Chapter Five. Misjudging
22
HOSKINS SAID, "And how's our boy doing this morning, Miss Fellowes?"
"Why don't you see for yourself, doctor?"
Hoskins' face registered a mixture of amusement and annoyance. "Why do you call me 'doctor' all the time?" he asked.
"Because you are one, or so I believe," she said, thinking of that "Ph. D. " label so proudly engraved on the name-plate in his office.
"A doctorate in physics; that's all. "
"A doctorate is a doctorate. "
"And you've been accustomed for a long time to calling people in positions of authority 'doctor,' is that it? Especially if they happen to be men?"
His words startled her. They were right on the mark, of course: throughout her career the senior figures at the hospitals where she had worked had all had medical degrees. Most of them, by no means all, had been men. She fell easily and automatically into the habit of tacking the word "doctor" to every other sentence when addressing someone she regarded as her superior.
Her husband had been a doctor, too-with a Ph. D. in physics, like Hoskins. Miss Fellowes wondered strangely whether she would be calling him "doctor" too, as she did Hoskins, if they had managed to stay married all these years. A curious thought. She rarely thought of him at all any more; the whole notion of being married, of having a husband, had come to seem remote and implausible to her. She had been married for such a short time, such a long time ago.
"What would you prefer?" she asked. "Should I call you 'Mr. Hoskins,' then?"
"Most people around here call me 'Jerry. * "
Miss Fellowes looked at him strangely. "I couldn't do that!"
"You couldn't?"
"It-wouldn't feel right. "
"Wouldn't feel right," Hoskins repeated, musingly. "To call me 'Jerry. ' " He studied her closely, as though seeing her for the first time. His wide, fleshy face broke into a warm smile. "You really are a very formal person. I hadn't realized quite how formal, I guess. All right, then: you can go on calling me 'Dr. Hoskins,' if that's what you're most comfortable with. And I'll go on calling you 'Miss Fellowes. ' "
What did he mean by that? she wondered.
Had he been thinking of calling her 'Edith'?
Nobody did that. Hardly anyone, at any rate: maybe six people in all the world. Most of the time she was 'Miss Fellowes' even to herself, whenever she thought of herself in the third person, which wasn't often. It was just a habit: she never gave it any thought at all. But how odd, she told herself now, to think of yourself diat way. How austere, how stiff. I have really become someone quite peculiar now that I'm middle-aged, Miss Fellowes thought. And I've never even noticed it.
Hoskins was still looking steadily at her, still smiling.
There was something very warm about the man, she realized suddenly, very likable. That too was a fact she hadn't noticed before. In their earlier meetings he had struck her mainly as someone who presented himself to the world as taut, guarded, inflexible, with only occasional moments when a little humanity showed through. But possibly the tensions of the final days before the Stasis experiment had made him seem that way; and now that the time-scoop had done its work and the success of the project was confirmed, he was more relaxed, more human, more himself. And quite a nice man indeed.
Miss Fellowes found herself wondering for an idle moment if Hoskins was married.
The speculation astonished and embarrassed her. He had told her a couple of weeks back that he had a son, hadn't he? A small son, barely old enough to know how to walk. Of course he was married. Of course. What could she be thinking of? She thrust the whole line of inquiry aside in horror.
"Timmie!" she called. "Come here, Timmie!"
Like Hoskins, the boy also appeared to be in a cheerful, outgoing mood this morning. He had slept well; he had eaten well; now he came hustling out of his bedroom, showing no uneasiness whatever at Hoskins' presence. He walked boldly up to Hoskins and uttered a stream of clicks.
"Do you think he's saying something, Miss Fellowes? Not just making sounds for the fun of hearing his own voice?"
"What else can he be doing but saying something, doctor? Dr. Mclntyre asked me the same thing yesterday when he heard Timmie speaking. How can anybody doubt that the boy's using a language-and a very elaborate one at that?"
"Dr. Mclntyre's extremely conservative. He doesn't believe in jumping to conclusions. "
"Well, neither do I. But that's a genuine language or I'm not speaking one myself. "
"Let's hope so, Miss Fellowes. Let's certainly hope so. If we can't develop any way of communicating with Timmie, then much of the value of having brought him here will be lost. Naturally we want him to tell us things about the world he came from. All manner of things. "
"He will, doctor. Either in his language or in ours. And my guess is that he'll learn to speak ours long before we've found out anything about his. "
"You may be right, Miss Fellowes. Time will tell, won't it? Time will tell. "
Hoskins crouched down so that his face was on the same level as Timmie*s and let his hands rest lightly on the boy's rib-cage, fingers outspread. Timmie remained calm. Miss Fellowes realized after a moment that Hoskins was ever so gendy tickling the boy, working his fingertips lighdy around in an easy, playful way that bespoke more than a litde knowledge of how to handle small boys. And Timmie liked being tickled.
"What a sturdy litde fellow," Hoskins said. "Tough as they come. -So you're going to learn English, are you, Timmie? And then you'll dictate a book to us all about life in the Paleolithic Era, and everybody will want to read it and it'll be a big bestseller, and we'll start to see a little return on our investment in you, eh, Timmie? Eh?" He glanced up at Miss Fellowes. -"We've got a tremendous amount riding on this boy, you know. I hardly need tell you. Not simply money, but our entire professional futures. "
"Yes. I imagine you do. "
Hoskins tousled Timmie's thick unruly hair, patted the boy, and stood up. "We've been working on a shoestring budget for years, scrounging funds a dime at a time wherever we could. You can't believe the energy costs involved in maintaining Stasis, even for a moment- enough to power up a whole city for days-and the energy's only one part of the overhead we run here. We've been right on the edge of going under at least half a dozen times. We had to shoot the works on one big show to save ourselves. It was everything-or nothing. And when I say the works, I mean it. But Timmie here has saved us. He's going to put Stasis Technologies, Ltd. on the map. We're in, Miss Fellowes, we're in!"
"I would have thought bringing back a live dinosaur would have sufficed to achieve that, Dr. Hoskins. "
"We thought so, too. But somehow that never captured the public's imagination. "
"A dinosaur didn't?"
Hoskins laughed. "Oh, if we had brought back a full-grown brontosaurus, I suppose, or a rip-snorting tyran-nosaur, something on that order. But we had our mass limitations to deal with, you know, and they tied our hands considerably. Not that we would have known how to keep a tyrannosaur under control, even if we'd been able to bring one back. -I should take you across the way one of these days and let you see our dinosaur, I guess. "
"You should, yes. "
"He's very cute. "
"Cute? A dinosaur?"
