“Oh, those are easy,” said Mary with a smile. “Jack Abbott used to be married to Nikki, who was born Nikki Reed. That was after she was married to Victor Newman—for the first two times, that is, but before the third time. But now Jack is married to…”

Jock held up a hand. “Okay, okay!”

“Anyway, like I said, Ponter’s man-mate’s woman-mate is a chemist named Lurt—and the Neanderthals consider genetics to be a branch of chemistry, which, of course, it really is, if you think about it. So she’ll be able to introduce me to all the right people.”

“Excellent. If you’re willing to head over to the other side, we could certainly use this information.”

“Willing?” said Mary, trying to contain her excitement. “Is the Pope Catholic?”

“Last time I checked,” said Jock with a small smile.

Cornelius Ruskin was afraid the vivid nightmares would never end: that goddamned caveman coming at him, throwing him down, mutilating him. He awoke each morning soaked with sweat.

Cornelius had spent most of the day after the horrid discovery painfully lying in bed, hugging himself. The phone had rung on several occasions, at least one of which was doubtless somebody calling from York University to find out where the hell he was. But he couldn’t bring himself to speak to anyone then.

Late that night, he’d called the genetics department and left a message on Qaiser Remtulla’s voice mail. He’d always hated that woman, and hated her even more now that this had been done to him. But he managed to keep his tone calm, saying that he was ill and wouldn’t be back in for several days.

Cornelius watched carefully for blood in his urine. Every morning, he felt around the wound for seepage, and took his own temperature repeatedly, to assure himself that he didn’t have a fever—which he didn’t, despite his frequent hot flashes.

He still had trouble believing it, was still overwhelmed by the very idea. There was pain, but it diminished day by day, and codeine tablets helped—thank God they were available over the counter here in Canada; he always had some 222s on hand, and had initially been taking five at a time, but now had himself down to the normal dose of two.

Beyond taking painkillers, though, Cornelius had no idea what to do. He certainly couldn’t go see his doctor—or any doctor, for that matter. There was no way his injury could be kept secret if he did that; someone would be bound to talk. And Ponter Boddit had been right: Cornelius couldn’t risk that.

Finally, when he at last managed to summon enough energy, Cornelius went to his computer. It was an old no-name 90 MHz Pentium that he’d had since his grad-student days. The machine was adequate for word processing and e-mail, but he usually saved web surfing for when he was at work: York had high-speed lines, while all he could afford for home was a dial-up account with a local ISP. But he needed answers now, and so he suffered through the maddeningly slow page-loading.

It took twenty minutes, but he finally found what he was looking for. Ponter had returned to this Earth wearing a medical belt that included among its tools a cauterizing laser scalpel. That device had been used to save the Neanderthal’s life when he’d been shot outside the United Nations. Surely that was how he had—

Cornelius felt all his muscles contracting as he thought yet again of what had been done to him.

His scrotum had been slit open, presumably by the laser, and—

Cornelius closed his eyes and swallowed hard, trying to keep stomach acid from climbing his esophagus again.

Somehow—possibly even with his bare hands—Ponter had then wrenched Cornelius’s testicles from his body. And then the laser must have been used again, searing his flesh shut.

Cornelius had frantically searched his entire apartment for his balls, in hopes that they could be reimplanted. But after a couple of hours, tears of anger and frustration streaming down his face, he’d had to face reality. Ponter had either flushed them down the toilet, or had disappeared into the night with them. Either way, they were gone for good.

Cornelius was furious. What he’d done had been so wonderfully appropriate: those women—Mary Vaughan and Qaiser Remtulla—had stood in his way. They’d gotten their positions, and their tenure, simply because they were female. He was the one with a Ph.D. from Oxford, for God’s sake, but he’d been passed over for promotion as York “corrected historical gender imbalances” among its various faculties. He’d been shafted by that, so he’d shown them—the department head, that Paki bitch; and Vaughan, who had the job he should have had—what it was really like to get the shaft.

Damn it, thought Cornelius, feeling once more between his legs. His scrotum was badly swollen—but empty.

God damn it.

Jock Krieger went back to his office, which was on the ground floor of the Synergy Group mansion. His large window faced south toward the marina, instead of north toward Lake Ontario; the mansion was on an east–west spit of land in the Rochester community of Seabreeze.

Jock’s Ph.D. was in game theory; he’d studied under John Nash at Princeton, and had spent three decades at the RAND Corporation. RAND had been the perfect place for Jock. Funded by the Air Force, it had been the principal U.S.-government think tank in the Cold War, carrying out studies of nuclear conflict. To this day, when Jock heard the initialsM.D., he thought of a megadeath —one million civilian casualties—rather than a medical doctor.

The Pentagon had been furious about the way the initial encounter with Neanderthal Prime—the first Neanderthal to slip into this reality from that one—had gone. The story of a modern caveman appearing in a nickel mine in Northern Ontario had seemed pure tabloid stuff, akin to alien encounters, Bigfoot sightings, and so on. By the time the U.S. government—or the Canadian one, for that matter—was taking things seriously, Neanderthal Prime was out and about among the general public, making it impossible to contain and control the situation.

And so money had suddenly appeared—some from the INS, but most from the DoD—to create the Synergy Group. That had been some politician’s name for it; Jock would have called it “Barast Encounter-Repetition Emergency Task-force,” or BERET. But the name—and that silly two-worlds-uniting logo—had been set before he was tapped to lead the organization.

Still, it had been no accident that a game theorist had been selected. It was clear that if contact ever did reopen, the Neanderthals and the humans—Jock still reserved that word, at least privately, for real people—would have different interests, and figuring out the most advantageous outcome that could be reasonably expected in such situations was what game theory was all about.

“Jock?”

Jock usually kept his door open—that was good management, wasn’t it? An open-door policy? Still, he was startled to see a Neanderthal face—broad, browridged, bearded—peeking around the jamb. “Yes, Ponter?”

“Lonwis Trob brought along some communiqués from New York City.” Lonwis and the nine other famous Neanderthals, plus the Neanderthal ambassador, Tukana Prat, had been spending most of their time at the United Nations. “Are you aware of the Corresponding-Points trip?”

Jock shook his head.

“Well,” said Ponter, “you know there are plans to open a bigger, permanent, ground-level portal between our worlds. Apparently your United Nations has taken the decision that the portal should be between United Nations headquarters and the corresponding point on my world.”