Pictures at 11

by Norman Spinrad

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

It's just another sleazy, smoggy day at KLAX: But today is anything but normal. Green Army Commandos is what they call themselves. They're violent ecoterrorists, they're armed to the teeth, and they haven't just taken over the station - they're hijacking the news itself. The Bad News Is they've wired themselves and the station with enough high explosives to blow a significant hole in the planet they're trying to save - and they're ready to do it unless their entirely impossible demands are met. The Good News Is the KLAX Action News Team has an exclusive on the most explosive story of the decade - their own kidnapping - and the ratings are going through the roof.

Release date: February 18, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 453

Sample

THE BLAZER’S AIR-CONDITIONING sealed Toby Inman away from the ninety-five-degree June heat and saturation smog but did nothing to shield him from the surly boredom of the stop-and-go traffic, so as he inched along east on Sunset toward the station, Toby—like several million of his fellow Angelenos—found himself wishing he really could take the subway to work.

Even though his schedule put him inbound against the outbound flow and in theory outside the rush hour too, even though his commute from Van Nuys to East Hollywood was a tool around the block by Los Angeles standards, it still took him half an hour minimum to get to work no matter what clever route he tried through L.A.’s more or less permanent gridlock.

The subway, pushed through by an unholy coalition of ecological dreamers, Congressional pork-barrel barons, and Los Angeles real-estate mavens, and built at hideous taxpayers’ expense, had a line that in theory would whip him from the Valley to Hollywood in half the time without all this hassle.

In practice, of course, he would have to drive from the house to the nearest subway station, or have Claire drive him, and then either hike for twenty minutes or take a crawl through the Hollywood traffic on a bus at the other end.

Someday, perhaps, it would all go according to the fantasy. The city would somehow magically rearrange itself into a series of high-rise megamalls clustered around subway stations with nothing but parkland in between, cars would become redundant, the smog would clear, the drought would break, the coyotes would retreat back up into the hills, and the San Fernando Valley would become a verdant paradise of orange groves.

For sure. And I’ll be the prime-time anchor for major network news or numero uno at CNN, and Claire will be on the wagon, and the kids will be straight-A students, and Jesus H. Christ himself will be the mayor.

Toby pulled into the KLAX parking lot, drove around the side to the staff area, and parked the Blazer snug against the tire-stop with his very own name stenciled on the concrete in fading whitewash.

What a poor boy’s dream-come-true that had been the first time he did it three years ago!

Poor boy? Methinks you kick a bit too much shit, my son!

Actually, Toby had grown up in relative middle-class comfort in a suburb of Atlanta and had gotten through LSU on a little partial scholarship, a big parental loan, and nothing worse than the usual student odd jobs. With his clean blond good looks, his mellifluous middle-American accent with only a soft breath of Dixie, he had segued from DJing on college radio to an FM DJ job in Athens fresh out of college, to FM newsreader, AM newsreader, tank-town UHF TV, to WBLAR in Columbus, to WBLAR evening news anchor, without what could honestly be called an undue amount of sweat.

True, Columbus, Georgia, was hardly a major market. True that it had seemed like a hick town to Toby when he first arrived to take his first job in VHF TV, and true too that the locals had a thing against city slickers from Atlanta.

But it was also true that even the low reporter on the WBLAR airtime totem pole was instant celebrity in a town the size of Columbus, and a professional hunk like Toby had himself a high old time with the local ladies before finally allowing himself to be caught by Claire Bayley, fairly recent college homecoming queen and general belle of the local ball.

By that time, Toby was anchoring the morning news, and not that long after Ellis was born, he moved up to features at six and eleven, and when Billy was two, old Horace Stone retired, and they made Toby the evening anchor.

Columbus might not have exactly been Atlanta, but it wasn’t a bad little town at all, not when you were the cock of the local media walk, and your wife was a grande dame in what passed for local society. Of course Toby had no intention of staying in a place like Columbus forever, but life was good, and he was young, and his career was proceeding more or less nominally. A couple more years in Columbus, and he’d get picked up by a network affiliate in a somewhat bigger market and start moving up the chain to places like Birmingham, New Orleans, maybe even Atlanta, and eventually, who knows, CNN might need a boy like him for a national beat, and …

No, Toby wasn’t exactly some poor shit-kicker when the big call from Eddie Franker came. He was a real celebrity, a young man moving up at a measured pace, a major media catfish in this minor media pond. He had more or less expected to move onwards and upwards long about now …

Still, he hadn’t imagined it would be so far so fast.

