CHAPTER XII
The Finger of Doom
As we crossed the Hudson River, a few miles north of the city, wedropped several units of the Yellow Intelligence Division, with fullinstrumental equipment. Their apparatus cases were nicely balanced atonly a few ounces weight each, and the men used their chute capes toease their drops.
We recrossed the river a little distance above and began dropping WhiteIntelligence units and a few long and short range gun units. Then weheld our position until we began to get reports. Gradually we ringed theterritory of the Sinsings, our observation units working busily andpatiently at their locators and scopes, both aloft and aground, untilGarlin finally turned to me with the remark:
"The map circle is complete now, Boss. We've got clear locations all theway around them."
"Let me see it," I replied, and studied the illuminated viewplate map,with its little overlapping circles of light that indicated spots provedclear of the enemy by ultroscopic observation.
I nodded to Bill Hearn. "Go ahead now, Hearn," I said, "and place yourbarrage men."
He spoke into his ultrophone, and three of the ships began to glide in awide ring around the enemy territory. Every few seconds, at the wordfrom his Unit Boss, a gunner would drop off the wire, and slipping theclasp of his chute cape, drift down into the darkness below.
Bill formed two lines, parallel to and facing the river, and enclosingthe entire territory of the enemy between them. Above and below,straddling the river, were two defensive lines. These latter were merelyto hold their positions. The others were to close in toward each other,pushing a high-explosive barrage five miles ahead of them. When the twobarrages met, both lines were to switch to short-vision-range barrageand continue to close in on any of the enemy who might have driftedthrough the previous curtain of fire.
In the meantime Bill kept his reserves, a picked corps of a hundred men(the same that had accompanied Hart and myself in our fight with the Hansquadron) in the air, divided about equally among the "kite-tails" offour ships.
A final roll call, by units, companies, divisions and functions,established the fact that all our forces were in position. No Hanactivity was reported, and no Han broadcasts indicated any suspicion ofour expedition. Nor was there any indication that the Sinsings had anyknowledge of the fate in store for them. The idling of rep-raygenerators was reported from the center of their camp, obviously thoseof the ships the Hans had given them--the price of their treason totheir race.
Again I gave the word, and Hearn passed on the order to hissubordinates.
Far below us, and several miles to the right and left, the two barragelines made their appearance. From the great height to which we hadrisen, they appeared like lines of brilliant, winking lights, and thedetonations were muffled by the distances into a sort of rumbling,distant thunder. Hearn and his assistants were very busy: measuring,calculating, and snapping out ultrophone orders to unit commanders thatresulted in the straightening of lines and the closing of gaps in thebarrage.
The White Division Boss reported the utmost confusion in the Sinsingorganization. They were, as might be expected, an inefficient, looselydisciplined gang, and repeated broadcasts for help to neighboring gangs.Ignoring the fact that the Mongolians had not used explosives for manygenerations, they nevertheless jumped at the conclusion that they werebeing raided by the Hans. Their frantic broadcasts persisted in thisthought, despite the nervous electrophonic inquiries of the Hansthemselves, to whom the sound of the battle was evidently audible, andwho were trying to locate the trouble.
At this point, the swooper I had sent south toward the city went intoaction as a diversion, to keep the Hans at home. Its "kite-tail" loadedwith long-range gunners, using the most highly explosive rockets we had,hung invisible in the darkness of the sky and bombarded the city from adistance of about five miles. With an entire city to shoot at, and theobject of creating as much commotion therein as possible, regardless ofactual damage, the gunners had no difficulty in hitting the mark. Icould see the glow of the city and the stabbing flashes of explodingrockets. In the end, the Hans, uncertain as to what was going on, fellback on a defensive policy, and shot their "hell cylinder," or wall ofupturned disintegrator rays into operation. That, of course, ended ourbombardment of them. The rays were a perfect defense, disintegrating ourrockets as they were reached.
If they had not sent out ships before turning on the rays, and if theyhad none within sufficient radius already in the air, all would be well.
