by Isaac Asimov
But Jacobs had accomplished all that he could by then anyway, and he packed up and left, saying that he’d return in a day or so to follow up on anything that looked unusual in the preliminary analysis.
“Do you want us to stay?” Mortenson asked.
“No need. Leave me with the boy.”
Timmie grew calm as soon as they were gone. Evidently he had already adapted to Miss Fellowes’ company; it was others who still made him nervous. But time would take care of that, Miss Fellowes thought.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it, Timmie? A little poking, a little prodding—but we have to find out a lot of things about you, don’t you see?”
He gazed solemnly at her, saying nothing.
“You do see, don’t you, Timmie?”
He made a little growling sound, two syllables. To her astounded ears, it sounded like Timmie.
Could it be? Did he know his own name already?
“Say it again! Timmie. Timmie.”
He uttered the two muffled syllables again. This time she wasn’t so sure that he was saying Timmie at all. That could have been her own over-eager imagination. But the possibility was worth following up.
She pointed at him. “Timmie—that’s you. Timmie. Timmie. Timmie.”
He was staring in silence again.
“And I am—” She pointed to herself, momentarily stymied. Miss Fellowes seemed like too much of a mouthful. But Edith didn’t sound right. Nurse? No, not right, either. Miss Fellowes it would have to be. “I—Miss Fellowes. You—Timmie.” She pointed. “I—Miss Fellowes. You—Timmie.” She went through the routine three or four more times. He didn’t respond at all.—“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” she asked him, laughing at her own foolishness. “Making all these incomprehensible noises at you, pointing, chanting. And I think all that’s on your mind just now is your lunch, right? Am I right, Timmie? Lunch? Food? Hungry?”
He uttered the two growled syllables again, and a few clicks for good measure.
“Hungry, yes. Time for some high-protein low-starch food. The Ice Age special, right, Timmie? Well, let’s see what we have here, now—”
[20]
Dr. McIntyre of the Smithsonian’s Department of Anthropology arrived in early afternoon. Hoskins took the precaution of calling in on the intercom to ask Miss Fellowes if she thought the boy would be able to handle another visitor so soon after the last one. She looked across the room. Timmie had eaten ravenously—an entire flask of some synthetic vitamin drink that Dr. Jacobs had recommended, plus another bowl of oatmeal and a small piece of toast, the first solid food she had risked letting him have. Now he was sitting on the edge of his bed, looking relaxed and contented, kicking his heels rhythmically back against the underside of the mattress, seeming for all the world like an ordinary little boy amusing himself after lunch.
“What do you say, Timmie? You think you can stand another examination?”
She didn’t seriously expect a reply from him, and the clicking sounds that he made didn’t seem to constitute one. The boy wasn’t looking in her direction and went on kicking his heels. Just talking to himself, no doubt. But he definitely appeared to be in a good mood.
“I think we can risk it,” she said to Hoskins.
“Good.—What was that I heard you call him? ‘Timmie?’ What does that mean?”
“It’s his name.”
“He told you his name?” Hoskins said, sounding thunderstruck.
“Of course not. ‘Timmie’ is simply what I call him.”
There was a short uncomfortable pause.
“Ah,” said Hoskins finally. “You call him ‘Timmie.’”
“I have to call him something, Dr. Hoskins.”
“Ah. Yes. Yes. ‘Timmie.’”
“‘Timmie,’” Miss Fellowes said firmly.
“‘Timmie.’ Yes. Very well.—I’ll send Dr. McIntyre in now, if that’s all right, Miss Fellowes. To see Timmie.”
Dr. McIntyre turned out to be slender and dapper and very much younger than Miss Fellowes had been expecting—no more than thirty or thirty-five, she guessed. He was a small man, delicately built, with fine gleaming golden hair and eyebrows so pale and soft that they were virtually invisible, who moved in a precise, fastidious, elaborately mannered way, as if following some mysterious inner choreography. Miss Fellowes was taken aback by his elegance and daintiness: that wasn’t at all how she had expected a paleoanthropologist to look. Even Timmie seemed mystified by his appearance, so very different from that of any of the other men he had encountered since his arrival. Eyes wide with wonder, he stared at McIntyre as though he were some glittering godlike creature from another star.
