The Ugly Little Boy

by Isaac Asimov

  “You’ve made great progress, Miss Fellowes!”

  “A little warm oatmeal can work wonders.”

  “He seems very attached to you already.”

  “I know how to do the things I’m supposed to do, Dr. Hoskins. Is that so astonishing?”

  He reddened. “I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “No, of course not. I understand. He was a wild little animal when you last saw him yesterday, and now—”

  “Not an animal at all.”

  “No,” Miss Fellowes said. “Not an animal at all.” She hesitated just a moment. Then she said, “I had some doubts about that at first.”

  “How could I forget it? You were quite indignant.”

  “But no longer. I over-reacted. At first glance I suppose I really did think he was an ape-boy, and I wasn’t prepared to be taking on anything like that. But he’s settling down amazingly. He’s no ape, Dr. Hoskins. He’s actually quite intelligent. We’re getting along very well.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Does that mean you’ve decided to keep the job, then?”

  She gave him a steely glance. “That was never in doubt, was it, Dr. Hoskins?”

  “Well—” Hoskins shrugged. “I suppose not.—You know, Miss Fellowes, you aren’t the only one who’s been a little on edge here. I think you can appreciate what a tremendous effort has gone into this project, and how much we’ve had riding on its success. And now that it is a success, an overwhelming success, we can’t help but feel somewhat stunned. Like a man who has gathered up all his strength to go charging through a door that’s barring his way. Suddenly he makes his mighty charge, and the door gives way under the onslaught with hardly any of the resistance he’d expected, and he bursts into the place that he’s been wanting so hard to reach; and now that he’s there, he stops and looks around, a little confused, and says to himself, All right, I’m finally here, and now what?”

  “A good question, Dr. Hoskins. Now what? You’ll be bringing all sorts of experts in to examine the boy, won’t you? Specialists in prehistoric life, and people like that?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ll have someone here soon to give him a thorough medical exam, I assume.”

  “Yes, naturally.—He’s all right, though, wouldn’t you say? Basically?”

  “Basically, yes. He’s a rugged little fellow. But I’m not a doctor and he hasn’t had any sort of internal examination whatever. There’s a difference between seeming healthy and being healthy. He could be carrying a load of parasites around: amoebas, protozoan infestations, all kinds of things. Probably is. Maybe they’re harmless to him, maybe not. Even if they don’t seriously threaten his welfare, they might threaten ours.”

  “We’ve already thought of that. Dr. Jacobs will be coming in at noon, to run a group of preliminary tests. He’s the doctor you’ll be working with as long as the project continues. If Dr. Jacobs doesn’t upset the boy too much, Dr. McIntyre of the Smithsonian will be seeing him after that for the first anthropological examination.—And then the media will be coming here, too, of course.”

  That caught her short. “The media? What media? Who? When?”

  “Why—they’ll want to see the boy as soon as they can, Miss Fellowes. Candide Deveney’s already broken the story. We’ll have every newspaper and television network in the world banging on our doors by the end of the day.”

  Miss Fellowes looked down at the child and put her arm protectively to his shoulder. He quivered, just the tiniest of flinches, but made no move to escape her touch.

  “You’re going to fill this little place with journalists and cameras? On his first full day here?”

  “Well, we hadn’t thought about—”

  “No,” she said, “you hadn’t thought. That much is obvious. Listen, Dr. Hoskins, he’s your little Neanderthal and you can do whatever you want with him. But there’ll be no media people in here until he’s had his medical checkup and come out with a clean bill of health, at the very minimum. And preferably not until he’s had more time to adapt to being here. You do understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”

  “Miss Fellowes, surely you know that publicity is an essential part of—”

  “Yes. Publicity is an essential part of everything, these days. Imagine the publicity you’ll get if this child dies of a panic attack right on camera!”

  “Miss Fellowes!”

  “Or if he catches a cold from one of your precious reporters. I tried to point out to you, when I was asking for a sterile environment, that he’s probably got zero resistance to contemporary infectious microorganisms. Zero. No antibodies, no inherent resistance, nothing to ward off—”

  “Please, Miss Fellowes. Please.”

  “And what if he gives them all some nice little Stone Age plague that we have no immunity to?”

