The Sheep Look Up

by John Brunner

  Thorne rounded his mouth into an O. “That’s a change of gear for them, isn’t it? But what can they hope to gain by attacking the only company that devotes itself exclusively to pure foods? Let alone bucking the Syndicate, of course.”

  “My guess is that they want to try and drive their prices down. Maybe collect data on as many slip-ups as possible—in an operation that size, some stuff must leak through now and then which isn’t as good as the advertising claims—and use these as a pistol to hold to the company’s head.”

  Thorne rubbed his chin. “Yes, that fits. I remember an article by Train in which he was very scathing about people profiteering from public concern about diet. Who’s behind this, though—it couldn’t be Train himself, could it?”

  “Hardly. Train’s dead. Killed himself. I had it on very good authority. Never really recovered from his breakdown, you know. But I guess it could be one of these people who took over his name.” Greenbriar cocked his head and sniffed loudly. “Hey, spring must be really here!”

  “What?” Bewildered, both at the irrelevance and also because here in the Virgins there was always luxuriant vegetation the year around.

  Greenbriar chuckled. “Try a noseful. Violets!”

  Thorne complied: hmff, hmff! “You’re right,” he said in surprise. “But if it’s that strong it’s not likely to be flowers, is it?”

  “I guess not. Hmm! Very odd! Which way’s the wind now? Oh yes, it’s still off the water.” He stared down toward the beach where Elly and Nancy were splashing about in the shallows, obviously on their way back to the house.

  Well, the world was full of mysteries. Thorne shrugged. “Looks as though they’re coming in for lunch,” he said. “I’ll just go tell—”

  He was interrupted by a scream.

  Both he and Greenbriar leapt from their chairs. Down there in the water Nancy was thrashing wildly about, and Elly, who had wandered some distance from her, had spun around to rush and help her.

  “Quick!” Thorne snapped, dumped his glass on the handiest table and ran down the steps to the shore. He continued straight into the water as Elly tried to raise Nancy to her feet.

  The stink of violets was incredibly strong.

  “Look—out!” Nancy choked, and with one arm around Elly’s shoulders pointed to an object just barely showing above the water. Shapeless, encrusted, it could have been mistaken for a rock. But something yellowish was dispersing from it through a narrow crack in its end.

  Thorne stared at his wife in horror. Her eyes were swelling, puffing out almost literally as he watched, turning the whole upper part of her face into a hideous bloated mass. Also her lips were dotted with pustules, her shoulders, her breasts.

  “Moses! Phone a doctor!” he screamed. “Helicopter ambulance service!”

  The fat man turned and stumbled back indoors, and in the same moment Nancy doubled over, vomiting, then slumped in a faint.

  Helped by one of their local manservants who appeared in answer to Greenbriar’s frantic shouting, Thorne and Elly carried her awkwardly into the house, laid her down on a couch, sent the cook for clean water, soothing ointment, the first-aid kit.

  “They’re sending the ambulance right away, with a doctor,” Greenbriar panted, hurrying back from the phone. “But what can have happened to her? A jellyfish?”

  “Damn it, no!” But of course he hadn’t been down on the beach, seen the drum, or barrel, or whatever, half-sunk in the sand. “Did they say what we should do in the meantime?” Thorne demanded.

  “I—” Greenbriar put his hand to his mouth in absurdly childlike fashion. “I didn’t ask.”

  “Idiot!” Thorne was beside himself with panic. “Get right back and—”

  But Greenbriar was already on his way.

  “What the hell can it be?” Elly moaned.

  “Lewisite,” the doctor said when he’d finished administering emergency oxygen. Not only the doctor, but a nurse and a sergeant of police had turned up in the helicopter.

  “What’s that?” Thorne asked, bewildered.

