The Ugly Little Boy (19 page)

They had been shorter than modern humans-the tallest of the men were probably no more than about five-feet-four in height-and very stocky, with wide shoulders and deep barrel-chests. Their foreheads sloped backward, their brow ridges were enormous, they had rounded lower jaws instead of chins. Their noses were big and broad and low-bridged, and their mouths jutted forward like muzzles. Their feet were flat and very wide, with short stubby toes. Their bones were heavy, thick, and large-jointed and their muscles probably were extremely well developed. Their legs were short in proportion to their torsos and possibly were naturally bowed, with permanently flexed knees, so that they might have walked in a sort of shuffle.

Not pretty, no. Not by modern standards.

But human. Unquestionably human. Give a Neanderthal man a shave and a haircut and put him into a shirt and a pair of jeans and he could probably walk down a street in any city of the world without attracting anyone's attention.

"And listen to this part, Timmie!" Miss Fellowes ran her finger across the page and read out loud to him. " 'He had a big brain. The brains of skeletons are measured by cranial capacities-that is, how much volume, in cubic centimeters, the skull cavity has. Among modern Homo sapiens, the average cranial capacity is something like 1,400 or 1,500 c.c. Some men have brain capacities of 1,100-1,200 c.c. The average brain capacity of Neanderthal man was about 1,600 c.c. for male skulls, and about 1,350 c.c. for female skulls. This is higher than the average figure for Homo sapiens.' " She chortled. "What do you think of that, Timmie? 'Higher than the average figure for Homo sapiens!"

Timmie smiled at her. Almost as if he had understood! But Miss Fellowes knew there was no chance of that.

"Of course," she said, "it isn't really the size of the skull that counts, it's the quality of the brain inside it. Elephants have bigger skulls than just about anybody, but they can't do algebra. Nor can I, for that matter, but I can read a book and drive a car, and show me the elephant that can do those things! -Do you think I'm silly, Timmie? Talking to you this way?" The boy's face was sol-*1 emn; he offered her a click or two. "But you need someone to talk to in here. And so do I. Come over here for a moment, will you?" Miss Fellowes beckoned to him. He stared blankly but stayed where he was. "Come over here to me, Timmie. I want to show you something."

But he didn't budge. It was a pretty fantasy, imagining that he was beginning to understand her words; but she knew very well that there was no substance to it.

She went to him instead, sitting down beside him and holding out the book she had been reading. There was a painting on the left-hand side of the page, an artist's reconstruction of a Neanderthal man's face, massive and grizzled, with the typical jutting mouth and great flattened nose and fierce tangled beard. His head was thrust forward from his shoulders. His lips were drawn back a little, baring his teeth. A savage countenance, yes. Brutish, one might even say: there was no getting away from that.

But yet there was the indisputable light of intelligence in his eyes, and a look of something else, something- what? Tragic? A look of anguish, a look of pain?

He was staring off into the distance as though looking across thousands of years of time. Looking into a world where none of his kind existed any longer, except for one small boy who had no proper business being there.

"How does he look, Timmie? Do you recognize him at all? Does he seem anything like the way your people actually were?"

Timmie made a few clicks. He glanced at the book without apparent interest.

Miss Fellowes tapped the picture a couple of times. Then she took his hand and put it on the page to direct his attention toward the plate.

He just didn't understand. The image on the page seemed to mean nothing to him at all.

He ran his hand over the page in a remote, uninterested way, as though the smooth texture of the paper was the only aspect of the book that had caught his attention. Then the boy turned the lower corner of the page upward and began idly to pull on it, so that the page started to rip from the binding.

"No!" Miss Fellowes cried, and in a quick reflexive gesture she pulled his hand away and slapped it, all at once-a light slap, but an unmistakable reprimand.

Timmie glared at her. His eyes were bright with fury. He made a ghastly snarling sound and his hand became a claw; and he reached for the book again.

She pulled it out of his reach.

He dropped down on his knees and growled at her. A terrifying growl, a deep eerie rumbling, eyes turned upward, lips drawn back, teeth bared in a frightful grimace of rage.

"Oh, Timmie, Timmie-" Tears welled up in Miss Fellowes' eyes, and she felt a vast sense of despair, of defeat-of horror, even-rising within her.

Groveling on the floor and growling like a little wild beast, she thought, appalled. Snarling at her as if he'd like to jump at her and rip her throat out just as he had clawed at that book, wanting to tear out a page.

