The Sheep Look Up (8 page)

Mouth dry, hands shaking, she switched off the flashlight and crept on silent bare feet to the living room.

“Hands up!” she shouted, switching on the torch again, and was instantly appalled by the way her finger was tightening on the trigger. Across the threshold lay a form which mingled khaki, dark-brown, bright-red. The red was blood. It was Major Obou, sprawled on his belly, his right hand limp beside his automatic, his left shoulder slashed to the bone.

“Major?” she tried to say, and found her voice wasn’t there. She saw his good hand, like a colossal spider, scrabbling for the lost gun.

“Major Obou!”

He heard her and rolled his head on the reed matting of the floor.
“Vaut rien,”
he said thickly, and corrected himself. “No good. No more bullet.”

“But what’s happening?” She put down her own gun and stooped with her flashlight playing on his wound, her mind spinning with thirty different things each as urgent as another: call out her neighbor the Swedish doctor, cleanse the cut, close the outside door, make sure he hadn’t been followed by his attacker ...

He summoned a supreme effort and seized her by the wrist as she made to rise and shut the door.

“Don’t go out, miss! Don’t go there! All mad, all crazy! Look, my arm! One of my men did that, my own men! See, I caught him take bowl food from widow with baby, and corporal say it third time tonight, so I order with my gun give back, go find more at airstrip for poor others he rob. Right for officer to say, no? Your food not for soldiers, for poor starve devils in town! So he took that axe and hit me, see? Oh, but it hurts!”

“Let me get bandages!” Lucy cried, but he seemed not to hear. Large, staring, his eyes were fixed on nowhere. He tightened his grip and words poured out frantically, his careful European syntax giving way to the grammar of his own language.

“No, not go! Gone crazy, say! Shout the town is full ghosts, ghosts everywhere, shoot at them, fire guns all time at shadow, anything! Say kill ghosts, kill ghosts,
kill kill ghosts!”

Outside there were footsteps. Lucy tried again to release her hand so she could close the door, failed, and thought at least of switching off the flashlight so that would not attract a mad prowler. What Obou had said made no sense, but the firing was louder and closer and through the open door she could see that more and still more flames were springing up, as though the town were turning into a volcano.

Footsteps again. Nearer. And her .22 was out of reach and Obou’s gun was empty. At first gently, then in growing panic, she fought to make him let go. A new bright light shone in the doorway. The instant before it dazzled her she saw a white man in a white shirt holding a pistol; the instant after, she realized what the torch-beam would show—a white girl in the grip of a black man, her thighs apart and smeared with blood, a case of rape.

She started to shout, “Don’t—!”

And was too late. The gun exploded. The bullet spattered her with bits of Obou.

Later someone kept trying to say to her—it was the Swedish doctor, Bertil—“But we didn’t know you were here! When the trouble started we saw Maua and she swore you weren’t in the house. We went down into the town, and all these madmen came at us with guns and hatchets, screaming that we were evil ghosts, kill the ghosts!”

I heard that before. Listless, Lucy rocked back and forth, eyes shut, right hand mechanically rubbing the spot on her left arm where she had been given some sort of injection, the two rhythms crisscrossing the lilt of Bertil’s accent.

“Be glad you didn’t see what we saw: the whole town gone insane, looting and burning and killing!”

The person I saw killing was you. You shot a nice man. I was going on leave with him. I liked his smile. He had a round dark face with funny stripes on his cheeks. He’s dead. You killed him.

She moaned and fell to the floor.

JANUARY

MARCHING ORDERS

“Go ye and bring the Light

To savage strands afar.

Take ye the Law of Right

Where’er the unblest are.

°“Heathens and stubborn Jews,

Lovers of Juggernaut,

Give them the chance to choose

That which the Saviour taught.

“Go where the gentle Lord

Is still as yet unknown,

There where the tribes ignored

Strive in the dark alone.

