The Eskimo Invasion (40 page)

 

 

The A.M.A. disapproved of such jovially self-advertising talk. Dr. Johansen's
picture no longer appeared in medical journals. His smiling horseface
appeared in space journals. NASA had retained him as a consultant to the
Bio-Power project. The goal was a subminiature solid state transmitter
utilizing a lifetime power supply from the electrical energy of the
astronaut's body.

 

 

Where had the transmitter been implanted, the leg, the buttock? With a
pained grin, Dr. West's teeth gleamed in the moonlight.

 

 

Dr. West remembered Dr. Johansen's wrinkled face bending over him.
An operating table? "Before I'm through, sir," the old voice croaked,
"you'll be a veritable electric eel. Hah!"

 

 

Then the anesthetic engulfed him.

 

 

Dr. West lay in the muddy rice paddy. His legs ached. He knew the Harvard
Circle had not gone to all that trouble just to install a duplicate
signal sender in his leg.

 

 

High below the stars an aircraft droned overhead, its red and green wing
lights flitting. Dr. West knew the CIA had not commandeered an Air Force
ramjet to fly him over China merely to spray the Esks. An expendable
technician could do that. Yet the plan must have something to do with the
Esks. The CIA had selected him, and he was the man with the most unpopular
theory about the Esks. He was the man who had been convicted of attempted
genocide of the Eskimos. He was the most unpopular man in the world.

 

 

If the Maoist police caught him alive, if they recognized him, remembering
him as Dr. West, the Mass Murderer of the Helpless Eskimos, the Chicoms
wouldn't kill him if they realized he was Dr. West.

 

 

The Chinese Federation of Nations joyfully would use him for political
purposes. Other Americans had confessed to anything. Dr. West knew he
was no stronger than they --

 

 

He smiled with the ultimate fear and fumbled into his layers of wet clothing
for the dagger. The Maoists would have enjoyed parading him. Even Mao III,
who had been neither seen nor photographed for three years, had expressed
the desire to face "the murderous Dr. West, eye to eye!"

 

 

Dr. West struggled to remove the dagger from its sheath. "Those fools,
those stupid CIA Sons of bitches!" If the Chicoms took him alive,
their glib diplomats would use him like acid to dissolve any last world
goodwill the United States had managed to retain. Piously the Chinese
representatives would tell the General Assembly: Any nation who would
parachute the murderous convict Dr. West upon another nation must be
guilty of more than germ warfare, more than genocide --

 

 

Dr. West spat in the mud. He was unable to make his hand draw out the
dagger. "You poor bastard. You're as helpless as an imperialist potato
bug complete with implicating little parachute and U.S. insignia on your
wing covers. Even the CIA can't be that stupid. They must see one move
beyond what I'm seeing."

 

 

The Major emerged grunting over the edge of the terrace. "Found it.
I'll carry the signal sender now."

 

 

Dr. West opened his mouth. He wanted to tell the Major that the signal
sender was tuned for the Maoist police wavelength, but he couldn't get
the words out. Instead he followed the Major across the rice paddy and
up the next terrace, and the next, and the next

 

 

The Major came back and helped him again. "Do your best. Easy does it,
old man."

 

 

Dr. West was not an old man, at least he had been a vigorous young man
when he was sentenced to prison. Theoretically, sixteen years in the
Cold Room shouldn't have aged him. But his legs were an old man's legs,
unbelievably heavy.

 

 

"When we get to the top," the Major gasped, "I'm hoping there'll --
uninhabited canyon on the other side. We can hide until -- guerrillas
trace -- our radio signal."

 

 

"In China, no place is uninhabited anymore," Dr. West said.

 

 

"You got the wrong attitude -- mustn't give up -- your CIA guerrillas
-- come for us." The Major raised the tiny radio signal sender -- which
was squeaking their location to any Maoist police radio location finding
equipment within a radius of fifty miles.

 

 

By the time the Major had half-carried Dr. West to the top of the
mountain ridge, the moon was rapidly descending toward the mountains of
Sinkiang. The flat top of the ridge glittered the moon's reflection.

