The Sheep Look Up

by John Brunner

  And thrust the finger into her mouth and instead of nibbling away the broken bit, tore it. Her finger bled.

  But at least the pain offered an anchor to reality. Calming, she wrapped around the injury a tissue from the glove-compartment and thought about calling in her story. It was a story. It would make the TV news services as well as the paper. Killed on the freeway: Decimus Jones, age thirty, busted twice for pot and once for assault, smeared with an average quantity of the grime a young black nowadays expected to acquire. But suddenly reformed (it says here) by the precepts of Austin Train at twenty-six, mastermind of Trainite operations when they spread to Colorado ... not that he would have acknowledged the name “Trainite” any more than Austin did. Austin said the proper term was “commie”, for “commensalist,” meaning that you and your dog, and the flea on the dog’s back, and the cow and the horse and the jackrabbit and the gopher and the nematode and the paramecium and the spirochete all sit down to the same table in the end. But that had been just a debating point, when he got sick of people screaming at him that he was a traitor.

  Ought to make sure Decimus gets returned to the biosphere right away. Forgot to mention that. Should I go back? Hell, I guess he put it in his will. If they take any notice of a black man’s will ...

  Somebody’s going to have to tell Austin. It would be terrible if he first learned the news in print or from TV.

  Me?

  Oh, shit Yes. I’m the first to latch on. So it has to be me.

  Her mind was abruptly a chaos of muddled images, as though three people had taken simultaneous possession of her head. Stanway by chance had asked precisely that question she felt constrained to answer honestly: “A close friend?”

  Close? More like only! Why? Because he was black and happily married and not interested any more in the exoticism of white girls? (Who’ll tell Zena and the kids?) Partly, maybe. But what mattered was that Decimus Jones, healthy, male and hetero, had treated luscious tempting Peg Mankiewicz ... as a friend.

  It had better be Austin who tells Zena. I couldn’t. And a merry Christmas to you all.

  After that the confusion became total. She could foresee events fanning out from this death as though she were reading a crystal ball. Everyone would automatically echo Stanway: “Jumping out of his car that way he must have been stoned—or maybe crazy!”

  Yet she’d known him as a very sane man, and being stoned belonged too far back in his past So it could never have been of his own volition. So somebody must have slipped him a cap of something fierce. And there was only one motive she could think of for doing that. To discredit him at any cost.

  She suddenly realized she had been staring, without seeing, at proof of a Trainite’s passage through this parking lot, a skull and crossbones on the door of a car parked slantwise to hers. Her own, naturally, would be unmarked.

  Yes. It must have been done to discredit Decimus. Must have. These stereotyped interchangeable plastic people with dollar signs in their eyes couldn’t bear to share their half-ruined planet with anyone who climbed out of his ordained grooves. A black JD dropout was meant to die in a street brawl, or better yet in jail partway through a spell of ninety-nine. For him to be loved and looked up to like a doctor or a priest, by white as well as black—that turned their stomachs!

  Turned stomach. Oh, Christ. She fumbled in her purse for a pill she should have taken over an hour ago. And forced it down despite its size without water.

  Usually, nowadays, one had to.

  Finally she decided she was getting maudlin and twisted the key in the dashboard lock. There was steam stored from the trip to get here and the car moved silently and instantly away.

  And cleanly. No lead alkyls, hardly any CO, nothing worse than CO2 and water. Praise be, if Anyone is listening, for those who struggle to save us from the consequences of our own mad cleverness.

  At the exit from the lot, if she had been going to the office she would have turned right. Instead she turned left. There were probably not more than a hundred people in the country who could rely on locating Austin Train when they wanted to. If her editor had known that among them was one of his own reporters who had never used the information for professional purposes, he would have come after her with a gun.

  THE BLEEDING HEART IS A RUNNING SORE

  ... veteran of campaigns in Indochina and the Philippines today became the latest of many distinguished ex-officers to join the Double-V adoption plan, taking into his family an orphaned girl aged eight with severe scars allegedly due to napalm burns. Commenting on his decision the general said, quote, I was not at war with children, only with those seeking the destruction of our way of life. End quote. Questioned concerning his reaction to the growth of the Double-V scheme prior to leaving the White House for his main engagement of the day, a luncheon organized by former members of his official fan club at which he is slated to deliver a major speech on foreign affairs, Prexy said, quote, I guess if they can’t break down the front door they have to sneak around the back. End quote. The Congressional inquiry into alleged bribe-taking by officials of the Federal Land Use Commission...

  THE ROOT OF THE TROUBLE

  “Te-goosey-goosey-galpa—” The rain was pelting down so hard the wipers of the Land Rover could barely cope, and the road was terrible. Despite four-wheel drive they were continually sliding and skidding, and every now and then they met a pothole which made Leonard Ross wince.

  “Knock ’er down and scalp ’er—”

  Dr. Williams’s singing was barely audible above the roar of the engine and the hammering of the rain, but it was just possible to discern that the tune belonged to a nursery rhyme: Goosey Gander.

  “Up hers! H’ and your ass—”

  Another pothole. Leonard reflexively glanced back to see if his equipment was okay, and wished he hadn’t. The rear seat was also occupied by the policeman assigned to escort him, who had a repulsive weeping skin condition, and Leonard’s stomach was queasy enough anyhow.

  “Nobody will halp ’er!” concluded Williams triumphantly, and added without drawing a fresh breath, “How long have you been with Globe Relief?”

  “Oh ...” For an instant Leonard didn’t realize the question was a question. “About four years now.”

  “And you’ve never been to this part of the world before?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Bloody typical!” With a snort. “At least I hope they gave you all the gen?”

  Leonard nodded. They had submerged him with masses of data, and his head was still ringing. But this country was so full of paradoxes! To start with, when he’d seen that the name of his contact at Guanagua was Williams, he’d assumed an American. He hadn’t been prepared for a manic Briton who wore a Harris tweed jacket in this stinking sub-tropical humidity. Yet it seemed of a piece with a nation whose first capital, for 357 years, had been demoted because the citizens objected to the governor keeping a mistress; whose current capital was so relatively unimportant it had never had a railroad, and the international airlines had given up servicing it ...

  “Every time someone tries to haul this country up by its bootstraps,” Williams said, “something goes wrong. Act of God! Though if that’s really how He likes to amuse Himself, no wonder the Tupamaros are making so much headway! Not around here, of course, but in the cities. Look at this road! By local standards it’s a ruddy highway. It’s so damned difficult to get goods to market, most people haven’t the currency to buy manufactured goods, even proper tools. But now and then someone whips up enthusiasm for cash crops instead of subsistence crops—cotton, coffee, that sort of thing—and it swings along for a while and then all of a sudden, crash. Their hard work goes for nothing. Like this time. Come and see for yourself.”

  Unexpectedly he braked the Land Rover at a spot where rocks as high as a man’s knee flanked the track. Peering through the rain-smeared windshield, Leonard made out that they had arrived within sight of a shabby village surrounded on two sides by lines of coffee plants, on
the others by maize and beans. The layout suggested competent husbandry, but every single plant was wilted.

  Jumping out, Williams added, “Bring your gear!”

  “Ah—”

  “Look, the rain isn’t going to stop for bloody weeks, you know, so you might as well get used to it!”

  Reluctantly Leonard picked up his field kit and ducked into the downpour. His glasses blurred instantly, but his sight was too bad for him to discard them. Water trickling down his collar, he followed the line Williams had marked across the sodden ground.

  “Doesn’t matter where you look,” Williams said, stopping level with the nearest coffee plant. “You’ll find the buggers anywhere.”

  Compliantly Leonard began to trowel in the mud. He said after a pause, “You’re English, aren’t you, doctor?”

  “Welsh, actually.” In a frigid tone.

  “Do you mind if I ask what brought you here?”

