Smilla and the Mechanic Contact Ravn from the Radio Room

Smilla and the mechanic’s radio-room call to Ravn is both a covert communication and a confrontation with the account of Isaiah’s death. Aboard the slowing Kronos, Smilla tells the mechanic that the expedition deaths may have been caused by a parasite, warns that the divers could face the same danger, and persuades him to help her place a call without exposing the ship’s position. When Ravn answers, she makes the boy’s final flight the center of the conversation, turning a fragile radio connection into an accusation.

The Theory Behind the Call

Smilla begins with uncertainty, not proof. She suspects that heat is coming from the stone and that it is emitting energy, perhaps radioactivity, but she also has another possibility to explain what is happening. Her caution matters: the call grows out of a developing hypothesis, not a settled scientific account.

She explains that Juliane’s report of Loyen’s regular examinations of Isaiah first made her consider disease. The X-rays then persuaded her that the 1966 expedition’s dead had not simply been killed by the explosion. Lagermann had obtained the images from Queen Ingrid’s Hospital in Nuuk; to Smilla, they showed signs of an attack by an enormous, fast-moving parasite, perhaps a worm. She believes it could have killed the expedition members within days, or even hours, and that Loyen had wanted to determine whether Isaiah was infected.

The scientific explanation also supplies a motive for Loyen’s long involvement. Smilla describes him as pursuing discovery and the prospect of a Nobel Prize, with money secondary, and says that he had anticipated a scientific sensation since learning of the matter in the 1940s. The mechanic’s response is disbelief: he has imagined the voyage as a treasure hunt for diamonds, not as an expedition entangled with a possible disease and a decades-old scientific secret.

Smilla connects that past danger to the immediate voyage. Isaiah’s father had been diving, she says, and the other expedition members presumably had been as well. Since parasites often pass through a stage in water, the divers aboard the Kronos may be exposed; she warns the mechanic that those directing the operation are unlikely to tell him. This argument changes the call from a private attempt to reach Ravn into an urgent warning about the people on the ship.

Breaking into the Radio Room

Smilla asks for the mechanic’s help making a phone call. As she rises, her hand closes around a piece of metal wrapped in cloth and a flat, round container in the drawer. The objects accompany her departure from the cabin, but the immediate purpose is to reach the radio room without being seen.

The mechanic hesitates outside the door. Smilla tells him that he owes the help to both of them; after wavering, he forces the door open by pressing its handle until the latch scrapes against the steel frame. The entry is quiet enough to avoid a splintering crash, but it is an unmistakable breach of the ship’s boundary and a concrete act of cooperation.

The compact room is crowded with communications equipment: a small VHF set, a double longwave transmitter as large as a refrigerator, a Morse sender, telex and fax machines, a mobile telephone, and a recorder screwed to the desk. A radio-operator’s license bearing Sonne’s name hangs among the certificates. This working environment gives the mechanic’s expertise practical force: he knows how to use the equipment and how a call can betray the vessel’s location.

Smilla writes Ravn’s number on a piece of paper. The mechanic freezes when she gives it to him, and she takes his arm, thinking this may be the last time she ever touches him. Once seated, however, he becomes quick, precise, and authoritative, as if returning to the competence he has shown in his kitchen. His change in manner steadies the operation without resolving the emotional strain between them.

Concealing the Kronos’s Position

The mechanic does not make a straightforward call. He transmits on the carrier wave, allowing the transmitter’s automatic settings to adjust while the conversation travels over a sideband, which he regards as the most efficient method and probably the only workable one that night. Before setting the dials, he catches a Canadian station broadcasting classical music; the sound briefly overwhelms Smilla with a childhood memory of Victor Halkenhvad singing Gurrelieder.

Instead of asking directly for Lyngby Radio, the mechanic routes the contact through Sisimiut, Reykjavik, and Torshavn. He explains that larger stations use automatic direction finders when they receive calls. Even when a ship gives a false name, bearings can fix the call to coordinates so the cost can be charged back to a location. Each additional station makes the transmission harder to trace; by the fourth connection, he says, it should be impossible.

