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The Fifth-Dimension Tube

By Murray Leinster

CHAPTER I

The Tube

THE generator 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 powerleads 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 multiplepole 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 and

wriggled. Then there was a queer, inaudible snap and 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 ãKingä Jacaroâs forfeiture of two hundred

thousand dollarsâ 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 FifthDimension 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. Heâd done most of the mechanical work on

the Tubeâs 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 Thbe. 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 b• 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.

IT had 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

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before the mouth of the Tube, an automatic rifle in his hands. Tommy Reames stood grimly before

Evelyn. Heâd 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:

ãI donât think thereâs any doubt about the Tube having gotten through. Thatâs the Fifth-

Dimension planet, all right.ä

He smiled at Evelyn. She was deathly pale.

ãI÷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 the laboratory. The

array looked much more like arms for an 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.

ãThe Tube wasnât seen, anyhow,ä said Professor Denham briskly. ãWhoâs going through

first?ä

Tommy slung a cartridge belt about his waist and a gas mask about his neck.

ãI am,ä he said shortly. ãWeâll want to camouflage the mouth of the Tube. Iâll watch a bit

before I get out.ä

He crawled into the mouth of the twisted pipe.

THE Tube 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. 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 Denhamâs apparatus. And Von Holtz had removed the

apparatus for Denhamâs 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.

Tommyâs 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 original catapult÷he made a new small device to achieve the original end.

THE whole 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 Earthlings

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

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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 longdead 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.

TOMMY reached 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 impossible conviction 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 Tubeâs mouth. And then, because the purpose of the Tube was not adventure but science, he went

back down into the laboratory.

THE three 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, sicklysweet 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 insectâs head, and Smithers killed it in a flash of nerve-racked horror. None

of them was 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.

CHAPTER II

The Death Mist

TOMMY Reames saw 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

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not, but none of them was feathered.

Then a tiny buzzing noise. The telephone that now rested below the lip of the Tube was

being used from the laboratory.

ãSmithers will relieve you,ä said Denhamâs voice in the receiver. ãCome on down. Weâre not

the only people experimenting with the Fifth Dimension. Jacaroâs been working, and all hellâs

loose!ä

Tommy slid down the Tube in an instant. The four rightangled turns made him sick and dizzy

again, but he came out with his jaw set grimly. There was good reason for Tommyâs interest in

Jacaro. Besides 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.

ãWhat the devilâs happened?ä 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.

ãJacaroâs gotten through too!ä snapped Denham. ãHeâs gotten in a pack of trouble. And heâs

loosed the devil on Earth. Here÷look!ä He jabbed his finger at one headline. ãAnd here÷ and here!ä

He thrust at others. ãHereâs proof.ä

The first headline read: ãKING JACARO FORFEITS BOND.ä Smaller headings beneath it read:

ãRacketeer Missing for Income Tax Trial. $200,000 Bail Forfeited.ä The second headline was in

smaller type: ãMonster Lizard Killed! Giant Meat Eater Brought Down by Riflemen. Akin to Ancient

Dinosaurs, Say Scientists.ä

"JACAROâS missing,ä said Denham harshly. ãThis article says heâs 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!ä

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 beastthingâs neck.

ãIt had killed and was devouring a cow when they shot it,ä said Denham bitterly. ãThereâve

been reports of these creatures for days÷so the news story says. They werenât printed because

nobody believed them. But there are a couple of people missing. A searching party was hunting for

them. They found this!ä

Tommy Reames stared at the picture. His face went grimmer still. He thought of sounds he

had heard beyond the Tube, not long since.

ãThereâs no question where they came from. The Fifth Dimension. But if Jacaro brought them

back, heâs a fool.ä

ãJacaroâs missing,ä said Denham savagely. ãDonât 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 traveled through. Jacaro wouldnât send them, but somebody did. Theyâve got collars

around their necks! Who sent them? And why?ä

TOMMYâS eyes narrowed.

ãIf civilized man found the mouth of a Tube, it would seem like the mouth of an artificial tunnel

or a cave÷ä

ãAnd if annoying vermin, like Jacaroâs gunmenä÷Denhamâs voice was brittle÷ähad 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! Thatâs whatâs happened! Jacaroâs gone through and

attacked the Golden City. Theyâve found his Tube. And theyâve sent these things down. . .

ãIf we found rats coming from a rat-hole,ä said Tommy very

quietly, ãand ferrets went down and didnât come up, weâd gas them.ä

ãAnd so,ä Denham told him, ãso would the Golden City.ä

He pointed to a boxed double-paragraph news story under a leaded twenty-point headline:

ãPoisonous Fog Kills Wild Life.ä

The story was not alarming. It said merely that state game wardens had found numerous dead

game animals in a thinlysettled 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

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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.

