FOR EDITH FELLOWES it was a tremendously busy few weeks.
The hardest part was the winding up of her work at the hospital. Giving only two weeks' notice was not only irregular, it was downright improper; but the administration was reasonably sympathetic once Miss Fellowes let it be known that she was leaving with the greatest reluctance, and only because she had been offered an opportunity to take part in an incredibly exciting new research project.
She mentioned the name of Stasis Technologies, Ltd.
"You're going to be taking care of the baby dinosaur?" they asked her, and everybody chuckled.
"No, not the dinosaur," she said. "Something much closer to what I know."
She didn't give any further details. Dr. Hoskins had forbidden her to go into specifics with anyone. But it wasn't hard for those who knew and worked with Edith Fellowes to guess that the project must have something to do with children; and if her employers were the people who had brought that famous baby dinosaur out of the
Mesozoic, then surely they must be planning to do something along the same lines now-such as bringing some prehistoric child out of a remote period of time. Miss Fellowes neither confirmed or denied it. But they knew. They all knew. Her leave of absence from the hospital was granted, of course.
Still, she had to work virtually round the clock for a few days, tying off loose ends, filing her final reports, preparing lists of things for her successors, separating her own equipment and research materials from the hospital's. That part was strenuous but not otherwise burdensome. The really difficult part was saying goodbye to the children. They couldn't believe that she was leaving.
"You'll be back in a week or two, won't you, Miss Fellowes?" they asked her, crowding around. "You'll just be going on vacation, isn't that so? A little holiday? -Where are you going, Miss Fellowes?"
She had known some of these children since the day they were born. Now they were five, six, seven years old: outpatients, most of them, but some were permanent residents and she had worked with them year in, year out.
That was hard, breaking the news to them, very hard.
But she steeled herself to the task. Anodier child needed her now, an extraordinarily special child, a child whose predicament would be unique in the history of the universe. She knew that she had to go where she would be most needed.
She closed up her small apartment on the south side of town, selecting the few things she would want to take with her to her new home, storing away the rest. That was done quickly enough. She had no houseplants to worry about, no cats, no pets of any kind. Her work had been the only thing that really mattered: the children, always the children, no need for plants or pets.
But in her prudent way she arranged to maintain her lease for an indefinite period of time. She was taking very seriously Gerald Hoskins' warning that she might be let go at any moment. Or might want to resign, for that matter: Miss Fellowes knew she should allow for the possibility that the operation at Stasis Technologies would be uncongenial to her, that her role in the project would be unsatisfying, that she might discover very swifdy that it had been a gigantic mistake to have taken the job. She hadn't burned her bridges, not at all: the hospital would be waiting for her return, the children, her apartment.
During those final two weeks, busy as she was, she made several trips across town to the headquarters of Stasis Technologies to help prepare for the arrival of the child from the past. They had given her a procurement staff of three, two young men and a woman, and she provided them with an extensive list of things she would need- medicines, nutritional supplements, even an incubator.
"An incubator?" Hoskins asked.
"An incubator," she said.
"We're not planning to bring back a premature child, Miss Fellowes."
"You don't know what you're bringing back, Dr. Hoskins. You told me so yourself, in just about that many words. You may be bringing a sick child; you may be bringing a weak one; you may be bringing a child who'll fall ill the moment it starts to get modern-day microbes into its system. I want an incubator, at least on a standby basis."
"An incubator. All right."
"And a sterile chamber big enough to contain an active and healthy child, if it turns out that it's too big to live in an incubator."
"Miss Fellowes, be reasonable, please. Our budget is-"
"A sterile chamber. Until we know that it's safe to let that child be contaminated by our air."
"Contamination is unavoidable, I'm afraid. It'll be breathing our microbe-ridden air from the moment it arrives. There's no way we can conduct the Stasis under the germ-free conditions you seem to want. No way, Miss Fellowes."
"I want there to be a way."
Hoskins gave her what she had already come to think of as his patented no-nonsense glare. "This is one that I'm going to win, Miss Fellowes. I appreciate your desire to protect the child from all imaginable risks. But you have no understanding of the physical layout of our equipment, and you've simply got to accept the fact that we can't deliver the child instantly into a perfectly pure isolation chamber. We can't."
"And if the child sickens and dies?"
"Our dinosaur is still in fine health."
"There's no reason to believe that reptiles, prehistoric or otherwise, would be subject to infection by the microorganisms that carry the diseases humans contract. But this is a human being you'll be bringing here, Dr. Hoskins, not a little dinosaur. A member of our own species."
"I appreciate that fact, Miss Fellowes."
