The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Fifth-Dimension TubeThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The Fifth-Dimension TubeAuthor: Murray LeinsterRelease date: November 6, 2009 [eBook #30408]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Greg Weeks, Barbara Tozier and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIFTH-DIMENSION TUBE ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The Fifth-Dimension TubeAuthor: Murray LeinsterRelease date: November 6, 2009 [eBook #30408]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Greg Weeks, Barbara Tozier and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Title: The Fifth-Dimension Tube
Author: Murray Leinster
Author: Murray Leinster
Release date: November 6, 2009 [eBook #30408]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Greg Weeks, Barbara Tozier and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIFTH-DIMENSION TUBE ***
This etext was produced fromAstounding StoriesJanuary 1933. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
A Sequel to “The Fifth-Dimension Catapult”
A woman zombie-walks towards a large shadowy figure with huge shining eyes.Evelyn swayed … and the Thing moved!
Evelyn swayed … and the Thing moved!
A Complete Novelette
By Murray Leinster
By way of Professor Denham’s Tube, Tommy and Evelyn invade the inimical Fifth-Dimensional world of golden cities and tree-fern jungles and Ragged Men.
Thegenerator rumbled and roared, building up to its maximum speed. The whole laboratory quivered from its vibration. The dynamo hummed and whined and the night silence outside seemed to make the noises within more deafening. Tommy Reames ran his eyes again over the power-leads to the monstrous, misshapen coils. Professor Denham bent over one of them, straightened, and nodded. Tommy Reames nodded to Evelyn, and she threw the heavy multiple-pole switch.
There was a flash of jumping current. The masses of metal on the floor seemed to leap into ungainly life. The whine of the dynamo rose to a scream and its brushes streaked blue flame. The metal things on the floor flicked together and were a tube, three feet and more in diameter. That tube writhed and twisted. It began to form itself into an awkward and seemingly impossible shape, while metal surfaces sliding on each other produced screams that cut through the din of the motor and dynamo. The writhing tube strained andwriggled. Then there was a queer, inaudiblesnapand something gave. A part of the tube quivered into nothingness. Another part hurt the eyes that looked upon it.
And then there was the smell of burned insulation and a wire was arcing somewhere, while thick rubbery smoke arose. A fuse blew out with a thunderous report, and Tommy Reames leaped to the suddenly racing motor-generator. The motor died amid gasps and rumblings. And Tommy Reames looked anxiously at the Fifth-Dimension Tube.
It was important, that Tube. Through it, Tommy Reames and Professor Denham had reason to believe they could travel to another universe, of which other men had only dreamed. And it was important in other ways, too. At the moment Evelyn Denham threw the switch, last-edition newspapers in Chicago were showing headlines about “King” Jacaro’s forfeiture of two hundred thousanddollars’ bail by failing to appear in court. King Jacaro was a lord of racketeerdom.
While Tommy inspected the Tube anxiously, a certain chief of police in a small town upstate was telling feverishly over the telephone of a posse having killed a monster lizard by torchlight, having discovered it in the act of devouring a cow. The lizard was eight feet high, walked on its hind legs, and had a collar of solid gold about its neck. And jewel importers, in New York, were in anxious conference about a flood of untraced jewels upon the market. Their origin was unknown. The Fifth-Dimension Tube ultimately affected all of those affairs, and the Death Mist as well. And—though it was not considered dangerous then—everybody remembers the Death Mist now.
But at the moment Professor Denham stared at the Tube concernedly, his daughter Evelyn shivered from pure excitement as she looked at it, and a red-headed man named Smithers looked impassively from the Tube to Tommy Reames and back again. He’d done most of the mechanical work on the Tube’s parts, and he was as anxious as the rest. But nobody thought of the world outside the laboratory.
Professor Denham moved suddenly. He was nearest to the open end of the Tube. He sniffed curiously and seemed to listen. Within seconds the others became aware of a new smell in the laboratory. It seemed to come from the Tube itself, and it was a warm, damp smell that could only be imagined as coming from a jungle in the tropics. There were the rich odors of feverishly growing things; the heavy fragrance of unknown tropic blossoms, and a background of some curious blend of scents and smells which was alien and luring, and exotic. The whole was like the smell of another planet of the jungles of a strange world which men had never trod. And then, definitely coming out of the Tube, there was a hollow, booming noise.
Ithad been echoed and re-echoed amid the twistings of the Tube, but only an animal could have made it. It grew louder, a monstrous roar. Then yells sounded suddenly above it—human yells, wild yells, insane, half-gibbering yells of hysterical excitement and blood lust. The beast-thing bellowed and an ululating chorus of joyous screams arose. The laboratory reverberated with the thunderous noise. Then there was the sound of crashing and of paddings, and abruptly the noise was diminishing as if its source were moving farther away. The beast-thing roared and bellowed as if in agony, and the yelling noise seemed to show that men were following close upon its flanks.
Those in the laboratory seemed to awaken as if from a bad dream. Denham was kneeling before the mouth of the Tube, an automatic rifle in his hands. Tommy Reames stood grimly before Evelyn. He’d snatched up a pair of automatic pistols. Smithers clutched a spanner and watched the mouth of the Tube with a strained attention. Evelyn stood shivering behind Tommy.
Tommy said with a hint of grim humor:
“I don’t think there’s any doubt about the Tube having gotten through. That’s the Fifth Dimension planet, all right.”
He smiled at Evelyn. She was deathly pale.
“I—remember—hearing noises like that….”
Denham stood up. He painstakingly slipped on the safety of his rifle and laid it on a bench with the other guns. There was a small arsenal on a bench at one side of thelaboratory. The array looked much more like arms for in expedition into dangerous territory than a normal part of apparatus for an experiment in rather abstruse mathematical physics. There were even gas masks on the bench, and some of those converted brass Very pistols now used only for discharging tear- and sternutatory-gas bombs.
“The Tube wasn’t seen, anyhow,” said Professor Denham briskly. “Who’s going through first?”
Tommy slung a cartridge belt about his waist and a gas mask about his neck.
“I am,” he said shortly. “We’ll want to camouflage the mouth of the Tube. I’ll watch a bit before I get out.”
He crawled into the mouth of the twisted pipe.
TheTube was nearly three feet across, each section was five feet long, and there were gigantic solenoids at each end of each section.
