The Eskimo Invasion (12 page)

, Dr. West thought desperately. "Help -- " From his
swollen throat his voice squeezed out so distantly it must be nearly
inaudible.

 

 

"This good man. You will like us," Edwardluk's Eskimo voice was murmuring
hopefully. "West says much food here. Dog bite him. Mad dog bite his leg.
This person drag him on little sled that many sleeps." Edwardluk must be
holding up stubby fingers, still trying to communicate. "Dogs drown. This
person drag him all the way across."

 

 

"Sea ice over there?" The halting voice of the old Guard was attempting
to reply in Eskimo as if he'd spent twenty years cooped in the Station
listening to language records, never allowed to speak to an Eskimo.
"Big travel. Bad ice." There was respect in the Guard's voice.
"You long-traveling hunter!"

 

 

Perhaps they were shaking hands.

 

 

Edwardluk giggled with embarrassment. "Pulled whiteman long way. Children
hungry. He say much food here."

 

 

There was an awkward silence. Already the Guard grievously had sinned
by allowing the Eskimo inside the Station. Now he was being asked to
further violate the purpose of the Sanctuary by giving the Eskimos food.

 

 

In the silence, Edwardluk laughed in confusion. "Will you help us?
Many-many people hungry!" Edwardluk must be spreading his short arms.
"Many people. Here his marker-book."

 

 

Muttering, the Guard must be turning the pages. "I'll be damned!"

 

 

"He count people. Say not enough seals," Edwardluk expounded. "He count
babies. He say more hungry quick."

 

 

"The Director should make his own survey," the Guard's voice blurted
in English. "This smuggler must be crazy. He's counted too many children.
Can't be this many until the end of the
second
Twenty-Year Plan."

 

 

"From now is twenty years," the accented younger voice remarked almost
maliciously. "But we are not permitted close enough to count. These
Eskimos we know are too many already or they would not be starving."

 

 

"He say all whitemen love us. We help him," Edwardluk's voice swept on
hopefully. "All this way pulling sled like dog."

 

 

"What does he say?"

 

 

"He says," the Guard's tired old voice muttered in English, "we'll have to
crank up the copter more often this winter to chase them back."

 

 

"Of their starvation I worry," the young voice blurted. "Of other guards
who obeyed orders I think. My grossvater -- "

 

 

"You can think," the old Guard's voice interrupted, "because you're as
good as out. Your contract won't be renewed anyway, so you don't have
to hang on for your pension."

 

 

"But if the Director finds out of the whale last winter which you --
we drove ashore," the young voice thrust slyly as if he were leading
toward something, "he will cut from his budget you and your pension,
kaput! -- Already didn't Suxbey say the budget is too small to give you
medical leave this year?"

 

 

"You talk about the whale, and you'll have an accident!"

 

 

"No, no, me you misunderstand. No one would know about us except the
producer. Think of this Eskimo smiling on the CBC all over Canada,
tears in his eyes, children starving."

 

 

"And wreck the Sanctuary before I get my pension?"

 

 

"The producer said I -- we would receive a percentage -- "

 

 

"To help sink Mr. Suxbey after twenty years?"

 

 

"But this trespasser, lying here, if he talks to the press, which he
will, perhaps for his own percentage, he or the next man will finish
the wreck of the Sanctuary. -- Your pension, kaput! My producer is a
generous man. But you are in command here. You must decide -- "

 

 

"Simple. I'm radioing the Director for instructions," the old Guard wheezed.

 

 

"Then hurry," the young voice retorted, "if out of life that is all you
want. This trespasser anyway is dying."

 

 

In terror, Dr. West tried to sit up. In his delirium he tried to speak,
as Edwardluk's face appeared pleading as if from the TV screens. "Our babies
starving." As if in a dream, Dr. West saw food packages pouring from
shimmering aircraft and there were always more Eskimos and not enough
packages. Dark faces were springing up in the UN General Assembly of his
delirium, accusing. Canada's attempted birth limitation of the Eskimos
was pushing the angry darker peoples of the world up in the UN shouting:
"Racial sterilization! Capitalist genocide!"

