Читать бесплатно онлайн книгу автора  Armageddon—2419 A.D

Philip Francis Nowlan

Foreword

Else­where I have set down, for what­ever in­ter­est they have in this, the 25th cen­tury, my per­sonal rec­ol­lec­tions of the 20th cen­tury.

Now it oc­curs to me that my mem­oirs of the 25th cen­tury may have an equal in­ter­est 500 years from now—par­tic­u­larly in view of that unique per­spec­tive from which I have seen the 25th cen­tury, en­ter­ing it as I did, in one leap across a gap of 492 years.

This state­ment re­quires elu­ci­da­tion. There are still many in the world who are not fa­mil­iar with my unique ex­pe­ri­ence. Five cen­turies from now there may be many more, es­pe­cially if civ­i­liza­tion is fated to en­dure any worse con­vul­sions than those which have oc­curred be­tween 1975 AD and the present time.

I should state there­fore, that I, An­thony Rogers, am, so far as I know, the only man alive whose nor­mal span of eighty-one years of life has been spread over a pe­riod of 573 years. To be pre­cise, I lived the first twenty-nine years of my life be­tween 1898 and 1927; the other fifty-two since 2419. The gap be­tween these two, a pe­riod of nearly five hun­dred years, I spent in a state of sus­pended an­i­ma­tion, free from the rav­ages of katabolic pro­cesses, and with­out any ap­par­ent ef­fect on my phys­i­cal or men­tal fac­ul­ties.

When I be­gan my long sleep, man had just be­gun his real con­quest of the air in a sud­den se­ries of transoceanic flights in air­planes driven by in­ter­nal com­bus­tion mo­tors. He had barely be­gun to spec­u­late on the pos­si­bil­i­ties of har­ness­ing sub­atomic forces, and had made no fur­ther prac­ti­cal pen­e­tra­tion into the field of ethe­real pul­sa­tions than the prim­i­tive ra­dio and tele­vi­sion of that day. The United States of Amer­ica was the most pow­er­ful na­tion in the world, its po­lit­i­cal, fi­nan­cial, in­dus­trial and sci­en­tific in­flu­ence be­ing supreme; and in the arts also it was rapidly climb­ing into lead­er­ship.

I awoke to find the Amer­ica I knew a to­tal wreck—to find Amer­i­cans a hunted race in their own land, hid­ing in the dense forests that cov­ered the shat­tered and lev­eled ru­ins of their once mag­nif­i­cent cities, des­per­ately pre­serv­ing, and strug­gling to de­velop in their se­cret re­treats, the rem­nants of their cul­ture and sci­ence—and the undy­ing flame of their sturdy in­de­pen­dence.

World dom­i­na­tion was in the hands of Mon­go­lians and the cen­ter of world power lay in in­land China, with Amer­i­cans one of the few races of mankind un­sub­dued—and it must be ad­mit­ted in fair­ness to the truth, not worth the trou­ble of sub­du­ing in the eyes of the Han Air­lords who ruled North Amer­ica as tit­u­lar trib­u­taries of the Most Mag­nif­i­cent.

For they needed not the forests in which the Amer­i­cans lived, nor the re­sources of the vast ter­ri­to­ries these forests cov­ered. With the per­fec­tion to which they had re­duced the syn­thetic pro­duc­tion of ne­ces­si­ties and lux­u­ries, their re­mark­able de­vel­op­ment of sci­en­tific pro­cesses and me­chan­i­cal ac­com­plish­ment of work, they had no eco­nomic need for the forests, and no eco­nomic de­sire for the en­slaved la­bor of an un­ruly race.

They had all they needed for their mag­nif­i­cently lux­u­ri­ous and de­graded scheme of civ­i­liza­tion, within the walls of the fif­teen cities of sparkling glass they had flung sky­ward on the sites of an­cient Amer­i­can cen­ters, into the bow­els of the earth un­der­neath them, and with rel­a­tively small sur­round­ing ar­eas of agri­cul­ture.

Com­plete dom­i­na­tion of the air ren­dered com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween these cen­ters a mat­ter of ease and safety. Oc­ca­sional de­struc­tive raids on the waste lands were con­sid­ered all that was nec­es­sary to keep the “wild” Amer­i­cans on the run within the shel­ter of their forests, and pre­vent their be­com­ing a men­ace to the Han civ­i­liza­tion.

But nearly three hun­dred years of eas­ily main­tained se­cu­rity, the last cen­tury of which had been nearly ster­ile in sci­en­tific, so­cial and eco­nomic progress, had soft­ened and de­vi­tal­ized the Hans.

It had like­wise de­vel­oped, be­neath the pro­tect­ing fo­liage of the for­est, the growth of a vig­or­ous new Amer­i­can civ­i­liza­tion, re­mark­able in the mo­bil­ity and flex­i­bil­ity of its or­ga­ni­za­tion, in its con­quest of al­most in­su­per­a­ble ob­sta­cles, in the de­vel­op­ment and guard­ing of its in­dus­trial and sci­en­tific re­sources, all in an­tic­i­pa­tion of that “Day of Hope” to which it had been look­ing for­ward for gen­er­a­tions, when it would be strong enough to burst from the green chrysalis of the forests, soar into the up­per air lanes and de­stroy the yel­low in­cubus.

At the time I awoke, the “Day of Hope” was al­most at hand. I shall not at­tempt to set forth a de­tailed his­tory of the Se­cond War of In­de­pen­dence, for that has been recorded al­ready by bet­ter his­to­ri­ans than I am. In­stead I shall con­fine my­self largely to the part I was for­tu­nate enough to play in this strug­gle and in the events lead­ing up to it.

It all re­sulted from my in­ter­est in ra­dioac­tive gases. Dur­ing the lat­ter part of 1927 my com­pany, the Amer­i­can Ra­dioac­tive Gas Cor­po­ra­tion, had been keep­ing me busy in­ves­ti­gat­ing re­ports of un­usual phe­nom­ena ob­served in cer­tain aban­doned coal mines near the Wy­oming Val­ley, in Penn­syl­va­nia.

With two as­sis­tants and a com­plete equip­ment of sci­en­tific in­stru­ments, I be­gan the ex­plo­ration of a de­serted work­ing in a moun­tain­ous dis­trict, where sev­eral weeks be­fore, a num­ber of min­ing en­gi­neers had re­ported traces of carnotite1 and what they be­lieved to be ra­dioac­tive gases. Their re­port was not with­out foun­da­tion, it was ap­par­ent from the out­set, for in our ex­am­i­na­tion of the up­per lev­els of the mine, our in­stru­ments in­di­cated a vig­or­ous ra­dioac­tiv­ity.

On the morn­ing of De­cem­ber 15th, we de­scended to one of the low­est lev­els. To our sur­prise, we found no wa­ter there. Ob­vi­ously it had drained off through some break in the strata. We no­ticed too that the rock in the side walls of the shaft was soft, ev­i­dently due to the ra­dioac­tiv­ity, and pieces crum­bled un­der foot rather eas­ily. We made our way cau­tiously down the shaft, when sud­denly the rot­ted tim­bers above us gave way.

I jumped ahead, barely es­cap­ing the avalanche of coal and soft rock, but my com­pan­ions, who were sev­eral paces be­hind me, were buried un­der it, and un­doubt­edly met in­stant death.

I was trapped. Re­turn was im­pos­si­ble. With my elec­tric torch I ex­plored the shaft to its end, but could find no other way out. The air be­came in­creas­ingly dif­fi­cult to breathe, prob­a­bly from the rapid ac­cu­mu­la­tion of the ra­dioac­tive gas. In a lit­tle while my senses reeled and I lost con­scious­ness.

When I awoke, there was a cool and re­fresh­ing cir­cu­la­tion of air in the shaft. I had no thought that I had been un­con­scious more than a few hours, al­though it seems that the ra­dioac­tive gas had kept me in a state of sus­pended an­i­ma­tion for some­thing like 500 years. My awak­en­ing, I fig­ured out later, had been due to some shift­ing of the strata which re­opened the shaft and cleared the at­mos­phere in the work­ing. This must have been the case, for I was able to strug­gle back up the shaft over a pile of de­bris, and stag­ger up the long in­cline to the mouth of the mine, where an en­tirely dif­fer­ent world, over­grown with a vast for­est and no vis­i­ble sign of hu­man habi­ta­tion, met my eyes.

I shall pass over the days of men­tal agony that fol­lowed in my at­tempt to grasp the mean­ing of it all. There were times when I felt that I was on the verge of in­san­ity. I roamed the un­fa­mil­iar for­est like a lost soul. Had it not been for the ne­ces­sity of im­pro­vis­ing traps and crude clubs with which to slay my food, I be­lieve I should have gone mad.

Suf­fice it to say, how­ever, that I sur­vived this psy­chic cri­sis. I shall be­gin my nar­ra­tive proper with my first con­tact with Amer­i­cans of the year 2419 AD.

Armageddon 2419 A.D.

I Floating Men

My first glimpse of a hu­man be­ing of the 25th cen­tury was ob­tained through a por­tion of wood­land where the trees were thinly scat­tered, with a dense for­est be­yond.

I had been wan­der­ing along aim­lessly, and hope­lessly, mus­ing over my strange fate, when I no­ticed a fig­ure that cau­tiously backed out of the dense growth across the glade. I was about to call out joy­fully, but there was some­thing furtive about the fig­ure that pre­vented me. The boy’s at­ten­tion (for it seemed to be a lad of fif­teen or six­teen) was cen­tered tensely on the heavy growth of trees from which he had just emerged.

He was clad in rather tight-fit­ting gar­ments en­tirely of green, and wore a hel­met-like cap of the same color. High around his waist he wore a broad, thick belt, which bulked up in the back across the shoul­ders, into some­thing of the pro­por­tions of a knap­sack.

As I was tak­ing in these de­tails, there came a vivid flash and heavy det­o­na­tion, like that of a hand grenade, not far to the left of him. He threw up an arm and stag­gered a bit in a queer, glid­ing way; then he re­cov­ered him­self and slipped cau­tiously away from the place of the ex­plo­sion, crouch­ing slightly, and still fac­ing the denser part of the for­est. Every few steps he would raise his arm, and point into the for­est with some­thing he held in his hand. Wher­ever he pointed there was a ter­rific ex­plo­sion, deeper in among the trees. It came to me then that he was shoot­ing with some form of pis­tol, though there was nei­ther flash nor det­o­na­tion from the muz­zle of the weapon it­self.

After fir­ing sev­eral times, he seemed to come to a sud­den res­o­lu­tion, and turn­ing in my gen­eral di­rec­tion, leaped—to my amaze­ment sail­ing through the air be­tween the sparsely scat­tered trees in such a jump as I had never in my life seen be­fore. That leap must have car­ried him a full fifty feet, al­though at the height of his arc, he was not more than ten or twelve feet from the ground.

When he alighted, his foot caught in a pro­ject­ing root, and he sprawled gen­tly for­ward. I say “gen­tly” for he did not crash down as I ex­pected him to do. The only thing I could com­pare it with was a slow-mo­tion cin­ema, al­though I had never seen one in which hor­i­zon­tal mo­tions were reg­is­tered at nor­mal speed and only the ver­ti­cal move­ments were slowed down.

Due to my sur­prise, I sup­pose my brain did not func­tion with its nor­mal quick­ness, for I gazed at the prone fig­ure for sev­eral sec­onds be­fore I saw the blood that oozed out from un­der the tight green cap. Re­gain­ing my power of ac­tion, I dragged him out of sight back of the big tree. For a few mo­ments I bus­ied my­self in an at­tempt to staunch the flow of blood. The wound was not a deep one. My com­pan­ion was more dazed than hurt. But what of the pur­suers?

I took the weapon from his grasp and ex­am­ined it hur­riedly. It was not un­like the au­to­matic pis­tol to which I was ac­cus­tomed, ex­cept that it ap­par­ently fired with a but­ton in­stead of a trig­ger. I in­serted sev­eral fresh rounds of am­mu­ni­tion into its mag­a­zine from my com­pan­ion’s belt, as rapidly as I could, for I soon heard, near us, the sup­pressed con­ver­sa­tion of his pur­suers.

There fol­lowed a se­ries of ex­plo­sions round about us, but none very close. They ev­i­dently had not spot­ted our hid­ing place, and were fir­ing at ran­dom.

I waited tensely, bal­anc­ing the gun in my hand, to ac­cus­tom my­self to its weight and prob­a­ble throw.

Then I saw a move­ment in the green fo­liage of a tree not far away, and the head and face of a man ap­peared. Like my com­pan­ion, he was clad en­tirely in green, which made his fig­ure dif­fi­cult to dis­tin­guish. But his face could be seen clearly. It was an evil face, and had mur­der in it.

That de­cided me. I raised the gun and fired. My aim was bad, for there was no kick in the gun, as I had ex­pected, and I hit the trunk of the tree sev­eral feet be­low him. It blew him from his perch like a crum­pled bit of pa­per, and he floated down to the ground, like some limp, dead thing, gen­tly low­ered by an in­vis­i­ble hand. The tree, its trunk blown apart by the ex­plo­sion, crashed down.

There fol­lowed an­other se­ries of ex­plo­sions around us. Th­ese guns we were us­ing made no sound in the fir­ing, and my op­po­nents were ev­i­dently as much at sea as to my po­si­tion as I was to theirs. So I made no at­tempt to re­ply to their fire, con­tent­ing my­self with keep­ing a sharp look­out in their gen­eral di­rec­tion. And pa­tience had its re­ward.

Very soon I saw a cau­tious move­ment in the top of an­other tree. Ex­pos­ing my­self as lit­tle as pos­si­ble, I aimed care­fully at the tree trunk and fired again. A shriek fol­lowed the ex­plo­sion. I heard the tree crash down; then a groan.

