The Ugly Little Boy

Chapter Ten. Reaching

Miss FELLOWES," Timmie said, "when will I be starting to go to school?"

The question, coming out of nowhere, hit her with the force of a thunderbolt.

She looked down at those eager brown eyes turned up to hers and passed her hand softly through his thick, coarse hair, automatically picking through the rough tangles of it and trying to straighten them. Timmie's hair was always disheveled. Miss Fellowes cut it herself while he squirmed restlessly under the scissors. The idea of having a barber in here for Timmie displeased her; and in any case the very clumsiness of the cut she gave him served to mask the retreating fore part of his skull and the bulging hinder part.

Carefully Miss Fellowes said, "Where did you hear about school, Timmie?"

"Jerry goes to school."

(Of course. Where else would he have heard of it but from Jerry?)

"Jerry goes to kin-der-gar-ten." Timmie pronounced the long word slowly and with unusual precision. "That's only one of the places he goes. He goes to the store with his mother. He goes to the movies. The zoo. All kinds of places outside. -When can I go outside, Miss Fellowes?"

A small pain centered in Miss Fellowes' heart.

It was inevitable, she knew, that Jerry would talk about the outside world with Timmie. They communicated freely and easily-two small boys who understood each other without difficulty. And Jerry, the emissary from the mysterious and forbidden world beyond the door of the Stasis bubble, would certainly want to tell Timmie all about it. There was no way of avoiding that.

But it was a world that Timmie could never enter.

Miss Fellowes said, with a studied gaiety that was her best attempt at distracting him from the anguish he must surely feel, "Why, whatever would you do out there, Timmie? Why would you want to go there? Do you know how cold it gets out there in the winter?"

"Cold?"

A blank look. He didn't know the word.

(But why would cold bother him, this boy who had learned how to walk in the snowfields of Ice Age Europe?)

"Cold is like the way it is in die refrigerator. You go outside and in a minute or two your nose begins to hurt from it, and your ears. But that's only in the winter. In the summer, outside gets very hot. It feels like an oven. Everyone sweats and complains about how hot it is outside. And then there's rain, too. Water falling down on you out of the sky, soaking your clothes, getting you all damp and nasty-"

It was a miserably cynical line of reasoning, and she knew it and felt dreadful about what she was trying to do. Telling a boy who could never go outside these few little rooms that the world out there held some minor physical discomforts was like telling a blind child that colors and shapes were boring, annoying distractions, that in fact, there was nothing very interesting worth seeing anyway.

But Timmie ignored her pitiful sophistries as though she hadn't said a thing.

"Jerry says that at school they can play all kinds of games that I don't have here. They have picture tapes and music. He says there are lots of children in the kin-der-gar-ten. He says-he says-" A moment of thought, then a triumphant upholding of both small hands with the fingers splayed apart. "He says this many."

Miss Fellowes said, "You have picture tapes."

"Just a few. Jerry says he sees more picture tapes in a day than I see all the time."

"We can get you more picture tapes. Very nice ones. And music tapes, too."

"Can you?"

"I'll get some this afternoon."

"Will you get me the Forty Thieves?"

"Is that a story Jerry heard in kindergarten?"

"There are these thieves in a cave, and these jars-" He paused. "Big jars. What are thieves?"

"Thieves are-people who take things that belong to other people."

"Oh."

"I can get you the Forty Thieves picture tape," Miss Fellowes told him. "It's a very famous story. And there are others like it. Sinbad the Sailor, who traveled everywhere in the world, who saw-everything." Her voice faltered for a moment. But Timmie hadn't picked up any depressing implications. "And Gulliver's Travels, I can get you that one. He went to a land of tiny people, and then afterward to a land of giants, and then-" Miss Fellowes faltered again. So many travelers, all these omnivorous devourers of experience! But maybe that was good: satisfy Timmie in his imprisonment with vicarious tales of far voyaging. He wouldn't be the first shut-in to revel in such narratives. "Then there's the story of Odysseus, who fought a war and spent ten years afterward trying to find his way home to his family." Again a pang. Her heart went out to the boy. Like Gulliver, like Sinbad, like Odysseus, Timmie too was a stranger in a strange land, and she could never forget that. Were all the great stories of the world about wanderers carried to strange places who were striving to reach their homes?

Timmie's eyes were glowing, though. "Will you get them right now? Will you?"

