The Sheep Look Up (27 page)

“Yes, honey,” Jeannie said. “But suppose—ours ...”

“Baby, I said I talked to Doc McNeil. That’s one of the things I talked about. And he says shoot. He says ...”

“What?” She leaned forward on her chair.

“He says if I like fall down stairs, or do something else bad to myself, there may not—uh—be another chance.”

There was a long cold silence. At length Jeannie set her glass aside.

“I get you, honey,” she whispered. “Sorry, I never thought of that. What about right now?”

“Yeah, and right here. Doc says it’s better if I lie on my back on a hard floor.”

RIGHT ABOUT NOW

A
DC-10 coming in to land at Tegucigalpa was hit by Tupamaro tracer and crashed on the control tower, which confirmed the decision to pull out. The previous record for the duration of a don’t-drink notice was broken in New Orleans (that’s a long river and a lot of people use it). The Bamberleys’ family doctor called to treat the latest of Cornelius’s fits—which was going to earn him a good old-fashioned beating when he recovered, because he knew he was forbidden to eat candy. The enteritis epidemic was declared officially over for the fourth time. And they completed the autopsy on Dr. Stanway, conducted at his own morgue: verdict, the extremely common one of degenerative nephritis.

He was, admittedly, only thirty-one. But he had after all spent his whole life in Los Angeles and Orange County.

Not surprising.

COMPANIONS IN ADVERSITY

“Delighted to meet you, Mr. Thorne,” Professor Quarrey said. His clothes hung loose on him, as though he had lost ten pounds in the past few weeks. “Do sit down. Would you like some sherry?”

An aptly academic drink. Thorne smiled and took the nearest chair as the professor’s wife—looking even more exhausted than her husband, with large dark rings under her eyes—filled glasses and offered a dish of nuts. She had a plaster on her nape; the shape of the lump underneath suggested a boil.

“Here’s to a fellow-sufferer,” Quarrey said. Thorne gave a humorless laugh and drank.

“Congratulations on your acquittal, by the way,” he said. “I confess I was expecting you to be pilloried.”

“There was some—ah—horse-trading behind the scenes,” Quarrey said. “You’re aware that they plan to resume production at Bamberley Hydroponics?”

“Yes, I saw Moses Greenbriar recently and he told me.”

“Well, they want someone who can’t be accused of being a government yes-man to approve their new filtration system. As you know, that’s my field, and I was approached, very discreetly, and asked whether I’d cooperate in exchange for a dismissal of that ridiculous charge.” A sigh. “It may not have been very courageous of me, but I said yes.”

“But they haven’t stopped persecuting us!” his wife chimed in, joining her husband on the shabby davenport facing Thorne. “I’m sure our telephone is being tapped.”

“And they definitely open my mail,” Quarrey grunted. “Which I wouldn’t mind if they had the courtesy to screen out the abusive letters ... You get any of those? I imagine you do.”

Thorne nodded.

“There’s our prize exhibit,” Quarrey said, pointing to the wall behind his guest. “I had it framed to remind me just how important it is to keep trying.”

Thorne twisted around. In a smart new frame, a sheet torn from a cheap yellow memo block. He read the semiliterate capitals that almost covered it: “TO MISTER COMMIE ASS LICKING QUAREY YOU SAY ONE MORE WORD AGANST AMRICA WELL HANG YOU BY YOUR PRICK ON A FAGPOLE GET OUT OR WELL BURN DOWN YOUR HOME AND YOUR NIGGERFUCKING WIFE TOO OUHT TO HAVE A GUN STUFF UP HER CUNT NOW YOU NOW WHAT LOYAL AMRICANS THINK OF TRATORS.”

“The fagpole is an original touch,” Quarrey said with a tired smile, and sipped his sherry.

There was a long silence. Thorne wanted it to end, but he couldn’t think of the best words. He had been growing daily more ashamed since Nancy died—ashamed of not having understood before, in the guts where it counts, what suffering really meant. It was a tough job managing the vast sums that the guilty conscience of the Western world siphoned into Globe Relief, and no one denied that, including him; he was dealing with sums that exceeded the turnover of all but the largest European and American corporations. That alone, though, wasn’t justification for the income he’d been drawing, even if it did average out to less than half a cent per person helped. So he’d taken refuge behind the additional defense that he had a wife to provide for and might well one day adopt a kid. (By a twenty-two-to-one chance he and Nancy had both been carrying the recessive gene for cystic fibrosis, and a child of their own would be mentally retarded.)

