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Title: Tomorrow the World!

Author: Robert W. Krepps

Illustrator: W. E. Terry

Release date: July 23, 2021 [eBook #65902]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOMORROW THE WORLD! ***

TOMORROW THE WORLD!

By Geoff St. Reynard

Can the past affect the future? What if
you remembered to the dawn of time when you
hated man and decided to destroy him—today!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
September 1952
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

It was like a cave, a great vaulted cave which echoed back my first hesitant movements on the slab and tossed them from wall to wall until the darkness about me was all one vast rustling. I felt my skin prickle into gooseflesh. In that moment of waking I was oddly frightened. I had no memory of location. I might have been in a subterranean grotto, with enormous stalagmites of supergrotesque shape rising all about me in the thick gloom.

I sat up. The slab was cold beneath me. Directly in front of it towered a thing like a nightmare skeleton of stone.

It was just that: the fossil of a duckbilled dinosaur. I had gone to sleep on a marble bench in the palaeontology room of the museum.

I laughed. The panic that had touched me was gone, and I felt ashamed of myself. Not for falling asleep, because I had been very tired; but ashamed of the fear.

Lord knew how long I had slept. It was black night without and within, and no sound save that of my own movements came to me. The museum must have been closed for hours. The guards had missed me on my bench behind the dinosaur. I stood and shook myself and smoothed the rumpled suit, and began to grope my way between exhibits toward the entrance hall. I left the reptilian skeletons behind—not without a certain relief, for they were awesome sleepers to pass among—and was striding down a dim pathway between glass cases when I heard the footsteps.

A watchman was coming toward me. I could see the reflection of his flashlight. I halted indecisively, growled at myself, and went on. I had a perfectly valid excuse for being there. They could hardly do anything to me.

The guard was big, about my size, and his flash jumped in his hand when he saw me. Then he hurried forward. I grinned into the glare.

"Sorry to scare you—"

"What the hell you doing here, bud?"

I did not like him in the least. "I fell asleep in the bone room. Just woke up."

"That's what they say, bud, that's what they say." He was breathing in my face. I do not care for secondhand hamburg with onions. "Who are you?"

"Bill Cuff, I write for the adventure mags, maybe you've seen my yarns."

"No, I ain't. How come you fell asleep, bud?"

"Cuff," I said, "Bill Cuff. I was knocked out. I mean I was tired. Been working nights on a piece that doesn't want to jell."

"That's what they say, bud." I was getting good and sick of that line. Three times was more than enough. He didn't think so. "That's what they say. Fell asleep, huh? In a room full o' jewelry that'd bring a nice price even if you melted it down. Relics. We got a brooch over there that Napoleon gave to Catherine of Aragon. Make a nice haul by itself."

"I dare say, especially as she died some centuries before he was born. A unique bit of trinketry indeed." I disliked this guard more with each word. "You knucklehead," I said, "I told you I fell asleep. I was looking for a watchman just now."

"That's what they say. You come on with me. We got to see a cop, bud."

"For the love of—I can identify myself. Here's my driver's license."

"Stole, probably. We've had sneak-thieves in here before. You come on with me, bud."

I counted ten. "Cuff, Bill Cuff." His stupidity, his dark stolid bulk behind the persistent flashlight were angering me. "All right, lets see a cop."

He gripped my arm. "I don't like to be touched and handled." I said. I knocked his hand off. "Here, here," he yelped, "don't get tough or I'll have to rough you up a little."

He clutched my arm again. A scarlet curtain of rage shut down over my senses. I reached out and took his throat between my hands, dragged him to my chest, tightened my fingers and pressed and twisted till his flashlight dropped to the stone floor and went out with a pitiful tinkle. There in the unbroken dark of the deserted museum I held him until he was dead, until his head was turned over his shoulder and his popping eyes stared sightlessly down his backbone. Then I threw him into a case of snuff boxes, and went on to the entrance and let myself out and walked away down the moonlit street.

CHAPTER II

For a long while I walked alone with my cold rage. It was, well, most curious is a mild way to describe it. I had never been a man of violence and fury. Only in my adventure yarns had I spread gore and destruction abroad. I thought back over my twenty-eight years of life. I didn't believe I had ever even hit anyone before tonight. Yet I had taken enormous pleasure in the wanton brutality. Even after my anger had died, I felt no regret whatever for the murder of the guard. He had been a stupid man.

I found myself wondering about that after I had said it half-aloud. I didn't know why I had put the emphasis on man. You might have thought I was a woman.

Going aimlessly up one street and down another, now staring ahead and now gazing up at the full moon riding in its field of India-ink sky, I eventually saw that I was near the museum again. Some obscure curiosity took me past its doors. Just as I passed them, craning my neck foolishly as though I could see through their oak and bronze, half a dozen men burst out into the street. Automatically I speeded my pace. Then they yelled, and were after me. I ran.

What smirking fate had pushed me back to the damned place? From my position on the sidewalk, my attitude of looking intently at the doors, my haste thereafter, they had leaped to the thought that I had just emerged from the museum. I thought of fingerprints, of all kinds of clues I might have left behind. I ran like a spooked steer.

Reason left me. I caught the last wisp of a fleeting amazement: could this murderous, panicky creature be Bill Cuff, hitherto a sane and sober pulp writer?

I turned a corner, vaulted over a hedge and flung myself prone behind it. The pursuers—museum guards, for evidently the police had not arrived—pounded by, yelling to each other. When they had gone I darted over to the building that shadowed this plot of earth, kicked in a window, knocked away shards of glass from the frame and let myself down into the basement of the museum. Swiftly I blundered my way between work-benches and unfinished exhibits until I had found the door. Down a long black hall I padded, snorting through my nose and peering back frequently. Like a beast, said a tiny voice in the depths of my brain; like a stalked beast.

