The Ugly Little Boy

26



LATER IN THE DAY Dr. Mclntyrc arrived at the doll-house for his second visit with Timmie. Miss Fel-lowes said, as he came in, "Thank you for the books, doctor. I want to assure you that I've been doing my homework very thoroughly."



Mclntyre smiled his small, precise, not very radiant smile. "I'm pleased to have been of some help, Miss Pel-lowes."



"But there's still more I'd like to know. I mean to keep reading, but since you're here, I thought I'd ask you-"



The paleoanthropologist smiled again, even less glowingly. He was all too evidently eager to get down to his session with the Neanderthal child, and not at all enthusiastic about stopping to answer a nurse's unimportant questions. But after the fiasco of the last visit, Miss Pel-lowes was determined not to allow Mclntyre to drive Timmie into tears with the intensity of his scientific curiosity. The session would proceed slowly, at the pace Miss Fellowes intended to set, or it wouldn't proceed at all.



Her word was going to be law: that was Hoskins' phrase, but she had adopted it as her own.



"If I can help you, Miss Fellowes-something you weren't able to discover in the books-"



"It's the one central question that has troubled me since i came to work with Timmie. We all agree that Neanderthals were human. What I'm trying to find out is how human they were. How close they are to us-where the similarities are, and where the differences. I don't mean the physical differences, particularly-those are obvious enough and I've studied the texts you sent over. I mean the cultural differences. The diflferences in intelligence. The things that really determine humanity."



"Well, Miss Fellowes, those are exactly the things I'm here to try to learn. The purpose of the tests I'm going to give Timmie is precisely to determine-"



"I understand that. Tell me first what's already known."



Mclntyre's lips quirked irritably. He ran his hand through his fine, shining golden hair.



"What in particular?"



"I learned today that the two different races, the Neanderthal race and the modern human one-is that correct, calling them races?-lived side by side in Europe and the Near East for perhaps a hundred thousand years during the glacial periods."



" 'Races' isn't quite the proper word, Miss Fellowes. The various 'races' of mankind, as we employ the term nowadays, are much more closely related to each other than we are to the Neanderthals. 'Subspecies' might be more accurate when talking about ourselves and the Neanderthals. They belonged to the subspecies Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and we're classed as Homo sapiens sapiens"



"All right. But they did live side by side."



"Apparently they did, at least in some areas. In the warmer places, that is-the Neanderthals probably had the colder regions all to themselves, because they were better adapted to deal with the conditions there. Of course, we're talking about very small populations, widely scattered bands. It's altogether possible that an individual Neanderthal tribe could have persisted for centuries without ever once encountering Homo sapiens sapiens. On the other hand, they might have been next-door neighbors in some places, especially as the last glacial period started to draw to its close and more of Europe became habitable by our ancestors."



"You don't think there's any chance that the Neanderthals were our ancestors at all, then."



"Oh, no. They're a separate group, off on an evolutionary branch of their own, or so nearly every scientist believes today. Close enough to us so that they could interbreed with Homo sapiens sapiens-we have some fossil evidence that they did-but mainly they must have kept to themselves, conserved their own gene pool, contributed very little if anything at all to the modern-day human genetic mix."



"Backwoodsmen. Country cousins."



"That's not a bad description," Mclntyre said.



"Thank you. -And were they less intelligent than Homo sapiens sapiens"?"



He looked impatient again. "That's something I really can't say, Miss Fellowes, until you let me get down to some serious testing of Timmie's mental capacity and ability to-"



"What's your guess, as of this afternoon?"



"Less intelligent."



"Based on what, Dr. Mclntyre? Pro-sapiens prejudice?"



Mclntyre's delicate complexion flooded with color*. "You asked me to offer an opinion before I've had a chance to examine the only real evidence that's ever been available to science. What else can my answer be except an expression of prejudice? By definition that's what it is."



"Yes, yes, I understand that. But it must be based on something concrete. What?"



Controlling himself, Mclntyre said, "The Mousterian cultural level-that's our technical term for Neanderthal culture, Mousterian-wasn't very sophisticated and didn't show much sign of progress over die hundreds of centuries drat it lasted. What we find at Neanderthal sites are simple flint tools, scarcely ever changing with time. Whereas the sapiens line made steady improvements in its technology all during the Paleolidiic, and has continued to do so until the present day, which is why it is sapiens humans who have brought a Neanderthal child out of the depths of time and not vice versa." Mclntyre paused for breath. -"Also, there's no Neanderthal art that we know about: no sculptures, no cave paintings, no sign of any decoration that we could consider to be religious in nature. We assume that they must have had a religion of some sort, because we've found Neanderthal graves, and a species that buries its dead almost certainly has to have some kind of belief in an afterlife, and therefore in higher spiritual entities. But those few Neanderthal dwelling sites that we've examined don't give us evidence of anything but the simplest, most basic sort of hunting-and-gathering tribal life. And as I mentioned the other day, we haven't even been altogether certain they were physiologically capable of using language. Or that they had the intellectual capacity to do so even if their larynxes and tongues were able to shape sounds."



