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+Project Gutenberg's The Fifth-Dimension Tube, by William Fitzgerald Jenkins
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Fifth-Dimension Tube
+
+Author: William Fitzgerald Jenkins
+
+Release Date: November 6, 2009 [EBook #30408]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIFTH-DIMENSION TUBE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Barbara Tozier and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+This etext was produced from Astounding Stories January 1933. 
+Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. 
+copyright on this publication was renewed. 
+
+
+
+
+A Sequel to "The Fifth-Dimension Catapult"
+
+[Illustration: _Evelyn swayed ... and the Thing moved!_]
+
+        By way of Professor Denham's Tube, Tommy and Evelyn invade
+        the inimical Fifth-Dimensional world of golden cities and
+        tree-fern jungles and Ragged Men.
+
+
+
+
+The Fifth-Dimension Tube
+
+_A Complete Novelette_
+
+By Murray Leinster
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+_The Tube_
+
+
+The generator rumbled and roared, building up to its maximum speed.
+The whole laboratory quivered from its vibration. The dynamo hummed
+and whined and the night silence outside seemed to make the noises
+within more deafening. Tommy Reames ran his eyes again over the
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+_The Death Mist_
+
+
+Tommy Reames saw the red sun rise while he was on guard at the mouth
+of the Tube. The tree-ferns above him came into view as vague gray
+outlines. The many-colored stars grew pale. And presently a bit of
+crimson light peeped through the jungle somewhere. It moved along the
+horizon and very slowly grew higher. For a moment, Tommy saw the huge,
+dull-red ball that was the sun of this alien planet. Queer mosses took
+form and color in the daylight, displaying colors never seen on Earth.
+He saw flying things dart among the tree-fern fronds, and some were
+scaled and some were not, but none of them were feathered.
+
+Then a tiny buzzing noise. The telephone that now rested below the lip
+of the Tube was being used from the laboratory.
+
+"Smithers will relieve you," said Denham's voice in the receiver.
+"Come on down. We're not the only people experimenting with the Fifth
+Dimension. Jacaro's been working, and all hell's loose!"
+
+Tommy slid down the Tube in an instant. The four right-angled turns
+made him sick and dizzy again, but he came out with his jaw set
+grimly. There was good reason for Tommy's interest in Jacaro. Besides
+sides three bullet wounds, Tommy owed Jacaro something for stealing
+the first model Tube.
+
+He emerged in the laboratory on his hands and knees as the size of the
+Tube made necessary. Smithers smiled placidly at him and crawled in to
+take his place.
+
+"What the devil happened?" demanded Tommy.
+
+Denham was bitter. He held a newspaper before him. Evelyn had brought
+coffee and the morning paper to the laboratory. She seemed rather
+pale.
+
+"Jacaro's gotten through too!" snapped Denham. "He's gotten in a pack
+of trouble. And he's loosed the devil on Earth. Here--look!" He jabbed
+his finger at one headline. "And here--and here!" He thrust at others.
+"Here's proof."
+
+The first headline read: "KING JACARO FORFEITS BOND." Smaller headings
+beneath it read: "Racketeer Missing for Income Tax Trial. $200,000
+Bail Forfeited." The second headline was in smaller type: "Monster
+Lizard Killed! Giant Meat Eater Brought Down by Rifleman. Akin to
+Ancient Dinosaurs, Say Scientists."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Jacaro's missing," said Denham harshly. "This article says he's
+vanished, and with him a dozen of his most prominent gunmen. You know
+he had a model catapult to duplicate--the one he got from you. Von
+Holtz could arrange the construction of a big Tube for him. And he
+knew about the Golden City. Look!"
+
+His finger, trembling, tapped on the flashlight picture of the giant
+lizard of which the story told. And it was a giant. A rope had upheld
+a colossal, leering, reptilian head while men with rifles posed
+self-consciously beside the dead creature. It was as big as a horse,
+and at first glance its kinship to the extinct dinosaurs of Earth was
+plain. Huge teeth in sharklike rows. A long, trailing tail. But there
+was a collar about the beast-thing's neck.
+
+"It had killed and was devouring a cow when they shot it," said Denham
+bitterly. "There've been reports of these creatures for days--so the
+news story says. They weren't printed because nobody believed them.
+But there are a couple of people missing. A searching party was
+hunting for them. They found this!"
+
+Tommy Reames stared at the picture. His face went grimmer still. He
+thought of sounds he had heard beyond the Tube, not long since.
+
+"There's no question where they came from. The Fifth Dimension. But if
+Jacaro brought them back, he's a fool."
+
+"Jacaro's missing," said Denham savagely. "Don't you understand? He
+could get through to the Golden City. These beast-things are proof
+somebody did. And these things came down the Tube that somebody
+travelled through. Jacaro wouldn't send them, but somebody did.
+They've got collars around their necks! Who sent them? And why?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tommy's eyes narrowed.
+
+"If civilized men found the mouth of a Tube, it would seem like the
+mouth of an artificial tunnel or a cave--"
+
+"And if annoying vermin, like Jacaro's gunmen"--Denham's voice was
+brittle--"had come out of it, why, intelligent men might send
+something living and deadly down it, as men on Earth will send ferrets
+down a rat-hole! To wipe out the breed! That's what's happened!
+Jacaro's gone through and attacked the Golden City. They've found his
+Tube. And they've sent these things down...."
+
+"If _we_ found rats coming from a rat-hole," said Tommy very quietly,
+"and ferrets went down and didn't come up, we'd gas them."
+
+"And so," Denham told him, "so would the Golden City."
+
+He pointed to a boxed double paragraph news story under leaded
+twenty-point headline: "Poisonous Fog Kills Wild Life."
+
+The story was not alarming. It said merely that state game wardens had
+found numerous dead game animals in a thinly-settled district near
+Coltsville, N.Y., and on investigation had found a bank of mist, all
+of half a mile across, which seemed to have caused the trouble. State
+chemists and biologists were investigating the phenomenon. Curiously,
+the bank of mist seemed not to dissipate in a normal fashion. Samples
+of the fog were being analyzed. It was probably akin to the Belgian
+fogs which on several occasions had caused much loss of life. The mist
+was especially interesting because in sunlight it displayed prismatic
+colorings. State troopers were warning the inhabitants of the
+neighborhood.
+
+"The gassing's started," said Denham savagely. "I know a gas that
+shows rainbow colors. The Golden City uses it. So we've got to find
+Jacaro's Tube and seal it, or only God knows what will come out of it
+next. I'm going off, Tommy. You and Smithers guard our Tube. Blow it
+up, if necessary. It's dangerous. I'll get some authority in Albany,
+and we'll find Jacaro's Tube and blast it shut."
+
+Tommy nodded, his eyes keen and thoughtful. Denham hurried out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Minutes later, only, they heard the roar of a car motor going down the
+long lane away from the laboratory. Evelyn tried to smile at Tommy.
+
+"It seems terrible, dangerous."
+
+Tommy considered and shrugged.
+
+"This news is old," he observed. "This paper was printed last night. I
+think I'll make a couple of long-distance calls. If the Golden City's
+had trouble with Jacaro, it's going to make things bad for us."
+
+He swept his eyes about and frowningly loaded a light rifle. He put it
+convenient to Evelyn's hand and made for the dwelling-house and the
+telephone. It was odd that as he emerged into the open air, the
+familiar smells of Earth struck his nostrils as strange and
+unaccustomed. The laboratory was redolent of the tree-fern forest into
+which the Tube extended. And Smithers was watching amid those dank,
+incredible carboniferous-period growths now.
+
+Tommy put through calls, seeing all his and Denham's plans for a
+peaceful exploration party and amicable contact with the civilization
+of that other planet, utterly shattered by presumed outrages by
+Jacaro. He made call after call, and his demands for information grew
+more urgent as he got closer to the source of trouble. His cause for
+worry was verified long before he had finished. Even as he made the
+first call, New York newspapers had crowded a second-grade murder off
+their front pages to make room for the white mist upstate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The early-morning editions had termed it a "poisonous fog." The
+breakfast editions spoke of it as a "poison fog." But it grew and
+moved and by the time Tommy had a clear line to get actual information
+about it, a tabloid had christened it the "Death Mist" and there were
+three chartered planes circling about it for the benefit of their
+newspapers. State troopers were being reinforced. At ten o'clock it
+was necessary to post extra traffic police to take care of the cars
+headed upstate to look at the mystery. At eleven it began to move!
+Sluggishly, to be sure, and rather raggedly, but it undoubtedly moved,
+and as undoubtedly it moved independently of the wind.
+
+It was at twelve-thirty that the first casualty occurred. Before that
+time, the police had frantically demanded that the flood of sightseers
+be stopped. The Death Mist covered a square mile or more. It clung to
+the ground, nowhere more than fifty or sixty feet high, and glittered
+with all the colors of the rainbow. It moved with a velocity of
+anywhere from ten to twenty miles an hour. In its path were a myriad
+small tragedies--nesting birds stiff and still, and rabbits and other
+small furry bodies contorted in queer agonized postures. But until
+twelve-thirty no human beings were known to be its victims.
+
+Then, though, it was moving blindly across the wind with a thin
+trailing edge behind it and a rolling billow of descending mist as its
+forefront. It rolled up to and across a concrete highway, watched by
+perspiring motor cops who had performed miracles in clearing a path
+for it among the horde of sightseeing cars. It swept on into a
+spindling pine wood. Behind it lay a thinning sheet of vapor--thick
+white mist which seemed to rise and move more swiftly to overtake the
+main body. It lay across the highway in a sheet which was ten feet
+deep, then thinned to six, to three....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The mist was no more than a foot thick, when a party of motorists
+essayed to drive through it as through a sheet of water. They dodged a
+swearing motorcycle cop and, yelling hilariously, plunged forward. It
+happened that they had not more than a hundred yards to go, so the
+whole thing was plainly seen.
+
+The car was ten yards across the sheet of mist before the effect of
+its motion was apparent. Then the mist, torn by the car-eddy, swirled
+madly in their wake. The motorists yelled delightedly. There is a
+picture extant, taken at just this moment. It shows the driver with a
+foolish grin on his face, clutching the wheel and very obviously
+stepping on the accelerator. A pandemonium of triumphant, hilarious
+shouting--and then a very sudden silence.
+
+The car roared on. The road curved slightly. The car did not. It went
+off the road, turned over, and its engine shrieked itself into
+silence. The Death Mist went on, draining from the roadway to follow
+the tall, prismatically-colored cloud. It moved swiftly and blindly.
+To the circling planes above it, it seemed like a blind thing
+imagining itself confined, and searching for the edges of its prison.
+It gave an uncanny impression of being directed by intelligence. But
+the Death Mist, itself, was not alive.
+
+Neither were the occupants of the motor car.
+
+When Tommy got back to the laboratory after his last call for news, he
+found Evelyn in the act of starting to fetch him.
+
+"Smithers called," she said uneasily. "He says something's moving
+about--" The buzzer of the telephone was humming stridently. Tommy
+answered quickly.
+
+"Just want you handy," said Smithers' calm voice. "I might have to
+duck. Some Ragged Men are chasin' something. Get set, will ya?"
+
+"Ready for anything," Tommy assured him.
+
+Then he made it true: rifles handy, a sub-machine gun, grenades, gas
+masks. He handed one to Evelyn. Smithers had one already. Then Tommy
+waited, grimly ready by the Tube-mouth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The warm, scent-laden breeze blew upon him. Straining his ears, he
+could hear the sound of tree-fern fronds clashing in the wind. He
+heard the louder sounds made by Smithers, stirring ever so slightly in
+the Tube. And then he caught a vague, distant uproar. It would have
+been faint and confused at best but the Tube was partly blocked by
+Smithers' body, and there were the multiple bends further to
+complicate the echoes. It was no more than a formless tumult through
+which faint yells came occasionally. It drew nearer and nearer. Tommy
+heard Smithers stir suddenly, almost as if he had jumped. Then there
+were scrapings which could only mean one thing: Smithers was climbing
+out of the Tube into the jungle of the Fifth-Dimension world.
+
+The noise rose abruptly to a roar as the muffling effect of Smithers'
+body was removed. The yells were sharp and savage and half mad. There
+was a sudden crackling sound and a voice screamed:
+
+"_Gott!_"
+
+The hair rose at the back of Tommy's neck. Then there came the
+deafening report of an automatic pistol roaring itself empty above the
+end of the Tube. Smithers' voice, vastly calm:
+
+"It's a'right, Mr. Reames. Don't worry."
+
+A second pistol took up the fusillade. Yells and howls and screams
+arose. Men fled. Something came crashing to the mouth of the Tube.
+Smithers' voice again, with purring note in it: "Get down there. I'll
+hold 'em off." Then single deliberately spaced shots, while something
+came stumbling, fumbling, squirming down through the Tube, so filling
+it that Smithers' shooting was muted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then came the subtly different explosions of the Very pistols,
+discharging gas bombs. And Tommy drew back, his jaw set, and he stood
+with his weapons very ready indeed, and a scratched, bleeding,
+exhausted, panting, terror-stricken human being in the tattered
+costume of Earth crawled from the Tube and groveled on the floor
+before him.
+
+Evelyn gave a little exclamation, partly of disgust and partly of
+horror. Because this man, who had had come from the world of the Fifth
+Dimension, was wholly familiar. He was tall, and he was lean,
+emaciated now; he wept sobbingly behind thick-lensed spectacles, and
+his lips were far too full and red. His name was Von Holtz; he had
+once been laboratory assistant to Professor Denham, and he had
+betrayed Evelyn and her father to the most ghastly of possible fates
+for a bribe offered him by Jacaro. Now he groveled. He was horrible to
+look at. Where he was not scratched and torn his flesh was reddened as
+if by fire. He was exhausted, and trembling with an awful terror, and
+he gasped out abject, placatory ejaculations and suddenly collapsed
+into a sobbing mass on the floor.
+
+Smithers emerged from the Tube with a look of unpleasant satisfaction
+on his face.
+
+"I chased off the Ragged Men with sneeze gas," he observed with a vast
+calmness. "They ain't comin' back for a while. An' I always wanted to
+break this guy's neck. I think I'll do it now."
+
+"Not till I've questioned him," said Tommy savagely. "He and Jacaro
+have started hell to popping, with that Tube design they stole from
+me. He's got to stay alive and tell us how to stop it. Von Holtz,
+talk! And talk quick, or back you go through the Tube for the Ragged
+Men to work on!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+_The Tree-Fern Jungle_
+
+
+Tommy watched Smithers drive away. The sun was sinking low toward the
+west, and the car stirred up a cloud of light-encarmined dust as it
+sped down the long, narrow lane to the main road. The laboratory had
+intentionally been built in an isolated spot, but at the moment Tommy
+would have given a good deal for a few men nearby. Smithers was taking
+Von Holtz to Albany to add his information to 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+_The Fifth-Dimension World_
+
+
+Tommy flung himself in pursuit, despairing. Evelyn cried out once more
+as the lumbering thing fled with her, giving utterance to shrieking
+outcries at which the tree-fern jungle shook. It leaped once, upon
+monstrous hind legs, but came crashing heavily to the ground. Tommy's
+explosive bullets had shattered the bones which supported the
+balancing tail. Now that huge fleshy member dragged uselessly. The
+thing could not progress in its normal fashion of leaps covering many
+yards. It began to waddle clumsily, shrieking, with Evelyn clasped
+close. Its jaw was a shattered horror. It went marching insanely
+through the blackness of the jungle, and with it went the unholy din
+of its anguish, and behind it Tommy Reames came flinging himself
+frenziedly in pursuit.
+
+Normally, the thing should have distanced him in seconds. Even
+crippled as it was, it moved swiftly. The scaly, duck-shaped head
+reared a good twenty feet above the fallen tree-fern fronds which
+carpeted the jungle. The monstrous splayed feet stretched a good yard
+and a half from front to rear upon the ground. Even its waddling
+footprints were yards apart, and it moved in terror.
