Central Heat by David Dvorkin

Author:David Dvorkin [Dvorkin, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: earth, aliens, underground, moon, sun, magma, bunker, theocracy, dictatorship
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * * * *

The university library wasn’t what Jonathan had anticipated.

Unconsciously, he had expected something much like America. He had assumed that excavating a building buried under the snow was simply a matter of digging out the many cubic meters of snow and ice and dragging them up to the surface. Then the original corridors and rooms would be accessible—probably looking much the way they had before the Taking. He would walk through hallways that would look much like those of America, and climb stairs to rooms on higher floors.

Instead, the ladder ended in a narrow corridor, lined with the same brown stuff as the tunnel and the floor of the hut on the surface, and after a long walk they came out of the corridor to find themselves in a brightly lighted, vast, open space under the snow. The walls of this, too, were covered with the now–familiar brown insulating cover.

In the middle of the great open space was an enormous pile of ice and snow. Here and there, the broken ends of wooden planks projected from it, and Jonathan could see bricks and stones dotting its surface. The mound of rubble almost filled the space, reaching to the brown covering of the ceiling and leaving only a narrow walkway of a meter and a half between itself and the walls. Here, the floor was not covered. It was solidly compacted snow, which had long ago turned to ice.

The lighting in the cavern came from powerful spotlights mounted high on the walls all around the cavern and trained on the shapeless pile. Their light reflected from it dazzlingly, casting a crazy quilt of light and shadow everywhere. Along the margin of the pile, small pools of water stood on the icy surface of the cavern. More water ran down the sides of the mound and dripped to the floor. The spotlights were melting the huge pile of ice, but with glacial slowness.

Human figures surrounded the pile, working cautiously at it with some sort of hand–held devices. They looked like guns, but the effect when they were pointed at the ice was that it melted in small areas, to a depth that could have been measured in centimeters. The workers then reached into the shallow holes they had made and tugged at the exposed rubble until pieces of it came loose. These pieces they piled behind them, along the walls of the cavern.

This was where the noises and voices they had heard earlier had come from. The air was misty with condensing steam from the hand–held melters and from the breaths of the workers. Vapor moved in curtains past the spotlights, and there was a chill dampness to the air. The work must have been hot, thought, for most of the workers had discarded their heavy coats. Charlie Yang’s earlier warning to Greta didn’t seem to bother these people.

The jumbled pile loomed over the people working around it. Jonathan estimated the height of the pile at ten meters.

Suddenly he realized what it was.

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