The Eskimo Invasion (43 page)

 

 

"You can sleep as soon as you tell the future symptoms of the virus,
Dr. West. When do they begin?" The Interrogator resorted to flashing
lights and buzzers and, after an indeterminate period of time, to small
electric shocks.

 

 

Once or twice Dr. West tried to argue, vaguely aware that his voice was
incoherent. Suddenly he screamed, his breath squawled, God what were they
doing to him?

 

 

"Message for Mao III," he heard his voice squawk. Torture had cued the next
communication from the Harvard Circle.

 

 

"I must be taken to Mao III," his hoarse voice repeated over and over.
No matter what they did to him, try as he could, he was unable to tell the
Interrogator what the message was. "Stop them, stop them. I don't know."

 

 

"Of course we cannot actually take him to our beloved Chairman,"
the Interrogator's voice agreed with someone equally invisible.
"Apologies that so much time has been spent; a little more time will be
needed; electrocranial accupuncture is required if we are to free the core
of truth in this man -- It seems that rigid blockades have been placed
in his memory, perhaps hypnotically."

 

 

Oblivion.

 

 

There were black silk slippers on his feet at the other end of him. He lay
in a different room. He was wearing a coarse gray cloth uniform. His head
ached. When he raised his fingers to his head, he found his hair had been
shaved off and there were a number of bumps, little knobs, on his scalp.
He could find no evidence of torture on his body. His legs ached and
appeared swollen, but this probably was due to -- he knew but couldn't
remember what had caused his swollen legs. Perhaps the unaccustomed
exercise of struggling up and down mountain rice terraces?

 

 

An intense-faced Chinese hurried into the white room. The man inhaled,
standing very straight in his gleaming black dacron robe, which was the
traditionally Chinese costume Maoist officials had reassumed in recent
years. Dr. West recalled that the color black symbolized virtue, and
the embroidered dragons: good luck and power.

 

 

Evidently, coarse blue cotton uniforms were only for the troops.

 

 

"Time is flowing past." The man's familiar voice suggested with a typical
interrogator's ploy: "Everything is known."

 

 

In remembrance of the pain with the Interrogator's voice, Dr. West's body
winced, and it was with a drying mouth that he tried to answer back like
a punished adolescent. "If you know everything -- you are too prescient
to be the -- Interrogator. You should be God -- or Mao III."

 

 

"That is a sacrilegious statement to your God and to Mao III, who sits
in judgment here at the center of the world."

 

 

"Then I have been flown to Peking?"

 

 

"You have been disinfected both externally and internally," the Interrogator
replied. "You have the honor -- "

 

 

But a man in a thick leaden apron with goggles on his forehead resembling
a second set of eyes interrupted. "Ah -- we need him for an hour now."

 

 

Dr. West recognized the man's profession as X-ray technician. Very funny.
Did they intend to X-ray his internal organs for bombs?

 

 

"Later! It is too late. The time has been set." In the Interrogator's voice
there was irritation and strain, and he turned back to Dr. West and managed
a conspiratorial smile.

 

 

"You are the first foreigner in three years to be so honored. This you will
remember and cherish. You can drink your tea later." The Interrogator
stiffened, straight as a bamboo.

 

 

"Ta-tung!" the Interrogator shouted.

 

 

The eastern sky reddens,
The sun rises
And in China the line of Maos has come!
They strive for the welfare of the people.
They are the great saviors of the people!

 

 

Two men dressed in black silk who appeared to be minor officials trundled
in on a low vehicle with four padded seats. Dr. West thought it resembled
an electric cart for a golf foursome. The golf cart was followed by half
a dozen bored soldiers. They stood scratching inside their padded blue
uniforms while the two men in black bowed unenthusiastically toward the
Interrogator. "Ready? We only have the office for ten minutes."

 

 

"He can understand everything you say," the Interrogator snapped.

 

 

One official glanced at his wristwatch, then wearily rolled his gaze to
the ceiling. "You should have notified me of that fact in writing."

 

 

It was plain that the Interrogator had much less influence here in Peking.

