The Sheep Look Up (36 page)

And then she’d changed her mind because the name Peg Mankiewicz rang a faint bell, and
wow!
The real Austin Train! A man the nation—the world—had been crying out to hear from, who had hidden himself away for forty months and chosen
her
show to break his silence on. The research department had come up with that evocative figure, forty, and it was exact, and thanks to its Biblical associations it was pregnant but
pregnant
with overtones. Forty days the waters were upon the face of the earth, forty days in the wilderness tempted of Satan ... “Anyone would think you had Jesus on the show!” Ian Farley had said crossly at one point during the frantic pre-broadcast hassles.

“Yes.”

Which stopped him dead. Well, it was true that the crucifixion teams were ready and rehearsing, wasn’t it? Not that she was going to let the guy be crucified the first time out. Ian had expected that she would, and it had taken two days to disabuse him and explain why to the Big Bosses in back of him. The crucifixion is for the
second
show—didn’t you ever hear of the Right to Reply?

And are there ever going to be people who demand it!

Never in its history had ABS lavished this much attention on one single performer. Come to that, nor had Petronella. But it was essential that they actually put out the show. They’d asked their audience research unit two questions: how many people would watch the first show because they’d heard Train was on it, and how many would watch a second show because they’d seen the first or because they’d missed it?

The answer in both cases was an unbelievable sixty million.

Naturally, threats had started to flood in within minutes of the first spot announcement. They ranged from routine bomb scares to a warning that the studio would be occupied by armed volunteers and the show converted into a kangaroo court to try Austin Train for treason. So, against emergencies, they alerted every local studio they controlled within five hundred miles of New York, and set up extra landlines and line-of-sight links to their main transmitters, so that within half an hour of their deadline they would still have several options open. Then they scheduled the real show—Train had dismissed the idea of pre-recording—for a location they’d never used before, a derelict theater they’d bought for rehearsal space and were anyway intending to fit up before the fall season. Even the technicians installing mikes and cables didn’t realize the place was going to be used for the crucial transmission. They only knew they were getting record wages.

But then there weren’t many people in their trade nowadays.

“Sixty million, hm? I’m not surprised,” Train said, and that wasn’t vanity. He had reasonable grounds. Sitting with Petronella in the high-security penthouse where the Big Bosses had immediately insisted on putting him—at their expense—when they learned he was staying in the same shoddy hotel as Peg Mankiewicz. She was behind and to one side of him, in almost literally the same place she had occupied ever since Petronella first met them. Like a bodyguard. Not a mistress; ABS had verified through their bugs that she slept alone and so did he. Small wonder, Petronella had thought once or twice. She had been dismayed to find what the man looked like now, bald and with those hideous scars on his scalp. Moreover, she found his statue-like composure repellent. He barely moved even his hands when he was talking like this, and refused to touch tobacco, pot, khat, anything stronger than beer or wine and very little of those.

Peg was extremely attractive. But the ABS researchers said she was straight.

Too bad. Petronella returned her attention to what Train was saying.

“It would have been different a few years ago. That size of audience would only have been available for a major public event such as a moon landing or the funeral of a celebrity who’d been assassinated. But now, of course, people so seldom go out. In the cities, because it’s dangerous; in the country, because—well, what is there to go out for? The puritan backlash has closed half the movie theaters and most of the drive-ins, particularly where they were a major social center, and thanks to the fear of shortage people don’t make more than one shopping trip a week because they keep enough in the house to see them through a siege. Yes, for most people nowadays television is their only contact with the world beyond their daily work.”

Ah. This could lead him on to lawnorder. Petronella baited her hook and cast it, and was rewarded.

“But the police encourage people to be afraid of them—in some cases, more afraid than they are of criminals. The intelligent ones among our young people catch the habit early and grow up with it. Recently, for example, I’ve seen a giant roundup of every man under thirty in a twenty-block area of Oakland. Most of them spent the night in a cell. No wonder there are twelve cities under martial law.”

