"Murray Leinster - The.Fifth-Dimension.Tube" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

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The Fifth-Dimension Tube

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 powerleads 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 multiplepole 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 ãKingä Jacaroâs forfeiture of two hundred
thousand dollarsâ 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 FifthDimension 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. Heâd done most of the mechanical work on
the Tubeâs 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 Thbe. 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