The Sheep Look Up (15 page)

"Make way, you old fool!" he rasped. "Hurry up!"

The priest stood his ground, fixing him with wild bloodshot eyes.

Sensing something he hadn't expected, the major glanced at the American for advice. This Hannigan was apparently some kind of detective, or spy, or government agent at any rate, and might have the

"common touch" inaccessible to an officer and an aristocrat.

"These people don't look like a Tupa resistance group to me,"

Hannigan murmured. "Try telling them we've brought food."

That was as might be, the major thought. The problem with Tupamaros was that they always looked like just anybody-a valet, a cook, a clerk in a store-until the crunch came. However, the idea was a sound one; the rabble were always much concerned with their bellies.

He said in a soothing tone, "Father, we have come to help your people. The government has sent us with food and medicine."

"We have had this kind of help before," the priest rumbled. He looked and sounded as though he had been without proper sleep for a month. "But do you bring holy water from the Vatican?"

"What?"

"Do you bring sacred relics that will frighten devils?"

The major shook his head, bewildered.

"They're agents of the devil themselves!" shouted a burly man who had been standing at the back of the crowd with a shotgun. Now he battered his way to the front, taking station beside the priest.

"The town is full of wicked spirits!" he cried. "Men, women, even children are possessed! We've seen the demons walk through walls, enter our homes, even trespass in the church!"

"True!" the priest said, and clutched his crucifix very tightly.

"Ah, they're out of their minds," the major muttered. "Or pretending to be! Let's see how they like a volley over their heads!"

Hannigan scowled. "If they are crazy, it won't do any good. If they aren't, we'll learn more by playing along with them. Try again."

Sighing, but aware of who was in charge, the major turned back to the priest, who suddenly spat in the dirt at his feet.

"We want nothing to do with you," he said. "Or your foreign masters. Go to the bishop, if he can spare a moment from his mistresses. Go to the cardinal, if he isn't too busy stuffing his belly. Tell them our poor hamlet of San Pablo is infested with devils. Bring us the kind of help that will exorcise them. Meantime we know our duty. We shall fast and pray."

"Aye!" chorused the villagers.

"Yes, but while you're fasting," Hannigan cut in in fair Spanish, "your children are likely to starve, aren't they?"

"Better to starve and go to heaven than live possessed by imps of Satan," rasped the burly man. "Holy water from Rome, that's what we need! Use your airplanes to bring us that!"

"You could bless the food we've brought," Hannigan insisted.

"Sprinkle it with water from your church font-"

"We're accursed!" the priest burst out. "Holy water here has no effect! It's the time of the coming of Antichrist!"

A gun went off. Hannigan and the major dropped reflexively on their bellies. Over their heads the soldiers in the jeeps returned a withering fire, and the priest and his congregation fell like wheat before the scythe.

Obviously they must have been Tupas after all.

It was the third time Philip Mason had come to the cheerless waiting room of the Market Street clinic, decorated solely with warning posters. But it was the first time he'd found the place so empty. Before, he'd found it crowded with youngsters. Today only one other patient was present, and instead of being teenaged or in his twenties, he was in his late thirties, well-dressed, growing comfortably plump, and in general assignable to Philip's own social bracket Before Philip could take refuge as usual behind some shabby back issue of
Scientific American
or
The National Geographic,
the stranger had caught his eye and grinned at him. He was dark-haired, brown-eyed, clean-shaven, in general unremarkable bar two things: his obvious atypical prosperity and a small round scar on the back of his left hand. A bullet mark?

"Morning!" he said in precisely that matter-of-fact tone Philip would have liked to be able to command but couldn't. The whole world was leaning on him. Denise was permanently hurt by his behavior. The Towerhill avalanche was still spawning so many claims he hadn't dared punch for the total for over a week. And…

Oh, that mother Clayford! But it was a Pyrrhic victory to know he was going to lose his fees for insurance examinations.

He dived into the shelter of a magazine he'd already read.

In a little while they called his number and he went for the regular humiliating treatment-massage with a sterile-gloved finger up his anus, a drip of prostatic secretion smeared on a slide. Things had been better the past few days and then this morning they'd been worse again, and Dennie-Stop, stop. He was in the office of Dr. McNeil, and the doctor was youthful, casual, unprejudiced. Philip liked this man a few years his junior, who kept a silly doll of a Highland bagpiper on the corner of his desk. He'd come here the first time almost incapable of talking, and McNeil had drawn him out in minutes, making him feel-just so long as he was in the office-that this really was a complaint anyone might suffer from, not to be ashamed of, easily put right. Though not, of course, under any circumstances to be neglected.

"How are you getting on?" McNeil said, taking the folder Philip had brought with him and extracting the morning's test report to add to the file of Mason Philip A. #605-193. 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 strain 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 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 well 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 lads 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 lanky 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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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.