Time of the Great Freeze (3 page)

"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.

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 thirty-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?

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!"

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