This opportunity had been seized by the Russian Soviets, who had made a coalition with the Chinese to sweep over all Europe and reduce it to a state of chaos.
America, industrially geared to world production and the world trade, collapsed economically, and there ensued a long period of stagnation and desperate attempts at economic reconstruction. But it was impossible to stave off war with the Mongolians, who by now had subjugated the Russians, and were aiming at a world empire.
In about 2109, it seems the conflict was finally precipitated. The Mongolians, with overwhelming fleets of great airships, and a science that far outstripped that of crippled America, swept in over the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts, and down from Canada, annihilating American aircraft, armies and cities with their terrific disintegrator ray. These rays were projected from a machine not unlike a searchlight in appearance, the reflector of which, however, was not material substance, but a complicated balance of interacting electronic forces. This resulted in a terribly destructive beam. Under its influence, material substance melted into “nothingness”; i.e., into electronic vibrations. It destroyed all then known substances, from air to the most dense metals and stone.
They settled down to the establishment of what became known as the Han dynasty in America, as a sort of province in their World Empire.
Those were terrible days for the Americans. They were hunted like wild beasts. Only those survived who finally found refuge in mountains, canyons and forests. Government was at an end among them. Anarchy prevailed for several generations. Most would have been eager to submit to the Hans, even if it meant slavery. But the Hans did not want them, for they themselves had marvelous machinery and scientific process by which all difficult labor was accomplished.
Ultimately they stopped their active search for, and annihilation of the widely scattered groups of now savage Americans. So long as Americans remained hidden in their forests, and did not venture near the great cities the Hans had built, little attention was paid to them.
Then began the building of the new American civilization. Families and individuals gathered together in clans or “gangs” for mutual protection. For nearly a century they lived a nomadic and primitive life, moving from place to place, in desperate fear of the casual and occasional Han air raids, and the terrible disintegrator ray. As the frequency of these raids decreased, they began to stay permanently in given localities, organizing upon lines which in many respects were similar to those of the military households of the Norman feudal barons. However, instead of gathering together in castles, American defense tactics necessitated a certain scattering of living quarters for families and individuals. They lived virtually in the open air, in the forests, in green tents, resorting to camouflage tactics that would conceal their presence from air observers. They dug underground factories and laboratories that they might better be shielded from the electronic detectors of the Hans. They tapped the radio communication lines of the Hans, with crude instruments at first, better ones later on. They bent every effort toward the redevelopment of science. For many generations they labored as unseen, unknown scholars of the Hans, picking up their knowledge piecemeal.
During the earlier part of this period, there were many deadly wars fought between the various gangs, and occasional courageous but childishly futile attacks upon the Hans, followed by terribly punitive raids.
But as knowledge progressed, the sense of American brotherhood redeveloped. Reciprocal arrangements were made among the gangs over constantly increasing areas. Trade developed to a certain extent, between one gang and another; but the interchange of knowledge became more important than that of goods as skill in the handling of synthetic processes developed.
Within the gang, an economy was developed that was a compromise between individual liberty and a military socialism. The right of private property was limited practically to personal possessions, but private privileges were many, and sacredly regarded. Stimulation to achievement lay chiefly in the winning of various kinds of leadership and prerogatives. There could be only a very limited degree of owning anything that might be classified as “wealth,” and nothing that might be classified as “resources.” Resources of every description, for military safety and efficiency, belonged as a matter of public interest to the community as a whole.
In the meantime, through these many generations, the Hans had developed a luxury economy. The Americans were regarded as “wild men of the woods.” And since the Hans neither needed nor wanted the woods or the wild men, they treated Americans as beasts, and were conscious of no human brotherhood with them. As time went on, and synthetic processes of producing foods and materials were further developed, less and less ground was needed by the Hans for the purposes of agriculture; finally, even the working of mines was abandoned when it became cheaper to build up metal from electronic vibrations than to dig them out of the ground.
The Han race, devitalized by its vices and luxuries with machinery and scientific processes to satisfy its every want, with virtually no necessity of labor, began to assume a defensive attitude toward the Americans.
And quite naturally, the Americans regarded the Hans with a deep, grim hatred; they longed desperately for the day when they should be powerful enough to rise and annihilate the Mongolian Blight that lay over the continent.
At the time of my awakening, the gangs were rather loosely organized, but were considering the establishment of a special military force, whose special business it would be to harry the Hans and bring down their air ships whenever possible, without causing general alarm among the Mongolians.
Wilma told me she was a member of the Wyoming Gang, which claimed the entire Wyoming Valley as its territory, under the leadership of Boss Hart. Her mother and father were dead, and she was unmarried, so she was not a “family member.” She lived in a little group of tents known as Camp 17, under a woman Camp Boss, with seven other girls.
