The Eskimo Invasion (53 page)

, he thought.
I don't want to. If I kill
a few, the others gently will restrain me. If the humans on the surface
can't effectively control their increasing Esks, how can I? On the surface,
the humans have the guns and are supposed to have the brains, but the Esks
still are multiplying. Down here, I'm already outnumbered 500 to 1,
and -- more Esks eating more each day. Could I create a poison?

 

 

His face twisting from his heart pain, Dr. West looked across the food
storeroom at the children laughing and rolling down the sandpile. At the
edge, a little boy was scratching with his fingers in the sand so that
the concrete floor showed through.

 

 

"What are you drawing?"

 

 

"Eh? Grandfather Bear -- so he come for us."

 

 

"Down here?"

 

 

"Eh!" The little boy shaped the sand and patted the sand.

 

 

Dr. West turned away, his chest tightening with pain. He sat down against
the concrete wall. A little girl ran over, threw her arms around his neck
and snuggled on his lap. His breath tickled the delicate beauty of her ear,
and she giggled. He closed his eyes, motionless and unbreathing as concrete.
When she went away, he considered suicide.

 

 

Instead he gathered the twenty-eight adult men and twenty-two mature women
together, only now there were thirty mature men and twenty-nine pregnant
women. He drew pictures on the wall showing the great distance to the
surface. He drew squares of diminishing size showing there soon would be
no more food. The Esks giggled, and Dr. West saw that one, aping him,
was drawing on the floor -- a bear? "Dammit, listen to me! Something
must be done."

 

 

Smiling patiently, the Esks volunteered to eat less. One man would stand
guard outside the food storage room. Dr. West hoped so.

 

 

In the artificial night, children began to whine with hunger, disturbing
Dr. West's sleep. In the artificial morning, Dr. West read from the small
footprints in the sand that children had been allowed to enter the storeroom
to gnaw the freeze-dried vegetable bricks.

 

 

When Dr. West tried rationing the food himself, after locking the storeroom,
the Esks seemed cooperative. In the night, hungry children cried and
the Esks gently took the key away from Dr. West without hurting him and
opened the storeroom and everyone was happy again.

 

 

When Dr. West stared down at Mao III's lopsided face, the left eye opened.
Help me
, the desperate thought rose,
to speak.

 

 

Concentrating to the utmost, Dr. West was unable to control Mao III's
damaged speech center, and Dr. West thought:
Only the spark of a man
remains.

 

 

Bad poetry while you look at my living corpse? Mao III thought with
surprising strength.
Kinder to kill me.

 

 

"Then who would I talk with?"

 

 

How many of my Esks have you murdered?

 

 

"None," Dr. West answered.

 

 

Fraud, you thought you could solve the Esk problems of the whole world,
but you can't even control this vault. Mao III's thoughts sparkled
with laughter.
Paint a line across the corridor, separating the men
from the women.

 

 

"You are taunting me," Dr. West replied without anger.

 

 

Induce the mothers to sacrifice their babies to a god, either you or me.

 

 

"In Canada the Esks shielded their babies from the mob with their own
bodies."

 

 

Ineffective mobs in capitalistic countries. Arrange a mirror so I can
see the telescreen.

 

 

"Strangely ineffective mobs. Your surface explosion destroyed our TV
antenna."

 

 

If you understood statesmanship, you would divide our Esks into two tribes.
Paint the foreheads of one tribe white, the other tribe black.

 

 

"We both know they're not that genetically combative. They're not as
self-limiting as some human populations have been. No wars."

 

 

Somewhere in the Data Retrieval computer, ancient Polynesian island customs
became effective when not enough taro patches for growing population.
Polynesians solved their problems. Use the push buttons on the console.

 

 

"Not anymore. I was killing time, an hour playing the console, endless
interesting data pictures from your computer. Already I can play it like
a visual piano. But suddenly, only a repeating pattern of information
about volcanos, avocados and phrenology appeared on the screen, as if the
Data Retrieval System has suffered a stroke. I replaced what seemed to be
the damaged electronic module, and now the computer doesn't work at all."

