The Sixth Winter

Book 342: Gateway Essentials

by John Gribbin, Douglas Orgill

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera; Fall & winter reads

Synopsis

Frank Rhind was lucky. He saw the Ice Dancer and lived. The town of Hays died. And still they didn't believe Dr. William Stovin's warnings. For very many years climatologists had been predicting a change in the world's climate but they always believed that the process would take centuries. Now there was a reason to believe differently. Stovin had staked his career and credibility on trying to persuade the U.S. National Science Council to act, but 15,000 years of warmth had lulled mankind into thinking that climatic history was over. Already it was too late. The new Ice Age had begun. One by one the great northern cities - Chicago, Oslo, Montreal, Moscow, Leningrad - came under siege. Some fell and were evacuated, sending their young, old and sick to crowded areas further south. Crops and animals were destroyed. Governments drew lines of catastrophe across their national maps. Doomsday prophets were in full cry. Technological man was overwhelmed. The world had changed. Some time in the year future the next Ice Age will be triggered off. It could happen in a thousand years' time, or in a century from now. Or it could, quite literally, happen next winter. This book is fiction only because the events described have not yet happened. But it is not science fiction because all the science in the book is fact. When the year arrives that we see the sixth winter resembling 1792 within the space of a decade or so, then the Ice Age will be with us in a matter of weeks - and it will develop very much as described here.

Release date: March 4, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 315

Sample

The watcher crouched in the stony outcrop above the lake, shifted his one hundred and twenty pounds of weight, and braced his clawed feet against the rocks, staring intently before him. Half a mile away, alternately swelling and receding against the sparse yellow scrub of the tundra, a brown cloud of animals drifted slowly nearer. From over to the east, where a glittering blue tongue of water ended in a wilderness of stunted alder and ash, the watcher on the rocks could hear the bellowing of beasts and a steady thumping and splashing as the first caribou plunged into the shallow water, half walking, half wading, and made for the southern bank. The caribou were much nearer now, and the watcher flicked his long tongue over his black lips as the leaders of the herd struggled out of the mud of the inlet and trotted away down the gully in front of him. There were hinds among them, and very young fawns, some of them barely able to keep up with the steady thrust of the herd. These he observed closely.

The wolf was at the very edge of his territory. He had marked it with his strong yellow urine ten weeks before, and no other had yet presumed to cross it. But what was happening in front of him was something completely new in his experience, and he sought to take advantage of it. Turning abruptly, he moved off at an easy lope, five or six miles an hour, keeping parallel with the herd, making no attempt at concealment. Ahead was a long shallow defile, cut deep into the permafrost of the tundra of the Canadian North West Territories by the grinding of a glacier long ago. The leaders of the caribou were already pouring into it in a heaving forest of antlers, followed by the hinds and the stumbling fawns, when the wolf stopped in a patch of high scree, threw back his head, and howled.

Almost two miles away, the wolf-howl came as a whisper, the merest thread of sound, to the man who was carefully cleaning his binoculars on the table in a little hut set in a meandering belt of green spruce beside one of the small streams that fed Lake Ennadai. He crossed to the dusty window and looked up the long bare hill, whistling in surprise. A man was slithering down the muddy slope in front of him. He wore a faded tartan lumber-jacket over a red shirt and thick tweed trousers. His face was broad and flat, his hair lank, black. He carried a hunting rifle and the pack of a radio transmitter was humped on his back. The white man in the hut went to the doorway as he approached.

‘What the hell?’ he said. ‘You’re back early, Atahoo. I didn’t expect – ’

‘Radio no good,’ said the Eskimo briefly. ‘I came to tell.’

‘Tell what?’

‘Tuktu,’ said Atahoo, pointing beyond the swell of the far ridge. ‘Tuktu-mie … the caribou Host.’

‘What?’ said the white man incredulously. He jerked his thumb at the cloudless blue of the sky. ‘Migrating now? Never …’

‘Tuktu-mie. Soon you will see.’

