The Ugly Little Boy

by Isaac Asimov

  McIntyre sighed heavily. “The question of Neanderthal extinction. Miss Fellowes, is such a vexed one, so fraught with controversy—”

  “Well, what’s your view? Were they simply exterminated, because they were as slow-witted as you seem to think? Did their special genetic characteristics disappear through intermarriage with the other line? Or was it some combination of—”

  “May I remind you, Miss Fellowes, that I have work to do here today?” McIntyre said. Exasperation was beginning to show in his eyes. “Much as I’d like to discuss Neanderthals with you, the fact remains that we have an actual living Neanderthal right in this room awaiting study, and I have only a limited amount of time in which to—”

  “Then go ahead, Dr. McIntyre,” said Miss Fellowes in resignation. “Examine Timmie as much as you’d like. You and I can talk some other time. Just make sure you don’t upset the boy the way you did before.”

  [27]

  And now the time had arrived for the first press conference—the public unveiling of Timmie. Miss Fellowes had delayed it as long as possible. But Hoskins was insistent. Publicity, he had been saying all along, was essential to the financing of the project. Now that it was undeniably clear that the boy was in good physical shape, that he apparently wasn’t going to come down with any twenty-first-century bacterial infection, that he was capable of withstanding the stress of a meeting with the media, it simply had to happen. Miss Fellowes’ word might be law, but it was clear that there was one word she didn’t have the leeway to utter. This time Hoskins wasn’t going to take “no” for an answer.

  “I want to limit the public viewing to five minutes, then,” she said.

  “They’ve asked for fifteen.”

  “They could ask for a day and a half. Dr. Hoskins. But five minutes is all that I consider to be acceptable.”

  “Ten, Miss Fellowes.”

  She could see the determination in his face.

  “Ten at the absolute limit. Less if the boy shows any sign of distress.”

  “You know he’ll show signs of distress,” said Hoskins. “I can’t simply let a little whimpering be the signal to throw the reporters out.”

  “I’m not talking about a little whimpering, doctor. I’m talking about hysteria, profound psychosomatic reactions, potentially life-threatening responses to a massive invasion of his living space. You remember how wild the boy was the night he arrived here.”

  “He was frightened out of his wits that night.”

  “And you think a bunch of television cameras poked into his face won’t upset him all over again? Bright hot lights? A lot of loud-mouthed strangers yelling things at him?”

  “Miss Fellowes—”

  “How many reporters are you planning to let in here, anyway?”

  Hoskins paused and counted up mentally. “About a dozen, most likely.”

  “Three.”

  “Miss Fellowes!”

  “The Stasis bubble is small. It’s Timmie’s sanctuary. If you let it be invaded by a vast pack of—baboons—”

  “They’ll be science reporters like Candide Deveney.”

  “Fine. Three reporters.”

  “You really are determined to be difficult, aren’t you?”

  “I have a child to care for. That’s what you’re paying me for and what I intend to do. If I’m too difficult to work with, you can always give me notice, you know.”

  The words slipped out unexpectedly. Miss Fellowes felt a sudden stab of alarm. What if Hoskins decided to call her bluff? Sent her away, called in one of the rejected applicants—there must surely have been rejected applicants—to take charge of Timmie?

  But the idea of dismissing her seemed to alarm Hoskins as much as it did her.

  “I don’t want to do that, Miss Fellowes. You know that very well.”

  “Then listen to me. The concept of a press pool isn’t unknown around here, is it? Let your precious media people choose their representatives to come in here and inspect Timmie. Or, rather, to stand outside the Stasis bubble’s door while I show him to them. They can share the information with the others. Tell them that any more than three would endanger the boy’s health and mental stability.”

  “Four, Miss Fellowes?”

  “Three.”

  “They’re going to give me hell if I tell them—”

  “Three.”

  Hoskins stared at her. Then he began to laugh. “All right, Miss Fellowes. You win. Three media people. But they can see him for ten minutes altogether. I’ll let them know that if they have any complaints they should direct them to Timmie’s nurse, not to me.”

