Cities in the air

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Air Wonder Stories November, December 1929 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Here is one of the most extraordinary stories that it has been our good fortune to read. For sheer audacity in construction, excellence in science and breath-taking adventure, this story undoubtedly stands in the foreground of science air-fiction stories of the year.

The recent advances in aeronautics where airplanes have been in the air for weeks at a time without coming down to the ground, point the way for tremendous achievements in the generations to come.

City life today is a conglomeration of structures close together. We have buildings now that house as many as 40,000 people at one time and soon we will have single business buildings that will house 100,000 and more individuals at the same time. Furthermore, every doctor will tell you that living at the surface of the earth is usually unhealthy because of the dust and the high density of the air, which gives rise to most pulmonary diseases, particularly consumption, colds and the like. At high altitudes such diseases tend to disappear. Therefore physicians usually send their afflicted patients to the higher altitudes.

You may be sure that conditions such as are described by the author of this marvelous story will come about sooner or later.

We also know that this story will arouse a great storm of discussion among our readers, due particularly to the audacity of the author in picturing his ideas as to future aviation--which by the way will not seem so fantastic two hundred years hence as they might seem now.

"Captain Martin Brant, of American Federation Air-Cruiser 3885!"

As the high clear voice rang through the bridge-room of my racing cruiser, I turned toward the distance-phone from which it issued. Pressing a stud beneath the instrument I answered into it.

"Captain Brant speaking."

"Order of the First Air Chief to Captain Brant: You are informed that the European and Asiatic Federations have combined in alliance to launch a great and unexpected attack upon the American Federation. The European Federation fleet of five thousand air-cruisers is now racing over the Atlantic toward New York and other eastern cities, while the Asiatic Federation fleet of the same size is heading over the Pacific toward our western coasts. All American cruisers patrolling east of the Mississippi, including your own, are ordered to head at full speed toward New York, where our eastern squadrons are assembling to meet the European Federation fleet. Upon arriving there yourself and all other squadron commanders will report at once to the First Air Chief."

The clear voice ceased, and I turned from the distance-phone to meet the startled eyes of Macklin, my first officer, who stood at the cruiser's wheel beside me.

"Head eastward--full speed, Macklin!" I cried to him. "It's war at last--war with the European and Asiatic Federations!"

Instantly Macklin swung over the wheel in his hands, and as he did so the whole long bulk of our cruiser swung likewise in mid-air, curving up and backward to race eastward above the green plains, the descending sun at our backs. A moment more and the cruiser's long torpedo shape, gleaming and unbroken metal save for the rows of portholes and the raised, transparent-walled bridge-room in which we stood, was splitting the air eastward at a speed that mounted with each moment. I reached for the order-phone, and as Hilliard, my young second officer, answered from the motor-rooms beneath, I informed him briefly of what had just been told me. Then there was a muffled cheer from the hundred-odd members of our crew, beneath, and a few minutes later the drone of the great motors had reached to an even higher pitch, and we were racing through the sunlight high above the earth at more than a thousand miles an hour.

Standing there with Macklin in the bridge-room as we shot eastward, though, my thoughts were grave enough despite the exciting quality of the news we had just heard. War!--the war that we of the American Federation had expected, had feared for decades. It had not been more than thirty years since the third Air War of 2039. Three mighty nations alone now shared the world between them; the American Federation, comprising the whole North and South American continents, with New York as its capital; the European Federation, which included all Europe west of Caucasus and all Africa, its center at Berlin; and the Asiatic Federation, which held all Asia and Australasia for the brown and yellow races, with Peking as its capital.

And though for three decades now there had been peace between them, it had been an uneasy peace dictated by the fact that each feared to attack another lest he be attacked by the third. The great navies of air-cruisers of the three mighty Federations had patrolled the air in ceaseless vigilance, their air-forts ever watchful. Lately, however, it had become apparent to all that a rapprochement had taken place between the European and Asiatic Federations, and such an alliance could only mean an attack upon our own, the American. So we had stood even more vigilantly upon the watch, and now that for which we had waited had come at last, and the two great Federations had launched their two mighty fleets upon us.

Gazing ahead, as our cruiser drove onward, I was as silent as Macklin, at the wheel beside me, and as young Hilliard, who had come up into the bridge-room from beneath. Far beneath us the green plains were rolling swiftly backward, as our motors hummed their unceasing song of power. Those great electric motors drew their current in limitless quantities from the electrostatic or atmospheric electricity surrounding the earth, by means of great transformers that changed it from electrostatic to current electricity to give us a power that could hurl us forward with almost unlimited endurance and speed. Connected as they were to our great horizontal tube-propellers, which were set in the cruiser's walls and which moved it forward by drawing immense volumes of air at vast speed through themselves from ahead, those motors could fling us on at more than a thousand miles an hour. This utmost force, as our indicators told us, was shooting us eastward now.

Beneath us the green plains had given way to the great tumbled folds and peaks of the Alleghanies. Somewhere to the south lay Pittsburgh, and to the north Cleveland and Buffalo, but being headed directly to New York, we therefore did not see them. Beneath us we could make out in swift flashes of vision masses of the air-traffic between those cities, great passenger-liners and bulky freight-carriers and slender private craft, but in our own military-craft level there moved only a few cruisers like our own racing eastward toward New York in answer to the alarm. With these, however, there was small danger of collision.

Now the Alleghanies had dropped behind and we were rocketing over the rolling, pleasant countryside that lies between them and the eastern Appalachians. As we shot on I gazed downward, over the green and silent and empty landscape rushing beneath us, and wondered momentarily what a citizen of fifty years ago would have thought to see this once-populous land over which we were speeding lying as lifeless and deserted beneath us as it was now. Then it had given way to the greater folds and ridges of the Appalachians, and then, as we shot on and over their tumbled masses, Macklin lifted his hand from the wheel to point ahead.

"The air-forts!" he said.