The Eskimo Invasion

by Hayden Howard

  "Yes, giggle. Heavy rock for little girl. Heavy bone. I see an Oligocene beast with bones like a small tuskless elephant. Perhaps you have a right to laugh. Perhaps this bone you are playing with is only an evolutionary dead end."

  Watching the children play, more hungry children every day, he knew he had to kill more of these people. But he dreaded. "I am not God, what right have I?" He procrastinated.

  One impatient day, Dr. West stared at a fanlike spread of little bones in a water-smoothed boulder. "Fragile as a monkey's hand. Dammit!" He felt anger at the prehistoric stream bed for eroding previous strata, treacherously restacking fossils and disordering time. "Protosimian fingers. But where are we? Up to the Miocene Period? No. I feel as though we're still buried at least sixty million years beneath the surface."

  Dr. West procrastinated, slept poorly as he chilled the vault preparatory to luring the Esks back to the Audience Room where the white bear waited. He faced the day with the horror and fascination of an executioner, a torero, a bomber pilot. Shivering as he watched on the telescreen the closed-circuit transmission of the Esks jamming into the Audience Room, he felt his heart thudding. His face twisted in pain. Either I'm burdened with guilt feelings or my heart --

  His fingers played with the microphone switch. If I didn't do this -- He thought of the genocidal executioners stationed at Buchenwald and those other hundreds of camps in a long-ago world. Was it delighted horror which squirmed within their armor of pride in their professional skill and devotion to duty? "It is justified because there is not enough food for all. I must do it as quickly and painlessly as my skill will allow. They would all die anyway -- some day."

  "Look at me, I am white bear, Grandfather Bear from the sky, coming down to you, rise to me -- "

  Afterward he showed the surviving adults how to stack the bodies neatly in the freezing chamber which once had contained food. He tried to give first aid to children who had been crushed in the ecstatic stampede. He tried to comfort children whose mothers now were refrigerated. And he shoved a surviving male up the tunnel to dig. In loneliness he walked back to the familiar hatred of Mao III.

  Dr. West laughed thinly. "The Esks say -- those who -- have died, have risen into happiness."

  Tapeworm, you fear to kill me. It cannot be simply because I desire death that you refuse to release me. You are not that cruel? Mao III lay totally paralyzed, begging.

  But the tube Dr. West had taped in the corner of Mao III's mouth implacably seeped liquid nourishment into Mao III's stomach.

  Tapeworm, when your host dies do you fear everything dies? When I die, you die! I die: the universe dies. You, you billions of tapeworms who exist only in my consciousness, of course you try to keep me alive. You fear nothingness without me --

  "Taunting me won't make me kill you," Dr. West muttered.

  But I need to die. Torturer! Let me die.

  His face twisting with sympathetic pain, Dr. West walked away in enclosing loneliness like a clear ice cave.

  He suspected at least three years stretched ahead before the Esk tunnel possibly could reach the surface. I'll lose control of myself before then -- alone with my victims , Dr. West thought. God help me, and up above, on the surface of the Earth, billions of smiling crowding faceless Esks!

  Dr. West walked into the bathroom and stared at the razor blade. I'll leave now. The razor blade gleamed between his fingertips.

  "You sick bastard, you'd never find out what happens!" Dr. West threw the razor blade into the wash basin. He glimpsed his wryly thin face turning in the mirror as he walked out of the bathroom. He walked back toward the cruel little prison which was Mao III's body.

  And on past it away from Mao III, he hurried into the corridor where smiling Esk children scampered away, and the handful of breeding adults carried sand and rock from the tunnel to the supply room, where more heaps of sand replaced sacks of rice each day.

  "Dig faster!" he shouted uselessly up the thin tunnel which had only elbow room for one Esk to dig at a time, and a rattling of descending rocks rushed down at him.

  "Mioeene dust, a local dry period, you stupidly smiling nongeologists. Yes, smile at the brown ridge on this rock. Smile stupidly because the little animal whose straight femur this was -- who crept down to drink -- may have been my ancestor. He sure as hell wasn't yours!"

  Brown stone from hardened grasslands, then darker stone formed in temperate forests slid down the tunnel each day, gradually reddening to rain-leached laterite stone typical of rain forests. "The rainy sweep of the cycle, and now blue swampy clay."

  In a discharge of gray slabs from the tunnel tumbled a massive thud, a giant's bone, followed by an odd-shaped white flat -- "Tooth as big as a spade! A shovel-jawed mastodon. Pliocene? Only thirty million years from the surface."

  "Dig!" Dr. West laughed like a crazy man. "Dig, you smiling fools, at this rate only two more years to go. Your children will see the sun."

  You won't, Dr. West thought, staring at the bent back of an Esk woman sweeping little rocks into a frying pan. His vision blurred as he almost saw Marthalik. He hurried away to the supply room. Shakily he counted sacks of rice. Always too many mouths were being born again. He must face the hungry white bear of necessity. Grandfather Bear, if you are truly up there in the sky, accept these, your children.

