Jock stopped at a traffic light. A front page from USA Today was blowing across the street. Kids were smoking at the bus stop. There was a McDonald’s a block ahead. Sirens were wailing in the distance, and car horns were honking. A truck next to him belched smoke out of a vertical exhaust pipe. Jock looked left and right, eventually spotting a single tree growing out of a concrete planter half a block away.

The radio newsreader started with a disgruntled man having shot and killed four coworkers at an electronics plant in Illinois. He then gave ten seconds to a suicide bombing in Cairo, a dozen more to what looked like impending war between Pakistan and India, and rounded out his minute with an oil spill in Puget Sound, a train derailment near Dallas, and a bank robbery here in Rochester.

What a mess, Jock thought, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel, waiting for the signal to go. What a goddamned mess.

Jock came in the front door of the Synergy Group mansion. Louise Benoît happened to be in the corridor. “Hey, Jock,” she said. “So is it as beautiful as they say over on the other side?”

Jock nodded.

“I don’t know about that,” said Louise. “You missed the most amazing aurora while you were gone.”

“Here?” said Jock. “This far south?”

Louise nodded. “It was incredible; like nothing I’d ever seen before—and I’m a solar physicist. Earth’s magnetic field is really beginning to act up.”

“You seem to still be conscious,” Jock said wryly.

Louise smiled, and indicated the package he was holding. “I’m going to let that remark pass, since you brought me flowers.”

Jock looked down at the long box Mary Vaughan had given him. “Actually, it’s something Mary wanted me to bring back for her.”

“What is it?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out.”

Jock headed down the corridor to the desk where Mrs. Wallace, who served as receptionist and Jock’s administrative assistant, sat.

“Welcome back, sir!” she said.

Jock nodded. “Any appointments today?”

“Just one. I set it up while you were away; I hope you don’t mind. A geneticist looking for a job. He came very highly recommended.”

Jock grunted.

“He’ll be here at 11:30,” said Mrs. Wallace.

Jock checked his e-mail and voice mail, got himself some black coffee, and then unwrapped the package Mary had given him. It was obvious at a glance that it was alien technology: the textures, the color scheme, the overall appearance—everything was different from what a human would have made. The Neanderthal fondness for squares was very much in evidence: a square cross section, square display, and control buds arranged in squares.

Various controls were labeled—some, to his surprise, in what looked like Neanderthal handwriting. It clearly wasn’t a mass-produced device; maybe it was a prototype of some sort…

Jock picked up his telephone, and dialed an internal number. “Lonwis? It’s Jock. Can you come down to my office, please…”

Jock’s door opened—no knock first—and in came Lonwis Trob. “What is it, Jock?” said the ancient Neanderthal.

“I’ve got this device here”—he indicated the long contraption sitting on his desktop—“and I was wondering how to turn it on.”

Lonwis moved across the room; Jock could almost hear the Neanderthal’s joints creaking as he did so. He bent over—this time the creak was definitely audible—bringing his blue mechanical eyes closer to the unit. “Here,” he said, pointing to an isolated control bud. He grabbed it between two gnarled fingers, and plucked it out. The unit began to hum softly. “What is it?”

“Mary said it’s a DNA synthesizer.”

Lonwis peered some more at it. “The housing is a standard unit, but I have never seen anything quite like this. Can you pick it up for me?”

“What?” said Jock. “Oh, sure.” He lifted the device off the desktop, and Lonwis stooped to look at its underside. “You will want to hook it up to an external power source, and—yes, good: it has a standard interface port. Dr. Benoît and I have built some units that allow Neanderthal technology to be hooked up to your personal computers. Would you like one of those?”

“Um, sure. Yes.”

“I will have Dr. Benoît attend to it.” Lonwis headed for the door. “Have fun with your new toy.”

Jock spent hours examining the codon writer, and reading over the notes Mary had prepared on it.

The thing could make DNA, that much was clear.

And RNA, too, which Jock knew was another nucleic acid.

It also seemed to be able to produce associated proteins, such as those used to bind deoxyribonucleic acid into chromosomes.

Jock had a cursory understanding of genetics; many of the studies he’d been involved with at RAND concerned bio-warfare. If this device could produce nucleic-acid strings and proteins, then…

Jock steepled his fingers. What the boys at Fort Detrick would give for this!

Nucleic acids. Proteins.

Those were the building blocks of viruses, which were, after all, just scraps of DNA or RNA contained in protein coats.

Jock stared at the machine, thinking.

The phone on Jock’s desk made its distinctive internal-call ring. Jock picked up the handset. “Your 11:30 appointment is here,” said Mrs. Wallace’s voice.

“Right, okay.”

A moment later a thin, blue-eyed man in his mid-thirties came through the door. “Dr. Krieger,” he said, extending his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Have a seat.”

The man did so, but first handed Jock a copy of a lengthy curriculum vitae. “As you can see, I have a Ph.D. in genetics from Oxford. I was associated with the Ancient Biomolecules Centre there.”

“Did you do any Neanderthal work?”

“No, not specifically. But lots of other late-Cenozoic stuff.”

“How did you hear about us?”

“I was with York University, where Mary Vaughan used to be, and—”

“We generally do our own recruiting, you know.”

“Oh, I understand that, sir. But I thought, with Mary having gone to the other universe, you might have need of a geneticist.”

Jock glanced at the object on his desktop. “As a matter of fact, Dr. Ruskin, I do.”

It had been almost three weeks since the United Nations contingent, including Jock, had returned home. Ponter and Adikor were working down in their quantum-computing facility, a thousand armspans below the surface, when the message came through: a courier envelope, passed along the Derkers tube by a Canadian Forces officer.

Ponter himself happened to open the package. The interior envelope bore the bisected-globe logo of the Synergy Group, and so Ponter at first assumed it was for Mare. But it wasn’t. To his astonishment, the inner envelope was addressed to him, in both English letters and Neanderthal glyphs.

Ponter opened the envelope, with his beloved Adikor looking over his shoulder. Inside was a memory bead. Ponter popped it into the player on his control console, and a three-dimensional image of Lonwis Trob appeared, his mechanical blue eyes shining from within. The image was about a third of life-size, and it floated a handspan above the console.

“Healthy day, Scholar Boddit,” said Lonwis. “I need you to return to the Synergy Group headquarters, here on the south side of Lake Jorlant—what the Gliksins still insist on calling Lake Ontario, despite me having corrected them repeatedly. As you know, I am working here with Dr. Benoît on quantum-computing issues, and I have a new idea about preventing decoherence even in surface-level systems, but I require your expertise in quantum computing. Bring your research partner, Scholar Adikor Huld; his expertise would be of considerable utility, too. Be here within three days.”