As for McIntyre, he appeared so overwhelmed by the sight of Timmie that he was barely able to speak. For a long moment he stood frozen just within the door, staring at the boy just as intently as Timmie was staring at him; then he took a few steps to his left, halted, stared again; and then he moved back past the door to the other side of the room, stopped there, stared some more.
A trifle acidly Miss Fellowes said, “Dr. McIntyre, this is Timmie. Timmie—Dr. McIntyre. Dr. McIntyre has come here to study you. And I suppose you can study him also, if you want to.”
McIntyre’s pallid cheeks reddened. “I don’t believe it,” he said in a light voice husky with emotion. “I absolutely can’t bring myself to believe it. The child is a pure Neanderthal! Alive, right before my eyes, an actual Neanderthal!—Forgive me, Miss Fellowes. You have to understand—this is something completely staggering for me, so utterly phenomenal, so totally astounding—”
He was virtually in tears. It was an embarrassing display, all this effusiveness. Miss Fellowes found it a little irksome. But then, abruptly, her annoyance dissolved and empathy took its place. She imagined how a historian would feel if he were to walk into a room and find himself offered a chance to hold a conversation with Abraham Lincoln or Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great: or how a Biblical scholar would react if confronted with the authentic stone tablets of the Law that Moses had carried down from the summit of Mount Sinai. Of course he’d be overwhelmed. Of course. To have spent years studying something that was known only from the sketchiest of ancient relics, trying to understand it, painstakingly recreating the lost reality of it in your mind, and then unexpectedly to encounter the thing itself, the actual genuine item—
But McIntyre made a swift recovery. In that deft graceful manner of his he moved quickly across the room and knelt just in front of Timmie, his face just a short distance from the boy’s. Timmie showed no sign of fear. It was the first time he had reacted so calmly to anyone new. The boy was smiling and humming tunelessly and rocking lightly from side to side as though enjoying a visit from a favorite uncle. That bright glow of wonder still was gleaming in his eyes. He seemed altogether fascinated by the paleoanthropologist.
“How beautiful he is, Miss Fellowes!” McIntyre said, after a long moment of silence.
“Beautiful? I haven’t heard many people say that about him so far.”
“But he is, he is! What a perfect little Neanderthal face! The supraorbital ridges—they’ve only just begun to develop, yet already they’re unmistakable. The platycephalic skull. The elongated occipital region.—May I touch his face, Miss Fellowes? I’ll be gentle. I don’t want to frighten him, but I’d like to check a few points of the bony structure—”
“It looks as though he’d like to touch yours,” Miss Fellowes said.
Indeed, Timmie’s hand was outstretched toward McIntyre’s forehead. The man from the Smithsonian leaned a little closer and Timmie’s fingers began to explore McIntyre’s brilliant golden hair. The boy stroked it as though he had never seen anything so wondrous in his life. Then, suddenly, he twined a few strands of it around his middle finger and tugged. It was a good hard tug.
McIntyre yelped and backed away, his face reddening.
“I think he wants some of it,” Miss Fellowes said.
“Not that way.—Here, let me have a scissors.
” McIntyre, grinning now, snipped a bit of hair from his forehead and passed the shining strands to Timmie, who beamed and gurgled with pleasure.—“Tell me, Miss Fellowes, has anyone else who’s been in here had blond hair?”
She thought a moment. Hoskins—Deveney—Elliott—Mortenson—Stratford—Dr. Jacobs—all of them had brown hair or black or gray. Her own was brown shading into gray.
“No. Not that I recall. You must be the first.”
“The first ever, I wonder? We have no idea, of course, what color Neanderthal hair might have been. In the popular reconstructions it’s almost always shown as dark, I suppose because Neanderthals are commonly thought of as brutal apish creatures, and most of the modern great apes have dark hair. But dark hair is more common among warm-weather peoples than it is in northern climates, and the Neanderthals certainly were well adapted to extreme cold. So they might have been as blond as your average Russian or Swede or Finn, for all we know.”
