Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 Part 26

"Closed!" came the answer from a distant room. There was a shouted warning to unseen men: "Stand back there--back--there's twenty thousand volts on that line--"

Again the silence....

"Would it work? Would it?" Delamater's mind was full of delirious, half-thought hopes. That fiend in some far-off room had cut the current meant as a death-bolt to the Nation's' head. He would leave the ray on--look along it to gloat over his easy victory. His generator must be insulated: would he touch it with his hand, now that his own current was off?--make of himself a conductor?

In the air overhead formed a terrible arc.

From the floor, Delamater saw it rip cras.h.i.+ngly into life as twenty thousand volts bridged the gap of a foot or less to the invisible ray.

It hissed tremendously in the stillness....

And Delamater suddenly buried his face in his hands. For in his mind he was seeing a rigid, searing body, and in his nostrils, acrid, distinct, was the smell of burning flesh.

"Don't be a fool," he told himself fiercely. "Don't be a fool!

Imagination!"

The light was out.

"Switch off!" a voice was calling. There was a rush of swift feet from the distant doors; friendly hands were under him--lifting him--as the room, for Robert Delamater, President-in-name of the United States, turned whirlingly, dizzily black....

Robert Delamater, U. S. Secret Service operative, entered the office of his Chief. Two days of enforced idleness and quiet had been all he could stand. He laid a folded newspaper before the smiling, welcoming man.

"That's it, I suppose," he said, and pointed to a short notice.

"X-ray Operator Killed," was the caption. "Found Dead in Office in Watts Building." He had read the brief item many times.

"That's what we let the reporters have," said the Chief.

"Was he"--the operative hesitated for a moment--"pretty well fried?"

"Quite!"

"And the machine?"

"Broken gla.s.s and melted metal. He smashed it as he fell."

"The Eye of Allah," mused Delamater. "Poor devil--poor, crazy devil.

Well, we gambled--and we won. How about the rest of the bet? Do I get the Mint?"

"h.e.l.l, no!" said the Chief. "Do you expect to win all the time? They want to know why it took us so long to get him.

"Now, there's a little matter out in Ohio, Del, that we'll have to get after--"

THE "TELELUX"

Sound and light were transformed into mechanical action at the banquet of the National Tool Exposition recently to ill.u.s.trate their possibilities in regulating traffic, aiding the aviator, and performing other automatic functions.

A beam of light was thrown on the "eyes" of a mechanical contrivance known as the "telelux," a brother of the "televox," and as the light was thrown on and off it performed mechanical function such as turning an electric switch.

The contrivance, which was developed by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, utilizes two photo-electric cells, sensitive to the light beam. One of the cells is a selector, which progressively chooses any one of three operating circuits when light is thrown on it. The other cell is the operator, which opens or closes the chosen circuit, thus performing the desired function.

S. M. Kintner, manager of the company's research department, who made the demonstration, also threw music across the room on a beam of light, and light was utilized in depicting the shape and direction of stresses in mechanical materials.

[Ill.u.s.tration _"The globe leaped upward into the huge coil, which whirled madly."_]

The Fifth-Dimension Catapult

A COMPLETE NOVELETTE

_By Murray Leinster_

The story of Tommy 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 a.s.sistant, 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 pa.s.sionate 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. Trespa.s.sers 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 customary means of transit--and ordinarily he acted quite unlike one. As a matter of fact, most of the people Tommy a.s.sociated with had no faintest inkling of his taste for science as an avocation. There was Peter Dalzell, for instance, who would have held up his hands in holy horror at the idea of Tommy Reames being the author of that article.

"On the Ma.s.s and Inertia of the Tesseract," which in the _Philosophical Journal_ had caused a controversy.

And there was one Mildred Holmes--of no importance in the matter of the Fifth-Dimension Catapult--who would have lifted beautifully arched eyebrows in bored unbelief if anybody had suggested that Tommy Reames was that Thomas Reames whose "Additions to Herglotz's Mechanics of Continua" produced such diversities of opinion in scientific circles.

She intended to make Tommy propose to her some day, and thought she knew all about him. And everybody, everywhere, would have been incredulous of his present errand.

Gliding down the narrow, fenced-in road. Tommy was a trifle dubious about this errand himself. A yellow telegraph-form in his pocket read rather like a hoax, but was just plausible enough to have brought him away from a rather important tennis match. The telegram read: