"I will be rescued," Mao III blurted. "My favorite general, Chen Yung, Commander of my personal 8th Route Army here in Peking, he, too, desires power. Now he will need my aid in exposing this impostor. My General Chen Yung personally will descend the elevator and bow down before me."
There was more news about the air raid scare. False warning.
The next morning Tele-Pravda reported that General Chen Yung, Commander of the 8th Route Army based in Peking and formerly considered the most influential of the inner council of generals, and the former favorite of Mao III, had been appointed Ambassador to South Belgium. "General Chen Yung already has departed to assume his new post."
"If his aircraft does not explode in midair," Mao III hissed, and began to sob like a little boy who has lost his last toy.
"Which leaves us with the Cantonese General Peng Huai consolidating his power." Dr. West asked, "Do you recall Peng Huai's attitude toward the future increase of the Esks?"
"That traitor first gained notoriety as Field Commander in our pacification of India." Mao III smiled crookedly at Dr. West. "Peng Huai always has maintained that China will need many more people for a still greater effort, therefore as many Esks as possible. Each Esk replaces on the homefront a peacefighter to free the world. Have I answered your question?"
That night, Mao III cried out in pain. Rising, Dr. West saw that Mao III was suffering a more massive stroke. The whole left side of Mao III's face was twisted down. Even when Dr. West's mind strained to help, Mao III was unable to move his lips as his thoughts leaked out: Tapeworm, leave me alone. At least permit me to die.
But Mao III's righ hand twitched in a signal for his Esk night servant to bring him a sip of water.
Finally, Dr. West walked away. When Dr. West was able to escape into sleep, in his dream he was clutched by a nightmare earthquake shaking apart the elevator shaft to the surface, filling it with rubble, squeezing the vault while the smiling Esks grew like balloons filling --
The bed shook him awake as he sat up, his eardrums still echoing the dull thud of -- an explosion?
The lights still worked. He felt as if he'd been slapped on the side of the head. He blinked at the ceiling, at new hairline cracks in the concrete here, 4000 feet deep in the earth. Through the reverberations of his eardrums, he could hear the excited chattering of Esks.
He noticed an Esk standing stupidly by the locked control panel, with an oddly shocked expression for an Esk. No smile now from Mao III's night servant. Swaying from the Esk's hand hung a thin silver neck chain dangling the key.
Dr. West's hand rose to his own neck where the key had been, and he bounded across the room, seized the key from the unresisting Esk.
Dr. West stared at the lock now turned to a horizontal position above the depressed red lever. "You idiot." The dull thud must have been an explosion at the surface.
Dr. West remembered Mao III's mental slip: The vault's defensive threat was the small nuc device encased in tons of concrete beneath the Winter Palace. As Mao III's last act it could be detonated by this lock and red lever, to entomb forever this vault in which Dr. West stood breathing hoarsely.
"You suicidal fool," Dr. West blurted at the Esk, "you stole it from me while I slept. Tell me why -- "
The Esk smiled with nervousness and glanced toward the dragon-curtains of Mao III's sleeping alcove.
Dr. West tore open the curtains. "You paralyzed old bastard. You communicated to this Esk to steal back your key. Wonderful! Bang! You've sealed us forever in this coffin."
Mao III's lopsided face smiled up at him. Tapeworm, fear? Mao III's triumphant thought filtered cut of his blood-clotted brain. With so much fear, you are unable to think. You must listen to my thoughts --
"Like hell I will!" Dr. West ran along the corridor to the elevator. The elevator door bulged out jaggedly, due to the mass of smashed rock which had jammed down the shaft. Would the radioactivity from the nuc extend down this far?
He tried to calm his unevenly thudding heart.
He walked to the end of the farthest concrete tunnel and stared at the concrete wall. "It is not possible to dig out. We're nearly a mile beneath the earth." He trudged slowly back with his hand pressed against his breastbone and flickers of reflected pain inside his left arm. "If I'm going to drop dead -- heart. Good! Now!" But he took a nitro. He searched through janitors' closets, and a small storeroom containing trays of spare modules for the computer and a vast storeroom of tiered shelves stacked with plastic-wrapped freeze-dried vegetable bricks. He wandered between mountains of sacks of rice and on into the kitchen equipment room.
By now he carried a crowbar he had found, and a handful of flimsy plactic- handled screwdrivers and a ball-peen hammer. He found a short-handled scoop-shovel intended for loading rice -- not intended for digging straight upward through 4000 feet of rock formations to the surface. "Got to get out -- "
When the next pain in his chest subsided, he herded eight male Esks to the end of the corridor and set them to chipping at the concrete wall. The plastic split off from the handles of the screwdrivers, and their soft iron shafts bent. The head of the ball-peen hammer popped off. The crowbar bounced back from the concrete with ringing protests.
