<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></SPAN>CHAPTER IX<br/> The Fall of Nu-Yok</h2>
<p class="cap"><span class="dcap">My</span> position among the Hans,
in this period, was a peculiar
one. I was at once a closely
guarded prisoner and an honored
guest. San-Lan told me
frankly that I would remain the
latter only so long as I remained
an object of serious study or
mental diversion to himself or
his court. I made bold to ask
him what would be done with me
when I ceased to be such.</p>
<p>"Naturally," he said, "you
will be eliminated. What else? It
takes the services of fifteen men
altogether, to guard you; and
men, you understand, cannot be
produced and developed in less
than eighteen years." He meditated
frowningly for a moment.
"That, by the way, is something
I must take up with the Birth
and Educational Bureau. They
must develop some method of
speeding growth, even at the
cost of mental development. With
your wild forest men getting out
of hand this way, we are going to
need greater resources of population,
and need them badly.</p>
<p>"But," he continued more
lightly, "there seems to be no
need for you to disturb yourself
over the prospect at present. It is
true you have been able to resist
our psychoanalysts and hypnotists,
and so have no value to us
from the viewpoint of military
information, but as a philosopher,
you have proved interesting
indeed."</p>
<p>He broke off to give his attention
to a gorgeously uniformed
official who suddenly appeared
on the large viewplate that
formed one wall of the apartment.
So perfectly did this mechanism
operate, that the man
might have been in the room
with us. He made a low obeisance,
then rose to his full
height and looked at his ruler
with malicious amusement.</p>
<p>"Heaven-Born," he said, "I
have the exquisite pain of reporting
bad news."</p>
<p>San-Lan gave him a scathing
look. "It will be less unpleasant
if I am not distracted by the
sight of you while you report."</p>
<p>At this the man disappeared,
and the viewplate once more presented
its normal picture of the
mountains North of Lo-Tan; but
the voice continued:</p>
<p>"Heaven-Born, the Nu-Yok
fleet has been destroyed, the city
is in ruins, and the newly formed
ground brigades, reduced to 10,000
men, have taken refuge in
the hills of Ron-Dak (the Adirondacks)
where they are being
pressed hard by the tribesmen,
who have surrounded them."</p>
<hr />
<p class="cap"><span class="dcap">For</span> an instant San-Lan sat as
though paralyzed. Then he
leaped to his feet, facing the
viewplate.</p>
<p>"Let me see you!" he snarled.
Instantly the mountain view
disappeared and the Intelligence
Officer appeared again, this time
looking a little frightened.</p>
<p>"Where is Lui-Lok?" he
shouted. "Cut him in on my
North plate. The commander
who loses his city dies by torture.
Cut him in. Cut him in!"</p>
<p>"Heaven-Born, Lui-Lok committed
suicide. He leaped into a
ray, when the rockets of the
tribesmen began to penetrate
the ray-wall. Lip-Hung is in
command of the survivors. We
have just had a message from
him. We could not understand
all of it. Reception was very
weak because he is operating
with emergency apparatus on
Bah-Flo power. The Nu-Yok
power broadcast plant has been
blown up. Lip-Hung begs for a
rescue fleet."</p>
<p>San-Lan, his expression momentarily
becoming more vicious,
now was striding up and
down the room, while the poor
wretch in the viewplate, thoroughly
scared at last, stood
trembling.</p>
<p>"What!" shrieked the tyrant.
"He begs a rescue. A rescue of
what? Of 10,000 beaten men and
nothing better than makeshift
apparatus? No fleet? No city? I
give him and his 10,000 to the
tribesmen! They are of no use to
us now! Get out! Vanish! No,
wait! Have any of the beasts'
rockets penetrated the ray-walls
of other cities?"</p>
<p>"No, Heaven-Born, no. It is
only at Nu-Yok that the tribesmen
used rockets sheathed in the
same mysterious substance they
use on their little aircraft and
which cannot be disintegrated by
the ray." (He meant inertron,
of course.)</p>
<p>San-Lan waved his hand in
dismissal. The officer dissolved
from view, and the mountains
once more appeared, as though
the whole side of the room were
of glass.</p>
<p>More slowly he paced back
and forth. He was the caged
tiger now, his face seamed with
hate and the desperation of
foreshadowed doom.</p>
<p>"Driven out into the hills," he
muttered to himself. "Not more
than 10,000 of them left. Hunted
like beasts—and by the very
beasts we ourselves have hunted
for centuries. Cursed be our ancestors
for letting a single one of
the spawn live!" He shook his
clenched hands above his head.
