NINE TOMORROWS Tales of the Near Future

by Isaac Asimov

  Miss Fellowes said, “But doesn’t it—change history to move something in and out of Time?”

  Hoskins shrugged. “Theoretically, yes; actually, except in unusual cases, no. We move objects out of Stasis all the time. Air molecules. Bacteria. Dust. About 10 percent of our energy consumption goes to make up micro-losses of that nature. But moving even large objects in Time sets up changes that damp out. Take that chalcopyrite from the Pliocene. Because of its absence for two weeks some insect didn’t find the shelter it might have found and is killed. That could initiate a whole series of changes, but the mathematics of Stasis indicates that this is a converging series. The amount of change diminishes with time and then things are as before.”

  “You mean, reality heals itself?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Abstract a human from time or send one back, and you make a larger wound. If the individual is an ordinary one, that wound still heals itself. Of course, there are a great many people who write to us each day and want us to bring Abraham Lincoln into the present, or Mohammed, or Lenin. That can’t be done, of course. Even if we could find them, the change in reality in moving one of the history molders would be too great to be healed. There are ways of calculating when a change is likely to be too great and we avoid even approaching that limit.”

  Miss Fellowes said, “Then, Timmie—”

  “No, he presents no problem in that direction. Reality is safe. But—” He gave her a quick, sharp glance, then went on, “But never mind. Yesterday you said Timmie needed companionship.”

  “Yes,” Miss Fellowes smiled her delight. “I didn’t think you paid that any attention.”

  “Of course I did. I’m fond of the child. I appreciate your feelings for him and I was concerned enough to want to explain to you. Now I have; you’ve seen what we do; you’ve gotten some insight into the difficulties involved; so you know why, with the best will in the world, we can’t supply companionship for Timmie.”

  “You can’t?” said Miss Fellowes, with sudden dismay.

  “But I’ve just explained. We couldn’t possibly expect to find another Neanderthal his age without incredible luck, and if we could, it wouldn’t be fair to multiply risks by having another human being in Stasis.”

  Miss Fellowes put down her spoon and said energetically, “But, Dr. Hoskins, that is not at all what I meant. I don’t want you to bring another Neanderthal into the present. I know that’s impossible. But it isn’t impossible to bring another child to play with Timmie.”

  Hoskins stared at her in concern. “A human child?”

  “Another child,” said Miss Fellowes, completely hostile now. “Timmie is human.”

  “I couldn’t dream of such a thing.”

  “Why not? Why couldn’t you? What is wrong with the notion? You pulled that child out of Time and made him an eternal prisoner. Don’t you owe him something? Dr. Hoskins, if there is any man who, in this world, is that child’s father in every sense but the biological, it is you. Why can’t you do this little 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 in a complete silence that neither broke.

  It was a long time after that before she saw Hoskins again, except for an occasional glimpse in passing. She was sorry about that at times; then, at other times, when Timmie was more than usually woebegone or when he spent silent hours at the window with its prospect of little more than nothing, she thought, fiercely: Stupid man.

  Timmie’s speech grew better and more precise each day. It never entirely lost a certain soft, slurriness that Miss Fellowes found rather endearing. In times of excitement, he fell back into tongue-clicking but those times were becoming fewer. He must be forgetting the days before he came into the present—except for dreams.

  As he grew older, the physiologists grew less interested and the psychologists more so. Miss Fellowes was not sure that she did not like the new group even less than the first. The needles were gone; the injections and withdrawals of fluid; the special diets. But now Timmie was made to overcome barriers to reach food and water. He had to lift panels, move bars, reach for cords. And the mild electric shocks made him cry and drove Miss Fellowes to distraction.

  She did not wish to appeal to Hoskins; she did not wish to have to go to him; for each time she thought of him, she thought of his face over the luncheon table that last time. Her eyes moistened and she thought: Stupid, stupid man.

  And then one day Hoskins’ voice sounded unexpectedly, calling into the dollhouse, “Miss Fellowes.”