“And yet his reaction to your hair, Dr. McIntyre—”
“Yes. No doubt about it, the sight of it does something special for him.—Well, maybe the tribe he came from was entirely dark-haired, or perhaps the entire population in his part of the world. Certainly there’s nothing very Nordic about this dusky skin of his. But we can’t draw much that’s conclusive from a sample consisting of just one child. At least we have that one child, though! And how wonderful that is, Miss Fellowes! I can’t believe—I absolutely can’t believe—” For an instant she feared that McIntyre was going to allow himself to be overcome by awe all over again. But he seemed to be keeping himself under control. With great delicacy he pressed the tips of his fingers to Timmie’s cheeks, his sloping forehead, his little receding chin. As he worked he muttered things under his breath, technical comments, apparently, words plainly meant for himself alone.
Timmie endured the examination with great patience.
Then, after a time, the boy launched into an extended monolog of clicks and growls, the first time he had spoken since the paleoanthropologist had entered the room.
McIntyre looked up at Miss Fellowes, his face crimsoning with excitement.
“Did you hear those sounds? Has he made any sounds like that before?”
“Of course he has. He talks all the time.”
“Talks?”
“What do you think he’s doing, if not talking? He’s saying something to us,”
“You mean you assume that he’s saying something to us.”
“No,” Miss Fellowes said, beginning to grow annoyed. “He’s speaking, Dr. McIntyre. In the Neanderthal language. There are definite patterns in the things he says. I’ve been trying to make them out, even to imitate them, but so far no luck.”
“What kind of patterns, Miss Fellowes?”
“Patterns of clicks and growls. I’m starting to recognize them. There’s one set of sounds to tell me that he’s hungry. Another to show impatience or restlessness. One that indicates fear.—I know these are only my own interpretations, and not very scientific. But I’ve been in here with this boy around the clock since the moment of his arrival, and I’ve had some experience in dealing with speech-impaired children, Dr. McIntyre. I listen to them very carefully.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do.” McIntyre gave her a skeptical glance. “This is important, Miss Fellowes. Has anyone been taping these clicks and growls of his?”
“I hope so. I don’t know.” (She realized that she had been going to ask Dr. Hoskins about that. But she had forgotten all about it.)
Timmie said something again, this time with a different intonation, more melodic, almost plaintive.
“You see, Dr. McIntyre? That was nothing like what he said before.—I think he wants to play with your hair again.”
“You’re only guessing about that, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am. I don’t speak Neanderthal very fluently yet. But look—look, he’s reaching out for you the way he did just before.”
McIntyre didn’t seem to care for having his hair yanked again. He smiled and extended a finger to Timmie instead, but the boy had no interest in that. He said so, with an extended series of clicks punctuated by three unfamiliar high-pitched sounds that were midway between a growl and a whine.
“I think you’re right, Miss Fellowes!” said McIntyre, his own voice rising. He looked flustered. “It does sound like formal speech! Definite formal speech.—How old do you think this child is?”
“Somewhere between three and four. Closer to four, is my guess. There’s no reason to be so surprised that he can speak so well. Four-year-olds are quite articulate, Dr. McIntyre. If you have any children yourself—”
“I do, as a matter of fact. She’s almost three and she has quite a lot to say. But this is a Neanderthal child.”
“Why should that matter? Wouldn’t you expect a Neanderthal child of his age to know how to speak?”
“At this point we have no real reason, Miss Fellowes, to assume that any Neanderthals of any age were capable of speech as we understand the concept. That’s why the sounds this child is making are of such immense importance to our knowledge of prehistoric man. If they represent speech, actual organized patterns of sound with distinct grammatical structure—”
“But of course that’s what they represent!” Miss Fellowes burst out. “Speech is the one thing that distinguishes human beings from animals, isn’t it? And if you think that you can get me to believe for one moment that this little boy isn’t a human being, you—”
“Certainly the Neanderthals were human, Miss Fellowes. I’d be the last person to dispute that. But that doesn’t mean they had a spoken language.”
“What? How could they have been human and not be able to speak?”
