Time of the Great Freeze (11 page)

"But how will you cross the water?"

"What water?"

"The Atlantic!"

"So far it's frozen," Ted replied. "Mostly, anyway. We hope to make it all the way across. We'll be seeing you soon, London!"

"Why… why are you coming?" the faint voice out of the speaker said, perplexed.

"Why?" Ted asked. "Why not? It's time for a visit, isn't it? Three hundred years underground is long enough. We're on our way, London!"

There was silence from the other end, strange after Ted's jubilant whoop. Jim frowned. Why no word of encouragement, why no expression of excitement? The Londoner seemed merely baffled that anybody should want to undertake so arduous and improbable a journey.

"Are you still there, London?" Ted asked after a moment.

"Yes. Yes. But… all right, New York. Good-by, now. Good-by, New York!"

"Hello?" Ted said. "Hello, hello, hello!"

He looked up, shaking his head, and turned off the set.

"They don't sound very friendly, do they?" Jim said.

"Maybe he was just startled," Carl suggested. "After all, to find out that an expedition is actually coming across the Atlantic-"

Dr. Barnes shook his head. "Even so, he might have seemed a little more enthusiastic. I wonder what sort of welcome we re in for, when we reach the other side. If we make it."

They were ready to leave. All but Chet. He had not eaten lunch with them, he had not helped to charge the sleds; he still sat by the edge of the water, long legs folded weirdly underneath him, patiently dangling his line into the water.

"Should we leave him behind?" Ted Callison asked. "He doesn't need us, anyway. He can live off the fish he catches."

"Then he'll go hungry," Roy said. "He hasn't caught one yet, has he?"

Chet ignored the banter. He peered into the dark water as though trying to hocus fish onto his line with sheer will power. Suddenly he stiffened and tugged at the line.

"I've got a bite!" he yelled. "Something took the bait!"

"Reel it in, man!" Ted Callison urged him. "Maybe you've caught a whale!"

The shining line came up out of the water. Chet stared in dismay. A wriggling, flopping creature no more than five inches long dangled from the end of his line.

"Some whale!" Ted Callison roared.

"A monster!" Carl whooped.

Chet's embarrassment seemed to overwhelm his scientific curiosity. Red-faced, he muttered a curse and made as if to throw the tiny fish back into the water without even pausing to examine it.

"Wait," Jim said. "Let me see!"

He took the line and held it up. The fish was beautiful. Its sleek, scaly body glimmered like quicksilver in the sunlight. Beady eyes looked at him in mute appeal. The little creature's body seemed perfectly designed, shaped by a master hand, magnificently streamlined for a life in the water. Fascinated, Jim studied it a long moment. Then, carefully, he disengaged the hook and returned the fish to the water. It sped away like a streak of flame and was lost to sight.

Jim remained, staring at the water.

"What's the matter?" Ted asked him. "You hypnotized or something?"

"It was a fish," Jim said. "I saw a fish!"

"Of course you did. What of it?"

"How many fish did you ever see in New York?"

"Why, none," Ted said. "So?"

Jim shook his head. "You don't understand, do you? Doesn't it excite you to be up here, seeing something new every day? Animals, fish-the sun, the moon, the stars…"

"Well, sure, those things are interesting," Ted agreed.

"It's more than just
interesting
to see them," Jim insisted. He fumbled for words. "It's… it's… oh, I don't know, it's like discovering the whole world all at once. It makes me feel dizzy. I want to grab hold of the moon and the sky. I want to sing loud enough to be heard down in New York. Just seeing a little squirming fish makes me feel that way. Do you realize we're the first New Yorkers to see a fish since… since around the year twenty-three hundred?"

Jim realized that Ted was looking at him as if he had gone insane.

"You
don't
understand, do you?" Jim asked quietly.

The short, stocky man shrugged. "You're just over-enthusiastic about being up here," he said. "I guess it's a natural reaction, when you're young. You'll outgrow it."

"I hope I don't," Jim shot back at him. "I wouldn't want to get as crusty and cantankerous as you are-Methusaleh."

He sensed that Ted was having some fun with him. Callison was only twenty-four, after all, which didn't really give him the right to regard himself as a patriarch and Jim as a child.