Her duties alternated between military or police scouting and factory work. For the two-week period which would end the next day, she had been on “air patrol” This did not mean, as I first imagined, that she was flying, but rather that she was on the lookout for Han ships over this outlying section of the Wyoming territory, and had spent most of her time perched in the tree tops scanning the skies. Had she seen one she would have fired a “drop flare” several miles off to one side, which would ignite when it was floating vertically toward the earth, so that the direction or point from which it had been fired might not be guessed by the airship and bring a blasting play of the disintegrator ray in her vicinity. Other members of the air patrol would send up rockets on seeing hers, until finally a scout equipped with an ultrophone, which, unlike the ancient radio, operated on the ultronic ethereal vibrations, would pass the warning simultaneously to the headquarters of the Wyoming Gang and other communities within a radius of several hundred miles. This would also alert the few American rocketships that might be in the air, which instantly would duck to cover either through forest clearings or by flattening down to earth in green fields where their coloring would probably protect them from observation.
The favorite American method of propulsion was known as “rocketing.” The rocket is what I would describe, from my 20th Century comprehension of the matter, as an extremely powerful gas blast, atomically produced through the stimulation of chemical action. Scientists of today regard it as a childishly simple reaction, but by that very virtue, most economical and efficient.
But tomorrow, Wilma explained, she would go back to work in the cloth plant, where she would take charge of one of the synthetic processes by which those wonderful substitutes for woven fabrics of wool, cotton and silk are produced. At the end of another two weeks, she would be back on military duty again, perhaps at the same work, or maybe as a “contact guard,” on duty where the territory of the Wyomings merged with that of the Delawares, or the “Susquannas” or one of the half dozen other “gangs” in that section of the country which I knew as Pennsylvania and New York States.
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Wilma cleared up for me the mystery of those flying leaps which she and her assailants had made, and explained in the following manner the inertron belt balances weight: “jumpers” were in common use at the time I “awoke,” though they were costly, for at that time inertron had not been produced in very great quantity. They were very useful in the forest. They were belts, strapped high under the arms, containing an amount of inertron adjusted to the wearer’s weight and purposes: In effect they made a man weigh as little as he desired; two pounds if he liked.
“Floaters” are a later development of “jumpers”—rocket motors encased in inertron blocks and strapped to the back in such a way that the wearer floats, when drifting, facing slightly downward. With his motor in operation, he moves like a diver, head foremost, controlling his direction by twisting his body and by movements of his outstretched arms and hands. Ballast weights locked in the front of the belt adjust weight and lift. Some men prefer a few ounces of weight in floating, using a slight motor thrust to overcome this. Others prefer a buoyancy balance of a few ounces. The inadvertent dropping of weight is not a serious matter. The motor thrust always can be used to descend. But as an extra precaution, in case the motor should fail, for any reason, there are built into every belt a number of detachable sections, one more of which can be discarded to balance off any loss in weight.
“But who were your assailants,” I asked, “and why were you attacked?”
Her assailants, she told me, were members of an outlaw gang, referred to as “Bad Bloods,” a group which for several generations had been under the domination of leaders who tried to advance the interests of their clan by tactics which their neighbors had come to regard as unfair, and who in consequence had been virtually boycotted. Their purpose had been to slay Wilma near Delaware frontier, making it appear that the crime had been committed by Delaware scouts and thus embroil the Delawares and Wyomings in acts of reprisal against each other, or at least cause suspicions.
Fortunately they had not succeeded in surprising her, and she had been successful in dodging them for some two hours before the shooting began, at the moment when I arrived on the scene.
“But we must not stay here talking,” Wilma concluded. “I have to take you in, and besides I must report this attack right away. I think we had better slip over to the other side of the mountain. Whoever is on that post will have a phone, and I can make a direct report. But you’ll have to have a belt. Mine alone won’t help much against our combined weights, and there’s little to be gained by jumping heavy. It’s almost as bad as walking.”
After a little search, we found one of the men I had killed, who had floated down among the trees some distance away and whose belt was not badly damaged. In detaching it from his body, it nearly got away from me and shot up in the air. Wilma caught it, however, and though it reinforced the lift of her own belt so that she had to hook her knee around a branch to hold herself down, she saved it. I climbed the tree, and with my weight added to hers, we floated down easily.
CHAPTER 3
Life in the 25th Century
We were delayed in starting for quite a while since I had to acquire a few crude ideas about the technique of using these belts. I had been sitting down, for instance, with the belt strapped about me, enjoying an ease similar to that of a comfortable armchair; when I stood up with a natural exertion of muscular effort, I shot ten feet into the air, with a wild instinctive thrashing of arms and legs that amused Wilma greatly.
