The New Boss
We had ultrophoned our arrival and the Big Boss himself, surrounded by
the Council, was on hand to welcome us and learn our news. In turn we
were informed that during the night a band of raiding Bad Bloods,
disguised under the insignia of the Altoonas, a gang some distance to
the west of us, had destroyed several of our camps before our people had
rallied and driven them off. Their purpose, evidently, had been to
embroil us with the Altoonas, but fortunately, one of our exchanges
recognized the Bad Blood leader, who had been slain.
The Big Boss had mobilized the full raiding force of the Gang, and was
on the point of heading an expedition for the extermination of the Bad
Bloods.
I looked around the grim circle of the sub-bosses, and realized the fate
of America, at this moment, lay in their hands. Their temper demanded
the immediate expenditure of our full effort in revenging ourselves for
this raid. But the strategic exigencies, to my mind, quite clearly
demanded the instant and absolute extermination of the Sinsings. It
might be only a matter of hours, for all we knew, before these degraded
people would barter clues to the American ultronic secrets to the Hans.
"How large a force have we?" I asked Hart.
"Every man and maid who can be spared," he replied. "That gives us seven
hundred married and unmarried men, and three hundred girls, more than
the entire Bad Blood Gang. Every one is equipped with belts,
ultrophones, rocket guns and swords, and all fighting mad."
I meditated how I might put the matter to these determined men, and was
vaguely conscious that they were awaiting my words.
Finally I began to speak. I do not remember to this day just what I
said. I talked calmly, with due regard for their passion, but with deep
conviction. I went over the information we had collected, point by
point, building my case logically, and painting a lurid picture of the
danger impending in that half-alliance between the Sinsings and the Hans
of Nu-yok. I became impassioned, culminating, I believe, with a vow to
proceed single-handed against the hereditary enemies of our race, "if
the Wyomings were blindly set on placing a gang feud ahead of honor and
duty and the hopes of all America."
As I concluded, a great calm came over me, as of one detached. I had
felt much the same way during several crises in the First World War. I
gazed from face to face, striving to read their expressions, and in a
mood to make good my threat without any further heroics, if the decision
was against me.
But it was Hart who sensed the temper of the Council more quickly than I
did, and looked beyond it into the future.
He arose from the tree trunk on which he had been sitting.
"That settles it," he said, looking around the ring. "I have felt this
thing coming on for some time now. I'm sure the Council agrees with me
that there is among us a man more capable than I, to boss the Wyoming
Gang, despite his handicap of having had all too short a time in which
to familiarize himself with our modern ways and facilities. Whatever I
can do to support his effective leadership, at any cost, I pledge myself
to do."
As he concluded, he advanced to where I stood, and taking from his head
the green-crested helmet that constituted his badge of office, to my
surprise he placed it in my mechanically extended hand.
The roar of approval that went up from the Council members left me
dazed. Somebody ultrophoned the news to the rest of the Gang, and even
though the earflaps of my helmet were turned up, I could hear the cheers
with which my invisible followers greeted me, from near and distant
hillsides, camps and plants.
My first move was to make sure that the Phone Boss, in communicating
this news to the members of the Gang, had not re-broadcast my talk nor
mentioned my plan of shifting the attack from the Bad Bloods to the
Sinsings. I was relieved by his assurance that he had not, for it would
have wrecked the whole plan. Everything depended upon our ability to
surprise the Sinsings.
So I pledged the Council and my companions to secrecy, and allowed it to
be believed that we were about to take to the air and the trees against
the Bad Bloods.
That outfit must have been badly scared, the way they were "burning" the
ether with ultrophone alibis and propaganda for the benefit of the more
distant gangs. It was their old game, and the only method by which they
had avoided extermination long ago from their immediate neighbors--these
appeals to the spirit of American brotherhood, addressed to gangs too
far away to have had the sort of experience with them that had fallen to
our lot.
I chuckled. Here was another good reason for the shift in my plans. Were
we actually to undertake the exterminations of the Bad Bloods at once,
it would have been a hard job to convince some of the gangs that we had
not been precipitate and unjustified. Jealousies and prejudices existed.
