The Ugly Little Boy (11 page)

She shoved the broken pieces aside with her foot-it would be important to get them picked up in a moment, because they were sharp, but let that wait for now-and drew another plate, identical to the first, from the cabinet at the base of the food cart. She held it up to him. The whimpering stopped. He smiled at her.

An unmistakable smile, the first one she had seen from him since his arrival. It was astonishingly broad- how wide his mouth was, truly ear to ear!-and wonderfully brilliant, like sudden sunlight breaking through dark clouds.

Miss Fellowes returned the smile. Gingerly she reached out to touch him, to stroke his hair, moving her hand very slowly, letting him follow it with his eyes every inch of the way, making sure that he could see that there was no harm in it.

He trembled. But he remained where he was, looking up at her. For a moment she succeeded in stroking his hair; and then he pulled back, bucking timidly away, she thought, like some frightened little-beast.

Miss Fellowes' face flamed at the thought.

(Stop it. You mustn't think of him that way. He's not an animal, no matter how he may look. He's a boy, a little boy, a frightened little boy, a frightened little human boy.)

But his hair-how coarse it had felt, in that one moment when he had allowed her to touch it! How tangled, how rough, how thick!

What strange hair it was. What very, very, very strange hair indeed.

She said, "I'm going to have to show you how to use the bathroom. Do you think you can learn?"

She spoke quietly, kindly, knowing quite well that he wouldn't understand her words, but hoping that he would respond to the calmness of the tone.

The boy launched into a clicking phrase again. More milk, was that was what he wanted? Or was this something new he was saying? Miss Fellowes hoped that they were recording every sound he made. Very likely they were, but she meant to mention it to Hoskins the next day anyway. She wanted to study the child's way of speech, to learn his language if there were some way she could manage it. Assuming it was a language, and not just some kind of instinctive animal sounds. Miss Fellowes intended to try to teach him English, if she could, but that might not be possible, and in that case she would at least attempt to learn how to communicate with him in his own fashion.

A strange concept: learning how to speak Neanderthal. But she had done a few things almost as odd in her time, for the sake of making contact with difficult children.

"May I take your hand?" she said.

Miss Fellowes held hers out and the boy looked at it as though he had never seen a hand before. She left it outstretched and waited. The boy frowned. After a moment his own hand rose uncertainly and crept forward, quivering a little, toward hers.

"That's right," she said. "Take my hand."

The trembling hand approached within an inch of hers and then the boy's courage failed him. He snatched it back as though fire were coming from her fingertips.

"Well," said Miss Fellowes calmly, "we'll try again later. Would you like to sit down here?"

She patted the mattress of the bed.

No response.

She pantomimed sitting down.

Nothing. A blank stare.

She sat down herself-not easy, on a small bed so close to the ground-and patted the space beside her.

"Here," she said, giving him her warmest, most reassuring smile. "Sit down next to me, won't you?"

Silence. A stare. Then a barrage of clicking sounds again, and some deep grunting noises-new ones, she was sure of it this time. He seemed to have a considerable vocabulary of clicks and grunts and gargles. It had to be a language. A major scientific breakthrough already: Dr. Hoskins had said that no one knew whether the Neanderthals had a language or not, and she had proved right at the outset that they had.

(No, not proved, Miss Fellowes told herself sternly. Merely hypothesized. But it was a plausible hypothesis.) "Sit down? No?"

Clicks. She listened and tried to imitate them, but they came clumsily off her tongue, with none of his rapid-fire crispness of delivery. He looked at her in- wonder? Amusement? His expressions were so hard to read. But he seemed fascinated by the idea that she was making clicks at him. For all she knew, she was saying something vile and dreadful in his language. Speaking the unspeakable. But it was much more likely that the sounds she was making were just so much incomprehensible gibberish to him. Perhaps he thought she was deranged.

He clicked and growled, in a low, quiet, almost reflective way.

She clicked back at him. She mimicked his growls. They were easier to imitate than the clicks. He stared again. His expression was grave, pensive, very much the way a child who has been confronted by a crazy adult might look.

