The Ugly Little Boy

Chapter Eight. Dreaming

  36

  LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, long after Bruce Mannheim and Marianne Levien had left, Hoskins returned to the dollhouse. He looked haggard and grim.

  "Is Timmie sleeping?" he asked.

  Miss Fellowes nodded. "Finally. He needed plenty of calming down. " She put down the book she had been reading and regarded Hoskins without warmth. It had been a tense, disturbing afternoon, and she would just as soon have been left alone now.

  Hoskins said, "I'm sorry things got so testy. "

  "There was a lot of shouting, yes. More than the boy really needed. Don't you think that discussion could have taken place someplace else?"

  "I'm sorry," Hoskins said again. "I flew off the handle, I guess. -That man is going to drive me crazy. "

  "Actually, he didn't seem as awful as I had expected. I think he's genuinely got Timmie's welfare at heart. "

  "No doubt he does. But to come butting in here uninvited, telling us what to do-"

  "The boy does need a playmate. "

  Hoskins gave her a despondent look, as though he thought the debate was going to get started all over again. But he managed to master himself in time.

  "Yes," he said quietly. "So he does. I won't argue with you about that. But where are we going to get one? The problems are enormous. "

  "You weren't serious about bringing your own son in here if ail else failed, then?"

  Hoskins seemed startled. Perhaps she might be pushing him too far. But she hadn't asked him to come back here a second time today.

  "Serious? -Yes, yes, of course I was serious. If we can't find anybody else. Do you think I'm afraid my boy would come to some harm at Timmie's hands? But my wife would have some objections, I suspect. She'd see risks. A lot of people on the outside seem to think Timmie's some kind of wild ape-boy. A savage creature that lived in caves and ate raw meat. "

  "What if we had an interview with him go out on the subetheric?" Miss Fellowes suggested. She was surprised to hear herself proposing more media incursions on Timmie's privacy; but if it would help overcome popular prejudices about the boy, it would be worth the strain on him. "Now that he speaks English-if people knew that he does-"

  "I don't think that would be likely to improve things, Miss Fellowes. "

  "Why not?"

  "His English really isn't very good, you know. "

  She was indignant at once. "What do you mean? He's got an amazing vocabulary, considering the point that he started from. And learning more words every day. "

  Hoskins' eyes seemed very weary. "You're the only one who can understand him. To the rest of us the things he says might just as well be Neanderthal words. They're practically unintelligible. "

  "You aren't listening carefully to him, then. "

  "No," Hoskins said without much vigor. "Perhaps not. "

  He shrugged and looked away and seemed to sink into some sort of reverie. Miss Fellowes picked up her book again and opened it to the page she had been on, without looking down at it, hoping that he would take the hint. But Hoskins sat where he was.

  "-If only that miserable woman hadn't become involved in this thing!" he burst out suddenly, after a time.

  "Marianne Levien?"

  "That robot, yes. "

  "Surely she isn't!"

  "No, not really," Hoskins said, with a tired little smile. "She just seems like one to me. Here we have a boy out of the past in the next room, and a woman who seems like something out of the future comes around to make trouble for me. I wish I'd never met her in the first place. Mannheim by himself isn't so bad-just one of those fuzzy-brained socially conscious guys, full of all sorts of lofty ideals, who goes running around all over the place determined to make the world a better place according to his own lights; that sort of thing. Your basic high-minded do-gooder. But Levien-that chrome-plated bitch-excuse my language, Miss Fellowes-"

  "But that's exactly what she is. "

  "Yes. Yes, she is, isn't she?"

  Miss Fellowes nodded. "I have trouble believing that a woman like that was once actually being considered for the job of looking after Timmie. "

  "One of the first to apply. Eager for the job. Hungry for it, as a matter of fact. "

  "She seems so-unsuitable. "

  "Her credentials were terrific. It was her personality that turned me off. She was very surprised not to be hired. -Well, somehow she's gotten herself entangled with Mannheim's crowd now, more's the pity. Probably deliberately, by way of paying me back for not giving her the job. Her way of getting revenge. Hell hath no fury, and so forth. She'll stir him up and stir him up and stir him up-she'll fill his head with her silly jargon, as though he doesn't have enough goofy psychobabble of his own stirring around in there-she'll keep him coming after me, fire him up to persecute me steadily-"

  His voice was starting to rise.

  Firmly Miss Fellowes said, "I don't think you can call it persecution when someone suggests that Timmie is a very lonely child and that something needs to be done about it. "

  "Something will be done about it. "

  "But why do you think she's being vengeful, when it seems to me she's simply pointing out-"

  "Because she is vengeful!" Hoskins said, more loudly than before. "Because she wanted to come in here and take charge of this project when it was just getting under way, but she didn't get the opportunity, and now she intends to bring it all down around our ears. She'll have no mercy. Mannheim's a pushover compared with her. He can be manipulated, if you know the right buttons to push. He'll settle for constant statements of good intentions, polite reassurances that I'm going to follow his party line. But she'll be demanding on-site inspections every other Tuesday, now that she's calling the tune for him, and she'll want results. Changes. Things that'll keep us in turmoil all the time. She'll want Timmie to have psychotherapy next, or orthodontia, or plastic surgery to give him a nice cheerful Homo sapiens face-she'll meddle and meddle and meddle, one damned intrusion after another, making use of Mannheim's publicity machine to smear us, to make us look like evil mad scientists coldbloodedly tormenting an innocent child-" He turned away and stared at Timmie's closed bedroom door. Morosely Hoskins said, "Mannheim's helpless in the power of a woman like that. She's probably sleeping with him, too. She must own him by now. He doesn't stand a chance against her. "

  Miss Fellowes' eyes widened. "What a thing to say!"

