I have always been able to control my body, down to the most peripheral nerve cell. I have never lacked courage-most probably because I never had the imagination to see, ahead of time, what pain and danger I was facing. Action has always been easier for me than reflection.

Yet the most difficult action I ever had to take was to step out from behind the concealment of that tree and show myself to the four young Neanderthal men who were in the clearing, feeding the flocks of birds.

I took a deep breath, calmed my racing heart, and began walking toward them. They were youngsters, probably no more than teen-agers, their hair dark and full, their faces smooth and unlined. They were laughing and whistling to one another as they tossed birdseed around the mossy ground. One of them was holding out both his hands and half a dozen birds perched on them, pecking at the seeds in his palms.

The birds noticed me before the lads did. With a great swirling, fluttering, flashing of colors they flew off in all directions as I approached. Not a peep out of them; no sound except the beating of frightened wings.

The four young Neanderthals, suddenly alone except for a few drifting feathers, turned to gape at me.

I held up both my hands, palms outward, as I approached.

"I am Orion," I said. "I come in peace."

They glanced at one another, more puzzled than frightened. They made no move to stop me from coming nearer, nor did they seem in any way inclined to run from me. They whistled back and forth among themselves, low, musical sounds not unlike the calls of birds-or the whistling language of dolphins.

I stopped and let my hands fall to my sides. "Do you live nearby?" I asked. "Will you take me to your village?" I knew that they could not understand my words, any more than I could interpret their whistles. But I had to establish at least the beginnings of communication.

The four of them looked me up and down, then walked around me as if I were a clothing display. In utter silence. Yet I had the feeling that they were conversing with one another, without the need for sounds.

They were more than a full head shorter than I, all four of them, although already their barrel chests and powerful arms were much bigger than my own. I felt puny beside them. The tallest one, who almost came up to my chin, grinned at me. There was no hint of fear or distrust in his deep brown eyes. Merely curiosity.

He stared at me in silence for several moments, and I could almost hear the questions in his mind: Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you doing here?"

Like an English tourist, I spoke slowly and loudly in my effort to make him understand. "My name is Orion. Orion." I touched my chest with a forefinger and repeated, "Orion."

"Ho-rye-un," the youngster said, in the same painful whisper that I had heard so often from Ahriman.

"Where is your village?" I asked. "Where do you live?"

No response.

I tried a different tack. "Do you know Ahriman? Where is Ahriman?"

The lad's eyes flicked to his comrades and I could feel feel some form of mental communication vibrating from one to another. some form of mental communication vibrating from one to another. Ahriman Ahriman echoed in my mind. echoed in my mind. Ahriman Ahriman.

After a moment or so, the teen-ager stared into my eyes and frowned in concentration. I concentrated, too, trying to receive whatever mental message he was trying to send. I got nothing but the vaguest impression of the forest around us, trees and not much else.

With a very human shrug, the lad whistled a few notes to his companions, then gestured for me to come along with him. The five of us started along a well-worn trail that began in that clearing and headed deeper into the woods.

CHAPTER 45.

The Neanderthals' "village," it turned out, was in the trees. Not among them, but actually inside the giant boles of those tall, massive sequoias. They had carved out elaborate living quarters for themselves, high above the ground, with long ladders made of vines hanging inside the trunks and leading up to their rooms. The broad, sturdy branches that radiated outward some forty or fifty feet above the ground served as patios and verandas for these dwellings.

At first I thought that their technology was pitifully limited. I could see nothing more sophisticated than stone axes and chisels, and smaller tools made of flint or quartz. But they had fire; they had as much intelligence as an Einstein or a Buddha, and they had a form of mental telepathy that allowed them to live in harmony with the world of animals and plants around them.

Where we Sapients invent a machine to do work that our arms are not strong enough to do, the Neanderthals tamed, trained, or developed an animal or plant. The vine ladders that they scampered up and down on were one example. They were living, growing vines, with roots imbedded in the soil and broad green leaves spreading in the sunlight along the high branches of the giant trees.

