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_!