***
The line of burned vans stretched for fifty yards along the road outside the JPL fences. Every press conference Diedre had ever seen had drawn a small circus of trucks bristling with satellite dishes and radio transmission antennas. Today the row of vehicles looked like the aftermath of a massacre. Hot fires had raged through the trucks leaving them charred with their bare wheel rims sunk into the asphalt pavement. The press corps had come to get JPL’s best guess as to who was attacking from Phaeon Crater but had gotten firsthand experience instead. Phaeon must have regarded JPL as a hot target buzzing with radio transmissions. If any of the broadcast crews survived, they were long gone.
Phaeon had missed the last van in the line, and now Diedre stood looking it over while Lloyd and Frank worked inside. Its white exterior was untarnished by smoke and the radio equipment was in good shape. The rooftop transmitter, a six-foot white radio dish, was turned up in what was once the direction of a geostationary communication satellite. The back of the van was a white box a dozen feet square with the logo “News Three” painted on the sides in bright red. In an open compartment at the rear a small generator motor purred softly, providing power for the broadcasting equipment Frank was busy rewiring.
Diedre went up a short staircase to the side door of the compartment and surveyed the banks of electronic equipment inside. The interior walls were crowded with video tape decks, TV monitors, and dozens of electronic consoles with red and green diode lights and switches and knobs and dials and slide-potentiometers and gizmos and gadgets defying description by anyone—except Frank.
Lloyd was inside, seated at the control desk in one of the two operator chairs, scowling grimly as he had done since early this morning. Frank was missing. She looked around and smiled when she spotted Frank’s legs extending out from under the desk. He had crawled there to get at the truck’s electronic circuitry. His circuit-testing tool kit sat on the floor by his side.
“Here we go!” His muffled voice came out from where his hefty torso vanished among the electronics racks. “I found a place where I can tie into their equipment.”
“Good,” Diedre replied to what she could see of Frank. Then she spotted something interesting on the wall beside the door. It was a telephone hung inside a cubbyhole. “Hey, what’s this?” she said, lifting the receiver.
“Go ahead, Diedre,” Lloyd muttered. “Try the White House. Maybe they’ll send the Marines.”
Diedre held the receiver to her ear and looked away from Lloyd’s scary eyes. There was nothing but static on the line.
“Of course, it’s dead,” she sighed, hanging up.
Lloyd stared at his shoes. “Phones don’t work anywhere.”
Undaunted by Lloyd’s bitterness, Diedre spotted a small handheld microphone hanging on the wall. “What’s this other thing here?” she asked, taking it off its hook.
“CB radio,” Lloyd answered without enthusiasm. “Probably useless.”
“Try the police channel,” Frank called from under the equipment bank.
Diedre punched the Channel 1 button on the console and pressed the thumb switch on the hand mike. “Hello, anybody there?”
The line stayed silent.
“Try another channel,” Frank called as he worked. “Try them all.”
Diedre hit the Channel 2 button and sent out another hello. Again only static, ragged walls of it. The airwaves were as dead as the JPL campus. She tried channel after channel with no luck, until she tried Channel 18. Something different happened there. After she sent her message out, the static surged and crackled.
“Wait!” Frank called. “I thought I heard something.”
“Yeah,” Diedre laughed. “If you like scratchy noises.” But she stayed on 18 and shortly, in the middle of the static, something was really there. A voice came faintly through the interference.
“—six, do you read me? Try Channel six.”
Diedre switched the radio back to Channel 6 and called into the handset, “Hello, are you there?”
The voice came through clearly now, a man’s voice. “Hello there, little lady, got a handle?”
Diedre was confused. “A handle?”
Lloyd stared at her unresponsively but Frank scooted out from under the desk and sat up. “He wants to know your name.”
“Diedre Porter,” she announced into the mike. “Calling from JPL.”
“JPL?” The voice made a wheezing laugh. “JPL? What’s that stand for? Jungle Patrol Lunatics?”
“Jet Propulsion Laboratories, in Pasadena.”
“Oh. And you’re the Little Old Lady from Pasadena.”
She didn’t like the tone of his voice—half-crazy, or worse. “No. I’m Diedre Porter.” Whoever the fellow was, he sure thought he was funny.
“D. P., that’s you to me,” the voice rhapsodized. “Okay if I call you Sweet Pea? My name, well now, that’s not for public consumption. Got my transmitter hopped up way louder than the law allows. Call me Daddy Longlegs, ’cause I’m a skinny bastard. How do you read me?”
“You’re loud and clear.” Diedre stifled an urge to comment on his odd attitude.
“You’re not too clear on my end Sweet Pea,” the voice replied. “But I can dig you if you shout.”
“Okay, Daddy Longlegs,” she shouted.
“Glad to hear yer voice, Sweet Pea,” he drawled. “I been lonely, way out here in Taos. Most’a my old buddies ain’t there no more. I think they got cooked by the moon unit, you know what I mean? The moonbeam.”
“Why didn’t it get you?”
“Well, see, I been off the air, for a month or so. I was in for a liver transplant, you know, on account-a my misspent youth. I guess the moonies didn’t know where to find me.”
“Sounds like you’re lucky. Better keep off the air when the moon is up.”
“Hey, Sweet Pea,” he launched into a sing-song voice, “you wanna boogie woogie with me? I got a jug’a bur-gun-dee.”
“Hey Daddy Longlegs, can we get serious a minute?”
“That’s what I’m sayin’, Sweet Pea. I wanna get serious with ya. Your place or mine?”
Irritated, she passed the hand set to Frank, who sat on the floor looking amused.
“Hello Taos,” Frank barked in an authoritarian voice. “Are you in touch with the military?”
“Hey,” the voice came back. “Who’re you? Put Sweet Pea back on the line.”
“Listen,” Frank fumed, “we need to know if you’re in touch with any military operations.”
“Affirmative, JPL,” Daddy Longlegs aped a crisp military reply. “I am communicado. They come on every so often, askin’ about aliens and little green men and such.”
“Can you pass a message to them?”
Daddy Longlegs took a less flippant tone. “Affirmative, good buddy. What you got goin’?”
Frank explained the details of the Clementine plan and admonished Daddy Longlegs not to transmit it when the moon was in the sky.
“Roger on that JPL. I’ll keep quiet while the moon is shinin’. That Holly Loo-Ya girl up at NORAD told me they got a schedule of times when it’s negatory to transmit. Guess that’s so’s I don’t get blasted. But I’m gettin’ blasted anyway, y’know what I mean? Straight bourbon. Anyway, gotta go. Someone’s knockin’ from Saint Louie on Channel Four. You got anything else?”
“No,” said Frank.
“Check you later. And kiss Sweat Pea for me. This’s Daddy Longlegs, over and out.”
“JPL out,” Frank replied.
Diedre took the mike back from Frank and put it on its hook, her face flushing at Daddy Longlegs’ suggestion. “We’ve got some big promises to keep,” she said.
“This rig’s gonna do it for us,” Frank said as he wormed himself back under the desk. “I’ve just about got things connected. Then I’ll need a little time to reset the satellite dish to talk on Clementine’s wavelength. But that won’t take long.”
Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall Page 18
