The Ugly Little Boy

by Isaac Asimov

  There was nothing fancy about the cafeteria fare. Salads, sandwiches, fruit plates, rolls—that was about it. Just as well: she had never been much for elaborate dining, especially in the middle of the day. And her years of hospital life had left her not only accustomed to cafeteria food but actually with a preference for it. She picked out a few simple things to put on her tray: a salad of lettuce and strawberries and orange slices, a couple of pieces of rye bread, a small flask of buttermilk.

  When they were seated, Miss Fellowes said, “Do you have that kind of trouble often, Dr. Hoskins? The sort you just had with the professor, I mean.”

  “That was a new one,” he said. “Of course, I’m always having to argue people out of removing specimens when their experimental time is up. But this is the first time one actually has tried to do it.”

  “Which would have created some terrible problem with—ah—the balance of temporal potential?”

  “Exactly,” said Hoskins, looking pleased at her use of the phrase. “Of course, we’ve tried to take such possibilities into account. Accidents will happen and so we’ve got special power sources designed to compensate for the drain of accidental removals from Stasis. But that doesn’t mean we want to see a year’s supply of energy gone in half a second. We couldn’t afford any such thing, not without having to cut back on our operations for months to come in order to make up the costs.—And on top of everything else, there’s the angle that the professor would have been in the room at the moment Stasis was being punctured.”

  “What would have happened to him if he had been?”

  “Well, we’ve experimented with inanimate objects—and with mice, for that matter—and whatever we’ve had in the bubble at the time of puncture has disappeared.”

  “Gone back in time, you mean?”

  “Presumably. Carried along, so to speak, by the pull of the object that’s simultaneously snapping back into its natural time. That’s the theory, anyway, and we don’t have any reason to doubt it: an object returning to its place in the space-time matrix generates such powerful forces in its immediate vicinity that it takes with it anything that’s nearby. The mass limitations seem to apply only in the forward direction. If there had been an elephant in the bubble with the rock sample, it would have been swept back in time when the rock went back. I don’t even want to think about the conservation-law violations involved in that.”

  “The lab table didn’t go,” Miss Fellowes pointed out.

  Hoskins grinned. “No, it didn’t. Or the floor, or the windows. The force has some limitations. It can’t take the whole building with it, obviously. And it doesn’t seem to be strong enough to sweep objects backward in time that are fixed in place. It just scoops up the loose things nearby. And so we anchor anything within Stasis that’s in proximity to the transit object that we don’t want to move, which is a fairly complicated procedure.”

  “But the professor wouldn’t have been anchored.”

  “No,” Hoskins said. “The idiot would have gone right along with the rock, straight back to the place where it came from in the Pliocene.”

  “How dreadful it would have been for him.”

  “I suppose it would. Not that I’d weep a lot, I assure you. If he was fool enough to break the rules, and as a result he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and something nasty happened to him, it would have served him right. But ultimately we’d have been the ones to suffer. Can you imagine the lawsuit we’d be hit with?”

  “But if he died as a result of his own negligence—”

  “Don’t be naïve, Miss Fellowes. For decades now all sorts of damned idiots in this country have been doing negligent things and the lawyers for their estates have been nailing the responsibility to other people’s hides. The drunk who falls in front of the subway train—the burglar who drops through a skylight and cracks his skull—the schoolboy who climbs on the back of the bus and falls off—don’t you think they’ve all been able to come away with huge payments in damages? Adamewski’s heirs would say that we were the negligent ones, because we didn’t check the bubble before we punctured Stasis to make sure that it was empty. And the courts would agree, regardless of the fact that the man had no business creeping inside the bubble to try to steal the specimen.—Even if we won the case, Miss Fellowes, can you imagine the effect it would have on the public if the story ever came out? Gentle old scientist killed in Stasis accident! The terrible dangers of the time travel process! Unknown risks to the public! Who knows, perhaps Stasis can be used to generate some kind of death-ray field! What kind of deadly experiments are actually going on behind those gates? Shut them down! Shut them down!—Do you see? Overnight we’d be turned into some sort of monsters and funds would be choked off like that,” Hoskins said, snapping his fingers. He scowled, looked down into his plate, played moodily with his food.