  “A girl, if you really want to know.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “Pry? Of course not. But I’ll tell you anyway. She was the daughter of one of the embassy staff in London. Very beautiful. I was twenty-four, she was nineteen. But her people were Catholics from Comayagua, where they’re strict, and naturally they didn’t want her marrying a Methodist. So they shipped her home. I finished my studies, saving like mad to buy a passage here, thinking that if I could convince them I was serious ... Hell, I’d have converted if I’d had to!”

  Down there close to the scrawny root of the coffee plant: something wriggling. “And what happened?”

  “I got here and discovered she was dead.”

  “What?”

  “Typhus. It’s endemic. And this was 1949.”

  There seemed to be nothing else anyone could possibly say. Leonard dragged up a clod of dirt and broke it in his hands. Exposed, a frantic creature two inches long, at first glance not unlike an earthworm, but of a bluish-red color, with a slight thickening at one end and a few minute bristles, and writhing with more energy than any earthworm ever had.

  “Yet, you know, I’ve never regretted staying here. There has to be someone on the spot to help these people—it’s no use trying to do it all by remote control ... Ah, you got one of them, did you?” His tone reverted to normal. “Recognize it, by any chance? I can’t find a technical name for it in the literature. Of course my reference-books aren’t up to much. In Spanish it’s sotojuela, but around here they say jigra.”

  One-handed, leaving fingermarks of mud, Leonard extracted a test-tube from his kit and dropped the pest into it. He tried to examine it with his folding glass, but the rain splashed down too heavily.

  “If I could get a look at it under cover,” he muttered.

  There may be a roof in the village that isn’t leaking. May be ... And this is what the buggers do to the plants, see?” Williams pulled a coffee bush casually out of the ground. It offered no resistance. The stem was spongy with bore-holes and the foliage limp and sickly.

  “They attack corn and beans as well?” Leonard asked.

  “Haven’t found anything they won’t eat yet!”

  In the hole left by the uprooted plant, five or six of them squirming to hide.

  “And how long have they been a nuisance?”

  “They’ve always been a nuisance,” Williams said. “But until—oh, about the time they cleared this patch for coffee, you only found them in the forest, living off the underbrush. I didn’t see more than half a dozen the first ten years I spent at Guanagua. Then about two and a half years ago, boom!”

  Leonard straightened, his legs grateful to be released from stooping. “Well, there’s no doubt that this is an emergency, as you claimed. So I’ll apply for authorization to use high-strength insecticides, and then when we’ve—”

  “How long did you say you’d been with Globe Relief?”

  Leonard blinked at him. Suddenly he was unaccountably angry.

  “Who do you think this ground belongs to, anyway? We’re on the private estate of some high government muckamuck who can bend the law as much as he likes! This area’s been sprayed and soaked and saturated with insecticides!”

  From the direction of the village, walking very slowly, a straggling line of men, women and children had emerged. All were thin, all were ragged and barefoot, and several of the children had the belly-bloat characteristic of pellagra.

  “The idiot’s made the jigras resistant to DDT, heptachlor, dieldrin, pyrethrum, the bloody lot! Think I was such a fool the idea hadn’t crossed my mind to check? Those people don’t need chemicals, they need food!”

  DEFICIT

  Petronella Page: Hi, world!

  Studio audience: Hi!

  Page: Well, this time as ever we have for you all kinds of people making news. Among others we’re to welcome Big Mama Prescott whose hit “The Man with the Forty-Five” is currently the center of a fierce debate about the proper—or improper—material for pop songs. (Audience laughter.) And then we’ll be talking to a whole group of the ex-officers who’ve given so many children from Southeast Asia the best of all Christmas presents, a new home and a new family. But first off let’s welcome someone who’s been making headlines in a different area. He’s a scientist, and you’ve been hearing about him because—well, because if his calculations are right they bode not too well for the future of this nation. Here he is, Professor Lucas Quarrey of Columbia. (Applause.)

