The Ugly Little Boy

by Isaac Asimov

  [15]

  It was difficult to sleep. Tired as she was, she lay with her eyes open, in the kind of absolute wakefulness that one reaches only in a state of the most extreme fatigue. She strained to hear any sounds that might come from the next room.

  He couldn’t get out, could he? Could he?

  The walls were sheer and impossibly high, but suppose the child could climb like a monkey?

  Up a vertical wall with no hand-holds? And there you go again, thinking of him as a monkey!

  He couldn’t climb up and over, no. She was certain of that. And in any case, there were Hoskins’ ever-watchful sensors up there in the balcony. Surely they’d notice and give an alarm, if the boy started climbing around from room to room in the middle of the night.

  Surely.

  (There’s so much that I didn’t take the trouble to find out, Miss Fellowes thought.)

  And then suddenly she found herself asking herself: Can he be dangerous? Physically dangerous?

  She considered how much trouble it had been to give him his bath. She had watched first Hoskins and then Elliott battling to hold him in place. Just a little child, and how strong he was! The scratch he had given Elliott!

  What if he came in here and—

  No, Miss Fellowes told herself. He won’t hurt me.

  Beyond any doubt Hoskins wouldn’t have left her in here alone, overhead sensors or no overhead sensors, if he felt there was any risk that—

  She tried to laugh at her own fears. He was only a three-year-old child, perhaps four at most. Still, she hadn’t managed to get his nails trimmed yet. If he should attack her with nails and teeth while she slept—

  Her breath came quickly. Oh, how ridiculous, how completely ridiculous, and yet—

  She was endlessly going back and forth, she knew, unable to take a consistent position and hold it for long. Was he a dangerous nasty little ape, or was he a miserably frightened little child far from his loved ones? One or the other, she told herself. But why not some of both? Even a frightened little child can hurt you if he strikes out with enough force. She could remember a few nasty episodes at the hospital—children driven to such desperation that they had attacked staff people with real vehemence and done some real damage.

  Miss Fellowes didn’t dare let herself fall asleep. Didn’t dare.

  She lay staring upward, listening with painful attentiveness. And now she heard a sound.

  The boy was crying.

  Not shrieking in fear or anger; not yelling or screaming. It was crying softly, and the cry was the heartbroken sobbing of a lonely, lonely child.

  All her ambivalence dissolved at once. For the first time, Miss Fellowes thought with a pang: Poor thing! Poor terrified child!

  Of course it was a child. What did the shape of its head matter, or the texture of its hair? It was a child that had been orphaned as no child had ever been orphaned before. Hoskins had said it, and said it accurately, at their first meeting: “This will be the most lonely child in the history of the world.” Not just its mother and father were gone, but all its species, every last one. Snatched callously out of its proper time, it was now the only creature of its kind in the world.

  The last. The only.

  She felt her pity for it strengthen and deepen, and with that came shame at her own callousness: the repugnance she had allowed herself to feel for the child, the irritation she had let herself show at its wild ways. How, she wondered, could she have been so cruel? So unprofessional. Bad enough to be kidnapped like this; worse to be looked upon with disdain by the very person who was supposed to care for you and teach you to find your way in your bewildering new life.

  Tucking her nightgown carefully about her calves—the overhead sensors, she couldn’t stop worrying about those idiotic sensors!—Miss Fellowes got out of bed and tiptoed into the boy’s room.

  “Little boy,” she called in a whisper. “Little boy.”

  She knelt and started to reach under the bed. But then the thought came—shameful but prudent, born of long experience with troubled children—that he might try to bite her, and she pulled back her hand. Instead she turned on the night light and moved the bed away from the wall.

  The poor thing was huddled miserably in the corner, knees up against his chin, looking up at her with blurred and apprehensive eyes.

  In the dim light she was able to ignore his repulsiveness, the thick blunt features, the big misshapen head.

  “Poor little boy,” she murmured. “Poor frightened little boy.”