There was si­lence for a while. Then I heard a faint sound of boughs swish­ing. I shot three times in its di­rec­tion, press­ing the but­ton as rapidly as I could. Branches crashed down where my shells had ex­ploded, but there was no body.

Then I saw one of them. He was start­ing one of those amaz­ing leaps from the bough of one tree to an­other, about forty feet away.

I threw up my gun im­pul­sively and fired. By now I had got­ten the feel of the weapon, and my aim was good. I hit him. The “bul­let” must have pen­e­trated his body and ex­ploded. For one mo­ment I saw him fly­ing through the air. Then the ex­plo­sion, and he had van­ished. He never fin­ished his leap. It was an­ni­hi­la­tion.

How many more of them there were I don’t know. But this must have been too much for them. They used a fi­nal round of shells on us, all of which ex­ploded harm­lessly, and shortly af­ter I heard them swish­ing and crash­ing away from us through the tree tops. Not one of them de­scended to earth.

Now I had time to give some at­ten­tion to my com­pan­ion. She was, I found, a girl, and not a boy. De­spite her bulky ap­pear­ance, due to the pe­cu­liar belt strapped around her body high up un­der the arms, she was very slen­der, and very pretty.

There was a stream not far away, from which I brought wa­ter and bathed her face and wound.

Ap­par­ently the mys­tery of these long leaps, the mon­key-like abil­ity to jump from bough to bough, and of the bod­ies that floated gen­tly down in­stead of fall­ing, lay in the belt. The thing was some sort of anti-grav­ity belt that al­most bal­anced the weight of the wearer, thereby tremen­dously mul­ti­ply­ing the propul­sive power of the leg mus­cles, and the lift­ing power of the arms.

When the girl came to, she re­garded me as cu­ri­ously as I did her, and promptly be­gan to quiz me. Her ac­cent and in­to­na­tion puz­zled me a lot, but nev­er­the­less we were able to un­der­stand each other fairly well, ex­cept for cer­tain words and phrases. I ex­plained what had hap­pened while she lay un­con­scious, and she thanked me sim­ply for sav­ing her life.

“You are a strange ex­change,” she said, ey­ing my cloth­ing quizzi­cally. Ev­i­dently she found it mirth-pro­vok­ing by con­trast with her own neatly ef­fi­cient garb. “Don’t you un­der­stand what I mean by ‘ex­change?’ I mean ah—let me see—a stranger, some­body from some other gang. What gang do you be­long to?” (She pro­nounced it “gan,” with only a sus­pi­cion of a nasal sound.)

I laughed. “I’m not a gang­ster,” I said. But she ev­i­dently did not un­der­stand this word. “I don’t be­long to any gang,” I ex­plained, “and never did. Does ev­ery­body be­long to a gang nowa­days?”

“Nat­u­rally,” she said, frown­ing. “If you don’t be­long to a gang, where and how do you live? Why have you not found and joined a gang? How do you eat? Where do you get your cloth­ing?”

“I’ve been eat­ing wild game for the past two weeks,” I ex­plained, “and this cloth­ing I—er—ah—.” I paused, won­der­ing how I could ex­plain that it must be many hun­dred years old.

In the end I saw I would have to tell my story as well as I could, piec­ing it to­gether with my as­sump­tions as to what had hap­pened. She lis­tened pa­tiently; in­cred­u­lously at first, but with more con­fi­dence as I went on. When I had fin­ished, she sat think­ing for a long time.

“That’s hard to be­lieve,” she said, “but I be­lieve it.” She looked me over with frank in­ter­est.

“Were you mar­ried when you slipped into un­con­scious­ness down in that mine?” she asked me sud­denly. I as­sured her I had never mar­ried. “Well, that sim­pli­fies mat­ters,” she con­tin­ued. “You see, if you were tech­ni­cally classed as a fam­ily man, I could take you back only as an in­vited ex­change and I, be­ing un­mar­ried, and no re­la­tion of yours, couldn’t do the invit­ing.”

II The Forest Gangs

She gave me a brief out­line of the very pe­cu­liar so­cial and eco­nomic sys­tem un­der which her peo­ple lived. At least it seemed very pe­cu­liar from my 20th cen­tury view­point.

I learned with amaze­ment that ex­actly 492 years had passed over my head as I lay un­con­scious in the mine.

Wilma, for that was her name, did not pro­fess to be a his­to­rian, and so could give me only a sketchy out­line of the wars that had been fought, and the man­ner in which such rad­i­cal changes had come about. It seemed that an­other war had fol­lowed the First World War, in which nearly all the Euro­pean na­tions had banded to­gether to break the fi­nan­cial and in­dus­trial power of Amer­ica. They suc­ceeded in their pur­pose, though they were beaten, for the war was a ter­rific one, and left Amer­ica, like them­selves, gasp­ing, bleed­ing and dis­or­ga­nized, with only the hol­low shell of a vic­tory.

This op­por­tu­nity had been seized by the Rus­sian Sovi­ets, who had made a coali­tion with the Chi­nese, to sweep over all Europe and re­duce it to a state of chaos.

Amer­ica, in­dus­tri­ally geared to world pro­duc­tion and the world trade, col­lapsed eco­nom­i­cally, and there en­sued a long pe­riod of stag­na­tion and des­per­ate at­tempts at eco­nomic re­con­struc­tion. But it was im­pos­si­ble to stave off war with the Mon­go­lians, who by now had sub­ju­gated the Rus­sians, and were aim­ing at a world em­pire.

In about 2109, it seems, the con­flict was fi­nally pre­cip­i­tated. The Mon­go­lians, with over­whelm­ing fleets of great air­ships, and a sci­ence that far out­stripped that of crip­pled Amer­ica, swept in over the Pa­cific and At­lantic Coasts, and down from Canada, an­ni­hi­lat­ing Amer­i­can air­craft, armies and cities with their ter­rific “dis­in­te­gra­tor” rays. Th­ese rays were pro­jected from a ma­chine not un­like a search­light in ap­pear­ance, the re­flec­tor of which, how­ever, was not ma­te­rial sub­stance, but a com­pli­cated bal­ance of in­ter­act­ing elec­tronic forces. This re­sulted in a ter­ri­bly de­struc­tive beam. Un­der its in­flu­ence, ma­te­rial sub­stance melted into “noth­ing­ness”; i.e., into elec­tronic vi­bra­tions. It de­stroyed all then known sub­stances, from air to the most dense met­als and stone.

They set­tled down to the es­tab­lish­ment of what be­came known as the Han Dy­nasty in Amer­ica, as a sort of prov­ince in their World Em­pire.

Those were ter­ri­ble days for the Amer­i­cans. They were hunted like wild beasts. Only those sur­vived who fi­nally found refuge in moun­tains, canyons and forests. Govern­ment was at an end among them. Anar­chy pre­vailed for sev­eral gen­er­a­tions. Most would have been ea­ger to sub­mit to the Hans, even if it meant slav­ery. But the Hans did not want them, for they them­selves had mar­velous ma­chin­ery and sci­en­tific process by which all dif­fi­cult la­bor was ac­com­plished.

Ul­ti­mately they stopped their ac­tive search for, and an­ni­hi­la­tion of, the widely scat­tered groups of now sav­age Amer­i­cans. So long as they re­mained hid­den in their forests, and did not ven­ture near the great cities the Hans had built, lit­tle at­ten­tion was paid to them.

Then be­gan the build­ing of the new Amer­i­can civ­i­liza­tion. Fam­i­lies and in­di­vid­u­als gath­ered to­gether in clans or “gangs” for mu­tual pro­tec­tion. For nearly a cen­tury they lived a no­madic and prim­i­tive life, mov­ing from place to place, in des­per­ate fear of the ca­sual and oc­ca­sional Han air raids, and the ter­ri­ble dis­in­te­gra­tor ray. As the fre­quency of these raids de­creased, they be­gan to stay per­ma­nently in given lo­cal­i­ties, or­ga­niz­ing upon lines which in many re­spects were sim­i­lar to those of the mil­i­tary house­holds of the Nor­man feu­dal barons, ex­cept that in­stead of gath­er­ing to­gether in cas­tles, their de­fense tac­tics ne­ces­si­tated a cer­tain scat­ter­ing of liv­ing quar­ters for fam­i­lies and in­di­vid­u­als. They lived vir­tu­ally in the open air, in the forests, in green tents, re­sort­ing to cam­ou­flage tac­tics that would con­ceal their pres­ence from air ob­servers. They dug un­der­ground fac­to­ries and lab­o­ra­to­ries, that they might bet­ter be shielded from the elec­tri­cal de­tec­tors of the Hans. They tapped the ra­dio com­mu­ni­ca­tion lines of the Hans, with crude in­stru­ments at first; bet­ter ones later on. They bent ev­ery ef­fort to­ward the re­de­vel­op­ment of sci­ence. For many gen­er­a­tions they la­bored as un­seen, un­known schol­ars of the Hans, pick­ing up their knowl­edge piece­meal, as fast as they were able to.

Dur­ing the ear­lier part of this pe­riod, there were many deadly wars fought be­tween the var­i­ous gangs, and oc­ca­sional coura­geous but child­ishly fu­tile at­tacks upon the Hans, fol­lowed by ter­ri­bly puni­tive raids.

But as knowl­edge pro­gressed, the sense of Amer­i­can broth­er­hood re­de­vel­oped. Re­cip­ro­cal ar­range­ments were made among the gangs over con­stantly in­creas­ing ar­eas. Trade de­vel­oped to a cer­tain ex­tent, as be­tween one gang and an­other. But the in­ter­change of knowl­edge be­came more im­por­tant than that of goods, as skill in the han­dling of syn­thetic pro­cesses de­vel­oped.

Within the gang, an econ­omy was de­vel­oped that was a com­pro­mise be­tween in­di­vid­ual lib­erty and a mil­i­tary so­cial­ism. The right of pri­vate prop­erty was lim­ited prac­ti­cally to per­sonal pos­ses­sions, but pri­vate priv­i­leges were many, and sa­credly re­garded. Stim­u­la­tion to achieve­ment lay chiefly in the win­ning of var­i­ous kinds of lead­er­ship and pre­rog­a­tives, and only in a very lim­ited de­gree in the hope of own­ing any­thing that might be clas­si­fied as “wealth,” and noth­ing that might be clas­si­fied as “re­sources.” Re­sources of ev­ery de­scrip­tion, for mil­i­tary safety and ef­fi­ciency, be­longed as a mat­ter of pub­lic in­ter­est to the com­mu­nity as a whole.

In the mean­time, through these many gen­er­a­tions, the Hans had de­vel­oped a lux­ury econ­omy, and with it the per­fec­tion of gilded vice and degra­da­tion. The Amer­i­cans were re­garded as “wild men of the woods.” And since they nei­ther needed nor wanted the woods or the wild men, they treated them as beasts, and were con­scious of no hu­man broth­er­hood with them. As time went on, and syn­thetic pro­cesses of pro­duc­ing foods and ma­te­ri­als were fur­ther de­vel­oped, less and less ground was needed by the Hans for the pur­poses of agri­cul­ture, and fi­nally, even the work­ing of mines was aban­doned when it be­came cheaper to build up metal from elec­tronic vi­bra­tions than to dig them out of the ground.

The Han race, de­vi­tal­ized by its vices and lux­u­ries, with ma­chin­ery and sci­en­tific pro­cesses to sat­isfy its ev­ery want, with vir­tu­ally no ne­ces­sity of la­bor, be­gan to as­sume a de­fen­sive at­ti­tude to­ward the Amer­i­cans.

And quite nat­u­rally, the Amer­i­cans re­garded the Hans with a deep, grim ha­tred. Con­scious of in­di­vid­ual su­pe­ri­or­ity as men, know­ing that lat­terly they were out­strip­ping the Hans in sci­ence and civ­i­liza­tion, they longed des­per­ately for the day when they should be pow­er­ful enough to rise and an­ni­hi­late the Yel­low Blight that lay over the con­ti­nent.

At the time of my awak­en­ing, the gangs were rather loosely or­ga­nized, but were con­sid­er­ing the es­tab­lish­ment of a spe­cial mil­i­tary force, whose spe­cial busi­ness it would be to harry the Hans and bring down their air ships when­ever pos­si­ble with­out caus­ing gen­eral alarm among the Mon­go­lians. This force was des­tined to be­come the nu­cleus of the na­tional force, when the Day of Retri­bu­tion ar­rived. But that, how­ever, did not hap­pen for ten years, and is an­other story.

Wilma told me she was a mem­ber of the Wy­oming Gang, which claimed the en­tire Wy­oming Val­ley as its ter­ri­tory, un­der the lead­er­ship of Boss Hart. Her mother and fa­ther were dead, and she was un­mar­ried, so she was not a “fam­ily mem­ber.” She lived in a lit­tle group of tents known as Camp 17, un­der a woman Camp Boss, with seven other girls.

