"Are you sure? This is not how things ended in Canada. Is it possible that the Esks have an overgroup psychological influence on our actions?"
Now you are a small boy whimpering at the darkness which conceals nothing but your teddy bears.
At this thought, Dr. West broke into laughter like dry coughing. "I've been a small boy -- whimpering a warning for years. And ever since those first Canadian years, the Esks have been recognized as a population problem. But they have continued increasing. Name for me one instance in which organized human activity effectively has limited the number of Esks anywhere. The few lynchings, your experimental napalm, ineffective pinpricks! Name an effective population control action. It's been all talk, and the number of Esks keeps increasing."
. . . Loud prophet, emerge from your hole and take action, Mao III taunted. There still is time. I have been told that the world can support a population of twenty billion.
"There are ten billion humans now in 2010. Next year four billion Esks, the next year eight billion, the next year sixteen billion Esks plus ten billion humans would be twenty-six billion if chaos and starvation permitted it."
Twenty billion --
"The twenty billion you're thinking about is the humans the world could support if we had fifty years of gradually increasing population, during which time we could prepare the world for them. Even with developing marine plankton farming and direct chemical food sources, we may not have time, even without the Esk problem. Why am I wasting my time talking to you? Up there, anarchic collapse will come before the human population plus the Esk population totals twenty billion, and after disorganization of our sensitive technology and food distribution systems, the world probably won't support three billion starving survivors, less people than in the 1970s."
It would support more Esks than that, Mao III taunted. They don't eat as much. At least Esks have faith in the future. They believe --
"Believe?" Dr. West whirled, staring in recognition at the gold-painted dragon which still grinned above the blinded telescreen. The dragon's jaws were painted red. His hungry jaws symbolized --
"Malthusian nightmare!" Dr. West's voice shouted. "Or Freudian dinosaur. Even you are not as hungry as Grandfather Bear."
Dr. West strode out into the corridor, thinking. In its creation, an effective religion must conform to the most pressing needs , Dr. West pondered, of its creator.
He stalked through corridors where the Esks meekly stepped aside. He unlocked the huge empty room Mao III's architects must have intended for --
"Official audiences, but in these last three years since his stroke, that egomaniac was afraid -- avoided being seen. I'll meet with all sixty adult Esks at one time, only I won't be here." Dr. West locked the door from the inside and set to work in the Audience Room.
As creator, he thought he knew his own needs.
When he emerged wearily, his work incomplete, he locked the door to the huge room behind him and wandered back to the Control Room to sleep. But first, in the Control Room he unlocked the Master Heating Panel and turned down the dials. "Like a god, I control my weather."
When he awoke he was shivering slightly. As he walked past Mao III's curtained bed, he detected distress, shivering, but continued to the Master Heating Panel, unlocking its little metal door again.
Inside gleamed the row of temperature control dials, one for each room in the vault, plus others for the corridors.
He thought their sensor thermometers must be concealed in the individual rooms. The other elements of each thermostat were here in front of him, their wire nerves extending within the walls.
"Maoist architecture, authoritative central control of all thermostat settings." With a cold smile he turned down each thermostat another degree. "This Control Room must be equally chilled or eventually, as the Esks become painfully cold, they'll all crowd in here, squeezing around me like a demographer's nightmare of the 1000% utilized planet. At first we must have equality of coldness throughout the vault."
But Dr. West located extra blankets for Mao III.
Apparently in China, Dr. West thought with wry humor, or at least in this Command Vault, electric blankets are banned for their softening revisionist tendencies. He suspended a small electric radiant heater above Mao III's curtained bed.
I am shivering. My tapeworm, you who will soon be without a host. Why not painlessly smother me with a pillow instead of chilling me to pneumonia -- to which I already have been susceptible. I wish to die, but, I dread the choking sensation of pneumonia fluid in the lungs. Simply use a pillow quickly.
"I'm not your assassin. I'd be lonely without you, mine host." Dr. West went away to get the paint and loudspeakers; laden with tools, he unlocked the Audience Room.
Each day he worked alone in the huge hollow-sounding Audience Room. After he had hung the black curtain at the rear wall, the echoes were muffled.
Each day he reduced the temperature throughout the vault one degree. As a side effect of the cold, the Esks digging the tunnel worked faster. Dr. West soon wore overshoes with three pairs of socks. Chilled, he donned two layers of padded uniforms and wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and ate more.
Unfortunately, the Esks also ate more. Since few of the children had shoes, whenever they tired of running around they huddled, rubbing their feet, whimpering.
"But human children would have colds and pneumonia." Dr. West coughed and laughed and cleared his phlegmed throat. "Comes another Ice Age, only Esks would prosper."
