"Philip Jose Farmer - 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
The name "BERKLEY" and the stylized "B" with design are trademarks
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.
Below was a tawny desert with big outcroppings of dark rock. Ahead, two miles away, was the edge of a
green land that extended to right and left as far as he could see. The desert ended abruptly at the borders of
the land as if it were an ocean breaking against an island. The land sloped up gradually for a mile, then it
became high cliffs supporting a plateau.
He glimpsed twinkling towers, houses, and fields beyond the trees on the edge of the plateau.
He twisted his neck to look behind him. The cloud was dwindling, and then it was gone as if it had been
sucked into an invisible vacuum cleaner.
Hank had been heading north by northwest towards Muscotah, Kansas, to deliver the personal effects of
John "Rube" Schultz, his late flying partner in Doobie's Flying Circus. Hank had dreaded telling the widow
how Rube had died in the accident, why the funeral would have to be a closed-casket ceremony, and his
probably inadequate attempts to console Mrs. Schultz. It seemed now that he would not be landing on a
meadow near the widow's home. Not within the time he had planned anyhow.