U6112 A BALLANTINE SCIENCE FICTION ORIGINAL
THE
ESKIMO
INVASION
Homo sapiens can atomize himself into extinction --
but there are other kindly extremes
just as deadly . . .
HAYDEN HOWARD
It was a happy scene . . .
The winter wastes; the igloos;
cheerful, laughing, roly-poly faces
-- his friends, the Eskimos -- the
gentlest, most warm-hearted peo-
ple in the world.
And they were cheerful, laughing,
gentle, and warm-hearted.
And busy, active, playful.
In fact, when Dr. West tried to
take a census, he couldn't be sure
that he hadn't counted the same
ones several times over.
Or had he?
And if not, how could they all be
so very young? Where had they
all come from?
But it was still a happy scene.
Then . . .
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THE
ESKIMO
INVASION
HAYDEN HOWARD
BALLANTINE BOOKS * NEW YORK
Copyright © 1967 by John Hayden Howard
First Edition: November, 1967
Manufactured in the United States of America
BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC.
101 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003
To Frederik Pohl
Human enzyme for writers
Editor of GALAXY Science Fiction Magazine
*
Definition of an enzyme:
A complex organic substance that accelerates
(catalyzes) specific transformations of material
CONTENTS
1. Love Is the Navel
2 Polar Bear!
3. Who Is More Human?
4. Berkeley Campus, 1990
5. The Spray Cans of Death
6. The Modern Penitentiary
7. Air Force Versus CIA
8. Our Man in Peking
9. Underground Dynasty
10. The Purpose of Life
The
Eskimo
Invasion
1. LOVE IS THE NAVEL
Feeling high with freedom, he was Dr. Joe West.
Like Icarus with aluminum wings, he thought quickly as laughter, his propjet engine singing.
Through the slanting Arctic sky, he flew the old de Havilland Turbo-Beaver as if he were the pilot. Over the ice on Franklin Strait he raced the shadow of this ski-plane.
Wryly grinning, he blinked at the glaring summer ice. Even this near the North Magnetic Pole the sea ice was breaking up like a psychedelic checkerboard. "Too late for a ski landing, too early for pontoons."
Ahead, ankle-deep in cracked ice rose the cliffs of what was supposed to be the Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary.
Welcome to Canada's living musuem, he thought sardonically, hoping the monstrous radar dome on the other side of the Boothia Peninsula was asleep. He'd been warned that what crouched beside that main Guard Station was one ancient F-111B swing-wing jet fighter on a steam catapult. Trespassers will be violated, Dr. West thought, his grin narrowing. But catch me first.
Instead of blundering north from Hudson Bay, be had chartered this bush plane from a more devious distance. Fifteen hundred miles away in Yeflowknife he had begun his trip. Laughing, with his normally introverted personality turned inside out, last night in the Yellowknife airtel he'd been able to swing with his first really satisfactory sexual happening in nearly two years, and he knew why.
The world's most hopeless problem had been yanked from his shoulders in Berkeley. This month he'd been asked to resign as Director of Oriental Population Problems Research. Pushed into his sabbatical year with pay, he was trying to enjoy what he couldn't forget. Through the shrill singing of the propjet he raised his angry baritone:
Pent-agon from whom all blessings flow, Praise Pentagon plans from here below. Praise them, all ye pro-fess-ors. Or lose your grants to younger whores.
He was an older thirty-four. The worst of it was, he couldn't even explain to Phyliss what was happening. I'm hooked by the National Security Act. My mouth would be a traitor to my country.
From the nesting cliffs rose dark-winged swarms. Naturally these isolated generations of cormorants no longer are accustomed to planes, he thought. But he was startled when something smacked against the aluminum wing, leaving a bloody streak.
"I'll take 'er!" the pilot shouted, violently awakening from his long forty winks.
In the bar in Yellowknife, the semilegal bush pilot had astounded Dr. West by asking a gigantic charter fee for this flight. "Me aircraft's me life! If we're arrested, I shan't mind jail for violating the Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary. It's the confiscation of me Turbo-Beaver! Ten years I've been scrimping."
A former R.A.F. ground crewman, he'd confided he left a wife and her mother in England's marmalade Newest Town ten years ago. Enjoying free transport to Canada, he'd discovered he was only another English-speaking statistic in the language race against the French-Canadians, as he shivered through ten winters of commercial net fishing through the ice on Great Slave Lake. "Ten years of me life to buy this aircraft and fly."
