Smilla's Sense of Snow aka Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

The Ice
1

In Sunday school they taught us that the sun was Our Lord Jesus; at boarding school we learned for the first time that the sun was supposed to be a continuously exploding hydrogen A-bomb.

For me the sun has always been the Heavenly Clown. In my first conscious memory of the sun, I have my eyes scrunched up and I'm looking right at it, fully aware that this is forbidden. I'm thinking that the sun is both menacing and full of laughter, like a clown's face when he paints himself with blood and ashes, bites down on a stick, and-alien, gruesome, and joyous-approaches us children.

Now, just before the orb of the sun reaches the horizon, where it momentarily evades the black cloud cover, casting fiery light across the ice and the ship, the clown's strategy becomes manifest-to evade the darkness by clucking as low as possible. The lethal striking force of humiliation.

The Kronos is on its way into the ice. I can see it in the distance, veiled by half-inch-thick safety glass fogged up by the salt crystallized on the outside. That doesn't make any difference. I can feel the ice as if I were standing on it.

It's dense field ice, and at first everything is gray. The narrow channel broken by the Kronos is like a gutter of ashes. The ice floes-most of them as long as the shipare like huge pieces of rock, slightly swollen and cracked by the cold. It's a world of absolute lifelessness.

Then the sun drops beneath the cloud cover, like ignited gasoline.

The ice cover was formed last year in the Arctic Ocean. From there it was forced out between Svalbard and the east coast of Greenland, carried down around Cape Farewell, and pushed up along the west coast.

It was created in beauty. One October day the temperature drops 50 degrees in four hours, and the sea is as motionless as a mirror. It's waiting to reflect a wonder of creation. The clouds and the sea glide together in a curtain of heavy gray silk. The water grows viscous and tinged with pink, like a liqueur of wild berries. A blue fog of frost smoke detaches itself from the surface of the water and drifts across the mirror. Then the water solidifies. Up out of the dark sea the cold now pulls a rose garden, a white blanket of ice blossoms formed from salt and frozen drops of water. They may last for four hours or two days.

At this point the structure of the ice crystals is based on the number six. Surrounding a hexagon, like a honeycomb of solidified water, six arms reach out toward six other cells, which in turn-as seen in a photograph taken with a color filter and greatly enlarged-dissolve into new hexagons.

Then frazil ice is formed, grease ice, and pancake ice, whose plates freeze together into floes. The ice separates out the salt, the seawater freezes from below. The ice breaks; surface packing; precipitation, and increased cold give it a rolling appearance. Eventually the ice is forced adrift.

In the distance is hiku, the permanent ice, the continent of frozen sea along which we are sailing.

Around the Kronos-in the fjord which the local current conditions have created (only partially understood and recorded)-different types of ice floes, hikuaq and puktaaq, are everywhere. The most dangerous are the blue and black floes, pure meltwater ice, which lie heavy and deep in the water; because of their transparency, they take on the color of the water surrounding them.

It's easier to see the white glacier ice and the gray sea ice, colored by air particulates.

The surface of the ice floes is a wasteland of ivuniq, packs of ice forced upward by the current and the collision of the plates; of maniilaq, ice knolls; and of apuhiniq, snow which the wind has compressed into hard barricades.

The same wind has blown agiuppiniq across the ice, snowdrifts that you follow with the sled when fog covers the ice.

As things now stand, the weather and the sea and the ice are allowing the Kronos to slip through. Lukas is sitting up in the crow's nest, coaxing his ship through the channels, looking for killaq, air holes, and letting the bow slide up onto the new ice, where it's less than twelve inches thick and the weight of the ship can crush it. He's making progress. Because the current is the way it is. Because the Kronos is built for it. Because he's an experienced captain. But we're just barely making headway.

Shackleton's ice-reinforced ship, the Endurance, was crushed by pack ice in the Weddell Sea. The Titanic sank. The Hans Hedtoft did, too. And so did the Proteus when it was attempting to rescue Lieutenant Greeley's expedition during the second International Polar Year. There are no statistics for the numbers of people lost on Arctic voyages.

