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twenty-nine years of my life between 1898 and 1927; the other fifty-two
since 2419. The gap between these two, a period of nearly five hundred
years, I spent in a state of suspended animation, free from the ravages
of katabolic processes, and without any apparent effect on my physical
or mental faculties.

When I began my long sleep, man had just begun his real conquest of the
air in a sudden series of transoceanic flights in airplanes driven by
internal combustion motors. He had barely begun to speculate on the
possibilities of harnessing sub-atomic forces, and had made no further
practical penetration into the field of ethereal pulsations than the
primitive radio and television of that day. The United States of America
was the most powerful nation in the world, its political, financial,
industrial and scientific influence being supreme; and in the arts also
it was rapidly climbing into leadership.

I awoke to find the America I knew a total wreck--to find Americans a
hunted race in their own land, hiding in the dense forests that covered
the shattered and leveled ruins of their once magnificent cities,
desperately preserving, and struggling to develop in their secret
retreats, the remnants of their culture and science--and the undying
flame of their sturdy independence.

World domination was in the hands of Mongolians and the center of world
power lay in inland China, with Americans one of the few races of
mankind unsubdued--and it must be admitted in fairness to the truth, not
worth the trouble of subduing in the eyes of the Han Airlords who ruled
North America as titular tributaries of the Most Magnificent.

For they needed not the forests in which the Americans lived, nor the
resources of the vast territories these forests covered. With the
perfection to which they had reduced the synthetic production of
necessities and luxuries, their remarkable development of scientific
processes and mechanical accomplishment of work, they had no economic
need for the forests, and no economic desire for the enslaved labor of
an unruly race.

They had all they needed for their magnificently luxurious and degraded
scheme of civilization, within the walls of the fifteen cities of
sparkling glass they had flung skyward on the sites of ancient American
centers, into the bowels of the earth underneath them, and with
relatively small surrounding areas of agriculture.

Complete domination of the air rendered communication bet