Golden City. Look!”

“Jacaro’s

His finger, trembling, tapped on the flashlight picture of the giant lizard of which the story told. And it was a giant. A rope had upheld a colossal, leering, reptilian head while men with rifles posed self-consciously beside the dead creature. It was as big as a horse, and at first glance its kinship to the extinct dinosaurs of Earth was plain. Huge teeth in sharklike rows. A long, trailing tail. But there was a collar about the beast-thing’s neck.

“It had killed and was devouring a cow when they shot it,” said Denham bitterly. “There’ve been reports of these creatures for days—so the news story says. They weren’t printed because nobody believed them. But there are a couple of people missing. A searching party was hunting for them. They found this!”

Tommy Reames stared at the picture. His face went grimmer still. He thought of sounds he had heard beyond the Tube, not long since.

“There’s no question where they came from. The Fifth Dimension. But if Jacaro brought them back, he’s a fool.”

“Jacaro’s missing,” said Denham savagely. “Don’t you understand? He could get through to the Golden City. These beast-things are proof somebody did. And these things came down the Tube that somebody travelled through. Jacaro wouldn’t send them, but somebody did. They’ve got collars around their necks! Who sent them? And why?”

Tommy’s eyes narrowed.

Tommy’s

“If civilized men found the mouth of a Tube, it would seem like the mouth of an artificial tunnel or a cave—”

“And if annoying vermin, like Jacaro’s gunmen”—Denham’s voice was brittle—“had come out of it, why, intelligent men might send something living and deadly down it, as men on Earth will send ferrets down a rat-hole! To wipe out the breed! That’s what’s happened! Jacaro’s gone through and attacked the Golden City. They’ve found his Tube. And they’ve sent these things down….”

“If we found rats coming from a rat-hole,” said Tommy very quietly, “and ferrets went down and didn’t come up, we’d gas them.”

“And so,” Denham told him, “so would the Golden City.”

He pointed to a boxed double paragraph news story under leaded twenty-point headline: “Poisonous Fog Kills Wild 

 Prev. P 8/70 next