The Ugly Little Boy

by Isaac Asimov

  “I appreciate that fact, Miss Fellowes.”

  “And therefore I ask you to—”

  “And I tell you the answer is no. Some risks have to be shouldered here, and microbial infection is one of them. We’ll be ready with all possible medical assistance if a problem develops. But we’re not going to try to create a miraculous magical 100% safe environment. We’re not.” Then Hoskins’ tone softened.—“Miss Fellowes, just let me say this much. I’ve got a child myself, a little boy, not even old enough for kindergarten yet. Yes, at my age, and he’s the most wonderful thing that ever happened in my life, bar none. I want you to know, Miss Fellowes, that I’m as concerned about the safety of the child that’ll be arriving here next week as I would be for my own son Jerry’s. And as confident that all will go well as though my own son were involved in the experiment.”

  Miss Fellowes wasn’t sure that the logic of his argument was especially sound. But it was clear enough to her that he wasn’t going to be shaken on this point, and that she had no leverage with him short of resigning. The possibility of resignation was something that she would hold in reserve, but it was pointless to threaten it now. It was the only weapon she had. She had to save it for the right moment, and this didn’t seem to be it.

  Hoskins was equally adamant about letting her have an advance look at the area where the child would be housed. “That’s the Stasis zone,” he said, “and we’re running a non-stop countdown in there. Nobody can go in there while that’s going on. Nobody. Not you, not me, not the President of the United States. And we can’t interrupt the countdown for the sake of letting you have a sight-seeing tour.”

  “But if the accommodations are inadequate—”

  “The accommodations are adequate, Miss Fellowes. More than adequate. Trust me.”

  “I’d still prefer—”

  “Yes. Trust me.”

  Despicable words. Yet somehow she did trust him, more or less.

  She still wasn’t sure what kind of scientist Hoskins might be, or how good, despite that vague, boastful Ph.D. on his nameplate. But one thing was certain. He was a tough administrator. He hadn’t come to be the head man of Stasis Technologies, Ltd. by being a pushover.

  [6]

  At precisely five in the afternoon on the fifteenth of the month, Miss Fellowes’ telephone rang. It was Phil Bryce, one of Hoskins’ staffers.

  “The countdown’s in its final three hours, Miss Fellowes, and everything’s right on target. We’ll be sending a car to pick you up at seven o’clock sharp.”

  “I can get over there on my own, thank you.”

  “Dr. Hoskins has instructed us to send a car to pick you up. It’ll be there at seven.”

  Miss Fellowes sighed. She could argue, but what was the use?

  Let Hoskins win the small victories, she decided. Save your ammunition for the big battles that surely lay ahead.

  [7]

  A light rain was falling. The evening sky was gray and dreary, and the Stasis Technologies buildings looked uglier than ever, big barn-like structures without the slightest scrap of elegance or grace.

  Everything seemed makeshift and hasty. There was a harsh, engineery feel about the place, cheerless and inhumane. She had spent her whole working life in institutional surroundings, but these buildings made even the most somber hospital look like the abode of joy and laughter. And the badged employees, going rigidly about their business, the closed-in faces, the hushed tones, the air of almost military urgency—

  What am I doing here? she asked herself. How did I ever get drawn into all of this?

  “This way, please, Miss Fellowes,” Bryce said.

  People began to nod and beckon to her. No announcements of her identity seemed necessary. One after another, men and women seemed to know her and to know her function. Of course, she was wearing a badge herself now, but no one appeared to look at that. They all just knew. This is the nurse for the child, they seemed to be saying. She found herself all but placed on skids as she was moved swiftly inward, down corridors that had a tacky, improvised look, into an area of the research center that she had never entered before.

  They descended clanging metallic stairs, emerged into a windowless tunnel of some sort lit by glaring fluorescent lights, walked for what seemed like forever underground until coming to a steel doorway with the rippling moire patterns of a security shield dancing up and down over its painted black surface.

  “Put your badge to the shield,” Bryce said.

  “Really, is all this necess—”

  “Please, Miss Fellowes. Please.”

  The doorway yielded. More stairs confronted them. Up and up and up, spiraling around the walls of an immense barrel-shaped vault, down a hallway, through another door—did they really need all this?

  At last she found herself stepping out onto a balcony that looked down into a large pit. Across from her, down below, was a bewildering array of instruments set into a curving matrix that looked like a cross between the control panel of a spaceship and the working face of a giant computer—or, perhaps, just a movie set for some fantastic and nonsensical “scientific” epic. Technicians, looking rumpled and wild-eyed, were racing around down there in an absurdly theatrical way, making frantic hand signals to each other. People were moving thick black cables from one outlet to another, studying them and shaking their heads, moving them back to their original positions. Lights were flashing, numbers were ticking downward on huge screens.

  Dr. Hoskins was on the balcony not far away, but he only looked at her distantly and murmured, “Miss Fellowes.” He seemed abstracted, preoccupied, hardly present at all.

  He didn’t even suggest that she take a seat, though there were four or five rows of folding chairs set up near the railing overlooking the frenzied scene below. She found one herself and drew it up to the edge for a better view.

