Hank recognized the room in which they stopped. It was the bedroom of the suite in which his parents had slept when they had taken him to San Francisco. Somehow, Glinda had pointed him—and herself—toward it. They had headed toward it as surely as iron leaped, toward a magnet.
What if he had never been here? Could Glinda still have found her way? He felt that she would have been able to do so, though she would have had much more difficulty.
The man in the bed was Warren Gamaliel Harding, the President of the United States of America. The woman sitting on a chair by the bed and reading to him from a magazine was Florence Kling De Wolfe, Mrs. Harding.
There were also two nurses moving around as if they had nothing to do at the moment but were pretending to find work.
On a table by the bedside was a vase with a few long-stemmed roses and a clock. The clockhands were on 7:27.
Harding was much fatter, older-looking, and far less healthy-seeming than in the photograph Hank had shown Glinda. His haggard eyes stared up at the ceiling while he listened to his wife, but he was smiling slightly.
The room and its contents seemed to Hank to be behind thin white veils. Still, he could see everything clearly, though he could not hear, smell, or feel anything. Glinda had told him that she could have activated these senses if it had been necessary to do so, but that would have required more energy. She had also told him that she was in a "form" that differed slightly from his. He could not affect anything; he would be as intangible as ectoplasm. She, however, would be more "dense" and could, when the occasion demanded, briefly handle material stuff. She was floating by him now near the ceiling and holding in one hand an object that he had not seen when in the castle room. She must have picked it up in her right hand when she closed her eyes.
Had she brought the actual object with her or was it an astral simulacrum of the object?
The President said something. Hank, lip-reading, thought that he said, "That's good. Go on. Read some more."
Then Harding shuddered, his mouth fell open, and his eyes looked fixedly at the ceiling, the lids unmoving. His wife rose from the chair and bent over him. Her lips worked in her emotionless face. The nurses came to the bed, and one felt Harding's pulse. Then Mrs. Harding ran to the door and called out something. Several men hurried in, pushed the nurses away, and examined the body. One shook his head; one seemed to say, "Apoplexy."
Glinda moved down. The thing in her outstretched hand, which he now saw was a tiny golden statuette of herself in her witch's robe and holding a shepherd's crook, began being less-transparent. By the time she reached the bed—she had passed through the doctor in front of her—the statuette had almost ceased wavering and looked almost as hard as the wall.
She shoved the statuette deep into Harding's open mouth.
Now Hank understood what she was doing. The coroners would find the statuette when they performed the autopsy, and they would notify authorities. These would not permit the public to know about it, and they would make sure that whoever found the statuette would keep quiet. But they would know who had placed the statuette there because Glinda had sent one exactly like it in the package that Hank had delivered to the Signal Corps.
If, somehow, the public learned about it, so much the better from Glinda's view. Its true identity would not be revealed; it would always be an unexplained mystery except to a few.
Glinda floated up to Hank, said in a voiceless voice, "It is done," touched him, and they shot downward. The return trip was much like the outward, though Hank felt that they were in even graver danger when they were in what he thought was the center of the planet. As he rose along the silver shafts from the mercury pool, he sensed that great "jaws" snapped shut close behind him, and something "screamed" in frustration.
"The figurine differed from the other," Glinda said, "in that it was made of wood, not gold, and it was hollow. A very thin layer of paint looking like gold was on it. I can't transport metal without losing so much energy that I'd be too vulnerable to that... thing. Even then, I wouldn't be able to take anyone with me. The mass and the chemical composition of the transported object have to be light and nonmetallic."
She was as pale and as languid as one of Count Dracula's donors. After the return, she had not left her apartment for two days. Hank thought that she had been sleeping most of that time. Her first minister had conducted all governmental business until the third day, and she had not worked for more than two hours then before going back to her suite.
"Did we really go to the center of the Earth or of this planet or maybe both?" he said.
"I didn't know where we were until we got to the basement of the hotel. But I, like you, felt that we were in the molten heart of the world. My theory is that we have to go there to accumulate energy from the great heat so that we can propel ourselves on the second leg of the journey and the return. For all I know, we may have been inside the sun. I don't think so, though. I feel that we are deep under the ground, as deep as you can get."
"I can understand, I think, why your magic works in this universe. But I can't understand why it should work in my universe."
"It's much more difficult and dangerous to work magic in your world. Much more uncertain. I have a theory that it only works there, your world, because, somehow, there's a leak of influences from my world to yours through the weak places in the walls. Or, to put it another way, Ertha is on a higher energy level than Earth. That is why it's easier to go from here to there than vice versa. And, when the way is open, there's a flow of energy involving a temporary and weak influence from this universe. The laws of your universe, you might say, are slightly changed during the opening whether the opening is made by us witches or by your scientists."
"Which might mean," Hank said, "that the witches and sorcerers of my universe have been able now and then to affect real magic. They've opened the way for the energy exchange or flow or whatever you want to call it?"
"It's possible. However, there's a more important subject to talk about now. Will we or won't we get a message from your people?"
"I don't know. I suppose that Coolidge, he'll be the President now, will have been informed of the project and the statuette. He's a hard-headed, no-nonsense, New England Yankee. I'd say that he's considered all the dangers to Earth, balanced profit against loss, and decided that it's best to close the project down. He'll make sure that the records are either locked up or destroyed and everybody in the know has been sworn again to silence. He's not a man to want to mess around with another world. He's got enough troubles in his own. Also, I doubt that he really believed the evidence even when it was laid out on his desk."
"Whatever happens there, I can't worry about it now. The news from the front is mostly bad. The Emerald City may fall anytime now. I've suggested to the Scarecrow that he leave the city—he could be carried out at night by two eagles—but he refuses. The Gillikin armies have invaded my country; they're still in the mountain forests and on the rivers, but they'll soon be on the farmlands and the prairies. I've had to replace some of my generals with younger, more flexible-minded men. Those I've discharged only know about war from textbooks; they can't adjust to the realities. The Gillikins in Winkieland have occupied most of the strategically important places there, and they've been replaced by Munchkins and Ozlander draftees. The relieved men will be marching into this country to reinforce the Gillikins here."
"What's the good news, if any?"
Glinda smiled. "My guerrillas, led by the Cowardly Lion, captured a dam long enough to blow it up. Fifty boats loaded with Erakna's troops were swept over the edge of the broken dam and were drowned."