.
"Why--yes...." said Tommy dazedly. "Yes. Of course!" Clarity came to
his brain with a jerk. He did not understand at all, but he believed
what he had seen. Denham and his daughter were somewhere in some other
dimension, yet within range of the extraordinary device he had looked
through. And they were in trouble. So much was evident from their
poses and their manner. "Of course," he repeated. "They're--there,
wherever it is, and they can't get back. They don't seem to be in any
imminent danger...."
Von Holtz licked his lips.
"The Ragged Men have not found them yet," he said in a hushed, harsh
voice. "Before they went in the globe we saw the Ragged Men. We
watched them. If they do find the Herr Professor and his daughter,
they will kill them very slowly, so that they will take days of
screaming agony to die. It is that that I am afraid of, Herr Reames.
The Ragged Men roam the tree-fern forests. If they find the Herr
Professor they will trace each nerve to its root of agony until he
dies. And we will be able only to watch...."
CHAPTER II
"The thing is," said Tommy feverishly, "that we've got to find a way
to get them back. Whether it duplicates Denham's results or not. How
far away are they?"
"A few hundred yards, perhaps," said Von Holtz wearily, "or ten
million miles. It is the same thing. They are in a place where the
fifth dimension is the dominant coordinate."
Tommy was pacing up and down the laboratory. He stopped and looked
through the eyepiece of the extraordinary vision apparatus. He tore
himself away from it again.
"How does this thing work?" he demanded.
Von Holtz began to unscrew two wing-nuts which kept the top of the
aluminum casting in place.
"It is the first piece of apparatus which Professor Denham made," he
said precisely. "I know the theory, but I cannot duplicate it. Every
dimension is at right angles to all other dimensions, of course. The
Herr Professor has a note, here--"
He stopped his unscrewing to run over a heap of papers on the
work-bench--papers over which he seemed to have been poring
desperately at the time of Tommy's arrival. He handed a sheet to
Tommy, who read:
"If a creature who was aware of only two dimensions made two
right-angled objects and so placed them that all the angles formed by
the combination were right angles, he would contrive a figure
represented by the corner of a box; he would discover a third
dimension. Similarly, if a three-dimensioned
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