"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.