These charges were serious enough, though not enough to warrant their pictures and descriptions on TV newscasts. What made this case so interesting was that the fingerprints of the male in the case had checked out as those of Paul Janus Finnegan, an ex-serviceman who had disappeared in 1946 from his apartment in Bloomington, Indiana, where he had been attending the university.
Twenty-four years later, he had showed up in Van Nuys, California, in very mysterious, or questionable, circumstances. And this was the kicker according to the newscaster-Finnegan was described by witnesses as being about twenty-five, yet he was fifty-two years old!
Moreover, since the first showing of his picture over TV, he had been identified as one of the men in a very mysterious chase in MacArthur Park.
The newscaster ended with a comment supposed to be droll. Perhaps this Finnegan had returned from the Fountain of Youth. Or perhaps the witnesses may have been drinking from a slightly different fountain.
"With all this publicity," Kickaha said, "we're in a bad spot. I hope the motel manager didn't watch this show."
It was eight thirty. They were to meet Wolff at nine at Stats Restaurant on Wilshire and San Vicente. If they took a taxi, they could get there with plenty of time to spare. He decided they should walk. He did not trust the taxis. And while he would use them if he had to, he saw no reason to take one just to avoid a walk. Especially since they needed the exercise.
Anana complained that she was hungry and would like to get to the restaurant as soon as possible. He told her that suffering was good for the soul and grinned as he said it. His own belly was contracting with pangs, and his ribs felt more obtrusive than several days ago. But he was not going to be rushed into anything if he could help it.
While they walked, Kickaha questioned her about Red Orc and the "alleged" creation of Earth.
"There was the universe of the Lords in the beginning, and that was the only one we knew about. Then, after ten thousand years of civilization, my ancestors formulated the theory of artificial universes. Once the mathematics of the concept was realized, it was only a matter of time and will until the first pocket universe was made. Then the same 'space' would hold two worlds of space-matter, but one would be impervious to the inhabitants of the other, because each universe was 'at right angles to the other.' You realize that the term 'right angles' does not mean anything. It is just an attempt to explain something that can really only be explained to one who understands the mathematics of the concept. I myself, though I designed a universe of my own and then built it, never understood the mathematics or even how the world-making machines operated.
"The first artificial universe was constructed about two hundred years before I was born. It was made by a group of Lords-they did not call themselves Lords then, by the way-among whom were my father Urizen and his brother Orc. Orc had already lived the equivalent of two thousand Terrestrial years. He had been a physicist and then a biologist and finally a social scientist.
"The initial step was like blowing a balloon in non-space. Can you conceive that? I can't either, but that's the way it was explained to me. You blow a balloon in non-space. That is, you create a small space or a small universe, one to which you can 'gate' your machines. These ex-and the space next to, or in, the time-space of the original universe. The new world is expanded so that you can gate even larger machines into it. And these expand the universe more, and you gate more machines into the new larger space.
"From the beginning of this making of a new world, you have set up a world which may have quite different physical 'laws' than the original universe. It's a matter of shaping the space-time-matter so that, say, gravity works differently than in the original world.
"However, the first new universe was crude, you might say. It embodied no new principles. It was, in fact, an exact imitation of the original. Well, not exact in the sense that it was not a copy of the world as it was but as it had been in our past."
"The copy was this-my-world?" Kickaha said. "Earth's?" She nodded and said, "It-this universe-was the first. And it was made approximately fifteen thousand Earth years ago. This solar system deviated only in small particulars from the solar system of the Lords. This Earth deviated only slightly from the native planet of the Lords."
"You mean... ?"
He was silent while they walked a half block, then he said, "So that explains what you meant when you said this world was fairly recent. I knew that that could not be so, because potassium-argon and xenon-argon dating prove irrefutably that this world is more than four and a half billion years old."
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 num ber 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.