The Sheep Look Up (45 page)

Damn. Well, do you know"-cough, cough, cough cough, COUGH-"Sorry! Do you know a good source of what-you-call-'ems around Denver-locums?" Cough. "Are you sure? No one at all? Doug thought maybe a medical officer at the Air Force Academy…They what? Are you putting me on? Mumps? Oh, Christ. How long is the quarantine going to last?"

(As though a bucket of sand had been thrown into a complex machine. This year, so many of the people who matter out of circulation, even if only for a week or two, and so many more-millions more-working far below their peak. On the Stock Exchange, dealings suspended in Angel City, Bamberley Trust Corporation, Plant Fertility, Puritan Health Supermarkets…and others.)

"Lady, I don't care if they're crawling up your cunt, you understand?

I have thirty-five more calls to make before I get around to
your
rats!"

The use of the fine house had been assigned to Maud Bamberley during her lifetime, but Jacob had omitted to provide adequate funds to support it, her, and the remaining children. Querulous on the last morning before departure, she rang her bell for Christy. But it was Ethel the cook who answered, limping a little for the verrucae in her right heel (She'd come to ask advice about them yesterday, but the sight was too disgusting; Maud had told her to wait for Dr. Halpern to call again, forgetting that they were compelled to move from here.)

"Christy's sick, ma'am," Ethel said. "It's her lungs, I guess. She wheezing all the time."

"Where is she?" Maud demanded. "In bed?"

"No, ma'am. She seeing to Mister Noel. He done wetted himself again."

Dear Jesus. Dear sweet kind loving Jesus. Maud gathered the silk sheets of her bed into a bundle on her left arm and began to croon to it.

Dr. Halpern had to come after all, despite his palpitations (since about two weeks ago), and the moving gang went away without anything; perhaps as well because they were eight men under their scheduled strength of fourteen. Cornelius went with the empty van-it was deemed advisable to hospitalize him what with his rash, his blocked sinuses and his non-stop trembling. Claude was pretty well okay. His broken wrist, three weeks old, was healing nicely considering his inability to metabolize calcium properly.

But Maud had to be given an injection, and when Ronald came to him all adult, as the oldest male in the house and the father of Christy's baby (not yet known to Maud), demanding information, the doctor did not feel justified in offering a favorable prognosis.

Christy's child was about three months gone when she miscarried it from brucellosis. Just as well. Mongoloid. She was forty.

"Honestly, Mrs. Byrne, I don't know how Dr. Advowson coped-no, no, don't move your head, just hold still…There! That'll do the trick, though it'll smart for a while. Very nasty, these furuncles, especially to someone like yourself-if you'll forgive my saying so-with a generous growth of facial hair. Put the ointment on night and morning."

Running water into the sink, reaching for the antiseptic soap.

"Sad about little Eileen, wasn't it? Tetanus is a terrible disease."

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"Brian, do you spell that name with or without an E at the end?"

"Without. Was it the drink that did for him, then?"

"It was indeed. Trying to drown his sorrows and somebody taught them to swim."

Before the shrine of his honorable ancestors: Mr. Hideki Katsamura. In his right hand the necessary knife. About his body the correct silk-strictly, dacron-robe. No respectable alternative, following announcement of suit impending from California where Mr. R.

Bamberley had so much difficulty with water-purifiers. Also in Colorado, Illinois, New York and Texas.

Place to aim for would be site of ulcer reputed doctor, friend of family, warned yesterday will perforate and cause marked physiological mishap within short time.

In company of ancestors conceivably not burdened with ulcerable intestines.

Arriegas! That name is one in our minds with those of
Guevara, Uñil, and other great heroes of the continuing
revolution, struck down by the foul agents of the imperialist
conspiracy!

OWING TO THE INDISPOSITION OF PROFESSOR DUVAL

THE FOLLOWING CLASSES WILL NOT BE HELD, VIZ…

"Yes, this Is Moses Greenbriar…Oh, how is she?…Cystitis? Is that serious?"

