The Airlords of Han quotes

By the spring of 2420 AD, 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;

Long before the opposing forces could come to grips, one or the other will be wiped out.”

But I only smiled, for I remembered how much of this same talk there was five centuries ago, and that it was even predicted in 1914 that no war could last more than six months.

That there would be hand-to-hand work before we were through, and in plenty, I was convinced, and so every able-bodied youth I could muster was enrolled in my infantry battalion and spent most of his time in vigorous bayonet practice.

The picture was a comic one to me, and I laughed, wondering how such soft creatures had held the sturdy and virile American race in complete subjection for centuries. But my laugh died as my mind grasped at the obvious explanation.

These Hans were only soft physically. Mentally they were hard and hellishly efficient; ruthless, relentless and conscienceless.

Impulsively I nosed my swooper down toward the ship and shot toward it at full rocket power. I had acted so swiftly that I had covered nearly half the distance toward the ship before my mind slowly drifted out of the daze of my emotion.

And have I mentioned the color of their uniforms? Their circular hats and pants were a bright yellow; their coats a flaming scarlet.

What targets they were!

I must have chuckled audibly at the thought, for their commander who was seated on a folding stool one of his men had placed for him, glanced in my direction, and, at his arrogant gesture of command, I was prodded to my feet, and with …

Then I knew what it was about these Hans that kept me in a turmoil of irritation.

It was their sardonic, mocking, cruel smiles; smiles which left their stamp on their faces, even in repose.

Now the commander was smiling tauntingly at me. When he spoke, it was in my own language.

… will never tell how, they discovered some likeness of her, and faked an electronoscopic picture of her in the hands of torturers in Nu-Yok, in which she was shown holding out her arms piteously toward me, as though begging me to save her by surrender.

Surrender of what? Strangely enough, they never indicated that to me directly, and to this day I do not know precisely what they expected or hoped to get out of me.

I surmise that it was information regarding the American sciences.

I have never, as a matter of fact, become entirely attuned to it. And even today I confess to a longing wish that man might travel backward as well as forward in time.

Now that my Wilma has been at rest these many years, I wish that I might go back to the year 1927, and take up my old life where I left it off, in the abandoned mine near Scranton.

And at the period of which I speak, I was less attuned than now to the modern world.

Did not the historians, the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome show themselves to be the same shrewd observers as those of succeeding centuries, the same masters of the logical and slaves of the illogical?

After all, I reflected, man makes little progress within himself.

Through succeeding generations he piles up those resources which he possesses outside of himself, the tools of his hands, and the warehouses of knowledge for his brain, whether they be parchment manuscripts, printed book, or electronorecordographs.

After all, I reflected, man makes little progress within himself.

Through succeeding generations he piles up those resources which he possesses outside of himself, the tools of his hands, and the warehouses of knowledge for his brain, whether they be parchment manuscripts, printed book, or electronorecordographs.

For the rest he is born today, as in ancient Greece, with a blank brain, and struggles through to his grave, with a more or less beclouded understanding, and with distinct limitations to what we used to call his “think tank.”

I made bold to ask him what would be done with me when I ceased to be such.

“Naturally,” he said, “you will be eliminated. What else? It takes the services of fifteen men altogether, to guard you; and men, you understand, cannot be produced and developed in less than eighteen years.”

He meditated frowningly for a moment. “That, by the way, is something I must take up with the Birth and Educational Bureau. They must develop some method of speeding growth, even at the cost of mental development.

More slowly he paced back and forth.

He was the caged tiger now, his face seamed with hate and the desperation of foreshadowed doom.

“Driven out into the hills,” he muttered to himself. “Not more than 10,000 of them left. Hunted like beasts—and by the very beasts we ourselves have hunted for centuries. Cursed be our ancestors for letting a single one of the spawn live!”

“For five centuries command of the air has meant victory. But this is so no longer. For more than three centuries your great, gleaming cities have been impregnable in all their arrogant visibility. But that day is done also.

Victory returns once more to the ground, to men invisible in the vast expanse of the forest which covers the ruins of the civilization destroyed by your ancestors.

Ye have sown destruction. Ye shall reap it!

But that day is done also. Victory returns once more to the ground, to men invisible in the vast expanse of the forest which covers the ruins of the civilization destroyed by your ancestors.

Ye have sown destruction. Ye shall reap it!

“Your ancestors thought they had made mere beasts of the American race. Physically you did reduce them to the state of beasts. But men do have souls, San-Lan, and in their souls the Americans still cherished the spark of manhood, of honor, of independence.

While the Hans have degenerated into a race of sleek, pampered beasts themselves, they have unwittingly bred a race of supermen out of those they sought to make animals.

You have bred your own destruction.

Your cities shall be blasted from their foundations. Your air fleets shall be brought crashing to earth.

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.

He bounded back from the impact, his chest crushed in, while his pistol, which fortunately had fallen with its muzzle pointed away from me, shot a continuous beam that melted its way instantly through the apartment wall.

The sphere then turned on the other guard, who had thrown himself into a corner where he crouched in fear.

Deliberately it seemed to gauge the distance and direction. Then it hurled itself at him with another vicious hiss, which I now saw came from a little rocket motor, crushing him to death where he lay.

It swung slowly around until the lens faced me again, and floated gently into position level with my face, seeming to scan me with its blank, four-inch eye. Then it spoke, with a metallic voice.

“If you are an American,” it said, “answer with your name, gang and position.”

“I am Anthony Rogers,” I replied, still half bewildered, “Boss of the Wyomings. I was captured by the Hans after my swooper was disabled in a fight with a Han airship and had drifted many hundred miles westward.

The pistol again became serviceable, this time for the destruction of the elevator, thus blocking any possible pursuit, yet without revealing my flight.

Ngo-Lan fought like a cat, but despite her writhing, scratching and biting, I bound and gagged her with her own clothing, and left her lying in the tunnel while I stepped in a car and shot toward the gate.

As the car glided swiftly along the brilliantly lit but deserted tunnel I conversed again with Wilma through the metallic speaker of the air ball.

But from our scopemen who were covering the city from the outside, I learned that the effects of the explosion on the mountain were terrific; far more than I had dared to hope for.

The mountain itself burst asunder in several spots, throwing out thousands of tons of earth and rock.

One-half the city itself tore loose and slid downward, lost in the debris of the avalanche of which it was a part.

I had gone five miles, and had paused for a moment, halfway 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 northward again toward the battle. And after a bit we pulled up close behind the barrage.

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.

… 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.