Tommy inspected his surroundings with an infinite care. As the
darkness deepened he meditatively taped a flashlight below the barrel
of the sub-machine gun. Turned on, it would cast a pitiless light upon
his target, and the sights would be silhouetted against the thing to
be killed. He hung his grenades in a handy row just inside the mouth
of the Tube and set his gas bombs conveniently in place, then settled
down to watch.
It was assuredly necessary. Von Holtz's story confirmed his own and
Denham's guesses and made their worst fears seem optimistic. Von Holtz
had made a Tube for Jacaro, working from the model of Tommy's own
construction. It had been completed nearly a month before. But no
jungle odors had seeped through that other Tube on its completion. It
opened in a sub-cellar of a structure in the Golden City itself, the
city of towers and soaring spires Denham had glimpsed long months
before. By sheer fortune it opened upon a rarely used storeroom where
improbable small animals--the equivalent of rats--played obscenely in
the light of ever-glowing panels in the wall.
For two days of the Fifth-Dimension world Jacaro and his gunmen lay
quiet. During two nights they made infinitely cautious reconnaissance.
The second night it was necessary to kill two men who sighted the tiny
exploring party. But the killing was done with silenced automatics,
and there was no alarm. The third night they lay still, fearing an
ambush. The fourth night Jacaro struck.
* * * * *
He and his men fled back to their Tube with plunder and precious gems.
Their loot was vast even beyond their hopes, though they had killed
other men in gathering it. The Golden City was rich beyond belief. The
very crust of the Fifth-Dimension world seemed to be composed of other
substances than those of Earth. The common metals of Earth were rare
or even unknown. The rarer metals of Earth were the commonplace ones
in the Golden City. Even the roofs seemed plated with gold, but
Jacaro's gunmen saw not one particle of iron save in a ring they took
from a dead man's finger. There, an acid-etched plate of steel was set
as if to be used for a signet.
Von Holtz had accompanied the raiders perforce on every journey.
Jeweled bearings for motors; objects of commonest use, made of gold
beat thin for lightness; huge ingots of silver for industry; once a
queer-shaped spool of platinum wire that it took two men to
carry--these things made up the loot they scurried back to their
rathole with. Five raids they made, and twenty men they shot down
before they came upon disaster. On the sixth raid an outcry rose and
an ambush fell upon them.
Flashes of incredibly vivid actinic flame leaped from queer engines
that opened upon them. Curious small truncheonlike weapons spat
paralyzing electric shocks upon them. The twelve gangsters fought with
the desperation of cornered rats, with notched and explosive bullets
and with streams of lead from tommy-guns.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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