The Ugly Little Boy

by Isaac Asimov

  “A small one is all we aimed for, believe me. You can imagine what would happen here if a full-grown stegosaurus, say, suddenly came thundering into Stasis and started lumbering around the laboratory. But of course there isn’t enough electrical energy in six counties to create a Stasis field big enough to handle something that size. And the technology itself isn’t developed enough yet to allow for significant mass transfer, even if we could get the power we’d need to do it.”

  Miss Fellowes stared. She felt a chill. A living dinosaur, yes! How fantastic!

  But so tiny—more like a bird without feathers, it was, or some peculiar kind of lizard—

  “If it isn’t big, why is it a dinosaur?”

  “Size isn’t the determining factor, Miss Fellowes. What causes an animal to be classed as a dinosaur is its bony structure. The pelvic anatomy, primarily. Modern reptiles have limbs that go out sideways, like this. Think of the way a crocodile walks, or a lizard. More of a waddle than a stride, wouldn’t you say? There aren’t any upright crocodiles walking around on their hind legs. But the dinosaurs had bird-like pelvises. As everyone knows, many of them were able to walk upright as modern two-legged creatures do. Think of an ostrich; think of long-legged wading birds; think of the way our own legs are attached. Even the dinosaurs who stayed closer to the ground on all four legs had the sort of pelvis that allowed the legs to descend straight instead of sticking out to the sides the way a lizard’s do. It’s an entirely different evolutionary model, a line one which led down from dinosaurian reptiles through birds to mammals. And the saurian end of it died out. The only reptiles that survived the Great Extinction at the end of the Mesozoic were the ones with the other kind of pelvic arrangement.”

  “I see. And there were small dinosaurs as well as big ones. It just happens that the big ones are the ones that captured our imaginations.”

  “Right. Those are the famous ones that everybody goggles at in the museums. But plenty of species were only a few feet high. This one, for instance.”

  “I can understand now why people lost interest in it so fast. It isn’t scary. It isn’t awesome.”

  “Laymen may have lost interest, Miss Fellowes. But I assure you that this little fellow has been a revelation to scientists. It’s being studied day and night, and some very interesting things have been discovered. For instance, we’ve been able to determine that it’s not entirely coldblooded. Which confirms one of the most controversial theories about dinosaurs ever set forth. Unlike any modern species of reptile, it has a method of maintaining internal temperatures higher than that of its environment. Not a perfect method, not by any means—but the fact that it has one at all backs up the skeletal evidence putting dinosaurs on the direct line of evolution leading toward birds and mammals. The creature that you’re looking at is one of our own most distant ancestors, Miss Fellowes.”

  “If it is, aren’t you messing up evolutionary history by pulling it out of its own era? Suppose this one dinosaur was the key link in the whole evolutionary chain?”

  Hoskins laughed. “I’m afraid evolution doesn’t work as simply as that. No, there’s no risk here of changing evolutionary history. The fact that we’re all still here, after this fellow has been transported a hundred million years across time, should be proof enough of that.”

  “I suppose so.—Is it a male or a female dinosaur?”

  “Male,” said Hoskins. “Unfortunately. Ever since we brought it in, we’ve been trying to get a fix on another of the same species that might be female. But doing that makes looking for a needle in a haystack seem like a cinch.”

  “Why get a female?”

  He looked at her quizzically. “So that we might have a fighting chance to obtain some fertile eggs, and breed a line of baby dinosaurs here in the laboratory.”

  She felt foolish. “Of course.”

  “Come over here,” Hoskins said. “The trilobite section. You know what trilobites are, Miss Fellowes?”

  She didn’t answer. She was watching the little dinosaur pathetically skittering around in its confinement area, bewilderedly running from one wall to the other. It would run right into the wall and bounce off before turning back. The stupid creature didn’t seem to be able to comprehend the reason why it couldn’t just keep going, out into the open, off into the dank swamps and torrid forests of its prehistoric home.

  She thought of Timmie, penned up across the way in his own little set of rooms.

  “I said, Miss Fellowes, do you know what trilobites are?”

