The Ugly Little Boy

by Isaac Asimov

  The child made the clicking, gargling sounds again. Looked at Miss Fellowes. Looked at the milk, and at the empty plate.

  “There’s your answer,” she said. “He’s definitely talking!”

  “If that’s so, then he’s human, wouldn’t you say, Miss Fellowes?”

  She let the question pass without responding. The issue was too complex to consider just now. A hungry child was calling to her. She reached for the milk.

  Hoskins caught her by the wrist and pulled her upward so that she was facing him. “Wait a moment, Miss Fellowes. Before we go any further, I have to know whether you’re planning to stay on the job.”

  She shook free of him in annoyance. “Will you starve him if I don’t? He’s asking for more milk, and you’re preventing me from giving it to him.”

  “Go ahead. But I need to know your answer.”

  “I’ll stay with him—for a while.”

  She poured the milk. The boy crouched down and plunged his face into it, lapping and slurping as if he hadn’t had anything to drink or eat in days. He made little crooning noises deep in his throat as he licked the plate.

  He’s nothing but a little beast, Miss Fellowes thought. A little beast!

  She came close to shuddering. She repressed it with a struggle.

  [13]

  Hoskins said, “We’re going to leave you with the boy, Miss Fellowes. He’s been through a considerable ordeal and it’s best to clear everyone out of here and allow you to try to settle him down for some rest.”

  “I agree.”

  He gestured toward the oval metal doorway, much like the hatch of a submarine, that stood open at the entrance to the dollhouse. “This is the only door to Stasis Section One, and it’s going to be elaborately locked and guarded at all times. We’ll seal it when we leave here. Tomorrow I’ll want you to learn the details of operating the lock, which will, of course, be keyed to your fingerprints as they are already keyed to mine. The spaces overhead”—he looked upward toward the open ceilings of the dollhouse—“are also guarded by a network of sensors, and we’ll be warned immediately if anything untoward takes place in here.”

  “Untoward?”

  “An intrusion.”

  “Why should there be—”

  “We have a Neanderthal child from the year 40,000 B.C. in these chambers,” Hoskins said, with barely concealed impatience. “It may sound unlikely to you, but there are all sorts of possibilities for intrusion here, anyone ranging from Hollywood producers to rival scientific groups to one of those self-styled advocates for children’s rights that you and I were discussing at our first meeting.”

  Bruce Mannheim, Miss Fellowes thought. He really is worried about trouble with Mannheim. It wasn’t just a hypothetical question, wanting to know if I had ever had any run-ins with Mannheim in my career.

  “Well, of course,” she said. “The child needs to be protected.” Then something occurred to her. She glanced up toward the topless ceiling, remembering how she had been able to see into the little rooms of the dollhouse from the balcony.—“You mean I’ll be in full view of any observers who might be looking down from up there?” she asked indignantly.

  “No, no,” said Hoskins. He smiled. A benign smile, perhaps a little condescending, she thought. The prudish spinster lady is worried about Peeping Toms. But there was no reason why she should have to dress and undress under the scrutiny of strangers. “Your privacy will be respected completely, Miss Fellowes. I assure you of that. Trust me. Miss Fellowes.”

  There he went. Trust me again. He liked to use that phrase; he probably used it all the time, with everyone he dealt with. It wasn’t a phrase that inspired much trust. The more often he used it, the less she trusted him.

  “If anybody at all can walk onto that balcony and look down into these rooms, I fail to see how—”

  “Access to the balcony is going to be strictly restricted—strictly,” Hoskins said. “The only ones going up there will be technicians who may have to work on the power core, and you’ll be given ample notice if they do. The sensors that I spoke about will be conducting purely electronic surveillance, which only a computer will deal with. We won’t be spying on you.—You’ll stay with him tonight, Miss Fellowes, is that understood? And every night thereafter, until further notice.”

  “Very well.”

