So he read everything he could get his hands on.
His schoolmates had kidded him about “always having his nose stuck in a book.” Not nastily and not too jeeringly, since they respected his quick temper and quicker fists. But they did not comprehend his lust for learning.
An outsider, observing him from the ages of seventeen through twenty-two, would not have known that he was often with his peers but not of them. They would have seen a star athlete and superior student who palled around with the roughest, raced around the country roads on a motorcycle, tumbled many girls in the hay, got disgustingly drunk, and once was jailed for running a police roadblock. His parents had been mortified, his mother weeping, his father raging. That he had escaped from jail just to show how easy it was and then voluntarily returned to it had upset them even more.
His male peers thought this was admirable and amusing, his female peers found it fascinating though scarey, and his teachers thought it alarming. The judge, who found him reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in his cell, decided that he was just a high-spirited youth with much potentiality who’d fallen among evil companions. The charges were dropped, but Paul was put on unofficial probation by the judge. The young man gave his word that he would behave as a decent respectable citizen should—during the probation period, anyway—and he had kept his word.
Paul seldom left the farm during the probation period. He didn’t want to be tempted into evil by those companions whose evil had mostly come from their willingness to follow him into it. Besides, his parents had been hurt enough. He worked, studied, and sometimes hunted in the woods. He didn’t mind being alone for long periods. He threw himself into solitariness with the same zest he threw himself into companionship.
And then Mr. and Mrs. Finnegan, perhaps in an effort to straighten him out even more, perhaps in an unconscious desire to hurt him as he’d hurt them, revealed something that shocked him.
He was an adopted child.
Paul was stunned. Like most children, he had gone through a phase when he believed that he was adopted. But he had not kept to the fantasy, which children conceive during periods when they think their parents don’t love them. But it was true, and he didn’t want to believe it.
According to his step-parents, his real mother was an Englishwoman with the quaint name of Philea Jane Fogg-Fog. Under other circumstances, he would have thought this hilarious. Not now.
Philea Jane’s parents were of the English landed gentry, though his great-grandfather had married a Parsi woman. The Parsis, he knew, were Persians who had fled to India and settled there when the Moslems invaded their homeland. So … he was actually one-eighth Indian. But it wasn’t American Indian, among whom his step-mother counted ancestors. It was Asiatic Indian, though only in naturalization. The Parsis usually did not marry their Hindu neighbors.
His mother’s mother, Roxana Fogg, was the one who’d picked up the hypenated name of Fogg-Fog. She’d married a distant relative, an American named Fog. A branch of the Foggs had emigrated to the colony of Virginia in the 1600’s. In the early 1800’s some of their descendants had moved to the then-Mexican territory of Texas. By then the extra “g” had been dropped from the family name. Paul’s maternal grandfather, Hardin Blaze Fog, was born on a ranch in the sovereign state of the Republic of Texas.
Roxana Fogg had married an Englishman at the age of twenty. He died when she was thirty-eight, leaving two children. Two years later she went with her son to Texas to look over some of the extensive ranch property he would inherit when he came of age. She also met some of the relatives there, including the famous Confederate war hero and Western gunfighter, Dustine “Dusty” Edward Marsden Fog. She was introduced to Hardin Blaze Fog, several years younger than herself. They fell in love, and he accompanied her back to England. She got the family’s approval, despite his barbarian origins, since she announced she was going to marry him anyway and he was a wealthy shipping magnate. Blaze settled down in London to run the British office. When Roxana was forty-three years old, she surprised everybody, including herself, by conceiving. The baby was named Philea Jane.
Philea Jane Fogg-Fog was born in 1880. In 1900 she married an English physician, Doctor Reginald Syn. He died in 1910 under mysterious circumstances, leaving no children. Philea did not remarry until 1916. She had met in London a handsome well-to-do man from Indiana, Park Joseph Finnegan. The Foggs didn’t like him because, one, he was of Irish descent, two, he was not an Episcopalian, and three, he had been seen with various ladies of the evening in gambling halls before he’d asked Philea to marry him. She married him anyway and went to Terre Haute, which her relatives thought was still subject to raids by the redskins.
Park Joseph Finnegan made Philea happy for the first six months, despite her difficulty in adjusting to a small Hoosier town. At least, she lived in a big house, and she suffered for no lack of material things.
Then life became hell. Finnegan resumed the spending of his fortune on women, booze, and poker games. Within a short time he’d lost his fortune, and when he found out his thirty-eight year old wife was pregnant, he deserted her. He announced he was going West to make another fortune, but she never heard from him again.
Too proud and too ashamed to return to England, Philea had gone to work as a housekeeper for a relative of her husband’s. It was a terrible comedown for her, but she labored without complaint and kept a British stiff upper lip.
Paul was six months old when the gasoline-burning apparatus used to heat an iron exploded in his mother’s face. The house burned down, and the infant would have perished with his mother if a young man had not dashed in through the flames and rescued him.
The relative whose house had burned died of a heart-attack shortly after. Paul was scheduled to go to an orphanage. But Ralph Finnegan, a cousin of Park’s, a Kentucky farmer, and his wife decided to adopt Paul. His fostermother gave him her maiden family name, Janus, as his middle name.
