“We haven’t been too smart, have we?” he whispered.

“We were not expecting to come under immediate attack by a troupe of Homo erectus.”

“Yeah, but it’s taken us a bare half-hour after opening the hatch to lose the lander, our supplies, and our weapons. I’m not even sure which way we’re running.”

“We will recover the lander.”

“How do you know?”

“Because we must,” Nemoto said simply.

A shadow slid across his field of view. It was subtle, difficult to distinguish from the swaying motion of a branch, the shifting coins of dappled sunlight that lay over the forest floor.

The camera on his shoulder swivelled to look into his face, and he forced a grin “If you guys have any suggestions, now would be a good time… ”

Eight, nine, ten shadows moved, all around them, shadows that coalesced into ape-people.

“The Erectus. They have been hunting us,” Nemoto said. “Their intelligence is advanced enough for that, at least.” She seemed calm, beyond fear.

The ape-people advanced. Some of them were grinning, and one of the men, perhaps excited by the prospect of a kill, sported an impressive erection.

Malenfant stood up slowly. The camera on his shoulder swivelled back and forth, whirring, somehow the most distracting object in his universe. He said, “I think—”

A vast, heavy creature came running out of the depths of the wood. It hurled itself at the largest ape-man. They rolled on the floor, wrestling.

The ape-men gathered around the combatants, hooting and hollering, their teeth showing between drawn-back lips — perhaps a rictus of fear — and they slapped ineffectually at the rolling figures.

Nemoto clutched Malenfant’s arm, and they backed away.

Nemoto said, “I thought it was a bear.”

“No,” Malenfant said grimly.

No, not a bear: a man — yet another sort of man, shorter than his naked opponent, but much more heavily muscled, and dressed in animal skins that were tied to his body with bits of red-black rope. Though the ape-man on the ground was a formidable opponent — surely more than a match for any human in hand-to hand combat — the bear-man was stronger yet, and soon he had the ape-man pinned to the ground by sitting on his chest.

The bear-man snarled, “Enough?”

Once again the use of English, distorted but clear enough, startled Malenfant. Was it really credible that Emma could have taught the use of English to not one but two species of other-men? But if not, what was going on?

The man on the ground snapped at the hand that slapped him, but it was clear that the fight had gone out of him. The bear-man sat back and let him up.

The ape-man rejoined his companions and, his defiance momentarily sparking, he growled at the bear-man. “Ham! Eat Ham good eat!”

The bear-man — the “Ham” — opened his huge mouth wide, exposing a row of flat brown teeth. He ran at the ape-people, making them scatter, and with a broad, bare foot he aimed a heavy kick at the naked rump of the last man.

Then the bear-man walked up to Malenfant and Nemoto. He was a good head shorter than Malenfant — no more than five five, five six — but he was broad as a barn door. Under the skins which wrapped him loosely, Malenfant could see muscles moving. His walk was somewhat ungainly, as if his legs were bowed, or his balance not quite perfect. His skull was long and flat, with a bulge at the back that showed beneath a sprawl of thick black hair. He had a vast cavernous nose, and brown eyes glinted beneath bony brows like two caves. Sweat had pooled in a hollow between the brow ridges and his low forehead.

“Neandertal,” Nemoto muttered. “Or possibly Homo heidelbergensis. Most probably Neandertalensis, of the so-called classic variant. Or rather a lineage evolved from Neandertal stock, in this unique place.”

Malenfant could smell beer on the Neandertal’s breath. “Holy shit,” he said. Beer?

The Neandertal — or bear-man, or Ham — grinned at them. “Stupi” Runners,” he said. “Scare easy.” He stuck his tongue out and lunged forward. “Boo!”

Both Malenfant and Nemoto took a step back. The bear-man’s voice was gravelly and thick, and his vowel sounds slurred one into the other. “But,” Malenfant said, “he speaks better than I do after a couple of hours at the Outpost.”

Now there was a crashing from the forest that resolved itself into clumsy, unconcealed footsteps. A new voice called, “What the devil is going on, Thomas?”

Malenfant frowned, trying to place the accent. English, of course — a British accent, maybe — but twisted in a way he didn’t recognize.

The bear-man called, “Here, Baas. Runners. Chase off.”

A man walked out of the shadows towards them — a human this time, a stocky man, white, aged maybe fifty, with a grubby walrus moustache. He was dressed in a buckskin suit, and he had a kind of crossbow over his shoulder. What looked like a long-legged rabbit hung from his belt.

When he saw Malenfant and Nemoto, he stopped dead, mouth a perfect circle.

Malenfant spread his hands wide. “We’re from America. NASA.”

The man frowned. “From where?… Have you come to rescue us?” Malenfant saw hope spark in his eyes, sudden, intense. He walked towards Malenfant, hand extended. “McCann. Hugh McCann. Oh, it has been so long in this place! Are you here to take us home?”

Malenfant felt a light touch on his shoulder, a soft crunch. When he looked, the camera he had worn there had gone, disappeared into the paw of the Neandertal.

Emma Stoney:

The spaceship had been quite unmistakable as it drifted out of the sky, heading east, Shuttle-orbiter black and white under a glowing blue and white canopy. Her eyes weren’t what they used to be, but she’d swear she made out the round blue NASA meatball logo on its flank.

Malenfant. Who else?

She knew immediately she had to follow it. She couldn’t stay with the Ham troupe any more. She couldn’t rely on whoever had drifted down from the sky to come find her. Her destiny had been in her own hands since the moment she had fallen out of the sky of Earth into this strange place, and it was no different now. She had to get herself to that lander.

She gathered up her gear. She equipped herself with stone tools and spears from the Ham encampment — without guilt, for the Hams seemed to make most of their tools as they needed them and then abandoned them. With her hat of woven grasses and her poncho of animal skin, all draped over the remnants of her air force coverall, she must look like the wild woman of the woods, she thought.

She attempted to say goodbye to the Ham who had first found her, and to some of the others she had gotten to know. But she was met with only blankness or bafflement.

After all, since nobody ever went anywhere, nobody said goodbye in a Ham community — except maybe at death.

She slipped into the forest.

Shadow:

Thanks to extended pulses of volcanism, this small world was steadily warming, and temperate forests were shrinking back in favour of more open grasslands. The range of Shadow’s family group was only a little smaller than the remnant of forest to which they clung; with invisible, unconscious skill, Shadow’s elders had always guided her away from the exposed fringes of the forest.

But now her people had turned on Shadow. And to escape them she would have to leave her forest home.

Emerging from the trees, she found herself at the foot of a shallow forest covered slope, a foothill of taller mountains which reared up behind her. She faced a wide plain, a range of open, park-like savannah, grasslands punctuated by stands of trees. To the right of the plain a broad river ran, sluggish and brown. Away to the left a range of more rocky hills rose, their lower slopes coated with a thick carpet of forest. The hills marched away m a subtly curving ring; they were the rim mountains of a small crater.