The Antarctica Signal (Part 2)

For two weeks Kenji did the same thing every night after dinner. He sat at his desk with a notebook and the club’s old callsign book, and he looked for anything that started with the three letters he had heard.

Callsigns are the names radio stations use. The first letters and numbers — the prefix — tell you where a station is. KC4 was the one that stopped him. Most of it belonged to ordinary American stations, but a small group of KC4 callsigns didn’t belong to any state at all. They belonged to research stations in Antarctica. One of them, KC4AAC, was Palmer Station, on the Antarctic Peninsula, about eight thousand miles from Oregon.

He built his evidence the way his science teacher had taught him to write up an experiment: one page, one column of times, one column of what he heard. Six nights. Five of them had the sound. Every time, it came between 5:30 and 6:00, when the sun was going down over the water.

On the Thursday he took the notebook to the shed.

Alvarez read it standing up, which was a bad sign, and gave it back in less than a minute.

“That’s not evidence,” he said. “That’s a list.”

“It’s the same time every night. That isn’t noise.”

“It might still be nothing. Signals do strange things at sunset.” But he didn’t let go of the notebook straight away, and Kenji noticed.

“The aerial’s too short,” Kenji said. “I read about it. If we build a taller one — even six meters taller — we could hear him properly. I’ll do the work. I just need somebody to tell me where to put it.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Alvarez put the notebook down on the table. Outside, the rain had started again.

“Because this club built a bigger antenna once,” he said. “In 1998. It cost us four hundred dollars and most of a summer, and it didn’t work. I’m not doing that twice. Go home.”