The Eskimo Invasion

by Hayden Howard

  "I already tried pentothal with her -- and LSD," Dr. West whispered. "Neither exposed what she's seeing -- in her dreams."

  "I don't care about that," Steve retorted. "It's Marthalik I care about."

  "You think I don't care about her?" Dr. West stood up, waiting for Steve to leave.

  One day when Dr. West wearily wandered back from class to the apartment, there was a strange middle-aged baby-sitter with the kids.

  "Where's my wife?"

  "Was she your wife?" The baby-sitter looked embarrassed.

  Dr. West saw the strange envelope on his desk, read the note and told the baby-sitter to get out. Then he telephoned the police. "Is there a Missing Persons Bureau?"

  Marthalik had vanished from Berkeley. So had Steve. The police couldn't find them anywhere in California.

  Marthalik, are you all right? I deserve -- suffering. But Marthalik, please -- he thought each night.

  "Find my wife." But he did not show the police the note.

  His life seemed shattered like an Arctic ice floe. Every day at Free U. he had to lecture to keep the money coming in to pay two shifts of baby-sitters and a housekeeper. At night he played with his children. "When Mama come home?"

  "She's gone on a long vacation, Little Joe." Dr. West couldn't believe that the police were unable to find Marthalik or Steve in the United States. "Steve wouldn't take her back to the Arctic -- "

  "He didn't even leave you a note?" Dr. Darwin stirred his coffee.

  "No," Dr. West lied with shame. "The police located Steve's folks in Detroit. They said they hadn't seen much of him since high school. Then he went to a junior college, and then into the service, four years in the Bacterial Warfare Section, came out as staff sergeant, and studied bacteriology at L.A. State." Dr. West stared out across Berkeley at the fog shrouding San Francisco Bay. "He wasn't outstandingly bright for a grad student, no scholarship grant-in-aid, but Steve was my most dependable team member. He was the only one who remained -- loyal to me -- after I was -- canned as Director."

  "So where did his money come from?" Dr. Darwin asked, smiling cynically. "Did he have an outside job?"

  "No. Any spare time, he used as Treasurer and then President of the Graduate Students' Forum."

  "A grad student can't live without money on top of his G.I. Bill checks."

  "Don't tell me you're one of those paranoid professors," Dr. West began, "who still suspects every student is a -- "

  "Conveniently planted inside your Oriental Population Problems Research program," Dr. Darwin interrupted triumphantly. "There he was. Every day he could report."

  "Our Government didn't need reports from Steve. Behind my back, Fred Gatson and three or four more of my so-called colleagues continuously were bitching about me to the Pentagon. Steve at least stuck with me. Until he stole my wife -- "

  "Was that in character?" Dr. Darwin laughed dryly. "Was Steve the passionate type?"

  "How can we know -- even ourselves?" Dr. West's face twisted in pain. "I hope he is in love with her. I hope he's looking after her."

  "In this neatly numbered population," Dr. Darwin persisted, spreading his arms, "where computers should be able to trace any man, cooperation from within Government is necessary if a man wants to disappear."

  "Bullshit! We're not animated IBM cards yet. A man and a woman still can disappear together." Dr. West's voice rose. "At least I believe he loves her and is looking after her. You, you're practically implying Steve Jervasoni is a Government employee such as CIA, who stole my wife following orders as cold-bloodedly as if she were a dog for vivisection. God! I hope he does love her."

  Each day, each night, Dr. West listened for the phone. In another shattered part of his life he worried about the care of his children. Now that old Peterluk had been located in Yellowknife, Dr. West was worried that he himself might be extradited to Canada as a witness against Peterluk. No charges had been filed against Dr. West for violating the Sanctuary or perhaps kidnapping Marthalik. Evidently someone in Canadian politics preferred to give Dr. West no publicity.

  Peterluk was tried for shooting the priest-pilot of the Order of Pope John solely on the dramatic testimony of the younger LaRue. This Hero of the North was running for Parliament, where his uncle was demanding abolition of the Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary. In newspaper accounts, Dr. West wasn't even mentioned. When Peterluk was convicted of murder and given an indeterminate sentence at the New Ottawa Reformation Center, Dr. West breathed more easily. He needed to stay here in Berkeley to help his motherless children grow up.

  What do you do with six children growing so fast their clothes have to be let out or exchanged every month? At one year they looked like six-year-olds, but talked like three-year-olds. Physically they looked old enough to be starting school.

  Although Dr. West hired a retired schoolteacher as a reading readiness tutor, he knew eventually he'd be contacted by an Attendance Administrator from the Public School System. Already a woman from the Child Welfare Bureau had visited. "We're concerned about these children -- without their mothers. Where are their mothers?"

  When Dr. West maintained that he was the legal father of all six children, the woman's thick eyebrows rose as if she thought he was a bigamist, and rose higher when he insisted Marthalik had been the mother of all six.

  "Didn't you see the Life article?" he asked.

