The Eskimo Invasion

by Hayden Howard

  Mao III did not open his eyes. Why your hatred of our gentle Esk comrades, they who feed us? Mao III's dagger-sharp thought incised, if you had been born in the closeness of a Chinese commune, you would be an open man instead of a closed man. Can't you love Esks who feel only love for you?

  "I don't hate them. I have never hated them." Dr. West was wide awake now. "But as they increase, crowding me everywhere, I feel my elbows -- my teeth grating. Why is that light blinking?"

  "Activity outside the surface entry door," Mao III said quickly, his face blooming in a smile. "My generals have come to rescue me."

  Pushing the proper combination of buttons on the console Dr. West focused a picture of workmen welding the steel frame for a new door approximately one foot outside the surface entry door. The Chinese up there were working directly under the warning lens, so that Dr. West was looking down at the tops of their heads. When he shifted to a second lens at an oblique angle, he saw military officers in black uniforms standing, watching the work from further away within the great concrete blockhouse which he knew was encased within the ancient Winter Palace.

  "Who are they?"

  "They are too small for me to recognize their faces," Mao III muttered from his bed. "It seems our surface door will become a door within a door."

  "Instead of simply welding our door shut ." Dr. West carried Mao III's slack body to his chair. "Why are they enclosing us with a second door?"

  "Historically, Chinese are cautious because they are so intelligent," Mao III said unselfconsciously. "Those who possess the key to the new outer door will be able to reach me quickly enough if events so guide them." He smiled. "Welding my door permanently shut would have seemed too irrevocable. There is more artistry in a door within a door. I may be needed tomorrow."

  A fading illusion, Dr. West thought. We are being permanently sealed down here with the Esks. "There are too many Esks down here to be fed, and on the surface Esks are being allowed to multiply as if the nations of the world have less foresight than ants." Dr. West's voice rose. "At least ants recognize that many intruders in their nest as enemies! I've got to get out of here."

  "You fear even my Esk servants?" Mao III asked and smiled. "Since I, too, once placed great value on survival when I was younger, there are freezers full of supplies in this vault for myself and for fifty Esk servants for twenty years. The vault was constructed and stocked during a period when I thought the American hawks were suicidally sincere in their talk of preventative war. Breathe this sweet air. It is a recirculating system which cannot be poisoned by surface assassins, either Chinese or American. We can wait, self-sufficient, safer and years longer than in a submarine. My vault is protected by 4000 feet of solid rock. If the United States warmongers had attacked, and won, amusing word, I could have waited down here like a seventeen-year locust and then emerged with my own personal Esks to repopulate the world."

  An Esk carried away the breakfast tray.

  "You were looking at one of my sons," Mao III said proudly. "Until my stroke three years ago, I was extremely functional. The historical duty of a great man is to pass on his seed."

  In the concrete corridors which surrounded the inner vault, neatly uniformed Esks wandered, as if there was not enough work to do. Dr. West noticed a few young Esks dressed in what appeared to be bedsheets, as if there no longer were enough uniforms for the increasing number of Esks. Hordes of naked children skipped gaily ahead in the corridor.

  Beside Dr. West, an Esk pushed Mao III's wheelchair.

  "Already you are plotting how you can murder my children," Mao III said pleasantly, as they passed the steel door to a tunnel which led down to the atomic-electric power source.

  "Speculative force of habit," Dr. West replied as calmly. "Yesterday, I showed one of your -- sons or grandsons how to conduct a census by touching each Esk with a dab of red paint so he wouldn't count the same child twice. I showed him how to make counting marks on a tablet. There are twenty-eight mature males, twenty-two breeding age females and -- prepare yourself -- 396 children and babies."

  "So? Under normal conditions the excess children are sent to the surface," Mao III replied as if undisturbed. "It has been convenient that babies need to be breast-fed for less than a month."

  "Sixty-two of the children would reach breeding age if we were down here a year," Dr. West remarked. "Of these, thirty-two are female."

  "It is unlikely we will be down here a week," Mao III replied. "My generals will need me, as they always have needed the line of Maos."

  "Then this is purely a theoretical problem," Dr. West shrilly laughed. "The thirty-two future breeding females added to the twenty-two females now adult, means there would be fifty-four breeding females within another year. Suppose we're optimistic and estimate two menstrual failures or miscarriages per mother during the next twelve months, each of the fifty-four women would give birth to only ten children instead of twelve, for a total of 450 more mouths to feed. And I'm forgetting to add children born to the twenty-two existing mothers this year."

  "You're talking as if we could be left to stagnate down here for two years," Mao laughed. "The generals will free me and kill you within a month."

  "In two years, counting existing Esks, mainly children now, plus babies who will be born, the total number of mouths to feed will be more than 1000."