Dr. West located an electric twist drill and enough extension cords, and the whole set of steel drill bits soon was ruined. He unbolted the hinges of the massive steel door of the Power Source room. Puzzled by his orders but smiling, eight heavily-breathing Esks carried the steel door up to the end of the corridor. The corner of the steel door made a clumsy battering ram. The noise was deafening. Wincing, Dr. West stared toward the shower room, and visualized a long hose.
The concrete within the corridor wall seemed slightly softened after a stream of hot water was hose-lengthed from the shower room. His Esks rammed the steel door against the wet wall.
"Cheap Maoist concrete," he laughed shrilly. "But who could make a profit?"
After exhausted relays of Esks, the clanging corner of the steel door smashed through concrete into darkness.
Dr. West leaped forward as if into a miraculous hidden tunnel, but his flashlight illuminated only the yellow-brown solidity of prehistoric sandstone strata, 4000 feet beneath the present surface of the Earth.
The battered point of the crowbar, hurled full force, penetrated nearly one-eighth inch into the sandstone. It left a tiny dent.
"This damned sandstone's been pressed down here so long and hard, it's not even sedimentary. For me, it's hard as metamorphic ." Sourly smiling, Dr. West set the Esks chipping upward at a 45-degree angle, aiming the slanting tunnel away from the nuc explosion's ground zero. "Not too steep for you to scramble up a gopher hole barefoot, yet steep enough for the debris to slide down."
He foresaw a narrow tunnel with one Esk digging at a time. It would have ventilating problems enough without being stuffed with other Esks passing the debris down by hand. He found a draftsman's 45-degree triangle and tied a string to a bolt. He suspended the bolt from the triangle like a plumb bob. "You understand the direction? Dig upward in line with the hypotenuse of this triangle."
"Eh?"
"I mean the tunnel must line up with this longest leg of the triangle."
"Eh?" These Esks all smiling stupidly made Dr. West want to scream with rage.
Smile, Dr. West thought at the cheerfully scurrying Esks, who already were carrying away double handfuls of granulated sandstone. Smile, at least this work gives you another purpose down here besides --
Their primary purpose scampered small and naked on the corridor floor, more children each day. Children's fingers traced childish symbols in the sand spilled on the corridor floor circles, circles around circles, and an amorphous blob reminding Dr. West of a bear.
In the shoulder-wide hole up into the hard sandstone Dr. West measured daily progress. "A good three feet in the last twenty-four hours. I like you, all of you. Now, dig faster!"
Dr. West exploded in irritation. "No! Don't dump the sand in the shower room! Empty it in the
food storeroom."
Each day there was more space in the food storeroom to store sand, less rice --
During the "night" shift, below the sounds of the upward tunneling Esk, Dr. West scowled at his penciled diagram on the wall. It was an inverted right triangle with its hypotenuse at a 45-degree angle to its vertical and horizontal lines.
Beside the vertical line he wrote: 4000 feet up. Beside the horizontal surface line, he also wrote 4000 feet. He scowled at the diagonal line symbolizing the tunnel. "This damn gopher-hole hypotenuse will be a lot longer than 4000 feet, you -- ghost of Pythagorus. The sum of the squares of the other two sides is 16,000,000 plus 16,000,000 equals 32,000,000. Now what in hell is the square root of 32,000,00? It's more than 5000 feet! This slanting tunnel will be more than 5600 feet long. Digging three feet per day, that's 1866 days -- "
He stared at the unhearing Esks. "God help us all, 1866 days, that's five years!"
He walked into the food storeroom where Esks were piling sand from the tunnel. "Even if these smiling fools could stop having babies as of this minute, all the food, just for the Esks alive right now, will be eaten in a couple of years. This stupid tunnel will starve to a stop not even halfway to the surface." He smiled like a starving clown. "We will have eaten ourselves to death three years below the surface."
I'm not going to murder any Esks, he thought. I don't want to. If I kill a few, the others gently will restrain me. If the humans on the surface can't effectively control their increasing Esks, how can I? On the surface, the humans have the guns and are supposed to have the brains, but the Esks still are multiplying. Down here, I'm already outnumbered 500 to 1, and -- more Esks eating more each day. Could I create a poison?
His face twisting from his heart pain, Dr. West looked across the food storeroom at the children laughing and rolling down the sandpile. At the edge, a little boy was scratching with his fingers in the sand so that the concrete floor showed through.
"What are you drawing?"
"Eh? Grandfather Bear -- so he come for us."
"Down here?"
"Eh!" The little boy shaped the sand and patted the sand.
Dr. West turned away, his chest tightening with pain. He sat down against the concrete wall. A little girl ran over, threw her arms around his neck and snuggled on his lap. His breath tickled the delicate beauty of her ear, and she giggled. He closed his eyes, motionless and unbreathing as concrete. When she went away, he considered suicide.
