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 "King" Jacaro's
forfeiture of two hundred thousand dollars' 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 Fifth-Dimension 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. He'd done most of the mechanical work on
the Tube's 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
Tube. 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 could
only be 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 the