They thumped and applauded as Hugh sat down. Colonel Chase was a tall, heavy-set man in his forties, with a pink and peeling scalp and a pale strip around his eyes.
“Hugh — everyone — I wish we were able to give you the welcome you deserve, with bells ringing and reporters pestering you. But you’ve returned at a very bad time, as I’m sure you expected.
“New Zealand has been under martial law since May. I have the doubtful honour to be the military governor of Canterbury District, including Christchurch. Our job is to maintain order and to ensure that everyone gets a fair share of the remaining food and energy. Even returning Antarctic heroes. I won’t burden you with the details of our problems — you’ll learn them soon enough — but I should tell you that we’ve lost virtually all our agriculture. Our harbours were wrecked in the tidal waves last summer, and sea level has risen almost two metres since then. We’ve been able to import very little oil, and the price is about ten times what it was a year ago. Our overseas markets have vanished. We’re almost as cut off from the world as you were down on the ice.
“Nevertheless, we’re better off than many other parts of the world these days. Those of you who aren’t New Zealanders may well choose to stay. In fact, you may have to — there’s not much travel to the outside.”
Penny looked at Steve; his face was impassive.
“Most of you are members of CARP,” the colonel went on. “Or were. The programme no longer exists. Neither does the Commonwealth, in any meaningful sense. So if you do choose to return to Britain, or Australia, or Canada or wherever, it’ll be at the expense of the New Zealand Provisional Government. And at its convenience. In the meantime, you’ll be expected to aid our efforts in every way possible. God knows there’s enough work to be done.”
Terry Dolan was on his feet. “You mean to say you’re too bloody cheap to send us home to Australia?”
“To bloody poor,” Colonel Chase barked. “Aircraft and fuel are scarce, and no one flies unless it’s absolutely essential. I’m not sure I’d want to be in Australia in any case”
“Why the hell not?”
“They’ve lost their agriculture, just as we have, and they’ve more mouths to feed. There’s a coalition government in Canberra, but no one seems to obey it. We understand the cities are being evacuated, but there’s not much left in the countryside.”
“What about Britain?” asked Colin.
“We don’t really know. They’ve got a military government like ours, and they face the same problems we do, but on a greater scale. All of Europe seems to be in the same boat — too many people, and not enough food or energy, and the weather getting worse all the time.
“As for Canada and the US, they’ve very near collapse. The Canadians have lost their entire wheat crop. I think the Americans managed to save part of theirs, but they’re fighting a civil war that’s totally disrupted their economy. The federal government is being run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but not very well.”
He paused. “We still have newspapers, of a sort. I’ll see that you get copies of them… Anyone here from Christchurch?”
“I’m from Dunedin,” Simon Partington said.
“You’ll be allowed a phone call in the morning. The phone system is open from 0900 to 1400 hours daily. I’m sure your family and friends will be overjoyed to know you’re safely home. Those of you from North Island can give us the names and addresses of your people, and we’ll have them notified by telegram.
“I haven’t much more to say. For the time being, you’re our guests here. Wellington will have to decide what’s to be done with you. Again, I’m sorry to offer you such poor hospitality and such depressing news. If it’s any consolation, your safe return is the best news we’ve had all year. God bless you all.”
He sat down in a nervous, rustling silence. Hugh stood up again.
“We’ve been given rooms on the second floor. I suggest we choose our quarters and plan on an early evening — Tommy tells me the lights go off at 2100 hours. At least there’ll be plenty of hot water, and I for one intend to soak in a tub for an hour or two.”
The sallow young man showed Penny and Steve into a second-floor room facing the river; apart from the dust on the furniture and a stale, unopened smell, the room might have been in Omaha or Honolulu.
“Too big,” Steve smiled when the young man left. “You could get lost in a room this size.” He’d grabbed an armful of magazines and newspapers in the lobby; dumping them on the bed, he began to undress. “Let’s take a shower.”
Under the hot, needle-sharp spray, Penny found herself looking at Steve’s body as if for the first time: it was hard, pale and very thin. His hands and feet, scarred with frostbite, looked like those of an old man, and his face looked older, too. His nose, sunburned almost purple, jutted like a beak from the lined, taut skin over his cheekbones; his lips were puffy and cracked. Her own body looked strange as well, the belly flatter than it had been in years, breasts beginning to sag, skin pale and dry and speckled with sores. It hadn’t mattered on the ice, but now her unattractiveness embarrassed her. With guilty relief, she stepped out of the shower and wrapped herself in a big towel.
