The Sheep Look Up (28 page)

“Might I have my umbrella, Mrs. Quarrey? And I think you took my mask as well.”

But when she opened the apartment door to let him out, there were three men in dark clothes lounging against the opposite wall. His heart lurched into his shoes.

And stopped.

Like the professor’s, and his wife’s.

“Fish in a barrel,” said one of the killers scornfully, and led his companions away.

BUILDUP OF FORCES

Doug and Angela McNeil saw the troops encamped near the Towerhill road on their way to dinner at a favorite restaurant in the mountains. They had decided to go out on the spur of the moment. They could do that sort of thing because they had no kids. A lot of doctors nowadays didn’t have kids.

All along the way they kept passing groups of the strange young people who had been drifting into Denver during the previous few days. By this time hundreds must have arrived. Most had come by bus, and a few among these had brought folding cycles that fitted in a bus’s baggage compartment, but the majority were on foot. They obviously hailed from big cities. They had filtermasks around their necks, like the winter tourists who couldn’t accept that Colorado air was safe.

“What are they all doing here?” Angela said as they passed one bunch of a dozen or so who had sat down to rest against a big billboard showing the monstrous silhouette of a worm, captioned: HAVE YOU SEEN ANY OF THESE INSECTS? IF YOU DO INFORM THE POLICE RIGHT AWAY!

“I thought at first they must be some kind of Trainite reunion, on their way to the wat. But they’re not. Notice they’re wearing synthetics? Trainites won’t.”

Angela nodded. Right: all the way from nylon shirts to plastic boots.

“So I guess they’re just the mountain counterpart of beach bums.” Unconsciously, Doug had slowed the car to look more closely at them; realizing they wouldn’t take kindly to being stared at, he accelerated again. “They can hardly go to California this year, can they?”

“I guess not.” Angela shuddered.

“And they can’t or won’t go to Florida because of the poison-gas scare. So that leaves the mountains. Probably the same is happening back east, in the Poconos for example.”

“I can’t see them being very warmly welcomed.” Angela sounded troubled. “Can you?”

“Well, no. And the forces of lawnorder seem to agree.” Doug pointed ahead. Two patrol cars were drawn up on the hard shoulder at a curve, and a group of sternfaced officers were photographing the kids with a Polaroid. Behind one of the cars others were searching a pale youth of about twenty. They had him down to undershorts. One of the police held his arms, though he was offering no resistance; another was feeling in his crotch with evident enjoyment; a third was searching the knapsack he’d been carrying.

A short distance further on was where they saw the troops: on a fairly level stretch of ground they’d erected tents like orange fungi. Five olive-green trucks were parked by the road.

Doug started. “Say, those are battle-lasers, aren’t they?”

“What are?”

“Those trailer things! Christ, are they expecting a civil war? They can’t mean to use them against those kids!”

“I should hope not,” Angela agreed.

And then, around the next bend, a heavy iron gate was set in a concrete wall with spikes around the top. Alongside it was a big illuminated sign, which read: BAMBERLEY HYDROPONICS INC.—SERVING THE NEEDS OF THE NEEDY.

There was another sign hung on the gate itself which stated that parties of visitors were welcome daily at 1000 and 1500, but that was covered with a piece of sodden sacking.

CRITICAL

Well at least you could breathe up here. Even if you couldn’t see the stars. Michael Advowson drew what consolation he could from that. Relishing freedom from the tyranny of a filtermask—though still irritated by a faint burning on the back of his tongue, which had haunted him since his arrival from Europe—he strolled uphill away from the hydroponics plant. It was good to go on grass, although it was dry and brittle, and brush between bushes, although their leaves were gray. Above all he was on his own, and that was a relief.

Christ. What wouldn’t he give to be home right now?

What hurt him most of all, made him feel like a sick child aware of terrible wrongness and yet incapable of explaining it to anyone who might help, was that in spite of the evidence around them, in spite of what their eyes and ears reported—and sometimes their flesh, from bruises, stab wounds, racking coughs, weeping sores—these people believed their way of life was the best in the world, and were prepared to export it at the point of a gun.

Down in Honduras, for example. Heaven’s name! Cromwell had done that sort of thing in Ireland—but that was centuries ago, another and more barbaric age!

