The heavy airlock hatch slammed shut behind Julian with a dull, iron clang.
Instantly, the warm amber glow of Studio B was gone. The smell of tube dust and hot broth vanished, replaced by the violent slap of a fifty-five-knot Atlantic gale.
Sleet hit Julian’s face like handfuls of coarse salt thrown from the dark. The cold was immediate and predatory, clawing through the seams of his canvas coat and biting into his chest. Below him, the black swells of New Marrow Harbor hurled themselves against the jagged basalt breakwater, churning into white foam that vanished into the night.
Above him rose the tower.
It was a monstrous triangular lattice of structural steel, six hundred feet tall, tapering into the low ceiling of sea clouds. The half-inch steel guy-wires, drawn drum-tight into massive concrete anchors on the headland, hummed in the wind with a deep, vibrating drone.
The pitch of that hum was not sixty hertz.
Julian leaned his forehead against the icy steel corner post and listened. The vibration traveling through the metal vibrated at fifty-eight hertz. It was a dragging, unnatural resonance that pulled at the roots of his teeth.
He clicked on his headlamp. The halogen beam cut through the swirling sleet, illuminating the central ladder column rising straight up through the core of the triangular mast.
