The Ugly Little Boy

by Isaac Asimov

  But at least they were playing with the same set of blocks, Miss Fellowes thought. It was a start.

  She dropped back out of their way and let them play. From time to time she looked over at them to see whether either of them had begun to think of crossing the invisible wall that they had drawn across the middle of the room. But no: they were still lost in their individual spheres of play. They were working so hard at paying no attention to each other that it must have been tiring for them. Timmie had matched all his blocks and had arranged them in a ragged square, with its ends open at two corners. Jerry had put his blocks together in a much more intricate way, forming them into a perfect pyramid after making some minor trial-and-error adjustments.

  Miss Fellowes found herself a little disheartened by the greater complexity of Jerry’s arrangement of the blocks. Another example of the superiority of the Homo sapiens sapiens mind over that of Homo sapiens neanderthalensis? Maybe so. But it was just as plausible to think that Jerry had a set of blocks just like these at home, and that his father—the scientist, the physicist—had taught him all about piling them up in a neat little pyramid like that. Poor fatherless Timmie had had no such advantage; Miss Fellowes had made no attempt to give Timmie instruction in the art of piling up blocks. That had never occurred to her at all. She had been pleased enough that Timmie had been able to figure out how to play with the blocks on his own, almost as if by instinct. Now, feeling abashed by Timmie’s relative lack of intellectual prowess, she wanted to think that Dr. Hoskins must have devoted great effort to expanding Jerry’s mastery of block-pile construction. She certainly hoped he had.

  “Would you boys like some milk?” Miss Fellowes asked, as the hour was coming to its end.

  They did; but they were no more social than before when she served it out. Each retreated to his corner of the room to drink it. Miss Fellowes noted with displeasure how much more dextrous Jerry was in handling his glass than Timmie.

  Stop that, she ordered herself sternly. Jerry’s had all sorts of opportunities to learn things that Timmie never had. He didn’t just drop into this world at age four without knowing how to do anything that modern people do.

  Even so, she couldn’t quite succeed in fighting off a mood of mild dejection when she took Jerry back to Hoskins’ office at the end of the first hour.

  “Well, how did it go?” Hoskins asked.

  “We made a beginning,” Miss Fellowes said. “Only a beginning, but you have to start somewhere.”

  “No more hitting?”

  “No.” She told him about the blocks, leaving out any description of Jerry’s apparent superiority as an architect. “They tolerated each other. That’s the best way I can put it. Timmie stayed in one zone and Jerry in the other. It’s going to take some time for them to warm up to one another.”

  “Yes, I’m sure that’s true,” Hoskins said. He sounded utterly indifferent, almost impatient to have her leave. She noted that he hadn’t said a word to his own son since the boy had entered the office.

  There were papers strewn all over Hoskins’ desk: printouts, strips of visual tape, a stack of data wheels.

  “A new experiment?” Miss Fellowes ventured.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. Or rather, a breakthrough of sorts in an older one. We’re closing in on short-range scooping. We’re on the verge of attaining intertemporal detection at extremely close range.”

  “Intertemp—”

  “Narrowing down the limits of our reach. We’re well within the ten-thousand-year envelope now, and the way it looks we can achieve a quantitative improvement of several magnitudes on our next pass through.”

  Miss Fellowes, her mind full of Timmie and Jerry, Jerry and Timmie, looked at him blankly.

  Hoskins went blithely on. “By which I mean we anticipate attaining the ability to reach back in time within a thousand years—or even less, Miss Fellowes! And there’s more. We’re stepping up our mass limitations, too. The old forty-kilogram limit is about to become a thing of the past. We think eighty, even one hundred kilograms is well within possibility now.”

  “I’m very happy for you, Dr. Hoskins.” She said it with no warmth whatsoever in her voice, but Hoskins didn’t appear to observe that.

