He opened his massive arms, and, after a moment, Mary stepped into them.

Mary, of course, could not stay with Ponter, for Ponter lived out in the Rim, which was the exclusive province of males. Adikor suggested the perfect solution: having Mary stay with his woman-mate, Lurt Fradlo. After all, she was a chemist, as Neanderthals defined the term—one who worked with molecules. And Mary, by that definition, was a specialized sort of chemist, focusing on deoxyribonucleic acid.

Lurt had agreed at once—and what scientist of either world wouldn’t leap at the chance to host one from the other? And so, Ponter had Hak summon a travel cube, and Mary headed into the Center.

The driver happened to be a female—or maybe Hak had requested that; after all, the artificial intelligence knew everything about Mary’s rape that Ponter did. Mary’s removable Companion had had Hak’s database transferred into it, and Mary made use of that fact now, conversing with the driver during the trip out.

“Why are your cars shaped like cubes?” Mary asked. “It doesn’t seem very aerodynamic.”

“What shape should they be?” asked the driver, who had a voice almost as low as Ponter’s and as resonant as Michel Bell’s when singing “Ol’ Man River.”

“Well, on my world they are rounded, and—” she thought briefly of Monty Python—“they’re thin at one end, thick in the middle, and thin again at the other end.”

The driver had short hair that was the darkest Mary had yet seen on a Neanderthal, meaning it was the color of milk chocolate. She shook her head. “Then how do you stack them?”

“ Stack them?” repeated Mary.

“Yes. You know, when they are not being used. We stack them one on top of the other, and fit the stacks together side by side. It cuts down on the amount of space that has to be set aside to accommodate them.”

Mary thought of all the land her world wasted on parking lots. “But—but how do you get at your own car when you need it, if it’s at the bottom of the stack?”

“My own car?” echoed the driver.

“Yes. You know, the one that belongs to you.”

“The cars all belong to the city,” said the driver. “Why would I want to own one?”

“Well, I don’t know…”

“I mean, they are costly to manufacture, at least here.”

Mary thought about her monthly car payments. “They are in my world, too.”

She looked out at the countryside. Off in the distance, another travel cube was flying along, going in the opposite direction. Mary wondered what Henry Ford would have thought if someone had told him that, within a century of releasing the Model T, half the surface area in cities would be devoted to accommodating the movement or storage of cars, that accidents with them would be the leading cause of death of men under the age of twenty-five, that they would put more pollution into the air than all the factories and furnaces in the world combined.

“Then why own a car?” asked the female Neanderthal.

Mary shrugged a little. “We like to own things.”

“So do we,” she said. “But you cannot use a car ten tenths a day.”

“Don’t you worry about the guy who used the car before you having, well, left it a mess?”

The driver operated the control sticks she was holding, turning the cube so that it would avoid a group of trees ahead. And then she simply silently held up her left arm, as if that explained it all.

And, thought Mary, she guessed it did. No one would leave behind garbage, or damage a public vehicle, if they knew that a complete visual record of what they’d done was being automatically transmitted to the alibi archives. No one could steal a car, or use a car to commit a crime. And the Companion implants probably kept track of everything you’d brought with you into the car; there would be little possibility of accidentally leaving your hat behind and having to track down the same car you’d used before.

It had grown very dark. Mary was astonished to realize that the car was no longer passing through barren countryside, but was now in the thick of Saldak Center. There were almost no artificial lights; Mary saw that the driver wasn’t looking out the transparent front of the travel cube, but rather was driving by consulting a square infrared monitor set into the panel in front of her.

The car settled to the ground, and one side folded away, opening the interior to the chilly night air. “Here you are,” said the driver. “It’s that house, there.” She pointed at an oddly shaped structure dimly visible a dozen meters away.

Mary thanked the driver and got out. She had planned to make a beeline for the house, finding it rather disconcerting to be out in the open at night on this strange world, but she stopped dead in her tracks and looked up.

The stars overhead were glorious, the Milky Way clearly visible. What had Ponter called it that night back in Sudbury? “The Night River,” that was it.

And there, there was the Big Dipper; the Head of the Mammoth. Mary drew an imaginary line from the pointer stars, and quickly located Polaris, which meant that she was facing due north. She fished into her purse for the compass she’d brought with her at Jock Krieger’s request, but it was too dark to make out its face. So, after taking in her fill of the gorgeous heavens, Mary walked over to Lurt’s house and asked her Companion to let the occupant know that she’d arrived.

A moment later, the door opened, and there was another female Neanderthal. “Healthy day,” said the woman, or, at least, that’s how Mary’s unit translated the sounds she made.

“Hello,” said Mary. “Uh, just a sec…” There was plenty of light spilling out through the open door. Mary glanced down at the compass needle, and felt her eyebrows lifting in astonishment. The colored end of the needle—metallic blue, as opposed to the naked silver of the other end—was pointing toward Polaris, just as it would have on Mary’s side of the portal. Despite what Jock had said, it seemed this version of Earth hadn’t yet undergone a magnetic-field reversal.

Mary spent a pleasant night at Lurt’s home, meeting Adikor’s young son Dab, and the rest of Lurt’s family. The only truly awkward moment came when she needed to use the bathroom. Lurt showed her the chamber, but Mary was absolutely flummoxed by the unit in front of her. After staring dumbly at it for most of a minute, she reemerged from the chamber, and called Lurt over.

“I’m sorry,” Mary said, “but…well, it’s nothing like a toilet in my world. I don’t have any idea how to…”

Lurt laughed. “I am sorry!” she said. “Here. You place your feet in these stirrups, and you grab these overhead rings like this…”

Mary realized she’d have to completely remove her pants to make it work, but there was a hook on the wall that seemed designed to hold them. It actually was quite comfortable, although she yelped in surprise when a moist sponge like thing came in of its own accord to clean her when she was done.

Mary did notice that there was no reading matter in the bathroom. Her own, back home in Toronto, had the latest copies of The Atlantic Monthly, Canadian Geographic, Utne Reader, Country Music, and World of Crosswords on the toilet tank. But, even with great plumbing, she supposed that Neanderthals, because of their acute senses of smell, would never dally in the bathroom.

Mary slept that night on a pile of cushions arranged on the floor. At first, she found it uncomfortable: she was used to a more uniformly flat surface, but Lurt showed her how to arrange the pillows just so, providing neck and back support, separating her knees, and so on. Despite all the strangeness, Mary fell rapidly to sleep, absolutely exhausted.

The next morning, Mary went with Lurt to her work place, which, unlike most of the buildings in the Center, was made entirely of stone—to contain fire or explosion should some experiment go wrong, Lurt explained.