The Long Quiet

You have the night watch at Kestrel Point, a relay station on a cold stretch of coast that is due to be automated at the end of the month. A fishing boat called the Aldis is four days overdue with two or three people aboard, depending on which piece of paper you believe. On your first night somebody answers you from a frequency that is not on any list.

Each night you turn the dial across the band by hand. The hiss narrows, a whistle rises and falls, the meter comes up, and you press a key to listen. There are two or three signals a night: the harbour clerk at Fenn, the day operator's tape reels, an unmodulated carrier on the distress frequency that somebody is keying by hand, and a woman on a dying handheld who is not always consistent about where she is or who is with her.

The log is the mechanic. Five questions open across the week and you commit an answer to each one in ink. Later nights contradict what you wrote, and you decide whether to amend the entry or hold it. On the seventh night a man from the Board reads your log back to you, and a cutter with fuel for exactly one sweep asks you where to look.

There are four endings and they are genuinely different. One of them is a failure and you will know it when you get it. One of them is earned and quite hard. One of them is neither, and is the strangest thing in the game. When it is over you are shown every entry you made against what was actually true, so you find out exactly where you went wrong.

A sitting runs about fifteen to twenty minutes. There is no reflex test anywhere in it. It is a game about listening carefully to somebody who is frightened, and about being willing to be wrong in writing.