The Airlords of Han

by Philip Francis Nowlan

Cautioning my unit to follow carefully, I pushed my control lever all the way forward until my "eye" pointed down, and there appeared on my viewplate the smooth cylindrical interior of the shaft, fading down toward the base of the mountain, and like a tiny speck, far, far down, was the car, descending with its last load.

I dropped my ball on it, battering it down to the bottom of the shaft, and with hammer-like blows flattening the wreckage, that I might squeeze the ball out of the shaft at the lower station.

It emerged into the great vaulted excavation, capable of holding a thousand or more persons, from which the various escape tunnels radiated. Down these tunnels the last remnants of a crowd of fugitives were disappearing, while red-coated soldiers guided the traffic and suppressed disorder with the threat of their spears, and the occasional flourish of a ray pistol.

As I floated my ball out into the middle of the artificial cavern I could see them stagger back in terror. Again the blinding flashes of a few ray pistols, and instantaneous borings of the rays into the walls. The red coats nearest the escape tunnels fled down them in panic. Those whose escape I blocked dropped their weapons and shrank back against the smooth, iridescent green walls.

I marshalled the rest of my string carefully into the cavern, and counted the tunnel entrances, slowly swinging my "eye" around the semicircle of them. There were 26 corridors diverging to the north and west. I decided to send three balls down each, leave 12 in the cavern, then detonate them all at once.

Assigning my operators to their corridors, I ordered intervals of five miles between them, and taking the lead down the first corridor, I ordered "go."

Soon my ball overtook the stream of fugitives, smashing them down despite ray pistols and even rockets that were shot against it. On and on I drove it, time and again battering it through detachments of fleeing Hans, while the distance register on my board climbed to ten, twenty, fifty miles.

Then I called a halt, and suspended my previous orders. I had had no idea that the Hans had bored these tunnels for such distances under the surface of the ground as this. It would be necessary to trace them to their ends and locate their new underground cities in which they expected to establish themselves, and in which many had established themselves by now, no doubt.

Fifty miles of air in these corridors, I thought, ought to prove a pretty good cushion against the shock of detonation in the cavern. So I ordered detonation of the twelve balls we had left behind. As I expected, there was little effect from it so far out in the tunnels.

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.