Her du­ties al­ter­nated be­tween mil­i­tary or po­lice scout­ing and fac­tory work. For the two-week pe­riod which would end the next day, she had been on “air pa­trol.” This did not mean, as I first imag­ined, that she was fly­ing, but rather that she was on the look­out for Han ships over this out­ly­ing sec­tion of the Wy­oming ter­ri­tory, and had spent most of her time perched in the tree tops scan­ning the skies. Had she seen one she would have fired a “drop flare” sev­eral miles off to one side, which would ig­nite when it was float­ing ver­ti­cally to­ward the earth, so that the di­rec­tion or point from which if had been fired might not be guessed by the air­ship and bring a blast­ing play of the dis­in­te­gra­tor ray in her vicin­ity. Other mem­bers of the air pa­trol would send up rock­ets on see­ing hers, un­til fi­nally a scout equipped with an ul­tro­phone, which, un­like the an­cient ra­dio, op­er­ated on the ul­tronic ethe­real vi­bra­tions, would pass the warn­ing si­mul­ta­ne­ously to the head­quar­ters of the Wy­oming Gang and other com­mu­ni­ties within a ra­dius of sev­eral hun­dred miles, not to men­tion the few Amer­i­can rocket ships that might be in the air, and which in­stantly would duck to cover ei­ther through for­est clear­ings or by flat­ten­ing down to earth in green fields where their col­or­ing would prob­a­bly pro­tect them from ob­ser­va­tion. The fa­vorite Amer­i­can method of propul­sion was known as “rock­et­ing.” The “rocket” is what I would de­scribe, from my 20th cen­tury com­pre­hen­sion of the mat­ter, as an ex­tremely pow­er­ful gas blast, atom­i­cally pro­duced through the stim­u­la­tion of chem­i­cal ac­tion. Sci­en­tists of to­day re­gard it as a child­ishly sim­ple re­ac­tion, but by that very virtue, most eco­nom­i­cal and ef­fi­cient.

But to­mor­row, she ex­plained, she would go back to work in the cloth plant, where she would take charge of one of the syn­thetic pro­cesses by which those won­der­ful sub­sti­tutes for wo­ven fab­rics of wool, cot­ton and silk are pro­duced. At the end of an­other two weeks, she would be back on mil­i­tary duty again, per­haps at the same work, or maybe as a “con­tact guard,” on duty where the ter­ri­tory of the Wy­omings merged with that of the Delawares, or the “Susquan­nas” (Susque­han­nas) or one of the half dozen other “gangs” in that sec­tion of the coun­try which I knew as Penn­syl­va­nia and New York States.

Wilma cleared up for me the mys­tery of those fly­ing leaps which she and her as­sailants had made, and ex­plained in the fol­low­ing man­ner, how the in­ertron belt bal­ances weight:

“Jumpers” were in com­mon use at the time I “awoke,” though they were costly, for at that time in­ertron had not been pro­duced in very great quan­tity. They were very use­ful in the for­est. They were belts, strapped high un­der the arms, con­tain­ing an amount of in­ertron ad­justed to the wearer’s weight and pur­poses. In ef­fect they made a man weigh as lit­tle as he de­sired; two pounds if he liked.

“Floaters” are a later de­vel­op­ment of “jumpers”—rocket mo­tors en­cased in in­ertron blocks and strapped to the back in such a way that the wearer floats, when drift­ing, fac­ing slightly down­ward. With his mo­tor in op­er­a­tion, he moves like a diver, head­fore­most, con­trol­ling his di­rec­tion by twist­ing his body and by move­ments of his out­stretched arms and hands. Bal­last weights locked in the front of the belt ad­just weight and lift. Some men pre­fer a few ounces of weight in float­ing, us­ing a slight mo­tor thrust to over­come this. Others pre­fer a buoy­ance bal­ance of a few ounces. The in­ad­ver­tent drop­ping of weight is not a se­ri­ous mat­ter. The mo­tor thrust al­ways can be used to de­scend. But as an ex­tra pre­cau­tion, in case the mo­tor should fail, for any rea­son, there are built into ev­ery belt a num­ber of de­tach­able sec­tions, one or more of which can be dis­carded to bal­ance off any loss in weight.

“But who were your as­sailants,” I asked, “and why were you at­tacked?”

Her as­sailants, she told me, were mem­bers of an out­law gang, re­ferred to as “Bad Bloods,” a group which for sev­eral gen­er­a­tions had been un­der the dom­i­na­tion of con­science­less lead­ers who tried to ad­vance the in­ter­ests of their clan by tac­tics which their neigh­bors had come to re­gard as un­fair, and who in con­se­quence had been vir­tu­ally boy­cotted. Their pur­pose had been to slay her near the Delaware fron­tier, mak­ing it ap­pear that the crime had been com­mit­ted by Delaware scouts and thus em­broil the Delawares and Wy­omings in acts of reprisal against each other, or at least cause sus­pi­cions.

For­tu­nately they had not suc­ceeded in sur­pris­ing her, and she had been suc­cess­ful in dodg­ing them for some two hours be­fore the shoot­ing be­gan, at the mo­ment when I ar­rived on the scene.

“But we must not stay here talk­ing,” Wilma con­cluded. “I have to take you in, and be­sides I must re­port this at­tack right away. I think we had bet­ter slip over to the other side of the moun­tain. Who­ever is on that post will have a phone, and I can make a di­rect re­port. But you’ll have to have a belt. Mine alone won’t help much against our com­bined weights, and there’s lit­tle to be gained by jump­ing heavy. It’s al­most as bad as walk­ing.”

After a lit­tle search, we found one of the men I had killed, who had floated down among the trees some dis­tance away and whose belt was not badly dam­aged. In de­tach­ing it from his body, it nearly got away from me and shot up in the air. Wilma caught it, how­ever, and though it re­in­forced the lift of her own belt so that she had to hook her knee around a branch to hold her­self down, she saved it. I climbed the tree and, with my weight added to hers, we floated down eas­ily.

III Life in the 25th Century

We were de­layed in start­ing for quite a while since I had to ac­quire a few crude ideas about the tech­nique of us­ing these belts. I had been sit­ting down, for in­stance, with the belt strapped about me, en­joy­ing an ease sim­i­lar to that of a com­fort­able arm­chair; when I stood up with a nat­u­ral ex­er­tion of mus­cu­lar ef­fort, I shot ten feet into the air, with a wild in­stinc­tive thrash­ing of arms and legs that amused Wilma greatly.

But af­ter some prac­tice, I be­gan to get the trick of gaug­ing mus­cu­lar ef­fort to a min­i­mum of ver­ti­cal and a max­i­mum of hor­i­zon­tal. The cor­rect form, I found, was in a mea­sure com­pa­ra­ble to that of skat­ing. I found, also, that in for­est work par­tic­u­larly the arms and hands could be used to great ad­van­tage in swing­ing along from branch to branch, so pro­long­ing leaps al­most in­def­i­nitely at times.

In go­ing up the side of the moun­tain, I found that my 20th cen­tury mus­cles did have an ad­van­tage, in spite of lack of skill with the belt, and since the slopes were very sharp, and most of our leaps were up­ward, I could have dis­tanced Wilma eas­ily. But when we crossed the ridge and de­scended, she out­stripped me with her su­pe­rior tech­nique. Choos­ing the steep­est slopes, she would crouch in the top of a tree, and pro­pel her­self out­ward, lit­er­ally div­ing un­til, with the loss of hor­i­zon­tal mo­men­tum, she would as­sume a more up­right po­si­tion and float down­ward. In this man­ner she would some­times cover as much as a quar­ter of a mile in a sin­gle leap, while I leaped and scram­bled clum­sily be­hind, thor­oughly en­joy­ing the novel sen­sa­tion.

Half way down the moun­tain, we saw an­other green-clad fig­ure leap out above the tree tops to­ward us. The three of us perched on an out­crop­ping of rock from which a view for many miles around could be had, while Wilma hastily ex­plained her ad­ven­ture and my pres­ence to her fel­low guard; whose name was Alan. I learned later that this was the mod­ern form of He­len.

“You want to re­port by phone then, don’t you?” Alan took a com­pact packet about six inches square from a hol­ster at­tached to her belt and handed it to Wilma.

So far as I could see, it had no spe­cial re­ceiver for the ear. Wilma merely threw back a lid, as though she were open­ing a book, and be­gan to talk. The voice that came back from the ma­chine was as au­di­ble as her own.

She was queried closely as to the at­tack upon her, and at con­sid­er­able length as to my­self, and I could tell from the tone of that voice that its owner was not pre­pared to take me at my face value as read­ily as Wilma had. For that mat­ter, nei­ther was the other girl. I could re­al­ize it from the sus­pi­cious glances she threw my way, when she thought my at­ten­tion was else­where, and the man­ner in which her hand hov­ered con­stantly near her gun hol­ster.

Wilma was or­dered to bring me in at once, and in­formed that an­other scout would take her place on the other side of the moun­tain. So she closed down the lid of the phone and handed it back to Alan, who seemed re­lieved to see us de­part­ing over the tree tops in the di­rec­tion of the camps.

We had cov­ered per­haps ten miles, in what still seemed to me a sur­pris­ingly easy fash­ion, when Wilma ex­plained, that from here on we would have to keep to the ground. We were near­ing the camps, she said, and there was al­ways the pos­si­bil­ity that some small Han scout­ship, in­vis­i­ble high in the sky, might catch sight of us through a pro­jec­to­scope and thus find the gen­eral lo­ca­tion of the camps.

Wilma took me to the Scout of­fice, which proved to be a small build­ing of ir­reg­u­lar shape, con­form­ing to the trees around it, and sub­stan­tially con­structed of green sheet­like ma­te­rial.

I was re­ceived by the as­sis­tant Scout Boss, who re­ported my ar­rival at once to the his­tor­i­cal of­fice, and to of­fi­cials he called the Psy­cho Boss and the His­tory Boss, who came in a few min­utes later. The at­ti­tude of all three men was at first po­lite but skep­ti­cal, and Wilma’s ar­dent ad­vo­cacy seemed to amuse them se­cretly.

For the next two hours I talked, ex­plained and an­swered ques­tions. I had to ex­plain, in de­tail, the man­ner of my life in the 20th cen­tury and my un­der­stand­ing of cus­toms, habits, busi­ness, sci­ence and the his­tory of that pe­riod, and about de­vel­op­ments in the cen­turies that had elapsed. Had I been in a class­room, I would have come through the ex­am­i­na­tion with a very poor mark, for I was un­able to give any an­swer to fully half of their ques­tions. But be­fore long I re­al­ized that the ma­jor­ity of these ques­tions were de­signed as traps. Ob­jects, of whose pur­pose I knew noth­ing, were ca­su­ally handed to me, and I was watched keenly as I han­dled them.

In the end I could see both amaze­ment and be­lief be­gin to show in the faces of my in­quisi­tors, and at last the His­tor­i­cal and Psy­cho Bosses agreed openly that they could find no flaw in my story or re­ac­tions, and that un­be­liev­able as it seemed, my story must be ac­cepted as gen­uine.

They took me at once to Big Boss Hart. He was a portly man with a “poker face.” He would prob­a­bly have been the suc­cess­ful politi­cian even in the 20th cen­tury.

They gave him a brief out­line of my story and a re­port of their ex­am­i­na­tion of me. He made no com­ment other than to nod his ac­cep­tance of it. Then he turned to me.

“How does it feel?” he asked. “Do we look funny to you?”

“A bit strange,” I ad­mit­ted. “But I’m be­gin­ning to lose that dazed feel­ing, though I can see I have an aw­ful lot to learn.”

“Maybe we can learn some things from you, too,” he said. “So you fought in the First World War. Do you know, we have very lit­tle left in the way of records of the de­tails of that war, that is, the pre­cise con­di­tions un­der which it was fought, and the tac­tics em­ployed. We for­got many things dur­ing the Han ter­ror, and—well, I think you might have a lot of ideas worth think­ing over for our raid mas­ters. By the way, now that you’re here, and can’t go back to your own cen­tury, so to speak, what do you want to do? You’re wel­come to be­come one of us. Or per­haps you’d just like to visit with us for a while, and then look around among the other gangs. Maybe you’d like some of the oth­ers bet­ter. Don’t make up your mind now. We’ll put you down as an ex­change for a while. Let’s see. You and Bill Hearn ought to get along well to­gether. He’s Camp Boss of Num­ber 34 when he isn’t act­ing as Raid Boss or Scout Boss. There’s a va­cancy in his camp. Stay with him and think things over as long as you want to. As soon as you make up your mind to any­thing, let me know.”

We all shook hands, for that was one cus­tom that had not died out in five hun­dred years, and I set out with Bill Hearn.

Bill, like all the oth­ers, was clad in green. He was a big man. That is, he was about my own height, five feet eleven. This was con­sid­er­ably above the av­er­age now, for the race had lost some­thing in stature, it seemed, through the vi­cis­si­tudes of five cen­turies. Most of the women were a bit be­low five feet, and the men only a tri­fle above this height.

For a pe­riod of two weeks Bill was to con­fine him­self to camp du­ties, so I had a good chance to fa­mil­iar­ize my­self with the com­mu­nity life. It was not easy. There were so many mar­vels to ab­sorb. I never ceased to won­der at the strange com­bi­na­tion of rus­tic so­cial life and fever­ish in­dus­trial ac­tiv­ity. At least, it was strange to me. For in my ex­pe­ri­ence, in­dus­trial de­vel­op­ment meant crowded cities, ten­e­ments, paved streets, pro­fu­sion of ve­hi­cles, noise, hur­ry­ing men and women with strained or dull faces, vast struc­tures and or­nate pub­lic works.

Here, how­ever, was rus­tic sim­plic­ity, ap­par­ently iso­lated fam­i­lies and groups, liv­ing in the heart of the for­est, with a quar­ter of a mile or more be­tween house­holds, a to­tal ab­sence of crowds, no means of con­veyance other than the belts called jumpers, al­most con­stantly worn by ev­ery­body, and an oc­ca­sional rocket ship, used only for longer jour­neys, and un­der­ground plants or fac­to­ries that were to my mind more like lab­o­ra­to­ries and en­gine rooms; many of them were ex­ca­va­tions as deep as mines, with well fin­ished, lighted and com­fort­able in­te­ri­ors. Th­ese peo­ple were adepts at cam­ou­flage against air ob­ser­va­tion. Not only would their ac­tiv­ity have been un­sus­pected by an air­ship pass­ing over the cen­ter of the com­mu­nity, but even by an en­emy who might hap­pen to drop through the screen of the up­per branches to the floor of the for­est. The camps, or house­hold struc­tures, were all ir­reg­u­lar in shape and of col­ors that blended with the great trees among which they were hid­den.