It was not an experiment made at random, nor was the world to which it reached an unknown one to Tommy or to Denham. Months before, Denham had built an instrument which would bend a ray of light into the Fifth Dimension and had found that he could fix a telescope to the device and look into a new and wholly strange cosmos.** “The Fifth-Dimension Catapult”—see theJanuary, 1931, issue of Astounding Stories.He had seen tree-fern jungles and a monstrous red sun, and all the flora and fauna of a planet in the carboniferous period of development. More, by the accident of its placing he had seen the towers and the pinnacles of a city whose walls and towers seemed plated with gold.
Having gone so far, he had devised a catapult which literally flung objects to the surface of that incredible world. Insects, birds, and at last a cat had made the journey unharmed, and he had built a steel globe in which to attempt the journey in person. His daughter Evelyn had demanded to accompany him, and he believed it safe. The trip had been made in security, but return was another matter. A laboratory assistant, Von Holtz, had sent them into the Fifth Dimension, only to betray them. One King Jacaro, lord of Chicago racketeers, was convinced by him of the existence of the golden city of that other world, and that it was full of delectable loot. He offered a bribe past envy for the secret of Denham’s apparatus. And Von Holtz had removed the apparatus for Denham’s return before working the catapult to send him on his strange journey. He wanted to be free to sell full privileges of rapine and murder to Jacaro.
The result was unexpected. Von Holtz could not unravel the secret of the catapult he himself had operated. He could not sell the secret for which he had committed a crime. In desperation he called in Tommy Reames—rather more than an amateur in mathematical physics—showed him Evelyn and her father marooned in a tree-fern jungle, and hypocritically asked for aid.
Tommy’s enthusiastic efforts soon became more than merely enthusiastic. The men of the Golden City remained invisible, but there were strange, half-mad outlaws of the jungles who hated the city. Tommy Reames had watched helplessly as they hunted for the occupants of the steel globe. He had worked frenziedly to achieve a rescue. In the course of his labor he discovered the treachery of Von Holtz as well as the secret of the catapult, and with the aid of Smithers—who had helped to build the originalcatapult—he made a new small device to achieve the original end.
Thewhole affair came to an end on one mad afternoon when the Ragged Men captured first an inhabitant of the Golden City, and then Denham and Evelyn in a forlorn attempt at rescue. Tommy Reames went mad. He used a tiny sub-machine gun upon the Ragged Men through the model magnetic catapult he had made, and contrived communication with Denham afterward. Instructed by Denham, he brought about the return of father and daughter to Earth just before Ragged Men and Earthling alike would have perished in a vengeful gas cloud from the Golden City. Even then, though, his triumph was incomplete because Von Holtz had gotten word to Jacaro, and nattily-dressed gunmen raided the laboratory and made off with the model catapult, leaving three bullets in Tommy and one in Smithers as souvenirs.
Now, using the principle developed in the catapult, Tommy and Denham had built a large Tube, and as Tommy climbed along its corrugated interior he knew a good part of what he should expect at the other end. A steady current of air blew past him. It was laden with a myriad unfamiliar scents. The Tube was a tunnel from one set of dimensions to another, a permanent way from Earth to a strange, carboniferous-period planet on which a monstrous dull-red sun shone hotly. Tommy should come out into a tree-fern forest whose lush vegetation would hide the sky, and which furnished a lurking place not only for strange reptilian monsters akin to those of the long-dead past of Earth, but for the bands of ragged, half-mad human beings who were outlaws from the civilization of which Denham and Evelyn had seen proofs.
Tommyreached the third bend in the Tube. By now he had lost all sense of orientation. An object may be bent through one right angle only in two dimensions, and a second perfect right angle—at ninety degrees to all former paths—only in three dimensions. It follows that a third perfect right angle requires four dimensions for existence, and four perfect right angles five. The Tube bent itself through four perfect right angles, and since no human-being can ever have experience of more than three dimensions, plus time, it followed that Tommy was experiencing other dimensions than those of Earth as soon as he passed the third bend. In short, he was in another cosmos.
There was a moment of awful sickness as he passed the third bend. He was hideously dizzy when he passed the fourth. For a time he felt as if he had no weight at all. But then, quite abruptly, he was climbing vertically upward and the soughing of tree-fern fronds was loud in his ears, and suddenly the end of the Tube was under his fingers and he stared out into the world of the Fifth Dimension.
Now a gentle wind blew in his face. Tree-ferns rose to incredible heights above his head, and now and again by the movements of their fronds he caught stray glimpses of unfamiliar stars. There were red stars, and blue ones, and once he caught sight of a clearly distinguishable double star, of which each component was visible to the naked eye. And very, very far away he heard the beastly yellings he knew must be the outlaws, the Ragged Men, feasting horribly on half-scorched flesh torn from the quivering, yet-living flanks of a monstrous reptile.
Something moved, whimpered—and fled suddenly. It sounded like a human being. And Tommy Reames was struck with the utterly impossibleconviction that he had heard just that sound before. It was not dangerous, in any case, and he watched, and listened, and presently he slipped from the mouth of the Tube and by the glow of a flashlight stripped foliage from nearby growths and piled it about the Tube’s mouth. And then, because the purpose of the Tube was not adventure but science, he went back down into the laboratory.
Thethree men, with Evelyn, worked until dawn at the rest of their preparations for the use of the Tube. All that time the laboratory was filled with the heavy fragrance of a tree-fern jungle upon an unknown planet. The heavy, sickly-sweet scents of closed jungle blossoms filled their nostrils. The reek of feverishly growing green things saturated the air. A steady wind blew down the Tube, and it bore innumerable unfamiliar odors into the laboratory. Once a gigantic moth bumped and blundered into the Tube, and finally crawled heavily out into the light. It was scaled, and terrible because of its monstrous size, but it had broken a wing and could not fly. So it crawled with feverish haste toward a brilliant electric light. Its eyes were especially horrible because they were not compound like the moths of Earth. They were single, like those of a man, and were fixed in an expression of utter, fascinated hypnosis. The thing looked horribly human with those eyes staring from an insect’s head, and Smithers killed it in a flash of nerve-racked horror. None of them were able to go on with their work until the thing and its fascinated, staring eyes had been put out of sight. Then they labored on with the smell of the jungles of that unnamed planet thick about them, and noises now and then coming down the Tube. There were roars, and growlings, and once there was a thin high sound which seemed like the far-distant, death-startled scream of a man.
