The Ugly Little Boy

Chapter One. Loving

  1

  EDITH FELLOWES smoothed her working smock as she always did before opening the elaborately locked door and stepping across the invisible dividing line between die is and die is not. She carried her notebook and her pen although she no longer took notes except when she felt the absolute need for some report.

  This time she also carried a suitcase. ("Some games for the boy," she had said, smiling, to the guard-who had long since stopped even thinking of questioning her and who waved her cheerfully on through the security barrier. )

  And, as always, the ugly little boy knew that she had entered his private world, and he came running to her, crying, "Miss Fellowes-Miss Fellowes-" in his soft, slurring way.

  "Timmie," she said, and ran her hand tenderly through die shaggy brown hair on his strangely shaped little head. "What's wrong?"

  He said, "Where's Jerry? Will he be back to play with me today?"

  "Not today, no. "

  "I'm sorry about what happened. "

  "I know you are, Timmie. "

  "And Jerry-?"

  "Never mind about Jerry now, Timmie. Is that why you've been crying? Because you miss Jerry?"

  He looked away. "Not just because of that, Miss Fel-lowes. I dreamed again. "

  "The same dream?" Miss Fellowes' lips set. Of course, the Jerry affair would bring back the dream.

  He nodded. "The same dream, yes. "

  "Was it very bad this time?"

  "Bad, yes. I was-outside. There were children there, lots of them. Jerry was there, too. They were all looking at me. Some were laughing, some were pointing at me and making faces, but some were nice to me. They said, Come on, come on, you can make it, Timmie. Just take one step at a time. Just keep on going and you'll be free. And I did. I walked right away from here into the outside. And I said, Now come and play with me, but then they turned all wavery and I couldn't see them any more, and I started sliding backward, back into here. I wasn't able to stop myself. I slid all the way back inside and there was a black wall all around me, and I couldn't move, I was stuck, I was-"

  "Oh, how terrible. I'm sorry, Timmie. You know that I am. "

  His too-large teeth showed as he tried to smile, and his lips stretched wide, making his mouth seem to thrust even farther forward from his face than it actually did.

  "When will I be big enough to go out there, Miss Fellowes? To really go outside? Not just in dreams?"

  "Soon," she said softly, feeling her heart break. "Soon. "

  Miss Fellowes let him take her hand. She lovea the warm touch of the thick dry skin of his palm against hers.

  He tugged at her, drawing her inward, leading her through the three rooms that made up the whole of Stasis Section One-comfortable enough, yes, but an eternal prison for the ugly little boy all the seven (Was it seven? Who could be sure?) years of his life.

  He led her to the one window, looking out onto a scrubby woodland section of the world of is (now hidden by night). There was a fence out there, and a dour glaring notice on a billboard, warning all and sundry to keep out on pain of this or that dire punishment.

  Timmie pressed his nose against the window.

  "Tell me what's out there again, Miss Fellowes. "

  "Better places. Nicer places," she said sadly.

  As she had done so many times before over the past three years, she studied him covertly out of the corner of her eye, looking at his poor little imprisoned face outlined in profile against the window. His forehead retreated in a flat slope and his thick coarse hair lay down upon it in tufts that she had never been able to straighten. The back of his skull bulged weirdly, giving his head an overheavy appearance and seemingly making it sag and bend forward, forcing his whole body into a stoop. Already, stark bulging bony ridges were beginning to force the skin outward above his eyes. His wide mouth thrust forward more prominendy than did his wide and flattened nose and he had no chin to speak of-only a jawbone that curved smoothly down and back. He was small for his years, almost dwarfish despite his already powerful build, and his stumpy legs were bowed. An angry red birthmark, looking for all the world like a jagged streak of lightning, stood out startlingly on his broad, strong-boned cheek.

  He was a very ugly little boy and Edith Fellowes loved him more dearly than anything in the world.

  She was standing with her own face behind his line of vision, so she allowed her lips the luxury of a tremor.

  They wanted to kill him. That was what it amounted to. He was only a child, an unusually helpless one at that, and they were planning to send him to his death.

  They would not. She would do anything to prevent it. Anything. Interfering with their plan would be a massive dereliction of duty, she knew, and she had never committed any act in her life that could be construed as going against her duty as she understood it, but that didn't matter now. She had a duty to them, yes, no question of that, but she had a duty to Timmie also, not to mention a duty to herself. And she had no doubt at all about which the highest of those three duties was, and which came second, and which was third.

  She opened the suitcase.

  She took out the overcoat, the woolen cap with the ear-flaps, and the rest.

  Timmie turned and stared at her. His eyes were so very big, so brightly gleaming, so solemn.

  "What are those things, Miss Fellowes?"

