The Eskimo Invasion

by Hayden Howard

  The crazy kid should have ended in jail instead of as a Ph.D. with his hands on millions of dollars of Defense Department money for extrasensory research. Surprisingly, Tom Randolph had resigned to take a seemingly less important position. This was with the Central Intelligence Agency, when the President of the United States appointed fellow Harvard-man George Bruning as Deputy Director.

  To Dr. West, the memory of Tom Randolph's narrow eyes inspecting him as if he were as expendable as a bomb was terrifying. After the injections, it had been Tom Randolph's disembodied voice which rasped: "Mao III has a faith healer. Remember that, Joe. He needs his faith healer. Remember, Joe, when we were young wise guys at Harvard and you scared the hell out of me at a drinking party. That was a pretty good parlor trick. That's what turned me on extrasensory research, and we are turning you on -- "

  Remembering the undergrad Tom Randolph gaily swerving his sports car to run over a cat, Dr. West felt like the cat. He felt claustrophobia even tighter than when he had been trapped in the aircraft capsule. Now he tried to climb off the electric cart.

  But they were too strong for him. The carved dragon doors opened, and the dwarfed man behind the huge desk glanced up. He wore a simple agricultural commune costume.

  "You are not Mao III," Dr. West's mouth immediately announced. "You are a double."

  The man blinked and glanced at the Interrogator's shocked face. The Interrogator whirled, screaming at Dr. West that he was insulting the Chairman of the World, the Father of the Chinese Federation of Nations --

  For a moment Dr. West experienced the weird feeling that he had been about to explode. The faces of the Harvard Circle, electric eels, biopower, heavy legs, for those sons of bitches was he a bomb that walked like a man with plastic sacks of nitroglycerine in his leg muscles, and was cued when he saw Mao III -- ?

  Another official appeared from a side door. "Quiet please. Clear the room. Your scheduled time is over. The room is needed."

  The man behind the desk rose obediently and departed.

  Even before the Interrogator was able to stop screaming, a third official appeared with soldiers. "Lieutenant, investigate this foreign prisoner's document-locator number. Update his Sparrow Folder and file in Pending."

  Some afternoons, Dr. West was taken from his cell to a waiting room. Through the swinging door to the main waiting room he glimpsed nervous men in Pakistani garb with briefcases and weary men in Western suits who sat on benches day after day. Sometimes he recognized the Australian Premier. When janitors began sweeping the floor, the men with briefcases would file out and Dr. West would be taken back to his cell.

  Once a Lieutenant peered through the bars: "Ah, I hoped I'd locate you eventually. According to records transferred from Szechwan Province, the twenty-one-day incubation period for unknown infectious virus is over. Now you can be shot."

  "No Esks were sick or died?" Dr. West demanded.

  "No reports of illness," the smiling Lieutenant replied and left.

  One sleeping period Dr. West was awakened and a barber shaved him. Drowsily, he protested this disturbance of his routine. "This is the wrong time to go to the waiting room." After a month of regular hours between cell and waiting room, Dr. West tended to become irritable whenever routine was disturbed from the outside. An electric cart transported him at this wrong hour to his empty outer waiting room and to his surprise carried him on into the main waiting room where the janitors were emptying ash trays and on into the empty office with the large desk where he had last seen the Interrogator and on along a hall and into an elevator. It plunged endlessly into the earth, stopped. The attendants were replaced by other attendants who smiled and smiled. Dr. West was led into a large-roomed apartment which was dim because the hunched shape of a man was watching a television screen beneath a bas-relief golden dragon.

  At the end of the news program, the man switched off the TV set by remote control. "Is this Dr. Joseph West?"

  "Yes, Chairman. His file has been placed on the tea table at your left hand."

  "Some years ago when I still believed there was a purpose to be served by personally making speeches, I announced to the world that I wanted to meet you eye to eye, Dr. West. The implication then was that I would righteously tear you limb from limb. The occasion was my address to the United Nations General Assembly on the subject of the attempted genocide of the Eskimos by you and persons unknown, such as the United States Government."

  Dr. West made no attempt to answer. No message to Mao III from the Harvard Circle emerged from his mouth, but now Dr. George Bruning's voice was echoing in his memory: "Listen and observe, when Mao III or any man speaks of his strengths and beliefs, soon his contradictions and weaknesses will stick out like handles -- by which you can seize him."

  Mao III stirred clumsily in his padded chair. Dr. West saw that Mao III was not wearing a simple commune costume. He was engulfed in an ornate black silk robe embroidered with a traditional dragon.

  "Tonight while I was watching television coverage of the latest CIA intruder aircraft to crash, I was reminded of an intelligence brief on my desk some months ago. This extrapolated a minimum of facts into a theory that a Dr. West had been delivered to China because I once had expressed a desire to meet him. This amused me at the time. It would be better for your President to communicate with me directly. I am a busy man and cannot deal with minor intermediaries."

