Time of the Great Freeze Read online

  Taboo!

  Taboo to repair one of the old radio sets. Taboo to seek contact with another city. Taboo to dream of a day when men would again walk aboveground, under the warm yellow sun.

  The Earth was growing warmer again, unless the instruments Dave Ellis used had lied. It was time to be stirring, time to go forth. But…

  Taboo!

  Jim Barnes looked up at the roof of his cell, only a foot or so above his head. He stood six feet two, no height for a man who lived underground. The walls and low ceilings oppressed him. He yearned to be out.

  The cell door whirred open. Morning had come.

  "This way," the policeman said.

  "What about breakfast?" Chet Farrington asked.

  "We've got no food for the likes of you here! Just come with us!"

  The prisoners assembled in the corridor. Jim nodded good morning to his father, who rather grimly smiled a greeting. The shadows under Dr. Barnes's eyes showed that he, too, had slept little.

  They were marched down the hall, into the room where the "trial" had been held the night before. The Mayor and his Council had already gathered. The prisoners took their places, lined up before the parchment-skinned oldsters.

  Mayor Hawkes rose to his feet, swaying a little. His voice, though, was steady.

  He said, "You are dangerous men. You threaten the security of the entire city. What are we to do with you? To put you to death would be an atrocity. To keep you here, though, would be extremely foolish. One does not store live bombs in one's own home." A mirthless smile played over the thin, pale lips. "What to do with you?" the Mayor repeated. "What to do with you? We have deliberated for hours. And we have reached our decision."

  He paused, and the cold blue eyes raked the row of silent prisoners.

  He said, "Dr. Barnes, you have told me of your great wish to contact other cities, to explore the surface world. Very well. You shall have your wish. I sentence all of you to expulsion from New York City. You are to leave the city within twelve hours. If you return, you will be treated as enemy invaders, which is to say you will be put to death."

  Ted Callison laughed. "Why not just throw us into the atomic reactor and get it over with quickly? It's a faster death than sending us outside, isn't it?"

  "I thought you and your group were eager to see the outside world," the Mayor said coolly.

  "In a properly equipped expedition, yes. Not cast forth helpless!" Callison retorted.

  Mayor Hawkes looked positively benevolent. "Did I say we would send you out of here naked? That would be a death sentence, and we do not have the death sentence here. You will be properly equipped, all of you. If you perish on the surface, it will not be our fault. We are not cruel men. We have the safety of the city foremost in our minds-and so you must leave. But we are not cruel men." The Mayor laughed, almost a senile giggle. Then he sat down. He waved his hand petulantly. "Take them away," he snapped. "They have twelve hours to get out!"

  3

  TO THE SURFACE!

  "Its on the books," Dr. Barnes said. "Expulsion from the city is the punishment for a crime against the city."

  "But that law hasn't been enforced in decades," Dave Ellis said. "When was the last expulsion, anyway?"

  "Twenty-five ninety-three," Roy Veeder said. "It's an historic case. I studied it in law school. A man named Stanton was expelled for advocating that everybody ought to have as many children as he wanted. That was the last one. What's more, it's the last time anybody left New York, voluntarily or otherwise-in fifty-seven years!"

  "We'll die out there," Dave Ellis muttered.

  "What makes you so sure?" Jim snapped at him. "Just last evening, you were all set to go on an expedition to the surface!"

  Ellis shook his head. The pudgy meteorologist was downcast and fearful now. He knotted his plump fingers together tensely. "I was talking about a proper expedition," he said. "One that had months of planning. Surveys of the surface to test conditions up there. Special equipment. And now, here they are, just throwing us out. Poof! Twelve hours to plan the whole thing!"

  Dr. Barnes said, "We'll manage, somehow. There's no sense giving up in advance. Pull yourself together, Dave!"

  Ted Callison nodded. "We'll make it!" he said fiercely. "We'll make it all the way to London. Three thousand miles-what's that? If we can hike twenty miles a day we can get there in less than six months!"