With disturbing initiative, the shivering Esks in the kitchen left the electric cookstoves turned on all the time. Esks smashed chairs in the dormitory and built a fire, nearly overpowering the carbon dioxide-monoxide filters.
"Dammit, you nearly fumigated us all." As Dr. West kicked apart the fire, he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. The Esks were on the verge of restraining him. He wondered, if warmth had become so vital an instinct, they would -- ?
"Warm today, disregard tomorrow," Dr. West muttered his conscious superiority at these people, but he worried that eventually the Esk servants might realize how the thermostatic heating system was controlled, and the Esks gently would take control of the weather in the vault.
He accelerated his plan. Unlocking the Heating Control Panel, he turned up one thermostat dial. It was the thermostat whose thermometer element was in the Audience Room. "Warmth will become like heaven."
When he unlocked the Audience Room, delicious warmth spread outward to the chilled faces of children in the corridor.
"Stay out! This is for adults." He discovered there was no way to keep the children out.
The crowding Esks were so solicitous of their children that they smilingly ignored his protests and pushed their children past him into the darkly warm Audience Room. The women carried their babies in their arms into the heavenly warmth. The room jammed with all 800 Esks. He'd intended only the eighty adults. Shoulder to shoulder, luxuriating in warmth, the Esks were smiling sleepily at the black curtain Dr. West had arranged to conceal the loudspeaker. How they were peering with recognition, with whispering excitement, at the lifesize portrait Dr. West had created on the black curtain with white paint.
Before leaving the dim room, Dr. West switched on the spotlight. Against the curtain, the spotlight's circle enshrined the immense snow whiteness of the polar bear.
Hypnotically humming behind the curtain, the electric fan made the curtain undulate, and the bear moved. In the sleepy warmth, from long staring into its centered whiteness, the gigantic polar bear seemed, even to Dr. West's eyes, to be enlarging, almost alive.
Children whimpered, gasping for breath in the thickening atmosphere. Dr. West slipped out of the overcrowded Audience Room into the cold reality of the corridor. He hurried along the concrete corridor to the Control Room.
His heart drumming with excitement, he stared at the closed-circuit image being transmitted to the telescreen from the Audience Room. He pursed his lips and blew softly against the microphone on the control
panel.
On the telescreen, from the Audience Room, the thickly crowded Esks seemed to sway. He was seeing them from the camera high in the curtain above the bear. He felt himself high above the multitude, as if floating above the excitedly smiling faces of the Esks.
Are there instincts stronger than life? Dr. West thought, stronger than this multiplying like rodents for no purpose other than more life itself? Is this the end-purpose for which the Esks were planted on this earth?
"Look at me," Dr. West breathed in Modern Eskimo and the Esk's eyes widened. He knew they did not comprehend his Eskimo words, and he inhaled, preparing to speak to them in the simplified Chinese that their recent Esk progenitors had absorbed during these seventeen Chinese years since Esks were flown here from the Arctic winter night.
For many nights he had been planning what he would say, remembering what he had said before, remembering the prophetic excitement in the igloo so long ago. In the night, Edwardluk, who was not an Eskimo, rose on the ice, shouting with expectant joy, Edwardluk's arms reaching toward the Arctic stars, ice-bright galaxies where man could never go. "Grandfather!"
As Dr. West spoke into the microphone, his plans vanished and his voice poured out with unthinking freedom.
" -- the darkness, the light from the sky, I am white bear, your Grandfather in front of you, all around you, above you, I am your Grandfather of whom you dream. Like a white bear from the sky, you see me coming for you. In joy your heartbeats are rising to the sky so that all become one with me. I in you, and you in me. We rise! We rise!"
On the telescreen the images of the Esks swayed forward toward his voice.
"You have filled the world for me and now I have come for you and we become one again," Dr. West's hoarse voice paraphrased the myth. "In joy, we become one!"
Esks' faces were shrieking upward with joy or agony. Esks were rising on tiptoe. It appeared as if the hair of an Esk man was standing on end. He fell down in a convulsion like a man being electrocuted, and became motionless, concealed by the pressing multitude. As if unaware of his fall, the other adults were straining forward sobbing with joy, and a woman fell among the shrieking children who had been forgotten and were being trampled.
"Grandfather, we have prepared this world for you. Grandfather! Grandfather!" He saw another man's face ripen in an agony of joy and his hair was standing on end just before his body toppled. Beside him, a woman in joy had fallen, vanished, trampled. A slender man, barely matured, frantically was beating the walls with his hands as if trying to climb. In the turmoil, children were screaming. In joy, a woman strained upward and fell. "Grandfather -- !"
Dr. West's face twisted with pain. He was crying.
He switched off the microphone which had transmitted his voice behind the black curtain to the loudspeaker. On the black curtain, the whiteness of the bear vanished as he pulled the switch that plunged the Audience Room into darkness. His trembling hand reached into the Master Heating Panel and turned down the thermostat controlling the Audience Room. He directed the icy blast of air conditioning into the Audience Room.
