Dan Simmons - The Terror

Peglar smiled. “You were dangerous to be around, John.” He stood in the cold thinking for another few minutes. The light was fading. The stars were filling in the southern sky once again. “Do you think this… thing… this last of its breed… walked the earth when the huge lizards were around? If so, why haven’t we found fossils of it?”

Bridgens chuckled again. “No, somehow I do not believe our predator on the ice contested with the giant lizards. Perhaps mammals such as Ursus maritimus did not coexist with the giant reptiles at all. As Lyell showed and our Mr. Darwin seems to understand, Time… with a capital T , Harry… may be much vaster than we have the ability to comprehend.”

The two men were silent for a few moments. The wind had started up a little and Peglar realized that it was too cold to stay out here like this much longer. He could see the older man shivering slightly. “John,” he said. “Do you think that understanding the origin of the beast… or thing , it sometimes seems too intelligent to be a beast… will help us kill it?”

Bridgens laughed aloud this time. “Not in the least, Harry. Just between you and me, dear friend, I think the creature already has the better of us. I think our bones will be fossils before its will… although, when one thinks about it, a huge creature which lives almost completely on the polar ice, not breeding or living on dry land as the more common white bears evidently do, perhaps even preying on the more common polar bear as its primary source of food, may well leave no bones, no trace, no fossils… at least ones we are able to find beneath the frozen polar seas at our current state of scientific technology.”

They began walking back toward Erebus .

“Tell me, Harry, what is happening on Terror ?”

“You heard about the near mutiny three days ago?” asked Peglar.

“Was it really so close a thing?”

Peglar shrugged. “It was ugly. Any officer’s nightmare. The caulker’s mate, Hickey, and two or three other agitators, had the men all worked up. It was a mob mentality. Crozier defused it brilliantly. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a captain handle a mob with more finesse and certainty than Crozier did on Wednesday.”

“And it was all over the Esquimaux woman?”

Peglar nodded, then pulled his Welsh wig and comforter tighter. The wind was very biting now. “Hickey and a majority of the men had learned that the wench had tunneled a way out through the hull before Christmas. Until the day of Carnivale, she’d been coming and going at will from her den in the forward cable locker. Mr. Honey and his carpenter mates had fixed the breech in the hull, and Mr. Irving had collapsed the outside tunnel route the day after the Carnivale fire – and word leaked out.”

“And Hickey and the others thought that she had something to do with the fire?”

Peglar shrugged again. If nothing else, the motion helped keep him warm. “For all I know, they thought she was the thing on the ice. Or at least its consort. Most of the men have been convinced for months that she’s a heathen witch.”

“Most of the crew on Erebus agree,” said Bridgens. His teeth were chattering. The two men picked up their pace back toward the canting ship.

“Hickey’s mob had made plans to waylay the girl when she came up for her evening biscuit and cod,” said Peglar. “And to cut her throat. Perhaps with some formal ceremony.”

“Why didn’t it happen that way, Harry?”

“There’s always someone who informs,” said Peglar. “When Captain Crozier got wind of it – possibly only hours before the murder was supposed to happen – he dragged the girl up to the lower deck and called a meeting of all officers and men. He even called the watch below, which is unheard of.”

Bridgens turned his pale square of a face toward Peglar as they walked. It was getting darker quickly now and the wind was holding out of the nor’west.

“It was just at supper time,” continued Peglar, “but the captain had all the men’s tables winched up again and made the men sit on the deck. No casks or chests – just on the bare deck – and had the officers, armed with sidearms, stand behind him. He held the Esquimaux girl by the arm, as if she was an offering he was going to throw to the men. Like a piece of meat to jackals. In a sense that’s what he did.”

“How do you mean?”

“He told the crew that if they were going to do murder, that they had to do it right then… at that moment. With their boat knives. Right there on the lower deck where they ate and slept. Captain Crozier said that they would all have to do it together – seamen and officers alike – because murder on a ship is like a canker and spreads unless everyone is already inoculated by being an accomplice.”

“Very strange,” said Bridgens. “But I am surprised that it worked to deter the men’s bloodthirst. A mob is a brainless thing.”

Peglar nodded again. “Then Crozier called Mr. Diggle forward from his place by the stove.”

“The cook?” said Bridgens.

“The cook. Crozier asked Mr. Diggle what was for supper that night… and for every night in the coming month. ‘Poor John,’ said Diggle. ‘Plus whatever canned things haven’t gone rotten or poisonous.’ ”

“Interesting,” said Bridgens.

“Crozier then asked Dr. Goodsir – who happened to be on Terror that day – how many men had shown up for sick call in the last three days. ‘Twenty-one,’ says Goodsir. ‘With fourteen sleeping nights in sick bay until you called them forward for this meeting, sir.’ ”

It was Bridgens’ turn to nod now, as if he could see where Crozier had been headed.

“And then the captain said, ‘It’s scurvy, boys.’ The first time any officer – surgeon, captain, even mates – had said the word aloud to the crew in three years,” continued Peglar. ‘We’re coming down with scurvy, Terrors,’ the captain said. ‘And you know the symptoms. Or if you don’t… or if you don’t have the balls to think about it… you need to listen.’ And then Crozier called Dr. Goodsir up front, next to the girl, and made him list the symptoms of scurvy.

“ ‘Ulcers,’ said Goodsir,” continued Peglar as they approached Erebus . “ ‘Ulcers and haemorrhages everywhere on your body. That’s pools of blood,’ he said, ‘under the skin. Flowing from the skin. Flowing from every orifice before the disease runs it course – your mouth, your ears, your eyes, your arse. Rictus of limbs,’ he said, ‘which means first your arms and legs hurt, then they become stiff. They won’t work. You’ll be clumsy as a blind ox. Then your teeth will fall out,’ said Goodsir and paused. It was so silent, John, that you couldn’t even hear the fifty men breathing, only the creaking and groaning of the ship in the ice. ‘And while your teeth are falling out,’ the surgeon went on, ‘your lips will turn black and pull back from any remaining teeth you might have. Like a dead man’s lips,’ he said. ‘And your gum tissue will bloom… that means swell. And stink. That’s the source of the terrible stench that comes from scurvy,’ he said, ‘your gums rotting and festering from the inside out.’

“‘But that’s not all,’ Goodsir went on,” continued Peglar. “ ‘Your vision and hearing will be impaired… compromised… as will your judgement. You’ll suddenly see no problem walking out in fifty-below-zero weather with no gloves and no hat. You’ll forget which way is north or how to drive a nail. And your senses will not only fail, they’ll turn on you,’ he says. ‘If we had a fresh orange to give you, when you have scurvy, the smell of the orange might make you writhe in agony or literally drive you mad. The sound of a sledge’s runner on ice might drop you to your knees in pain; the report of a musket could be fatal.’