There were 724 dwellings or “camps” among the Wy­omings, lo­cated within an area of about fif­teen square miles. The to­tal pop­u­la­tion was 8,688, ev­ery man, woman and child, whether mem­ber or “ex­change,” be­ing listed.

The plants were widely scat­tered through the ter­ri­tory also. Nowhere was any­thing like con­ges­tion per­mit­ted. So far as pos­si­ble, fam­i­lies and in­di­vid­u­als were as­signed to liv­ing quar­ters, not too far from the plants or of­fices in which their work lay.

All able-bod­ied men and women al­ter­nated in two-week pe­ri­ods be­tween mil­i­tary and in­dus­trial ser­vice, ex­cept those who were needed for house­hold work. Since work­ing con­di­tions in the plants and of­fices were ideal, and ev­ery­body thus had plenty of healthy out­door ac­tiv­ity in ad­di­tion, the pop­u­la­tion was sturdy and ac­tive. Lazi­ness was re­garded as nearly the great­est of so­cial of­fenses. Hard work and gen­eral merit were var­i­ously re­warded with ex­tra priv­i­leges, ad­vance­ment to po­si­tions of au­thor­ity, and with var­i­ous items of per­sonal equip­ment for con­ve­nience and lux­ury.

In leisure mo­ments, I got great en­joy­ment from sit­ting out­side the dwelling in which I was quar­tered with Bill Hearn and ten other men, watch­ing the oc­ca­sional passersby, as with leisurely, but swift move­ments, they swung up and down the for­est trail, ris­ing from the ground in long al­most-hor­i­zon­tal leaps, oc­ca­sion­ally swing­ing from one con­ve­nient branch over­head to an­other be­fore “slid­ing” back to the ground far­ther on. Nor­mal trav­el­ing pace, where these trails were straight enough, was about twenty miles an hour. Such things as au­to­mo­biles and rail­road trains (the mem­ory of them not more than a month old in my mind) seemed in­ex­press­ibly silly and fu­tile com­pared with such con­ve­nience as these belts or jumpers of­fered.

Bill sug­gested that I wan­der around for sev­eral days, from plant to plant, to ob­serve and study what I could. The en­tire com­mu­nity had been ap­prised of my com­ing, my rat­ing as an “ex­change” reach­ing ev­ery build­ing and post in the com­mu­nity, by means of ul­tronic broad­cast. Every­where I was wel­comed in an in­ter­ested and help­ful spirit.

I vis­ited the plants where ul­tronic vi­bra­tions were iso­lated from the ether and through slow pro­cesses built up into sub-elec­tronic, elec­tronic and atomic forms into the two great syn­thetic el­e­ments, ul­tron and in­ertron. I learned some­thing, su­per­fi­cially at least, of the pro­cesses of com­bined chem­i­cal and me­chan­i­cal ac­tion through which were pro­duced the var­i­ous forms of syn­thetic cloth. I watched the man­u­fac­ture of the ma­chines which were used at lo­ca­tions of con­struc­tion to pro­duce the var­i­ous forms of build­ing ma­te­ri­als. But I was par­tic­u­larly in­ter­ested in the mu­ni­tions plants and the rocket-ship shops.

Ul­tron is a solid of great molec­u­lar den­sity and mod­er­ate elas­tic­ity, which has the prop­erty of be­ing one hun­dred per­cent con­duc­tive to those pul­sa­tions known as light, elec­tric­ity and heat. Since it is com­pletely per­me­able to light vi­bra­tions, it is there­fore ab­so­lutely in­vis­i­ble and non-re­flec­tive. Its mag­netic re­sponse is al­most, but not quite, one hun­dred per­cent also. It is there­fore very heavy un­der nor­mal con­di­tions but ex­tremely re­spon­sive to the “re­pel­lor” or anti-grav­ity rays, such as the Hans use as “legs” for their air­ships.

In­ertron is the sec­ond great tri­umph of Amer­i­can re­search and ex­per­i­men­ta­tion with ul­tronic forces. It was de­vel­oped just a few years be­fore my awak­en­ing in the aban­doned mine. It is a syn­thetic el­e­ment, built up, through a com­pli­cated het­ero­dyn­ing of ul­tronic pul­sa­tions, from “in­fra-bal­anced” sub-ionic forms. It is com­pletely in­ert to both elec­tric and mag­netic forces in all the or­ders above the ul­tronic; that is to say, the sub-elec­tronic, the elec­tronic, the atomic and the molec­u­lar. In con­se­quence it has a num­ber of amaz­ing and valu­able prop­er­ties. One of these is the to­tal lack of weight. Another is a to­tal lack of heat. It has no molec­u­lar vi­bra­tion what­ever. It re­flects one hun­dred per­cent of the heat and light im­ping­ing upon it. It does not feel cold to the touch, of course, since it will not ab­sorb the heat of the hand. It is a solid, very dense in molec­u­lar struc­ture de­spite its lack of weight, of great strength and con­sid­er­able elas­tic­ity. It is a per­fect shield against the dis­in­te­gra­tor rays.

Rocket-guns are very sim­ple con­trivances so far as the mech­a­nism of launch­ing the bul­let is con­cerned. They are sim­ple light tubes, closed at the rear end, with a trig­ger-ac­tu­ated pin for pierc­ing the thin skin at the base of the car­tridge. This pierc­ing of the skin starts the chem­i­cal and atomic re­ac­tion. The en­tire car­tridge leaves the tube un­der its own power, at a very easy ini­tial ve­loc­ity, just enough to in­sure ac­cu­racy of aim; so the tube does not have to be of heavy con­struc­tion. The bul­let in­creases in ve­loc­ity as it goes. It may be solid or ex­plo­sive. It may ex­plode on con­tact or on time, or a com­bi­na­tion of these two.

Bill and I talked mostly of weapons, mil­i­tary tac­tics and strat­egy. Strangely enough he had no idea what­ever of the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the bar­rage, though the tremen­dous ef­fect of a “cur­tain of fire” with such high-ex­plo­sive pro­jec­tiles as these mod­ern rocket-guns used was ob­vi­ous to me. But the bar­rage idea, it seemed, has been lost track of com­pletely in the air wars that fol­lowed the First World War, and in the pe­cu­liar guerilla tac­tics de­vel­oped by Amer­i­cans in the later pe­riod of op­er­a­tions from the ground against Han air­ships, and in the gang wars which, un­til a few gen­er­a­tions ago I learned, had been al­most con­tin­u­ous.

“I won­der,” said Bill one day, “if we couldn’t work up some form of bar­rage to spring on the Bad Bloods. The Big Boss told me to­day that he’s been in com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the other gangs, and all are agreed that the Bad Bloods might as well be wiped out for good. That at­tempt on Wilma Deer­ing’s life and their ev­i­dent de­sire to make trou­ble among the gangs, has stirred up ev­ery com­mu­nity east of the Al­leghe­nies. The Boss says that none of the oth­ers will ob­ject if we go af­ter them. So I imag­ine that be­fore long we will. Now show me again how you worked that busi­ness in the Ar­gonne for­est. The con­di­tions ought to be pretty much the same.”

I went over it with him in de­tail, and grad­u­ally we worked out a mod­i­fied plan that would be bet­ter adapted to our more pow­er­ful weapons, and the use of jumpers.

“It will be easy,” Bill ex­ulted. “I’ll slide down and talk it over with the Boss to­mor­row.”

Dur­ing the first two weeks of my stay with the Wy­omings, Wilma Deer­ing and I saw a great deal of each other. I nat­u­rally felt a lit­tle closer friend­ship for her, in view of the fact that she was the first hu­man be­ing I saw af­ter wak­ing from my long sleep; her ap­pre­ci­a­tion of my sav­ing her life, though I could not have done oth­er­wise than I did in that mat­ter, and most of all my own ap­pre­ci­a­tion of the fact that she had not found it as dif­fi­cult as the oth­ers to be­lieve my story, op­er­ated in the same di­rec­tion. I could eas­ily imag­ine my story must have sounded in­cred­i­ble.

It was nat­u­ral enough too, that she should feel an un­usual in­ter­est in me. In the first place, I was her per­sonal dis­cov­ery. In the sec­ond, she was a girl of stu­dious and re­flec­tive turn of mind. She never got tired of my sto­ries and de­scrip­tions of the 20th cen­tury.

The oth­ers of the com­mu­nity, how­ever, seemed to find our friend­ship a bit amus­ing. It seemed that Wilma had a rep­u­ta­tion for be­ing cold to­ward the op­po­site sex, and so oth­ers, not be­ing able to ap­pre­ci­ate some of her fine qual­i­ties as I did, mis­in­ter­preted her at­ti­tude, much to their own de­light. Wilma and I, how­ever, ig­nored this as much as we could.

IV A Han Air Raid

There was a girl in Wilma’s camp named Gerdi Mann, with whom Bill Hearn was des­per­ately in love, and the four of us used to go around a lot to­gether. Gerdi was a dis­tinct type. Whereas Wilma had the usual dark brown hair and hazel eyes that marked nearly ev­ery mem­ber of the com­mu­nity, Gerdi had red hair, blue eyes and very fair skin. She has been dead many years now, but I re­mem­ber her vividly be­cause she was a throw­back in phys­i­cal ap­pear­ance to a cer­tain 20th cen­tury type which I have found very rare among mod­ern Amer­i­cans; also be­cause the four of us were en­gaged one day in a dis­cus­sion of this very point, when I ob­tained my first ex­pe­ri­ence of a Han air raid.

We were sit­ting high on the side of a hill over­look­ing the val­ley that teemed with hu­man ac­tiv­ity, in­vis­i­ble be­neath its blan­ket of fo­liage.

The other three, who knew of the Ir­ish but vaguely and in­def­i­nitely, as a race on the other side of the globe, which, like our­selves, had suc­ceeded in main­tain­ing a pre­car­i­ous and fugi­tive ex­is­tence in re­bel­lion against the Mon­go­lian dom­i­na­tion of the earth, were lis­ten­ing with in­ter­est to my the­ory that Gerdi’s an­ces­tors of sev­eral hun­dred years ago must have been Ir­ish. I ex­plained that Gerdi was an Ir­ish type, ev­i­dently a throw­back, and that her sur­name might well have been McMann, or McMa­han, and still more an­ciently “mac Mathghamhain.” They were in­ter­ested too in my sur­mise that “Gerdi” was the same name as that which had been “Gerty” or “Gertrude” in the 20th cen­tury.

In the mid­dle of our dis­cus­sion, we were star­tled by an alarm rocket that burst high in the air, far to the north, spread­ing a pall of red smoke that drifted like a cloud. It was fol­lowed by oth­ers at scat­tered points in the north­ern sky.

“A Han raid!” Bill ex­claimed in amaze­ment. “The first in seven years!”

“Maybe it’s just one of their ships off its course,” I ven­tured.

“No,” said Wilma in some ag­i­ta­tion. “That would be green rock­ets. Red means only one thing, Tony. They’re sweep­ing the coun­try­side with their dis beams. Can you see any­thing, Bill?”

“We had bet­ter get un­der cover,” Gerdi said ner­vously. “The four of us are bunched here in the open. For all we know they may be twelve miles up, out of sight, yet look­ing at us with a pro­jecto’.”

Bill had been sweep­ing the hori­zon hastily with his glass, but ap­par­ently saw noth­ing.

“We had bet­ter scat­ter, at that,” he said fi­nally. “It’s or­ders, you know. See!” He pointed to the val­ley.

Here and there a tiny hu­man fig­ure shot for a mo­ment above the fo­liage of the tree­tops.

“That’s bad,” Wilma com­mented, as she counted the jumpers. “No less than fif­teen peo­ple vis­i­ble, and all clearly ra­di­at­ing from a cen­tral point. Do they want to give away our lo­ca­tion?”

The stan­dard or­ders cov­er­ing air raids were that the pop­u­la­tion was to scat­ter in­di­vid­u­ally. There should be no group­ing, or even pair­ing, in view of the de­struc­tive­ness of the dis­in­te­gra­tor rays. Ex­pe­ri­ence of gen­er­a­tions had proved that if this were done, and ev­ery­body re­mained hid­den be­neath the tree screens, the Hans would have to sweep mile af­ter mile of ter­ri­tory, foot by foot, to catch more than a small per­cent­age of the com­mu­nity.

Gerdi, how­ever, re­fused to leave Bill, and Wilma de­vel­oped an equal ob­sti­nacy against quit­ting my side. I was in­ex­pe­ri­enced at this sort of thing, she ex­plained, quite ig­nor­ing the fact that she was too; she was only thir­teen or four­teen years old at the time of the last air raid.

How­ever, since I could not ar­gue her out of it, we leaped to­gether about a quar­ter of a mile to the right, while Bill and Gerdi dis­ap­peared down the hill­side among the trees.

Wilma and I both wanted a point of van­tage from which we might over­look the val­ley and the sky to the north, and we found it near the top of the ridge, where, pro­tected from vis­i­bil­ity by thick branches, we could look out be­tween the tree trunks, and get a good view of the val­ley.

No more rock­ets went up. Ex­cept for a few of those warn­ing red clouds, drift­ing lazily in a blue sky, there was no vis­i­ble in­di­ca­tion of man’s past or present ex­is­tence any­where in the sky or on the ground.

