The Ugly Little Boy

by Isaac Asimov

  The Other One made the same sound again.

  “Stupid as well as ugly,” said She Who Knows, shaking her head. “The work of hyenas, is what you are! Made out of rhinoceros dung.”

  The men were baffled by her. No one moved.

  She walked past them, to the shrine itself. The waters of the three rivers came pouring in from all sides, splashing high. The People had built the shrine right at the meeting place of the rivers, against an outcropping of rock that rose above the water. Goddess Woman had gone crawling out amidst the icy spray to place the rocks in the proper pattern and to pile the sheets of the special shining rock between them. Approaching now, She Who Knows saw the Goddess-lines that the priestesses had scratched in the stone: five this way, three that, three the other way. But something had been done to them. Someone not of the People had drawn a circle around each group of the Goddess-lines, digging deep into the rock, and had added other figures above them, strange disagreeable-looking symbols, painted ones that curled and twisted around like something you might see in a bad dream. They had painted some animal pictures there, too: a mammoth with a big humped head, a wolf, and a creature She Who Knows could not recognize. That had to be the work of the Other Ones, She Who Knows thought. The People used paint to color themselves, when the need arose; but they never drew painted symbols on rocks. Never. And to paint pictures of animals was simply foolish. It could anger the spirits of the animals you were painting, and you would never have success at hunting such animals again.

  “What have you done, you filthy beasts? This is a shrine of the Goddess that you’ve defiled. A shrine of the Goddess.” And she said again, louder, since they showed no sign of having understood: “A shrine of the Goddess.”

  Blank looks. Shrugs.

  She Who Knows pointed to the earth, and to the sky: the universal signs of the Goddess. She touched her own breasts, her womb, her loins; she was made in the image of the Goddess, and surely they would understand the gesture. Surely.

  But they just went on staring.

  “You don’t have any intelligence at all, do you?” she cried. “Stupid! Stupid! You’re a bunch of stupid animals!”

  She clambered up onto the rocks, slipping and sliding on the wet surface, nearly falling at one point into the rushing river. That would be the end of her, falling in the river; but she caught a jutting fang of the rock and steadied herself. When she came close to the shrine she reached out and tapped her finger against the painting of the mammoth.

  “Wrong!” she shouted. “Evil! Sacrilege!”

  She wet her finger and rubbed it against the painted image. It smeared and became blurry.

  The Other Ones looked perturbed, now. They were turning to each other, muttering, shuffling their feet back and forth in place where they stood.

  “Your paintings don’t belong here!” She Who Knows cried. “This is our shrine! We built it for Her! And we came here to worship Her and ask Her guidance.” Diligently she scrubbed at the painted image until it was a messy ruin. She reached for the others then, but she wasn’t able to reach them: her arms were too short. Only the spider-like arms of Other Ones could reach that far up the rock.

  But she was satisfied that she had made her point. She scrambled down from the rocks and walked back to the place where the two groups of warriors still faced each other.

  “You understand?” she asked the Other Ones. “This is our shrine! Ours!” She went toward them, right up to them, fearlessly. They stirred uneasily, but none lifted his spear. They were afraid of her, she knew. A holy woman, a woman with the Goddess within her: they didn’t dare offer any resistance.

  She glared up into their faces. They towered above her, tall as trees, tall as mountains. She pointed toward the west.

  “Go back there, to your own country,” she said. “Leave us alone. Let us make our offering in peace, you ugly bad-smelling animals! You blockheads! You stupid beasts!”

  She caught hold of the Other One closest to her and pushed him in the direction she had been pointing. He drew back from her touch, taking a few steps away. She made a shooing gesture at him.

  “Keep going! All of you, get moving!”

  She Who Knows moved among them like a whirlwind, shouting, pushing. They edged nervously away from her as though she were carrying a plague. She followed after, waving her arms, yelling at them, single-handedly driving them out of the immediate vicinity of the shrine.