And so he was temporarily comforted.

She ordered all the picture tapes of myth and fable that were in the catalog. They stacked up higher dian Timmie in the playroom. On days when Jerry wasn't there he pored over them hour after hour.

How much he actually understood was hard to say. Certainly they were full of concepts, images, locales, that could make very little sense to him. But how much did any child of five or six understand of those stories? There was no way for an adult to enter a child's mind and know for sure. Miss Fellowes had loved those stories herself without fully understanding them when she was a child, though, and so had children before her for hundreds, even thousands of years; and whatever they might have lacked in detail-by-detail comprehension, all those children had made up for by using their own imaginations. So too was it with Timmie, she hoped.

After her early moments of uncertainty over Gulliver and Sinbad and Odysseus, she made no attempts to eliminate from his growing library of picture tapes anything that might stir some disturbing thoughts in him about his own plight. Children, she knew, were less easily disturbed than adults feared they were. And even an occasional nightmare wouldn't do any real harm. No child had ever died of fright while hearing the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, even though it was, on its most literal level, a horrifying tale. None of the slavering wolves and shambling bogeymen and terrible trolls of childhood fable had left any lasting scars. Children loved to hear about such things.

Was the bogeyman of myth-beetle-browed, shaggy, glowering-a vestige of the racial memory of the time when Neanderthals roamed Europe? Miss Fellowes had seen a reference to that theory in one of the books she had borrowed from Dr. Mclntyre. Would Timmie be upset by the thought that he was a member of a tribe that had survived in folk tale as something to fear and loathe? No, no, she thought: it would never occur to him. Only overeducated adults would worry about such contingencies. Timmie would be as fascinated by bogeymen as any child, and would huddle under his coverlet in delicious terror, seeing shapes in the dark-and there wasn't a chance in a billion that he would draw any dire conclusions about his own genetic status from those scary stories.

So the tapes came flooding in, and the boy watched them one after another after another: as though a dam had been breached and the whole glorious river of the human imagination was rushing into Timmie's soul. Theseus and the Minotaur, Perseus and the Gorgon, King Midas and his golden touch, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the labors of Hercules, Bellerophon and the Chimaera, Alice through the Looking-Glass, Jack and the beanstalk, Aladdin and the magic lamp, the Fisherman and the Genie, Gulliver among the Lilliputians and the Houyhnhnms, the adventures of Odin and Thor, the battle between Osiris and Set, the wanderings of Odysseus, the voyage of Captain

Nemo-there was no end of it, and Timmie devoured it all. Did it all get muddled in his mind? Was he able to tell one tale from another, or remember any of them an hour later? Miss Fellowes didn't know, and didn't try to find out. For the moment, she was concerned only with allowing him to immerse himself in this tremendous torrent of story-of filling his mind with it-of reaching out toward the magical world of myth, since the real world of houses and airplanes and highways and people must forever remain beyond his grasp.

When he tired of watching tapes, she read to him out of ordinary books. The tales were the same; but now he created the pictures in his own mind as she read the words.

There had to be some impact. More than once she heard him telling some wildly garbled version of one of his picture tapes to Jerry-Sinbad traveling by submarine, or Hercules tied down by Lilliputians-and Jerry would listen solemnly, enjoying the story as much as Timmie enjoyed telling it.

Miss Fellowes made sure that everything the boy said was being recorded. It was vital evidence of his intelligence. Let anyone who imagined that the Neanderthals had been mere bestial shaggy half-men listen to Timmie retelling the story of Theseus in the Labyrinth! Even if he did seem to think that the Minotaur was the hero of the story.

But then there were the dreams. He was having them more often, now that the world outside the bubble was becoming a reality in his mind.*.

It was always the same dream, so far as she could tell- always about the outside. Timmie tried haltingly to describe it to Miss Fellowes. In his dreams he invariably found himself outside, in that big empty place about which he had told her so often. It was no longer empty in the newer dreams. Now there were children in it, and queer indescribable objects half-digested in his thought out of bookish descriptions half-understood, or out of distant Neanderthal memories half-recalled.

But the children ignored him and the objects eluded him when he tried to touch them. Though he was in the world, he was never part of it. He wandered through the big empty place of his dreams in a solitude just as absolute as that of his own room. And would wake up crying more often than not.

