Time of the Great Freeze Read online

  Set in the Ice Age of 2300 a.d., when cities have gone completely underground and where the inhabitants have lived for centuries under heavy layers of ice, science fiction has been skillfully merged with science fact to come up with a gripping adventure story of the first few men to explore the earth when the ice begins to melt. How they manage to survive the constant battles against danger and fear as they cross the mighty ocean of ice provides a highly dramatic tale.

  To Everett Orr

  1

  CITY UNDER THE ICE

  It was late in the day-or what passed for day in the underground city of New York. Pale lights glimmered in the corridors of Level C. Figures moved quietly down the long hallway. At this hour, most New Yorkers were settling down for a quiet, restful evening.

  Jim Barnes paused in front of a sturdy door in the residential section of Level C, and rapped smartly with his knuckles. He waited a moment, running his hand tensely through his thick shock of bright red hair. The door opened, after a long moment, and a short, blocky figure appeared. It was Ted Callison, whose room this was.

  "Jim. Come on in. We've already made contact."

  "I got here as soon as I could," Jim said. "Is my father here yet?"

  "Ten minutes ago. Everyone's here. We've got London on the wireless."

  Jim stepped into the room. Callison closed the door behind him and dogged it shut. Jim stood there a moment, a tall, rangy boy of seventeen, deceptively slender, for he was stronger than he looked.

  Half a dozen faces confronted the newcomer. Jim knew them all well. His father, Dr. Raymond Barnes, was there. Chunky Ted Callison, capable in his field of electronics. Nimble-witted, blue-eyed Roy Veeder, one of the city's cleverest lawyers. Dom Hannon, small and wiry, whose specialty was the study of languages, philology. Brawny, muscular Chet Farrington, he of the legendary appetite, a zoologist by profession. And Dave Ellis, plump and short, a meteorologist, who studied the changing weather of the world far above the city.

  Six men. Jim, who was studying to be a hydroponics engineer, learning how to grow plants without soil or sun, was the seventh. Jim's heart pounded. What these men were doing was illegal, almost blasphemous-and he was one of them, he was part of the group, he shared the risk as an equal partner.

  For six months now they had been meeting here in Ted Callison's room. At first, their goal had seemed hopeless, a wild dream. But the months had passed, and through long nights of toil they had put the radio equipment back into working order after decades on the shelf, and now…

  "Speak up, New York!" a tinny voice cried out of nowhere. "We can barely hear you! Speak up, I say!"

  "It's London," Roy Veeder murmured to Jim.

  London! At last-contact with another city!

  Like a priest before some strange idol Ted Callison crouched by the table and feverishly adjusted dials, Callison, whose broad face and ruddy light-brown skin told of his American Indian descent, was probably the best electronics technician in New York-which wasn't really saying too much. It was he who had restored the set to working order. Now he desperately manipulated the controls, trying to screen out interference.

  Dr. Barnes grasped the microphone so tightly his knuckles whitened, and he leaned forward to speak. A historian by profession and something of a rebel by temperament, he was as thin as his son, but an astonishingly deep voice rumbled out of him: "London, this is New York calling. Do you hear us better now? Do you hear us?"

  "We hear you, New York. Your accent is hard to understand, but we hear you!"

  "This is Raymond Barnes, London. Barnes. I spoke last week with a Thomas Whitcomb."

  A pause. Then:

  "He is dead, Raymond Barnes," came London's answer, the words clipped and almost incomprehensible.

  "Dead?"

  "He died yesterday. It was by mischance… accident. He was found by…" The signal faded out, buried by noise. Callison toiled frenziedly with his controls. "…am Noel Hunt, his cousin," came a blurp of sound unexpectedly. "What do you want, New York?"

  "Why… to talk!" Dr. Barnes said in surprise. "It's hundreds of years since the last contact between London and New York!"

  "… did not hear you…"

  "Hundred of years since the last contact! No record of contact since twenty-three hundred!"

  "We have tried to reach you by wireless," the Londoner said. "There has never been any response."

  "Now there is! Listen to me, Noel Hunt. We think the ice is retreating! We think it's time for man to come up out of these caves! Do you hear what I say, London?"

