The Eskimo Invasion (57 page)

 

 

"My God!" All around Dr. West, the Esks -- their hair was standing on
end. They were smiling upward as the whip-crash of lightning blinded
Dr. West. The lightning arose from them. His retinas and the visual
part of his brain retained the imprint of the lightning flashing upward
in static electric discharge as he lurched in the deafening boom of
colliding air molecules refilling the gulf.

 

 

In the prickly scent of ozone, on his knees he groped, his hand closing
on the soft back, the still-warm shoulder of an Esk woman as delicately
boned as Marthalik had been so many years ago, and Dr. West cried out.
His sight was returning, but he was afraid to look upward.

 

 

All around him lay the fallen bodies of the Esks in their dance patterns.
He thought he heard the humming sound above his head. Crouched in the dust,
instinctively he clung to the Earth. His eyes closed tightly as fists.
In tightening pain his heart labored.

 

 

Because he had almost seen the end, he thought he understood the beginning.
Forty-two years ago the huge white shell had fallen down through the
polar inbending of the Earth's magnetic lines of force, down through
the weak inturning of the Earth's ionospheric radiation belts, smashing
down on the Boothia Peninsula near the North Magnetic Pole.
Oh God,
why couldn't it have fallen at the lifeless South Magnetic Pole?

 

 

The humming sound seemed closer, huger.

 

 

Everywhere, he thought,
are your eggs wafting at random through
the universe?

 

 

He was afraid to look up as the humming grew inside his skull, and his
evasive mind fled backward.
Forty-two years ago a young Eskimo stared at
the Burned Place
, Dr. West thought frantically.
Peterluk, yes, with his
grimy finger he would have poked whatever lay within the inner shell.
He stood too close to --
Sharp heart pains reflected from Dr. West's chest down the inside of his
left arm. His thoughts blurred as if something from above overlapped his
brain.
From the nucleus of the cell -- no, shell -- a repatterning flowed
-- through Peterluk -- to his gonads? Yes, for your purpose, his genetic
material was altered. His offspring would be patterned for your purpose.
Dr. West's face twisted like a tired smile as his thoughts clung to the
Boothia Peninsula. Peterluk's fanciful explanation of the first Esk
emerging as a fully grown baby-man from the splitting hump of a dying
monster, who was perhaps Peterluk, had been an inexplicable lie.
Peterluk's wife's explanation was closer. Yes, Eevvaalik's explanation
that the first Esk was born a month after a huge glass hypodermic
repeatedly violated her, in artificial insemination, was only half a lie.
Yes, unknowingly Peterluk carried your purpose to Eevvaalik's uterus
,
Dr. West thought,
where it grew more efficiently than the babies of our
purpose. Your Esks had the advantage of a one-month gestation period
and more rapid maturation. In rapid generations of Esks, your purpose
almost covered the Earth.

 

 

His hand pressing his chest, his cramping heart pain, Dr. West grimaced
at the golden dust.
Those unsophisticated Esks believed you were coming
down for them. For them you had become the true myth of power like a huge
white Grandfather Polar Bear coming down.

 

 

Dr. West was afraid to look up.
Who are you? You, whose pattern was
passed on through billions of Esks, your pattern that included such
adaptability! Smiling, smiling, your Esks instinctively behaved in a
nonviolent manner. Yes, nonviolence enabled their maximum survival in the
peculiar environment of this particular planet at this time. How they
multiplied! But your time fuse was burning in them. Cued somehow, your
Esks joined hands in their billions. In vast dance patterns for -- whom?

