by Ben Bova
On one knee, Hawk fitted an arrow into his hunter’s bow. Tim suddenly felt very exposed, standing there beside the campfire, both hands empty.
Out of the shadows of the trees stepped a figure. A man. An old, shaggy, squat barrel of a man in a patchwork vest that hung open across his white-fuzzed chest and heavy belly, his head bare and balding but his brows and beard and what was left of his hair bushy and white. His arms were short, but thick with muscle. And he carried a strange-looking bow, black and powerful-looking, with all kinds of weird attachments on it.
“No need for weapons,” he said, in his gravelly voice.
“Yeah?” Hawk challenged, his voice shaking only a little. “Then what’s that in your hand?”
“Oh, this?” The stranger bent down and laid his bow gently on the ground. “I’ve been carrying it around with me for so many years it’s like an extension of my arm.”
He straightened up slowly, Tim saw, as if the effort caused him pain. There was a big, thick-bladed knife tucked in his belt. His feet were shod in what looked like strips of leather.
“Who are you?” Hawk demanded, his bow still in his hands. “What do you want?”
The stranger smiled from inside his bushy white beard. “Since you’ve just arrived on my island, I think it’s more proper for you to identify yourselves first.”
Tim saw that Hawk was a little puzzled by that.
“Whaddaya mean, your island?” Hawk asked.
The old man spread his arms wide. “This is my island. I live here. I’ve lived her for damned near two hundred years.”
“That’s bull-dingy,” Hawk snapped. Back home he never would have spoken so disrespectfully to an adult, but things were different out here.
The shaggy old man laughed. “Yes, I suppose it does sound fantastic. But it’s true. I’m two hundred and fifty-six years old, assuming I’ve been keeping my calendar correctly.”
“Who are you?” Hawk demanded. “Whatcha want?”
Placing a stubby-fingered hand on his chest, the man replied, “My name is Julius Schwarzkopf, once a professor of meteorology at the University of Washington, in St. Louis, Missouri, U. S. of A.”
“I heard of St. Louie,” Tim blurted.
“Fairy tales,” Hawk snapped.
“No, it was real,” said Professor Julius Schwarzkopf. “It was a fine city, back when I was a teacher.”
Little by little, the white-bearded stranger eased their suspicions. He came up to the fire and sat down with them, leaving his bow where he’d laid it. He kept the knife in his belt, though. Tim sat a little bit away from him, where there were plenty of fist-sized rocks within easy reach.
The Prof, as he insisted they call him, opened a little sack on his belt and offered the boys a taste of dried figs.
As the last embers of daylight faded and the stars began to come out, he suggested, “Why don’t you come to my place for the night? It’s better than sleeping out in the open.”
Hawk didn’t reply, thinking it over.
“There’s wild boars in the woods, you know,” said the Prof. “Mean beasts. And the cats hunt at night, too. Coyotes, of course. No wolves, though; for some reason they haven’t made it to this island.”
“Where’s your cabin?” Hawk asked. “Who else lives there?”
“Ten minutes’ walk,” the Prof answered, pointing with an outstretched arm. “And I live alone. There’s nobody but me on this island—except you, of course.”
The old man led the way through the trees, guiding the boys with a small greenish lamp that he claimed was made from fireflies’ innards. It was fully dark by the time they reached the Prof’s cabin. To Tim, what little he could make out of it looked more like a bare little hump of dirt than a regular cabin.
The Prof stepped down into a sort of hollow and pushed open a creaking door. In the ghostly green light from his little lamp, the boys stepped inside. The door groaned and closed again.
And suddenly the room was brightly lit, so bright it made Tim squeeze his eyes shut for a moment. He heard Hawk gasp with surprise.
“Ah, I forgot,” the Prof said. “You’re not accustomed to electricity.”
The place was a wonder. It was mostly underground, but there were lights that made everything look like it was daytime. And there were lots of rooms; the place just seemed to go on and on.
“Nothing much else to do for the past two centuries,” the Prof said. “Home improvement was always a hobby of mine, even back before the Flood.”
