Time of the Great Freeze (7 page)

The old one said something. He spoke in short, sharp monosyllables, harsh grunting sounds that emerged as though each one cost him dearly.

Dr. Barnes replied, speaking clearly and loudly: "We come in peace.
Peace
."

Again the monosyllabic grunts. The two younger hunters conferred in brusque whispers. The old chief stared malevolently at Dr. Barnes.

"Take this," Dr. Barnes said, and handed the power torch he was holding to Jim. He held out his hand, fingers upraised. "Peace," he repeated. "I carry no weapons. Peace! Friendship!"

Back came more incomprehensible words-higher in pitch now, more excited-sounding.

Dr. Barnes glanced at Dom Hannon. "Dom, does that language of theirs make any sense to
you
?"

The philologist shrugged. "It sounds as though it may have been English once. But the language has rotted away. There's nothing left of it but a few grunts. I can't pick up the sense of it."

Several other hunters detached themselves from the group dressing the kill, and strolled over. The scene began to look ugly. The hunters were sinister-looking little men, brutish and suspicious, and their bodies had the acrid smell of people among whom bathing is unknown.

"They must think we're trespassing on their hunting territory," Roy Veeder said. "He's probably warning us to get back to our own neighborhood."

"If they try anything," Ted Callison muttered, "we'll let them have it with the torches!"

"No," Jim said. "They belong here and we don't. We've got no right to kill them!"

"Only in self-defense," Roy said. "Looks to me as if they're going to attack."

And, for a moment, it did appear that trouble was brewing. The parley was getting nowhere. Dr. Barnes and the nomad chief had given up the attempt to communicate through language, and were pantomiming, but even that was not creating much mutual understanding. The old chief had his knife out and was waving it through the air in a belligerent fashion, while Dr. Barnes smiled, spoke mildly, showed his empty hands, and pointed to himself and then onward toward the sea to indicate he was only passing through, not staying to compete for hunting rights.

Meanwhile, the younger hunters were carrying on an independent-and heated-discussion of their own. It looked to Jim as if one of them were arguing for an immediate attack, the other one counseling patience.

All but five of the hunters had gathered around the parleyers now. The five were still busy with the kill. No one seemed at all interested in the two dead or dying men who had been trampled by the escaping animals.

Two of the youngest hunters were gripping their knives in an obviously menacing way. It seemed that in another moment violence might erupt between the two groups. Dr. Barnes was grimly acting out every kind of charade that he thought might pacify the hunters, but he clearly did not appear to be getting through.

Suddenly he turned. "Carl, do you have police medic training?"

"Yes, sir. First aid, at least."

"All right. Get your medic kit and come on with me. You too, Jim. Keep that power torch handy, just in case they misunderstand."

Jim and Carl followed Dr. Barnes across the ice to where the fallen hunters lay. A stir ran through the band of nomads, but they remained gathered together, muttering to one another.

Dr. Barnes knelt by the side of one hunter. The fallen man wasn't a pretty sight. Flying hoofs had crashed into him and knocked him down, other hoofs had trampled across his skull. His face was nothing but a bloody smear. His chest was caved in.

"Nothing we can do for him, poor devil," Dr. Barnes muttered. "Let's see about the other one."

The second man was still alive. His fur jacket was half ripped off, and Jim could see the ugly gouge in his chest where a passing moose had kicked him. The hairy, dirty skin was purple and swollen around the wound. He had been kicked in several other places, too, and the skin had been broken, but he did not seem really badly hurt.

Carl opened the medic kit and took out retractors and a sterilizer. He worked briskly and efficiently; he was no doctor, but medical equipment had been refined to the point where anyone with a little first-aid training could take care of even serious injuries. Dr. Barnes moved the wounded man into position while Carl drew back the edges of the big gash with the retractors and passed the sterilizer the length of the cut. A quick hum, a flash of light, and the danger of infection was past.

Carl took a flesh-sealer from the little medic kit. Tiny metals claws seized the ragged edges of the wound, drew them together.

"He's going to have a pretty ugly scar," Carl said apologetically. "I'm not very good at matching the tissues yet, I'm afraid."

