The Sheep Look Up

by John Brunner

  At least it was dark now so you couldn’t see the mess.

  Eventually Ralph said, “The idea scares the hell out of me, but I feel it simply has to be done.” He rose and began to pace restlessly back and forth under the curved dome of the roof, having to stoop a fraction at the end of each pass as he turned. He was tall. “Those damned fools out there”—a wave at the blank black windows—“won’t react to anything short of a real shock. They’ve been warned over and over, by Austin, by Nader, by Rattray Taylor, everybody. And do they take any notice? Not even when their own bodies fail them. Christ, we’ve practically had to turn our jeep into an ambulance!”

  That was an exaggeration. But it was true that at least a dozen times since the influx of tourists began, strangers had come shouting to the wat for a doctor, or to have septic wounds bound up, or to ask advice for a sick kid.

  “Bet they don’t offer anything in return,” Rose Shattock from Taos said morosely.

  Once more, silence; it became too long. Zena said almost at random, “Oh, Ralph, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Rick’s been pestering me to know what’s causing the patches on all the broad-leaved plants this summer.”

  “Which patches? The brown are from lack of water, I guess. But if he means the yellow ones, that’s SO2.”

  “That’s what I told him. I just wanted to make sure I’d given him the right answer.”

  “Wish the pollutants would kill the jigras,” said Tony Whitefeather from Spokane. “But they’re resistant to literally everything ... Think there’s any truth in this idea that they didn’t get in by mistake, that the Tupas shipped them deliberately?”

  “Why should they have to bother?” Ralph grunted. “Just let some stinking commercial concern lower its standards ...”

  “We bought from them before,” Zena reminded him.

  “Sure, but only because we had to. And anyway: importing earthworms, for God’s sake! Bees! Ladybugs! Sometimes I think there’s a mad scientist in Washington, controlling Prexy by posthypnotic suggestion, who wants us all to live in a nice sterile factory full of glass and stainless steel and eat little pink and blue pills so we don’t have to shit.”

  “Then he’s getting rid of a lot of us first,” Tony Whitefeather said. “So when the factory’s built it won’t have to be too big.”

  “Like Lucas Quarrey and Gerry Thorne?” suggested Drew Henker.

  “Oh, they didn’t need to wipe them out,” Ralph countered with a shrug. “The Syndicate attended to that chore for them. Still, they’re due for a shock shortly. You’re all staying over, aren’t you? So we can discuss the initial news release in the morning.”

  Nods all around the circle. They started to rise.

  “Any of you know anything about these new Mitsuyama water-purifiers?” Rose Shattock said. “We’ve been thinking of investing in some.”

  “Us too,” Ralph nodded. “But the housekeeping committee agreed to postpone it. This will be the first year we haven’t managed to grow enough food to last us through the winter, so our spare cash will have to go on provisions bought outside.”

  “It’s not so much of a problem for you anyhow, is it?” Drew said. “Come snow-time you can always rely on natural purification.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Ralph grunted. “With all this high-level haze, Christ knows what the snow’s going to be like this year.”

  “Grimy,” Zena said, and pulled a face.

  At the same moment the distant drone of a light aircraft could be heard, growing louder, and they all glanced toward the window. Ralph exclaimed.

  “Say! If those are the lights of that plane, he’s low!”

  “Sure is,” Zena confirmed, peering past his shoulder. “Must be in trouble!”

  “His engine’s firing fine ... Hey, what’s he playing at? He’s heading straight for the wat! Crazy joy-rider!”

  “He’s high, or drunk!” Drew decided. “The damned fool!”

  “Let’s get outside and warn him off with a flashlight,” Zena proposed, and headed for the door.

  Swinging around, Ralph shouted after her. “Hey, no! If he is stoned, he’ll think you’re playing games with him and fly even lower!”

  “But we can’t just—”

  It was as far as she got. The roar of the engine was almost loud enough to drown out speech, but that wasn’t what cut off the rest of the sentence.

  A sudden line of splintered holes, like the stabs of a sewing-machine needle, spiked the window, the roof, the floor, and Drew and Ralph.

