The Fifth-Dimension Catapult

A COMPLETE NOVELETTE

By Murray Leinster

“The globe leaped upward into the huge coil, which whirled madly.”

The story of Tommy Reames' extraordinary rescue of Professor
Denham and his daughter--marooned in the fifth dimension.


FOREWORD

This story has no normal starting-place, because there are too many
places where it might be said to begin. One might commence when
Professor Denham, Ph. D., M. A., etc., isolated a metal that
scientists have been talking about for many years without ever being
able to smelt. Or it might start with his first experimental use of
that metal with entirely impossible results. Or it might very
plausibly begin with an interview between a celebrated leader of
gangsters in the city of Chicago and a spectacled young laboratory
assistant, who had turned over to him a peculiar heavy object of solid
gold and very nervously explained, and finally managed to prove, where
it came from. With also impossible results, because it turned "King"
Jacaro, lord of vice-resorts and rum-runners, into a passionate
enthusiast in non-Euclidean geometry. The whole story might be said to
begin with the moment of that interview.

But that leaves out Smithers, and especially it leaves out Tommy
Reames. So, on the whole, it is best to take up the narrative at the
moment of Tommy's first entrance into the course of events.


CHAPTER I

He came to a stop in a cloud of dust that swirled up to and all about
the big roadster, and surveyed the gate of the private road. The gate
was rather impressive. At its top was a sign. "Keep Out!" Halfway down
was another sign. "Private Property. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted."
On one gate-post was another notice, "Live Wires Within." and on the
other a defiant placard. "Savage Dogs At Large Within This Fence."

The fence itself was all of seven feet high and made of the heaviest
of woven-wire construction. It was topped with barbed wire, and went
all the way down both sides of a narrow right of way until it vanished
in the distance.

Tommy got out of the car and opened the gate. This fitted the
description of his destination, as given him by a brawny, red-headed
filling-station attendant in the village some two miles back. He drove
the roadster through the gate, got out and closed it piously, got back
in the car and shot it ahead.

He went humming down the narrow private road at forty-five miles an
hour. That was Tommy Reames' way. He looked totally unlike the
conventional description of a scientist of any sort--as much unlike a
scientist as his sport roadster looked unlike a scientist's customary
means of transit--and ordinarily he acted quite unlike one. As a
matter of fact, most of the people Tommy associated with had no
faintest inkling of his taste for science as an avocation. There was
Peter Dalzell, for instance, who would have held up his hands in holy
horror at the idea of Tommy Reames being the author of that article.
"On the Mass and Inertia of the Tesseract," which in the
_Philosophical Journal_ had caused a controversy.

And there was one Mildred Holmes--of no importance in the matter of
the Fifth-Dimension Catapult--who would have lifted beautifully arched
eyebrows in bored unbelief if anybody had suggested that Tommy Reames
was that Thomas Reames whose "Additions to Herglotz's Mechanics of
Continua" produced such diversities of opinion in scientific circles.
She intended to make Tommy propose to her some day, and thought she
knew all about him. And everybody, everywhere, would have been
incredulous of his present errand.

* * * * *

Gliding down the narrow, fenced-in road. Tommy was a trifle dubious
about this errand himself. A yellow telegraph-form in his pocket read
rather like a hoax, but was just plausible enough to have brought him
away from a rather important tennis match. The telegram read:

PROFESSOR DENHAM IN EXTREME DANGER THROUGH EXPERIMENT BASED ON
YOUR ARTICLE ON DOMINANT COORDINATES YOU ALONE CAN HELP HIM IN
THE NAME OF HUMANITY COME AT ONCE.

A. VON HOLTZ.

The fence went on past the car. A mile, a mile and a half of narrow
lane, fenced in and made as nearly intruder-proof as possible.

"Wonder what I'd do," said Tommy Reames, "if another car came along
from the other end?"

He deliberately tried not to think about the telegram any more. He
didn't believe it. He couldn't believe it. But he couldn't ignore it,
either. Nobody could: few scientists, and no human being with a normal
amount of curiosity. Because the article on dominant coordinates had
appeared in the _Journal of Physics_ and had dealt with a state of
things in which the normal coordinates of everyday existence were
assumed to have changed their functions: when the coordinates of time,
the vertical, the horizontal and the lateral changed places and a man
went east to go up and west to go "down" and ran his street-numbers in
a fourth dimension. It was mathematical foolery, from one standpoint,
but it led to some fascinating if abstruse conclusions.

* * * * *

But his brain would not remain away from the subject of the telegram,
even though a chicken appeared in the fenced-in lane ahead of him and
went flapping wildly on before the car. It rose in mid-air, the car
overtook it as it rose above the level of the hood, and there was a
rolling, squawking bundle of shedding feathers tumbling over and over
along the hood until it reached the slanting windshield. There it spun
wildly upward, left a cloud of feather's fluttering about Tommy's
head, and fell still squawking into the road behind. By the back-view
mirror, Tommy could see it picking itself up and staggering dizzily
back to the side of the road.

"My point was," said Tommy vexedly to himself, speaking of the article
the telegram referred to, "that a man can only recognize three
dimensions of space and one of time. So that if he got shot out of
this cosmos altogether he wouldn't know the difference. He'd still
seem to be in a three-dimensioned universe. And what is there in that
stuff to get Denham in trouble?"

A house appeared ahead. A low, rambling sort of bungalow with a huge
brick barn behind it. The house of Professor Denham, very certainly,
and that barn was the laboratory in which he made his experiments.

Instinctively, Tommy stepped on the gas. The car leaped ahead. And
then he was braking frantically. A pipe-framed gate with thinner,
unpainted wire mesh filling its surface loomed before him, much too
late for him to stop. There was a minor shock, a crashing and
squeaking, and then a crash and shattering of glass. Tommy bent low as
the top bar of the gate hit his windshield. The double glass cracked
and crumpled and bent, but did not fly to bits. And the car came to a
halt with its wheels intricately entangled in torn-away fence wire.
The gate had been torn from its hinges and was draped rakishly over
the roadster. A tire went flat with a loud hissing noise, and Tommy
Reames swore softly under his breath and got out to inspect the
damage.

* * * * *

He was deciding that nothing irreparable was wrong when a man came
bursting out of the brick building behind the house. A tall, lean,
youngish man who waved his arms emphatically and approached shouting:

"You had no right to come in here! You must go away at once! You have
damaged property! I will tell the Professor! You must pay for the
damage! You must--"

"Damn!" said Tommy Reames. He had just seen that his radiator was
punctured. A spout of ruddy, rusty water was pouring out on the grass.

The youngish man came up furiously. A pale young man, Tommy noticed. A
young man with bristling, close-cropped hair and horn-rimmed
spectacles before weak-looking eyes. His mouth was very full and very
red, in marked contrast to the pallor of his cheeks.

"Did you not see the sign upon the gate?" he demanded angrily, in
curiously stilted English. "Did you not see that trespassers are
forbidden? You must go away at once! You will be prosecuted! You will
be imprisoned! You--"

Tommy said irritably:

"Are you Von Holtz? My name is Reames. You telegraphed me."

The waving, lanky arms stopped in the middle of an excited gesture.
The weak-looking eyes behind the lenses widened. A pink tongue licked
the too-full, too-red lips.

"Reames? The Herr Reames?" Von Holtz stammered. Then he said
suspiciously, "But you are not--you cannot be the Herr Reames of the
article on dominant coordinates!"

"I don't know why," said Tommy annoyedly. "I'm also the Herr Reames of
several other articles, such as on the mechanics of continua and the
mass and inertia of the tesseract. And I believe the current
_Philosophical Journal_--"

* * * * *

He surveyed the spouting red stream from the radiator and shrugged
ruefully.

"I wish you'd telephone the village to have somebody come out and fix
my car," he said shortly, "and then tell me if this telegram is a joke
or not."

He pulled out a yellow form and offered it. He had taken an
instinctive dislike to the lean figure before him, but suppressed the
feeling.

Von Holtz took the telegram and read it, and smoothed it out, and said
agitatedly:

"But I thought the Herr Reames would be--would be a venerable
gentleman! I thought--"

"You sent that wire," said Tommy. "It puzzled me just enough to make
me rush out here. And I feel like a fool for having done it. What's
the matter? Is it a joke?"

Von Holtz shook his head violently, even as he bit his lips.

"No! No!" he protested. "The Herr Professor Denham is in the most
terrible, most deadly danger! I--I have been very nearly mad, Herr
Reames. The Ragged Men may seize him!... I telegraphed to you. I have
not slept for four nights. I have worked! I have racked my brains! I
have gone nearly insane, trying to rescue the Herr Professor! And I--"

* * * * *

Tommy stared.

"Four days?" he said. "The thing, whatever it is, has been going on
for four days?"

"Five," said Von Holtz nervously. "It was only to-day that I thought
of you, Herr Reames. The Herr Professor Denham had praised your
articles highly. He said that you were the only man who would be able
to understand his work. Five days ago--"

Tommy grunted.

"If he's been in danger for five days," he said skeptically, "he's not
in such a bad fix or it'd have been over. Will you phone for a
repairman? Then we'll see what it's all about."

The lean arms began to wave again as Von Holtz said desperately:

"But Herr Reames, it is urgent! The Herr Professor is in deadly
danger!"

"What's the matter with him?"

"He is marooned," said Von Holtz. Again he licked his lips. "He is
marooned, Herr Reames, and you alone--"

"Marooned?" said Tommy more skeptically still. "In the middle of New
York State? And I alone can help him? You sound more and more as if
you were playing a rather elaborate and not very funny practical joke.
I've driven sixty miles to get here. What is the joke, anyhow?"

Von Holtz said despairingly:

"But it is true, Herr Reames! He is marooned. He has changed his
coordinates. It was an experiment. He is marooned in the fifth
dimension!"

* * * * *

There was dead silence. Tommy Reames stared blankly. Then his gorge
rose. He had taken an instinctive dislike to this lean young man,
anyhow. So he stared at him, and grew very angry, and would
undoubtedly have gotten into his car and turned it about and driven it
away again if it had been in any shape to run. But it wasn't. One tire
was flat, and the last ruddy drops from the radiator were dripping
slowly on the grass. So he pulled out a cigarette case and lighted a
cigarette and said sardonically:

"The fifth dimension? That seems rather extreme. Most of us get along
very well with three dimensions. Four seems luxurious. Why pick on the
fifth?"

Von Holtz grew pale with anger in his turn. He waved his arms,
stopped, and said with stiff formality:

"If the Herr Reames will follow me into the laboratory I will show him
Professor Denham and convince him of the Herr Professor's extreme
danger."

Tommy had a sudden startling conviction that Von Holtz was in earnest.
He might be mad, but he was in earnest. And there was undoubtedly a
Professor Denham, and this was undoubtedly his home and laboratory.

"I'll look, anyway," said Tommy less skeptically. "But it is rather
incredible, you know!"

"It is impossible," said Von Holtz stiffly. "You are right, Herr
Reames. It is quite impossible. But it is a fact."

He turned and stalked toward the big brick barn behind the house.
Tommy went with him, wholly unbelieving and yet beginning to wonder
if, just possibly, there was actually an emergency of a more normal
and ghastly nature in being. Von Holtz might be a madman. He might....

Gruesome, grisly thoughts ran through Tommy's head. A madman dabbling
in science might do incredible things, horrible things, and then
demand assistance to undo an unimaginable murder....

* * * * *

Tommy was tense and alert as Von Holtz opened the door of the barnlike
laboratory. He waved the lean young man on ahead.

"After you," he said curtly.

He felt almost a shiver as he entered. But the interior of the
laboratory displayed no gruesome scene. It was a huge, high-ceilinged
room with a concrete floor. A monster dynamo was over in one corner,
coupled to a matter-of-fact four-cylinder crude-oil engine, to which
was also coupled by a clutch an inexplicable windlass-drum with
several hundred feet of chain wrapped around it. There were ammeters
and voltmeters on a control panel, and one of the most delicate of
dynamometers on its own stand, and there were work benches and a
motor-driven lathe and a very complete equipment for the working of
metals. And there was an electric furnace, with splashes of solidified
metal on the floor beside it, and there was a miniature casting-floor,
and at the farther end of the monster room there was a gigantic
solenoid which evidently had once swung upon gymbals and as evidently
now was broken, because it lay toppled askew upon its supports.

The only totally unidentifiable piece of apparatus in the place was
one queer contrivance at one side. It looked partly like a
machine-gun, because of a long brass barrel projecting from it. But
the brass tube came out of a bulging casing of cast aluminum and there
was no opening through which shells could be fed.

* * * * *

Von Holz moved to that contrivance, removed a cap from the end of the
brass tube, looked carefully into the opening, and waved stiffly for
Tommy to look in.

Again Tommy was suspicious; watched until Von Holtz was some distance
away. But the instant he put his eye to the end of the brass tube he
forgot all caution, all suspicion, all his doubts. He forgot
everything in his amazement.

There was a lens in the end of the brass tube. It was, in fact,
nothing more or less than a telescope, apparently looking at something
in a closed box. But Tommy was not able to believe that he looked at
an illuminated miniature for even the fraction of a second. He looked
into the telescope, and he was seeing out-of-doors. Through the
aluminum casting that enclosed the end of the tube. Through the thick
brick walls of the laboratory. He was gazing upon a landscape such as
should not--such as could not--exist upon the earth.

There were monstrous, feathery tree-ferns waving languid fronds in a
breeze that came from beyond them. The telescope seemed to be pointing
at a gentle slope, and those tree-ferns cut off a farther view, but
there was an impenetrable tangle of breast-high foliage between the
instrument and that slope, and halfway up the incline there rested a
huge steel globe.