Miss Fellowes felt herself bogging down in gloom. She looked over at Timmie, glad that he could understand nothing of what Mclntyre was telling her.



"So you think that they were an intellectually inferior race, then? Compared to Homo sapiens sapiens, I mean?" "Certainly we have to think so on the basis of what we know as of now," Mclntyre said. "On the other hand, that's not being entirely fair to them. The Neanderthals may not have needed the sorts of cultural frills and fol-de-rols that the sapiens sapiens subspecies thought were important. Mousterian tools, simple as they were, were perfectly well suited for the tasks they had to perform- killing small game, chopping up meat, scraping hides, felling trees, things like that. And if the Neanderthals didn't go in for painting and sculpture, well, they may simply have felt that such things were blasphemous. We can't say that diey didn't. More recent cultures than theirs have had prohibitions dealing with making graven images, you know."



"But even so you think the Neanderthals were an inferior race. -An inferior subspecies, I should say."



"I do. It's prejudice, Miss Fellowes, sheer prejudice, and I admit it freely. I can't help it that I'm a member of Homo sapiens sapiens. I can make a case out for the Neanderthals, but the fact remains that I basically see them as a slow-witted unprogressive form of humanity that was outmaneuvered and eventually obliterated by our own people. -Of course, when we talk about physical superiority, that's a different matter. In terms of the living conditions that existed in their time, the Neanderthals could well be considered the superior form. The very features that make us think of them as ugly brutes may have been marks of that superiority." "Give me an example."



"The nose," Mclntyre said. He pointed toward Tim-mie. "His nose is a lot larger than a modern child's." "Yes. It is."



"And some might say it's ugly, because it's so wide and thick and protrudes so much."



"Some might say so," Miss Fellowes agreed coolly.



"But then consider the climate that Paleolithic man had to deal with. Much of Europe was covered by permafrost. A constant cold, dry wind blew across the central plains. Snow might fall in any season of the year. You know what it feels like to breathe really cold air. But one purpose that the human nose serves is the warming and moistening of inhaled air on its way to the lungs. The bigger the nose, the more effective the warming capacity."



"Serving as a kind of radiator, you mean?"



"Exactly. The whole Neanderthal facial structure seems designed to keep cold air from reaching the lungs- and the brain, too; don't forget that the arteries that feed blood to the brain are located just back of the nasal passages. But the big Neanderthal nose, its forward location, the extremely large maxillary sinuses, the large diameter of the blood vessels serving the face-they may all have been adaptations to the glacial environment, making it far easier for the Neanderthals to deal with the cold than were our own ancestors. The heavy musculature as well, the sturdy body structure-"



"So the so-called 'brutish' look of the Neanderthals may have been nothing more than natural selection at work, a specialized evolutionary response to the harsh conditions with which man had to cope in ice-age Europe."



"Quite so."



"If they were so well designed to survive," Miss Fellowes said, "then why did they become extinct? A change in the climate making their specializations no longer advantageous?"



Mclntyre sighed heavily. "The question of Neanderthai extinction. Miss Fellowes, is such a vexed one, so fraught with controversy-"



"Well, what's your view? Were they simply exterminated, because they were as slow-witted as you seem to think? Did their special genetic characteristics disappear through intermarriage with the other line? Or was it some combination of-"



"May I remind you, Miss Fellowes, diat I have work to do here today?" Mclntyre said. Exasperation was beginning to show in his eyes. "Much as I'd like to discuss Neanderthals with you, the fact remains that we have an actual living Neanderthal right in this room awaiting study, and I have only a limited amount of time in which



"Then go ahead, Dr. Mclntyre," said Miss Fellowes in resignation. "Examine Timmie as much as you'd like. You and I can talk some other time. Just make sure you don't upset the boy the way you did before."



27



And now die time had arrived for the first press conference-the public unveiling of Timmie. Miss Fellowes had delayed it as long as possible. But Hoskins was insistent. Publicity, he had been saying all along, was essential to the financing of the project. Now that it was undeniably clear that the boy was in good physical shape, that he apparently wasn't going to come down with any twenty-first-century bacterial infection, that he was capable of withstanding the stress of a meeting with the media, it simply had to happen. Miss Fellowes' word might be law, but it was clear that there was one word she didn't have the leeway to utter. This time Hoskins wasn't going to take "no" for an answer.



"I want to limit the public viewing to five minutes, then," she said.



"They've asked for fifteen."



"They could ask for a day and a half. Dr. Hoskins. But five minutes is all that I consider to be acceptable."



"Ten, Miss Fellowes."



She could see the determination in his face.



"Ten at the absolute limit. Less if the boy shows any sign of distress."



"You know he'll show signs of distress," said Hoskins. "I can!t simply let a little whimpering be the signal to throw the reporters out."



"I'm not talking about a little whimpering, doctor. I'm talking about hysteria, profound psychosomatic reactions, potentially life-threatening responses to a massive invasion of his living space. You remember how wild the boy was the night he arrived here."