 

 

"Irrigation reservoir up here," the Major gasped. "Look at the big pipes
and hoses and pumps. Never knew the Chinks had it in 'em!"

 

 

"That's a high voltage power line leading down into your uninhabited
canyon," Dr. West said.

 

 

"Doesn't mean there's Chinks down there. Never give up!" The Major led
the way down the other side of the mountains.

 

 

They fell down terraces, sloshed through rice paddies, tripped over
irrigation pipes, slid down endless terraces into the faintly humming
canyon. This was how the Maoists had forced impossible mountains to yield
rice crops. At the bottom of the canyon the power line would lead to an
atomic generator plant.

 

 

At the bottom of the canyon, the two men scrambled over an enormous
concrete pipe. Dr. West heard the water rushing inside. With unlimited
atomic-electric power the Chinese were piping water across vast
distances. With an unlimited number of obedient hands, the Maoists had
ordered terracing of mountains previously considered "impossible for
wet rice cultivation."

 

 

Impossible these tiny rice paddies were for Chinese commune workers
who needed at least 1800 calories of rice-energy per day. If Chinese
tended these inefficient vertical fields, they would need to eat the
entire harvest in order to survive and multiply. There would be no
surplus. But Dr. West knew that these tiny paddies were hand-tended by
beings who could not only survive; they could labor from dawn to dark
and multiply like rabbits on only 600 calories of rice-energy per day!

 

 

As the Major led the way across the dark canyon, he stumbled over the
sleeping body of the Maoist solution to the agricultural problem.

 

 

"Don't strangle him. Don't kill him," Dr. West hissed. "The man's an Esk."

 

 

But the Major tightened his grip on the gurgling throat. "Got to kill him.
Would yell for help."

 

 

"He's sure to be an Esk. I assume he's descended from at least three
generations of Maoist conditioning. I believe if I ordered this Esk to
go back to sleep, he would go back -- "

 

 

"You assume -- you believe," the Major panted angrily. "I now -- he stinks
like a Chink." There was a vertebral crunch, and the body shuddered and
quivered like a dying fish. "He was a Chink!"

 

 

Dr. West did not try to explain how he knew the man was an Esk merely
by standing near him.

 

 

Dr. West followed the Major down the canyon along the side of the
roaring concrete pipe. Someone, perhaps a thousand miles away, turned a
rheostatic switch which electromagnetically opened giant valves, and the
roar of irrigation water within the pipe increased. Ahead of Dr. West,
the sky grew white with dawn.

 

 

The Major's gaze darted frantically from side to side. He appeared to
be searching for a place of concealment, but all the natural vegetation
in the canyon had been gathered, plucked, uprooted to feed the miserable
cooking fires of the Esks. The two men threaded their way among sleeping
lumps of cloth.

 

 

Around dead fires, the faces of the sleeping Esks were animated, twitching,
smiling, baring their teeth, seemingly more alive than when the Esks
were conscious.

 

 

Clutching his .45 as though it was his mother's hand, the Major tiptoed on,
then looked back. It was evident he wanted to turn back. The further down
the canyon they went, the more numerous the sleeping Esks. The brightening
dawn illuminated the Major's frightened face. He kept glancing up at the
terraced mountainsides for some place to hide. Yet he stubbornly continued
down the canyon.

 

 

In the canyon, sleeping clumps of men, women, children, lay clustered
together for warmth -- all around the two quietly walking men. The Major's
hand closed on Dr. West's shoulder, transmitting his shivering fear to
the Doctor. "Tell me they're Eskimos," the Major breathed. "If they're
Chinese -- "

 

 

"Chinese would be awake and screaming at us right now," Dr. West whispered.
"The Esks don't pay much attention to us. Observe, the Esks sleep intensely
-- as if they're on another planet when they're asleep. Look at that smiling
face. We've tried truth drugs, but no human has been able to learn what
dreams the Esks have. Awake, the Esks don't know. It's as if the Esks
lead two lives, concurrently yet separately. That is why the Chinese
word for them is Dream Persons."