  "I hear you, New York." The London voice sounded suddenly wary. "Have you been to the surface yet?"

  "Not yet. But we're going to go! We hope to visit you, London! To cross the Atlantic!"

  "To visit us? Why?"

  "So that contact between cities can be restored."

  "Perhaps it is best this way," the Londoner said slowly. "We… we are content this way."

  "If you don't want contact," Dr. Barnes said, "why did you build the radio set?"

  "I did not build it. My cousin Thomas Whitcomb built it. He had… different ideas. He is… dead now…"

  The set sputtered into incoherence.

  "He's saying something!" Jim cried.

  Callison scowled, stood up. "We've lost the signal," he said bitterly. There was sudden silence in the room. "I'll try again. But he didn't sound very friendly."

  "No," Dr. Barnes said. "He sounded… frightened, almost."

  "Maybe someone was monitoring him," suggested Dave Ellis, the short, plump meteorologist. "Maybe he was afraid to say what was on his mind."

  "Whitcomb was much more encouraging," Dr. Barnes said.

  "Whitcomb's dead," Jim pointed out. "He was killed in an accident."

  "I doubt that," Roy Veeder said, in the precise, clipped tones of one who has spent much of his time droning through the dry formalities of the law. "It sounds to me as though Whitcomb were murdered."

  Jim stared at the lawyer in shock. "You mean killed deliberately?"

  Veeder smiled. "I mean exactly that. I know, it's a strange concept to us. But things like that happened in the old chaotic world up above. And they may still happen in London. I don't think it was an accident. The Londoner was trying to tell us something else. Someone may have deliberately removed Whitcomb. I'm certain that's what he was saying."

  Dr. Barnes shrugged. "That may be as may be." He glanced at Callison and said, "Any hope of restoring transmission?"

  "I don't think so, Doc. It's dead at the other end. I'm not picking up a thing."

  "Try some other channels," Chet Farrington suggested, crossing and recrossing his long legs.

  "What's the use? No one else is broadcasting."

  "Try, at least," Farrington urged.

  Callison knelt and began to explore the air waves. After a moment he looked up, his face tense, a muscle flicking in his cheek. "It's a waste of time," he said darkly. "And the air in here stinks! Open that vent a little wider. Seven people and only air enough for two!"

  Jim moved toward the vent control. As he started to turn it, his father said simply, "Don't, Jim."

  "Ted's right, Dad. The air's bad in here."

  "That's okay, Jim. But we don't really want people to know we're meeting, do we? If the computer registers a sudden extra air flow in Ted's room, and somebody bothers to check, we may all have to answer questions."

  Callison balled his fist menacingly and shook it at the air vent. "You see?" he demanded of nobody in particular. "We aren't even free to breathe down here! Oh, I can't wait to get out! To see the surface, to fill my lungs with real air!"

  "It's cold up there, Ted," Dom Hannon said.

  "But it's getting warmer!" Callison r
etorted. "Ask Dave! He'll tell you it's warming up!"

  Dave Ellis smiled thinly. "The mean surface temperature is about one degree warmer than it was fifty years ago," he said. "It's warming up there, but not very fast."

  "Fast enough," Callison growled. His thick-muscled, powerful body seemed to throb at the injustice of being cooped in a man-made cave far below the surface of the earth. "I want to get out of here," he muttered. "Bad enough that my ancestors were penned down on reservations. But to be boxed up in a little hive underground, to live your whole life without seeing the sky and the clouds…"

  "All right," Dave Ellis said with a snort of amused annoyance. "If he's talking about his ancestors, it's time for us to break up for the night. Next thing he'll be painting his face and trying to scalp us, and…"

  "Shut your mouth!" Callison erupted. He whirled, amazingly fast for such a thick-set, stocky man, and grabbed the meteorologist by the shoulders. He began to shake him violently. Ellis' head joggled as though it were going to fly loose from its moorings. "I've had enough sarcasm from you!" Callison cried. "If you want to spend the rest of your life huddled like a worm down here, that's all right with me, but-"

  "Easy," Ellis gasped. "You're… hurting… me…"

  A figure stepped between them and easily separated them-Dr. Barnes, looking fragile but determined as he pushed the chunky Callison away. "Enough of that, Ted," he said quietly.