  "Clothes," she said. "Clothes for wearing outside. " She beckoned to him. "Come here, Timmie. "

  2

  She had actually been the third one that Hoskins had interviewed for the job, and the other two had been the preferred choices of the Personnel people. But Gerald Hoskins was a hands-on kind of chief executive who didn't necessarily accept the opinions of those to whom he had delegated authority without taking the trouble to check those opinions out for himself. There were people in the company who thought that that was his biggest fault as a manager. There were times when he agreed with them. All the same, he had insisted on interviewing all three of the women personally.

  The first one came with a three-star rating mom Sam Aickman, who was Stasis Technologies' Personnel chief. That in itself made Hoskins a little suspicious, because Aickman had a powerful bias in favor of hard-edge state-of-the-art sorts of people. Which was just the right thing if you happened to be looking for an expert in implosion-field containment, or someone who could deal with a swarm of unruly positrons on a first-name basis. But Hoskins wasn't convinced that one of Sam's high-tech types was exactly the right choice for this particular job.

  Her name was Marianne Levien and she was a real tiger. Somewhere in her late thirties: sleek, lean, trim, glossy. Not actually beautiful-that wasn't the most precise word for her-but striking, definitely striking.

  She had magnificent cheekbones and jet-black hair that was pulled back tight from her forehead and cool glittering eyes that didn't miss a thing. She was wearing an elegant business suit of deep rich brown with gold piping that she might have picked up in Paris or San Francisco the day before yesterday, and an oh-so-under-played little cluster of pearl-tipped gold strands at her throat that didn't strike Hoskins as the sort of jewelry one usually wore to a job interview, especially one of this sort. She looked more like an aggressive youngish executive who had a slot on the board of directors as her ultimate target than like his notion of what a nurse ought to be.

  But a nurse was what she was, fundamentally, even if that seemed a very modest designation for someone of her professional affiliations and accomplishments. Her resume was a knockout. Doctorates in heuristic pedagogy and rehabilitative technology. Assistant to the head of Special Services at Houston General's childrens* clinic. Consultant to the Katzin Commission, the Federal task force on remedial education. Six years' experience in advanced artificial-intelligence interfacing for autistic kids. Software bibliography a mile long.

  Just what Stasis Technologies, Ltd. needed for this job?

  So Sam Aickman seemed to think, at any r
ate.

  Hoskins said, "You understand, don't you, diat we'll be asking you to give up all your outside projects, the Washington stuff, the Houston affiliation, any consulting work that might require travel. You'll basically be pinned down here on a full-time basis for a period of several years, dealing with a single highly specialized assignment. "

  She didn't flinch. "I understand that. "

  "I see that in the last eighteen months alone you've appeared at conferences in Sao Paulo, Winnipeg, Melbourne, San Diego, and Baltimore, and that you've had papers read on your behalf at five other scientific meetings that you weren't able to attend personally. "

  "That's correct. "

  "And yet you're quite sure that you'll be able to make the transition from the very active professional career outlined in your resume to the essentially isolated kind of existence you'll need to adopt here?"

  There was a cold, determined glint in her eyes. "Not only do I think I'll be completely capable of making the transition, I'm quite ready and eager to do so. "

  Something sounded just a little wrong about that to Hoskins.

  He said, "Would you care to expand on that a bit? Perhaps you don't fully grasp how-ah-monastic we tend to be at Stasis Technologies, Ltd. And how demanding your own area of responsibility in particular is likely to be. "

  "I think I do grasp that, Dr. Hoskins. "

  "And yet you're ready and eager?"

  "Perhaps I'm a trifle less eager to run around from Winnipeg to Melbourne to Sao Paulo than I used to be. "

  "A little touch of burnout, maybe, is that what you're saying, Dr. Levien?"

  A shadow of a smile appeared on her lips, the first sign of any human warmth that Hoskins had seen her display since she had entered his office. But it was gone almost as quickly as it had appeared.

  "You might call it that, Dr. Hoskins. "

  "Yes, but would you?"

  She looked startled at his unexpected sally. But then she drew a deep breath and reconstructed her all but imperturbable poise with hardly any show of effort.

  "Burnout might be too extreme a term for my current attitudinal orientation. Let me just say that I'm interested in repositioning my energy expenditures-which as you see have been quite diffusely manifested-so that they're allocated to a single concentration of output. "

  "Ah-yes. Exactly so. "

  Hoskins regarded her with a mixture of awe and horror. Her voice was a perfectly pitched contralto; her eyebrows were flawlessly symmetrical; she sat splendidly upright with the finest posture imaginable. She was extraordinary in every way. But she didn't seem real.

  He said, after a little pause, "And what is it, exactly, that led you to apply for this job, other than the aspect of allowing you a single concentration of energy expenditure?"

