Episode Twenty-Six: The Peak

During the night as the snow deepened encasing Jim in his small hovel, the sounds of the storm were muffled into silence. In a few hours his own heat had comfortably raised the temperature, and he drifted into a deep sleep. He became aware of morning as a passage of time; the snow blocked the rising sun. Preparing himself to brace the storm anew, he used a hatchet like as an improvised shovel and hacked his way to open air.
The morning was still new. Blue sky was everywhere and the snow was dazzled by the light of a new sun. Jim saw that he had been closer to his goal than he thought. Less than a hundred yards up the ridge the peak was raised against the sky. Leaving his sleeping bag and pack, putting socks on his hands again to protect them from the snow, and reawakening his hopes that he might yet live through the day, he began to struggle through the waist deep snow toward the peak.
The air was abnormally warm for a snow covered peak, but perhaps the storm and snow were the true abnormality. The ridge he had been following came from the direction of the shore and at the peak joined another ridge that was still blocking his view. When he saw the land beyond pushing back the horizon he would see it all at once.
His heart began beating as he neared the peak, to the west he could see the mountain range sank into the ocean many miles away. To the east he could only see peak behind peaks and the plains next to the ocean. To the north, there was only a horizon.
When his eyes reached the same level as the peak, the whole world froze.  He could clearly see that he was on a peninsula with an ocean on the north and the south, but the peak still blocked a wedged shape of the northern ocean from his view. The next moment he could move again and surged up to the peak.
He had found the horizon. A black void, an inverted triangle in the shape of the mountain that had blocked his view the moment the memory in the computer ran out, lay like a strange shadow in which nothing could be seen across the surface of the ocean. Jim guessed the computer had started trying to fill that void in with the land nearest him, because the north side of the mountain was solid and whole.  A large band of ocean had also been filled in, but the void was there—just a few miles from the shore.
His mind leaped to William and Elizabeth. Their boat would reach the horizon long before he could—unless Dean was already talking with them. Perhaps Dean had already talked with them and taken them out! Then Troy, wherever he was must be close to the horizon. It would take Jim at least a full day to get down to the shore and a few more to make a boat.  He would have to wait.
For a moment he considered the glade at the foot of the mountain, but now that he had seen the horizon he just couldn't let it leave his sight.  After getting his things, he returned to the peak and began walking to the horizon—but this time, he could see it.