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

Philip Jos6 Farmer

since he could see the profiles of those in front and behind j and the full face of the one looking to the south. Its seven- j pointed crown was set with jewels. The couchant body was i not a lioness's but a bear's.

On the 28th day of his imprisonment, the late afternoon sun was shrouded by thick black clouds. The wind slowly strengthened until it had a voice and then was howling. The branches of the trees flailed, and their tops bent. Thunder snapped out lightning as if it were a whip on fire. Rain came at nightfall and spread over the windows of his apartment. Out in the desert, the white arcs increased their number and the distance they spat from point to point. The gigantic fireballs seemed to pop out from everywhere. They rolled like a charging army, like thundering surf, toward the edge of the sands, where they blew up.

"The devil's laying down his artillery barrage," Stover muttered.

Cold skated over his skin. After the barrage, then what? Zero hour? The onslaught?

Also, his theory that the spurts and balls were some kind of St. Elmo's fire was untenable. That could not exist in this wet atmosphere.

He went to a table and poured out a tall glass of the local liquor which had long ago replaced his scotch. This was different from the first bottle he'd been given. It was some sort of barley vodka, strong eye-watering stuff. He drank down two or three ounces and turned, full of Dutch courage, to face the fury from the south. He had not been afraid of lightning storms before; in fact, he had flown through them,

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Philip Jos6 Farmer

A BARNSTORMER IN OZ

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and, though nervous, had not been frightened. But there was something about this fury that made him far more uneasy. Perhaps it was those arcs and fireballs. His instructors had not been able to explain them. They had said that they had always been out there, but they did not know how they originated.

Stover had almost gotten used to them. Now... they seemed determined to get over whatever hidden barrier it was that kept them in the desert.

"I'm anthropomorphizing," he said. "But what else can an anthropos do? It's his nature to commit the pathetic fallacy. Commit?"

The wind seemed to get even stronger, rattling the windows and hurling solid slices of the rain against the glass. The tall grandfather clock in the living room, the case of which was carved with grotesque goblinish faces, gonged twelve times. Midnight. And before the final note sounded, the rain and the wind stopped. It was as if a switch had cut off the power that was driving the elements.

He opened the French windows and stepped outside. There was silence except for the drip of water. The fireballs, the "enemy ghosts," exploded as they hurled themselves against the desert boundary. Their flashes reminded him of artillery barrages at night on the distant front. The farmhouses were not illuminated, and the clouds covered the sky. But the intense glare of gouting fireballs as they went up punctuated the darkness as if God were a crazy writer whose finger was stuck on the asterisk key.

Far off, thunder rumbled sullenly. It sounded like an angry bear whose attack had been beaten off and who had decided to go elsewhere.

The glowing spheres became more numerous. The desert was suddenly alive with them. Where there had been an estimated four or five per acre, there now seemed to be a hundred. They wheeled towards the forest across the sandy marsh in ragged phalanxes; the rumble of their advance was like the wheels of an ancient British chariot army.

Suddenly, to his left, a glaring sphere slipped through whatever it was that had prevented its mates from penetrating. He saw it in its full splendor, then could see only flashes now and then as it sped through the heavy forest.

He jumped. The room holding the sphinx, previously lit only by the single torch, had flared with a great light. It

j blinded him when he turned to look into it, but, as the i illumination died down, he saw that someone had come into j the room. At first, he could not make the figure out distinctly.

The bright light had faded, leaving the torch to push back the

darkness, a task it could not handle. Then, a hundred lights I sprang out, making the vast room bright but not dazzlingly ; so. They came from many hemispheres set in the walls. ; Stover swore. How could all those lamps have been lit at

once when there was only one person in the room?