The Land God Gave to Cain Page 5

  “Where will I find you?” I called after him. I didn’t want to lose him. The place looked so vast and desolate.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t forget you,” he answered over his shoulder. His crew were waiting for him and when he had caught them up, they all went on together in a bunch. I heard the flight engineer’s rather high-pitched laugh, and then they disappeared into the hangar.

  “What did you want to see me about?” Ledder’s voice was dull and flat and I turned to find him standing close beside me, his hands in his pockets and a bored look on his face.

  I’d thought about this meeting all through the monotonous hours of the flight, but now that I was alone with him, I found myself at a loss for words. The references to him in my father’s log books had given him an importance in my mind I couldn’t reconcile with this morose-looking individual. “Do you recall the name Ferguson?” I asked. “James Finlay Ferguson. He’s dead now, but—”

  “The expedition of nineteen hundred. Is that what you mean?” There was a sudden flicker of interest in the eyes that peered at me through thick horn-rimmed lenses.

  Intuition should have told me that a gap in the past was being bridged for me, but my mind was on Briffe and the things my father had written. “No, Station G2STO,” I said. “It’s about those radio contacts you had with him.” But the momentary flicker of interest had vanished from his eyes and his face was blank. “Your call sign is VO6AZ, isn’t it?” I asked him.

  He nodded, waiting.

  “G2STO contacted you three times in the past few weeks. Don’t you remember?”

  “Sure I do. It was six times to be exact.” His voice sounded weary. And then he added, “What are you, Police or Air Force?”

  I didn’t answer that. I thought maybe he’d talk more readily if he believed I had authority to question him. “Can we go somewhere where we can talk?” I said. It was beginning to rain again and an aircraft had started warming up its engines farther along the apron. “There are one or two questions—”

  “Questions?” That seemed to touch him off. “I’ve had nothing but questions about this darned ham for the past few days. G2STO! I’m sick of him. The crazy bastard claims he picked up a transmission from Paul Briffe. That’s what you’ve come about, isn’t it?” His manner was openly hostile. “Well, I spent a whole day making out a report on him. The Station Commander here has a copy of it, if you want to see it. I’ve nothing to add. Nothing at all.”

  I was too angry to say anything. To come all this way and find that Ledder was completely unco-operative … it was what I’d feared the moment I had seen him waiting there, sullenly, on the apron.

  “Well,” he said, “do you want to see the report?”

  I nodded and we began to walk across the tarmac.

  “You know about Briffe?” He was looking at me. I think he was puzzled by my silence. “He couldn’t have made that transmission.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “How do I know? Why, the man was dead. How the hell can a man who’s been dead a week suddenly start sending?”

  “You don’t know he’s dead,” I said.

  He stopped then. “How do you mean?”

  “He’s been reported dead. That’s all.”

  “That’s all, you say.” He was peering at me curiously. “What are you getting at?”

  “Just that you can’t be absolutely certain he didn’t transmit,” I told him. “Not unless you were listening in for him on his frequency that day.” I was facing him then. “Were you listening in for him at two o’clock on the twenty-ninth?”

  “The time I was given was nine twenty-five.”

  “Yes, of course.” That was the four and a half hours difference. “It would have been nine twenty-five here. But you weren’t listening for him then, were you?”

  He shook his head. “Why should I? The search had been called off three days before, and I’d no reason to think—”

  “Then you can’t be absolutely certain.”

  “I tell you Briffe was dead.” I had touched his professional pride and he said it angrily. “If I thought there’d been a chance of any transmission, I’d have kept constant watch. But there wasn’t. He’d been dead since the twentieth.”

  Perhaps he wasn’t so unlike my father when it came to radio. “You’ve only the pilot’s word for that,” I said.

  He stared at me and his face had a startled look. “Are you suggesting … Look, for Chrissake, Laroche is all right.” He was looking at me with sudden suspicion. “You’re not the Police. You’re not Air Force either. Who are you?”

