The Sheep Look Up (19 page)

He slid up the blind of his window and peered out. There was no moon visible. When he consulted his diary he discovered that it had set, a tiny sliver, at exactly the time the plane had taken off from London.

Turn right and go home. (He realized he was in his home time zone.)

Wish I could.

APRIL

HERO FIDDLING

Hey, man with the big muscles!

Yes, you!

Steam-powered, gas-powered, electrically-powered,

You with the big concrete and cement footprints!

Globe-girdler, continent-tamer, putting the planet through hoops,

You I hail!

Packer and preserver of food in incorruptible cans,

Blocker-out of winter-blast with bricks and mortar,

Wheeled, shod, tracked with rails of shining iron,

Multiplier of goods and chattels, chewer-up of forests,

Furrow-maker across the unpopulous plains,

Flier higher than eagles, swimmer swifter than sharks,

Trafficker in the world’s wealth, miracle-worker,

I salute you, I sing your praises ...

—“Song of the States Unborn,” 1924

A VICTIM OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

“I’ve done
my
best,” Gerry Thorne said, sounding aggrieved, and well he might be. Both he and Moses Greenbriar had been doing nicely out of the aid shipments from the Bamberley hydroponics plant—half a cent per person fed had added up to a considerable sum over the years. Moreover, several of the left and center group in Congress, small though that might nowadays be, had been advocating purchase of Nutripon by organizations like Earth Community Chest to maintain the welfare allotments in major cities where right-wing mayors were axing their welfare budgets on grounds of economy. There had been fairly widespread starvation during the past winter.

“I can’t work miracles,” he added.

Well ... maybe only conjuring tricks. Like this second home in the Virgins, splendid with its high stone-and-timber walls and this verandah on which you could pretty often sit right outdoors, provided the wind was from the south, not from the fetid puddle of the Gulf of Mexico or the colossal revolving sewer of the Sargasso. Never mind that the venom of the Trainites had reached this far and there was a fading line of skull-and-crossbones symbols facing the sea. Nobody really begrudged such luxury to a man who’d made his money in a Good Cause. He might have gone to work for DuPont.

The most remarkable thing of all was that you could still swim from here; although the Canary Current did sometimes sweep the ordure of Europe this far over, the Antilles Current came from the relatively cleanly coast of underdeveloped South America. This morning’s Coast Guard bulletin had said the water was okay, so Elly Greenbriar and Nancy Thorne were proving it.

“But where the hell did the stuff come from? The drug, the whatever!” Thorne’s question was rhetorical; the UN inquiry had been set up to determine exactly that.

“Well, it wasn’t the factory,” Greenbriar said, and took another sip of his gin. “We asked the Federal Narcotics Bureau for one of their top forensic chemists, and he tested fifty random samples from the warehouse. All clean. We’re set to give his report to the inquiry next week, but it won’t be much help.”

“I guess not. We’ve got everybody against us now, from the stinking isolationists who ‘don’t see why we should give away our precious food to ungrateful bastards,’ clear to the ungrateful bastards themselves. Anyway, a denial never catches up with a rumor. Did you hear about the raid on San Diego, for example? Some crazy Mex-Tup kid—say, you heard that one? Petronella Page used it on her show the other night. Mex-Tup kid! I thought it was kind of neat.”

“What do you mean, raid?” grunted Greenbriar. “Raids, plural. Three so far, according to my cousin Sophie.”

“How many?”

“Three. Sophie’s lived out there for twenty years, but when she called me the other day she said she’s thinking of moving back east. After the first raid they had another—they don’t think it was the same gang, because the payload was thermite instead of napalm—and then there was a third that burned out a block of black tenements.”

“Bastards,” Thorne said. “Burning people in their homes, hell!” His eyes were following a ship that had emerged into blurred view from the haze to the north: new and smart, one of the latest deep-trawling fish factories designed to bring up squid from the relatively safe bottom water. Surface fish nowadays were either so rare as to be prohibitively expensive, like cod and herring, or hopelessly high in dangerous substances such as organic mercury. But so far squid were generally okay.

“Is that the second or third we’ve seen today?” Greenbriar asked.

“Third. Must be a good season for fishing ... I imagine you told your cousin she ought to move?”