I found a door, steps that led upward. I passed the first floor and then the second. My shins were barked, my nose bled from a smack against an unseen wall. I licked the blood off my lips. The stairs ended and I was on the third floor. Here the moon slanted its cool rays into the windows, unhampered by nearby buildings. I could see quite well. My feet seemed to know where they were going. I passed through the hall of mammals, glancing aside at the dusty elephants, the two giraffes in their great cage of glass, the family of sea lions frozen forever in attitudes of stuffy majesty. My leather heels tapped loudly in the thick silence. I bent and took off my shoes, stuffing them into the pockets of my coat. Then I came to the central well, and leaning over the balcony I looked down at the hall of dinosaurs. Their bizarre frames were jagged splotches of black in a lesser blackness. Then the lights went up on their floor, and as I, two stories above, drew back my head with an involuntary snarl, guards hurried across the floor between the fossils, calling back and forth. I heard them say something about the broken window. I had trapped myself. I did not consider that important. Something in me knew I was heading for sanctuary.

I thrust my head over the railing again, like a fox on a cliff regarding a pack of hounds at fault. Chance made one of the hounds peer upward. There was a loud shout from below as the guard saw me.

Dashing along the passage between rail and wall, I entered the art gallery, traversed it, and came to the geology hall. Here was a replica of a Pennsylvania cavern, through which visitors could wander to gawk at stalactites and artificial springs and plaster-and-plastic underworld creatures—dead-white salamanders, strange little blind bugs, crawling unnamed worms stuck to the synthetic rock with hidden adhesives. I dived through the mouth of this weird exhibit, bruising myself heedlessly; rounded heaps of faked stone, scraped skin off my knuckles as I fended off obstacles that seemed to hurl themselves at me in the murk, at last came to the back of the cave and turned and squatted there on my hams, fingertips trailing against the cool hardness of the sham rock floor.

The moon was dropping; now it looked in a window opposite the cave, finding its way between the icicle forms of stalactites, just grazing my dark blue suit here and there. I bent my head and stared at the ivory huntress of the skies. Her full round belly was gravid with portent. I felt that all sorts of shattering events were shaping within her, that something alien and terrible and withal glorious was about to be born.

CHAPTER III

I could hear no sounds of pursuit as yet. I thought back over the past half hour. I still experienced no shred of remorse. The man had deserved to die. He had laid hands on me without provocation. He had been stupid. He had been a man.

Again that odd emphasis stirred a wonder in my mind, which vanished before I could grip it. I looked about me at what I could discern of the artificial cavern. I felt at home here. Then my memory played me a trick. I thought I had been in this place before, with others of my kind (my kind? what the hell?), and we had squatted thus and hearkened to the hunting cries of great carnivores and of—I grasped too quickly and too consciously for the rest of the thought and it was gone. But I could have sworn that I was going to remember the blood-roaring of a band of men.

What the hell, indeed! Had my wild adventure tales got under my skin and turned me lunatic?

That idea lasted for about a breath and a half. I knew I was cold sane. So, coldly and sanely, I groped in my memory for whatever experience I had turned up a fragment of. It was dim but it was certainly there, a scene painted in faded oils on dark canvas. I was in a cave with others of my kind, hulking broad-chested shapes in the gloom, and outside rose the howling of our pursuers. I felt the hair bristle on my neck and my forehead creased with rage. Then the lights went on in the geology hall, dispelling the picture.

I curled myself down behind the biggest of the stalagmites. I was wholly in shadow. I lay perfectly still, and my heart slowed its beat so that the blood hissed more quietly in my ears and I could hear with wonderful clarity. Guards spoke nearby. They were searching for me, checking methodically through every cranny of the hall. I flexed my fingers. A silent chuckle shook me.

One came cautiously to the entrance of the cave and bent and stared futilely. I saw him glance around for his companions, then advance slowly into the place. When he was nearly above me I rose as swiftly as a panther. He had no time to drag in breath for a yell. I clamped his mouth tight with one hand, broke his neck with the other. It was done beautifully. In that moment I found pride in my perfect coordination, in my excellence as a killing machine as deadly as a king cobra. I laid him down in shadow. I traded my coat for his uniform jacket, which was too snug in the shoulders but fitted well enough otherwise. I put on my shoes and his visored cap and walked out of the cave. I went along the aisle, face averted from the other guards, and found a stair well and slipped into it.

Up went the hue and cry before I was halfway down!

I leaped to the second floor entrance, feeling their eyes already on my back as I passed through it, and went loping for the nearest window, a tall square of moontouched glittering. I hurled the thing open, swung onto the sill, and launched myself into space without even looking at the ground. It rushed up at me. As naturally as a cat might have done it, I landed on toes and fingers. Then I was running.

No shouts broke out behind me. They had not seen my leap. I shed the jacket and cap as I ran. Then I remembered my coat, lying across the dead guard. No identification there—until they had time to check dry-cleaner's marks. I had an hour or two at least.

I headed for my hotel, a dingy, half-respectable pile on the edge of the downtown district. An hour to pack, and I would be on my way. There was something, or someone, calling to me from a great distance. I did not know what it was nor where.

My instincts would carry me to it. I wasted no time in wondering. I let my mind slip out of gear, put my whole energy into my traveling.

When I had run far enough, I found an owl cab and let it carry me the rest of the distance. It seemed oddly alien to me to trust to anything but my own powerful legs; but I forced myself to sit back and let the civilized habits of Bill Cuff take the upper hand. I would rest for a little while.

CHAPTER IV

As I stuffed things into my big battered Gladstone I found myself changing.

