<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN>
<div class="trn"><p><b>Transcriber's Note:</b> This etext was produced from <i>Amazing Stories Fact and Science Fiction</i>
May 1962 and was first published in <i>Amazing Stories</i> 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:</p>
<div class="bk1"><ul><li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_I">The Airlords Besieged</SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_II">The "Ground Ships" Threaten</SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_III">We "Sink" the "Ground Ships"</SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_IV">Han Electrono-Ray Science</SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_V">American Ultronic Science</SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_VI">An Unequal Duel</SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_VII">Captured!</SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_VIII">Hypnotic Torture</SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_IX">The Fall of Nu-Yok</SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_X">Life in Lo-Tan, the Magnificent</SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XI">The Forest Men Attack</SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XII">The Mysterious "Air Balls"</SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XIII">Escape!</SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XIV">The Destruction of Lo-Tan</SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XV">The Counter-Attack</SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XVI">Victory</SPAN></li>
</ul></div>
</div>
<div class="figright"><b>A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, March, 1929</b><br/><br/> <ANTIMG src="images/001.png" width-obs="366" height-obs="500" alt="" title="" /></div>
<h1><i>The AIRLORDS of HAN</i></h1>
<h2><small>By PHILIP FRANCIS NOWLAN</small></h2>
<p class="illo"><b><big>Illustrated by FRANK R. PAUL</big></b><br/><br/>
<i>Copyright, 1927, by E. P. Co., Inc.</i></p>
<hr class="mj" />
<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></SPAN>CHAPTER I<br/> The Airlords Besieged</h2>
<p class="cap"><span class="dcap">In</span> a previous record of my
adventures in the early part of
the Second War of Independence
I explained how I, Anthony Rogers,
was overcome by radioactive
gases in an abandoned mine near
Scranton in the year 1927, where
I existed in a state of suspended
animation for nearly five hundred
years; and awakened to find
that the America I knew had
been crushed under the cruel
tyranny of the Airlords of Han,
fierce Mongolians, who, as scientists
now contend, had in their
blood a taint not of this earth,
and who with science and resources
far in advance of those
of a United States, economically
prostrate at the end of a long
series of wars with a Bolshevik
Europe, in the year 2270 A.D.,
had swept down from the skies in
their great airships that rode
"repeller rays" as a ball rides
the stream of a fountain, and
with their terrible "disintegrator
rays" had destroyed more than
four-fifths of the American race,
and driven the other fifth to
cover in the vast forests which
grew up over the remains of the
once mighty civilization of the
United States.</p>
<p>I explained the part I played
in the fall of the year 2419,
when the rugged Americans,
with science secretly developed
to terrific efficiency in their forest
fastness, turned fiercely and
assumed the aggressive against
a now effete Han population,
which for generations had shut
itself up in the fifteen great
Mongolian cities of America, having
abandoned cultivation of the
soil and the operation of mines;
for these Hans produced all they
needed in the way of food, clothing,
shelter and machinery
through electrono-synthetic processes.</p>
<p>I explained how I was adopted
into the Wyoming Gang, or clan,
descendants of the original populations
of Wilkes-Barre, Scranton
and the Wyoming Valley in
Pennsylvania; how quite by accident
I stumbled upon a method
of destroying Han aircraft by
shooting explosive rockets, not
directly at the heavily armored
ships, but at the repeller ray columns,
which automatically drew
the rockets upward where they
exploded in the generators of the
aircraft; how the Wyomings
threw the first thrill of terror
into the Airlords by bringing
an entire squadron crashing to
earth; how a handful of us in a
rocketship successfully raided
the Han city of Nu-Yok; and how
by the application of military
principles I remembered from
the First World War, I was able
to lead the Wyomings to victory
over the Sinsings, a Hudson River
tribe which had formed a
traitorous alliance with the hereditary
enemies and oppressors
of the White Race in America.</p>
<hr />
<p class="cap"><span class="dcap">By</span> the Spring of 2420 A.D., a
short six months after these
events, the positions of the Yellow
and the White Races in America
had been reversed. The hunted
were now the hunters. The
Hans desperately were increasing
the defenses of their fifteen
cities, around each of which the
American Gangs had drawn a
widely deployed line of long-gunners;
while nervous air convoys,
closely bunched behind their protective
screen of disintegrator
beams, kept up sporadic and
costly systems of transportation
between the cities.</p>
<p>During this period our own
campaign against the Hans of
Nu-Yok was fairly typical of the
development of the war throughout
the country. Our force was
composed of contingents from
most of the Gangs of Pennsylvania,
Jersey and New England.
We encircled the city on a
wide radius, our line running
roughly from Staten Island to
the forested site of the ancient
city of Elizabeth, to First and
Second Mountains just west of
the ruins of Newark, Bloomfield
and Montclair, thence Northeasterly
across the Hudson, and down
to the Sound. On Long Island
our line was pushed forward to
the first slopes of the hills.</p>
<p>We had no more than four
long-gunners to the square mile
in our first line, but each of
these was equal to a battery of
heavy artillery such as I had
known in the First World War.
