by Isaac Asimov
He made clicks.
“I can’t understand you.”
The clicks became more insistent.
“No, Timmie. It’s no good. You have to speak my kind of words. I don’t understand yours. When you dreamed you were outside—what did you see?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Empty.”
Empty, yes. No wonder. He had no idea what was out there. The dollhouse’s single window showed him only a little grassy patch, a fence, a meaningless sign.
“Big—empty,” he said.
“You didn’t see anything at all out there?”
Clicks.
Perhaps in his sleep he had been back in his Neanderthal world, and he had seen Ice Age scenes, drifts of snow, great shambling hairy animals wandering across the land, people clad in robes made of fur. But he had no words in English to describe any of that to her; and so he used the only sounds he did know.
“Outside,” he said again. “Big—empty—”
“Scary?” Miss Fellowes prompted.
“Empty,” he said. “Timmie alone.”
Yes, she thought. Timmie alone. You poor, poor child.
She hugged him and tucked him in a second time, for he had pulled the coverlet free, and she gave him one of his favorite toys, a shapeless green floppy-limbed animal that was supposed to be a dinosaur. Dr. McIntyre had scowled when he saw it, and had given her one of his little paleoanthropological lectures about how it was a mistake to think that prehistoric man had been in any way a contemporary of the dinosaurs—a common popular error, he said, but in fact the Mesozoic Era had ended many millions of years before the appearance on the evolutionary scene of the first manlike primates. Yes, Miss Fellowes said, I know all that. But Timmie doesn’t, and he loves his dinosaur very much. The boy hugged it now; and Miss Fellowes stood beside his bed until he had fallen asleep again.
No more bad dreams, she told him silently. No dreams of the great empty place outside where Timmie is all alone.
She went back to her own bed. A glance at the clock on the dresser told her that the time was a quarter to five. Too close to morning; she doubted that she would get back to sleep. More likely she’d simply lie awake, vigilantly listening for sounds from Timmie’s room, and before long it would be dawn.
But she was wrong. Sleep took her quickly; and this time she was the one who dreamed.
She was in her bed, not here in the dollhouse but in her little apartment on the other side of town, which she hadn’t seen in so many months. Someone was knocking on her door: eagerly, urgently, impatiently. She rose, slipping on a bathrobe, and activated the security screen. A man stood in the hall: a youngish man with close-clinging red hair, and a reddish beard, too.
Bruce Mannheim.
“Edith?” he said. “Edith, I have to see you.”
He was smiling. Her hands shook a little as she undid the safeties on the door. He loomed before her in the dark, shadowy hallway, taller than she remembered, broad-shouldered, a sturdy virile figure. “Edith,” he said. “Oh, Edith, it’s been such a long time—”
And then she was in his arms. Right there in the hall, heedless of the staring neighbors, who stood in their doorways, pointing and murmuring. He swept her up as she had swept Timmie up not long before—carried her into her own apartment—whispering her name all the while—
“Bruce,” she said. And realized that she had spoken the name aloud. She was awake. She sat up quickly and pressed both her hands over her mouth. Her cheeks were hot and stinging with embarrassment. Fragments of the dream whirled in her astounded mind. The absurdity of it—and its blatant schoolgirlish eroticism—stunned and dismayed her. She couldn’t remember when she had last had any such sort of dream.
And to pick Bruce Mannheim as her dashing romantic hero—of all people—!
She began to laugh.
Dr. Hoskins would be appalled, if he knew! His reliable, dependable Miss Fellowes—consorting intimately with the enemy, even if only in her dreams!
How ridiculous—how preposterous—
How pathetic, she told herself abruptly.
