The Sheep Look Up (4 page)

Jumping out, Williams added, “Bring your gear!”

“Ah—”

“Look, the rain isn’t going to stop for bloody weeks, you know, so you might as well get used to it!”

Reluctantly Leonard picked up his field kit and ducked into the downpour. His glasses blurred instantly, but his sight was too bad for him to discard them. Water trickling down his collar, he followed the line Williams had marked across the sodden ground.

“Doesn’t matter where you look,” Williams said, stopping level with the nearest coffee plant. “You’ll find the buggers anywhere.”

Compliantly Leonard began to trowel in the mud. He said after a pause, “You’re English, aren’t you, doctor?”

“Welsh, actually.” In a frigid tone.

“Do you mind if I ask what brought you here?”

“A girl, if you really want to know.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“Pry? Of course not. But I’ll tell you anyway. She was the daughter of one of the embassy staff in London. Very beautiful. I was twenty-four, she was nineteen. But her people were Catholics from Comayagua, where they’re strict, and naturally they didn’t want her marrying a Methodist. So they shipped her home. I finished my studies, saving like mad to buy a passage here, thinking that if I could convince them I was serious ... Hell, I’d have converted if I’d had to!”

Down there close to the scrawny root of the coffee plant: something wriggling. “And what happened?”

“I got here and discovered she was dead.”

“What?”

“Typhus. It’s endemic. And this was 1949.”

There seemed to be nothing else anyone could possibly say. Leonard dragged up a clod of dirt and broke it in his hands. Exposed, a frantic creature two inches long, at first glance not unlike an earthworm, but of a bluish-red color, with a slight thickening at one end and a few minute bristles, and writhing with more energy than any earthworm ever had.

“Yet, you know, I’ve never regretted staying here. There has to be someone on the spot to help these people—it’s no use trying to do it all by remote control ... Ah, you got one of them, did you?” His tone reverted to normal. “Recognize it, by any chance? I can’t find a technical name for it in the literature. Of course my reference-books aren’t up to much. In Spanish it’s
sotojuela,
but around here they say
jigra.”

One-handed, leaving fingermarks of mud, Leonard extracted a test-tube from his kit and dropped the pest into it. He tried to examine it with his folding glass, but the rain splashed down too heavily.

“If I could get a look at it under cover,” he muttered.

There may be a roof in the village that isn’t leaking. May be ... And this is what the buggers do to the plants, see?” Williams pulled a coffee bush casually out of the ground. It offered no resistance. The stem was spongy with bore-holes and the foliage limp and sickly.

“They attack corn and beans as well?” Leonard asked.

“Haven’t found anything they won’t eat yet!”

In the hole left by the uprooted plant, five or six of them squirming to hide.

“And how long have they been a nuisance?”

“They’ve always been a nuisance,” Williams said. “But until—oh, about the time they cleared this patch for coffee, you only found them in the forest, living off the underbrush. I didn’t see more than half a dozen the first ten years I spent at Guanagua. Then about two and a half years ago, boom!”

Leonard straightened, his legs grateful to be released from stooping. “Well, there’s no doubt that this is an emergency, as you claimed. So I’ll apply for authorization to use high-strength insecticides, and then when we’ve—”

“How
long did you say you’d been with Globe Relief?”

Leonard blinked at him. Suddenly he was unaccountably angry.

“Who do you think this ground belongs to, anyway? We’re on the private estate of some high government muckamuck who can bend the law as much as he likes! This area’s been sprayed and soaked and
saturated
with insecticides!”

From the direction of the village, walking very slowly, a straggling line of men, women and children had emerged. All were thin, all were ragged and barefoot, and several of the children had the belly-bloat characteristic of pellagra.

“The idiot’s made the
jigras
resistant to DDT, heptachlor, dieldrin, pyrethrum, the bloody lot! Think I was such a fool the idea hadn’t crossed my mind to check? Those people don’t need chemicals, they need
food!”

DEFICIT

Petronella Page:
Hi, world!

Studio audience:
Hi!