Tommy Reamessaw the red sun rise while he was on guard at the mouth of the Tube. The tree-ferns above him came into view as vague gray outlines. The many-colored stars grew pale. And presently a bit of crimson light peeped through the jungle somewhere. It moved along the horizon and very slowly grew higher. For a moment, Tommy saw the huge, dull-red ball that was the sun of this alien planet. Queer mosses took form and color in the daylight, displaying colors never seen on Earth. He saw flying things dart among the tree-fern fronds, and some were scaled and some were not, but none of them were feathered.
Then a tiny buzzing noise. The telephone that now rested below the lip of the Tube was being used from the laboratory.
“Smithers will relieve you,” said Denham’s voice in the receiver. “Come on down. We’re not the only people experimenting with the Fifth Dimension. Jacaro’s been working, and all hell’s loose!”
Tommy slid down the Tube in an instant. The four right-angled turns made him sick and dizzy again, but he came out with his jaw set grimly. There was good reason for Tommy’s interest in Jacaro. Besides sides three bullet wounds, Tommy owed Jacaro something for stealing the first model Tube.
He emerged in the laboratory on his hands and knees as the size of the Tube made necessary. Smithers smiled placidly at him and crawled in to take his place.
“What the devil happened?” demanded Tommy.
Denham was bitter. He held a newspaper before him. Evelyn had brought coffee and the morning paper to the laboratory. She seemed rather pale.
“Jacaro’s gotten through too!” snapped Denham. “He’s gotten in a pack of trouble. And he’s loosed the devil on Earth. Here—look!” He jabbed his finger at one headline. “And here—and here!” He thrust at others. “Here’s proof.”
The first headline read: “KING JACARO FORFEITS BOND.” Smaller headings beneath it read: “Racketeer Missing for Income Tax Trial. $200,000 Bail Forfeited.” The second headline was in smaller type: “Monster Lizard Killed! Giant Meat Eater Brought Down by Rifleman. Akin to Ancient Dinosaurs, Say Scientists.”
“Jacaro’smissing,” said Denham harshly. “This article says he’s vanished, and with him a dozen of his most prominent gunmen. You know he had a model catapult to duplicate—the one he got from you. Von Holtz could arrange the construction of a big Tube for him. And he knew about the Golden City. Look!”
His finger, trembling, tapped on the flashlight picture of the giant lizard of which the story told. And it was a giant. A rope had upheld a colossal, leering, reptilian head while men with rifles posed self-consciously beside the dead creature. It was as big as a horse, and at first glance its kinship to the extinct dinosaurs of Earth was plain. Huge teeth in sharklike rows. A long, trailing tail. But there was a collar about the beast-thing’s neck.
“It had killed and was devouring a cow when they shot it,” said Denham bitterly. “There’ve been reports of these creatures for days—so the news story says. They weren’t printed because nobody believed them. But there are a couple of people missing. A searching party was hunting for them. They found this!”
Tommy Reames stared at the picture. His face went grimmer still. He thought of sounds he had heard beyond the Tube, not long since.
“There’s no question where they came from. The Fifth Dimension. But if Jacaro brought them back, he’s a fool.”
“Jacaro’s missing,” said Denham savagely. “Don’t you understand? He could get through to the Golden City. These beast-things are proof somebody did. And these things came down the Tube that somebody travelled through. Jacaro wouldn’t send them, but somebody did. They’ve got collars around their necks! Who sent them? And why?”
Tommy’seyes narrowed.
“If civilized men found the mouth of a Tube, it would seem like the mouth of an artificial tunnel or a cave—”
“And if annoying vermin, like Jacaro’s gunmen”—Denham’s voice was brittle—“had come out of it, why, intelligent men might send something living and deadly down it, as men on Earth will send ferrets down a rat-hole! To wipe out the breed! That’s what’s happened! Jacaro’s gone through and attacked the Golden City. They’ve found his Tube. And they’ve sent these things down….”
“Ifwefound rats coming from a rat-hole,” said Tommy very quietly, “and ferrets went down and didn’t come up, we’d gas them.”
“And so,” Denham told him, “so would the Golden City.”
He pointed to a boxed double paragraph news story under leaded twenty-point headline: “Poisonous Fog Kills Wild Life.”
The story was not alarming. Itsaid merely that state game wardens had found numerous dead game animals in a thinly-settled district near Coltsville, N.Y., and on investigation had found a bank of mist, all of half a mile across, which seemed to have caused the trouble. State chemists and biologists were investigating the phenomenon. Curiously, the bank of mist seemed not to dissipate in a normal fashion. Samples of the fog were being analyzed. It was probably akin to the Belgian fogs which on several occasions had caused much loss of life. The mist was especially interesting because in sunlight it displayed prismatic colorings. State troopers were warning the inhabitants of the neighborhood.
“The gassing’s started,” said Denham savagely. “I know a gas that shows rainbow colors. The Golden City uses it. So we’ve got to find Jacaro’s Tube and seal it, or only God knows what will come out of it next. I’m going off, Tommy. You and Smithers guard our Tube. Blow it up, if necessary. It’s dangerous. I’ll get some authority in Albany, and we’ll find Jacaro’s Tube and blast it shut.”
Tommy nodded, his eyes keen and thoughtful. Denham hurried out.
Minuteslater, only, they heard the roar of a car motor going down the long lane away from the laboratory. Evelyn tried to smile at Tommy.
“It seems terrible, dangerous.”
Tommy considered and shrugged.
“This news is old,” he observed. “This paper was printed last night. I think I’ll make a couple of long-distance calls. If the Golden City’s had trouble with Jacaro, it’s going to make things bad for us.”
He swept his eyes about and frowningly loaded a light rifle. He put it convenient to Evelyn’s hand and made for the dwelling-house and the telephone. It was odd that as he emerged into the open air, the familiar smells of Earth struck his nostrils as strange and unaccustomed. The laboratory was redolent of the tree-fern forest into which the Tube extended. And Smithers was watching amid those dank, incredible carboniferous-period growths now.
Tommy put through calls, seeing all his and Denham’s plans for a peaceful exploration party and amicable contact with the civilization of that other planet, utterly shattered by presumed outrages by Jacaro. He made call after call, and his demands for information grew more urgent as he got closer to the source of trouble. His cause for worry was verified long before he had finished. Even as he made the first call, New York newspapers had crowded a second-grade murder off their front pages to make room for the white mist upstate.