…
ascribed to the continuing shortage of manpower. Many
local police forces
…

(The sound of creaking, as when a tree grows old and can no longer endure the thrashing of the gale.)

Of all the damned silly things, Carl thought, lying out on a hillside under bushes to wait for dark and his chance to elude the Colorado border patrols. Hiccoughs! And he couldn't stop them. They must have been going on for hours.

After being angry he had started to be afraid. They were making him so tired.

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"Doug?"

"Yes, honey?"

"I don't want to worry you, but I've tried to get through to Millicent at least a dozen times, and there's no reply. Do you think I ought to run over there and see how she is?"

DURING THE INDISPOSITION OF MR. BOLLINGER THE

FOLLOWING TEMPORARY RE-ALLOCATION OF

RESPONSIBILITIES…

"This will clear it up in a few days, Mr. Cowper. It's a very effective vermifuge, this. I imagine it must have been badly-cured pork that caused the trouble, I've had a number of cases of trichinosomiasis lately."

Owing to the indisposition of the Reverend Horace Kirk, joint
services will be held at
…

"Where the hell is that black bastard? He should have been here two hours ago! I can't hang around all night!"

"He called in to say his wife's died."

"Oh, Christ. Who's going to let people in the building, then? I can't do his tour as well as my own!"

"Mom?" And then, louder: "Mom!"

The kid advanced slowly on the still dark form in the untidy bed. A fly was buzzing against the shut window, trying to get in, against its own interests because there was a fly-strip hanging right over the bed. Also on the seat of the chair that doubled for a bedside table, there were the usual sleeping pills.

The boy said again, "Mom!" This time the word peaked into a cry.

Who takes advice from a garbage-man?

"Sorry, Mr. President, Mr. Penwarren isn't in today. His doctor told him to take the rest of the week off…No, nothing serious, I understand. Something he ate disagreed with him."

FOR SALE:
A substantial holding of 3241.5 acres down to
vegetables between Bockvitte and Candida, formerly operated by
Mr. Lent Walbridge, together with the farmhouse (18 rooms, 2

baths, good structural condition), various outbuildings, all
necessary plant and equipment including late-model tractors (6),
cultivating and spraying machinery
…

In a back room at a friend's pad: Ossie. He was making bombs.

Now and then he paused to scratch his crotch. He had urticaria, and so did the friend, and so did everybody around here this month. It was the in disease. But those mothers mustn't be allowed to get away with arresting Austin Train on a false charge in plain sight of sixty million people.

NOTICE OF POSTING:
Col. Rollo B. Saddler
From:
Wickens Army Base, Col.

To:
Active service in Honduras.

WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT your unit is reassigned to
…

Fritz and his friends were among the Sixty-Three. (One capitalizes the number now. Martyrs.)

"Mr. Steinitz? Sorry, he's not in the office. He's unwell. So's his deputy. We had this leak in the ventilating pipes, you know, and some of these here spores got loose and they breathed them in. Kind of nasty!"

To all patients of Dr. David Halpern:

Please note that until further notice your physician will be Dr.

Monty B. Murray, at the Flowerwood Memorial Hospital.

Shivering and coughing, Cindy allowed them to undress her. When they found the skull and crossbones on her body they told her to get out of the clinic before she was thrown out.

"You'll be up and about in a day or two, Hector my boy! And then we'll fix that devil Austin Train for good and all."

Chuck in prison hospital; his forged ID let him down at last. The male nurses making a lot of jokes about his being yellow.

Jaundice.

Dear Mrs. Barleyman: It is my sad duty to inform you that your
husband is unlikely to be well enough to return home in the
foreseeable future.

"Kitty Walsh? Sit down. I have bad news, but I'm afraid it's your own fault. You should never have let it go on so long. You have acute salpingitis-that's inflammation of the Fallopian tubes, from the ovaries to the womb. You'll never be able to have a baby."

