The Sheep Look Up (40 page)

“That sounds bad!” Alan snapped, and headed for the door. The others followed. Down the corridor separating the administrative section from the—

“It’s Mack!” Pete shouted. “He’s gone crazy!”

They stopped, crowded into the doorway of the warehouse: strutted shelves full of cartoned parts, mostly the filters in green and red boxes with Japanese characters on the end. At the door of his cubbyhole office, wood and glass about ten feet on a side, Pete, his face agonized, clinging to the jamb for support because his cane was out of reach. Lying on the floor a yard away. Philip grabbed it, gave it back, steadied him and felt him shaking. From out of sight behind a barrier of shelving came noises: things being dragged down and flung aside.

“What happened?” Alan rasped.

“He—he came in a few minutes ago without his helper,” Pete forced out, panting so violently he could hardly spare the breath for speech. “Yelled something to me about black mothers thinking they own this place, and went storming down there and started smashing things!”

“Anybody else around?” Philip demanded.

“Nobody! It’s four o’clock, so the fitters are still out, and I sent Gladys home. She’s sick—tonsilitis.”

“Dorothy, call the pigs,” Philip said. She nodded and ran back along the passage.

“But we can’t just let him go on!” Alan snapped. “Where is he?”

“Here I am!” Mack shouted. “Peek-a-boo!”

He forced apart the two top cartons of a pile about six feet tall, at the end of an aisle between the shelving, and leered at them. He was a big man with broad shoulders. His face gleamed with perspiration.

“And jigaboo, too!” he added. “You get that filthy nigger out of my hair or I’ll wreck everything in the place!”

“Mack—!”

Alan took a step forward, but in the same instant Mack pitched the cartons to the floor, crash-crash, and there were little crunching noises as the brittle plastic shells of a dozen purifiers broke. Then he started to stamp on the pile. He weighed a good hundred and sixty, maybe eighty.

“You bastard, stop that!” Alan roared.

Mack curled his lip and seized something from the nearest shelf and threw it. Alan ducked. It smashed the glass of Pete’s office. Mack giggled like a three-year-old child and went on pounding the cartons to pulp. After a moment or two he started to sing in rhythm.

“I’m—the king—o’ the castle! Go wipe—y’r fucking—asshole!”

“He’s really crazy,” Philip whispered, feeling as though all the blood had drained from his head to his legs, making his brain sluggish and his feet lead-heavy.

“Yes.” Alan wiped his face. “Go get my gun. Know where I keep it?”

“Yes.”

But as Philip turned, he almost bumped into Dorothy running back.

“Phil, the line’s dead! And I’ve seen fires—all over the place! Half the downtown section is ablaze!”

The three of them froze: Pete, Philip, Alan. They recalled suddenly things heard during the past half hour—fire sirens, police sirens, shots. But one was always hearing those, all day, in any big city!

Mack, meantime, went on happily trampling those cartons flat. Now and then he dragged more down to add to the pile.

“Are we at war?” Alan said slowly. It was the thought in all their minds.

“I got a radio in there,” Pete said, pointing into his office now bright with shards of glass.

Philip rushed to it, spun the dial, hunting for a station broadcasting something other than music. In a moment, a man saying, “Hey, Morris baby, you piss in this cah-fee or sump’n? Say, I hate that last disc. Gonna break it. Heh-heh! An’ fuck Body English, they’re a bunch of creeps and queers!”

The station went off the air as though a switch had been turned, and that was the moment Mack chose to get bored with his game and shatter another of the office’s windows. They all ducked, except Pete because of his back brace.

“Dorothy, bring my gun,” Alan whispered. “Pete, could you stand him off with it? I guess they taught you to use a gun when you were a pig, huh?”

“Taught me!” Pete snorted. “My whole training lasted like six weeks! But yeah, I can shoot pretty well.”

“Dorothy—”

She was already gone.

“What the hell can have happened to him?” Philip muttered to Alan, crouching.

“Come on, everybody!” Mack yelled, jumping up and down. “This is fun! Whyncha join in?”

“That DJ didn’t sound as though he had his head too straight,” Pete said equally softly, keeping a wary eye on Mack. “And what about these fires?”

