Dan Simmons: The Abominable: A Novel

“It still sounds as if Admiral Byrd was punishing you,” I said, the taste of apple clean and fresh in my mouth. “Sending you into solitary confinement for seven months.”

Jake Perry shrugged. “The admiral’s ‘rescue’—he hated anyone using that word to describe it—embarrassed him. He couldn’t do anything about Dr. Poulter or Mr. Waite—they were bigwigs in the expedition—but he assigned Demas to jobs where he, Admiral Byrd, would rarely see him. And he sent me out on the summer’s expeditions and then assigned me to Cape Royds for the entire Antarctic winter. In the end, Admiral Byrd didn’t even mention me in the report about his…rescue. My name’s not in most of the history books about Antarctica.”

I was astounded at the meanness and pettiness of such an action on Admiral Byrd’s part. “Being sent to spend the winter alone at Cape Royds was the equivalent of you being put in solitary confinement,” I said, letting my anger come through in my tone. “And no radio? Admiral Byrd went nuts after three months of being alone—and he had daily radio contact with Little America.”

Mr. Perry grinned. “No radio.”

I tried to understand this but could not. “Was there any purpose—any reason at all—for you to spend seven months of isolation and five months of absolute darkness in Shackleton’s hut on Cape Royds?”

Mr. Perry shook his head, but neither his expression nor his voice showed any anger or resentment. “As I said, I was hired on the expedition to climb mountains. After we’d rescued Byrd—which required the four of us staying with him in that little underground cell he’d created at Advance Base from August eleven, when we arrived, to October twelve, when Byrd and Dr. Poulter were flown out in the Pilgrim— I finally did get to go on some summer expeditions where I could help the scientists with my climbing skills.”

“The Pilgrim was a plane?” I said.

Mr. Perry had every right to say something like What else could it be if they flew out in it? An oversized albatross? but he only nodded politely and said, “They started the expedition there with three planes—the big Fokker…” He paused and smiled. “That’s ‘Fokker,’ Mr. Simmons. F-o-k…” He spelled it for me.

I grinned. “Got it. But call me Dan.”

“If you’ll call me Jake,” he said.

I was surprised that I couldn’t—easily call him Jake, that is. I’m rarely impressed when I find myself with people known for their fame or title or supposed authority, but I found that I was deeply impressed in the presence of Mr. Jacob Perry. To me, even after I’d managed to say “Jake” a few times, he stayed “Mr. Perry” in my mind.

“Anyway,” he continued, “they had the big Fokker, named Blue Blade… but it crashed the first time they tried to get it off the ground—or ice, really—after we arrived in Antarctica. And they had an even bigger seaplane, named the William Horlick, but it always seemed down for maintenance. So the little monoplane, Pilgrim, was sent to fetch Admiral Byrd and Dr. Poulter as soon as the weather stabilized in October after we’d reached him and fixed the ventilation in his little subterranean hidey-hole in the ice. I remember that during the weeks we were waiting, Dr. Poulter did a lot of the star sightings, meteor watching, and barometric work that Byrd was too ill and befuddled to carry out. The carbon monoxide buildup hadn’t exactly sharpened the admiral’s brain cells. Then, after the Pilgrim flew Admiral Byrd and Dr. Poulter out in August, Waite, Demas, and I took the tractor back to Little America…just in time for me to join some of the expeditions heading out to the Haines Mountains.”

“Had you joined the expedition in order to climb mountains in Antarctica?” Mary had knocked and come in with lemonade for both of us, but it was a brief interruption. And the lemonade was homemade and excellent.

Mr. Perry nodded. “That was my one real skill. My one real reason for being on that expedition. Climbing. Oh, I could handle motors and fiddle with equipment well enough…that’s how I ended up working with the snow tractors for Demas during the winter, when there was no climbing…but I went to Antarctica for its mountains.”

“Did you get to climb many?” I asked.

Perry grinned and again his blue gaze grew ruminative. “McKinley Peak that summer of ’thirty-four…not the Mount McKinley, of course, but the peak near the South Pole with the same name. Several of the unnamed peaks in the Haines range…the scientists were looking for moss and lichens there, and after I got them safely situated on their ledges, I’d just bag the summit before coming back down to help them with their equipment. I summited Mount Woodward in the Ford range during that summer of ’thirty-four, then Mount Rea, Mount Cooper, then Saunders Mountain. None of them very interesting from a technical perspective. Lots of snow and ice work. Lots of crevasses, ice cliffs, and avalanches. Jean-Claude would have enjoyed it.”

“Who’s Jean-Claude?” I asked. “Someone else on the Byrd Expedition?”

Mr. Perry’s eyes had been at their most ruminative, but now they came back into focus and he looked at me and smiled. “No, no. Just a climber I knew a long time ago. Someone who loved any problem involving snow, ice, glaciers, or crevasses. Oh, I climbed Mount Erebus and Terror.”

“Those last two are volcanoes,” I said, trying to show that I wasn’t totally ignorant of all things relating to the South Pole. “Named after British ships, weren’t they?”

Mr. Perry nodded. “They were named in eighteen forty-one by James Clark Ross—he was credited for actually finding Antarctica, although they never really set foot on the continent—and the HMS Erebus was his flagship, while the HMS Terror was captained by Ross’s second-in-command, a certain Francis Crozier.”

I scribbled all this down, not knowing what use it might be for my possible book about giant mutant killer penguins attacking Shackleton’s hut in Antarctica.

“Crozier was second-in-command a few years later on Sir John Franklin’s expedition, where both Erebus and Terror were lost in the northern ice fields,” Mr. Perry said almost absently, as if finishing a thought. “The British icebreaker ships, that is,” he said with a smile. “Not the volcanoes. They’re still there.”

I looked up. “They sank? The two ships the volcanoes were named after, Erebus and Terror… they sank a few years later?”

“Worse than that, Dan. They totally disappeared. Sir John Franklin, Francis Moira Crozier, and a hundred and twenty-seven men. They were trying to force the Northwest Passage, and somewhere north of Canada the two ships and all the men just…disappeared. Some graves and a few bones of the men have been found here and there on empty islands up there, but there’s been no sign of the ships or the majority of the crew’s remains to this day.”

I scribbled madly. I’d had no interest in writing about the North Pole and its expeditions, but more than a hundred men and two ships just…gone? I asked for this Captain Crozier’s full name and the spelling of it and Mr. Perry gave it to me, spelling it out as patiently as if I were a child.

“Anyway,” concluded Mr. Perry, “since Admiral Byrd wasn’t all that happy seeing me around—I guess I reminded him of his near-criminal negligence for gassing himself up at his much-ballyhooed ‘Advanced Base’ and making other men risk their lives to save his behind—for my next and last winter there, instead of my wintering on the main base with the other men, Admiral Byrd ordered me to ‘observe the penguins’ while staying alone in Shackleton’s hut on Cape Royds. March to October nineteen thirty-five.”