Fifty Hertz

The cell had been drawing a clean violet all afternoon and Rasmus Holt had been turning the dial in quarter steps for six hours, and at nine and a quarter the hum went out of the room.

Not the plasma. The plasma was fine, a thumbnail of light behind the quartz, doing what it had done since two o'clock. It was the building that stopped. The fluorescent tubes in the Kanbara Institute's basement corridor had hummed at fifty cycles a second every Sunday he had ever worked there, low, flat, a note he could have sung back without being asked, and it went out from under him the way a floor goes out from under a man on a stair he has miscounted.

Then it came back. Higher.

He sat very still with his hand on the dial.

"That's not a thing sound does," he said, to the cell, which had no opinion.

He wrote down what he could see, because that was the whole of his training and all he had left. Drive nine and a quarter. Cell nominal. Ozone, faint, as usual. Corridor hum, changed, and he did not have a word for what it had changed to, so he wrote higher and underlined it, and later he would take that underline apart in his head a thousand times, because in it was the only version of the number he was ever going to have.

The corridor door numbers were wrong.

He stood in front of B-14 for a while, which was his room and had been for eleven months, and read B-14 on the plate, and could not say what was wrong with it until he turned round and found B-15 where B-13 belonged. The whole basement had been counted from the other end.

"Sorry," said a woman behind him. "Sorry, sorry. How long have you been standing there?"

He turned round. She was about his age, in a coat that had been rained on, holding two coffees she had clearly carried a long way, and she was looking at him the way you look at somebody you have already forgiven twice today.

"Not long," Rasmus said.

"You did it again."

"Did I."

"You did the thing where you say you'll come up at six and then the cell's doing something and it's half eight." She held out one of the coffees. He took it because his hands took it. "It's cold now. That's on you."

"Thank you."

She stopped. It was a very small stop, the kind that happens between two people who know each other's timing, and he heard himself land wrong in it.

"Thank you?" she said.

"For the coffee."

"Rasmus."

"Nao," he said, because it was on the visitor badge clipped to her coat, and watched that land wrong too, because you do not say your wife's name like a man reading it off a badge.

She put her own coffee down on the corridor bench and looked at him properly for the first time, and he understood, standing there with the hum going at a pitch he had never heard in that building, that he was about to have to be very good at something he had never once been good at.

"Are you all right," she said. It was not a question.

"I've been down here a long time."

"Since Thursday, near enough."

"Then I'm probably not all right." He tried it and it came out almost true, which is the only kind of lie that works. "Can I ask you something stupid."

"You can ask me anything, that's the deal, you just never do."

"What do I do here."

Nao picked her coffee back up. She did it slowly, the way people buy themselves four seconds.

"You run the cell," she said.

"What for."

"For the Institute. For the grant. For whatever it is you tell my mother at dinner, which is different every time and none of it is true, because you don't think she'd follow it, which she would, because she was a radiographer for thirty years and you've never once asked her that."

"Right," Rasmus said.

"Is that the stupid question?"

"No. The stupid question is what the tubes in this corridor sound like to you."

She listened. She actually listened, and he loved her for it in a way that had no business existing three minutes into knowing her, and he understood a half-second before she answered that she was going to say something unbearable.

"They sound like tubes," Nao said. "What do they sound like to you?"

---

He got back into B-14 and locked it, which he had never done, and sat on the floor with his back against the bench because the chair was somebody else's.

He had it in about ten minutes. It was not clever. It was arithmetic, and it had been sitting in front of him since he had signed the lease on a flat in Kanbara eleven months ago and been told, by a very patient man in a shop, that the fan heater he had brought from Tokyo would run but would run wrong.

A hundred volts. That was the country. That was why the cell ran here and nowhere else he had ever tried it, why the drive board had failed in three countries and behaved in this one, why the whole of the thing he had built was, in a way he had never let himself look at squarely, a device that plugged into Japan.

And fifty cycles a second, east of the Fujigawa. Sixty, west of it. Tokyo's generators had come from Germany and Osaka's had come from America and neither side had ever given in, and there was a line through Shizuoka Prefecture where the country changed its mind about what a second was.

The dial was not a dial. It never had been. It was a multiplier, and the thing it multiplied was the note under the floor.

Nine and a quarter on fifty was one door. Nine and a quarter on sixty was a different one.

He had come out of a basement that hummed at fifty and into a corridor that hummed higher, which meant that wherever this was, the wall socket he was sitting next to was running at sixty, which meant that this Rasmus Holt, the one with Nao and the cold coffee and a mother-in-law who had been a radiographer for thirty years, did not live in Kanbara at all. He lived somewhere west of that river. The Institute had a building in Osaka. He had been to a meeting in it once, in a life that was, as of about twenty minutes ago, not the one he was standing in.

He got up off the floor and plugged the box back into the wall.

"Nine and a quarter," he said, and turned it there, and waited for the hum to drop.

It did not drop. It went higher again, and the ozone came up hard enough to sting, and the tube outside B-14 went out entirely and stayed out.

He had made an error so simple that he laughed at it, alone, on the floor of a room with the wrong number on the door. To go back he did not need nine and a quarter. Nine and a quarter was the number that got him out. To get home he needed the number that would be nine and a quarter on fifty hertz, applied to a wall that was running at sixty, and he could do that arithmetic in his head in four seconds and it gave him a number that was not on the dial, because the dial stopped at ten.

Which meant crossing the river. Which meant getting to the other side of Shizuoka, in a life he did not have a train pass for, with a woman upstairs who had been married to him for however long and had just watched him read her name off a badge.

He sat down again and put his hand flat on the box, which was warm, and was the only object in the building that was his.

"All right," he said. "All right."

---

He never wrote the number down.

That was the thing, and he would come back to it in every room he ever arrived in afterwards. He had written drive nine and a quarter because that was where he had been going. He had not written where he had been. Six hours of quarter steps, and the one before the one that worked was just the one before, and a man does not record the floor he is standing on.

He knew it was past nine. He was nearly sure of past nine. In the long years afterwards, in the lives where he was rich and the lives where he was wanted by somebody and the one life where he understood, slowly, over a terrible afternoon, that nobody in the room was going to answer him because he had no mouth to ask with, he could always get to past nine and never any further.

Upstairs, Nao would be waiting in the foyer with a coat over her arm, because that was what she did, apparently, and he was going to have to go up there and be somebody's husband until he could find a socket she was not standing next to.

Rasmus put the box in his bag and went to the stairs.

The hum followed him up, sixty cycles a second, a country that had never once agreed with itself about what a second was, and underneath it, very faint, from somewhere below and behind him, the tube outside B-14 came back on at a pitch he had not heard yet, and was not going to like.