The Sheep Look Up Page 20

  “Christ almighty,” Philip said.

  “What are you worrying about?” Doug said sourly. “You and Alan got your water-purifier franchise, didn’t you?”

  Philip scowled. “That’s a sick joke if ever I heard one. Still, I guess you’re right—look on the bright side. And it’s nice to be one of the few who have a bright side to look on ... By the way, Pete!”

  “Yes?”

  “Didn’t Alan say he was going to recommend you to Doug?”

  “You’re a friend of Alan’s too?” Doug put in.

  “Sure.” Pete nodded. “Going to work for him.”

  “Oh, he’s been just great!” Jeannie exclaimed. “Found us an apartment, and everything. That’s why we came to Denver today, to look it over, and it’s fine.”

  “Not like having a house,” Pete said. “But.” He contrived a sketch for a shrug despite his back-brace.

  Jeannie frowned at him. After a moment she added, “One thing I didn’t ask, though. Mrs. Mason—”

  “Denise, please!”

  “Uh—sure, Denise. Do you have much trouble with rats?”

  “No, why?”

  “They’re bad right now in Towerhill. I been bitten myself. And the other day ...” Her voice trailed away.

  “What?” Philip prompted.

  “They killed a baby,” Pete grunted. “Just chewed it to death.”

  There was a pause. At length Doug drained his glass and rose. “Well, I don’t know of any plague of rats in Denver,” he said. “But I guess you may have a little trouble with fleas and lice. Around half the houses I go to on my rounds have them now. Resistant, of course.”

  “Even to the—uh—strong ones?” Philip said, using the common euphemism for “banned.”

  “Oh, especially those,” Doug said, smiling without humor. “These are the survivors. They’ve taken the worst we could offer and come back jeering. The only thing they care about now is a direct hit with a brick, and I’m not too sure about that ... Well, thanks for the drink. I’d better be on my way.”

  He was amused to notice, as he took his leave, that all of them were trying not to scratch themselves.

  But he didn’t find it so funny when a psychosomatic itch overtook him too in the elevator going down.

  SIDE EFFECTS

  ... officially attributed to the debilitating effects of enteritis among troops newly arrived from this country. This marks the greatest single territorial gain for the Tupamaros since the uprising began. No comment on the battle was available from the president this morning owing to his indisposition. The epidemic continues to gather momentum in all states except Alaska and Hawaii, and many major corporations are working with a skeleton staff. Public services have been heavily hit, especially garbagemen and sewage workers. Bus and subway schedules in New York have been cut back, on certain routes to as few as one per hour, while the chief of police in New Orleans has forecast an unprecedented crime-wave owing to the sickness of more than half his men. Trainite demonstrations this morning...

  OVERCAST

  “These potatoes look as limp as I feel,” said Peg, attempting a joke as she set down the bucket of compost she’d brought to hoe in among the sickly plants. It was her first day back at work after her recent bout of enteritis, and she was still weak and a trifle lightheaded, but she couldn’t stand any more sitting around.

  “Yes, I guess what they mainly need is some sun,” Zena said absently. Rolling up her sleeves, she frowned at the high faint gray cloud that masked the entire sky.

  Peg heard the words and experienced a sudden moment of enlightenment: a sort of rapid astral projection. She seemed, for a flash, to be looking down at herself, not only seeing herself in space but in time also.

  It was over, and she was staring at the by now familiar mountains that surrounded the wat, and the curious irregular roofs of the buildings which themselves were like mountains, dome next to pyramid next to cube. One of the community’s architects had studied in England under Albarn.

  “Peg, honey, you all right?” Zena demanded.

  “Oh, sure,” Peg insisted. She had swayed a little without realizing.

  “Well, don’t you overdo it, hear? Take as much rest as you need.”

