The Sheep Look Up (25 page)

Advowson:
Probably not. I doubt that he reads Uruguayan press releases, and you’ve kept the matter under wraps.

Chairman:
Shut up, major. Sorry. In a sense you’re right, much as it galls me to admit it. Publicity wouldn’t have been very good for morale, would it?

Howell:
What the hell are you talking about?

Advowson:
The Tenth Counter-Insurgency Corps, I imagine.

Chairman:
Damn it, yes of course. Senator, they didn’t just fight a rearguard action and withdraw owing to their debilitated condition, which was the story we released to the media. There’s been nothing like it since the First World War. They ran away. They were sick. They had fever over a hundred degrees and most of them were delirious. I guess that’s an excuse. But it meant that the entire equipment of the Corps was captured intact by the Tupas. As a result Tegucigalpa is having to be supplied by air, and we may have to pull the government out any day now. And of course practically every big-city ghetto is alive with pro-Tupa black militants, and you can imagine what will happen if we can’t clear the name of Nutripon before we have to start issuing it as relief allotments. Not content with poisoning innocent Honduran peasants and African blacks, we’re starting genocide operations against black Americans too! That’ll be the line, and we’ve got to prevent it at all costs.

THE UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT

Lem Walbridge had built up his holdings from the five hundred acres his father had left, until now he had over three thousand, all under vegetables: potatoes, beans, salads, beets, plus some corn and sunflowers—for oil—and a few gourmet delicacies like zucchini and scorzonera. The man from the State Board of Agriculture knew him well.

“Never seen anything like it!” Lem said for the tenth time, jumping down from his jeep at the edge of a field of sickly-looking beets. He pulled one up at random and displayed it, alive with horrible writhing worms. “Have you?”

The other nodded. “Yeah. Few days ago. Right the other side of those hills.”

“But what the hell are these things? Christ, if this goes on I’ll be ruined! I’m only going to get half my usual crop to market as it is, and unless I stop these stinking buggers ...!” He hurled the rotten beet away with a snort of fury.

“Buy any earthworms this year?”

Lem blinked. “Well, sure! You have to. Like for soil conditioning.”

“Put any down around here?”

“I guess maybe sixty, seventy quarts, same as usual. But I got a license, they were all approved.”

“You get ’em from Plant Fertility in San Clemente?”

“Sure! Always do! They’ve been in the business longer’n anyone else. Best quality. And bees, too.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that. Their stuff goes all over the country, doesn’t it? Clear to New England!”

“What in hell does that have to do with it?”

“It’s beginning to look as though it has everything to do with it.”

BY THE DEAD SEA

The wind was bad today. Hugh’s filtermask was used up, all clogged, and he didn’t have the seventy-five cents for another from a roadside dispenser, and anyway the quality of those things was lousy, didn’t even last the hour claimed for them.

Lousy...

Absently he scratched his crotch. He’d more or less got used to lice by now, of course; there just didn’t seem to be any way of avoiding them. For every evil under the sun there is a remedy or there’s none. If there is one try and find it, if there isn’t never mind it.

There must be a hell of a lot of evils in the world nowadays that there weren’t any remedies for. Anyway: what sun? He hadn’t seen the sun in fucking weeks.

It was hot, though. Leaning on the wall overlooking the Pacific, he wondered what this beach had been like when he was a kid. Scattered with pretty girls, maybe. Strong young men showing off their muscles to impress. Now...

The water looked more like oil. It was dark gray and barely moved to the breeze. Along the edge of the sand was a rough demarcation line composed of garbage, mainly plastic. Big signs read: THIS BEACH UNSAFE FOR SWIMMING.

Must have been posted last year. This year you wouldn’t have needed to put up signs. One whiff of the stench, and
yecch.

Still, it was great to be out and about again. It had been bad since he hit California. The runs. Everybody had them, but
everybody.
Back in Berkeley, along Telegraph, he’d seen them lying and whimpering, the seats of their jeans stained brown, no one to turn to for help. There had been a free clinic, but it treated VD as well, and the governor had said it encouraged promiscuity and had it closed.