The revelation had shaken Paul terribly. It was after this that he began to suffer from a sense of loneliness. Or perhaps a sense of having been abandoned. Once he’d learned all the details he wanted to know about his true parents, he never spoke of them again. When he mentioned his parents to others, he spoke only of the man and woman who’d reared him.
Two years after Kickaha learned about his true parents, Mr. Finnegan fell ill with cancer and died in six months. That was grief enough, but three months after the burial, his mother had also fallen victim to the same disease. She took a longer time dying, and now Paul had no time to do anything except farm, attend school, and help take care of her. Finally, after much pain, she had died, the day before he was to graduate from high school.
Mingled with his grief was guilt. In some mysterious fashion, he thought, the shame they’d felt when he’d been arrested had caused the cancer. Considered rationally, the idea did not seem plausible. But guilt often had irrational origins. In fact, there were even times when he wondered if he hadn’t somehow been responsible for his real father’s having deserted his real mother and for her death.
His plans to go to college and major in zoology or in anthropology—he couldn’t make up his mind—had been deferred. The farm had been mortgaged to pay for the heavy medical expenses of his parents, and Paul had to work the farm and take a part-time job in Terre Haute as a car mechanic. Nevertheless, despite the long hours of work, and the lack of money, he had some time to express his innate exuberance. He would drop in occasionally at Fisher’s Tavern, where some of the old gang still hung out. They’d go roaring off into the night on their motorcycles, their girls riding behind them, and finally end up in Indian Meadow, where there’d be a continuation of the beer blast and some fighting and lovemaking.
One of the girls wanted him to marry her, but he shied away from that. He wasn’t in love with her, and he couldn’t see himself spending the rest of his life with a woman with no intellectual interests whatever. Then she got pregnant, though fortunately not by him, and she d
eparted to Chicago for a new life. Shortly thereafter, the gang began to drift apart.
He became alone and lonely again. But he liked to ride a horse wildly through the meadows or his chopper over the country roads. It was a good way to blow off steam.
Meantime, he had visits from an uncle who was a knifethrower, juggler, and circus acrobat. Paul learned much from him and became proficient at knife-throwing. When he felt gloomy he would go out into the backyard and practice throwing knives at a target. He knew he was working off his depression, guilt, and resentment at the lot cast for him by the fates with this harmless form of mayhem.
Five years went by swiftly. Suddenly, he was twenty-three. The farm still wasn’t paid off. He couldn’t see himself as a farmer the rest of his life, so he sold the farm at a very small profit. But now it was evident that his hopes of entering college and becoming an anthropologist—he’d decided by then his choice of career—would once more have to be set aside. The United States would be getting into the war in a year or two.
Loving horses so much, he enlisted in the cavalry. To his surprise and chagrin, he soon found himself driving a tank instead. Then there was a three-months’ period in officers candidate training school. Though he wasn’t a college graduate, he’d taken an examination which qualified him to enter it. Pearl Harbor tilted the nation into the conflict, and eventually he was with the Eighth Army and in combat.
One day, during a brief respite in the advance of Patton’s forces, Paul had looked through the ruins of a small museum in a German town he’d helped clean out. He found a curious object, a crescent of some silvery metal. It was so hard that a hammer couldn’t dent it or an acetylene torch melt it. He added it to his souvenirs.
Discharged from the Army, he returned to Terre Haute, where he didn’t plan to stay long. A few days later, he was called into the office of his lawyer. To his surprise, Mr. Tubb handed him a check for ten thousand dollars.
“It’s from your father,” the lawyer said.
“My father? He didn’t have a pot to pee in. You know that,” Paul had said.
“Not the man who adopted you,” Mr. Tubb had said. “It’s from your real father.”
“Where is he?” Paul had said. “I’ll kill him.”
“You wouldn’t want to go where he is,” fat old Tubb said. “He’s six feet under. Buried in a church cemetery in Oregon. He got religion years ago and became a fire-eating brimstone-drinking hallelujah-shouting revivalist. But the old bastard must’ve had some conscience left. He willed all his estate to you.”
For a minute, Paul thought about tearing up the check. Then he told himself that old Park Finnegan owed him. Much more than this, true, but it was enough to enable him to get his Ph.D.
“I’ll take it,” he said. “Will the bank cash it if there’s spit on it?”
“According to the law, the bank must accept it even if you crapped on it. Have a snort of bourbon, son.”
Paul had entered the University of Indiana and rented a small but comfortable apartment off-campus. Paul told a friend of his, a newspaper reporter, about the mysterious crescent he’d found in Germany. The story was in the Bloomington paper and picked up by a syndicate which printed the story nationally. The university physicists, however, didn’t seem interested in it.
Three days after the story appeared, a man calling himself Mr. Vannax appeared at Paul’s apartment. He spoke English fluently but with a slight foreign accent. He asked to see the crescent; Paul obliged. Vannax became very excited, and he offered ten thousand dollars for the crescent. Paul became suspicious. He pumped the sum up to one hundred thousand dollars. Though Vannax was angry, he said he’d come back in twenty-four hours.