"You'll see. Yes. A cute little dinosaur. Unfortunately, people don't seem to be very excited by cute little dinosaurs. 'How interesting,' they said, 'these scientists have brought a live dinosaur back from prehistoric times. ' But then they got a look at the dinosaur on television and they didn't find it very interesting at all, because it wasn t twice as high as a house and breathing fire, I guess. A
Neanderthal boy, now-an actual prehistoric human being, quite strange-looking but nevertheless something everyone can identify with and care deeply about-that'll be our salvation. -Do you hear that, Timmie? You're our salvation. " To Miss Fellowes again Hoskins said, "If this hadn't worke
d out, I'd have been through. No doubt about it. This whole corporation would have been through. "
"But we're all right now. We'll have plenty of money soon. Funds have been promised from every source. This is all wonderful, Miss Fellowes. So long as we can keep Timmie healthy and happy, and maybe get him to speak a few words of English-'Hello, everybody out there, this is Timmie from the Stone Age'-"
"Or some such thing," Miss Fellowes said drily.
"Yes. Some such thing. -Healthy and happy, that's the key to it all. If anything happens to him, our name is mud, and worse than mud, Miss Fellowes. Which makes you the central figure in our whole operation, do you realize that? We depend on you to provide a supportive, nourishing environment for our boy. . Your word will be law: whatever Timmie needs, Timmie gets. You were absolutely right yesterday when you refused to let the media have a whack at him so soon. "
"Thank you. "
"Naturally, you understand that we do want to have a press conference just as soon as possible-that it's vital to everybody's interests that we maximize the publicity value of the Timmie project as quickly as we can-"
Suddenly Hoskins seemed less genial and likable again, more the driven executive who said things like "Trust me" when he was at his least trustworthy.
Coolly Miss Fellowes said, "Does that mean you want to bring them in here this afternoon?"
"Well, If you thought he was ready for-"
"I don't. Not yet. "
Hoskins moistened his lips. "Your word is law. Just tell us when. "
"I will. "
"I mean, can you give us an estimate now? What about our having the press conference tomorrow? -The day after tomorrow?"
"Let's just put it on hold, doctor. All right? I simply don't want to commit Timmie to anything as stressful as a press conference at this point. He's still catching his breath, so to speak, still getting his feet on the ground- whatever metaphor you want to use. He's made fine progress after those first terrified moments. But he could revert in a second to the wild, frightened child you saw that night. Even Dr. Mclntyre yesterday managed to get him upset, after a while. "
Hoskins looked troubled. "We can't keep the press out indefinitely, Miss Fellowes. "
"I'm not talking about indefinitely. I'm talking about a few days. Two, three, four-let me be the judge of it, yes, Dr. Hoskins? My word is law?"
"Your word is law," Hoskins said, not sounding terribly pleased. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, "You haven't been out of the Stasis zone since the night of the experiment, have you, Miss Fellowes? Not even for a moment. "
"No!" she said indignantly. "I know my responsibilities, Dr. Hoskins, and if you think-"
"Please, Miss Fellowes. " He smiled and held up his hand. "I'm not implying anything. I'm just working my way around to pointing out that we really don't intend to cage you up in here with the boy twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I'm aware that in the critical first few couple of days it was best that you be on hand round the clock, and that in fact I told you at our first interview that you'd be on duty constantly in the beginning, at least. But Timmie seems to be stabilizing very nicely now. You'll need to work out a schedule of time off for recreation and relaxation. Ms. Stratford can fill in for you for an hour or so at first, and then perhaps you can have whole afternoons off, later on. "
"Whatever you say. "
"You don't sound very enthusiastic. I didn't realize you were such a workaholic, Miss Fellowes. "
"That's not quite the right word. It's simply that- well, Timmie's in such a frighteningly vulnerable position. Disoriented, isolated, far from home-so much in need of love and protection as he comes to terms with what's happened to him. I haven't wanted to leave him even for a short while. "
"Very commendable of you. But now that the worst of the transition is over, you've got to start coming out of here, if only for short breaks. "
"If that's what you want, doctor. "
"I think it's best. For your own good, Miss Fellowes. You're entitled to a little respite from your work. And I wouldn't want Timmie to become totally dependent on having you right here at hand, either. There's no telling what sort of intense bonding might develop if this full-time nursing goes on very much longer. And then, if for some reason you have to leave the Stasis zone, Timmie might not be able to handle that. The situation wouldn't be entirely healthy. Do you follow me?"
Miss Fellowes nodded. "You have a point there. "
"Good. Do you want to try a little experiment, then? We'll call Ms. Stratford in and let her look after Timmie for an hour or two, and you come out with me this very day and I'll take you on a tour of the rest of the laboratory. "
"Well-"
"You don't like it, do you? -Look, we'll put a beeper on you. If Ms. Stratford starts running into the slightest problem with Timmie, we'll have you back inside here in five minutes, okay? Trust me. "
"All right," Miss Fellowes said, less grudgingly than before. She had to admit the validity of Hoskins' reasoning. Now that she had eased Timmie through the first two days, it probably would be wise to test the boy's ability to withstand her absence for a short while. "I'm willing to give it a try. Take me to see your dinosaur. "
"I'll show you everything," said Hoskins. "Animal, vegetable, and mineral in equal parts. " He looked at his watch. "Suppose I give you-ah-ninety minutes to finish up whatever you were doing when I arrived this morning, and to brief Ms. Stratford on what she needs to watch out for. Then I'll come back here and pick you up for a personal tour. "
Miss Fellowes thought for a moment. "Make it two hours, I think. "
"Two hours? Fine. I'll be back at eleven sharp. See you then. -You don't have any problems about this, do you?"
She smiled happily. "Actually, I'm looking forward to it. -You can spare me for a little while, can't you, Timmie?"
The boy made clicking sounds.
"You see, doctor? He knows when I'm asking him a question, and he responds, even if he doesn't know what I'm actually saying to him. There's a real intelligence inside that head of his. "
"I'm sure there is," Hoskins said. He nodded and smiled and left.
Miss Fellowes found herself humming as she went through her morning chores. She had told the truth when she said she was looking forward to getting out of the Stasis bubble for a while. Much as she loved caring for Timmie, even she needed to take a break.
Or was it just the thought of spending some time in Hoskins' company?
Really-to think so was ridiculous, she knew-but really, it was almost like-like making a date.
He has a young son, she told herself again, very sternly. Which means he's almost certainly got a wife. A young and pretty wife.
Even so, Miss Fellowes had changed from her nurse's uniform into a dress when Hoskins returned at eleven to get her. A dress of conservative cut, to be sure-she had no other kind-but she hadn't felt so feminine in years.
He complimented her on her appearance with staid formality and she accepted with equally formal grace. It was really a perfect prelude, she thought. And then the next thought came inexorably. Prelude to what?
