The Sheep Look Up (44 page)

There was laughter. Nervous, drive-away-the-ghosts laughter.

“And because of that”—he drew himself up straight—“at all costs, to me, to anyone,
at all costs
if the human race is to survive, the forcible exportation of the way of life invented by these stupid men must ... be ...
stopped.
”

His voice suddenly rose to a roar.

“The planet Earth can’t afford it!”

He’s got them, Peg thought. I never believed he’d do it. But he’s got them. Christ, that cameraman: he’s shaking, shaking from head to foot! In a moment he’s going to weep like Petronella did!

“Our way of life,” Austin said, resuming a conversational tone. “Yes ... You’re aware that we’re under martial law? It’s been claimed that we’re at war, that at Denver we suffered a sneak chemical attack. As a matter of fact, the stuff that caused the Denver Madness is a military psychotomimetic based on the ergot that infects rye, known by the US Army code ‘BW,’ manufactured on an experimental basis at Fort Detrick, Maryland, from 1959 to 1963, stored at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal until the latter year, and then disposed of in steel drums in an abandoned silver mine. Are you interested in hearing what happened to it?”

He grinned suddenly; it made his newly bald head resemble the skull of one of the Trainite symbols they had—for a very short time—marketed for people to hang on their gates, three-dimensional in sterile plastic.

“Well, shortly before Christmas last year, one of the now frequent earthquakes in that area ruptured the first of the drums. Its contents leaked into the water-table serving the wells at the Bamberley Hydroponics Plant. As far as I’ve been able to discover, only one American citizen died from that contamination, my late friend Decimus Jones. Hearing he was about to make a trip to California, an acquaintance of his made him a present of some Nutripon filched from the factory. Part of the same batch that went to Noshri and San Pablo! He went insane, and he died.

“You now know who started the war in Honduras, by the way.”

Quite distinctly, Peg heard several people say, “So that’s what happened!”

“Later there was another earthquake. It must have broken open not one but scores of the drums containing BW. So now you know about Denver and the Madness, too. You know why you’re eating scant rations, why you’re forbidden to travel freely, why you’re at risk of being stopped and searched by any soldier who dislikes your face. The other thing you should know concerns the
jigras
. They weren’t made deliberately resistant for use as a weapon against us! They simply learned the technique of biological adaptation. Any of you had trouble lately with fleas? Lice? Roaches? Mosquitoes?”

Roland Bamberley was sitting silent, Peg realized suddenly, when he should by rights have been on his feet screaming. Why? She glanced at him, and saw that his face was perfectly rigid, his eyes were shut, and he was clutching his right arm.

But no one was making any move to help him, though he was obviously in such pain he had almost fainted. What could be wrong?

And then she forgot about that Austin was talking again.

“I could have said most of this months ago, all in fact except the story of Decimus Jones. Indeed, I was going to. On the Page show, as you’ll recall. But then, when I realized what was going to happen to me, I decided I was better advised to wait. One more thing remained to be done.

“When did you last bask in the sun, friends? When did you last dare drink from a creek? When did you last risk picking fruit and eating it straight from the tree? What were your doctor’s bills last year? Which of you live in cities where you don’t wear a filtermask? Which of you spent this year’s vacation in the mountains because the sea is fringed with garbage? Which of you right now is not suffering from a nagging minor complaint—bowel upset, headache, catarrh, or like Mr. Bamberley there”—he pointed—“acute claudication of a major artery? Someone should attend to him, please. He needs an immediate dose of a good vasodilator.”

Astonished, the medic by the courtroom door who had administered shots to the press selected the right hypodermic from his kit and ran to obey. There was a spontaneous burst of clapping which Austin waved down.

“He’ll recover, though I’m afraid he can’t expect to live very long. None of us can. I don’t mean because we’re going to be gunned down, though that’s likely, but because our life expectancy is slipping. Ten years ago it was thirty-second in the world—strange, that: the world’s richest country having only the thirty-second-best life expectancy—but now it’s down to thirty-seventh and still falling ... Still, there’s hope for man!”

Let there be, Peg said under her breath. Oh, let there be! She remembered: “I think I can save the world!”

She’d been right about the cameraman. His cheeks were wet.

