The Ugly Little Boy

by Isaac Asimov

  Now she remembered what she had read in the books Dr. McIntyre had given her. About the total absence of any known examples of Neanderthal art. No cave paintings, no statuettes, no designs carved on walls.

  (What if they really were inferior? And that was why they died out when we came along.)

  Miss Fellowes didn’t want to think about that.

  Yet here was Jerry, swaggering in here now twice a week as if he owned the place. “Let’s play with the blocks,” he would say to Timmie. Or “let’s paint” or “let’s watch the whirloscreen.” And Timmie would go along with it, never suggesting some preference of his own, always blandly following Jerry’s agenda. Jerry had forced Timmie into a completely secondary role. The only thing that reconciled Miss Fellowes to the developing situation was that, despite difficulties, Timmie looked forward with more and more delight to the periodic appearances of his playfellow.

  Jerry is all he has, she told herself mournfully.

  And once, as she watched them, she thought: Hoskins’ two children, one by his wife and one by Stasis.

  Whereas she herself—

  Heavens, she thought, putting her fists to her temples and feeling ashamed: I’m jealous!

  CHAPTER TEN

  Reaching

  [47]

  MISS FELLOWES,” Timmie said, “when will I be starting to go to school?”

  The question, coming out of nowhere, hit her with the force of a thunderbolt.

  She looked down at those eager brown eyes turned up to hers and passed her hand softly through his thick, coarse hair, automatically picking through the rough tangles of it and trying to straighten them. Timmie’s hair was always disheveled. Miss Fellowes cut it herself while he squirmed restlessly under the scissors. The idea of having a barber in here for Timmie displeased her; and in any case the very clumsiness of the cut she gave him served to mask the retreating fore part of his skull and the bulging hinder part.

  Carefully Miss Fellowes said, “Where did you hear about school, Timmie?”

  “Jerry goes to school.”

  (Of course. Where else would he have heard of it but from Jerry?)

  “Jerry goes to kin-der-gar-ten.” Timmie pronounced the long word slowly and with unusual precision. “That’s only one of the places he goes. He goes to the store with his mother. He goes to the movies. The zoo. All kinds of places outside.—When can I go outside, Miss Fellowes?”

  A small pain centered in Miss Fellowes’ heart.

  It was inevitable, she knew, that Jerry would talk about the outside world with Timmie. They communicated freely and easily—two small boys who understood each other without difficulty. And Jerry, the emissary from the mysterious and forbidden world beyond the door of the Stasis bubble, would certainly want to tell Timmie all about it. There was no way of avoiding that.

  But it was a world that Timmie could never enter.

  Miss Fellowes said, with a studied gaiety that was her best attempt at distracting him from the anguish he must surely feel, “Why, whatever would you do out there, Timmie? Why would you want to go there? Do you know how cold it gets out there in the winter?”

  “Cold?”

  A blank look. He didn’t know the word.

  (But why would cold bother him, this boy who had learned how to walk in the snowfields of Ice Age Europe?)

  “Cold is like the way it is in the refrigerator. You go outside and in a minute or two your nose begins to hurt from it, and your ears. But that’s only in the winter. In the summer, outside gets very hot. It feels like an oven. Everyone sweats and complains about how hot it is outside. And then there’s rain, too. Water falling down on you out of the sky, soaking your clothes, getting you all damp and nasty—”

  It was a miserably cynical line of reasoning, and she knew it and felt dreadful about what she was trying to do. Telling a boy who could never go outside these few little rooms that the world out there held some minor physical discomforts was like telling a blind child that colors and shapes were boring, annoying distractions, that in fact, there was nothing very interesting worth seeing anyway.

  But Timmie ignored her pitiful sophistries as though she hadn’t said a thing.

  “Jerry says that at school they can play all kinds of games that I don’t have here. They have picture tapes and music. He says there are lots of children in the kin-der-gar-ten. He says—he says—” A moment of thought, then a triumphant upholding of both small hands with the fingers splayed apart. “He says this many.”

  Miss Fellowes said, “You have picture tapes.”

  “Just a few. Jerry says he sees more picture tapes in a day than I see all the time.”

  “We can get you more picture tapes. Very nice ones. And music tapes, too.”

  “Can you?”

  “I’ll get some this afternoon.”

  “Will you get me the Forty Thieves?”

  “Is that a story Jerry heard in kindergarten?”

  “There are these thieves in a cave, and these jars—” He paused. “Big jars. What are thieves?”

  “Thieves are—people who take things that belong to other people.”

  “Oh.”

  “I can get you the Forty Thieves picture tape,” Miss Fellowes told him. “It’s a very famous story. And there are others like it. Sinbad the Sailor, who traveled everywhere in the world, who saw—everything.” Her voice faltered for a moment. But Timmie hadn’t picked up any depressing implications. “And Gulliver’s Travels, I can get you that one. He went to a land of tiny people, and then afterward to a land of giants, and then—” Miss Fellowes faltered again. So many travelers, all these omnivorous devourers of experience! But maybe that was good: satisfy Timmie in his imprisonment with vicarious tales of far voyaging. He wouldn’t be the first shut-in to revel in such narratives. “Then there’s the story of Odysseus, who fought a war and spent ten years afterward trying to find his way home to his family.” Again a pang. Her heart went out to the boy. Like Gulliver, like Sinbad, like Odysseus, Timmie too was a stranger in a strange land, and she could never forget that. Were all the great stories of the world about wanderers carried to strange places who were striving to reach their homes?

