The Ugly Little Boy

During the daytime he went through long woebegone periods when he was aimless and withdrawn, or when he spent silent hours at the dollhouse window with its prospect of little more than nothing-staring out into the big empty of his dream, perhaps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 Ma

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 begi

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 Ma

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 constandy 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 Morten-son, Elliott, and Stratford, Dr. Mclntyre, 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 begi

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 die 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 die remote past.

Unfortunately, Timmie's interrogators almost always went away dissatisfied with the boy's revelations. It wasn't diat he was unwilling to cooperate. But he had spent only three or four years in die 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." "Well- "

The other questions produced results nearly as uncertain. Tribal structure? Miss Fellowes managed to extract from Timmie, after a lot of verbal gyration, that there the tribe had had a "big man," by which he evidently meant a chief. No surprise there. Primitive tribes of historic times always had chiefs; it was reasonable to expect that Neanderthal tribes had had them, too. She asked if he knew the big man's name, and Timmie answered with clicks. Whatever the chiefs name might be, the boy couldn't translate it into English words or even render a phonetic equivalent: he had to fall back on Neanderthal sounds. -Did the chief have a wife? the scientists wanted to know. Timmie didn't know what a wife was.

— How was the chief chosen? Timmie couldn't understand the question. -What about religious beliefs and practices?