Then Wilma gripped my arm and pointed. I saw it; away off in the dis­tance; look­ing like a phan­tom di­ri­gi­ble air­ship, in its coat of low-vis­i­bil­ity paint, a bare spec­tre.

“Seven thou­sand feet up,” Wilma whis­pered, crouch­ing close to me. “Watch.”

The ship was about the same shape as the great di­ri­gi­bles of the 20th cen­tury that I had seen, but with­out the sus­pended con­trol car, en­gines, pro­pel­lors, rud­ders or el­e­vat­ing planes. As it loomed rapidly nearer, I saw that it was wider and some­what flat­ter than I had sup­posed.

Now I could see the re­pel­lor rays that held the ship aloft, like search­light beams faintly vis­i­ble in the bright day­light (and still faintly vis­i­ble to the hu­man eye at night). Ac­tu­ally, I had been in­formed by my in­struc­tors, there were two rays; the vis­i­ble one gen­er­ated by the ship’s ap­pa­ra­tus, and di­rected to­ward the ground as a beam of “car­rier” im­pulses; and the true re­pel­lor ray, the com­ple­ment of the other in one sense, in­duced by the ac­tion of the “car­rier” and re­act­ing in a con­cen­trat­ing up­ward di­rec­tion from the mass of the earth, be­com­ing suc­ces­sively elec­tronic, atomic and fi­nally molec­u­lar, in its na­ture, ac­cord­ing to var­i­ous ra­tios of dis­tance be­tween earth mass and “car­rier” source, un­til, in the last anal­y­sis, the ship it­self ac­tu­ally is sup­ported on an up­ward rush­ing col­umn of air, much like a ball con­tin­u­ously sup­ported on a foun­tain jet.

The raider neared with in­cred­i­ble speed. Its rays were both slanted astern at a sharp an­gle, so that it slid for­ward with tremen­dous mo­men­tum.

The ship was op­er­at­ing two dis­in­te­gra­tor rays, though only in a ca­sual, in­ter­mit­tent fash­ion. But when­ever they flashed down­ward with blind­ing bril­liancy, for­est, rocks and ground melted in­stan­ta­neously into noth­ing, where they played upon them.

When later I in­spected the scars left by these rays I found them some five feet deep and thirty feet wide, the ex­posed sur­faces be­ing lava-like in tex­ture, but of a pale, iri­des­cent, green­ish hue.

No sys­tem­atic use of the rays was made by the ship, how­ever, un­til it reached a point over the cen­ter of the val­ley—the cen­ter of the com­mu­nity’s ac­tiv­i­ties. There it came to a sud­den stop by shoot­ing its re­pel­lor beams sharply for­ward and eas­ing them back grad­u­ally to the ver­ti­cal, hold­ing the ship float­ing and mo­tion­less. Then the work of de­struc­tion be­gan sys­tem­at­i­cally.

Back and forth trav­eled the de­stroy­ing rays, plough­ing par­al­lel fur­rows from hill­side to hill­side. We gasped in dis­may, Wilma and I, as time af­ter time we saw it plough through sec­tions where we knew camps or plants were lo­cated.

“This is aw­ful,” she moaned, a ter­ri­fied ques­tion in her eyes. “How could they know the lo­ca­tion so ex­actly, Tony? Did you see? They were never in doubt. They stalled at a pre­de­ter­mined spot—and—and it was ex­actly the right spot.”

We did not talk of what might hap­pen if the rays were turned in our di­rec­tion. We both knew. We would sim­ply dis­in­te­grate in a split sec­ond into mere scat­tered elec­tronic vi­bra­tions. Strangely enough, it was this self-re­liant girl of the 25th cen­tury, who clung to me, a rel­a­tively prim­i­tive man of the 20th, less fa­mil­iar than she with the thought of this ter­ri­fy­ing pos­si­bil­ity, for moral sup­port.

We knew that many of our com­pan­ions must have been whisked into ab­so­lute nonex­is­tence be­fore our eyes in these few mo­ments. The whole thing par­a­lyzed us into men­tal and phys­i­cal im­mo­bil­ity for I do not know how long.

It couldn’t have been long, how­ever, for the rays had not ploughed more than thirty of their twenty-foot fur­rows or so across the val­ley, when I re­gained con­trol of my­self, and brought Wilma to her­self by shak­ing her roughly.

“How far will this rocket-gun shoot, Wilma?” I de­manded, draw­ing my pis­tol.

“It de­pends on your rocket, Tony. It will take even the long­est range rocket, but you could shoot more ac­cu­rately from a longer tube. But why? You couldn’t pen­e­trate the shell of that ship with rocket force, even if you could reach it.”

I fum­bled clum­sily with my rocket pouch, for I was ex­cited. I had an idea I wanted to try; a “hunch” I called it, for­get­ting that Wilma could not un­der­stand my an­cient slang. But fi­nally, with her help, I se­lected the long­est range ex­plo­sive rocket in my pouch, and fit­ted it to my pis­tol.

“It won’t carry seven thou­sand feet, Tony,” Wilma ob­jected. But I took aim care­fully. It was an­other thought that I had in my mind. The sup­port­ing re­pel­lor ray, I had been told, be­came molec­u­lar in char­ac­ter at what was called a log­a­rith­mic level of five (be­low that it was a purely elec­tronic “flow” or pul­sa­tion be­tween the source of the “car­rier” and the av­er­age mass of the earth). Below that level if I could project my ex­plo­sive bul­let into this stream where it be­gan to carry ma­te­rial sub­stance up­ward, might it not rise with the air col­umn, gath­er­ing speed and hit­ting the ship with enough im­pact to carry it through the shell? It was worth try­ing any­how. Wilma be­came greatly ex­cited, too, when she grasped the na­ture of my in­spi­ra­tion.

Fev­er­ishly I looked around for some for­ma­tion of branches against which I could rest the pis­tol, for I had to aim most care­fully. At last I found one. Pa­tiently I sighted on the hulk of the ship far above us, aim­ing at the far side of it, at such an an­gle as would, so far as I could es­ti­mate, bring my bul­let path through the for­ward re­pel­lor beam. At last the sights wa­vered across the point I sought and I pressed the but­ton gen­tly.

For a mo­ment we gazed breath­lessly.

Sud­denly the ship swung bow down, as on a pivot, and swayed like a pen­du­lum. Wilma screamed in her ex­cite­ment.

“Oh, Tony, you hit it! You hit it! Do it again; bring it down!”

We had only one more rocket of ex­treme range be­tween us, and we dropped it three times in our ex­cite­ment in in­sert­ing it in my gun. Then, forc­ing my­self to be calm by sheer will power, while Wilma stuffed her lit­tle fist into her mouth to keep from shriek­ing, I sighted care­fully again and fired. In a flash, Wilma had grasped the hope that this dis­cov­ery of mine might lead to the end of the Han dom­i­na­tion.

The elapsed time of the rocket’s in­vis­i­ble flight seemed an age.

Then we saw the ship fall­ing. It seemed to plunge lazily, but ac­tu­ally it fell with ter­rific ac­cel­er­a­tion, turn­ing end over end, its dis­in­te­gra­tor rays, out of con­trol, de­scrib­ing vast, wild arcs, and once cut­ting a gash through the for­est less than two hun­dred feet from where we stood.

The crash with which the heavy craft hit the ground re­ver­ber­ated from the hills—the mo­men­tum of eigh­teen or twenty thou­sand tons, in a sheer drop of seven thou­sand feet. A man­gled mass of metal, it buried it­self in the ground, with po­etic jus­tice, in the mid­dle of the smok­ing, semi-molten field of de­struc­tion it had been so de­lib­er­ately plough­ing.

The si­lence, the vacu­ity of the land­scape, was op­pres­sive, as the last echoes died away.

Then far down the hill­side, a sin­gle fig­ure leaped ex­ul­tantly above the fo­liage screen. And in the dis­tance an­other, and an­other.

In a mo­ment the sky was punc­tured by sig­nal rock­ets. One af­ter an­other the lit­tle red puffs be­came drift­ing clouds.

“Scat­ter! Scat­ter!” Wilma ex­claimed. “In half an hour there’ll be an en­tire Han fleet here from Nu-yok, and an­other from Bah-flo. They’ll get this in­stantly on their recor­do­graphs and lo­ca­tion find­ers. They’ll blast the whole val­ley and the coun­try for miles be­yond. Come, Tony. There’s no time for the gang to rally. See the sig­nals. We’ve got to jump. Oh, I’m so proud of you!”

Over the ridge we went, in long leaps to­ward the east, the coun­try of the Delawares.

From time to time sig­nal rock­ets puffed in the sky. Most of them were the “red warn­ings,” the “scat­ter” sig­nals. But from cer­tain of the oth­ers, which Wilma iden­ti­fied as Wy­oming rock­ets, she gath­ered that who­ever was in com­mand (we did not know whether the Boss was alive or not) was or­der­ing an ul­ti­mate rally to­ward the south, and so we changed our course.

It was a great pity, I thought, that the clan had not been equipped through­out its mem­ber­ship with ul­tro­phones, but Wilma ex­plained to me, that not enough of these had been built for dis­tri­bu­tion as yet, al­though gen­eral dis­tri­bu­tion had been con­tem­plated within a cou­ple of months.

We trav­eled far be­fore night­fall over­took us, try­ing only to put as much dis­tance as pos­si­ble be­tween our­selves and the val­ley.

When gath­er­ing dusk made jump­ing too dan­ger­ous, we sought a com­fort­able spot be­neath the trees, and con­sumed part of our emer­gency ra­tions. It was the first time I had tasted the stuff—a highly nu­tri­tive syn­thetic sub­stance called “con­cen­tro,” which was, how­ever, a bit bit­ter and un­palat­able. But as only a mouth­ful or so was needed, it did not mat­ter.

Nei­ther of us had a cloak, but we were both thor­oughly tired and happy, so we curled up to­gether for warmth. I re­mem­ber Wilma mak­ing some sleepy re­mark about our mat­ing, as she cud­dled up, as though the mat­ter were all set­tled, and my sur­prise at my own in­stant ac­cep­tance of the idea, for I had not con­sciously thought of her that way be­fore. But we both fell asleep at once.

In the morn­ing we found lit­tle time for love­mak­ing. The prac­ti­cal prob­lem fac­ing us was too great. Wilma felt that the Wy­oming plan must be to rally in the Susquanna ter­ri­tory, but she had her doubts about the wis­dom of this plan. In my ela­tion at my suc­cess in bring­ing down the Han ship, and my newly found in­ter­est in my charm­ing com­pan­ion, who was, from my view­point of an­other cen­tury, at once more highly civ­i­lized and yet more prim­i­tive than my­self, I had for­got­ten the omi­nous fact that the Han ship I had de­stroyed must have known the ex­act lo­ca­tion of the Wy­oming Works.

This meant, to Wilma’s log­i­cal mind, ei­ther that the Hans had per­fected new in­stru­ments as yet un­known to us, or that some­where, among the Wy­omings or some other nearby gang, there were traitors so de­graded as to com­mit that un­think­able act of traf­fick­ing in in­for­ma­tion with the Hans. In ei­ther con­tin­gency, she ar­gued, other Han raids would fol­low, and since the Susquan­nas had a highly de­vel­oped or­ga­ni­za­tion and more than usu­ally pro­duc­tive plants, the next raid might be ex­pected to strike them.

But at any rate it was clearly our busi­ness to get in touch with the other fugi­tives as quickly as pos­si­ble, so in spite of mus­cles that were sore from the ex­ces­sive leap­ing of the day be­fore, we con­tin­ued on our way.

We trav­eled for only a cou­ple of hours when we saw a mul­ti­col­ored rocket in the sky, some ten miles ahead of us.

“Bear to the left, Tony,” Wilma said, “and lis­ten for the whis­tle.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Haven’t they given you the rocket code yet?” she replied. “That’s what the green, fol­lowed by yel­low and pur­ple means; to con­cen­trate five miles east of the rocket po­si­tion. You know the rocket po­si­tion it­self might draw a play of dis­in­te­gra­tor beams.”

It did not take us long to reach the neigh­bor­hood of the in­di­cated ral­ly­ing, though we were now trav­el­ing be­neath the trees, with but an oc­ca­sional leap to a top branch to see if any more rocket smoke was float­ing above. And soon we heard a dis­tant whis­tle.

We found about half the Gang al­ready there, in a spot where the trees met high above a lit­tle stream. The Big Boss and Raid Bosses were busy re­or­ga­niz­ing the rem­nants.

We re­ported to Boss Hart at once. He was silent, but in­ter­ested, when he heard our story.

“You two stick close to me,” he said, adding grimly, “I’m go­ing back to the val­ley at once with a hun­dred picked men, and I’ll need you.”

V Setting the Trap

In­side of fif­teen min­utes we were on our way. A cer­tain amount of cau­tion was sac­ri­ficed for the sake of speed, and the men leaped away ei­ther across the for­est top, or over open spa­ces of ground, but con­cen­tra­tion was for­bid­den. The Big Boss named the spot on the hill­side as the ral­ly­ing point.

“We’ll have to take a chance on be­ing seen, so long as we don’t group,” he de­clared, “at least un­til within five miles of the ral­ly­ing spot. From then on I want ev­ery man to dis­ap­pear from sight and to travel un­der cover. And keep your ul­tro­phones open, and tuned on ten-four-seven-six.”

Wilma and I had re­ceived our bat­tle equip­ment from the Gear boss. It con­sisted of a long-gun, a hand­gun, with a spe­cial case of am­mu­ni­tion con­structed of in­ertron, which made the load weigh but a few ounces, and a short sword. This gear we strapped over each other’s shoul­ders, on top of our jump­ing belts. In ad­di­tion, we each re­ceived an ul­tro­phone, and a light in­ertron blan­ket rolled into a cylin­der about six inches long by two or three in di­am­e­ter. This fab­ric was ex­ceed­ingly thin and light, but it had con­sid­er­able warmth, be­cause of the mix­ture of in­ertron in its com­po­si­tion.

