The Eskimo Invasion

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was a happy scene . . .
The winter wastes; the igloos;
cheerful, laughing, roly-poly faces
-- his friends, the Eskimos -- the
gentlest, most warm-hearted peo-
ple in the world.
And they
were
cheerful, laughing,
gentle, and warm-hearted.
And busy, active, playful.
In fact, when Dr. West tried to
take a census, he couldn't be sure
that he hadn't counted the same
ones several times over.
Or
had
he?
And if not, how could they all be
so very young? Where had they
all come from?
But it was still a happy scene.
Then . . .
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$ .75 each
All available from Ballantine Books: To order by mail or
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101 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10003

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright © 1967 by John Hayden Howard

 

First Edition: November, 1967

 

 

Manufactured in the United States of America

 

 

BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC.

 

101 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To Frederik Pohl

 

 

Human enzyme for writers

 

Editor of GALAXY Science Fiction Magazine

 

 

*

 

 

Definition of an enzyme:

 

A complex organic substance that accelerates

 

(catalyzes) specific transformations of material

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONTENTS

 

 

1. Love Is the Navel

 

2 Polar Bear!

 

3. Who Is More Human?

 

4. Berkeley Campus, 1990

 

5. The Spray Cans of Death

 

6. The Modern Penitentiary

 

7. Air Force Versus CIA

 

8. Our Man in Peking

 

9. Underground Dynasty

 

10. The Purpose of Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The

 

 

Eskimo

 

 

Invasion

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. LOVE IS THE NAVEL

 

 

Feeling high with freedom, he was Dr. Joe West.

 

 

Like Icarus with aluminum wings, he thought quickly as laughter, his propjet
engine singing.

 

 

Through the slanting Arctic sky, he flew the old de Havilland Turbo-Beaver
as if he were the pilot. Over the ice on Franklin Strait he raced the
shadow of this ski-plane.

 

 

Wryly grinning, he blinked at the glaring summer ice. Even this near
the North Magnetic Pole the sea ice was breaking up like a psychedelic
checkerboard. "Too late for a ski landing, too early for pontoons."

 

 

Ahead, ankle-deep in cracked ice rose the cliffs of what was supposed
to be the Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary.

 

 

Welcome to Canada's living musuem, he thought sardonically, hoping the
monstrous radar dome on the other side of the Boothia Peninsula was
asleep. He'd been warned that what crouched beside that main Guard
Station was one ancient F-111B swing-wing jet fighter on a steam
catapult. Trespassers will be violated, Dr. West thought, his grin
narrowing. But catch me first.

 

 

Instead of blundering north from Hudson Bay, be had chartered this
bush plane from a more devious distance. Fifteen hundred miles away in
Yeflowknife he had begun his trip. Laughing, with his normally introverted
personality turned inside out, last night in the Yellowknife airtel he'd
been able to swing with his first really satisfactory sexual happening
in nearly two years, and he knew why.

 

 

The world's most hopeless problem had been yanked from his shoulders in
Berkeley. This month he'd been asked to resign as Director of Oriental
Population Problems Research. Pushed into his sabbatical year with pay,
he was trying to enjoy what he couldn't forget. Through the shrill
singing of the propjet he raised his angry baritone:

 

 

Pent-agon from whom all blessings flow,
Praise Pentagon plans from here below.
Praise them, all ye pro-fess-ors.
Or lose your grants to younger whores.

 

 

He was an older thirty-four. The worst of it was, he couldn't even
explain to Phyliss what was happening.
I'm hooked by the National
Security Act. My mouth would be a traitor to my country.

 

 

From the nesting cliffs rose dark-winged swarms. Naturally these
isolated generations of cormorants no longer are accustomed to planes,
he thought. But he was startled when something smacked against the
aluminum wing, leaving a bloody streak.

 

 

"I'll take 'er!" the pilot shouted, violently awakening from his long
forty winks.

 

 

In the bar in Yellowknife, the semilegal bush pilot had astounded Dr. West
by asking a gigantic charter fee for this flight. "Me aircraft's me life!
If we're arrested, I shan't mind jail for violating the Eskimo Cultural
Sanctuary. It's the confiscation of me Turbo-Beaver! Ten years I've
been scrimping."

 

 

A former R.A.F. ground crewman, he'd confided he left a wife and her mother
in England's marmalade Newest Town ten years ago. Enjoying free transport
to Canada, he'd discovered he was only another English-speaking statistic
in the language race against the French-Canadians, as he shivered through
ten winters of commercial net fishing through the ice on Great Slave Lake.
"Ten years of me life to buy this aircraft and fly."

 

 

As if fearing cormorants more than radar, the pilot lifted his pricelessly
antique Turbo-Beaver high above the cliffs. "Which direction -- we search --
for the 'skimos?"

 

 

Peering down, Dr. West grinned with excitement.
No one's had a legal look
at these people for twenty years.

