The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner Read Free Book Online Page A

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