They did not hunt, nor did they farm. They had no need of either. They were gatherers, in the ultimate sense. They controlled herds of animals mentally, and led the oldest and weakest to their ritual deaths by some form of telepathic inducement. They kept pets such as dogs, but even there the link between Neanderthal and dog was a mental one.

They had no spoken language; their throats were not built for speech. They communicated among themselves by an elaborate combination of telepathy, whistling, and gestures. I tried as hard as I could, and after several weeks of living among them, I began to be able to make a crude, tentative form of mental contact. The ability was built into my brain, as it was built into theirs by evolution, but it would take a long period of training before I could communicate as easily as their babies did.

The Neanderthals had no fear of strangers. Warfare and conflict were virtually unknown to them. At first I thought that might be because their telepathic abilities made it impossible to attack someone without his sensing it beforehand and being prepared to retaliate. I was wrong, although I had been on the right track.

They were peaceful because their telepathic abilities allowed them to understand understand each other much more thoroughly than speech permits true understanding. It was not that they constantly read each others' minds, I gradually learned. But the Neanderthals were trained from birth to communicate their feelings, their emotions, as well as rational thoughts and ideas. When a Neanderthal was angry or upset or afraid, everyone around him knew of it instantly, and they all did their best to get to the cause of the problem and solve it. Similarly, when a Neanderthal was happy, everyone knew it and shared in the joy. each other much more thoroughly than speech permits true understanding. It was not that they constantly read each others' minds, I gradually learned. But the Neanderthals were trained from birth to communicate their feelings, their emotions, as well as rational thoughts and ideas. When a Neanderthal was angry or upset or afraid, everyone around him knew of it instantly, and they all did their best to get to the cause of the problem and solve it. Similarly, when a Neanderthal was happy, everyone knew it and shared in the joy.

How alone we Sapients are! Locked inside our skulls with our individual personalities, we make feeble attempts at communication through speech, where the Neanderthals shared their thoughts as naturally as warmth flows from a fire. There were no psychotherapists among them-or, rather, they were all psychologists.

They were a gentle people, in spite of their powerful muscular bodies. Their innocent brown eyes reminded me of the doe and fawns I had seen my first day in this time. They did not, probably could not, dissemble. Even their method of slaughtering the weakest members of their herds was so gentle that the word slaughter hardly applies: they merely exerted enough mental control over the animal to stop its heart. The animal collapsed and died within moments, painlessly.

The days lengthened into weeks as I dwelled among them, living with the family of the tallest teen-ager of the four who had first encountered me. Their home, like all the others', was some forty feet above the ground, inside a sturdy sequoia. The family consisted of the parents, Tohon and his wife Huyana, their son Tunu, and their daughter, Yoki, who was about five or six years old. They had accepted me as a guest, after the whole village-some hundred or so people-gathered in a clearing at the base of "their" trees to discuss what they should do with me.

It was an eerie, unsettling feeling to be standing in the midst of all these Neanderthals, knowing that they were talking about me, but unable to hear a word. Except for a few whistles and an occasional wave of a hand or shake of a head, the discussion was carried out in complete silence.

I could not listen to them, so, instead, I studied their faces. They were not at all like the shambling, beetle-browed savages that twentieth-century Sapients depicted the Neanderthals to be. Their faces were broader than mine, their brows heavier, their chins less prominent, but the totality of their facial features were not all that different from my own. They were no hairier than I was. The men's faces were beardless, and I learned after several painful attempts at shaving with a flint knife that the Neanderthals removed facial hair with an ointment they obtained from the leaves of a shrub.

Apparently they decided that I would live among them, and Tunu's father accepted the obligation-or, for all I knew then, they might have considered it an honor.

I saw that very first day how they managed to carve living quarters out of the tree trunks. After Tunu painfully introduced himself and his family to me, pointing to each in turn and carefully pronouncing each name several times in his labored, dry whisper, his father led me to their home.