  "The nature of the experiment fascinates me. "

  "Ah. Tell me. "

  "As every first-rate author of children's literature knows, the world of the child is very different from the world of adults-an alien world, in fact, whose values and assumptions and realities are entirely other. As we grow older, most of us make the transition from that world to this one so completely that we forget the nature of the world we've left behind. Throughout my work with children I've attempted to enter into dieir minds and comprehend the other-worldly nature of them as profoundly as my limitations as an adult will enable me to do. "

  Hoskins said, trying to keep the surprise out of his voice, "You think children are alien beings?"

  "In a metaphorical way, yes. Obviously not literally. "

  "Obviously. " He scanned her resume, frowning. "You've never been married?"

  "No, never," she said coolly.

  "And I assume you haven't gone in for single parenting, either?"

  "It was an option I considered quite seriously some years ago. But my work has provided me with a sense of surrogate parenting that has been quite sufficient. "

  "Yes. I suppose that it has. -Now, you were saying a moment ago that you see the world of the child as a fundamentally alien place. How does that statement relate to my question about what led you to apply for this job?"

  "If I can accept at face value the remarkable preliminary description of your experiment that I've been given, it would involve me in caring for a child who quite literally comes from an alien world. Not in space, but in time; nevertheless, the essence of the existential situation is equivalent. I'd welcome a chance to study such a child's fundamental differences from us, by way of obtaining some parallactic displacement that might provide additional insights for my own work. "

  Hoskins stared at her.

  No, he thought. Not real at all. A cleverly made android of some sort. A robotic nursoid. Except they hadn't perfected robots of this level of quality yet-he was pertain of that. So she had to be a flesh-and-Wood human being. But she certainly didn't act like one.

  He said, "That may not be so easy. There may be difficulties in communication. The child very likely will have a speech impediment, you know. As a matter of fact there's a good chance that it may be virtually incapable of speech at all. "

  "It?"

  "He, she. We can't tell you which, just yet. You do realize that the child won't be arriving here for another three weeks, give or take a day or two, and until the moment it arrives we'll basically know nothing about its actual nature. "

  She seemed indifferent to that. "I'm aware of the risks. The child may be drastically handicapped vocally, physically, and perhaps intellectually. "

  "Yes, you may well have to deal with it the way you'd deal with a severely retarded child of our own era. We just don't know. We'll be handing you a complete unknown. "

  "I'm prepared to meet that challenge," she said. "Or any other. Challenge is what interests me, Dr. Hoskins. "

  He believed that. The conditional and even speculative nature of the job description had produced no reaction in her. She seemed ready to face anything and didn't seem concerned with the whys and wherefores.

  It wasn't hard to see why Sam Aickman had been so impressed with her.

  Hoskins was silent again for a moment, just long enough to give her an opening. Marianne Levien didn't hesitate to take advantage of it.

  She reached into her attache case and drew forth a hand-held computer, no bigger than a large coin. "I've brought with me," she said, "a program that I've been working on since the word came across on the computer network that you were open for applications for this position. It's a variation on some work I did with braindamaged children seven yean ago in Peru: six algorithms defining and modifying communications flow. Essentially they bypass the normal verbal channels of the mind and-"

  "Thank you," Hoskins said smoothly, staring at the tiny device in her outstretched hand as though she were offering him a bomb. "But there are all sorts of legal complexities preventing me from looking at your material until you're actually an employee of Stasis Technologies, Ltd. Once you're under contract, naturally, I'U be glad to discuss your prior research with you in detail, but until then-"

  "Of course," she said. Color flooded her flawless cheeks. A tactical error, and she knew it: overeagerness, even pushiness. Hoskins watched her elaborately making her recovery. "I quite see the situation. It was foolish of me to try to jump past the formalities like that. But I hope you can understand, Dr. Hoskins, tliat despite this very carefully burnished facade of mine that you see I'm basically a researcher, with all the enthusiasm of a brand-new graduate student setting out to uncover the secrets of the universe, and sometimes despite all my knowledge of what's feasible and appropriate I tend to sidestep the customary protocols out of sheer feverish desire to get to the heart of-"

  Hoskins smiled. Hoskins nodded. Hoskins said, "Of course, Dr. Levien. It's no sin to err on the side of enthusiasm. -And this has been a very valuable conversation. We'll be in touch with you just as soon as we've made our decision. "

  She gave him an odd look, as though surprised he wasn't hir
ing her on the spot. She had the good sense not to say anything else except "Thank you very much" and "Goodbye," though.

  At the door of his office she paused, turned, flashed one final high-voltage smile. Then she was gone, leaving an incandescent image behind on the retina of Hoskins' mind.

  Whew, Hoskins thought.

  He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead.

  3

  The second candidate was different from Marianne Levien in almost every way. She was twenty years older, for one thing; for another, there was nothing in the least elegant, cool, intimidating, incandescent, or androidal about her. Dorothy Newcombe was her name. She was plump, matronly, almost overabundant; she wore no jewelry and her clothing was simple, even dowdy; her demeanor was mild and her face was pleasantly jolly.

