Time of the Great Freeze (8 page)

In a little while, they were lost to sight. The world seemed empty once again. There was nothing but whiteness, stretching off toward the distant horizon.

They saw no more nomads that afternoon. The sleds glided on, always eastward over the endless ice plateau, and the sun passed them and began to dip toward the westward horizon. A late-afternoon chill swept down on them. The temperature began to drop, falling sharply almost from minute to minute. When they had traveled another twenty miles, the sun was nearly down, and it was time to halt for the night.

Jim, Carl, and Ted Callison broke out the tents. Chet and Roy lit a fire, feeding it with synthetic-fuel pellets. Dom Hannon and Dave Ellis began to open food containers for dinner, while Dr. Barnes patrolled the area, power torch in hand, as though he expected an attack any moment.

They ate in silence. The wind was biting now, and the temperature was getting near the zero mark, though it was still early in the evening. The moon was up, even bigger and more brilliant than the night before. In the unearthly silence of the ice field, where the only sounds were the howling of the wind and the crunch of a footfall against crisp snow, all the world seemed locked in an eternal freeze.

And then, across the flat wasteland, came the blood-chilling wails of hungry beasts.

"Listen," Jim whispered.

"It's the wind," Dave Ellis said.

"No. No, it's not!"

Ted Callison, whose eyes were the sharpest among them, had his field glasses out. As he had earlier that day, he spied animals coming toward them. But not grazing animals, this time.

"They look like dogs," he said. He hefted his power torch. "Big dogs. A whole pack of them!"

"Wolves," Chet muttered. "They've seen the fire, and they're coming to eat."

The pack was clearly visible in the moonlight now: fifteen, perhaps twenty long, lean shapes, pattering across the ice, baying as they came. Through his binoculars, Jim could see the curling pink tongues, the slavering jaws. Who said the glacier world was an empty one, he wondered? Moose-hunters-now a pack of hungry wolves…

"Push the sleds together!" Ted Callison yelled. "Make a barricade!"

They huddled behind the sleds. Jim, his father, Ted, and Roy held the four power torches, and crouched in readiness, while the other four men armed themselves with ice hatchets, knives, anything that might protect them in case the wolves burst through the barricade. The power torches had an effective range of only some twenty or thirty feet, which meant the wolves would have to be allowed to come quite close before firing.

Onward they came. But their steady lope broke into a suspicious slink as they came within close range of the camp. They had been running in tight formation; now they separated and fanned out over the ice.

"Ugly devils," Ted murmured.

Jim nodded, keeping his finger close to the stud of the torch. The wolves looked enormous, bigger than a man, their yellow eyes gleaming by the light of the fire, their sides hollow, their shanks flat. Snarling, growling, barking, they closed in on the encampment, wary but obviously unafraid.

Half a dozen of the brutes were within torch range now.

"Let 'em have it!" Dr. Barnes shouted.

Jim rammed the stud forward, and felt the blood surge in his veins as the beam of light blazed forth to envelop one fang-toothed attacker. He switched the torch off rapidly. The wolf was gone; two severed legs that had not been in the torch's blasting field lay horridly in a puddle of melted ice, and a smell of singed fur drifted through the air.

But there was no time now, for sensations of either triumph or revulsion. The wolves were charging desperately! Dr. Barnes brought down one, and Ted two with two quick blasts, but one of the others somehow sidestepped a destructive bolt and leaped with terrifying grace, arching upward and over the barrier. Roy swung his torch upward and fired while the wolf was still in mid-leap. The creature seemed to disintegrate as the bolt took it, and the air sizzled and crackled for a moment, eddying in ragged currents around the place where the wolf had been.

Jim's torch claimed a second victim, and a third, but then he saw two wolves come soaring over the barricade simultaneously, and there was no way to fire without blasting away half of one sled. The nearer of the snarling monsters came right at Jim; he smelled the wolf-stink of it, stared right into the frightful eyes. Unable to fire the torch, he swung it around, bashed it butt end first into the wolf's snout.

