The Sheep Look Up (3 page)

THE OPPOSITE OF OVENS

White tile, white enamel, stainless steel ... One spoke here in hushed tones, as though in a church. But that was because of the echoes from the hard walls, hard floor, hard ceiling, not out of respect for what was hidden behind the oblong doors, one above another from ankle-level to the height of a tall man’s head, one next to another almost as far as the eye could see. Like an endless series of ovens, except that they weren’t to cool, but to chill.

The man walking ahead of her was white, too—coat, pants, surgical mask at present dangling below his chin, tight ugly cap around his hair. Even plastic overshoes also white. Apart from what she had brought in with her, dull brown, there was effectively only one other color in here.

Blood-red.

A man going the other way wheeling a trolley laden with waxed-paper containers (white) labeled (in red) for delivery to the labs attached to this morgue. While he and her companion exchanged helloes, Peg Mankiewicz read some of the directions: 108562 SPLEEN SUSP TYPH CULT, 108563 LIVER VERIFY DEGEN CHGES, 108565 MARSH TEST.

“What’s a Marsh test?” she said.

“Presence of arsenic,” Dr. Stanway answered, sidling past the trolley and continuing down the long line of corpse closets. He was a pale man, as though his environment had bleached every strong tint out of him; his cheeks had the shade and texture of the organ containers, his visible hair was ash-blond, and his eyes were the dilute blue of shallow water. Peg found him more tolerable than the rest of the morgue staff. He was devoid of emotion—either that, or absolutely homosexual—and never plagued her with the jocular passes most of his colleagues indulged in.

Shit. Maybe I should take a wash in vitriol!

She was beautiful: slim, five-six, with satin skin, huge dark eyes, a mouth juicier than peaches. Especially modern peaches. But she hated it because it meant she was forever being hounded by men collecting pubic scalps. Coming on butch was no help; it was that much more of a challenge to men and started the ki-ki types after her as well. Without make-up, perfume or jewelry, in a deliberately unflattering brown coat and drab shoes, she still felt like a pot of honey surrounded by noisy flies.

Poised to unzip if she so much as smiled.

To distract herself she said, “A murder case?”

“No, that suit someone filed in Orange County. Accused a fruit grower of using an illegal spray.” Eyes roaming the numbered doors. “Ah, here we are.”

But he didn’t open the compartment at once.

“He isn’t pretty, you know,” he said after a pause. “The car splattered his brains all over everywhere.”

Peg buried her hands in the pockets of her coat so that he couldn’t see how pale her knuckles were. It might, just conceivably might be a thief who’d stolen his ID. ...

“Go ahead,” she said.

And it wasn’t a thief.

The whole right-hand side of the dark head was—well,
soft.
Also the lower eyelid had been torn away and only roughly laid back where it belonged, so the underside of the eyeball was exposed. A graze clotted with blood rasped from the level of the mouth down and out of sight beneath the chin. And the crown was so badly smashed, they’d put a kind of Saran sack around it, to hold it together.

But it was pointless to pretend this wasn’t Decimus.

“Well?” Stanway said at length.

“Yes, put him away.”

He complied. Turning to lead her to the entrance again, he said, “How did you hear about this? And what makes the guy so important?”

“Oh ... People call the paper, you know. Like ambulance-drivers. We give them a few bucks for tipping us off.”

As though floating ahead of her like a horrible sick-joke balloon on a string: the softened face. She swallowed hard against nausea.

“And he’s—I mean he was—one of Austin Train’s top men.”

Stanway turned his head sharply. “No wonder you’re interested, then! Local guy, was he? I heard Trainites were out in force again today.”

“No, from Colorado. Runs—ran—a wat near Denver.”

They had come to the end of the corridor between the anti-ovens. With the formal politeness due to her sex, which she ordinarily detested but could accept from this man on a host-and-guest basis, Stanway held the door for her to pass through ahead of him and noticed her properly for the first time since her arrival.

“Say! Would you like to—uh ...?” A poor communicator, this Stanway, at least where women were concerned. “Would you like to sit down? You’re kind of green.”