+
+Tommy tripped, fell, and got to his feet again, and the shrieking
+tumult was farther away. He raced madly toward the sound, the
+flashlight beam cutting swordlike through the blackness. He caught
+sight of the warty, scaly bulk of the monster at the extreme limit of
+the rays. It was moving faster than he could travel. He sobbed
+helpless curses at the thing and put forth superhuman exertions. He
+leaped fallen tree-fern trunks, he splashed through shallow
+ponds--later, when he knew something of the inhabitants of such pools,
+Tommy would turn cold at that memory--and raced on, gasping for breath
+while the shrieking of the thing that bore Evelyn grew more and more
+distant.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In five minutes he was almost strangling and the thing was half a mile
+ahead of him. In ten, he was exhausted, and the shrieking noise it
+made as it waddled away was distinctly fainter. In fifteen minutes he
+only heard its hooting scream between the harsh laboring rasps of his
+own breath as he drew it into tortured lungs. But he ran on. He leaped
+and climbed and ran in a terrible obliviousness to all dangers the
+jungle might hold.
+
+He leaped down from one toppled tree-trunk upon what seemed be
+another. But the thing he landed upon gave beneath his boots in the
+unmistakable fashion of yielding flesh. Something vast and angry
+stirred and hissed furiously. Something--a head, perhaps--whipped
+toward him among the fallen fern-fronds. But he was racing on,
+sobbing, cursing, praying all at once.
+
+Then suddenly he broke out into a profuse sweat. His breathing became
+easier, and then he was running lightly. His second wind had come to
+him. He was no longer exhausted. He felt as if he could run forever,
+and ran on more swiftly still. Suddenly the flashlight beam showed him
+a deep furrow in the rotting vegetation underfoot, and something
+glistened. A musky reek filled his nostrils. The thing's trail--the
+furrow left by its dragging tail! That musky reek was the thing's
+blood. It was bleeding from the wounds the explosive bullets had made.
+It was spouting whatever filthy fluid ran in its veins even as it
+waddled onward, screaming.
+
+Five minutes more, and he felt that he was gaining on it. Then, and he
+was sure of it. But it was half an hour before he actually overtook
+the injured monster marching like a mad machine. Its mutilated
+ducklike head held high, its colossal feet lifting one after the other
+in a heavy, slowing waddle, and its hoarse screams re-echoing in a
+senseless uproar of agony.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tommy's hands were shaking, but his brain was cool with a vast
+coolness. He raced past the shrieking monster, and halted in its path.
+He saw Evelyn, a huddled bundle, clasped still to the creature's scaly
+breast. And Tommy sent a burst of explosive bullets into a gigantic,
+foot thick ankle-joint.
+
+The monster toppled, and flung out its prehensile lizard claws in an
+instinctive effort to catch itself. Evelyn was thrown clear. And
+Tommy, standing alone in the blackness of a carboniferous jungle upon
+an alien planet, sent bullet after bullet into the shaking, obscenely
+flabby body of the thing. The bullets penetrated, and exploded. Great
+masses of flesh upheaved and fell away. Great gouts of awful smelling
+fluid were flung out and blown to mist by the explosions. The thing
+did not so much die as disintegrate under the storm of detonating
+missiles.
+
+Then Tommy went to Evelyn. He was wild with grief. He had no faintest
+hope that she could still be living. But as he picked her up she
+moaned softly, and when he cried her name she clung to him, pressing
+close in an agony of thankfulness almost as devastating as her fear
+had been.
+
+It was minutes before either of them could think of anything other
+than her safety and the fact that they were together again. But then
+Tommy said, in a shaken effort to be himself again:
+
+"I--I'd have done better if--if I'd had roller skates, maybe." His
+grin was wholly unconvincing. "Why'd you get out of the Tube?"
+
+"Its eyes!" Evelyn shuddered, her own eyes hidden against Tommy's
+shoulder. "I saw them suddenly, looking at me. And I--hadn't any will.
+I felt myself getting out of the Tube and walking toward it. It was
+like the way a snake fascinates--hypnotizes--a bird...."
+
+A vagrant wind-eddy submerged them in the foul reek of the dead
+thing's flesh. Tommy stirred.
+
+"Ugh! Let's get out of this. There'll be things coming to feed on that
+carcass. They'll smell it."
+
+Evelyn tried to stand, and succeeded. She clung to his hand.
+
+"Do you think you can find the Tube again?"
+
+Tommy was already thinking of that. He grimaced.
+
+"Probably. Back-trail the damned thing. If the flashlight battery
+holds out. Its tail left plenty of sign for us to follow."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They started. And Evelyn had literally been forgotten in its agony by
+the monster which had carried her. Its body, though scaled and warty,
+was flabby and soft. Pressed against its breast she had been half
+strangled, but had no injuries beyond huge, purple bruises which had
+not yet reached the point of stiffness. She followed Tommy gamely, and
+the need for action kept her from yielding to the reaction from her
+terror.
+
+For a long, long time they back-trailed. Less than fifteen minutes
+after leaving the carcass of the thing Tommy had killed, they heard
+beast-roarings and the sound of fighting. But that noise died away as
+they traveled. Presently they reached the spot where Tommy had leaped
+upon a huge living thing. It was gone now, but the impress of a body
+the thickness of a barrel remained upon the rotted vegetation of the
+jungle floor. Evelyn shivered when Tommy pointed it out.
+
+"It was large," said Tommy ruefully. "I didn't even get a good look it the
+thing. Probably just as well, though. I might have been--er--delayed.
+Good Lord! What's that?"
+
+A light had sprung into being somewhere. It was bright. It was
+blinding in its brilliance. Coming through the tangled jungle growth,
+it seemed as if spears of flame shot through the air, irradiating
+stray patches of scabrous tree-trunk with unbearable light. For an
+instant the illumination held. Then there was a distant, cracking
+detonation. The unmistakable explosion of gun-cotton split the air,
+and its echoes rolled and reverberated through the jungle. The light
+went out. Then came a thin, high yelling sound which, faint as it was,
+had something of the quality of hysterical glee. That crazy ululation
+kept up for several minutes. Evelyn shivered.
+
+"The Ragged Men," said Tommy very quietly. "They sneaked up on the
+Tube. They flung blazing thermit, or something like it, with a weapon
+captured from the Golden City. That explosion was the grenades going
+off. I'm afraid the Tube's blown up, Evelyn."
+
+She caught her breath, looking mutely up at him.
+
+"Here's a pistol," he said briefly, "and shells. There's no use our
+going to the Tube to-night. It would be dangerous. We'll do our
+investigating at dawn."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He found a crevice where tree-fern trunks grew close together and
+closed in three sides of a sort of roofless cave. He seated himself
+grimly at the opening to wait for daybreak. He was not easy in his
+mind. There had been two Tubes to the Fifth-Dimension world. One had
+been made by Jacaro for his gunmen. That was now held by the men of
+the Golden City, as was proved by carnivorous lizards and the Death
+Mist that had come down it. The other was now blown up or, worse, in
+the hands of the Ragged Men. In any case Tommy and Evelyn were
+isolated upon a strange planet in a strange universe. To fall into the
+hands of the Ragged Men was to die horribly, and the Golden City would
+not now welcome inhabitants of the world Jacaro and his men had come
+from. To the civilized men of this world, Jacaro's raids would seem
+invasion. They would seem acts of war on the part of the people of
+Earth. And the people of Earth, all of them, would seem enemies.
+Jacaro would never be identified as an unauthorized invader. He would
+seem to be a scout, an advance guard, a spy, for hordes of other
+invaders yet to come.
+
+As the long night wore away, Tommy's grim hopelessness intensified.
+The Ragged Men would hunt them for sport and out of hatred for all
+sane human beings. The men of the Golden City would be merciless to
+compatriots of Jacaro's gunmen. And Tommy had Evelyn to look out for.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When dawn came, his face was drawn and lined. Evelyn woke with a
+little gasp, staring affrightedly about her. Then she tried gamely to
+smile.
+
+"Morning, Tommy," she said shakily. She added in a brave attempt at
+levity: "Where do we go from here?"
+
+"We look at the Tube," said Tommy heavily. "There's a bare chance...."
+
+He led the way as on the night before, with his gun held ready. They
+traveled for half an hour through the awakening jungle. Then for long,
+long minutes Tommy searched for a sign of living men before he
+ventured forth to look at the wreckage of the Tube. He found no live
+men, and only two dead ones. But a glimpse of their bestial,
+vice-ridden faces was enough to remove any regret for their deaths.
+
+The Tube was shattered. Its mouth was belled out and broken by the
+explosion of the grenades hung within it. A part of the metal was
+molten--from the thermit, past question. There was a veritable crater
+fifteen feet across where the Tube had come through, and there were only
+shattered shreds of metal where the first bend had been. Tommy regarded
+the wreckage grimly. A pair of oxidized copper wires, their insulation
+burnt off, stung his eyes as he traced them to where they vanished in
+torn-up earth. He took them in his bare hands. The tingling sting of a
+low-voltage current made his heart leap. Then he smiled grimly. He
+touched them to each other. Dot-dot-dot--dash-dash-dash--dot-dot-dot.
+S O S! If there was anybody in the laboratory, that would tell them.
+
+His hands stung sharply. Someone was there, ringing the phone! Evelyn
+came toward him, her face resolutely cheerful.
+
+"No hope, Tommy?" she asked. "I just saw the telephone, all battered
+up. I guess we're pretty badly off."
+
+"Get it!" said Tommy feverishly. "For Heaven's sake, get it! The phone
+wires weren't broken. If we can make it work...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The instrument was a wreck. It was crumpled and torn and apparently
+useless. The diaphragm of the receiver was punctured. The transmitter
+seemed to have been crushed. But Tommy worked desperately over them,
+and twisted the earth-wires into place.
+
+"Hello, hello, hello!"
+
+The voice that answered was Smithers', strained and fearful:
+
+"Mr. Reames! Thank Gawd! What's happened? Is Miss Evelyn all right?"
+
+"So far," said Tommy. "Listen!" He told curtly just what had happened.
+"Now, what's happened on Earth?"
+
+"Hell!" panted Smithers bitterly. "Hell's been poppin'! The Death
+Mist's two miles across an' still growin an' movin'. Four townships
+under martial law an' movin' out the people. It got thirty of 'em this
+morning. An' they think the professor's crazy an' nobody'll listen to
+him!"
+
+"Damn!" said Tommy. He considered, grimly. "Look here, Von Holtz ought
+to convince them."
+
+"He caved in, outa his head, before I got to Albany. He's in hospital
+now, ravin'. He's got some kinda fever the doctors don't know nothin'
+about. Sick as hell!"
+
+Tommy compressed his lips. Matters were more desperate even than he
+had believed. He informed his helper measuredly:
+
+"Evelyn and I can't stay around here, Smithers. The Ragged Men may
+come back, and it'll be weeks before you and the professor can get
+another Tube through. I'm going to make for the Golden City and work
+on them there to cut off the Death Mist."
+
+There was an inarticulate sound from Smithers.
+
+"Tell the professor. If he can find Jacaro's Tube, he'll work out some
+way to communicate through it. We've got to stop that Death Mist
+somehow. And we don't know what else they may try."
+
+Smithers tried to speak, and could not. He merely made grief-stricken
+noises. He worshiped Evelyn and she was isolated in a hostile world
+which was vastly more unreachable than could be measured by millions
+or trillions of miles. But at last he said unsteadily:
+
+"We'll be comin', Mr. Reames. We'll come, if we have t' blow half the
+world apart!"
+
+Tommy said grimly: "Then hunt up the Golden City and bring extra
+ammunition. Mostly explosive bullets. Good-by."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He untwisted the wires from the shattered phone units and thrust them
+in his pocket. Evelyn was picking up stray small objects from the
+ground.
+
+"I've found some cartridges, Tommy," she said constrainedly, "and a
+pistol I think will work."
+
+"Then listen for visitors," commanded Tommy, "while I look for more."
+
+For half in hour he scoured the area around the shattered Tube. He
+found where some clumsy-wheeled thing had been pushed to a spot near
+the Tube--undoubtedly the machine which had sprayed the flaming stuff
+upon it. He found two pockets full of shells. He found an extra
+magazine, for the sub-machine gun. It was nearly full and only a
+little bent. That was all.
+
+"Now," he said briskly, "we'll start. I've got a hunch the jungle
+thins out over that way. We'll find a clearing, try to locate the
+Golden City either by seeing it or by watching for aircraft flying to
+it, and then make for it. They're making war on Earth there. They
+don't understand. We've got to make them understand. O. K.?"
+
+Evelyn nodded. She put out her hand suddenly, a brave slender figure
+amid the incredible growths about her.
+
+"I'm glad, Tommy," she said slowly, "that if--if anything happens, it
+will be the--the two of us. Funny, isn't it?"
+
+Tommy kissed the twisted little smile from her face.
+
+"And now that that's over," he observed, ashamed of his own emotion,
+"let's go!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They went. Tommy watched the sun and kept approximately a straight
+line. They traveled three miles, and the jungle broke abruptly. Before
+them was a spongy surface neither solid earth or marsh. It shelved
+gently down to a vast and steaming morass upon which the dull-red sun
+shone hotly. It was vast, that marsh, and a steaming haze hung over
+it, and it seemed to reach to the world's end. But vaguely, through
+the attenuating upper layers of the steamy haze, they saw the outlines
+of a city beyond: tall towers and soaring spires, buildings of a grace
+and perfection of outline unknown upon the Earth. And faint golden
+flashes came from the walls and pinnacles of that city. They were
+reflections of this planet's monster sun, upon walls and roofs of
+plated gold.
+
+"The Golden City," said Tommy heavily. He looked at the horrible marsh
+between. His heart sank.
+
+And then there was a sudden screaming ululation nearby. A half-naked
+man was running out of sight. Two others danced and capered and yelled
+in insane glee, pointing at Tommy and at Evelyn. The running man's
+outcry was echoed from far away. Then it was taken up and repeated
+here and there in the jungle.
+
+"They saw our tracks near the Tube," snapped Tommy bitterly. "Oh, what
+a fool I am! Now they'll ring us in."
+
+He seized Evelyn's hand and began to run. There was a little rise in
+the ground a hundred yards away, with a clump of leafy ferns to shade
+it. They reached it as other half-naked, wholly mad human forms burst
+out of the jungle to yell and caper and make derisive and horrible
+gestures at the fugitives.
+
+"Here we fight," said Tommy grimly. "The ground's open, anyhow. We
+fight here, and very probably we die here. But first...."
+
+He knelt down and drew the finest of fine beads upon a bearded man who
+carried a glittering truncheonlike club which, by the way it was
+carried, was more than merely a bludgeon. He pulled the trigger for a
+single shot.
+
+The bullet struck the capering Ragged Man fairly in the chest. And it
+exploded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+_The Fight in the Marsh_
+
+
+Twice, within the next two hours, the Ragged Men mustered the courage
+to charge. They came racing across the semi-solid ooze like the madmen
+they were. Their yells and shouts were maniacal howls of blood-lust or
+worse. And twice Tommy broke their rush with a savage ruthlessness.
+The sub-machine-gun's first magazine was nearly empty. It was an
+unhandy weapon for single-shot work but it was loaded with explosive
+shells. The second rush he stopped with an automatic pistol. There
+were half-naked bodies partly buried in the ooze all the way from the
+jungle's edge to within ten yards of the hillock on which he and
+Evelyn had taken refuge.
+
+It was hot there, terribly hot. The air was stifling. It fairly reeked
+of moisture and the smells from the swamp behind them were sickening.
