The Sheep Look Up

by John Brunner

  NOTICE OF POSTING: Col. Rollo B. Saddler

  From: Wickens Army Base, Col.

  To: Active service in Honduras.

  WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT your unit is reassigned to...

  Fritz and his friends were among the Sixty-Three. (One capitalizes the number now. Martyrs.)

  “Mr. Steinitz? Sorry, he’s not in the office. He’s unwell. So’s his deputy. We had this leak in the ventilating pipes, you know, and some of these here spores got loose and they breathed them in. Kind of nasty!”

  To all patients of Dr. David Halpern:

  Please note that until further notice your physician will be Dr. Monty B. Murray, at the Flowerwood Memorial Hospital.

  Shivering and coughing, Cindy allowed them to undress her. When they found the skull and crossbones on her body they told her to get out of the clinic before she was thrown out.

  “You’ll be up and about in a day or two, Hector my boy! And then we’ll fix that devil Austin Train for good and all.”

  Chuck in prison hospital; his forged ID let him down at last. The male nurses making a lot of jokes about his being yellow.

  Jaundice.

  Dear Mrs. Barleyman: It is my sad duty to inform you that your husband is unlikely to be well enough to return home in the foreseeable future.

  “Kitty Walsh? Sit down. I have bad news, but I’m afraid it’s your own fault. You should never have let it go on so long. You have acute salpingitis—that’s inflammation of the Fallopian tubes, from the ovaries to the womb. You’ll never be able to have a baby.”

  “What you mean, bad news? Who’d want to bring a baby into this filthy world?”

  MEMORANDUM

  From: Dr. Elijah Prentiss

  To: Hospital director Owing to this damned fibrositis, I shall not be able to ...

  Drew Henker and Ralph Henderson, like the majority of Trainites, had willed their bodies for medical teaching purposes. But they turned out not to be required by any hospital in the state. All of them had as many gunshot wounds as they needed.

  “Harold? Harold, where are you? ... Oh, there.” Painkillers had helped Denise’s migraine, a little, and she’d dozed off. Waking in alarm she wondered what had become of the children. But it was okay; Josie was lying down, and Harold was sitting in the corner of his bedroom, quite quiet, his bad leg tucked under him as usual.

  “Harold darling, it’s about time you ... Harold?”

  He just sat there, staring at nothing.

  He was the first.

  THE IMAGE

  is of a house: large, old, once very beautiful, built by someone whose imagination matched his skills. But he squandered his substance and fell on evil times. Sublet and then again sublet, the house became infested as though by vermin with occupants who felt no sense of attachment to its fabric, and were prepared to complain forever without themselves accepting responsibility for its upkeep.

  Thus from a distance it may be seen that the roof is swaybacked like a standard whale. Certain of the slates were cracked in a long-ago hurricane and not repaired; under them wood has warped and split. A footstep, be it never so light—as of a toddling child—will cause the boards anywhere on any floor to shift on their joists, uttering creaks.

  Also the basement is noisome. It has been flooded more than once. The foundations have settled. A stench permeates the air, testimony to generations of drunks who pissed where the need overtook them. There is much woodworm. Closets and cupboards have been shut for years because inside there are the fruiting bodies of the dry-rot fungus, and they stink. The grand staircase is missing a tread about halfway to the noble gallery encircling the entrance hall. One or two of the ancestral portraits remain, but not many; the majority have been sold off, along with the marble statues that once graced the front steps. The coach-house is dank and affords crowded lodging for a family of mentally sub-normal children, orphaned, half-clad, filthy and incestuous. There are fleas.

  The lawn is covered with wind-blown rubbish. The goldfish that used to dart among the lily-pads in the ornamental pond were seen to float, belly-up and bloated, one spring following a winter of hard frosts; now they are gone. The graveled driveway is obscured with dandelions and docks. The gates at the end of it have been adrift from their hinges for far longer than anyone can remember, half rusted through. So too the doors within the house, if they haven’t been chopped into firewood.

  More than half the windows have been broken, and hardly any have been made good. The rest are blocked with rags, or have had bits of cardboard tacked over them.

  In the least damaged wing the owner, in an alcoholic haze, conducts delightful conversations with imaginary ambassadors and dukes. Meantime, those of the other inhabitants who know how to write pen endless letters to the government, demanding that someone come and fix the drains.

  SPASM

  Later, they mapped the earliest cases on the western side of Denver, around Arvada, Wheatridge, Lakewood and other districts which had exploded during the past few years. To meet an almost doubled demand for water, which Denver was already sucking from a vast area of thousands of square miles by a piping system as complex and random-seeming as the taproots of a tree, the lakes and reservoirs were no longer adequate: Ralston, Gross, Granby, Carter, Lonetree, Horsetooth ...

