Peter Høeg - Smilla's Sense of Snow aka Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

"You must know that."

I don't reply. I know what he's going to say before he says it.

"It was Verlaine, naturlich."

So that's how they've manned the Kronos. With people so compromised that they had no choice. Not until now, after all this time, do I see the ship's mess for what it really is: a microcosm, a manifestation of the network that Tork and Claussen created earlier. Just as Loyen and Ving used the Cryolite Corporation, they have also made use of an organization that already existed. Fernanda and Maria from Thailand. Maurice, Hansen, and Urs from Europe. All part of the same organization.

"Ich hatte keine Wahl. I had no choice. I couldn't pay." His fear no longer seems exaggerated.

I'm on my way out, but he follows me.

"Fraulein Smilla, sometimes I think you're bluffing. That maybe you're not from the police, after all."

Even two feet away, I can feel the heat from the bread. It must have just come out of the oven.

"And if that's the case, there wouldn't be any risk if one day I served you a portion of trifle, shall we say… full of glass shards and bits of barbed wire."

He's holding the bread in his hand. It must be over 400°F. Maybe he's not so soft, after all. If he was exposed to high temperatures, maybe he'd develop a crust as hard as glass.

A breakdown doesn't necessarily have to be a collapse; it can also take the form of a quiet slide into resignation. That's the way it happens to me. On my way out of the galley, I decide to escape from the Kronos.

Back in my cabin I put on underwear made of new wool. Then I put on my blue work clothes, blue rubber boots, blue sweater, and a thin navy-blue down jacket. In the dark it will be almost black, and it's the least obtrusive thing I can find at the moment. I don't pack a suitcase. I roll up my money, toothbrush, an extra pair of panties, and a little bottle of almond oil in a plastic bag. I don't think it would be possible to slip away with anything else.

I tell myself that it's the loneliness that's getting to me. I grew up in a community. If I've desired and sought out brief periods of solitude and introspection, it has always been in order to return to the social group as a stronger person.

But I haven't been able to find that group. I seem to have lost it, sometime during that autumn when Moritz first brought me out of Greenland by plane. I'm still searching; I haven't given up. But I don't seem to be making any progress.

Now life on this ship has turned into a travesty of my existence in the modern world.

I'm no hero. I had affection for a child. I would have put my tenacity at the disposal of anyone who wanted to understand his death. But there wasn't anyone. No one but me.

I go up on deck. At every corner, I expect to meet Verlaine. But I meet no one. The deck seems deserted. I go over to the railing. The Greenland Star looks different than when I stood here several hours ago. Then I was still numb from the preceding days. Now it represents my way out, my escape route.

At least two of the piers are half a mile long. They're strangely motionless in the long swells rolling in from the dark. Up near the buildings I can see small, illuminated electric cars and forklifts.

The gangway of the Kronos is down. Big signs on the dock say: ACCESS TO PIER STRICTLY FORBIDDEN.

At the bottom of the gangway I'll have to walk across six or seven hundred yards of pontoon dock bathed in light. There probably isn't any guard. The lights are out in the control towers, from which they direct the pumping of the oil. But it's likely that they have the area under surveillance and that they'll see me and pick me up.

That's what I'm counting on. They may be obligated to return me to the ship, but first they'll take me somewhere to an officer and a desk and a chair. Then I'll tell them about the Kronos. Nothing bordering on the truth that I know. They wouldn't believe me. But something else. Something about Jakkelsen's drugs, and that I feel threatened by the rest of the crew and want to leave the ship.

They'll have to listen to me. Technically and legally, desertion no longer exists. A sailor and a cabin stewardess can go ashore anytime they like.

I go down to the second deck. From there the gangway is visible. There's an alcove where it adjoins the deck. That's where Jakkelsen once waited for me.

Now someone else is waiting. Hansen has propped his rubber boots up on the low steel box.

I could reach the end of the gangway before he was even out of his chair. I'd be the certain winner in a 150 yard sprint down the dock. But then I would run out of steam and collapse.

I retreat to the deck to reconsider my options. I've come to the conclusion that there aren't any, when suddenly the lights go out.

I had just closed my eyes, trying to find an answer in the sounds.

The rolling of the waves along the dock, the hollow sound of the water slapping against the fender beams. The gulls screeching in the darkness, the wind howling low against the control towers. The sigh of the links of the pontoons rubbing against each other. A distant, faint hiss from great turbine generators. And more disheartening than all these sounds put together: the feeling that all noise is being sucked out into the emptiness above the vast Atlantic Ocean. That the entire complex, along with the docked ships, is a vulnerable miscalculation that will be swept away at any moment.

These sounds have no advice to give me. In a place like this, the only way to leave a ship is by means of the gangway. I'm a captive on the Kronos.

That's when the lights go out. When I open my eyes, they seem blinded by the darkness at first. Then a series of red lights appear, approximately a hundred yards apart, on the dock. Emergency lights.

The lights have been turned off on the pier where the Kronos is moored and on the ship itself. The night is so dark that even things close at hand seem to vanish. The distant part of the platform looks like a yellowish-white island in the night.

I can see the dock. I can also see a figure down there. Heading away from the Kronos. A mixture of fear and hope and old habit stops me from hitting my head on the mast or a capstan. At the bottom of the stairs I pause for a moment. There's no one around. But even if there was, I wouldn't be able to see him. Then I take off running.

Out of the ship and down the gangway. I don't see anyone, and no one calls after me. I turn and run along the pier. The pontoons seem alive and unsteady beneath my feet. Down here the emergency lights seem painfully bright. I keep to the side away from the lamps and increase my speed every time I approach a patch of light, catching my breath when I'm back in the dark. Only six days have passed since I watched Lander sail off into the fog, on his way back to Skovshoved, and in every sense of the word, I'm still at sea. But I share some of the joy a sailor must feel when he sets foot on land again after a long voyage.

A figure appears in front of me, moving with the faltering, swaying gait of a drunkard.

It has started to rain. The dock is marked off for traffic, like a street, which is lined with the windowless sides of ships, rising up like skyscrapers 150 feet high. In the distance the aluminum of the barracks glistens. Everything vibrates dully from big, invisible engines. The Greenland Star is a deserted town on the edge of the empty heavens.

The only living thing is the wobbly figure in front of me. It's Jakkelsen. The silhouette against the lamp is indisputably Jakkelsen. Far ahead of him there's someone else heading off somewhere. That's why Jakkelsen is wavering. Like me, he's trying to avoid the light. He's trying to make himself invisible to the person he's following.

There doesn't seem to be anyone following me, so I fall back, not wanting to gain on the two in front of me, but still moving forward.