  “My name’s Ian Ferguson,” I said. “The crazy bastard you spoke of was my father, and I happen to believe that he did pick up some sort of a transmission.” My words had shocked him and I didn’t give him time to recover, but added quickly, “My father made several contacts with you.” I pulled out the sheet of paper with the entries I had isolated. “The first time was on the twenty-third of September, and then again on the twenty-fifth of last month and again on the twenty-sixth. Did he seem crazy to you then?”

  “No, but that was before—”

  “He was perfectly rational, was he?”

  “He asked some odd questions,” he answered evasively.

  I hesitated. But this wasn’t the moment to find out what those questions were. “Forget for the moment that Briffe has been reported dead,” I said, “and that my father ever picked up this transmission. Cast your mind back to the first time he contacted you. Can you remember what your reaction was?”

  “I tell you, he asked some odd questions,” he answered uncomfortably. “Otherwise there was nothing to it, I guess. He was just another ham.”

  “Look,” I said, trying to get my own urgency across to him. “My father was a radio operator, like you.” Surely there was some sort of freemasonry between these men whose world was the ether, some sense of brotherhood. “I know he was contacting you on W/T and that all you get is a lot of dots and dashes, but something must come through, some indication—”

  “It’s not the same as Voice, you know. And he always contacted me on Key—never Voice.”

  “Of course he did,” I said angrily. “How else could he contact you? But even so,” I added, “something must come through, surely—some indication of the sort of man he was, his mood, something?”

  “I tell you, it was all on Key. If I’d had a QSO—a Voice contact—then maybe …” He gave a little shrug. “To tell you the truth I didn’t think much about him—not then.”

  It was raining harder now, but he made no move to take shelter and I asked him again what he’d thought of my father. “You must have formed some impression.” And when he didn’t answer, I said impatiently, “Don’t the men you contact on the air mean anything to you? Surely you must have got some impression—”

  “He was just another ham, that’s all.” He said it irritably. “I pick up any number of hams.”

  I felt suddenly tired of the whole thing then. My father had meant nothing to this morose Canadian operator, nothing at all. There seemed to be no point in my having made the trip to Goose. In desperation I said, “At least you didn’t think him irrational or irresponsible—at that time?”

  “I tell you, I didn’t think anything about him. I was puzzled by his questions. That was all.”

  Over two thousand miles, and I was no further forward. I asked him about the questions then and he said it was all set down in the report he’d written. “All I could remember, anyway.” And he added, “If you want to come back to the house I could show you the report there. I kept a copy.”

  I hesitated because the invitation had been made so grudgingly, but then he looked at his watch and said, “It’s after five-thirty now. I guess the Station Commander will have left anyway.”

  “All right.” I was thinking that perhaps I’d get more out of him at his home, and without a word he turned and led me back across the apron. As we passed the open door of the hangar, Farrow appeared and called to
me. “If you come into the office now we can get the formalities completed.” And then to Ledder: “Give you a lift down, if you like. The truck will be here any minute.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Ledder said. “Save me a wetting. That’s the worst of this dump,” he added, turning to me with the ghost of a smile. “We’re not allowed a car of our own. A question of gas, I guess. The bay’s frozen half the year and then supplies have to be flown in.”

  We went into the office, and whilst my passport was being checked and my suitcase cleared, Farrow inquired about Ledder. “Got what you wanted?” he asked in a whisper.

  “No,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “Oh, well, you’ve plenty of time. Take-off won’t be till seven in the morning, and that’s presuming they work on that engine all night.”

  “You’re here the night, are you?” Ledder said. And when Farrow nodded, he turned to me. “Then you’d better get some food and come over to my place afterwards. The D.O.T. houses are right across from the hotel.”