+Tommy began to transfer the shells from the spare bent magazine to the
+one he had carried with the gun.
+
+"We've a couple of reasons to be thankful," he observed. "One is that
+there's a bit of shade overhead. The other is that we had the big
+magazines for this gun. We still have nearly ninety shells, besides
+the ones for the pistols."
+
+Evelyn said soberly:
+
+"We're going to be killed, don't you think, Tommy?"
+
+Tommy frowned.
+
+"I'm rather afraid we are," he said irritably. "Confound it, and I'd
+thought of such excellent arguments to use in the City back yonder!
+Smithers said the Death Mist was two miles across, to-day, and still
+growing. The people in the city are still pouring the stuff down
+through Jacaro's Tube."
+
+Evelyn smiled faintly. She touched his hand.
+
+"Trying to keep me from worrying? Tommy...." She hesitated until he
+growled a question. "Please--remember that when Daddy and I were in
+the jungle before, we saw what these Ragged Men do to prisoners they
+take. I just want you to promise that--well, you won't wait too long,
+in hopes of somehow saving me."
+
+Tommy stared at her. Then he decisively reached forward and put his
+hand over her mouth.
+
+"Keep quiet," he said gently. "They shan't capture you. I promise
+that. Now keep quiet."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was only silence for a long time. Now and again a hidden figure
+screamed in rage at them. Now and again some flapping thing sped
+toward the jungle's edge. Once a naked arm thrust one of the golden
+truncheons from behind its cover, pointing at a flying thing a few
+yards overhead. The flying thing suddenly toppled, turning over and
+over before it crashed to the ground. There were howls of glee.
+
+"They seem mad," said Tommy meditatively, "and they act like lunatics,
+but I've got a hunch of some sort about them. But what?"
+
+Sunlight gleamed on something golden beyond the jungle's edge. Naked
+figures went running to the spot. An exultant tumult arose.
+
+"Now they try another trick," Tommy observed dispassionately. "I
+remember that at the Tube they had pushed something on wheels...."
+
+The sub-machine gun was unhandy for accurate single shots, and no
+pistol can be used to effect at long ranges. To conserve ammunition,
+Tommy had been shooting only at relatively close targets, allowing the
+Ragged Men immunity at over two hundred yards. But now he flung over
+the continuous-fire stud. He watched grimly.
+
+The foliage at the edge of the jungle parted. A crude wagon appeared.
+Its axles were lesser tree-trunks. Its wheels were clumsy and crude
+beyond belief. But mounted upon it there was a queer mass of golden
+metal which looked strangely beautiful and strangely deadly.
+
+"That's the thing," said Tommy dispassionately, "which made the flare
+of light last night. It blew up the Tube. And Von Holtz told
+me--hm--his friends, in the City...."
+
+He sighted carefully. The wagon and its contents were surrounded by a
+leaping, capering mob. They shook their fists in an insane hatred.
+
+A storm of bullets burst upon them. Tommy was traversing the little
+gun with the trigger pressed down. His lips were set tightly. And
+suddenly it seemed as if the solid earth burst asunder! There had been
+an instant in which the bullet-bursts were visible. They tore and
+shattered the howling mob of Ragged Men. But then they struck the
+golden weapon. A sheet of blue-white flame leaped skyward and round
+about. A blast of blistering, horrible heat smote upon the beleaguered
+pair. The moisture of the ooze between them and the jungle flashed
+into steam. A section of the jungle itself, a hundred yards across,
+shriveled and died.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Steam shot upward in a monstrous cloud--miles high, it seemed. Then,
+almost instantly, there was nothing left of the Ragged Men about the
+golden weapon, or of the weapon itself, but an unbearable blue-white
+light which poured away and trickled here and there and seemed to grow
+in volume as it flamed.
+
+From the rest of the jungle a howl arose. It was a howl of such loss,
+and of such unspeakable rage, that the hair at the back of Tommy's
+neck lifted, as a dog's hackles lift at sight of an enemy.
+
+"Keep your head down, Evelyn," said Tommy composedly. "I have an idea
+that the burning stuff gives off a lot of ultra-violet. Von Holtz was
+badly burned, you remember."
+
+Naked figures flashed forward from the jungle beyond the burned area.
+Tommy shot them down grimly. He discarded the sub-machine gun with its
+explosive shells for the automatics. Some of his targets were only
+wounded. Those wounded men dragged themselves forward, screaming their
+rage. Tommy felt sickened, as if he were shooting down madmen. A voice
+roared a rage-thickened order from the jungle. The assault slackened.
+
+Five minutes later it began again, and this time the attackers waded
+out into the softer ooze and flung themselves down, and then began a
+half-swimming, half-crawling progress behind bits of tree-fern stump,
+or merely pushing walls of the jellylike mud before them. The white
+light expanded and grew huge--but it dulled as it expanded, and
+presently seemed no hotter than molten steel, and later still it was
+no more than a dull-red heat, and later yet....
+
+Tommy shot savagely. Some of the Ragged Men died. More did not.
+
+"I'm afraid," he said coolly, "they're going to get us. It seems
+rather purposeless, but I'm afraid they're going to win."
+
+Evelyn thrust a shaking hand skyward. "There, Tommy!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A strange, angular flying thing was moving steadily across the marsh,
+barely above the steamlike haze that hung in thinning layers about its
+foulness. The flying thing moved with a machinelike steadiness, and
+the sun twinkled upon something bright and shining before it.
+
+"A flying machine," said Tommy shortly. His mind leaped ahead and his
+lips parted in a mirthless smile. "Get your gas mask ready, Evelyn.
+The explosion of that thermit-thrower made them curious in the City.
+They sent a ship to see."
+
+The flying thing grew closer, grew distinct. A wail arose from the
+Ragged Men. Some of them leaped to their feet and fled. A man came out
+into the open and shook his fists at the angular thing in the air. He
+screamed at it, and such ghastly hatred was in the sound that Evelyn
+shuddered.
+
+Tommy could see it plainly, now. Its single wing was thick and queerly
+unlike the air-foils of Earth. A framework hung below it, but it had
+no balancing tail. And there was a glittering something before it that
+obviously was its propelling mechanism, but as obviously was not a
+screw propeller. It swept overhead, with a man in it looking downward.
+Tommy watched coolly. It was past him, sweeping toward the jungle. It
+swung sharply to the right, banking steeply. Smoking things dropped
+from it, which expanded into columns of swiftly-descending vapor. They
+reached the jungle and blotted it out. The flying machine swung again
+and swept back to the left. More smoking things dropped. Ragged Men
+erupted from the jungle's edge in screaming groups, only to writhe and
+fall and lie still. But a group of five of them sped toward Tommy,
+shrieking their rage upon him as the cause of disaster. Tommy held his
+fire, looking upward. A hundred yards, fifty yards, twenty-five....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The flying machine soared in easy, effortless circles. The man in it
+was watching, making no effort to interfere.
+
+Tommy shot down the five men, one after the other, with a curiously
+detached feeling that their vice-brutalized faces would haunt him
+forever. Then he stood up.
+
+The flying machine banked, turned, and swept toward him, and a smoking
+thing dropped toward the earth. It was a gas bomb like those that had
+wiped out the Ragged Men. It would strike not ten yards away.
+
+"Your mask!" snapped Tommy.
+
+He helped Evelyn adjust it. The billowing white cloud rolled around
+him. He held his breath, clapped on his mask, exhaled until his lungs
+ached, and was breathing comfortably. The mask was effective
+protection. And then he held Evelyn comfortably close.
+
+For what seemed a long, long while they were surrounded by the white
+mist. The cloud was so dense, indeed, that the light about them faded
+to a gray twilight. But gradually, bit by bit, the mist grew thinner.
+Then it moved aside. It drifted before the wind toward the tree-fern
+forest and was lost to sight.
+
+The flying machine was circling and soaring silently overhead. As the
+mist drew aside, the pilot dived down and down. And Tommy emptied his
+automatic at the glittering thing which drew it. There was a crashing
+bolt of blue light. The machine canted, spun about with one wing
+almost vertical, that wing-tip struck the marsh, and it settled with a
+monstrous splashing of mud. All was still.
+
+Tommy reloaded, watching it keenly.
+
+"The framework isn't smashed up, anyhow," he observed grimly. "The
+pilot thinks we're some of Jacaro's gang. My guns were proof, to him.
+So, since the Ragged Men didn't get us, he gassed us." He watched
+again, his eyes narrow. The pilot was utterly still. "He may be
+knocked out. I hope so! I'm going to see."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Automatic held ready, Tommy moved toward the crashed machine. It had
+splashed into the ooze less than a hundred yards away. Tommy moved
+cautiously. Twenty yards away, the pilot moved feebly. He had knocked
+his head against some part of his machine. A moment later he opened
+his eyes and stared about. The next instant he had seen Tommy and
+moved convulsively. A glittering thing appeared in his hand--and Tommy
+fired. The glittering thing flew to one side and the pilot clapped his
+hand to a punctured forearm. He went white, but his jaw set. He stared
+at Tommy, waiting for death.
+
+"For the love of Pete," said Tommy irritably, "I'm not going to kill
+you! You tried to kill me, and it was very annoying, but I have some
+things I want to tell you."
+
+He stopped and felt foolish because his words were, of course,
+unintelligible. The pilot was staring amazedly at him. Tommy's tone
+had been irritated, certainly, but there was neither hatred nor
+triumph in it. He waved his hand.
+
+"Come on and I'll bandage you up and see if we can make you understand
+a few things."
+
+Evelyn came running through the muck.
+
+"He didn't hurt you, Tommy?" she gasped. "I saw you shoot--"
+
+The pilot fairly jumped. At first glance he had recognized her as a
+woman. Tommy growled that he'd had to "shoot the damn fool through the
+arm." The pilot spoke, curiously. Evelyn looked at his arm and
+exclaimed. He was holding it above the wound to stop the bleeding.
+Evelyn looked about helplessly for something with which to bandage it.
+
+"Make pads with your handkerchief," grunted Tommy. "Take my tie to
+hold them in place."
+
+The prisoner looked curiously from one to the other. His color was
+returning. As Evelyn worked on his arm he seemed to grow excited at
+some inner thought. He spoke again, and looked at once puzzled and
+confirmed in some conviction when they were unable to comprehend. When
+Evelyn finished her first-aid task he smiled suddenly, flashing white
+teeth at them. He even made a little speech which was humorously
+apologetic, to judge by its tone. When they turned to go back to their
+fortress he went with them without a trace of hesitation.
+
+"Now what?" asked Evelyn.
+
+"They'll be looking for him in a little while," said Tommy curtly. "If
+we can convince him we're not enemies, he'll keep them from giving us
+more gas."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The pilot was fumbling at a belt about the curious tunic he wore.
+Tommy watched him warily. But a pad of what seemed to be black metal
+came out, with a silvery-white stylus attached to it. The pilot sat
+down the instant they stopped and began to draw in white lines on the
+black surface. He drew a picture of a man and an angular flying
+machine, and then a sketchy, impressionistic outline of a city's
+towers. He drew a circle to enclose all three drawings and indicated
+himself, the machine, and the distant city. Tommy nodded comprehension
+as the pilot looked up. Then came a picture of a half-naked man
+shaking his fists at the three encircled sketches. The half-naked man
+stood beneath a roughly indicated tree-fern.
+
+"Clever," said Tommy, as a larger circle enclosed that with the city
+and the machine. "He's identifying himself, and saying the Ragged Men
+are enemies of himself and his Golden City, too. That much is not hard
+to get."
+
+He nodded vigorously as the pilot looked up again. And then he watched
+as a lively, tiny sketch grew on the black slab, showing half a dozen
+men, garbed almost as Tommy was, using weapons which could only be
+sub-machine guns and automatic pistols. They were obviously Jacaro's
+gangsters. The pilot handed over the plate and watched absorbedly as
+Tommy fumbled with the stylus. He drew, not well but well enough, an
+outline of the towers of New York. The difference in architecture was
+striking. There followed tiny figures of himself and Evelyn--with a
+drily murmured, "This isn't a flattering portrait of you,
+Evelyn!"--and a circle enclosing them with the towers of New York.
+
+The pilot nodded in his turn. And then Tommy encircled the previously
+drawn figures of the gangsters with New York, just as the Ragged Men
+had been linked with the other city. And a second circle linked
+gangsters and Ragged Men together.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I'm saying," observed Tommy, "that Jacaro and his mob are the Ragged
+Men of our world, which may not be wrong, at that."
+
+There was no question but that the pilot took his meaning. He grinned
+in a friendly fashion, and winced as his wounded arm hurt him.
+Ruefully, he looked down at his bandage. Then he pressed a tiny stud
+at the top of the black-metal pad and all the white lines vanished
+instantly. He drew a new circle, with tree-ferns scattered about its
+upper third--a tiny sketch of a city's towers. He pointed to that and
+to the city visible through the mist--a second city, and a third, in
+other places. He waved his hand vaguely about, then impatiently
+scribbled over the middle third of the circle and handed it back to
+Tommy.
+
+Tommy grinned ruefully.
+
+"A map," he said amusedly. "He's pointed out his own city and a couple
+of others, and he wants us to tell him where we come from.
+Evelyn--er--how are we going to explain a trip through five dimensions
+in a sketch?"
+
+Evelyn shook her head. But a shadow passed over their heads. The pilot
+leaped to his feet and shouted. There were three planes soaring above
+them, and the pilot in the first was in the act of releasing a smoking
+object over the side. At the grounded pilot's shout, he flung his ship
+into a frantic dive, while behind him the smoking thing billowed out a
+thicker and thicker cloud. His plane was nearly hidden by the vapor
+when he released it. It fell two hundred yards and more away, and the
+white mist spread and spread. But it fell short of the little hillock.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Quick thinking," said Tommy coolly. "He thought we had this man a
+prisoner, and he'd be better off dead. But--"
+
+Their captive was shouting again. His head thrown back, he called
+sentence after sentence aloft while the three ships soared back and
+forth above their heads, soundless as bats. One of the three rose
+steeply and soared away toward the city. Their captive, grinning,
+turned and nodded his head satisfiedly. Then he sat down to wait.
+
+Twenty minutes later a monstrous machine with ungainly flapping wings
+came heavily over the swamp. It checked and settled with a terrific
+flapping and an even more terrific din. Half a dozen armed men waited
+warily for the three to approach. The golden weapons lifted alertly as
+they drew near. The wounded man explained at some length. His
+explanation was dismissed brusquely. A man advanced and held out his
+hands for Tommy's weapons.
+
+"I don't like it," growled Tommy, "but we've got to think of Earth. If
+you get a chance hide your gun, Evelyn."
+
+He pushed on the safety catches and passed over his guns. The pilot he
+had shot down led them onto the fenced-in deck of the monstrous
+ornithopter. Machinery roared. The wings began to beat. They were
+nearly invisible from the speed of their flapping when the ship lifted
+vertically from the ground. It rose straight up for fifty feet, the
+motion of the wings changed subtly, and it swept forward.
+
+It swung in a vast half circle and headed back across the marsh for
+the Golden City. Five minutes of noisy flight during which the machine
+flapped its way higher and higher above the marsh--which seemed more
+noisome and horrible still from above--and then the golden towers of
+the city were below. Strange and tapering and beautiful, they were. No
+single line was perfectly straight, nor was any form ungraceful. These
+towers sprang upward in clean-soaring curves toward the sky. Bridges
+between them were gossamerlike things that seemed lace spun out in
+metal. And as Tommy looked keenly and saw the jungle crowding close
+against the city's metal walls, the flapping of the ornithopter's
+wings changed again and it seemed to plunge downward like a stone
+toward a narrow landing place amid the great city's towering
+buildings.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+_The Golden City_
+
+
+The thing that struck Tommy first of all was the scarcity of men in
+the city, compared to its size. The next thing was the entire absence
+of women. The roar of machines smote upon his consciousness as a bad
+third, though they made din enough. Perhaps he ignored the machine
+noises because the ornithopter on which they had arrived made such a
+racket itself.
