Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931Various
Science
Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931
Various
Science fiction -- Periodicals; Science fiction, American -- Periodicals
While Tommy had been talking and listening, while he had been away
from the eyepiece, one or other of the occupants of the globe had
emerged from it. The door was open. But now the girl came bounding
suddenly through the ferns. She called, though it seemed to Tommy that
there was a curious air of caution even in her calling. She was
excited, hopefully excited.
Denham came out of the globe with a clumsy club in his hand. But
Evelyn caught his arm and pointed up into the sky. Denham stared, and
then began to make wild and desperate gestures as if trying to attract
attention to himself.
Tommy watched for minutes, and then swung the dimensoscope around. It
was extraordinary, to be sitting in the perfectly normal brick-walled
laboratory, looking into a slender brass tube, and seeing another
universe entirely, another wild and unbelievable landscape.
The tree-fern forest drew back and the vast and steaming morass was
again in view. There were distant bright golden gleams from the city.
But Tommy was searching the sky, looking in the sky of a world in the
fifth dimension for a thing which would make a man gesticulate
hopefully.
He found it. It was an aircraft, startlingly close through the
telescope. A single figure was seated at its controls, motionless as
if bored, with exactly the air of a weary truck driver piloting a
vehicle along a roadway he does not really see. And Tommy, being near
enough to see the pilot's pose, could see the aircraft clearly. It was
totally unlike a terrestrial airplane. A single huge and thick wing
supported it. But the wing was angular and clumsy-seeming, and its
form was devoid of the grace of an earthly aircraft wing, and there
was no tail whatever to give it the appearance of a living thing.
There was merely a long, rectangular wing with a framework beneath it,
and a shimmering thing which was certainly not a screw propeller, but
which seemed to draw it.
* * * * *
It moved on steadily and swiftly, dwindling in the distance, with its
motionless pilot seated before a mass of corded bundles. It looked as
if this were a freight plane of some sort, and therefore made in a
strictly utilitarian fashion.
It vanished in the haze above the monster swamp, going in a straight
line for the golden city at the world's edge.
Tommy stared at it, long after it had ceased to be visible. Then he
saw a queer movement on the earth near the edge of the morass. Figures
were moving. Human figures. He saw four of them, shaking clenched
fists and capering insanely, seeming to bellow insults after the
oblivious and now invisible flying thing. He could see that they were
nearly naked, and that one of them carried a spear. But the
indubitable glint of metal was reflected from one of them for an
instant, when some metal accoutrement about him glittered in the
sunlight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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