"And therefore I ask you to-"
"And I tell you the answer is no. Some risks have to be shouldered here, and microbial infection is one of them. We'll be ready with all possible medical assistance if a problem develops. But we're not going to try to create a miraculous magical 100% safe environment. We're not," Then Hoskins' tone softened. -"Miss Fellowes, just let me say this much. I've got a child myself, a little boy, not even old enough for kindergarten yet. Yes, at my age, and he's the most wonderful thing that ever happened in my life, bar none. I want you to know, Miss Fellowes, that I'm as concerned about the safety of the child that'll be arriving here next week as I would be for my own son Jerry's. And as confident that all will go well as though my own son were involved in the experiment."
Miss Fellowes wasn't sure that the logic of his argument was especially sound. But it was clear enough to her that he wasn't going to be shaken on this point, and that she had no leverage with him short of resigning. The possibility of resignation was something that she would hold in reserve, but it was pointless to threaten it now. It was the only weapon she had. She had to save it for the right moment, and this didn't seem to be it.
Hoskins was equally adamant about letting her have an advance look at the area where the child would be housed. "That's the Stasis zone," he said, "and we're running a non-stop countdown in there. Nobody can go in there while that's going on. Nobody. Not you, not me, not the President of the United States. And we can't interrupt the countdown for the sake of letting you have a sight-seeing tour."
"But if the accommodations are inadequate-"
"The accommodations are adequate, Miss Fellowes. More than adequate. Trust me."
"I'd still prefer-"
"Yes. Trust me."
Despicable words. Yet somehow she did trust him, more or less,
She still wasn't sure what kind of scientist Hoskins might be, or how good, despite that vague, boastful PH.D. on his nameplate. But one thing was certain. He was a tough administrator. He hadn't come to be the head man of Stasis Technologies, Ltd. by being a pushover.
6
At precisely five in the afternoon on the fifteenth of the month, Miss Fellowes' telephone rang. It was Phil Bryce, one of Hoskins* staffers.
"The countdown's in its final three hours, Miss Fellowes, and everything's right on target. We'll be sending a car to pick you up at seven o'clock sharp."
"I can get over there on my own, thank you."
"Dr. Hoskins has instructed us to send a car to pick you up. It'll be there at seven."
Miss Fellowes sighed. She could argue, but what was the use?
Let Hoskins win the small victories, she decided. Save your ammunition for the big battles that surely lay ahead.
7
A light rain was falling. The evening sky was gray and dreary, and the Stasis Technologies buildings looked uglier than ever, big barn-like structures without the slightest scrap of elegance or grace.
Everything seemed makeshift and hasty. There was a harsh, engineery feel about the place, cheerless and inhumane. She had spent her whole working life in institutional surroundings, but these buildings made even the most somber hospital look like the abode of joy and laughter. And the badged employees, going rigidly about their business, the closed-in faces, the hushed tones, the air of almost military urgencyWhat am I doing here? she asked herself. How did I ever get drawn into all of this?
"This way, please, Miss Fellowes," Bryce said.
People began to nod and beckon to her. No announcements of her identity seemed necessary. One after another, men and women seemed to know her and to know her function. Of course, she was wearing a badge herself now, but no one appeared to look at that. They all just knew. This is the nurse for the child, they seemed to be saying. She found herself all but placed on skids as she was moved swiftly inward, down corridors that had a tacky, improvised look, into an area of the research center that she had never entered before.
They descended clanging metallic stairs, emerged into a windowless tunnel of some sort lit by glaring fluorescent lights, walked for what seemed like forever underground until coming to a steel doorway with the rippling moire patterns of a security shield dancing up and down over its painted black surface.
"Put your badge to the shield," Bryce said.
"Really, is all this necess-"
"Please, Miss Fellowes. Please."
The doorway yielded. More stairs confronted them. Up and up and up, spiraling around the walls of ah immense barrel-shaped vault, down a hallway, through another door-did they really need all this?
At last she found herself stepping out onto a balcony that looked down into a large pit. Across from her, down below, was a bewildering array of instruments set into a curving matrix that looked like a cross between the control panel of a spaceship and the working face of a giant computer-or, perhaps, just a movie set for some fantastic and nonsensical "scientific" epic. Technicians, looking rumpled and wild-eyed, were racing around down there in an absurdly theatrical way, making frantic hand signals to each other. People were moving thick black cables from one oudet to another, studying them and shaking their heads, moving them back to their original positions. Lights were flashing, numbers were ticking downward on huge screens.
Dr. Hoskins was on the balcony not far away, but he only looked at her distantly and murmured, "Miss Fel-lowes." He seemed abstracted, preoccupied, hardly present at all.
He didn't even suggest that she take a seat, though there were four or five rows of folding chairs set up near the railing overlooking the frenzied scene below. She found one herself and drew it up to the edge for a better view.
Suddenly lights came on in the pit, illuminating the area just beneath where she sat, which had been completely dark. She looked down and saw partitions that seemed to make up an unceilinged apartment, a giant dollhouse into the rooms of which it was possible to look from above.
She could see what seemed to be a microwave cooker and a freezer-space unit in one room and a washroom arrangement off another. There was a small cubicle full of medical equipment of a kind that was very familiar to her -indeed, it appeared to contain all the things she had asked Hoskins' staffers to provide. Including the incubator.
