When I understood where things were heading, I rebelled against Moritz for the first time and went home. It was also a return to relative contentedness with my work.

This same contentedness comes over me now as I'm vacuuming the cabins in the crew's quarters on the upper deck of the Kronos. The same sense of calm as when I repaired nets in my childhood.

Strict order reigns in every one of the cabins. The crew understands-as I did to survive the boarding schools in my life-that when you have only a few cubic yards to yourself and your innermost feelings, that private space must be subjected to the severest discipline if it is to withstand the dissolution, destruction, and pressure to yield coming from all sides.

In his own way Isaiah had this fastidiousness, too. The mechanic had it. The crew of the Kronos has it. Surprisingly enough, Jakkelsen has it, too.

On his walls Jakkelsen has banners, postcards, and little souvenirs from South America, the Far East, Canada, and Indonesia. All the clothes in the closet are meticulously folded and stacked up.

I feel around among the stacks. I take off the mattress and vacuum out the cubbyhole for the bed linen. I pull out the desk drawers, I get down on my knees and look under the desk, I carefully examine the mattress. His closet is full of shirts. I touch every one of them. Some of them are raw silk. He has a collection of aftershave lotions and eau de toilette that smell expensive and sweetly alcoholic; I open them and put a dab of the fragrance on a paper napkin, which I then roll into a ball and put in the pocket of my smock, to flush down the toilet later on. I'm looking for something specific, but I don't find it. Or anything else of interest, either.

I put the vacuum cleaner back and go downstairs, past the second deck, past the cold storage and the supply rooms, and on down the stairs,, bordered on one side by the smokestack housing and on the other by a wall labeled DEEP TANK. At the bottom of the stairs is the door to the engine room. I'm carrying in my hand a bucket and scrub brush as a ready excuse, and if that's not enough, I can always fall back on the tried-and-true story that I'm a stranger who's gotten lost.

The door is heavy and insulated, and when I open it the noise is deafening at first. I'm out on a steel platform from which a gallery extends, running around the entire perimeter of the room.

On the deck thirty feet below me on a slightly raised platform in the middle of the room, the engine looms up. It's in two sections: the main engine with nine exposed cylinder heads and a six-cylinder auxiliary engine. The shiny valves move rhythmically like parts of a beating heart. The entire engine block is about sixteen feet high and forty feet long, and the whole thing gives the impression of an overwhelming, tamed savagery. There's not a soul in sight.

The steel of the walkway is perforated, my canvas shoes are walking right over the drop beneath me. Everywhere signs prohibit smoking in five languages. Several yards up ahead there's an alcove. A blue veil of tobacco smoke is seeping out. Jakkelsen is sitting on a folding chair with his feet up on the worktable smoking a cigar. Half an inch under his lower lip there's a blood blister running the whole width of his mouth. I lean against the table, in order to discreetly put my hand on the 13-inch monkey wrench lying there.

He takes his feet off the table, puts down the cigar, and gives me a big smile. "Smilla. I was just sitting here thinking about you."

I let go of the wrench. His restlessness has been temporarily stowed away.

"I've got a bad back, you know. On other ships they take it easy while they're at sea. Here we start at 7:00 A.M. Chipping off rust and splicing mooring cables and painting and scraping off oxide scale and polishing brass. How am I supposed to keep my hands looking presentable if I have to splice cable every single day?"

I don't reply. I try silence on Bernard Jakkelsen. He has very little tolerance for it. Even now when he's in good spirits, you can sense his underlying nervousness.

"Where are we off to, Smilla?" I simply wait.

"I've been sailing for five years, and I've never seen anything like this before. Alcohol prohibited. Uniforms. No one allowed on the boat deck. And even Lukas says that he doesn't know where we're going."

He puffs on his cigar again. "Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen. That must be a Greenlandic middle name…" He must have looked at my passport. Which is in the ship's safe. That's something worth thinking about. "I've had a good look at this ship. I know everything about ships. This one here, she's got a double hull and icebreaker cables running the whole length of the ship. Up front the plates are thick enough to withstand an antitank grenade."

He gives me a sly look. "In the stern, over the propeller, there's an ice cutter. That engine produces at least 6,000 ihp, enough to sail at 16 to 18 knots. We're on our way up to the ice. I'm sure about that. You don't think we're heading for Greenland, do you?"

I don't have to reply to keep him talking.

"Then there's the crew. They're a pile of shit. And they stick together. They all know each other. And they're scared; can't get them to talk about why. And there are the passengers that we never see. Why are they coming along?"

He puts down his cigar. He hasn't really been enjoying it. "Then there's you, Smilla. I've sailed on lots of 4,000 ton ships. None of them ever had a cabin attendant. Certainly not one who acts like she's the Queen of Sheba."

I pick up his cigar and drop it in my bucket. It goes out with a little hiss.

"I'm cleaning up," I say.

"Why did he let you on board, Smilla?"

I don't give him an answer. I don't know what to say.

It's not until the door to the engine room shuts behind me that I realize how enervating the noise was. The silence is refreshing.

Verlaine, the bosun, is standing on the lowest platform, leaning against the wall. I involuntarily turn sideways as I go past him.

"Get lost?"

He pulls out a clump of rice from his breast pocket and puts it in his mouth. He doesn't drop a single grain, and nothing sticks to his hands; it's a purely automatic movement.

Maybe I should make up an excuse, but I hate being interrogated. "Just took a wrong turn."

Several steps up, I happen to remember something. "Mr. Bosun," I add. "Just took a wrong turn, Mr. Bosun."

3

I hit the alarm clock with the side of my hand. It shoots through the cabin like a projectile, slams against the hooks on the door, and drops to the floor.

I don't do well with phenomena that are supposed to last for life. Prison sentences, marriage contracts, lifetime appointments. They're attempts to pin down segments of life and exempt them from the passage of time. It's even worse with things that are supposed to last forever. Like my alarm clock. My "eternity clock." That's what they called it. I pried it out of the smashed instrument panel of the second NASA moon vehicle after it was totaled on the ice cap. The vehicle was as incapable as the Americans of withstanding minus 67°F and winds that went off the Beaufort scale.

They didn't notice that I took the clock. I took it as a souvenir, to prove that no everlasting flowers can survive in my company, that even the American space program couldn't survive three weeks with me.

The clock has lasted for ten years. Ten years in which it has received nothing but brutality and harsh words. But they expected great things from it back then. They said you could stick it in the flame of a blowtorch and boil it in sulfuric acid and sink it to the bottom of the Philippine Trench and it would keep time as if nothing had happened. This claim was a flagrant provocation for me. In Qaanaaq we thought that wristwatches were cute. Some of the hunters wore them for decoration. But we would never dream of being regulated by them.