‘How many?’

‘Here … twenty score, perhaps thirty score. Beyond them, I think, many.’

‘Only five hundred? Well, that’s not the Host, is it? Just a bit of it that’s gone crazy, I guess.’

‘It is the beginning,’ said Atahoo. He crossed to the cupboard at the end of the little living room and took out a belt of cartridges. ‘There was a wolf …’

‘I heard him,’ said the other thoughtfully. ‘But …’

‘And you have heard that before?’ said Atahoo, his voice heavy with irony. ‘You have heard a wolf give the caribou-call when the Host is not moving?’

‘But, damn it, it’s so early,’ said the white man. ‘You must be wrong.’

From beyond the ridge came once more that long stretched thread of sound.

‘The wolf is not wrong,’ said Atahoo.

William Stovin walked down in the warm sunshine through the campus, along the smooth paths between lawns which the sprinklers fought to keep green, across the traffic of Roma, across Lomax, past the brown bulk of the Physics-Astronomy Department, past the outdoor tables where the students sat and read and argued and drank Cokes, and then out to the bus-stop beside the Journalism Building.

He’d timed it correctly, as he always did, and the Rio Grande bus came down the wide boulevard a few seconds after he reached the stop. He climbed up on to the step, bought his ticket, and absently watched the untidy sprawl of hotels and motels and gas stations, superstores and dusty trees of downtown Albuquerque roll past his window.

He left the bus beside a vast concrete superstore and walked into the tourist-thronged shadows of the Old Town. There was a Spanish cannon in the square opposite the Church of San Felipe which he always gave a surreptitious, superstitious pat. He did it again today, and then crossed the square to his usual restaurant for lunch. He sat in a ladder-backed Spanish chair at the table they kept for him on this day of the week, opposite the big wallpainting of Don Juan de Oñate, who’d been the first coloniser of New Mexico in 1598. He looked at his watch. Diane wasn’t here yet. Well, no surprise in that, although he wished she were. She often mocked him, that he was a creature of habit. Maybe, maybe. He liked routine, he thought to himself, half-ruefully. Routine gave his mind a chance to get on with something more important. When the waitress came, dark, shining-haired, peasant-faced and plump in her white blouse and gold-belted red skirt, he smiled at her and said he’d wait.

He pulled from his briefcase the Lithman Report, although he already knew it almost by heart. It backs up Eddy, he said to himself for the hundredth time. And by God, it backs up me. It was all there, double-checked, amplified even … the Sporer Minimum, the Maunder Minimum. And now, what? The Stovin Minimum. Just take a look at Lithman’s tree-rings alone. We’re getting to the point, he thought, when we can’t any longer go on adding two and two and still make three and a half.

Supposing the Maunder Minimum and the Sporer Minimum and the Stovin Minimum weren’t anomalies at all? Supposing that the last 15,000 years – with odd deceiving Maxima, like that period in the thirteenth century, for instance, when the English grew wine in Kent – supposing the Interglacial of the last 15,000 years was the anomaly? Fifteen thousand years was no more than an eyeblink in geological time. Yet practically the whole of human civilisation had taken place in that eyeblink. He pushed his left fist into his right palm and stared moodily at Don Juan de Oñate. If only they’d had enough sense to –

‘Hi, Stovin.’

Diane Hilder was standing behind his chair, smiling down at him, a short chunky square-shouldered girl in old corduroy jeans and a pink shirt under a scuffed leather waistcoat, her platinum-streaked blonde hair in its usual disarray. He felt a stab of pleasure as he got awkwardly to his feet and pulled out her chair.

‘I thought you’d stood me up.’

‘Never stand up a good lunch, Stovin. That’s what Mom always told me.’

‘Sensible woman.’

The waitress came and they ordered … for him, the meal he invariably ate … chicken enchilada, rice, red sauce, half a litre of white wine; for her, cheese and a salad. She poured herself half a glass of his wine and stared critically at his plate.

