A BARNSTORMER IN OZ by Philip José Farmer Read online

  Before it was a round open grave. Beyond it, Glinda sat on a marble throne, but an old black blanket protected her naked buttocks from the hard cold stone. She wore only a feathered headdress and was painted from neck to toes with alternating white-and-black stripes that spiralled around her. She held in her left hand a long wooden shepherd’s staff.

  Hank stopped before her and bowed, his eyes on the ground. He was embarrassed. The mourners howled, the crowd hummed like a dynamo, the gourds rattled, the bells rang, and the bullroarers roared.

  “Look up!” Glinda cried. “Look up, stranger!”

  Reluctantly, Hank raised his gaze. Glinda was half-smiling, and her blue eyes seemed amused. Did she know how shocked he was at this savagery and her nakedness?

  “Look up, stranger!” she said, and she pointed the staff at the sky.

  Hank obeyed. The sky was unclouded. What was he supposed to see, even if only symbolically? He glanced to his right and saw that everybody was also looking upward.

  “Silence!” she shouted, and the wailing, humming, rattling, tinkling, and roaring ceased. But a baby held by a woman near the front of the crowd screamed.

  “Face to the west!” Glinda cried. “Look west!”

  He turned with everybody else except Glinda.

  “There we all go!” she said. “Whether you live a day or a thousand years, you go there! Naked you came into this world; naked you go there! As it was, so shall it be!”

  She paused, then said, “But it shall not always be thus!”

  “It shall not always be thus!” the others shouted.

  “There is an end even to endlessness!”

  “There is an end!”

  Silence for a minute. The baby was nursing now and quiet.

  Glinda shattered the silence.

  “The dead should not go home without blood!”

  “Not without blood!” the crowd shouted.

  “The dead man is a stranger! He is not of our blood! Yet even the stranger shall not go hungry! Is there no father or mother, no brother or sister to give him blood?”

  “There is none!” the people yelled.

  “Is there no one of his blood to give him blood?”

  “There is one!”

  “Then let him share his blood! The dead shall not go hungry!”

  A priest and priestess ran up to Hank. The woman grabbed Hank’s right hand and turned it over to expose the palm. The man raised a flint knife and slashed down. Hank cried out from the pain. He had not expected to be cut so deeply.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Turn towards the dead!” another priestess shrilled.

  Hank was urged to face the coffin and then was pushed towards it. The crowd also moved to look at the red granite dome. The holy men and women began dancing again, the gourds rattled, the bells tinkled, the bullroarers hummed, the mourners began howling and cutting themselves.

  The tiny priestesses pulled his hand so that it was above the ghastly face of the corpse. Then she turned it, and the blood dripped on the black charred skin and into the half-opened mouth.

  Glinda rose from the throne and pointed the staff at the dead man and then to the west.

  “Drink so that you may be strong! Go! Go west to your home!”

  This is no place for an anemic, Hank thought. He looked at the blood and the corpse and hoped that he would not faint.

  Glinda had opened her mouth to say something. Now she was staring, not at him but at the south. Those facing him on the other side of the coffin were also staring and crying out. Even in his numbness, he knew that this was not part of the ceremony. He turned to look out across the desert.

  High in the sky, but falling, was a bright light.

  It looked like a Very flare, the burning magnesium signal light he had seen so often in the night skies over the battlefields of France.

  Before the still glaring though tiny light reached the ground, an object appeared above it. It came from a green cloud that looked no larger than Hank’s hand. It twinkled, the sunlight bouncing off its silvery material.

  “A parachute?” Hank murmured.

  Almost immediately after it, another flashing object shot from the cloud and drifted down.

  And then another light flared out.

  The green cloud dwindled into the blue sky.

  Glinda said something to the hawk perched above her on the right comer of the throne. It flapped off toward the descending light.

  Hank wanted very much to leave at once for the desert, but Glinda had other ideas. That she could keep the curious crowd from stampeding for the desert showed her iron control of herself and her people. She said loudly that the ceremony would continue, and it did, though even Hank could see that it was being rushed. At Glinda’s request, he said a prayer over the corpse, the “Our father,” the lid was put on, and the heavy coffin was lowered by straps into the grave. Hank was then directed to bleed a few drops onto the coffin, and the shovelers started filling the hole. The holy people danced nine times widdershins around the grave, and then Glinda took off her feathered headdress and put on a long loose white robe.

  A doctor bandaged Hank’s hand. A few minutes later, he was on a chariot headed for the desert. When the procession was halfway down the cliff-road, the hawk lit on the railing of Glinda’s vehicle. The two conversed, but Hank was not near enough to hear what they said.

