of tubing, and two suction fans at the bottom would draw in the air. The main feature, actually an afterthought, was a group of instruments mounted at the upper opening for reporting the weather.
After those drawings were completed, I spent a lot of time speculating upon what manner of vehicle Rance Goodrich would design for carrying us over the snow. I began to make drawings of so-called snowmobiles, which were used back in the Dark Centuries to travel in the Arctic and Antarctic, before man had discovered the simplicities of fusion reactors and the easy way to fly. The vehicles I was drawing were, actually, variations of the ancient automobile, the chief differences being tremendous wheels of inflated rubber that would support the machine and its occupants on snow.
At 8:15 I got Bill Wernecke on the scope and put my ventilation project in his lap. The Werneckes had just finished breakfast, and I could hear Martha and the kids in the background with voices raised. I showed Bill the drawings over the scope and he praised my design and said that in his opinion it would work like a mallow.
“Save ’em,” he said. “We’ll see you later today. I talked to Gabe yesterday and he insists that we all come out to Fallon immediately.”
“Wind do any damage at Berle Park?” I asked.
“Not to us. We heard it, though. Woke us up at three A.M. It seems to be dying down now.”
“I talked to Gabe about it,” I said. “It’s some sort of freak disturbance.”
“Probably the sun will be out this afternoon,” he said. “Wouldn’t be a bit surprised if this was the end of the storm—a sort of last gasp.”
“A hundred to one says you won’t see the sun during your lifetime,” I said.
“I’ll take that. One louvre’s worth, and I’ll collect it tonight. Keep your chin up, Colonel Savage.”
He went off the scope and I went back to my designing. At ten o’clock the wind had subsided completely. I had been aware, over my concentration, that there had been a change—that something external was very different. Suddenly I realized it was the absence of wind-howl. I looked out the window (the snow had drifted up to the second-story sill) and it seemed that the snowfall had thinned out considerably. I went down to the living room and turned on the VM and the VK receivers.
Luke Hobson, Secretary for Internal Affairs, was on the VK, his fat, smiling face and his unctuous voice oozing optimism. “. . . that the storm is nearing its end,” he said. “You will see that our predictions have been right, that these prophecies of an Ice Age and a frozen world are just so much latakia. I can assure you that it will stop snowing within hours and—”
I cut off the VK and tuned up the VM. There was a plump lady with shiny, blonde hair mixing something in a bowl and talking about it in a low, sexy voice. Life went on as usual. I cut off the VM.
At 10:41 the Garbut I had ordered from the Henderson Office set down at the jetshield and Marge Couzins was in my arms and giving me one of those kisses I once thought I couldn’t live without—and apparently was ready so to think again. Marge is a tall girl, only seven inches shorter than I am, and ordinarily her heels make up for some of that difference. Today she was dressed in Fincham arctics with fur snowboots, so she was back down to her real height. She took my arm and we walked up the heated path to the house.
“You’re a hell of a weather prophet,” she said. “Everybody from Luke Hobson on down to the air steward says the storm is over—that there’ll be no more snow after today.”
“All right,” I said. “You win. The storm is over. Gabe is a crackpot. How about we get married?”
“You mean a silly ceremony with a priest? I should say not!”
“Well—what do we do then? I’ve never been through this before.”
“Neither have I. . . . But we get three witnesses. We turn on the DW-three—there is a DW-three here, isn’t there?—then you say, ‘Be my wife, Marjorie Couzins.’ I reply, ’I will be your wife, Victor Savage.’ Then we face the screen while our picture is taken and we give our addresses and Waverly Numbers. That’s all there is to it.”
“I like the old-fashioned way better,” I said. “We would go to a temple or the priest comes here. He would read out of the ancient prayer book, then we would promise to love, honor, and obey each other and I would put a gold ring on your finger. Then we would kiss and would be married. We would get an engraved certificate which we could frame over our bed—a sort of license to make love. That’s real romance!”
“Phooie,” said Marge. But she gave me another one of those kisses and I didn’t care much how we got married, so long as we did.
9
ON FRIDAY, September 20th, the sun came out for two hours and set in a blaze of orange and dusty red over the Missouri plains. It was the first time any of us had seen the sun for some five months, and we stood on the porch of the Harrow farm at Fallon and watched it sink to rest. There was a large gathering of us at that memorable sundown. There were Elaine and Gabe Harrow, who had flown in from Mt. Hood, bringing with them Professor Osborne and Bob and Libby Jordan. Steve Engles and his mother Cora came from York Area Two, Rance Goodrich from Jersey Complex, Florence Donner from Colorado Center, and Dr. Rufus Howard and Bill and Martha Wernecke and their two children, Alice and George, from Missouri Center. There were Marge and myself, of course, and the two Lawrence boys, Fred and Sam Houston from the next farm.
Gabe Harrow, Bob Jordan and Jack Osborne brought with them further disquieting news that seemed oddly improbable with the sun shining and the temperature rising to the 30’s. They said that the abatement of the snow and the sunshine were very temporary—that the earth had been passing through a rift, or hiatus in the cosmic cloud, and that they had been able to measure its extent three days before and could predict that at 2:13 the next morning the snow and wind would begin again with redoubled violence.
Later in the evening Gabe, Osborne, Jordan, Engles, who was a former Navy commander and reactor engineer, Wernecke and I gathered in the library for the first meeting of the directors of the Harrow Group. Gabe presided, since it was his idea and his house, and he briefly outlined the agenda.
“Our problem now is simply ways and means of survival,” he said.
“Vic Savage has filled this house with enough food concentrates to last us a couple of years, so food will not be the problem. Also, he had the foresight to obtain one of the new Kincadium reactors and additional fuel for our present Fornium reactor, so our problem will not fall into the areas of heat, light, and power.
“What we face are two immediate problems, mainly. There was a third—that of ventilation in the event our oxygen generator failed, but Colonel Savage has already solved it for us with his design of a vent tube that will reach to the surface of the snow when it covers us over. What remain are a safe passageway from the house to the East barn, where all of our vital materials and our workshop and tools will be, and secondly the shoring up of our house and the barn so that they will not cave in on us with the weight of the snow.
“Bill Wernecke is applying his engineering skill to both of these situations, and I have no doubt they will be solved while we are still mobile.
“There is one more vital aspect of our condition, our escape from this place. Some time within the next twelve months the violence of the storm will subside and the precipitation will form into a more or less regular pattern for areas. Our expectation
