The Ugly Little Boy (23 page)

It was Blazing Eye who made the first attempt to break the impasse. He stepped forward one pace. A moment later everyone in the War Society line stepped forward one pace also. v

Blazing Eye shook his spear menacingly and glared across toward the Other Ones and uttered a sound, long and low, that came floating up the hill to the watchers above:

"Hoooo."

The Other Ones exchanged glances and frowns. They looked confused, uncertain, troubled.

One of their men stepped forward also; and his whole line followed him. He too shook his spear.

"Hooooo."

"Hoooooo,"

"Hooooooo."

She Who Knows and Keeps The Past looked at each other in wonder. All they were doing on both sides was making foolish noises at each other down there! Was this how a battle was supposed to begin? Perhaps it was: she couldn't be sure. But it was a silly way to go about things, if it was.

Maybe the men down there weren't sure of what they were supposed to do, either. These warriors, She Who Knows realized, had never fought against the Other Ones before, had never even encountered them until this moment. She was the only one of the tribe who had, that time when she had met the lone Other One by the icy pool. And that one time, so long ago, the Other One had turned and run from her.

Now these Other Ones were simply standing there looking worried, and mimicking the silly noises that the men of the War Society were making. Even though the Other Ones outnumbered the men of the Killing Society and seemed to have better weapons.

Why? Were the dreaded Other Ones a race of cowards?

"Hooooo."

"Hooooo."

"Hooooo."

"Hooooo,"

"Listen to them," She Who Knows said, snickering. "Like owls, they sound."

Just then there was a litde movement down below. The entire line of War Society men had turned ever so slightly, so that it was now at a little angle from the front of the shrine. And the Other Ones had turned also at the same angle, still staying in formation, continuing to face die War Society men.

There was more hooting. The lines moved a litde more, without actually going anywhere. Then diey moved back. Spears were raised and shaken, but were not thrown.

"They're afraid of each other!" Keeps The Past said, in astonishment.

"Hoooo."

"Hoooo."

"We should just charge at them," She Who Knows muttered. "They'd turn and run in a moment!"

"Hoooo."

"Hoooo."

"Like owls," said Keeps The Past.

It was maddening. The stalemate could go on forever. She Who Knows was unable to take it any longer. She went across to the place where Mammoth Rider was sitting, with the two bowls of warpaint on the ground in front of him, and stripped away her robe. Mammodi Rider looked up at her, puzzled.

"Give me the paint," She Who Knows said.

"But you can't-"

"I can."

She bent and quickly snatched up the bowl of blue pigment, and splattered some carelessly on each of her breasts. Then she took up die red, and drew a big triangje on her middle, across die base of her belly and up both her thighs, and one splash on the dark hair at her loins.

Everyone was staring at her now. She didn't bother asking Mammoth Rider to put stripes of warpaint on her back; she doubted that he would do it, and she didn't want to waste time discussing it with him. It didn't matter. She wasn't planning to turn her back on any of the enemy down there.

Other Ones! she thought fiercely. Cowards, all of them!

Silver Cloud was coming toward her now, moving hesitantly, favoring his sore leg.

"What are you doing, She Who Knows?"

"Getting ready to fight your war for you," she said. And put her robe back on and started down the hill toward the place of the shrine of the shining rocks.

SAM AICKMAN said, "Play the bastard's call one more rime, will you, Jerry?"

Hoskins slipped the transcript cube into the access slot. On the screen at the front end of the boardroom Bruce Mannheim's face appeared, reproduced just as it had been on the screen of Hoskins' own telephone at the rime of the call. An insistendy blinking green rosette at the lower right-hand corner of the screen signaled that the call had been recorded with die knowledge and permission of the caller.

Mannheim was a youngish, full-faced man with dense waves of thick red hair clinging close to his scalp and a ruddy, florid complexion. Though beards had been out of fashion for some years except among extremely young men and very old ones, he wore a short, neatly trimmed goatee and a bushy little mustache.

