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

produced such diversities of opinion in scientific circles. She intended to make Towmy 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.



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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.
├гWonder what I├вd do,├д said Tommy Reames, ├гif another car came along from the other end?├д
He deliberately tried not to think about the telegram any more. He didn├вt believe it. He
couldn├вt believe it. But he couldn├вt 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 lead to some fascinating if abstruse conclusions.
But his brain would not remain away from the subject of the telegram, even though a
chicken appeared in the fenced-in lane ahead of him and went flapping wildly on before the car. It
rose in midair, the car overtook it as it rose above the level of the hood, and there was a
rolling, squawking bundle of shedding feathers tumbling over and over along the hood until it
reached the slanting windshield. There it spun wildly upward, left a cloud of feathers fluttering
about Tommy├вs head, and fell still squawking into the road behind. By the back-view
mirror, Tommy could see it picking itself up and staggering dizzily back to the side of the road.
├гMy point was,├д said Tommy vexedly to himself, speaking of the article the telegram
referred to, ├гthat a man can only recognize three dimensions of space and one of time. So that if
he got shot out of this cosmos altogether he wouldn├вt know the difference. He├вd still seem to be
in a three-dimensioned universe. And what is there in that stuff to get Denham in trouble?├д
A house appeared ahead. A low, rambling sort of bungalow with a huge brick barn behind it.
The house of Professor Denham, very certainly, and that barn was the laboratory in which he made
his experiments.
Instinctively, Tommy stepped on the gas. The car leaped ahead. And then he was breaking
frantically. A pipe-framed gate with thinner, unpainted wire mesh filling its surface loomed
before him, much too late for him to stop. There was a minor shock, a crashing and squeaking, and