CHAPTER 15
OVER THE ICE
We had flashed through two days and nights before Lantin judged it safe to stop our progress in time. By then, we had started the space-movement mechanism, and had sent the car up to a height of a mile above the ground. Once there, we snapped off the time-wave, and hung in midair, motionless in both time and space.
It was early morning now, bright and sunny, and peering down over the car's side to the valley below, I could see no sign of life. In the two days through which we had passed so quickly, it was evident that the guards had given up searching for us and had returned to the city. I wondered how they explained to themselves our sudden disappearance.
I slid down into the car's interior, now, and closed the circular door above me. Sinking down on the padded floor with utter weariness, I tried to express to Lantin my thanks for saving my life, since had he acted a fraction of a second later, I should have been struck down by the flashing spears of our pursuers. But Lantin would not hear me, declaring that alone he would have been unable ever to reach the car, and so, conscious that without the other each of us would have perished, we let the matter rest.
In a few minutes, Lantin returned to the controls, and swinging the car in a great circle, pointed it south, opening up the power gradually until we were racing down toward the southern horizon with our highest speed. Soon, far ahead, the glistening ice came into view, and in a few minutes after that the green land behind us had dwindled to a speck against the ice, and then vanished. High above the ground, we sped across the endless ice, splitting the air like a meteor.
Hour after hour we fled on, across the gleaming fields of whiteness. The cold air had forced us to turn on the heater of the car, and even with it, we were none too warm. Below, from horizon to horizon, billowed the frozen fields, with here and there a white dune or hill to break the monotony of the landscape.
Finally, in midafternoon, a thickening line of black showed against the southern horizon. We reduced our speed, and sinking closer to the ground, sped down toward the black line.
It seemed to grow as we came nearer, loomed larger and larger, until at last we hung above the black mass, gazing down at it in silent awe. And it was a wall.
But what a wall! A gigantic, mountain-high and mountain-thick barrier of solid black metal, extending as far as we could see, from the eastern to the western horizon. A colossal barrier of metal, all of a mile and a half in height, with a thickness at the bottom of nearly a mile and at the top of half that much. A smooth-sided, dully gleaming mass beside which the walls of mighty Babylon would have been toylike, microscopic.
And with that wall, the ice stopped. On the northern side of the barrier, the fields of ice stretched away as far as the eye could reach. But on its southern side there was no ice. Grass of dull green, and small trees, gnarled and twisted by the glacier's cold, lay to the wall's south, a vista of rolling, bleak plains that extended down to the southern horizon.
Hanging above the mighty, flat-topped barrier, we surveyed it, stupefied. All around us was no sign of life. No sound, no movement. Only the white expanse to the north, the green one to the south, and between them, separating and defining them, the titanic wall.
Lantin spoke, excitedly. "You see its purpose, Wheeler? It has been built here as a dam to hold back the glacier, to stem the tides of ice. But how built? To think that men can do things like that!"
I saw now that Lantin spoke aright, and that it was to dam the engulfing, southward-flowing ice that the wall had been built. And I was struck with awe at the achievement. What were the great Chinese wall and Martian canals, to this? Here in the far future, fifteen thousand years ahead of our own time, we were seeing another step in the conquest of nature by man. He had leveled mountains and turned rivers, and here, below us, had thrust forth a hand and halted the resistless glaciers.
An hour we hung above the colossal barrier, fascinated, and then remembered our mission and sped again south.
As we rocketed on, we could see no sign of life below, nothing but the bleak arctic plains with here and there some sparse vegetation.
Again Lantin cried out, and when I looked south, I discerned an odd flicker of light, a seeming hesitating wavering of the air. We sped down toward it, dropping down again to a scant mile above the ground.
Far ahead showed expanses of bright green, and as we drew nearer, I saw that there were small patches of white against the green, oddly regular in shape. As we sped on, these white blotches changed to buildings, and the green to verdant lawns and gardens, in which they were set. Again Lantin stopped the car, while we looked down, puzzled. For in a straight line from east to west, was the boundary, the limit, of the gardens and the buildings. North of that line were the cold, wind-swept plains and stunted, arctic vegetation, while south of the same invisible line, seemingly only a few feet from the bleak tundras, began the luxuriant, tropical gardens, stretching away south as far as the eye could see. And also the elusive flicker of light seemed to begin at the same point, and to be present everywhere south of it. If you have ever seen the flicker of heated air above railway tracks or hot sand, on a warm afternoon, you will understand me. It was like that, an elusive, fleeting wavering in the air, below us.
"I can't understand it," said Lantin, pointing down to the invisible line which separated arctic world from tropic. "Gardens like those, only a few feet away from the cold plain."
"It's beyond me," I told him. "Another thing, Lantin, the car is as cold as ever, even with the heater functioning. Yet down there the country looks tropical."
He shook his head, and starting the car, we sped on south, as cold as we had been above the glacier, while below was a landscape that reminded me of Florida, in my own time. Set in the lawns and gardens, the white buildings became more numerous as we sped on. We could see that they were of varying shapes, some cone-shaped, others cubical, while still others were spherical, like great globes of white stone sunk a little in the earth. The cone-shaped buildings were the most numerous, I saw, though there were many of the other designs. But nowhere was there a building that was cylindrical.
Ever and again our eyes caught that inexplicable flicker in the air below us. We were flying with reduced speed, now, less than a mile above the ground, and beneath us the lawns and gardens had disappeared, giving way to the crowded buildings of a great city. In the broad streets of that city were tiny, moving figures, and many vehicles seemed to flash continually along the wide avenues. But there was no sign of aircraft.
Always the buildings grew larger, and it was plain that we were approaching the city's center. Away ahead of us a great cone began to loom up gigantically, an immense, cone-shaped building that was fully as large as the temple of the Raider, back in the city of the Kanlars. We changed our course, headed down toward the colossal center building. As we drew nearer, we saw that it was smooth and unbroken of side, and at its top it was truncated, flattened, the summit of the cone forming a flat, circular platform a few hundred feet in diameter. We glimpsed this much, and then Lantin sent the car down on a long slant toward the cone's flat summit.
"We'll land there," he said. "This city is Kom, without doubt."
I nodded but did not answer, for my attention was engaged by something else. As we slanted smoothly down toward the cone, with moderate speed, I noticed that the strange flicker of light that had puzzled us seemed to be growing plainer, stronger, nearer. It apparently hung steady above the cone, a few rods over its summit. And as we rushed down toward that summit, the truth struck me, and the nature of the odd flickering was clear to me in a sudden flash of intuition.
"Lantin!" I screamed. "That flicker! It's a roof, a transparent roof! Stop the car!"
His face livid, he reached toward the space-mechanism control, but before ever his hand touched it, there was an ear-splitting crash, I was thrown violently forward in the car, and as my head hit its steel wall with stunning force, something seemed to explode in my brain, and consciousness left me.