  “Yes. Thank you, Miss Fellowes.” Hoskins glanced at his son as though noticing him for the first time, and gathered him in against him with a casual sweep of his arm.—“Well, we’ll have to bring Jerry back here in another couple of days and see if things work out a little better between them the next time, eh, Miss Fellowes?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  She hesitated.

  “Is there anything else?” Hoskins asked.

  Yes, there was. She wanted to tell him how grateful to him she was for having allowed Jerry to come to visit Timmie at all. Even though it hadn’t gone particularly well. She knew that the initial tensions would ebb, that fears and uncertainties would vanish over the course of time, that the boys would eventually become friends. Timmie’s willingness to share the blocks, however tepid it had been, told her that much. And a friend was what Timmie needed more than anything. As time went along, Jerry’s presence would cause wonderful changes in Timmie: opening him up, allowing him to reach out to someone who was his peer, enabling him to become the boy he was meant to be. Yes. At last Timmie would be able to become Timmie. He couldn’t do that while living alone, no matter how lovingly she cared for him. Miss Fellowes was grateful indeed to Hoskins, almost maudlinly grateful, for having brought Jerry to him.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to tell Hoskins that. She searched for ways to thank him, but his very formality, his remoteness, his preoccupation with the printouts and data wheels of this new experiment of his, served as a chilly rebuff. Perhaps he still remembered that time when they had had lunch together—when she had spoken of him as though he were Timmie’s father, in every sense but the biological, and said that he was being cruel by denying Timmie a companion, that he owed it to the boy. So he had brought in his own real son. Perhaps bringing Jerry here had been an attempt, after all, to prove himself both a kind father to Timmie and, also, not his father at all. Both at the same time! And with all manner of buried resentments involved.

  So all she could say was, “I’m very pleased you’ve allowed your boy to come here. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Hoskins.”

  And all he could say was, “That’s all right. Don’t mention it, Miss Fellowes.”

  [43]

  It became a settled routine. Jerry returned three days later, and four days after that. The second visit lasted as long as the first; the third one was extended to two hours, and that remained the rule thereafter.

  There was no repetition of the staring and shoving of the first visit. The two boys eyed each other a little fretfully when Jerry—without either of his parents—was brought through the Stasis barrier the second time; but Miss Fellowes quickly said, “Here’s your friend Jerry again, Timmie,” and Timmie nodded in acknowledgment of Jerry’s presence without any show of hostility. He was starting to accept Jerry as a fact of life in the bubble, like the visits of the anthropologists or the tests administered by Dr. Jacobs.

  “Say hello, Timmie.”

  “Hello.”

  “Jerry?”

  “Hello, Timmie.”

  “Now you say, ‘Hello, Jerry,’ why don’t you, Timmie?”

  A pause. “Hello, Jerry.”

  “Hello, Timmie.”

  “Hello, Jerry.”

  “Hello, Timmie.”

  “Hello, Jerry—”

  They wouldn’t stop. It had become a game. They were both laughing. Miss Fellowes felt relief flooding her spirit. Children who could be silly together were children who weren’t likely to start punching each other the moment she turned her back on them. Children who made each other laugh weren’t going to hate each other.

  “Hello, Timmie.”

  “Hello, Jerry.”

  “Hello—”

  And another thing. Jerry didn’t seem t
o be having any trouble understanding what Timmie was saying. Not that “Hello, Jerry” was a particularly complicated series of sounds, but plenty of adult visitors to the dollhouse had failed completely to comprehend even a syllable of Timmie’s speech. Jerry didn’t have an adult’s preconceptions about enunciation and pronunciation, though. Timmie’s thick-tongued manner of speaking apparently held no mysteries for him.

  “Would you like to play with the blocks again?” Miss Fellowes asked.

  Enthusiastic nods. She brought them in from the other room and dumped them on the floor.

  Quickly the boys divided them once again into approximately equal heaps. Each went swiftly to work on his own heap. But this time there was no retreating to opposite ends of the room. They worked side by side, in silence, neither one paying any great attention to what the other was doing but having no problem with the other one’s proximity.

  Good. Good.

