"Twenty-four hundred men. How many women? Divide by six?"
"You always try to be too precise," her voice laughed. "Our men are changing and graduating all the time. The average stay is less than a year. Thousands and thousands." Her voice grew serious. "I think of a stream of men being reborn."
"I think of thieves and murderers, criminals, myself, crouched in their cells waiting for you." His voice rose. "Listen, I'll never get out of here. For political reasons, I'll -- "
"Oh shut up. Don't act so egotistical. If you want to act like a pessimistic, guilt-tortured little boy, go ahead and roll in your own mess." In the blanket tent rose the bulge of a head. "Until you take a more positive attitude, you jolly well won't roll on the sheets with me."
"You mean it, don't you," his voice softened, then exclaimed with wry laughter. "I understand too well! So simple, but I don't know how effective. Solitary confinement is the stick and you're the carrot. I've been given donkey ears."
"You stubborn donk," her voice laughed, "don't you see any further than your big nose? You men in here can't be deeply changed by rewards and punishments. Outside, carrots and sticks certainly failed to civilize you, or you wouldn't be in here. All your life you've been rewarded and punished, but you wouldn't conform and you ended up in here."
"I need to get out. There is a great need for me to get out. Outside, the Esks are -- "
"Sweet, harmless, law-abiding people. There's no use talking about Eskimos in here. Listen, we want you to like it in here. Lover, when you adjust -- we love you."
"My god, Nona, are you going to give me the family bit? The Recreation Officer already shoveled it on me -- during his friendly period." Dr. West's voice rose with anger. "The staff is my family. I am provided with a new childhood, loving and secure, so that I can grow up to the world again. Strengthened by my secure second childhood, or is that the wrong terminology? With new inner security we criminals graduate from our prison families into the world to be law-abiding and patient and sympathetic with our fellow man. Bugles please."
"It works. The family-group produces the -- "
"Yes, Mom. But Dad was nasty today. Was he cranky because he thought I wanted to get in bed with you?"
"You don't need to be that sarcastic," her voice said.
"I'm sorry. But my eloquence gets -- poisonous. How can you bring yourself to lie beside a murderous maniac like me? The civil service ought to give you a medal. If you're supposed to feel motherly toward me, you don't have to. Just leave me, please, I -- "
"I love you.~~
"I should accept that as it is, now. You also love five other men in five other suites."
"Yes, I love men. I love women. I love my children. I try to love everybody."
"Next you'll tell me you also have a husband to love. I was hoping -- and I wasn't so jealous of my five invisible cellmates," Dr. West's voice stammered, "but I was hoping that ring on your third finger left hand was just for -- show."
"Every evening after work I take the monorail back to the apartment district. Did you get much of a look at Ottawa?"
"I saw those angry people waving signs at me."
"I have three children, three little girls. The oldest puts the TV dinners in the oven before I get home. After supper I help them with their homework. On the rug, even the second grader mutters at her homework. The older two have begun to giggle about boys, and the oldest is only sixth grade, my heavens! Then we watch TV and no one wants to go take the first bath. When my angels are asleep, I think -- they're another day older and stronger and wiser, I hope. I sit watching TV. Me, I'm another day older. I crawl into bed."
"I wish I were there with you."
"You are. Squeeze me hard. You're in bed with me right now."
"That wasn't all that I meant," Dr. West's voice replied. "At the moment I feel more protective than -- "
"You needn't be. I can get along very well, thank you," she said. "Except when my children were helpless babies, I always worked, worked as an IBM operator, even when my husband was working." Her voice for the first time rose in anger.
Her voice tried again more softly. "My husband was a nice guy, he really was. I didn't just love him because he was the father of my children. He was a sweet guy, not scheming, not adjustable the way we have to be. Everything's changing faster and faster, and he got quieter every time they automated away his job. What did I do? Did I give him inner strength? No, I began to earn more money than he did, and he said less and less. When I brought my -- our kids home from my father's into the kitchen, I ran to turn off the gas."
Her voice sank. "I tried to give him artificial respiration."
"It wasn't until then -- after then," her voice laughed unhappily, "I learned what brief animals we are. You're all horny schemers. If you and I were Outside, don't expect that a dinner date downtown and a cinerama will make me -- owe you anything just because I haven't got a husband. You understand me?"
"So you got the perfect job here. No, I'm oversimplifying you."
"Yes, I'm simple. I'm just a simple bundle of mother love. Always cheery. Pardon me for sounding cynical with you, but my other students happen to be such uneducated children. They wouldn't understand."
"Or notice you're not perfect, I hope," Dr. West laughed. "I hope not. You're our only hope. Don't hurt us. You are too powerful. Without your personal love this would be solitary confinement and we convicts would go insane. Right now you are miraculously changing me and five other men."