  Timmie’s eyes were glowing, though. “Will you get them right now? Will you?”

  And so he was temporarily comforted.

  [48]

  She ordered all the picture tapes of myth and fable that were in the catalog. They stacked up higher than Timmie in the playroom. On days when Jerry wasn’t there he pored over them hour after hour.

  How much he actually understood was hard to say. Certainly they were full of concepts, images, locales, that could make very little sense to him. But how much did any child of five or six understand of those stories? There was no way for an adult to enter a child’s mind and know for sure. Miss Fellowes had loved those stories herself without fully understanding them when she was a child, though, and so had children before her for hundreds, even thousands of years; and whatever they might have lacked in detail-by-detail comprehension, all those children had made up for by using their own imaginations. So too was it with Timmie, she hoped.

  After her early moments of uncertainty over Gulliver and Sinbad and Odysseus, she made no attempts to eliminate from his growing library of picture tapes anything that might stir some disturbing thoughts in him about his own plight. Children, she knew, were less easily disturbed than adults feared they were. And even an occasional nightmare wouldn’t do any real harm. No child had ever died of fright while hearing the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, even though it was, on its most literal level, a horrifying tale. None of the slavering wolves and shambling bogeymen and terrible trolls of childhood fable had left any lasting scars. Children loved to hear about such things.

  Was the bogeyman of myth—beetle-browed, shaggy, glowering—a vestige of the racial memory of the time when Neanderthals roamed Europe? Miss Fellowes had seen a reference to that theory in one of the books she had borrowed from Dr. McIntyre. Would Timmie be ups
et by the thought that he was a member of a tribe that had survived in folk tale as something to fear and loathe? No, no, she thought: it would never occur to him. Only overeducated adults would worry about such contingencies. Timmie would be as fascinated by bogeymen as any child, and would huddle under his coverlet in delicious terror, seeing shapes in the dark—and there wasn’t a chance in a billion that he would draw any dire conclusions about his own genetic status from those scary stories.

  So the tapes came flooding in, and the boy watched them one after another after another: as though a dam had been breached and the whole glorious river of the human imagination was rushing into Timmie’s soul. Theseus and the Minotaur, Perseus and the Gorgon, King Midas and his golden touch, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the labors of Hercules, Bellerophon and the Chimaera, Alice through the Looking-Glass, Jack and the beanstalk, Aladdin and the magic lamp, the Fisherman and the Genie, Gulliver among the Lilliputians and the Houyhnhnms, the adventures of Odin and Thor, the battle between Osiris and Set, the wanderings of Odysseus, the voyage of Captain Nemo—there was no end of it, and Timmie devoured it all. Did it all get muddled in his mind? Was he able to tell one tale from another, or remember any of them an hour later? Miss Fellowes didn’t know, and didn’t try to find out. For the moment, she was concerned only with allowing him to immerse himself in this tremendous torrent of story—of filling his mind with it—of reaching out toward the magical world of myth, since the real world of houses and airplanes and highways and people must forever remain beyond his grasp.

  When he tired of watching tapes, she read to him out of ordinary books. The tales were the same; but now he created the pictures in his own mind as she read the words.

  There had to be some impact. More than once she heard him telling some wildly garbled version of one of his picture tapes to Jerry—Sinbad traveling by submarine, or Hercules tied down by Lilliputians—and Jerry would listen solemnly, enjoying the story as much as Timmie enjoyed telling it.

  Miss Fellowes made sure that everything the boy said was being recorded. It was vital evidence of his intelligence. Let anyone who imagined that the Neanderthals had been mere bestial shaggy half-men listen to Timmie retelling the story of Theseus in the Labyrinth! Even if he did seem to think that the Minotaur was the hero of the story.

  [49]

  But then there were the dreams. He was having them more often, now that the world outside the bubble was becoming a reality in his mind.

  It was always the same dream, so far as she could tell—always about the outside. Timmie tried haltingly to describe it to Miss Fellowes. In his dreams he invariably found himself outside, in that big empty place about which he had told her so often. It was no longer empty in the newer dreams. Now there were children in it, and queer indescribable objects half-digested in his thought out of bookish descriptions half-understood, or out of distant Neanderthal memories half-recalled.

  But the children ignored him and the objects eluded him when he tried to touch them. Though he was in the world, he was never part of it. He wandered through the big empty place of his dreams in a solitude just as absolute as that of his own room. And would wake up crying more often than not.

  Miss Fellowes wasn’t always there to hear him when he cried out in the night. She had begun sleeping three or four nights a week in the apartment elsewhere on the grounds that Hoskins had offered her long ago. It seemed wise to begin weaning Timmie from his dependence on her perpetual presence. The first few nights she tried it, she felt so guilty over abandoning him that she could scarcely sleep; but Timmie said nothing in the morning about her absence. Perhaps he expected to be left on his own, sooner or later. She allowed herself to feel more comfortable about sleeping away from the dollhouse, after a time. She realized that Timmie wasn’t the only one being weaned from a dependence.