It doesn't make any sense to try to conquer the ice, there's too much resistance in it. Right now I can see how the impact of collisions has splintered the edges of the floes, forcing them up into barriers sixty-five feet high, underneath, the floes extend a hundred feet down in the water. It's freezing up all around us. At this moment I can feel how the sea wants to close us in, how it's merely because of a coincidental, passing constellation of water, wind, and current that we're allowed to continue. A hundred sea miles north, the pack ice forms a wall that nothing can penetrate. Toward the east are the solidly frozen icebergs that have broken off from the Jakobshavn Glacier; in a single year it has calved a thousand icebergs, totaling over 140 million tons of ice, standing between us and the land like a rigid chain of mountains seventy-five sea miles from the coast. At any given time floating ice covers a fourth of the earth's ocean area. The drift ice belt in Antarctica is 8 million square miles; between Greenland and Canada it's between 3 and 4 million square kilometers.

Yet they still want to conquer the ice. They want to sail through it and build oil drilling platforms on it and tow table icebergs from the South Pole to the Sahara to irrigate the deserts.

These are schemes whose interim projections do not interest me. It's a waste of time calculating impossibilities. You can try to live with the ice. You can't fight it or change it or replace it.

In some ways ice is so transparent. It carries its history on its surface. Ice packs, knolls, and slush form when the ice melts and then freezes again. The blend of various ice ages in mosaic ice: the black fragments of sikussaq, ancient ice formed in protected fjords, released over time and forced out to sea. Now, in the last rays of the sun, a fine veil of qanik, snow flurries, falls from the clouds that the sun had evaded.

A reed stretches from the white surface straight into my heart. Like an extension of the saltwater tree within the ice.

When I wake up, I realize I've been asleep for some time. It must be night.

The Kronos continues to move forward. Its movements tell me that Lukas is still having to break through new ice.

I try the drawers in the medicine cupboard. They're locked. I wrap my sweater around my elbow and push in the glass. On the shelves there are scissors, clamps, and tweezers. An otoscope, a bottle of ethanol, iodine, sterile wrapped surgical needles. I find two disposable scalpels with plastic handles and a roll of Leuco bandages. I put the thin plastic handles together and wrap them with tape. Now they have some cutting strength.

There are no warning footsteps. The door simply opens. The mechanic enters carrying a tray. He looks more tired and more stooped than when I saw him last. His eyes fix on the broken glass.

I hold the scalpel against my thigh. My palms are sweaty. He looks down at my hand. I lay the knife on the bunk. He puts down the tray.

"Urs has out d-done himself."

I feel as if I'm going to throw up if I look at him. He goes over and shuts the door. I move away. Self-control is so fragile.

The worst thing is not the anger. The worst thing is the desire behind the anger. It's possible to live with pure emotion. What truly frightens me is my secret need to cling to him.

"You've been on expeditions yourself, Smilla. You know there c-comes a time when you have to let it proceed, when you can't stop it anymore."

Somehow I think that I don't know him, that I've never made love to him. On the other hand, there's a coldly dignified consistency in his lack of regret. As soon as the opportunity presents itself, I'm going to kick him out of my life. But right now he's the only frail, improbable chance l have.

"I want to show you something," I say. And then I tell him what it is.

He laughs tensely. "Impossible, Smilla."

I open the door for him, so that he'll leave. We've been whispering, but now I give up on talking softly.

"Isaiah," I say. "In some way you're part of it now. You're up on the roof with him, too."

His hands grip my arms and he lifts me back toward the examination table. "How c-can you be so sure, Smilla?"

His stuttering has gotten much worse. There's fear in his eyes. There may not be a single person on board the Kronos who isn't afraid.

"You won't run away, will you? You'll c-come back with me afterward?"

I almost laugh.

"Where would I go, Føjl?" He doesn't smile.

"Lander told me that he saw you walk on water."

I take off my socks. At the base of my toes there's a piece of bandage. It holds Jakkelsen's passkey in place.

We don't meet a soul. The light above the quarterdeck is off. When I let us in, we both realize that we're standing a few yards away from the deck platform where we waited less than twenty-four hours ago to observe Jakkelsen's last journey. This awareness means nothing in particular. Love arises when you have a surplus; it disappears when you're reduced to the basic instincts: hunger, sleep, the need for security.

On the lower level I turn on the light, a flood of light compared to the beam from my flashlight. Maybe I'm being rash, but there's no time for anything else. We'll reach our destination in a few hours at the most. Then the deck lights will be lit and these deserted rooms will be full of people.

We stop in front of the wall at the end of the room. I'm betting everything on my curiosity. I want to know why, according to my measurements, the wall has been moved more than five feet away from the hydraulic rudder system. Why there's some sort of generator behind the wall.