  On the second pass the plane dropped a stick of Molotov cocktails. Then it zoomed away into the night.

  UNABLE NOW TO SEE THE MOUNTAINS

  Surely from here on an August day you used to be able to see the mountains?

  Pete looked around. They’d been detoured by police barriers from the route they’d intended to take—there was a house-to-house going on—and now here they were halted at the high point of Colfax, between Lincoln and Sherman, right next to the state capitol, while a group of young patrolmen went from car to car checking ID’s and chaffing the pretty girls. On the mile-high step of the capitol frontage parties of tourists who’d been passed by the guards were taking each other’s pictures, as usual. Usual Saturday morning crowds on the sidewalks, too.

  But no mountains.

  Funny. Made Denver feel kind of like a stage set. The arrow-straight line of Colfax pointing into blurred gray.

  Almost one could believe that the world outside of what one could see was dissolving—that what the TV showed, the papers reported, was a fake.

  On a notice-board hung to the fence enclosing the capitol grounds was a small version of the poster showing a jigra which had appeared throughout the Midwest and West in the past few weeks. Over it someone had scrawled the Trainite symbol in red: [??].

  The patrolmen reached their car, checked their ID’s and looked into the trunk, and waved them on. He kept staring at that poster until he almost cricked his neck, which was sort of dangerous with his back condition. Another funny sensation: being a passenger all the time. He enjoyed driving. But it would be a long while before he could do that again.

  Those stinking symbols were everywhere. They’d had three painted on the car, for instance, which Jeannie had had to clean off—trying not to damage the cellulose—wasting an hour or more on each occasion. If only, when it came to getting rid of one of the cars, they’d been able to keep the Stephenson ... But it was so much smaller, so much harder for him to get in and out of, and of course the trade-in value of an electric was far higher than that of any gas-driven car nowadays, and since they had to find the money for their new refrigerator ...

  Damned silly not being able to get the old one repaired! But none of these kids nowadays would have anything to do with technical matters. Like it was black magic, and just touching it put you in the devil’s power. They’d been expecting to recruit kids quitting school this year as trainee fitters at Prosser Enterprises. And hadn’t hired half what they needed: maybe nine or ten, when they’d planned on thirty.

  And now this trouble with the clogged filters. He was handing out two six-packs of the things as replacements under guarantee for every one sent to a new purchaser. Alan was talking about suing Mitsuyama, but that was talk and nothing more. You couldn’t touch a billion-dollar corporation like that one, foreign or domestic. Best would be if the same problem hit, say, Bamberley in California or some other, bigger franchise holder who’d be prepared to make the suit a joint one.

  Jeannie wasn’t her usual talkative self today, but that was fine by him; he wasn’t in a chatty mood himself. Anyway, she needed to concentrate. There was a lot of traffic. They were headed for Towerhill, to have lunch with her family, so they were on the road which led to many things not only tourists but local people out for a ride wanted to see: the site of the avalanche, the scene of the sixty-three deaths at the hydroponics plant, the burned-out remains of the Trainite wat ...

  Is it true the Syndicate was responsible, tryi
ng to kill these daily louder rumors about the quality of Puritan food? Have to be a real bastard of that kind to do what he did! It’s one thing to object to Trainite demonstrations and sabotage and all, something else to kill children asleep in their beds.

  “Say, honey, look!” Jeannie exclaimed. “There’s a bird!”

  But he was too slow, and missed it.

  Half a mile out of the city she said, “Pete, what’s doing it?”

  “What?”

  She pointed to the sere yellow hillside they were passing. The plants on it were dusty. Shabby. Like untended house-plants in an overheated room.

  “Well, pollution, I guess,” Pete said uncomfortably.

  “Sure, I know. But what does that really mean?”

  He forgot to answer. Around the next bend they came in sight of a highway patrol car drawn up on the hard shoulder. A couple of officers had got out and were walking up the slope to inspect something new, a monstrous skull and crossbones at least thirty feet overall, etched into the dry grass with some dark viscous liquid, maybe used lubricating oil. The driver still sitting in the car was an old acquaintance, so Pete called and waved, but the guy was yawning and didn’t notice.

