“I don’t think there’s any doubt about the Tube having gotten through. That’s the Fifth Dimension planet, all right.”
He smiled at Evelyn. She was deathly pale.
“I—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 in 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.
“The Tube wasn’t seen, anyhow,” said Professor Denham briskly. “Who’s going through first?”
Tommy slung a cartridge belt about his waist and a gas mask about his neck.
“I am,” he said shortly. “We’ll want to camouflage the mouth of the Tube. I’ll watch a bit before I get out.”
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.