  “You’ll be relieved during the day according to whatever schedule you find convenient. We’ll arrange that with you tomorrow. Mortenson, Elliott, and Ms. Stratford will make themselves available on a rotating schedule to fill in for you whenever you’re away from the boy. He’ll have to be guarded by one of you at all times. It’s absolutely essential that he remain within the Stasis area and that you be constantly aware of his whereabouts.”

  Miss Fellowes peered about the dollhouse with a puzzled expression. “But why is all that necessary, Dr. Hoskins? Is the boy so dangerous?”

  “It’s a matter of energy, Miss Fellowes. There are conservation laws involved that I can explain to you if you like, but I think you have more important things to deal with just now. The point to bear in mind is simply that he must never be allowed to leave these rooms. Never. Not for an instant. Not for any reason. Not to save his life. Not even to save your life, Miss Fellowes.—Is that clear?”

  Miss Fellowes raised her chin in something of a theatrical way. “I’m not sure what you mean by a conservation law, but I do understand the orders, Dr. Hoskins. The boy stays in his rooms, if there’s some good and sufficient reason for it, and evidently there is. Even if my own life is at stake, melodramatic as that sounds, I’m prepared to abide by that.—The nursing profession is accustomed to placing its duties ahead of self-preservation.”

  “Good. You can always signal via the intercom system if you need anyone. Good night, Miss Fellowes.”

  And the two men left. Everyone else had already gone out. The hatch swung shut and Miss Fellowes thought she heard the sound of electronic devices clicking into place.

  She was locked in. With a wild child from the year 40,000 B.C.

  She turned to the boy. He was watching her warily and there was still milk in the saucer. Laboriously Miss Fellowes tried to show him in pantomimed gestures how to lift the saucer and place it to his lips. The pantomime had no effect. He simply stared but made no attempt to imitate her. She acted it out instead, as she had before, lifting the saucer to her own face and pretending to lick the milk from it.

  “Now you,” she said. “Try it.”

  Still he stared. He was trembling.

  “It isn’t hard,” she said. “I’ll show you how to do it. Here. Let me have your hands.”

  Gently—very gently—she put her hands to his wrists.

  He growled, a terrifying sound coming out of a child so small, and pulled his arms away from her with startling force. His face blazed with rage and fear. The lightning-bolt birthmark stood out fiercely against his newly cleansed skin.

  Dr. Hoskins had seized him by the wrists only a little while ago. And had pulled his arms together across his body and dangled him in mid-air. No doubt the boy still could remember the sensation of those big male hands roughly grasping his wrists.

  “No,” Miss Fellowes said, in her softest tone. “I’m not trying to hurt you. I just want to show you how to hold your milk saucer.”

  His frightened eyes were on her, watching, watching for any false move. Slowly she reached for his wrists again, but he shook his head and jerked them out of her reach.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll hold the saucer. You just lick from it. But at least you won’t be crouching on the floor like a little animal.”

  She poured a little more milk into the plate, lifted it, held it out to him at his own level. And waited.

  Waited.

  He made the clicking sounds and the guttural gargles that meant hunger. But he didn’t move toward the plate.

  He looked up at her, big-eyed.

  He made a sound, one which she didn’t think that she had heard him make
before.

  What did this one mean? Put the plate down, you stupid old creature, so I can lick some milk! Was that it?

  “Come on, child. Drink it without going down on the floor, the way a decent little human child should.”

  He stared. Clicked again, a little mournfully.

  “Do it like this,” Miss Fellowes said. Practically bending double, she thrust her face forward—it was hard; she didn’t have a jutting muzzle-like mouth like his—and lapped a little milk from her side of the saucer as she held it in front of him. He peered solemnly at her from the other side, just a short distance away.

  How huge his eyes are, she thought.

  “Like this—”

  She lapped a little more of the milk.

  He moved forward. Kept his hands at his sides, so that she had to continue to hold the plate; but he let his tongue flicker out tentatively, then with more enthusiasm, and began to drink, still standing.