Dr. West's voice suddenly probed. "If any of your prisoners fail, I mean, are released and then hold up a liquor store, do you have such a masochistic and guilty view of yourself that you believe you are responsible for the failure of this man?"
"I don't understand you?"
"As with the failure of your husband."
"What are you saying?"
"Nona, do you think you are so God-awful powerful that if we cons fail, it is because of something you did or didn't do?"
"I don't understand. Not one of my students has become a recidivist. I've worked here four years. Twenty-two of my students have graduated. None have gotten in any trouble with the law."
"You misunderstood my question."
"Of course I'm holding my breath about a few of my boys," she said. "They all get pretty fair jobs because we've retrained them, and the Government subsidizes, pays their employers during the first year."
"So they get along without you?" Dr. West's voice laughed suddenly. "Marry girls just like you?"
"You are a flatterer. My students write to me, some of them, and I save the letters and photos. One boy is going with a woman a little bit older than he is, but very pretty. I shouldn't have said that. What I meant to say was she looks enough like me to be my sister."
"No doubt the Government wishes you could be divided more than six ways."
"Silly. The whole purpose of the Government's reformation policy is to help them -- you -- stand on their own feet when they go Outside. Someday, you'll -- Now you stop that," her voice sighed.
"Nona, you're so warm, so smooth -- "
"I think you just want me to stop preaching at you."
"Nona, what I want -- "
"Lover, turn your wrist the other way. My heavens, if your wristwatch is correct and I'm sure it is, your borrowed time is up."
"You aren't going to leave me like this?"
"Sort of let me up, lover. Where's my bra? You're lying on it."
"But I was just beginning."
"But you've no more time today," she laughed. "Be here tomorrow? On second thought, I won't be back till Wednesday. You traded away tomorrow. Oh, there's a run in my stocking. Now stop that! You can wait till Wednesday, lover."
The blanket tent shook and Nona's legs swung out. She fumbled for her shoes. "Where's my comb?" Zipping up the hip of her blue skirt, she clicked on high heels to the door. There was a departing hiss as the inner door opened and closed. Dr. West was alone.
Dr. West emerged from the blanket tent. He
stared blankly at the huge cage where the Arctic ground squirrels slept in artificially induced hibernation. Then he smiled and squinted up at the artificial afternoon in his suite.
The luminous ceiling panels were synchronized to a clock and rheostat. There also was an OFF switch, but if he left the panels alone, the evening would come gradually, and then night. Then Tuesday. On Wednesday morning at 10:00 --
He smiled down at the coffee table where she had sat looking up at him. He hurried to dismantle the tent, folding the blankets, his pulse racing, his face hot with suppressed memory. For an instant he pictured her inside the tent, moving. The view was too powerful -- and he laughed and shook his head, and blinked his eyes. "Wednesday, Wednesday, hurry up, Wednesday."
He vaulted over the couch, grinning. Tomorrow was only Tuesday but -- "When Tuesday's here, can Wednesday be far behind?"
He reached for a glass tube on his work counter, and grinned at the Bunsen burner in his lab setup. He felt young. If he softened the glass tubing, bending, twisting the glass, he could make something for her. "A glass giraffe to make her laugh?"
Behind him, the inner door hissed open. With a surge of warmth, wanting to believe she had returned already, Dr. West whirled.
"Surprise," the Recreation Officer said. "I'm off duty now -- Doctor. Before you get too well adjusted in here, I'm to deliver this."
Beneath his toothbrush mustache, the Recreation Officer forced a smile as he flapped down a manila folder on the coffee table. "You wanted news of the world, didn't you?"
"Get out." Dr. West stared at the folder with its projecting newspaper clippings as if he were looking at a snake. Obviously it did not come from the staff. It was from Outside.
"I'm sorry," the Recreation Officer's voice said. "I apologize for my eccentric performance this morning. Nothing personal, really."
"Get out, and take it with you." Dr. West felt no desire to open the folder.
"I'm not trying to frame you, Doctor. I'm the one who should be disciplined -- for bringing these clippings into your suite."
"You tried to trigger me to violence during your so-called search. You tried to -- wash me out. I assume you're trying again. Get out!"
"It's a pity no one will leave you alone," the Recreation Officer remarked. "Look, we can be frank. I've done two things at great personal risk. One, during my search this morning I disconnected the audio bug to your suite. Two, this noon in the basement I damn near electrocuted myself. Your Ceiling Lens no longer is transmitting. Instead, I've spliced a projector to your transmission line in the basement. If the Observer should happen to inspect your TV screen, he'll see what you were doing two days ago. Your screen is showing a replay of your old micro-video tape forty-eight hours long. I hope you weren't doing anything suspicious during the last 48 hours since I started my video tape recorder. I hadn't time to review forty-eight long hours of tape."