“In Europe, as you know, they’ve killed the Mediterranean, just as we killed the Great Lakes. They’re in a fair way to killing the Baltic, with help from the Russians who have already killed the Caspian. Well, this living organism we call Mother Earth can’t stand that treatment for long—her bowels tormented, her arteries clogged, her lungs choked ... But what’s happened inevitably as a result? Such a social upheaval that all thoughts of spreading this—this
cancer
of ours have had to be forgotten! Yes, there’s hope! When starving refugees are besieging frontiers, armies can’t be spared to propagate the cancer any further. They have to be called home—like ours!”

Again his voice rose to that pitch that commanded total attention.

“Keep it here! For God’s sake if you believe in Him, but in any case for Man’s sake, keep it here! Although it’s already too late for us, it may not be too late for the rest of the planet! We owe it to those who come after that there never be another Mekong Desert! There must never be another Oklahoma dustbowl! There must never be another dead sea! I beg you, I plead with you to take a solemn oath: though your children will be twisted, and dull-witted, and slow of speech, there will remain somewhere, for long enough, a place where children grow up healthy, bright and sane! Vow it! Swear it! Pledge it for the species we have so nearly—Yes?”

Blinking at the cameraman with tear-wet cheeks, who now sniveled, “I’m sorry, Mr. Train, but it’s no good!” He tapped the earphones he was wearing. “The president has ordered you to be cut off!”

There was total silence. It was as though Austin were an inflated dummy and someone had just located the valve to let the gas out. He seemed inches shorter as he turned aside, and scarcely anyone heard him mutter, “Well, I did try,”

“But you mustn’t stop!” Peg heard herself scream, leaping to her feet. “You—”

The wall behind him buckled and the ceiling leaned on his head with the full weight of a concrete beam. Then the roof began to cascade down on everybody in a stream of rubble.

Ossie’s last bomb had worked well.

ARMED

“There, baby—how does that grab you?” Pete said proudly.

Jeannie clapped her hands and gasped. “Oh, honey! I always wanted one of them! A microwave cooker!” She rounded on him. “But how did you get hold of it?”

He knew why she was asking. Goods of all kinds had become scarce in the past weeks. Partly it was due to lack of transportation; trucks were being reserved to essentials, mainly food, and convoyed from city to city under Army guard. But also it was because people were dropping out of their jobs, emigrating from cities like a new wave of Okies. One had seen what happened in Denver. If the same fate overtook New York, or Los Angeles, or Chicago ...

There were reports of farmers standing off would-be squatters with a gun. Not, of course, in the papers or on TV.

“It was liberated,” Pete said with a grin.

“You mean you stole it?” Carl, from the doorway. “Tush, tush. And you an ex-pig. Who shall guard the guardians?”

“I did not steal it!” Pete snapped. He found his brother-in-law almost impossible to tolerate. Even after that crazy speech on TV he still seemed to think that Austin Train was God. And the hell of it was, so did far too many other people. It was making Pete nervous. The station house in Towerhill where he’d worked most of last year had been bombed and Sergeant Chain, his former chief, was dead. There had been a rattle of gunfire only a few blocks distant as he came home tonight, most likely a suspected curfew-breaker being stopped from running. The whole city felt like a factory whose owners had gone bankrupt without warning: a shell, emptied of its workers, who now stood at its gate seething with fury.

“Then how did you get it?” Carl pressed. Aware he was being needled, Pete drew a deep breath.

“It came from that big discount warehouse over in Arvada. The owner got killed. His widow’s just been telling people to help themselves.”

“Looting with permission, huh?”

“No! The Army’s supervising it all, and I got a certificate—”

“Oh, quit wrangling, you two!” Jeannie ordered. “Don’t spoil my treat. This is something I’ve wanted for ages, Carl. I don’t care how we got it, so there.”

Carl sighed and turned away. After a moment Pete said awkwardly, “Like a beer, Carl? I managed to locate a six-pack. In the icebox.”

“Ah ... Yeah, I guess I would; thanks. I’ll bring you one in the living-room, shall I?”

It was so hard all the time pretending to be dull from the aftermath of the BW, when at long long last the revolution had arrived! Well—maybe not quite THE REVOLUTION, in capitals, but certainly the chance to make a revolution work. There had never before been so many people so absolutely angry with the system, and striking back against it.