23
She said goodbye to Timmie and assured him that she'd be coming back soon. She made sure Ms. Stratford knew what to give him for lunch, and when. The young orderly seemed a little uneasy about taking on the responsibility of being alone with Timmie, Miss Fellowes thought. But then Ms. Stratford remarked that Mortenson would be nearby in case Timmie turned difficult, and Miss Fellowes realized that the woman was more worried about finding herself with a wild battle on her hands than she was about any harm that might come to Timmie while he was in her care. Perhaps she needs to be transferred to some other duties, Miss Fellowes thought. But there was no choice other than to turn Timmie over to her for now. The beeper in her purse would summon her quickly enough, if need should develop.
They went out. From Timmie carne one little whimper of-surprise? Despair?
"Don't worry, Timmie! I'll be coming back! I'll be coming back!"
The break had to be made, she thought. The sooner the better-for the boy, for her.
Hoskins led her upward through the maze of harshly lit hallways and echoing vaults and gloomy metal staircases that they had traversed on the night of Timmie's arrival, a night which to Miss Fellowes now seemed so long ago that it felt more like the memory of a dream than an actual event. For a brief while they were outside the building entirely, blinking into the midday brilliance of a clear, golden day; and then they plunged into another bleak, barn-like building very much like the one where Timmie's Stasis bubble had been formed.
"This is the old Stasis lab," Hoskins told her. "Where it all began. "
Again, security checks; again, clattering staircases and musty passageways and dismal cavernous vaults. At last they were in the heart of a bustling research zone, far busier than the other. Men and women in laboratory coats were going this way and that, carrying stacks of reports, files, computer cubes. Hoskins greeted many of them by first name, and they hailed him the same way. Miss Fellowes found the informality jarring.
But this is not a hospital, she told herself. These people simply work here. There's a difference.
"Animal, vegetable, mineral," Hoskins said. "Just as I promised. Animal right down there: our most spectacular exhibits. Before Timmie, I mean. "
The space was divided into many rooms, each a separate Stasis bubble somewhat smaller than the one Timmie was housed in. Hoskins led her to the view-glass of one and she looked inside.
What she saw impressed her at first as a scaled, tailed chicken. It ran back and forth from one wall to the other in a nervous, frenzied way, skittering on two thin legs, looking this way and that. But there had never been a chicken that looked anything like this one: a wingless chicken with two small dangling arms terminating in handlike paws, which clenched and unclenched constantly. Its narrow head was delicate and bircUike, with weirdly glittering scarlet eyes. Its skull was surmounted by a bony keel a little like the comb of a rooster, but bright blue in color. Its body was green with darker stripes, and there was a gleaming reptilian sheen to it. The thin serpentine tail lashed nervously from side to side.
Hoskins said, "There's our dinosaur. Our pride and joy-until Timmie came here. "
"Dinosaur? That?"
"I told you it was small. You want it to be a giant, don't you, Miss Fellowes?"
She dimpled. "I do, I suppose. It's only natural. The first thing anyone thinks of when dinosaurs are mentioned is their enormous size. And this one is, well, so tiny. "
"A small one is all we aimed for, believe me. You can imagine what would happen here if a full-grown stego-saurus, say, suddenly came thundering into Stasis and started lumbering around the laboratory. But of course there isn't enough electrical energy in six counties to create a Stasis field big enough to handle something that size. And the technology itself isn't developed enough yet to allow for significant mass transfer, even if we could get the power we'd need to do it. "
Miss Fellowes stared. She felt a chill. A living dinosaur, yes! How fantastic!
But so tiny-more like a bird without feathers, it was, or some peculiar kind of lizard"If it isn't big, why is it a dinosaur?" "Size isn't the determining factor, Miss Fellowes. What causes an animal to be classed as a dinosaur is its bony structure. The pelvic anatomy, primarily. Modern reptiles have limbs that go out sideways, like this. Think of the way a crocodile walks, or a lizard. More of a waddle than a stride, wouldn't you say? There aren't any upright crocodiles walking around on their hind legs. But the dinosaurs had bird-like pelvises. As everyone knows, many of them were able to walk upright as modern two-legged creatures do. Think of an ostrich; think of long-legged wading birds; think of the way our own legs are attached. Even the dinosaurs who stayed closer to the ground on all four legs had the sort of pelvis that allowed the legs to descend straight instead of sticking out to the sides the way a lizard's do. It's an entirely different evolutionary model, a line one which led down from dmosau-rian reptiles through birds to mammals. And the saurian end of it died out. The only reptiles that survived the Great Extinction at the end of the Mesozoic were the ones with the other kind of pelvic arrangement. "
"I see. And there were small dinosaurs as well as big ones. It just happens that the big ones are the ones that captured our imaginations. "
"Right. Those are the famous ones that everybody goggles at in the museums. But plenty of species were only a few feet high. This one, for instance. "
"I can understand now why people lost interest in it so fast. It isn't scary. It isn't awesome. "
"Laymen may have lost interest, Miss Fellowes. But I assure you that this Httle fellow has been a revelation to scientists. It's being studied day and night, and some veYy interesting things have been discovered. For instance, we've been able to determine that it's not entirely coldblooded. Which confirms one of the most controversial theories about dinosaurs ever set forth. Unlike any modern species of reptile, it has a method of maintaining internal temperatures higher than that of its environment. Not a perfect method, not by any means-but the fact that it has one at all backs up the skeletal evidence putting dinosaurs on the direct line of evolution leading toward birds and mammals. The creature that you're looking at is one of our own most distant ancestors, Miss Fellowes. "
"If it is, aren't you messing up evolutionary history by pulling it out of its own era? Suppose this one dinosaur was the key link in the whole evolutionary chain?"
Hoskins laughed. "I'm afraid evolution doesn't work as simply as that. No, there's no risk here of changing evolutionary history. The fact that we're all still here, after this fellow has been transported a hundred million years across time, should be proof enough of that. "
"I suppose so. -Is it a male or a female dinosaur?"
"Male," said Hoskins. "Unfortunately. Ever since we brought it in, we've been trying to get a fix on another of the same species that might be female. But doing that makes looking for a needle in a haystack seem like a cinch. "
"Why get a female?"
He looked at her quizzically. "So that we might have a fighting chance to obtain some fertile eggs, and breed a line of baby dinosaurs here in the laboratory. "
She felt foolish. "Of course. "
"Come over here," Hoskins said. "The trilobite section. You know what trilobites are, Miss Fellowes?"
She didn't answer. She was watching the little dinosaur pathetically skittering around in its confinement area, bewilderedly running from one wall to the other. It would run right into the wall and bounce offbefore turning back. The stupid creature didn't seem to be able to comprehend the reason why it couldn't just keep going, out into the open, off into the dank swamps and torrid forests of its prehistoric home.
She thought of Timmie, penned up across the way in his own little set of rooms.
"I said, Miss Fellowes, do you know what trilobites are?"
"What? Oh-yes. Yes. Some sort of extinct kind of lobster, isn't that so?"
