The Eskimo Invasion (54 page)

 

 

With disturbing initiative, the shivering Esks in the kitchen left
the electric cookstoves turned on all the time. Esks smashed chairs
in the dormitory and built a fire, nearly overpowering the carbon
dioxide-monoxide filters.

 

 

"Dammit, you nearly fumigated us all." As Dr. West kicked apart the fire,
he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. The Esks were on the verge of
restraining him. He wondered, if warmth had become so vital an instinct,
they would -- ?

 

 

"Warm today, disregard tomorrow," Dr. West muttered his conscious
superiority at these people, but he worried that eventually the Esk
servants might realize how the thermostatic heating system was controlled,
and the Esks gently would take control of the weather in the vault.

 

 

He accelerated his plan. Unlocking the Heating Control Panel, he turned
up one thermostat dial. It was the thermostat whose thermometer element
was in the Audience Room. "Warmth will become like heaven."

 

 

When he unlocked the Audience Room, delicious warmth spread outward to
the chilled faces of children in the corridor.

 

 

"Stay out! This is for adults." He discovered there was no way to keep
the children out.

 

 

The crowding Esks were so solicitous of their children that they smilingly
ignored his protests and pushed their children past him into the darkly
warm Audience Room. The women carried their babies in their arms into
the heavenly warmth. The room jammed with all 800 Esks. He'd intended
only the eighty adults. Shoulder to shoulder, luxuriating in warmth,
the Esks were smiling sleepily at the black curtain Dr. West had arranged
to conceal the loudspeaker. How they were peering with recognition, with
whispering excitement, at the lifesize portrait Dr. West had created on
the black curtain with white paint.

 

 

Before leaving the dim room, Dr. West switched on the spotlight. Against
the curtain, the spotlight's circle enshrined the immense snow whiteness
of the polar bear.

 

 

Hypnotically humming behind the curtain, the electric fan made the curtain
undulate, and the bear moved. In the sleepy warmth, from long staring
into its centered whiteness, the gigantic polar bear seemed, even to
Dr. West's eyes, to be enlarging, almost alive.

 

 

Children whimpered, gasping for breath in the thickening atmosphere.
Dr. West slipped out of the overcrowded Audience Room into the cold
reality of the corridor. He hurried along the concrete corridor to the
Control Room.

 

 

His heart drumming with excitement, he stared at the closed-circuit image
being transmitted to the telescreen from the Audience Room. He pursed
his lips and blew softly against the microphone on the control panel.

 

 

On the telescreen, from the Audience Room, the thickly crowded Esks
seemed to sway. He was seeing them from the camera high in the curtain
above the bear. He felt himself high above the multitude, as if floating
above the excitedly smiling faces of the Esks.

 

 

Are there instincts stronger than life? Dr. West thought,
stronger
than this multiplying like rodents for no purpose other than more life
itself? Is this the end-purpose for which the Esks were planted on
this earth?

 

 

"Look at me," Dr. West breathed in Modern Eskimo and the Esk's eyes widened.
He knew they did not comprehend his Eskimo words, and he inhaled, preparing
to speak to them in the simplified Chinese that their recent Esk progenitors
had absorbed during these seventeen Chinese years since Esks were flown here
from the Arctic winter night.

 

 

For many nights he had been planning what he would say, remembering what
he had said before, remembering the prophetic excitement in the igloo so
long ago. In the night, Edwardluk, who was not an Eskimo, rose on the
ice, shouting with expectant joy, Edwardluk's arms reaching toward the
Arctic stars, ice-bright galaxies where man could never go. "Grandfather!"

 

 

As Dr. West spoke into the microphone, his plans vanished and his voice
poured out with unthinking freedom.

 

 

" -- the darkness, the light from the sky, I am white bear, your Grandfather
in front of you, all around you, above you, I am your Grandfather of whom
you dream. Like a white bear from the sky, you see me coming for you.
In joy your heartbeats are rising to the sky so that all become one with me.
I in you, and you in me. We rise! We rise!"

 

 

On the telescreen the images of the Esks swayed forward toward his voice.