  "Which?"

  "That she and he-that she would use her- You have no proof of that. The whole suggestion's out ofline, Dr. Hoskins. Absolutely out ofline. "

  "Is it?" Hoskins' anger seemed to dissolve in an instant. He looked toward her and grinned shamefacedly. "-Yes, I suppose it is. You're right. I don't know anything about who Mannheim may be sleeping with, if anybody, and I don't care. Or Levien. I just want them to get out of our hair so we can do our research, Miss Fellowes. You know that. You also know that I've taken every step possible to make Timmie happy here. But I'm so tired, now-so damned tired-"

  Impulsively Miss Fellowes went to him and seized his hands in hers. They were cold. She held them for a moment, wishing she could pump life and energy into them.

  "When was the last time you had a vacation, Dr. Hoskins?"

  "A vacation?" He chuckled hollowly. "I don't diink I know what the word means. "

  "Maybe that's the problem. "

  "I can't. I simply can't. I turn my back for a minute, Miss Fellowes, and anything will happen here. A dozen different Adamewskis trying to steal scientific specimens out of Stasis. People running strange new experiments without authorization, doing God knows what at God knows what cost. Equipment that we can't afford purchased to set up projects that don't have a chance of working. We've got a lot of wild characters around this place, and I'm the only policeman. Until we've finished this phase of our work I don't dare take time off. "

  "A long weekend, at least? You need some rest. "

  "I know that. God, do I know that! -
Thank you for caring so much, Miss Fellowes. Thank you for everything. In this whole madhouse of a research institute you've been one of the few pillars of sanity and dependability. "

  "And will you try to get a little rest?"

  "I'll try, yes. "

  "Starting now?" she asked. "It's getting toward six o'clock. Your wife's expecting you at home. Your litde boy. "

  "Yes," Hoskins said. "I'd better be heading out of here. And once again: thank you for everything, Miss Fellowes. Thank you. Thank you. "

  37

  In the night she was awakened by the sound of sobbing coming from Timmie's room. It was the first time she had heard that in a long while.

  She got quickly out of bed and went to him. She had long ago mastered the skill of waking up in a hurry when a troubled child was calling out.

  "Timmie?" she called.

  She turned the night-light on. He was sitting up in bed, staring straight forward, with his eyes wide open, making the eerie high-pitched sound that was his kind of sobbing. But he didn't seem to see her. He took no notice of her at all as she entered the room, and the sobbing went on and on.

  "Timmie, it's me. Miss Fellowes. " She sat down beside him and slipped her arm around his shoulders. "It's all right, Timmie. It's all right!"

  Slowly the sobbing stopped.

  He looked at her as though he had never seen her before in his life. His eyes had a weirdly glassy look and his lips were drawn back in a bizarre way. In the half-darkness the lightning-bolt birthmark stood out fiercely on his cheek. She had virtually stopped noticing it but his face seemed pallid, almost bloodless, just now and the birthmark looked brighter than it had ever been before.

  He's still asleep, she thought.

  "Timmie?"

  He made clicking sounds at her, Neanderthal speech. He seemed to be talking not so much to her as through her, to some invisible entity standing behind her.

  Miss Fellowes hugged him and rocked him lightly from side to side, murmuring his name, crooning to him. His small body was rigid. He might almost have been under some kind of a spell. The clicking went on and on, interspersed with the sort of feral growls he had uttered in the early weeks of his stay. It was frightening to hear him revert like that to his prehistoric self.

  "There, there, Timmie-little boy-Miss Fellowes' little boy-it's all right, everything's all right, there's nothing to worry about. -Would you like some milk, Timmie?"

  She felt him grow less stiff. He was waking up now.

  "Miss-Fellowes," he said haltingly.

  "Milk? A little warm milk, Timmie?"

  "Milk. Yes. Want milk. "

  "Come," she said, and swooped him up out of the bed, carrying him into the kitchen. It didn't strike her as a good idea to leave him alone just now. She perched him on the stool next to the refrigeration unit, got out a flask of milk, popped it in the heater for a moment. *.

  "What was it?" she asked him, as he drank. "A dream? A bad dream, Timmie?"

  He nodded, busy with the milk. Miss Fellowes waited for him to finish.

  "Dream," he said. It was one of his newest words. "Bad. Bad dream. "

  "Dreams aren't real. " Did he understand that? "You don't have to be afraid of dreams, Timmie. "

  "Bad-dream-''

  His face was solemn. He seemed to be shivering, though the dollhouse was as warm as ever.

  "Come back to bed now," she told him, scooping him up again. She tucked him in. -"What did you dream, Timmie? Can you tell me what it was?"

  He made clicks again, a long series of them, interrupted by two short, soft growls.

  Reverting to the old ways in the stress of the night? Or was it simply that he lacked the vocabulary to describe the dream in English?

  Then he said, "Out-side. "

  His enunciation was so poor she wasn't certain that she heard him right.

  "Outside? Is that what you said?"

  "Out-side," he said again.

  Yes, she was fairly sure of it. "Outside the bubble?" Miss Fellowes pointed toward the wall. "Out there?"

  He nodded. "Out-side. "

  "You dreamed that you were outside there?"

  Vigorous nodding. "Yes. "

  "And what did you see out there?"

  He made clicks.