He stood in the corridor watching crying children flee the cold wind from the Audience Room.
Adults staggered out with faces waxy as corpses. They shuffled away along the corridor. A moaning mother carried her little girl, who had been trampled.
In the Audience Room, his flashlight beam flitted like a white moth over slack faces of ten prone Esks, all adults. He knelt, feeling for a pulse. This Esk was dead. "God help us all."
Tomorrow he thought he would guide the Esks to remove the bodies. His eyes narrowed as he went out into the light of the corridor. He was afraid to drag away the bodies himself because the Esks would see this. They might see a causal connection between the dead Esks and him.
I did not murder them. They wanted to go. They were hoping to go, Dr. West rationalized. They behaved as if they were going to the purpose of their lives. "They were shouting with happiness."
And I should feel relief, Dr. West thought. I can control their numbers now. It is possible to postpone starvation. It may be possible to reach the surface if we try.
Dr. West collapsed facedown on his bed, groaning. It was many hours before he regained self-control and purpose to get out of bed, intending to send the Esks back to the tunnel. But he found they were already digging.
Much faster and more purposefully than before, the surviving adult Esks were digging upward and carrying away blue-gray rock. They were smiling.
"Smile at what? At what is happening up there, years above our heads where the world is filling with Esks." Dr. West was not smiling. "Dig faster!"
Broken blue rock rumbled out of the steep tunnel.
"We are rising through a pond," Dr. West announced as if the loudness of his voice could make the stupidly smiling Esks understand. "You are digging upward through blue silt which has become stone. Yes, giggle. Do you realize we are buried millions of years beneath the surface? Dig!"
Staring at a massive blue slab of stone which had rumbled from the tunnel, he blinked at irregular whiteness, fossil teeth too jaggedly huge to be mammalian. "Dinosaur? Oh my god, how deep are we? So deep in geological time we'll never get out."
Dayless day after nightless night, he watched alternating shifts of Esks burrowing upward. A clumsy Esk dropped a brown-stained slab and giggled. Beside Dr. West's foot, the slab had split, and on the rock's flat brown face there curved, like a tiny white necklace, a pattern of small teeth in a lower jaw.
"Specialized teeth. Extremely specialized for a little reptile." Dr. West bent over this fossil as if searching for a key to time.
Within Dr. West's eyes, the pupils, like dark mushroom extensions of his brain enlarged with excitement. He was remembering himself as a sleepy premed student, a zoology lecture and diagrams so long ago. "The dental formula of this little bastard in my hand -- " Incisors 3/3. Canines 1/1. Premolars 4/4. Molars 3/3. A little shrewlike mammal? "Beautiful! We're going to escape from those damn dinosaurs."
He laughed too loudly. "Dig. Already, I think, we're up in the late Cretaceous. Among the ultimate dinosaurs, you little shrewlike mammals seemed as unimportant as the Arctic Esks. We're burrowing up into the Paleocene, up toward the Eocene, crowded with little five-toed horses, beyond the last dinosaurs. We may be less than eighty million years from the surface," he said with irony. "We're entering the glorious Age of Mammals."
"It means nothing to you because you were not born of this planet," he told the blankly smiling faces of the Esks. "But to me! I'm part of it," he laughed. "Evolving upward, we're entering the upper layer of my planet's cake. Already we're standing on top of four billion years of life struggling up from the original hot rocks of my planet. It's my planet, not yours."
"Eh?"
"Smile. Dig! We'll reach the surface and find out whose planet it is." Dr. West stalked off toward the Control Room because he needed to talk to a human being.
"I found mammalian teeth!" Dr. West's lonely voice rose with boyish excitement. "We'll get out of here. Digging up through -- life," he laughed, "From the bottom up -- "
Mao III appeared dead. But in Dr. West's conscidusness something writhed, Tapeworm, kill me, fiend, please free me, Mao III's thoughts screamed soundlessly into Dr. West's brain. Have you no humane conception of euthanasia? Press the pillow against my face. So simple. Lean on it. Please.
But Dr. West walked away from the agony of the man unable to die, his fingernails gouging his palms. Why can't I kill him? Dr. West knew he was vacillating within neurotic indecisiveness. He walked away past the Esk servant approaching to pour water into Mao III's throat tube as if tending a vegetable.
"When he dies, I'll be alone for four or five years." Dr. West walked in sweat. "Alone with more Esks every day unless I -- "
New and beautiful little girls and boys scampered in the corridor, laughing and playing in their world. Stream-bed gravel rattled out of the long 45-degree tunnel for them to play with, followed by a thud of mineralized
bone.
The Eskimo Invasion Page 42