Case file
Dead Air
The premise
New York, Sunday, October 30, 1938. On another network, actors are reading a Martian invasion, and half the town believes it. On the twenty-first floor of the Hanover Building, station WKLN plays its own live hour, 20:00 to 21:00, like every Sunday.
At 19:30 Elmore Kane came up from the network with typed pages and an order signed downtown. At 20:47:10 the station went off the air. Ninety seconds of dead air, heard across the whole city. At 21:25 the night man found Kane in the transmitter room, at the foot of the open transmitter bay.
The elevator boy kept the only car all night: nobody came up, nobody went down. The fire stairs were bolted from the inside. Every police car in the city is out chasing Martians that never landed; the precinct sends a man at 08:00. You have three rounds.
Who is at the table
Everyone introduces themselves with one public line before a word is said. Nothing below is a clue — this is only what the whole table already knows.
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Cy Loomis
The sponsor's man from Corona Soap. He sits in the glass booth and counts the minutes his money buys.
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June Calloway
The lead of the Sunday hour. Radio has kept her famous and invisible for six years.
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Gil Hartley
Director of the hour: the stopwatch, the cue light and the timing sheet. The show ends on the second because he says so.
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Ada Prewitt
Chief engineer. Eleven years on the board, and the transmitter room down the hall is hers alone.
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Dutch Brenner
The sound-effects man. Doors, rain, hoofbeats and thunder live on his table, and he plays them like an organ.
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Vernon Pike
The station's announcer for nine years. Listeners trust his voice more than the news it reads.
Where you are
The twenty-first floor: Studio A behind double glass, the control room with the board, the client booth, one corridor, and the transmitter room at its end — the door every voice in the city passes through. The show ran to 21:00 because the show must. Six of you were on this floor from eight o'clock. Nobody else was.
Everyone at the table gets a character, three cards and one rule: you may hide things, you may not invent them. Between the acts a dossier appears on every phone with a new fact about somebody in the room — and it never clears anyone.
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