  “A poison gas.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, the smell of violets is unmistakable. I’ve seen two or three cases like this—not here, in Florida where I used to live. It’s an arsenical compound they invented in the First World War. Didn’t get around to using it, so they dumped it in the ocean. What happened in Florida was that they’d dropped a batch into the Hatteras Canyon, and one of these new deep-trawling fishing boats hauled a lot of it up. They had no idea what they’d got—after sixty years they were all crusted with barnacles and things, of course—so they cracked one of the drums open, thinking it might be valuable. When they found it was dangerous, they just pitched the lot overside again, but by then they were in shallow water and some of the drums smashed on the bottom rocks. A hell of a lot washed up on shore.”

  “I never heard about that,” Thorne whispered.

  “Would you expect to? It would have ruined the winter vacation trade—not that there’s much left of it anyway. I got out because I wanted clean beaches for my kids, not because Florida was so healthy I didn’t have enough patients!” With an ironical chuckle he turned to examine Nancy again; the oxygen had had its effect and she was breathing easier.

  “I guess we can move her now,” he said. “Don’t worry too much. There may not be permanent scars. Though of course if she inhaled or swallowed the stuff ... Well, we’ll see.”

  “This time,” Thorne said as though he hadn’t been listening, “the news is going to get around. I’ll see to that.”

  DON’T TOUCH

  ... alleging, quote, intelligence with a proscribed country. End quote. It’s claimed that he attempted to obtain air-pollution data from Cuban sources. Protesting the arrest, some two hundred students from Columbia were joined by approximately a thousand Trainites in a demonstration which the police dispersed with tear smoke. Eighty-eight hospitalizations were reported, but no deaths. Asked to comment just prior to his departure for Hollywood where he will again preside at the Oscar ceremonies, Prexy said, quote, If that’s the guy who claims we’re running short of oxygen, tell him I don’t find any difficulty in breathing. End quote. Heavy fighting again today in Guanagua province as Honduran government forces supported by American air cover...

  REHEARSAL

  Exactly what Hugh Pettingill had expected to find at the wat, he couldn’t have said. After only a short while, though, he was certain it wasn’t there. Day in, day out, he drifted through it and around it, watching the snows melt and spring come hesitantly to the surrounding high valleys. He didn’t click. He didn’t fit in. He felt excluded. And despite not being sure whether he wanted to fit in or not, he resented being denied the choice.

  Physically, the environment was comfortable: shabby, pieced together from scrap, but practical and in many respects attractive. What jarred on him, though, was the way in which everyone at the wat took it for granted that this was a rehearsal: not for the aftermath of an allover war, just a dry run for the ordinary life of the twenty-first century. He couldn’t see it. For him it was more like escapism, running to hide from the real world.

  Granted, they had some things going for them: the food, for example, though plain was delicious, better even than what he’d had at the Bamberleys’, and he ate voraciously of the savory soups, the home-baked bread, the vegetables and salads grown under glass. That interested him, a little. He hadn’t watched things grow before, except some pot seeds he’d planted at college, and for a while he joined in with some of the routine spring tasks out of doors. When he had to distribute the gallon of worms Felice had brought, though, he found the job so distasteful—tipping all those anonymous wrigglers out in doses of ten or a dozen and watching them dive among what was going to become food that he might eat—he moved on to other things. There was a handicrafts shop, and he helped in the making of some rough stools and tables, because last year for the first time ever more Americans had taken vacations inland than by the sea, and the i
dea was to run a restaurant for tourists during the coming summer, get some wholesome natural-grown food down them in the hope of showing them what they were missing. But turning out one stool exactly like another grew monotonous. He moved on again.

  All the time, though: this feeling that the world was bound to go to hell! Okay, so it’s true these mothers have turned prairies into dustbowls and used the sea for a giant sewer and laid concrete where there used to be forests. So stop them! Don’t just let them walk over you, crush you face-down into the dirt!

  Crush them first!

  That strange cold Peg: she must, he concluded, be queer, because she didn’t—not only not with him, not with anybody. (Not even with Felice whom he’d naturally assumed to be her girl, who did, though also not with him. Shit!) Yet she seemed somehow happy.

