Time of the Great Freeze

by Robert Silverberg

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

  Some of the signs carried an extra symbol, the atom-symbol, warning that this was the approach to the nuclear reactor that powered the entire city. Anyone caught going beyond a sign that bore the atom-symbol was a dead man if a guard saw him. No citizen could approach the reactor for any reason whatever, without express permission of the City Council. To cross into the forbidden zone was to invite a fatal full-intensity blast from a stun gun, no questions asked.

  There was silence in the roller car. Dr. Barnes sat in the front seat, bolt upright between two of the policemen. Jim, Ted Callison, and Dave Ellis were crowded together with a third policeman in the rear seat, while the remaining officer was hunched behind them, his stun gun drawn, its blunt snout tickling their backbones warningly. Jim saw Callison's powerful fists clenching and unclenching in cold, silent fury.

  City Hall loomed up before them, squat and somehow sinister. The roller car halted. More police were waiting there, at least a dozen of them, although by now it was quite late at night.

  "Out," came the crisp order.

  The four prisoners left the roller car, hands held high. The new escort moved in, surrounding them, and the original police drove off. The prisoners were marched into City Hall, and down the brightly lit hallway that Jim had seen five years before.

  He had met Mayor Hawkes then, and had been terrified of the seam-faced, wizened old man who had governed New York for what seemed like all eternity. Then, the Mayor had beamed, had smiled at the class of edgy twelve-year-olds, and had welcomed them all to the city's administrative level.

  Mayor Hawkes would not beam tonight, Jim thought.

  "In here," a frog-voiced policeman said crisply.

  Here turned out to be a square, forbidding little room whose unnaturally bright illumination stung the eyes. There was a raised dais along the far wall, and a low table with a bench behind it. No other furniture broke the starkness of the room. There were three other prisoners there already-Roy Veeder, Dom Hannon, Chet Farrington. The whole group, then-all seven who had gathered around the little radio to hear the squeaky voice from London only a short while before.

  Rounded up! Charged with treason!

  A door slid back out of sight, recessing into the rear wall, and a new group of men entered. Old men. Mayor Hawkes led the way, wearing his official robes of office for the occasion, the blue cloak with the orange trim, the peaked hat, the seal of power dangling from a massive chain around his neck.

  He looked horribly, grotesquely old. He had been Mayor of New York since 2611, thirty-nine years ago, and he had been a middle-aged man when first elected. Every ten years since he had been reelected, and everyone assumed that he would be elected without opposition to a fifth term next year, though he was now nearly ninety. He stood rigidly erect, the light glaring down on his domed, wrinkled forehead, his hook of a nose, his withered cheeks and sharp chin. Humorless pale blue eyes glinted deep in the Mayor's eye sockets.

  Behind him marched the City Council, nine of them, the youngest well past sixty. Like the Mayor, the City Council was supposedly chosen in open election every ten years. But it had been a century or more since anyone had last contested an election. The way the system worked now, a new Councilor was elected only when one of the old ones died-and the stubborn old men never seemed to die. Two of the nine were past the hundred-year mark now, and evidently planned to live forever.

  The ten rulers of New York arrayed themselves along the dais and sat down. Ten pairs of flinty aged eyes peered in hostility at the prisoners, who stood before them.

  Dr. Barnes said, staring straight at the Mayor, "Your Honor, I demand to know the meaning of this arrest."

  "The charge is treason," Mayor Hawkes said in a voice that sounded like a swinging rusty gate. "The seven of you have engaged in activities detrimental to the welfare of New York City, and you stand accused. How do you plead?"

  Jim gasped. His father said, "Is this a trial?"

  "It is."

  "Without lawyers? Without witnesses? Without a judge or a jury?"

  "I understand there is one among you who is a lawyer," the Mayor replied, with a glance at Roy Veeder. "He can speak for you. I am the judge. The Council is the jury. There is no need for anyone else."

