She remembered feeling as if the world had lost an eye. Time was, a celestial pickup truck could have climbed skyward on a pillar of fire and put the satellite back where it belonged. No longer.
Bruce scowled and pulled at his beard. "Do you want to take a chance driving under that, Bob? It looks strong enough."
Drive underneath several tons of unsupported ice? She thought only Crazy Eddie came up with notions like that.
And Bob was shaking his head. "Too chancy."
As if to punctuate his remarks, the ice moaned and the sound of far-off thunder rolled in their ears. A cloud of ice crystals as fine as mist billowed toward them out of the darkness. Somewhere farther down the road a part of the frozen wave had broken off.
She was starting to feel the cold. She gazed longingly at the van. The others stood around, shuffling their feet and looking at each other. She waited a moment longer. This has gone on long enough. "The eastbound lanes are clear," she pointed out.
Bruce looked shocked. "You want us to turn back?"
She rolled her eyes up. "For Ghu's sake, no!" It took them a moment longer to catch on, then Will began chuckling.
"For a gang of taboo-shattering imagineers," he said, "we sure do let the Accepted Customs of our tribe blinker us. Drive on the left side of the road? What a revolutionary notion!"
They drove more cautiously headed west in the eastbound lanes. Bob put the flood lights on blinker so oncoming traffic would notice. Not that he expected much oncoming traffic at six in the morning in rural Minnesota, not along the edge of the glacier, but it never hurt to be careful. A few miles farther on, Steve pointed silently out the side window at the westbound lanes and they saw where the ice had collapsed across the roadway, blocking it completely with landbergs. Bob and Bruce exchanged glances and Bob hunched his shoulders over the steering wheel. Sherrine's fingernails dug into her palms. Two Angels had been down on the Ice now for four and a half hours.
Past Elizabeth, the glacier had flowed entirely across the road, and the Army Corps of Engineers had blasted and dug a channel right through it.
Fargo Gap. Sherrine's heart beat slightly faster. A name of romance and bravery and determination. Fargo Gap;. Minneapolis's last link to the ice-free West. Arc lights staged around the worksite made the area almost as bright as daylight. Portable generators chugged and men and women with picks and airhammers fought the encroaching ice. They didn't look heroic; they only looked tired. But wasn't that how heroes always looked? She saw a cadre wearing Army Corps of Engineer uniforms, but most of the workers were civilians, with only a brassard on the left arm to show that they had been drafted into the corvee.
A state trooper stopped them well short of the work area. He walked toward the van and Bob rolled down the window and waited. The trooper wore sunglasses even though it was dark. For the glare of the arc lights, she supposed. Or for the macho look. He pulled a pad of traffic tickets from under his parka.
"Where do you think you re going," he said without preamble.
"Fargo, officer." Bob could be very sincere and submissive when he wanted to be. "Our friends here from California have never seen the Ice, so we drove them up here from Minneapolis."
Sherrine thought it was a pretty good story for having been made up on the spot; but the trooper just shook his head. "Ice tourists. Now I've heard everything." His face, what they could see of it, showed what he thought of Californians who drove to the Ice for kicks. "You're driving on the wrong side of the highway," he said. She wondered if he thought they didn't know that, and saw Mike bite his tongue to keep from making a smartass remark.
Bob explained about the ice wave that had broken over the westbound lanes and the trooper lowered his pad. "Ah, shit," he said without feeling. He turned and called over his shoulder. "Captain!"
A short, stocky man in an Engineer uniform broke away from a small knot of people and trotted over. His name tag read Scithers, and he was wearing a headset with a throat mike. The trooper had Bob repeat the story. The captain listened carefully and nodded. Then he keyed his mike and barked orders. Within minutes, a tank outfitted with a plow and carrying a work gang on its skirts had rumbled east. A conscripted civilian pickup truck followed, pulling a portable generator and work lights. Scithers watched them out of sight. Then he sighed. "We've kept the Gap open all summer," he said to no one in particular, "but this winter will kill the road for good."
The trooper didn't respond. He laid a hand on the door of the van. "You might as well turn around," he said. "We're going to be evacuating Fargo in the next couple weeks anyway."
Sherrine felt her stomach go into free fall. We can't turn around. We can't! The Angels were depending on them. But they couldn't tell the trooper that.
"Oh, let them through, trooper," said Scithers. "What the hell's the point of keeping the Gap clear if we don't let people through?"
The trooper shrugged. "Suit yourself. But stay on the right side of the road from here on. There's two-way traffic. And try not to freeze to death." Sherrine couldn't tell if his request was sincere or pro forma.
Mike, of course, couldn't leave well enough alone. "We heard that a spaceship crashed on the Ice earlier tonight. Do you know where that was?" She wanted to kick him, but he was out of reach. The trooper adjusted his sunglasses and Scithers, who had been turning away, stopped to listen.
"Where did you hear that?" the trooper asked.
Since Mike couldn't exactly mention a tightbeam downlink from Freedom, he was at a temporary loss for words. And while normally Sherrine might have enjoyed that, she didn't think a long, strained silence would be too smart. So she spoke up. "My grandparents live near Fargo," she said. "They saw a fireball go down on the Ice and called me and told me about it. As long as these guys were coming this way to sightsee, I thought I'd tag along and see if I could pick up some souvenirs."
The trooper rubbed a heavily gloved hand across his chin, and she wondered why he didn't wear a beard like most men did these days. Dress policy? "Yeah, we heard about it, too, at the barracks. Goddam Angels. A couple of planes from Ellsworth flew over a few hours back; though I don't know what they hoped to see at night. IR, maybe. Come daylight the glacier'll be crawling with helicopters and search parties. No rush. Those Angels will be froze dead by then."
"Froze," she repeated.
"And serves them right, too."
She noticed Mikes jaw twitch an instant before he spoke. "Why?"
Mike, she thought, don't let your mouth talk us into trouble. So far, they were just a van load of jerks out joyriding. If the trooper began to suspect that they were "Angel-loving technophiliacs," they would be in serious shit.
"Why?" The trooper waved his arm at the glacier. "Because they started this, asshole! They did it to us. Stealing our air until the Protective Blanket was too thin to keep us warm."
Captain Scithers nodded. "Damn right," he said. "All that air they took, hundreds of tons--" His voice was serious.
Sherrine nodded her head as if she agreed. So did Steve and Will. Thor said nothing, but he twisted his finger in his right ear as if to unplug it. She prayed to Ghu that Mike would take the hint and keep quiet.
Bob decided not to trust in Ghu. He put the van in gear. "We better get going," he said over his shoulder, "if we're going to reach your grandparents' house in time for breakfast. Thanks for your help, officer." He gave a wave that was half-salute.