Theearly-morning editions had termed it a “poisonous fog.” The breakfast editions spoke of it as a “poison fog.” But it grew and moved and by the time Tommy had a clear line to get actual information about it, a tabloid had christened it the “Death Mist” and there were three chartered planes circling about it for the benefit of their newspapers. State troopers were being reinforced. At ten o’clock it was necessary to post extra traffic police to take care of the cars headed upstate to look at the mystery. At eleven it began to move! Sluggishly, to be sure, and rather raggedly, but it undoubtedly moved, and as undoubtedly it moved independently of the wind.
It was at twelve-thirty that the first casualty occurred. Before that time, the police had frantically demanded that the flood of sightseers be stopped. The Death Mistcovered a square mile or more. It clung to the ground, nowhere more than fifty or sixty feet high, and glittered with all the colors of the rainbow. It moved with a velocity of anywhere from ten to twenty miles an hour. In its path were a myriad small tragedies—nesting birds stiff and still, and rabbits and other small furry bodies contorted in queer agonized postures. But until twelve-thirty no human beings were known to be its victims.
Then, though, it was moving blindly across the wind with a thin trailing edge behind it and a rolling billow of descending mist as its forefront. It rolled up to and across a concrete highway, watched by perspiring motor cops who had performed miracles in clearing a path for it among the horde of sightseeing cars. It swept on into a spindling pine wood. Behind it lay a thinning sheet of vapor—thick white mist which seemed to rise and move more swiftly to overtake the main body. It lay across the highway in a sheet which was ten feet deep, then thinned to six, to three….
Themist was no more than a foot thick, when a party of motorists essayed to drive through it as through a sheet of water. They dodged a swearing motorcycle cop and, yelling hilariously, plunged forward. It happened that they had not more than a hundred yards to go, so the whole thing was plainly seen.
The car was ten yards across the sheet of mist before the effect of its motion was apparent. Then the mist, torn by the car-eddy, swirled madly in their wake. The motorists yelled delightedly. There is a picture extant, taken at just this moment. It shows the driver with a foolish grin on his face, clutching the wheel and very obviously stepping on the accelerator. A pandemonium of triumphant, hilarious shouting—and then a very sudden silence.
The car roared on. The road curved slightly. The car did not. It went off the road, turned over, and its engine shrieked itself into silence. The Death Mist went on, draining from the roadway to follow the tall, prismatically-colored cloud. It moved swiftly and blindly. To the circling planes above it, it seemed like a blind thing imagining itself confined, and searching for the edges of its prison. It gave an uncanny impression of being directed by intelligence. But the Death Mist, itself, was not alive.
Neither were the occupants of the motor car.
When Tommy got back to the laboratory after his last call for news, he found Evelyn in the act of starting to fetch him.
“Smithers called,” she said uneasily. “He says something’s moving about—” The buzzer of the telephone was humming stridently. Tommy answered quickly.
“Just want you handy,” said Smithers’ calm voice. “I might have to duck. Some Ragged Men are chasin’ something. Get set, will ya?”
“Ready for anything,” Tommy assured him.
Then he made it true: rifles handy, a sub-machine gun, grenades, gas masks. He handed one to Evelyn. Smithers had one already. Then Tommy waited, grimly ready by the Tube-mouth.
Thewarm, scent-laden breeze blew upon him. Straining his ears, he could hear the sound of tree-fern fronds clashing in the wind. He heard the louder sounds made by Smithers, stirring ever so slightly in the Tube. And then he caught a vague, distant uproar. It would have been faint and confusedat best but the Tube was partly blocked by Smithers’ body, and there were the multiple bends further to complicate the echoes. It was no more than a formless tumult through which faint yells came occasionally. It drew nearer and nearer. Tommy heard Smithers stir suddenly, almost as if he had jumped. Then there were scrapings which could only mean one thing: Smithers was climbing out of the Tube into the jungle of the Fifth-Dimension world.
The noise rose abruptly to a roar as the muffling effect of Smithers’ body was removed. The yells were sharp and savage and half mad. There was a sudden crackling sound and a voice screamed:
“Gott!”
The hair rose at the back of Tommy’s neck. Then there came the deafening report of an automatic pistol roaring itself empty above the end of the Tube. Smithers’ voice, vastly calm:
“It’s a’right, Mr. Reames. Don’t worry.”
A second pistol took up the fusillade. Yells and howls and screams arose. Men fled. Something came crashing to the mouth of the Tube. Smithers’ voice again, with purring note in it: “Get down there. I’ll hold ’em off.” Then single deliberately spaced shots, while something came stumbling, fumbling, squirming down through the Tube, so filling it that Smithers’ shooting was muted.
Thencame the subtly different explosions of the Very pistols, discharging gas bombs. And Tommy drew back, his jaw set, and he stood with his weapons very ready indeed, and a scratched, bleeding, exhausted, panting, terror-stricken human being in the tattered costume of Earth crawled from the Tube and groveled on the floor before him.
Evelyn gave a little exclamation, partly of disgust and partly of horror. Because this man, who had had come from the world of the Fifth Dimension, was wholly familiar. He was tall, and he was lean, emaciated now; he wept sobbingly behind thick-lensed spectacles, and his lips were far too full and red. His name was Von Holtz; he had once been laboratory assistant to Professor Denham, and he had betrayed Evelyn and her father to the most ghastly of possible fates for a bribe offered him by Jacaro. Now he groveled. He was horrible to look at. Where he was not scratched and torn his flesh was reddened as if by fire. He was exhausted, and trembling with an awful terror, and he gasped out abject, placatory ejaculations and suddenly collapsed into a sobbing mass on the floor.
Smithers emerged from the Tube with a look of unpleasant satisfaction on his face.
“I chased off the Ragged Men with sneeze gas,” he observed with a vast calmness. “They ain’t comin’ back for a while. An’ I always wanted to break this guy’s neck. I think I’ll do it now.”
“Not till I’ve questioned him,” said Tommy savagely. “He and Jacaro have started hell to popping, with that Tube design they stole from me. He’s got to stay alive and tell us how to stop it. Von Holtz, talk! And talk quick, or back you go through the Tube for the Ragged Men to work on!”
Tommywatched Smithers drive away. The sun was sinking low toward the west, and the car stirred up a cloud of light-encarmined dust as it sped down the long, narrow lane to the main road. The laboratory had intentionally beenbuilt in an isolated spot, but at the moment Tommy would have given a good deal for a few men nearby. Smithers was taking Von Holtz to Albany to add his information to Denham’s pleas. Denham had ordered it, when they reached him by phone after hours of effort. Smithers had to go, to guard against Von Holtz’s escape, even sick and ill as he was. And Evelyn had refused to go with him.