  "Why go all the way to London?" Dom Hannon asked, nervously fingering his thinning hair. "There are cities closer at hand. Boston. Philadelphia."

  "We don't know anything about them," Jim said. "For all we can tell, everyone's been dead in those cities for two hundred years. We couldn't raise them on the radio. At least we know London's alive. We've talked to people there. Ted's right: we'll have to try to make it to London."

  "Three thousand miles," Dave Ellis murmured feebly. "It isn't possible!"

  "We're going to make it possible," Ted Callison said.

  One thing, at least, could be said for the Mayor and the City Councilors: they were not deliberately trying to send the condemned men to their deaths. They were willing to supply the outcasts with whatever New York City had available in the way of survival equipment. Which was not very much. No one had been out of the city since before the turn of the century, and the warm clothing, the tents, the signal flares, and all the rest of the surface-going materiel had been stored as museum pieces.

  In the hours that remained to them, Jim and his father and the rest of their group rummaged desperately through the storehouse on Level M, taking what they thought they would need. The Councilors were kind enough, at least, to let them take their radio. New York had no need of such things.

  It was only now, in the final hours before leaving New York City, that Jim began to realize what a slim chance of survival they all had. Not one of them had ever been exposed to weather below sixty-eight degrees, for the temperature in the underground city was never allowed to fall below that point. None of them had ever covered a distance of more than a mile on foot, for there was nowhere to walk any great length in the city of tunnels. None of them had hunted for food. None of them had any experience at all in the techniques of survival under adverse conditions.

  Well be babes in the woods, Jim thought.

  No help for it now. They would simply have to learn survival as they went along-or else.

  The day was drawing to its close by the time they had assembled their equipment. The two prizes were a pair of jet-sleds that could each seat five men comfortably, plus baggage. At least they would not have to cross the trackless wastes on foot! A search through the city archives produced an instruction manual for the sleds; they had a copy made.

  Knives, hatchets, tinned provisions and a six-month supply of food pellets, glare-goggles, compasses, sextants, power torches-no, they were not exactly going forth naked into the wilderness. But their total lack of experience with surface conditions would make every moment incalculably hazardous.

  There were no good-bys. The trial had happened too fast. Not until the condemned men were outside would the people of the city be told of what had taken place. That is, if they were told at all. One could never be sure that the Mayor would see fit to release the news. Seven citizens had "disappeared," and no one would be the wiser for it. In a world where the largest families had two children-under rare circumstances, three-there were few family alliances, few relatives to ponder the disappearances. Dr. Barnes' wife had died when Jim was a baby; none of the other outcasts had ever been married.

  * * *

  It was early in the evening when the moment of departure came. The expedition had assembled its belongings in Level A, near the hatch that led upward to the surface world. They were only a hundred feet below the old surface. But a mile or more of ice lay between them and the open sky.

  A contingent of police escorted them from the city. Carl Bolin, was one of them.

  Surprisingly enough, a couple of the young policemen looked enviously at the departing group. And as
Jim lugged a folded tent toward the hatch, Carl came up alongside and said, "Let me give you a hand with that, Jim."

  "I can manage."

  "But I can help you." Carl seized the back half of the bulky, cumbersome tent and together they lugged it toward the hatch. The policeman said quietly to Jim, "You don't know how lucky you are. I wish I was going with you!"

  "Who's stopping you?"

  "I can't go. I… I've got a job here. I…" Carl hesitated, and looked strangely at his police brassard. "It would be desertion," he muttered. "I'm a policeman! An officer of the law. And the law-"

  "-is sending us outside," Jim said. "We can use another strong back."

  "It wouldn't be right to leave," Carl insisted. "They wouldn't let me go, anyway. I've had police training. I owe it to the city to stay here and serve."

  "Suit yourself," Jim answered curtly.

