“Come.” He set off out of the room with his rolling, purposeful gait. “Bring bottle.”

Quentin looked at Plum.

“After you,” she said.

“Ladies first.”

“Age before beauty.”

“P’s before Q’s.”

It was starting to seem funny. They were a pair of comedy supernumeraries, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Mayakovsky’s gloomy Hamlet. Glean what afflicts him. Quentin found some glasses—he was tired of sharing a bottle with Mayakovsky, though no doubt Antarctic moonshine had powerful sterilizing properties—and they followed him.

He led them through a door Quentin had never seen unlocked before and through his private apartment. Quentin averted his eyes from the many small, unclean garments scattered on the floor.

“Dreenk!” Mayakovsky roared as they walked.

“Thanks,” Quentin said, “but I’m—”

“Dreenk! This is your professor speaking, skraelings!”

“You know,” he said, “I’m a professor now too. Technically speaking. Or I was.”

“I will show you something, Professor Skraeling. Something you will see nowhere else.”

Apparently murderous drinking was the price of admission to Mayakovsky’s inner sanctum, but Quentin was willing to follow any lead no matter how tenuous. He was still wobbly from the trip over, but the moonshine had ignited some smoldering heat source in his stomach, a sour, slow-burning peat fire. Mayakovsky himself didn’t seem particularly drunk, except that his mood had flipped from depressive to manic.

He led them down two flights of stairs, down into the Antarctic rock itself. Maybe he was the anti-Santa, of the South Pole, and he was going to show them where the elves made lumps of coal for Anti-Christmas. Quentin prayed to every god he could think of, living and dead, that this was not a sex thing.

It wasn’t. It was Mayakovsky’s laboratory: a suite of dark, square, windowless workrooms, each one furnished with well-worn benches and tables and studded with silent heavy machinery: a drill press, a band saw, a small forge, a lathe. In contrast with everything else in Mayakovsky’s domain it was all magnificently clean and orderly. The tools and instruments were polished and laid out in straight rows on cloths as if they were for sale. The machinery gleamed a dull matte blue-black. The room was still except for some quiet regular motion in the shadows: a softly swinging pendulum; a spinning top that for some reason didn’t stop; a slowly turning armillary sphere.

The three of them stood looking around in the half-light, the lichen vodka or whatever it was momentarily forgotten. The silence was another level below the regular ambient silence of Antarctica: an absolute sonic vacuum.

“This is lovely,” Plum said.

It was true.

“Beautiful.”

“I know why you do this,” Mayakovsky said.

He didn’t so much answer them as continue a monologue that had been going on in his head.