 

 

Because you have the wrong specialization, Doctor, you're not qualified
to be even an electronics technician. Your specialty is population control.
With minimal intelligence you should be able to lead the Esks to the one
logical course -- cannibalism.

 

 

"Stop taunting me. There have been no examples of Esks killing each other
for food, not in Canada -- have there?" Dr. West wondered if, in the last
extremity of starvation and still driven by their urge to multiply, the adult
Esks here might feed their own bodies to their children. "I doubt it.
At least not organized -- "

 

 

Not yet organized makes it easier for you. There are no troublesome
congenital leaders among Esks. You should be able to organize these few
Esks into any behavior pattern you decide.

 

 

"You flatter me. For me, one man, now to curb the Esks' overpowering
instinct to multiply like lemmings, after all the Canadian attempts to
organize birth control among the Esks failed."

 

 

My Szechwan agricultural planners easily organized millions of Esks to
hand-shape mountains into rice paddies.

 

 

"Easy, because it was helping Esks multiply."

 

 

For Maoist progress, yes. Esks were so much more easily controllable
than Chinese within my Twenty-Year Plan. If you imagine yourself
my intellectual equal, you should be able to organize the lives of
these mere 500 Esks, most of them little children, so that one of their
overpowering instincts will conflict with another, and they will destroy
themselves. This is how I maintained control over my generals.

 

 

"And look at you now!" Dr. West immediately realized his own retort was
inadequate, childish because Mao III had retained power longer than most
leaders; any leader can suffer a brain-stroke, and all men sink into death.

 

 

Having nothing better to do today, I am trying to help you.

 

 

"I doubt that!" Dr. West seemed unable to restrain his childish anger.
"How were you so stupid as to help Esks multiply like a billion cancer
cells in China? Brilliant leader, you can't answer. Perhaps Esks have
an as yet unidentified psychological advantage. Smiling with love,
they are leading us."

 

 

Ridiculous! You are a defeatist born of a disorganized nation whose
historical moment has passed. If my television still were operating, while
you starve you could watch the triumph of Maoism throughout the world.

 

 

"Triumph? Soon, Esks will outnumber us throughout the world. Next year
four billion, the next year eight billion. The next year sixteen billion
Esks will -- "

 

 

Statistical trickster. Any fool knows that the rate of Esk increase will
be slowed down and then stopped. In America, when your relatives feel the
bite of hunger in their fat bellies, they will limit their Esks. With guns
and clubs if necessary. In China, rational Maoist economic planning will
reveal when the total number of Chinese Esks is optimum, and further increase
will be painlessly discouraged.

 

 

"Are you sure? This is not how things ended in Canada. Is it possible that
the Esks have an overgroup psychological influence on our actions?"

 

 

Now you are a small boy whimpering at the darkness which conceals nothing
but your teddy bears.

 

 

At this thought, Dr. West broke into laughter like dry coughing. "I've
been a small boy -- whimpering a warning for years. And ever since those
first Canadian years, the Esks have been recognized as a population problem.
But they have continued increasing. Name for me one instance in which
organized human activity effectively has limited the number of Esks anywhere.
The few lynchings, your experimental napalm, ineffective pinpricks! Name
an effective population control action. It's been all talk, and the number
of Esks keeps increasing."

 

 

. . . Loud prophet, emerge from your hole and take action, Mao III
taunted.
There still is time. I have been told that the world can support
a population of twenty billion.

 

 

"There are ten billion humans now in 2010. Next year four billion Esks,
the next year eight billion, the next year sixteen billion Esks plus
ten billion humans would be twenty-six billion if chaos and starvation
permitted it."