This is completely ridiculous, Miss Fellowes told herself. I need to stick to English. He'll never learn anything if I make idiotic mumbo-jumbo noises at him in what I imagine is his own language.

"Sit," she said, the way she would have said it to a puppy. "Sit! -No? Well, no, then. Bathroom? Take my hand and I'll show you how to use the bathroom. -No again, is it? You can't just go on the floor, you know. This isn't 40,000 B.C., and even if you're accustomed to digging a hole in the ground after yourself, boy, you aren't going to be able to do that here. Especially with a wooden floor. Take my hand and let's go inside, all right? -No? A little later?"

Miss Fellowes realized that she was starting to babble.

The problem was, she began to see, that she was exhausted. It was getting late, now, and she had been under a bizarre strain since early evening. There was something very dreamlike about sitting here in this dollhouse room trying to explain to a little ape-child with bulging brows and great goggling eyes how to drink milk from a saucer, how to go to the bathroom, how to sit down on a little bed.

No, she thought severely. Not an ape-child.

Never call him that-not even to yourself!

"Take my hand?" Miss Fellowes said again.

He almost did. Almost.

The hours were crawling slowly along, and there had been scarcely any progress. She wasn't going to succeed either with the bathroom or with the bed, that was obvious. And now he too was showing signs of fatigue. He yawned. His eyes looked glazed; his lids were drooping. Suddenly he folded himself up and lay down on the bare floor and then, with a quick movement, rolled beneath the bed.

Miss Fellowes, on her knees, stared down underneath at him. His eyes gleamed out at her and he chattered at her in tongue-clicks.

"All right," she told him. "If you feel safer there, you sleep there."

She waited a little while, until she heard the sound of steady, regular breathing. How tired he must be! Forty thousand years from home, thrust into a baffling alien place full of bright lights and hard floors and strange people who looked nothing at all like anyone he had ever known, and even so he was capable of curling up and falling asleep. Miss Fellowes envied him that wonderful adaptability. Children were so resilient, so capable of accommodating to the most terrible disruptionsShe turned out the light and closed the door to the boy's bedroom, and retired to the cot that had been left for her use in the largest room.

Overhead there was nothing but darkness. She scrutinized it, wondering whether someone might be lurking about on the balcony, observing her. It was impossible to tell. Miss Fellowes knew that she was being absurd, that it was late and there was no one up there. The only eyes that would be watching her were those of a bunch of electronic sensors. But still-to have no privacy at all- They were filming everything, very likely. Making a complete visual record of all that took place in the Stasis zone. She should never have taken on this job without insisting that Hoskins let her inspect the sort of place where she was going to have to live. Trust me, he had said. Right. Certainly.

Well, she'd make do for tonight. But tomorrow they were going to have to put a roof over her living quarters, at least. And also, she thought, those stupid men will have to place a mirror in this room and a larger chest of drawers and a separate washroom if they expect me to spend my nights in here.

It was difficult to sleep. Tired as she was, she lay with her eyes open, in the kind of absolute wakefolness dial one reaches only in a state of die most extreme fatigue. She strained to hear any sounds that might come from the next room.

He couldn't get out, could he? Could he?

The walls were sheer and impossibly high, but suppose the child could climb like a monkey?

Up a vertical wall with no hand-holds? And there you go again, thinking of him as a monkey!

He couldn't climb up and over, no. She was certain of that. And in any case, there were Hoskins' ever-watchful sensors up there in the balcony. Surely they'd notice and give an alarm, if the boy started climbing around from room to room in the middle of the night.

Surely.

(There's so much that I didn't take the trouble to find out, Miss Fellowes thought.)

And then suddenly she found herself asking herself: Can he be dangerous? Physically dangerous?

She considered how much trouble it had been to give him his bath. She had watched first Hoskins and then Elliott battling to hold him in place. Just a little child, and how strong he was! The scratch he had given Elliott!

What if he came in here andNo, Miss Fellowes told herself. He won't hurt me.

