第16章 The Generator

The generator failed at two in the morning on the twenty-third, an hour before the bell, and everything that happened after that happened in a building with no light in it. I have gone over the sequence many times and it does not improve on the telling, so I will set it down as it was, and the first thing is that I was awake at two, and I was awake because I have been awake at two for nine nights running, and the reason I have been awake at two is that I do not trust the third of December to the fourth of December and I have not trusted it since the fourteenth of November. At two I heard the engine stop. It does not stop like a light going out. It slows. A diesel at a thousand and fifty comes off its note and comes down the scale for about four seconds and then it stops, and the room you are in gets a great deal quieter than it has ever been, and then you hear the boiler, which is on the far side of the corridor and which you had stopped hearing about a year ago. I was in the corridor in nine seconds. The dormitory door was open and Torsten was already out of his bed and already had a torch in his hand, because a man who keeps a generator for eleven years sleeps with a torch by the bed and I have told him so and he has never once thanked me for it. The boiler-room door was open. He got the panel off the third cylinder in under a minute. "Same crack," he said. "Same." "You know what that means." "Tell me what it means." "It means the head is finished." He had the torch in his teeth and his hands were in the machine and he was talking to the engine, not to me. "That crack is in the third cylinder and it runs from the head down into the water jacket, and it has been opening about a millimetre a week since the September, and at about a millimetre and a half the head comes off. When the head comes off the engine will not restart without a new head and I cannot make a new head on this rock with the tools in this room." I said, "How long." "Days," he said. "The question is days, and I have been unable to answer it since September because I did not want to say a number out loud, and I am saying it now because I have to. It could be Friday. It could be the twentieth of January. Both those are days." And then he said the other thing, and he said it standing on the step of the engine with the torch in his teeth, and it is the reason I have written all of this down. "I want you to know that I have been sitting on this since the September and I have not written it in the log, and I have not told one of the six, and I want to know what you think I was doing that for." "You were afraid of being the man who took the light off the island," I said. "I was afraid of being the man who took the emergency set off the island." He took the torch out of his teeth. "That is the whole arithmetic and you already know it. The radio is the only thing here that anybody outside this rock can hear. The wire room is fed off the engine because I put it on the engine in fifty-four, and the dormitory is on the boiler, and the wire room is the only warm room with a set in it. When the engine goes, the wire room goes cold at the same hour. And if I put the set in the dormitory, it is off the aerial, and a set off the aerial is a box with a valve in it, and then this station has no communication at all until the boat comes in February, and if anything happens to any of us between December and February then nobody on this coast knows it for ten weeks." Nobody said anything. I want that in the account. Six people stood in a dark corridor on an island in the dark and nobody said anything for about a minute. "Keep it where it is," I said. "Keep it where it is." "Twenty-three people on the fishing fleet out of Skjoldvik and a supply ship on the twenty-eighth and the boat in February," I said. "I am not moving a valve to warm a room." "That is not mine to decide." "It is the station-master's," I said. "Write it in the log. 02:10, engine stopped, cause a crack in the head, third cylinder, will not restart without a new head. Emergency set remains in the wire room on the engine circuit. My decision, and mine alone, and I have put my name against it." He wrote it. He wrote it standing up, in a corridor, by torchlight, in the time it takes. Then we went round the station and did what had to be done. Torsten shut the emergency set's supply off at the board so that when the set does come up on the last of the emergency diesel it will not come up with a fault on it, and that is the last time any of us has seen a light in this station until the morning. I went round with a lamp and put the lamp in the dormitory and the kitchen and the corridor and at the foot of the stairs, and the lamp in the kitchen is a hurricane lamp with a glass chimney and it makes the room orange and about six feet across and the rest of the kitchen is a country I could not walk into. Halvard sat down in the wire room in the chair with the case on the bench in front of him, because he said he was not leaving it and nobody argued. At three o'clock the note came. I was in the dormitory doorway. I had the log book under my arm and the pen in my hand because I write at three o'clock every night and I had got to the habit of being there with it. It was a single note, held. Not from the case. From all five in the case and from the sixth on the shelf, and they were not the same pitch, and the room had no light in it and the note came through the wall on my left the way it had come through that wall on the third of November, and it did not stop. Halvard said, from inside, "Erik. Come and hear this." I went in. It was black in there. He had a torch off. "Hold your hand on the aerial lead," he said. I put my hand on the lead where it comes through the wall, and where it comes through the wall it is a bare copper strap, and it was cold, and it was humming. "Feel that?" "I feel it." "Two volts," he said. "I cannot tell you it is two volts. I have not got a meter on it and I have not had one on it for a month because I have been too busy writing down that there is nothing on it. But I am an operator of thirty years and I can feel two volts in my hand, and that was zero every night of the month, and you can put your hand on the other end of it." I put my hand on the other end, at the set. "You feel it?" "I feel it." "Then it is not a receiver," Halvard said, and his voice was entirely steady and entirely wrong for a man saying a thing like that, "and it is not a transmitter, and it is not on any frequency, and it is not coming from anywhere, and I would like to go outside now, please." Nobody went outside. It is a hundred and forty miles to the point in a following sea at three in the morning with no light, and Torsten had it right in the corridor and all of us knew it. So six of us sat in a dark wire room on an island in the polar night with the boiler down and the engine down and the case open on the bench, and the note went on being held by six instruments for eleven seconds, and then it was gone. Odd spoke last. He had been standing in the doorway the whole time with his hand on the frame. "The cord is on the rocks," he said. "The first of six went on last night from the south end and the gale came up at two and I heard it in the cord at midnight, coming. It has been coming since midnight." He came into the room and stood at the bench with his hand out over the five of them. "Listen to the strait," he said. "Listen to it now, with the engine off. Do any of you hear it?" And the four of us who had not been out on the rocks in eleven years sat in a dark room on an island and listened, and I heard it, and it was the note. I wrote in the log by the light of a hurricane lamp with the tide in the corner of my eye. *23rd. 02:10, engine stopped, cause a crack in the head, third cylinder, will not restart without a new head. Emergency set remains in the wire room on the engine circuit. My decision, and mine alone. 03:00, note, six sources, eleven seconds. Aerial lead measured by hand, live, previously dead. 03:40, O. reports gale audible in cord, and audible in room, and the two are the same sound. Cause unknown.* And at the bottom of the page, in the same hand, the thing I have not shown to anybody and never shall: *The instrument was not on any frequency because it was not receiving. It is the seventh cord. It is a needle in a case with a socket at the back, and the socket is for a wire, and there is a wire in this room, and it has been in this room for forty years.*