Time of the Great Freeze (14 page)

"Remain here," Kennart ordered them. "No one leave the sleds until I return."

He walked briskly away, and before long his broad-backed form was nothing but a speck against the ice. Ted Callison lifted his binoculars and peered after him.

"What's he doing?" Carl asked.

"Kneeling," Ted reported. "Praying. I think he's praying!"

Kennart remained alone on the ice for twenty minutes. When he returned, he looked taut-nerved, uncertain.

"The warm weather is coming," he told them. "The ice is strange this time of the year. I hear it groaning. It cries out for blood. Danger lies between us and the water. But we will go on. And we will reach the sea."

The sleds crept forward, speed held down to no more than a couple of miles an hour. Ominous cracking and splitting sounds seemed to rise from the ice, and now and then, a far-off boom as of thunder. Kennart did not notice the sounds-or at least pretended not to notice them.

The sun was warm the following morning. Too warm, thought Jim, who found himself longing for zero-degree weather. In his mind's eye he saw droplets of water forming like beads on the underside of the ice pack, saw the ice growing thinner and thinner until it was only inches thick beneath them. After they had traveled for an horn, Kennart ordered the sleds to halt.

"From here to the sea," he said, "we must go on foot. The sleds can follow behind us. The ice is very unfriendly here."

Carl remained in one sled, Dave in the other, as drivers. Everyone else clambered out. Kennart shaped the group into a V-formation, with himself at the apex and the rest spread out behind him over the ice.

They walked and the sleds followed behind.

The ice field stretched ahead of them, clear to the horizon, so that it seemed to be an infinite trip to the sea. Still, the sun blazed in the east, leading them on. It was almost uncomfortably warm now, the temperature well up in the middle thirties, so that Jim found himself actually sweating inside his thick garments.

They plodded on.

The ice seemed solid enough beneath their feet. Kennart detoured several times that morning, detecting who knew what mysterious weakness in the underpinning, but to Jim it did not seem as though the ice was nearly as "unfriendly" as Kennart believed.

So when trouble struck, it was all the more tragic, coming as it did when they were just being lulled again into a sense of false confidence.

It happened with lightning swiftness, an hour after their halt for lunch. Kennart was well out in front. Jim and Chet flanked him, to the side and some thirty yards behind. In back of them came Dr. Barnes, Roy, and Ted, while Dave and Carl, in the sleds, brought up the rear. Jim had swung into a steady rhythm of march,
left-
right,
left-
right,
left-
right, and a kind of hypnosis gripped him, a dreamy mood of inattention brought on by the flat terrain and the whiteness of everything and the brightness of the sun and the monotony of the march.

He heard a sound as of breaking wood, and then a splash.

But what he had heard did not register on his mind for a long moment. Then he reacted slowly, like one coming up out of a drugged sleep.

To his left a sudden fissure yawned in the ice. For an instant, he saw dark water, gleaming in the sun, saw a hand wave briefly-and then nothing.

"Chet!" he yelled, and started to spring toward the place where the ice had opened.

"No!" Kennart cried, in an ear-splitting voice that could have been heard a continent away. "No, Jim! Stay back!"

Jim halted momentarily. Looking around, he saw Kennart sprinting toward him over the ice.

"It's Chet," Jim called. "He fell in!"

He started toward the place where Chet had been. Already, he saw in horror, the ice crack was closing again. A bare six-inch-wide line of darkness revealed the site of the crack now.

Jim had gone no more than three steps when Kennart caught up with him. The blond man's hand shot out and seized Jim by the back of the neck, fingers digging in agonizingly. Jim squirmed and tried to break free, but Kennart's grip was like the grasp of metal bands.

"Let go of me!" Jim bellowed. "We've got to save Chet! Let go! Do you hear?"

"He is dead," Kennart said mercilessly. "Do you wish to die, too?"

"We can still save him," Jim grunted. He lashed out at Kennart with his elbows, twisted, tried to land a solid blow. But the ice dweller held Jim at arm's length, fingers locked in place on Jim's neck. Slowly, humiliatingly, with one arm alone, he forced him to his knees.