  "You know we have the right of independent counsel, Your Honor," Roy Veeder said. "An accused man is entitled-"

  "Never mind, Roy," Dr. Barnes said. "They have us, and we're helpless."

  "No." Veeder shook his head. "I must protest, Your Honor," he said to the Mayor. "This violates the basic charter of the city. Accused men have right of counsel. You are not empowered to conduct a trial, Your Honor! Your powers are executive, not judicial!"

  "Roy's wasting his breath," Ted Callison murmured to Jim. "Those men can do anything they please. This is a trial that was over before it ever began."

  Jim nodded. A sense of hopeless rage stole over him. Those ten willful men up there had ruled the city so long they were convinced of their own infallibility. What did charters, laws, codes mean to them? They were the representatives of the people! They were the rulers!

  The Mayors gaunt, fleshless face grew harsher, more ugly. He glowered at Roy Veeder and said, "Such trial as you will have, you will have here, Counselor Veeder. If you object to the proceedings, you will be removed from the room and tried in absentia. Traitors must be dealt with promptly. It is late at night."

  "Of course," Ted Callison blurted out. "Old men need to get their sleep! Get rid of us fast so you can get to bed!"

  Callison grunted as the snout of a stun gun was rammed into his kidneys. He subsided. There was a chill silence in the room. The Mayor beckoned, and the sliding panel opened again. A policeman walked in-carrying the radio!

  He carried it as though it were a live serpent. He put it down on the table before the Mayor, and backed out of the room.

  The Mayor eyed the square box sourly, then glared at the prisoners. "With this," he said, "you contacted another city. You spoke with men from London. True or false?"

  "True," Roy said.

  "You conspired with them against the welfare of New York City. You plotted the overthrow of the legally constituted government of this city."

  "That's false, Your Honor," Roy said.

  "There is evidence on record against you."

  "Produce it, then! It's an established principle of law that an accused man has the right to be confronted with evidence on which he's been indicted."

  "There is no need of that," the Mayor said, almost to himself. "The evidence exists. We have examined it and discussed it. Traitors! Enemies of the city!"

  "No," Dr. Barnes said. "We are not traitors! I won't deny we've been in contact with London. Dave Ellis, here, has been studying surface conditions with the telemetering equipment. He believes that the Freeze is almost over, that climatic conditions have reversed themselves at last. It's time to come up out of the ground. Time for men to breathe the air again, to walk under the open sky. And so we've tried to reach other cities, to find out what's been happening in the world. All this I freely admit. But treason? No! Enemies of the city? No!"

  "You are trying to disturb the established order of things," the Mayor said cuttingly. "This is treason, and must be punished. You stand condemned by your own words. I call for the verdict, Councilors."

  "Guilty!" came the hoarse croaking sounds of the old men.

  "Guilty!"

  "Guilty!"

  "Guilty!"

  The Mayor's thin lips drew back in a cold smile. "The verdict is guilty," he said. "It is late. Take them away, guards. We will announce the sentence in the morning."

  The trial was over.

  The mockery of justice had lasted less than ten minutes.

  * * *

  Guilty!

  Enemies of the city!

  Jim Barnes paced tensely around the cell that he shared with Roy Veeder, Dave Ellis, and Chet Farrington. His father, Ted Callison, and Dom Hannon were next door.

&
nbsp; The verdict had not surprised him. He had known what the prevailing patterns of thought in the city were, had known that the clandestine radio contact with London might be considered treasonable. What angered him was not the verdict so much as the cynical dispatch with which the "trial" had been conducted. It had been no trial, simply an out-of-hand condemnation by a small group of autocratic, self-centered old dodderers.

  In a few hours sentence would be imposed. Jim wondered what it would be. In the old days, he knew, men had frequently been put to death by their governments for crimes. Thank Heaven that bit of barbarity had gone out with the Dark Ages, he thought. Punishment for crime today was more civilized, though hardly a cheerful matter.

