The Han City
This conversation set me thinking. All of the Han electrophone
inter-communication had been an open record to the Americans for a good
many years, and the Hans were just finding it out. For centuries they
had not regarded us as any sort of a menace. Unquestionably it had never
occurred to them to secrete their own records. Somewhere in Nu-yok or
Bah-flo, or possibly in Lo-Tan itself, the record of this traitorous
transaction would be more or less openly filed. If we could only get at
it! I wondered if a raid might not be possible.
Bill Hearn and I talked it over with our Han-affairs Boss and his
experts. There ensued several days of research, in which the Han records
of the entire decade were scanned and analyzed. In the end they picked
out a mass of detail, and fitted it together into a very definite
picture of the great central filing office of the Hans in Nu-yok, where
the entire mass of official records was kept, constantly available for
instant projectoscoping to any of the city's offices, and of the system
by which the information was filed.
The attempt began to look feasible, though Hart instantly turned the
idea 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 Han
library system; Bert Gaunt, who for years has specialized on their
military offices; Bill Barker, the ray specialist, and the best swooper
pilot we have." _Swoopers_ are one-man and two-man ships, developed by
the Americans, with skeleton backbones of inertron (during the war
painted 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 swoopers
left, Tony, but I'll risk one of them if you and the others will
voluntarily risk your existences. But mind, I won't urge or order one of
you to go. I'll spread the word to every Plant Boss at once to give you
anything and everything you need in the way of equipment."
When I told Wilma of the plan, I expected her to raise violent and
tearful objections, but she didn't. She was made of far sterner stuff
than the women of the 20th Century. Not that she couldn't weep as
copiously or be just as whimsical on occasion; but she wouldn't weep for
the same reasons.
She just gave me an unfathomable look, in which there seemed to be a bit
of pride, and asked eagerly for the details. I confess I was somewhat
disappointed that she could so courageously risk my loss, even though I
was amazed at her fortitude. But later I was to learn how little I knew
her then.
We were ready to slide off at dawn the next morning. I had kissed Wilma
good-bye at our camp, and after a final conference over our plans, we
boarded 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 out
over the Atlantic, off the Jersey coast, whence we would come up on
Nu-yok from the ocean.
Twice we had to nose down and lie motionless on the ground near a route
while Han ships passed. Those were tense moments. Had the green back of
our 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 in
diameter, until our altimeter registered ten miles. Here Gibbons shut
off his rocket motor, and we floated, far above the level of the
Atlantic liners, whose course was well to the north of us anyhow, and
waited 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 of
what 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 being
annihilated by the disintegrator ray), you don't think I'm going to let
you go alone, do you, Tony? I couldn't believe my ears last night when
you spoke of going without me, until I realized that you are still five
hundred years behind the times in lots of ways. Don't you know, dear
heart, that you offered me the greatest insult a husband could give a
wife? You didn't, of course."
The others, it seemed, had all been in on the secret, and now they would
have kidded me unmercifully, except that Wilma's eyes blazed
dangerously.
At nightfall, we maneuvered to a position directly above the city. This
took some time and calculation on the part of Bill Barker, who explained
to me that he had to determine our point by ultronic bearings. The
slightest resort to an electronic instrument, he feared, might be
detected by our enemies' locators. In fact, we did not dare bring our
swooper any lower than five miles for fear that its capacity might be
reflected in their instruments.
Finally, however, he succeeded in locating above the central tower of
the city.
"If my calculations are as much as ten feet off," he remarked with
confidence, "I'll eat the tower. Now the rest is up to you, Mort. See
what you can do to hold her steady. No--here, watch this indicator--the
red beam, not the green one. See--if you keep it exactly centered on the
needle, you're O.K. The width of the beam represents seventeen feet. The
tower platform is fifty feet square, so we've got a good margin to work
on."
For several moments we watched as Gibbons bent over his levers,
constantly adjusting them with deft touches of his fingers. After a bit
of 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 felt
the air rushing out of the ship into the rarefied atmosphere in a
torrent. Gibbons literally yelled a protest from his instrument board.
