The Ugly Little Boy (25 page)

"He said, 'pretty.' Your dress. Then he said, 'want!' To touch, he meant."

"He was speaking English?" Mannheim asked in surprise. "I wouldn't have guessed."

"His articulation isn't good, probably for some physiological reason. But I can understand him. He's got a vocabulary of-oh, about a hundred English words, I'd say, maybe a little more. He learns a few every day. He picks them up on his own by this time. He's probably about four years old, you realize. Even though he's getting such a late start, he's got the normal linguistic ability that you'd expect in a child of his age, and he's catching up in a hurry."

"You say that a Neanderthal child has the same linguistic ability as a human child?" Marianne Levien asked.

"He is a human child."

"Yes. Yes, of course. But different. A separate subspecies, isn't that so? And therefore it would be reasonable to expect differences in mental aptitude that could be as considerable as the differences in physical appearance. His extremely primitive facial structure-"

Miss Fellowes said sharply, "It's not all that primitive, Ms. Levien. Go look at a chimpanzee sometime if you want to see what a truly subhuman face is like. Timmie has some unusual anatomical features, but-"

"You used the word subhuman, not me," Levien said.

"But you were thinking it."

"Miss Fellowes! Dr. Levien! Please! There's no need for such rancor!"

Doctor Levien? Miss Fellowes thought, with a quick glance at Hoskins. Well, yes, yes, probably so.

Mannheim said, glancing around, "These little rooms here-this is the boy's entire living environment?"

"That's correct," Miss Fellowes replied. "That's his bedroom and playroom back there. He takes his meals here, and that's his bathroom. I have my own living area over here, and these are the storage facilities."

"He never goes beyond this enclosed area?"

"No," Miss Fellowes said. "This is the Stasis bubble. He doesn't leave the bubble, not ever."

"A very confining sort of life, wouldn't you agree?"

Hoskins said quickly, too quickly, "It's an absolutely necessary confinement. There are technical reasons for it, having to do with the buildup of temporal potential involved in bringing the boy across time, that I could explain in detail if you wanted the full background. But what it comes down to is that the energy cost of allowing the boy to cross the Stasis boundary would be prohibitive."

"So to save a little money, you plan to keep him cooped up in these few small rooms indefinitely?" Levien asked.

"Not just a little money, Dr. Levien," Hoskins said, looking more harried than ever. "I said that the cost would be prohibitive. It goes even beyond cost. The available metropolitan energy supply would have to be diverted in a way that I think would cause insuperable problems for the entire utility district. There's no problem when you or I or Miss Fellowes cross the Stasis line, but for Timmie to do it would be, well, simply not possible. Simply not possible."

"If science can find a way to bring a child across forty thousand years of time," Marianne Levien said grandly, "science can find a way to make it possible for him to walk down that hallway if he wanted to."

"I wish that were true, Dr. Levien," Hoskins said.

"So the child is permanendy restricted to these rooms," said Mannheim, "and if I understand you rightly, no research is currently under way to find a way around that problem?"

"That's correct. As I've tried to explain, it can't be done, not within the real-world considerations that we have to put up with. We want the boy to be comfortable, but we simply can't divert our resources into trying to solve insoluble problems. -As I told you, I can provide you later on with the full technical analysis, if you want to check it over."

Mannheim nodded. He seemed to be checking something off on some list he kept in his mind.

Levien said, "What sort of diet is the boy on?"

"Would you like to examine the pantry?" Miss Fellowes asked, in no very friendly way.

"Yes, as a matter of fact. Yes, I would."

Miss Fellowes made a sweeping gesture toward the refrigeration cabinets.

Take a good look, she thought. I think you'll be happy when you do.

Indeed Levien seemed pleased by what she found-a bunch of vials and ampoules and drip-globes and mixa-tion pods. The entire inhuman assortment of synthetic diets, so remote from anything that Miss Fellowes thought of as wholesome food, that Dr. Jacobs and his associates had insisted Timmie had to eat against Miss Fellowes* vehement objections. Levien prowled through the racks of high-tech foodstuffs with evident approval. It was just the kind of superfuturistic stuff she'd be likely to go for, Miss Fellowes thought angrily. She probably ate nothing but synthetics herself. If she ate anything at all.