 

 

Dr. West wanted to look up.
Joining hands
, he thought, Esks looking
upward. Upward toward your purpose, your purpose --
Dr. West looked up at the sky. Dazzling blue, the sky was visually empty,
but Dr. West was seeing sparkling representational patterns imposed directly
on his brain. With his eyes there was nothing up there with sufficient
molecular density to be seen. But in the visual portion of his brain he
was being communicated with --
He understood. He was being shown a diagrammatic pattern of a brain,
flowing thoughts, circling memories. Transmitting neuron cells were
represented as strings of sparkling dots. Electric potentials within
these cells discharged in sequence, symbolic dots blinking in succession
like falling dominoes, symbolizing the flow of conscious thought. Life!
All around Dr. West in the Great Square the Esks lay dead. The vital
electric flowings which had been their consciousness, the sum of their
memories and experience, and their subconscious dreams, had stopped --
forever?
From his memory the symbol for a single free electron was drawn, a dancing
e. He supposed he was being shown the essence of life as the electron
skipped along a neuron pathway in the brain.

 

 

Surprisingly, the electron was towing an unknown symbol. As if connected by
an invisible string, the unknown symbol followed its electron along the
neuron pathway, bobbing like a red balloon pulled by an erratic electron
child.

 

 

A simplified pattern of a brain was outlined by billions of these
moving symbols.

 

 

On the blackboard of his consciousness enlarged a more sophisticated diagram
of an electron with its unknown satellite. The connecting string of force
was behaving more like a rabid rubber band, so that the unknown symbol
was whirling everywhere around its electron. Strangely, the electron was
not near the center of this activity. All the varying orbits of the unknown
symbol were distorted upward. The unknown symbol was being acted upon by
another force from below.

 

 

As if rising from the center of the Earth, tiny particles were shown
bombarding the unknown symbol. Illustrating gravitons? To Dr. West's
surprise, the force of gravity seemed to be REPELLING the unknown
symbol. Unable to break free from its electron, the unknown symbol
strained upward in each distorted orbit as if trying to escape from the
Earth. At the same time, all the unknown symbols were being moved along
the neuron pathways of every living brain.

 

 

Dr. West cried out from the pain in his chest. He felt an abstract brain
dying. Diagrammatically, he saw the vital differences in electric potential
of neuron cells leaking out like water until all were level and in stasis.
Unconsciousness. No directional electron flow. Random movement
of free electrons up through the cell walls. If there had been an
electroencephalographic machine available, it would have graphed this
brain as clinically dead.

 

 

For the electrons which had outlined the brain's pattern, Dr. West saw
their freed movements of "escape" were not wholly random. They were
moving upward because of the repelling pressure of gravity upon their
whirling satellites, the unknown symbols. And the orbits of the unknown
symbols still overlapped adjoining symbols' orbits, so that the whole
pattern which had been in the brain still held its shape.

 

 

"This is the spirit?" Dr. West cried out in realization. Out of the
diagrammatic brain, perhaps representing a dead Esk, rose the whole
intricate pattern of the unknown symbols like the skeleton of the Esk's
consciousness and memory. It retained its general shape even as the
free electrons were skipping upward from one temporary molecular perch
to another as they rose from the dead Esk's skull into the air. The
overlapping orbits of the billions of unknown symbols maintained the
general shape reminiscent of a brain even though the brain pattern was
spreading as the electrons skipped upward through the thinning atmosphere.

 

 

Atomic perches were further apart in the stratosphere. Yet the enlarging
orbit of each unknown symbol around its electron still overlapped the orbits
of adjoining unknown symbols. The shape of a man's brain pattern, with all
its intricate electroskeletal pathways, still was being maintained even
though the diameter of his brain pattern had spread to hundreds of yards.

 

 

Continuously repelled outward by the diminishing force of gravity,
the man's brain pattern was spreading over the sparse atoms in the near
vacuum beyond the Moon. Now the immense brain pattern was being driven
out of the solar system by the gravitational force from the sun, out
into the hard vacuum between the stars, where each Esk's mind pattern
was expanding larger than a planet.

 

 

"Are they still alive?" Dr. West cried aloud. "Are they conscious?"

 

 

In his chest, in his mind he was given the feeling of pressure of billions
of Esks' patterns like invisible balloons packing together due to the speed
of their individual expansions. Their individual brain patterns could not
overlap, perhaps because within each brain pattern the orbits of the unknown
symbols had developed characteristics unique to that individual. Pressing
outward against each other in every direction, the brain patterns pushed
outward from Earth in contiguous expansion through the solar system.
Except where repelled by gravity of the planets and the sun, the brain
patterns filled the solar system like invisible bubble-foam. Beyond the
solar system, they were pressing outward in every direction into the
blackness of space.