I queried Garlin on this, but he assured me Yellow Intelligence reportedno indications of Han ships nearer than 800 miles. This would probablygive us a free hand for a while, since most of their instrumentsrecorded only imperfectly or not at all, through the death wall.
Requisitioning one of the viewplates of the headquarters ship, and theservices of an expert operator, I instructed him to focus on our linesbelow. I wanted a close-up of the men in action.
He began to manipulate his controls and chaotic shadows moved rapidlyacross the plate, fading in and out of focus, until he reached anadjustment that gave me a picture of the forest floor, apparently 100feet wide, with the intervening branches and foliage of the treesappearing like shadows that melted into reality a few feet above theground.
I watched one man setting up his long-gun with skillful speed. His lipspursed slightly as though he were whistling, as he adjusted the talltripod on which the long tube was balanced. Swiftly he twirled the knobscontrolling the aim and elevation of his piece. Then, lifting a belt ofammunition from the big box, which itself looked heavy enough to breakdown the spindly tripod, he inserted the end of it in the lock of histube and touched the proper combination of buttons.
Then he stepped aside, and occupied himself with peering carefullythrough the trees ahead. Not even a tremor shook the tube, but I knewthat at intervals of something less than a second, it was dischargingsmall projectiles which, traveling under their own continuously reducedpower, were arching into the air, to fall precisely five miles ahead andexplode with the force of eight-inch shells, such as we used in theFirst World War.
Another gunner, fifty feet to the right of him, waved a hand and calledout something to him. Then, picking up his own tube and tripod, hegauged the distance between the trees ahead of him, and the height oftheir lowest branches, and bending forward a bit, flexed his muscles andleaped lightly, some twenty-five feet. Another leap took him anothertwenty feet or so, where he began to set up his piece.
I ordered my observer then to switch to the barrage itself. He got aclose focus on it, but this showed little except a continuous series ofblinding flashes, which, from the viewplate, lit up the entire interiorof the ship. An eight-hundred-foot focus proved better. I had thoughtthat some of our French and American artillery of the 20th Century hadachieved the ultimate in mathematical precision of fire, but I had neverseen anything to equal the accuracy of that line of terrific explosionsas it moved steadily forward, mowing down trees as a scythe cuts grass(or used to 500 years ago), literally churning up the earth and thesplintered, blasted remains of the forest giants, to a depth of from tento twenty feet.
By now the two curtains of fire were nearing each other, lines ofvibrant, shimmering, continuous, brilliant destruction, inevitablysqueezing the panic-stricken Sinsings between them.
Even as I watched, a group of them, who had been making a futile effortto get their three rep-ray machines into the air, abandoned theirefforts, and rushed forth into the milling mob.
I queried the Control Boss sharply on the futility of this attempt oftheirs, and learned that the Hans, apparently in doubt as to what wasgoing on, had continued to "play safe," and broken off their powerbroadcast, after ordering all their own ships east of the Alleghenies tothe ground, for fear these ships they had traded to the Sinsings mightbe used against them.
Again I turned to my viewplate, which was still focussed on the centralsection of the Sinsing works. The confusion of the traitors was entirelythat of fear, for our barrage had not yet re
ached them.
Some of them set up their long-guns and fired at random over the barrageline, then gave it up. They realized that they had no target to shootat, no way of knowing whether our gunners were a few hundred feet orseveral miles beyond it.
Their ultrophone men, of whom they did not have many, stood around intense attitudes, their helmet phones strapped around their ears,nervously fingering the tuning controls at their belts. Unquestionablythey must have located some of our frequencies, and overheard many ofour reports and orders. But they were confused and disorganized. If theyhad an Ultrophone Boss they evidently were not reporting to him in anorganized way.
They were beginning to draw back now before our advancing fire. Withintermittent desperation, they began to shoot over our barrage again,and the explosions of their rockets flashed at widely scattered pointsbeyond. A few took distance "pot shots."
