Chapter 3 The Firewatch

Day six. The first burst came at twenty past four in the afternoon on the sixth day, and Rafe was the only one of the seven who heard it, because he was the only one of the seven who was listening for it. He had the set in the crook of his arm under a plastic bag and the aerial lashed to a forked stick, and the stick was held down by a guy he had made out of aircraft wire out of a ration tin, and the whole arrangement was in a fold of ground behind two buttress roots about four feet high, and it was not much of a position. The relief column transmitted at irregular intervals. That was the first thing Rafe had been told and the only thing he could remember of the briefing, and the phrasing of it had taken him three days to work out: the column does not keep a schedule. It transmits when it stops, and it stops when the ground lets it, and the ground has not let it anything for nine days. So the intervals between bursts are not information. They are just the intervals. Then the intervals do become information, because a column that moves every week and stops where the ground lets it and has not stopped in four days is a column that has found ground. He had been on the set every waking hour since the second day. In that time the firewatch had spoken four times, and the last of those was on the fourth day, and the fourth day was two days ago, and it was the twenty-ninth of May and it was raining. The set came alive at twenty past four. Rafe had his hand on the volume before he knew it was anything, because that is a thing that happens to you after four years. "Delta Nine, this is the Column. Column is at the water at Co Tinh. Holding. Will hold the water two days, weather permitting. Relief is three days behind and we will signal again from here or from the north side of the valley. Out." Then nothing. Four seconds of it, maybe five, and the carrier dropped away and the set went back to the sound it makes when there is no one on it, which is not silence and is not static either. It is a hiss with a slow rise and fall in it, like water running in another room. Rafe wrote it on the back of his left hand with a pencil, because he had lost the notebook on the fourth day and had not gone back for it. *1519. Col at water Co Tinh. Holding 2 days. Relief 3 days behind. Signal again from here or N side of valley.* He sat with it for a while. Then he took the aerial down off the guy, coiled the wire, and put the set back inside his shirt against his body, and it was the wrong thing to do with a set that had just gone live on a frequency a fire direction post is sitting on four hundred metres above him. He knew it while he was doing it. He put the wire in his pocket and the set under his coat and the plastic bag in the bottom of the pack and then he sat in the wet for about a minute, which was a thing he had not been doing for six days. Sant found him at the twentieth hour. "You've gone quiet." "The column's at the water at Co Tinh. Holding two days. Relief is three days behind." Rafe said it in the low voice they all used now, which was not a whisper and was not a speaking voice. "It came in at twenty past four." "Did you answer it?" "No." "Why not." Rafe looked up at him. It was the only question anybody had asked him in six days that was about the thing he had been thinking about for six days. "Because a set that transmits is a set with a direction," he said, "and a direction is a light. And if somebody on that ridge has been sitting up there for six days in this rain waiting for a reason, then a carrier coming off our valley at twenty past four is that reason, and I have got a fob on a cord round a man's neck and a colonel who says it is nothing, and I am not going to be the reason for both of those tonight." Sant stood in the rain and thought about it, and Rafe watched him do it, and it took him about as long as it took Rafe to do it the first time, which was four days. "Firewatch," said Sant. "That's the whole of it. Firewatch. It watches. It does not talk." Sant went away up the slope. Captain Ito came down at the twenty-second hour and Rafe told him, and Ito stood in the fold of ground with the plastic bag against his chest and the aerial coiled and a rain running off the brim of his cap, and he did not look up the slope, and he did not look down it either. He looked at the set. "Co Tinh," he said. "Water at Co Tinh. Two days. Relief three days behind." "Co Tinh is nine days south of here and nine days south of where the map has it." Ito turned the whole thing over in one movement, and Rafe understood that the man had gone through the arithmetic while the other one was still arriving. "It stopped. It has not stopped in nine days, because it has been walking. So it found water and it is holding, and the ground let it." "Then the relief is three days behind a column that's stopped for two." "Yes." Ito put the plastic bag down on the ground and wiped his face with the back of his wrist, which took the rain off and put more on. "Which means the relief arrives at a place two days before the column leaves it, which means the relief will pass through this valley, and if the relief comes through this valley then this valley is on the road, and this valley is not on the map, and it has not been on any map since 1962, because I have had the paper for thirty-nine days and it is not on the paper." He picked the set up and gave it back. "Keep it open," he said. "Do not answer. Nothing tonight, nothing tomorrow night, and nothing at all if the column says please. If the column asks us for anything then he has been made a different man, and I will want to know which."