Ray Rollins fought to preserve the Space
Station—and Earth—from an enemy mankind had
forgotten. An enemy in hiding, awaiting its—

Vengeance From The Past!

By Geoff St. Reynard

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
September 1954
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

It started during the program. The little noises were there but I didn't pay any attention to them, and I don't know now whether I thought they were the wind and the rain or maybe some realistic sound effects on tv. Of course they were the small sounds made by the two things that wanted to get into my house. They tried the doors, turning the knobs and pressing their bodies against the panels, and then they prowled around testing the windows. They were as silent as cobras but windows pushed or doors shoved will make some noise and so the little creaks were there but I paid no attention to them.

Then I got the feeling that someone was looking at me.

Nuts. My background as a fiction writer was getting under my skin. Someone watching me, my God, from where? The French windows behind me? Who'd be out in this downpour? I was glad my wife Nessa was asleep upstairs. With a baby on the way she needed her rest. Just to ease my rippling spine, I'd give a quick glance over my shoulder.

I did.

I saw a face like a gigantic mask. Enormous skull, low brow, small chin and thick-lipped mouth; wide cheeks and a mass of tumbled gray hair crowning the hatless head. Suggestion of a body like a gorilla's clad in dark broadcloth. Hands pressed flat on the glass, short thumbs and long fingers thick as country sausages. Worst of all the ghastly thing, two thinned eyes that caught the light of the tv lamp and shot it back at me as glowing crimson oblongs of animal hate. This creature, standing rock-steady beyond the full-length windows that were streamed and blurry with the driving rain, this beast, this—

I closed my eyes tight and then opened them. It was gone into the rain, an optical illusion! It had really spooked me there for an instant, the old marrow was still cold from the first grisly shock.

I turned and started watching the set again. I started to chuckle to myself. I heard the French windows snap and groan a little with the wind. Then I heard the fretful sound of a strained and snapping bolt. That wasn't the wind! I jumped to my feet and whirled around. I froze where I stood. A hulking brute with a mask for a face was coming for me and then I saw the face was a face and not a mask at all.

Another man behind the horror said sharply, "Don't touch him, Old One!" and those paws with the sausage fingers fell reluctantly. I backed up two steps and the tv set held me from going any further. The second intruder passed the horror and thrust out his hand, which was about as big as a hand can be without becoming an outsize foot; it took me a moment to realize that he meant me to shake it. When I didn't move, he grinned and said in his deep voice, "Don't know me, Ray?" and then I did know him. I was happier not remembering him, I wished I could stop knowing who he was, but now I did and I knew I was likely going to be dead before sunup, because he was Bill Cuff.

I did shake hands with him. I'm five-feet-ten and weigh one-sixty and I'm about as rugged as the average guy, or more so, because I play handball and used to be a pro footballer before I got married; but if I'd angered Bill Cuff he might have picked me up and torn me into little scraps like a piece of bond paper. He was the strongest man I ever knew. And for a couple of years he'd been badly wanted by the police, because he had murdered at least a dozen people. I shook hands with him. I didn't like it but I wasn't going to pander to my preferences just then.

"Sit down, Ray," Bill said, as if it had been his house. "Sit down, Old One." This to his companion.

The thing with the face sat on the floor, folding down without effort till his hams rested on his heels. I sat on the couch. Bill Cuff walked up and down the room. He kept his voice pitched low as he talked and I knew that Nessa wouldn't hear a thing if she happened to be awake. I watched Cuff. He moved back and forth like a great panther brooding in its cage and planning an escape. There was something so easy in those movements of leg and body that the effect wasn't altogether human. Which wasn't surprising, in view of what he proceeded to tell me....

CHAPTER II

"You remember, Ray, the week I disappeared? You remember how I killed the two museum guards and the three cops, and afterwards the eight or ten searchers who were pursuing me through the swamp? It made headlines all over this country and the rest of the world too. Jack the Ripper had a grandson. Bill Cuff the mad berserker was unleashed on the world, breaking men's backs and twisting their heads in a nightmare of murder. Where would he strike next?

"And then I didn't strike, and they said I must be dead, drowned in the swamplands.

"I wasn't dead: obviously. I'd been discovered by a muster of the Old Companions, and was living in their HQ, an ancient wooden house in the center of the swamps. I was learning the history of my race, and the plans that it had for its future.

"My race, yes....

"Ray we are the Neanderthals...."

I didn't laugh at him, hearing Bill Cuff say that so soberly. I couldn't. Not with the thing sitting on the floor watching me; the thing that had stepped right out of a museum reconstruction of the Stone Age! Cuff went on talking.

"My memories came at me in a flood, remembrances of the dawn of time. I fled in retrospect from the encroachments of Man, he who was a little like me but so vastly different; Man who gradually, painstakingly wiped out my breed. Or so he thought. He forgot the matings, the myriad couplings of Neanderthal bucks with human women. He forgot that dark blood runs stronger than light, that the bestial is stronger than the civilized, that a drop of wolf-blood will often make a dog a ravening brute, that one small dilution of Neanderthal carries down through years and centuries to crop up again, full-fledged and vigorous, time after time in an otherwise placid strain.

"The Neanderthal died, but his seed was carried in the bodies of Homo sapiens, and after a period cropped out in violent flowering as the Pict. Luck brought out the great strain in force, and banding together in the isles, we were a race apart once more. Then time conquered us a second season; the Picts were vanquished and their pitiful remnants bred once more into the watery outlander life-form, that of Man.

"Then in later ages we discovered ourselves as different, but never could make of ourselves a dominant race: so we were hunted in ones and twos, and when our ancient blood cried for vengeance on Man, we slew him and died alone. We were the so-called werewolves and the vampires, the ghouls, the ogres, the incubi and succubi, the Good Folk and changelings and devils of the woods. We who always fought Man, unknowing what we were or why we fought, we formed the basis of every legend that told of horrible alien things lying in wait beside every path and in every fen and bog and desolute place.

"In the eighteenth century we were the raging madmen of Bedlam.

"Late in the nineteenth, science unwittingly came to our aid. The Neanderthal man emerged from dry bones as a beast, a manlike animal who had fallen to make way for Homo sapiens. And gradually those of us who had the dawn brain, the remembrance of glories far past, realized that we were not mad, but poor deluded men who thought ourselves different—we were different. We were the descendants and inheritors of the Neanderthal, he who came before man and was in many ways better, stronger, more savagely intelligent and possessed of much higher capabilities. We were not men, and the time was coming when we would no longer need to masquerade as men. We were coming into our inheritance!"

Bill Cuff halted in front of me and his face, broad, heavy-boned, topped with thick black hair and carrying an expression of cruel and truculent power, now lit up with malignant glee. I felt a cold chill.

"And all this I remembered in a space of two days!

"What I remembered best was the hate.

