The Sheep Look Up Page 9

  “Well, there’s lots of us down by the ambulances.”

  “Us?”

  “Sure. We’re from the Trainite wat my dad used to run before he died. I’ll send someone up to help you—Harry, maybe. He’s big. What’s your name, so he’ll know who to come to?”

  “Uh ... I’m Pete. Pete Goddard.”

  “I’m Rick Jones. Okay, someone will be along in a minute!”

  “Hey!”

  But the kid had gone scrambling and leaping down the trenched mounds of snow. Pete reclaimed his shovel, alarmed. Only this morning at the wat he’d had to guard the occupants as they stood out in the cold while detectives searched for drugs. Having a Trainite partner him ...

  The hell with it. What mattered was to pull out any more poor bastards who might be buried under this load of white shit.

  It was okay. Harry wasn’t one of the people he’d met this morning. He wasn’t too much bigger than Pete, but he was fresher. He hardly said more than hello before he started shifting snow, and they concentrated on the job until they uncovered their first victim: dead, blue with cyanosis and cold. Stretcher-bearers came, and a young Air Force officer—they’d turned out the Academy, of course—took particulars of the ID in the man’s pocket. He was local. Pete had given him a parking ticket once. One of the stretcher-bearers had a transistor radio, and while it was in earshot it said something about Towerhill being declared a disaster zone.

  “First of many,” Harry muttered.

  “What?”

  “I said first of many. You don’t think this is the only avalanche they’re going to cause with their stinking SST’s, do you? The Swiss won’t let them overfly the country between October and May—said they’d shoot them down first. So did the Austrians.”

  Pete handed Harry his shovel. “Let’s dig,” he sighed.

  About ten minutes later it became clear what they’d got into at this spot: a whole collapsed room, if not a building. Uphill, a wall of rough stone had broken the worst impact of the avalanche, but it had shifted on its foundations and twisted into an irregular line of precariously poised fragments. Over that the roof-beams had folded, but not fallen, leaving a small vacant space in which—

  “Christ!” Harry said. “Alive!”

  Something moved feebly in darkness. White darkness. The snow had burst in through a window, fanned out on the floor.

  “Ah-yah-ahh!” The treble cry of a child.

  “Look out, you fucking idiot!” Pete roared as Harry made to drop his shovel and dive straight in under the arching timbers. He grabbed his arm.

  “What? That’s a kid! Get your hands off—!”

  “Look, look, look!” And Pete pointed to the huge trembling overhang of snow that had broken against the stone wall like a frozen wave. Because of their digging it loured above the space in which the child—children, he realized, hearing a second cry discord with the first—in which the children were trapped.

  “Ah ... Yeah.” Harry regained his self-possession and blinked down into the dark hollow. A bed, overset. A lot of snow. “See what you mean. We could bring that whole pile down on us. Got a flashlight?”

  “Loaned it to someone. Go get another. And lots of help. See, that beam?” Pete didn’t dare so much as touch it. Now it was exposed, the single crucial roof-strut that had spared the children looked like a match, and on the slanted broken roof that it supported lay God knew how many tons of snow and rock.

  “Sure! Be back right away!” Turning to run.

  “Hang on, kids,” Pete called into the cold dark. “We’ll get you out soon’s we can.”

  One of the half-seen shapes moved. Stood up. Shedding snow.

  Moving snow.

  Trying to climb to the light!

  “Oh, my God! Harry, HARRY! BE QUICK!”

  Crying. And the crying drowned by the noise of weight leaning on a fractured beam. The beam, the one that held back the incredible mass of snow. He saw it spray tiny white flakes, like dust, that danced in the glow of the distant emergency lights.

  Christ ... Jeannie, Jeannie, it could be a kid of ours down there—I don’t mean could, not at fifty bucks a day, but I mean it’s a kid, and we could have kids, and ...

  But those thoughts were spin-off, and had nothing to do with him moving. Shovel dropped. The beam yielding. Turning so his shoulders came under it, his numb hands felt for it. The weight, the incredible intolerable unthinkable weight. He looked down and saw his boots had been driven in over ankles in the packed snow.

