The Ugly Little Boy

"All right," she told him. "If you feel safer there, you sleep there."

She waited a little while, until she heard the sound of steady, regular breathing. How tired he must be! Forty thousand years from home, thrust into a baffling alien place full of bright lights and hard floors and strange people who looked nothing at all like anyone he had ever known, and even so he was capable of curling up and falling asleep. Miss Fellowes envied him that wonderful adaptability. Children were so resilient, so capable of accommodating to the most terrible disruptionsShe turned out the light and closed the door to the boy's bedroom, and retired to the cot that had been left for her use in the largest room.

Overhead there was nothing but darkness. She scrutinized it, wondering whether someone might be lurking about on the balcony, observing her. It was impossible to tell. Miss Fellowes knew that she was being absurd, that it was late and there was no one up there. The only eyes that would be watching her were those of a bunch of electronic sensors. But still-to have no privacy at all- They were filming everything, very likely. Making a complete visual record of all that took place in the Stasis zone. She should never have taken on this job without insisting that Hoskins let her inspect the sort of place where she was going to have to live. Trust me, he had said. Right. Certainly.

Well, she'd make do for tonight. But tomorrow they were going to have to put a roof over her living quarters, at least. And also, she thought, those stupid men will have to place a mirror in this room and a larger chest of drawers and a separate washroom if they expect me to spend my nights in here.

It was difficult to sleep. Tired as she was, she lay with her eyes open, in the kind of absolute wakefolness dial one reaches only in a state of die 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 andNo, 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 thatShe 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 sleptHer breath came quickly. Oh, how ridiculous, how completely ridiculous, and yetShe was endlessly going back and forth, she knew, unable to take a consistent position and hold it for long. Was he a dangerous nasty litde ape, or was he a miserably frightened litde child far from his loved ones? One or the other, she told herself. But why not some of both? Even a frightened litde 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 atten-tiveness. 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.

"Litde boy," she called in a whisper. "Litde 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 repulsive-ness, the thick blunt features, the big misshapen head.

"Poor litde boy," she murmured. "Poor frightened litde 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 ru

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, gendy 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 ky 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" botde 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 litde hand crept into hers.

Miss Fellowes smiled.

She awoke with a start, wondering where she was, why she felt so stiff and sore. There was the unfamiliar 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?