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 auto record only, at this time of night. Still, we don’t want 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.”
CHAPTER 9
The Fight in the Tower
So far we had not laid eyes on a Han. The tower seemed deserted. Blash and Gaunt, however, assured me that there would be at least one man on “duty” in the military offices, though he would probably be asleep, and two or three in the library proper and the projectoscope plant. “We’ve got to put them out of commission,” I said. “Did you bring the ‘dope’ cans, Wilma?”
“Yes,” she said, “two for each. Here,” and she distributed them.
We were now two levels below the roof, and at the point where we were to separate.
I did not want to let Wilma out of my sight, but it was necessary.
According to our plan, Barker was to make his way to the projectoscope plant, Blash and I to the library, and Wilma and Gaunt to the military office.
Blash and I traversed a long corridor, and I paused at the great arched doorway of the library. Cautiously peered in. Seated at three great switchboards were library operatives. Occasionally one of them would reach lazily for a lever, or sleepily push a button, as little numbered lights winked on and off. They were answering calls for electrograph and viewplate records on all sorts of subjects from all sections of the city.
I apprised my companions of the situation.
“Better wait a bit,” Blash added. “The calls will lessen shortly.”
Wilma reported an officer in the military office sound asleep.
“Give him the can, then,” I said.
Barker was to do nothing more than keep watch in the projectoscope plant, and a few moments later he reported himself well concealed, with a splendid view of the floor.
“I think we can take a chance now,” Blash said to me, and at my nod, he opened the lid of his dope can. Of course, the fumes did not affect us through our helmets. They were absolutely without odor or visibility, and in a few seconds the librarians were unconscious. We stepped into the room.
There ensued considerable cautious observation and experiment on the part of Gaunt, working from the military office, and Blash in the library; while Wilma and I, with drawn swords and sharply attuned microphones, stood guard, and occasionally patrolled nearby corridors.
“I hear something approaching,” Wilma said after a bit, with excitement in her voice. “It’s a soft, gliding sound.”
“‘That’s an elevator somewhere,” Barker cut in from the projectoscope floor. “Can you locate it? I can’t hear it.”
“It’s to the east of me,” she replied.
“And to my west,” said I, faintly catching it. “It’s between us, Wilma, and nearer you than me. Be careful. Have you got any information yet, Blash—Gaunt?”
“Getting it now,” one of them replied. “Give us two minutes more.”
“Keep at it then,” I said. “We’ll guard.”
The soft, gliding sound ceased.
“I think it’s very close to me,” Wilma almost whispered. “Come closer, Tony. I have a feeling something is going to happen. I’ve never known my nerves to get taut like this without reason.”
In some alarm, I launched myself down the corridor in great leap toward the intersection whence I knew I could see her.
In the middle of my leap my ultrophone registered her gasp of alarm. The next instant I glided to a stop at the intersection to see Wilma backing toward the door of the military office, her sword red with blood, and an inert form on the corridor floor. Two other Hans were circling to either side of her with wicked-looking knives, while a third, evidently a high officer judging by the resplendence of his garb, tugged desperately to get an electrophone instrument out of a bulky pocket. If he ever gave the alarm, there was no telling what might happen to us. I was at least seventy feet away, but I crouched low and sprang with every bit of strength in my legs. It would be more correct to say that I dived, for I reached the fellow head on, with no attempt to draw my legs beneath me.
Some instinct must have warned him, for he turned suddenly as I hurtled close to him. But by this time I had sunk close to the floor, and had stiffened myself rigidly, lest a dragging knee or foot might just prevent my reaching him. I brought my blade upward and over.
It was a vicious slash that laid him open, bisecting him from groin to chin, and his body toppled down on me as I slid to a tangled stop.
The other two, startled, turned. Wilma leaped at once and struck him down with a side slash. I looked up at this instant, and the dazed fear on his face at the length of her leap, registered vividly. The Hans knew nothing of our inertron belts, it seemed, and these leaps and dives of ours filled them with terror.
As I rose to my feet, a gory mess, Wilma, with a poise and speed which I found time to admire even in this crisis, again leaped. This time she dove head first as I had done, and with a beautifully executed thrust, ran the last Han through the throat.
Uncertainly, she scrambled to her feet, staggered queerly, and then sank gently prone on the corridor. She had fainted.
At this juncture, Blash and Gaunt reported with elation that they had the record we wanted.
“Back to the room, everybody!” I ordered, as I picked Wilma up in my arms. With her inertron belt, she felt light as a feather.