  * * *

  It took half an hour to move everything through the hatch into the musty, dusty tunnel outside. The hardest part was getting the two jet-sleds through; they were almost as wide as the hatch itself, and had to be maneuvered delicately. During the building of the city, many openings hundreds of feet wide had been left to permit the entry of construction materials and machinery, but they had all been sealed, all but this small opening, through which only a few could pass at a time. Jim wondered what would happen if it ever became necessary to evacuate New York suddenly. But that was no longer his problem, he told himself. He and New York City were at the parting of the ways.

  "Everything set?" asked the policeman in charge.

  Dr. Barnes nodded. "We've got all our gear through."

  "Close the hatch, then!"

  The seven outcasts stood amid their heaps of belongings in the vestibule beyond the hatch. Three burly policemen began to swing the heavy door closed. It moved smoothly enough on its burnished gimbals. Jim felt a pounding in his heart as it swung into place. Another two yards and the hatch would be closed, and they would be banished from New York City forever…

  "Wait!" someone yelled.

  An instant later, a figure slipped through the hatch and into the vestibule to join the exiles: Carl, the young policeman. He made it with only seconds to spare, grasping the hatch arm and flipping it through the narrow opening, back into the city from which he had just exiled himself.

  Clang!

  The hatch was closed now. From the far side came the sounds of metal rasping against metal as the police lodged the hatch in place. There was no return possible. The barrier could be opened only from the inside.

  "I want to go with you," Carl said to Dr. Barnes.

  Jim's father smiled faintly. "It looks as though we have no choice but to accept you. Who are you?"

  "Carl Bolin. My father was Peter Bolin the hydroponics technician."

  "I know him, Dad," Jim said. "He's all right."

  "He'd better be," Dr. Barnes said, and there was a strange coldness to his tone that startled Jim. "Everybody in this team is going to have to pull his own weight. We can't make allowances for slackers."

  Ted Callison peered upward into the dimness above them. "We'd better start loading the elevator," he said. "Time to get moving."

  Jim shared his impatience. The outside world, that forbidding land of snow and ice, was only a legend to him. Neither he nor his father, nor even his grandfather's grandfather, had ever set eyes on that world. Of the eight of them, only Dave Ellis had ever had a glimpse of the surface, and that had been at second hand, through one of the periscopes the meteorologists used. During the centuries underground, the city's meteorologists had come to have an almost religious role. It was they, and they alone, who were permitted to monitor surface conditions, using telemetering devices and periscopic television eyes. The city's Charter expressly commanded that the surveillance continue ceaselessly. The idea was, of course, that the city should be prepared for the day when the surface became habitable again.

  But with the passing of the decades the meteorologists' role had become purely ritualistic. Nobody seriously expected man ever to return to the surface again-except for a few dreamers like Dr. Barnes and Jim. Each month, the meteorologists made their observations, and formally submitted their report to the Mayor-and the report was just as formally filed away, unread, merely part of the ritual.

  Maybe, Jim thought, the reason Dave was so apprehensive about the surface was the fact that he, alone among them, had some idea of what it was really like.

  An elevator ran up the side of the tunnel that led to the surface. Through the years, the tunnel had been extended up into the gathering ice pack, and it had been a sacred duty of the city dwellers to keep the passage clear. Jim suspected, though, that no tunnel maintenance had been performed in years. Would they be able to get out to the surface after all? Suppose miles of ice pinned them down? Where would they go? New York would not take them back.

  "Everything's aboard the elevator," Roy Veeder called out.

  "Let's hope it still works," Dr. Barnes said. "Ted, can you reach the switch?"

  "Got it."

  There was a groaning, a whining, as servo motors spun into life after decades of inactivity. The elevator seemed to strain against its moorings. Had its core rotted away, or was the load simply too great for it?

  "Maybe we'll have to make two trips," Dom Han-non suggested. "The elevator's carrying a couple of tons, and…"

  And it began to lift.

  Slowly, painfully, it rose away from the tunnel floor and began to toil toward the surface.