 

 

Toward the gravitationless void between two distant stars, the outermost
patterns were expanding toward -- Dr. West's heart hammered with excitement
-- toward an immense extrusion from another group of strange patterns
stretching in from vast light-year dimensions of the Galaxy. This immensity
was not born of Esks. Its billions of strange patterns extending had reached
the brain patterns of the Esks.

 

 

Dr. West understood from whence his mind-pictures had been transmitted.
Already the billions of Esks who must have died a year ago on every
continent of the Earth, while his Esks clawed in frustrated rapture at
their tunnel, had spread across the intervening blackness. From galactic
space, contact through those Esks and through his Esks who had just died
in the Great Square, still crowding from Earth into the stratosphere, had
been made with Dr. West. He feared this contact would be lost forever when
gravity forced away the last mind patterns of the Esks from Earth. "Wait!"

 

 

"Wait -- " He did not know to whom he spoke.

 

 

His awareness was lifted through the blackness and dazzle of space. As if
overwhelmed in a psychedelic journey, he soared outward toward the rim of
the Galaxy. He remembered rapture. He remembered his passion of years ago
when he strained with Marthalik in his arms. Again he was falling toward
that Strange Sun. Again, as if he were sharing the subconscious dreams
of the Esks, he was searching for the green planet.

 

 

Without Marthalik to support him, he fell past mountainous asteroids
dotted with white domes. Like colossal barnacles, they opened their
gigantic green nets toward the strange sun below. As if trapping the
sun's radiant energy, they turned their chlorophyllous green nets. And
he glimpsed an opening in the whiteness of one of these rock-digesting
domes. It was expelling spherical white eggs.

 

 

With unfolding purple fringes like immense curved sails, these gigantic
organic-lime eggs slowly drifted away from the pressure of the strange
sun's light, their purple sails diminishing into the blackness.
Its fleshy
sail burned off
, he thought in recognition,
when its white shell fell
through our atmosphere smashing down on the Boothia Peninsula --
He was falling toward the third planet. The planet was brown and dead.
For him, the picturization spun backward in time, and the planet became
green and densely populated. Slender and with a seemingly infinite variety
of specialized organs, nevertheless they were all of one species, capable
of skilled psionic electron adjustments of the genes of their unborn.
He felt the frightened thoughts of a varied population. Rich in telepathic
empathy, they had achieved gentle social control of themselves. But they
had not achieved space flight. Their evolutionary climb was trapped on their
single planet when the viral catastrophe exterminated them. All together
they died. Their bodies had decomposed while their planet turned brown.
Their strange brain patterns rose across Dr. West's inner vision,
expanding out through their solar system, past the minimum gravity
asteroids into the emptiness of space. His heart struggled with the
nervous expectation of a miracle.
But death, irrevocable and complete, loomed at him. He saw that their brain
patterns, like the patterns of the Esks, simply were rising in nonconscious
death.
The only movement was outward expansion. He was shown a single brain
pattern outlined in glowing dots. He knew each dot represented an
electron surrounded by the activity of its whirling satellite, the
unknown symbol whose orbit-shell still overlapped the orbits of adjoining
symbols, so that the dots remained in contact, the pattern retained
its cohesiveness. As the pattern expanded, so did the diameters of its
dot-orbits of the unknown symbols connecting its electrons. Intricate
bead necklaces of dots still formed the electroskeletal pathways of what
had been a brain.
But there was no flow of dots along the pathways, within the pattern
no circulation of dots analogous to consciousness. Without an energy
source, the dots simply retained their positions relative to the whole
pattern. The only movement was expansion. Like the mental patterns of the
Esks and everything that had ever died, in their billions these dead brain
patterns were expanding outward through the universe in eternal death.
But we are alive!