Time of the Great Freeze Read Online Free PDF Page B

hand, through one of the periscopes the meteorologists used. During the centuries underground, the city's meteorologists had come to have an almost religious role. It was they, and they alone, who were permitted to monitor surface conditions, using telemetering devices and periscopic television eyes. The city's Charter expressly commanded that the surveillance continue ceaselessly. The idea was, of course, that the city should be prepared for the day when the surface became habitable again.
    But with the passing of the decades the meteorologists' role had become purely ritualistic. Nobody seriously expected man ever to return to the surface again-except for a few dreamers like Dr. Barnes and Jim. Each month, the meteorologists made their observations, and formally submitted their report to the Mayor-and the report was just as formally filed away, unread, merely part of the ritual.
    Maybe, Jim thought, the reason Dave was so apprehensive about the surface was the fact that he, alone among them, had some idea of what it was really like.
    An elevator ran up the side of the tunnel that led to the surface. Through the years, the tunnel had been extended up into the gathering ice pack, and it had been a sacred duty of the city dwellers to keep the passage clear. Jim suspected, though, that no tunnel maintenance had been performed in years. Would they be able to get out to the surface after all? Suppose miles of ice pinned them down? Where would they go? New York would not take them back.
    "Everything's aboard the elevator," Roy Veeder called out.
    "Let's hope it still works," Dr. Barnes said. "Ted, can you reach the switch?"
    "Got it."
    There was a groaning, a whining, as servo motors spun into life after decades of inactivity. The elevator seemed to strain against its moorings. Had its core rotted away, or was the load simply too great for it?
    "Maybe we'll have to make two trips," Dom Han-non suggested. "The elevator's carrying a couple of tons, and…"
    And it began to lift.
    Slowly, painfully, it rose away from the tunnel floor and began to toil toward the surface.
    The eight men on the elevator's open platform huddled together. It was cold, in the tunnel shaft, and it grew colder as they rose. Was it simply the chill of the upper world, Jim wondered, or was it an inner chill that made the goose-pimples rise along his skin?
    "We're up a hundred twenty feet," Ted Callison reported. "We must be into the glacier now."
    "Shine a light upward," Dr. Barnes said. "Let's see how far up the shaft is clear."
    It was impossible to tell. Light gleamed along the shiny metal walls of the tunnel, and it was apparent that the way was open for at least several hundred feet more above them. But beyond that…?
    The elevator continued to rise.
    Jim glanced at Carl Bolin. The brawny young ex-policeman was gripping the edge of one of the sleds, holding on for dear life. His eyes were closed, and his lips were moving as if in prayer. Jim felt like praying himself. Suppose the elevator failed, and dashed them hundreds of feet back down to the tunnel floor? Or suppose a plug of ice dozens of yards thick blocked them from reaching the surface?
    Jim drew his parka close about him. He had never worn warm clothing before, and the bulk of the heavy garment oppressed him. So, too, the idea of the bulk of the ice above him oppressed him. Millions of tons of frozen water, pressing down. He had never really thought of it that way before. The ice had been simply something that was there, something taken for granted. But now he felt as though the whole great weight of the glacier lay upon his back.
    Upward.
    "It's dark above us!" Ted Callison called out. "The tunnel's closed, and we've only gone four hundred feet!"
    A stab of the flashlight revealed, though, that the darkness above them was caused by a metal hatch set athwart the tunnel, and not by a plug of ice. Obviously the builders of the tunnel to the surface had partitioned it with horizontal bulkheads so