"Well, not exactly. A crustacean and extinct, but not at all like a lobster. Not much like anything now living, as a matter of fact. Once they were the dominant life-form of the Earth, the crown of creation. That was half a billion years ago. There were trilobites wherever you looked, then. Crawling around on the floor of every ocean by the millions. And then they all died out: we can't yet say why. Leaving no descendants, no genetic heritage whatever. They were here, they were fruitful and multiplied, and then they vanished as though they had never been. Leaving fossils of themselves behind in enormous quantities. "
Miss Fellowes peered into the trilobite tank. She saw six or seven sluggish gray-green creatures three or four inches long, sitting on a bed of gray ooze. They looked like something you might see at the seashore in a tide-pool. Their narrow, oval, hard-looking bodies were divided the long way into three ridged sections, a raised central one and two smaller sid
e lobes fringed with little spikes. Huge dark eyes were visible at one end, faceted like the eyes of insects. As Miss Fellowes watched, one of the trilobites pushed an array of tiny jointed legs outward from its sides and began to crawl-slowly, very slowly- across the bottom of the tank.
The crown of creation. The dominant life-form oTits time.
A man in a lab coat appeared, wheeling a tray on which some complex, unfamiliar device was mounted. He greeted Hoskins amiably and gave Miss Fellowes an impersonal grin.
"This is Tom Dwayne of Washington University," Hoskins said. "He's one of our trilobite people. Tom's a nuclear chemist. -Tom, I want you to meet Edith Fellowes, R. N. She's the wonderful woman who's taking care of our new little Neanderthal. "
The newcomer smiled again, considerably less impersonally this time. "A great honor to meet you, Dr. Fellowes. You've got a tremendous job on your hands. "
"Miss Fellowes will do," she said, trying not to sound too stuffy about it. -"What does a nuclear chemist have to do with trilobites, if you don't mind my asking?"
"Well, actually I'm not studying the trilobites per se," Dwayne said. "I'm studying the chemistry of the water that came here with them. "
"Tom's taking isotope ratios on the oxygen contained in the water," said Hoskins.
"And why is that?"
Dwayne replied, "What we have here is primeval water, at least half a billion years old, maybe as much as six hundred million. The isotope ratio gives us the prevailing temperature of the ocean at that time-I could explain in detail, if you like-and when we know the ocean temperature, we can work out all sorts of other things about the ancient planetary climate. The world was mostly ocean at the time the trilobites flourished. "
"So you see, Miss Fellowes, Tom doesn't really care about the trilobites at all. They're just ugly little annoyances, crawling around in his precious primeval water: The ones who study the trilobites themselves have a much easier time of it, because all they have to do is dissect the critters, and they don't need anything but a scalpel and a microscope for that. Whereas poor Tom has to set up a mass spectrograph in here each time he conducts an experiment. "
"Why's that? Can't he-"
"No, he can't. He can't take anything out of its Stasis bubble and there's no way around that. It's a matter of maintaining the balance of temporal potential. "
"The balance of temporal potential," Miss Fellowes repeated, as though Hoskins had said something in Latin.
"An energy-conservation problem. What comes across time is traveling across lines of temporal force. It builds up potential as it moves. We've got that neutralized inside Stasis and we need to keep it that way. "
"Ah," said Miss Fellowes. Her scientific training had never included much physics. Its concepts were largely lost on her. It was a reaction, perhaps, to the unhappy memories of her marriage. Her former husband had liked to go on and on about the "poetry" inherent in physics, the mystery and magic and beauty of it. Maybe it actually had some. But anything that could be associated with her former husband was something that Miss Fellowes didn't care to think about very deeply.
Hoskins said, "Shall we move along and leave Tom here to his trilobites?"
There were samples of primordial plant life in sealed chambers-odd scaly little plants, eerie and unbeautiful- and chunks of rock formations, looking no different from twenty-first-century rocks so far as Miss Fellowes could see. Those were the vegetable and mineral parts of the collection. Animal, vegetable, mineral, yes, just as Hoskins had said-a comprehensive raid on the natural history of the past had been carried out here. And every specimen had its investigator. The place was like a museum: a museum that had been brought to life and was serving as a superactive center of research.
"And you have to supervise all of this, Dr. Hoskins?"
"Only indirectly, Miss Fellowes. I have subordinates, thank heaven. The general administrative work of running the corporation is enough to keep me busy three times over. "
"But you aren't a businessman, really," she said, thinking of that vaunted Ph. D. in physics. "You're basically a scientist who has gradually drifted across into being a corporate executive, isn't that so?"
He nodded, looking wistful. " 'Drifted' is the right word. I began on the theoretical side. My doctorate dealt with the nature of time, the technique of mesonic inter-temporal detection, and so on. When we formed the company, I didn't have the slightest idea that I'd be anything otner than head of theoretical research. But then there were-well, problems. I don't mean technical ones. I mean the bankers came in and gave us a good talking-to about the way we were going about our business. After that there were personnel changes at the highest levels of the corporation and one thing led to another and next thing I knew they were turning to me and saying, 'You have to be C. E. O. , Jerry, you're the only one who can steady the place down,' and I was fool enough to believe them, and then, well-well-" He grinned. "There I am with a fine mahogany desk and all. Shuffling papers, initialling reports, holding meetings. Telling people what to do. With maybe ten minutes left here and there in the day to think about anything like my own actual scientific research. "
Miss Fellowes felt an unexpectedly powerful burst of sympathy. At last she understood why there was that "Ph. D. " tag on the nameplate on Hoskins' desk. He wasn't boasting. He had it there simply to remind himself of who and what he really was. How sad, she thought.
"If you could step aside from the business end of things," she said, "what sort of research do you think you'd want to do?"
"Short-range temporal transfer problems. No question of it. I'd want to work on a method of detecting objects that lie closer to us in time than the present limit of 10,000 years. We've done some promising preliminary studies, but we haven't been able to get further than that. A matter of available resources-financial, technical-of priorities, of accepting the limitations of the moment. If we could manage to reach our scoop into historical times, Miss Fellowes-if we could make contact with the living Egypt of the pharaohs, or the people of Babylonia or ancient Rome or Greece or-"
He broke off in mid-sentence. Miss Fellowes could hear a commotion coming from one of the distant booths, a thin voice raised querulously. Hoskins frowned, muttered a hasty "Excuse me," and went rushing off.
Miss Fellowes followed as best she could without actually running. She didn't feel much like being left here by herself in the midst of all this hubbub of bygone ages. An elderly man in street clothes with a thin gray beard and an angry, reddened face was arguing with a much younger uniformed technician who wore the red and gold Stasis Technologies, Ltd. monogram on his lab coat. The irate older man was saying, "I had vital aspects of my investigations to complete. Don't you understand that?" "What's going on?" Hoskins asked, hastily coming between them.