  When they were on foot and within half a mile of one of the fallen objects, they stopped. Lamblo, by Hank’s side, said, “God save us!”

  A glowing ball perhaps twelve feet wide appeared suddenly on a tall twisted rock spire. Glinda shouted an order, and a company of male archers trotted out ahead of the main body. The shimmering sphere, through which Hank could see the sky beyond it, rolled straight down, perpendicular to the ground, and then shot towards them. But it did not seem aware of them. Its path, if continued on a straight line, would have led it about thirty feet past them.

  At the barked commands of a captain, the men raised their bows. Another order. The arrows sped into the ball, and it exploded like a French .75 shell. Hank jumped and blinked. The ball was gone, but the wooden shafts of the arrows were burning.

  They proceeded warily but without incident until they got to the thing that had come from the green cloud. It was a large wooden box covered with small mirrors and attached to a huge collapsed parachute, painted silvery.

  The cords of the chute were cut, the silver-painted leather straps were unbuckled, and the lid was opened. Hank looked inside it. Enclosed in thick insulation were other boxes. He removed and opened these. There was a movie camera, four canisters of movie film, a Kodak and ten rolls of film for it, two instruction manuals, tablets of writing paper with many pencils, pens, and bottles of ink, a pencil sharpener, a twelve-inch ruler, erasers, protractor, materials for developing film, an instruction book with procedures for using the developers, a flashlight, a stopwatch, and a large manila envelope. The envelope bore the emblem and title of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Also on it, in large printed letters, was his name.

  “Now how in hell...?” he muttered.

  Before he could open the envelope, he heard a cry from around the spire. A hawk flew around it and announced that another box was being brought in. Hank decided not to open the envelope until he determined the contents of the second box.

  Opened, the other container revealed a radio transmitter-receiver with headphones and extra batteries. There was also an envelope with his name. As it turned out, it contained an exact copy of the letter in the first envelope.

  Glinda must have been curious about their find, but she wished to get her people out of the danger zone. A minute later, they were marching towards the green land. When they reached it, they loaded the boxes into a moose-drawn wagon. Hank did not open the envelopes until he was in a room on the first floor of the castle.

  Glinda’s first question was about the things in the boxes. He told her what they were and who or what had sent them. “Read the letter,” she said. “T
hen give me the essence of it. Then read it aloud, translating for me.”

  There were six pages of single-spaced typing. Though the missive came out of the office of a Colonel Mark Sampson of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, it was also signed by the General of the Armies and the chief of staff, John Joseph Pershing.

  “Black Jack himself,” Hank murmured. He had great respect for Pershing’s abilities during World War I, but he also loathed him. It was, so he had heard, Pershing who had refused to permit American fliers to wear parachutes. The reason: they might abandon their craft during combat if they were in extreme danger. In other words, Pershing did not trust the courage of his aviators.

  It was also Pershing who did not mind wasting thousands of soldiers to gain a position but who thought that whorehouses for his men were wicked and did his best to close them down. “A genuine prudish prick.”

  “What?” Glinda said.

  “Nothing. O.K. Here goes.”

  “O.K?”

  “An American phrase. It means all right, fine, yes, hunkey dorey, copasetic.”

  “Hongkiidorii? Kopasetik?”

  Hank read the letter to himself, but there was no silence in the room. Though the queen was evidently impatient to learn its contents, she wasted no time. She conferred with several people and birds, gave orders, dictated a short letter, and went once to the toilet. When she came out of it, she found that Hank had read all of the letter.

  “First, there’s not a word about how they were able to identify me,” he said. “But it would not have been difficult.”

  He wondered if Intelligence agents had visited his parents. Probably not yet, since everything about this would be a top-secret priority. They would have thoroughly investigated Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln Stover, though.

  And they surely would have notified President Harding about it. Perhaps a few cabinet officials, too.

  “This is addressed to Lieutenant Henry L. Stover. I’m no longer an Army officer, and I’m not in the reserve. They’re using the title for psychological reasons.”

  “Why?”

  “They want me to do certain things because I’m an American citizen, and they’re appealing to my patriotism. Reminding me that I was an officer and a soldier and should act like one.”

  “What certain things?”

  “These will become apparent, Little Mother. They also omit any specific explanation of just how and why the green haze, the opening, was made. However, they do refer to the operation or experiment or whatever as Project Thor. That might mean that it has or had something to do with power transmission. Thor was the god of thunder and lightning to the Norse people.”

  It would not be easy to explain everything in the letter. There were just too many references lacking in this culture or in his vocabulary.