"He was frightened out of his wits that night."



"And you think a bunch of television cameras poked into his face won't upset him all over again? Bright hot lights? A lot of loud-mouthed strangers yelling things at him?"



"Miss Fellowes-"



"How many reporters are you planning to let in here, anyway?"



Hoskins paused and counted up mentally. "About a dozen, most likely."



"Three."



"Miss Fellowesl"



"The Stasis bubble is small. It's Timmie's sanctuary. If you let it be invaded by a vast pack of-baboons-"



"They'll be science reporters like Candide Deveney."



"Fine. Three reporters."



"You really are determined to be difficult, aren't you?"



"I have a child to care for. That's what you're paying me for and what I intend to do. If I'm too difficult to work with, you can always give me notice, you know."



The words slipped out unexpectedly. Miss Fellowes felt a sudden stab of alarm. What if Hoskins decided to call her bluff? Sent her away, called in one of the rejected applicants-there must surely have been rejected applicants-to take charge of Timmie?



But the idea of dismissing her seemed to alarm Hoskins as much as it did her.



"I don't want to do that, Miss Fellowes. You know that very well."



"Then listen to me. The concept of a press pool isn't unknown around here, is it? Let your precious media people choose diree representatives to come in here and inspect Timmie. Or, rather, to stand outside the Stasis bubble's door while I show him to them. They can share the information with the others. Tell them that any more than three would endanger die boy's health and mental stability."



"Four, Miss Fellowes?"



"Three."



"They're going to give me hell if I tell them-"



"Three."



Hoskins stared at her. Then he began to laugh. "All right, Miss Fellowes. You win. Three media people. But they can see him for ten minutes altogether. I'll let them know that if they have any complaints they should direct them to Timmie's nurse, not to me."



28



Later in the day the gentlemen of the press arriveS. Two gentlemen and a lady, more accurately: John Underhill of the Times, Stan Washington of Globe-Net Cable News, Margaret Anne Crawford of Reuters.



Miss Fellowes held Timmie in her arms just at the perimeter of Stasis and he clung to her wildly while they set their cameras to work and called requests to her through the open door from their places just outside the bubble. She did her best to cope, turning Timmie this way and that so they could see his face and head from various angles.



"Is it a boy or a girl?" the Reuters woman asked.



"Boy," said Miss Fellowes brusquely.



"He looks almost human," said Underbill of the Times.



"He is human."



"We were told he was a Neanderthal. If you tell us now that he's human-"



"I assure you," said Hoskins' voice suddenly, from behind her, "that no deception has been practiced here. That child is authentic Homo sapiens ncanderthalensis."



"And Homo sapiens neanderthalensis," Miss Fellowes said in a crisp tone, "is a form of Homo sapiens. This boy is as human as you and I."



"With an ape's face, though," said Washington of Globe-Net Cable News. "An ape-boy; that's what we've got here. How does he act, nurse? Like an ape?"



"He acts exactly the way a little boy acts," snapped Miss Fellowes, moving deeper into her mode of belligerent defensiveness with every moment. Timmie squirmed madly against her shoulder. She could hear him uttering soft little clicks of fear. "He is not an ape-boy in any sense. His facial features are those of the Neanderthal branch of the human race. His behavior is that of a completely normal human child. He's intelligent and responsive when he isn't being terrified by a bunch of noisy strangers. His name is-is Timothy-Timmie-and it's an absolute error to regard him as-"



"Timothy?" said the man from the Times. "What's the significance of calling him that?"



Miss Fellowes colored. "There's no particular significance. It's simply his name."



"Tied to his sleeve when he got here?" asked Globe-Net Cable News.



"I gave him the name."



"Timmie the ape-boy," Globe-Net said.



The three reporters laughed. Miss Fellowes felt her anger rising to the point where she feared she was going to have trouble holding it in check.



"Put it down, can't you?" the woman from Reuters called. "Let's see how it walks."



"The child's too frightened for that," Miss Fellowes replied, wondering if they expected Timmie to walk about the room with his knuckles dragging against the floor. "Much too frightened. Can't you see? Isn't that obvious?"



Indeed, Timmie's breath had been coming in ever-deeper sighs as he gradually gathered momentum for an outburst of wailing. And now it began-piercing agonized screams mixed with a cascade of growls and clicks. They went on and on. She could feel him quivering against her. The laughter, the hot lights, the barrage of questions-the boy was completely terrified.



"Miss Fellowes-Miss Fellowes-"



"No more questions!" she shot back. "This press conference is over."



She spun around, holding Timmie tightly, and headed back into the inner room. On the way she strode past Hoskins, whose face was tight with consternation but who gave her a quick, tense nod and a small smile of approval.



It took her a couple of minutes to calm the boy down. Gradually the tension left his small quivering body; gradually the fear ebbed from his face.



A press conference! Miss Fellowes thought bitterly. For a four-year-old. The poor suffering child! What will they do to him next?



