Philip Jose Farmer - WOT 4 - Behind the Walls of Terra

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Behind the Walls of Terra
Philip Jose Farmer
This adventure of Kickaha is dedicated to Jack Cordes, who lives in the pocket universes
of Peoria and Pekin.
The sky had been green for twenty-four years. Suddenly, it was blue.
Kickaha blinked. He was home again. Rather, he was once more on the planet of his birth.
He had lived on Earth for twenty-eight years. Then he had lived for twenty-four years in that
pocket universe he called . Now, though he did not care to be here, he was back "home."
He was standing in the shadow of an enormous overhang of rock. The stone floor was swept
clean by the wind that traveled along the face of the cliff. Outside the semi-cavern were
mountains covered with pine and fir trees. The air was cool but would get warmer, since this was
morning of a July day in southern California. Or it should be, if his calculations were correct.
Since he was high on the face of a mountain, he could see very far into the southwest.
There was a great valley beyond the nearer smaller valleys, a valley which he supposed was one
near the Los Angeles area. It surprised and unnerved him, because it was not at all what he had
expected. It was covered with a thick gray poisonous-looking cloud, that gave the impression of
being composed of many many thousands of fumes, as if the floor of the valley below the cloud were
jammed with geysers boiling and bubbling and pouring out the noxious gases of internal Earth.
He had no idea of what had occurred on Earth since that night in 1946 when he had been
transmitted accidentally from this universe to that of Jadawin. Perhaps the great basins of the
Los Angeles area were filled with poison gas that some enemy nation had dropped. He could not
guess what enemy could do this, since both Germany and Japan had been wrecked and utterly defeated
when he left this world, and Russia was sorely wounded.
He shrugged. He would find out in time. The memory banks below the great fortress-palace
at the top of the only planet in the universe of the green sky had said that this "gate" opened
into a place in the mountains near a lake called Arrowhead.
The gate was a circle of indestructible metal buried a few inches below the rock of the
floor. Only a dimly stained ring of purple on the stone marked its presence.
Kickaha (born Paul Janus Finnegan) was six feet one inch in height, weighed one hundred
and ninety pounds, and was broad-shouldered, lean-waisted, and massively thighed. His hair was red-
bronze, his eyebrows were thick, dark, and arching, his eyes were leaf-green, his nose was
straight but short, his upper lip was long, and his chin was deeply cleft. He wore hiking clothes
and a bag on his back. In one hand he held the handle of a dark leather case which looked as if it
contained a musical instrument, perhaps a horn or trumpet.
His hair was shoulder-length. He had considered cutting it before he returned to Earth, so
he would not look strange. But the time had been short, and he had decided to wait until he got to
a barber shop. His cover story would be that he and Anana had been in the mountains so long he had
not had a chance to clip his hair.
The woman beside him was as beautiful as it was possible for a woman to be. She had long
dark wavy hair, a flawless white skin, dark-blue eyes, and a superb figure. She wore hiking garb:
boots, Levi's, a lumberman's checked shirt, and a cap with a long bill. She also carried a pack on
her back in which were shoes, a dress, undergarments, a small handbag, and several devices which
would have startled or shocked an Earth scientist. Her hair was done in the style of 1946 as
Kickaha remembered it. She wore no makeup nor needed it. Thousands of years ago, she had
permanently reddened her lips, as every female Lord had done.
He kissed the woman on the lips and said, "You've been in a number of worlds, Anana, but
I'll bet in none more weird than Earth."
"I've seen blue skies before," she said. "Wolff and Chryseis have a five-hour start on us.
The Beller has a two-hour start. And all have a big world in which to get lost."
He nodded and said, "There was no reason for Wolff and Chryseis to hang around here, since
the gate is one-way. They'll take off for the nearest two-way gate, which is in the Los Angeles
area, if the gate still exists. If it doesn't, then the closest ones will be in Kentucky or
Hawaii. So we know where they should be going."
He paused and wet his lips and then said, "As for the Beller, who knows? He could have
gone anywhere or he may still be around here. He's in an absolutely strange world, he doesn't know
anything about Earth, and he can't speak any of the languages."
"We don't know what he looks like, but we'll find him. I know the Bellers," she said.
"This one won't cache his bell and then run away to hide with the idea he'll come back later for
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it. A Beller cannot endure the idea of being very far away from his bell. He'll carry it around as
long as he can. And that will be our only means of identifying him."
"I know," Kickaha said. He was having trouble breathing, and his eyes were beginning to
swim. Suddenly, he was weeping.
Anana was alarmed for a minute, and then she said, "Cry! I did it when I went back to my
home world once. I thought I was dry forever, that tears were for mortals. But coming back home
after so long exposed my weakness."
Kickaha dried his tears and took his canteen from his belt, uncapped it and drank deeply.
"I love my world, the green-skied world," he said. "I don't like Earth; I don't remember
it with much affection. But I guess I had more love for it than I thought. I'll admit that, every
once in a while, I had some nostalgia, some faint longing to see it again, see the people I knew.
But. . ."
Below them, perhaps a thousand feet down, a two-lane macadam road curbed around the side
of the mountain and continued upward until it was lost around the other side. A car appeared on
the upgrade, sped below them, and then was lost with the road. Kickaha's eyes widened, and he
said, "I never saw a car like that before. It looked like a little bug. A beetle!"
