A BARNSTORMER IN OZ by Philip José Farmer Read online

  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 and this planet shared the same extra-atmospheric space but yet were walled off from each other. Or they were two different floors in the same planetary building, as it were. When he had gone through the green haze, he had ascended from the first floor, Earth, to the second floor, Ertha.

  Ertha. That that was so similar to the English word was no coincidence. Not when the language used lamb for lamb, fotuz for foot, manna for man, kald for cold, arm for arm, and herto for heart. The people of this desert-surrounded land, called Amariiki, “Spirit-Kingdom,” spoke a tongue descended from some Germanic language. He suspected that it was Gothic, but he did not know enough to be sure.

  There was also a nation to the north which was called Oz. This was not a word which these people had brought in from Earth.

  Hank Stover had had many questions, still did, but he could not ask them until he learned his captors' speech. Since they started his language lessons an hour after he was in his luxurious cell, they were eager to communicate. Most of his daylight hours were spent bent over by the window in the door. His instructors, all wearing gauze masks for the first two weeks, stood on the other side. Hank learned much, but he got a hell of a backache and, sometimes, a headache.

  “What am I?” he yelled now and then. “A skunk? A pariah? Something unspeakably filthy and degraded? A leper? A Socialist?”

  Four men, four women, and a child taught him, each for about an hour and fifteen minutes. One was the blonde pipperoo, Captain Lamblo, “Little Lamb.” Like the others, she had no surname but had a nickname or cognomen. Hers was “The Swift.”

  They started out by pointing to and naming parts of their bodies. He repeated their words until his pronunciation was perfect or, at this stage, acceptable. If he could have seen their lips, he would have learned faster.

  They brought in objects and named these. After five days, he was taught simple sentences.

  “Sa-her'z ain sko.” “This is a shoe.”

  “Sa-thar'z ain hilm.” “That's a helmet.”

  “I sai thuk.” “I see you.”

  “Sai thu mik?” “See you me?”

  “Ain, twai, thriiz...” “One, two, three...”

  He was able to relate many words to three branches of the Teutonic language. His Swedish governess had taught him some of her language, and he had learned German in prep school, during the Occupation, and at Yale. This enabled him to relate some of the words to English.

  But how had the Teutonics gotten into this world? And why had they become pygmies?

  In the meantime, he had managed to get a building erected around the Jenny to protect her from the weather and wind. He could not see the plane because his windows, the augdor, literally, eye-doors, faced the south. He had also gotten his captors to deliver his luggage, which was kept in the recess under the rear turtle deck. This had been brought to him wrapped in sheets and carried by men with gloves. The sheets were removed, and the cases were pushed through the door at the ends of long sticks. He supposed that the sheets and gloves would be burned later.

  He was happy about this. He had had to wash his underwear, shirt, and socks in cold water and with the strong soap. Then he had had to go without them until they had dried. Now he had a change. He also had a carton of Camel cigarettes and a quart of bootleg booze, Glenfiddich scotch, smuggled in from Canada. He'd had to smoke the local tobacco, a strong burley, in a pipe. He did not like to smoke a pipe. They'd given him beer, which was tastier than any he'd ever had, but he preferred hard liquor. The stuff they'd given him was grain alcohol mixed with water and the juice of berries.

  Also in the luggage was a Colt .45 New Service revolver and two boxes of ammunition. These people had no idea what they were, but he did not intend to use them.

  There were also copies of a farmer's almanac, Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, Civilization In the United States, edited by Harold Stearns, and two Current Opinion magazines. The latter had been taken from a Kansas City boardinghouse, and, though they were the April, 1920 and April, 1921 issues, Hank had started reading them. They had many interesting articles. Besides, he would read anything, even the labels on a can of Campbell's soup, if he had nothing else.

  He also exercised vigorously for an hour, and he spent some time observing the celestial phenomena and the hundreds of fireballs that went up in flashes like shells from Big Bertha.

  He asked Lamblo what they were called.

  “Fizhanam.” “Enemy-ghosts.”

  When he asked her to explain their nature, he got no answer.

  At the end of the third week, his captors must have concluded that he was rain, clean. The inner door was unlocked, and Wulfla (Little Wolf), a teacher, entered. But two guards stood at the door.

  “Why did you treat me as if I had the...” he said. What was the word for plague?

  “Unhaili. Zha, sa Aithlo (Yes, the Little Mother) had you locked up until we could find out if you were carrying some evil thing which might make us sick.”

  “What diseases do you have? After all, if I can give mine to you, you can give yours to me.”

  “You'll have to ask Little Mother. She commanded that you be kept here untouched. But I think that you giants have some sort of loathsome illnesses which might make us sick and die.”

  “You don't have those kinds of diseases?”

  “Ne. We die of gund (cancer), heart failure, stroke, and other self-diseases, but, except for some skin diseases, we have little that one person transmits to another.”

  More questioning told him that these people did not even have the common cold, though they could get pneumonia. And the childbirth fatality rate was low, one in ten thousand. Some of his questions were readily, if not fully, answered. Others were referred to his scheduled meeting with Sa Hauist (The Highest), another of the many titles of the female ruler.