After a time she went out of the room again, Bushed with indignation, closing Timmie's door behind her. The three reporters were still there, huddling in the space just outside the bubble. She stepped through the Stasis boundary and confronted them out there.



"Haven't you had enough?" she demanded. "It's going to take me all afternoon to repair the damage to the boy's peace of mind that you've done here today. Why don't you go away?"



"We have just a few more questions, Miss Fellowes. If you don't mind-"



She looked toward Hoskins in appeal. He shrugged and gave her a weak smile as though to counsel patience.



"If we could know a little about your own background, Miss Fellowes-" said the woman from Reuters.



Hoskins said quickly, "We can provide you with a copy of Miss Fellowes' professional credentials, if you wish, Ms. Crawford."



"Yes. Please do."



"Is she a time-travel scientist?"



"Miss Fellowes is a highly experienced nurse," said Hoskins. "She was brought to Stasis Technologies, Ltd., specifically for the purpose of caring for Timmie."



"And what do you expect to do with-Timmie," asked the man from the Times, "now that you have him?"



"Well," Hoskins said, "from my point of view the chief purpose of the Neanderthal project was simply to find out whether we could aim our scoop at the relatively short-range target of the Paleolithic era with sufficient accuracy to bring back a living organism. Our previous successes, as you know, have all involved a target zone in the millions of years, rather than a mere forty thousand. That has now been accomplished, and we are continuing to work on ever narrower refinements of our process with the goal of even shorter-range targeting. -But of course we also now have a live Neanderthal child in our midst, a creature which is at the edge of being human or indeed must actually be considered to be human. The anthropologists and the physiologists are naturally very much interested in him and he'll be the subject of intensive study."



"How long will you keep him?"



"Until such a time as we need the space more than we need him. Quite a while, perhaps."



The man from Globe-Net Cable said, "Can you bring him out into the open so we can set up a sub-etheric transmission and give our viewers a real show?"



Miss Fellowes cleared her throat loudly.



But Hoskins was a step ahead of her. "I'm sorry, but the child can't be removed from Stasis."



"And what is Stasis again, actually?" asked Ms. Craw-ford of Reuters.



"Ah." Hoskins permitted himself one of his short smiles. "That would take a great deal of explanation- more, I think, than your readers would care about at this point. But I can give you a brief summary. -In Stasis, time as we know it doesn't exist. Those rooms are inside an invisible bubble that is not exactly part of our universe. A self-contained inviolable environment, one might say. That's why the child could be plucked out of time the way it was."



"Wait a minute, now," Underbill of the Times objected. "Self-contained? Inviolable? The nurse goes into the room and out of it."



"And so could any of you," said Hoskins matter-offactly. "You would be moving parallel to the lines of temporal force and no great energy gain or loss would be involved. The child, however, was taken from the far past. It moved across the time lines and gained temporal potential. To move it into the universe-our universe, and into our own time-would absorb enough energy to burn out every line in the place and probably to knock out power in the entire city. When he arrived, all sorts of trash came with him-dirt and twigs and pebbles and things-and we've got every crumb of it all stored out back of this area. When we get a chance we'll ship it back where it came from. But we don't dare let it out of the Stasis zone."



The media people were busily jotting down notes as Hoskins spoke to them. Miss Fellowes suspected that they didn't understand very much and that they were sure that their audience wouldn't either. But it sounded scientific and that was what counted.



The Globe-Net man said, "Would you be available for an all-circuit interview tonight, Dr. Hoskins?"



"I think we can manage that," said Hoskins at once.



"But not the boy," said Miss Fellowes.



"No," said Hoskins. "Not the boy. But I'll be happy to answer any further questions you might have. And now, please, if we can clear the area-"



Miss Fellowes watched them go with no regret.



She closed the door and heard the electronic locks kicking in and stood there for a moment, reflecting on all that had just been said.



Once again, this business of the build-up of temporal potential, of power surges, of the fear of removing anything from Stasis that had come forward in time, had come up. She remembered how agitated Dr. Hoskins had been when Professor Adamewski was caught trying to sneak a rock sample out of his research area, and the explanations he had given her then. Much of that had quickly become hazy to her; but, reminded of it now, Miss Fellowes saw one thing with terrible clarity, a conclusion to which she had given no serious thought when she had brushed against it earlier.



Timmie was doomed never to see anything of the world into which he had-without his comprehension or consent-been thrust. The bubble would be his entire universe so long as he remained in modern time.



He was a prisoner and always would be. Not by the arbitrary fiat of Dr. Hoskins, but by the inexorable laws of the process by which he had been snatched out of his own time. It wasn't that Hoskins would not ever let him out of the Stasis bubble. Hoskins could not let him out.



Words came back to her from her conversation with Hoskins on the night of Timmie's arrival.



The point to bear in mind is simply that he must never be allowed to leave these rooms. Never. Not for an instant. Not for any reason. Not to save his life. Not even to save your life, Miss Fellowes.



