Eighteen Duluthian scavengers with their newest member(that’s me, Dear Reader) were led across the permanently snow-covered plains of the Dakotas by our Selected. One yellow school bus slipped and slid in the snow that covered the empty interstate despite the chains on the tires. Inside the bus the heat cranked up to the maximum while outside a four year long winter continued to chill the planet in the wake of the Spasm.



I had been listening to the conversation for the past several hours trying to understand the world I fell into from across the dimensional divide.



The Frost obviously meant the four-year Nuclear Winter which led me to conclude the Spasm was a short nuclear war.



“So, how did this happen, this Spasm?” I asked at last when I realized nobody was going to explain it in casual conversation because everyone already knew. This is a big problem for versers; the most important data bits do not get much mentioned in most worlds.



They looked at me and then at each other sideways as I reminded them that they did not know much about the new guy they had picked up in the road.

“Uh, well…”

“I was out in an area far from news when it happened.” I said which was not exactly a lie. I’d heard of inter-dimensional news services, but I expected they did not cover this universe.

“OK,” My explainer smiled in relaxation, and I saw several people take their hands out of their jackets. “OK, well, a nuke went off in Pakistan. Probably a Middle Eastern provocation to give the Paks an excuse to nuke India. Seeing as the nuke blew in an isolated country area.”

This started an argument. Finally, he continued.

“Anyways, we KNOW the Paks nuked an Indian armoured column. Then the Indians went one better and threw a city-buster at the Paks. But they followed up with another which they said was aimed at an army base near the Chinese border with Paks. The Chinese swatted it down, and launched a major spread over India. NK went for Tokyo in the general enthusiasm. The Japanese surprised everyone with lasering down the missile, and threatening to counter-nuke anyone who fired another weapon.

It almost worked, but the surviving Chinese leadership was, well, ‘insane’, ‘grief-stricken’, just afraid that Taiwan would finally win their long rivalry, and plainly terrified of the shocking news from Tokyo.

So they tried for a quick strike which failed. Things went to pot. The Anglosphere finally launched a massive strike aimed at killing anyone with the potential to use nuclear weapons.”



It did not make sense to me. Until someone casually mentioned an epidemic plaguing the Far East at the time. Someone, who knows who, had been playing at bio-warfare at the same time this chaos had broken out.



I studied it more, and it developed that the incidents happened against a background of treachery all about so that no one in any captal trusted anyone else to keep their word.



America had tried to be isolationist, and ignore the world in the wake of the Cold War being won. The Peace Dividend had been far deeper, and the movement to close the doors of immigration and ignore the world had won out. And then the final act of re-involvement had been a desperate over-reaction which threw the globe into Nuclear Winter.



I pondered this as I got out of the bus to help push. We were stuck, but they had plywood, and sand, and even winches to help pull us out. Half the group stood around watching the surroundings for an ambush.



It seemed that I had revisited this turning point a number of times. In my first world in 2016? Pakistan and India went at it, but the rest of the world powers reacted a bit more rationally. It made me wonder about the pressures on the leaderships; supposedly much of the downfall of Rome could be traced to the Imperial family using lead welded plates to eat off of which caused “bizzarre”(if you want to be charitable) behavior. I might never know the full story of this world, but it showed another path for the critical turning point at the end of the TwenCen.

David had told me of a world in which a fairly reasonable world government had been the response to terrorism and nuclear devices. I’d seen a world of Hostage Cities and the “villagification” of the targetted West. And here, everything had gone to pieces. And I still did not really know why. It was frustrating.

Was there a world out there somewhere where some truly happy result was achieved to this problem?



The bus started forward again, and we all scrambled on to the moving bus. The driver did not want to stop, and risk getting stuck again. Only the Selected and the driver stayed inside the whole time.



Another hour, and tension gripped the bus as it slowed. Rifles, pistols landed in too well accustomed hands.

“Iceman or banditti?” Someone called out anxiously.