McIntyre drew a deep breath, the kind of exaggerated gesture of carefully hoarded patience that Miss Fellowes recognized all too well. She had spent her whole working life around people who assumed that she knew less than they did, because she was “only” a nurse. Most of the time that wasn’t so, at least in the hospital. But this wasn’t the hospital; and when it came to Neanderthals, she knew virtually nothing at all, and this fair-haired young man was an expert. She compelled herself to maintain an expression of studious interest.
“Miss Fellowes,” McIntyre began, in an unmistakable here-comes-the-lecture tone, “in order for a creature to be able to speak, it needs not only a certain degree of intelligence but also the physical capacity to produce complex sounds. Dogs are quite intelligent, and have considerable vocabularies—but there’s a difference between knowing what ‘sit’ and ‘fetch’ mean and being able to say ‘sit’ and ‘fetch’ yourself, and no dog since time began has ever been able to manage anything better than ‘woof And surely you know that chimpanzees and gorillas can be taught to communicate quite well, through signs and gestures—but they can’t shape words any more than dogs can. They simply don’t have the anatomical equipment for it.”
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Human speech is a very complicated thing,” said McIntyre. He tapped his throat. “The key to it is a tiny U-shaped bone called the hyoid, at the base of the tongue. It controls eleven small muscles that move the tongue and the lower jaw and also are capable of lifting and depressing the larynx to bring forth the vowels and consonants that make up speech. The hyoid bone isn’t present in apes. Therefore all they can do is grunt and hiss.”
“What about parrots and myna birds? They can speak actual words. Are you telling me that the hyoid bone evolved in them, and not in chimpanzees?”
“Birds like parrots and mynas simply mimic the sounds humans make, using entirely different anatomical structures. But what they do can’t be regarded as speech. There isn’t any verbal understanding there. They don’t have any idea of what they’re saying. It’s just a playback of the sounds they hear.”
“All right. And Neanderthals—don’t they have hyoid bones? If they’re considered human beings, they must.”
“We haven’t been sure that they do,�
�� McIntyre said. “You need to bear in mind, first, that the total number of Neanderthal skeletons ever discovered, since the first one came to light in 1856, is not quite two hundred, and a lot of those are fragmentary or otherwise badly damaged. And, second, that the hyoid bone is very small and isn’t connected to any other bones of the body, only to the muscles of the larynx. When a body decays, the hyoid falls away and can easily be separated from the rest of the skeleton. Of all the Neanderthal fossils we’ve examined, Miss Fellowes, a total of one—one—still had a hyoid bone in place.”
“But if one of them had it, all of them must have!”
McIntyre nodded. “Very likely so. But we’ve never seen a Neanderthal larynx. Soft tissues don’t survive, of course. And so we don’t know what function the hyoid served in the Neanderthal. Hyoid or not, we’ve had no way of being certain that the Neanderthals actually were capable of speech. All we can say is that the anatomy of the vocal apparatus was probably the same in Neanderthals as it is in modern humans. Probably. But whether it was developed sufficiently to allow them to articulate understandable words—or whether their brains were advanced enough to handle the concept of speech—”
Timmie was clicking and growling again.
“Listen to him,” Miss Fellowes said triumphantly. “There’s your answer! He’s got a fine language and he speaks it perfectly well. And before he’s been here much longer, he’ll be speaking English, too, Dr. McIntyre. I’m certain of that. And then you won’t need to speculate any longer about whether the Neanderthals were capable of speech.”
[21]
McIntyre seemed to want to solve all the Neanderthal riddles at once. He made clicking sounds at Timmie in the hope of eliciting clicks in return; he produced colored plastic blocks from his briefcase, some sort of intelligence test, no doubt, and tried to get Timmie to arrange them in sequences of size and color; he offered the boy crayons and paper and stood back waiting for him to draw something, which Timmie seemed to have no interest in doing; he had Miss Fellowes lead Timmie around the room by the hand, and photographed him as he moved. There were other tests he wanted to carry out on Timmie, too; but Timmie had his own thoughts about that. Just as McIntyre began to set up some arrangement of spools and spindles, which looked like a toy but was actually a device to measure the boy’s coordination, Timmie sat down in the middle of the floor and began to cry. Loudly.