+
+They landed on a paved space perhaps a hundred yards by two hundred,
+three sides of which were walled off by soaring towers. The fourth
+gave off on empty space, and he realized that he was still at least a
+hundred feet above the ground. The ornithopter landed with a certain
+skilful precision and its wings ceased to beat. Behind it, the two
+fixed-wing machines soared down, leveled, hovered, and settled upon
+amazingly inadequate wheels. Their pilots got out and began to push
+them toward one side of the landing area. Tommy noticed it, of course.
+He was noticing everything, just now. He said amazedly:
+
+"Evelyn! They launch these planes with catapults like those our
+battleships use! They don't take off under their own power!"
+
+The six men on the ornithopter put their shoulders to their machine
+and trundled it out of the way. Tommy blinked at the sight.
+
+"No field attendants!" He gazed out across the open portion of the
+land area and saw an elevated thoroughfare below. Some sort of
+vehicle, gleaming like gold, moved swiftly on two wheels. There was a
+walkway in the center of the street with room for a multitude. But
+only two men were in sight upon it. "Lord!" said Tommy. "Where are the
+people?"
+
+There was brief talk among the crew of the ornithopter. Two of them
+picked up Tommy's weapons, and the pilot he had wounded made a gesture
+indicating that he should follow. He led the way to an arched door in
+the nearest tower. A little two-wheeled car was waiting. They got into
+it and the pilot fumbled with the controls. As he worked at it--rather
+clumsily on account of his arm--the rest of the ornithopter's crew
+came in. They wheeled out another vehicle, climbed into it, and shot
+away down a sloping passage.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Their own vehicle followed and emerged upon the paved and nearly empty
+thoroughfare. Tall buildings rose all about them, with curved walls
+soaring dizzily skyward. There was every sign of a populous city,
+including the dull drumming roar of many machines, but the streets
+were empty. The little machine moved swiftly for minutes. Twice it
+swung aside and entered a sloping incline. Once it went up. The other
+time it dived down seventy feet on a four-hundred-foot ramp. Then it
+swung sharply to the right, meandered into a street-level way leading
+into the heart of a monster building, and stopped. And in all its
+travel it had not passed fifty people.
+
+The pilot-turned-chauffeur turned and grinned amiably, and led the way
+again. Steps--twenty or thirty of them. Then they emerged suddenly
+into a vast room. It must have been a hundred and fifty feet long,
+fifty wide, and nearly as high. It was floored with alternate blocks
+of what seemed to be an iron-hard black wood and the omnipresent
+golden metal. Columns and pilasters about the place gave forth the
+same subdued deep golden glow. Light streamed from panels inset in the
+wall and ceiling--a curious saffron-red light. There was a massive
+table of the hard black wood. Chairs with curiously designed backs
+were ranged about it. They were benches, really, but they served the
+purpose of chairs. Each was too narrow to hold more than one person.
+The room was empty.
+
+They waited. After a long time a man in a blue tunic came into the
+room and sat down on one of the benches. A long time later, another
+man came in, in red; and another and another, until there were a dozen
+in all. They regarded Tommy and Evelyn with a weary suspicion. One of
+them--an old man with a white beard--asked questions. The pilot
+answered them. At a word, the two men with Tommy's weapons placed them
+on the table. They were inspected casually, as familiar things. They
+probably were, since some of Jacaro's gunmen had been killed in a
+fight in this city. Another question.
+
+The pilot explained briefly and offered Tommy the black-metal pad
+again. It still contained the incomplete map of a hemisphere, and was
+obviously a repetition of the question of where he came from.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tommy took it, frowning thoughtfully. Then an idea struck him. He
+found the little stud which, pressed by the pad's owner, had erased
+the previous drawings. He pressed it and the lines disappeared. And
+Tommy drew, crudely enough, that complicated diagram which is supposed
+to represent a cube which is a cube in four dimensions: a tesseract.
+Upon one surface of the cube he indicated the curving towers of the
+Golden City. Upon a surface representing a plane beyond the three
+dimensions of normal experience, he repeated the angular tower
+structures of New York. He shrugged rather hopelessly as he passed it
+over, but to his amazement it was understood at once.
+
+The little black pad passed from hand to hand and an animated
+discussion took place. One rather hard-faced man was the most animated
+of all. The bearded old man demurred. The hard-faced man insisted.
+Tommy could see that his pilot's expression was becoming uneasy. But
+then a compromise seemed to be arrived at. The bearded man spoke a
+single, ceremonial phrase and the twelve men rose. They moved toward
+various doors and one by one left, until the room was empty.
+
+But the pilot looked relieved. He grinned cheerfully at Tommy and led
+the way back to the two-wheeled vehicle. The two men with Tommy's
+weapons vanished. And again there was a swift, cyclonelike passage
+along empty ways with the throbbing of machinery audible everywhere.
+Into the base of a second building, up endless stairs, past
+innumerable doors. It seemed to Tommy that he heard voices behind some
+of them, and they were women's voices.
+
+At a private, triple knock a door opened wide, and the pilot led the
+way into a room, closed and locked the door behind him, and called. A
+woman's voice cried out in astonishment. Through an inner arch a woman
+came running eagerly. Her face went blank at sight of Tommy and
+Evelyn, and her hand flew to a tiny golden object at her waist. Then,
+at the pilot's chuckle, she flushed vividly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hours later, Tommy and Evelyn were able to talk it over. They were
+alone then, and could look out an oval window upon the Golden City all
+about them. It was dark, but saffron-red panels glowed in building
+walls all along the thoroughfares, and tiny glowing dots in the
+soaring spires of gold told of people within other dwellings like
+this.
+
+"As I see it," said Tommy restlessly, "the Council--and it must have
+been that in the big room to-day--put us in our friend's hands to
+learn the language. He's been working with me four hours, drawing
+pictures, and I've been writing down words I've learned. I must have
+several hundred of them. But we do our best talking with pictures. And
+Evelyn, this city's in a bad fix."
+
+Evelyn said irrelevantly: "Her name is Ahnya, Tommy, and she's a dear.
+We got along beautifully. I'll bet I found out things you don't even
+guess at."
+
+"You probably have," admitted Tommy, frowning. "Check up on this: our
+friend's name is Aten, and he's an air-pilot and also has something to
+do with growing foodstuffs in some special towers where they grow
+crops by artificial light only. Some of the plants he sketched look
+amazingly like wheat, by the way. The name of the town is"--he looked
+at his notes--"Yugna. There are some other towns, ten or twelve of
+them. Rahn is the nearest, and it's worse off than this one."
+
+"Of course," said Evelyn, smiling. "They use _cuyal_ openly, there!"
+
+"How'd you learn all that?" demanded Tommy.
+
+"Ahnya told me. We made gestures and smiled at each other. We
+understood perfectly. She's crazy about her husband, and I--well she
+knows I'm going to marry you, so...."
+
+Tommy grunted.
+
+"I suppose she explained with a smile and gestures just how much of a
+strain it is, simply keeping the city going?"
+
+"Of course," said Evelyn calmly. "The city's fighting against the
+jungle, which grows worse all the time. They used to grow their
+foodstuffs in the open fields. Then within the city. Now they use
+empty towers and artificial light. I don't know why."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tommy grunted again.
+
+"This planet's just had, or is having, a change of geologic period,"
+he explained, frowning. "The plants people need to live on aren't
+adapted to the new climate and new plants fit for food are scarce.
+They have to grow food under shelter, now, and their machines take an
+abnormal amount of supervision--I don't know why. The air-conditions
+for the food plants; the machines that fight back the jungle creepers
+which thrive in the new climate and try to crawl into the city to
+smother it; the power machines; the clothing machines--a million
+machines have to be kept going to keep back the jungle and fight off
+starvation and just hold on doggedly to the bare fact of civilization.
+And they're short-handed. The law of diminishing returns seems to
+operate. They're trying to maintain a civilization higher than their
+environment will support. They work until they're ready to drop, just
+to stay in the same place. And the monotony and the strain makes some
+of them take to _cuyal_ for relief."
+
+He surveyed the city from the oval window, frowning in thought.
+
+"It's a drug which grows wild," he added slowly. "It peps them up. It
+makes the monotony and the weariness bearable. And then, suddenly,
+they break. They hate the machines and the city and everything they
+ever knew or did. It's a sort of delayed-action psychosis which goes
+off with a bang. Some of them go amuck in the city, using their
+belt-weapons until they're killed. More of them bolt for the jungle.
+The city loses better than one per cent of its population a year to
+the jungle. And then they're Ragged Men, half mad at all times and
+wholly mad as far as the city and its machines are concerned."
+
+Evelyn linked her arm in his.
+
+"Somehow," she told him, smiling, "I think one Thomas Reames is
+working out ways and means to help a city named Yugna."
+
+"Not yet," said Tommy grimly. "We have to think of Earth. Not
+everybody in the Council approved of us. Aten told me one chap argued
+that we ought to be shoved out into the jungle again as compatriots of
+Jacaro. And the machines were especially short-handed to-day because
+of a diversion of labor to get ready something monstrous and really
+deadly to send down the Tube to Earth. We've got to find out what that
+is, and stop it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But on the second day afterward, when he and Evelyn were summoned
+before the Council again, he still had not found out. During those two
+days he learned many other things, to be sure: that Aten for instance,
+was relieved from duty at the machines only because he was wounded;
+that the power of the main machines came from a deep bore which
+brought up superheated steam from the source of boiling springs long
+since built over; that iron was a rare metal, and consequently there
+was no dynamo in the city and magnetism was practically an unknown
+force; that electrokinetics was a laboratory puzzle--or had been, when
+there was leisure for research--while the science of electrostatics
+had progressed far past its state on Earth. The little truncheonlike
+weapons carried a stored-up static charge measurable only in hundreds
+of thousands of volts, which could be released in flashes which were
+effective up to a hundred feet or more.
+
+And he learned that the thermit-throwers actually spat out in normal
+operation tiny droplets of matter Aten could not describe clearly, but
+which seemed to be radioactive with a period of five minutes or less;
+that in Rahn, the nearest other city, _cuyal_ was taken openly, and
+the jungle was growing into the town with no one to hold it back; that
+two generations since there had been twenty cities like this one, but
+that a bare dozen still survived; that there was a tradition that
+human beings had come upon this planet from another world where other
+human beings had harried them, and that in that other world there were
+divers races of humanity, of different colors, whereas in the world of
+the Golden City all mankind was one race; that Tommy's declaration
+that he came from another group of dimensions had been debated and, on
+re-examination of Jacaro's Tube, accepted, and that there was keen
+argument going on as to the measures to be taken concerning it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These things Tommy had learned, and he and Evelyn went to their second
+interrogation by the city's Council armed with written vocabularies of
+nearly a thousand words, which they had sorted out and made ready for
+use. But they were still ignorant of the weapons the Golden City might
+use against Earth.
+
+The Council meeting took place in the same hall, with its alternating
+black-and-gold flooring and the saffron-red lighting panels casting a
+soft light everywhere. This was a scheduled meeting, foreseen and
+arranged for. The twelve chairs above the heavy table were all
+occupied from the first. But Tommy realized that the table had been
+intended to seat a large number of councilors. There were guards
+stationed formally behind the chairs. There were spectators, auditors
+of the deliberations of the Council. They were dressed in a myriad
+colors, and they talked quietly among themselves; but it seemed to
+Tommy that nowhere had he seen weariness, as an ingrained expression,
+upon so many faces.
+
+Tommy and Evelyn were led to the foot of the Council table. The
+bearded old man in blue began the questioning. As Keeper of
+Foodstuffs--according to Aten--he was a sort of presiding officer.
+
+Tommy answered the questions crisply. He had known what they would be,
+and he had developed a vocabulary to answer them. He told them of
+Earth, of Professor Denham, of his and the professor's experiments. He
+outlined the first experiment with the Fifth-Dimension catapult and
+the result of it--when the Golden City had sent the Death Mist to wipe
+out a band of Ragged Men who had captured a citizen, and after him
+Evelyn and her father.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This they remembered. Nods went around the table. Tommy told them of
+Jacaro, stressing the fact that Jacaro was an outlaw, a criminal upon
+Earth. He explained the theft of the model Tube, and how it was that
+their first contact with Earth had been with the dregs of Earth
+humanity. On behalf of his countrymen he offered reparation for all
+the damage Jacaro and his men had done. He proposed a peaceful
+commerce between worlds, to the infinite benefit of both.
+
+There was silence until he finished. The faces before him were
+immobile. But a hawk-faced man in brown asked dry questions. Were
+there more races than one upon Earth? Were they of diverse colors? Did
+they ever war among themselves? At Tommy's answers the atmosphere
+seemed to change. And the hawk-faced man rose to speak.
+
+Tommy and Evelyn, he conceded caustically, had certainly come from
+another world. Their own most ancient legends described just such a
+world as his: a world of many races of many colors, who fought many
+wars among themselves. Their ancestors had fled from such a world,
+according to legend through a twisting cavern which they had sealed
+behind them. The conditions Tommy described had been the cause of
+their ancestors' flight. They, the people of Yugna, would do well to
+follow the example of their forebears: strip these Earth folk of their
+weapons, exile them to the jungles, destroy the Tube through which the
+Mist of Many Colors had been sent. All should be as in past ages.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tommy opened his mouth to answer, but another man sprang to his feet.
+His face alone was not weary and worn. As he stood up, Aten murmured
+"_Cuyal!_" and Tommy understood that this man used the drug which was
+destroying the city's citizens, but gave a transient energy to its
+victims. He spoke in fiery phrases, urging action which would be
+drastic and certain. He spoke confidently, persuasively. There was a
+rustling among those who watched and listened to the debate. He had
+caught at their imagination.
+
+Evelyn, exerting every faculty to understand, saw Tommy's lips set
+grimly.
+
+"What--what is it?" she whispered. "I--I don't understand...."
+
+Tommy spoke in a savage growl.
+
+"He says," he told her bitterly, "that in one blow they can defeat
+both the jungle and the invaders from Earth. In past ages their
+ancestors were faced by enemies they could not defeat. They fled to
+this world. Now they are faced by jungles they cannot defeat. He
+proposes that they flee to our world. The Death Mist is a toy, he
+reminds them, compared with gases they know. There is a gas of which
+one part in ten hundred million is fatal! In a hundred of their days
+they can make and send through the Tube enough of it to kill every
+living thing on Earth. They've figures on the Earth's size and
+atmosphere from me, damn 'em! And he reminds them that that deadly gas
+changes of itself into a harmless substance. He urges them to gas
+Earth humanity out of existence, call upon the other cities of this
+world, and presently move through the Tube to Earth. They'll carry
+their food-plants, rebuild their cities, and abandon this planet to
+the jungles and the Ragged Men. And the hell of it is, they can do
+it!"
+
+A sudden approving buzz went through the Council hall.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+_The Fleet from Rahn_
+
+
+The approval of the citizens of Yugna was not enthusiastic. It was
+desperate. Their faces were weary. Their lives were warped. They had
+been fighting since birth against the encroachment of the jungle,
+which until the days of their grandparents had been no menace at all.
+But for two generations these people had been foredoomed, and they
+knew it. Nearly half the cities of their race were overwhelmed and
+their inhabitants reduced to savage hunters in the victorious jungles.
+Now the people of Yugna saw a chance to escape from the jungle. They
+were offered rest. Peace. Relaxation from the desperate need to serve
+insatiable machines. Sheer desperation impelled them. In their
+situation, the people of Earth would annihilate a solar system for
+relief, let alone the inhabitants of a single planet.