“They got the road blocked, but they have a pallet of ‘trade goods’. So I’d say they are Icemen.” The driver replied, and a certain tension ebbed a bit.

“Who goes out?” The Selected called. I felt a jab in my back of a rifle.

“He could be one of them. A spy. Send him out.” The guy said behind me to general smiles at the neat solution, from their point of view.



Irritated, I walked up to the front of the bus with my M-5 resting on my right hip, and pointing skyward. It stood out as a fine weapon among the deer rifles and ancient M-16’s.

“You’ll leave that here.” A man said reaching for my gun. I stepped back a step.

About a half-dozen guns pointed at various parts of my anatomy.

I looked at their unsympathetic and smirking faces, and I knew that this was just the start. Soon enough, they would go through my backpack, and take all my stuff. Never once would they show a bit of true courtesy despite the kindness I offered them.



To them, I was an Iceman, whatever that was. Not really human they had categorized me as. So, if they wanted me to be different, I would show them different.

“Got the computer working well yet, Selected?” I sneered. She gave me a hard and thoughtful look. I smirked back.

“Activate total meltdown-two minutes.” I said and my pocket pc vocally assented.

They hollered at me, and I smiled until the Selected ordered quiet. She nodded at the man who had stuck a gun in my back. His rifle came up under my nose.

“Fix it; give me the gun, now.”

Something in me snapped. Frustration and contempt gave way to a barely held in check fury.

And the phrase beloved of very enthused defenders of gun rights sprang to my lips.

“You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.”

The Selected waved him back, and I relaxed a bit. Then someone produced a knife, but she waved that off as well.

“Not enough time.” She said in one of the coldest phrases I had ever heard fall from a beauties face. She knew torture would not break me in time to save her precious computer.

So I backed out of the bus, and reevaluated things.



They were respectable, until you pushed them a bit hard. And while I have a temper, that passed my usual level. And it did not shock them. Maybe it was customary in this world. Maybe in other worlds, the gods kept humans from being able to overreact, to a degree, but here, humans were permitted the full opportunity to make idiots of themselves? I’d heard of worlds where you could not even think of murdering someone even though your guns worked just fine.



The short walk toward the wall of ice across the road, and the pallet of furs in front of it let me relax which was strange because I went into deadly danger.



“Citizen, I offer you prize furs, and gasoline. We need penicillin.” The wretchedly scrawny fellow in his poorly tanned furs bowed to me. I saw weapons held on the other side of the wall. It was a stick-up of sorts. The Duluthians did not want to trade for this garbage probably, but they wanted less to get in a gunfight.

“Why do you not keep the gasoline?”

“It is for the rocket to the stars. To get closer to the Sun so the College can warm up the planet again for all of us. And we could use it, but it is good cause.”

“And you need penicillin more.” I made clear in a polite tone the relationship. He nodded miserably.

I bowed, and walked back.

They stopped me ten feet away.

“What does the Iceman want this time?”

I told them, and they refused. So I dropped my rifle down to the left where it was not point at anyone except the engine. They let me.

“You know what a hypersonic fletchette made of titanium will do to a steel engine block?” And I smiled. So, we did the trade. And they left me by the side of the road.



I made friends with the Iceman tribe a bit, and found out about the banditti who were the real scum of the Frozen Land, according to the Icemen. The banditti killed for the heck of it since, as they said,we were all dead anyways, and we might as well enjoy the Last Year. I was told, a few of the more sane banditti claimed this was Fimbulwinter and the Spasm had been Ragnarok. I noticed the Icemen praying to Thor to come back from the dead when they thought I did not notice.



The penicillin seemed to have no affect, but it looked and smelled like sugar water to me. A shot of something that named itself in florid letters on the side of the needle “Pow!” I tried. This drug I found in the bottom of my backpack claimed to be a sovereign remedy against bacterial and viral and fungal infestations. The expiration date was 3205 A.D., and I had no memory of the world where I got it from. But in ten minutes, the young girl wanted to be let out of bed to play in the snow. They kept her in bed, and cleaned her off, and changed her bedding. Despite their appearance, these were educated people of the early twenty-first century.



