The Sheep Look Up (5 page)

Quarrey:
Particle precipitation. I'm currently heading a research project designing more compact and efficient filters.

Page:
For what-cars?

Quarrey:
Oh yes. And buses, and factories too. But mainly for aircraft cabins. We have a commission from a major airline to try and improve cabin air at high altitude. On the most traveled routes the air is so full of exhaust fumes from other planes, passengers get airsick even on a dead calm day-
especially
on a dead calm day, because it takes longer for the fumes to disperse.

Page:
So you had to start by analyzing what you needed to filter out, right?

Quarrey:
Precisely. I designed a gadget to be mounted on the wing of a plane and catch the contaminants on little sticky plates-I have one here, I don't know if your viewers can see it clearly…Yes? Fine.

Well, each unit has fifty of these plates, time-switched to collect samples at various stages of a journey. And by plotting the results on a map I've been able to pin down-like you said-factory-smoke from New Jersey over nearly two thousand miles.

Page:
Lots of people argue that can't be done with the accuracy you claim.

Quarrey:
I wish the people who say that would take the trouble to find out what my equipment is capable of.

Page:
Now this is all very disturbing, isn't it? Most people have the impression that since the passage of the Environment Acts things have taken a turn for the better.

Quarrey:
I'm afraid this seems to be-uh-an optical illusion, so to speak.

For one thing, the Acts don't have enough teeth. One can apply for all kinds of postponements, exemptions, stays of execution, and of course companies which would have their profits shaved by complying with the new regulations use every possible means to evade them. And the other point is that we aren't being as watchful as we used to be. There was a brief flurry of anxiety a few years ago, and the Environment Acts were introduced, as you said, and ever since then we've been sitting back assuming the situation was being taken care of, although in fact it isn't.

Page:
I see. Now what do you say to people who maintain that publicizing these allegations of yours is-well, not in the best interests of this country?

Quarrey:
You don't serve your country by sweeping unpleasant facts under the carpet. We're not exactly the most popular nation in the world right now, and my view is that we ought to put a stop right away to anything that's apt to make us even less well liked.

Page:
I guess there could be something in that. Well, thanks for coming and talking to us, Lucas. Now, right after this next break for station identification…

IN SPITE OF HAVING CHARITY A MAN LIKE

"I guess the nearest analogy would be with cheese," said Mr.

Bamberley. To show he was paying attention Hugh Pettingill gave a nod. He was twenty, dark-haired, brown-eyed, with a permanently bad-tempered set to his face-pouting mouth, narrowed eyes, prematurely creased forehead. That had been stamped on him during the bad years from fourteen to nineteen. Allegedly this was the first of many good years he was currently living through, and he was fair-minded enough to expose himself to the possibility of being convinced.

This had started with an argument concerning his future. During it he had said something to the effect that the rich industrial countries were ruining the planet, and he was determined never to have anything to do with commerce, or technology, or the armed forces for which Mr.

Bamberley retained an archaic admiration. Whereupon: this instruction, too firmly phrased to be termed an invitation, to go on a guided tour of the hydroponics plant and find out how constructively technology might be applied.

"I don't see why we shouldn't improve on nature!" Mr. Bamberley had chuckled.

Hugh had kept his counter to himself: "So what has to happen before you realize you haven't?"

Portly, but muscular, Mr. Bamberley strode along the steel walkway that spined the roof of the factory, his arms shooting to left and right as he indicated the various stages through which the hydroponically-grown cassava they started with had to pass before it emerged as the end product, "Nutripon." There was a vaguely yeasty smell under the huge semi-transparent dome, as though a baker's shop had been taken over by oil technicians.

And in some senses that was an apt comparison. The Bamberley fortune had been made in oil, though that was two generations back and neither this Mr. Bamberley-whose Christian name was Jacob but who preferred to be called Jack-nor his younger brother Roland had ever stumped around in the slush below a derrick. The fortune had long ago grown to the point where it was not only self-supporting but capable of fission, like an amoeba. Roland's portion was his own, greedily clung to, and destined to descend to his only son Hector (whom Hugh regarded on the strength of their sole meeting as a cotton-wool-wrapped snob…but that couldn't be his fault at fifteen, must be his father's); Jacob had vested his in the Bamberley Trust Corporation twenty years ago, since when it had multiplied cancerously.

Hugh had no idea how many people were involved in cultivating the funds of the Trust, since he had never been to the New York office where its tenders hung out, but he pictured a blurred group of several hundred pruning, manuring, watering. The horticultural images came readily to hand because his adopted father had turned the former family ranch, here in Colorado, into one of the finest botanical gardens in the country. All that had taken on reality in his mind, however, as far as the Trust was concerned, was the central fact that the sum was now so vast, Jacob Bamberley could afford to run this, the world's largest hydroponics factory, as a charitable undertaking. Employing six hundred people, it sold its product at cost and sometimes below, and every last ounce of what was made here was shipped abroad.

Lord Bountiful. Well, it was a better way to use inherited money than the one Roland had chosen, lavishing it all on yourself and your son so that he would never have to face the harsh real world…

"Cheese," Mr. Bamberley said again. They were overlooking a number of perfectly round vats in which something that distantly resembled spaghetti was being churned in a clear steaming liquid. A masked man in a sterile coverall was taking samples from the vats with a long ladle.

"You give it some kind of chemical treatment here?" Hugh ventured.

He hoped this wasn't going to drag on too long; he'd had diarrhea this morning and his stomach was grumbling again.

"Minor correction," Mr. Bamberley said, eyes twinkling. "

'Chemical' is full of wrong associations. Cassava is tricky to handle, though, because its rind contains some highly poisonous compounds.

Still, there's nothing extraordinary about a plant some bits of which are safe to eat and other bits of which are not. Probably you can think of other examples?"

Hugh repressed a sigh. He had never said so outright, being far too conscious of the obligations he owed to Jack (orphaned at fourteen in an urban insurrection, dumped in an adolescents' hostel, picked apparently at random to be added to this plump smiling man's growing family of adopted sons: so far, eight), but there were times when he found his habit of asking this land of question irritating. It was the mannerism of a poor teacher who had grasped the point about making children find out for themselves but not the technique of making them want to ask suitable questions.

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

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…

But we can't do it without your help. Think of us now.

Remember us in your will. Give generously to the world's
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*All donations wholly tax-deductible.

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.