  The truck had already arrived. We piled in, and a moment later we were bumping along a dirt road overlooking the bay. The airport dropped behind us, desolate in the rain, and below us I caught a glimpse of a jetty with a steamer alongside and beyond that some seaplanes anchored close against the shore, small and indistinct in the fading light. Beside the road bull-dozers had exposed the gravel soil in raw slashes, the clearings littered with uprooted trees, and here and there the yellow wood of a new construction was reared up out of the naked land. The whole place had a lost feel about it, raw and ugly like a frontier settlement. It was a gauntlet flung in nature’s face, the scrub spruce crowding it in so that I was conscious all the time of the infinite wastes that lay beyond it.

  The hotel was a low, sprawling building made up of a series of wood-frame huts angled out in the form of a star. Thin dwarf scrub lapped round the sandy clearing. The rain had slackened and as we climbed out of the truck, I could see the hills across the bay again, dark and remote and very blue. It had become suddenly colder. Ledder pointed me out his house, just visible through a screen of trees. “Come over as soon as you’ve had your supper,” he said. And then we left him and went inside to be greeted with the hot breath of steam heating turned full on. The place had a bare, barrack air, but surprisingly the rooms were neat and very modern, the food good.

  It was almost seven-thirty before I’d finished eating and I came out into a biting wind. It was dark and the stars had a frosty look. A thin pale curtain of northern lights wavered across the sky and the silence was absolute. Through the trees the lights of Ledder’s house had the warm glow of orange curtains.

  He came to the door dressed in a vivid, short-sleeved shirt open at the neck. There was a little girl with him and in the room beyond his wife and another woman sat chatting through the blare of the radio. He introduced me and I stood there, feeling awkward because I wanted to talk to him alone. The room was overpoweringly hot, full of very new-looking furniture upholstered in brilliant colours. “Would you care for some coffee?” Mrs. Ledder asked.

  I shook my head. “I’ve just had some.”

  She laughed. She was young and jolly, with broad features and fair hair, rather pretty except that she was a little too stockily built. But that may have been because she was going to have a child and was wearing a smock. “It’s easy to see you’re not a Canadian, Mr. Ferguson. No Canadian would ever refuse a cup of coffee because he’d just had one, that’s for sure. Simon and the boys drink it all the time. Sure you won’t change your mind?”

  I shook my head, and Ledder said, “Well, if you don’t want any coffee we’ll go down below, shall we? It’ll be quieter there.” He pulled open a door under the stairs and switched on the light. “You must excuse the mess, but I’m just installing some new equipment.”

  I followed him down steps that led into a sort of cellar that was probably meant to house just the furnace and hot water boiler. But there was also a desk thrust close against one wall with a mass of radio equipment stacked round it like a barricade. Toys littered the floor, odds and ends of household gear, the remains of a Christmas tree, a pram, and over everything lay a sprinkling of tools and the insides of old radio sets. “Is this where you work?” I asked.

  “Sure. Folk here are always asking me to fix something or other.”

  “I mean—is this where you send from?”

  He nodded and went across to the desk. “I told you it was a mess.”

  I don’t know what I’d expected. Something neat and tidy, I suppose. It seemed incredible that this junk room of a basement should be VO6AZ and that out of this muddle he could have made contact with my father on the other side of the Atlantic. “It doesn’t look much I know, not all spick and span like the D.O.T. station.” He was sitting down and rummaging amongst some papers in a drawer. “But I can tell you this, there’s equipment here that Goose Radio hasn’t got.” He slammed the drawer shut. “Here you are,” he said and held out a typed sheet of foolscap. I took it from him. It was headed: REPORT ON BRITISH AMATEUR RADIO STATION G2STO. “You must remember that when I wrote that I knew Briffe was dead,” he said, his smile half-apologetic. “And I didn’t know your father’s name. If I’d known his name it might have made some sense.”

  Seated at his desk he seemed a different person, more alive, more vital—I suppose because this was his world, as it had been my father’s. His hand strayed automatically to the key, the way my father’s always had. It was a different key, an American side-operated pattern known as a bug key. But though the key was different, the gesture was the same. “As far as I was concerned G2STO was nuts and that’s all there was to it.” His voice was easy and natural, all the hostility gone out of it. “I’m sorry,” he added. “But I guess I was pretty tired of the whole business by then. I should have checked his name in the book.”