  "It's the air in here," Roy Veeder said crisply. "Stale air makes tempers short."

  Dave Ellis rubbed his shoulders ruefully. Still looking angry, Ted Callison began to twiddle the dials of the radio once again, his hands moving in brusque, deliberately jerky gestures.

  Jim felt a throb of sympathy for him. The staleness of the air had little to do with the shortness of the tempers in the room, Jim knew. No, it was the tension, the frustration of coming together night after night, of wearily trying to reach someone-anyone-in the outside world, the dull bleak knowledge that you and your descendants to the tenth or twentieth generation were all condemned to spend your lives far under ground, hiding from the ice that had conquered the world. The glaciers that covered the surface were like hands at every man's throat.

  Callison shut the power off, after a moment. "Nothing," he said. "We've had our talk with London for tonight."

  "Too bad about Whitcomb," Ellis said. He seemed genuinely interested in hearing from us."

  "Maybe his cousin is, too," Jim offered. "But he sounded so suspicious… so uneasy."

  "Why shouldn't he be?" Callison asked. "Put yourself in his place. You get hold of a radio set that somebody else builds, and you pick up signals from a city nobody's heard from in hundreds of years. They talk about friendship, but do you trust them? Do you trust anybody? Suppose this other city is just out to attack you? Lull you into confidence, then steal your nuclear fuel supplies? You never can tell."

  "Tom Whitcomb seemed to trust us," Jim said.

  "And they must have killed him," Callison said. "I'm sure Roy's right about that. He probably went running to the City Council, or whatever they call it there, and said he had picked up radio signals from New York-so they slit his throat right away, naturally. Men like that are dangerous. They're troublemakers."

  Dr. Barnes sighed. "We aren't getting anywhere," he said. "Ted, will you keep trying for an hour or so? If you pick up London again-or anyplace else-let us know."

  "Right."

  "As for the rest of us," Dr. Barnes said, "we might as well just go back to our rooms."

  The group broke up. Jim and his father strode off toward the room they shared, three sections eastward on Level C. Neither of them said much as they walked through the cool, dimly lit corridors. It had been too disappointing an evening to discuss. Hopes that had been high only an hour ago were dashed now.

  They had made radio contact with the Londoner, Whitcomb, last week. He had seemed intelligent, alert, a man who enjoyed being alive, a bold and fearless man who welcomed the voice out of the dark. He was dead now. The new voice on the radio had been a more familiar kind of voice, Jim thought-the cramped, edgy voice of fear and mistrust. He knew that kind of voice well.

  "It was a pretty rough night, eh, Dad?" Jim said finally, as they reached their room.

  "I had hoped for better results," Dr. Barnes admitted. He put his hand to the doorplate, and the sensors recognized his prints. The door yielded. They went in.

  The room was small and low of ceiling. There was no space for luxury dwellings in New York. This was not the New York of skyscrapers and stock exchanges, but an underground hive a hundred miles inland from the old Atlantic coastline, a nest of interlocking tunnels going down deep into the crust of the Earth. Eight hundred thousand people lived here. The population had not varied so much as one percentage point in three hundred years. It was not allowed to vary. Limiting population was easier than building new tunnels; no laws were more strictly enforced in the underground cities than those controlling population growth.

  The room that Jim shared with his father was occupied mostly with microfilmed books, hundred of reels of them. They belonged to the Central Library-private property was a rarity in underground New York-and Dr. Barnes had nearly filled the room with them. He was writing a history of the twenty-third century, the century in which the Fifth Ice Age came to engulf much of the earth.

  Hardly had they closed the door when there came a knock at it. Jim and his father exchanged glances.

  "I'll get it, Dad," Jim said.

  He opened the door. Ted Callison and Dave Ellis stood there, side by side as though all memory of their recent scuffle had been blotted out.

  "What is it?" Jim asked. "Did you pick up London again?"

  "No," Callison said. "They've shut down for the night, I guess. Dave and I had an idea, though."