  “Yes, of course,” Peg muttered, and picked up her hoe and began to do as she’d been shown: make a little pit next to each of the sickly plants, scoop in an ounce of compost, cover it over. Later they’d water the fertilizer in. Before she had finished the first hole, however, she heard a sharp exclamation from Zena and glanced around to discover—with a tremor of nausea—that she was holding up something thin and wriggly.

  “Hey, look at this!” she cried.

  Peg complied, reluctantly, and after a moment could think of nothing better to say than, “It’s an odd color for a worm. Aren’t they usually pink?” This thing was a livid color, somewhat bluish, as though it were engorged with venous blood.

  “Yes,” Zena muttered. “I wonder if it’s been affected by some sort of poison, same as the potatoes, or if ...” One-handed, she used her hoe to expose the roots of the nearest plant.

  “Well, there’s our answer,” she said grimly. The tubers, which by now should have been a fair size, were only an inch or two in diameter and riddled with holes. And each hole was surrounded by a patch of blackish rot.

  “If that’s what’s ruining this whole field ...” Zena turned slowly, surveying the acreage they’d put down to potatoes last fall. “We been taking it for granted it was—well, something in the rain, or the ground. It usually is.”

  Yes. It usually is.

  And then, staring at the wriggling thing, Peg was struck by a horrible suspicion.

  “Zena! That—Oh, no. They were a different color.”

  “What?”

  “That gallon of worms Felice brought. I thought for a moment ...” Peg shook her head. “But we looked at them in the store, and they were pink.”

  “And they came from Plant Fertility,” Zena said. “We’ve had their insects before. Got our bees from them, in fact.” There were a dozen hives around the wat. “So ... Well, we sure as hell don’t have enough garlic juice to treat an area this size. So I guess all we can do is call the State Agriculture Board and find out if there’s something we can plant between the rows to attract the little buggers. Come on, let’s go back inside. No future in this.”

  “Zena!” Peg said abruptly.

  “Yes?”

  “I think I’m going to move on.” How to explain that fit of insight a moment ago? She’d viewed herself as it were in the role of a passenger on the stream of time. She’d been content for weeks to let the wat insulate her, because life here was so undemanding and harmonious. Meanwhile, though, Out There, bad things were happening. Like the bad thing which had drawn her here. Like death and destruction. Like poison in the rain which killed your crops.

  “I was expecting that,” Zena said. “It isn’t your kind of life, is it? You need competition, and we don’t have it here.”

  “No, not exactly.” Peg hunted for the right words, leaning on her hoe. “More—more making a mark. More wanting to do one thing to change the course of the world, instead of preparing to survive while the world does its worst.”

  “That was why you became a reporter, I guess.”

  “I guess so.” Peg pulled a face. She was more relaxed here, more able to reveal her feelings in her expression or with her body. The wat made its own herb wines, to traditional European recipes, and sold them not only to summer tourists but by mail, and the other night there had been a party to try out an especially successful brew. She’d danced for hours and felt great—just before she went down with enteritis. And no man had plagued her to get in the sack with him, except that poor disorganized boy Hugh whom you couldn’t really count as a man yet, and perhaps because of that she’d recently found herself wondering whether she might not try it again and enjoy it this time. On the few previous occasions she’d been as locked up as a bank vault.

  That
was the point at which young Rick turned up, and they showed him the wriggling insect and he took authoritative charge of it, promising to compare it with all the pictures of pests he could find in the library. On impulse, she added, “Rick, I’m thinking of moving on.”

  “Go back to work on a paper?” he asked absently, examining the insect with concentration.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Ah-hah. Come back and see us often, won’t you?” He folded a handkerchief carefully around the creature and made off. A moment before going out of sight, he called back, “And see if you can find out how my dad was poisoned, please!”

  It was like being doused in ice water. She stood frozen for long seconds before she was able to say, “I didn’t tell him Decimus was poisoned, Zena!”

  “Of course not.”

  “Though ...” She had to swallow. “Though I’m certain he must have been.”

  “I think so, too,” Zena said. “But we all are.”

  That snapped together in Peg’s mind with lack of sunlight and rain that didn’t nourish plants but killed them, and all of a sudden she let fall her hoe and was crying with her face in her palms. Part of her was standing back in amazement and thinking: Peg Mankiewicz crying? It can’t be true!

  But it was a catharsis and a cleansing.

  “I can’t stand it!” she said after a while, feeling Zena’s arm comforting around her shoulders. She blinked her tears away and looked at the dying potatoes: stock selected on the assumption that every plant would be doused with artificial fertilizers, systemic insecticides, plastic leaf-sprays to minimize water loss, and the hell with how they tasted so long as they looked good and weighed heavy. Cast back on the resources of nature, they wilted because the resources had been stolen.

  “What kind of future do we have, Zena? A few thousand of us living underground in air-conditioned caves, fed from hydroponics plants like Bamberley’s? While the rest of our descendants grub around on the poisoned surface, their kids sickly and crippled, worse off than Bushmen after centuries of proud civilization?”

  She felt Zena wince. The younger of her adopted daughters suffered from allergies, and half the time went around wheezing and choking and gasping.

  “We’ve got to make them listen!” Peg declared. “Isn’t that the message of all Austin’s books? You can’t blame the people who can’t hear the warnings; you have to blame the ones who can, and who ignore them. I have one talent, and that’s for stringing words together. Austin’s vanished, Decimus is dead, but someone’s got to go on shouting!”

  On the point of striding away, she checked. “Give the kids my love,” she said. And added, to her own surprise, in a husky whisper, “And remember I love you too, won’t you?”

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  THE DOG DAYS

  Christ! Flies!

  Austin Train stopped dead in his tracks, listening to the buzz of wings around the heaped-up garbage. There hadn’t been a clearance here in five weeks. The epidemic meant the removal gangs were working at under half strength, and there had been an order from high up that the prosperous areas should get the benefit before the poor ones.

  “Hell, they chuck their trash straight out the window anyway,” someone had said.

  And it looked as though he’d been right. Every can in sight along the narrow alley, which angled back between two buildings four and five stories high, was overflowing, and huge sodden cartons bulged and leaked beside them and on top of that mess was yet one more layer which certainly must have been tossed from windows. The lot stank.

  But there were flies. Incredible. Last summer down in LA he hadn’t seen one, that he could remember.

  His back ached and his feet were sore and that condition on his scalp had killed off most of his hair and the whole of his head itched abominably, but all of a sudden he was cheerful, and he was whistling when he forced the nose of his trolley under the first of the cans to be wheeled to the truck waiting on the main street.

  “Hey! Hey, mister!”

  A cry from overhead. A small swarthy boy peering from a window on the third floor, most likely a Chicano kid. He waved.

  “Wait a minute! Please don’t go ’way!”

  The kid vanished. Now what was all that about? He shrugged and went on trying to load up the can. It was tricky with so much loose muck in the way. In the end he had to use his boots to expose its base.

  A door to the alley swung open and here was the kid, in a torn shirt and faded jeans, a grimy bandage wrapped around his right arm. His eyes were swollen as though from long weeping.

  “Mister, would you take away my dog, please? He—he died.”

  Oh.

  Austin sighed and brushed his hands on the side of his pants. “He upstairs? Too heavy to carry down with your bad arm?”

  “No, he’s right around the corner in the alley. Not allowed to keep him in the apartment,” the boy said, and snuffled a little. “I wanted to take him and—well, bury him properly. But mom said not.”

  “Your mom’s quite right,” Austin approved. Right here in the dense-packed city center you didn’t bury carcasses, though the odd dog or cat rotting in the ground wouldn’t be half the health hazard of this uncleared garbage. “Okay, let’s see him.”

  He followed the kid around the angle of the alley, and there was a kind of kennel nailed together out of scrap wood and plastic. The dog’s muzzle protruded over the lip of the entrance. Austin hunkered down to look at the body, and whistled.

