The Sheep Look Up (2 page)

“It wasn’t that Some”—repressing the ridiculous impulse to make sure no one black was in earshot such as Felice or the guards around the parking lot—“crazy spade jumped out of his car in the middle of a jam and tried to run across the other half of the road.”

“You don’t say. Stoned, was he?”

“I guess he must have been. Oh, thanks”—Halkin courteously holding the door. “Naturally the cars that were still moving in the fast lanes had to brake and swerve and
bang
, must have been forty of them bumped each other. Missed him by a miracle, not that it did him any good. The traffic coming away from the city was doing fifty-sixty at that point, and when he got across the divide he fell in front of a sports car.”

“Good lord.” This had brought them level with Felice, who was keeping an elevator for them, so they ushered her inside and Halkin hovered his hand over the floor-selection buttons. “Three, isn’t it?”

“No, we’re not in Bill’s office. We’re in the conference room on the seventh.”

“Was your car damaged?” Halkin went on.

“No, luckily mine wasn’t included in the shunt. But we had to sit there for more than half an hour before they got the road clear ... You said you were held up by Trainites?”

“Yes, on Wilshire.” Halkin’s professional smile gave way to a scowl. “Lousy dodgers, most of them, I bet! If I’d known I was sweating out my time for their sake ...! You did yours, of course?”

“Yes, of course, in Manila.”

“My stint was in ‘Nam and Laos.”

The car was slowing and they all glanced at the lighted numbers. But this wasn’t seven, it was five. The doors parted to reveal a woman with a spotty face who said under her breath, “Ah, shit!” And stepped into the car anyway.

“I’ll ride up with you and down again,” she added more loudly. “You could wait until doomsday in this filthy building.”

The windows of the conference room were bright yellow-gray. The proceedings had started without waiting for the last two arrivals; Philip was thankful that he wasn’t entering alone. Eight or nine men were present in comfortable chairs with foldaway flaps bearing books, notepads, personal recorders. Facing them across a table shaped like an undernourished boomerang: William Chalmers, vice-president in charge of interstate operations, a black-haired man in his late forties who had developed too much of a paunch to get away with the fashionable figure-hugging gear he was wearing. Standing, interrupted by the intrusion: Thomas Grey, the company’s senior actuary, a bald lean man of fifty with such thick spectacles one could imagine their weight accounting for the habitual forward stoop of his shoulders. He looked put out; scratching absently under his left arm, he accorded no more than a curt nod by way of greeting.

Chalmers, however, welcomed the latecomers cordially enough, brushed aside their apologies, waved them to the remaining vacant places—right in the front row, of course. The wall-clock showed two minutes of eleven instead of the scheduled ten-thirty. Trying to ignore it, Philip picked up a folder of papers from his assigned chair and distributed mechanical smiles to those of his colleagues with whom he could claim casual acquaintance.

Casual ...

Don’t think about Laura. Dennie, I love you! I love Josie, I love Harold, I love my family! But if only you hadn’t insisted on my—

Oh, shut up. Talk about mountains out of molehills!

But his situation was precarious, after all. Notoriously, he was by nearly seven years the youngest of Angel City’s area managers: LA, Bay, SoCal, Oregon, Utah, Arizona, NM, Texas, Colorado. Texas due for subdivision next year, the grapevine said, but as yet it hadn’t happened. That meant that his footsteps were being hounded by hordes of skilled, degree-equipped unemployed. He had six salesmen with Ph.D.’s. Running to stay in the same place ...

“If we can continue?” Grey said. Philip composed himself. The first time he had met the actuary he had assumed him to be a dry extension of his computers, lost in a world where only numbers possessed reality. Since then, however, he had learned that it had been Grey who hit on the notion of adopting astrological symbolism for the firm’s promotional material, and thereby endowed Angel City with its unique status as the only major insurance company whose business among clients under thirty was expanding as fast as the proportion of the population they represented. Anyone with that much insight was worth listening to.

“Thank you. I was just explaining why you’ve come.”

Eyes rolling back to the limits of their sockets, mouth ajar, breath hissing in her throat! Useless denying it to myself. No woman ever made me feel more like a man!

Philip touched the inside of his cheek with the tip of his tongue. She had slapped him back-handed and marched out of the motel cabin with blazing eyes because he had offered her money. There was a cut. It had bled for five minutes. It was next to his right upper canine, all his life the sharpest of his teeth.