  What wasn’t so good was the fact that the division of the blocks hadn’t been quite as equal as Miss Fellowes had thought at first glance. Jerry had appropriated considerably more than half of them—close to two thirds, as a matter of fact. He was rapidly arranging them into the pyramid shape again, carrying out the construction more easily now that he had a greater supply of building material.

  As for Timmie, he was working on some kind of X-shaped pattern, but he didn’t quite have enough blocks to make his design turn out properly. Miss Fellowes saw him glance thoughtfully at Jerry’s pile of blocks, and got herself ready to intervene in case a squabble began. But Timmie didn’t actually reach across to help himself to any of Jerry’s blocks; he contented himself simply with staring at them.

  A laudable sign of self-restraint? The politeness of the well-bred child toward his guest?

  Or was there something more worrisome in Timmie’s reluctance to take blocks away from Jerry? One thing that Timmie wasn’t was well-bred. Miss Fellowes had no illusions about that. She had trained him with all her skill and diligence to be courteous and deferential; but nevertheless it was folly to believe that Timmie was any model of deportment. What he was was the child of a primitive society where manners as they were understood today were probably unknown, and after being taken from his own tribe he had been compelled to live in isolation in the Stasis bubble, which had given him no opportunity to develop many of the social traits that ordinary children had picked up by the time they were his age. And ordinary children his age weren’t all that polite either.

  If Timmie wasn’t reaching out to take the blocks from Jerry—his blocks, after all—that he wanted, the reason probably wasn’t that he was such a nice little boy, but simply that he was intimidated by Jerry. Afraid to reach out and help himself to the blocks the way any boy might be expected to do.

  Had that single shove at the first visit so cowed Timmie?

  Or was it something else—something deeper, something darker, something lost in the forgotten history of the human race’s earliest days?

  [44]

  Early one evening after Timmie had gone to his room, the telephone rang and the switchboard voice said, “Miss Fellowes, I have a call for you from Bruce Mannheim.”

  She raised her eyebrows. Mannheim calling her? Nobody called her here, not ever. By her own choice she lived almost completely cut off from the outside world, lest she be bothered by the media, by curious-minded people of all sorts, by crackpots and fanatics, and by people like—Bruce Mannheim. But here he was on the telephone. How had he managed to get through to her behind Hoskins’ back? He must be calling with Hoskins’ knowledge and permission, she decided.

  “Yes, Mr. Mannheim. How are you?”

  “Fine, Miss Fellowes, just fine.—Dr. Hoskins tells me that Timmie finally has the playmate he needs.”

  “So he does. Dr. Hoskins’ own son, as a matter of fact.”

  “Yes. I know that. We all think it was perfectly splendid of Dr. Hoskins to do that.—And how is everything working out, would you say?”

  Miss Fellowes hesitated. “Quite well, actually.”

  “The boys are getting along with each other?”

  “Of course they are. There was the usual little edginess at first—more on Jerry’s part than Timmie’s, I have to say; Timmie took to Jerry very readily, even though he’d never seen a child his own age of our kind before.”

  “But Jerry? Confronted with a Neanderthal, he didn’t react so well?”

  “I don’t know whether Timmie’s being a Neanderthal had anything to do with it, Mr. Mannheim. He was just edgy, that’s all. A straight child-child reaction, without any special anthropological undertones, is what I’d call it. Push came to shove—it could have happened between any two. But it’s not like that now. They’re very peaceful with each other.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Mannheim said. “And Timmie is thriving?”

  “He’s doing very well, yes.”

  There was a pause. She hoped the children’s advocate wasn’t leading up to telling her that he had wangled permission to pay another call on the dollhouse so that he could check up on Timmie’s new friendship. Timmie didn’t need any more visitors than he already had; and Miss Fellowes was wary of having an outsider like Mannheim on hand while Timmie and Jerry were together. Their developing relationship, while it was just as peaceful as she had told Mannheim it was, had a subtext of potential volatility that was all too likely to turn into something troublesome in the presence of a stranger.