Instead he gathered the twenty-eight adult men and twenty-two mature women together, only now there were thirty mature men and twenty-nine pregnant women. He drew pictures on the wall showing the great distance to the surface. He drew squares of diminishing size showing there soon would be no more food. The Esks giggled, and Dr. West saw that one, aping him, was drawing on the floor -- a bear? "Dammit, listen to me! Something must be done."
Smiling patiently, the Esks volunteered to eat less. One man would stand guard outside the food storage room. Dr. West hoped so.
In the artificial night, children began to whine with hunger, disturbing Dr. West's sleep. In the artificial morning, Dr. West read from the small footprints in the sand that children had been allowed to enter the storeroom to gnaw the freeze-dried vegetable bricks.
When Dr. West tried rationing the food himself, after locking the storeroom, the Esks seemed cooperative. In the night, hungry children cried and the Esks gently took the key away from Dr. West without hurting him and opened the storeroom and everyone was happy again.
When Dr. West stared down at Mao III's lopsided face, the left eye opened. Help me, the desperate thought rose, to speak.
Concentrating to the utmost, Dr. West was unable to control Mao III's damaged speech center, and Dr. West thought: Only the spark of a man remains.
Bad poetry while you look at my living corpse? Mao III thought with surprising strength. Kinder to kill me.
"Then who would I talk with?"
How many of my Esks have you murdered?
"None," Dr. West answered.
Fraud, you thought you could solve the Esk problems of the whole world, but you can't even control this vault. Mao III's thoughts sparkled with laughter. Paint a line across the corridor, separating the men from the women.
"You are taunting me," Dr. West replied without anger.
Induce the mothers to sacrifice their babies to a god, either you or me.
"In Canada the Esks shielded their babies from the mob with their own bodies."
Ineffective mobs in capitalistic countries. Arrange a mirror so I can see the telescreen.
"Strangely ineffective mobs. Your surface explosion destroyed our TV antenna."
If you understood statesmanship, you would divide our Esks into two tribes. Paint the foreheads of one tribe white, the other tribe black.
"We both know they're not that genetically combative. They're not as self-limiting as some human populations have been. No wars."
Somewhere in the Data Retrieval computer, ancient Polynesian island customs became effective when not enough taro patches for growing population. Polynesians solved their problems. Use the push buttons on the console.
"Not anymore. I was killing time, an hour playing the console, endless interesting data pictures from your computer. Already I can play it like a visual piano. But suddenly, only a repeating pattern of information about volcanos, avocados and phrenology appeared on the screen, as if the Data Retrieval System has suffered a stroke. I replaced what seemed to be the damaged electronic module, and now the computer doesn't work at all."
Because you have the wrong specialization, Doctor, you're not qualified to be even an electronics technician. Your specialty is population control. With minimal intelligence you should be able to lead the Esks to the one logical course -- cannibalism.
"Stop taunting me. There have been no examples of Esks killing each other for food, not in Canada -- have there?" Dr. West wondered if, in the last extremity of starvation and still driven by their urge to multiply, the adult Esks here might feed their own bodies to their children. "I doubt it. At least not organized -- "
Not yet organized makes it easier for you. There are no troublesome congenital leaders among Esks. You should be able to organize these few Esks into any behavior pattern you decide.
"You flatter me. For me, one man, now to curb the Esks' overpowering instinct to multiply like lemmings, after all the Canadian attempts to organize birth control among the Esks failed."
My Szechwan agricultural planners easily organized millions of Esks to hand-shape mountains into rice paddies.
"Easy, because it was helping Esks multiply."
For Maoist progress, yes. Esks were so much more easily controllable than Chinese within my Twenty-Year Plan. If you imagine yourself my intellectual equal, you should be able to organize the lives of these mere 500 Esks, most of them little children, so that one of their overpowering instincts will conflict with another, and they will destroy themselves. This is how I maintained control over my generals.
"And look at you now!" Dr. West immediately realized his own retort was inadequate, childish because Mao III had retained power longer than most leaders; any leader can suffer a brain-stroke, and all men sink into death.
Having nothing better to do today, I am trying to help you.
"I doubt that!" Dr. West seemed unable to restrain his childish anger. "How were you so stupid as to help Esks multiply like a billion cancer cells in China? Brilliant leader, you can't answer. Perhaps Esks have an as yet unidentified psychological advantage. Smiling with love, they are leading us."
Ridiculous! You are a defeatist born of a disorganized nation whose historical moment has passed. If my television still were operating, while you starve you could watch the triumph of Maoism throughout the world.
"Triumph? Soon, Esks will outnumber us throughout the world. Next year four billion, the next year eight billion. The next year sixteen billion Esks will -- "
Statistical trickster. Any fool kno
ws that the rate of Esk increase will be slowed down and then stopped. In America, when your relatives feel the bite of hunger in their fat bellies, they will limit their Esks. With guns and clubs if necessary. In China, rational Maoist economic planning will reveal when the total number of Chinese Esks is optimum, and further increase will be painlessly discouraged.
The Eskimo Invasion Page 41