The Atom Smasher was vibrating at tremendous speed. Jim, with one arm round Lucille, faced Tode at the instrument board. Near by sat Parrish, watching him too.
"That took a whole year," said Tode. "That pretty little scene of destruction we"ve just witnessed. The good old Atom Smasher has been doing some lively stunts, or we"d have been engulfed too. We"re not likely to see anything so pretty in history again, unless we go to watch the destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii by lava from Vesuvius. But that would be quite tame in comparison with this."
Tode"s jeering tone grated on Jim"s ears immeasurably.
"I don"t think any of us are craving any more experiments, Tode," he said, trying to keep his voice steady. "Suppose you take us back to Peconic Bay. We"ll dump the Atom Smasher into the pond, and try to forget that we"ve had anything except a bad nightmare."
"Don"t trust him, Jim," whispered Lucille.
Tode heard. "Thank you," he answered, scowling. "But seriously, Dent, we can"t go back with nothing to show for all our trouble. Those fools tried to betray me, and then the Eye went out. Perhaps I have you to thank for that performance? However, the sensible thing is to let bygones be bygones. But we must make a little excursion. How about picking up a little treasure from the h.o.a.rds of Solomon or Genghis Khan? A few pounds of precious stones would make a world of difference in our social status when we reach Long Island."
Jim felt a cold fury permeating him. Tode saw his grim look and laughed malignantly.
"Well, Dent, I"m ready to be frank with you," he said. "The game"s still in my hands. I want Lucille. I"m willing to take you and Parrish back, provided you agree she shall be mine. I"ll have to trust you, but I shall have means of evening up if you play crooked."
"Why don"t you ask my girl herself?" piped old Parrish.
"He needn"t trouble. He knows the answer!" cried Lucille scornfully.
"There"s your answer," said Jim. "Now, what"s the alternative?"
"The alternative is, that I have already set the dial to eternity, Dent," grinned Tode. "Eternity in the fifth dimension. Didn"t know I"d worked that out, did you? A pleasant little surprise. No, don"t try to move. My hand is on the lever. I have only to press it, and we"re there."
Jim stood stock still in horror. Tode"s voice rang true. He believed Tode had the power he claimed.
"Yes, the fifth dimension, and eternity," said Tode, "where time and s.p.a.ce reel into functionlessness. Don"t ask me what it"s like there.
I"ve never been there. But my impression of it is that it"s a fairly good representation of the place popularly known as h.e.l.l.
"You fool, Dent," Tode"s voice rang out with vicious, snarling emphasis, "I gave you your chance to come in with me. Together we"d have made ourselves masters of Atlantis and brought back her plunder to our Twentieth Century world. You refused because of a girl--a girl, Dent, who loved me long before you came upon the scene."
"That"s a lie, Lucius," answered Lucille steadily. "And you can do your worst. There"s one factor you haven"t reckoned in your calculations, and that"s called G.o.d."
"The dark blur on the spectral lines," old Parrish muttered.
Tode laughed uproariously. "Come, make your choice, Dent," he mocked.
"It"s merely to press this lever. You"ll find yourself--well, we won"t go into that. I don"t know where you"ll find yourself. You"ll disappear. So shall I. But I"m desperate. I must have Lucille.
Choose!" His voice rang out in maniac tones. "Choose, all of you!"
"Lucille has answered you," Jim retorted.
"And how about you, old man?" called Tode to Parrish.
Parrish leased forward, making a swift movement with his hand. "Go to your own h.e.l.l, you dev--"
A blinding light, a frantic oscillation of the Atom Smasher, a sense of death, awful and indescribable--and stark unconsciousness rushed over Jim. His last thought was that Lucille"s arms were about him, and that he was holding her. Nothing mattered, therefore, even though they two were plunged into that awful nothingness of the fifth dimension, where neither s.p.a.ce nor time recognizably exists. Love could exist there.
CHAPTER XII
_Solid Earth_
"He"s coming around, Lucille. Thank G.o.d for it!"
