Аннотация: The short story about a strange shortwave radio station... and secrets it keeps. English version of "Жужжалка"
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The Buzzer
Some time ago, people lived here. He just knew it. Rusty cars on sides of a road destroyed long time ago, trees grown as if they had been planted in lines, a radio tower on the hill and power lines - everything meant that life had been there.
Not anymore.
Silence. Dead silence. No word, no sing, no sound for thousand miles around. Only the wind blows in trees, insects make their sounds and a thunder roars after a rain sometimes. Nothing more. One can tune the transiver forever - only the static would be heard. All radio stations had finished their broadcasting long time ago. All except one. Every day, in all weather, it transmits its signal on short waves every minute. A short sound, as if a squeaky door is opened, a thirty-second buzz, a pause, another buzz, and then a monotonic creepy voice says something in a language unknown. When it stops, a moment of silence fills the air, and then all that sequence repeats again. Squeak, buzz, voice. Every day, every minute it is transmitted on short waves, as if nobody have told the station that there is no one to hear it.
Well, there is one now.
Sometimes he was talking with it. Sometimes he just turned the radio on and was hearing until he was feared by that uncanny sounds and his hand switched the transiver off beyond his will. He didn't know why he kept doing that. He didn't know what he should do at all. The air and water regeneration on board guaranteed that he wouldn't die from suffocation or dehydration. Supplies for the food synthesizer would be enough for years, as well as the fuel for the thermonuclear reactor. The crash had left him without engine or far radio communications, but mercifully hadn't broken the life support. If he got luck, and his weak radio signal was received and decoded on another planet, they would send a spaceship for him in next twenty years. Maybe. All he could do was to walk on his spaceship, to watch movies he knew every word of and to listen the tireless "Buzzer".
The view from his viewports hadn't changed since he landed there. He didn't know did seasons change on this planet or not. He didn't know did years change there! How long was this planet desolated? How long was this strange radio station broadcasting its signal powerful enough to be heard anywhere? Where did it take the electricity for that? Did it have its own batteries, or generators? Or was there an automatic power station that worked by itself not knowing that it was unnecessary now? Maybe, there was a hydro plant that would work while there was a water stream. He could ask thousand questions, but hardly he would ever know answers for any of them.
Day was changed by night, night was changed by day. Nothing changed. The red lights on the radio tower still blinked. The wind in trees still blew. The mysterious signal on short waves still repeated every minute. But all these questions bugged him more and more. And with every day passing, his desire to know the answers grew more and more. And one day, he finally made a decision.
He had made short expeditions around his spaceship before. He hadn't risked to go too far from the ship before, but today he would walk as far as the air supply of his space suit would allow. He would walk there where the radio tower winked him with its lights. Of course, the Buzzer might be anywhere, but what if today he was lucky? The control panel of air lock chirped behind his back. Hermetic doors opened slowly with hissing of an air from outside. It was a lethal air, full with carbon monoxide and many other poisons enough to kill a man from one breath. He stepped down to the earth, looked the last time on his spaceship painted gray with blue stripe and with a huge sign of the post service near the door and walked on the crumbed concrete of the road.
The road was going through the forest where all trees were planted in lines. Almost all of the trees were high and dead, with black bodies and ginger leaves. There were some young green plants between them, though. A couple of times the road was blocked by fallen trees, and he was forced to make a detour. Some trees were charred, as if there had been a fire. What exactly had happened here? What and when?
It took almost an hour before the road led him to the tall fence with a wide gate. The fence had been dark green before, as parts of remaining paint suggested, but now the paint was unnoticeable due to rust covered almost every inch. Few places were so rusty that there were chipped holes in them. The gate wasn't locked. He pulled one part of the gate - it took a lot of force, but eventually, he moved it enough to be able to fit through the gap. Behind the fence, a wide cut-through was opened to his view. The road was going to the right, hidden by dead trees. A red-and-white automatic barrier blocked the way right after the gate. A low brick booth was stayed near it. Bricks were crumbled, moss covered gaps between bricks, and pieces of glass were stuck in window frames. He went to the booth and looked inside. He saw a desk with a registration log on it. Paper was yellow, and blue writings on paper were almost washed by moisture. An unknown device with a metal body was situated near the log. The whole top panel of it was occupied by a wide dial with a small yellow circle with a black dot and three black sectors in the bottom right corner. A needle of the device was stuck in the rightmost position. A poster with a picture of a missile flying upwards and a mushroom cloud in the background was glued to the far wall. Something looking like a speaker was attached near the poster. A broken chair was on the floor. An unlocked door was being swung by the wind, and its squeak seemed to be as creepy as the Buzzer itself.
