Dan Simmons - The Terror

“Wait!” he called.

Only it had not been a call. It had hardly been a croak. Jopson realized that he had not spoken aloud for days – perhaps weeks – and the noise he’d just made sounded muted and muffled even to his own ringing ears.

“Wait!” That had been no better. He realized that he had to wave his arm in the air, make them see him, make them turn back for him.

Thomas Jopson could not raise either arm. Even trying to do so caused him to fall forward, his face striking the gravel.

There was nothing for it – he would just have to crawl toward them until they saw him and turned back. They wouldn’t leave behind a fellow crewmate healthy enough to crawl a hundred yards after them onto the ice.

Jopson wriggled forward on his torn elbows another three feet and collapsed facedown onto the icy gravel again. The fog roiled around him, obscuring even his own tent a few paces behind him. The wind moaned – or perhaps it was more abandoned sick souls moaning in the few tents still standing – and the chill of the cold day cut right through his filthy wool shirt and soiled trousers. He realized that if he kept crawling away from his tent, he might not have the strength to crawl back and would die of the cold and damp out here.

“Wait!” he called. His voice was as weak and mewling as a newborn kitten’s.

He crawled and wriggled and writhed another three feet… four… and lay gasping like a harpooned seal. His weakened, dragging arms and hands were of no more use than flippers would be… of less use.

Jopson tried digging his chin into the frozen earth to propel himself forward another foot or two. He immediately chipped one of his last remaining teeth in two but dug his chin in again for another try. His body was simply too heavy. It seemed attached to the earth by great weights.

I am only thirty-one years old , he thought fiercely, angrily. Today is my birthday .

“Wait… wait… wait… wait.” Each syllable was weaker than the last.

Panting, gasping, his remaining strands of hair dabbing crimson streaks onto the rounded stones, Jopson lay on his belly, his dead arms at his sides, painfully cocked his neck, and settled his cheek against the cold earth so that he could see straight ahead.

“Wait…”

The fog swirled and then lifted.

He could see a hundred yards, past the odd vacuity where the boats had been lined up, past the shingle of shore gravel and the tumble of shore ice, out onto the ice itself where forty-some men and four boats – where is the fifth ? – struggled southward deeper onto the ice, the men’s own weakness evident even at this distance, their own progress not that much more efficient or elegant than Jopson’s five-yard struggle had been.

“Wait!” This last shout had taken the penultimate ounce of draining energy – Jopson could feel his core’s warmth flowing away into the icy ground beneath him – but it had come out as loud as any spoken word he had ever uttered.

“Wait!!” he finally shouted. It was a man’s voice now, not a kitten’s mewl or dying seal’s squeak.

But it was too late. The men and boats were a hundred yards out now and disappearing fast – mere black, staggering silhouettes against an eternal background of grey and grey – and the cracking and groaning of ice and wind would have covered the sound of a rifle shot, much less a solitary voice of one man left behind.

For an instant the fog lifted more and a benevolent light fell on everything – as if the sun were coming out to melt the ice everywhere and to bring green tendrils and living things and hope back where none existed here before – but then the fog closed in and swirled around Jopson, blinding him and binding him with its clammy, cold grey fingers.

And then the men and the boats were gone.

It was as if they had never existed.

Caulker’s mate Cornelius Hickey hated kings and queens. He thought they were all bloodsucking parasites on the corpusass of the body politick.

But he found that he did not at all mind being king.

His plan to sail and row all the way back to Terror Camp or Terror herself went acropper when their pinnace – no longer so crowded – rounded the southwest cape of King William Land and encountered advancing ice pack. The open water narrowed to leads which led nowhere or which closed ahead of them even as their boat tried to creep along the coast that now stretched ahead to the northeast.

There was real open water much farther to the west, but Hickey could not allow the pinnace to be out of sight of land for the simple reason that no one left alive in their boat knew how to navigate at sea.

The only reason that Hickey and Aylmore had been so generous as to allow George Hodgson to come with them – actually, to seduce the young lieutenant into wanting to come with them – was that the fool had been trained, as all Naval lieutenants were, in celestial navigation. But on their first day of man-hauling away from Rescue Camp, Hodgson admitted that he could not fix their position or navigate their way back to Terror at sea without a sextant, and the only remaining sextants were still in the possession of Captain Crozier.

One of the reasons Hickey, Manson, Aylmore, and Thompson had doubled back and lured Crozier and Goodsir out onto the ice was to somehow get one of those God-damned sextants, but there Cornelius Hickey’s native cleverness had failed him. He and Dickie Aylmore failed to come up with any convincing reason that their Judas goat – Bobby Golding – could ask Crozier to bring his sextant out onto the ice with him, so they’d discussed torturing that toff Irish bastard into somehow sending a note back demanding the instrument be sent out from camp, but in the end, actually seeing his tormentor on his knees, Hickey had opted to kill him at once.

So once they found open water, young Hodgson’s usefulness, even as a man-hauler, was over, and Hickey soon had to dispatch him in a clean and merciful manner.

It helped to have Crozier’s pistol and extra cartridges for just such a purpose. In the first days after they’d returned with Goodsir and a food supply, Hickey had allowed Aylmore and Thompson to keep the two extra shotguns they’d seized – Hickey himself had been given the third one by Crozier the day they left Rescue Camp – but he soon thought better of having the extra weapons around and had Magnus toss them into the sea. This way was better: the king, Cornelius Hickey, having the pistol and control of the only shotgun and its cartridges, with Magnus Manson by his side. Aylmore was an effete, bookish born conspirator, Hickey knew, and Thompson was a drunken lout who could never be fully trusted – Hickey knew such things by instinct and because of his innately superior intelligence – and when the Hodgson food supply ran short around the third day of September, Hickey sent Magnus to knock both men on the head, bind them up, and drag them half senseless before the other dozen assembled men where Hickey held a brief court-martial, found both Aylmore and Thompson guilty of sedition and of plotting against their leader and shipmates, and dispatched them both with a single bullet into the base of the brain.

With all three sacrifices for the greater good – Hodgson, Aylmore, and Thompson – the damned surgeon, Goodsir, still refused to fulfill his role as Dissector General.

So for each refusal, Commander Hickey had been forced to mete out a punishment for the recalcitrant surgeon. There had been three such punishments, so Goodsir was certainly having trouble walking now that they’d been forced ashore again.