  Miss Fellowes started to lower the plate toward the floor.

  He grunted in displeasure as it descended and brought his own hands up to maintain it at his level. She took hers quickly away. Now the boy was holding the saucer all by himself. Lapping eagerly.

  (Well done, child. Magnificent!)

  The plate was empty. Now that he was through drinking, he casually let it drop to the floor, and it smashed into half a dozen pieces. The boy looked up at her in what seemed almost certainly an expression registering dismay, chagrin, maybe even fear. Something like a whimper came from him.

  Miss Fellowes smiled.

  “It’s only a plate, boy. Plates are of no importance. There are plenty more where that one came from. And plenty more milk, too.”

  She shoved the broken pieces aside with her foot—it would be important to get them picked up in a moment, because they were sharp, but let that wait for now—and drew another plate, identical to the first, from the cabinet at the base of the food cart. She held it up to him.

  The whimpering stopped. He smiled at her.

  An unmistakable smile, the first one she had seen from him since his arrival. It was astonishingly broad—how wide his mouth was, truly ear to ear!—and wonderfully brilliant, like sudden sunlight breaking through dark clouds.

  Miss Fellowes returned the smile. Gingerly she reached out to touch him, to stroke his hair, moving her hand very slowly, letting him follow it with his eyes every inch of the way, making sure that he could see that there was no harm in it.

  He trembled. But he remained where he was, looking up at her. For a moment she succeeded in stroking his hair; and then he pulled back, bucking timidly away, she thought, like some frightened little—

  —beast.

  Miss Fellowes’ face flamed at the thought.

  (Stop it. You mustn’t think of him that way. He’s not an animal, no matter how he may look. He’s a boy, a little boy, a frightened little boy, a frightened little human boy.)

  But his hair—how coarse it had felt, in that one moment when he had allowed her to touch it! How tangled, how rough, how thick!

  What strange hair it was. What very, very, very strange hair indeed.

  [14]

  She said, “I’m going to have to show you how to use the bathroom. Do you think you can learn?”

  She spoke quietly, kindly, knowing quite well that he wouldn’t understand her words, but hoping that he would respond to the calmness of the tone.

  The boy launched into a clicking phrase again. More milk, was that was what he wanted? Or was this something new he was saying? Miss Fellowes hoped that they were recording every sound he made. Very likely they were, but she meant to mention it to Hoskins the next day anyway. She wanted to study the child’s way of speech, to learn his language if there were some way she could manage it. Assuming it was a language, and not just some kind of instinctive animal sounds. Miss Fellowes intended to try to teach him English, if she could, but that might not be possible, and in that case she would at least attempt to learn how to communicate with him in his own fashion.

  A strange concept: learning how to speak Neanderthal. But she had done a few things almost as odd in her time, for the sake of making contact with difficult children.

  “May I take your hand?” she said.

  Miss Fellowes held hers out and the boy looked at it as though he had never seen a hand before. She left it outstretched and waited. The boy frowned. After a moment his own hand rose uncertainly and crept forward, quivering a little, toward hers.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Take my hand.”

  The trembling hand approached within an inch of hers and then the boy’s courage failed him. He snatched it back as though fire were coming from her fingertips.

  “Well,” said Miss Fellowes calmly, “we’ll try again later. Would you like to sit down here?”

  She patted the mattress of the bed.

  No response.

  She pantomimed sitting down.

  Nothing. A blank stare.

  She sat down herself—not easy, on a small bed so close to the ground—and patted the space beside her.

  “Here,” she said, giving him her warmest, most reassuring smile. “Sit down next to me, won’t you?”

  Silence. A stare. Then a barrage of clicking sounds again, and some deep grunting noises—new ones, she was sure of it this time. He seemed to have a considerable vocabulary of clicks and grunts and gargles. It had to be a language. A major scientific breakthrough already: Dr. Hoskins had said that no one knew whether the Neanderthals had a language or not, and she had proved right at the outset that they had.