  So they had drilled, and sunk pipes to deep porous strata, and moreover carved great gashes into the rock of the mountains to expose the edges of those strata. The principle was this: when the snow melts, vast quantities of water run off and go to waste. If we draw on the water-table under the mountains, thus making room for more, we must arrange that every spring melting snow will soak into the porous rock and replenish the supply.

  It had been new last year. It had worked fairly well, bar the teething troubles which occurred when one of the newly-tapped aquifers proved to be contaminated with sewage. That led to the issuing of don’t-drink notices now and then. There had been a few complaints, too, that Boulder Creek and the Thompson and Bear Creek had been even lower this summer than they should have been—but those came only from people with long memories, not from the wealthy new arrivals who had abandoned the old boom state of California for the new boom state of Colorado.

  Now, today ...

  Black Hawk: Giddy, the owner of a newly-built house with a magnificent view fumbled out a cigarette, felt for his lighter, couldn’t find it, used a match instead. It fell from his shaking hand onto the day’s newspaper. He watched the flame take to the edge of the paper, fascinated. It spread—beautiful, how beautiful! All yellow and gold and orange, centered with black, like a moving flower!

  He started to laugh. It was so lovely. He picked up the paper and threw it at a rug to see if that would burn too, and it did, and so, not long afterwards, did he.

  Towerhill: “Mom,” the little boy said in a serious tone, “I hate you.”

  And pushed the butcher-knife he’d brought into her belly.

  US 72: “The more we are together, together, together!” sang the driver of the Thunderbird howling at ninety toward Denver, to the air of Ach Du Lieber Augustin, “the more we are together the happier we’ll be! For your friends are my friends and—”

  Caught sight of a pretty girl in the next car ahead and jammed on the brakes as he drew alongside and crowded her off the road so he could say hello and kiss her and share his ecstatic happiness.

  There was a culvert. Concrete. Crash.

  Golden: Luxuriating in the deep warm bath, she sipped and sipped at the tall julep she’d brought with her, the ice-cubes making a melodious jingle as they melted. She was there about an hour and a half, listening to the radio, humming, and at one point masturbating because she had a very special date this afternoon. Eventually, when the glass was empty, she lay back and let the water close over her face.

  Wheatridge: He struggled and struggled with the faulty TV, and still the picture wouldn’t come right. It was all wavy and the colors bled into one another.

  As time passed, though, he realized that in fac
t this was much prettier than regular TV. He sat down before the set and stared at it, sometimes chuckling when one of the faces turned green or bright blue. Unthinking, he put his hand to his mouth, meaning childlike to suck his thumb. He happened to be holding a test lead connected to the power.

  Sss ...

  Thump.

  Arvada: Time to start dinner, damn it, or my stinking husband will—and the kid bawling again, and ...

  Absently, her mind on the TV she’d spent the afternoon watching, she bundled up the baby and put him in the oven and set the thermostat, and went back to her chair cradling the chicken.

  That stopped his racket. Sure did!

  Westminster: “You stinking white bastard,” the black man said, and swung his wrench at the man behind the counter. After that, he sat down and began to stuff his mouth with odds and ends: candy, aspirin, chocolate bars, indigestion tablets. Sometimes he dipped them in the blood from the clerk’s head, to improve the color.

  Lakewood: Hey, man, wowowow! I never had pot like this before. This is a high—I mean °H°I°I°I°G°H°!!! Ho-ho! I feel light, like I could fly, I mean like I am flying I mean like I’m not even on the floor already just bobbing around in the draught from that fan there WOW! But these four lousy walls in the way—get in the open, enjoy it more, they keep coming and banging up against me, where’s the door? Door. Window closer. Open it. Fall out on the wind and just blow away across the mountains, wow.

  Four stories from the street, which was hard.

  Denver ...

  FIT

  “Alan-n-n-n!”

  It was Pete’s voice, from the warehouse. Philip broke off in mid-sentence and looked at Alan and Dorothy. They were having a kind of council of war to review the firm’s financial situation. It wasn’t good. Replacements under guarantee had wiped out about a third of their expected income and screwed up most of the regular plumbing business they were still carrying on. The only good news was bad: Bamberley in California had hit the same trouble and they expected to mount a joint suit against Mitsuyama. Outcome, in about eighteen months with luck ...

  It was another close, clammy, hot day with dense overcast, so the door was open for what breeze might be around and they’d heard shouts and banging noises from the warehouse, but paid no attention. People’s tempers always frayed in weather like this.

  “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.

&nb
sp; 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.