The Eskimo Invasion

by Hayden Howard

  "Even if my professional journal article is published, there'll be no cash payment, no quick money." He stayed up late, hammering into the typewriter a first-person article: "Population Explosion in the Arctic," aimed at the New Saturday Evening Post . "When you think about it, future Esk numbers could become -- overwhelming -- if the Canadian Government -- for political and religious reasons -- does not attempt forcible birth control of the Esks. That's what's needed -- "

  In the bedroom, Dr. West studied Marthalik's sleeping face. Even in her sleep she was smiling.

  My love, he thought, are you dreaming of me or of Grandfather Bear?

  As she turned restlessly, under the sheet the bulge was there. His face twisted in mental pain. He couldn't ask her to have an abortion now. But this sixth baby had to be the last.

  When this baby was born, he thought, he could hardly ask her to undergo a hysterectomy. Even severing her Fallopian tubes was a major abdominal operation. The safe abortifacient pill he had given her three weeks ago without explanation hadn't aborted the ovum, or the microscopically shapeless beginning embryo. Evidently her hormonal balance was more stable or adaptable than a human woman's. Something's got to be done -- which won't hurt her, won't frighten her, won't turn her against me. "I do love you, Marthalik."

  On Saturday morning when Marthalik had gone on an exciting expedition to the supermarket all by herself, and Dr. West was playing with his five children on the living room rug, Steve Jervasoni dropped by. "Thought you'd be interested to hear, we've finally evaluated those tests we began at Sierra Women's Reformatory while you were -- Very interesting."

  "So?" Dr. West didn't want to listen, but what could he say? While he was Director, he had arranged for the test. Now it seemed weird to him how his originally broad proposal, which won a Defense Department research grant and erected a white concrete building on the hillside behind Cal with gleaming brass letters over the open door spelling out: Oriental Population Problems Research, had been narrowed.

  The door to widespread basic research on the social-religious-physiological approaches to population control had been slammed. From the original staff he had recruited, all the sociologists were fired due to pressure from the Pentagon. The social psychologists and mass communications experts were gone. The ethnologists were gone. The religious experts were gone, Taoist, Maoist, Marxist, Buddhist, Moslem, Protestant, Catholic, Cao Dai, Animist. Some had gone even before Dr. West was fired. But their empty desks had been refilled so quickly. Enlarging the edifice, a specialized lab was being erected by the ever-generous Defense Department.

  Dr. West's original proposal for Oriental Population Problems Research had been a study of all avenues toward control of the population explosion in the Orient. Advertising, psychological, religious, chemical and bacterial approaches to population limitation were to be pretested. Then the most humanely promising approaches were to be evaluated in the Orient. Efficiency of population control was to be only one of the criteria for evaluating any proposed approaches. The effect of any method upon the people as human beings with social and psychological traits as well as physiological plumbing was to be evaluated. Each nation and within each nation each identifiable social or religious group and within each group each individual should be considered.

  What will be the long-term effects of this particular approach to population limitation upon this woman -- and her husband? With fewer children, will they fear there may be no one to care for their graves, to worship their bones after they become ancestors? What substitutes can be offered for these truly human needs? At the end of the first year, Oriental Population Problems Research still had been a diversified and hopeful program.

  But someone in the project evidently was reporting continuously to the Pentagon, because the pressure already was on Dr. West.

  On the telephone, the General said: "Dr. -- uh, West, explain to me why we're spending money for this crap."

  Dr. West tried, and the General's voice brightened: "I get it! Attack on all fronts."

  But the phone calls from the Pentagon became more frequent. "Dr. -- uh, West, I hear only your bacteriological boys have been making real progress. Seems to be your only effective attack."

  "That's just one approach," Dr. West had insisted, "and it hasn't been tested even in a controlled environment. There are so many implications -- "

  Theoretically, a nation might become able to control another nation's birthrate without that nation's consent, perhaps even without that countiy's knowledge. Only after several years might its leaders become frantic at how rapidly the birthrate curve was falling. Belatedly they would begin trying to find out why. Was it disease, or malnutrition, or declining national morale, or a change in social and religious attitudes, or the result of foreign propaganda urging birth control? They might not discover who had attacked their country with a genocidal weapon as deadly as nuclear bombs, or had intervened with humane wisdom.

  The next phone call from the Pentagon barked at Dr. West: "Your bacteriological boys have perfected a surefire attack."

  "Hardly that," Dr. West had replied, "we're just beginning the first pretest of the bacterial strain."

  At Sierra Woman's Reformatory there were a hundred volunteers between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five. Isolated, these women had developed slight colds, a temporary burning sensation in the abdomen and groin, and even before their uneventful recoveries the phone was ringing in Dr. West's office.