I followed Tohon up the sturdy ladder of vines to their main room, a spacious womb-like chamber set in the living wood, with a round window on one side and an open doorway that led out onto a branch that was broad enough to allow all five of us to stand on its flattened surface at the same time. Their furniture consisted of stools and table-like things that looked oddly out of place, yet strangely familiar. Then I realized that they were actually giant mushrooms, toadstools, that had been shaped to serve the Neanderthals. It was then that I began to understand that they altered the world around them, vegetable as well as animal, to suit their needs.

Tohon took me out on that broad, green veranda and showed me how they enlarged their living quarters to make room for a guest. He sent Tunu scampering out along the big branch toward a smaller limb where thick clusters of needles grew. The lad came back with a wooden bowl filled with a thick, syrupy liquid that must have been some form of tree sap.

I followed Tohon inside and watched him begin to paint the sap onto the wall of their main room. It smelled of pine resin, but stronger. Off to one side, I could see Huyana and Yoki silently studying an array of herbs and leaves that they had spread across the floor: a lesson in botany, or more likely, nutrition.

And all this was being done in nearly total silence. I had never realized how much we Sapients take for granted our constant chattering. Noise is our companion from our first birth cries to. our last dying words. The Neanderthals lived in a world of quiet, broken only by the natural sounds of wind and rustling leaf, of bird song and animal call. As the time went on and I grew accustomed to this hushed way of life, I began to wonder if the Neanderthals' lack of violence was associated with their lack of noisemaking equipment.

As I stood watching Tohon's handiwork, that first day, I could feel my eyes widening with surprise as the liquid he smeared onto the curved wall of the room began to eat into the wood. At first it etched the smooth surface of the wall slowly, giving off the faintest hissing sound and a slightly acrid smell. Then the wood seemed to dissolve; it just began to melt away.

Tunu grinned at me, his nearly lipless mouth pulling back to show a wide expanse of gleaming teeth. I must have looked very surprised; I'm sure my jaw was hanging open.

Tohon gestured urgently to his grinning son, and the two of them began smearing the syrupy liquid with great vigor against the sides and back of the niche that had just been created. Why the stuff melted away the wood and yet seemed to have no effect at all on their bare hands, as they stuck them into the bowl and spread the liquid against the wood, was a mystery to me.

Within a few minutes Tohon seemed satisfied with their work. Tunu took the nearly empty bowl back out along the branch while his father sat cross-legged on the floor and gestured to me to sit beside him.

Huyana served a meal of boiled vegetables and fresh fruit. Their kitchen, I soon found out, was a level below this main room. By the time we finished eating, the acidic sap had done its work, and there was a small but comfortable room for me, literally eroded out of the living wood of the tree trunk, connected to the main room by a short corridor that curved so that my room could not be seen from the main room. No need for doors; privacy was maintained by geometrical arrangement.

Tohon inspected the new room, and for a moment seemed somewhat agitated. Without moving or making a sound, he wrinkled his heavy brow in concentration. Tunu came back with the bowl and wordlessly painted a small round window for me. Tohon nodded, satisfied that the job was completed.

I thought that they had forgotten about my asking for Ahriman, that first day. As the weeks rolled leisurely by and I became accustomed to this almost silent life among the Neanderthals, I nearly forgot about him myself. I spent most of my time trying to learn how to communicate with them, mentally, and gradually I began to get the hang of "speaking" without making sounds. My abilities were ludicrously poor, but I found that some of the Neanderthals were better communicators than others. Tunu, the grinning, cheerful teen-ager, was the easiest for me to converse with. So were many of the other youngsters. I had more trouble with the adults, perhaps because they were more withdrawn and circumspect. And the Neanderthal women, even little Yoki, were virtually a complete blank to me, as far as telepathic communication was concerned. I was certain that this was by intent; well enough for the men to converse with this spindly stranger, but the women decided they would keep their distance, physically and mentally.