Miss Fellowes hadn't really paid much attention then to the perfunctory explanation Hoskins had offered. A matter of energy, he had said. There are conservation laws involved. She had had other things to think about then, much more urgent things. But it was all as clear to her now as it needed to be. The few little rooms of this doll-house were forever to be the boundaries of Timmie's world.



Poor child. Poor child.



She became suddenly aware that he was crying and she hastened into the bedroom to console him.



29



Hoskins was getting ready to call the meeting of the board of directors to order when his telephone rang. He stared at it in irritation. What now?



It went on ringing.



"Excuse me, will you?" he said, looking around the room. He switched it to audio-only and said, "Hoskins."



"Dr. Hoskins, this is Bruce Mannheim. Of the Children's Advocacy Council, as I think you know."



Hoskins choked back a cough.



"Yes, Mr. Mannheim. What can I do for you?"



"I saw your telecast last night, of course. The little Neanderthal boy. Fascinating, fascinating, an absolutely miraculous scientific achievement!"



"Why, thank you. And-"



"But of course, the situation raises some moral and ethical problems. As I think you know. To have taken a child of an alien culture from his own nurturing family situation, and to bring him into our own era-" Mannheim paused. "I think we need to talk about this. Dr. Hoskins."



"Perhaps we do. But right at this moment-"



"Oh, not at this moment," Mannheim said airily. "I didn't intend that at all. I simply want to propose that we set up a time for a more extended discussion of the issues which-"



"Yes," Hoskins said, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. "Of course. Of course, Mr. Mannheim. If you'll leave your number with my secretary, she'll get back to you just as soon as possible, and we can organize aR-ap-pointment."



"Very good, Dr. Hoskins. Thank you very much."



Hoskins put the telephone down. He stared bleakly around the room.



"Brace Mannheim," he said dolefully. "The famous children's advocate. Wants to talk to me about the boy. -My God, my God! It was inevitable, wasn't it? And now here it all comes."



30



In the weeks that followed, Miss Fellowes felt herself grow to be an integral part of Stasis Technologies, Ltd. She was given a small office of her own with her name on the door, an office quite close to the dollhouse (as she never stopped calling Timmie's Stasis bubble). Her original contract was torn up and Hoskins offered her a new one providing for a substantial raise. She and Hoskins might be destined to be adversaries now and again but she had clearly won his respect. The dollhouse was covered with the ceiling she had requested at the outset; its furnishings were elaborated and improved; a second washroom was added, and better storage facilities for Miss Fellowes' belongings.



Hoskins told her that an apartment of her own could be made available on the company grounds, so she could get away from having to be on duty twenty-four hours a day. But she refused. "I want to stay close to Timmie while he's sleeping," she explained. "He wakes up crying almost every night. He seems to have very vivid dreams- terrifying ones, I'd guess. I can comfort him. I don't think anyone else would be able to."



Miss Fellowes did leave the premises occasionally, more because she felt that she should than because she wanted to. She would go into town to carry out little chores-making a bank deposit, perhaps some shopping for clothing or toys for Timmie, even seeing a movie once. But she was uneasy about Timmie all the*1 time, eager to get back. Timmie was all that mattered to her.



She had never really noticed, in the years when she had worked at the hospital, how totally her life was centered around her work, how sparse were her connections to the world outside. Now that she actually lived at the place where she worked, it was exceedingly clear. She desired little contact with the outside, not even to see her few friends, most of them nurses like herself. It was sufficient to speak with them by telephone; she felt little impulse to visit them.



It was on one of these forays into the city that Miss Fellowes began to realize just how thoroughly accustomed to Timmie she had become. One day she found herself staring at an ordinary boy in the street and finding something bulgy and unattractive about his high domed forehead and jutting chin, his flat brows, his insignificant little nub of a nose. She had to shake herself to break the spell.



Just as she had come to accept Timmie as he was, and no longer saw anything especially strange or unusual about him, Timmie, too, seemed to be settling fairly quickly into his new life. He was becoming less timid with strangers; his dreams appeared not to be as harrowing as they had been; he was as comfortable with Miss Fellowes now as though she were his actual mother. He dressed and undressed himself, now, climbing in and out of the overalls that he usually wore with distinct signs of pleasure in the accomplishment. He had learned to drink from a glass and to use-however clumsily-a plastic fork to convey his food to his mouth.



He even seemed to be trying to learn how to speak English.



Miss Fellowes had not managed to get anywhere in decoding Timmie's own language of clicks and growls. Though Hoskins had indeed recorded everything, and she had listened over and over to the playbacks of Timmie's statements, there didn't seem to be any intelligible verbal pattern behind them. They were just clicks, just growls. He made certain sounds when he was hungry, certain sounds when he was tired, certain sounds when he was frightened. But, as Hoskins had pointed out long ago, even cats and dogs made recognizable sorts of sounds in response to particular situations, but no one had ever identified specific "words" in any cat or dog "language."