Gaunt joined me at once from the military office and at the intersection of the corridor, we came upon Blash waiting for us. Barker, however, was not in evidence.
“Where are you, Barker?” I called.
“Go ahead,” he replied. “I’ll be with you on the roof at once.”
We came out in the open without any further mishap and I instructed Gibbons in the ship to light the knob on the end of the ultron wire. It flashed dully a few feet away from us. Just how he had maneuvered the ship to keep our end of the line in position, without its swinging in a tremendous arc, I have never been able to understand. Had not the night been an unusually still one, he could not have checked the initial pendulum-like movements. As it was, there was considerable air current at certain of the levels, and in different directions too, But Gibbons was an expert of rare ability and sensitivity in the handling of a rocket-ship, and he managed, with the aid of his delicate instruments, to sense the drifts almost before they affected the fine ultron wire, and to neutralize them with little shifts in the position of the ship.
Blash and Gaunt fastened their rings to the wire, and I hooked my own and Wilma’s on, too. But on looking around, I found that Barker was still missing.
“Barker, come!” I called. “We’re waiting.”
“Coming!” he replied, and indeed, at that instant, his figure appeared up the ramp. He chuckled as he fastened his ring to the wire and said something about a little surprise he had left for the Hans.
“Don’t reel in the wire more than a few hundred feet,” I instructed Gibbons. “It will take too long to wind it in. We’ll float up, and when we’re aboard, we can drop it.”
In order to float up, we had to dispense with a pound or two of weight apiece. We hurled our swords from us, and kicked off our shoes as Gibbons reeled up the line a bit, and then letting go of the wire, began to hum upward on our rings with increasing velocity.
The rush of air brought Wilma to, and I hastily explained to her that we had been successful. Receding far below us now, I could see our dully shining knob swinging to and fro in an ever-widening arc, as it crossed and recrossed the black square of the tower roof. As an extra precaution, I ordered Gibbons to shut off the light, and to show on
e from the belly of the ship, for so great was our speed now, that I began to fear we would have difficulty in checking ourselves. We were literally falling upward, and with terrific acceleration.
Fortunately, we had several minutes in which to solve this difficulty, which none of us, strangely enough, had foreseen. It was Gibbons who found the answer.
“You’ll be all right if all of you grab the wire tight when I give the word,” he said. “First I’ll start reeling it in at full speed. You won’t get much of a jar, and then I’ll decrease its speed again gradually, and its weight will hold you back. Are you ready? One-two-three!”
We all grabbed tightly with our gloved hands as he gave the word. We must have been rising a good bit faster than he figured, however, for it wrenched our arms considerably, and the maneuver set up a sickening pendulum motion.
For a while all we could do was swing there in an arc that may have been a quarter of a mile across, about three and a half miles above the city, and still more than a mile from our ship.
Gibbons skillfully took up the slack as our momentum pulled up the line. Then at last we had ourselves under control again, and continued our upward journey, checking our speed somewhat with our gloves.
There was not one of us who did not breathe a big sigh of relief when we scrambled through the hatch safely into the ship again, cast off the ultron line and slammed the trap shut.
Little realizing that we had a still more terrible experience to go through, we discussed the information that Blash and Gaunt had between them extracted from the Han records, and the advisability of ultrophoning Hart at once.
CHAPTER 10
The Walls of Hell
The traitors were, it seemed, a gang located a few miles north of Nu-Yok on the wooded banks of the Hudson, the Sinsings. They had exchanged scraps of information to the Hans in return for several old rep ray machines, and the privilege of tuning in on the Han electronic power broadcast for their operation, provided their ships agreed to subject themselves to the orders of the Han traffic office, while aloft.
The rest wanted to ultrophone their news at once, since there was always danger that we might never get back to the gang with it.
I objected, however. The Sinsings would be likely to pick up our message. Even if we used the directional projector, they might have scouts out to the west and south in the big inter-gang stretches of country. They would flee to Nu-Yok and escape the punishment they merited. It seemed to be vitally important that that should not, for the sake of example to other weak groups among the gangs, as well as to prevent a crisis in they might clear more vital information to the enemy.
“Out to sea again,” I ordered Gibbons. “They’ll be less likely to look for us in that direction.”
“Easy, Boss, easy,” he replied. “Wait until we get up a mile or two more. They must have discovered evidence of our raid by now, and their dis ray wall may go in operation any moment.”