Page:
Well, this time as ever we have for you all kinds of people making news. Among others we’re to welcome Big Mama Prescott whose hit “The Man with the Forty-Five” is currently the center of a fierce debate about the proper—or improper—material for pop songs. (
Audience laughter.
) And then we’ll be talking to a whole group of the ex-officers who’ve given so many children from Southeast Asia the best of all Christmas presents, a new home and a new family. But first off let’s welcome someone who’s been making headlines in a different area. He’s a scientist, and you’ve been hearing about him because—well, because if his calculations are right they bode not too well for the future of this nation. Here he is, Professor Lucas Quarrey of Columbia. (
Applause.
)

Quarrey:
Good eve—I mean, hello, everyone.

Page:
Lucas, because not as much attention is paid to scientific matters these days as perhaps ought to be, maybe you’d refresh the viewers’ memories concerning the subject that put you in the news.

Quarrey:
Gladly, and if there’s someone watching who hasn’t heard about this it’ll come as—uh—as much of a surprise as it did to me when I first saw the print-out from the university computers. Asked to guess what’s the largest single item imported by the United States, people might nominate lots of things—iron, aluminum, copper, many raw materials we no longer possess in economic quantities.

Page:
And they’d be wrong?

Quarrey:
Very wrong indeed. And they’d be just as wrong if they were asked to name our largest single export, too.

Page:
So what is our largest import?

Quarrey:
Ton for ton—oxygen. We produce less than sixty per cent of the amount we consume.

Page:
And our biggest export?

Quarrey:
Ton for ton again, it’s noxious gases.

Page:
Ah, now this is where the controversy has arisen, isn’t it? A lot of people have been wondering how you can claim to trace—oh, smoke from New Jersey clear across the Atlantic. Particularly since you’re not a meteorologist or weather scientist. What is your specialty in fact?

Quarrey:
Particle precipitation. I’m currently heading a research project designing more compact and efficient filters.

Page:
For what—cars?

Quarrey:
Oh yes. And buses, and factories too. But mainly for aircraft cabins. We have a commission from a major airline to try and improve cabin air at high altitude. On the most traveled routes the air is so full of exhaust fumes from other planes, passengers get airsick even on a dead calm day—
especially
on a dead calm day, because it takes longer for the fumes to disperse.

Page:
So you had to start by analyzing what you needed to filter out, right?

Quarrey:
Precisely. I designed a gadget to be mounted on the wing of a plane and catch the contaminants on little sticky plates—I have one here, I don’t know if your viewers can see it clearly ... Yes? Fine. Well, each unit has fifty of these plates, time-switched to collect samples at various stages of a journey. And by plotting the results on a map I’ve been able to pin down—like you said—factory-smoke from New Jersey over nearly two thousand miles.

Page:
Lots of people argue that can’t be done with the accuracy you claim.

Quarrey:
I wish the people who say that would take the trouble to find out what my equipment is capable of.

Page:
Now this is all very disturbing, isn’t it? Most people have the impression that since the passage of the Environment Acts things have taken a turn for the better.

Quarrey:
I’m afraid this seems to be—uh—an optical illusion, so to speak. For one thing, the Acts don’t have enough teeth. One can apply for all kinds of postponements, exemptions, stays of execution, and of course companies which would have their profits shaved by complying with the new regulations use every possible means to evade them. And the other point is that we aren’t being as watchful as we used to be. There was a brief flurry of anxiety a few years ago, and the Environment Acts were introduced, as you said, and ever since then we’ve been sitting back assuming the situation was being taken care of, although in fact it isn’t.

Page:
I see. Now what do you say to people who maintain that publicizing these allegations of yours is—well, not in the best interests of this country?

Quarrey:
You don’t serve your country by sweeping unpleasant facts under the carpet. We’re not exactly the most popular nation in the world right now, and my view is that we ought to put a stop right away to anything that’s apt to make us even less well liked.

Page:
I guess there could be something in that. Well, thanks for coming and talking to us, Lucas. Now, right after this next break for station identification...

