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.