I glance at the mechanic. Suddenly I can't understand why he's come with me. Maybe he doesn't know why, either. Maybe because of the lure, of the improbable. I point at the door to the metal shop.

"There's a mallet in there."

He doesn't seem to hear me. He seizes hold of the molding around the edge of the wall and pulls it off. He examines the nail holes. It's fresh wood.

He slips his hands in the gap between the paneling and the bulkhead and pulls. It won't budge. There are about fifteen nails in each side. Then he yanks at it sharply and the wall comes away in his hands. It's a piece of plywood half an inch thick and six yards square. In his hands it looks like a cupboard door.

Behind it is a refrigerator that's six feet tall and three feet wide, made of stainless steel. It reminds me of the dairy shops in Copenhagen in the sixties, where for the first time I saw people using energy to keep something cold. It has been secured against the rolling of the ship with metal fittings that must have been attached to the original wall of the room and then screwed onto the base of the refrigerator. It has a cylinder lock on the door.

He gets a screwdriver and unscrews the fittings. Then he takes hold of the refrigerator. It seems immovable. He braces himself. Then he tugs it into the room. There's something insightful about his movements, a knowledge that you should give it your all only for fractions of a second. He tugs three more times, and the refrigerator now has its back to us. He has a Phillips screwdriver on his knife. There, must be fifty screws all around the back covering. He inserts the screwdriver, supporting the screw with the forefinger of his left hand, turning counterclockwise smoothly, not in spurts. The screws seem to leave the holes of their own accord. It takes, less than ten minutes for him to remove all of them. He carefully stores them in his pocket. He lifts off the entire back covering with its cords, cooling grid, compressors, and fluid tank. Even under these circumstances, I note that what we're looking at is both banal and out of the ordinary: we're looking inside the back of a refrigerator.

It's full of rice. The square boxes are carefully stacked up from top to bottom.

The mechanic takes out a box and opens it, lifting the boiler bag free of its container. I have time to think that I didn't have much to lose, after all. Then I notice the muscles in his face contract. I take another look at the bag. It's almost opaque. It's not rice. It's a vacuum pack around a substance that is dense and yellowish like white chocolate.

He opens a knife blade and slices open the bag. With a little sigh it takes in air. Then a lumpy dark powder pours into his hand; it has the consistency of melted butter mixed with the kind of sand used in an hourglass.

He chooses a few more boxes at random, opens them, looks inside, and then carefully returns them to their place.

He screws the back covering on and shoves the refrigerator back. I don't help him; I can't touch him anymore. He puts up the plywood and presses the wall into position. He gets a hammer and meticulously pounds it into place. His movements are absentminded and robotlike. Not until then do we look at each other.

"Mayam," I say. "A stage between raw opium and heroin. With a high oil content; that's why it has to be refrigerated. Tørk developed it. Ravn told me about it. It's part of the agreement between Tørk and Verlaine. It's Verlaine's piece of the pie. We're supposed to pull into some port on our way back. Maybe Holsteinsborg, maybe Nuuk. Maybe he has connections on the Greenland Star. Only ten years ago they were smuggling liquor and cigarettes up here. That's already a thing of the past. That's already the good old days. Now there's lots of cocaine in Nuuk. There's a Greenland upper class that lives like Europeans. There's a big market up here."

His eyes are dreamy, remote. I have to reach him. "Jakkelsen must have discovered it. He must have found out about it. And then he gave himself away. He must have been high and he overestimated his own abilities. He put pressure on them. That forced them to act. Tørk took care of the telegram for them: He had to do it. But he and Verlaine hate each other. They come from two different worlds. They only work together because they can use each other."

He leans down toward me and takes my hands. "Smilla," he whispers, "when I was a kid I had a windup tank with caterpillar treads. If you put it down in front of something, it would climb straight over it because it had such low gears. If the object was perpendicular the tank would turn around and crawl along the edge until it found some other way over. You couldn't stop it. You're like that tank, Smilla. You were supposed to be kept out of all this, but you kept on getting involved. You were supposed to be left behind in Copenhagen, but suddenly you wound up on board. They lock you up-that was my idea, it was the safest thing for you. They lock the door; that's the end of Smilla. And then suddenly you're out again. You keep popping up. You're like that tank, Smilla."