As if fearing cormorants more than radar, the pilot lifted his pricelessly antique Turbo-Beaver high above the cliffs. "Which direction -- we search -- for the 'skimos?"
Peering down, Dr. West grinned with excitement. No one's had a legal look at these people for twenty years.
Barren hills protruded from muskeg still sparkling with snow. The Boothia Peninsula wrinkled south over the horizon. Larger than Vermont and 2,000 miles nearer the North Pole, it appeared empty of men.
As the plane banked, Dr. West saw flocks of geese rippling north. He looked north at the glint of ice still blocking Bellot Strait, that historically futile Northwest Passage. With awe, he saw these geese were flying north of the northernmost promontory of continental North America.
Beyond sprawled the hazy hump of Somerset Island, larger than New Jersey, entombed in permafrost. The old buildings at Fort Ross had been removed twenty years ago when this vast Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary was voted by the Canadian Parliament. Dr. West visualized north of Somerset Island another five hundred miles of Sanctuary ice embedded with other islands of diminishing life extending into the Arctic Ocean where ancient ice curved over the world fifteen hundred miles toward the dim coast of Russia.
"Search south," Dr. West shouted through the whining of the propjet engine, "south along this west coast of Boothia."
"If any are still alive after twenty years," the pilot shouted. "Look for safer ice for us. Me aircraft needs to set down to refuel herself."
> Dr. West stared down at glaring ice crisscrossed by pressure ridges. For abrupt stops? Against the back of his neck he imagined the hurtling fifty-five gallon drums of jet fuel. Massed behind him in the fuselage, those heavy drums of extra fuel seemed so flimsily tied. Avalanche, he thought. Funeral pyre. The reason he was here instead of those eager ethnologists and demographers from McGill University no longer was so laughably --
"Big dark spot ahead," the pilot shouted, "on that rocky point."
Dr. West stared ahead at the rocky Jeffersonian profile of the point. On its chin, on the broadest ledge above the sea, he saw the dark indentation in the rock. As the aircraft approached and the ledge grew, he realized how huge it was.
"Too big for a campfire scar," the pilot shouted. "You think -- something from the old days? Your government was setting up radar installations all over the North like pimples then. Maybe a supply plane crashed. But I can't see wreckage."
"No airplane would smash a pit that big in solid rock." Dr. West imagined it was some sort of natural phenomenon, perhaps a dark extrusion of soft volcanic material which had eroded back, leaving this shallow crater. But geology isn't my specialty. Nor were bombs, but Dr. West visualized a tactical atomic weapon being tested here. Perhaps a meteor had blasted this oval scar in solid rock. He even imagined another huge Mars rocket rising from Russia, capitalistically malfunctioning and falling back here with a tremendous blast, and terrified Eskimos fleeing, trying to break out of the Sanctuary. "Crater's probably been here for thousands of years. Keep flying south."
South was by eyeball and gyrocompass. In the aircraft, the magnetic compass revolved and twitched. Dr. West thought the North Magnetic Pole was supposed to be in or near the Boothia Peninsula this year. To the disgust of cartographers, the Magnetic Pole shifted erratically through the years as if following some mysterious drifting within the Earth's core.
The next rocky point, the next ice-choked bay, the next promontory showed no evidence of Eskimo occupancy. But dark leads of open water radiated outward from the promontory, a good place for seal hunting, Dr. West thought. In his eiderdown parka was his copy of the hurried census the McGill University ethnologists had taken twenty-one years ago while the cultural sanctuary concept was being debated in Parliament. The McGill census had counted 112 Eskimos. The next year, Hans Suxbey as first and only Director of the Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary had not permitted his former colleagues to return. For twenty years Hans Suxbey had battled to keep out all whitemen's cultural influences.
"We won't find nobody alive," the pilot shouted. "Without their Family Allowances, without kerosene or rubber boots or ammunition all those 'skimos have starved."
"I see them! At the head of this bay on the river flats, their tents." Dr. West shouted with excitement: "Thirty or forty tents!"
This was a surprisingly dense concentration of Eskimos in one spot, he thought. Since prehistoric Eskimo hunters were able to support only a few children, probably there wouldn't be more than three children per tent, plus the man and wife, plus an occasional old person. He estimated an average of five Eskimos per tent. "At least 150 Eskimos. Perhaps they all gathered at this one river to wait for the summer run of char."