By this time, the others had come up, all but those in the sleds, who had halted abruptly when Chet vanished. Kennart released Jim, who got to his feet, glaring and rubbing his neck.

The fissure in the ice was completely closed now. There was no way of knowing where Chet had gone under.

Kennart said slowly, "He is gone, and we could not have saved him. The water draws the life from a man in moments. It sucks out the warmth. If you had gone to help him, Jim, you would have fallen through and been lost also. One death does not prevent the other. I am sorry if I angered you, but your life was in danger."

Jim did not answer. He stared in dull dismay at the treacherous ice. A hushed silence gripped the party. Ted Callison cracked his knuckles fiercely. Dr. Barnes shook his head in sadness.

"Is it safe to go on?" he asked.

Kennart nodded. "We must go on. It is dangerous here, but we will reach the open water safely. The ice has had the victim it demands."

Stunned, chilled by the tragedy, the voyagers pushed onward, forming their V once again. No more than ten minutes ago, Chet had been alive, striding along in his loose-jointed, long-legged way, perhaps thinking of fish he planned to catch the next time they stopped to rest. And now he bobbed lifeless beneath the ice, snuffed out in the flickering of an eye. They could not even put his body to rest. They could only mourn silently, and go on.

Up ahead, Kennart was walking carefully but at his usual pace. Jim hesitated each time he put his foot down. The ice still seemed solid to him, but there might be other deadly traps waiting here, places where the ice was only paper-thin over a pocket of air, places where darkness might gleam suddenly out of the whiteness and claim a life.

Onward they went, detouring, zigzagging. Now it was Carl who walked to Jim's left; Roy and Ted made up the ends of the V, and Dr. Barnes had gone back to drive one of the sleds. Like the Dooney folk, the ice pack had claimed its toll.

They continued until the first shadows of night were falling. Their meal was a silent one that night, and no one spoke afterward. Jim slept badly, tossing and turning, eternally seeing the ice yawning to engulf Chet. It seemed to him as though they were moving across the skin of some giant creature, who might at any moment grow angered at them and destroy them with a shrug.

In the morning, they were on their way almost as soon as dawn had broken-once again, on foot, so that they covered only a few miles. But by midmorning Kennart told them they could return to the sleds. "The ice is stronger here," he said.

"How does he know?" Carl demanded, as they once more began to move at a fast pace. "Suppose he's wrong?"

"He's risking his own life as well as ours," Jim replied. "
He
isn't in any hurry to reach the sea. If he thinks it's safer here, it's because he's got good reason to think it."

When they stopped at noon, Kennart pointed toward the east, and said, "Tomorrow we will reach the sea. I give you my pledge of that."

"Then it wasn't impossible!" Jim said.

Kennart smiled distantly. "No," he said. "My father was mistaken. He said it could not be done, but he was wrong. It
can
be done. We will do it. Nothing is impossible.
Nothing
!"

The golden fire of midday danced across the field of ice. The sleds had halted, for they could go no farther. Fifty yards ahead, the ice shield came to an end. Beyond, a thousand ice floes bobbed and drifted in the open water. Islands of ice, some of them only a few feet across, others a hundred yards or more in diameter, swirled, crashed against one another, rose high out of the water for a moment before falling back.

Jim walked as close to the edge of the ice field as he dared, and looked out across the water.

The sea!

It was a stupefying sight. Where there had been unending whiteness, now there was dark blue, stretching to the boundaries of the world. The wind swept low, blowing the surface of the water up into wavelets tipped with white caps of foam. Up off the sea came the salty breeze, cold but invigorating. Jim felt faintly dazed by the thought of such a bulk of water lying in their path.

"Here we wait," Kennart said. "The Sea People will come ashore along this coast."

"How long will it be?" Dr. Barnes asked.

Kennart shook his head and grinned, showing gleaming white teeth. "A day," he said. "Or six days, or twenty. Who knows the way of the Sea People? But they come here. They sail past, and put men ashore to hunt."

