Rings of Ice

by Piers Anthony

  Gus turned, smiling. His seat was double-width, but mounted so that it could face around behind. He had an attractive grin and looked capable. But she could not forget that forlorn cry of his—“Thatch!”—as he was hurt. Not badly hurt, either! Was he in fact a physical coward, or was there something else between these two men?

  “That’s all right,” Gus said. “Girl’s got to watch out for herself. Where’re you from?”

  She took a moment to restore the dinette table, still fallen. It propped on a single light metal rod, now bent but not broken. Like Thatch’s glasses.

  Where was she from? What was the safest answer? She felt she owed no further allegiance to the government, but she was not yet ready to set aside her commitment to secrecy.

  A half-truth would have to do. “The Cape. I worked there—for a while. How about you?”

  “Other side of the street,” Gus said, gesturing expansively. “State, I mean.” He seemed to carry no grudge. “Too hot for regular work, not much money, so Thatch got us this bus to drive north. The owner pays for gas and tolls, and we have a week to get it safely to Michigan.”

  Zena shook her head silently. It was nice to know they had come by the vehicle honestly—but it would never see Michigan, now that the rain had started.

  “Just in time, too,” Gus continued. “I figured the rain was coming, and I knew we had to get moving fast. We just stopped off for cheap gas—can’t get that on the main route—and then we saw you.”

  Fine. Keep the men talking about themselves. “You had trouble finding decent work? Maybe you should have gone back to school to learn a trade.”

  “I’ve been to school,” Gus said amiably. “You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I’ve got a BA in Liberal Arts.”

  Zena smiled carefully. Liberal arts, by one definition, was the way a dull student could get through college without having to learn anything. “You’re right. I wouldn’t know it.”

  “Say—are you a karate instructor or something?”

  Fair question, after the fighting she had just done. “No. If I had been an instructor, Thatch would never have gotten a hand on me. I’m a meteorologist. I happened to take a course in self-defense. Just in case.”

  “Meteorology!” he exclaimed. She thought he was going to make the old joke about studying meteors, but he passed that up. “Then you know about this rain!”

  Trouble again! “What do you mean?”

  “That’s what you do, isn’t it? Study the weather? So you know.”

  “I study the weather, yes. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I know more than you do about this particular rain. Obviously I didn’t know enough to come in out of it!”

  Gus let out a hearty laugh. Then he shook his head wisely. “Uh-uh! This is a special rain! It started with that band in the sky—you saw that, didn’t you?”

  “No.” Literally true. But the man was on an uncomfortably accurate track—by what coincidence, she hoped to learn.

  “This one that looked like a contrail, then got larger and larger until it filled the whole sky? They said it was just a freak cloud formation that would go away in a few days, but the experts always lie about things like that How could you miss it?”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “Zena, the whole world could see it! The news was censored out of the papers, which is how I knew it was significant, but I have a little shortwave radio and I picked up the hams discussing it. That band went all around the earth from pole to pole, like a Russian satellite. But the Russians didn’t know anything about it either. Not the ones who were talking, anyway. You would have had to be blind or in jail to miss it!”

  No help for it: She was not a facile evader, and she refused to lie directly. “I wasn’t on the world.”

  Gus chuckled. “Oh, yeah! You came from the Cape. You were up in orbit, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you didn’t see it after all. Not from below, anyhow! Maybe you were investigating it from a satellite?”

  “No. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “I get it now. Military secret.”

  “Something like that.” Did it really make any difference? The damage had been done before Gus ever spotted his band in the sky, and there was no way to reverse it now.

  “Well, the way I see it, this is no ordinary rain,” Gus said. “It’s a canopy-rain, coming down from the Saturn-rings.”

  “Saturn is another planet!” Zena exclaimed, relieved to discover that he was after all off the track. It had seemed for a moment that he had somehow guessed the truth. The truth that she was still theoretically not permitted to divulge.

  “I said Saturn-rings. Rings of ice, like those around Saturn—only they’re around Earth now. So the rain won’t stop—not for a long, long time. Maybe the whole world will flood. Right?”