“If I stay in the laboratory,” she insisted fiercely, “you can slip down and I can blow up the Tube after you, if the Ragged Men don’t stay away. But by yourself….”
Tommy did not consent, but he was helpless. There was danger from the Tube. Not only from ghastly animals which might come through, but from men. Smithers had fought the Ragged Men above it. He had chased them off, but they would come back. Perhaps they would come very soon, perhaps not until Denham and Smithers had returned. If they could be held off, the as yet unknown dangers from the other Tube—of which only the lizards and the Death Mist were certainties—might be counteracted. In any case, the Tube must not be destroyed until its defense was hopeless.
Tommy made up a grim bundle to go through the Tube with him: the sub-machine gun, extra drums of shells, more gas bombs and half a dozen grenades. He hung the various objects about himself. Evelyn watched him miserably.
“You—you’ll be careful, Tommy?”
“Nothing else but,” said Tommy. He grinned reassuringly. “There’s nothing to it, really. Just sitting still, listening. If I pop off some fireworks I’ll just have to sit down and watch them run.”
Hesettled his gas mask about his neck and started to enter the Tube. Evelyn touched his arm.
“I’m—frightened, Tommy.”
“Shucks!” said Tommy. “Also a couple of tut-tuts.” He stood up, put his arms about her, and kissed her until she smiled. “Feel better now?” he asked interestedly.
“Y-yes….”
“Fine!” said Tommy, and grinned again. “When you feel scared again, ring me on the phone and I’ll give you another treatment.”
But her smile faded as, beaming at her, he crawled into the first section of the Tube. And his own expression grew serious enough when she could see him no longer. The situation was not comfortable. Evelyn intended to marry him and he had to keep her cheerful, but he wished she were well away from here.
He tried to move cautiously through the Tube, but his bundles bumped and rattled. It seemed hours before he was climbing up the last section into the tree-fern jungle. He was caution itself as he peered over the edge. It was already night upon Earth, but here the monstrous, dull-red sun was barely sinking. It moved slowly along the horizon as it dipped, but presently a gray cast come over the colorings in the forest. Flying things came clattering homeward through the masses of fern-fronds overhead. He saw a projectile-like thing with a lizard’s head and jaws go darting through an incredibly small opening. It seemed to have no wings at all. But then, in one instant, a vast wing-surface flashed out, made a single gigantic flap—and the thing was a projectile again, darting through acheraux-de-friseof interlaced fronds without a sign of wings to support it.
Tommyinspected his surroundings with an infinite care. As the darkness deepened he meditatively taped a flashlight below the barrel of the sub-machine gun.Turned on, it would cast a pitiless light upon his target, and the sights would be silhouetted against the thing to be killed. He hung his grenades in a handy row just inside the mouth of the Tube and set his gas bombs conveniently in place, then settled down to watch.
It was assuredly necessary. Von Holtz’s story confirmed his own and Denham’s guesses and made their worst fears seem optimistic. Von Holtz had made a Tube for Jacaro, working from the model of Tommy’s own construction. It had been completed nearly a month before. But no jungle odors had seeped through that other Tube on its completion. It opened in a sub-cellar of a structure in the Golden City itself, the city of towers and soaring spires Denham had glimpsed long months before. By sheer fortune it opened upon a rarely used storeroom where improbable small animals—the equivalent of rats—played obscenely in the light of ever-glowing panels in the wall.
For two days of the Fifth-Dimension world Jacaro and his gunmen lay quiet. During two nights they made infinitely cautious reconnaissance. The second night it was necessary to kill two men who sighted the tiny exploring party. But the killing was done with silenced automatics, and there was no alarm. The third night they lay still, fearing an ambush. The fourth night Jacaro struck.
Heand his men fled back to their Tube with plunder and precious gems. Their loot was vast even beyond their hopes, though they had killed other men in gathering it. The Golden City was rich beyond belief. The very crust of the Fifth-Dimension world seemed to be composed of other substances than those of Earth. The common metals of Earth were rare or even unknown. The rarer metals of Earth were the commonplace ones in the Golden City. Even the roofs seemed plated with gold, but Jacaro’s gunmen saw not one particle of iron save in a ring they took from a dead man’s finger. There, an acid-etched plate of steel was set as if to be used for a signet.
Von Holtz had accompanied the raiders perforce on every journey. Jeweled bearings for motors; objects of commonest use, made of gold beat thin for lightness; huge ingots of silver for industry; once a queer-shaped spool of platinum wire that it took two men to carry—these things made up the loot they scurried back to their rathole with. Five raids they made, and twenty men they shot down before they came upon disaster. On the sixth raid an outcry rose and an ambush fell upon them.
Flashes of incredibly vivid actinic flame leaped from queer engines that opened upon them. Curious small truncheonlike weapons spat paralyzing electric shocks upon them. The twelve gangsters fought with the desperation of cornered rats, with notched and explosive bullets and with streams of lead from tommy-guns.
A chancebullet blew something up. One of the flame weapons flew to bits, spouting what seemed to be liquid thermit upon friend and foe alike. The way of the gangsters back to their Tube was barred. The route they knew was a chaos of scorched bodies and melting metal. The thermit flowed in all directions, seeming to grow in volume as it flamed. Jacaro and his gangsters fled. They broke through the shaken remnants of the ambush. The six of them who survived the fighting found a man somnolently driving a ground vehicle with two wheels. They burst upon him and, with their scaredfaces constituting threats in themselves, forced him to drive them out of the Golden City. They fled along aluminum roads into the tree-fern forests, while the sky behind them seemed to flame as the city woke to the tumult in its ways.
They killed the driver of their vehicle when he refused to take them farther, and it was that murder which saved their lives. It was seen by Ragged Men, the outlaws of the jungle, and it proved their enmity to the Golden City. The Ragged Men greeted them joyously and fed them, and enlisted their aid in a savage attack on a land-convoy on the way to the city. Their weapons carried the convoy, and they watched wounded prisoners killed with excruciating tortures….
They were with the Ragged Men now, Von Holtz believed. He had fled a week or more before, when Jacaro—already learning the language of his half-mad allies—began to plan a grandiose attack upon the Golden City. Von Holtz was born a coward, and he knew where Tommy Reames and Denham would shortly thrust a Tube through. It would come out just where the catapult had flung Evelyn and Denham, months before, the same spot where he had marooned them. He searched desperately for that Tube, and failed to find it. He was chased by carnivores, scratched by thorns, and at last pursued by a yelling horde of human devils who were fired into by Smithers from the mouth of the just-finished Tube.
