The Fifth-Dimension Tube Page 6

  CHAPTER VI

  _The Golden City_

  The thing that struck Tommy first of all was the scarcity of men inthe city, compared to its size. The next thing was the entire absenceof women. The roar of machines smote upon his consciousness as a badthird, though they made din enough. Perhaps he ignored the machinenoises because the ornithopter on which they had arrived made such aracket 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 fourthgave off on empty space, and he realized that he was still at least ahundred feet above the ground. The ornithopter landed with a certainskilful precision and its wings ceased to beat. Behind it, the twofixed-wing machines soared down, leveled, hovered, and settled uponamazingly inadequate wheels. Their pilots got out and began to pushthem 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 ourbattleships use! They don't take off under their own power!"

  The six men on the ornithopter put their shoulders to their machineand trundled it out of the way. Tommy blinked at the sight.

  "No field attendants!" He gazed out across the open portion of theland area and saw an elevated thoroughfare below. Some sort ofvehicle, gleaming like gold, moved swiftly on two wheels. There was awalkway in the center of the street with room for a multitude. Butonly two men were in sight upon it. "Lord!" said Tommy. "Where are thepeople?"

  There was brief talk among the crew of the ornithopter. Two of thempicked up Tommy's weapons, and the pilot he had wounded made a gestureindicating that he should follow. He led the way to an arched door inthe nearest tower. A little two-wheeled car was waiting. They got intoit and the pilot fumbled with the controls. As he worked at it--ratherclumsily on account of his arm--the rest of the ornithopter's crewcame in. They wheeled out another vehicle, climbed into it, and shotaway down a sloping passage.

  * * * * *

  Their own vehicle followed and emerged upon the paved and nearly emptythoroughfare. Tall buildings rose all about them, with curved wallssoaring dizzily skyward. There was every sign of a populous city,including the dull drumming roar of many machines, but the streetswere empty. The little machine moved swiftly for minutes. Twice itswung aside and entered a sloping incline. Once it went up. The othertime it dived down seventy feet on a four-hundred-foot ramp. Then itswung sharply to the right, meandered into a street-level way leadinginto the heart of a monster building, and stopped. And in all itstravel it had not passed fifty people.

  The pilot-turned-chauffeur turned and grinned amiably, and led the wayagain. Steps--twenty or thirty of them. Then they emerged suddenlyinto a vast room. It must have been a hundred and fifty feet long,fifty wide, and nearly as high. It was floored with alternate blocksof what seemed to be an iron-hard black wood and the omnipresentgolden metal. Columns and pilasters about the place gave forth thesame subdued deep golden glow. Light streamed from panels inset in thewall and ceiling--a curious saffron-red light. There was a massivetable of the hard black wood. Chairs with curiously designed backswere ranged about it. They were benches, really, but they served thepurpose 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 theroom and sat down on one of the benches. A long time later, anotherman came in, in red; and another and another, until there were a dozenin all. They regarded Tommy and Evelyn with a weary suspicion. One ofthem--an old man with a white beard--asked questions. The pilotanswered them. At a word, the two men with Tommy's weapons placed themon the table. They were inspected casually, as familiar things. Theyprobably were, since some of Jacaro's gunmen had been killed in afight in this city. Another question.

  The pilot explained briefly and offered Tommy the black-metal padagain. It still contained the incomplete map of a hemisphere, and wasobviously a repetition of the question of where he came from.

  * * * * *

  Tommy took it, frowning thoughtfully. Then an idea struck him. Hefound the little stud which, pressed by the pad's owner, had erasedthe previous drawings. He pressed it and the lines disappeared. AndTommy drew, crudely enough, that complicated diagram which is supposedto represent a cube which is a cube in four dimensions: a tesseract.Upon one surface of the cube he indicated the curving towers of theGolden City. Upon a surface representing a plane beyond the threedimensions of normal experience, he repeated the angular towerstructures of New York. He shrugged rather hopelessly as he passed itover, but to his amazement it was understood at once.

  The little black pad passed from hand to hand and an animateddiscussion took place. One rather hard-faced man was the most animatedof all. The bearded old man demurred. The hard-faced man insisted.Tommy could see that his pilot's expression was becoming uneasy. Butthen a compromise seemed to be arrived at. The bearded man spoke asingle, ceremonial phrase and the twelve men rose. They moved towardvarious doors and one by one left, until the room was empty.