  [28]

  Later in the day the gentlemen of the press arrives. Two gentlemen and a lady, more accurately: John Underhill of the Times, Stan Washington of Globe-Net Cable News, Margaret Anne Crawford of Reuters.

  Miss Fellowes held Timmie in her arms just at the perimeter of Stasis and he clung to her wildly while they set their cameras to work and called requests to her through the open door from their places just outside the bubble. She did her best to cope, turning Timmie this way and that so they could see his face and head from various angles.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?” the Reuters woman asked.

  “Boy,” said Miss Fellowes brusquely.

  “He looks almost human,” said Underhill of the Times.

  “He is human.”

  “We were told he was a Neanderthal. If you tell us now that he’s human—”

  “I assure you,” said Hoskins’ voice suddenly, from behind her, “that no deception has been practiced here. That child is authentic Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.”

  “And Homo sapiens neanderthalensis,” Miss Fellowes said in a crisp tone, “is a form of Homo sapiens. This boy is as human as you and I.”

  “With an ape’s face, though,” said Washington of Globe-Net Cable News. “An ape-boy; that’s what we’ve got here. How does he act, nurse? Like an ape?”

  “He acts exactly the way a little boy acts,” snapped Miss Fellowes, moving deeper into her mode of belligerent defensiveness with every moment. Timmie squirmed madly against her shoulder. She could hear him uttering soft little clicks of fear. “He is not an ape-boy in any sense. His facial features are those of the Neanderthal branch of the human race. His behavior is that of a completely normal human child. He’s intelligent and responsive when he isn’t being terrified by a bunch of noisy strangers. His name is—is Timothy—Timmie—and it’s an absolute error to regard him as—”

  “Timothy?” said the man from the Times. “What’s the significance of calling him that?”

  Miss Fellowes colored. “There’s no particular significance. It’s simply his name.”

  “Tied to his sleeve when he got here?” asked Globe-Net Cable News.

  “I gave him the name.”

  “Timmie the ape-boy,” Globe-Net said.

  The three reporters laughed. Miss Fellowes felt her anger rising to the point where she feared she was going to have trouble holding it in check.

  “Put it down, can’t you?” the woman from Reuters called. “Let’s see how it walks.”

  “The child’s too frightened for that,” Miss Fellowes replied, wondering if they expected Timmie to walk about the room with his knuckles dragging against the floor. “Much too frightened. Can’t you see? Isn’t that obvious?”

  Indeed, Timmie’s breath had been coming in ever-deeper sighs as he gradually gathered momentum for an outburst of wailing. And now it began—piercing agonized screams mixed with a cascade of growls and clicks. They went on and on. She could feel him quivering against her. The laughter, the hot lights, the barrage of questions—the boy was completely terrified.

  “Miss Fellowes—Miss Fellowes—”

  “No more questions!” she shot back. “This press conference is over.”

  She spun around, holding Timmie tightly, and headed back into the inner room. On the way she strode past Hoskins, whose face was tight with consternation but who gave her a quick, tense nod a
nd a small smile of approval.

  It took her a couple of minutes to calm the boy down. Gradually the tension left his small quivering body; gradually the fear ebbed from his face.

  A press conference! Miss Fellowes thought bitterly. For a four-year-old. The poor suffering child! What will they do to him next?

  After a time she went out of the room again, flushed with indignation, closing Timmie’s door behind her. The three reporters were still there, huddling in the space just outside the bubble. She stepped through the Stasis boundary and confronted them out there.

  “Haven’t you had enough?” she demanded. “It’s going to take me all afternoon to repair the damage to the boy’s peace of mind that you’ve done here today. Why don’t you go away?”

  “We have just a few more questions, Miss Fellowes. If you don’t mind—”

  She looked toward Hoskins in appeal. He shrugged and gave her a weak smile as though to counsel patience.

  “If we could know a little about your own background, Miss Fellowes—” said the woman from Reuters.