  "I can't understand you. "

  The clicks became more insistent.

  "No, Timmie. It's no good. You have to speak my kind of words. I don't understand yours. When you dreamed you were outside-what did you see?"

  "Nothing," he said. "Empty. "

  Empty, yes. No wonder. He had no idea what was out there. The dollhouse's single window showed him only a little grassy patch, a fence, a meaningless sign.

  "Big-empty," he said.

  "You didn't see anything at all out there?"

  Clicks.

  Perhaps in his sleep he had been back in his Neanderthal world, and he had seen Ice Age scenes, drifts of snow, great shambling hairy animals wandering across the land, people clad in robes made of fur. But he had no words in English to describe any of that to her; and so he used the only sounds he did know.

  "Outside," he said again. "Big-empty-"

  "Scary?" Miss Fellowes prompted.

  "Empty," he said. "Timmie alone. "

  Yes, she thought. Timmie alone. You poor, poor child.

  She hugged him and tucked him in a second time, for he had pulled the coverlet free, and she gave him one of his favorite toys, a shapeless green floppy-limbed animal that was supposed to be a dinosaur. Dr. Mclntyre had scowled when he saw it, and had given her one of his little paleoanthropological lectures about how it was a mistake to think that prehistoric man had been in any way a contemporary of the dinosaurs-a common popular error, he said, but in fact the Mesozoic Era had ended many millions of years before the appearance on the evolutionary scene of the first manlike primates. Yes, Miss Fellowes said, I know all that. But Timmie doesn't, and he loves his dinosaur very much. The boy hugged it now; and Miss Fellowes stood beside his bed until he had fallen asleep again.

  No more bad dreams, she told him silently. ЈJo dreams of the great empty place outside where Timmie is all alone.

  She went back to her own bed. A glance at the clock on the dresser told her that the rime was a quarter to five. Too close to morning; she doubted that she would get back to sleep. More likely she'd simply lie awake, vigilantly listening for sounds from Timmie's room, and before long it would be dawn.

  But she was wrong. Sleep took her quickly; and this time she was the one who dreamed.

  She was in her bed, not here in the dollhouse but in her little apartment on the other side of town, which she hadn't seen in so many months. Someone was knocking on her door: eagerly, urgently, impatiently. She rose, slipping on a bathrobe, and activated the security screen. A man stood in the hall: a youngish man with close-clinging red hair, and a reddish beard, too.

  Bruce Mannheim.

  "Edith?" he said. "Edith, I have to see you. "

  He was smiling. Her hands shook a little as she undid the safeties on the door. He loomed before her in the dark, shadowy hallway, taller than she remembered, broad-shouldered, a sturdy virile figure. "Edith," he said. "Oh, Edith, it's been such a long time-"

  And then she was in his arms. Right there in the hall, heedless of the staring neighbors, who stood in their doorways, pointing and murmuring. He swept her up as she had swept Timmie up not long before-carried her into her own apartment-whispering her name all the while"Bruce," she said. And realized that she had spoken the name aloud. She was awake. She sat up quickly and pressed both her hands over her mouth. Her cheeks were hot and stinging with embarrassment. Fragments of the dream whirled in her astounded mind. The absurdity of it -and its blatant schoolgirlish eroticism-stunned and dismayed her. She couldn't remember when she had last had any such sort of dream.

  And to pick Bruce Mannheim as her dashing romantic hero-of all people-!
r />   She began to laugh.

  Dr. Hoskins would be appalled, if he knew! His reliable, dependable Miss Fellowes-consorting intimately with the enemy, even if only in her dreams!

  How ridiculous-how preposterousHow pathetic, she told herself abruptly.

  The aura of the dream still hovered about her. Some of the details were already gone from her mind. Others burned as vividly as though she were still asleep. His ardent embrace, his steamy passionate whispering. Edith- Edith-it's been such a long time, EdithA spinster's pitiful little fantasy. Sick. Sick. Miss Fellowes began to tremble, and had to struggle to fight off tears. The dream no longer seemed in any way funny to her. She felt soiled by it. An intrusion into her mind; an invasion of her neat enclosed life: where had it come from? Why? She had shut off all such yearnings years ago -or so she wanted to think. She had opted for a life without the disturbances that desire brought. A maidenly life; a spinster's life. Strictly speaking, she was neither, for she had been married, after all-if only for a handful of months. But that chapter was closed. She had lived as an island, entire of herself, for years-for decades. Devoted to her work, to her children. And now thisIt was only a dream, she told herself. And dreams aren't real. She had told Timmie the same thing just a little while before.

  Only a dream. Only. The sleeping mind is capable of liberating any kind of thought at all. Strange things drift around randomly in there, floating on the tides of the unconscious. It meant nothing, nothing at all, other than that Bruce Mannheim had come here today and he had left some kind of impression on her that her sleeping mind had rearranged into a startling and improbable little scenario. But Mannheim was at least ten years younger than she was. And, pleasant-looking though he was, she didn't find him particularly attractive-not even in fantasy. He was just a man: someone she had met that day. Sometimes, despite everything, she did feel attracted to men. She had felt attracted to Hoskins, after all-a pointless, useless, meaningless attraction to a happily married man with whom she happened to work. There was some slight reality to the feeling she had for Hoskins, at least. There was none here. Only a dream, Miss Fellowes told herself again, only a dream, only a dream.

  The thing to do now was to go back to sleep, she decided. By the time morning came she would probably have forgotten the whole thing.