  Miss Fellowes stroked his hair, that harsh tangled bristly hair that had felt so disagreeable to her a few hours before. Now it merely seemed unusual. He stiffened at the first touch of her hand, but then she saw him relax.

  “Poor child,” she said. “Let me hold you.”

  He made a soft clicking sound. Then a little low growl, a kind of gentle unhappy rumbling.

  She sat down on the floor next to him and stroked his hair again, slowly, rhythmically. The tension was visibly going from his body. Perhaps no one had ever stroked his hair before, back in whatever ferocious prehistoric life it was that he had left behind. He seemed to like it. Gently, tenderly, she played with his hair, smoothing it, straightening it, picking a few burrs out of it, but mainly just running her hand along the top of his head, slowly, slowly, almost hypnotically.

  She stroked his cheek, his arm. He allowed it.

  Softly she began to sing a slow and gentle song, a wordless repetitive one, a tune that she had known since childhood, one that she had sung to many disturbed children to soothe them, to calm them.

  He lifted his head at that, staring at her mouth in the dimness, as though wondering at the sound.

  She maneuvered him closer, gathering him in while he listened to her. He offered no resistance. Slowly she pressed her hand against the side of his head, gently guiding it toward her until it rested on her shoulder. She put her arm under his thighs and with a smooth and unhurried motion lifted him into her lap.

  She continued singing, the same quiet, sinuous musical phrase over and over, while she rocked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

  He had stopped crying, somewhere along the way.

  After a while the smooth, even purr of his breathing told Miss Fellowes that he was asleep.

  With infinite care she nudged his bed back against the wall, pushing it into place with her knee, and laid him down on it. She pulled the covers over him—had he ever known a coverlet before? Certainly not a bed!—and tucked them in and stood over him for a time, staring down at him. His face looked wondrously peaceful as he slept.

  Somehow it didn’t matter so much now that it was so ugly. Really.

  She made her way out of the room on tiptoes. But as she reached the door she paused and halted, thinking: What if he wakes up!

  He might be even more troubled than before, expecting to find her comforting presence close at hand and not knowing where she had gone. He might panic; he might run amok.

  Miss Fellowes hesitated, battling irresolutely with herself. She stood above the bed again, studying him as he slept. Then she sighed. There was only one thing to do. Slowly she lowered herself to the bed and lay down beside him.

  The bed was much too small for her. She had to draw her legs up close against her chest, and her left elbow pressed against the wall, and to avoid disturbing the boy she had to twist herself around into an intricate uncomfortable curve. She lay there wide awake, cramped and bent, feeling like Alice after she had sampled the “Drink Me” bottle in Wonderland. Very well: so she’d get no sleep this night. This was only the first night. Things would be easier later on. Sometimes there were higher priorities than sleep.

  She felt a touch against her hand. The child’s fingers, grazing her palm. He was reaching for her in his sleep. The rough little hand crept into hers.

  Miss Fellowes smiled.

  [16]

  She awoke with a start, wondering where she was, why she felt so stiff and sore. There was the un
familiar smell of another person in her nostrils and the unfamiliar sense of someone’s body pressing against hers.

  She had to fight back a wild impulse to scream. She was able just barely to suppress it into a gurgle.

  The boy was sitting up, looking at her wide-eyed. The ugly little boy, the child snatched from time. The little Neanderthal child.

  It took a long moment for Miss Fellowes to remember getting into bed with him. Then it all came back. She realized that she had managed somehow to fall asleep, despite everything. And now it was morning.

  Slowly, without unfixing her eyes from his, she stretched one leg carefully and let it touch the floor, and then the other. Her muscles were tensed for quick disengagement in case the boy should go into a panic.

  She cast a quick and apprehensive glance toward the open ceiling. Were they watching, up there? Cameras grinding away as she made her bleary-eyed entry into the new day?

  Then the boy’s stubby fingers reached out and touched her lips. He said something: two quick clicks and a growl.

