A BARNSTORMER IN OZ by Philip José Farmer Read online

  Stover continued, “Uncle Henry had assumed that Dorothy was dead, and he wanted to hold services for her. But Aunt Em told him that they wouldn’t consider her dead until it was proven. She had faith that Dorothy still lived, and she prayed a lot for her.”

  “Surely the newspapers would at least have reported that she had appeared after she was thought to be dead? The reporters would have wanted her story of how she’d survived.”

  “Yes, especially in that small community where even a tea party was a hot item. The story about her seemingly miraculous escape from death and her amnesia and all that was printed. My mother kept it in a scrapbook and showed it to me.”

  “Why did this Baum put Dorothy in the state of Kansas?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t want to be sued by my mother. As I said, he fictionalized her story, put stuff in it that didn’t happen.”

  He told Glinda about the chapter in which Dorothy and her companions on the quest, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodman, Toto the dog, and the Scarecrow, discovered a city of living dolls.

  “Even Baum’s most ardent admirers feel that that chapter had no place there, that it was contrived and didn’t work. But he did other things, too, all accountable by his desire to write a children’s book. It had to be quick and simple reading, and the action had to move smoothly and swiftly. Thus, he ignored the fact that the people of your world would not speak English. He didn’t tell the truth, which was that Mother didn’t set out at once on the Yellow Brick Road. She had to stay where she’d landed for a month in order to learn the Munchkin language. She’s a whizbang at picking up foreign tongues. I’m pretty good, but she outshines me by far.”

  “All this is interesting,” the queen said. “But you still haven’t told me of her later life.”

  “Sorry. I have to fill in the background. Otherwise, you won’t know what I’m talking about.”

  Glinda smiled and said, “I may know more than you think I do.”

  Hank stared at her for a moment. “I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll ask you some time what you mean by that.”

  His mother had lived the hard struggling life of a Dakota farmgirl until she was almost sixteen. She’d gone to the local grade school and high school and also read much whenever she had the chance.

  “Which wasn’t often, since she helped with the house chores and even with the plowing and reaping.”

  But life as a whole was easier and better than before her visit to the other world. Dorothy was hardheaded but not so much that she wasn’t also somewhat superstitious. She attributed the improvement to, one, the blessing the North Witch had given her and, two, to the housekey. That had become a semimagical token. But when Uncle Henry was killed by the kick of a mule and, two weeks later, Aunt Em died of a heart attack, Dorothy thought her luck had run out.

  “However, she realized some profit from the sale of the farm. She couldn’t get her hands on the lump sum because she was a ward of the court, and it was doled out to her for her living expenses and education. She quit high school and went to a business college in Iowa. Then she told the lawyers handling her affairs that she was going to New York to be a stenographer and secretary. They objected, but she went anyway. She got a job by lying about her age. At the same time, she looked for openings in dramas or musical comedies. Mother was—is, even at forty-one—a good-looker.”

  He was going to say that she had legs almost as good as Glinda’s, but he decided that that might not be discreet.

  His mother got a job as a dancer in a chorus line in a very successful Broadway production. Shortly afterwards, she met Lincoln Stover, the only child of a wealthy stockbroker. Lincoln was ten years older than Dorothy, and he was a regular stage-door Johnny.

  Hank explained this term.

  “His parents came from distinguished families, Massachusetts pioneers who came from England in the early 1630s.”

  Lincoln Stover, Hank’s father, was born in Oyster Bay, Long Island, an area where great estates were owned by such as Louis Tiffany and F. W. Woolworth and where Theodore Roosevelt had a home, his summer White House. Lincoln’s parents expected him to follow in his father’s footsteps, and so he did—except that he did not marry a daughter of a wealthy New York family. Instead, he fell almost violently in love with Dorothy and proposed marriage.

  Mr. and Mrs. Robert Stover, Hank’s grandparents, were both affronted and aghast. Lincoln just could not—could not—marry the penniless and pedigreeless daughter and niece of poor dirt farmers. Though threatened with disinheritance, Lincoln ran off with Dorothy to the wild state of Nevada, where the parson who married them failed to ask the age of the bride.

  Perhaps it was the fait accompli that caused the Robert Stovers to tell Lincoln Stover and Dorothy to come home, all was forgiven. A second and lawful marriage was made. And, after Lincoln’s father and mother had gotten to know Dorothy well, they not only accepted her, but came to love her.

  “Which was pretty good for such snobs,” Hank said.

  “Your mother was a remarkable person,” Glinda said. “Also, very lovable.”

  “If I weren’t so modest, I’d tell you how much like her I am,” Hank said.

  Both laughed.

  Ah, he thought, if only you would love me, Glinda. You’d find me a giant not only in size but in love.

