CHAPTER VIII
The Han City
This conversation set me thinking. All of the Han electrophoneinter-communication had been an open record to the Americans for a goodmany years, and the Hans were just finding it out. For centuries theyhad not regarded us as any sort of a menace. Unquestionably it had neveroccurred to them to secrete their own records. Somewhere in Nu-yok orBah-flo, or possibly in Lo-Tan itself, the record of this traitoroustransaction would be more or less openly filed. If we could only get atit! I wondered if a raid might not be possible.
Bill Hearn and I talked it over with our Han-affairs Boss and hisexperts. There ensued several days of research, in which the Han recordsof the entire decade were scanned and analyzed. In the end they pickedout a mass of detail, and fitted it together into a very definitepicture of the great central filing office of the Hans in Nu-yok, wherethe entire mass of official records was kept, constantly available forinstant projectoscoping to any of the city's offices, and of the systemby which the information was filed.
The attempt began to look feasible, though Hart instantly turned theidea down when I first presented it to him. It was unthinkable, he said.Sheer suicide. But in the end I persuaded him.
"I will need," I said, "Blash, who is thoroughly familiar with the Hanlibrary system; Bert Gaunt, who for years has specialized on theirmilitary offices; Bill Barker, the ray specialist, and the best swooperpilot we have." _Swoopers_ are one-man and two-man ships, developed bythe Americans, with skeleton backbones of inertron (during the warpainted green for invisibility against the green forests below) and"bellies" of clear ultron.
"That will be Mort Gibbons," said Hart. "We've only got three swoopersleft, Tony, but I'll risk one of them if you and the others willvoluntarily risk your existences. But mind, I won't urge or order one ofyou to go. I'll spread the word to every Plant Boss at once to give youanything and everything you need in the way of equipment."
When I told Wilma of the plan, I expected her to raise violent andtearful objections, but she didn't. She was made of far sterner stuffthan the women of the 20th Century. Not that she couldn't weep ascopiously or be just as whimsical on occasion; but she wouldn't weep forthe same reasons.
She just gave me an unfathomable look, in which there seemed to be a bitof pride, and asked eagerly for the details. I confess I was somewhatdisappointed that she could so courageously risk my loss, even though Iwas amazed at her fortitude. But later I was to learn how little I knewher then.
We were ready to slide off at dawn the next morning. I had kissed Wilmagood-bye at our camp, and after a final conference over our plans, weboarded our craft and gently glided away over the tree tops on a course,which, after crossing three routes of the Han ships, would take us outover the Atlantic, off the Jersey coast, whence we would come up onNu-yok from the ocean.
Twice we had to nose down and lie motionless on the ground near a routewhile Han ships passed. Those were tense moments. Had the green back ofour ship been observed, we would have been disintegrated in a second.But it wasn't.
Once over the water, however, we climbed in a great spiral, ten miles indiameter, until our altimeter registered ten miles. Here Gibbons shutoff his rocket motor, and we floated, far above the level of theAtlantic liners, whose course was well to the north of us anyhow, andwaited for nightfall.
Then Gibbons turned from his control long enough to grin at me.
"I have a surprise for you, Tony," he said, throwing back the lid ofwhat I had supposed was a big supply case. And with a sigh of relief,Wilma stepped out of the case.
"If you 'go into zero' (a common expression of the day for beingannihilated by the disintegrator ray), you don't think I'm going to letyou go alone, do you, Tony? I couldn't believe my ears last night whenyou spoke of going without me, until I realized that you are still fivehundred years behind the times in lots of ways. Don't you know, dearheart, that you offered me the greatest insult a husband could give awife? You didn't, of course."
The others, it seemed, had all been in on the secret, and now they wouldhave kidded me unmercifully, except that Wilma's eyes blazeddangerously.
At nightfall, we maneuvered to a position directly above the city. Thistook some time and calculation on the part of Bill Barker, who explainedto me that he had to determine our point by ultronic bearings. Theslightest resort to an electronic instrument, he feared, might bedetected by our enemies' locators. In fact, we did not dare bring ourswooper any lower than five miles for fear that its capacity might bereflected in their instruments.
Finally, however, he succeeded in locating above the central tower ofthe city.
"If my calculations are as much as ten feet off," he remarked withconfidence, "I'll eat the tower. Now the rest is up to you, Mort. Seewhat you can do to hold her steady. No--here, watch this indicator--thered beam, not the green one. See--if you keep it exactly centered on theneedle, you're O.K. The width of the beam represents seventeen feet. Thetower platform is fifty feet square, so we've got a good margin to workon."
