Runaway World

The Bridge

     "How thick do you suppose the ice is here?" asked James as they pulled on their surface suits in the outfitting room.

     "Still plenty thick enough to support the weight of the rovers," said Andrew. "Don't worry, we're not going to fall through."

     "I wasn't worried about that," his son replied as he pulled the tight fitting material up his thighs and around his waist. "They say there are probably still living creatures down there, on the sea floor. The deep oceans will never freeze, they say. Not for billions of years, anyway. The ice acts as insulation, keeps the Earth's inner heat in."

     "Yeah," agreed Andrew. "I heard that."

     "One of my science teachers said that life might actually last longer down there than if the Earth hadn't been thrown out of orbit," James added as he pulled the suit's arms on. "Because the sun's continually growing brighter and the Earth's surface temperature would have exceeded the boiling point of water within just one billion years. The planet would have been completely sterilised."

     "Life, uh, finds a way," said Andrew, making James laugh. "Did you know," Andrew added, "that the underground cities were almost underwater cities? They thought for a while about building the cities at the bottom of the oceans. We'd have been able to come and go the entire two hundred years The Freeze was going on, not trapped in the cities. We'd have been surrounded by a living ecosystem."

     "So why didn't they do it that way?"

     "It was probably easier to get the construction equipment to sites on the surface. I don't know, there were probably loads of technical reasons." He picked up his helmet and studied the status readouts on the back, the readouts provided for a second person to read. He didn't want to put it on his head while they were still talking. The intercom wasn't the same, and he enjoyed talking to his children.

     "It would have made it a lot harder for the mobs to attack the cities," James pointed out. "A lot of the cities that fell might still exist."

     "I don't think they expected the attacks to be so furious," Andrew replied. The display said his suit was in good condition. Ready for a stroll on the surface. "They trusted the defenders and the automatic weaponry. Your suit ready?"

     "Yep." James put his helmet on and Andrew did the same. The teenager's voice came to Andrew by way of the speakers by his ears, thin and tinny compared to hearing him directly. "So, let's see what these things feel like."

     Hanging on the wall were two garments they'd never had to wear before. They had been designed by engineers back in the city just in case anyone ever had to try crossing the Atlantic, and had then been left in storage for twenty years because everyone had been too sensible to try such a mad idea. They looked like the arms, torso and helmet of a medieval suit of armour but were made of a polymer, ceramic composite that was both light and resistant to becoming brittle at low temperatures. Additional pieces of armour fitted around their legs and feet. The father and son helped each other into them and did up the clip fastenings before standing back to admire each other.

     "Feels really easy to move," said James, lifting an arm experimentally. "Not as heavy as I thought they'd be."

     "Let's go try them out properly," said Andrew. "Shall we go?" He indicated the airlock. James nodded and they went in together.

     The inner door closed behind them and the outer door opened, letting the air escape to become a shower of crystals falling to the ground. The ladder deployed and Andrew led the way down onto the ice.