The aura of the dream still hovered about her. Some of the details were already gone from her mind. Others burned as vividly as though she were still asleep. His ardent embrace, his steamy passionate whispering. Edith—Edith—it’s been such a long time, Edith—
A spinster’s pitiful little fantasy. Sick. Sick. Miss Fellowes began to tremble, and had to struggle to fight off tears. The dream no longer seemed in any way funny to her. She felt soiled by it. An intrusion into her mind; an invasion of her neat enclosed life: where had it come from? Why? She had shut off all such yearnings years ago—or so she wanted to think. She had opted for a life without the disturbances that desire brought. A maidenly life; a spinster’s life. Strictly speaking, she was neither, for she had been married, after all—if only for a handful of months. But that chapter was closed. She had lived as an island, entire of herself, for years—for decades. Devoted to her work, to her children. And now this—
It was only a dream, she told herself. And dreams aren’t real. She had told Timmie the same thing just a little while before.
Only a dream. Only. The sleeping mind is capable of liberating any kind of thought at all. Strange things drift around randomly in there, floating on the tides of the unconscious. It meant nothing, nothing at all, other than that Bruce Mannheim had come here today and he had left some kind of impression on her that her sleeping mind had rearranged into a startling and improbable little scenario. But Mannheim was at least ten years younger than she was. And, pleasant-looking though he was, she didn’t find him particularly attractive—not even in fantasy. He was just a man: someone she had met that day. Sometimes, despite everything, she did feel attracted to men. She had felt attracted to Hoskins, after all—a pointless, useless, meaningless attraction to a happily married man with whom she happened to work. There was some slight reality to the feeling she had for Hoskins, at least. There was none here. Only a dream, Miss Fellowes told herself again, only a dream, only a dream.
The thing to do now was to go back to sleep, she decided. By the time morning came she would probably have forgotten the whole thing.
Miss Fellowes closed her eyes again. After a while, she slept. The shadow of the dream was still with her, though, the vague outline and humiliating essence of it, when she woke once again a little past six as Timmie began to move about in his room: the urgent knocking at her door, the breathless greeting, the passionate embrace. But the whole thing simply seemed absurd to her now.
[38]
After all the talk of the need to get a playmate for Timmie, Miss Fellowes expected that Hoskins would produce one almost immediately, if only to pacify the powerful political forces that Mannheim and Marianne Levien represented. But to her surprise weeks went by and nothing seemed to happen. Evidently Hoskins was having just as much difficulty arranging for someone’s child to be brought into the Stasis bubble as he had anticipated. How he was managing to stall Mannheim off, Miss Fellowes didn’t know.
Indeed she saw almost nothing of Hoskins in this period. Evidently he was preoccupied with other activities of Stasis Technologies, Ltd., and she caught no more than an occasional glimpse of him in passing. Running the company was obviously a full time job for him, and then some. Miss Fellowes had already gotten the impression, from little bits and snatches of comment that she had picked up from other people, that Hoskins was constantly struggling to cope with a staff of talented but high strung prima donnas hungry for Nobel prizes while he presided in his harried way over one of the most complex scientific ventures in history.
Be that as it may. He had his problems; she had hers.
Timmie’s increasing loneliness was one of the worst of them. She tried to be everything the boy needed, nurse and teacher and surrogate mother; but she couldn’t be enough. He dreamed again and again, always the same dream—not every night but often enough so that Miss Fellowes began keeping a record of the frequency of the dream—of
that big, empty place outside the dollhouse where he could never be allowed to go. Sometimes he was alone out there; sometimes there were shadowy, mysterious figures with him. Because his English was still so rudimentary, she still wasn’t able to tell whether the big empty place represented the lost Ice Age world to him or his imagined fantasy of the strange new era into which he had been brought. Either way, it was a frightening place to him, and he often awoke in tears. It wasn’t necessary to have a degree in psychiatry to know that the dream was a powerful symptom of Timmie’s isolation, his deepening sadness.
