The Sheep Look Up (14 page)

Philip told him.

“I see.” McNeil plucked his lower lip. “Well, I guess that’s not too surprising. The strain of G you have”—he always said “G,” not gonorrhea—“seems to be resistant.”

“Oh my God. You mean I’m not cured?”

“No, not yet. Says this report.” McNeil shut the file with a slap, memorializing another stage in the development of the disaster. “Still, there’s definitely no indication of syph, which is a comfort—sometimes those spirochetes can be right buggers. Say! Don’t look as if the world’s about to end!”

He chuckled, leaning back in his chair. “I’m afraid your problem’s getting commoner and commoner. You’re not a health-food addict, are you?”

“Uh ... Not seriously,” Philip muttered. “Though we buy from Puritan pretty often.” Wondering what on earth this had to do with VD.

“Thought not. You might have got off lighter if you had been. You see, what happens is, you pick up some sub-clinical infection—I don’t mean only social diseases, but anything from a whitlow to a sore throat—and at the same time you’re getting traces of antibiotic in your diet: what’s left in the chicken particularly, but also pork and even steak that you’ve been eating. And there’s just enough of the stuff to select for the resistant strains among the millions of organisms in your body, and when we come along and try to tackle them they thumb their noses at us. Are you with me?”

Philip gave a distracted nod, his mind on Denise and the kids.

“Still, not to worry,” McNeil resumed, opening the file again. “We’re ahead of the game so far, still got two or three tricks up our sleeves.”

“My wife,” Philip whispered.

“Judging by this, though,” McNeil said, not seeming to have heard, “we’d better do a bit of sifting first. Look, can you come back tomorrow? I’d like to check out your cultures. There’s a risk we might have to go over to injections. But we’ll get the better of the blighters, never fear.”

At which point he appeared to recall being interrupted.

“Oh, yes, your wife. She—uh—still doesn’t know?”

“No,” Philip confessed miserably. “I made sure she took the penicillin, of course, but I said it was hepatitis I’d caught. She did want to know why I hadn’t got medicine for the kids as well, but I managed to evade that. Now, though, Josie—my daughter—she was sick in the night, and ...”

“And, to be blunt, you don’t have a hope in hell of keeping the truth from her,” McNeil said briskly. “I did warn you it would cause—ah—rifts in the lute. Look, why don’t we cut our losses? I’ll send the diagnosis and lab reports to your own doctor, and—”

“Clayford,” Philip said raggedly.

“Hell.” McNeil bit his lip. “I was forgetting. Yes, that toffy-nosed devil. A good God-fearing type, isn’t he? Won’t touch a VD case, as though he were a parson refusing to visit someone in jail for witchcraft!” He shuddered elaborately.

“Well, in that case ... It’s probably unethical, but I don’t regard it as wrong to save people embarrassment. If you like, I'll take on you and your wife as private patients. I only do this clinic part-time, you know. Sort of on principle. Conditioning, I suppose. I trained in England.”

Philip nodded. He had noticed many English turns of phrase in McNeil’s speech, though his accent was purely American. “What brought you here, then?”

“Not the shortcomings of their state health service, as most people instantly assume.” McNeil chuckled. “Hell, it may be a mess, but half the doctors I’ve met over here—Clayford, for one—get offended if people fall ill out of office hours. Try refusing house calls in Britain and you get struck off the medical register ... No, my mother was born right here, and when my father died she decided to retire to her home town. So when I passed twenty-six I came to join her.”

Why—? Oh, of course. The draft limit.

McNeil slapped the desk and rose. “Think it over. I’d make it as easy on your wife as possible, of course. But I’m afraid I must insist on your bringing the matter into the open. Good afternoon.”

“Bad news,” a voice said at Philip’s elbow as he descended the stairs. The clinic was over a store selling sports equipment and kinky leather goods.

“What?” Philip glanced around. The speaker was the man who’d been in the waiting room.