The technician said, "Attempted removal of a specimen, Dr. Hoskins. "
"Removal from Stasis?" Hoskins said, eyebrows rising. "Are you serious?" He turned to the older man. -"I can't believe this is true, Dr. Adamewski. "
The older man pointed into the nearest Stasis bubble.
Miss Fellowes followed his pointing hand. All she saw was a small gray lab table on which a totally undistinguished sample of rock was sitting, along with some vials of what she supposed were testing reagents.
Adamewski said, "I still have extensive work to do in order to ascertain-"
The technician cut him off. "Dr. Hoskins, Professor Adamewski knew from the start that his chalcopyrite specimen could only stay here for a two-week period. And the time's up today. "
"Two weeks!" Adamewski erupted. "Who can say in advance how long a research task is going to take? Did Roentgen work out the principles of X rays in two weeks? Did Rutherford solve the problem of the atomic nucleus in two weeks? Did-"
"But two weeks was the limitation imposed for this experiment," said the technician. "He knew that. "
"What of it? I wasn't able to guarantee I'd be able to finish my work in so short a t
ime. I can't see the future, Dr. Hoskins. Two weeks, three weeks, four-what matters is solving the problem, is it not?"
"The problem, professor," Hoskins said, "is that our facilities are limited here. We've got only so many Stasis bubbles and there's an infinite amount of work to be done. So we have to keep specimens rotating. That piece of chalcopyrite has to go back where it came from. There's a long list of people waiting to use this bubble. "
"So let them use it," said Adamewski heatedly. "And I'll take the specimen out of there and finish working on it at my university. You can have it back whenever I'm done. "
"You know that isn't possible. "
"A piece of chalcopyrite! A miserable three-kilogram chunk of rock with no commercial value! Why not?"
"We can't afford the energy expense!" Hoskins said.
"You know that. None of this comes as any news to you, and please don't try to pretend otherwise. "
The technician said, "The point is, Dr. Hoskins, that he tried to remove the rock against the rules and while he was in there I almost punctured Stasis, not realizing he was still inside the bubble. "
There was an icy silence.
After a moment Hoskins turned to the scientist and said in a coldly formal way, "Is that so, professor?"
Adamewski looked uncomfortable. "I saw no harm in-"
"No harm? No harm?" Hoskins shook his head. He seemed to be penning up real anger with a considerable effort.
There was a red-handled pull-lever dangling just within reach outside the Stasis chamber that contained Professor Adamewski's mineral specimen. A nylon cord ran from the end of it, through the wall, into the chamber. Hoskins reached up unhesitatingly and jerked down on the lever.
Miss Fellowes, looking into the Stasis bubble, drew in her breath sharply as a quick burst of brilliant light flickered around the chunk of rock, surrounding it for the briefest of moments with a dazzling halo of red and green. Before she even had time to close her eyes against the brightness of the flare the light was gone. And so, too, was the chunk of rock. Its existence had flickered out. The gray lab table was bare.
Adamewski stood gasping in outrage and frustration. "What have you-"
Hoskins cut him off brusquely. "You can clear out your cubicle, professor. Your permit to investigate material in Stasis is permanently voided, as of this moment. "
"Wait. You can't-"
"I'm sorry. I can, professor. And I have. You've violated one of our most stringent rules. "
"I will appeal this to the International Association of-"
"Appeal away," Hoskins said. "In a case like this, you'll find I can't be overruled. "
He turned away deliberately, leaving the professor still protesting, and swung around toward Miss Fellowes. She had watched the entire episode with mounting discomfort, hoping that her beeper would go off and give her some excuse to get away from this disagreeable scene.
Hoskins* face was white with anger.
"I regret that we've had to interrupt this tour with such unpleasantness, Miss Fellowes. But occasionally things like this are necessary. If there's anything else you'd like to see in here-any further questions-"
"If it's all right with you, doctor, I think I've seen enough. Perhaps I ought to be getting back to Timmie now. "
"But you've only been out of your chamber for-"
"Perhaps I should, anyway. "
Hoskins' lips moved silently for a moment. He seemed to be framing some sort of appeal. At length he said, "Suppose you check with Ms. Stratford and see how Timmie's doing. And if everything's all right with the boy, maybe you can allow yourself a little more free time. I'd like to invite you to have lunch with me, Miss Fellowes. "
24
They went into the small executive alcove of the company cafeteria. Hoskins greeted people on all sides and introduced Miss Fellowes with complete ease, although she herself felt painfully self-conscious.
What must they think, seeing us together? she wondered, and tried desperately to look businesslike. She wished now that she hadn't changed out of her nurse's uniform. The uniform served as a kind of armor for her. It allowed her to face the world in the guise of a function rather than as a person.
There was nothing fancy about the cafeteria fare. Salads, sandwiches, fruit plates, roils-that was about it. Just as well: she had never been much for elaborate dining, especially in the middle of the day. And her years of hospital life had left her not only accustomed to cafeteria food but actually with a preference for it. She picked out a few simple things to put on her tray: a salad of lettuce and strawberries and orange slices, a couple of pieces of rye bread, a small flask of buttermilk.
When they were seated, Miss Fellowes said, "Do you have that kind of trouble often, Dr. Hoskins? The sort you just had with the professor, I mean. "
"That was a new one," he said. "Of course, I'm always having to argue people out of removing specimens when their experimental time is up. But this is the first time one actually has tried to do it. "
"Which would have created some terrible problem with-ah-the balance of temporal potential?"
"Exactly," said Hoskins, looking pleased at her use of the phrase. "Of course, we've tried to take such possibilities into account. Accidents will happen and so we've got special power sources designed to compensate for the drain of accidental removals from Stasis. But that doesn't mean we want to see a year's supply of energy gone in half a second. We couldn't afford any such thing, not without having to cut back on our operations for months to come in order to make up the costs. -And on top of everything else, there's the angle that the professor would have been in the room at the moment Stasis was being punctured. "
"What would have happened to him if he had been?"
"Well, we've experimented with inanimate objects- and with mice, for that matter-and whatever we've had in the bubble at the time of puncture has disappeared. "
"Gone back in time, you mean?"
"Presumably. Carried along, so to speak, by the pull of the object that's simultaneously snapping back into its natural time. That's the theory, anyway, and we don't have any reason to doubt it: an object returning to its place in the space-time matrix generates such powerful forces in its immediate vicinity that it takes with it anything that's nearby. The mass limitations seem to apply only in the forward direction. If there had been an elephant in the bubble with the rock sample, it would have been swept back in time when the rock went back. I don't even want to think about the conservation-law violations involved in that. "
"The lab table didn't go," Miss Fellowes pointed out.