And surely die object she made out in another room could only be part of a bed, a small bed.
Men and women wearing company badges were filing into the room, now, taking the seats alongside her. Miss Fellowes recognized a few of them as Stasis executives to whom she had been introduced on her earlier visits here, though she was unable to remember a single name. Others were completely unknown to her. They all nodded and smiled in her direction as if she had been working here for years.
Then she saw someone whose name and face were familiar to her: a thin, fine-looking man of fifty-five or thereabouts, with a small, fastidiously clipped gray mustache and keen eyes that seemed to busy themselves with everything.
Candide Deveney! The science correspondent for International Telenews!
Miss Fellowes wasn't much of a screen-watcher. An hour or two a week, sometimes even less; there were weeks when she didn't even remember to turn the thing on. Books were sufficient entertainment for her, and for long stretches of time her work itself was so fascinating that even books seemed unnecessary. But Candide Deveney was one screen person she did know. There were times, every once in a while, when some event of immense interest came along that she simply had to see, not merely read about-the landing on Mars, for instance, or the public unveiling of the baby dinosaur, or the spectacular nuclear destruction, high above the Eastern Hemisphere, of that tiny but deadly asteroid that had been on a collision course with Earth the year before last. Candide Deveney had been the on-screen face during those events. He was notoriously at the scene of every major scientific breakthrough. That he was here tonight impressed Miss Fellowes despite herself. She felt her heart beating just a little faster at the realization that this must indeed be going to be something of high importance if it was worthy of his being present here, and that she was almost close enough to reach out and touch Candide Deveney himself as the great moment approached.
Then she scowled at her own foolishness. Deveney was only a reporter, after all. Why should she be so awed by him, merely because she had seen him on television?
What was a more fitting reason for awe, she thought, was that they were going to reach into the remoteness of time and bring a little human being forth into the twenty-first century. And she was going to be a vital part of that enterprise. She-not Candide Deveney. If anything, Candide Deveney ought to feel impressed at being in the same room with Edith Fellowes, not the other way around.
Hoskins had gone over to greet Deveney, and seemed to be explaining the project to him. Miss Fellowes inclined her head to listen.
Deveney was saying, "I've been thinking about what you people have been doing here ever since my last visit here, the day the dinosaur came. -There's one thing in particular I've been wrestling with, and it's this matter of selectivity."
"Go on," Hoskins said.
"You can reach out only so far; that seems sensible. Things get dimmer the farther you go. It takes more energy, and ultimately you run up against absolute limits of energy-I don't have any problem comprehending that. -But then, apparently you can reach out only so near, also. That's what I find the puzzling part. And not only me. I mean, if you can go out and grab something from 100 million years ago, you ought to be able to bring something back from last Tuesday with a whole lot less effort. And yet you tell me you can't reach last Tuesday at all, or anything else that's at all close to us in time. Why is that?"
Hoskins said, "I can make it seem less paradoxical, Deveney, if you will allow me to use an analogy."
(He calls him "Deveney"! Miss Fellowes thought. Like a college professor casually explaining something to a student!)
"By all means use an analogy," Deveney said. "Whatever you think will help."
"Well, then: you can't read a book with ordinary-sized print if it's held six feet from your eyes, can you? But you can read it quite easily if you hold it, say, one root away. So far, the closer the better. If you bring the book to within an inch of your eyes, though, you've lost it again. The human eye simply can't focus on anything that close. So distance is a determining factor in more than one way. Too close is just as bad as too far, at least where vision is involved."
"Hmm," said Deveney.
"Or take another example. Your right shoulder is about thirty inches from the tip of your right forefinger and you can place your right forefinger on your right shoulder without any difficulty whatsoever. Well, now. Your right elbow is only half as far from the tip of your right forefinger as your shoulder is. By all ordinary logic it ought to be a lot easier to touch it with your finger than your shoulder. Go on, then: put your right forefinger on your right elbow. Again, there's such a thing as being too close."
Deveney said, "I can use these analogies of yours in my story, can't I?"
"Well, of course. Use whatever you like. You know you've got free access. For this one we want the whole world looking over our shoulder. There's going to be plenty here to see."
(Miss Fellowes found herself admiring Hoskins' calm certainty despite herself. There was strength there.)
Deveney said, "How far out are you planning to reach tonight?"
"Forty thousand years."
Miss Fellowes drew in her breath sharply.
Forty thousand years?
8
She had never considered that possibility. She had been too busy with other things, things like breaking off her professional ties with the hospital and getting settled in here. She became aware now, suddenly, that there was a good deal of fundamental thinking about this project dial she had never taken the trouble to do.
She knew, of course, that they were going to be bringing a child from the past into die modern world. She understood-although she wasn't certain exactly where she had picked up the information-that the child would be taken from the prehistoric era.