“It’s because,” Grey continued, “of the hike in life insurance premiums we’re going to impose from January first. Of course we’ve always predicated our quotations on the assumption that life expectancy in the United States would continue to rise. But during the past three years it has in fact started to go down.”

A ROOST FOR CHICKENS

Sharp on nine the Trainites had scattered caltraps in the roadway and created a monumental snarl-up twelve blocks by seven. The fuzz, as usual, was elsewhere—there were always plenty of sympathizers willing to cause a diversion. It was impossible to guess how many allies the movement had; at a rough guess, though, one could say that in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, LA or San Francisco people were apt to cheer, while in the surrounding suburbs or the Midwest people were apt to go fetch guns. In other words, they had least support in the areas which had voted for Prexy.

Next, the stalled cars had their windows opaqued with a cheap commercial compound used for etching glass, and slogans were painted on their doors. Some were long: THIS VEHICLE IS A DANGER TO LIFE AND LIMB. Many were short: IT STINKS! But the commonest of all was the universally known catchphrase: STOP, YOU’RE KILLING ME!

And in every case the inscription was concluded with a rough egg-shape above a saltire—the simplified ideogrammatic version of the invariable Trainite symbol, a skull and crossbones reduced to [??].

Then, consulting printed data-sheets, many of which were flapping along the gutter hours later in the wind of passing cars, they turned to the nearby store-windows and obscured the goods on offer with similarly appropriate slogans. Unprejudiced, they found something apt for every single store.

It wasn’t too hard.

Delighted, kids on the afternoon school shift joined in the job of keeping at bay angry drivers, store-clerks and other meddlers. Some of them weren’t smart enough to get lost when the fuzz arrived—by helicopter after frantic radio messages—and made their first trip to Juvenile Hall. But what the hell? They were of an age to realize a conviction was a keen thing to have. Might stop you being drafted. Might save your life.

Most of the drivers, however, had the sense to stay put, fuming behind their blank windshields as they calculated the cost of repairs and repainting. Practically all of them were armed, but not one was stupid enough to pull a gun. It had been tried during a Trainite demonstration in San Francisco last month. A girl had been shot dead. Others, anonymous in whole-head masks and drab mock-homespun clothing, had dragged the killer from his car and used the same violent acid they applied to glass to write MURDERER on his flesh.

In any case, there was little future in rolling down a window to curse the demonstrators. Throats didn’t last long in the raw air.

ENTRAINED

“It’s easy enough to make people understand that cars and guns are inherently dangerous. Statistically, almost everyone in the country now has experience of a relative being shot dead either at home or abroad, while the association between cars and traffic fatalities opens the public mind to the concept of other, subtler threats.”

MASTER MOTOR MART

New & Used Cars

Lead: causes subnormality in children and other disorders. Exceeds 12 mg. per m
³
. in surface water off California. Probable contributory factor in decline of Roman Empire whose upper class ate food cooked in lead pans and drank wine fermented in lead-lined vats. Common sources are paint, antiknock gas where still in use, and wildfowl from marshes etc. contaminated over generations by lead shot in the water.

“On the other hand it’s far harder to make it clear to people that such a superficially innocuous firm as a beauty parlor is dangerous. And I don’t mean because some women are allergic to regular cosmetics.”

Nanette’s Beauty Center

Cosmetics, Perfumery & Wigs

Polychlorinated biphenyls: waste products of the plastics, lubrication and cosmetics industries. Universal distribution at levels similar to DDT, less toxic but having more marked effect on steroid hormones. Found in museum specimens collected as early as 1944. Known to kill birds.

“Similarly it’s a short mental step from the notion of killing plants or insects to the notion of killing animals and people. It didn’t take the Vietnam disaster to spell that out—it was foreshadowed in everybody’s mind.”

FARM & GARDEN INC.

Landscaping & Pest Control Experts

Pelican, brown: failed to breed in California where formerly common, 1969 onward, owing to estrogenic effect of DDT on shell secretion. Eggs collapsed when hen birds tried to brood them.

