San-Lan, his expression momentarily becoming more vicious, now was
striding up and down the room, while the poor wretch in the viewplate,
thoroughly scared at last, stood trembling.

"What!" shrieked the tyrant. "He begs a rescue. A rescue of what? Of
10,000 beaten men and nothing better than makeshift apparatus? No fleet?
No city? I give him and his 10,000 to the tribesmen! They are of no use
to us now! Get out! Vanish! No, wait! Have any of the beasts' rockets
penetrated the ray-walls of other cities?"

"No, Heaven-Born, no. It is only at Nu-Yok that the tribesmen used
rockets sheathed in the same mysterious substance they use on their
little aircraft and which cannot be disintegrated by the ray." (He meant
inertron, of course.)

San-Lan waved his hand in dismissal. The officer dissolved from view,
and the mountains once more appeared, as though the whole side of the
room were of glass.

More slowly he paced back and forth. He was the caged tiger now, his
face seamed with hate and the desperation of foreshadowed doom.

"Driven out into the hills," he muttered to himself. "Not more than
10,000 of them left. Hunted like beasts--and by the very beasts we
ourselves have hunted for centuries. Cursed be our ancestors for letting
a single one of the spawn live!" He shook his clenched hands above his
head. Then, suddenly remembering me, he turned and glared.

"Forest man, what have you to say?" he demanded.

Thus confronted, there stole over me that same detached feeling that
possessed me the day I had been made Boss of the Wyomings.

"It is the end of the Air Lords of Han," I said quietly. "For five
centuries command of the air has meant victory. But this is so no
longer. For more than three centuries your great, gleaming cities have
been impregnable in all their arrogant visibility. But that day is done
also. Victory returns once more to the ground, to men invisible in the
vast expanse of the forest which covers the ruins of the civilization
destroyed by your ancestors. Ye have sown destruction. Ye shall reap it!

"Your ancestors thought they had made mere beasts of the American race.
Physically you did reduce them to the state of beasts. But men do have
souls, San-Lan, and in their souls the Americans still cherished the
spark of manhood, of honor, of independence. While the Hans have
degenerated into a race of sleek, pampered beasts themselves, they have
unwittingly bred a race of super-men out of those they s