Perhaps she was just failing to hear the linguistic patterns. Perhaps they all were. She still was sure that there was a language there-one so remote in its structure from modern tongues that no one alive today could begin to comprehend how it was organized. But in darker moments Miss Fellowes feared that Timmie simply wasn't going to turn out to be capable of learning true language at all-either because Neanderthals were too far back along the evolutionary path to have the intellectual capacity for speech, or else because, having passed his formative years among people who spoke only the simplest, most primitive of languages, it was too late now for Timmie to master anything more complex.



She did some research on the subject of feral children -children who had spent prolonged periods living wild, virtually animal lives, on their own in primitive regions- and discovered that even after these children had been found and brought back into civilization, they usually never did develop the knack of uttering more than a few crude grunts. It appeared that even where the physiological and intellectual capability for speech existed, the right learning stimuli needed to be provided in the early years of life, or else the child would never learn how to speak.



Miss Fellowes desperately wanted Timmie to prove her-and Dr. Mclntyre-wrong about that, so that no one could doubt that he was human. And what trait was there that more clearly distinguished human beings from beasts than that of being able to speak?



"Milk," she said, pointing. "A glass of milk."



Timmie made what she took to be the hunger-clicks.



"Yes. Hungry. Do you want some milk?"



No response.



She tried a different tack.



"Timmie-you. You-Timmie." Pointing.



He stared at her finger but said nothing.



"Walk."



"Eat."



"Laugh."



"Me-Miss Fellowes. You-Timmie."



Nothing each time.



Hopeless, Miss Fellowes thought bitterly. Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless!



"Talk?"



"Drink?"



"Eat?"



"Laugh?"



"Eat," Timmie said suddenly.



She was so astounded that she nearly dropped the plate of food she had just prepared for him.



"Say that again!"



"Eat."



The same sound. Not really clear. More like "Eeeh." She hadn't been able to detect the final consonant either time. But it was the right sound for the context.



She held the plate toward him, too high for him to be able to reach it.



"Eeeh!" he said again, more insistently.



"Eat?" she asked. "You want to eat?"



"Eeeeh!" Real impatience now.



"Here," Miss Fellowes said. "Eat, yes, Timmie. Eat! Eat your food!"



"Eeeh," he said in satisfaction, and seized his fork and fell to vigorously.



"Was it good?" she asked him afterward. "Did you like your lunch?"



But that was expecting too much of him. Even so, she wasn't going to give up now. Where there was one word there might be others. Had to be others.



She pointed to him. "Timmie."



"Mmm-mmm," he said.



Was that his way of saying "Timmie"?



"Does Timmie want to eat some more? Eat?"



She pointed to him, then to her mouth, and made earing motions. He looked at her and said nothing. Well, why should he? He wasn't hungry any longer.



But he knew that he was Timmie. Didn't he?



"Timmie," she said again, and pointed to him.



"Mmm-mmm," he said, and tapped his chest.



There could be no mistake about that. A stunning surge of-was it pride? Joy? Astonishment?-ran through her. All three. Miss Fellowes thought for a moment that she was going to burst into tears.



Then she ran for the intercom. "Dr. Hoskins! Will you come in here, please? And you'd better send for Dr. Mclntyre, too!"



31



"It's Bruce Mannheim again, Dr. Hoskins." Hoskins stared at the telephone in his hand as though it had turned into a serpent. This was the third call from



Mannheim in less than two weeks. But he tried to sound jovial.



"Yes, Mr. Mannheim! Good to hear from you!"



"I just wanted to let you know that I've discussed the results of my very amiable conversation with you last week with my board of advisers."



"Yes?" Hoskins said, not so jovially. He hadn't found the last conversation quite as amiable as Mannheim apparently had. He had found it prying and intrusive and generally outrageous.



"I told them that you had answered my preliminary queries very satisfactorily."



"I'm glad to hear that."



"And the general feeling around here is that we don't intend to take action at this time concerning the Neanderthal boy, but that we'll need to monitor the situation closely while we complete our studies of the entire question. I'll be calling you next week with a further list of points that need to be satisfied. I thought you'd like to know that."



"Ah-yes," Hoskins said. "Thank you very much for telling me, Mr. Mannheim."



He closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe slowly in and out.



Thank you very much, Mr. Mannheim. How kind of you to allow us to continue our work for the time being. While you complete your studies of the entire question, that is. Thank you. Very much. Very, very, very, much.



32



The day Timmie spoke his first words of English was a wondrous one for Miss Fellowes. But other days followed soon afterward that were much less wondrous.



The problem was that Timmie wasn't just a little boy who happened to have been placed in her care. He was an extraordinary scientific specimen, and scientists from all over the world were jostling with one another for the privilege of studying him. Dr. Jacobs and Dr. Mclntyre had been only the tip of the wave, the first indications of the deluge to follow.



