Kickaha wanted to protest violently. He felt outraged. But he forced himself to say calmly, “How do you explain that?”
“The space-matter outside the orbit of Pluto is a simulacrum. A tiny simulacrum. Relatively tiny, that is.”
“The effects of the light from the stars, the nebulas, and so forth? The red shift? The speed of light? All that?”
“There’s a warping factor which gives all the necessary illusions.”
An extra-Plutonian astronomy, all cosmogony, all cosmology, was false.
“But why did the Lords feel it necessary to set up this simulacrum of an infinite ever-expanding universe with its trillions of heavenly bodies? Why didn’t they just leave the sky blank except for the moon and the planets? Why this utterly cruel deception? Or need I ask? I had forgotten for the moment that the Lords are cruel.”
She patted his hand, looked up into his eyes, and said, “The Lords are not the only cruel ones. You forget that I told you that this universe was an exact copy of ours. I meant exact. From the center, that is, the sun, to the outer walls of this universe, your world is a duplicate of ours. That includes the simulacrum of extra-solar-system space.”
He stopped and said, “You mean …? The native world of the Lords was an artificial universe, too?”
“Yes. After three ships had been sent out past our outermost planet, to the nearest star, only four-point-three light-years away—we thought—a fourth ship was sent. But this slowed down when it came near the area where the others had disappeared in a burst of light. It was not destroyed, but it could progress no further than the first three. It was repelled by a force field. Or was turned away by the structure of the space-matter continuum at that point.
“After some study, we reluctantly came to the realization that there were no stars or outer space. Not as we had thought of them.
“This revelation was not accepted by many people. In fact, the impact of this discovery was so great that our civilization was in a near-psychotic state for a long while.
“Some historians have maintained that it was the discovery that we were in an artificial, comparatively finite, universe that spurred us—stung us—into searching for means of making our own synthetic universes. Because, if we were ourselves the product of a people who made our universe, and, therefore, made us, then we, too, could make our worlds. And so …”
“Then Earth’s world is not even secondhand!” Kickaha said. “It’s thirdhand! But who could have made your world? Who are the Lords of the Lords?”
“So far, we do not know,” she said. “We have found no trace of them or their native worlds or any other artificial worlds they might have made. They exist on a plane of polarity that was beyond us then, and, as far as I know, will always be beyond us.”
Kickaha thought that this discovery should have humbled the Lords. Perhaps, in the beginning, it did. But they had recovered and gone on to their own making of cosmoses and their solipsist way of life.
And in their search for immortality, they had made the Bellers, those Frankenstein’s monsters, and then, after a long war, had conquered the Bellers and disposed of the menace forever—they had thought. But now there was a Beller loose and … No, he was not loose. He was in the hands of Red Orc, who surely would see to it that the Beller died and his bell was buried deep somewhere, perhaps at the bottom of the Pacific.
“I’ll swallow what you told me,” he said, “though I’m choking. But what about the people of Earth? Where did they come from?”
“Your ancestors of fifteen thousand years ago were made in the biolabs of the Lords. One set was made for this Earth and another set, exact duplicates, for the second Earth. Red Orc made two universes which were alike, and he put down on the face of each Earth the same peoples. Exactly the same in every detail.
“Orc set down in various places the infants, the Caucasoids, the Negroids and Negritos, the Mongolians, Amerinds, and Australoids. These were infants who were raised by Lords to be Stone Age peoples. Each group was taught a language, which, by the way, were artificial languages. They were also taught how to make stone and wooden tools, how to hunt, what rules of behavior to adopt, and so forth. And then the Lords disappeared. Most of them returned to the home universe, where they would make plans for building their own universes. Some stayed on the two Earths to see but not be seen. Eventually, all of these were killed or run out of the two universes by Red Orc, but that was a thousand years later.”
“Wait a minute,” Kickaha said. “I never thought about it, just took it for granted, I guess. But I thought all Lords were Caucasians.”