And when their fire was first
concentrated on the Han city,
they blew its outer walls and
roof levels into a chaotic mass
of wreckage before the nervous
Yellow engineers could turn on
the ring of generators which surrounded
the city with a vertical
film of disintegrator rays. Our
explosive rockets could not penetrate
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 the sub-electronic and
ultronic orders.</p>
<hr />
<p class="cap"><span class="dcap">The</span> continuous operation of
the disintegrators destroyed
the air and maintained a constant
vacuum wherever they
played, into which the surrounding
air continuously rushed, naturally
creating atmospheric disturbances
after a time, which resulted
in a local storm. This,
however, ceased after a number
of hours, when the flow of air
toward the city became steady.</p>
<p>The Hans suffered severely
from atmospheric conditions inside
their city at first, but later
rearranged their disintegrator
ring in a system of overlapping
films that left diagonal openings,
through which the air rushed to
them, and through which their
ships emerged to scout our positions.</p>
<p>We shot down seven of their
cruisers before they realized the
folly of floating individually over
our invisible line. Their beams
traced paths of destruction like
scars across the countryside, but
caught less than half a dozen of
our gunners all told, for it
takes a lot of time to sweep every
square foot of a square mile
with a beam whose cross section
is not more than twenty or twenty-five
feet in diameter. Our gunners,
completely concealed beneath
the foliage of the forest,
with weapons which did not reveal
their position, as did the
flashes and detonation of the
Twentieth Century artillery, hit
their repeller rays with comparative
ease.</p>
<p>The "drop ships," which the
Hans next sent out, were harder
to handle. Rising to immense
heights behind the city's disintegrator
wall, these tiny, projectile-like
craft slipped through
the rifts in the cylinder of destruction,
and then turning off
their repeller rays, dropped at
terrific speed until their small
vanes were sufficient to support
them as they volplaned in great
circles, shooting back into the
city defenses at a lower level.</p>
<p>The great speed of these craft
made it almost impossible to register
a direct hit against them
with rocket guns, and they had
no repeller rays at which we
might shoot while they were over
our lines.</p>
<p>But by the same token they
were able to do little damage to
us. So great was the speed of a
drop ship, that the only way in
which it could use a disintegrator
ray was from a fixed generator
in the nose of the structure,
as it dropped in a straight line
toward its target. But since they
could not sight the widely deployed
individual gunners in our
line, their scouting was just as
ineffective as our attempts were
to shoot them down.</p>
<hr />
<p class="cap"><span class="dcap">For</span> more than a month the
situation remained a deadlock,
with the Hans locked up in
their cities, while we mobilized
gunners and supplies.</p>
<p>Had our stock of inertron been
sufficiently great at this period,
we could 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 ultronic vibrations
through the sub-electronic, electronic
and atomic states into
molecular form. Our laboratories
had barely begun production on
a quantity basis, for we had just
learned how to protect them from
Han air raids, and it would be
many months more before the
supply they had just started to
manufacture would be finished.
In the meantime we had enough
for a few aircraft, for jumping
belts and a small amount of armor.</p>
<p>We Wyomings possessed one
swooper completely sheathed
with inertron and counterweighted
with ultron. The Altoonas and
the Lycomings also had one
apiece. But a shielded swooper,
while impervious to the "dis"
ray, was helpless against squadrons
of Han aircraft, for the
Hans developed a technique of
playing their beams underneath
the swooper in such fashion as to
suck it down flutteringly into
the vacuum so created, until they
brought it finally, and more or
less violently, to earth.</p>
<p>Ultimately the Hans broke our
blockade to a certain extent,
when they resumed traffic
between their cities in great
convoys, protected by squadrons of
cruisers in vertical formation,
playing a continuous cross-fire
of disintegrator beams ahead of
them and down on the sides in a
most effective screen, so that it
was very difficult for us to get a
rocket through to the repeller
rays.</p>
<p>But we lined the scar paths
beneath their air routes for miles
at a stretch with concealed
gunners, some of whom would sooner
or later register hits, and it
was seldom that a convoy made
the trip between Nu-Yok and
Bos-Tan, Bah-Flo, Si-ka-ga or
Ah-la-nah without losing several
of its ships.</p>
<p>Hans who reached the ground
alive were never taken prisoner.
Not even the splendid discipline
of the Americans could curb the
wild hate developed through centuries
of dastardly oppression,
and the Hans were mercilessly
slaughtered, when they did not
save us the trouble by committing
suicide.</p>
<p>Several times the Hans drove
"air wedges" over our lines in
this vertical or "cloud bank" formation,
ploughing a scar path a
mile or more wide through our
positions. But at worst, to us,
this did not mean the loss of
more than a dozen men and girls,
and generally their raids cost
them 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 out over our lines,
there was nothing left for them
to do but to turn around and
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.</p>
<p>So at the time of which I
speak, the Spring of 2420 A.D.,
the Americans and the Hans
were temporarily at pretty much
of a deadlock. But the Hans were
as desperate as we were sanguine,
for we had time on our
side.</p>
<p>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 when command of the air
meant victory. We had no visible
cities nor massed bodies of men
for them to destroy, nothing but
vast stretches of silent forests
and hills, where our forces
lurked, invisible from the air.</p>
<hr class="mj" />
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