The Eskimo Invasion (35 page)

 

 

The Tower Administratrix shook her head. "Look for a note," she said
sharply to Nona. "Suicide. A note."

 

 

On the coffee table lay a manila folder. Nona opened it. Empty. Swiftly
she looked around the suite.

 

 

Something white showed under the huge insulated cage and Nona knelt down,
reaching under. A single newspaper clipping had fallen behind the cage,
and her cold hand drew it out. "FURTHER ESKIMO INCREASE NOTED."

 

 

"You didn't smuggle this in, did you?" the Administratrix asked Nona.
"The Recreation Officer!" The Administratrix answered her own question
and turned back to the Medical Officer. "If people outside could bribe
the Recreation Officer so easily, how much easier to bribe the underpaid
orderlies in the hospital. You yourself determined that this student's
so-called appendicitis attack was feigned in order to get him out of my
Tower and into the hospital."

 

 

The Medical Officer shrugged. "He'll die here."

 

 

Nona's hand clamped on the Administratrix's arm. "You're not going to
let him die!"

 

 

"Is that a question? I'm sure it's not intended as an order," the
Administratrix replied. "Nona, this is my responsibility. I know you.
I know you're thinking somehow you failed him. You didn't. This man's urge
to escape was too strong. He has taken too big a gamble. He can't escape."

 

 

"You can't let him die," Nona repeated.

 

 

"The best guarded building outside of the Tower," the Administratrix
murmured, "is the Cold Room. There, no decision would be irrevocable.
It starts a new problem, but -- "

 

 

"That would be the place for him, the safest place." The Medical Officer
stared down at Dr. West. "He ignored my warning when I sent him back his
appendix in a bottle. Such powerful motivation is driving him. Alive,
conscious, he would try again to escape. I think we are agreed this student
has shown himself not amenable to therapeutic reformation. The Cold Room -- "

 

 

"But he's not an incorrigible psychopath," Nona protested. "He hasn't
attacked the staff." She turned from the Administratrix to confront the
Medical Officer. "You both want to evade -- "

 

 

"I'm wholly in agreement with the Administratrix," the Medical Officer
continued. "The man has shown himself to be dangerous, suicidal. No regard
for his own life. How much regard would you expect him to show for yours?"

 

 

"I believe he is essentially a good man, better than you," Nona retorted,
but they weren't listening.

 

 

"To preserve his life in the Cold Room," the Administratrix addressed the
Medical Officer, "I assume he should be cryofiled as quickly as possible.
The legal steps can be justified post-factum."

 

 

"Yes, before irreversible physical deterioration takes place," the Medical
Officer apologized in Nona's direction. "In five or ten years when we learn
how to thaw them out -- "

 

 

"You can't do this without a court hearing," Nona cried. "The two of you
standing there can't convict, sentence and execute him."

 

 

"Execute is an unfair word." Instead of growing angry, the Administratrix
put her arm around Nona. "It's not your fault. I'm sorry you're emotionally
involved with this man, but then you're emotionally involved with so many
of them. That's why you are so good."

 

 

"Please!" Nona stepped back.

 

 

"Nona, there's nothing you can do," the Medical Officer said. "Nona,
you still have five. Do your best for them."

 

 

"You damn weak bootlicker," Nona cried at him. "Would you tell that to a
mother whose baby has died? Would you say, so what? You still have five?"

 

 

"If you need to shout, Nona, do so at me," the Administratrix said,
lowering her head. "Forget that I am your superior. If you want to accuse
me, do so. It is I who must bear the responsibility."

 

 

"Please," Nona gasped.

 

 

"You did your best for him. You only had him -- was it two weeks?" The
Administratrix's hand closed around Nona's wrist. "Now go home, take the
rest of the day off, tomorrow off, all week off. You are our best. All I
can hire is an untrained substitute to take care of your students until
you return. Don't feel guilty about your absence."

 

 

Without looking at Dr. West's body, Nona walked out of the suite. She went
to her 11:00 to 12:00 man as if nothing had happened. The day, the night --

 

 

That night on TV a politician stated that the anticipated increase of
Eskimos would be a blessing. They could be trained as government nurses
and guards. Eskimos needed less pay from the taxpayers. Increase would
be good for Canada, which still had plenty of room. Nona could not sleep
remembering Dr. West.