 

 

"You have filled the world for me and now I have come for you and we become
one again," Dr. West's hoarse voice paraphrased the myth. "In joy, we become
one!"

 

 

Esks' faces were shrieking upward with joy or agony. Esks were rising
on tiptoe. It appeared as if the hair of an Esk man was standing on
end. He fell down in a convulsion like a man being electrocuted, and
became motionless, concealed by the pressing multitude. As if unaware
of his fall, the other adults were straining forward sobbing with joy,
and a woman fell among the shrieking children who had been forgotten
and were being trampled.

 

 

"Grandfather, we have prepared this world for you. Grandfather! Grandfather!"
He saw another man's face ripen in an agony of joy and his hair was standing
on end just before his body toppled. Beside him, a woman in joy had fallen,
vanished, trampled. A slender man, barely matured, frantically was beating
the walls with his hands as if trying to climb. In the turmoil, children
were screaming. In joy, a woman strained upward and fell. "Grandfather -- !"

 

 

Dr. West's face twisted with pain. He was crying.

 

 

He switched off the microphone which had transmitted his voice behind the
black curtain to the loudspeaker. On the black curtain, the whiteness
of the bear vanished as he pulled the switch that plunged the Audience
Room into darkness. His trembling hand reached into the Master Heating
Panel and turned down the thermostat controlling the Audience Room. He
directed the icy blast of air conditioning into the Audience Room.

 

 

He stood in the corridor watching crying children flee the cold wind
from the Audience Room.

 

 

Adults staggered out with faces waxy as corpses. They shuffled away
along the corridor. A moaning mother carried her little girl, who had
been trampled.

 

 

In the Audience Room, his flashlight beam flitted like a white moth
over slack faces of ten prone Esks, all adults. He knelt, feeling for
a pulse. This Esk was dead. "God help us all."

 

 

Tomorrow he thought he would guide the Esks to remove the bodies. His eyes
narrowed as he went out into the light of the corridor. He was afraid to
drag away the bodies himself because the Esks would see this. They might
see a causal connection between the dead Esks and him.

 

 

I did not murder them. They wanted to go. They were hoping to go,
Dr. West rationalized.
They behaved as if they were going to the purpose
of their lives.
"They were shouting with happiness."

 

 

And I should feel relief, Dr. West thought.
I can control their numbers
now. It is possible to postpone starvation. It may be possible to reach
the surface if we try.

 

 

Dr. West collapsed facedown on his bed, groaning. It was many hours before
he regained self-control and purpose to get out of bed, intending to send
the Esks back to the tunnel. But he found they were already digging.

 

 

Much faster and more purposefully than before, the surviving adult Esks
were digging upward and carrying away blue-gray rock. They were smiling.

 

 

"Smile at what? At what is happening up there, years above our heads where
the world is filling with Esks." Dr. West was not smiling. "Dig faster!"

 

 

Broken blue rock rumbled out of the steep tunnel.

 

 

"We are rising through a pond," Dr. West announced as if the loudness
of his voice could make the stupidly smiling Esks understand. "You are
digging upward through blue silt which has become stone. Yes, giggle.
Do you realize we are buried millions of years beneath the surface? Dig!"

 

 

Staring at a massive blue slab of stone which had rumbled from the tunnel,
he blinked at irregular whiteness, fossil teeth too jaggedly huge to be
mammalian. "Dinosaur? Oh my god, how deep are we? So deep in geological
time we'll never get out."

 

 

Dayless day after nightless night, he watched alternating shifts of Esks
burrowing upward. A clumsy Esk dropped a brown-stained slab and giggled.
Beside Dr. West's foot, the slab had split, and on the rock's flat brown
face there curved, like a tiny white necklace, a pattern of small teeth
in a lower jaw.

 

 

"Specialized teeth. Extremely specialized for a little reptile." Dr. West
bent over this fossil as if searching for a key to time.