“Arm ye to face the foe,

Carib and cannibal,

Men who must live as low

As any animal

°“Cover the naked limb,

Shoe ye the unshod foot,

Silence the pagan hymn,

Conquer the godless brute.

“Tell them the news of Love,

Preach them the Prince of Peace,

Tear down their pagan grove,

Give them divine release.”

—“The Sacred Sower: Being a Collection of Hymns and Devout Songs Adapted to the Use of Missionary Societies”, 1887; verses marked ° may be omitted if desired.

ABOVE THE SOUND OF SPEED

RM-1808, out of Phoenix for Seattle, had reported acute catting—clear air turbulence—in the vicinity of Salt Lake City. Hearing of this, the navigator of TW-6036, the Montreal-Los Angeles direct SST, punched the keys of his computer and passed a course-correction to the pilot. Then he leaned back to resume his snooze.

They would be super for over a thousand miles yet.

SNOW JOB

Disregarded, the twenty-nine-inch color TV displayed images of today’s violence. The camera lingeringly swept the gutters of far-off Noshri, pausing occasionally at corpses. A dog, miraculous survivor of the period last summer when people had paid a hundred local francs for a rat, fifty for a handful of mealies, was seen snuffling the body of a child, and a tall black soldier broke its back with the butt of his carbine.

“Shit! You see what that black mother did to that poor dog?”

“What?”

But the screen had switched to the wreckage of a plane.

This was Towerhill, latest of the prosperous winter-sports resorts of Colorado, and they were in the Apennine Lodge, smartest and most expensive of its accommodations. Brand-new, the place struggled hard to appear old. Skis hung from plastic beams, a simulated log fire burned in a stone hearth. Beyond a double-glazed window taking up most of one wall powerful arc lights played on a magnificent dark-striped snow-slope running nearly to the crest of Mount Hawes. Until last year, although this town was barely fifty miles from Denver, the road had been bad and only a handful of visitors had chanced on it. The increasing tendency for people to take mountain vacations, however, since the sea had become too filthy to be tolerable, could not be ignored. The road now was excellent and the area had exploded. There were three ultramodern ski-lifts and a branch of Puritan Health Supermarkets. There were facilities for skijoring behind snowmobiles and Colorado Chemical Bank planned to double the size of its operation here. One could go skating and curling and American Express had taken up its option on some offices. Next year they promised a ski-jump of Olympic standard.

On the screen a group of men, women and children were shown shivering outside a cluster of improbably-shaped buildings. They were poorly dressed but on average rather good-looking. Meantime police with dogs conducted a search.

Oh. Trainites. What the hell?

After his second drink Bill Chalmers was feeling better. It had been a filthy day: driving to Denver this morning over roads that had been ploughed and sanded but were still slithery; sweating out that awful lunch at the Masons’, aware of “an atmosphere” but unable to pin down the cause; breaking it up finally when their son Anton, six, had a row with the Mason kids aged five and four and ran away screaming ...

But they were back safely, and he liked Towerhill: its air of affluence which was a snook cocked at the prophets of doom, its enclosing mountains, its unbelievably blessedly fresh air. One saw big-city visitors, their first day, going out in filtermasks, not convinced they were okay without them.

The screen showed a map of Central America with an arrow pointing to somewhere, then photographs of two men, both white.

“Tania!”

“Yes, I’d love another,” his wife said, and went right on comparing symptoms with the lawyer’s wife from Oakland she’d met yesterday. “Now me, I had this funny rash, and a prickly feeling all over ...”

Christ! Can’t anybody talk about anything these days except allergies and neuroses? Once a man could be satisfied to be a breadwinner. Now he has to be a medicine-winner as well. And it never does any good.

“Yes, well!” the lawyer’s wife said. “Now I got this hot-and-cold feeling, and sometimes actual dizziness.”