“I said bad news. I could read it in the stoop of your shoulders.”

“It’s none of your fucking business,” Philip snapped.

“Well put. I’m feeling pretty low myself. Come and have a drink.”

“Ah, go to hell!”

“I’m there,” the stranger said, suddenly serious. “Aren’t you? Shit, I’m thirty-seven and I never caught a dose before, thought it was something you could laugh off nowadays, like a head cold.” He had one, by the sound of him; his n’s were more like d’s, as though he were holding his nose. “Turns out the stinking bug’s resistant. So far it’s been four months.”

“Four months!” Philip was appalled, envisaging how endless such a sentence would be for himself.

“Now they’re giving me six million units a day of some new miracle drug. In the ass. It hurts like fire, but at least it’s started to cure me. What about that drink?”

Philip hesitated.

“Name’s Alan Prosser,” the stranger said. “Prosser Enterprises. Plumbing equipment, sewage pipes, garbage-disposal systems, that kind of shit.”

“Christ.” Philip blinked at him. “We had your stuff put in at our last place. I remember. But I never met you.” He frowned. “Someone called—”

“Bud Burkhardt?”

“Yes! Your partner?”

“Ex-partner.” With a scowl. “The mother walked out on me. Went to Towerhill, manage the new branch of Puritan ... Did you say ‘our’ last place?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re married, hm? Then maybe I shouldn’t talk about my troubles!”

“You not?”

“Was.” Prosser’s face suddenly grew strained and lined, as though ten years had passed between words. He raised his left hand to display the palm. There was a round mark on it to match the scar on the back, like a brand.

“What happened?” Philip said uncertainly.

“Shot. The same slug that left this mark on me. We’d wandered into the fringes of a Trainite demonstration, and some trigger-happy National Guardsman ... Oh, shit, it’s ancient history. And luckily Belle couldn’t have kids. What about that drink?”

“Yes. Okay. Only one, though. It’s supposed to be—uh—bad for the condition.”

“Ah, shit. Not having it is far worse for the mind.”

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BROKENMINDED

After the terrible collective madness of Christmastide in Noshri, Lucy Ramage somehow managed to keep going for a while alongside those members of the original Globe Relief and UN teams who hadn’t been deported. It was as though the work of the preceding four months had been wiped out like chalk writing by a wet cloth. Indeed, things were worse than before. When she first arrived, people used to come out willingly from wherever they had found shelter—tumbledown shacks, smashed cars, wrecked buses, holes in the ground—and asked for food and first aid. Now they skulked and shied away, remained in hiding and stared at the world with mad distrustful faces, eyes wide and white-rimmed. To persuade someone to take food, you first had to swallow a mouthful yourself; to bandage a wound was often possible, but they wouldn’t allow you to apply ointment or administer oral drugs. They were all agreed on what had happened to them: they were victims of a terrifying magic.

Some, it seemed, had been driven totally insane. For the rest of their lives they would limp around moaning, or break into causeless tears, or scream until their throats were raw at the sight of a harmless insect.

There were insects in Noshri again now. During the war they had completely disappeared.

Directly after the worst time, Lucy had been interrogated by hostile government officials concerning the nature of the madness. Fretting to get back to the miserable people who needed her help, she condensed what she had to report into the briefest possible version and delivered it in dry emotionless tones.

“Characteristic symptoms? They included violent perspiration, facial tics, occasional spasms of the long muscles in the thighs and calves, and extremely marked pupillary dilation. Vomiting? That was reported in only a minority of cases. But everyone suffered acid diarrhea and occasionally the stools were mixed with fresh blood.

