Time of the Great Freeze Read Online Free PDF

outcasts had ever been married.
    * * *
    It was early in the evening when the moment of departure came. The expedition had assembled its belongings in Level A, near the hatch that led upward to the surface world. They were only a hundred feet below the old surface. But a mile or more of ice lay between them and the open sky.
    A contingent of police escorted them from the city. Carl Bolin, was one of them.
    Surprisingly enough, a couple of the young policemen looked enviously at the departing group. And as Jim lugged a folded tent toward the hatch, Carl came up alongside and said, "Let me give you a hand with that, Jim."
    "I can manage."
    "But I can help you." Carl seized the back half of the bulky, cumbersome tent and together they lugged it toward the hatch. The policeman said quietly to Jim, "You don't know how lucky you are. I wish I was going with you!"
    "Who's stopping you?"
    "I can't go. I… I've got a job here. I…" Carl hesitated, and looked strangely at his police brassard. "It would be desertion," he muttered. "I'm a policeman! An officer of the law. And the law-"
    "-is sending us outside," Jim said. "We can use another strong back."
    "It wouldn't be right to leave," Carl insisted. "They wouldn't let me go, anyway. I've had police training. I owe it to the city to stay here and serve."
    "Suit yourself," Jim answered curtly.
    * * *
    It took half an hour to move everything through the hatch into the musty, dusty tunnel outside. The hardest part was getting the two jet-sleds through; they were almost as wide as the hatch itself, and had to be maneuvered delicately. During the building of the city, many openings hundreds of feet wide had been left to permit the entry of construction materials and machinery, but they had all been sealed, all but this small opening, through which only a few could pass at a time. Jim wondered what would happen if it ever became necessary to evacuate New York suddenly. But that was no longer his problem, he told himself. He and New York City were at the parting of the ways.
    "Everything set?" asked the policeman in charge.
    Dr. Barnes nodded. "We've got all our gear through."
    "Close the hatch, then!"
    The seven outcasts stood amid their heaps of belongings in the vestibule beyond the hatch. Three burly policemen began to swing the heavy door closed. It moved smoothly enough on its burnished gimbals. Jim felt a pounding in his heart as it swung into place. Another two yards and the hatch would be closed, and they would be banished from New York City forever…
    "Wait!" someone yelled.
    An instant later, a figure slipped through the hatch and into the vestibule to join the exiles: Carl, the young policeman. He made it with only seconds to spare, grasping the hatch arm and flipping it through the narrow opening, back into the city from which he had just exiled himself.
    Clang !
    The hatch was closed now. From the far side came the sounds of metal rasping against metal as the police lodged the hatch in place. There was no return possible. The barrier could be opened only from the inside.
    "I want to go with you," Carl said to Dr. Barnes.
    Jim's father smiled faintly. "It looks as though we have no choice but to accept you. Who are you?"
    "Carl Bolin. My father was Peter Bolin the hydroponics technician."
    "I know him, Dad," Jim said. "He's all right."
    "He'd better be," Dr. Barnes said, and there was a strange coldness to his tone that startled Jim. "Everybody in this team is going to have to pull his own weight. We can't make allowances for slackers."
    Ted Callison peered upward into the dimness above them. "We'd better start loading the elevator," he said. "Time to get moving."
    Jim shared his impatience. The outside world, that forbidding land of snow and ice, was only a legend to him. Neither he nor his father, nor even his grandfather's grandfather, had ever set eyes on that world. Of the eight of them, only Dave Ellis had ever had a glimpse of the surface, and that had been at second