A hawk swung into view and, riding the currents, passed before them not more than a
hundred yards.
Kickaha was delighted, "The first red-tail I've seen since I left Indiana!"
He stepped out onto the ledge, forgetting for a second, but a second only, his caution.
Then he jumped back in under the protection of the overhang. He motioned to Anana, and she went to
one end of the ledge and looked out while he did so at the other.
There was nobody below, as far as he could see, though the many trees could conceal
anybody who did not want to be seen. He went out a little further and looked upward then but could
not see past the overhang. The way down was not apparent at first, but investigation revealed
projections just below the right side of the ledge. These would have to do for a start, and, once
they began climbing down, other hand and footholds had to appear.
Kickaha eased himself backward over the ledge, feeling with his foot for a projection.
Then he pulled himself back up and lay down on the ledge and again scrutinized the road and the
forest a thousand feet below. A number of bluejays had started screaming somewhere below him; the
air acted as a funnel to siphon the faint cries to him.
He took a pair of small binoculars from his shirt pocket and adjusted three dials on their
surface. Then he removed an earphone and a thin wire with a male jack on one end and plugged the
jack into the receptacle on the side of the binoculars. He began to sweep the forest below and
eventually centered it on that spot where the jays were raising such a ruckus.
Through the device, the distant forest suddenly became close, and the faint noises were
loud. Something dark moved, and, after he readjusted the binoculars, he saw the face of a man.
More sweepings of the device and more adjusting enabled him to see parts of three other men. Each
was armed with a rifle with scope, and two had binoculars.
Kickaha gave the device to Anana so she could see for herself. He said, "As far as you
know, Red Orc is the only Lord on Earth?"
She put the glasses down and said, "Yes."
"He must know about these gates, then, and he's set up some sort of alarm device, so he
knows when they're activated. Maybe his men are stationed close, maybe far off. Maybe Wolff and
Chryseis and the Beller got away before his men could get here. Maybe not. In any case, they're
waiting for us."
They did not comment about the lack of a permanent trap at the gates or a permanent guard.
Red Orc, or whatever Lord was responsible for these men, would make a game out of the invasion of
his home territory by other Lords. It was deadly but nevertheless a game.
Kickaha went back to viewing the four beneath the trees. Presently, he said, "They've got
a walkie-talkie."
He heard a whirring sound above him. He rolled over to look up and saw a strange machine
that had just flown down over the mountain to his right.
He said, "An autogyro!" and then the machine was hidden by a spur of the mountain. He
jumped up and ran into the cavern with Anana behind him.
The chopping sound of a plane's rotors became a roar and then the machine was hovering
before the ledge. Kickaha became aware that the machine was not a true autogyro. As far as he
knew, a gyro could not stand still in the air, or, as this was doing, swing from side to side or
turn around one spot. The body of the craft was transparent; he could see the pilot and three men
inside, armed with rifles. He and Anana were trapped, they had no place to run or hide.
Undoubtedly, Orc's men had been sent to find out what weapons the intruders carried. Under these
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conditions, the intruders would have to use their weapons, unless they preferred to be captured.
They did riot so prefer. They spoke the activating code word, aimed the rings at the machine, and
spoke the final word.
The needle-thin golden rays spat once, delivering the full charges in the rings' tiny
powerpacks.
The fuselage split in two places, and the plane fell. Kickaha ran out and looked down
over the ledge in time to see the pieces strike the side of the mountain below. One section went
up in a white and red ball which fissioned into a dozen smaller fire globes. All the pieces
eventually fell not too far apart near the bottom and burned fiercely. The four men under the
trees were white-faced, and the man with the walkie-talkie spat words into the transmitter.
Kickaha tried to tighten the beam so he could pick them up, but the noise from the burning machine
interfered.
Kickaha was glad that he had struck the first blow, but his elation was darkened. He knew
that the Lord had deliberately sacrificed the men in the gyro in order to find out how dangerous
his opponents were. Kickaha would have preferred to have gotten away undetected. Moreover, getting
down the mountainside would be impossible until night fell. In the meantime, the Lord would attack
again.
He and Anana recharged their rings with the tiny powerpacks. He kept a watch on the men
below while she scanned the sides of the mountain. Presently, a red convertible appeared on the
left, going down the mountain road. A man and a woman sat in it. The car stopped near the flaming
wreckage and the two got out to investigate. They stood around talking and then they got back into
the car and sped off.
Kickaha grinned. No doubt they were going to notify the authorities.
That meant that the four men would be powerless to attack. On the other hand, the
authorities might climb up here and find him and Anana. He could claim that they were just hikers,
and the authorities could not hold them for long. But just to be in custody for a while would
enable the Lord to seize them the moment they were released. Also, he and Anana would have a hard
time identifying themselves, and it was possible that the authorities might hold them until they
could be identified.
They would have no record of Anana, of course, but if they tracked down his fingerprints,
they would find something difficult to explain. They would discover that he was Paul Janus
Finnegan, born in 1918 near Terre Haute, Indiana, that he had served in a tank corps of the Eighth
Army during World War II, and that he had mysteriously disappeared in 1946 from his apartment in a
building in Bloomington while he was attending the University of Indiana, and that he had not been
seen since.