Hoskins grinned. "No, it didn't. Or the floor, or the windows. The force has some limitations. It can't take the whole building with it, obviously. And it doesn't seem to be strong enough to sweep objects backward in time that are fixed in place. It just scoops up the loose things nearby. And so we anchor anything within Stasis that's in proximity to the transit object that we don't want to move, which is a fairly complicated procedure. "
"But the professor wouldn't have been anchored. "
"No," Hoskins said. "The idiot would have gone right along with the rock, straight back to the place where it came from in the Pliocene. "
"How dreadful it would have been for him. "
"I suppose it would. Not that I'd weep a lot, I assure you. If he was fool enough to break the rules, and as a result he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and something nasty happened to him, it would have served him right. But ultimately we'd have been the ones to suffer. Can you imagine the lawsuit we'd be hit with?"
"But if he died as a result of his own negligence-"
"Don't be naive, Miss Fellowes. For decades now all sorts of damned idiots in this country have been doing negligent things and the lawyers for their estates have been nailing the responsibility to other people's hides. The drunk who falls in front of the subway train-the burglar who drops through a skylight and cracks his skull -the schoolbo
y who climbs on the back of the bus and falls off-don't you think they've all been able to come away with huge payments in damages? Adamewski's heirs would say that we were the negligent ones, because we didn't check the bubble before we punctured Stasis to make sure that it was empty. And the courts would agree, regardless of the fact that the man had no business creeping inside the bubble to try to steal the specimen. -Even if we won the case, Miss Fellowes, can you imagine the effect it would have on the public if the story ever came out? Gentle old scientist killed in Stasis accident! The terrible dangers of the time travel process! Unknown risks to the public! Who knows, perhaps Stasis can be used to generate some kind of death-ray field! What kind of deadly experiments are actually going on behind those gates? Shut them down! Shut them down! -Do you see? Overnight we'd be turned into some sort of monsters and funds would be choked off like that," Hoskins said, snapping his fingers. He scowled, looked down into his plate, played moodily with his food.
Miss Fellowes said, "Couldn't you get him back? The way you got the rock in the first place?"
"No, because once an object is returned, the origirtal fix will be lost unless we take steps ahead of rime to retain it-and we wouldn't have done that in this case. As a matter of fact, we never take such steps in any case. There's no reason for it. Finding the professor again would mean relocating a specific fix across five million years or thereabouts and that would be like dropping a line into the oceanic abyss for the purpose of dredging up one particular fish. -My God, when I think of the precautions we take to prevent accidents, it makes me furious. We have every individual Stasis unit set up with its own puncturing device-we have to, since each unit has its own separate fix and needs to be independently collapsible. The point is, though, none of the puncturing devices is ever activated until the last minute. And then we deliberately make activation impossible except by- you saw me do it, didn't you?-by the pull of a lever whose handle is carefully placed outside Stasis. The pull is gross mechanical motion that requires a strong effort, not something that's likely to be done accidentally. "
"So you'd simply have to leave Professor Adamewski back there in-what did you say?-the Pliocene?"
"There'd be no alternative. "
"And the Pliocene was five million years ago?"
"It began about ten million years ago, as a matter of fact. And lasted for something like eight million years. But that particular rock came from five million years back. "
"Would the professor have been able to survive there very long, do you think?"
Hoskins turned his hands upward in a gesture of uncertainty. "Well, the climate probably wouldn't be as rough as it would get later on in the glacial period your Timmie comes from, and the atmosphere he'd find himself in would be more or less identical to the stuff we breathe today-minus a lot of the garbage that we've pumped into it in the past couple of hundred years, of course. So if Adamewski knew anything about hunting and finding edible plants, which I would say is highly doubtful, he'd have been able to cope for a while. Anywhere between two weeks and two months, is my guess. " "Well, what if he met some Pliocene woman during that rime, and she took a liking to him and taught him how to gather food?" Then an even wilder idea occurred to Miss Fellowes. -"And he might even mate with her back there and they would have children, a whole new genetic line, a modern man's genes combining with those of a prehistoric woman. Wouldn't that change all of history to come? That would be the biggest risk of having the professor go back in time, wouldn't it?"
Hoskins was trying to smother an attack of giggles. Miss Fellowes felt her face turning a hot red. "Have I said something very stupid, doctor?"
It was another moment before he was able to reply. "Stupid? Well, that's too harsh a word. -Naive, is what I'd prefer to say. Miss Fellowes, there weren't any women conveniently waiting back there in the Pliocene for our Dr. Adamewski to set up housekeeping with. Not anybody that he'd regard as an eligible mate, anyway. " "I see. "
"I forget most of the details of what I once knew about hominid ancestry, but I can tell you quite confidently that Adamewski wouldn't have found anything that looked like Homo sapiens back there. The best he could hope for would be some primitive form of australo-pithecine, maybe four feet tall and covered with hair from head to toe. The human race as we understand it simply hadn't evolved at such an early date. And I doubt that even a passionate man like Dr. Adamewski"-Hoskins smothered another burst of giggles-"would find himself so enamored of your average Pliocene hominid ferrtale that he'd want to have sexual relations with her. Of course, if he ran into the Pliocene equivalent of Helen of Troy-the ape that launched a thousand ships, so to speak-"
"I think I get the point," Miss Fellowes said primly, regretting now that she had led the discussion in this direction in the first place. "But I asked you before, when you showed me the dinosaur, why it was that moving something in and out of time doesn't change history. I understand now that the professor wouldn't have been able to start a family in the Pliocene, but if you sent someone back in time to an era when there were actual human beings-say, twenty thousand years ago-"
Hoskins looked thoughtful. "Well, then, there'd be some minor disruption of the time-line, I suppose. But I don't think there'd be anything big. "
"So you simply can't change history using Stasis?"
"Theoretically, yes, you can, I suppose. Actually, except in really unusual cases, no. We move objects out of Stasis all the time. Air molecules. Bacteria. Dust. About ten per cent of our energy consumption goes to make up micro-losses of that sort. But even moving large objects in time sets up changes that damp out. Consider Adamew-ski's chunk of chalcopyrite from the Pliocene. During the two weeks it was up here in our time, let's say, some insect that might have taken shelter under it couldn't find it, and was killed. That could initiate a whole series of changes along the time-line, I imagine. But the mathematics of Stasis indicates that it would be a converging series. The amount of change tends to diminish with time and eventually things return to the track they would have followed all along. "
"You mean, reality heals itself?"