“That is just because it so happened that you only met Caucasoid Lords,” she said. “How many have you met, by the way?”
He grinned and said, “Six.”
“I would guess that there are about a thousand left, and of these about a third are Negroid and a third Mongolian, to use Terrestrial terms. On our world our equivalent of Australoids became extinct and our equivalent of Polynesians and Amerinds became absorbed by the Mongolians and Caucasoids.”
“That other Earth universe?” he said. “Have the peoples there developed on lines similar to ours? Or have they deviated considerably?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” she said. “Only Red Orc knows.”
He had many questions, including why there happened to be a number of gates on Earth over which Red Orc had no control. It occurred to him that these might be gates left over from the old days when many Lords were on Earth.
There was no time to ask more questions. They were crossing San Vicente at Wilshire now, and Stats was only a few dozen yards away. It was a low brick and stone building with a big plate glass window in front. His heart was beating fast. The prospect of seeing Wolff and Chryseis again made him happier than he had been for a long time. Nevertheless, he did not lose his wariness.
“We’ll walk right on by the first time,” he said. “Let’s case it.”
They were opposite the restaurant. There were about a dozen people eating in it, two waitresses, and a woman at the cash register. Two uniformed policemen were in a booth; their black and white car was in the plaza parking lot west of the building. Neither Wolff nor Chryseis was there.
It was still not quite nine o’clock, however, and Wolff might be approaching cautiously.
They halted before the display window of a dress shop. From their vantage point, they could observe anybody entering or leaving the restaurant. Two customers got up and walked out. The policemen showed no signs of leaving. A car drove into the plaza, pulled into a slot, and turned its lights out. A man and a woman, both white-haired, got out and went in to the restaurant. The man was too short and skinny to be Wolff, and the woman was too tall and bulky to be Chryseis.
A half hour passed. More customers arrived and more left. None of them could be his friends. At a quarter to ten, the two policemen left.
Anana said, “Could we go inside now? I’m so hungry, my stomach is eating itself.”
“I don’t like the smell of this,” he said. “Nothing looks wrong, except Wolff not being here yet. We’ll wait a while, give him a chance to show. But we’re not going inside that place. It’s too much like a trap.”
“I see a restaurant way down the street,” she said. “Why don’t I go down there and get some food and bring it back?”
They went over her pronunciation of two cheeseburgers, everything except onions, and two chocolate milk shakes, very thick. To go. He told her what to expect in change and then told her to hurry.
For a minute, he wondered if he should not tell her to forget it. If something unexpected happened, and he had to take off without her, she’d be in trouble. She still did not know the way of this world.
On the other hand, his own belly was growling.
Reluctantly he said “Okay. But don’t be long, and if anything happens so we get separated, we’ll meet back at the motel.”
He alternated watching the restaurant to his left and looking down the street for her.
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About five minutes later she appeared with a large white paper bag. She crossed the street twice to get back on the same block and started walking toward him. She had taken a few steps from the corner when a car which had passed her stopped. Two men jumped out and ran toward her. Kickaha began running toward them. Anana dropped the bag and then she crumpled. There was no sound of a gun or spurt of flame or anything to indicate that a gun had been used. The two men ran to her. One picked her up; the other turned to face Kickaha.
At the same time, another man got out of the car and ran toward Kickaha. Several cars came up behind the stopped car, honked, and then pulled around it. Their lights revealed one man inside the parked car in the driver’s seat.
Kickaha leaped sideways and out into the street. A car blew its horn and swerved away to keep from hitting him. The angry voice of its driver floated back, “You crazy son …!”
Kickaha had his beamer-pen out by then. A few hasty words set it for piercing effect. His first concern was to keep from being hit by the beamers of the men and his second was to cripple the car.
He dropped on the street and rolled, catching out of the corner of his eye a flash of needle-thin, sun-hot ray. A beam leaped from his own pen and ran along the wheels of the car on the street side. The tires blew with a bang, and the car listed to one side as the bottom parts of the wheels fell off.
