"Murray Leinster - The.Fifth-Dimension.Catapult" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

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The Fifth-Dimension Catapult
BY MURRAY LEINSTER


FOREWORD

THIS STORY has no normal starting place, because there are too many places where it might be said
to begin. One might commence when Professor Denham, Ph.D., MA., etc., isolated a metal that
scientists have been talking about for many years without ever being able to smelt. Or it might
start with his first experimental use of that metal
with entirely impossible results. Or it might very plausibly begin with an interview between a
celebrated leader of gangsters in the city of Chicago and a spectacled young laboratory assistant
who had turned over to him a peculiar heavy object of solid gold and very nervously explained, and
finally managed to prove, where it came from. With also impossible results, because it turned
├гKing├д Jacaro, lord of vice-
resorts and rum-runners, into a passionate enthusiast in nonEuclidean geometry. The whole story
might be said to begin with the moment of that interview.
But that leaves out Smithers, and especially it leaves out Tommy Reames. So, on the whole,
it is best to take up the narrative at the moment of Tommy├вs first entrance into the course of
events.


CHAPTER I

He came to a stop in a cloud of dust that swirled up to and all about the big roadster and
surveyed the gate of the private road. The gate was rather impressive. At its top was a sign,
├гKeep Out!├д Halfway down was another sign, ├гPrivate Property. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.├д On
one gate-post was another notice, ├гLive Wires Within,├д and on the other a defiant placard, ├гSavage
Dogs At Large Within This Fence.├д
The fence itself was all of seven feet high and made of the heaviest of woven-wire
construction. It was topped with barbed wire, and went all the way down both sides of a narrow
right of way until it vanished in the distance.
Tommy got out of the car and opened the gate. This fitted the description of his
destination, as given him by a brawny, red-headed filling-station attendant in the village some
two miles back. He drove the roadster through the gate, got out and closed it piously, got back in
the car and shot it ahead.
He went humming down the narrow private road at forty-five miles an hour. That was Tommy
Reames├вs way. He looked totally unlike the conventional description of a scientist of any sort├╖as
much unlike a scientist as his sport roadster looked unlike a scientist├вs customary means of
transit├╖and ordinarily he acted quite unlike one. As a matter of fact, most of the people Tommy
associated with hadn├вt the faintest inkling of his taste for science as an avocation. There was
Peter Daizell, for instance, who would have held up his hands in holy horror at the idea of Tommy
Reames├вs being the author of that article in the Philosophical Journal, ├гOn the Mass and Inertia
of the Tesseract,├д which had caused such 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 ├гAdditions to Herglotz├вs Mechanics of Continua├д