The Sheep Look Up (30 page)

On each envelope was printed: A FREE GIFT FOR YOU ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, COURTESY OF THE “BE A BETTER AMERICAN LEAGUE.” Inside there was a handsome print, in copperplate engraving style, showing a tall man at a table with several companions handing pieces of cloth to a group of nearly naked Indians of both sexes.

Underneath was the caption:
First in a Series Commemorating Traditional American Values. The Governor of Massachusetts Distributes Smallpox-Infected Blankets to the Indians.

OUT IN THE OPEN, SHUT UP

It was kind of a fraught scene around the Bay right now—there was this big drive on to catch dodgers. Anyone out on the street (though who’d want to be, when the wind was blowing off the miles-wide garbage pile that blocked the Bay?) who was young and male or a reasonable facsimile thereof, was apt to be dragged into a squad car and left to cool in a cell until he produced a discharge certificate or a valid excuse for not serving. Everyone went around sweating and wishing they’d made it to Canada, or to Mexico before that crazy spic mounted his fire-balloon raids on San Diego. Following that the border had become tighter than a khathead’s asshole.

Must have something to do with Honduras, they figured, though there hadn’t been much news from down there since the Tupas took Tegucigalpa and drove the legal government to San Pedro Sula. The Pentagon was doing the tar-baby bit.

It eased the problem when Hugh and Carl, together with their friends—or rather Kitty’s—Chuck and Tab got in a fight one night with a pair of ex-Marines and acquired their discharge certificates after knocking them out. The man they were still calling Ossie even though they had long ago realized he wasn’t the original Austin Train knew where he could get them copied and altered. So now they all had documents to prove they’d done their stint ... at least to the local pigs. Trying them on at a state border post would have been dicey, which was why they hadn’t headed inland.

Train-as-was hadn’t mentioned his real name, but they had discussed the idea of his giving up the alias. He was disgusted with his former idol. Why in hell, he kept asking, didn’t the mother come out of hiding and assume leadership of the revolutionary forces awaiting centralized command? It was a fair question. This summer the nation was aboil. People drifted in from out of state occasionally, and they all told the same story, though you wouldn’t have known the truth from the regular news. You couldn’t walk the streets of any major city without seeing the skull and crossbones. People had taken to painting signs on their own front doors; they were being marketed as skin decals like the one Ossie had been wearing when Hugh and Carl met him, and illuminated plastic models were offered to hang on gateposts. The whole agricultural section of the country was seething because of this pest that was killing crops, and that was new—normally the rural communities were blind-loyal. Moreover, the acts of sabotage tabulated in the underground papers came from literally every state, from sugar in a gas tank to caltraps on a freeway.

Also bombs—though they weren’t in the Trainite tradition, strictly speaking.

But for Ossie’s fair question Carl had a fair answer, and it sounded only too likely to be true.

“My guess is the guy’s been liquidated. Making too much trouble for the bosses. Look at what happened to Lucas Quarrey and Gerry Thorne!”

Still, things weren’t so bad you couldn’t hold a party, and on the Fourth of July they decided to hold one. It was kind of swinging ahead of midnight. Eighteen people in the pad and lots of noise. All very high on pot or khat. Also there was wine but hardly anyone touched it. They put things on the grapes and the pickers died. Kitty hadn’t shown, but what the hell? There were other chicks here. So far Hugh had made it with two he hadn’t met before, friends of Tab’s, and he was reassured and felt great. Making it with Carl so much of the time led to worry, but Tab had scored for L-dopa, and it worked.

There was a phone. Owing to non-payment of a bill it was good for incoming calls only right now, and was going to be removed altogether some time soon. It rang and went on ringing until finally Hugh picked it up to say drop dead. But after he’d listened for a while he yelled for quiet.

“It’s about Kitty,” he explained.

Several friends of friends asked who Kitty was. He shut them up.

“Been to this fireworks party on the campus.”

Someone turned down the tape-player until the group on it sounded as though they were on the phone themselves, long-distance.

“Well?”

“Busted. Not
just
busted. Beaten up.”

“Ah, shit!” Carl frog-hopped toward him. “Her, or the whole bunch? And who’s calling?”

“Chuck. He says the lot. Someone’s uptight because they been bombing gas stations all over with like Roman candles.”

