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glaciers when the Ice Age came down across Europe…probably via the same Gibralter landbridge the dinosaurs used, many millions of years earlier…”
    All this was interesting enough, I suppose, but hardly relevant to the problem at hand. I didn’t bother asking the Doc if Neanderthal men were dangerous, because I had a pretty fair notion they were. And I believe I failed to mention they were carrying wooden clubs, stone axes, and a couple of long, clumsylooking spears tipped with sharply pointed bits of stone.
    One perfectly enormous caveman stepped to the fore to look us over. He was a good head taller than I am, and must have tipped the scales at three hundred pounds, with those gorilla-like shoulders and huge, hairy paunch. He wore a crude necklace of seashells threaded on a string of gut around his fat throat: from this, and the way the others deferred to him, I reckoned him to be the chief.
    “How,” I said, lifting my right hand slowly, palm open and forward, as they do in the movies.
    He grunted and spat, looking me over sourly. I took the opportunity to take a good look at him.
    He must have been the ugliest man I’ve ever seen, with a thick underslung jaw and a heavy brow-ridge, hardly any forehead to speak of, and a nose that had been squashed flat a few times. His skin was so dirty and matted with hair that it was almost impossible to tell what color it was. His hair, amusingly, was reddish, nearly the same shade as the mammoth’s coat. His eyes caught my attention: one of them was blank white, obviously blinded either from a cataract or an injury. The other eye was small and mean, buried in a pit of gristle under that bony shelf of a brow. His beard was short and scrubby, and he was crawling with lice: I know this for a fact, for while he was giving me the once-over, he plucked one of the vermin from his armpit, and cracked it between his teeth.
    “Tasty, I’ll bet,” I remarked in an easy, conversational manner. “I can just imagine what your table manners are like!”
    “Be careful, my boy, you might make him angry,” muttered the Professor nervously.
    I grinned. The Neanderthal man evidently felt he was being talked about, or laughed at—or, possibly, both. Grunting, he spat between my feet, a murderous gleam in his one good eye.
    In the next instant he came at me in a rush, growling like a lion at the charge.
    I went for the automatic at my waist, but didn’t have time to use it. For the caveman slammed the flat of his stone axe up alongside my head, and, for me, the day was over.

PART III: MEN OF THE STONE AGE
    CHAPTER 9
    CAPTIVES OF THE CAVEMEN
    The next two or three days I will skip over, partly because my memory of them is rather blurred, but mostly because there really wasn’t much that happened to us that will bear repeating.
    The Neanderthal men seem to have been on a slave-hunting expedition, and were on their way back home with a dozen other captives when they encountered the two of us. One-Eye, as I came to call the chief of the expedition, didn’t mind adding a couple more captives to his collection, although I understand he thought the Professor a bit too scrawny to be worth carrying along. One of his cronies, an ugly customer I came to think of as Fatso from his triple chin and enormous belly, must have persuaded him otherwise, for when I came out of my little nap, there the two of us were, tied together.
    I was being carried over the shoulder of one brawny youth who was quite glad to put me down once it was understood I was awake and could walk. These men bore little resemblance to the Neanderthals; in fact, if you shaved them and put some clothes on them, they would not look out of place on Broadway or Main Street, being tall, bronzed, athletic young fellows with straw-yellow hair and blue eyes.
    “Obviously, descendants of Cro-Magnon man,” the Professor explained when I got a chance to ask him about our fellow-captives. “The two major genera of Homo sapiens were