"Leinster, Murray - The Fifth-Dimension Tube UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

A chance bullet blew something up. One of the flame weapons flew to bits, spouting what seemed to be liquid thermit upon friend and foe alike. The way of the gangsters back to their Tube was barred. The route they knew was a chaos of scorched bodies and melting metal. The thermit flowed in all directions, seeming to grow in volume as it flamed. Jacaro and his gangsters fled. They broke through the shaken remnants of the ambush. The six of them who survived the fighting found a man somnolently driving a ground vehicle with two wheels. They burst upon him and, with their seared faces constituting threats in themselves, forced him to drive them out of the Golden City. They fled along aluminum roads into
the tree-fern forests, while the sky behind them seemed to flame as the city woke to the tumult in its ways.
They killed the driver of their vehicle when he refused to take them farther, and it was that murder which saved their lives. It was seen by Ragged Men, the outlaws of the jungle, and it proved their enmity to the Golden City. The Ragged Men greeted them joyously and fed them, and enlisted their aid in a savage attack on a land-convoy on the way to the city. Their weapons carried the convoy, and they watched wounded prisoners killed with excruciating tortures. .
They were with the Ragged Men now, Von Holtz believed. He had fled a week or more before, when JacaroЧalready learning the language of his half-mad alliesЧbegan to plan a grandiose attack upon the Golden City. Von Holtz was born a coward, and he knew where Tommy Reames and Denham would shortly thrust a Tube through. It would come out just where the catapult had flung Evelyn and Denham, months before, the same spot where he had marooned them. He searched desperately for that Tube, and failed to find it. He was chased by carnivores, scratched by thorns, and at last pursued by a yelling horde of human devils who were fired into by Smithers from the mouth of the just-finished Tube.

TOMMY debated the story grimly as he stood guard in the Tube in the humid jungle night. Many-colored stars winked fitfully through the thatch of giant ferns overhead. The wind soughed unsteadily above the jungle. There were queer creakings, and once or twice there were distant cries, and when the wind died down there was a deep-toned croaking audible somewhere which sounded rather like the croaking of unthinkably monstrous frogs. But it could not be that, of course. And once there was the sound of dainty movement and something passed nearby. Tommy Reames saw the shadowy outline of a bulk so vast that it turned him cold to think about it, and it did not seem fair for any creature as huge as that to move so quietly.
Then there was a little scuffling noise beneath him. A hand touched his foot.
УItТsЧitТs me, Tommy.Ф Evelyn crowded up beside him and
whispered shakenly: УItЧit was so lonesome down there, so quiet.Ф
Tommy frowned unhappilyТ in the darkness. If he sent her back, she would know it was because he knew danger lurked here. Then she would worry. If he did not send her back .
УIТllЧIТll go back the minute you tell me,Ф she insisted forlornly. УHonestly. ButЧI was lonesome.Ф
Tommy slipped his arm about her.
УWoman,Ф he said sternly, УIТm going to let you stay ten minutes, so you can brag to our grandchildren that you were the first Earth-girl ever to be kissed in the Fifth Dimension. But I want you down in the laboratory so you wonТt be in my way if I start running!Ф
His tone was the right one. She even laughed a little, softly, as he pressed her to him. Then she clung to his hand and tried eagerly to pierce the darkness all about them.
УYouТll be able to see something presently,Ф he assured her in a low tone. УJust keep quiet, now.Ф

SHE gazed up at the stars, then around in the so-nearly complete obscurity. Tommy answered her comments abstractedly, after a little. He was not quite sure that certain irregular sounds, yet far distant, were not actually quite regular ones. The Ragged Men Smithers had shot into had run away. But they would come back, and they might come with Jacaro and his gunmen as allies. If those distant sounds were men .
She withdrew her hand from his. Her back was toward him then, as she tried to pierce the darkness with her eyes. Tommy listened uneasily to the distant sound. Suddenly he felt Evelyn bump against his shoulder. He turned sharplyЧand she was out of the Tube! She was walking steadily off into the darkness!
УEvelyn! Evelyn!Ф
She did not falter or turn. He switched on the flashlight beneath his gun barrel and leaped out of the Tube himself. The light swept about. EvelynТs little figure kept moving away from him. Then his heart stood still. There were eyes beyond her in the darkness, huge, monstrous, steady eyes, half a yard apart in a head like something out of hell. And he could not fire
because Evelyn was between the Thing and himself. Its eyes glowed unholilyЧfascinating, hypnotic, insane. .