A cryptic statement, that, and one which requires explanation; yet how can I say just what it was like, this metamorphosis? At first I was the same creature that had crouched behind the false stalagmite and slain the guard, then had leaped from the second-story window to flee into the night. This was a—I was about to say a wholly physical being. That isn't true. There was brainwork of a sort behind its actions, but an alien brainwork. Could you understand the thoughts of an ape? Could you describe them if you did?

At any rate, I slid away from this physical being, imperceptibly, until Bill Cuff the prosaic pulpster seemed in the ascendant. Touching familiar things: my typewriter, sport shirts, cigarette lighter, a stack of manuscript—appeared to bring me back to what had all my life been normality.

Yet this creates the portrait of a sort of Jekyll-Hyde personality, an extreme example of schizophrenia. I would not have you believe this for a moment. I was not two souls warring in a single body, nor a lunatic of any sort.

No. I was not two people. I was a sleeper who had awakened in a manner not explained, not understood, but acceptable at once as quite natural. I found myself in a body which I had already been occupying for twenty-eight years and two months and seven days. There was no other personality in this body with me. The body was mine. The mind therein, fully developed along its own lines, was my mind.

The body and mind were mine, but the I—the older I—which had wakened was of somewhat different stuff. It had taken the body and mind (perhaps while I slept on the marble bench, perhaps during the brief argument with the guard), merging with them and dominating them. Yet the dual brain, the single body with new proclivities, were one, were all Bill Cuff. They differed but they were one.

I have said that before this night I had never even struck anyone. Yet there had always been the possibility that I might; might strike and slay, go berserk as I had now done. I had written many tales of brutal violence. Without my knowledge, there had been the seeds of savagery within me. They had flowered.

I looked in the mirror. I saw a well-set-up young fellow, a little broader than average for my six feet, heavy-boned, not much excess fat. My face was broad too, with high cheekbones and a small mustache and wide gray eyes, under an unruly thatch of thick black hair. I had a rather unintellectual look for a writer; it had always annoyed me. But I didn't look brutal. I had a sort of mild-mannered air, like a wider Jimmy Stewart.

In all that night I never questioned anything for more than a second or two until I came to pack my belongings. Then the lifelong habits and prejudices came back to make me ask myself for an accounting. No remorse, nor fear, nor any such weak emotions; simply curiosity at the changes.

What is it, I asked myself; reincarnation?

That would explain many things, including the paradox of two individuals in one—who were not two, had never been two, yet were different.

Postulate a gorilla, reborn in a man. His racial memories come to life after a certain period of time. He is still a man, has the reasoning ability of a man, is thoroughly Homo sapiens in everything, except that suddenly he can swing through the trees and can think in a manner strange to man—a furtive, sly, cunning, beastly way, if you like, but a way that will help to preserve him even in the stone jungles of man.

As I said this to myself, I caught at one phrase therein. Swing through the trees.

It was obvious that my physical powers had undergone a terrific change. I did not remember my hands ever being so powerful before. Never, certainly, had my reflexes been so flawless. Why, take but one instance: my leap from the second floor of the museum. That leap yesterday would more than likely have cost me two fractured ankles.

Superstitiously I looked in the mirror again and felt my muscles. Had they grown overnight, bulging out into the great biceps of whatever primitive entity had emerged within me? So far as I could tell, they were just my old muscles—not bad for a writer, because I swam a lot and did calisthenics regularly, but surely no marvels as muscles go. The change appeared to be in my use of them. Instinctively I could employ them in the most effective way. What could that be but a racial memory acting beneath the surface of the skin?

Other implausible explanations of the business occurred to me as I packed. I discarded them. Nothing seemed to fit except the abrupt return of a personality from eons ago, some great brute out of my lineage. That chimed with the curious recollection I had had in the cave, and with the accent I had several times put upon the word man to describe my enemies. A gorilla? I laughed to myself. An intriguing thought, indeed! I did not for a minute believe it. But what?

CHAPTER V

I caught the five A.M. train for another big city—never mind which. I had about two hundred dollars in my wallet, a fair selection of clothes and essentials in my Gladstone, and the portable typewriter in its beat-up case. For a while I was well enough provided for. I settled back in the reclining chair, watched the dawn come up beyond the windows of the train, and listened with half an ear to the whispering voice that was calling to me from the unknown.

An hour passed. I was drowsing, comfortably, my eyes shut. Then in an instant I was wide awake. Someone was watching me. I felt their gaze through my eyelids. As though moving in my sleep I turned myself around, opened my eyes the merest slit. It was the girl across the aisle. I observed her carefully. She was a pretty blonde, and yesterday's Bill Cuff would have been flattered to find her regarding him. Not I! A steady regard was a menacing thing.

I made sure she was alone. Then I opened my eyes wide and said, "Do I know you?" It flustered her. She turned pink and said confusedly, "I—I don't think so!"

I had one of those singular picture-thoughts, that seemed to come and go unbidden in my mind. I saw another female of this girl's race, whom I had taken from her people. I had desired her deeply, and later had trusted her more than I should.

She had betrayed me to her kin, and I had died.

For a moment I considered killing this woman. There were too many men all about us; I should have to flee instead. I stood up, gathered my Gladstone and typewriter, gave her a long hard look, and went forward to the next coach. She must have been completely baffled.

After a few minutes I grew restless. I was enclosed by the walls of this conveyance, and vulnerable to attack. We came into a small city. The train left it, moving slowly. I suppose it was waiting for another train some distance ahead to be shunted off its track. I could stand the confinement no longer. I put my machine under my left arm, took the Gladstone in my left hand. (Always leave one hand free for emergencies.) I went out to the platform between the cars. A conductor was standing there counting tickets.

