“Look, it’s maybe better now to just call me ‘Jim,’ rather than ‘Captain’ or ‘Skipper.’ I’m not captain of anything now. But, yeah, you got a point there. Did Zelig leave it as they evacuated? Or…” He paused to think it through. “Did he come back here after… after whatever it was had happened? If he did, is there some other kind of message for us?”
There was.
Chapter Fourteen
Jim Hilton was furious with himself.
Though he wasn’t the oldest of the crew—Mac had that dubious honor—he was certainly the most senior. Supposedly the most experienced and the best able to command.
But he hadn’t figured it out as Kyle Lynch had. Zelig’s message outside the door had been deliberately coded and made obscure, so the general by then must have been fully aware of the dangerous threat to the base.
And Jim knew in his heart that he’d slipped up badly in overlooking the possibility that there might be another message somewhere within the sealed section of the Air Force base. But then, he hadn’t been used to thinking along conspiratorial lines.
His training had been running a starship and correlating the variety of experimentation on their missions.
“Could be a note or a tape,” he said. “Might be in code.”
“Zelig must have known that nobody had penetrated into our quarters,” said Carrie. “So it might just be out in the open.”
Steve Romero was the one to find it.
“Cassette player,” he called. “Bit of paper stuck under the lid that says ‘Play me.’ That’s all. Not signed, but it’s Zelig’s hand.”
They gathered around.
Beyond the lobby there’d been some muffled banging on the doors, as though the attackers were trying to force entrance. But Jim was confident that they would never manage to break in.
As Steve reached to switch on the player, the overhead lights flickered, went out for a moment, then came on again.
Mac looked at Jim. “Could be the bastards are trying to get at the power supply. If they find the link between here and the nuke generator, we’re in shit. Air and light and everything stops.”
“Right. Turn on the tape. Better hear it before we lose it.”
The red light came on, and the digital audiotape began to play. A faint hiss, then the familiar voice of General John Kennedy Zelig. It was an unlikely voice, high and thin, like a querulous old man’s, belying Zelig’s robust manner and appearance.
“Greeting to Captain Hilton and the crew of the Aquila. Welcome back to Earth, or what’s left of it. You’ve got this far, so you’ll be cognizant that there’ve been some changes around the old place. This tape is the only way we could think to debrief you and give you some minimal information. But you must realize that you are in great danger in the base. I am recording this here, on the spot, in the middle of June. I have only a small armed guard with me and I shall stay the shortest time possible. So I won’t waste words.”
Steve pressed the Pause button. “The old bugger sounds frightened.”
“Never.” Pete Turner laughed. “Zelig wasn’t frightened of anything.”
Jim shook his head. “No, Steve’s got something. There’s real strain in the voice. Said we were in danger, so he must have been when he made this tape for us. Carry on, Steve.”
The story that Zelig rattled off for them, in his dry, flat voice, kept them totally silent.
The population of Earth had been growing far too fast for far too long, and agrarian scientists had been concentrating their efforts on improving production of basic foodstuffs. Cereals were being developed to produce their own proteins. Pulses were grown in laboratory complexes that had extra nodules on their root clusters, effectively giving them their own tiny nitrate factories.
Hand in hand with peaceful developments walked the military scientist, looking for newer ways of waging and winning wars.
“A plant bacteriologist in Leeds, in England, discovered a mutant gene that produced toxins in plants similar to cancer in humans. The spores were wind- and water-borne, almost invisible and undetectable. Unstoppable.”
The lights went off again, and the tape stopped. This time it was several seconds longer before power was restored.