EVELYN swayed . . . and the Thing moved! Tommy leaped like a madman, shouting. As his feet struck the ground a mass of solid-seeming fungus gave way beneath him. He fell sprawling, but clutching the gun fast. The spreading beam of the flashlight showed him Evelyn turning, her face filled with a wakening horrorЧthe horror of one released from the fascination of a snake. She screamed his name.
Then a huge lizard paw swept forward and seized her body. A second gripped her as she screamed again. And Tommy Reames was deathly, terribly cold. The whole thing had happened in seconds only. He was submerged in slimy, sticky ooze which was the crushed fungus that had tripped him. But he cleared the gun. The flashlight limned a ghastly, obscenely fat body and a long tapering tail. Tommy aimed at the base of that tail and pulled the trigger, praying frenziedly.
A stream of flame leaped from the gun-muzzle. Explosive bullets uttered their queer cracking noise. The thing screamed horribly. Its cry was hoarsely shrill. The flashlight showed it swinging ponderously about, with Evelyn held fast against its body in a fashion horribly reminiscent of a child holding a doll.
Tommy was scrambling upright. Jaws clamped, cold horror filling him, he aimed again, at the sharp-toothed head above EvelynТs body. He could not try a heart shot with her in the way. Again the gun spat out a burst of explosive lead. And Tommy should have been sickened by the effect of the detonating missiles. The thingТs lower jaw was shattered, half severed, made useless. It should have been killed a dozen times over.
But it screamed again until the jungle rang with the uproar, and then it fled, still screaming and still holding Evelyn clutched fast against its scaly breast.

CHAPTER IV
The Fifth-Dimension World

TOMMY flung himself in pursuit, despairing. Evelyn cried out once more as the lumbering thing fled with her, giving utterance to shrieking outcries at which the tree-fern jun
gle shook. It leaped once, upon monstrous hind legs, but came crashing heavily to the ground. TommyТs explosive bullets had shattered the bones which supported the balancing tail. Now that huge fleshy member dragged uselessly. The thing could not progress in its normal fashion of leaps covering many yards. It began to waddle clumsily, shrieking, with Evelyn clasped close. Its jaw was a shattered horror. It went marching insanely through the blackness of the jungle, and with it went the unholy din of its anguish, and behind it Tommy Reames came flinging himself frenziedly in pursuit.
Normally, the thing should have distanced him in seconds. Even crippled as it was, it moved swiftly. The scaly, duckshaped head reared a good twenty feet above the fallen treefern fronds which carpeted the jungle. The monstrous splayed feet stretched a good yard and a half from front to rear upon the ground. Even its waddling footprints were yards apart, and it moved in terror.
Tommy tripped, fell, and got to his feet again, and the shrieking tumult was farther away. He raced madly toward the sound, the flashlight beam cutting swordlike through the blackness. He caught sight of the warty, scaly bulk of the monster at the extreme limit of the rays. It was moving faster than he could travel. He sobbed helpless curses at the thing and put forth superhuman exertions. He leaped fallen treefern trunks, he splashed through shallow pondsЧlater, when he knew something of the inhabitants of such pools, Tommy would turn cold at that memoryЧand raced on, gasping for breath while the shrieking of the thing that bore Evelyn grew more and more distant.

IN five minutes he was almost strangling and the thing was half a mile ahead of him. In ten, he was exhausted, and the shrieking noise it made as it waddled away was distinctly fainter. In fifteen minutes he only heard its hooting scream between the harsh laboring rasps of his own breath as he drew it into tortured lungs. But he ran on. He leaped and climbed and ran in a terrible obliviousness to all dangers the jungle might hold.
He leaped down from one toppled tree-trunk upon what seemed to be another. But the thing he landed upon gave
beneath his boots in the unmistakable fashion of yielding flesh. Something vast and angry stirred and hissed furiously. SomethingЧa head, perhapsЧwhipped toward him among the fallen fern-fronds. But he was racing on, sobbing, cursing, praying all at once.
Then suddenly he broke out into a profuse sweat. His breathing became easier, and then he was running lightly. His second wind had come to him. He was no longer exhausted. He felt as if he could run forever, and ran on more swiftly still. Suddenly the flashlight beam showed him a deep furrow in the rotting vegetation underfoot, and something glistened. A musky reek filled his nostrils. The thingТs trailЧthe furrow left by its dragging tail! That musky reek was the thingТs blood. It was bleeding from the wounds the explosive bullets had made. It was spouting whatever filthy fluid ran in its veins even as it waddled onward, screaming.
Five minutes more, and he felt that he was gaining on it. Ten, and he was sure of it. But it was half an hour before he actually overtook the injured monster marching like a mad machine, its mutilated ducklike head held high, its colossal feet lifting one after the other in a heavy, slowing waddle, and its hoarse screams re-echoing in a senseless uproar of agony.

TOMMYТS hands were shaking, but his brain was cool with
a vast coolness. He raced past the shrieking monster,
and halted in its path. He saw Evelyn, a huddled bundle,
clasped still to the creatureТs scaly breast. And Tommy sent a
burst of explosive bullets into a gigantic, foot-thick ankle-joint. The monster toppled, and flung out its prehensile lizard
claws in an instinctive effort to catch itself. Evelyn was thrown clear. And Tommy, standing alone in the blackness of a carboniferous jungle upon an alien planet, sent bullet after bullet into the shaking, obscenely flabby body of the thing. The bullets penetrated, and exploded. Great masses of flesh upheaved and fell away. Great gouts of awful-smelling fluid were flung out and blown to mist by the explosions. The thing did not so much die as disintegrate under the storm of detonating missiles.
Then Tommy went to Evelyn. He was wild with grief. He had no faintest hope that she could still be living. But as he picked
her up she moaned softly, and when he cried her name she clung to him, pressing close in an agony of thankfulness almost as devastating as her fear had been.