  Found something here. What? Resignation? Could a former crusading reporter and campaigner for Women’s Lib be satisfied with such a drab existence?

  Well, the fact stood. Even though Felice had left after a week or so, uttering some kind of weird apology to everyone and saying she’d had a fantastic vacation—hell, vacation, in a place where work literally never stopped!—Peg had stayed, and seemed content, inasmuch as you could figure out what she was thinking behind that lovely but stone-cold face ...

  If he’d been asked before he came here, “Are you a Trainite?”, Hugh would have answered that he was without hesitation, on the strength of having taken part in Trainite demonstrations at college. Recruiters for the big corporations came around all the time nowadays, not just in spring and summer, because the number of students taking up science and engineering had fallen by around 60 per cent and those taking business management by 30 per cent and those who couldn’t get into something constructive like agriculture or forestry (which generally meant emigrating, of course) preferred to drop out. So these frantic recruiters were a nuisance and now and then one of them gave particular offense and it was necessary to dump him in a dirty river or strip him and paint the skull and crossbones on his belly.

  The people here, though, weren’t in the least like the Trainites he’d known outside. And obviously this was more what Austin Train himself had had in mind. This cat Jones had been a personal friend of Train’s, and he’d had the guy to stay several times before he vanished. (He wasn’t dead; Hugh had learned that much for certain. Nobody, though, would admit to knowing where he was.)

  He struggled and struggled to make sense of what was going on around him, and bits of it fitted fine. Only whenever he thought he had the pattern straight in his head, something turned up which completely screwed him.

  The simple life bit, the natural foods—so far, so good. Also the clothing woven from natural fibers which would rot: cotton, linen, wool. Fine. The composting of vegetable peelings and such, the sorting and cleaning of the inescapable cans, the return of plastics to the nearest reclamation company, which called for a once-monthly trip by the communal jeep. Great. But if it was the simple life they were after, how come they used electricity? It was all very well to say it was clean power and could be generated from waterfalls and tides. The fact stood: it hadn’t been. And their insistence that tomorrow it would have to be and (here it came again, the same dirty argument) they were rehearsing for tomorrow, devising a viable life-style by trial and error—that didn’t convince him. Sixty-some people in this wat, and this the largest out of only about four or five hundred in the whole of the States and Canada: how many of the human race were going to learn about this life-style before the crunch came? Every day in the news some fresh warning sign!

  Of course it was as well they did have electricity, or his car would still be stranded where Peg and Felice had found him. Instead they’d brought the batteries in and recharged them, and now it was here and any time he wanted to get the hell out, he could. He was becoming daily more tempted. The whole scene here struck him as play-acting.

  They listened to radio news a lot and talked a lot about things he was sure they didn’t properly understand, like the Honduras war and the starvation in Europe since the Med stagnated. And didn’t give. Somehow. Even the kids. There was this Rick in particular that made his skin crawl, Zena’s adopted son (and formerly Decimus’s; the cat being dead you’d think they might stop talking about him, but they never seemed to, especially Rick who claimed that when he grew up he was going to find the person who’d poisoned his dad. Christ!)—this Rick, anyway, kept hanging around him all day maybe because other people were busy, and asking crazy questions he couldn’t answer, like why isn’t the sun always square overhead when it’s noon on the clock and if you can’t tell me what book do I look in for the answer, huh? He wanted to be an astronomer when he grew up, he said. Fat chance. They were closing down observatories all over.

  What the hell did all this have to do with being a Trainite? Out there those stinking bastards raping and murdering and poisoning ... Christ. Where’s a pistol? Where’s a bomb?

  He tried to read Austin Train’s works. They had a complete set. It was dull.

  The only person he met during his stay at the wat whom he took to was an outsider, laid off from the Bamberley hydroponics plant: a light-colored cat about his own age, named Carl Travers. He had a vague feeling he might have seen the guy before, but he wasn’t sure.