Main evening news anchor in a small southern city to main evening news anchor in Los Angeles in a single bound! A 25 percent pay raise! A fat relocation bonus! Prime-time exposure in Hollywood! Surely a major network position could only be a year or two away!

If not exactly a poor boy’s dream-come-true, it sure had been a small-town news anchor’s dream of a major career move come true, or so it had seemed at the time.

At the time …

At the time, Claire had been all for it, and even the boys were caught up in the fantasy. Disneyland! Movie stars! Roger Rabbit! The Dodgers!

Franker had flown them all out from Atlanta business class, put them up in a by-the-week furnished apartment, found them a three-bedroom house in northern Van Nuys to rent, and in fact the biggest decision they had to make was the cars.

Back in Columbus, they had a four-year-old Dodge minivan as the main family vehicle and a three-year-old white Firebird convertible in which to arrive wherever as Prince and/or Princess of the city. This would obviously not do for Hollywood, the name by which they thought of all of Los Angeles at the time, besides which they could hardly drive both cars solo from Georgia to California.

So they hired a nanny for the boys, flew back, unloaded the Dodge at a distressed price, closed things down in Columbus, and drove the Firebird back to L.A., a romantic seven days on the road that improved their love life but did little for the transmission and rear end.

Most of the relocation bonus went into fixing up the Firebird and buying the Blazer. There had been much discussion of what to buy during the cross-country drive, with Claire entertaining fantasies of humongous Mercedeses and Toby dreaming of Porsches and Ferraris, but in the real world they needed a solid four-seater with plenty of cargo space. Such German and Italian fantasies were out of reach anyway; two young boys would destroy the upholstery, besides which Toby had his qualms about the political correctness of purchasing foreign iron.

So they finally settled on this four-wheel-drive Blazer, and did it up brown, or rather chrome and royal blue, loading it with everything from air-conditioning, CD-stereo, car phone, and leather upholstery to custom pinstriping, fog lights, long-distance lights, outsized mag wheels, and smoked-glass windows.

It might not have been a Porsche or a Ferrari, but the first time Toby pulled this downhome dreamboat into the KLAX lot and parked it in his very own space with the lettering still fresh and shiny had been a perfect Hollywood version of a Hollywood dream-come-true.

Toby sighed, turned off the engine, pocketed the keys, braced himself for the shock, opened the door, and stepped out of the protection of the air-conditioning and into the naked atmosphere of Planet Los Angeles.

As a son of the South, Toby had grown up accustomed to sultry climes, and indeed, degree for degree, Los Angeles’s dry desert heat would have been much more bearable than the same temperature in Georgia, let alone the steambath of a New Orleans summer, were it not for the smog.

But that was like saying that Chernobyl would be an okay place to live if only it wasn’t still radioactive. Old-time Angelenos claimed that the smog had been worse back in the 1960s, before various clean-air acts had cleaned up cars’ exhausts, but Toby found that mercifully hard to imagine.

You could see this shit even up close. The air had a strange kind of dull gray sparkiness to it, and everything inside it looked a bit washed of color, like a TV monitor with the gain set too low. Toby couldn’t exactly taste it, maybe, but he could feel it drying his eyeballs and sandpapering the back of his throat even on the short walk across the parking lot from his air-conditioned car to the air-conditioned building.

Yet this was only Hollywood. You could take Mulholland Drive along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains, and look down north into the Valley or south toward Torrance and Long Beach where the cityscape disappeared beneath crud that was visibly brown. On a really bad day, there were patches over certain stretches of freeway that shone a sickly luminous green.

And this was only June. According to the old-timers, meaning anyone who had been in L.A. more than ten years, this wasn’t even supposed to be the smog season; it used to be the end of the so-called rainy season.