Tommy's eyes fixed themselves upon the globe. It was man-made, of
course. He could see where it had been bolted together. There were
glassed-in windows in its sides, and there was a door.

* * * * *

As Tommy looked, that door opened partway, stopped as if someone
within had hesitated, and then opened fully. A man came out. And Tommy
said dazedly:

"My God!"

Because the man was a perfectly commonplace sort of individual,
dressed in a perfectly commonplace fashion, and he carried a perfectly
commonplace briar pipe in his hand. Moreover, Tommy recognized him. He
had seen pictures of him often enough, and he was Professor Edward
Denham, entitled to put practically all the letters of the alphabet
after his name, the author of "Polymerization of the Pseudo-Metallic
Nitrides" and the proper owner of this building and its contents. But
Tommy saw him against a background of tree-ferns such as should have
been extinct upon this earth since the Carboniferous Period, some
millions of years ago.

He was looking hungrily at his briar pipe. Presently he began to hunt
carefully about on the ground. He picked together half a handful of
brownish things which had to be dried leaves. He stuffed them into the
pipe, struck a match, and lighted it. He puffed away gloomily,
surrounded by wholly monstrous vegetation. A butterfly fluttered over
the top of the steel globe. Its wings were fully a yard across. It
flittered lightly to a plant and seemed to wait, and abruptly a vivid
carmine blossom opened wide; wide enough to admit it.

Denham watched curiously enough, smoking the rank and plainly
unsatisfying dried leaves. He turned his head and spoke over his
shoulder. The door opened again. Again Tommy Reames was dazed. Because
a girl came out of the huge steel sphere--and she was a girl of the
most modern and most normal sort. A trim sport frock, slim silken
legs, bobbed hair....

Tommy did not see her face until she turned, smiling, to make some
comment to Denham. Then he saw that she was breath-takingly pretty. He
swore softly under his breath.

* * * * *

The butterfly backed clumsily out of the gigantic flower. It flew
lightly away, its many-colored wings brilliant in the sunshine. And
the huge crimson blossom closed slowly.

Denham watched the butterfly go away. His eyes returned to the girl
who was smiling at the flying thing, now out of the field of vision of
the telescope. And there was utter discouragement visible in every
line of Denham's figure. Tommy saw the girl suddenly reach out her
hand and put it on Denham's shoulder. She patted it, speaking in an
evident attempt to encourage him. She smiled, and talked coaxingly,
and presently Denham made a queer, arrested gesture and went heavily
back into the steel globe. She followed him, though she looked wearily
all about before the door closed behind her, and when Denham could not
see her face, her expression was tired and anxious indeed.

Tommy had forgotten Von Holtz, had forgotten the laboratory, had
forgotten absolutely everything. If his original suspicions of Von
Holtz had been justified, he could have been killed half a dozen times
over. He was oblivious to everything but the sight before his eyes.

Now he felt a touch on his shoulder and drew his head away with a
jerk. Von Holtz was looking down at him, very pale, with his
weak-looking eyes anxious.

"They are still all right?" he demanded.

"Yes," said Tommy dazedly. "Surely. Who is that girl?"

"That is the Herr Professor's daughter Evelyn," said Von Holtz
uneasily. "I suggest, Herr Reames, that you swing the dimensoscope
about."

"The--what?" asked Tommy, still dazed by what he had seen.

"The dimensoscope. This." Von Holtz shifted the brass tube. The whole
thing was mounted so that it could be swung in any direction. The
mounting was exactly like that of a normal telescope. Tommy instantly
put his eye to the eyepiece again.

* * * * *

He saw more tree-ferns, practically the duplicates of the background
beyond the globe. Nothing moved save small, fugitive creatures among
their fronds. He swung the telescope still farther. The landscape
swept by before his eyes. The tree-fern forest drew back. He saw the
beginning of a vast and noisome morass, over which lay a thick haze as
of a stream raised by the sun. He saw something move in that morass;
something huge and horrible with a long and snake-like neck and the
tiniest of heads at the end of it. But he could not see the thing
clearly.

He swung the telescope yet again. And he looked over miles and miles
of level, haze-blanketed marsh. Here and there were clumps of taller
vegetation. Here and there were steaming, desolate pools. And three or
four times he saw monstrous objects moving about clumsily in the
marsh-land.

But then a glitter at the skyline caught his eye. He tilted the
telescope to see more clearly, and suddenly he caught his breath.
There, far away at the very horizon, was a city. It was tall and
gleaming and very strange. No earthly city ever flung its towers so
splendidly high and soaring. No city ever built by man gave off the
fiery gleam of gold from all its walls and pinnacles. It looked like
an artist's dream, hammered out in precious metal, with its outlines
softened by the haze of distance.

And something was moving in the air near the city. Staring, tense,
again incredulous, Tommy Reames strained his eyes and saw that it was
a machine. An air-craft; a flying-machine of a type wholly unlike
anything ever built upon the planet Earth. It swept steadily and
swiftly toward the city, dwindling as it went. It swooped downward
toward one of the mighty spires of the city of golden gleams, and
vanished.

* * * * *

It was with a sense of shock, of almost physical shock, that Tommy
came back to realization of his surroundings to feel Von Holtz's hand
upon his shoulder and to hear the lean young man saying harshly:

"Well, Herr Reames? Are you convinced that I did not lie to you? Are
you convinced that the Herr Professor Denham is in need of help?"

Tommy blinked dazedly as he looked around the laboratory again. Brick
walls, an oil-spattered crude-oil engine in one corner, a concrete
floor and an electric furnace and a casting-box....

"Why--yes...." said Tommy dazedly. "Yes. Of course!" Clarity came to
his brain with a jerk. He did not understand at all, but he believed
what he had seen. Denham and his daughter were somewhere in some other
dimension, yet within range of the extraordinary device he had looked
through. And they were in trouble. So much was evident from their
poses and their manner. "Of course," he repeated. "They're--there,
wherever it is, and they can't get back. They don't seem to be in any
imminent danger...."

Von Holtz licked his lips.

"The Ragged Men have not found them yet," he said in a hushed, harsh
voice. "Before they went in the globe we saw the Ragged Men. We
watched them. If they do find the Herr Professor and his daughter,
they will kill them very slowly, so that they will take days of
screaming agony to die. It is that that I am afraid of, Herr Reames.
The Ragged Men roam the tree-fern forests. If they find the Herr
Professor they will trace each nerve to its root of agony until he
dies. And we will be able only to watch...."


CHAPTER II

"The thing is," said Tommy feverishly, "that we've got to find a way
to get them back. Whether it duplicates Denham's results or not. How
far away are they?"

"A few hundred yards, perhaps," said Von Holtz wearily, "or ten
million miles. It is the same thing. They are in a place where the
fifth dimension is the dominant coordinate."

Tommy was pacing up and down the laboratory. He stopped and looked
through the eyepiece of the extraordinary vision apparatus. He tore
himself away from it again.

"How does this thing work?" he demanded.

Von Holtz began to unscrew two wing-nuts which kept the top of the
aluminum casting in place.

"It is the first piece of apparatus which Professor Denham made," he
said precisely. "I know the theory, but I cannot duplicate it. Every
dimension is at right angles to all other dimensions, of course. The
Herr Professor has a note, here--"

He stopped his unscrewing to run over a heap of papers on the
work-bench--papers over which he seemed to have been poring
desperately at the time of Tommy's arrival. He handed a sheet to
Tommy, who read:

"If a creature who was aware of only two dimensions made two
right-angled objects and so placed them that all the angles formed by
the combination were right angles, he would contrive a figure
represented by the corner of a box; he would discover a third
dimension. Similarly, if a three-dimensioned man took three right
angles and placed them so that all the angles formed were right
angles, he would discover a fourth dimension. This, however, would
probably be the time dimension, and to travel in time would instantly
be fatal. But with four right angles he could discover a fifth
dimension, and with five right angles he could discover a sixth...."

* * * * *

Tommy Reames put down the paper impatiently.

"Of course" he said brusquely. "I know all that stuff. But up to the
present time nobody has been able to put together even three right
angles, in practise."

Von Holtz had returned to the unscrewing of the wing-nuts. He lifted
off the cover of the dimensoscope.

"It is the thing the Herr Professor did not confide to me," he said
bitterly. "The secret. The one secret! Look in here."

Tommy looked. The objective-glass at the end of the telescope faced a
mirror, which was inclined to its face at an angle of forty-five
degrees. A beam of light from the objective would be reflected to a
second mirror, twisted in a fashion curiously askew. Then the light
would go to a third mirror....

Tommy looked at that third mirror, and instantly his eyes ached. He
closed them and opened them again. Again they stung horribly. It was
exactly the sort of eye-strain which comes of looking through a lens
which does not focus exactly, or through a strange pair of eyeglasses.
He could see the third mirror, but his eyes hurt the instant they
looked upon it, as if that third mirror were distorted in an
impossible fashion. He was forced to draw them away. He could see,
though, that somehow that third mirror would reflect his imaginary
beam of light into a fourth mirror of which he could see only the
edge. He moved his head--and still saw only the edge of a mirror. He
was sure of what he saw, because he could look into the wavy, bluish
translucency all glass shows upon its edge. He could even see the thin
layer of silver backing. But he could not put himself into a position
in which more than the edge of that mirror was visible.

"Good Lord!" said Tommy Reames feverishly. "That mirror--"

"A mirror at forty-five degrees," said Von Holtz precisely, "reflects
light at a right angle. There are four mirrors, and each bends a ray
of light through a right angle which is also a right angle to all the
others. The result is that the dimensoscope looks into what is a fifth
dimension, into which no man ever looked before. But I cannot move
other mirrors into the positions they have in this instrument. I do
not know how."

* * * * *

Tommy shook his head impatiently, staring at the so-simple, yet
incredible device whose theory had been mathematically proven
numberless times, but never put into practice before.

"Having made this device," said Von Holtz, "the Herr Professor
constructed what he termed a catapult. It was a coil of wire, like the
large machine there. It jerked a steel ball first vertically, then
horizontally, then laterally, then in a fourth-dimensional direction,
and finally projected it violently off in a fifth-dimensional path. He
made small hollow steel balls and sent a butterfly, a small sparrow,
and finally a cat into that other world. The steel balls opened of
themselves and freed those creatures. They seemed to suffer no
distress. Therefore he concluded that it would be safe for him to go,
himself. His daughter refused to permit him to go alone, and he was so
sure of his safety that he allowed her to enter the globe with him.
She did. I worked the catapult which flung the globe in the fifth
dimension, and his device for returning failed to operate. Hence he is
marooned."

"But the big catapult--"

"Can you not see that the big catapult is broken?" demanded Von Holtz
bitterly. "A special metal is required for the missing parts. That, I
know how to make. Yes. I can supply that. But I cannot shape it! I
cannot design the gears which will move it as it should be moved! I
cannot make another dimensoscope. I cannot, Herr Reames, calculate any
method of causing four right angles to be all at right angles to each
other. It is my impossibility! It is for that that I have appealed to
you. You see it has been done. I see that it is done. I can make the
metal which alone can be moved in the necessary direction. But I
cannot calculate any method of moving it in that direction! If you can
do so, Herr Reames, we can perhaps save the Herr Professor Denham. If
you cannot--Gott! The death he will die is horrible to think of!"

"And his daughter," said Tommy grimly. "His daughter, also."

* * * * *

He paced up and down the laboratory again. Von Holtz moved to the
work-bench from which he had taken Denham's note. There was a pile of
such memoranda, thumbed over and over. And there were papers in the
angular, precise handwriting which was Von Holtz's own, and
calculations and speculations and the remains of frantic efforts to
work out, somehow, the secret which as one manifestation had placed
one mirror so that it hurt the eyes to look at it, and one other
mirror so that from every angle of a normal existence, one could see
only the edge.

"I have worked, Herr Reames," said Von Holtz drearily. "Gott! How I
have worked! But the Herr Professor kept some things secret, and that
so-essential thing is one of them."

Presently he said tiredly:

"The dimension-traveling globe was built in this laboratory. It rested
here." He pointed. "The Herr Professor was laughing and excited at the
moment of departure. His daughter smiled at me through the window of
the globe. There was an under-carriage with wheels upon it. You cannot
see those wheels through the dimensoscope. They got into the globe and
closed the door. The Herr Professor nodded to me through the glass
window. The dynamo was running at its fullest speed. The laboratory
smelled of hot oil, and of ozone from the sparks. I lifted my hand,
and the Herr Professor nodded again, and I threw the switch. This
switch, Herr Reames! It sparked as I closed it, and the flash partly
blinded me. But I saw the globe rush toward the giant catapult yonder.
It leaped upward into the huge coil, which whirled madly. Dazed, I saw
the globe hanging suspended in mid-air, two feet from the floor. It
shook! Once! Twice! With violence! Suddenly its outline became hazy
and distorted. My eyes ached with looking at it. And then it was
gone!"

* * * * *

Von Holtz's arms waved melodramatically.

"I rushed to the dimensoscope and gazed through it into the fifth
dimension. I saw the globe floating onward through the air, toward
that bank of glossy ferns. I saw it settle and turn over, and then
slowly right itself as it came to rest. The Herr Professor got out of
it. I saw him through the instrument which could look into the
dimension into which he had gone. He waved his hand to me. His
daughter joined him, surveying the strange cosmos in which they were.
The Herr Professor plucked some of the glossy ferns, took photographs,
then got back into the globe.