The well-known advocate for the rights of children looked very sincere, very earnest, very serious.

To Hoskins he also looked very annoying.

On-screen, Mannheim said, "The situation is, Dr. Hoskins, dial our most recent discussion was not at all fruitful, and I simply can't take your word any longer that the boy is being held under acceptable conditions."

"Why?" die Hoskins on the screen replied. "Has my word suddenly become untrustworthy?"

"That's not the point, doctor. We have no reason to doubt your word. But we have no reason to take it at face value, either, and some members of my advisory board have begun to feel that I've been too willing up to now to accept your own evaluations of the boy's status. The point is that diere's been no on-site inspection."

"You speak of die child as though he's some kind of hidden weapon, Mr. Mannheim."

Mannheim smiled, but there wasn't much amusement visible in his pale gray eyes. "Please understand my position. I'm under considerable pressure from die sector of public opinion diat I represent, Dr. Hoskins, Despite all your publicity releases, many people continue to feel that a child who was brought here as this one was and who is kept in what amounts to solitary confinement for an indefinite period is a child who is being subjected to cruel and inhuman punishment."

"You and I have been through all this more dian once," said Hoskins. "The child is receiving the best care in the world, and you know it. He has twenty-four-hour-a-day nursing attention and daily medical checkups and he's on a perfectly balanced diet that has already done wonders for his physical condition. We'd be crazy to do tilings any other way, and whatever else we may be, we aren't crazy."

"I grant you that you've told me all that. But you still aren't allowing any outside confirmation of the things you claim. And the letters and calls that I'm receiving daily- the outcries, the pressure from concerned individuals-"

"If you're under pressure, Mr. Mannheim," said Hoskins unceremoniously, "may I suggest that it's because you've stirred this matter up by yourself in the first place, and now your own people are turning on you a little of the heat that you singlehandedly chose to generate?"

"That's the way to talk to him, Jerry-boy!" said Charlie McDermott, the comptroller.

"Maybe a bit on the blunt side, seems to me," Ned Cassiday said. He was the head of Legal: it was his job to err on the side of prudence.

The recorded conversation was proceeding on the screen.

"-neither here nor there, Dr. Hoskins. We have to keep returning to one basic point here, which is that a child has been ripped away from his parents and his home-"

"A Neanderthal child, Mr. Mannheim. Neanderthal Man was a primitive, savage, nomadic form of humanity. It's anybody's guess whether or not Neanderthals had homes of any real sort, or even that they understood the concept of the parent-child relationship as we know it. For all we know we may have pulled this child out of an absolutely brutish, hostile, miserable existence-much more likely, I'd say, than the picture you offer of our callously yanking him out of his idyllic little Christmas-card family life back there in the Pleistocene."

"Are you telling me that Neanderthals are no more than animals?" Mannheim asked. "That the child you've brought back from the Pleistocene is actually just some kind of ape that walks on his hind legs?"

"Certainly not. We aren't trying to pretend anything of the sort. Neanderthals were primitive but they were unquestionably human."

"-Because if you're going to try to claim that your captive has no human rights because he isn't human, Dr. Hoskins, then I must point out that scientists are completely unanimous in their belief that Homo neanderthatensis is in fact simply a subspecies of our own race, Homo sapiens, and therefore-"

"Jesus Suffering Christ," Hoskins exploded, "aren't you listening to me at all? I just got through saying that we concede the point that Tirnmie is human."

"Timmie?" Mannheim said.

"The child has been nicknamed Timmie around here, yes. It's been in all the news reports."

From the sidelines Ned Cassiday murmured, "Which was probably a mistake. Creates too much identification with the child as child per se. You give them names, you start making them seem too real in the eyes of the public, and then if there happens to be any sort of trouble-"

"The child is real, Ned," Hoskins said. "And there's not going to be any trouble."

On screen Mannheim was saying, "Very well, doctor. We both agree that we're talking about a human child. And we have no real disagreement on another basic point, which as I said a few moments back is that you've taken custody of this child by your own decision and you have no legal claim to him. You've essentially kidnapped this child, I could quite accurately say."