Oh, TimmieBut then Miss Fellowes forced herself back to calmness. This was no way to react to the child's little outburst. What had she expected? He was four years old at most and came out of some primitive tribal culture and he had never seen a book before in his life. Was he supposed to look at it with respect and awe, and thank her politely for having made this valuable source of information available to his eager young mind?

Even modern four-year-olds from nice educated households, she reminded herself, have been known to tear pages out of books. And also sometimes to growl ahd snarl and look angry when you slap their hands for doing it. Nobody thinks that they're little savage beasts, just because they do things like that. Not at that age. And Timmie isn't a beast either, just a small boy, a small wild boy who finds himself a prisoner in a world he can't begin to understand.

Carefully Miss Fellowes put the books Mclntyre had given her away in one of her lockers. When she returned to the other room she found Timmie calm again, playing with his toy as though nothing unusual had taken place.

Her heart flooded with love for the boy. She yearned to beg his forgiveness for having seemed once again to give up on him so quickly. But what good would that do? He couldn't begin to understand.

Well, there was another way.

"I think it's time for some oatmeal, Timmie. Don't you?"

LATER IN THE DAY Dr. Mclntyrc arrived at the doll-house for his second visit with Timmie. Miss Fel-lowes said, as he came in, "Thank you for the books, doctor. I want to assure you that I've been doing my homework very thoroughly."

Mclntyre smiled his small, precise, not very radiant smile. "I'm pleased to have been of some help, Miss Pel-lowes."

"But there's still more I'd like to know. I mean to keep reading, but since you're here, I thought I'd ask you-"

The paleoanthropologist smiled again, even less glowingly. He was all too evidently eager to get down to his session with the Neanderthal child, and not at all enthusiastic about stopping to answer a nurse's unimportant questions. But after the fiasco of the last visit, Miss Pel-lowes was determined not to allow Mclntyre to drive Timmie into tears with the intensity of his scientific curiosity. The session would proceed slowly, at the pace Miss Fellowes intended to set, or it wouldn't proceed at all.

Her word was going to be law: that was Hoskins' phrase, but she had adopted it as her own.

"If I can help you, Miss Fellowes-something you weren't able to discover in the books-"

"It's the one central question that has troubled me since i came to work with Timmie. We all agree that Neanderthals were human. What I'm trying to find out is how human they were. How close they are to us-where the similarities are, and where the differences. I don't mean the physical differences, particularly-those are obvious enough and I've studied the texts you sent over. I mean the cultural differences. The diflferences in intelligence. The things that really determine humanity."

"Well, Miss Fellowes, those are exactly the things I'm here to try to learn. The purpose of the tests I'm going to give Timmie is precisely to determine-"

"I understand that. Tell me first what's already known."

Mclntyre's lips quirked irritably. He ran his hand through his fine, shining golden hair.

"What in particular?"

"I learned today that the two different races, the Neanderthal race and the modern human one-is that correct, calling them races?-lived side by side in Europe and the Near East for perhaps a hundred thousand years during the glacial periods."

" 'Races' isn't quite the proper word, Miss Fellowes. The various 'races' of mankind, as we employ the term nowadays, are much more closely related to each other than we are to the Neanderthals. 'Subspecies' might be more accurate when talking about ourselves and the Neanderthals. They belonged to the subspecies Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and we're classed as Homo sapiens sapiens"

"All right. But they did live side by side."

"Apparently they did, at least in some areas. In the warmer places, that is-the Neanderthals probably had the colder regions all to themselves, because they were better adapted to deal with the conditions there. Of course, we're talking about very small populations, widely scattered bands. It's altogether possible that an individual Neanderthal tribe could have persisted for centuries without ever once encountering Homo sapiens sapiens. On the other hand, they might have been next-door neighbors in some places, especially as the last glacial period started to draw to its close and more of Europe became habitable by our ancestors."

"You don't think there's any chance that the Neanderthals were our ancestors at all, then."

"Oh, no. They're a separate group, off on an evolutionary branch of their own, or so nearly every scientist believes today. Close enough to us so that they could interbreed with Homo sapiens sapiens-we have some fossil evidence that they did-but mainly they must have kept to themselves, conserved their own gene pool, contributed very little if anything at all to the modern-day human genetic mix."

"Backwoodsmen. Country cousins."

"That's not a bad description," Mclntyre said.