  Miss Fellowes closed her eyes again. After a while, she slept. The shadow of the dream was still with her, though, the vague outline and humiliating essence of it, when she woke once again a little past six as Timmie began to move about in his room: the urgent knocking at her door, the breathless greeting, the passionate embrace. But the whole thing simply seemed absurd to her now.

  38

  After all the talk of the need to get a playmate for Timmie, Miss Fellowes expected that Hoskins would produce one almost immediately, if only to pacify the powerful political forces that Mannheim and Marianne Levien represented. But to her surprise weeks went by and nothing seemed to happen. Evidently Hoskins was having just as much difficulty arranging for someone's child to be brought into the Stasis bubble as he had anticipated. How he was managing to stall Mannheim off, Miss Fellowes didn't know.

  Indeed she saw almost nothing of Hoskins in this period. Evidently he was preoccupied with other activities of Stasis Technologies, Ltd. , and she caught no more than an occasional glimpse of him in passing. Running the company was obviously a full time job for him, and then some. Miss Fellowes had already gotten the impression, from little bits and snatches of comment that she had picked up from other people, that Hoskins was constantly struggling to cope with a staff of talented but high strung prima donnas hungry for Nobel prizes while he presided in his harried way over one of the most complex scientific ventures in history.

  Be that as it may. He had his problems; she had hers.

  Timmie's increasing loneliness was one of the worst of them. She tried to be everything the boy needed, nurse and teacher and surrogate mother; but she couldn't be enough. He dreamed again and again, always the same dream-not every night but often enough so that Miss Fellowes began keeping a record of the frequency of the dream-of that big, empty place outside the dollhouse where he could never be allowed to go. Sometimes he was alone out there; sometimes there were shadowy, mysterious figures with him. Because his English was still so rudimentary, she still wasn't able to tell whether the big empty place represented the lost Ice Age world to him or his imagined fantasy of the strange new era into which he had been brought. Either way, it was a frightening place to him, and he often awoke in tears. It wasn't necessary to have a degree in psychiatry to know that the dream was a powerful symptom of Timmie's isolation, his deepening sadness.

  During the daytime he went through long woebegone periods when he was aimless and withdrawn, or when he spent silent hours at the dollhouse window with its prospect of little more than nothing-staring out into the big empty of his dream, perhaps thinking nostalgically of the bleak ice-swept plateaus of his now distant childhood, perhaps simply wondering what lay beyond the walls of the rooms in which his existence was confined. And she thought furiously: Why don't they bring someone here to keep him company? Why?

  Miss Fellowes wondered if she ought to get in touch with Mannheim herself and tell him that nothing was being done, urge him to bring more pressure on Hoskins. But that seemed too much like treachery to her. Devoted as she was to Timmie, she still couldn't bring herself to go behind Hoskins' back that way. Yet her anger mounted.

  The physiologists by now had learned about all they could from the boy, short of dissecting him, and that didn't appear to be part of the research program. So their visits became less frequent; someone came in once a week to measure Timmie's growth and ask a few routine questions and take some photographs, but that was all. The needles were gone, the injections and withdrawals of fluid; the special diets were deemed no longer necessary; the elaborate and taxing studies of how Timmie's joints and ligaments and bones were articulated became much less frequent.

  So much to the good. But if the physiologists were growing less interested in the boy, the psychologists were only just beginning to turn up the heat. Miss Fellowes found the new group just as bothersome as the first, sometimes a good deal more so. Now Timmie was made to overcome barriers to reach food and water. He had to lift panels, move bars, reach for cords. And the mild electric shocks made him whimper with surprise and fear-or else to snarl in a highly primordial way. All of it drove Miss Fellowes to distraction.

  She didn't want to appeal to Hoskins, though. She didn't wish to go to Hoskins at all. He was keeping his distance, for whatever reason; and Miss Fellowes was afraid that if she carried new demands to him now, she'd lose her temper at the slightest sign of resistance, might even quit altogether. That was a step she didn't want to find herself taking. For Timmie's sake she had to stay here.

  Why had the man backed off from the Timmie project, though? Why this indifference? Was this his way of insulating himself from Bruce Mannheim's complaints and requests? It was stupid, she thought. Timmie was the only victim of his remoteness. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  She did what she could to limit access to Timmie by the scientists. But she couldn't seal the boy off from them entirely. This was a scientific experiment, after all. So the probing and the poking and the mild electrical shocks went on.

  And there were the anthropologists, too, armies of them, eager to interrogate Timmie about life as it had been lived in the Paleolithic. But even though Timmie now had a surprisingly good command of English-his kind of English-they still were doomed to frustration. They could ask all they wanted; but he could answer only if he understood the questions, and if his mind still retained any information about those aspects of his now remote days in the Stone Age world.

  As the weeks of his sojourn in the modern era turned into months Timmie's speech had grown constandy better and more precise. It never entirely lost a certain soft slurriness that Miss Fellowes found rather endearing, but his comprehension of Englis
h was now practically the equal of that of a modern child of his age. In times of excitement, he did tend to fall back into bursts of tongue-clicking and occasional primordial growling, but those times were becoming fewer. He must be forgetting the life he had known in the days before he came into the twenty-first century-except in his private world of dreams, where Miss Fellowes could not enter. Who knew what huge shambling mammoths and mastodons cavorted there, what dark scenes of prehistoric mystery were enacted on the screen of the Neanderthal boy's mind?