  Carl looked in pretty frequently, and talked friendly, but didn’t show any inclination to stay—wouldn’t have come so often but for being out of work. He had good khat, which right now Hugh didn’t dig too well because it intensified his feeling of having too much energy all pent up inside and no way to let it out, and also pot. So now and then they went out together for a smoke. It had to be out. The Trainites didn’t approve.

  “You got family?” Hugh said one day when they were pretty high, parked in Carl’s second-hand Ford on a curving mountain road watching the sun sink red toward the haze along the coast.

  “Like brothers and sisters,” Carl said.

  “Older, younger?”

  “Younger except Jeannie. I don’t see her too often. She married into the fuzz. This cat who got made like a hero in the avalanche.”

  “Ah-hah?”

  Time passed. Impossible to tell how long. It was the high.

  “You?”

  “No.” Don’t count the Bamberley gang as family. Never mentioned that bunch of creeps to Carl.

  “That why you’re at the wat?”

  “Hell, I don’t know why I’m at the wat.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Nope. You live with your folks?”

  “Shit, no. Furnished room, other side of town from them. Self-supporting, me. Working man. I mean, I was.”

  More silence. To roll another joint.

  “Thinking of moving away. Wait till hell freezes over before they reopen the plant. Never liked the work anyhow.”

  “Where to?”

  “Maybe Berkeley.”

  “Ah, shit, California you don’t see the sun one year’s end to the next! Whole state stinks!”

  “Maybe so, but they gon’ have that big quake one day soon, and I’d kinda like to be on hand and laugh ... Got friends in Berkeley,” though. Was in college a year.”

  “Me too.”

  “Dropped out?”

  “Dropped out.”

  More silence. To burn up the joint.

  “Make the scene together?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Man, I’m high. Want to screw?”

  “Yeah.”

  BEFORE WE ARE SO RUDELY INTERRUPTED

  “I have an appointment with Mr. Bamberley,” Michael said, and glanced at the wall clock. “I see I’m a few minutes early, though.”

  “Oh, you must be Captain Advowson!” the girl at the reception desk said brightly—but not very clearly; there was something in her mouth and her voice was hoarse. On the corner of her desk, an open package of throat pastilles. They scented the vicinity strongly with menthol. “Do sit down and I’ll tell Mr. Bamberley you’re here. Would you like me to tak
e your filtermask?”

  “Thank you.” He undid the strap and gave it to her, and she added it to a rack where there were already eight or ten dangling.

  Moving to a chair on the other side of this spacious ante-room, he glanced back at her, and she noticed and smiled, thinking it was because she was pretty. In fact it was because she reminded him of the nurse from Noshri—the same shade of fair hair, the same general cast of features. Though much plumper and lacking the dark undereye pouches that marred Lucy Ramage’s good looks.

  He’d seen her twice again since their meeting on the plane, once in the flesh at the UN building and once late at night on TV, on a talk show run by a woman called Petronella Page. She’d sat dead still, impervious to even the most subtly vicious verbal jabs, and recited a low-voiced account of incredible suffering which the commère had tried to interrupt, and tried again, and each time failed. Cold as falling snow, settling ultimately into a dead weight of horror, huge, massive, stifling, the words followed one another until when they turned the cameras on the audience they weren’t quite quick enough to avoid the sight of a girl in the second row fainting and falling from her chair.

  When she started on accusations of deliberate genocide they brought the next commercials in early.

  Who the hell had poisoned that relief food? Someone out to discredit Western aid programs must have got at the affected consignment, opened the cartons, sprayed the contents, resealed them. Even though Duval insisted that this was inconsistent with the uniform distribution of the drug throughout the interior of the pieces he’d examined ...

  How much longer was that damned inquiry going to drag on? He wanted more than anything to go home, but he was under orders to remain until the distinguished international jurists now sifting the evidence issued their final report. If he survived that long.