stomary
means of transit--and ordinarily he acted quite unlike one. As a
matter of fact, most of the people Tommy associated with had no
faintest inkling of his taste for science as an avocation. There was
Peter Dalzell, for instance, who would have held up his hands in holy
horror at the idea of Tommy Reames being the author of that article.
"On the Mass and Inertia of the Tesseract," which in the
_Philosophical Journal_ had caused a controversy.

And there was one Mildred Holmes--of no importance in the matter of
the Fifth-Dimension Catapult--who would have lifted beautifully arched
eyebrows in bored unbelief if anybody had suggested that Tommy Reames
was that Thomas Reames whose "Additions to Herglotz's Mechanics of
Continua" produced such diversities of opinion in scientific circles.
She intended to make Tommy propose to her some day, and thought she
knew all about him. And everybody, everywhere, would have been
incredulous of his present errand.

* * * * *

Gliding down the narrow, fenced-in road. Tommy was a trifle dubious
about this errand himself. A yellow telegraph-form in his pocket read
rather like a hoax, but was just plausible enough to have brought him
away from a rather important tennis match. The telegram read:

PROFESSOR DENHAM IN EXTREME DANGER THROUGH EXPERIMENT BASED ON
YOUR ARTICLE ON DOMINANT COORDINATES YOU ALONE CAN HELP HIM IN
THE NAME OF HUMANITY COME AT ONCE.

A. VON HOLTZ.

The fence went on past the car. A mile, a mile and a half of narrow
lane, fenced in and made as nearly intruder-proof as possible.

"Wonder what I'd do," said Tommy Reames, "if another car came along
from the other end?"

He deliberately tried not to think about the telegram any more. He
didn't believe it. He couldn't believe it. But he couldn't ignore it,
either. Nobody could: few scientists, and no human being with a normal
amount of curiosity. Because the article on dominant coordinates had
appeared in the _Journal of Physics_ and had dealt with a state of
things in which the normal coordinates of everyday existence were
assumed to have changed their functions: when the coordinates of time,
the vertical, the horizontal and the lateral changed places and a man
went east to go up and west to go "down" and ran his street-numbers in
a fourth dimension. It was mathematical foolery, from one standpoint,
but it led to some