"Thank you. -And were they less intelligent than Homo sapiens sapiens"?"

He looked impatient again. "That's something I really can't say, Miss Fellowes, until you let me get down to some serious testing of Timmie's mental capacity and ability to-"

"What's your guess, as of this afternoon?"

"Less intelligent."

"Based on what, Dr. Mclntyre? Pro-sapiens prejudice?"

Mclntyre's delicate complexion flooded with color*. "You asked me to offer an opinion before I've had a chance to examine the only real evidence that's ever been available to science. What else can my answer be except an expression of prejudice? By definition that's what it is."

"Yes, yes, I understand that. But it must be based on something concrete. What?"

Controlling himself, Mclntyre said, "The Mousterian cultural level-that's our technical term for Neanderthal culture, Mousterian-wasn't very sophisticated and didn't show much sign of progress over die hundreds of centuries drat it lasted. What we find at Neanderthal sites are simple flint tools, scarcely ever changing with time. Whereas the sapiens line made steady improvements in its technology all during the Paleolidiic, and has continued to do so until the present day, which is why it is sapiens humans who have brought a Neanderthal child out of the depths of time and not vice versa." Mclntyre paused for breath. -"Also, there's no Neanderthal art that we know about: no sculptures, no cave paintings, no sign of any decoration that we could consider to be religious in nature. We assume that they must have had a religion of some sort, because we've found Neanderthal graves, and a species that buries its dead almost certainly has to have some kind of belief in an afterlife, and therefore in higher spiritual entities. But those few Neanderthal dwelling sites that we've examined don't give us evidence of anything but the simplest, most basic sort of hunting-and-gathering tribal life. And as I mentioned the other day, we haven't even been altogether certain they were physiologically capable of using language. Or that they had the intellectual capacity to do so even if their larynxes and tongues were able to shape sounds."

Miss Fellowes felt herself bogging down in gloom. She looked over at Timmie, glad that he could understand nothing of what Mclntyre was telling her.

"So you think that they were an intellectually inferior race, then? Compared to Homo sapiens sapiens, I mean?" "Certainly we have to think so on the basis of what we know as of now," Mclntyre said. "On the other hand, that's not being entirely fair to them. The Neanderthals may not have needed the sorts of cultural frills and fol-de-rols that the sapiens sapiens subspecies thought were important. Mousterian tools, simple as they were, were perfectly well suited for the tasks they had to perform- killing small game, chopping up meat, scraping hides, felling trees, things like that. And if the Neanderthals didn't go in for painting and sculpture, well, they may simply have felt that such things were blasphemous. We can't say that diey didn't. More recent cultures than theirs have had prohibitions dealing with making graven images, you know."

"But even so you think the Neanderthals were an inferior race. -An inferior subspecies, I should say."

"I do. It's prejudice, Miss Fellowes, sheer prejudice, and I admit it freely. I can't help it that I'm a member of Homo sapiens sapiens. I can make a case out for the Neanderthals, but the fact remains that I basically see them as a slow-witted unprogressive form of humanity that was outmaneuvered and eventually obliterated by our own people. -Of course, when we talk about physical superiority, that's a different matter. In terms of the living conditions that existed in their time, the Neanderthals could well be considered the superior form. The very features that make us think of them as ugly brutes may have been marks of that superiority." "Give me an example."

"The nose," Mclntyre said. He pointed toward Tim-mie. "His nose is a lot larger than a modern child's." "Yes. It is."

"And some might say it's ugly, because it's so wide and thick and protrudes so much."

"Some might say so," Miss Fellowes agreed coolly.

"But then consider the climate that Paleolithic man had to deal with. Much of Europe was covered by permafrost. A constant cold, dry wind blew across the central plains. Snow might fall in any season of the year. You know what it feels like to breathe really cold air. But one purpose that the human nose serves is the warming and moistening of inhaled air on its way to the lungs. The bigger the nose, the more effective the warming capacity."

"Serving as a kind of radiator, you mean?"

"Exactly. The whole Neanderthal facial structure seems designed to keep cold air from reaching the lungs- and the brain, too; don't forget that the arteries that feed blood to the brain are located just back of the nasal passages. But the big Neanderthal nose, its forward location, the extremely large maxillary sinuses, the large diameter of the blood vessels serving the face-they may all have been adaptations to the glacial environment, making it far easier for the Neanderthals to deal with the cold than were our own ancestors. The heavy musculature as well, the sturdy body structure-"

"So the so-called 'brutish' look of the Neanderthals may have been nothing more than natural selection at work, a specialized evolutionary response to the harsh conditions with which man had to cope in ice-age Europe."

