Rings of Ice

Chapter 5: Rape

“We have enough to get us back where we were,” Gordon said. “After that, we’re stationary.”

“We’ll be better off in the forest,” Gus said glumly.

The trip that had taken three days down took only hours back, for they knew the route and had no further need for caution. Their laborious road-building paid off in need, in speed. But it also blazed a trail for the city men to follow, later.

They passed their prior stop and went on. The meter for the gasoline read empty, and the last of their reserve gallons was in the tank.

Now they had to slow, for they had no pieced-together road here, and wanted none. Gordon turned off the motor whenever they stopped for construction, and coasted wherever he could. Sometimes they used the pulleys, so that the bus could traverse seemingly impassable terrain with minimum disturbance. If they were lucky, it would fool the pursuit.

“Trees!” Floy cried happily.

The forest began—tightly meshed pine trees. Gordon pulled into the forest as far as possible, found a sheltered, level place, and stopped. “We made it!” he said. “And we still have a few drops left for an emergency.”

Just in time, for it was dusk. They had spent all night and all day without noticing it, getting away from the city and into the high wilderness. Zena’s hands were ingrained with dirt, and she had several painful blisters.

“Okay,” Gus said. “We’ll sleep here tonight and take stock in the morning. Floy stands guard until midnight, then Glory.”

“I’ll do it,” Zena said. “Gordon needs some rest.”

“Sure he does—but you can’t do it!” Gus snapped. “You have a bad hand and foot and you’ve been working your ass off and you lose your head in a crisis. You’ve got to take care of yourself.”

So that she could be a breeder, she thought bitterly. Gus didn’t care about her welfare; he was thinking of posterity. He was taking care of her the same way he would a ten-gallon drum of gasoline: needed for future use.

Karen fixed supper and they all ate, sparingly. Then Floy went out with her cat, Gordon rolled into his bunk, and Gus took Karen to the back room.

Zena lay on her dinette-bed, wide awake. Why had she done it? How could she have blundered so? In retrospect it was obvious that she should have stopped firing the machine gun the moment the two men following Thatch went down. Instead she had hysterically blasted the tank and precipitated the conflagration.

She had lost her head. And she had murdered several men.

“Zena?” Thatch said from the floor.

“Oh, Thatch—I’m sorry!” she said miserably.

He sat up. “I just wanted to say—I thought we were finished when those men ambushed us. They had knives, and they were going to use them to make us tell where the bus was. The idea of torture—it terrifies me. When you took over the machine gun—”

“I ruined everything!” she finished.

Gordon dropped down from his bed. “You saved our lives!” he said. “Nothing less would have made those bastards stop.”

Pleased by this unexpected support, Zena did not know how to express herself. “You forgot to change!” she said. Always before it had been Gloria who slept.

“That whole project was ill-conceived,” Gordon continued. “You were the only one who argued against it. We should have known there would be no more free gasoline. You did the right thing, breaking up the mousetrap.” Then he looked at his wig, hanging on a hook by the bed. “I didn’t forget. I took it off. I’m going out to take a walk with Floy.” He went out.

Zena felt tears in her eyes. “He’s generous,” she said.

“Floy prefers him as a man,” Thatch said.

“That isn’t what I meant,” she said, embarrassed. Was this Floy-Gordon thing becoming serious? A fourteen-year-old child…

“He’s right,” Thatch said. “Gus was mad because his plan didn’t work out. He doesn’t like being wrong. We never had a chance.”

“Oh, let it drop!”

“I thought I was going to die. You saved us. The sound of that gun was the sweetest thing I ever heard. And it was brilliant of you to hole the tank, so that they’d be too distracted to organize a pursuit.”

“That was an accident!”

“Oh.” There was an awkward pause. “Well, I just wanted to thank you.”

Just like that, she thought. Thatch decided she had saved his life, so he gave her a formal, almost dispassionate thank-you. Because it was the proper thing to do.

“Nobody ever helped me like that before,” he said. “Except Gus.”

Except Gus. Zena felt a wave of nausea. There seemed to be no immediate cause. Certainly she did not object to weaning Thatch away from Gus. So what was bothering her now?

She thought it through, and realized that it was not the result of what had happened, but the anticipation of what was about to happen.

She got down beside Thatch on his mattress. “I can’t do anything else right,” she said. “And I’m not going to be much good at this. But I guess it’s time.”

