The Sheep Look Up Read online

Gingerly he touched a bruise at the corner of his jaw. About a week ago he’d been to a party, six blocks from his hotel, and he’d been incautious enough to walk home after midnight. Someone had jumped him with a blackjack. Luckily the bruise was the worst effect.

  Also he’d developed conjunctivitis two days after his arrival, and as a result was still wearing a piratical black patch over his left eye. Then he’d been warned to get rid of his beard, because the police didn’t like them, and a minor shaving cut—on the side opposite his bruise—had become infected, and he’d been assured it was because he’d been stupid enough to shave with regular tap-water. No one he’d met at the UN used anything but an electric shaver, and in fact the drugstore clerk from whom he’d bought his razor and shaving cream had looked puzzled and tried to insist on his buying a bactericidal after-shave lotion as well. But he’d thought the man was just trying to squeeze out a drop of extra profit.

  Now the cut had festered into a miniature boil, with an ugly white head on it. It was protected by a bandaid, but sooner or later he feared it would have to be lanced.

  Incredible. But he’d been told repeatedly that every stranger to New York suffered the same way. The natives, of course, were resistant, but anyone from more than say a hundred miles distant lacked the immunities the residents had acquired.

  And even the residents weren’t too happy... At one of the many parties around the diplomatic circuit which he’d been obliged to attend he’d met a girl in her middle twenties, pretty with dark hair and a good figure, very drunk although the party had only been under way for an hour. She was looking for an ear to bend, and out of politeness—or perhaps boredom—Michael lent her his. She was working at the UN as a secretary, because, she said, she’d wanted to do something to improve the world. And found it simply wasn’t possible. She claimed that she’d hoped to marry a man she knew from college, who turned her down when he learned she wanted to work for those stinking commie-front bastards; that he was so far from unique that she’d lost friend after friend until now her only social life was on this level, these endless formal cocktail parties where people of a dozen different nationalities misunderstood one another at the tops of their voices.

  “But we’re all stuck on this same ball of mud, aren’t we?” He heard her voice again in memory, nearly breaking into a sob. “And the only people who seem to care are the wrong ones, I mean the ones you’re not supposed to be friends with. I met this Uruguayan the other day, Fernando Arri—something, I forget. But did you hear what happened to him?”

  Michael shook his head.

  “He was going home to the place where all the Uruguayans live—they’re not allowed off Manhattan, you know, and they have to live in this block near the UN Plaza—and it was raining, and four men who’d been pretending to shelter under an awning jumped him. Kicked him in the balls and knocked out four of his teeth.”

  “Good lord,” Michael said. “Did the police—?”

  “Police!” A hard brittle laugh, like a scream. “They were the police! They found the sole-marks of a police boot on his face!”

  At which point she sobered, almost like magic, because it was time for the party to break up, and said, “Thank you for listening to my drunken babbling. Unless I get someone to take me seriously now and then I think it must really all be a dream. Can I buy you dinner? You deserve it.”

  And, when he hesitated, she added, “I know a marvelous restaurant where they still have real food.”

  Which was the bait he couldn’t resist. Everything he’d eaten here tasted to him of plastic and chewed paper.

  Over the meal—which was good, despite his astonished discovery that what he thought of as everyday basics at home, such as ham and herring, appeared here in the “gourmet” section of the menu and were charged extra—she talked calmly and reasonably of fearful things. About her elder sister who had borne two children in New York, and they were both sub-normal: not moronic, just slow, the older beginning to read at last after his ninth birthday; about flowers she had tried to grow in a window-box at her apartment, that wilted and dropped their leaves after a week; about the cost of hospitalization insurance; about the panhandler she had found wheezing against a wall, begging a quarter for oxygen; about the rain that melted stockings and panty-hose into holes. Michael had experienced New York rain. It had ruined one of his uniforms. But at least he was able to revert to mufti now.

  And then, when he escorted her home—by taxi, of course—she said on the threshold, “I’d like to ask you up and make love. But it’ll have to be next time. I have another week to go before it’s safe.”

