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.
Recently, Wolff and Chryseis had mysteriously disappeared, probably because of the machinations of some Lord of another universe. Kickaha had run into Anana, who, with two other Lords, was fleeing from the Black Bellers. The Bellers had originally been devices created in the biolabs of the Lords and intended for housing of the minds of the Lords during mind transference from one body to another. But the bell-shaped and indestructible machines had developed into entities with their own intelligence. These had succeeded in transferring their minds into the bodies of Lords and then began to wage a secret war on the Lords. They were found out, and a long and savage struggle began, with all the Bellers supposedly captured and imprisoned in a specially made universe. However, fifty-one had been overlooked, and these, after ten thousand years of dormancy, had gotten into human bodies again and were once more loose.