He could always claim amnesia, of course, but how would he explain that he was fifty-two
years old chronologically yet only twenty-five years old physiologically? And how would he explain
the origin of the peculiar devices in his backpack?
He cursed softly in Tishquetmoac, in Half-Horse Lakotah, in the Middle High German of
Dracheland, in the language of the Lords, and in English. And then he switched his thinking into
English, because he had half-forgotten that language and had to get accustomed to its use. If
those four men stuck there until the authorities showed up ...
But the four were not staying. After a long conversation, and obvious receipt of orders
from the walkie-talkie, they left. They climbed up onto the road, and within a minute a car
appeared from the right. It stopped, and the four got in and drove off.
Kickaha considered that this might be a feint to get him and Anana to climb down the
mountain. Then another gyro would catch them on the mountainside, or the men would come back. Or
both.
But if he waited until the police showed up, he could not come down until nightfall. Orc's
men would be waiting down there, and they might have some of the Lord's advanced weapons to use,
because they would not fear to use them at night and in this remote area.
"Come on," he said to Anana in English. "We're going down now. If the police see us, we'll
tell them we're just hitchhikers. You leave the talking to me; I'll tell them you're Finnish and
don't speak English yet. Let's hope there'll be no Finns among them."
"What?" Anana said. She had spent three and a half years on Earth in the 1880's and had
learned some English and more French but had forgotten the little she had known.
Kickaha repeated slowly.
"It's your world," she said in English. "You're the boss."
He grinned at that, because very few female Lords ever admitted there was any situation in
which the male was their master. He let himself down again over the ledge. He was beginning to
sweat. The sun was coming over the mountain now and shining fully on them, but this did not
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account for his perspiration. He was sweating out the possible reappearance of the Lord's men.
He and Anana had gotten about one-third of the way down when the first police car
appeared. It was black and white and had a big star on the side. Two men got out. Their uniforms
looked like those of state police, as he remembered those of the Midwest.
A few minutes later, another patrol car and an ambulance appeared. Then two more cars
stopped. After a while, there were ten cars.
Kickaha found a path that was sometimes precarious but led at an angle to the right along
the slope. He and Anana could keep hidden from the people below part of the time. If they should
be seen, they would not have to stop. The police could come after them, but they would be so far
behind that their pursuit would be hopeless.
Or so it seemed until another gyro appeared. This one swept back and forth, apparently
looking for bodies or survivors. Kickaha and Anana hid behind a large boulder until the craft
landed near the road. Then they continued their sidewise descent of the mountain.
When they reached the road, they drank some water and ate some of the concentrated food
they had brought from the other world. Kickaha told her that they would walk along the road, going
downward. He also reminded her that Red Orc's men would be cruising up and down the road looking
for them.
"Then why don't we hide out until nightfall?" she said. "Because in the daylight I can
spot a car that definitely won't be Orc's. I won't mind being picked up by one of them. But if
Orc's men show up and try anything, we have our rays and we can be on guard. At night, you won't
know who's stopping to pick you up. We could avoid the road altogether and hike alongside it in
the woods, but that's slow going. I don't want Wolff or the Beller to get too far ahead."
"How do we know they didn't both go the other way?" she said. "Or that Red Orc didn't pick
them up?"
"We don't," he said. "But I'm betting that this is the way to Los Angeles. It's westward,
and it's downhill. Wolff would know this, and the instinct of the Beller would be to go down, I
would think. I could be wrong. But I can't stand here forever trying to make up my mind what
happened. Let's go."
They started off. The air was sweet and clean; birds sang; a squirrel ran onto the branch
of a tall and half-dead pine and watched them with its bright eyes. There were a number of dead or
dying pines. Evidently, some plant disease had struck them. The only signs of human beings were
the skeletal power transmission towers and aluminum cables going up the side of a mountain.
Kickaha explained to Anana what they were; he was going to be doing much explaining from now on.
He did not mind. It gave her the opportunity to learn English and him the opportunity to relearn
it.
A car passed them from behind. On hearing it, Kickaha and Anana withdrew from the side of
the road, ready to shoot their ray rings or to leap down the slope of the mountain if they had to.
He gestured with his thumb at the car, which held a man, woman, and two children. The car did not
even slow down. Then a big truck pulling a trailer passed them. The driver looked as if he might
be going to stop but he kept on going.
Anana said, "These vehicles! So primitive! So noisy! And they stink!"
"Yes, but we do have atomic power," Kickaha said. "At least, we had atomic bombs. America
did anyway. I thought that by now they'd have atomic-powered cars. They've had a whole generation
to develop them."
A cream-colored station wagon with a man and woman and two teenagers passed them. Kickaha
stared after the boy. He had hair as long as Kickaha's and considerably less disciplined. The girl
had long yellow hair that fell smoothly over her shoulders, and her face was thickly made-up. Like
a whore's, he thought. Were those really green eyelids?
The parents, who looked about fifty, seemed normal. Except that she had a hairdo that was
definitely not around in 1946. And her makeup had been heavy, too, although not nearly as thick as
the girl's.
None of the cars that he had seen were identifiable. Some of them had a GM emblem, but
that was the only familiar thing. This was to be expected, of course. But he was startled when the
next car to pass was the beetle he had seen when he first looked down from the ledge. Or at least
it looked enough like it to be the same. VW? What did that stand for?