“This looks like busi­ness,” Wilma re­marked to me with sparkling eyes. (And I might men­tion a cu­ri­ous thing here. The word “busi­ness” had sur­vived from the 20th cen­tury Amer­i­can vo­cab­u­lary, but not with any mean­ing of “in­dus­try” or “trade,” for such things be­ing purely com­mu­nity ac­tiv­i­ties were spo­ken of as “work” and “clear­ing.” Busi­ness sim­ply meant fight­ing, and that was all.)

“Did you bring all this equip­ment from the val­ley?” I asked the Gear Boss.

“No,” he said. “There was no time to gather any­thing. All this stuff we cleared from the Susquan­nas a few hours ago. I was with the Boss on the way down, and he had me jump on ahead and ar­range it. But you two had bet­ter be mov­ing. He’s beck­on­ing you now.”

Hart was about to call us on our phones when we looked up. As soon as we did so, he leaped away, wav­ing us to fol­low closely.

He was a pow­er­ful man, and he darted ahead in long, swift, low leaps up the banks of the stream, which fol­lowed a fairly straight course at this point. By ex­tend­ing our­selves, how­ever, Wilma and I were able to catch up to him.

As we grad­u­ally syn­chro­nized our leaps with his, he out­lined to us, be­tween the grunts that ac­com­pa­nied each leap, his plan of ac­tion.

“We have to start the big busi­ness—unh—sooner or later,” he said. “And if—unh—the Hans have found any way of lo­cat­ing our po­si­tions—unh—it’s time to start now, al­though the Coun­cil of Bosses—unh—had in­tended wait­ing a few years un­til enough rocket ships have been—unh—built. But no mat­ter what the sac­ri­fice—unh—we can’t af­ford to let them get us on the run—unh. We’ll set a trap for the yel­low dev­ils in the—unh—val­ley if they come back for their wreck­age—unh—and if they don’t, we’ll go rock­et­ing for some of their lin­ers—unh—on the Nu-yok, Clee-lan, Si-ka-ga course. We can use—unh—that idea of yours of shoot­ing up the re­pel­lor—unh—beams. Want you to give us a demon­stra­tion.”

With fur­ther ad­mo­ni­tion to fol­low him closely, he in­creased his pace, and Wilma and I were taxed to our ut­most to keep up with him. It was only in as­cend­ing the slopes that my tougher mus­cles over­bal­anced his greater skill, and I was able to set the pace for him, as I had for Wilma.

We slept in greater com­fort that night, un­der our in­ertron blan­kets, and were off with the dawn, leap­ing cau­tiously to the top of the ridge over­look­ing the val­ley which Wilma and I had left.

The Boss scanned the sky with his ul­tro­scope, pa­tiently tak­ing some fif­teen min­utes to the task, and then swung his phone into use, call­ing the roll and giv­ing the men their in­struc­tions.

His first or­der was for us all to slip our ear and chest discs into per­ma­nent po­si­tion.

Th­ese ul­tro­phones were quite dif­fer­ent from the one used by Wilma’s com­pan­ion scout the day I saved her from the vi­cious at­tack of the ban­dit Gang. That one was con­tained en­tirely in a small pocket case. Th­ese, with which we were now equipped, con­sisted of a pair of ear discs, each a sep­a­rate and self-con­tained re­ceiv­ing set. They slipped into lit­tle pock­ets over our ears in the fab­ric hel­mets we wore, and shut out vir­tu­ally all ex­tra­ne­ous sounds. The chest discs were like­wise self-con­tained send­ing sets, strapped to the chest a few inches be­low the neck and ac­tu­ated by the vi­bra­tions from the vo­cal cords through the body tis­sues. The to­tal range of these sets was about eigh­teen miles. Re­cep­tion was re­mark­ably clear, quite free from the static that so marked the 20th cen­tury ra­dios, and of a strength in di­rect pro­por­tion to the dis­tance of the speaker.

The Boss’ set was triple pow­ered, so that his or­ders would cut in on any lo­cal con­ver­sa­tions, which were in­dulged in, how­ever, with great re­straint, and only for the pur­pose of main­tain­ing con­tacts.

I mar­veled at the ef­fi­ciency of this mod­ern method of bat­tle com­mu­ni­ca­tion in con­trast to the clumsy sig­nal­ing de­vices of more an­cient times; and also at other mil­i­tary con­trasts in which the 20th and 25th cen­tury meth­ods were the re­verse of each other in ef­fi­ciency. Th­ese mod­ern Amer­i­cans, for in­stance, knew lit­tle of hand to hand fight­ing, and noth­ing, nat­u­rally, of trench war­fare. Of bar­rages they were quite ig­no­rant, al­though they pos­sessed weapons of ter­rific power. And un­til my re­cent flash of in­spi­ra­tion, no one among them, ap­par­ently, had ever thought of the scheme of shoot­ing a rocket into a re­pel­lor beam and let­ting the beam it­self hurl it up­ward into the most vi­tal part of the Han ship.

Hart pa­tiently placed his men, first giv­ing his in­struc­tions to the camp­mas­ters, and then re­main­ing silent, while they placed the in­di­vid­u­als.

In the end, the hun­dred men were ringed about the val­ley, on the hill­sides and tops, each in a po­si­tion from which he had a good view of the wreck­age of the Han ship. But not a man had come in view, so far as I could see, in the whole process.

The Boss ex­plained to me that it was his idea that he, Wilma and I should in­ves­ti­gate the wreck. If Han ships should ap­pear in the sky, we would leap for the hill­sides.

I sug­gested to him to have the men set up their long-guns trained on an imag­i­nary cir­cle sur­round­ing the wreck. He bus­ied him­self with this af­ter the three of us leaped down to the Han ship, serv­ing as a tar­get him­self, while he called on the men in­di­vid­u­ally to aim their pieces and lock them in po­si­tion.

In the mean­time Wilma and I climbed into the wreck­age, but did not find much. Prac­ti­cally all of the in­stru­ments and ma­chin­ery had been twisted out of all rec­og­niz­able shape, or ut­terly de­stroyed by the ship’s dis­in­te­gra­tor rays which ap­par­ently had con­tin­ued to op­er­ate in the midst of its warped re­mains for some mo­ments af­ter the crash.

It was un­pleas­ant work search­ing the man­gled bod­ies of the crew. But it had to be done. The Han cloth­ing, I ob­served, was quite dif­fer­ent from that of the Amer­i­cans, and in many re­spects more like the garb to which I had been ac­cus­tomed in the ear­lier part of my life. It was made of syn­thetic fab­rics like silks, loose and com­fort­able trousers of knee length, and sleeve­less shirts.

No pro­tec­tion, ex­cept that against drafts, was needed, Wilma ex­plained to me, for the Han cities were en­tirely en­closed, with splen­did ar­range­ments for ven­ti­la­tion and heat­ing. Th­ese ar­range­ments of course were equally ad­e­quate in their air­ships. The Hans, in­deed, had quite a dis­taste for un­shaded day­light, since their light­ing ap­pa­ra­tus dif­fused a con­trolled amount of vi­o­let rays, mak­ing the un­mod­i­fied sun­light un­nec­es­sary for health, and un­de­sir­able for com­fort. Since the Hans did not have the se­cret of in­ertron, none of them wore anti-grav­ity belts. Yet in spite of the fact that they had to bear their own full weights at all times, they were phys­i­cally far in­fe­rior to the Amer­i­cans, for they lived lives of de­gen­er­a­tive phys­i­cal in­er­tia, hav­ing ma­chin­ery of ev­ery de­scrip­tion for the per­for­mance of all la­bor, and con­ve­nient con­veyances for any move­ment of more than a few steps.

Even from the twisted wreck­age of this ship I could see that seats, chairs and couches played an ex­tremely im­por­tant part in their scheme of ex­is­tence.

But none of the bod­ies were over­weight. They seemed to have been the bod­ies of men in good health, but mus­cu­larly much un­der­de­vel­oped. Wilma ex­plained to me that they had mas­tered the sci­ence of gland con­trol, and of course di­etet­ics, to the point where men and women among them not un­com­monly reached the age of a hun­dred years with ar­ter­ies and gen­eral health in splen­did con­di­tion.

I did not have time to study the ship and its con­tents as care­fully as I would have liked, how­ever. Time pressed, and it was our busi­ness to dis­cover some clue to the deadly ac­cu­racy with which the ship had spot­ted the Wy­oming Works.

The Boss had hardly fin­ished his ar­range­ments for the ring bar­rage, when one of the scouts on an em­i­nence to the north, an­nounced the ap­proach of seven Han ships, spread out in a great semi­cir­cle.

Hart leaped for the hill­side, call­ing to us to do like­wise, but Wilma and I had raised the flaps of our hel­mets and switched off our “speak­ers” for con­ver­sa­tion be­tween our­selves, and by the time we dis­cov­ered what had hap­pened, the ships were clearly vis­i­ble, so fast were they ap­proach­ing.

“Jump!” we heard the Boss or­der, “Deer­ing to the north. Rogers to the east.”

But Wilma looked at me mean­ingly and pointed to where the twisted plates of the ship, pro­ject­ing from the ground, of­fered a shel­ter.

“Too late, Boss,” she said. “They’d see us. Be­sides I think there’s some­thing here we ought to look at. It’s prob­a­bly their mag­netic graph.”

“You’re sign­ing your death war­rant,” Hart warned.

“We’ll risk it,” said Wilma and I to­gether.

“Good for you,” replied the Boss. “Take com­mand then, Rogers, for the present. Do you all know his voice, boys?”

A cho­rus of as­sent rang in our ears, and I be­gan to do some fast think­ing as the girl and I ducked into the twisted mass of metal.

“Wilma, hunt for that record,” I said, know­ing that by the sim­ple process of talk­ing I could keep the en­tire com­mand con­tin­u­ously in­formed as to the sit­u­a­tion. “On the hill­sides, keep your guns trained on the cir­cles and stand by. On the hill­tops, how many of you are there? Speak in ro­ta­tion from Bald Knob around to the east, north, west.”

In turn the men called their names. There were twenty of them.

I as­signed them by name to cover the var­i­ous Han ships, num­ber­ing the lat­ter from left to right.

“Train your rock­ets on their re­pel­lor rays about three-quar­ters of the way up, be­tween ships and ground. Aim is more im­por­tant than el­e­va­tion. Fol­low those rays with your aim con­tin­u­ously. Shoot when I tell you, not be­fore. Deer­ing has the record. The Hans prob­a­bly have not seen us, or at least think there are but two of us in the val­ley, since they’re set­tling with­out open­ing up dis­in­te­gra­tors. Any opin­ions?”

My ear discs re­mained silent.

“Deer­ing and I re­main here un­til they land and de­bark. Stand by and keep alert.”

Rapidly and eas­ily the largest of the Han ships set­tled to the earth. Three scouted sharply to the south, ris­ing to a higher level. The oth­ers floated mo­tion­less about a thou­sand feet above.

Peep­ing through a small fis­sure be­tween two plates, I saw the vast hulk of the ship come to rest full on the line of our prospec­tive ring bar­rage. A door clanged open a cou­ple of feet from the ground, and one by one the crew emerged.

VI The “Wyoming Massacre”

“They’re com­ing out of the ship.” I spoke qui­etly, with my hand over my mouth, for fear they might hear me. “One—two—three—four, five—six—seven—eight—nine. That seems to be all. Who knows how many men a ship like that is likely to carry?”

“About ten, if there are no pas­sen­gers,” replied one of my men, prob­a­bly one of those on the hill­side.

“How are they armed?” I asked.

“Just knives,” came the re­ply. “They never per­mit hand-rays on the ships. Afraid of ac­ci­dents. Have a rul­ing against it.”

“Leave them to us then,” I said, for I had a hastily formed plan in my mind. “You, on the hill­sides, take the ships above. Aban­don the ring tar­get. Di­vide up in train­ing on those re­pel­lor rays. You, on the hill­tops, all train on the re­pel­lors of the ships to the south. Shoot at the word, but not be­fore.

“Wilma, crawl over to your left where you can make a straight leap for the door in that ship. Th­ese men are all walk­ing around the wreck in a bunch. When they’re on the far side, I’ll give the word and you leap through that door in one bound. I’ll fol­low. Maybe we won’t be seen. We’ll over­power the guard in­side, but don’t shoot. We may es­cape be­ing seen by both this crew and ships above. They can’t see over this wreck.”

It was so easy that it seemed too good to be true. The Hans who had emerged from the ship walked round the wreck­age lazily, talk­ing in gut­tural tones, keenly in­ter­ested in the wreck, but quite un­sus­pi­cious.

At last they were on the far side. In a mo­ment they would be pick­ing their way into the wreck.

“Wilma, leap!” I al­most whis­pered the or­der.

The dis­tance be­tween Wilma’s hid­ing place and the door in the side of the Han ship was not more than fif­teen feet. She was al­ready crouched with her feet braced against a metal beam. Tak­ing the lift of that won­der­ful in­ertron belt into her cal­cu­la­tion, she dove head­fore­most, like a green pro­jec­tile, through the door. I fol­lowed in a split sec­ond, more clum­sily, but no less speed­ily, bruis­ing my shoul­der painfully, as I ric­o­cheted from the edge of the open­ing and brought up slid­ing against the un­con­scious girl; for she ev­i­dently had hit her head against the par­ti­tion within the ship into which she had crashed.