Well, at least you didn’t die of the runs, not over about six months of age. Carl had found a part-time job for a couple of weeks after their arrival, nailing together cheap coffins for babies; the cash had been useful.

Though sometimes the runs made you feel you’d
like
to die.

Where in hell was Carl, anyway? The air was hot and harsh, so he’d gone to a soft-drink stand for some Cokes. Taking his time. Bastard. Probably picked someone up.

They were shacking with a girl named Kitty, who’d spread half a dozen mattresses on her floor and didn’t really mind who shared them, how many or what sex. She and Carl had been lucky and escaped the runs, and what they brought in, by working, panhandling and hustling, kept the others fed. When Hugh got over the aftereffects, he promised himself, he was going to get a decent job. Garbage clearance, maybe. Beach cleaning. Something constructive, anyhow.

Still no sign of Carl returning. But, drifting toward him, a wind-blown newspaper, almost intact and too heavy for the breeze to move it more than a few inches at each gust. He trod on it and picked it up. Ah, great! A copy of
Tupamaro USA!

Leaning back against the wall, he shook it around to the front page and at once a name leapt out at him: Bamberley. Not Jacob, Roland. Something about Japanese water-purifiers. Hugh glanced over his shoulder at the befouled ocean and laughed.

But other things of more interest. Trainites in Washington rigged a catapult, Roman-style, bombarded the White House with paper sacks of fleas—hey, crazy, wish I’d been in on that. And a piece about Puritan, saying their food isn’t really any better, costs more because of all their advertising ...

“Hugh!”

He looked up and here came Carl, and Carl wasn’t alone. For an instant he was transfixed by jealousy. He’d never imagined he might drift into this kind of scene. But it had happened, and Carl was a good cat, and ... Well, at least Kitty being around allowed him to keep his—uh—hand in.

“Hey, you should meet this guy!” Carl said, beaming as he handed over the straw-stuck Coke bottle he’d brought. “Hugh Pettingill, Austin Train!”

Austin Train?

Hugh was so shaken he dropped the paper and nearly let go of the Coke as well, but recovered and took the hand proffered by the thick-set stranger in shabby red shirt and faded blue pants, who grinned and exposed a row of teeth browned by khat.

“Carl says you met at the Denver wat.”

“Ah... Yeah, we did.”

“What do you think of them up there?”

“Full of gas,” Carl chimed in. “Right, Hugh baby?”

It didn’t seem right to put down a bunch of Trainites to Train himself, but after a moment Hugh nodded. It was true, and what was the good of pretending it wasn’t?

“Damned right,” Train said. “All gab and contemplation. No action. Now down here in Cal the scene isn’t the same. You’re shacking in Berkeley, right? So you seen Telegraph.”

Hugh nodded again. From end to end, and down most of the cross streets, it was marked with the relics of Trainite demonstrations. Skulls and crossbones stared from every vacant wall.

Like the one on this guy’s chest. Not a tattoo but a decal, exposed when he reached up to scratch among the coarse hair inside his shirt.

“Now Carl says you quit the wat because you wanted action,” Train pursued, moving to perch on the sea wall at Hugh’s side. Overhead there was a loud droning noise, and they all glanced up, but the plane wasn’t visible through the haze.

“Well, something’s got to be done,” Hugh muttered. “And demonstrations aren’t enough. They haven’t stopped the world getting deeper in shit every day.”

“Too damned true,” the heavy-set man nodded. For the first time Hugh noticed that there was a bulge—not muscle—under the sleeve of his shirt, and without thinking he touched it. The man withdrew with a grimace.

“Easy there! It’s still tender.”

“What happened?” He had recognized the softness: an absorbent cotton pad and a bandage.

“Got burned.” With a shrug. “Making up some napalm out of Vaseline and stuff. Thought we’d take a leaf out of the Tupas’ book. You heard they caught that Mexican who staged the raids on San Diego, by the way?”