"We hated you—oh, God, how we hated! Imagine the hate you'd feel toward a race from Mars that came and overran your planet and stamped out your folk till only a pitiful handful were left. Man had come and usurped our earth, hadn't he? So the blood remembered, and hated."

Bill Cuff laughed suddenly.

"Ray, I'm not mad, as you were just thinking. I offer you that as proof: we are to a degree telepathic. All of us. Yet men are not.

"It's true. We are the Neanderthals. We are not human. And we have returned to take back our inheritance, which is the world!"

CHAPTER III

He allowed me to sit without speaking for the space of about ten minutes. I needed that time. I had to go all over what he'd said, consider each statement, try to forget that it sounded like fantasy, try to realize that Bill Cuff and Lord knew how many others of the so-called Old Companions believed this yarn with their whole energies. I had to take the tale and consider it in its entirety, as a broad concept which might be true, and then I had to grit my teeth and look at the significance of it as if by some incredible, wild chance it were true....

The significance was horrible, of course, but it was doubly or rather trebly awful for me personally, because Bill Cuff was my cousin.

His father, who'd died before Bill was born, had been my mother's brother.

And the reason I say it was trebly bad for me was that upstairs my wife Nessa lay asleep, and stirring in her was our child.

And if Bill Cuff was right, then that child and I myself came of a race that was only partly human; and neither of us could call ourselves by the proud title of Man.

At the end of ten minutes, the creature called Old One roused himself and gave a grunt. It seemed to be a two-syllable word, but of no language I ever knew.

Bill Cuff nodded and replied, "Yes he does, Old One," showing that it had actually conveyed meaning. I looked again at that ferocious mask, and I think I began believing Bill Cuff's story with an intelligent awareness of its truth, right them. Old One was a Neanderthal. Only a blind idiot could have doubted it.

"Now here's the reason I've come here to tell you this," began Bill Cuff, and I waved a hand to stop him.

"I know why," I said huskily. "We're cousins. You think the same blood may run in my veins."

"It does without a doubt. You see, I've checked on my mother, who's still living; and she isn't a carrier. So it was my father—your uncle. And you may not have the memory, Ray, but you have the blood. You're Neanderthal too."

"So you want me to come out to the swamps and join you?"

Bill Cuff flung himself onto the couch beside me, leaning near, breathing into my face. His breath smelled like raw meat, or maybe it was my imagination. He said, his voice a rumbling growl, "No, that isn't why I came. I want to find Howard. And I think you know where he is."

My belly contracted and my palms that were already damp became clammy.

I got up and paced the room nervously. My brain was clanking and buzzing in a kind of scrambled gear.

Howard Rollins was my brother. He was a scientist, a top-flight brain; serious where I'm flippant, keen where I'm fuzzy, and high-IQed where I'm sort of upper-middle-minded. He'd been working for the government since the establishment of Oak Ridge. Right at that moment he was on a small heavily forested scrap of land off the Maine coast, a bit of wind-swept earth called Odo Island. I knew what he was doing and it was as important as the atom bomb, or maybe even more so. I knew these things because Howard trusted me. I said to Bill Cuff, "He's on Pompey Island."

Cuff's gray eyes glinted. I noticed now that Old One's eyes were exactly the same color. "Cachug," said Cuff, or some damn fool grunt that sounded like it, and Old One got up and went out of the French windows into the wind and rain, lurching like a clothed gorilla. Then my cousin turned to me once more.

"We know what he's doing, Ray; but we couldn't find out where he was doing it. We have Old Companions in the government, but none who were placed in your position, who'd know where Howard was despite the heavy curtain of secrecy. So I had to risk coming into the city to see you." He seemed to listen then, to sounds which I couldn't hear. He grinned. "Now," he said, "how soon can you wind up your affairs for, say, a week?"

"Right now," I said, almost without thinking. "I have six scripts completed—"

"Then you'll meet us in Boston tomorrow afternoon—five sharp beside the City Hall on School Street."

"Wait a minute," I protested. "What—"

"We'll explain everything then. Don't worry, Ray. You deal fairly with us and we'll deal more than fairly by you. If you're telling me the truth, if you play ball, you'll be the first member of the Old Companions accepted in spite of lack of dawn memory. A proud thing," he said, drawing himself up to his impressive full height, "a very proud thing, Ray." The flame of a fanatic shone in the gray eyes, and then he had turned and was gone and I was staring at the dead tv set and licking my lips that were dry as tomb-dust.

When I was sure they had both gone, I crossed to the French windows and secured them with a chair, and then I went to the phone. I had to call the police right away, of course; I was believing the mad Neanderthal story, but I knew that the light of morning might force me to discredit it; nevertheless, Bill Cuff the multiple murderer had been here, and the cops would have to know. Thank God I'd given my cousin the wrong address for Howard! I picked up the phone and started to dial the police.

To this day I don't know why I racked the phone before I'd finished dialing. Some hunch, I don't know what it was. I stood there in the diffused radiance of the tv lamp, still trembling from my recent interview with that ripper and his apeman sidekick, and for a few minutes I didn't do anything but breathe heavily, and then I turned and raced up the stairs.

Not until I saw the empty bed, the blanket and sheet on the floor, the open window, not till then did I face the fact that Bill Cuff would never have left me without taking along a hostage.

Nessa was gone!

CHAPTER IV

I caught the seven a.m. train for Boston. I hadn't slept or even lain down all night. The sole conclusion I'd come to was that I didn't dare ask for help in this job, not yet at any rate. I would be jeopardizing Nessa's life.

I had thought of the police. But they'd had two years to find Bill Cuff and failed. One hint that they were looking for him, and he with his crazy Old Companions would stamp out my wife's life as off-handedly as I'd squash a beetle. I'm a law-abiding citizen and I respect the enforcers of the law; but this was a special case. I'd done my civic duty other times, but now I was on a one-man crusade. I had to save Nessa. If I could chop down Cuff, well and good. But Nessa came first.

As the train shot along through countryside scattered with dying autumn foliage, swept with intermittent rains, I thought of my brother Howard and his work. On Odo Island he and six other top-grade brains were creating a space station for the United States—a man-made moon, the first jump to the stars—and equally important, a lookout post from which we could keep tabs on all of Earth.

A lot of the heavy forest on Odo was false; it couldn't be detected from the air, and the formation of the island prevented its being seen from the sea, but plenty of that green was only a big canopy shielding the small air field on which a great wheel-shaped space station had already been put together. 237 feet across, it would in the near future be carried off the earth, towed by the enormous three-stage rockets which were already waiting in hiding along the eastern coast of the States. One thousand miles up—one thousand plus—it would then become a satellite of Terra.

Odo was guarded by its coast, a real rock-bound wreckers' paradise, and by six brace of anti-aircraft guns. There were forty Marines based there, six scientists, and eighty-odd workmen. Everyone had been screened back to his grandparents, and evidently none of the Old Companions had been able to worm in, since Bill Cuff hadn't known where the artificial moon was being constructed.