  The eight men on the elevator's open platform huddled together. It was cold, in the tunnel shaft, and it grew colder as they rose. Was it simply the chill of the upper world, Jim wondered, or was it an inner chill that made the goose-pimples rise along his skin?

  "We're up a hundred twenty feet," Ted Callison reported. "We must be into the glacier now."

  "Shine a light upward," Dr. Barnes said. "Let's see how far up the shaft is clear."

  It was impossible to tell. Light gleamed along the shiny metal walls of the tunnel, and it was apparent that the way was open for at least several hundred feet more above them. But beyond that…?

  The elevator continued to rise.

  Jim glanced at Carl Bolin. The brawny young ex-policeman was gripping the edge of one of the sleds, holding on for dear life. His eyes were closed, and his lips were moving as if in prayer. Jim felt like praying himself. Suppose the elevator failed, and dashed them hundreds of feet back down to the tunnel floor? Or suppose a plug of ice dozens of yards thick blocked them from reaching the surface?

  Jim drew his parka close about him. He had never worn warm clothing before, and the bulk of the heavy garment oppressed him. So, too, the idea of the bulk of the ice above him oppressed him. Millions of tons of frozen water, pressing down. He had never really thought of it that way before. The ice had been simply something that was there, something taken for granted. But now he felt as though the whole great weight of the glacier lay upon his back.

  Upward.

  "It's dark above us!" Ted Callison called out. "The tunnel's closed, and we've only gone four hundred feet!"

  A stab of the flashlight revealed, though, that the darkness above them was caused by a metal hatch set athwart the tunnel, and not by a plug of ice. Obviously the builders of the tunnel to the surface had partitioned it with horizontal bulkheads so that possible melting ice from above would not flood the lower part of the tunnel. But would the hatch open?

  The elevator ground to a halt. It was possible to peer over the edge and see the vestibule, tiny and dark, hundreds of feet below. After a few moments of inspection, Jim came upon a set of switches mounted in the tunnel wall. A hasty conference followed; then Ted Callison threw one of the switches.

  The hatch began to swing open.

  Creaking and protesting, the thick door retracted until it had withdrawn itself half the width of the tunnel. There was room for the elevator to continue upward. Callison started the elevator again. When they passed through t
he bulkhead, they found more switches, and one of them closed the hatch. They moved on toward the surface.

  Four hundred feet farther up, they came to another hatch, and passed it the same way. Then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. More than half a mile separated them now from the entrance to New York City, and-hopefully-only half a mile separated them from the surface.

  This was the newest part of the tunnel, built only some two hundred years before. There were subtle changes in the workmanship. It became more slipshod, as though this part of the tunnel had been put in purely out of ritualistic reflex, rather than out of any real intention ever to use it for a mass exodus from the city.

  Upward. Upward. Past a sixth hatch, and a seventh.

  Then, as they drew near the eighth bulkhead, it became apparent that the next barrier was not a man-made one. A ceiling of ice blocked the shaft!

  They halted the elevator within fifteen feet of the ceiling. By climbing up on the sled and stretching, Jim could just barely touch the ice. He put his finger tips to it, and drew them away quickly, as though burned.

  "Cold!"

  "Yes," Dr. Barnes said, "and it'll be a lot colder for us if we're stuck in this tunnel forever. Break out the power torches!"

  Roy Veeder and Chet Farrington unpacked one of the knapsacks and produced four power torches, yard-long metal rods whose tiny fusion plasmas generated fierce heat. Dr. Barnes studied the ice plug thoughtfully.

  "We don't want to bring it down on our heads," he said. "Let's melt away the far side of it first and see what happens."

  Jim took one of the torches, his father another. Dr. Barnes hefted his torch and pressed the firing stud. A greenish glow of light bathed the surface of the ice plug, which melted away as though touched by a dragon's fiery breath. In the chill of the tunnel, the ice vapor condensed a moment later, and the men on the elevator heard a sound brand-new to them: that of rain, falling from a highly localized cloud and pelting down hundreds of feet to the closed metal hatch below them.