Lucy wept, openly and frankly. Jack held her, feeling her slim frame against his body, pressing her head to his shoulder. Secretly, he feared that they had lost Sam; even more, that the world itself was lost. He knew that the storm was coming south, and that it could easily get this far. It could be that the Potomac would come striding out of its banks, propelled by billions of gallons of rain, and then would follow a killing freeze unlike any freeze mankind had ever known, and he thought again of mammoths and daisies, and the last summer day of an apple tree.
He had to release his wife. He did not want to, but his work demanded his involvement. It could not wait, and even though he would have held her forever if he’d been able, he gently pushed her away.
He turned to Frank, who had been waiting—hovering, really—just across the room. “Where’d you store our antarctic gear?”
Frank’s face registered confusion, then surprise, then understanding. “Oh, no, no way. You can’t make it to New York.”
“I can try. I’ve covered as many miles on foot at the poles.” What was it? he wondered. About two hundred, and a lot of it was liable to be under water … at the moment.
Frank’s face had gone the color of heavy cream—a sick color in a man who was in robust good health. Jack saw it for what it was: the color of fear.
“Jack, this isn’t any arctic trek you’re talking about. Lucy—”
She remained silent. She would not stop him and Frank knew why. If he made it, he would save their son. No mother would have stopped him.
“I have to go,” Jack told her. “I have to do it.”
She nodded slightly. Jack wiped away her tears, tried to ignore his own. She gave him the steadiest, strongest, and bravest look he’d ever seen in her face. It made him proud of her, that look. It washed away years of disappointment and misunderstanding. She smiled a little, and he knew she was proud of him, of his bravery.
He touched her cheek. Her eyes closed. Only another divorcee could understand that gesture. For divorce is as mysterious as marriage, and the real life of couples is known only to couples, a life that is lived through the medium of a secret language of gestures and coded sentences.
He had touched her like that the first time he’d seen her, and it had made her close her eyes and press her cheek against his fingertips. Again, standing beside their marriage bed, two trembling kids, he had touched her like that, and in the gesture there had been the shadow and promise of pleasure in the night, the promise that would one day become that precious soul up there in the land of chaos.
This time, when she leaned gently against his fingers, it said, I remember all that has come before, and I approve what you’re doing now, and if you give up your life for our son, I will reverence your spirit until my own days are done.
There could be no more profound moment than this between two people who are snared in the sliver cords of marriage… whether they be divorced or not.
In the clammy, dark library, echoing with the rush of swirling water and the strange throbbing of the stricken city, as the occasional cries and sirens sounded as boats, makeshift and otherwise, plied past outside— in the dark, Laura and Sam explored. The lower reaches of the building were lost to them, of course, but it was a large structure and there was much to be learned and found.
They explored, though, because they were already freezing in their soaked clothes, and his dad had warned Sam that it was about to get much colder. She was a little drier than he was and had a coat, so she was not in quite such desperate shape. He was barely able to walk, he was shivering so much, and if he let himself go, it felt as if it might turn into a sort of a seizure or something. The word hypothermia came to mind, and he wondered if that was what he was suffering from. If so, shock was on the way, and then the sleep of the very cold, followed by the gradual darkening of dreams that ends in death. Sam had read, in his efforts to understand the perils his dad faced on his polar expeditions, all about what it was like to die of cold. As people froze, they dreamed of their lives, just as the drowning do.
And then, in Laura’s flashlight beam, there was a door with what could be a very, very useful sign on it: Lost and Found.
It was unlocked, so they opened it and went in. A worn counter, a desk with some papers on it, and boxes and boxes of stuff. Sam gasped at how many. People lost a lot of stuff. He doubted that he’d find many pairs of underpants or socks, but he might just get a shirt, and over there he could see a whole array of coats, some of them hung on a rack, more in boxes.
“Come on,” Laura said, “we need to get your clothes off before you get hypothermia.”
What did she mean? What was he going to have to do, here?
“This is no time to be shy,” she snapped as she started pulling his shirt off. He helped her with the buttons, but she tossed it aside like a rag. Then she dropped his pants and ordered him out of them. He complied, and she went down on her knees and helped him out of his socks. Without blinking an eye, she took down his underpants.
It was dark but not that dark. He thought, I’m seventeen and this is the dreamiest girl I have ever known, and I am naked. He was shivering so uncontrollably, however, that nothing happened down below. Then she opened her coat and wrapped him up in her warmth, and that was like being swaddled in an angel’s wings. But not a heavenly angel. No, these wings were steeped in girl smell, and this warmth was not heavenly, it was bodily. Very.
“Wha-what are you doing?”
“I’m using my body heat to warm your core slowly. You can’t let the cold blood in your extremities rush back to your heart too quickly. It can cause heart failure.”