The impact of the blow sent the wolf reeling back, blood dripping, broken fangs dropping to the ice. It circled Jim, ready for a second spring, but this time drew itself far enough away from the sled so that he could take a shot at it. The torch turned it to ash even as it readied itself to rip Jim's throat out.

The other wolf had gone for Chet. His only defense was a hatchet, which he swung with telling effect as the monster leaped. He caught the wolfs left shoulder, and bright blood fountained. But the hatchet went skittering away, and a moment later Chet was sprawling on the ice behind the sled, the wolf covering him and going for his throat.

Jim shouted and plunged forward, handing his power torch to Dave Ellis. Chet was struggling against the savage creature, holding the snapping jaws away from him with all the strength in his long, muscle-corded arms. Drawing his hunting knife, Jim threw himself down, the blade digging deep. The wolf shivered convulsively as Jim dragged the knife through its hairy belly, and rolled to one side. Chet scrambled free, and they both leaped back.

"I've got him!" Dr. Barnes roared, and fired. The wolf died in a blaze of nuclear fury.

"You all right?" Jim asked.

Chet nodded. "Just some claw scratches."

Turning, Jim saw Dave Ellis blazing away with the torch Jim had given him. The meteorologist's timidity seemed forgotten in the excitement of battle. Two wolves at once were coming at Dave, and he bellowed at them, a primordial, spine-shivering cry of fury and hatred, and cut them down in quick order. Seeing that Dave was taking good care of himself, Jim gripped his knife and looked to see where he could be useful.

But everything was under control. A single wolf remained, growling viciously on the far side of the sleds, but coming no closer. Ted Callison dispatched the creature with a quick bleep of light, and the attack was over.

Steam rose from the ice. The repeated blasts of the power torch had melted small lakes on both sides of the barricade, but they were already beginning to re-freeze at the edges. Fragments of wolf lay everywhere. The stink of destruction clawed at Jim's nostrils. There was fresh blood on his gloves, not moose blood this time but wolf blood, and he trembled a little as he remembered how it had felt to thrust the gleaming blade deep within the belly of a living creature.

Dr. Barnes, still holding his power torch, inspected them.

"Everyone okay? Jim? Chet?"

"I'm a little scratched," Chet reported.

"Take care of him, will you, Carl?" Dr. Barnes said. He mounted one of the sleds and looked around. "No more in sight. But we'd better keep watch through the night. Three-hour shifts, I guess. Let's clean up the mess first."

Chet laughed. "It's too bad we wasted those wolves," he said. "The meat might have been useful later on."

"I'd rather eat moose," Jim said. "These fellows were all tooth and claw and muscle."

They cleaned up, fastidiously heaping the remains of the dead wolf pack together and covering the refuse with snow. Then they settled in for the night. Dr. Barnes and Ted Callison drew the first watch shift together.

Jim huddled down in the tent. He heard howls from without, and told himself that it was just the howling of the wind. He was fiercely tired. It had been a long, hard day-a day that seemed to have lasted years.

But they had met challenges out here in this forbidding world of ice, and they had responded to them, had triumphed. What more could they ask? He had eaten raw meat today, and he had killed wild beasts.

In a single day, he thought, the Jim Barnes whose skin he had worn for seventeen years had changed almost beyond recognition. It was well, he told himself. He was adapting to this rugged new life. He was adapting.

Waking was a struggle. Jim would rather have fought a dozen wolves barehanded than to have come up out of sleep. But the hand that gripped his shoulder shook mercilessly, and finally he pried his bleary eyes open and saw Dave Ellis crouched over him.

"Your shift," he said. "Wake up!"

It was nearly dawn. The night had passed rapidly and uneventfully. Jim and Carl, armed with torches just in case, sat shivering in the bitter cold while their comrades slept. Somewhere, twenty or thirty miles behind them and more than a mile straight down, New York's eight hundred thousand people slumbered warm and safe in their beds. Jim did not envy them, though. Better to shiver blue-lipped up here, wolves and nomads and all, than to hide like a worm in the ground!