The driver jumped out and ran behind the car.
Kickaha was up and running across the street toward a car parked by the curb. He threw himself forward, hit the macadam hard, and rolled. When he had crawled behind the car and peered from behind it, he saw that a second car was stopped some distance behind the first. Anana was being passed into it by the men from the first car.
He jumped up and shouted, but several cars whizzed by, preventing him from using the beam. By the time they had passed, the second car was making a U-turn. More cars, coming down the other lane, passed between him and the automobile containing her. He had no chance now to beam the back wheels of the departing car. And just then, as if the Fates were against him, a police car approached on the lane on his side and stopped. Raging, he fled.
Behind him, a siren started whooping. A man shouted at him and fired into the air.
He increased his pace and ran out onto San Vicente, almost stopping traffic as he dodged between the streaming cars. He crossed the divider. As he reached the other side of the street, he spared a glance behind and saw one policeman on the divider, blocked by the stream of cars.
The police car had made a U-turn and was coming across. Kickaha ran on, turned the corner, ran between two houses, and came out behind them on San Vicente again. The cop on foot was getting into the car. Kickaha crouched in the shadows until the car, siren still whooping, took off again. It went around the same corner he had turned.
He doubled to Stats and looked inside. There was no sign of Wolff or Chryseis. Another police car was approaching, its lights flashing but its siren quiet.
He went across the parking lot and around a building. It took him an hour, but by then dodging between houses, running across streets, hiding now and then, he had eluded the patrol cars. After a stop at a drive-in to pick up some food, he returned to his motel.
There was a police car parked outside it. Once more, he abandoned his luggage and was gone into the night.
CHAPTER SEVEN
There was one thing he had to do immediately. He knew that Red Orc would give Anana a drug which would make her answer any question Orc asked. It just might happen that Orc would become aware that the Horn of Shambarimen had been brought through into this world and that it now was in a locker in the downtown bus station. He would, of course, send men down to the station and would not hesitate to have the whole station blown up. Orc would not care what he had to do to get that Horn.
Kickaha caught a taxi and went down to the bus station. After emptying the locker, he walked seven blocks from the bus station before he took another taxi, which carried him to the downtown railroad station. Here he placed the Horn in a locker. He did not want to carry the key with him. He purchased a package of gum and chewed all the sticks until he had a big ball of gum. While he was chewing, he strolled around outside the station, inspected a tree on the edge of the parking lot, and decided he had found an excellent hiding place. He stuck the key, embedded in the ball of gum, into a small hollow in the tree just above the line of his vision.
He took another taxi to the Sunset and Fairfax area.
He awoke about eight o’clock on an old mattress on the bare floor of a big moldy room. Beside him slept Rod (short for Rodriga). Rodriga Elseed, as she called herself, was a tall thin girl with remarkably large breasts, a pretty but overfreckled face, big dark-blue eyes, and lank yellow-brown hair that fell to her waist. She was wearing a red-and-blue checked lumberman’s shirt, dirty bellbottoms, and torn moccasins. Her teeth were white and even, but her breath reeked of too little food and too much marijuana.
While walking along Sunset Boulevard in the Saturday night crowds, Kickaha had seen her sitting on the sidewalk talking to another girl and a boy.
The girl, seeing Kickaha, had smiled at him. She said, “Hello, friend. You look as if you’ve been running for a long time.”
“I hope not,” he said, smiling back. “The fuzz might see it, too.”
It had been easy to make the acquaintanceship of all three, and when Kickaha said he would buy them something to eat, he felt a definite strengthening of their interest.
After eating they had wandered around Sunset, “groovin” on everything. He learned much about their sub-world that night. When he mentioned that he had no roof over his head, they invited him to stay at their pad. It was a big run-down spooky old house, they said, with about fifty people, give or take ten, living in it and chipping in on the rent and utilities, if they had it. If they didn’t, they were welcome until they got some bread.