He was stuck here, though, until the opportunity arose to slip through the cordon around the city and go underground. Because of the massive forces which had been poured into Denver to clear up after the Madness, this was almost certainly the most completely controlled city in the nation. What a place to be stranded! He distrusted Pete because he had been in the police, and he was even afraid of Jeannie because he’d confessed to her the killing of that state border guard.

Hell, how could these two be so wilfully
blind?
They conceded that the Madness had been caused by poison gas, but because it was Train who had given chapter and verse about it, they were ready to argue that “it wasn’t the government’s fault!” They wanted the clock turned back to where it was before, they wanted the government to regain control even though it had lied to and cheated and even killed its people!

If they were capable of that degree of stupidity and docility, they might all too easily sell him out ...

“You picked the right day to have it delivered, too,” Jeannie was saying as she patted the cooker’s shining side. “Mom got me a chicken. Don’t hang around too long with your beer, will you? Dinner’s only going to be a minute with this beauty.”

Carl curled his lip in disgust as he collected the beer cans and headed for the adjacent room in Pete’s wake. Sitting down, he said, “Seen the sun lately, have you?”

“Oh, stop it!” Pete snapped. “I’ve heard it all before! But things are getting back to normal, aren’t they? We got water on again, morning and evening. We got power though we don’t have gas. Yeah, back to normal.”

“You’re damned right,” Carl said with earnestness. “This is going to be ‘normal’ from now on. The situation we’re in now, I mean. Martial law. Travel restrictions. Protest banned. Half the country rocking with dynamite explosions. This
is
the future, unless we prevent it. And what sort of a life is it going to be for my nephew?”

“The kid’s going to be okay,” Pete insisted. “Doc McNeil says he’s coming on fine, we got special rations for Jeannie because she’s pregnant—”

“And you’re happy with that?” Carl exploded. “You’re happy that he’s never going to be able to move from one city to another because he wants to, without applying for police permission? That’s the kind of freedom we’re going to lose for good unless we seize it back for ourselves!”

“I thought you were the one who objected to freedom,” Pete sighed. “At least the freedom to make what you want, where you want. Where would you let someone build a factory?”

“Any place it wouldn’t spoil other people’s lives,” Carl retorted. “But why have so many factories, anyway? Why can’t you like have a car that lasts half your lifetime? Why—?”

“Now then, you two!” Jeannie shouted from the kitchen, interrupting the cheerful tune she’d been humming. “I want this to be a nice happy evening, hear?”

“Okay,” Carl called back, and went on in a lower tone. “But what bugs me is this—and I’m not the only one, thank God.
They’re still there.
The people who covered up the sun, the people who jailed Train on a count he wasn’t guilty of, the people who made that poison gas: they’re still there, and they’ll be there until the stink gets so bad they move to New Zealand. They’ll be able to afford to. You and I can’t. That’s what we’ve got to put right!”

“Even if it’s true about the gas,” Pete grunted, “Train himself said it was an accident. An earthquake.”

“What’s accidental about an earthquake in Denver? Mom told me: there weren’t any around here when I was a baby. All that poisoned waste they poured down old mine-shafts made the rocks slip under the mountains. Nothing accidental there, man!”

It was the same argument. Tenth time through? Twelfth?

“Here goes nothing!” Jeannie sang out merrily from the kitchen. “Sharpen your appetites!”

“Know one of the reasons I got that cooker?” Pete said under his breath. “To cut short the time I have to listen to your talk before we go to the table.” He chuckled and sipped his beer.

And there was a thump from the kitchen and the sound of a dish breaking, and Carl ran to the door and stared in, and said, “Oh, Christ. What happened? She get a—a shock, maybe?”

Hobbling frantically in his wake, clutching at tables and chair-backs because his cane was out of reach, Pete stared in horror at Jeannie prostrate on the floor. Carl dived for the socket and unplugged the cooker.

“But it’s brand-new!” Pete said foolishly. “Jeannie! Jeannie!”

There was an hour to wait in the lobby of the hospital, where the breeze drifted in through broken windows and brought with it the scent of smoke. They had passed the fire on the way, and the police escort who was riding with them to vouch for their right to traverse the street-corner checkpoints after curfew—it was Pete’s old friend, Chappie Rice—said it was the third he’d heard about tonight, all due to arson.