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

could only b• 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


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before the mouth of the Tube, an automatic rifle in his hands. Tommy Reames stood grimly before
Evelyn. Heâd 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:
ãI donât think thereâs any doubt about the Tube having gotten through. Thatâs the Fifth-
Dimension planet, all right.ä
He smiled at Evelyn. She was deathly pale.
ãI÷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 an 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.
ãThe Tube wasnât seen, anyhow,ä said Professor Denham briskly. ãWhoâs going through
first?ä
Tommy slung a cartridge belt about his waist and a gas mask about his neck.
ãI am,ä he said shortly. ãWeâll want to camouflage the mouth of the Tube. Iâll watch a bit
before I get out.ä
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. 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.
Having gone so far, he had devised a catapult which literally flung objects to the surface