  Miss Fellowes said, “Couldn’t you get him back? The way you got the rock in the first place?”

  “No, because once an object is returned, the original fix will be lost unless we take steps ahead of time to retain it—and we wouldn’t have done that in this case. As a matter of fact, we never take such steps in any case. There’s no reason for it. Finding the professor again would mean relocating a specific fix across five million years or thereabouts and that would be like dropping a line into the oceanic abyss for the purpose of dredging up one particular fish.—My God, when I think of the precautions we take to prevent accidents, it makes me furious. We have every individual Stasis unit set up with its own puncturing device—we have to, since each unit has its own separate fix and needs to be independently collapsible. The point is, though, none of the puncturing devices is ever activated until the last minute. And then we deliberately make activation impossible except by—you saw me do it, didn’t you?—by the pull of a lever whose handle is carefully placed outside Stasis. The pull is gross mechanical motion that requires a strong effort, not something that’s likely to be done accidentally.”

  “So you’d simply have to leave Professor Adamewski back there in—what did you say?—the Pliocene?”

  “There’d be no alternative.”

  “And the Pliocene was five million years ago?”

  “It began about ten million years ago, as a matter of fact. And lasted for something like eight million years. But that particular rock came from five million years back.”

  “Would the professor have been able to survive there very long, do you think?”

  Hoskins turned his hands upward in a gesture of uncertainty. “Well, the climate probably wouldn’t be as rough as it would get later on in the glacial period your Timmie comes from, and the atmosphere he’d find himself in would be more or less identical to the stuff we breathe today—minus a lot of the garbage that we’ve pumped into it in the past couple of hundred years, of course. So if Adamewski knew anything about hunting and finding edible plants, which I would say is highly doubtful, he’d have been able to cope for a while. Anywhere between two weeks and two months, is my guess.”

  “Well, what if he met some Pliocene woman during that time, and she took a liking to him and taught him how to gather food?” Then an even wilder idea occurred to Miss Fellowes.—“And he might even mate with her back there and they would have children, a whole new genetic line, a modern man’s genes combining with those of a prehistoric woman. Wouldn’t that change all of history to come? That would be the biggest risk of having the professor go back in time, wouldn’t it?”

  Hoskins was trying to smother an attack of giggles.

  Miss Fellowes felt her face turning a hot red. “Have I said something very stupid, doctor?”

  It was another moment before he was able to reply. “Stupid? Well, that’s too harsh a word.—Naïve, is what I’d prefer to say. Miss Fellowes, there weren’t any women conveniently waiting back there in the Pliocene for our Dr. Adamewski to set up housekeeping with. Not anybody that he’d regard as an eligible mate, anyway.”

  “I see.”

 
“I forget most of the details of what I once knew about hominid ancestry, but I can tell you quite confidently that Adamewski wouldn’t have found anything that looked like Homo sapiens back there. The best he could hope for would be some primitive form of australopithecine, maybe four feet tall and covered with hair from head to toe. The human race as we understand it simply hadn’t evolved at such an early date. And I doubt that even a passionate man like Dr. Adamewski”—Hoskins smothered another burst of giggles—“would find himself so enamored of your average Pliocene hominid female that he’d want to have sexual relations with her. Of course, if he ran into the Pliocene equivalent of Helen of Troy—the ape that launched a thousand ships, so to speak—”

  “I think I get the point,” Miss Fellowes said primly, regretting now that she had led the discussion in this direction in the first place. “But I asked you before, when you showed me the dinosaur, why it was that moving something in and out of time doesn’t change history. I understand now that the professor wouldn’t have been able to start a family in the Pliocene, but if you sent someone back in time to an era when there were actual human beings—say, twenty thousand years ago—”

  Hoskins looked thoughtful. “Well, then, there’d be some minor disruption of the time-line, I suppose. But I don’t think there’d be anything big.”

  “So you simply can’t change history using Stasis?”

