THE year is 2517, and half of the United States has surrendered to the advancing glaciers.
The front line of America's desperate struggle against mountains of ice stretches 3,000 miles, coast-to-coast from Hilton Head, South Carolina, to San Francisco. The summer is over, and the entire nation is bracing for yet another brutally cold winter.
John "Spoonman" Ginan has not seen his father, Goodman, since he began terrestrial-exploration training at Cape Canaveral on his birthday, Jan. 2.
Spoonman could fly no further north than D.C. to get as close as possible to New York City, which was home to him in many ways. The Modern Ice Age had made Reagan International Airport the last bastion of U.S. aviation north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
The last leg of Spoonman's journey home is a bone-chilling trek on every snow machine imaginable. At the Reagan airport, the bevy of vehicles available to most travelers with family or professional business in The Big Apple is a menagerie of machinery. The collection at the airport's ground-transportation depot ranges from 100-year-old Arctic Cats, trailer-equipped snowmobiles, and the speedy anti-gravity Snow Devils that the U.S. government started deploying nation-wide in 2508.
Traveling in the trailer of a relatively new model snowmobile seems like the best value, so Spoonman tosses his backpack next to the spare gasoline canister and gingerly slides into the trailer's unexpectedly comfortable banana seat.
Goodman Ginan
When Spoonman emerges from the subway station in Hoboken, New Jersey, he does what he always does when he comes home -- gaze at the greatest walled city of all time. When it had become clear around 2220 that the Modern Ice Age had begun in the prior century, the citizens of NYC faced a choice: fight or flight.
Manhattan had decided to accept the Herculean challenge, designing then constructing walls of reinforced concrete 50-feet wide and 50-feet tall. The inhabitants of the great city's other three boroughs fled south.
Spoonman decides to take a creaky Arctic Cat with two other travelers across the long-frozen-solid and glacier-covered Hudson River to The Great Wall's Pier 45 Parapet. After tipping the Cat's driver generously, he looks at the parapet's entryway with mixed emotions -- this would be his last visit to the first city he had ever known. Like his wife and most of the other astronauts, engineers, and builders in Earth's first wave of Europa colonists, Spoonman's fate was to die on Jupiter's ice-clad, water-world moon.
The Pier 45 Parapet is one of seventeen 70-foot-high titanium towers that interlock The Great Wall and help protect America's financial center from the Northeastern Glacier's megaton pressure. After passing through the parapet's base, Spoonman re-hitches his backpack and scampers two blocks to the Christopher Street subway station. His next stop would be where he could always find his father in the hour after dawn -- atop the Battery Park Parapet.
Before he could feel his father's warm embrace in the chilled air that blankets the city, Spoonman climbs the hundreds of artfully crafted stairs that spiral up the inner wall of the Battery Park Parapet. In addition to being relatively close to Goodman's apartment in Greenwich Village, this rook-like outpost has unique commanding views. To the north, all of Manhattan is visible. To the south and east, feet-thick ice cover the once-bustling harbor, Long Island Sound, and the vast frozen expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.
Spoonman opens the exit door at the top of the spiral staircase silently, hoping to surprise his father. He sees his dad's back, which is covered by a bright orange parka. Goodman had been surveying the icy wasteland surrounding the city since dawn. Now, he is deep in thought about his son's months-long journey to Europa, Jupiter's ice-clad satellite.
"The day is always darkest before the dawn," Spoonman says, borrowing a catch phrase that his father has told him at least dozens of times.
Goodman spins on his heels in an instant, the sound of his son's voice breaking the spell that the mysterious moon had cast upon him.
"Son! I was beginning to think I would have a frost-bit nose by the time you showed up," the older man says.
Father and son then hold each other in a bear hug, swaying gently as puffs of their flash-frozen breath flow from their fur-lined parka hoods.
After 30 seconds that alternately seem like an eternity and an instant for Spoonman as his father holds him close, Goodman leads his son to the parapet's edge.
"The Northeast Glacier is still inching its way up The Great Wall, you know," the retired mechanical engineer says.
"I know," Spoonman says, staring intently down the concrete slope of The Great Wall to the meters-thick sheet of ice and detritus that has encased the city since before he was born at Mount Sinai Hospital in 2483. "New Yorkers are lucky they listened to you and grandfather instead of Reginald Thump."
