Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 41: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A hundred tons of gleaming yellow gold pieces—and he was standing right among them! He looked down at his feet. The coins were piled all around him. The floor was strewn thick with them everywhere. He kicked one foot into them. Nothing happened! There was no sound; his foot seemed to touch nothing but empty air. Where was his foot? He couldn’t see it. Or his leg. Or his hand, which he held before him! Panic seized Tubby. Was he a ghost? Couldn’t he even see his own feet? The professor answered his thoughts. “Your body is still in your own world, Tubby—the world of three dimensions. Only your vision has penetrated into the Fourth Dimension. You can see that gold, but—” A sob choked the pro- fessor’s voice at the pathos of it—“but Tubby, you—we cannot touch that gold—we can do nothing with it except look at it!” Tubby stooped down frantically to gather up a handful of the coins. He felt his fingers scraping along the bare boards of the professor’s laboratory. He touched his foot. But he could not see his hands. Or his feet. He could only see the heaps of glistening coins that lay there undisturbed! The professor’s voice wailed dismally: ‘The gold is right there, Tubby. Your fingers are going right through it. But you cannot feel it—you cannot touch it. You can only look at it—only look at it—” The words trailed away into silence. Tubby climbed to his feet, and then sat down in his chair, nonplused. What a horrible thing! You could see the gold, but you couldn’t touch it! That was all wrong. The professor would have to figure some way of getting that gold out of the Fourth Dimension. They'd figure it together. The professor would— Where was the professor? The room was quite silent. Tubby felt suddenly very weak and sick. He lay back at full length in the chair and closed his eyes. His new eye hurt him. Or was it his new eye? Wasn’t that pain shooting through his left eye? It must be his left eye—there seemed to be a bandage over it. There was a dim murmur of voices in the room—familiar voices. They seemed to have been there a long time, but Tubby just noticed them. He opened one eye—his right eye—and saw a swaying expanse of white sheet, with the white enameled foot of a hospital cot just beyond his toes. The scene stopped swaying and grew clearer. A hand touched his forearm. He turned his head weakly, and stared with his one eye into the anxious faces of his two friends who were sitting beside the bed. “Hello, Tubby!” exclaimed the first man with relief. “You didn’t die, did you? / knew you wouldn't.” “You're right, Jake,” agreed the second man. “He didn’t die, did he?” comicbooks.com