Irreconcilable emotions are battling in his voice. "When I was a kid," I say, "my father gave me a teddy bear. Until then we'd only had dolls that we'd made ourselves. The bear lasted a week. First it got dirty, then the fur fell out. It got holes in it and the stuffing came out; otherwise it was hollow inside. You're like that teddy bear, Føjl."

We're sitting next to each other on the bunk in his cabin. On the desk is one of those flat flasks, but he's the only one drinking.

He's huddled up with his hands between his thighs. "It's a meteorite," he says. "Some sort of stone. Tørk says that it's ancient. It's wedged into a kind of saddle in the cliff beneath the ice. We're going to pick it up."

I think about the photographs among Tørk's papers. I should have guessed then. The ones that looked like X-rays. The Widmannstatten structure. It's in every textbook. The manifestation of the relationship between nickel and iron in meteorites.

"Why this one?" I ask.

"Whoever finds something of interest in Greenland has to report it to the National Museum in Nuuk. From there they'll c-call the Mineralogical Museum and the Institute for Metallurgy in Copenhagen. The find will be registered as something of national interest and will be confiscated."

He leans forward.

"Tørk says it weighs fifty tons. It's the biggest meteorite ever found. They took along oxygen and acetylene in '91. They cut off several fragments. Tørk says there are diamonds in it. Substances not found on earth."

If it hadn't been for the perverse situation, I might have almost thought there was something touching and boyish about him. A child's enthusiasm at the thought of the mysterious substances, the diamonds, the gold at the end of the rainbow.

"What about Isaiah?"

"He went along in '91. He was with his f-father." Of course that's the way it happened.

"He ran away from the ship in Nuuk. They had to leave him behind. Loyen found him and sent him home."

"And you, Føjl? What did you want with him?" When he understands what I'm asking, his expression becomes stony and hard. Now, when it's all too late, anyway, I manage to reach into the far corners of his soul.

"I never touched him, of course. Up there on the roof. I loved him, in a way I've n-never…"

His stuttering strangles his sentence. He waits for the tension to subside.

"Tørk knew that Isaiah had taken something. A c-cassette tape. The glacier had moved. They searched for two weeks without finding it. Finally Tørk chartered a helicopter and flew to Thule. To find the Inuits who had been on the expedition in '66. He found them, all right. But they d-didn't want to come back. So he got a description of the route from them. That's the tape the Baron took. That's what you found."

"So how did you happen to move into the White Palace?"

I know the answer.

"Ving," I say. "It was Ving. He put you there to keep an eye on Isaiah and Juliane."

He shakes his head.

"Then it was the other way around, of course," I say. "You were there first. Ving moved Isaiah and Juliane in to have them near you. Maybe to find out how much they knew or remembered. That's why Juliane's request to move to a lower floor wasn't approved. They were supposed to be near you."

"Seidenfaden hired me. I had never heard of the other two. Not until you uncovered them. I had been a diver for Seidenfaden. He's a transport engineer. At that time he was dealing in antiques. I dived for idols for him, in Liai Lake in Burma, before the state of emergency."

I think about the tea he made for me, how it tasted of the tropics.

"Later I ran into him in Copenhagen. I was unemployed. Had no p-place to live. He suggested that I might keep an eye on the Baron."

There's not a single human being who doesn't find it a relief to be forced to tell the truth. The mechanic is not a natural liar.

"And Tørk?"

His gaze becomes remote. "Someone who carries through with whatever he sets out to do."

"What does he know about us?" I ask. "Does he know we're sitting here right now?"

He shakes his head.

"And you, Føjl? Who are you?"

His eyes are empty. It's the one question he has never found an answer for. "Someone who wants to make a little money."

"I hope it's a lot of money," I say. "Enough to compensate for the death of two children."

His mouth tightens.

"Give me a swallow," I say.

The flask is empty. He takes another one out of the drawer. I catch a glimpse of a round blue plastic container and a yellow cloth wrapped around something rectangular.

The liquor has a real kick to it. "Loyen, Ving, Andreas Licht?"

"They were excluded from the start. They're t-too old. This was supposed to be our expedition."

I can hear Tørk's voice behind his cliches. There's something charming about naivete. Until it's seduced. Then it's simply depressing.

"So when I started making trouble, all of you agreed that you should be the one to follow me?"

He shakes his head. "I never heard about any of this, or about Tørk and Katja. That came later. Everything you and I found out together was new to me."

