The Sheep Look Up

by John Brunner

  Bamberley: No, I am not reserving any of them for this disgraceful so-called ransom! I am neither going to yield to blackmail, nor am I going to connive at the plans of traitors. I’ve told the police that this kidnapping is the work of a highly organized subversive movement intent on defaming the United States, and if they’re any damned good at their job they ought already to have the culprits on record down to their—their taste in liquor! But I decline to collaborate with them in any way.

  Page: How would ransoming your son amount to collaboration?

  Bamberley: During the late sixties and early seventies there was a massive smear campaign against the United States. The world was told that this country was hell on earth. We’ve won back some of our proper pride in ourselves, and we dare not waste the ground we’ve regained. If I gave in, our enemies would pounce on the act as an admission that we supply our own citizens with unwholesome water. Think of the political capital they could make out of that!

  Page: But you’ve already made that admission by arranging to import these purifiers.

  Bamberley: Nonsense. I’m a businessman. When a demand exists I take steps to supply it. There’s a demand for these purifiers.

  Page: Wouldn’t some people claim that the existence of the demand proves that the authorities aren’t providing pure water? And that by ransoming your son you’d actually be improving the state of affairs?

  Bamberley: Some people will say anything.

  Page: With respect, that’s no answer to my question.

  Bamberley: Look, any reasonable person knows there are occasions when you need ultrapure water—to mix a baby formula, for instance. Usually you boil it. Using these filters I’m importing, you don’t have to go to that trouble. That’s all.

  Page: But when it’s your only son who— Hello! Mr. Bamberley! Hello, San Francisco! ... Sorry, world, we seem temporarily to have lost— Just one moment, let’s pause for —uh—station identification.

  (Breach in transcript lasting appx. 38 sec.)

  Ian Farley: Pet, you’ll have to switch to the next subject. Someone’s put out our Frisco transmitters. They think it may have been a mortar bomb.

  BACK IN FOCUS

  There had been this endless—timeless—period of her life when everything looked flat, like a bad photograph. Nothing connected. Nothing meant anything.

  She was aware of facts, like: name, Peg Mankiewicz; sex, female; nationality, American. Beyond that, a void. A terrible vacuum into which, the moment she let down her guard, uncontrolled emotions rushed such as fear and misery.

  She looked at a window. It was possible to see a small patch of sky through it. The sky was as gray and flat as the entire world had been for—how long? She didn’t know. But it was shedding rain. It must just have started. It was as though someone out of sight were flipping the bowl of a tiny spoon laden with thin mud. Plop on the pane: an irregular elliptical darkish splodge. And another, a bit bigger. And another smaller. And so on. Each dirty drop causing runnels in the dirt already accumulated on the outside of the glass.

  She didn’t much care for the idea of dirty rain. She looked at the foreground instead, and discovered that certain things had rounded out. There was a desk across which a black man of about forty was facing her. He reminded her of Decimus, but fatter. She said, “I ought to know who you are, oughtn’t I?”

  “I’m Dr. Prentiss. I’ve been treating you for a month.”

  “Oh. Of course.” She frowned, and passed her hand across her forehead. There seemed to be too much of her hair. “I don’t remember quite how I ...”

  Staring around the room, she sought for clues. Vaguely, she remembered this place, as though she’d seen it before on an old-fashioned TV set, in black and white. But the carpet was really green, and the walls were white, and there was a bookcase of natural pine in which there were blue and black and brown and red and multi-colored books, and behind this black desk sat—just a second—Dr. Prentiss in a gray suit. Good. It all fitted together.

  “Yes, I do remember,” she said. “In the hotel.”

  “Ah.” Prentiss made the single non-word sound like an accolade. He leaned back, putting his long but chubby fingers together. “And—?”

  It was like falling into a fairy tale: not the gentle Andersen kind, but the Grimm type, drawn from the cesspits of the communal subconscious. A magic poison, as it were. She didn’t want to think about it, but she was thinking about it, and since she couldn’t stop thinking about it, it was marginally more bearable to talk than to keep silence.