We had made some noise within the ship. Shuf­fling foot­steps were ap­proach­ing down a well lit gang­way.

“Any signs we have been ob­served?” I asked my men on the hill­sides.

“Not yet,” I heard the Boss re­ply. “Ships over­head still stand­ing. No beams have been bro­ken out. Men on ground ab­sorbed in wreck. Most of them have crawled into it out of sight.”

“Good,” I said quickly. “Deer­ing hit her head. Knocked out. One or more mem­bers of the crew ap­proach­ing. We’re not dis­cov­ered yet. I’ll take care of them. Stand a bit longer, but be ready.”

I think my last words must have been heard by the man who was ap­proach­ing, for he stopped sud­denly.

I crouched at the far side of the com­part­ment, mo­tion­less. I would not draw my sword if there were only one of them. He would be a weak­ling, I fig­ured, and I should eas­ily over­come him with my bare hands.

Ap­par­ently re­as­sured at the ab­sence of any fur­ther sound, a man came around a sort of bulk­head—and I leaped.

I swung my legs up in front of me as I did so, catch­ing him full in the stom­ach and knocked him cold.

I ran for­ward along the keel gang­way, search­ing for the con­trol room. I found it well up in the nose of the ship. And it was de­serted. What could I do to jam the con­trols of the ships that would not reg­is­ter on the record­ing in­stru­ments of the other ships? I gazed at the mass of con­trols. Lev­ers and wheels ga­lore. In the cen­ter of the com­part­ment, on a mas­sively braced uni­ver­sal joint mount­ing, was what I took for the re­pel­lor gen­er­a­tor. A dial on it glowed and a faint hum came from within its shield­ing metal­lic case. But I had no time to study it.

Above all else, I was afraid that some au­to­matic tele­phone ap­pa­ra­tus ex­isted in the room, through which I might be heard on the other ships. The risk of try­ing to jam the con­trols was too great. I aban­doned the idea and with­drew softly. I would have to take a chance that there was no other mem­ber of the crew aboard.

I ran back to the en­trance com­part­ment. Wilma still lay where she had slumped down. I heard the voices of the Hans ap­proach­ing. It was time to act. The next few sec­onds would tell whether the ships in the air would try or be able to melt us into noth­ing­ness. I spoke.

“Are you boys all ready?” I asked, creep­ing to a po­si­tion op­po­site the door and draw­ing my hand­gun.

Again there was a cho­rus of as­sent.

“Then on the count of three, shoot up those re­pel­lor rays—all of them—and for God’s sake, don’t miss.” And I counted.

I think my “three” was a bit weak. I know it took all the courage I had to ut­ter it.

For an ag­o­niz­ing in­stant noth­ing hap­pened, ex­cept that the land­ing party from the ship strolled into my range of vi­sion.

Then star­tled, they turned their eyes up­ward. For an in­stant they stood frozen with hor­ror at what­ever they saw.

One hurled his knife at me. It grazed my cheek. Then a cou­ple of them made a break for the door­way. The rest fol­lowed. But I fired point­blank with my hand­gun, press­ing the but­ton as fast as I could and aim­ing at their feet to make sure my ex­plo­sive rock­ets would make con­tact and do their work.

The det­o­na­tions of my rock­ets were deaf­en­ing. The spot on which the Hans stood flashed into a blind­ing glare. Then there was noth­ing there ex­cept their torn and mu­ti­lated corpses. They had been fairly bunched, and I got them all.

I ran to the door, ex­pect­ing any in­stant to be hurled into in­fin­ity by the sweep of a dis­in­te­gra­tor ray.

Some eighth of a mile away I saw one of the ships crash to earth. A dis­in­te­gra­tor ray came into my line of vi­sion, wa­vered un­cer­tainly for a mo­ment and then be­gan to sweep di­rectly to­ward the ship in which I stood. But it never reached it. Sud­denly, like a light switched off, it shot to one side, and a mo­ment later an­other vast hulk crashed to earth. I looked out, then stepped out on the ground.

The only Han ships in the sky were two of the scouts to the south which were hang­ing per­pen­dic­u­larly, and sag­ging slowly down. The oth­ers must have crashed down while I was deaf­ened by the sound of the ex­plo­sion of my own rock­ets.

Some­body hit the other re­pel­lor ray of one of the two re­main­ing ships and it fell out of sight be­yond a hill­top. The other, far­ther away, drifted down di­ag­o­nally, its dis­in­te­gra­tor ray play­ing vi­ciously over the ground be­low it.

I shouted with ex­ul­ta­tion and re­lief.

“Take back the com­mand, Boss!” I yelled.

His com­mands, send­ing out jumpers in pur­suit of the de­scend­ing ship, rang in my ears, but I paid no at­ten­tion to them. I leaped back into the com­part­ment of the Han ship and knelt be­side my Wilma. Her padded hel­met had ab­sorbed much of the blow, I thought; oth­er­wise, her skull might have been frac­tured.

“Oh, my head!” she groaned, com­ing to as I lifted her gen­tly in my arms and strode out in the open with her. “We must have won, dear­est, did we?”

“We most cer­tainly did,” I re­as­sured her. “All but one crashed and that one is drift­ing down to­ward the south; we’ve cap­tured this one we’re in in­tact. There was only one mem­ber of the crew aboard when we dove in.”

Less than an hour af­ter­ward the Big Boss or­dered the out­fit to tune in ul­tro­phones on three-twenty-three to pick up a trans­lated broad­cast of the Han in­tel­li­gence of­fice in Nu-yok from the Susquanna sta­tion. It was in the form of a pub­lic warn­ing and news item, and read as fol­lows:

“This is Public In­tel­li­gence Of­fice, Nu-yok, broad­cast­ing warn­ing to nav­i­ga­tors of pri­vate ships, and news of pub­lic in­ter­est. The squadron of seven ships, which left Nu-yok this morn­ing to in­ves­ti­gate the re­cent de­struc­tion of the GK-984 in the Wy­oming Val­ley, has been de­stroyed by a se­ries of mys­te­ri­ous ex­plo­sions sim­i­lar to those which wrecked the GK-984.

“The phones, view­plates, and all other sig­nal­ing de­vices of five of the seven ships ceased op­er­at­ing sud­denly at ap­prox­i­mately the same mo­ment, about seven-four-nine.” (Ac­cord­ing to the Han sys­tem of reck­on­ing time, seven and forty-nine one hun­dredths af­ter mid­night.) “After vi­o­lent dis­tur­bances the lo­ca­tion find­ers went out of op­er­a­tion. Elec­troac­tiv­ity reg­is­ters ap­plied to the ter­ri­tory of the Wy­oming Val­ley re­main dead.

“The In­tel­li­gence Of­fice has no in­di­ca­tion of the kind of dis­as­ter which over­took the squadron ex­cept cer­tain ev­i­dences of ex­plo­sive phe­nom­ena sim­i­lar to those in the case of the GK-984, which re­cently went dead while beam­ing the val­ley in a sys­tem­atic ef­fort to wipe out the works and camps of the tribes­men. The Of­fice con­sid­ers, as ob­vi­ous, the de­duc­tion that the tribes­men have de­vel­oped a new, and as yet un­de­ter­mined, tech­nique of at­tack on air­ships, and has rec­om­mended to the Heaven-Born that im­me­di­ate and un­lim­ited au­thor­ity be given the Nav­i­ga­tion In­tel­li­gence Divi­sion to make an in­ves­ti­ga­tion of this tech­nique and de­velop a de­fense against it.

“In the mean­time it urges that pri­vate nav­i­ga­tors avoid this ter­ri­tory in par­tic­u­lar, and in gen­eral hold as closely as pos­si­ble to the of­fi­cial in­ter-city routes, which now are be­ing pa­trolled by the en­tire force of the Mil­i­tary Of­fice, which is beam­ing the routes gen­er­ously to a width of ten miles. The Mil­i­tary Of­fice re­ports that it is at present con­sid­er­ing no re­tal­ia­tory raids against the tribes­men. With the Nav­i­ga­tion In­tel­li­gence Divi­sion, it holds that un­less fur­ther ev­i­dence of the na­ture of the dis­as­ter is de­vel­oped in the near fu­ture, the pub­lic in­ter­est will be bet­ter served, and at smaller cost of life, by a sci­en­tific re­search than by at­tempts at re­tal­i­a­tion, which may bring de­struc­tion on all ships en­gag­ing therein. So un­less fur­ther ev­i­dence ac­tu­ally is de­vel­oped, or the Heaven-Born or­ders to the con­trary, the Mil­i­tary will hold to a de­fen­sive pol­icy.

“Unof­fi­cial in­ti­ma­tions from Lo-Tan are to the ef­fect that the Heaven-Coun­cil has the mat­ter un­der con­sid­er­a­tion.

“The Nav­i­ga­tion In­tel­li­gence Of­fice per­mits the broad­cast of the fol­low­ing con­den­sa­tion of its de­tailed ob­ser­va­tions:

“The squadron pro­ceeded to a po­si­tion above the Wy­oming Val­ley where the wreck of the GK-984 was known to be, from the record of its lo­ca­tion finder be­fore it went dead re­cently. There the bot­tom pro­jec­to­scope re­lays of all ships reg­is­tered the wreck of the GK-984. Telepro­jec­to­scope views of the wreck and the bowl of the val­ley showed no ev­i­dence of the pres­ence of tribes­men. Nei­ther ship reg­is­ters nor base reg­is­ters showed any in­di­ca­tion of elec­troac­tiv­ity ex­cept from the squadron it­self. On or­ders from the Base Squadron Com­man­der, the LD-248, LK-745 and LG-25 scouted south­ward at 3,000 feet. The GK-43, GK-981 and GK-220 stood above at 2,500 feet, and the GK-18 landed to per­mit per­sonal in­spec­tion of the wreck by the sci­ence com­mit­tee. The party de­barked, leav­ing one man on board in the con­trol cabin. He set all pro­jec­to­scopes at uni­ver­sal fo­cus ex­cept RB-3,” (this meant the third pro­jec­to­scope from the bow of the ship, on the right-hand side of the lower deck) “with which he fol­lowed the land­ing group as it walked around the wreck.

“The first ab­nor­mal phe­nom­e­non recorded by any of the in­stru­ments at Base was that re­layed au­to­mat­i­cally from pro­jec­to­scope RB-4 of the GK-18, which as the party dis­ap­peared from view in back of the wreck, recorded two green mis­siles of roughly cylin­dri­cal shape, pro­jected from the wreck­age into the land­ing com­part­ment of the ship. At such close range these were not clearly de­fined, ow­ing to the uni­ver­sal fo­cus at which the pro­jec­to­scope was set. The Base Cap­tain of GK-18 at once or­dered the man in the con­trol room to in­ves­ti­gate, and saw him leave the con­trol room in com­pli­ance with this or­der. An in­stant later con­fused sounds reached the con­trol-room elec­tro­phone, such as might be made by a man fall­ing heav­ily, and foot­steps reap­proached the con­trol room, a fig­ure en­ter­ing and leav­ing the con­trol room hur­riedly. The Base Cap­tain now be­lieves, and the stills of the pho­torecord sup­port his be­lief, that this was not the crew mem­ber who had been left in the con­trol room. Be­fore the Base Cap­tain could speak to him he left the room, nor was any re­sponse given to the at­ten­tion sig­nal the Cap­tain flashed through­out the ship.

“At this point pro­jec­to­scope RB-3 of the ship now out of fo­cus con­trol, dimly showed the land­ing party walk­ing back to­ward the ship. RB-4 showed it more clearly. Then on both these in­stru­ments, a num­ber of blind­ing ex­plo­sives in rapid suc­ces­sion were seen and the elec­tro­phone re­lays reg­is­tered ter­rific con­cus­sions; the ship’s elec­tronic ap­pa­ra­tus and pro­jec­to­scopes ap­pa­ra­tus went dead.

“Re­ports of the other ships’ Base Ob­servers and Ex­ec­u­tives, backed by the pho­torecords, show the ex­plo­sions as tak­ing place in the midst of the land­ing party as it re­turned, ev­i­dently un­sus­pi­cious, to the ship. Then in rapid suc­ces­sion they in­di­cate that ter­rific ex­plo­sions oc­curred in­side and out­side the three ships stand­ing above close to their rep-ray gen­er­a­tors, and all sig­nals from these ships there­upon went dead.

“Of the three ships scout­ing to the south, the LD-248 suf­fered an iden­ti­cal fate, at the same mo­ment. Its records add lit­tle to the knowl­edge of the dis­as­ter. But with the LK-745 and the LG-25 it was dif­fer­ent.

“The re­lay in­stru­ments of the LK-745 in­di­cated the de­struc­tion by an ex­plo­sion of the rear rep-ray gen­er­a­tor, and that the ship hung stern down for a short space, swing­ing like a pen­du­lum. The for­ward view­plates and in­di­ca­tors did not cease func­tion­ing, but their records are chaotic, ex­cept for one pro­jec­to­scope still, which shows the bowl of the val­ley, and the GK-981 fall­ing, but no vis­i­ble ev­i­dence of tribes­men. The con­trol-room view­plate is also a chaotic record of the ship’s crew tum­bling and fall­ing to the rear wall. Then the for­ward rep-ray gen­er­a­tor ex­ploded, and all sig­nals went dead.

“The fate of the LG-25 was some­what sim­i­lar, ex­cept that this ship hung nose down, and drifted on the wind south­ward as it slowly de­scended out of con­trol.

