“You do not have a permanent settlement there?”

“No.”

“So people simply go to see the moon, then return to Earth. How many go each month? Is it a popular thing to do?”

“Umm, nobody goes. Nobody has gone for—well, I guess it’s thirty years now. We only ever sent twelve people to the moon’s surface. Six groups of two.”

“Why did you stop?”

“Well, it’s complicated. Money was certainly one factor.”

“I can imagine,” said Ponter.

“And, well, there was the political situation. See, we—” She paused for a moment. “Gee, this is hard to explain. We called it The Cold War. There was no actual fighting going on, but the United States and another large nation, the Soviet Union, were in a severe ideological conflict.”

“Over what?”

“Umm, over economic systems, I suppose.”

“Hardly sounds worth fighting about,” said Ponter.

“It seemed very important at the time. But, anyway, the president of the United States, he set the goal in—when was it?—in 1961, I guess, to put a man on the moon by the end of that decade. See, the Russians—the people from the Soviet Union—they’d put the first artificial satellite in space, and then the first man in space, and the U.S. was lagging behind, so, well, it set out to beat them.”

“And did it?”

“Oh, yes. The Russians never managed to put anyone on the moon. But, well, once we’d beaten the Russians, the public pretty much lost interest.”

“That is ridiculous—” began Ponter, but then he stopped. “No, I must apologize. Going to the moon is a magnificent feat, and whether you did it once or a thousand times, it is still praiseworthy.” He paused. “I guess it is simply a question of different priorities.”

Chapter 35

Mary and Ponter headed downstairs, looking for something to eat. Just after they got to the kitchen, Reuben Montego and Louise Benoit finally emerged from the basement. Reuben grinned at Ponter. “More barbecue?”

Ponter smiled back at him. “Please. But you must let me help.”

“I’ll show you how,” said Louise. She patted Ponter on the forearm. “Come on, big fella.”

Suddenly, Mary found herself objecting. “I thought you were a vegetarian.”

“I am,” said Louise. “For five years now. But I know how to barbecue.”

Mary had an urge to go with them, as Ponter and Louise headed out through the sliding glass doors onto the deck. But … but … no, that was silly.

Louise slid the glass doors shut behind them, keeping the cooled air inside the house.

Reuben was clearing off the kitchen table. He faked the voice of an old Jewish yenta. “So, vhat have you two kids been talking about?”

Mary was still looking out through the glass, at Louise, laughing and tossing her hair as she explained how the barbecue worked, and at Ponter, hanging on her every word.

“Umm, mostly religion,” said Mary.

Reuben’s voice immediately switched back to normal. “Really?”

“Uh-huh,” said Mary. She tore her eyes away from what was going on outside, and looked at Reuben. “Or more precisely, Neanderthals’ lack of religion.”

“But I thought Neanderthals did have religion,” said Reuben, now getting some plain white Corelle plates from a cupboard. “The cult of the cave bear, and all that.”

Mary shook her head. “You’ve been reading old books, Reuben. No one takes that seriously anymore.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Oh, some cave-bear skulls were found in one cave that had indeed been occupied by Neanderthals. But it now looks like the bears had simply died in the cave, probably during hibernation, and the Neanderthals had moved in afterwards.”

“But weren’t the skulls all arranged in patterns?”

“Well,” said Mary, getting a handful of cutlery and laying it out, “the guy who first found them claimed they were in a stone crib or coffin. But no photos were taken, workers supposedly destroyed the coffin, and the only two sketches made by the archeologist—a guy named Bachler—completely contradict each other. No, it seems Bachler simply saw what he wanted to see.”

“Oh,” said Reuben, now rummaging in the fridge for things to make a salad. “But what about Neanderthals burying their dead with stuff the dear departed might need in the afterlife? Surely that’s a sign of religion.”

“Well, it would be,” said Mary, “if Neanderthals had really done that. But sites occupied for generations accumulate garbage: bones, old stone tools, and so on. The few examples we thought we had of grave goods at Neanderthal burials turned out to be stuff that had just accidentally been buried with the corpse.”

Reuben was pulling leaves off a head of iceberg lettuce now. “Ah, but doesn’t burial in and of itself imply a belief in the afterlife?”

Mary looked around for something else she could do to help, but there really didn’t seem to be anything. “It might,” she said, “or it might just be a case of trying to keep things neat. Lots of Neanderthal corpses are found in tightly wrapped fetal positions. That could be ceremony, or it could just be a desire on the part of the poor slob who had to dig the grave to make the hole as small as possible. Dead bodies attract scavengers, after all, and they get to stinking if you leave them out in the sun.”

Reuben was now chopping up celery. “But … but I read about Neanderthals being, well, the first flower children.”

Mary laughed. “Ah, yes. Shanidar Cave, in Iraq—where Neanderthal bodies were found covered with fossil pollen.”

“That’s right,” said Reuben, nodding. “As if they’d been buried wearing flower garlands, or something.”

“Sorry, but that’s been discredited, too. The pollen was just an accidental intrusion into the grave, brought there by burrowing rodents or groundwater percolating through the sediment.”

“But—wait a minute! What about the Neanderthal flute! That was front-page news all over the world.”

“Yeah,” said Mary. “Ivan Turk found that in Slovenia: a hollowed-out bear bone with four holes in it.”

“Right, right. A flute!”

“’Fraid not,” said Mary, leaning against the side-by-side fridge now. “It turns out that the bone was pierced by carnivore gnawing—probably by a wolf. And, yes, in typical newspaper fashion, that revelation did not make the front page.”

“That’s for sure. This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“I was there at the Paleoanthropology Society meeting in Seattle in ’98, when Nowell and Chase presented their paper discrediting the flute.” Mary paused. “No, it really does look like right until the very end, Neanderthals—at least on this version of Earth—had nothing that we’d call religion, or even culture for that matter. Oh, some of the very last specimens show a little variety in the things they did, but most paleoanthropologists think they were just imitating Cro-Magnons who lived nearby; Cro-Magnons were indisputably our direct ancestors.”

“Speaking of Cro-Magnons,” said Reuben, “what about crossbreeding between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons? Didn’t I read that fossils of a hybrid child had been found in, what, oh, maybe 1998?”

“Yeah, Erik Trinkaus is big on that specimen; it’s from Portugal. But, look, he’s a physical anthropologist, and I’m a geneticist. He bases his case entirely on the skeleton of a child that, to him, shows hybrid characteristics. But he doesn’t have the skull—and the skull is the only truly diagnostic part of a Neanderthal. To me, it just looks like a stocky kid.”

“Hmm,” said Reuben. “But, you know, I’ve seen guys who look a fair bit like Ponter, in features if not in coloring. Some Eastern Europeans, for instance, have big noses and prominent browridges. Are you saying those guys don’t have Neanderthal genes in them?”

Mary shrugged. “I know some paleoanthropologists who would argue that they do. But, really, the jury is still out on whether our kind of humans and Neanderthals even could crossbreed.”