The Sheep Look Up (5 page)

He said tiredly, “Potato tops.”

“Very good!” Mr. Bamberley clapped him on the shoulder and turned once more to point at the factory floor.

“Considering the complexity of the treatment which is required before cassava yields an edible product—”

Ah, shit. He’s off on another of his lousy lectures.

“—and the unlikelihood of anyone stumbling on it by accident, it’s always struck me as one of the clearest proofs of supernal intervention in the affairs of primitive mankind,” Mr. Bamberley declaimed. “Here’s no comparative triviality like oxalic acid, but the deadliest of poisons, cyanide! Yet for centuries people have relied on cassava as a staple diet, and survived, and indeed flourished! Isn’t it marvelous when you think of it like that?”

Maybe. Except I
don’t
think of it like that. I picture desperate men struggling on the verge of starvation, trying everything that occurs to them in the faint hope that the next person who samples this strange plant won’t drop dead.

“Coffee’s another case. Who, without prompting, would have thought of drying the berries, husking them, roasting them, then grinding them and
then
infusing them in water?” Mr. Bamberley’s voice was rising toward sermon pitch. All of a sudden, though, it dropped back to a normal level.

“So calling this a ‘chemical process’ is misleading. What we really do is cook the stuff! But there’s one major drawback in relying on cassava as a staple. I may have mentioned ...?”

“Shortage of protein,” Hugh said, thinking of himself as one of those question-and-answer toys they give children, with little lights which come on when the proper button is pressed.

“Right in one!” Mr. Bamberley beamed. “Which is why I compare our job to making cheese. Here”—flinging open the door to the next section of the plant, a vast twilit room where spidery metal girders supported shielded ultraviolet lamps—“we fortify the protein content of the mix. With absolutely natural substances: yeasts, and fungi with especially high nutritive value. If all goes well we turn as much as eight per cent of the cassava into protein, but even six per cent, the average yield, is a vast improvement.”

Walking ahead as he talked toward yet another section where the finished product was draped in huge skeins on drying-racks, like knitting-wool, then chopped into finger-sized lengths.

“And you know something else extraordinary? Cassava’s a tropical plant, of course. Yet it grows better here than under so-called ‘natural’ conditions. Do you know why?”

Hugh shook his head.

“Because we draw so much of our water supply from melted snow. That contains less heavy hydrogen—deuterium. A lot of plants simply can’t cope with it.”

And now the packing room, where men and women in masks and coveralls tamped measured quantities into cardboard cartons lined with polyethylene, then loaded the cartons on to humming fork-lift trucks. Some of them waved on noticing Mr. Bamberley. He grinned almost from ear to ear as he waved back.

Oh, God. Mine, that is—if any. Not Bamberley’s cosy cheery paterfamilias kind, who is certainly tall and handsome and white-skinned behind his long gray beard. I mean, this guy paid for the clothes I’m wearing, the college I attend, the car I drive—even if it is only a sluggish electric. So I’d like to like him. If you can’t like the people who are kind to you ...

And he makes it so difficult! Always this feeling, just when you think you’re there, that something isn’t right. Like he gives all the time to Earth Community Chest, and supplies this cheap food to Globe Relief, and out of eight adopted sons not one a crippled Vietnamese ...

Hollow. That’s the word. Hollow.

But not to start arguments and rows. Another question.

“Where are the cases going that they’re filling now?”

“Noshri, I think,” Mr. Bamberley said. “The postwar aid program, you know. But I’ll make sure.”

He shouted to a black woman who was stenciling destination names on empty cartons. She tilted the one she’d just finished so it could be read from the gallery.

“Not to Africa!” Mr. Bamberley sounded surprised. “Then someone must have put in a lot of overtime—I’ll find out who and make some commendations. They’ve already started on the new contract with Globe Relief.”

“Which one is that?”

“Oh, for some village in Honduras where the coffee crop failed.”

SPACE FOR THIS INSERTION IS DONATED BY THE PUBLISHERS AS A SERVICE TO THE COMMUNITY

Where a child cries—or is too weak to cry ... Where a mother mourns—for one who will not weep again ...

Where plague and famine and the scourge of war have proved too much for struggling human beings ...

