For four days I received that call from the empty frequency each night. I copied it down but did not answer — keeping my predecessor's one line. The dispatches transmitted with tomorrow's date came in each night, and I copied them into the log and waited for the next day. And the next day, I saw the dispatch come true.
The dispatch transmitted for the dawn of November 4th had set down, in advance — not a letter wrong — the content of the mainland relay's scheduled traffic for that day. Before the scheduled traffic came, I had already, in effect, written into the log what it would be. So it was on the 5th, and on the 6th. The call from the empty frequency told no lie. It only told what had not yet come.
That day, I closed the Communications Bureau register. To sort the true callsign from the false had ceased to have meaning — the callsign was on no register, and the dispatches were all true. I spread a blank sheet and began a register of my own, for the calls from the empty frequency alone. I would make a more accurate record, I told myself. The task of one faithful to his duty.
In the first line of the new register, I copied that callsign — the one struck from the Bureau register by the censor's ink, yet coming in clear each night.
At the fingertip that copied the callsign, the chill rose again. I tried to give a reasonable account of it — the headland in November is cold, and the penholder is iron. But the instant I filled the first line of the new register, I knew I had begun something. A register is not made to receive. It is made to answer.
All at once a line my predecessor had written in the margin of the handover papers rose to my mind. Four days before, I had kept it.
When it calls from an empty frequency, copy it down, but do not answer.Do not answer. But my predecessor had not written why one must not answer. Why he allowed the copying yet forbade only the reply. That night I came to the why — so long as I do not answer, I am one who listens. The instant I answer, I become one who transmits. And the one who transmits becomes the one who sends the dispatch dated tomorrow.
Past midnight, the call began on the empty frequency. The dots and dashes were sharp. For the first time, I laid my hand on the key. Out of fidelity to my duty, I told myself — to confirm that no reply would reach, and so to prove the call a phantom. I struck my station's callsign and a single phrase. Receiving you. Please respond.
The instant I lifted the key from its last dot, the answer came.
The dots and dashes were sharp. But the letters I copied, as four days before, bound into no word at all — save one group only. That one group, among the marks that were no alphabet, arrived resolved into a single clear word. It was my name.
██ ███ Sin Gyeong-ha ████.In that instant the needle of the receiver's current meter did not leap once — it went, quietly, and stopped at a place that was not zero. There was no carrier. On the empty frequency no transmission hung. Yet the needle did not return to zero. Something, unbroken, was flowing there.
My predecessor too must have answered, once. That is why he wrote, do not answer. The words were not a warning but a regret. He knew I would break this line — and wrote it nonetheless. For those who come after.The sentence breaks off there. As it had four days before. But this time the pen was not refused. The ink did not stop; it stopped to wait for the next call to come.
As I write this, the Bureau register is closed, and the new register I began lies open on the receiving desk. In its first line is a callsign on no register. The current meter needle, not returned to zero, trembles faintly.