Now I see him for what he is. It's not a disappointing sight. It's just a more complex picture than I originally had. Infatuation always simplifies things. Like mathematics. Seeing him clearly means becoming objective, dropping the illusion of a hero and coming back to reality.

Or maybe I'm already drunk after a few sips. That's what comes from drinking so seldom. You get drunk as soon as the first molecules are absorbed by the mucous membranes inside your mouth.

The mechanic stands up and goes over to the porthole. I lean forward. With one hand I pick up the bottle. With the other I pull out the drawer and touch the cloth inside. It's wrapped around a rounded, ridged metal object.

I look at him. I see his weight, his slowness, his vigor, his greed, and his simplicity. His need for a leader, the danger he represents. I also see his solicitude, his warmth, his patience, his passion. And I see that he is still my only chance.

Then I close my eyes and wipe my internal slate clean. Gone is our mutual lying, the unanswered questions, the justifiable and the morbid suspicions. The past is a luxury we can no longer afford.

"Føjl," I say, "are you going to dive near that stone?"

He nodded at my question. I didn't hear whether he said anything or not. But he nodded. For a moment this affirmation blocks out everything else.

"Why?" I hear myself ask him.

"It's lying in a lake of meltwater. It's almost covered. It's supposed to be close to the surface of the ice. Seidenfaden doesn't think it will be difficult to get to it. Either through a meltwater tunnel or through the cracks in a crevasse right next to the saddle. The problem is getting it out. Seidenfaden thinks we should enlarge the tunnel that drains the lake and bring the stone out that way. It will have to be enlarged with explosives. It will all be underwater work."

I sit down next to him.

"Water," I say, "freezes at 32°F. What reason did Tørk give you to explain why there's water surrounding the stone?"

"Isn't there something about the pressure in the ice?"

"Yes. There's something about the pressure. The farther down you go in a glacier, the warmer it gets. Because of the weight of the ice masses above. The ice cap is -10°F at a depth of 1,600 feet. Sixteen hundred feet farther down it's 14°F. Since the melting point depends on the amount of pressure, water actually exists at temperatures below freezing. Maybe even at 29°F. There are temperate glaciers in the Alps and the Rocky Mountains in which meltwater exists at a depth of a hundred feet and below."

He nods. "That's what Tørk explained to me."

"But Gela Alta isn't in the Alps. It's a so-called cold glacier. And it's quite small. At the present time its surface temperature must be 14°F. The temperature at its base is about the same. The melting point under that pressure is around 32°F. Not a drop of liquid water can form in that glacier."

He looks at me as he takes a drink. What I've said doesn't bother him. Maybe he didn't understand it. Maybe Tørk provokes a sense of trust in people that locks out the rest of the world. Maybe it's just the usual problem: ice is incomprehensible to those who were not born to it. I try another approach.

"Did they tell you how they found it?"

"The Greenlanders found it. In prehistoric times. It was in their legends. That's why they got Andreas Fine Licht involved. In those days it might have still been on top of the ice."

"When a meteor enters the atmosphere," I say, "the first thing that happens, at about ninety miles out, is that a blast wave goes through it, as if it had rammed into a concrete wall. The outer layer melts off. I've seen black stripes like that strewn on the ice cap. But this decreases the speed of the meteor and the heat. If it reaches the earth without breaking up, it typically has the earth's median temperature of 41°F. So it doesn't melt down. But it doesn't just sit there either. The force of gravity calmly and quietly presses it down. No meteorites of any size have ever been found on top of the ice. And none ever will be. Gravity presses them down. They become encapsulated and with time are carried out to sea. If they get caught in a crevice underground, they'll be pulverized. There's nothing delicate about a glacier. It's a combination of a stone crusher and a gigantic carpenter's plane. It doesn't create enchanted caves around objects of geological interest. It files them down, mashes them to powder, and empties the powder into the Atlantic Ocean."

"Then there must be warm springs around it," the mechanic says.

"There's no volcanic activity on Gela Alta."

"I've seen the photographs. It's lying in a lake."

"Yes, I've seen those photographs, too. If the whole thing's not a hoax, it's sitting in water. I sincerely hope that it's a hoax."

"Why?"

I wonder whether he'll be able to grasp it. But there's no other alternative than to tell him the truth. Or what I suspect is the truth.

"I don't know for sure, but it looks as if the heat might be coming from the stone. It's emitting some kind of energy. Maybe in the form of radioactivity. But there's also another possibility."