Miss Fellowes wasn't always there to hear him when he cried out in the night. She had begun sleeping three or four nights a week in the apartment elsewhere on the grounds that Hoskins had offered her long ago. It seemed wise to begin weaning Timmie from his dependence on her perpetual presence. The first few nights she tried it, she felt so guilty over abandoning him that she could scarcely sleep; but Timmie said nothing in the morning about her absence. Perhaps he expected to be left on his own, sooner or later. She allowed herself to feel more comfortable about sleeping away from the dollhouse, after a time. She realized that Timmie wasn't the only one being weaned from a dependence.

She took elaborate notes every morning about his dreams and tried to regard them as nothing more than useful material for the psychological study of Timmie's mind that would ultimately be one of the most valuable products of this experiment. But there were nights when she was alone in her room when she cried, too.

One day as Miss Fellowes was reading to him-the book was Tales from the Arabian Nights, one of his special favorites-Timmie put his hand under her chin and lifted it gently so that her eyes left the book and met his.

He said, "Every time you read me that story it's exactly the same. How do you always know how to say it the same way, Miss Fellowes?"

"Why, I'm reading it right from this page!"

"Yes, I know. But what does that mean, reading?"

"Why-why-" The question was so basic that she scarcely knew at first how to tackle it. Ordinarily, when children learned to read, they seemed somehow intuitively to divine die nature of the process by themselves, and then went on to the next step of learning the meaning of the coded symbols on the page. But Timmie's ignorance seemed to be more deeply rooted than that of the usual four-or-five-year-old who was just beginning to discover that there was such a thing as reading which perhaps he or she might actually be able someday to master. The essential concept was foreign to him.

She said, "You know how, in your picture books- not the tapes, the books-there are marks along the bottoms of the pages?"

"Yes," he said. "Words."

"The book I'm reading is all words. No pictures, just words. These marks are the words. I look at the marks and I hear words in my mind. That's what reading is-turning the marks on the page into words."

"Let me see."

She handed him the book. He swung it around sideways and then upside down. Miss Fellowes laughed and turned it right side up again.

"The marks only make sense when you look at them this way," she said.

He nodded. He bent low over the page, so low that the words couldn't possibly have been in focus, and stared long and curiously. Then he backed off a few inches, until the text was legible. Experimentally he turned the book sideways again. Miss Fellowes said nothing this time. He turned it back the right way.

"Some of these marks are the same," he said, after a very long time.

"Yes. Yes." She laughed with pleasure at this sign of shrewdness. "So they are, Timmie!"

"But how do you know which marks mean what word?"

"You have to learn."

"There are so many words, though! How could anyone learn all that many marks?"

"Little marks are used to make the big marks. The big marks are the words; the little marks are called letters. And actually there aren't that many little marks," she said. "Only twenty-six." She held up her hand and flashed her fingers five times, and then one finger more. "All the words are made up out of those few little letter-marks, arranged in different ways."

"Show me."

"Here. Look." She pointed to Sinbad on the page. "Do you see these six little marks here, between the two blank spaces? Those are the marks that mean Sinbad. This one is the Y sound. This is the*f and this is the 'n'." She spoke the letters phonetically instead of pronouncing their names. "You read them one by one and you put all the sounds together-Ess-ih-nnn-bbb-aaah-ddd. Sinbad,"

Did the boy even begin to understand?

"Sinbad," Timmie said softly, and traced the name on the page with his fingertip.

"And this word is ship. You see, it begins with the same little mark as Sinbad? Ssssss. The name of that mark is 's.' This time she pronounced it, "ess". "And this one is 'i,' from Sinbad, only here it is in ship, over here."

He stared at the page. He looked lost.

"I'll show you all the marks," she offered. "Would you like that?"

"It would be a nice game, yes."

"Then get me a piece of paper, and a crayon. And get one for yourself, too."

He settled down beside her. She drew an a, a b, a c, and right on through the alphabet, in two long columns. Timmie, clutching the crayon clumsily in his fist, drew something that he must have thought was an imitation of her a, but it had long wobbly legs that wandered all over the page and left no room for any other letters.

