Standard Candle

At half past seven Bernie opened the dehydrator and put two fingers on the outermost wrap of tape to see whether it had stopped being sticky. It had. Eight hours at a hundred and thirty degrees and the reel came out dry, which meant she had a week, maybe ten days, before the binder went soft again and she had to decide all over again what was worth transferring. Delbert Pryor had left the museum six hundred and eleven cassettes, forty-one reels, and a shoebox of index cards. The cards were why she'd taken the collection at all. He had logged everything in ballpoint: date, frequency, station nickname, and a remarks line that got harder to read year by year until the last few cards were mostly shapes with a slant to them. Tobin came into the tape room with his coat still on. "You need to hear this." "I'm threading." "You can thread and hear." He put his phone face up on the workbench, on top of her deacidification log, and she moved it off the log without looking at him. The sound was a…