The Eskimo Invasion

by Hayden Howard

  An abrupt jolt whiplashed his neck. The swooping side-to-side revolving swinging rocking slammed his head against the wall of the capsule. Dr. West finally realized the capsule had been ejected from the bomber, and the capsule's parachute already had opened.

  In the hoarse breathing descending pendulum silence of the capsule, Dr. West's hand crept to his slippery mouth. He bit his hand. The capsule was descending regardless of what he did. The explosion, the ejection from the bomber had been programmed. The smiling faces in the Harvard Circle of the Central Intelligence Agency had delivered him to China.

  "Why me?" Those smiling sons of bitches, what had they planned for him to do? "I never volunteered for this!" he gasped. "You sons of bitches, my narcohypnosis has worn off. You may think you conditioned my responses like an experimental animal's. I've got news for you. It's worn off. I'm free!" Whatever program was in his skull, as it emerged, Dr. West determined he would snafu it, foul it up.

  "I'll sell out, I'll bug out, I owe no allegiance to a country who would do this to a man. I've got one ambition, to save my neck and to hell with you!"

  The capsule struck the earth. His head slammed down. Dr. West raised his head in the blinding darkness of the capsule. He shook the Major's slack shoulder. A gurgling sound --

  With shock, Dr. West felt his foot was wet. He groped down. Too much liquid to be blood. The gurgling sound was more distinct when he stopped breathing.

  Water was leaking into the smashed bottom of the capsule.

  A one in a million spot landing, Dr. West wondered. Instead of striking the mountainsides in this formerly desolate western interior of Szechwan Province, had the capsule descended into a precipitious river valley where water was -- Szechwan Province?

  "Those sons of bitches!" Until now he had not remembered the landing was to be in Szechwan Province. "Memory -- triggered!" He realized the landing of the capsule had unblocked data the CIA had drilled into his memory. Now he could even visualize the map. The terrain, changing sets of spy-in-the-sky photographs were riffled before his inner eyes.

  The slender fingers of Dr. George Bruning had paused beside an oval dot on the aerial photo. "Another new irrigation reservoir." Dr. Bruning's calmly intelligent face smiled across the table at him.

  "You son of a bitch," Dr. West said to the darkness of the capsule.

  Dr. George Bruning was no medical doctor. He was a former boy wonder, a former geophysicist, a former scientific astronaut whose two lovable children and smiling wife and publicity in Life mag had resulted in his election to the House of Representatives. His political defeat by a movie star two years later resulted in his appointment to the President's Scientific Advisory Staff. He was photographed playing croquet with the President. He was promoted to Chief Scientific Advisor.

  The unexpected defection of Australia to neutralism resulted in wholesale firings in the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Dr. George Bruning was appointed by the President as Deputy Director of the CIA. George might be inexperienced in the use of cloak and dagger but he soon showed himself to be an organizer. His own agency emerged within the Agency and gained the newspaper label "Harvard Circle." By a noncoincidence, not only had Dr. George Bruning and his four top assistants attended Harvard as undergraduates, so had the President of the United States.

  "So what's the big deal?" Dr. West hissed, struggling to unbuckle his nylon safety harness, while no explanation, only odd details, emerged from the outer layer of his memory -- instructions.

  He remembered that there was a special landing kit attached under the seat. A detail, but it was a remarkable feat of memory because he had never looked under the seat. His hand felt it though. He could visualize its contents laid out on a white table. Total partial recall.

  "You sons of bitches, you're rationing me details." Dr. West's hands lifted the metal kit and attached it to a prearranged hook inside the voluminous padded jacket of his Chinese commune worker's costume.

  "You're all very stupid if you think I can pass for a Chinese just because I'm a student of Oriental population problems." Dr. West knew his laughter was freighted with hysteria. Plainly he was outfitted in this agricultural commune costume for some reason other than to pass as a Chinese during interrogation by Chinese.

  Water continued to gurgle into the capsule. Dr. West's nostrils detected the faint yet fetid odor that emanates from streams polluted by humanity. There were no sounds of people outside the capsule.

  Not even a frog croaked in what must be night outside.

  From his escape kit, Dr. West's hands detached a small, heavy, no larger than a woman's compact, radio. He remembered it was an automatic signal sender. In order to extend the aerial his hands were trained to locate the upper air vent in the darkness, to twist it open and project the aerial like a collapsible fishing rod into the Chinese night. Dr. West crouched in the blackness of the capsule with his legs in the rising water and his thumb on the signal-send switch of the miniaturized ionospheric-ricochet radio beacon. He knew it was broadcasting a continuous signal to someone.

  He supposed his body had been trained in a mock-up of this ejection capsule, but he couldn't remember that yet. "You chose me, didn't you trust me? Only part of my memory, part of my conditioning has been unblocked. But I won't wait for the cues like a trained dog. I'm going to tear apart your conditioning, Sammy, you son of a bitch."

