Time of the Great Freeze by Robert Silverberg Read Free Book Online

Carl stamped his feet, rubbed his gloved hands together. Cold was turning his cheeks cherry red. "But tell me, Jim-"
    "What?"
    "Where are we going? What's this all about? Everything happened so fast." He grinned embarrassedly. "I don't really have any idea of what's up."
    "We're going to London," Jim said. "We're going to cross the Atlantic ice."
    "London? That's a million miles away!"
    "Only three thousand, or so," Jim said.
    "That's the same as a million, the way I look at it But what's in London?"
    "People. People like those in New York."
    "Then why go to them?"
    "Because New York doesn't want us," Jim said. "Mayor Hawkes and the Council tossed us out because we made radio contact with London. You know what radio is?"
    Carl nodded.
    "We talked to someone in London," Jim said. "He agreed with us that it was time to start coming out of the ground. Well, they got him. Roy thinks they killed him, and he's probably right. But we can't go on living in burrows. The ice is retreating."
    "Is it?" Carl asked in surprise. "It doesn't look that way!"
    "Maybe not here," Jim said. "But Dave says the worst is over. He's a meteorologist, you know. His studies show that the temperature trend started to reverse itself about fifty years ago. The Earth is coming out of the dust cloud. Things are warming up. In another hundred or hundred and fifty years the ice may be gone from the United States."
    "A hundred and fifty years! Then why should we be concerned?"
    "Because," Jim said, "the time to start preparing is now . We've got to start exploring the surface again, to get the city people ready to live in the open. We have to plan ahead two or even three generations-just as they planned two generations ahead when they first built the underground cities. Only the Mayor didn't want to look that far ahead. If we left things up to him, nobody would ever come aboveground again, not even if North America turned into the Garden of Eden!"
    "I think I understand," Carl said. "Or maybe not. Anyway, I'm glad I'm here. It isn't everybody who gets to see what the world is like. Look at that moon! Look at it!"
    Jim looked. He tingled in awe at the sight of that pockmarked round face, so blazing bright in the cold, black sky. Once, he knew, men had reached for the moon. Men had walked its dead surface. Mars, Venus-they had been reached, too. No one in New York knew what had happened to man's space dominion. Did the people of the tropical countries fly back and forth to the worlds of space every day? Or had the ice reached them too, finally, and choked off all thoughts but those of survival?
    Jim turned his glance from the moon, back to the field of ice, to the white desert that stretched as far as eye could see in every direction. He scuffed at the snow, and watched it leap and scatter. And he kicked at the glacier, the obstinate mass of frozen water that had driven man from his domain.
    "It's going to be quite a trip," he said quietly, as he and Carl trudged back to the tent.
    * * *
    It was Carl who first saw the sun.
    "It's morning!" he yelled. "The sun is rising!"
    Jim realized he had slept after all. He found himself lying in a corner of the tent with somebody-Dom Hannon, it developed-sprawled across his legs. Getting to his feet, lie found himself stiff and sore, every joint protesting against the cold. There was a general race for the exit from the tent.
    "The sun," Dr. Barnes said quietly.
    There wasn't much to see yet-a reddish-gold pin point of light, rising far to the east, just barely peeking above the white sheet of the glacier. But Jim felt choked as though a hand had grasped his throat. The sun!
    "It's beautiful," he murmured.
    It was rising with almost frightening speed. The whole upper lobe was above the horizon now; the color was changing from red to yellow, and in the clear blue sky scudded pink-bellied clouds of heart-numbing loveliness. A track of light seared along the ice plateau toward them like a runnel of golden, molten metal. The air