The Ugly Little Boy

by Isaac Asimov

  “The cat—ran up—the tree.”

  “That wasn’t what you said before.”

  “No. Before I said, ‘The dog began to chase the cat.’ Just like it says here.”

  “What? What?” Miss Fellowes’ eyes were wide open now. She glanced down at the slim book that the child in her lap was holding.

  The caption on the left-hand page said: The dog began to chase the cat.

  And the caption on the facing page was: The cat ran up the tree.

  He was following the printing in the book, word by word. He was reading to her!

  In amazement Miss Fellowes got to her feet so quickly that the boy went tumbling to the floor. He seemed to think it was some new game, and looked up at her, grinning. But she pulled him quickly to his feet and set him upright.

  “How long have you been able to read?”

  He shrugged. “Always?”

  “No—really.”

  “I don’t know. I looked at the marks and heard the words, the way you said.”

  “Here. Read to me from this one.” Miss Fellowes snatched up a book at random from his heap and opened it to its center pages. He took it and studied it, frowning in that intense way that emphasized the great bony shelf that was his brow. His tongue came forth and wandered along his lips.

  Slowly, painfully, he said, “Then the—tra-in—blew its—whuh—its whuh—whuh—is—its whuh-is—”

  “Its whistle!” she finished for him. “You can read, Timmie! You can actually read!”

  Excited nearly to frenzy, she swung him up into her arms and danced him around the room while he stared at her in huge-eyed amazement.

  “You can read! You can read!”

  (Ape-boy, was he? Cave-boy? Some lesser form of human life? The cat ran up the tree. The train blew its whistle. Show me the chimp that can read those lines! Show me the gorilla that can! The train blew its whistle. Oh, Timmie, Timmie—)

  “Miss Fellowes?” he said, sounding a little startled, as she swung him wildly around.

  She laughed and put him down.

  This was a breakthrough that she had to share. The answer to Timmie’s unhappiness was in her hand. Picture tapes might keep him amused for a time, but he was bound to outgrow them. Now, though, as he grew older, he would have access to the full, rich world of books. If Timmie couldn’t leave the Stasis bubble to enter the world, the world could be brought into these three rooms to Timmie—the whole world in books. He must be educated to his full capacity. That much was owed to him.

  “You stay here with your books,” she told him. “I’ll be back in a little while. I have to see Dr. Hoskins.”

  She made her way along the catwalks and through the tortuous passageways that led out of the Stasis zone, and into the executive area. Hoskins’ receptionist looked up in surprise as Miss Fellowes came bursting into the anteroom of Hoskins’ office.

  “Is Dr. Hoskins here?”

  “Miss Fellowes! Dr. Hoskins isn’t expecting—”

  “Yes, I know that. But I want to see him.”

  “Is there some problem?”

  Miss Fellowes shook her head. “News. Exciting news. Please, just tell him I’m here.”

  The receptionist pressed a button. “Miss Fellowes to see you, Dr. Hoskins. She has no appointment.”

  (Since when do I need—?)

  There was an uncomfortable pause. Miss Fellowes wondered if she was going to have to make a scene in order to be admitted to Hoskins’ presence. Whatever he might be doing in there, it couldn’t be as important as what she had to tell him.

  Hoskins’ voice out of the intercom said, “Tell her to come in.”

  The door rolled open. Hoskins rose from behind the desk with its GERALD A. HOSKINS, PH.D. nameplate to greet her.

  He looked flushed and excited himself, as though his mood was precisely analogous to hers: a kind of triumph and glory. “So you’ve heard?” he said at once. “No, of course, you couldn’t have. We’ve done it. We’ve actually done it.”

  “Done what?”

  “We have intertemporal detection at close range.”

  He was so full of his own success that for a moment Miss Fellowes allowed it to shove her own spectacular news into the background.

  “You can reach historical times, you mean?” she said.

  “That’s exactly what I mean. We have a fix on a fourteenth-century individual right now. Imagine. Imagine! We’re ready to launch Project Middle Ages. Oh, Miss Fellowes, if you could only know how glad I’ll be to shift from the eternal concentration on the Mesozoic—to get away from all these trilobites and rock samples and bits and pieces of ferns and things—to send the paleontologists home and bring some historians in here at last—” He stopped in midflow.—“But there’s something you want to tell me, isn’t there? And here I am, running on and on, without giving you a chance to speak. Well, go ahead. Go ahead, Miss Fellowes! You find me in a very fine mood, indeed. Anything you want, just ask for it.”

