“You wouldn’t put me on?” Lou said to the girl, Moo-Moo Nanssen, after he had backed away from Kickaha’s leaf-green eyes.
“There’s something very strange about them,” Moo-Moo said. “Very attractive, very virile, and very frightening. Alien. Real alien.”
Kickaha felt the back of his scalp chill. Anana, moving closer to him, whispered in the language of the Lords, “I don’t know what she’s saying, but I don’t like it. That girl has a gift of seeing things; she is Zundra.”
Zundra had no exact or near-exact translation into English. It meant a combination of psychologist, clairvoyant, and witch, with a strain of madness.
Lou Baum shook his head, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and then removed and polished his glasses. His weak, pale-blue eyes blinked.
“The chick is psychic,” he said. “Weird. But in the groove. She knows what she’s talking about.”
“I get vibrations,” Moo-Moo said. “They never fail me. I can read character like that!” She snapped her fingers loudly. “But there’s something about you two, especially her, I don’t get. Maybe like you two ain’t from this world, you know. Like you’re Martians … or something.”
A short stocky youth with blond hair and an acne-scarred face, introduced only as Wipe-Out, looked up from his seat, where he was tuning a guitar.
“Finnegan’s no Martian,” he said, grinning. “He’s got a flat Midwestern accent like he came from Indiana, Illinois, or Iowa. A hoosier, I’d guess. Right?”
“I’m a hoosier,” Kickaha said.
“Close your eyes, you good people,” Wipe-Out said loudly. “Listen to him! Speak again, Finnegan! If his voice isn’t a dead ringer for Gary Cooper’s, I’ll eat the inedible!”
Kickaha said something for their benefit, and the others laughed and said, “Gary Cooper! Did you ever?”
That seemed to shatter the crystal tension that Moo-Moo’s words had built. Moo-Moo smiled and sat down again, but her dark eyes flicked glances again and again at the two strangers, and Kickaha knew that she was not satisfied. Lou Baum sat down by Moo-Moo. His Adam’s apple worked as if it were the plunger on a pump. His face was set in a heavy, almost stupefied expression, but Kickaha could tell that he was still very curious. He was also afraid.
Apparently, Baum believed in his girl friend’s reputation as a psychic. He was also probably a little afraid of her.
Kickaha did not care. Her analysis of the strangers may have been nothing but a maneuver to scare Baum from Anana.
The important thing was to get to Los Angeles as swiftly as possible, with as little chance of being detected by Orc’s men as possible. This bus was a lucky thing for him, and as soon as they reached a suitable jumping-off place in the metropolitan area, they would jump. And hail and farewell to the Gnome King and His Bad Eggs.
He inspected the rest of the bus. The three older men playing cards looked up at him but said nothing. He felt a little repulsed by their bald heads and gray hair, their thickening and sagging features, red-veined eyes, wrinkles, dewlaps, and big bellies. He had not seen more than four old people in the twenty-four years he had lived in the universe of Jadawin. Humans lived to be a thousand there if they could avoid accident or homicide, and did not age until the last hundred years. Very few survived that long, however. Thus, Kickaha had forgotten about old men and women. He felt repelled, though not as much as Anana. She had grown up in a world which contained no physically aged people, and though she was now ten thousand years old, she had lived in no universes which contained unhandsome humans. The Lords were an aesthetic people and so they had weeded out the unbeautiful among their chattels and given the survivors the chance for a long long youth.
Baum walked down the aisle and said, “Looking for something?”
“I’m just curious,” Kickaha said. “Is there any way out other than the door in front?”
“There’s an emergency inside the women’s dressing room. Why?”
“I just like to know these things,” Kickaha said. He did not see why he should explain that he always made sure he knew exactly the number of exits and their accessibility.