He wore his uniform most of the time now. It indicated that he was more than just a foreigner, that he possessed rank in a hierarchy, and these people worshipped power. Recognizing his status, they behaved to him with frigid politeness. No.
Correctness.

But that wasn’t what he’d expected. He had kinfolk, going back to the brother of his great-grandfather, who had come here to escape the oppression of the British. He had expected somehow to be—well, greeted as a cousin. Not as a fellow-conspirator.

Loneliness in New York had driven him more and more into the company of the drunken girl who’d picked him up at that diplomatic cocktail party. Sylvia Young, that was her name. He had found something waif-like and wistful behind her façade of sophistication, as though she were in search of a dream from which she could recall only a mood, no details.

The latest meeting had been the night before last, and she was cured, she said, and wanted him to come to bed. But his subconscious was so disturbed he couldn’t do anything, and when she snapped at him in frustration he snapped back, saying he’d never known a girl before who’d been infected, at which she gave a bitter laugh and swore she didn’t know one who had not.

And the laughing dissolved into tears, and she fell against his shoulder and clung there like a frightened child, and from her moans emerged the shreds of that unspeakably pathetic dream: wanting to live somewhere clean, wanting to raise a son with a chance of being healthy.

“Everybody’s kids I know have something wrong! Everybody has something wrong with one of their kids!”

As a doctor Michael knew that wasn’t true; the incidence of congenital abnormality, even in the States, was still only three or four per cent. But everyone did insure against it as a matter of course, and talked as though the least fit of ill-temper, the least bout of any childish ailment, were the end of the world.

“There must be something that can be done! There must, there must!”

It had crossed his mind: I could offer you—well, not
entirely
a clean place to live, because near Balpenny, when the wind blows from the direction of the industrial estate around Shannon Airport, you go out for a deep first-thing-in-the-morning breath and find yourself choking. But they’ve promised to do something about that.

Also animals are sometimes born deformed. Still, you can kill animals with more or less a clear conscience.

But I could say: let me show you lakes that are not foul with the leavings of man. Let me reap you crops grown on animal dung and pure clean rain. Let me feed you apples from trees that were never sprayed with arsenic. Let me cut you bread from a cob loaf, that greets your hands with the affectionate warmth of the oven. Let me give you children that need fear nothing worse than a bottle dropped by a drunk, straight-limbed, smiling, clear of speech. And would you care if that speech were full of the echoes of a tongue that spoke civilization a thousand years ago?

But he hadn’t said it, only thought it. And probably now he never would. After tomorrow’s burning of the suspect food he intended to go straight home on an Aer Lingus flight from Chicago.

On the crest of a rise he paused and looked around. There was the hydroponics plant sprawling like a colossal caterpillar along the side of a hill. He could just make out by uncurtained lighted windows the home of the plant’s manager, an agreeable man named Steinitz. More than one could say of his host, Jacob Bamberley ... Staying in that great mansion, the enlarged ranch-house of the estate his grandfather had bought, was somehow
wrong,
even though it was surrounded by what were reputed to be marvelous botanical gardens. He had only glimpsed them; they appeared to be drab and ill-doing.

He must drive back there shortly. He had been engaged in a final review of preparations with the American officers in charge, Colonel Saddler, Captain Aarons and Lieutenant Wassermann, and the other UN observer, a Venezuelan called Captain Robles. Michael didn’t like any of them, and following the meeting had needed to unwind. Which was why he was out here at midnight under the sky.

Not the stars. Apparently they hadn’t been seen here this summer. Mr. Bamberley had said at dinner, “A bad year.”

But would next year be any better?

He shivered despite the warmth of the light breeze, and an instant later had the fright of his life. A voice spoke to him from nowhere.

“Well, shit. Who’s this nosy son of a bitch?”

He stared frantically around, and only then saw that a shadowy figure stood less than ten paces away: a black man in black clothes, very tall and lean. And in his right hand something lighter, a knife held in the easy fighting poise of someone who understood the proper way to use it, not stupidly raised to shoulder height but low where it could slash open the soft muscles of the belly.

“What the hell—? Who are you?” Michael demanded.

A moment of dead silence. During it other forms materialized from what had seemed bare empty ground.