“You remember before the Flood?” Tim asked, awed.
The Prof sank his chunky body onto a sagging, tatty sofa and gestured to chairs for the boys to sit on.
“I was going to be one of the Immortals,” he said, his rasping voice somewhere between sad and sore. “Got my telomerase shots. I’d never age—so long as I took the booster shots every fifty years.”
Tim glanced at Hawk, who looked just as puzzled as he himself felt.
“But then the Flood wiped all that out. I’m aging again . . . slowly, I grant you, but just take a look at me! Hardly immortal, right?”
Hawk pointed to the thickly stacked shelves lining the room’s walls. “Are all those things books?”
The Prof nodded. “My other hobby was looting libraries—while they were still on dry land.”
He babbled on about solar panels and superconducting batteries and thermoionic generators and all kinds of other weird stuff that started to make Tim’s head spin. It was like the Prof was so glad to have somebody to talk to he didn’t know when to stop.
Tim had always been taught to be respectful of his elders; sometimes the lessons had included a sound thrashing. But no matter how respectfully he tried to pay attention to the Prof’s rambling, barely understandable monologue, he kept drifting toward sleep. Back home everybody was abed shortly after nightfall, but now this Prof was yakking on and on. It must be pretty near midnight, Tim thought. He could hardly keep his eyes open. He nodded off, woke himself with a start, and tried as hard as he could to stay awake.
“But look at me,” the Prof said at last. “I’m keeping you two from a good night’s sleep, talking away like this.”
He led the boys to another room that had real beds in it. “Be careful how you get on them,” he warned. “Nobody’s slept in those antiques in fifty years or more, not since a family of pilgrims got blown off their course for New Nashville. Stayed for damned near a month. Ate me out of house and home, just about, but I was still sad to see them go. I . . .”
Hawk yawned noisily and the Prof’s monologue petered out. “I’ll see you in the morning. Have a good sleep.”
Tim didn’t care about the Prof’s warning. He was so sleepy he threw himself on the bare mattress of the nearer bed. He raised a cloud of dust, but after one cough he fell sound asleep.
Because the Prof’s home was mostly underground it stayed dark long after sunrise. Tim and Hawk slept longer than they ever had at home. Only the sound of the Prof knocking hard on their bedroom door woke them.
The boys washed and relieved themselves in a privy that was built right into the house, in a separate little room of its own, with running water at the turn of a handle.
“Gravity feed,” the Prof told them over a hearty breakfast of eggs and ham and waffles and muffins and fruit preserves. “Got a cistern for rainwater up in the hills and pipes carry the water here. I boil all the drinking and cooking water, of course.”
“Of course,” Hawk mumbled, his mouth full of blueberry muffin.
“We’ve got to haul your boat farther up out of the water,” the Prof said, “and tie it down good and tight. Big blow likely soon.”
Tim glanced out the narrow slit of the kitchen’s only window and saw that it was dull gray outside, cloudy.
Once they finished breakfast, the Prof took them to still another room. This one had desks and strange-looking boxes sitting on them, with windows in them.
The Prof slipped into a little chair that creaked under his weight and
started pecking with his fingers on a board full of buttons. The window on the box atop the desk lit up and suddenly showed a picture.
Tim jerked back a step, surprised. Even Hawk looked wide-eyed, his mouth hanging open.
“Not many weather satellites still functioning,” the Prof muttered, as much to himself as the boys. “Only the old military birds left; rugged little buggers. Hardened, you know. But even with solar power and gyro stabilization, after two hundred years they’re crapping out, one by one.”
“What is that?” Hawk asked, his voice strangely small and hollow. Tim knew what was going through his friend’s mind: This is witchcraft!
The Prof launched into an explanation that meant practically nothing to the boys. Near as Tim could figure it, the old man was saying there was a machine hanging in the air like a circling hawk or buzzard, but miles and miles and higher, so high they couldn’t see it. And the machine had some sort of eyes on it and this box on the Prof’s desk was showing what those eyes saw.