  Miss Fellowes smiled. “I’m glad to hear it. Because I wonder if we can start bringing in tutors for Timmie.”

  “Tutors?”

  “To give him instruction. I can teach him only so much, and then I ought to step aside in favor of someone who has the proper training for it.”

  “Instruction? In what?”

  “Well, in everything. History, geography, science, arithmetic, grammar, the whole elementary school curriculum. We have to set up a kind of school in here for Timmie. So that he’ll be able to learn all that he needs to know.”

  Hoskins stared at her as though she were speaking some alien language.

  “You want to teach him long division? The story of the Pilgrims? The history of the American Revolution?”

  “Why not?”

  “We can try to teach him, yes. And trigonometry and calculus, too, if you like. But how much can he learn, Miss Fellowes? He’s a great little boy, no question of it. But we must never lose sight of the fact that he’s only a Neanderthal.”

  “Only?”

  “They were a people of very limited intellectual capacity, according to all the—”

  “He already knows how to read, Dr. Hoskins.”

  Hoskins’ jaw sagged open.

  “What?”

  “The cat ran up the tree. He read it to me right off the page. The train blew its whistle. I picked the book and showed him the page and he read me the words.”

  “He can read?” said Hoskins in wonder. “Really?”

  “I showed him how the letters were shaped, and how they were put together in words. And he did the rest. He’s learned it in an astonishingly short span of time. I can’t wait for Dr. McIntyre and the rest of the crew to find out about it. So much for the very limited intellectual capacity of the Neanderthals, eh, Dr. Hoskins? He can read a storybook. And as time goes along you’ll see him reading books without any pictures at all, reading newspapers, magazines, textbooks—”

  Hoskins sat there, seemingly suddenly depressed. “I don’t know, Miss Fellowes.”

  She said, “You just told me that anything I wanted—”

  “I know, and I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “A tutor for Timmie? Is that such a big expense?”

  “It isn’t the expense I’m concerned with,” said Hoskins. “And it’s a wonderful thing that Timmie can read. Astonishing. I mean that. I want to see a demonstration of it right away. But you talk about setting up a school for him. You talk about all the things he’ll learn as time goes along.—Miss Fellowes, there isn’t much more time.”

  She blinked. “There isn’t?”

  “I’m sure you must be aware that we aren’t able to maintain the Timmie experiment indefinitely.”

  A surge of horror swept through her. She felt as though the floor had turned to quicksand beneath her feet.

  What did he mean? Miss Fellowes wasn’t sure that she understood. We aren’t able to maintain the Timmie experiment indefinitely. What? What?

  With an agonizing flash of rec
ollection, she recalled Professor Adamewski and his mineral specimen that was taken away after two weeks because the Stasis facility that contained it had to be cleared for the next experiment.

  “You’re going to send him back?” she said in a tiny voice.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “But you’re talking about a boy, Dr. Hoskins. Not about a rock.”

  Uneasily Hoskins said, “Even so. He can’t be given undue importance, you know. We’ve learned just about as much from him as we’re likely to. He doesn’t remember anything about his life in the Neanderthal era that’s of any real scientific value. The anthropologists can’t make much sense out of what he says, and the questions they’ve put to him with you as the interpreter haven’t yielded a lot of worthwhile data, and so—”

  “I don’t believe this,” Miss Fellowes said numbly.

  “Please, Miss Fellowes. It’s not going to happen today, you know. But there’s no escaping the necessity of it.” He indicated the research materials on his desk. “Now that we expect to be bringing back individuals out of historical time, we’ll need Stasis space—all we can get.”

  She couldn’t grasp it.

  “But you can’t. Timmie—Timmie—”

  “Please don’t get so upset, Miss Fellowes.”

  “The world’s only living Neanderthal, and you’re talking about sending him back?”

  “As I’ve said. We’ve learned all we can. Now we have to move along.”

