The Sheep Look Up

by John Brunner

  Hector said, “What ...?” Tried to sit up. Fell back. Tried again. He was big for his age, as tall as Hugh, and in first-rate physical shape. So he ought to be, the way he’d been coddled all his life.

  He nearly threw up—they’d left the chamber-pot handy in case—but managed not to. At the third attempt he reached a sitting position and focused his eyes. He was very pale, and there was a whimper in his voice when he said, “I ... Do I know you? I think I saw ...”

  It tailed away.

  “Where am I?” With a cry. “What am I doing here?”

  Hugh kept on looking steadily at him.

  “I do know you.” Putting both hands to his temples and swaying. “You’re ... No, I don’t know you after all.”

  There was a silence during which he recuperated from the worst effects and was able to drop his hands and regained a little color in his cheeks.

  “Where am I?” he said again.

  “Here.”

  “What are you going to do with me?”

  ‘Take care of you,” Hugh grunted. “Very good care. Expensive care. Look!” He reached under the bed, barely missing Hector’s feet, and drew out a plastic tray on which they had arranged food: sausage, salad, bread, fruit, cheese, and a water-glass. There was no don’t-drink notice in force at present, so they’d agreed to take the fact literally.

  “This is all from Puritan. Got that?”

  “I don’t understand!”

  “Simple enough,” Hugh sighed. “You are not going to be starved, that’s the first thing. You’re not going to be beaten—nothing like that.”

  “But ...” Hector took a firm grip on himself. Among the subjects they taught best at his expensive school was self-control. “All right, so I’m not here to be starved or beaten. What for, then?”

  “Because your father inherited a fortune made by ruining the earth. Now he stands to make another out of his ancestors’ shit. So we’re going to keep you here, and feed you—all stuff from Puritan, the best kind—until your dad agrees to install twenty thousand of his new water-filters free of charge.”

  But Hector wasn’t seriously listening. “I know who you are!” he said suddenly. “You had a quarrel with Uncle Jack and walked out!”

  “Did you understand what I told you?” Hugh scrambled to his feet. So much for wearing a filtermask!

  “Ah ... Yes, I guess so.” Hector looked nervous. Small wonder. “Say, I—uh—I need to go to the can.”

  Hugh pointed.

  “What? You mean you’re not even going to let me go to the bathroom?”

  “No. You can wash down at the sink. You’ll get a towel.” Hugh curled his lip, not that it showed. “Don’t know why you’re so eager for the bathroom anyhow. We don’t have one of your dad’s water-purifiers here. We have to take the regular supply. Think about that. You’ll have lots of time.”

  He reached with bunched knuckles to rap on the door, twice. Ossie had worked out a scheme: no one to go in the room without a mask, no one to go in without someone waiting outside behind the locked door, not to open until he heard the agreed number of knocks and that was to be changed every time.

  Prompt, Tab opened to him, and Carl was seen in the background poised to block an escape. Both were masked.

  Hugh stepped out and the door was slammed and locked.

  “All cool?” Carl demanded.

  “Shit, no. He recognized me.” Hugh threw aside his mask in disgust. “Ah, I guess he was bound to. I mean, people wear them so much of the time, you go by the eyes and forehead. Should have known I had to take the risk. Well, never mind.” Saying it made him feel bolder. He added, “Christ, khat makes me thirsty. Got a Coke or something?”

  “Here.” Chuck tossed one from a carton they had going in the corner. “Say, did he look at the books yet?”

  “Hell, of course not. Why?”

  Chuck grinned. “I put a stack of porn in with them. Might be handy for him while he’s alone.”

  EARTHWAKE

  “What the hell?” Elbow in the ribs. Philip Mason swore at his wife. It was dark. Also hot. But the windows had to be shut because of the smoke from the river fires.

  And then he realized: another stinking quake.

  He sat up. “Bad one?” he muttered, driving sleep from his eyes with the palms of his hands.

  “No, but Harold’s crying.” Denise was climbing out of bed, feet fumbling for slippers. There was another brief rumble and something rattled on her dressing-table: perfume bottles, maybe. A wail. No, a top-of-the-lungs yell.