“Rioting!” Alan snapped. “Don’t worry about that right now, we got problems of our own—ah, thanks!” To Dorothy as she handed him the .32 he kept in his office against intruders. “Pete, take this, and Phil and I will try and get in back of him, see? If we can jump him we can maybe knock him out. Phil, come on—”

Which was the point at which Mack noticed the gun, not quite hidden as Alan held it toward Pete. His face instantly deformed into a mask of blind fury.

“You son of a bitch!” he bellowed, and charged them. Philip cried out and drew back, thinking to protect Dorothy, and Alan fired.

“You mother!” Mack looked down at his chest, bare in the opening of his shirt, and saw the round hole beside his breastbone. His expression altered to complete astonishment. “Why, you ...”

A dark patch spread down his pants leg. “Hell,” he said mildly. “I wet myself.”

And slowly collapsed on his knees and laid his face on the floor.

Dorothy started to sob.

There was a long silence. Blood began to mingle with the urine.

“Now we got to contact the pigs somehow,” Alan said at length. “Phone dead or not dead. But ...” He looked from one to another of his companions, beseechingly. “I did have to do it, didn’t I?”

“Yeah.” Pete licked his lips. “If ever I saw murder in a man’s eyes ... Christ, what could have done that to him? He never even joshed me about being black, like some of the men do. And then all of a sudden—this!”

“Dorothy,” Alan said, not tearing his eyes from the corpse, “could you drive down to—?”

“No,” Dorothy interrupted. She was pressing her hands together to stop them trembling. “You haven’t seen what it’s like out there. I can’t drive anywhere by myself right now. Wouldn’t dare.”

Philip and Alan exchanged glances.

“I guess we better see what she means,” Philip said, and led the way back to his own office—not Alan’s where they had been conferring earlier, from which the view was of a high black wall the other side of the road. The instant he thrust open the door, he exclaimed in horrified amazement

In the distance, smoke was rising in vast billowing clouds to join the eternal gray overcast. Opening the window let in the stench of burning: rubber, plastic, wood, heaven knew what else. It was infinitely worse than any river fire.

A moment, and a highway patrol car came screaming past and made a frantic left toward the downtown area, siren blasting. They caught a glimpse of a man next to the driver, perfectly white, barking into a microphone.

After that, rumbling, Army trucks, at least eight or nine, each crammed with masked men carrying guns.

“Run out and ask what’s happening!” Dorothy cried, and Philip jolted into action. But before he made it to the road they’d driven past. He came back wiping his eyes and coughing.

“Too late!” he forced out. “But there must be some way to find out what’s going on! Do we have another radio?”

“Yes, mine,” Dorothy said, and hurried to fetch it.

Set to the Conelrad band, it uttered a little girl’s voice, chanting. Or was it a little girl? “Castor was bigger than Pollux! So when they were both at their frolics, Pollux offered his ass to Give pleasure to Castor, Who had a huge prick and three bollocks.”

The voice dropped an octave and a half and added in normal businesslike tones, “Stand by. Keep your sets tuned to this wavelength for further information.”

Philip, growing frantic, wound the dial again. Pastypale, Dorothy tried the phone and confirmed that it was totally useless, not even a hum on the line.

“Wowee, man!” the radio said, and gave a neighing laugh. “This is a great high, surely is. This is a
fantastic—
Hey, you stinking mother, leave that switch alone! This is
my
show! You cut me off and I’ll cut you off.” The sound of a bottle being smashed. “Get away from there or I’ll carve you good, hear?”

Another station was playing the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth at 45 instead of 33, and someone was finding that so funny he was laughing louder than the music.

There was nothing else on the dial at all, not even on the police band, but that meant nothing. The lie of the land here was bad for short wave, and this set wasn’t a very good one.

Alan reached past Philip and switched the set off.

“Phil, you got a wife and kids down there. Get along home.”

“But—”

“You heard me!” Gruffly. “I’ll lock up with Dorothy, then drive her home. I got my gun, I’ll be all right. You tell the police about Mack on the way, okay?”

Philip nodded, heart hammering. “I’ll ride Pete home too, then. He can’t drive.” He hesitated. “Thanks.”

THE DESCENT INTO HELL

It was hard for Pete to get into Philip’s car. Some impulse—a pang of conscience, maybe—had led him to switch to the next size smaller in the range he patronized when he bought the year’s new one back in June. Having made sure Pete was settled okay, he felt in the glove compartment. Filtermasks.

