Ships in the Rock

Season two. Fifteen hundred kilometres south of the mast they gave back, Gaz and Degsy stand in a field in Bohuslän underneath a thirty-metre satellite dish — and sign a lease. Two thousand kronor a month plus VAT, toilet shared, no welding after six. Their landlord is Roy, who owns the machine station and the dead teleport it sits in, and who has one rule: he doesn't ask what his tenants do, and he doesn't lie for them either.

Tanum Teleport opened in 1971, the first in the Nordics. Thirty people worked here around the clock in the eighties; if you rang Australia, the call went through this field. On the fifteenth of June 1973 the first computer link ever to leave America came through here too — Virginia to Norway. It was switched off in 2002, the equipment was sold, and the dishes stayed, because taking them down costs more than leaving them pointing at the sky.

A few miles up the road there is a rock twenty-two metres long with three hundred figures cut into it. Ships, wagons, ploughs, men in horned helmets — which are bronze age, not Viking, whatever Degsy's tattoo says. When it was carved the sea was higher and that rock stood at the water's edge, where every boat had to look at it. Nobody paid the man who made it. He just wanted somebody, some day, to see it.

Then they open a floor duct they were told to leave alone, and find out where the dish is still pointing.

Contains strong language throughout. The history is fact-checked; the punks are not.

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