  He remembered Dr. Sammy Wynoski inserting a needle into his arm.

  He remembered before that, the first face he recognized after his rebirth out of the cryothermos bottle from the New Ottawa Reformation Center had been Dr. Sammy Wynoski's vulpine face, startlingly aged. Not so startling, thirty-three years had passed for Sam since they said good-bye, each clutching his graduation award from Harvard's School of Medicine.

  While Dr. Joe West returned to California, and finally achieved the exalted position of Director of Oriental Population Problems Research at the University of California, was canned, discovered the Eskimo population explosion, lost Marthalik, and was imprisoned for "attempted genocide," Dr. Sammy Wynoski said he'd been quietly specializing in chemopsychiatry. He had an increasing number of weekend jobs as a medical interrogation consultant for the Central Intelligence Agency. When fellow Harvardman George Bruning was appointed Deputy Director of the Agency, Sammy Wynoski had answered his country's call, his Harvard buddy's phone call, and became a full-time member of the Harvard Circle of the CIA.

  Thus when Dr. Joe West and Dr. Sammy Wynoski parted consciousness this year in the basement of CIA headquarters, they were at opposite ends of a hypodermic needle which Dr. Sammy Wynoski was apologetically inserting into Dr. Joe West's arm.

  "Joe, you haven't aged like -- uh, I -- have -- " Sammy muttered.

  Passing out, Dr. West had been in no condition to reply then, but now -- "You bunch of amateurs," Dr. West muttered, crouching in the flooding capsule. "Have you got any rational plan for me? What do I do next?"

  Beside him, the Major groaned. Dr. West's pulse rate jumped. His wrist gave a nervous jerk of its own volition.

  "Where's my gun?" the Major's voice blurted, and then he whispered, "Any Chinks out there? What you doing?"

  "Nothing," Dr. West's voice replied soothingly. "Our best hope is to stay in the capsule." For some reason, his fingers twisted his wristwatch to the underside of his wrist.

  "Damn capsule -- flooding," the Major grunted. "We got to get out of here fast." From the thrashing, it sounded as if the Major was having difficulty disengaging himself from his safety harness and assorted intercom wires and oxygen tubes.

  "We stay here!" Dr. West's voice stated, his pulse rate accelerating as if readying his body for violent combat. He realized -- he remembered, when he tipped back his wrist as he was doing now, an injection needle emerged from his wristwatch.

  "If the faceless airman becomes uncooperative," a disembodied voice had explained, "simply prick him with the wristwatch needle." Otherwise Dr. West was to wait. He was not to kill the purposely "face
less" airman until the proper strategic moment. Dr. West began to shiver. He had not remembered this until now.

  He had no intention of murdering the Major. He had no intention of murdering anyone, not even a Chinese.

  "Those sons of bitches!" Dr. West blurted, in his memory studying Dr. Sammy Wynoski's apologetic face.

  "Yeah," the Major wheezed, probably also referring to the CIA, and the two men collided in the darkness.

  Dr. West realized he almost had jabbed the Major with the needle watch. With his other hand, Dr. West tried to unbuckle the wristband.

  His fingers struggled against his orders. His fingers wouldn't obey him. He felt as frustrated as a spastic as he gasped and sloshed about in the water. The wristwatch fell off his wrist. Success! One victory against the Harvard Circle.

  "You all right?" the Major demanded.

  "Yes, fine. I feel much better. Let's get out of here. You're in command, Major."

  "I'm going to unbolt the hatch."

  "Hadn't we better wait in the capsule?" Dr. West's smooth voice suggested.

  "But you just said for us to -- let's get out," the Major hissed; Dr. West was contradicting himself.

  "The ignorant Chinese peasants can't reach us, can't torture us if we stay in the capsule." Dr. West's mouth talked fast. "Yes, they'll think the capsule is one of theirs. Our best hope is for the People's Militia to reach us. Still better is for the Maoist police to find us before the people lynch us. The capsule isn't sinking anymore. The water isn't rising. Probably we're mired in a rice paddy. Our only hope is to stay in the capsule."

  "You gone crazy or something? A minute ago you wanted out -- Get out of this capsule!" The Major bodily shoved Dr. West through the hatch into the mud.

  Under Dr. West's submerged hands was the bristly feel of newly transplanted rice seedlings.

  He lifted his gaze up a steeply terraced mountainside to the night sky.

  Behind him, the Major thrashed out of the capsule into the mud and sloshed about in the darkness. With a gasp and a curse, the Major slipped off the crumbling edge of the narrow terrace into the rice paddy below. These terraced rice paddies were little wider than a man's arm span.

  The capsule had not descended into a river valley. Dr. West saw that they had landed on a mountainside so steep that all this terracing would have been uneconomic for man. Immense labor would be required for the limited number of catties of rice the mountain could produce.

  The odors of the terrace-makers permeated the night air.

  "Stinks like human -- fertilizer," the Major scrambled back up the hand- packed mud slope. "Millions of Chinks!"

