Time of the Great Freeze (5 page)

Upward. Upward. Past a sixth hatch, and a seventh.

Then, as they drew near the eighth bulkhead, it became apparent that the next barrier was not a man-made one. A ceiling of ice blocked the shaft!

They halted the elevator within fifteen feet of the ceiling. By climbing up on the sled and stretching, Jim could just barely touch the ice. He put his finger tips to it, and drew them away quickly, as though burned.

"Cold!"

"Yes," Dr. Barnes said, "and it'll be a lot colder for us if we're stuck in this tunnel forever. Break out the power torches!"

Roy Veeder and Chet Farrington unpacked one of the knapsacks and produced four power torches, yard-long metal rods whose tiny fusion plasmas generated fierce heat. Dr. Barnes studied the ice plug thoughtfully.

"We don't want to bring it down on our heads," he said. "Let's melt away the far side of it first and see what happens."

Jim took one of the torches, his father another. Dr. Barnes hefted his torch and pressed the firing stud. A greenish glow of light bathed the surface of the ice plug, which melted away as though touched by a dragon's fiery breath. In the chill of the tunnel, the ice vapor condensed a moment later, and the men on the elevator heard a sound brand-new to them: that of rain, falling from a highly localized cloud and pelting down hundreds of feet to the closed metal hatch below them.

"Listen to it!" Carl whispered. "Little drops of water falling! Like a hundred drums!"

The power torch had bitten a gouge twenty feet high and six or seven feet across into the ice plug. It held firm.

Dave Ellis said, "Someone left the city at the turn of the century. That fellow Stanton that Roy mentioned. We haven't found any bones along the way, so he must have come at least this far. Therefore the ice above us is less than a sixty-year accumulation."

"How thick would that be, Dave?" Dr. Barnes asked.

Ellis shook his head. "There are five or six feet of snow a year in these parts now. But the question isn't so much the amount that falls as the amount that doesn't melt. The year-to-year accumulation may be as much as a couple of feet-or it could be less."

"So we may have fifty to a hundred feet of ice above us," Dr. Barnes said. "All right. Everybody pull up hoods. We're going to get wet."

He gripped the power torch again, and this time aimed it straight overhead. The lambent glow of the torch turned the tunnel bright; another slice of ice disappeared; cold droplets of rain showered down on the roofless elevator. Jim shivered, but grinned all the same, and turned his face upward to the rain. He saw Ted Callison, hoodless, all but capering in the icy shower.

The beam licked out again. And again. Thirty feet of air space gaped above them where a few moments before there had been a roof of ice. But the ice seemed as thick, as dark as ever. What if it were half a mile thick? A mile?

"Lift the elevator twenty feet, Ted," Dr. Barnes ordered. "I'm getting out of range."

The elevator rose slowly. The power torch flared again. Rain showered down. Up. Up.

Then the torch spurted cold fire, there was a sudden sizzle, and chunks of ice began to hail down on them, chunks six inches, a foot across.

"The plug's breaking!" Jim yelled, shielding himself from the massive chunks.

A moment later, the fall ceased. "Everyone okay?" Dr. Barnes asked. "I went right through the roof. Look up!"

Jim looked. And gasped.

The plug was broken. Fragments of ice still clung to the sides of the tunnel, but there was a gaping hole twenty feet across, through which could be seen a flat swath of blackness, and little dots of light so sharp and hard they hurt the eyes, and the edge of a great gleaming thing, painfully bright. The night sky! The stars! The moon!

"Hoist the elevator, Ted," Dr. Barnes yelled. "Hoist it! Were at the surface! We've made it!"

It was a silent world of blinding whiteness.

It was a cold world.

Jim hoisted himself over the rim of the tunnel mouth, stepped into the new world, and fought back a surge of panic as he saw the magnitude of it all. Even at night, even by moonlight, it was possible to see how the flat ice sheet spread out to the horizon. It was a numbing, breath-taking sight for anyone who had spent his whole life in tunnels hardly higher than his head.

And the whiteness of it! The fierce dazzle of the moonlight as it bounced and glittered from the fields of snow!