Beyond any doubt Hoskins wouldn't have left her in here alone, overhead sensors or no overhead sensors, if he felt there was any risk thatShe tried to laugh at her own fears. He was only a three-year-old child, perhaps four at most. Still, she hadn't managed to get his nails trimmed yet. If he should attack her with nails and teeth while she sleptHer breath came quickly. Oh, how ridiculous, how completely ridiculous, and yetShe was endlessly going back and forth, she knew, unable to take a consistent position and hold it for long. Was he a dangerous nasty litde ape, or was he a miserably frightened litde child far from his loved ones? One or the other, she told herself. But why not some of both? Even a frightened litde child can hurt you if he strikes out with enough force. She could remember a few nasty episodes at the hospital-children driven to such desperation that they had attacked staff people with real vehemence and done some real damage.

Miss Fellowes didn't dare let herself fall asleep. Didn't dare.

She lay staring upward, listening with painful atten-tiveness. And now she heard a sound.

The boy was crying.

Not shrieking in fear or anger; not yelling or screaming. It was crying softly, and the cry was the heartbroken sobbing of a lonely, lonely child.

All her ambivalence dissolved at once. For the first time, Miss Fellowes thought with a pang: Poor thing! Poor terrified child!

Of course it was a child. What did the shape of its head matter, or the texture of its hair? It was a child that had been orphaned as no child had ever been orphaned before. Hoskins had said it, and said it accurately, at their first meeting: "This will be the most lonely child in the history of the world." Not just its mother and father were gone, but all its species, every last one. Snatched callously out of its proper time, it was now the only creature of its kind in the world.

The last. The only.

She felt her pity for it strengthen and deepen, and with that came shame at her own callousness: the repugnance she had allowed herself to feel for the child, the irritation she had let herself show at its wild ways. How, she wondered, could she have been so cruel? So unprofessional Bad enough to be kidnapped like this; worse to be looked upon with disdain by the very person who was supposed to care for you and teach you to find your way in your bewildering new life.

Tucking her nightgown carefully about her calves- the overhead sensors, she couldn't stop worrying about those idiotic sensors!-Miss Fellowes got out of bed and tiptoed into the boy's room.

"Litde boy," she called in a whisper. "Litde boy."

She knelt and started to reach under the bed. But then the thought came-shameful but prudent, born of long experience with troubled children-that he might try to bite her, and she pulled back her hand. Instead she turned on the night light and moved the bed away from the wall.

The poor thing was huddled miserably in the corner, knees up against his chin, looking up at her with blurred and apprehensive eyes.

In the dim light she was able to ignore his repulsive-ness, the thick blunt features, the big misshapen head.

"Poor litde boy," she murmured. "Poor frightened litde boy."

Miss Fellowes stroked his hair, that harsh tangled bristly hair that had felt so disagreeable to her a few hours before. Now it merely seemed unusual. He stiffened at the first touch of her hand, but then she saw him relax.

"Poor child," she said. "Let me hold you."

He made a soft clicking sound. Then a little low growl, a kind of gentle unhappy rumbling.

She sat down on the floor next to him and stroked his hair again, slowly, rhythmically. The tension was visibly going from his body. Perhaps no one had ever stroked his hair before, back in whatever ferocious prehistoric life it was that he had left behind. He seemed to like it. Gently, tenderly, she played with his hair, smoothing it, straightening it, picking a few burrs out of it, but mainly just running her hand along the top of his head, slowly, slowly, almost hypnotically.

She stroked his cheek, his arm. He allowed it. Softly she began to sing a slow and gentle song, a wordless repetitive one, a tune that she had known since childhood, one that she had sung to many disturbed children to soothe them, to calm them.

He lifted his head at that, staring at her mouth in the dimness, as though wondering at the sound.

She maneuvered him closer, gathering him in while he listened to her. He offered no resistance. Slowly she pressed her hand against the side of his head, gendy guiding it toward her until it rested on her shoulder. She put her arm under his thighs and with a smooth and unhurried motion lifted him into her lap.