Time of the Great Freeze

by Robert Silverberg

  "Listen to it!" Carl whispered. "Little drops of water falling! Like a hundred drums!"

  The power torch had bitten a gouge twenty feet high and six or seven feet across into the ice plug. It held firm.

  Dave Ellis said, "Someone left the city at the turn of the century. That fellow Stanton that Roy mentioned. We haven't found any bones along the way, so he must have come at least this far. Therefore the ice above us is less than a sixty-year accumulation."

  "How thick would that be, Dave?" Dr. Barnes asked.

  Ellis shook his head. "There are five or six feet of snow a year in these parts now. But the question isn't so much the amount that falls as the amount that doesn't melt. The year-to-year accumulation may be as much as a couple of feet-or it could be less."

  "So we may have fifty to a hundred feet of ice above us," Dr. Barnes said. "All right. Everybody pull up hoods. We're going to get wet."

  He gripped the power torch again, and this time aimed it straight overhead. The lambent glow of the torch turned the tunnel bright; another slice of ice disappeared; cold droplets of rain showered down on the roofless elevator. Jim shivered, but grinned all the same, and turned his face upward to the rain. He saw Ted Callison, hoodless, all but capering in the icy shower.

  The beam licked out again. And again. Thirty feet of air space gaped above them where a few moments before there had been a roof of ice. But the ice seemed as thick, as dark as ever. What if it were half a mile thick? A mile?

  "Lift the elevator twenty feet, Ted," Dr. Barnes ordered. "I'm getting out of range."

  The elevator rose slowly. The power torch flared again. Rain showered down. Up. Up.

  Then the torch spurted cold fire, there was a sudden sizzle, and chunks of ice began to hail down on them, chunks six inches, a foot across.

  "The plug's breaking!" Jim yelled, shielding himself from the massive chunks.

  A moment later, the fall ceased. "Everyone okay?" Dr. Barnes asked. "I went right through the roof. Look up!"

  Jim looked. And gasped.

  The plug was broken. Fragments of ice still clung to the sides of the tunnel, but there was a gaping hole twenty feet across, through which could be seen a flat swath of blackness, and little dots of light so sharp and hard they hurt the eyes, and the edge of a great gleaming thing, painfully bright. The night sky! The stars! The moon!

  "Hoist the elevator, Ted," Dr. Barnes yelled. "Hoist it! Were at the surface! We've made it!"

  4

  THE WHITE DESERT

  It was a silent world of blinding whiteness.

  It was a cold world.

  Jim hoisted himself over the rim of the tunnel mouth, stepped into the new world, and fought back a surge of panic as he saw the magnitude of it all. Even at night, even by moonlight, it was possible to see how the flat ice sheet spread out to the horizon. It was a numbing, breath-taking sight for anyone who had spent his whole life in tunnels hardly higher than his head.

  And the whiteness of it! The fierce dazzle of the moonlight as it bounced and glittered from the fields of snow!

  The world blazed. It sparkled. It shimmered with light.

  One by one, the men were coming up out of the tunnel. Carl emerged, and cringed in disbelief at the immensity of the ice field. He put his hands to his eyes, shielding them against the glare of the moon and the stars, and hastily donned his goggles.

  "It's cold," he whispered. "So cold!"

  Dave Ellis appeared, looking tense and apprehensive. Roy Veeder, Chet Farrington, Dom Hannon. Dr. Barnes. Then Ted Callison, even his high spirits dampened by the sudden emergence into the world. The eight stood together, uncertain, confused.

  Jim knelt. He touched the ground-gingerly, for he remembered how the ice had burned. What he touched was stingingly cold, but he was prepared for the shock this time.

  "See," he said. "There's white powder everywhere."

  "Snow," Dave Ellis said. "Six, seven inches of snow lying on the ice. It's springtime. Most of the winter snow has melted and refrozen, and become part of the glacier." He kicked at the fluffy snow, sending a cloud of it into the air. "There's just this little layer of snow on top."

  Ted Callison bent, gathered snow in both hands, sent it soaring into the air. The flakes floated down, shining like diamonds in the bright moonlight. He scooped again, and showers of snow cascaded down.

  "Careful," Dr. Barnes said. "Put your gloves on. Your skin isn't designed for these temperatures."

  "How cold do you think it is, anyway, Dad?" Jim asked.

  "Dave can tell you that."

  The meteorologist had already started to examine his thermometer. He was carrying what amounted to a portable weather station, snug in his parka.

  "Not too bad," he reported after a moment. "It's twenty-two above zero. It may even be above freezing by morning. It's a fine spring night."

  Jim shivered. A scything gust of wind swept down on them, and seemed to cut through his bulky clothes as though they were gauze. A lucky thing they were making this trip in spring, he thought. In winter, Dave said, the temperature ranged between forty below zero and ten above. Forty below! The mere thought of it made his teeth chatter.

  But he was warm in a little while, as they busied themselves breaking out the jet-sleds and bundling their belongings aboard. There was nowhere they could go until morning; the energy accumulators of the sleds were solar-powered, and had long since run down, so that a couple of hours of charging by daylight would be necessary before they could get going. And morning was still three or four hours away.

  Roy Veeder and Ted Callison pitched a tent, and some of them settled down to wait for sunrise. Jim was still too restless to sleep. He had had nothing but quick naps for the past two days, and fatigue made his red-rimmed eyes raw and foggy, but the wonder of the white new world burned the sleep from him, and left him throbbing with excitement, tense as a coiled spring.