“Oh, I’ve been telling her since the LA quake of ‘71, but of course she’d have taken such a loss on her home ... Still, I guess she’s finally made up her mind.”

“Speaking of losses,” Thorne murmured, “did you have stock in Angel City?”

Greenbriar gave a rueful smile.

“Me too. And they went through the floor. I switched into Puritan, but I lost a packet even so.”

“You take my advice,” Greenbriar said, “you switch right back
out
of Puritan.”

“Why in the world? They’re a Syndicate operation, aren’t they? Which makes them just about the solidest stock in the market.”

“Oh, sure, anything the Syndicate is backing turns to gold. But”—Greenbriar dropped his voice—“I hear gossip. Maybe only scuttlebutt, of course. Even so ...”

“Such as what?”

“The Trainites are after them.”

“Impossible!” Thorne jolted upright in his chair. “But the Trainites are on their side, always have been!”

“Then why are they conducting massive analyses of Puritan products?”

“Who says they are? Or even if they are, what does it signify? You know how paranoid they are about what they eat.”

“Paranoid enough to enlist Lucas Quarrey of Columbia?”

Thorne stared.

“It’s a fact,” Greenbriar said. “I know someone who knows him; in fact he’s done some minor contract work for the Trust now and then. Apparently he was discreetly approached the other day and asked if he would coordinate this project the Trainites’ own chemists have already launched.”

Thorne rounded his mouth into an O. “That’s a change of gear for them, isn’t it? But what can they hope to gain by attacking the only company that devotes itself exclusively to pure foods? Let alone bucking the Syndicate, of course.”

“My guess is that they want to try and drive their prices down. Maybe collect data on as many slip-ups as possible—in an operation that size, some stuff must leak through now and then which isn’t as good as the advertising claims—and use these as a pistol to hold to the company’s head.”

Thorne rubbed his chin. “Yes, that fits. I remember an article by Train in which he was very scathing about people profiteering from public concern about diet. Who’s behind this, though—it couldn’t be Train himself, could it?”

“Hardly. Train’s dead. Killed himself. I had it on very good authority. Never really recovered from his breakdown, you know. But I guess it could be one of these people who took over his name.” Greenbriar cocked his head and sniffed loudly. “Hey, spring must be really here!”

“What?” Bewildered, both at the irrelevance and also because here in the Virgins there was always luxuriant vegetation the year around.

Greenbriar chuckled. “Try a noseful. Violets!”

Thorne complied: hmff, hmff! “You’re right,” he said in surprise. “But if it’s that strong it’s not likely to be flowers, is it?”

“I guess not. Hmm! Very odd! Which way’s the wind now? Oh yes, it’s still off the water.” He stared down toward the beach where Elly and Nancy were splashing about in the shallows, obviously on their way back to the house.

Well, the world was full of mysteries. Thorne shrugged. “Looks as though they’re coming in for lunch,” he said. “I’ll just go tell—”

He was interrupted by a scream.

Both he and Greenbriar leapt from their chairs. Down there in the water Nancy was thrashing wildly about, and Elly, who had wandered some distance from her, had spun around to rush and help her.

“Quick!” Thorne snapped, dumped his glass on the handiest table and ran down the steps to the shore. He continued straight into the water as Elly tried to raise Nancy to her feet.

The stink of violets was incredibly strong.

“Look—out!” Nancy choked, and with one arm around Elly’s shoulders pointed to an object just barely showing above the water. Shapeless, encrusted, it could have been mistaken for a rock. But something yellowish was dispersing from it through a narrow crack in its end.

Thorne stared at his wife in horror. Her eyes were swelling, puffing out almost literally as he watched, turning the whole upper part of her face into a hideous bloated mass. Also her lips were dotted with pustules, her shoulders, her breasts.

“Moses! Phone a doctor!” he screamed. “Helicopter ambulance service!”

The fat man turned and stumbled back indoors, and in the same moment Nancy doubled over, vomiting, then slumped in a faint.

Helped by one of their local manservants who appeared in answer to Greenbriar’s frantic shouting, Thorne and Elly carried her awkwardly into the house, laid her down on a couch, sent the cook for clean water, soothing ointment, the first-aid kit.

“They’re sending the ambulance right away, with a doctor,” Greenbriar panted, hurrying back from the phone. “But what can have happened to her? A jellyfish?”