IN SPITE OF HAVING CHARITY A MAN LIKE SOUNDING BRASS

“I guess the nearest analogy would be with cheese,” said Mr. Bamberly. To show he was paying attention Hugh Pettingill gave a nod. He was twenty, dark-haired, brown-eyed, with a permanently bad-tempered set to his face—pouting mouth, narrowed eyes, prematurely creased forehead. That had been stamped on him during the bad years from fourteen to nineteen. Allegedly this was the first of many good years he was currently living through, and he was fair-minded enough to expose himself to the possibility of being convinced.

This had started with an argument concerning his future. During it he had said something to the effect that the rich industrial countries were ruining the planet, and he was determined never to have anything to do with commerce, or technology, or the armed forces for which Mr. Bamberley retained an archaic admiration. Whereupon: this instruction, too firmly phrased to be termed an invitation, to go on a guided tour of the hydroponics plant and find out how constructively technology might be applied.

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t improve on nature!” Mr. Bamberley had chuckled.

Hugh had kept his counter to himself: “So what has to happen before you realize you haven’t?”

Portly, but muscular, Mr. Bamberley strode along the steel walkway that spined the roof of the factory, his arms shooting to left and right as he indicated the various stages through which the hydroponically-grown cassava they started with had to pass before it emerged as the end product, “Nutripon.” There was a vaguely yeasty smell under the huge semi-transparent dome, as though a baker’s shop had been taken over by oil technicians.

And in some senses that was an apt comparison. The Bamberley fortune had been made in oil, though that was two generations back and neither this Mr. Bamberley—whose Christian name was Jacob but who preferred to be called Jack—nor his younger brother Roland had ever stumped around in the slush below a derrick. The fortune had long ago grown to the point where it was not only self-supporting but capable of fission, like an amoeba. Roland’s portion was his own, greedily clung to, and destined to descend to his only son Hector (whom Hugh regarded on the strength of their sole meeting as a cotton-wool-wrapped snob ... but that couldn’t be his fault at fifteen, must be his father’s); Jacob had vested his in the Bamberley Trust Corporation twenty years ago, since when it had multiplied cancerously.

Hugh had no idea how many people were involved in cultivating the funds of the Trust, since he had never been to the New York office where its tenders hung out, but he pictured a blurred group of several hundred pruning, manuring, watering. The horticultural images came readily to hand because his adopted father had turned the former family ranch, here in Colorado, into one of the finest botanical gardens in the country. All that had taken on reality in his mind, however, as far as the Trust was concerned, was the central fact that the sum was now so vast, Jacob Bamberley could afford to run this, the world’s largest hydroponics factory, as a charitable undertaking. Employing six hundred people, it sold its product at cost and sometimes below, and every last ounce of what was made here was shipped abroad.

Lord Bountiful. Well, it was a better way to use inherited money than the one Roland had chosen, lavishing it all on yourself and your son so that he would never have to face the harsh real world ...

“Cheese,” Mr. Bamberley said again. They were overlooking a number of perfectly round vats in which something that distantly resembled spaghetti was being churned in a clear steaming liquid. A masked man in a sterile coverall was taking samples from the vats with a long ladle.

“You give it some kind of chemical treatment here?” Hugh ventured. He hoped this wasn’t going to drag on too long; he’d had diarrhea this morning and his stomach was grumbling again.

“Minor correction,” Mr. Bamberley said, eyes twinkling. “ ‘Chemical’ is full of wrong associations. Cassava is tricky to handle, though, because its rind contains some highly poisonous compounds. Still, there’s nothing extraordinary about a plant some bits of which are safe to eat and other bits of which are not. Probably you can think of other examples?”

Hugh repressed a sigh. He had never said so outright, being far too conscious of the obligations he owed to Jack (orphaned at fourteen in an urban insurrection, dumped in an adolescents’ hostel, picked apparently at random to be added to this plump smiling man’s growing family of adopted sons: so far, eight), but there were times when he found his habit of asking this kind of question irritating. It was the mannerism of a poor teacher who had grasped the point about making children find out for themselves but not the technique of making them want to ask suitable questions.