"Legal claim? What legality? Where? Tell me what laws I've broken. Show me the Pleistocene court where I can be brought to justice!"

"The fact that Pleistocene people have no courts doesn't mean that they have no rights," said Mannheim smoothly. "You'll notice that I use the present tense to refer to these extinct people. Now that time travel has become a working reality, everything is present tense. If we are capable of intruding on the lives of people who lived 40,000 years ago, then we must of necessity extend to those people the same human rights and courtesies that we regard as inalienable in our own society. You certainly wouldn't try to tell me that Stasis Technologies, Ltd.

would have the right to reach into some village in contemporary Brazil or Zaire or Indonesia and simply seize any child it felt like seizing, purely for the sake of-"

"This is a unique experiment of immense scientific importance, Mr. Mannheim!" Hoskins sputtered.

"Now I think you're failing to listen to me, Dr. Hoskins. I'm not discussing motive; I'm discussing simple legalities. Even for the sake of scientific research, would you feel justified in swooping down on some child in his native village in some present-day tribal culture and bringing him here so that anthropologists could study him, regardless of the feelings of the child's parents or other guardians?"

"Of course not."

"But tribal cultures of the past are fair game?"

Hoskins said, "There's no analogy. The past is a closed book. The child now in our custody has been dead, Mr. Mannheim, for 40,000 years."

Ned Cassiday let out a gasp and began to shake his head violently. It struck Hoskins that Cassiday must see novel and disturbing legal ramifications here that probably should never have been allowed into the discussion.

Mannheim said, "I see. The child is dead, but he receives round-the-clock nursing care? Come off it, Dr. Hoskins. Your reasoning's absurd. In the era of time travel the old distinctions between 'dead' and 'alive' no longer have the same validity. You've opened the closed book that you just spoke of, and you can't just close it again by your own say-so. Like it or not, we live in an age of paradox now. The child's as alive as you and I, now that you've moved him from his proper era to our own, and we both agree that he's human and deserving of the sort of treatment that any child is entitled to. And that brings us right back to the question of the care he's receiving while he's here among us. Call him a kidnap victim, call him the subject of a unique scientific experiment, call him an involuntary guest in our era, whatever semantic spin you want to put on things-all that really matters is that you've arbitrarily removed a child from his native environment without the consent of anybody concerned and you're keeping him locked up in some kind of containment unit. Must we continue to go around in circles? There's only one issue here. You know what it is. I represent a large body of concerned opinion and I've been asked to ascertain that the human rights of this unfortunate child are being properly respected."

"I object to your use of the word 'unfortunate.' I've made it clear again and again that the child is-"

"All right. I retract the word if it bothers you so much. The rest of my statement stands as is."

Hoskins said, making no attempt to conceal his thinning patience, "What is it specifically that you want from us, Mr. Mannheim?"

"I've told you. On-site inspection, so that we can see the child's condition and attitude for ourselves."

The on-screen Hoskins closed his eyes a moment. "You're very persistent, aren't you? Nothing will please you short of coming in here and checking things out in person?"

"You know the answer to that."

"Well, I'll have to get back to you, Mr. Mannheim. We've been allowing only qualified scientific investigators to see Timmie up till this point, and I'm not sure you fit that category. I'll need to convene a meeting of my advisory board to discuss all this. Thank you very much for calling, Mr. Mannheim. It's been a pleasure speaking with you."

The screen went dark.

Hoskins looked around the room.

"Well? There it is. You see the problem. He's like a bulldog who's got his teeth in the cuff of my pants. He won't let go no matter how I try to shake him off."

Ned Cassiday said, "And if you do manage somehow to shake the bulldog off, he'll come right at you again, and this time the teeth very likely will clamp onto your leg, Jerry, not just your pants cuff."

"What are you telling me, Ned?"

"That we ought to let him have his on-site inspection. As a gesture of good will."