“Zena, don’t—”

“No, it has to be. I’ve proved I can’t do anything else, as I said. I’ll be stiff as a board and I may throw up, but Gus is right. It has to be.”

“Zena, this is preposterous!” he said alarmed.

“That’s my line, not yours.”

“Without love, without joy—”

“Take it or leave it,” she said, though she was trembling so violently she was sure he noticed. “Do you want me to go to Gordon instead?”

He pondered. “Maybe you’d better.”

“What?”

“Or Gus. He always knows what to do.”

“I ought to slap you!”

“Yes.”

Her fear was replaced by a stunted kind of fury. “I don’t understand you at all!”

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Going into something without knowing, without planning—that’s asking for trouble.”

“So I discovered, yesterday.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Don’t make me feel even worse.”

“I’m trying not to. You’re too nice a girl to—it wouldn’t be right. I don’t know what to do.”

“You said that. Maybe you need to start with Karen.”

“Yes. She’s experienced. She offered—”

“She did!”

“She has to take a lot of food, so she said she wanted to make it up to us any way she could. She thought it would make things easier for you and Floy if she just handled everything in that line. Until things were more settled.”

“She’s probably right. But she doesn’t dare have a baby.”

“Yes.”

“Did Gordon—?”

“No. He’s ambiguous about sex.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I suppose I should have.”

“Thatch, you knew it had to come to this eventually. You can’t turn down experience, then plead no experience.”

“I think I’d know what to do if there were love.”

If there were love…

“You know, Thatch, when I came down here, I was afraid. But I see that I don’t have to be.”

“Yes.”

“Will you stop saying ‘yes’!”

“Sorry.”

“Because you aren’t like the men I have known. Or thought I knew. You really aren’t going to push.”

“I’m glad you understand. It wouldn’t be right.”

Once she would have accused him of homosexual inclinations, but now she knew that his relationship with Gus was not of that nature. The two men had their peculiar social and intellectual interdependence, but in other matters they were separate. Instead she tried another thrust: “Because there must be love, and you don’t love me.”

He was silent.

“Did I say something wrong?” she asked after a moment.

“No, of course not. There can’t be love unless it’s mutual.”

She felt a thrill of something unfamiliar. “Are you saying you do?”

“No, no, no, I didn’t say that. It isn’t right.”

She felt the sting of tears in her eyes again. “Thatch, you never said anything!”

“There was never anything to say.”

“I can’t love anyone. I don’t know why.”

“Maybe you never got to know anyone well enough.”

“Did you?”

“Gus always handled things.”

“Especially the girls!”

“Yes.”

“Well, I can’t stand Gus.”

“Maybe you should get back on your bed now.”

She took a breath. “No, I came here for a purpose.”

“But I told you—”

“Couldn’t you do it platonically? Weeks of group effort have gone into fattening this lamb for the slaughter! Mustn’t waste it. You are the least of evils, you know.” She was aware that she was making it about as inviting as an enema, but couldn’t help her own perversity.

“No. Not platonically. Not with you. It would destroy—”

“Destroy what?” What was the answer she sought?

“Any chance for a real…” He did not finish.

He wanted her love, not her body. He wanted too much.

“When a horse breaks a leg,” she said, “you shoot him. Because it’s better than letting him suffer. You don’t have to love the horse.”

“What has that to do with—”

She laughed, not easily. “I hurt my ankle.” Did people still speak of a pregnant girl as one who had ‘sprained her ankle’?

“It will get better.”

“You’re not much for analogy, are you?”

“No.”

“It has to be done, and if I don’t do it this time I’ll never get up my nerve again. It would disgust me to have to get aggressive, and I might retch on you.” She lifted her head to look at him. “Please, Thatch—I’ll just lie here, and you do it. Quickly. I’ve gone as far as I can.”

“I don’t like this,” he said, and she knew he meant it. She was not insulted, knowing his reason.

“I know it’s not fair to you. I wish I could be like Karen. But I can’t.”

“If you were like Karen, I couldn’t love—”

“So it has to be like an operation,” she said quickly, refusing to hear what would embarrass her. Love was a gift that had to be returned. “And I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.”

“I would never want to hurt you.”

She sat up and struggled out of her clothes. “I want to be hurt. I didn’t realize it until just now, but I want to be punished. Because I fouled up the gasoline mission.”

“Zena!” he said, sounding anguished.