But after some practice, I began to get the trick of gauging muscular effort to a minimum of vertical and a maximum of horizontal. The correct form, I found, was a measure comparable to that of skating. I found, also, that in forest work the arms and hands could be used to great advantage in swinging along from branch to branch, so prolonging leaps almost indefinitely at times.
In going up the side of the mountain, I found that my 20th Century muscles did have an advantage, in spite of lack of skill with the belt; and since the slopes were very sharp, and most of our leaps were upward, I could have outdistanced Wilma, but when we crossed the ridge and descended, she outstripped me with her superior technique. Choosing the steepest slopes, she would crouch in the top of a tree, and propel herself outward, literally diving until, with the loss of horizontal momentum, she would assume a more upright position and float downward. In this manner she would sometimes cover as much as a quarter of a mile in a single leap, while I leaped and scrambled clumsily behind, thoroughly enjoying the sensation.
Halfway down the mountain, we saw another green-clad figure leap out above the tree tops toward us. The three of us perched on an outcropping of rock from which a view for many miles around could be had, while Wilma hastily explained her adventure and my presence to her fellow guard, whose name was Alan. I learned later that this was the modern form of Helen.
“You want to report by phone then, don’t you?” Alan took a compact packet about six inches square from a holster attached to her belt and handed it to Wilma. So far as I could see, it had no special receiver for the ear. Wilma merely threw back a lid, as though she were opening a book, and began to talk. The voice that came back from the machine was as audible as her own.
She was queried closely as to the attack upon her, and at considerable length as to myself, and I could tell from the tone of that voice that its owner was not prepared to take me at my face value as readily as Wilma had. For that matter, neither was the other girl. I could realize it from the suspicious glances she threw my way, when she thought my attention was elsewhere, and, the manner in which her hand hovered constantly near her gun holster.
Wilma was ordered to bring me in at once, and informed that another scout would take her place on the other side of the mountain. She closed down the lid of the phone and handed it back to Alan, who seemed relieved to see us departing over the tree tops in the direction of the camps.
We had covered perhaps ten miles, in what still seemed to me a surprisingly easy fashion, when Wilma explained, that from here on we would have to keep to the ground. We were nearing the camps, she said, and there was always the possibility that some small Han scoutship, invisibly high in the sky, might catch sight of us through a projectoscope and thus find the general location of the camps.
Wilma took me to the Scout office, which proved to be a small building of irregular shape, conforming to the trees around it, and substantially constructed of green sheet-like material.
I was received by the assistant Scout Boss, who reported my arrival at once to the historical office, and to officials he called the Psycho Boss and the History Boss, who came in a few minutes later. The attitude of all three men was at first polite but skeptical, and Wilma’s ardent advocacy seemed to amuse them.
For the next two hours, I talked, explained and answered questions. I had to explain, in detail, the manner of my life in the 20th Century and my understanding of customs, habits, business, science and the history of that period, and about developments in the centuries that had elapsed. Had I been in a classroom, I would have come through the examination with a very poor mark, for I was unable to give any answer to fully half of their questions. But before long I realized that the majority of these questions were designed as traps. Objects, of whose purpose I knew nothing, were casually handed to me, and I was watched keenly as I handled them.
In the end I could see both amazement and belief begin to show in the faces of my inquisitors, and at last the Historical and Psycho Bosses agreed openly that they could find no flaw in my story or reactions, and that my story must be accepted as genuine.
They took me at once to Big Boss Hart. He was a portly man with a “poker face.” He would probably have been the successful politician even in the 20th Century.
They gave him a brief outline of my story and a report of their examination of me. He made no comment other than to nod his acceptance of it; Then he turned to me. “How does it feel?” he asked. “Do we look funny to you?”
“A bit strange,” I admitted.
“But I’m beginning to lose that dazed feeling, though I can see I have an awful lot to learn.”
“Maybe we can learn some things from you, too,” he said. “So you fought in the First World War? Do you know, we have very little left in the way of records of the details of that war, that is, the precise conditions under which it was fought, and the tactics employed. We forgot many things during the Han terror, and—well… I think you might have a lot of ideas worth thinking over for our raid masters. By the way, now that you’re here, and can’t go back to your own century, so to speak, what do you want to do? You’re welcome to become one of us. Or perhaps you’d just like to visit with us for a while, and then look around among the other gangs. Maybe you’d like some of the others better. Don’t make up your mind now. We’ll put you down as an exchange for a while. Let’s see. You and Bill Hearn ought to get along well together. He’s Camp Boss of Number 34 when he isn’t acting as Raid Boss or Scout Boss. There’s a vacancy in his camp. Stay with him and think things over as long as you want to. As soon as you make up your mind to anything, let me know.”
We all shook hands, for that was one custom that had not died out in five hundred years, and I set out with Hearn.
Buck Rogers' Complete Adventures Page 2