  “All right, Miss Fellowes. You’ve made your point.”

  “I want to be completely sure that I have. Let your media wait, is what I’m saying. He needs all sorts of protective inoculation first. It’s bad enough that he’s been exposed to as many people as he was last night; but I’m not going to let a whole mob of reporters in here, not today and not tomorrow, either. If they like, they can photograph him from upstairs, for the time being, outside the Stasis zone entirely, just as though we had a newborn infant in here, and I want them to be quiet about it, too. We can work out a video schedule later in the day.—Oh, and speaking of upstairs. I’m still not happy about the degree of exposure here. I want my quarters roofed over—a tarpaulin of some sort will do for the moment; I don’t want workmen clattering around here with construction equipment just yet—and I think the rest of the dollhouse could safely be given a ceiling, too.”

  Hoskins smiled. “You mince no words. You’re a very forceful woman, Miss Fellowes.” His tone seemed to have as much admiration as annoyance in it.

  “Forceful?” she said. “I suppose I am. At least where my children are concerned.”

  [18]

  Jacobs was a burly, blunt-faced man of about sixty, with thick white hair cropped close to his skull, military-fashion. He had an efficient, no-nonsense manner, a little on the brusque side, which some might say would be more suitable for an army doctor than for a pediatrician. But Miss Fellowes knew from long experience that children weren’t troubled by that sort of brusqueness, so long as it was tempered by a fundamental kindliness. They expected a doctor to be an authority-figure. They wanted him to be one. They looked elsewhere for gentleness, tenderness, comfort. The doctor was supposed to be godlike, the solver of problems, the dispenser of cures.

  Miss Fellowes wondered what kind of doctors had ministered to the needs of the little boy’s tribe back there in 40,000 B.C. Witch-doctors, no doubt. Terrifying figures with bones through their noses and painted red circles around their eyes, who performed their diagnoses by leaping and cavorting around campfires that burned blue and green and scarlet. How would Dr. Jacobs look with a bone through his nose? she wondered. With a bear-skin around his shoulders instead of that prosaic white coat?

  He offered her a quick, uncondescending handshake. “I’ve heard good things about you, Fellowes.”

  “So I would hope.”

  “You worked under Gallagher at Valley General, didn’t you? Or so Hoskins said. Fine man, Gallagher. Dogmatic son of a bitch, but at least he swore by the right dogmas. How long were you in his department?”

  “Three and a half years.”

  “You like him?”

  Miss Fellowes shrugged. “Not particularly. I heard him say some things once to a young nurse that I thought were out of line. But he and I worked well together. I learned a great deal from him.”

  “A shrewd man, yes.” Jacobs shook his head. “Pity about the way he handled his nurses. In more than one sense of the word.—You didn’t happen to have any sort of run-in with him yourself, did you?”

  “Me? No. No, nothing of the kind!”

  “No, I guess he wouldn’t have tried anything with you,” Jacobs sai
d.

  Miss Fellowes wondered what he had meant by that. Not Gallagher’s type, maybe? She wasn’t anyone’s type, and that was the way she had preferred things to be for many years. She let the remark pass.

  Jacobs seemed to have memorized her entire résumé. He mentioned this hospital and that, this doctor and that one, spoke with easy familiarity of heads of nursing and boards of directors. Plainly he had been around. All she knew of Dr. Jacobs, on the other hand, was that he was something big at the state medical institute and had a considerable private practice on the side. Their paths had never crossed professionally. If Hoskins had seen fit to let him see her résumé, he might have thought of letting her see his. But Miss Fellowes let that point pass, too.

  “And I suppose that now it’s about time that we had a look at this little Neanderthal of yours,” Jacobs said. “Where’s he hiding?”

  She gestured toward the other room. The boy was lurking uneasily in there, now and again peeping out, with a lock of his matted hair showing behind the barrier of the door and, occasionally, the corner of an eye.

  “Shy, is he? That’s not what I heard from the orderlies. They said he’s as wild as a little ape.”

  “Not any more. His initial terror has worn off, and now he simply feels lost and frightened.”

  “As well he should, poor little critter. But we’ve got to get down to this. Call him out here, please. Or will you have to go in there and get him?”

