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"You don't look like an Indian," Wolff said.
"And you, my friend, don't look like a sixty-sixyear-old man, either. But here we are. Okay. I've put off telling my story because I wanted to hear yours first. Tonight I'll talk."
They did not speak much more that day. Wolff exclaimed now and then at the animals he saw. There were great herds of bison, dark, shaggy, bearded, and far larger than their cousins of Earth. There were other herds of horses and a creature that looked like the prototype of the camel. More mammoths and then a family of steppe mastodons. A pack of six dire wolves raced alongside the two for awhile at a distance of a hundred yards. These stood almost as high as Wolff's shoulder.
Kickaha, seeing Wolff's alarm, laughed and said, "They won't attack us unless they're hungry. That isn't very likely with all the game around here. They're just curious."
Presently, the giant wolves curved away, their speed increasing as they flushed some striped antelopes out of a grove of trees.
"This is North America as it was a long time before the white man," Kickaha said, "Fresh, spacious, with a multitude of animals and a few tribes roaming around."
A flock of a hundred ducks flew overhead, honking. Out of the green sky, a hawk fell, struck with a thud, and the flock was minus one comrade. "The Happy Hunting Ground!" Kickaha cried. "Only it's not so happy sometimes."
Several hours before the sun went around the mountain, they stopped by a small lake. Kickaha found the tree in which he had built a platform.
"We'll sleep here tonight, taking turns on watch. About the only animal that might attack us in the tree is the giant weasel, but he's enough to worry about. Besides, and worse, there could be war parties."
Kickaha left with his bow in hand and returned in fifteen minutes with a large buck rabbit. Wolff had started a small fire with little smoke; over this they roasted the rabbit. While they ate, Kickaha explained the topography of the country.
"Whatever else you can say about the Lord, you can't deny he did a good job of designing this world. You take this level, Amerindia. It's not really flat. It has a series of slight curves each about 160 miles long. These allow the water to run off, creeks and rivers and lakes to form. There's no snow anywhere on the planet—can't be, with no seasons and a fairly uniform climate. But it rains every day—the clouds come in from space somewhere."
They finished eating the rabbit and covered the fire. Wolff took first watch. Kickaha talked all through Wolff's turn at guard. And Wolff stayed awake through Kickaha's watch to listen.
In the begi
"But what they lacked in quantity they more than possessed in quality," Kickaha said. "They had a science and technology that makes ours, Earth's, look like the wisdom of Tasmanian aborigines. They were able to construct these private universes. And they did.
"At first each universe was a sort of playground, a microcosmic country club for small groups. Then, as was inevitable, since these people were human beings no matter how godlike in their powers, they quarreled. The feeling of property was, is, as strong in them as in us. There was a struggle among them. I suppose there were also deaths from accident and suicide. Also, the isolation and loneliness of the Lords made them megalomaniacs, natural when you consider that each played the part of a little god and came to believe in his role.
"To compress an eons-long story into a few words, the Lord who built this particular universe eventually found himself alone. Jadawin was his name, and he did not even have a mate of his own kind. He did not want one. Why should he share this world with an equal, when he could be a Zeus with a million Europas, with the loveliest of Ledas?
"He had populated this world with beings abducted from other universes, mainly Earth's, or created in the laboratories in the palace on top of the highest tier. He had created divine beauties and exotic monsters as he wished.
"The only trouble was, the Lords were not content to rule over just one universe. They began to covet the worlds of the others. And so the struggle was continued. They erected nearly impregnable defenses and conceived almost invincible offenses. The battle became a deadly game. This fatal play was inevitable, when you consider that boredom and e
"But how did you come into this?" Wolff said.
"I? My name on Earth was Paul Janus Fi
Kickaha gri
Wolff was begi
"I know what you're thinking, but don't you believe it," Kickaha said. "I'm a trickster, but I'm leveling with you. By the way, did you know how I came by my name among the Bear People? In their language, a kickaha is a mythological character, a semidivine trickster. Something like the Old Man Coyote of the Plains of Nanabozho of the Ojibway or Wakdjunkaga of the Wi
VII
IN 1941, AT THE AGE OF twenty-three Paul Fi
"I asked some of the citizens about it. All they knew was that it had been in the museum a long time. A professor of chemistry, after making some tests on it, had tried to interest the University of Munich in it but had failed.
"I took it home with me after the war, along with other souvenirs. Then I went back to the University of Indiana. My father had left me enough money to see me through for a few years, so I had a nice little apartment, a sports car, and so on.
"A friend of mine was a newspaper reporter. I told him about the crescent and its peculiar properties and unknown composition. He wrote a story about it which was printed in Bloomington, and the story was picked up by a syndicate. It didn't create much interest among scientists—in fact, they wanted nothing to do with it.
"Three days later, a man calling himself Mr. Va