  But to Miss Fellowes' surprise, she was still the only one who could understand Timmie's words with any degree of assurance. Some of the others who worked frequently inside the Stasis bubble-her assistants Morten-son, Elliott, and Stratford, Dr. Mclntyre, Dr. Jacobs- seemed able to pick out a phrase or two, but it was always a great effort and they usually misconstrued at least half of what Timmie was saying. Miss Fellowes was puzzled by that. In the beginning, yes, the boy had had a little difficulty in shaping words intelligibly; but time had gone by and he was quite fluent now. Or so it seemed to her. But gradually she had to admit that it was only her constant day-and-night proximity to Timmie that had made her so readily capable of understanding him. Her ear automatically compensated for the differences between what he said and the way the words really should be pronounced. He was different from a modern child, at least so far as his capacity to speak was concerned. He understood much of what was said to him; he was able to reply now in complex sentences-but his tongue and lips and larynx and, Miss Fellowes supposed, his little hyoid bone simply didn't appear to be properly adapted to the niceties of the twenty-first-century English language, and what came out was thick with distortions.

  She defended him to the others. "Have you ever heard a Frenchman trying to say a simple word like 'the'? Or an Englishman trying to speak French? And there are letters in the Russian alphabet that we have to break our jaws to pronounce. Each linguistic group gets a different sort of training of the linguistic muscles from birth and for most people it's just about impossible to change. That's why there's such a thing as accents. Well, Timmie has a very pronounced Neanderthal accent. But it'll diminish with time. "

  Until that happened, Miss Fellowes realized, her own position would be one of unanticipated power and authority. She was not only Timmie*s nurse, she was also his interpreter: the conduit through which his memories of the prehistoric world were transmitted to the anthropologists who came to interrogate him. Without her as an intermediary, they would find it impossible to get coherent answers to the questions they wanted to put to die boy. Her help was necessary if the project was to achieve its full scientific value. And so Miss Fellowes became essential, in a way that no one including herself had expected, to the ongoing work of exploring the nature of human life in die remote past.

  Unfortunately, Timmie's interrogators almost always went away dissatisfied with the boy's revelations. It wasn't diat he was unwilling to cooperate. But he had spent only three or four years in die world of the Neanderthals-the first three or four years, at that. There weren't many children of his age in any era who were prepared to offer a comprehensive verbal account of the workings of the society they lived in.

  Most of what he did manage to convey were things that the anthropologists already suspected, and which, perhaps, they themselves planted in the boy's mind by the very nature of the questions which they had Miss Fellowes put to him.

  "Ask him how big his tribe was," they would say. "

  "I don't think he has any word for tribe. "

  "How many people there were in the group that he lived with, then. "

  She asked him. She had begun teaching him recently how to count. He looked confused.

  "Many," he said.

  "Many," in Timmie's vocabulary, could be anything more than about three. It all seemed to be the same to him, beyond that point.

  "How many?" she asked. She lifted his hand and ran her finger across the tips of his. "This many?"

  "More. "

  "How many more?"

  He made an effort. He closed his eyes for a moment as if staring into another world, and held out his hands, wriggling his fingers at her in rapid in-out gestures.

  "Is he indicating numbers, Miss Fellowes?"

  "I think so. Each hand movement is probably a five. "

  "I counted three movements of each hand. So the tribe was thirty people?"

  "Forty, I think. "

  "Ask him again. "

  "Timmie, tell me again: how many people were there in your group?"

  "Group, Miss Fellowes?"

  "The people around you. Your friends and relatives. How many were there?"

  "Friends. Relatives. " He considered those concepts. Vague unreal words to him, very likely.

  Then after a time he stared at his hands, and thrust his fingers out again, the same quick fluttery gesture, which might have been counting or might have been something else entirely. It was impossible to tell how many times he did it: perhaps eight, perhaps ten.

  "Did you see?" Miss Fellowes asked. "Eighty, ninety, a hundred people, I think he's saying this time. If he's really answering the question at all. " "The number was smaller before. " "I know. This is what he's saying now. " "It's impossible. A tribe that primitive couldn't have more than thirty! At most. "

  Miss Fellowes shrugged. If they wanted to taint the evidence with their own preconceptions, that wasn't her problem. "Then put down thirty. You're asking a child who was only around three years old to give you a census report. He's only guessing, and the amazing thing is that he can even guess what we're trying to get him to tell us. And he may not be. What makes you think he knows how to count? That he even understands the concept of number?"

  "But he does understand it, doesn't he?" "About as well as any five-year-old does. Ask the next five-year-old how many people he thinks live on his street, and see what he tells you. " "Well- "

  The other questions produced results nearly as uncertain. Tribal structure? Miss Fellowes managed to extract from Timmie, after a lot of verbal gyration, that there the tribe had had a "big man," by which he evidently meant a chief. No surprise there. Primitive tribes of historic times always had chiefs; it was reasonable to expect that Neanderthal tribes had had them, too. She asked if he knew the big man's name, and Timmie answered with clicks. Whatever the chiefs name might be, the boy couldn't translate it into English words or even render a phonetic equivalent: he had to fall back on Neanderthal sounds. -Did the chief have a wife? the scientists wanted to know. Timmie didn't know what a wife was.

  - How was the chief chosen? Timmie couldn't understand the question. -What about religious beliefs and practices?

  Miss Fellowes was able, by dint of giving Timmie all sorts of scientifically dubious prompting, to get some sort of description from the boy of a holy place made of rocks, which he had been forbidden to go near, and a cult which might or might not have been run by a high priestess. She was sure it was a priestess, not a priest, because he kept pointing to her as he spoke; but whether he really understood what she was trying to learn from him was something not at all certain to her.