  Miss Fellowes shrank involuntarily away from him at the touch. She glanced down at him. A little shiver ran through her. She hated herself for it, but there was no preventing it. He was terribly ugly in the light of day.

  The boy spoke again. He opened his own mouth and gestured with his hand as though something were coming out.

  The meaning wasn’t hard to decode. Tremulously Miss Fellowes said, “Do you want me to sing again? Is that it?”

  The boy said nothing, but he was staring at her mouth.

  In a voice that was quavering and slightly off-key with tension, Miss Fellowes began the little song that she had sung the night before. The ugly little boy smiled. He seemed to recognize the melody, and he swayed clumsily in rough time to it, waving his arms about. He made a little gurgly sound that might have been the beginnings of a laugh.

  Miss Fellowes sighed inwardly. Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast. Well, whatever would help—

  She said, “You wait. Let me get myself fixed up. It’ll just take a minute. Then I’ll make breakfast for you.”

  She rinsed her face and brushed out her hair, maddeningly conscious the whole time of the lack of ceiling covering, the invisible staring electronic eyes. Perhaps not only electronic ones, she thought.

  The boy remained in bed, looking toward her. He seemed calm. The fierce frenzied wildness of his first few hours in the twenty-first century seemed long ago, now. Whenever she turned his way, Miss Fellowes waved at him. Eventually he waved back, an awkward but charming gesture that sent a little chill of surprise and delight down her spine.

  When she was done she said, “You could use something solid, I suspect. What about some oatmeal with your milk?”

  He smiled, almost as though he had understood her. Almost.

  It took only a moment to prepare the cereal in the microwave oven. Then she beckoned to the boy.

  Whether he understood the gesture or was simply following the aroma, Miss Fellowes had no way of knowing; but he got out of bed and came stumping over to her. His legs were very short in proportion to his stocky trunk, which made them look more bowed than in fact they were.

  He glanced down at the floor, plainly in the expectation that she was going to set the bowl of oatmeal in front of him down there for him to lick.

  “No,” she said. “You’re a civilized little boy now. Or at least you’re going to be one. Civilized little boys don’t eat on the floor.”

  Clicks. Growls.

  “I know you don’t understand anything I’m saying. But you will, sooner or later. I don’t think I can learn your language, but I’m pretty certain you’re capable of learning mine.”

  She took a spoon from the drawer and showed it to him.

  “Spoon.”

  He looked at it stolidly, without interest.

  “To eat with. Spoon.”

  She dipped it into the oatmeal and carried it to her mouth. His eyes widened and his broad nostrils flared even wider and he made a strange uneasy drawn-out noise, like a very quiet howl: the sound, Miss Fellowes suspected, of a hungry creature that thinks some other creature is going to steal its breakfast.

  She pantomimed putting the spoon into her mouth, swallowing the oatmeal, licking her lips in pleasure. Round-eyed, unhappy-looking, he watched the process, all too obviously failing to comprehend.

  “Now you try it,” Miss Fellowes said. She dumped the oatmeal back into the bowl, turning the empty spoon toward him to show him that she hadn’t eaten any of it. Then she scooped more onto the spoon and held it out to him.

  He drew back, eyes wide with alarm as though the spoon were a weapon. His tawny little face puckered in fright and he uttered a sound that was not quite a sob, not quite a growl.

  “Look,” she said. “Spoon. Oatmeal. Mouth.”

  No. Hungry as he was, he didn’t want to know anything about the spoon. Well, time enough for that, Miss Fellowes thought. She put the spoon away.

  “But you’re going to have to hold the bowl in your hands. You know how to do that. There’s going to be no crouching on the floor to eat around here.”

  She offered him the bowl. He glanced at it and looked down at the floor.

  “Hold it in your hands.”

  Clicks. She thought she recognized them as a familiar pattern, but she couldn’t be certain. By God, Hoskins would have to tape those sounds! If he wasn’t already doing so.