  “Okay, I’ll come along, too,” Philip sighed, and swung his legs to the floor.

  THIS ISN’T THE END OF THE WORLD, IS IT?

  Normally Moses Greenbriar distributed greetings like largesse as he waddled toward his office every morning. Today he distributed snarls. He was soaking with perspiration—the air outside was appallingly hot and wet—and he was more than an hour late. He stormed into his office and slammed the door.

  “Dr. Grey has been waiting for you for over half an hour,” his secretary said nervously via the intercom.

  “Shut up! I know!”

  He fumbled the lid off a small bottle of capsules, gulped one down, and in a few minutes felt somewhat better. But it was still horribly hot and humid in here. He buzzed the secretary.

  “What the hell’s wrong with the air conditioning?”

  “Uh ... It’s overloaded, sir. It’s on maximum already. They promised to send someone along and adjust it next week.”

  “Next week!”

  “Yes, sir. They haven’t caught up the backlog they accumulated during the enteritis epidemic.”

  “Ah, hell!” Greenbriar wiped his face and peeled off his jacket. Who cared if he showed a wet shirt? So would everybody on a day like this. “Okay, send Dr. Grey in.”

  And, by the time Grey appeared in the doorway, he’d composed himself with the help of the pill into something resembling his normal affability.

  “Tom, do sit down. I’m sorry to have kept you hanging about—it was those dirty Trainites again.”

  “I hadn’t heard there was another demonstration today,” Grey said, crossing his legs. Greenbriar stared at him resentfully; the guy hardly showed a wrinkle, let alone a patch of sweat.

  He said, “Not a demonstration. They seem to have given up such harmless stunts, don’t they? I imagine you heard Hector Bamberley’s been kidnapped?”

  Grey nodded. “Was your trouble something to do with—?”

  “Shit, no.” Greenbriar seized a cigar and savagely bit off the end. “Though I can’t say it hasn’t caused plenty of trouble for us, that—what with Jack Bamberley dead, and Maud under sedation, we were expecting Roland to step into his shoes and help keep the organization on an even keel, stop this disastrous drop in our share price ... But what happened to me, the police had a tip-off that some maniac was going to blow the Queens Midtown Tunnel by driving through it with a bomb in his car. And himself too, I guess. So they’re stopping and searching everybody. Bet it’s another stinking hoax!”

  “Yes, threats are an excellent sabotage technique in themselves,” Grey said with clinical interest. “Very much akin to the German V-1 flying bombs, you know. They carried warheads too small to do much damage, but everyone within earshot naturally took shelter, so they interfered remarkably efficiently with munitions production and public services.”

  Greenbriar blinked at him. After a pause, he said, “Well, maybe, but it’s a stinking nuisance all the same ... Say, I guess I should have started by saying I’m glad to see you better. You were indisposed, weren’t you?”

  “Nothing serious,” Grey said. But he sounded, and was, aggrieved. Neither a drinker nor a smoker, celibate, and eating a balanced diet, he suffered from the subconscious assumption that disease germs would realize he was a hard nut to crack and keep their distance. Instead, he had gone down with brucellosis—he, Tom Grey, who never touched unpasteurized milk and invariably ate margarine instead of butter!

  N
ow, naturally, he was cured; there were excellent and fast-acting specifics. But it irked him that he’d been deprived of three precious weeks he could have devoted to his project. At Angel City he had had a great deal of time to pursue what he regarded as the most important aspects of it. Here, by contrast, precisely because he had been engaged to work on it as a main job instead of a private venture, he had to subordinate his own preferences to the priorities of his employers.

  “I believe it was because of Jacob’s sad demise that you wanted to see me,” he said.

