<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></SPAN>CHAPTER XVI<br/> Victory</h2>
<p class="cap"><span class="dcap">I had</span> gone five miles, and had
paused for a moment, half
way up the slope of the valley to
get my bearings, when a figure
came hurtling through the air
from behind, and landed lightly
at my side. It was Wilma.</p>
<p>"I put Bill Hearn in command
and followed, Tony. I won't let
you go into that alone. If you die,
I do, too. Now don't argue, dear.
I'm determined."</p>
<p>So together we leaped northward
again toward the battle.
And after a bit we pulled up
close behind the barrage.</p>
<p>Great, blinding flashes, like a
continuous wall of gigantic fireworks,
receded up the valley
ahead of us, sweeping ahead of
it a seething, tossing mass of
debris that seemed composed of
all nature, tons of earth, rocks
and trees. Ever and anon vast
sections of the mountain sides
would loosen and slide into the
valley.</p>
<p>And, leaping close behind this
barrage, with a reckless skill and
courage that amazed me, our
bayonet-gunners appeared in a
continuous series of flashing
pictures, outlined in midleap
against the wall of fire.</p>
<p>I would not have believed it
possible for such a barrage to
pass over any of the enemy and
leave them unscathed. But it did.
For the Hans, operating small
disintegrator beams from local
or field broadcasts, frantically
bored deep, slanting holes in the
earth as the fiery tides of explosions
rolled up the valleys toward
them, and into these probably
half of their units were able
to throw themselves and escape
destruction.</p>
<p>But dazed and staggering they
came forth again only to meet
death from the terrible, ripping,
slashing, cleaving weapons in
the hands of our leaping bayonet-gunners.</p>
<p>Thrust! Cut! Crunch! Slice!
Thrust! Up and down with vicious,
tireless, flashing speed,
swung the bayonets and ax-bladed
butts of the American
gunners as they leaped and
dodged, ever forward, toward
new opponents.</p>
<p>Weakly and ineffectually the
red-coated Han soldiery thrust
at them with spears, flailing
with their short-swords and
knives, or whipping about their
ray pistols. The forest men were
too powerful, too fast in their
remorselessly efficient movement.</p>
<p>With a shout of unholy joy, I
gripped a bayonet-gun from the
hands of a gunner whose leg had
been whisked out of existence
beneath him by a pistol ray, and
leaped forward into the fight,
launching myself at a red-coated
officer who was just stepping out
of a "worm hole."</p>
<p>Like a shriek of the Valkyrie,
Wilma's battle cry rang in my
ear as she, too, shot herself like
a rocket at a red-coated figure.</p>
<p>I thrust with every ounce of
my strength. The Han officer,
grinning wickedly as he tried to
raise the muzzle of his pistol,
threw himself backward as my
bayonet ripped the air under his
nose. But his grin turned instantly
to sickened surprise as
the up-cleaving ax-blade on the
butt of my weapon caught him
in the groin, half bisecting him.</p>
<p>And from the corner of my eye
I saw Wilma bury her bayonet
in her opponent, screaming in
ecstatic joy.</p>
<hr />
<p class="cap"><span class="dcap">And</span> so, in a matter of seconds,
we found ourselves in
the front rank, thrusting, cutting,
dodging, leaping along behind
that blinding and deafening
barrage in a veritable whirlwind
of fury, until it seemed to
me that we were exulting in a
consciousness of excelling even
that tide of destruction in our
merciless efficiency.</p>
<p>At last we became aware, in
but a vague sort of way at first,
that no more red-coats were rising
up out of the ground to go
down again before our whirling,
swinging weapons. Gradually we
paused, looking about in wonder.
Then the barrage ceased, and
the sudden absence of the deafening
roll, and the wall of light,
in themselves, deafened and
blinded us.</p>
<p>I leaped weakly toward the
spot where hazily I spied Wilma,
now drooping and swaying on
her feet, supported as she was by
her jumping belt, and caught
her in my arms, just as she was
sinking gently to the ground.</p>
<p>All around us the weary warriors,
crimsoned now with the
blood of the enemy, were sinking
to the ground in exhaustion.
