The Airlords of Han by Philip Francis Nowlan (top novels of all time .TXT) 📕

enabled the operator to make a sphere move sidewise, backward or vertically. Some of these spheres were equipped with devices which enabled their operators to hear as well as see through their ultronic broadcasts, and most of those which had invaded the interior of Lo-Tan were equipped with “speakers,” in the hope of finding me and establishing communication. Still others were equipped for two-stage control. That is, the operator control led the vision sphere, and through it watched and steered an air torpedo that travelled ahead of it.

The Han airship or any other target selected by the operator of such a combination was doomed. There was no escape. The spheres and torpedoes were too small to be hit. They could travel with the speed of bullets. They could trail a ship indefinitely, hover a safe distance from their mark, and strike at will. Finally, neither darkness nor smoke screens were any bar to their ultronic vision. The spheres, which had penetrated and explored Lo-Tan in their search for me, had floated through breaches in the walls and roofs made by their advance torpedoes.

Wilma had just finished explaining all this to me when I heard a noise outside my door. With a whispered warning I flung myself back on the couch and simulated unconsciousness. When I did not answer the poundings and calls to open, a police detail broke in and shook me roughly.

“The air ball,” I moaned, pretending to regain consciousness slowly. “It came in from the corridor. Look what it did to the guard. It must have grazed my head. Where is it?”

“Gone,” muttered the under-officer, looking fearfully around. “Yes, undoubtedly gone. These men have been dead some time. And this pistol. The ball got him before he had a chance to use it. See, it has beamed through the wall only here, where he dropped it. Who are you? You look like a tribesman. Oh, yes, you’re the Heaven-Born’s special prisoner. Maybe I ought to beam you right now. Good thing. Everyone would call it an accident. By the Grand Dragon, I will!”

While he was talking, I had staggered to the other side of the room, to draw his attention away from the couch where the ball was concealed.

Now suddenly the pillows burst apart, and a blanket with which I had covered the thing streaked from the couch, hitting the man in the small of the back. I could hear his spine snap under the impact. Then it shot through the air toward the group of soldiers in the doorway, bowling them over and sending them shrieking right and left along the corridor. Relentlessly and with amazing speed it launched itself at each in turn, until the corpses lay grotesquely strewn about, and not one had escaped.

It returned to me for all the world like an old-fashioned ghost, the blanket still draped over it (and not interfering with its ultronic vision in the least) and “stood” before me.

“The yellow devils were going to kill you, Tony,” I heard Wilma’s voice saying. “You’ve got to get out of there, Tony, before you are killed. Besides, we need you at the control boards, where you can make real use of your knowledge of the city. Have you your jumping belt, ultrophone and rocket gun?”

“No,” I replied, “they are all gone.”

“It would be no good for you to try to make your way to one of the breaches in the wall, nor to the roof,” she mused.

“No, they are too well guarded,” I replied, “and even if you made a new one at a predetermined spot I’m afraid the repair men and the patrol would go to it ahead of me.”

“Yes, and they would beam you before you could climb inside of a swooper,” she added.

“I’ll tell you what I can do, Wilma,” I suggested. “I know my way about the city pretty well. Suppose I go down one of the shafts to the base of the mountain. I think I can get out. It is dark in the valley, so the Hans cannot see me, and I will stand out in the open, where your ultroscopes can pick me up. Then a swooper can drop quickly down and get me.”

“Good!” Wilma said. “But take that Han’s disintegrator pistol with you. And go right away, Tony. But wrap this ball in something and carry it with you. Just toss it from you if you are attacked. I’ll stay at the control board and operate it in case of emergency.”

So I picked up ball and pistol, and thrust the hand in which I held it into the loose Han blouse I wore, wrapped the ball in a piece of sheeting, and stepped out in the corridor, hurrying toward the nearest magnetic car station, a couple of hundred feet down the corridor, for I had to cross nearly the entire width of the city to reach the shaft that went to the base of the mountain.

I thanked Providence for the perfection of the Han mechanical devices when I reached the station. The automatic checking system of these cars made station attendants unnecessary. I had only to slip the key I had taken from the dead Han officer into the account-charting machine at the station to release a car.

Pressing the proper combinations of main and branch line buttons, I seated myself, holding the pistol ready but concealed beneath my blouse. The car shot with rapid acceleration down the narrow tunnel.

The tubes in which these magnetic cars (which slid along a few inches above the floor of the tunnel by localized repeller rays) ran were very narrow, just the width of the car, and my only danger would come if on catching up to another car its driver should turn around and look in my face. If I kept my face to the front, and hunched over so as to conceal my size, no driver of a following car would suspect that I was not a Han like himself.

The tube dipped under traffic as it