  She came out coldly, smoothing her nurse’s uniform, then stopped in confusion at finding herself in the presence of a pale woman, slender and of middle height. The woman’s fair hair and complexion gave her an appearance of fragility. Standing behind her and clutching at her skirt was a round-faced, large-eyed child of four.

  Hoskins said, “Dear, this is Miss Fellowes, the nurse in charge of the boy. Miss Fellowes, this is my wife.”

  (Was this his wife? She was not as Miss Fellowes had imagined her to be. But then, why not? A man like Hoskins would choose a weak thing to be his foil. If that was what he wanted—)

  She forced a matter-of-fact greeting. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Hoskins. Is this your—your little boy?”

  (That was a surprise. She had thought of Hoskins as a husband, but not as a father, except, of course— She suddenly caught Hoskins’ grave eyes and flushed.)

  Hoskins said, “Yes, this is my boy, Jerry. Say hello to Miss Fellowes, Jerry.” .

  (Had he stressed the word “this” just a bit? Was he saying this was his son and not—)

  Jerry receded a bit further into the folds of the maternal skirt and muttered his hello. Mrs. Hoskins’ eyes were searching over Miss Fellowes’ shoulders, peering into the room, looking for something.

  Hoskins said, “Well, let’s go in. Come, dear. There’s a trifling discomfort at the threshold, but it passes.”

  Miss Fellowes said, “Do you want Jerry to come in, too?”

  “Of course. He is to be Timmie’s playmate. You said that Timmie needed a playmate. Or have you forgotten?”

  “But—” She looked at him with a colossal, surprised wonder. “Your boy?”

  He said peevishly, “Well, whose boy, then? Isn’t this what you want? Come on in, dear. Come on in.”

  Mrs. Hoskins lifted Jerry into her arms with a distinct effort and, hesitantly, stepped over the threshold. Jerry squirmed as she did so, disliking the sensation.

  Mrs. Hoskins said in a thin voice, “Is the creature here? I don’t see him.”

  Miss Fellowes called, “Timmie. Come out.”

  Timmie peered around the edge of the door, staring up at the little boy who was visiting him. The muscles in Mrs. Hoskins’ arms tensed visibly.

  She said to her husband, “Gerald, are you sure it’s safe?”

  Miss Fellowes said at once, “If you mean is Timmie safe, why, of course he is. He’s a gentle little boy.”

  “But he’s a sa—savage.”

  (The ape-boy stories in the newspapers!) Miss Fellowes said emphatically, “He is not a savage. He is just as quiet and reasonable as you can possibly expect a five-and-a-half-year-old to be. It is very generous of you, Mrs. Hoskins, to agree to allow your boy to play with Timmie but please have no fears about it.”

  Mrs. Hoskins said with mild heat, “I’m not sure that I agree.”

  “We’ve had it out, dear,” said Hoskins. “Let’s not bring up the matter for new argument. Put Jerry down.”

  Mrs. Hoskins did so and the boy backed against her, staring at the pair of eyes which were staring back at him from the next room.

  “Come here, Timmie,” said Miss Fellowes. “Don’t be afraid.”

  Slowly, Timmie stepped into the room. Hoskins bent to disengage Jerry’s fingers from his mother’s skirt. “Step back, dear. Give the children a chance.”

>   The youngsters faced one another. Although the younger, Jerry was nevertheless an inch taller, and in the presence of his straightness and his high-held, well-proportioned head, Timmie’s grotesqueries were suddenly almost as pronounced as they had been in the first days.

  Miss Fellowes’ lips quivered.

  It was the little Neanderthal who spoke first, in childish treble. “What’s your name?” And Timmie thrust his face suddenly forward as though to inspect the other’s features more closely.

  Startled Jerry responded with a vigorous shove that sent Timmie tumbling. Both began crying loudly and Mrs. Hoskins snatched up her child, while Miss Fellowes, flushed with repressed anger, lifted Timmie and comforted him.