Pompey Island was about twelve miles to the south of Odo. There wasn't anything on it but trees and the only chuckle I could muster during that whole train ride was at the picture of Bill Cuff at the head of a hundred Neanderthal men (all clad in mammoth skins and carrying stone-headed clubs) landing on Pompey and roaring over it in search of my brother and his metal moon.

I had no idea why I was to meet Cuff in Boston. For all I knew, Nessa might be held in New York, in Alabama, or in Evanston, Illinois. But I had to go to Boston, because I had no other lead whatever. I couldn't form plans because I was so totally in the dark. I just had to do what I could. And I had to be ready to think like lightning when I did meet Cuff and find out what was happening.

Just as we drew into the station, I used an old writer's trick: I swallowed a couple of dexedrine tablets so that for a few hours my fatigue would lie down and I'd have a kind of false vigor of intellect and muscles. I'd be mighty tired by morning, but for now I'd be at peak. I got off and took a taxi to a hotel near School Street. I bathed and shaved and checked my automatic and the extra clips in my jacket; then I ate an early supper and walked over to City Hall.

On the nose of five o'clock a gray car drew up and one of the men in the back seat rolled down the window and gestured me over. I got in beside the driver and we moved away into the traffic. Nobody said anything until we had left Boston behind and were almost into Lynn. Then Bill Cuff said from the back seat, "You seem pretty calm, Ray," and laughed. "That's the blood," he said admiringly. "That's the dark blood. A man would be fizzing and twitching and babbling his head off."

I had determined not to think any further than the rescue of Nessa. I wasn't going to bog down in speculations as to my humanness, or the truth of this whole theory of Cuff's; but even so, the chills chased over me when he said man like that. Wasn't I altogether human? Would I, too, eventually experience the dawn brain's awakening, the revulsion against humanity, the reversion to pre-historic emotion?

I said as casually as possible, "Seems you don't trust the dark blood any further than you could spit it, Bill."

"Not in you, not yet. I'm sorry about Nessa. She was a sensible precaution. You wouldn't think much of my wits if I hadn't taken her."

"Where is she?" I held my breath tensely.

"You'll see her at the end of the trip."

"And when's that?" My breathing relaxed a trifle.

"Few hours."

"He wants to know too much," said the driver. I looked over at him. He was a thick, short, shallow-templed fellow, gray of eye and straight of thin-lipped mouth. He had ears like a baby elephant's long unkempt hair draping over them. I could smell his breath three feet away.

"Shut up, Trutch," said Bill Cuff impatiently. "He's my cousin."

"But has he the dawn brain? Are you sure he—"

"Shut up. Just shut up," said Bill, and his voice was like that of a maniac holding himself in with a terrible effort.

"I don't think you ought to tell him things like—" persisted Trutch, and then Bill Cuff had leaned forward and given him a hell of a wallop on the side of the head with his open palm. The driver jerked forward and grunted and then he was quiet, as the car lurched and recovered. We were doing fifty. Cuff said, "Shut up! When I tell you that, do it!"

There were two other men in the back. One of them growled, "Easy, Bill. We live by the primal rage, but you must control it."

I turned and put my arm across the back of the seat and looked at the man who had spoken. He was another of the short and stocky breed. His eyes were snapping gray gems in a face as tan as a boot. He had more hair piled on top of his long skull than I ever saw on anyone but a movie actor: it was bright yellow, not gold but sulphur yellow, and slicked with oil. His features were broad and at the same time vulpine, the thickened muzzle of a fox. I had meant only to glance at each of them in turn, but my gaze was held by this Old Companion. His expression was good-humored and yet he radiated evil, an old, old wickedness commingled with piercing intelligence. When at last I managed to tear my eyes from him, I knew that this was the worst of my enemies. I could not have defended that by logic, but neither could I have been argued out of it. I would have faced five giant Bill Cuffs rather than this yellow-haired creature.

"My name is Skagarach," he said to me, bringing my eyes back to him involuntarily. "I am third leader in our muster of the Old Companions. You have met the second leader, Old One. That is the truth of our folk. In time, in generations, we shall all look so, and the effete refinements of Homo sapiens will be gone." He glanced at Bill Cuff, who towered beside him, watching me. "Bill is first leader. In two years he has become so. He killed nineteen of us to gain that leadership." Skagarach smiled, cunningly and drily. I gathered that he was not fond of my cousin. And that was my first piece of real hope.

"The man at the wheel," he went on, "is called Trutch. As far as I know he has no other name. The fourth is Vance." This last was a young fellow, about as wide as he was high, with the usual gray eyes.

"Are the eyes a distinguishing characteristic?" I asked.

"Some ninety per cent of us have them. You do yourself. But every gray-eyed man is not Homo-Neanderthal by any means."

"How do you—we—tell each other apart from men?"

"Actions: Cuff killed insanely, from a human viewpoint, that is, and then answered our telepathic call. Occasionally we have only actions, not mental communication, to judge by, and then we find the one who has gone berserk and test him. Sometimes the dawn brain returns to an Old Companion without the gift of telepathy."

"Suppose I were to say that I remembered being a caveman. How would you test that?"

Skagarach and Bill Cuff grinned. The other two seemed without humor. "Go ahead, tell us what you remember," said my cousin.

"I don't—but suppose I say, I remember hunting a mammoth...."

"You would be lying. You'd recall other things—mating with human women, being stalked to your death, fighting the upstart Man. You would have flashes of other centuries, of being named werewolf, vampire, hobgoblin, ogre, bugbear and demon. Always the violence, the antagonism to man, the slaying and being slain. Not the common everyday life, but the high and savage points."

"I see. You give me a swell opportunity to lie to you," I told him candidly. I had nothing to lose, for I wouldn't bother lying. I had a hunch it wouldn't do me any good in this swift job I had to do.

"There are other checks on you," said Skagarach. He leaned forward suddenly. "Truthfully—do you have stirrings when I say those things? Does your brain murmur the least surprise of faintest recognition?"

"Truthfully," I said, "no."

"Never mind," said he, sitting back again. "It took me 17 years to develop the memory fully. Others are given it by a knock on the head, or even, as Cuff here, gain it full-blown in a few days with no stimulus from outside. You be patient, Ray. It will come."

And when it does, if it does, I thought, I hope I have the strength to kill myself before I stop being a man and turn into one of these pre-historic horrors!

Then I remembered that they claimed telepathic powers. I glanced from one to another. Either my sudden thought hadn't reached them, or they hadn't minded its implications. I said tentatively, "Can you read the thoughts of other men?"

"Men, not other men," said Trutch viciously.

"Yes," said Skagarach.

Now I had spent a good many years around actors, and damned good ones at that. This Skagarach was an actor from the word go, but I believed that I was a better one. So I said carelessly, "Can you tell what I'm thinking?" and allowed my face to assume the tiniest lines of worry, the smallest indications of fear possible to the facial muscles. Skagarach said immediately, "You're fretting over your wife."

