The Ugly Little Boy (17 page)

"But you aren't a businessman, really," she said, thinking of that vaunted Ph.D. in physics. "You're basically a scientist who has gradually drifted across into being a corporate executive, isn't that so?"

He nodded, looking wistful. " 'Drifted' is the right word. I began on the theoretical side. My doctorate dealt with the nature of time, the technique of mesonic inter-temporal detection, and so on. When we formed the company, I didn't have the slightest idea that I'd be anything otner than head of theoretical research. But then there were-well, problems. I don't mean technical ones. I mean the bankers came in and gave us a good talking-to about the way we were going about our business. After that there were personnel changes at the highest levels of the corporation and one thing led to another and next thing I knew they were turning to me and saying, 'You have to be C.E.O., Jerry, you're the only one who can steady the place down,' and I was fool enough to believe them, and then, well-well-" He grinned. "There I am with a fine mahogany desk and all. Shuffling papers, initialling reports, holding meetings. Telling people what to do. With maybe ten minutes left here and there in the day to think about anything like my own actual scientific research."

Miss Fellowes felt an unexpectedly powerful burst of sympathy. At last she understood why there was that "Ph.D." tag on the nameplate on Hoskins' desk. He wasn't boasting. He had it there simply to remind himself of who and what he really was. How sad, she thought.

"If you could step aside from the business end of things," she said, "what sort of research do you think you'd want to do?"

"Short-range temporal transfer problems. No question of it. I'd want to work on a method of detecting objects that lie closer to us in time than the present limit of 10,000 years. We've done some promising preliminary studies, but we haven't been able to get further than that. A matter of available resources-financial, technical-of priorities, of accepting the limitations of the moment. If we could manage to reach our scoop into historical times, Miss Fellowes-if we could make contact with the living Egypt of the pharaohs, or the people of Babylonia or ancient Rome or Greece or-"

He broke off in mid-sentence. Miss Fellowes could hear a commotion coming from one of the distant booths, a thin voice raised querulously. Hoskins frowned, muttered a hasty "Excuse me," and went rushing off.

Miss Fellowes followed as best she could without actually running. She didn't feel much like being left here by herself in the midst of all this hubbub of bygone ages. An elderly man in street clothes with a thin gray beard and an angry, reddened face was arguing with a much younger uniformed technician who wore the red and gold Stasis Technologies, Ltd. monogram on his lab coat. The irate older man was saying, "I had vital aspects of my investigations to complete. Don't you understand that?" "What's going on?" Hoskins asked, hastily coming between them.

The technician said, "Attempted removal of a specimen, Dr. Hoskins."

"Removal from Stasis?" Hoskins said, eyebrows rising. "Are you serious?" He turned to the older man. -"I can't believe this is true, Dr. Adamewski."

The older man pointed into the nearest Stasis bubble.

Miss Fellowes followed his pointing hand. All she saw was a small gray lab table on which a totally undistinguished sample of rock was sitting, along with some vials of what she supposed were testing reagents.

Adamewski said, "I still have extensive work to do in order to ascertain-"

The technician cut him off. "Dr. Hoskins, Professor Adamewski knew from the start that his chalcopyrite specimen could only stay here for a two-week period. And the time's up today."

"Two weeks!" Adamewski erupted. "Who can say in advance how long a research task is going to take? Did Roentgen work out the principles of X rays in two weeks? Did Rutherford solve the problem of the atomic nucleus in two weeks? Did-"

"But two weeks was the limitation imposed for this experiment," said the technician. "He knew that."

"What of it? I wasn't able to guarantee I'd be able to finish my work in so short a time. I can't see the future, Dr. Hoskins. Two weeks, three weeks, four-what matters is solving the problem, is it not?"

"The problem, professor," Hoskins said, "is that our facilities are limited here. We've got only so many Stasis bubbles and there's an infinite amount of work to be done. So we have to keep specimens rotating. That piece of chalcopyrite has to go back where it came from. There's a long list of people waiting to use this bubble."

"So let them use it," said Adamewski heatedly. "And I'll take the specimen out of there and finish working on it at my university. You can have it back whenever I'm done."

"You know that isn't possible."

"A piece of chalcopyrite! A miserable three-kilogram chunk of rock with no commercial value! Why not?"

"We can't afford the energy expense!" Hoskins said.

"You know that. None of this comes as any news to you, and please don't try to pretend otherwise."

The technician said, "The point is, Dr. Hoskins, that he tried to remove the rock against the rules and while he was in there I almost punctured Stasis, not realizing he was still inside the bubble."

There was an icy silence.

After a moment Hoskins turned to the scientist and said in a coldly formal way, "Is that so, professor?"

Adamewski looked uncomfortable. "I saw no harm in-"

"No harm? No harm?" Hoskins shook his head. He seemed to be penning up real anger with a considerable effort.

There was a red-handled pull-lever dangling just within reach outside the Stasis chamber that contained Professor Adamewski's mineral specimen. A nylon cord ran from the end of it, through the wall, into the chamber. Hoskins reached up unhesitatingly and jerked down on the lever.

Miss Fellowes, looking into the Stasis bubble, drew in her breath sharply as a quick burst of brilliant light flickered around the chunk of rock, surrounding it for the briefest of moments with a dazzling halo of red and green. Before she even had time to close her eyes against the brightness of the flare the light was gone. And so, too, was the chunk of rock. Its existence had flickered out. The gray lab table was bare.

Adamewski stood gasping in outrage and frustration. "What have you-"

Hoskins cut him off brusquely. "You can clear out your cubicle, professor. Your permit to investigate material in Stasis is permanently voided, as of this moment."

"Wait. You can't-"

"I'm sorry. I can, professor. And I have. You've violated one of our most stringent rules."

"I will appeal this to the International Association of-"

"Appeal away," Hoskins said. "In a case like this, you'll find I can't be overruled."

He turned away deliberately, leaving the professor still protesting, and swung around toward Miss Fellowes. She had watched the entire episode with mounting discomfort, hoping that her beeper would go off and give her some excuse to get away from this disagreeable scene.

Hoskins* face was white with anger.

"I regret that we've had to interrupt this tour with such unpleasantness, Miss Fellowes. But occasionally things like this are necessary. If there's anything else you'd like to see in here-any further questions-"

"If it's all right with you, doctor, I think I've seen enough. Perhaps I ought to be getting back to Timmie now."

"But you've only been out of your chamber for-"

"Perhaps I should, anyway."

Hoskins' lips moved silently for a moment. He seemed to be framing some sort of appeal. At length he said, "Suppose you check with Ms. Stratford and see how Timmie's doing. And if everything's all right with the boy, maybe you can allow yourself a little more free time. I'd like to invite you to have lunch with me, Miss Fellowes."

They went into the small executive alcove of the company cafeteria. Hoskins greeted people on all sides and introduced Miss Fellowes with complete ease, although she herself felt painfully self-conscious.

What must they think, seeing us together? she wondered, and tried desperately to look businesslike. She wished now that she hadn't changed out of her nurse's uniform. The uniform served as a kind of armor for her. It allowed her to face the world in the guise of a function rather than as a person.

There was nothing fancy about the cafeteria fare. Salads, sandwiches, fruit plates, roils-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 naive, 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 origirtal fix will be lost unless we take steps ahead of rime 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."