Мюррей Лейнстер - The Fifth-Dimension Tube

The pilot explained briefly and offered Tommy the black–metal pad again. It still contained the incomplete map of a hemisphere, and was obviously a repetition of the question of where he came from.

Tommy took it, frowning thoughtfully. Then an idea struck him. He found the little stud which, pressed by the pad's owner, had erased the previous drawings. He pressed it and the lines disappeared. And Tommy drew, crudely enough, that complicated diagram which is supposed to represent a cube which is a cube in four dimensions: a tesseract. Upon one surface of the cube he indicated the curving towers of the Golden City. Upon a surface representing a plane beyond the three dimensions of normal experience, he repeated the angular tower structures of New York. He shrugged rather hopelessly as he passed it over, but to his amazement it was understood at once.

The little black pad passed from hand to hand and an animated discussion took place. One rather hard–faced man was the most animated of all. The bearded old man demurred. The hard–faced man insisted. Tommy could see that his pilot's expression was becoming uneasy. But then a compromise seemed to be arrived at. The bearded man spoke a single, ceremonial phrase and the twelve men rose. They moved toward various doors and one by one left, until the room was empty.

But the pilot looked relieved. He grinned cheerfully at Tommy and led the way back to the two–wheeled vehicle. The two men with Tommy's weapons vanished. And again there was a swift, cyclonelike passage along empty ways with the throbbing of machinery audible everywhere. Into the base of a second building, up endless stairs, past innumerable doors. It seemed to Tommy that he heard voices behind some of them, and they were women's voices.

At a private, triple knock a door opened wide, and the pilot led the way into a room, closed and locked the door behind him, and called. A woman's voice cried out in astonishment. Through an inner arch a woman came running eagerly. Her face went blank at sight of Tommy and Evelyn, and her hand flew to a tiny golden object at her waist. Then, at the pilot's chuckle, she flushed vividly.

Hours later, Tommy and Evelyn were able to talk it over. They were alone then, and could look out an oval window upon the Golden City all about them. It was dark, but saffron–red panels glowed in building walls all along the thoroughfares, and tiny glowing dots in the soaring spires of gold told of people within other dwellings like this.

"As I see it," said Tommy restlessly, "the Council—and it must have been that in the big room to–day—put us in our friend's hands to learn the language. He's been working with me four hours, drawing pictures, and I've been writing down words I've learned. I must have several hundred of them. But we do our best talking with pictures. And Evelyn, this city's in a bad fix."

Evelyn said irrelevantly: "Her name is Ahnya, Tommy, and she's a dear. We got along beautifully. I'll bet I found out things you don't even guess at."

"You probably have," admitted Tommy, frowning. "Check up on this: our friend's name is Aten, and he's an air–pilot and also has something to do with growing foodstuffs in some special towers where they grow crops by artificial light only. Some of the plants he sketched look amazingly like wheat, by the way. The name of the town is"—he looked at his notes—"Yugna. There are some other towns, ten or twelve of them. Rahn is the nearest, and it's worse off than this one."

"Of course," said Evelyn, smiling. "They use cuyal openly, there!"

"How'd you learn all that?" demanded Tommy.

"Ahnya told me. We made gestures and smiled at each other. We understood perfectly. She's crazy about her husband, and I—well she knows I'm going to marry you, so…."

Tommy grunted.

"I suppose she explained with a smile and gestures just how much of a strain it is, simply keeping the city going?"

"Of course," said Evelyn calmly. "The city's fighting against the jungle, which grows worse all the time. They used to grow their foodstuffs in the open fields. Then within the city. Now they use empty towers and artificial light. I don't know why."

Tommy grunted again.

"This planet's just had, or is having, a change of geologic period," he explained, frowning. "The plants people need to live on aren't adapted to the new climate and new plants fit for food are scarce. They have to grow food under shelter, now, and their machines take an abnormal amount of supervision—I don't know why. The air–conditions for the food plants; the machines that fight back the jungle creepers which thrive in the new climate and try to crawl into the city to smother it; the power machines; the clothing machines—a million machines have to be kept going to keep back the jungle and fight off starvation and just hold on doggedly to the bare fact of civilization. And they're short–handed. The law of diminishing returns seems to operate. They're trying to maintain a civilization higher than their environment will support. They work until they're ready to drop, just to stay in the same place. And the monotony and the strain makes some of them take to cuyal for relief."

He surveyed the city from the oval window, frowning in thought.

"It's a drug which grows wild," he added slowly. "It peps them up. It makes the monotony and the weariness bearable. And then, suddenly, they break. They hate the machines and the city and everything they ever knew or did. It's a sort of delayed–action psychosis which goes off with a bang. Some of them go amuck in the city, using their belt–weapons until they're killed. More of them bolt for the jungle. The city loses better than one per cent of its population a year to the jungle. And then they're Ragged Men, half mad at all times and wholly mad as far as the city and its machines are concerned."

Evelyn linked her arm in his.

"Somehow," she told him, smiling, "I think one Thomas Reames is working out ways and means to help a city named Yugna."

"Not yet," said Tommy grimly. "We have to think of Earth. Not everybody in the Council approved of us. Aten told me one chap argued that we ought to be shoved out into the jungle again as compatriots of Jacaro. And the machines were especially short–handed to–day because of a diversion of labor to get ready something monstrous and really deadly to send down the Tube to Earth. We've got to find out what that is, and stop it."

But on the second day afterward, when he and Evelyn were summoned before the Council again, he still had not found out. During those two days he learned many other things, to be sure: that Aten for instance, was relieved from duty at the machines only because he was wounded; that the power of the main machines came from a deep bore which brought up superheated steam from the source of boiling springs long since built over; that iron was a rare metal, and consequently there was no dynamo in the city and magnetism was practically an unknown force; that electrokinetics was a laboratory puzzle—or had been, when there was leisure for research—while the science of electrostatics had progressed far past its state on Earth. The little truncheonlike weapons carried a stored–up static charge measurable only in hundreds of thousands of volts, which could be released in flashes which were effective up to a hundred feet or more.

And he learned that the thermit–throwers actually spat out in normal operation tiny droplets of matter Aten could not describe clearly, but which seemed to be radioactive with a period of five minutes or less; that in Rahn, the nearest other city, cuyal was taken openly, and the jungle was growing into the town with no one to hold it back; that two generations since there had been twenty cities like this one, but that a bare dozen still survived; that there was a tradition that human beings had come upon this planet from another world where other human beings had harried them, and that in that other world there were divers races of humanity, of different colors, whereas in the world of the Golden City all mankind was one race; that Tommy's declaration that he came from another group of dimensions had been debated and, on re–examination of Jacaro's Tube, accepted, and that there was keen argument going on as to the measures to be taken concerning it.