 

 

In the morning when she entered the Tower, Nona went to the office of
the Administratrix.

 

 

"Nona, you're looking unwell." The Administratrix stood up behind her desk.

 

 

"I couldn't sleep, thinking he may have tricked us," Nona said slowly.
"How do you know the body in the bottle-drawer in the Cold Room is his?
Perhaps his real plan was a switch of bodies."

 

 

"Well, surely -- " the Administratrix blurted.

 

 

"The Cold Room is guarded," Nona pressed on: "the drawers are locked,
but last night who worked in the cryogenic preparation room; who prepared
the body?"

 

 

"I don't know. One of the orderlies!" The Administratrix grabbed the phone.

 

 

"I want to go with you to identify the body," Nona said.

 

 

The Cold Room consisted of tiers of numbered drawers containing huge metal
thermos bottles of liquid nitrogen maintained at minus 196 degrees centigrade.

 

 

As the Guard unlocked the drawer, Nona memorized the number. When she
looked down through the periscope at Dr. West's rock-hard white face,
Nona shivered. "Yes, that is the man."

 

 

Now she could tell exactly where he was.

 

 

That night in the monorail car, to her alarm the Man with the short haircut
was not there. The night before, still frantic from the terrible scene
beside Dr. West's body, she deliberately had sat down beside the
short-haircut Man. Surprised, he had seemed perceptibly disturbed,
trapped, hiding behind his newspaper while she told him she didn't want
money, she wanted Dr. West to be removed from the Cold Room.

 

 

"There are thousands of drawers in there," he had murmured. "Find out the
drawer number." And he had left the monorail car at the next stop.

 

 

Tonight he was not in the monorail car, nor waiting at her stop. As she
walked past the magazine rack and the soda fountain, a dark young man
tried to pick her up. She kept walking. "What is the number?" he was
murmuring.

 

 

She paused in the crowd by the bus stand. "I won't tell you the number
of his cryodrawer until you show proof," she said slowly, "that there
is someone qualified to bring him out of the Cold Room and then out of
his -- hibernation."

 

 

The dark young man seemed startled. "I'll find out," he said, and walked
away.

 

 

Nona watched him thread his way through the crowd into the icy night. Her
face felt old with determination. Dr. West or whoever he was -- the man
who built the tent with chair and blanket -- he was hers, still in her care.

 

 

Her jaw hardened. Her teeth felt as if they were about to crack. It was
even possible that these two men, short-haircut and dark young man,
were maneuvering to kill Dr. West. They might be some of those emotional
Canadians who waved SAVE OUR ESKIMOS signs and wanted to lynch Dr. West.
Or might be inadequate rescuers. She knew she must deal with them with
great caution.

 

 

As Nona stepped out into the razor-sharp Canadian night, the stars were
glittering like ice. She tipped her head high. Invisible up there, she knew
U.S. astronauts were supposed to be coasting on the long voyage to Mars,
sleeping all the way in their hibernation capsules.

 

 

At that moment Nona did not differentiate between their chemical hibernation
in which their bodies rested at 45 degrees, safely above freezing, and
Dr. West's totally different protoplasmic condition, frozen rock-hard
in liquid nitrogen, from which no man had been thawed without horribly
self-destroying rebirth defects.

 

 

"It truly is possible to rescue a man from hibernation," Nona murmured
in vaguely misplaced hope.

 

 

In the cold she hugged her arms across her body feeling hope as when
she had carried each of her unborn children.

 

 

Breathing hard, Nona stared in the direction of the New Ottawa Reformation
Center.

 

 

"You'll get out," she whispered. "I'll get you out."

 

 

 

 

Dr. West became aware that he was alive. Blindly engulfed in the prickling
of his spreading nervous system, he was aware of intensifying light. His
eyes must be open. Out there, a granulated blur moved, but Dr. West was
unable to move.