+
+Shouts began to be heard above the uproar in the Council
+hall--approving shouts, demands that one be appointed to conduct the
+operation which was to give them a new planet on which to live, where
+their food-plants would thrive in the open, where jungles would no
+longer press on them.
+
+Tommy's face went savage and desperate, itself. He clenched and
+unclenched his hands, struggling among his meagre supply of words for
+promises of help from Earth, which promises would tip the scales for
+peace again. He raised his voice in a shout for attention. He was
+unheard. The Council hall was in an uproar of desperate approval. The
+orator stood flushed and triumphant. The Council members looked from
+eye to eye, and slowly the old, white-bearded Keeper of Foodstuffs
+placed a golden box upon the table. He touched it in a certain
+fashion, and handed it to the next man. That second man touched it,
+and passed it to a third. And that man....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A hush fell instantly. Tommy understood. The measure was being decided
+by solemn vote. The voting device had reached the fifth man when there
+was a frantic clatter of footsteps, a door burst in, and babbling men
+stood in the opening, white-faced and stammering and overwhelmed, but
+trying to make a report.
+
+Consternation reigned, incredulous, amazed consternation. The bearded
+old man rose dazedly and strode from the hall with the rest of the
+Council following him. A pause of stunned stupefaction, and the
+spectators in the hall rushed for other doors.
+
+"Stick to Aten," snapped Tommy. "Something's broken, and it has to be
+our way. Let's see what it is."
+
+He clung alike to Evelyn and to Aten as the air-pilot fought to clear
+a way. The doors were jammed. It was minutes before they could make
+their way through and plunge up the interminable steps Aten mounted,
+only to fling himself out to the open air. Then they were upon a
+flying bridge between two of the towers of the city. All about the
+city human figures were massing, staring upward.
+
+And above the city swirled a swarm of aircraft. Tommy counted three of
+the clumsy ornithopters, high and motelike. There were twenty or
+thirty of the small, one-man craft. There were a dozen or more two-man
+planes. And there were at least forty giant single-wing ships which
+looked as if they had been made for carrying freight. They soared and
+circled above the city in soundless confusion. Before each of them
+glittered something silvery, like glass, which was not a screw
+propeller but somehow drew them on.
+
+The Council was massed two hundred yards away. A single-seater dived
+downward, soared and circled noiselessly fifty yards overhead, and its
+pilot shouted a message. Then he climbed swiftly and rejoined his
+fellows. The men about Tommy looked stunned, as if they could not
+believe their ears. Aten seemed stricken beyond the passability of
+reaction.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I got part of it," snapped Tommy, to Evelyn's whispered question. "I
+think I know the rest. Aten!" He snapped question after question in
+his inadequate phrasing of the city's tongue. Evelyn saw Aten answer
+dully, then bitterly, and then, as Tommy caught his arm and whispered
+savagely to him, Aten's eyes caught fire. He nodded violently and
+turned on his heel.
+
+"Come on!" And Tommy seized Evelyn's arm again.
+
+They followed closely as Aten wormed his way through the crowd. They
+raced behind him downstairs and through a door into a dusty and
+unvisited room. It was a museum. Aten pointed grimly.
+
+Here were the automatic pistols taken from those of Jacaro's men who
+had been killed, a nasty sub-machine gun which had been Tommy's, and
+grenades--Jacaro's. Tommy checked shell calibres and carried off a
+ninety-shot magazine full of explosive bullets, and a repeating rifle.
+
+"I can do more accurate work with this than the machine gun," he said
+cryptically. "Let's go!"
+
+It was not until they were racing away from the Council building in
+one of the two-wheeled vehicles that Evelyn spoke again.
+
+"I--understand part," she said unsteadily. "Those planes overhead are
+from Rahn. And they're threatening--"
+
+"Blackmail," said Tommy between clenched teeth. "It sounds like a
+perfectly normal Earth racket. A fleet from Rahn is over Yugna, loaded
+with the Death Mist. Yugna pays food and goods and women or it's wiped
+out by gas. Further, it surrenders its aircraft to make further
+collections easier. Rahn refuses to die, though it's let in the
+jungle. It's turned pirate stronghold. Fed and clothed by a few other
+cities like this one, it should be able to hold out. It's a racket,
+Evelyn. A stick-up. A hijacking of a civilised city. Sounds like
+Jacaro."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The little vehicle darted madly through empty highways, passing groups
+of men staring dazedly upward at the soaring motes overhead. It darted
+down this inclined way, up that one. It shot into a building and
+around a winding ramp. It stopped with a jerk and Aten was climbing
+out. He ran through a doorway, Tommy and Evelyn following. Planes of
+all sizes, still and lifeless, filled a vast hall. And Aten struggled
+with a door mechanism and a monster valve swung wide. Then Tommy threw
+his weight with Aten's to roll out the plane he had selected. It was a
+small, triangular ship, with seats for three, but it was heavy. The
+two men moved it with desperate exertion. Aten pointed, panting, to
+slide-rail and it took them five minutes to get the plane about that
+rail and engage a curious contrivance in a slot in the ship's
+fuselage.
+
+"Tommy," said Evelyn, "you're not going to--"
+
+"Run away? Hardly!" said Tommy. "We're going up. I'm going to fight
+the fleet with bullets. They don't have missile-weapons here, and Aten
+will know the range of their electric-charge outfits."
+
+"I'm coming too," said Evelyn desperately.
+
+Tommy hesitated, then agreed.
+
+"If we fail they'll gas the city anyway. One way or the other...."
+
+There was a sudden rumble as Evelyn took her place. The plane shot
+forward with a swift smooth acceleration. There was no sound of any
+motor. There was no movement of the glittering thing at the forepart
+of the plane. But the ship reached the end of the slide and lifted,
+and then was in mid-air, fifty feet above the vehicular way, a hundred
+feet above the ground.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tommy spoke urgently. Aten nodded. The ship had started to climb. He
+leveled it out and darted straight forward. He swung madly to dodge a
+soaring tower. He swept upward a little to avoid a flying bridge. The
+ship was travelling with an enormous speed, and the golden walls of
+the city flashed past below them and they sped away across feathery
+jungle.
+
+"If we climbed at once," observed Tommy shortly, "they'd think we
+meant to fight. They might start their gassing. As it is, we look like
+we're running away."
+
+Evelyn said nothing. For five miles the plane fled as if in panic.
+Evelyn clung to the filigree side of the cockpit. The city dwindled
+behind them. Then Aten climbed steeply. Tommy was looking keenly at
+the glittering thing which propelled the ship. It seemed like a
+crystal gridwork, like angular lace contrived of glass. But a cold
+blue flame burned in it and Tommy was obscurely reminded of a neon
+tube, though the color was wholly unlike. A blast of air poured back
+through the grid. Somehow, by some development of electro-statics, the
+"static jet" which is merely a toy in Earth laboratories had become
+usable as a means of propelling aircraft.
+
+Back they swept toward the Golden City, five thousand feet or more
+aloft. The ground was partly obscured by the hazy, humid atmosphere,
+but glinting sun-reflections from the city guided them. Soaring things
+took shape before them and grew swiftly nearer. Tommy spoke again,
+busily loading the automatic rifle with explosive shells.
+
+Aten swung to follow a vast dark shape in its circular soaring, a
+hundred feet above it and a hundred yards behind. Wind whistled,
+rising to a shriek. Tommy fired painstakingly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The other plane zoomed suddenly as a flash of blue flame spouted
+before it. It dived, then, fluttering and swooping, began to drift
+helplessly toward the spires of the city below it.
+
+"Good!" snapped Tommy. "Another one, Aten."
+
+Aten made no reply. He flung his ship sidewise and dived steeply
+before a monstrous freight carrier. Tommy fired deliberately as they
+swept past. The propelling grid flashed blue flame in a vast, crashing
+flame. It, too, began to flutter down.
+
+Tommy did not miss until the fifth time, and Aten turned with a
+grimace of disappointment. Tommy's second shot burst in a freight
+compartment and a man screamed. His voice carried horribly in the
+silence of these heights. But Tommy shot again, and, again, and there
+was a satisfying blue flash as a fifth big ship went fluttering
+helplessly down.
+
+Aten began to circle for height Tommy refilled the magazine.
+
+"I'm bringing 'em down," he explained unnecessarily to Evelyn, "by
+smashing their propellers. They have to land, and when they land
+they're hostages--I hope!"
+
+Confusion became apparent among the hostile planes. The one Yugna ship
+was identified as the source of disaster. Tommy worked his rifle in
+cold fury. He aimed at no man, but the propelling grids were large.
+For a one-man ship they were five feet in diameter, and for the big
+freight ships, they were circles fifteen feet across. They were
+perfect targets, and Aten seemed to grasp the necessary tactics almost
+instantly. Dead ahead or from straight astern, Tommy could not miss a
+shot. The fleet of Rahn went fluttering downward. Fifteen of the
+biggest were down, and six of the two-man planes. A sixteenth and
+seventeenth flashed at their bows and drifted helplessly....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then the one-man ships attacked. Six of them at once. Aten grinned and
+dived for all of them. One by one, Tommy smashed their crystal grids
+and watched them sinking unsteadily toward the towers of the city. As
+his own ship drove over them, little golden flashes licked out.
+Electric-charge weapons. One flash struck the wingtip of their plane,
+and flame burst out, but Aten flung the ship into a mad whirl in which
+the blaze was blown out.
+
+Another freight ship helpless--and another. Then the air fleet of Rahn
+turned and fled. The ornithopters winged away in heavy, creaking
+terror. The others dived for speed and flattened out hardly above the
+tree-fern jungle. They streaked away in ignominious panic. Aten darted
+and circled above them and, as Tommy failed to fire, turned and went
+racing back toward the city.
+
+"After the first ones went down," observed Tommy, "they knew that if
+they gassed the city we'd shoot them down into their own gas cloud. So
+they ran away. I hope this gives us a pull."
+
+The city's towers loomed before them. The lacy bridges swarmed with
+human figures. Somewhere a fight was in progress about a grounded
+plane from Rahn. Others seemed to have surrendered sullenly on
+alighting. For the first time Tommy saw the city as a thronging mass
+of humanity, and for the first time he realized how terrible must be
+the strain upon the city if with so large a population so few could be
+free for leisure in normal times.
+
+The little plane settled down and landed lightly. There were a dozen
+men on the landing platform now, and they were herding disarmed men
+from Rahn away from a big ship Tommy had brought down. Tommy looked
+curiously at the prisoners. They seemed freer than the inhabitants of
+Yugna. Their faces showed no such signs of strain. But they did not
+seem well-fed, nor did they appear as capable or as resolute.
+
+"_Cuyal_," said Aten in an explanatory tone, seeing Tommy's
+expression. He put his shoulder to the big ship, to wheel it back into
+its shed.
+
+"You son of a gun," grunted Tommy, "it's all in the day's work to you,
+fighting an invading fleet!"
+
+A messenger came panting through the doorway. Tommy grinned.
+
+"The Council wants us, Evelyn. Now maybe they'll listen."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The atmosphere of the resumed Council meeting was, as a matter of
+fact, considerably changed. The white-bearded Keeper of Foodstuffs
+thanked them with dignity. He invited Tommy to offer advice, since his
+services had proved so useful.
+
+"Advice?" said Tommy, in the halting, fumbling phrases he had slaved
+to acquire. "I would put the prisoners from Rahn to work at the
+machines, releasing citizens." There was a buzz of approval, and he
+added drily in English: "I'm playing politics, Evelyn." Again in the
+speech of Yugna he added: "And I would have the fleet of Yugna soar
+above Rahn, not to demand tribute as that city did, but to disable all
+its aircraft, so that such piracy as to-day may not be tried again!"
+There was a second buzz of approval. "And third," said Tommy
+earnestly, "I would communicate with Earth, rather than assassinate
+it. I would require the science of Earth for the benefit of this
+world, rather than use the science of this world to annihilate that!
+I--"
+
+For the second time the Council meeting was interrupted. An armed
+messenger came pounding into the room. He reported swiftly. Tommy
+grasped Evelyn's wrist in what was almost a painful grip.
+
+"Noises in the Tube!" he told her sharply. "Earth-folk doing something
+in the Tube Jacaro came through. Your father...."
+
+There was an alert silence in the Council hall. The white-bearded old
+man had listened to the messenger. Now he asked a grim question of
+Tommy.
+
+"They may be my friends, or your enemies," said Tommy briefly. "Mass
+thermit-throwers and let me find out!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was the only possible thing to do. Tommy and Evelyn went with the
+Council, in a body, in a huge wheeled vehicle that raced across the
+city. Lingering groups still searched the sky above them, now
+blessedly empty again. But the Council's vehicle dived down and down
+to ground level, where the rumble of machines was loud indeed, and
+then turned into a tunnel which went down still farther. There was
+feverish activity ahead, where it stopped, and a golden
+thermit-thrower came into sight upon a dull-colored truck.
+
+Questions. Feverish replies. The white-bearded man touched Tommy on
+the shoulder, regarding him with a peculiarly noncommittal gaze, and
+pointed to a doorway that someone was just opening. The door swung
+wide. There was a confusion of prismatically-colored mist within it,
+and Tommy noticed that tanks upon tanks were massed outside the metal
+wall of that compartment, and seemingly had been pouring something
+into the room.
+
+The mist drew back from the door. Saffron-red lighting panels appeared
+dimly, then grew distinct. There were small, collapsed bundles of fur
+upon the floor of the storeroom being exposed to view. They were,
+probably, the equivalent of rats. And then the last remnant of mist
+vanished with a curiously wraithlike abruptness, and the end of
+Jacaro's Tube came into view.
+
+Tommy advanced, Evelyn clinging to his sleeve. There were clanking
+noises audible in this room even above the dull rumble of the city's
+machines. The noises came from the Tube's mouth. It was four feet and
+more across, and it projected at a crazy angle out of a previously
+solid wall.
+
+"Hello!" shouted Tommy. "Down the Tube!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The clattering noise stopped, then continued at a faster rate.
+
+"The gas is cut off!" shouted Tommy again. "Who's there?"
+
+A voice gasped from the Tube's depths:
+
+"It's him!" The tone was made metallic by echoing and reechoing in the
+bends of the Tube, but it was Smithers. "We're comin', Mr. Reames."
+
+"Is--is Daddy there?" called Evelyn eagerly. "Daddy!"
+
+"Coming," said a grim voice.
+
+The clattering grew nearer. A goggled, gas-masked head appeared, and a
+body followed it out of the Tube, laden with a multitude of burdens. A
+second climbed still more heavily after the first. The brightly-colored
+citizens of the Golden City reached quietly to the weapons at their
+waists. A third voice came up the Tube, distant and nearly
+unintelligible. It roared a question.
+
+Smithers ripped off his gas mask and said distinctly:
+
+"Sure we're through. Go ahead. An' go to hell!"
+
+Then there was a thunderous detonation somewhere down in the Tube's
+depths. The visible part of it jerked spasmodically and cracked
+across. A wisp of brownish smoke puffed out of it, and the stinging
+reek of high explosive tainted the air. Then Evelyn was clinging close
+to her father, and he was patting her comfortingly, and Smithers was
+pumping both of Tommy's hands, his normal calmness torn from him for
+once. But after a bare moment he had gripped himself again. He
+unloaded an impressive number of parcels from about his person. Then
+he regarded the citizens of the Golden City with an impersonal,
+estimating gaze, ignoring twenty weapons trained upon him.
+
+"Those damn fools back on Earth," he observed impassively, "decided
+the professor an' me was better off of it. So they let us come through
+the Tube before they blew it up. We brought the explosive bullets, Mr.
+Reames. I hope we brought enough."