‘Don’t you ever get tired of that stuff? Heaven knows what it does to your stomach.’

He shrugged.

‘I’ve told you before, Diane, it doesn’t bother me. It saves a lot of hassle. Thursday is enchilada day. I don’t have to waste time thinking about it. And what you’ve got there’ he nodded towards her salad – ‘wouldn’t feed a chipmunk.’

‘Well, I have to think about my stomach,’ she said, laughing, and patting it briskly. ‘I put on two pounds last month.’

‘Horrifying.’ He grinned. Diane looked at him under her lashes as he cut carefully into his enchilada. He wasn’t the type to put on weight, anyway – that kind of ageless, compact Englishman never did. Oh, yes, he was American now, of course, but he was still English in everything but his citizenship papers. How old was he? It was somewhere in the campus records, she supposed, but she’d never looked it up. Forty? Forty-five? With Stovin, it was hard to tell. And why did she call him Stovin, anyway? Everybody else called him Sto. He disliked ‘William’ almost as much as she did.

‘How’s Canis latrans?’

‘Thriving,’ she said. ‘Still plenty around. I came down from the Pecos this morning I’ve been up there above Chico for the last three days, and there was a big one, dead by the road. Hit by a truck last night, I guess. It’s in the back of the pick-up.’

She nodded towards the car park on the edge of the square.

‘You loaded the corpse of a full-grown coyote into the back of your pick-up? He must have weighed forty pounds.’

‘She,’ said the girl. ‘It was a female. No, I guess I was lucky. A State trooper came by and he helped.’

She imitated a deep Texas drawl.

‘“Say, ma’am, you know what you can get from these things? Fleas, ma’am, fleas. You understand that, ma’am?” You should have seen his face when I told him fleas were exactly what I wanted.’

‘Why don’t you just shoot a coyote or two?’ said Stovin impatiently. ‘God knows, it isn’t exactly an endangered species.’

‘Not yet, it isn’t,’ she said flatly. ‘But, my goodness, we’re working on it, aren’t we? No, Stovin, I don’t kill unless I have to.’

‘Have it your own way,’ he said indifferently. Absently, his hand stroked the pink cover of the Lithman Report. She did not miss the movement.

‘What do you have there?’

‘Lithman.’

His voice was too expressionless to be truly casual, she thought. She looked at him curiously.

‘And you’re all het up about it, aren’t you? What’s he say?’

Stovin shrugged. ‘Pretty much what I say. What I’ve been saying for the last three years.’

She whistled. ‘Lithman …? He’s the man who – ’

‘That’s right,’ he said tonelessly. ‘He was wrong about the volcano cycle. He exaggerated the dust factor. He’s been wrong before. Like I have. Like Einstein was. Like Copernicus was. And they’ll say he’s wrong again …’

‘And is he?’

‘No.’

‘It’s a pity,’ she said reflectively, ‘that Lithman’s so old. People don’t listen to old men any more.’

Stovin laughed, and sipped his wire.

‘Well, he isn’t going to get any older.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Lithman’s dead … heard it on the nine o’clock newscast this morning. He was eighty-seven … just about the most original climatologist in the world. That’s what they’ll call him, anyway. It’s a sort of put-down. A guy who’s as original as that must be wrong.’

She looked at him, troubled.

‘Where does that leave you?’

‘Oh,’ he said, more cheerfully, ‘I’ll carry the banner. Though I’m not a young man, exactly.’

‘Nobody,’ she said, ‘thinks of you as old or young or even middle-aged.’ And that’s the truth, she thought.

Stovin called for the bill. She watched him fish in his pocket for a pile of crumpled dollars. Why in hell didn’t he use a credit card like everybody else?

‘Stick to coyotes,’ he said, as they walked to the door. She offered her cheek. Briefly, he brushed his lips against her. It felt like being kissed by a tortoise.

