_The Tube_
The generator rumbled and roared, building up to its maximum speed.
The whole laboratory quivered from its vibration. The dynamo hummed
and whined and the night silence outside seemed to make the noises
within more deafening. Tommy Reames ran his eyes again over the
power-leads to the monstrous, misshapen coils. Professor Denham bent
over one of them, straightened, and nodded. Tommy Reames nodded to
Evelyn, and she threw the heavy multiple-pole switch.
There was a flash of jumping current. The masses of metal on the floor
seemed to leap into ungainly life. The whine of the dynamo rose to a
scream and its brushes streaked blue flame. The metal things on the
floor flicked together and were a tube, three feet and more in
diameter. That tube writhed and twisted. It began to form itself into
an awkward and seemingly impossible shape, while metal surfaces
sliding on each other produced screams that cut through the din of the
motor and dynamo. The writhing tube strained and wriggled. Then there
was a queer, inaudible _snap_ and something gave. A part of the tube
quivered into nothingness. Another part hurt the eyes that looked upon
it.
And then there was the smell of burned insulation and a wire was
arcing somewhere, while thick rubbery smoke arose. A fuse blew out
with a thunderous report, and Tommy Reames leaped to the suddenly
racing motor-generator. The motor died amid gasps and rumblings. And
Tommy Reames looked anxiously at the Fifth-Dimension Tube.
It was important, that Tube. Through it, Tommy Reames and Professor
Denham had reason to believe they could travel to another universe, of
which other men had only dreamed. And it was important in other ways,
too. At the moment Evelyn Denham threw the switch, last-edition
newspapers in Chicago were showing headlines about "King" Jacaro's
forfeiture of two hundred thousand dollars' bail by failing to appear
in court. King Jacaro was a lord of racketeerdom.
While Tommy inspected the Tube anxiously, a certain chief of police in
a small town upstate was telling feverishly over the telephone of a
posse having killed a monster lizard by torchlight, having discovered
it in the act of devouring a cow. The lizard was eight feet high,
walked on its hind legs, and had a collar of solid gold about its
neck. And jewel importers, in New York, were in anxious conference
about a flood of untraced jewels upon the market. Their origin was
unknown. The Fifth-Dimension Tube ultimately affected all of those
affairs, and the Death Mist as well. And--though it was not considered
dangerous then--everybody remembers the Death Mist now.
But at the moment Professor Denham stared at the Tube concernedly, his
daughter Evelyn shivered from pure excitement as she looked at it, and
a red-headed man named Smithers looked impassively from the Tube to
Tommy Reames and back again. He'd done most of the mechanical work on
the Tube's parts, and he was as anxious as the rest. But nobody
thought of the world outside the laboratory.
Professor Denham moved suddenly. He was nearest to the open end of the
Tube. He sniffed curiously and seemed to listen. Within seconds the
others became aware of a new smell in the laboratory. It seemed to
come from the Tube itself, and it was a warm, damp smell that could
only be imagined as coming from a jungle in the tropics. There were
the rich odors of feverishly growing things; the heavy fragrance of
unknown tropic blossoms, and a background of some curious blend of
scents and smells which was alien and luring, and exotic. The whole
was like the smell of another planet of the jungles of a strange world
which men had never trod. And then, definitely coming out of the Tube,
there was a hollow, booming noise.
* * * * *
It had been echoed and re-echoed amid the twistings of the Tube, but
only an animal could have made it. It grew louder, a monstrous roar.
Then yells sounded suddenly above it--human yells, wild yells, insane,
half-gibbering yells of hysterical excitement and blood lust. The
beast-thing bellowed and an ululating chorus of joyous screams arose.
The laboratory reverberated with the thunderous noise. Then there was
the sound of crashing and of paddings, and abruptly the noise was
diminishing as if its source were moving farther away. The beast-thing
roared and bellowed as if in agony, and the yelling noise seemed to
show that men were following close upon its flanks.
Those in the laboratory seemed to awaken as if from a bad dream.