"I awaited its return to our own world. I saw it rock slightly as he
worked upon the apparatus within. I knew that when it vanished from
the dimensoscope it would have returned to our own universe. But it
remained as before. It did not move. After three hours of anguished
waiting, the Herr Professor came out and made signals to me of
despair. By gestures, because no sound could come through the
dimensoscope itself, he begged me to assist him. And I was helpless!
Made helpless by the Herr Professor's own secrecy! For four days and
nights I have toiled, hoping desperately to discover what the Herr
Professor had hidden from me. At last I thought of you. I telegraphed
to you. If you can assist me...."

"I'm going to try it, of course," said Tommy shortly.

He paced back and forth. He stopped and looked through the brass-tubed
telescope. Giant tree-ferns, unbelievable but real. The steel globe
resting partly overturned upon a bank of glossy ferns. Breast-high,
incredible foliage between the point of vision and that extraordinary
vehicle.

* * * * *

While Tommy had been talking and listening, while he had been away
from the eyepiece, one or other of the occupants of the globe had
emerged from it. The door was open. But now the girl came bounding
suddenly through the ferns. She called, though it seemed to Tommy that
there was a curious air of caution even in her calling. She was
excited, hopefully excited.

Denham came out of the globe with a clumsy club in his hand. But
Evelyn caught his arm and pointed up into the sky. Denham stared, and
then began to make wild and desperate gestures as if trying to attract
attention to himself.

Tommy watched for minutes, and then swung the dimensoscope around. It
was extraordinary, to be sitting in the perfectly normal brick-walled
laboratory, looking into a slender brass tube, and seeing another
universe entirely, another wild and unbelievable landscape.

The tree-fern forest drew back and the vast and steaming morass was
again in view. There were distant bright golden gleams from the city.
But Tommy was searching the sky, looking in the sky of a world in the
fifth dimension for a thing which would make a man gesticulate
hopefully.

He found it. It was an aircraft, startlingly close through the
telescope. A single figure was seated at its controls, motionless as
if bored, with exactly the air of a weary truck driver piloting a
vehicle along a roadway he does not really see. And Tommy, being near
enough to see the pilot's pose, could see the aircraft clearly. It was
totally unlike a terrestrial airplane. A single huge and thick wing
supported it. But the wing was angular and clumsy-seeming, and its
form was devoid of the grace of an earthly aircraft wing, and there
was no tail whatever to give it the appearance of a living thing.
There was merely a long, rectangular wing with a framework beneath it,
and a shimmering thing which was certainly not a screw propeller, but
which seemed to draw it.

* * * * *

It moved on steadily and swiftly, dwindling in the distance, with its
motionless pilot seated before a mass of corded bundles. It looked as
if this were a freight plane of some sort, and therefore made in a
strictly utilitarian fashion.

It vanished in the haze above the monster swamp, going in a straight
line for the golden city at the world's edge.

Tommy stared at it, long after it had ceased to be visible. Then he
saw a queer movement on the earth near the edge of the morass. Figures
were moving. Human figures. He saw four of them, shaking clenched
fists and capering insanely, seeming to bellow insults after the
oblivious and now invisible flying thing. He could see that they were
nearly naked, and that one of them carried a spear. But the
indubitable glint of metal was reflected from one of them for an
instant, when some metal accoutrement about him glittered in the
sunlight.

They moved from sight behind thick, feathery foliage, and Tommy swung
back the brass tube to see the globe again. Denham and his daughter
were staring in the direction in which Tommy had seen those human
figures. Denham clutched his clumsy club grimly. His face was drawn
and his figure tensed. And suddenly Evelyn spoke quietly, and the two
of then dived into the fern forest and disappeared. Minutes later they
returned, dragging masses of tree-fern fronds with which they masked
the globe from view. They worked hastily, desperately, concealing the
steel vehicle from sight. And then Denham stared tensely all about,
shading his eyes with his hand. He and the girl withdrew cautiously
into the forest.

* * * * *

It was minutes later that Tommy was roused by Von Holtz's hand on his
shoulder.

"What has happened, Herr Reames?" he asked uneasily. "The--Ragged
Men?"

"I saw men," said Tommy briefly, "shaking clenched fists at an
aircraft flying overhead. And Denham and his daughter have hidden the
globe behind a screen of foliage."

Von Holtz licked his lips fascinatedly.

"The Ragged Men," he said in a hushed voice. "The Herr Professor
called them that, because they cannot be of the people who live in the
Golden City. They hate the people of the Golden City. I think that
they are bandits; renegades, perhaps. They live in the tree-fern
forests and scream curses at the airships which fly overhead. And they
are afraid of those airships."

"How long did Denham use this thing to look through, before he built
his globe?"

Von Holtz considered.

"Immediately it worked," he said at last, "he began work on a small
catapult. It took him one week to devise exactly how to make that. He
experimented with it for some days and began to make the large globe.
That took nearly two months--the globe and the large catapult
together. And also the dimensoscope was at hand. His daughter looked
through it more than he did, or myself."

"He should have known what he was up against," said Tommy, frowning.
"He ought to have taken guns, at least. Is he armed?"

Von Holtz shook his head.

"He expected to return at once," he said desperately. "Do you see,
Herr Reames, the position it puts me in? I may be suspected of murder!
I am the Herr Professor's assistant. He disappears. Will I not be
accused of having put him out of the way?"

"No," said Tommy thoughtfully. "You won't." He glanced through the
brass tube and paced up and down the room. "You telephone for someone
to repair my car," he said suddenly and abruptly. "I am going to stay
here and work this thing out. I've got just the glimmering of an idea.
But I'll need my car in running order, in case we have to go out and
get materials in a hurry."

* * * * *

Von Holtz bowed stiffly and went out of the laboratory. Tommy looked
after him. Even moved to make sure he was gone. And then Tommy Reames
went quickly to the work bench on which were the littered notes and
calculations Von Holtz had been using and which were now at his
disposal. But Tommy did not leaf through them. He reached under the
blotter beneath the whole pile. He had seen Von Holtz furtively push
something out of sight, and he had disliked and distrusted Von Holtz
from the beginning. Moreover, it was pretty thoroughly clear that
Denham had not trusted him too much. A trusted assistant should be
able to understand, at least, any experiment performed in a
laboratory.

A folded sheet of paper came out. Tommy glanced at it.

"You messed things up right! Denham marooned and you got
nothing. No plans or figures either. When you get them, you
get your money. If you don't you are out of luck. If this
Reames guy can't fix up what you want it'll be just too bad
for you."

There was no salutation nor any signature beyond a scrawled and
sprawling "J."

Tommy Reames' jaw set grimly. He folded the scrap of paper and thrust
it back out of sight again.

"Pretty!" he said harshly. "So a gentleman named 'J' is going to pay
Von Holtz for plans or calculations it is hoped I'll provide! Which
suggests--many things! But at least I'll have Von Holtz's help until
he thinks my plans or calculations are complete. So that's all
right...."

Tommy could not be expected, of course, to guess that the note he had
read was quite astounding proof of the interest taken in non-Euclidean
geometry by a vice king of Chicago, or that the ranking beer baron of
that metropolis was the man who was so absorbed in abstruse theoretic
physics.

* * * * *

Tommy moved toward the great solenoid which lay askew upon its wrecked
support. It had drawn the steel globe toward it, had made that globe
vibrate madly, twice, and then go hazy and vanish. It had jerked the
globe in each of five directions, each at right angles to all the
others, and had released it when started in the fifth dimension. The
huge coil was quite nine feet across and would take the steel globe
easily. It was pivoted in concentric rings which made up a set of
gymbals far more elaborate than were ever used to suspend a mariner's
compass aboard ship.

There were three rings, one inside the other. And two rings will take
care of any motion in three dimensions. These rings were pivoted, too,
so that an unbelievably intricate series of motions could be given to
the solenoid within them all. But the device was broken, now. A pivot
had given away, and shaft and socket alike had vanished. Tommy became
absorbed. Some oddity bothered him....

He pieced the thing together mentally. And he exclaimed suddenly.
There had been four rings of metal! One was gone! He comprehended,
very suddenly. The third mirror in the dimensoscope was the one so
strangely distorted by its position, which was at half of a right
angle to all the dimensions of human experience. It was the third ring
in the solenoid's supports which had vanished. And Tommy, staring at
the gigantic apparatus and summoning all his theoretic knowledge and
all his brain to work, saw the connection between the two things.

"The time dimension and the world-line," he said sharply, excited in
spite of himself. "Revolving in the time dimension means telescoping
in the world-line.... It would be a strain no matter could endure...."

* * * * *

The mirror in the dimensoscope was not pointing in a fourth dimension.
It did not need to. It was reflecting light at a right angle, and
hence needed to be only at half of a right angle to the two courses of
the beam it reflected. But to whirl the steel globe into a fifth
dimension, the solenoid's support had for one instant to revolve in
time! For the fraction of a second it would have literally to pass
through its own substance. It would be required to undergo precisely
the sort of strain involved in turning a hollow seamless metal globe,
inside out! No metal could stand such a strain. No form of matter
known to man could endure it.

"It would explode!" said Tommy excitedly to himself, alone in the
great bare laboratory. "Steel itself would vaporize! It would wreck
the place!"

And then he looked blank. Because the place had very obviously not
been wrecked. And yet a metal ring had vanished, leaving no trace....

Von Holtz came back. He looked frightened.

"A--a repairman, Herr Reames," he said, stammering, "is on the way.
And--Herr Reames...."

Tommy barely heard him. For a moment, Tommy was all scientist,
confronted with the inexplicable, yet groping with a blind certainty
toward a conclusion he very vaguely foresaw. He waved his hand
impatiently....

"The Herr Jacaro is on the way here," stammered Von Holtz.

* * * * *

Tommy blinked, remembering that Von Holtz had told him he could make a
certain metal, the only metal which could be moved in the fourth
dimension.

"Jacaro?" he said blankly.

"The--friend of the Herr Professor Denham. He advanced the money for
the Herr Professor's experiments."

Tommy heard him with only half his brain, though that half instantly
decided that Von Holtz was lying. The only Jacaro Tommy knew of was a
prominent gangster from Chicago, who had recently cemented his
position in Chicago's underworld by engineering the amalgamation of
two once-rival gangs. Tommy knew, in a vague fashion, that Von Holtz
was frightened. That he was terrified in some way. And that he was
inordinately suspicious of someone, and filled with a queer
desperation.

"Well?" said Tommy abstractedly. The thought he needed was coming. A
metal which would have full tensile strength up to a certain instant,
and then disrupt itself without violence into a gas, a vapor.... It
would be an alloy, perhaps. It would be....

He struck at his own head with his clenched fist, angrily demanding
that his brain bring forth the thought that was forming slowly. The
metal that could be revolved in time without producing a disastrous
explosion and without requiring an impossible amount of power....

* * * * *

He did not see Von Holtz looking in the eyepiece of the dimensoscope.
He stared at nothing, thinking concentratedly, putting every bit of
energy into sheer thought. And suddenly, like the explosion he sought
a way to avoid, the answer came, blindingly clear.

He surveyed that answer warily. A tremendous excitement filled him.

"I've got it!" he said softly to himself. "By God, I know how he did
the thing!"

And as if through a mist the figure of Von Holtz became clear before
his eyes. Von Holtz was looking into the dimensoscope tube. He was
staring into that other, extraordinary world in which Denham and his
daughter were marooned. And Von Holtz's face was utterly, deathly
white, and he was making frantic, repressed gestures, and whispering
little whimpering phrases to himself. They were unintelligible, but
the deathly pallor of his cheeks, and the fascinated, dribbling
fullness of his lips brought Tommy Reames suddenly down to earth.

"What's happening?" demanded Tommy sharply.

Von Holtz did not answer. He made disjointed, moaning little
exclamations to himself. He was twitching horribly as he looked
through the telescope into that other world....

Tommy flung him aside and clapped his own eye to the eyepiece. And
then he groaned.

* * * * *

The telescope was pointed at the steel globe upon that ferny bank, no
more than a few hundred yards away but two dimensions removed from
Earth. The screening mass of tree-fronds had been torn away. A swarm
of ragged, half-naked men was gathered about the globe. They were
armed with spears and clubs, in the main, but there were other weapons
of intricate design whose uses Tommy could not even guess at. He did
not try. He was watching the men as they swarmed about and over the
steel sphere. Their faces were brutal and savage, and now they were
distorted with an insane hate. It was the same awful, gibbering hatred
he had sensed in the caperings of the four he had seen bellowing
vituperation at an airplane.

They were not savages. Somehow he could not envision them as
primitive. Their features were hard-bitten, seamed with hatred and
with vice unspeakable. And they were white. The instant impression any
man would have received was that here were broken men; fugitives,
bandits, assassins. Here were renegades or worse from some higher,
civilized race.

They battered hysterically upon the steel globe. It was not the attack
of savages upon a strange thing. It was the assault of desperate,
broken men upon a thing they hated. A glass pane splintered and
crashed. Spears were thrust into the opening, while mouths opened as
if in screams of insane fury. And then, suddenly, the door of the
globe flew wide.

The Ragged Men did not wait for anyone to come out. They fought each
other to get into the opening, their eyes glaring madly, filled with
the lust to kill.


CHAPTER III

A battered and antiquated flivver came chugging down the wire-fenced
lane to the laboratory, an hour later. It made a prodigious din, and
Tommy Reames went out to meet it. He was still a little pale. He had
watched the steel globe turned practically inside out by the Ragged
Men. He had seen them bringing out cameras, cushions, and even the
padding of the walls, to be torn to bits in a truly maniacal fury. But
he had not seen one sign of a human being killed. Denham and his
daughter had not been in the globe when it was found and ransacked. So
far, then, they were probably safe. Tommy had seen them vanish into
the tree-fern forest. They had been afraid, and with good reason. What
dangers they might encounter in the fern forest he could not guess.
How long they would escape the search of the Ragged Men, he could not
know. How he could ever hope to find them if he succeeded in
duplicating Denham's dimension-traveling apparatus he could not even
think of, just now. But the Ragged Men were not searching the fern
forest. So much was sure. They were encamped by the steel sphere, and
a scurvy-looking lot they were.