  Then she halted and watched them go. They drew off perhaps a hundred and fifty paces, to a place where one of the two smaller rivers emerged around a bend and shot forth between a double wall of rocks. There they halted; and now, for the first time, She Who Knows saw that there was an encampment of Other Ones back there, a cluster of women and children and old people, hidden away in a bushy gully.

  All right, She Who Knows thought. They have been driven away from the shrine; that was as much as she could hope to accomplish. But it was no small thing, and she had done it all by herself—though the fire of the Goddess had been burning within her all the while, or she never would have succeeded.

  She went back to the men of the War Society.

  “Without even a spear,” she said to them triumphantly.

  Young Antelope shook his head. “What a crazy woman you are!” But his eyes were shining with admiration.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Dreaming

  [36]

  LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, long after Bruce Mannheim and Marianne Levien had left, Hoskins returned to the dollhouse. He looked haggard and grim.

  “Is Timmie sleeping?” he asked.

  Miss Fellowes nodded. “Finally. He needed plenty of calming down.” She put down the book she had been reading and regarded Hoskins without warmth. It had been a tense, disturbing afternoon, and she would just as soon have been left alone now.

  Hoskins said, “I’m sorry things got so testy.”

  “There was a lot of shouting, yes. More than the boy really needed. Don’t you think that discussion could have taken place someplace else?”

  “I’m sorry,” Hoskins said again. “I flew off the handle, I guess.—That man is going to drive me crazy.”

  “Actually, he didn’t seem as awful as I had expected. I think he’s genuinely got Timmie’s welfare at heart.”

  “No doubt he does. But to come butting in here uninvited, telling us what to do—”

  “The boy does need a playmate.”

  Hoskins gave her a despondent look, as though he thought the debate was going to get started all over again. But he managed to master himself in time.

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “So he does. I won’t argue with you about that. But where are we going to get one? The problems are enormous.”

  “You weren’t serious about bringing your own son in here if all else failed, then?”

  Hoskins seemed startled. Perhaps she might be pushing him too far. But she hadn’t asked him to come back here a second time today.

  “Serious?—Yes, yes, of course I was serious. If we can’t find anybody else. Do you think I’m afraid my boy would come to some harm at Timmie’s hands? But my wife would have some objections, I suspect. She’d see risks. A lot of people on the outside seem to think Timmie’s some kind of wild ape-boy. A savage creature that lived in caves and ate raw meat.”

  “What if we had an interview with him go out on the subetheric?” Miss Fellowes suggested. She was surprised to hear herself proposing more media incursions on Timmie’s privacy; but if it would help overcome popular prejudices about the boy, it would be worth the strain on him. “Now that he speaks English—if people knew that he does—”

  “I don’t think that would be likely to improve things, Miss Fellowes.”

  “Why not?”

  “His English really isn’t very good, you know.”

  She was indignant at once. “What do you mean? He’s got an amazing vocabulary, considering the point that he started from. And learning more words every day.”

  Hoskins’ eyes seem
ed very weary. “You’re the only one who can understand him. To the rest of us the things he says might just as well be Neanderthal words. They’re practically unintelligible.”

  “You aren’t listening carefully to him, then.”

  “No,” Hoskins said without much vigor. “Perhaps not.”

  He shrugged and looked away and seemed to sink into some sort of reverie. Miss Fellowes picked up her book again and opened it to the page she had been on, without looking down at it, hoping that he would take the hint. But Hoskins sat where he was.

  “—If only that miserable woman hadn’t become involved in this thing!” he burst out suddenly, after a time.

  “Marianne Levien?”

  “That robot, yes.”

  “Surely she isn’t!”

  “No, not really,” Hoskins said, with a tired little smile. “She just seems like one to me. Here we have a boy out of the past in the next room, and a woman who seems like something out of the future comes around to make trouble for me. I wish I’d never met her in the first place. Mannheim by himself isn’t so bad—just one of those fuzzy-brained socially conscious guys, full of all sorts of lofty ideals, who goes running around all over the place determined to make the world a better place according to his own lights; that sort of thing. Your basic high-minded do-gooder. But Levien—that chrome-plated bitch—excuse my language, Miss Fellowes—”

  “But that’s exactly what she is.”

