Then the beastmen sank to their knees, hands upraised, open, and empty.

Some of the soldiers snarled and hefted their pikes; but Tuan barked an order, and knights echoed it; then sergeants roared it. Reluctantly, the soldiers lowered their weapons.

“What hath happed?” Sir Maris demanded.

“I can only think ‘tis some event within their minds,” Tuan answered in a low voice, “mayhap to do with that fell weight being lifted from ours.”

“But why have they not fought to the death?”

“For that, haply we may thank Master Yorick’s rumormongering.” Tuan squared his shoulders. “Yet, when we bade him spread that word, we did effectively make compact with him, and with all his nation. Bid the men gather up the weapons, Sir Maris—but be certain they do not touch a hair of any beastman’s head!” He turned his horse away.

“Why, so I shall,” the old knight growled reluctantly. “But whither goest thou, my liege?”

“To the High Cave,” Tuan said grimly, “for I misdoubt me as to what occurreth there.”

 

Fess’s hooves lifted, slamming down at the back of a Neanderthal’s head. The beastman slumped.

Rod caught two beastmen by the neck, yanked them apart, and smashed their heads back together. He turned away, letting them drop, and saw a pair of rocks flying through the air to brain two beastmen “Tag!” cried Magnus; and, as the Neanderthals fell, he gurgled, “Fun game!”

Rod repressed a shudder, and turned just in time to see Brom heave at a beastman’s ankles. The Neanderthal fell like a poleaxed steer, and Brom sapped him with the hilt of his knife.

But beastmen came in mismatched pairs here, and Brom had guessed wrongly. The other half roared and lunged at him.

The dwarf grabbed an arm and pulled sharply. The beast-man doubled over, his head slamming against the rock floor.

“Nice work,” Rod called approvingly. “That’s why I’ve been knocking out both halves of each couple. We can winnow out the friends from the foes later.”

Yorick finished trussing up Mughorck like a pot roast, and turned to join the battle; but just as he did, Fess nailed the last beastman. “Aw-w-w! I always miss the fun!”

Rod looked around the huge cave and saw that there was nothing left standing except himself, Brom, Fess, Yorick, and Magnus. Though Magnus wasn’t really standing, actually; he was floating over an unconscious beastman, lisping, “S’eepy?”

“Hey, we did it!” Yorick strode around Mughorck’s inert form with his hand outstretched—but he kept on rounding, circling further and further toward the mouth of the cave as he came toward Rod. Rod suddenly realized Yorick was pulling Rod’s gaze away from the back of the cave. He spun around just in time to see the black doorway behind the monster glow to life, a seven-by-three-foot rectangle. Its light showed him a short twisted man. From the neck down, he looked like a caricature of Richard III—an amazingly scrawny body with a hunched back, shriveled arm, shortened leg—and so slender as to seem almost frail.

But the head!

He was arresting, commanding. Ice-blue eyes glared back at Rod from beneath bushy white eyebrows. Above them lifted a high, broad forehead, surmounted by a mane of white hair. The face was crags and angles, with a blade of a nose. It was a hatchet face, a hawk face…

An eagle’s face.

Rod stared, electrified, as the figure began to dim, to fade. Just as it became transparent, the mouth hooked upward in a sardonic smile, and the figure raised one hand in salute.

Then it was gone, and the “doorway” darkened.

“Impressive, isn’t he?” Yorick murmured behind him.

Rod turned slowly, blinking. “Yes, really. Quite.” He stared at Yorick for a moment longer, then turned back to the “doorway.”

“Time machine?”

“Of course.”

Rod turned back. “Who is he? And don’t just tell me the Eagle. That’s pretty obvious.”

“We call him ‘Doc Angus,’ back at the time lab,” Yorick offered. “You wouldn’t have heard of him, though. We’re very careful about that. Publicly, he’s got a bunch of minor patents to his credit; but the big things he kept secret. They just had too much potential for harm.”

“Such as—a time machine?”

Yorick nodded. “He’s the inventor.”

“Then”—Rod groped for words—“the anarchists… the totalitarians…”

“They stole the design.” Yorick shook his head ruefully. “And we thought we had such a good security setup, too! Rather ingenious how they did it, really…” Then he saw the look on Rod’s face, and stopped. “Well, another time, maybe. But it is worth saying that Doc Angus got mad at them—real mad.”

“So he decided to fight them anywhere he could?”

Yorick nodded. “A hundred thousand B.C., a million B.C., one million A.D.—you name it.”

“That would take a sizable organization, of course.”

“Sure—so he built one up and found ways to make it finance itself.”

“And if he’s fighting the futurian anarchists and the futurian totalitarians,” Rod said slowly, “that puts him on our side.”

Yorick nodded.

Rod shook his head, amazed. “Now, that’s what I call carrying a grudge!”

“A gripe,” Yorick chuckled. “That’s the name of the organization, actually—G.R.I.P.E., and it stands for ‘Guardians of the Rights of Individuals, Patentholders Especially.’ ”

Rod frowned. Then understanding came, and the frown turned to a sour smile. “I thought you said he didn’t patent the time machine.”

“That just made him madder. It was his design, and they should have respected his rights. But the bums don’t even pay him royalties! So he gathered us together to protect patent rights up and down the time line, especially his—and democracy guards individual rights better than any other form of government, including patent rights; so…”

“So he backs us. But how does that tie in with several thousand psionic Neanderthals cavorting around our planet?”

Yorick tugged at an earlobe, embarrassed. “Well, it wasn’t supposed to work out quite this way…”

“How about telling me how it was supposed to work?” Rod’s voice was dangerously soft.

“Well, it all began with the totalitarians…”

Rod frowned. “How?”

“By tectogenetics.” Yorick hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the Kobold. “You may have noticed they’re pretty good at it. The future has worked up some dandy genetic engineering gadgets.”

Rod nodded, still frowning. “All right, I’ll buy it. So, what did they engineer?”

“Evil-Eye Neanderthals.” Yorick grinned. “They cooked up a strain of mutant projective telepaths and planted ‘em all over Terra. Figured they’d breed true and become dominant in whatever society they were in—take over completely, in fact. It would’ve made things a lot easier for the futurians if they’d been able to prevent democracy’s ever getting started at all.”

Rod shuddered. “It sure would have.” He had a quick mental vision of humanity evolving and progressing down through the long road of history, always shackled to the will of one group of tyrants after another. “I take it they’re genetically a different race from the other Neanderthals.”

Yorick nodded. “Can’t interbreed to produce fertile offspring. So they’d stay a minority and they wouldn’t dare loosen the reins, for fear of being wiped out by the non-psis.”

Rod began to realize that humanity had had a close call. “But you caught them at it.”

Yorick nodded. “Caught ‘em, and managed to persuade all the little groups of projectives to band together. The totalitarians made the mistake of just letting nature take its course; they left ‘em unsupervised.”

“Which you didn’t, of course.”

“Well, we thought we were keeping a close watch.” Yorick seemed embarrassed. “But the totalitarians dropped some storm troopers on us one night, killed most of the GRIPE force and chased away the rest, then set up a time machine and herded all the Neanderthals to Gramarye.”