She would have felt better if he had told her to shut up in gutter language. But of course that was not his way. Thatch always gave way to others, concealing his substantial talents even from himself. So he became less than he might be—and would not budge from that subservience.

She forced another laugh. Who was she to talk about being less than one might be! She had the figure and the health to put Karen to shame—but the very notion was sickening. “I’m making you out to be an instrument of torture, aren’t I.” She put her hand on his, and felt him shaking. “I take it all back. If I need punishment, it surely dates from decades ago. I have to get pregnant, so Gus will get off my back, and I’d rather it be yours. Maybe you could call that love.”

“I wish it were,” he said wistfully.

I wish it were, too, she thought—but could not say it. “You do know what to do, don’t you?”

“Tell me to stop, if—”

She was taken aback. She had anticipated yet another demurral, and perhaps an extension of the debate until Gordon returned, at which point the affair would have to be cut off. Thus she would gain credit for trying—and failing through circumstances.

She called herself a hypocrite, and decided to go through with it no matter what. She spread her legs and pulled him against her. He was heavy, making breathing difficult. The position wasn’t right, and he had to back off to adjust. Maybe he’ll give up! she thought wildly.

But she had really given him a directive, and Thatch always followed through on directives, however unreasonable they might seem. There was a probing, and, oddly, excitement. She was crossing a long-feared boundary, going off the high board with the icy water far below… and suddenly there was pain.

She gasped for breath. Slowly, shallowly, it came. She realized that she had blacked out for an instant. She turned her head, feeling the weight of her eyeballs, and saw her surroundings.

She was in a space ship, breaking free of Earth’s well of gravity. The lone civilian meteorologist to be consulted on this classified paramilitary project.

Somewhere there was pain. She squirmed, but could not alleviate it at the moment.

“You are conversant with the power crisis,” the officer said to her. “With civilian mismanagement, fossil fuels banned, and nuclear equipment not yet sufficient, we have to have a cheap, nonpolluting, now source of power. Obviously, this is the sun. There is enough energy in a few square miles of sunlight over Earth to produce a million kilowatts of clean power. The problem is putting the mirrors into orbit. If we can find a way to focus that light without mirrors, we’ve got it licked.”

“It will take more than a million kilowatts to fill Earth’s power deficit,” Zena said.

“We plan to set up the equivalent of a thousand million-kilowatt stations,” he said. “In a band about the equator. This will be an adequate temporary relief to the energy shortage.”

“Just like that? A billion kilowatts? With no mirrors?”

“No artificial mirrors. Actually, ice is a fine reflective surface. Picture what a ring of ice around the world would do.”

“You would still have to get the ice there—and you could hardly take it from the oceans.”

He showed her a slide. “This is a nebula,” he said. “A small one, containing only a few billion tons of matter— ninety-five per cent of which is ice. It is drifting in a course that will miss Earth by only a few million miles.”

“Suddenly I see. You want to divert this icy nebula to intersect exactly with the orbit of Earth. And use all that ice to set up a cloud of crystalline mirrors.”

“Precisely. The ice will form a pattern of concentric circles about the Earth, each highly reflective. Stations on the ground will receive that focused light and process it into usable power. In less than a year the energy will be flowing—the cheapest source yet available—and the cleanest.”

“Too simplistic,” she said. “The mere presence of ice rings will not guarantee a usable focus of light. They would have to be precisely oriented. And the ice would soon melt, because Earth is much closer to the sun than Saturn is. And the energy required to divert the nebula even slightly—”

“Here are the calculations,” he said with military smugness. “You will see that the orientation is, indeed, precise—an equatorial orbit angled to provide the necessary amount of reflection. There will be four rings, the outer ones shielding the inner ones from precipitous heat so that they will not melt rapidly. The system does not have to be permanent; it is projected to last fifty years, during which period more durable sources of energy will be developed. And as for diverting the nebula—”

He paused with a satisfied smile. “Come this way.” He showed her a gravity-free chamber in the center of the station. “Observe the cloud of ice crystals on the left,” he said. He pushed a button, and a jet of vapor shot out, making her feel inexplicably queasy. The water quickly crystallized, forming a cloud of frozen particles that drifted on toward the center of the chamber.

“Now observe the action of Substance J-2.” A smaller jet came from the opposite side, but this did not crystallize. “Only a twentieth the volume of the ice, and far less than that in mass—but an interesting reaction.”