  “Theoretically, yes, you can, I suppose. Actually, except in really unusual cases, no. We move objects out of Stasis all the time. Air molecules. Bacteria. Dust. About ten per cent of our energy consumption goes to make up micro-losses of that sort. But even moving large objects in time sets up changes that damp out. Consider Adamewski’s chunk of chalcopyrite from the Pliocene. During the two weeks it was up here in our time, let’s say, some insect that might have taken shelter under it couldn’t find it, and was killed. That could initiate a whole series of changes along the time-line, I imagine. But the mathematics of Stasis indicates that it would be a converging series. The amount of change tends to diminish with time and eventually things return to the track they would have followed all along.”

  “You mean, reality heals itself?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Yank a human being out of the past, or send one back, and you make a larger wound. If the individual is an ordinary one, that wound would still heal itself—that’s what the calculations show. Naturally there are a great many people who write to us every day and want us to bring Abraham Lincoln into the present, or Mohammed, or Alexander the Great. Well, we don’t have the technical ability to do that just yet, not that we’d be likely to if we could. But even if we could cast our net such a short distance into the past, and were able to locate a specific human being such as the three I named, the change in reality involved in moving one of the great molders of history would be too huge to be healed. There are ways of calculating when a change is likely to be too great, and we make sure that we don’t come anywhere near that limit.”

  Miss Fellowes said, “Then Timmie—”

  “No, he doesn’t present any problems of that sort. One small boy who belonged to a human subspecies that was destined to die out in another five or ten thousand years is hardly going to be a history-changer because we’ve brought him forward to our era. Reality is safe.” Hoskins gave her a quick, sharp glance. “You don’t need to worry about it.”

  “I’m not. I’m just trying to understand how things work around here.”

  “Which I applaud.”

  Miss Fellowes took a long deep sip of her buttermilk. “If there wasn’t any historical risk in bringing one Neanderthal child into our time, then it would be possible to bring another one eventually, wouldn’t it?”

  “Of course. But one is all we’ll need, I imagine. If Timmie helps us learn everything that we want to—”

  “I don’t mean to bring another one here for purposes of research. I mean as a playmate for Timmie.”

  “What?”

  It was a concept that had burst into her mind as suddenly and unexpectedly as the name “Timmie” itself had—an impulse, a spontaneous thing. Miss Fellowes was astonished at herself for having brought it up.

  But she pursued it, now that it was here.

  “He’s a normal, healthy child in every way, so far as I can see. A child of his time, of course. But in his own way I think he’s outstanding.”

  “I certainly think so too, Miss Fellowes.”

  “His development from here on, though, may not continue normally.”

  “Why not?” Hoskins asked.

  “Any child needs stimulation and this one lives a life of solitary confinement. I intend to do what I can, but I can’t replace an entire cultural matrix. What I’m saying, Dr. Hoskins, is that he needs another boy to play with.”

  Hoskins nodded slowly. “Unfortunately, there’s only one of him, isn’t there? Poor child.”

  Miss Fellowes watched him shrewdly, hoping that she had picked the right moment for this.

  “If you could bring a second Neanderthal forward to share his quarters with him—”

  “Yes. That would be ideal, Miss Fellowes.—But of course it can’t be done.”

  “It can’t?” said Miss Fellowes, with sudden dismay.

  “Not with the best will in the world, which I like to think is what we have. We couldn’t possibly expect to find another Neanderthal close to his age without incredible luck—it was a very sparsely populated era, Miss Fellowes; we can’t just dip casually into the Neanderthal equivalent of a big city and snatch a child—and even if we could, it wouldn’t be fair to multiply risks by having another human being in Stasis.”

  Miss Fellowes put down her spoon. Heady new ideas were flooding into her mind. She said energetically, “In that case, Dr. Hoskins, let me take a different tack. If it’s impossible to bring another Neanderthal child into the present, so be it. I’m not even sure I could cope with a second one, anyway. But what if—a little later, once Timmie is better adapted to modern life—what if we were to bring another child in from the outside to play with him?”

