Victory
: The Airlords Of HanI had 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.
"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."
So together we leaped n
we pulled up close behind the barrage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
And from the corner of my eye I saw Wilma bury her bayonet in her
opponent, screaming in ecstatic joy.
* * * * *
And 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* * * * *
As 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
* * * * *
Latterly, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How all this may be, I do not know. It is merely a hypothesis over which
the learned men of today quarrel.
* * * * *
But 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.
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.
There, it is my hope and my conviction that my courageous mate of those
bloody days waits for me with loving arms.
More
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ADDENDUM (Written by John Yiewsley Claxton, Esq., of Norbury, in the County Borough of Croydon, Surrey) In accordance with the desire of my old friend, Wilfrid Poynders, I am now about to publish the book which was handed to me by Mer... What I Saw Of The Destruction Of Weybridge And Shepperton
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