  Suddenly lights came on in the pit, illuminating the area just beneath where she sat, which had been completely dark. She looked down and saw partitions that seemed to make up an unceilinged apartment, a giant dollhouse into the rooms of which it was possible to look from above.

  She could see what seemed to be a microwave cooker and a freezer-space unit in one room and a washroom arrangement off another. There was a small cubicle full of medical equipment of a kind that was very familiar to her—indeed, it appeared to contain all the things she had asked Hoskins’ staffers to provide. Including the incubator.

  And surely the object she made out in another room could only be part of a bed, a small bed.

  Men and women wearing company badges were filing into the room, now, taking the seats alongside her. Miss Fellowes recognized a few of them as Stasis executives to whom she had been introduced on her earlier visits here, though she was unable to remember a single name. Others were completely unknown to her. They all nodded and smiled in her direction as if she had been working here for years.

  Then she saw someone whose name and face were familiar to her: a thin, fine-looking man of fifty-five or thereabouts, with a small, fastidiously clipped gray mustache and keen eyes that seemed to busy themselves with everything.

  Candide Deveney! The science correspondent for International Telenews!

  Miss Fellowes wasn’t much of a screen-watcher. An hour or two a week, sometimes even less; there were weeks when she didn’t even remember to turn the thing on. Books were sufficient entertainment for her, and for long stretches of time her work itself was so fascinating that even books seemed unnecessary. But Candide Deveney was one screen person she did know. There were times, every once in a while, when some event of immense interest came along that she simply had to see, not merely read about—the landing on Mars, for instance, or the public unveiling of the baby dinosaur, or the spectacular nuclear destruction, high above the Eastern Hemisphere, of that tiny but deadly asteroid that had been on a collision course with Earth the year before last. Candide Deveney had been the on-screen face during those events. He was notoriously at the scene of every major sci
entific breakthrough. That he was here tonight impressed Miss Fellowes despite herself. She felt her heart beating just a little faster at the realization that this must indeed be going to be something of high importance if it was worthy of his being present here, and that she was almost close enough to reach out and touch Candide Deveney himself as the great moment approached.

  Then she scowled at her own foolishness. Deveney was only a reporter, after all. Why should she be so awed by him, merely because she had seen him on television?

  What was a more fitting reason for awe, she thought, was that they were going to reach into the remoteness of time and bring a little human being forth into the twenty-first century. And she was going to be a vital part of that enterprise. She—not Candide Deveney. If anything, Candide Deveney ought to feel impressed at being in the same room with Edith Fellowes, not the other way around.

  Hoskins had gone over to greet Deveney, and seemed to be explaining the project to him. Miss Fellowes inclined her head to listen.

  Deveney was saying, “I’ve been thinking about what you people have been doing here ever since my last visit here, the day the dinosaur came.—There’s one thing in particular I’ve been wrestling with, and it’s this matter of selectivity.”

  “Go on,” Hoskins said.

  “You can reach out only so far; that seems sensible. Things get dimmer the farther you go. It takes more energy, and ultimately you run up against absolute limits of energy—I don’t have any problem comprehending that.—But then, apparently you can reach out only so near, also. That’s what I find the puzzling part. And not only me. I mean, if you can go out and grab something from 100 million years ago, you ought to be able to bring something back from last Tuesday with a whole lot less effort. And yet you tell me you can’t reach last Tuesday at all, or anything else that’s at all close to us in time. Why is that?”

  Hoskins said, “I can make it seem less paradoxical, Deveney, if you will allow me to use an analogy.”

  (He calls him “Deveney”! Miss Fellowes thought. Like a college professor casually explaining something to a student!)

  “By all means use an analogy,” Deveney said. “Whatever you think will help.”

  “Well, then: you can’t read a book with ordinary-sized print if it’s held six feet from your eyes, can you? But you can read it quite easily if you hold it, say, one foot away. So far, the closer the better. If you bring the book to within an inch of your eyes, though, you’ve lost it again. The human eye simply can’t focus on anything that close. So distance is a determining factor in more than one way. Too close is just as bad as too far, at least where vision is involved.”

  “Hmm,” said Deveney.

  “Or take another example. Your right shoulder is about thirty inches from the tip of your right forefinger and you can place your right forefinger on your right shoulder without any difficulty whatsoever. Well, now. Your right elbow is only half as far from the tip of your right forefinger as your shoulder is. By all ordinary logic it ought to be a lot easier to touch it with your finger than your shoulder. Go on, then: put your right forefinger on your right elbow. Again, there’s such a thing as being too close.”

  Deveney said, “I can use these analogies of yours in my story, can’t I?”

  “Well, of course. Use whatever you like. You know you’ve got free access. For this one we want the whole world looking over our shoulder. There’s going to be plenty here to see.”

  (Miss Fellowes found herself admiring Hoskins’ calm certainty despite herself. There was strength there.)

  Deveney said, “How far out are you planning to reach tonight?”

  “Forty thousand years.”

  Miss Fellowes drew in her breath sharply.

  Forty thousand years?

