The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF by David G. Hartwell (ed.); Kathryn Kramer (ed.)

Author:David G. Hartwell (ed.); Kathryn Kramer (ed.) [Kramer, David G. Hartwell ; Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

It was June 10th. New York City was semideserted. Snow ten feet deep, where it wasn't drifted, blocked all the streets. Where it was drifted, which was almost everywhere, it ran forty and fifty feet deep. The few people who still lived in New York, less than five hundred thousand, moved about little; only when a boat was due to sail.

Day and night the crunch-crack'shuff of the icebreakers in the harbor was audible. Because the temperature had begun to drop in late May. It was —32.4 at noon, June 10th. Where the icebreakers opened the water, it steamed.

The oceans were giving up their age-old hoard of heat. Had ice only been heavier, instead of lighter, than water, the temperature would not have fallen so low, for even in the cold of space where Earth was headed now, the stored heat of the oceans would have warmed her for decades.

But ice was forming. The Atlantic was in port now, taking aboard passengers at five hundred dollars a head for rhird class, five thousand for a private room. She was a vast liner, another attempt at the "world's greatest."

And New York heard a rumor. The Atlantic was making her last trip—the last trip any ship would make. They were afraid of the waves. They were afraid of the winds. They were most afraid of the ice.

On June 9th there was a blizzard—an antarctic blizzard. The wind howled, and the howl mounted to a shriek. No snow fell, but the powdery stuff rose, thousands of tons of it, swept up by a wind of one-hundrcd-mile-an-hour velocity, with undiminished force and mass, since its inertia remained. The snow had lost weight. New York was blinded.

At seven a.m. the George Washington Bridge shrieked a new song. The fragments landed nearly a quarter of a mile down the river. At seven thirty, the older bridges failed, the Brooklyn going first. By eight fifteen there were no man-made bridges. But the wind, the snow, had sucked the heat out of the rivers, and the ice had solidified all across them, so there was a single, great ice bridge.

At ten twenty, the old Woolworth Building crashed, and on its heels came the Empire State tower. The fragments of the Empire State's tower fell over most of southeastern Manhattan.

The blizzard had died by the morning of the tenth, but there were no great towers remaining on the sky line of New York. The weakening of materials, and the titanic force of the wind, had seen to that.

And the rumor that the Atlantic would be the last ship to leave New York spread.

The Atlantic was booked by dawn of the 10th, and there were no more ships in New York harbor leaving that day, sailings scheduled the next day would not go. A crowd gathered about the sheltered dock of the Atlantic on the southern side of Manhattan. A wind still raged at forty-five miles an hour from the north.

Slowly the crowd grew, and the low muttering increased. Police and guards kept the lines in check till ten.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.