Coming out of the brick laboratory, Tommy saw a brawny figure getting
out of the antiquated flivver whose arrival had been so thunderous.
That brawny figure nodded to him and grinned. Tommy recognized him.
The red-headed, broad-shouldered filling station attendant in the last
village, who had given him specific directions for reaching this
place.

"You hit that gate a lick, didn't you?" asked the erstwhile filling
station attendant amiably. "Mr. Von Holtz said you had a flat and a
busted radiator. That right?"

* * * * *

Tommy nodded. The red-headed man walked around the car, scratched his
chin, and drew out certain assorted tools. He put them on the grass
with great precision, pumped a gasoline blow-torch to pressure and
touched a match to its priming-basin, and while the gasoline flamed
smokily he made a half dozen casual movements with a file, and the
broken radiator tube was exposed for repair.

He went back to the torch and observed placidly:

"The Professor ain't around, is he?"

Tommy shook his head.

"Thought not," said the red-headed one. "He gen'rally comes out and
talks a while. I helped him build some of them dinkuses in the barn
yonder."

Tommy said eagerly:

"Say, which of those things did you help him build? That big thing
with the solenoid--the coil?"

"Yeah. How'd it work?" The red-headed one set a soldering iron in
place and began to jack up the rear wheel to get at the tire. "Crazy
idea, if you ask me. I told Miss Evelyn so. She laughed and said she'd
be in the ball when it was tried. Did it work?"

"Too damn well," said Tommy briefly. "I've got to repair that
solenoid. How about a job helping?"

The red-headed man unfastened the lugs of the rim, kicked the tire
speculatively, and said, "Gone to hell." He put on the spare tire with
ease and dispatch.

"Um," he said. "How about that Mr. Von Holtz? Is he goin' to boss the
job?"

"He is not," said Tommy, with a shade of grimness in his tone.

* * * * *

The red-headed man nodded and took the soldering iron in hand. He
unwound a strip of wire solder, mended the radiator tube with placid
ease, and seemed to bang the cooling-flanges with a total lack of
care. They went magically back into place, and it took close
inspection to see that the radiator had been damaged.

"She's all right," he observed. He regarded Tommy impersonally.
"Suppose you tell me how come you horn in on this," he suggested, "an'
maybe I'll play. That guy Von Holtz is a crook, if you ask me about
him."

Tommy ran his hand across his forehead, and told him.

"Um," said the red-headed man calmly. "I think I'll go break Mr. Von
Holtz's neck. I got me a hunch."

He took two deliberate steps forward. But Tommy said:

"I saw Denham not an hour ago. So far, he's all right. How long he'll
be all right is a question. But I'm going after him."

The red-headed man scrutinized him exhaustively.

"Um. I might try that myself. I kinda like the Professor. An' Miss
Evelyn. My name's Smithers. Let's go look through the dinkus the
Professor made."

They went together into the laboratory. Von Holtz was looking through
the dimensoscope. He started back as they entered, and looked acutely
uneasy when he saw the red-headed man.

"How do you do," he said nervously. "They--the Ragged Men--have just
brought in a dead man. But it is not the Herr Professor."

Without a word, Tommy took the brass tube in his hand. Von Holtz moved
away, biting his lips. Tommy stared into that strange other world.

* * * * *

The steel sphere lay as before, slightly askew upon a bank of glossy
ferns. But its glass windows were shattered, and fragments of
everything it had contained were scattered about. The Ragged Men had
made a camp and built a fire. Some of them were roasting meat--the
huge limb of a monstrous animal with a scaly, reptilian hide. Others
were engaged in vehement argument over the body of one of their
number, lying sprawled out upon the ground.

Tommy spoke without moving his eyes from the eyepiece.

"I saw Denham with a club just now. This man was killed by a club."

The Ragged Men in the other world debated acrimoniously. One of them
pointed to the dead man's belt, and spread out his hands. Something
was missing from the body. Tommy saw, now, three or four other men
with objects that looked rather like policemen's truncheons, save that
they were made of glittering metal. They were plainly weapons. Denham,
then, was armed--if he could understand how the weapon was used.

The Ragged Men debated, and presently their dispute attracted the
attention of a man with a huge black beard. He rose from where he sat
gnawing at a piece of meat and moved grandly toward the disputatious
group. They parted at his approach, but a single member continued the
debate against even the bearded giant. The bearded one plucked the
glittering truncheon from his belt. The disputatious one gasped in
fear and flung himself desperately forward. But the bearded man kept
the truncheon pointed steadily.... The man who assailed him staggered,
reached close enough to strike a single blow, and collapsed. The
bearded man pointed the metal truncheon at him as he lay upon the
ground. He heaved convulsively, and was still.

The bearded man went back to his seat and picked up the gnawed bit of
meat again. The dispute had ceased. The chattering group of men
dispersed.

* * * * *

Tommy was about to leave the eyepiece of the instrument when a
movement nearby caught his eye. A head peered cautiously toward the
encampment. A second rose beside it. Denham and his daughter Evelyn.
They were apparently no more than thirty feet from the dimensoscope.
Tommy could see them talking cautiously, saw Denham lift and examine a
metal truncheon like the bearded man's, and force his daughter to
accept it. He clutched a club, himself, with a grim satisfaction.

Moments later they vanished quietly in the thick fern foliage, and
though Tommy swung the dimensoscope around in every direction, he
could see nothing of their retreat.

He rose from that instrument with something approaching hopefulness.
He'd seen Evelyn very near and very closely. She did not look happy,
but she did look alert rather than worn. And Denham was displaying a
form of competence in the face of danger which was really more than
would have been expected in a Ph.D., a M.A., and other academic
distinctions running to most of the letters of the alphabet.

"I've just seen Denham and Evelyn again," said Tommy crisply. "They're
safe so far. And I've seen one of the weapons of the Ragged Men in
use. If we can get a couple of automatics and some cartridges to
Denham, he'll be safe until we can repair the big solenoid."

"There was the small catapult," said Von Holtz bitterly, "but it was
dismantled. The Herr Professor saw me examining it, and he dismantled
it. So that I did not learn how to calculate the way of changing the
position--"

* * * * *

Tommy's eyes rested queerly on Von Holtz for a moment.

"You know how to make the metal required," he said suddenly. "You'd
better get busy making it. Plenty of it. We'll need it."

Von Holtz stared at him, his weak eyes almost frightened.

"You _know_? You know how to combine the right angles?"

"I think so," said Tommy. "I've got to find out if I'm right. Will you
make the metal?"

Von Holtz bit at his too-red lips.

"But Herr Reames!" he said stridently, "I wish to know the equation!
Tell me the method of pointing a body in a fourth or a fifth
direction. It is only fair--"

"Denham didn't tell you," said Tommy.

Von Holtz's arms jerked wildly.

"But I will not make the metal! I insist upon being told the equation!
I insist upon it! I will not make the metal if you do not tell me!"

Smithers was in the laboratory, of course. He had been surveying the
big solenoid-catapult and scratching his chin reflectively. Now he
turned.

* * * * *

But Tommy took Von Holtz by the shoulders. And Tommy's hands were the
firm and sinewy hands of a sportsman, if his brain did happen to be
the brain of a scientist. Von Holtz writhed in his grip.

"There is only one substance which could be the metal I need, Von Holtz,"
he said gently. "Only one substance is nearly three-dimensional.
Metallic ammonium! It's known to exist, because it makes a mercury
amalgam, but nobody has been able to isolate it because nobody has
been able to give it a fourth dimension--duration in time. Denham did
it. You can do it. And I need it, and you'd better set to work at the
job. You'll be very sorry if you don't, Von Holtz!"

Smithers said with a vast calmness.

"I got me a hunch. So if y'want his neck broke...."

Tommy released Von Holtz and the lean young man gasped and sputtered
and gesticulated wildly in a frenzy of rage.

"He'll make it," said Tommy coldly. "Because he doesn't dare not to!"

Von Holtz went out of the laboratory, his weak-looking eyes staring
and wild, and his mouth working.

"He'll be back," said Tommy briefly. "You've got to make a small model
of that big catapult, Smithers. Can you do it?"

"Sure," said Smithers. "The ring'll be copper tubing, with
pin-bearings. Wind a coil on the lathe. It'll be kinda rough, but
it'll do. But gears, now...."

"I'll attend to them. You know how to work that metallic ammonium?"

"If that's what it was," agreed Smithers. "I worked it for the
Professor."

Tommy leaned close and whispered:

"You never made any gears of that. But did you make some springs?"

"Uh-huh!"

Tommy grinned joyously.

"Then we're set and I'm right! Von Holtz wants a mathematical formula,
and no one on earth could write one, but we don't need it!"

* * * * *

Smithers rummaged around the laboratory with a casual air, acquired
this and that and the other thing, and set to work with an astounding
absence of waste motions. From time to time he inspected the great
catapult thoughtfully, verified some impression, and went about the
construction of another part.

And when Von Holtz did not return, Tommy hunted for him. He suddenly
remembered hearing his car motor start. He found his car missing. He
swore, then, and grimly began to hunt for a telephone in the house.
But before he had raised central he heard the deep-toned purring of
the motor again. His car was coming swiftly back to the house. And he
saw, through a window, that Von Holtz was driving it.

The lean young man got out of it, his face white with passion. He
started for the laboratory. Tommy intercepted him.

"I--went to get materials for making the metal," said Von Holtz
hoarsely, repressing his rage with a great effort. "I shall begin at
once, Herr Reames."

Tommy said nothing whatever. Von Holtz was lying. Of course. He
carried nothing in the way of materials. But he had gone away from the
house, and Tommy knew as definitely as if Von Holtz had told him, that
Von Holtz had gone off to communicate in safety with someone who
signed his correspondence with a J.

Von Holtz went into the laboratory. The four-cylinder motor began to
throb at once. The whine of the dynamo arose almost immediately after.
Von Holtz came out of the laboratory and dived into a shed that
adjoined the brick building. He remained in there.

Tommy looked at the trip register on his speedometer. Like most people
with methodical minds, he had noted the reading on arriving at a new
destination. Now he knew how far Von Holtz had gone. He had been to
the village and back.

"Meaning," said Tommy grimly to himself, "that the J who wants plans
and calculations is either in the village or at the end of a
long-distance wire. And Von Holtz said he was on the way. He'll
probably turn up and try to bribe me."

* * * * *

He went back into the laboratory and put his eye to the eyepiece of
the dimensoscope. Smithers had his blow-torch going and was busily
accumulating an apparently unrelated series of discordant bits of
queerly-shaped metal. Tommy looked through at the strange mad world he
could see through the eyepiece.

The tree-fern forest was still. The encampment of the Ragged Men was
nearly quiet. Sunset seemed to be approaching in this other world,
though it was still bright outside the laboratory. The hours of day
and night were obviously not the same in the two worlds, so close
together that a man could be flung from one to the other by a
mechanical contrivance.

The sun seemed larger, too, than the orb which lights our normal
earth. When Tommy swung the vision instrument about to search for it,
he found a great red ball quite four times the diameter of our own
sun, neatly bisected by the horizon. Tommy watched, waiting for it to
sink. But it did not sink straight downward as the sun seems to do in
all temperate latitudes. It descended, yes, but it moved along the
horizon as it sank. Instead of a direct and forthright dip downward,
the sun seemed to progress along the horizon, dipping more deeply as
it swam. And Tommy watched it blankly.

"It's not our sun.... But it's not our world. Yet it revolves, and
there are men on it. And a sun that size would bake the earth.... And
it's sinking at an angle that would only come at a latitude of--"

That was the clue. He understood at once. The instrument through which
he regarded the strange world looked out upon the polar regions of
that world. Here, where the sun descended slantwise, were the high
latitudes, the coldest spaces upon all the whole planet. And if here
there were the gigantic growths of a carboniferous era, the tropic
regions of this planet must be literal infernos.

And then he saw in its gradual descent the monster sun was going along
behind the golden city, and the outlines of its buildings, the
magnificence of its spires, were limned clearly for him against the
dully glowing disk.

Nowhere upon earth had such a city ever been dreamed of. No man had
ever envisioned such a place, where far-flung arches interconnected
soaring, towering columns, where curves of perfect grace were united
in forms of utterly perfect proportion....

* * * * *

The sunlight died, and dusk began and deepened, and vividly brilliant
stars began to come out overhead, and Tommy suddenly searched the
heavens eagerly for familiar constellations. And found not one. All
the stars were strange. These stars seemed larger and much more near
than the tiny pinpoints that blink down upon our earth.

And then he swung the instrument again and saw great fires roaring and
the Ragged Men crouched about them. Within them, rather, because they
had built fires about themselves as if to make a wall of flame. And
once Tommy saw twin, monstrous eyes, gazing from the blackness of the
tree-fern forest. They were huge eyes, and they were far apart, so
that the head of the creature who used them must have been enormous.
And they were all of fifteen feet above the ground when they
speculatively looked over the ring of fires and the ragged, degraded
men within them. Then that creature, whatever it was, turned away and
vanished.

But Tommy felt a curious shivering horror of the thing. It had moved
soundlessly, without a doubt, because not one of the Ragged Men had
noted its presence. It had been kept away by the fires. But Denham and
Evelyn were somewhere in the tree-fern forest, and they would not dare
to make fires....

Tommy drew away from the dimensoscope, shivering. He had been looking
only, but the place into which he looked was real, and the dangers
that lay hidden there were very genuine, and there was a man and a
girl of his own race and time struggling desperately, without arms or
hope, to survive.

* * * * *

Smithers was casually fitting together an intricate array of little
rings made of copper tubing. There were three of them, and each was
fitted into the next largest by pins which enabled them to spin
noiselessly and swiftly at the touch of Smithers' finger. He had them
spinning now, each in a separate direction, and the effect was
bewildering.

As Tommy watched, Smithers stopped them, oiled the pins carefully, and
painstakingly inserted a fourth ring. Only this ring was of a white
metal that looked somehow more pallid than silver. It had a whiteness
like that of ivory beneath its metallic gleam.

Tommy blinked.

"Did Von Holtz give you that metal?" he asked suddenly.

Smithers looked up and puffed at a short brown pipe.

"Nope. There was some splashes of it by the castin' box. I melted 'em
together an' run a ring. Pressed it to shape; y' can't hammer this
stuff. It goes to water and dries up quicker'n lightning--an' you hold
y'nose an' run. I used it before for the Professor."

Tommy went over to him excitedly. He picked up the little contrivance
of many concentric rings. The big motor was throbbing rhythmically,
and the generator was humming at the back of the laboratory. Von Holtz
was out of sight.

* * * * *

With painstaking care Tommy went over the little device. He looked up.

"A coil?"

"I wound one," said Smithers calmly. "On the lathe. Not so hot, but
it'll do, I guess. But I can't fix these rings like the Professor
did."

"I think I can," said Tommy crisply. "Did you make some wire for
springs?"

"Yeah!"

Tommy fingered the wire. Stout, stiff, and surprisingly springy wire
of the same peculiar metal. It was that metallic ammonium which
chemists have deduced must exist because of the chemical behavior of
the compound NH3, but which Denham alone had managed to procure.
Tommy deduced that it was an allotropic modification of the substance
which forms an amalgam with mercury, as metallic tin is an allotrope
of the amorphous gray powder which is tin in its normal, stable state.

He set to work with feverish excitement. For one hour, for two he
worked. At the end of that time he was explaining the matter curtly to
Smithers, so intent on his work that he wholly failed to hear a motor
car outside or to realize that it had also grown dark in this world of
ours.

"You see, Smithers, if a two-dimensioned creature wanted to adjust two
right angles at right angles to each other, he'd have them laid flat,
of course. And if he put a spring at the far ends of those right
angles--they'd look like a T, put together--so that the cross-bar of
that T was under tension, he'd have the equivalent of what I'm doing.
To make a three-dimensioned figure, that imaginary man would have to
bend one side of the cross-bar up. As if the two ends of it were under
tension by a spring, and the spring would only be relieved of tension
when that cross-bar was bent. But the vertical would be his time
dimension, so he'd have to have something thin, or it couldn't be
bent. He'd need something 'thin in time.'

"We have the same problem. But metallic ammonium is 'thin in time.'
It's so fugitive a substance that Denham is the only man ever to
secure it. So we use these rings and adjust these springs to them so
they're under tension which will only be released when they're all at
right angles to each other. In our three dimensions that's impossible,
but we have a metal that can revolve in a fourth, and we reinforce
their tendency to adjust themselves by starting them off with a jerk.
We've got 'em flat. They'll make a good stiff jerk when they try to
adjust themselves. And the solenoid's a bit eccentric--"

"Shut up!" snapped Smithers suddenly.

* * * * *

He was facing the door, bristling. Von Holtz was in the act of coming
in, with a beefy, broad-shouldered man with blue jowls. Tommy
straightened up, thought swiftly, and then smiled grimly.

"Hullo, Von Holtz," he said pleasantly. "We've just completed a model
catapult. We're all set to try it out. Watch!"

He set a little tin can beneath the peculiar device of copper-tubing
rings. The can was wholly ordinary, made of thin sheet-iron plated
with tin as are all the tin cans of commerce.

"You have the catapult remade?" gasped Von Holtz. "Wait! Wait! Let me
look at it!"

For one instant, and one instant only, Tommy let him see. The massed
set of concentric rings, each one of them parallel to all the others.
It looked rather like a flat coil of tubing; certainly like no
particularly obscure form of projector. But as Von Holtz's weak eyes
fastened avidly upon it, Tommy pressed the improvised electric switch.
At once that would energize the solenoid and release all the tensed
springs from their greater tension, for an attempt to reach a
permanent equilibrium.

As Von Holtz and the blue-jowled man stared, the little tin can leaped
upward into the tiny coil. The small copper rings twinkled one within
the other as the springs operated. The tin can was wrenched this way
and that, then for the fraction of a second hurt the eyes that gazed
upon it--and it was gone! And then the little coil came spinning down
to the work bench top from its broken bearings and the remaining
copper rings spun aimlessly for a moment. But the third ring of
whitish metal had vanished utterly, and so had the coiled-wire springs
which Von Holtz had been unable to distinguish. And there was an
overpowering smell of ammonia in the room.

* * * * *

Von Holtz flung himself upon the still-moving little instrument. He
inspected it savagely, desperately. His full red lips drew back in a
snarl.

"How did you do it?" he cried shrilly. "You must tell me! I--I--I will
kill you if you do not tell me!"

The blue-jowled man was watching Von Holtz. Now his lips twisted
disgustedly. He turned to Tommy and narrowed his eyes.

"Look here," he rumbled. "This fool's no good! I want the secret of
that trick you did. What's your price?"

"I'm not for sale," said Tommy, smiling faintly.

The blue-jowled man regarded him with level eyes.

"My name's Jacaro," he said after an instant. "Maybe you've heard of
me. I'm from Chicago."

Tommy smiled more widely.

"To be sure," he admitted. "You were the man who introduced
machine-guns into gang warfare, weren't you? Your gunmen lined up half
a dozen of the Buddy Haines gang against a wall and wiped them out, I
believe. What do you want this secret for?"

The level eyes narrowed. They looked suddenly deadly.

"That's my business," said Jacaro briefly. "You know who I am. And I
want that trick y'did. I got my own reasons. I'll pay for it. Plenty.
You know I got plenty to pay, too. Or else--"

"What?"

"Something'll happen to you," said Jacaro briefly. "I ain't sayin''
what. But it's damn likely you'll tell what I want to know before it's
finished. Name your price and be damn quick!"

Tommy took his hand out of his pocket. He had a gun in it.

"The only possible answer to that," he said suavely, "is to tell you
to go to hell. Get out! But Von Holtz stays here. He'd better!"


CHAPTER IV

Within half an hour after Jacaro's leaving, Smithers was in the
village, laying in a stock of supplies and sending telegrams that
Tommy had written out for transmission. Tommy sat facing an ashen Von
Holtz and told him pleasantly what would be done to him if he failed
to make the metallic ammonium needed to repair the big solenoid. In an
hour, Smithers was back, reporting that Jacaro was also sending
telegrams but that he, Smithers, had stood over the telegraph operator
until his own messages were transmitted. He brought back weapons,
too--highly illegal things to have in New York State, where a citizen
is only law-abiding when defenseless. And then four days of hectic,
sleepless labor began.

On the first day one of Tommy's friends drove in in answer to a
telegram. It was Peter Dalzell, with men in uniform apparently
festooned about his car. He announced that a placard warning passersby
of smallpox within, had been added to the decorative signs upon the
gate, and stared incredulously at the interior of the big brick barn.
Tommy grinned at him and gave him plans and specifications of a light
steel globe in which two men might be transported into the fifth
dimension by a suitably operating device. Tommy had sat up all night
drawing those plans. He told Dalzell just enough of what he was up
against to enlist Dalzell's enthusiastic cooperation without
permitting him to doubt Tommy's sanity. Dalzell had known Tommy as an
amateur tennis player, but not as a scientist.

He marveled, refused to believe his eyes when he looked through the
dimensoscope, and agreed that the whole thing had to be kept secret or
the rescue expedition would be prevented from starting by the
incarceration of both Tommy and Smithers in comfortable insane
asylums. He feigned to admire Von Holtz, deathly white and nearly
frantic with a corroding rage, and complimented Tommy on his taste for
illegality. He even asked Von Holtz if he wanted to leave, and Von
Holtz snarled insults at him. Von Holtz was beginning to work at the
manufacture of metallic ammonium.

* * * * *

It was an electrolytic process, of course. Ordinarily,
when--say--ammonium chloride is broken down by an electric current,
ammonium is deposited at the cathode and instantly becomes a gas which
dissolves in the water or bubbles up to the surface. With a mercury
cathode, it is dissolved and becomes a metallic amalgam, which also
breaks down into gas with much bubbling of the mercury. But Denham had
worked out a way of delaying the breaking-down, which left him with a
curiously white, spongy mass of metal which could be carefully melted
down and cast, but not under any circumstances violently struck or
strained.

Von Holtz was working at that. On the second day he delivered,
snarling, a small ingot of the white metal. He was imprisoned in the
lean-to-shed in which the electrolysis went on. But Tommy had more
than a suspicion that he was in communication with Jacaro.

"Of course," he said drily to Smithers, who had expressed his doubts.
"Jacaro had somebody sneak up and talk to him through the walls, or
maybe through a bored hole. While there's a hope of finding out what
he wants to know through Von Holtz, Jacaro won't try anything. Not
anything rough, anyhow. We mustn't be bumped off while what we are
doing is in our heads alone. We're safe enough--for a while."

Smithers grumbled.

"We need that ammonium," said Tommy, "and I don't know how to make it.
I bluffed that I could, and in time I might, but it would need time
and meanwhile Denham needs us. Dalzell is going to send a plane over
today, with word of when we can expect our own globe. We'll try to
have the big catapult ready when it comes. And the plane will drop
some extra supplies. I've ordered a sub-machine gun. Handy when we get
over there in the tree-fern forests. Right now, though, we need to be
watching...."

Because they were taking turns looking through the dimensoscope. For
signs of Denham and Evelyn. And Tommy was finding himself thinking
wholly unscientific thoughts about Evelyn, since a pretty girl in
difficulties is of all possible things the one most likely to make a
man romantic.

* * * * *

In the four days of their hardest working, he saw her three times. The
globe was wrecked and ruined. Its glass was broken out and its
interior ripped apart. It had been pillaged so exhaustively that there
was no hope that whatever device had been included in its design, for
its return, remained even repairably intact. That device had not
worked, to be sure, but Tommy puzzled sometimes over the fact that he
had seen no mechanical device of any sort in the plunder that had been
brought out to be demolished. But he did not think of those things
when he saw Evelyn.

The Ragged Men's encampment was gone, but she and her father lingered
furtively, still near the pillaged globe. The first day Tommy saw her,
she was still blooming and alert. The second day she was paler. Her
clothing was ripped and torn, as if by thorns. Denham had a great raw
wound upon his forehead, and his coat was gone and half his shirt was
in ribbons. Before Tommy's eyes they killed a nameless small animal
with the trunchionlike weapon Evelyn carried. And Denham carted it
triumphantly off into the shelter of the tree-fern forest. But to
Tommy that shelter began to appear extremely dubious.

That same afternoon some of the Ragged Men came suspiciously to the
globe and inspected it, and then vented a gibbering rage upon it with
blows and curses. They seemed half-mad, these men. But then, all the
Ragged Men seemed a shade less than sane. Their hatred for the Golden
City seemed the dominant emotion of their existence.

And when they had gone, Tommy saw Denham peering cautiously from
behind a screening mass of fern. And Denham looked sick at heart. His
eyes lifted suddenly to the heavens, and he stared off into the
distance again, and then he regarded the heavens again with an
expression that was at once of the utmost wistfulness and the
uttermost of despair.

* * * * *

Tommy swung the dimensoscope about and searched the skies of that
other world. He saw the flying machine, and it was a swallow-winged
device that moved swiftly, and now soared and swooped in abrupt short
circles almost overhead. Tommy could see its pilot, leaning out to
gaze downward. He was no more than a hundred feet up, almost at the
height of the tree-fern tops. And the pilot was moving too swiftly for
Tommy to be able to focus accurately upon his face, but he could see
him as a man, an indubitable man in no fashion distinguishable from
the other men of this earth. He was scrutinizing the globe as well as
he could without alighting.

He soared upward, suddenly, and his plane dwindled as it went toward
the Golden City.

And then, inevitably, Tommy searched for the four Ragged Men who had
inspected the globe a little while since. He saw them, capering
horribly behind a screening of verdure. They did not shake their
clenched fists at the flying machine. Instead, they seemed filled with
a ghastly mirth. And suddenly they began to run frantically for the
far distance, as if bearing news of infinite importance.

And when he looked back at Denham, it seemed to Tommy that he wrung
his hands before he disappeared.

* * * * *

But that was the second day of the work upon our own world, and just
before sunset there was a droning in the earthly sky above the
laboratory, and Tommy ran out, and somebody shot at him from a patch
of woodland a quarter of a mile away from the brick building. Isolated
as Denham's place was, the shot would go unnoticed. The bullet passed
within a few feet of Tommy, but he paid no attention. It was one of
Jacaro's watchers, no doubt, but Jacaro did not want Tommy killed. So
Tommy waited until the plane swooped low--almost to the level of the
laboratory roof--and a thickly padded package thudded to the ground.
He picked it up and darted back into the laboratory as other bullets
came from the patch of woodland.

"Funny," he said dryly to Smithers, inside the laboratory again; "they
don't dare kill me--yet--and Von Holtz doesn't dare leave or refuse to
do what I tell him to do; and yet they expect to lick us."

Smithers growled. Tommy was unpacking the wrapped package. A grim,
blued-steel thing came out of much padding. Boxes tumbled after it.

