The Eskimo Invasion

by Hayden Howard

  "Doc, our best chance is to get far far away from this capsule before daylight shows it to the Chinks down there." The Major needed to clutch at any hope. "Then we hide and wait for the guerrillas."

  Dr. West tried to keep up with the Major as he lumbered and splashed along the terraces. Joe West suspected there were few, if any, Chinese asleep down there in the canyon. His legs dragged. His legs felt so heavy --

  His hand refused to let go of it, but he wanted to throw away the signal sender. Why should he obediently give himself up to the Maoist police? "Those CIA sons of bitches!" Dr. West couldn't make his fingers let go of the signal sender. "They really conditioned the carrying of this radio into my skull."

  "What?" The Major looked back.

  "Nothing." Joe West staggered on.

  With devilish energy, the Major began clambering up the sides of terraces, ascending the mountain like a monkey up a giant staircase. Dr. West's legs grew heavier and heavier, and he gasped for breath, dragging himself up over terraces mainly by the strength of his arms. His legs felt like swollen corpses. "Mental elephantiasis? Imaginary heavy legs? Hell!" Dr. West wondered when he would remember exactly what they had done to his legs.

  "Hurry up," the Major hissed from far above.

  But Joe West was already exhausted. He gasped for breath, and his heart thudded unevenly. As he struggled to climb over the lip of a terrace into the next paddy, the muddy signal sender slipped out of his hand. The tiny radio slid back down the terrace wall. Dr. West clung there, then triumphantly bellied over into the rice paddy, leaving the radio.

  His hands wanted to scramble back down and search for the signal sender. "Oh, but you can't make me do it," he whispered. "No CIA assassins sitting safe in Washington give me orders." He crawled forward across the paddy and struggled up the terrace above, leaving the radio lost in the darkness. "To hell with Harvard! I'm free."

  The Major came sliding back down. "Let me help you. That's OK, you're not in shape. Let's go. I won't leave you, Doc."

  The Major unmercifully hoisted Joe West to his feet. Supporting him, urging him, dragging him, the Major hauled Joe West up the terraced side of the mountain. Dr. West's legs kept sagging.

  "That's OK, do your best," the Major gasped. "We're Americans. We'll stick together."

  Dr. West wondered what the Major would say if and when he discovered Dr. West was wearing a Chinese commune worker's clothes under his nylock flying suit.

  "Doc, Doc! Hey, where's the little radio?" The Major began to shake him, to search his outer pockets.

  "In my hand. No, I dropped it."

  "You dropped it?" the Major shrilled. "You just dropped our only chance."

  The Major scrambled back down the terrace, leaving Dr. West lying in the mud listening to the Major sloshing about below him. There was not one chance in a million that anyone could find that signal sender in the dark.

  Dr. West lay there listening to his own uneven heartbeat. His heart sounded like a candidate for an electronic pacemaker.

  "Best way to beat the Harvard Circle -- for my heart to stop." Dr. West stared up at the moon: the Harvard Circle peered down at him from his imagination.

  Dr. George Bruning -- Deputy Director, CIA.

  Dr. Sammy Wynoski -- Chemopsychiatrist.

  Dr. Fred Gatson -- Population control expert; bacteriologist.

  But there were two more members of the Harvard Circle: Dr. West's irregularly beating heart cued one of them out of his blocked memory.

  Dr. Einar R. Johansen had not been a direct acquaintance of Dr. West's, but Dr. West had recognized him in the basement of the CIA headquarters. The eccentric Dr. Johansen was so easily recognizable. He was only slightly withered by the thirty years which had passed since Dr. West regularly saw his protruding face in medical journals. In those days Dr. Johansen had been the nation's most inventive surgeon.

  More recently Dr. Johansen had earned a Ph.D. in bioelectrical engineering from Harvard. He was better known now as an inventive neurosurgeon than as a heart surgeon, and still better known for his press conferences. Reportedly he was the doctor who said: "The older I get, the softer my head, so the more I soak up. I learn more now than when I was a kid of forty. At this rate, when I'm eighty I'll revolutionize medicine." This enraged the A.M.A.

  On pop-science TV shows, Dr. Johansen played with electric eels -- without wearing rubber gloves. He was ingeniously grounded against electrocution. He was the first surgeon to design and install an electronic heart pacemaker which was powered by the patient's neuron electricity. No internal batteries to wear out, no wires to fray. "My pacemaker lasts as long as the patient. Yes, longer!"

  The A.M.A. disapproved of such jovially self-advertising talk. Dr. Johansen's picture no longer appeared in medical journals. His smiling horseface appeared in space journals. NASA had retained him as a consultant to the Bio-Power project. The goal was a subminiature solid state transmitter utilizing a lifetime power supply from the electrical energy of the astronaut's body.

  Where had the transmitter been implanted, the leg, the buttock? With a pained grin, Dr. West's teeth gleamed in the moonlight.