Heather Blake had done one of her minifeatures on the smog and the disappearance of Southern California rainy seasons last Thursday. According to the chrome-dome from USC, all the good done by the air-quality laws in the past two or three decades had been overwhelmed by the population increase, human and automotive, more and more cars on the road that spent more and more dirty time idling in the gridlock traffic, plus the greenhouse warming, and the ozone erosion, and something about the snowfall in the Sierras and …

Toby shrugged. The bottom line was that the endless drought went on, the coyotes got more desperate, and the smog had been like this for about nine or ten months a year for as long as Toby had been here.

Like everything else about the Hollywood myth, even the fabled Southern Californian climate dissolved on the ground into the grubby reality of Los Angeles.

Including the KLAX building itself. What a letdown it had been at first sight! Toby had pictured a gleaming tower of black glass set in a vast white plaza festooned with palm trees. Only when he drove past Universal City a day later and saw the Black Tower did he realize that he had picked up his notion of a big-time television station on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood from a TV image of this studio headquarters in the Valley.

KLAX was indeed located on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, but in East Hollywood where the property values were more affordable, the palm trees bedraggled and moribund, and the neighbors ran to the likes of obscure Asian car dealerships, discount department stores, porn movie houses, and Thai pizza parlors.

The building itself was older and certainly seedier than the WBLAR building in Columbus—five stories of dirty pink stucco occupying about a quarter of a block.

There was a tall pipe-frame structure beside it holding the station logo shakily aloft and pretending to be a broadcast tower, another seedy piece of Hollywood illusion. Actually, nothing was broadcast from down here in the lowlands. The satellite dishes on the roof linked the station to the StarNet transponders, and a microwave antenna atop the phony broadcast tower beamed the local signal to the broadcast complex up in the hills used by most of the independents.

Toby ambled quickly around to the main front entrance. The building wasn’t much, but after all, when you thought about it, a local independent TV station in Los Angeles really needed no more floor space than the same sort of operation in Bumfuck, Mississippi.

Toby’s mood improved as soon as he stepped inside. Claire’s increasingly booze-sodden boredom, the boys’ school problems and isolated friendlessness, the necessity of driving them everywhere, the necessity of driving everywhere period, the endless traffic, the blinding heat, the choking smog, the damn coyotes—that was all Los Angeles, that was out there.

This was in here, this was The Station, and once you were inside, it didn’t matter all that much whether it was WBLAR in Columbus or KLAX in Los Angeles.

A sealed air-conditioned environment with no windows except for the offices. Cool. Windless. Optimum humidity. A little public lobby with only the emergency fire exit connecting it to the rest of the building. A receptionist in a glassed-off booth controlling access to the working interior. A bored security guard reading a dirty comic book in there with her.

Columbus or L.A., not all that different. Different accents from the off-air staff. Somewhat different graffiti in the toilet. Same corkboard bulletin boards. Same crummy coffee.

“Afternoon, Mr. Inman.”

“Afternoon, Dawnie.”

Same sort of greeting from the same sort of receptionist as she buzzed you inside, and probably the same sort of fantasy inside her head if you were the main news anchor, though Toby hadn’t checked that out as yet, and probably wouldn’t.

As the anchor-man hunk back in Columbus, married or not, Toby could have pretty much scored at will. But maybe because it had been so readily available, because he was the cock of the walk, and because he was already married to the belle of the burg, he had remained disgustingly and happily faithful.

In L.A., though, where there were hundreds of male faces more recognizable than his own and legions of wannabe actors who were hunkier, and where Claire was devolving into a bored Valley hausfrau under the pressure of unaccustomed anonymity and the ubiquitous presence of endless would-be starlets at least as good-looking as she was, and where Toby’s level of celebrity was reduced to the ability to maybe walk into some bar and eventually be dimly recognized as some nameless face off the tube by one of same—well, after a few drinks, a quickie in a convenient nearby motel with the hourly meter running was no longer always above him.

But while an uncomplicated piece of ass once in a while to keep your pecker up might be no worse than slightly sleazy, screwing around with station staff if you were an anchor, here, no less than in Columbus, was, moral questions aside, major stupid.

Nine times out of ten, they had fantasies of some kind of affair in their heads, and once it got through to them that all you were interested in was a quickie once in a while or a one-shot, they did tend to get vindictive, they did lose all motivation to be discreet, and, whatever his problems at home, Toby Inman wanted no such high-school intrigues in the workplace.

Toby stopped for a piss in the first-floor men’s room, then made his way to the green room to have his makeup applied.