  "Great work, Dr. -- uh, West. Now you can expedite R and D on this successful attack."

  "General, several years will be necessary to evaluate the physiological effects and much longer for the psychological effects."

  "Anything you say, Doctor. Great work. We evaluate your program at the end of the fiscal year."

  At that meeting Dr. West was forced to admit that the biological- bacteriological research had made the most apparent progress, and he accepted the additional money to enlarge that wing of the building.

  In a few months the phone rang louder than usual. "Dr. -- uh, West, we understand the bacteria you used at that women's prison wasn't strong enough. It pooped out."

  "Hardly that," Dr. West replied. "For the safety of us all, naturally we have been breeding only self-attenuating strains."

  "Huh?"

  "As the test women transmitted and retransmitted the disease from one isolated cellblock to another, the virulence of the disease declined."

  "It pooped out."

  "Of course," Dr. West replied, "it was supposed to -- "

  "You're kidding? -- Dr. -- uh, West, we're paying for results. Your bacteriological boys can give us better results than that. Now!"

  This had launched Dr. West's jet trips to Washington. His desperate confrontations were ended when the Defense Department suggested to the University administrators, if they hoped for continued funding for this and other research programs, the present Director of Oriental Population Problems Research named Dr. -- uh, West, should be replaced.

  Dumped into his sabbatical leave, Dr. West had fled; from further conflict he had escaped to the Arctic, but now he lay on the living room rug in his Berkeley apartment with his five children crawling all over him while he listened to Steve Jervasoni.

  "The hundred lucky fellows from Chino Men's Prison have really been producing," Steve Jervasoni laughed. "After two years, a better percentage of those gals than we hoped finally have managed to get pregnant. In the outlying cellblocks where the infection was least virulent, most of them are pregnant."

  "Good. I'm relieved the way their Fallopian tubes are reopening. Just as our first gynecological studies indicated, most of the stoppage was due to swelling rather than permanent scarring. Good."

  "Bad," replied Steve Jervasoni. "The Pentagon is pressing us to start human testing of Dr. Gatson's virulent strain."

  "Dammit!" Dr. West stood up. "Those military minds have been juggling H-bombs on the tightrope of extinction for so long they've lost all sensation of danger. Dammit! Accidental transmi
ssion of Gatson's favorite bacteria outside the prison -- God! Why would even the military want to develop anything that can't be used, that couldn't be sprayed on Asia. Do they think we could medically isolate America while infection sweeps the rest of the world sterilizing all women and men until -- "

  Steve Jervasoni's restraining hand was on his forearm.

  "Dr. Gatson still thinks he's on the trail of the antibodies for a protective inoculation."

  "Bullshit! That's what little Freddie Gatson was saying two years ago."

  "Maybe yes, maybe no," Steve Jervasoni replied, sitting down again and absently ruffling the dark hair of Little Joe's head. "What I'm wondering is whether the mild and safe temporarily birth limiting strain we tested at Sierra Women's Reformatory would have any effect on Esks. Let's face it," Steve sighed, "now that the Canadian Government's feeding them, there's going to be an awful lot more, and if they're all as uncooperative in birth control as Marthalik -- "

  "Probably little or no effect on Esks," Dr. West retorted. "My kids haven't even caught cold. No sore throats or secondary bacterial infections. Marthalik's never ill. No, she did have a sore throat once."

  "Then this mild strain might not be able to limit the births of Esks in a few years when Canada needs help."

  "Who knows? Unless something like this is developed, I think Canada will have a lot of Esks. And a lot of starvation and a lot of lynching of innocent Esks."

  "And you'll have a hundred children by then, a hundred of Marthalik's children to feed, clothe and educate," Steve Jervasoni replied.

  "Very funny. You've observed Marthalik's preg again."

  "This is a safely self-attenuating bacterial strain."

  "Marthalik?"

  "You said it, I didn't." Steve stood up.

  "Forget it," Dr. West retorted, and failed to forget it.

  The day Marthalik produced his sixth child, Dr. West discovered Steve Jervasoni sitting on his doorstep.

  "Wouldn't the baby-sitter let you in?" Dr. West asked wearily.

  "When do you bring Marthalik home?" Steve's fist bulged awkwardly inside his coat pocket as if he had a sixth finger. " Life still taking pictures? Next month they'll have lost interest in your seventh baby. Eighth. Ninth." Steve took out a stoppered glass tube and blurted: "Giving you this from the lab, I guess I could get twenty years in the Federal Pen -- "

  "Bacterial spores? Dammit! Damn you! Good stockpiling characteristics?" Dr. West asked bitterly. "Storable to Pentagon specifications?"

  "Until you have to do it," Steve murmured, "in this culture medium, the spores could survive for months -- years at low temperatures like in the Arctic or in your refrigerator."