Denham was kneeling before the mouth of the Tube, an automatic rifle
in his hands. Tommy Reames stood grimly before Evelyn. He'd snatched
up a pair of automatic pistols. Smithers clutched a spanner and
watched the mouth of the Tube with a strained attention. Evelyn stood
shivering behind Tommy.
Tommy said with a hint of grim humor:
"I don't think there's any doubt about the Tube having gotten through.
That's the Fifth Dimension planet, all right."
He smiled at Evelyn. She was deathly pale.
"I--remember--hearing noises like that...."
Denham stood up. He painstakingly slipped on the safety of his rifle
and laid it on a bench with the other guns. There was a small arsenal
on a bench at one side of the laboratory. The array looked much more
like arms for in expedition into dangerous territory than a normal
part of apparatus for an experiment in rather abstruse mathematical
physics. There were even gas masks on the bench, and some of those
converted brass Very pistols now used only for discharging tear- and
sternutatory-gas bombs.
"The Tube wasn't seen, anyhow," said Professor Denham briskly. "Who's
going through first?"
Tommy slung a cartridge belt about his waist and a gas mask about his
neck.
"I am," he said shortly. "We'll want to camouflage the mouth of the
Tube. I'll watch a bit before I get out."
He crawled into the mouth of the twisted pipe.
* * * * *
The Tube was nearly three feet across, each section was five feet
long, and there were gigantic solenoids at each end of each section.
It was not an experiment made at random, nor was the world to which it
reached an unknown one to Tommy or to Denham. Months before, Denham
had built an instrument which would bend a ray of light into the Fifth
Dimension and had found that he could fix a telescope to the device
and look into a new and wholly strange cosmos.[1] He had seen
tree-fern jungles and a monstrous red sun, and all the flora and fauna
of a planet in the carboniferous period of development. More, by the
accident of its placing he had seen the towers and the pinnacles of a
city whose walls and towers seemed plated with gold.
[1] "The Fifth-Dimension Catapult"--see the January, 1931,
issue of Astounding Stories.
Having gone so far, he had devised a catapult which literally flung
objects to the surface of that incredible world. Insects, birds, and
at last a cat had made the journey unharmed, and he had built a steel
globe in which to attempt the journey in person. His daughter Evelyn
had demanded to accompany him, and he believed it safe. The trip had
been made in security, but return was another matter. A laboratory
assistant, Von Holtz, had sent them into the Fifth Dimension, only to
betray them. One King Jacaro, lord of Chicago racketeers, was
convinced by him of the existence of the golden city of that other
world, and that it was full of delectable loot. He offered a bribe
past envy for the secret of Denham's apparatus. And Von Holtz had
removed the apparatus for Denham's return before working the catapult
to send him on his strange journey. He wanted to be free to sell full
privileges of rapine and murder to Jacaro.
The result was unexpected. Von Holtz could not unravel the secret of
the catapult he himself had operated. He could not sell the secret for
which he had committed a crime. In desperation he called in Tommy
Reames--rather more than an amateur in mathematical physics--showed
him Evelyn and her father marooned in a tree-fern jungle, and
hypocritically asked for aid.
Tommy's enthusiastic efforts soon became more than merely
enthusiastic. The men of the Golden City remained invisible, but there
were strange, half-mad outlaws of the jungles who hated the city.
Tommy Reames had watched helplessly as they hunted for the occupants
of the steel globe. He had worked frenziedly to achieve a rescue. In
the course of his labor he discovered the treachery of Von Holtz as
well as the secret of the catapult, and with the aid of Smithers--who
had helped to build the original catapult--he made a new small device
to achieve the original end.
* * * * *
The whole affair came to an end on one mad afternoon when the Ragged
Men captured first an inhabitant of the Golden City, and then Denham
and Evelyn in a forlorn attempt at rescue. Tommy Reames went mad. He
used a tiny sub-machine gun upon the Ragged Men through the model
magnetic catapult he had made, and contrived communication with Denham
afterward. Instructed by Denham, he brought about the return of father
and daughter to Earth just before Ragged Men and Earthling alike would
have perished in a vengeful gas cloud from the Golden City. Even then,
though, his triumph was incomplete because Von Holtz had gotten word
to Jacaro, and nattily-dressed gunmen raided the laboratory and made
off with the model catapult, leaving three bullets in Tommy and one in
Smithers as souvenirs.