  “Yes,” she said wearily, “I remember it all now. They broke in, didn’t they? Who were they—FBI?”

  Prentiss hesitated. “Well ... Yes, I guess you’d have worked that out anyway. They’d been following the people who called on you.”

  “Arriegas,” Peg said. “And Lucy Ramage.”

  Poor babes in the wood. The jungle of New York was too much. Far away, mindless terror. She felt insulated from it now, as though she were trying to remember by proxy. Perhaps with Lucy Ramage’s brain. Had she seen the front of her head after the bullet smashed it, or only invented the picture in her imagination? Either way it was repulsive. To distract herself she looked at the clothes she was wearing: shirt and pants of pale blue. Not her own. She detested blue.

  “How do you feel now, Peg?” Prentiss inquired.

  She almost bridled by reflex, having all her life hated men who presumed instant familiarity. And then realized: she had lost four weeks. Incredible. Time scissored out of her life like a tape being edited. She forced herself to take stock of her condition, and experienced a pang of surprise.

  “Well—pretty good! Sort of weak, like when you get up from bed after being ill, but ... Rested. Relaxed.”

  “That’s the catharsis. You know the term?”

  “Sure. A discharge of tension. Like lancing a boil.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Was it the food they made me eat which—uh ...?”

  “Landed you in this hospital?” Prentiss murmured. “Yes and no. You can’t have had time to ingest a dangerous dose of the stuff they’d put in it, and of course when we worked out what had happened we pumped your stomach. But you must have been under strain for a considerable time. You were cocked like a hair trigger, ready to go bang at the least shock.”

  That made sense. Although he said something about “the stuff they put in it ...” Surely it was there already? Still, she didn’t feel inclined to argue.

  She said, “You make it sound as though they did me a favor without meaning to.”

  “That’s a very acute insight. I suspect they did. At any rate a lot of repressed material got purged out of your subconscious. That’s why you feel pleasantly relaxed right now.”

  “What—kind of material?” With vague alarm, as though she’d suddenly discovered that a spyhole had been bored in her bathroom wall.

  “I think you know,” Prentiss murmured. “That’s the benefit of this kind of experience, unpleasant though it may be at the time. You begin to admit all kinds of things you’ve always concealed from yourself.”

  “Yes.” Peg looked at the window. The rain was heavy now, and the panes were almost opaque with dirty water. “Yes, it was the whole stinking world that had got on top of me, wasn’t it? All the water filthy—like that.” She pointed. “All the ground full of chemicals. The air thick with fumes. And not one friend anywhere that I could trust, who’d tell me how to stay alive.”

  There, it was out. And it must be the truth because this dark quiet doctor was nodding. He said now, “But you did have one friend you trusted. You’ve been talking about him all the time. You probably know who I’m referring to.”

  With a start Peg said, “Oh! Decimus Jones?” He had seemed to be there, somewhere in the gray flatness of the other world.

  “Yes.”

  “But he’s dead.”

  “Even so, didn’t he have friends? Aren’t some of his friends your friends too?”

  Pe
g gave a cautious nod. Now she felt so much more like her normal self, her guard was beginning to go up again. There was something fractionally too casual about this smooth black doctor’s tone, as though he were leading up to something.

  “You certainly talked about them a lot. Gave the impression you’re very fond of them. You talked about Jones, as I said, but also about his sister, his wife, his adopted children, lots of other people who knew him and know you. You even mentioned Austin Train.”

  So that was it. Peg gathered herself and said in a cool level voice, “Did I? How strange. Yes, I used to know him, but only slightly, and many years ago. And of course I’ve run across some of these people who’ve adopted his name. Ridiculous, that—don’t you think? As though it were some kind of protective magic!”

  When she had been taken back to her quarters, the man who had been listening in the adjacent room entered, scowling.

  “Well, you botched that!” he snapped.