+
+And Tommy grinned elatedly as Denham turned to crush his hands in his
+own.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+"_Those Devils Have Got Evelyn!_"
+
+
+That night the three of them talked, on a high terrace with most of
+the Golden City spread out below them. Over their heads, lights of
+many colors moved and shifted slowly in the sky. There were a myriad
+glowing specks of saffron-red about the ways of the city, and the air
+was full of fragrant odors. The breath of the jungle reached them even
+a thousand feet above ground. And the dull, persistent roar of the
+machines reached them too. There were five people on the terrace:
+Tommy, Denham, Smithers, Aten and the white-bearded old Keeper of
+Foodstuffs. He looked on as the Earthmen talked.
+
+"We're marooned," Tommy was saying crisply, "and for the time being
+we've got to throw in with these people. I believe they came from
+Earth originally. Four, five thousand years ago, perhaps. Their tale
+is of a cave they sealed up behind them. It might have been a
+primitive Tube, if such a thing can be imagined."
+
+Denham filled his pipe and lighted it meditatively.
+
+"Half the American Indian tribes," he observed drily, "had legends of
+coming originally from an underworld. I wonder if Tubes are less your
+own invention than we thought?"
+
+Tommy shrugged.
+
+"In any case, Earth is safe."
+
+"Is it?" insisted Denham. "You say they understood at once when you
+talked of dimension-travel. Ask the old chap there."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tommy frowned, then labored with the question. The bearded old man
+spoke gravely. At his answer, Tommy grimaced.
+
+"Datl's gone looking for the cave their legends tell of," he said
+reluctantly. "He's the lad who wanted the city to gas Earth with some
+ghastly stuff they know of, and move over when the gas was harmless
+again. But the cave has been lost for centuries, and it's in the
+torrid zone--which _is_ torrid! We're near the North Pole of this
+planet, and it's tropic here. It must be mighty hot at the equator.
+Datl took a ship and supplies and sailed off. He may be killed. In any
+case it'll be some time before he's dangerous. Meanwhile, as I said,
+we're marooned."
+
+"And more," said Denham deliberately. "By the time the authorities
+halfway believed me, and Von Holtz could talk, there were more deaths
+from the Death Mist. It wiped out a village, clean. So when it was
+realized that I'd caused it--or that was their interpretation--and was
+the only man who could cause it again, why, the authorities thought it
+a splendid idea for me to come through the Tube. They invited me to
+commit suicide. My knowledge was too dangerous for a man to have. So,"
+he added grimly, "I have committed suicide. We will not be welcomed
+back on Earth, Tommy."
+
+Tommy made an impatient gesture.
+
+"Worry about that later," he said impatiently. "Right now there's a
+war on. Rahn's desperate, and the prisoners we took this morning say
+Jacaro and his gunmen are there, advising them. Ragged Men have joined
+in to help kill civilized humans. And they've still got aircraft."
+
+"Which can still bombard this city," observed Denham. "Can't they?"
+
+Tommy pointed to the many-colored beams of light playing through the
+sky overhead.
+
+"No. Those lights were invented to guide night-flying planes back
+home. They're static lights--cold lights, by the way--and they
+register powerfully when a static-discharge propeller comes within
+range of them. If Rahn tries a night attack, Aten and I take off and
+shoot them down again. That's that. But we've got to design gas masks
+for these people, and I think I can persuade the Council to send over
+and take all Rahn's aircraft away to-morrow. But the real emergency is
+the jungle."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He expounded the situation of the city as he understood it. He labored
+painstakingly to make his meaning clear while Denham blew meditative
+smoke rings and Smithers listened quietly. But when Tommy had
+finished, Smithers said in a vast calm:
+
+"Say, Mr. Reames, y'know I asked you to get somebody to take me
+through some o' these engine rooms. That's kinda my specialty. An'
+these folks are good, no question! There's engines--even steam
+engines--we couldn't build on Earth. But, my Gawd, they're dumb! There
+ain't a piece of automatic machinery on the place. There's one man to
+every motor, handlin' the controls or the throttle. They got stuff we
+couldn't come near, but they never thought of a steam governor."
+
+Tommy turned kindling eyes upon him. "Go on!"
+
+"Hell," said Smithers, "gimme some tools an' I'll go through one shop
+an' cut the workin' force in half, just slammin' governors, reducin'
+valves, an' automatic cut-offs on the machines I understand!"
+
+Tommy jumped to his feet. He paced up and down, then halted and began
+to spout at Aten and the Keeper of Foodstuffs. He gesticulated,
+fumbling for words, and hunted absurdly for the ones he wanted among
+his written lists, and finally was drawing excitedly on Aten's
+black-metal tablet. Smithers got up and looked over his shoulder.
+
+"That ain't it, Mr. Reames," he said slowly. "Maybe I...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tommy pressed the stud that erased the page. Smithers took the tablet
+and began to draw painstakingly. Aten, watching, exclaimed suddenly.
+Smithers was drawing an actual machine, actually used in the Golden
+City, and he was making a working sketch of a governor so that it
+would operate without supervision while the steam pressure continued.
+Aten began to talk excitedly. The Keeper of Foodstuffs took the tablet
+and examined it. He looked blank, then amazed, and as the utterly
+foreign idea of a machine which controlled itself struck home, his
+hands shook and color deepened in his cheeks.
+
+He gave an order to Aten, who dashed away. In ten minutes other men
+began to arrive. They bent over the drawing. Excited comments,
+discussions and disputes began. A dawning enthusiasm manifested
+itself. Two of them approached Smithers respectfully, with shining
+eyes. They drew their tablets from their belts, rather skilfully drew
+the governor he had indicated in larger scale, and by gestures asked
+for more detailed plans. Smithers stood up to go with them.
+
+"You're a hero, now, Smithers," Tommy informed him exultantly.
+"They'll work you to death and call you blessed!"
+
+"Yes, sir," said Smithers. "These fellas are right good mechanics.
+They just happened to miss this trick." He paused. "Uh--where's Miss
+Evelyn?"
+
+"With Aten's--wife," said Tommy. This was no time to discuss the
+marital system of Yugna. "We were prisoners until this morning. Now
+we're guests of honor. Evelyn's talking to a lot of women and trying
+to boost our prestige."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Smithers went over to the gesticulating group of draftsmen. He settled
+down to explain by drawings, since he had not a word of their
+language. In a few minutes a group went rushing away with the sketch
+tablets held jealously to their breasts, bound for workshops. Other
+men appeared to present new problems. A wave of sheer enthusiasm was
+in being. A new idea which would lessen the demands of the machines
+was a godsend to these folk.
+
+Then Denham blew a smoke ring and said meditatively:
+
+"I think I've got something too, Tommy. Ultra-sonic vibrations. Sound
+waves at two to three hundred thousand per second. Air won't carry
+them. Liquids will. They use 'em to sterilize milk, killing the germs
+by sound waves carried through the fluid. I think we can start some
+ultra-sonic generators out there that will go through the wet soil and
+kill all vegetation within a given range. We might clear away the
+jungle for half a mile or so and then use ultra-sonic beams to help it
+clear while new food-plants are tried out."
+
+Tommy's eyes glowed.
+
+"You've given yourself a job! We'll turn this planet upside down."
+
+"We'll have to," said Denham drily. "This city may believe in you, but
+there are others, and these folk are a little too clever. There's no
+reason why some other city shouldn't attack Earth, if they seriously
+attack the problem of building a Tube."
+
+Tommy ground his teeth, frowning. Then he started up. There was a new
+noise down in the city. A sudden flare of intolerable illumination
+broke out. There was an explosion, many screams, then the yelling
+tumult of men in deadly battle.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Every man on the tower terrace was facing toward the noise, staring.
+The white-bearded man gave an order, deliberately. Men rushed. But as
+they swarmed toward an exit, a green beam of light appeared near the
+uproar. It streaked upward, wavering from side to side and making the
+golden walls visible in a ghostly fashion. It shivered in a hasty
+rhythm.
+
+Aten groaned, almost sobbed. There was another flash of that
+unbearable actinic flame. A thermit-thrower was in action. Then a
+third flash. This was farther away. The tumult died suddenly, but the
+green light-beam continued its motion.
+
+Tommy was snapping questions. Aten spoke, and choked upon his words.
+Tommy swore in a sudden raging passion and then turned a chalky face
+toward the other two men from Earth.
+
+"The prisoners!" he said in a hoarse voice. "The men from Rahn! They
+broke loose. They rushed an arsenal. With hand weapons and a
+thermit-thrower they fought their way to a place where the big
+vehicles are kept. They raided a dwelling-tower on the way and seized
+women. They've gone off on the metal roads through the jungle!" He
+tried to ease his collar. Aten, still watching the green beam, croaked
+another sentence. "Those devils have got Evelyn!" cried Tommy
+hoarsely. "My God! Aten's wife, and his...." He jerked a hand toward
+the Councilor. "Fifty women--gone through the jungle with them, toward
+Rahn! Those devils have got Evelyn!"
+
+He whirled upon Aten, seizing his shoulder, shaking the man as he
+roared questions.
+
+"No chance of catching them." Far away, in the jungle, the infinitely
+vivid actinic flame blazed for several seconds. "They've sprayed
+thermit on the road. It's melted and ruined. It'd take hours to haul
+the ground vehicles past the gap. They're got arms and lights. They
+can fight off the beasts and Ragged Men. They'll make Rahn. And
+then"--he shook with the rage that possessed him--"Jacaro's there with
+those gunmen of his and his friends the Ragged Men!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He seemed to control himself with a terrific effort. He turned to the
+white-bearded Councilor, whose bearing was that of a man stunned by
+disaster. Tommy spoke measuredly, choosing words with a painstaking
+care, clipping the words crisply as he spoke.
+
+The Councilor stiffened. Old as he was, an undeniable fighting light
+came into his eyes. He barked orders right and left. Men woke from the
+paralysis of shock and fled upon errands of his command. And Tommy
+turned to Denham and Smithers.
+
+"The women will be safe until dawn," he said evenly. "Our late
+prisoners can't lose the way--aluminum roads that are no longer much
+used lead between all the cities--but they won't dare stop in the
+jungles. They'll go straight on through. They should reach Rahn at
+dawn or a little before. And at dawn our air fleet will be over the
+city and they'll give back the women, unharmed, or we'll turn their
+own trick on them, by God! It'd be better for Evelyn to die of gas
+than as--as the Ragged Men would kill her!"
+
+His hands were clenched and he breathed noisily for an instant. Then
+he swallowed, and went on in the same unnatural calm:
+
+"Smithers, you're going to stay behind, with part of the air fleet.
+You'll get aloft before dawn and shoot down any strange aircraft. They
+might try to stalemate us by repeating their threat, with our guns
+over Rahn. I'll give orders."
+
+He turned again to the Councilor, who nodded, glanced at Smithers, and
+repeated the command.
+
+"You, sir," he spoke to Denham, "you'll come with me. It's your right,
+I suppose. And we'll go down and get ready."
+
+He led the way steadily toward a door. But he reached up to his
+collar, once, as if he were choking, and ripped away collar and coat
+and all, unconscious of the resistance of the cloth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night the Golden City made savage preparation for war. Ships were
+loaded and ranged in order. Crews armed themselves, and helped in the
+loading and arming of other ships. Oddly enough, it was to Tommy that
+men came to ask if the directing apparatus for the Death Mist should
+be carried. The Death Mist could, of course, be used as a gas alone,
+drifting with the wind, or it could be directed from a distance. This
+had been done on Earth, with the directional impulses sent blindly
+down the Tube merely to keep the Mist moving always. The controlling
+apparatus could be carried in a monster freight plane. Tommy ordered
+it done. Also he had the captured planes from Rahn refitted for flight
+by replacing their smashed propelling grids. Fresh crews of men for
+these ships organized themselves.
+
+When the fleet took off there was only darkness in all the world. The
+unfamiliar stars above shone bright and very near as Tommy's ship,
+leading, winged noiselessly up and down and straight away from the
+play of prismatic lights above the city. Behind him, silhouetted
+against that many-colored glow, were the angular shapes of many other
+noiseless shadows. The ornithopters with their racket would start
+later, so the planes would be soaring above Rahn before their presence
+was even suspected. The rest of the fleet flew in darkness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The flight above the jungle would have been awe-inspiring at another
+time. There were the stars above, nearer and brighter than those of
+Earth. There was no Milky Way in the firmament of this universe. The
+stars were separate and fewer in number. There was no moon. And below
+there was only utter, unrelieved darkness, from which now and again
+beast-sounds arose. They were clearly audible on board the silent air
+fleet. Roarings, bellowings, and hoarse screamings. Once the ships
+passed above a tumult as of unthinkable monsters in deadly battle,
+when for an instant the very clashing of monstrous jaws was audible
+and a hissing sound which seemed filled with deadly hate.
+
+Then lights--few of them, and dim ones. Then blazing fires--Ragged
+Men, camped without the walls of Rahn or in some gold-walled courtyard
+where the jungle thrust greedy, invading green tentacles. The air
+fleet circled noiselessly in a huge batlike cloud. Then things came
+racing from the darkness, down below, and there was a tumult and a
+shouting, and presently the hilarious, insanely gleeful uproar of the
+Ragged Men. Tommy's face went gray. These were the escaped prisoners,
+arrived actually after the air fleet which was to demand the return of
+their captives.
+
+Tommy wet his lips and spoke grimly to his pilot. There were six men
+and many Death-Mist bombs in his ship. He was asking if communication
+could be had with the other ships. It was wise to let Rahn know at
+once that avengers lurked overhead for the captives just delivered
+there.
+
+For answer, a green signal-beam shot out. It wavered here and there.
+Tommy commanded again. And as the signal-beam flickered, he somehow
+sensed the obedience of the invisible ships about him. They were
+sweeping off to right and left. Bombs of the Death Mist were dropping
+in the darkness. Even in the starlight, Tommy could see great walls of
+pale vapor building themselves up above the jungle. And a sudden
+confused noise of yapping defiance and raging hatred came up from the
+city of Rahn. But before dawn came there was no other sign that their
+presence was known.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The ornithopters came squeaking and rattling in their heavy flight
+just as the dull-red sun of this world peered above the horizon. The
+tree-fern fronds waved languidly in the morning breeze. The walls and
+towers of Rahn gleamed bright gold, in parts, and in parts they seemed
+dull and scabrous with some creeping fungus stuff, and on one side of
+the city the wall was overwhelmed by a triumphant tide of green. There
+the jungle had crawled over the ramparts and surged into the city.
+Three of the towers had their bases in the welter of growing things,
+and creepers had climbed incredibly and were still climbing to enter
+and then destroy the man-made structures.
+
+But about the city there now reared a new rampart, rising above the
+tree-fern tops: there was a wall of the Death Mist encompassing the
+city. No living thing could enter or leave the city without passing
+through that cloud. And at Tommy's order it moved forward to the very
+encampments of the Ragged Men.
+
+He spoke, beginning his ultimatum. But a movement below checked him.
+On a landing stage that was spotted with molds and lichens, women were
+being herded into clear view. They were the women of the Golden City.
+Tommy saw a tiny figure in khaki--Evelyn! Then there was a sudden
+uproar from an encampment of the Ragged Men. His eyes flicked there,
+and he saw the Ragged Men running into and out of the tall wall of
+Death Mist. And they laughed uproariously and ran into and out of the
+Mist again.
+
+His pilot dived down. The Ragged Men yelled and capered and howled
+derisively at him. He saw that they removed masklike things from their
+faces in order to shout, and donned them again before running again
+into the Mist. At once he understood. The Ragged Men had gas masks!
+
+Then, a sudden cracking noise. Three men had opened fire with rifles
+from below. Their garments were drab-colored, in contrast to the vivid
+tints of the clothing of the inhabitants of Rahn. They were Jacaro's
+gunmen. And a great freight carrier from Yugna veered suddenly, and a
+bluish flash burst out before it, and it began to flutter helplessly
+down into the city beneath.