At Lyngby Radio, he identifies the vessel as the good ship Candy 2 and provides Ravn’s number. The false name and relays are not incidental technical flourishes: they let Smilla contact the investigator without giving him a direct bearing on the Kronos. She understands the trade-off. If she insisted on a direct call that would allow Ravn to locate the ship, the mechanic would end the connection. Having already pressed him hard, she stays silent rather than risk losing the call.

A security line is requested, and the signal eventually carries a voice from far away. Before Ravn speaks, Smilla imagines the white-haired woman in the photographs inside Ravn’s wallet, then hears a nearby child cry as the woman puts down the receiver. Ravn answers, but his first response is to tell Smilla that she will have to call another time. The clarity of the line makes his rejection unmistakable; she nevertheless refuses to retreat from the reason she called.

Reconstructing Isaiah’s Death

Smilla says she wants to discuss what happened on the roofs in Singapore and Christianshavn. Ravn does not answer, but continues listening. She frames the account through a child walking home alone from kindergarten in late afternoon, in the middle of December, while other children are collected. Her comparison to Ravn’s grandchildren makes the scene intimate and accusatory: she asks him to imagine the boy moving through the world with a child’s attention fixed on what is immediately around him.

In Smilla’s reconstruction, a man waiting by a car grabs Isaiah not by the arm but by the bib of his rain overalls, where the fabric will not tear and the grasp will leave no marks. The man misjudges the boy’s recognition. Smilla believes Isaiah recognizes him from weeks spent together, and possibly from the day he saw his father die. She offers another possibility—that Isaiah had seen the man force divers back into the water after one had died, before the cause was understood—or that Isaiah had simply come to associate the man with death. The scene is presented as Smilla’s inference, not as an independently confirmed account; Ravn challenges her by saying she is guessing.

Smilla describes Isaiah freezing at first, as children do when overwhelmed. The man bends toward him as if to lift a doll-like child onto the car seat, briefly letting go. That moment gives Isaiah room to run. Packed snow favors the boy, who has the training to move across it; the man slips and stumbles after him. The pursuit carries them along the building and into the street, where the man blocks Isaiah’s way toward the warehouses.

With escape apparently cut off, Isaiah turns toward his pursuer and then looks around. Smilla describes his thinking as having stopped while an inner engine continues until his strength is spent. He climbs the scaffolding and reaches the roof despite his fear of heights; terror of the man behind him is stronger. Smilla leaves the pursuer’s intention uncertain, considering whether he wanted the fatal outcome from the beginning or only recognized his own intention once they were on the roof. The radio account thus turns the boy’s death into a sequence of choices and miscalculations, while preserving uncertainty about the adult’s purpose.

An Accusation Carried by Fear

The call’s force comes from the difference between its channels. Technically, the mechanic makes the conversation difficult to trace; narratively, Smilla makes its subject impossible to evade. She addresses Ravn across an intermittent connection, while the mechanic listens with one ear uncovered and stays alert to sounds in the corridor. The physical risk of being overheard runs alongside the danger described in her account.

Smilla recognizes that she is not speaking into an emotionally neutral line. She imagines the child near Ravn and the boy in her reconstruction, then describes fear as the force binding the two men who are listening to her. Her appeal does not depend on Ravn accepting every detail as proven. It makes him hear the circumstances under which Isaiah may have recognized his attacker, escaped the initial grab, and climbed toward the roof.

The episode joins the expedition mystery to Isaiah’s death without collapsing suspicion into certainty. The X-rays and Loyen’s examinations support Smilla’s parasite theory; the divers’ exposure makes that theory urgent aboard the Kronos; and the call gives her a chance to press Ravn on the roofs in Singapore and Christianshavn. The covert route protects the ship’s location, but it cannot make the conversation safe in any deeper sense: the mechanic’s cooperation remains tentative, the signal is poor, and Smilla’s account remains an accusation assembled from clues and conjecture.