KLAX, like any such independent in a major market these days, was a shoestring operation trying to survive on a minuscule market share. Mostly, the station ran moldy syndicate packages of network reruns dating back to Gilligan’s Island, I Dream of Jeannie, and of course the ever-popular Star Trek: The Geriatric Generation, ancient horror movies and westerns, syndicated soaps on their third run, old cartoons for the kiddies, taped wrestling, and things cheaper and worse when they were to be had.

Meaning that the only programming of its own that the station did was a cooking show, a few talk shows, the occasional feature, and live news at seven A.M., noon, six P.M., and eleven. Meaning that there were only two live broadcasting studios, both on the first floor, one for the standing newsroom set and the other for everything else, with the control room between them and the shared green room, such as it was, located across the corridor.

Some smartass had actually had the walls of the room painted a perky lime green long before Toby had arrived at KLAX, though by now years of smoke and greaseburger fumes had browned them to the usual grim institutional shade. The ceiling was grayish-white fiberboard, the carpeting the expected dusty brown, and the furniture was the usual collection of ancient mismatched sofas and armchairs and old motel tables with the veneer peeling along the edges.

The usual clanky refrigerator sat next to the usual rickety table holding the coffee machine and hot-water urn. An air-feed monitor flanked by speakers was hung high on the wall facing the door, the sound controllable by a rheostat mounted on the wall at shoulder level. Some prehistoric western was currently being broadcast, and the sound, as usual, was off.

At KLAX, though, the green room’s limited area was crowded by an untidy old desk laden with paints and powders and two chairs facing a mirror, for the management was so cheap that it doubled as the makeup studio. Melanie James, who apparently had been at the station for centuries, doubled, or rather quadrupled as relief receptionist, tape librarian, bookkeeper, and makeup artist. She was applying the final touches to Heather Blake, the evening weathergirl, a gilding of the lily that to Toby’s eyes seemed entirely redundant.

If anyone could have persuaded Toby to break his sensible resolution to keep his prick in his pants around the station, it was Heather, and the same applied to anyone else of the requisite gender and sexual orientation.

Heather Blake was a formidable piece of ass even by Hollywood standards. Built like the proverbial brick shithouse, with long yellow cornsilk hair and peaches-and-cream complexion that were apparently quite natural, bright-blue-eyed and swishy-tailed with a radiant young smile that could melt glass, Heather was perfect casting as the Midwestern blond bombshell.

But she was also the most relentlessly professional weathergirl in the business. Certainly the most serious weathergirl that Toby had ever encountered. She understood the scripts she was reading. She wrote them herself. She studied meteorology and climatology. Toby had seen her interpret raw weather-sat pix straight from the download. She had persuaded Franker (not even the old fart could deny Heather) to let her do the occasional “mini-doc” spot.

“Hi, Heather.”

“Hi, Toby.”

Heather was intelligent, friendly, prompt, professional, helpful, distant without being an ice goddess, and after a year and a half of working with her, that was really about all that Toby knew about her. Sometimes he had the feeling that “KLAX Weatherwoman Heather Blake” was a part someone else was playing.

Even now, Heather was trying to read some script or weather report or something while Melanie applied a final dot of powder to her forehead. Intense! Tantalizing, yet somehow intimidating and off-putting, and Toby had a feeling that was exactly the effect she intended.

By the time Melanie had finished applying his makeup, it was 5:36, and time, by Toby’s lights, to wander over to the set and prep himself for the 6:00 P.M. broadcast.

It was a pretty standard cut-rate newsroom set, with nothing much—or to tell the truth, nothing at all—in the way of bells and whistles to distinguish it from five hundred or a thousand other such newsroom sets across the country from Los Angeles to New York, Eureka to Bridgeport.

The anchor sat in the focus of a big crescent-shaped desk, or rather a fiberboard mock-up of same, walnut with black trim in this case, with the station logo beneath him for establishing shots. The weathergirl sat to his left and the sports reader to his right. The background was a blue matte; all background visuals were mixed in the control room.

The control room itself was two-faced, with one window looking out into studio B and one into this one, and a single mixing console and director’s position. The miking was fixed to the set positions, the microphones hidden behind the desk fairings. There were only two cameras, another cost-cutting measure; after all, as Franker pointed out to the displeasure of the directors, only one camera could be live at any given moment, and any halfway competent hack should be able to anticipate his next shot with a simple setup like this.