"Now," she said, "let's look at the first mark-"

To her shame, it had never occurred to her before this that it might actually be possible for him to learn to read. For all the boy's vast hunger for picture books and picture tapes, this was the first time that he had shown any real interest m the printed symbols that accompanied them. Something else that Jerry had inspired in him? She made a mental note to ask Jerry, the next time he was here, whether he had begun to learn how to read. But in any event Miss Fellowes had simply dismissed a priori the idea that Timmie someday might.

Racial prejudice, she realized. Even now, after having lived with him for so long, having seen his mind grow and flower and develop, she still thought of him on some level as not quite human. Or at least too primitive, too backward, to master so sophisticated a skill as reading.

And while she was showing him the letters, pointing them out on her chart and pronouncing them and teaching him how in his clumsy way to draw them himself, she still did not seriously believe that he could ever put any of that to use.

She went on not believing it until the very moment that he read a book to her.

It was many weeks later. He was sitting in her lap, holding one of his books, turning the pages, looking at the pictures-or so she assumed.

And suddenly he ran his fingertip along a line of type and said aloud, haltingly but with stubborn determination, "The dog began-to chase-the cat."

Miss Fellowes was feeling drowsy and was barely paying attention. "What did you say, Timmie?"

"The cat-ran up-the tree."

"That wasn't what you said before."

"No. Before I said, 'The dog began to chase the cat.' Just like it says here."

"What? What?" Miss Fellowes' eyes were wide open now. She glanced down at the slim book that the child in her lap was holding.

The caption on the left-hand page said: The dog began to chase the cat.

And the caption on the facing page was: The cat ran up the tree.

He was following the printing in the book, word by word. He was reading to her!

In amazement Miss Fellowes got to her feet so quickly that the boy went tumbling to the floor. He seemed to think it was some new game, and looked up at her, grinning. But she pulled him quickly to his feet and set him upright.

"How long have you been able to read?"

He shrugged. "Always?"

"No-really."

"I don't know. I looked at the marks and heard the words, the way you said."

"Here. Read to me from this one." Miss Fellowes snatched up a book at random from his heap and opened it to its center pages. He took it and studied it, frowning in that intense way that emphasized the great bony shelf that was his brow. His tongue came forth and wandered along his lips.

Slowly, painfully, he said, "Then the-tra-in-blew its-whuh-its whuh-whuh-is-its whuh-is-"

"Its whistle!" she finished for him. "You can read, Timmie! You can actually read!"

Excited nearly to frenzy, she swung him up into her arms and danced him around the room while he stared at her in huge-eyed amazement.

"You can read! You can read!"

(Ape-boy, was he? Cave-boy? Some lesser form of human life? The cat ran up the tree. The train blew its whistle. Show me the chimp that can read those lines! Show me the gorilla that can! The train blew its whistle. Oh, Timmie, Timmie-)

"Miss Fellowes?" he said, sounding a little starded, as she swung him wildly around.

She laughed and put him down.

This was a breakthrough that she had to share. The answer to Timmie's unhappiness was in her hand. Picture tapes might keep him amused for a time, but he was bound to outgrow them. Now, though, as he grew older, he would have access to the full, rich world of books. If Timmie couldn't leave the Stasis bubble to enter the world, the world could be brought into these three rooms to Timmie-the whole world in books. He must be educated to his full capacity. That much was owed to him.

"You stay here with your books," she told him. "I'll be back in a little while. I have to see Dr. Hoskins."

She made her way along the catwalks and through the tortuous passageways that led out of the Stasis zone, and into the executive area. Hoskins' receptionist looked up in surprise as Miss Fellowes came bursting into the anteroom of Hoskins' office.

"Is Dr. Hoskins here?"

"Miss Fellowes! Dr. Hoskins isn't expecting-"

"Yes, I know that. But I want to see him."

"Is there some problem?"

Miss Fellowes shook her head. "News. Exciting news. Please, just tell him I'm here."

The receptionist pressed a button. "Miss Fellowes to see you, Dr. Hoskins. She has no appointment."

(Since when do I need-?)

There was an uncomfortable pause. Miss Fellowes wondered if she was going to have to make a scene in order to be admitted to Hoskins' presence. Whatever he might be doing in there, it couldn't be as important as what she had to tell him.

Hoskins' voice out of the intercom said, "Tell her to come in."

The door rolled open. Hoskins rose from behind the desk with its GERALD A. HOSKTNS, PH.D. nameplate to greet her.

