ment of awful sickness as he passed the third bend. He
was hideously dizzy when he passed the fourth. For a time he felt as
if he had no weight at all. But then, quite abruptly, he was climbing
vertically upward and the soughing of tree-fern fronds was loud in his
ears, and suddenly the end of the Tube was under his fingers and he
stared out into the world of the Fifth Dimension.

Now a gentle wind blew in his face. Tree-ferns rose to incredible
heights above his head, and now and again by the movements of their
fronds he caught stray glimpses of unfamiliar stars. There were red
stars, and blue ones, and once he caught sight of a clearly
distinguishable double star, of which each component was visible to
the naked eye. And very, very far away he heard the beastly yellings
he knew must be the outlaws, the Ragged Men, feasting horribly on
half-scorched flesh torn from the quivering, yet-living flanks of a
monstrous reptile.

Something moved, whimpered--and fled suddenly. It sounded like a human
being. And Tommy Reames was struck with the utterly impossible
conviction that he had heard just that sound before. It was not
dangerous, in any case, and he watched, and listened, and presently he
slipped from the mouth of the Tube and by the glow of a flashlight
stripped foliage from nearby growths and piled it about the Tube's
mouth. And then, because the purpose of the Tube was not adventure but
science, he went back down into the laboratory.

* * * * *

The three men, with Evelyn, worked until dawn at the rest of their
preparations for the use of the Tube. All that time the laboratory was
filled with the heavy fragrance of a tree-fern jungle upon an unknown
planet. The heavy, sickly-sweet scents of closed jungle blossoms
filled their nostrils. The reek of feverishly growing green things
saturated the air. A steady wind blew down the Tube, and it bore
innumerable unfamiliar odors into the laboratory. Once a gigantic moth
bumped and blundered into the Tube, and finally crawled heavily out
into the light. It was scaled, and terrible because of its monstrous
size, but it had broken a wing and could not fly. So it crawled with
feverish haste toward a brilliant electric light. Its eyes were
especially horrible because they were not compound like the moths of
Earth. They were single, like those of a man, and were fixed in an
expression of utter, fascinated hypnosis. The thing looked horribly
human