  Hoskins said quickly, “We can provide you with a copy of Miss Fellowes’ professional credentials, if you wish, Ms. Crawford.”

  “Yes. Please do.”

  “Is she a time-travel scientist?”

  “Miss Fellowes is a highly experienced nurse,” said Hoskins. “She was brought to Stasis Technologies, Ltd., specifically for the purpose of caring for Timmie.”

  “And what do you expect to do with—Timmie,” asked the man from the Times, “now that you have him?”

  “Well,” Hoskins said, “from my point of view the chief purpose of the Neanderthal project was simply to find out whether we could aim our scoop at the relatively short-range target of the Paleolithic era with sufficient accuracy to bring back a living organism. Our previous successes, as you know, have all involved a target zone in the millions of years, rather than a mere forty thousand. That has now been accomplished, and we are continuing to work on ever narrower refinements of our process with the goal of even shorter-range targeting.—But of course we also now have a live Neanderthal child in our midst, a creature which is at the edge of being human or indeed must actually be considered to be human. The anthropologists and the physiologists are naturally very much interested in him and he’ll be the subject of intensive study.”

  “How long will you keep him?”

  “Until such a time as we need the space more than we need him. Quite a while, perhaps.”

  The man from Globe-Net Cable said, “Can you bring him out into the open so we can set up a sub-etheric transmission and give our viewers a real show?”

  Miss Fellowes cleared her throat loudly.

  But Hoskins was a step ahead of her. “I’m sorry, but the child can’t be removed from Stasis.”

  “And what is Stasis again, actually?” asked Ms. Crawford of Reuters.

  “Ah.” Hoskins permitted himself one of his short smiles. “That would take a great deal of explanation—more, I think, than your readers would care about at this point. But I can give you a brief summary.—In Stasis, time as we know it doesn’t exist. Those rooms are inside an invisible bubble that is not exactly part of our universe. A self-contained inviolable environment, one might say. That’s why the child could be plucked out of time the way it was.”

  “Wait a minute, now,” Underhill of the Times objected. “Self-contained? Inviolable? The nurse goes into the room and out of it.”

  “And so could any of you,” said Hoskins matter-of-factly. “You would be moving parallel to the lines of temporal force and no great energy gain or loss would be involved. The child, however, was taken from the far past. It moved across the time lines and gained temporal potential. To move it into the universe—our universe, and into our own time—would absorb enough energy to burn out every line in the place and probably to knock out power in the entire city. When he arrived, all sorts of trash came with him—dirt and twigs and pebbles and things—and we’ve got every crumb of it all stored out back of this area. When we get a chance we’ll ship it back where it came from. But we don’t dare let it out of the Stasis zone.”

  The media people were busily jotting down notes as Hoskins spoke to them. Miss Fellowes suspected that they didn’t understand very much and that they were sure that their audience wouldn’t either. But it sounded scientific and that was what counted.

  The Globe-Net man said, “Would you be available for an all-circuit interview tonight, Dr. Hoskins?”

  “I think we can manage that,” said Hoskins at once.

  “But not the boy,” said Miss Fellowes.

  “No,” said Hoskins. “Not the boy. But I’ll be happy to answer any further questions you might have. And now, please, if we can clear the area—”

  Miss Fellowes watched them go with no regret.

  She closed the door and heard the electronic locks kicking in and stood there for a moment, reflecting on all that had just been said.

  Once again, this business of the build-up of temporal potential, of power surges, of the fear of removing anything from Stasis that had come forward in time, had come up. She remembered how agitated Dr. Hoskins had been when Professor Adamewski was caught trying to sneak a rock sample out of his research area, and the explanations he had given her then. Much of that had quickly become hazy to her; but, reminded of it now, Miss Fellowes saw one thing with terrible clarity, a conclusion to which she had given no serious thought when she had brushed against it earlier.

  Timmie was doomed never to see anything of the world into which he had—without his comprehension or consent—been thrust. The bubble would be his entire universe so long as he remained in modern time.