She knew more about hypothermia than he did. But she did not know about the male body, the way that it cannot conceal its enthusiasms. Or did she? “Wh-where did you learn all this?”
“Some of us actually paid attention in health and safety class. How are you feeling.”
“M-m-much better.”
Her arms surrounded him and pulled him to her, and he realized that nothing was going to happen that might embarrass the two of them. Because she had been absolutely right. He was seriously cold. He was farther along than he had realized. Just as it said in the books, death by cold had been creeping up on him. His grateful body was interested only in one thing: this delicious, wonderful, life-giving warmth. Later, it might long to be in these arms for other reasons. But right now it was life, and life alone, that it sought.
He thought, We’re seventeen, we’re not about dying, we’re about being alive and having fun. The water echoed, a lapping tinkle. Outside the wind rose, and the old eaves of the building moaned, and its ghosts.
ELEVEN
L
ike all of the great federal buildings in Washington,
Department of Commerce headquarters had been built to last forever and was packed with more rooms than its planners could conceive that the agency would ever need in a hundred years. Which was why it was stuffed to the rafters with people and equipment after just a few years, and NOAA was spread out across nooks, crannies, hallways, and conference rooms. The headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was like Los Angeles: there was no there there.
But Frank knew it as well as a grizzled old cabbie might know L.A., and he led Jack straight to the cache of equipment that they’d brought back from the antarctic. Frank had stored it with the skill of an old-line civil servant. It would take another old-liner even to understand that the cryptic file notations concealed a treasure trove of superb cold-weather gear. And nobody, but nobody, was going to find this storage space within a storage space without a map, a guide, and more than a little luck.
Jack pulled out a crate of gear and began sorting through the familiar parkas. They were all fur-lined, not out of choice, but because only nature could really handle cold as intense as they had to withstand. But would they still be pliant and still retain enough warmth to keep a man alive at, say, 150 below?
The lowest temperature ever recorded on earth
was minus 128.3 at the Russian Vostok base in Antartica, back in the winter of 1983. These parkas were rated to minus 130. But below that, who knew what might happen?
At minus 140, exposed skin would freeze hard in about six seconds. At minus 150, a healthy man’s blood would freeze in thirty-four seconds, despite the most vigorous activity possible.
He heard somebody behind him. He kept assembling his kit. “Frank told me about Sam,” Tom Gomez said.
Jack ignored him. Frank had obviously sent him down here, and Jack wished he hadn’t.
“I’m not gonna try to talk you out of going. But there’s something I need to do, first.” He had a printout of Jack’s results, which he held up like a flag—of surrender, Jack thought. “You need to explain your results to the White House.”
That had been tried and Jack had been humiliated by that jackass of a vice president, and he wanted no more part of any of it. Let the idiots freeze to death, and the folks who elected them.
No, not them. They’d been lied to, or the administration wouldn’t even be in power. But how could he re-explain something to people who’d already dismissed him? How did you do that? “I’ve already tried, Tom,” he said.
Gomez shuffled uneasily. His guilty expression revealed that there might have been something between him and vice president Becker, something along the lines of Tom assuring the VP that Jack was just a harmless crank … in order to preserve his job.
Because Tom had not believed him, either. Tom had dismissed all of this as nonsense, even when the tragedy was well advanced. Now that it was too late—well, here he was. “This time, it’s going to be different,” he said. “This time, you’re going to brief the president.”
So, Tom had bought the model and informed the White House that it was real. You didn’t speculate at a presidential briefing, you informed.
“When?” Jack asked.
“There’s a car waiting to take us now.”
At the New York Public Library, Patrolman Campbell was getting things organized. Sam had explained who his father was and the information that he’d offered. Before that, everybody had been waiting for the water to recede. The consensus was that it couldn’t be long. People did not understand the behavior of massive surges like the one that had inundated the East Coast. They have an inertia of their own. They do not recede as fast as they rise, not when the scale is as massive as this.
In truth, a terrible race was on, on a scale much too large to be understood by anybody in the library. Probably not even Jack Hall himself was fully aware of it. Or, no, he knew, but it would not be in his briefing or in his thoughts, not this secret: that the world was hanging in an extraordinary balance.
If that water did not slide back into the ocean before it froze, and if there was enough snow, then the earth would begin reflecting the sun’s heat back out into space. It would be reflected from massive fields of white that would cover a huge circle of land from New York west to Washington State, from Vladivostok to Moscow, and on deep into Europe, to Paris and London and even Marseille on the Mediterranean coast, to Rome and Athens and Tehran. In the end, almost half the world would be involved.
And if summer didn’t heat it enough, then it would not melt, and next winter would add to it, and the winter after that, and on and on, until global warming would come to seem like the memory of a lunatic, and another ice age would have begun.
