_The Tree-Fern Jungle_
Tommy watched Smithers drive away. The sun was sinking low toward the
west, and the car stirred up a cloud of light-encarmined dust as it
sped down the long, narrow lane to the main road. The laboratory had
intentionally been built in an isolated spot, but at the moment Tommy
would have given a good deal for a few men nearby. Smithers was taking
Von Holtz to Albany to add his information to Denham's pleas. Denham
had ordered it, when they reached him by phone after hours of effort.
Smithers had to go, to guard against Von Holtz's escape, even sick and
ill as he was. And Evelyn had refused to go with him.
"If I stay in the laboratory," she insisted fiercely, "you can slip
down and I can blow up the Tube after you, if the Ragged Men don't
stay away. But by yourself...."
Tommy did not consent, but he was helpless. There was danger from the
Tube. Not only from ghastly animals which might come through, but from
men. Smithers had fought the Ragged Men above it. He had chased them
off, but they would come back. Perhaps they would come very soon,
perhaps not until Denham and Smithers had returned. If they could be
held off, the as yet unknown dangers from the other Tube--of which
only the lizards and the Death Mist were certainties--might be
counteracted. In any case, the Tube must not be destroyed until its
defense was hopeless.
Tommy made up a grim bundle to go through the Tube with him: the
sub-machine gun, extra drums of shells, more gas bombs and half a
dozen grenades. He hung the various objects about himself. Evelyn
watched him miserably.
"You--you'll be careful, Tommy?"
"Nothing else but," said Tommy. He grinned reassuringly. "There's
nothing to it, really. Just sitting still, listening. If I pop off
some fireworks I'll just have to sit down and watch them run."
* * * * *
He settled his gas mask about his neck and started to enter the Tube.
Evelyn touched his arm.
"I'm--frightened, Tommy."
"Shucks!" said Tommy. "Also a couple of tut-tuts." He stood up, put
his arms about her, and kissed her until she smiled. "Feel better
now?" he asked interestedly.
"Y-yes...."
"Fine!" said Tommy, and grinned again. "When you feel scared again,
ring me on the phone and I'll give you another treatment."
But her smile faded as, beaming at her, he crawled into the first
section of the Tube. And his own expression grew serious enough when
she could see him no longer. The situation was not comfortable. Evelyn
intended to marry him and he had to keep her cheerful, but he wished
she were well away from here.
He tried to move cautiously through the Tube, but his bundles bumped
and rattled. It seemed hours before he was climbing up the last
section into the tree-fern jungle. He was caution itself as he peered
over the edge. It was already night upon Earth, but here the
monstrous, dull-red sun was barely sinking. It moved slowly along the
horizon as it dipped, but presently a gray cast come over the
colorings in the forest. Flying things came clattering homeward
through the masses of fern-fronds overhead. He saw a projectile-like
thing with a lizard's head and jaws go darting through an incredibly
small opening. It seemed to have no wings at all. But then, in one
instant, a vast wing-surface flashed out, made a single gigantic
flap--and the thing was a projectile again, darting through a
_cheraux-de-frise_ of interlaced fronds without a sign of wings to
support it.
* * * * *
Tommy inspected his surroundings with an infinite care. As the
darkness deepened he meditatively taped a flashlight below the barrel
of the sub-machine gun. Turned on, it would cast a pitiless light upon
his target, and the sights would be silhouetted against the thing to
be killed. He hung his grenades in a handy row just inside the mouth
of the Tube and set his gas bombs conveniently in place, then settled
down to watch.
It was assuredly necessary. Von Holtz's story confirmed his own and
Denham's guesses and made their worst fears seem optimistic. Von Holtz
had made a Tube for Jacaro, working from the model of Tommy's own
construction. It had been completed nearly a month before. But no
jungle odors had seeped through that other Tube on its completion. It
opened in a sub-cellar of a structure in the Golden City itself, the
city of towers and soaring spires Denham had glimpsed long months
before. By sheer fortune it opened upon a rarely used storeroom where
improbable small animals--the equivalent of rats--played obscenely in
the light of ever-glowing panels in the wall.