But "prehistoric" could mean almost anything. Most of Europe could have been considered "prehistoric" only diree thousand years ago. There were a few parts of the world still living a sort of prehistoric existence today. Miss Fellowes had assumed, in so far as she had given the matter any real consideration at all, that the child would be drawn from some nomadic pre-agricultural era, possibly going back five or at most ten thousand years.
But forty thousand?
She wasn't prepared for that. Would die child they were going to hand her be recognizable at all as human? Had diere even been such a thing as Homo sapiens forty thousand years ago?
Miss Fellowes found herself wishing she could remember a little of her college anthropology courses of long ago, but right at this moment only the merest shreds of information came to the surface of her mind, and those, Miss Fellowes feared, were hopelessly garbled and distorted. Before true human beings had evolved, there had been the Neanderthal people, yes? Primitive brutish creatures. And the even more primitive Pithecandiropus people had roamed die world before them, and something else with an equally intricate name, and probably some odier kinds of pre-men or sub-men, too, shaggy little naked ape-creatures that could more or less be ccjn-sidered to be our distant ancestors. But how far back in time had all these ancestral people lived? Twenty thousand years ago? Fifty? A hundred thousand? She really knew nothing useful about the time-frame of all this.
Great God in heaven, am I going to be taking care of an ape-child?
She began to tremble. Here she was, fussing over incubators and sterile chambers, and they were preparing to toss something very much like a chimpanzee into her lap, weren't they? Weren't they? Some fierce hairy little wild thing with claws and teeth, something that really belonged in a zoo, if anywhere, not in the care of a specialist
Well, maybe not. Maybe the Neanderthals and the Pithecanthropuses and all those other early forms of human-like life had lived a million years ago and more, and what she'd be getting would be nothing more than a wild little boy. She had coped with wild little boys before.
Still, it sounded like such an enormous span of time, forty thousand years. The vastness of it dizzied her.
Forty thousand years?
Forty thousand years?
9
There was tension in the air. Now the chaotic ballet in die pit below had ceased, and the technicians at die controls were scarcely moving at all. They communicated with one another by means of signals so subtle that it was almost impossible to detect diem-a flick of an eyebrow, the tapping of a ringer on die back of a wrist.
One man at a microphone spoke into it in a soft monotone, saying things in short phrases that made no sense to Miss Fellowes-numbers, mostly, punctuated by what sounded like phrases in code, cryptic and impenetrable.
Deveney had taken a seat just next to her. Hoskins was on the other side. Leaning over the balcony railing with an intent stare, the scientific reporter said, "Is there going to be anything for us to see, Dr. Hoskins? Visual effects, I mean."
"What? No. Nothing till the job is done. We detect indirectly, something on the principle of radar, except that we use mesons rather than radiation. We've been running the meson scans for weeks, tuning and retuning. Mesons reach backward-under the proper conditions. Some are reflected and we have to analyze the reflections, and we feed them back in and use them as guides for the next probe, fining it down until we start approximating the desired level of accuracy."
"That sounds like a tough job. How can you be sure you've reached the right level?"
Hoskins smiled, his usual quick one, a cool on-off flash. "We've been at work on this for fifteen years, now. Closer to twenty-five, if you count the work of our 'predecessor company, which developed a lot of the basic principles but wasn't able to break through to real reliability. -Yes, it's tough, Deveney. Very tough. And scary."
The man at the microphone raised his hand.
"Scary?" Deveney said.
"We don't like to fail. I definitely don't. And failure's an ever-present default mode in our operation. We're working in probabilistic areas here. Quantum effects, you understand. The best we can hope for is likeliness, never certainty. That's not good enough, really. But it's the best we can hope for."
"Still, you seem pretty confident."
"Yes," Hoskins said. "We've had the fix on this one particular moment in time for weeks-breaking it, remaking it after factoring in our own temporal movements, checking parallaxes, looking for every imaginable relativistic distortion, constantly seeking assurance that we can handle time flow with sufficient precision. And we think we can do it. I'd almost be willing to say that we know we can."
But his forehead was glistening.
There was a sudden terrible silence in the room, broken only by the sound of uneasy breathing. Edith Fellowes found herself rising from her seat, leaning forward, gripping the balcony railing.
But there was nothing to see.
"Now," said the man at the microphone quietly.
The silence ascended to a higher level. It was a new kind of silence, total silence, a silence more profound than Miss Fellowes had ever imagined could be achieved in a room full of people. But it lasted no longer than the space of a single breath.
Then came the sound of a terrified little boy's scream from the dollhouse rooms below. It was a scream of the most awful intensity, the kind of scream that made you want to cover your ears with your hands.
Terror! Piercing terror!
A frightened child, crying out in a moment of utter shock and despair, letting its voice ring forth with astonishing power and force-an expression of such overwhelming horror as could barely be believed.
Miss Fellowes' head twisted in the direction of the cry.
And Hoskins' fist pounded on the railing and he said in a tight voice, trembling with triumph, "Did it!"