  A golden aura of maternal warmth seemed to surround her. She looked like any child's ideal fantasy grand-mother. She seemed so simple and easy-going that it was hard to believe that she had the prerequisite background in pediatrics, physiology, and clinical chemistry. But it was all there on her resume, and one other surprising specialty besides-a degree in anthropological medicine. For all the wonders of twenty-first-century civilization, there still were primitive regions here and there on the globe, and Dorothy Newcombe had worked in six or seven of them, in various parts of the world-Africa, South America, Polynesia, Southeast Asia. No wonder she had Sam Aickman's seal of approval. A woman who could have served as a model for a statue of the goddess of motherly love, and who was experienced besides in the handling of children in backward societiesShe seemed exactly right in every way. After the oppressive hyperglossy perfection of the too-awesome Marianne Levien, Hoskins felt so much at ease in this woman's presence that he had to fight back a strong impulse to offer her the position right away, without even bothering to interview her. It wouldn't have been the first time that he had allowed himself the luxury of giving way to a spontaneous feeling.

  But he managed to master it.

  And then, to his astonishment and dismay, Dorothy Newcombe managed to disqualify herself for die job before the interview had lasted five minutes.

  Everything had gone beautifully up to the fatal point. She was warm and personable. She loved children, of course: she had had three of her own, and even before that, as the eldest child in a large family with an ailing mother, she had been involved in child-rearing from an early age, caring for her many brothers and sisters as far back as she could remember. And she had the right professional background. She came with the highest recommendations from the hospitals and clinics where she had worked; she had stood up under the strangest and most taxing conditions of remote tribal areas without difficulty; she enjoyed working with disadvantaged children of all sorts and was looking forward with the greatest excitement to tackling the unique problems that the Stasis Technologies project was certain to involve.

  But then the conversation came around to the subject of why she would be willing to leave her present post-an important and apparently highly rewarding position as head of nursing at a child-care center of one of the Southern states-for the sake of immuring herself in the secretive and closely guarded headquarters of Stasis Technologies. And she said, "I know that I'll be giving up a great deal to come here. Still, I'll be gaining a great deal, too. Not only the chance to do work of the kind I like best in an area that nobody has ever worked in before. But also it'll give me a chance to get that damned nuisance Bruce Mannheim out of my hair at last. "

  Hoskins felt a chill run through him.

  "Bruce Mannheim? You mean the 'children in crisis' advocate?"

  "Is there some other one?"

  He drew his breath in deeply and held it. Mannheim! That loudmouth! That troublemaker! How on earth had Dorothy Newcombe gotten herself mixed up with him? This was completely unexpected and not at all welcome.

  After a moment he said carefully, "Are you saying that there's sort of a problem between you and Bruce Mannheim, then?"

  She laughed. "A problem? I guess you could call it that. He's suing my hospital. Suing me, I suppose I'd have to say. I'm one of the named defendants, actually. It's been a tremendous distraction for us for the past six months. "

  A sickly sensation churned in the pit of Hoskins' stomach. He fumbled with the papers on his desk and struggled to regain his equilibrium.

  "There's nothing about this in your Personnel report. "

  "No one asked me. Obviously I wasn't trying to conceal anything or I wouldn't have mentioned it now. But the subject just never came up. "

  "Well, I'm asking you now, Ms. Newcombe. What's this all about?"

  "You know what kind of professional agitator Mannheim is? You know that he takes the most far-fetched positions imaginable by way of showing everybody how concerned ha is for the welfare of children?"

  It didn't seem wise to get drawn into spouting opinions. Not where Bruce Mannheim was concerned.

  Warily Hoskins said, "I know there are people who think of him that way. "

  "You phrase that in such a diplomatic way, Dr. Hoskins. Do you think he's got your office bugged?"

  "Hardly. But I don't necessarily share your obvious distaste for Mannheim and his ideas. As a matter of fact, I don't really have much of a position about him. I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the issues he's been raising. " That was a flat lie, and Hoskins felt uncomfortable about it. One of the earliest planning papers dealing with the current project had said: Take every step to make sure that we keep pests like Bruce Mannheim from landing on our backs. But Hoskins was interviewing her, not the other way around. He didn't feel obliged to tell her anything more than seemed appropriate.

  He leaned forward. "All I know, actually, is that he's a very vocal crusader with a lot of articulate ideas about how children in public custody ought to be raised. Whether his ideas are right or not, I'm not really qualified to say. About this lawsuit, Ms. Newcombe-"

  "We've taken some small children off the streets. Most of them are third-generation drug users, even fourth-generation, congenital addicts. It's the saddest thing you can imagine, children who are born addicted. -I assume you're aware of the generally accepted theory that drug addiction, like most physiological addictions, very often arises from some genetic predisposition in that direction?"