“Damn it, no!” But of course he hadn’t been down on the beach, seen the drum, or barrel, or whatever, half-sunk in the sand. “Did they say what we should do in the meantime?” Thorne demanded.

“I—” Greenbriar put his hand to his mouth in absurdly childlike fashion. “I didn’t ask.”

“Idiot!” Thorne was beside himself with panic. “Get right back and—”

But Greenbriar was already on his way.

“What the hell
can
it be?” Elly moaned.

“Lewisite,” the doctor said when he’d finished administering emergency oxygen. Not only the doctor, but a nurse and a sergeant of police had turned up in the helicopter.

“What’s that?” Thorne asked, bewildered.

“A poison gas.”

“What?”

“Yes, the smell of violets is unmistakable. I’ve seen two or three cases like this—not here, in Florida where I used to live. It’s an arsenical compound they invented in the First World War. Didn’t get around to using it, so they dumped it in the ocean. What happened in Florida was that they’d dropped a batch into the Hatteras Canyon, and one of these new deep-trawling fishing boats hauled a lot of it up. They had no idea what they’d got—after sixty years they were all crusted with barnacles and things, of course—so they cracked one of the drums open, thinking it might be valuable. When they found it was dangerous, they just pitched the lot overside again, but by then they were in shallow water and some of the drums smashed on the bottom rocks. A hell of a lot washed up on shore.”

“I never heard about that,” Thorne whispered.

“Would you expect to? It would have ruined the winter vacation trade—not that there’s much left of it anyway. I got out because I wanted clean beaches for my kids, not because Florida was so healthy I didn’t have enough patients!” With an ironical chuckle he turned to examine Nancy again; the oxygen had had its effect and she was breathing easier.

“I guess we can move her now,” he said. “Don’t worry too much. There may not be permanent scars. Though of course if she inhaled or swallowed the stuff ... Well, we’ll see.”

“This time,” Thorne said as though he hadn’t been listening, “the news is going to get around. I’ll see to that.”

DON’T TOUCH

...
alleging, quote, intelligence with a proscribed country. End quote. It’s claimed that he attempted to obtain air-pollution data from Cuban sources. Protesting the arrest, some two hundred students from Columbia were joined by approximately a thousand Trainites in a demonstration which the police dispersed with tear smoke. Eighty-eight hospitalizations were reported, but no deaths. Asked to comment just prior to his departure for Hollywood where he will again preside at the Oscar ceremonies, Prexy said, quote, If that’s the guy who claims we’re running short of oxygen, tell him I don’t find any difficulty in breathing. End quote. Heavy fighting again today in Guanagua province as Honduran government forces supported by American air cover...

REHEARSAL

Exactly what Hugh Pettingill had expected to find at the wat, he couldn’t have said. After only a short while, though, he was certain it wasn’t there. Day in, day out, he drifted through it and around it, watching the snows melt and spring come hesitantly to the surrounding high valleys. He didn’t click. He didn’t fit in. He felt excluded. And despite not being sure whether he wanted to fit in or not, he resented being denied the choice.

Physically, the environment was comfortable: shabby, pieced together from scrap, but practical and in many respects attractive. What jarred on him, though, was the way in which everyone at the wat took it for granted that this was a rehearsal: not for the aftermath of an allover war, just a dry run for the ordinary life of the twenty-first century. He couldn’t see it. For him it was more like escapism, running to hide from the real world.

Granted, they had some things going for them: the food, for example, though plain was delicious, better even than what he’d had at the Bamberleys’, and he ate voraciously of the savory soups, the home-baked bread, the vegetables and salads grown under glass. That interested him, a little. He hadn’t watched things grow before, except some pot seeds he’d planted at college, and for a while he joined in with some of the routine spring tasks out of doors. When he had to distribute the gallon of worms Felice had brought, though, he found the job so distasteful—tipping all those anonymous wrigglers out in doses of ten or a dozen and watching them dive among what was going to become food that he might eat—he moved on to other things. There was a handicrafts shop, and he helped in the making of some rough stools and tables, because last year for the first time ever more Americans had taken vacations inland than by the sea, and the idea was to run a restaurant for tourists during the coming summer, get some wholesome natural-grown food down them in the hope of showing them what they were missing. But turning out one stool exactly like another grew monotonous. He moved on again.