Chapter 8

What we have here are three possibilities.

One, Hugo doesn’t even exist, I’ve been hallucinating the whole thing, I’m completely out of my mind and they’ll be coming for me in white coats—do doctors still wear white coats?—and with a straitjacket pretty soon.

I’m not sure I can entirely discount that one.

Two, Hugo is the biggest fraud you could ask to meet, and has been shining me on right along. Hell, I guess I’m gullible enough, even that fucking baby-rapist had me going.

In fact, maybe he’s even shining himself on, to the point that he actually believes what he’s saying and doing. He’s the one who’s wigged out, not me.

That seems pretty hard to go for, though. The Internet can’t find anything at all about cults or groups that go back to caveman living, and I can’t imagine he could have done all the work on those spears and the bag and the clothes and everything completely alone. There had to be others helping him, real others and not just figments of his imagination.

So either there’s a whole crew of whackos out there, in which case where the hell are the rest of them, or it’s door number three—which is that somehow or another Hugo’s for real and has come through about three hundred centuries or so to wind up in my living room. Maybe some kind of suspended animation, he got frozen in a glacier and only just woke up? But no, that doesn’t fit what he’s been telling me, and anyhow I don’t think it can happen. If you freeze you die, the water inside the body’s cells turns to ice and expands and the cells themselves rupture.

Which leaves ... time travel?

OK, that’s ridiculous, science fiction.

But the ‘Net says scientists think they’ve actually accomplished something like that in a small way. Very small, sub-atomic particles and only tiny fractions of a second. Even so, if scientists can do it a little bit in a lab, can’t nature maybe do it on a much grander scale?

I don’t know what to think.

Well, there’s not a lot of point to worrying about number one; if I’m hallucinating I’m doing such a dandy job of it that there’s no way I’m going to pull myself out of it by my own bootstraps, so I might as well act on the presumption that this is really happening.

I’ll keep number two on the back burner for a while, but I don’t really believe it. Nobody’s that good an actor, and if he’s looney tunes I think it’d show in more ways than this. There’s also the matter of his missing chums, and anyhow how’d he show up in the middle of my front yard with no footprints or anything and nothing he could have fallen out of?

So I guess the only way to handle it is continue on the basis of number three: He’s a real caveman from the past. And Jesus, if he is they made some damn smart cavemen back then. In his shoes I’d be dead of shock at all the technology he’s been seeing, and he just takes it in his stride and keeps going. And the speed that he’s been picking up English is truly amazing.