He had expected many changes, some of which would not be easy to understand. He could
think of no reason why such an ugly cramped car as the VW would be accepted, although he did
remember the little Willys of his adolescence. He shrugged. It would take too much energy and time
to figure out the reasons for everything he saw. If he were to survive, he would have to
concentrate on the immediate problem: getting away from Red Orc's men. If they were Red Orc's.
He and Anana walked swiftly in a loose-jointed gait. She was beginning to relax and to
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take an interest in the beauty of their surroundings. She smiled and squeezed his hand once and
said, "I love you." He kissed her on the cheek and said, "I love you, too." She was beginning to
sound and act like an Earthwoman, instead of the superaristocratic Lord.
He heard a car coming around the bend a quarter of a mile away and glanced back at it. It
was a black and white state police car with two golden-helmeted men. He looked straight ahead but
out of the side of his mouth said, "If this car stops, act easy. It's the police. Let me handle
things. If I hold up two fingers, run and jump down the side of the mountain. No! On second
thought . . . listen, we'll go with them. They can take us into town, or near it, and then we'll
stun them with the rings. Got it?"
The car, however, shot by without even slowing. Kickaha breathed relief and said, "We
don't look as suspicious as I feel."
They walked on down the road. As they came onto a half-mile stretch, they heard a faint
roar behind them. The sound became louder, and then Kickaha grinned with pleasure. "Motorcycles,"
he said. "Lots of them."
The roaring became very loud. They turned, and saw about twenty big black cycles race like
a black cloud around the corner of the mountain. Kickaha was amazed. He had never seen men or
women dressed like these. Several of them aroused a reflex he had thought dead since peace was
declared in 1945. His hand flew to the handle of the knife in bis belt sheath, and he looked for a
ditch into which to dive.
Three of the cyclists wore German coalscuttle helmets with big black swastikas painted on
the gray metal. They also wore Iron Crosses or metal swastikas on chains around their necks.
All wore dark glasses, and these, coupled with the men's beards or handlebar moustaches
and sideburns, and the women's heavy makeup, made their faces seem insectile. Their clothing was
dark, although a few men wore duty once-white T-shirts. Most wore calf-length boots. A woman
sported a kepi and a dragoon's bright-red, yellow-piped jacket. Their black leather jackets and T-
shirts bore skulls and crossbones that looked like phalluses, and the legend: LUCIFER'S LOUTS.
The cavalcade went roaring by, some gunning then: motors or waving at the two and several
wove back and forth across the road, leaning far over to both sides with their arms folded.
Kickaha grinned appreciatively at that; he had owned and loved a motorcycle when he was going to
high school in Terre Haute.
Anana, however, wrinkled up her nose. "The stink of fuel is bad enough," she said. "But
did you smell them? They haven't bathed for weeks. Or months."
"The Lord of this world has been very lax," Kickaha said. He referred to the sanitary
habits of the human inhabitants of the pocket universes which the other Lords ruled. Although the
Lords were often very cruel with their human property, they insisted on cleanliness and beauty.
They had established laws and religious precepts which saw to it that cleanliness was part of the
base of every culture.
But there were exceptions. Some Lords had allowed their human societies to degenerate into
dirt-indifference.
Anana had explained that the Lord of Earth was unique. Red Orc ruled in strictest secrecy
and anonymity, although he had not always done so. In the early days, in man's dawn, he had often
acted as a god. But he had abandoned that role and gone into hiding-as it were. He had let things
go as they would. This accounted for the past, present, and doubtless future mess in which
Earthlings were mired.
Kickaha had had little time to learn much about Red Orc, because he had not even known of
his existence until a few minutes before he and Anana stepped through the gates into this
universe. "They all looked so ugly," Anana said.
"I told you man had gone to seed here," he said. "There has been no selective breeding,
either by a Lord or by humans themselves."
Then they heard the muted roar of the cycles again, and in a minute they saw eight coming
back up the road. These held only men.
The cycles passed them, slowed, turned, and came up behind them. Kickaha and Anana
continued walking. Three cycles zoomed by them, cutting in so close that he could have knocked
them over as they went by. He was beginning to wonder if he should not have done so and therefore
cut down the odds immediately. It seemed obvious that they were going to be harassed, if not
worse.
Some of the men whistled at Anana and called out invitations, or wishes, in various
obscene terms. Anana did not understand the words but she understood the tones and the gestures
and grins that went with them. She scowled and made a gesture peculiar to the Lords. Despite their
unfamiliarity with it, the cyclists understood. One almost fell off his cycle laughing. Others,
however, bared their teeth in half-grins, half-snarls.
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Kickaha stopped and faced them. They pulled up around the pair in an enfolding crescent
and turned off their motors.
"OK," Kickaha said. "What do you want?"
A big-paunched, thick-necked youth with thick coarse black hair spilling out of the V of
his shirt and wearing a goatee and an Afrika Korps hat, spoke up. "Well, now, Red, if we was
Satan's Slaves, we'd want you. But we ain't fags, so we'll take your la belle dame con, voila."
"Man, that chick is the most!" said a tall skinny boy with acne scars, big Adam's apple,
and a gold ring in a pierced ear. His long lank black hair hung down past his shoulders and fell
over his eyes.