  Now she was intrigued. He was veering closer to the track again. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know. You’re the meteorologist. I only know what I read.”

  “That’s right. I’m the meteorologist—and I can’t make much sense of what you’re saying. What’s this about a canopy, or rings of ice?”

  “That theory. How there were rings of ice around the world, long ago. And they melted down into a canopy, and then into rain—so much that the oceans rose up maybe a mile, and never did go down again. That’s what the Bible is really talking about, and all those other legends of the flood. And it’s starting again!”

  “I never heard of such a thing!” Zena said indignantly. “There’s no fossil record of such large increases in the ocean level—not in the past billion years, certainly!”

  “Oh yes there is,” he insisted. “Just in the last million years the ocean has changed—”

  “Fluctuated, yes; risen, no,” she said. “You’re thinking of the last ice age, when so much water was taken up by glaciers and polar ice that the level of the world’s oceans dropped—then rose again when all that ice melted. But that has nothing to do with any canopy—”

  “Yes it does! And ancient man actually saw the canopy.”

  “Ridiculous! What ancient man saw were the four great glacials of the Pleistocene: Gunz, Mindel, Riss and Wurm.”

  “The four frost giants,” Gus agreed. “But it was the canopy that caused those glaciers. Say—didn’t they have American names, too?”

  “There were equivalent glacials in North America. The Nebraskan, Kansan, Illinoisan and Wisconsin. They were named after the states in which the first finds were made—the moraines and scratches and other typical signs. The European ones were named after the various German valleys where they were identified. The two sets correlate pretty well.”

  “Right! So there was one overall cause, worldwide. The canopy.”

  “Gus, if man had seen anything like that, he would have recorded it somehow, if only in legends.”

  “He did. Ancient pottery shows the canopy, and Stonehenge was built to—”

  She laughed. “I don’t know what sort of stuff you read, but that’s crackpot theory! Are you sure it wasn’t a fantasy novel?”

  “Nonfiction,” he said seriously. “It was the Annular Theory. I have a book on it packed away, Heavens and Earth of Prehistoric Man. Things like that interest me. I’ll show you, when we have a chance to unload.”

  “So that’s why you think this rain will flood the world!” she said derisively. “You read someone’s wild conjecture—”

  But Gus was not nettled. Whatever his failings, he had a steady temper. “Do you know otherwise?”

  That shut her up. She did not know otherwise. In fact this theory of his bore an uncanny resemblance to the actual situation. It was as if fate had directed her to the very person who could understand and help—a person she would never ordinarily have met. She knew the rain would continue, horrendously, even though she was not free to admit that. Everything she had learned in space was classified, rightly or wrongly. Her flight from the stupidity and confusion that had precipitat
ed this crisis did not release her from the oath of secrecy she had unwillingly taken.

  But if Gus came close to the truth, was she bound to lie in defense of that secrecy? Or was it ethical to let him prevail, so long as she never specifically confirmed his accuracy?

  “So we figure the whole state will flood out, maybe in a few days, and we’re headed for the mountains,” Gus said, satisfied. “We’ve got the Whole Earth catalogue and extra gasoline, a fifty-gallon reserve tank we won’t touch until we have to. And food.”

  “Food?” she said eagerly.

  “Hey yeah, you’re hungry! Here.” Gus got up and stepped past her to the kitchenette. He got a loaf of bread and opened the refrigerator. “Mostly jars of stuff—we figured it would keep better, because we won’t always have current for the fridge. And we didn’t have too much money. Bean or marmalade?”

  “What?”

  “Your sandwich. We have other stuff, but it isn’t open yet. Don’t want to waste anything.”

  “Oh.” She got up, feeling her fatigue now that she had had a chance to rest. “I’ll do it.”

  Gus shrugged and turned over the makings. She made herself one of each.