  I stared down at the report, wondering why the name should have made any difference. He had detailed six contacts and two of the three that I didn’t know about concerned Briffe’s sending frequency. “I see my father first contacted you on August the eleventh,” I said. “He asked for Briffe’s transmitting time, and you gave it to him. The sending frequency, too.”

  “Sure I did. There was nothing secret about it.”

  “What was the frequency?”

  “Three seven eight zero.”

  I got out my sheet of notes. August 11: Briffe. Briffe. Who is Briffe? “Is that it?” I asked, showing him the note I had made.

  He leaned forward, looking at it. “Seventy-five meter phone band. Net frequency three point seven eight zero. Yes, that’s it.”

  It explained the half-obliterated entry I had found. “Take a look at that,” I said. “I couldn’t read the date, but it was somewhere towards the end of August.”

  “Three point seven eight zero—nothing, nothing, nothing, always nothing.” He read it out slowly and then looked up at me. “Well?”

  “It means my father was watching on Briffe’s frequency.”

  “It means he was curious, sure. But then so were several other hams. There were two Canadians, one at Burnt Creek and the other right up in Baffin Island, listening regularly. It’ doesn’t mean anything. They were just interested, that’s all.”

  “Then what about this contact on September 26? That was the day the search was called off. According to your report my father actually contacted you that evening to check Briffe’s frequency and ask whether there was any other frequency he might use in an emergency. Doesn’t that make it obvious that he was keeping watch for Briffe?”

  “Paule Briffe only had an old forty-eight set. It was operated by a hand generator and a British ham would be more than two thousand miles outside normal range.”

  “Outside of normal range, yes,” I said impatiently. “Nevertheless, my father was keeping watch. You knew that, and yet down here at the bottom of your report you give it as your opinion that G2STO couldn’t possibly have picked up a transmission from Briffe. And you list your reasons�
�one of them, that, granted freak reception and the transmission having actually been made, the odds against G2STO choosing that particular moment to listen in are too great. What exactly did you mean by that?”

  “Just what I say,” he answered sharply. “Take all those points together—Briffe transmitting when he’s known to be dead, freak reception and finally the remote chance that your father should be keeping watch at that precise moment. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “Why not? The odds are against it, I admit, but it’s not impossible.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” he exclaimed irritably. “The plane crashed on the evening of the fourteenth. We were on constant watch until the twenty-sixth when the search was abandoned—not only us, but the Air Force, Government stations, and a whole bunch of hams. We picked up nothing. And three days after we ceased watch G2STO reports contact. Suppose Briffe did transmit on the twenty-ninth as he says. To be certain of picking up that transmission he’d have had to be listening on net frequency for three whole days, twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four.” He shook his head. “It just isn’t credible.”

  “My father was paralysed,” I said. “He had nothing else to do.”

  He stared at me. “I’m sorry,” he said tonelessly. “I guess they didn’t tell us anything about him.”

  “They didn’t tell you then that he died immediately after picking up the transmission?”

  “No. I guess that explains it—why you’re here, I mean. I’d been wondering about that.”

  “That transmission killed him.”

  His eyes widened, looking at me curiously. “How do you mean?”

  I told him then about my father calling out and how he’d somehow struggled to his feet. I told him the whole story, and when I’d finished, he said, “I didn’t know about all this.” His soft, slow voice was shocked, his tone apologetic. “They didn’t give any details, not even his name. I been thinking about that over my supper. It was those questions he asked that started me thinking he was nuts. If they’d given me his name I might have understood what he was getting at. As it was those questions just seemed so Goddamned irrelevant.” He nodded to the report in my hand. “Read ’em. They’re all there. You’ll see what I mean then. You’d have thought he was nuts if they’d come at you out of the blue, so to speak—anybody would.”