Ted grinned suddenly and threw his arm around Jim's shoulders. "Sure," he said. "I think it's the greatest thing in the world to be looking a fish in the eye. I mean that. Otherwise why would I be here?"

Later that day they had an entirely different kind of creature look them in the eye.

They were on their way around the lake, which was turning out to be bigger than Ted's first estimate had it. Having traveled three miles to the north, they were beginning to curve eastward again. They were sledding over solid ice a hundred fifty yards from the edge of the water when the creature bobbed up out of the depths and regarded them curiously.

It was enormous. It stood shoulder-high out of the water, and a huge head decked with two fierce-looking tusks confronted them. Flippers sprouted where arms should have been. The creature looked like some grotesque parody of mankind, with its whiskers and its solemn little eyes, but no human being had ever had two-foot-long tusks like those.

"What is it?" Jim asked in a hushed voice.

"Walrus, I think," Chet Farrington said. "Relative of the seals, if that helps you any. Mammal. Lives in cold water."

Jim fingered the stud of his power torch. "Do you think he's going to attack?"

"Best I remember from my natural history books, they aren't flesh-eaters," Chet said. "They live off shellfish."

"He doesn't
look
unfriendly," said Roy Veeder.

Indeed, he seemed positively friendly. He was at the edge of the ice, now, flippers leaning out onto the ice shelf, and he was regarding them quizzically and with great curiosity, showing no sign of fear. The vast beast looked gentle and intelligent.

"Wait a second," Chet said. "I want a closer look."

"Same here," said Jim.

They left the sled and walked slowly toward the walrus. At close range it looked even stranger, Jim thought. But when he had come within a hundred feet of it, it turned and slipped into the water, and vanished from sight with astonishing speed.

Later that afternoon they encountered the walrus again, or one of his relatives. But this time the meeting was a less peaceful one. The walrus was under attack!

A group of fur-clad hunters had somehow lured the creature up onto the ice and had cut off its retreat to the water. Surrounding it, they were stabbing at it with wicked-looking spears of bone. When the sleds came upon the scene, the New Yorkers quickly de-toured and headed away. One encounter with spear-wielding huntsmen had been enough for a while. The hunters were too busy with the walrus to pay attention to the party of travelers that had come upon them. Jim looked back, awed by the bulk of the beleaguered creature that reared nearly a dozen feet into the air, snorting and howling at its attackers, and then flopped helplessly down on the ice again as the hunters closed in for the kill. Jim felt a pang of sadness as he watched the nightmare scene of death being enacted on the ice. The walrus had seemed so gentle, so friendly. And now here he was, bleeding from a dozen wounds, succumbing to the onslaught of men.

Jim forced himself to be realistic. Men must eat. There were no hydroponics laboratories on the ice pack, no factories for the manufacture of synthetic foods. The walrus was food-thousands of pounds of it. His tusks, his bones, would all be useful as knives and utensils; his thick hide would go for clothing, his fat for oil, his very sinews for rope and for cord. Every day was a struggle for life, in the ice-world, and where man and walrus shared the same habitat, only one outcome was possible.

The struggle seemed over now. The walrus lay still.

Two of the hunters detached themselves from the group and began to run after the sleds, shouting.

"They see us," Jim said. "What do they want?"

"They're waving to us," Dave Ellis said. "They want us to stop. Here we go again!"

"Halt the sled," Dr. Barnes ordered. "Let's see what they want."

Dave looked startled. "But…"

"They aren't armed. Halt the sled!"

Dave eased the sled to a halt. Nearby, Ted Callison had brought the other sled to a stop also. The two huntsmen, panting and gasping, came running up alongside.

"Strangers!" they called. "Wait, strangers! Wait!"

They spoke English. Simply from their appearance, they seemed as far beyond the unfriendly Dooney folk of the shore as the Dooneys had been beyond the primitive, monosyllabic hunters that had been encountered farther inland. These two were tall and straight-backed and clean-shaven, and seemed almost like New Yorkers dressed in fur garments, rather than savages of fierce and bestial ways.

