The Sheep Look Up Page 10

  Amen.

  Something had infected his hair-roots and eyebrows, that made the skin flake away in dry crusty yellow scurf and left little raw patches of exposed flesh. He rubbed in a lotion Mrs. Blore had recommended; she and her husband suffered from the same complaint, and so did the kids on the lower floor. The lotion certainly helped—his scalp wasn’t nearly as sore as it had been last week.

  Then he ate, absently, not so much food as fuel: tasting of cottonwool or cardboard, the human counterpart of the fertilizers they were continuing to pour on land that daily grew more and more barren, hardened, scoriated, turned to dust. Like his scalp. He was shaping something he sensed to be important. He had given up books, even his favorites: the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Precepts of Patanjali, the I Ching, the Popul Vuh, the Book of the Dead ...

  If I don’t know enough now, I shall never know enough. I couldn’t stand that

  While he ate, he was thinking. While he worked during the day, he had been thinking. He had a job with the city sanitation department, and garbage was full of morals: sermons in trash-cans, books in running drains. The others on the gang he worked with thought he was odd, maybe touched in the head. Could be. What had touched him, though, felt—significant. Suddenly, in recent weeks, the conviction had come on him: I matter. I count. I have an insight. I think a thing no one else thinks. I believe with the certainty of faith. I must must make others hear and understand.

  When it is time.

  At night, when he lay down to sleep, he felt that his brain was resonating with the heartbeat of the planet.

  SHOWDOWN

  “Get me a wig—quickly!” Startled by the shout, Terry Fenton glanced up from inventorying his equipment: paints, powders, dyes, lacquers—all of the finest quality, of course, Peruvian and Mexican, based on herbal essences and vegetable waxes and flower pigments, not a trace of anything synthetic. Nothing but the best for Terry Fenton. He was at the apex of his profession, senior makeup supervisor for the entire New York studio complex of ABS, far more trendily clad and infinitely better groomed than almost all the stars who nightly fed visual pablum to the admass.

  “Pet! Christ, what have you done to your hair?”

  Forty, but glamorous and rigorously dieted slim, Petronella Page stormed to her usual chair. She was wearing a magnificent pants suit in abstract scarlet and yellow and her face was so flawless Terry would as ever need to add only minor touches. But her hair was streaked with irregular muddy marks.

  She ran the Monday and Wednesday late-night talk show, and was popular, and expected to take on Friday as well because the trans-Atlantic commuting compère, the Englishman Adrian Sprague, was verging on a nervous breakdown at long-awaited last and moreover had missed three shows in three months owing to bomb scares aboard the planes he was taking.

  “I’ll sue the mother!” she said between clenched teeth as the full horror of her appearance clanged back from the merciless mirrors.

  “But what happened?” Terry snapped his fingers and his current assistant, Marlon, a light-brown boy who adored him, absolutely adored him, and thought Petronella was okay—for a woman, you know—came scurrying into the room. So also, a moment later, did Lola Crown, assistant to Ian Farley the producer, with a pile of briefing documents concerning the night’s guests. The show was due on camera in about twenty minutes.

  “Thank God you finally made it!” Lola cried. “Ian’s been pissing himself!”

  “Shut up! Drop dead!” Petronella rasped, and slapped the papers out of Lola’s hand as she offered them. “I don’t give a fart who we have on the show, not if it’s the stinking King of England! I sure as hell am not going out looking like this!”

  “You won’t have to, baby,” Terry soothed, inspecting the discolored tresses. Lola, on the point of weeping, went down on hands and knees to reclaim the scattered papers. “Lord, though, why didn’t you have it done at Guido’s same as usual?”

  “This happened at Guido’s.”

  “What?” Terry was horrified. He insisted on everyone he handled having their hair washed, styled, cut at Guido’s, because it was the only place in New York where they guaranteed their shampoos were done with imported rainwater. They shipped it specially from Chile.