10
They went rushing down the short spiral flight of steps that led to the operations room, Hoskins in the lead, Deveney just behind him, and Miss Fellowes-unasked- following the journalist. Perhaps it was a terrible breach of security for her to be going down there now, she thought. But she had heard the cry that child had uttered.
She belonged down there at least as much as Candide Deveney, she told herself.
At the bottom of the staircase Hoskins paused and looked around. He seemed a little surprised that Miss Fellowes had come down after him-but only a little. He said nothing to her.
The mood in the operations room had changed dramatically now. All the frenzy was gone, and most of the tension. The technicians who had been monitoring the time-scoop equipment looked utterly spent. They stood by quietly, appearing almost dazed. Hoskins ignored them too. It was as though they were mere discarded parts of the machinery, no longer of any importance to him.
A very soft buzz sounded (mm the direction of the dollhouse.
Hoskins said, "We'll go inside now."
"Into the Stasis field?" Deveney asked, looking uneasy.
"It's perfectly safe to enter Stasis. I've done it a thousand times. There's a queer sensation when you pass through the envelope of the field, but it's momentary and it doesn't mean a thing. Trust me."
He stepped through an open door in mute demonstration. Deveney, smiling stiffly and drawing an obviously deep breath, followed him an instant later.
Hoskins said, "You too, Miss Fellowes. Please!"
He crooked his forefinger impatiently.
Miss Fellowes nodded and stepped across the threshold. She felt the field unmistakably. It was as though a ripple had gone through her, an internal tickle.
But once she was inside she was aware of no unusual sensations. Everything seemed normal. She picked up the clean fresh smell of the newly constructed wooden rooms, and something else-an earthy smell, the smell of a forest, somehowThe panicky screaming, she realized, had ended some time ago. Everything was quiet inside the stasis field now. And then she heard the dry shuffling of feet, a scrabbling as of fingers against wood-and, she thought, a low moan.
"Where is the child?" asked Miss Fellowes in distress.
Hoskins was examining some dials and meters just inside the entrance to the dollhouse. Deveney was gaping idiotically at him. Neither one seemed in any hurry to look after the child-the child that this vast and incomprehensible mass of machinery had just ripped out of some unthinkably ancient era.
Didn't these fool men care?
Miss Fellowes went forward on her own authority, around an elbow-bend corridor that led to the room with the bed in it.
The child was in there. A boy. A very small boy, very dirty, very scrawny, very strange-looking.
He might have been three years old-certainly not very much more than that. He was naked. His small dirt-smeared chest was heaving raggedly. All around him lay an untidy sprawl of loose earth and pebbles and torn-off tufts of coarse grass, all of it strewn around the floor in a broad arc as though a bushel load of landfill had been casually upended in the room. The rich smell of soil rose up from it, and a touch of something fetid, besides. Miss Fellowes saw some large dark ants and what might have been a couple of furry little spiders moving around slowly near the boy's bare brown feet.
Hoskins followed her horrified glance and said with a sharp thrust of annoyance in his voice, "You can't pluck a boy cleanly out of time, Miss Fellowes. We had to take some of the surroundings with him for safety's sake. Or would you have preferred to have him arrive here minus one of his legs or with only half a head?"
"Please!" said Miss Fellowes, in an agony of revulsion. "Are we just going to stand here? The poor child is frightened. And it's filthy."
Which was an understatement. She had never seen a child that was quite so disreputable-looking. Perhaps he hadn't been washed in weeks; perhaps not ever. He reeked. His entire body was smeared with a thick layer of encrusted grime and grease, and there was a long scratch on his thigh that looked red and sore, possibly infected.
"Here, let me have a look at you-" Hoskins muttered, stepping forward in a gingerly way.
The boy hunched low, pulling his elbows in against his sides and drawing his head down close against his shoulders in what seemed like an innate defensive stance, and backed away rapidly. His eyes were fiery with fear and defiance. When he reached the far side of the room and could go no farther, he lifted his upper lip and snarled in a hissing fashion, like a cat. It was a frightening sound- savage, bestial, ferocious.
Miss Fellowes felt a cold shock wave sweeping through her nervous system. This was her new charge? This? This little-animal?
It was as bad as she had feared.
Worse. Worse. He hardly seemed human. He was hideous; he was a little monster.
Hoskins reached out swiftly and seized both of the child's wrists, pulling his arms inward across his body and crossing them over his belly. In the same motion Hoskins lifted him, kicking and writhing and screaming, from the floor.
Ghastly banshee howls came forth from the child. They erupted from the depths of his body with astonishing force. Miss Fellowes realized that she was trembling, and forced herself to be calm. It was a frightful noise, ear-splitting, repellent, sub-human. It was almost impossible to believe that a boy so small could make sounds so horrendous.
Hoskins held him at arms' length in midair and looked around in obvious distress at Miss Fellowes.