  Greenbriar studied the tip of his cigar with critical concentrated attention. He said, “Well—yes. It’s no secret that this is the latest.in a series of body-blows, as you might say. Even such an enormously wealthy organization as the Bamberley Trust has limits to the amount of punishment it can take. First the African business, then the Honduran affair, then the riot at the hydroponics plant, and now this—it’s turned public opinion against us and practically wiped out confidence in our stock. So we’re desperately in need of something, something dramatic, to improve our image. At our last Board meeting, I raised the matter of your—ah—precautionary program, and everyone felt that it had strong potential for this application. Is there any chance of putting the use of it on public offer in the immediate future?”

  Grey hesitated. He had been half afraid of this. But ...

  “Well, actually, that brings to my mind a suggestion Anderson made the other week. That young programmer you assigned as my assistant, you know? I suspect he intended it as a pleasantry, but I’ve been pondering it during my confinement to bed. In effect he argued that we are less in need of extrapolatory analyses to prevent fresh mistakes being made, than of emergency solutions to problems already in existence. Not that he phrased it quite like that, of course.”

  “Then how did he phrase it?”

  “What he in fact said,” Grey replied, “was this.” Not for the first time Greenbriar decided he totally lacked a sense of humor; the question had been put, he felt obligated to answer in detail. “He said, ‘Doc, instead of looking for ways to avoid more and bigger messes, why not just look for ways out of the mess we’re in right now? The way things are shaping, we may not be around long enough to make any more mistakes!’ ” Defensively he appended, “As I told you, I suspected him of being jocular.”

  “Joking or not, do you think he was right?”

  “Well ... You know, I have sometimes been accused of inhabiting an ivory tower, but I do keep up with the news even though my tastes incline toward the quiet life. I can’t help believing that the public at large would welcome something similar to what Anderson proposed. I can’t accept that our political leaders are correct in maintaining that concern about environmental deterioration was a fad, which now sounds stale if it’s mentioned in a campaign speech and bores the listeners. My conclusion is rather that because the politicians appear to be bored with it the public are resorting to more extreme measures. You’ve noticed how many acts of sabotage have been committed lately?”

  “Damn it, of course!” Greenbriar spoke curtly. Many of the Trust’s major holdings had suffered, being concentrated in growth industrials.

  “Well, there’s one thing to be said in defense of the saboteurs, isn’t there? They are striking at industries with high pollution ratings. Oil, plastics, glass, concrete, products generally which don’t decay. And of course paper, which consumes irreplaceable trees.”

  “I had the impression you were on the side of progress,” Greenbriar muttered. “This morning you sound like an apologist for the Trainites.”

  “Oh, hardly.” A thin smile. “Of course I had to reread Train’s work for incorporation in my program data, along with every other thinker who’s had a major influence on the modern world—Lenin, Gandhi, Mao and the rest. But what I’m driving at is this. We’ve had centuries of unplanned progress, and the result can justly be called chaotic. Uninformed people, aware only that their lives may be revolutionized without warning, are naturally insecure. And they come to distrust their leaders, too, for reasons which might be exemplified by what happened at your hydroponics plant, when half a million dollars’ worth of food, despite the government’s insistence that it was perfectly edible, was destroyed against the background of starvation in Asia, Africa, even Europe. And, what is more”—he leaned forward intently—“against the depredations of these jigras throughout the agricultural states. A huge advertising campaign is being mounted, asking everyone to watch out for and report new outbreaks. But who’s going to take it seriously when the government authorizes the burning of so much food purely to score a political point?”

  Greenbriar nodded. Moreover, steaks in his favorite restaurant had gone up from $7.50 to $9.50 this summer.

  “I suspect,” Grey plowed on, “that young people in general want to believe in their leaders’ good faith. After all, many of them are proud that the world’s largest charitable organization is American. But instead of capitalizing on the fund of goodwill that exists, the government repeatedly tramples on it. Instead of exclaiming in horror at the fate of your friend’s wife, Mrs. Thorne, they refuse to acknowledge any responsibility, they even try and deny the danger is a real one. And, reverting to the riot at your plant: wasn’t it a terrible tactical error to use battle-lasers? There’s been a considerable outcry over their employment in Honduras, and one must confess that the reports of their effect don’t make for pleasant reading. One could imagine young people being deeply disturbed by descriptions of how a person standing at the fringe of the beam may instantly find that an arm or leg has been amputated and cauterized.”