It was a good guess. He knew his book of reactions and signs inside and out. The only trouble was that I had at that moment been concentrating intently on a chocolate milk shake and a cheeseburger. I had even been saying the words over in my mind. So I knew that he had been trying to convince me of the truth of a lie, and that was another flake of hope for me.

It was a good thing for me that I had those few minute hopes. They were all I had.

CHAPTER V

In the late dusk of evening the car pulled off the road and rattled over a field full of boulders and stopped at the top of a high cliff overlooking the sea. We all got out and stretched our cramped legs. Bill Cuff walked along the edge of the foreland until he came to a trace of path. He called to us and we followed him down the nearly-sheer face of the promontory, myself trying not to look at the dark foam spattered sea so far beneath our feet.

At the base of the promontory was a beach. It had looked tiny from above; I found that it was large, for the ocean had long ago hollowed out a great cavelike place in the rock, and the beach ran back under the land for several hundred feet. There were dim blue searchlights set up at intervals, which would not have been seen from any distance; no ship would come closer than a mile to the coast here, and so the presence of Old Companions in the cavern would be kept secret.

Old Companions....

Great God! What a horde swarmed in that hidden hole, across that rock-canopied beach! There were about two hundred of them. The majority were duplicates, in breadth of frame and depth of chest, of Trutch and Vance. The faces were handsome or ugly, grotesque or plain, yet all held the concentrated savagery of my four escorts. Many had arms longer than normal. Some were so deformed that their gait as they crossed the sand on various errands was almost that of an ape that swings along on its knuckles. Again, several were tall and personable, like Bill Cuff.

They were all dressed darkly, in gray broadcloth or black wool jackets, crepe-soled shoes, no ties and no hats evident. Some of them were carrying things—submachine guns, handguns, even hand grenades—from broken crates to the six big boats that lined the water's edge. Others were giving orders in voices that were almost without exception gruff and barking. And everywhere I looked I caught the stare of gray eyes: eyes that took the blue glow of the searchlights and threw it back condensed and changed, so that from many dark faces there gleamed at me thin ovals of orange and crimson and green luminescence.

Now I knew for sure that the tale of the recrudescent apemen was no fable. Now the focused animal hatred of this pack washed over me like an unclean sea-wave full of crawling horrors and I realized fully and beyond a doubt that Bill Cuff's story was true, and that here in this cavern might well be the start of the finish of the human race.

"Where's Nessa?" I asked Skagarach. I spoke to him rather than to my cousin because I had a plan and this could well be the start of it.

"She's back there, I suppose," he said, gesturing to the rear of the beach. "First come and see the boats." He led me toward the dockless rim of the sea, and Bill Cuff came after us, glowering at him. I'd presumed he would hate any assumption of authority on Skagarach's part. The thing they called the primal rage bubbled near the surface in Bill Cuff.

The boats were very like LCPs, with big bow ports closed by movable ramps. Skagarach said, "Yes, very like LCPs," which of course was not mind-reading, but intelligent guessing of my first thought. "We ground them on the beach, then they can be backed off easily, because of their specially designed propellors and rudders. The power comes from a reactor operating with thermal neutrons, and late refinements have made it almost wholly silent. This is the perfect transportation for us."

"To Pompey Island, naturally," I said.

"Naturally," said Bill Cuff in a surly tone. "We're going to pay Howard a visit."

"But what good will that do?"

"Don't be a burbling, maundering, congenital idiot, Ray," said Bill irritably. "That space station is the answer for us. With it we'll command the world."

"But how will you get it into the sky?"

"The same way the men were going to do it. Tow it with three stage rockets." He relaxed his expression of potential murder, and gripped me by the shoulder. His hand was like a bear trap. "There are musters of the Old Companions lying in wait near every rocket station on the seaboard. As soon as we've secured possession of the space station, they'll know it; and within fifteen minutes the rockets will be on the way to Pompey."

"Oh, wait a minute," I said. I was consumed with impatience to see Nessa, but the sheer incredibility of this plot had to be coped with now. These men were stark crazy.... "If I dared to write up a yarn in which three-stage rockets were flown to an island and from there into the sky with a 237-foot-broad space station, my publisher would slit my throat with a rolled-up contract! Vampires are easier to believe than a wacked thing like that."

"Ray," said Bill Cuff, and suddenly from the growl in his voice I realized that I had been taking liberties with a savage cave-brute, "Ray, do we seem like fumblers to you?"

"No," I said.

"How do you think the men were going to do it?"

"I don't know, but I presumed they'd dismantle the station, after testing it, and tow it in parts into space, where they'd reassemble it."

"Dead wrong. They were going to carry it to the thousand-mile mark by three-stage rockets, yes; but as a whole, not in parts."

"I didn't think it could be done."

"It can with the rockets they have. There've been improvements since you read about rocketry last, Ray." Cuff looked superior. As if he'd had something to do with the improvements, instead of squatting somewhere in a swamp. "And that isn't all. Those rockets are going to be towed themselves—from their bases to the site of the man-made moon—by smaller vehicles built on the principles of the VTO planes."

VTO—Vertical Take Off. Yes, it was remotely conceivable....

"But all this thud-and-blunder business," I protested, turning to Skagarach. "You're dealing with the highest product of man. And you figure to take it over by a series of ambushes, wild attacks in the night, and in general the heavy hand of the apeman. It's straight out of a nut hatch."

Then Bill Cuff hit me. I saw the swing coming, and the trunklike arm sweeping round and up with a fist like a boulder on the end of it, and I started to duck, and then the mountain collapsed on my skull and the blue lights went out, wham!

CHAPTER VI

I came gradually out of a scarlet fog into a jet-black well. My head, which was aching abominably, was pillowed on something soft and warm and slightly moving. I heard mutters of guttural voices, the slap of waves on metal. I licked my dry lips and tasted salt. Blood? No, ocean salt. We were at sea. I was a little chilly. I shivered, tried to see something, and made out the dim figure of a person above me. The sky was moonless and inky. I was lying with my head in this person's lap. I breathed deep and said quietly, "Nessa?"

"Yes, Ray."

I didn't have words. I reached up and touched her face with my fingers, and she bent and we kissed. "You okay?" I said then.

"I'm okay," said Nessa. That was all. For now, that was enough.

"Anybody near us?" I looked up at her tense face.

"I am," said Skagarach. He moved into my vision, and I sat up, head pounding, and stared at him until I could make out his foxy features. "I'm sorry," he said under his breath. "Cuff is on the primitive side. So are we all ... but there ought to be limits. There was no sense in hitting you."

"I don't get it," I said. "Why is that big murder-machine the first leader, and not you, Skagarach?"