  At least, though, he could still hear the crying.

  THE TINIEST TRACE

  “Did it go okay, Peg?” Mel Torrance called as she wended her way through the maze of desks, glass partitions, file cabinets. The paper was losing money. Most papers were losing money. Even Mel had only a cubbyhole for an office, whose door stood permanently open except when he was taking his pills. He was embarrassed about that for some reason.

  Ridiculous. Who do you know who doesn’t have to take pills of some kind nowadays? Which reminds me, I’m past due for mine.

  “Oh, fine,” Peg muttered. She’d been out to cover a sewer explosion. Someone had poured something he shouldn’t have down the drain, and it had reacted with something else. Big deal. It happened all the time. Today nobody had even been killed.

  “Did Rod get any good pictures?”

  “Said he’d have some for you in about two hours.”

  “He didn’t get Polaroids? Shit, of course not—the pol count is up today, isn’t it?” Mel sighed. Days you couldn’t get Polaroids were starting to outnumber those when you could; it was something in the air that affected the emulsion. “Well, a couple of hours should be okay ... Message for you, by the way. It’s on your desk.”

  “Later.”

  But the note said she should contact the city morgue, so she put the call in while rolling paper into her typewriter with her other hand, and after five wrong numbers—about par for the course—the phone said, “Stanway.”

  “Peg Mankiewicz.”

  “Oh, yes.” Stanway’s voice dropped a trifle. “Look, we finally had the definitive lab report on your friend Jones.”

  “Christ! You mean they’ve been on at him all this time?” Peg heard her voice ragged. Couldn’t they even leave his corpse alone? Weren’t they content with hurling insults at his memory? “This self-appointed prophet of a better world who turned out to be just another acid-head.” Quote/unquote.

  “Well, it’s a slow process looking for these very tiny traces of a drug,” Stanway said, missing the point. “Paper chromatography work. Long-column separation, even, sometimes.”

  “All right, what did they find?”

  “A hallucinogen in his system. Not LSD or psilocybin or any of the regular ones, but something with a similar molecular structure. I don’t really understand the report myself—I’m an anatomist, not a biochemist. But I thought you’d like to know right away.”

  Like! No, it was the thing in all the world she least wanted to hear. But there it was: evidence.

  “Any special reason why they went to all that trouble?”

  Stanway hesitated. He said at length, “Well, the fuzz insisted.”

  “The lousy mothers! They didn’t find drugs in his car!” Not strictly his, but rented. Trainites did their best not to contribute to pollution, and the entire community of sixty-some at the Denver wat owned one vehicle between them, a jeep. Apart from bicycles.

  Moreover they didn’t hold with drugs, not even pot, though they did tolerate beer and wine.

  She slid open a drawer in her desk, where she kept the file she’d compiled about Decimus’s death, and reread the list of things that had been found in the car—more or less what you would expect. A traveling-bag with a change of clothes, razor, toothbrush and so on, a folder of papers about chemicals in food, another concerned with the family business which had brought him to LA to see his sister Felice, and a sort of picnic basket. That fitted, too; he’d have brought his own food along, the good wh
olesome kind the wat community grew themselves.

  Stanway coughed in the phone. It started as a polite attention-catching noise; a few seconds, and it developed into a real cough, punctuated with gasps of, “Sorry!” When he recovered, he said, “Was there anything else?”

  “No.” Absently. “Thanks very much for letting me know.”

  Having hung up she sat for long minutes staring at nothing. Anger burned in her mind like a sullen flame. She was convinced—beyond the possibility of argument—Decimus must have been poisoned.

  But how? By whom? They’d backtracked on his route, discovered a couple of truck-drivers who’d noticed him asleep in the park outside a diner when they stopped for a snack, then found him awake when they came out again, shaving in the men’s room; also a gas station where he’d filled up—and that was that. No one else seemed to have seen or spoken to him on the way.

