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....