  "Of course. "

  "Well, we've been conducting genetic studies on these children, and on their parents and grandparents- when we're able to find them. We're trying to locate and isolate the drug-positive gene, if there is such a thing, in the hope that some day we can get rid of it. "

  "Sounds like a good idea to me," Hoskins said:

  "It does to everyone except Bruce Mannheim, apparently. The way he's come down on us, you'd think we're performing actual gene surgery on those kids, not simply doing a little prowling around in their chromosomes to find out what's there. Purely investigative work, no genetic modification whatsoever. But he's slapped us with sixteen different injunctions tying our hands in every imaginable way. It's enough to make you cry. We've tried to explain, but he won't pay attention. He distorts our own affidavits and uses them as the basis for his next lawsuit. And you know how the courts are when it comes to accusations that children are being used as experimental subjects. "

  "I'm afraid I do," said Hoskins dolefully. "And so your hospital is spending its energies and resources on legal defense instead of-"

  "Not just the hospital. He's named specific individuals. I'm one of them. One of nine researchers who he's charged with child abuse-literal child abuse-as a result of his so-called studies of our work up to this point. " There was obvious bitterness in her voice, but a touch of amusement, too. Her eyes flashed a bright twinkle. She laughed until her heavy breasts shook. "Can you imagine it? Child abuse? Me?"

  Hoskins shook his head sympathetically. "It does seem incredible. "

  But his heart was sinking. He still had no doubt that this woman was ideally qualified for the job. But how cou
ld he hire someone who was already in trouble with the dreaded Bruce Mannheim? There was going to be controversy enough over this project as it was. No doubt Mannheim would be poking his nose into what they were doing before very long in any case, no matter what precautions they took. All the same, to add Dorothy New-combe to the roster would be asking for the worst sort of trouble. He could just imagine the press conference

  Mannheim would call. Letting it be known that Stasis Technologies had chosen to hire a woman who was currently defending herself against the accusation of child abuse at another scientific facility-and Mannheim would make accusation sound like indictment-to serve as nurse and guardian of the unfortunate child who was the pathetic victim of this unprecedented new form of kidnapping-No. No. He couldn't possibly take her on.

  Somehow he forced himself to go through another five minutes of asking questions. On the surface, everything remained amiable and pleasant. But it was an empty exercise, and Hoskins knew that Dorothy Newcombe knew it. When she left, he thanked her for her frankness and expressed his appreciation of her high qualifications and offered her the usual assurances that he'd be in touch soon, and she smiled and told him how pleased she had been by their conversation-and he had no doubt at all that she realized that she wasn't going to get the job.

  As soon as she was gone, he phoned Sam Aickman and said, "For God's sake, Sam, why didn't you tell me that Dorothy Newcombe is currently on the receiving end of some kind of cockeyed lawsuit of Bruce Mannheim's?"

  Aickman's face on die screen registered amazement verging on shock.

  "She is?"

  "So she told me just now. A child-abuse accusation stemming from the work she's been doing. "

  "Really. Really," Aickman said, crestfallen. He looked more abashed than amazed now. "Hell, Jerry, I had no idea at all that she was tangled up with that colossal pain in the neck. And we questioned her very thoroughly; let me tell you. -Not dioroughly enough, I guess. "

  "That's all we'd need, hiring somebody for this job who's already on Mannheim's hit-list. "

  "She's terrific, though, isn't she? Absolutely the most motherly human being I ever-"

  "Yes. Absolutely. And comes with a money-back guarantee that we'll have Mannheim's legal vultures sinking their claws into us as soon as he finds out she's here. Or don't you agree, Sam?"

  "Looks like you're going to go for Marianne Levien, then, is that it?"

  "I'm not through interviewing yet," Hoskins said, "But Levien looks pretty good. "

  "Yes, doesn't she," said Aickman, with a grin.

  4

  Edith Fellowes had no way of knowing that she was merely the Number Three candidate for the job, but it wouldn't have surprised her to learn it. She was accustomed to being underestimated. There was nothing flashy about her, nothing very dramatic, nothing that registered immediate top-rank qualifications in anything. She was neither stunningly beautiful nor fascinatingly ugly, neither intensely passionate nor interestingly aloof, neither daringly insightful nor painstakingly brilliant. All through her life people had tended to take her for granted. But she was a stable, firmly balanced woman who knew her own worth perfectly well, and, by and large, she had had a satisfying, fulfilling existence-by and large.

  The campus-like headquarters of Stasis Technologies, Ltd. was a place of mystery to her. Ordinary-looking gray buildings, bare and plain, rose from pleasant green lawns studded by occasional small trees. It was a research center very much like a thousand odiers. But within these buildings. Edith Fellowes knew, strange things were going on

  - things beyond her understanding, things virtually beyond her powers of belief. The idea that she might actually be working in one of those buildings soon filled her with wonder.