"Sub-machine gun," said Tommy, "and ammunition. Jacaro and his little
pals will try to get in here when they think we've got the big
solenoid ready for use. They'll try to get it before we can use it.
This will attend to them."

"An' get us in jail," said Smithers calmly, "for forty-'leven years."

"No," said Tommy, and grinned. "We'll be in the fifth dimension. Our
job is to fling through the catapult all the stuff we'll need to make
another catapult to fling us back again."

"It can't be done," said Smithers flatly.

"Maybe not," agreed Tommy, "especially since we ruin all our springs
and one gymbal ring every time we use the thing. But I've got an idea.
I'll want five coils with hollow iron cores, and the whole works
shaped like this, with two holes bored so...."

* * * * *

He sketched. He had been working on the idea for several days, and the
sketch was ready in his mind to be transferred to paper.

"What you goin' to do?"

"Something crazy," said Tommy. "A mirror isn't the only thing that
changes angles to right ones."

"You're the doctor," said the imperturbable Smithers.

He set to work. He puzzled Tommy sometimes, Smithers did. So far he
hadn't asked how much his pay was going to be. He'd worked
unintermittantly. He had displayed a colossal, a tremendous calmness.
But no man could work as hard as Smithers did without some powerful
driving-force. It was on the fourth day that Tommy learned what it
was.

The five coils had been made, and Tommy was assembling them with an
extraordinary painstaking care behind a screen, to hide what he was
doing. He'd discovered a peep-hole bored through the brick wall from
the lean-to where Von Holtz worked. He was no longer locked in there.
Tommy abandoned the pretense of imprisonment after finding an
automatic pistol and a duplicate key to the lock in Von Holtz's
possession. He'd had neither when he was theoretically locked up, and
Tommy laughed.

"It's a farce, Von Holtz," he said dryly, "this pretending you'll run
away. You're here spying now, for Jacaro. Of course. And you don't
dare harm either of us until you find out from me what you can't work
out for yourself, and know I have done. How much is Jacaro going to
pay you for the secret of the catapult, Von Holtz?"

Von Holtz snarled. Smithers moved toward him, his hands closing and
unclosing. Von Holtz went gray with terror.

"Talk!" said Smithers.

"A--a million dollars," said Von Holtz, cringing away from the brawny
red-headed man.

"It would be interesting to know what use it would be to him," said
Tommy dryly. "But to earn that million you have to learn what we know.
And to learn that, you have to help us do it again, on the scale we
want. You won't run away. So I shan't bother to lock you up hereafter.
Jacaro's men come and talk to you at night, don't they?"

* * * * *

Von Holtz cringed again. It was an admission.

"I don't want to have to kill any of them," said Tommy pleasantly,
"and we'll all be classed as mad if this thing gets out. So you go and
talk to them in the lane when you want to, Von Holtz. But if any of
them come near the laboratory, Smithers and I will kill them, and if
Smithers is hurt I'll kill you; and I don't imagine Jacaro wants that,
because he expects you to build another catapult for him. But I warn
you, if I find another gun on you I'll thrash you."

Von Holtz's pallor changed subtly from the pallor of fear to the awful
lividness of rage.

"You--Gott! You dare threaten--" He choked upon his own fury.

"I do," said Tommy. "And I'll carry out the threat."

Smithers moved forward once more.

"Mr. Von Holtz," he said in a very terrible steadiness, "I aim to kill
you some time. I ain't done it yet because Mr. Reames says he needs
you a while. But I know you got Miss Evelyn marooned off in them
fern-woods on purpose! And--God knows she wouldn't ever look at me,
but--I aim to kill you some time!"

His eyes were flames. His hands closed and unclosed horribly. Von
Holtz gaped at him, shocked out of his fury into fear again. He went
unsteadily back to his lean-to. And Smithers went back to the
dimensoscope. It was his turn to watch that other world for signs of
Denham and Evelyn, and for any sign of danger to them.

* * * * *

Tommy adjusted the screen before the bench on which he was working, so
Von Holtz could not see his task, and went back to work. It was a
rather intricate task he had undertaken, and before the events of the
past few days he would have said it was insane. But now he was taking
it quite casually.

Presently he said:

"Smithers."

Smithers did not look away from the brass tube.

"Yeah?"

"You're thinking more about Miss Denham than her father."

Smithers did not reply for a moment. Then he said:

"Well? What if I am?"

"I am, too," said Tommy quietly. "I've never spoken to her, and I
daresay she's never even heard of me, and she certainly has never seen
me, but--"

Smithers said with a vast calmness:

"She'll never look at me, Mr. Reames. I know it. She talks to me, an'
laughs with me, but she's never sure-'nough looked at me. An' she
never will. But I got the right to love her."

Tommy nodded very gravely.

"Yes. You have. So have I. And so, when that globe comes, we both get
into it with what arms and ammunition we can pack in, and go where she
is, to help her. I intended to have you work the switch and send me
off. But you can come, too."

Smithers was silent. But he took his eyes from the dimensoscope
eye-piece and regarded Tommy soberly. Then he nodded and turned back.
And it was a compact between the two men that they should serve
Evelyn, without any rivalry at all.

* * * * *

Tommy went on with his work. The essential defect in the catapult
Denham had designed was the fact that it practically had to be rebuilt
after each use. And, moreover, the metallic ammonium was so fugitive a
substance that it was hard to keep. Once it had been strained by
working, it gradually adverted to a gaseous state and was lost. And
while he still tried to keep the little catapult in a condition for
use, he was at no time sure that he could send a pair of automatics
and ammunition through in a steel box at any moment that Denham came
close enough to notice a burning smoke-fuse attached.

But he was working on another form of catapult entirely, now. In this
case he was using hollow magnets placed at known angles to each other.
And they were so designed that each one tended to adjust its own
hollow bore at right angles to the preceding one, and each one would
take any moving, magnetic object and swing it through four successive
right angles into the fifth dimension.

He fitted the first magnet on twin rods of malleable copper, which
also would carry the current which energized the coil. He threaded the
second upon the same twin supports. When the current was passed
through the two of them, the magnetic field itself twisted the
magnets, bending the copper supports and placing the magnets in their
proper relative positions. A third magnet on the same pair of rods,
and a repetition of the experiment, proved the accuracy of the idea.
And since this device, like the dimensoscope, required only a
forty-five degree angle to our known dimensions, instead of a right
angle as the other catapult did, Tommy was able to work with ordinary
and durable materials. He fitted on the last two coils and turned on
the current for his final experiment. And as he watched, the twin
three-eighths-inch rods twisted and writhed in the grip of the
intangible magnetic force. They bent, and quivered, and twisted....
And suddenly there seemed to be a sort of inaudible _snap_, and one of
the magnets hurt the eyes that looked at it, and only the edge of the
last of the series was visible.

* * * * *

Tommy drew in his breath sharply. "Now we try it," he said tensely. "I
was trying to work this as the mirrors of the dimensoscope were
fitted. Let's see."

He took a long piece of soft-iron wire and fed it into the hollow of
the first magnet. He saw it come out and bend stiffly to enter the
hollow of the second. It required force to thrust it through. It went
still more stiffly into the third magnet. It required nearly all his
strength to thrust it on, and on.... The end of it vanished. He pushed
two feet or more of it beyond the last place where it was visible. It
went into the magnet that hurt one's eyes. After that it could not be
seen.

Tommy's voice was strained.

"Swing the dimensoscope, Smithers," he ordered. "See if you can see
the wire. The end of it should be in the other world."

It seemed an age, an aeon, that Smithers searched. Then:

"Move it," he said.

Tommy obeyed.

"It's there," said Smithers evenly. "Two or three feet of it."

* * * * *

Tommy drew a deep, swift breath of relief.

"All right!" he said crisply. "Now we can fling anything we need
through there, when our globe arrives. We can built up a dump of
supplies, all sent through just before we slide through in the globe."

"Yeah," said Smithers. "Uh--Mr. Reames. There's a bunch of Ragged Men
in sight, hauling something heavy behind them. I don't know what it's
all about."

Tommy went to the brass tube and stared through it. The tree-fern
forest, drawing away in the distance. The vast and steaming morass.
The glittering city, far, far in the distance.

And then a mob of the Ragged Men, hauling at some heavy thing. They
were a long way off. Some of them came capering on ahead, and Tommy
swung the dimensoscope about to see Denham and Evelyn dart for cover
and vanish amid the tree-ferns. Denham was as ragged as the Ragged
Men, by now, and Evelyn's case was little better.

Frightened for them, Tommy swung the instrument about again. But they
had not been seen. The leaders who ran gleefully on ahead were merely
in haste. And they were followed more slowly by burly men and lean
ones, whole men and limping men, who hauled frantically on long ropes
of hide, dragging some heavy thing behind them. Tommy saw it only
indistinctly as the filthy, nearly naked bodies moved. But it was an
intricate device of a golden-colored metal, and it rested upon the
crudest of possible carts. The wheels were sections of tree trunks,
pierced for wooden axles. The cart itself was made of the most
roughly-hewed of timbers. And there were fifty or more of the Ragged
Men who dragged it.

The men in advance now attacked the underbrush at the edge of the
forest. They worked with a maniacal energy, clearing away the long
fern-fronds while they capered and danced and babbled excitedly.

* * * * *

Irrelevantly, Tommy thought of escaped galley slaves. Just such
hard-bitten, vice-ridden men as these, and filled with just such a
mad, gibbering hatred of the free men they had escaped from. Certainly
these men had been civilized once. As the golden-metal device came
nearer, its intricacy was the more apparent. No savages could utilize
a device like this one. And there was a queer deadliness in the very
grace of its outlines. It was a weapon of some sort, but whose nature
Tommy could not even guess.

And then he caught the gleam of metal also in the fern-forest. On the
ground. In glimpses and in fragments of glimpses between the swarming
naked bodies of the Ragged Men, he pieced together a wholly incredible
impression. There was a roadway skirting the edge of the forest. It
was not wide; not more than fifteen feet at most. But it was a solid
road-bed of metal! The dull silver-white of aluminum gleamed from the
ground. Two or more inches thick and fifteen feet wide, there was a
seamless ribbon of aluminum that vanished behind the tree-ferns on
either side.

The intricate device of golden metal was set up, now, and a shaggy,
savage-seeming man mounted beside it grinning. He manipulated its
levers and wheels with an expert's assurance. And Tommy saw repairs
upon it. Crude repairs, with crude materials, but expertly done. Done
by the Ragged Men, past doubt, and so demolishing any idea that they
came of a savage race.

"Watch here, Smithers," said Tommy grimly.

* * * * *

He sat to work upon the little catapult after Denham's design. His own
had seemed to work, but the other was more sure. This would be an
ambush the Ragged Men were preparing, and of course they would be
preparing it for men of the Golden City. The plane had sighted
Denham's steel globe. It had hovered overhead, and carried news of
what it had seen to the Golden City. And here was a roadway that must
have been made by the folk of the Golden City at some time or another.
Its existence explained why Denham remained nearby. He had been hoping
that some vehicle would travel along its length, containing civilized
people to whom he could signal and ultimately explain his plight. And,
being near the steel globe, his narrative would have its proofs at
hand.

And now it was clear that the Ragged Men expected some ground-vehicle,
too. They were preparing for it. They were setting a splendid ambush,
with a highly-treasured weapon they ordinarily kept hidden. Their
triumphant hatred could apply to nothing else than an expectation of
inflicting injury on men of the Golden City.

So Tommy worked swiftly upon the catapult. A new little ring of
metallic ammonium was ready, and so were the necessary springs. The
Ragged Men would lay their ambush. The men of the Golden City might
enter it. They might. But the aviator who had spotted the globe would
have seen the shredded contents of the sphere about. He would have
known the Ragged Men had found it. And the men who came in a
ground-vehicle from the Golden City should be expecting just such an
ambush as was being laid.

There would be a fight, and Tommy, somehow, had no doubt that the men
of the Golden City would win. And when they had cleared the field he
would fling a smoking missile through the catapult. The victors should
see it and should examine it. And though writing would serve little
purpose, they should at least recognize it as written communication in
a language other than their own. And mathematical diagrams would
certainly be lucid, and proof of a civilized man sending the missile,
and photographs....

* * * * *

The catapult was ready, and Tommy prepared his message-carrying
projectile. He found snapshots and included them. He tore out a
photograph of Evelyn and her father, which had been framed above a
work bench in the laboratory. He labored, racking his brain for a
means of conveying the information that the globe was of any other
world.... And suddenly he had an idea. A cord attached to his missile
would lead to nothingness from either world, yet one end would be in
that other world, and the other end in this. A wire would be better.
Tugs upon it would convey the idea of living beings nearby but
invisible. The photograph would identify Denham and his daughter as
associated with the phenomenon and competent to explain it....

Tommy worked frantically to get the thing ready. He almost prayed that
the men of the Golden City would be victors, would find his little
missile when the fray was over, and would try to comprehend it....

All he could do was try.

Then Smithers said, from the dimensoscope:

"They're all set, Mr. Reames. Y'better look."

Tommy stared through the eye-piece. Strangely, the golden weapon had
vanished. All seemed to be exactly as before. The cleared-away
underbrush was replaced. Nothing was in any way changed from the
normal in that space upon a mad world. But there was a tiny movement
and Tommy saw a Ragged Man. He was lying prone upon the earth. He
seemed either to hear or see something, because his lips moved as he
spoke to another invisible man beside him, and his expression of
malevolent joy was horrible.

Tommy swung the tube about. Nothing.... But suddenly he saw
swiftly-moving winkings of sunlight from the edge of the tree-fern
forest. Something was moving in there, moving with lightning swiftness
along the fifteen-foot roadway of solid aluminum. It drew nearer, and
more near....