  "You are intimating I lacked foresight because there are only supplies for fifty Esks for twenty years."

  "Supplies for fifty Esks for twenty years equals supplies for 1000 Esks for one year." Dr. West walked toward the myriad sounds of babies.

  "I am as familiar with arithmetic as you are," Mao III's voice retorted triumphantly. "I also am familiar with birth control pills."

  "I can see from the age distribution of your Esks and the terrible preponderance of children, that no birth control pills are being used," Dr. West said softly; as he stepped into the crowded sleeping dormitory, his nose wrinkled.

  "These are my grandchildren," Mao III replied. "So there has been no reason to stifle my own ancestral line with pills. Do not panic. My generals will free me in a few days, and if the generals procrastinate and you become frightened of all these harmless Esks, there is a whole closet full of birth control pills."

  Dr. West blinked. He smiled fleetingly.

  "It might be wise to start testing these pills," Dr. West remarked, as if it were of no importance.

  He had glanced into the steam-blurred kitchen where Esks were boiling rice and freeze-dried vegetables. "Unless the birth control pills are effective, their food will be gone in less than two years."

  "We will not be down here three months." Mao III's tone of voice was a verbal shrug. "But you are a medical person, and it might add to your medical knowledge if you begin testing the quality of those pills. They were manufactured in the United States."

  When Dr. West opened the closet, he saw the old labeled bottles of pills. They were an abortifacient put out by an American pharmaceutical company, based on research begun years ago while he was Director of Oriental Populations Problems Research. The original abortifacient pills had been intended for humans. Dr. West hoped these had been tested on Esks. Only one abortion-inducing pill a month was necessary. In Canada it had been found impractical to force Esk women to take the daily pills.

  Taken only once a month, ideally before the woman had grown large from her monthly pregnancy, these abortifacients might do the job if the Esk women would swallow them.

  Dr. West smiled grimly, thinking: That brilliant mathematician, Mao III, has stocked twenty large jars of 300 pills each. That's 6000 pills. Mathematically, enough pills for twenty-five women for twenty years. Assuming the pills are 100% effective, by the time all the existing 396 children mature, even assuming no new births, in three years we will have a total of 220 females of breeding age. They will need 2640 pills each year. "There won't be enough pills to complete the fourth year. Chemical birth control will cease. Soon we'd be jammed shoulder to shoulder, except for one lucky cir
cumstance. We already will have starved to death.

  "But I'm ever the hopeful experimenter." Dr. West wondered if he would be more successful than the Canadians in inducing the Esk women to swallow monthly pills. "I can't use force. Too many Esks. I can try deception." He slipped one bottle under his coat and carefully locked the closet. He frowned. Why did the Canadian government fail?

  He waded through naked children romping in the thermostatically heated corridor.

  The abortifacient pills so strongly contradict the Esk women's instinctive purpose in life , he thought, what insidious things can happen when we trick their instinctive urge to give birth?

  His face twisted with grief as he thought of Marthalik, his wife --

  In the crowded dormitory, he stared at an Esk woman sitting on the edge of a cot, hunching over her baby. Her strong hands were steadying her newborn baby, who was hungrily suckling her breast.

  Genetically formed in both of you, Dr. West thought, is such an overwhelming urge to multiply. Even stronger than ours --

  He knew within the uterus of this blissful woman, the next fertilized ovum already was clinging, growing, already an embryo, efficiently growing without wasted energy or unnecessary gills or prehuman tail, and in less than a month it would emerge into the world. Your whole being, all of those smiling instincts, your inoffensive survival instincts were designed by -- something to help your rapid multiplication. And you help each other. Unlike men, you don't kill. Uneasily he smiled down at the woman, who cradled her baby protectively in her arms.

  Mother, he thought, would anything you suspect of interfering with your purpose in life cause you to -- But I've never heard of Esks deliberately killing anyone , he thought. I should be safe enough.

  He gave twenty-two pills to the steward, who seemed unusually intelligent. Although his Esk characteristics were dominant, the steward undoubtedly was one of Mao III's sons. He listened placidly to Dr. West's instructions. "You understand," Dr. West repeated, "these twenty-two calcium pills must be given only to each woman. That is, one to each woman."

  "Eh?" The Esk smiled.

  "One pill for each woman in her rice," Dr. West said. "Tonight. Good calcium pills to make bones strong," he lied.

  "For babies?"

  "No, for the mothers! Give the pills to the mothers."

  As Dr. West returned to the Control Room, Mao III was leaning toward the telescreen, his skeletal face twisting in a comedy of outrage and black humor.

