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Kickaha opened the door to the car, tore off the microphone of the transceiver, reached under the dashboard and tore loose all the wires co
After two miles of the grinding noise and piston-like movement, Kickaha decided to call it quits. He drove the car to the side of the road, got out, threw the ignition keys into the weeds, and started to hike again. They had walked perhaps fifty yards when they turned at the noise of a vehicle. A bus shot by them. It was painted all over with swirls, dots, squares, circles, and explosions of many bright colors. In bright yellow and orange-trimmed letters was a title along the front and the sides of the bus: the gnome king and his bad eggs. Above the title were painted glowing red and yellow quarter notes, bars, small guitars and drums.
For a moment, looking at the faces against the windows, he thought that the bus had picked up Lucifer's Louts. There were long hairs, fuzzy hairs, moustaches, beards, and the heavy makeup and long straight lank hair of the girls.
But the faces were different; they did look wild but not brutish or savage.
The bus slowed down with a squealing of brakes. It stopped, a door swung open, and a youth with a beard and enormous spectacles leaned out and waved at them. They ran to the bus and boarded with the accompaniment of much laughter and the strumming of guitars.
The bus, driven by a youth who looked like Buffalo Bill, started up. Kickaha looked around into the gri
Two girls wore skirts that just barely covered their buttocks and dark gray stockings, bright frilly blouses, many varicolored beads, and heavy makeup: green or silver eyelids, artificial eyelashes, panda-like rings around the eyes, and green (!) and pale mauve (!) lips. The third girl had no makeup at all. Long straight black hair fell to her waist and she wore a tight sleeveless green and red striped sweater with a deep cleavage, tight Levi's, and sandals. Several of the boys wore bellbottom trousers, very frilly shirts, and all had long hair.
The Gnome King was a very tall, tubercular looking youth with very curly hair, handlebar moustaches, and enormous spectacles perched on the end of his big nose. He also wore an earring. He introduced himself as Lou Baum (born Goldbaum).
Kickaha gave his name as Paul Fi
"From the Land of the Reindeer?" Baum said. "She's a dear, all right." He whistled and kissed his fingertips and flicked them at Anana. "Groovy, me boy! Too much! Say, either of you play an instrument?" He looked at the case Kickaha was carrying.
Kickaha said that they did not. He did not care to explain that he had once played the flute but not since 1945 or that he had played an instrument like a panpipe when he lived with the Bear Folk on the Amerindian level of . Nor did he think it wise to explain that Anana played a host of instruments, some of which were similar to Earth instruments and some of which were definitely not.
"I'm using this instrument case as a suitcase," Kickaha said. "We've been on the road for some time since leaving Europe. We just spent a month in the mountains, and now we've decided to visit L.A. We've never been there."
"Then you got no place to stay," Baum said. He talked to Kickaha but stared at Anana. His eyes glistened, and his hands kept moving with gestures that seemed to be reshaping Anana out of the air.
"Can she sing?" he said suddenly.
"Not in English," Kickaha replied.
The girl in Levi's stood up and said, "Come on, Lou. You aren't going to get anywhere with that chick. Her boy friend'll kill you if you lay a hand on her. Or else she will. That chick can do it, you know."
Lou seemed to be shaken. He came very close and peered into Kickaha's eyes as if he were looking through a microscope. Kickaha smelled a strange acrid odor on his breath. A moment later, he thought he knew what it was. The citizens of the city of Talanac on the Amerind level, carved out of a mountain of jade, smoked a narcotic tobacco which left the same odor on their breath. Kickaha did not know, of course, since he had had no experience on Earth, but he had always suspected that the tobacco was marijuana, and that the Talanacs, descendants of the ancient Olmecs of Mexico, had brought it with them when they had crossed through the gates provided by Wolff.
"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.
"Fi
"I'm a hoosier," Kickaha said.
"Close your eyes, you good people," Wipe-Out said loudly. "Listen to him! Speak again, Fi
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.