第3章 The First Night

The sun went under at ten past three on the fourteenth of November and the first night of the long dark is the fourteenth, because that is the day it happens on, and I have never been able to make the count come out any other way. We had supper at seven. Sven had the soup again and the hard bread and a tin of fish from the boat, and he stood at the end of the table with his arms folded and watched the six of us eat, and Torsten told the story about the Norwegian trawler that came in through the fog at Skjoldvik in 1954 and put herself on the rocks nobody knew were there, and Karin laughed before the end of it, which she had not done in the wire room in three weeks. At eight Halvard went on the set. At nine I wrote the log. 21:40, wind west four, temperature minus nine, generator running, boiler good, long dark, six on station. I shut the book and sat for a while with the lamp off, because the one thing I have learned in eleven winters is that a man who sits in the dark on purpose stops being frightened of it in about a week, and a man who only ever sees it because there is a lamp on does not stop for eleven years. I went to bed at half past ten. I was in the bed by the door, in my clothes the way you do in the first month, and I was asleep inside of a quarter of an hour because I was fifty-three and because I had got up at five. I woke at three. There was a sound coming through the wall on my left, and the wall on my left is the wall between my bed and the wire room, and it was a single note, held. Not struck and let go. Held, the way a note is held, at a pitch that did not go anywhere, and it did not fade and it did not change, and after a length of it that I would guess at eight seconds and could not have told you to within four, it stopped. I was out of the bed and into the corridor in my stocking feet with the cold coming up through the boards, and the door of the wire room was already open and the light was on. Halvard was in the chair with the headphones round his neck. He had the set on and the set was hissing its slow rising and falling hiss, and he had the headphones off and he had been off them for some time, and his face was the colour of the wall. "Halvard." "I heard it too," he said. "I was on the set. I had the cans on and I came off them at the first second, because it was not coming through the cans." "Through the wall." "Through the room." He turned the chair round. "It was in here. It came out of the room, Erik, not through the wall. It came out of the middle of this room, the way a sound comes out of a thing that is making it." I looked at the shelf. The small grey object was on the shelf, in the same place, and it was the same size and the same colour, and the grille with its hundred small holes was facing out into the room, and the short line and the long line and the mark that might have been a stop were where they had always been. I put my hand out and touched it. It was cold. It was the temperature of the shelf and the shelf was the temperature of the room, and there was no warmth in it at all, and there was no smell, and there was nothing on the dial and nothing in the socket at the back. "What time did it start?" I said. "Three o'clock." "What time is it now?" "Three." He looked at the clock on the wall. The clock is a station clock, and it loses four minutes a month, and I have wound it every Sunday for eleven years and it is never right. "It is three and it has been three for some time. I have been sitting here since it started and it has not once gone past." We both stood and listened to the set hiss for a while. "Check it," I said. "Torsten checked it in the summer. He took the back off." "Check it now." That was the beginning of something, and I want it in the account, because in the end it was the only thing all of us agreed on for eleven weeks: that we would check. Not pray about it, not discuss what it meant, not write in the log that it had happened. We would check it. And every night after that, one of us checked it, and the checking is the whole of what we know. Torsten came in with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead and a cigarette behind his ear, at a quarter past three, and he did not ask what had happened because he could see the two of us standing at a shelf in the middle of the night, which is a thing that explains itself. "Take the back off it," I said. He took the back off it on the wire room table under the lamp, and the four of us watched, and I will set down what was in there because it is the only physical fact any of us ever got. No battery. No cell, no accumulator, nothing of the kind. No transformer, no coil, no crystal, no valve, no transistor. No wire of any kind longer than about four inches, and those four inches were the earth strap, and the earth strap went to a lug on the case, and the lug was clean and bright where somebody had taken a spanner to it, and there was bright metal under the rust where the lug had been bright for a long time, which meant it had been earthed once and had not been earthed for a very long while. Torsten turned it over in his hands and said, "It has never had a battery." "It is not a radio," Halvard said. "I know it is not a radio. I have said so since August." "Then what is it?" "It is an object," Torsten said, and put it down on the table, and turned it over again with one finger, "made by somebody, out of a material that is not anything I know of, and it has no power in it, and it made a noise. There is nothing in this room that could have made that noise. I will say that to you, Erik, and you can write it in your book, because it is the only thing I am certain of and I would like one of us to be certain of something this winter." Then he put the back on and screwed it home, and we put it back on the shelf, and it went back in the same place, and I did not sleep again that night and neither, from the look of him at breakfast, did anybody else. At seven I wrote the log. *06:50. 03:00, single note, duration approx 8 sec, source not established. Small grey object on wire-room shelf, examined, no power source present. W.H., T.O., E.D. present. Barometer 1004 and falling. Wind west four.* Then I sat with the pen in my hand, because the rule is that nothing goes in the log that a man in an office in Trondheim could use against us, and because a note of eight seconds at three in the morning from an object with no battery in it is a thing that would have an officer off this rock inside a fortnight. And then I wrote a second line, which I have not shown to a living soul. *03:00. It will be at 03:00 again. We will see.*