  He was puzzled by the tobacco. If these natives were descendants of Dark-Age Goths, how had they encountered tobacco? That was indigenous to America; the Goths were Europeans. Also, there were many other North American plants: canned squash, pumpkin, and Indian corn or maize. Potatoes and tomatoes were jacking, but the former had come from South America and the latter from Central America to Europe and then to North America.

  There were many illustrated books on the shelves, and these showed animals that were a mixture of European and American. They included the lion and tiger that Baum had written of and his mother had told him about. The lion looked much like the African counterpart, but the cub spots had not entirely faded away in the adult. It was much larger in proportion t
han the African lion would have been if it had diminished in size. It seemed to him that it must be descended from the “Atrocious Lion” that had once roamed the southwest U.S. but had become extinct about 14,000 years ago.

  The tiger, which his mother had never seen but had heard of, was not the Asiatic cat. It was what was called the sabertooth tiger or smilodon, and its fur was tawny and unstriped. It, too, had perished on the North American continent about the.same time as the American lion.

  Apparently, the giant ground sloth and the short-faced grizzly also dwelt in the forests and plains along with the humpless camel, the mammoth, and the mastodon.

  Where were the dog and the horse? The ancient Goths would have had these when they came into this universe. What had, boojumlike, snatched them all away?

  And what had caused both animals and humans to shrink in size?

  And what... ?

  He tried to keep from thinking of the questions that crowded at the windows of his mind like ghostly peeping toms.

  Sometimes, he stared out the huge French windows or from the balcony. His apartment was in the southeast arm of the X-shaped castle. He could see part of the southern land, the farms, the forest, and the desert beyond. He could also look into many windows on the lower levels of the arm. There was one vast room which aroused his curiosity, though he had never seen anyone enter it, not even to dust.

  Its windows were huge, and its curtains were always open. The floor was of wood, and the walls had many various designs including pentacles and nonacles. There were many tables, large and small, bearing what looked like laboratory equipment. When the sun shone into it, he could see much of the room clearly. At night, only one light burned, a giant torch set in the middle of the room on top of a sphinx of highly polished black stone which was pointed southward. The head had four female faces. At least, he thought it did since he could see the profiles of those in front and behind and the full face of the one looking to the south. Its seven-pointed crown was set with jewels. The couchant body was 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, 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 blinded him when he turned to look into it, but, as the illumination died down, he saw that someone had come into 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 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?

  He forgot about that. The person was a woman, nude except for high-heeled shoes of some glittering silverish metal and a tall conical white hat with outspread bird-wings. Her long hair hung down almost to the back of her knees, and its dark auburn seemed to catch the light, compress it, and shed it as if it had become jewels. Her face was beautiful but with just enough irregularity, a nose a trifle too long, lips a trifle too full, eyes a trifle too far apart, to make them nonclassical but highly individual. Her body was perfect, long, slim but well rounded legs, hips narrow but not too narrow, a slim waist, a big ribcage, full upstanding breasts with tiny aureoles but big nipples. Her skin was very white. Hank despised peeping toms, but he could not force himself to go back into his room. Surely, if she did not want to be observed, she would have closed the curtains. Moreover, what she was doing had made him curious. He forgot about decency and gentleman's behavior.

  She had taken the torch from the hole in top of the four-faced sphinx's head and had stuck it in a wall-holder. Then she went to a table and put her arms around a glass or crystal sphere twice as large as a basketball. She carried it to the sphinx and placed it on the top of the crown, where it fit snugly. Stover glanced southwards, the corner of his eye having detected another breakthrough. Two more flaming balls had rolled through, leaving their exploding companions behind.

  The first was halfway through the forest, flitting phantomlike among the trees and bushes, and it would soon be out of view; below the plateau edge. He looked back at the red-haired woman. She was dancing counterclockwise around the sphinx. In her left hand was a shepherd's staff, the shaft of which was carved with a spiral.

  She raised and lowered and stabbed it in and out as she spun, leaped, shuffled, whirled, sidestepped, bent, raised, and moved her lips. Now and then she seemed to be catching the neck of an invisible enemy in the hook at the end of her staff.

  Lightning challenged the earth to a duel by slapping it in its face. He jumped, and his heart hammered. The bolt was unexpected; he had thought that the electrical
fury was over. Also, the discharge had seemed to come so close to him that a cat's whisker could have measured the distance. Following the bolt, thunder rumbled as if the sky were trying to digest the spirit of anger. Lightning bridged cloud and ground again, though farther away this time.

  The clearness of the sphere was gone. Something dark roiled inside it.

  At the same time, the corners of the vast room darkened as if shadows were breeding in it. The blacknesses expanded like a cloud of ink shot out by an escaping octopus. It floated to the nearest lamps and passed over, but he could see the burning wicks faintly through the darkness.

  A chill passed over him. His hairs felt as if they were rising.

  “Jesus!” he muttered. He went back into his room and got his binoculars. Returning to the balcony, he directed the glasses towards the sphere, focussed them, and saw that there was within the sphere what looked like a miniature of the scene outside the castle. There were little black clouds and tiny threads of lightning shooting- among them and down from them.