The space insignia hung on the opposite wall— with a maroon background, it carried a circle of tiny silver stars. Zelig looked at it, his mind hundreds of miles away. Then his gaze moved to the large map of the western half of what had been the continental United States of America.
His powerful hands clasped each other like long-lost brothers as he looked at the dozens of tiny pins that dotted the map, some clustered in nests. Red and yellow and blue and green and orange and white.
And black.
The black gathering mainly in the vicinity of Las Vegas, Nevada.
MARGARET DILDOW TABOR, the Chief of the Hunters of the Sun, was alone in her office, sitting at a similar desk, looking at a similar map.
Only hers was computer controlled and was covered with hundreds of flickering lights. If you could have put the two maps side by side, you’d have observed uncanny similarities in the patterns of the lights and the pins.
The biggest difference between the two opposing forces and their Intelligence was that she didn’t know where Aurora was, though she was feeling increasingly confident that her far-flung recon patrols were getting closer all the time. Now it was narrowed down to an area close to what used to be the Canadian border, in Washington State. Their comp predictions had it hidden in the suburbs of Seattle, but the Chief’s personal guess put it either in the Olympic Mountains or up in the Cascades.
“Always a man for trying to take the fucking high ground, weren’t you, General Zelig,” she whispered to herself. The socio-psychology program that had occupied four years out at UCLA flooded back into her mind. “Make sure you get both the territorial and the moral imperative.”
The main keyboard linked to a sophisticated WP console was at her side, and Margaret Tabor turned to it. She keyed in the code to search for probable locations of the missing members of the crew of the crashed Aquila. She still found it difficult to believe that she’d had the old woman and the journalist actually snug in the palm of her hand and then, through the foolishness of others, allowed them to escape.
Hilton and the others were far from being the only people whom the Hunters of the Sun wanted to contact. There were others, men and women with special skills.
Men and women who might be enlisted to the cause of the Hunters of the Sun.
Or men who might well prove of greater value to Zelig and his friends. Who would, therefore, be of grave potential harm to the Hunters of the Sun and needed to be removed. All of the existing evidence seemed to place Captain James Hilton and the others in the latter category.
Her capable fingers moved confidently over the concave keys until the screen gave her the access that she wanted. The bulk of the lights on her map dimmed, drawing attention to those that were colored silver.
The brightest was not all that far away from her base: Stevenson, where the USSV Aquila had crashed from the sky and flamed out on landing.
They’d tapped into crew information, so that there were single lights at the homes of everyone. Margaret Tabor knew them all by heart.
Hollywood for Hilton.
Aspen, Colorado, for the radio expert, Steve Romero.
Jeff Thomas, the journalist, had resided in San Francisco, though a pair of lights to the north and west of Vegas showed where he might be at present… with the woman.
“The bitch… dangerous bitch.”
Henderson McGill, the astrophysicist, had lived in New England. With two wives and a brood of children. She frowned at where he might now be. They’d checked up in Mystic and found only a burned shell of a house and a couple of graves.
There’d also been graves at the Hilton home.
Other glittering silver points of light indicated New Orleans and Albuquerque. Carrie Princip and Kyle Lynch.
Jed Herne had been the electronics whiz kid of the crew and had come from rural Vermont. And the last of them who were believed to be alive, Pete Turner from New York.
Communication in the crumbled society was so much more difficult to sustain.