"What's that?"

I can tell by looking at him that these are not new ideas for him, either. He, too, knew that something was wrong. But he pushed the problem aside. He's a Dane. Always choose the comfort of suppressed information rather than the burdensome truth.

"The forward tank of the Kronos has been rebuilt. It can be sterilized. It's equipped with supplies of oxygen and compressed air. It's constructed as if they were going to transport a large animal. It has occurred to me that Tørk may believe that the stone you are going to pick up is alive."

The bottle is empty.

"That was a good idea with the fire alarm," I say.

He smiles wearily. "It was the only way to put the papers back and at the same t-time explain why they were wet."

We're sitting at opposite ends of the bed. The Kronos is moving more and more slowly. A gloomy and lively battle is raging inside my body between two kinds of poison: the crystal-clear unreality of the amphetamines and the fuzzy pleasure of the alcohol.

"It was when Juliane told you that Loyen had regularly examined Isaiah that I decided it might have something to do with a disease. But when I saw the X-rays, I was convinced. X-rays from the expedition in '66. Lagermann got them from Queen Ingrid's Hospital in Nuuk. They didn't die from the explosion. They were attacked by some kind of parasite. Maybe some sort of worm. But bigger than any I've ever seen. And faster. They died within a few days. Maybe in a few hours. Loyen wanted to find out whether Isaiah had been infected."

The mechanic shakes his head. He doesn't want to believe me. He's on a treasure hunt. On his way to find diamonds.

"That's why Loyen has been involved right from the start. He's a scientist. Money is secondary. He was after the Nobel Prize. He's been anticipating a scientific sensation from the moment he found out about it back in the forties."

"Why didn't they tell me all this?" he asks.

We all live our lives blindly believing in the people who make the decisions. Believing in science. Because the world is inscrutable and all information is hazy. We accept the existence of a round globe, of an atom's nucleus that sticks together like drops, of a shrinking universeand the necessity of interfering with genetic material. Not because we know these things are true, but because we believe the people who tell us so. We are all proselytes of science. And, in contrast to the followers of other religions, we can no longer bridge the gap between ourselves and the priests. Problems arise when we stumble on an outright lie. And it affects our own lives. The mechanic's panic is that of a child who for the first time catches his parents in a lie he had always suspected.

"Isaiah's father was diving," I say. "Presumably the others were, too. Most parasites go through a stage in water. You're going to dive, and you'll get others to dive. You're the last person they're going to tell."

Emotion drives him to his feet.

"You have to help me make a phone call," I say.

As I stand up, my hand closes around a piece of metal wrapped in a cloth in the drawer, and around a flat, round container.

The radio room is located behind the bridge, across from the officers' mess. We manage to make it there without being seen. Outside the door I hesitate. He shakes his head.

"It's empty. The IMO requires it to be manned twice an hour, but we have no radio technician on board. Instead, they set the HF at 2182 kHz, the international emergency frequency, and then they connect it to an alarm which sounds when someone sends a distress signal.

Jakkelsen's key won't open the door. I feel an urge to scream.

"I have to get inside," I say. The mechanic shrugs.

"You owe it to both of us," I say.

He still wavers for a moment. Then he carefully places his hands on the door handle and pushes the door in. There's no splintering of wood, only a scraping sound as the latch forces the steel frame inward.

The room is quite small and crammed with equipment. There's a little VHF, a double longwave transmitter the size of a refrigerator, some kind of box that I've never seen before, with a Morse sender mounted on top. A desk, chairs, telex machine, fax, and a coffee machine with sugar and plastic cups. On the wall there's a clock with paper triangles of different colors taped to its face, a mobile telephone, a calendar, equipment certificates in thin steel frames, and a license certifying Sonne as a radio operator. On the desk there's a tape recorder that has been screwed down, manuals, and an open radio log.

I write the number on a piece of paper. "This is Ravn's number," I say.

He freezes. I take him by the arm, thinking that this is the last time in my life I'll ever touch him.

He sits down in the chair and is transformed into a different person. His movements become quick, precise, and authoritative, just like in his kitchen. He taps on the face of the clock.

"The triangles indicate the internationally established times when the channels have to be kept free and open for distress signals. If we go into that time the alarm will go off. For the HF this means within three minutes past the half hour and the hour. We have ten minutes."

