mmy Reames' extraordinary rescue of Professor
Denham and his daughter--marooned in the fifth dimension.

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., M. A., 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 "King"
Jacaro, lord of vice-resorts and rum-runners, into a passionate
enthusiast in non-Euclidean 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's 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. "Keep Out!" Halfway down
was another sign. "Private Property. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted."
On one gate-post was another notice, "Live Wires Within." and on the
other a defiant placard. "Savage Dogs At Large Within This Fence."

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' 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's cu