"That's your considered legal opinion?"

Cassiday nodded. "You've been stonewalling this guy for weeks now, right? He calls, you give him a run-around, he calls again, you find some new way of deflecting his arguments, and so on and so on and so on. But you can't keep it up forever. He's just as stubborn as you are, and the difference is that in his case stubbornness looks like dedication to a worthy cause, and in your case it looks like willful obstructionism. -This is the first time he's actually asked to set foot on the premises, isn't it?"

"Right," Hoskins said.

"You see? He can always keep coming up with new maneuvers. And you can't counter this one with more press releases, or another interview with Candide Deveney on the sub-etheric. Mannheim'11 go public right away with claims that there's a cover-up going on here, that we have something terrible to hide. -Let him come and see the little boy. It might just shut him up long enough for us to get our work on this project finished."

Sam Aickman shook his head. "I don't think there's a reason in the world why we need to cave in to that colossal pain in the neck, Ned. If we were keeping the kid chained up in a closet, maybe-if he was just a miserable sickly bag of bones with pimples and scurvy, who cries bloody murder all day and all night-but the kid is flourishing, according to Jerry. He's putting on a little weight,

I hear that he's even learning to speak some English-he's never had it so good and that ought to be obvious, even to Bruce Mannheim."

"Exacdy," Cassiday said. "We don't have anything to hide. So why should we give Mannheim the chance to make it seem as though we do?"

"Good point," said Hoskins. He glanced around the room. "I'd like a show of opinion on this. Do we invite Mannheim here to see Timmie or don't we?"

"I say to hell with him," Sam Aickman said. "He's nothing more than a pest. No reason in the world why we should cave in to him."

"I'm with Ned Cassiday," said Frank Bruton. "Let him come in so we can get this over with."

"It's risky," said Charlie McDermott. "Once he's in the door, there's no telling what further issues he'll raise. As Ned says, there's always some new maneuver. Allowing him to visit the boy won't get him off our backs and might just make the situation worse for us. I say no."

"What about you, Elena?" Hoskins said, turning toward Elena Saddler, who ran materiels procurement.

"I vote for letting him come. As Ned says, we've got nothing to hide. We can't let this man go on smearing us the way he's done. Once he's been here, it's simply his word against ours, and we've got our televised glimpses of Timmie to show the world that we're right and he's wrong."

Hoskins nodded glumly. "Two for it, two against. So I get to cast the deciding vote. -Okay. So be it. I'll tell Mannheim he can come."

Aickman said, "Jerry, are you sure you want to-"

"Yes," said Hoskins. "I don't like him any more than you do, Sam. Or want him sniffing around this place for so much as two minutes. He's a pest, just as you say. And it's precisely because he is such a pest that I've come around to thinking we'd better give him his way. Let him see Timmie, thriving and flourishing. Let him meet Miss Fellowes and find out for himself whether there's any sort of child abuse going on around here. I agree with Ned that the visit might just shut him up. If it doesn't, well, we're no worse off" than we are now: he'll continue to agitate and howl, and we'll continue to deny all his accusations. But if we simply refuse his request to visit, he'll wrap all sorts of bizarre new charges around our necks, and God only knows what we'll have to do to counter them. So my vote is for tossing the bulldog a bone. That way we stand a chance against him; the other way, we're sunk. Mannheim gets an invitation to come here, and so be it. -Meeting adjourned."

Miss Fellowes was giving Tinimie his bath when the intercom sounded in the next room. The interruption drew a scowl from her. She looked at the boy in the tub. Bath-time was no longer an ordeal for him. It was more like sport: he looked forward to it every day. The sensation of lying half submerged in warm water no longer was threatening to him. Plainly it was a wondrous luxurious treat for him, not only the feel of the warm water itself, but the delight of coming forth pink, clean, sweet-smelling. And of course there was the fun of doing a litde splashing around. The longer he lived here, the more like an ordinary little boy Timmie was coming to seem. Miss Fellowes thought.