But what wasn't creepy here?
He stepped away from the booth and went ahead on the road. The road was turned right after fifty yards. He turned right as well. He saw a big pond with greenish water in front of him. An arch of a bridge was reflected on the shallow water. A two-story gray brick building, low and wide, was stayed behind the pond. An army jeep in camouflage painting was rusting alone on the parking lot. Wires from the power line descended to an electric transformer booth that looked like a funny robot figure and went from the booth to the building.
And the radio tower rose far behind over all that.
He stopped. For a moment, he was overcome with fear. The booth near the gate looked like it had been abandoned hundred years ago, but this building did not. He couldn't get rid of feeling that in a second, a man would go out of there, or a dog would bark, or an alarm would be triggered by him. He knew for sure that there were no people - they simply couldn't survive in the atmosphere that almost completely was from carbon monoxide. But what if they managed to survive? What if they had covered in shelters, provided with air filters, oxygen regeneration, food and water supplies?
He made a step ahead. Well, maybe, he soon would know.
A heavy steel door required a lot of force to be opened. Behind the door, a small hall was located. The other end of the hall was closed by steel bars. He passed the glass separated the hall from the security room and pushed an unlocked gate in the bars. Hinges squeaked painfully. The hall behind the bars was covered with dark. Darkness blinded him for a second. Only one lonely day-light lamp was blinking to the far left. He felt shivers started running up and down his spine. He turned the flashlight mounted on his helmet on and noticed a stairway to the upper floor. He went down the hall. In the light of the flashlight, he saw dirty walls painted dark-blue, dark-brown doors with crimson sign plates, wood-and-glass boxes attached to walls with fire hoses, fire extinguishers and hand-written posters in them. He made another step, but suddenly froze. The fear took him over. On the ceiling behind him, a small red dot was blinking. He heard a ticking sound that made him thought about a clockwork bomb ready to blow any intruder to pieces. What if the clock was counting the last seconds of his life? He jumped away and directed his flashlight to the dot. The flashlight showed him the thing that so scared him. A fire alarm sensor.
He sighed in relief and continued his walk. How many such surprises were waiting for him here? The flashlight enlighten a switchboard with two white buttons. He hesitated for a moment but then pressed them. Lamps over him slowly, one-by-one, started to turned on. It was like in the movie. It seemed that no matter how long this building had been abandoned, the electricity worked here just fine. He realized that he didn't have any clue how long this planet was in that condition. He used to think that it had become like this decades ago, maybe, even half a century ago. But how long could a day light lamp work? How long could a fire alarm sensor tick? How many years could the radio station transmit its mysterious messages - without breaks, without personnel, without repairs, taking hundreds of kilowatts every month?
Most of the rooms were locked. All of them were empty. In every room he opened he saw only desks with paper folders and flat computer screens on them. In one room, a pale green jacket still was hanged on a chair's back. A blinking of a green light on a bottom right corner of the computer screen was reflecting in the window behind the desk. Computer speakers staying on the desk hummed monotonously. As if the owner of the room just had gone away for a moment and would be back soon. He carefully and slowly closed the door. It all looked so normal, so usual... and so uncanny because of that.
He went to another door. Behind this door, a narrow steel stairway to the basement was hidden. He hesitated for a second, but went downstairs. Metal stairs sounded hollow under his boots. He went through two staircase flights before he saw a door with an opal glass. He pulled a door knob. The door didn't open, and he thought that it was locked, but he pulled harder and succeed finally. He was in another hallway, as dark as its upper counterpart. He heard familiar sounds from somewhere to the left and ahead of him: squeak, buzz, voice, pause... He carefully went ahead, using his flashlight to see his path. He quickly found a source of the sound. The half-opened door was the only door on this level. He entered to the room behind the door.
The room, not big by itself, was filled with various equipment. There was a desk staying to the left from the entrance. A huge old microphone in cradle was on the desk. A dark metal control panel with half-dozen dials, lights, knobs and buttons was near it. Someone had put an open message log on the desk with a ballpoint pen on the fold. And on top of this log was a cardboard large square box. Two reel tape recorders were leaned on the wall opposite to the door. The tape on the left one was looped into an endless film. A transport mechanism became worn over the years, so it advanced the tape with speed slower than needed. Perhaps, that's why the voice sounded so uncanny... Control monitor speakers on the cupboard to the right from the door repeated all that the Buzzer transmitted: buzz, pause, voice.