“You’re not American,” the black man said. Man? Maybe boy; there was a lightness to his voice, all head tones and no chest.

“No, I’m not. I’m Irish!”

A flashlight speared him like a butterfly on a pin. How long before that image would be meaningless? He hadn’t seen a butterfly in this country.

A new voice, a girl’s, said, “Uniform!”

“Cool it,” the black boy said. “He says he’s Irish. So what are you doing here, Paddy?”

Michael felt sweat prickly on his skin. He said, “I’m a United Nations observer.”

“And you’re observing us, hm?” With irony.

“I didn’t realize there was anyone here. I just came out for a walk.”

“Hey,
man.
You surely are a foreigner.” The black boy sheathed his knife and moved forward into the flashlight beam. “Thought you must be a pig. But they hunt in gangs.”

“He’s a skunk!” the girl snapped. Michael had heard the term; it meant soldier. He felt menaced.

“But he isn’t wearing a gun,” the black boy said.

The girl’s voice changed suddenly. “Shit, that’s right. Hey, Paddy, what kind of army is it where you don’t carry a gun?”

“I’m a medical officer,” Michael forced out of his dry throat. “Want to see my ID?”

The black boy moved closer, looking him over from head to toe. “Yes,” he said after a while. “I guess we do.”

Michael tugged it from his pocket. The boy studied it

“Well, hell. A major, yet. Welcome to this sick shitpile we live in, Mike. How do you like it?”

“I’d give anything to get the hell out,” Michael blurted. “And they won’t let me.”

“
They
”—heavily stressed—“won’t let you do anything.” He handed the ID back and stepped out of Michael’s way. “I’m Fritz,” he added. “That’s Diana—Hal—Curt—Bernie. Come sit down.”

There seemed to be no alternative. Michael moved forward. The group had camped here, he saw now: sleeping-bags hidden by a ring of bushes, a few dull embers on a hearth of flat rocks.

“Smoke?” Fritz said. “Chaw?”

“Fritz!”—from the girl Diana.

Fritz chuckled. “Ain’t no skin off Mike’s ass how we screw ourselves up. Right, Mike?”

The reference to a chaw had suddenly explained to Michael the light tone—close to shrillness—in Fritz’s voice. He was high on khat, popular among the American blacks because it came from Africa: a stimulating leaf to be chewed or smoked or infused, exported from Kenya in enormous quantities by the Meru people who called it meru-ngi.

“No thanks,” he said after a pause.

“Man, you don’t know what you’re missing.” That was—Bernie? Yes, Bernie. He giggled. “One of the great natural medicines. You get the runs lately?”

“Yes, of course.”

“No ‘of course’ about it. They said thirty-five million people caught them. We didn’t. Where’s the chaw?”

“Here.” Curt, next in line, produced the sodden lump from his mouth and handed it on. Michael repressed a shudder. It was interesting, that point about escaping the universal diarrhea. Because of the constipating effect of the drug, no doubt.

He said, “What brings you here?”

“Tourists, us,” Fritz answered with a high chuckle. “Just tourists. And you?”

“Oh, they’re going to burn all this suspect food tomorrow. I’m here to see the job’s properly carried out.”

Dead pause. Suddenly the one called Hal said, “Well, you won’t.”

The girl Diana gave him a fearful sidelong glance. She was very fair, and pretty with it although plump. “Hal, you watch your mouth!”

“Fact, ain’t it? Nobody going stop us!”

Michael said slowly, incredulously, “You’re here to try and get your hands on that food?”

Hesitation. Then nods. Firm ones.

“But why?” He thought of all the young people he’d seen trudging up from Denver: hundreds! And Steinitz at the factory had said they’d been arriving for days on end.

“Why not?” That was Curt.

“Yeah, why not?” Hal again. “It’d be the first time, the very first time the government of this lousy country turned some of its
citizens
on.” He made the word “citizens” sound obscene.

Diana licked her lips. She had broad full lips and a broad long tongue. There was a sound like “hlryup.”

“Are you crazy?” Michael gasped before he could stop himself.

“Isn’t crazy the only sane way to be in this fucked-up world?” Fritz retorted.

“But there’s no drug in the food they have stored! I’ve seen the analyses.”