"Shore ice looks too broken for us to land -- safely."
"Fly on down the coast." Dr. West thought this might be his only chance to scout the Boothia Peninsula from the air. "There may be other camps."
But the pilot circled. "Better to make me first landing attempts here -- while I know I've plenty of fuel to lift her and try again."
The pilot kept circling the aircraft farther and farther from shore. "Better ice out here." He flew a downwind leg. On the base leg he lowered the flaps to 50 degrees. Turning into the wind the Turbo-Beaver sank down at eighty mph toward the ice, while Dr. West hunched forward as if he could duck all those fuel drums stacked behind him in the fuselage.
"Big crack ahead," the pilot remarked as the ice rose to meet them, and he advanced the throttle lever, making the propjet engine scream with last instant power.
Skimming above the ice, the Turbo-Beaver climbed. Scowling, the pilot attempted another landing pattern, while Dr. West tried to look nonchalant. Like a brick, the Turbo-Beaver dropped in. The skis skipped along the ice while the pilot slid the throttle lever past idle into reverse. The reversed pitch prop frantically beat the air as they slid toward the Mississippi-wide crack with the pilot shrilly cursing. Instinctively, Dr. West ducked. The Turbo-Beaver swerved alongside the open lead, momentarily tail into the wind, and spun around. Motion ceased.
"Piece of cake," the pilot laughed. "Me Turbo-Beaver may be old because her first owner bought 'er way back in '67. But twenty-two years old and she hasn't killed a pilot yet."
Dr. West was looking toward the distant shore. The tents were so far away they were specks.
"Hop out, sir. Help me work these planks under the skis. Shouldn't want to freeze her to the ice."
The wind felt sharp against Dr. West's cheeks as the pilot handed down his sleeping bag, rifle, camera and ninety-pound pack of supplies. He didn't want to sponge off Eskimos who might be starving. Staring at the shore he could see smaller specks moving among the tents.
"They'll come." Visible through the double doors of the fuselage, the pilot hurriedly was rigging a rubber hose from a fuel drum to the floor tank. "If we hear the F-111 overhead, I've lost me aircraft." Violently, he began to hand-pump. "No use walking, sir. They'll come out after you."
Dr. West hoped so. Uneasily he suspected some of these Eskimos at some time must have attempted to leave the Sanctuary. They would have been turned back by the blue-and-white uniformed Guards. Logically, they might think all whitemen were their enemies. After twenty years of isolation, these Eskimos might have strange ideas about the world Outside.
"They're coming." The pilot called from his higher observation point in the doorway of the ski-plane. "Only one dogsled. Maybe a dozen 'skimos running behind."
Dr. West grinned with excitement. The McGill University crowd were so damn curious to know how Canada's Fifth Alternative for her Eskimos was turning out. But the ethnologists and demographers hadn't been curious enough to risk being arrested and losing their various research grants from the Canadian Government.
Dr. West knew the Five Alternative Program offered more varying life-possibilities to Eskimos than the U.S. offered to Indians or Anglo-Saxons. With a less cumbersome population than the United States, Canada had become more flexible in dealing with her people and economy. He hoped Canada was becoming a guide dog for the United States.
The loading doors of the Turbo-Beaver slammed shut. The cockpit window opened. "Pick you up at this camp, one week from today."
"One week?" Dr. West bleated. "We agreed one month."
"The way this ice is breaking up, in a month I'll be lucky to walk away from the crash. Impossible to land ."
"We agreed on a month. Come back with pontoons."
"Should of thought of this sooner, I should." The pilot was glancing up at the sky as if he expected to see the F-111B circling like a hawk. "Eskimos travel. Probably gossip like old ladies. Word of me aircraft will spread from this camp to the Guard Stations."
"There's supposed to be no contact."
"Those Guards are human, sir. 'skimo girls are a bit of all right, I hear. Even in a week, word about us may travel to the Guard Station, and you'll be arrested. If I come back in a month, I bloody well know I'll be flying into an ambush. Me aircraft's me life!"
Dr. West stood looking up at the pilot. What could he say?
The pilot said: "Allow me another week for engine trouble before you walk out to the Guard Station and give yourself up."
The Eskimo Invasion Page 1