  There were few serious crimes in New York. Since no one had much personal property, theft was all but unknown. Murder was unheard of. Disputes still arose, people frequently lost their tempers-but, in the stable, tightly regulated underground city, there wasn't much scope for wrongdoing. Such serious crimes as were committed were punished, first of all, by loss of parenthood privileges. Every resident of the city was considered to have the right to give life to one child, his own replacement-no more. A criminal might have the right suspended, or even taken away permanently. Then, too, punishments included loss of free-time privileges, demotion to less desirable living quarters, job degradation. Jim wondered if he and his father would be sentenced to a year or two of manning the garbage conduits.

  No, he thought. Somehow he expected a graver sentence.

  The night ticked away. Jim tried to sleep, but it was no use. He boiled with rage. The fear of the Mayor he had felt when he was twelve had given way to hatred now.

  The stupid, stubborn, mindless, tyrannical old man!

  Jim, his father, Ted Callison, and the others had discussed the psychology of the city many times during the long hours of working on the radio. They had all attacked the prevailing attitudes bluntly, as they would not dare to do among strangers.

  "It's a withdrawal pattern," Dr. Barnes had said. "A kind of isolationism. Here we are, snug in our little burrow under the ice, and anybody who wants to climb out of the hole in the ground is obviously a subversive and a traitor."

  "But the underground cities were supposed to be only temporary refuges," Ted Callison had pointed out. "Places for civilization to endure until the ice sheets retreated."

  "Ah, yes!" Dr. Barnes had grinned. "But it's too comfortable down here. The machinery purrs along smoothly, population growth is regulated, every person has his niche in society. There are no troublesome challenges."

  "Like a city full of ostriches," Chet Farrington said. And then, seeing the blank faces, he added in explanation, "A large flightless bird. It hides its head in the sand when it's faced with trouble it doesn't want to see."

  It was true, Jim thought. The builders of the underground cities have done their work well, and the cities would endure for thousands of years. There was no need to venture up to the frozen surface. Why look for trouble? Why-to use an expression long since obsolete-why rock the boat?

  Even in a city where boats were unknown, the expression had meaning. Ted Callison and Dr. Barnes and Jim and the others were boat-rockers. They were not content to live out their lives placidly underground. They yearned to return to the surface world, now that the ice had reached its peak spread and was beginning to retreat. They longed to see that strange world above, to explore its vastness. It was time to reach out for contact with survivors in other cities-if any.

  The world had begun to grow cold about the year 2200. It had started gradually, with an ever-so-slight drop in the annual mean temperature all over the world. For several centuries prior to that, the world had been growing warmer, and the idea of a Fifth Ice Age had seemed fantastic-until it began to happen.

  Four times in the geologically recent past, the last million years, glaciers had descended on the world. Many ingenious theories had been offered to explain those glacial periods. Changes in the solar radiation, increases or decreases in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, variations in the temperature of the Arctic Ocean-all these theories had been put forth, and each had its advocates.

  In 2200, the world again began to grow cold.

  The change was stealthy. Winters were longer by a few days each year. In parts of the world where the warmth of spring once had come by the middle of March, it did not come until early April. The summers were cooler. Where snow had previously fallen no earlier than late November, it began to fall in October, then in late September. The snow was more abundant, too.

  In the arctic regions, summer disappeared altogether after a while. There was no midyear warmth to melt the winter snows. The ice accumulated, hundreds of feet thick across the top of the world, and as the weight increased, the ice began to flow. Glaciers-rivers of ice-crept southward across Canada, and down out of Scandinavia into Europe.

  "The winters are getting colder," people said, but it was twenty years before anyone realized that a major trend was under way. Each year the mean temperature was a fraction of a degree lower than it had been the year before. Some villages of Alaska, Canada, and Sweden had to be evacuated as the glaciers crept down toward them.