The next morning, I set out with a brand new polar bear cloak which I had been forced to accept or the educated people were afraid the spirits might punish them for not showing gratitude. At one time, they had not believed thus, but as civilization had fallen so had a commitment to Western modes of thought.



Ordinarily, I approve of Western modes of thought, but in their situation, a supposedly more primitive way of life would probably be better at ensuring their survival. They had addapted physically and mentally to their new world. The problem for them was that humans can only adapt so far before we die. But if they died, it would not be for a lack of courage or for a cold-hearted stinginess.



I hiked ten miles to Duluth and took the off-ramp which led down to the Community College.



Guards behind ice walls that encircled the college tried to shoo me away. Past the walls, I could see a spot of green as evergreens grew inside greenhouses, and electric lights lit up the twenty or so old-fashioned buildings that made up the small college.



“But I’m a citizen. You can ask the Selected.”

“Which of the Selected?”

“The blonde one who came in on a bus yesterday.”

The guards shrugged, and sent for higher officers. They shrugged, and sent for higher authority. Soon, I saw a collection of black-robed men and women, and my favorite Selected with them(It was not that I liked her; she was the only one I knew.)



They let me in, and brought me into the commons. And they waited until everyone got out of the cold to start the arguement.



My favorite Selected was in favor of tossing me out. A few, bright-looking geeky sorts hemmed and hawed in my favor. Although, nobody wanted to say it, I gathered that my security protocol on the card still defested them. Besides, the professors from the PoliSci Department pointed out that I was legally a Citizen and thus entitled to a Trial before removing my Citizenship.



Deferential people came in to bring hot cocoa for the “darling professors”‘ our “noble Selected leaders.” and so on. The professors did not even bother to thank the servants who ladled hot chocolate and flattery out in equal amounts. I didn’t get any.



The social customs of the Seventeenth Century reborn in this new land made me ill, and the smell of the chocolate made me hungry. So, I opened up my backpack, and slowly and lovingly drew out a king-sized Snickers(r) bar from my last world. I had been planning to eat it when that sniper got me. Their eyes bugged out, and I could see the need for a candy bar which none of them had probably had in years obsess them. The temptation to eat it all very slowly was almost unbearable, but I shared it out in tiny bits to the Council which sat at the lunchroom tables in the Commons.



We politely dickered for a while as we tried to get the feel of each other’s positions. I wanted to be fed and sleep in a warm room. They wanted to use my computer for “calculations”.

“What type of calculations?” I asked.

“You wouln’t understand.” My least favorite Selected said.

“Ahem, Mel, please.” The chairman rebuked her gently.

“Oh, allright.” And she explained very quickly, and in jargon laden detail about the plan to put a rocket they had built into orbit to rendevous with the O’Neill Space Station at LaGrange Point Five which was a stable orbit point near the Earth. And the station would likely be a “ballooned out” asteroid that was now hollow and could be made habitable.

“So, who are the Selected?”

“Those deemed valuable enough to make space and mass available on the rocket to the O’Neill. Intelligence and skills are what makes the grade.”

I bit my lip to keep from a mocking smile at the self-promotion because ‘Mel’ would have gone on any Ark due to sheer beauty. But then a progression of daily business interrupted our meeting and I got to see how the Selected ran things.



Men came in and made arguements that they needed more resources, and they presented long details which went over the professors heads or under their feet. The engineers, including one fellow from as far away as Vancouver, talked a language of pressures and sublimation rates that went clean over the PoliSci chairman’s head. And the peasants, for what other name could I use, had such tiny details to relate about trying to survive in frigid conditions that none of the Selected had to deal with, and yet the Selected were supposed to provide the wisdom as to the proper course of building houses and whether newspaper should be limited to insulation, or allowed to be used for tinder.