At least the three main air personalities didn’t have to share the same teleprompter; that cheesy KLAX was not. They all had their own—old see-through models on pedestals rather than state-of-the-art heads-up displays to be sure—but at least not primitive desktop monitors that made it impossible to maintain eye contact with the camera.

There was a printout of the script on the desk in front of Toby’s chair. As far as the director was concerned, this was a prop designed to convey the impression that he was a hardworking reporter who dug it out and wrote it up himself to anyone who still believed in the tooth fairy. But Toby Inman actually used it.

He had seen newsreaders walk on the set three minutes before airtime and read the whole thing cold off the prompter, but Toby believed in reading through the whole script beforehand.

You never knew. You didn’t want to tie your tongue up around unfamiliar syllables in some foreign language. You didn’t want to screw up the emphasis in a sentence or a paragraph because you didn’t know what you were going to say next until you read it. If you took the time to read the script through before airtime, you could think these things through, you could even ponder the content of what you were going to read on the air, develop an attitude toward the material, convey a bit of emotional sincerity, establish a rapport with your audience.

KLAX might be a struggling independent with horrendous ratings, but this was, after all, Los Angeles, and anyone might be watching. Besides which, Toby Inman was no aging has-been on the way down going through the motions; he had gone from FM DJ in Athens to prime-time independent major-market anchor in his first decade. This was not going to be the high point of his career, the last stop.

He was still young, he was telegenic, he hadn’t given up; he was still a rising TV newsman, and he believed in being professional.

GLANCING AT THE STUDIO AIR-FEED MONITOR, CARL MENDOZA noted with zero surprise that they were doing it again. The same stock footage of the same six gaunt and scraggly coyotes snarling at the camera to defend their favorite supermarket dumpster that they always used as the visual for the current coyote attack story.

“… and in Silverlake, five-year-old Elvira Garcia escaped serious injury thanks to the timely intervention of her mother, Sandra, but her Yorkshire terrier Wanda was carried off and apparently devoured by yet another marauding pack of coyotes, though no remains have yet been discovered. KLAX’s Terry Gill has details from the scene of the attack …”

Cut to Terry Gill’s taped interview with Mom, a heavyset middle-aged woman still clutching some kind of cute designer assault rifle as she poses awkwardly for the camera in front of a sprawling hillside bungalow dangerously shrouded in tinder-dry chaparral.

“… when I heard the screams and the yapping, I knew what was happening, we’ve had a lot of problems around here, so I grabbed my piece right away, but by the time I got outside, they were halfway up the hillside with poor Wanda, I got off a few bursts, but I don’t know if I hit anything …”

Carl tuned out the interview and Inman’s subsequent babble—serial killer apprehended, record dope bust in Venice, latest instapoll gives Seawater Referendum 5 percent edge, Elvis impersonator sights UFO over Griffith Park, pictures at eleven—as he usually did at this stage in the broadcast, with two minutes to go before his own slot, and concentrated on getting the pronunciation of the kid’s name right.

Nguyen Zyzmanski … Caramba, what a mouthful! A no-hitter by some goddamn slope-Polack rookie, would you believe it, could you pronounce it, and Carl had a feeling he had better learn, ’cause the kid had a Ryan-class fastball and a major-league knuckler, and he had walked only two in the process of writing it in the record books.

Why couldn’t the star of today’s sportscast have a nice easy All-American name, like, say, Carl Mendoza?

Bad thought, cholo! Do try to remember that all that’s as dead as your arm.

Carl had never had a knuckler, but as an eighteen-year-old straight out of high school, his fastball had been clocked at ninety-two that first season in the California League, sure he was wild, but he was averaging 9.8 Ks a game and was learning the split-finger when he was drafted, had hopes of jumping straight to Triple A.

Nam had ended all that, though he hadn’t given up on the dream until he had kicked around for three years afterward in the minors without ever getting his ERA below four. It hadn’t seemed like such a bad wound at the time, just enough shrapnel in his right arm to buy him a ticket back to The World.