Not that Huyana or any of the other Neanderthals, of whatever age or gender, were anything but unfailingly kind and courteous to me. The women merely stayed beyond my reach, as far as communication of any sort was concerned.

At night, as I lay stretched out sleeplessly on a bed of spongy moss, I wondered what Anya was doing and why she had sent me here and how long she would keep me among the Neanderthals. I began to form paranoid fears in my head: Ormazd had decided to keep me here permanently, even though Anya wanted to bring me back to her. Or worse yet, the two of them had agreed to keep me in this sylvan exile; they were laughing at me, alone and helpless among people I could not even speak to.

I thought about Ahriman, and how Ormazd intended to keep him imprisoned in that shell of energy, alive in a timeless stasis, but trapped, smothered, helpless. Ormazd was doing the same thing to me, I knew it. And there was nothing I could do about it. Not a thing. Each night I searched every molecule of my mind for a way to escape this idyllic prison, and each dawn I admitted defeat. There was no escape. Not unless, or until, either Anya or Ormazd decided to allow me to return.

I began to lose track of the days. They were all pretty much the same. A heaven of peace and plenty, without anger, without murder, without war. Yet I could not accept it; I could not rest content.

Then one morning, after I had climbed down the vine ladder from Tohon's dwelling and stepped out onto the open ground, Tunu came running up to me, breathless with excitement.

"Ahriman!" he gasped aloud.

I blinked with surprise. "Ahriman?" I asked. "He's coming here?"

Tunu bobbed his head up and down. "Yes, he is coming up the trail." I was so excited that I did not realize he was speaking telepathically and I was understanding him clearly.

He gestured for me to follow him. I saw that the whole village was pouring out of their tree homes and gathering in the clearing, jostling one another slightly, low whistles flicking back and forth, staring expectantly down the trail. I picked up enough of their telepathic vibrations to understand that they were all quite excited. Ahriman was one of their greatest leaders, a man of high intelligence and accomplishment, a poet and philosopher whose fame was known wherever the Neanderthals lived.

It can't be the same Ahriman that I have known, I told myself. The mental image I was getting from the crowd was very different from the dark, tormented, angry, vengeful Ahriman that I knew.

But when I saw him, walking on the trail, smiling at the crowd that had gathered to greet him, I saw that it was indeed the same man.

Ahriman. A younger Ahriman than the one I had known, but unmistakably the same one. Taller than any of the other Neanderthals, more powerful in physique, his eyes held the intelligence that I had seen in them in other ages. But they were not yet the reddened, hate-filled eyes of the Ahriman who sought to destroy the continuum. This was the face of a man in his prime, happy with life, content with his environment and his place in it. He had not learned to hate. He had no need for vengeance-not yet.

The crowd gathered around Ahriman as he strode the final yards toward the center of the clearing. I could not make out specific words or meanings from their mental chatter, but I felt an urging from them, a pleading for him to do something-I did not know what-that would please them.

He smiled and nodded his assent. The crowd immediately sat down on the ground, excited, anticipating. I remained standing.

Ahriman's eyes met mine. His smile did not change. His eyes betrayed no hint of anger or enmity. Nor surprise. Obviously, the others had already told him that there was a stranger in their midst. They must have told him my name as well. And, just as obviously, my name, my appearance, my presence meant nothing to him. He was not afraid of me. He was not enraged. The only emotion I caught from him was a gentle curiosity.

Slowly I sat, too, between Tunu and another teen-aged boy. I closed my eyes and concentrated as hard as I could to catch whatever it was that Ahriman was going to say, telepathically.

There was no need for me to work so hard. He was the most powerful telepathic "voice" I had encountered. I could understand him with almost no effort at all.

He sang.

