The Eskimo Invasion (55 page)

"Look at me, I am white bear, Grandfather Bear from the sky, coming down
to you, rise to me -- "

 

 

Afterward he showed the surviving adults how to stack the bodies neatly
in the freezing chamber which once had contained food. He tried to give
first aid to children who had been crushed in the ecstatic stampede. He
tried to comfort children whose mothers now were refrigerated. And he
shoved a surviving male up the tunnel to dig. In loneliness he walked
back to the familiar hatred of Mao III.

 

 

Dr. West laughed thinly. "The Esks say -- those who -- have died, have
risen into happiness."

 

 

Tapeworm, you fear to kill me. It cannot be simply because I desire
death that you refuse to release me. You are not that cruel? Mao III
lay totally paralyzed, begging.

 

 

But the tube Dr. West had taped in the corner of Mao III's mouth
implacably seeped liquid nourishment into Mao III's stomach.

 

 

Tapeworm, when your host dies do you fear everything dies? When I die,
you die! I die: the universe dies. You, you billions of tapeworms who
exist only in my consciousness, of course you try to keep me alive.
You fear nothingness without me --
"Taunting me won't make me kill you," Dr. West muttered.
But I need to die. Torturer! Let me die.

 

 

His face twisting with sympathetic pain, Dr. West walked away in enclosing
loneliness like a clear ice cave.

 

 

He suspected at least three years stretched ahead before the Esk tunnel
possibly could reach the surface.
I'll lose control of myself before then
-- alone with my victims
, Dr. West thought.
God help me, and up above,
on the surface of the Earth, billions of smiling crowding faceless Esks!

 

 

Dr. West walked into the bathroom and stared at the razor blade.
I'll leave now. The razor blade gleamed between his fingertips.

 

 

"You sick bastard, you'd never find out what happens!" Dr. West threw
the razor blade into the wash basin. He glimpsed his wryly thin face
turning in the mirror as he walked out of the bathroom. He walked back
toward the cruel little prison which was Mao III's body.

 

 

And on past it away from Mao III, he hurried into the corridor where
smiling Esk children scampered away, and the handful of breeding adults
carried sand and rock from the tunnel to the supply room, where more
heaps of sand replaced sacks of rice each day.

 

 

"Dig faster!" he shouted uselessly up the thin tunnel which had only
elbow room for one Esk to dig at a time, and a rattling of descending
rocks rushed down at him.

 

 

"Mioeene dust, a local dry period, you stupidly smiling nongeologists.
Yes, smile at the brown ridge on this rock. Smile stupidly because the
little animal whose straight femur this was -- who crept down to drink --
may have been my ancestor. He sure as hell wasn't yours!"

 

 

Brown stone from hardened grasslands, then darker stone formed in
temperate forests slid down the tunnel each day, gradually reddening to
rain-leached laterite stone typical of rain forests. "The rainy sweep
of the cycle, and now blue swampy clay."

 

 

In a discharge of gray slabs from the tunnel tumbled a massive thud,
a giant's bone, followed by an odd-shaped white flat -- "Tooth as big
as a spade! A shovel-jawed mastodon. Pliocene? Only thirty million years
from the surface."

 

 

"Dig!" Dr. West laughed like a crazy man. "Dig, you smiling fools,
at this rate only two more years to go. Your children will see the sun."

 

 

You won't, Dr. West thought, staring at the bent back of an Esk woman
sweeping little rocks into a frying pan. His vision blurred as he almost
saw Marthalik. He hurried away to the supply room. Shakily he counted
sacks of rice. Always too many mouths were being born again. He must face
the hungry white bear of necessity.
Grandfather Bear, if you are truly
up there in the sky, accept these, your children.

 

 

"Then what am I?" Scowling, he knew now he had the strength to reach
the surface, if he clung to the belief his human world was still up there.

 

 

Dr. West walked to the Control Room to turn down the thermostats, again to
prepare for the hungry bear. Something squirmed in his mind. With extra
blankets, he bent over the withered remnant of Mao III. The paralyzed
man's trapped thoughts frantically raced and squirmed like agonized
white rats and burst out.