Without Nancy, it was as though cataracts had been taken from his eyes. It had become suddenly clear: there are madmen in charge, and they must be stopped!

He had read feverishly, beginning with Austin Train’s famous source-books that had taken one, two, even three years apiece to compile, soberly documenting the course of organochlorides in the biosphere, factory-smoke on the wind, pinning down some—not all, because often the information was denied to the public—of the places where dangerous substances had been dumped. Among the first things he’d come across was a description of the gas-disposal program in 1919. And on top of that radioactive waste, nerve gas, fluorine compounds, cyanide solutions ...

It was as though you tore up the floorboards of an apartment you’d just bought and found a corpse grinning at you.

But even more educational were the things he couldn’t find out. In the New York Public Library Train’s works were on open shelves—there would have been riots if they hadn’t been—but of the total of 1130 other books cited in the various bibliographies, 167 were withdrawn or restricted.

He’d asked why, and the answers came back pat—“Oh, there was a libel case over that. Something about General Motors, I believe.” And—“Well, someone defaced our only copy, it says here, and it was out of print by then, I’m afraid.”

One book in particular he remembered, a text on accidents with nuclear weapons, which was duly brought to him by a smiling librarian. But when he opened the front cover he found a hole had been carefully cut from first page to last.

“Do you know what’s become of Austin Train?” Mrs. Quarrey said suddenly.

Thorne blinked. “As a matter of fact that was one of the questions I came to ask your husband. I understand the Trainites contacted you some while ago and asked for help in a nationwide survey they’re doing on Puritan products—is that true?”

Quarrey nodded.

“And I’ve been hunting high and low in the hope of locating Train, but so far all my leads have taken me to one of these—these Doppelgängers of his.” Thorne hesitated. “Do you think he’s dead?”

“One does keep hearing rumors,” Quarrey sighed. “He never had any direct connection with the Trainites, of course, but the latest story I’ve heard did come from a Trainite, for what that’s worth. Claimed that he was burned to death in that slum apartment in San Diego.”

“I’ve heard that too,” Thorne agreed. “But I think it’s another of these mistaken identity cases. Incidentally, do you know where that crazy fisherman got his napalm?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It was part of a consignment we supplied to the Mexicans to burn off marijuana fields.”

“Well, that’s the chickens coming home to roost with a vengeance,” Quarrey said with a sour chuckle. “Why have you been hunting so hard for Train, by the way? More sherry?”

“Please, it’s very good ... Well, I guess because he seems to be about the only person who might lead us out of this mess. I mean so many people respect him and at least give lip-service to his principles. Do you agree?”

“In a way,” the professor said thoughtfully. “We need something to break us out of this—this isolationism we’ve drifted into. I don’t mean that in the standard sense; I mean more isolationism in
time,
as it were. We’re divorced from reality, in the same way as the Romans went on thinking of themselves as invulnerable and unchallengeable long after it ceased to be true. The most awful warnings are staring us in the face—the stagnant Mediterranean above all, dead like the Great Lakes—yet we’re so proud of being the richest, the most powerful, the whatever, that we won’t face facts. We won’t admit that we’re short of water, we’re short of timber, we’re short of—”

“Food,” Thorne said positively. “Or we shall be next winter. That’s why they’re so eager to resume production of Nutripon. I met a very interesting guy the other day, used to work for Angel City, an actuary called Tom Grey. He’s based in New York now, and I met him through Moses Greenbriar, at the Bamberley Trust. He’s been compiling masses of social data for years, for some obsessive project of his own, and Moses asked him to extrapolate the question of this year’s crop failures. You know crops are bad everywhere.”

“Bad? Disastrous!” Quarrey snorted. “Idaho, the Dakotas, Colorado, Wisconsin ... Yes, you mentioned this survey the Trainites asked me to coordinate; frankly, I’m of two minds about going through with it.”

“Not surprising!” his wife said with asperity. “He’s had his life threatened, Mr. Thorne—no, dear, I will not keep quiet about that! It’s disgraceful! We’ve had at least half a dozen anonymous phone calls threatening to kill Lucas if he carries on, and since as I said I’m sure the police are tapping the phone they must know we’re telling the truth, but they won’t do anything about it.”