“But if they’re looking for draft dodgers, who are by definition criminals—”

“More exactly revolutionaries, whether they know it or not. Our society fosters criminals, as the blood of a sheep nourishes the ticks on its back; indeed, they often find it more profitable past a certain point to conform rather than resist. The money made from bootlegging now finances Puritan, for instance, just as fortunes made from piracy ennobled many famous English families. But draft-dodgers have opted out of this system, which has proved that it both demeans the individual and degrades his environment.”

Yum.

“Still, men who refuse to train in defense of their country—”

“No, that’s not what an army trains men to do.”

She let him interrupt. This was one guest who wasn’t going through the stock interrogation; let him convict himself out of his own mouth. He was doing a better job than she’d ever dreamed of.

“It’s natural for a man to defend what’s dear to him: his own life, his home, his family. But in order to make him fight on behalf of his rulers, the rich and powerful who are too cunning to fight their own battles—in short to defend not himself but people whom he’s never met and moreover would not care to be in the same room with him—you have to condition him into loving violence not for the benefits it bestows on him but for its own sake. Result: the society has to defend itself from its defenders, because what’s admirable in wartime is termed psychopathic in peace. It’s easier to wreck a man than to repair him. Ask any psychotherapist. And take a look at the crime figures among veterans.”

Petronella was almost beside herself. So far, if this was a sample of what he planned to say during the actual show, he’d have managed to alienate both major political parties, the armed services, all the ex-service organizations except the bleeding heart Double-V, all big business interests, and the police along with everyone who still trusted them. (And possibly Puritan, one of her sponsors—but most of the Syndicate people she’d met were rather proud of their romantic gangster origins and didn’t mind who knew about them.)

Oh, yes! This was going to be a °S°E°N°S°A°T°I°O°N°. She could almost see the big blue-and-red headlines which would appear the following day.

Memo to self: have extra phone lines rigged and hire extra operators to take the calls.

“So”—needling—“what have you done to the people who call themselves Trainites, who kill and blow things up and generally behave like your description of an army, a horde of madmen?”

“Nothing. I am no more responsible for the actions of the Trainites than Jesus for the behavior of the Christians on whom Paul of Tarsus projected his personal neuroses.”

Add the churches to the list of people offended. Keep rolling, baby!

“So you don’t approve of their sabotage and arson?”

“I don’t approve of the situation that’s driven people to such desperate measures. There is, however, such a thing as righteous anger.”

“You think their anger is righteous, when all that we can foresee beyond it is anarchy, nihilism, a world where every man’s hand is turned against his brother?”

“Not against his brother. The man who’s being poisoned by the additives Universal Mills put in his food knows who his brother is—a stranger, starving in Africa because a foolish war has destroyed his field of mealies. The brother of the man who has to waste half his income on treatment for a child who was born deformed is the peasant in Laos whose wife died aborting an egg-bundle fetus. No, not against his brother. Against the enemies of his species. That they also happen to be human—well, that’s regrettable. Is a cancer cell in your lung or liver any more welcome for being tissue spawned from your own body?”

That, unexpectedly, touched her. She was afraid of cancer. Among the reasons she had never married was that she thought of pregnancy as a kind of malignant growth, an uncontrollable independent organism in her belly. She spoke harshly to drive away such thoughts.

“Then you advocate violence as a surgical operation.”

“The people who have brought it about have no more right to object to it than the long-time smoker has to object to cancer and bronchitis.”

“I’d say they have as much right to object as someone who’s been promised surgery and discovers the local butcher doing the job,” Petronella retorted, quite pleased with the image. “Hacking off an arm, a leg, a breast”—better not say that on the show!—“and leaving the patient crippled ... Unless someone can offer superior alternatives, he has no right to interfere.”

“But there are superior alternatives,” Austin Train said.

Under those curious abridged brows sharp eyes fixed her. Suddenly the room seemed to recede to a great distance.