"Shouldn't change cars with all that luggage, sir," he said. "Train rocks a good deal and it's dangerous."

He took a step toward me. I put up my hand to tear out his throat and realized that he was simply going to pass by. I pressed against the wall. He went into the next car. I would have to watch myself. Needless killing at this stage of my flight would only complicate matters. I swung down to the last step, waited for a level stretch of cindery earth, and dropped off. The train was going perhaps twenty-five miles an hour. I lit as easily, as safely as a leopard bounding from a tree. I began to think there was nothing I could not accomplish in the way of strength and agility.

I walked back into the small city. Instinctively I sought the lower districts—not Skid Row, but the tenements and cheap hotels of the poor. I took a room in one of the latter. I barricaded the door and put up a makeshift burglar alarm on the window sill: a couple of glasses, a water pitcher, other objects, all perched precariously on the edge so that nothing could come in without knocking them off and rousing me. Then I crawled into bed and slept for twelve hours.

In the evening I had a meal and the papers sent up to me. I read them while I chewed on leathery steak coated with half-congealed grease, and tiny potatoes as appetizing as the boiled eyes of iguanas.

The papers had it all. My name, life story, photos, even a list of the magazines for which I had written. Brutal Slayings ... Writer on Rampage ... Have You Seen This Man ... all the rest of the trite screamers.

Then I came to the local paper. It was thought I might be here. It was thought that the man who acted so strangely on the west-bound train that morning, and who vanished at a point several miles out of town, might have been Cuff the Murderer. Descriptions tallied. Tentative identification had been made from telephotos. My lip lifted in a silent snarl. The hounds were baying close.

I dressed and shaved off my mustache. I put on dark glasses and went out to a bar. The liquor tasted like water from a goldfish bowl. I walked the streets. About midnight a policeman gave me a second look, then called questioningly. I waited until he came to me, and then with savage glee I put him across my knee and broke his back.

I went to the hotel and stored up some more sleep, like an animal, preparing for the time when I should be fleeing or fighting around the clock.

CHAPTER VI

It was some two hours before sunrise. I was dressing, packing leisurely. There was a knock at the door.

My light was on. I could not pretend to be asleep. "What is it?"

"Police sir. We're checking for a wanted man. Will you open up, please?"

I threw the last of my stuff into the Gladstone and shoved it under the bed. Putting my ear to the panel of the door, I listened for their breathing. There were two of them, and probably more within call, checking other rooms where a single man was registered. I tipped the shade of the lamp so that my face would be in shadow, and opened the door. They walked in, one of them diffident, the other as insolent as a thug, with his hand on his holstered revolver.

The second would be the less dangerous, I thought; he would be faster to draw that gun but more stupid in his reactions to a surprise than the other, who looked the more intelligent. So as they entered, turning to face me, I pushed the door shut with my heel and let the smart, shy one have a quick jab on the angle of his jaw to quiet him for a time. That left me the tough boy, and I looked forward to a good time with him.

He was fast on the draw. His gun was not buttoned down and it fairly flew out to cover me. I am big and make a fine target. His eyes were squinting at my chest where he expected to shoot me and he never saw my foot come off the floor. The gun exploded out of his broken hand and skidded across the room.

He was full of guts. He came at me with his one good hand and his knees and even his teeth. I did not want to be marked. I kept my face away from him and let him hit me twice in the stomach. Then I caught his wrist and flying-mared him over my shoulder. The crack of his skull against the wall was a burst of sharp sweet music. I grinned wide. Then I bent over the other policeman. I had hit him more scientifically than I had known. He wouldn't get up any more.

That made five.

Five murders! Five killings, using no weapons, just my hands, for five violent homicides!

I stood there in the center of that room, which I had made a gory shambles, and for the first (and last) time remorse touched me. I was Bill Cuff, law-abiding writer; if not exactly an altruistic dweller by the side of the road and friend to man, at least I had always been a normally decent guy who would go to a lot of trouble to keep from hurting anybody. What had happened to me?

A voice inside me said, But you are only killing men.

Men? But I'm a man, damn it all!

No, you aren't.

What am I, an orangutan? I asked myself with heavy sarcasm.

No, not that. No more kin to ape than to man.

An extraterrestrial, then, descendant of a flying saucer pilot?

No, not that either.

I put my face in my hands. Oh for the love of God, what am I then? What am I?

I knew I wasn't a man and I didn't know what I was.

The thing that was me, that had lain dormant until twenty-six hours before, and then had waked and taken over its rightful inheritance which was my body and my mind, what was it?

I didn't know what it was. But I knew a few things about it. It had once crouched in a cave with others of its breed, to listen to the angry yelling of hunting men. It had once stolen a human she and mated with her, and been killed by her treachery. It was master to an incredible degree of its sense and muscular equipment, even of its heart, which it could slew at will, and of its breathing, which it could stop entirely for fantastic periods of time.

It was rising in me now and it was I. Remorse died forever. Human traits and sentiments died that I could no longer remember ever harboring. I was I and though I did not yet know exactly what I was, I knew it was no fit of madness that had taken possession of me, no devil of the olden times to be driven out by exorcism, no second personality to land me in an asylum; but the soul that had come down through untold centuries hidden in my genes, traveling its recondite course through blood and flesh and brain matter until it woke again to conscious life in Bill Cuff in the early autumn of 1952.

The pictures I had seen thus far were racial memory, remembrance of a dawn world, and I knew there would be more of them. I would hold patience in my hands and wait till time brought full recall.