 

 

The angry roaring was huge aircraft attacking from all over the world
with more food, more tents. Like a distant dream, the Eskimos were
spreading over his delirium.

 

 

"Eh-eh, we fill world," Edwardluk had explained a week ago with lovable
simplicity, "until bear comes."

 

 

Death gnawed Dr. West's leg, and he tried to sit up while Edwardluk's
gentle hands held him down.

 

 

"Must speak," Dr. West gasped, thinking:
I must live. I want so much
to live.
"I must speak."

 

 

"You sleep now," Edwardluk was whispering, holding him down. "He come -- "

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. WHO IS MORE HUMAN?

 

 

The moaning sound of the airplane enclosing him bumped down. He was carried
out feet first.

 

 

Under a modern surgical-green ceiling he lay in delirium as a blinding
light moved above him and a phantom bear's teeth gnawed his leg.
"Scalpel. Suture," a disembodied voice snapped, and years later another
voice remarked: "They say a sled dog did this to his leg?"

 

 

Writhing feverishly, Dr. West heard the savage howl of a diesel train.
With a revolving clarity he decided he must be a thousand miles south
of Boothia in the city of Churchill on Hudson Bay at the northern end
of the railroad. He opened his eyes.

 

 

Now he seemed to be lying in an Intensive Care room. There was an oddly
familiar wheezing sound.

 

 

"Welcome to Ottawa, sir." On the other bed lounged the blue-and-white
uniform of a Cultural Sanctuary Guard.

 

 

"Ottawa?" Dr. West blurted in surprise. "Ottawa?"

 

 

"Ottawa?" the leathery face of the Cultural Sanctuary Guard mimicked.
"Because you're from the States, sir, you've not bothered to learn
we Canadians have a capital too?" The Guard's sarcastic smile widened
in triumph. "Welcome to the New Ottawa Reformation Center."

 

 

"My trial! When was my trial?"

 

 

"I expect you're looking forward to the Pasteur injections for rabies, sir?
They stick the needle in your stomach and -- "

 

 

"I'm in prison without a trial!"

 

 

"No, sir. This is the finest hospital in Canada. For serious illness,
sir, the Cultural Sanctuary always uses this hospital. The prison is
outside. Around us."

 

 

Dr. West tried to sit up, entangled in drainage tubes, and in wires
presumably transmitting his heartbeat and blood pressure to the monitor
beside his bed.

 

 

The nurse materialized through the revolving one-way glass wall.
"You're disturbing the patient."

 

 

"Never did a thing," the Cultural Sanctuary Guard retorted weakly,
his leathery old face seeming out of place in this hospital room 2000 miles
south of the Boothia Peninsula, and he slumped back on his own bed, wheezing.

 

 

"You've been smoking again," she sniffed. "I can smell it. The doctor
should take away your uniform. In a hospital gown, you should be guarding
this gentleman. From your bed, you should be -- "

 

 

"Pranging you!"

 

 

"You old dreamer. Is this how you earned your pay in your Cultural Sanctuary?
Lying around boasting and smoking. Going outside to take away transistor
radios from poor little Eskimos. Or stealing their fishhooks. Or shooting
down newspaper gentlemen." She winked at Dr. West inaccurately.

 

 

"I know which party you belong to -- my lass," the Cultural Sanctuary
Guard's voice wheezed. "Asinine women like you think they understand
more than important scientists and statesmen. Your asinine party would
solve Canada's problems with her unprepared minorities by making the
Eskimos disappear. We'll save a few Eskimos from your melting pot."

 

 

"Please stop disturbing the patient." She pressed her cool hand on Dr. West's
forehead between his taped-on encephalogram sensors and winked at him.

 

 

 

 

One day when the Guard was asleep, she asked Dr. West if Marthalik was
his wife.

 

 

"Marthalik?" Dr. West realized he must have done a lot of talking those
first days while he was delirious. "Yes, my wife."

