The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner Page B

gave it back. “You tell your mom she makes great soup, okay?” he said, and clapped the boy’s shoulder. At the back of his mind he was thinking about Jeannie; she being so much lighter than he, their kids ought to come out just about the same shade as this boy here. If only they were equally bright, equally healthy ...
    “Sure will,” the boy said, and added, struck by a thought, “Say, you need anyone else up here? You’re working pretty much on your own, aren’t you?”
    “Well, we have to spread out because there are so many places to dig,” Pete said. He was never at ease talking to children, having had problems when he was a kid himself. His father hadn’t died and made the papers, but simply vanished.
    “Well, there’s lots of us down by the ambulances.”
    “Us?”
    “Sure. We’re from the Trainite wat my dad used to run before he died. I’ll send someone up to help you—Harry, maybe. He’s big. What’s your name, so he’ll know who to come to?”
    “Uh ... I’m Pete. Pete Goddard.”
    “I’m Rick Jones. Okay, someone will be along in a minute!”
    “Hey!”
    But the kid had gone scrambling and leaping down the trenched mounds of snow. Pete reclaimed his shovel, alarmed. Only this morning at the wat he’d had to guard the occupants as they stood out in the cold while detectives searched for drugs. Having a Trainite partner him ...
    The hell with it. What mattered was to pull out any more poor bastards who might be buried under this load of white shit.

    It was okay. Harry wasn’t one of the people he’d met this morning. He wasn’t too much bigger than Pete, but he was fresher. He hardly said more than hello before he started shifting snow, and they concentrated on the job until they uncovered their first victim: dead, blue with cyanosis and cold. Stretcher-bearers came, and a young Air Force officer—they’d turned out the Academy, of course—took particulars of the ID in the man’s pocket. He was local. Pete had given him a parking ticket once. One of the stretcher-bearers had a transistor radio, and while it was in earshot it said something about Towerhill being declared a disaster zone.

    “First of many,” Harry muttered.
    “What?”
    “I said first of many. You don’t think this is the only avalanche they’re going to cause with their stinking SST’s, do you? The Swiss won’t let them overfly the country between October and May—said they’d shoot them down first. So did the Austrians.”
    Pete handed Harry his shovel. “Let’s dig,” he sighed.
    About ten minutes later it became clear what they’d got into at this spot: a whole collapsed room, if not a building. Uphill, a wall of rough stone had broken the worst impact of the avalanche, but it had shifted on its foundations and twisted into an irregular line of precariously poised fragments. Over that the roof-beams had folded, but not fallen, leaving a small vacant space in which—
    “Christ!” Harry said. “Alive!”
    Something moved feebly in darkness. White darkness. The snow had burst in through a window, fanned out on the floor.
    “Ah-yah-ahh!” The treble cry of a child.
    “Look out, you fucking idiot!” Pete roared as Harry made to drop his shovel and dive straight in under the arching timbers. He grabbed his arm.
    “What? That’s a kid! Get your hands off—!”
    “Look, look, look!” And Pete pointed to the huge trembling overhang of snow that had broken against the stone wall like a frozen wave. Because of their digging it loured above the space in which the child—children, he realized, hearing a second cry discord with the first—in which the children were trapped.
    “Ah ... Yeah.” Harry regained his self-possession and blinked down into the dark hollow. A bed, overset. A lot of snow. “See what you mean. We could bring that whole pile down on us. Got a flashlight?”
    “Loaned it to someone. Go get another. And lots of help. See, that beam?” Pete didn’t dare so much as touch