  “So it’s like this,” Gus said as she munched sandwiches that hunger made delicious and washed them down with a glass of milk. “Maybe the whole nation will flood out, with only a few islands where the mountain tops are. No one will be left, except us. We don’t have an ark, so we’ll have to use this bus. And we’ll save civilization. Like Noah.”

  Zena had to laugh, explosively. Fatigue and relief had abated her inhibitions. Precious crumbs of bean sandwich sprayed out of her mouth in most unladylike fashion, embarrassing her. “Noah!”

  But Gus was serious. “That’s why we’re picking up people. We don’t need old ones or sick ones—but every young, healthy person is a potential citizen of the new order.”

  Suddenly it wasn’t funny—if it had ever been. She had been preoccupied by the problems of the moment, and hadn’t thought it through: people were going to die. Including her own family, if she didn’t get through in time to warn them. Had she herself been picked up because she was a woman of childbearing age?

  “Make sense to you?” Gus asked, averting his gaze.

  It made sense, all right! These two hoped to build a captive kingdom! Would she have been accepted as a candidate if she had not been pretty? Ha-ha! “I believe I’ll get off at the next mountain,” she said.

  Gus made a gesture of laissez-faire. “It has to be voluntary, of course. But you’ll drown, here.”

  The awful thing was that it was true. She would drown, if she didn’t get out of Florida in the next few days. And as the nature of the disaster became apparent to the surviving populace, a woman alone would not be safe. From either the weather or the people.

  “If you really believe that the world in this vicinity is coming to an end,” she said, “why aren’t you worried about your own folks? You do have folks?”

  Gus wasn’t fazed. “My dad farms in the mountains. My brother was captain of his school swimming team. They can take care of themselves.”

  “And yours?” she asked Thatch.

  Thatch didn’t answer.

  “He knows we can’t save anyone else until we save ourselves,” Gus said. “If there’s a break in the rain, then maybe we can look about.”

  “A pragmatic philosophy,” she said. “It confirms my opinion of you. How about dropping me off when you hit the Appalachians, then?”

  If Gus caught the irony he didn’t show it. “Sure enough. But you’re eating our food and using up our gas. You’ll have to earn your keep.”

  She tensed. “Such as?”

  “Such as cleaning house, washing socks, sewing buttons—”

  “I’m a meteorologist! I never sewed a button in my life!”

  “Well, there’s a sewing machine in back. We don’t know how to use it.”

  “Neither do I!” she snapped.

  Gus looked at her with annoying tolerance. “Being feminine bugs you, doesn’t it.”

  Perfect shot! Her first impulse was to hit him again, to make him go down with another wail for his buddy. Her second was to launch a tirade on masculine arrogance. But she was better rested now, and dry, and not so hungry, and her more sober third impulse prevailed. She would not be baited! “All right—I’ll sew buttons!”

  Gus shrugged with just one shoulder, knowing he had the upper hand now. “You don’t have to. That was only an example.”

  “Yes I do have to,” she said with controlled fury. “Because I have other values, and I’m not joining your kingdom.”

  The vehicle slowed. “There’s one,” Thatch said.

  Another pickup. “Male or female?” Zena asked.

  “Female,” Gus said, swinging around to look. “Young. And single. We don’t even stop for nonsurvival types. I told you.”

  “Do you mean you leave them standing, knowing they will drown?” she demanded. But that required no answer: of course they did.

  It was female, all right. A tall girl with long blonde hair, her breasts standing out like turrets in the plastered mess that was her dress. Zena was relieved to see her; a statuesque blonde was exactly what was needed to distract the men.

  Gus got out of his seat and pushed open the door as the motor-home halted. The sound of the rain became loud, making Zena shiver. “Welcome aboard!” Gus cried, extending his big hand.

  “Thank you, sir,” the blonde answered. Her voice was low and husky, as befitted her appearance. A sex bomb, despite what originally had been reasonably decorous apparel. She stepped up lithely, showing muscular legs above the tall heels. She was shorter than Gus, but not by much. “That rain! Will it never stop?”

  “It never will!” Gus said cheerfully. “Get it moving, Thatch.”