Hugh felt a stir of excitement. This was the kind of talk he’d been yearning for: practical talk, with a definite end in view. He said, “Yeah. Some stinking fishery patrol, wasn’t it?”

“Right. Claimed he was fishing in illegal waters. Found these balloons all laid out on the foredeck, ready to go.”

“But like I was just saying to Austin,” Carl cut in, “we’re right here in the same country with the mothers. We don’t have to strike at random from a distance. We can pick out and identify guilty individuals, right?”

“Only we don’t,” Train snapped. “I mean, like this cat Bamberley.”

“Shit, he’s got as much trouble as he deserves,” Hugh said with a shrug. “They closed his hydroponics factory, and—”

“Not Jacob! Roland!” Train pointed with his toe at the paper Hugh had dropped. “Going to make a fucking fortune out of these Mitsuyama filters, isn’t he? When back before he and his breed got to work on the world, when you felt thirsty you helped yourself at the nearest creek!”

“Right,” Hugh agreed. “Now they’ve used the creeks for sewers, and what happens? Millions of people lie around groaning with the runs.”

“That’s it,” Train approved. “We got to stop them. Hell, d’you hear this one? Some pest got at the crops in Idaho—worm of some kind—so they’re demanding to be allowed to turn loose all the old poisons, like DDT!”

“Shit, no!” Hugh said, and felt his cheeks pale.

“It’s a fact. Aren’t there better ways of handling the problem? Sure there are. Like in China they don’t have trouble with flies. You see a fly, you swat it, and pretty soon—no more flies.”

“I like the trick they use in Cuba,” Carl said. “To keep pests off the sugar cane. Plant something between the rows that the bugs make for first, cut it down and turn it into compost.”

“Right! Right! ’Stead of which, over here, they shit in the water until it’s dangerous to drink, then make a fucking fortune out of selling us gadgets to purify it again. Why can’t they be made to strain out their own shit?”

“Know what I’d like to do?” Carl exclaimed. “Like to soak those mothers right in their own shit until they turn
brown!”

“We’re all in this together now,” Train said somberly. “Black, white, red, yellow, we all been screwed up until we got to stick together or go under.”

“Sure, but you know these bastards! Darker you are, more they screw you! Like the atom-bomb. Did they drop it on the Germans? Shit, no—Germans are white same as them. So they dropped it on the little yellow man. And then when they found there were
black
men who were standing up on their hind legs and talking back, they joined forces with the yellow ones because they were kind of pale and pretty damned near as good at messing up the environment. Truth or lies?”

“Trying to make me ashamed of being white, baby?” Hugh snapped.

“Shit, of course not.” Carl put his arm around Hugh’s waist. “But did they send that poisoned food to a white country, baby? Hell, no—they sent it to Africa, and when they found it worked they gave it to the Indians in Honduras, got the excuse they were after to march in with their guns and bombs and napalm and all that shit.”

There was a long pause full of confirmatory nods.

At length Train stirred, feeling in his pocket for a pen. “Well, right now I got to split—this chica I’m shacked with promised to fix a meal tonight. I get the impression we talk the same language, though, and I’m working on a kind of plan you might like. Let me leave you a number where you can reach me.”

Hugh dived for the abandoned newspaper and tore a strip off its margin for Train to write on.

JUNE

A VIEW STILL EXTREMELY WIDELY ADHERED TO

There’s an ’eathen bint out in Malacca

With an ’orrible ’eathenish name.

As for black, they don’t come any blacker—

But she answered to “Jill” just the same!

Well, a man ’oo’s abroad can get lonely,

Missin’ friends an’ relations an’ such.

She wasn’t “me sweet one-an’-only”—

But there’s others as done just as much!

I’m not blushin’ or makin’ excuses,

An’ I don’t think she’d want that, because

When she stopped blubbin’ over ’er bruises

The long an’ the short of it was

That I’d bust up ’er ’orrible idol

An’ I’d taught ’er respect for a gun—

Yus, I broke ’er to saddle an’ bridle

An’ I left ’er an Englishman’s son!