WE BRING HOPE

But we can’t do it without your help. Think of us now. Remember us in your will. Give generously to the world’s largest relief organization: GLOBE RELIEF.°

°All donations wholly tax-deductible.

HOUSE TO HOUSE

Gilt-tooled on yard-square panels of green leather—imitation, of course—the zodiacal signs looked down from the walls of the executive lunch-room. The air was full of the chatter of voices and the clink of ice-cubes. Waiting to be attacked when the president of the company joined them (he had promised to show at one sharp) was a table laden with expensive food: hard-boiled eggs, shells intact so that it could be seen they were brown, free-range, rich in carotene; lettuces whose outer leaves had been rasped by slugs; apples and pears wearing their maggot-marks like dueling scars, in this case presumably genuine ones though it had been known for fruit growers to fake them with red-hot wires in areas where insects were no longer found; whole hams, very lean, proud of their immunity from antibiotics and copper sulphate; scrawny chickens; bread as coarse as sandstone, dark as mud and nubbled with wheat grains ...

“Hmm! Looks as though someone bought out the local branch of Puritan!” a voice said within Chalmers’s hearing, and he was pleased. He was moving from House to House, measuring a precise three minutes at each stop. Virgo: no women were present apart from Felice with whom he was having an affair and the two girls serving at the bar. In pursuance of its progressive image Angel City had tried appointing female area managers, but of the first two such one had married and quit and the other had suffered a nervous breakdown. Occasionally he had wondered whether Felice slept with him in the hope of climbing that far up the corporation totem-pole.

The policy, however, had been reviewed.

Libra: “Now me, I’d go straight into scrap-reclamation and sewage-plant construction. They’re the growth industries of the eighties. You’ll see your investment double in next to no time.”

Scorpio: “Rats? No, we have a terrier and a tomcat and keep them hungry. But the ants! I spent two thousand on proofing the kitchen and they still got in. So we fell back on—uh—the old reliable. By the way, if you need any, I have a good discreet source of supply.”

Sagittarius: “Yes, up our way we’ve established a
modus vivendi
with the Syndicate. Their interest in Puritan, of course. Very strong around our base. Anyone tries to put in a false claim gets a dusty answer straight away.”

No one at Capricorn.

Aquarius: “No ice, thanks—hey! I said NO ICE! Don’t you understand plain English? Doctor’s orders. Mustn’t touch anything but canned mineral water. I lose more working time thanks to digestive trouble ...”

Pisces: “Why don’t we make acceptance of a life proposal conditional on installing an approved water purifier in the guy’s home, like we insist on an approved precipitator in his car? I’ve sounded out a couple of the big firms, and they show every interest in cooperating.”

No one at Aries.

Taurus: “If we’re going to expand into the cattle states we
must
have solid documentation on the natural incidence of deformed births in domestic animals. I managed to hold his claim down to a refund of the stud fee, but even that came to five thousand, and he insisted the value of this mare that died in foal was twice as much. I had to drop very heavy hints about the cost of litigation before he accepted the settlement.”

Gemini: “I’ve had a rash of demands lately for insurance against egg-bundle fetus. Can’t help wondering whether there may not be something behind the scare. Maybe a leak from a research lab?”

No one at Cancer ... naturally.

Leo: “Yes, the reason I was delayed—this crazy spade ...”

Chalmers clucked sympathy when he had heard Philip out, and switched instantly to a less depressing subject. “By the way! Tania and I will be in Colorado over the holiday. Get in some skiing.”

“Ah-hah? Where you aiming for—Aspen?”

“Oh, Aspen’s full of people who read about it in
Playboy.
No, your own stamping ground. Towerhill!”

“Never! Well, call us up! Maybe you could stop by with us and like have lunch?”

Sweating slightly from the
Playboy
putdown.

The conclusion of Chalmers’s meticulously timed peregrination brought him within arm’s reach of Grey at five to one.

“The man from Denver,” Grey said. “Philip Mason.”

“What about him?” Anticipating what was coming, and relieved to be able to offer an impenetrably defensive answer. Chalmers had a stake in that man; the personnel board had split three to two and his own vote had been in favor.

“There’s something wrong. Or else he’s not himself today.”

“Not himself. Saw a man killed right before his eyes this morning.” And recounted the story.