  But Mannheim wasn’t planning to visit, it seemed. He said, after a moment, “I just want to tell you, Miss Fellows, how pleased we all are that a capable nurse like you is looking after Timmie.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “The boy’s been put through a very frightening experience and he’s made a wonderful adaptation—so far. Much of the credit for that must go to you.”

  (What did he mean, so far?)

  —“We’d much rather have preferred it, of course, that Timmie had been left to live out his natural life among his own people,” Mannheim continued. “But since that option wasn’t allowed him, it’s good to know that a devoted, dedicated woman like you has been placed in charge of him, that you’ve been giving him the kind of care you have ever since he came to our era. You’ve worked wonders. I have no other word for it.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Miss Fellowes said again, more lamely than before. She had never cared much for praise; and Mannheim was laying it on pretty thickly.

  “And Dr. Levien feels the same way that I do.”

  “Ah,” said Miss Fellowes. “Yes.” And, coolly, stiffly: “That’s—very good to hear.”

  “I’d like to give you my number,” Mannheim said.

  (Why?)

  “I can always reach you through Dr. Hoskins,” Miss Fellowes replied.

  “Yes, of course. But a time might come when you’d want to reach me more directly.”

  (Why? Why? What is this all about?)

  “Well, perhaps—”

  “I feel that you and I are natural allies in this enterprise, Miss Fellowes. The one thing we have at heart, above all else, is Timmie’s welfare. However we may feel about child-care techniques, about politics, about anything in the world, we both are concerned with Timmie. Deeply so. And therefore if you need to talk to me about Timmie’s welfare, if any changes take place in the setup at Stasis Technologies that might have an unfavorable impact on Timmie’s existence there—”

  (Ah. You want me to be a spy for you.)

  “I’m sure that everything’s going to keep on going very smoothly, Mr. Mannheim.”

  “Of course it will. Of course. But all the same—”

  He gave her the number. She wrote it down, not knowing why.

  Just in case, Miss Fellowes told herself.

  In case of what?

  [45]

  “Is Jerry coining again today, Miss Fellowes?” Timmie asked.

  “Tomorrow.”

  The boy’s disappointment was all too obvious. His round face disso
lved into wrinkles, his jutting brow knotted in a frown. “Why not today?”

  “Today isn’t Jerry’s day, Timmie. Jerry has—a place to go today.”

  “What place?”

  “A place,” she said, being deliberately vague. How could she describe kindergarten to him? What would Timmie think, knowing that other children, many of them, came together to play games, to chase each other in laughter around a schoolyard, to daub pieces of paper with gloriously gooey fingerpaints. “Jerry’ll be here tomorrow,”

  “I wish he could come every day.”

  “So do I,” Miss Fellowes said.

  (But do I? Really?)

  [46]

  The problem was not that Timmie had a friend, but that the friend was becoming too confident, too aggressive, as time went along. Jerry had overcome his initial timidity entirely by now, and he was very much the dominant member of the pair.

  He had been bigger than Timmie to start with, and he seemed to be growing faster now. The height differential was close to an inch and a half by this time, and Jerry was heavier than Timmie as well. And quicker and stronger and—Miss Fellowes had trouble with this aspect of it—quite possibly more intelligent, too. Jerry seemed to figure out new toys much more swiftly than Timmie, and to find interesting things to do with them. And when she gave them paints or crayons or modeling clay to play with, Jerry quickly set to work creating designs and shapes, while Timmie simply made messes. Timmie appeared to have no artistic aptitude at all, not even the minimal skills one would expect from any reasonably intelligent child his age.

  Of course, she argued, Jerry goes to kindergarten every day. He’s learned all about how to use crayons and paints and clay there.

  But Timmie had had them too, long before Jerry had first come here. He had never managed to master them, but that hadn’t troubled Miss Fellowes at the time; she hadn’t been comparing Timmie with any other children then, and she was making allowances for the blankness of his first few years.