"No complaints there," Levien said after a time. "Your nutrition people seem to know what they're doing."

"The boy does appear healthy," said Mannheim. "But I'm concerned about this enforced solitude of his."

"Yes," Marianne Levien chimed in. "So am I. Very much so."

Mannheim said, "It's bad enough that he's being deprived of the supportive tribal structures into which he was born-but the fact that Timmie has to do without companionship of any sort does indeed seem extremely troublesome to me."

"Don't I count as companionship, Mr. Mannheim?" Miss Fellowes asked, with some asperity. "I'm with him virtually all the time, you know."

"I was referring to die need for someone close to his own age. A playmate. This experiment is planned to run for a considerable length of time, Dr. Hoskins, is it not?"

"There's a great deal we hope to learn from Timmie about the era from which he comes. As his command of English improves-and Miss Fellowes assures me that he's becoming quite fluent, even though it's not easy for some of us to make out exactly what he's saying-"

"In other words, you intend to keep him here for a period of some years, Dr. Hoskins?" Marianne Levien said.

"That could be, yes."

Mannheim said, "Perpetually penned up in a few small rooms? And never being exposed to contact with children of his own age? Is that any kind of life for a healthy young boy like Timmie, do you think?"

Hoskins' eyes moved quickly from one to the other. He looked outnumbered and beleaguered.

He said, "Miss Fellowes has already brought up the issue of getting a playmate for Timmie. I assure you that we've got no desire whatever to cripple the boy's emotional development or any other aspect of his existence."

Miss Fellowes glanced at him in surprise. She had brought the issue up, yes. But nothing had come of it. Since that one inconclusive conversation in the company cafeteria, Hoskins hadn't said the slightest thing to her in response to her request that Timmie be given a child to keep him company. He had brushed the idea off then as unworkable, and he had seemed so taken aback by the whole notion, in fact, that Miss Fellowes had hesitated to bring it up with him a second time. For the moment Timmie had been getting along quite satisfactorily on his own. But lately she had begun to look ahead, thinking that Timmie's adaptation to modern life was proceeding so quickly that the moment to raise the point again with Hoskins was approaching.

And now Mannheim was raising it first, for which Miss Fellowes was immensely grateful. The children's advocate was absolutely right. Timmie couldn't be kept in here all by himself like an ape in a cage. Timmie wasn't an ape. And even a gorilla or a chimpanzee wouldn't do well cut off indefinitely from the society of his peers.

Mannheim said, "Well, then, if you've already been working on getting a companion for him, I'd like to know what progress has been made along those lines."

Suddenly his tone was no longer so amiable.

Sounding flustered, Hoskins said, "So far as bringing a second Neanderthal back to the present rime to put in here with Timmie goes, which was Miss Fellowes' original suggestion, I have to tell you that we simply don't intend-"

"A second Neanderthal? Oh, no, Dr. Hoskins," said Mannheim. "We wouldn't want that at all."

"It's a serious enough matter that there's one already incarcerated here," Marianne Levien said. "To capture a second one would only compound the problem."

Hoskins shot her a venomous glare. Sweat was streaming down his face.

"I said that we don't intend to bring a second Neanderthal here," he replied, virtually between clenched teeth. "That's never been under consideration. Never! There are a dozen different reasons why. When Miss Fellowes brought it up the first time, I told her-"

Mannheim and Levien exchanged glances. They appeared bothered by Hoskins' sudden vehemence. Even Timmie began to seem a little alarmed, and moved up close against Miss Fellowes' side as though seeking protection.

Smoothly Mannheim said, "We're all agreed, Dr. Hoskins, that a second Neanderthal would be a bad idea. That's not the point at all. What we want to know is whether it would be possible for Timmie to be given a- well, what word do I want? Not human, because Timmie is human. But modern. A modern playmate. A child of this era."

"A child who could visit Timmie on a regular basis," said Marianne Levien, "and provide him with the kind of developmental stimuli that would tend to further the healthy sociocultural assimilation which we all agree is necessary."