  They came in. Dr. Barnes picked up a reel of microfilm, put it down, picked up another, and then another. After a moment of tense silence Dave Ellis said, "Ted and I have decided that radio isn't the right way to reach the Londoners."

  "Oh?" Dr. Barnes said.

  Callison said, "This way, we're just voices out of nowhere. What we've got to do is go to them. Get up out of the ground and cross the ice and say, 'Here we are, time to thaw out!' The Ice Age is ending. The worst of the freeze is over. We can risk an over-the-ice mission to Europe."

  "He's right!" Jim blurted. "Dad, that's the best way."

  "It's more than three thousand miles to London," Dr. Barnes said. "No one has made the trip in centuries. No one has left New York in fifty years, even to go to a spot as near as Philadelphia."

  "Someone has to start it, Dad!"

  "Another point," Dr. Barnes said. "It's taboo to contact other cities. You know that. What we've been doing goes against the whole way of life down here. You don't seriously expect the City Council to welcome the idea of an expedition, do you?"

  Ellis said, "We're not asking them to go. Just to let us go, Dr. Barnes. To outfit us with such equipment as they can give us for the expedition. With a little help, we can make it to London. We can-"

  There was another knock at the door. Jim frowned; his father gestured with a thumb, and Jim went to open it. Somehow, irrationally, he was expecting trouble, and trouble was there-in the form of four husky young men wearing the brassards of the police.

  Jim knew one of them, at least slightly. He was Carl Bolin, a broad-shouldered, blond-haired young man, whose father, Peter Bolin, had been a hydroponics technician and instructor. Jim had studied with the elder Bolin the previous year, and had met Carl several times. Only a few months before, Jim had been saddened by Peter Bolin's death, and had sent condolences to Carl. And now here Carl was with three of his police comrades, and not here to visit, either. He looked both sheepish and grim at the same time, as though he were embarrassed by his mission and yet determined to carry it out.

  One of the other policemen stepped forward. "Dr. Barnes? I'm sorry to say, you're under arrest. Also your son James. I'm instructed to take you to City Co
uncil headquarters." His hand went to the butt of his stun gun in a meaningful gesture. "I hope you'll surrender peacefully, sir."

  A second policeman eyed Callison and Ellis. "Your names?" he demanded.

  "Ted Callison."

  "Dave Ellis."

  "Very convenient, finding you two here. We've got warrants for both of you, also. Come along."

  Jim saw Ted Callison's muscles tensing under his thin green shirt, and realized that the hothead was likely to cause trouble. Quietly, Jim reached out and caught Callison's thick wrist, encircling it with his fingers and squeezing until he heard Ted grunt.

  "Don't do anything," Jim murmured.

  Callison subsided, grumbling under his breath.

  Dr. Barnes said, "We're entitled to know the nature of the charges against us, aren't we?"

  The first policeman nodded somberly. "The charge is treason, Dr. Barnes."

  2

  ENEMIES OF THE CITY

  Down, down, down!

  Down through the coiling intestines of the underground city, down through level after level, down past the last residential level to the industrial levels, and then still down, down to Level M in the depths of the city, the administrative level where no one went except on official business.

  Here, the great computer that co-ordinated the life of the city ticked and throbbed. Here, the master controls of the city were housed: the water-recycling factory and the air plant and the food-processing laboratories and the hydroponics sheds. Here, too, was City Hall, where the Mayor and his nine Councilors ran the city.

  Jim had been here once, when he was twelve, on a school trip. Every civics class came here once to be shown the heart and core of New York. He had seen, and he had been awed. Now he was here again-a prisoner.

  The gleaming shell of the elevator came to a halt.

  "Out," the police ordered.

  Out, and down a shining ramp, and into a waiting roller car that ran along a track down a wide corridor, through looping curves of hallway. Dimly visible to left and to right were bulky power plants and mysterious installations, flat against the low ceiling. A faint humming sound, ominous and persistent, assailed Jim's ears. The deep booming thum-thum thum-thum thum-thum of the generators set a rhythm for his own thumping heart. Every narrow corridor intersecting the main one bore a glowing sign: