Christopher Stasheff: King Kobold Revived

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.”

Rod’s eyes widened. “Now it begins to make sense. What’d they expect the beastmen to do, take over right away?”

“I’m sure they did. Leastways, by the time we managed to find ‘em again they were running around in horned helmets and talking about going a-viking—and I don’t think they dreamed that up on their own.”

“So you hit the totalitarian force with everything you had and stole your Neanderthals back. But why couldn’t you have taken them someplace else?”

“Have pity on the poor people, milord! Would you want them to spend their whole existences being balls in a cosmic game of Ping-Pong? No, we figured it was better to let them stay and try to keep them under protection. We mounted a strong guard—but we forgot about infiltration.”

“Mughorck.” Rod’s mouth twisted. “Then he isn’t really a Neanderthal?”

“Oh, he’s the genuine article, all right—just as much as I am!”

Rod stared at Yorick. Then, slowly, he nodded. “I see. They ‘adopted’ him in infancy and raised him to be an agent.”

Yorick nodded. “A farsighted plan, but it paid off. When the fat hit the fire we couldn’t do anything about it. It was either kill the people we’d been trying to civilize, or run—so we ran.” For a moment, he looked miserable. “Sorry we slipped up.”

Rod sighed. “Not much we can do about it now, I suppose.”

“No, not really,” Yorick answered. “ ‘Fraid you’re stuck with ‘em.”

It was the perfect moment for Tuan to come charging into the cave.

He took one look at the Kobold and sawed back on the reins, freezing—just for a moment, of course; the monster was shut down. But it was a sight to give anyone pause.

Behind him, sandals and hooves clattered and Brother Chillde jerked to a halt to stare, paralyzed, at the monster. “My liege.. what…”

Tuan turned to him, frowning, then caught a glimpse of what was behind the monk. He looked again, and stared. “Lord Warlock!”

Rod turned, frowning. “Yes?”

“But how didst thou…” Tuan turned back to him, and whites showed all around his eyes. “But thou wert even now…” He jerked around to stare past Brother Chillde again.

Rod followed his gaze, and saw…

Himself.

A giant self, astride a behemoth of a horse; a handsome self, with the form of a Greek statue.

Brother Chillde stared at the double, then whipped around to stare at Rod, then back to the double, back to Rod—and the double began to shrink, the horse began to dwindle; the doppelganger’s face became more homely, its features more irregular, its muscles less fantastic—and Rod found himself staring at an exact duplicate of himself.