The Council tried, but they were not up to keeping track of everything. Many decisions, including several that sounded important and urgent were referred to committee.



But, I confess, I misjudged the blonde and blue-eyed Mel. Her beauty and aura would have been enough to make her a Selected, but she was a faction leader of the Selected group, I called mentally, the Realists. Even more than the others, she favored harsh action forced by dire necessity. When a man was discovered to have buried his dead child secretly, and giving the extra portion to his other children instead of reporting the loss, well she wanted to hang him.



I reached for my gun at the time. And her eagle eyes spotted it.

“See, he goes for a weapon. Just like I’ve been telling you. He’s not trustworthy. Guards…” She called out in loud tones, and several guards perked up from their comfortable doze while the chairman tried to get her to shut up.

“Um,” I cleared my throat, and lay my rifle on the table in front of me. “Anyone, and I mean anyone who points a gun at me is dead.” I looked around the room and ended with Mel.

“But I will first shoot the one who orders it.”

She opened her mouth and closed it several times.

“Perfectly reasonable.” The chairman said in a suave voice. He lied because it was not at all reasonable, but I was tired of being reasonable to these people. Some people require a two-by-four up the side of their head to get their brain in gear.



They let the poor man go with a warning although he almost looked like he would have preferred hanging.



So, I had my citizenship and they gave me a room and coupons for food and coupons for fuel, and a pile of paperwork to fill out. I wandered the grounds looking for the appropriate people to sign this piece of paper or that piece. And thus I ran into the rocket warehouse.



A giant bell shaped vehicle towered forty feet up, and nearly as wide. A professional guard kept his hand near his wooden crossbow, and his eyes on me at all time. For which I was grateful in a way. One lunatic with a spark, and this whole place would achieve orbit all right.



The engineers babbled in an arcane jargon that I understood in part. When I tried to get the chief engineer to sign off, he was too busy, and pointed away. The Vancouver fellow suggested in a bland tone that the office next door had run short of fuel. I looked at him, and he shrugged. It was my decision. So, I took him up on it, and dumped the nearly foot-high stack in the Franklin stove where it could do some good.



And then I tracked down the engineers who had gone on break. I wanted to know why they were building the bottom of a mult-stage rocket.

“Why not a SSTO, single stage to orbit. And why a disposable? You are leaving plenty of people back home.”

One guy almost slugged me then; it seems like he was Selected but his family wasn’t. I sat back a second; these engineers wanted to win; they did not want to see their friends die. All they needed was an idea or a means.



The equations were cold and unforgiving and they demanded sacrifice, human sacrfice, or so the Selected said.



I waited until the end of a meeting with the Selected Councilwoman in charge of Aesthetics. An hour later, they got ready to go back to work.

“What about an Apollo rocket?”

“Like the one at Huntsville? Not big enough.”

“No, I mean a metal plate, and nuclear devices popped off underneath.” The room got still, and then the chief looked me dead in the eye.

“I like ya’ kid, but the Council had declared talk of such a plan to be treason. So shut up.”



I went away, and studied the various rocket books I could find. In the end, although SSTO was better than what they had, and using a baloon like the Vancouver guy wanted to do as the first stage was better still, I did not think these people had the time to do anything but ride a bouncing metal plate into orbit. But they had a justified severe case of nuclear phobia. It would deepen the winter, but the planet was already dead.



The engineers could save them; the people were smart and able, but the leadership did not know how to delegate. I looked down at my M-5 rifle. I knew one solution to this problem, but I hated to just walk into the council and mow them down. Besides, the people might well revolt. But, if need be, I would try it. I would not let the Selected toss most of the human race left from the troika to save themselves.



The equations might be cold, but I could be colder still.



It was hard, but I found a map of the nuclear weapons sites nearby in the plentiful missile fields of the Dakotas. Then I forged documents, and bribed guards which was easier than I expected. Of course, a black market flourishes in any command economy.