  Dr. West observed the awkward position of Mao III's right wrist and left leg. Although Mao III was a comparatively young man, evidently he had suffered a paralytic stroke. Probably about three years ago when he vanished from the public eye.

  "The intruder aircraft which crashed tonight was a converted passenger transport painted black," Mao III continued in his precise voice. "It contained an estimated dozen Eskimos confined in three large parachute ejection capsules, which did not eject. After the crash of the aircraft, one of the capsules preserved its four corpses from burning."

  Dr. West straightened mentally, glimpsing the unknowable faces of the Harvard Circle. What was going on? Twelve Esks murdered.

  Mao III was saying: " -- were to be parachuted into the mountainous region of Szechwan Province where our Dream Persons now comprise more than 90% of the population. The bodies of these Eskimos or American Dream Persons were dressed in commune costumes. They were equipped with machine pistols, plastic explosives, miniature radios and related equipment, as if the CIA intended that they organize guerrilla warfare. As my grandfather, Mao Tse-tung, often said: 'The guerrilla is the fish who swims among the people.' But to swim among our Dream Persons would be more frustrating."

  Mao III laughed as if he liked to hear his own voice. "Times have changed since my grandfather was Chairman. He had no Dream Persons to perplex him. Surely you CIA assassins do not really believe that American Eskimos or even a sentient strain of American Dream Persons could arouse our Dream Persons."

  This was a statement rather than a question. Like other leaders, Mao III swept into a monologue. "It is not psychologically possible for Dream Persons to take the aggressive initiative necessary for revolution. Your Eskimos cannot arouse our Dream Persons because there is nothing to arouse. If your heavily armed corpses are not Eskimos, if they are American Dream Persons, the joke is even stranger. This is like sending the blind to teach the blind how to see."

  Dr. West felt physically ill, suspecting the black aircraft had been purposely crashed by the Harvard Circle. The planeload of Esks might be simply to remind the Chinese that the CIA's Esk expert was filed away somewhere in a Peking prison. Had those Harvard sons of bitches in effect murdered twelve Esks as another little move in the attempt to place an American face to face with Mao III? His distance to Mao III was about fifteen feet. What did the Harvard Circle expect him to do, explode -- or strangle Mao III with his bare hands?

  " -- Marxist-Maoists are anti-Malthusian," Mao III was saying, "because we have faith in mankind's ability to find new food supplies, new living space beneath the sea, new planets. There
cannot be too many Chinese when there is so much work to be done. For the present, there cannot be too many Dream Persons. It is strange that the CIA would send you to China. From the beginning you have had a closed mind concerning the Esks. Dr. West, what rational message could you possibly bring?"

  Dr. West stood there swaying. He did not know. If the Harvard Circle had given him a message for Mao III, it was lost or buried too deep in his skull. He stood face to face with Mao III and no message had been cued.

  " -- Marxist-Maoist position regarding the origin of the Dream Person," Mao III was orating, "is that the renewed thermonuclear testing by Russia in the Arctic during the 1970s caused the mutation. No other nation would have both the vicious deviationist disregard for human life and the technological clumsiness to explode weapons so unexpectedly filthy with radioactive cesium."

  This cued the one track in Dr. West's mind. "The mutation theory has no basis in fa- "

  "The lichens, the little plants on Arctic rocks were contaminated with radioactive cesium." Mao III's voice swept on emotionally, drowning Dr. West's voice. "The lichens were like rice to the herds of caribou, and radioactive cesium concentrated in certain organs of these extinct beasts who were eaten by the Eskimos, who are an Oriental people. Don't tell me there was no mutation!"

  Mao III gasped for breath, evidently emotionally involved with his interpretation of the Esks. "The most important mutation in the world took place on the Boothia Peninsula in the Canadian Northwest Territories. An Oriental child was born.

  "Even though there were not Three Wise Men in attendance, even though no angels sang," Mao III laughed breathlessly, "the metabolism of this child was at least three times as efficient and he matured in one-sixth as many years as other children. Whenever this precocious Eskimo mated, from each conception to the time of birth was only a month."

  Near Mao III's right hand gleamed a glass of water. He looked at it longingly. "The rapid multiplication of these Dream Persons has proved vital to the rightful growth of the Chinese Federation of Nations. My original decision to rescue the Eskimos from imperialist genocide has been proven correct."

  Mao III's right hand jerked and he stared at Dr. West. " -- I recall from the United Nations discussions of seventeen years ago, your own theory of the origin of that first Dream Person was more unlikely and -- sinister."

  "I was the first -- I was encamped on the Boothia Peninsula within twenty years after the event took place." Dr. West spoke quickly. "I tried to interview the Eskimos who -- "

  "There is no need for you to defend your theory," Mao III interrupted. "You have attempted to justify your mass murder on many occasions. I, for one, would be equally disturbed if I believed your theory."