  "I am reported to be dying. A national year of mourning is being prepared. This same day Chu-Ti's personal aircraft has exploded in flight, accidentally, the teleannouncers say. Lin Po died last night at a banquet, of indigestion. Here in Peking, Chen Yung's 8th Route Army has canceled all leaves."

  "In the south," Mao III laughed nervously, "Peng Huai's troops have entered Canton to calm a very little disturbance caused by less than a dozen ancient reactionary revisionists who drank too much wine. To put them down, his troops temporarily have occupied all the airfields and the television station." Now Mao III laughed as faintly as the ghost of a man. " -- the Cantonese dogs say they are preparing for democratic elections. No doubt the general with the most troops hopes to receive the most votes."

  Dr. West wondered if this revolution would help him.

  "When their armies have bloodied the streets," Mao III muttered, "and still the fighting continues, they will remember me, their Saving Star." He laughed faintly. "I can rise from the dead?"

  After a silence Mao III opened his eyes and announced: "The survivors will unlock my steel door, and I will permit them to come down in my elevator, and bow down before me. Humbly the surviving generals will beg me once more to command all China ."

  Dr. West made no comment. They would shoot him.

  The next day many television stations transmitted only their focusing pattern, the white lotus star. From the south, a few broadcasts showed waving flags and martial music and schoolgirl poetesses with Cantonese accents reciting instant odes to the heroism and patriotism of General Peng Huai, Liberator of Canton, Savior of China.

  "Southern traitor," Mao III blurted, and his quick fingers clicked through the other television broadcasts. "Why don't they praise Mao? Traitors! This Cantonese rebellion will produce loyalty in Peking -- to me."

  The next day none of the Peking stations was broadcasting.

  In the dormitory, Dr. West stared anxiously at the Esk women. They should be aborting by now , he thought. None of them showed any discomfort.

  As he walked back along the corridor, Dr. West noticed a scar on the doorjamb of the closet, beside the lock. Breathing hard, he unlocked the closet door. The jars still were white with pills -- no, with grains of rice. " -- The pills, where are the pills?"

  The steward continued smiling while Dr. West violently shook him. "Pills?" the Esk gasped. "Please, sir, which pills?"

  "Did you give the women the pills?"

  "Eh?" the Esk giggled with embarrassment as Dr. West stopped shaking him. "This person gave away pills."

  "You're lying."

  "Eh-eh, this person is lying." the Esk laughed placatingly.

  "Where are all the other pills?"

  "Eh? Pills here? This person does not know."

  "The whole closet was full of pills!" Dr. West shouted.

  "Eh-eh, this person is telling the truth. No pills."

  "You're lying."

  "This person is lying," the Esk patiently agreed as if soothing an insane man. "It is the truth."

  Dr. West hurled the unresisting Esk to the floor.

  By now most of the Chinese television stations were off the air. Some of Mao III's remaining surveillance cameras, which were automatic equipment, showed circling flies, or perhaps distant aircraft circling clouds of smoke beyond the horizon.

  One surveillance camera suddenly blurred with the too-close face of an Esk smiling stupidly into the lens.

  That night Tele-Pravda's satellite broadcast that General Peng Huai's troops from Canton were meeting only token resistance outside Nanking. A victorious Cantonese television broadcast was expected hourly.

  It came with joyful music and a triumvirate of smiling Chinese physicians, the first doctor announcing that the beloved Chairman, Mao III, was showing superlogically materialistic improvement from his three-year illness. The second announced that new developments in traditional Chinese accupuncture had completely cured the paralysis from which their beloved Chairman for three years had suffered. The third announced that the Chairman, the Saving Star, now was able to speak to all of his people.

  In the dim vault, Dr. West watched Mao III's expression change from surprise to rage.

  On the telescreen a Mao III appeared, walking briskly forward. With sturdy peasant gestures and a confident voice, this Mao III reassured the world that: "The Maoist Party shines like a gun barrel! Your Chairman once again is able to labor for the wellare of the people. All is now peace, for I am with you."

  This Mao glanced at the teleprompter and announced that he had appointed General Peng Huai of the Canton Military District to rebuild three bridges to the people, to assume three responsibilities. "The Ministries of Defense, of Dream Persons and of Internal Security." Pseudo-Mao bowed perceptibly. "General Peng Huai's heroism has saved my life, and through me the life of China.

  "With Comrade Peng Huai's guidance, we shall build an even larger China, worthy of our great population. Together, arm in arm, we will lead all the free peoples of the world into the future."

  Beside Dr. West, Mao III gurgled with rage, and Dr. West remarked: "Is that one of your former doubles? You used so many to confuse your assassins. Now they've discovered one Mao is as good as another."

  Mao III glowered at the waving flags on the screen, the rising balloons, the traditional ranks of marching children, until the Canton station abruptly signed off the air. "Air raid warning!"