‘You know where you are with coyotes,’ he said. ‘Mind you …’

‘Mind you what?’

‘Well,’ he said, smiling, ‘if Lithman’s right, it’s a whole new future for coyotes.’

He watched her stride off across the Plaza. She smelled nice, he thought irrelevantly. He always liked that little kiss. But he mustn’t, mustn’t get to like it too much.

He walked across the square, past the brass cannon, and into the cool shade of the Church of San Felipe. It was quiet there – one of the few places down here where he could think. Outside in the little walled garden, doves cooed. Candles flickered … the altar was piled high with flowers. Only two lamps were lit, and he sat in a light-brown wooden pew in the half-darkness and looked round him. Superstitious nonsense, all of it, of course. It could all be demolished with three or four unanswerable questions. And the chief one was: if God existed, what the hell was He playing at? But San Felipe was a healing sort of place, nevertheless. It was a quarter of an hour before he went out again.

Back in his room at the University, he took the Lithman Report from his briefcase. He read it through again swiftly, economically. Then he crossed to his desk, took the black plastic cover off the portable typewriter, and, with two fingers, began to type.

Like a gigantic dragonfly, its four stubby opaque wings outspread, Big Bird cruised along the line of the 64th Parallel, high above the great Ob River of north-western Siberia. Three minutes ago, it had reached the bottom point of its periodic low orbital pass. A relay closed. The hoods over the lenses of the still cameras below the cylindrical twelve-ton fuselage drew back, and Big Bird began – in obedience to the pre-programmed order of those who had despatched it from a launch-pad at Point Arguello on the Californian coast – to photograph the Soviet oilfield installations sprouting out of the Siberian taiga wilderness between Igrim and Berezovo, ninety miles below.

In a few seconds, the task was done. Three more relays closed. The long winged tube of Big Bird adjusted its flying angle and moved out to the end point of its orbit 198 miles above the earth. Forty-eight hours later, the films it had exposed above the River Ob, snug now in six heat-proof canisters, shot from an ejection hatch, entered the earth’s atmosphere, opened their parachutes, and drifted steadily down through a dawn sky to the blue Pacific north of Hawaii. They were the most significant photographs any satellite had ever taken. They brought the evidence of a new age.

A small copper-coloured butterfly beat vainly at the big window above Yevgeny Soldatov’s desk, as he watched it for a few moments. Hippothoe, he thought absently. What was the local name for it? The Farewell Butterfly. Some Siberians called it the Farewell because it lingered on past the end of the short Siberian summer. And who’d told him that? Valentina, of course. She’d probably be interested. He’d tell her when he went home at lunchtime.

He looked out through the silver birches and larch trees of Akademgorodok. The pink brickwork of the other wing of the Katukov Complex glowed through the trees: a couple of student-researchers, a young man and woman, walked hand in hand through the dappled shadows. With a sigh, Soldatov turned back to his desk. He picked up the paper he had been reading when the butterfly arrived. Now if indeed the dust in the cores from Kraznogorsk could be related to the Ostahkkov climax 23,000 years ago, surely there must be –

The telephone on the side of his desk emitted a single brief peal. He picked it up, and spoke.

‘This is Soldatov.’

The voice at the other end sounded hurried, breathless. It was also a voice he knew – that of Andrei Bulavin, a senior climatologist at Yakutsk.

‘Yevgeny … I’m glad you’re there. Listen … it’s happened again.’

‘Where?’

‘A place called Ziba. Up in the north-east – a little place nobody’s ever heard of. It’s got some sort of fish processing plant – part of the local Plan. A population of about eight hundred … nine hundred perhaps.’

‘What happened?’

‘Exactly the same as at Kalya.’

‘And were there any …?’

‘Yes, there were, Yevgeny. It wasn’t nice. It hit a school bus. They haven’t got any of them out yet. Apparently the school is by a lake, about three miles out of Ziba. Luckily they’ve got a bit of an influenza outbreak there, and the bus was only half full. So it could have been worse …’

‘You say it was exactly the same?’

