The first thing they saw was the outside world drowned in light. In the words of one young pilot, who had not been informed of the situation, “It was like flying through a neon light tube.” The glare lasted for around fifteen seconds and was accompanied by a giant roar, as if the planet below them was exploding. All at once they saw blue sky, a circular region centered on the blast that expanded rapidly outward. It was the nuclear shock wave dispersing the cloud layer out to a radius of one hundred kilometers from the hypocenter, they later learned.
Smack in the center of the blue towered a mushroom cloud. It started off in two parts, one huge ball of white smoke and fire that took shape at two thousand meters after the initial fireball cooled, and a second on the ground where the shock wave kicked up dirt into a low pyramid whose apex extended upward into a thin spire that joined up with the huge smoke ball. The white ball instantly darkened in color as it absorbed the dust sent up by the pyramid, and flames flickered intermittently throughout the surface. Now the fog beneath the helicopter had been banished like the clouds, giving them a clear view of the land. The pilot later recalled, “The ground got fuzzy all of a sudden, like it had turned to liquid, as if an endless expanse of floodwater was surging toward us, and all of those little hills were islands and reefs. I saw cars on temporary roads flip over one after another like matchboxes….”
The three helicopters were battered about like leaves in a storm. A number of times they dropped perilously close to the ground and were pelted by flying stones and sand; then they were flung high into the air. But they didn’t crash. When they finally landed safely on snowy ground, the children jumped out of the cabin and looked back seaward at the tall mushroom cloud, even darker now. The morning sun, still below the Antarctic horizon, was high enough to just light up the top of the cloud, painting its rippling outline in gold against that slowly expanding dark blue circle of sky.
BLIZZARD
“Now this is Antarctica!” Huahua said, standing in the driving snow and bone-chilling wind. Visibility was poor through the endless whiteness of earth and sky, and even though they were on the coast, there was no distinguishing land from water. The young leaders of all the countries in Antarctica were closely gathered together as the blizzard swirled around them.
“That’s not really accurate,” Specs said. He had to shout to make himself heard over the howling wind. “It rarely snowed in Antarctica before the supernova. It’s actually one of the driest places on Earth.”
“That’s right,” Vaughn said. He was still only lightly dressed, and stood at ease in the cold wind, which had the children burrowing into their coats and shivering anyway. It was like the cold didn’t affect him at all. “Higher temperatures filled the air in Antarctica with moisture, and now the dramatic drop in temperature is turning that moisture to snow. It might be the biggest snowfall on the continent for the next hundred thousand years.”
“Let’s go back. We’ll be frozen stiff if we stay here,” Davey said through chattering teeth, as he stomped his feet.
And so the heads of state returned to the pressurized hall, identical to the one on the US base that had been vaporized by the atomic fireball of the CE Mine. They had gathered here with the intent of holding talks about Antarctic territory, but the long-anticipated conference was entirely meaningless now.
The CE Mine had ended the Antarctic war games. The children of every country had finally agreed to meet at the negotiating table to discuss the question of Antarctic territory. Each country had paid a heavy price during the war games, but now that the contest had unexpectedly returned to its starting point with no major power commanding a decisive advantage, negotiations seemed impossible for the foreseeable future. The children had no clear idea of whether war would break out again on the continent, or if events would follow another path. In the end, however, all of their problems were solved by a sudden change in climate.
Signs had actually started appearing more than a month ago when autumn made its return to the northern hemisphere after a two-year absence, first with a hint of a chill, and then rains, cold weather, and fallen leaves piling up on the ground. After analyzing worldwide climate data, various countries’ meteorological agencies concluded that the impact of the supernova on global climate was only temporary, and it now was returning to a pre-supernova state.
The ocean may have stopped rising, but it fell far more slowly than it had risen, leading many young scientists to predict that it might never return to its previous level. Still, the worldwide flood was over.
In Antarctica, temperatures hadn’t changed as much, and the small drop was taken by most children to be a function of the long night. They expected the rising sun to dispel the cold and for Antarctica to welcome its first spring. Little did they know that the white figure of Death loomed near on the vast continent.
In what later proved to be a wise decision, countries began withdrawing personnel from Antarctica once they reached the conclusion that the climate would recover. The war games had claimed the lives of five hundred thousand children, half in conventional games and half to nuclear explosions, but the death toll would have been four to five times worse if they had not effected an immediate withdrawal as the climate began to return to normal.
Their bases were largely built to withstand winter temperatures no colder than around −10°C, and were incapable of sustaining the bitter −30°C temperatures that were to come. In the first month, the temperature changed only gradually, allowing the withdrawal of 2.7 million children at a speed that would have astonished the adults. However, equipment still needed to be evacuated, and countries also desired to maintain a certain presence, so nearly three hundred thousand children remained behind as the climate changed. The temperature plummeted nearly 20°C in a single week, and blizzards swept the continent, turning it into a white hellscape.
An emergency evacuation of the remaining children left more than two hundred thousand on the shore, since the worsening weather had grounded virtually all aircraft, and the ports had all iced over in the space of a week, preventing ships from entering. Because most young heads of state were still gathered on the continent for the territorial negotiations, they naturally assumed the role of evacuation command. Leaders wanted to assemble their own country’s children, but the crowds on the shore were a mixture of all countries, leaving them at a loss as to how to proceed.
In the pressurized hall, Davey said, “Now that you’ve seen how things are out there, we have to come up with a solution, and quickly. Otherwise more than two hundred thousand people will freeze to death on the seashore.”
“In a pinch, we could retreat to the inland bases,” Green said.
“No,” Specs said, “most base facilities were dismantled earlier in the withdrawal. And with minimal fuel remaining, all these people wouldn’t survive very long. Going back and forth would waste tons of time and miss any chance to evacuate.”
“We can’t go back,” someone added. “Even if the bases were in perfect order, in this kind of weather we’d still freeze to death in those buildings.”
Huahua said, “All our hopes are on the ocean now. Time is too tight to transport so many people by air even if the routes were passable. The critical question is how to deal with the frozen harbors.”
Davey asked Ilyukhin, “When can your icebreakers get here?”
“They’re in the middle of the Atlantic. It’ll be ten days at the earliest before they make it here. Don’t count on them.”