Tommydebated the story grimly as he stood guard in the Tube in the humid jungle night. Many-colored stars winked fitfully through the thatch of giant ferns overhead. The wind soughed unsteadily above the jungle. There were queer creakings, and once or twice there were distant cries, and when the wind died down there was a deep-toned croaking audible somewhere which sounded rather like the croaking of unthinkably, monstrous frogs. But it could not be that, of course. And once there was the sound of dainty movement and something passed nearby. Tommy Reames saw the shadowy outline of a bulk so vast that it turned him cold to think about it, and it did not seem fair for any creature as huge as that to move so quietly.
Then there was a little scuffling noise beneath him. A hand touched his foot.
“It’s—it’s me, Tommy.” Evelyn crowded up beside him and whispered shakenly: “It—it was so lonesome down there, so quiet.”
Tommy frowned unhappily in the darkness. If he sent her back, she would know it was because he knew danger lurked here. Then she would worry. If he did not send her back….
“I’ll go back the minute you tell me,” she insisted forlornly. “Honestly. But—I was lonesome.”
Tommy slipped his arm about her.
“Woman,” he said sternly. “I’m going to let you stay ten minutes, so you can brag to our grandchildren that you were the first Earth-girl ever to be kissed in the Fifth Dimension. But I want you down in the laboratory so you won’t be in my way if I start running!”
His tone was the right one. She even laughed a little, softly, as he pressed her to him. Then she clung to his hand and tried eagerly to pierce the darkness all about them.
“You’ll be able to see something presently,” he assured her in a low tone. “Just keep quiet, now.”
Shegazed up at the stars, then around in the so-nearly complete obscurity. Tommy answeredher comments abstractedly, after a little. He was not quite sure that certain irregular sounds, yet far distant, were not actually quite regular ones. The Ragged Men Smithers had shot into had run away. But they would come back and they might come with Jacaro and his gunmen as allies. If those distant sounds were men….
She withdrew her hand from his. Her back was toward him then, as she tried to pierce the darkness with her eyes. Tommy listened uneasily to the distant sound. Suddenly he felt Evelyn bump against his shoulder. He turned sharply—and she was out of the Tube! She was walking steadily off into the darkness!
“Evelyn! Evelyn!”
She did not falter or turn. He switched on the flashlight beneath his gun barrel and leaped out of the Tube himself. The light swept about. Evelyn’s lithe figure kept moving away from him. Then his heart stood still. There were eyes beyond her in the darkness, huge, monstrous, steady eyes, half a yard apart in a head like something out of hell. And he could not fire because Evelyn was between the Thing and himself. Its eyes glowed unholily—fascinating, hypnotic, insane….
Evelynswayed … and the Thing moved! Tommy leaped like a madman shouting. As his feet struck the ground a mass of sold-seeming fungus gave way beneath him. He fell sprawling, but clutching the gun fast. The spreading beam of the flashlight showed him Evelyn turning, her face filled with a wakening horror—the horror of one released from the fascination of a snake. She screamed his name.
Then a huge lizard paw swept forward and seized her body. A second gripped her as she screamed again. And Tommy Reames was deathly, terribly cool. The whole thing had happened in seconds only. He was submerged in slimy, sticky ooze which was the crushed fungus that had tripped him. But he cleared the gun. The flashlight limned a ghastly, obscenely fat body and a long tapering tail. Tommy aimed at the base of that tail and pulled the trigger, praying frenziedly.
A stream of flame leaped from the gun-muzzle. Explosive bullets uttered their queer cracking noise. The thing screamed horribly. Its cry was hoarsely shrill. The flashlight showed it swinging ponderously about, with Evelyn held fast against its body in a fashion horribly reminiscent of a child holding a doll.
Tommy was scrambling upright. Jaws clamped, cold horror filling him, he aimed again, at the sharp-toothed head above Evelyn’s body. He could not try a heart shot with her in the way. Again the gun spat out a burst of explosive lead. And Tommy should have been sickened by the effect of detonating missiles. The thing’s lower jaw was shattered, half severed, made useless. It should have been killed a dozen times over.
But it screamed again until the jungle rang with the uproar, and then it fled, still screaming and still holding Evelyn clutched fast against its scaly breast.
Tommyflung himself in pursuit, despairing. Evelyn cried out once more as the lumbering thing fled with her, giving utterance to shrieking outcries at which the tree-fern jungle shook. It leaped once, upon monstrous hind legs, but came crashing heavily to the ground. Tommy’s explosive bulletshad shattered the bones which supported the balancing tail. Now that huge fleshy member dragged uselessly. The thing could not progress in its normal fashion of leaps covering many yards. It began to waddle clumsily, shrieking, with Evelyn clasped close. Its jaw was a shattered horror. It went marching insanely through the blackness of the jungle, and with it went the unholy din of its anguish, and behind it Tommy Reames came flinging himself frenziedly in pursuit.
Normally, the thing should have distanced him in seconds. Even crippled as it was, it moved swiftly. The scaly, duck-shaped head reared a good twenty feet above the fallen tree-fern fronds which carpeted the jungle. The monstrous splayed feet stretched a good yard and a half from front to rear upon the ground. Even its waddling footprints were yards apart, and it moved in terror.
Tommy tripped, fell, and got to his feet again, and the shrieking tumult was farther away. He raced madly toward the sound, the flashlight beam cutting swordlike through the blackness. He caught sight of the warty, scaly bulk of the monster at the extreme limit of the rays. It was moving faster than he could travel. He sobbed helpless curses at the thing and put forth superhuman exertions. He leaped fallen tree-fern trunks, he splashed through shallow ponds—later, when he knew something of the inhabitants of such pools, Tommy would turn cold at that memory—and raced on, gasping for breath while the shrieking of the thing that bore Evelyn grew more and more distant.
Infive minutes he was almost strangling and the thing was half a mile ahead of him. In ten, he was exhausted, and the shrieking noise it made as it waddled away was distinctly fainter. In fifteen minutes he only heard its hooting scream between the harsh laboring rasps of his own breath as he drew it into tortured lungs. But he ran on. He leaped and climbed and ran in a terrible obliviousness to all dangers the jungle might hold.