  “Silver nitrate,” Petronella sighed. “I contacted Guido at home and blew my stack, and he checked up and called back almost weeping. Seems they’ve been rainmaking down there—remember I had a rainmaker on the show last year? Guido thinks it reacted with the setting lotion.”

  Marlon brought a choice of wigs. Terry seized one, and a brush and comb and aerosol of lacquer. He brutally sabotaged Guido’s efforts into a tight layer close to the scalp and set about re-creating the same style on the wig.

  “Going to take long?” Petronella demanded.

  “Couple of minutes,” Terry said. He forbore to add that anything Guido’s best stylist could do, he could copy, only in a tenth of the time. Everyone knew how good he was.

  “Thank God. Lola, you bitch, where are my briefings?”

  “Here!” the girl snuffled. Petronella flicked through the pages.

  “Oh, yes, I remember. Jacob Bamberley—”

  “He likes to be called Jack!” Lola cut in.

  “Stuff what he likes. I run this show. Terry baby, we got the man who sent all that poisoned shit to Africa. Know what I’m going to make him do? I’m going to make him eat a bowlful of it right at the start of the show, then come back to him at the end so people can see what it’s done to him.”

  Turning to the next briefing, she added thoughtfully, “And I shall definitely call him Jacob.”

  This was a Globe Relief operation on behalf of Globe Relief. When it became clear that Kaika’s accusations weren’t just propaganda, it had been a matter of panic stations all around. It was no use stressing the true fact that Globe was the largest aid organization on the planet and invariably the soonest on the scene of a disaster. Simply because it was American-based and American-funded, it was tarred with the Vietnam brush. There was almost certain to be a UN inquiry shortly.

  Accordingly State had made it very clear that unless Globe came up promptly with a full defense the organization would have to be thrown to the wolves. Inestimable trouble had already been caused by black militants instantly prepared to believe in chemical genocide.

  The obvious steps had naturally been taken. Samples of the Nutripon still in store had been analyzed and given a clean bill. Now suspicion had turned on the yeasts and fungi in the hydroponics plant: could a rogue, akin say to the ergot mold of rye, have infected one batch of the stuff with a natural psychedelic poison? It would have helped if they’d had a sample from Noshri to study, but apparently it had all been consumed or burned during the riots. So it was going to be a slow job.

  Casting around for some form of distraction, the directors of Globe had realized that Jacob Bamberley was due in New York for his monthly visit to the headquarters of the Bamberley Trust, and seen a heaven-sent chance to pass the buck one stage further. They pulled a lot of strings extremely hard. The Petronella Page Show had a nightly audience of around thirty million; sometimes on a Monday when people stayed home after the heavy spending of a weekend, it approached forty. To be exposed on it, moveover, meant a lot of spin-off in newspaper and magazine publicity. They wanted that exposure now, today. “Thrice armed is he whose cause is just, but four times he who gets a blow in fust.”

  Besides, if war is hell, so is peace.

  So here he was under the bright studio lights, flanked on one side by Gerry Thorne from Globe, small and tense and with a tic in his left cheek, and on the other by Moses Greenbriar, senior treasurer of the Bamberley Trust, a fat and jolly man who could answer any questions about the financing of the hydroponics plant.

  Terry and his wig had worked a miracle. Nonetheless Petronella was still in a foul mood when she took her place. She cheered up slightly as the first commercials were run, because they had wonderful sponsors on this show and inasmuch as she was proud of
anything she was proud of these: Puritan Health Supermarkets, Hailey Cars—or rather the agency which imported them from Britain, where they cost too much to be common—and Johnson & Johnson’s filtermasks. Even so the smile she bestowed on the audience was forced.

  “Hi, world!” And, mindful of their status as a representative cross-section of the species Man, they echoed her.

  “Now this time we got for you people who are very much making news, and people we predict will make the news tomorrow. And not only here but half around the world, such as for instance in Africa.”

  Ah, good. She didn’t have to tell Ian Farley more than once about anything. As arranged, the cameras had picked up on Mr. Bamberley, ignoring the men at his left and right, and were closing like the gun-muzzles of a firing squad.