  “No.”

  “Miss Fellowes, please. Please. I know you’re deeply attached to the boy. And who can blame you? He’s a terrific kid. And you’ve lived with him day and night for a long time now. But you’re a professional, Miss Fellowes. You understand that the children under your care constantly come and go, that you can’t hope to keep them forever. This is nothing new.—Besides, Timmie isn’t going to go right away; perhaps not for months. Meanwhile, if you want a tutor for him, yes, yes, of course, we’ll do whatever we can.”

  She was still staring at him.

  “Let me get you something, Miss Fellowes.”

  “No,” she whispered. “I don’t need anything.”

  She was trembling. She rose and stumbled across the room in a kind of nightmare and waited for the door to open, and walked through the antechamber without looking either to the right or to the left.

  Send him back?

  Send him back?

  Were they out of their minds? He wasn’t a Neanderthal any more, except on the outside. He was a gentle good-natured little boy who wore green overalls and liked to look at picture tapes and books that told tales out of the Arabian Nights. A boy who tidied up his room at the end of the day. A boy who could use a knife and a fork and a spoon. A boy who could read.

  And they were going to send him back to the Ice Age and let him shift for himself in some Godforsaken tundra?

  They couldn’t mean it. He didn’t stand a chance, back in the world he had come from. He was no longer fitted for it. He no longer had any of the skills that a Neanderthal needed to have, and in their place he had acquired a great many new skills that were absolutely worthless in the Neanderthal world.

  He would die there, she thought.

  No.

  Timmie, Miss Fellowes told herself with all the ferocity that there was in her soul, you will not die. You will not.

  [51]

  Now she knew why Bruce Mannheim had given her his telephone number. She hadn’t understood it at the time, but obviously Mannheim had been thinking ahead. Something was going to come up that would jeopardize Timmie. He had seen it, and she hadn’t. She had simply blinded herself to the possibility. She had carefully ignored every obvious clue that pointed to the blunt realities Hoskins had just been explaining to her. She had allowed herself to assume, against all the evidence, against all reason—that Timmie was going to be spending the rest of his life in the twenty-first century.

  But Mannheim knew it wasn’t so.

  And he had been waiting all this time for her to call him.

  “I need to see you right away,” she told him.

  “At the Stasis headquarters?”

  “No,” she said. “Somewhere else. Anywhere. In the city somewhere. You pick the place.”

  They met at a small restaurant near the river, where Mannheim said no one would bother them, on a rainy midweek afternoon. Mannheim was waiting for her when she arrived. It all seemed terribly clandestine to Miss Fellowes, vaguely scandalous: lunch with a man who had made all sorts of trouble for her employer. And—for that matter—lunch with a man. A man she scarcely knew, a young attractive man. Not like Edith Fellowes at all to be doing things like this, she told herself. Especially when she thought of that dream she had once had, Mannheim knocking at her door, swooping her off her feet when she answered—

  But this was no romantic assignation. The dream had only been a dream, a fugitive fantasy of her unconscious mind. She felt not the slightest shred of attraction for Mannheim. This was business. This was a matter of life and death.

  She fidgeted with her menu and wondered how to begin.

  He said, “How’s Timmie doing these days?”

  “Fine. Fine. You wouldn’t believe the progress he’s been making.”

  “Getting big and strong?”

  “Every day. And now he can read.”

  “Really!” Mannheim’s eyes twinkled. He has a very nice smile, Miss Fellowes thought. How could Dr. Hoskins have thought he was such a monster? “That’s an amazing step forward, isn’t it? I bet the anthropology boys were startled when they found out about it.”

  She nodded. She turned the pages of the menu as though she had no idea what it was. The rain intensified outside; it drummed against the window of the little restaurant with almost malevolent force. They were practically the only customers.

  Mannheim said, “I like the chicken in red wine sauce here, particularly. And they do some fine lasagna. Or maybe you’d like the veal.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll have whatever you’re having, Mr. Mannheim.”

  He gave her an odd look. “Call me Bruce. Please. Shall we get a bottle of wine?”

  “Wine? I never drink wine, I’m afraid. But if you’d like to get some for yourself—”

  He was still looking at her.