‘As far as we can make out. There was a man who saw it – he was on the very edge, but he doesn’t make much sense. He was badly shocked.’

‘And it was quite local – I mean, it didn’t affect the whole area?’

‘Well, we don’t have much information yet. I rang you immediately, because those were the instructions. But, certainly, we’ve still got normal communications with Ziba. So it can’t be too widespread.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘At Yakutsk … at the Institute.’

I think I’d better come up and have a look. Expect me tomorrow. I’ll ring you later as soon as I can arrange a flight …’

Carefully, thoughtfully, Yevgeny Soldatov put into a large blue folder all the papers from his desk. He crossed to the wall safe and locked them away.

Then he went out of the Complex, shivering a little as a sudden breath of icy air trembled the sunlit branches of the birches. It’s still early for winter, he thought ruefully. A glint of copper caught his eye on the hard brown ground. It was the butterfly, and it was dead. He went on down to the car park and drove home to Valentina.

Eight and a half thousand miles from Akademgorodok, Frank Rhind drove steadily along Highway US 16. He had left Rapid City two hours ago, and was now well into the long climb to the Black Hills of South Dakota. It was snowing hard … they’d be skiing early in the Black Hills this year. The crisp brush of his wheel-chains on the patchy surface of the road had a curiously sleep-inducing effect. There was little other traffic an occasional big long-distance truck, moving east on the other lanes towards Rapid City and Pierre, but hardly anything on his side of US 16. To keep himself awake, he began to work out his possible arrival time. He was now about eighteen miles from the Wyoming State Line. From there it was around a hundred miles on to Gillette, and a bowl of Cathy’s special soup, and the evening TV. He might even get to see the kids. Say, three more hours, because he couldn’t make more than about thirty-five miles to the hour in these conditions.

An emergency diversion sign came up just after the Pringle slip-road. He would barely have seen it through the snow, but there was a State police car parked beside it, red warning lights flashing, and the huddled trooper in the driving seat raised a gloved hand as Frank Rhind went by.

He glanced down at the map on the front passenger seat. With luck, this diversion shouldn’t be more than a mile or two. Probably just some temporary trouble a jack-knifed truck, maybe – on US 16. There was a tiny place ahead called he picked up the map and stared at the small print under the glow of the dash – Hays. Hays, that was it. He didn’t know it, and he guessed it wouldn’t be more then a few houses and a gas station, but there was another little road from it, going back to US 16. So that might well be the end of the diversion. He drove on.

It was becoming colder. Even in the car, with the heater full on, he could feel a deepening chill. The snow was packing more and more heavily against the windshield, coming steadily out of a white-yellow sky. A few miles later, the scattered, half-dozen lights that were presumably Hays could be glimpsed through the swirling flakes in the late afternoon gloom. Goddammit, if this got worse, he wasn’t going to see Cathy or the kids tonight. Was there a motel in Hays? It seemed a mighty long bet … but he might have –

Something came over the long dark ridge behind Hays, like nothing he had ever seen, nothing he had remotely imagined. It was a white twisting column, towering into the sky, apparently solid against the driving snow through which he saw it, and moving at tremendous speed towards the scattered lights, barely a mile away. Even through the closed windows of the car, Rhind could hear its dull, unceasing roar. The lights of Hays vanished as though extinguished by a master switch. Whirling, the white column reared above the place where they had been, and then moved steadily away, vanishing over the ridge towards the Black Hills.

