Salt and Signal

Her mother rang once and asked whether she was lonely out there, and Imogen said no, and it was true in the way that answers to that question are true, and she stood outside afterwards and counted three intervals through before going back in to work.

Twice a year the department sent a student for a fortnight, and they arrived expecting the sky and left having learned to strip a connector and to write down what they had done at the time rather than afterwards. It was the only teaching Imogen thought she had done well.

The town's water tank stood on four legs at the end of the main street and carried, in faded paint, the name of a football club that had folded in 1974. It was the tallest structure for sixty kilometres, which is a thing she had checked rather than assumed.

Imogen's supervisor wanted a number by Friday. Imogen wanted a second array, on a different continent, on a different clock, run by people who did not know what she thought she had. She got Friday, and a paragraph in a newsletter, and a reminder about the mileage form.

Her thesis had been on pulsar timing, which is the art of being astonished by something that arrives on schedule, and she had chosen it at twenty-three for reasons she now recognised as temperamental rather than scientific, and did not regret for a moment.

The mine ran a blast at eleven on Tuesdays and the whole plain registered it, a wide dirty thump across every channel, and for four minutes afterwards the receivers were useless. She had come to look forward to it as a kind of punctuation in the week.

The array had sixteen dishes and a seventeenth that had never worked, and the seventeenth was the one visitors photographed, because it faced the road. Imogen had stopped correcting people about that in her second year and had come, privately, to enjoy it.

The heat came through the roof of the control hut by mid morning and the air conditioner was older than the array, and she worked with a towel across the back of her neck and a rule about drinking water that she kept the way other people keep a religion.

It did not come from the array, the town, the mine, the highway, an aircraft, a satellite, the pump or the fence, and each of those sentences had cost her between two days and five weeks, and she could produce the working for every one of them on demand.

Out there the sky is not a ceiling. It has depth, and on a moonless night you can see the depth, and Imogen had brought people out to look and watched them go quiet in the particular way that means a person has just been rearranged.

She kept two archives, one on a disk in the hut and one on a disk in the caravan, and every Sunday she copied the week across by hand and initialled a card. It was a ritual out of a more careful decade and she had no intention of giving it up.

A second receiver arrived in a crate with the wrong paperwork and spent five weeks in a customs shed four hundred kilometres away, and she thought about it constantly, the way you think about a person. When it came it worked first time, which felt less like luck than like a warning.

The generator shed smelled of diesel and hot dust and had a door that had to be lifted on its hinge to close. Imogen had spent more hours in there than in any room she had ever paid rent on, and she knew the engine the way you know a difficult relative.

Her one collaborator was a man in Chile who answered email at four in the morning his time and had never once used a greeting. He said the shape was familiar. He said he would look. He did not say what it was familiar from, and she did not ask twice.

She checked the timing chain four times, because the one explanation that would end the whole business was that her clock was wrong in exactly the way that makes a steady thing look like it is drifting. The clock was not wrong. She wished, for about an hour, that it had been.

A signal is a number in a column until somebody decides it is a message, and that decision is not a measurement. Imogen had written it on the whiteboard in her first week on the salt and had not yet found a reason good enough to rub it out.

The pub had a television that was always on and always ignored, and the publican poured her a half without being asked. Nobody there wanted to talk about the array, which is why she went. It is restful to be the woman with the aerials rather than a person with a hypothesis.

The town had four hundred people, a pub, and a habit of not asking what the dishes were for. When she started asking whether anyone had heard a ticking, three separate people told her about their fathers, and one told her about a well.

The interval had been measured against three clocks now, and the three agreed to a precision she could state in numbers and could not describe in words, and it was the agreement rather than the number that had been costing her sleep since the end of March.

The spectral shape was the argument. Natural sources smear. They are made of gas and distance and violence, and they arrive as a broad wash. This arrived narrow, in a band so tight that it looked less like a thing that happened than like a thing that was chosen.

Ninety seconds, then ninety again, and the third time Imogen stopped writing it down and simply sat with her hands flat on the desk, because there is a moment in every measurement where the instrument stops being the interesting part of the room.

There is a version of this in which she is simply wrong, and Imogen had written it out in full, fourteen pages, in the second person, addressed to herself. She reread it whenever the data was kind to her, which was more often now than she altogether liked.

A countdown implies an end, and an end implies an author, and Imogen distrusted every step of that reasoning while being unable to find the place where it broke. She wrote the objection out longhand and put it in the drawer with the others.

Sleep came in two pieces with an hour of the desk between them, and in that hour she did her clearest work and made her worst decisions. On the night the interval changed by another hundredth she was awake for all of it, and she did not write it down until morning.

The interval was not quite ninety seconds. It was ninety point one four, and it had been ninety point one seven in March, and the difference was small enough to be nothing and regular enough to be a countdown.

A journalist rang from the city and wanted one sentence, and Imogen gave him nine hundred words of context, and he printed one sentence. It was accurate. It was also, stripped of the nine hundred words, a claim she would have thrown a student out for making.

The draft ran to eleven pages, and nine of them were about why it was not the compressor. She read it back and heard, underneath her own careful voice, a person trying very hard not to be laughed at, which she knew from experience is the worst way to be believed.

The road out was forty kilometres of gravel with one creek crossing, and after rain it was not a road at all, and the store in town understood this and put things aside for her. Isolation on the salt is a schedule rather than a feeling.

Her sister called on Sundays and talked about the children and the roof, and Imogen listened and heard the gaps, and both of them behaved as though the gaps were a kindness. Afterwards she would walk out onto the salt in the dark and not think about it, at ninety second intervals.

Her predecessor had left three boxes of notebooks and a mug with a departmental logo on it. The notebooks were meticulous until the final six months, when they became a diary, and Imogen read those pages once and put them back in the box and left them there.

It is possible to want a thing to be real and to want it to be a cable fault in the same hour, and Imogen had stopped treating that as a contradiction and started treating it as the only defensible state of mind for the work she was doing.

She drove out to the eastern anchor at four in the morning to check a cable, and the salt under the headlights was so flat that the car felt stationary and the world felt like it was being pulled past her at speed.

Everything in the observatory was disciplined to a clock, and the clock was disciplined to a signal from a satellite, and the satellite was disciplined by an atomic standard in a building she would never see. Imogen liked to follow the chain down in her head before sleep, like counting a rosary made of committees.

The power came in on a single line from the town and failed about four times a year, and each failure ate ninety minutes of data that could not be recovered. She recorded the outages as carefully as the observations, on the principle that a gap is also a fact.

There is a natural explanation. There is always a natural explanation, and Imogen could write three that nearly worked. Each of them required one coincidence she could not justify, and she had a rule about coincidences, which was that a theory is allowed exactly one and hers already had its.

Nine hundred kilometres away a colleague pointed a different instrument at the same patch of sky for six hours as a favour, and found nothing, which she had expected and which comforted nobody, least of all her, because the salt heard it that night as clearly as ever.