  Like most people, she had only the haziest notion of what the company was or the way it had accomplished the remarkable things it had done. She had heard, of course, about the baby dinosaur that they had managed to bring out of the past. That had seemed pretty miraculous to her, once she overcame her initial reaction of skepticism. But the explanations on television of how Stasis Technologies had reached into the past to bring the extinct reptile into the twenty-first century had been incomprehensible to her. And then the expedition to the moons of Jupiter had pushed Stasis and its dinosaur into the back pages of the newspapers, and she had forgotten all about them both. The dinosaur had been just another nine days' wonder, one of many in what was turning out to be a century of wonders.

  But now, apparently, Stasis was planning to bring a child out of the past, a human child, a prehistoric human child. They needed someone to care for that child.

  She could do that.

  She wanted to do that.

  She might just be able to do that better than anyone else. Certainly she would be able to do it very, very well.

  They had said the job was going to be challenging, unusual, extremely difficult. She wasn't troubled by any of that. It was the unchallenging, ordinary, simple jobs that she had always preferred to avoid.

  They had advertised for a woman with a background in physiology, some knowledge of clinical chemistry, and a love for children. Edith Fellowes qualified on all three counts.

  The love for children had been built in from the start

  - what normal person, she wondered, didn't have a love for children? Especially a woman?

  The knowledge of physiology had come as part of her basic nursing training. The clinical chemistry had been something of an afterthought-it had seemed a good idea, if she was going to work with sickly children, many of them premature or otherwise starting life under some handicap-to have the best possible understanding of how their troubled little bodies could be made to function more effectively.

  Challenging, difficult job involving an unusual child

  - yes, it was her kind of thing. The salary they were offering was pretty phenomenal, too, enough to catch her attention even though the pursuit of money had never been much of a factor in her scheme of living. And she was ready for a new challenge. The all-too-familiar routines of children's-hospital life were beginning to pall on her now, even to make her a little resentful. That was a terrible thing, she thought, to resent your own work, particularly work like hers. Maybe she needed a change.

  To care for a prehistoric childYes. Yes.

  "Dr. Hoskins will see you now," the receptionist said.

  An electronically actuated door rolled silently open. Miss Fellowes stepped forward into a surprisingly unostentatious-looking office that contained an ordinary sort of desk, an ordinary data-screen, and an ordinary-looking man of about fifty, with thinning sandy-colored hair, the beginnings of jowls, and a curiously down-curved mouth that looked more sullen, perhaps, than it really should.

  The nameplate on the desk said:

  GEKALD A. HOSKINS, Ph. D.

  Chief Executive Officer

  Miss Fellowes was more amused than impressed by that. Was the company really so large that the C. E. O. had to remind people of the identity of the man in charge by putting a nameplate in front of himself in his own office? And why did he think it was necessary to brag of having a Ph. D. ? Didn't everybody here have an advanced degree or two? Was this his way of announcing that he wasn't simply a mere corporate executive, that he was really a scientist himself? She would have assumed that the head of a highly specialized company like Stasis Technologies, Ltd. would be a scientist, without having to have it jammed in her face this way.

  But that was all right. It was possible for a man to have worse foibles than a little self-importance.

  Hoskins had a sheaf of printouts in front of him. Her resume, she supposed, and the report on her preliminary interview, and things like that. He looked from the printouts to her, and back to the printouts, and to her again. His appraisal was frank and a little too direct. Miss Fel-lowes automatically stiffened. She felt her cheeks coloring and a muscle twitched briefly in her cheek.

  He thinks my eyebrows are too
heavy and my nose is a little off center, she told herself.

  And then she told herself crisply that she was being ridiculous, that this man had no more interest in evaluating the angle of her nose and the fullness of her eyebrows than he did in knowing what brand of shoes she might be wearing. But it was surprising and a little disturbing to be looked at so intently by a man at all. A nurse in uniform was generally invisible, so far as most men's interest went. She wasn't in uniform now, but over the years she had developed ways of making herself look invisible to men even in her street clodies, and, she supposed, she had been quite successful at that. Being studied this way now was something she found more unsettling than it should have been.

  He said, "Your record is quite an outstanding one, Miss Fellowes. "

  She smiled but said nothing. What could she possibly say? Agree with him? Disagree?

  "And you come with some very high recommendations from your superiors. They all praise you in almost identical words, do you know that? Unswerving dedication to your work-deep devotion to duty-great resourcefulness in moments of crisis-superb technical skills-"

  "I'm a hard worker, Dr. Hoskins, and I generally know what I'm doing. I think those are just fancy ways of saying those two basic things. "

  "I suppose. " His eyes fixed on hers and she felt, suddenly, the strength of the man, the singlemindedness of him, the dogged determination to carry his tasks through to completion. Those could be fine traits in an administrator. They could also lead him to make life maddening for those who worked with him. Time would tell, she thought. She met his gaze evenly and steadily. He said, finally, "I don't see any serious need to question you about your professional background. That's been very carefully gone over in your previous interviews and you came through with flying colors. I've got only two points to take up with you, really. "

  She waited.