  "Then what am I?" Scowling, he knew now he had the strength to reach the surface, if he clung to the belief his human world was still up there.

  Dr. West walked to the Control Room to turn down the thermostats, again to prepare for the hungry bear. Something squirmed in his mind. With extra blankets, he bent over the withered remnant of Mao III. The paralyzed man's trapped thoughts frantically raced and squirmed like agonized white rats and burst out.

  Dr. West stood in the squealing wind of Mao III's incoherent thoughts. A dagger appeared, as if a mind could stab itself to death with a visualized dagger. Now the dagger struck out at Dr. West and he felt a sharp stinging as if the beginning of a tiny stroke spreading within his own brain. He bowed his head in the rain of Mao III's inner sobbing.

  Tapeworm, my friend, my last contact with life, please kill me.

  Dr. West's hand lay gently on Mao III's throat and his thumb and forefinger closed on the twin faint pulsations of the carotid arteries. He felt gratitude like sparks of laughter from Mao III.

  Pressing in, his forefinger and opposed thumb narrowed the flow from heart to brain until the last vivid picture -- armies of Chinese children with white balloons marching along the pink walls of the Great Square -- turned gray in Mao III's blood-starving brain. Dr. West glimpsed a single huge gray -- what was it? A loud squawling seemed to emerge from within himself, and he realized he was seeing upward through the eyes of a baby instinctively loudly commanding food, warmth, love. A huge gray hand was descending.

  Into his crib? Dr. West couldn't see. There was nothing. He opened his eyes at the waxen face of Mao III. Beneath Dr. West's fingertips there was no pulse in the throat arteries. From Mao III's brain, his own parasitic brain no longer could feel organized electrical activity. In fifteen minutes Dr. West confirmed irreversible clinical death.

  He did not freeze Mao III's body. Somberly, he buried it under Pliocene sand in the supply room, and smiling Esks emptied soup pans full of broken rock from the tunnel face onto that growing pile of debris, and smiled and smiled.

  "I'm alone with you now, you smiling Dream Persons. I just hope that others of me are alive on the surface."

  "Eh?"

  "So you don't understand. You see this sliver of bone from the rock. All that is left of a wolf, hyena, baboon, or undiscovered anthropoid who ran on the ground upright, I don't know. All I know, this fossilized bone and I are more closely related than you and I. The ancient imprints in my cells have been continuously reshaped by this Earth for four billion years. You -- your ancestors have been part of this world less than fifty years. I belong here. Your progenitor invaded. Were you sent here for a purpose? Now you are digging upward. But where
are you going?"

  Dr. West talked to the Esks a great deal now. It was another form of talking to himself. Thickened by fermented rice wine, Dr. West liked to shout at the ceiling. "Up there in the sky, come down here to hell, Grandfather Bear."

  Into the tunnel four years had gone. "On the surface, four billion, eight billion, sixteen billion, thirty-two billion Esks?" But he knew thirty-two billion Esks was beyond the Earth's limit.

  Suddenly his Esks were staring at the ceiling, and they were smiling, laughing and running about in confusion. Shouting with joy, some of the adults scrambled into the tunnel, struggling upward.

  "No! No! You'll smother the man digging. We're still a thousand feet below the surface." Dr. West kept trying to pull them back, but they wriggled free, stronger and so much younger than he.

  Those who couldn't force their way into the tunnel ran against the walls, climbed on chairs. As the excitement grew, shouting Esks tried to climb the walls, while their children whimpered uncomprehendingly. In mounting desperation, an Esk man stretched his arms toward the ceiling, shouting unintelligibly.

  Dr. West became afraid something really was happening at the surface, were the billions of Esks up there becoming frantic like this? Marthalik!

  Dr. West grabbed an Esk woman. "Dammit, what's happening?"

  "Eh? Let me go, please. All becoming one." Her excited laughter gradually muted to frustrated sobs as the adult Esks sagged down on the corridor floor. They seemed so strange staring at the ceiling without their smiles.

  Esks slept in exhaustion where they lay, and their nonplussed children scampered around them whining and playing. It was Dr. West who had to drag the smothered bodies out of the tunnel. It was Dr. West who boiled the great tub of rice for the children while the surviving adults sat stunned with disappointment. At what -- ?

  Lethargic, they had to be loudly ordered to work in the tunnel. It seemed strange to see Esks who did not smile. They drooped as if they no longer had a purpose in life.

  They cannot know what has happened at the surface, Dr. West thought. But their organisms knew something was happening, and now it has stopped. "You, there, hurry up, carry that sand to the supply room. We'll never reach the surface unless everyone works the way you used to -- "

  Something had happened up there. Down here the Esks ceased to mate. The last babies emerged too soon, as if cast out, spontaneous abortions, dead.

  Dr. West resorted to shouts and shoves to make the Esks dig.

  "Dammit, why have you lost your purpose in life?"

  "Eh?"

  Now the swarm of older children were better diggers than their parents, and the tunnel proceeded under Dr. West's constant direction. Their lives required so much more guidance and reassurance now from Dr. West, he began to feel like the father --

  "Dig! That's the way. We're nearer the surface every day." Pleistocene gravel less than a million years old was rattling out of the tunnel. "Dig my children, and we'll see the Earth."

  Sometimes Dr. West dreamed the surface was green with willow trees along a silvery brook, and from his childhood he poked straight sticks deep into the water, which bent them. He dipped his face in the cool water and raised his head. Behind him the surface of the Earth was barren and dry, all life obliterated.

  "Which is it?" He awoke, and when he slept again the cities hummed with life as if he'd never been away, and the humming grew and spread shoulder packed against shoulder in a solid mass of Esks spreading through the streets. The surface of the Earth turned black with bobbing heads of Esks, and the humming rose while their heads drooped, and the Esks died in sagging masses melting into a golden honey, gleaming and flowing between the buildings and down the valleys. He began to run, looking for Marthalik. Like golden honey it covered the Earth, as he shouted for her. The humming grew louder coming down from the sky and Dr. West tried to look up --

  He blundered into the corridor toward the chattering voices of the Esks. They were carrying black clods from the mouth of the tunnel. He awakened fully. It was crumbling rock flecked with bone, blackened within as if containing the ashes of an ancient campfire.

  His fingers picked out a glint of sharpness. "Flake of flint. Dig, my children! We've reached the Age of Man!"

  He laughed. "Peking Man? True man? Who knows what man? Ancestor, we've passed you." He poked at slender humanoid femurs split for their marrow. "You Paleolithic cannibals! We're trying to pass you. By stepping on your heads, we'll get out."

  Day after day the dark rock became lighter-colored, more sandy.

  Out of the tunnel bumped chunks of compacted loess dust, the yellow windblown dust from the Gobi Desert, the deep soil of China. "The climate has dried. Cold dusty winds from the advancing Arctic may have driven prehistoric man away from this place. Is the ice approaching Peking?"

  But the next day, in a crumbling yellow clod, which had been loess dust, gleamed a beautiful leaf-shaped javelin head with delicately pressure-flaked edges. "Sharp as the day you made it. And this sharp splinter, was it an awl? We're up among the real men now, who outsmart the cold, perhaps in intricately sewn wild reindeer skins."

  Dr. West stared up the tunnel hole. "Am I the first amateur archeologist to make his dig from the bottom up?" he laughed excitedly. "Am I the first with a rear-end perspective of history, a proctologist's view of civilization?"

  As the tunnel extended upward, shards of fire-burned pottery rattled down out of the hole. "We must be up into the Neolithic. Pots are used to store grain. Deliberate farmers must have produced a more assured food supply, and the rules of Malthusian starvation have eased. Because food production is increasing more rapidly, for the first time population is increasing rapidly, faster and faster. Dig!"

  When Dr. West with his flashlight wormed his way up the slanting tunnel, wheezing through dust, slipping on loose rocks, squirming past Esk children who had been sent up to clear bottlenecks in debris slides, struggling upward for a mile through hot dusty air which made him gasp, his chest tightening with warning heart pains, he finally reached the buttocks of the Esk who was digging.

  "Move aside. Let me look." Dr. West raised his flashlight to sun-dried yellow bricks. "Foundations. Permanent village."

  But the bricks above were fire-blackened. When the Esk jabbed the crowbar up among them, crumbling bricks roared down, releasing a landslide of compacted chunks of kitchen midden against Dr. West. Struggling to free his leg, he found his fellow man.

  "This green lump encloses a skull. Helmeted he was buried in the trash of his ancestors. The green oxide was copper, a helmet or a crown. Already we're digging up through the graves of men more sophisticated than Eskimos."

  The crowbar clanged upward against masses of harder brick. "A village built upon a village."

  Bricks thudded down, and Dr. West swept them between his legs, centered them rumbling down the tunnel. "More blackened brick and charcoaled wooden beams. This village has been raided, burned."

  A clod of fire-darkened soil contained a triangular stain of rust. "The killers came with iron arrow points. We must be within 5000 years of the surface. Dig! We're only a heartbeat from the surface of man's long evolutionary climb."

  A clod slashed his palm. It contained white shards sharp as glass. "We've broken into recorded history. Perhaps your head and shoulders are in 1100 B.C., among the descendants of the semimythical Yellow Emperor. Yes, armed with civilization these ethnic Chinese had migrated northward. They built fortifications on the future site of Peking."

  The crowbar was dislodging masses of crumbling brick into the hole. "They rarely built with stone. After the roof beams burn, the protective roof tiles fall. Chinese castles dissolve in the rain," he laughed. "But in 300 B.C. the King of Yen began the Great Wall."

  A charred beam slid into the hole. "North China was overwhelmed by the Hu tribes. In distant Europe were they called the Huns? Already we are past the time of Christ. Dig! Before we reach 605 A.D. the Grand Canal will reach Peking. The population is multiplying rapidly now.
Dig!"