"The grooviest!" a bushy-bearded gap-toothed scar-faced man said.
Kickaha knew when to keep silent and when to talk, but he sometimes had a hard time doing
what he knew was best. He had no time or inclination for brawls now; his business was serious and
important. In fact, it was vital. If the Beller got loose and adapted to Earth well enough to make
other bells, he and his kind would literally take over Earth. The Beller was no science-fiction
monster; he existed, and if he were not killed, goodbye Earth! Or goodbye mankind! The bodies
would survive but the brains would be emptied and alien minds would fill them!
It was unfortunate that salvation could not discriminate. If others were saved, then these
would be too.
At the moment, it looked as if there could be some doubt about Kickaha being able to save
even himself, let alone the world. The eight had left their cycles and were approaching with
various weapons. Three had long chains; two, iron pipes; one, a switchblade knife; one, brass
knuckles; another, an ice pick.
"I suppose you think you're going to attack her in broad daylight and with the cops so
close?" he said.
The youth with the Afrika Korps cap said, "Man, we wouldn't bother you, ordinarily. But
when I saw that chick, it was too much! What a doll! I ain't never seen a chick could wipe her.
Too much! We gotta have her! You dig?"
Kickaha did not understand what this last meant but it did not matter. They were brutal
men who meant to have what they wanted. "You better be prepared to die," Kickaha said.
They looked surprised. The Afrika Korps youth said, "You got a lotta class, Red, I'll give
you that. Listen, we could stomp the guts outta you and enjoy it, really dig it, but I admire your
style, friend. Let us have the chick, and we return her in an hour or so."
Then Afrika Korps grinned and said, " 'Course, she may not be in the same condition she is
now, but what the hell! Nobody's perfect!"
Kickaha spoke to Anana in the language of the Lords.
"If we get a chance, we'll make off on one of these cycles. It'll get us to Los Angeles."
"Hey, what kinda gook talk is that?" Afrika Korps said. He gestured at the men with the
chains, who, grinning, stepped in front of the others. They drew their arms back to lash out with
the chains and Kickaha and Anana sprayed the beams from their rings, which were set at "stun"
power. The three dropped their chains, grabbed their middles, and bent over. The rays caught them
on the tops of their heads then, and they fell forward. Their faces were red with suddenly broken
blood vessels. When they recovered, they would be dizzy and sick for days, and their stomachs
would be sore and red with ruptured veins and arteries.
The others became motionless and went white with shock. Kickaha snatched the knife out of
his sheath and threw it at the shoulder of Afrika Korps. Afrika Korps screamed and dropped the ice
pick. Anana knocked him out with her ray; Kickaha sprayed the remaining men.
Fortunately, no cars came by in the next few minutes. The two dragged the groaning half-
conscious men to the edge of the road and pushed them over. They rolled about twenty feet and came
to rest on a shelf of rock.
The cycles, except for one, were then pushed over the edge at a place where there was
nothing to stop them. They leaped and rolled down the steep incline, turned over and over, came
apart, and some burst into flames.
Kickaha regretted this, since he did not want the smoke to attract anybody.
Anana had been told what the group had planned for her. She climbed down the slope to the
piled-up bodies. She set the ring at the lowest burn power and burned off the pants, and much
outer skin, of every male. They would not forget Anana for a long time. And if they cursed her in
aftertimes, they should have blessed Kickaha. He kept her from killing them.
Kickaha took the wallet of Afrika Korps. The driver's license gave his name as Alfred
Roger Goodrich. His photograph did not look at all like Kickaha, which could not be helped. Among
other things it contained forty dollars.
He instructed Anana in how to ride behind him and what to expect when they were on the
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road. Within a minute, they were out on the highway, heading toward Los Angeles. The roar of the
engine did not resurrect the happy memories of his cycling days in Indiana. The road disturbed him
and the reek of gasoline and oil displeased him. He had been in a quiet and sweet-aired world too
long.
Anana, clinging to his waist, was silent for a long while. He glanced back once to see her
black hair flying. Her lids were half-shut behind the sunglasses she had taken from one of the
Louts. The shadows made them impenetrable. Later, she shouted something at him but the wind and
the engine noise flicked her words away.
Kickaha tested the cycle out and determined that a number of items had been cut out by the
owner, mostly to reduce weight. For one thing, the front brakes had been taken off.
Once he knew what the strengths and weaknesses of the vehicle were, he drove along with
his eyes inspecting the road ahead but his thoughts inclined to be elsewhere.
He had come on a long and fantastic road from that campus of the University of Indiana to
this road in the mountains of southern California. When he was with the Eighth Army in Germany, he
had found that crescent of hard silvery metal in the ruins of a local museum. He took it back with
him to Bloomington, and there, one night, a man by the name of Vannax had appeared and offered him
a fantastic sum for the crescent. He had refused the money. Later that night he had awakened to
find Vannax had broken into his apartment. Vannax was in the act of placing another crescent of
metal by his to form a circle. Kickaha had attacked Vannax and accidentally stepped within the
circle. The next he knew, he was transported to a very strange place.
