Orth's dark face reddened with sudden mirth that he choked back. The twisted idiomatic expressions of this strange world were taking a familiar pattern. Even the scrambled pattern of wars and their military leaders began to make sense. Thumping a ride, six shooters, and scalp lockets linked up with Ayna's reference to Ancient American Mythology.
"You're from the little globes clustering around the sun," he said, "and you were visiting Earth—or this primitive duplication of it. Sort of a park for your people, this. Your spacer crashed or you've lost it."
Ayna frowned at Orth. "Yes," she said slowly, "I landed on Earth, contrary to the regulations, and a herd of mammoths wrecked my ship. But how could you, a creature of Ivath's great workship, know anything of spacers?"
"I do not know Ivath," Orth said angrily, "and I came here in a spacer that has vanished.... Now, how do we get out of this make believe world of yours to your home?"
"But this is real," the girl protested. "If a redskin's arrow or a tearunner's slug cuts you down you will die. Until the war is ended, or you take me to Ivath's headquarters, we are not safe."
"All I can say is human beings are as crazy as they were three million years ago," grunted Orth.
Meanwhile the dust cloud rolled closer and slowed. Horgan's thumping had halted them. Orth saw three great waggons, their twenty foot-high metal-tired wheels fitting deep down into the rutted way.
Sixty feet in length they were, and beneath a low roof, that Ayna called a hood, there was a broad treadmill geared up with the eight huge wheels. Between eighty and a hundred thick-bodied little ponies were tied upon this raised moving belt. Above the hood lifted a sort of tower, its roof twenty feet above the ground, and here the two waggon drivers sat, steering the cumbersome vehicle with a spoked wooden wheel.
Back of the cab was the covered cargo deck of the waggon where bags of grain, hides and other produce were heaped.
One of the wooden blocks that had braked the enormous wheels was smoking and now it burst into flame. One of the drivers hastily tossed a bucket of water on the block and put it out.