He hands me a telephone receiver, taking the main receiver himself. I sit down next to him.

"It's hopeless in this weather and this far from the coast," he says.

At first I can follow what he's doing, even though I couldn't have done it myself.

He selects the maximum output of 200 watts. At that level the transmitter risks drowning out its own signal, but the bad weather and distance from shore make it necessary.

There's the crackling of empty space, and then a voice comes through.

"This is Sisimiut. What can we do for you?"

He decides to transmit on the carrier wave. The transmitter has analog readouts and automatic settings. Now it will continue to adjust according to the carrier wave while the conversation is transmitted over a side band. It's the most efficient method, and probably the only one on a night like this.

Right before he sets the dials, the receiver, picks up a Canadian station sending classical music over the shortwave net. For a moment the room disappears, as I'm overwhelmed by childhood memories. It's Victor Halkenhvad singing Gurrelieder. Then Sisimiut is back.

The mechanic doesn't ask for Lyngby Radio. He asks for Reykjavik. When the station responds, he asks for Torshavn.

"What's happening?" I ask.

He covers the microphone. "All the larger stations have an automatic directional finder that is switched on when they receive a call. They compute the costs for a conversation under the name of the ship you give. In case a false name is used, they take a bearing on the ship's position, so that a conversation can always be charged back to a set of coordinates. I'm creating a smokescreen. With every new station it'll be harder to trace the call. By the fourth linkup it'll be impossible."

He gets Lyngby Radio, tells them he's calling from the good ship Candy 2, and gives them Ravn's number. He gives me a long look. We both know that if I demand a different procedure, a direct call that would make it possible for Ravn to track the position of the Kronos, the mechanic will break off the connection. I don't say a word. I've already pressed him too hard. And we're not done yet.

He requests a security line. Far away, in a different part of the world, a telephone rings. The signal is faint and intermittent.

"What's it like outside, Smilla?"

I try to remember the night and the weather. "Clouds with ice crystals."

"That's the worst. The HF beams arc along the atmosphere. When it's overcast or snowing, they can get caught in a reflection trap."

The telephone rings, monotone and lifeless. I give up. Hopelessness is a numbness that emanates from your gut. Then someone picks up the phone.

"Yes?"

The voice is close, crystal-clear, but groggy with sleep. It must be about five in the morning in Denmark.

I envision her the way she looked in the photos in Ravn's wallet. White-haired, wearing a wool suit. "May I speak to Ravn?"

As she puts down the receiver, a child starts crying nearby. It must be sleeping in their bedroom. Maybe between them in the bed.

"Ravn here."

"It's me," I say.

"You'll have to call some other time."

Because his voice comes through so clearly, the rejection is quite clear, as well. I don't know what has happened. But now I've gone too far to wonder about it.

"It's too late," I say. "I want to talk about what happened on the roofs. In Singapore and in Christianshavn." He doesn't reply. But he's still listening.

It's impossible to visualize him as a private citizen. What does he wear to bed? How does he look right now, in bed next to his grandchild?

"Let's imagine that it's late afternoon," I say. "The boy is walking home alone from kindergarten. He's the only child who isn't picked up every day. He's walking along the way children do, wandering and skipping, with his eyes on the ground. Only aware of his immediate surroundings. The same way your grandchildren walk, Ravn."

I can hear him breathing as clearly as if he were in the room with us.

The mechanic has pulled the headset away from one ear so that he can follow the conversation and also listen for sounds in the corridor.

"That's why he doesn't see the man until he's right next to him. He was waiting in the car. The buildings have no windows facing the parking lot. It's almost dark. It's the middle of December. The man grabs him. Not by the arm, but by his clothes. By the bib of his rain overalls, which won't tear, and where he won't leave any marks. But he miscalculates. The boy recognizes him at once. They've spent weeks together. But that's not why he remembers him. He remembers him from one of the last days. The day when he saw his father die. Maybe he saw the man force the divers back into the water after one had died. At a time when they didn't know what was wrong. Or maybe it was the experience of death itself which the boy has come to associate with the man. At any rate, he doesn't see a human being in front of him. He sees a threat. The way only children can experience threats. It's overwhelming. At first he freezes up. All children freeze up."

"You're guessing," says Ravn.

The signal is getting worse. For a moment I almost lose my train of thought.