CHAPTER VII

I pulled my Gladstone from below the bed, strapped and locked it. Then for a moment I stared at my typewriter. It was doubtful that I would ever use her again, and she'd make an extra burden which I could scarcely afford to carry with me. I hated the thought of someone else's fingers on her keys. I had loved that cranky, faithful old mill. I opened her case and raising the machine above my head brought her face down onto a bedpost. Two crashes were plenty. They'd never repair my old girl now. I put her gently on the bed.

"Sleep well, lady." I said, and was obscurely glad to find that my metamorphosed self could still be whimsically sentimental.

I brushed the water glasses off the window sill, threw up the sash and climbed onto the fire escape, Gladstone in hand. I took off my felt hat and skimmed it out and down; it fell in the middle of the alley where anyone would be sure to see it. Then I climbed upward until I reached the roof. They would suppose I had lost my hat while running away down the alley.

Leaving the fire escape, brushing its flaky rust from my palm, I walked across the flat roof. The moon, very low in the gray-black sky, showed me the age-battered forms of chimneys and ventilators, with a shack-like structure looming foursquare among them: the entrance to the hotel. I thought of waiting till the searchers hared off on my false trail, then leaving by this obvious route. No good: my face and build were becoming too well known. I looked about me, deciding what to do.

And it seemed to me that I was not on the roof of a dingy third-rate hotel in an American city, but somewhere entirely different.

The cries of pursuers echoed in my brain. I was crouching amid tall buttress-tops, gargoyled rainspouts, coned tower-peaks; ancient tiles were slippery beneath my feet. I was scrambling round the roof of a castle, or at least what seemed a massive and castle-like building. Peering over the edge of the gutter, I could make out the sheen of moon-silvered water lying far below, with tiny wind-ripples on its surface. A moat?

No weapons were in my hands. I was hunted by fierce enemies. Yet I was not afraid. I was only hideously angry. I longed to get at them, but there were too many. Just let them come three or four at a time, armed however they wished, and I would meet them. But no, they must needs draw their game in great packs of howling humanity. Humans! How I loathed them!

What was I? I was myself, Bill Cuff, some centuries before. My vision was strangely two-fold. I could see the sooty hotel chimneys and could realize where I stood, and at the same time I was again creeping round among the gables and towers of the medieval castle. I could hear the cries of my seekers. A word was repeated over and over until it stood out from all the hubbub.

Vampire ... vampire ... vampire....

I knew I was no such thing. The undead—a superstition.

But they thought me a vampire. I had slain and slain, brutally, and—yes, and lapped up blood from torn throats, hot and bubbling between my lips. Was I a vampire? Were my kind the origin of that legend?

The race-recollection died away. I heard the shouts of my twentieth century foeman, who had found the two dead policemen. I walked to the edge of the roof and gauged the distance to the next building, which was several feet lower than this one. There was a gap of no more than ten feet. I threw the suitcase across. Men appeared eighty feet below, running through the alley. I watched them, leaning fearlessly over the low parapet. Like single-minded hounds, they never looked up. I laughed and gathered myself and jumped across the yawning void, alighting easily on the next roof.

I was beginning to take a keen gratification in my agility. Even the lifting of my Gladstone, the feel of sentient muscles gliding over one another to apportion the work between them, gave me intense pleasure. Thus must an animal feel when he moves about his small enterprises, knowing his body will answer any call he cares to make upon it.

I crossed this roof and leaped again and crossed a third, and found myself overlooking a wide street. The sky was growing more gray than black, and the lamps were beginning to take on the futile appearance they have in the half-light of earliest dawn. I wanted to put plenty of distance between me and this city that was too aware of me within it. There was a rickety ladder leading down the side to a fire escape. I descended it one-handed, jumped to the metal framework, trotted-down to the street. Cars lined it, and the third I checked was unlocked. There are ways to start a car without the key. I hummed peacefully out of town. The sun found me driving along a broad straight highway between fields of shocked grain, singing a tuneless song. There was happiness in the song, and hatred; and I thought suddenly that I was happy because of the hatred, which I had found again after many years of ignorance and futility.

CHAPTER VIII

I stopped on the crest of a knoll and got out of the car. Off to the right lay the beginnings of a vast swampy tract of wilderness, green and steaming in the early morning air. I had never known of it before, had no idea of its name or nature, and yet I knew I had been heading for it ever since I left the museum. Somewhere in its somber depths I would find the voice that was calling to me.

I looked back the way I had come. I could see for miles. There was nothing moving on the road but I had the feeling that pursuit was on its way; there was a prickling at the nape of my neck that could not be denied. Getting into the car again, I ran it to the edge of the knoll opposite to the marsh. Stepping out, dragging my Gladstone after me, I put my shoulder to the car's side and shoved it over. It hurtled down and crashed into a tree at the bottom. Far beyond it, still shrouded in the morning mists, was a town. My followers might presume I had made for it. A primitive stratagem, the car, like the hat in the alley—primitive, but perhaps effective.

It was wonderful in the swamp. A cool, damp efflux of greenness emanated from the soggy earth, the watery pools and stretches of quagmire, the moss-dripping trees and hummocks of sharp-speared coarse grass. I hung my coat over my arm, swung along lithely, reveling in the green feel of things and in my own newfound brawn that made the heavy Gladstone a feather in my hand. Unerringly my feet chose the swiftest, safest path. I was a beast, with the simple pleasures of a beast, hunted or not. And always before me sounded the strange and powerful calling that drew me on and on, a far-wandering wolf returning to his all-but-forgotten lair.

I had been in the marshland for about half an hour when I heard the dogs. So far away as to be little more than a whisper in the brain, their baying chilled my happiness in an instant. Dogs were old implacable enemies....

