The little ones crawled and then walked as soon as they could, exploring farther and farther from their mothers—their sole source of food, when they were so young, so they never quite lost sight of her. No wonder the hyenas, watching from a distance, grew hopeful. The little ones weren’t exactly fearless, but what they had were monkey fears—spiders bothered them more than animals that were trying to eat them.

But the alertness of the adults and older children never flagged. The Erectids had somehow marked out just how far a child could be allowed to roam before someone swooped in to carry it back to safety, and by the time a child was walking, he or she knew just how far was considered safe. This didn’t mean that they never crossed over that invisible line—but as soon as they approached it, they would begin checking to see if any adult was watching them. For the surest way to get adult attention was to stray beyond the line. But the children themselves had no desire to cross the line and actually get away with it—that would be dangerous. They knew that they should only “go too far” when someone older would be sure to notice and rescue them.

The babies also tussled with each other, the males constantly practicing for later struggles—warfare with other tribes, contests with animals, but, most importantly, battles for supremacy within the tribe.

For this Erectid tribe was still divided between alpha and non-alpha populations. They were on the verge of the forest, where dry dead trees showed that the wooded land had once reached much farther out into the savannah. The dead trees provided the savannah-dwellers with fuel for their fires and sticks for their prodding weapons; yet it wasn’t so very far to walk into greener woods, where the leaf-eating branch of the tribe still lived with the alpha male and his harem of closely-watched females.

But it was the group that lived fulltime on the savannah, in the grassland, dealing with predators, walking upright all the time, hunting for their food, twisting grasses into twines and weaving them into baskets—they were the ones that Professor Wheaton insisted they must watch. “Because these are the ones heading toward becoming humans.”

“Not because they want to,” said Deborah. “It just happens when they aren’t paying attention.”

“Less than two million years till the tee shirt,” said Ram Odin. “And starflight.”

“But right now they don’t have the slightest interest in either,” said Deborah. “They just want to eat, pee, get laid, and keep the babies alive.”

“My little girl,” said Professor Wheaton. But he didn’t look at her. He only watched the vids they had taken of camp life.

They only visited the camp while slicing time—invisibility was essential. But they set up video cameras and changed out the memory cards several times a day.