For two days of the Fifth-Dimension world Jacaro and his gunmen lay
quiet. During two nights they made infinitely cautious reconnaissance.
The second night it was necessary to kill two men who sighted the tiny
exploring party. But the killing was done with silenced automatics,
and there was no alarm. The third night they lay still, fearing an
ambush. The fourth night Jacaro struck.
* * * * *
He and his men fled back to their Tube with plunder and precious gems.
Their loot was vast even beyond their hopes, though they had killed
other men in gathering it. The Golden City was rich beyond belief. The
very crust of the Fifth-Dimension world seemed to be composed of other
substances than those of Earth. The common metals of Earth were rare
or even unknown. The rarer metals of Earth were the commonplace ones
in the Golden City. Even the roofs seemed plated with gold, but
Jacaro's gunmen saw not one particle of iron save in a ring they took
from a dead man's finger. There, an acid-etched plate of steel was set
as if to be used for a signet.
Von Holtz had accompanied the raiders perforce on every journey.
Jeweled bearings for motors; objects of commonest use, made of gold
beat thin for lightness; huge ingots of silver for industry; once a
queer-shaped spool of platinum wire that it took two men to
carry--these things made up the loot they scurried back to their
rathole with. Five raids they made, and twenty men they shot down
before they came upon disaster. On the sixth raid an outcry rose and
an ambush fell upon them.
Flashes of incredibly vivid actinic flame leaped from queer engines
that opened upon them. Curious small truncheonlike weapons spat
paralyzing electric shocks upon them. The twelve gangsters fought with
the desperation of cornered rats, with notched and explosive bullets
and with streams of lead from tommy-guns.
* * * * *
A chance bullet blew something up. One of the flame weapons flew to
bits, spouting what seemed to be liquid thermit upon friend and foe
alike. The way of the gangsters back to their Tube was barred. The
route they knew was a chaos of scorched bodies and melting metal. The
thermit flowed in all directions, seeming to grow in volume as it
flamed. Jacaro and his gangsters fled. They broke through the shaken
remnants of the ambush. The six of them who survived the fighting
found a man somnolently driving a ground vehicle with two wheels. They
burst upon him and, with their scared faces constituting threats in
themselves, forced him to drive them out of the Golden City. They fled
along aluminum roads into the tree-fern forests, while the sky behind
them seemed to flame as the city woke to the tumult in its ways.
They killed the driver of their vehicle when he refused to take them
farther, and it was that murder which saved their lives. It was seen
by Ragged Men, the outlaws of the jungle, and it proved their enmity
to the Golden City. The Ragged Men greeted them joyously and fed them,
and enlisted their aid in a savage attack on a land-convoy on the way
to the city. Their weapons carried the convoy, and they watched
wounded prisoners killed with excruciating tortures....
They were with the Ragged Men now, Von Holtz believed. He had fled a
week or more before, when Jacaro--already learning the language of his
half-mad allies--began to plan a grandiose attack upon the Golden
City. Von Holtz was born a coward, and he knew where Tommy Reames and
Denham would shortly thrust a Tube through. It would come out just
where the catapult had flung Evelyn and Denham, months before, the
same spot where he had marooned them. He searched desperately for that
Tube, and failed to find it. He was chased by carnivores, scratched by
thorns, and at last pursued by a yelling horde of human devils who
were fired into by Smithers from the mouth of the just-finished Tube.
* * * * *
Tommy debated the story grimly as he stood guard in the Tube in the
humid jungle night. Many-colored stars winked fitfully through the
thatch of giant ferns overhead. The wind soughed unsteadily above the
jungle. There were queer creakings, and once or twice there were
distant cries, and when the wind died down there was a deep-toned
croaking audible somewhere which sounded rather like the croaking of
unthinkably, monstrous frogs. But it could not be that, of course. And
once there was the sound of dainty movement and something passed
nearby. Tommy Reames saw the shadowy outline of a bulk so vast that it
turned him cold to think about it, and it did not seem fair for any
creature as huge as that to move so quietly.