"Yes, hold him, now. Don't put him down. Watch out for his toenails when he kicks. Take him into the bathroom and let's clean him up. That's what he needs before anything else, a good warm bath."
Hoskins nodded. Small as the child was, it didn't seem to be any easy matter to keep him pinioned that way. A grown man and a little child: but there was tremendous wild strength in the child, small as he was. And beyond any doubt he thought that he was fighting for his life.
"Fill that tub, Miss Fellowes!" Hoskins yelled. "Fill it fast!"
There were other people inside the Stasis area now. In the midst of the confusion Miss Fellowes recognized her three assistants and singled them out.
"You, Elliott-get the water running. Mortenson, I want antibiotics for that infection on his leg. In fact, bring the whole antisepsis kit into the bathroom. Stratford, find yourself a cleanup crew and start getting all this trash and filth removed from here!"
They began to snap to it. Now that she was giving the orders, her initial shock and horror were starting to drop away and some degree of professional aplomb returned to her. This was going to be difficult, yes. But she was a specialist in managing difficult cases. And she had been up against plenty of them during the course of her career.
Workmen appeared. Storage canisters were brought in. The workmen began to sweep away the soil and debris and carry the canisters off to a containment area somewhere in back. Hoskins called to them, "Remember, not a scrap goes outside the bubble!"
Miss Fellowes strode after Hoskins into the bathroom and signaled for him to plunge the boy into the tub, which Elliott was rapidly filling with warm water. No longer just one of a group of confused spectators, but now an efficient and experienced nurse swinging into action, she was collected enough to pause and look at the child with a calm, clinical eye, seeing him clearly as though for the first time.
What she saw overwhelmed her with new dismay. She hesitated for one shocked moment, fighting against the sudden emotions that swirled up through her unguarded mind. She saw past the dirt and shrieking, past the thrashing of limbs and useless twisting. She saw the boy himself.
Her first impression in that moment of chaos had been right. He was the ugliest boy she had ever seen. He was horribly ugly-from misshapen head to bandy legs.
His body was exceptionally stocky, very deep through the chest and broad in the shoulders. All right; nothing terribly unusual about that, really. But that long oversized skull! That bulging, sloping forehead! That immense potato of a nose, with its dark cavernous nostrils, which opened outward as much as downward. The great staring eyes framed in those huge bony rims! The receding chin, the short neck, the dwarfish limbs!
Forty thousand years, Miss Fellowes told herself numbly.
Not human. Not really.
An animal. Her worst-case scenario had come true. An ape-child; that was what he was. Some kind of chimpanzee, more or less. That was what they were paying her all this money to look after! How could she? What old she know about caring for little savage prehistoric apes?
And yet-yetMaybe she was wrong about him. She hoped so most profoundly. There was the glow of unmistakably human intelligence in those huge, gleaming, furious eyes of his. His skin, light brown, almost tawny, was covered only with fine golden down, not the coarse shaggy pelt that one would imagine an animal-child to have. And his face, ugly as it was-it wasn't really the face of any kind of ape. You had to look behind the superficial strangeness, and when you did you saw that he was really just a little boy.
A little boy, yes, an ugly little boy, a strange little boy, a human boy-a dirty little frightened child with bandy legs and a peculiarly shaped head and a miserable excuse for a chin and an infected cut on his thigh and a curious red birthmark on his cheek that looked like a jagged bolt of lightning-yes, yes, he wasn't at all like any child she had ever seen, but nevertheless she would try to think of him as a human being, this poor lost frightened child who had been snatched out of time. Perhaps she would succeed. Perhaps.
But Lord, he was ugly! Lord, Lord, Lord, it was going to be a real challenge to love anything that looked as ugly as this child did! Miss Fellowes wasn't at all sure that she would be able to do it, despite everything that she had told Dr. Hoskins when he had interviewed her. And that was a deeply troubling thought.
The tub was full now. Elliott, a brawny dark-haired man with huge hands and thick wrists, had taken the boy from Dr. Hoskins and was holding his squirming body half submerged. Mortenson, the other assistant, had wheeled in the medical tray. Miss Fellowes squirted half a tube of antiseptic soap into the bathtub and a yellowish bubbly foam began to churn up. The bubbles seemed to catch the child's attention for a moment and it stopped howling and kicking-but only for a moment. Then it must have remembered that something horrible was happening to it, and it went back to struggling.
Elliott laughed. "He's a slippery little bugger. Almost got away from me that time."
"Make sure he doesn't," Miss Fellowes said grimly. "My Lord, what filth! Careful-hold him! Hold him!"
It was a brutal job. Even with two men helping her, it was all she could manage to keep the boy under some measure of control. He never stopped squirming, wriggling, kicking, scratching, bellowing. Whether he thought he was defending his life or just his dignity Miss Fellowes had no idea, but she had rarely had such a reluctant patient as this. They were all splashed with soapy, dirty water now, and Elliott had stopped laughing. The boy had raked his arm with his fingernails and a long bloody line showed beneath the thick curling hair. Miss Feilowes wondered whether it might be necessary to sedate the child in order to get the job finished. She regarded that only as a desperate last resort.
