Chapter 12: The Iceman Cometh

“UP!” shouts Melvin. “KEEP GOING UP!” Scrambling through the dark cave, you keep running and jumping, trying to climb up and up and up. You can’t see it, but you know that somehow, the skull spirit is right behind you, ready to snatch the golden crown away from you. You’ve collected so many diamonds that some spill out of your backpack with every jump. “HERE IT IS!” shouts Melvin. Up above, you see it – the eternal flame. You’ve lost track of where you entered the mountain, maybe it froze over again? But the map shows that there is a way out at the eternal flame, high in the mountain. “I CAN SEE THE EXIT!” shouts Melvin. “IT’S RIGHT UP HERE!” You keep bounding and scrambling up and up. You see the flame and feel its heat. You also feel a cold wind from outside that seems to be feeding the flame. Suddenly a worrisome thought occurs to you. “Melvin,” you pant, “Why didn’t the map…” pant, “have us…” more panting, “come in this way?”

“NO TIME!” shouts Melvin. “Follow me!” Melvin shoots out the cave opening into the night, and you hear the horrible sound of the skull spirit rising up below you, its eerie organ music growing louder each second. The terrifying skull is flying up at you, and in desperation, you leap out of the cave opening.

You find yourself falling though the cold air, and soon you find the icy wall of the mountain at your back, and you are sliding down, insanely fast, like some kind of frozen waterslide. Luckily, there don’t seem to be any rocks, and as you plummet, the angle of the ice wall becomes less and less steep, bit by bit, until finally you are sliding horizontally across the snow, and you skid to a stop, on your back, looking up once again at the pixelated stars.

“YAHOO!” shouts Melvin. “We did it!”

You worry for a second that you might have lost the crown in the scramble, but no, it is still perched on top of your head.

Melvin looks at you. “Hey! Take that off!” he says indignantly. “That crown is for Queen Stella.”

“Yeah, sorry,” you say, and take it off. It is the most beautiful object you have ever seen, made of filigreed gold spun into impossibly thin threads. You carefully wrap it up in the gray cloth treasure map and put it into your backpack. You shiver with cold for a moment, but are comforted that the heat gun is still on your belt. “I feel kind of bad that we stole this stuff from that angry father,” you say.

“Pffft,” says Melvin. “He’s never going in there if he knows what’s good for him, and those kids just used the heat gun for vandalism.” He looks around. “Where are we, anyway?”

You look around. Above you, Spike’s Peak looms, a vast wall of ice. As you look around, you realize that you seem to be in some kind of canyon – there are walls of ice and rock on each side of you. “It’s late,” you say to Melvin. You yawn. “To get out of here, we’re going to have to do some climbing, and I’m too tired for that. Besides, it’ll be easier in daylight. Why don’t we make camp and get some sleep?”

Melvin agrees. “We need to find our way back down the mountain, and that’s too dangerous in the dark. Our flags were good, but even they don’t glow in the dark,” he jokes.

“Ha, yeah, flags,” you chuckle. As you look around to figure out where to make camp, you hear an ominous roaring noise from above. “Gah! Is that the skull spirit? Did it follow us out?”

Melvin looks up, and squints, not that he has eyes. “No…” You both look up, and see, reflected in the moonlight, some kind of spacecraft. “What is that doing here?” wonders Melvin. It looks like it is going to fly past, but it suddenly turns around, and heads back toward you. A hatch opens on its underside, and you see little parachuted packages dropping out of it. “Maybe someone wants to help us?” wonders Melvin. “Maybe they are delivering some supplies?” You watch the packages drift down. One of them, about forty feet in the air, abruptly stops, and forms into a floating ice panel, sort of a tile. Then another does, then another. Melvin becomes alarmed. “Someone is trying to seal us in here!”

“Well, what do we do? Should we climb out?”

“No, there’s no time! Wait! Use your heat gun, see if you can melt those tiles!” You aim and shoot. It seems to have no effect. You shoot at a different one. Nothing. You shoot at one more. This time, you miss, and hit a package in mid-flight. It vaporizes. “Of course!” shouts Melvin. “It’s Space Ice!”

“What does that mean?” you shout back, trying to zap more falling ice blocks.

“Space ice is normal ice, until it undergoes supercrystallization… then, well, I don’t know, it’s still ice, but it won’t melt!”

“So... what do I do?” You find yourself suddenly, intensely cold. You zap yourself with the heat gun, but it doesn’t help.

“Don’t walk under the tiles!” shouts Melvin. “Space ice is super cold, and you’ll slow down, and maybe freeze to death!”

You struggle to run to a place where there are no tiles above. Just then, a big snowball rolls out of nowhere and knocks you down. “Where did that even come from?” you shout.

“I don’t know,” says Melvin, zipping off, “but keep shooting the ice blocks, and watch out in case there’s more!” he shouts again. “I’ll try to find us a way out of here!”

Put the Glacier Patrol cartridge into your Atari 2600. Use game select 1, and set the difficulty switches to b. Keep playing until you get 10,000 points. Post a link to a video in the comments section of yourself completing the challenge.