  “We’ve all been shocked and horrified by the outbreak of—well, mass insanity that occurred at Noshri before Christmas. Just as we thought that terrible war was finally over, we’ve seen the pictures and heard the stories of people literally running amok. We’ve even heard accusations of”—hushed—“cannibalism among the starving survivors.

  “Now it’s been charged that poison in relief supplies caused these people to go out of their minds. Specifically, a consignment of Nutripon from the Bamberley hydroponics plant near Denver, Colorado ...”

  Bless you, Ian baby!

  Farley had kept one camera practically squinting up Mr. Bamberley’s nostrils throughout the intro. Of course that wasn’t what stayed on the monitor all the time; the audience and Petronella had been intercut. But Bamberley wasn’t to know that. He was visibly afraid to twist around and get a sight of the monitor, in case he was on it.

  Oh, Ian baby, I don’t have to tell you, do I?

  “Jacob! You don’t mind if I call you Jacob?” With a dazzling smile.

  “Well, people usually—”

  “I’m sure they do. No one with such a reputation for good works could be other than on the best of terms with everyone.” The voice syrupy, the tiniest fraction too far in the direction of sentimentality. “So now, Jacob, this stuff Nutripon that’s been called in question—what exactly does it consist of?”

  “Well, it’s cassava, processed in a way not unlike making cheese—”

  “Cassava. I see.” Time to let the smile make way for a slight frown. “Now I’m no expert on this”—though the briefings had been thorough as always and she was a quick study—“but I seem to remember cassava is kind of a dangerous plant to meddle with. Eye disease, isn’t that right?”

  “Well, I guess you must be referring to cassava amblyopia, which is—”

  “An eye condition?” She noticed, though the admass didn’t because the camera wasn’t on the guy, that Gerry Thorne reflexively touched one of his own eyes at that. Right; he’d had conjunctivitis recently. And now here he was pulling out a pair of shades against the brilliant lights. Splendid. He looked positively sinister in them. Prompt to his unspoken cue, Ian pulled back his camera.

  “Yes, but you see Nutripon is fortified—”

  “Just a second!” The word was on the teleprompter, but she hadn’t needed the reminder; it was too full of possibilities. “I hadn’t quite covered my point. Isn’t there cyanide in cassava?”

  “In the raw rind, yes, but not after it’s been processed!” Mr. Bamberley was sweating. Petronella looked forward to the moment when he would begin to squirm. His companions had reached it already.

  “You claim your treatment makes it quite safe?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “Are the details of the treatment a trade secret, or can anybody hear them?”

  “Goodness, not in the least secret! Though I’m afraid if you want the technical details you’d have to—”

  “Yes, we appreciate that you’re not a hydroponics expert. You do grow the stuff hydroponically, right?”

  “Quite correct, we do.”

  “That means you grow it artificially, in sand or cellulite, in controlled conditions with a solution of nutrient chemicals. That’s what “hydroponics’ means, isn’t it?” Barb after barb stabbing into the audience’s ears, fresh from their exposure to the Puritan commercial with its emphasis on food grown in the open air, in natural soil.

  “Yes. Uh—yes!” Mr. Bamberley was becoming confused. Beside him Greenbriar, the fat man, was signaling with his eyebrows: Call on me, I can cope!

  Ho no, baby. Ho no! We aren’t here to help Globe Relief justify itself to all those blacks who already believe your charley outfit has been genociding their African cousins. No more are we here to help you elude the stockholders in the Bamberley Trust who resent seeing what might have been profit in their pockets squandered on ungrateful bastards overseas. No, baby! That ain’t what we’re here for at all!

  Like to know what we are here for? Then stick around.

  She smiled again, sweetly. “There are no doubt reasons for growing your cassava in this way. Does it have anything to do with reducing the amount of cyanide in it?”

  “No, no, no! The most important reason is that we need something that’s widely acceptable in those areas where famine is likeliest to strike, and cassava is—”

  ‘Yes, you ship everything you make abroad, don’t you?” Petronella inserted, with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. The breath he was taking to launch into the next segment of his prepared exposition had to be diverted to a different purpose.