  Thus did another fly walk into the spider’s nest. Wait until Blondie heard about the onerous duties of citizenship!

  “What’s your name?” Gus asked. “I’m Gus; this is Thatch, and she’s Zena.”

  “Gloria,” she said, smiling properly. “Gloria Black. My car ran out of gas, and no one would stop! I’m soaked!”

  “Horrors!” Zena muttered behind her hand.

  “There’s dry clothing in back,” Gus said, putting his familiar hand on her damp shoulder. Zena winced. “I’ll show you.”

  “Thank you,” Gloria said, ultimately feminine even when dripping. She did not seem to find it remarkable to be welcomed in to a traveling bedroom. Zena resented the type but found it expedient to remain silent.

  “Do you know how to sew?” Gus inquired.

  “Excellently.”

  “Well, let me tell you where we’re going,” Gus said enthusiastically. “You know, there’s a sewing machine here! This rain won’t stop. We have food—”

  “That’s fine, but I’m only going to Gainesville.”

  “I’d better explain,” Gus said, guiding her back. “This rain—”

  Zena transferred to the seat Gus had vacated, so that she could talk to Thatch privately. The chair was capacious and comfortable; one could readily fall asleep in it. But what a contrast to the fury of nature outside, so thoroughly visible here! “Hello,” she said.

  Thatch’s eyes flicked over to her, then back to the road. He didn’t answer. The rain made driving dangerous, even at the moderate speed he was going, but he could talk if he wanted to. She wondered if the heat of physical struggle had made him forget his shyness before, while her direct approach in the absence of Gus choked him up.

  “I’m sorry I hit you,” she said.

  “Forget it.” She could see his knuckles whiten on the wheel. Gus might readily forgive; but not this man.

  “If I hurt you, I’ll try to clean it up,” she said. “I am sorry, Thatch. I thought you had a real gun, and I overreacted.” How much easier it was to apologize to an unhandsome man, as though he were less dangerous!

  “It’s not that,” he said tightly.

  “You aren’t much
for socializing, are you?” It was amazing how his obvious discomfort made her feel at ease; not long ago Gus had teased her similarly.

  He smiled momentarily, still not looking at her. In that moment his weak-chinned, scarred face gained strength. “Gus takes care of that sort of thing.”

  She was tempted to inquire exactly what the relation between the two men was, but refrained. Some men preferred men, particularly those brought up in fatherless households. If this were his case, it really was not her business. In fact, that would verify that she had been mistaken about Gus’s familiarity; it could be his camouflage for a basic disinterest in the opposite sex.

  Well, blonde Gloria would soon be the proof of that pudding! In any event, it behooved Zena to comprehend the real motives of Gus and Thatch. She might well be eating and working with them for several days in close quarters. “Do you do all the driving?”

  “Gus doesn’t have a license.”

  She was surprised; she had anticipated a demurral. “Was it revoked?”

  “No, he never learned to drive.” Thatch was speaking more freely, now that they were talking about another person. He was shy and basically harmless; even when goaded to action by a threat to his friend, he had used that toy pistol!

  “Well, I have a license,” she said. How much better to drive, even through this weather, than to sew buttons!

  “You’re not part of the party.”

  If Gus had said that, it would have had another meaning. “So you go along with everything Gus says?”

  Thatch nodded affirmatively.

  “If you trust me to fix your food,” she said, “you should trust me to drive.”

  “It’s not that, Miss Emers. Gus has firm notions of propriety. Women don’t drive.”

  “Call me Zena,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t.

  Sure enough, he didn’t answer. His arms tightened again, and he stared straight ahead.

  “You can’t do all the driving!” she exclaimed. “In this weather it must be an awful strain.”

  “The job must be done.”

  There wasn’t much to say to that, so she just watched ahead. There had been other traffic at the start of the rain, for the interstate was a busy highway. Now the moving traffic had thinned. It had been raining for an hour; many cars had stalled. Thatch went around them, maneuvering with skill.