  "If only they had managed to bring a child who was older than this across time!" the anthropologists kept lamenting. "Or a full-grown Neanderthal, for God's sake! If only! If only! How maddening, to have nothing but an ignorant little boy as our one source of information. "

  "I'm sure it is," Miss Fellowes agreed, without much compassion in her tone of voice. "But that ignorant little boy is one more Neanderthal than any of you ever expected to have a chance to interrogate. Never in your wildest dreams did you think you'd have any Neanderthals at all to talk to. "

  "Even so! If only! If only!"

  "If only, yes," said Miss Fellowes, and told them that their time for interviewing Timmie was over for that day.

  39

  Then Hoskins reappeared, arriving at the dollhouse without advance word one morning.

  "Miss
Fellowes? May I speak with you?"

  He was using that sheepish tone of his again, the one that conveyed extreme embarrassment. As well he might, Miss Fellowes thought.

  She came out coldly, smoothing her nurse's uniform. Then she halted in confusion. Hoskins wasn't alone. A pale woman, slender and of middle height, was with him, hovering at the threshold of the Stasis zone. Her fair hair and complexion gave her an appearance of fragility. Her eyes, a very light blue in color, were searching worriedly over Miss Fellowes' shoulders, looking diligently for something, flickering uneasily around the room as though she expected a savage gorilla to jump out from behind the door to Timmie's playroom.

  Hoskins said, "Miss Fellowes, this is my wife, Annette. Dear, you can step inside. It's perfectly safe. You'll feel a trifling discomfort at the threshold, but it passes. -1 want you to meet Miss Fellowes, who has been in charge of the boy since the night he came here. "

  (So this was his wife? She wasn't much like what Miss Fellowes would have expected Hoskins' wife to be; but then, she considered, she had never really had any clear expectations of what Hoskins' wife ought to be like. Someone more substantial, a little less fidgety, than this all too obviously ill-at-ease woman, at any rate. But, then, why? A strong-willed man like Hoskins might have preferred to choose a weak thing as his foil. Well, if that was what he wanted, so be it. On the other hand, Miss Fellowes had imagined Hoskins' wife would be young, young and sleek and glamorous, the usual sort of second wife that she had been told successful businessmen of Hoskins' age liked to acquire. Annette Hoskins didn't quite fall into that category. She was a good deal younger than Hoskins, yes, and younger than Miss Fellowes, too, for that matter. But she wasn't really young: forty, perhaps. Or close to it. )

  Miss Fellowes forced a matter-of-fact greeting. "Good morning, Mrs. Hoskins. I'm pleased to meet you. "

  "Annette. "

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Call me Annette, Miss Fellowes. Everyone does. And your name is-"

  Hoskins cut in quickly. "What's Timmie doing, Miss Fellowes? Taking a nap? I'd like my wife to meet him. "

  "He's in his room," Miss Fellowes said. "Reading. "

  Annette Hoskins gave a short, sharp, almost derisive-sounding laugh. "He can read?"

  "Simple picture books, Mrs. Hoskins. With short captions. He's not quite ready for real reading yet. But he does like to look at books. This one's about life in the far north. Eskimos, walrus-hunting, igloos, that sort of thing. He reads it at least once a day. "

  (Reading wasn't exactly the most accurate description of what Timmie did, Miss Fellowes knew. In fact it was something of a fib. Timmie wasn't reading at all. As far as she could tell, Timmie only looked at the pictures; the words printed under them seemed to have no more than a decorative value to him, mere strange little marks. He had showed no curiosity about them at any time thus far. Perhaps he never would. But he was looking at books, and apparently understanding their content. That was the next best thing to actual reading. For the purpose of this conversation it might just be a good idea to let Hoskins' wife jump to the conclusion that Timmie really could read, though surely Hoskins himself was aware of the truth. )

  Hoskins said in a robust, curiously pumped-up tone, "Isn't that amazing, Miss Fellowes? Do you remember what he was like the night we brought him in? That wild, screaming, dirty, frantic little prehistoric creature?"

  {As though I could ever forget, Miss Fellowes thought. )

  "And now-sitting quietly in there, reading a book- learning about Eskimos and igloos-" Hoskins beamed with what seemed almost like paternal pride. "How mar-velous that is! How absolutely splendid, isn't it! What wonderful progress the boy has been making in your care!"

  Miss Fellowes studied Hoskins suspiciously. There was something odd and unreal about this suddenly grandiose oratorical tone of his. What was he up to? He knew Tim-mie wasn't really able to read. And why bring his wife here after all this time, why be making all this insincere-sounding noise about Timmie's wonderful progress?

  And then she understood.

  In a more normal voice Hoskins said, "I have to apologize for stopping by so infrequently of late, Miss Fellowes. But as you can guess I've been tied up having to deal with all manner of peripheral distractions. Not the least of which is our friend Mr. Bruce Mannheim. "

  "I imagine you have been. "

  "He's called me just about every week since the day he was here. Asking me this, asking me that, fretting about Timmie as if the boy was his own son and I was the headmaster of some school he had sent him away to. -Some ghastly school out of a novel by Charles Dickens, one would think. "

  "Asking you particularly about what you've been doing to get Timmie a companion?" Miss Fellowes said.

  "Especially that. "

  "And what actually have you been doing along those lines, Dr. Hoskins?"