“By contrast, now that we scarcely make use of the substances which used to constitute the bulk of the pharmacopoeia and which were clearly recognizable as poisonous because of their names—arsenic, strychnine, mercury and so on—people seem to assume that any medical drug is good, period. I wasted more of my life than I care to recall going around farms trying to discourage pig and chicken breeders from buying feeds that contained antibiotics, and they simply wouldn’t listen. They held that the more of the stuff you scattered around the better. So developing new drugs to replace those wasted in cake for cattle, pap for pigs and pellets for pullets has become like the race between guns and armor!”

Stacy & Schwartz Inc.

IMPORTED GOURMET FOODS

Train, Austin P. (Proudfoot): b. Los Angeles 1938; e. UCLA (B.Sc. 1957), Univ. Coll. London (Ph.D. 1961); m. 1960 Clara Alice née Shoolman, div. 1963, n.c.; a. c/o publishers. Pub: thesis, “Metabolic Degradation of Complex Organophosphates” (Univ. of London Press 1962); “The Great Epidemics” (Potter & Vasarely 1965, rep. as “Death In the Wind,” Common Sense Books 1972); “Studies in Refractive Ecology” (P&V 1968, rep. as “The Resistance Movement in Nature,” CSB 1972); “Preservatives and Additives in the American Diet” (P&V 1971, rep. as “You Are What You Have To Eat,” CSB 1972); “Guide to the Survival of Mankind” (International Information Inc., boards 1972, paper 1973); “A Handbook for 3000 A.D.” (III, boards 1973, paper 1975); crt. J. Biol. Sci., J. Ecol., J. Biosph., Intl. Ecol. Rev., Nature, Sci. Am., Proc. Acad. Life Sci., Sat. Rev., New Ykr., New Sci. (London), Envrmt. (London), Paris Match, Der Spiegel (Bonn), Blitz (India), Manchete (Rio) etc.

IT’S A GAS

Leaving behind half his lonely brunch (not that the coffee shop where he’d eaten regularly now for almost a year wasn’t crowded with lunchers, but sitting next to the fuzz is prickly), Pete Goddard waited for change to be made for him. Across the street, on the big billboards enclosing the site of Harrigan’s Harness and Feed Store—it had kept the name although for years before it was demolished it had sold snowmobiles, motorcycle parts and dude Western gear—which now was scheduled to become forty-two desirable apartments and the Towerhill home of American Express and Colorado Chemical Bank, someone had painted about a dozen black skulls and crossbones.

Well, he was feeling a little that way himself. Last night had been a party: first wedding anniversary. His mouth tasted foul and his head ached and moreover Jeannie had had to get up at the ordinary time because she worked too, at the Bamberley hydroponics plant, and he’d broken his promise to clear away the mess so she wouldn’t be faced with it this evening. Besides, that patch on her leg, even if it didn’t hurt ... But they had good doctors at the plant. Had to have.

New, not disposed to like him, the girl cashier dropped his due coins in his palm and turned back to conversation with a friend.

The wall-clock agreed with his watch that he had eight minutes to make the four-minute drive to the station house. Moreover, it was bitterly cold outside, down to around twenty with a strong wind. Fine for the tourists on the slopes of Mount Hawes, not good for the police who measured temperature on a graph of smashed cars, frostbite cases and petty thefts committed by men thrown out of seasonal work.

And women, come to that.

So maybe before going ... By the door, a large red object with a mirror on the upper part of its front. Installed last fall. Japanese. On a plate at the side:
Mitsuyama Corp., Osaka.
Shaped like a weighing machine. Stand here and insert 25¢. Do not smoke while using. Place mouth and nose to soft black flexible mask. Like an obscene animal’s kiss.

Usually he laughed at it because up here in the mountains the air was never so bad you needed to tank up on oxygen to make the next block. On the other hand some people did say it was a hell of a good cure for a hangover...

More detail penetrated his mind. Noticing detail was something he prided himself on; when his probationary period was through, he was going to shoot for detective. Having a good wife could spawn ambition in any man’s mind.

The mirror cut in a curve to fit around the mouthpiece: cracked. Slot for quarters. Below it a line defining the coin-hopper. Around that line, scratches. As though someone had tried to pry the box out with a knife.

Pete thought of bus-drivers murdered for the contents of a change machine.

Turning back to the counter he said, “Miss!”

“What?”

“That oxygen machine of yours—”

“Ah, shit!” the girl said, hitting “No Sale” on the register. “Don’t tell me the stinking thing is on the fritz
again!
Here’s your quarter back. Go try the drugstore on Tremont—they have three.”