Rodriga Elseed (he was sure that wasn’t her real name) had recently come here from Dayton, Ohio. She had left two uptight parents there. She was seventeen and didn’t know what she wanted to be. Just herself for the time being, she said.
Kickaha donated some more money for marijuana, and the other girl, Jackie, disappeared for a while. When she returned, they went to the big house, which they called The Shire, and retired to this room. Kickaha smoked with them, since he had the feeling that he would be a far more accepted comrade if he did. The smoke did not seem to do much except to set him coughing.
After a while, Jackie and the boy, Dar, began to make love. Rodriga and Kickaha went for a walk. She said she liked Kickaha, but did not feel like going to bed with him on such short acquaintance.
Kickaha said that he understood. He was not at all disgruntled. He just wanted to get some sleep. An hour later, they returned to the room, which was then empty and fell asleep on the dirty mattress.
But the night’s sleep had not lessened his anxiety. He was depressed because Anana was in Red Orc’s hands, and he suspected that Wolff and Chryseis were also his prisoners. Somehow, Red Orc had guessed that the ad was from Kickaha and had answered. But he would not have been able to answer so specifically unless he had Wolff and had gotten out of him what he knew about Kickaha.
Knowing the Lords, Kickaha felt it was likely that Red Orc would torture Wolff and Chryseis first, even though he had only to administer a drug which would make them tell whatever Orc asked for. After that, he would torture them again and finally kill them.
He would do the same with Anana. Even now …
He shuddered and said, “No!”
Rodriga opened her eyes and said, “What?”
“Go back to sleep,” he said, but she sat up and hugged her knees to her breasts. She rocked back and forth and said, “Something is bugging you, amigo. Deeply. Look, I don’t want to bug you, too, but if there’s anything I can do …”
“I’ve got my own thing to do,” he said.
He could not involve her in this even if she could help him in any wa
y. She would be killed the first time they contacted Red Orc’s men. She wasn’t the fast, extremely tough, many-resourced woman that Anana was. Yes, that’s right, he said to himself. Was. She might not be alive at this very moment.
Tears came to his eyes.
“Thanks, Rod. I’ve got to be going now. Dig you later, maybe.”
She was up off the floor then and said, “There’s something a little strange about you, Paul. You’re young but you don’t use our lingo quite right, you know what I mean? You seem to me to be just a little weird. I don’t mean a creep. I mean, as if you don’t quite belong to this world, I know how that is; I get the same feeling quite a lot. That is, I don’t belong here, either. But it isn’t quite the same thing with you, I mean, you are really out of this world. You aren’t some being off a flying saucer, are you now?”
“Look, Rod, I appreciate your offer. I really do. But you can’t go with me or do anything for me. Not just now. But later, if anything comes up that you can help me with, I sure as hell will let you do something for me and be glad to do so.”
He bent over and kissed her forehead and said, “Hasta la vista, Rodriga. Maybe adios. Let’s hope we see each other again, though.”
Kickaha walked until he found a small restaurant. As he ate breakfast he considered the situation.
One thing was certain. The problem of the Beller was solved. It did not matter whether Kickaha or Orc killed him. Just so he was killed and the Bellers forever out of the way.
And Red Orc now had all but one of his enemies in his hands, and he would soon have that last one. Unless that enemy got to him first. Red Orc had not been using all his powers to catch Kickaha because his first concern was the Beller. But now he could concentrate on the last holdout.
Somehow, Kickaha had to find the Lord before the Lord got to him. Very soon.
When he had finished eating, he bought a Times. As he walked along the street, he scanned the columns of the paper. There was nothing about a girl being kidnapped or a car on Wilshire with the bottom halves of the left wheels sliced off. There was a small item about the police sighting Paul J. Finnegan, the mystery man, his getting away, and a resume of what was known about him in his pre-1946 life.