Then there was a little scuffling noise beneath him. A hand touched
his foot.
"It's--it's me, Tommy." Evelyn crowded up beside him and whispered
shakenly: "It--it was so lonesome down there, so quiet."
Tommy frowned unhappily in the darkness. If he sent her back, she
would know it was because he knew danger lurked here. Then she would
worry. If he did not send her back....
"I'll go back the minute you tell me," she insisted forlornly.
"Honestly. But--I was lonesome."
Tommy slipped his arm about her.
"Woman," he said sternly. "I'm going to let you stay ten minutes, so
you can brag to our grandchildren that you were the first Earth-girl
ever to be kissed in the Fifth Dimension. But I want you down in the
laboratory so you won't be in my way if I start running!"
His tone was the right one. She even laughed a little, softly, as he
pressed her to him. Then she clung to his hand and tried eagerly to
pierce the darkness all about them.
"You'll be able to see something presently," he assured her in a low
tone. "Just keep quiet, now."
* * * * *
She gazed up at the stars, then around in the so-nearly complete
obscurity. Tommy answered her comments abstractedly, after a little.
He was not quite sure that certain irregular sounds, yet far distant,
were not actually quite regular ones. The Ragged Men Smithers had shot
into had run away. But they would come back and they might come with
Jacaro and his gunmen as allies. If those distant sounds were men....
She withdrew her hand from his. Her back was toward him then, as she
tried to pierce the darkness with her eyes. Tommy listened uneasily to
the distant sound. Suddenly he felt Evelyn bump against his shoulder.
He turned sharply--and she was out of the Tube! She was walking
steadily off into the darkness!
"Evelyn! Evelyn!"
She did not falter or turn. He switched on the flashlight beneath his
gun barrel and leaped out of the Tube himself. The light swept about.
Evelyn's lithe figure kept moving away from him. Then his heart stood
still. There were eyes beyond her in the darkness, huge, monstrous,
steady eyes, half a yard apart in a head like something out of hell.
And he could not fire because Evelyn was between the Thing and
himself. Its eyes glowed unholily--fascinating, hypnotic, insane....
* * * * *
Evelyn swayed ... and the Thing moved! Tommy leaped like a madman
shouting. As his feet struck the ground a mass of sold-seeming fungus
gave way beneath him. He fell sprawling, but clutching the gun fast.
The spreading beam of the flashlight showed him Evelyn turning, her
face filled with a wakening horror--the horror of one released from
the fascination of a snake. She screamed his name.
Then a huge lizard paw swept forward and seized her body. A second
gripped her as she screamed again. And Tommy Reames was deathly,
terribly cool. The whole thing had happened in seconds only. He was
submerged in slimy, sticky ooze which was the crushed fungus that had
tripped him. But he cleared the gun. The flashlight limned a ghastly,
obscenely fat body and a long tapering tail. Tommy aimed at the base
of that tail and pulled the trigger, praying frenziedly.
A stream of flame leaped from the gun-muzzle. Explosive bullets
uttered their queer cracking noise. The thing screamed horribly. Its
cry was hoarsely shrill. The flashlight showed it swinging ponderously
about, with Evelyn held fast against its body in a fashion horribly
reminiscent of a child holding a doll.
Tommy was scrambling upright. Jaws clamped, cold horror filling him,
he aimed again, at the sharp-toothed head above Evelyn's body. He
could not try a heart shot with her in the way. Again the gun spat out
a burst of explosive lead. And Tommy should have been sickened by the
effect of detonating missiles. The thing's lower jaw was shattered,
half severed, made useless. It should have been killed a dozen times
over.
But it screamed again until the jungle rang with the uproar, and then
it fled, still screaming and still holding Evelyn clutched fast
against its scaly breast.