“Make it three hundred thousand dollars, and it’s yours,” Paul said. “Since that’s such a big sum, I’ll give you an additional twenty-four hours to round up the money.
“But first, you have to tell me what this is all about.”
Vannax became so troublesome that Paul forced him to leave. About two in the morning, he caught Vannax in his apartment. His crescent was lying on the floor, and so was another.
Vannax had placed the two so that their ends met, forming a circle. He was about to step into the circle.
Paul forced him away by firing a pistol over his head. Vannax backed away, babbling, offering Paul half a million dollars for his crescent.
Following him across the room, Paul stepped into the circle. As he did so, Vannax cried out in panic for him to stay away from the crescents. Too late. The apartment and Vannax disappeared, and Paul found himself in another world.
He was standing in a circle formed by crescents just like those he’d left. But he was in a tremendous palace, as splendid as anything out of the Arabian Nights. This was, literally, on top of the new world to which Paul had been transported. It was the castle of the Lord who’d made the universe of the world of tiers.
Paul figured out that the crescents formed some sort of “gate,” a temporary opening through what he called the “fourth dimension” for lack of a better term. Vannax, he was to discover, was a Lord who’d been stranded in Earth’s universe. He’d had one crescent but needed another to make a gate so he could get into a pocket universe.
Paul soon found himself not alone. Creatures called gworls came through a gate. They’d been sent by a Lord of another world to steal the Horn of Shambarimen. This was a device made many millenia ago, when the pocket universes were just beginning to be created. Using it as a sort of sonic skeleton key, a person could unlock any gate. Paul didn’t know this, of course, but while hiding he saw a gworl open a gate to one of the tiers on this planet with the Horn. Paul pushed the gworl into a pool and dived through the gate with the Horn in his hand.
In the years that passed, as he traveled from level to level, the gworl trailing him, he became well acquainted with many sectors of this planet. On the Dracheland level he took the disguise of Baron Horst von Horstmann. But it was on the Amerind level that he was Kickaha, the name he preferred to be known by. Paul Janus Finnegan was someone in his distant past. Memories of Earth grew dim. He made no effort to go back to his home universe. This was a world he loved, though its dangers were many.
Then an Earthman, Robert Wolff, retired in Phoenix, Arizona, was inspecting the basement of a house for sale when the wall opened. He looked into another world and saw Kickaha surrounded by some gworl who’d finally caught up with him. Kickaha couldn’t escape through the gate, but he did throw the Horn through so that the gworl couldn’t have it. Wolff might have thought he was crazy or hallucinating, but the Horn was physical evidence that he wasn’t.
Wolff was unhappy; he didn’t like his Earthly situation. So he blew the Horn, pressing on the buttons to make notes, and he went through the gate. He found himself on the lowest level of the planet, which looked at first like Eden. As time passed, he became rejuvenated, eventually attaining the body he had had when he was twenty-five.
He also fell in love with a woman called Chryseis. Pursued by the gworl, they fled to the next level, meeting Kickaha on the way. Finally, after many adventures, Wolff reached the palace on top of the world, and he discovered that he was Jadawin, the Lord who’d made this little universe.
Later, he and Chryseis were precipitated into a series of adventures in which he met a number of the Lords. He also had to pass through a series of pocket worlds, all of which were traps designed to catch and kill other Lords.
Meanwhile, Kickaha was engaged in a battle with the Bellers, creatures of artificial origin which could transfer their minds to the bodies of human beings. He also met and fell in love with Anana, a female Lord.
While chasing the last survivor of the Bellers, Kickaha and Anana were gated through to Earth. Kickaha liked Earth even less than he remembered liking it. It was getting overcrowded and polluted. Most of the changes in the twenty years since he’d left it were, in his opinion, for the worse.
Red Orc, the secret Lord of the Two Earths, found out that he and Anana were in hi
s domain. Urthona, another Lord, stranded on Earth for some time, also became Kickaha’s deadly enemy. Kickaha found out that Wolff, or Jadawin, and Chryseis were prisoners of Red Orc. But they’d escaped through a gate to the lavalite world. Now Jadawin and Chryseis were roaming somewhere on its everchanging surface, if they were still alive. And he, Kickaha, had lost the Horn of Shambarimen and Anana. He’d never get out of this unpleasant nerve-stretching world unless he somehow found a gate. Finding it wasn’t going to do him any good unless he had some open-sesame to activate the gate, though. And he couldn’t leave then unless he found Anana alive or dead.
For that matter, he couldn’t leave until he found Wolff and Chryseis. Kickaha was a very bad enemy but a very good friend.
He had also always been extremely independent, self-assured, and adaptable. He’d lived for over twenty years without any roots, though he had been a warrior in the tribe of Hrowakas and thought of them as his people. But they were all gone now, slaughtered by the Bellers. He was in love with the beautiful Anana, who, though a Lord, had become more humane because of his influence.
For some time now he’d been wanting to quit this wandering always-changing-identities life. He wanted to establish himself and Anana some place, among a people who’d respect and maybe even love him. There he and Anana would settle down, perhaps adopt some children. Make a home and a family.