The two crescents had formed a gate, a device of the Lords which permitted a sort of
teleportation from one universe to another. Kickaha had been transmitted into an artificial
universe, a pocket universe, created by a Lord named Jadawin. But Jadawin was no longer in his
universe; he had been forced out of it by another Lord, dispossessed and cast into Earth. Jadawin
had lost his memory. He became Robert Wolff.
The stories of Wolff (Jadawin) and Kickaha (Finnegan) were long and involved. Wolff was
helped back into his universe by Kickaha, and, after a series of adventures, Wolff regained his
memory. He also regained his Lordship of the peculiar universe he had constructed, and he settled
down with his lover, Chryseis, to rule in the palace on top of the Tower-of-Babel-like planet
which hung in the middle of a universe whose "walls" contained a volume less than that within the
solar system of Earth.
Recently, Wolff and Chryseis had mysteriously disappeared, probably because of the
machinations of some Lord of another universe. Kickaha had run into Anana, who, with two other
Lords, was fleeing from the Black Bellers. The Bellers had originally been devices created in the
biolabs of the Lords and intended for housing of the minds of the Lords during mind transference
from one body to another. But the bell-shaped and indestructible machines had developed into
entities with their own intelligence. These had succeeded in transferring their minds into the
bodies of Lords and then began to wage a secret war on the Lords. They were found out, and a long
and savage struggle began, with all the Bellers supposedly captured and imprisoned in a specially
made universe. However, fifty-one had been overlooked, and these, after ten thousand years of
dormancy, had gotten into human bodies again and were once more loose.
Kickaha had directly or indirectly killed all but one. This one, its mind in the body of a
man called Thabuuz, had gated through to Earth. Wolff and Chryseis had returned to their palace
just in time to be attacked by the Bellers and had escaped through the gate which Thabuuz later
took.
Now Kickaha and Anana were searching for Wolff and Chryseis. And they were also determined
to hunt down and kill the last of the Black Bellers. If Thabuuz succeeded in eluding them, he
would, in time, build more of the bells and with these begin a secret war against the humans of
Earth, and later, invade the private universes of the Lords and discharge their minds and occupy
their bodies also. The Lords had never forgotten the Black Bellers, and every one still wore a
ring which could detect the metal bells of their ancient enemies and transmit a warning to a tiny
circuit-board and alarm in the brain of every Lord.
The peoples of Earth knew nothing of the Bellers. They knew nothing of the Lords. Kickaha
was the only Earthling who had ever become aware of the existence of the Lords and their pocket
universes.
The peoples of Earth would be wide open to being taken over, one by one, their minds
discharged by the antennas of the bells and the minds of the Bellers possessing the brains. The
warfare would be so insidious that only through accident would the humans even know that they were
being attacked.
The Black Beller Thabuuz had to be found and killed.
In the meantime, the Lord of Earth, the Lord called Red Orc, had learned that five people
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had gated through into his domain. He would not know that one of them was the Black Beller. He
would be trying to capture all five. And Red Orc could not be notified that a Black Beller was
loose on Earth because Red Orc could not be found. Neither Anana nor Kickaha knew where he lived.
Indeed, until a few hours ago, Kickaha had not known that Earth had a Lord.
In fifteen minutes, they had come down off the slope onto a plateau. The little village at
the crossroads was a pleasant place, though highly commercialized. It was clean and bright with
many white houses and buildings. However, as they passed through the main street, they passed a
big hamburger stand. And there were the rest of Lucifer's Louts lounging by the picnic tables,
eating hamburgers and drinking cokes or beer. They looked up on hearing the familiar Harley-
Davidson and then, seeing the two, did a double take. One jumped onto his cycle and kicked over
the motor. He was a tall frowzy-haired long-moustachioed youth wearing a Confederate officer's
cavalry hat, white silk shirt with frills at the neck and wrists, tight black shiny pants with red
seams, and fur-topped boots.
The others quickly followed him. Kickaha did not think they would be going to the police;
there was something about them which indicated that their relations with the police were not
friendly. They would take vengeance in their own dirty hands. However, it was not likely that they
would do anything while still in town. Kickaha accelerated to top speed.
When they had gone around a curve which took them out of sight of the village, Anana half-
turned. She waited until the leader was only ten feet behind her. He was bent over the bars and
grinning savagely. Evidently he expected to pass them and either force them to stop or to knock
them over. Behind him, side by side so that two rode in the other lane, were five cycles with
individual riders. The engines burdened down with couples were some twenty yards behind.
Kickaha glanced back and yelled at Anana. She released the ray just long enough to cut the
front wheel of the lead cycle in half. Its front dropped, and the rider shot over the bars, his
mouth open in a yell no one could hear. He hit the macadam and slid for a long way on his face and
body. The five cycles behind him tried to avoid the first, which lay in their path. They split
like a school of fish, but Anana cut the wheels of the two in the lead and all three piled up
while two skidded on their sides off the road. The other cycles slowed down in tune to avoid
hitting the fallen engines and drivers.
Kickaha grinned and shouted, "Good show, Anana!" And then his grin fell off and he cursed.
Around the corner of the road, now a half-mile away, a black and white car with red lights on top
had appeared. Any hopes that he had that it would stop to investigate the accident quickly faded.
The car swung to the shoulder to avoid the fallen vehicles and riders and then twisted back onto
the road and took off after Kickaha, its siren whooping, its red lights flashing.