“But that’s serious!” Thorne exclaimed. “They must know—everybody knows—Puritan is a Syndicate operation, and if you’re trying to drive their prices down—”

“It’s not quite like that,” Quarrey cut in.

Thorne stared at him for a moment. Then he leaned back in his chair. “I’m sorry. I seem to have been jumping to conclusions. I assumed that you were looking for food being sold by Puritan which doesn’t match their claims, so as to—uh—pressurize them into cutting their extravagant profit margins.”

“There’s no question of having to look for food which isn’t up to their advertised standards,” Quarrey said. “You stand about an even chance of finding it at random.”

There was dead silence. Eventually Thorne shook his head. “I don’t think I quite understand.”

“It’s very simple. It must have struck you that in spite of their exorbitant prices Puritan sells a colossal volume of food?”

“Yes, fantastic. It’s an index of how frightened people really are. Especially parents of young children.”

“Well, what some Trainite has discovered—I don’t know who, this is all being conducted on an anonymous footing—what he’s worked out is this. If you divide the amount of home-grown produce Puritan sells per year into the amount of ground you’d need to grow it on, there literally isn’t enough uncontaminated land left in North America. Not after the watershed defoliation program of the sixties. And he’s analyzed their stuff, and as I say about half of it is no better than you can get in a regular supermarket. I’m still checking out his calculations, but I’m fairly sure he’s proved his point.”

“I’m wondering,” Mrs. Quarrey said, “whether it could be Austin Train himself.”

Thorne glanced at her and back at her husband. “Well, I don’t see why you don’t publish straight away!” he exclaimed. “If you’ve been threatened, wouldn’t publicity be the best protection?”

“I told him that,” Mrs. Quarrey said firmly.

“And I was going to,” the professor said. “Until the Trainites told me what’s happening to those crops that are failing. Do you know what we’ve let into the country?”

“Well, some sort of insect pest, I gather. Or pests, at least, seeing they ruin so many different plants.”

“It’s the worm that caused the famine in Honduras, and indirectly led to the war.”

“Oh, no!” Thorne’s mouth was suddenly dry. “But
how?”

“Imported under Federal license,” Quarrey said with gloomy relish, as of a preacher at the graveside of an unreformed drunkard. “They were discovered at the Trainite wat in Colorado, and someone with Tupamaro contacts managed to identify them. Apparently one of the big insect importers sub-contracted his worm business to a guy who was supposed to supply Argentine worms, but he didn’t give a hoot, cheated them right and left, palmed off thousands of gallons of these damned pests, and skipped to Australia with the proceeds.”

“Incredible!” Thorne breathed. “But didn’t they realize they weren’t getting regular worms?

“Oh, they were mixed in with ordinary worms. And apart from being slightly bluish and a bit differently shaped, these
jigras,
as they call them, do look pretty much like real worms.”

“But the experts at the importing company!” Thorne clenched his fists. “Or the customs! Didn’t they worry about them being blue?”

“Of course not. He dyed them pink.”

“Of course,” Thorne said bitterly.

“The Trainites take it for granted that the customs officers and the firm’s inspectors were bribed, but I find that hard to believe.” Quarrey shrugged. “However it happened, though, the damage is done. And the damned things are resistant to just about every known insecticide, banned or legal.”

“So you’re afraid of the consequences if you frighten people off Puritan,” Thorne said slowly.

“Yes, precisely. We’re headed for a hungry winter. My Trainite contacts feel the same way, because even if half the Puritan food isn’t as good as it’s claimed to be, we’re going to need every scrap that’s even remotely edible.”

“Half a loaf,” Mrs. Quarrey said.

There was another silence. Eventually Thorne drained his glass. “I’d better be on my way,” he muttered. “I’m dining with my lawyer. I guess he’ll have another shot at making me drop my suit against the Defense Department. What the hell can you do when even your lawyer doesn’t think you can get justice?”

“I understood you were enlisting the support of—well, other support,” Quarrey put in.

“Angel City, you mean? Yes, I had high hopes of them. I mean, it’s no secret I had a half-million dollar policy on Nancy’s life. But they’ve paid up and kept their mouths shut. As for the nine cases of Lewisite in Florida—”

“Nine?”

“I’m morally certain, plus maybe one more. But everyone I’ve tackled so far has been well paid not to make a fuss.” Thorne gave a bitter smile. “They can’t reach me, though; I was rich already, and now Angel City has made me richer.” He checked his watch.