The Fifth-Dimension Tube Read online

  Produced by Greg Weeks, Barbara Tozier and the OnlineDistributed 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"

  _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 hummedand whined and the night silence outside seemed to make the noiseswithin more deafening. Tommy Reames ran his eyes again over thepower-leads to the monstrous, misshapen coils. Professor Denham bentover one of them, straightened, and nodded. Tommy Reames nodded toEvelyn, and she threw the heavy multiple-pole switch.

  There was a flash of jumping current. The masses of metal on the floorseemed to leap into ungainly life. The whine of the dynamo rose to ascream and its brushes streaked blue flame. The metal things on thefloor flicked together and were a tube, three feet and more indiameter. That tube writhed and twisted. It began to form itself intoan awkward and seemingly impossible shape, while metal surfacessliding on each other produced screams that cut through the din of themotor and dynamo. The writhing tube strained and wriggled. Then therewas a queer, inaudible _snap_ and something gave. A part of the tubequivered into nothingness. Another part hurt the eyes that looked uponit.

  And then there was the smell of burned insulation and a wire wasarcing somewhere, while thick rubbery smoke arose. A fuse blew outwith a thunderous report, and Tommy Reames leaped to the suddenlyracing motor-generator. The motor died amid gasps and rumblings. AndTommy Reames looked anxiously at the Fifth-Dimension Tube.

  It was important, that Tube. Through it, Tommy Reames and ProfessorDenham had reason to believe they could travel to another universe, ofwhich other men had only dreamed. And it was important in other ways,too. At the moment Evelyn Denham threw the switch, last-editionnewspapers in Chicago were showing headlines about "King" Jacaro'sforfeiture of two hundred thousand dollars' bail by failing to appearin court. King Jacaro was a lord of racketeerdom.

  While Tommy inspected the Tube anxiously, a certain chief of police ina small town upstate was telling feverishly over the telephone of aposse having killed a monster lizard by torchlight, having discoveredit 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 itsneck. And jewel importers, in New York, were in anxious conferenceabout a flood of untraced jewels upon the market. Their origin wasunknown. The Fifth-Dimension Tube ultimately affected all of thoseaffairs, and the Death Mist as well. And--though it was not considereddangerous then--everybody remembers the Death Mist now.

  But at the moment Professor Denham stared at the Tube concernedly, hisdaughter Evelyn shivered from pure excitement as she looked at it, anda red-headed man named Smithers looked impassively from the Tube toTommy Reames and back again. He'd done most of the mechanical work onthe Tube's parts, and he was as anxious as the rest. But nobodythought of the world outside the laboratory.

  Professor Denham moved suddenly. He was nearest to the open end of theTube. He sniffed curiously and seemed to listen. Within seconds theothers became aware of a new smell in the laboratory. It seemed tocome from the Tube itself, and it was a warm, damp smell that couldonly be imagined as coming from a jungle in the tropics. There werethe rich odors of feverishly growing things; the heavy fragrance ofunknown tropic blossoms, and a background of some curious blend ofscents and smells which was alien and luring, and exotic. The wholewas like the smell of another planet of the jungles of a strange worldwhich 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, butonly 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. Thebeast-thing bellowed and an ululating chorus of joyous screams arose.The laboratory reverberated with the thunderous noise. Then there wasthe sound of crashing and of paddings, and abruptly the noise wasdiminishing as if its source were moving farther away. The beast-thingroared and bellowed as if in agony, and the yelling noise seemed toshow 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 riflein his hands. Tommy Reames stood grimly before Evelyn. He'd snatchedup a pair of automatic pistols. Smithers clutched a spanner andwatched the mouth of the Tube with a strained attention. Evelyn stoodshivering 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 rifleand laid it on a bench with the other guns. There was a small arsenalon a bench at one side of the laboratory. The array looked much morelike arms for in expedition into dangerous territory than a normalpart of apparatus for an experiment in rather abstruse mathematicalphysics. There were even gas masks on the bench, and some of thoseconverted brass Very pistols now used only for discharging tear- andsternutatory-gas bombs.

  "The Tube wasn't seen, anyhow," said Professor Denham briskly. "Who'sgoing through first?"

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

  "I am," he said shortly. "We'll want to camouflage the mouth of theTube. 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 feetlong, 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 itreached an unknown one to Tommy or to Denham. Months before, Denhamhad built an instrument which would bend a ray of light into the FifthDimension and had found that he could fix a telescope to the deviceand look into a new and wholly strange cosmos.[1] He had seentree-fern jungles and a monstrous red sun, and all the flora and faunaof a planet in the carboniferous period of development. More, by theaccident of its placing he had seen the towers and the pinnacles of acity 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 flungobjects to the surface of that incredible world. Insects, birds, andat last a cat had made the journey unharmed, and he had built a steelglobe in which to attempt the journey in person. His daughter Evelynhad demanded to accompany him, and he believed it safe. The trip hadbeen made in security, but return was another matter. A laboratoryassistant, Von Holtz, had sent them into the Fifth Dimension, only tobetray them. One King Jacaro, lord of Chicago racketeers, wasconvinced by him of the existence of the golden city of that otherworld, and that it was full of delectable loot. He offered a bribepast envy for the secret of Denham's apparatus. And Von Holtz hadremoved the apparatus for Denham's return before w
orking the catapultto send him on his strange journey. He wanted to be free to sell fullprivileges of rapine and murder to Jacaro.