“Shit, man, why din’ we think of that?” Tab clapped his forehead with his open palm, smack.

“But why bust the campus?” demanded one of the girls Hugh had made it with earlier. Name of Cindy, Hugh believed. A student there. Black.

“Someone hoisted the skull and crossbones on that big flagpole near the dean’s—”

“Oh,
fantastic!”
Cindy went sprawling backwards in a fit of laughter, flinging wide the shirt which was all she wore to show off her so to say negative tattoo: a skull whose eyes were her nipples, bared teeth across her midriff, crossed bones intersecting at her pubis, which she shaved. It was done by minor cosmetic surgery and could be reversed; She always assured people it could be reversed.

“Yeah,” Hugh muttered. “But they got like clubbed and dragged in the wagon.”

There was silence as he put down the phone. Ossie said suddenly, “We got to get back at them. We
got
to!”

“No use just hitting and running!” Carl snapped. “Got to hurt the man who gives the orders!”

“Well, who gives the orders?” Ossie rounded on him.

“The rich! Shit, baby, who else?”

“Right. And we got a pipeline to the rich—you didn’t notice? I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Hugh, how much is Roland Bamberley worth?”

Some of the listeners went back to what they’d been doing before, mainly screwing, but a few stayed to listen because they sensed this was strong.

“Christ, millions! Thirty? Fifty? I don’t know!”

“You ever met him?” Ossie pressed.

“Well, just the one time. At Jack Bamberley’s.”

“And this son of his—what’s his name?”

“Oh, Hector!” Hugh began to giggle. He was adrift on pot and khat both and maybe the L-dopa was having impact too; all three were fighting inside his head to keep him floating. “Shit, is that ever a ridiculous scene! He keeps that son of his like wrapped in Saran. Know he wasn’t even allowed to eat with us? Special food checked out by this tame chemist. Travels everywhere with a bodyguard, night and day—armed, too. Hell, I swear I hardly saw his face. Made to keep his filtermask on all the time he’s outdoors, even in Colorado!”

“And he’s how old—fifteen?”

“I guess. Going on sixteen now, maybe.” But Hugh was over his giggles and beginning to be puzzled. “What’s this about?”

“One moment. One itty-bitty moment You read how he got this franchise for the whole state with these Jap water-purifiers?”

“Yeah, they put one in where we go have breakfast sometimes. Make a thing of it on the wall. Posters.”

“Well, don’t you think Hector ought to be a little less protected, the rest of us a little more?” Ossie hunkered forward. “Like shouldn’t we get next to him and—uh—invite him to see how the other half lives?” He waved at the smoky room and implied the entire filthy city beyond.

There was a confused silence. Carl said at length, “You mean like kidnap him? Hold him for ransom?”

“Ah, shit!” Hugh began, but Ossie cut him short.

“Not money, baby. Not a cash ransom. I’m thinking of”—he groped in the air as though seizing a number from a lucky dip—“like twenty thousand water-purifiers installed free of charge if he wants to see his boy again.”

“Hey, that’s music!” Tab exclaimed. He’d stayed to listen. “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Go ’way!”—to Cindy, who was fumbling in his crotch. At once the argument became general, ideas being thrown out a dozen a minute and most of them absurd.

But meantime Hugh was sitting back against the wall and thinking: Christ, it’s crazy and it might work. It just, very just,
might.

It was in the spirit of the whole national scene, too—would kick off a lot of support especially in the cities—and a hell of a sight closer to the original Trainite ideals than throwing bombs.

If it hadn’t been for Ossie, of course, it would never have progressed from a pipe-dream to actual execution. Hugh wasn’t sure quite how it developed—the moment he realized he was going to be the key to the scheme, he got high, and stayed high, and was still high the day they did it. But Ossie had spent fifteen years on the underground scene, getting busted now and then but never spending long inside because he had an instinct for self-preservation that was halfway to paranoia. Also he had contacts, and he used them.

Roland Bamberley had divorced Hector’s mother years ago and kept a succession of respectable mistresses, unwilling to remarry because he wanted total control of his fortune. He and his son lived on a Stronghold Estate (where else?) near Point Reyes, built around an artificial lake with clean fresh water and lots of tall trees nearby to keep the air sweet. It was obviously no good tackling the job right there. Not with ex-Marine sharpshooters on patrol.