"I forgot," I mumbled. "Silly of me. Of course, we'll have to drop out
of compartment."
The compartment, to which I referred, was similar to those in some of
the 20th Century submarines. We all entered it. There was barely room
for us to stand, shoulder to shoulder. With some struggles, we got into
our special air helmets and adjusted the pressure. At our signal,
Gibbons exhausted the air in the compartment, pumping it into the body
of the ship, and as the little signal light flashed, Wilma threw open
the hatch.
Setting the ultron-wire reel, I climbed through, and began to slide down
gently.
We all had our belts on, of course, adjusted to a weight balance of but
a few ounces. And the five-mile reel of ultron wire that was to be our
guide, was of gossamer fineness, though, anyway, I believe it would have
lifted the full weight of the five of us, so strong and tough was this
invisible metal. As an extra precaution, since the wire was of the
purest metal, and therefore totally invisible, even in daylight, we all
had 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 above
me, then Barker, Gaunt and Blash. Gibbons, of course, stayed behind to
hold the ship in position and control the paying out of the line. We all
had our ultrophones in place inside our air helmets, and so could
converse 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 them
adjusted to short-range work, for fear that those who had been clearing
with the Hans, and against whom we were on a raid for evidence, might
also pick up our conversation. We had no fear that the Hans would hear
us. In fact, we had the added advantage that, even after we landed, we
could converse freely without danger of their hearing our voices through
our air helmets.
For a while I could see nothing below but utter darkness. Then I
realized, from the feel of the air as much as from anything, that we
were sinking through a cloud layer. We passed through two more cloud
layers before anything was visible to us.
Then there came under my gaze, about two miles below, one of the most
beautiful sights I have ever seen; the soft, yet brilliant, radiance of
the great Han city of Nu-yok. Every foot of its structural members
seemed 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 been
told, sheered upward from the surface of the rivers to a height of 728
levels.
The city, I noticed with some surprise, did not cover anything like the
same area as the New York of the 20th Century. It occupied, as a matter
of fact, only the lower half of Manhattan Island, with one section
straddling the East River, and spreading out sufficiently over what once
had been Brooklyn, to provide berths for the great liners and other air
craft.
Straight beneath my feet was a tiny dark patch. It seemed the only spot
in the entire city that was not aflame with radiance. This was the
central tower, in the top floors of which were housed the vast library
of record files and the main projectoscope plant.
"You can shoot the wire now," I ultrophoned Gibbons, and let go the
little weighted knob. It dropped like a plummet, and we followed with
considerable speed, but braking our descent with gloved hands
sufficiently to see whether the knob, on which a faint light glowed as a
signal for ourselves, might be observed by any Han guard or night
prowler. Apparently it was not, and we again shot down with accelerated
speed.
We landed on the roof of the tower without any mishap, and fortunately
for our plan, in darkness. Since there was nothing above it on which it
would have been worth while to shed illumination, or from which there
was any need to observe it, the Hans had neglected to light the tower
roof, or indeed to occupy it at all. This was the reason we had selected
it as our landing place.
As soon as Gibbons had our word, he extinguished the knob light, and the
knob, as well as the wire, became totally invisible. At our ultrophoned
word, he would light it again.
"No gun play now," I warned. "Swords only, and then only if absolutely
necessary."
Closely bunched, and treading as lightly as only inertron-belted people
could, we made our way cautiously through a door and down an inclined
plane to the floor below, where Gaunt and Blash assured us the military
offices were located.
Twice Barker cautioned us to stop as we were about to pass in front of
mirror-like "windows" in the passage wall, and flattening ourselves to
the floor, we crawled past them.
"Projectoscopes," he said. "Probably on automatic record only, at this
time of night. Still, we don't want to leave any records for them to
study after we're gone."
"Were you ever here before?" I asked.
"No," he replied, "but I haven't been studying their electrophone
communications for seven years without being able to recognize these
machines when I run across them."