  “Well, yes, everything we make does go for aid projects.”

  “And this is a non-profit operation?” Petronella said, knowing the official answer. “You are, after all, one of the richest men in the world; according to its last annual report the Bamberley Trust disposes of assets in excess of half a billion dollars. Don’t you take any profit on your relief contracts?”

  “Definitely not! At most we aim to cover our costs. The hydroponics plant is absolutely not required to make a profit.”

  “Why not?”

  The phrase stuck there, as though a thrown knife had found a lodging in mid-air. Mr. Bamberley blinked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I asked why not. All your other business interests have to, or you get rid of them. During the past year, for instance, you disposed of a chain of supermarkets in Tennessee, which hadn’t shown a profit in two years, and shed all your airline holdings. Well?”

  “Uh—well!” Mr. Bamberley did exactly what she had hoped he would, and Thorne and Greenbriar had been praying he would not do: tugged a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. It was very hot under the lights—designedly so. “Well, I regard this as a ... Well, a charitable undertaking, you see. A practical way of helping people with my—uh—my good fortune.”

  “Not the only expression of your charitable impulses, I gather,” Petronella murmured.

  “No, of course not. I believe—I mean, I’m a Christian and all Christians should believe—that we’re the children of the Lord, made in His image, and no man is an island, heh-heh!” Terribly embarrassed, like so many professing a religion when faced with admitting the fact before anonymous millions. But sincere. Oh, painfully sincere.

  ‘Yes, I’m told you’ve surrounded yourself with boys who’ve been orphaned. Eight of them right now.”

  “Ah, you mean my adopted sons. Well, yes. It’s one thing, isn’t it, to send aid to some faraway country? And something else again to bring deserving cases into your own home.” Blinking on every word, flicker-flicker.

  In the goldfish bowl Ian making fierce gestures: don’t lean on the queer bit too hard. But the hell with him. The Bible Belt goes to bed early, this may be the last chance to catch them.

  “We’ve talked a lot about adoption on this show recently—because of the success of the Double-V scheme, of course. Are you a patron of Double-V?”

  “Ah ... As a matter of fact, no, because there are after all a great many orphans right here in this country. Worse still, children abandoned by their parents!”

  “Yes, that is an alarming problem, isn’t it? We
had a social worker on the show last month who mentioned just that point, in connection with these gangs of black kids who have taken to terrorizing city centers. She said thousands of them have suffered just as badly as the Asian children who are being adopted in. But none of your—ah—sons are black, are they?”

  Dead silence. Just long enough to let the point fester. And then resuming in a let’s-get-on-with-it tone, “Well, I guess that’s by the way, Jacob. Your private life is your concern and presumably a white Protestant is entitled to prefer white Protestant boys.” Fester, fester! “So let’s get back to the main line of the discussion.”

  That was one of her favorite words. Sharp-tongued guests on the show sometimes managed to sneak in the more accurate term, “interrogation,” but tonight she was in top form, and even though Thorne was pale and shaking and Greenbriar almost bouncing up and down with fury, neither had contrived to interrupt her. Maybe she wouldn’t sue Guido after all. Blessings in disguise, and all that shit.

  “So anyhow: what have you to say to the charge that the food you sent to Noshri was poisoned?”

  “As God is my witness, Nutripon is wholesome and delicious!” Mr. Bamberley sat up very straight and jutted his jaw forward as though trying to look like Winston Churchill.

  “I’m glad to hear it. But have you yourself been to Noshri to investigate, or any of your associates?” Naturally not; Kaika had booted the American relief workers out of the country and broken off diplomatic relations.

  “Ah ...” Mr. Bamberley was trembling now, enough for the cameras to pick it up. “It simply hasn’t been possible—but our quality controls are of the highest standard, we test the product at every stage of manufacture!”

  “So the consignment in question must have been poisoned after it left the factory?”