  “I did not!” Prentiss countered. “I did exactly as I was told. If you overlooked the fact that her references to Austin Train could just as well apply to someone who’s adopted the name, that’s your problem! And why are you so frantic to find the guy, anyhow?”

  “Why do you think?” the other man exploded. “Isn’t this damned country falling to pieces around us? And aren’t all these dirty saboteurs doing it in the name of Austin Train? Unless we find him and pillory him in public, make him look like the fool and traitor that he is, he can walk back into the spotlight any time he chooses and take command of an army a million strong!”

  AUGUST

  FOLLOWED BY THE EXPLOSIVE HARPOON

  There she blows, bullies, yes, there she blows now!

  There she blows, bullies, abaft of the prow!

  Jump to it, bullies, come reef your topsails,

  Take to the boats and go hunting for whales!

  I’m a Newcastle whaler, I’ve money at home,

  But my pleasure is on the Atlantic to roam,

  To brave the rough ocean and add to my store—

  I’ve killed fifty whales and I’ll kill fifty more!

  There she blows ...

  The holds are all full, there’s an end to our toil,

  We’re going to be rich from the blubber and oil,

  And when we’re ashore and I walk down the street,

  I’ll march to the music of coin chinking sweet!

  There she blows ...

  I’ll go to the tavern and buy ale and beer,

  And the girls will flock round me and call me my dear.

  There’s no king or emp’ror lives more gallantly

  Than a Newcastle whaler just home from the sea!

  There she blows ...

  —Broadside, about 1860, to the air of “An Honest Young Woman”

  THE GRASS IS ALWAYS BROWNER

  ... described as quote disastrous unquote by airlines, travel agencies and tour operators. Hotel bookings are down by an average 40, in some cases 60, per cent. Commenting on the report just prior to departing for Disneyland, where he is slated to deliver a major speech on education, Prexy said, quote, Well, you don’t have to go abroad to know our way of life is the best in the world. End quote. A warning that food hoarding might be made a Federal offense was today issued by the Department of Agriculture, after another day of rioting in many major cities over sharp price increases. Hijacking of vegetable trucks ...

  WATERSHED

  The phone on Philip Mason’s desk rang yet again; it was about the tenth time in an hour. He picked it up and snapped, “Yes?”

  “Well, that’s a hell of a tone to use to your wife,” Denise said.

  “Oh.” Philip leaned back and passed his hand across his face. “Sorry.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Kind of. I’ve had eight or ten calls today demanding instant servicing. People saying their filters are choked.” Philip tried not to let his voice convey too much gloom. “Teething troubles, I guess, but of course it means postponing new installations and reassigning the available men ... Well, what can I do for you?”

  “Angie McNeil just called. She and Doug can’t make it to dinner tonight after all.”

  “Christ, again? That’s the third time they’ve broken the date! What is it this time?”

  Denise hesitated. She said after a pause, her voice strained, “So many emergency calls she says he’ll be lucky to be through by midnight. Sounds as though just about everything is breaking loose at once. Brucellosis is the main one, but they have calls for infectious hepatitis, dysentery, measles, rubella, scarlet fever and something Doug suspects may be typhus.”

  “Typhus!” Philip almost dropped the phone.

  “That’s right,” Denise confirmed soberly. “He says—or rather Angie says—it’s because all these people have come up here for their vacations instead of going to the coast. The sanitation and water supply can’t cope.”

  “You’ve told Harold and Josie not to help themselves to water?”

  “Of course I have!” And she added, “Sorry, didn’t mean to bite your head off.”

  “Well, this all sounds terrible, but what exactly do you want me to do?”

  “Oh, I laid in food for six, of course, so I thought maybe you could ask Pete and Jeannie instead.”

  “Sure, good idea. Matter of fact I can see Pete right now, heading this way. Hang on.” He covered the phone and shouted to Pete, who was visible through the office door, standing ajar because the conditioning couldn’t cope with the heat. He was getting around fine now; he’d discarded his crutches and was using only a cane. Entering with a nod to Philip, he dumped something in a plastic sack on his desk.

