The Ugly Little Boy

Chapter Nine. Becoming

THREE DAYS LATER Hoskins stopped by to see Miss Fellowes and said, "It's all been worked out. My wife has no further problem about letting Jerry come here to play with Timmie, and Ned Cassiday has drafted a liability agreement that he thinks will stand legal muster."

"Liability? Liability for what, Dr. Hoskins?"

"Why, any sort of injury that might be inflicted."

"By Timmie on Jerry, you mean."

"Yes," Hoskins said, in that sheepish voice of his once again.

Miss Fellowes instantly began to bristle. "Tell me: do you seriously think there's any chance of that happening? Does your wife?"

"If we were really worried about that, we wouldn't be volunteering Jerry to be Timmie's playmate. My wife had her doubts at first, as you know, but it didn't take long for Timmie to win her over. Still, there's always the chance, when you bring two small boys together who don't know each other, that one of them will take a swing at the other, Miss Fellowes. I surely don't have to remind you of that."

"Of course. But parents don't usually insist on liability agreements before they'll allow their child to play with other children."

Hoskins laughed. "You don't understand. It's the company that insists on the liability agreement, not us. Annette and I are the ones who are guaranteeing to the company that we won't take any legal action against Stasis Technologies, Ltd., in case something happens. -It's a waiver of liability, Miss Fellowes."

"Oh," she said, in a very small voice. -"I see. When will you be bringing Jerry here, then?"

"Tomorrow morning? How would that be?"

Miss Fellowes waited until breakfast time to tell him. She hadn't wanted to say anything the night before, thinking that the excitement of anticipation might unsettle Timmie's sleep, making him edgy and unpredictable when Jerry arrived.

"You'll be getting a friend today, Timmie."

"A friend?"

"Another little boy. To play with you."

"A little boy just like me?"

"Just like you, yes." In every way that really mattered, Miss Fellowes told herself fiercely. "His name is Jerry. He's Dr. Hoskins' son."

"Son?" He gave her a puzzled look.

"Dr. Hoskins is his father," she said, as though that would help.

"Father."

"Father-son." She held her hand high in the air, then lower down. "The father is the big man. The son is the little boy."

He still looked baffled. There were so many basic assumptions of life, so many things that everyone took for granted, that were alien to him. It was because he had spent all this time in the isolation of the Stasis bubble. But certainly he knew what parents were. Or had he forgotten even that? Not for the first time Miss Fellowes found herself detesting Gerald Hoskins and everyone else connected with Stasis Technologies, Ltd., for having ripped this little boy out of his own proper time and place. She could almost agree with the Bruce Mannheim crowd that a very sophisticated kind of child abuse had taken place here.

Rummaging in Timmie's pile of storybooks, Miss Fellowes found one of his favorites, a retelling of the story of William Tell. What meaning the story itself had for him was something she couldn't even begin to guess, but the book was boldly and vividly illustrated and he pored over it again and again, lightly rubbing his fingers over the bright pictures. She opened it now to the two-page spread showing William Tell shooting the apple off his son's head with a bolt from his crossbow, and indicated, first the archer in his medieval costume, then his son.

"Father-son-father-son-"

Timmie nodded gravely.

What, she wondered, was he thinking? That Dr. Hoskins was really a handsome man with long blond hair who wore strange clothing and carried a curious machine under his arm? Or that someone was going to come here to shoot apples off his head? Perhaps it had been an error to muddle the moment with abstract concepts like "father" and "son."

Well, all that was really important was that Timmie would have a friend soon.

"He'll be coming after we've finished breakfast," Miss Fellowes told him. "He's a very nice boy." She profoundly hoped that he was. "And you'll show him what a nice boy you are too, won't you?" "Nice boy. Yes."

"You'll be his friend. He'll be your friend."

"Friend. Nice boy."

His eyes were gleaming. But did he understand? Did he understand any of this at all?

She felt all sorts of unexpected misgivings as the time of Jerry Hoskins' arrival drew near. She saw all sorts of problems that she had not considered before.

Stop it, she told herself.

(You've wanted this for Timmie for months. And now it's happening. There's nothing to worry about. Nothing.)

"Miss Fellowes?"

Hoskins' voice, on the intercom.

"Here they are," she said to Timmie. "Jerry's coming!"

To her surprise, Timmie went scuttling into his playroom and closed the door partway. He peered out uneasily. Not a good sign, she thought.

"Timmie-" she began.

And then the whole Hoskins family was at the threshold of the Stasis bubble.