  “You’re beginning to remind me of Gerry Thorne,” Greenbriar said slowly. Somewhere during that lengthy speech Grey had touched him on a raw nerve. “He put it more—more forcefully, of course. He said, ‘There are madmen in charge and they’ve got to be stopped!’ ”

  He looked at Grey, and the thin man gave a sober nod.

  Yes, damned right. What would happen if someone didn’t come up—and very soon—with a rational, scientific, practicable plan to cure this country’s ills? You couldn’t look to that straw dummy Prexy and his cabinet of mediocrities for anything more useful than pious platitudes. Their attitude seemed to be, “Well, it didn’t work last time but it damned well should have done, so we’ll do it again!” Meantime, what had been uncommitted support drifted steadily toward the extremist axis of the Trainites, or the radical right, or the Marxists. It was as though the public was taking the stand which came handiest, just so long as there was a stand to be taken that put an end to bumbling along from day to day.

  He said, looking down at his fat hands on the desk and noticing that they glistened with perspiration, “Do you think your program can be adapted to offer—uh—real-world solutions?”

  Grey pondered. He said finally, “I’ll be frank. Right from the beginning of my project I’ve proceeded on the assumption that what’s done is done, and the best we could hope for was to avoid compounding our mistakes. Obviously, though, the data that are already accumulated can be employed for other purposes, though certain necessary and perhaps time-consuming adjustments ...”

  “But you’d be willing to let us announce that Bamberley Trust is to finance a computerized study which may reveal some useful new ideas? I’ll guarantee to keep it down to ‘may.’ ” Greenbriar was sweating worse than ever. “To be honest, Tom, we’re throwing ourselves on your mercy. We’re in terrible trouble. And next year can only be worse if we don’t hit on something which will make the public feel more favorably disposed toward us.”

  “I’d need extra funds, extra staff,” Grey said.

  “You’ll get them. I’ll see to that.”

  SCRATCHED

  “Yes? ... Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that. Please convey him our best wishes for a speedy recovery. But the president did ask me to pass this message informally as soon as possible; I may say he feels very strongly about the matter. Of course, not knowing if the rumor is well founded, we didn�
�t want to handle it on an official level ... Yes, I would be obliged if you could make sure the ambassador is told at the earliest opportunity. Tell him, please, that any attempt to nominate Austin Train for the Nobel Peace Prize would be regarded as a grave and—I quote the president’s actual word—calculated affront to the United States.

  PRIME TIME OVER TARGET

  Petronella Page: ... and welcome to our new Friday slot where we break our regular habit and cover the entire planet! Later we shall be going to Honduras for interviews right on the firing line, and by satellite to London for in-person opinions concerning the food riots among Britain’s five million unemployed, and finally to Stockholm where we’ll speak direct to the newly appointed secretary of the “Save the Baltic” Fund and find out how this latest attempt to rescue an endangered sea is getting on. But right now we have a very sad episode in focus, the kidnapping of fifteen-year-old Hector Bamberley. Over in our San Francisco studios—ah, I see the picture on the monitor now. Mr. Roland Bamberley!

  Hello!

  Bamberley: Hello.

  Page: Now everyone who follows the news is aware that your son vanished more than a week ago. We also know that a ransom demand of a very strange kind has been received. Are there any clues yet to the identity of the criminals?

  Bamberley: Some things have been obvious from the start. To begin with this is clearly a politically motivated crime. During the kidnapping a sleep gas grenade was employed, and those aren’t found on bushes, so it’s plain that we have to deal with a well-equipped subversive group. And no ordinary kidnappers would have fixed on such a ridiculous ransom.

  Page: Some people would argue that on the contrary such a grenade could have been obtained very easily, and that anybody annoyed with the notoriously poor quality of California water might have—

  Bamberley: Bunkum.

  Page: Is that your only comment?

  Bamberley: Yes.

  Page: It’s been reported that a first delivery of forty thousand Mitsuyama water-filters destined for your company arrived yesterday. Are you intending to—?