Then, suddenly remembering
me, he turned and glared.</p>
<p>"Forest man, what have you
to say?" he demanded.</p>
<p>Thus confronted, there stole
over me that same detached feeling
that possessed me the day I
had been made Boss of the Wyomings.</p>
<p>"It is the end of the Air Lords
of Han," I said quietly. "For
five centuries command of the
air has meant victory. But this
is so no longer. For more than
three centuries your great,
gleaming cities have been impregnable
in all their arrogant
visibility. But that day is done
also. Victory returns once more
to the ground, to men invisible
in the vast expanse of the forest
which covers the ruins of the
civilization destroyed by your
ancestors. Ye have sown destruction.
Ye shall reap it!</p>
<p>"Your ancestors thought they
had made mere beasts of the
American race. Physically you
did reduce them to the state of
beasts. But men do have souls,
San-Lan, and in their souls the
Americans still cherished the
spark of manhood, of honor, of
independence. While the Hans
have degenerated into a race of
sleek, pampered beasts themselves,
they have unwittingly
bred a race of super-men out of
those they sought to make animals.
You have bred your own
destruction. Your cities shall be
blasted from their foundations.
Your air fleets shall be brought
crashing to earth. You have your
choice of dying in the wreckage,
or of fleeing to the forests, there
to be hunted down and killed as
you have sought to destroy us!"</p>
<p>And the ruler of all the Hans
shrank back from my outstretched
finger as though it had
been in truth the finger of doom.</p>
<p>But only for a moment. Suddenly
he snarled and crouched as
though to spring at me with his
bare hands. By a mighty convulsion
of the will he regained control
of himself, however, and assumed
a manner of quiet dignity.
He even smiled—a slow, crooked
smile.</p>
<p>"No," he said, answering his
own thought. "I will not have
you killed now. You shall live on,
my honored guest, to see with
your own eyes how we shall exterminate
your animal-brethren
in their forests. With your own
ears you shall hear their dying
shrieks. The cold science of Han
is superior to your spurious
knowledge. We have been careless.
To our cost we have let you
develop brains of a sort. But we
are still superior. We shall go
down into the forests and meet
you. We shall beat you in your
own element. When you have seen
and heard this happen, my Council
shall devise for you a death by
scientific torture, such as no man
in the history of the world has
been honored with."</p>
<hr />
<p class="cap"><span class="dcap">I must</span> digress here a bit from
my own personal adventures
to explain briefly how the fall of
Nu-Yok came about, as I learned
it afterward.</p>
<p>Upon my capture by the Hans,
my wife, Wilma, courageously
had assumed command of my
Gang, the Wyomings.</p>
<p>Boss Handan, of the Winslows,
who was directing the American
forces investing Nu-Yok, contented
himself for several weeks
with maintaining our lines, while
waiting for the completion of the
first supply of inertron-jacketed
rockets. At last they arrived
with a limited quantity of very
high-powered atomic shells, a
trifle over a hundred of them to
be exact. But this number, it was
estimated, would be enough to
reduce the city to ruins. The
rockets were distributed, and the
day for the final bombardment
was set.</p>
<p>The Hans, however, upset
Handan's plans by launching a
ground expedition up the west
bank of the Hudson. Under cover
of an air raid to the southwest,
in which the bulk of their ships
took part, this ground expedition
shot northward in low-flying
ships.</p>
<p>The raiding air fleet ploughed
deep into our lines in their famous
"cloud-bank" formation,
with down-playing disintegrator
rays so concentrated as to form a
virtual curtain of destruction. It
seared a scar path a mile and a
half wide fifteen miles into our
territory.</p>
<p>Everyone of our rocket gunners
caught in this section was
annihilated. Altogether we lost
several hundred men and girls.</p>
<p>Gunners to each side of the
raiding ships kept up a continuous
fire on them. Most of the
rockets were disintegrated, for
Handan would not permit the use
of the inertron rockets against
the ships. But now and then one
found its way through the playing
beams, hit a repeller ray and
was hurled up against a Han
ship, bringing it crashing down.</p>
<p>The orders that Handan
barked into his ultrophone
were, of course, heard by every
long-gunner in the ring of American
forces around the city, and
nearly all of them turned their
fire on the Han airfleet, with the
exception of those equipped with
the inertron rockets.</p>
<p>These latter held to the original
target and promptly cut loose
on the city with a shower of destruction
which the disintegrator-ray
walls could not stop. The
results produced awe even in our
own ranks.</p>
<hr />
<p class="cap"><span class="dcap">Where</span> an instant before had
stood the high-flung masses
and towers of Nu-Yok, gleaming
red, blue and gold in the brilliant
sunlight, and shimmering
through the iridescence of the
ray "wall," there was a seething
turmoil of gigantic explosions.</p>
<p>Surging billows of debris were
hurled skyward on gigantic pulsations
of blinding light, to the
detonations that shook men from
their feet in many sections of the
American line seven and eight
miles away.</p>
<p>As I have said, there were only
some hundred of the inertron
rockets among the Americans,
long and slender, to fit the ordinary
guns, but the atomic laboratories
hidden beneath the forests,
had outdone themselves in
their construction. Their release
of atomic force was nearly 100
per cent, and each one of them
was equal to many hundred tons
of trinitrotoluol, which I had
known in the First World War,
five hundred years before, as
"T.N.T."</p>
<p>It was all over in a few seconds.