  She took elaborate notes every morning about his dreams and tried to regard them as nothing more than useful material for the psychological study of Timmie’s mind that would ultimately be one of the most valuable products of this experiment. But there were nights when she was alone in her room when she cried, too.

  [50]

  One day as Miss Fellowes was reading to him—the book was Tales from the Arabian Nights, one of his special favorites—Timmie put his hand under her chin and lifted it gently so that her eyes left the book and met his.

  He said, “Every time you read me that story it’s exactly the same. How do you always know how to say it the same way, Miss Fellowes?”

  “Why, I’m reading it right from this page!”

  “Yes, I know. But what does that mean, reading?”

  “Why—why—” The question was so basic that she scarcely knew at first how to tackle it. Ordinarily, when children learned to read, they seemed somehow intuitively to divine the nature of the process by themselves, and then went on to the next step of learning the meaning of the coded symbols on the page. But Timmie’s ignorance seemed to be more deeply rooted than that of the usual four-or-five-year-old who was just beginning to discover that there was such a thing as reading which perhaps he or she might actually be able someday to master. The essential concept was foreign to him.

  She said, “You know how, in your picture books—not the tapes, the books—there are marks along the bottoms of the pages?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Words.”

  “The book I’m reading is all words. No pictures, just words. These marks are the words. I look at the marks and I hear words in my mind. That’s what reading is—turning the marks on the page into words.”

  “Let me see.”

  She handed him the book. He swung it around sideways and then upside down. Miss Fellowes laughed and turned it right side up again.

  “The marks only make sense when you look at them this way,” she said.

  He nodded. He bent low over the page, so low that the words couldn’t possibly have been in focus, and stared long and curiously. Then he backed off a few inches, until the text was legible. Experimentally he turned the book sideways again. Miss Fellowes said nothing this time. He turned it back the right way.

  “Some of these marks are the same,” he said, after a very long time.

  “Yes. Yes.” She laughed with pleasure at this sign of shrewdness. “So they are, Timmie!”

  “But how do you know which marks mean what word?”

  “You have to learn.”

  “There are so many words, though! How could anyone learn all that many marks?”

  “Little marks are used to make the big marks. The big marks are the words; the little marks are called letters. And actually there aren’t that many little marks,” she said. “Only twenty-six.” She held up her hand and flashed her fingers five times, and then one finger more. “All the words are made up out of those few little letter-marks, arranged in different ways.”

  “Show me.”

  “Here. Look.” She pointed to Sinbad on the page. “Do you see these six little marks here, between the two blank spaces? Those are the marks that mean Sinbad. This one is the ‘s’ sound. This is the ‘i’ and this is the ‘n’.” She spoke the letters phonetically instead of pronouncing their names. “You read them one by one and you put all the sounds together—Ess-ih-nnn-bbb-aaah-ddd. Sinbad.”

  Did the boy even begin to understand?

  “Sinbad,” Timmie said softly, and traced the name on the page with his fingertip.

  “And this word is ship. You see, it begins with the same little mark as Sinbad? Ssssss. The name of that mark is ‘s.’” This time she pronounced it, “ess”. “And this one is ‘i,’ from Sinbad, only here it is in ship, over here.”

  He stared at the page. He looked lost.

  “I’ll show you all the marks,” she offered. “Would you like that?”

  “It would be a nice game, yes.”

  “Then get me a piece of paper, and a crayon. And get one for yourself, too.”

  He settled down beside her. She drew an a, a b, a c, and right on through the alphabet, i
n two long columns. Timmie, clutching the crayon clumsily in his fist, drew something that he must have thought was an imitation of her a, but it had long wobbly legs that wandered all over the page and left no room for any other letters.

  “Now,” she said, “let’s look at the first mark—”

  To her shame, it had never occurred to her before this that it might actually be possible for him to learn to read. For all the boy’s vast hunger for picture books and picture tapes, this was the first time that he had shown any real interest in the printed symbols that accompanied them. Something else that Jerry had inspired in him? She made a mental note to ask Jerry, the next time he was here, whether he had begun to learn how to read. But in any event Miss Fellowes had simply dismissed a priori the idea that Timmie someday might.

  Racial prejudice, she realized. Even now, after having lived with him for so long, having seen his mind grow and flower and develop, she still thought of him on some level as not quite human. Or at least too primitive, too backward, to master so sophisticated a skill as reading.

  And while she was showing him the letters, pointing them out on her chart and pronouncing them and teaching him how in his clumsy way to draw them himself, she still did not seriously believe that he could ever put any of that to use.

  She went on not believing it until the very moment that he read a book to her.

  It was many weeks later. He was sitting in her lap, holding one of his books, turning the pages, looking at the pictures—or so she assumed.

  And suddenly he ran his fingertip along a line of type and said aloud, haltingly but with stubborn determination, “The dog began—to chase—the cat.”

  Miss Fellowes was feeling drowsy and was barely paying attention. “What did you say, Timmie?”