Time of the Great Freeze (6 page)

"The sun," Dr. Barnes said quietly.

There wasn't much to see yet-a reddish-gold pin point of light, rising far to the east, just barely peeking above the white sheet of the glacier. But Jim felt choked as though a hand had grasped his throat. The sun!

"It's beautiful," he murmured.

It was rising with almost frightening speed. The whole upper lobe was above the horizon now; the color was changing from red to yellow, and in the clear blue sky scudded pink-bellied clouds of heart-numbing loveliness. A track of light seared along the ice plateau toward them like a runnel of golden, molten metal. The air was clear and cold, but not painfully so. Jim's cheeks and nose, which had suffered during the night, felt oddly stiff and brittle now, as though they might drop off at any moment, or as though they had
already
dropped off, but as he touched his skin he felt the blood surge back into it. He was rapidly getting used to the cold weather.

Ted Callison was kneeling at the sleds, exposing the energy accumulators to the first rays of the sun. Higher it mounted, soaring into the sky. The clouds turned from pink to gold to pure white, and the glacier blazed so savagely that one could not look directly into the path of reflected light.

Now was the world clear to view. And the impression of the night was borne out: it was a plateau of cosmic size, stretching to the limits of eyesight.

"I hope they're having good breakfasts down there," Chet Farrington said. "But they can't be as hungry as lam!"

Jim looked down. Beneath his feet-a mile down, more than a mile-was the swarming beehive of New York! Eight hundred thousand people moving through the tunnels, on the way to the cafeterias for their first meal of the day. Standing here, all but alone on what could have been the world's first morning, Jim found it hard to believe that a noisy, bustling city lay below. Coming up from New York into the glacier world was like awakening from a lifetime-long dream-or like passing from reality to fantasy.

They ate-tinned provisions brought up from the world below. Synthetics. Hydroponic vegetables. Later on, Jim knew, they would have to start foraging for themselves. Was anything alive in this empty world? They could not eat ice, after all.

After breakfast, they broke camp and boarded the jet-sleds. Ted Callison had studied the manuals, and told them that he figured the sleds had already soaked up enough solar energy to carry them a dozen miles before recharging. When the solar cells started to run down, they would have to halt and recharge for an hour or two. Eventually they would build up enough of a power backlog to drive the sleds all day, even with a few hours of clouds now and then.

They set off, two hours after sunrise. Eastward, into the sun.

The sleds functioned well, in spite of the centuries they had languished in storage. They moved slowly, no more than ten or fifteen miles an hour, but that was quite fast enough over the slippery ice. Jim, his father, Carl, and Dave Ellis rode in the lead sled; the other, with Ted Callison, Roy Veeder, Dom Hannon, and Chet Farrington aboard, followed.

Icy winds blew across the plateau, coming in from the east to slow them down. The travelers, bundled up so that only their faces were exposed to the elements, huddled down behind the curving shield of the sled's snout, peering sideways at the monotonous landscape.

Ice. Ice everywhere, and blue sky, and clouds of purest white, and the astounding fiery eye of the sun, climbing the sky and moving toward them even as they moved toward it. Not a tree, not a bird, not a sign of life to break the flat, white, barren sameness of it all.

"Is it going to be this way all the way to London?" Jim asked. "Three thousand miles of emptiness?"

"It'll be different when we reach the sea," Dr. Barnes promised. "But we'd better hope it's not too much different. If the sea isn't frozen over, we'll have to give up the idea of getting to London."

"What'll we do then, sir?" Carl wanted to know.

Dr. Barnes shrugged. "Head south, I guess. If we're lucky, the ice will already have retreated from Florida or Texas. If not, we'll just keep going into Mexico."

"Why don't we do that in the first place?" Dave Ellis put in. "Forget about London altogether?"

"No," Dr. Barnes said. "We've at least got to try to make contact with other underground cities. The people of the South aren't likely to be much friendlier toward us now than they were when the ice first came. We need to show a united front before we venture down to the lands that the ice never reached."

They fell silent. After a while, Jim said, "The sky is much clearer than I expected it to be. Where's the famous dust cloud that caused all the trouble?"