"The child beside you would freeze up, too," I say. "That's where the man miscalculates. The boy looks so small. He bends down toward him. He's like a doll. The man is going to lift him onto the seat. For a moment he lets go. And that's his mistake. He hadn't anticipated the boy's vitality. Suddenly the boy takes off. The ground is covered with packed snow. That's why the man doesn't catch him. He doesn't have the boy's training in running on snow."

Now they're paying attention, the man next to me and the man an infinite distance away. It's not so much me they're listening to. It's fear that binds us, the child's fear we all carry within us.

"The boy runs along the building. The man runs out into the street and blocks his way. The boy reaches the warehouses. The man comes after him, slipping and stumbling. But calmer now. There's no escape. The boy turns toward him. The man relaxes. The boy looks around. He has stopped thinking. But inside him an engine is spinning that will keep on going until all his strength is used up. It's this engine that the man hasn't counted on. Suddenly the boy is on his way up the scaffolding. The man follows. The boy knows what's behind him. It's terror personified. He knows that he's going to die. This feeling is stronger than his fear of heights. He continues up to the roof. And then he runs forward. The man stops. Maybe he wanted this to happen from the very beginning, maybe the idea first occurs to him now, maybe up here he first becomes aware of his own intentions. The possibility of eliminating a threat. To avoid having the boy ever tell anyone what he saw in a cave on a glacier somewhere in Davis Strait."

"You're guessing." Ravn's voice is a whisper.

"The man moves toward the boy. Watches him running along the edge, looking for a way down. Children can't grasp the whole picture, the boy probably doesn't even know where he is; he only sees what's a few yards ahead. At the edge of the snow the man stops. He doesn't want to leave any tracks. He's hoping it won't be necessary."

The signal disappears. The mechanic twists the dials. It comes back.

"The man waits. There seems to be an enormous amount of self-confidence in this waiting. As if he knows that his presence is enough. His silhouette against the sky. Like in Singapore. Was it enough there, Ravn? Or did he push her because she was older and more rational than the boy? Because he could come right up to her? Because there wasn't any snow to leave tracks in?"

The sound is so clear that I think it's coming from the mechanic, but he is silent.

It's there again, tormented. It's coming from Ravn.

I speak softly to him. "Look at the child, Ravn, the child next to you. That's the child on the roof. Tørk is behind him, a silhouette. He could stop the boy, but he doesn't, he drives him onward, like he did to the woman. Who was she? What did he do?"

He disappears and then returns, far away. "I have to know! Her name was Ravn!"

The mechanic puts a hand over my mouth. His palm is cold as ice. I must have screamed.

"… was…" Ravn's voice fades out.

I grab the apparatus and shake it. The mechanic pulls me away. At that moment Ravn's voice comes back, clear, distinct, stripped of all emotion.

"My daughter. He pushed her. Are you satisfied, Miss Smilla?"

"The photo," I say, "did she take that photo of Tørk? Was she with the police?"

He says something. At the same time his voice is carried away through a tunnel of noise and vanishes. The connection is broken.

The mechanic turns off the light in the ceiling. In the glow from the instrument panels his face looks pale and tense. Slowly he takes off the headset and hangs it back in place. I'm sweating as if I'd been running.

"Testimony from a child wouldn't be valid in court, would it?"

"It would have weighed heavily with the jurors," I say. He doesn't continue this line of thought; he doesn't have to. We're both thinking the same thing. There was something about Isaiah's eyes, a wisdom beyond his years, beyond anyone's yea"rs, a deep insight into the adult world. Tørk was familiar with that look. There are other kinds of accusations than the ones presented in court.

"What about the door?" I say.

He puts his hand on the steel frame and carefully bends it back into place.

He accompanies me along the external stairway. At the sick bay he pauses for a moment in the doorway.

I turn away. The body's pain is so paper-thin and insignificant compared to that of the mind.

He spreads out his fingers and looks down at his hands. "After we're done," he says, "I'm going to kill him."

Nothing could induce me to spend the night on an examination table-even such a short and bleak night as the one ahead of me. I pull off the sheets, remove the cushions from the chairs, and lie down right in front of the door. If anyone tries to come in, they'll have to push me aside first.

No one tries to get in. I have a few hours of deep sleep; then the hull scrapes against something and the deck is full of footsteps. I think I hear the rattling of the anchor, too; maybe the Kronos has put in at the edge of the ice. I'm too tired to get up. Somewhere close by, out in the darkness, lies Gela Alta.