I sent the engineer from Vancouver since he had come that way before and about twenty others on a little trip on “behalf of the Council, a most secret mission”. The Icemen family unit I had been given the cloak from were their tour guides.



I had no clue how to build a giant flat pan with shock supressors to serve as my base plate without the Council finding out. So, I trusted in magic. Competive bids were placed out in the black market for parts for it, and my currency was a promise of a ride to the stars.



Eventually, I got several dozen in on the revolution. But I made extravagant promises, and borrowed “received investments” from Peter to pay Paul back from what I had stolen from him with his approval. It was not a healthy capitalism. It was a speculative bubble. I sold life, and they wanted to believe.



And in a way that I still don’t know how it happened, we got our base plate built, and we turned the bell-shaped first stage into a relanding vehicle that would carry the dissasembled in space plate back home after it served as the passenger hold upstairs. Magic happens.



The Council knew something was up, but they also found how fragile their control was in the face of hope.



We launched the “Nuclear Summer” and took the first load into orbit where it found an uninhabited and ready to set up housekeeping space station. Then it landed, and we used some of the abundant nuclear weapons scattered over the Dakotas to refuel.



The council abdicated.



And we sent messages all over the world for people to gather in spots to be lifted out.



Things were going well. A lunar mass-driver had been set up, and the second O’Neill was being heated by a solar powered laser so that it melted and ballooned out to make a hollow core and eventually another home.



I stood in the commons while busy and excited people ran about trying new ideas of their own, and co-operating in ways that I could not begin to control if I had wanted to, and someone ran in shouting my name.



“Tadeusz, come quick. This strange woman just appeared…”

I ran because I could hear screaming and sense another verser.



Up to their thighs in snow, the lady commando I had last met in Menlo Park, and a skinny guy next to her writhed and screamed. Plowing up to them next to Mel, I saw each held a knife, one a kris, and the other a simple double-bladed dagger. And they were trying to stab themselves in the neck with one hand while fighting it off with the other.



One fellow, quicker than me, tried to get the knife away from the broad-shouldered and black buzz cut commando. She back-fisted him with casual ease. So, I applied a disabling strike to the inside of her elbow, and wrapped my legs around her neck.



“What’s going on, Karla?”

“Is another man here, dark, terribly handsome with an arrow tattoo on his cheek?”

I looked over at her companion who was being restrained easily by Mel. The description fit him if you dropped the terribly habndsome part.

Then I heard him say,

“Please, let me go, I do not want to hurt anyone. Really, I’m against it. Just, please tell me, is there a black-haired goddess somewhere near here. I cannot see her. Tell me please.”

Even Mel’s hard heart melted at the agony in his plea, and she nodded yes while mouthing a befuddled profanity at me emanding to know what was going on.

Karla saw my face, and looked blankly at the space I was looking at.

“He’s here, isn’t he? Oh darling, I wish you could see me.” And then he and her started madly gnawing at their tongues.

She stopped with a horrible effort of the will evident by the bulging eyes and the horse breath.

“Tadesuz, you owe me. Blood-debt. I claim it. You said you owed me ten lives for rescuing your doppleganger from that torture chamber.”

I did not know what she was talking about. But no one ever accused Karla of being a liar, or a coward,and no one before today had accused her of being beautiful, and if she said she needed me, and I owed her, then it was so. I nodded.

“Come with me.” She said around a mouthful of blood. I nodded, and let her go.

Pulling out a dagger of my own, I flipped it end for end so the pommel rested in the palm of my hand.

“What are you doing? Are you mad?” Mel asked me looking askance as she released the dying tattoed man.

“There’s more things in heaven and Earth than are written of in your philosophy, Mel.” I said and drove the dagger in one strike though my rib cage and into the bottom of my aortal sack ripping it, and ensuring a very quick versing out.



I hoped I went with Karla and her love.



Taduesz