The Ugly Little Boy (6 page)

He understood that, at least.

He made a low rumbling sound, like that of an animal at bay. His eyes had the bright sheen of fear in them. His lips drew back in an expression of what-dismay? Disgust?

Yes, disgust, she realized.

I must look as ugly to him as he does to me.

He was turning now, running from her, lurching helter-skelter through the birches.

"Wait!" she called. "Other One! Other One, come back! Don't run away like that, Other One!"

But he was gone. It was the first time in her life that a man had refused her, and she found the experience astonishing, unbelievable, almost shattering. Even though he was an Other One, even though she must have seemed alien and perhaps unattractive to him, had he really found her so repellent that he would growl and grimace and run?

Yes. Yes. He must have been only a boy, she told herself. Tall as he was, only a boy.

That night she returned to the tribe, resolved to take one of her own kind as a mate at last, and when Dark Wind asked her soon afterward to share his sleeping-rug she accepted without hesitation.

"Yes," she said to the men of the Hunting Society. "Yes, I know all too well what the Other Ones are like. And when we catch up with them I mean to be right there beside you, killing die loathsome beasts like the foul demons that they are."

"Look," Tree Of Wolves said, pointing. "The old men are coming down from the hill."

Indeed, there they came now, Silver Cloud leading the way, limping painfully and all too obviously trying to pretend that he wasn't, and the other three elders creaking along behind him. She Who Knows watched as they paraded into the camp, going straight to the place of the Goddess-shrine. For a long while Silver Cloud conferred with the three priestesses. There was much shaking of heads, then much nodding. And eventually Silver Cloud stepped forward, with the oldest of the priestesses a^ his side, to make an announcement.

The Summer Festival, he said, would be canceled this year-or postponed, at least. The Goddess had shown her displeasure by bringing a party of Other Ones uncomfortably close to their encampment, even in these eastern lands where no Other Ones were supposed to live. Plainly die People had done something improper; plainly this was not a good place for them to be. Therefore the People would leave here this day and would undertake a pilgrimage to the Place of Three Rivers, far behind them, where on their way east last year they had erected an elaborate shrine in honor of the Goddess. And at the Place of Three Rivers they would beseech the Goddess to explain their errors to them.

She Who Knows groaned. "But it'll take us weeks to get there! And it's in the wrong direction entirely! We'll be walking right back into the territory we've just left, where Other Ones are swarming everywhere!"

Silver Cloud gave her an icy glare. "The Goddess promised us this land, free of Other Ones. Now we have come into it and we find Other Ones already here. This is not as it should be. We need to ask Her guidance."

"Let's ask for it down south, then. At least it'll be warmer there, and we may find a decent place to camp, with no Other Ones around to bother us."

"You have our permission to go south, She Who Knows. But the rest of us will set out this afternoon toward the Place of Three Rivers."

"And the Other Ones?" she cried.

"The Other Ones will not dare to approach the shrine of the Goddess," said Silver Cloud. "But if you fear that they will, She Who Knows, why, then-go south! Go south, She Who Knows!"

She heard someone laughing. Blazing Eye, it was. Then the other men of the Hunting Society began to laugh, too, and a few of the Mothers joined in. Within moments they were all laughing and pointing at her.

She wished she still had Blazing Eye's spear in her hands. She would smite them all if she did, and nothing would stop die slaughter.

"Go south, She Who Knows!" they called to her. "Go south, go south, go south."

A curse came to her lips, but she forced it back. They meant it, she realized. If she spoke out angrily now, they might well drive her from the tribe. Ten years ago she would have welcomed that. But she was an old woman, now, past thirty. To go off by herself would be certain death.

She murmured a few angry words to herself, and turned away from Silver Cloud's steady stare.

Silver Cloud clapped his hands. "All right," he called. "Start packing up, everybody! We're breaking camp! We're getting out of here before it turns dark!"

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.

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.

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?