He looked flushed and excited himself, as though his mood was precisely analogous to hers: a kind of triumph and glory. "So you've heard?" he said at once. "No, of course, you couldn't have. We've done it. We've actually done it."

"Done what?"

"We have intertemporal detection at close range."

He was so mil of his own success that for a moment Miss Fellowes allowed it to shove her own spectacular news into the background.

"You can reach historical times, you mean?" she said.

"That's exactly what I mean. We have a fix on a fourteenth-century individual right now. Imagine. Imagine!

We're ready to launch Project Middle Ages. Oh, Miss Fellowes, if you could only know how glad I'll be to shift from the eternal concentration on the Mesozoic-to get away from all these trilobites and rock samples and bits and pieces of ferns and things-to send the paleontologists home and bring some historians in here at last-" He stopped in midflow. -"But there's something you want to tell me, isn't there? And here I am, running on and on, without giving you a chance to speak. Well, go ahead. Go ahead, Miss Fellowes! You find me in a very fine mood, indeed. Anything you want, just ask for it."

Miss Fellowes smiled. "I'm glad to hear it. Because I wonder if we can start bringing in tutors for Timmie."

"Tutors?"

"To give him instruction. I can teach him only so much, and then I ought to step aside in favor of someone who has the proper training for it."

"Instruction? In what?"

"Well, in everything. History, geography, science, arithmetic, grammar, the whole elementary school curriculum. We have to set up a kind of school in here for Timmie. So that he'll be able to learn all that he needs to know."

Hoskins stared at her as though she were speaking some alien language.

"You want to teach him long division? The story of the Pilgrims? The history of the American Revolution?"

"Why not?"

"We can try to teach him, yes. And trigonometry and calculus, too, if you like. But how much can he learn, Miss Fellowes? He's a great little boy, no question of it. But we must never lose sight of the fact that he's only a Neanderthal."

"Only?"

"They were a people of very limited intellectual capacity, according to all the-"

"He already knows how to read, Dr. Hoskins."

Hoskins' jaw sagged open.

"What?"

"The cat ran up the tree. He read it to me right off the page. The train blew its whistle. I picked the book and showed him the page and he read me the words."

"He can read?" said Hoskins in wonder. "Really?"

"I showed him how the letters were shaped, and how they were put together in words. And he did the rest. He's learned it in an astonishingly short span of time. I can't wait for Dr. Mclntyre and the rest of the crew to find out about it. So much for the very limited intellectual capacity of the Neanderthals, eh, Dr. Hoskins? He can read a storybook. And as time goes along you'll see him reading books without any pictures at all, reading newspapers, magazines, textbooks-"

Hoskins sat there, seemingly suddenly depressed. "I don't know, Miss Fellowes."

She said, "You just told me that anything I wanted-"

"I know, and I shouldn't have said that."

"A tutor for Timmie? Is that such a big expense?"

"It isn't the expense I'm concerned with," said Hoskins. "And it's a wonderful thing that Timmie can read. Astonishing. I mean that. I want to see a demonstration of it right away. But you talk about setting up a school for him. You talk about all the things he'll learn as time goes along. -Miss Fellowes, there isn't much more time."

She blinked. "There isn't?"

"I'm sure you must be aware that we aren't able to maintain the Timmie experiment indefinitely."

A surge of horror swept through her. She felt as though the floor had turned to quicksand beneath her feet.

What did he mean? Miss FeUowes wasn't sure that she understood. We aren't able to maintain the Timmie experiment indefinitely. What? What?

With an agonizing flash of recollection, she recalled Professor Adamewski and his mineral specimen that was taken away after two weeks because the Stasis facility that contained it had to be cleared for the next experiment.

"You're going to send him back?" she said in a tiny voice.

"I'm afraid so."

"But you're talking about a boy, Dr. Hoskins. Not about a rock."

Uneasily Hoskins said, "Even so. He can't be given undue importance, you know. We've learned just about as much from him as we're likely to. He doesn't remember anything about his life in the Neanderthal era that's of any real scientific value. The anthropologists can't make much sense out of what he says, and the questions they've put to him with you as the interpreter haven't yielded a lot of worthwhile data, and so-"

"I don't believe this," Miss Fellowes said numbly.

"Please, Miss Fellowes. It's not going to happen today, you know. But there's no escaping the necessity of it." He indicated the research materials on his desk. "Now that we expect to be bringing back individuals out of historical time, we'll need Stasis space-all we can get."

