Runaway World

The Glacier

     The sleeping quarters were on the hab-rover's upper level. There were no windows, since there was nothing but gloom and darkness visible outside the steadily trundling vehicle. Instead, there was a large monitor screen mounted on the wall that could show images of the world before The Freeze. The one on the wall of Andrew and Susan's bedroom was currently showing a sunrise above a range of mountains with wispy clouds lit a golden white from below. The sound of birdsong was coming from the speakers.

     The rover was still vibrating gently as the engines powered the six spiky steel wheels, carrying them onward at a steady and sedate ten kilometres per hour, and it rolled gently from side to side as the terrain they were crossing rose and fell in dips and hummocks. Together, they reassured Andrew that nothing bad had happened while he'd been asleep and that they were still on course for their return to the Sellafield dig site early the next day. Nevertheless he still got gently out of bed, being careful not to wake his wife, left the room and descended the ladder through the hole in the floor down to the lower level. His bladder was uncomfortably full, but he had to reassure himself that all was well first. His visit to the bathroom could come later. One quick glimpse into the cockpit was all it would take to settle his mind.

     To his surprise, Jasmine was already there, sitting in the pilot's chair and frowning at the instrument panel on front of her. "Trouble?" said Andrew, suddenly worried, coming forward to look over her shoulder.

     "There was an alert," the girl replied, turning her head to look at him. She reached up a hand to brush a lock of long, auburn hair out of her eyes. "I came to check it out."

     "I didn't hear anything," said Andrew, suddenly concerned. He came forward and dropped into the co-pilot's chair to study the instruments.

     "It was only a level one alert," said Jasmine. "You were probably still deep in the land of dreams. I heard it because I was answering a call of nature. The auropilot says the glacier's shifted."

     Andrew muttered a mild oath. "How much?" he said.

     "Not much, according to the computer. A human, piloting the rover and noticing the discrepancy, probably wouldn't have thougnt it worth mentioning, but the autopilot's a slave to its programming."

     Andrew nodded distractedly while tapping the touch screen in front of him to bring up the terrain data, as measured by the rover's autopilot. He looked out through the cockpit window to see if they were still following their own wheel tracks. Maybe they'd simply drifted a little off course.

     The surface of the glacier was broken into jumbled blocks, all at slightly different levels and angles. After the atmosphere had condensed into liquid nitrogen and oxygen, falling as rain and running in rivers and then freezing solid in the lowest dips and hollows, it had cooled a little more at the surface and contracted, breaking into an almost regular array of slabs like the baked mud of a dried out lake bed. As the relatively warmer and more viscous layers of nitrogen ice below the surface had flowed, slowly but inexorably, these surface slabs had been either pushed together or pulled apart creating a surface that looked as if a careless giant had dropped a huge sheet of glass, that had shattered. The uneven surface of the glacier hasn't worried the Birch family the first time they'd crossed it as the rover was designed to traverse uneven terrain, and Andrew could see the scratches the huge wheels had left in the ice as they had climbed up one sloping surface and down the almost vertical drop of up to a metre to the next slab.

     Then he saw something that made his heart flutter with anxiety, though. Between one tilted slab and the next the wheel scratches were offset by several metres. The offset was a fracture in the glacier where the ice had slipped since the first time they'd crossed it.