Zena already knew better than to inquire into the chemical identity of “J-2.” These people guarded their secrets jealously, with or without reason. An offshoot from sinister researches?

The J-2 cloud met the ice. The explosion that resulted was soundless, since the chamber was airless. Ice shot out in a hemisphere—and the main body of the ice cloud reversed course. “Explosive interaction,” the man said. “The J-2 is almost completely destroyed, but the recoil shifts the direction of the remainder of the ice. This will work in deep space as readily as here, as it occurs in a vacuum. J-2 is cheap, as these things go; all we have to do is fire the proper quantity to intersect the nebula at the proper angle, and it will change that nebula’s course.”

“It needs more consideration,” she said, though she was impressed. It appeared that they really could bring the nebula to Earth! “There are too many opportunities for error, and we don’t know what effect such a series of rings would have on the climate of the planet.”

“That’s why we brought you in,” he said. “The conservation lobbyists squawked like a bunch of chickens when they heard about this—we’re running down the source of that information leak now—and demanded a reassessment. Well, we’re reasonable. You have forty-eight hours to study the proposal before implementation.”

“Two days!” she exclaimed. “I can’t begin to appraise it in that time! It will take weeks on a computer to consider the meteorological impact—”

“Sorry—our computer’s tied up. But we have plenty of paper and a pencil for you. You’ll find everything’s in order.”

She felt another pain. “No, Thatch—of course it doesn’t hurt,” she said, wincing.

The figures did seem to be in order, on gross examination. But they were all military figures, provided by the organization that had worked out this grandiose plan. Therefore they were suspect.

“By the way,” the officer said as the two days expired. “There has been a small modification. The original attitude of the rings was inefficient for reflectivity, so the orbits have been changed from equatorial to polar. That will put the rings broadside to the sun, as it were, instead of edgewise. That one small change will multiply the reflective power a hundredfold, with no increase in investment.”

Zena was stricken. “But the heat! The rings will melt and disintegrate!”

“Oh, they’ll break down faster than they otherwise would have—but even as little as a decade will provide more power than half a century the other way. It is well worth it, since our power crisis is now.”

“But the water!” she cried. “What do you think will happen to it, once the rings melt?”

“It’ll dissipate in space,” be said nonchalantly. “Some will fall to the ground. What of it?”

“What of it! Have you any idea what that amount of water would do to the climate of the planet? It would be the second Deluge!”

“Let’s not exaggerate,” he said. “Now it is time to watch the J-2 missiles being launched. This is a great moment for Earth!”

“You can’t do it!” she cried. “This is a disaster! At least run the revised figures through your own computer and get a projection for the time of breakdown. If—”

The officer frowned. “I knew it was a mistake to let a flighty civilian in on this. Our computer is occupied with more important matters than a rehash of a minor variation in one project. Now are you going to watch the launch or aren’t you?”

“The rape of Earth!” she cried. “You don’t know what you’re doing!” It was like a physical pain, a literal rape, making her writhe.

“I’m sorry,” Thatch said. “I—I got carried away, I guess. Did I hurt you?”

Zena reoriented. “Oh, no, of course not, Thatch!” He had hurt her, but she knew she must never admit that. “I was remembering things.”

“Were you—were you ever raped?” he asked, looking at her with concern.

Not before this! “Thatch! What a notion! Of course not.”

“You screamed something about rape—”

The rape of the Earth. “No, that was figurative. I— never mind! I must have passed out, and dreamed. Reliving something that happened weeks ago. Nothing to do with you.”

“You passed out?” He sounded disappointed.

What should she say now? “This experience—it was too much to assimilate all at once. My mind must have shied away. I’m sorry if it made it worse for you.”

“No, you were very much alive! I thought—” He broke off.

She had a certain sympathy. He had thought she was writhing with the pangs of fulfillment, when actually she was reliving the colossal blunder that had precipitated the deluge. What a blow to his fragile ego!

“You did the right thing,” she told him. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said disconsolately.

Her stomach started to heave. She turned her face aside quickly—but it was a false alarm. It was laughter.

“So it is an annular system!” Gus exclaimed. “Just as Vail said.”

“Close enough,” Zena said. “I don’t know whether there was ever a natural one, but we have an artificial one now.”

“It’s natural! All you did was divert the nebula to bring it near Earth. Everything else happened just the way Vail said. If there’s one ice nebula, there must be others; if even one passed Earth, it would account for everything.”