  “Maybe I can call him,” Miss Fellowes said.

  She turned to face the boy. “You can come out, Timmie. This is Dr. Jacobs. He won’t hurt you.”

  Timmie?

  Where had that come from? She had no idea.

  The name had just surged up out of the well of her unconscious that moment. She had never known a Timmie in her life. But the boy had to be called something, didn’t he? And it seemed that she had named him, now. Timothy. Timmie for short. So be it. A real name, a human name. Timmie.

  “Timmie?” she said again, liking the sound of it, enjoying being able to call him by name. She could stop thinking of him as “the child,” “the Neanderthal,” “the ugly little boy.” He was Timmie. He was a person. He had a name.

  And as she approached the other room Timmie slipped back behind the door, out of sight.

  “All right,” Jacobs said, with some impatience. “We can’t spend all day at this. Go in there and bring him out, will you, Fellowes?”

  He slipped a surgical mask over his face—as much for his protection, Miss Fellowes guessed, as for Timmie’s.

  But the mask was a mistake. Timmie peeked out and saw it and let out a shrill piercing howl as though he had seen some demon out of his Stone Age nightmares. As Miss Fellowes reached the door, he flung himself violently against the wall on the far side of the room, like a caged creature fleeing its keeper, and pressed up against it, shivering fearfully.

  “Timmie—Timmie—”

  No use. He wouldn’t let her near him, not with Jacobs anywhere about. The boy had tolerated Hoskins’ presence well enough, but Jacobs seemed to scare the daylights out of him. So much for her theory that children wanted their doctors to be brusque no-nonsense military types. Not this child, at any rate.

  She rang the bell and summoned Mortenson and Elliot.

  “We’re going to need a little help, I think,” Miss Fellowes told them.

  The two husky orderlies looked at each other uncertainly. There was a visible bulge along Elliot’s left arm, under his uniform jacket—a bandage, no doubt, covering the scratch that Timmie had inflicted yesterday.

  “Oh, come on,” Miss Fellowes said. “He’s only a small child, you know.”

  But the boy, in his terror, had reverted completely to his original feral mode. Flanked by Mortenson and Elliott, Miss Fellowes entered his room and attempted to take hold of him, but he went scrambling wildly around the room with truly anthropoid agility, and they were hard put to get a grip on him. Finally Mortenson, with a lunge, caught him by the midsection and spun him up off the ground. Elliott cautiously took hold of him by the ankles and tried to prevent him from kicking.

  Miss Fellowes went over to him. Softly she said, “It’s all right, Timmie—no one will hurt you—”

  She might just as well have said, “Trust me.” The boy struggled furiously, with nearly as much enterprise as he had shown the day before when they were trying to give him a bath.

  Feeling preposterous. Miss Fellowes tried crooning the little tune of the night before at him in an attempt to lull him into cooperating. That was useless, too.

  Dr. Jacobs leaned close. “We’ll have to sedate him, I guess.—God, he’s an ugly little thing!”

  Miss Fellowes felt a sharp stab of fury, almost as though Timmie were her own child. How dare he say anything like that! How dare he!

  Crisply she retorted, “It’s a classic Neanderthal face. He’s very handsome, by Neanderthal standards.” She wondered where she had gotten that from. She knew practically nothing about what a classic Neanderthal face was supposed to be like, and nothing whatever about Neanderthal standards of handsomeness. “—I don’t much like the idea of sedating him. But if there’s no other alternative—”

  “I don’t think there is,” said the doctor. “We aren’t going to get anywhere holding him down by brute force while I try to take my readings.”

  No, Miss Fellowes thought. The boy wasn’t going to have any enthusiasm for having a tongue depressor pushed into his mouth or lights shined into his eyes, no tolerance at all for surrendering a sample of his blood, no willingness to have his temperature taken, even by a remote-control thermocouple relay. Reluctantly she nodded.

  Jacobs produced an ultrasonic tranquilizer ampoule from his kit and started to activate it.

  “You don’t know anything about the appropriate dose,” Miss Fellowes said.

  The doctor looked at her in surprise. “These doses are calibrated for a body weight of up to thirty kilograms. This should be well within tolerance.”