One of them, a lanky, blue-eyed man of about thirty, his lean face tanned and wind-toughened, called out to them, "Why do you flee? Claim your guest-rights!"

"We do not understand," Dr. Barnes replied.

"There has been a kill," the blue-eyed hunter answered, pointing to the fallen walrus. "You are strangers come among us. The law of hospitality requires us to feed you. Why flee, then?"

Dr. Barnes frowned. "We come from far off," he said slowly. "We do not know your ways. The last people we met had no law of hospitality. They attacked us and took a life."

"Who were they? What was their tribe-name?"

"They called themselves the Dooney folk."

"
Pah
! Inlanders! Savages!" the blue-eyed man exclaimed, while his silent companion shook his fist angrily in the general direction of the shore. "You can expect no better from them. But we are different. Come. You are our guests."

It was unthinkable to refuse. The blue-eyed man, who gave his name as Kennart and said he was son of the chief of the Jersey people, was obviously not expecting no for an answer. Dr. Barnes signaled to Ted, and both sleds reversed and headed back toward the hunters.

It was a pleasant novelty not to have to defend themselves against these people of the ice-world. It was even more agreeable to be treated as guests, even if they had little choice about accepting Jersey hospitality.

They returned to the site of the walrus kill, where two dozen Jersey hunters were slashing up the bulky corpse even more skillfully than the inlanders had sliced up their kill of moose. The Jerseys stared in surprise and fascination at the sleds, but there was no trace of fear or suspicion about them. Most of them, Jim noticed, were of the same blond-haired, blue-eyed type as Kennart himself. For an outsider, it was difficult to tell one from another, and Jim decided they were probably all descended from a small, closely related group.

Since Carl, too, was blond-haired and blue-eyed, he was the object of considerable interest. Kennart pointed to him and said, "Have you Jersey blood?"

"I doubt it," Carl said in confusion. "That is-well, I'm not sure."

Kennart laughed. "You look like one of us! Of what tribe are you, then?"

"Well-I'm from New York," Carl stammered. "The… the policeman tribe."

Kennart shook his head. "I know not these Pleece-mans. Come you from the north?"

"No," Carl said. He looked to Jim for help.

Jim said, "We come from the west. From up there."

Kennart's eyes flashed. His hand darted out, caught Jim's wrist in an iron grip. "
Inlanders
? You say you are inlanders? That cannot be! Inlanders are animals! They speak another language, they live like beasts! Speak truth when you are my guest, stranger. From where come you?"

Jim did not flinch as the bone-crushing grip tightened. He said in a level voice, "We come from the west, but we are not inlanders. We come out of the Earth itself. We come from New York, a city beneath the ice."

He could not have staggered Kennart more thoroughly if he had rammed him in the gut with his boot. The Jersey leader let go of Jim's arm, took a few faltering steps backward, turned pale beneath his deep tan. His jaw sagged, and for a moment he was speechless.

"No," he muttered finally. "It cannot be! From under the ice…? You make sport of me, no?"

"I speak only the truth," Jim told him. "We came up out of the ice, four, five days ago. We travel eastward."

"It is only a legend!" Kennart cried. "There are not really cities under the ice!" Then he bit his lip, and began to tremble. "Forgive me," he said to Jim in a hoarse whisper. "It is not right to give guests the lie." He came close, and one calloused hand reached up to touch Jim's cheek. "Your skin," Kennart muttered. "Soft. Not like our skin. Your strange clothing… your speech… everything about you… like nothing I have known before." He moistened his lips. "It is really true? You have come up out of the ice?"

"It is really true," Jim said.

They reached the Jersey encampment an hour later, when the sun had nearly dipped into the western ice field and the sky was rapidly darkening. The fair-haired hunters were camped on the far side of the lake. Thirty or more igloos sprouted like mushrooms from the ice, and nearly the entire tribe, more than a hundred strong, turned out to greet the strange new guests. The Jersey women, like their men, were light of complexion, though all were deeply tanned where-ever bare skin showed. In the case of the very small children, a great deal of skin showed; despite the bitter twenty-five-degree cold, some youngsters no more than five or six years old wore nothing but a strip of fur around their waists, and loose sandals of hide.