There were gangs which would give the benefit of the doubt to the Bad
Bloods, rather than to ourselves, and the issue was now hopelessly
beclouded with the clever lies that were being broadcast in an unceasing
stream.
But the extermination of the Sinsings would be another thing. In the
first place, there would be no warning of our action until it was all
over, I hoped. In the second place, we would have indisputable proof, in
the form of their rep-ray ships and other paraphernalia, of their
traffic with the Hans; and the state of American prejudice, at the time
of which I write held trafficking with the Hans a far more heinous thing
than even a vicious gang feud.
I called an executive session of the Council at once. I wanted to
inventory our military resources.
I created a new office on the spot, that of "Control Boss," and
appointed Ned Garlin to the post, turning over his former responsibility
as Plants Boss to his assistant. I needed someone, I felt, to tie in the
records of the various functional activities of the campaign, and take
over from me the task of keeping the records of them up to the minute.
I received reports from the bosses of the ultrophone unit, and those of
food, transportation, fighting gear, chemistry, electronic activity and
electrophone intelligence, ultroscopes, air patrol and contact guard.
My ideas for the campaign, of course, were somewhat tinged with my 20th
Century experience, and I found myself faced with the task of working
out a staff organization that was a composite of the best and most
easily applied principles of business and military efficiency, as I knew
them from the viewpoint of immediate practicality.
What I wanted was an organization that would be specialized,
functionally, not as that indicated above, but from the angles of:
intelligence as to the Sinsings' activities; intelligence as to Han
activities; perfection of communication with my own units; co-operation
of field command; and perfect mobilization of emergency supplies and
resources.
It took several hours of hard work with the Council to map out the plan.
First we assigned functional experts and equipment to each "Division" in
accordance with its needs. Then these in turn were reassigned by the new
Division Bosses to the Field Commands as needed, or as Independent or
Headquarters Units. The two intelligence divisions were named the White
and the Yellow, indicating that one specialized on the American enemy
and the other on the Mongolians.
The division in charge of our own communications, the assignment of
ultrophone frequencies and strengths, and the maintenance of operators
and equipment, I called "Communications."
I named Bill Hearn to the post of Field Boss, in charge of the main or
undetached fighting units, and to the Resources Division, I assigned all
responsibility for what few aircraft we had; and all transportation and
supply problems, I assigned to "Resources." The functional bosses stayed
with this division.
We finally completed our organization with the assignment of liaison
representatives among the various divisions as needed.
Thus I had a "Headquarters Staff" composed of the Division Bosses who
reported directly to Ned Garlin as Control Boss, or to Wilma as my
personal assistant. And each of the Division Bosses had a small staff of
his own.
In the final summing up of our personnel and resources, I found we had
roughly a thousand "troops," of whom some three hundred and fifty were,
in what I called the Service Divisions, the rest being in Bill Hearn's
Field Division. This latter number, however, was cut down somewhat by
the assignment of numerous small units to detached service. Altogether,
the actual available fighting force, I figured, would number about five
hundred, by the time we actually went into action.
We had only six small swoopers, but I had an ingenious plan in my mind,
as the result of our little raid on Nu-yok, that would make this
sufficient, since the reserves of inertron blocks were larger than I
expected to find them. The Resources Division, by packing its supply
cases a bit tight, or by slipping in extra blocks of inertron, was able
to reduce each to a weight of a few ounces. These easily could be
floated and towed by the swoopers in any quantity. Hitched to ultron
lines, it would be a virtual impossibility for them to break loose.
The entire personnel, of course, was supplied with jumpers, and if each
man and girl was careful to adjust balances properly, the entire number
could also be towed along through the air, grasping wires of ultron,
swinging below the swoopers, or stringing out behind them.
There would be nothing tiring about this, because the strain would be no
greater than that of carrying a one or two pound weight in the hand,
except for air friction at high speeds. But to make doubly sure that we
should lose none of our personnel, I gave strict orders that the belts
and tow lines should be equipped with rings and hooks.