“No thanks!” Over-forcefully. Peg hated to display any sign of weakness for fear it might be interpreted as “feminine.” She relented fractionally a second later. Of all the men she knew she suspected this one least of hoping to exploit chinks in her guard.

“You see,” she admitted, “I knew him.”

“Ah.” Satisfied “A close friend?”

There was another corridor here, floored with soft green resilient composition and wallpapered with drifts of monotonous Muzak. A girl came out of a gilt-lettered door bearing a tray of coffee-cups. Peg scented fragrant steam.

“Yes ... Have the police sent anyone to check on him?”

“Not yet. I hear they’re kind of overloaded. The demonstration, I guess.”

“Did they take his belongings from the car?”

“I guess they must have. We didn’t even get his ID— just one of those forms they fill out at the scene of the accident.” Dealing with Christ knew how many such per day, Stanway displayed no particular interest. “Way I read it, though, they’d be concerned. Must have been stoned to do what he did. And if he was one of Train’s top men they’re bound to show up soon, aren’t they?”

They hadn’t yet reached the door to the outside, but Peg hastily put on her filtermask.

It covered so much of her traitorous face.

It was a long walk to where she had left her car: a Hailey, of course, on principle. Her vision was so blurred by the time she reached it—not merely because the air stung her eyes—that she twice tried to put the key in the lock upside-down. When she finally realized, she was so annoyed she broke a nail dragging open the door.

And thrust the finger into her mouth and instead of nibbling away the broken bit, tore it. Her finger bled.

But at least the pain offered an anchor to reality. Calming, she wrapped around the injury a tissue from the glove-compartment and thought about calling in her story. It was a story. It would make the TV news services as well as the paper. Killed on the freeway: Decimus Jones, age thirty, busted twice for pot and once for assault, smeared with an average quantity of the grime a young black nowadays expected to acquire. But suddenly reformed (it says here) by the precepts of Austin Train at twenty-six, mastermind of Trainite operations when they spread to Colorado ... not that he would have acknowledged the name “Trainite” any more than Austin did. Austin said the proper term was “commie”, for “commensalist,” meaning that you and your dog, and the flea on the dog’s back, and the cow and the horse and the jackrabbit and the gopher and the nematode and the paramecium and the spirochete all sit down to the same table in the end. But that had been just a debating point, when he got sick of people screaming at him that he was a traitor.

Ought to make sure Decimus gets returned to the biosphere right away. Forgot to mention that. Should I go back? Hell, I guess he put it in his will. If they take any notice of a black man’s will ...

Somebody’s going to have to tell Austin. It would be terrible if he first learned the news in print or from TV.

Me?

Oh, shit Yes. I’m the first to latch on. So it has to be me.

Her mind was abruptly a chaos of muddled images, as though three people had taken simultaneous possession of her head. Stanway by chance had asked precisely that question she felt constrained to answer honestly: “A close friend?”

Close? More like only! Why? Because he was black and happily married and not interested any more in the exoticism of white girls? (Who’ll tell Zena and the kids?) Partly, maybe. But what mattered was that Decimus Jones, healthy, male and hetero, had treated luscious tempting Peg Mankiewicz ... as a friend.

It had better be Austin who tells Zena. I
couldn’t.
And a merry Christmas to you all.

After that the confusion became total. She could foresee events fanning out from this death as though she were reading a crystal ball. Everyone would automatically echo Stanway: “Jumping out of his car that way he must have been stoned—or maybe crazy!”

Yet she’d known him as a very sane man, and being stoned belonged too far back in his past So it could never have been of his own volition. So somebody must have slipped him a cap of something fierce. And there was only one motive she could think of for doing that. To discredit him at any cost.

She suddenly realized she had been staring, without seeing, at proof of a Trainite’s passage through this parking lot, a skull and crossbones on the door of a car parked slantwise to hers. Her own, naturally, would be unmarked.

Yes. It must have been done to discredit Decimus. Must have. These stereotyped interchangeable plastic people with dollar signs in their eyes couldn’t bear to share their half-ruined planet with anyone who climbed out of his ordained grooves. A black JD dropout was meant to die in a street brawl, or better yet in jail partway through a spell of ninety-nine. For him to be loved and looked up to like a doctor or a priest, by white as well as black—that turned their stomachs!

