Howard sat down at the table. He seemed to have trouble absorbing the information. “Jesus,” he said. “Fire at the research facility?”

“I believe so.”

“Jesus.”

Now Dex caught something on the radio. It was a voice, a masculine rumble distorted by static, too faint to decipher. He turned up the volume but the intelligibility didn’t improve.

“Put the radio on top of the refrigerator,” Evelyn said. “It always works better up there.”

He did so. The reception was marginally better, but the station faded in and out. Nevertheless, the three of them strained to hear what they could.

And for a time, the broadcast was quite clear.

Moments later it faded altogether. Dex took the radio down and switched it off.

Evelyn said, “Did anyone understand any of that?”

“It sounded like a newscast,” Howard said cautiously.

“Or a radio play,” Evelyn said. “That’s what I thought of.”

Dex shook his head. “There hasn’t been a radio play on the air since 1950. Howard’s right. It was a news broadcast.”

“But I thought—” Evelyn gave a small, puzzled laugh. “I thought the announcer said something about ‘the Spaniards.’ A war with the Spaniards.”

“He did,” Dex said.

For a few moments, the announcer’s bored voice had risen from the rattle of noise and distance into rough intelligibility. Issued was the first word Dex had understood.

… issued reports of great successes along the Jalisco front in the war with the Spaniards. Casualties were light and the cities of Colima and Manzanillo are under Allied control. In the Bahia, amphibian landings—

Then the swell of electronic noise buried the voice.

“Pardon me,” Howard said, “but what the hell kind of accent was that? Guy sounds like a Norwegian funeral director on Quaaludes. And excuse me, but Spaniards? It’s like the news from 1898. It has to be a joke. Or, Evelyn’s right, some kind of radio drama.”