That's what I told Gil, who was driving. (My job was to sit in the observation cockpit and report when the color of the firn got too dark or too white, which means that it won't hold but will open up, allowing the earth to swallow a 15-ton, idiotic American dream of reaching the moon, letting it fall into a 100-foot-deep, brilliantly blue-and-green crevasse, which narrows at the bottom and wedges everything that falls in into a tight embrace at minus 22°F.) In Qaanaaq we are guided by the weather, I told him. We are guided by the animals. By love. And death. Not by a piece of mechanized tin.

I was only in my early twenties. At that age you can lie -you can even lie to yourself-with greater self-confidence. In reality, European time had come to Greenland a long time ago, long before my birth. It came with the Greenland Trading Company's opening and closing times, payment schedules, church hours, and hourly wages.

I've tried pounding on the clock with a sheet-metal hammer. It made dents in the hammer. By now I've given up. Now I make do with knocking it onto the floor, where it lies, electronically beeping, unperturbed, saving me from showing up on the bridge without having splashed cold water on my face and put on eyeliner.

It's 2:30 a.m. It's the middle of the night in the Northern Atlantic Ocean. At 10:00 p.m., with no prior warning except a green wink of light, Lukas's voice had issued from the loudspeaker over my bed. Like an invasion of my little room.

"Jaspersen. At 3:00 a.m. we need coffee served on the bridge."

Not until the clock hits the floor does it emit any sound. I woke up on my own, awakened by a feeling of abnormal activity. Twenty-four hours is enough to make the ship's rhythm my own. A ship at sea is quiet at night. the engine thuds, of course, the long, high swells slosh against the side, and now and then the stern crushes a fifty-ton block of water into a fine powder of fluid. But those are normal sounds, and when sounds are repeated often enough, they become part of the silence. The watch is changed on the bridge, somewhere a ship's clock strikes. But the people are asleep.

Now there is commotion against this familiar backdrop. Boots in the corridor, doors slamming, voices, sounds on the loudspeaker, and a distant rumbling from hydraulic winches.

On my way up the stairs to the bridge, I stick my head out on deck. It's dark. I can hear footsteps and voices, but no light is on. I step out into the darkness.

I'm not wearing any outdoor clothes. The temperature is about freezing, the wind is blowing astern, the cloud cover is low and dense. The waves are visible only right next to the ship, but the troughs of the waves seem as long as a soccer field. The deck is slippery and slick with salt water. I duck under the sea rail to seek shelter and make myself as unobtrusive as possible. Near the tarp I pass a figure in the dark. Up ahead there is a faint light. It's coming from the cargo hold farthest forward. The hatches have been slid aside and a railing put up around the opening. Two wires extend through the opening from the two backward-facing cranes on the forward mast. Over the railing, both in front and in back, lies a heavy blue nylon hawser. There's no one in sight.

The cargo hold is surprisingly deep and illuminated by four fluorescent lights, one on each bulkhead. Thirty feet down, on the lid of a huge metal container, sits Verlaine. At each corner of the container is a white fiberglass holder, like the ones for inflatable life rafts.

That's all I manage to see. Someone grabs my clothes from behind.

I yield, not out of resignation, but to retaliate with even greater force. At that moment the ship rolls on an oblique swell, and we lose our balance and fall backward against the control panel for the winches, and I catch a scent of aftershave that I recognize.

"Idiot! You idiot!" Jakkelsen fights to catch his breath after his exertion. There's something in his face and voice that wasn't there before. The beginnings of fear.

"This ship is run like in the old days-you keep to your own area." He gives me an almost pleading look. "Beat it. Get lost."

I walk back. He half whispers, half shouts after me into the wind. "Do you want to end up in the big wet closet?"

The tray rams into one side of the door frame and then the other before I manage to get my bearings and stand there clattering in the dark room.

No one speaks to me. After a moment I push my way backward and find room for the cups and the pastry on the table among rulers and calipers.

"Two minutes, eight hundred yards."

He's merely an outline in the dark, but it's an outline that I haven't seen before. He's bending over the green digits of the electronic log.

The pastry dough smells of butter. Urs is a meticulous cook. The aroma is whisked away because the door is standing open. On the bridge wing, I can make out Sonne's back.

Above a sea chart, a faint red bulb is turned on, and Sigmund Lukas's face appears out of the darkness. "Five hundred yards."

The other man is wearing a coverall with the collar turned up. Next to him, on the navigation table, there is a flat box the size of a stereo amplifier. Two slender telescope antennas stick up out of the sides of the box. Nearby stands a woman, wearing the same kind of coverall as the man. Her long dark hair flowing loosely over her turned-up collar and curling down her back seems oddly out of place with her work clothes and air of concentration. It's Katja Claussen. Instinctively I know that the man is Seidenfaden.

"One minute, two hundred yards."

"Hoist it up."

The voice comes from the intercom on the wall. I release my grip on the tabletop behind me. My palms are sweaty. I've heard that voice before. On the phone in my apartment. The last time I was there.

The red light goes off. Out of the night a gray shape rises up, emerging from the forward cargo hold, and swings, swaying slowly, over the side of the ship.

"Ten seconds."

"Lower it, Verlaine."

He must be sitting in the enclosed crow's nest at the top of the forward mast. We're listening to his orders to the crew.

"Pull it tight. Slack off now."

"Five seconds. Four, three, two, one, zero."

A ray of light behind us bores a tunnel through the night. The container is lying in the water, fifteen feet from the stern. It's apparently riding a bow wave. From one of its corners, a blue hawser runs forward along the side of the ship. Maria and Fernanda, Hansen, and the deckhands are standing at the railing. They're keeping it away from the hull with what looks like a very long boathook. In the light I can see that there are two narrow, inflatable white rubber strips along its sides.

"Release it, Verlaine."

I move over to the bridge wing. The light is coming from one of the spotlights mounted on the sea rail. Sonne is manning it. He searches with the spotlight across the water. The container is free of the hawser now, already forty yards astern, and is starting to sink.

There's a muted bang. The five fiberglass shells on the surface of the water are cast off, and like five enormous lily pads, five self-inflating gray flotation balloons spread out above the big metal container. Then the spotlight goes out.

"One yard, five hundred gallons." It's the woman's voice.

"Three thousand, four thousand. Two yards, thirteen hundred gallons. Two yards. Two and a half. Two point three. Thirteen hundred gallons, and two point three."

I stand next to the serving tray. In my place. On the instrument in front of her, several displays are now lit up red.

"I'm letting it out. Twelve hundred and two and a half. Three, three-twenty, four, four and a half, five. Fifteen hundred gallons and five yards. The list is zero. Temperature 31°F."

She turns a dial and a sound fills the room, as if they had brought in my alarm clock.