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 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.
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 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 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 time 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!"