 

 

As the electric cart trundled along endless concrete corridors, the soldiers
lagged further and further behind, and Dr. West realized the building must
cover acres of ground, a veritable Pentagon.

 

 

Even seated in the cart, he was in pain from his swollen legs. The electric
cart whirred on and on. His head felt as if a fist were tightening inside.
Apparently the Interrogator's electric needles had failed to discharge
any messages intended for Mao III. The Harvard Circle must have planned
one sight, one reaction which would cue a synapse in the recesses of his
brain, releasing the message to his conscious mind. It seemed obvious
whom he was being taken to see, face to face.

 

 

His pulse was racing, as if his body expected to be cued to violent action.
If there was a message in his skull, Dr. West thought it must be a dandy,
to justify the maneuvers of the Harvard Circle.

 

 

Again, he remembered the blue eyes of the Major widening.
Good God
,
the Major's voice cried.
What was intended for me?
And Dr. West thought:
What is intended for me?

 

 

Those callous sons of bitches! Dr. West began to shiver uncontrollably.
He wanted to jump off the cart. The smiling faces closed in on him:
Dr. George Bruning, Deputy Director of the CIA; Dr. Sammy Wynoski,
chemopsychiatrist; Dr. Fred Gatson, bacteriologist; Dr. Einar Johansen,
neurosurgeon. But there had been another member of the Harvard Circle,
a disembodied voice.

 

 

Tom Randolph, a narrow-eyed man who chain-smoked cigarettes as if he had a
death wish, had become a full professor of parapsychology at Duke University
at age twenty-six. In the basement of CIA headquarters, Dr. West had
recognized Tom's off-kilter face. While Joe West had been a graduate
medical student at Harvard, Tom Randolph had been the undergrad who led
the protest march which culminated in the dynamiting of the Quad.

 

 

The crazy kid should have ended in jail instead of as a Ph.D. with his hands
on millions of dollars of Defense Department money for extrasensory research.
Surprisingly, Tom Randolph had resigned to take a seemingly less important
position. This was with the Central Intelligence Agency, when the President
of the United States appointed fellow Harvard-man George Bruning as
Deputy Director.

 

 

To Dr. West, the memory of Tom Randolph's narrow eyes inspecting him as if
he were as expendable as a bomb was terrifying. After the injections,
it had been Tom Randolph's disembodied voice which rasped: "Mao III has
a faith healer. Remember that, Joe. He needs his faith healer. Remember,
Joe, when we were young wise guys at Harvard and you scared the hell out
of me at a drinking party. That was a pretty good parlor trick. That's
what turned me on extrasensory research, and we are turning you on -- "

 

 

Remembering the undergrad Tom Randolph gaily swerving his sports car to
run over a cat, Dr. West felt like the cat. He felt claustrophobia even
tighter than when he had been trapped in the aircraft capsule. Now he
tried to climb off the electric cart.

 

 

But they were too strong for him. The carved dragon doors opened,
and the dwarfed man behind the huge desk glanced up. He wore a simple
agricultural commune costume.

 

 

"You are not Mao III," Dr. West's mouth immediately announced. "You are
a double."

 

 

The man blinked and glanced at the Interrogator's shocked face.
The Interrogator whirled, screaming at Dr. West that he was insulting the
Chairman of the World, the Father of the Chinese Federation of Nations --

 

 

For a moment Dr. West experienced the weird feeling that he had been about
to explode. The faces of the Harvard Circle, electric eels, biopower,
heavy legs, for those sons of bitches was he a bomb that walked like
a man with plastic sacks of nitroglycerine in his leg muscles, and was
cued when he saw Mao III -- ?

 

 

Another official appeared from a side door. "Quiet please. Clear the room.
Your scheduled time is over. The room is needed."

 

 

The man behind the desk rose obediently and departed.

 

 

Even before the Interrogator was able to stop screaming, a third official
appeared with soldiers. "Lieutenant, investigate this foreign prisoner's
document-locator number. Update his Sparrow Folder and file in Pending."

