Saturday, October 6, 1973.
It’s a more-or-less typical Saturday morning at the Ransoms’. The breakfast plates are being washed and dried by Eddie and Charley, Jane is reading the Saturday Examiner in the living room while the Saturday morning cartoons play (Bailey’s Comets, the new DePatie-Freleng roller-skating cartoon, has just finished up on KPIX-5 in favor of one of the new hour-long New Scooby-Doo Movies) and Melanie helps the kids out in the kitchen (and does some prep for dinner tonight). Archie has maybe moved into the den. That's when Archie hears it, a ringing from his office. Not the familiar ringing of his office phone but the much less frequently heard bell on his office Telex machine. From work.
Archie puts down whatever he was reading — maybe Life magazine or Time or something else more or less middle-of-the-road and current affairs-ish — and heads to his office with much trepidation. No good news has ever come over that wire, on a Saturday no less.
And after Archie rips off the Telex paper and reads the Top Secret dispatch that's just come in from Granite Peak and read what's on it, that streak definitely stands.
URIEL’s preliminary assessment of the data trove mined by Charley from ALLOCHTHON’s computer system.