I explained how I was adopted into the Wyoming Gang, or clan,
descendants of the original populations of Wilkes-Barre, Scranton and
the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania; how quite by accident I stumbled
upon a method of destroying Han aircraft by shooting explosive rockets,
not directly at the heavily armored ships, but at the repeller ray
columns, which automatically drew the rockets upward where they exploded
in the generators of the aircraft; how the Wyomings threw the first
thrill of terror into the Airlords by bringing an entire squadron
crashing to earth; how a handful of us in a rocketship successfully
raided the Han city of Nu-Yok; and how by the application of military
principles I remembered from the First World War, I was able to lead the
Wyomings to victory over the Sinsings, a Hudson River tribe which had
formed a traitorous alliance with the hereditary enemies and oppressors
of the White Race in America.
* * * * *
By the Spring of 2420 A.D., a short six months after these events, the
positions of the Yellow and the White Races in America had been
reversed. The hunted were now the hunters. The Hans desperately were
increasing the defenses of their fifteen cities, around each of which
the American Gangs had drawn a widely deployed line of long-gunners;
while nervous air convoys, closely bunched behind their protective
screen of disintegrator beams, kept up sporadic and costly systems of
transportation between the cities.
During this period our own campaign against the Hans of Nu-Yok was
fairly typical of the development of the war throughout the country. Our
force was composed of contingents from most of the Gangs of
Pennsylvania, Jersey and New England. We encircled the city on a wide
radius, our line running roughly from Staten Island to the forested site
of the ancient city of Elizabeth, to First and Second Mountains just
west of the ruins of Newark, Bloomfield and Montclair, thence
northeasterly across the Hudson, and down to the Sound. On Long Island
our line was pushed forward to the first slopes of the hills.
We had no more than four long-gunners to the square mile in our first
line, but each of these was equal to a battery of heavy artillery such
as I had known in the First World War. And when their fire was first
concentrated on the Han city, they blew its outer walls and roof levels
into a chaotic mass of wreckage before the nervous Yellow engineers
could turn on the ring of generators which surrounded the city with a
vertical film of disintegrator rays. Our explosive rockets could not
penetrate this film, for it disintegrated them instantly and harmlessly,
as it did all other material substance with the sole exception of
"inertron," that synthetic element developed by the Americans from the
sub-electronic and ultronic orders.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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