 

 

A buzzer sounded, resounded up and down the canyon. Blankly, the Esks
stood up. There was none of the yawning and stretching, eye-rubbing and
giggling, hawking and spitting which would have characterized real Arctic
Eskimos or Chinese or Americans. The awakened faces of the Esks began to
smile. The men and some of the women started climbing the steep trails
among the rice terraces, their hoes already in their hands. Efficiently
they did not urinate until they stood in the rice paddies. Up there on
the terraces, the Esks began hoeing without breakfast.

 

 

"What do we do now?" the Major whispered, still shivering as if he expected
to be assailed by screaming Chinese with upraised hoes. "Do you think they've
sent someone off to telephone for the Chinese soldiers?" He pointed at an
overhead wire.

 

 

Dr. West looked down at the Esk children crowding around smiling. And
he was smiling. Their faces reflected his smile, lighting up with joy
almost like children's faces anywhere. Little Joe -- Little Martha --

 

 

Dr. West squatted down and tried to talk with them, using the central Eskimo
dialect he had learned in the Arctic. He tried introducing Cantonese words,
then Mandarin Chinese -- He looked up at the Major and shrugged and
wearily smiled and shook his head. "These people -- the Esks have increased
millions of times in numbers since I identified them in the Arctic
twenty-two years ago. Individually, they -- each generation has deteriorated
as to outward awareness and adaptability. The original little group I studied
in the Arctic -- they were excellent imitators of the Eskimos. But these
people, these children, they're almost nonverbal. They're not imitating
the Chinese. They're not trying very hard to imitate anything human."

 

 

A heavily pregnant woman prodded one of the circle of boys and made upward
motions with her hands. Evidently the boy was big enough; he should be up
there working on the rice terraces. He appeared to be about six years old.

 

 

"That boy is about a year old," the Doctor said. "The wonderful and
terrible thing is that these people's bodies mature so much more
efficiently than ours. Their prenatal development is as perfectly
straightforward as if God had had a plan -- this time."

 

 

Dr. West became excited and disturbed as he always did when he launched
into the subject that had overwhelmed his life. "Why should our human
fetuses take nine months to be born? Because of our evolutionary history
on this planet, the growth of our embryos follows the old paths, gills
appear and are absorbed. An obsolete tail begins and disappears. Primitive
appendages from our evolutionary past are recapitulated. This is our
heritage from the billions of years of changing life forms on this Earth."
Dr. West hurled the bitter question no one could answer. "Now we are among
people whose babies are born in a month and mature in three years. That
does not reflect the evolutionary history on this planet. Now tell me
if the Esks are human?"

 

 

"You murderer!" the Major hissed unexpectedly. "Finally I've figured out
who you are. You genocidal maniac! You've got to be Dr. West. On the TV
news, your escape from Canada about six months ago. You narrow maniac,
are you telling me the Eskimos aren't human?"

 

 

"These Esks aren't. The Eskimos are, if there are any real Eskimos still
alive. Don't tell me even a calloused military mind like yours has been
softened by the 'Esks are Eskimos, love the Eskimos' campaign."

 

 

"You murdered harmless Eskimos. Look at these little children. We just
sprayed 'em," the Major bleated, as if it had been a death spray.

 

 

The children scrambled about unconcernedly. A little girl clung to
Dr. West's leg.

 

 

"Don't tell me that little girl isn't human," the Major said. "She
is
human. Look at her little hands, her ears, her eyes, you murderer."

 

 

"You were happier when you thought we were spraying Chinese children -- "
Dr. West retorted.

 

 

The Major made an abrupt move with his .45, and let his arm drop down
hopelessly. "You're insane, criminally insane, you were convicted of
genocide and sent to a prison for the criminally insane. The Eskimos
are the world's happiest, most cooperative people."

 

 

"And you believe that murderers should be executed," Dr. West challenged,
hoping the Major would fire the gun, kill him, foul up all the intricate,
unknown plans of the CIA.

 

 

"These
are
people," the Major pressed. "Call them Esks or Eskimos,
they're just as human as we are. Right home at Edwards Air Force Base,
whole crews of happy Eskimos are working at the base, more of them all the
time. Wonderful obedient happy people, and you tell me they're not human."