 

 

Dr. West stood in the squealing wind of Mao III's incoherent thoughts.
A dagger appeared, as if a mind could stab itself to death with a
visualized dagger. Now the dagger struck out at Dr. West and he felt
a sharp stinging as if the beginning of a tiny stroke spreading within
his own brain. He bowed his head in the rain of Mao III's inner sobbing.

 

 

Tapeworm, my friend, my last contact with life, please kill me.

 

 

Dr. West's hand lay gently on Mao III's throat and his thumb and forefinger
closed on the twin faint pulsations of the carotid arteries. He felt
gratitude like sparks of laughter from Mao III.

 

 

Pressing in, his forefinger and opposed thumb narrowed the flow from
heart to brain until the last vivid picture -- armies of Chinese children
with white balloons marching along the pink walls of the Great Square
-- turned gray in Mao III's blood-starving brain. Dr. West glimpsed a
single huge gray -- what was it? A loud squawling seemed to emerge from
within himself, and he realized he was seeing upward through the eyes
of a baby instinctively loudly commanding food, warmth, love. A huge
gray hand was descending.

 

 

Into his crib? Dr. West couldn't see. There was nothing. He opened his
eyes at the waxen face of Mao III. Beneath Dr. West's fingertips there
was no pulse in the throat arteries. From Mao III's brain, his own
parasitic brain no longer could feel organized electrical activity.
In fifteen minutes Dr. West confirmed irreversible clinical death.

 

 

He did not freeze Mao III's body. Somberly, he buried it under Pliocene
sand in the supply room, and smiling Esks emptied soup pans full of
broken rock from the tunnel face onto that growing pile of debris,
and smiled and smiled.

 

 

"I'm alone with you now, you smiling Dream Persons. I just hope that
others of me are alive on the surface."

 

 

"Eh?"

 

 

"So you don't understand. You see this sliver of bone from the rock. All
that is left of a wolf, hyena, baboon, or undiscovered anthropoid who ran
on the ground upright, I don't know. All I know, this fossilized bone
and I are more closely related than you and I. The ancient imprints in
my cells have been continuously reshaped by this Earth for four billion
years. You -- your ancestors have been part of this world less than
fifty years. I belong here. Your progenitor invaded. Were you sent here
for a purpose? Now you are digging upward. But where are you going?"

 

 

Dr. West talked to the Esks a great deal now. It was another form of
talking to himself. Thickened by fermented rice wine, Dr. West liked
to shout at the ceiling. "Up there in the sky, come down here to hell,
Grandfather Bear."

 

 

Into the tunnel four years had gone. "On the surface, four billion,
eight billion, sixteen billion, thirty-two billion Esks?" But he knew
thirty-two billion Esks was beyond the Earth's limit.

 

 

Suddenly his Esks were staring at the ceiling, and they were smiling,
laughing and running about in confusion. Shouting with joy, some of the
adults scrambled into the tunnel, struggling upward.

 

 

"No! No! You'll smother the man digging. We're still a thousand feet
below the surface." Dr. West kept trying to pull them back, but they
wriggled free, stronger and so much younger than he.

 

 

Those who couldn't force their way into the tunnel ran against the walls,
climbed on chairs. As the excitement grew, shouting Esks tried to climb
the walls, while their children whimpered uncomprehendingly. In mounting
desperation, an Esk man stretched his arms toward the ceiling, shouting
unintelligibly.

 

 

Dr. West became afraid something really was happening at the surface, were
the billions of Esks up there becoming frantic like this?
Marthalik!

 

 

Dr. West grabbed an Esk woman. "Dammit, what's happening?"

 

 

"Eh? Let me go, please. All becoming one." Her excited laughter gradually
muted to frustrated sobs as the adult Esks sagged down on the corridor
floor. They seemed so strange staring at the ceiling without their smiles.

 

 

Esks slept in exhaustion where they lay, and their nonplussed children
scampered around them whining and playing. It was Dr. West who had to
drag the smothered bodies out of the tunnel. It was Dr. West who boiled
the great tub of rice for the children while the surviving adults sat
stunned with disappointment.
At what -- ?