  He’d thought: rhythm method? But she’d disabused him.

  The commonest disease after measles ...

  “Captain Advowson!”

  He rose and went through the door smilingly held for him.

  Bamberley’s office was like every other room he had been in since arriving here: armored against exterior reality. Windows that must not be opened. Air processed and scented. Pictures, originals, expensive but bad. Much modern gadgetry. A built-in bar with its door ajar. And not one book.

  How long, Michael wondered, before he went mad for lack of an Atlantic breeze blowing across the butter-yellow miles of flowering furze?

  Mr. Bamberley, affably extending his hand, was not alone. With him was the thin man Gerry Thorne whom Michael had met at the UN inquiry which he’d attended on behalf of Globe Relief, and Moses Greenbriar, the trust’s senior treasurer. Thorne appeared distracted. Dutifully Michael shook hands, refused a cigar, accepted a drop of Irish whiskey from a full bottle probably specially obtained in his honor.

  “Well, now!” The preliminaries over, Mr. Bamberley didn’t seem quite in control of the situation, and looked beseechingly at Greenbriar, who coughed discreetly. Which was a mistake, because a second later he coughed for real, and wheezed, and had to stifle it with a tissue and sniff some kind of a cure from a white plastic tube. Michael waited. Eventually he recovered and apologized.

  “Well, captain, I imagine you can guess why we’ve asked you to spare us a little of your valuable time. We’re in an impossible position. Our Colorado plant is shut down, as you know, the staff has had to be laid off—”

  “And starving people are being deprived of what could make the difference between life and death!” Mr. Bamberley burst out.

  “I’m sorry to have to say this,” Michael sighed. “But at Noshri I saw people who would literally be better off dead.”

  There was an awkward pause.

  “Perhaps,” Greenbriar said at length. “But the fact stands: Bamberley relief foods have saved thousands, one might even say millions, of lives on previous occasions, and the sabotaging of one consignment must not be allowed to put a full stop to our work. And if these damned Tupas manage to make their accusations stick, regardless of what the official inquiry reports, that’s what will happen.”

  “You have heard what they’re saying, have you?” Mr. Bamberley said. “Lies, of course—damnable lies! They’ll stick at nothing to malign this country.”

  Outside the UN building itself, this was the first time Michael had heard reference here to the charge that relief food sent to Honduras had been poisoned the same way as that in Noshri. The Uruguayans had made a formal deposition to the inquiry and demanded that a neutral team of doctors be sent to investigate, but no action had been taken. He’d watched for comment on TV or in the few surviving New York newspapers, expecting at least an indignant rebuttal, but to his amazement the matter was being ignored. He’d been told at home, a year or so ago, by someone returned from visiting an American cousin, that the news media were complying with the president’s celebrated dictum, “If the papers know what’s good for them they’ll print what’s good for America!” He hadn’t believed it. He was still trying not to. But it was getting harder by the day.

  “According to what I learned at the inquiry,” he ventured, “the Nutripon sent to Honduras was manufactured and dispatched at just about the same time
as the African supplies—”

  “Yes, and no doubt the Tupas’ next step,” Greenbriar broke in, “will be to fake up some poisoned Nutripon and claim it was found at San Pablo! But if this were true, why did we hear nothing about it until last month? Why haven’t Honduran government doctors reported mass psychosis similar to that at Noshri? Why did the forensic people give the stored Nutripon a clean bill of health, although our stocks went right back to the end of the Christmas-New Year holiday and must have been the very next batch off the production line?”

  “Well, of course that’s what the inquiry’s trying to find out,” Michael said. “But one assumes that either someone got at your vats and deliberately added the drug—and you insist that’s impossible—or some natural ergot-like fungus contaminated your regular yeasts.”

  “That seems to be the only acceptable explanation,” Mr. Bamberley said with a shrug. “And it’s not something we can be blamed for. We can only take steps to prevent a recurrence, and of course offer compensation for what it’s worth.”