  Further on Jeannie said suddenly, “Honey!”

  “Yes?”

  “I ... Do you still think we ought to call him Franklin?”

  That wasn’t what she’d been going to say; he was sure of that. Still, he said, “I like it. Or Mandy for a girl.”

  “Yes, Mandy.”

  And then in the same breath, in a rush, “Pete, I feel so dirty inside!”

  “Baby, how do you mean?”

  “Like—like all my bones need to be taken out and washed!”

  “Now that’s foolish talk,” Pete said gently.

  “No, I mean it,” she muttered. “I don’t have too much to do all day now, while you’re at work. Not having the garden any more, or a whole house to keep clean ... I can’t help thinking about it, honey, not when there’s a baby growing inside me!”

  “The baby’s going to be okay,” Pete declared. “You couldn’t have a better guy than Doc McNeil to see you through.”

  “Oh, sure, and I always do just like he tells me. Eat the right kind of food, drink canned water, never touch milk or butter ... But—Pete, what the hell kind of world are we going to bring the kid into?”

  She snapped a harsh stare at him, lasting only a second, but long enough for him to recognize the real terror in her eyes.

  “The doc says I probably won’t be able to feed him myself. Says practically no mothers can. Too much DDT in their milk!”

  “Baby, all that shit was banned years ago!”

  “So how many times did you book someone peddling it?”

  Pete had no answer for that. Even during one year of service in the police he had helped to arrest five or six people home-brewing illegal chemicals: not just insecticides, but defoliants, too.

  “And proper food costs so much, too,” Jeannie worried on, signaling right as she slowed for the Towerhill turn. “A dime here, a quarter there, without knowing it you’re spending twice as much as you expected. And it’s going to get worse. I was talking to Susie Chain the other day. Ran into her in Denver, shopping.”

  “Ah-hah?” She was referring to the wife of his former sergeant at Towerhill.

  “She has cousins in Idaho, she said, and they’ve told her they’re only going to bring in about a quarter of the potato crop this year. The rest’s been spoiled by jigras.”

  Pete whistled.

  “They eat anything, she said. Corn, beets, squash ... Say, you seen the Trainite wat?” She pointed across the valley. Blurred by the haze, but visible in enough detail to be gruesome, the hollow shell of the wat lay like a rotted lobster. Small parties of sightseers were wandering around it, poking at the wreckage in search of souvenirs.

  The local fire chief had said on TV how many warnings he’d issued about building in Fiberglas and scrap plastic. Worse than timber. Something about the poisonous fumes given off.

  “Is that the way our kid’s going to go?” Jeannie said bitterly. “Burned alive like those three were?”

  Pete reached over to pat her comfortingly on the knee. But she rushed on. “Think of all the things he’ll never be able to do, Pete! Swim in a river, or even row a boat on it—pick fruit right off the tree and eat it—take off his shoes to walk in wet grass, all squelchy and thick!”

  “Oh, honey, you sound like Carl,” Pete chided.

  “Why not?” She sniffed. “Carl’s the bright one in our family, always was. Wish he’d write and let me know how he is ... You know, I’d half like to catch this brucellosis that’s going around, so there wouldn’t have to be a baby.”

  “Shit, you mustn’t say that!” Pete exclaimed in horror. “If we miss on this one, we may never—”

  But at that point the road gave a shudder. It was as though every one of the hundreds of cars in sight simultaneously ran over a rock. He reached for the radio and switched it on, to find out whether the quake was going to be serious. It wasn’t. And in another few minutes they were at Jeannie’s mother’s home and they had to try and pretend that everything was fine, just fine.