  He resumed his biography. When the United States declared war on Germany, August 6, 1917, he was in prep school. He’d quit during his last semester to enlist in the Army Air Service in February, 1918. The previous summer, he’d taken flying lessons. In September he was transported to France, and he flew a Spad pursuit from September 20th until November 11th, the day of the Armistice. He’d been in five dogfights but had shot down only one plane, and he’d had to share that victory with his commander.

  When he was discharged, he’d bummed around in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Italy, and Spain. On returning, he’d finished his prep school education and had started at Yale. But he was passionately in love with flying, and he was too old and experienced to enjoy being a freshman. The summer of 1921 he’d told his parents that he wasn’t going back to college. Not for a while, anyway. He wanted to be a barnstormer. Lincoln and Dorothy objected very much, but he was as bullheaded as they. Off he’d gone with the Jenny his father had purchased for him, promising to pay him back from the money he made on his tours.

  “Dad refused to have anything to do with me until I gave up all that romantic idiocy, as he called it. Mother had begged me to finish school first and then go, as she put it, skylarking. She was mad at me, too, but she did write me long letters. Oh, yes, I forgot. The housekey. She gave it to me just before I embarked for France. She said it had always brought her luck, and maybe it would for me. I certainly would need it, she said.”

  Glinda handed the key back to him. “It has been in many far-off places.”

  He then told her again how he had happened to pass through the green cloud into this world.

  “Very rarely,” she said, “there is a brief opening in the walls that separate our two worlds. Usually, they occur far above ground, though at one time there must have been some at surface level. They are a natural unpredictable phenomenon, and, for some reason, it is much more difficult to get from your world into mine than the other way around.”

  “I can’t go back?” Hank said. “But my mother...”

  “It’s not impossible. Just hard. As I was about to say before you interrupted, stories handed down by our ancestors indicate that they passed through some openings into this world about 1500 or so years ago. More than one tribe and parts of tribes and some individuals came through. Animals, birds, and reptiles, too. And, of course, insects.

  “At that time, the openings must have lasted longer than they do now. Perhaps they moved more swiftly and swept some areas, scooped up, as it were, areas containing living beings. We really don’t know what happened.

  “In any event, it seems that the openings, from what little we know about them, drifted westward. But, r
egardless of their location on Earth, their other side, that which gave access to this world, has always been fixed in this area, Amariiki.”

  “May I interrupt again, Your Witchness?”

  “Zha, thu mag.” (“Yes, you may.”)

  “What if the openings were partly below the surface of the Earth? Would they, when they ceased to be open, quit operating, remove the Earth from the other world, too? And the vegetation?”

  “I don’t know. I think that something, perhaps the Earth’s radiations...”

  Hank thought, Earth currents?

  “... prevented the openings from existing below the ground and water levels of your world and mine. However, when my ancestors got here, they found some humans who spoke a different language. They were tiny, and very hairy, white-skinned, had huge supraorbital ridges, weak chins, breadloaf-shaped skulls, and thick bones.”

  Neanderthals? Hank thought.

  Glinda said that these were either exterminated or absorbed by her ancestors. During this long process, her ancestors borrowed words from the languages of the vanquished. Thus, names such as Quadling, Winkie, Munchkin, and Gillikin were derived from the firstcomers.

  In about ten generations after entering this world, her ancestors had shrunk to their present size. About this time, other tribes came in, and there was war. But these newcomers also shrank in ten generations, and eventually Glinda’s ancestors absorbed them. According to the tales, they called themselves the People of Morrigan.

  Morrigan? Hank thought. A goddess of the ancient Irish?

  Glinda said that there were still some villages in mountainous northeast Gillikinland which spoke dialects descended from the invaders’ speech.

  Glinda continued. The third people to come were also giants, very dark, and had straight black hair, broad faces, high cheekbones, and big bold noses. They, too, shrank while they were warring with their predecessors. Eventually, they established residence behind the mountain range that cut off the northwestern area of this giant oasis.

  “What really bothers me, Your Witchness, is, uh, well, how can an inanimate object, the Scarecrow, for instance, become alive? Not only that, but how can it be intelligent, able to speak? How can something made of cloth and straw, something that lacks a skeleton, muscles, nerves, blood, how can that walk? How can it talk when its mouth is only painted on, how see when its eyes are also painted on? How... ?”

  He jumped, startled, when a bird shot in and then floated to a landing on the back of a chair.

  Glinda gave a start, too, and spoke angrily to the bird.

  It was a goshawk, and it answered in the voice that still made him uneasy when he heard it. He just could not get used to animals and birds talking, especially when the voices sounded as if they were issuing from a gramophone. They all sounded much alike to him. It made no difference if a small-throated hawk or a large-throated cow spoke. The pitch remained the same, though the loudness differed. The one should have been piping, the other bass. But they were not.

  “Pardon, Little Mother,” the goshawk said. “I would have announced myself to your guards, but I bring very important news!”

