His voice has a teasing undertone. Suddenly I understand him.

"But that's not important, is it?"

"No, it's not important." He looks at me. "The true reality of things is not important. What's important is what people believe. They will believe in this stone. Have you ever heard of Ilya Prigogine? A Belgian chemist who received the Nobel Prize in '77 for his description of dissipative structures. He and his students have been working nonstop. on the idea that life originated from inorganic substances that were irradiated with energy. These ideas have paved the way. People are waiting for this stone. Their belief and anticipation will make it real. They will make it alive regardless of the true nature of the stone."

"And the parasite?" I ask.

"I can already hear the first ranks of speculative journalists. They'll write that the Arctic worm represents a significant stage in the encounter between the stone, inorganic life, and higher organisms. They'll come to all sorts of conclusions, none of which is important. What's important are the forces of fear and hope that will be let loose."

"Why, Tørk? What do you get out of it?"

"Money," he says. "Fame. More money. In reality it's unimportant whether the stone is alive or not. What counts is its size. Its heat. The worm. It's the biggest scientific discovery of the century. Not just numbers on a piece of paper. Or abstractions that take thirty years to get published in a form that can be sold to the public. A stone. That you can touch and feel. That you can cut up and sell. That you can photograph and film."

I'm reminded again of Victor Halkenhvad's letter. "The boy was ice," he wrote. That's not quite true. His coldness is superficial. Behind it there is passion. Suddenly whether the stone is alive or not is no longer important to me, either. Suddenly it has become a symbol. At this moment it becomes the crystallization of the attitude of Western science toward the world. Calculation, hatred, hope, fear, the attempt to measure everything. And above all else, stronger than any empathy for living things: the desire for money.

"You can't remove the worm and transport it to a densely populated part of the world," I say. "Not until you know what it is. You could set off a catastrophe. If it was once widespread around the globe, its numbers were not limited until it had exterminated its hosts."

He puts the lamp down on the snow. Without interruption it maintains a conical tunnel of light, shining across the mirror of water and the stone. The rest of the world has been erased.

"Death is always a waste. But sometimes it's the only way to arouse people. Bohr participated in the construction of the atomic bomb and thought that it would promote peace."

I remember something Juliane once said during a moment of sobriety. She said that we shouldn't be afraid of a third world war; human beings need a new war in order to come to their senses.

My reaction is the same at this moment as it was then -I'm conscious of the insanity of the argument.

"You can't force people to feel love by degrading them as much as possible," I say.

I shift my weight to my other foot and grab hold of a coil of rope.

"You lack imagination, Smilla. That's unforgivable in a scientist."

If I can manage to swing the coil I might be able to knock him into the water. Then I could run.

"What about the boy?" I ask. "Isaiah. Why did Loyen examine him?"

I step farther away to give my swing a bigger arc. "He jumped into the water. We were forced to bring him along into the cave; he was afraid of heights. His father collapsed while he was still near the surface. The boy wanted to go to him. He was never afraid of cold water; he swam in the sea. Loyen was the one who came up with the idea of keeping him under observation. The worm was subcutaneous in him, not in his intestines. He never even felt it."

That explains the muscle biopsy. Loyen's desire to get one last, definitive sample. Information about the fate of the parasite when its carrier dies.

The water has a greenish tinge to it, a peaceful color. It's the thought of death that is horrifying; the phenomenon itself always comes as naturally as a sunset. At Force Bay I once saw Major Guldbrandsen of the Sirius Patrol brandish an automatic weapon to force three Americans away from a bear liver infected with trichinosis. It was broad daylight, they knew the meat was infested, and all they had to do was wait forty-five minutes for it to be cooked. And yet they had cut small slices off the liver and had started to eat it when we reached them. It was all so ordinary. The blue highlights of the meat, the men's hunger, the major's rifle, and their astonishment.

Tørk reaches behind me and takes the coil from my hand, the way you take sharp tools away from a child. "Go up there and wait," he says.

He shines his lamp on the opposite wall, where the mouth of a tunnel opens. I walk toward it. Now I recognize the path. It doesn't lead upward, it leads into the void. The entrance to the end has always been a tunnel. Like the entrance to life. He has led me up here. He has led me all the way from the ship.

For the first time I realize his brilliance as a strategist. He couldn't have done it on board. He still has to go back, and the Kronos still has to pull into some port. He wouldn't be able to hide it. But this will be just one more desertion. A disappearance, like Jakkelsen's. No one saw me meet Tørk, no one will see me disappear.

The mechanic won't be going back either. He would figure things out, he would link me to Tørk as surely as if he had seen us together. Tørk will let him dive; they obviously have a need for him, at least in placing the first fuse. They'll let him dive, and then he will cease to exist. Tørk will return, and there will have been an accident. Maybe something went wrong with the oxygen gauge. Tørk will have planned it all out.

Now I understand the equipment near the lake. The mechanic was unpacking it while Tørk was talking to me. That's why he took me into the laboratory.

The light from his lamp catches the stone, casting shadows onto the wall in front of me. When I enter the tunnel the light dims.

It's a rectangular horizontal shaft, five feet square. Several yards inside the entrance it gets wider and there's a table. On top of the table there are measuring devices, milk bottles, dried meat, oatmeal-everything is twentyeight years old and covered with ice.

I let my eyes grow accustomed to the faint light from the ice and then continue on until everything is pitch dark, but I keep going, following the wall with my outstretched hand. The floor has a slight incline, but there's no draft that might indicate an exit up ahead; it's a dead end.

I come to a wall in front me, a wall of ice. This is where I wait.

There's no sound of footsteps, but there's a light in the distance, coming closer. He has fastened the lamp to his forehead. It locates me next to the wall, and the light stands still. Then he takes it off. It's Verlaine.

"I showed Lukas the refrigerator," I tell him. "When that's added on top of what you did to Jakkelsen, you'll get a life sentence without parole."

He stops halfway between me and the light.

"Even if they ripped off your arms and legs, you'd find some way to kick back," he says.

He bows his head and mutters to himself. It sounds like some kind of prayer. Then he steps toward me.

At first I think it's his shadow on the wall, but then I look back, anyway. A rose is growing on the ice, about ten feet across, composed of little red dots spattered up on the wall. Then he lifts his feet off the ground, spreads his arms, rises a foot and a half in the air, and throws himself against the wall. He hangs there, impaled like a big insect, in the center of the rose. That's when the sound comes. A brief whistle. A gray cloud drifts into the light from the lamp on the ground. Out of the cloud steps Lukas. He doesn't look at me. He looks at Verlaine. In his hand he's holding a compressed-air harpoon gun.