"Farmer,.Phillip.Jose.-.A.Barnstormer.In.Oz" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

To L. Frank Baum, to Fred M. Meyer, to the International Wizard of Oz flub, to Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey, to Judy Garland, to all the Scarecrows, Tin Woodmans, Cowardly Lions, and Dorothys this side of the Yellow Brick Road, and to John Steinbeck, who said that, more than anything else, he would rather be "the ambassador to Oz."

A limited first edition of this book was published by Phantasia Press. A BARNSTORMER IN OZ

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY

Berkley trade paperback edition / September 1982 Berkley edition / October 1983

All rights reserved.

Copyright й 1982 by Philip Jose Farmer.

Cover illustration by Don Ivan Punchatz.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,

by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

ISBN: 0-425-06274-0

A BERKLEY BOOK,о TM 757,375

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belonging to Berkley Publishing Corporation.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Kansas winked.

That was the second unexpected and disconcerting phenomenon. The first had been a few seconds before when a green cloud had ballooned from emptiness about two hundred feet in front of him. He was flying at one thousand feet altitude in his Jenny, a Curtiss JN-4H biplane, when the emeraldish haze had spurted from an almost cloudless sky like a genie from a bottle. It had grown in two eyeblinks to a thick mist about eighty feet wide and thirty deep. It was a transparent light-green at the edges and the front and an opaque dark-green elsewhere.

He had been so astonished that his trained reflexes had deserted him. His left hand did not move the huge wooden control stick, and his feet did not move the wooden rudder bars. The Jenny shot into the outer limits of the cloud. It was then that the state of Kansas winked at him, disappeared, reappeared, then was gone.

Fort Leavenworth, the Missouri River, and the fields and trees vanished.

This was no cloud formed of tiny drops of moisture. He felt no wetness on his face.

The sun was in the same position as when he had plunged into the cloud. The sky, however, which had been partly cloudy on this April Fool's Day, Easter Sunday, and first day of Passover of A.D. 1923, was now pure blue.

2 Philip Jos6 Farmer

He glanced at his wristwatch. Eleven A.M. He knew what time it was, but he did not know where he was.