She couldn't grasp it.

"But you can't. Timmie-Timmie-"

"Please don't get so upset, Miss Fellowes."

"The world's only living Neanderthal, and you're talking about sending him back?"

"As I've said. We've learned all we can. Now we have to move along."

"No."

"Miss Fellowes, please. Please. I know you're deeply attached to the boy. And who can blame you? He's a terrific kid. And you've lived with him day and night for a long time now. But you're a professional, Miss Fellowes. You understand that the children under your care constantly come and go, that you can't hope to keep them forever. This is nothing new. -Besides, Timmie isn't going to go right away; perhaps not for months. Meanwhile, if you want a tutor for him, yes, yes, of course, we'll do whatever we can."

She was still staring at him.

"Let me get you something, Miss Fellowes."

"No," she whispered. "I don't need anything."

She was trembling. She rose and stumbled across the room in a kind of nightmare and waited for the door to open, and walked through the antechamber without looking either to the right or to the left.

Send him back?

Send him back?

Were they out of their minds? He wasn't a Neanderthal any more, except on the outside. He was a gentle good-natured little boy who wore green overalls and liked to look at picture tapes and books that told tales out of the Arabian Nights. A boy who tidied up his room at the end of the day. A boy who could use a knife and a fork and a spoon. A boy who could read.

And they were going to send him back to the Ice Age and let him shift for himself in some Godforsaken tundra?

They couldn't mean it. He didn't stand a chance, back in the world he had come from. He was no longer fitted for it. He no longer had any of the skills that a Neanderthal needed to have, and in their place he had acquired a great many new skills that were absolutely worthless in the Neanderthal world.

He would die there, she thought.

No.

Timmie, Miss Fellowes told herself with all the ferocity that there was in her soul, you will not die. You will not.

Now she knew why Bruce Mannheim had given her his telephone number. She hadn't understood it at the time, but obviously Mannheim had been thinking ahead. Something was going to come up that would jeopardize Timmie. He had seen it, and she hadn't. She had simply blinded herself to the possibility. She had carefully ignored every obvious clue that pointed to the blunt realities Hoskins had just been explaining to her. She had allowed herself to assume, against all the evidence, against all reason-that Timmie was going to be spending the rest of his life in the twenty-first century.

But Mannheim knew it wasn't so.

And he had been waiting all this time for her to call him.

"I need to see you right away," she told him.

"At the Stasis headquarters?"

"No," she said. "Somewhere else. Anywhere. In the city somewhere. You pick the place."

They met at a small restaurant near the river, where Mannheim said no one would bother them, on a rainy midweek afternoon. Mannheim was waiting for her when she arrived. It all seemed terribly clandestine to Miss Fellowes, vaguely scandalous: lunch with a man who had made all sorts of trouble for her employer. And-for that matter-lunch with a man. A man she scarcely knew, a young attractive man. Not like Edith Fellowes at all to be doing things like this, she told herself. Especially when she thought of that dream she had once had, Mannheim knocking at her door, swooping her off her feet when she answeredBut this was no romantic assignation. The dream had only been a dream, a fugitive fantasy of her unconscious mind. She felt not the slightest shred of attraction for Mannheim. This was business. This was a matter of life and death.

She fidgeted with her menu and wondered how to begin.

He said, "How's Timmie doing these days?"

"Fine. Fine. You wouldn't believe the progress he's been making."

"Getting big and strong?"

"Every day. And now he can read."

"Really!" Mannheim's eyes twinkled. He has a very nice smile, Miss Fellowes thought. How could Dr. Hoskins have thought he was such a monster? "That's an amazing step forward, isn't it? I bet the anthropology boys were startled when they found out about it."

She nodded. She turned the pages of the menu as though she had no idea what it was. The rain intensified outside; it drummed against the window of the little restaurant with almost malevolent force. They were practically the only customers.

Mannheim said, "I like the chicken in red wine sauce here, particularly. And they do some fine lasagna. Or maybe you'd like the veal."

"It doesn't matter. I'll have whatever you're having, Mr. Mannheim."

He gave her an odd look. "Call me Bruce. Please. Shall we get a botde of wine?"

"Wine? I never drink wine, I'm afraid. But if you'd like to get some for yourself-"

He was still looking at her.

