CHAPTER 8

PLAGUE!

In the control room the interstellar radio and teletype-translator were silent. The red light on the call board was still blinking; Tiger turned it off with a snap. "Here's the message that just came in, as near as I can make out," he said, "and if you can make sense of it, you're way ahead of me."

The message was a single word, teletyped in the center of a blue dispatch sheet:

GREETINGS

"This is all?" Jack said.

"That's every bit of it. They repeated it half a dozen times, just like that."

"Who repeated it?" Dal asked. "Where are the identification symbols?"