“Future it is,” said Noxon. “I might be able to do this without holding your hands, but let’s be safe.”

They took each other’s hands. The Neanderthals were so fast—Noxon could already smell them, not just their bodies but their breath, when he made a random jump forward in time.

They returned a few days before they had first arrived in the car. Not wanting to go through the tedium of time-slicing, Noxon flung them forward again. But the jump was imprecise enough that he overshot—now there were policemen and a tow truck at their car. They could probably have talked their way through the situation, but they would have had to explain why Noxon was fluent in Slovenian and how they had managed to camp for however many days the car had been abandoned. And then there was that lack-of-identification problem.

So Noxon jumped them back to a time soon after their own paths had disappeared over a hill, and they returned to the car long before their earlier selves would have reached the site of the Neanderthal aurochs hunt.

“We can’t prove that modern humans ever saw Neanderthals hunt that way,” said Deborah. “But Sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted so long that it would strain credulity to claim that they did not.”

“I agree,” said Wheaton. “My hypothesis isn’t proven, but this certainly didn’t contradict it. Right down to the picadors, that was a bullfight. And the birth of the sport of bull-leaping. Though the Minoan vase paintings show the bull-leapers going clean over the bull. Nobody seems to have tried to ride the things.”

“That had to wait for the rodeo,” said Deborah. “Such strength, such control, such patience. How could Homo sapiens have ever defeated these people?”

“They didn’t have to defeat them,” said Wheaton. “The fact that Homo sapiens has no mitochondrial DNA from Neanderthals suggests that if there were head-to-head battles, the Neanderthals always won, and their males mated with the Sapient women, never the other way around.”

“Or Neanderthal women were so strong that they broke the necks of any gracile humans who tried to mate with them,” said Deborah.

Noxon wasn’t sure he liked the relish with which she said that.

“Seeing all that bloody beef made me hungry,” said Deborah.

“Why?” asked Wheaton. “You always like your beef cooked into a flavorless stringy mass.”

“But I know that it begins with those great bloody haunches and sides,” said Deborah, “and I could do with a nice parmentier about now. Or a hamburger.”

“Well, Noxon,” said Wheaton, “in all honesty, today’s work completely pays for the easy half of the bargain—providing you with a place to stay while you wait to see why the people of Earth decide to wipe out your world. So if you want to stop taking me into the distant past, I’d still consider us more than even.”