It didn’t sound like witchcraft, the way the Prof explained it. He made it sound just as natural as chopping wood.
“That’s the United States,” the Prof said, tapping the glass that covered the picture. “Or what’s left of it.”
Tim saw mostly wide stretches of blue stuff that sort of looked like water, with plenty of smears of white and gray. Clouds?
“Florida’s gone, of course,” the Prof muttered. “Most of the Midwest has been inundated. New England . . . Maryland and the whole Chesapeake region . . . all flooded.”
His voice had gone low and soft, as if he was about to cry. Tim even thought he saw a tear glint in one of the old man’s eyes, though it was hard to tell, under those shaggy white brows of his.
“Here’s where we are,” the Prof said, pointing to one of the gray smudges. “Can’t see the island, of course; we’re beneath the cloud cover.”
Tim looked at Hawk, who shrugged. Couldn’t figure out if the Prof was crazy or a witch or what.
The Prof tapped at the buttons on the oblong board in front of him and the picture on the box changed. Now it showed something that was mostly white. Lots of clouds, still, but they were almost all white and if that was supposed to be ground underneath them the ground was all white, too.
“Canada,” said the Prof, grimly. “The ice cap is advancing fast.”
“What’s that mean?” Hawk asked.
The Prof sucked in a big sigh and looked up at the boys. “It’s going to get colder. A lot colder.”
“Winter’s comin’ already?” Tim asked. It was still springtime, he knew. Summer was coming, not winter.
But the Prof answered, “A long winter, son. A winter that lasts thousands of years. An ice age.”
Hawk asked, “What’s an ice age?”
“It’s what follows a greenhouse warming. This greenhouse was an anomaly, caused by anthropogenic factors. Now the CO2’s being leached out of the atmosphere and the global climate will bounce back to a Pleistocene condition.”
He might as well have been talking Cherokee or some other redskin language, Tim thought. Hawk looked just as baffled.
Seeing the confusion on the boys’ faces, the Prof went to great pains to try to explain. Tim got the idea that he was saying the weather was going to turn colder, a lot colder, and stay that way for a really long time.
“Glaciers a mile thick!” the Prof said, nearly raving in his earnestness. “Minnesota, Michigan, the whole Great Lakes region was covered with ice a mile thick!”
“It was?”
“When?”
Shaking his head impatiently, the Prof said, “It doesn’t matter when. The important thing is that it’s going to happen all over again!”
“Here?” Tim asked. “Where our folks live?”
“Yes!”
“How soon?” asked Hawk.
The Prof hesitated. He drummed his fingers on the desktop for a minute, looking lost in thought.
“By the time you’re a grandfather,” he said at last. “Maybe sooner, maybe later. But it’s going to happen.”
Hawk let a giggle out of him. “That’s a long time from now.”
“But you’ve got to get ready for it,” the Prof said, frowning. “It will take a long time to prepare, to learn how to make warm clothing, to grow different crops or migrate south.”
Hawk shook his head.
“You ought to at least warn your people, let them know it’s going to happen,” the Prof insisted.
“But we’re headin’ for Colorado,” Tim confessed. “We’re not goin’ back home.”
The Prof’s bushy brows knit together. “This climate shift could be just as abrupt as the greenhouse cliff was. People who aren’t prepared for it will die—starve to death or freeze.”
“How do you know it’s gonna happen like that?” Hawk demanded.
“You saw the satellite imagery of Canada, didn’t you?”
“We saw some picture of something, I don’t know what it really was,” Hawk said. “How do you know what it is? How do you know it’s gonna get so cold?”
The Prof thought a moment, then admitted, “I don’t know. But all the evidence points that way. I’m sure of it, but I don’t have conclusive proof.”
“You don’t really know,” Hawk said.
For a long moment the old man glared at Hawk angrily. Then he took another deep breath and his anger seemed to fade away.
“Listen, son. Many years ago people like me tried to warn the rest of the world that the greenhouse warming was going to drastically change the global climate. All the available evidence pointed to it, but the evidence was not conclusive. We couldn’t convince the political leaders of the world that they were facing a disaster.”