"In a manner of speaking. Yank a human being out of the past, or send one back, and you make a larger wound. If the individual is an ordinary one, that wound would still heal itself-that's what the calculations show. Naturally there are a great many people who write to us every day and want us to bring Abraham Lincoln into the present, or Mohammed, or Alexander the Great. Well, we don't have the technical ability to do that just yet, not that we'd be likely to if we could. But even if we could cast our net such a short distance into the past, and were able to locate a specific human being such as the three 1 named, the change in reality involved in moving one of the great molders of history would be too huge to be healed. There are ways of calculating when a change is likely to be too great, and we make sure that we don't come anywhere near that limit. "
Miss Fellowes said, "Then Timmie-" "No, he doesn't present any problems of that sort. One small boy who belonged to a human subspecies that was destined to die out in another five or ten thousand years is hardly going to be a history-changer because we've brought him forward to our era. Reality is safe. " Hoskins gave her a quick, sharp glance. "You don't need to worry about it. "
"I'm not. I'm just trying to understand how things work around here. " "Which I applaud. "
Miss Fellowes took a long deep sip of her buttermilk. "If there wasn't any historical risk in bringing one Neanderthal child into our time, then it would be possible to bring another one eventually, wouldn't it?"
"Of course. But one is all we'll need, I imagine. If Timmie helps us learn everything that we want to-"
"I don't mean to bring another one here for purposes of research. I mean as a playmate for Timmie. " "What?"
It was a concept diat had burst into her mind as suddenly and unexpectedly as the name "Timmie" itself had-an impulse, a spontaneous thing. Miss Fellowes was astonished at herself for having brought it up.
But she pursued it, now that it was here.
"He's a normal, healthy child in every way, so far as I can see. A child of his time, of course. But in his own way I think he's outstanding. "
"I certainly think so too, Miss Fellowes. "
"His development from here on, though, may not continue normally. "
"Why not?" Hoskins asked.
"Any child needs stimulation and this one lives a life of solitary confinement. I intend to do what I can, but I can't replace an entire cultural matrix. What I'm saying, Dr. Hoskins, is that he needs another boy to play with. "
Hoskins nodded slowly. "Unfortunately, there's only one of him, isn't there? Poor child. "
Miss Fellowes watched him shrewdly, hoping that she had picked the right moment for this.
"If you could bring a second Neanderthal forward to share his quarters with him-"
"Yes. That would be ideal, Miss Fellowes. -But of course it can't be done. "
"It can't?" said Miss Fellowes, with sudden dismay.
"Not with the best will in the world, which I like to think is what we have. We couldn't possibly expect to find another Neanderthal close to his age without incredible luck-it was a very sparsely populated era, Miss Fellowes; we can't just dip casually into the Neanderthal equivalent of a big city and snatch a child-and even if we could, it wouldn't be fair to multiply risks by having another human being in Stasis. "
Miss Fellowes put down her spoon. Heady new ideas were flooding into her mind. She said energetically, "In that case, Dr. Hoskins, let me take a different tack. If it's impossible to bring another Neanderthal child into the present, so be it. I'm not even sure I could cope with a second one, anyway. But what if- a little later, once Timmie is better adapted to modern life - what if we were to bring another child in from the outside to play with him?"
Hoskins stared at her in concern. "A human child?"
"Another child," said Miss Fellowes, with an angry glare. "Timmie is human. "
"Of course. You know what I meant. - But I couldn't dream of such a thing. "
"Why not? Why couldn't you? I don't see anything wrong with the idea. You pulled that child out of time and made him an eternal prisoner. Don't you owe hint something? Dr. Hoskins, if there is any man who, in this present-day world, can be considered that child's father - in every sense but the biological - it's you. Why can't you do this litde thing for him?"
Hoskins said, "His father?" He rose, somewhat unsteadily, to his feet. "Miss Fellowes, I think I'll take you back now, if you don't mind. "
They returned to the dollhouse that was Stasis Section One in a bleak silence that neither broke.
25
As he had promised, Mclntyre sent over a stack of reference works that dealt with Neanderthals. Miss Fellowes plunged into them as if she were back at nursing school and a critical exam was coming up in a couple of days.
She learned that the first Neanderthal fossils had been discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century by workmen digging in a limestone quarry near Diisseldorf, Germany, at a place called the Neander Valley - Neandtr-thal, in German. While cleaning away the mud that covered a limestone deposit in a grotto sixty feet above the valley floor, they came across a human skull embedded in the grotto floor, and other bones not far away.
The workmen gave the skull and a few of the other bones to a local high school teacher, who took them to Dr. Hermann Schaafhausen of Bonn, a well-known anatomist. Schaafhausen was startled by their strangeness. The skull had many human features, but it was curiously primitive in appearance, long and narrow, with a sloping forehead and an enormous bony ridge bulging above the brows. The thighbones that accompanied the skull were so thick and heavy that they scarcely looked human at all.
But Schaafhausen did think the Neanderthal bones were human relics-extremely ancient ones. In a paper he read at a scientific meeting early in 1857, he termed the unusual fossils "the most ancient memorial of the early inhabitants of Europe. "
Miss Fellowes looked up at Timmie, who was playing with some toy on the far side of the room.
"Listen to that," she said. " 'The most ancient memorial of the earfy inhabitants of Europe. ' That's one of your relatives he's talking about, Timmie. "
Timmie didn't seem impressed. He uttered a few indifferent clicks and went back to his game.
Miss Fellowes read on. And quickly the book confirmed what she already vaguely knew: that the Neanderthal people, while certainly ancient inhabitants of Europe, were far from being the most ancient ones.
The discovery of the original Neanderthal fossils had been followed, later in the nineteenth century, by similar discoveries in many other parts of Europe-more fossilized bones of prehistoric human-like creatures with sloping foreheads, huge beetling brows, and-another typical characteristic-receding chins. Scientists debated the meaning of these fossils, and, as Darwin's theories of evolution came to gain wide acceptance, general agreement developed that the Neanderthal-type specimens were the remains of a brutish-looking prehistoric kind of human being, ancestral to modern humanity, perhaps midway on the evolutionary scale between apes and humans.
" 'Brutish-looking. ' " Miss Fellowes sniffed. "All in the eye of the beholder, eh, Timmie?"
But then had come the discovery of other types of fossil humans-in Java, in China, elsewhere in Europe- that seemed even more primitive in form than the Neanderthals. And in the twentieth century, when reliable methods of dating ancient sites were developed, it became clear that the Neanderthal people must have lived relatively recently on the time-scale of human evolution. The Javan and Chinese forms of primitive human being were at least half a million years old, perhaps even more, whereas the Neanderthals had not appeared on the scene until something like 150,000 years ago. They had occupied much of Europe and the Near East, apparently, for over a hundred thousand years, flourishing until about 35,000 years ago. Then they had disappeared-replaced at all locations by the modern form of the human race, which evidently had already come into existence at the time the first Neanderthals emerged. It appeared that humans of the modern type had lived alongside the Neanderthals, peacefully or otherwise, for thousands of years before undergoing a sudden population explosion and completely displacing the other human form.