+
+The weapons of Tommy's fleet were useless, since the citizens of Rahn
+were protected by gas masks. And Tommy's fighting ships were subject
+to the same rifle fire against their propelling grids that had
+defeated the fleet from Rahn. The only thing the avenging fleet could
+now accomplish was the death of the women it could not save.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+_War!_
+
+
+A huge ornithopter came heavily out on the landing stage in the city
+of Rahn. Its crew took their places. With a creaking and rattling
+noise it rose toward the invading fleet. From its filigree cockpit
+sides, men waved green branches. A green light wavered from the big
+plane that carried the bearded Council man and Denham. That plane
+swept forward and hovered above the ornithopter. The two flying things
+seemed almost fastened together, so closely did their pilots maintain
+that same speed and course. A snaky rope went coiling down into the
+lower ship's cockpit. A burly figure began to climb it hand over hand.
+A second figure followed. A third figure, in the drab clothing that
+distinguished Jacaro's men from all others, wrapped the rope about
+himself and was hauled up bodily. And Tommy had seen Jacaro but once,
+yet he was suddenly grimly convinced that this was Jacaro himself.
+
+The two planes swept apart. The ornithopter descended toward the
+landing stage of Rahn. The freight plane swept toward the ship that
+carried Tommy. Again the snaky rope coiled down. And Tommy swung up
+the fifteen feet that alone separated the two soaring planes, and
+looked into the hard, amused eyes of Jacaro where he sat between two
+other emissaries of Rahn. One of them was half naked and savage, with
+the light of madness in his eyes. A Ragged Man. The other was lean and
+desperate, despite the colored tunic of a civilized man that he wore.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Hello," said Jacaro blandly. "We come up to talk things over."
+
+Tommy gave him the briefest of nods. He looked at Denham--who was
+deathly white and grim--and the bearded Councilor.
+
+"I' been givin' 'em the dope," said Jacaro easily. "We got the whip
+hand now. We got gas masks, we got guns just the same as you have, an'
+we got the women."
+
+"You haven't ammunition," said Tommy evenly, "or damned little. Your
+men brought down one ship, and stopped. If you had enough shells would
+you have stopped there?"
+
+Jacaro grinned.
+
+"You got arithmetic, Reames," he conceded. "That's so. But--I'm sayin'
+it again--we got the women. Your girl, for one! Now, how about
+throwin' in with me, you an' the professor?"
+
+"No," said Tommy.
+
+"In a coupla months, Rahn'll be runnin' this planet," said Jacaro
+blandly, "and I'm runnin' Rahn! I didn't know how easy the racket'd
+be, or I'd 've let Yugna alone. I'd 've come here first. Now get it!
+Rahn runnin' the planet, with a couple guys runnin' Rahn an' passin'
+down through a Tube any little thing we want, like a few million bucks
+in solid gold. An' Rahn an' the other cities for kinda country homes
+for us an' our friends. All the women we want, good liquor, an' a
+swell time!"
+
+"Talk sense," said Tommy, without even contempt in his tone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jacaro snarled.
+
+"No sense actin' too big!" But the snarl encouraged Tommy, because it
+proved Jacaro less confidant than he tried to seem. His next change of
+tone proved it. "Aw, hell!" he said placatingly. "This is what I'm
+figurin' on. These guys ain't used to fighting, but they got the
+stuff. They got gases that are hell-roarin'. They got ships can beat
+any we got back home. Figure out the racket. A couple big Tubes,
+that'll let a ship--maybe folded--go through. A fleet of 'em floatin'
+over N'York, loaded with gas--that white stuff y' can steer wherever
+y' want it. Figure the shake-down. We could pull a hundred million
+from Chicago! We c'd take over the whole United States! Try that on y'
+piano! Me, King Jacaro, King of America!" His dark eyes flashed. "I'll
+give y' Canada or Mexico, whichever y' want. Name y' price, guy. A
+coupla months organizin' here, buildin' a big Tube, then...."
+
+Tommy's expression did not change.
+
+"If it were that easy," he said drily, "you wouldn't be bargaining.
+I'm not altogether a fool, Jacaro. We want those women back. You want
+something we've got, and you want it badly. Cut out the oratory and
+tell me the real price for the return of the women, unharmed."
+
+Jacaro burst into a flood of profanity.
+
+"I'd rather Evelyn died from gas," said Tommy, "than as your filthy
+Ragged Men would kill her. And you know I mean it." He switched to the
+language of the cities to go on coldly: "If one woman is harmed, Rahn
+dies. We will shoot down every ship that rises from her stages. We
+will spray burning thermit through her streets. We will cover her
+towers with gas until her people starve in the gas masks they've
+made!"
+
+The lean man in the tunic of Rahn snarled bitterly: "What matter? We
+starve now!"
+
+Tommy turned upon him as Jacaro whirled and cursed him bitterly for
+the revealing outburst.
+
+"We will ransom the women with food," said Tommy coldly--and then his
+eyes flamed, "and thrash you afterwards for fools!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He made a gesture to the Keeper of Foodstuffs. It was unconsciously an
+authoritative gesture, though the Keeper of Foodstuffs was in the
+state of affairs in Yugna the head of the Council. But that old man
+spoke deliberately. The man from Rahn snarled his reply. And Tommy
+turned aside as the bargaining went on. He could see Evelyn down
+below, a tiny speck of khaki amid the rainbow-colored robes of the
+other women. This had been a savage expedition, to rescue or to
+avenge. It had deteriorated into a bargain. Tommy heard, dully,
+amounts of unfamiliar weights and measures of foodstuffs he did not
+recognize. He heard the time and place of payment named: the gate of
+Yugna, the third dawn hence. He hardly looked up as at some signal one
+of their own ornithopters slid below and the three ambassadors of Rahn
+prepared to go over the side. But Jacaro snarled out of one corner of
+his mouth.
+
+"These guys are takin' each other's words. Maybe that's all right, but
+I'm warnin' you, if there's any double-crossin'...."
+
+He was gone. The Keeper of Foodstuffs touched Tommy's shoulder.
+
+"Our flier," he said slowly, "will make sure our women are as yet
+unharmed. We are to deliver the foods at our own city gate, and after
+the women have been returned. Rahn dares not keep them or harm them.
+We of Yugna keep our word. Even in Rahn they know it."
+
+"But they won't keep theirs," said Tommy heavily. "Not with a man of
+Earth to lead them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He watched with his heart in his mouth as the ornithopter alighted
+near the assembled women of Yugna. As the three ambassadors climbed
+out, he could hear the faint murmur of voices. The men of Yugna, under
+truce, called across the landing stage to the women of their own city,
+and the women replied to them. Then the crew of the one grounded
+freighter arrived on the landing stage and the flapping flier rose
+slowly and rejoined the fleet. Its crew shouted a shamefaced
+reassurance to the flagship.
+
+"I suppose," said Tommy bitterly, "we'd better go back--if you're sure
+the women are safe."
+
+"I am sure," said the old man unhappily, "or I had not agreed to pay
+half the foodstuffs in Yugna for their return."
+
+He withdrew into a troubled silence as the fleet swept far from
+triumphantly for him. Denham had not spoken at all, though his eyes
+had blazed savagely upon the men of Rahn. Now he spoke,
+dry-throatedly:
+
+"Tommy--Evelyn--"
+
+"She is all right so far," said Tommy bitterly. "She's to be ransomed
+by foodstuffs, paid at the gates of Yugna. And Jacaro bragged he's
+running Rahn--and they've got gas masks. We'd better be ready for
+trouble after the women are returned."
+
+Denham nodded grimly. Tommy reached out and took one of the black
+tablets from the man beside him. He began to draw carefully, his eyes
+savage.
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"There's high-pressure steam in Yugna," said Tommy coldly. "I'm
+designing steam guns. Gravity feed of spherical projectiles. A jet of
+steam instead of gunpowder. They'll be low-velocity, but we can use
+big-calibre balls for shock effect, and with long barrels they ought
+to serve for a hundred yards or better. Smooth bore, of course."
+
+Denham stirred. His lips were pinched.
+
+"I'll design a gas mask," he said restlessly, "and Smithers and I,
+between us, will do what we can."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The air fleet went on over the waving tree-fern jungle in an unvarying
+monotony of bitterness. Presently Tommy wearily explained his design
+to the bearded Councilor who, with the quick comprehension of
+mechanical design apparently instinctive in these folk, grasped it
+immediately. He selected three of the six-man crew and passed Tommy's
+drawings to them. While the jungle flowed beneath the fleet they
+studied the sketches, made other drawings, and showed them eagerly to
+Tommy. When the fleet soared down to the scattered landing stages, not
+only was the design understood but apparently plans for production had
+been made. It did not take the men of the Golden City long to respond.
+
+Tommy flung himself savagely into the work he had taken upon himself.
+It did not occur to him to ask for authority. He knew what had to be
+done and he set to work to do it, commanding men and materials as if
+there could be no question of disobedience. As a matter of fact, he
+yielded impatiently to an order of the Council that he should present
+himself in the Council hall, and, since no questions were asked him,
+continued his organizing in the very presence of the Council, sending
+for information and giving orders in a low tone while the Council
+deliberated. A vote was taken by the voting machine. At its end, he
+was solemnly informed that, though not a native of Yugna, he was
+entrusted with the command of the defense forces of the city. His
+skill in arms--as evidenced by his defeat of the fleet of Rahn--and
+his ability in command--when he met the gas-mask defense of Rahn with
+a threat of starvation--moved the Council to that action. He accepted
+the command almost abstractedly, and hurried away to pick gun
+emplacements.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Within four hours after the return of the fleet, the first steam gun
+was ready for trial. Smithers appeared, sweat-streaked and vastly
+calm, to announce that others could be turned out in quantity.
+
+"These guys have got the stuff," he said steadily. "Instead o' castin'
+their stuff, they shoot it on a core in a melted spray. They ain't got
+steel, an' copper's scarce, but they got some alloys that are good an'
+tough. One's part tungsten or I'm crazy."
+
+Tommy nodded.
+
+"Turn out all the guns you can," he said. "I look for fighting."
+
+"Yeah," said Smithers. "Miss Evelyn's still all right?"
+
+"Up to three hours ago," said Tommy grimly. "Every three hours one of
+our ships lands in Rahn and reports. We give the Rahnians their stuff
+at our own city gates. I've warned Jacaro that we've mounted
+thermit-throwers on our food stores. If he manages to gas us by
+surprise, nevertheless our foodstuffs can't be captured. They've got
+to turn over Evelyn and cart off their food before they dare to fight,
+else they'll starve."
+
+"But--uh--there're other cities they could stick up, ain't there?"
+
+"We've warned them," said Tommy curtly. "They've got thermit-throwers
+mounted on their food supplies, too. And they're desperate enough to
+keep Rahn off. They're willing enough to let Yugna do the fighting,
+but they know what Rahn's winning will mean."
+
+Smithers turned away, then turned back.
+
+"Uh--Mr. Reames," he said heavily, "these fellas've gone near crazy
+about governors an' reducing valves an' such. They're inventin' ways
+to use 'em on machines I don't make head or tail of. We got three-four
+hundred men loose from machines already, an' they're turnin' out these
+steam guns as soon as you check up. There'll be more loose by night. I
+had 'em spray some castin's for another Tube, too. Workin' like they
+do, an' with the tools they got, they make speed."
+
+Tommy responded impatiently: "There's no steel, no iron for magnets."
+
+"I know," admitted Smithers. "I'm tryin' steam cylinders
+to--uh--energize the castin's, instead o' coils. It'll be ready by
+mornin'. I wish you'd look it over, Mr. Reames. If Miss Evelyn gets
+safe into the city, we could send her down the Tube to Earth until the
+fightin's over."
+
+"I'll try to see it," said Tommy impatiently. "I'll try!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He turned back to the set-up steam gun. A flexible pipe from a heavily
+insulated cylinder ran to it. A hopper dropped metallic balls down
+into a bored-out barrel, where they were sucked into the blast of
+superheated steam from the storage cylinder. At a touch of the trigger
+a monstrous cloud of steam poured out. It was six feet from the gun
+muzzle before it condensed enough to be visible. Then a huge white
+cloud developed; but the metal pellets went on with deadly force. Half
+an inch in diameter, they carried seven hundred yards at extreme
+elevation. Point-blank range was seventy-five yards. They would kill
+at three hundred, and stun or disable beyond that. At a hundred yards
+they would tear through a man's body.
+
+Tommy was promised a hundred of the weapons, with their boilers, in
+two days. He selected their emplacements. He directed that a disabling
+device be inserted, so if rushed they could not be turned against
+their owners. He inspected the gas masks being turned out by the
+women, who in this emergency worked like the men. Though helpless
+before machinery, it seemed, they could contrive a fabric device like
+a gas mask.
+
+The second day the work went on more desperately still. But Smithers'
+work in releasing men was telling. There were fifteen hundred
+governors, or reducing valves, or autocratic cut-outs in operation
+now. And fifteen hundred men were released from the machines, which
+had to be kept going to keep the city alive. With that many men,
+intelligent mechanics all, Tommy and Smithers worked wonders. Smithers
+drove them mercilessly, using profanity and mechanical drawings
+instead of speech. Denham withdrew twenty men and labored on top of
+one of the towers. Toward sunset of the second day, vast clouds of
+steam bellied out from it at odd, irregular intervals. Nothing else
+manifested itself. Those irregular belchings of steam continued until
+dark, but Tommy paid no attention to them. He was driving the gunners
+of the machine guns to practice. He was planning patrols, devising a
+reserve, mounting thermit-throwers, and arranging for the delivery of
+the promised ransom at the specified city gate. So far, there was no
+sign of anything unusual in Rahn. Messengers from Yugna saw the
+captive women regularly, once every three hours. The last to leave had
+reported them being loaded into great ground vehicles under a
+defending escort, to travel through the dark jungle roads to Yugna. A
+vast concourse of empty vehicles was trailing into the jungle after
+them, to bring back the food which would keep Rahn from starving, for
+a while. It all seemed wholly regular.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At dawn, the remaining ships of the air fleet of Rahn were soaring
+silently above the jungle about the Golden City. They made no threat.
+They offered no affront. But they soared, and soared....
+
+A little after dawn, glitterings in the jungle announced the arrival
+of the convoy. Messengers, in advance, shouted the news. Men from
+Yugna went out to inspect. The atmosphere grew tense. The air fleet of
+Rahn drew closer.
+
+Slowly, a great golden gateway yawned. Four ground vehicles rolled
+forward, and under escort of the Rahnians entered the city. Half the
+captive women from Yugna were within them. They alighted, weeping for
+joy, and were promptly whisked away. Evelyn was not among them. Tommy
+ground his teeth. An explanation came. When one half the promised
+ransom was paid, the others would be forthcoming.
+
+Tommy gave grim orders. Half the foodstuffs were taken to the city
+gate--half, no more. At his direction, it was explained gently to the
+Rahnians that the rest of the ransom remained under guard of the
+thermit-throwers. It would not be exposed to capture until the last of
+the captives were released. There was argument, expostulation. The
+rest of the women appeared. Aten, at Tommy's express command, piled
+Evelyn and his own wife into a ground vehicle and came racing madly to
+the tower from which Tommy could see all the circuit of the city.
+
+"You're all right?" asked Tommy. At Evelyn's speechless nod, he put
+his hand heavily on her shoulder. "I'm glad," he managed to say. "Put
+on that gas mask. Hell's going to pop in a minute."
+
+He watched, every muscle tense. There was confusion about the city
+gate. Ground vehicles, loaded with foodstuffs, poured out of the gate
+and back toward the jungle. Other vehicles with improvised
+enlargements to their carrying platforms--making them into huge closed
+boxes--rolled up to the gate. The loaded vehicles rolled back and back
+and back, and ever more apparently empty ones crowded about the city
+gate waiting for admission.