"It's there," Dave Ellis said. "Thinner than it was 200 years ago, probably, but it's there."

"Where?"

"Diffused in the atmosphere. One particle every few square feet, probably."

"And a little dust made the whole world freeze?" Carl asked.

Dave laughed. "It didn't take much to do the job," he said. "Just enough to screen off some of the sun's warmth-to drop the world's temperature by a few degrees. Once the process got started, it fed on itself. The colder it got, the more ice piled up; and the more ice piled up, the colder the seas and rivers got; and the colder they got, the more snow fell. Round and round and round. And because it was so cold, more snow stuck than melted away. A few feet each year did the trick. But now it's going in reverse. The glaciers are
losing
a few feet every year. And as the Earth warms, the melting will get faster and faster."

"Where will all the water go?" Jim asked.

"Some of it will evaporate," Dave said. "There'll be heavy rains as a result. The dry parts of the world will get drenched as they haven't been in fifty thousand years. And a lot of the water will run into the oceans. Right now, the oceans are hundreds of feet below their normal sea levels. All that water is locked up, in the glaciers. The seas will rise tremendously as the glaciers melt."

"Won't the underground cities be drowned when the ice melts?" Carl asked.

Dave shook his head. "The cities are sealed. Besides, the water won't stay on the continental areas. It'll rush off down the slope to the ocean. And there'll be evaporation. Don't get the idea that everything will turn into a gigantic lake when the ice goes. It'll be gradual-a slow retreat."

Jim tried to picture a mile-thick glacier melting, and the water running off into the ocean. It defeated his imagination. It was hard for him even to imagine what an ocean could look like. Something like this frozen sea of ice, he figured, only wet, and moving with waves and currents…

When they had covered eleven and a half miles, they stopped to recharge the accumulators. It was impossible to recognize any landmarks; so far as Jim could tell, they were right where they had started, in the middle of an endless plateau of ice. But the sextant said they had traveled. And the sun was high overhead, now.

A few moments after they had halted, the first difference between this stopping place and the last became evident: they were not alone here.

There were shapes on the horizon. Dark, bulky figures were drawing near.

Ted Callison saw them first. He squinted into the blaze of light bouncing from the ice, and then grabbed hastily for the binoculars in Jim's knapsack.

"What do you see?" Jim asked.

"Things," Ted murmured. "Big ugly things."

"People?"

"No," he said. "Animals. Gigantic animals!"

By this time, nearly everyone had his field glasses out. Jim wrenched his own back from Ted, who fumbled in his knapsack for his rightful pair.

Jim gazed at the advancing creatures with amazement and mounting incredulity. It was hard to judge their size, since there were no trees or rocks to gauge them against, but they were big, at least half as high again as a man. There were a dozen of them, shambling, hairy, four-legged creatures with sinister drooping snouts and a nest of complex bony-looking stuff sprouting from their heads.

Jims pulse throbbed. In the underground city, there was neither room nor food for animals of any sort, not even dogs or cats. He had seen pictures of animals, just as he had seen pictures of trees and mountains, but the whole concept of living creatures who were not human left him a bit mystified. Yet here they came, moving slowly over the ice, stooping now and then to lick the ground.

"What on earth are they?" Jim whispered.

"Could they be horses?" Dave Ellis asked. "Horses have four legs, I think."

"No," Chet Farrington said. "Horses don't have antlers-the things on their heads. These are some kind of moose. Or caribou, or elk. I don't remember the exact differences, but that's what these are."

"Dangerous?" Roy Veeder asked.

Chet shrugged. "I suppose they could be if we get them angry. Looks mostly like they're grazing on the ice. They aren't flesh-eaters."

"
Grazing
?" Jim asked. "On what?"

"Algae," Chet explained. "You studied hydroponics. You ought to know about algae."

"Sure," Jim said. "Microscopic plants. But living on the ice?"

"They're adapted to the cold. The moose lick them up. It's probably a full day's work for a moose to lick up enough algae to keep himself alive."

