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
non-existence 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 love making. 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 multi-colored
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."