The Ugly Little Boy

by Isaac Asimov

  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 from 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, somehow—

  The 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 agai
nst 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 did she know about caring for little savage prehistoric apes?

  And yet—yet—

  Maybe 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 Fellowes 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 thing—

  Well, 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 strugglings 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 the 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 Fellowes?

  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 an
d 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 toenails.

  Blood tests. Immune-system vulnerability?

  Vaccinations? A course of preventive antibiotic treatments?

  Haircut.

  Stool samples. Intestinal parasites?