The moon slipped from sight. The sky turned from black to iron-gray, then blued as the day dawned. The first pink streaks of morning stained the sky, and the sun rose, a beacon in the east, beckoning to them to continue their journey.

The sleepers were up soon after sunrise. They had a light breakfast, and while they waited for the jet's accumulators to charge themselves, Ted Callison broke out the radio and started to toy with it.

"What are you doing?" Chet asked him.

"Calling London," Ted answered. "We might as well let them know we're coming."

But there was no response. Ted tried channel after channel, and nothing came in but the dry crackle of static, and then it was time to move on.

The day was colder than yesterday had been. Clouds hid the sun half the time, and a sharp wind came slicing down from the north. The temperature never got above 15 degrees. The monotony of the journey was broken only twice during the day: in the morning, a solitary wolf loped past them, gave them a startled look, and streaked out of sight. Late that day, as they neared the end of their travel for the afternoon, they came upon the remains of a nomad encampment. Five dome-shaped houses had been built of blocks of ice-"igloos," Dr. Barnes called them-and within were a few gnawed animal bones, some discarded ropes made of wolf sinew, and a broken knife. Of the igloo-builders themselves, there was no sign, and from the looks of things the camp had been abandoned some weeks back.

The next day it snowed. Light, powdery flakes came spiraling down out of the gray sky. The sight was a beautiful one, but it was no fun having the snow drifting into your face all morning, Jim decided. And the sunless day slowed them, since the sleds could not charge and power soon ran short. They had to halt after having gone only fifteen miles. The snow stopped, late in the afternoon. Jim, Carl, and Dom Hannon amused themselves by trying to build an igloo, but the job defeated them. Arranging the foundation blocks was easy enough, but getting the dome to curve properly proved to be no task for amateur architects.

Ted Callison watched them, smiling sardonically. "You ought to be able to do a better job than that," he told them. "If those illiterate, skin-wearing nomads can build these things, why cant you intelligent New Yorkers do it?"

"Maybe because we're intelligent New Yorkers," Dom Hannon retorted. "Instead of living out here in the ice and learning how, our ancestors were keeping warm down below."

"Why don't you show us how to do it, Ted?" Carl invited. "They tell me you're an Indian, so you ought to know."

"Indians aren't Eskimos," Ted said thinly. "My people lived in log cabins."

"I thought Indians lived in wigwams," Jim said.

Ted favored him with a look of vast scorn. "Where did
you
study your ancient history? Some Indians lived in wigwams, some lived in wooden cabins, some lived in pits in the ground, and some lived in apartment houses made of brick."

"And some lived in igloos," Carl added.

"Those were Eskimos!" Ted said, and made a face as he saw he was once again being teased. "Oh, what's the use! Here, let me show you children how to build your little igloo."

But he had no better luck than they had. After fifteen minutes of trying to put a dome on the igloo, he gave up and walked away, his normally ruddy cheeks red with cold and redder still from embarrassment. As he disappeared into the tent, Jim heard him exclaim something about, "Wrong kind of foundation, that's the trouble!"

Once again, they guarded themselves in shifts during the night, but no wolves came to harass them this time. Jim had been lucky the first night, drawing the dawn shift so that he could sleep most of the night without interruption, but the fates were against him tonight. He and Dom Hannon picked short straws and had to take the middle shift, which meant sleeping a few hours, then being awakened to stand sentry, and back to sleep-if possible-afterward.

It was an uneventful night. Jim began to get the picture of the ice-world as being populated by sparse groups of nomads, tribes that gave each other plenty of elbowroom, and by roaming bands of animals whose numbers were not very great, since the land could not support them. The wolves probably fed on the moose, and the moose, Chet had told them, fed on the tiny green and red plants that miraculously grew right on the surface of the ice, and the hunters fed on the moose and most likely on the wolves as well. There did not seem to be any birds, and Jim found that disappointing. The idea that animals actually could fly had always seemed fantastic to him when he read about it in books dealing with life of the pre-Ice Age, and he had hoped to see birds in flight when he left New York. But there were none here, at least not so far as any of them had yet seen.