  “What? Oh—yes. Yes. Some sort of extinct kind of lobster, isn’t that so?”

  “Well, not exactly. A crustacean and extinct, but not at all like a lobster. Not much like anything now living, as a matter of fact. Once they were the dominant life-form of the Earth, the crown of creation. That was half a billion years ago. There were trilobites wherever you looked, then. Crawling around on the floor of every ocean by the millions. And then they all died out: we can’t yet say why. Leaving no descendants, no genetic heritage whatever. They were here, they were fruitful and multiplied, and then they vanished as though they had never been. Leaving fossils of themselves behind in enormous quantities.”

  Miss Fellowes peered into the trilobite tank. She saw six or seven sluggish gray-green creatures three or four inches long, sitting on a bed of gray ooze. They looked like something you might see at the seashore in a tide-pool. Their narrow, oval, hard-looking bodies were divided the long way into three ridged sections, a raised central one and two smaller side lobes fringed with little spikes. Huge dark eyes were visible at one end, faceted like the eyes of insects. As Miss Fellowes watched, one of the trilobites pushed an array of tiny jointed legs outward from its sides and began to crawl—slowly, very slowly—across the bottom of the tank.

  The crown of creation. The dominant life-form of its time.

  A man in a lab coat appeared, wheeling a tray on which some complex, unfamiliar device was mounted. He greeted Hoskins amiably and gave Miss Fellowes an impersonal grin.

  “This is Tom Dwayne of Washington University,” Hoskins said. “He’s one of our trilobite people. Tom’s a nuclear chemist.—Tom, I want you to meet Edith Fellowes, R.N. She’s the wonderful woman who’s taking care of our new little Neanderthal.”

  The newcomer smiled again, considerably less impersonally this time. “A great honor to meet you, Dr. Fellowes. You’ve got a tremendous job on your hands.”

  “Miss Fellowes will do,” she said, trying not to sound too stuffy about it.—“What does a nuclear chemist have to do with trilobites, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Well, actually I’m not studying the trilobites per se,” Dwayne said. “I’m studying the chemistry of the water that came here with them.”

  “Tom’s taking isotope ratios on the oxygen contained in the water,” said Hoskins.

  “And why is that?”

  Dwayne replied, “What we have here is primeval water, at least half a billion years old, maybe as much as six hundred million. The isotope ratio gives us the prevailing temperature of the ocean at that time—I could explain in detail, if you like—and when we know the ocean temperature, we can work out all sorts of other things about the ancient planetary climate. The world was mostly ocean at the time the trilobites flourished.”

  “So you see, Miss Fellowes, Tom doesn’t really care about the trilobites at all. They’re just ugly little annoyances, crawling around in his precious primeval water: The ones who study the trilobites themselves have a much easier time of it, because all they have to do is dissect the critters, and they don’t need anything but a scalpel and a microscope for that. Whereas poor Tom has to set up a mass spectrograph in here each time he conducts an experiment.”

  “Why’s that? Can’t he—”

  “No, he can’t. He can’t take anything out of its Stasis bubble and there’s no way around that. It’s a matter of maintaining the balance of temporal potential.”

  “The balance of temporal potential,” Miss Fello
wes repeated, as though Hoskins had said something in Latin.

  “An energy-conservation problem. What comes across time is traveling across lines of temporal force. It builds up potential as it moves. We’ve got that neutralized inside Stasis and we need to keep it that way.”

  “Ah,” said Miss Fellowes. Her scientific training had never included much physics. Its concepts were largely lost on her. It was a reaction, perhaps, to the unhappy memories of her marriage. Her former husband had liked to go on and on about the “poetry” inherent in physics, the mystery and magic and beauty of it. Maybe it actually had some. But anything that could be associated with her former husband was something that Miss Fellowes didn’t care to think about very deeply.

  Hoskins said, “Shall we move along and leave Tom here to his trilobites?”