She had of course seen him both in person—at a major academic conference where he had been a featured speaker—and repeatedly on television during his spell of previous notoriety. Despite his baldness, she had already been sure he wasn’t a fake even before the ABS researchers surreptitiously contrived to check his fingerprints against his FBI dossier—in other words, managed to bribe the right person. She recalled him as a forceful and witty speaker with a ready repartee and a penetrating voice. He had once, for example, put down a spokesman for the pesticide industry with a remark that people still quoted at parties: “And I presume on the eighth day God called you and said, ‘I changed my mind about insects!’ ”

Up to now, he had confirmed this long-standing impression. Thousands of people, though, could be both articulate and outrageous, and if it was going to turn out that she’d allotted an entire show to a man who was no more than that ...

And then, all of a sudden, it was as though through those dark eyes an electrical circuit had been struck. She sat fascinated. Snake-and-bird fascinated. Afterwards she could not recall the details of what he had said. She remembered only that she had been absorbed, rapt, lost, for over ten minutes by the clock. She had perceived images conjured up from the dead past: a hand trailed in clear river water, deliciously cool, while the sun smiled and a shoal of tiny fishes darted between her fingers; the crisp flesh of a ripe apple straight from the tree, so juicy it ran down her chin; grass between her bare toes, the turf like springs so that she seemed not to bear the whole of her weight on her soles but to be floating, dreamlike, in slow motion, instantly transported to the moon; the western sky painted with vast heart-tearing slapdash streaks of red below the bright steel-blue of clouds, and stars coming snap-snap into view against the eastern dark; wind gentle in her hair and on her cheeks, bearing flower perfumes, dusting her with petals; snow cold to the palm as it was shaped into a ball; laughter echoing from a dark lane where only lovers walked, not thieves and muggers; butter like an ingot of soft gold; ocean spray sharp and clean as the edge of an axe; with the same sense of safe, provided rightly used; round pebbles polychrome beside a pool; rain to which a thirsty mouth could open, distilling the taste of a continent of air ... And under, and through, and in, and around all this, a conviction: “Something can be done to get that back!”

She was crying. Small tears like ants had itched their paths down her cheeks. She said, when she realized he had fallen silent, “But I never knew that! None of it! I was born and raised right here in New York!”

“But don’t you think you should have known it?” Austin Train inquired gently.

Petronella woke the morning of the show—or rather, afternoon, because her day was askew—with the muscles of her cheeks strained toward cramp; she had smiled so long and hard in her sleep.

Then it all stormed in on her: what they expected her to do tonight.

She sat up, afraid of drifting back to those tempting dreams, to that other impossible world where the ground was clean and the trees were green and the sun beamed down after the pure rain. She reached for a cigarette from the bedside shelf to distract herself, and instead of lighting it turned it over and over between her hands, frowning.

The present-day world was still here: the air on the Manhattan streets you breathed at your peril, the food in the Manhattan stores it was safer not to buy, the rain from the Manhattan sky that smirched a new dress in a moment and kept the dry-cleaners in business on wet days, the noise, the rush, and now and then a bang—an SST overshooting Kennedy, a saboteur taking revenge on a building, a policeman trying to stop a fleeing suspect.

Hell, she’d been conned. That
other
world could never have existed. It was simply a pipe-dream of paradise.

Though if Train’s imagination could conjure up that kind of vision, it was small wonder he wouldn’t touch drugs.

He didn’t need them.

She reached finally for the phone and called Ian Farley, and said, “Ian baby! I’ve been thinking. The people we need for the second show, the crucifixion ...”

Yet, in spite of everything, the vision haunted her. As the echo of her regular greeting died away— “Hi, world!” —and the star commercials of her sponsors went up on the monitor, she looked at them without her normal pride. Filtermasks? We evolved on this planet; why should we have to strain its air before we fill our lungs? Steam cars? Why cars at all? Ground is there to be walked on. A man, an athlete from England, had crossed North America on foot to show it could be done—and so, come to that, had relays of people protesting ... something. (It had happened years ago and she had forgotten the reason. Likely something to do with a war that got aborted.)