The son sensed his father's back stiffen reflexively at the mention of the Ginan family's arch nemesis.
"Thump's plan for The Great Wall would have heaped cataclysm on top of disaster," Goodman says flatly, using his favorite turn of phrase when describing anything related to the real estate magnate and disgraced former U.S. president's ill-conceived scheme to save Manhattan.
"If that decrepit ass-hat had had his way," he said, looking over his right shoulder at Thump's frost-covered golden tower, "the glacier would have razed the city decades ago."
Goodman and his father were both outstanding mechanical engineers.
Thump's brilliance was limited to the mechanisms of turning a fast profit, usually on assets that were leveraged with debt to the hilt.
To be effective, Goodman's father knew years before the first gargantuan bucket of concrete was poured that The Great Wall would have to be the biggest public works project in the history of civilization. While he was president, Thump's minimalist approach to construction of the glacier-barrier wall would have saved U.S. taxpayers about a trillion dollars, but it would not have saved the city.
Thump could not help seeking the limelight and being a slave to his self-interest. Single-minded selfishness was the root cause of Thump's scandal-shortened single term as president of the United States. Narcissism doomed his presidency to impeachment in the House of Representatives and removal from office in a landslide vote in the Senate.
The trillionaire's attempt to cut corners during the final phase of The Great Wall's construction probably sealed his fate as the worst president in U.S. history. He had rarely emerged from his golden, 58-story monolith since Marine One had delivered him to the helipad on the skyscraper's roof in 2500. The city's vibrant tabloid press called Thump the Hermit of 5th Avenue.
"I am a compassionate man," Goodman says, draping his right arm across his son's broad shoulders, "but I can't wait much longer for that shit-heel to draw his last gasping breath."
Artist's conception of Europa's frozen surface, Jupiter, and the Sun /NASA image
Genevieve Ginan
AFTER talking for two hours about the great city of New York, The Great Wall, and Spoonman's impending great adventure, father and son made the slightly dizzying decent down the Battery Park Parapet's spiral staircase.
Before they parted outside the titanic tower, the men gaze at one another's faces through their parka hoods. "I'll be alright, dad," Spoonman says.
"I know, but I also know that this is the last time that I will see you in the flesh."
Neither of the engineers wanted to cry, so their last-ever clutch is short and sweet.
The astronaut-engineer is hankering for lunch before starting his journey south back to Cape Canaveral; but his eagerness is fueled by love, not hunger.
The Battery Park Parapet is only three blocks from the Golden Orchid, the Thai restaurant where Spoonman first met Genevieve Leigh.
In the summer of 2514, the then-bachelor had arrived at the eatery before his future bride, whom he had met online through the NASA astronaut online community. Through the restaurant's thick plate-glass window facing the street, he had watched with amusement the beautiful and brilliant woman's confusion as she tried to open the locked door that led to an apartment above the Golden Orchid.
He sensed the native New Yorker's embarrassment as she walked toward their table wearing a tight-fitting blouse and a smile that betrayed her nervousness, and her dismay over picking the wrong entryway door.
"Genevieve, it's great to see you," Spoonman said, attempting with great difficulty to pronounce his lunch-mate's name with a French accent.
"I'm so flustered," the tall brunette with dark-chocolate eyes said as she took her seat opposite from Spoonman across their ornate dining table.
"Your agitation is nothing compared to how I feel about butchering the pronunciation of your name."
"Please call me Genie," she said, quickly signally to a waitress before the conversation spun out of control into premature intimacy,
"The curry dishes are amazing here," Genie said, hoping to change the subject.
"I love Thai food, so pretty much every kind of curry they have here will work for me!" Spoonman said, with the prompting of his empty belly and gratitude for Genie's abilities as a conversationalist.
She had been recruited to be among the first Europa colonists for her communications skills, which were essential to overcome the 40-minute audio-signal delay over the 390-million miles separating Earth and Europa.
Communication skills also would be essential if the colonists encountered intelligent life on the Jovian moon.
After its awkward beginning, the rest of the soon-to-be couple's first date flowed effortlessly. The topics of conversation ranged rapidly from growing up in Manhattan, to the rivalry between their respective high schools, to the Europa colonist selection process, to what the pair expected when their spacecraft arrived at the ice-encrusted moon as it orbited the solar system's largest planet.
The curry had been very good.
Their first kiss outside the Golden Orchid was much more satisfying.
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