Nu-Yok had ceased to exist,
and the waters of the bay and
the rivers were pouring into the
vast hole where a moment before
had been the rocky strata beneath
lower Manhattan.</p>
<p>Naturally, with the destruction
of the city's power-broadcasting
plant the Han air fleet
had plunged to earth.</p>
<p>But the ships of the ground
expedition up the river, hugging
the tree tops closely, had run the
gauntlet of the American long-gunners
who were busily shooting
at the other Han fleet, high
in the air to the southwest, and
about half of them had landed before
their ships were robbed of
their power. The other half
crashed, taking some 10,000 or
12,000 Han troops to destruction
with them. But from those which
had landed safely, emerged the
10,000 who now were the sole survivors
of the city, and who took
refuge in wooded fastnesses of
the Adirondacks.</p>
<hr />
<p class="cap"><span class="dcap">The</span> Americans with their immensely
greater mobility, due
to their jumping belts and their
familiarity with the forest, had
them ringed in within twenty-four
hours.</p>
<p>But owing to the speed of the
maneuvers, the lines were not as
tightly drawn as they might
have been, and there was considerable
scattering of both American
and Han units. The Hans
could make only the weakest
short-range use of their newly
developed disintegrator-ray field
units, since they had only distant
sources of power-broadcast on
which to draw. On the other
hand, the Americans could use
their explosive rockets only
sparingly for fear of hitting one
another.</p>
<p>So the battle was finished in a
series of desperate hand-to-hand
encounters in the ravines and
mountain slopes of the district.</p>
<p>The Mifflins and Altoonas,
themselves from rocky, mountainous
sections, gave a splendid
account of themselves in this
fighting, leaping to the craggy
slopes above the Hans, and driving
them down into the ravines,
where they could safely concentrate
on them the fire of depressed
rocket guns.</p>
<p>The Susquannas, with their
great inertron shields, which
served them well against the
weak rays of the Hans, pressed
forward irresistibly every time
they made a contact with a Han
unit, their short-range rocket
guns sending a hail of explosive
destruction before them.</p>
<p>But the Delawares, with their
smaller shields, inertron leg-guards
and helmets, and their
ax-guns, made faster work of it.
They would rush the Hans,
shooting from their shields as
they closed in, and finish the
business with their ax-blades
and the small rocket guns that
formed the handles of their axes.</p>
<p>It was my own unit of Wyomings,
equipped with bayonet guns
not unlike the rifles of the First
World War, that took the most
terrible toll from the Hans.</p>
<p>They advanced at the double,
laying a continuous barrage before
them as they ran, closing
with the enemy in great leaps,
cutting, thrusting and slicing
with those terrible double-ended
weapons in a vicious efficiency
against which the Hans with
their swords, knives and spears
were utterly helpless.</p>
<p>And so my prediction that the
war would develop hand-to-hand
fighting was verified at the outset.</p>
<p>None of the details of this battle
of the Ron-Daks were ever
known in Lo-Tan. Not more than
the barest outlines of the destruction
of the survivors of Nu-Yok
were ever received by San-Lan
and his Council. And of
course, at that time I knew no
more about it than they did.</p>
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