For several moments we watched as Gibbons bent over his levers,constantly adjusting them with deft touches of his fingers. After a bitof wavering, the beam remained centered on the needle.
"Now," I said, "let's drop."
I opened the trap and looked down, but quickly shut it again when I feltthe air rushing out of the ship into the rarefied atmosphere in atorrent. Gibbons literally yelled a protest from his instrument board.
"I forgot," I mumbled. "Silly of me. Of course, we'll have to drop outof compartment."
The compartment, to which I referred, was similar to those in some ofthe 20th Century submarines. We all entered it. There was barely roomfor us to stand, shoulder to shoulder. With some struggles, we got intoour special air helmets and adjusted the pressure. At our signal,Gibbons exhausted the air in the compartment, pumping it into the bodyof the ship, and as the little signal light flashed, Wilma threw openthe hatch.
Setting the ultron-wire reel, I climbed through, and began to slide downgently.
We all had our belts on, of course, adjusted to a weight balance of buta few ounces. And the five-mile reel of ultron wire that was to be ourguide, was of gossamer fineness, though, anyway, I believe it would havelifted the full weight of the five of us, so strong and tough was thisinvisible metal. As an extra precaution, since the wire was of thepurest metal, and therefore totally invisible, even in daylight, we allhad our belts hooked on small rings that slid down the wire.
I went down with the end of the wire. Wilma followed a few feet aboveme, then Barker, Gaunt and Blash. Gibbons, of course, stayed behind tohold the ship in position and control the paying out of the line. We allhad our ultrophones in place inside our air helmets, and so couldconverse with one another and with Gibbons. But at Wilma's suggestion,although we would have liked to let the Big Boss listen in, we kept themadjusted to short-range work, for fear that those who had been clearingwith the Hans, and against whom we were on a raid for evidence, mightalso pick up our conversation. We had no fear that the Hans would hearus. In fact, we had the added advantage that, even after we landed, wecould converse freely without danger of their hearing our voices throughour air helmets.
For a while I could see nothing below but utter darkness. Then Irealized, from the feel of the air as much as from anything, that wewere sinking through a cloud layer. We passed through two more cloudlayers before anything was visible to us.
Then there came under my gaze, about two miles below, one of the mostbeautiful sights I have ever seen; the soft, yet brilliant, radiance ofthe great Han city of Nu-yok. Every foot of its structural membersseemed to glow with a wonderful incandescence, tower piled up on tower,and all built on the vast base-mass of the city, which, so I had beentold, sheered upward from the surface of the rivers to a height of 728levels.
The city, I noticed with some surprise, did not cover anything like thesame area as the New York of the 20th Century. It occupied, as a matterof fact, only the lower half of Manhattan Island, with
one sectionstraddling the East River, and spreading out sufficiently over what oncehad been Brooklyn, to provide berths for the great liners and other aircraft.
Straight beneath my feet was a tiny dark patch. It seemed the only spotin the entire city that was not aflame with radiance. This was thecentral tower, in the top floors of which were housed the vast libraryof record files and the main projectoscope plant.
"You can shoot the wire now," I ultrophoned Gibbons, and let go thelittle weighted knob. It dropped like a plummet, and we followed withconsiderable speed, but braking our descent with gloved handssufficiently to see whether the knob, on which a faint light glowed as asignal for ourselves, might be observed by any Han guard or nightprowler. Apparently it was not, and we again shot down with acceleratedspeed.
We landed on the roof of the tower without any mishap, and fortunatelyfor our plan, in darkness. Since there was nothing above it on which itwould have been worth while to shed illumination, or from which therewas any need to observe it, the Hans had neglected to light the towerroof, or indeed to occupy it at all. This was the reason we had selectedit as our landing place.
As soon as Gibbons had our word, he extinguished the knob light, and theknob, as well as the wire, became totally invisible. At our ultrophonedword, he would light it again.
"No gun play now," I warned. "Swords only, and then only if absolutelynecessary."
Closely bunched, and treading as lightly as only inertron-belted peoplecould, we made our way cautiously through a door and down an inclinedplane to the floor below, where Gaunt and Blash assured us the militaryoffices were located.
Twice Barker cautioned us to stop as we were about to pass in front ofmirror-like "windows" in the passage wall, and flattening ourselves tothe floor, we crawled past them.
"Projectoscopes," he said. "Probably on automatic record only, at thistime of night. Still, we don't want to leave any records for them tostudy after we're gone."
"Were you ever here before?" I asked.
"No," he replied, "but I haven't been studying their electrophonecommunications for seven years without being able to recognize thesemachines when I run across them."