This ship shot out toward our lines just as the last of the groundships
turned turtle and was blown to pieces. As it approached, the rockets of
our invisible and widely scattered gunners in the forest below began to
explode beneath its _rep_ ray plates. The explosions caused the great
ship to plunge and roll mightily, but otherwise did it no serious harm
that I could see, for it was very heavily armored.
Occasionally rockets fired directly at the ship would find their mark
and tear gashes in its side and bottom plates, but these hits were few.
The ship was high in the air, and a far more difficult target than were
its _rep_ ray columns. To hit the latter, our gunners had only to gauge
their aim vertically. Range could be practically ignored, since the
_rep_ ray at any point above two-thirds the distance from the earth to
the ship would automatically hurl the rocket upward against the _rep_
ray plate.
As the ship sped toward us, rocking, plunging and recovering, it began
to beam the forest below. It was equipped with a superbeam too, which
cut a swathe nearly a hundred feet wide wherever it played.
With visions of many a life snuffed out below me, I surrendered to the
impulse to stage a single-handed attack on this ship, feeling quite
secure in my floating shell of inertron. I nosed up vertically, and
rocketed for a position above the ship. Then as I climbed upward, as yet
unobserved in my tiny craft that was scarcely larger than myself, I
trained my telultroscope on the Han ship, focussing through to a view of
its interior.
Much as I had imbibed of this generation's hatred for the Hans, I was
forced to admire them for the completeness and efficiency of this
marvelous craft of theirs.
Constantly twirling the controls of my scope to hold the focus, I
examined its interior from nose to stern.
* * * * *
It may be of interest at this point to give the reader a layman's
explanation of the electronic or ionic machinery of these ships, and of
their general construction, for today the general public knows little of
the particular application of the electronic laws which the Hans used,
although the practical application of ultronics are well understood.
Back in the Twentieth Century I had, like literally millions of others,
dabbled a bit in "radio" as we called it then; the science of the Hans
was simply the superdevelopment of "electricity," "radio," and
"broadcasting."
It must be understood that this explanation of mine is not technically
accurate, but only what might be termed an illustrative approximation.
The Hans' power-stations used to broadcast three distinct "_powers_"
simultaneously. Our engineers called them the "_starter_," the
"_pullee_" and the "_sub-disintegrator_." The last named had nothing to
do with the operation of the ships, but was exclusively the powerizer of
the disintegrator generators.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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