  “The pardon depends upon the importance of what you bring me,” Glinda said. “What is it?”

  “A small green cloud suddenly appeared out in the desert, and a flying machine, something like the giant’s, shot through. But it did not continue to fly. Something had cut it in half, and it fell to the ground. It is burning on the ground now.”

  Hank Stover shot out of his chair.

  “Exactly where is it?” he cried.

  The goshawk looked at Glinda. She nodded.

  “Exactly south of the castle. About three miles straight from here.”

  Glenda rose and said, “Eight miles by the road. Stop!”

  Hank turned. “Yes, Little Mother?”

  “I can understand your impatience to get there. But you do not walk out in my presence unless I grant permission.”

  “Sorry, Your Witchness.”

  Glinda rapidly gave some orders, and she walked out with her bodyguard and Stover trailing. He wanted to run, but he had to walk, and he could not even do that quickly. Glinda’s legs, though long in proportion to her trunk, were short compared to his. Fuming, jittering, he matched his pace to hers as they went down the hall and then the stairway to the ground floor. The goshawk had flown ahead to transmit her commands. By the time the party got to the front entrance, it found chariots awaiting it. Hank got into the vehicle driven by the blonde, Lamblo, and bent down so that he could grip the railing. The two moose pulling it would have a heavier load than the others. His weight was over three times Lamblo’s.

  Presently, the queen, sitting on an attached bench in the lead chariot, gave the word to proceed. Her driver, standing up, shouted at the moose to go at top pace. She did not use reins and was not so much the driver as the director. Sentient animals did not need these and would have resented them.

  They raced across the drawbridge and out through the enormous gateway of the outer walls. The people caught unawares scattered before them. Then they were going east on the red brick road and were quickly past the walls. Hank, looking south, saw the black plume of smoke from the burning aircraft.

  A mile from the castle, the chariots turned south onto a dirt road. It soon left the plateau and began winding down the face of the cliff. It was just wide enough for two small wagons to pass each other, but the moose took the inner curves as if they were sure that they’d not meet anyone coming from the other direction. Hank hoped they were right.

  Lamblo had to shout several times at her animals to slow down, and once she pulled on the brake handle by her side. Somehow, the whole cavalcade—cervuscade?—got down to the bottom without accident. Here, Hank thought, the animals would slow down, take a breather. But no. Now they were going even faster. The trees on the sides of the road flashed by. Eventually, his weight began to tell on Lamblo’s beasts, and the chariot dropped behind the others. Glinda, looking back, shouted something, and the others checked their pace.

  They came from the semidarkness of the heavy woods into bright sunlight. The desert lay before them. Tawny sand and red and black rocks of from house-size to egg-size. Glinda stopped the chariots. When Hank’s pulled near hers, she said, “We’ll walk from here.”

  He did not have to ask her why. Pulling the vehicles through that rugged, ragged waste would have worn out the moose more in a mile than the six miles of racing.

  He wondered if that was the only reason when he saw boxes unloaded from the only four-wheeled chariot. They were opened, and the contents passed out. Hank took three of the thin iron javelins Lamblo handed him.

  “What’re these for?”

  The snub-nosed blonde pointed at a white arc springing from one high rock to another.

  “They’re not dangerous if you don’t get in their path. But if any roll at you, throw one of these through it.”

  She spread her palms up and outwards.

  “Gaguum!”

  Which was Quadling for “Boom!”

  “They explode. Usually, anyway. Sometimes, you have to throw a second one through them.”

  Javelins were not their only protection. As they walked out slowly, they were joined by a group that had arrived a few minutes behind them. These were archers, male and female, their arrows tipped with round iron balls. The weight of these would prevent long-range shooting, but, apparently, they were thought adequate for their purpose. The archers formed a circle around the queen’s party.

  They went up a tortured slope of projecting sheets of rocks and pockets of sand. When they got to its top, they could see the wreck burning on the downward side of the slope. Dark marks on the rock showed where the craft had struck near the end of a slanting sheet, had bounced, and then had slid down the bottom half of the grayish apron. Hank wanted to urge more speed; he was vibrating with curiosity. But Glinda walked slowly, and nobody was going to break the discipline of matching the pace with her.

  She st
opped for a moment and looked around.

  “Good!” she said. “No fizhanam in sight. They do, however, come up swiftly, Hank.”

  The searing heat from the flaming wreck kept them from getting closer than a hundred feet. There was nothing to do but to wait for the flames to die and the metal to cool. Or so Hank thought. Twenty minutes later, more soldiers and moose came, hauling with much labor six four-wheeled wagons. These held tanks and pumping machinery. A greenish foam was sprayed from three of them, and this quickly smothered the burning gasoline. Then water was pumped from the other three to dissipate the foam and cool the hot metal.