  And his sister, of course, knew nothing useful. She’d refused to be interviewed directly after his death, claiming with good grounds that since she hadn’t met her brother in years she hardly knew him, but then the makeup for their December 23rd issue had been half a column short and Peg had dashed off a moralizing Christmassy bit about Decimus which Mel reluctantly approved with only minor changes, and Felice had seen it and called up and thanked her. But they still hadn’t met, and it was clear from the way she spoke that she didn’t sympathize with her brother’s views.

  That food. Had it been analyzed? No, of course not. And it was mainly crumbs anyhow. Probably just thrown out ...

  Sudden decision. She reached for the phone again and this time by a minor miracle got through to Angel City first go. She asked for Felice.

  “I’m afraid she’s in conference right now. Shall I take a message?”

  Peg hesitated. “Yes! Yes, tell her Peg Mankiewicz called. Tell her that her brother was definitely poisoned.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand.” And a sneeze, hastily apologized for.

  “Oh, shit,” Peg said wearily. “Never mind.”

  She found her eyesight was blurred. Tears? No. Watering. And her forehead tight and starting to throb. Hell and damnation, another lousy bout of sinusitis.

  She hurried to the water-cooler to wash down her belated pill.

  AND IT GOES ON

  ... and Dr. Isaiah Williams, whose body was recovered from a ravine near San Pablo. Inquiries are being hampered by what an Army spokesman termed the obstinate attitude of the local people. “They won’t admit they know their left hands from their right,” he asserted. Here at home Senator Richard Howell (Rep., Col.) today launched a fierce attack on the quote chlorophyll addicts unquote who, he claims, are hamstringing American business, already staggering under the load of high unemployment and recession, by insisting that our manufacturers comply with regulations ignored by foreign competition. In Southern Italy rioting continues in many small towns formerly dependent on fishing. Meantime, dust storms in the Camargue ...

  EARTHMOVER

  “Hi, Fred!”

  “Hi!”

  Austin Train/Fred Smith continued up the stairs. It was incredibly noisy here—squalling kids, TV sound, radio, a record, someone practicing drums, and ahead on the top floor his neighbors the Blores quarreling again. Their apartment was like a bombed site. Either there would be murder done one day, or the eventual victor would inherit a mere heap of rubble.

  Which was full of lessons for today. But the hell with it. He was tired, and the cut on his leg which he’d sustained a couple of days ago had swollen up and begun to throb. It looked as though it might be infected.

  Pausing as he thrust his key into his own door, he noticed there was a new graffito on the landing, the Trainite slogan: YOU’RE KILLING ME.

  In purple lipstick. Very fashionable.

  He glanced around, not really worried as to whether someone had broken in during his absence and robbed him, apart from the inconvenience of having to buy replacements. This belonged to Fred Smith, not Austin Train. The store-closet and icebox were full of commonplace cheap foods (if any food could be called cheap nowadays): canned, frozen, freeze-dried, irradiated, precooked and even predigested. The walls were chipped and needed paint. The windows were mostly okay but one pane was blocked with cardboard. There were fleas the exterminator couldn’t kill and rats that scrabbled in the walls and mice who left droppings like a cocked snook and roaches that thrived on insecticide, even the illegal kinds. He wouldn’t touch those himself—that would have been carrying his “Fred Smith” role too far—but everyone else in the house knew where to score for DDT and dieldrin and so forth, and it hadn’t helped.

  He didn’t really see his surroundings, though. One could live this way, and he was proving it. It meant something to him to be here. It implied—

  Hope? Possibly. Suppose that great heretic St. Francis of Assisi had been put (as he, Austin Train, had been) in front of twenty-eight million viewers on the Petronella Page Show and told to define his reasons for behaving as he did. We are told that “the meek shall inherit the earth.” It follows that the meek are chosen of God. I shall try to be meek, not because I want the earth—you can keep it, after the way you’ve fucked it around it’s not worth having—but because I too should like to be chosen of God. QED.

  Besides, I like animals better than you bastards.