* * * * *

The carefully camouflaged ambuscade was fully focussed and Tommy was
watching tensely when the thing happened.

He saw glitterings through the tree-fronds come to a smoothly
decelerated stop. There was a pause; and suddenly the underbrush fell
flat. As if a single hand had smitten it, it wavered, drooped, and lay
prone. The golden weapon was exposed, with its brawny and horribly
grinning attendant. For one-half a split second Tommy saw the wheeled
thing in which half a dozen men of the Golden City were riding. It was
graceful and stream-lined and glittering. There was a platform on
which the steel sphere would have been mounted for carrying away.

But then there was a sudden intolerable light as the men of the Golden
City reached swiftly for peculiar weapons beside them. The light came
from the crudely mounted weapon of the Ragged Men, and it was an
unbearable actinic glare. For half a second, perhaps, it persisted,
and died away to a red flame which leaped upward and was not.

Then the vehicle from the Golden City was a smoking, twisted ruin.
Four of the six men in it were blasted, blackened crisps. Another
staggered to his feet, struggled to reach a weapon and could not lift
it, and twitched a dagger from his belt and fell forward; and Tommy
could see that his suicide was deliberate.

The last man, alone, was comparatively unharmed by the blast of light.
He swept a pistol-like contrivance into sight. It bore swiftly upon
the now surging, yelling horde of Ragged Men. And one--two--three of
them seemed to scream convulsively before they were trampled under by
the rest.

But suddenly there were a myriad little specks of red all over the
body of the man at bay. The pistol-like thing dropped from his grasp
as his whole hand became encrimsoned. And then he was buried beneath
the hating, blood-lusting mob of the forest men.


CHAPTER V

An hour later, Tommy took his eyes away from the dimensoscope
eye-piece. He could not bear to look any longer.

"Why don't they kill him?" he demanded sickly, filled with a horrible,
a monstrous rage. "Oh, why don't they kill him?"

He felt maddeningly impotent. In another world entirely, a mob of
half-naked renegades had made a prisoner. He was not dead, that solely
surviving man from the Golden City. He was bound, and the Ragged Men
guarded him closely, and his guards were diverting themselves
unspeakably by small tortures, minor tortures, horribly painful but
not weakening. And they capered and howled with glee when the bound
man writhed.

The prisoner was a brave man, though. Helpless as he was, he presently
flung back his head and set his teeth. Sweat stood out in great
droplets upon his body and upon his forehead. And he stilled his
writhings, and looked at his captors with a grim and desperate
defiance.

The guards made gestures which were all too clear, all too luridly
descriptive of the manner of death which awaited him. And the man of
the Golden City was ashen and hopeless and utterly despairing--and yet
defiant.

Smithers took Tommy's place at the eye-piece of the instrument. His
nostrils quivered at what he saw. The vehicle from the Golden City was
being plundered, of course. Weapons from the dead men were being
squabbled over, even fought over. And the Ragged Men fought as madly
among themselves as if in combat with their enemies. The big golden
weapon on its cart was already being dragged away to its former
hiding-place. And somehow, it was clear that those who dragged it away
expected and demanded that the solitary prisoner not be killed until
their return.

It was that prisoner, in the agony which was only the beginning of his
death, who made Smithers' teeth set tightly.

* * * * *

"I don't see the Professor or Miss Evelyn," said Smithers in a vast
calmness. "I hope to Gawd they--don't see this."

Tommy swung on his heel, staring and ashen.

"They were near," he said stridently. "I saw them! They saw what
happened in the ambush! They'll--they'll see that man tortured!"

Smithers' hand closed and unclosed.

"Maybe the Professor'll have sense enough to take Miss
Evelyn--uh--where she--can't hear," he said slowly, his voice level.
"I hope so."

Tommy flung out his hands desperately.

"I want to help that man!" he cried savagely. "I want to do something!
I saw what they promised to do to him. I want to--to kill him, even!
It would be mercy!"

Smithers said, with a queer, stilly shock in his voice:

"I see the Professor now. He's got that gun-thing in his hand.... Miss
Evelyn's urging him to try to do something.... He's looking at the
sky.... It'll be a long time before it's dark.... He's gone back out
of sight...."

"If we had some dynamite!" said Tommy desperately, "we could take a
chance on blowing ourselves to bits and try to fling it through and
into the middle of those devils...."

* * * * *

He was pacing up and down the laboratory, harrowed by the fate of that
gray-faced man who awaited death by torture; filled with a wild terror
that Evelyn and her father would try to rescue him and be caught to
share his fate; racked by his utter impotence to do more than
watch....

Then Smithers said thickly:

"God!"

He stumbled away from the eye-piece. Tommy took his place,
dry-throated with terror. He saw the Ragged Men laughing uproariously.
The bearded man who was their leader was breaking the arms and legs of
the prisoner so that he would be helpless when released from the stake
to which he was bound. And if ever human beings looked like devils out
of hell, it was at that moment. The method of breaking the bones was
excruciating. The prisoner screamed. The Ragged Men rolled upon the
ground in their maniacal mirth.

And then a man dropped, heaving convulsively, and then another, and
still another.... The grim, gaunt figure of Denham came out of the
tree-fern forest, the queer small golden-metal trunchion in his hand.
A fourth man dropped before the Ragged Men quite realized what had
happened. The fourth man himself was armed--and a flashing slender
body came plunging from the forest and Evelyn flung herself upon the
still-heaving body and plucked away that weapon.

* * * * *

Tommy groaned, in the laboratory in another world. He could not look
away, and yet it seemed that the heart would be torn from his body by
that sight. Because the Ragged Men had turned upon Denham with a
concentrated ferocity, somehow knowing instantly that he was more
nearly akin to the men of the Golden City than to them. But at sight
of Evelyn, her garments rent by the thorns of the forest, her white
body gleaming through the largest tears, they seemed to go mad. And
Tommy's eyes, glazing, saw the look on Denham's face as he realized
that Evelyn had not fled, but had followed him in his desperate and
wholly hopeless effort.

Then the swarming mass of Ragged Men surged over the two of them.
Buried them under reaching, hating, lusting fiends who fought even
among themselves to be first to seize them.

Then there was only madness, and Denham was bound beside the man of
the Golden City, and Evelyn was the center of a fighting group which
was suddenly flung aside by the bearded giant, and the encampment of
the Ragged Men was bedlam. And somehow Tommy knew with a terrible
clarity that a man of the Golden City to torture was bliss
unimaginable to these half-mad enemies of that city. But a woman--

He turned from the instrument, three-quarters out of his head. He
literally did not see Von Holtz gazing furtively in the doorway. His
eyes were fixed and staring. It seemed that his brain would burst.

Then he heard his own voice saying with an altogether unbelievable
steadiness:

"Smithers! They've got Evelyn. Get the sub-machine gun."

* * * * *

Smithers cried out hoarsely. His face was not quite human, for an
instant. But Tommy was bringing the work bench on which he had
installed his magnetic catapult, close over by the dimensoscope.

"This cannot work," he said in the same incredible calmness. "Not
possibly. It should not work. It will not work. But it has to work!"

He was clamping the catapult to a piece of heavy timber.

"Put the gun so it shoots into the first magnet," he said steadily.
"The magnet-windings shouldn't stand the current we've got to put into
them. They've got to."

Smithers' fingers were trembling and unsteady. Tommy helped him, not
looking through the dimensoscope at all.

"Start the dynamo," he said evenly--and marveled foolishly at the
voice that did not seem to belong to him at all, talking so steadily
and so quietly. "Give me all the juice you've got. We'll cut out this
rheostat."

He was tightening a vise which would hold the deadly little weapon in
place while Smithers got the crude-oil engine going and accelerated it
recklessly to its highest speed. Tommy flung the switch. Rubber
insulation steamed and stank. He pulled the trigger of the little gun
for a single shot. The bullet flew into the first hollow magnet, just
as he had beforehand thrust an iron wire. It vanished. The series of
magnets seemed unharmed.

* * * * *

With a peculiar, dreamlike steadiness, Tommy put his hand where an
undeflected bullet would go through it. He pressed the trigger again.
He felt a tiny breeze upon his hand. But the bullet had been unable to
elude the compound-wound magnets, each of which now had quite four
times the designed voltage impressed upon its coils.

Tommy flung off the switch.

"Work the gun," he ordered harshly. "When I say fire, send a burst of
shots through it. Keep the switch off except when you're actually
firing, so--God willing--the coils don't burn out. Fire!"

He was gazing through the dimensoscope. Evelyn was struggling
helplessly while two Ragged Men held her arms, grinning as only devils
could have grinned, and others squabbled and watched with a fascinated
attention some cryptic process which could only be the drawing of
lots....

Tommy saw, and paid no attention. The machine-gun beside him rasped
suddenly. He saw a tree-fern frond shudder. He saw a gaping, irregular
hole where a fresh frond was uncurling. Tommy put out his hand to the
gun.

"Let me move it, bench and all," he said steadily. "Now try it again.
Just a burst."

* * * * *

Again the gun rasped. And the earth was kicked up suddenly where the
bullets struck in that other world. The little steel-jacketed missiles
were deflected by the terribly overstrained magnets of the catapult,
but their energy was not destroyed. It was merely altered in
direction. Fired within the laboratory upon our own and normal world,
the bullets came out into the world of tree-ferns and monstrous
things. They came out, as it happened, sideways instead of point
first, which was due to some queer effect of dimension change upon an
object moving at high velocity. Because of that, they ricocheted much
more readily, and where they struck they made a much more ghastly
wound. But the first two bursts caused no effect at all. They were not
even noticed by the Ragged Men. The noise of the little gun was
thunderous and snarling in the laboratory, but in the world of the
fifth dimension there was no sound at all.

"Like this," said Tommy steadily. "Just like this.... Now fire!"

He had tilted the muzzle upward. And then with a horrible grim
intensity he traversed the gun as it roared.

And it was butchery. Three Ragged Men were cut literally to bits
before the storm of bullets began to do real damage. The squabbling
group, casting lots for Evelyn, had a swathe of dead men in its midst
before snarls begun had been completed.

"Again," said Tommy coldly. "Again, Smithers, again!"

* * * * *

And again the little gun roared. The burly bearded man clutched at his
throat--and it was a gory horror. A Thing began to run insanely. It
did not even look human any longer. It stumbled over the leader of the
Ragged Men and died as he had done. The bullets came tumbling over
themselves erratically. They swooped and curved and dispersed
themselves crazily. Spinning as they were, at right angles to their
line of flight, their trajectories were incalculable and their impacts
were grisly.

The little gun fired ten several bursts, aimed in a desperate
cold-bloodedness, before the smell of burnt rubber became suddenly
overpowering and the rasping sound of an electric arc broke through
the rumbling of the crude-oil engine in the back.

Smithers sobbed.

"Burnt out!"

But Tommy waved his hand.

"I think," he said savagely, "that maybe a dozen of them got away.
Evelyn's staggering toward her father. She'll turn him loose. That
prisoner's dead, though. Didn't mean to shoot him, but those bullets
flew wild."

He gave Smithers the eye-piece. Sweat was rolling down his forehead in
great drops. His hands were trembling uncontrollably.

He paced shakenly up and down the laboratory, trying to shut out of
his own sight the things he had seen when the bullets of his own
aiming literally splashed into the living flesh of men. He had seen
Ragged Men disemboweled by those spinning, knifelike projectiles. He
had turned a part of the mad world of that other dimension into a
shambles, and he did not regret it because he had saved Evelyn, but he
wanted to shut out the horror of seeing what he had done.

"But now," he said uncertainly to himself, "they're no better off,
except they've got weapons.... If that man from the Golden City hadn't
been killed...."

* * * * *

He was looking at the magnetic catapult, burned out and useless. His
eyes swung suddenly to the other one. Just a little while since he had
made ready a missile to be thrown through into the other world by
that. It contained snapshots, and diagrams, and it was an attempt to
communicate with the men of the Golden City without any knowledge of
their language.

"But--I can communicate with Denham!"

He began to write feverishly. If he had looked out of the laboratory
window, he would have seen Von Holtz running like a deer, waving his
arms jerkily, and--when out of earshot of the laboratory--shouting
loudly. And Von Holtz was carrying a small black box which Tommy would
have identified instantly as a motion picture camera, built for
amateurs but capable of taking pictures indoors and with a
surprisingly small amount of light. And if Tommy had listened, he
might possibly have heard the beginnings of those shoutings to men
hidden in a patch of woodland about a quarter of a mile away. The men,
of course, were Jacaro's, waiting until either Von Holtz had secured
the information that was wanted, or until an assault in force upon the
laboratory would net them a catapult ready for use--to be examined,
photographed, and duplicated at leisure.

But Tommy neither looked nor listened. He wrote feverishly, saying to
Smithers at the dimensoscope:

"Denham'll be looking around to see what killed those men. When he
does, we want to be ready to shoot a smoke-bomb through to him, with a
message attached."

Smithers made a gesture of no especial meaning save that he had heard.
And Tommy went on writing swiftly, saying who he was and what he had
done, and that another globe was being built so that he and Smithers
could come with supplies and arms to help....

"He's lookin'' around now, Mr. Reames," said Smithers quietly. "He's
picked up a ricocheted bullet an' is staring at it."

* * * * *

The crude-oil engine was running at a thunderous rate. Tommy fastened
his note in the little missile he had made ready. He placed it under
the solenoid of the catapult after Denham's design, with the springs
and rings of metallic ammonium. He turned to Smithers.

"I'll watch for him," said Tommy unsteadily. "You know, watch for the
right moment to fling it through. Slow up the generator a little.
It'll rack itself to pieces."