During the daytime he went through long woebegone periods when he was aimless and withdrawn, or when he spent silent hours at the dollhouse window with its prospect of little more than nothing—staring out into the big empty of his dream, perhaps thinking nostalgically of the bleak ice-swept plateaus of his now distant childhood, perhaps simply wondering what lay beyond the walls of the rooms in which his existence was confined. And she thought furiously: Why don’t they bring someone here to keep him company? Why?
Miss Fellowes wondered if she ought to get in touch with Mannheim herself and tell him that nothing was being done, urge him to bring more pressure on Hoskins. But that seemed too much like treachery to her. Devoted as she was to Timmie, she still couldn’t bring herself to go behind Hoskins’ back that way. Yet her anger mounted.
The physiologists by now had learned about all they could from the boy, short of dissecting him, and that didn’t appear to be part of the research program. So their visits became less frequent; someone came in once a week to measure Timmie’s growth and ask a few routine questions and take some photographs, but that was all. The needles were gone, the injections and withdrawals of fluid; the special diets were deemed no longer necessary; the elaborate and taxing studies of how Timmie’s joints and ligaments and bones were articulated became much less frequent.
So much to the good. But if the physiologists were growing less interested in the boy, the psychologists were only just beginning to turn up the heat. Miss Fellowes found the new group just as bothersome as the first, sometimes a good deal more so. Now Timmie was made to overcome barriers to reach food and water. He had to lift panels, move bars, reach for cords. And the mild electric shocks made him whimper with surprise and fear—or else to snarl in a highly primordial way. All of it drove Miss Fellowes to distraction.
She didn’t want to appeal to Hoskins, though. She didn’t wish to go to Hoskins at all. He was keeping his distance, for whatever reason; and Miss Fellowes was afraid that if she carried new demands to him now, she’d lose her temper at the slightest sign of resistance, might even quit altogether. That was a step she didn’t want to find herself taking. For Timmie’s sake she had to stay here.
Why had the man backed off from the Timmie project, though? Why this indifference? Was this his way of insulating himself from Bruce Mannheim’s complaints and requests? It was stupid, she thought. Timmie was the only victim of his remoteness. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
She did what she could to limit access to Timmie by the scientists. But she couldn’t seal the boy off from them entirely. This was a scientific experiment, after all. So the probing and the poking and the mild electrical shocks went on.
And there were the anthropologists, too, armies of them, eager to interrogate Timmie about life as it had been lived in the Paleolithic. But even though Timmie now had a surprisingly good command of English—his kind of English—they still were doomed to frustration. They could ask all they wanted; but he could answer only if he understood the questions, and if his mind still retained any information about those aspects of his now remote days in the Stone Age world.
As the weeks of his sojourn in the modern era turned into months Timmie’s speech had grown constantly better and more precise. It never entirely lost a certain soft slurriness that Miss Fellowes found rather endearing, but his comprehension of English was now practically the equal of that of a modern child of his age. In times of excitement, he did tend to fall back into bursts of tongue-clicking and occasional primordial growling, but those times were becoming fewer. He must be forgetting the life he had known in the days before he came into the twenty-first century—except in his private world of dreams, where Miss Fellowes could not enter. Who knew what huge shambling mammoths and mastodons cavorted there, what dark scenes of prehistoric mystery were enacted on the screen of the Neanderthal boy’s mind?
But to Miss Fellowes’ surprise, she was still the only one who could understand Timmie’s words with any degree of assurance. Some of the others who worked frequently inside the Stasis bubble—her assistants Mortenson, Elliott, and Stratford, Dr. McIntyre, Dr. Jacobs—seemed able to pick out a phrase or two, but it was always a great effort and they usually misconstrued at least half of what Timmie was saying. Miss Fellowes was puzzled by that. In the beginning, yes, the boy had had a little difficulty in shaping words intelligibly; but time had gone by and he was quite fluent now. Or so it seemed to her. But gradually she had to admit that it was only her constant day-and-night proximity to Timmie that had made her so readily capable of understanding him. Her ear automatically compensated for the differences between what he said and the way the words really should be pronounced. He was different from a modern child, at least so far as his capacity to speak was concerned. He understood much of what was said to him; he was able to reply now in complex sentences—but his tongue and lips and larynx and, Miss Fellowes supposed, his little hyoid bone simply didn’t appear to be properly adapted to the niceties of the twenty-first-century English language, and what came out was thick with distortions.