  “And in pursuit of that goal,” Greenbriar said, “we’re having the air-purifying system of the plant redesigned by a firm specializing in germ-free operation theaters. I think you’ll concede they must work to pretty demanding standards?”

  “One would hope so,” Michael said dryly. “But standards are only as good as the people who comply with them. I once saw a small boy given gangrene in a modern hospital because a surgeon who should have known better lifted a dressing to inspect an incision without putting on a mask. He breathed resistant staph all over the wound. The boy died.”

  There was another pause, this time a very uncomfortable one. During it, Michael decided he didn’t much like Moses Greenbriar. He had already concluded he didn’t like Gerry Thorne.

  Why not? He was getting a glimmering of the reason. It had something to do with the fact that these incredibly rich people had grown fat on charitable undertakings. For Michael—raised as a Catholic, although no longer a believer —the image they evoked was that of the Borgia popes.

  “Naturally we’d go to any length to avoid that kind of oversight,” Greenbriar said at last. “But the main point is this, captain. Clearly, before we can put the plant back into operation, we shall need to have our new arrangements approved by some disinterested party. We can hardly ask for a UN team, as such—as you know, any hint of ‘UN meddling’ in the domestic affairs of this country provokes a tremendous outcry. On the other hand there’s a great traditional sympathy, one might almost say a great love, for Ireland, so it occurred to us that we should invite you to—”

  He got that far, when there was a sudden vast thump, as though the building had been kicked by a passing giant a thousand feet tall, and the not-supposed-to-be-opened windows fell in big brilliant splinters and the ceiling slammed down on them and the stomach-turning street air of New York came rolling in.

  Minutes before, a car painted with a skull and crossbones had been illegally parked in front of the building, on 42nd Street. The driver—masked, of course, like everyone on the sidewalks—jumped out and ran toward a nearby drugstore. A patrolman across the street noticed, and thought little of it; Trainites were forever drawing skull-and-crossbones signs on cars, and not everyone could spare the time or money to clean them off straight away. Besides, if the guy had run into a drugstore he was likely in need of urgent medicine.

  So he just made a mental note to tell him off when he came back.

  Only he didn’t come back. He continued out the other door of the drugstore and doubled into the bowels of Grand Central Station, and was well out of reach when the fuse in the back of the car reached what they later estimated to be over fifty sticks of dynamite.

  BLEST ARE THE PURE IN BOWEL

  It turned out that Doug McNeil had actually been to Japan. Denise was gossiping in his office after he’d treated Josie for a minor bout of worms—probably picked up off a dog, and how could you stop a kid fondling a puppy or a kitten?—and he happened to mention that he’d attended a medical conference in Tokyo.

  So naturally when the question came up of how to entertain this Mr. Hideki Katsamura who was in the States letting the franchises for the new water-purifier, they consulted him. Katsamura was making a grand tour, starting in California—where the franchise was obviously going to Roland Bamberley and thank goodness he’d confined himself to bidding for a single state because no one else stood a chance—and continuing via Texas and the Atlantic seaboard to New York and New England, and finally doubling back to Chicago and Denver. Afraid of being outdone because a big Chicago-based corporation was bidding for exclusive rights covering six states, Alan had instantly let his reflexes be triggered: the Denver Hilton, a restaurant in Larimer Square, the best nightclub in town, where can I get a girl because of geishas—?

  But Doug said hold it just a moment: not the Hilton but the Brown Palace, and the old part at that provided they’ve fixed the earthquake damage. These Japanese are nuts about other countries’ traditions. And don’t take him to a restaurant, either; lots of Japanese are envious of the freedom with which Europeans and Americans invite guests into their own homes, instead of entertaining them in restaurants which is Japanese SOP.

  Plainly, though, Alan couldn’t invite the guy for dinner in his small bachelor pad, and at first it looked as though Philip couldn’t either because Denise went straight into a tizzy. She’d never minded being hostess to Philip’s superiors from Angel City, but a Japanese was a different matter. She kept talking about not knowing how to make tempura or sukiyaki.