The world blazed. It sparkled. It shimmered with light.

One by one, the men were coming up out of the tunnel. Carl emerged, and cringed in disbelief at the immensity of the ice field. He put his hands to his eyes, shielding them against the glare of the moon and the stars, and hastily donned his goggles.

"It's cold," he whispered. "So cold!"

Dave Ellis appeared, looking tense and apprehensive. Roy Veeder, Chet Farrington, Dom Hannon. Dr. Barnes. Then Ted Callison, even his high spirits dampened by the sudden emergence into the world. The eight stood together, uncertain, confused.

Jim knelt. He touched the ground-gingerly, for he remembered how the ice had burned. What he touched was stingingly cold, but he was prepared for the shock this time.

"See," he said. "There's white powder everywhere."

"Snow," Dave Ellis said. "Six, seven inches of snow lying on the ice. It's springtime. Most of the winter snow has melted and refrozen, and become part of the glacier." He kicked at the fluffy snow, sending a cloud of it into the air. "There's just this little layer of snow on top."

Ted Callison bent, gathered snow in both hands, sent it soaring into the air. The flakes floated down, shining like diamonds in the bright moonlight. He scooped again, and showers of snow cascaded down.

"Careful," Dr. Barnes said. "Put your gloves on. Your skin isn't designed for these temperatures."

"How cold do you think it is, anyway, Dad?" Jim asked.

"Dave can tell you that."

The meteorologist had already started to examine his thermometer. He was carrying what amounted to a portable weather station, snug in his parka.

"Not too bad," he reported after a moment. "It's twenty-two above zero. It may even be above freezing by morning. It's a fine spring night."

Jim shivered. A scything gust of wind swept down on them, and seemed to cut through his bulky clothes as though they were gauze. A lucky thing they were making this trip in spring, he thought. In winter, Dave said, the temperature ranged between forty below zero and ten above. Forty below! The mere thought of it made his teeth chatter.

But he was warm in a little while, as they busied themselves breaking out the jet-sleds and bundling their belongings aboard. There was nowhere they could go until morning; the energy accumulators of the sleds were solar-powered, and had long since run down, so that a couple of hours of charging by daylight would be necessary before they could get going. And morning was still three or four hours away.

Roy Veeder and Ted Callison pitched a tent, and some of them settled down to wait for sunrise. Jim was still too restless to sleep. He had had nothing but quick naps for the past two days, and fatigue made his red-rimmed eyes raw and foggy, but the wonder of the white new world burned the sleep from him, and left him throbbing with excitement, tense as a coiled spring.

He walked away from the group, moving cautiously, his booted feet sinking half a foot or more into the loose, drifting snow before they struck the reassuring solidity of the glacier beneath. The cold air assailed his lungs, stung his nostrils. But it was a joy to breathe it. There was a freshness about it that dizzied him; it was as tangy and sweet as new wine. He halted in the snow, a hundred feet from his party, and looked out across the wasteland of ice.

It was flat, a vast plateau. Once, he knew, there had been rolling farmland here, hills and valleys, tree-clad hummocks, winding brooks cutting through the fields. He had seen the pictures of the world as it had been, so that he had some idea of what all those abstract concepts meant, those empty words, "hill" and "valley," "tree" and "brook." For more than three hundred years no New Yorker had seen hill or valley, tree or brook.

And none would now, Jim thought. The glacier, that great leveler, had drawn its white bulk over everything, smothering the world like a vast all-embracing beast. Here, in what had been the eastern part of the United States, the mile-thick ice sheet had created a uniform flatland. Jim knew that somewhere, thousands of miles to the west, the bare fangs of giant mountains stuck out high above the ice, but not here. The highest natural features in this part of the country were no more than fifteen hundred or two thousand feet high, and they were gone, buried without a trace, without causing so much as a bulge in the surface of the glacier.

When the ice finally retreated, the raw, wounded land would be revealed. The glacier, sluggishly rolling down, had scraped topsoil and landmarks away, pushed them far to the south, deposited them in the terminal moraines, the great heaps of rubble that marked the southern border of the ice field. The land that one day would be freed from the glaciers grip would bear little resemblance to the thriving, populous zone of cities and towns that it had been, centuries ago.

