Bowden shrugged. He was uncomfortable, and he was familiar enough with Neanderthals to know that you can't lie to them.

'I am,' he replied, 'I've never been in a Neanderthal house before.'

'Is it any different to yours?'

'Very,' said Bowden, looking up at the construction of the roof beams, which had been made by gluing oddments of wood together and then planing them into shape.

'Not a single wood screw or bolt, Mr Cable. Have you heard the noise wood makes when you turn a screw into it? Most uncharitable.'

'Is there anything you don't make yourself?'

'Not really. You are insulting the raw material if you do not extract all possible use from it. Any cash we earn has to go to our buy-back scheme. We may be able to afford our ownership papers by the time we are due to leave.'

'Then what, if you'll excuse me, is the point?'

'To die free, Mr Cable. Drink?'

Mrs Stiggins appeared with four glasses that had been cut from the bottom of wine bottles and offered them to us. Stig drank his straight down and I tried to do the same and nearly choked — it was not unlike drinking petrol. Bowden choked and clasped his throat as if it were on fire. Mr and Mrs Stiggms stared at us curiously, then collapsed into an odd series of grunty coughs.

'I'm not sure I see the joke,' said Bowden, eyes streaming.

'It is the Neanderthal custom to humiliate guests,' announced Stig, taking our glasses from us. 'Yours was potato gin — ours was merely water. Life is good. Have a seat.'

We sat down on the sofa and Stig poked at the embers in the fire. There was a rabbit on a stick and I gave a deep sigh of relief - it wasn't going to be beetles for lunch.

'Those croquet players outside,' I began, 'do you suppose anything could induce them to play for the Swindon Mallets?'

'No. Only humans define themselves by conflict with other humans. Winning and losing have no meaning to us. Things just are as they are meant to be."

I thought about offering some money. After all, a month's salary for an averagely rated player would easily cover a thousand buy-back schemes. But Neanderthals are funny about money — especially money that they don't think they've earned. I kept quiet.

'Have you had any more thoughts about the cloned Shakespeares? asked Bowden.

Stig thought for a moment, twitched his nose, turned the rabbit, and then went to a large rolltop bureau and returned with a buff file — the genome report he had got from Mr Rumplunkett.

'Definitely clones,' he said, 'and whoever built them covered their tracks — the serial numbers are scrubbed from the cells and the manufacturer's information is missing from the DNA. On a molecular level they might have been built anywhere.'

'Stig,' I said, thinking of Hamlet, 'I can't stress how important it is that I find a Will clone - and soon.'