  Over the drumbeat of the rain he said, “What’s the trouble, Edith?”

  (Edith?)

  For a moment she was unable to say anything.

  (All right, Edith. Pull yourself together, Edith! He’ll think you’re a gibbering idiot!)

  She said, “They’re going to send Timmie back.”

  “Back? You mean back in time?”

  “That’s right. To his own era. To Neanderthal times. To the Ice Age.”

  A broad smile spread across Mannheim’s face. His eyes lit up. “Why, that’s wonderful! That’s absolutely the finest news I’ve heard all week!”

  She was horrified. “No—you don’t understand—”

  “I understand that that sad little captive child is finally going to be returned to his proper people, to his mother and father and sisters and brothers, to the world he belonged to and loved. That’s something to celebrate. Waiter! Waiter! I’d like a bottle of Chianti—make it a half-bottle, I guess, my friend won’t be having any—”

  Miss Fellowes stared at him in dismay.

  Mannheim said, “But you look so troubled, Miss Fellowes. Edith. Don’t you want Timmie to return to his people?”

  “Yes, but—but—” She waved her hands in a helpless gesture.

  “I think I see.” Mannheim leaned across the table toward her. He glowed with sympathy and concern. “You’ve cared for him so long that you find it hard to let go of him now. The bond between you and Timmie has become so strong that it’s a real shock to you to hear that he’s being sent back. I can certainly understand how you feel.”

  “That’s part of it,” Miss Fellowes replied. “But only a very small part.”

  “What’s the real problem, then?�
�

  At that moment the waiter arrived with the wine. He made a great show of displaying its label to Mannheim and of pulling the cork, and poured a little into Mannheim’s glass to taste. Mannheim nodded. To Miss Fellowes he said, “Are you sure you don’t want any, Edith? On a foul rainy day like this—”

  “No. Please,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Go ahead. You drink it. It would only be wasted on me.”

  The waiter filled Mannheim’s glass and went away.

  “Now,” he said. “Timmie.”

  “He’ll die if he’s returned. Don’t you see that?”

  Mannheim set down his glass with such abruptness that the wine brimmed over and splashed the tablecloth. “Are you telling me that a return trip in time is fatal?”

  “No, that isn’t it. Not as far as I know, and I don’t think it would be. But it would be fatal for Timmie. Look, he’s civilized now. He can tie his shoelaces and cut a piece of meat with a knife and a fork. He brushes his teeth morning and night. He sleeps in a bed and takes a shower every day. He watches picture tapes and now he can read simple little books. What good are any of those skills in the Paleolithic era?”

  Suddenly solemn, Mannheim said, “I think I see what you’re getting at.”

  “And meanwhile,” she went on, “he’s probably forgotten whatever he knew about how to live under Paleolithic conditions—and very likely he didn’t know a lot to begin with. He was only a little child when he came to us. His parents, his tribal guardians, whoever, must have still been taking care of him. Even Neanderthals wouldn’t have expected a boy of three or four to know how to hunt and forage for himself. And even if he did know a little bit at that age, it’s been several years since he was exposed to those conditions. He won’t remember a thing.”

  “But surely if he’s returned to his own tribe, they’ll take him in, they’ll re-educate him in tribal ways—”

  “Would they? He can’t speak their language very well any more; he doesn’t think the way they do; he smells funny because he’s so clean.—They might just as readily kill him, wouldn’t you say?”

  Mannheim gazed thoughtfully into his wineglass.

  Miss Fellowes went on, “Besides, what guarantee is there that he’ll return to his tribe at all? I don’t understand a lot about how time travel works, and I’m not sure the Stasis people really do, either. Will he go back right to the exact moment when he left? In that case he’ll be three years older and from their point of view he’ll have changed tremendously in a single instant—and they won’t know what to make of him. They might think he was a demon of some kind. Or will he return to the same place on Earth, but a time three years after he left? If that’s how it works, then his tribe will have moved on to some other region long ago. Surely they were nomads then. When he arrives in the past, there’ll be no one around to take him in. He’ll be completely on his own in a rugged, hostile, bitterly cold environment. A little boy facing the Ice Age by himself. Do you see, Mr. Mannheim? Do you see?”