I was running through a fen. Miry bog sucked at my naked feet, stale-smelling sweat covered me, my face was lashed by the thorned branches of a legion of trees that sprang from the rich muck of the morass. Hounds gave tongue in a continuous chorus of hate, seemingly all about me. I ran and ran. Now I could hear the thick shouts of men, in a language that was foreign to me, though it had almost as many gutturals and slurrings as my own speech.

I was of a very ancient race in these parts (wherever they were). My people were classed as vermin, along with the dire wolf and the gray ape and the last surviving remnants of the hyena tribe. Man hunted us with his dogs, great vicious brutes with saber fangs.

I burst through a screen of hanging moss and fell into a spongy patch of swamp. I struggled, miring myself worse than ever. Then the dogs were upon me, screeching their delight. Men followed them and ringed the quagmire. Great satisfaction was on their faces as the boldest of the dogs leaped forward to gash my upthrown arm.

"Haah," exulted their leader, and spat at me. "Pict...."

I shook away the horrible and haunting remembrance. I heard the hounds of the twentieth century, perhaps a little closer than before.

So I had been a Pict! One of the aboriginal British men (or manlike beings) who are supposed eventually to have bred and merged with Aryan invaders and thereafter with the Scots. Was this the most ancient of my racial memories—or were they recollections of former incarnations of myself, my own individual soul? Whichever they were, and I knew they were one or the other, was this the eldest of them? Or would my waxing memory bring forth still earlier pictures?

If the Picts were subhuman, or even utterly nonhuman, and their uncanny blood had come through the incredible cycle of the centuries to rise anew in my veins, wouldn't that explain my war with the genus homo?

Surely it would!

I dropped the suitcase for a moment, standing quiet to hear the dogs. Then I smacked fist into palm and laughed, a grim snarling bark of merriment. "Pict!" I said aloud. "Pict, by the gods!"

And then, ages after the Picts, the strain had risen again and my comrades and I had fought mankind in our bitter, blind, malignant fashion—to be superstitiously regarded as evil spirits, the undead of the vampire myth.

And, come to think of it, we were probably the origin of the grisly werewolf illusion, too.

My chest swelled with a strange elated arrogance. This was the reason I hated the humans, calling them men in the accents of loathing. I and my people were not of humanity; we were all those harried, despised and feared creatures in human or nearhuman form, all who had fled down the years and turned at bay and torn the throats from our would-be butchers. Sometimes we must have mated with them, infusing our dark strain into their pale stock. But blood ran in our veins and thoughts coursed in our brains which were as alien to man as the blood and the thoughts of tigers. But it is a proud if lonely thing to be a tiger....

CHAPTER IX

The hounds bayed on my trail, and the voice in my head called me forward. I picked up the Gladstone and hastened on, following an invisible path between oozing stretches of swamp under great creeper-festooned oaks, never putting my feet on anything but firm ground. I seemed closer to the earth than I had ever been. It spoke to me, mystically, silently, and I knew where was footing and where was treacherous bog. Even so a fox traverses new territory and never makes a misstep.

I don't know how long I walked through the marshland. My thoughts were busy, my heart was light and at the same time full of my hereditary wrath, and always my ears were cocked for the sound of the dogs.

At last I realized that they were much closer. I was going fast, but my route must have been deduced and short-cuts taken, on the chance that the dogs could pick up my scent again. I began to run. The rank hanging vegetation brushed my face, bringing a flash of that older hunting scene to mind.

Suddenly—and I use that well-worn word in its strongest sense, for never was anything more startlingly sudden—there was a man in the path.

I dropped the suitcase and sprang at him, reflexes acting without my conscious volition. My surprise was overwhelming when he avoided my leap with ease, and tripped me before I could turn. Then a number of bodies hit me and pinned me to the mossy earth. With a roar I flung them off, twisting and bounding to my feet. The first man stood near. I feinted and as he dodged I changed the direction of my grasp and caught him by one arm. Then he was above my head, held helpless by my right hand. I faced the others—three of them, there were—and rasped, "One move and he's dead." I wanted the respite of a second or two in which to plan an attack. These were strong and tricky foemen.

The man aloft wriggled. I was holding him by the back of the belt. I gave him a warning shake. "Lie quiet, little man," I said, "or I'll chuck you into the ooze."

The three moved forward uncertainly. "Wait," he said to them, his voice calm. Then he chuckled. I admired his nerve. "Big fellow," he said to me, "how long since you ranged the fens and slew the upstart Man?"

I set him on his feet. "I was right," I said. "The call wasn't in my mind alone."

He grinned at his friends. "Here is another who has the memory," said he.

I stared at him. He was short, stocky, with a great shock of yellow hair sleeked down with oil. His eyes were living gray jewels in a tan face. His friends were nondescript, yet they held an odd resemblance to one another: all were broad of chest and vital-looking, and—I liked them.

"You're a rugged one," said the leader. "How long since you came awake?"

"About thirty-two hours."

They exchanged doubting glances. "I mean the first token you had that you were—different."

"Thirty-two hours."

"And you remember the fens? Are you sure?"

"I remember that I was a Pict. I was called a vampire and likely a werewolf. And I've had intimations that I go back even farther than those fens."

"My God," said yellow-hair half-aloud. "Thirty-two hours! Did you get a swat on the skull, or was it natural?"

"I think I just woke out of a sleep with it. It took a while to percolate."

"Kill anybody?" he asked casually.

"Five men."

"The primal anger, yes. Five! Then you're Bill Cuff, of course. We've been hearing about you on the radio. Thought you might be one of the Old Companions."

"So that's what I am," I said.

"A name, only a name. We like the useless trappings of fraternity as well as Homo sapiens does."

"How far back do we go?"