  There were samples of primordial plant life in sealed chambers—odd scaly little plants, eerie and unbeautiful—and chunks of rock formations, looking no different from twenty-first-century rocks so far as Miss Fellowes could see. Those were the vegetable and mineral parts of the collection. Animal, vegetable, mineral, yes, just as Hoskins had said—a comprehensive raid on the natural history of the past had been carried out here. And every specimen had its investigator. The place was like a museum: a museum that had been brought to life and was serving as a superactive center of research.

  “And you have to supervise all of this, Dr. Hoskins?”

  “Only indirectly, Miss Fellowes. I have subordinates, thank heaven. The general administrative work of running the corporation is enough to keep me busy three times over.”

  “But you aren’t a businessman, really,” she said, thinking of that vaunted Ph.D. in physics. “You’re basically a scientist who has gradually drifted across into being a corporate executive, isn’t that so?”

  He nodded, looking wistful. “‘Drifted’ is the right word. I began on the theoretical side. My doctorate dealt with the nature of time, the technique of mesonic intertemporal detection, and so on. When we formed the company, I didn’t have the slightest idea that I’d be anything other than head of theoretical research. But then there were—well, problems. I don’t mean technical ones. I mean the bankers came in and gave us a good talking-to about the way we were going about our business. After that there were personnel changes at the highest levels of the corporation and one thing led to another and next thing I knew they were turning to me and saying, ‘You have to be C.E.O., Jerry, you’re the only one who can steady the place down,’ and I was fool enough to believe them, and then, well—well—” He grinned. “There I am with a fine mahogany desk and all. Shuffling papers, initialing reports, holding meetings. Telling people what to do. With maybe ten minutes left here and there in the day to think about anything like my own actual scientific research.”

  Miss Fellowes felt an unexpectedly powerful burst of sympathy. At last she understood why there was that “Ph.D.” tag on the nameplate on Hoskins’ desk. He wasn’t boasting. He had it there simply to remind himself of who and what he really was.

  How sad, she thought.

  “If you could step aside from the business end of things,” she said, “what sort of research do you think you’d want to do?”

  “Short-range temporal transfer problems. No question of it. I’d want to work on a method of detecting objects that lie closer to us in time than the present limit of 10,000 years. We’ve done some promising preliminary studies, but we haven’t been able to get further than that. A matter of available resources—financial, technical—of priorities, of accepting the limitations of the moment. If we could manage to reach our scoop into historical times, Miss Fellowes—if we could make contact with the living Egypt of the pharaohs, or the people of Babylonia or ancient Rome or Greece or—”

  He broke off in mid-sentence. Miss Fellowes could hear a commotion coming from one of the distant booths, a thin voice raised querulously. Hoskins frowned, muttered a hasty “Excuse me,” and went rushing off.

  Miss Fellowes followed as best she could without actually running. She didn’t feel much like being left here by herself in the midst of all this hubbub of bygone ages.

  An elderly man in street clothes with a thin gray beard and an angry, reddened face was arguing with a much younger uniformed technician who wore the red and gold Stasis Technologies, Ltd. monogram on his lab coat. The irate older man was saying, “I had vital aspects of my investigations to complete. Don’t you understand that?”

  “What’s going on?” Hoskins asked, hastily coming between them.

  The technician said, “Attempted removal of a specimen, Dr. Hoskins.”

  “Removal from Stasis?” Hoskins said, eyebrows rising. “Are you serious?” He turned to the older man.—“I can’t believe this is true, Dr. Adamewski.”

  The older man pointed into the nearest Stasis bubble.

  Miss Fellowes followed his pointing hand. All she saw was a small gray lab table on which a totally undistinguished sample of rock was sitting, along with some vials of what she supposed were testing reagents.

  Adamewski said, “I still have extensive work to do in order to ascertain—”

  The technician cut him off. “Dr. Hoskins, Professor Adamewski knew from the start that his chalcopyrite specimen could only stay here for a two-week period. And the time’s up today.”

  “Two weeks!” Adamewski erupted. “Who can say in advance how long a research task is going to take? Did Roentgen work out the principles of X rays in two weeks? Did Rutherford solve the problem of the atomic nucleus in two weeks? Did—”

  “But two weeks was the limitation imposed for this experiment,” said the technician. “He knew that.”