 

 

Twenty billion --
"The twenty billion you're thinking about is the humans the world could
support if we had fifty years of gradually increasing population, during
which time we could prepare the world for them. Even with developing
marine plankton farming and direct chemical food sources, we may not have
time, even without the Esk problem. Why am I wasting my time talking to
you? Up there, anarchic collapse will come before the human population
plus the Esk population totals twenty billion, and after disorganization
of our sensitive technology and food distribution systems, the world
probably won't support three billion starving survivors, less people
than in the 1970s."
It would support more Esks than that, Mao III taunted.
They don't eat
as much. At least Esks have faith in the future. They believe --
"Believe?" Dr. West whirled, staring in recognition at the gold-painted
dragon which still grinned above the blinded telescreen. The dragon's jaws
were painted red. His hungry jaws symbolized --
"Malthusian nightmare!" Dr. West's voice shouted. "Or Freudian dinosaur.
Even you are not as hungry as Grandfather Bear."
Dr. West strode out into the corridor, thinking.
In its creation,
an effective religion must conform to the most pressing needs
, Dr. West
pondered,
of its creator.
He stalked through corridors where the Esks meekly stepped aside. He unlocked
the huge empty room Mao III's architects must have intended for --
"Official audiences, but in these last three years since his stroke,
that egomaniac was afraid -- avoided being seen. I'll meet with all sixty
adult Esks at one time, only I won't be here." Dr. West locked the door
from the inside and set to work in the Audience Room.
As creator, he thought he knew his own needs.
When he emerged wearily, his work incomplete, he locked the door to the
huge room behind him and wandered back to the Control Room to sleep. But
first, in the Control Room he unlocked the Master Heating Panel and turned
down the dials. "Like a god, I control my weather."
When he awoke he was shivering slightly. As he walked past Mao III's
curtained bed, he detected distress, shivering, but continued to the
Master Heating Panel, unlocking its little metal door again.
Inside gleamed the row of temperature control dials, one for each room
in the vault, plus others for the corridors.
He thought their sensor thermometers must be concealed in the individual
rooms. The other elements of each thermostat were here in front of him,
their wire nerves extending within the walls.
"Maoist architecture, authoritative central control of all thermostat
settings." With a cold smile he turned down each thermostat another degree.
"This Control Room must be equally chilled or eventually, as the Esks
become painfully cold, they'll all crowd in here, squeezing around me
like a demographer's nightmare of the 1000% utilized planet. At first
we must have equality of coldness throughout the vault."
But Dr. West located extra blankets for Mao III.
Apparently in China
, Dr. West thought with wry humor,
or at least in
this Command Vault, electric blankets are banned for their softening
revisionist tendencies.
He suspended a small electric radiant heater
above Mao III's curtained bed.

 

 

I am shivering. My tapeworm, you who will soon be without a host.
Why not painlessly smother me with a pillow instead of chilling me to
pneumonia -- to which I already have been susceptible. I wish to die,
but, I dread the choking sensation of pneumonia fluid in the lungs.
Simply use a pillow quickly.

 

 

"I'm not your assassin. I'd be lonely without you, mine host." Dr. West
went away to get the paint and loudspeakers; laden with tools, he unlocked
the Audience Room.

 

 

Each day he worked alone in the huge hollow-sounding Audience Room. After
he had hung the black curtain at the rear wall, the echoes were muffled.

 

 

Each day he reduced the temperature throughout the vault one degree.
As a side effect of the cold, the Esks digging the tunnel worked faster.
Dr. West soon wore overshoes with three pairs of socks. Chilled, he donned
two layers of padded uniforms and wrapped a blanket around his shoulders
and ate more.

 

 

Unfortunately, the Esks also ate more. Since few of the children had shoes,
whenever they tired of running around they huddled, rubbing their feet,
whimpering.

 

 

"But human children would have colds and pneumonia." Dr. West coughed
and laughed and cleared his phlegmed throat. "Comes another Ice Age,
only Esks would prosper."