own appreciation of the fact that she
had not found it as difficult as the others to believe my story,
operated in the same direction. I could easily imagine my story must
have sounded incredible.

It was natural enough too, that she should feel an unusual interest in
me. In the first place, I was her personal discovery. In the second, she
was a girl of studious and reflective turn of mind. She never got tired
of my stories and descriptions of the 20th Century.

The others of the community, however, seemed to find our friendship a
bit amusing. It seemed that Wilma had a reputation for being cold toward
the opposite sex, and so others, not being able to appreciate some of
her fine qualities as I did, misinterpreted her attitude, much to their
own delight. Wilma and I, however, ignored this as much as we could.

CHAPTER IV

A Han Air Raid

There was a girl in Wilma's camp named Gerdi Mann, with whom Bill Hearn
was desperately in love, and the four of us used to go around a lot
together. Gerdi was a distinct type. Whereas Wilma had the usual dark
brown hair and hazel eyes that marked nearly every member of the
community, Gerdi had red hair, blue eyes and very fair skin. She has
been dead many years now, but I remember her vividly because she was a
throwback in physical appearance to a certain 20th Century type which I
have found very rare among modern Americans; also because the four of us
were engaged one day in a discussion of this very point, when I obtained
my first experience of a Han air raid.

We were sitting high on the side of a hill overlooking the valley that
teemed with human activity, invisible beneath its blanket of foliage.

The other three, who knew of the Irish but vaguely and indefinitely, as
a race on the other side of the globe, which, like ourselves, had
succeeded in maintaining a precarious and fugitive existence in
rebellion against the Mongolian domination of the earth, were listening
with interest to my theory that Gerdi's ancestors of several hundred
years ago must have been Irish. I explained that Gerdi was an Irish
type, evidently a throwback, and that her surname might well have been
McMann, or McMahan, and still more anciently "mac Mathghamhain." They
were interested too in my surmise that "Gerdi" was the same name as that
which had been "Gerty" or "Gertrude" in the 20th Century.

In the middle of our discussion, we were startled by an alarm rocket
that burst high in the air,