He went to the desk, sat down to the worn black chair. He took the cardboard box from the desk and opened it. There was another reel inside it. What could be taped on this reel, another cryptic message? For a moment, he had a desire to stop the tape machine and switch the tape played for this reel. But he discarded these thoughts. He hardly could understand now how this old machine worked. And even if he could, what for? He didn't know the local language anyway. He looked at the message log. The page opened was almost full. There were two columns on the page, a tiny left one and a large right one. Blue letters on the page looked like fish hooks joined together. He couldn't understand what was written but if it was a message log, it was dates and messages. Specialists, probably, could decipher this log. They probably could understand what these notes meant eventually, maybe even what happened here. But he wasn't a specialist. And for him, it would remain a mystery forever. What had he hoped for coming there? What had he expected to find? He found the Buzzer, but wasn't able to find out its secrets.
The tape reels still spin on the tape machine. An old piece of equipment, it probably had been obsolete even when the station had just been built. But it was reliable enough to continue the broadcasting for so long, without any supervision or maintenance. He turned the red switch on the tape recorder, and the tape stopped. He had to pressed all buttons on the control board before all lights turned off, and all needles swung left, to their zero positions, on dials. You had worked hard, the Buzzer, and now you had to take a rest. Forever.
He left the room, carefully closed the door. Now without sounds from control speakers, there was a dead silence. Uncomfortable science. He saw an arrow-shaped red sign on the wall with a picture of a man rushing to stairs. The arrow pointed to the opposite direction from the stairs he used before. Curious, he walked towards this direction. In the end of the hallway, there was another stairway to the right leading somewhere down. When he went downstairs, he faced another door. It was a heavy metal door with rounded corners and a wheel instead usual handle. He leaned on the wheel turning it right, and soon, he heard a hissing sound of the air leaking from behind the door. It seemed there was a some kind of airlock. He pushed the door, and it turned surprisingly easily.
The lights in the chamber turned on right after he entered. There was another entrance on the opposite wall, but it was closed, and a red lamp above it was alight. He closed the hatch he had entered through and heard humming of air pumps. They replaced the dangerous air from outside for the safe air from inside. He waited. Five minutes, ten, twenty. After twenty five minutes, humming was faded, and the red lamp went off. The way was clear.
This was a small shelter, definitely only for those who had worked at the station. White walls, as clean and cold as a snow, concrete floor, cold light of fluorescent lamps. He passed shelves with gas masks and first-aid kits, walked to the floor map attached near the next exit. There were two large rooms, bathroom, storage rooms, air cleaning chamber, medical room, another big room next to it. He guessed that shelter that small might contain supplies not more than for one year. He opened another door - he lost the count how many doors he faced today already.
At first sight, the room he entered seemed to be empty. There were three rows of bunks, four bunks in each row. They were white and clean, seemed untouched as if they had never been in use. Only after a second glance, he noticed a man in green uniform lying on the bunk at far corner. He went to that bunk. The man lay on his back, arms straight, eyes open. He touched this man. A person on the bunk was dead.
He had to take a deep breath before he managed to calm down.
The other room looked almost exactly the same. Only there were no dead man, and there was an electric oven and a wash stand near the far wall. The room was clean as well, tided perfectly. He went to the medical room. As he entered the place, he just could feel the specific smell of hospital - a mix of blood, sweat, antiseptics and drugs, although he knew that his suit was air-tight. The medical room was empty as well. An open first-aid kit lay on the desk, an used syrette was on the floor. All cupboards were locked and almost empty. He went to the another exit and opened the door.
It'd be better if he didn't do it. He saw another room, similar to the previous rooms he visited. Only that time, it was full with people. Dead people in blue and green uniforms. They were on bunks and on the floor - he counted more than twenty bodies. He didn't know how long corpses stay looking like humans, but he was sure no one body here exceeded that time. He shut the door. Of all the secrets the Buzzer kept, it was the most terrifying.
Now he knew what was the transmitted signal for. People who went down to the shelter after what had happened up there, changed the tape for the distress message. "Mayday! Mayday! We are still here! Save us!" And they had been waiting every day, waiting for help... until all of them died.
He didn't visit a storage room. There was no meaning to do that. He was going to the airlock when he noticed something unusual. He returned to the man in the first room and took the arm of this person. There was a wrist watch on the arm. He had seen watches like this in museums before. A small watch with clock hands, on a black leather wristlet and with clock winder. He noticed a red star with an orange and black strip on the dial. It was a cheap watch that could keep its work without winding up for one day only, maybe, for two days. It was only when he released the hand of the dead man, that he realized what exactly attracted his attention.