“Here!” he said, offering the one Denise generally used—the kids’ would be far too small. Pete took it with a mutter of thanks. Even with the precipitator on the ventilator, this stench would be hard to endure. Already the air was full of greasy black smuts.

“Think it is an attack?” he said, muffled. “Or just rioting?”

“God knows,” Philip answered, bringing something else out of the glove compartment: Denise’s .22. “Take this as well.”

“Right.” Pete set it on his lap, dark hand loosely around the butt.

“So let’s go. Your place first.”

Philip gunned the engine and headed for the exit from the parking lot—and had to stand on the brake as he reached it. Coming from the city center like a bat out of hell, a madman with wide staring eyes at the wheel of a Maserati.

VROOM!

“What the—?”

And behind him a Mustang, and a Camaro, and a big Lincoln, and ...

There was a gap. Philip grabbed it. And heading into the city: nothing. Not a car for ten blocks, twelve, fifteen! But coming the other way so many cars they were cramming the whole of their half of the road, overflowing into the other half, ignoring red lights, cutting in on each other, scraping though not in fact colliding ...

“I seen that before,” Pete said. “Panic.”

“Yeah.”

Ahead, an Econoline jumped a red from their right and cut across their bows to try and join the out-from-town traffic. It locked fenders with a Cadillac and both stalled.

“Oh-oh,” Philip murmured, and dodged around the Econoline’s tail before the light turned red against him. He felt extraordinarily calm. It was as though he had been subconsciously awaiting this day, the day when the heavens would fall, and had used up his whole reservoir of fear and anxiety. He would get home, and either find Denise and the kids, or not find them. Then he’d either find them later somewhere else, or never find them because they were dead. It was all fixed, all outside his control.

He glanced at Pete. “Is Jeannie home?” he demanded.

“Likely,” Pete grunted. His hands tensed suddenly on the gun. “Look out ahead!”

A block in front of them: a gas station afire, huge yellow licking tongues of flame. Someone vainly struggling to rig a hose. Passers-by, delighted, yelling and trying to prevent him by throwing cans and bottles. Philip made a fast right and dodged through some side streets he hadn’t known about, which brought them out eventually in the right place. Miraculous. People obeying a red light. He got on to the parallel avenue and rolled.

All the time the scream of sirens.

Now and then the crisp snap of guns.

“Try the radio again,” Pete said, and pressed the on button. Music. Everything quite normal. Roaring Mortimer’s crazy version of
Summertime
with the high-speed double talk like an old King Pleasure number.

“Summertime boys and girls and those intermediate and the killing is wheezy laze an’ gemmun an’ it’s a GAS a GAS a KNOCK SEE JIM! Heddle-ah-boh!”

At which point: silence. Pete, surprised, turned the set off and on again, but now there was nothing anywhere.

Here, the windows of five or six stores broken. But so far none of the other regular symptoms of a riot day like barriers closing streets and patrol cars and detour signs and ... Wonder what became of the Army trucks and the men in them? And everyone on the sidewalks kind of cheerful. Slowing as traffic became more dense in the road ahead, Philip stared from side to side. They were still nowhere near the main area of the fire which was making the air so dirty. It might be somewhere around 18th and Stout, he guessed, maybe at the big post office. He saw a boy grab a middle-aged woman by the skirt and smack her bottom, and she jumped away and left the skirt in his hand, and she wore no panties and walked on quite unconcerned.

“Everybody’s going crazy!” Pete whispered. “Like Mack!”

“I don’t believe it,” Philip snapped. “Look, there’s a squad car ahead. We can ask them ...”

Surrounded by a grinning group of young people. Hell! Very slowly, Philip crept past the squad car, drawn up by the curb, and saw incredulously why the crowd had gathered. The driver and the man beside him were locked in each other’s arms, kissing passionately.

A girl was drawing a skull and crossbones on the car’s trunk with a lipstick. It was a good one, artistic, with the right number of teeth and everything.

But at that point someone shot at them, and there was a sudden hole in the rear left corner of the car’s roof and the back window shattered and starred.

Philip was so startled, he almost ran off the road, but recovered before he hit any of the pedestrians. And then there was a proper police barrier. Being familiar, it was a reassurance as well as a stinking nuisance.