The Sheep Look Up Read online

  “You cut yourself, baby?” he demanded.

  “Uh ...” She made to hide it, changed her mind. “No, I got bitten.”

  “Bitten! What by—a dog?”

  “No, a rat. I reached in the cupboard for a bag of flour ... I keep calling the exterminator, but he can’t come. Got too many calls—hey, what you doing?” Pete had seized the bell-push by his bed.

  “Calling the nurse! You put that dressing on yourself?”

  “Well—yes.”

  “You have it attended to properly! You know what rats carry? Sometimes plague! Or it might go septic.”

  The nurse came, prompt because of his benefactor’s money, and led Jeannie protesting away. While she was gone he lay there fuming, thinking: Rats? So many rats the exterminator can’t cope? Hell!

  And it was just as well he inisted. Jeannie had a sub-clinical fever due to septicemia. When they found out she’d kissed him, they gave him a prophylactic injection as well.

  Trying to lighten the mood when she came back with her hand neatly wrapped in white, he said, “Say, baby, good news. Tomorrow they’re going to let me try and walk!”

  “Honey, that’s really great!” Her eyes shone. But mainly with tears. “Is it...?”

  “Is it going to be the same?”

  She nodded.

  “They think it will be. But not for a pretty long time. I’ll have to wear a brace for my back, to start with anyway.”

  “How long?”

  He hesitated, then repeated the physiotherapist’s estimate. “Two years.”

  “Oh, Pete!”

  “But everything else is okay!” He brought out the worst terror, the most fearful fear. “There’s nothing wrong with ... I mean, I’m still a man.”

  Thank God. Thank God. He’d prayed, really prayed, when that point occurred to him. And one of the doctors, whom he was going to remember every time he prayed again, had told him well, as far as can be judged that ought to be okay, as soon as you’ve got the strength back in your arms try it for yourself. I’ll send you some deep-dirt books in case they help.

  Jeannie clutched his hand and began to cry.

  Eventually she was able to ask about the future. Obviously a cripple couldn’t go back on the force. Could he?

  He shook his head. He could do that now without a twinge of pain. They’d been wonderful, the care they’d taken.

  “No. But I got the offer of a job already. Man called by this morning who’d heard I can’t get back in the police. Friend of one of the doctors, cat called Prosser. Says to let him know as soon as I’m fit and he’ll give me a desk job I can handle.”

  “Back in Towerhill, you mean?”

  “No, here in Denver. Of course we’d have to move house, but he said the pay would be good ... Ah, don’t worry, baby. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  MY FINGERS ARE GREEN AND SOMETIMES DROP OFF

  Dear Sir: Thank you for your letter of 18th and enclosures. The sample of dirt contains an exceptionally high proportion of lead and mercury, trace quantities of molybdenum and selenium, and a small amount of salts of silver. There is no detectable cadmium. The water sample is contaminated with lead, arsenic, selenium and compounds of sodium and potassium, particularly sodium nitrite. We suspect that the garden of the house you have bought is sited on infill derived from mine tailings, and suggest you raise the matter with the former owners. You do not mention whether you have children, but if you do we would draw your attention to the dangers they face from lead and sodium nitrite in such quantities. Early settlement of your account would be appreciated.

  Yours faithfully.

  THE REARING OF THE UGLY HEAD

  Having dropped Harold, Josie and the Henlowes’ boy at their play-school—social behavior should be encouraged at an early age and the hell with the risk of infection that caused parents like Bill and Tania Chalmers (RIP, victims along with Anton of the Towerhill avalanche) to keep their kids at home as late as was legal: what a nasty personality poor Anton had developed!—Denise Mason continued to Dr. Clayford’s office.

  The room was a perfect frame for his personality. He sat at a mahogany desk, an antique, with a gilt-tooled leather top, in a leather armchair with a swivel base. He was gruff, bluff and tough. He was proud of belonging to what, in a rare moment of jocularity, Denise had once heard him term “the sulfa generation.” She had been on his list for years, since long before her marriage, even though she didn’t much like him because he was distant and difficult to talk to. All the same there was something reassuring in his old-fashioned manner.