"Ah," he said. "Ah, yes. Some of us wonder about that too." For all his obvious intelligence, he was a sucker for a one-two compliment to the jaw.

"That was an awful belt he gave me," I said. Something had just occurred to me. "It kind of addled my brains. Lord, I'd like to hit him back for that!"

"Ray?" said Nessa uncertainly. She knew me for a strictly non-aggressive joe since I'd quit football.

"I feel—I feel furious," I said, and I hissed it low and aimed it at Skagarach. "I never had so much yearning to pulverize someone."

Skagarach leaned over and peered into my eyes. "Don't sit on it," he said. "Let it fume, let it rage. It may well be the primal anger. Let it have its way. Only—I don't suggest you hit Cuff."

"Not with my fists, anyway," I agreed. "Maybe with a gun butt."

"Let the rage bubble," he said, laughing almost without sound. "You'll do, Ray Rollins; I believe you'll do." He sat down, staring ahead.

I found Nessa's hand and squeezed it reassuringly. She must have been baffled by the things I'd said. Then I took up with Skagarach where I'd left off on the beach. "All this hand-to-hand combat rot," I said. "Where will that get you—us? Dealing with rockets and space stations, and doing it with submachine guns, after all. It's race suicide."

"You're thinking on the wrong tack. We are the primeval beings, yes; and we're facing, and prepared to use, the farthest reaches of scientific achievement. But look, Ray: if an intelligent caveman came among a group of moderns, and saw a gun lying there, and was taught how to use it, which would be the bright thing to do—snatch it and use it on them, or wade in with his fists?

"We intend to blot out Homo sapiens and we shall do it. But not with stone clubs, not with revolvers. No, we'll lay hands tonight on man's greatest weapon, the only weapon which can be turned against the whole globe: the space station. You object to our primitive methods. You're not thinking deeply enough. The pure science of the station, the rockets and the VTO tugs buffaloes you. You can't see a horde of men with handguns and grenades capturing those awesome devices."

"That's right, I can't."

"Why not? There is no more problem here than there is attacking a bank vault, or an outpost of soldiers. So far as the government knows, there is no secret army within its borders! They haven't the faintest notion that we exist, an army of manlike non-men.

"It's the broad conception that stumps you, Ray. So picture each operation by itself. The storming of the rocket ports—by quite adequate troops of ours, well-armed and savage. Then the towing of the rockets, by VTO tugs, to Pompey Island—this done by technicians and scientists who are not men, but Neanderthals. Then the locking of the space station to the rockets, and the takeoff for outer space. Sixty of us in these boats, plus twenty waiting with other musters at the rocket stations will man that moon. From attack on Pompey to blast-off from Terra should take from one to three hours."

"You are insane," said Nessa in a shocked voice.

"No," said Skagarach seriously, "we are sane. But we have fought for the existence of our race through too many thousands of years, in too many lands and too many ages, to have mercy now that our hour is at hand."

I felt as though I'd been dropped into icy water. Skagarach wasn't kidding. And Bill Cuff was worse than he.

And I had lied to them. I could picture in brain-shattering detail what they would do to Nessa when they discovered that; for my lie could blow up their whole scheme. They'd torture her, not me, for they needed me. I looked at the thought and I couldn't stand it.

I did the most cowardly thing a man could do: I stood up and betrayed my country, my world, and my entire breed. But I did it because I knew exactly how much I could take before I cracked—and while I might withstand their worst for a little while, they would inevitably do things to Nessa which I could not take.

"Skagarach," I said, "I won't try to fool you. I don't have any dawn memory. As far as I know I never ranged the fens or slew the upstart Man in the ages past." I was talking like him. He was an overwhelming personality. "But I know this: I feel a terrible, inchoate anger against almost everything. I think it must be what you call the primal rage. And I also feel a hell of a strong kinship with you, if not with Bill Cuff. I lied to you. My brother and the space station aren't on Pompey. They're on Odo Island."

"Well," he said easily, "well, I thought you might have been trying to outwit us. I thought we might have to flay your woman an inch at a time to make you talk. But by God, that knock on the cranium fixed you! Congratulations—and welcome to the Old Companions." He chuckled. "If you wonder why we trusted your first word to such an extent, I'll say that we knew the moon was on one of these islands. We knew that if it wasn't Pompey, it wouldn't be too damned far." He started forward in the boat. "I'll change our course," he said.

And it was at that moment that I realized something. I had turned traitor because I couldn't let my wife be maltreated. I had counted on a feeble plot, a one-in-a-thousand chance that I would be able to beat the Old Companions; and I'd known quite well that I was only excusing myself for my craven weakness. Only now did I remember that the real answer, the only thing a man could have honorably done, was to kill Nessa and myself immediately—to grip her and leap into the sea, and dive deep and deeper until we both drowned. Then my wife would have been safe from them, and I would be dead with a clean conscience.

But it was much too late to think of that now.

I flung myself down beside her, put my arms around her waist, and began softly and vividly cursing myself for the prize fool and the biggest yellow-livered skunk of all time.

CHAPTER VII

We came in toward the shores of Odo Island at ten minutes to midnight. Bill Cuff and Skagarach and Trutch and I were sitting on the top of the bow ramp in the lead boat, straining our eyes toward the small forested bit of earth ahead. Starshine showed us a broken coastline of rock that didn't look passable, not for a monkey. I said so. Bill Cuff muttered, "We can make it."

Behind us crowded the cave beasts, each of them equipped with at least one weapon; some had grenades slung in belts over their shoulders, others carried .45 revolvers, tommyguns, and rifles. Skagarach had apologized for not giving me a gun. He said that of course they couldn't trust me that far yet. I said it was okay. I had my own automatic and thank God they hadn't discovered it.

Bill Cuff said now, "Tell them to bring the boats in just under the rocks, Skagarach."

Yellow-hair nodded and then after a moment had passed and he had not moved, I said, "He isn't doing it," to Bill in a tone of inquiry.

"He's done it. He telepathed it to them."

"Why didn't you?" I asked. Cuff, looking very annoyed, stared away from me, and Skagarach laughed maliciously. "He can't telepath as smoothly as I, I'm afraid."

"Then why is he first leader?" I asked, chancing another swat on the head.

Bill Cuff, however, only stared at Skagarach evilly and said, "Because I'm the strongest of us all, and the smartest."

"That's not my opinion," said Skagarach.

"I'll show you proof if you want it," shouted Cuff angrily, but the yellow-haired one shook his head. "Not now, not now. This is our night."

The boats slid in beneath the walls of rock and the pilots skilfully halted them inches from the island. There was no way to go ashore except to leap to the rock and clutch and clamber upward. The rock wasn't sheer, but it was rough and cold and if not actually dangerous, at least mighty uncomfortable. At midnight the first Neanderthal—Bill Cuff—jumped from the first boat, and at 12:06 two hundred of us stood on the island of Odo.