“What happened?” Tim asked.
Spreading his arms out wide, the Prof shouted, “This happened! The world’s breadbaskets flooded! Electrical power distribution systems totally wiped out. The global nets, the information and knowledge of centuries—all drowned. Food distribution gone. Cities abandoned. Billions died! Billions! Civilization sank back to subsistence agriculture.”
Tim looked at Hawk and Hawk looked back at Tim. Maybe the old man isn’t a witch, Tim thought. Maybe he’s just crazy.
The Prof sighed. “It doesn’t mean a thing to you, does it? You just don’t have the understanding, the education or . . .”
Muttering to himself, the old man turned back to his magic box and pecked at the buttons again. The picture went back to the first one the boys had seen.
Abruptly the Prof jabbed a button and the picture winked off. Pushing himself up from his chair, he said, “Come on, we’ve got to get your boat farther up out of the water and tied down good and strong.”
“What for?” Hawk demanded, suddenly suspicious.
With a frown, the Prof said, “This area used to be called Tornado Alley. Just because it’s covered by water doesn’t change that. In fact, it makes the twisters even worse.”
The boys had heard of twisters. One had levelled a village not more than a day’s travel from their own, only a couple of springtimes ago.
When it came, the twister was a monster.
The boys spent most of the day hauling their boat up close to the trees and then tying it down as firmly as they could. The Prof provided ropes and plenty of advice and even some muscle power. All the time they worked the clouds got thicker and darker and lower. Tim expected a thunderstorm any minute as they headed back for the Prof’s house, bone tired.
They were halfway back when the trees began tossing back and forth and rain started spattering down. Leaves went flying through the air, torn off the trees. A whole bough whipped by, nearly smacking Hawk on the head. Tim heard a weird sound, a low dull roaring, like the distant howl of some giant beast.
“Run!” the Prof shouted over the howling wind. “You don’t want to get caught here amidst the trees!”
Despite their aching muscles they ran. Tim glanced over his shoulder and through the bending, swaying t
rees he saw a mammoth pillar of pure terror marching across the open water, heading right for him, sucking up water and twigs and anything in its path, weaving slowly back and forth, high as the sky, bearing down on them, coming to get him.
It roared and shouted and moved up onto the land. Whole trees were ripped up by their roots. Tim tripped and sprawled face-first into the dirt. Somebody grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and yanked him to his feet. The rain was so thick and hard he couldn’t see an arm’s length in front of him but suddenly the low earthen hump of the Prof’s house was in sight and the old man, despite his years, was half a dozen strides ahead of them, already fumbling with the front door.
They staggered inside, the wind-driven rain pouring in with them. It took all three of them to get the door closed again and firmly latched. The Prof pushed a heavy cabinet against the door, then slumped to the floor, soaking wet, chest heaving.
“Check . . . the windows,” he gasped. “Shutters . . .”
Hawk nodded and scrambled to his feet. Tim hesitated only a moment, then did the same. He saw there were thick wooden shutters folded back along the edges of each window. He pulled them across the glass and locked them tight.
The twister roared and raged outside but the Prof’s house, largely underground, held firm. Tim thought the ground was shaking, but maybe it was just him shaking, he was so scared. The storm yowled and battered at the house. Things pounded on the roof. The rain drummed so hard it sounded like all the redskins in the world doing a war dance.
The Prof lay sprawled in the puddle by the door until Hawk gestured for Tim to help him get the old man to his feet.
“Bedroom . . .” the Prof said. “Let me . . . lay down . . . for a while.” His chest was heaving, his face looked gray.
They put him down gently on his bed. His wet clothes made a squishy sound on the covers. He closed his eyes and seemed to go to sleep. Tim stared at the old man’s bare, white-fuzzed chest. It was pumping up and down, fast.
Something crashed against the roof so hard that books tumbled out of their shelves and dust sifted down from the ceiling. The lights blinked, then went out altogether. A dim lamp came on and cast scary shadows on the wall.