Free The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner Page B

when people had paid a hundred local francs for a rat, fifty for a handful of mealies, was seen snuffling the body of a child, and a tall black soldier broke its back with the butt of his carbine.
    “Shit! You see what that black mother did to that poor dog?”
    “What?”
    But the screen had switched to the wreckage of a plane.

    This was Towerhill, latest of the prosperous winter-sports resorts of Colorado, and they were in the Apennine Lodge, smartest and most expensive of its accommodations. Brand-new, the place struggled hard to appear old. Skis hung from plastic beams, a simulated log fire burned in a stone hearth. Beyond a double-glazed window taking up most of one wall powerful arc lights played on a magnificent dark-striped snow-slope running nearly to the crest of Mount Hawes. Until last year, although this town was barely fifty miles from Denver, the road had been bad and only a handful of visitors had chanced on it. The increasing tendency for people to take mountain vacations, however, since the sea had become too filthy to be tolerable, could not be ignored. The road now was excellent and the area had exploded. There were three ultramodern ski-lifts and a branch of Puritan Health Supermarkets. There were facilities for skijoring behind snowmobiles and Colorado Chemical Bank planned to double the size of its operation here. One could go skating and curling and American Express had taken up its option on some offices. Next year they promised a ski-jump of Olympic standard.

    On the screen a group of men, women and children were shown shivering outside a cluster of improbably-shaped buildings. They were poorly dressed but on average rather good-looking. Meantime police with dogs conducted a search.
    Oh. Trainites. What the hell?

    After his second drink Bill Chalmers was feeling better. It had been a filthy day: driving to Denver this morning over roads that had been ploughed and sanded but were still slithery; sweating out that awful lunch at the Masons’, aware of “an atmosphere” but unable to pin down the cause; breaking it up finally when their son Anton, six, had a row with the Mason kids aged five and four and ran away screaming ...
    But they were back safely, and he liked Towerhill: its air of affluence which was a snook cocked at the prophets of doom, its enclosing mountains, its unbelievably blessedly fresh air. One saw big-city visitors, their first day, going out in filtermasks, not convinced they were okay without them.
    The screen showed a map of Central America with an arrow pointing to somewhere, then photographs of two men, both white.
    “Tania!”
    “Yes, I’d love another,” his wife said, and went right on comparing symptoms with the lawyer’s wife from Oakland she’d met yesterday. “Now me, I had this funny rash, and a prickly feeling all over ...”
    Christ! Can’t anybody talk about anything these days except allergies and neuroses? Once a man could be satisfied to be a breadwinner. Now he has to be a medicine-winner as well. And it never does any good.
    “Yes, well!” the lawyer’s wife said. “Now I got this hot-and-cold feeling, and sometimes actual dizziness.”
    Abruptly he realized they were talking about pregnancy, and instead of fuming he found himself shivering. Of course he’d taken out abnormality insurance when Anton was on the way, but despite his position with Angel City it hadn’t come cheap, and when Anton had been safely delivered Tom Grey had told him just what odds they had been bucking. Words reheard in memory made him tremble: cystic fibrosis, phenylketonuria, hemophilia, hypothyroidism, mongolism, Tetralogy of Fallot, alexia, dichromatism ... A list that went on forever, as though it were a miracle anyone at all became a normal adult!
    It made one understand why Grey was a bachelor. He himself wouldn’t risk a second kid.

    The TV went over to sports results. For the first time several people paid it full attention.
    “Tania!”
    She finally turned.