ed, giant pistons plunged back and forth, and immense
systems of chemical vats, piping and converters, automatically performed
their functions with the assistance of no human hand, but under the
minute television inspection of many perfumed dandies reclining at their
ease before viewplates in their apartment offices in the city, that
clung to the mountain peak far above.

There were just two restrictions on my freedom of movement. I was
allowed nowhere near the power-broadcasting station on the peak, nor the
complement of it which was buried three miles below the base of the
mountain. And I was never allowed to approach within a hundred feet of
any disintegrator ray machine when I visited the military outposts in
the surrounding mountains.

I first noticed the "escape tunnels" one day when I had descended to the
lowest level of all, the location of the Electronic Plant, where
machines, known as "reverse disintegrators," fed with earth and crushed
rock by automatic conveyors, subjected this material to the
disintegrator ray, held the released electrons captive within their
magnetic fields and slowly refashioned them into supplies of metals and
other desired elements.

My attention was attracted to the tunnels by the unusual fact that men
were busily entering and leaving them. Almost the entire repair force
seemed to be concentrated here. Stocky, muscular men they were, with the
same modified Oriental countenances as the rest of the Hans, but with a
certain ruggedness about them that was lacking in the rest of the
indolent population. They sweated as they labored over the construction
of magnetic cars evidently designed to travel down these tunnels,
automatically laying pipe lines for ventilation and temperature control.
The tunnels themselves appeared to have been driven with disintegrator
rays, which could bore rapidly through the solid rock, forming glassy
iridescent walls as they bored, and involving no problem of debris
removal.

* * * * *

I asked San-Lan about it the next time I saw him, for the officer of my
guard would give me no information.

The supreme ruler of the Hans smiled mockingly.

"There is no reason why you should not know their purpose," he said,
"for you will never be able to stop our use of them. These tunnels
constitute the road to a new Han era. Your forest men have turned our
cities into traps, but they have not trapped our minds and our powers
over Nature