So the world hung in the balance. If the cold now building in the north captured this water and turned it into a sheet of ice, it would be a hundred thousand years before it would melt. If not, then maybe, in the spring, mankind would be given another chance.
It wasn’t a new thing. It had happened before. In the past 3 million years, in fact, it had happened no less than twenty-three times. But the scale of time was so unimaginably large that it was hard for people to understand the truth: the whole of human history, from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the space shuttle, had unfolded during one of the brief warm periods that punctuated the earth’s normal state, which was to lie sleeping beneath massive sheets of ice.
Couldn’t happen again? On the contrary, it happened all the time. But still, in the tremendous history of earth, even 3 million years was just the flicker of a fly’s eye. Indeed, most of the time there had been no ice on earth at all. Polar caps were rare on our planet. Mostly, there was a dusting of snow at the south pole, and that was it.
Mostly, but not since Central America had risen out of the sea, cutting off the great trans-equatorial current that had ruled the earth’s climate for 25 million years. That, and a period of instability on the sun, had created this little spate of climactic turbulence that had caused the past 3 million years to be, well, just a little wilder than normal.
In the library, Sam and Laura and Brian had quickly assumed roles as authorities and organizers. It had ever been thus: back when the glaciers last ruled and the winters in what are now Provence and South Carolina could see temperatures of fifty below, the smartest had been the leaders. The ones who could trap and sew and measure the seasons in the majesty of the stars—they had kept mankind going.
“Is that the last of it?” Campbell asked as J.D. and Sam and Laura brought in a load of coats.
“Pretty much,” Laura replied. “We also found this radio, but I don’t think it works.”
The silence that followed that remark was pregnant with sorrow. Every soul in that room knew just how valuable a functioning radio might be. Just as, twenty thousand years ago, every soul huddled at the back of some winter-choked cave had known just how valuable a little spark of fire would be.
“Let me see it,” Brian said.
She handed it to him, and he began examining it. The thing had been lost for a long time. It was an ancient transistor radio, something from back in the eighties, before the Walkman and microcircuitry.
Then there came a sound so unexpected that a couple of people actually screamed. It was barking— Buddha had started to bark. He and Luther were keeping to themselves at a table across the reading room. Luther was embarrassed because he was so dirty and he smelled, or suspected that he did, or perhaps he was exhibiting the wrinkle of mind that had made him a street person in the first place.
The barking soon subsided to a series of whines. Buddha kept pricking up his ears, too. He was obviously uncomfortable about something, and that was making the whole group uncomfortable, too. The role of the dog had changed. Now, he was an essential part of the community, just as his ancestors had been back when winter had howled and fur had made him a good friend on a cold night, and his nose told of the silent approach of the saber-toothed tiger long before human eyes and ears noticed.
Sam’s head turned, then Laura’s. Then they all heard it—the high-pitched screeching sound that had made Buddha so uncomfortable. He still whined and yowled, but between the whines, the noise got louder and louder.
Sam’s first thought was that it was girders straining in the basement. Maybe the building was caving in. But that couldn’t be. The water filled the structure all the way down to the bottom, so the water was supporting its own weight. It wouldn’t be placing any extra strain on the structure.
Sam, wearing a comfy lined raincoat over the sweats that he’d found still in their bags from Bloomie’s Sports Store, went out into the long hallway that fronted the reading room.
“What’s going on?” Brian said, joining him.
“I have no idea!”
Laura and J.D. came out, followed by the others. They crossed the hall and entered the Salomon Room, which overlooked Fifth Avenue. At the moment, the room housed a collection of Native American written objects from deerskin story sheets to Iroquois wampum. Here, the sound was loud, crunching and screeching, loud cracks and long metallic groans.
They went into the small Special Collections office with its tall windows and looked out over one of the strangest sights that anyone, in all the colorful history of Manhattan Island, had ever seen.
Wreathed in snow, which was already be
ginning to flurry, was the gray steel side of a huge cargo ship, which had somehow been swept through the streets, by whatever maniac trick of tide and wind, and was now grinding and scraping slowly along, pushed by the slight current that still remained, and the whipping, nervous wind.
There was silence in the crowded little room, as each of them thought the same private thought: this is the very image of chaos, a world gone mad, life turned inside out.
Jack was also experiencing one of the strangest things he had ever known. He was giving a briefing to the most powerful people in the United States, and nobody had coughed, snickered, yawned, or even so much as glazed over, not for a second.
He had laid the situation out as he saw it: Since 1999, there had been a series of events that he had been concerned might be warning signs of a much more dramatic event. After an unseasonably warm autumn in 1999, tremendous storms had swept Europe with winds that were unprecedented in recorded history. In total, something like 300 million trees, many of them hundreds of years old and as solidly rooted as trees could be, had been uprooted across the Continent. Even trees planted by Marie Antoinette at Versailles had been destroyed, making wreckage of its legendary park.
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