The Sheep Look Up

by John Brunner

Praise be, if Anyone is listening, for those who struggle to save us from the consequences of our own mad cleverness.

Oh, God! No, there can’t be a god. At least none that I want to believe in. I won’t accept a god who’d let a mother find her baby dead on her hip when there was food in her hand that might have saved it!

And all this because a sea had died which she had never seen …

“You and your ancestors treated the world like a fucking great toilet bowl. You shat in it and boasted about the mess you’d made. And now it’s full and overflowing, and you’re fat and happy and black kids are going crazy to keep you rich. Goodbye!”

And, on the slant roof of the house, a crash, and a wave of fire that splashed, and soaked their clothes, and clung to their skins, and killed them screaming. It was very good napalm, the best American brand, made by Bamberley Oil.

“But we’re all stuck on this same ball of mud, aren’t we?”

“That is the worst thing they have done to you: damaged

your intelligence. And it’s small consolation that now they are doing it to themselves. “Those charges that the intelligence of people in this country is being undermined by pollution are all true—if they weren’t, do you think I’d be here, the wrong man, the man who didn’t kidnap Hector Bamberley? Who could have been so silly?” There was