And as I too, sank down, clutching
in my arms the unconscious
form of my warrior wife, I began
to hear, through my helmet
phones, the exultant report of
headquarters.</p>
<p>Our attack had swept straight
through the enemy's sector,
completely annihilating everything
except a few hundred of
his troops on either flank. And
these, in panic and terror, had
scattered wildly in flight. We
had wiped out a force more than
ten times our own number. The
right flank of the American
army was saved. And already
the Colorado Union, from behind
us, was leaping around in
a great circling movement, closing
in on the Han force that was
advancing from the ruins of Lo-Tan.</p>
<p>Far away, to the southwest,
the southern Gangs, reinforced
in the end by the bulk of our left
wing, had struck straight at the
enveloping Han force shattering
it like a thunderbolt, and at present
were busily hunting down
and destroying its scattered remnants.</p>
<p>But before the Colorado Union
could complete the destruction
of the central division of the enemy,
the despairing Hans saved
them the trouble. Company after
company of them, knowing no
escape was possible, lined up in
the forest glades and valleys,
while their officers swept them
out of existence by the hundreds
with their ray pistols, which
they then turned on themselves.</p>
<p>And so the fall of Lo-Tan was
accomplished. Somewhere in the
seething activities of these few
days, San-Lan, the "Heaven-Born,"
Emperor of the Hans in
America, perished, for he was
heard of never again, and the
unified action of the Hans vanished
with him, though it was
several years before one by one
their remaining cities were destroyed
and their populations
hunted down, thus completing
the reclamation of America and
inaugurating the most glorious
and noble era of scientific civilization
in the history of the
American race.</p>
<hr />
<p class="cap"><span class="dcap">As</span> I look back on those emotional
and violent years from
my present vantage point of declining
existence in an age of
peace and good will toward all
mankind, they do seem savage
and repellent.</p>
<p>Then there flashes into my
memory the picture of Wilma
(now long since gone to her rest)
as, screaming in an utter abandon
of merciless fury, she threw
herself recklessly, exultantly into
the thick of that wild, relentless
slaughter; and my mind can
find nothing savage nor repellent
about her.</p>
<p>If I, product of the relatively
peaceful Twentieth Century, was
so completely carried away by
the fury of that war, intensified
by centuries of unspeakable
cruelty on the part of the yellow
men who were mentally gods and
morally beasts, shall I be shocked
at the "bloodthirstiness" of a
mate who was, after all, but a
normal girl of that day, and
who, girl as she was, never for a
moment faltered in the high
courage with which she threw
herself into that combat, responding
to the passionate urge
for freedom in her blood that not
five centuries of inhuman persecution
could subdue?</p>
<p>Had the Hans been raging tigers,
or slimy, loathsome reptiles,
would we have spared
them? And when in their centuries
of degradation they had
destroyed the souls within themselves,
were they in any way superior
to tigers or snakes? To
have extended mercy would have
been suicide.</p>
<p>In the years that followed,
Wilma and I travelled nearly every
nation on the earth which
had succeeded in throwing off
the Han domination, spurred on
by our success in America, and I
never knew her to show to the
men or women of any race anything
but the utmost of sympathetic
courtesy and consideration,
whether they were the noble
brown-skinned Caucasians of
India, the sturdy Balkanites of
Southern Europe, or the simple,
spiritual Blacks of Africa, today
one of the leading races of
the world, although in the Twentieth
Century we regarded them
as inferior. This charity and
gentleness of hers did not fail
even in our contacts with the
non-Han Mongolians of Japan
and the coast provinces of China.</p>
<p>But that monstrosity among
the races of men which originated
as a hybrid somewhere in the
dark fastnesses of interior Asia,
and spread itself like an inhuman
yellow blight over the face
of the globe—for that race, like
all of us, she felt nothing but
horror and the irresistible urge
to extermination.</p>
<hr />
<p class="cap"><span class="dcap">Latterly</span>, our historians
and anthropologists find
much support for the theory that
the Hans sprang from a genus
of human-like creatures that may
have arrived on this earth with a
small planet (or large meteor)
which is known to have crashed
in interior Asia late in the
Twentieth Century, causing certain
permanent changes in the
earth's orbit and climate.</p>
<p>Geological convulsions blocked
this section off from the rest of
the world for many years. And
it is a historical fact that Chinese
scientists, driving their explorations
into it at a somewhat
later period, met the first wave of
the on-coming Hans.</p>
<p>The theory is that these creatures
(and certain queer skeletons
have been found in the
"Asiatic Bowl") with a mental
superdevelopment, but a vacuum
in place of that intangible something
we call a soul, mated forcibly
with the Tibetans, thereby
strengthening their physical
structure to almost the human
normal, adapting themselves to
earthly speech and habits, and in
some strange manner intensifying
even further their mental
powers.</p>
<p>Or, to put it the other way
around. These Tibetans, through
the injection of this unearthly
blood, deteriorated slightly physically,
lost the "soul" parts of
their nature entirely, and developed
abnormally efficient intellects.</p>
<p>However, through the centuries
that followed, as the Hans
spread over the face of the earth,
this unearthly strain in them
not only became more dilute, but
lost its potency; and in the end,
the poison of it submerged the
power of it, and earth's mankind
came again into possession of
its inheritance.</p>
<p>How all this may be, I do not
know. It is merely a hypothesis
over which the learned men of today
quarrel.</p>
<hr />
<p class="cap"><span class="dcap">But</span> I do know that there was
something inhuman about
these Hans. And I had many
months of intimate contact with
them, and with their Emperor in
America. I can vouch for the fact
that even in his most friendly
and human moments, there was
an inhumanity, or perhaps "unhumanity"
about him that
aroused in me that urge to kill.</p>
<p>But whether or not there was
in these people blood from outside
this planet, the fact remains
that they have been exterminated,
that a truly human civilization
reigns once more—and that
I am now a very tired old man,
waiting with no regrets for the
call which will take me to another
existence.</p>
<p>There, it is my hope and my
conviction that my courageous
mate of those bloody days waits
for me with loving arms.</p>
<p class="theend">THE END</p>
<div class="trn"><p><b>Transcriber's Note:</b> In this text the two prefixes <i>ultro-</i> and <i>ultrono-</i> have been applied
inconsistently to much of the future technology. These discrepancies remain as
printed.</p>
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