  “I could be guessing wrong, but I think that possibly the Signal Corps was conducting an experiment to transmit... oh, hell! I’ll have to make clear what the word electricity means.”

  Glinda surprised him by saying that she had some grasp of the concept. His mother had told her about it and had also described somewhat how lightning power was generated and transmitted and what it could do.

  “Yes, but she was an eight-year-old kid. Besides, the science using it has progressed considerably since 1890. So I’ll give you more details and bring you up to date.”

  When she heard Hank out, she said, “And these Signal Corps people were, you believe, doing what?”

  “I think that they were trying to transmit electrical power without wires. Via the atmosphere, perhaps. A famous scientist, Nikola Tesla, has long been interested in trying to do that. Maybe he’s the head of the project. I don’t know.

  “Anyway, I think that the Corps was conducting such an experiment just as I was flying near Fort Leavenworth. And there was a totally unexpected by-product of the experiment. A weak place in the walls between these two universes or a natural channel for going up or down the slope between the two worlds... well, this weak spot was opened by the power. Just long enough for me to fly through.

  “The Signal Corps people saw me go into the haze and not come out. So they duplicated the experiment, and the haze was made again. I don’t know what fantastic speculations they made about this. Whatever they were, they wouldn’t match the reality. But they did decide to send an Army plane through. Just how they planned to get it back through to Earth, I don’t know either. Probably, they made plans to open the gate again at a specified time. But...”

  He shrugged, and he said, “Evidently, they don’t have control over the dimensions or duration of the opening. And they have no idea what this world is.”

  He burst out laughing, then said, “If someone told them that this was the Land of Oz, he’d be considered crazy! They’d lock him up! And if, when, I tell them the truth, they’ll think I’m out of my head!”

  Should he tell them that his mother was the Dorothy of Baum’s books? No. Whether or not they believed him, they’d harass her with long interrogations. They’d make her life miserable, give her no rest or privacy. And if by some chance the secret of this project came out, and if he did convince them that he was indeed in Oz, she’d be subjected to worldwide publicity.

  Glinda said, “You have the means to convince them.”

  She pointed at the boxes stacked in a corner.

  “They still won’t believe me.”

  “That’s not important. Continue.”

  “Well, after impressing upon me that I must tell no unauthorized person about this—who in hell could I tell, that side of the universe?—they demand that I cooperate to the fullest extent. Obey every order. Do my utmost to get information about this world to them.”

  “With the films?”

  “With those and maps and data about the population, if any... They don’t even know if this world—they call it the Fourth Dimension—has sentient beings or life of any kind except for me... If there are sentients, then they want to know all about them. Particularly, their... your... military potential. Also, diseases, the natural resources, by which they mean fertile land, bodies of water, wood, iron, copper, bauxite, oil, gold, silver, and so on. I’m supposed to make motion and still pictures of everything significant, record data about this and that, give them as complete a picture as possible.”

  He looked up from the letter.

  “They aren’t even sure I’m alive or, if I am, that I’ll be around in this area to get the message. They admit they’re taking a chance.”

  “When will they open the way again?”

  “It’ll be opened briefly seven days from now. At ten in the morning their time. They don’t know of course, whether the time here corresponds to theirs. I’m supposed to go by the time on the watch they sent. But they’re taking a chance. It’s all highly chancy.”

  “The way will be open briefly?”

  “So that I can acknowledge receipt of this. After that, thirty days before I am to pass through the films and data.”

  Hank interpreted, the message word by word, interrupting himself or being interrupted by the witch to clarify various references. When he was finished, Glinda said, “I wonder what would happen if you failed to send your reply seven days from now? Would your people then just give up?”

  “Not at all. They’d try to send through another pilot as soon as they could get the needed control over the gateway.”

  “Maybe they won’t be able to do that.”

  “That’s possible. But I doubt they’ll give up. Their curiosity will be too great. They’ll believe that this world might be as big a danger to theirs as you think theirs is to yours. They can’t stop trying. If things from my world can come here, then things from yours can go there. They’ll be thinking of the novel by Mr. H. G. Wells. That was about an invasion from Mars...”

  He outlined briefly the plot of the book. Then he said, “They’ll think the worst. They can’t afford to take a chance that there might not be any danger to them here. You can understand that, can’t you, Your Witchness?”<
br />
  “Oh, yes. So... this is not a problem which can be ignored. I will allow you to send your first message, but I want you to read it to me. And don’t lie. I will know if you are.”

  Hank felt his skin warming. “I wouldn’t think of it!”

  “Yes, you would. You’re thinking of it now. Not that that means that you would lie. Now, just how do you intend to get the message through the opening?”

  He told her that he would fly above the green cloud and drop the message through.