  “Come off it!” Doug chided her. “If you went to Tokyo would you want to be greeted with hamburgers and French fries? I admit you probably would, because even when I was there four years ago they’d had to give up most of their traditional dishes like raw fish. I tried some that was supposed to be okay, and it tasted great, but I went down with dysentery the next day—did I have cramps! But anyway that’s not the point. You fix steaks, with lots of fried onions, and maybe start with some New Zealand clam chowder, which is pretty much like the New England stuff and a sight safer, and get lots of salad from Puritan, and ...”

  “It’s going to cost the earth!” Denise worried, making up her shopping list.

  “It’s on the firm,” Alan said. “Just get the stuff!”

  So of course because he’d been such a help they invited Doug, and his pretty English wife Angela, and inevitably, his mother, a spry, bright-eyed woman of sixty-five called Millicent by everybody including her son and daughter-in-law with whom she appeared to have a marvelous relationship. And Alan, of course, and the man from Colorado Chemical who was sponsoring the Prosser Enterprises bid, Sandy Bollinger with his wife Mabel, and to make up the even number because Katsamura was traveling alone without a secretary Alan’s right-hand woman, Dorothy Black, thirty-five, plain, single, but a good talker with a fund of jokes.

  All planes of course were always late, but they hadn’t expected Katsamura’s to be quite so far behind schedule. When Philip, tired by an hour’s waiting at the airport, made inquiries, he learned that among the baggage being loaded at Chicago O’Hare had been a case marked with a skull and crossbones, which naturally they opened. When it proved to contain nothing but a printed data sheet repeating Professor Quarrey’s findings on high-altitude exhaust residues they concluded it must be meant to distract attention from something else, maybe a bomb. So they searched everything and everybody and instead of arriving at 1650 Mr. Katsamura landed at 1912.

  During the wait Alan had said, “By the way, how are you?”

  “Doug says another week at most.”

  “Isn’t it hell, sweating out the time? This is my longest stretch without since I was sixteen.”

  At least it was a relief to be able to talk casually about it. With it so common, it was absurd to pretend it didn’t exist.

  The flight number went up on the arrivals board and they headed for the barrier, looking. Philip was vaguely expecting someone small and yellow w
ith horn-rimmed glasses and a habit of continual stooping, half-formed bows. But there wasn’t anyone like that. There was only a man of about forty, wearing a black coat, roughly as tall as himself, slightly sallow and with the skin around his eyes drawn tight on the bone.

  “Mr. Katsamura?” Alan said, offering his hand.

  “Yes, sir!” said Mr. Katsamura, who had learned a great deal very quickly during his so far two and a half weeks in the States, chiefly concerning proper social conduct and right use of jargon—correction, slang. He shook, smiled, was introduced to Philip too, and apologized for making them wait yet one moment longer.

  It was face-losing. But utterly unavoidable. Had been also on the plane. Troublesome and problematic. Moreover, of excessive long-standing: since the first day of the tour! Medicine bought in Texas was used up and had not cured the distressing malfunction. It would be constructive to investigate a doctor here.

  Behind him the door swung to which was marked MEN.

  Nervous in a gown bought specially for the occasion and a brand-new wig, Denise served cocktails and appetizers when they brought him on from the hotel where he’d dumped his bags—and made further use of excellent American apparatus. Her nervousness faded within minutes. He talked freely and fluently with everyone: to Doug about their respective reactions to the foreignness of each other’s countries; to Sandy Bollinger about the impact of the European depression on international finance; to Denise about the ailments of children because his own were continually suffering minor allergies, fevers, similar disorders. Behind his back Millicent caught Philip’s eye and ringed her thumb and forefinger: okay! Philip grinned back, thinking what a stroke of luck it had been to meet Doug.

  And Katsamura faded to the bathroom again.

  “Something’s wrong with that guy,” Alan said in a low tone. “He went at the airport too, and the hotel.”