their protective
screen of disintegrator beams, kept up sporadic and costly systems of
transportation between the cities.

During this period our own campaign against the Hans of Nu-Yok was
fairly typical of the development of the war throughout the country. Our
force was composed of contingents from most of the Gangs of
Pennsylvania, Jersey and New England. We encircled the city on a wide
radius, our line running roughly from Staten Island to the forested site
of the ancient city of Elizabeth, to First and Second Mountains just
west of the ruins of Newark, Bloomfield and Montclair, thence
northeasterly across the Hudson, and down to the Sound. On Long Island
our line was pushed forward to the first slopes of the hills.

We had no more than four long-gunners to the square mile in our first
line, but each of these was equal to a battery of heavy artillery such
as I had known in the First World War. And when their fire was first
concentrated on the Han city, they blew its outer walls and roof levels
into a chaotic mass of wreckage before the nervous Yellow engineers
could turn on the ring of generators which surrounded the city with a
vertical film of disintegrator rays. Our explosive rockets could not
penetrate this film, for it disintegrated them instantly and harmlessly,
as it did all other material substance with the sole exception of
"inertron," that synthetic element developed by the Americans from the
sub-electronic and ultronic orders.

* * * * *

The continuous operation of the disintegrators destroyed the air and
maintained a constant vacuum wherever they played, into which the
surrounding air continuously rushed, naturally creating atmospheric
disturbances after a time, which resulted in a local storm. This,
however, ceased after a number of hours, when the flow of air toward the
city became steady.

The Hans suffered severely from atmospheric conditions inside their city
at first, but later rearranged their disintegrator ring in a system of
overlapping films that left diagonal openings, through which the air
rushed to them, and through which their ships emerged to scout our
positions.

We shot down seven of their cruisers before they realized the folly of
floating individually over our invisible line. Their beams traced paths
of destruction like scars across the countryside, but caught less than
half a dozen of our gunners all told, for it takes a lot of time to
sweep ev