"Just a minute," Hoskins snapped. "What assimilation? Are you imagining a pleasant future life in some cozy little suburb for Timmie? Applying for American citizenship, joining a church, settling down and getting married? May I remind you that what we have here is a prehistoric child from an era so remote that we can't even call it barbaric-a Stone Age child, a visitor from what you yourself, Dr. Levien, once described with some accuracy as an alien society. And you think he's going to become-"

Levien cut in coolly. "Timmie's hypothetical citizenship application and church membership aren't the issue, Dr. Hoskins, or any other such reductio ad absurdum. Timmie is still a child, and it's the quality of the childhood that he experiences that Mr. Mannheim and I are primarily concerned with. The conditions under which he's being held as of now are unacceptable. They would, I'm sure, have been unacceptable in Timmie's own society, however alien from ours in some respects it must surely have been. Every human society we know, no matter how remote its paradigms and parameters may be from ours, assures its children the right to a nurturing integration into its social matrix. There's no way that we can regard Timmie's present living conditions as providing him with that sort of adequately nurturant social matrix."

Acidly Hoskins said, "Which means in words of one syllable comprehensible by a mere physicist like myself,

Dr. Levien, that you think Timmie ought to have a playmate."

"Not merely 'ought to,' " Levien said. "Must."

"I'm afraid we're going to take the position that companionship for the child is essential," said Mannheim in a less belligerent tone than Levien's.

"Essential," Hoskins repeated bleakly.

"A minimum first step," Levien said. "This is not to say that we are prepared to regard the boy's incarceration in our era for a prolonged period as acceptable or permissible. But for the moment, at least, we think we can waive our other outstanding objections and therefore the experiment can be permitted to continue-is that not so, Mr. Mannheim?"

"Permitted!" Hoskins cried.

"Provided," Marianne Levien continued serenely, "that Timmie be allowed the opportunity to enjoy regular and emotionally nourishing contact with other children of his chronological peer group."

Hoskins looked toward Miss Fellowes for some sort of support under this onslaught. But she could offer him no help.

"I have to agree, Dr. Hoskins," said Miss Fellowes, feeling like a traitor. "I've felt this way all along, and it's becoming more urgent now. The boy's coming along very nicely, indeed. But the point is close at hand where continuing to live in this kind of social vacuum will be very bad for him. And since there aren't going to be any other children of Timmie's own subspecies available to him-"

Hoskins turned to her as if to say, You're against me too?

There was silence for a moment in the room. Timmie, who seemed increasingly disturbed by the vocifet-ousness of the discussion, clung ever tighter to Miss Fellowes.

At length Hoskins said, "Those are your terms, Mr. Mannheim? Dr. Levien? A playmate for Timmie or you'll bring your hordes of protesters down on my head?"

Mannheim said, "No threats are being made, Dr. Hoskins. But even your own Miss Fellowes sees the need for implementing our recommendation."

"Right. And you think it'll be easy to find people who'll cheerfully let their young children come in here and play with a little Neanderthal? With all those fantastic notions circulating out there about how savage and ferocious and primitive Neanderthal Man must have been?"

"It should be no harder," Mannheim said, "than being able to bring a little Neanderthal child into die twenty-first century in the first place. A good deal easier, I'd like to think."

"I can imagine what our counsel would have to say about that. The cost of liability insurance alone-assuming we can find anyone crazy enough to allow their child inside the Stasis bubble with Timmie-"

"Timmie doesn't seem all that ferocious to me," said Mannheim. "He seems quite gentle, as a matter of fact. Wouldn't you say so, Miss Fellowes?"

"And as Miss Fellowes pointed out earlier," Marianne Levien said with icy sweetness, "we must not regard Timmie as being in any way subhuman, merely as unusual in certain physical aspects."

"So of course you'd be delighted to let your own small child come in and play with him," said Hoskins. "Except you don't happen to have any children, do you, Dr. Levien? No, of course you don't. -What about you, Mannheim? Do you have a little boy you'd like to volunteer for us?"

Mannheim looked stung. Stiffly he said, "That's neither here nor there, Dr. Hoskins. I assure you that if I had been fortunate enough to have children, I wouldn't hesitate to offer to help. -I understand your resentment at what you see as outside interference, doctor. But by transporting Timmie to our era, you've taken the law into your own hands. It's time now to consider the full implications of what you've done. You can't keep the boy in solitary confinement simply because there's a scientific experiment going on here. You can't, Dr. Hoskins."