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Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from _Amazing Stories Fact and Science Fiction_ May 1962 and was first published in _Amazing Stories_ March 1929. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. A table of contents has been provided below:
I. The Airlords Besieged II. The "Ground Ships" Threaten III. We "Sink" the "Ground Ships" IV. Han Electrono-Ray Science V. American Ultronic Science VI. An Unequal Duel VII. Captured! VIII. Hypnotic Torture IX. The Fall of Nu-Yok X. Life in Lo-Tan, the Magnificent XI. The Forest Men Attack XII. The Mysterious "Air Balls" XIII. Escape! XIV. The Destruction of Lo-Tan XV. The Counter-Attack XVI. Victory
A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, March, 1929]
_The AIRLORDS of HAN_
By PHILIP FRANCIS NOWLAN
Illustrated by FRANK R. PAUL
_Copyright, 1927, by E. P. Co., Inc._
CHAPTER I
The Airlords Besieged
In a previous record of my adventures in the early part of the SecondWar of Independence I explained how I, Anthony Rogers, was overcome byradioactive gases in an abandoned mine near Scranton in the year 1927,where I existed in a state of suspended animation for nearly fivehundred years; and awakened to find that the America I knew had beencrushed under the cruel tyranny of the Airlords of Han, fierceMongolians, who, as scientists now contend, had in their blood a taintnot of this earth, and who with science and resources far in advance ofthose of a United States, economically prostrate at the end of a longseries of wars with a Bolshevik Europe, in the year 2270 A.D., had sweptdown from the skies in their great airships that rode "repeller rays" asa ball rides the stream of a fountain, and with their terrible"disintegrator rays" had destroyed more than four-fifths of the Americanrace, and driven the other fifth to cover in the vast forests which grewup over the remains of the once mighty civilization of the UnitedStates.
I explained the part I played in the fall of the year 2419, when therugged Americans, with science secretly developed to terrific efficiencyin their forest fastness, turned fiercely and assumed the aggressiveagainst a now effete Han population, which for generations had shutitself up in the fifteen great Mongolian cities of America, havingabandoned cultivation of the soil and the operation of mines; for theseHans produced all they needed in the way of food, clothing, shelter andmachinery through electrono-synthetic processes.
I explained how I was adopted into the Wyoming Gang, or clan,descendants of the original populations of Wilkes-Barre, Scranton andthe Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania; how quite by accident I stumbledupon a method of destroying Han aircraft by shooting explosive rockets,not directly at the heavily armored ships, but at the repeller raycolumns, which automatically drew the rockets upward where they explodedin the generators of the aircraft; how the Wyomings threw the firstthrill of terror into the Airlords by bringing an entire squadroncrashing to earth; how a handful of us in a rocketship successfullyraided the Han city of Nu-Yok; and how by the application of militaryprinciples I remembered from the First World War, I was able to lead theWyomings to victory over the Sinsings, a Hudson River tribe which hadformed a traitorous alliance with the hereditary enemies and oppressorsof the White Race in America.
* * * * *
By the Spring of 2420 A.D., a short six months after these events, thepositions of the Yellow and the White Races in America had beenreversed. The hunted were now the hunters. The Hans desperately wereincreasing the defenses of their fifteen cities, around each of whichthe American Gangs had drawn a widely deployed line of long-gunners;while nervous air convoys, closely bunched behind their protectivescreen of disintegrator beams, kept up sporadic and costly systems oftransportation between the cities.
During this period our own campaign against the Hans of Nu-Yok wasfairly typical of the development of the war throughout the country. Ourforce was composed of contingents from most of the Gangs ofPennsylvania, Jersey and New England. We encircled the city on a wideradius, our line running roughly from Staten Island to the forested siteof the ancient city of Elizabeth, to First and Second Mountains justwest of the ruins of Newark, Bloomfield and Montclair, thencenortheasterly across the Hudson, and down to the Sound. On Long Islandour line was pushed forward to the first slopes of the hills.
We had no more than four long-gunners to the square mile in our firstline, but each of these was equal to a battery of heavy artillery suchas I had known in the First World War. And when their fire was firstconcentrated on the Han city, they blew its outer walls and roof levelsinto a chaotic mass of wreckage before the nervous Yellow engineerscould turn on the ring of generators which surrounded the city with avertical film of disintegrator rays. Our explosive rockets could notpenetrate this film, for it disintegrated them instantly and harmlessly,as it did all other material substance with the sole exception of"inertron," that synthetic element developed by the Americans from thesub-electronic and ultronic orders.
* * * * *
The continuous operation of the disintegrators destroyed the air andmaintained a constant vacuum wherever they played, into which thesurrounding air continuously rushed, naturally creating atmosphericdisturbances after a time, which resulted in a local storm. This,however, ceased after a number of hours, when the flow of air toward thecity became steady.