 

 

Within Dr. West's eyes, the pupils, like dark mushroom extensions of his
brain enlarged with excitement. He was remembering himself as a sleepy
premed student, a zoology lecture and diagrams so long ago. "The dental
formula of this little bastard in my hand -- "
Incisors 3/3. Canines 1/1.
Premolars 4/4. Molars 3/3. A little shrewlike mammal?
"Beautiful!
We're going to escape from those damn dinosaurs."

 

 

He laughed too loudly. "Dig. Already, I think, we're up in the late
Cretaceous. Among the ultimate dinosaurs, you little shrewlike mammals
seemed as unimportant as the Arctic Esks. We're burrowing up into the
Paleocene, up toward the Eocene, crowded with little five-toed horses,
beyond the last dinosaurs. We may be less than eighty million years
from the surface," he said with irony. "We're entering the glorious Age
of Mammals."

 

 

"It means nothing to you because you were not born of this planet,"
he told the blankly smiling faces of the Esks. "But to me! I'm part of
it," he laughed. "Evolving upward, we're entering the upper layer of
my planet's cake. Already we're standing on top of four billion years
of life struggling up from the original hot rocks of my planet. It's my
planet, not yours."

 

 

"Eh?"

 

 

"Smile. Dig! We'll reach the surface and find out whose planet it is."
Dr. West stalked off toward the Control Room because he needed to talk
to a human being.

 

 

"I found mammalian teeth!" Dr. West's lonely voice rose with boyish
excitement. "We'll get out of here. Digging up through -- life,"
he laughed, "From the bottom up -- "

 

 

Mao III appeared dead. But in Dr. West's conscidusness something writhed,
Tapeworm, kill me, fiend, please free me, Mao III's thoughts screamed
soundlessly into Dr. West's brain.
Have you no humane conception of
euthanasia? Press the pillow against my face. So simple. Lean on it.
Please.

 

 

But Dr. West walked away from the agony of the man unable to die, his
fingernails gouging his palms.
Why can't I kill him?
Dr. West knew he
was vacillating within neurotic indecisiveness. He walked away past the
Esk servant approaching to pour water into Mao III's throat tube as if
tending a vegetable.

 

 

"When he dies, I'll be alone for four or five years." Dr. West walked
in sweat. "Alone with more Esks every day unless I -- "

 

 

New and beautiful little girls and boys scampered in the corridor,
laughing and playing in their world. Stream-bed gravel rattled out of
the long 45-degree tunnel for them to play with, followed by a thud of
mineralized bone.

 

 

"Yes, giggle. Heavy rock for little girl. Heavy bone. I see an Oligocene
beast with bones like a small tuskless elephant. Perhaps you have a right
to laugh. Perhaps this bone you are playing with is only an evolutionary
dead end."

 

 

Watching the children play, more hungry children every day, he knew he had
to kill more of these people. But he dreaded. "I am not God, what right
have I?" He procrastinated.

 

 

One impatient day, Dr. West stared at a fanlike spread of little bones
in a water-smoothed boulder. "Fragile as a monkey's hand. Dammit!"
He felt anger at the prehistoric stream bed for eroding previous strata,
treacherously restacking fossils and disordering time. "Protosimian fingers.
But where are we? Up to the Miocene Period? No. I feel as though we're still
buried at least sixty million years beneath the surface."

 

 

Dr. West procrastinated, slept poorly as he chilled the vault
preparatory to luring the Esks back to the Audience Room where the
white bear waited. He faced the day with the horror and fascination
of an executioner, a torero, a bomber pilot. Shivering as he watched
on the telescreen the closed-circuit transmission of the Esks jamming
into the Audience Room, he felt his heart thudding. His face twisted in
pain.
Either I'm burdened with guilt feelings or my heart --

 

 

His fingers played with the microphone switch.
If I didn't do this --
He thought of the genocidal executioners stationed at Buchenwald and
those other hundreds of camps in a long-ago world.
Was it delighted
horror which squirmed within their armor of pride in their professional
skill and devotion to duty?
"It is justified because there is not enough
food for all. I must do it as quickly and painlessly as my skill will
allow. They would all die anyway -- some day."