  By 2230, everyone knew what was happening, and why. The sun and all its planets, it was found, as they moved together through the universe had been engulfed by a vast cloud of cosmic debris, and an all but infinite number of dust motes were screening and blocking the sun's radiation from Earth. To the eye, everything still looked the same; the sky was just as blue, the clouds as fleecy. The cosmic dust could not be seen, but its effect could be felt. Invisible, it shrouded the sun, cut off the golden warmth. And so immense was the cloud that it would take centuries for the Solar System to pass entirely though it!

  An Ice Age would result.

  The temperature of Earth would continue to drop. Not drastically, true. Just enough to insure that more snow fell every winter than could be melted in the warm months. As the accumulations built up, glaciers would crawl out of the north, other glaciers would lick the tip of South America and rise from Patagonia. Half the world would be buried beneath the ice.

  There were plans aplenty for halting the glaciers, of course. Atomic-powered heating plants were suggested. Melt the ice, funnel it into the sea!

  The plans were tested, run off by simulator computers. Ten years of study culminated in the melancholy realization that man was powerless against the advancing ice. Proud twenty-third-century man, lord of creation, was powerless!

  It would take every bit of fissionable material in the world to defeat the ice. Such gigantic quantities of water would be liberated that the seas of the world would rise six to ten feet, drowning the world's greatest cities. The radiation products from the atomic heaters would poison man's environment.

  Nothing could hold back the ice. Nothing!

  People began to flee. The ice shield ground inexorably down, and mass migrations began, millions of people heading southward before the white front of the invader. Naturally, everyone wanted to settle in those countries that would not feel the brunt of the glaciation, the countries along the Equator. Brazil, the Congo, Nigeria, Algeria, India, Indonesia-these became the new powers of the world. Russia, China, the United States all were crippled by the cold. The tropical lands, though, benefited. Their climate grew cool and moist, pleasant, ideal for agriculture and industrialization. Rain fell in the Sahara; the desert bloomed. Wheat fields sprouted in the Amazon basin.

  The tropical countries closed their doors to immigrants. "We do not need you," they told the refugees from the North. "We do not want you."

  The highly industrialized, powerful new nations along the waistline of the world were strong enough to make their isolationist policies stick. Despair and dismay swept the people of the once-temperate zones. Thousands perished in riots-food riots, work riots, and motiveless riots of sheer fright and anguish. The birth rates dropped, for who would bring children into a world of gathering cold, a world without food? In a single thir
ty-year span, the population of the United States fell from 280,000,000 to 240,000,000-and it kept on falling.

  Since there was no way to roll back the ice, one could only hide from it. The nations of the glacier-menaced countries began to go underground. Self-contained, atomic-powered cities were built, capable of surviving under the ice for an indefinite length of time. Twenty such cities were built in the United States, and they were given time-hallowed names like Chicago and Boston, Philadelphia and New York, Detroit and Washington, even though they were usually far from the sites of those surface cities. In Europe, too, many cities went underground.

  Not everyone chose to go down into the ground. Many decided to try their luck as wanderers, roaming the face of the storm-blasted world in the hopes that the nations of the warm belt would relent and take them in.

  The new cities were built slowly, and with care. There was no real hurry, since the ice was advancing only a few miles a year. The underground city of New York was ready for occupancy in the year 2297, about a century after the Earth had entered the cloud of cosmic dust By that time, only a million and a half people were left in New York; millions had already fled the increasingly bitter winters, only to cluster helplessly at the closed southern borders. The new underground city was built to hold eight hundred thousand. Less than five hundred thousand New Yorkers agreed to take refuge there. They city was sealed, and the ice covered it.

  And now it was 2650 a.d., and the underground cities were more than three hundred years old. They slumbered under a mile-high blanket of ice. They had long since lost contact with one another, and by now all such contact was taboo. The New Yorkers, whose number had grown to 800,000 and then had been fixed there by law, were warm and happy in their underground hive. Who cared for the outside world? Why go back to that vale of tears?