It seemed like madness, Jim thought-to camp here by the edge of the sea, waiting for the landing of seafarers who might put in to shore anywhere within a thousand miles. But he knew they had no choice. They could not contact the Sea People. And Kennart had agreed to wait with them. He would not leave them, he said, until he saw them safely to sea.

They waited.

It was not the most comforting place in the world to camp. The ice seemed sturdy enough, here, but every now and then a vast chunk would crack free of the ice shelf and go drifting out into the open water. Late on the day of their arrival, an ice mass at least a hundred feet in diameter broke away on a voyage of its own. But Kennart didn't seem troubled. So long as they all stayed together, it did not appear really to matter whether they remained on the mainland or went bobbing off on a little ice-floe island. The seafarers, he said, would find them all the same. If he were worried about his own return trip, he kept those worries out of sight.

On the second day the cry went up: "A sail! A sail! They're coming!"

Jim looked out to sea. It was a thrilling sight: a ship coming down from the north, sailing parallel to the shore, weaving its way riskily between the butting, rearing floes of ice. The ship was bigger than Jim had expected, more than a hundred feet long, its hull made of wood planks painted a bright red. A sail of black cloth bellied in the breeze. On the ship's prow a fearsome figurehead was carved: a dragon's neck, ending in a grisly head whose eyes were glittering yellow, whose savage teeth looked like wolf teeth mounted in the wood.

Through the binoculars, Jim could make out figures moving aboard the ship-husky men clad in leather doublets, brawny figures with long hair, long beards.

"They see us," Carl said. "They're putting in toward shore."

"How can they reach it?" Jim asked. "They'll be caved in by the floating islands of ice."

Kennart laughed. "They know their trade," he said quietly. "They will have no trouble."

He was right. With magnificent ease, the ship found a path through the floating ice, gliding gracefully in until it was within a dozen yards of shore. Crewmen appeared at the bow and threw down anchors. The seafarers' ship rode superbly in the water, ice snapping at its hull but unable to harm it.

A ladder of animal hide was lowered. The seven men on the shore waited silently as the seafarers came ashore, marching down their hinged wooden gangplank.

They came armed. They carried spears and daggers of bone, and short swords slung at their waists. A dozen of them left the ship, swaggering and bold, their faces set in harsh, unfriendly lines. Eight of the twelve were red-haired men. Their fiery manes and beards blazed in the midday sun. They filed ashore and arrayed themselves in a line, backs to the sea.

One of them, the biggest and most fearsome, snapped something in an unfamiliar language studded with clicking consonants and broad vowels. Not a word was intelligible, but the meaning was clear enough: the seafarer wanted to know who the travelers were, and by what right they came here?

"They speak not our tongue," Kennart whispered. "I will address them in theirs."

He stepped forward. Adopting an expression every bit as arrogant as that of the man who faced him, Kennart made reply, spitting the words out as though it soiled his lips to have to utter such barbaric jargon.

There was a long, crackling silence when Kennart finished speaking. Then the seafarer chief uttered a single syllable.

Kennart turned red. He replied with two short, violent bursts of words, the sounds tumbling over one another as they emerged. It was the turn of the Sea People to grow hot with anger. They stirred menacingly, hands stealing to the hilts of their swords. Aboard the ship, dozens of bearded faces peered down, taking it all in.

An argument was raging now. Voices were growing heated. Kennart said something, only to be shouted down by the sea-chief, and to shout the bearded one down in turn. The situation looked critical. Standing by the sled, Jim eyed a power torch, readying himself to grab it if matters came to a boil. But what would they do, he wondered, if there were a battle? They needed the co-operation of these Sea People, not their enmity.

The negotiations seemed to have broken down. Kennart turned, stalked back to the tense group by the sleds. Scratching his chin thoughtfully, Kennart said, "It happens that they make voyage now to the far side of the ice. But they are not eager for passengers. They like not your looks, men of New York."

"Our looks don't matter," Dr. Barnes said. "What will they take as fee to carry us? What do they need?"

"Nothing you can give them," Kennart said. "There the troubles lies. The Sea People need only food from the shore, and that you cannot offer."