Over the drumbeat of the rain he said, "What's the trouble, Edith?"

(Edith?)

For a moment she was unable to say anything.

(All right, Edith. Pull yourself together, Edith! He'll think you're a gibbering idiot!)

She said, "They're going to send Timmie back."

"Back? You mean back in time?"

"That's right. To his own era. To Neanderthal times. To the Ice Age."

A broad smile spread across Mannheim's face. His eyes lit up. "Why, that's wonderful! That's absolutely the finest news I've heard all week!"

She was horrified. "No-you don't understand-"

"I understand that that sad little captive child is finally going to be returned to his proper people, to his mother and father and sisters and brothers, to the world he belonged to and loved. That's something to celebrate. Waiter! Waiter! I'd like a bottle of Chianti-make it a half-bottle, I guess, my friend won't be having any-"

Miss Fellowes stared at him in dismay.

Mannheim said, "But you look so troubled, Miss Fellowes. Edith. Don't you want Timmie to return to his people?"

"Yes, but-but-" She waved her hands in a helpless gesture.

"I think I see." Mannheim leaned across the table toward her. He glowed with sympathy and concern. "You've cared for him so long that you find it hard to let go of him now. The bond between you and Timmie has become so strong that it's a real shock to you to hear that he's being sent back. I can certainly understand how you feel."

"That's part of it," Miss Fellowes replied. "But only a very small part."

"What's the real problem, then?"

At that moment the waiter arrived with the wine. He made a great show of displaying its label to Mannheim and of pulling the cork, and poured a little into Mannheim's glass to taste. Mannheim nodded. To Miss Fellowes he said, "Are you sure you don't want any, Edith? On a foul rainy day like this-"

"No. Please," she said, almost in a whisper. "Go ahead. You drink it. It would only be wasted on me."

The waiter filled Mannheim's glass and went away.

"Now," he said. "Timmie."

"He'll die if he's returned. Don't you see that?"

Mannheim set down his glass with such abruptness that the wine brimmed over and splashed the tablecloth. "Are you telling me that a return trip in time is fatal?"

"No, that isn't it. Not as far as I know, and I don't think it would be. But it would be fatal for Timmie. Look, he's civilized now. He can tie his shoelaces and cut a piece of meat with a knife and a fork. He brushes his teeth morning and night. He sleeps in a bed and takes a shower every day. He watches picture tapes and now he can read simple little books. What good are any of those skills in the Paleolithic era?"

Suddenly solemn, Mannheim said, "I think I see what you're getting at."

"And meanwhile," she went on, "he's probably forgotten whatever he knew about how to live under Paleolithic conditions-and very likely he didn't know a lot to begin with. He was only a little child when he came to us. His parents, his tribal guardians, whoever, must have still been taking care of him. Even Neanderthals wouldn't have expected a boy of three or four to know how to hunt and forage for himself. And even if he did know a little bit at that age, it's been several years since he was exposed to those conditions. He won't remember a thing."

"But surely if he's returned to his own tribe, they'll take him in, they'll re-educate him in tribal ways-"

"Would they? He can't speak their language very well any more; he doesn't think the way they do; he smells funny because he's so clean. -They might just as readily kill him, wouldn't you say?"

Mannheim gazed thoughtfully into his wineglass. Miss Fellowes went on, "Besides, what guarantee is there that he'll return to his tribe at all? 1 don't understand a lot about how time travel works, and I'm not sure the Stasis people really do, either. Will he go back right to the exact moment when he left? In that case he'll be three years older and from their point of view he'll have changed tremendously in a single instant-and they won't know what to make of him. They might think he was a demon of some kind. Or will he return to the same place on Earth, but a time three years after he left? If that's how it works, then his tribe will have moved on to some other region long ago. Surely they were nomads then. When he arrives in the past, there'll be no one around to take him in. He'll be completely on his own in a rugged, hostile, bitterly cold environment. A little boy facing the Ice Age by himself. Do you see, Mr. Mannheim? Do you see?"

"Yes," Mannheim said. "I do."

He was quiet a long while. He seemed to be working out some profound calculation in his mind.

Finally he said, "When is he supposed to be shipped back? Do you know?"

"Perhaps not for months, Dr. Hoskins told me. I can't say whether that means two months or six."