  “Can you and Jeannie come to dinner with us tonight?” Philip said before Pete could speak.

  “Ah ... Well, I guess we’d like to very much,” Pete said, taken aback. “Is that Denise on the line? Would you ask her to call Jeannie at home and say if it’s okay with her it’s fine with me? Thanks very much.”

  He sat down as Philip relayed the message and cradled the phone, and reached to open the sack, Philip stared in disbelief at what it contained.

  “What in hell’s happened to that thing?” he exclaimed.

  It was a filter cylinder from a Mitsuyama water-purifier. It was discolored; instead of being off-white, it was dark purulent yellow with patches of brown, and the close-packed plastic leaves it was composed of had been forced apart, as though very high-pressure air had been blasted through it from the tube down its center.

  “That’s what all the faulty ones look like,” Pete said. “Mack’s found three like that already today. Thought he’d better check with us before exchanging any more.”

  “Christ!” Philip touched it gingerly; it was slimy and loathsome. “Has Alan seen this?”

  “By now I guess he must have. He went down to Doc McNeil’s clinic. They have real trouble. Twelve units all blocked solid.”

  “Oh, hell,” Philip muttered. “And have these people who are calling in really used up all their spare filters?”

  “Mack says the three he’s spoken to have. They’re getting through a pack of six in that many weeks. But I thought they were meant to last half a year.”

  “They are!”

  “So what’s going wrong?”

  The phone rang. Philip snatched at it. “Yes?”

  “Alan for you,” Dorothy told him. “Alan, go ahead—”

  “Phil!” Alan cut in. “We’re in trouble!”

  “I know. Pete just brought me a filter to look at. What in the world—?”

  “Bacteria!”

  “You have to be joking,” Philip said after a pause.

  “Like hell I am. I’ve run across this before, in big purifying plants. And you get ’em in domestic softeners, too. But those mothers at Mitsuyama swore blind their gear was proofed against the problem. Get a service engineer down here to the clinic right away, will you?”

  Philip repeated the request to Pete, who shook his head. “Nobody
here but Mack, and he has eight more—”

  “I heard that!” From Alan. “Tell Mack everybody else can wait. He’s to come here right away. Phil, put me back to Dorothy, would you? I want to book a call to Osaka!”

  “Just little bugs,” Pete said incredulously, turning the filter cylinder over and over. “Making a pile of shit like this!” He shuddered and let the disgusting object fall. “Scares the hell out of me,” he added after a moment. “You know there’s a new epidemic building up—brucellosis?”

  “I did hear,” Philip agreed.

  “They say it brings on abortion,” Pete said, eyes focused on nowhere. “Jeannie’s getting nightmares. She’s well along now, nearly two months ... Ah, hell, it hasn’t happened yet.” He hoisted his stiff body off the chair. “I’ll go see Mack on his way.”

  The phone rang. It was a man this time, for a change, but he had the same trouble: a six-pack of filters used up in six weeks, and now a mere trickle of water at his sink.

  HAVE YOU SEEN ANY OF THESE INSECTS?

  If you do inform the police immediately!

  LOW SUMMER

  Delegates from the five largest wats sat in conference with Zena and Ralph Henderson, in one of the bubble-shaped rooms leading off the big hall where the whole Denver community met for meals, like a side chapel from the nave of an ovoidal cathedral which had shrunk in the wash.

  Hunched forward on clear blue cushions, Drew Henker from Phoenix said, “So we’re agreed. We’ll have to blast Puritan regardless.”

  There was a depressed silence. On the brown hills surrounding the wat there were few of the usual bright patches of summer color. Ever since its inception, the people living here had planted flowering shrubs round about to improve the view. But they’d been replaced by the tents and trailers of visitors who had picked the flowers, chopped down the smaller trees for firewood, created garbage dumps overnight and polluted their one clean stream with raw sewage. There had been a lot of trouble, too, with rowdy drunks who found it amusing to throw rocks at the wat’s windows.