  But the pilot looked relieved. He grinned cheerfully at Tommy and ledthe way back to the two-wheeled vehicle. The two men with Tommy'sweapons vanished. And again there was a swift, cyclonelike passagealong empty ways with the throbbing of machinery audible everywhere.Into the base of a second building, up endless stairs, pastinnumerable doors. It seemed to Tommy that he heard voices behind someof them, and they were women's voices.

  At a private, triple knock a door opened wide, and the pilot led theway into a room, closed and locked the door behind him, and called. Awoman's voice cried out in astonishment. Through an inner arch a womancame running eagerly. Her face went blank at sight of Tommy andEvelyn, 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 werealone then, and could look out an oval window upon the Golden City allabout them. It was dark, but saffron-red panels glowed in buildingwalls all along the thoroughfares, and tiny glowing dots in thesoaring spires of gold told of people within other dwellings likethis.

  "As I see it," said Tommy restlessly, "the Council--and it must havebeen that in the big room to-day--put us in our friend's hands tolearn the language. He's been working with me four hours, drawingpictures, and I've been writing down words I've learned. I must haveseveral hundred of them. But we do our best talking with pictures. AndEvelyn, 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 evenguess at."

  "You probably have," admitted Tommy, frowning. "Check up on this: ourfriend's name is Aten, and he's an air-pilot and also has something todo with growing foodstuffs in some special towers where they growcrops by artificial light only. Some of the plants he sketched lookamazingly like wheat, by the way. The name of the town is"--he lookedat his notes--"Yugna. There are some other towns, ten or twelve ofthem. 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. Weunderstood perfectly. She's crazy about her husband, and I--well sheknows I'm going to marry you, so...."

  Tommy grunted.

  "I suppose she explained with a smile and gestures just how much of astrain it is, simply keeping the city going?"

  "Of course," said Evelyn calmly. "The city's fighting against thejungle, which grows worse all the time. They used to grow theirfoodstuffs in the open fields. Then within the city. Now they useempty towers and artificial light. I don't know why."

  * * * * *

  Tommy grunted again.

  "This planet's just had, or is havin
g, a change of geologic period,"he explained, frowning. "The plants people need to live on aren'tadapted to the new climate and new plants fit for food are scarce.They have to grow food under shelter, now, and their machines take anabnormal amount of supervision--I don't know why. The air-conditionsfor the food plants; the machines that fight back the jungle creeperswhich thrive in the new climate and try to crawl into the city tosmother it; the power machines; the clothing machines--a millionmachines have to be kept going to keep back the jungle and fight offstarvation and just hold on doggedly to the bare fact of civilization.And they're short-handed. The law of diminishing returns seems tooperate. They're trying to maintain a civilization higher than theirenvironment will support. They work until they're ready to drop, justto stay in the same place. And the monotony and the strain makes someof 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. Itmakes the monotony and the weariness bearable. And then, suddenly,they break. They hate the machines and the city and everything theyever knew or did. It's a sort of delayed-action psychosis which goesoff with a bang. Some of them go amuck in the city, using theirbelt-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 tothe jungle. And then they're Ragged Men, half mad at all times andwholly 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 isworking out ways and means to help a city named Yugna."

  "Not yet," said Tommy grimly. "We have to think of Earth. Noteverybody in the Council approved of us. Aten told me one chap arguedthat we ought to be shoved out into the jungle again as compatriots ofJacaro. And the machines were especially short-handed to-day becauseof a diversion of labor to get ready something monstrous and reallydeadly to send down the Tube to Earth. We've got to find out what thatis, and stop it."

  * * * * *

  But on the second day afterward, when he and Evelyn were summonedbefore the Council again, he still had not found out. During those twodays 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 whichbrought up superheated steam from the source of boiling springs longsince built over; that iron was a rare metal, and consequently therewas no dynamo in the city and magnetism was practically an unknownforce; that electrokinetics was a laboratory puzzle--or had been, whenthere was leisure for research--while the science of electrostaticshad progressed far past its state on Earth. The little truncheonlikeweapons carried a stored-up static charge measurable only in hundredsof thousands of volts, which could be released in flashes which wereeffective up to a hundred feet or more.

