ought to make
animals. You have bred your own destruction. Your cities shall be
blasted from their foundations. Your air fleets shall be brought
crashing to earth. You have your choice of dying in the wreckage, or of
fleeing to the forests, there to be hunted down and killed as you have
sought to destroy us!"

And the ruler of all the Hans shrank back from my outstretched finger as
though it had been in truth the finger of doom.

But only for a moment. Suddenly he snarled and crouched as though to
spring at me with his bare hands. By a mighty convulsion of the will he
regained control of himself, however, and assumed a manner of quiet
dignity. He even smiled--a slow, crooked smile.

"No," he said, answering his own thought. "I will not have you killed
now. You shall live on, my honored guest, to see with your own eyes how
we shall exterminate your animal-brethren in their forests. With your
own ears you shall hear their dying shrieks. The cold science of Han is
superior to your spurious knowledge. We have been careless. To our cost
we have let you develop brains of a sort. But we are still superior. We
shall go down into the forests and meet you. We shall beat you in your
own element. When you have seen and heard this happen, my Council shall
devise for you a death by scientific torture, such as no man in the
history of the world has been honored with."

* * * * *

I must digress here a bit from my own personal adventures to explain
briefly how the fall of Nu-Yok came about, as I learned it afterward.

Upon my capture by the Hans, my wife, Wilma, courageously had assumed
command of my Gang, the Wyomings.

Boss Handan, of the Winslows, who was directing the American forces
investing Nu-Yok, contented himself for several weeks with maintaining
our lines, while waiting for the completion of the first supply of
inertron-jacketed rockets. At last they arrived with a limited quantity
of very high-powered atomic shells, a trifle over a hundred of them to
be exact. But this number, it was estimated, would be enough to reduce
the city to ruins. The rockets were distributed, and the day for the
final bombardment was set.

The Hans, however, upset Handan's plans by launching a ground expedition
up the west bank of the Hudson. Under cover of an air raid to the
southwest, in which the bulk of their ships took part, this ground
expedition shot northward in low-flying ships.

The raiding air f