  He reminded her more than a little of her father.

  For the first time ever he didn’t stand up as she entered, merely waved her to the chair facing him. Puzzled, she sat down.

  “Well, what’s the trouble?”

  “Well—uh ...” Absurbly, she felt herself flushing bright scarlet. “Well, I’ve been pretty run down lately. But now I’ve developed—well, a discharge. And irritation.”

  “Vaginal, you mean? Oh, that’s the gonorrhea your husband gave you.”

  “What?”

  “I told him to go to the clinic on Market. They specialize in that sort of thing. He didn’t tell you?”

  She could only shake her head wordlessly. So many things had suddenly become clear.

  “Typical,” Clayford said with contempt. “Absolutely typical. These products of the so-called permissive generation. Dishonest. Greedy, lazy, self-indulgent, ready at the drop of a hat to tell any lie that will protect them from the consequences of their actions. They’re the cause of all the troubles in the world today!”

  He leaned suddenly across his desk, shaking a pen at her.

  “You should see what I have to see, daily in my practice. Children from good homes, subnormal from lead poisoning! Blind from congenital syphilis, too! Choking with asthma! Bone cancer, leukemia, God knows what!” He was beginning to spray little drops of spittle from his thin lips.

  Denise stared at him as though seeing him for the first time.

  “You’ve been treating Philip for a social disease?” she said at last.

  “Of course not. I told him where he could get treatment, for you as well as himself. I’m not going to help him cover up his tracks. It’s that kind of refusal to admit responsibility that’s put the world in the mess it’s in!”

  “He asked you for help, and you refused?”

  “I told you,” Clayford grunted. “I recommended him to the proper clinic.”

  Suddenly she couldn’t see him any longer. There were stinging tears in her eyes. She stood up in a single jerk that snapped her spine straight like a bowstring when the arrow is released.

  “You bastard,” she said. “You smug pompous devil. You liar. You filthy dishonest old man. You put the poison in the world, you and your generation. You crippled my children. You made sure they’d never eat clean food, drink pure water, breathe sweet air. And when someone comes to you for help you turn your back.”

  Suddenly she was crying and hurling things—a big glass inkwell, full of lovely pitch-black ink, a huge beautiful mess all over his white shirt. A book, a tray of papers. Anything.

  “Philip isn’t—what you called him! He’s not, he’s not! He’s my husband, and I love him!”

  She spun around. There was a tall glass-fronted cabinet full of medical texts. She caught at one of the doors, that stood ajar, and leaned her full weight on it, and toppled it in a crashing smashing marvelous miracle of noise.

  And marched out.

  It was all insured by Angel City, anyway.

  DISGRACE

  “O Lord!” Mr. Bamberley said, head bowed at the head of his fine long table of seasoned oak, “enter our hearts, we pray, and as this food nourishes our bodies so may our souls be nourished by Thy word, amen.”

  Amen, said a ragged chorus, cut short by the rattle of porcelain and silver. The silent black girl who worked as the Bamberleys’ maid—her name was Christy and she was fat—offered Hugh a basket of roll
s and breadsticks. He took a roll. There was as usual too much vinegar on the salad. It made his tongue curl.

  He was home for the weekend from college, and this was the ritual of Sunday lunch after church. Apparently servants, in Mr. Bamberley’s cosmos, didn’t have to be allowed time off for worship, although both Christy and Ethel, the cook, were devout. They could be heard singing gospel songs in the kitchen most of the day.

  But Sunday mornings they worked like slaves from six a.m. to get this family meal ready.

  Opposite her husband, plump, with a smile on her face as fixed as a wax doll’s, sat Mrs. Bamberley—Maud. She was ten years younger than her husband and twenty points lower on the IQ scale. She thought he was wonderful and sometimes gave talks to local women’s groups about how wonderful he was. Also she judged flower-arranging competitions and was regularly interviewed by the local press and TV when some vet with a bad conscience joined the Double-V adoption scheme. She was, by courtesy of her husband, a great adopter herself, and when they asked needling questions about race and religion she was prompt with the proper replies: a child of a different color from the rest of the family feels so pitifully self-conscious, and surely all parents want their children to be brought up in their own faith?