ãThe gassingâs started,ä said Denham savagely. ãI know a gas that shows rainbow colors.

The Golden City uses it. So weâve got to find Jacaroâs Tube and seal it, or only God knows what

will come out of it next. Iâm going off, Tommy. You and Smithers guard our Tube. Blow it up, if

necessary. Itâs dangerous. Iâll get some authority in Albany, and weâll find Jacaroâs Tube and

blast it shut.ä

Tommy nodded, his eyes keen and thoughtful. Denham hurried out.

MINUTES later, only, they heard the roar of a car motor going down the long lane away from the

laboratory. Evelyn tried to smile at Tommy.

ãIt seems terrible, dangerous.ä

Tommy considered and shrugged.

ãThis news is old,ä he observed. ãThis paper was printed last night. I think Iâll make a

couple of long-distance calls. If the Golden Cityâs had trouble with Jacaro, itâs going to make

things bad for us.ä

He swept his eyes about and frowningly loaded a light rifle. He put it convenient to

Evelynâs 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 nos

trils 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 Denhamâs 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.

THE early-morning editions had termed it a ãpoisonous fog.ä The breakfast editions spoke of it as

a ãpoison fog.ä 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 ãDeath Mistä and there were three chartered

planes circling about it for the benefit of their newspapers. State troopers were being

reinforced. At ten oâclock 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 Mist covered 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. .

THE mist 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

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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.

ãSmithers called,ä she said uneasily. ãHe says somethingâs moving about÷ä The buzzer of

the telephone was humming stridently. Tommy answered quickly.

ãJust want you handy,ä said Smithersâ calm voice. ãI might have to duck. Some Ragged Men

are chasmâ something. Get set, will ya?ä

ãReady for anything,ä Tommy assured him.

Then he made it true: rifles handy, a sub-machine gun, gre-

nades, gas masks. He handed one to Evelyn. Smithers had one already. Then Tommy waited, grimly

ready by the Tubemouth.

THE warm, 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

confused at best, but the Tube was partly blocked by Smithersâ 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 Smithersâ body was removed.

The yells were sharp and savage and half mad. There was a sudden crackling sound and a voice

screamed:

ãGott!ä

The hair rose at the back of Tommyâs neck. Then there came the deafening report of an

automatic pistol roaring itself empty above the end of the Tube. Smithersâ voice, vastly calm:

ãItâs aâright, Mr. Reames. Donât worry.ä

A second pistol took up the fusillade. Yells and howls and screams arose. Men fled.

Something came crashing to the mouth of the Tube. Smithersâ voice again, with a purring note in

it: ãGet down there. Iâll hold Îem off.ä Then single, deliberately spaced shots, while something

came stumbling, fumbling, squirming down through the Tube, so filling it that Smithersâ shooting

was muted.

THEN came 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 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.

ãI chased off the Ragged Men with sneeze gas,ä he observed with a vast calmness. ãThey

ainât cominâ back for a while. Anâ I always wanted to break this guyâs neck. I think Iâll do it

now.ä

ãNot till Iâve questioned him,ä said Tommy savagely. ãHe and Jacaro have started hell to

popping, with that Tube design they stole from me. Heâs 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

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on!ä

CHAPTER III

The Tree-Fern Jungle

TOMMY watched 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 been built 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 Denhamâs pleas. Denham had ordered it, when they reached him by phone after hours

of effort. Smithers had to go, to guard against Von Holtzâs escape, even sick and ill as he was.

And Evelyn had refused to go with him.

ãIf I stay in the laboratory,ä she insisted fiercely, ãyou can slip down and I can blow up

the Tube after you, if the Ragged Men donât 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.

ãYou÷youâll be careful, Tommy?ä

ãNothing else but,ä said Tommy. He grinned reassuringly.

ãThereâs nothing to it, really. Just sitting still, listening. If I pop off some fireworks Iâll

just have to sit down and watch them run.ä

HE settled his gas mask about his neck and started to enter the Tube. Evelyn touched his arm.

ãIâm÷frightened, Tommy.ä

ãShucks!ä said Tommy. ãAlso a couple of tut-tuts.ä He stood up, put his arms about her,

and kissed her until she smiled. ãFeel better now?ä he asked interestedly.

ãY-yes. . .

ãFine!ä said Tommy, and grinned again. ãWhen you feel scared again, ring me on the phone

and Iâll give you another treatment.ä

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 came 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 lizardâs 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 a chevaux-de-frise of

interlaced fronds without a sign of wings to support it.

TOMMY inspected 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 Holtzâs story confirmed his own and Denhamâs guesses and

made their worst fears seem optimistic. Von Holtz had made a Tube for Jacaro, working from the

model of Tommyâs 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 subcellar 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

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