  Hoskins winced. "Having a very difficult time. We've interviewed at least half a dozen children, perhaps more, as potential playmates for Timmie. And interviewed their parents as well, naturally. "

  That was news to Miss Fellowes. "And?"

  "What it comes down to is that there were two little boys who seemed suitable, but their parents raised all sorts of special conditions and objections that we were in no position to deal with. There was another boy who might have worked out, and we were just about ready to bring him in here for a trial visit with Timmie, but at the last moment it was conditions and objections again; the parents brought in a lawyer who wanted us to post bond, tie ourselves up in some very elaborate contractual guarantees, and commit ourselves to various other things that our lawyers thought were unwise. As for the rest of the children we saw, the question of liability didn't arise, because their parents seemed only interested in the fee we were offering. But the kids all struck us as wild little roughnecks who'd do Timmie more harm than good. Naturally we turned them down. "

  "So you don't have anyone, is what you're saying. "

  Hoskins moistened his lips. "We decided finally that we'd stay in~house for this-that we'd use the child of a staff member. This particular staff member standing here in front of you. Me. "

  "Your own son?" Miss Fellowes asked.

  "You recall, don't you, that when Mannheim and Dr. Levien were here I said, more in anger than otherwise, that if necessary I'd make my own boy available? Well, it's come down to that. I'm a man of my word, Miss Fellowes, as I think you realize. I'm not going to ask anyone eke in the company to do something that I'm not prepared to do. I've decided to put my boy Jerry forth as the playmate that Timmie needs so badly. -But of course that can't be my unilateral decision alone. "

  "So you brought Mrs. Hoskins here so that she could satisfy herself that your son wouldn't be in any danger at Timmie's hands," Miss Fellowes said.

  Hoskins looked overwhelmed with gratitude. "Yes, Miss Fellowes. Yes, exactly so!"

  Miss Fellowes glanced again at Hoskins* wife. The woman was chewing her lip and staring once more at the door behind which the terrifying Neanderthal lurked.

  She must believe that Timmie's an ape, Miss Fellowes thought. A gorilla. A chimpanzee. Who will instandy leap on her precious little baby and rend him limb from limb.

  Icily Miss Fellowes said, "Well, shall I bring him out and show him to her now?"

  Mrs. Hoskins tensed visibly, and she had been tense to begin with. "I suppose you should-Miss Fellowes. "

  The nurse nodded.

  "Timmie?" she called. "Timrnie, will you come out here for a moment? We have visitors. "

  Timmie peered shyly around the edge of the door.

  "It's all right, Timmie. It's Dr. Hoskins and his wife. Come on out. "

  The boy stepped forward. He looked quite presentable, Miss Fellowes thought, uttering a little prayer of gratitude. He was wearing the blue overalls with the big green circles on them, his second-favorite pair, and his hair, which Miss Fellowes had brushed out thoroughly an hour ago, was still relatively u
nmussed and unsnarled. The slender book he had been looking at dangled from his left hand.

  He peered up expectantly at the visitors. His eyes were very wide. Plainly Timmie recognized Hoskins, even after all this time, but he didn't seem sure what to make of Hoskins' wife. No doubt something in her body language, something tightly strung and wary about her, had put the boy on guard. Primitive reflexes-instincts, you could almost say-coming to the fore in him, perhaps?

  There was a long awkward silence.

  Then Timmie smiled.

  It was a warm, wonderful smile, Timmie's extraspecial ear-to-ear smile. Miss Fellowes loved him for it. She could have gathered him up and hugged him. How deUV cious he looked when he did that! How sweet, how trusting, how childlike. Yes. A little boy coming out of his nursery to greet the company. How could Annette Hoskins possibly resist that smile?

  "Oh," the woman said, as though she had just found a beetle in her soup. "I didn't realize he'd look so- strange. "

  Miss Fellowes gave her a baleful scowl.

  Hoskins said, "It's mostly his facial features, you know. From the neck down he just looks like a very muscular little boy. More or less. "

  "But his face, Gerald-that huge mouth-that enormous nose-the eyebrows bulging like that-the chin- he's so ugly, Gerald. So weird. "

  "He can understand much of what you're saying," Miss Fellowes warned in a low, frosty voice.

  Mrs. Hoskins nodded. But she still wasn't able to stop herself. "He looks very different in person from the way he looks on television. He definitely seems much more human when you see him on-"

  "He is human, Mrs. Hoskins," Miss Fellowes said curtly. She was very tired of having to tell people that. "He's simply from a different branch of the human race, that's all. One that happens to be extinct. "

  Hoskins, as though sensing the barely suppressed rage in Miss Fellowes' tone, turned to his wife and said with some urgency, "Why don't you talk to Timmie, dear? Get to know him a little. That's why you came here today, after all. "

  "Yes. Yes. "

  She seemed to be working up her courage.

  "Timmie?" the woman said, in a thin, tense voice. "Hello, Timmie. I'm Mrs. Hoskins. "

  "Hello," Timmie said.

  He put out his hand to her. That was what Miss Fellowes had taught him to do.

  Annette Hoskins glanced quickly at her husband. He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and nodded.

  She reached out uncertainly and took Timmie's hand as though she were shaking hands with a trained chimpanzee at the circus. She gave it a quick unenthusiastic shake and let go of it in a hurry.

  Timmie said, "Hello, Mrs. Hoskins. Pleased to meet you. "

  "What did he say?" Annette Hoskins asked. "Was he saying something to me?"

  "He said hello," Miss Fellowes told her. "He said he was pleased to meet you. "

  "He speaks"? English?"