  “Say! He was a handsome beast, wasn’t he?”

  The kid sighed. “Yeah. I called him Rey. Mom said that was ‘king’ in Spanish. He was half German shepherd and half chow ... Only he got in this fight, see? And where he was bitten it went all kind of rotten.” He pointed.

  Austin saw, on the side of the dog’s neck, an infected wound. Must have hurt like hell.

  “We did everything we could for him. Didn’t help. It hurt so much he even bit me.” Waving the bandaged arm. “Last night he was howling and howling, you could hear him even with the windows shut. So in the end Mom had to take sleeping pills, and said to give him one as well. Wish I hadn’t! But the neighbors were kinda angry for the noise ...” An empty shrug.

  Austin nodded, estimating the weight of the beast. Not under seventy pounds, maybe eighty. A load. How could a family this poor feed that big an extra mouth? Well, better drag him out. He reached for purchase, and his hand brushed something dangling from the underside of the kennel’s roof. What the—?

  Oh no!

  He unhooked the thing from its nail and drew it out. A fly-killing strip. Spanish brand name. No country of origin, of course.

  “Where did you get this?” he demanded.

  “Mom bought a box. Flies got so bad when the garbagemen stopped coming. And they were crawling all over Rey’s sores, so I put that up.”

  “Your mom got more of these in the apartment?”

  “Why, sure. In the kitchen, the bedroom, all over. They work fine.”

  “You go straight up and tell her she must take them down. They’re dangerous.”

  “Well...” Biting his lip. “Well, okay, I’ll tell her you said so. When she wakes up.”

  “What?”

  “She ain’t up yet. Heard her snoring when I got up. And she hates for me to disturb her.”

  Austin clenched his fists. “What kind of sleeping pills does she take—barbiturates, aren’t they?”

  “I don’t know!” There was fear and astonishment in the boy’s eyes. “Just pills, I guess!”

  Stupid to have asked. He knew alread
y that they had to be. “Here, take me up to your apartment, quick!”

  “Smith!” A roar from the gang-boss, storming up the alley. “What the hell are you playing at? Hey, where do you think you’re going?”

  Austin waved the fly-strip under his nose. “There’s a woman sick upstairs! Taken barbiturates in a room with the windows shut and one of these hanging up! Know what they put in these stinking things? Dichlorvos! It’s a cholinesterase antagonist! Mix that with barbiturates and—”

  “What’s all this crazy doubletalk about?” the gang-boss snapped.

  “It’s about what killed that dog! Come on, hurry!”

  They saved her life. But of course reporters wanted to talk to this unexpectedly well-informed garbage-man, so he had to move on again before they got the chance.

  A PLAN TO MAP THE PLANET

  As yet they had undertaken only makeshift repairs to the façade of the Bamberley Trust building. The broken windows had been covered, of course—you couldn’t let street air leak in—but the store at ground level had been boarded up. Shortage of labor, Tom Grey deduced.

  “Looks like it’s been hit by an earthquake!” said his cab-driver cheerfully.

  “Well, not really,” Grey contradicted. “An earthquake produces a highly characteristic type of damage, readily distinguishable from the effect of a bomb.” But he was extremely late for his appointment with Moses Greenbriar, so he was disinclined to pursue the point.

  Besides, out here on the street it was most depressing. Garbage was piled high by the curb and against the walls of the buildings. Moreover, the air was unbelievably clammy, from air-conditioning systems no doubt—and people at bus-stops were coughing and wiping their streaming eyes because of the fumes. On the way from the airport he’d seen a fight break out at one stop, between two men in working overalls who—astonishingly—were belaboring each other with umbrellas.

  His cab-driver had volunteered the information that this bus-route had been particularly hard hit by the enteritis outbreak, and those people might have been waiting in the open for more than an hour, which was bad for the temper. He’d asked about the umbrellas, and the man had chuckled.