He heard a car coming around the bend a quarter of a mile away and glanced back at it. It was a black and white state police car with two golden-helmeted men. He looked straight ahead but out of the side of his mouth said, “If this car stops, act easy. It’s the police. Let me handle things. If I hold up two fingers, run and jump down the side of the mountain. No! On second thought . . . listen, we’ll go with them. They can take us into town, or near it, and then we’ll stun them with the rings. Got it?”
The car, however, shot by without even slowing. Kickaha breathed relief and said, “We don’t look as suspicious as I feel.”
They walked on down the road. As they came onto a half-mile stretch, they heard a faint roar behind them. The sound became louder, and then Kickaha grinned with pleasure. “Motorcycles,” he said. “Lots of them.”
The roaring became very loud. They turned, and saw about twenty big black cycles race like a black cloud around the corner of the mountain. Kickaha was amazed. He had never seen men or women dressed like these. Several of them aroused a reflex he had thought dead since peace was declared in 1945. His hand flew to the handle of the knife in bis belt sheath, and he looked for a ditch into which to dive.
Three of the cyclists wore German coalscuttle helmets with big black swastikas painted on the gray metal. They also wore Iron Crosses or metal swastikas on chains around their necks.
All wore dark glasses, and these, coupled with the men’s beards or handlebar moustaches and sideburns, and the women’s heavy makeup, made their faces seem insectile. Their clothing was dark, although a few men wore duty once-white T-shirts. Most wore calf-length boots. A woman sported a kepi and a dragoon’s bright-red, yellow-piped jacket. Their black leather jackets and T-shirts bore skulls and crossbones that looked like phalluses, and the legend: lucifer’s louts.
The cavalcade went roaring by, some gunning then: motors or waving at the two and several wove back and forth across the road, leaning far over to both sides with their arms folded. Kickaha grinned appreciatively at that; he had owned and loved a motorcycle when he was going to high school in Terre Haute.
Anana, however, wrinkled up her nose. “The stink of fuel is bad enough,” she said. “But did you smell them? They haven’t bathed for weeks. Or months.”
“The Lord of this world has been very lax,” Kickaha said. He referred to the sanitary habits of the human inhabitants of the pocket universes which the other Lords ruled. Although the Lords were often very cruel with their human property, they insisted on cleanliness and beauty. They had established laws and religious precepts which saw to it that cleanliness was part of the base of every culture.
But there were exceptions. Some Lords had allowed their human societies to degenerate into dirt-indifference.
Anana had explained that the Lord of Earth was unique. Red Orc ruled in strictest secrecy and anonymity, although he had not always done so. In the early days, in man’s dawn, he had often acted as a god. But he had abandoned that role and gone into hiding-as it were. He had let things go as they would. This accounted for the past, present, and doubtless future mess in which Earthlings were mired.
Kickaha had had little time to learn much about Red Orc, because he had not even known of his existence until a few minutes before he and Anana stepped through the gates into this universe. “They all looked so ugly,” Anana said.
“I told you man had gone to seed here,” he said. “There has been no selective breeding, either by a Lord or by humans themselves.”
Then they heard the muted roar of the cycles again, and in a minute they saw eight coming back up the road. These held only men.
The cycles passed them, slowed, turned, and came up behind them. Kickaha and Anana continued walking. Three cycles zoomed by them, cutting in so close that he could have knocked them over as they went by. He was beginning to wonder if he should not have done so and therefore cut down the odds immediately. It seemed obvious that they were going to be harassed, if not worse.