—“Lays of the Long Haul,” 1905

STEAM ENGINE TIME

Although the sun showed only as a bright patch on pale gray, it was a sunny day in the life of Philip Mason. Against all the odds everything was turning out okay. Talk about blessings in disguise!

They had their franchise. They had the first consignment of a thousand units. Their first spot commercial on the local TV stations—featuring Pete Goddard, who’d done an excellent job considering he had no training as an actor—had brought six hundred inquiries by Monday morning’s mail.

Pausing in the task of sorting the inquiries into serious and frivolous—most of the latter abusive, of course, from anonymous Trainites—he glanced at the clothing store catty-corner from Prosser Enterprises. A man in overalls was scrubbing off a slogan which had been painted on its main window over the weekend; it now read ROTTING IS NATU. The accompanying skull and crossbones had gone.

They were having a man-made fiber week. Trainites objected to orlon, nylon, dacron, anything that didn’t come from a plant or an animal.

Hah! They don’t mind if a sheep catches cold, he thought cynically, so long as they don’t—and speaking of colds ... He dabbed his watering eyes with a tissue and soaked it with a thorough blast from his nose.

The door of his office opened. It was Alan.

“Hey!” Philip exclaimed. “I thought you had to stay home today. Dorothy said you—”

Alan grimaced. “Yeah, I have the runs again okay. But I heard the good news and decided I couldn’t miss out.” He stared at the heap of correspondence on Philip’s desk.

“Christ, there really are six hundred!”

“And five,” Philip said with a smirk.

“I’d never have believed it.” Shaking his head, Alan dropped into a chair. “Well, I guess Doug was right, hm?”

“About the enteritis being on our side? I thought that was in kind of bad taste.”

“Don’t let that stop you getting the point,” Alan said. “Know what I like about my job, Phil? They talk all the time about the businessman, the entrepreneur, being an ‘enemy of mankind’ and all that shit, and it
is
shit! I mean, if anyone has a reason to hate society and want to screw it up, it ought to be me, right?” He held up his bullet-scarred hand. “But I don’t. I got my chance to grow fat—least, it looks like that’s what’s happening—and do I have to be ashamed of how I do it? I do not. Here I am offering a product people really want, really need, and into the bargain creating jobs for people who’d otherwise be on relief. True or false?”

“Well, sure,” Philip said, blinking. Especially the point about new jobs. Unemployment throughout the nation was at an all-time high this summer, and on this side of Denver it was particularly bad and would remain so until they finished the modifications to the hydroponics plant and hired back their former six hundred workers.

That too was naturally redounding to the benefit of Prosser Enterprises. Anyone with an ounce of wit could be taught to fit these purifiers in an hour.

“Well, then!” Alan said gruffly, and swiveled his chair to face the window overlooking the street. “Say, there’s another bunch of kids. City’s alive with them today. Where they all coming from?”

Across the street a group of about eight or ten youngsters—more boys than girls—had paused to jeer at the man washing the slogan off the clothing store.

“Yes, I saw a whole lot of them getting off a bus at the Trailways terminal,” Philip agreed. “Must have been—oh—nearly thirty. They asked me the way to the Tower-hill road.”

“Looks like this lot is heading the same way,” Alan muttered. “Wonder what the big attraction is.”

“You could run over and ask them.”

“Thanks, I don’t care that much. Say, by the way: how come you’re sorting these letters yourself? What became of that girl we hired for you?”

Philip sighed. “Called in to apologize. Sore throat. She could barely talk on the phone.”

“Ah, hell. Remind me, will you? Top priority on filters for the homes of our staff. See if we can cut the sickness rate a bit, hm? Charity begins at home and all that shit.” He leafed curiously through a few of the letters. “How many of these are genuine orders and how many are junk?”

“I guess we’re running ten to one in favor of genuine ones.”

That’s great. That’s terrific!”

The door opened again and Dorothy entered, a sheaf of pages from a memo pad in one hand, a handkerchief in the other with which she was wiping her nose. “More inquiries all the time,” she said. “Another thirty this morning already.”