 

 

Lethargic, they had to be loudly ordered to work in the tunnel. It seemed
strange to see Esks who did not smile. They drooped as if they no longer
had a purpose in life.

 

 

They cannot know what has happened at the surface, Dr. West thought.
But their organisms knew something was happening, and now it has stopped.
"You, there, hurry up, carry that sand to the supply room. We'll never
reach the surface unless everyone works the way you used to -- "

 

 

Something had happened up there. Down here the Esks ceased to mate.
The last babies emerged too soon, as if cast out, spontaneous abortions,
dead.

 

 

Dr. West resorted to shouts and shoves to make the Esks dig.

 

 

"Dammit, why have you lost your purpose in life?"

 

 

"Eh?"

 

 

Now the swarm of older children were better diggers than their parents,
and the tunnel proceeded under Dr. West's constant direction. Their
lives required so much more guidance and reassurance now from Dr. West,
he began to feel like the father --

 

 

"Dig! That's the way. We're nearer the surface every day." Pleistocene
gravel less than a million years old was rattling out of the tunnel.
"Dig my children, and we'll see the Earth."

 

 

Sometimes Dr. West dreamed the surface was green with willow trees along
a silvery brook, and from his childhood he poked straight sticks deep
into the water, which bent them. He dipped his face in the cool water and
raised his head. Behind him the surface of the Earth was barren and dry,
all life obliterated.

 

 

"Which is it?" He awoke, and when he slept again the cities hummed
with life as if he'd never been away, and the humming grew and spread
shoulder packed against shoulder in a solid mass of Esks spreading
through the streets. The surface of the Earth turned black with bobbing
heads of Esks, and the humming rose while their heads drooped, and the
Esks died in sagging masses melting into a golden honey, gleaming and
flowing between the buildings and down the valleys. He began to run,
looking for Marthalik. Like golden honey it covered the Earth, as he
shouted for her. The humming grew louder coming down from the sky and
Dr. West tried to look up --

 

 

He blundered into the corridor toward the chattering voices of the Esks.
They were carrying black clods from the mouth of the tunnel. He awakened
fully. It was crumbling rock flecked with bone, blackened within as if
containing the ashes of an ancient campfire.

 

 

His fingers picked out a glint of sharpness. "Flake of flint.
Dig, my children! We've reached the Age of Man!"

 

 

He laughed. "Peking Man? True man? Who knows what man? Ancestor, we've
passed you." He poked at slender humanoid femurs split for their marrow.
"You Paleolithic cannibals! We're trying to pass you. By stepping on
your heads, we'll get out."

 

 

Day after day the dark rock became lighter-colored, more sandy.

 

 

Out of the tunnel bumped chunks of compacted loess dust, the yellow
windblown dust from the Gobi Desert, the deep soil of China. "The climate
has dried. Cold dusty winds from the advancing Arctic may have driven
prehistoric man away from this place. Is the ice approaching Peking?"

 

 

But the next day, in a crumbling yellow clod, which had been loess
dust, gleamed a beautiful leaf-shaped javelin head with delicately
pressure-flaked edges. "Sharp as the day you made it. And this sharp
splinter, was it an awl? We're up among the real men now, who outsmart
the cold, perhaps in intricately sewn wild reindeer skins."

 

 

Dr. West stared up the tunnel hole. "Am I the first amateur archeologist
to make his dig from the bottom up?" he laughed excitedly. "Am I the
first with a rear-end perspective of history, a proctologist's view
of civilization?"

 

 

As the tunnel extended upward, shards of fire-burned pottery rattled down
out of the hole. "We must be up into the Neolithic. Pots are used to store
grain. Deliberate farmers must have produced a more assured food supply,
and the rules of Malthusian starvation have eased. Because food production
is increasing more rapidly, for the first time population is increasing
rapidly, faster and faster. Dig!"

 

 

When Dr. West with his flashlight wormed his way up the slanting tunnel,
wheezing through dust, slipping on loose rocks, squirming past Esk
children who had been sent up to clear bottlenecks in debris slides,
struggling upward for a mile through hot dusty air which made him gasp,
his chest tightening with warning heart pains, he finally reached the
buttocks of the Esk who was digging.