Nevertheless, there were things in it which children would skate over while reading the fascinating adventures. There was death in Oz, though there were no gory details, and Baum was right in being sparing of them. The Tin Woodman chopped off the head of a wildcat chasing the Queen of the Mice. Two bear-bodied, tiger-headed Kalidahs were smashed to death when they fell off a log bridge chopped off by the Tin Woodman. The Woodman also killed forty wolves with an axe. The Cowardly Lion sneaked off at night to get something to eat, and Dorothy did not ask him what his food had been. She did tremble for the deer.

Dorothy saw a tiny baby, which meant that there was birth and, therefore, copulation and conception. And all that these implied.

There was, even in Baum's Oz, hate and lust for power and hunger and terror and oppression and birth and death.

Baum had intended to write no more of Oz than the first book. His great ambition was to be the creator of the truly American fairy tale. His fairies and brownies and sentient animals would be indigenous, owing little to the European.

But his readers, the American children, wanted more of Oz. And, since the demand was high and he needed the money, he wrote a sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz. This was almost entirely fictional, though he did use some names and persons Dorothy had mentioned. And he created those wonderful characters, Jack Pumpkinhead. the Gump, the Wooden Sawhorse, the Wogglebug, and Ozma, the long hidden and true queen of Oz.

His readers were delighted and asked for more.

Though Baum tried to ignore them, he could not. Like A. Conan Doyle, he found that what he regarded as hackwork was really the jewel in the crown—as far as his readers were concerned. Doyle made his fortune and his reputation from Sherlock Holmes, though he tried, unsuccessfully, to kill him off so he could get back to his beloved historical novels. Baum worked at the genuine American fairy tale as long as he could, but then he did what he must. He ended up writing fourteen in the series.

During the course of this, he decided to make Oz as Utopian as possible. Thus, in his later books, no one could die in Oz nor would anyone grow old. Babies would remain babies forever; people who were old when the great fairy queen Lurline cast her spell on Oz would grow no older.

Even if a person were cut into little pieces, the pieces would still live.

Baum forgot about this from time to time, and his later Oz books contained passing references indicating that there was a possibility of death in that land.

Hank had not noticed the many discrepancies in the series when he was very young. He had liked the idea that no one could die, but, when he got older, he saw that this took much of the tension from the adventures. And, when he became a young man, he realized that a world in which babies remained babies and there was no death, and, by implication, no birth either, was a horrible world.

Still, he could turn off his critical faculties and enjoy the books as he had when a child. Become, during the reading, a child again.

Here, though, he was in the nonfictional world. He could not close a page when he was tired of reading it and walk off. Reality was a novel that kept batting its pages hard against you. You had to read on and on until you died. Even sleep was no refuge; your mind presented other books, even more plotless and footnoted and nonsensical and filled with misprints and dropped sentences than what you read while awake.

Hank put on his barnstormer outfit and then studied the sheet of paper on which he had printed the twenty-eight letters of the Quadling alphabet and the symbols he'd made up to indicate their pronunciation.

He spent an hour reading a child's primer. Then he went to the bathroom, coming out just as a servant came for him. He was led this time into a large room near the throne room. Glinda, clad in a pure white robe but uncrowned, sat in a chair before an oak table. The table legs were carved like sphinx-faces.

There was a long line before her, petitioners of various sorts, he supposed. But he did not have to wait. The servant conducted him by the people and animals. If they resented his being passed by them, they did not show it. They stared at him openly, as the natives did everywhere. But many smiled, and some even said, "Goth morn!"

They were noisy, too, not silent in the queen's presence as he had expected. Sometimes, a short phrase or a complete sentence sounded as if it was English. Double-talk English.

Glinda smiled at him, said something to the captain by her side, and waited while the soldier announced that the audiences were over for a while. The petitioners could wait in the hall.

A folding chair was brought in built for him, and Hank was told to sit down across the table. He waved away the glass goblet of fruit juice offered him.

Glinda leaned back in the high-backed, ornately carved oaken chair. "Have you anything to ask me? Is there anything I can do for you?"

Hank was sure that he was not here just so she could find out if his needs were being taken care of. He said, "No complaints. As for asking, well, I have a hundred questions."

"Some of which we may have time for," she said. "You're here primarily so that I can acquaint you with certain situations. And I have a request to make of you."

"I'm all yours, Little Mother."

He thought, I sure would like to be. "The man who was killed yesterday in the flying machine will be buried this afternoon," she said. "I don't know what religion he was, but if you care to say prayers over him, you may do so during the ceremony."

"My father's an Anglican; my mother, a Methodist. I'm a hardshelled agnostic." Glinda looked puzzled.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "I'll say a prayer for him. It couldn't hurt."

"No. But he may be only the first. Others will follow him, I'm sure. What you must know is that we won't tolerate any more. One of you is enough. We can handle one—especially since he is Dorothy's son. One is even welcome. But no more than one. We will not be invaded!"

Hank was startled. The last sentence had been uttered so strongly and with such a hard face and eyes. Glinda meant what she said.

"My anger is not for you," she said, smiling. "But you're intelligent. You must have known from your strict quarantine that we are very disturbed at the prospect of disease from Earth. We had those here once, and they must have killed many. Then the plagues died out. Why, I don't know. Perhaps that was because of something the Long-Gone Ones left here. Some sort of anti-disease protection which fills... radiates? ...over this land."

"The Long-Gone Ones?"

"The ancient aborigines. The nonhumans who originated on this planet. Or, at least, they did as far as we know. They must have died out or been exterminated or left this world before the first humans came through the openings. We do not know, but the stories that have come down to us, in distorted form, I'm sure, from our ancestors... these say that there were no indigenes then. But there are the half-buried ruins of a city of the Long-Gone Ones in the far northwest comer of the land. We don't know much about it since it's in Natawey territory. I have been there, but I wasn't able to make much from what I saw during my brief stay. I had other things to occupy my interest then."

She paused, looking as if she were contemplating the past. Then she said, "It was very fortunate that neither you nor your mother were carrying any diseases when you came here.

But I know that these foulnesses sicken and kill many of you. And if these are brought in, well..."

She grimaced as if she were seeing visions of hell.

"My people would be defenseless. They would be swept away by the thousands, perhaps all or almost all would die. Be honest, wouldn't that happen?"