They could think that the Jenny was a winged monster. And Jenny must appear especially fearsome. Her fuselage was yellow, and her wings were scarlet. Two big blue eyes were painted on each side below the exposed engine, the propeller hub and part of the area around it was painted to look like a nose, and below it was a mouth with a red Cupid's-bow mouth and white pointed teeth.
It was warmer here. The temperature when he had left Kansas City was about 24 degrees Fahrenheit. It seemed to him that it was close to 39 degrees here.
Twelve bald eagles flying in V-formation flew over him at a height of twenty feet. Squadrons of goshawks, chicken hawks, and peregrine falcons followed them. Bringing up the rear were twelve golden eagles. All the birds were about one-third smaller than the species he knew on Earth. They wheeled and landed on the branches of some trees at the edge of the meadow. There, silent, scarcely moving, they eyed him steadily. But a lone peregrine circled above him, then sped toward the castle.
The engine was hot enough that he could start it again without having someone spin the propeller. Perhaps he should do that and taxi to the northeast corner to face the wind and so be ready for a quick takeoff.
"What the hell," he said, and he climbed out of the rear cockpit and got down to the ground.
He was conscious that he was flamboyant and handsome in his barnstormer's garb: black leather helmet with green-rimmed goggles shoved up on it, a long white scarf, black leather jacket, black-leather fur-trimmed gloves, yellow puttees, and black shoes. However, instead of the conventional rabbit's foot attached to the jacket to ensure good luck, he wore a housekey on a gold chain.
There were by then many people along the road, all staring at him. The eyes of most of them were on a level with his bellybutton. He was not surprised.
The men and women jabbering in an unknown language—yet it sometimes sounded like English—wore tall conical hats with tiny bells hanging from the wide brims. The women wore dresses with low-cut necklines and hems just below the knees. Their boots were really wooden shoes to which were attached leggings of wool. The men wore sleeved shirts, vests, pants, and boots like the women's except that they had a fat roll at the tops. The older men were full-bearded; the younger, clean-shaved or moustached.
Only the women wore make-up, and that was just rouge.
All were Caucasians, though deeply tanned. The faces looked like those he had seen when in occupied north Germany.
After a while, the animals in the corner of the meadow approached him, their number swelled by those from adjoining farms. These were, like the people, about one-third smaller than their Terrestrial counterparts.
Hank was shocked when a sheep spoke to another. The language was undoubtedly that of the humans, but the voice was unhuman. Its Victrola-record quality sent chills over him.
Yet, he should have been prepared for it.
Deciding that he would probably be leaving the meadow soon, he took out his anchoring equipment from a recess in the rear turtle deck. Just as he finished staking the Jenny down, he saw a train of chariots bearing armed women stop by the fence. Chariots! Pulling them were diminutive moose. These, like the cows he had seen, lacked reins. And the charioteers carried no whips.
He should have expected that.
The female soldiers got down from their vehicles, and assembled in formation at the directions of an officer. Their steel helmets were conical and had gold arabesques and bore on the front a horseshoe shape enclosing an X. Long scarlet feathers stuck from the peaks, and red cloth chinstraps secured the helmets. They wore stiff red shirts over which were hip-length woolen jackets, scarlet with gold braid. Their knee-length scarlet skirts bore yellow, blue, and green designs: the horseshoe and X, hackenkreuzes, ankhs, and owls' eyes. Their boots were like the farmers' but were scarlet with golden clockwork.
Stover looked at the blonde, blue-eyed commander and said, "A real doll! A peach!"
There was nothing peachy about the sword she held in one hand or her troop's long spears. She gestured that Stover should leave the plane. He did so, and he suddenly found himself surrounded by sharp steel spearheads.
Smiling, he gestured that he came in peace. If the commander understood Indian sign language, she did not indicate so. He was marched to the road and then down it towards the castle. The chariots, with the rest of the soldiers, followed them, and behind them came the crowd of civilians. The bodyguard and he walked a mile before coming to the castle. Here a large crowd of people, animals, and birds, waited to see the giant who had flown in a huge bird from somewhere. It was kept from pressing close to him by soldiers, males who also wore skirts.
Hank went across a drawbridge over a fifty-foot-wide moat, passed through the outer walls, across a courtyard with marble paving, and up twelve marble steps forty feet or so wide. These were flanked by ramps for the animals. He had no chance to examine the rubies, large as his head, set in the walls by the entrance.
He was seeing much but noting little in detail. He went through high-ceilinged and wide halls furnished with statuary, paintings, and other artifacts of various kinds. The floors were marble set with colored mosaics. At the end of a hall, he was conducted up a broad winding staircase and arrived, out of breath, at a door on the ninth floor.
He walked stooping through the doorway into an anteroom. The next room had a steel door with a small barred, window. He was urged through that, and the captain and two soldiers who had accompanied him into the room left it. The door was closed, and a big steel bar clanged shut on the outside. He was in a very large room with furniture too small for him except for the enormous canopied bed. A door led to a bathroom. It did have running water, however, though the toilet was too small for him to sit comfortably on—his testicles would fall into the water—and he would have to bend far over to wash his face. The only light he'd have at night would be lamps burning oil of some kind.
All Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Roy Rockwood, and Mr. Dante Alighieri had overlooked in their journeys to other worlds was how shocked their heroes would be. To leave Earth was to suffer a physical and emotional blow similar to that which the newborn baby felt on being ejected from the womb. However, the baby had no idea of what had happened, whereas the adult journeying to the moon or Mars or Hell had some notion of what he was to encounter and had willingly launched himself into the unknown. Also, Mr. Wells' characters in The First Men in the Moon, and Mr. Rockwood's in Through Space to Mars, and Mr. Alighieri's in The Inferno had voyaged within the relatively narrow limits of the solar system and their destinations were not unmapped. Mr. Alighieri's hero, Dante himself, had a clear image of what Hell would be like, though the reality must have shaken him to the center of his being. Surely, the heroes of all three fantasists must have been numb and disoriented for a while. Lesser men might have died from the shock.
Well, maybe not. After all, they had had some sort of conditioning for their voyages, some degree of preparation.
But to be suddenly propelled into another universe—that was something that Hank Stover had not read about or even heard of. Well, yes, he had. Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven were other worlds in the sense that they were in another universe. Or were they? Weren't they in the solar system also?
And, in a sense, he had been conditioned, prepared, for this universe by his mother's stories and Mr. Baum's books. So, he had not been completely shocked.
Also, though he was in another universe, he was still, somehow, in the solar system of Earth.
There was a big ornately carved pendulum clock in the room. Its face bore twenty-three single characters or bi-characters. These were numerals, many of which looked like they had been derived from the Greek alphabet, some from the Latin, and a few from what he thought was the Runic. He was not sure, but they seemed to be like those he had seen in a book on the Gothic language.