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One man at a microphone spoke into it in a soft monotone, saying things in short phrases that made no sense to Miss Fellowes-numbers, mostly, punctuated by what sounded like phrases in code, cryptic and impenetrable.
Deveney had taken a seat just next to her. Hoskins was on the other side. Leaning over the balcony railing with an intent stare, the scientific reporter said, "Is there going to be anything for us to see, Dr. Hoskins? Visual effects, I mean."
"What? No. Nothing till the job is done. We detect indirectly, something on the principle of radar, except that we use mesons rather than radiation. We've been ru
"That sounds like a tough job. How can you be sure you've reached the right level?"
Hoskins smiled, his usual quick one, a cool on-off flash. "We've been at work on this for fifteen years, now. Closer to twenty-five, if you count the work of our 'predecessor company, which developed a lot of the basic principles but wasn't able to break through to real reliability. -Yes, it's tough, Deveney. Very tough. And scary."
The man at the microphone raised his hand.
"Scary?" Deveney said.
"We don't like to fail. I definitely don't. And failure's an ever-present default mode in our operation. We're working in probabilistic areas here. Quantum effects, you understand. The best we can hope for is likeliness, never certainty. That's not good enough, really. But it's the best we can hope for."
"Still, you seem pretty confident."
"Yes," Hoskins said. "We've had the fix on this one particular moment in time for weeks-breaking it, remaking it after factoring in our own temporal movements, checking parallaxes, looking for every imaginable relativistic distortion, constantly seeking assurance that we can handle time flow with sufficient precision. And we think we can do it. I'd almost be willing to say that we know we can."
But his forehead was glistening.
There was a sudden terrible silence in the room, broken only by the sound of uneasy breathing. Edith Fellowes found herself rising from her seat, leaning forward, gripping the balcony railing.
But there was nothing to see.
"Now," said the man at the microphone quietly.
The silence ascended to a higher level. It was a new kind of silence, total silence, a silence more profound than Miss Fellowes had ever imagined could be achieved in a room full of people. But it lasted no longer than the space of a single breath.
Then came the sound of a terrified little boy's scream from the dollhouse rooms below. It was a scream of the most awful intensity, the kind of scream that made you want to cover your ears with your hands.
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!"
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 (mm 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, somehowThe 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 a
"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 i
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 ru
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!"