  “In your hands,” Miss Fellowes said again, firmly. “Here.”

  He understood. He took the bowl into his hands, with his thumbs sticking into the oatmeal, and lifted it to his face. He did it clumsily enough and it was incredibly messy but most of it did get into him.

  So he was a quick learner—when he wasn’t numbed by fear. Miss Fellowes doubted that there’d be much more animal-like lapping of food on the floor.

  She watched him closely as he ate. He seemed to be in good health, sturdy and strong. His eyes were bright, his color was high, there were no outward signs of fever or illness. So far he appeared to be withstanding the rigors of his extraordinary journey very well indeed.

  Although she knew no more than anybody else about the growth patterns of Neanderthal children, Miss Fellowes started to think now that he probably was older than she had originally thought, definitely closer to four years of age than three. He was small, yes, but his physiological development was beyond the modern child’s three-year-old level. Of course, some of that might just be the result of the conditions under which he had lived, back there in the Stone Age world. (Stone Age? Yes, of course. Neanderthals must be Stone Age. She was reasonably certain of that. There was so much that she needed to learn, when she had the chance.)

  She tried having him drink his milk in a glass this time. He seemed to catch on swiftly to the idea of holding the glass in his hands—he needed both hands to do it, but that was the way most children his age held glasses, and at least he didn’t find the glass as threatening as the spoon appeared to have been. But he had trouble with the opening, which was too small for him to get his face into conveniently, and he began to whine, a high-pitched keening sound of frustration that was starting to edge upward into anger. Miss Fellowes put her own hand over the little boy’s, making him tip the glass, forcing his mouth to the rim.

  Again a mess, but again most went into him. And she was used to messes.

  The washroom, to her surprise and immense relief, was a less difficult matter. At first he appeared to think that the toilet bowl was some sort of fountain that might be fun to splash around in, and she was afraid that he was going to climb into it. But Miss Fellowes held him back and stood him in front of it and opened his robe, and he understood right away what it was she expected him to do.

  She found herself patting his head, saying, “Good boy. Smart boy.”

  And to Miss Fellowes’ exceeding pleasure, the boy smiled up at her.

  It was going to be a morning of discoveries, Miss Fellowes realized pleasantly. For him and
for her as well. He was learning about spoons and milk glasses and toilet bowls. She was learning about him. Discovering the essential humanity that lay behind that strange and ugly—oh, so ugly!—face of his.

  She replied to his smile with one of her own. He smiled again. It was a very normal smile, the smile of a child who has seen that his smile has brought a pleasing response.

  He wasn’t at all a normal child, she reminded herself. It would be a serious mistake to allow herself any illusions about that.

  But when he smiles, she thought, he’s quite bearable. Really.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Studying

  [17]

  MID-MORNING. She had bathed him again—far less of a battle than it had been yesterday—and given him a fairly close physical inspection—he showed some bruises and scratches of the sort you would expect a boy who had been living under primitive conditions to have, but no obvious signs of disease or serious injury—and had even succeeded, with a great deal of patience and an endless amount of singing to lull him into a peaceful mood, in trimming his fingernails. The toenails would have to wait until later. Neither she nor the boy had sufficient endurance to tackle any further manicure chores today.

  Without her noticing it, the door to the Stasis bubble had opened while Miss Fellowes was going about her chores, and Hoskins was standing before her, silent, his arms folded. He might have been there for minutes.

  He said, “May I come in?”

  Miss Fellowes nodded curtly. “You seem already to have done that, haven’t you?”

  “I mean into the working area.—You didn’t answer when I spoke to you on the intercom from outside.”

  “I was busy. You may need to speak louder. But come in, come in!”

  The boy drew back as Hoskins entered. He gave Hoskins an uneasy look and seemed about to bolt into the rear room. Miss Fellowes smiled and beckoned to him and he came forward instead and clung to her, curling his little bandy legs—so thin, so very thin—about her.

  A look of something close to awe blossomed on Hoskins’ face.