Not with words or musical sounds as we Sapients use. Ahriman sang with thoughts, mental conceptions that released colors, shapes, memories, impressions in my mind. My eyes flew open and still my head filled with beauty and harmony that I had never known before. I could see the Neanderthals around me, staring blankly, enraptured by the beginning of Ahriman's song.

I closed my eyes once again, but this time it was only to shut out the conflicting view of the world around me, so that I might share more fully the vision that Ahriman was projecting directly into my mind.

It was a song, a poem, a speculation, a history, a report-all in one. I saw the many places that Ahriman had traveled through since the last time he had been to this village. I realized that he was a wanderer, a nomad who linked the scattered settlements of the Neanderthals the way we Sapients eventually learned to link our communities with electronic circuitry.

I saw all the other Neanderthal villages, in ice cliffs far to the north, along balmy seashores, huts built of mud and straw clustered together in the open treeless steppes. I felt the oneness of all these communities, the linkage among their men and women, the common bonds of blood and affection that they all shared. And Ahriman showed us more; he began to tell us of his own thoughts, the ideas and questions that filled his mind when he gazed up at the star-filled night sky. He showed us the harmony of the stars, the rhythms of the planets as they swept among the fixed points of nighttime fire, the glory of the sun as it was created out of cold dust and gained its strength by bringing all the myriad motes together into one fiery, loving embrace.

Ahriman took us among the stars and helped us to wander in realms of breathless beauty. Then, slowly, with enormous reverence and gentleness, he brought us back to Earth, to this clearing in the forest, to this moment in time.

I saw, as I opened my eyes, that Neanderthals cannot weep. But the tears were streaming down my cheeks as Ahriman ended his song.

CHAPTER 46.

The Neanderthals did not applaud. Such noisemaking was not their way. But I, with my dim telepathic ability, could sense the enormous wave of approbation and thanks that swept through the gathered villagers. A few low whistles and grunting mutters accompanied the telepathic appreciation. Ahriman nodded a few times, accepting their approval. Then the crowd broke up and everyone went back to their business.

I got to my feet, after wiping away the tears that had blurred my vision.

"You are Orion," Ahriman said, silently.

We were alone in the clearing now. All the others had dispersed. He looked at me without any emotion except curiosity. He had never seen me before this day. I was the one with the memories, not him. I recalled how I felt when I had first met him, in that chamber he had created deep underground in the twentieth century. How confused I had been then; he had known everything, and I, nothing. Now I knew of all our encounters, The War and its aftermath, and he was as innocent as a newborn. Yet I still felt confused, uncertain.

"I enjoyed your song," I said, aloud, knowing that he could understand the meaning of my sounds.

"Thank you."

I wondered what I should say next. I wondered how deeply into my mind he could probe. The other Neanderthals had apparently been unable to read my thoughts, my memories. It had been difficult enough for me merely to communicate ordinary conversation to them. But Ahriman's powers of telepathy were many times greater.

"Where are you from?" he asked, and I felt genuine concern. Either he could not search my mind or he was too polite to try.

"Far from here," I answered. Then I added, "Farther in time than in distance. I come from the future, from thousands of years in the future."

His heavy brow knitted with puzzlement. "The future?"

"You can see that I am not one of your kind."

"That is true."

"I came into being more than a hundred thousand years from now, and have been sent to this time."

I caught a vague, fleeting thought to the effect that I must be insane, but it passed quickly.

"It is quite true," I said. "I don't know how it is done, but I have been sent to this time and place."

"Sent by whom? For what purpose?"

Ignoring that, I went on, "Somehow you will learn how to transport yourself through time and space. We will meet many times, in different eras..."

"I will travel into the future?" He seemed genuinely fascinated by the possibility.

"Yes."

"With you?"

With a shake of my head, "We will not travel together, not as companions. But we will meet in the future, time and again."

His heavy-featured face broke into a wide smile. "Travel into the future! Can time be bent and turned the way a man can knot a length of vine?"

"Ahriman!" I had to tell him. "In that future-in those times to come-we will be enemies."