Abruptly he realized they were talking about pregnancy, and instead of fuming he found himself shivering. Of course he’d taken out abnormality insurance when Anton was on the way, but despite his position with Angel City it hadn’t come cheap, and when Anton had been safely delivered Tom Grey had told him just what odds they had been bucking. Words reheard in memory made him tremble: cystic fibrosis, phenylketonuria, hemophilia, hypothyroidism, mongolism, Tetralogy of Fallot, alexia, dichromatism ... A list that went on forever, as though it were a miracle anyone at all became a normal adult!

It made one understand why Grey was a bachelor. He himself wouldn’t risk a second kid.

The TV went over to sports results. For the first time several people paid it full attention.

“Tania!”

She finally turned. The lawyer’s wife escaped to join her husband on the far side of the room.

“Did you have that heart-to-heart with Denise?”

“Oh, God,” Tania said, leaning back and crossing her arms. “So that was why you brought us here—to spy on the Masons!”

“It was not!”

“Then what in hell makes it so urgent? You don’t have to be back at the office before Monday! And why didn’t you ask me in the car instead of snapping my head off every time I spoke?”

All around, their attention caught by voices sharpening toward the pitch of a quarrel, people were turning to look. Hideously embarrassed, Chalmers adopted a conciliatory manner.

“Tania honey, I’m sorry, but it
is
important.”

“Obviously! More important than me or Tony! More important than my first chance in years to relax and make some new friends! Look what you’ve done—chased Sally away!”

He just sat there.

After a moment, however, she relented. Four years ago they had been through the unemployable stage; she knew what it would mean to lose his job.

“Oh, hell ... Yes, I wormed it out of her. She’s a crank. Practically a Trainite.”

Chalmers pricked up his ears. “How do you mean?”

“A crank, like I say. Won’t let him fly. Says she wants her grandchildren to see the sun. What difference it makes if a plane flies with one seat empty,
I
don’t know! But she thinks Phil’s in some kind of trouble because she made him drive to LA, only he won’t come out and put the blame squarely on her. And she wants desperately to know what the problem is. In fact she brought the matter up. I didn’t have to. Because he was awful over Christmas, apparently. What’s more he keeps finding excuses not to screw her. Wouldn’t have made it even on New Year’s, she said, not unless she’d actually
seduced
him—”

The last word was drowned out by a sudden thudding noise from the sky, as though a giant had clapped hands around a mosquito. Everyone winced. An anonymous voice said, “Oh, a filthy sonic boom. Don’t you hate them?”

But it should have been over in an instant. It continued: after the initial bang, a growling sound, lower-pitched, but enduring, like stones being rubbed by the current of a fast river or a vigorous tide on a pebbly headland. Poised to renew their conversation, people realized that this wasn’t right. The noise grew louder, grinding. They turned and looked at the window.

Tania screamed.

With implacable majesty, to the beating of countless drums, half a million tons of snow and ice were marching on the town of Towerhill.

CHARGE ACCOUNT

Reporter:
General, it’s no exaggeration to say the world has been appalled at your decision to arrest and expel the American relief workers from Noshri—

General Kaika:
Do you expect us to let them remain when they have poisoned thousands of our people, killed them or, worse still, driven them mad?

Reporter:
There’s no proof that—

General Kaika:
Yes, there is proof. All the people of the town went mad. They attacked our own troops who had freed them from the occupying forces. They were poisoned by the evil food sent under the pretence of relief supplies.

Reporter:
But what conceivable motive could—?

General Kaika:
Plenty of motive. For one thing, Americans go to any length to prevent an independent country whose government does not have white skin. Colored governments must bow to Washington. Consider China. Consider Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Ceylon, Indonesia. If ever we have a strong united country of black people in Africa they will no longer be able to tread down their black countrymen.

Reporter:
Are you saying there was a deliberate plot to weaken your forces and win the war for the invaders?

General Kaika:
I am making investigations to confirm. But it is white men who made the war to start with.

Reporter:
There weren’t even any white mercenaries with the—

General Kaika:
Was it black men who filled the Mediterranean with poison? No, it was destroyed by the filthy wastes from European factories!