  "One," he said, "I need to know whether you've ever been involved in any matters that might be considered, well, politically sensitive. Politically controversial. "

  "I'm not political at all, Dr. Hoskins. I vote-when there's someone I think is worth voting for, which isn't very often. But I don't sign petitions and I don't march in demonstrations, if that's what you're asking. "

  "Not exactly. I'm talking about professional controversies rather than political ones, I guess. Issues having to do with the way children should or should not be treated. "

  "I only know one way children should be treated, which is to do your absolute best to meet the child's needs as you understand them. If that sounds simplistic, I'm sorry, but-"

  He smiled. "That's not precisely what I mean, either. What I mean is-" He paused and moistened his lips. "The Bruce Mannheim sort of thing is what I mean. Heated debate over the methods by which certain children are handled in public institutions. Do you follow what I'm saying, Miss Fellowes?"

  "I've been dealing mainly with weak or handicapped children, Dr. Hoskins. What I attempt to do is keep them alive and help them build up their strength. There isn't much to have a debate over in matters like that, is there?"

  "So you've never had any kind of professional encounters with so-called child advocates of the Bruce Mannheim sort?"

  "Never. I've read a little about Mr. Mannheim in the papers, I guess. But I haven't ever had any contact with him or anyone like him. I wouldn't know him if I bumped into him in the street. And I don't have any particular opinions about his ideas, pro or con. "

  Hoskins looked relieved.

  He said, "I don't mean to imply that I'm opposed to Bruce Mannheim or the positions he represents, you understand. But it would be a serious complicating factor here if our work became the subject of hostile publicity. "

  "Of course. That would be the last thing I'd want also. " "

  "All right, then. We can move along. My other question has to do with the nature of the commitment to your work that we'll be demanding of you here. -Miss Fellowes, do you think you can love a difficult, strange, perhaps unruly and even highly disagreeable child?"

  "Love? Not merely care for?"

  "Love. To stand in loco parentis. To be its mother, more or less, Miss Fellowes. And rather more than less. This will be the most lonely child in the history of the world. It won't just need a nurse, it'll need a mother. Are you prepared to take on such a burden? Are you willing to take on such a burden?"

  He was staring at her again, as though trying to stare through her. Once again she met the intensity of his gaze with unwavering strength.

  "You say he'll be difficult and strange and- What was the word? -highly disagreeable. In what way, disagreeable?"

  "We're talking about a prehistoric child. You know that. He-or she, we don't know which yet-may very well be savage in a way that goes beyond the most savage tribe on Earth today. This child's behavior may be more like that of an animal than a child. A ferocious animal, perhaps. That's what I mean by difficult, Miss Fellowes. "

  "I haven't only worked with premature infants, Dr. Hoskins. I've had experience with emotionally disturbed children. I've dealt with some pretty tough little customers. "

  "Not this tough, perhaps. "

  "We'll see, won't we?"

  "Savage, very likely, and miserable and lonely, and furious. A stranger and afraid, in a world it never made. Ripped from everything that was familiar to it and put down in circumstances of almost complete isolation-a true Displaced Person. Do you know that term, 'Displaced Person,' Miss Fellowes? It goes back to the middle of the last century, to the time of the Second World War, when uprooted people were wandering all over the face of Europe, and-"

  "The world is at peace now, Dr. Hoskins. "

  "Of course it is. But this child won't feel much peace. It'll be suffering from the total disruption of its life, a genuine Displaced Person of the most poignant kind. A very small one, at that. "

  "How small?"

  "At present we can bring no more than forty kilograms of mass out of the past with each scoop. That includes not only the living subject but the surrounding inanimate insulation zone. So we're talking about a little child, a very little child. "

  "An infant, is that it?"

  "We can't be sure. We hope to get a child of six or seven years. But it might be considerably younger. "

  "You don't know? You're just going to make a blind grab?"

  Hoskins looked displeased. "Let's talk about love, Miss Fellowes. Loving this child. I guarantee you that it won't be easy. You really do love children, don't you? I don't mean in any trivial sense. And I'm not talking now about proper performance of professional duties. I want you to dig down and examine the assumptions of the word, what love really means, what motherhood really means, what the unconditional love that is motherhood really means. "

  "I think I know what that love is like. "

  "Your bio data says that you were once married, but that you've lived alone for many years. "

  She could feel her face blazing. "I was married once, yes. For a short while, a long time ago. "

  "There were no children. " ^

  "The marriage broke up," she said, "mainly because I turned out to be unable to have a child. "

  "I see," said Hoskins, looking uncomfortable.