In his stupefaction at the sight, Rhind had stopped the car. Suddenly he became aware that he was deadly cold, and that the engine was silent. He pressed the starter. It was several minutes before he could start the engine again, although the snow had now ceased. The diversion road was narrow, and he didn’t risk the turn. He drove on, alone, to Hays. Or rather, to where Hays had been half an hour before. There was a bridge outside Hays and beyond it a wall of snow. It must be, he thought desperately, fifty feet high. Maybe more. And there was no Hays. The road ended beyond the bridge, cut off by the snow wall. Terrified of sliding off the road, he managed to turn the car, and then saw something else. At the edge of the snow wall, an extraordinary ice formation like an upward-thrusting icicle sprouted from the ground. He drove to the side of it, and opened the car window.

It was a woman. At least, he thought it was a woman. She seemed to be entombed in the column of ice, standing upright on the road. The refraction of the ice made it impossible to see her face clearly, but it seemed to be turned towards Hays. Frank Rhind wanted to drive on and away from the snow wall, but he did not lack courage. Hunching his shoulders against the piercing cold, he went round to the trunk of the car and took out his biggest spanner. With it he beat and beat and beat again at the ice enclosing that still figure. It was like hammering at granite. At last, with a sob, he got back into the car and drove carefully back to US 16.

The State trooper was still there, huddled in his seat. He looked up as Frank drew alongside. It was a long time before he could make sense of what he was told, but there was one phrase that Frank Rhind used which he was to remember, and repeat, for the rest of his life.

‘But what was it like?’ he had asked Rhind. ‘What did it look like? Listen, I’ll have to make a radio call. I’ll have to know exactly what it looked like …’

And Rhind had looked up at him for a moment without speaking.

‘I guess,’ he said at last, ‘it was like God. Only it wasn’t any God that I’ve ever learned about.’



SECRET: Classification One

This document is not to be stored in retrieval devices.

Recipients will be personally responsible for its security.

COPIES: Seven

RECIPIENTS: President of the United States (one) Members, National Science Council (five) Dr William F. Stovin, Visiting Professor (Climatology), University of New Mexico (one)

AUTHOR: Melvin H. Brookman

AFFILIATION: Chairman, National Science Council; Director, Connecticut Institute of Technology

PRESENTATION: Extract from Technical Report 66/10/8, from the Office of the Chairman of the National Science Council to the President of the United States

TITLE: Recurrence of Blocking High Conditions in Climatic Fluctuations

ONE With references to your Minute 88, the attached interpretative outline may be of some use to you.

TWO Since the 1940s, the globe has been cooling down, with a fall in average temperatures now reaching more than one-half degree Centigrade.

THREE This change is not of great concern in itself, since yearly, seasonal and even daily fluctuations cover a bigger range in temperature than this.

FOUR However, there are now noticeable increases in snow and ice cover at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere. These, combined with the cooling, are producing a recurrence of so-called ‘blocking high’ conditions, which cause extreme weather conditions to persist for months at a time in many parts of the northern hemisphere.

FIVE Weather at the latitudes of North America, Europe, and the USSR is dominated by the guiding hand of the jet stream, circling the globe from west to east at high altitude. In warm decades, such as those prior to 1950, this jet follows an almost perfect circle round the globe. At the same time, it pushes with it a succession of weather systems – rain, followed by a dry spell, more rain, and so on. But when the atmosphere cools, the jet stream becomes more erratic, swinging in zigzags first north and then south, and becoming very weak and susceptible to disturbance caused by sea temperature and by snow and ice on land and sea.

SIX Recent severe weather conditions in North America and elsewhere are a result of this weaker, more erratic pattern of wind-flow. High pressure building over the south-western US seaboard, aided by ocean temperature conditions, zigzags the jet stream so that it is too weak to push the ‘blocking high’ system away. A dominant flow from north-west to south-east is established across the whole of the US east of the Rockies, encouraging the southward flow of the jet stream and cooling a great area of ocean south of Newfoundland. The severe US winters of 1977, 1978 and 1979 marked the return of this pattern after more than one hundred years of relatively equable weather.

SEVEN This fall in sea temperature helps to produce a new bend in the jet stream, allowing a ‘blocking high’ system to become established in the region of the British Isles.