  He walked away from the group, moving cautiously, his booted feet sinking half a foot or more into the loose, drifting snow before they struck the reassuring solidity of the glacier beneath. The cold air assailed his lungs, stung his nostrils. But it was a joy to breathe it. There was a freshness about it that dizzied him; it was as tangy and sweet as new wine. He halted in the snow, a hundred feet from his party, and looked out across the wasteland of ice.

  It was flat, a vast plateau. Once, he knew, there had been rolling farmland here, hills and valleys, tree-clad hummocks, winding brooks cutting through the fields. He had seen the pictures of the world as it had been, so that he had some idea of what all those abstract concepts meant, those empty words, "hill" and "valley," "tree" and "brook." For more than three hundred years no New Yorker had seen hill or valley, tree or brook.

  And none would now, Jim thought. The glacier, that great leveler, had drawn its white bulk over everything, smothering the world like a vast all-embracing beast. Here, in what had been the eastern part of the United States, the mile-thick ice sheet had created a uniform flatland. Jim knew that somewhere, thousands of miles to the west, the bare fangs of giant mountains stuck out high above the ice, but not here. The highest natural features in this part of the country were no more than fifteen hundred or two thousand feet high, and they were gone, buried without a trace, without causing so much as a bulge in the surface of the glacier.

  When the ice finally retreated, the raw, wounded land would be revealed. The glacier, sluggishly rolling down, had scraped topsoil and landmarks away, pushed them far to the south, deposited them in the terminal moraines, the great heaps of rubble that marked the southern border of the ice field. The land that one day would be freed from the glaciers grip would bear little resemblance to the thriving, populous zone of cities and towns that it had been, centuries ago.

  And there, to the east-there the continent sloped off to meet the sea, or what had been the sea before the world grew cold. Was the Atlantic frozen? Would they be able to make the three-thousand-mile crossing safely, on pack ice? They would know soon enough, Jim
thought. If the sleds worked, it would be only a short journey to the shore zone.

  Footsteps crunched in the snow behind him. Jim turned.

  "Hello, Carl. Big, isn't it?"

  "Terrifying."

  "Wish you had stayed in New York?"

  "No," Carl said. "I'm glad I came."

  Jim said, "Do you always do things on the spur of the moment like that, Carl?"

  Carl chuckled. "Not really. It was just that-well, I'd been wondering for a long time: Was I doing anything important with my life? I mean, being a policeman. I hadn't taken any real training for any kind of profession, so I guess it was my own fault. But even though policemen are necessary in society, you don't get much feeling that you're contributing anything."

  "I don't know," Jim said. "Somebody's got to maintain order."

  "I suppose. But the job was boring me. I felt restless. And then, after my father died, I had no family left, no ties in New York. Things were hatching in me. And then suddenly I knew what I wanted to do. To get out, to join your group, to see the upper world." Carl stamped his feet, rubbed his gloved hands together. Cold was turning his cheeks cherry red. "But tell me, Jim-"

  "What?"

  "Where are we going? What's this all about? Everything happened so fast." He grinned embarrassedly. "I don't really have any idea of what's up."

  "We're going to London," Jim said. "We're going to cross the Atlantic ice."

  "London? That's a million miles away!"

  "Only three thousand, or so," Jim said.

  "That's the same as a million, the way I look at it But what's in London?"

  "People. People like those in New York."

  "Then why go to them?"

  "Because New York doesn't want us," Jim said. "Mayor Hawkes and the Council tossed us out because we made radio contact with London. You know what radio is?"

  Carl nodded.

  "We talked to someone in London," Jim said. "He agreed with us that it was time to start coming out of the ground. Well, they got him. Roy thinks they killed him, and he's probably right. But we can't go on living in burrows. The ice is retreating."

  "Is it?" Carl asked in surprise. "It doesn't look that way!"

  "Maybe not here," Jim said. "But Dave says the worst is over. He's a meteorologist, you know. His studies show that the temperature trend started to reverse itself about fifty years ago. The Earth is coming out of the dust cloud. Things are warming up. In another hundred or hundred and fifty years the ice may be gone from the United States."

  "A hundred and fifty years! Then why should we be concerned?"

  "Because," Jim said, "the time to start preparing is now. We've got to start exploring the surface again, to get the city people ready to live in the open. We have to plan ahead two or even three generations-just as they planned two generations ahead when they first built the underground cities. Only the Mayor didn't want to look that far ahead. If we left things up to him, nobody would ever come aboveground again, not even if North America turned into the Garden of Eden!"

  "I think I understand," Carl said. "Or maybe not. Anyway, I'm glad I'm here. It isn't everybody who gets to see what the world is like. Look at that moon! Look at it!"

  Jim looked. He tingled in awe at the sight of that pockmarked round face, so blazing bright in the cold, black sky. Once, he knew, men had reached for the moon. Men had walked its dead surface. Mars, Venus-they had been reached, too. No one in New York knew what had happened to man's space dominion. Did the people of the tropical countries fly back and forth to the worlds of space every day? Or had the ice reached them too, finally, and choked off all thoughts but those of survival?

  Jim turned his glance from the moon, back to the field of ice, to the white desert that stretched as far as eye could see in every direction. He scuffed at the snow, and watched it leap and scatter. And he kicked at the glacier, the obstinate mass of frozen water that had driven man from his domain.

  "It's going to be quite a trip," he said quietly, as he and Carl trudged back to the tent.

  * * *

  It was Carl who first saw the sun.

  "It's morning!" he yelled. "The sun is rising!"

  Jim realized he had slept after all. He found himself lying in a corner of the tent with somebody-Dom Hannon, it developed-sprawled across his legs. Getting to his feet, lie found himself stiff and sore, every joint protesting against the cold. There was a general race for the exit from the tent.

  "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."