  Dr. West remembered Dr. Johansen's wrinkled face bending over him. An operating table? "Before I'm through, sir," the old voice croaked, "you'll be a veritable electric eel. Hah!"

  Then the anesthetic engulfed him.

  Dr. West lay in the muddy rice paddy. His legs ached. He knew the Harvard Circle had not gone to all that trouble just to install a duplicate signal sender in his leg.

  High below the stars an aircraft droned overhead, its red and green wing lights flitting. Dr. West knew the CIA had not commandeered an Air Force ramjet to fly him over China merely to spray the Esks. An expendable technician could do that. Yet the plan must have something to do with the Esks. The CIA had selected him, and he was the man with the most unpopular theory about the Esks. He was the man who had been convicted of attempted genocide of the Eskimos. He was the most unpopular man in the world.

  If the Maoist police caught him alive, if they recognized him, remembering him as Dr. West, the Mass Murderer of the Helpless Eskimos, the Chicoms wouldn't kill him if they realized he was Dr. West.

  The Chinese Federation of Nations joyfully would use him for political purposes. Other Americans had confessed to anything. Dr. West knew he was no stronger than they --

  He smiled with the ultimate fear and fumbled into his layers of wet clothing for the dagger. The Maoists would have enjoyed parading him. Even Mao III, who had been neither seen nor photographed for three years, had expressed the desire to face "the murderous Dr. West, eye to eye!"

  Dr. West struggled to remove the dagger from its sheath. "Those fools, those stupid CIA Sons of bitches!" If the Chicoms took him alive, their glib diplomats would use him like acid to dissolve any last world goodwill the United States had managed to retain. Piously the Chinese representatives would tell the General Assembly: Any nation who would parachute the murderous convict Dr. West upon another nation must be guilty of more than germ warfare, more than genocide --

  Dr. West spat in the mud. He was unable to make his hand draw out the dagger. "You poor bastard. You're as helpless as an imperialist potato bug complete with implicating little parachute and U.S. insignia on your wing covers. Even the CIA can't be that stupid. They must see one move beyond what I'm seeing."

  The Major emerged grunting over the edge of the terrace. "Found it. I'll carry the signal sender now."

  Dr. West opened his mouth. He wanted to tell the Major that the signal sender was tuned for the Maoist police wavelength, but he couldn't get the words out. Instead he followed the Major across the rice paddy and up the next terrace, and the next, and the next

  The Major came back and helped him again. "Do your best. Easy does it, old man."

  Dr. West was not an old man, at least he had been a vigorous young man when he was sentenced to prison. Theoretically, sixteen years in the Cold Room shouldn't have aged him. But his legs were an old man'
s legs, unbelievably heavy.

  "When we get to the top," the Major gasped, "I'm hoping there'll -- uninhabited canyon on the other side. We can hide until -- guerrillas trace -- our radio signal."

  "In China, no place is uninhabited anymore," Dr. West said.

  "You got the wrong attitude -- mustn't give up -- your CIA guerrillas -- come for us." The Major raised the tiny radio signal sender -- which was squeaking their location to any Maoist police radio location finding equipment within a radius of fifty miles.

  By the time the Major had half-carried Dr. West to the top of the mountain ridge, the moon was rapidly descending toward the mountains of Sinkiang. The flat top of the ridge glittered the moon's reflection.

  "Irrigation reservoir up here," the Major gasped. "Look at the big pipes and hoses and pumps. Never knew the Chinks had it in 'em!"

  "That's a high voltage power line leading down into your uninhabited canyon," Dr. West said.

  "Doesn't mean there's Chinks down there. Never give up!" The Major led the way down the other side of the mountains.

  They fell down terraces, sloshed through rice paddies, tripped over irrigation pipes, slid down endless terraces into the faintly humming canyon. This was how the Maoists had forced impossible mountains to yield rice crops. At the bottom of the canyon the power line would lead to an atomic generator plant.

  At the bottom of the canyon, the two men scrambled over an enormous concrete pipe. Dr. West heard the water rushing inside. With unlimited atomic-electric power the Chinese were piping water across vast distances. With an unlimited number of obedient hands, the Maoists had ordered terracing of mountains previously considered "impossible for wet rice cultivation."

  Impossible these tiny rice paddies were for Chinese commune workers who needed at least 1800 calories of rice-energy per day. If Chinese tended these inefficient vertical fields, they would need to eat the entire harvest in order to survive and multiply. There would be no surplus. But Dr. West knew that these tiny paddies were hand-tended by beings who could not only survive; they could labor from dawn to dark and multiply like rabbits on only 600 calories of rice-energy per day!

  As the Major led the way across the dark canyon, he stumbled over the sleeping body of the Maoist solution to the agricultural problem.

  "Don't strangle him. Don't kill him," Dr. West hissed. "The man's an Esk."

  But the Major tightened his grip on the gurgling throat. "Got to kill him. Would yell for help."