There seemed to be several different theories to explain why the Neanderthals had suddenly become extinct. But one thing all the experts agreed on was that they had vanished from the Earth late in the period of the ice ages.
The Neanderthals, then, hadn't been some brutish' ape-like ancestor of modern man. They weren't ancestral at all. They were simply humans of another form, different in various ways from their contemporaries, who were the kind of human that had survived into modern times. Distant cousins, perhaps. The two races had had a parallel existence in Ice Age times, an uneasy coexistence. But only one of the two forms had lasted beyond the time when the great glaciers had covered Europe.
"So you are human, Timmie. I never really doubted it-" (though she had, for a bad moment right at the beginning, for which she still felt shame) "-but here it is in black and white. You're just a little unusual-looking, that's all. But you're as human as I am. As human as anybody here. "
Clicks and murmurs came from Timmie.
"Yes," Miss Fellowes said. "You think so, too, don't you?"
And yet, the differences, the differences-r
Miss Fellowes' eyes raced over the pages. What had the Neanderthals really looked like? At first there had been hot debates over that, because so few fossil specimens of Neanderthals had been found, and one of the earliest skeletons to be discovered turned out to be that of a man whose bones had been crippled by osteoarthritis, creating a distorted impression of how a normal man of his people would have appeared. But gradually, as more skeletal evidence was uncovered, a generally accepted picture of the Neanderthal people had emerged.
They had been shorter than modern humans-the tallest of the men were probably no more than
about five-feet-four in height-and very stocky, with wide shoulders and deep barrel-chests. Their foreheads sloped backward, their brow ridges were enormous, they had rounded lower jaws instead of chins. Their noses were big and broad and low-bridged, and their mouths jutted forward like muzzles. Their feet were flat and very wide, with short stubby toes. Their bones were heavy, thick, and large-jointed and their muscles probably were extremely well developed. Their legs were short in proportion to their torsos and possibly were naturally bowed, with permanently flexed knees, so that they might have walked in a sort of shuffle.
Not pretty, no. Not by modern standards.
But human. Unquestionably human. Give a Neanderthal man a shave and a haircut and put him into a shirt and a pair of jeans and he could probably walk down a street in any city of the world without attracting anyone's attention.
"And listen to this part, Timmie!" Miss Fellowes ran her finger across the page and read out loud to him. " 'He had a big brain. The brains of skeletons are measured by cranial capacities-that is, how much volume, in cubic centimeters, the skull cavity has. Among modern Homo sapiens, the average cranial capacity is something like 1,400 or 1,500 c. c. Some men have brain capacities of 1,100-1,200 c. c. The average brain capacity of Neanderthal man was about 1,600 c. c. for male skulls, and about 1,350 c. c. for female skulls. This is higher than the average figure for Homo sapiens. ' " She chortled. "What do you think of that, Timmie? 'Higher than the average figure for Homo sapiens!"
Timmie smiled at her. Almost as if he had understood! But Miss Fellowes knew there was no chance of that.
"Of course," she said, "it isn't really the size of the skull that counts, it's the quality of the brain inside it. Elephants have bigger skulls than just about anybody, but they can't do algebra. Nor can I, for that matter, but I can read a book and drive a car, and show me the elephant that can do those things! -Do you think I'm silly, Timmie? Talking to you this way?" The boy's face was sol-*1 emn; he offered her a click or two. "But you need someone to talk to in here. And so do I. Come over here for a moment, will you?" Miss Fellowes beckoned to him. He stared blankly but stayed where he was. "Come over here to me, Timmie. I want to show you something. "
But he didn't budge. It was a pretty fantasy, imagining that he was beginning to understand her words; but she knew very well that there was no substance to it.
She went to him instead, sitting down beside him and holding out the book she had been reading. There was a painting on the left-hand side of the page, an artist's reconstruction of a Neanderthal man's face, massive and grizzled, with the typical jutting mouth and great flattened nose and fierce tangled beard. His head was thrust forward from his shoulders. His lips were drawn back a little, baring his teeth. A savage countenance, yes. Brutish, one might even say: there was no getting away from that.
But yet there was the indisputable light of intelligence in his eyes, and a look of something else, something- what? Tragic? A look of anguish, a look of pain?
He was staring off into the distance as though looking across thousands of years of time. Looking into a world where none of his kind existed any longer, except for one small boy who had no proper business being there.
"How does he look, Timmie? Do you recognize him at all? Does he seem anything like the way your people actually were?"
Timmie made a few clicks. He glanced at the book without apparent interest.
Miss Fellowes tapped the picture a couple of times. Then she took his hand and put it on the page to direct his attention toward the plate.
He just didn't understand. The image on the page seemed to mean nothing to him at all.
He ran his hand over the page in a remote, uninterested way, as though the smooth texture of the paper was the only aspect of the book that had caught his attention. Then the boy turned the lower corner of the page upward and began idly to pull on it, so that the page started to rip from the binding.
"No!" Miss Fellowes cried, and in a quick reflexive gesture she pulled his hand away and slapped it, all at once-a light slap, but an unmistakable reprimand.
Timmie glared at her. His eyes were bright with fury. He made a ghastly snarling sound and his hand became a claw; and he reached for the book again.
She pulled it out of his reach.
He dropped down on his knees and growled at her. A terrifying growl, a deep eerie rumbling, eyes turned upward, lips drawn back, teeth bared in a frightful grimace of rage.
"Oh, Timmie, Timmie-" Tears welled up in Miss Fellowes' eyes, and she felt a vast sense of despair, of defeat-of horror, even-rising within her.
Groveling on the floor and growling like a little wild beast, she thought, appalled. Snarling at her as if he'd like to jump at her and rip her throat out just as he had clawed at that book, wanting to tear out a page.
Oh, TimmieBut then Miss Fellowes forced herself back to calmness. This was no way to react to the child's little outburst. What had she expected? He was four years old at most and came out of some primitive tribal culture and he had never seen a book before in his life. Was he supposed to look at it with respect and awe, and thank her politely for having made this valuable source of information available to his eager young mind?
Even modern four-year-olds from nice educated households, she reminded herself, have been known to tear pages out of books. And also sometimes to growl ahd snarl and look angry when you slap their hands for doing it. Nobody thinks that they're little savage beasts, just because they do things like that. Not at that age. And Timmie isn't a beast either, just a small boy, a small wild boy who finds himself a prisoner in a world he can't begin to understand.
Carefully Miss Fellowes put the books Mclntyre had given her away in one of her lockers. When she returned to the other room she found Timmie calm again, playing with his toy as though nothing unusual had taken place.
Her heart flooded with love for the boy. She yearned to beg his forgiveness for having seemed once again to give up on him so quickly. But what good would that do? He couldn't begin to understand.
Well, there was another way.
"I think it's time for some oatmeal, Timmie. Don't you?"