The Ugly Little Boy

by Isaac Asimov

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

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

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

  Whew, Hoskins thought.

  He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead.

  [3]

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

  A golden aura of maternal warmth seemed to surround her. She looked like any child’s ideal fantasy grandmother. She seemed so simple and easy-going that it was hard to believe that she had the prerequisite background in pediatrics, physiology, and clinical chemistry. But it was all there on her résumé, and one other surprising specialty besides—a degree in anthropological medicine. For all the wonders of twenty-first-century civilization, there still were primitive regions here and there on the globe, and Dorothy Newcombe had worked in six or seven of them, in various parts of the world—Africa, South America, Polynesia, Southeast Asia. No wonder she had Sam Aickman’s seal of approval. A woman who could have served as a model for a statue of the goddess of motherly love, and who was experienced besides in the handling of children in backward societies—

  She seemed exactly right in every way. After the oppressive hyper-glossy perfection of the too-awesome Marianne Levien, Hoskins felt so much at ease in this woman’s presence that he had to fight back a strong impulse to offer her the position right away, without even bothering to interview her. It wouldn’t have been the first time that he had allowed himself the luxury of giving way to a spontaneous feeling.

  But he managed to master it.

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

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

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

  Hoskins felt a chill run through him.

  “Bruce Mannheim? You mean the ‘children in crisis’ advocate?”

  “Is there some other one?”

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

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

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

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

  “There’s nothing about this in your Personnel report.”

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

  “Well, I’m asking you now, Ms. Newcombe. What’s this all about?”

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

  It didn’t seem wise to get drawn into spouting opinions. Not where Bruce Mannheim was concerned. Warily Hoskins said, “I know there are people who think of him that way.”

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

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

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

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

  “Of course.”

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

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” Hoskins said.

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

  “I’m afraid I do,” said Hoskins dolefully. “And so your hospital is spending its energies and resources on legal defense instead of—”

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

  Hoskins shook his head sympathetically. “It does seem incredible.”

  But his heart was sinking. He still had no doubt that this woman was ideally qualified for the job. But how could he hire someone who was already in trouble with the dreaded Bruce Mannheim? There was going to be controversy enough over this project as it was. No doubt Mannheim would be poking his nose into what they were doing before very long in any case, no matter what precautions they took. All the same, to add Dorothy Newcombe to the roster would be asking for the worst sort of trouble. He could just imagine the press conference Mannheim would call. Letting it be known that Stasis Technologies had chosen to hire a woman who was currently defending herself against the accusation of child abuse at another scientific facility—and Mannheim would make accusation sound like indictment—to serve as nurse and guardian of the unfortunate child who was the pathetic victim of this unprecedented new form of kidnapping—

  No. No. He couldn’t possibly take her on.

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

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

  Aickman’s face on the screen registered amazement verging on shock.

  “She is?”

  “So she told me just now. A child-abuse accusation stemming from the work she’s been doing.”

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

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

  “She’s terrific, though, isn’t she? Absolutely the most motherly human being I ever—”

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

  “Looks like you’re going to go for Marianne Levien, then, is that it?”

  “I’m not through interviewing yet,” Hoskins said, “But Levien looks pretty good.”

  “Yes, doesn’t she,” said Aickman, with a grin.

  [4]

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

  The campus-like headquarters of Stasis Technologies, Ltd. was a place of mystery to her. Ordinary-looking gray buildings, bare and plain, rose from pleasant green lawns studded by occasional small trees. It was a research center very much like a thousand others. But within these buildings. Edith Fellowes knew, strange things were going on—things beyond her understanding, things virtually beyond her powers of belief. The idea that she might actually be working in one of those buildings soon filled her with wonder.

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

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

  She could do that.

  She wanted to do that.

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

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

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

  The love for children had been built in from the start—what normal person, she wondered, didn’t have a love for children? Especially a woman?

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

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

  To care for a prehistoric child—

  Yes. Yes.

  “Dr. Hoskins will see you now,” the receptionist said.

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

  The nameplate on the desk said:

  GERALD A. HOSKINS, Ph.D.

  CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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