  "He's sure to be an Esk. I assume he's descended from at least three generations of Maoist conditioning. I believe if I ordered this Esk to go back to sleep, he would go back -- "

  "You assume -- you believe," the Major panted angrily. "I now -- he stinks like a Chink." There was a vertebral crunch, and the body shuddered and quivered like a dying fish. "He was a Chink!"

  Dr. West did not try to explain how he knew the man was an Esk merely by standing near him.

  Dr. West followed the Major down the canyon along the side of the roaring concrete pipe. Someone, perhaps a thousand miles away, turned a rheostatic switch which electromagnetically opened giant valves, and the roar of irrigation water within the pipe increased. Ahead of Dr. West, the sky grew white with dawn.

  The Major's gaze darted frantically from side to side. He appeared to be searching for a place of concealment, but all the natural vegetation in the canyon had been gathered, plucked, uprooted to feed the miserable cooking fires of the Esks. The two men threaded their way among sleeping lumps of cloth.

  Around dead fires, the faces of the sleeping Esks were animated, twitching, smiling, baring their teeth, seemingly more alive than when the Esks were conscious.

  Clutching his .45 as though it was his mother's hand, the Major tiptoed on, then looked back. It was evident he wanted to turn back. The further down the canyon they went, the more numerous the sleeping Esks. The brightening dawn illuminated the Major's frightened face. He kept glancing up at the terraced mountainsides for some place to hide. Yet he stubbornly continued down the canyon.

  In the canyon, sleeping clumps of men, women, children, lay clustered together for warmth -- all around the two quietly walking men. The Major's hand closed on Dr. West's shoulder, transmitting his shivering fear to the Doctor. "Tell me they're Eskimos," the Major breathed. "If they're Chinese -- "

  "Chinese would be awake and screaming at us right now," Dr. West whispered. "The Esks don't pay much attention to us. Observe, the Esks sleep intensely -- as if they're on another planet when they're asleep. Look at that smiling face. We've tried truth drugs, but no human has been able to learn what dreams the Esks have. Awake, the Esks don't know. It's as if the Esks lead two lives, concurrently yet separately. That is why the Chinese word for them is Dream Persons."

  A buzzer sounded, resounded up and down the canyon. Blankly, the Esks stood up. There was none of the yawning and stretching, eye-rubbing and giggling, hawking and spitting which would have characterized real Arctic Eskimos or Chinese or Americans. The awakened faces of the Esks began to smile. The men and some of the women started climbing the steep trails among the rice terraces, their hoes already in their hands. Efficiently they did not urinate until they stood in the rice paddies. Up there on the terraces, the Esks began hoeing without breakfast.

  "What do we do now?" the Major whispered, still shivering as if he expected to be assailed by screaming Chinese with upraised hoes. "Do you think they've sent someone off to telephone for the Chinese soldiers?" He pointed at an overhead wire.

  Dr. West looked down at the Esk children crowding around smiling. And he was smiling. Their faces reflected his smile, lighting up with joy almost like children's faces anywhere. Little Joe -- Little Martha --

  Dr. West squatted down and tried to talk with them, using the central Eskimo dialect he had learned in the Arctic. He tried introducing Cantonese words, then Mandarin Chinese -- He looked up at the Major and shrugged and wearily smiled and shook his head. "These people -- the Esks have increased millions of times in numbers since I identified them in the Arctic twenty-two years ago. Individually, they -- each generation has deteriorated as to outward awareness and adaptability. The original little group I studied in the Arctic -- they were excellent imitators of the Eskimos. But these people, these children, they're almost nonverbal. They're not imitating the Chinese. They're not trying very hard to imitate anything human."

  A heavily pregnant woman prodded one of the circle of boys and made upward motions with her hands. Evidently the boy was big enough; he should be up there working on the rice terraces. He appeared to be about six years old.

  "That boy is about a year old," the Doctor said. "The wonderful and terrible thing is that these people's bodies mature so much more efficiently than ours. Their prenatal development is as perfectly straightforward as if God had had a plan -- this time."

  Dr. West became excited and disturbed as he always did when he launched into the subject that had overwhelmed his life. "Why should our human fetuses take nine months to be born? Because of our evolutionary history on this planet, the growth of our embryos follows the old paths, gills appear and are absorbed. An obsolete tail begins and disappears. Primitive appendages from our evolutionary past are recapitulated. This is our heritage from the billions of years of changing life forms on this Earth." Dr. West hurled the bitter question no one could answer. "Now we are among people whose babies are born in a month and mature in three years. That does not reflect the evolutionary history on this planet. Now tell me if the Esks are human?"

  "You murderer!" the Major hissed unexpectedly. "Finally I've figured out who you are. You genocidal maniac! You've got to be Dr. West. On the TV news, your escape from Canada about six months ago. You narrow maniac, are you telling me the Eskimos aren't human?"

  "These Esks aren't. The Eskimos are, if there are any real Eskimos still alive. Don't tell me even a calloused military mind like yours has been softened by the 'Esks are Eskimos, love the Eskimos' campaign."