“This is fantastic!” Alan said, taking the papers from her. From outside there came a rumble of heavy traffic, and Dorothy exclaimed.

“What in the world are those things?”

They glanced up. Pausing at the corner before making a left toward Towerhill, a string of big olive-drab Army trucks, each trailing something on fat deep-cleated tires from which protruded a snub and deadly-looking muzzle. But not guns.

“Hell, I saw those on TV!” Alan said. “They’re the new things they’re trying out in Honduras—they’re battle-lasers!”

“Christ, I guess they must be!” Philip jumped up and went to the window for a closer look. “But why are they bringing them up here? Maneuvers or something?”

“I didn’t hear they were planning any,” Alan said. “But of course nowadays you don’t. Say! Do you think all these kids coming into town might have got wind of maneuvers and decided to screw them up?”

“Well, it’s the kind of damn-fool thing they might do,” Philip agreed.

“Right. In which case they deserve what’s coming to them.” Absently Alan rubbed the back of his scarred hand. “Wicked-looking, aren’t they? Wouldn’t care to be in the way when they let loose. And speaking of letting loose—excuse me!”

He rushed from the room.

IF IT MOVES, SHOOT IT

...
that the Army is using defoliants in Honduras to create free-fire zones. This charge has been strongly denied by the Pentagon. Asked to comment just prior to leaving for Hawaii, where he will convalesce for the next two or three weeks, Prexy said, quote, Well, if you can’t see them you can’t shoot them. End quote. Support has been growing for a bill which Senator Richard Howell will introduce at the earliest opportunity, forbidding the issue of a passport to any male between sixteen and sixty not in possession of a valid discharge certificate or medical exemption. Welcoming the proposal, a Pentagon spokesman today admitted that of the last class called for the draft more than one in three failed to report. Your steaks are going to cost you more. This warning was today issued by the Department of Agriculture. The price of animal fodder has quote taken off like a rocket unquote, following the mysterious ...

A PLACE TO STAND

“A lady and a gentleman to see you, Miss Mankiewicz,” said the hotel reception-clerk. He was Puerto Rican and adhered to the old-fashioned formalities. “I don’t know if you’re expecting them?”

“Who are they?” Peg said. She sounded nervous, knew it, and wasn’t surprised. During the previous few weeks she had initiated a very tricky venture, and she was sure that for the past ten days at least someone had been following her. It wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that she had broken one of the increasingly complex disloyalty laws. The situation was beginning to resemble that in Britain during the eighteenth century: any new law involving a harsher punishment for a vaguer crime was certain of passage through Congress and instant presidential approval.

Granted, Canada wasn’t yet a proscribed country. But at this rate it wouldn’t be long ...

“A Mr. Lopez,” the clerk said. “And a Miss Ramage. Uh—Ra
-maige?
”

Peg’s heart seemed to stop in mid-beat. When she recovered she said, “Tell them I’ll be right down.”

“They say they’d prefer to come up.”

“Whatever they want.”

When she put down the phone her hand was trembling. She’d pulled all kinds of strings recently, but she hadn’t expected one of them to draw Lucy Ramage to her. Incredible!

Hastily she gathered up some soiled clothing scattered on her bed and thrust it out of sight. The ashtrays needed emptying, and ... Well, it was a ropy hotel anyhow. But she couldn’t afford a better one. Thirty bucks a day was her limit.

She’d come to New York because she had a project on her mind. As she’d told Zena, she had only one talent, and right now the logical use to put it to seemed to be muckraking. So she’d asked herself a key question: what was the most important muck? (Actually she had phrased it, subconsciously, in terms of what Decimus had hated most. But it came to the same in the end.)

It almost answered itself: “Do unto others ...”