He put his eye to the eye-piece. He winced as he saw again what the
bullets of his aiming had done. But he saw Denham almost at once. And
Denham was scratched and bruised and looked very far indeed from the
ideal of a professor of theoretic physics, with hardly more than a few
shreds of clothing left upon him, and a ten-day's beard upon his face.
He limped as he walked. But he had stopped in the task of gathering up
weapons to show Evelyn excitedly what it was that he had found. A
spent and battered bullet, but indubitably a bullet from the world of
his own ken. He began to stare about him, hopeful yet incredulous.

Tommy took his eye from the dimensoscope just long enough to light the
fuse of the smoke-bomb.

"Here it goes, Smithers!"

He flung the switch. The missile with its thickly smoking fuse leaped
upward as the concentric rings flickered and whirled bewilderingly.
The missile hurt the eyes that watched it. It vanished. The solenoid
dropped to the floor from the broken small contrivance.

Then Tommy's heart stood still as he gazed through the eye-piece
again. He could see nothing but an opaque milkiness. But it drifted
away, and he realised that it was smoke. More, Denham was staring at
it. More yet, he was moving cautiously towards its source, one of the
strange golden weapons held ready....

Denham was investigating.

* * * * *

The generator at the back of the laboratory slowed down. Smithers was
obeying orders. Tommy hung close by the vision instrument, his hands
moving vaguely and helplessly, as one makes gestures without volition
when anxious for someone else to duplicate the movements for which he
sets the example.

He saw Denham, very near, inspecting the smoking thing on the ground
suspiciously. The smoke-fuse ceased to burn. Denham stared. After an
age-long delay, he picked up the missile Tommy had prepared. And Tommy
saw that there was a cord attached to it. He had fastened that cord
when planning to try to communicate with the men of the Golden City,
when he had expected them to be victorious.

But he saw Denham's face light up with pathetic hope. He called to
Evelyn. He hobbled excitedly to her, babbling....

Tommy watched, and his heart pounded suddenly as Evelyn turned and
smiled in the direction in which she knew the dimensoscope must be. A
huge butterfly, its wings a full yard across, fluttered past her head.
Denham talked excitedly to her. A clumsy batlike thing swooped by
overhead. Its shadow blanketed her face for an instant. A running
animal, small and long, ran swiftly in full view from one side of the
dimensoscope's field of vision to the other. Then a snake, curiously
horned, went writhing past....

Denham talked excitedly. He turned and made gestures as of writing,
toward the spot where he had picked up Tommy's message. He began to
search for a charred stick where the Ragged Men had built a fire some
days now past. A fleeing furry thing sped across his feet, running....

* * * * *

Denham looked up. And Evelyn was staring now. She was staring in the
direction of the Golden City. And now what was almost a wave of
animals, all wild and all fleeing, swept across the field of vision of
the dimensoscope. There were gazelles, it seemed--slender-limbed,
graceful animals, at any rate--and there were tiny hoofed things which
might have been eohippi, and then a monstrous armadillo clanked and
rattled past....

Tommy swung the dimensoscope. He gasped. All the animal world was in
flight. The insects had taken to wing. Flying creatures were soaring
upward and streaking through the clear blue sky, and all in the one
direction. And then out of the morass came monstrous shapes;
misshapen, unbelievable reptilian shapes, which fled bellowing
thunderously for the tree-fern forest. They were gigantic, those
things from the morass. They were hideous. They were things out of
nightmares, made into flabby flesh. There were lizards and what might
have been gigantic frogs, save that frogs possess no tails. And there
were long and snaky necks terminating in infinitesimal heads, and vast
palpitating bodies following those impossible small brain-cases, and
long tapering tails that thrashed mightily as the ghastly things fled
bellowing....

And the cause of the mad panic was a slowly moving white curtain of
mist. It was flowing over the marsh, moving with apparent
deliberation, but, as Tommy saw, actually very swiftly. It shimmered
and quivered and moved onward steadily. Its upper surface gleamed with
elusive prismatic colors. It had blotted out the horizon and the
Golden City, and it came onward....

* * * * *

Denham made frantic, despairing gestures toward the dimensoscope. The
thing was coming too fast. There was no time to write. Denham held
high the cord that trailed from the message-bearing missile. He
gesticulated frantically, and raced to the gutted steel globe and
heaved mightily upon it and swung it about so that Tommy saw a great
steel ring set in its side, which had been hidden before. He made more
gestures, urgently, and motioned Evelyn inside.

Tommy struck at his forehead.

"It's poison gas," he muttered. "Revenge for the smashed-up
vehicle.... They knew it by an automatic radio signal, maybe. This is
their way of wiping out the Ragged Men.... Poison gas.... It'll kill
Denham and Evelyn.... He wants me to do something...."

He drew back, staring, straining every nerve to think.... And somehow
his eyes were drawn to the back of the laboratory and he saw Smithers
teetering on his feet, with his hands clasped queerly to his body, and
a strange man standing in the door of the laboratory with an automatic
pistol in his hand. The automatic had a silencer on it, and its
clicking had been drowned out, anyhow, by the roaring of the crude-oil
engine.

The man was small and dark and natty. His lips were drawn back in a
peculiar mirthless grin as Smithers teetered stupidly back and forth
and then fell....

The explosion of Tommy's own revolver astounded him as much as it did
Jacaro's gunman. He did not ever remember drawing it or aiming. The
natty little gunman was blotted out by a spouting mass of white
smoke--and suddenly Tommy knew what it was that Denham wanted him to
do.

* * * * *

There was rope in a loose and untidy coil beneath a work bench. Tommy
sprang to it in a queer, nightmarish activity. He knew what was
happening, of course. Von Holtz had seen the magnetic catapult at
work. That couldn't be destroyed or its workings hidden like the ring
catapult of Denham's design. He'd gone out to call in Jacaro's men.
And they'd shot down Smithers as a cold-blooded preliminary to the
seizure of the instrument Jacaro wanted.

It was necessary to defend the laboratory. But Tommy could not spare
the time. That white mist was moving upon Evelyn and her father, in
that other world. It was death, as the terror of the wild things
demonstrated. They had to be helped....

He knotted the rope to the end of the cord that vanished curiously
somewhere among the useless mass of rings. He tugged at the cord--and
it was tugged in return. Denham, in another world, had felt his signal
and had replied to it....

A window smashed suddenly and a bullet missed Tommy's neck by inches.
He fired at that window, and absorbedly guided the knot of the rope
past its vanishing point. The knot ceased to exist and the rope crept
onward--and suddenly moved more and more swiftly to a place where
abruptly it was not. For the length of half an inch, the rope hurt the
eyes that looked at it. Beyond that it was not possible to see it at
all.

Tommy leaped up. He plunged ahead of two separate spurts of shots from
two separate windows. The shots pierced the place where he had been.
He was racing for the crude-oil engine. There was a chain wound upon a
drum, there, and a clutch attached the drum to the engine.

He stopped and seized the repeating shotgun Smithers had brought as
his own weapon against Jacaro's gangsters. He sent four loads of
buckshot at the windows of the laboratory. A man yelled.

And Tommy had dropped the gun to knot the rope to the chain,
desperately, fiercely, in a terrible haste.

* * * * *

The chain began to pay out to that peculiar vanishing point which was
here an entry-way to another world--perhaps another universe.

A bullet nicked his ribs. He picked up the gun and fired it nearly at
random. He saw Smithers moving feebly, and Tommy had a vast compassion
for Smithers, but-- He shuddered suddenly. Something had struck him a
heavy blow in the shoulder. And something else battered at his leg.
There was no sound that could be heard above the thunder of the
crude-oil motor, but Tommy, was queerly aware of buzzing things flying
about him, and of something very warm flowing down his body and down
his leg. And he felt very dizzy and weak and extremely tired.... He
could not see clearly, either.

But he had to wait until Denham had the chain fast to the globe. That
was the way he had intended to come back, of course. The ring was in
the globe, and this chain was in the laboratory to haul the globe back
from wherever it had been sent. And Von Holtz had disconnected it
before sending away the globe with Denham in it. If the chain remained
unbroken, of course it could be hauled in, as it would turn all
necessary angles and force the globe to follow those angles, whatever
they might be....

Tommy was on his hands and knees, and men were saying savagely:

"Where's that thing, hey? Where's th' thing Jacaro wants?"

He wanted to tell them that they should say if the chain had stopped
moving to a place where it ceased to exist, so that he could throw a
clutch and bring Denham and his daughter back from the place where Von
Holtz had marooned them when he wanted to steal Denham's secret. Tommy
wanted to explain that. But the floor struck him in the face, and
something said to him:

"They've shot you."

* * * * *

But it did not seem to matter, somehow, and he lay very still until he
felt himself strangling, and he was breathing in strong ammonia which
made his eyes smart and his tired lungs gasp.

Then he saw flames, and heard a motor car roaring away from close by
the laboratory.

"They've stolen the catapult and set fire to the place," he remembered
dizzily, "and now they're skipping out...."

Even that did not seem to matter. But then he heard the chain clank,
next to him on the floor. The white mist! Denham and Evelyn waiting
for the white mist to reach them, and Denham jerking desperately on
the chain to signal that he was ready....

The flames had released ammonia from the metal Von Holtz had made.
That had roused Tommy. But it did not give him strength. It is
impossible to say where Tommy's strength came from, when somehow he
crawled to the clutch lever, with the engine roaring steadily above
him, and got one hand on the lever, and edged himself up, and up, and
up, until he could swing his whole weight on that lever. That instant
of dangling hurt excruciatingly, too, and Tommy saw only that the drum
began to revolve swiftly, winding the chain upon it, before his grip
gave way.

And the chain came winding in and in from nowhere, and the tall
laboratory filled more and more thickly with smoke, and lurid flames
appeared somewhere, and a rushing sound began to be audible as the
fire roared upward to the inflammable roof, and the engine ran
thunderously....

* * * * *

Then, suddenly, there was a shape in the middle of the laboratory
floor. A huge globular shape which it hurt the eyes to look upon. It
became visible out of nowhere as if evoked by magic amid the flames of
hell. But it came, and was solid and substantial, and it slid along
the floor upon small wheels until it wound up with a crash against the
winding drum, and the chain shrieked as it tightened unbearably--and
the engine choked and died.

Then a door opened in the monstrous globe. Two figures leaped out,
aghast. Two ragged, tattered, strangely-armed figures, who cried out
to each other and started for the door. But the girl stumbled over
Tommy and called, choking, to her father. Groping toward her, he found
Smithers. And then Tommy smiled drowsily to himself as soft arms
tugged bravely at him, and a slender, glorious figure staggered with
him to fresh air.

"It's Von Holtz," snapped Denham, and coughed as he fought his way to
the open. "I'll blast him to hell with these things we brought
back...."

* * * * *

That was the last thing Tommy knew until he woke up in bed with a
feeling of many bandages and an impression that his lungs hurt.

Denham seemed to have heard him move. He looked in the door.

"Hullo, Reames. You're all right now."

Tommy regarded him curiously until he realized. Denham was shaved and
fully clothed. That was the strangeness about him. Tommy had been
watching him for many days as his clothing swiftly deteriorated and
his beard grew.

"You are, too, I see," he said weakly. "I'm damned glad." Then he felt
foolish, and querulous, and as if he should make some apology, and
instead said, "But five dimensions does seem extreme. Three is enough
for ordinary use, and four is luxurious. Five seems to be going a bit
too far."

Denham blinked, and then grinned suddenly. Tommy had admired the man
who could face so extraordinary a situation with such dogged courage,
and now he found, suddenly, that he liked Denham.

"Not too far," said Denham grimly. "Look!" He held up one of the
weapons Tommy had seen in that other world, one of the golden-colored
truncheons. "I brought this back. The same metal they built that wagon
of theirs with. All their weapons. Most of their tools--as I know.
It's gold, man! They use gold in that world as we use steel here.
That's why Jacaro was ready to kill to get the secret of getting
there. Von Holtz enlisted him."

"How did you know--" began Tommy weakly.

"Smithers," said Denham. "We dragged both of you out before the lab
went-up in smoke. He's going to be all right, too. Evelyn's nursing
both of you. She wants to talk to you, but I want to say this first:
You did a damned fine thing, Reames! The only man who could have saved
us, and you just about killed yourself doing it. Smithers saw you
swing that clutch lever with three bullets in your body. And you're a
scientist, too. You're my partner, Reames, in what we do in the fifth
dimension."

* * * * *

Tommy blinked. "But five dimensions does seem extreme...."

"We are the Interdimensional Trading Company," said Denham, smiling.
"Somehow, I think we'll find something in this world we can trade for
the gold in that. And we've got to get there, Reames, because Jacaro
will surely try to make use of that catapult principle you worked out.
He'll raise the devil; and I think the people of that Golden City
would be worth knowing. No, we're partners. Sooner or later, you'll
know how I feel about what you've done. I'm going to bring Evelyn in
here now."

He vanished. An instant later Tommy heard a voice--a girl's voice. His
heart began to pound. Denham came back into the room and with him was
Evelyn. She smiled warmly upon Tommy, though as his eyes fell blankly
upon the smart sport clothes she was again wearing, she flushed.

"My daughter Evelyn," said Denham. "She wants to thank you."

And Tommy felt a warm soft hand pressing his, and he looked deep into
the eyes of the girl he had never before spoken to, but for whom he
had risked his life, and whom he knew he would love forever. There
were a thousand things crowding to his lips for utterance. He had
watched Evelyn, and he loved her--

"H-how do you do?" said Tommy, lamely. "I'm--awfully glad to meet
you."

But before he was well he learned to talk more sensibly.