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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.
The clock was obviously a twenty-four-hour chronometer. The day, indicated by the zero mark, started at noon. The zero mark at the top of the face was not the zero he was accustomed to. It was a short horizontal line with a large dot in the middle. These people, if they or their ancestors had come from Earth, would have come before Arabic numerals had been introduced. But one of their geniuses had invented a symbol for zero.
When the clock struck noon, Hank's wristwatch indicated 12:04:08 P.M. The moon was full, as on this date on Earth, and, though it was pale in the daylight, its markings seemed to be like Earth' s moon. There was a morning star, which would have been Venus on Earth. Sunset was at 6:25 by his watch, just as it was supposed to. Also, the constellations were what he could have expected on this date as seen from the Midwest.
What was not on Earth was the sudden appearance and rolling charge across the desert floor of huge glowing balls and their silent explosions as they neared the fertile borderland. Something at the edge of the desert was discharging them.
On April 2, the moon, now begi
He was sure that this desert and the green land were not on Earth somewhere. Even though there were in A.D. 1923 unexplored territories, this could not be one of them. Wherever the green haze, some sort of entrance, had sent him, it had not transported him to a remote spot of his native planet. He had passed into another universe.
The two universes formed a split-level continuum. Earth and this planet shared the same extra-atmospheric space but yet were walled off from each other. Or they were two different floors in the same planetary building, as it were. When he had gone through the green haze, he had ascended from the first floor, Earth, to the second floor, Ertha.
Ertha. That that was so similar to the English word was no coincidence. Not when the language used lamb for lamb, fotuz for foot, ma
There was also a nation to the north which was called Oz. This was not a word which these people had brought in from Earth.
Hank Stover had had many questions, still did, but he could not ask them until he learned his captors' speech. Since they started his language lessons an hour after he was in his luxurious cell, they were eager to communicate. Most of his daylight hours were spent bent over by the window in the door. His instructors, all wearing gauze masks for the first two weeks, stood on the other side. Hank learned much, but he got a hell of a backache and, sometimes, a headache.
"What am I?" he yelled now and then. "A skunk? A pariah? Something unspeakably filthy and degraded? A leper? A Socialist?"
Four men, four women, and a child taught him, each for about an hour and fifteen minutes. One was the blonde pipperoo, Captain Lamblo, "Little Lamb." Like the others, she had no surname but had a nickname or cognomen. Hers was "The Swift."
They started out by pointing to and naming parts of their bodies. He repeated their words until his pronunciation was perfect or, at this stage, acceptable. If he could have seen their lips, he would have learned faster.
They brought in objects and named these. After five days, he was taught simple sentences.
"Sa-her'z ain sko." "This is a shoe."
"Sa-thar'z ain hilm." "That's a helmet."
"I sai thuk." "I see you."
"Sai thu mik?" "See you me?"
"Ain, twai, thriiz..." "One, two, three..."
He was able to relate many words to three branches of the Teutonic language. His Swedish governess had taught him some of her language, and he had learned German in prep school, during the Occupation, and at Yale. This enabled him to relate some of the words to English.
But how had the Teutonics gotten into this world? And why had they become pygmies?
In the meantime, he had managed to get a building erected around the Je
He was happy about this. He had had to wash his underwear, shirt, and socks in cold water and with the strong soap. Then he had had to go without them until they had dried. Now he had a change. He also had a carton of Camel cigarettes and a quart of bootleg booze, Glenfiddich scotch, smuggled in from Canada. He'd had to smoke the local tobacco, a strong burley, in a pipe. He did not like to smoke a pipe. They'd given him beer, which was tastier than any he'd ever had, but he preferred hard liquor. The stuff they'd given him was grain alcohol mixed with water and the juice of berries.
Also in the luggage was a Colt .45 New Service revolver and two boxes of ammunition. These people had no idea what they were, but he did not intend to use them.
There were also copies of a farmer's almanac, Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, Civilization In the United States, edited by Harold Stearns, and two Current Opinion magazines. The latter had been taken from a Kansas City boardinghouse, and, though they were the April, 1920 and April, 1921 issues, Hank had started reading them. They had many interesting articles. Besides, he would read anything, even the labels on a can of Campbell's soup, if he had nothing else.
He also exercised vigorously for an hour, and he spent some time observing the celestial phenomena and the hundreds of fireballs that went up in flashes like shells from Big Bertha.
He asked Lamblo what they were called.
"Fizhanam." "Enemy-ghosts."
When he asked her to explain their nature, he got no answer.
At the end of the third week, his captors must have concluded that he was rain, clean. The i
"Why did you treat me as if I had the..." he said. What was the word for plague?
"Unhaili. Zha, sa Aithlo (Yes, the Little Mother) had you locked up until we could find out if you were carrying some evil thing which might make us sick."
"What diseases do you have? After all, if I can give mine to you, you can give yours to me."
"You'll have to ask Little Mother. She commanded that you be kept here untouched. But I think that you giants have some sort of loathsome illnesses which might make us sick and die."
"You don't have those kinds of diseases?"
"Ne. We die of gund (cancer), heart failure, stroke, and other self-diseases, but, except for some skin diseases, we have little that one person transmits to another."
More questioning told him that these people did not even have the common cold, though they could get pneumonia. And the childbirth fatality rate was low, one in ten thousand. Some of his questions were readily, if not fully, answered. Others were referred to his scheduled meeting with Sa Hauist (The Highest), another of the many titles of the female ruler.
He was puzzled by the tobacco. If these natives were descendants of Dark-Age Goths, how had they encountered tobacco? That was indigenous to America; the Goths were Europeans. Also, there were many other North American plants: ca