  Behind her chair, from a wall covered in a very expensive velvet-flock paper, a portrait of her grandfather looked down. He had been an Episcopalian bishop, but the picture showed him in the costume of a New England gentleman keeping up the Old English custom of riding to hounds: red coat, brown boots, distinguished with a white dog-collar and black silk front.

  Hugh referred to him as being dressed to kill.

  The salad was replaced—though Hugh had sampled only a mouthful of his—by a dish of cold fish with mayonnaise. He didn’t even touch this course. He was suddenly afraid of it because it had come from the sea.

  It was the first time he had been here since the disastrous interview Mr. Bamberley had given on the Petronella Page show, and the consequent closing down of the hydroponics plant. Everyone had been prepared to believe, as soon as that expert in Paris had published his verdict about the victims, that there was indeed poison in the Nutripon. He’d arrived—home—on Friday evening. So far there hadn’t been a single reference to this event.

  Petronella Page was notoriously merciless with any kind of fake. Hugh had been interested to learn that she agreed with his opinion: Mr. Bamberley was a phony on the grand scale.

  Correspondingly, behind Mr. Bamberley’s own chair, another portrait looked down, of his grandfather. It showed him—a burly man with his legs planted a yard apart, fists on his hips—committing rape. At least that was Hugh’s description. People who didn’t know the story might be content to recognize the oil gusher in the background.

  The fish was replaced by platters of roast meat, dishes of baked and boiled potatoes, carrots, cabbage, peas. Also there were sauce-boats of gravy and imported English horseradish cream. Silent as ever, Christy brought a pitcher of beer of a brand Hugh didn’t like, a weekly treat for the older boys, and another of lemonade for Maud and “the kids.”

  So far nothing of any consequence had been said.

  The remainder of the company at table consisted of Mr. Bamberley’s adopted sons, with omissions. Cyril, who as well as being the oldest was also the longest-established, was in Manila. He’d graduated with distinction from West Point and was now personal aide, at twenty-four, to one of the generals setting up what Prexy kept terming “the Pacific bastion”—in other words, a white alliance including Australia, New Zealand and what few Latin American countries were still right-wing dictatorships, designed to contain the pro-Chinese, neo-Marxist tidal wave surging around the planet.

  Hugh had met Cyril only once, just after his own recruitment to the family, and taken an instant loathing to him. But at the time he’d been too overwhelmed with his new prospects to say anything.

  The second omission was Jared. Jared, who was twenty-one, was in jail. One didn’t speak of him in Mr. Bamberley’s presence. He’d been convicted of helping to organize a pro-Tupamaro movement among the Chicanos of New Mexico. Hugh hadn’t met him; he was serving a five-year term.

  But he thought he’d probably like him a lot.

  And Noel, five, was in bed with a fever, but the rest were here. Down at Maud’s end there sat Ronald, who was sixteen and rather dull; Cornelius, dutiful and bright but the victim of occasional fits since his twelfth birthday —not epilepsy, something to do with enzymes that fouled up the interchange of energy between one nerve-cell and the next, kept under control by a special diet; then Norman, eight, with the facial tic, and Claude, ten, with the bad teeth that sometimes cracked edge to edge and fell out of his mouth. A fairly typical family in its way, despite having been assembled from so many different sources: those in their teens physically healthy, those younger, not. Hugh had a girl-friend in college with a younger brother who vomited back anything cooked in corn-oil.

  And still those mothers won’t admit how they’ve fucked up the world.

  “Hugh,” Mr. Bamberley said, “did you speak?”

  He hadn’t meant to. But he recalled the echo of his words. Not looking to his right, he reached for his beer.

  “I’m sorry, Jack. Did you ask me a question?”

