d. I got my own reasons. I'll pay for it. Plenty.
You know I got plenty to pay, too. Or else--"

"What?"

"Something'll happen to you," said Jacaro briefly. "I ain't sayin''
what. But it's damn likely you'll tell what I want to know before it's
finished. Name your price and be damn quick!"

Tommy took his hand out of his pocket. He had a gun in it.

"The only possible answer to that," he said suavely, "is to tell you
to go to hell. Get out! But Von Holtz stays here. He'd better!"

CHAPTER IV

Within half an hour after Jacaro's leaving, Smithers was in the
village, laying in a stock of supplies and sending telegrams that
Tommy had written out for transmission. Tommy sat facing an ashen Von
Holtz and told him pleasantly what would be done to him if he failed
to make the metallic ammonium needed to repair the big solenoid. In an
hour, Smithers was back, reporting that Jacaro was also sending
telegrams but that he, Smithers, had stood over the telegraph operator
until his own messages were transmitted. He brought back weapons,
too--highly illegal things to have in New York State, where a citizen
is only law-abiding when defenseless. And then four days of hectic,
sleepless labor began.

On the first day one of Tommy's friends drove in in answer to a
telegram. It was Peter Dalzell, with men in uniform apparently
festooned about his car. He announced that a placard warning passersby
of smallpox within, had been added to the decorative signs upon the
gate, and stared incredulously at the interior of the big brick barn.
Tommy grinned at him and gave him plans and specifications of a light
steel globe in which two men might be transported into the fifth
dimension by a suitably operating device. Tommy had sat up all night
drawing those plans. He told Dalzell just enough of what he was up
against to enlist Dalzell's enthusiastic cooperation without
permitting him to doubt Tommy's sanity. Dalzell had known Tommy as an
amateur tennis player, but not as a scientist.

He marveled, refused to believe his eyes when he looked through the
dimensoscope, and agreed that the whole thing had to be kept secret or
the rescue expedition would be prevented from starting by the
incarceration of both Tommy and Smithers in comfortable insane
asylums. He feigned to admire Von Holtz, deathly white and nearly
frantic with a corroding rage, and complimented Tommy on his taste for
illegality. He even asked Von Holtz if he wanted to leave, and