Even as he spoke, the ship lurched downward and to one side.
“There it is!” he shouted. “Hang on, everybody, We’re going to nose straight up!” And he flipped the rocket motor control wide open.
Looking through one of the rear ports, I could see a nebulous, luminous ring, and on all sides the atmosphere took on a faint iridescence.
We were almost over the destructive range of the dis ray wall, a hollow cylinder of annihilation shooting upward from a solid ring of generators surrounding the city. It was the main defense system of the Hans, which had never been used except in periodic tests. They may or may not have suspected that an American rocket-ship was within the cylinder; probably they had turned on their generators more as a precaution to prevent any reaching a position above the city.
But even at our present great height, we were in great danger. It was a question how much we might have been harmed by the rays themselves, for their effective range was not much more than seven or eight miles. The greater danger lay in the terrific downward rush of air within the cylinder to replace that which was being burned into nothingness by the continual play of the disintegrators. The air fell into the cylinder with the force of a gale. It would be rushing toward the wall from the outside with terrific force also, but naturally, the effect was intensified on the interior.
Our ship vibrated and trembled. We had only one chance of escape—to fight our way well above the current. To drift down with it meant ultimately, and inevitably, to be sucked into the annihilating wall at some lower level.
But very gradually and perkily our upward movement, as shown on the indicators, began to increase; and after an hour of desperate struggle we were free of the maelstrom and into the rarefied upper levels. The terror beneath us was now invisible through several layers of cloud formations.
Gibbons brought the ship back to an even keel, and drove her eastward into one of the most brilliantly gorgeous sunrises I have ever seen.
We described a great circle to the south and west, in a long easy dive, for he had cut out his rocket motors to save them as much as possible. We had drawn terrifically on their fuel reserves in our battle with the elements. For the moment, the atmosphere below cleared, and we could see the Jersey coast far beneath, like a great map.
“We’re not through yet,” remarked Gibbons suddenly, pointing at his periscope, and adjusting it to telescopic focus. “A Han ship, and a ‘drop ship’ at that—and he’s seen us. If he whips that beam of his on us, we’re done.”
I gazed, fascinated, at the viewplate. What I saw was a cigar-shaped ship not dissimilar to our own in design, and from the proportional size of its ports, of about the same size as our swoopers. We learned later that they carried crews, for the most part of not more than three or four men. They had streamlined hulls and tails that embodied universal-jointed double fish-tail rudders. In operation they rose to great heights on their powerful rep rays, then gathered speed either by a straight nose dive, or an inclined dive in which they sometimes used the rep ray slanted at a sharp angle. He was already above us, though several miles to the north. He could, of course, try to get on our tail and spear us with his beam as he dropped at us from a great height.
Suddenly his beam blazed forth in a blinding flash, whipping downward slowly to our right. He went through a peculiar corkscrew-like evolution, evidently maneuvering to bring his beam to bear on us with a spiral motion.
Gibbons instantly sent our ship into a series of evolutions that must have looked like those of a frightened hen. Alternately, he used the forward and the reverse rocket blasts, and in varying degree. We fluttered, we shot suddenly to right and left, and dropped like a plummet in uncertain movements. But all the time the Han scout dropped toward us, determinedly whipping the air around us with his beam. Once it sliced across beneath us, not more than a hundred feet, and we dropped with a jar into the pocket formed by the destruction of the air.
He had dropped to within a mile of us, and was coming with the speed of a projectile, when the end came. Gibbons always swore it was sheer luck. Maybe it was, but I like pilots who are lucky that way.
In the midst of a dizzy, fluttering maneuver of our own, with the Han ship enlarging to our gaze with terrifying rapidity, and its beam slowly slicing toward us in what looked like certain destruction within the second, I saw Gibbons’ fingers flick at the lever of his rocket gun and a split second later the Han ship flew apart like a clay pigeon.
We staggered, fluttered crazily for several moments while Gibbons struggled to bring our ship into balance, and a section of about four square feet in the side of the ship near the stern slowly crumbled like rusted metal. His beam actually had touched us, but our explosive rocket had got him a thousandth of a second sooner.
Part of our rudder had been annihilated, and our motor damaged. But we were able to swoop gently back across Jersey, fortunately crossing the ship lanes without sighting any more Han craft, and finally settling to rest in the little glade beneath the trees, near Hart’s camp.
CHAPTER 11
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 that 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 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 they would barter clues to the America nultronic secrets to the Hans.
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