  And he learned that the thermit-throwers actually spat out in normaloperation tiny droplets of matter Aten could not describe clearly, butwhich seemed to be radioactive with a period of five minutes or less;that in Rahn, the nearest other city, _cuyal_ was taken openly, andthe jungle was growing into the town with no one to hold it back; thattwo generations since there had been twenty cities like this one, butthat a bare dozen still survived; that there was a tradition thathuman beings had come upon this planet from another world where otherhuman beings had harried them, and that in that other world there weredivers races of humanity, of different colors, whereas in the world ofthe Golden City all mankind was one race; that Tommy's declarationthat he came from another group of dimensions had been debated and, onre-examination of Jacaro's Tube, accepted, and that there was keenargument going on as to the measures to be taken concerning it.

  * * * * *

  These things Tommy had learned, and he and Evelyn went to their secondinterrogation by the city's Council armed with written vocabularies ofnearly a thousand words, which they had sorted out and made ready foruse. But they were still ignorant of the weapons the Golden City mightuse against Earth.

  The Council meeting took place in the same hall, with its alternatingblack-and-gold flooring and the saffron-red lighting panels casting asoft light everywhere. This was a scheduled meeting, foreseen andarranged for. The twelve chairs above the heavy table were alloccupied from the first. But Tommy realized that the table had beenintended to seat a large number of councilors. There were guardsstationed formally behind the chairs. There were spectators, auditorsof the deliberations of the Council. They were dressed in a myriadcolors, and they talked quietly among themselves; but it seemed toTommy 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. Thebearded old man in blue began the questioning. As Keeper ofFoodstuffs--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 ofEarth, of Professor Denham, of his and the professor's experiments. Heoutlined the first experiment with the Fifth-Dimension catapult andthe result of it--when the Golden City had sent the Death Mist to wipeout a band of Ragged Men who had captured a citizen, and after himEvelyn and her father.

  * * * * *

  This they remembered. Nods went around the table. Tommy told them ofJacaro, stressing the fact that Jacaro was an outlaw, a criminal uponEarth. He explained the theft of the model Tube, and how it was thattheir first contact with Earth had been with the dregs of Earthhumanity. On behalf of his countrymen he offered reparation for allthe damage Jacaro and his men had done. He proposed a peacefulcommerce between worlds, to the infinite benefit of both.

  There was silence until he finished. The faces before him wereimmobile. But a hawk-faced man in brown asked dry questions. Werethere more races than one upon Earth? Were they of diverse colors? Didthey ever war among themselves? At Tommy's answers the atmosphereseemed to change. And the hawk-faced man rose to speak.

  Tommy and Evelyn, he conceded caustically, had certainly come fromanother world. Their own most ancient legends described just such aworld as his: a world of many races of many colors, who fought manywars among themselves. Their ancestors had fled from such a world,according to legend through a twisting cavern which they had sealedbehind them. The conditions Tommy described had been the cause oftheir ancestors' flight. They, the people of Yugna, would do well tofollow the example of their forebears: strip these Earth folk of theirweapons, exile them to the jungles, destroy the Tube through which theMist 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 wasdestroying the city's citizens, but gave a transient energy to itsvictims. He spoke in fiery phrases, urging action which would bedrastic and certain. He spoke confidently, persuasively. There was arustling among those who watched and listened to the debate. He hadcaught at their imagination.

  Evelyn, exerting every faculty to understand, saw Tommy's lips setgrimly.

  "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 defeatboth the jungle and the invaders from Earth. In past ages theirancestors were faced by enemies they could not defeat. They fled tothis world. Now they are faced by jungles they cannot defeat. Heproposes that they flee to our world. The Death Mist is a toy, hereminds them, compared with gases they know. There is a gas of whichone part in ten hundred million is fatal! In a hundred of their daysthey can make and send through the Tube enough of it to kill everyliving thing on Earth. They've figures on the Earth's size andatmosphere from me, damn 'em! And he reminds
them that that deadly gaschanges of itself into a harmless substance. He urges them to gasEarth humanity out of existence, call upon the other cities of thisworld, and presently move through the Tube to Earth. They'll carrytheir food-plants, rebuild their cities, and abandon this planet tothe jungles and the Ragged Men. And the hell of it is, they can doit!"

  A sudden approving buzz went through the Council hall.