The Fifth-Dimension Tube

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.