  He was a prisoner and always would be. Not by the arbitrary fiat of Dr. Hoskins, but by the inexorable laws of the process by which he had been snatched out of his own time. It wasn’t that Hoskins would not ever let him out of the Stasis bubble. Hoskins could not let him out.

  Words came back to her from her conversation with Hoskins on the night of Timmie’s arrival.

  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.

  Miss Fellowes hadn’t really paid much attention then to the perfunctory explanation Hoskins had offered. A matter of energy, he had said. There are conservation laws involved. She had had other things to think about then, much more urgent things. But it was all as clear to her now as it needed to be. The few little rooms of this dollhouse were forever to be the boundaries of Timmie’s world.

  Poor child. Poor child.

  She became suddenly aware that he was crying and she hastened into the bedroom to console him.

  [29]

  Hoskins was getting ready to call the meeting of the board of directors to order when his telephone rang. He stared at it in irritation. What now?

  It went on ringing.

  “Excuse me, will you?” he said, looking around the room. He switched it to audio-only and said, “Hoskins.”

  “Dr. Hoskins, this is Bruce Mannheim. Of the Children’s Advocacy Council, as I think you know.”

  Hoskins choked back a cough.

  “Yes, Mr. Mannheim. What can I do for you?”

  “I saw your telecast last night, of course. The little Neanderthal boy. Fascinating, fascinating, an absolutely miraculous scientific achievement!”

  “Why, thank you. And—”

  “But of course, the situation raises some moral and ethical problems. As I think you know. To have taken a child of an alien culture from his own nurturing family situation, and to bring him into our own era—” Mannheim paused. “I think we need to talk about this. Dr. Hoskins.”

  “Perhaps we do. But right at this moment—”

  “Oh, not at this moment,” Mannheim said airily. “I didn’t intend that at all. I simply want to propose that we set up a time for a more extended discussion of the issues which—”<
br />
  “Yes,” Hoskins said, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. “Of course. Of course, Mr. Mannheim. If you’ll leave your number with my secretary, she’ll get back to you just as soon as possible, and we can organize an appointment.”

  “Very good, Dr. Hoskins. Thank you very much.”

  Hoskins put the telephone down. He stared bleakly around the room.

  “Bruce Mannheim,” he said dolefully. “The famous children’s advocate. Wants to talk to me about the boy.—My God, my God! It was inevitable, wasn’t it? And now here it all comes.”

  [30]

  In the weeks that followed, Miss Fellowes felt herself grow to be an integral part of Stasis Technologies, Ltd. She was given a small office of her own with her name on the door, an office quite close to the dollhouse (as she never stopped calling Timmie’s Stasis bubble). Her original contract was torn up and Hoskins offered her a new one providing for a substantial raise. She and Hoskins might be destined to be adversaries now and again but she had clearly won his respect. The dollhouse was covered with the ceiling she had requested at the outset; its furnishings were elaborated and improved; a second washroom was added, and better storage facilities for Miss Fellowes’ belongings.

  Hoskins told her that an apartment of her own could be made available on the company grounds, so she could get away from having to be on duty twenty-four hours a day. But she refused. “I want to stay close to Timmie while he’s sleeping,” she explained. “He wakes up crying almost every night. He seems to have very vivid dreams—terrifying ones, I’d guess. I can comfort him. I don’t think anyone else would be able to.”

  Miss Fellowes did leave the premises occasionally, more because she felt that she should than because she wanted to. She would go into town to carry out little chores—making a bank deposit, perhaps some shopping for clothing or toys for Timmie, even seeing a movie once. But she was uneasy about Timmie all the time, eager to get back. Timmie was all that mattered to her. She had never really noticed, in the years when she had worked at the hospital, how totally her life was centered around her work, how sparse were her connections to the world outside. Now that she actually lived at the place where she worked, it was exceedingly clear. She desired little contact with the outside, not even to see her few friends, most of them nurses like herself. It was sufficient to speak with them by telephone; she felt little impulse to visit them.