  "You think some day I'll open this tube in desperation?"Dr. West demanded. "You think I'll say: Marthalik, breathe -- "

  "But not around here. Fairly safe, self-attenuating but -- "

  "I can't do this," Dr. West said and glared at Steve but did not hand back the glass tube.

  "It was your -- you gave me the idea," Steve muttered and departed with his head down.

  His face blank, Dr. West walked into his kitchen. Carefully enclosing the tube in a polyethelene bag, he transferred part of the culture medium to an empty nasal inhalator can. He put the polyethelene bag, which contained both the glass tube of bacterial spores and the inhalator can of spores, in a Mason jar. Opening the refrigerator, he hid the jar at the back behind a six-pack of lager beer.

  He thought Steve was a contradictory character, supplying the bacteria and then acting as if its use was morally wrong. Even Steve's outward personality seemed contradictory. He acted more awkward and shy than Dr. West. Yet Steve was the newly elected president of the Graduate Students' Forum. For such an introvert to be elected president of anything seemed strange. But Dr. West suspected that few other grads had the free time or motivation to sit as moderator at interminable meetings where U.S. foreign and domestic policies endlessly were argued.

  Surprisingly for a bacteriologist concerned with infective means of limiting the world's birth rate, Steve favored larger families in the U.S., speaking quietly from his central seat on the platform. "It's a matter of our national survival. In the international competition, the Chinese are -- " Steve had repeated the Pentagon's line, urging an increased income tax deduction per child. "Our whole economy will be stimulated. More children mean more consumption, and for the unemployed more jobs, demonstrating to the world that our system still works best. A return to our American tradition of large families is in the national interest."

  After Marthalik returned in the Life Magazine limousine from the hospital, proudly carrying her new baby, Dr. West hired a full-time sitter. "Goodbye Little Joe, Daddy and Mommy are going on their first vacation."

  Dr. West was relieved how easily Marthalik left her children. "This person does not worry about children once they are born," she laughed wistfully. "Always someone will take care of those who are born."

  Dr. West almost asked her if she was more concerned about those who weren't born yet, but with husbandly wisdom he kept his mouth shut. He drove their Olds electric to the shingled cottage overlooking one of the last private beaches in California. He had borrowed this old wooden cottage from a rich but short-haired artistic type who was a friend of Phyliss's. Locking the chain across the long dirt driveway, Dr. West helped Marthalik carry two-weeks' supply of groceries into the cottage.

  "Warm waves. No ice." Across the deserted beach, Marthalik ran to him, her flawless skin beaded by the sea. Breathing hard in her first bathing suit, she had a stocky figure by whitewomen's fashion standards, but very nice, Dr. West thought. So very nice. Because I love you, you have a beautiful body.

  "My husband," she giggled as he squeezed her, "this wet person is making your shirt wet; you are so strong!"

  "Are you happy here?" He released her.

  "Like this we sat," she sighed, sitting down beside him on the salt-whitened log, "like this on the bone of the whale. This person's heart felt quick like a bird held in the hand. A very strong man beside me with his own rifle, even stronger than Old Peterluk, you touched my hand. Until you saw me, this young girl was so careful." She rested her cheek against his shoulder. "With you, so strong, this person was ready for her children to begin."

  "Now we feel close again like that," he suggested hopefully, "because there are no children between us now. Do you think that?"

  "This person thinks she does not miss them. No matter where we are, we will have new babies for us to love."

  Inside the beach cottage, Marthalik peeled off her wet bathing suit. She was most beautiful lying down.

  "Marthalik, first we must breathe this." Sitting on the bed with his arm around her, he opened the inhalator can, and in her trust she didn't even ask him what it was, and inhaled, and he wanted to cry.

  Breathing deeply from the can, he stood up.

  "My husband, are you feeling well?" Her hand sought his leg.

  "It is a custom here," he muttered, walking away from the bed, "as when the hunters are preparing to go out on the ice after walrus, the night before -- they do not sleep with their wives."

  With his back turned, for an instant he imagined her flushed with fever from the bacteria, moaning and writhing on the bed. He wanted to cry.

  From the bed, she giggled. "My husband, you are not going walrus hunting. It is not a walrus you are going to harpoon."

  He had to smile, his pulse racing. Probably she wouldn't even have a fever. Turning, he looked down at her lying there. Looking up at him, she stretched luxuriously. And he had to laugh, he was in such a burning agony of desire. There seemed no medical reason why they shouldn't, particularly if he took old-fashioned precautions, so why was he torturing them both, denying nature? His face twisted in a grin. He was burning like hell's fire. He thought with wry amusement: continence might not be quite so difficult if I were 5000 miles away in Rome.