EIGHT In winter, this can produce severe snowfalls, extreme frosts over the whole of Britain. In summer, the same ‘blocking high’ will produce severe droughts. The British and North European summer of 1976 is the classic example.

NINE Should such a pattern of jet stream zigzag and ‘blocking high’ conditions recur over five or six reasonably closely-spaced winters, with summer sunshine insufficient to melt all the snow from each preceding winter, this may quite rapidly build snowcover over the north-eastern part of North America beyond the point of no return.

TEN At the same time, ‘blocking highs’ further to the east may similarly build snowcover over the northern USSR.

ELEVEN It is, of course, my duty to inform you that this is one of several models now being postulated as being the final trigger for Ice Age conditions.

TWELVE I cannot emphasise too strongly that it is premature to draw any such dramatic conclusions from the present run of rather unusual conditions with recurrent ‘blocking highs’.

‘Is it just possible it’s some kind of weapon?’ asked the President of the United States. He looked out from his desk in the Oval Office of the White House, the red-white-and-blue flag with its fifty gold stars behind it, towards the half-circle of faces of the five men and women who made up his National Science Council, and the single ‘guest’ they had invited to meet him. The National Science Council, he thought wryly, was his own creation. It had begun as an election gimmick, three years ago – a political gesture to reassure intellectual America that science would now receive the same place in the Presidential pecking order as Defense. The National Science Council ranked, ostensibly at least, with the National Security Council. But scientists, it seemed, disagreed with each other even more than did the military. And a layman understood their arguments even less.

‘Could this be a weapon?’ he asked again. ‘These shots’ – he tapped a pile of glossy photographs on his desk – ‘the ones taken by that cruise satellite what was it, Big Bird? – well, they show it happening in a way-lonely part of Siberia, just where they might try something out, I guess. And now, suddenly, it starts happening here. Twice in Alaska and now in Dakota. Have they got something going for them over there? Some way of producing freak storms, say? By golly’ – it was a cautious expletive he had learned long ago from Dwight Eisenhower – ‘that could be tricky.’

Opposite the President, Melvin Brookman, Chairman of the Council, stirred uneasily. Politicians, he thought … they always dream in weapons.

‘I think not,’ he said decisively. ‘What do you say, Sto?’

The President turned his pale blue eyes to the ‘guest’ who sat at the tip of the left-hand horn of the Science Council’s half-circle. So this was Stovin, the wild man that some of them, privately, individually, and, of course, confidentially, had warned him against. Well, he wasn’t a young man, which was one point in his favour. The President was becoming tired of thrusting young men who knew how to put the world right and couldn’t wait to get started. He looked at Stovin again, at the thin lines of the mouth, the studied lack of expression on the face, the slight stoop to the narrow shoulders, the right index finger slowly tapping the palm of the left hand. There seemed to be a lot of tension there.

‘I agree,’ Stovin said quietly. ‘It isn’t a weapon.’

Nine out of ten men, thought the President, would have gone on to say what, in their opinion, it was. But not this one. He had to be asked.

‘Then what is it?’ asked the President, gently.

Stovin stirred, speaking almost, it seemed, unwillingly.

‘Did you read Melvin’s “blocking high” report, Mr President?’ He nodded towards the bulky form of the Chairman of the Council, three seats away.

‘I did, Dr Stovin.’

‘What did you think of it?’

‘I think I asked you the first question,’ said the President. For the first time, Stovin smiled.

‘I asked you that, Mr President, only because I think that the phenomenon we’re talking about … the kind of thing that’s just killed nineteen people in that Dakota township … is a spin-off, on a small concentrated scale, from the kind of jet stream changes that Mel Brookman is talking about. A sharp change in air pattern, a concentration of cold – something we’ve never seen before, although Peary once reported something not unlike it near the North Pole.’

‘Unreliable eye-witness stuff, from an explorer, not a scientific observer,’ s