But Hector did emerge into the open now and then, even though he was invariably accompanied by his armed bodyguard. A friend of his from the same expensive prep school he attended lived on the hillside overlooking Sausalito, which had become a very sought-after location indeed during the past five years, because the greenery was still lush and some trick of micrometeorology made the air better than average. Ossie had an acquaintance who worked for a local TV station. Obligingly, the guy established that if he wasn’t traveling during summer vacation Hector called on his friend once a week for a morning game of tennis (indoors, naturally), after which he stayed to lunch.

So they scouted the area while Ossie worked on a few of his other contacts, and figured out a route back to Berkeley from the north which avoided the main bridges, and did a couple of dry runs complete in every detail bar one: that for the actual operation they would steal a car and later abandon it.

And all of a sudden the day appointed was upon them.

It was just as well Hugh was living in a dream. If he’d believed what was happening was real, he’d have pissed in his pants with terror. As it was, he felt quite calm.

Just around the corner from the home of Hector’s friend, which was screened from the road by dense trees and shrubs, there was a stop sign. At it the dark-blue air-conditioned Cadillac dutifully halted. Hugh stepped into plain view and grinned and waved and knocked on the car’s window. He had put on his best—or rather, what had been until a day or two ago someone else’s best—clothes, and shaved, and generally made himself presentable.

“Say, aren’t you Hector? Hector Bamberley?” he shouted.

At the wheel, the bodyguard twisted around, one hand reaching under his jacket for his gun. Not wearing a mask inside the car, of course—Caddies had the best possible precipitators—Hector looked politely puzzled, a trifle startled.

“I’m Hugh! Hugh Pettingill! At your uncle Jack’s!”

Recognition dawned. A word to the bodyguard, who gave a frown, and then also remembered their former meeting. He relaxed, then tensed again as Hector automatically touched the window switch.

“Hey, put your mask on if you’re going to open that—”

But by then it was too late. Hugh had pitched the sleep-grenade into the car. It landed fair on the middle of the front seat. He spun and raced for the side of the road.

The grenade held the US Army’s latest riot-control compound, PL. It had been mailed home from Honduras. Ossie knew someone who knew someone. And there was always a keen demand for weaponry.

They waited the requisite three minutes. The bodyguard’s foot had slipped off the brake, of course, but the car had only rolled forward across the main road and gently bumped the bank opposite. They were prepared to take the risk of his remembering Hugh. In two cases out of three PL induced temporary amnesia, like a blow on the head. It was more likely than not that he’d wake up to find he couldn’t recall a thing.

Then the others appeared from the scrawny underbrush, and Ossie drove up in the station wagon they’d stolen, and they piled Hector in the back under a blanket and split.

“He looks pretty green,” Hugh muttered as they dumped him in the room—more, an oversize closet—they’d made ready at Kitty’s. She hadn’t been back since her bust at the Fourth of July party, and no one seemed to know where she’d gone, except it wasn’t jail, but they were sure she’d have approved if she’d known what they were doing.

This was a gloryhole without windows, though very well ventilated—they’d made sure of that—with concrete walls, a good solid lockable door, and a sink in the corner whose tap worked fine. They’d fitted it up with a divan bed, a chamber-pot and a supply of paper, some books and magazines to help him pass the time. He’d hate it. But he wouldn’t be getting much worse than some people had to live with all the time.

“He looks sick!” Hugh said, more loudly this time.

“Sure he is,” Ossie grunted, pulling the boy’s legs straight on the bed. “They always are when they wake up from PL. But we have the promise of the Pentagon that it isn’t fatal.” Grinning without humor.

“Me, I’ll go mail the ransom note,” he added, and turned to leave.

When Hector Bamberley struggled back from the depths of coma, he found Hugh squatting against the wall surrounded by roaches, some alive and some khat. You could chew it, infuse it, smoke it—come to that you could stick it up your ass, but Hugh hadn’t tried that. Of the others, he’d decided he preferred smoking. Hastily he donned his filtermask.

Hector said, “What ...?” Tried to sit up. Fell back. Tried again. He was big for his age, as tall as Hugh, and in first-rate physical shape. So he ought to be, the way he’d been coddled all his life.