“Yes,” she said, not having the energy to quarrel. She still hurt from the siege of the night before, and from her prior injuries and exertions.

“Except for one thing,” Gus said. “You say this ring was in polar orbit, not equatorial. So it wouldn’t act like Vail’s rings, would it?”

“That’s complex to ascertain. Certainly the polar ring is less durable—in fact, it broke down in days, not years. But what the exact pattern of rainfall would be—”

“In the Vail canopy, the rain falls mostly at the poles,” Gus said. “At least it does at first. The sky opens up, there, in a kind of circular window, and the stars shine through. We had our rain right here—the canopy never really formed.”

“We certainly did have rain right here!” Gloria said. She was cooking something appetizing from unappetizing scraps: her special talent, much appreciated by the group. Gordon, oddly, could not cook well at all.

“In the equatorial orbit the rings match the spin of the planet,” Zena said. “The canopy matches, too. But with this polar orbit, the breakup should be much less uniform. Worst at the equator, probably. Just one more consequence of the original blunder.”

“When the military mind blunders,” Gus said, “it doesn’t do it small!”

Zena thought of the raid on the gasoline tanks that Gus himself had planned. The type of mind was much the same.

“But at least the rain is over,” Floy said.

Zena shook her head. “It is not over. This was only the first ring, of four—and not the largest”

“Oh, no!” Floy wailed.

“How do you know?” Gus asked.

“I studied the figures. They planned on four rings, each in a different orbit. The first and smallest in the center, as it were; the others outside, protecting it and contributing their own reflectivity. The second one out was to have about six times the mass of the first, for example. Of course all that came to naught when they set up the polar orbit, because the energy of the sun struck broadside—”

“They didn’t send all the rings at once?”

“No. One at a time. Spaced about two months apart.”

“They couldn’t!” Gus exclaimed. “The first one has broken down all civilization. No way to mount the technology two months after this!”

Zena shook her head. “Would it were so! They sent the batches of J-2 out at 48 hour intervals. They arranged it so that the first contributed less mass and more velocity, so it arrived faster. The others are larger and slower—but inevitable. They are all on their way right now.”

“Maybe they goofed it up,” Floy said hopefully.

“I doubt it,” Zena said. “The military mind is much sharper on detail than consequence. They won’t have many little mistakes to interfere with their big mistake.”

“Four deluges!” Gus said, pushing his fists into the sides of his head. “That’s like the four parts of the last ice age.”

“Gunz, Mindel, Riss and Wurm,” Zena agreed morosely. “We’ve had Gunz,” Floy said. “The others will be worse?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“How much worse?” Gus asked. “You said six times as much—”

“I can’t give an exact figure, because I don’t know how much will be lost in space or remain in the atmosphere. I’d guess we’ve had no more than a twentieth of the total rainfall—perhaps less.”

“One twentieth!” Gus cried.

“There won’t be anything left!” Floy said.

“It’s not that bad,” Zena said. “There’s lots of land above two thousand feet elevation. The western plains—”

“But who can live on scoured bedrock?”

“We’ll worry about that when we get to it,” Gus said. “Right now, we have to gear for survival of the next deluge.”

“Mindel,” Floy said.

“And the ones after that,” Gus continued. “We have to grow food, trap meat, build shelter. High enough to be safe from rising water.”

“The bus will do,” Gordon said. “We can add to it, once we get it parked. But we’ll need enough gas to drive it up into the mountains.”

“Right. We’ll have to survey for parked cars anywhere within miles, and siphon out their gas. If we find enough, we can use the bus to haul in other equipment before we camp. We can make it all right, if we just consider the problems and get organized. Now I’ll appoint teams—”

Dust Devil, who had been exploring among the trees, hissed. “He’s found something!” Floy said, running toward the cat. Zena shook her head. That grotesque awkwardness still embarrassed her. Floy was a good night guard— but what else could she do?

“Hey!” Floy cried. “It’s a dog!”

“Kill it,” Gus said. “We need the meat.”

Zena wanted to protest, but knew he was right again. They could not afford to take in stray animals, and they did need the meat.

“A puppy,” Floy said. “His folks must have ditched him. Somebody come pick him up.”

Thatch went over. “Careful,” he said. “He may be wild—or rabid.”

Gloria looked thoughtful. “A puppy should be train-able.”

Gus paused. “You’re right. We have to anticipate trouble. A good guard dog could make the difference.”

