The inside of the sledge stank already, and the fresh dry moss on its floor, dim in the narrow moonlight bars that penetrated the car’s ceiling slats, only looked inviting. A guardhouse like an ice-fishing shed sprouted from the roof of each sledge, with a helmeted guard seated in each, rifle between his knees, already shivering.
When the crowd in our iron box had packed in shoulder to shoulder, a small man in a red moustache, who had told someone else that he was a shopkeeper, called, “Please! I’m claustrophobic!”
A guard shouted in, “It’s just to keep you out of the wind while we couple to the main train. Move closer! Others are chilled out here.”
How thoughtful. People, even the claustrophobic shopkeeper, shuffled closer together.
Our sledge’s door slid shut, then iron clanged on iron as it was latched. I swallowed. This was beginning to seem like a terrible plan.
Two hours later, my legs ached, people were swearing, and the smell of wet clothing mixed with sweat generated by shoulder-to-shoulder overcoated bodies had overpowered the ore box’s stink.
The sledge rolled the first six inches north, and a man in a long black coat and a matching hat, which on Earth would be called a homburg, lurched against me. “Sorry.”
“No problem.”
“You don’t sound Iridian.”
I said, “I’m not.”
“I’m not, either. This is a mistake, you see. I’m a physician.”
He didn’t know the half of it. Over the next six days, which was the one-way-trip time that Spook intel had predicted, we and the other pairs in other sledges would try to recruit and educate a little army in each of our moving prisons about what was really going on and what they could do to save their own lives.
The ice train hissed into darkness.
I dozed standing up.
When I woke, thin gray daylight trickled between the ill-riveted wall plates, and the thump-thumps as the sledge runners crossed pressure ridges in the river ice had become a steady growl. The physician faced me, close enough that I smelled something like onion when he breathed out beneath a pencil-line black moustache. He stared at Aud, false-moustached in the daylight. The physician frowned, then his eyes brightened. “Chancellor?”
Aud’s head swiveled toward the question, only a half inch, but it was enough.
The physician’s face lit. “Yes! It is you! Thank God, it’s you!” The physician turned to a woman beside him. “You see? It is a mistake! If Chancellor Planck himself is in this box, it’s all a mistake!” He threw back his head and screamed at the ceiling, “Stop the train! Stop the train! It’s all a mistake! The chancellor is in here! Chancellor Planck is in here!”
I hissed, “Shut up!”
“Why? Don’t you see? They’ll let us go!” He threw his head back again and screamed so loud that his hat popped off his bald head, rolled off an adjacent shoulder, and disappeared onto the iron floor.
I wrestled enough space to draw back my fist and cold-cock him.
“No!” Aud caught my forearm.
“Shut up down there!” The guard’s boot stomped the ceiling.
“I tell you I know him! He’s right down here beside me!”
“And Puck the Fairy is up here beside me! Shut the fuck up!”
Two minutes later, the physician screamed out again. “Just look! That’s all I ask! Just look down here and see for yourself.”
Boots thumped the car’s roof as every face in the car turned up toward its ceiling.
I swallowed, but my mouth was dry. If the guards found Aud in here, our plan was done. Ord’s pistol nestled in my shoulder holster, but a shot now would solve nothing.
The roof trapdoor creaked open, and daylight flooded in and blinded us.
The physician pogoed up and down, staring up and pointing at Aud. “Here! He’s right here!”
With my fingers splayed in front of my eyes to block the light I said to Aud, “Fuck! You should have let me slug him!”
The guard’s helmeted head and greatcoated shoulders darkened the square of daylight above us as he peered down, broad nosed and scowling. His shoulder seemed to move.
A breath tweaked my ear as something flew past it.
The physician screamed. The brick struck him full on the forehead, and crushed brain and blood and bone sprayed the shoulders and faces that stared at the physician.
The guard shouted, “I told you people to shut the fuck up! If I run out of bricks, I got a rifle!” He slammed the hatch and left us in the dark.
People shrank away from the physician’s body until it slumped to the floor.
In a distant corner, someone prayed. A woman sobbed.
Beside me, Aud whispered, “What have I done? What have I done?”
The physician’s bowels evacuated when he died, the harbinger of a problem that would not improve over the next six days.
The next day, Aud and I began whispered recruiting.
A woman beside me covered her ears and began reciting nursery rhymes to herself. Few of our car mates would even meet the eyes of either of us, or of anyone else.
Before the sun set for the second time, someone found the physician’s hat, and people began using it to pass human feces from one person to another until they could be dumped, more or less successfully, outside the car through the openings between the wall slabs.
The matter of the dead man’s hat, and the communication and cooperation that began with it, opened the doors between us and our fellow death-row inmates. And as we plotted, we didn’t have to worry about anyone ratting us out to the guard.
As the hours inched by, the mass of people in the sledge orbited, so each would take a turn at the wall opening, to enjoy light and the fresh air sucked through the open sliver. As the ice train rumbled farther north, driven snow on the wall joint could be licked off, to supplement the buckets of snow that the guard periodically lowered through the hatch.
When the rivers ended, the ice track continued, hewn from the frozen ground. The farther north we traveled, the less prized became the time a person spent exposed to the frigid wind that knifed between the wall slabs.
The physician, and a frail woman in a cloth coat who didn’t wake up on the third day, were slid to the wind- ward side of the sledge, where their bodies froze and also provided useful windbreaks.
After a lifetime, five days, twenty-two hours, and six minutes according to the wrist ’Puter hidden beneath my coat, Aud and I snapped out of sleep as the ice train slowed down.
FIFTY-THREE
I TUGGED UP THE MASK that shielded my face and pointed a mittened hand. “There!”
The moments between thumps lengthened as Aud and I stood together squinting out through the side slits at endless white beneath a hard blue sky. Aud and I took longer turns standing at the frigid, windward wall of our sledge because, forewarned, we had come equipped with more effective cold-weather clothing than most of the others.
In fact, the Spooks had forewarned us about much that we would see. Tressel’s North Polar region actually more closely resembled Earth’s South Pole, a wind-scoured continental plain bisected by razor-peaked mountains, its moisture so frozen in its ice and snow that its air was as dry as a desert.
Bits of black appeared in the distance, peeking from snowy ridges.
I said, “That must be the wire. Makes a lousy snow fence.”