  "He speaks, yes. He can understand easy books. He eats with a knife and a fork. He can dress and undress himself. It shouldn't be any surprise that he can do all those things. He's a normal little boy, Mrs. Hoskins, and he's something more than five years old. Maybe five and a half. "

  "You don't know?"

  "We can only guess," Miss Fellowes said. "He didn't have his birth certificate in his pocket when he came here. "

  Mrs. Hoskins looked at her husband again. "Gerald, I'm not so sure about this. Jerry isn't quite five yet. "

  "I know how old our son is, dear," Hoskins said stonily. "He's big and sturdy for his age, though. Bigger than Timmie is. -Look, Annette, if I thought there was any risk at all-the slightest possibility of-"

  "I don't know. I just don't know. How can we be certain that it's safe?"

  Miss Fellowes said at once, "If you mean is Timmie safe to be with your son, Mrs. Hoskins, the answer is yes, of course he is. Timmie's a gentle little boy. "

  "But he's a sav-savage. "

  (The ape-boy label from the media, again! Didn't people ever think for themselves?)

  Miss Fellowes said emphatically, "He is not a savage, not in the slightest. Does a savage come out of his room carrying his book, and put out his hand for a handshake? Does a savage smile like that and say hello and tell you that he's pleased to meet you? You see him right in front of you. What does he really look like to you, Mrs. Hoskins?"

  "I can't get used to his face. It's not a human face. "

  Miss Fellowes would not let herself explode in wrath. Tautly she said, "As I've already explained, he's as human as any of us. And not a savage at all. He is just as quiet and reasonable as you can possibly expect a five-and-some-months-year-old boy to be. It's very generous of you, Mrs. Hoskins, to agree to allow your son to come here to play with Timmie, but please don't have any fears about it. "

  "I haven't said that I've agreed," Mrs. Hoskins replied with some mild heat in her voice.

  Hoskins gave her a desperate glare. "Annette-"

  "I haven't!"

  (Then why don't you get out of here and let Timmie go back to his book?)

  Miss Fellowes struggled to keep her temper.

  (Let Dr. Hoskins handle this. She's his wife. )

  Hoskins said, "Talk to the boy, Annette. Get to know him a litde. You did agree to do that much. "

  "Yes. Yes, I suppose. " She approached the boy again. "Timmie?" she said tentatively. Timmie looked up. He wasn't doing the ear-to-ear smile this time. He had already learned, stricdy from the verbal intonations he was picking up, that this woman was no friend of his.

  Mrs. Hoskins did smile, but it wasn't a very convincing one. -"How old are you, Timmie?"

  "He's not very good at counting," Miss Fellowes said quietly.

  But to her astonishment Timmie held up the five fingers of his left hand, splayed out distinctly.

  "Five!" the boy cried.

  "He put up five fingers and he said five," Miss Fellowes said, amazed. "You heard him, didn't you?"

  "I heard it," said Hoskins. -"I think. "

  "Five," Mrs. Hoskins said, grimly continuing. She was working at making contact with Timmie now. "That's a very nice age. My boy Jerry is almost five himself. If I bring Jerry here, will you be nice to him?"

  "Nice," Timmie said.

  "Nice," Miss Fellowes translated. "He understood you. He promised to be nice. "

  Mrs. Hoskins nodded. Under her breath she said, "He's small, but he looks so strong. "

  "He's never tried to hurt anyone," Miss Fellowes said, conveniently allowing herself to overlook the frantic battles of the long-ago first night. "He's extremely gentle. Extremely. You've got to believe that, Mrs. Hoskins. " To Timmie she said, "Take Mrs. Hoskins into your room. Show her your toys and your books. And your clothes closet. " Make her see that you're a real little boy, Timmie. Make her look past your brow ridges and your chinless chin.

  Timmie held out his hand. Mrs. Hoskins, after only a moment of hesitation, took it. For the first time since she had entered the Stasis bubble something like a genuine smile appeared on her face.

  She and Timmie went into Timmie's room. The door closed behind them.

  "I think it's going to work," Hoskins said in a low voice to Miss Fellowes, the moment his wife was gone. "He's winning her over. " "Of course he is. "

  "She's not an unreasonable woman. Trust me on that. Or an irrational one. But Jerry's very precious to her. "

  "Naturally so. "

  "Our only child. We'd been married for several years, and there were fertility problems in the beginning, and then we managed-we were finally able-"

  "Yes," Miss Fellowes said. "I understand. " She wasn't enormously interested in hearing about the fertility problems of Dr. and Mrs. Hoskins. Or how they had finally been able to overcome them.

  "So you see-even though I've been over this thoroughly with her, even though she understands the problems that Mannheim and his crowd has been making for me and the importance of ending Timmie's isolation, she's still so
mewhat hesitant about exposing Jerry to the risk that-"

  "There is no risk, Dr. Hoskins. "

  "I know that. You know that. But until Annette knows that, too-"

  The door of Timmie's playroom opened. Mrs. Hoskins emerged. Miss Fellowes saw Timmie hanging back, peering out in that wary way he sometimes adopted. Her breath stopped. Something must have gone wrong in there, she thought.

  But no. Annette Hoskins was smiling.

  "It's a very cute little room," she said. "He can fold his own clothes. He showed me. I wish Jerry could do it half as well. And he keeps his toys so neatly-"

  Miss Fellowes let her breath out.

  "So we can give it a try?" Hoskins asked his wife.

  "Yes. I think we can give it a try. "