  "Not Chinese." In his memory Dr. West visualized photographs of only five years ago showing these mountains desolate and dry, completely uneconomic for rice cultivation. During the last two or three years, incredible energy had been expended on these mountain terraces. The mountains were too steep, the terraces too small for efficient use of machinery. Human cultivators would consume too much rice, more energy laboring here than the submarginal rice harvests would replace. Yet these mountains had been laboriously terraced, magically irrigated, freshly hand-planted with bristly new rice seedlings.

  "The moon is rising." Like glittering liquid steps, the terraced rice paddies shimmered down the mountainside into the dark canyon.

  "I smell smoke," the Major whispered. "Millions of Chinks down there."

  Dr. West did not bother to disagree with him. Turning, he looked for the dim whiteness of another giant parachute, but there was no sign of Colonel Meller's escape capsule.

  The Major held up his shining wet hand, feeling for the direction of the night breeze. "Bad! I'm afraid the wind is coming from where we sprayed. Hell of a note if we get infected by our own spray. Got to move out of here fast!"

  Again, Dr. West did not bother to disagree with him. Dr. West's hand reached into his nylock flying suit and groped into his commune worker's rags, where his fingers closed around the handle of a dagger he had not known was sheathed there.

  The Major pulled at his shoulder. "Move out! You may be inoculated against -- whatever it is, but I'm not."

  "You don't need to be terrified of this microbiological," Dr. West's voice replied smoothly. "Probably it is a bacterial infection of the staph-strep group -- "

  "Let's go, let's go!" the Major interrupted.

  "A mild infection may settle in the Fallopian tubes and in the spermatic ducts."

  "Sterilized," the Major grunted in partial understanding. "Kill 'em before they're born. Yeah, kill Chinks before they're conceived. Yeah, typically CIA. Let's get the hell out of here."

  "I'm just guessing about the bacterial spray." Dr. West was remembering the young-old face of Dr. Fred Gatson, bacteriologist.

  Harvard grad Fred Gatson had been even younger than Dr. West when they were the big wheels in Oriental Population Problems Research. When Dr. Joe West was fired as Director, amazingly, Dr. Fred Gatson had been appointed to replace him.

  Dr. West thought. Fred had no compunctions about breeding more virulent "birth control" bacteria in those days, even though they had potentialities for sterilizing the human race, exterminating mankind. They were more menacing than atomic war.

  When the CIA "freed" Joe West from his life sentence and imprisoned him in the basement of CIA headquarters, Dr. Fred Gatson reappeared with a receding hairline. It turned out Fred had left Cal and scrambled still higher up the ladder of success. Dr. Fred Gatson now was a member of the Harvard Circle of the CIA. Facing Dr. West, Fred appeared uncomfortable but determined. In Dr. West's memory, Fred opened his mouth. He was speaking, presumably about his latest accomplishments, but he appeared unhappy.

  In his memory, Dr. West could see Fred's lips moving, but he couldn't hear his voice. What Fred was telling him seemed blocked out of his memory. In frustration and hope, Dr. West wondered if a bacterial mutation finally had been developed which would sterilize or even kill Esks but not humans. If so, this spraying flight over China should be the culmination of his life. Had they finally begun bacterial control of the Esk population explosion before it overwhelmed the world?

  Suspiciously, Dr. West felt no happiness. He didn't believe such an Esk-selective bacteria finally had been developed. He didn't believe this was what Fred Gatson's silently moving mouth had said. Fred's words had been censored from his surface memory. Why had the CIA delivered him to China?

  "This spray doesn't affect people," Dr. West's voice said reassuringly to the Major. "You don't need to fear personal sterilization. The bacterial mutation is quite specific." Dr. West couldn't believe what his mouth was saying. "It only affects Esks."

  "Eskimos? They're people. Same species. So it will affect me. You're lying so I won't panic," the Major blurted. "But I have no intention of panicking. Let's get away from this capsule! Double-time! If Chink peasants catch us here where we sprayed, I mean -- we won't father anything. They'll butcher us. Right now I'm not worried about my virility. Let's get out of here."

  The Major's heaving chest made a close target but Dr. West managed to uncurl his own fingers from the handle of the concealed dagger. Those CIA sons of bitches were determined he should kill someone. Dr. West was equally determined he would not kill anyone.

  "We'll have to take the escape radio," Dr. West's voice said.

  "What radio are you talking about?"

  "Continuous signal sender." Dr. West removed it from the capsule. It barely filled the palm of his hand.

  Hope returned to the Major's voice. "The CIA is looking out for us! Is a CIA snatch plane going to pick us up? Or is this a guerrilla wavelength?"

  "Guerrilla ," Dr. West lied; it was the communications wavelength of the Maoist Police.

  "Let's go!" The Major was pulling at him again, making Dr. West's involuntary nervous system clench as if he had been conditioned to kill --