"I _told_ him not to touch that wheel! Lanfierre. He's in the upstairs
bedroom!"
When he heard this Fownes plunged into the house and fought his way
up the stairs. He found Lanfierre standing outside the bedroom with a
wheel in his hand.
"What have I done?" Lanfierre asked in the monotone of shock.
Fownes took the wheel. It was off a 1995 Studebaker.
"I'm not sure what's going to come of this," he said to Lanfierre with
an astonishing amount of objectivity, "but the entire dome air supply
is now coming through my bedroom."
The wind screamed.
"Is there something I can turn?" Lanfierre asked.
"Not any more there isn't."
They started down the stairs carefully, but the wind caught them and
they quickly reached the bottom in a wet heap.
Recruiting Lieutenant MacBride from behind his sofa, the men carefully
edged out of the house and forced the front door shut.
The wind died. The fog dispersed. They stood dripping in the Optimum
Dome Conditions of the bright avenue.
"I never figured on _this_," Lanfierre said, shaking his head.
With the front door closed the wind quickly built up inside the house.
They could see the furnishing whirl past the windows. The house did a
wild, elated jig.
"What kind of a place _is_ this?" MacBride said, his courage beginning
to return. He took out his notebook but it was a soggy mess. He tossed
it away.
"Sure, he was _different_," Lanfierre murmured. "I knew that much."
When the roof blew off they weren't really surprised. With a certain
amount of equanimity they watched it lift off almost gracefully,
standing on end for a moment before toppling to the ground. It was
strangely slow motion, as was the black twirling cloud that now rose
out of the master bedroom, spewing shorts and socks and cases every
which way.
"_Now_ what?" MacBride said, thoroughly exasperated, as this strange
black cloud began to accelerate, whirling about like some malevolent
top....
* * * * *
Humphrey Fownes took out the dust jacket he'd found in the library. He
held it up and carefully compared the spinning cloud in his bedroom
with the illustration. The cloud rose and spun, assuming the identical
shape of the illustration.
"It's a twister," he said softly. "A Kansas twister!"
"What," MacBride asked, his bravado slipping away again, "what ... is a
twister?"
The twister roared and moved out of the bedroom, out over the rear of
the house toward the side of the dome. "It says here," Fownes shouted
over the roaring, "that Dorothy traveled from Kansas to Oz in a twister
and that ... and that Oz is a wonderful and mysterious land _beyond the
confines of everyday living_."
MacBride's eyes and mouth were great zeros.
"Is there something I can turn?" Lanfierre asked.
Huge chunks of glass began to fall around them.
"Fownes!" MacBride shouted. "This is a direct order! Make it go back!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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