He leaped down from one toppled tree-trunk upon what seemed be another. But the thing he landed upon gave beneath his boots in the unmistakable fashion of yielding flesh. Something vast and angry stirred and hissed furiously. Something—a head, perhaps—whipped toward him among the fallen fern-fronds. But he was racing on, sobbing, cursing, praying all at once.
Then suddenly he broke out into a profuse sweat. His breathing became easier, and then he was running lightly. His second wind had come to him. He was no longer exhausted. He felt as if he could run forever, and ran on more swiftly still. Suddenly the flashlight beam showed him a deep furrow in the rotting vegetation underfoot, and something glistened. A musky reek filled his nostrils. The thing’s trail—the furrow left by its dragging tail! That musky reek was the thing’s blood. It was bleeding from the wounds the explosive bullets had made. It was spouting whatever filthy fluid ran in its veins even as it waddled onward, screaming.
Five minutes more, and he felt that he was gaining on it. Then, and he was sure of it. But it was half an hour before he actually overtook the injured monster marching like a mad machine. Its mutilated ducklike head held high, its colossal feet lifting one after the other in a heavy, slowing waddle, and its hoarse screams re-echoing in a senseless uproar of agony.
Tommy’shands were shaking, but his brain was cool with a vast coolness. He raced past the shrieking monster, and halted in its path. He saw Evelyn, a huddled bundle, clasped still to the creature’s scaly breast. And Tommy sent a burst of explosive bullets into a gigantic, foot thick ankle-joint.
The monster toppled, and flung out its prehensile lizard claws in an instinctive effort to catch itself. Evelyn was thrown clear. And Tommy, standing alone in the blackness of a carboniferous jungle upon an alien planet, sent bullet after bullet into the shaking, obscenely flabby body of the thing. The bullets penetrated, and exploded. Great masses of flesh upheaved and fell away. Great gouts of awful smelling fluid were flung out and blown to mist by the explosions. The thing did not so much die as disintegrate under the storm of detonating missiles.
Then Tommy went to Evelyn. He was wild with grief. He had no faintest hope that she could still be living. But as he picked her up she moaned softly, and when he cried her name she clung to him, pressing close in an agony of thankfulness almost as devastating as her fear had been.
It was minutes before either of them could think of anything other than her safety and the fact that they were together again. But then Tommy said, in a shaken effort to be himself again:
“I—I’d have done better if—if I’d had roller skates, maybe.” His grin was wholly unconvincing. “Why’d you get out of the Tube?”
“Its eyes!” Evelyn shuddered, her own eyes hidden against Tommy’s shoulder. “I saw them suddenly, looking at me. And I—hadn’t any will. I felt myself getting out of the Tube and walking toward it. It was like the way a snake fascinates—hypnotizes—a bird….”
A vagrant wind-eddy submerged them in the foul reek of the dead thing’s flesh. Tommy stirred.
“Ugh! Let’s get out of this. There’ll be things coming to feed on that carcass. They’ll smell it.”
Evelyn tried to stand, and succeeded. She clung to his hand.
“Do you think you can find the Tube again?”
Tommy was already thinking of that. He grimaced.
“Probably. Back-trail the damned thing. If the flashlight battery holds out. Its tail left plenty of sign for us to follow.”
Theystarted. And Evelyn had literally been forgotten in its agony by the monster which had carried her. Its body, though scaled and warty, was flabby and soft. Pressed against its breast she had been half strangled, but had no injuries beyond huge, purple bruises which had not yet reached the point of stiffness. She followed Tommy gamely, and the need for action kept her from yielding to the reaction from her terror.
For a long, long time they back-trailed. Less than fifteen minutes after leaving the carcass of the thing Tommy had killed, they heard beast-roarings and the sound of fighting. But that noise died away as they traveled. Presently they reached the spot where Tommy had leaped upon a huge living thing. It was gone now, but the impress of a body the thickness of a barrel remained upon the rotted vegetation of the jungle floor. Evelyn shivered when Tommy pointed it out.
“It was large,” said Tommy ruefully. “I didn’t even get a good look it the thing. Probably just as well, though. I might have been—er—delayed. Good Lord! What’s that?”
A light had sprung into beingsomewhere. It was bright. It was blinding in its brilliance. Coming through the tangled jungle growth, it seemed as if spears of flame shot through the air, irradiating stray patches of scabrous tree-trunk with unbearable light. For an instant the illumination held. Then there was a distant, cracking detonation. The unmistakable explosion of gun-cotton split the air, and its echoes rolled and reverberated through the jungle. The light went out. Then came a thin, high yelling sound which, faint as it was, had something of the quality of hysterical glee. That crazy ululation kept up for several minutes. Evelyn shivered.
“The Ragged Men,” said Tommy very quietly. “They sneaked up on the Tube. They flung blazing thermit, or something like it, with a weapon captured from the Golden City. That explosion was the grenades going off. I’m afraid the Tube’s blown up, Evelyn.”
She caught her breath, looking mutely up at him.
“Here’s a pistol,” he said briefly, “and shells. There’s no use our going to the Tube to-night. It would be dangerous. We’ll do our investigating at dawn.”
Hefound a crevice where tree-fern trunks grew close together and closed in three sides of a sort of roofless cave. He seated himself grimly at the opening to wait for daybreak. He was not easy in his mind. There had been two Tubes to the Fifth-Dimension world. One had been made by Jacaro for his gunmen. That was now held by the men of the Golden City, as was proved by carnivorous lizards and the Death Mist that had come down it. The other was now blown up or, worse, in the hands of the Ragged Men. In any case Tommy and Evelyn were isolated upon a strange planet in a strange universe. To fall into the hands of the Ragged Men was to die horribly, and the Golden City would not now welcome inhabitants of the world Jacaro and his men had come from. To the civilized men of this world, Jacaro’s raids would seem invasion. They would seem acts of war on the part of the people of Earth. And the people of Earth, all of them, would seem enemies. Jacaro would never be identified as an unauthorized invader. He would seem to be a scout, an advance guard, a spy, for hordes of other invaders yet to come.
As the long night wore away, Tommy’s grim hopelessness intensified. The Ragged Men would hunt them for sport and out of hatred for all sane human beings. The men of the Golden City would be merciless to compatriots of Jacaro’s gunmen. And Tommy had Evelyn to look out for.
Whendawn came, his face was drawn and lined. Evelyn woke with a little gasp, staring affrightedly about her. Then she tried gamely to smile.
“Morning, Tommy,” she said shakily. She added in a brave attempt at levity: “Where do we go from here?”