  Hoskins stared at her in concern. “A human child?”

  “Another child,” said Miss Fellowes, with an angry glare. “Timmie is human.”

  “Of course. You know what I meant.—But I couldn’t dream of such a thing.”

  “Why not? Why couldn’t you? I don’t see anything wrong with the idea. You pulled that child out of time and made him an eternal prisoner. Don’t you owe him something? Dr. Hoskins, if there is any man who, in this present-day world, can be considered that child’s father—in every sense but the biological—it’s you. Why can’t you do this little thing for him?”

  Hoskins said, “His father?” He rose, somewhat unsteadily, to his feet. “Miss Fellowes, I think I’ll take you back now, if you don’t mind.”

  They returned to the dollhouse that was Stasis Section One in a bleak silence that neither broke.

  [25]

  As he had promised, McIntyre sent over a stack of reference works that dealt with Neanderthals. Miss Fellowes plunged into them as if she were back at nursing school and a critical exam was coming up in a couple of days.

  She learned that the first Neanderthal fossils had been discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century by workmen digging in a limestone quarry near Düsseldorf, Germany, at a place called the Neander Valley—Neanderthal, in German. While cleaning away the mud that covered a limestone deposit in a grotto sixty feet above the valley floor, they came across a human skull embedded in the grotto floor, and other bones not far away.

  The workmen gave the skull and a few of the other bones to a local high school teacher, who took them to Dr. Hermann Schaafhausen of Bonn, a well-known anatomist. Schaafhausen was startled by their strangeness. The skull had many human features, but it was curiously primitive in appearance, long and narrow, with a sloping forehead and an enormous bony ridge bulging above the brows. The thighbones that accompanied the skull were so thick and heavy that they scarcely l
ooked human at all.

  But Schaafhausen did think the Neanderthal bones were human relics—extremely ancient ones. In a paper he read at a scientific meeting early in 1857, he termed the unusual fossils “the most ancient memorial of the early inhabitants of Europe.”

  Miss Fellowes looked up at Timmie, who was playing with some toy on the far side of the room.

  “Listen to that,” she said. “‘The most ancient memorial of the early inhabitants of Europe.’ That’s one of your relatives he’s talking about, Timmie.”

  Timmie didn’t seem impressed. He uttered a few indifferent clicks and went back to his game.

  Miss Fellowes read on. And quickly the book confirmed what she already vaguely knew: that the Neanderthal people, while certainly ancient inhabitants of Europe, were far from being the most ancient ones.

  The discovery of the original Neanderthal fossils had been followed, later in the nineteenth century, by similar discoveries in many other parts of Europe—more fossilized bones of prehistoric human-like creatures with sloping foreheads, huge beetling brows, and—another typical characteristic—receding chins. Scientists debated the meaning of these fossils, and, as Darwin’s theories of evolution came to gain wide acceptance, general agreement developed that the Neanderthal-type specimens were the remains of a brutish-looking prehistoric kind of human being, ancestral to modern humanity, perhaps midway on the evolutionary scale between apes and humans.

  “‘Brutish-looking.’” Miss Fellowes sniffed. “All in the eye of the beholder, eh, Timmie?”

  But then had come the discovery of other types of fossil humans—in Java, in China, elsewhere in Europe—that seemed even more primitive in form than the Neanderthals. And in the twentieth century, when reliable methods of dating ancient sites were developed, it became clear that the Neanderthal people must have lived relatively recently on the time-scale of human evolution. The Javan and Chinese forms of primitive human being were at least half a million years old, perhaps even more, whereas the Neanderthals had not appeared on the scene until something like 150,000 years ago. They had occupied much of Europe and the Near East, apparently, for over a hundred thousand years, flourishing until about 35,000 years ago. Then they had disappeared—replaced at all locations by the modern form of the human race, which evidently had already come into existence at the time the first Neanderthals emerged. It appeared that humans of the modern type had lived alongside the Neanderthals, peacefully or otherwise, for thousands of years before undergoing a sudden population explosion and completely displacing the other human form.