The Sheep Look Up

by John Brunner

“You bastard,” she said. “You smug pompous devil. You liar. You filthy dishonest old man. You put the poison in the world, you and your generation. You crippled my children. You made sure they’d never eat clean food, drink pure water, breathe sweet air. And when someone comes to you for help you turn your back.”

Even this far from shore, the night stank. The sea moved lazily, its embryo waves aborted before cresting by the layer of oily residues surrounding the hull, impermeable as sheet plastic: a mixture of detergents, sewage, industrial chemicals and the microscopic cellulose fibers due to toilet paper and newsprint. There was no sound of fish breaking surface. There were no fish.

“What kind of future do we have, Zena? A few thousand of us living underground in air-conditioned caves, fed from hydroponics plants like Bamberley’s? While the rest of our descendants grub around on the poisoned surface, their kids sickly and crippled, worse off than Bushmen after centuries of proud civilization?”

The government couldn’t go on forever bailing out mismanaged giant corporations, even though it was their own supporters, people who ranted against “UN meddling” and “creeping socialism,” who yelled the loudest for Federal aid when they got into a mess.

Who’s going to be sane in this country when you know every breath you draw, every glass you fill with water, every swim you take in the river, every meal you eat, is killing you? And you know why, and you know who’s doing it to you, and you can’t get back at the mothers.”

“I don’t want to die, baby. But I can’t stand having to live. I want to tear those stinking buggers limb from limb. I want to gouge out their eyes. I want to stuff their mouths with their own shit. I want to pull their guts out their ass, inch by inch, and wind ’em around their throats until they choke. I want to be so crazy-mad I can think of the things they deserve to have done to them! Now maybe you understand!”

Their attitude seemed to be, “Well, it didn’t work last time but it damned well should have done, so we’ll do it again!”

It was as though the public was taking the stand which came handiest, just so long as there was a stand to be taken that put an end to bumbling along from day to day.

All the water filthy—like that.” She pointed. “All the ground full of chemicals. The air thick with fumes. And not one friend anywhere that I could trust, who’d tell me how to stay alive.”

People are actually afraid to be interested, because they suspect—I think rightly—that we’ll find if we dig deep enough that we’ve gone so far beyond the limits of what the planet will tolerate that only a major catastrophe which cuts back both our population and our ability to interfere with the natural biocycle would offer a chance of survival.