Reporter:
Well, the Aswan dam—

General Kaika:
Yes, yes, the Aswan dam may have tipped the balance finally, but before that the sea was dying. Because so many had to starve on the African coast there began this war. That is why I say the white countries are responsible. It is the typical white habit to ruin what you have and then go to steal from other people.

Reporter:
Oh, General, you’re stretching the facts a bit!

General Kaika:
Is the fact that it is dangerous to swim in the Mediterranean? Is the fact that the fish have died?

Reporter:
Well, yes, but—

General Kaika:
I have no more to say.

RATS

Jeannie was already home, of course, her Stephenson electric tucked into a corner of the garage. Pete was on the ten-to-six shift today and her job at Bamberley’s stopped at five.

Pete Goddard hated his wife going to work. He wanted her at home, looking after a couple of kids. That, though, would have to wait until after his next promotion. These days nobody in his right mind would start a family before he could afford proper medical care for his children. Up here in the mountains it wasn’t so bad as in the cities; even so you couldn’t be too careful.

As he scraped his boots before treading on the front step, there was a slamming sound in the sky. He glanced up just in time to meet an eyeful of snow shaken off the overhang of the porch. Ah, shit, a sonic boom. Oughtn’t to have been that loud! One grew used to one or two a day, but faint, far away, doing no damage beyond maybe startling you into spilling a cup of coffee. Down at the station house Sergeant Chain could look forward to a rash of complaints. As though there were anything the police here could do. As though there were anything anybody could do.

Jeannie was in the kitchen. Not much of a kitchen, equipped with repossessed appliances. But they usually worked. She was busy at the stove: a pretty girl, much lighter than he and a year older, bound to be plump before thirty but what the hell? He liked plenty of meat. Blowing her a kiss, he collected his evening pill, the one for his allergy, and headed for the sink to draw some water.

But she stopped him with a cry. “No, Pete! I found a don’t-drink notice when I got home. See, on the table?”

Startled, he turned and spotted the bright red paper printed in bold black letters. The familiar phrases leapt out at him:
fault in the purifying plant—must not be drunk without boiling—rectified as soon as possible ...

“Shit!” he exclaimed. “It’s getting to be as bad as Denver!”

“Oh, no, honey! Down in the city they get these all the time, like every week, and that’s only our second since the summer. Won’t a beer do?”

“A beer? Sure it will!”

“In the icebox. And one for me. I got this complicated recipe going.” She brandished a clipping from the newspaper.

Grinning, he made to comply—and his hand flew to his hip after his not-present gun as he exclaimed in dismay.

“What?” Jeannie spun around. “Oh, not another rat?”

“Just the biggest I ever saw!” But it was gone now. “I thought I told you to call the exterminator!” he snapped.

“Well, I did! But he said he has so much business we’ll have to wait at least another week.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Pete sighed. “Everybody I meet ...” He let the words trail away and opened the icebox. On two shelves, packages with a familiar trade mark: a girl holding an ear of corn between her tits, to make a sort of prick-and-balls pattern of them.

“Hey, you been to Puritan again!”

“Well, I spent my bonus,” Jeannie said defensively. “And things there aren’t that much more expensive! Besides, they do really taste much better.”

“What bonus?”

“Oh, you know! I told you! All us girls in the packing section who worked overtime to get that shipment away before Christmas. Twenty bucks extra from Mr. Bamberley!”

“Oh. Oh, yeah.” Taking his beer and hers from the six-pack. What the hell? Twenty bucks today was a spit in the ocean. Though he would rather have put it toward their policy with Angel City, saving against the time when they could afford a baby. All these scare stories about chemicals. Just an excuse to double the prices at Puritan ...

Reminded of the plant, though: “Say, baby, how’s your leg?” That smooth patch of skin, as though part of her thigh had been glazed.

“Oh, they were right first time. It is a fungus. You know we have to wear masks against actino-what’s-its-name. I picked up something of the same kind. But the ointment’s fixing it.”