  “What of it? I wasn’t able to guarantee I’d be able to finish my work in so short a time. I can’t see the future, Dr. Hoskins. Two weeks, three weeks, four—what matters is solving the problem, is it not?”

  “The problem, professor,” Hoskins said, “is that our facilities are limited here. We’ve got only so many Stasis bubbles and there’s an infinite amount of work to be done. So we have to keep specimens rotating. That piece of chalcopyrite has to go back where it came from. There’s a long list of people waiting to use this bubble.”

  “So let them use it,” said Adamewski heatedly. “And I’ll take the specimen out of there and finish working on it at my university. You can have it back whenever I’m done.”

  “You know that isn’t possible.”

  “A piece of chalcopyrite! A miserable three-kilogram chunk of rock with no commercial value! Why not?”

  “We can’t afford the energy expense!” Hoskins said. “You know that. None of this comes as any news to you, and please don’t try to pretend otherwise.”

  The technician said, “The point is, Dr. Hoskins, that he tried to remove the rock against the rules and while he was in there I almost punctured Stasis, not realizing he was still inside the bubble.”

  There was an icy silence.

  After a moment Hoskins turned to the scientist and said in a coldly formal way, “Is that so, professor?”

  Adamewski looked uncomfortable. “I saw no harm in—”

  “No harm? No harm?” Hoskins shook his head. He seemed to be penning up real anger with a considerable effort.

  There was a red-handled pull-lever dangling just within reach outside the Stasis chamber that contained Professor Adamewski’s mineral specimen. A nylon cord ran from the end of it, through the wall, into the chamber. Hoskins reached up unhesitatingly and jerked down on the lever.

  Miss Fellowes, looking into the Stasis bubble, drew in her breath sharply as a quick burst of brilliant light flickered around the chunk of rock, surrounding it for the briefest of moments with a dazzling halo of red and green. Before she even had time to close her eyes against the brightness of the flare the light was gone. And so, too, was the chunk of rock. Its existence had flickered out. The gray lab table was bare.

  Adamewski stood gasping in outrage and frustration. “What have you—”

&
nbsp; Hoskins cut him off brusquely. “You can clear out your cubicle, professor. Your permit to investigate material in Stasis is permanently voided, as of this moment.”

  “Wait. You can’t—”

  “I’m sorry. I can, professor. And I have. You’ve violated one of our most stringent rules.”

  “I will appeal this to the International Association of—”

  “Appeal away,” Hoskins said. “In a case like this, you’ll find I can’t be overruled.”

  He turned away deliberately, leaving the professor still protesting, and swung around toward Miss Fellowes. She had watched the entire episode with mounting discomfort, hoping that her beeper would go off and give her some excuse to get away from this disagreeable scene.

  Hoskins’ face was white with anger.

  “I regret that we’ve had to interrupt this tour with such unpleasantness, Miss Fellowes. But occasionally things like this are necessary. If there’s anything else you’d like to see in here—any further questions—”

  “If it’s all right with you, doctor, I think I’ve seen enough. Perhaps I ought to be getting back to Timmie now.”

  “But you’ve only been out of your chamber for—”

  “Perhaps I should, anyway.”

  Hoskins’ lips moved silently for a moment. He seemed to be framing some sort of appeal. At length he said, “Suppose you check with Ms. Stratford and see how Timmie’s doing. And if everything’s all right with the boy, maybe you can allow yourself a little more free time. I’d like to invite you to have lunch with me, Miss Fellowes.”

  [24]

  They went into the small executive alcove of the company cafeteria. Hoskins greeted people on all sides and introduced Miss Fellowes with complete ease, although she herself felt painfully self-conscious.

  What must they think, seeing us together? she wondered, and tried desperately to look businesslike. She wished now that she hadn’t changed out of her nurse’s uniform. The uniform served as a kind of armor for her. It allowed her to face the world in the guise of a function rather than as a person.