The Hans suffered severely from atmospheric conditions inside their cityat first, but later rearranged their disintegrator ring in a system ofoverlapping films that left diagonal openings, through which the airrushed to them, and through which their ships emerged to scout ourpositions.
We shot down seven of their cruisers before they realized the folly offloating individually over our invisible line. Their beams traced pathsof destruction like scars across the countryside, but caught less thanhalf a dozen of our gunners all told, for it takes a lot of time tosweep every square foot of a square mile with a beam whose cross sectionis not more than twenty or twenty-five feet in diameter. Our gunners,completely concealed beneath the foliage of the forest, with weaponswhich did not reveal their position, as did the flashes and detonationof the Twentieth Century artillery, hit their repeller rays withcomparative ease.
The "drop ships," which the Hans next sent out, were harder to handle.Rising to immense heights behind the city's disintegrator wall, thesetiny, projectile-like craft slipped through the rifts in the cylinder ofdestruction, and then turning off their repeller rays, dropped atterrific speed until their small vanes were sufficient to support themas they volplaned in great circles, shooting back into the city defensesat a lower level.
The great speed of these craft made it almost impossible to register adirect hit against them with rocket guns, and they had no repeller raysat which we might shoot while they were over our lines.
But by the same token they were able to do little damage to us. So greatwas the speed of a drop ship, that the only way in which it could use adisintegrator ray was from a fixed generator in the nose of thestructure, as it dropped in a straight line toward its target. But sincethey could not sight the widely deployed individual gunners in our line,their scouting was just as ineffective as our attempts were to shootthem down.
* * * * *
For more than a month the situation remained a deadlock, with the Hanslocked up in their cities, while we mobilized gunners and supplies.
Had our stock of inertron been sufficiently gre
at at this period, wecould have ended the war quickly, with aircraft impervious to the "dis"ray. But the production of inertron is a painfully slow process,involving the building up of this weightless element from ultronicvibrations through the sub-electronic, electronic and atomic states intomolecular form. Our laboratories had barely begun production on aquantity basis, for we had just learned how to protect them from Han airraids, and it would be many months more before the supply they had juststarted to manufacture would be finished. In the meantime we had enoughfor a few aircraft, for jumping belts and a small amount of armor.
We Wyomings possessed one swooper completely sheathed with inertron andcounterweighted with ultron. The Altoonas and the Lycomings also hadone apiece. But a shielded swooper, while impervious to the "dis" ray,was helpless against squadrons of Han aircraft, for the Hans developed atechnique of playing their beams underneath the swooper in such fashionas to suck it down flutteringly into the vacuum so created, until theybrought it finally, and more or less violently, to earth.
Ultimately the Hans broke our blockade to a certain extent, when theyresumed traffic between their cities in great convoys, protected bysquadrons of cruisers in vertical formation, playing a continuouscross-fire of disintegrator beams ahead of them and down on the sides ina most effective screen, so that it was very difficult for us to get arocket through to the repeller rays.
But we lined the scar paths beneath their air routes for miles at astretch with concealed gunners, some of whom would sooner or laterregister hits, and it was seldom that a convoy made the trip betweenNu-Yok and Bos-Tan, Bah-Flo, Si-ka-ga or Ah-la-nah without losingseveral of its ships.
Hans who reached the ground alive were never taken prisoner. Not eventhe splendid discipline of the Americans could curb the wild hatedeveloped through centuries of dastardly oppression, and the Hans weremercilessly slaughtered, when they did not save us the trouble bycommitting suicide.
Several times the Hans drove "air wedges" over our lines in thisvertical or "cloud bank" formation, ploughing a scar path a mile or morewide through our positions. But at worst, to us, this did not mean theloss of more than a dozen men and girls, and generally their raids costthem one or more ships. They cut paths of destruction across the map,but they could not cover the entire area, and when they had ploughed outover our lines, there was nothing left for them to do but to turn aroundand plough back to Nu-Yok. Our lines closed up again after each raid,and we continued to take heavy toll from convoys and raiding fleets.Finally they abandoned these tactics.
So at the time of which I speak, the Spring of 2420 A.D., the Americansand the Hans were temporarily at pretty much of a deadlock. But the Hanswere as desperate as we were sanguine, for we had time on our side.
It was at this period that we first learned of the Airlords'determination, a very unpopular one with their conscripted populations,to carry the fight to us on the ground. The time had passed whencommand of the air meant victory. We had no visible cities nor massedbodies of men for them to destroy, nothing but vast stretches of silentforests and hills, where our forces lurked, invisible from the air.