Oddly enough it was our own forces that suffered the first casualties inthe battle. Some of these distance shots by chance registered hits,while our men were under strict orders not to exceed their barragedistances.
Seen upon the ultroscope viewplate, the battle looked as though it werebeing fought in daylight, perhaps on a cloudy day, while the explosionsof the rockets appeared as flashes of extra brilliance.
The two barrage lines were not more than five hundred feet apart whenthe Sinsings resorted to tactics we had not foreseen. We noticed firstthat they began to lighten themselves by throwing away extra equipment.A few of them in their excitement threw away too much, and shot suddenlyinto the air. Then a scattering few floated up gently, followed byincreasing numbers, while still others, preserving a weight balance,jumped toward the closing barrages and leaped high, hoping to clearthem. Some succeeded. We saw others blown about like leaves in awindstorm, to crumple and drift slowly down, or else to fall into thebarrage, their belts blown from their bodies.
However, it was not part of our plan to allow a single one of them toescape and find his way to the Hans. I quickly passed the word to BillHearn to have the alternate men in his line raise their barrages andheard him bark out a mathematical formula to the Unit Bosses.
We backed off our ships as the explosions climbed into the air instagger formation until they reached a height of three miles. I don'tbelieve any of the Sinsings who tried to float away to freedomsucceeded.
But we did know later, that a few who leaped the barrage got away andultimately reached Nu-yok.
It was those who managed to jump the barrage who gave us the mosttrouble. With half of our long-guns turned aloft, I foresaw we would nothave enough to establish successive ground barrages and so ordered thebarrage back two miles, from which positions our "curtains" began toclose in again, this time, however, gauged to explode, not on contact,but thirty feet in the air. This left little chance for the Sinsings toleap either over or under it.
Gradually, the two barrages approached each other until they finallymet, and in the grey dawn the battle ended.
Our own casualties amounted to forty-seven men in the ground forces,eighteen of whom had been slain in hand to hand fighting with the few ofthe enemy who managed to reach our lines, and sixty-two in the crew and"kite-tail" force of swooper No. 4, which had been located by one ofthe enemy's ultroscopes and brought down with long-gun fire.
Since nearly every member of the Sinsing Gang had, so far as we knew,been killed, we considered the raid a great success.
It had, however, a far greater significance than this. To all of us whotook part in the expedition, the effectiveness of our barrage tacticsdefinitely established a confidence in our ability to overcome the Hans.
As I pointed out to Wilma:
"It has been my belief all along, dear, that the American explosiverocket is a far more efficient weapon than the disintegrator ray of theHans, once we can train all our gangs to use it systematically and inco-ordinated fashion. As a weapon in the hands of a single individual,shooting at a mark in direct line of vision, the rocket-gun is inferiorin destructive power to the dis ray, except as its range may be a littlegreater. The trouble is that to date it has been used only as we usedour rifles and shot guns in the 20th Century. The possibilities of itsuse as artillery, in laying barrages that advance along the ground, orclimb into the air, are tremendous.
"The dis ray inevitably reveals its source of emanation. The rocket gundoes not. The dis ray can reach its target only in a straight line. Therocket may be made to travel in an arc, over intervening obstacles, toan unseen target.
"Nor must we forget that our ultronists now are promising us a perfectshield against the dis ray in inertron."
"I tremble though, Tony dear, when I think of the horrors that are aheadof us. The Hans are clever. They will develop defenses against our newtactics. And they are sure to mass against us not only the full force oftheir power in America, but the united forces of the World Empire. Theyare a cowardly race in one sense, but clever as the very Devils in Hell,and inheritors of a calm, ruthless, vicious persistency."
"Nevertheless," I prophesied, "the Finger of Doom points squarely atthem today, and unless you and I are killed in the struggle, we shalllive to see America blast the Yellow Blight from the face of the Earth."
THE END.
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from _Amazing Stories_ August 1928. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.
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