Just enough to take the edge off his fastball, make his pitching arm ache after about three innings, make it painfully impossible to throw a curve. If he had been a power-hitting first baseman, say, he still could have made it, or at least as a DH in the AL. But as a pitcher—forget it, kid.

Not that forgetting it was easy. But at least he hadn’t ended up like one of those bitter professional Namvet losers you still saw cached out around the fringes of downtown, blown-out derelicts still blaming everything in their fucked-up lives on the war. Not Carl’s way. As a pitcher, he had learned to play it one inning at a time, one out at a time, one pitch at a time, don’t let the base runners get to you, be here now.

Even in Nam.

So there he was, handed the ball with the bases loaded, and nobody out, and the meat of the order coming up. Show ’em what you got, kid.

So he did.

He went LURP. Why? For the mad machismo of it all? To see if he could cut it? He was a nineteen-year-old frustrated ballplayer with his brains in his cojones, so quién sabe …

He found that he liked it, bad-ass missions deep behind the lines, company stuff under grunt contract. He liked the competitive edge of the game, not unlike baseball played with M-16s and grenades instead of a ball and a bat to a nineteen-year-old temporarily ex-hotshot minor-league fireballer. You could even move up to the big time if you racked up the stats. And in fact there was a CIA scout named Coleman looking him over on the mission when he took the hit.

Coleman had even offered him a cup of coffee with the Agency in the hospital afterward, but Carl still dreamed of beating the odds and making the majors. After he got cut off his last minor-league roster, he had drifted around odd-jobbing, drinking, and doping for a year before he finally got it together enough to approach Coleman and ask for a tryout, still about as politically conscious as an earthworm.

They put him through the CIA version of spring training, brushed up his Spanish, then optioned him to Guatemala, definitely the bushes, as part of some team supposedly assigned to train the locals in counterinsurgency tactics.

The whole thing turned out to be a front for the middle part of some coke-for-arms deal with sleazoid colonels in the early stages of inventing Manuel Noriega, and worse things clearly waiting, an unpleasantly fast education in the depths of Agency cynicism, not exactly the kind of scene that could keep an ex-ballplayer from the barrio rooting for the team he found himself playing on. Nor was the manager exactly entranced with his attitude when he chose to make it apparent, and they graciously let him go on the voluntary retirement list before they were forced to ax him.

More drifting around in downward spirals, factory jobs, a six-month failed marriage, security guard crap at a bank, then at an FM radio station in Bakersfield, where one of his ex-minor-league managers was reading the scores and got him started in the business. And now here he finally was, back in L.A., doing the sports for KLAX, not the majors for sure, but it paid enough, and free tickets to everything besides.

It was as good a job as he could get; he was over forty, and face it, he was probably about where he would have been after a career in the majors anyway, a retired pitcher doing the ball scores on a local TV station, trying to figure out how to pronounce the name of the latest phenom and pissing and moaning to himself about glory days gone by.

Noy-yen, Ziz-man-ski …

Be here now.

“And now, it’s time for sports—with KLAX’s own … Carl Mendoza!”

“… ON WALL STREET, THE NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE WAS down fourteen points on moderate volume, and in the broader and secondary markets …”

Heather Blake scanned the printout of tonight’s script again as she waited for her slot, not at all pleased with the cuts the producer had made, and not very pleased with Eddie Franker, either.

Quinlan she expected it from; to him she was just a pretentious little bimbo whose pants she had made clear he wasn’t going to get into, “Just stick to reading the weather and lookin’ good, will ya,” was his chronic attitude.

If it wasn’t for Eddie, she wouldn’t have been able to squeeze in any of her mini-docs. The station manager was old enough to be her father, old enough to be her grandfather maybe, and he was married enough and mature enough to accept it. Because his interest in her was strictly fatherly, Eddie could see her clearly enough to take her seriously, to treat her as a colleague, to force reluctant producers to “humor” his pet weathergirl with 120 seconds of something other than reading straight forecasts every once in a while.

But he had refused to stand up to Quinlan for her this time.

“Not this stuff, Heather, sorry.”

“But why, Eddie? It’s a good piece.”

Eddie Franker had shrugged, hadn’t quite met her eyes, did not look comfortable.

“It’s a good little bite, but it’s political opinion,” he said, “and that’s over the line.”

“I’m just reporting the findings of reputable scientists.”

“Their opinions on a politic