Very well, the starting point would be that claim of Professor Quarrey’s, which had been in the news at the beginning of the year, that the country’s greatest export was noxious gas. And who would like to stir up the fuss again? Obviously, the Canadians, cramped into a narrow band to the north of their more powerful neighbors, growing daily angrier about the dirt that drifted to them on the wind, spoiling crops, causing chest diseases and soiling laundry hung out to dry. So she’d called the magazine
Hemisphere
in Toronto, and the editor had immediately offered ten thousand dollars for three articles.

Very conscious that all calls out of the country were apt to be monitored, she’d put the proposition to him in highly general terms: the risk of the Baltic going the same way as the Mediterranean, the danger of further dust-bowls like the Mekong Desert, the effects of bringing about climatic change. That was back in the news—the Russians had revived their plan to reverse the Yenisei and Ob. Moreover, there was the Danube problem, worse than the Rhine had ever been, and Welsh nationalists were sabotaging pipelines meant to carry “their” water into England, and the border war in West Pakistan had been dragging on so long most people seemed to have forgotten that it concerned a river.

And so on.

Almost as soon as she started digging, though, she thought she might never be able to stop. It was out of the question to cover the entire planet. Her pledged total of twelve thousand words would be exhausted by North American material alone.

Among her most useful contacts was Felice, née Jones. Having spent more than two months after her return from the wat in hunting for a new job, she had finally resigned herself to being unemployable and married some guy she’d known for years. He had an unexciting but safe job and she was now able to devote much of her time to acting as Peg’s unpaid West Coast correspondent. Despite her former dismissal of her brother’s ideals, she was obviously very worried now. What seemed to have revised her opinions was the fact that her new husband was going to insist on children.

Among the questions she had drawn Peg’s attention to ...

Why had there been a sharp fall in the value of shares in Plant Fertility? In the spring there had been such a demand for their bees and earthworms, they’d been booming; they’d even initiated a market survey to determine if they should add ants and ladybugs. (Felice said there was a Texas firm which had cornered the market in ichneumon wasps, but Peg hadn’t got around to finding what they were wanted for.) There had been no official comment about the company’s decline, but undoubtedly someone on the inside was selling his stock in huge quantities.

Was there a connection between Plant Fertility’s problems and the fact that potatoes were up a dime a pound over spring prices and still rising?

And could animal feed really have been so severely affected as to account for the rise of meat prices from exorbitant to prohibitive? (It had been years since cattle could be grazed on open land anywhere in the country.) Or was there—as rumor claimed—a wave of contagious abortion decimating the herds, which no antibiotic would touch?

Peg thought: likely both.

Another question. Was it true that Angel City had decided to give up life insurance and realize the value of their out-of-state property because the decline in life expectancy was so sharp it threatened to cut through the profit line?

Similarly: Stephenson Electric Transport was the only car maker in the States whose product met with complete approval from the Trainites. They had been due for a colossal takeover bid from Ford. The negotiations were hanging fire; was that really due to a threat from Chrysler that they’d have them hit with an injunction under the Environment Acts for generating excessive ozone? (Which would leave the pure-exhaust field wide open for foreign companies: Hailey, Peugeot who had just unwrapped their first steamer, and the Japanese Freonvapor cars.)

Was it true that the Trainites had turned sour on Puritan and dug up some kind of dirt about their operations?

She didn’t know. And she was becoming daily more frightened at her inability to find out.

Of course, there were good reasons why companies in trouble with the Trainites should fight tooth and nail to keep their dirty secrets from the public. The government couldn’t go on forever bailing out mismanaged giant corporations, even though it was their own supporters, people who ranted against “UN meddling” and “creeping socialism,” who yelled the loudest for Federal aid when they got into a mess. With an eye to her next series of articles, she’d compiled a list of companies which were state-owned in all but name and would go broke overnight if the government ever called in its loans. So far it included a chemical company caught by the ban on “strong” insecticides; an oil company ruined by public revulsion against defoliants; a pharmaceutical company that had nearly become a subsidiary of Maya Pura, the enormously successful Mexican producers of herbal remedies and cosmetics (to be bought out by Dagoes! Oh, the shame!); six major computer manufacturers who had glutted the market for their costly products; and, inevitably, several airlines.