"You'll know some day. Soon, if your progress thus far is a criterion. Better to remember by yourself." He shook his head. "You're a phenomenon. Do you know how long it took me to develop the memory? Seventeen years. And I am second leader here."

"Who's leader?"

"You'll meet him."

I clenched my hands, looked him up and down, and said. "Pict, wolf-man, or whatever, I tell you this. I take orders badly and I acknowledge no authority higher than myself." Anything less like the old Bill Cuff would have been hard to imagine, and yet I knew these things about myself and I spoke only the truth.

"Ah," he said, his jewel-gray eyes lighting, "you're a Tartar, all right. Goes with the swift progress, I suppose. We may have to tame you a little."

"Little man," I said gently, "you are welcome to try."

He jerked a thumb at my Gladstone. "Got anything worthwhile in there?"

"Just clothes and junk."

"Well, that's something. It would be hard to outfit an ox like you from our wardrobes. We don't generally run to height, you know." He said to one of the others, "Take it to the house, Trutch." The man (or I should say the reincarnated Pict) took it and disappeared down the trail. "Now we'll throw off your hunters. Many of them?"

"Hell, I don't know. Sounds like a lot of dogs."

He scratched his cheek. "Reinforcements," he said, and whistled a fluting call. Then he made a curious motion with his right hand. I knew that motion as well as his followers did. We stepped quietly in among the thick underbrush and, squatting down, waited.

CHAPTER X

They came along the pathway, holding in the leashed dogs, for evidently they did not trust to their own powers to keep up with free-running beasts. There were eight or ten men, with as many hounds. These were making a fearful racket. They nosed us and before they got abreast of us were poking wildly aside from the safety of the tussocked path of solid earth. The men yelled at each other and made the usual human amount of unnecessary uproar.

How I scorned and despised them!

One carried a grotesque-looking apparatus on his back which I supposed to be a kind of enlarged walkie-talkie. The germ of a plan grew. I marked this fellow for my own.

When they drew opposite I charged out of hiding with a savage bellow. The dogs, not mankillers, were baffled for a moment, and the men were taken wholly by surprise. I gripped the front of the walkie-talkie operator's jacket and hit him in the belly; with the new adroitness lent my muscles by race memory, the punch had the force of a giraffe's kick. Ignoring the other men, I dragged him off to the side and laid him on his face among the lush weeds.

Others of the Old Companions were fighting with them now. None of us had weapons—indeed, they would only have hampered us and blunted our murder-lust. I heard the futile spat of a revolver over the barking and yelling. Two men came at me, drawing their guns. I reached out, laughing, and took them by the necks and smashed their heads together. My hands and forearms were spattered with blood and brains. I let the corpses fall and looked for other adversaries.

They were all dead, even the dogs. Seven of my brothers watched me expectantly, including the yellow-haired chief. I went over to the man whom I had hit in the belly.

"Can any of you work that instrument?"

They shook their heads. So I took it off his back—it was held by shoulder straps—and rolled him over. I splashed green-slimed water in his face. After a while he blinked and gasped.

"How does this thing work?" I asked. He looked at me, then at the malevolent faces of the Old Companions. In a whispering croak he told me how to manipulate the transmitter.

"How many other parties are searching the swamp?"

"One."

"What's the leader's name?"

His eyes flickered for a minute. "Bill Jones," he said weakly. I doubled my fist and regarded his face. After a minute he said, "All right. It's Sam D'Peero."

"Where are they?"

"Took another trail. Off west, I think."

I killed him then. "Deep hole near here?" I asked yellow-hair.

He grinned, shouldered a corpse and picked up a dead hound by its collar. We followed him, myself dragging two men by the belts so as not to get any bloodier than I was. We found a big reeking boghole and threw them into it. Going back, we destroyed the signs of the battle. Then I picked up the walkie-talkie, switched it on.

"Sam!" I shouted, pitching my voice high and filling it with terror. "Sam, can you hear me? Oh, my God, we're trapped! The dogs run us into the swamp!" I waited a moment, heard someone say faintly and tinnily, "Johnny, what's the matter?"

"I—oh Lord, I'm sinking! I can't hold onto this branch much longer. Sam, Sam! I think the Cuff guy came and fell into this hole. You can't tell it ain't solid, and the dogs followed him and all the others—oh Sam, help me!"

"Explain, Johnny!" said the instrument. "What's wrong with the others?"

"I tell you we fell in, Sam! We were all bunched and this stuff's like quicksand. I'm—" I broke off, shrieked, gurgled horridly, and then picked up the walkie-talkie and heaved it deep into the swamp.

Yellow-hair laughed. "It might not put them off, but it'll confuse them no end. If you're worried about them finding the house, don't. A cross between a bloodhound and a private eye couldn't locate it. Come on." He patted my arm. "Let's go home."

CHAPTER XI

The house was old but well-kept, upreared in the heart of the great green swampland. It was such a house as a troll might have built—a troll with a Gothic imagination. Rambling, with a ramshackle look despite its sturdiness, wood-turreted.... "One of our more exotic head-quarters," said yellow-hair, whose name was Skagarach. "Don't know what madman built it. We have them, HQs that is, all over the world; but not many in so congenial a setting."

"Are we truly all over the world, then?"

"Most of it. Maybe not in deep Africa, nor in places like the South Seas, but wherever there're big enough colonies of so-called white men, we are there." There arose a faint barking, somewhere in the depths of the house. Skagarach shook his head as I snarled. "No, they're ours. We have dogs, of course. The friendship of the dog was not always limited to man. He was our servant too. And will be again."

"Who were we?"

He returned a question. "Do you know why you came here?"