Turned stomach. Oh, Christ. She fumbled in her purse for a pill she should have taken over an hour ago. And forced it down despite its size without water.

Usually, nowadays, one had to.

Finally she decided she was getting maudlin and twisted the key in the dashboard lock. There was steam stored from the trip to get here and the car moved silently and instantly away.

And cleanly. No lead alkyls, hardly any CO, nothing worse than CO
₂
and water. Praise be, if Anyone is listening, for those who struggle to save us from the consequences of our own mad cleverness.

At the exit from the lot, if she had been going to the office she would have turned right. Instead she turned left. There were probably not more than a hundred people in the country who could rely on locating Austin Train when they wanted to. If her editor had known that among them was one of his own reporters who had never used the information for professional purposes, he would have come after her with a gun.

THE BLEEDING HEART IS A RUNNING SORE

...
veteran of campaigns in Indochina and the Philippines today became the latest of many distinguished ex-officers to join the Double-V adoption plan, taking into his family an orphaned girl aged eight with severe scars allegedly due to napalm burns. Commenting on his decision the general said, quote, I was not at war with children, only with those seeking the destruction of our way of life. End quote. Questioned concerning his reaction to the growth of the Double-V scheme prior to leaving the White House for his main engagement of the day, a luncheon organized by former members of his official fan club at which he is slated to deliver a major speech on foreign affairs, Prexy said, quote, I guess if they can’t break down the front door they have to sneak around the back. End quote. The Congressional inquiry into alleged bribe-taking by officials of the Federal Land Use Commission...

THE ROOT OF THE TROUBLE

“Te-goosey-goosey-galpa—” The rain was pelting down so hard the wipers of the Land Rover could barely cope, and the road was terrible. Despite four-wheel drive they were continually sliding and skidding, and every now and then they met a pothole which made Leonard Ross wince.

“Knock ’er down and scalp ’er—”

Dr. Williams’s singing was barely audible above the roar of the engine and the hammering of the rain, but it was just possible to discern that the tune belonged to a nursery rhyme: Goosey Gander.

“Up hers! H’ and your ass—”

Another pothole. Leonard reflexively glanced back to see if his equipment was okay, and wished he hadn’t. The rear seat was also occupied by the policeman assigned to escort him, who had a repulsive weeping skin condition, and Leonard’s stomach was queasy enough anyhow.

“Nobody will
halp
’er!” concluded Williams triumphantly, and added without drawing a fresh breath, “How long have you been with Globe Relief?”

“Oh ...” For an instant Leonard didn’t realize the question was a question. “About four years now.”

“And you’ve never been to this part of the world before?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Bloody typical!” With a snort. “At least I hope they gave you all the gen?”

Leonard nodded. They had submerged him with masses of data, and his head was still ringing. But this country was so full of paradoxes! To start with, when he’d seen that the name of his contact at Guanagua was Williams, he’d assumed an American. He hadn’t been prepared for a manic Briton who wore a Harris tweed jacket in this stinking sub-tropical humidity. Yet it seemed of a piece with a nation whose first capital, for 357 years, had been demoted because the citizens objected to the governor keeping a mistress; whose current capital was so relatively unimportant it had never had a railroad, and the international airlines had given up servicing it ...

“Every time someone tries to haul this country up by its bootstraps,” Williams said, “something goes wrong. Act of God! Though if that’s really how He likes to amuse Himself, no wonder the Tupamaros are making so much headway! Not around here, of course, but in the cities. Look at this road! By local standards it’s a ruddy highway. It’s so damned difficult to get goods to market, most people haven’t the currency to buy manufactured goods, even proper tools. But now and then someone whips up enthusiasm for cash crops instead of subsistence crops—cotton, coffee, that sort of thing—and it swings along for a while and then all of a sudden, crash. Their hard work goes for nothing. Like this time. Come and see for yourself.”

Unexpectedly he braked the Land Rover at a spot where rocks as high as a man’s knee flanked the track. Peering through the rain-smeared windshield, Leonard made out that they had arrived within sight of a shabby village surrounded on two sides by lines of coffee plants, on the others by maize and beans. The layout suggested competent husbandry, but every single plant was wilted.