It was very dark here, darker than it had been on the sea; there were trees everywhere. But I found I could see outlines without trouble, if not actual features within those outlines. Looking around me, I saw in this way the figure of a woman, and knew it was Nessa.

"Nessa! How did you get here?" I said, shocked. "You oughtn't to climb—"

"Trutch carried her on his back," said Cuff. "Now shut up. Here we go."

As we moved off toward the center of Odo, I grasped my wife's arm. She seemed to draw away slightly. "What is it?" I whispered.

"I don't know. I—they've told me what this is about, and you seem to be one of them," she said uncertainly.

What to do? Reassure her? In the midst of these keen-eared, ravening animals? "I don't know," I said. "I don't really know where I stand. Except that I feel mad clean through." That was for the Old Companions' benefit. At the same time I gently squeezed her arm twice, and catching her eye, winked. But in the dimness of the forest, I couldn't be sure she'd seen it.

We moved along an autumn-smelling trail that wandered through trees from which leaves fell in a constant erratic shower. The air was cold, a touch of sea-wind pimpling my flesh. I was in the forefront of the horde, with Cuff and Skagarach, Old One and Trutch and my wife Nessa. Now a scout came running back toward us, his gait a half-ape, half-dog loping. He spoke to Cuff in the hoarse brief gutturals of their primitive tongue.

"Trip-wires ahead," Cuff said. "Tell 'em, Skagarach."

The first warning devices, evidently: wires that would set off signals in the headquarters of the Marines, doubtless, when anyone stumbled across them. Bill Cuff laughed. We marched on until the scout halted us with a gesture. Bill picked up Nessa and ran forward and leaped into the air, graceful, a great cat of a man. There were four wires at varying heights. Warned of them, we cleared them all. I would have touched one, but Trutch was at my side watching me.

Now we slowed our pace while more scouts prowled ahead. In about five minutes we were halted again, this time by an eight-foot fence of barbed wire whose strands were only inches apart. "Oh, for God's sake," said Cuff, "they plant barbed wire in the woods and leave the trees hanging over it. How knuckleheaded do they think an enemy'd be? Climb up and jump over." He looked at Nessa. "I think we'll leave you here," he said slowly. "Ray cherishes your safety—and I might want a check on his loyalty. Trutch, keep her safe." The big-eared, lank-haired brute folded a paw over her wrist and dragged her to one side. I said sharply, "Treat her easily, you damn orangutan!" and started after them, till someone's open hand caught me on the chest and shoved me rudely on my tail. I got up and Nessa was gone.

We moved into the trees. I shinnied up a smooth trunk for a couple of feet. Topping the fence, we launched ourselves into space—we looked like dark monkeys pouncing on a farmer's garden—and came to earth with soft thuds and here and there a jolted grunt. We went forward once more.

Now the trees were thinner and up ahead there were strange gleams and reflections in a darkness that appeared deeper than that which we had left behind. Of course, the canopy that looked like forest from the sky; and beneath it, the buildings and the field and the man-made moon. My blood grew a little colder. The incredible consequences of this expedition, if successful, hit me with the kick of a shod hoof. The end of man ... the end of man ... words so staggering you couldn't actually take them in. The end of man. Thanks to me....

The Old Companions were bunched, two hundred strong in a great knot of dimly-seen figures. Bill Cuff said to Skagarach, "Have them spread out. We go in from this side on a wide front."

Skagarach sent the mental order, and the crew thinned and left us. "You stick with Vance," my cousin said to me. "Just do as you're told. He'll keep you near me, but out of my hair." He bent toward me. "No funny stuff," he said malignantly. "No whooping and hollering to wake 'em up, Ray, boy. No last-minute regrets."

"No, Bill, no regrets." The falsehood of the century, I thought.

Vance carried a big .45 Colt. He was the squat young lug I'd met in the car. He prodded me with the barrel of his weapon and waved me off to the right. Now we were in a line, barely visible to one another, and we began to move slowly over the level ground, crouching, being as silent as so many shadows. I stepped on a stick and broke it and Vance dug his revolver painfully into my ribs.

I had to warn the humans! My fate and—yes, even Nessa's, didn't matter worth a tinker's dam. All the important personal conceits and fears and longings were flushed out of me now. If I'd been a coward, I was now not a strong man, but simply a man, and I'd been absorbed into my race and made its representative. If I was torn apart by these throwbacks it wouldn't even hurt.

But I didn't have an idea in my head.

We neared the field, and its diffused lighting, so like that in the blue cavern, showed me and my fellow attackers the shapes of monstrous unknown creations of metal, of square housings and low machine shops and sheds and barracks. Vance drew a little ahead of me. I heard him cock his Colt. And the idea I had determined to have came to me. It wasn't much of an idea. But the instant it struck me I put it into action, because I was facing great brute force and had no time for complex plots or civilized reasoning.

I took one swift step forward and smacked Vance behind the shoulder as hard as I could, an overhand blow with every ounce of muscle I could summon. At the same time I drew my automatic from beneath my jacket.

The reflex I'd hoped for was Vance's instinctive yank on the trigger of that .45. Instead he moved to the side, swung his upper torso around, and fired point-blank at me.

His slug scorched along my ribs under the left arm, a leaden chunk of fire; I fell sideways and snapped a shot back at him. It was luck; I blew in his eye and tore out the back of his head.

He fell on top of me, and I squirmed around and shoved his body away.

At the sound of the shots every Old Companion leaped forward. That saved my skin. I hurled Vance off me, leaped up, and ran on to catch the Neanderthals, my torn side shrieking in pain.

A form cut across before me and a hand clamped on my arm while our forward charge continued. Skagarach's fox-face dipped sidelong toward me and he said, "What was it? Who did it?"

"I think it was Cuff," I panted.

"What?"

"Looked like him. Whoever it was, he scored on me."

"Bad?"

"Not very."

"It couldn't have been Cuff," he growled, half to himself. "Primal rage isn't primal idiocy!"

"Somebody was idiotic," I said. We were nearing the field and the lights were brightening. I could see men running from the barracks and the sheds.

"We'll find out who it was. By God!" he said, lifting his voice. "When this is done, you'll see the fool's head torn from his shoulders!"

Then the field lit up around us and the machine guns started to chatter.

It must have been automatic, the banks of searchlights must have been triggered by our vanguard crossing electric eyes on the edge of the field. But the Marines, warned by my shot, were at their gun emplacements and ready. Several dozen Neanderthals died in that first couple of seconds before we all went to earth. I heard the choking screams and the thunk of bullets striking flesh. I dove to the ground. The air whined just over my head and I knew I hadn't hit dirt an instant too soon.

I hoped that Bill Cuff, that magnificent target, had been chopped in half....

Cuff's grenaders got into action then. There was the crump-crump and the screeching as grenades tore holes in earth and sandbags and metal and men. A Neanderthal stood up just in front of me and peered forward against the lights' glare to check on the damage, and as I looked up at him I saw the entire top of his skull explode as a dozen slugs hit it. There were more grenades and then a tommygun opened up. I crawled forward.