"Get yourself an antibiotic shot when we're done," she said to Elliott. "That's a nasty scratch. There's no telling what kind of prehistoric microbes that boy may be carrying under his fingernails."
She realized that she had forgotten all about her earlier demand to have the child arrive into a sterile, germ-free environment. Somehow that seemed like mere foolishness to her now. The boy was so strong, so agile, so fierce; and she had imagined a weak, vulnerable little thingWell, Miss Fellowes told herself, he was still vulnerable, regardless of the way he fought. They'd have to monitor him very closely in the first few days to make sure that he wasn't coming down with some bacterial infection to which he had no built-in resistance.
"Lift him out of the tub for a minute, Elliott," she said. "Mortenson, let's put some clean water in there. Lord, Lord, what a filthy little child!"
The bath process seemed to go on and on forever.
Miss Fellowes worked in silence and with a sense of rising outrage. Her mood was beginning to swing back the other way, toward annoyance, toward actual anger. She was no longer thinking of how stimulating it was to tackle a difficult challenge. What was uppermost in her mind now, spurred by the continued wild smugglings and outcries of the boy and the way she and everything about her was getting drenched, was the notion that Hoskins had tricked her into accepting an impossible assignment whose true nature she had not really understood.
He had hinted that the child wouldn't be pretty. But that was a long way from saying that it would be repulsively deformed and as intractable as a jungle animal. And there was a stench about the boy that soap and water was managing to alleviate only little by little.
As the battle continued, she had die strong desire to thrust the boy into Dr. Hoskins' arms-soapy and wet as the child was-and walk right out of this place. But Miss Fellowes knew that she couldn't do that. There was the matter of her professional pride, after all. For better or for worse, she had agreed to take this job on. She would simply have to go through with that. Hoskins hadn't tricked her in any way, she admitted to herself. He had told her that the work was going to be tough. He had said the child would be difficult, strange, unruly, perhaps highly disagreeable. Those had been his exact words. He had asked her if she was prepared to love the child unconditionally-regardless of the way its chin might recede or its brow might bulge. And she had said yes, yes, yes, she was prepared to deal with all that.
- And there would be the look in Hoskins' eyes, if she walked out now. A cold searching look that would say, So I was right. You're only interested in looking after pretty children, eh, Miss FeHowes?
She glanced over at him. Hoskins was standing apart from them, watching coolly from a distance with a half-smile on his face. The smile broadened as his eyes met hers, as though he was able to read her mind and could see the feelings of outrage and the sense of betrayal that were churning in it, and was amused by what he saw.
I will quit, she thought, as fury surged up in her all over again.
But not yet. Not until I have things under control here. To quit before then would be demeaning. Let me get this hideous little savage civilized a little first: and then Hoskins can find someone else to cope with him.
11
The bathtub skirmish ended with a victory for the three adults over the small frightened child. The outer layers of filth were gone, at least, and his skin had taken on a reasonably presentable undertone of pink. His piercing cries of fear had given way to uncertain whimpers.
He seemed worn out by all his struggling. He watched carefully, eyes moving in quick frightened suspicion, going back and forth from one to another of those in the room.
He was shivering. Not so much from fear as from cold after his bath, Miss Fellowes guessed. Stockily built though he was, he was terribly thin-no spare fat on him at all, arms and legs like pipestems-and he was trembling now as if his dirt had been a useful layer of insulation.
Miss Fellowes said sharply, "Bring me a nightgown for the child!"
A nightgown appeared at once. It was as though everything were ready and yet nothing were ready unless she gave orders, as though Hoskins was deliberately standing back and letting her call the tune, to test her.
"I'd better hold him again, Miss Fellowes," the burly Elliott said. "You'll never get it on him all by yourself."
"You're right," Miss Fellowes said. "I won't. Thank you, Elliott."
The boy's eyes widened at the approach of the nightgown as if it were some implement of torture. But the battle this time was shorter and less violent than the one in the tub. Elliott seized each tiny wrist with one of his huge hands and held the short arms upward; and Miss Fellowes deftly drew the pink flannel nightgown down over the gnomish head.
The boy made a soft interrogative sound. He slipped the fingers of one hand inside the collar of the nightgown and gripped the fabric tightly. His strange sloping forehead furrowed in a deep frown.
Then he growled and gave the cloth a quick, hard tug, as though to rip the nightgown off.
Miss Fellowes slapped his hand sharply. From Dr. Hoskins, behind her, came a sound of surprise. She ignored it.
The boy reddened, but didn't cry. He stared at Miss Fellowes in a curious way, as if her slapping him hadn't offended him at all, but rather seemed familiar and expected. His eyes were the biggest child-eyes Miss Fellowes had ever seen, dark and shining and eerie.