So great was the efficiency of the fundamental organization and
discipline of the Gang, that we got under way at nightfall.
One by one the swoopers eased into the air, each followed by its long
train or "kite-tail" of humanity and supply cases hanging lightly from
its tow line. For convenience, the tow lines were made of an alloy of
ultron which, unlike the metal itself, is visible.
At first these "tails" hung downward, but as the ships swung into
formation and headed eastward toward the Bad Blood territory, gathering
speed, they began to string out behind. And swinging low from each ship
on heavily weighted lines, ultroscope, ultrophone, and straight-vision
observers keenly scanned the countryside, while intelligence men in the
swoopers above bent over their instrument boards and viewplates.
Leaving Control Boss Ned Garlin temporarily in charge of affairs, Wilma
and I dropped a weighted line from our ship, and slid down about half
way to the under lookouts, that is to say, about a thousand feet. The
sensation of floating swiftly through the air like this, in the absolute
security of one's confidence in the inertron belt, was one of
never-ending delight to me.
We reascended into the swooper as the expedition approached the
territory of the Bad Bloods, and directed the preparations for the
bombardment. It was part of my plan to appear to carry out the attack as
originally planned.
About fifteen miles from their camps our ships came to a halt and
maintained their positions for a while with the idling blasts of their
rocket motors, to give the ultroscope operators a chance to make a
thorough examination of the territory below us, for it was very
important that this next step in our program should be carried out with
all secrecy.
At length they reported the ground below us entirely clear of any
appearance of human occupation, and a gun unit of long-range specialists
was lowered with a dozen rocket guns, equipped with special automatic
devices that the Resources Division had developed at my request, a few
hours before our departure. These were aiming and timing devices. After
calculating the range, elevation and rocket charges carefully, the guns
were left, concealed in a ravine, and the men were hauled up into the
ship again. At the predetermined hour, those unmanned rocket guns would
begin automatically to bombard the Bad Bloods' hillsides, shifting their
aim and elevation slightly with each shot, as did many of our artillery
pieces in the First World War.
In the meantime, we turned south about twenty miles, and grounded,
waiting for the bombardment to begin before we attempted to sneak across
the Han ship lane. I was relying for security on the distraction that
the bombardment might furnish the Han observers.
It was tense work waiting, but the affair went through as planned, our
squadron drifting across the route high enough to enable the ships'
tails of troops and supply cases to clear the ground.
In crossing the second ship route, out along the Beaches of Jersey, we
were not so successful in escaping observation. A Han ship came speeding
along at a very low elevation. We caught it on our electronic location
and direction finders, and also located it with our ultroscopes, but it
came so fast and so low that I thought it best to remain where we had
grounded the second time, and lie quiet, rather than get under way and
cross in front of it.
The point was this. While the Hans had no such devices as our
ultroscopes, with which we could see in the dark (within certain
limitations of course), and their electronic instruments would be
virtually useless in uncovering our presence, since all but natural
electronic activities were carefully eliminated from our apparatus,
except electrophone receivers (which are not easily spotted), the Hans
did have some very highly sensitive sound devices which operated with
great efficiency in calm weather, so far as sounds emanating from the
air were concerned. But the "ground roar" greatly confused their use of
these instruments in the location of specific sounds floating up from
the surface of the earth.
This ship must have caught some slight noise of ours, however, in its
sensitive instruments, for we heard its electronic devices go into play,
and picked up the routine report of the noise to its Base Ship
Commander. But from the nature of the conversation, I judged they had
not identified it, and were, in fact, more curious about the detonations
they were picking up now from the Bad Blood lands some sixty miles or so
to the west.
Immediately after this ship had shot by, we took the air again, and
following much the same route that I had taken the previous night,
climbed in a long semi-circle out over the ocean, swung toward the north
and finally the west. We set our course, however, for the Sinsings' land
north of Nu-yok, instead of for the city itself.