out of his trance, and together they realise that the floating image is the source of the mass psychosis. Even without the craft and electricity, it is now draining the combined psychic energy of London.
Remembering the legends of demons and their aversion to iron and water, Roney deduces that a sufficient mass of iron connected to wet earth may be enough to short the apparition out. Quatermass gets a length of iron chain and tries to reach the "devil" but succumbs to the psychic pressure. It is Roney who manages to hurl the chain into the fiery image and end the madness, but both he and the craft are reduced to ashes.
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