  Of all the vices human beings are capable of, Austin Train detested hypocrisy most. He hadn’t realized that until a matter of three years or so ago, following the period of notoriety which had begun a couple of years before with the publication of his Handbook for 3000 AD. Prior to that he had enjoyed moderate success; a group of his books had been reissued as matched paperbacks and attracted attention from an increasingly worried public, but it had all been low-key stuff. Suddenly, one might say overnight, he had become a celebrity, in demand for TV interviews, commissioned to write for popular journals, called in as consultant on government committees. And then, equally abruptly, stop.

  He had six hundred thousand dollars in the bank and lived in a slum tenement in the heart of a dying city.

  Back there—he had come to think of it as another world—lying and fakery were a way of life. Sponsoring the programs on which he appeared as Cassandra: a plastics company, daily pouring half a million gallons of hot and poisoned water into a river that served eleven cities before it reached the ocean. Printing the articles he wrote: a corporation whose paper demanded the felling of half a forest every month. Ruling the country which paraded him as a prime example of the benefits of free speech: madmen who had made a desert and misnamed it peace.

  It made him sick.

  Literally.

  He lay in the hospital for two months, shivering without cease, spat at people who came to wish him well, tore up cables from strangers saying they hoped he’d get better quickly, threw food on the floor because it was poisoned, caught nurses around the neck and lectured them, helplessly pinioned, on egg-bundle fetus, sulphur dioxide, lead alkyls, DDE. Not that they heard much of what he told them. They were screaming too loudly.

  When they released him, doped on tranquilizers, he went to live with the people who didn’t make a professional habit of omitting to let their left hands know. He settled in the dirtiest back streets of the city he’d been born in. He’d considered alternatives: Barcelona, by the open cesspool of the Mediterranean; the rabbit-warrens of Rome, almost permanently under martial law; Osaka, where they were marketing airlocks to be fitted in place of regular front doors. Still, he wanted to be able to talk to the people around him—so he came home. “I am a man,” he had said many times during his moment of fame. “I am as guilty as you, and you are as guilty as me. We can repent together, or we can die together; it must be our joint decision.”

  He hadn’t expected to leave behind, in that world he’d abandoned, such a surprising legacy: the Trainites, who had no formal organization, not even a newspaper, yet now and then manifested themselves—one might almost believe as the result of some telepathic trigger,
some upsurge of the collective unconscious—to put a brand on some company or enterprise that was endangering mankind. Obviously, he had not created them. They must have been there, waiting. Mainly they were the former radical students for whom it had become a matter of principle to say, “Yes, I’m a commie!” That habit had followed the Vietnam disaster, when the tons upon thousands of tons of herbicides, defoliants, riot gases, toxic agents, had finally broken the land down into desert. All of a sudden, in a single summer, dead plants, dead animals, dead rivers.

  Dead people.

  And when he popularized the term “commensalist” a little later, the reference was rapidly transferred. But didn’t stick. Instead the news media invented the name “Trainite,” and now it was universal.

  He was half pleased by the flattery this implied, half frightened for complex reasons of which he had cited one to Peg. He dreamed occasionally of meeting the men who had taken his name in place of their own, and would wake sweating and moaning, because that led to visions of endless millions of identical people, impossible to tell apart.

  Anyway, here he was in half the upper floor of a derelict building in downtown LA, formerly offices, converted to dwellings five years ago, never repaired or painted since. The people around him, though, didn’t lie except to protect their egos, and he found that tolerable. What he loathed was a deed such as he would no longer term a crime, but a sin. Unto the third and fourth generation, General Motors, you have visited your greed on the children. Unto the twentieth, AEC, you have twisted their limbs and closed their eyes. Unto the last dawn of man you have cursed us, O Father. Our Father. Our Father Which art in Washington, give us this day our daily calcium propionate, sodium diacetate monoglyceride, potassium bromate, calcium phosphate, monobasic chloramine T, aluminium potassium sulphate, sodium benzoate, butylated hydroxyanisole, mono-iso-propyl citrate, axer-ophthol and calciferol. Include with it a little flour and salt.