 

 

Some afternoons, Dr. West was taken from his cell to a waiting room.
Through the swinging door to the main waiting room he glimpsed nervous
men in Pakistani garb with briefcases and weary men in Western suits
who sat on benches day after day. Sometimes he recognized the Australian
Premier. When janitors began sweeping the floor, the men with briefcases
would file out and Dr. West would be taken back to his cell.

 

 

Once a Lieutenant peered through the bars: "Ah, I hoped I'd locate you
eventually. According to records transferred from Szechwan Province,
the twenty-one-day incubation period for unknown infectious virus is
over. Now you can be shot."

 

 

"No Esks were sick or died?" Dr. West demanded.

 

 

"No reports of illness," the smiling Lieutenant replied and left.

 

 

One sleeping period Dr. West was awakened and a barber shaved him.
Drowsily, he protested this disturbance of his routine. "This is the wrong
time to go to the waiting room." After a month of regular hours between
cell and waiting room, Dr. West tended to become irritable whenever
routine was disturbed from the outside. An electric cart transported him
at this wrong hour to his empty outer waiting room and to his surprise
carried him on into the main waiting room where the janitors were
emptying ash trays and on into the empty office with the large desk
where he had last seen the Interrogator and on along a hall and into an
elevator. It plunged endlessly into the earth, stopped. The attendants
were replaced by other attendants who smiled and smiled. Dr. West was led
into a large-roomed apartment which was dim because the hunched shape of
a man was watching a television screen beneath a bas-relief golden dragon.

 

 

At the end of the news program, the man switched off the TV set by remote
control. "Is this Dr. Joseph West?"

 

 

"Yes, Chairman. His file has been placed on the tea table at your left hand."

 

 

"Some years ago when I still believed there was a purpose to be served
by personally making speeches, I announced to the world that I wanted
to meet you eye to eye, Dr. West. The implication then was that I would
righteously tear you limb from limb. The occasion was my address to the
United Nations General Assembly on the subject of the attempted genocide
of the Eskimos by you and persons unknown, such as the United States
Government."

 

 

Dr. West made no attempt to answer. No message to Mao III from the
Harvard Circle emerged from his mouth, but now Dr. George Bruning's
voice was echoing in his memory: "Listen and observe, when Mao III or
any man speaks of his strengths and beliefs, soon his contradictions
and weaknesses will stick out like handles -- by which you can seize him."

 

 

Mao III stirred clumsily in his padded chair. Dr. West saw that Mao III
was not wearing a simple commune costume. He was engulfed in an ornate
black silk robe embroidered with a traditional dragon.

 

 

"Tonight while I was watching television coverage of the latest CIA
intruder aircraft to crash, I was reminded of an intelligence brief on
my desk some months ago. This extrapolated a minimum of facts into a
theory that a Dr. West had been delivered to China because I once had
expressed a desire to meet him. This amused me at the time. It would be
better for your President to communicate with me directly. I am a busy
man and cannot deal with minor intermediaries."

 

 

Dr. West observed the awkward position of Mao III's right wrist and left
leg. Although Mao III was a comparatively young man, evidently he had
suffered a paralytic stroke. Probably about three years ago when he
vanished from the public eye.

 

 

"The intruder aircraft which crashed tonight was a converted passenger
transport painted black," Mao III continued in his precise voice.
"It contained an estimated dozen Eskimos confined in three large parachute
ejection capsules, which did not eject. After the crash of the aircraft,
one of the capsules preserved its four corpses from burning."

 

 

Dr. West straightened mentally, glimpsing the unknowable faces of the
Harvard Circle. What was going on? Twelve Esks murdered.

 

 

Mao III was saying: " -- were to be parachuted into the mountainous region
of Szechwan Province where our Dream Persons now comprise more than 90%
of the population. The bodies of these Eskimos or American Dream Persons
were dressed in commune costumes. They were equipped with machine pistols,
plastic explosives, miniature radios and related equipment, as if the
CIA intended that they organize guerrilla warfare. As my grandfather,
Mao Tse-tung, often said: 'The guerrilla is the fish who swims among the
people.' But to swim among our Dream Persons would be more frustrating."