Seaman had dragged him into the cabin by force. They hid in the dim quarters and waited for the sailors on shift to pass by and disappear, one after another, up the stairs to the deck.
"What if it just happens to be drifting toward us?" His companion answered his own question with another absurd one, eyes darting about in search of somewhere to land before settling on Seaman.
It was clear he needed a little reassurance, a nod or a word of encouragement, but Seaman couldn't give him one.
He'd never seen a massive iceberg, but he'd seen plenty of large floes. Floes often served as reference points for judging their progress. They had no sails, and their limited movement was negligible compared to the ship's speed. Before long, the ship would leave them behind, and the crew would know they were that much closer to their destination.
He'd never seen an iceberg, but he didn't think it would be any different. By simple logic, the answer had to be no. But Seaman didn't want to admit it. "Who knows? Maybe it wasn't the same one."
That explanation successfully convinced both his companion and Seaman himself. The odds of encountering two enormous icebergs in a single voyage, when they were rarely seen even once in a decade, were too small to calculate. But they were still far greater than the odds of an iceberg moving at the ship's speed.
The two of them felt their way back to their quarters in the last of the light and decided to get some sleep. The captain himself was in charge of this shift—a dependable old hand who had steered ships across the Ice Sea for years. Maybe the matter would be settled by the time they woke.
With that hope, Seaman