Jim opened his eyes. For a few moments he looked about him without understanding. Then the outlines of a room etched themselves against the clouded background. And in the foreground Lucille"s face. The girl was bending over Jim, one hand soothing his forehead.
"Where am I?" Jim muttered.
"Back on earth, Jim, the good old earth, never again to leave it,"
answered Lucille, with a catch in her voice. With an effort she composed herself. "You mustn"t talk," she said.
"But what place is this?"
"It"s Andy Lumm"s house. Now rest, and I"ll explain everything later."
But the first explanation came from Andy Lumm. "Well, Mr. Dent, my wife and me sure were glad to be on the spot when you and Miss Parrish got bogged on the edge of the Black Pool," he said. "Mean, treacherous place it is. Thar was a cow got mired thar last month, up to her belly. If us hadn"t found her, and dragged her out with ropes, she"d have gone clear under. Granpop Dawes says thar"s underground springs around the edge, and that it runs straight down to h.e.l.l, though that seems sorter far-fetched to me.
"Yessir, and if I hadn"t heard WNYC giving Miss Parrish on the list of missing persons, and as having been seen near here, I reckon I"d never have found you. Made me and my wife uneasy, that did. "Andy," she says. "I got an inkling you oughter go to the Vanishing Place and see if she ain"t there." And there I found you two, mired to the waist, and Mr. Parrish dancing around and fretting, and his clothes burned to cinders.
"It sure seems strange to me, to think Mr. Parrish got away safe after that explosion five years ago, and of his wandering around with loss of memory, till you found him, and brung him back here to restore it, but thar"s strange things in the world--yes, sir, thar surely is!"
In the happiness of being back on Earth once more, Jim was content to let further explanations go. The return of Parrish had been duly chronicled in the newspapers, and had provoked a mild interest, but fortunately the public mind was so occupied at the moment with the trial of a night club hostess that, after the first rush of newspaper men, the three were left alone.
Day after day, in the brilliant autumn weather, Jim and Lucille would roam the tinted woods, recharging themselves with the feel of Earth, until the memory of those dread experiences grew dim.
"Well, Jim, I reckon I"d better tell you and get it over," said old Parrish one morning--Parrish, quite his old, jaunty self again. "Tode had got the dials pointing to the fifth dimension--eternity, he called it, though actually I believe it"s nothing more than annihilation, a grand smash. Well, he pressed that lever. But something had gone wrong.
"You remember how poor Cain seemed to take great interest in the Atom Smasher. There"s no way of telling what had been going on in that brain of his, but it looks to me like he"d known that that lever meant death. It was sealed up in wax, and Tode had got it free on the way out of Atlantis.
"Well--this it what I made out from examining the thing afterward.
Cain had been monkeying with the lever. He"d pried loose one of the wires that hooked to the transformer, and short-circuited it, not knowing, of course, just what he was doing. The result was that when Tode pressed that lever, instead of blowing the whole contraption to pieces, he got a couple of billion volts of electricity through his body, combined with a larger amperage than has ever been imagined. It burned him to a few grease spots. He simply--vanished. You don"t remember what you did at the moment, boy?"
"I don"t seem to remember anything," said Jim.
"Well, your response was an automatic one. You jumped him. Luckily you were too late, for Tode vanished like that!" Old Parrish snapped his fingers. "But you must have got into the field of magnetic force--any way, you were almost electrocuted. Lucille and I thought you were dead for hours.
"We laid you down and set a course for home. I used those dial numberings Tode had given me. He"d said they wouldn"t work, but he"d lied. They did work. They brought us back to the Vanishing Place.
"We carried you out, and then I saw your eyelid twitch. We worked over you with artificial respiration till it looked as if there was a chance for you. Then I shut off the power and let the waters rush in over the Atom Smasher, and swam ash.o.r.e. And there it lies at the bottom of the pool, and may it lie there till the Judgment Day."
"Tode was a genius," said Jim, "but he never understood that character counts for more than genius."