And there, to the east-there the continent sloped off to meet the sea, or what had been the sea before the world grew cold. Was the Atlantic frozen? Would they be able to make the three-thousand-mile crossing safely, on pack ice? They would know soon enough, Jim thought. If the sleds worked, it would be only a short journey to the shore zone.

Footsteps crunched in the snow behind him. Jim turned.

"Hello, Carl. Big, isn't it?"

"Terrifying."

"Wish you had stayed in New York?"

"No," Carl said. "I'm glad I came."

Jim said, "Do you always do things on the spur of the moment like that, Carl?"

Carl chuckled. "Not really. It was just that-well, I'd been wondering for a long time: Was I doing anything important with my life? I mean, being a policeman. I hadn't taken any real training for any kind of profession, so I guess it was my own fault. But even though policemen are necessary in society, you don't get much feeling that you're
contributing
anything."

"I don't know," Jim said. "Somebody's got to maintain order."

"I suppose. But the job was boring me. I felt restless. And then, after my father died, I had no family left, no ties in New York. Things were hatching in me. And then suddenly I knew what I wanted to do. To get out, to join your group, to see the upper world." Carl stamped his feet, rubbed his gloved hands together. Cold was turning his cheeks cherry red. "But tell me, Jim-"

"What?"

"Where are we going? What's this all about? Everything happened so fast." He grinned embarrassedly. "I don't really have any idea of what's up."

"We're going to London," Jim said. "We're going to cross the Atlantic ice."

"London? That's a million miles away!"

"Only three thousand, or so," Jim said.

"That's the same as a million, the way I look at it But what's in London?"

"People. People like those in New York."

"Then why go to them?"

"Because New York doesn't want us," Jim said. "Mayor Hawkes and the Council tossed us out because we made radio contact with London. You know what radio is?"

Carl nodded.

"We talked to someone in London," Jim said. "He agreed with us that it was time to start coming out of the ground. Well, they got him. Roy thinks they killed him, and he's probably right. But we can't go on living in burrows. The ice is retreating."

"Is it?" Carl asked in surprise. "It doesn't look that way!"

"Maybe not here," Jim said. "But Dave says the worst is over. He's a meteorologist, you know. His studies show that the temperature trend started to reverse itself about fifty years ago. The Earth is coming out of the dust cloud. Things are warming up. In another hundred or hundred and fifty years the ice may be gone from the United States."

"A hundred and fifty years! Then why should we be concerned?"

"Because," Jim said, "the time to start preparing is
now
. We've got to start exploring the surface again, to get the city people ready to live in the open. We have to plan ahead two or even three generations-just as they planned two generations ahead when they first built the underground cities. Only the Mayor didn't want to look that far ahead. If we left things up to him, nobody would ever come aboveground again, not even if North America turned into the Garden of Eden!"

"I think I understand," Carl said. "Or maybe not. Anyway, I'm glad I'm here. It isn't everybody who gets to see what the world is like. Look at that moon! Look at it!"

Jim looked. He tingled in awe at the sight of that pockmarked round face, so blazing bright in the cold, black sky. Once, he knew, men had reached for the moon. Men had walked its dead surface. Mars, Venus-they had been reached, too. No one in New York knew what had happened to man's space dominion. Did the people of the tropical countries fly back and forth to the worlds of space every day? Or had the ice reached them too, finally, and choked off all thoughts but those of survival?

Jim turned his glance from the moon, back to the field of ice, to the white desert that stretched as far as eye could see in every direction. He scuffed at the snow, and watched it leap and scatter. And he kicked at the glacier, the obstinate mass of frozen water that had driven man from his domain.

"It's going to be quite a trip," he said quietly, as he and Carl trudged back to the tent.

It was Carl who first saw the sun.

"It's morning!" he yelled. "The sun is rising!"

Jim realized he had slept after all. He found himself lying in a corner of the tent with somebody-Dom Hannon, it developed-sprawled across his legs. Getting to his feet, lie found himself stiff and sore, every joint protesting against the cold. There was a general race for the exit from the tent.