ery square foot of a square mile with a beam whose cross section
is not more than twenty or twenty-five feet in diameter. Our gunners,
completely concealed beneath the foliage of the forest, with weapons
which did not reveal their position, as did the flashes and detonation
of the Twentieth Century artillery, hit their repeller rays with
comparative ease.

The "drop ships," which the Hans next sent out, were harder to handle.
Rising to immense heights behind the city's disintegrator wall, these
tiny, projectile-like craft slipped through the rifts in the cylinder of
destruction, and then turning off their repeller rays, dropped at
terrific speed until their small vanes were sufficient to support them
as they volplaned in great circles, shooting back into the city defenses
at a lower level.

The great speed of these craft made it almost impossible to register a
direct hit against them with rocket guns, and they had no repeller rays
at which we might shoot while they were over our lines.

But by the same token they were able to do little damage to us. So great
was the speed of a drop ship, that the only way in which it could use a
disintegrator ray was from a fixed generator in the nose of the
structure, as it dropped in a straight line toward its target. But since
they could not sight the widely deployed individual gunners in our line,
their scouting was just as ineffective as our attempts were to shoot
them down.

* * * * *

For more than a month the situation remained a deadlock, with the Hans
locked up in their cities, while we mobilized gunners and supplies.

Had our stock of inertron been sufficiently great at this period, we
could have ended the war quickly, with aircraft impervious to the "dis"
ray. But the production of inertron is a painfully slow process,
involving the building up of this weightless element from ultronic
vibrations through the sub-electronic, electronic and atomic states into
molecular form. Our laboratories had barely begun production on a
quantity basis, for we had just learned how to protect them from Han air
raids, and it would be many months more before the supply they had just
started to manufacture would be finished. In the meantime we had enough
for a few aircraft, for jumping belts and a small amount of armor.

We Wyomings possessed one swooper completely sheathed with inertron and
counterweighted with ultron. The Altoonas and the Lycomings also ha