  Physically all six children now appeared to be between three and six years of age.

  "None are twins," she muttered, lowering her eyebrows in a thoughtful squint. "The older children should be enrolled in school. Where are their birth certificates?"

  The Public School System pounced. "In spite of the apparent validity of their birth certificates, physiological readiness for school increasingly has been recognized as the most important criterion for admission. The larger three children obviously should be given placement tests."

  The tests showed Little Joe, Little Martha and Eva had the approximate mental ages of three-year-olds. "Because they are physically ready but not mentally ready, they must be placed in the Special Class."

  "You mean for retarded children?" Dr. West protested. "They're not retarded. They're advanced for their ages. Show me another eighteen-month-old child who knows his addition combinations. Little Joe does."

  "But surely he's really at least five years old. The operative from the Child Welfare Bureau informs us the birth certificates and Life article may have been a publicity stunt. A Guidance Administrator will investigate your noncooperation. Surely, your children need to associate with other children."

  "They do. After their lessons. In the park." Dr. West spent hours playing catch with them.

  Soon Little Joe was as large as a nine-year-old boy. When he tried to play baseball with other boys his size, he couldn't hit the ball.

  "You will. You will," Dr. West kept reassuring him. "You just haven't had as much practice as they have."

  By the time Little Joe's coordination was as good as a nine-year-old's, he looked like a twelve-year-old. Finally placed in an ungraded classroom in the regular neighborhood school, Little Joe seemed embarrassed surrounded by "little kids." But his reading level was only third grade. He was two years old. By the time he was two and a half, he was reading and doing arithmetic at a sixth-grade level, but he was as large as a fifteen-year-old who should be in junior high.

  "Joe, please believe me. You'll catch up, Joe." Dr. West had dropped the "Little" from his son's name.

  The boy stood a massive five feet three inches tall, appearing muscular like a giant among grade school children. But he was no bully. Even when he was unhappy, Joe smiled.

  Dr. West couldn't smile. Within six months, Joe would be three. At the calendar age of one he had looked like a six-year-old, at two like a twelve-year-old. Physically he had matured six times as fast as a hu- -- as other children, Dr. West thought. In six months, when he was three, Joe might be looking at girls as if he were an eighteen-year-old. "Nothing but trouble! But he's such a good kid." Dr. West
thought all Joe needed was time for his mental age to catch up with his physical growth. Joe had been promoted three grades in the last year, but he had grown six years physically.

  At what might be physically eighteen, Joe needed scissors rather than the electric razor he bashfully asked for, but his voice had deepened and he was a powerfully built young man five feet nine inches tall. Smiling, he appeared like a football prospect in junior high but he didn't block. When he was knocked down, he stood up smiling while smaller boys tittered. But suddenly Joe became "a star" in basketball and then baseball, and he was very popular in junior high school. He laughed and joked with budding girls.

  It was Little Martha who was overtaken by trouble. Dr. West's housekeeper had purchased her a bra the month before, and now she was in junior high school and giggling a great deal. Whenever Dr. West looked at her, he was reminded of his wife. He felt like crying. How old had Marthalik been when he married her?

  Already high school age boys shouted at Martha. She wasn't a "Little" Martha anymore. A brash high school boy telephoned her at home, asking her for a date. Smiling with pride and hope, she asked Dr. West. He said no. Her smile faded while he tried to explain why she was too young to go out on her first date, why she wasn't like other girls.

  "Daddy, I can't believe I'm only three years old."

  What problems we create, Dr. West thought in anguish, bringing children into the world. Alone he thought: No, my bringing my children to Berkeley was what caused the problems. On the Boothia Peninsula, they would have grown up at the same rate as other children there and entered smoothly into a simpler life as Eskimos.

  But his children couldn't go back and squat in frigid tents gnawing at seal bones. "They don't even speak Eskimo. They're -- Americans."

  Marthalik and Steve seemed to have vanished from the face of the Earth. Dr. West had finally shown the police Marthalik's note, the Missing Persons Bureau had what seemed a good way of tracing her, but found no record of her. If Steve had taken her back to the Boothia Peninsula, Dr. West was sure he would have heard about it. Dozens of eager-beaver ethnologists, gynecologists, social workers and professional journalists had entered the former Sanctuary. Dr. West's own first-person article had been purchased and rewritten by The New Saturday Evening Post . He used all that money to pay bills. Before he could expand it to a book, a professional journalist who "parachuted on the spot" had published a book complete with ferocious attacks by hordes of spear-hurling Esks and other nonsense. Dr. West's own manuscript dragged on, not completed.

  In the three winters since Dr. West had carried Marthalik away from the Boothia Peninsula, the Canadian Government had forestalled starvation with larger and larger food deliveries.

  "So their Public Health nurses still are having difficulty teaching family planning. That's Canada's problem," Dr. West told Dr. Darwin. "I've enough problems here. My kids -- Joe wants a car. Already he's talking about a college education."