“As its con­trol room was shat­tered, ver­bal re­port from its Ac­tion Cap­tain was pre­cluded. The record of the in­te­rior rear view­plate shows mem­bers of the crew climb­ing to­ward the rear rep-ray gen­er­a­tor in an at­tempt to es­tab­lish man­ual con­trol of it, and in­crease the lift. The pro­jec­to­scope re­lays, swing­ing in wide arcs, recorded lit­tle of value ex­cept at the ends of their swings. One of these, from a ma­chine which hap­pened to be set in tele­scopic fo­cus, shows sev­eral views of great value in pic­tur­ing the falls of the other ships, and all of the rear pro­jec­to­scope records en­able the re­con­struc­tion in de­tail of the pen­du­lum and tor­sional move­ments of the ship, and its sag to­ward the earth. But none of the views show­ing the for­est be­low con­tain any in­di­ca­tion of tribes­men’s pres­ence. A fi­nal ex­plo­sion put this ship out of com­mis­sion at a height of 1,000 feet, and at a point four miles S. by E. of the cen­ter of the val­ley.”

The mes­sage ended with a rep­e­ti­tion of the warn­ing to other air­men to avoid the val­ley.

VII Incredible Treason

After re­ceiv­ing this re­port, and re­as­sur­ances of sup­port from the Big Bosses of the neigh­bor­ing Gangs, Hart de­ter­mined to reestab­lish the Wy­oming Val­ley com­mu­nity.

A care­ful sur­vey of the ter­ri­tory showed that it was only the north­ern sec­tions and slopes that had been “beamed” by the first Han ship.

The syn­thetic-fab­rics plant had been par­tially wiped out, though the lower lev­els un­der­ground had not been reached by the dis-ray. The for­est screen above it, how­ever, had been an­ni­hi­lated, and it was de­ter­mined to aban­don it, af­ter re­mov­ing all us­able ma­chin­ery and ev­i­dences of the pro­cesses that might be of in­ter­est to the Han sci­en­tists, should they re­turn to the val­ley in the fu­ture.

The am­mu­ni­tion plant, and the rocket-ship plant, which had just been about to start op­er­a­tion at the time of the raid, were in­tact, as were the other im­por­tant plants.

Hart brought the Cam­boss up from the Susquanna Works, and laid out new camp lo­ca­tions, scat­ter­ing them far­ther to the south, and avoid­ing ground which had been seared by the Han beams and the im­me­di­ate lo­ca­tions of the Han wrecks.

Dur­ing this pe­riod, a sharp check was kept upon Han mes­sages, for the phone plant had been one of the first to be put in op­er­a­tion, and when it be­came ev­i­dent that the Hans did not in­tend any im­me­di­ate reprisals, the en­tire mem­ber­ship of the com­mu­nity was sum­moned back, and nor­mal life was re­sumed.

Wilma and I had been mar­ried the day af­ter the de­struc­tion of the ships, and spent this in­ter­ven­ing pe­riod in a de­light­ful hon­ey­moon, camp­ing high in the moun­tains. On our re­turn, we had a camp of our own, of course. We were as­signed to lo­ca­tion 1017. And as might be ex­pected, we had a great deal of ban­ter over which one of us was Camp Boss. The ti­tle stood af­ter my name on the Big Boss’ records, and those of the Big Cam­boss, of course, but Wilma air­ily held that this meant noth­ing at all—and gen­er­ally suc­ceeded in mak­ing me ad­mit it when­ever she chose.

I found my­self a full-fledged mem­ber of the Gang now, for I had elected to search no far­ther for a per­ma­nent al­liance, much as I would have liked to fa­mil­iar­ize my­self with this 25th cen­tury life in other sec­tions of the coun­try. The Wy­omings had a high morale, and had pros­pered un­der the rule of Big Boss Hart for many years. But many of the gangs, I found, were badly or­ga­nized, lacked strong hands in au­thor­ity, and were rife with in­trigue. On the whole, I thought I would be wise to stay with a group which had al­ready proved its friend­li­ness, and in which I seemed to have prospects of ad­vance­ment. Un­der these mod­ern so­cial and eco­nomic con­di­tions, the kind of in­di­vid­ual free­dom to which I had been ac­cus­tomed in the 20th cen­tury was im­pos­si­ble. I would have been as much of a nonen­tity in ev­ery phase of hu­man re­la­tion­ship by at­tempt­ing to avoid al­liances, as any man of the 20th cen­tury would have been po­lit­i­cally, who aligned him­self with no po­lit­i­cal party.

This en­tire mod­ern life, it ap­peared to me, judg­ing from my an­cient view­point, was or­ga­nized along what I called “po­lit­i­cal” lines. And in this con­nec­tion, it amused me to no­tice how uni­ver­sal had be­come the use of the word “boss.” The leader, the per­son in charge or au­thor­ity over any­thing, was a “boss.” There was as lit­tle for­mal­ity in his re­la­tions with his fol­low­ers as there was in the case of the 20th cen­tury po­lit­i­cal boss, and the same high re­spect paid him by his fol­low­ers as well as the same high con­sid­er­a­tion by him of their in­ter­ests. He was just as much of an au­to­crat, and just as much de­pen­dent upon the gen­eral pop­u­lar­ity of his ac­tions for the abil­ity to main­tain his au­toc­racy.

The sub-boss who could not com­mand the loy­alty of his fol­low­ers was as quickly de­posed, ei­ther by them or by his su­pe­ri­ors, as the an­cient ward leader of the 20th cen­tury who lost con­trol of his votes.

As so­ci­ety was or­ga­nized in the 20th cen­tury, I do not be­lieve the sys­tem could have worked in any­thing but pol­i­tics. I trem­ble to think what would have hap­pened, had the at­tempt been made to han­dle the AEF this way dur­ing the First World War, in­stead of by that rigid mil­i­tary dis­ci­pline and com­plete as­sump­tion of the in­di­vid­ual as a mere stan­dard­ized cog in the ma­chine.

But ow­ing to the cen­turies of des­per­ate suf­fer­ing the peo­ple had en­dured at the hands of the Hans, there de­vel­oped a spirit of self-sac­ri­fice and con­sid­er­a­tion for the com­mon good that made the scheme ap­pli­ca­ble and ef­fi­cient in all forms of hu­man co­op­er­a­tion.

I have a lit­tle heresy about all this, how­ever. My as­so­ciates re­gard the thought with as much hor­ror as many wor­thy peo­ple of the 20th cen­tury felt in re­gard to any hereti­cal sug­ges­tion that the orig­i­nal out­line of gov­ern­ment as laid down in the First Con­sti­tu­tion did not ap­ply as well to 20th cen­tury con­di­tions as to those of the early 19th.

In later years, I felt that there was a cer­tain soft­en­ing of moral fiber among the peo­ple, since the Hans had been fi­nally de­stroyed with all their works; and Amer­i­cans have de­vel­oped a new lux­ury econ­omy. I have seen signs of the reawak­en­ing of greed, of self­ish­ness. The eter­nal cy­cle seems to be at work. I fear that slowly, though surely, pri­vate wealth is reap­pear­ing, codes of in­flex­i­bil­ity are de­vel­op­ing; they will be fol­lowed by cor­rup­tion, degra­da­tion; and in the end some cat­a­clysmic event will end this era and usher in a new one.

All this, how­ever, is wan­der­ing afar from my story, which con­cerns our early bat­tles against the Hans, and not our more mod­ern prob­lems of self-con­trol.

Our vic­tory over the seven Han ships had set the coun­try ablaze. The se­cret had been care­fully com­mu­ni­cated to the other gangs, and the coun­try was agog from one end to the other. There was fever­ish ac­tiv­ity in the am­mu­ni­tion plants, and the hunt­ing of stray Han ships be­came an en­thu­si­as­tic sport. The re­sults were dis­as­trous to our hered­i­tary en­e­mies.

From the Pa­cific Coast came the re­port of a great transpa­cific liner of 75,000 tons “lift” be­ing brought to earth from a po­si­tion of in­vis­i­bil­ity above the clouds. A dozen Sacra­men­tos had caught the hazy out­lines of its rep rays ap­proach­ing them, head-on, in the twi­light, like ghostly pil­lars reach­ing into the sky. They had fired rock­ets into it with ease, whereas they would have had dif­fi­culty in hit­ting it if it had been mov­ing at right an­gles to their po­si­tion. They got one rep ray. The other was not strong enough to hold it up. It floated to earth, nose down, and since it was un­armed and un­ar­mored, they had no dif­fi­culty in shoot­ing it to pieces and mas­sacring its crew and pas­sen­gers. It seemed bar­barous to me. But then I did not have cen­turies of bit­ter per­se­cu­tion in my blood.

From the Jersey Beaches we re­ceived news of the de­struc­tion of a Nu-yok–A-lan-a liner. The Sand-snipers, prac­ti­cally in­vis­i­ble in their sand-col­ored cloth­ing, and half buried along the beaches, lay in wait for days, risk­ing the play of dis beams along the route, and fi­nally reg­is­ter­ing four hits within a week. The Hans dis­con­tin­ued their ser­vice along this route, and as ev­i­dence that they were badly shaken by our suc­cess, sent no raiders down the Beaches.

It was a few weeks later that Big Boss Hart sent for me.

“Tony,” he said, “There are two things I want to talk to you about. One of them will be­come pub­lic prop­erty in a few days, I think. We aren’t go­ing to get any more Han ships by shoot­ing up their re­pel­lor rays un­less we use much larger rock­ets. They are wise to us now. They’re putting ar­mor of great thick­ness in the hulls of their ships be­low the rep-ray ma­chines. Near Bah-flo this morn­ing a party of Eries shot one with­out suc­cess. The ex­plo­sions stag­gered her, but did not pen­e­trate. As near as we can gather from their re­ports, their lab­o­ra­to­ries have de­vel­oped a new al­loy of great ten­sile strength and elas­tic­ity which nev­er­the­less lets the rep rays through like a sieve. Our re­ports in­di­cate that the Eries’ rock­ets bounced off harm­lessly. Most of the party was wiped out as the dis-rays went into ac­tion on them.

“This is go­ing to mean real busi­ness for all of the gangs be­fore long. The Big Bosses have just held a na­tional ul­tro­phone coun­cil. It was de­cided that Amer­ica must or­ga­nize on a na­tional ba­sis. The first move is to de­velop sec­tional or­ga­ni­za­tion by Zones. I have been made Su­per­boss of the Mid-At­lantic Zone.

“We’re in for it now. The Hans are sure to launch reprisal ex­pe­di­tions. If we’re to save the race we must keep them away from our camps and plants. I’m think­ing of de­vel­op­ing a per­ma­nent field force, along the lines of the reg­u­lar armies of the 20th cen­tury you told me about. Its busi­ness will be twofold: to carry the war­fare as much as pos­si­ble to the Hans, and to serve as a de­coy, to beep their at­ten­tion from our plants. I’m go­ing to need your help in this.

“The other thing I wanted to talk to you about is this: Amaz­ing and im­pos­si­ble as it seems, there is a group, or per­haps an en­tire gang, some­where among us, that is be­tray­ing us to the Hans. It may be the Bad Bloods, or it may be one of those gangs who live near one of the Han cities. You know, a hun­dred and fif­teen or twenty years ago there were cer­tain of these peo­ple’s an­ces­tors who ac­tu­ally de­graded them­selves by mat­ing with the Hans, some­times even serv­ing them as slaves, in the days be­fore they brought all their ser­vice ma­chin­ery to per­fec­tion.

“There is such a gang, called the Na­gras, up near Bah-flo, and an­other in Mid-Jersey that men call the Pineys. But I hardly sus­pect the Pineys. There is lit­tle in­tel­li­gence among them. They wouldn’t have the in­for­ma­tion to give the Hans, nor would they be ca­pa­ble of im­part­ing it. They’re ab­so­lute sav­ages.”

“Just what ev­i­dence is there that any­body has been clear­ing in­for­ma­tion to the Hans?” I asked.

“Well,” he replied, “first of all there was that raid upon us. That first Han ship knew the lo­ca­tion of our plants ex­actly. You re­mem­ber it floated di­rectly into po­si­tion above the val­ley and be­gan a sys­tem­atic beam­ing. Then, the Hans quite ob­vi­ously have learned that we are pick­ing up their elec­tro­phone waves, for they’ve gone back to their old, but ex­tremely ac­cu­rate, sys­tem of di­rec­tional con­trol. But we’ve been get­ting them for the past week by in­stalling au­to­matic re­broad­cast units along the scar paths. This is what the Amer­i­cans called those strips of coun­try di­rectly un­der the reg­u­lar ship routes of the Hans, who as a mat­ter of pre­cau­tion fre­quently blasted them with their dis beams to pre­vent the growth of fo­liage which might give shel­ter to the Amer­i­cans. But they’ve been beam­ing those paths so hard, it looks as though they even had in­for­ma­tion of this strat­egy. And in ad­di­tion, they’ve been us­ing code. Fi­nally, we’ve picked up three of their mes­sages in which they dis­cuss, with some ner­vous­ness, the ex­is­tence of our ‘mys­te­ri­ous’ ul­tro­phone.”

“But they still have no knowl­edge of the na­ture and con­trol of ul­tronic ac­tiv­ity?” I asked.

“No,” said the Big Boss thought­fully, “they don’t seem to have a bit of in­for­ma­tion about it.”

“Then it’s quite clear,” I ven­tured, “that who­ever is ‘clear­ing’ us to them is do­ing it piece­meal. It sounds like a bit of oc­ca­sional barter, rather than an out-and-out al­liance. They’re hold­ing back as much in­for­ma­tion as pos­si­ble for fu­ture bar­ter­ing, per­haps.”

“Yes,” Hart said, “and it isn’t in­for­ma­tion the Hans are giv­ing in re­turn, but some form of goods, or priv­i­lege. The trick would be to lo­cate the goods. I guess I’ll have to make a per­sonal trip around among the Big Bosses.”