The Airlords of Han

And so the fall of Lo-Tan was accomplished. Somewhere in the seething activities of these few days, San-Lan, the "Heaven-Born," Emperor of the Hans in America, perished, for he was heard of never again, and the unified action of the Hans vanished with him, though it was several years before one by one their remaining cities were destroyed and their populations hunted down, thus completing the reclamation of America and inaugurating the most glorious and noble era of scientific civilization in the history of the American race.

AS I look back on those emotional and violent years from my present vantage point of declining existence in an age of peace and good will toward all mankind, they do seem savage and repellent.

Then there flashes into my memory the picture of Wilma (now long since gone to her rest) as, screaming in an utter abandon of merciless fury, she threw herself recklessly, exultantly into the thick of that wild, relentless slaughter; and my mind can find nothing savage nor repellent about her.

If I, product of the relatively peaceful Twentieth Century, was so completely carried away by the fury of that war, intensified by centuries of unspeakable cruelty on the part of the yellow men who were mentally gods and morally beasts, shall I be shocked at the "bloodthirstiness" of a mate who was, after all, but a normal girl of that day, and who, girl as she was, never for a moment faltered in the high courage with which she threw herself into that combat, responding to the passionate urge for freedom in her blood that not five centuries of inhuman persecution could subdue?

Had the Hans been raging tigers, or slimy, loathsome reptiles, would we have spared them? And when in their centuries of degradation they had destroyed the souls within themselves, were they in any way superior to tigers or snakes? To have extended mercy would have been suicide.

In the years that followed, Wilma and I travelled nearly every nation on the earth which had succeeded in throwing off the Han domination, spurred on by our success in America, and I never knew her to show to the men or women of any race anything but the utmost of sympathetic courtesy and consideration, whether they were the noble brown-skinned Caucasians of India, the sturdy Balkanites of Southern Europe, or the simple, spiritual Blacks of Africa, today one of the leading races of the world, although in the Twentieth Century we regarded them as inferior. This charity and gentleness of hers did not fail even in our contacts with the non-Han Mongolians of Japan and the coast provinces of China.

But that monstrosity among the races of men which originated as a hybrid somewhere in the dark fastnesses of interior Asia, and spread itself like an inhuman yellow blight over the face of the globe—for that race, like all of us, she felt nothing but horror and the irresistible urge to extermination.

LATTERLY, our historians and anthropologists find much support for the theory that the Hans sprang from a genus of human-like creatures that may have arrived on this earth with a small planet (or large meteor) which is known to have crashed in interior Asia late in the Twentieth Century, causing certain permanent changes in the earth's orbit and climate.

Geological convulsions blocked this section off from the rest of the world for many years. And it is a historical fact that Chinese scientists, driving their explorations into it at a somewhat later period, met the first wave of the on-coming Hans.

The theory is that these creatures (and certain queer skeletons have been found in the "Asiatic Bowl") with a mental superdevelopment, but a vacuum in place of that intangible something we call a soul, mated forcibly with the Tibetans, thereby strengthening their physical structure to almost the human normal, adapting themselves to earthly speech and habits, and in some strange manner intensifying even further their mental powers.

Or, to put it the other way around. These Tibetans, through the injection of this unearthly blood, deteriorated slightly physically, lost the "soul" parts of their nature entirely, and developed abnormally efficient intellects.

However, through the centuries that followed, as the Hans spread over the face of the earth, this unearthly strain in them not only became more dilute, but lost its potency; and in the end, the poison of it submerged the power of it, and earth's mankind came again into possession of its inheritance.

How all this may be, I do not know. It is merely a hypothesis over which the learned men of today quarrel.

BUT I do know that there was something inhuman about these Hans. And I had many months of intimate contact with them, and with their Emperor in America. I can vouch for the fact that even in his most friendly and human moments, there was an inhumanity, or perhaps "unhumanity" about him that aroused in me that urge to kill.

But whether or not there was in these people blood from outside this planet, the fact remains that they have been exterminated, that a truly human civilization reigns once more—and that I am now a very tired old man, waiting with no regrets for the call which will take me to another existence.

There, it is my hope and my conviction that my courageous mate of those bloody days waits for me with loving arms.

THE END