第15章 The Seventh

Odd went out on the twenty-second night and came back at twenty past eleven with the boat full to the gunwales and a length of cord in his lap that was not the length he usually brought in. I looked at it. I did not say anything about it. I have learned over eleven winters on this rock that a man who has been out in a boat in a gale and has come back with something different in his hands is not a man you interrogate in a doorway. In the wire room the five of us were waiting, and he came in and put it on the table, and it was thirty feet of three-strand laid the old way, and it had a loop in one end, and I had seen that loop twice in my life. "From the south end," he said. "From the south end," said Karin. The two of them said it at the same moment and neither of them looked at the other, and I understood that something had happened on that rock in an hour that I had not been part of, and that I was not going to be told about it, and that this was the correct arrangement. "Six cords," Odd said. "One for each of us. Six nights from the fifth. And the seventh night is the tenth, and on the seventh night it comes off." Torsten put his hand out flat over the cord without touching it, the way a man puts his hand over a stove he has been told is hot. "Odd," he said. "I have been an engineer for eleven years and I am going to ask you a stupid question and I would like you to answer it exactly. Six of us, six cords. Who is the seventh?" "I don't know." "That is not an answer." "It is the only one I have got, and I have had it since the ninth of November." He put his hand on the cord and pulled it straight along the table so that the three strands showed. "There have been six of us at this station since forty-eight. There were six when I came in fifty-two. The people who put the braiding here and built the station and drew the map with the mistake on it were six, and the braiding is a working method and not a story, and if it were a story somebody would have written it down somewhere and there is nothing written down anywhere on this rock or on the mainland about any of it. So it is a working method. And a working method with six cords for six men is a working method with a hole in it." Karin said, "Say what you mean." "I mean six cords do not close." He held up the loop. "A net is a thing that closes. That is the whole of what the word means and it does not matter what it is made of. Six lines laid on a rock in a shape is not a net. It is six lines with a gap where the seventh one goes, and a gap in a net is not a small thing, it is the entire difference between a net and a heap of cord." "It holds the gale," said Torsten. "You have told us it holds the gale. Karin has had her hand on it." "It holds the gale in five places and it lets it through in the sixth, and the sixth is the gap, and the gale comes through the gap and goes on up the strait past this station in the middle of the night." He put the loop down. "And it has been doing that every night for a hundred and fifty years and none of us ever lay the seventh, because you cannot lay a seventh with six pairs of hands, and because the seventh is not one of the six, and because the people who could have laid it are all dead and did not write it down." The stove ticked. That is the sound a stove makes when it is burning down and nobody has put anything on it for an hour, and it is the only clock in this station that does not lose four minutes a month. Then Halvard stood up. He had been sitting in the chair with his back to the set for an hour and he had not said anything, and he came over to the case on the bench and did not open it, and crouched down in front of it with his head on one side. "Torsten," he said. "Come here and look at this and do not touch it." We all looked. "The dial," Halvard said. "The short line and the long line and the mark that might be a stop. I told you on the third of December — on the third — that the dial did not point to anything, because there are no numbers, and I was wrong, and I have been wrong in a way I should have caught in the first hour, and I want you all to understand what I am about to say and I want you to understand it before I say it." He stood up and stepped back. "It is a needle. It is a moving coil meter movement with a printed scale of nothing and a pointer in it, and the pointer has been moving the entire time, and I have been putting a thumb on it every night for a month and telling myself it was a stop." "Then where is it pointing," said Karin. Halvard went and got the one from the shelf. He carried it to the table and set it down and took his hand away. The pointer was at about eleven o'clock. "That is where it points when it is on the table in this room with the five of them in the case and me in the room," he said. "It has not moved an eighth of an inch all month, and I have watched it every night of the month, and I am certain of what I am telling you." "Then where does it point when you move it," said Torsten. Halvard picked it up and carried it to the far end of the wire room, to the barometer bench, and put it down. The pointer swung. It swung about forty degrees and stopped, and Halvard said, "There. And it is not a compass and it is not pointing at the case. It is pointing at the wall, and the wall is the outside wall, and that is the wall the aerial comes in on." "The aerial," said Karin. "The aerial is on the roof of the wire room and it comes down through that wall and it goes out to the mast and the mast is over the kitchen." He carried the object back to the middle of the room and it swung back. "It points at the aerial, and the aerial is a wire, and the wire is a conductor, and that is not a mystery, that is physics, and I have been an idiot for a month." "Then it is an instrument," said Torsten. "It is a meter. It is a meter for a line." "It is a meter for a line and the line is a wire and there is no current in the wire, because I have put a meter on that aerial every night for a month and there is nothing on it, and this thing is showing me a deflection that is not there." Halvard put the object down in the middle of the table. "There is a fifth explanation and I crossed it out. I am now going to say it and then I am going to go outside and I would like somebody to lock the door behind me." "Say it." "Between the third and the fourteenth of November, on the nights the note rang, this thing was in the middle of a room with a wire over the roof and a wire coming in on the wall, and it was pointing eleven o'clock the whole time." Halvard looked at the six of us. "It has never pointed anywhere else. Not once. Not when the wind was in it and not when the wind dropped. So it is not a direction and it is not a strength. It is a *count*, and the count has been six since the beginning, and the sixth is the one on the shelf, and the five in the case are the other five, and I want somebody to open the case and tell me there is a seventh space in it. There is a sixth space in it. The felt is pressed down in the shape of a thing that is not there." Nobody moved. "Odd," I said. "Say the date out loud." "The fifth," he said. "The first cord goes on on the fifth, and it is the twenty-second, and the net closes on the sixth night and comes off on the seventh, and the seventh is the tenth of December, and I have worked it out twice since the fourteenth of November and it comes out the same both times and I have stopped saying it out loud in the shed because I did not trust my own arithmetic after the first time." "That is seven nights from the third of December," said Torsten. "That is six nights from the fifth," said Karin. "Six cords on six nights. The fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, and the tenth, and the tenth is when the net comes off. It is not a week of nights, Torsten. It is a net, and it is six lines and a gap, and the gap is on the seventh night, and on the seventh night the net is whole and comes off the rock." She said it very quietly and then she sat down on the end of the table because she had to. I wrote in the log. *22nd. 21:20. Cord laid, first of six, from the south end. Instrument examined: dial is a moving-coil movement; pointer constant at approximately 11 o'clock in this room, deflecting to the aerial wall when the object is moved; no corresponding deflection measurable on the aerial itself. Case bed shows six impressions, five occupied. O. states the count is six cords and the net cannot close on six. Cause unknown.* And then, because I have written cause unknown at the bottom of every line in this book for eleven years, and because a man in an office in Trondheim would have the whole of it in a fortnight, I wrote a second line. *03:00. If the count is six, the instrument is the only one of the six of us that has not been asked.*