She defended him to the others. “Have you ever heard a Frenchman trying to say a simple word like ‘the’? Or an Englishman trying to speak French? And there are letters in the Russian alphabet that we have to break our jaws to pronounce. Each linguistic group gets a different sort of training of the linguistic muscles from birth and for most people it’s just about impossible to change. That’s why there’s such a thing as accents. Well, Timmie has a very pronounced Neanderthal accent. But it’ll diminish with time.”
Until that happened, Miss Fellowes realized, her own position would be one of unanticipated power and authority. She was not only Timmie’s nurse, she was also his interpreter: the conduit through which his memories of the prehistoric world were transmitted to the anthropologists who came to interrogate him. Without her as an intermediary, they would find it impossible to get coherent answers to the questions they wanted to put to the boy. Her help was necessary if the project was to achieve its full scientific value. And so Miss Fellowes became essential, in a way that no one including herself had expected, to the ongoing work of exploring the nature of human life in the remote past.
Unfortunately, Timmie’s interrogators almost always went away dissatisfied with the boy’s revelations. It wasn’t that he was unwilling to cooperate. But he had spent only three or four years in the world of the Neanderthals—the first three or four years, at that. There weren’t many children of his age in any era who were prepared to offer a comprehensive verbal account of the workings of the society they lived in.
Most of what he did manage to convey were things that the anthropologists already suspected, and which, perhaps, they themselves planted in the boy’s mind by the very nature of the questions which they had Miss Fellowes put to him.
“Ask him how big his tribe was,” they would say.
“I don’t think he has any word for tribe.”
“How many people there were in the group that he lived with, then.”
She asked him. She had begun teaching him recently how to count. He looked confused.
“Many,” he said.
“Many,” in Timmie’s vocabulary, could be anything more than about three. It all seemed to be the same to him, beyond that point.
“How many?” she asked. She lifted his hand and ran her finger across the tips of his. “This many?”
“More.”
“How many more?”
>
He made an effort. He closed his eyes for a moment as if staring into another world, and held out his hands, wriggling his fingers at her in rapid in-out gestures.
“Is he indicating numbers, Miss Fellowes?”
“I think so. Each hand movement is probably a five.”
“I counted three movements of each hand. So the tribe was thirty people?”
“Forty, I think.”
“Ask him again.”
“Timmie, tell me again: how many people were there in your group?”
“Group, Miss Fellowes?”
“The people around you. Your friends and relatives. How many were there?”
“Friends. Relatives.” He considered those concepts. Vague unreal words to him, very likely.
Then after a time he stared at his hands, and thrust his fingers out again, the same quick fluttery gesture, which might have been counting or might have been something else entirely. It was impossible to tell how many times he did it: perhaps eight, perhaps ten.
“Did you see?” Miss Fellowes asked. “Eighty, ninety, a hundred people, I think he’s saying this time. If he’s really answering the question at all.”
“The number was smaller before.”
“I know. This is what he’s saying now.”
“It’s impossible. A tribe that primitive couldn’t have more than thirty! At most.”
Miss Fellowes shrugged. If they wanted to taint the evidence with their own preconceptions, that wasn’t her problem. “Then put down thirty. You’re asking a child who was only around three years old to give you a census report. He’s only guessing, and the amazing thing is that he can even guess what we’re trying to get him to tell us. And he may not be. What makes you think he knows how to count? That he even understands the concept of number?”
“But he does understand it, doesn’t he?”
“About as well as any five-year-old does. Ask the next five-year-old how many people he thinks live on his street, and see what he tells you.”