Only the powers that be know why there were only forty Marines on Odo Island. There should have been four hundred. I suppose they counted on the dead secrecy to guard it. That, and the assurance that no foreign power could get within fifty miles of the place. Who could have foreseen Neanderthals from a past age in crepe-soled shoes?

The Marines took a fearful toll of the Old Companions before they were obliterated. Within four or five minutes they had been overpowered and smashed into the bloody earth; but no more than seventy Neanderthals stood over their bodies and looked toward the great wheel-shaped satellite. I was sick to see that Bill Cuff and Skagarach were among them. And Old One, the true primordial brute, was there, though his left arm hung useless and dripped gore.

Then, before any of us could even speak, the sheds and barracks erupted more men: the eighty workers, hard strong men—and they too were armed.

My hopes soared, even as the submachine guns began to talk in staccato bursts of ear-piercing sound.

CHAPTER VIII

The workers were inadequately armed. A few revolvers and little ammo. Lead pipes and with things that looked like weapons but were actually odds and ends of tools they'd snatched up when they'd heard the battle start. They were armed with guts, but it wasn't enough.

They swept across the field, dropping and struggling up, bulling ahead to come to grips with an enemy they didn't understand, couldn't fathom. Perhaps a score of them survived the tommyguns, got in amongst the Neanderthals. I saw one big fellow grab two ape-necks and smash the brutish skulls together, and even thirty feet off I could hear the bone splinter. When that man went down writhing I was as shocked as though he'd been my brother.

Where was Howard, anyway?

No one was watching me. I stepped swiftly backward, turned and ran for the satellite. There was no hiding place there worth a damn. I stood against its gleaming silver side towering high above my head. I saw the end of the fight; even had my chance to take a small crack at the devils myself. A workman was brawling with a carbine as Old One came up behind him lifting him over his head and bringing his body down across an uplifted knee. There was a hoarse scream and then a loud crack as the man's back snapped. I lifted my automatic and shot the creature through the heart.

I looked for Skagarach then, and for my cousin, but they weren't in sight. I shoulder holstered my gun. The last worker now had been dropped and the Old Companions came toward the great wheel and me.

There were—I counted, automatically and hopefully—there were some fifty or more on their feet. Bill Cuff strode ahead of the horde, untouched and grinning wolfishly. And there was the ugly figure of Skagarach beside him.

I tackled Cuff immediately. "Skagarach says I can't have a gun, but I sure could have used one just now," I said, hoping he hadn't seen me firing the gun now, safely out of sight under my shirt.

Bill looked wickedly at Skagarach. Then he pulled a revolver from his belt and stuck it out to me. "Take it, you earned it."

Skagarach smirked; but his gray eyes flashed sullen hate at the big man, and I hoped anew that I could split them and make a rebellion in the ranks of the Neanderthals.

"I am second leader now," said Skagarach loudly, "as Old One is dead. I should have a voice in decisions such as that," and he gestured toward the gun I held. "However, I think Ray has earned it, too. Now let's get to business. We have to let the other musters know at once, so the three-stage rockets will come to Odo as fast as possible," he said, lifting his voice until it was a hoarse bellow. "Everyone quiet. This is a distance job, and difficult."

Bill Cuff watched him impatiently as the fox-face crinkled into furrows of thought. Then he said to me, not bothering to lower his voice, "You might think they'd have radioed for help, or that the scientists would be doing that now. Well, we've got hand-jammers on the LCPs that have been working since we touched the coast." Hand-jammers, invented only this year, tiny boxes that could jam radio, phone, television, in fact any method of communication from one spot to another. Odo was therefore isolated!

"Won't silence be suspicious?" I asked him. "Don't you suppose they'll begin to wonder, over on the mainland?"

"Hell, no. Too dangerous to keep up steady communications to a place that's supposed to be as dead secret as this hunk of rock. You can bet only emergencies would make 'em radio from here." He laughed. "You see, we laid our plans well."

I had just thought of something, something big. I blurted it out before I'd more than recognized it as a possibility. "Here, Bill, for God's sake, how do we know this thing is ready to leave the earth?" I pointed to the metal moon. "How do we know it won't just come apart when we try to lift it?"

"There again," said Cuff, as Skagarach gave him a dirty look and obviously tried to concentrate, "we haven't just presumed, or taken our chances. We've been watching the three-stage rockets—and for two days they've been ready to go in an instant's notice. And two of our fellows reported that they had stand-by orders; they're on the rocket crews," he added smugly.

Skagarach said, "I've established contact with Milo. Now will you clamp your goddam jaws shut!"

Bill Cuff nearly hit him. I caught Bill's eye and gave a grin, as one who would say, Let the jerk strut, you can handle him later. Then, Bill turning away, I winked at Skagarach. Both ends had to be played against the middle fast and furious in this game.

"All right," said Skagarach finally. "Milo will keep touch while they make their moves, and so will Summers from post three. Now we have to get into this thing."

Cuff, overbearingly, shouted orders; and the Old Companions scattered to look for the entrance. A strange thing happened then, a weird thing to watch. Two of them remained standing before us as the others left. Cuff shouted at them. They did not move. Skagarach shook them by a shoulder each, and they collapsed without a sound. They had died on their feet, of wounds sustained in the fight. I was glad to see two more gone and at the same time I felt a chill at the tenacity of such a race.

A cry announced that the door had been found. We three ran over. There was a portable ramp running up to the sleek side. A door like that in a commercial plane showed its outline above the incline. Eagerly Cuff and several others leaped upward. And now they hit their first real unexpected obstruction, for the door could not possibly be opened from the outside. Not without TNT. It had been closed from within and it stared blindly at the Old Companions and in a moment they began to snarl and curse.

I turned away from them so that they wouldn't see my face, which I knew must be hopeful; and across the brilliant field toward us I saw a man and a woman approaching. The man, or rather brute, was the gray-eyed Trutch. The girl was my wife Nessa, and she was walking as though she were in pain.

CHAPTER IX

I ran and caught her in my arms. "Nessa! What is it?"

"I twisted my ankle," she murmured, not looking at me. "This man made me walk anyway." Then I'd knelt and lifted her in both arms. "Don't bother," she said, struggling half-heartedly. "I can go alone."

She believed that I was a beast-man myself, and with Trutch flapping his elephant ears alongside us, I couldn't tell her different. And of course, she might be right at that....

"You feel all right otherwise?" I asked her, gently. She nodded. She was pale and haggard and her hair hadn't been brushed for twenty-four hours, but for all that she was the most beautiful woman in America. The feel of her in my arms gave me strength. I carried her over and set her lightly on the ramp. The leaders were still fumbling around the door.

Then suddenly the door of the space station swung open.