 

 

Barren hills protruded from muskeg still sparkling with snow. The Boothia
Peninsula wrinkled south over the horizon. Larger than Vermont and 2,000
miles nearer the North Pole, it appeared empty of men.

 

 

As the plane banked, Dr. West saw flocks of geese rippling north. He looked
north at the glint of ice still blocking Bellot Strait, that historically
futile Northwest Passage. With awe, he saw these geese were flying north
of the northernmost promontory of continental North America.

 

 

Beyond sprawled the hazy hump of Somerset Island, larger than New Jersey,
entombed in permafrost. The old buildings at Fort Ross had been removed
twenty years ago when this vast Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary was voted by
the Canadian Parliament. Dr. West visualized north of Somerset Island
another five hundred miles of Sanctuary ice embedded with other islands of
diminishing life extending into the Arctic Ocean where ancient ice curved
over the world fifteen hundred miles toward the dim coast of Russia.

 

 

"Search south," Dr. West shouted through the whining of the propjet engine,
"south along this west coast of Boothia."

 

 

"If any are still alive after twenty years," the pilot shouted. "Look for
safer ice for us. Me aircraft needs to set down to refuel herself."

 

 

Dr. West stared down at glaring ice crisscrossed by pressure ridges.
For abrupt stops? Against the back of his neck he imagined the hurtling
fifty-five gallon drums of jet fuel. Massed behind him in the fuselage,
those heavy drums of extra fuel seemed so flimsily tied. Avalanche, he
thought. Funeral pyre. The reason
he
was here instead of those eager
ethnologists and demographers from McGill University no longer was so
laughably --

 

 

"Big dark spot ahead," the pilot shouted, "on that rocky point."

 

 

Dr. West stared ahead at the rocky Jeffersonian profile of the point. On
its chin, on the broadest ledge above the sea, he saw the dark indentation
in the rock. As the aircraft approached and the ledge grew, he realized how
huge it was.

 

 

"Too big for a campfire scar," the pilot shouted. "You think -- something
from the old days? Your government was setting up radar installations
all over the North like pimples then. Maybe a supply plane crashed.
But I can't see wreckage."

 

 

"No airplane would smash a pit that big in solid rock." Dr. West imagined
it was some sort of natural phenomenon, perhaps a dark extrusion of soft
volcanic material which had eroded back, leaving this shallow crater.
But geology isn't my specialty. Nor were bombs, but Dr. West visualized
a tactical atomic weapon being tested here. Perhaps a meteor had blasted
this oval scar in solid rock. He even imagined another huge Mars rocket
rising from Russia, capitalistically malfunctioning and falling back
here with a tremendous blast, and terrified Eskimos fleeing, trying to
break out of the Sanctuary. "Crater's probably been here for thousands
of years. Keep flying south."

 

 

South was by eyeball and gyrocompass. In the aircraft, the magnetic
compass revolved and twitched. Dr. West thought the North Magnetic
Pole was supposed to be in or near the Boothia Peninsula this year.
To the disgust of cartographers, the Magnetic Pole shifted erratically
through the years as if following some mysterious drifting within the
Earth's core.

 

 

The next rocky point, the next ice-choked bay, the next promontory showed
no evidence of Eskimo occupancy. But dark leads of open water radiated
outward from the promontory, a good place for seal hunting, Dr. West
thought. In his eiderdown parka was his copy of the hurried census the
McGill University ethnologists had taken twenty-one years ago while the
cultural sanctuary concept was being debated in Parliament. The McGill
census had counted 112 Eskimos. The next year, Hans Suxbey as first and
only Director of the Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary had not permitted his
former colleagues to return. For twenty years Hans Suxbey had battled
to keep out all whitemen's cultural influences.

 

 

"We won't find nobody alive," the pilot shouted. "Without their Family
Allowances, without kerosene or rubber boots or ammunition all those
'skimos have starved."

 

 

"I see them! At the head of this bay on the river flats, their tents."
Dr. West shouted with excitement: "Thirty or forty tents!"

 

 

This was a surprisingly dense concentration of Eskimos in one spot, he
thought. Since prehistoric Eskimo hunters were able to support only a few
children, probably there wouldn't be more than three children per tent,
plus the man and wife, plus an occasional old person. He estimated an
average of five Eskimos per tent. "At least 150 Eskimos. Perhaps they
all gathered at this one river to wait for the summer run of char."

 

 

"Shore ice looks too broken for us to land -- safely."

 

 

"Fly on down the coast." Dr. West thought this might be his only chance
to scout the Boothia Peninsula from the air. "There may be other camps."

 

 

But the pilot circled. "Better to make me first landing attempts here --
while I know I've plenty of fuel to lift her and try again."

 

 

The pilot kept circling the aircraft farther and farther from shore.
"Better ice out here." He flew a downwind leg. On the base leg he lowered
the flaps to 50 degrees. Turning into the wind the Turbo-Beaver sank down
at eighty mph toward the ice, while Dr. West hunched forward as if he
could duck all those fuel drums stacked behind him in the fuselage.