The splayed, stubby fingers of his hand moved slowly across the thick flannel of the nightgown, feeling the strangeness of it, but he made no second attempt to rip it away.
Miss Fellowes thought desperately: Well, what next?
Everyone seemed in suspended animation, waiting for her-even the ugly little boy.
A long list of things that needed to be done blossomed in her mind, not necessarily in order of importance:
PROPHYLAXIS FOR THAT INFECTED SCRATCH OF HIS. TRIM HIS FINGERNAILS AND TOENA1LS. BLOOD TESTS. IMMUNE-SYSTEM VULNERABILITY? VACCINATIONS? A COURSE OF PREVENTIVE ANTIBIOTIC TREATMENTS? HAIRCUT.
STOOL SAMPLES. INTESTINAL PARASITES? DENTAL EXAMINATION. CHEST X HAY. GENERAL SKELETAL X RAY, TOO.
And half a dozen other items of varying degrees of urgency. But then she realized what the top priority of all must be, at least for the ugly little boy.
Briskly she said, "Have you provided food? Milk?"
They had. Ms. Stratford, her third assistant, wheeled in a gleaming mobile unit. In the refrigeration compartment Miss Fellowes found three quarts of milk, with a warming unit and a supply of fortifications in the form of vitamin supplements, copper-cobalt-iron syrup, and other things she had no time to be concerned with now. Another compartment held an assortment of baby foods in self-warming cans.
Milk, simply milk, that was the thing to begin with. Whatever else he had been eating in the place from which he had been taken-half-charred meat, wild berries, roots and insects, who knew what?-milk was a safe bet to have been part of a child's diet. Savages, she speculated, would be likely to go on nursing their children to an advanced age.
But savages wouldn't know how to handle cups. That much seemed certain. Miss Fellowes poured a little of the milk into a saucer and popped it into the microwave for a few seconds' worth of warming.
They were all watching her-Hoskins, Candide Deveney, the three orderlies, and everyone else who had managed to crowd into the Stasis area. The boy was staring at her too.
"Yes, look at me," she said to the boy. "There's a good fellow."
She held the saucer carefully in her hands, brought it to her mouth, and pantomimed the act of lapping up the milk.
The boy's eyes followed. But did he understand?
"Drink," she said. "This is how to drink."
Miss Fellowes pantomimed the lapping again. She felt a little absurd. But she brushed the feeling away. She would do whatever felt right to do. The boy had to be taught how to drink.
"Now you," she said.
She offered him the saucer, holding it out toward him so that all he had to do was move his head forward slightly and lick up the milk. He looked at it solemnly, without the slightest sign of comprehension.
"Drink," she said. "Drink." She let her tongue flick out again as though to show him once more.
No response. Just a stare. He was trembling again, though the room was warm and the nightgown surely was more than sufficient.
Direct measures were in order, the nurse thought.
She put the saucer down on the floor. Then she seized the boy's upper arm in one hand and, bending, she dipped three fingers of her other hand in the milk, scooping some up and dashing it across his lips. It dripped down his cheeks and over his receding chin.
The boy uttered a high-pitched cry of a kind she hadn't heard from him before. He looked baffled and displeased. Then his tongue slowly moved over his wetted lips. He frowned. Tasted. The tongue licked out again.
Was that a smile?
Yes. Yes. A sort of smile, anyway. Miss Fellowes stepped back.
"Milk," she said. "That's milk. Go on. Have a little more of it."
Tentatively the boy approached the saucer. He bent toward it, then looked up and over his shoulder sharply as though expecting to find some enemy crouching behind him. But there was nothing behind him. He bent again, stiffly, clumsily, pushed his head forward, licked at the milk, first in a cautious way and then with increasing eagerness. He lapped it the way a cat would. He made a slurping noise. He showed no interest in using his hands to raise the saucer to his face. He was like a little animal, squatting on the floor lapping up the milk.
Miss Fellowes felt a sudden surge of revulsion, even though she knew that she was the one who had pantomimed the lapping in the first place. She wanted to think of him as a child, a human child, but he kept reverting to some animal level, and she hated that. She hated it. She knew that her reaction must be apparent on her face. But she couldn't help it. Why was the child so bestial? It was prehistoric, yes-forty thousand years!-but did that have to mean it would seem so much like an ape? It was human, wasn't it? Wasn't it? What kind of child had they given her?
Candide Deveney caught that, perhaps. He said, "Does the nurse know, Dr. Hoskins?"
"Know what?" Miss Fellowes demanded.
Deveney hesitated, but Hoskins (again that look of detached amusement on his face) said, "I'm not sure.
Why don't you tell her?"
"What's all this mystery?" she asked. "Come on, tell me, if there's some secret I'm supposed to find out about!"
Deveney turned to her. "I just was wondering, Miss -whether you're actually aware that you happen to be the first civilized woman in history ever to be asked to take care of a young Neanderthal?"