Hoskins said, "This is my boy Jerry. Say hello to Miss Fellowes, Jerry."

She saw a round-faced, large-eyed child, with pale cheeks and loose, unruly brown hair, clutching at Annette Hoskins' skirt. He looked very much like his father: a five-year-old version of Gerald Hoskins, yes.

"Say hello," Hoskins said to the boy, a little ominously this time.

"Hello." It was barely audible. Jerry receded a bit farther into the folds of the maternal skirt.

Miss Fellowes gave him her warmest, most inviting smile. "Hello, Jerry. Would you like to come in? This is where Timmie lives. -Timmie's going to be your friend."

Jerry stared. He looked as though he would much rather bolt and run.

"Lift him over the threshold," Hoskins said to his wife, not very patiently.

She gathered the boy into her arms-it was a distinct effort; Jerry was big for his age-and stepped over the threshold. Jerry squirmed visibly as the threshold sensations of Stasis passed through him.

"He isn't happy, Gerald," Mrs. Hoskins said.

"I can see that. It'll take a little time for him to feel at ease. Put him down."

Annette Hoskins' eyes searched the room. The. muscles in her arms tensed visibly. However much she might have been won over by Timmie on her earlier visit, she seemed more than a little apprehensive now. Her precious little child, turned loose in the cage of this ape-boy"Put him down, Annette."

She nodded. The boy backed up against her, staring worriedly at the pair of eyes which were staring back at him from the next room.

"Come out here, Timmie," Miss Fellowes said. "This is your new friend, Jerry. Jerry wants very much to meet you. Don't be afraid."

Slowly Timmie stepped into the room. Jerry squirmed. Hoskins bent to disengage Jerry's fingers from his mother's skirt. In a stage whisper he said, "Step back, Annette. For God's sake, give the children a chance."

The youngsters faced one another, standing virtually nose to nose. Although Jerry was almost certainly some months younger than Timmie, nevertheless he was an inch taller. And in the presence of Jerry's straightness and his high-held well-proportioned head, Timmie's grotesqueries of appearance were suddenly almost as pronounced in Miss Fellowes' eyes as they had been in the earliest days.

Miss Fellowes' lips quivered.

There was a long silent awkward moment of mutual staring. It was the little Neanderthal who spoke first, finally, in childish treble. "My name is Timmie."

And he thrust his face suddenly forward as though to inspect the other's features more closely.

Startled, Jerry responded with a vigorous shove that sent Timmie tumbling. Both began crying loudly, and Mrs. Hoskins snatched up her child, while Miss Fellowes, flushed with repressed anger, lifted Timmie quickly and comforted him. The little animal! she thought vehe-mendy. The vicious little beast!

But she knew that she was being much too harsh. Timmie had startled Jerry; Jerry had defended himself in the only way he knew. Nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. Something like this was exactly what they should have expected at the outset, Miss Fellowes told herself.

"Well," Hoskins said. "Well!"

Annette Hoskins said, "I knew this wasn't a good idea. They just instinctively don't like each other." "It isn't instinctive," Miss Fellowes said firmly. "No," Hoskins said. "It's not instinctive at all. Any more than when any two children dislike each other on first sight. Put Jerry down and let him get used to the situation."

"What if that cave-boy hits Jerry back?" "It won't be at all amazing if he does," said Hoskins. "But he can take care of himself. And if he can't, it's time he started learning how. We just have to let him get accustomed to this by himself."

Annette Hoskins still looked uncertain.

"In fact," her husband went on, "I think the best thing is for you and me to leave. If there are any problems, Miss Fellowes will know how to handle them. Arid after an hour or so she can bring Jerry to my office and I'll have him taken home."

It was a long hour. Timmie retreated to the far end of the room and glowered malevolently at Jerry as though trying to eradicate him from the universe by the intensity of his glare alone. Evidently he had decided not to take refuge in the back room as he often did when he felt troubled, perhaps thinking that it was unwise to withdraw and thereby concede the front section of his domain to the enemy by default.

As for Jerry, he huddled miserably at the opposite end of the room, crying for his mother. He looked so unhappy that Miss Fellowes, though aware that she risked upsetting Timmie even further, went to him and tried to reassure him that his mother was nearby, that he hadn't been abandoned at all, that he'd be seeing her again in just a short while.

"Want her now!" Jerry said.

(You probably think you've been left here to live in this room forever, don't you, child? Just you and Timmie, locked up in this little dollhouse with each other. And you hate the idea. Of course you do. Just as Timmie must.)

