leet ploughed deep into our lines in their famous
"cloud-bank" formation, with down-playing disintegrator rays so
concentrated as to form a virtual curtain of destruction. It seared a
scar path a mile and a half wide fifteen miles into our territory.

Everyone of our rocket gunners caught in this section was annihilated.
Altogether we lost several hundred men and girls.

Gunners to each side of the raiding ships kept up a continuous fire on
them. Most of the rockets were disintegrated, for Handan would not
permit the use of the inertron rockets against the ships. But now and
then one found its way through the playing beams, hit a repeller ray and
was hurled up against a Han ship, bringing it crashing down.

The orders that Handan barked into his ultrophone were, of course, heard
by every long-gunner in the ring of American forces around the city, and
nearly all of them turned their fire on the Han airfleet, with the
exception of those equipped with the inertron rockets.

These latter held to the original target and promptly cut loose on the
city with a shower of destruction which the disintegrator-ray walls
could not stop. The results produced awe even in our own ranks.

* * * * *

Where an instant before had stood the high-flung masses and towers of
Nu-Yok, gleaming red, blue and gold in the brilliant sunlight, and
shimmering through the iridescence of the ray "wall," there was a
seething turmoil of gigantic explosions.

Surging billows of debris were hurled skyward on gigantic pulsations of
blinding light, to the detonations that shook men from their feet in
many sections of the American line seven and eight miles away.

As I have said, there were only some hundred of the inertron rockets
among the Americans, long and slender, to fit the ordinary guns, but the
atomic laboratories hidden beneath the forests, had outdone themselves
in their construction. Their release of atomic force was nearly 100 per
cent, and each one of them was equal to many hundred tons of
trinitrotoluol, which I had known in the First World War, five hundred
years before, as "T.N.T."

It was all over in a few seconds. Nu-Yok had ceased to exist, and the
waters of the bay and the rivers were pouring into the vast hole where a
moment before had been the rocky strata beneath lower Manhattan.

Naturally, with the destruction of the city's power-broadcasting plant
the Han air fleet had plunged to earth.

But