  Dr. West was grossing $20,000 a year from his lectures. After paying his share of rent, lights, janitorial services in the former furniture warehouse, and miscellaneous expenses, such as printing of course outlines and tests, he netted $16,000. This was about a plumber's take-home pay in the continuous price-wage inflation. It was about what he would be making if he started at the bottom again as an Assistant Prof at the University of California.

  "You keep talking about the satisfaction of teaching Undergrads," he accused Dr. Darwin. "But at Free U. we lecture to such large classes we have so little time for face-to-face two-way communication with individuals. Teaching was more satisfying for me, I was doing more real teaching, when I was a research professor at Cal working closely with only a dozen grad students. That was real teaching, the ideal method of education for both professor and student." He was restless. He felt the world had passed him by. He dreamed of Marthalik.

  Dr. West's biggest problem was Little Martha, who was not little. His housekeeper snidely reported Martha was pregnant. Evidently someone reported this to the Child Welfare Bureau, because a woman with bushy eyebrows appeared with a sternly satisfied expression and a photostat of Little Martha's birth certificate. "This proves you're not a fit father, Dr. West. Your daughter is only three years old, and she's pregnant! You failed to give these little three-year-old children the parental protection they deserve. You're not a fit parent."

  At the hearing, Dr. West lost his temper and his six children. "I tried! You think you can do better?" he shouted up at the judge. "Little Martha will have another baby in a month. What will you do? Put the baby out for adoption?"

  "Please sit down," the judge asked gently.

  "In a few years," Dr. West shouted, "how will you feed their thousand grandchildren?"

  "Dr. West, I should hold you in contempt of court. If you cause further disturbance in this courtroom, I will order you held for a psychiatric examination."

  Alone in his terribly empty apartment, Dr. West smashed the mirror. He kicked the bed until it collapsed. Sitting on the floor, he thought of Hans Suxbey, founder and Director of the Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary. During Suxbey's last appeal before the Parliamentary Investigating Committee, when it became evident they would recommend against any future appropriation for the Sanctuary and that they would recommend abolishing the Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary, Hans Suxbey had lifted a revolver from his coat pocket. While old LaRue sat like a grinning dinosaur, unafraid, and other Members of Parliament tipped over backward in their chairs in their haste to leave the room, Hans Suxbey had blown out his own brains.

  Dr. West went to his bureau drawer. Opening it he took out Marthalik's note, smudged and crumpled from reading and rereading. My husband , she had dictated in Steve's handwriting, this person loves you. This person has gone away with Steve. It is hoped the operation will help this person have more babies.

  "That's all you wanted, Marthalik, to bring more babies into the world." Dr. West walked toward the kitchen. "More children to be penalized because they are different from humans. More and more children. Until there are too many Esks for us whitemen to feed, then the anger of the whitemen will rise against the Esks."

  He opened the refrigerator. "We humans are descended from savage animals. You Esks are meek, multiplying toward misery. So who will inherit the Earth?"

  Yesterday the expedition to Boothia from the State University at Palo Alto had published their preliminary report. They had counted 4000 Esks. Statistical analysis of the birth rate, which was in excess of 10,000 per thousand women per year, the maturation rate to breeding age, three years; and death rate, a few statistically insignificant accidental deaths; and present age distribution, approximately 70% of the population were children two calendar years of age or less, had caused the eager geniuses from Palo Alto to estimate that the Esk population was doubling every year.

  "Multiplying into misery, Marthalik," Dr. West picked up a crayola left by one of his children on the kitchen linoleum, and he savagely scrawled on the ivory-toned wall:

  1 -- this year -- 4000 Esks 2 -- next year -- 8000 3 -- 16,000 4 -- 32,000 5 -- 64,000 6 -- 128,000 7 -- 256,000 8 -- 512,000 9 -- 1,024,000 10 -- 2,048,000

  "That's not many Esks ten years from now, only two million or so Esks in a world population with nine billion humans," he laughed savagely. "But the Canadian economy would rupture itself trying to feed that many Esks. Canada will try to get rid of them and not by means of mass sterilization or genocide. Canadians are too civilized. They'll try to export their problem. The world can absorb two million Esks so easily."

  Defacing the ivory-tinted wall of the kitchen he he scrawled:

  11 years from now 4,096,000 12 8,192,000 13 16,384,000 14 32,768,000 15 65,536,000 16 131,072,000 17 262,144,000 18 524,288,000 19 1,048,576,000 20 2,097,152,000

  "Only two billion, give or take ninety million, twenty years from now. That's controllable, that's feedable, only two billion Esks against a human population of twelve billion. Surely forced birth control, machine guns and starvation can administer Esk
family planning, maintaining the Esk population at a useful two billion cheap laborers throughout the world. But let us hope human politicians are sufficiently intelligent, because the doubling process involves a subjective deception. As long as the total numbers are much smaller than you are, you can laugh it off. They seem small."