The creatures were grotesque, Jim thought. They were inhabitants of another world, the world of the glacier. He gripped the binoculars tightly, fascinated and repelled at the same time by the thick wooly fur, by the spindly legs with the wicked-looking hoofs, by the intricate convolutions sprouting from their heads. What was the word Chet had used? Antlers?

His nostrils, sensitive in the pure air, brought the smell of the beasts to him: rank, sickening.

"The wind's blowing toward us," Chet said. "They don't smell us yet, and I guess they can't see us. But we'd better get our power torches ready. If they panic and run toward us, we might get trampled."

Ted Callison, who had been scanning the horizon, pointed suddenly toward the south.

"Here come some more of them!" he cried.

Everyone swung around to look. Jim saw only a dark line against the snow at first, but then the image resolved itself into…

"Those aren't animals coming now," Dr. Barnes said. "They're men. Hunters!"

There were at least two dozen of them, stalking the animals. They were still half a mile or more away, but coming on steadily, a straggling line of club-wielding men.

"Savages," Dr. Barnes said quietly. "Nomads of the ice."

"Will they make trouble for us, Dad?"

"I don't know," the older man said. "Keep the power torches handy, just in case."

The advancing hunters, though, showed no interest yet in the eight strangers to their territory. All their attention was concentrated on the roaming band of grazing beasts. Jim stared through his field glasses until his eyes throbbed with pain.

They were close enough to be seen in detail now. The hunters were short, brutish-looking men, squat and bulky, clad in animal skins and high leather leggings. Unkempt black hair tumbled to their shoulders. Some carried thick clubs, which Jim saw were fashioned not of wood but of the bones of some huge animal; others were armed with bows and arrows.

Keeping downwind of the grazers, the nomads began to fan out into a wide half-circle, surrounding them. Now and then one of the savages threw a curious look at the newcomers, but they kept their heads turned toward the animals.

The biggest, most majestic of the moose lifted his ponderous head. He had scented something! He pawed uneasily at the ice with his hoofs, took a few steps, turned to peer out of obviously shortsighted eyes at the attackers slowly creeping up on his band. The nomads were less than a hundred yards away now, and Jim was able at last to judge the true size of the beasts. They were enormous, seven and eight feet high at the shoulders.

One of the hunters was nocking an arrow. Thick muscles rippled and bulged as the string was drawn back. He let the arrow fly!

Straight on target it went, embedding itself in the throat of the lead moose! The superb creature reared and whirled, hurt but apparently not seriously crippled by the flimsy-looking shaft. The other animals began to mill, to grunt in distress as the circle of hunters closed in.

Suddenly the air was thick with arrows.

The moose were panicky, stampeding. Jim gasped as three of them burst through the circle, trampling down two hunters as though they were dolls. The two little men went sprawling. A rivulet of blood spread across the ice as the three beasts made good their escape.

The remaining moose, though, were still trapped in the now tight circle of hunters. Their hairy bodies bristled with the arrows lodged in them. One animal had fallen, an arrow in its eye, and lay writhing on the ice while two of the club-wielders pounded mercilessly at it. A second, battered to its knees, growled defiance and butted with its antlers at its assailants. A third, bleeding in a dozen places, still stood erect, trumpeting ear-splitting calls of anger over the ice.

The hunters closed upon them for the kill. Forgotten now were the other six animals, who were allowed to break through the circle and flee, despite their wounds. All three trapped moose were down, now, and clubs were flailing. The sight horrified Jim, but he forced himself to watch. He had never seen violent death before.

It was all over in a few minutes. Three great creatures lay dead on the ice. A dozen of the hunters went efficiently to work with bone knives, skinning the beasts, peeling off huge chunks of fat and meat and wrapping them in the animal hides for easy transportation.

Now, and only now, did the hunters deign to notice the eight strangers in their midst.

Three of the hunters strode over. They were short, Jim saw, no more than five feet tall, but their bodies were thick and hard-muscled, and they showed no sign of distress over the exposure of their arms and faces to the cold. One was gray-haired and stubble-bearded, apparently the leader of the band. The other two were much younger. None of them looked at all friendly.