I got a little sick.

My brother Howard stood there. He stood erect and his slight, white-smocked figure looked oddly noble above the dark-clad Neanderthals. He held his arms up; some of the Neanderthals raised their guns.

Howard said slowly, "No, don't do it. Please don't do it. You don't understand. This is security for all of us!"

They glanced at one another, Cuff's brows drew into a scowl, and then Skagarach, the best brain of the lot, cried, "Don't harm this man!" and leaped forward, stood with his body against the door so that it could not be closed. "He's necessary to the operation—he's vital." The Old Companions muttered and the weapons lowered. Skagarach said to Howard, "You think we've come to destroy the satellite. You believe we're aroused citizens, or religious fanatics, bent on halting the experiment. You're wrong."

That was, of course, the reason why my brother had opened the door: to keep what he thought were ordinary people from wrecking the man-made moon. From within the wheel he had seen them conquer the guards and workers, and by their plain clothes had imagined them to be a bunch of fanatics who couldn't stand the idea of a policeman in the sky.

If the Old Companions had worn uniforms, Howard might have kept that door shut, and the whole Neanderthal plan would have collapsed. But he thought he could reason with these creatures.

Skagarach pushed past him and disappeared in the station. Bill Cuff, herding Nessa and Trutch and me ahead of him, followed, and the Old Companions trooped up the ramp behind us. Howard had seen me and was walking at my side. "If they don't want to destroy it, what do they want?" he kept repeating. I kept my mouth grimly shut. I couldn't explain it to him now, I couldn't begin to. "What are you doing here, Ray?" he asked then, and again I was stuck for an answer.

Trutch bent close to me, smirking. "Why, he brought us here," he said.

The important Old Companions assembled in what was intended to be the scientists' main living room, a section of the wheel lined with fold-up bunks and empty tv screens. From what little knowledge I had of the theory of the space station, I could identify the air purification system's tubes, the emergency geiger counters, the oxygen vents and, through a partly-open locker door, a space suit. The tv screens were either for communication within the ship or connected with the cameras that would be trained on Terra 24 hours a day.

"Where are the others?" Bill Cuff asked Howard. "The other scientists?"

"Throughout the wheel."

"Good. They won't be hurt. You're all going to come in handy for us; three of our experts were killed on that field," said Cuff, his face dark and his teeth clenched so tightly I could hear them grind together.

"Who the hell planned that suicidal charge?" I asked.

"Our leader," said Skagarach drily. "Mister Cuff."

The primal rage, my last hope, welled and subsided in Cuff as plainly as mercury in a thermometer. With what must have been a really superb effort he said in a quiet voice to Howard, "I'll fill you in, cousin, on what's happening," and proceeded to do so concisely and accurately.

Howard became pale, but bending forward he followed Cuff with attention and didn't open his mouth until Cuff had finished. Then he said just two words. "My God!" He looked at me. "And you're with them?" he asked.

"What else? I have the dark blood," I said. He made as if to say something, and then looked at Cuff.

"So do you," Bill told him.

Skagarach said, "I think Summers has been killed. Milo is being shelled with mortars, but his muster is winning. We should have the three-stage rockets here within half an hour."

The other scientists, five men ranging from thirty to fifty years old, had been brought in by Neanderthals. Cuff glanced at them now and then said to Howard, "I want you to take us on a tour of the station immediately. I want you to show me and Skagarach, and our technical officers, exactly how everything is worked, from the H-bomb launchers to the refuse outlets. Eventually you'll come over to us, Howard; but for now you've got to show us under pressure, I realize." His eye roamed the room. He pointed to the tallest scientist, a man nearly as bulky as Bill Cuff himself. "What's his job?"

"Communications technician," said Howard blankly.

On the words, Cuff was out of his chair, hurtling across the room; he shot his great arms out and gripped the astounded scientist by the throat and the top of his head. Whirling, he flying-mared the man over his shoulder, and as the scientist's heavy frame nearly touched the floor, Cuff perked upward again, so that the whole body was snapped like a blacksnake whip. There was a terrible cracking sound and the man's form went limp. Cuff dropped the body to the floor and stepped over it.

"Only an example, Howard," said the Neanderthal easily. He came back to his seat. Nessa was sobbing hysterically, and all the men were white as chalk.

Skagarach said, "Probably unnecessary, but vivid enough," and laughed. Cuff said, "All right, Howard, will you show us the station?"

"Do it," I said to my brother in a low tone. He looked at me and his eyes were a little wet. He shook himself and said, "Come on," in a dull voice. Howard was not afraid of anything, I know, but Cuff's unvoiced threat, to act with each of the other scientists in turn as he had with the communications technician, appalled my brother and dulled his reasoning—even as Nessa's danger had dulled mine in the boat. We followed him through an automatically operated door into the next chamber.

For half an hour we worked through the space station, Howard pointing out in an emotionless voice the personnel quarters, control room, the gauge panels, fuel storage tanks (for the small rocket clamped to the center spoke of the wheel and reserved for emergency flight back to Terra), the space suits and the many instrument panels. We saw television cameras so powerful that from the 1,000-mile altitude they could pick up movements as small as those made by a single man on a prairie. We saw the astrodome, the oxygen supplies, the air blower pump, the air locks and moon-to-earth radios; the recreation area and the radar equipment. Everything that would support life in space.

Last of all we saw the weapons: the levers that would release the hell-bombs and guided missiles, the aiming mechanisms, the terrible arsenal that was to threaten the world and keep it under control, at the benevolent mercy of the men who lived within the wheel.

Bill Cuff exulted. "In five days," he said, and then stopped. I knew what he meant. In five days all the Neanderthals on earth would be congregated in specified sanctuaries, and mankind would die. These projectiles would mop up the cities and towns, and the Old Companions would then sweep over the countrysides, slaying what remained of Homo sapiens.

One thing which we'd been shown had given me an idea. One of those hundreds of gadgets and mechanisms.

Queerly enough, I wouldn't ordinarily have thought of it as a weapon.

It was the air blower pump.

CHAPTER X

Skagarach said, "They're here!" so sharply that it startled all of us, even Cuff. He continued more quietly. "They've brought down two of the rockets and the third will be here soon." He went on, and the other Old Companions crowded around him, listening eagerly as he told of the battles as the news was telepathed to him. I looked quickly for my guard, Trutch. He was turned with his back to me. I moved swiftly across to where Howard stood talking to Nessa. They saw me coming and their faces hardened. I started talking in a monotone, pitching my voice to reach them alone.

"Do you two still think I'm pulling a quisling?" I drew my automatic and handed it to Howard. "Put that away, quick. Now listen. We're going to whip these cave bastards. Don't ask questions, just answer, and make it fast. How do you run the air blower pump up to full capacity?"

Howard looked puzzled but not quite so uncertain of me. He gave me brief explicit instructions.

"And what would the effect be?" I asked.