+
+Then there was a sudden flare of intolerable light. A wild yell arose.
+Clouds of steam shot up from the ready steam guns. But the circling
+air fleet turned as one ship and plunged for the city. The leaders
+began to drop smoking things that turned into monstrous pillars of
+prismatically-colored mist. A wave of deadly vapor rolled over the
+ramparts of the city. And then there was a long-continued ululation
+and the noise of battle. Ragged Men, hidden in the jungle, had swarmed
+upon the walls with ladders made of jungle reeds. They came over the
+parapet in a wave of howling madness. And they surged into the city,
+flinging gas bombs as they came.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+_The Fight_
+
+
+The city was pandemonium. Tommy, looking down from his post of
+command, swore softly under his breath. The Death Mist was harmless to
+the defenders of Yugna as a gas, because of their gas masks. But it
+served as a screen. It blotted out the waves of attackers so the steam
+guns could not be aimed save at the shortest of short ranges. His
+precautions were taking effect, to be sure. Two thirds of the
+attackers were Ragged Men drawn from about half the surviving cities,
+and against such a horde Yugna could not have held out at all but for
+his preparations. Now the defenders took a heavy toll. Swarms of men
+came racing toward the open gate, their truncheons aglow in the
+sunlight. The ring of Death Mist was contracting as if to strangle the
+city, and it left the ramparts bare again. And from more than one
+point upon the battlements the roaring clouds of steam burst out
+again. A dozen guns concentrated on the racing men of Rahn, plunging
+from the jungle to enter by the gate. They were racing forward,
+without order but at top speed, to share in the fighting and loot.
+Then streams of metal balls tore into them. The front of the irregular
+column was wiped out utterly. Wide swathes were cut in the rest. The
+survivors ran wildly forward over a litter of dead and dying men.
+Electric-charge weapons sent crackling discharges among them. Their
+contorted figures reeled and fell or leaped convulsively to lie
+forever still where they struck. And then the steam guns turned about
+to fire into the rear of the men who had charged past them.
+
+The steam guns had literally blasted away the line of Ragged Men where
+they stood. But the line went on, with great ragged gaps in it, to be
+sure, but still vastly outnumbering the defenders of the city. Here
+and there a steam gun was silent, its gun crew dead. And presently
+those that were left were useless, immobile upon the ramparts in the
+rear of the attack.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Down in the ways of the city the fight rose to a riotous clamor. At
+Tommy's order the women of the city had been concentrated into a few
+strong towers. The machines of the city were left undefended for a
+time. A few strong patrols of fighting men, strategically placed,
+flung themselves with irresistible force upon certain bands of
+maddened Ragged Men. But where a combat raged, there the Ragged Men
+swarmed howling. Their hatred impelled them to suicidal courage and to
+unspeakable atrocities. From his tower, Tommy saw a man of Yugna,
+evidently a prisoner. Four Ragged Men surrounded him, literally
+tearing him to pieces like the maniacs they were. Then he saw dust
+spurting up in a swift-advancing line, and all four Ragged Men
+twitched and collapsed on top of their victim. A steam gun had done
+that. A fighting patrol of the men of Yugna swept fiercely down a
+paved way in one of the Golden City's vehicles. There was the glint of
+gold from it. A solid, choked mass of invaders rushed upon it. Without
+slackening speed, without a pause, the vehicle raced ahead.
+Intolerable flashes of light appeared. A thermit-thrower was mounted
+on the machine. It drove forward like a flaming meteor, and as
+electric-charge weapons flashed upon it men screamed and died. It tore
+into a vast cloud of the Death Mist and the unbearable flames of its
+weapon could only be seen as illuminations of that deadly vapor.
+
+A part of the city was free of defenders, save the isolated steam
+gunners left behind upon the walls. Ragged Men, drunk with success,
+ran through its ways, slashing at the walls, battering at the
+light-panels, pounding upon the doorways of the towers. Tommy saw them
+hacking at the great doorway of a tower. It gave. They rushed within.
+Almost instantly thereafter the opening spouted them forth again and
+after them, leaping upon them, snapping and biting and striking out
+with monstrous paws and teeth, were green lizard-things like the one
+that had been killed--years back, it seemed--on Earth. A deadly combat
+began instantly. But when the last of the fighting creatures was down,
+no more than a dozen were left of the three score who had begun the
+fight.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But this was not the main battle. The main battle was hidden under the
+Death-Mist cloud, concentrated in a vast thick mass in the very center
+of the city. Tommy watched that grimly. Perhaps eight thousand men had
+assailed the city. Certainly two thousand of them were represented by
+the still or twitching forms in queer attitudes here and there, in
+single dots or groups. There were seven hundred corpses before the
+city gate alone, where the steam guns had mowed down a reinforcing
+column. And there were others scattered all about. The defenders had
+lost heavily enough, but Tommy's defense behind the line of the
+ramparts was soundly concentrated in strong points, equipped with
+steam guns and mostly armed with thermit-throwers as well. From the
+center of the city there came only a vast, unorganized tumult of
+battle and death.
+
+Then a huge winged thing came soaring down past Tommy's tower. It
+landed with a crash on the roofs below, spilling its men like ants.
+Tommy strained his eyes. There was a billowing outburst of steam from
+the tower where Denham had been working the night before. A big flier
+burst into the weird bright flame of the thermit fluid. It fell,
+splitting apart as it dropped. Again the billowing steam. No
+result--but beyond the city walls showed a flash of thermit flame.
+
+"Denham!" muttered Tommy. "He's got a steam cannon; he's shooting
+shells loaded with thermit! They smash when they hit. Good!"
+
+He dispatched a man with orders, but a messenger was panting his way
+up as the runner left. He thrust a scribbled bit of paper into Tommy's
+hand.
+
+    "I'm trying to bring down the ship that's controlling the
+    Death Mist. I'll shell those devils in the middle of town as
+    soon as our controls can handle the Mist.
+
+                                                          Denham."
+
+Tommy began to snap out his commands. He raced downward toward the
+street. Men seemed to spring up like magic about him. A ship with one
+wing aflame was tottering in mid-air, and another was dropping like a
+plummet.
+
+Then Tommy uttered a roar of pure joy. The huge globe of beautiful,
+deadly vapor was lifting! Its control-ship was shattered, and men of
+the Golden City had found its setting. The Mist rose swiftly in a
+single vast globule of varicolored reflections. And the situation in
+the center of the city was clear. Two towers were besieged. Dense
+masses of the invaders crowded about them, battering at them. Steam
+guns opened from their windows. Thermit-throwers shot out flashes of
+deadly fire.
+
+Tommy led five hundred men in savage assault, cleaving the mass of
+invaders like a wedge. He cut off a hundred men and wiped them out,
+while a rear guard poured electric charges into the main body of the
+enemy. More men of Yugna came leaping from a dozen doorways and joined
+them. Tommy found Smithers by his side, powder-stained and
+sweat-streaked.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Miss Evelyn's all right?" Smithers asked in a great calm.
+
+"She is," growled Tommy. "On the top floor of a tower, with a hundred
+men to guard her."
+
+"You didn't look at the Tube I made," said Smithers impassively; "but
+I turned on the steam. Looks like it worked. It's ready to go through,
+anyways. It's the same place the other one was, down in that cellar.
+I'm tellin' you in case anything happens."
+
+He opened fire with a magazine rifle into the thick of the mob that
+assailed the two towers. Tommy left him with fifty men to block a
+highway and led his men again into the mass of mingled Ragged Men and
+Rahnians. His followers saw his tactics now. They split off a section
+of the mob and fell upon it ferociously. There were sudden awful
+screams. Thermit flame was rising from two places in the very thick of
+the mob. It burst up from a third, and fourth, and fifth.... Denham,
+atop his tower, had the range with his steam cannon, and was flinging
+heavy shells into the attackers of the two central buildings. And then
+there was a roaring of steam and a ground vehicle came to a stop not
+fifty feet away. A gun crew of Yugnans had shifted their unwieldy
+weapon and its insulated steam boiler to a freight-carrying vehicle.
+Now the gunner pulled trigger and traversed his weapon into the thick
+of the massed invaders, while his companions worked desperately to
+keep the hopper full of projectiles.
+
+The invaders melted away. Steam guns in the towers, thermit
+projectiles from the cannon far away: now this.... And the concealing
+cloud of Death Mist was rising still, headed straight up toward the
+zenith. It looked like a tiny, dwindling pearl.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The assault upon Yugna had been a mad one, a frantic one. But the
+flight from Yugna was the flight of men trying to escape from hell.
+Wild panic characterized the fleeing men. They threw aside their
+weapons and ran with screams of terror no whit less horrible than
+their howls of triumph had been. And Tommy would have stopped the
+slaughter, but there was no way to send orders to the rampart gunners
+in time. As the fugitives swarmed toward the walls again, the storms
+of steam-propelled missiles mowed them down. Even those who scrambled
+down to the ground outside and fled sobbing for the jungle were
+pursued by hails of bullets. Of the eight thousand men who assailed
+Yugna, less than one in five escaped.
+
+Pursuit was still in progress. Here and there, through the city, the
+sound of isolated combats still went on. Denham came down from his
+tower, looking rather sick as he saw the carnage about him. A strong
+escort brought Evelyn. Aten was grinning proudly, as though he had in
+person defeated the enemy. And as Evelyn shakingly put out her hand to
+touch Tommy's arm--it was only later that he realized he had been
+wounded in half a dozen minor ways--a shadow roared over their heads.
+The crackle of firearms came from it.
+
+"Jacaro!" snarled Tommy. He leaped instinctively to pursue. But the
+flying thing was bound for a landing in an open square, the same one
+which not long since had seen the heaviest fighting. It alighted there
+and toppled askew on contact. Figures tumbled out of it, in torn and
+ragged garments fashioned in the style of the very best tailors of the
+Earth's underworld.
+
+Men of Yugna raced to intercept them. Firearms spat and bellowed
+luridly. In a close-knit, flame-spitting group, the knot of men raced
+over fallen bodies and hurtled areas where the pavement had cooled to
+no more than a dull-red heat where a thermit shell had struck. One
+man, two, three men fell under the small-arms fire. The gangsters went
+racing on, firing desperately. They dived into a tunnel and
+disappeared.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"The Tube!" roared Smithers. "They' goin' for the Tube!"
+
+He plunged forward, and Tommy seized his arm.
+
+"They'll go through your Tube," he said curtly. "It looks like the one
+they came through. They'll think it is. Let 'em!"
+
+Smithers tried to tear free.
+
+"But they'll get back to Earth!" he raged. "They'll get off clear!"
+
+The sharp, cracking sound of a gun-cotton explosion came out of the
+doorway into which Jacaro and his men had dived. Tommy smiled very
+grimly indeed.
+
+"They've gone through," he said drily, "and they've blown up the Tube
+behind them. But--I didn't tell you--I took a look at your castings.
+Your pupils were putting them together, ready for the steam to go in,
+in place of the coils I used. But--er--Smithers! You'd discarded one
+pair of castings. They didn't satisfy you. Your pupils forgot that.
+They hooked them all together."
+
+Smithers gulped.
+
+"Instead of four right-angled bends," said Tommy grimly, "you have six
+connected together. You turned on the steam in a hurry, not noticing.
+And I don't know how many series of dimensions there are in this
+universe of ours. We know of two. There may be any number. But Jacaro
+and his men didn't go back to Earth. God only knows where they landed,
+or what it's like. Maybe somewhere a million miles in space. Nobody
+knows. The main thing is that Earth is safe now. The Death Mist has
+faded out of the picture."
+
+He turned and smiled warmly at Evelyn. He was a rather horrible sight
+just then, though he did not know it. He was bloody and burned and
+wounded. He ignored all matters but success, however.
+
+"I think," he said drily, "we have won the confidence of the Golden
+City, Evelyn, and that there'll be no more talk of gassing Earth. As
+soon as the Council meets again, we'll make sure. And then--well, I
+think we can devote a certain amount of time to our personal affairs.
+You are the first Earth-girl to be kissed in the Fifth Dimension.
+We'll have to see if you can't distinguish yourself further."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again the Council hall in the tower of government in the Golden City
+of Yugna. Again the queer benches about the black wood table--though
+two of the seats that had been occupied were now empty. Again the
+guards behind the chairs, and the crowd of watchers--visitors,
+citizens of Yugna attending the deliberations of the Council. The
+audience was a queer one, this time. There were bandages here and
+there. There were men who were wounded, broken, bent and crippled in
+the fighting. But a warmly welcoming murmur spread through the hall as
+Tommy came in, himself rather extensively patched. He was wearing the
+tunic and breeches of the Golden City, because his own clothes were
+hopelessly beyond repair. The bearded old Councilor gathered the eyes
+of his fellows. They rose. This Council seated itself as one man.
+
+Quiet, placid formalities. The Keeper of Foodstuffs murmured that the
+ransom paid to Rahn had been recaptured after the fight. The Keeper of
+Rolls reported with savage satisfaction the number of enemies who had
+been slain in battle. He added that the loss to Yugna was less than
+one man to ten of the enemy. And he added with still greater emphasis
+that the shops being fitted with automatic controls had released
+now--it had grown so much--two thousand men from the necessary
+day-and-night working force, and further releases were to be expected.
+The demands of the machines were lessened already beyond the memory of
+man. Eyes turned to Tommy. There was an expectant pause for his reply.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I have been Commander of Defense Forces," he told them slowly, "in
+this fighting. I have given you weapons. My two friends have done
+more. The machines will need fewer and fewer attendants as the hints
+they have given you are developed by yourselves. And there is some
+hope that one of my friends may show you, in ultra-sonic vibrations, a
+weapon against the jungle itself. My own work is finished. But I ask
+again for friendship for my planet Earth. I ask that no war be made on
+my own people. I ask that what benefits you receive from us be passed
+to the other surviving cities on the same terms. And since there can
+be no further fighting on this scale, I give back my commission as
+Commander of Defense."
+
+There was a little murmur among the men of Yugna, looking on. It rose
+to a protesting babble, to a shout of denial. The bearded old Keeper
+of Foodstuffs smiled.
+
+"It is proposed that the appointment as Commander of Defense Forces be
+permanent," he said mildly.
+
+He produced the queer black box and touched it in a certain fashion.
+He passed it to the next man, and the next and next. It went around
+the table. It passed a second time, but this time each man merely
+looked at the top.
+
+"You command the defense forces of Yugna for always," said the bearded
+old man, gently. "Now give orders that your requests become laws."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tommy stared blankly. He was suddenly aware of Aten in the background,
+smiling triumphantly and very happily at him. There was something like
+a roar of approval from the men of Yugna, assembled.
+
+"Just what," demanded Tommy, "does this mean?"
+
+"For many years," said a hawk-faced man ungraciously, "we have had no
+Commander of Defense. We have had no wars. But we see it is needful.
+We have chosen you, with all agreeing. The Commander of Defense"--he
+sniffed a little, pugnaciously--"has the authority the ancient kings
+once owned."
+
+Tommy leaned back in the curious benchlike chair, his eyes narrow and
+thoughtful. This would simplify matters. No danger of trouble to
+Earth. A free hand for Denham and Smithers to help these folk, and for
+Denham to learn scientific facts--in the sciences they had
+developed--which would be of inestimable value to Earth. And it could
+be possible to open a peaceful trade with the nations of Earth without
+any danger of war. And maybe....
+
+He smiled suddenly. It widened almost into a grin.
+
+"All right. I'll settle down here for a while. But--er--just how does
+one set about getting married here?"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fifth-Dimension Tube, by 
+William Fitzgerald Jenkins
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIFTH-DIMENSION TUBE ***
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