The Recreation Officer pointed at the manila folder. "In any case now you don't need to try to earn brownie points in here by claiming you don't want to break the rules. No one is watching you. You -- sit down and read a year's clippings. What has really happened during this year you've been isolated in a series of jails? Weren't you the doctor who was so concerned about the Esks increasing?"
"Right now, I don't give a damn what's happening Outside. Get out."
"She's all heart, Nona really is," the Recreation Officer said slyly. "She's the best woman in Tower #3. I don't blame you for forgetting your purpose in life."
"What are you trying to do? Goad me to break out of here?"
"I don't know. I'm not paid to think. I'm sure this tower is escape-proof. You should be intelligent enough to get yourself moved." The Recreation Officer began spreading clippings from The New York Times , MacLean's Magazine , Life, Time, American Medical Journal, Arctic Review, completely covering the coffee table. "I'm supposed to say to you: hospital or the Cold Room. You're the one with brains!"
The Recreation Officer spread more clippings on the work counter and more clippings on top of the insulated cage. "I didn't realize so much had been written in the last year about the Esks," the Recreation Officer's voice went on. "I suppose all of these are from a clipping service. That they -- "
"Get out!"
"They didn't tell me exactly why you were discharged from your position at the University of California, or why you returned to the Arctic. But I'm beginning to understand why you tried to infect the Esks. The newspaper accounts at the time of your trial simplified you for the simple minds of their simple readers as simply a murderous maniac. But now the New York Times seems to be having second thoughts on the matter."
"Get out!" Dr. West's voice rose with alarm as the Recreation Officer actually did walk out of the suite leaving Dr. West alone with hundreds of clippings and articles staring whitely at him from the terrifying world Outside.
Dr. West chewed his cheek in self-torment. Until today with Nona, he had been preparing for an escape with almost suicidal calm. Now he didn't want to take any risks. All he wanted was Wednesday, when Nona would return.
Swaying, Dr. West imagined himself gathering up the clippings, eyes averted. Without reading, he would soak the clippings in the bathtub, tearing and squeezing the paper into dying lumps. He would not read what other men were thinking about the Esks, the research that must be going on, perhaps the frightened admissions in scientific circles that he might be right, that the terrible thing he had attempted was justified. "I won't read. I'm a prisoner and safe. Tear them up and flush them down the toilet without reading -- "
"That heartless son of a bitch." Dr. West was under such stress he was speaking out loud. "Mysterious sons of bitches who're paying him -- I won't read. What do you want me to do? I can't hoist the world on my shoulders. I already dropped it. Very funny." Dr. West stared down at the clippings on the coffee table.
His flashing arm swept clippings fluttering onto the floor. "I refuse to destroy myself. I will not read."
Dr. West dropped to his knees and hands on the floor, his head throbbing as he read of the multiplying Esks. An estimated 16,000 divided between China and Canada by next year, he thought. "Not very many yet." An agnostic, he began to pray for guidance.
No one entered Dr. West's suite the next day, which was Tuesday. Not by happenstance, the Recreation Officer had telephoned to the Tower from Outside saying he had the flu and would not be reporting for duty for a day or two.
Nona did not enter Dr. West's suite because of the exchange of his Tuesday hour to her 11:00 to 12:00 man. She paused outside Dr. West's suite and did not enter, and went on to the adjoining cell.
In the basement the Observer, monitoring the red-tagged screens, yawned and glanced at a hockey magazine.
At 5:00 p.m., when Nona went off duty she hurried to the monorail because the hairdresser's would close at 6:00. In the high-speed car suspended above the city, as Nona found a seat she recognized the Man, the back of his head, the Man.
A week before, this short-haircut Man had sat down beside her and at first she hadn't realized his conversational ploy about the New Ottawa Reformation Center was more than casual. Then she had become quite abrupt, because her first loyalty, her life was tied up in the Reformation Center, and she was afraid the Man might be someone preparing to bribe her. She had left the car so she would not have to hear where his conversation was leading.
Now, the same Man, short-haircut, was sitting in front of her. When she got off, and rode the escalator down to the ground level, she hoped he wasn't following.
In the evening, after supper, Nona played jacks with her smallest daughter on the floor, while the Tuesday TV news blared half-heard everyday topics, neo-Maoists, unemployment, the third Mars Expedition, hockey fights, the underprivileged Esks who had been resettled in China.
The Eskimo Invasion Page 26