"Not much time, either way. We'd have to organize a campaign, a Save Timmie campaign-letters to the newspapers, demonstrations, an injunction, maybe a Congressional investigation into the whole Stasis Technologies operation. -Of course, it would be useful if you'd take part by testifying to Timmie's essential humanity, by providing us with videos showing how he reads and looks after himself. But you'd probably have to resign your post there if you were to do that, and that would cut you off from Timmie, which you wouldn't want, and which wouldn't be useful to us, either. A problem. On the other hand, suppose-"

"No," Miss Fellowes said. "It's no good." Mannheim glanced up, surprised. "What?" "A campaign of the kind you're talking about. It'll backfire. The moment you start with your protests and your talk of demonstrations and injunctions, Dr. Hoskins will simply pull the switch on Timmie. That's all it is-a switch, a handle. You yank it and whatever's in the cubicle goes back where it came from. The Stasis people couldn't afford to let things get to the point where you have them tied up with an injunction. They'd act right away and make the whole thing a moot issue." "They wouldn't dare."

"Wouldn't they? They've already decided the Timmie experiment is over. They need his Stasis facility for something else. You don't know them. They're not sentimental people, not really. Hoskins is basically a decent man, but if it's a choice between Timmie and the future of Stasis Technologies, Ltd., he wouldn't have any problem choosing at all. And once Timmie's gone, there's no bringing him back. It'll be a fait accompli. They could never find him in the past a second time. Your injunction would be worthless. And somebody who lived forty thousand years ago and died before civilization was ever imagined wouldn't have any recourse in our courts." Mannheim nodded slowly. He took a long, reflective sip of his wine. The waiter came by, hovering with his order pad at the ready, but Mannheim waved him away.

"There's only one thing to do," he said.

"And that is?"

"We have people in Canada who'd be glad to raise Timmie. In England, in New Zealand also. Concerned, loving people. Our organization could provide a grant that would cover the cost of employing you as his full-time nurse. Of course, you'd have to make a total break with your present existence and start all over again in some other country, but my reading of you is that for Timmie's sake you'd have no problem with-"

"No. That wouldn't be possible."

"No?"

"No. Not at all."

Mannheim frowned. "I see." Though it was apparent that he didn't. "-Well, then, Edith, even if you have a problem yourself about leaving the country, and I completely understand that, I think we can count on you at least to help us in smuggling Timmie out of the Stasis facility, can't we?"

"I don't have any problem with leaving the country, if that's what I'd need to do to save Timmie. I'd do whatever I could and go wherever I had to, for Timmie's sake. It's smuggling him out of the Stasis facility that isn't possible."

"Is it as tightly guarded as all that? I assure you, we'd find ways of infiltrating the security staff, of working out a completely foolproof plan for taking Timmie from you and getting him out of that building."

"It can't be done. Scientifically, it can't."

"Scientifically?"

"There's something about temporal potential, an energy build-up, lines of temporal force. If we moved a mass the size of Timmie out of Stasis it would blow out every power line in the city. Hoskins told me that and I don't question the truth of it. They've got a bunch of pebbles and dirt and twigs that they brought here when they scooped Timmie out of the past, and they don't even dare take that stuff out and throw it away. It's all stored in the back of the Stasis bubble. -Besides all that, I'm not even sure whether moving Timmie outside of Stasis would be safe for him. I'm not certain about that part, but maybe it could be dangerous for him. I'm only guessing at this part. For all I know, he might undergo some kind of temporal-force effect too if he was brought out of the bubble into our universe. The bubble isn't in our universe, you know. It's in some special place of its own. You can feel the change when you pass through the door, remember? So your idea of kidnapping Timmie from Stasis and sending him to people overseas -No, no, the risks are too big. Not for you or for me, really, but maybe for Timmie."

Mannheim's face was bleak.

"I don't know," he said. "I offer to raise a legal firestorm in Timmie's defense and you say it won't work, they'll simply pull the switch on him the moment we make any trouble. Then I come up with the completely illegal resort of stealing Timmie from Stasis and putting him beyond Hoskins' jurisdiction and you tell me we can't do that either, because of some problem in the physics of it. All right. I want to help, Edith, but you've got me stymied and right now I don't have any further ideas."

"Neither do I," Miss Fellowes said miserably.

They sat there in silence as the rain hammered at the windows of the restaurant.