"I was called. Something in my mind—"

"Yes. We're telepathic to a degree." He grinned. "Don't let it go to your head. It's a gift we share with the ants and the bees." We entered the house and I found a spacious living room furnished with big leather armchairs. "Have a drink," he said, pointing to a wall bar. "One worthwhile invention of our friend Man."

"No friend of mine," I said, and then, turning to him, "but why? Why this two-day reversal of my feelings? Why has this thing happened to me, Skagarach?"

"So quickly ... I don't know why it happened so quickly. As for the general why of it, it's blood and bone and sinew and soul come down to us from the beings we once were. It's a powerful strain—so powerful that powerful is a weak word for it. I think it must be the strongest blood-strain that ever ran in animal veins. One drop, I think, would redden an ocean of milk."

"Animal." I repeated. One of the Old Companions put a tall drink in my hand and I nodded thanks. "I know this, but tell me again. We are not men, are we?"

He looked into my eyes with those uncanny gray jewel-orbs. "No, we are not. At least not Homo sapiens pure and simple. I believe we began this hybrid race by stealing and mating with human women—" I recalled my long-ago death by treachery and agreed—"and then possibly the offspring of those unions mated among men. Certainly the Picts were not pure us. Then afterward the breed was watered again when the Picts bred to outlanders. Men always hated us, but women are strange creatures and—well, the unions must have been many. A mere handful that's accounted for by thefts of women couldn't have produced the mighty tide of anti-human passion which runs in us after so many centuries. Many millions must have our taint in them, though comparatively few have it so abundantly as you and I and these Old Companions. Note that I say 'comparatively'. Actually there are thousands of us who recognize our essential difference."

"So now the old blood wakes in us," I said exultantly. "Why? After so long, why now? Are we like locusts, our knowledge lying hidden for an age and then bursting up in all of us at the same time?"

"A quaint notion," said Skagarach. "No, we have always known, I think, in all the periods of history. But we never banded together before, never fought the ancient enemy as an army within its gates, as we are doing and will do with increasing potency."

"Why not?"

"Think, Cuff, only think! You are born in 1700; at a certain age you begin to know you are different. You hate the race of men. You have racial memories of living in caves, of being harried by men. What do you do? You never heard the name of—what we were and are. Science has told you nothing of prehistory. So where do you end?" He shrugged. "Bedlam. The lunatic dungeons. Fancy ladies come and giggle at you, the murderous madman, through the bars. You pine for fresh air and freedom, because freedom is even more precious to our race than to man. You die."

"Oh," I said, catching his meaning. "It's only in the last century that science has opened the door to the past, of course. Now we can realize what we are, and work accordingly."

"Yes, we can organize, can sheer off from the pack of humankind, and strengthen our race by inbreeding. We have children here and in the other HQs, born of two of us who remember what they are before they can read and write. I said it was a powerful strain. Listen. I raise dogs. Once I bred a wolf to a shepherd. Five generations later a pup was born that was all wolf, every last ounce of him. Perfectly untameable little brute. We have that same tenacious blood-line, but to an almost incredible degree. In fact I think it is not so much blood with us as a strain in the mind. In us it has carried down through the uncountable years since prehistory. As that dog was no dog, but a true wolf, so we are not men, but—what we are." He broke off and looked at me appraisingly. "I have hopes for you," he said. "The tide runs high in you, Cuff. We will win back the world some day, we who are not of mankind. You should prove tremendously important to us."

I said, "Skagarach, who are we?"

"Hush," he said, "the Old Man is coming."

"Old Man?"

"The leader."

I turned and saw the Old Man, and I knew what we were. I had one final crashing burst of dawn memory, and I saw our beginnings and our whole long story and why we would always have to fight men. All this I saw in the Old Man's face.

That face was like a great terrible mask. The cheeks were broad, the brow low and ridged, the brain case enormous. The chin was shallow, with a wide thick-lipped mouth; and the eyes were glittering oblongs of gray mica-sprinkled flint. Gray hair covered the massive forward-thrusting head thickly, and tufts of it boiled up from the collar of the white shirt on the barrel-sized chest.

Skagarach came up to me and saw my knowledge in my face. "Yes," he said, "There is the true strain of our race; there is the result of inbreeding over a number of generations. The true he of our people."

I growled. "No truer than I, Skagarach. His are the features, but mine is the memory and the dawn brain."

He laughed. He seemed to find humor in everything. "I foresee strife," he said quietly. "You're a headstrong beast, Cuff. Never mind! We thrive on strife. Do you know now who and what we are?"

"H. G. Wells called us the Grisly Folk."

"Yes. Cuff. You have it. We are the Neanderthals."

CHAPTER XII

Now you who read this:

I declare war on you and all your kind.

I tell you plain that we will rise and slay you, that there will be no quarter in this war which is to come to you. Forget your hostilities between nation and nation—they have no importance compared with our crusade. Put by your silly fears of invasion from other worlds—your foe is here, has always been here, and is an enemy you cannot even recognize.

For we are banding against you and we can do that which will be the all-important factor in the waging and winning of this war: we can know each other, while you are blind.

Lest you object that the Old Companions are madmen, that there is no strain in mankind excepting that of man (and, if you are one of that foolish breed who misreads Darwin, of monkey), let me also tell you this:

Most scientists agree that Homo Neanderthalensis was no true man, but a kind of animal in manlike form, with several improvements and more specialized faculties than man.

We know this, for the first thing we remember, the first thing our children know, is that we are not men.

So watch for us.

Don't feel sheepish if you find yourself glancing back on the lonely road. Don't be self-conscious if you draw away from the silent man who sits next to you in the subway, he may not be a man at all.

We are here all about you. Watch for us.

We will win back the earth from you who crushed us so long ago.

Watch for us! The future is ours!

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