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.