Now, using the principle developed in the catapult, Tommy and Denham
had built a large Tube, and as Tommy climbed along its corrugated
interior he knew a good part of what he should expect at the other
end. A steady current of air blew past him. It was laden with a myriad
unfamiliar scents. The Tube was a tunnel from one set of dimensions to
another, a permanent way from Earth to a strange, carboniferous-period
planet on which a monstrous dull-red sun shone hotly. Tommy should
come out into a tree-fern forest whose lush vegetation would hide the
sky, and which furnished a lurking place not only for strange
reptilian monsters akin to those of the long-dead past of Earth, but
for the bands of ragged, half-mad human beings who were outlaws from
the civilization of which Denham and Evelyn had seen proofs.
* * * * *
Tommy reached the third bend in the Tube. By now he had lost all sense
of orientation. An object may be bent through one right angle only in
two dimensions, and a second perfect right angle--at ninety degrees to
all former paths--only in three dimensions. It follows that a third
perfect right angle requires four dimensions for existence, and four
perfect right angles five. The Tube bent itself through four perfect
right angles, and since no human-being can ever have experience of
more than three dimensions, plus time, it followed that Tommy was
experiencing other dimensions than those of Earth as soon as he passed
the third bend. In short, he was in another cosmos.
There was a moment of awful sickness as he passed the third bend. He
was hideously dizzy when he passed the fourth. For a time he felt as
if he had no weight at all. But then, quite abruptly, he was climbing
vertically upward and the soughing of tree-fern fronds was loud in his
ears, and suddenly the end of the Tube was under his fingers and he
stared out into the world of the Fifth Dimension.
Now a gentle wind blew in his face. Tree-ferns rose to incredible
heights above his head, and now and again by the movements of their
fronds he caught stray glimpses of unfamiliar stars. There were red
stars, and blue ones, and once he caught sight of a clearly
distinguishable double star, of which each component was visible to
the naked eye. And very, very far away he heard the beastly yellings
he knew must be the outlaws, the Ragged Men, feasting horribly on
half-scorched flesh torn from the quivering, yet-living flanks of a
monstrous reptile.
Something moved, whimpered--and fled suddenly. It sounded like a human
being. And Tommy Reames was struck with the utterly impossible
conviction that he had heard just that sound before. It was not
dangerous, in any case, and he watched, and listened, and presently he
slipped from the mouth of the Tube and by the glow of a flashlight
stripped foliage from nearby growths and piled it about the Tube's
mouth. And then, because the purpose of the Tube was not adventure but
science, he went back down into the laboratory.
* * * * *
The three men, with Evelyn, worked until dawn at the rest of their
preparations for the use of the Tube. All that time the laboratory was
filled with the heavy fragrance of a tree-fern jungle upon an unknown
planet. The heavy, sickly-sweet scents of closed jungle blossoms
filled their nostrils. The reek of feverishly growing green things
saturated the air. A steady wind blew down the Tube, and it bore
innumerable unfamiliar odors into the laboratory. Once a gigantic moth
bumped and blundered into the Tube, and finally crawled heavily out
into the light. It was scaled, and terrible because of its monstrous
size, but it had broken a wing and could not fly. So it crawled with
feverish haste toward a brilliant electric light. Its eyes were
especially horrible because they were not compound like the moths of
Earth. They were single, like those of a man, and were fixed in an
expression of utter, fascinated hypnosis. The thing looked horribly
human with those eyes staring from an insect's head, and Smithers
killed it in a flash of nerve-racked horror. None of them were able to
go on with their work until the thing and its fascinated, staring eyes
had been put out of sight. Then they labored on with the smell of the
jungles of that unnamed planet thick about them, and noises now and
then coming down the Tube. There were roars, and growlings, and once
there was a thin high sound which seemed like the far-distant,
death-startled scream of a man.