The haze of static turned into music so abruptly as Ginny crested the hill that she almost yelped in surprise. One minute she was getting nothing but a slow hiss that threatened to send her to sleep mid-drive, the next she heard the Beatles clear as day. "He says one and one and one is three...got to be good looking 'cause he's..."
Just as Ginny was starting to sing along, the words became a garbled mess as she coasted down the next hill, then faded back into static. She sighed, twisting the dial with one hand while using the other to navigate the winding downhill road, desperately seeking out another signal to help keep her awake. She would have laughed at the irony if she wasn't so annoyed-here she was, on her way to the biggest musical event she was ever likely to have a chance to witness, and she was driving a car without even so much as an eight-track.
No matter how carefully she adjusted the dial, though, Ginny couldn't get the Beatles back. She started turning the tuning knob slowly and steadily, going up and down in a desperate search for something other than white noise. With Babs chickening out at the last second, she was making the long drive to the festival all by herself. She needed something to keep her awake and driving.
A squeal of distortion melted into something Motown that Ginny didn't recognize, and she left it there for a moment. It was still music, even if it wasn't the Dead, and music beat silence any day. Ginny felt like she could never get enough of it-she studied it during the day, she practiced and played it all afternoon and every evening, and she still slept with the radio on. This drive was probably the longest stretch of silence she'd endured in years.
The Motown singer went faint and tinny as Ginny rounded another curve, and she fiddled with the dial a bit to try to keep the station coming in clear. She caught the end of the song and snatches of the beginning of another, but by then the music was more static than song and she gave up trying. She started searching for another station.
It took her almost five minutes to find anything, though. Ginny was technically past the Rockies, but she was still probably five hours' drive from the nearest big city and driving through winding foothills that seemed to block every radio signal with capricious malice. When she finally did pick up something, it was so distant and staticky that she didn't even know what she was listening to. Probably just her imagination, so bored by the moonless night and the endless stars overhead that she was transforming the crackling hiss into music through the power of suggestion.
Ginny turned the volume up, hoping to make out the melody. She thought she heard fragments of 'Cosmic Charlie', but that was probably just wishful thinking-this far out in the middle of nowhere, she was more likely to hear Tammy Wynette than the Grateful Dead. Still, she hummed the tune to 'Cosmic Charlie' anyway, making it fit the nebulous sounds she heard on the radio and imagining herself listening to them live in just a few days' time.
The song ended, and another one picked up after it. At least, Ginny thought another song was playing-she could definitely hear music now, albeit fuzzy music that sounded like it was coming from one of those distant stars overhead, but she could also hear someone talking in a voice too garbled to make out. Some sort of crosstalk, probably. She'd experienced it a few times on the long drive, when driving through an area that was right on the edges of the signal strength of two different stations that shared the same frequency. One second you were listening to one song, the next you were listening to two at once.
She turned the frequency knob with a safecracker's finesse, trying to clear out the interference and get the music to come in clearly, but all she got was a little less static in the mix. She couldn't get the speech out of the music or the music out of the speech, and neither one of them would resolve into anything intelligible.
The road curved north, though, and Ginny found as she followed it that she heard the music slightly clearer. She still didn't recognize the tune; whatever was playing, it was nothing she'd heard on her radio back home. It sounded vaguely psychedelic, with distortion coming from the instruments as well as from the signal, but not like anything she'd ever heard before. Ginny found herself fiddling with the knob again, trying to bring it into closer focus.
That almost turned out to be a mistake-Ginny lost the station entirely once or twice in her efforts to get it to come in clearer-but she finally got it to come in reasonably clearly. She still couldn't get rid of the man's voice underneath it all, but the music reduced his endless speech to an unintelligible murmur. Ginny let go of the dial and decided that would have to be good enough for now. She turned up the volume and hit the gas pedal, crossing her fingers and hoping that the music would last her through at least until sunrise.
