and German, though French was easy enough.
Fingers on the key called for a flexible wrist. The amount of energy pulsing from the elbow varied as much as a snowflake or thumb print. Energy was fed from the heart and backbone, an engine sending power to the hand, so that he could tell when a man (or, who knows, a woman?) was tired, or irascible, or lackadaisical, or slapdash, or indeed calm, competent, conscientious, and incapable of exhaustion. Maybe the latter played tennis, or went swimming, or sawed an uncountable number of logs to keep his fire going. The difference was minimal but always detectable. If a man was tired he might be unhappy, or at the end of his stint. If someone was easy and competent they had no worries, or they had just come on watch and weren’t yet jaded. Some operators had a natural sense of rhythm, and rattled on like talented pianists, while others, a minority, laboured in such a way as made them tiring to listen to, and he couldn’t imagine why they had taken up such a job, though it was certainly better than working on a motorway or building site. The behaviour of the fist was mysterious, but with earphones clamped Howard became a remote and all-knowing god, skilled in interpretation but, like a true god, unable to help anyone avoid their fate, even supposing he would want to.
He knew from experience that the most difficult place from which to send morse was an aeroplane. Though seated at a comfortable-enough desk, albeit most of the time cramped, your fist was at the mercy of vibration and turbulence, not to mention the vagaries of height and aerial. He had heard Chinese operators flying between Peking and Urumchi sending hourly position reports, a fluke of reception because after a few weeks the signals faded. The Russians also had radio men on board civil and military aircraft. He understood them because they used – as did the Chinese – the same international Q signals which he had used in the Air Force, detailing times of arrival and departure, height, speed and geographical locality.
The station most persistently monitored was that of the direction-finding system near Moscow, which he first came across during a morning’s idle trawl. The operator in a plane would tap out a request for latitude and longitude, and the man in Moscow would ask him to press his morse key for ten or so seconds of continuous squeak. This the man in the aircraft willingly did, and a minute or so later, Vanya (as Howard called him) on earth near Moscow, had worked his technological magic and the position was sent.
After recording each message Howard fixed a metaphorical pin on a map of the Soviet Union displayed in his mind. In the beginning he’d had to ask Laura for help in placing such coordinates, until he became familiar enough with the geographical graticule to do without her. The operator who communicated the result of his bearings did not have the lightning dexterity of his marine counterpart, and an aircraft would often have trouble making contact. The fist of Vanya on the ground was sometimes erratic, while his correspondent in the plane was occasionally affected by turbulence.
Such interceptions allowed Howard to play a game called ‘Spot the Bomber’, and if Laura came in to say lunch was ready he would laugh: ‘Shan’t be a moment. I have a bomber on the line.’ She read him an item about Soviet planes trying to manipulate the weather over the Arctic Ocean, and he heard some from that region asking for their position. Others were so far north they must have been on ‘Bear Patrol’, and he’d even heard the hesitant squeak of planes on the Vladivostok run.
The Moscow operator suffered from ennui, because in eight hours of keeping watch not more than a dozen planes would ask for their position, and each transmission did not last for more than a few minutes. Howard assumed that Vanya closed his eyes now and again, for a plane would sometimes call and get no reply. On the other hand either the plane didn’t hear the land station, or the land station didn’t hear the aeroplane, which could happen if the latter’s equipment was a few kilocycles off frequency. Cannier airborne operators would try to catch Vanya out by sending a single letter V, but he would invariably shoot back rapidly with:.’Who’s calling me?’ and contact would be made, with no evidence of sloth at all.
He pictured Vanya, at his direction-finder’s Consol, as a man with cropped fair hair and, of course, blue eyes. He was underpaid, and became more and more bored as the hours went by and the airwaves stayed empty. What kind of person was he? When a contact was made he displayed a very individual style, would start by sending with painful slowness and then, suddenly, maybe to fox or catch out the other operator, whom he considered to be an interloper till proved a friend because he had need of his services, speed along like a virtuoso, overall erratic but good even when bad, unwilling to be constrained by the age old parameters of Samuel B. Morse. Perhaps he even wished at times that the genius inventor of the telegraphic code had stuck to his painting and had not come up out of nowhere with his disciplined style of communication.
Laura had taken a biography of the great man out of the library, and read a chapter a night to Howard till the book was finished – the only entertainment she had known which had kept him away from his ‘precious wireless’. ‘More about Samuel,’ he would say after supper, knowing she smiled on reaching for the book.
Samuel B. Morse had been the white hope of American classical painting, and earned a fair living covering enormous canvases with the dignified faces of the worthy.
Returning from a tour of Europe on the steamship Sully in 1832, Morse conceived the idea of an electric telegraph, and a couple of years later he had devised a working model which sent letters from one side of the room to the other. As a concept it seemed to others a step into the white and empty spaces of the unknown, the blank future that their imaginations could not envisage, and certainly not colonise with science. But Morse had a practical mind and overcame the setbacks. ‘If we knew the how and why of such a brain even the secrets of the universe might one day be revealed,’ Howard thought, after the author of the book had said: ‘His inventive brain, nurtured by painting, putting what the eye can see onto canvas, helped if not actually propelled him to make the leap, art being ever the precursor of invention.’
From that point the narrative became thrilling, and Laura was sometimes persuaded to go on reading till nearly midnight, taking him through the inventor’s struggle to have his idea accepted by the US Congress, though it didn’t happen till 1843, by which time he had constructed the famous code ‘which will forever bear his name.’ Howard lived, as the code was put together, in the light of inspiration, Samuel no doubt making a chart so that he could alter and modify, until the perfect arrangements of dots and dashes for each letter and number was fixed for all time.
The triumph of the first transmission on a line between Washington and Baltimore, a mere thirty nautical miles, called forth the immortal phrase from the Bible, which Morse chose to send: ‘WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT,’ because he modestly believed, like all artists, that neither praise nor responsibility could be accepted whatever was achieved in his name.
Howard used the phrase from then on as an exercise when his key was plugged into the oscillator, a way of flexing his fingers and warming his spirit, on no better concept than Morse’s chosen words.
The vision of Morse was of the earth being circled and criss-crossed by lines of more-or-less instant communication, and this eventually came about when cables were laid under the sea. A more complete girdling of the world – which Morse imagined but did not live to see – occurred when the equally great Marconi invented a method of signalling without wires. The ability to send news and save life at sea was achieved.
After Vanya had tapped out the plane’s position, thanks to Morse and Marconi (in some sort of homage, though he didn’t know it) boredom once more threw its woolly blanket over him. When no requests came for his assistance the sky must have been clear across the vastness of the Soviet Empire, all navigators knowing where they were by looking out of the window, only asking the radio officer to use the facility as a final resort, when cloud went from nought to forty thousand feet over Siberia and the Northern Ocean.
Most of the time Vanya sat with earphones around his neck instead of clamped where they should be, and brooded at not having any money in his pocket. He didn’t give a damn anymore, tilting his chair so far back and knowing that the legs would eventually break, but telling himself there were plenty more where that came from, and if not, so what? He looked boggle-eyed at the morse key and receiver needle, and hoped for another call on his expertise to stop him going berserk and breaking up the table as well.