  The result was unexpected. Von Holtz could not unravel the secret ofthe catapult he himself had operated. He could not sell the secret forwhich he had committed a crime. In desperation he called in TommyReames--rather more than an amateur in mathematical physics--showedhim Evelyn and her father marooned in a tree-fern jungle, andhypocritically asked for aid.

  Tommy's enthusiastic efforts soon became more than merelyenthusiastic. The men of the Golden City remained invisible, but therewere strange, half-mad outlaws of the jungles who hated the city.Tommy Reames had watched helplessly as they hunted for the occupantsof the steel globe. He had worked frenziedly to achieve a rescue. Inthe course of his labor he discovered the treachery of Von Holtz aswell as the secret of the catapult, and with the aid of Smithers--whohad helped to build the original catapult--he made a new small deviceto achieve the original end.

  * * * * *

  The whole affair came to an end on one mad afternoon when the RaggedMen captured first an inhabitant of the Golden City, and then Denhamand Evelyn in a forlorn attempt at rescue. Tommy Reames went mad. Heused a tiny sub-machine gun upon the Ragged Men through the modelmagnetic catapult he had made, and contrived communication with Denhamafterward. Instructed by Denham, he brought about the return of fatherand daughter to Earth just before Ragged Men and Earthling alike wouldhave perished in a vengeful gas cloud from the Golden City. Even then,though, his triumph was incomplete because Von Holtz had gotten wordto Jacaro, and nattily-dressed gunmen raided the laboratory and madeoff with the model catapult, leaving three bullets in Tommy and one inSmithers as souvenirs.

  Now, using the principle developed in the catapult, Tommy and Denhamhad built a large Tube, and as Tommy climbed along its corrugatedinterior he knew a good part of what he should expect at the otherend. A steady current of air blew past him. It was laden with a myriadunfamiliar scents. The Tube was a tunnel from one set of dimensions toanother, a permanent way from Earth to a strange, carboniferous-periodplanet on which a monstrous dull-red sun shone hotly. Tommy shouldcome out into a tree-fern forest whose lush vegetation would hide thesky, and which furnished a lurking place not only for strangereptilian monsters akin to those of the long-dead past of Earth, butfor the bands of ragged, half-mad human beings who were outlaws fromthe civilization of which Denham and Evelyn had seen proofs.

  * * * * *

  Tommy reached the third bend in the Tube. By now he had lost all senseof orientation. An object may be bent through one right angle only intwo dimensions, and a second perfect right angle--at ninety degrees toall former paths--only in three dimensions. It follows that a thirdperfect right angle requires four dimensions for existence, and fourperfect right angles five. The Tube bent itself through four perfectright angles, and since no human-being can ever have experience ofmore than three dimensions, plus time, it followed that Tommy wasexperiencing other dimensions than those of Earth as soon as he passedthe third bend. In short, he was in another cosmos.

  There was a moment of awful sickness as he passed the third bend. Hewas hideously dizzy when he passed the fourth. For a time he felt asif he had no weight at all. But then, quite abruptly, he was climbingvertically upward and the soughing of tree-fern fronds was loud in hisears, and suddenly the end of the Tube was under his fingers and hestared out into the world of the Fifth Dimension.

  Now a gentle wind blew in his face. Tree-ferns rose to incredibleheights above his head, and now and again by the movements of theirfronds he caught stray glimpses of unfamiliar stars. There were redstars, and blue ones, and once he caught sight of a clearlydistinguishable double star, of which each component was visible tothe naked eye. And very, very far away he heard the beastly yellingshe knew must be the outlaws, the Ragged Men, feasting horribly onhalf-scorched flesh torn from the quivering, yet-living flanks of amonstrous reptile.

  Something moved, whimpered--and fled suddenly. It sounded like a humanbeing. And Tommy Reames was struck with the utterly impossibleconviction that he had heard just that sound before. It was notdangerous, in any case, and he watched, and listened, and presently heslipped from the mouth of the Tube and by the glow of a flashlightstripped foliage from nearby growths and piled it about the Tube'smouth. And then, because the purpose of the Tube was not adventure butscience, he went back down into the laboratory.

  * * * * *

  The three men, with Evelyn, worked until dawn at the rest of theirpreparations for the use of the Tube. All that time the laboratory wasfilled with the heavy fragrance of a tree-fern jungle upon an unknownplanet. The heavy, sickly-sweet scents of closed jungle blossomsfilled their nostrils. The reek of feverishly growing green thingssaturated the air. A steady wind blew down the Tube, and it boreinnumerable unfamiliar odors into the laboratory. Once a gigantic mothbumped and blundered into the Tube, and finally crawled heavily outinto the light. It was scaled, and terrible because of its monstroussize, but it had broken a wing and could not fly. So it crawled withfeverish haste toward a brilliant electric light. Its eyes wereespecially horrible because they were not compound like the moths ofEarth. They were single, like those of a man, and were fixed in anexpression of utter, fascinated hypnosis. The thing looked horriblyhuman with those eyes staring from an insect's head, and Smitherskilled it in a flash of nerve-racked horror. None of them were able togo on with their work until the thing and its fascinated, staring eyeshad been put out of sight. Then they labored on with the smell of thejungles of that unnamed planet thick about them, and noises now andthen coming down the Tube. There were roars, and growlings, and oncethere was a thin high sound which seemed like the far-distant,death-startled scream of a man.