  “Yes. Yes, she is, isn’t she?”

  Miss Fellowes nodded. “I have trouble believing that a woman like that was once actually being considered for the job of looking after Timmie.”

  “One of the first to apply. Eager for the job. Hungry for it, as a matter of fact.”

  “She seems so—unsuitable.”

  “Her credentials were terrific. It was her personality that turned me off. She was very surprised not to be hired.—Well, somehow she’s gotten herself entangled with Mannheim’s crowd now, more’s the pity. Probably deliberately, by way of paying me back for not giving her the job. Her way of getting revenge. Hell hath no fury, and so forth. She’ll stir him up and stir him up and stir him up—she’ll fill his head with her silly jargon, as though he doesn’t have enough goofy psychobabble of his own stirring around in there—she’ll keep him coming after me, fire him up to persecute me steadily—”

  His voice was starting to rise.

  Firmly Miss Fellowes said, “I don’t think you can call it persecution when someone suggests that Timmie is a very lonely child and that something needs to be done about it.”

  “Something will be done about it.”

  “But why do you think she’s being vengeful, when it seems to me she’s simply pointing out—”

  “Because she is vengeful!” Hoskins said, more loudly than before. “Because she wanted to come in here and take charge of this project when it was just getting under way, but she didn’t get the opportunity, and now she intends to bring it all down around our ears. She’ll have no mercy. Mannheim’s a pushover compared with her. He can be manipulated, if you know the right buttons to push. He’ll settle for constant statements of good intentions, polite reassurances that I’m going to follow his party line. But she’ll be demanding on-site inspections every other Tuesday, now that she’s calling the tune for him, and she’ll want results. Changes. Things that’ll keep us in turmoil all the time. She’ll want Timmie to have psychotherapy next, or orthodontia, or plastic surgery to give him a nice cheerful Homo sapiens face—she’ll meddle and meddle and meddle, one damned intrusion after another, making use of Mannheim’s publicity machine to smear us, to make us look like evil mad scientists cold-bloodedly tormenting an innocent child—” He turned away and stared at Timmie’s closed bedroom door. Morosely Hoskins said, “Mannheim’s helpless in the power of a woman like that. She’s probably sleeping with him, too. She must own him by now. He doesn’t stand a chance against her.”

  Miss Fellowes’ eyes widened. “What a thing to say!”

  “Which?”

  “That she and he—that she would use her—You have no proof of that. The whole suggestion’s out of line, Dr. Hoskins. Absolutely out of line.”

  “Is it?” Hoskins’ anger seemed to dissolve in an instant. He looked toward her and grinned shamefacedly. “—Yes, I suppose it is. You’re right. I don’t know anything about who Mannheim may be sleeping with, if anybody, and I don’t care. Or Levien. I just want them to get out of our hair so we can do our research, Miss Fellowes. You know that. You also know that I’ve taken every step possible to make Timmie happy here. But I’m so tired, now—so damned tired—”

  Impulsively Miss Fellowes went to him and seized his hands in hers. They were cold. She held them for a moment, wishing she could pump life and energy into them.

  “When was the last time you had a vacation, Dr. Hoskins?”

  “A vacation?” He chuckled hollowly. “I don’t think I know what the word means.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem.”

  “I can’t. I simply can’t. I turn my back for a minute, Miss Fellowes, and anything will happen here. A dozen different Adamewskis trying to steal scientific specimens out of Stasis. People running strange new experiments without authorization, doing God knows what at God knows what cost. Equipment that we can’t afford purchased to set up projects that don’t have a chance of working. We’ve got a lot of wild characters around this place, and I’m the only policeman. Until we’ve finished this phase of our work I don’t dare take time off.”

  “A long weekend, at least? You need some rest.”