 

 

He lay trapped in the hospital while they attempted massive repairs of
his leg, while simultaneously torturing him with Pasteur injections.
"It was a bear that bit me, not a mad dog," he protested, but he had to
admit to himself that perhaps the bear
had
been rabid and this was why
it had acted so strangely.

 

 

Like a fellow prisoner, the Cultural Sanctuary Guard reclined on the
other bed, fully uniformed, setting down his oxygen mask. "Don't plan
to escape, lad, while I'm in the can. If you pull off your wires, the
monitor will buzz the nurse."

 

 

She might be watching him through the one-way glass wall, Dr. West knew.
Because his room was narrower at that end, with an oddly trapezoidal
pie shape, he deduced these Intensive Care rooms were arranged around a
central nursing station but located in a square building. The center was
where the warning lights and sensor readout panels and computer would
be located, he thought, wondering how to get out. He saw the walls
and floor of his room had removable vinyl covering to help maintain
semi-sterility. Whenever his door opened, he could feel air from his
room flow outward, evidently an air pressure barrier against outside
bacteria. Although the Cultural Sanctuary Guard was a minimum care
patient, the hospital staff never allowed the Cultural Guard outside to
carry in new bacteria.

 

 

One day, while the glass wall was opening, Dr. West glimpsed a nurse at
the central console removing a bottle from a pneumatic tube which must
extend down to the pharmacy. He supposed the computerized console had the
medication schedules of the patients dialed into it by the doctors.
On schedule it would order the medical dosages from the pharmaceutical
computer downstairs But there were no stairs. To escape from the ward
he would need to use the elevator.

 

 

Trapped with his leg in an antigangrene hip boot pulsating, Dr. West had
to envy the medical technology in this Canadian hospital. Everything
expensive that they talked about in the States, and rarely installed,
was here: patient self-service beds, liquid residue diets, electrocephalic
sleeping helmets, old-pro nurses.

 

 

"You have a visitor." She glowered at the tweedy bacteria carrier,
who extended toward Dr. West an unsterile and leathery hand.

 

 

It was a hard grip the wizened man had, a commanding gaze. The nurse
departed. The Cultural Sanctuary Guard, who had been standing at
attention, obediently departed as if he had heard an order from this
grimly smiling man.

 

 

"Dr. West, I've been most interested by your dossier -- your, shall we
say, checkered career," Hans Suxbey said. "As Director of the Eskimo
Cultural Sanctuary, I've often imagined how it would feel to be --
fired. I assume your resignation was not a, shall we say, cover. You
weren't sent into my Sanctuary by that Oriental Population Problems
Research Project from which you were fired. The U.S. Defense Department
surely can't be interested in my innocent Eskimos."

 

 

Dr. West smiled like a shield. "I'm up here on my sabbatical, on University
of California money, not Defense Department money. Either press legal charges
against me or let me go."

 

 

"Nothing would give me greater pleasure than for your medical treatment to
be completed, so you can depart for the States. You raved so deliriously
on the various aircraft which transported you here from Boothia, that
your accidental crash and heroic rescue by one of my Eskimos earned
thirty seconds on the TV news. But you've been forgotten, replaced by
more important news such as Ottawa's increasing lead over San Francisco
in the new International Hockey League."

 

 

"What crash? What happened to my pilot?"

 

 

"The English are abominable pilots. Before our aircraft could intercept
him, he crashed. So much open water in Victoria Strait."

 

 

"Your F-111 forced him down or shot him down?"

 

 

"Of course not," Hans Suxbey laughed. "But it would have been better
for all concerned if our radar had noticed his aircraft on the way
into the Sanctuary, while you still were in the aircraft. Even now,
your distraught wife is lurking outside the pris -- the hospital."

 

 

"My wife?"

 

 

"So she's not," Hans Suxbey laughed. "I thought any woman who carries
her marriage license in her purse must have an ulterior motive. Either
she's the most persistent of the reporters or she's been sent by the
McGill University crowd who put you up to this."

 

 

Dr. West said nothing, wondering if the Director's attaché case contained
a tape recorder.