  “Calibrated for a human body weight of up to thirty kilograms, doctor. This is a Neanderthal child. We don’t have any data on their circulatory systems at all.”

  Her own line of reasoning startled her. In some chagrin she realized that she had drawn a distinction between Neanderthals and humans once again. She didn’t seem able to maintain a consistent philosophy about the boy. He is human, she told herself vehemently. Human, human, human. He’s Timmie and he’s human.

  But to Jacobs it was an issue not even worth discussing, apparently.

  “Even if he were a young gorilla or orangutan, Fellowes, I’d regard this as an appropriate dose. Human, Neanderthal, what does his circulatory system have to do with it? It’s body mass that matters.—All right, a half dose this time. Just to take no risks with Hoskins’ precious little creature.”

  Not only Hoskins’, Miss Fellowes found herself thinking, to her own astonishment.

  Jacobs stepped the dosage down and touched the ampoule to Timmie’s forearm. There was a little buzz and the tranquilizer instantly began to do its work.

  “Well, now,” the doctor said. “Let’s get a little of that Paleolithic blood of his, and a little prehistoric urine.—Do you have a stool sample for me, Fellowes?”

  “He hasn’t moved his bowels since he’s been here, Dr. Jacobs. The dislocation of the trip through time—”

  “Well, when he does, suppose you scrape some up off the floor and let me know, will you?”

  “He uses the toilet, doctor,” Miss Fellowes said in a tone of ringing indignation.

  Jacobs looked up at her. Surprise and what could have been anger were evident in his expression; but then he laughed. “You’re very quick to defend him, I see.”

  “Yes. Yes, I am. Is there anything wrong with that?”

  “I suppose there isn’t.—All right, when the boy next uses the toilet, I want that sample if he happens to move his bowels. I take it he doesn’t flush afterward yet, eh, Fellowes?”

  This time bo
th Elliott and Mortenson laughed also. Miss Fellowes didn’t share in the general amusement.

  Timmie seemed asleep—passive, at any rate, quiescent, tolerant. Jacobs had no difficulty opening his mouth to study his dentition. Miss Fellowes, who hadn’t had an opportunity of seeing Timmie’s teeth before, stared over Jacobs’ shoulder, afraid that she was going to behold fierce, savage, ape-like fangs. But no, no: his teeth were nothing like that. They were somewhat large, larger than a modern child’s, and they looked strong, but they were nicely shaped, evenly arranged, a very fine set of teeth indeed. And human, definitely human, no terrifying jutting incisors, no great projecting canine teeth. Miss Fellowes let out her breath slowly in a deep sigh of relief.

  Jacobs closed the boy’s mouth, peered into his ears, rolled back his eyelids. Looked at the palms of his hands, the soles of his feet, tapped his chest, palpated his abdomen, flexed his arms and his legs, dug his fingers lightly into the musculature of his forearms and thighs.

  “A little powerhouse is what he is. As you’ve already had reason to discover. Small for his age and slightly on the thin side but there’s no indication of malnutrition. Once we get that stool sample I’ll have some idea of what sorts of things he’d been eating, but the most probable guess is a high-protein low-starch diet, pretty much what you’d expect among hunters and gatherers living in a time of adverse climate.”

  “Adverse?” Miss Fellowes asked.

  “An ice age,” Jacobs said, a little patronizingly. “That’s what was going on most of the time during the Neanderthal era—a glacial period.”

  How would you know? she thought belligerently. Were you there? Are you an anthropologist?

  But she held her tongue. Dr. Jacobs was doing everything possible to rub her the wrong way; but nevertheless he was her colleague now, and they would have to maintain a civil relationship. For Timmie’s sake, if for no other reason.

  [19]

  Timmie stirred and became restless by the time the medical exam was half over, and a little while later it was obvious that the tranquilizer had all but worn off. Which meant that a normal dose for an ordinary child of his size would have been the correct one, as Jacobs had insisted, and that Miss Fellowes had erred on the side of over-protectiveness. However else he might differ from a modern child, Timmie had reacted to the sedative just about the same way a modern child would have done. He was coming to seem more and more human as she got to know things about him.