  Mrs. Hoskins said, “They just instinctively don’t like one another.”

  “No more instinctively,” said her husband wearily, “than any two children dislike each other. Now put Jerry down and let him get used to the situation. In fact, we had better leave. Miss Fellowes can bring Jerry to my office after a while and I’ll have him taken home.”

  The two children spent the next hour very aware of each other. Jerry cried for his mother, struck out at Miss Fellowes and, finally, allowed himself to be comforted with a lollipop. Timmie sucked at another, and at the end of an hour, Miss Fellowes had them playing with the same set of blocks, though at opposite ends of the room.

  She found herself almost maudlinly grateful to Hoskins when she brought Jerry to him.

  She searched for ways to thank him but his very formality was a rebuff. Perhaps he could not forgive her for making him feel like a cruel father. Perhaps the bringing of his own child was an attempt, after all, to prove himself both a kind father to Timmie and, also, not his father at all. Both at the same time!

  So all she could say was, “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  And all he could say was, “It’s all right. Don’t mention it.”

  It became a settled routine. Twice a week, Jerry was brought in for an hour’s play, later extended to two hours’ play. The children learned each other’s names and ways and played together.

  And yet, after the first rush of gratitude, Miss Fellowes found herself disliking Jerry. He was larger and heavier and in all things dominant, forcing Timmie into a completely secondary role. All that reconciled her to the situation was the fact that, despite difficulties, Timmie looked forward with more and more delight to the periodic appearances of his playfellow.

  It was all he had, she mourned to herself.

  And once, as she watched them, she thought: Hoskins’ two children, one by his wife and one by Stasis.

  While she herself—

  Heavens, she thought, putting her fists to her temples and feeling ashamed: I’m jealous!

  “Miss Fellowes,” said Timmie (carefully, she had never allowed him to call her anything else) “when will I go to school?”

  She looked down at those eager brown eyes turned up to hers and passed her hand softly through his thick, curly hair. It was the most disheveled portion of his appearance, for she cut his hair herself while he sat restlessly under the scissors. She did not ask for professional help, for the very clumsiness of the cut served to mask the retreating fore part of the skull and the bulging hinder part.

  She said, “Where did you hear about school?”

  “Jerry goes to school. Kin-der-gar-ten.” He said it carefully. “There are lots of places he goes. Outside. When can I go outside, Miss Fellowes?”

  A small pain centered in Miss Fellowes’ heart. Of course, she saw, there would be no way of avoiding the inevitability of Timmie’s hearing more and more of the outer world he could never enter.

  She said, with an attempt at gaiety, “Why, whatever would you do in kindergarten, Timmie?’

  “Jerry says they play games, they have picture tapes. He says there are lots of children. He says—he says—” A thought, then a triumphant upholding of both small hands with the fingers splayed apart. “He says this many.”

  Miss Fellowes said, “Would you like picture tapes? I can get you picture tapes. Very nice ones. And music tapes too.”

  So that Timmie was temporarily comforted.

  He pored over the picture tapes in Jerry’s absence and Miss Fellowes read to him out of ordinary books by the hours.

  There was so much to explain in even the simplest story, so much that was outside the perspective of his three rooms. Timmie took to having his dreams more often now that the outside was being introduced to him.

  They were always the same, about the outside. He tried haltingly to describe them to Miss Fellowes. In his dreams, he was outside, an empty outside, but very large, with children and queer indescribable objects half-digested in his thought out of bookish descriptions half-understood, or out of distant Neanderthal memories half-recalled.

  But the children and objects ignored him and though he was in the world, he was never part of it, but was as alone as though he were in his own room—and would wake up crying.

  Miss Fellowes tried to laugh at the dreams, but there were nights in her own apartment when she cried, too.

  One day, as Miss Fellowes read, Timmie put his hand under her chin and lifted it gently so that her eyes left the book and met his.

  He said, “How do you know what to say, Miss Fellowes?”

  She said, “You see these marks? They tell me what to say. These marks make words.”

