Since the Americans, not knowing the exact location of the Han outer line, had shot their barrage over it, and the Hans had fired at unknown American positions, this first exchange of fire had done little more than to churn up vast areas of mountain and valley.
The Hans appeared to be elated, to feel that they had driven off an American attack. I knew better. The next American move, I felt, would be the occupation of the air, from which they had driven the Hans, and from swoopers to direct the rocket fire at the city itself. Then, when they had destroyed this, they would sweep in and hunt down the Hans, man to man, in the surrounding mountains. Command of the air was still important in military strategy, but command of the air rested no longer in the air, but on the ground.
The Hans themselves attempted to scout the American positions from the air, under cover of a massed attack of ships in cloud bank or beaming formation, but with very little success. Most of their ships were shot down, and the remainder slid back to the city on sharply inclined repeller rays, one of them which had its generators badly damaged while still fifty miles out, collapsed over the city, before it could reach its berth at the airport, and crashed down through the glass roof of the city, doing great damage.
Then followed the “air balls,” an unforeseen and ingenious resurrection by the Americans of an old principle of air and submarine tactics, through a modern application of the principle of remote control.
The air balls took heavy toll of the morale of the Hans before they were clearly understood by them, and even afterward for that matter.
Their first appearance was quite mysterious. One uneasy night, while the pulsating growl of the distant barrage kept the nerves of the city’s inhabitants on edge, there was an explosion near the top of a pinnacle not far from the Imperial Tower. It occurred at the 732nd level, and caused the structure above it to lean and sag, though it did not fall.
Repair men who shot up the shafts a few minutes later to bring new broadcast lamps to replace those which had been shattered, reported what seemed to be a sphere of metal, about three feet in diameter, with a four-inch lens in it, floating slowly down the shaft, as though it were some living creature making a careful examination, pausing now and then as its lens swung about like a great single eye. The moment this “eye” turned upon them, they said, the ball “rushed” down on them, crushing several to death in its vicious gyrations, and jamming the mechanism of the elevator, though failing to crash through it. Then, said the wounded survivors, it floated back up the shaft, watchfully “eyeing” them, and slipped off to the side at the wrecked level.
The next night several of these air balls were seen, following explosions in various towers and sections of the city roof and walls. In each case repair gangs were “rushed” by them, and suffered many casualties. On the third night a few of the air balls were destroyed by the repair men and guards, who now were equipped with disintegrator pistols.
This, however, was pretty costly business, for in each case the ray bored into the corridor and shaft walls beyond its target, wrecking much machinery, injuring the structural members of that section, penetrating apartments and taking a number of lives. Moreover, the air balls, being destroyed, could not be subjected to scientific inspection.
After this the explosions ceased. But for many days the sudden appearances of those air balls in the corridors and shafts of the city caused the greatest confusion, and many times they were the cause of death and panic.
At times they released poison gases, and not infrequently themselves burst, instead of withdrawing, in a veritable explosion of disease germs, requiring absolute quarantine by the Han medical department.
There was an utter heartlessness about the defense of the Han authorities, who considered nothing but the good of the community as a whole; for when they established these quarantines, they did not hesitate to seal up thousands of the city’s inhabitants behind hermetic barriers enclosing entire sections of different levels, where deprived of food and ventilation, the wretched inhabitants died miserably, long before the disease germs developed in their systems.
At the end of two weeks the entire population of the city was in a mood of panicky revolt. News service to the public had been suspended, and the use of all viewplates and phones in the city were restricted to official communications. The city administration had issued orders that all citizens not on duty should keep to their apartments, but the order was openly flouted, and small mobs were wandering through the corridors, ascending and descending from one level to another, seeking they knew not what, fleeing the air balls, which might appear anywhere, and being driven back from the innermost and deepest sections of the city by the military guard.
I now made up my mind that the time was ripe for me to attempt my escape. In all this confusion I might have an even break, in spite of the danger I might myself run from the air balls, and the almost insuperable difficulties of making my way to the outside of the city and down the precipitous walls of the mountain to which the city clung like a cap. I would have given much for my inertron belt, that I might simply have leaped outward from the edge of the roof some dark night and floated gently down. I longed for my ultrophone equipment, with which I might have