Like a dull old married couple, they got into bed and started reading. Penny picked up a July issue of the Christchurch Times: it was just four tabloid pages, without photographs or advertisements.
“Didn’t Al say someone told him there was rioting in Auckland and Wellington?” she asked when she’d finished.
“Mmph.”
“Not a word about it in here. Just stuff about military regulations and how to save food and energy.”
Steve was engrossed in a magazine, but showed her the cover.
“Time Monthly. Monthly?”
“Look at the price,” Steve said. “Ten New Zealand dollars.” It was printed on pulp, even the cover, which showed a black-and-white photo of President Wood looking grim. “The only article in the science section is something about a ‘loyalty shakeout’ of what they call ‘renegade scientists’.”
They read more or less at random, gradually sifting out the events of the last seven months from masses of propaganda.
The disappearance of the earth’s magnetic field, back in January, had crippled the world: radio communications broke down, and both the ozone layer and the ionosphere disintegrated under the continuous bombardment of solar flares. International trade dwindled to a trickle. The industrial nations were convulsed by strikes, riots, even insurrections, all made worse by food shortages. It was some compensation, though, that military electronics systems were as deranged as civilian ones. Missiles died in their silos; the computers that ruled the armies went mad; bombers and fighters became dangerously unreliable. With each country absorbed in its own problems, none could risk war.
Then the icequake struck. Steve had been right — the tsunamis rose across the Southern Ocean, across the Pacific, and focussed their energies in the Aleutians and the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia. The north polar ice, only a few metres thick, shattered as the waves crashed repeatedly into the Arctic Ocean.
Not many Pacific coastlines escaped. From Lyttleton to Vladivostok to Los Angeles to Santiago, the tsunamis left little but wreckage and oil slicks (a million-tonne super-tanker, leaving the Alaskan oil port of Valdez fully laden, was carried ten kilometres inland before it broke up). No one knew how many died in the first two days after the tsunamis struck, but estimates ranged as high as three million. San Francisco had been especially hard hit. At the beginning of February deranged computers had failed to produce over fifty thousand unemployment cheques for the Bay Area. Riots had broken out, and by February 7 much of San Francisco, Oakland and Richmond was in flames. The tsunamis struck, carrying away the Golden Gate Bridge and flooding the rapid-transit tunnels under the bay. Thousands of people living on the low-lying lands around the bay were drowned or driven from their homes. The rest of the US west coast suffered as well. The Trident nuclear submarine base at Bangor, Washington, was destroy
ed; so were the naval facilities at San Diego and the missile pads at Vandenberg Air Force Base. A moderately severe earthquake a week later in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles compounded the disaster.
The world’s attention turned, briefly, to the Antarctic; the New Zealand papers, at least, were full of human-interest stories about the evacuation of McMurdo and the presumed loss of New Shackleton and the other stations. One Wellington paper ran a photograph of Hugh, and described with macabre relish how the station must have been buried under its falling roof. There was a mention of the RNZAF Hercules that had vanished on its mission to relieve New Shackleton; Penny remembered Max’s photos of the wrecked aeroplane on the Shelf.
Before the end of February, the rise in eustatic sea level was noticeable all over the world. It was only about eighteen centimetres at that point, but it was enough — with the help of hurricanes and storm tides — to knock out of over half of the world’s major ports. London was partially evacuated; so were large areas of Belgium and the Netherlands. The oil ports of the Persian Gulf were flooded. Hundreds of airfields, built on low ground near the sea, became tidal marshes. As relatively warm water poured into the Arctic Ocean, its ice cap dwindled to a few bergs.
March brought violent weather to both hemispheres. Unseasonably early frosts struck southern Africa, South America, Australia and New Zealand. In the northern Hemisphere the jet stream swung wildly out of its usual path, carrying warm air into the Arctic and blizzards into the American Midwest and South. All over the planet crops withered and livestock perished as ultraviolet pierced the endless clouds. Blind and starving, great herds of cattle frenziedly invaded crop lands; in some parts of the American Southwest napalm had to be used to stop them. With transport systems in ruins, livestock couldn’t even be slaughtered to feed the hungry cities; by June beef was up to $150 a kilo in the US — while the dollar itself had lost three-quarters of its value in six months.
Frustratingly, details were scarcest in the most recent newspapers. North America, as Colonel Chase had said, was locked in a suicidal civil war. After the failure of Washington and Ottawa to cope with the disaster, ‘local councils’ had taken over large parts of the US and Canada. Confrontations had led to gunfights, then to guerrilla skirmishes, and at last — with the desertion of whole battalions to the rebel side — to full-scale military campaigns. Battles were fought for control of oil fields and refineries in Texas and Alberta, coal mines in British Columbia and Kentucky, even for suburban supermarkets. One New Zealand paper, in June, reported a rumour that tactical nuclear weapons had been used to halt a rebel offensive against Chicago.
Still less was known, or at least reported, about the Communist countries. The Soviet Union was believed to be evacuating its Black Sea coast and Arctic ports. The Chinese had abandoned Shanghai to the sea, and were refusing to accept any more refugees from Hong Kong and Macao North and South Korea were either at war or cooperating in relief operations. Indochina was silent. Eastern Europe was, perhaps, breaking free of Soviet domination, but no one knew for sure.
Cut off from their northern markets, the industrial nations of the southern hemisphere failed rapidly. South Africa’s whites were surrendering most of the country and withdrawing to a coastal strip from Cape Town to Durban: ‘Blankestan’. the Africans jeeringly called it. South America was a continent in anarchy. The disintegration of Indonesia seemed, at any rate, to have spared Australia the threat of an invasion. Chase had been right: New Zealand was better off than most of the world, though only relatively.
“‘An estimated six hundred million people have perished as a result of the disasters of the past year’.” Penny read from the Wellington News. She looked up and met Steve’s eyes. “I don’t believe it.”
“It’s only a guess. They could be doubling the real figure — or halving it.” He looked almost like a parody of the man who’d made love to her in the greenhouse: the world was again conforming to his vision of it, but now he took no pleasure — not even Schadenfreude — in the fact.
They heard a pounding on a door down the hall, and the voice of the sallow young man: “Power goes off in ten minutes. Power off in ten minutes.”
Steve doused the lights. The windows still glowed with the rain-softened light of street lamps. Penny went to a window and looked down at the empty park: the statue was just visible, a white blur in the darkness. She felt Steve come up behind her and put his arms around her.
“That’s Scott down there in the park.”
“Really?”
“His wife carved it.”
Someday he’ll see the sun again, in a thirtieth-century summer as the ice groans and breaks around him, and Wilson, and Bowers. Someday. For some reason she remembered the seeds she’d brought from the greenhouse. Somewhere she must find another sheltered place for them, plant them and hope that they would grow.
It felt good to be together in bed, listening to the shouts and laughter of friends down the hall.
“What’ll we do, Steve?”
“Go where we’ll do the most good, I guess.”
“Where — the States, or Canada?”
“I don’t think so. They don’t seem to need science writers or seismologists just now.”
“That’s not all we’re good for, is it? And they’re our countries.”
“They don’t seem to be countries at all. We could choose factions, but even if our side won, it wouldn’t bring back the country we’d left.”
“There you go, being cold-blooded and rational again.”
He turned on his side and put his arm around her.
“We’re different too, you know. We’re new. If this really is a new Ice Age starting, we’re the first people who’ve had to live in it. If we owe loyalty to anyone, it’s to the people who come after us. The more we learn, the better prepared they’ll be.”
“So what do we do — stay here?”
“For now”, anyway. They’ll be able to use what we’ve learned and put us back to work learning more. This time next year we could even be back in the Antarctic.”
The eagerness in his voice would have enraged her once, or made her laugh. But she understood him at last, and knew what he was seeing beyond the rain-streaked windows.
The power went off, killing the street lamps below. The rain fell harder than ever, drumming on the windows and hissing on the empty street, the dead river. Penny remembered the darkness of the crevasse where Will had dangled, and her arrogant, crazy boast that the ice could never kill them. She saw the surge beginning on Beardmore Glacier; she saw the Shelf, glowing blue under the moon and stars. As she put her arms around Steve and felt the reassuring warmth of him, she felt a hunger that was his as well: a yearning for the cold, for the wind, for the high dark sky and the blinding sun, and the ice.
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Icequake: A Prophetic Survival Thriller Page 24