"Don't let it worry you," Dr. Barnes said. "They were going to leave him for dead."

"They're coming over to have a look," Jim said uneasily. "The whole bunch of them. They look ugly."

"Just go on working, Carl," Dr. Barnes said quietly. He glanced up at Jim. "Let them come within about six feet of us, but no closer. And stay cool."

Jim nodded. He watched the nomads crowd round, and held the power torch in readiness, though without aiming it. The nomads seemed awed by the instruments Carl was using, and they kept their distance, their mood changing from one of menace to one of uncertainty and fear.

Carl worked methodically, closing the wound, sealing it with the heat-and-pressure device that had replaced surgical stitches centuries before. When he was finished, a ragged red line ran down the man's chest-but the wound was closed.

"Go on," Dr. Barnes said. "Let's get the other cuts now."

In a matter of minutes, the injured hunter's wounds were rendered aseptic and sealed. The man stirred. His eyes opened, and he looked at his saviors in dull incomprehension. He lifted a shaky hand, touched it to the rough patch of sterile plastispray covering the wound on his chest. Then he looked at his companions and said something to them. They answered with hoots of amazement. The injured man tried to get to his feet, rose as far as his knees, halted there, dizzy, swaying. Two of the hunters started forward to help him, then hesitated until Carl and Dr. Barnes stepped back.

The injured man rose, leaning against them, and took a few hobbling steps. A moment later, every hunter had his knife drawn!

Jim leveled the power torch, ready to wipe out the whole band if he had to. But he relaxed as he saw what the nomads were doing.

They were tossing their knives down at Carl's feet!

Carl grinned in amazement and surprise as each of the hunters, in turn, added his bone knife to the heap, then withdrew and sank to his knees in the snow. The last to pay homage was the grizzled old chief himself. He came forward almost grudgingly, flipped his knife onto the pile, and dropped in obeisance.

"I think you've just become chief of the tribe, Carl," Jim said with a laugh.

Carl turned to Dr. Barnes. "What do I do now?"

"Pick up the chief's knife. Hand it back to him."

Carl did so. The chief, still kneeling, stared blankly at the crude bone knife as Carl offered it, butt first. He did not seem to understand at all. Carl pressed the knife into his hand, and in sudden inspiration touched the old man's shoulder, as if giving a blessing. Then he stepped back.

The chief rose, sheathing the knife, and for the first time broke into a broad smile, baring the stubs of worn yellow teeth.

After that everything was simple. The gulf in communication that had existed was magically bridged. Now, Dr. Barnes's pantomiming got across, as was shown by the smiles and the excited chatter of the hunting folk. Dr. Barnes pointed to himself, to the other seven city people, and then toward the sea. The nomad chief nodded. With his knife, he drew a line in the snow, indicated their present location by tapping his chest and then the ground, and sketched out a second line running from that point to the other line. He repeated it several times.

"What's he trying to tell us?" Jim asked.

"I think he's saying that we can have safe conduct as far as his territory reaches," Dr. Barnes said. "Another few miles, at any rate."

The crisis was past. The injured hunter, still shaky but able to move around, had rejoined his comrades. Jim watched as they cut away a slab of ice and buried their dead fellow in the glacier, heaping snow to hide his body.

Then a new crisis developed-far less menacing than the last one, but just as perplexing. The man who had been wounded sought out Carl, carrying in his hands a raw gobbet of moose meat! He held the great bloody chunk of flesh out toward his savior.

Carl took the meat, but held it gingerly, looking at it with barely concealed disgust.

"What am I supposed to do with it?" he asked.

"Eat it," Dr. Barnes said. "It's a friendship offering."

"
Eat
it?
Raw
?"

"He'll take offense otherwise," Dr. Barnes said.

Carl shuddered, and Jim had to turn away, laughing at the husky ex-policeman's plight Carl took a bite of the red meat, grimaced, gulped.

A moment later, Jim was laughing out of the other side of his mouth as a slimy hunk of meat was pressed into
his
hands, too. The nomads were showing their friendship in the only way they knew how, by offering food, and one at a time they were coming forward to give meat to the newcomers.