"Quite so."

"If they were so well designed to survive," Miss Fellowes said, "then why did they become extinct? A change in the climate making their specializations no longer advantageous?"

Mclntyre sighed heavily. "The question of Neanderthai extinction. Miss Fellowes, is such a vexed one, so fraught with controversy-"

"Well, what's your view? Were they simply exterminated, because they were as slow-witted as you seem to think? Did their special genetic characteristics disappear through intermarriage with the other line? Or was it some combination of-"

"May I remind you, Miss Fellowes, diat I have work to do here today?" Mclntyre said. Exasperation was beginning to show in his eyes. "Much as I'd like to discuss Neanderthals with you, the fact remains that we have an actual living Neanderthal right in this room awaiting study, and I have only a limited amount of time in which

"Then go ahead, Dr. Mclntyre," said Miss Fellowes in resignation. "Examine Timmie as much as you'd like. You and I can talk some other time. Just make sure you don't upset the boy the way you did before."

And now die time had arrived for the first press conference-the public unveiling of Timmie. Miss Fellowes had delayed it as long as possible. But Hoskins was insistent. Publicity, he had been saying all along, was essential to the financing of the project. Now that it was undeniably clear that the boy was in good physical shape, that he apparently wasn't going to come down with any twenty-first-century bacterial infection, that he was capable of withstanding the stress of a meeting with the media, it simply had to happen. Miss Fellowes' word might be law, but it was clear that there was one word she didn't have the leeway to utter. This time Hoskins wasn't going to take "no" for an answer.

"I want to limit the public viewing to five minutes, then," she said.

"They've asked for fifteen."

"They could ask for a day and a half. Dr. Hoskins. But five minutes is all that I consider to be acceptable."

"Ten, Miss Fellowes."

She could see the determination in his face.

"Ten at the absolute limit. Less if the boy shows any sign of distress."

"You know he'll show signs of distress," said Hoskins. "I can!t simply let a little whimpering be the signal to throw the reporters out."

"I'm not talking about a little whimpering, doctor. I'm talking about hysteria, profound psychosomatic reactions, potentially life-threatening responses to a massive invasion of his living space. You remember how wild the boy was the night he arrived here."

"He was frightened out of his wits that night."

"And you think a bunch of television cameras poked into his face won't upset him all over again? Bright hot lights? A lot of loud-mouthed strangers yelling things at him?"

"Miss Fellowes-"

"How many reporters are you planning to let in here, anyway?"

Hoskins paused and counted up mentally. "About a dozen, most likely."

"Three."

"Miss Fellowesl"

"The Stasis bubble is small. It's Timmie's sanctuary. If you let it be invaded by a vast pack of-baboons-"

"They'll be science reporters like Candide Deveney."

"Fine. Three reporters."

"You really are determined to be difficult, aren't you?"

"I have a child to care for. That's what you're paying me for and what I intend to do. If I'm too difficult to work with, you can always give me notice, you know."

The words slipped out unexpectedly. Miss Fellowes felt a sudden stab of alarm. What if Hoskins decided to call her bluff? Sent her away, called in one of the rejected applicants-there must surely have been rejected applicants-to take charge of Timmie?

But the idea of dismissing her seemed to alarm Hoskins as much as it did her.

"I don't want to do that, Miss Fellowes. You know that very well."

"Then listen to me. The concept of a press pool isn't unknown around here, is it? Let your precious media people choose diree representatives to come in here and inspect Timmie. Or, rather, to stand outside the Stasis bubble's door while I show him to them. They can share the information with the others. Tell them that any more than three would endanger die boy's health and mental stability."

"Four, Miss Fellowes?"

"Three."

"They're going to give me hell if I tell them-"

"Three."

Hoskins stared at her. Then he began to laugh. "All right, Miss Fellowes. You win. Three media people. But they can see him for ten minutes altogether. I'll let them know that if they have any complaints they should direct them to Timmie's nurse, not to me."

Later in the day the gentlemen of the press arriveS. Two gentlemen and a lady, more accurately: John Underhill of the Times, Stan Washington of Globe-Net Cable News, Margaret Anne Crawford of Reuters.