  He stared at them long and curiously, taking the book out of her hands. “Some of these marks are the same.”

  She laughed with pleasure at this sign of his shrewdness and said, “So they are. Would you like to have me show you how to make the marks?”

  “All right. That would be a nice game.”

  It did not occur to her that he could learn to read. Up to the very moment that he read a book to her, it did not occur to her that he could learn to read.

  Then, weeks later, the enormity of what had been done struck her. Timmie sat in her lap, following word by word the printing in a child’s book, reading to her. He was reading to her!

  She struggled to her feet in amazement and said, “Now Timmie, I’ll be back later. I want to see Dr. Hoskins.”

  Excited nearly to frenzy, it seemed to her she might have an answer to Timmie’s unhappiness. If Timmie could not leave to enter the world, the world must be brought into those three rooms to Timmie—the whole world in books and film and sound. He must be educated to his full capacity. So much the world owed him.

  She found Hoskins in a mood that was oddly analogous to her own; a kind of triumph and glory. His offices were unusually busy, and for a moment, she thought she would not get to see him, as she stood abashed in the anteroom.

  But he saw her, and a smile spread over his broad face. “Miss Fellowes, come here.” He spoke rapidly into the intercom, then shut it off.

  “Have you heard?—No, of course, you couldn’t have. We’ve done it. We’ve actually done it. We have intertemporal detection at close range.”

  “You mean,” she tried to detach her thought from her own good news for a moment, “that you can get a person from historical times into the present?”

  “That’s just what I mean. We have a fix on a fourteenth century individual right now. Imagine. Imagine! If you could only know how glad I’ll be to shift from the eternal concentration on the Mesozoic, replace the paleontologists with the historians—But there’s something you wish to say to me, eh? Well, go ahead; go ahead. You find me in a good mood. Anything you want you can have.”

  Miss Fellowes smiled. “I’m glad. Because I wonder if we might not establish a system of instruction for Timmie?”

  “Instruction? In what?”

  “Well, in everything. A school. So that he might learn.”

  “But can he learn?”

  “Certainly, he is learning. He can read. I’ve taught him so much myself.”

  Hoskins sat there, seeming suddenly depressed. “I don’t know, Miss Fellowes.”

  She said, “You just said that anyt
hing I wanted—”

  “I know and I should not have. You see, Miss Fellowes, I’m sure you must realize that we cannot maintain the Timmie experiment forever.”

  She stared at him with sudden horror, not really understanding what he had said. How did he mean “cannot maintain”? With an agonizing flash of recollection, she recalled Professor Ademewski and his mineral specimen that was taken away after two weeks. She said, “But you’re talking about a boy. Not about a rock—”

  Dr. Hoskins said uneasily, “Even a boy can’t be given undue importance, Miss Fellowes. Now that we expect individuals out of historical time, we will need Stasis space, all we can get.”

  She didn’t grasp it. “But you can’t. Timmie—Timmie—”

  “Now, Miss Fellowes, please don’t upset yourself. Timmie won’t go right away; perhaps not for months. Meanwhile we’ll do what we can.”

  She was still staring at him.

  “Let me get you something, Miss Fellowes.”

  “No,” she whispered. “I don’t need anything.” She arose in a kind of nightmare and left.

  Timmie, she thought, you will not die. You will not die.

  It was all very well to hold tensely to the thought that Timmie must not die, but how was that to be arranged? In the first weeks, Miss Fellowes clung only to the hope that the attempt to bring forward a man from the fourteenth century would fail completely. Hoskins’ theories might be wrong or his practice defective. Then things could go on as before.

  Certainly, that was not the hope of the rest of the world and, irrationally, Miss Fellowes hated the world for it. “Project Middle Ages” reached a climax of white-hot publicity. The press and the public had hungered for something like this. Stasis, Inc. had lacked the necessary sensation for a long time now. A new rock or another ancient fish failed to stir them. But this was it.

  A historical human; an adult speaking a known language; someone who could open a new page of history to the scholar.