“We look at the Tube,” said Tommy heavily. “There’s a bare chance….”
He led the way as on the night before, with his gun held ready. They traveled for half an hour through the awakening jungle. Then for long, long minutes Tommy searched for a sign of living men before he ventured forth to look at the wreckage of the Tube. He found no live men, and only two dead ones. But a glimpse of their bestial, vice-ridden faces was enough to remove any regret for their deaths.
The Tube was shattered. Its mouth was belled out and brokenby the explosion of the grenades hung within it. A part of the metal was molten—from the thermit, past question. There was a veritable crater fifteen feet across where the Tube had come through, and there were only shattered shreds of metal where the first bend had been. Tommy regarded the wreckage grimly. A pair of oxidized copper wires, their insulation burnt off, stung his eyes as he traced them to where they vanished in torn-up earth. He took them in his bare hands. The tingling sting of a low-voltage current made his heart leap. Then he smiled grimly. He touched them to each other. Dot-dot-dot—dash-dash-dash—dot-dot-dot. S O S! If there was anybody in the laboratory, that would tell them.
His hands stung sharply. Someone was there, ringing the phone! Evelyn came toward him, her face resolutely cheerful.
“No hope, Tommy?” she asked. “I just saw the telephone, all battered up. I guess we’re pretty badly off.”
“Get it!” said Tommy feverishly. “For Heaven’s sake, get it! The phone wires weren’t broken. If we can make it work….”
Theinstrument was a wreck. It was crumpled and torn and apparently useless. The diaphragm of the receiver was punctured. The transmitter seemed to have been crushed. But Tommy worked desperately over them, and twisted the earth-wires into place.
“Hello, hello, hello!”
The voice that answered was Smithers’, strained and fearful:
“Mr. Reames! Thank Gawd! What’s happened? Is Miss Evelyn all right?”
“So far,” said Tommy. “Listen!” He told curtly just what had happened. “Now, what’s happened on Earth?”
“Hell!” panted Smithers bitterly. “Hell’s been poppin’! The Death Mist’s two miles across an’ still growin an’ movin’. Four townships under martial law an’ movin’ out the people. It got thirty of ’em this morning. An’ they think the professor’s crazy an’ nobody’ll listen to him!”
“Damn!” said Tommy. He considered, grimly. “Look here, Von Holtz ought to convince them.”
“He caved in, outa his head, before I got to Albany. He’s in hospital now, ravin’. He’s got some kinda fever the doctors don’t know nothin’ about. Sick as hell!”
Tommy compressed his lips. Matters were more desperate even than he had believed. He informed his helper measuredly:
“Evelyn and I can’t stay around here, Smithers. The Ragged Men may come back, and it’ll be weeks before you and the professor can get another Tube through. I’m going to make for the Golden City and work on them there to cut off the Death Mist.”
There was an inarticulate sound from Smithers.
“Tell the professor. If he can find Jacaro’s Tube, he’ll work out some way to communicate through it. We’ve got to stop that Death Mist somehow. And we don’t know what else they may try.”
Smithers tried to speak, and could not. He merely made grief-stricken noises. He worshiped Evelyn and she was isolated in a hostile world which was vastly more unreachable than could be measured by millions or trillions of miles. But at last he said unsteadily:
“We’ll be comin’, Mr. Reames. We’ll come, if we have t’ blow half the world apart!”
Tommy said grimly: “Then hunt up the Golden City and bring extra ammunition. Mostly explosive bullets. Good-by.”
Heuntwisted the wires from the shattered phone units and thrust them in his pocket. Evelyn was picking up stray small objects from the ground.
“I’ve found some cartridges, Tommy,” she said constrainedly, “and a pistol I think will work.”
“Then listen for visitors,” commanded Tommy, “while I look for more.”
For half in hour he scoured the area around the shattered Tube. He found where some clumsy-wheeled thing had been pushed to a spot near the Tube—undoubtedly the machine which had sprayed the flaming stuff upon it. He found two pockets full of shells. He found an extra magazine, for the sub-machine gun. It was nearly full and only a little bent. That was all.
“Now,” he said briskly, “we’ll start. I’ve got a hunch the jungle thins out over that way. We’ll find a clearing, try to locate the Golden City either by seeing it or by watching for aircraft flying to it, and then make for it. They’re making war on Earth there. They don’t understand. We’ve got to make them understand. O. K.?”
Evelyn nodded. She put out her hand suddenly, a brave slender figure amid the incredible growths about her.
“I’m glad, Tommy,” she said slowly, “that if—if anything happens, it will be the—the two of us. Funny, isn’t it?”
Tommy kissed the twisted little smile from her face.
“And now that that’s over,” he observed, ashamed of his own emotion, “let’s go!”
Theywent. Tommy watched the sun and kept approximately a straight line. They traveled three miles, and the jungle broke abruptly. Before them was a spongy surface neither solid earth or marsh. It shelved gently down to a vast and steaming morass upon which the dull-red sun shone hotly. It was vast, that marsh, and a steaming haze hung over it, and it seemed to reach to the world’s end. But vaguely, through the attenuating upper layers of the steamy haze, they saw the outlines of a city beyond: tall towers and soaring spires, buildings of a grace and perfection of outline unknown upon the Earth. And faint golden flashes came from the walls and pinnacles of that city. They were reflections of this planet’s monster sun, upon walls and roofs of plated gold.
“The Golden City,” said Tommy heavily. He looked at the horrible marsh between. His heart sank.
And then there was a sudden screaming ululation nearby. A half-naked man was running out of sight. Two others danced and capered and yelled in insane glee, pointing at Tommy and at Evelyn. The running man’s outcry was echoed from far away. Then it was taken up and repeated here and there in the jungle.
“They saw our tracks near the Tube,” snapped Tommy bitterly. “Oh, what a fool I am! Now they’ll ring us in.”
He seized Evelyn’s hand and began to run. There was a little rise in the ground a hundred yards away, with a clump of leafy ferns to shade it. They reached it as other half-naked, wholly mad human forms burst out of the jungle to yell and caper and make derisive and horrible gestures at the fugitives.
“Here we fight,” said Tommy grimly. “The ground’s open, anyhow. We fight here, and very probably we die here. But first….”
He knelt down and drew the finest of fine beads upon a bearded man who carried a glittering truncheonlike club which, by the wayit was carried, was more than merely a bludgeon. He pulled the trigger for a single shot.
The bullet struck the capering Ragged Man fairly in the chest. And it exploded.