The Ugly Little Boy

by Isaac Asimov

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

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

  She waited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Hoskins looked relieved.

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

  “Of course. That would be the last thing I’d want also.”

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

  “Love? Not merely care for?”

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

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

  “You say he’ll be difficult and strange and—What was the word?—highly disagreeable. In what way, disagreeable?”

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

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

  “Not this tough, perhaps.”

  “We’ll see, won’t we?”

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

  “The world is at peace now, Dr. Hoskins.”

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

  “How small?”

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

  “An infant, is that it?”

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

  “You don’t know? You’re just going to make a blind grab?”

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

  “I think I know what that love is like.”

  “Your bio data says that you were once married, but that you’ve lived alone for many years.”

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

  “There were no children.”

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

  “I see,” said Hoskins, looking uncomfortable.

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

  “I’m sorry.—And you never married again.”

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

  “Not all of them very nice children.”

  “Not all of them nice, no.”

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

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

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

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

  She gaped at him, flustered.

  “You mean you’re taking me on? Right here and now?”

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

  “Doesn’t this have to go to some committee first?”

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

  “And if you are?”

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

  “You certainly are blunt, Dr. Hoskins.”

  “I certainly am. Except when I’m not. Well, Miss Fellowes? What do you say?”

  “I don’t like to gamble, either,” she said.

  His face darkened. “Is that a refusal?”

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

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

  “Yes.”

  “Then we understand each other perfectly.”

  No, she thought. We don’t understand each other at all. But that’s not important. If there are problems, we’ll work them out somehow. It’s the child that’s important. Everything else is secondary. Everything.

  INTERCHAPTER ONE

  She Who Knows

  IT WAS THE MIDDLE of the day now and a sense of mounting crisis was affecting the whole encampment. The entire Hunting Society had returned from the plains, without having remained there long enough even to catch sight of game, let alone to do any hunting—and now its seven members sat in a morose huddle, fretting over the possibility of war and how it would affect them. The Goddess Women had unpacked the three holy bear-skulls and had set them up on the stone shelves above the shrine of the Goddess, and were crouching naked in front of them, anointed with bear fat and wolf blood and honey, chanting the special prayers that were supposed to bring wisdom in time of great peril. The Mothers had gathered all the small children under their wings as if they expected the Other Ones to attack at any minute, and the half-grown ones lurked at the edge of the circle, fearful and uncertain.

  As for the older men, the wise and distinguished elders of the tribe, they had gone off by themselves to the little hill above the camp for a discussion of strategy. Silver Cloud was up there, and Mammoth Rider, and one-eyed humpbacked Fights Like A Lion, and fat, sluggish Stinking Musk Ox. On their decisions the fate of the tribe would rest.

  When the Other Ones had moved into the tribe’s hunting grounds in the western lands and it became clear that nothing the People did was going to make them leave, the elders had decided that the best thing to do was go east. “The Goddess has chosen to give the western lands to the Other Ones,” Stinking Musk Ox opined. “But the cold lands in the east belong to us. The Goddess means for us to go there and live in peace.” The others agreed. Whereupon the Goddess Women had cast the destiny-stones and had come up with a result that supported the opinion of the men.

  So the People had migrated to this place. But now the Other Ones had turned up here too, apparently.

  What do we do now? She Who Knows wondered.

  We could go south to the warm lands, perhaps. But very likely the warm lands are full of Other Ones by now. Should we go up north where the terrible ice fields are, then? Surely the Other Ones are too tender to want to live in a place like that. But so are we, She Who Knows suspected. So are we.

  She felt a great sadness. They had come a long way to this place. The strenuous march had left her weary, and she knew that Silver Cloud was tired also, and many of the others. It was time to rest now, and gather meat and nuts to store for the winter ahead, and replenish their strength. But it seemed that they would have to wander again, without any chance to rest, without a moment of peace. Why was that? Was there no place in this broad barren land where they would be allowed to pause for a time to catch their breath?

  She Who Knows had no answers, not to that, not to anything, really. Despite the proud name she had given herself, She Who Knows was baffled by the problem of the eternally bothersome Other Ones, just as she was by the challenges and mysteries of her own existence.

  She was the only member of the tribe who had no real place, no real function. Like most girls, she had grown up assuming that she would be a Mother, but she had waited too long to take a mate, preferring instead a free-spirited roving life, even going out to the hunting fields with the men sometimes. When in her twentieth year she finally did agree to take the warrior Dark Wind as her mate, a very late age for such a thing, nothing but dead babies came from her womb. And then she lost Dark Wind as well, to a black fever that carried him off in a single afternoon.

  She still had much of her beauty then, but after Dark Wind died none of the unmated men of the tribe had wanted to have her—no matter how beautiful she might be. They knew that her womb was a place that killed babies, so what value could she have as a mate? And Dark Wind’s early death argued that she was cursed by ill luck, besides. So she would remain forever alone, untouched by men, she who once had had so many lovers. She would never become one of the Mothers.

  Nor could she join the Goddess Women, not now; it would be a mockery of the Goddess and all that she stood for that a sterile woman should serve Her, and in any case you had to begin learning the mysteries of the Goddess Women before the first blood came fr
om your loins. It was absurd to have an aging woman of twenty-five who had borne and lost five babies in five years becoming a Goddess Woman.

  So She Who Knows was neither a Mother nor a Goddess Woman, and that meant she was nothing at all. She did the ordinary things that any woman would do, scraping hides and cooking meals and caring for the sick and looking after children, but she had no mate and she belonged to no Society and that made her almost a stranger among her own people. The one hope for her was that Keeps The Past would die, and then she could become the tribe’s chronicler. Keeps The Past was a woman like herself, not a Mother and not a priestess, and in all the tribe she was She Who Knows’ closest friend. But although Keeps The Past was forty years old, indeed the oldest woman in the tribe, she was still vigorous and sleek. Whereas She Who Knows, eight years younger, was already turning into an old woman. She was starting to think that she was destined to shrivel and fade and die long before Keeps The Past yielded up her record-sticks and went to the Goddess.

  It was a sorrowful sort of life. But She Who Knows took care to hide the sorrow that afflicted her from the others. Let them fear her; let them dislike her. She would not have them pitying her.

  Now she stood by herself, as usual, looking around at the others in their groups. Each one was as helpless against the threat of the Other Ones as she was. But at least they were together, in the comfort of a group.

  “There’s the one we need!” Blazing Eye called out. “She Who Knows ought to come out and fight the Other Ones alongside us!”

  “She Who Knows! She Who Knows!” the Hunting Society men called raucously.

  They were mocking her, of course. Hadn’t they always? Hadn’t each of these men in his turn rejected her, in the days after Dark Wind’s death, when she had hoped to find a new mate?

  But she went over to them all the same, and stood grinning fiercely down at them where they huddled in a circle on the frosty ground.

  “Yes,” she said. “A good idea. I can fight as well as any of you.”