Jacobs and Mclntyre were still very much in evidence, of course. They had been lucky enough to have first shot at Timmie, and they still had the inside track with him because of their priority status. But they were aware that they could not have a monopoly on him. A horde of anthropologists, physiologists, cultural historians, and specialists of a dozen other sorts was at the door, knocking to get in. And each one had his own agenda for the little Neanderthal boy.



The fact that Timmie could speak English now made them all the more eager. Some of them acted as if they could simply sit down with the boy and start asking him questions about life in the Paleolithic Era as he remembered it:



"What species of animals did your tribe hunt?"



"What were your people's religious beliefs like?"



"Did you migrate with the seasons?"



"Was there warfare between tribes?"



"What about warfare between your subspecies and the other one?"



He was the only possible source. Their minds bubbled with queries that Timmie alone could answer. Tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us! We want to know all that there is to know about your people'skinship structures- totemic animals- linguistic groups- astronomical concepts- technological skillsBut of course no one got to ask Timmie any of these fascinating and important questions, because Timmie's command of English, though it was growing stronger day by day, was still confined at the moment to phrases like "Timmie eat now" and "Man go away now."



Besides which, Miss Fellowes was the only one who could understand Timmie's words with any degree of reliability. To the others, even those who saw the boy virtually every day, his thick, strangled attempts at pronunciation were only barely recognizable as carrying meaning. Evidently the original speculations about Neanderthal linguistic ability were correct, at least in part: though the Neanderthals obviously did have the intellectual capacity for speech, and the anatomical ability to produce intelligible words, their tongues and larynxes were apparently unable to create sounds with the degree of articulation required by modern-day languages. At least, Timmie couldn't manage it. Even Miss Fellowes had to strain much of the time to figure out what he was trying to say.



It was a frustrating business for everyone-for Timmie, for Miss Fellowes, and especially for the scientists who were so anxious to question the boy. And it reinforced the poignancy of Timmie's isolation. Even now that he was beginning to learn how to communicate with his captors-and that's what we are, Miss Fellowes found herself thinking again and again, his captors-it was a terrible struggle for him to get even the simplest of concepts across to the one person who could at least partially understand him.



How lonely he must be! she thought.



And how baffled and frightened by all the hubbub that went on constantly around him!



She did her best to protect him. She could not and would not allow herself to accept the fact that what she was engaged in was simply a scientific experiment. It certainly was that; but there was a small unhappy child at die center of it; and she would not let him be treated only as an experimental subject.



The physiologists put him on special diets. She purchased toys for him. They plagued her with requests for blood samples, X-ray pictures, even clipping of Timmie's hair. She taught him songs and nursery rhymes. They put Timmie through exhaustive and exhausting tests of his coordination and reflexes, his visual acuity, his hearing, his intuitive intelligence. Miss Fellowes comforted him afterward, holding him and stroking him until he was calm again.



They demanded more and more of his time.



She insisted on strict limits to the daily inquisitions. Most of the time her wishes prevailed, though not always. The visiting scientists undoubtedly thought she was an ogre, an impediment to knowledge, a stubborn and irrational woman. Miss Fellowes didn't care. Let them think whatever they wanted; it was Timmie's interests that concerned her, not theirs.



The closest thing to an ally she had was Hoskins. He came to visit the dollhouse virtually every day. It was obvious to Miss Fellowes that Hoskins welcomed any chance to escape from his increasingly difficult role as head of Stasis Technologies, Ltd., and that he took a sentimental interest in the child who had caused all this furor; but it seemed to her also that he enjoyed talking to her.



(She had learned a few things about him by this time. He had invented the method of analyzing the reflections cast by the past-penetrating mesonic beam; he had been one of the inventors of the method of establishing Stasis; his often chilly, exceedingly businesslike manner was only an effort to hide a kindly nature that was sometimes too easy for others to take advantage of; and, oh yes, he was married, very definitely and happily so.)



One day Hoskins walked in on her just in time to catch her in the process of erupting.



It had been a bad day, very bad. A new team of physiologists from California had showed up with a whole new series of tests they wanted to put Timmie through-right now-something having to do with his posture and pelvic structure. The tests involved an intricate arrangement of cold metal rods and a lot of pushing and pressing. Timmie wasn't much in the mood just then to be pushed and pressed against cold metal rods. Miss Fellowes, watching them manipulating him as though he were some sort of laboratory animal, found herself being swept by the hot urge to kill.



"Enough!" she cried, finally. "Out! Out!"



They gaped and gawped at her.



"I said, Out! Session's over! The boy is tired. You're twisting his legs and straining his back. Don't you see that he's crying? Out! Out!"



"But, Miss Fellowes-"



She began to gather up their instruments. They snatched them hastily from her. She pointed to the door. Muttering among themselves, they scuttled out.



She was staring after them in a blind fury, looking out the open door and wondering what kind of intolerable intrusion was next on the schedule, while Timmie stood sobbing behind her. And then she realized that Hoskins was there.



He said, "Is there a problem?"



She glowered at him. "I'll say there is!"



Turning to Timmie, she gestured and he came running to her, clinging to her, twining his legs around her. She heard the boy murmur something, very low, words she couldn't quite make out. She held him close.