"What you mean, bad news? Who'd want to bring a baby into this filthy world?"

From:
Dr. Elijah Prentiss

To:
Hospital director

Owing to this damned fibrositis, I shall not be able to…

Drew Henker and Ralph Henderson, like the majority of
Trainites, had willed their bodies for medical teaching purposes.

But they turned out not to be required by any hospital in the state.

All of them had as many gunshot wounds as they needed.

"Harold? Harold, where are you?…Oh, there." Painkillers had helped Denise's migraine, a little, and she'd dozed off. Waking in alarm she wondered what had become of the children. But it was okay; Josie was lying down, and Harold was sitting in the corner of his bedroom, quite quiet, his bad leg tucked under him as usual.

"Harold darling, it's about time you…Harold?"

He just sat there, staring at nothing.

He was the first.

is of a house: large, old, once very beautiful, built by someone whose imagination matched his skills. But he squandered his substance and fell on evil times. Sublet and then again sublet, the house became infested as though by vermin with occupants who felt no sense of attachment to its fabric, and were prepared to complain forever without themselves accepting responsibility for its upkeep.

Thus from a distance it may be seen that the roof is swaybacked like a standard whale. Certain of the slates were cracked in a long-ago hurricane and not repaired; under them wood has warped and split. A footstep, be it never so light-as of a toddling child-will cause the boards anywhere on any floor to shift on their joists, uttering creaks.

Also the basement is noisome. It has been flooded more than once.

The foundations have settled. A stench permeates the air, testimony to generations of drunks who pissed where the need overtook them.

There is much woodworm. Closets and cupboards have been shut for years because inside there are the fruiting bodies of the dry-rot fungus, and they stink. The grand staircase is missing a tread about halfway to the noble gallery encircling the entrance hall. One or two of the ancestral portraits remain, but not many; the majority have been sold off, along with the marble statues that once graced the front steps. The coach-house is dank and affords crowded lodging for a family of mentally sub-normal children, orphaned, half-clad, filthy and incestuous.

There are fleas.

The lawn is covered with wind-blown rubbish. The goldfish that used to dart among the lily-pads in the ornamental pond were seen to float, belly-up and bloated, one spring following a winter of hard frosts; now they are gone. The graveled driveway is obscured with dandelions and docks. The gates at the end of it have been adrift from their hinges for far longer than anyone can remember, half rusted through. So too the doors within the house, if they haven't been chopped into firewood.

More than half the windows have been broken, and hardly any have been made good. The rest are blocked with rags, or have had bits of cardboard tacked over them.

In the least damaged wing the owner, in an alcoholic haze, conducts delightful conversations with imaginary ambassadors and dukes.

Meantime, those of the other inhabitants who know how to write pen endless letters to the government, demanding that someone come and fix the drains.

Later, they mapped the earliest cases on the western side of Denver, around Arvada, Wheatridge, Lakewood and other districts which had exploded during the past few years. To meet an almost doubled demand for water, which Denver was already sucking from a vast area of thousands of square miles by a piping system as complex and random-seeming as the taproots of a tree, the lakes and reservoirs were no longer adequate: Ralston, Cross, Granby, Carter, Lonetree, Horsetooth…

So they had drilled, and sunk pipes to deep porous strata, and moreover carved great gashes into the rock of the mountains to expose the edges of those strata. The principle was this: when the snow melts, vast quantities of water run off and go to waste. If we draw on the water-table under the mountains, thus making room for more, we must arrange that every spring melting snow will soak into the porous rock and replenish the supply.

It had been new last year. It had worked fairly well, bar the teething troubles which occurred when one of the newly-tapped aquifers proved to be contaminated with sewage. That led to the issuing of don't-drink notices now and then. There had been a few complaints, too, that Boulder Creek and the Thompson and Bear Creek had been even lower this summer than they should have been-but those came only from people with long memories, not from the wealthy new arrivals who had abandoned the old boom state of California for the new boom state of Colorado. Now, today…