Tommy released Von Holtz, and the lean young man gasped and sputtered and gesticulated wildly in a frenzy of rage.
«He’ll make it,» said Tommy coldly. «Because he doesn’t dare not to!»
Von Holtz went out of the laboratory, his weak-looking eyes staring and wild, and his mouth working.
«He’ll be back,» said Tommy briefly. «You’ve got to make a small model of that big catapult, Smithers. Can you do it?»
«Sure,» said Smithers. «The ring’!! be copper tubing, with pinbearings. Wind a coil on the lathe. It’ll be kinda rough, but it’ll do. But gears, now..
«I’ll attend to them. You know how to work that metallic ammonium?»
«If that’s what it was,» agreed Smithers. «I worked it for the Professor.»
Tommy leaned close and whispered, «You never made any gears of that. But did you make some springs?»
«Uh-huh!»
Tommy grinned joyously.
«Then we’re set and I’m right! Von Holtz wants a mathematical formula, and no one on earth could write one, but we don’t need it!»
Smithers rummaged around the laboratory with a casual air, acquired this and that and the other thing, and set to work with an astounding absence of waste motions. From time to time he inspected the great catapult thoughtfully, verified some impression, and went about the construction of another part.
And when Von Holtz did not return, Tommy hunted for him. He suddenly remembered hearing his car motor start. He found his car missing. He swore, then, and grimly began to hunt for a telephone in the house. But before he had raised central he heard the deep-toned purring of the motor again. His car was coming swiftly back to the house. And he saw, through a window, that Von Holtz was driving it.
The lean young man got out of it, his face white with passion. He started for the laboratory. Tommy intercepted him.
«I-went to get materials for making the metal,» said Von Holtz hoarsely, repressing his rage with a great effort. «I shall begin at once, Herr Reames.»
Tommy said nothing whatever. Von Holtz was lying. Of course. He carried nothing in the way of materials. But he had gone away from the house, and Tommy knew as definitely as if Von Holtz had told him, that Von Holtz had gone off to communicate in safety with someone who signed his correspondence with a J.
Von Holtz went into the laboratory. The four-cylinder motor began to throb at once. The whine of the dynamo arose almost immediately after. Von Holtz came out of the laboratory and dived into a shed that adjoined the brick building. He remained in there.
Tommy looked at the trip register on his speedometer. Like most people with methodical minds, he had noted the reading on arriving at a new destination. Now he knew how far Von Holtz had gone. He had been to the village and back.
«Meaning,» said Tommy grimly to himself, «that the J who wants plans and calculations is either in the village or at the end of a longdistance wire. And Von Holtz said he was on the way. He’ll probably turn up and try to bribe me.»
He went back into the laboratory and put his eye to the eyepiece of the dimensoscope. Smithers had his blowtorch going and was busily accumulating an apparently unrelated series of discordant bits of queerly shaped metal. Tommy looked through at the strange, mad world he could see through the eyepiece.
The tree-fern forest was still. The encampment of the Ragged Men was nearly quiet. Sunset seemed to be approaching in this other world, though it was still bright outside the laboratory. The hours of day and night were obviously not the same in the two worlds, so close together that a man could be flung from one to the other by a mechanical contrivance.
The sun seemed larger, too, than the orb which lights our normal earth. When Tommy swung the vision instrument about to search for it, he found a great red ball quite four times the diameter of our own sun, neatly bisected by the horizon. Tommy watched, waiting for it to sink. But it did not sink straight downward as the sun seems to do in all temperate latitudes. It descended, yes, but it moved along the horizon as it sank. Instead of a direct and forthright dip downward, the sun seemed to progress along the horizon, dipping more deeply as it swam. And Tommy watched it blankly.
«It’s not our sun… But it’s not our world. Yet it revolves, and there are men on it. And a sun that size would bake the earth.. And it’s sinking at an angle that would only come at a latitude of-»
That was the clue. He understood at once. The instrument through which he regarded the strange world looked out upon the polar regions of that world. Here, where the sun descended slantwise, were the high latitudes, the coldest spaces upon all the whole planet. And if here there were the gigantic growths of a carboniferous era, the tropic regions of this planet must be literal infernos.
And then he saw that in its gradual descent the monster sun was going along behind the Golden City, and the outlines of its buildings, the magnificence of its spires, were limned clearly for him against the dully glowing disk.
Nowhere upon earth had such a city ever been dreamed of. No man had ever envisioned such a place, where far-flung arches interconnected soaring, towering columns, where curves of perfect grace were united in forms of utterly perfect proportion..
The sunlight died, and dusk began and deepened, and vividly brilliant stars began to come out overhead, and Tommy suddenly searched the heavens eagerly for familiar constellations. And found not one. All the stars were strange. These stars seemed larger and much more near than the tiny pinpoints that blink down upon our earth.
And then he swung the instrument again and saw great fires roaring and the Ragged Men crouched about them. Within them, rather, because they had built fires about themselves as if to make a wall of flame. And once Tommy saw twin, monstrous eyes gazing from the blackness of the tree-fern forest. They were huge eyes, and they were far apart, so that the head of the creature who used them must have been enormous. And they were all of fifteen feet above the ground when they speculatively looked over the ring of fires and the ragged, degraded men within them. Then that creature, whatever it was, turned away and vanished.
But Tommy felt a curious shivering horror of the thing. It had moved soundlessly, without a doubt, because not one of the Ragged Men had noted its presence. It had been kept away by the fires. But Denham and Evelyn were somewhere in the tree-fern forest, and they would not dare to make fires..
Tommy drew away from the dimensoscope, shivering. He had been looking only, but the place into which he looked was real, and the dangers that lay hidden there were very genuine, and there was a man and a girl of his own race and time struggling desperately, without arms or hope, to survive.
Smithers was casually fitting together an intricate array of little rings made of copper tubing. There were three of them, and each was fitted into the next largest by pins which enabled them to spin noiselessly and swiftly at the touch of Smithers’s finger. He had them spinning now, each in a separate direction, and the effect was bewildering.
As Tommy watched, Smithers stopped them, oiled the pins carefully, and painstakingly inserted a fourth ring. Only this ring was of a white metal that looked somehow more pallid than silver. It had a whiteness like that of ivory beneath its metallic gleam.
Tommy blinked. «Did Von Holtz give you that metal?» he asked suddenly.
Smithers looked up and puffed at a short brown pipe. «Nope. There was some splashes of it by the castin’ box. I melted them together an’ run a ring. Pressed it to shape; y’ can’t hammer this stuff. It goes to water and dries up quicker’n lightning-an’ you hold y’nose an’ run. I used it before for the Professor.»
Tommy went over to him excitedly. He picked up the little contrivance of many concentric rings. The big motor was throbbing rhythmically, and the generator was humming at the back of the laboratory. Von Holtz was out of sight. -.