The Fifth-Dimension Tube Murray Leinster
By Murray Leinster
MINUTES later, they heard the roar of a car motor going down the long lane away from the laboratory. Evelyn tried to smile at Tommy. “It seems terrible, dangerous.” Tommy considered and shrugged. “This news is old,” he observed. “This paper was printed last night. I think I’ll make a couple of long-distance calls. If the Golden City had trouble with Jacaro, things would be bad for us.” He swept his eyes about and frowningly loaded a light rifle.
He made it convenient for Evelyn’s hand and made it for the dwelling-house and the telephone. It was odd that as he emerged into the open air, the familiar smells of Earth struck his nostrils as strange and unaccustomed. The laboratory was redolent of the tree-fern forest into which the Tube extended. And Smithers was watching amid those dank, incredible carboniferous-period growths now. Tommy put through calls, seeing all his and Denham’s plans for a peaceful exploration party and amicable contact with the civilization of that other planet utterly shattered by presumed outrages by Jacaro.
He made call after call, and his demands for information grew more urgent as he approached the source of trouble. His cause for worry was verified long before he had finished. Even as he made the first call, New York newspapers had crowded a second-grade murder off their front pages to make room for the white mist upstate.
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Murray Leinster
Murray Leinster (June 16, 1896 – June 8, 1975) was the pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an American writer of genre fiction, particularly science fiction.
Biography.
He wrote and published over 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays. Leinster was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of George B. Jenkins and Mary L. Jenkins. His father was an accountant. Although both parents were born in Virginia, the family lived in Manhattan in 1910, according to the 1910 Federal Census. A high school dropout, he nevertheless began a career as a freelance writer before World War I. He was two months short of his 20th birthday when his first story, “The Foreigner,” appeared in the May 1916 issue of H. L. Mencken’s literary magazine The Smart Set.
Over the next three years, Leinster published ten more stories in the magazine; in a September 2022 interview, Leinster’s daughter stated that Mencken recommended using a pseudonym for non-Smart Set content. During World War I, Leinster served with the Committee of Public Information and the United States Army (1917–1918). During and after the war, his work began appearing in pulp magazines like Argosy, Snappy Stories, and Breezy Stories. He continued to be published regularly in Argosy into the 1950s.
When the pulp magazines began to diversify into particular genres in the 1920s, Leinster followed suit, selling jungle stories to Danger Trails, westerns to West and Cowboy Stories, detective stories to Black Mask and Mystery Stories, horror stories to Weird Tales, and even romance stories to Love Story Magazine under the pen name Louisa Carter Lee.
Murray Leinster