“Why are you always looking for trouble?” Zena demanded, irritated. “All survivors will have to work together.”

“Maybe they will. But until they forget about that gas-tank raid of ours, we’d better work alone.”

Zena hadn’t thought of that, but now she realized that this was what had given her misgivings about the raid from the outset. The survivors of that raid would be out to kill. Contact of any kind would be hazardous.

“Would you rather kill the dog?” Gus demanded, misunderstanding her silence.

Zena nodded “no.”

They found gasoline, in small amounts. They set up a ten-gallon reserve to get up the mountain, and used the rest to drive about, picking up whatever supplies they could find. Karen checked over a deserted drug store for insulin, and Thatch found several hundred pounds of seed grains in a farm shed, already sprouting. They got gardening tools and hauled dirt and fertilizer to a forest glade in the mountains, and Zena became chief farmer. She had no prior experience, but she was unlikely to hurt herself in the course of this activity.

“Party night!” Gus cried. “Look what I liberated!” He held up a bottle of Scotch whiskey.

“Throw it away,” Zena said. “We have a world of problems without aggravating them.”

“All work and no play,” Gus retorted. “I say, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow is another day.”

“Gus, you cheated!” Karen chided him. “You’re already stewed.”

“Have some yourself.” He brought out a bottle of sweet brandy.

“I have to watch it,” Karen said dubiously. “If I take too many calories, or forget my insulin—”

“We’ll remind you,” Gus said. “And here’s some for you, Glory.”

Gloria accepted the bottle. “White cooking wine!” she exclaimed, delighted. She put it away in a cupboard for future use.

“This is ridiculous!” Zena cried. “With so many things we need, to waste effort on this—”

Gloria looked at her. “Gus is right. We’re a group, we have serious problems ahead. We’ll be better off if we learn to get along together, to understand each other well. We need to get sloshed together—one time, at least.”

“Yeah,” Floy agreed, eagerly inspecting the wares.

Zena threw up her hands. “I’m outvoted, as usual.”

“Here,” Gus said, handing her crème de menthe.

Zena shook her head in wonder. She had always been partial to that particular liqueur. Gus had uncanny perception about this sort of thing.

They drank. Zena’s fears proved to be unfounded; no one imbibed to excess. Karen was quite careful, Floy took only sips of each type, Thatch made one small glass of brandy last an hour, and Gloria evidently had a connoisseur’s taste in alcohol. “Gordon gets drunk on hard liquor; I’m more discriminating,” she explained.

Gus himself drank heartily, but only grew more affable. It was contagious, and Zena soon found herself pleasantly high. The awfulness of past events became bearable. She realized that some of this would have helped her with Thatch. Well, before long she would brace him again, and this time try to hang on to her consciousness. Sex was not an evil.

It wasn’t? She caught herself in that mental dialogue and marveled. Were her fundamental values changing? What was the distinction between a Necessary Evil and a Means to an End?

“Whatcha thinking of, brown eyes?” Gus asked her.

“Green eyes,” she said. “It’s my hair that’s brown.”

“Funny,” he said. “You look brown. Or black. Eyes. I must be getting drunk.”

“That’s right,” Karen said. “Floy’s the one with black eyes.”

“Yeah,” Floy agreed, obviously enjoying her first licit alcohol. “ ’Cause I hit myself in the face so often.”

“Black-eyed or not, you’re a cute one,” Gus said grandly. “You did just great in that dance.”

“Yeah,” Floy agreed, flattered.

“I’d take you to bed in a moment—”

“Why don’t we sing a song?” Zena suggested quickly.

“Hey, pretty little black-eyed Susie,” Gus sang, slopping his drink as he gestured expansively. “Hey, pretty little black-eyed Susie! Hey, pretty little black-eyed Susie, hey!”

“Hey, I like that song!” Floy said.

“Watch it,” Zena warned. “Some of the words—”

“Susie and the boys went huckleberry picking,” Gus continued jovially. “Boys got drunk and Susie got a licking!”

Zena joined in the chorus: “Hey, pretty little black-eyed Susie!”

“Susie and the boys went whiskey brewing, Boys got drunk and Susie got a—”

“Licking!” Zena finished loudly, drowning him out Karen choked on a mouthful of brandy, laughing.

Undismayed, Gus went through the chorus and started the next verse. “Susie and the boys went corn shucking—”

This time everybody shouted “Licking!”