  FED UP

  ... purchases of Nutripon to supplement welfare stocks, currently at their lowest level for years owing to the unforeseen impact of unemployment in resort areas deserted by tourists, where ordinarily casual jobs in hotels and restaurants absorb much surplus labor from June through September. Discounting fears expressed by black and poverty-group spokesmen, Secretary for Welfare Barney K. Deane pointed out that the Bamberley plant has been refitted to an extremely high standard, close to what you get in an operating theater, quote, unquote. Asked whether the plan would be extended later to relieve the impact of scarcity prices on underprivileged families, he said the question was actively under consideration but no decision had been reached. A call to ban exports of food to the United States was today issued by ...

  BACK

  Not much changed. Garbagecans fuller than ever and stinking. Buzzing flies. Kitty Walsh was pretty high. She stood for a while looking at the flies and wondering—not very seriously—where they’d come from. Imported, maybe? Last year, or the year before, or something, there hadn’t been any at all.

  But finally she picked her way among the cans and went indoors, trying to take off her filtermask as she went. It got kind of entangled with her hair. She’d let it grow while she was away.

  The air inside was full of fumes, too, but that was pot. The windows were taped to keep the stench out. It was very hot.

  “Christ, it’s Kitty,” Hugh said, and rolled away from Carl. They were both naked. And she was nearly: just a dress, slit up the front, and sandals.

  “Where you been, baby?” Carl demanded.

  “Places.” She threw down the canvas airline bag which was all she’d brought with her and reached for the joint they were sharing.

  “Met this cat when I got busted at the fireworks party,” she said after a while. “We went to Oregon. I didn’t know it was so good up there. We had like three days of blue sky. Maybe four.”

  “No shit!” Carl said.

  “No shit. Even found a lake we could swim in. And I got a tan, see?” She skinned her dress up under her armpits, and she was just a trifle brown.

  After that there was silence for a while. It was the high. There was radio music coming soft from the back room, the gloryhole. She realized that finally and straightened her head, as far as she could. “Who’s in back?” she inquired, glancing around. “And—say! You put a padlock on that door!”

  Hugh and Carl exchanged glances. But it was after all her apartment.

  “Hector Bamberley,” Hugh said.

  “What?”

  “You didn’t hear about that deal?”

  “Christ, of course I did. You mean ...” She almost rose to her feet, but fell back on the mattress-spread floor in a burst of helpless laughter.

  “You mean right here? Li
ke under the snouts of the pigs? Ah, shit! That’s fantastic!”

  Carl sat up, linking his hands around his knees, and chuckled. Hugh, though, said, “Not so funny. His stinking father won’t play. And it’s getting to be a grind, keeping watch all the time. Mustn’t leave the pad empty, of course. And he’s sick.”

  “Playing sick,” Carl grunted. “It was one of the first ideas he hit on, trying to make us bring in a doctor he can talk to. Now he’s back at the same game. It’s getting me down to throw away so much expensive food.”

  “Huh?”

  “All from Puritan. Ossie insisted. He’s masterminding the deal.”

  Hugh exclaimed. “Say, isn’t it about time we fed him again?”

  “Could be,” Carl nodded. “Kitty, any idea of the time?”

  She shook her head. “Ossie?” she said. “You mean Austin? But you know he’s not for real, don’t you?”

  “Oh, sure,” Hugh sighed. “Been thinking of giving the name up, too. Says he’s sick of waiting for the real one to come out of hiding and do something.”

  “If he did,” Kitty said, “he’d raise the biggest army in history, just by snapping his fingers. Up in Oregon I saw—Hell, never mind. I’ll take the food in. Always wanted to meet a millionaire’s son. Where is it—in the icebox?”

  “Sure, all ready on a tray. And when you come out, bang the door for us to unlock. One, one-two.” Carl demonstrated. “So we’ll know it’s you and not him.”

  “Okay,” Kitty said, and took one more drag on the joint before going to the kitchen.

  Hector was lying asleep, his back to the door. She made a space for the food tray among a mess of books and magazines, mainly porn—German and Danish, good-quality stuff. Then she went around the bed and found that he had his fly open and his hand clasped around his prick. Half-hidden under the pillow was another porn magazine, a lesbian one. On the floor, a soiled tissue. Wet. She dropped it into the chamber pot.