The eight city men forced back their qualms and ate, for the sake of peace. Even Chet, with his famous appetite, looked uneasy. Jim took a bite, retched, gagged, and tensed every muscle to keep the meat down. The idea of eating flesh, raw flesh, sickened him. There were no meat animals in the underground city. Men got their protein in other ways. And to stand here, in thirty-degree weather, munching on the raw flesh of an animal that had been alive half an hour before…

"Eat," Dr. Barnes commanded, as they hesitated after a few bites.

Jim ate. Carl ate. They all ate, pointing at each others blood-smeared jowls, making a grim joke out of the ceremony of friendship.

Once the first queasiness was past, Jim discovered to his surprise that he rather liked the taste of the meat. Not the texture of it-it was too slick, too wet-but the gamy taste appealed to him. Probably the meat tasted quite delectable when cooked. He ate as much as he could hold, and then, when he felt he could take no more, he quietly slipped the rest into a sleeve of his parka when no hunter was looking, and stooped to wash the moose blood from his gloves and face with snow.

The hunters had all repossessed their knives by this time, and had gone back to their prey to finish stripping and preparing the animals for transportation back to wherever their encampment might be. The city men, looking pale and a little wobbly, exchanged feeble grins as their digestive systems went to work on their unfamiliar fare.

"That wasn't so bad, was it?" Dr. Barnes asked.

"Better than having a fight, I guess," Jim said. "Only the next time, maybe we can cook the meat."

"I rather liked it this way," Ted Callison remarked.

Dave Ellis, the meteorologist, glared at him. "You
would
," he grumbled. "Savage!"

Callison took no offense. "You wait, paleface," he said. "By and by we get hungry again, run out of moose meat. I eat meteorologist meat! Raw!"

Everyone laughed-all but Dave. Even the hunters, busy with their gory work, looked up and joined the general chorus of laughter.

Jim looked toward them. "Who do you think they are, Dad?"

"Survivors," Dr. Barnes said. "Descendants of people who didn't go underground. They waited out the worst of the cold somewhere south of here, then came back when things got a little better."

"But there's nothing to live on up here!" Jim said.

"No? There's moose, at least. And probably plenty of other game, too. It must be a hard life, but they seem to have survived for centuries this way. Men can adapt to almost any kind of conditions, Jim. Even before the glaciers came, there were men who lived in the Arctic in conditions very much like these. Eskimos. They lived there voluntarily, and made a good life out of it. It was the only life they knew."

"Are these men Eskimos?" Carl asked.

Dr. Barnes shook his head. "The Eskimos were Asiatics. These men are of our own race. They've adapted to the cold, but they're descended from the same kind of people we are."

"Why couldn't we understand their language, then?" Roy Veeder wanted to know.

Dom Hannon said, "Because we've been living in isolation for centuries, and they've been up here. Languages change. They've boiled theirs down to a few syllables. Remember how much trouble we had understanding the Londoners? And they've lived the same kind of life we have. These nomads don't need all our fancy words. They've scrapped every excess sound."

The hunters were nearly finished with their chores. Blood stained a wide area of the ice, animal blood, and the picked carcasses of the dead moose looked weirdly naked. Almost everything useful had been carved away and neatly packed up in skin for the trek back to their encampment, probably many miles away across the forbidding glacier.

All this while the sled accumulators had been charging themselves, too. It was time for the eight voyagers to be moving along.

They boarded the sleds. The nomads, still friendly, tried to climb aboard also, but Carl held up his hand to keep them back, and they obeyed.

The sleds started. As they began to glide off across the ice, the hunters followed, their eyes wide at the sight of this new wonder of men moving without exerting themselves. Jim settled down, feeling his stomach rebelling once again at the lunch it had had to endure. The motion of the sled didn't help matters any. He gulped hard, clenched his jaws.

Carl laughed. "Still hungry, Jim?"

"Very funny," Jim growled. He took a deep breath, and the spasm passed. Looking back, he saw the nomad hunters trekking along behind the sled, grinning and waving as the city people gradually drew away from them.