  “Yes, I did!” Mr. Bamberley laid down his knife and fork next to massive slices of beef partly sectioned. “It was my distinct impression that you—ah—murmured a word I disapprove of.”

  Hugh drained his glass and leaned back with a sigh. “So what if I did?”

  Mr. Bamberley slowly turned pink all the way to his receding hairline. “What reason had you for employing such a word?”

  “The reason’s all around you,” Hugh snapped, and made a gesture that embraced the luxuriously furnished dining-room, the food piled on the table, the maid waiting in the corner like a store-window dummy.

  “Explain further!” Mr. Bamberley was about to choke with the effort of controlling his fury.

  “Okay, I will!” Suddenly Hugh could stand the pressure no longer. He leapt to his feet, his chair crashing over backwards. “Here you sit, stuffing your fat paunch with food from all over the stinking world, when you’ve poisoned thousands of poor black buggers in Africa—haven’t you? Are you out sharing their suffering helping them pick up the bits? The hell you are! You’re fighting tooth and nail the one thing that might help to get to the bottom of the disaster, screaming that a UN inquiry would ‘serve no useful purpose’—I saw that quote in the papers! Here you are at your beautiful table, gobbling and guzzling and saying grace for Chrissake, as though you expect God to thank you for all the people you’ve killed and driven out of their minds!”

  Mr. Bamberley extended toward the door a shaking hand from which his napkin depended like a crumpled flag.

  “Leave this room!” he roared. “Leave this house! And don’t come back until you’re willing to apologize!”

  “Exactly what I’d have expected you to say,” Hugh said in a dead voice. He felt suddenly very grown-up indeed, very mature, almost old. “Right square in the tradition: you kick people in the balls and expect them to do the apologizing. Because of you and people like you we sit here in the richest country in the world surrounded by sick kids—”

  “You have a foul mouth and a foul mind!”

  “You trying to tell me you adopted Norman because of his tic? Don’t give me that shit. I heard from Maud: you found out when the papers had been signed. Look at Claude’s teeth, like punk from a rotten stump! Look at Corny envying us because we can eat regular food! You—”

  But the tension overcame Corny at that point. It was always stress that brought on his attacks. He collapsed into his plate, face down, shattering it and spattering his special mush all over everywhere. As Maud and Christy rushed to attend him, Hugh delivered his parting shot.

  “You and your ancestors treated the world like a fucking great toilet bowl. You shat in it and boasted about the mess you’d made. And now it’s full and overfl
owing, and you’re fat and happy and black kids are going crazy to keep you rich. Goodbye!”

  He slammed the door as hard as he could when storming out, hoping the crash might shake down the portrait of Jacob Holmes Bamberley I.

  But the nail was too solidly imbedded in the wall.

  NOT MAKING HEADLINES

  ... guilty of using brominated vegetable oil, an illegal emulsifying agent. Despite defense submissions that no harm had been proved to anyone who ate the food in question, the company was fined one hundred dollars. Now the weather. SO2, ozone and lead alkyl counts all remain high ...

  A CALL TO ALMS

  Outside the gray stone house that Michael Advowson called home, on the gray road, a green official car was standing, the dirty rain smearing its smart paint. He ignored it. He ignored, equally, the man in the fawn raincoat who rose to meet him in the hallway—or would have done so, but that the stranger blocked the door to his surgery, and Advowson was carrying a bleeding child in his arms, crying at the top of her lungs.

  “Get out of my way!” he snapped, and shouldered the man bodily aside.

  “But, doctor, this is—” The voice of his housekeeper, Mrs. Byrne.

  “I know Mr. Clark! He was here last month! There, there, darling, it’ll stop hurting soon. You be calm!” Laying the little girl on his examination couch. At once the white disposable cover turned bright red around her foot.

  “Come inside and make yourself useful or get the hell out,” he added to the man in the raincoat. “Better make yourself useful. Wash your hands, quick!” Meantime he was seizing from the cabinets around the room bandages, powders, a syringe, scissors to cut away the shoe and sock.