Grey pondered a while. Uncomfortable, Chalmers waited. It was disturbing to watch this man think; it made the world seem full of the sound of whizzing wheels.

“Someone will have to keep an eye on him,” Grey said at last.

“But he’s one of our best men!” Chalmers felt personally aggrieved. “He’s nearly doubled the business of the Denver office. He was among the first to get wind of the new developments at Towerhill and put us in on the ground floor, and now we cover three-quarters of the place. Besides, this notion of his of sending out proposal forms for short-term injury insurance with hotel booking confirmations is showing a thousand per cent profit.”

“I’m not talking about that,” Grey said. What I want to know is what he was doing driving his own car into Los Angeles this morning. It’s a long pull from Denver. I’d have expected him to fly.”

The door opened to admit the president of the company, and he moved away to greet him. Scowling at his back, Chalmers wondered—not for the first time—when if ever he would dare call Grey “Mike”: short for “My-croft,” elder brother of Sherlock Holmes. It was only an inner echelon of the top staff who used the nickname to his face.

THE MORAL OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Last valiant sally of a great department store whose customers had quit the city center, six Santa Clauses marched down the road.

“Ho-ho-ho!” Jingle-jangle.

The sidewalks they passed were crowded. Most of the onlookers were black, and many were children whose eyes reflected unfulfillable dreams. The city’s heart was dying before its carcass, and these were the poor, trapped in outworn clothes and rat-ridden tenements. If they wanted to escape, like as not they had to steal a car to travel in because the now compulsory clean exhaust systems were expensive. Last time Peg had come down this way it had been to cover the story of a thriving trade in fake filters, home-built out of sheet steel by an enterprising mechanic.

In spite of the few cars, the air stank. She had taken off her mask, not wanting to be conspicuous—at least, no more than was due to being white. In this district people didn’t wear them. They seemed inured to the reek. The chests of the children were shallow, as though to discourage overdeep breathing.

She stared at the Santa Clauses. Behind those once-white beards, now grimed from an excursion in the open, she could not make out their features. She did, though, notice that the second man in the line was only moving his lips, not booming out his “Ho-ho-ho!” His eyes were bulging with the effort of repressing a cough.

Which would be very out of character for Saint Nick.

They broke the line to distribute come-on leaflets, most of which were immediately dropped, and dispersed into a dark alley where notices warned that only “authorized personnel” might enter.

Was one of the six, as she’d been assured, Austin Train?

The idea seemed crazy on the surface. Underneath, maybe it wasn’t wholly absurd. She hadn’t seen Austin since just after he recovered from his breakdown, but when he vanished from the public eye it had been with the promise that he was going to live as the poor were living, even if it meant risking what they risked. That decision had caused trendy Catholic television spokesmen to mention openly the possibility that the Church might recognize a new category of “secular saints.” She’d watched one such program with Decimus and Zena, and they’d laughed aloud.

But if this was the path Austin had chosen, it was different from Decimus’s. His principle, at the Colorado wat, was third-world oriented; his community grew its own food, or tried to—crops had a nasty habit of failing because of wind-borne defoliants or industrial contaminants in the rain—and likewise wove its own cloth, while its chief source of income lay in handicrafts. The underlying concept was to dramatize the predicament of the majority of mankind. Often, prior to a meal, there had been little homilies: “You’re each getting about twice as much at this table as someone in a Bolivian mountain village gets in a day.” And sometimes there were strange unexciting dishes: glutinous African sauces of fine-chopped okra, tasteless cakes of anonymous grain, samples of relief shipments sympathizers had paid for and mailed to the wat.

“This is what we’re giving away,” Decimus would say. “Not steak or chicken or big fat Idaho potatoes. This is made from”—and it could be algae, or yeast, or grass clippings, or on one occasion, incredibly, sawmill wastes. “See how
you
like it, and think of those who have only such shit to be grateful for!”

But that had been a long time ago.

Around the back of the store she found a half-empty parking lot. There was a door marked
Employees Only.
She found it barred from inside. Nearby, though, was a reeded-glass window. She could make out blurred images if she leaned close to the panes. Inside, red forms changing to white as the Santa Clauses stripped off their suits and padding.