  “I know that. God, do I know that!—Thank you for caring so much, Miss Fellowes. Thank you for everything. In this whole madhouse of a research institute you’ve been one of the few pillars of sanity and dependability.”

  “And will you try to get a little rest?”

  “I’ll try, yes.”

  “Starting now?” she asked. “It’s getting toward six o’clock. Your wife’s expecting you at home. Your little boy.”

  “Yes,” Hoskins said. “I’d better be heading out of here. And once again: thank you for everything, Miss Fellowes. Thank you. Thank you.”

  [37]

  In the night she was awakened by the sound of sobbing coming from Timmie’s room. It was the first time she had heard that in a long while.

  She got quickly out of bed and went to him. She had long ago mastered the skill of waking up in a hurry when a troubled child was calling out.

  “Timmie?” she called.

  She turned the night-light on. He was sitting up in bed, staring straight forward, with his eyes wide open, making the eerie high-pitched sound that was his kind of sobbing. But he didn’t seem to see her. He took no notice of her at all as she entered the room, and the sobbing went on and on.

  “Timmie, it’s me. Miss Fellowes.” She sat down beside him and slipped her arm around his shoulders. “It’s all right, Timmie. It’s all right!”

  Slowly the sobbing stopped.

  He looked at her as though he had never seen her before in his life. His eyes had a weirdly glassy look and his lips were drawn back in a bizarre way. In the half-darkness the lightning-bolt birthmark stood out fiercely on his cheek. She had virtually stopped noticing it but his face seemed pallid, almost bloodless, just now and the birthmark looked brighter than it had ever been before.

  He’s still asleep, she thought.

  “Timmie?”

  He made clicking sounds at her, Neanderthal speech. He seemed to be talking not so much to her as through her, to some invisible entity standing behind her.

  Miss Fellowes hugged him and rocked him lightly from side to side, murmuring his name, crooning to him. His small body was rigid. He might almost have been under some kind of a spell. The clicking went on and on, interspersed with the sort of feral growls he had uttered in the early weeks of his stay. It was frightening to hear him revert like that to his prehistoric self.

  “There, there, Timmie—little boy—Miss Fell
owes’ little boy—it’s all right, everything’s all right, there’s nothing to worry about.—Would you like some milk, Timmie?”

  She felt him grow less stiff. He was waking up now.

  “Miss—Fellowes,” he said haltingly.

  “Milk? A little warm milk, Timmie?”

  “Milk. Yes. Want milk.”

  “Come,” she said, and swooped him up out of the bed, carrying him into the kitchen. It didn’t strike her as a good idea to leave him alone just now. She perched him on the stool next to the refrigeration unit, got out a flask of milk, popped it in the heater for a moment.

  “What was it?” she asked him, as he drank. “A dream? A bad dream, Timmie?”

  He nodded, busy with the milk. Miss Fellowes waited for him to finish.

  “Dream,” he said. It was one of his newest words. “Bad. Bad dream.”

  “Dreams aren’t real.” Did he understand that? “You don’t have to be afraid of dreams, Timmie.”

  “Bad—dream—”

  His face was solemn. He seemed to be shivering, though the dollhouse was as warm as ever.

  “Come back to bed now,” she told him, scooping him up again. She tucked him in.—“What did you dream, Timmie? Can you tell me what it was?”

  He made clicks again, a long series of them, interrupted by two short, soft growls.

  Reverting to the old ways in the stress of the night? Or was it simply that he lacked the vocabulary to describe the dream in English?

  Then he said, “Out—side.”

  His enunciation was so poor she wasn’t certain that she heard him right.

  “Outside? Is that what you said?”

  “Out—side,” he said again.

  Yes, she was fairly sure of it. “Outside the bubble?” Miss Fellowes pointed toward the wall. “Out there?”

  He nodded. “Out—side.”

  “You dreamed that you were outside there?”

  Vigorous nodding. “Yes.”

  “And what did you see out there?”