That night's watch, too, deepened with the work of trimming the static of the receiver to an even level. With the headphones to both ears, I turned the knob of the variable condenser slowly, and the static rose like a swell and sank again. Above it the carrier wave of some far transmitting station lay flowing at a steady pitch — monotonous, always at the same height. Below the headland the black water of the East Sea lay drowned in darkness, and beyond it I could not judge how far the waves of the air reached. I sat at the receiving desk, counting the monotonous code of dots and dashes that ran on without end. There was a kind of solace in the counting. Two months since I had come to the headland; I no longer remembered when I had last heard a human voice with my ears.
The only thing that broke that monotony was the scheduled wire that came in at its appointed hour. The mainland relay sent its callsign at the appointed hour and broke off at the appointed hour. The air did not break its promise — the Bureau's scheduled traffic, at least, did not. On the hour it called; when the traffic was done it fell silent. Listening to that calling and silence, I came to admit that the regularity of this unseen air was the one companion the remote headland offered.
Among an operator's duties is the copying of every received dispatch into the log without omission. There was a printed register of callsigns sent down by the Bureau, and beside it I set down the code I had received to compare. The register was tacked to the wall above the receiving desk; it had hung there before my posting, left by my predecessor. Who he was I do not know. The handover had been finished on the mainland with a single sheet of paper, and all he left behind was that register and one telegraph key worn out too soon to use.
That night, as my hand felt through the static waiting for the next scheduled traffic, it stopped at a callsign that was on no register.
It was not a scheduled wire. At the very bottom of the static, in a gap of frequency that should have been empty, someone was transmitting a single dispatch. The dots and dashes were sharp, and a date of transmission was fixed to the end of it — but that date was tomorrow. For a dawn hour of a day not yet come, a dispatch had already been transmitted. A call neither scheduled nor of emergency, on no register at all. At the head of the dispatch was fixed a group of callsign, and the instant I went to copy it into the log I recognized that the callsign had been struck — in the ink of the censor — from the register.
The instant my fingertip traced that struck-out place on the register, a cold like the night wind of the headland ran down my spine. "The headland in November is cold like this as a matter of course," I muttered to myself, trying to give a reasonable account of the chill that seemed to pour from the receiving desk. It was not that the register was cold because it hung there — only that the register had been hung in a place already cold, I added.
My predecessor was a man who struck his key too hard. He would have been idle enough, too, to write a joke into the register. The nights on a remote headland are long, and when they are long a man will write down anything at all — even that he received a wire he never received.The receiver had been made in England and had reached this headland by way of Japan. On the brass front panel the maker's plate was engraved, and in two months I had only polished it, never read it. That night, when I brought the lamp close, a single line of Latin engraved on the panel rose to my eye.
AUDITUR QUOD NON SONAT"That which does not sound is heard" — as the motto of a receiver it was a fitting sentence. But what that unsounding thing was heard toward, or what was calling without sounding, the Latin did not say.
All at once a line my predecessor had written in the margin of the handover papers rose to my mind — a line I had read past on the day of my posting, that no one at headquarters had told me.
When it calls from an empty frequency, copy it down, but do not answer.I resolved to copy the dispatch out to its end. Out of fidelity to my duty, I told myself. To confirm that a call on no register was a phantom, and so to strike a line through my predecessor's scribble. I did not intend to answer — only to copy it down.
Past midnight, at the hour of scheduled traffic, the mainland relay sent its callsign exactly. The dots and dashes ran on as promised. I copied them into the log. The promise was kept.
And in that gap of frequency on no register, the call began once more. The dots and dashes were sharp, but the letters I copied bound into no word at all. They were not an alphabet. I set them down, one by one, just as I heard them.
The line breaks off there. I took up the pen to write the next letter, but at my fingertip something refused the pen. It was the same kind of cold as when I had touched the tacked register. Yet the ink went on. Without my being aware of it, a group of code was set down — slowly, for those who come after.
██ ███ █ ████.In that instant the needle of the receiver's current meter leapt once — for a very brief moment — and sank. There was no carrier. The mainland relay had already finished its traffic, and on the empty frequency no transmission hung at all. What had pushed the needle up, the static in the headphones did not answer. That was all, and presently the needle trembled faintly again at zero.
I set the time down precisely in the margin of the log. Surely an old gauge had slipped once — two months trembling without rest; even a needle might miss its step one time, might it not?
Even now, as I write this, the receiver pours its static before me. Beside the Latin of the brass front panel, the needle of the current meter trembles faintly at zero.
I look at the familiar grain of the front panel. Will it not leap once more — but the needle does not move from zero.