The Sheep Look Up Read Online Free PDF

might as well get used to it!”
    Reluctantly Leonard picked up his field kit and ducked into the downpour. His glasses blurred instantly, but his sight was too bad for him to discard them. Water trickling down his collar, he followed the line Williams had marked across the sodden ground.
    “Doesn’t matter where you look,” Williams said, stopping level with the nearest coffee plant. “You’ll find the buggers anywhere.”
    Compliantly Leonard began to trowel in the mud. He said after a pause, “You’re English, aren’t you, doctor?”
    “Welsh, actually.” In a frigid tone.
    “Do you mind if I ask what brought you here?”
    “A girl, if you really want to know.”
    “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
    “Pry? Of course not. But I’ll tell you anyway. She was the daughter of one of the embassy staff in London. Very beautiful. I was twenty-four, she was nineteen. But her people were Catholics from Comayagua, where they’re strict, and naturally they didn’t want her marrying a Methodist. So they shipped her home. I finished my studies, saving like mad to buy a passage here, thinking that if I could convince them I was serious ... Hell, I’d have converted if I’d had to!”
    Down there close to the scrawny root of the coffee plant: something wriggling. “And what happened?”
    “I got here and discovered she was dead.”
    “What?”
    “Typhus. It’s endemic. And this was 1949.”
    There seemed to be nothing else anyone could possibly say. Leonard dragged up a clod of dirt and broke it in his hands. Exposed, a frantic creature two inches long, at first glance not unlike an earthworm, but of a bluish-red color, with a slight thickening at one end and a few minute bristles, and writhing with more energy than any earthworm ever had.
    “Yet, you know, I’ve never regretted staying here. There has to be someone on the spot to help these people—it’s no use trying to do it all by remote control ... Ah, you got one of them, did you?” His tone reverted to normal. “Recognize it, by any chance? I can’t find a technical name for it in the literature. Of course my reference-books aren’t up to much. In Spanish it’s sotojuela, but around here they say jigra.”
    One-handed, leaving fingermarks of mud, Leonard extracted a test-tube from his kit and dropped the pest into it. He tried to examine it with his folding glass, but the rain splashed down too heavily.
    “If I could get a look at it under cover,” he muttered.
    There may be a roof in the village that isn’t leaking. May be ... And this is what the buggers do to the plants, see?” Williams pulled a coffee bush casually out of the ground. It offered no resistance. The stem was spongy with bore-holes and the foliage limp and sickly.
    “They attack corn and beans as well?” Leonard asked.
    “Haven’t found anything they won’t eat yet!”
    In the hole left by the uprooted plant, five or six of them squirming to hide.
    “And how long have they been a nuisance?”
    “They’ve always been a nuisance,” Williams said. “But until—oh, about the time they cleared this patch for coffee, you only found them in the forest, living off the underbrush. I didn’t see more than half a dozen the first ten years I spent at Guanagua. Then about two and a half years ago, boom!”
    Leonard straightened, his legs grateful to be released from stooping. “Well, there’s no doubt that this is an emergency, as you claimed. So I’ll apply for authorization to use high-strength insecticides, and then when we’ve—”
    “How long did you say you’d been with Globe Relief?”
    Leonard blinked at him. Suddenly he was unaccountably angry.
    “Who do you think this ground belongs to, anyway? We’re on the private estate of some high government muckamuck who can bend the law as much as he likes! This area’s been sprayed and soaked and saturated with insecticides!”
    From the direction of the village, walking very slowly, a straggling line of men, women