“How long to take effect? Typically, about one to three hours after the onset of the sweating and pupillary dilation, a sensation of floating ensued, and one saw the victims staring at their hands and feet unable to believe they any longer belonged to them. This stage was rapidly succeeded by one of hysterical terror, with visual and auditory hallucinations, and in the great majority of cases total loss of self-control. Outbursts of wild rage, often leading to random wrecking of the immediate surroundings and particularly to arson, and later to assault on anybody and anything that moved—especially crying children, who were frequently kicked and beaten to death by their own parents because their noise proved intolerable—lasted six to thirty-six hours. Most sufferers did not sleep for the longer period. If no other target offered itself their own bodies took the brunt and they gashed or battered themselves. I also saw many run to the river and jump in, crying they were dying of thirst. This probably connects with the extreme dehydration the diarrhea entailed.

“The content of the hallucinations? Remarkably uniform. Voices came first, especially those of parents, senior relatives, and—in the case of ex-soldiers—officers and NCO’s. Since the majority of these were dead the conviction that ghosts were walking followed logically. Many of those killed were mistaken for evil spirits. Because personal appearance is radically changed by the condition (e.g., the huge staring eyes, the awkward walk due to muscular cramps) close relatives often did not recognize one another and ran screaming even from a wife or husband.

“After-effects? Melancholia, acute hypnophobia—that’s fear of going to sleep because of the high incidence of nightmares—anxiety, unaccountable fits of violence ... A man was murdered the other day for no better reason than that he let his shadow fall on someone else’s foot.

“Treatment? Well, we’ve had some success with doctoring the water supply—you know we’re still selling drinking water from carts, and dumping half a pound of tranquilizers into every barrel seems to have helped, a little. But the tranquilizers are running short, so ...”

Shrug.

She, too, was afraid to sleep. She dreamed always of the little bloody bits of human flesh that had spattered her. Either she doped herself with amnhetamines, or—when they ceased to have any effect and her eyelids began to sting—she took enough barbiturates to drive her into coma, insulated against dreams. While she was awake she hardly ate, but wandered around coaxing people from hiding, washing gangrened wounds, helping to rig improvised shelters. At first the black soldiers now cleaning up the town were hostile; when they saw how meekly she worked, and how hard, they grew used to her and more than once when she found herself falling down with fatigue strong anonymous black arms carried her bodily home. Often the man was surprised at being called major when he was a mere private.

She learned about the charge that the relief food contained a hallucinogen from Bertil, who believed the suggestion that it had been infected with ergot or something like it; he said that had been responsible for outbreaks of medieval dancing mania. She was told about it again by the army officers investigating the calamity, who believed there had been poison deliberately added.

She herself had no views on the matter.

Reporters naturally came in swarms. Although the news value of the war had more or less died with the armistice, General Kaika was anxious that the whole world should see the extent of the continuing disaster, so he put government planes at the disposal of journalists and TV camera teams. He even relaxed his embargo on Americans for the sake of a team from ABS’s Paris office, provided they were led by a Frenchman. When they heard about Lucy they sensed an angle: beautiful blonde caught up in a night of horror. No one apparently knew exactly where she was, so they set off in search of her.

They came on her burrowing in the ruins of a house. She had uncovered a body the soldiers had overlooked, that of a child about ten years old. She was disinterring it with a pocket-knife.

When she realized the interviewer was an American she bared her teeth and attacked him. He had to have eight stitches in a gash that ran from his collarbone to his sternum.

They flew her, under sedation, to England, to a country mental hospital, where she awoke to discover green lawns, the first flowers of spring peering out under the overcast sky, cows grazing in a field the other side of a pleasant valley, and steel bars across an unopenable window.

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THE STRONG CAME FORTH

His haunted dreams had finally faded and Pete Goddard was sleeping okay again. His first wakening after the collapse, though, had been appalling: terror, paralysis, pain.

Except that he wasn’t paralyzed. They had merely put his legs into traction, cased the whole lower part of his trunk in tight plastic wraps,
stretched
him with weights hung from ceiling-mounted pulleys. As soon as he was alert enough to understand, they explained what they were doing to him, and why, and he very nearly couldn’t believe the why.

They said that all by himself he had held up three-quarters of a ton.