Hoskins said gravely, "He doesn't seem happy."



"Would you be, in his place? They're at him every day now with their blood samples and their probings and their tests. You should have seen what they were doing to him just now-trying to find out which way his legs were fastened to his body, is what it looked like. And now his food's been changed too. The synthetic diet that Jacobs has had him on since Monday is stuff that I wouldn't feed a pig."



"Dr. Jacobs says that it'll build up his strength, that it'll make him better able to withstand-"



"Withstand what? Even more testing?"



"You have to bear in mind, Miss Fellowes, that the primary purpose of this experiment is to learn as much as can be learned about-"



"I do bear that in mind, doctor. And you bear in mind that what we have here isn't a hamster or a guinea pig or even a chimpanzee-but an actual human being."



"No one denies that," Hoskins said. "But-"



She cut him off yet again. "But you're all ignoring the fact that that's what he is: a human being, a human child. I suppose you see him as nothing more than some kind of little ape wearing overalls, and you think that you can-"



"We do not see him as-"



"You do! You do! Dr. Hoskins, I insist. You told me it was Timmie's coming that put your company on the map. If you have any gratitude for that at all, you've got to keep them away from the poor child at least until he's old enough to understand a little more of what's being asked of him. After he's had a bad session with them, he has nightmares, he can't sleep, he screams for hours sometimes. Now I warn you" (and she reached a sudden peak of fury) "I'm not letting them in here any more. Not!"



(She realized that her voice had been grow louder and louder as she spoke and now she was screaming. But she couldn't help it.)



Hoskins was looking at her in deep chagrin.



"I'm sorry," she said after a moment, in a much more temperate tone. "I didn't mean to yell that way."



"I understand that you're upset. I understand why you're upset."



"Thank you."



"Dr. Jacobs assures me that the boy's health is fine, that he's not in any way impaired by the program of research to which he's being-subjected."



"Then Dr. Jacobs ought to spend a night sleeping in here and he might have a different view," Miss Fellowes said. She saw a startled look come into Hoskins' eyes and her face blossomed with embarrassment at the unintended, implausible other meaning of what she had just said. -*'To listen to him crying in the dark. To watch me have to go into his bedroom and hold him and sing lullabies to him. Not impaired, Dr. Hoskins? If he hasn't been impaired by all this, it's because he spent the first few years of his life under the most dreadful conditions imaginable and somehow survived them. If a child can survive an ice-age winter, he can probably survive a lot of poking and testing by a pack of people in white coats. But that doesn't mean it's good for him."



"We'll need to discuss the research schedule at the next staff meeting."



"Yes. We will. Everyone is to be reminded that Tim-mie has a right to humane treatment. To human treatment."



Hoskins smiled. She gave him an interrogative look.



He said, "I was just thinking how you've changed since the first day, when you were so angry because I had foisted a Neanderthal on you. You were ready to quit, do you remember?"



"I would never have quit," Miss Fellowes said softly.



" Til stay with him-for a while,' you said. Those were your exact words. You seemed quite distraught. I had to convince you that you really would be taking care of a child and not some sort of little primate that belonged in a zoo."



Miss Fellowes lowered her eyes. She said in a low voice, "I suppose that at first glance I didn't quite understand-" and trailed off.



She glanced down at Timmie, who still clung to her. He was very much calmer now. She patted the little boy gently on his rump and sent him off toward his playroom. Hoskins looked in as Timmie opened the door, and smiled briefly at the display of toys that could be seen in there.



"Quite an array," he said.



"The poor child deserves them. They're all that he has and he earns them with what he goes through."



"Of course. Of course. We ought to get him even more. I'll send you a requisition form. Anything that you think he'd like to have-"



Miss Fellowes smiled warmly. "You do like Timmie, don't you?"



"How could I not like him? He's such a sturdy little fellow! He's so brave."



"Brave, yes."



"And so are you, Miss Fellowes."



She didn't know what to make of that. They stood facing each other in silence for a moment. Hoskins seemed to have his guard down: Miss Fellowes could see deep weariness in his eyes.



She said, with real concern, "You look worn out, Dr. Hoskins."



"Do I, Miss Fellowes?" He laughed, not very convincingly. "I'll have to practice looking more lifelike, then."



"Has some problem come up that I ought to know about?"



"Problem?" He seemed surprised. "No, no problem! Why would you think that? -I have a demanding job; that's all. Not because it's so complex, you understand. I don't mind complexity. But it's not the thing I'd be happiest doing. If I could simply get back into the laboratory end of things again-" He shook his head. "Well, that's neither here nor there. I've taken note of your complaint, Miss Fellowes. We'll see what we can do about easing up a little on Timmie's schedule of research interviews. In so far as we legitimately can, that is, considering the great importance of what we can learn from him. I'm sure you take my meaning."



"I'm sure that I do," said Miss Fellowes, in a tone of voice that was perhaps a shade too dry.