 

 

Totally paralyzed, he lay trapped within his body prison, increasingly
frantic as his consciousness increased, like a white mouse writhing faster
and faster within the prickly hot oven-cage which was his unconnected
body. From his eyeholes, his granulated vision signaled to his brain a
gridlike pattern. His memory darted. His consciousness steadied as the
wire grid reminded him of a shortwave heating grid he had noticed in
restaurants to cook huge roasts of beef evenly and almost instantaneously
from within. He was burning.

 

 

Failing to raise his head, he realized his chest was encased in a thoracic
respirator. Into his neck a tube was gurgling. Two tubes extended to a
gleaming machine at the edge of his vision and he realized it must be
a new design of recirculating arterial machine he hadn't seen before.
Although he hadn't known it before, evidently, they already knew how to
drain the DMSO-Ringer's solution from the thawing body and replace it with
blood so swiftly his revived brain cells apparently had not been damaged
by temporary oxygen starvation. Until now, he had not known it already
was medically possible to revive cryocadavers to complete consciousness.

 

 

He could move his jaw.

 

 

A pleased face peered down at him. "Can you hear me? Move your jaw again
if you can hear me."

 

 

"Yes, I can hear you," Dr. West's joyous laugh gurgled. "So good to
be alive."

 

 

The face raised its eyebrows in surprise.

 

 

"So quick," Dr. West laughed. "You freed me from my thermos bottle and
thawed me so quickly."

 

 

The face frowned, glanced at someone else and nodded.

 

 

Another face appeared, vaguely reminiscent, an old and vulpine face.
Had he known -- the son of this man? Harvard Med School? This couldn't be
his roomie, inarticulate Sammy Wynoski, could it? Sammy would be only about
forty years old. This withered face looked sixty and worried as it bent
closer. "Can you see me?"

 

 

"Sammy?" Dr. West asked.

 

 

"Yes."

 

 

"How long?" Dr. West croaked. "How long I been -- gone?"

 

 

"Sixteen years. Two presidents." Dr. Samuel Wynoski shrugged as if in
apology. "We've made it into the twenty-first century. It's 2009. For
a long time we've known how to -- "

 

 

"Am I still in Canada -- the United States?"

 

 

"We're across the Potomac River from the Capitol," Dr. Samuel Wynoski
murmured." You're in the basement of -- "

 

 

"Sixteen years -- Why would anyone want me now?"

 

 

Dr. West remembered that Sammy Wynoski had specialized in chemopsychiatry.
Back in the 1980s when Dr. West was Director of Oriental Population
Problems Research supported by a Defense Department grant at the
University of California, reportedly Dr. Wynoski was with a clinic
in Washington, D.C., which had a consultant contract with the Central
Intelligence Agency. He still was --

 

 

Each day Dr. West's strength increased but his confusion did not. He
was anxious to find out about the U.S. outside. Leaning over his bed,
his muscular "teacher" persisted in talking about China. "They already
have over a billion Esks." The cleancut man's jaw hardened as if in
suppressed anger as he evaded questions about the U.S. and lectured on
and on about China.

 

 

Dr. West remembered, while he was on trial the Chinese had recruited nearly
half the population from the Boothia Peninsula, approximately 4000 Esks.
Now he wondered what had happened to the remaining 4000 Canadian Esks.
Sixteen years had passed. Marthalik? he thought and asked: "Do Esks grow old?"

 

 

"They look about the same as they always did." His muscular teacher
shrugged and smiled grimly. "Western hemisphere's relatively unchanged,"
he repeated. "A.O.K. here. But in China there is a solution to the
agricultural problem. Tomorrow you'll be interested in looking at our
latest satelphotos of Szechwan Province."

 

 

"Why? Why the hell should I be interested in China now? I want to know
what's happening in the United States!"

 

 

When Dr. West was disconnected from his pumps and pacemaker, and
wheelchaired to the office of Dr. George Bruning, who was no medical
doctor, the bland- faced Deputy Director of the CIA leaned forward over
his desk. "You have us to thank for being alive. Years ago, under another
presidential administration, one of our Canadian agents somehow acquired
from a female informant the filing number of your cryodrawer in -- was
it the New Ottawa Reformation Center? But that administration didn't
consider you of national importance, not enough to justify, shall we say,
violation of Canadian sovereignty in order to remove you. In those days,
Washington simply considered you an unusually unpopular mass murderer."