"Home!" Jerry said. "Now!"

"You'll be going home soon, Jerry," she told the boy. "This is only a little visit."

He struck out at her with his clenched fists.

"No," Miss Fellowes said, catching him deftly by his belt and holding him at arm's length while he flailed unsuccessfully at her. "No, Jerry! No, don't hit. -How would you like a lollipop, Jerry?" "No! No! No!"

Miss Fellowes laughed. "I think you would, though. You stay right where you are and I'll get one for you."

She unlocked the hidden lollipop cache-Timmie had already proved he couldn't be trusted to keep away from the supply she kept on hand-and pulled out a huge spherical green one, almost too big to fit in the boy's mouth.

Jerry's eyes went wide and he stopped wailing instantly.

"I thought so," Miss Fellowes said, with a grin. She handed the lollipop to him, and he stuck it into his mouth with no difficulty at all.

From behind her Timmie made a low growling sound.

"Yes, I know, you want one, too. I haven't forgotten about you, Timmie."

She pulled a second one out, orange this time, and held it out toward him. Timmie grabbed at it with the ferocity of a caged animal, pulling it from her hand.

Miss Fellowes gave him a troubled look. She hadn't expected this visit to go serenely; but this was disturbing, these signs of reversion to savagery in Timmie.

Savagery? No, she thought. That was too harsh an interpretation of Timmie's behavior. It had been Jerry who struck the first blow, Miss Fellowes reminded herself. Timmie had come over and introduced himself to Jerry in a polite, civilized way, after all. And Jerry had pushed him. Quite probably Timmie reasoned that savage growls and snarls were the only sensible response to that sort of behavior.

The children glared at each other now over their lollipops across the whole width of the room.

The first hour wasn't going to be a lot of fim for anyone, Miss Fellowes realized.

But this sort of thing was nothing new to her, and not all that intimidating. She had presided over many a pitched battle between angered children-and had seen many a truce come into being eventually, and then friendships. Patience was the answer. In dealing with children, it almost always was. Problems like this had a way of solving themselves, given time.

"What about blocks?" she asked them. "Timmie, would you like to play with your blocks?"

Timmie gave her a dark, sullen look-more or less an acquiescent one, she decided, though she wasn't altogether confident she was right about that.

"Good," she said. She went into the other room and brought the blocks out-state-of-the-art stuff, smoothly machined cubes that clicked together elegantly and made a soft chiming sound when you brought the similarly-colored faces into contact. Miss Fellowes laid them out in the middle of the floor. -"And is it all right if Jerry plays with your blocks too, Timmie?"

Timmie made a grumbling sound.

"It 15 all right," she said. "Good boy! I knew you wouldn't mind. -Come on over here, Jerry. Timmie's going to let you play with his blocks."

Hesitandy Jerry approached. Timmie was down on the floor already, picking through the blocks for the ones he considered his favorites. Jerry watched in a gingerly way from a comfortable distance. Miss Fellowes came up behind him and gendy but forcefully nudged him downward toward the blocks.

"Play with the blocks, Jerry. Go ahead. It's all right. Timmie doesn't mind."

He looked back and up at her, very doubtfully.

Then he cautiously selected a block. Timmie made a louder grumbling noise, but stayed where he was when Miss Fellowes shot him a swift warning look. Jerry took another block. Another. Timmie snatched up two of them, and moved them around in back of himself. Jerry took a third block.

In hardly any time at all the pile of blocks had been divided roughly in half, and Timmie was playing with one group of them on one side of the room and Jerry was studiously playing with the others at the opposite end, close to the door. The two children ignored each other as thoroughly as though they had been on two different planets. There was no contact at all between them, not even a furtive glance.

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 Fetlowes 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 litde 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.

And all he could say was, "That's all right. Don't mention it, Miss Fellowes."

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." v

"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 to 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 Tim-mie'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 litde 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?

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 edgi-ness 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?

"Is Jerry coining again today, Miss Fellowes?" Tim-mie asked.

"Tomorrow."

The boy's disappointment was all too obvious. His round face dissolved 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'11 be here tomorrow,"

"I wish he could come every day."

"So do I," Miss Fellowes said.

(But do I? Really?)

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.

Now she remembered what she had read in the books Dr. Mclntyre 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: Hos-kins' two children, one by his wife and one by Stasis.

Whereas she herselfHeavens, she thought, putting her fists to her temples and feeling ashamed: I'm jealous!