  "Of course, there were all sorts of twenty-first-cen-tury ways around the problem-ex utero fetal chambers, implantations, surrogate mothers, and so forth. But my husband wasn't able to come to terms with anything short of the ancient traditional method of sharing genes. It had to be our child all the way, his and mine. And I had to carry the child for the right and proper nine months. But I couldn't do that, and he couldn't bring himself to accept any of the alternatives, and so we-came apart. "

  "I'm sorry. -And you never married again. "

  She kept her voice steady, unemotional. "The first try was painful enough. I could never be sure that I wouldn't get hurt even worse a second time, and I wasn't able to let myself take the risk. But that doesn't mean I don't know how to love childre
n, Dr. Hoskins. Surely it isn't necessary for me to point out that my choice of profession very likely has something to do with the great emptiness that my marriage created in my-in my soul, if you will. And so instead of loving just one or two children I've loved dozens. Hundreds. As though they were my own. "

  "Not all of them very nice children. "

  "Not all of them nice, no. "

  "Not just nice sweet children with cute little button-noses and gurgly ways? You've taken them as they come, pretty or ugly, gentle or wild? Unconditionally?"

  "Unconditionally," Miss Fellowes said. "Children are children, Dr. Hoskins. The ones that aren't pretty and nice are just the ones who may happen to need help most. And the way you begin to help a child is by loving it. "

  Hoskins was silent, thinking for a moment. She felt a sense of letdown building up in her. She had come in here prepared to talk about her technical background, her research in electrolyte imbalances, in neuroreceptors, in physiotherapy. But he hadn't asked her anything about that. He had concentrated entirely on this business of whether she could love some unfortunate wild child- whether she could love any child, maybe-as though that were a real issue. And on the even less relevant matter of whedier she had ever done anything that might stir up some sort of political agitation. Obviously he wasn't very interested in her actual qualifications. Obviously he had someone else in mind for the job and was going to offer her some bland, polite dismissal as soon as he had figured out a tactful way to do it.

  At length he said, "Well, how soon can you give notice at your present place of employment?"

  She gaped at him, flustered.

  "You mean you're taking me on? Right here and now?"

  Hoskins smiled briefly, and for a moment his broad face had a certain absent-minded charm about it. "Why else would I want you to give notice?"

  "Doesn't this have to go to some committee first?"

  "Miss Fellowes, I'm the committee. The ultimate committee, the one that gives final approval. And I make quick decisions. I know what sort of person I'm looking for and you seem to be it. -Of course, I could be wrong. "

  "And if you are?"

  "I can reverse myself just as quickly, believe me. This is a project that can't afford any errors. There's a life at stake, a human life, a child's life. For the sake of sheer scientific curiosity, we're going to do what some people surely will say is a monstrous thing to that child. I have no illusions about that. I don't for a moment believe that we're monsters here-no one here does-and I have no qualms or regrets about what we propose to do, and^ I believe that in the long run the child who is the subject of our experiment will only stand to benefit from it. But I'm quite aware that others will disagree radically with drat position. Therefore we want that child to be as well cared for as possible during its stay in our era. If it becomes apparent diat you're not capable of providing that care, you'll be replaced without hesitation, Miss Fellowes. I don't see any delicate way of phrasing that. We aren't sentimental here and we don't like to gamble on anything that's within our power to control, either. So the job is to be considered no more than tentatively yours, at this point. We're asking you to cut yourself loose from your entire present existence with no guarantee that we'll keep you on here past the first week, or possibly even the first day. Do you think you're willing to take the chance?"

  "You certainly are blunt, Dr. Hoskins. "

  "I certainly am. Except when I'm not. Well, Miss Fellowes? What do you say?"

  "I don't like to gamble, either," she said.

  His face darkened. "Is that a refusal?"

  "No, Dr. Hoskins, it's an acceptance. If I doubted for one moment that I was die wrong woman for the job, I wouldn't have come here in the first place. I can do it. I will do it. And you'll have no reason to regret your decision, you can be certain of that. -When do I start?"

  "We're bringing the Stasis up to critical level right now. We expect to make the actual scoop two weeks from tonight, on the fifteenth, at half-past seven in the evening sharp. We'll want you here at die moment of arrival, ready to take over at once. You'll have until then to wind down your present outside-world activities. It is clear that you'll be living on these premises full-time, isn't it, Miss Fellowes? And by full-time I mean twenty-four hours a day, at least in the early phases. You did see that in the application specifications, didn't you?"

  "Yes. "

  "Then we understand each other perfectly. " No, she thought. We don't understand each other at all. But that's not important. If there are problems, we'll work them out somehow. It's the child that's important.

  Everything else is secondary. Everything.