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

He should have expected that.

The female soldiers got down from their vehicles, and assembled in formation at the directions of an officer. Their steel helmets were conical and had gold arabesques and bore on the front a horseshoe shape enclosing an X. Long scarlet feathers stuck from the peaks, and red cloth chinstraps secured the helmets. They wore stiff red shirts over which were hip-length woolen jackets, scarlet with gold braid. Their knee-length scarlet skirts bore yellow, blue, and green designs: the horseshoe and X, hackenkreuzes, ankhs, and owls' eyes. Their boots were like the farmers' but were scarlet with golden clockwork.

Stover looked at the blonde, blue-eyed commander and said, "A real doll! A peach!"

There was nothing peachy about the sword she held in one hand or her troop's long spears. She gestured that Stover should leave the plane. He did so, and he suddenly found himself surrounded by sharp steel spearheads.

A BARNSTORMER IN OZ 7

Smiling, he gestured that he came in peace. If the commander understood Indian sign language, she did not indicate so. He was marched to the road and then down it towards the castle. The chariots, with the rest of the soldiers, followed them, and behind them came the crowd of civilians. The bodyguard and he walked a mile before coming to the castle. Here a large crowd of people, animals, and birds, waited to see the giant who had flown in a huge bird from somewhere. It was kept from pressing close to him by soldiers, males who also wore skirts.

Hank went across a drawbridge over a fifty-foot-wide moat, passed through the outer walls, across a courtyard with marble paving, and up twelve marble steps forty feet or so wide. These were flanked by ramps for the animals. He had no chance to examine the rubies, large as his head, set in the walls by the entrance.

He was seeing much but noting little in detail. He went through high-ceilinged and wide halls furnished with statuary, paintings, and other artifacts of various kinds. The floors were marble set with colored mosaics. At the end of a hall, he was conducted up a broad winding staircase and arrived, out of breath, at a door on the ninth floor.

He walked stooping through the doorway into an anteroom. The next room had a steel door with a small barred, window. He was urged through that, and the captain and two soldiers who had accompanied him into the room left it. The door was closed, and a big steel bar clanged shut on the outside. He was in a very large room with furniture too small for him except for the enormous canopied bed. A door led to a bathroom. It did have running water, however, though the toilet was too -small for him to sit comfortably onЧhis testicles would fall into the waterЧand he would have to bend far over to wash his face. The only light he'd have at night would be lamps burning oil of some kind.

at Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Roy Rockwood, and Mr. Dante Alighieri had overlooked in their journeys to other worlds was how shocked their heroes would be. To leave Earth was to suffer a physical and emotional blow similar to that which the newborn baby felt on being ejected from the womb. However, the baby had no idea of what had happened, whereas the adult journeying to the moon or Mars or Hell had some notion of what he was to encounter and had willingly launched himself into the unknown. Also, Mr. Wells' characters in The First Men in the Modn, and Mr. Rockwood's in Through Space to Mars, and Mr. Alighieri's in The Inferno had voyaged within the relatively narrow limits of the solar system and their destinations were not unmapped. Mr. Alighieri's hero, Dante himself, had a clear image of what Hell would be like, though the reality must have shaken him to the center of his being. Surely, the heroes of all three fantasists must have been numb and disoriented for a while. Lesser men might have died from the shock.

Well, maybe not. After all, they had had some sort of conditioning for their voyages, some degree of preparation.

But to be suddenly propelled into another universeЧthat was something that Hank Stover had not read about or even heard of. Well, yes, he had. Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven were other worlds in the sense that they were in another universe. Or were they? Weren't they in the solar system also?

8

A BARNSTORMER IN OZ 9

And, in a sense, he had been conditioned, prepared, for this universe by his mother's stories and Mr. Baum's books. So, he had not been completely shocked.

Also, though he was in another universe, he was still, somehow, in the solar system of Earth.

There was a big ornately carved pendulum clock in the room. Its face bore twenty-three single characters or bi-characters. These were numerals, many of which looked like they had been derived from the Greek alphabet, some from the Latin, and a few from what he thought was the Runic. He was not sure, but they seemed to be like those he had seen in a book on the Gothic language.

The clock was obviously a twenty-four-hour chronometer. The day, indicated by the zero mark, started at noon. The zero mark at the top of the face was not the zero he was accustomed to. It was a short horizontal line with a large dot in the middle. These people, if they or their ancestors had come from Earth, would have come before Arabic numerals had been introduced. But one of their geniuses had invented a symbol for zero.

When the clock struck noon, Hank's wristwatch indicated 12:04:08 P.M. The moon was full, as on this date on Earth, and, though it was pale in the daylight, its markings seemed to be like Earth' s moon. There was a morning star, which would have been Venus on Earth. Sunset was at 6:25 by his watch, just as it was supposed to. Also, the constellations were what he could have expected on this date as seen from the Midwest.

What was not on Earth was the sudden appearance and rolling charge across the desert floor of huge glowing balls and their silent explosions as they neared the fertile borderland. Something at the edge of the desert was discharging them.

On April 2, the moon, now beginning to wane, rose at 8:00 A.M.

He was sure that this desert and the green land were not on Earth somewhere. Even though there were in A.D. 1923 unexplored territories, this could not be one of them. Wherever the green haze, some sort of entrance, had sent him, it had not transported him to a remote spot of his native planet. He had passed into another universe.

The two universes formed a split-level continuum. Earth

10

Philip Jos6 Farmer