"Phillip Francis Nowlan - Buck Rogers 01 - Armageddon 2419" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nowlan Philip Francis)

"ARMAGEDDON-2419"

by Phillip Frances Nowlan

PROLOGUE

Elsewhere I have set down, for whatever interest they have in this, the 25th Century, my personal
recollections of the 20th Century.
Now it occurs to me that my memories of the 25th Century may have an equal interest 500 years from
now
-particularly in view of that unique perspective from which I have seen the 25th Century, entering it as I
did, in one leap across a gap of 492 years.
This statement requires elucidation. There are still many in the world who are not familiar with my
unique experience. I should state therefore, that I, Anthony Rogers, am, so far as I know the only man
alive wh6se normal span of life has been spread over a period of 573 years. To be precise, I lived the
first twenty-nine years of my life between 1898 and 1927; the rest since 2419. The gap between these
two, a period of nearly a five hundred years, I spent in a state of suspended animation, free from the
ravages of catabolic processes, and without any apparent effect on my physical or mental faculties.
When I began my long sleep, man had just begun his real conquest of the air in a sudden series of
transoceanic flights in airplanes driven by internal combustion motors. He had barely begun to speculate
on the possibilities of harnessing sub-atomic forces, and had made no further practical penetration into
the field of ethereal pulsations than the primitive radio and television of that day. The United States of
America was the most powerful nation in the world, its political, financial, industrial and scientific influence
being suprerne.
I awoke to find the America I knew a total wreck-to find Americans a hunted race in their own land,
hiding in the dense forests that covered the shattered and leveled ruins of their once magnificent cities,
desperately preserving, and struggling to develop in their secret retreats, the remnants of their culture
and science-and their independence.
World domination was in the hands of Mongolians, and the center of world power lay in inland China,
with Americans one of the few races of mankind unsubdued-and it must be admitted in fairness to the
truth, not worth the trouble of subduing in the eyes of the Han Airlords who ruled North Amenca as
titular tributaries of the Most Magnificent.
For they needed not the forests in which the Americans lived, nor the resources of the vast territories
these forests covered. With the perfection to which they had reduced the synthetic production of
necessities and luxuries, their development of scientific processes and mechanical accomplishments of
work, they had no economic need for the forests, and no economic desire for the enslaved labor of an
unruly race.
They had all they needed for their magnificently luxurious' scheme of civilization within the walls of the
fifteen cities of sparkling glass they had flung skyward on the sites of ancient American centers, into
the bowels of the earth underneath them, and with relatively small surrounding areas of agriculture.
Complete domination of the air rendered communication between these centers a matter of ease and
safety. Occasional destructive raids on the wastelands were considered all that was necessary to keep
the "wild" Americans on the run within the shelter of their forests, aad prevent their becoming a menace to
the Han civilization.
But nearly three hundred years of easily maintained secarity, the last century of which had been nearly
sterile in scientific, social and economic progress, had softened them.
It had likewise developed, beneath the protecting foliage of the forest, the growth of a vigorous new
American civilization, remarkable in the mobility and flexibility of its organization, in its conquest of
almost insuperable obstacles, and in the development and guarding of its industrial and scientific
resources. All this was in anticipation of that "Day of Hope" to which Americans had been looking