ed desperately for the day when they should be powerful enough
to rise and annihilate the Yellow Blight that lay over the continent.

At the time of my awakening, the gangs were rather loosely organized,
but were considering the establishment of a special military force,
whose special business it would be to harry the Hans and bring down
their air ships whenever possible without causing general alarm among
the Mongolians. This force was destined to become the nucleus of the
national force, when the Day of Retribution arrived. But that, however,
did not happen for ten years, and is another story.

[Illustration: On the left of the illustration is a Han girl, and on the
right is an American girl, who, like all of her race, is equipped with
an inertron belt and a rocket gun.]

Wilma told me she was a member of the Wyoming Gang, which claimed the
entire Wyoming Valley as its territory, under the leadership of Boss
Hart. Her mother and father were dead, and she was unmarried, so she was
not a "family member." She lived in a little group of tents known as
Camp 17, under a woman Camp Boss, with seven other girls.

Her duties alternated between military or police scouting and factory
work. For the two-week period which would end the next day, she had been
on "air patrol." This did not mean, as I first imagined, that she was
flying, but rather that she was on the lookout for Han ships over this
outlying section of the Wyoming territory, and had spent most of her
time perched in the tree tops scanning the skies. Had she seen one she
would have fired a "drop flare" several miles off to one side, which
would ignite when it was floating vertically toward the earth, so that
the direction or point from which if had been fired might not be guessed
by the airship and bring a blasting play of the disintegrator ray in her
vicinity. Other members of the air patrol would send up rockets on
seeing hers, until finally a scout equipped with an ultrophone, which,
unlike the ancient radio, operated on the ultronic ethereal vibrations,
would pass the warning simultaneously to the headquarters of the Wyoming
Gang and other communities within a radius of several hundred miles, not
to mention the few American rocket ships that might be in the air, and
which instantly would duck to cover either through forest clearings or
by flattening down to earth in green fields where their coloring would
probably protect them from observation. The favorite Amer