he original catapult--he made a new small device
to achieve the original end.

* * * * *

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

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

* * * * *

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

There was a mo