Then Gloria tried a home-made verse in her husky voice: “Zena and the boys went ice-ring planing, Boys fouled up and Earth got a raining!” And the song dissolved into mirth.

Next morning they started the garden. Thatch and Gordon had already made a plateau of rich earth and boxed it in as well as possible. Now Zena planted the seeds according to the instructions on each package.

“We’ll need a privy,” Gus said. “Nothing like human ordure to fertilize a garden; mustn’t be wasted. I’ll draw up the plans.”

“And we’ll need water,” Zena said. “It may not rain for a long time. We’ll have to haul it or pump it. A lot of it, if we want the plants to grow properly.”

A fine beginning—but the weeds grew with far more vigor than the vegetables, and the insects were horrendous. Thatch and Gordon had to make a special foraging trip for weed killer and bug spray, for it wasn’t only the garden that was attacked. Zena necessarily spent much time carefully pulling out each intruder without disturbing the tame plants. She didn’t mind; it was peaceful and she felt useful.

Meanwhile, she saw much of the changing sky.

The second canopy was forming. Barely two weeks after the rains of Gunz ceased, Ring Mindel appeared—because it had taken six weeks for Gunz to form and rain itself out. This new ring was more massive, and higher in the sky. Day by day it spread across the heavens, twisting slowly about to form the equatorial attitude it should have had at the outset. That huge effort was costing it cohesion and stability, and so the ring that had been projected to endure fifty years would be in disarray in weeks. At that, its fate was better than that of the first ring, that had dissolved so precipitously that a formal canopy had never even formed.

At first Mindel was a thin vapor high in the heavens— two hundred miles, Zena thought. But it thickened and dropped lower, until the sun faded behind the mass of high cloud, and the under-surface of it was no further than a hundred miles above the ground.

Mindel was rotating. She could tell by irregularities in its structure, occasional rifts that let the sunlight through. It moved as fast as the sun, but opposite; a rift in it would rise in the west and set in the east twelve hours later.

But that was the least of it. The cloud cover was not even. It swirled in long strands, like a raveling rope or an endlessly writhing snake. Zena was fascinated by the slow undulations, seeing them as the struggles of an alien visitor: the ice nebula.

A reptile encircling the globe, like the Midgard Serpent of Norse myth. A creature whose poison overwhelmed the Earth in a great flood—as Mindel was about to do. How bad would that flood be? No one could really say; it depended on the efficiency of that misguided military project, intended to save the world by solving its power crisis simplistically—but actually destroying it.

Zena looked up, startled, a small weed in her hand. Midgard—Mindel. A coincidence of nomenclature, surely, but did it reflect reality? Götterdämmerung—the end of the world. The Biblical flood. Surely there had been a monstrous flood in antiquity; the mystery had been its cause. God had decreed it, perhaps, commanding the rain to fall, but no normal precipitation could actually have raised the level of the ocean. Could it have been such a canopy, visible as a snake or dragon in the sky, destined one day to swallow the entire Earth in the floods of its demise?

She stared at the massive, endless torso of Mindel, and began to believe. If man survived this, there would be new legends, similar to the old.

“There’s a station!” Gus cried happily. “Someone’s broadcasting again!”

“Ham,” Gordon said. “Some ham got his equipment going again. Those hams are indomitable.”

“I don’t care who it is!” Gus said. “It’s civilization!”

This turned out to be true and not true. The hams were now in operation—but their dialogue only confirmed the devastation wrought upon the world. Just over a hundred feet of rain had fallen, wiping out every major city the hams knew about. Now they spoke for small groups of survivors who were trying to organize a new nation built upon the highlands. Mechanics were putting motor vehicles back in operation; builders were constructing mass housing. The nearest reconstruction center was in Atlanta, though it was laboring under the handicap of senseless vandalism that had destroyed much of its fuel reserves. The radio invited anyone in the area to participate in the recivilization effort.

“They’d kill us,” Gus said morosely. “We don’t dare go near that place! Anywhere but there.”

Thus they had forfeited their place in the new order. “It doesn’t make much difference, really,” Zena said. “There’ll be more rain—lots more. It will wipe out everything they rebuild.” She shared the guilt with Gus for that debacle: he for planning it, she for compounding it. Neither of them had anticipated the full cost of that endeavor, and both had to deprecate its importance. It did not make her like Gus any better, however; she was a partner with him in crime.

“If only we had asked them for what we needed,” she groaned to herself. “Instead of coming as thieves.”