The car was about fifty yards away when Anana swept the ray down the road and across the
front tires. She snapped the ray off so quickly that the wheels were probably only disintegrated a
little on the rims, but the tires were cut in two. The car dropped a little but kept going on,
though it decreased speed so suddenly that the two policemen were thrown violently forward. The
siren died; the lights quit flashing; the car shook to a halt. And Kickaha and Anana sped around a
curve and saw the policemen no more.
"If this keeps up, we're going to be out of charges!" Kickaha said. "Hell, I wanted to
save them for extreme emergencies! I didn't think we'd be having so much trouble so soon! And
we've just started!"
They continued for five miles and then he saw another police car coming toward them. It
went down a dip and was lost for a minute. He shouted, "Hang on!" and swung off the road, bouncing
across a slight depression toward a wide field that grew more rocks than grass. His goal was a
clump of trees about a hundred yards away, and he almost made it before the police came into view.
Anana, hanging on, yelled that the police car was coming across the field after them. Kickaha
slowed the cycle. Anana ran the ray down the field in front of the advancing car. Burning dirt
flew up in dust along a furrow and then the tires exploded and the front of the radiator of the
car gushed water and steam.
Kickaha took the cycle back toward the road at an angle away from the car. Two policemen
jumped out and, steadying their pistols, fired. The chances of hitting the riders or the machine
at that distance were poor, but a bullet did penetrate the rear tire. There was a bang; the cycle
began fishtailing. Kickaha cut the motor, and they coasted to a stop. The policemen began running
toward them.
"Hell, I don't want to kill them! "Kickaha said. "But. . ."
The policemen were big and blubbery-looking and looked as if they might be between forty
and fifty years old. Kickaha and Anana were wearing packs of about thirty pounds, but both were
physically about twenty-five years old.
"We'll outrun them," he said, and they fled together toward the road. The two men fired
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their guns and shouted but they were slowing down swiftly and soon they were trotting. A half-mile
later, they were standing together watching the two dwindle.
Kickaha, grinning, circled back toward the car. He looked back once and saw that the two
policemen realized that he had led them astray. They were running again but not too swiftly.
Their legs and arms were pumping at first but soon the motions became less energetic, and then
both were walking toward him.
Kickaha opened the door to the car, tore off the microphone of the transceiver, reached
under the dashboard and tore loose all the wires connected to the radio. By that time, Anana had
caught up with him. The keys were still in the ignition lock, and the wheels themselves had not
been cut into deeply. He told Anana to jump in, and he got behind the driver's wheel and started
the motor. The cops speeded up then and began firing again, but the car pulled away from them and
bumped and shook across the field, accelerating all the time. One bullet pierced and starred a
rear window, and then the car was bumping down the road.
After two miles of the grinding noise and piston-like movement, Kickaha decided to call it
quits. He drove the car to the side of the road, got out, threw the ignition keys into the weeds,
and started to hike again. They had walked perhaps fifty yards when they turned at the noise of a
vehicle. A bus shot by them. It was painted all over with swirls, dots, squares, circles, and
explosions of many bright colors. In bright yellow and orange-trimmed letters was a title along
the front and the sides of the bus: THE GNOME KING AND HIS BAD EGGS. Above the title were painted
glowing red and yellow quarter notes, bars, small guitars and drums.
For a moment, looking at the faces against the windows, he thought that the bus had picked
up Lucifer's Louts. There were long hairs, fuzzy hairs, moustaches, beards, and the heavy makeup
and long straight lank hair of the girls.
But the faces were different; they did look wild but not brutish or savage.
The bus slowed down with a squealing of brakes. It stopped, a door swung open, and a youth
with a beard and enormous spectacles leaned out and waved at them. They ran to the bus and boarded
with the accompaniment of much laughter and the strumming of guitars.
The bus, driven by a youth who looked like Buffalo Bill, started up. Kickaha looked around
into the grinning faces of six boys and three girls. Three older men sat at the rear of the bus
and played cards on a small collapsible table. They looked up and nodded and then went back to
their game. Part of the bus was enclosed; there were, he later found out, a toilet and washroom
and two small dressing rooms. Guitars, drums, xylophone, saxophone, flute, and harp, were stored
on seats or on the racks above the seats.
Two girls wore skirts that just barely covered their buttocks and dark gray stockings,
bright frilly blouses, many varicolored beads, and heavy makeup: green or silver eyelids,
artificial eyelashes, panda-like rings around the eyes, and green (!) and pale mauve (!) lips. The
third girl had no makeup at all. Long straight black hair fell to her waist and she wore a tight
sleeveless green and red striped sweater with a deep cleavage, tight Levi's, and sandals. Several
of the boys wore bellbottom trousers, very frilly shirts, and all had long hair.
The Gnome King was a very tall, tubercular looking youth with very curly hair, handlebar
moustaches, and enormous spectacles perched on the end of his big nose. He also wore an earring.
He introduced himself as Lou Baum (born Goldbaum).
Kickaha gave his name as Paul Finnegan and Anana's as Ann Finnegan. She was his wife, he
told Baum, and had only recently come from Finnish Lapland. He gave this pedigree because he did
not think that it was likely they would run into anyone who could speak Laplander.