  Mao III's right hand made a tentative movement toward the glass of water. "At the present time it is to the advantage of the Chinese Federation of Nations to breed several billion more Dream Persons at the very least."

  "And drown the world!"

  "Are you worried about the disappearance of hairy, Anglo-Saxon man? Because the Dream Person's traits invariably are dominant?" Mao III laughed. "Perhaps the world would be a happier and more peaceful place if all peoples were absorbed by the Dream Persons?"

  Mao III's eyes narrowed. "Perhaps you are a member of an extremist group in the United States. In angry disagreement with your own Government, you are plotting the violent elimination of Esks everywhere. Are you sure there is not already a political splinter group in the United States which has decided that I am a Dream Person, that even your President hides an Esk in his ancestry. It cannot be true. Dream Persons are remarkably unqualified for the violent leadership that is necessary in the world today."

  Awkwardly, Mao III's paralyzed right hand attempted to reach the glass. "The Chinese people and all the peace-loving peoples of the world -- know that the vicious racist American propaganda campaign claiming Chinese maltreatment of the Esks is a hypocritical attempt to pressure the Chinese Federation of Nations into unilaterally limiting our greatest source of agricultural growth, our Dream Persons!"

  Dr. West watched the shivering hand. Instinctively, because he was a fellow human being, his eyes wanted Mao III's hand to be able to reach, to grasp the glass of water.

  "Ah!" Mao III proudly clutched the glass in his hand. Shuddering, he raised it to his lips and drank deeply.

  When he had finished, an attendant stepped from the shadows to take the glass. "No, no," Mao III coughed. "This time, this time I will not drop it -- "

  Dr. West's eyes concentrated on the cautiously moving hand on its long journey with the empty glass down toward the table. The glass clunked on the table.

  "Ah! You see I am making great improvement. Until tonight I always broke the glass. I am informed you originally were a medical doctor who attempted to save lives rather than destroy them? If so, you will understand the importance in my condition of such a sudden improvement. It was as if a voice in my head was telling my hand to move downward. Amazingly, my hand obeyed. No doubt new nerve wires have been growing as my doctors promised, growing past the dead spot in my brain, and tonight contact is made! Look at this. I am going to raise my arm. Soon, you will see, soon I will stand before the people again. I will astound the world with my words. This is the greatest moment in the history of the world!"

  While Dr. West's eyes watched, Mao III tried to stand up.

  "I am standing!"

  Fall, you bigmouthed little tyrant! Dr. West thought.

  Mao III pitched forward, upsetting the table and glass. Attendants sprang from the shadows to assist Mao III. An attendant's hand closed on Dr. West's elbow to lead him from the room.

  Tell them to leave me alone! Dr. West thought.

  "Leave him alone," Mao III gasped.

  Tell them to bring me a chair!

  "Bring him a chair." Mao III collapsed on his couch.

  Dr. West sat down. His heavy legs were twitching, and he was reminded of Galvani's early experiments with electricity and a frog's legs. His legs tingled. His face felt numb with shock.

  Those incredible Harvard sons of bitches! Heavy legs, electric eels, biopower, parapsychology, this was why they had connived to maneuver an American into close proximity with the Chairman of the Chinese Federation of Nations, the ruler of four-fifths of the population of the world. Within how many feet of Mao III did he have to remain?

  Dr. West was afraid he was a poor choice for this kind of power. Had the Harvard Circle selected him because Mao III once said he wanted to meet Dr. West eye to eye? Selected him because they thought he could control a paralyzed dictator?

  He remembered when he was a med student at Harvard, startling Tom Randolph, who tried to laugh it off. "That's only a parlor trick."

  But perhaps he did have a certain empathy and power of suggestion. Sometimes it had extended its corona to startle imaginative persons such as undergrad Tom Randolph. And Tom had grown. Professor Tom Randolph's experiments at Duke University in which one soldier attempted to control another hadn't satisfied the Defense Department. But Dr. West remembered Tom Randolph's excuse. "A human's bio-power to broadcast his thoughts through his neuron-electrical system is simply too weak."

  But a man with biological booster batteries as powerful as electric eels' installed in his swollen legs, Dr. West thought, such a man close enough -- Tell them to bring me a glass of water.

  "Bring him a glass of water," Mao III murmured hollowly from his couch.

  Because there were no peculiar reactions from the attendants in the room, Dr. West concluded that he had been neatly conditioned to focus his control at only one man, Mao III.

  Tell them to prepare a couch for me. Tell them you believe I have a healing power. When I am near you, your paralysis is cured.

  When the water was brought, Dr. West was afraid to drink. It might be poisoned. He knew he would have to suppress such fears. Now every move would be into the unknown.

  When the couch was brought, Dr. West was afraid to sleep. What was going on in Mao III's
head? The man had not spoken or moved since --