  Quarrey: Good eve—I mean, hello, everyone.

  Page: Lucas, because not as much attention is paid to scientific matters these days as perhaps ought to be, maybe you’d refresh the viewers’ memories concerning the subject that put you in the news.

  Quarrey: Gladly, and if there’s someone watching who hasn’t heard about this it’ll come as—uh—as much of a surprise as it did to me when I first saw the print-out from the university computers. Asked to guess what’s the largest single item imported by the United States, people might nominate lots of things—iron, aluminum, copper, many raw materials we no longer possess in economic quantities.

  Page: And they’d be wrong?

  Quarrey: Very wrong indeed. And they’d be just as wrong if they were asked to name our largest single export, too.

  Page: So what is our largest import?

  Quarrey: Ton for ton—oxygen. We produce less than sixty per cent of the amount we consume.

  Page: And our biggest export?

  Quarrey: Ton for ton again, it’s noxious gases.

  Page: Ah, now this is where the controversy has arisen, isn’t it? A lot of people have been wondering how you can claim to trace—oh, smoke from New Jersey clear across the Atlantic. Particularly since you’re not a meteorologist or weather scientist. What is your specialty in fact?

  Quarrey: Particle precipitation. I’m currently heading a research project designing more compact and efficient filters.

  Page: For what—cars?

  Quarrey: Oh yes. And buses, and factories too. But mainly for aircraft cabins. We have a commission from a major airline to try and improve cabin air at high altitude. On the most traveled routes the air is so full of exhaust fumes from other planes, passengers get airsick even on a dead calm day—especially on a dead calm day, because it takes longer for the fumes to disperse.

  Page: So you had to start by analyzing what you needed to filter out, right?

  Quarrey: Precisely. I designed a gadget to be mounted on the wing of a plane and catch the contaminants on little sticky plates—I have one here, I don’t know if your viewers can see it clearly ... Yes? Fine. Well, each unit has fifty of these plates, time-switched to collect samples at various stages of a journey. And by plotting the results on a map I’ve been able to pin down—like you said—factory-smoke from New Jersey over nearly two thousand miles.

  Page: Lots of people argue that can’t be done with the accuracy you claim.

  Quarrey: I wish the people who say that would take the trouble to find out what my equipment is capable of.

 
; Page: Now this is all very disturbing, isn’t it? Most people have the impression that since the passage of the Environment Acts things have taken a turn for the better.

  Quarrey: I’m afraid this seems to be—uh—an optical illusion, so to speak. For one thing, the Acts don’t have enough teeth. One can apply for all kinds of postponements, exemptions, stays of execution, and of course companies which would have their profits shaved by complying with the new regulations use every possible means to evade them. And the other point is that we aren’t being as watchful as we used to be. There was a brief flurry of anxiety a few years ago, and the Environment Acts were introduced, as you said, and ever since then we’ve been sitting back assuming the situation was being taken care of, although in fact it isn’t.

  Page: I see. Now what do you say to people who maintain that publicizing these allegations of yours is—well, not in the best interests of this country?

  Quarrey: You don’t serve your country by sweeping unpleasant facts under the carpet. We’re not exactly the most popular nation in the world right now, and my view is that we ought to put a stop right away to anything that’s apt to make us even less well liked.

  Page: I guess there could be something in that. Well, thanks for coming and talking to us, Lucas. Now, right after this next break for station identification...

  IN SPITE OF HAVING CHARITY A MAN LIKE SOUNDING BRASS

  “I guess the nearest analogy would be with cheese,” said Mr. Bamberly. To show he was paying attention Hugh Pettingill gave a nod. He was twenty, dark-haired, brown-eyed, with a permanently bad-tempered set to his face—pouting mouth, narrowed eyes, prematurely creased forehead. That had been stamped on him during the bad years from fourteen to nineteen. Allegedly this was the first of many good years he was currently living through, and he was fair-minded enough to expose himself to the possibility of being convinced.