"From the Land of the Reindeer?" Baum said. "She's a dear, all right." He whistled and
kissed his fingertips and flicked them at Anana. "Groovy, me boy! Too much! Say, either of you
play an instrument?" He looked at the case Kickaha was carrying.
Kickaha said that they did not. He did not care to explain that he had once played the
flute but not since 1945 or that he had played an instrument like a panpipe when he lived with the
Bear Folk on the Amerindian level of . Nor did he think it wise to explain that Anana played a
host of instruments, some of which were similar to Earth instruments and some of which were
definitely not.
"I'm using this instrument case as a suitcase," Kickaha said. "We've been on the road for
some time since leaving Europe. We just spent a month in the mountains, and now we've decided to
visit L.A. We've never been there."
"Then you got no place to stay," Baum said. He talked to Kickaha but stared at Anana. His
eyes glistened, and his hands kept moving with gestures that seemed to be reshaping Anana out of
the air.
"Can she sing?" he said suddenly.
"Not in English," Kickaha replied.
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The girl in Levi's stood up and said, "Come on, Lou. You aren't going to get anywhere with
that chick. Her boy friend'll kill you if you lay a hand on her. Or else she will. That chick can
do it, you know."
Lou seemed to be shaken. He came very close and peered into Kickaha's eyes as if he were
looking through a microscope. Kickaha smelled a strange acrid odor on his breath. A moment later,
he thought he knew what it was. The citizens of the city of Talanac on the Amerind level, carved
out of a mountain of jade, smoked a narcotic tobacco which left the same odor on their breath.
Kickaha did not know, of course, since he had had no experience on Earth, but he had always
suspected that the tobacco was marijuana, and that the Talanacs, descendants of the ancient Olmecs
of Mexico, had brought it with them when they had crossed through the gates provided by Wolff.
"You wouldn't put me on?" Lou said to the girl, Moo-Moo Nanssen, after he had backed away
from Kickaha's leaf-green eyes.
"There's something very strange about them," Moo-Moo said. "Very attractive, very virile,
and very frightening. Alien. Real alien."
Kickaha felt the back of his scalp chill. Anana, moving closer to him, whispered in the
language of the Lords, "I don't know what she's saying, but I don't like it. That girl has a gift
of seeing things; she is Zundra."
Zundra had no exact or near-exact translation into English. It meant a combination of
psychologist, clairvoyant, and witch, with a strain of madness.
Lou Baum shook his head, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and then removed and polished
his glasses. His weak, pale-blue eyes blinked.
"The chick is psychic," he said. "Weird. But in the groove. She knows what she's talking
about."
"I get vibrations," Moo-Moo said. "They never fail me. I can read character like that!"
She snapped her fingers loudly. "But there's something about you two, especially her, I don't get.
Maybe like you two ain't from this world, you know. Like you're Martians ... or something."
A short stocky youth with blond hair and an acne-scarred face, introduced only as Wipe-
Out, looked up from his seat, where he was tuning a guitar.
"Finnegan's no Martian," he said, grinning. "He's got a flat Midwestern accent like he
came from Indiana, Illinois, or Iowa. A hoosier, I'd guess. Right?"
"I'm a hoosier," Kickaha said.
"Close your eyes, you good people," Wipe-Out said loudly. "Listen to him! Speak again,
Finnegan! If his voice isn't a dead ringer for Gary Cooper's, I'll eat the inedible!"
Kickaha said something for their benefit, and the others laughed and said, "Gary Cooper!
Did you ever?"
That seemed to shatter the crystal tension that Moo-Moo's words had built. Moo-Moo smiled
and sat down again, but her dark eyes flicked glances again and again at the two strangers, and
Kickaha knew that she was not satisfied. Lou Baum sat down by Moo-Moo. His Adam's apple worked as
if it were the plunger on a pump. His face was set in a heavy, almost stupefied expression, but
Kickaha could tell that he was still very curious. He was also afraid.
Apparently, Baum believed in his girl friend's reputation as a psychic. He was also
probably a little afraid of her.
Kickaha did not care. Her analysis of the strangers may have been nothing but a maneuver
to scare Baum from Anana.
The important thing was to get to Los Angeles as swiftly as possible, with as little
chance of being detected by Orc's men as possible. This bus was a lucky thing for him, and as soon
as they reached a suitable jumping-off place in the metropolitan area, they would jump. And hail
and farewell to the Gnome King and His Bad Eggs.
He inspected the rest of the bus. The three older men playing cards looked up at him but
said nothing. He felt a little repulsed by their bald heads and gray hair, their thickening and
sagging features, red-veined eyes, wrinkles, dewlaps, and big bellies. He had not seen more than
four old people in the twenty-four years he had lived in the universe of Jadawin. Humans lived to
be a thousand there if they could avoid accident or homicide, and did not age until the last
hundred years. Very few survived that long, however. Thus, Kickaha had forgotten about old men and
women. He felt repelled, though not as much as Anana. She had grown up in a world which contained
no physically aged people, and though she was now ten thousand years old, she had lived in no
universes which contained unhandsome humans. The Lords were an aesthetic people and so they had
weeded out the unbeautiful among their chattels and given the survivors the chance for a long long
youth.
Baum walked down the aisle and said, "Looking for something?"
"I'm just curious," Kickaha said. "Is there any way out other than the door in front?"
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