  [8]

  She had never considered that possibility. She had been too busy with other things, things like breaking off her professional ties with the hospital and getting settled in here. She became aware now, suddenly, that there was a good deal of fundamental thinking about this project that she had never taken the trouble to do.

  She knew, of course, that they were going to be bringing a child from the past into the modern world. She understood—although she wasn’t certain exactly where she had picked up the information—that the child would be taken from the prehistoric era.

  But “prehistoric” could mean almost anything. Most of Europe could have been considered “prehistoric” only three thousand years ago. There were a few parts of the world still living a sort of prehistoric existence today. Miss Fellowes had assumed, in so far as she had given the matter any real consideration at all, that the child would be drawn from some nomadic pre-agricultural era, possibly going back five or at most ten thousand years.

  But forty thousand?

  She wasn’t prepared for that. Would the child they were going to hand her be recognizable at all as human? Had there even been such a thing as Homo sapiens forty thousand years ago?

  Miss Fellowes found herself wishing she could remember a little of her college anthropology courses of long ago, but right at this moment only the merest shreds of information came to the surface of her mind, and those, Miss Fellowes feared, were hopelessly garbled and distorted. Before true human beings had evolved, there had been the Neanderthal people, yes? Primitive brutish creatures. And the even more primitive Pithecanthropus people had roamed the world before them, and something else with an equally intricate name, and probably some other kinds of pre-men or sub-men, too, shaggy little naked ape-creatures that could more or less be considered to be our distant ancestors. But how far back in time had all these ancestral people lived? Twenty thousand years ago? Fifty? A hundred thousand? She really knew nothing useful about the time-frame of all this.

  Great God in heaven, am I going to be taking care of an ape-child?

  She began to tremble. Here she was, fussing over incubators and sterile chambers, and they were preparing to toss something very much like a chimpanzee into her lap, weren’t they? Weren’t they? Some fierce hairy little wild thing with claws and teeth, something that really belonged in a zoo, if anywhere, not in the care of a specialist in—

  Well, maybe not. Maybe the Neanderthals and the Pithecanthropuses and all those other early forms of human-like life had lived a million years ago and more, and what she’d be getting would be nothing more than a wild little boy. She had coped with wild little boys before.

  Still, it sounded like such an enormous span of time, forty thousand years. The vastness of it dizzied her.

  Forty thousand years?

  Forty thousand years?

  [9]

  There was tension in the air. Now the chaotic ballet in the pit below had ceased, and the technicians at the controls were scarcely moving at all. They communicated with one another by means of signals so subtle that it was almost impossible to detect them—a flick of an eyebrow, the tapping of a ringer on the back of a wrist.

  One man at a microphone spoke into it in a soft monotone, saying things in short phrases that made no sense to Miss Fellowes—numbers, mostly, punctuated by what sounded like phrases in code, cryptic and impenetrable.

  Deveney had taken a seat just next to her. Hoskins was on the other side. Leaning over the balcony railing with an intent stare, the scientific reporter said, “Is there going to be anything for us to see, Dr. Hoskins? Visual effects, I mean.”

  “What? No. Nothing till the job is done. We detect indirectly, something on the principle of radar, except that we use mesons rather than radiation. We’ve been running the meson scans for weeks, tuning and retuning. Mesons reach backward—under the proper conditions. Some are reflected and we have to analyze the reflections, and we feed them back in and use them as guides for the next probe, fining it down until we start approximating the desired level of accuracy.”

  “That sounds like a tough job. How can you be sure you’ve reached the right level?”

  Hoskins smiled, his usual quick one, a cool on-off flash. “We’ve be
en at work on this for fifteen years, now. Closer to twenty-five, if you count the work of our predecessor company, which developed a lot of the basic principles but wasn’t able to break through to real reliability.—Yes, it’s tough, Deveney. Very tough. And scary.”

  The man at the microphone raised his hand.

  “Scary?” Deveney said.

  “We don’t like to fail. I definitely don’t. And failure’s an ever-present default mode in our operation. We’re working in probabilistic areas here. Quantum effects, you understand. The best we can hope for is likeliness, never certainty. That’s not good enough, really. But it’s the best we can hope for.”

  “Still, you seem pretty confident.”

  “Yes,” Hoskins said. “We’ve had the fix on this one particular moment in time for weeks—breaking it, remaking it after factoring in our own temporal movements, checking parallaxes, looking for every imaginable relativistic distortion, constantly seeking assurance that we can handle time flow with sufficient precision. And we think we can do it. I’d almost be willing to say that we know we can.”

  But his forehead was glistening.

  There was a sudden terrible silence in the room, broken only by the sound of uneasy breathing. Edith Fellowes found herself rising from her seat, leaning forward, gripping the balcony railing.

  But there was nothing to see.

  “Now,” said the man at the microphone quietly.

  The silence ascended to a higher level. It was a new kind of silence, total silence, a silence more profound than Miss Fellowes had ever imagined could be achieved in a room full of people. But it lasted no longer than the space of a single breath.

  Then came the sound of a terrified little boy’s scream from the dollhouse rooms below. It was a scream of the most awful intensity, the kind of scream that made you want to cover your ears with your hands.