  (No, not proved, Miss Fellowes told herself sternly. Merely hypothesized. But it was a plausible hypothesis.)

  “Sit down? No?”

  Clicks. She listened and tried to imitate them, but they came clumsily off her tongue, with none of his rapid-fire crispness of delivery. He looked at her in—wonder? Amusement? His expressions were so hard to read. But he seemed fascinated by the idea that she was making clicks at him. For all she knew, she was saying something vile and dreadful in his language. Speaking the unspeakable. But it was much more likely that the sounds she was making were just so much incomprehensible gibberish to him. Perhaps he thought she was deranged.

  He clicked and growled, in a low, quiet, almost reflective way.

  She clicked back at him. She mimicked his growls. They were easier to imitate than the clicks. He stared again. His expression was grave, pensive, very much the way a child who has been confronted by a crazy adult might look.

  This is completely ridiculous, Miss Fellowes told herself. I need to stick to English. He’ll never learn anything if I make idiotic mumbo-jumbo noises at him in what I imagine is his own language.

  “Sit,” she said, the way she would have said it to a puppy. “Sit!—No? Well, no, then. Bathroom? Take my hand and I’ll show you how to use the bathroom.—No again, is it? You can’t just go on the floor, you know. This isn’t 40,000 B.C., and even if you’re accustomed to digging a hole in the ground after yourself, boy, you aren’t going to be able to do that here. Especially with a wooden floor. Take my hand and let’s go inside, all right?—No? A little later?”

  Miss Fellowes realized that she was starting to babble.

  The problem was, she began to see, that she was exhausted. It was getting late, now, and she had been under a bizarre strain since early evening. There was something very dreamlike about sitting here in this dollhouse room trying to explain to a little ape-child with bulging brows and great goggling eyes how to drink milk from a saucer, how to go to the bathroom, how to sit down on a little bed.

  No, she thought severely. Not an ape-child.

  Never call him that—not even to yourself!

  “Take my hand?” Miss Fellowes said again.

  He almost did. Almost.

  The hours were crawling slowly along, and there had been scarcely any progress. She wasn’t going to succeed either with the bathroom or with the bed, that was obvious. And now he too was showing signs o
f fatigue. He yawned. His eyes looked glazed; his lids were drooping. Suddenly he folded himself up and lay down on the bare floor and then, with a quick movement, rolled beneath the bed.

  Miss Fellowes, on her knees, stared down underneath at him. His eyes gleamed out at her and he chattered at her in tongue-clicks.

  “All right,” she told him. “If you feel safer there, you sleep there.”

  She waited a little while, until she heard the sound of steady, regular breathing. How tired he must be! Forty thousand years from home, thrust into a baffling alien place full of bright lights and hard floors and strange people who looked nothing at all like anyone he had ever known, and even so he was capable of curling up and falling asleep. Miss Fellowes envied him that wonderful adaptability. Children were so resilient, so capable of accommodating to the most terrible disruptions—

  She turned out the light and closed the door to the boy’s bedroom, and retired to the cot that had been left for her use in the largest room.

  Overhead there was nothing but darkness. She scrutinized it, wondering whether someone might be lurking about on the balcony, observing her. It was impossible to tell. Miss Fellowes knew that she was being absurd, that it was late and there was no one up there. The only eyes that would be watching her were those of a bunch of electronic sensors. But still—to have no privacy at all—

  They were filming everything, very likely. Making a complete visual record of all that took place in the Stasis zone. She should never have taken on this job without insisting that Hoskins let her inspect the sort of place where she was going to have to live.

  Trust me, he had said.

  Right. Certainly.

  Well, she’d make do for tonight. But tomorrow they were going to have to put a roof over her living quarters, at least. And also, she thought, those stupid men will have to place a mirror in this room and a larger chest of drawers and a separate washroom if they expect me to spend my nights in here.