"I'm afraid I do," said Hoskins dolefully. "And so your hospital is spending its energies and resources on legal defense instead of-"
"Not just the hospital. He's named specific individuals. I'm one of them. One of nine researchers who he's charged with child abuse-literal child abuse-as a result of his so-called studies of our work up to this point." There was obvious bitterness in her voice, but a touch of amusement, too. Her eyes flashed a bright twinkle. She laughed until her heavy breasts shook. "Can you imagine it? Child abuse? Me?"
Hoskins shook his head sympathetically. "It does seem incredible."
But his heart was sinking. He still had no doubt that this woman was ideally qualified for the job. But how could he hire someone who was already in trouble with the dreaded Bruce Mannheim? There was going to be controversy enough over this project as it was. No doubt Mannheim would be poking his nose into what they were doing before very long in any case, no matter what precautions they took. All the same, to add Dorothy New-combe to the roster would be asking for the worst sort of trouble. He could just imagine the press conference
Mannheim would call. Letting it be known that Stasis Technologies had chosen to hire a woman who was currently defending herself against the accusation of child abuse at another scientific facility-and Mannheim would make accusation sound like indictment-to serve as nurse and guardian of the unfortunate child who was the pathetic victim of this unprecedented new form of kidnapping-No. No. He couldn't possibly take her on.
Somehow he forced himself to go through another five minutes of asking questions. On the surface, everything remained amiable and pleasant. But it was an empty exercise, and Hoskins knew that Dorothy Newcombe knew it. When she left, he thanked her for her frankness and expressed his appreciation of her high qualifications and offered her the usual assurances that he'd be in touch soon, and she smiled and told him how pleased she had been by their conversation-and he had no doubt at all that she realized that she wasn't going to get the job.
As soon as she was gone, he phoned Sam Aickman and said, "For God's sake, Sam, why didn't you tell me that Dorothy Newcombe is currently on the receiving end of some kind of cockeyed lawsuit of Bruce Mannheim's?"
Aickman's face on die screen registered amazement verging on shock.
"She is?"
"So she told me just now. A child-abuse accusation stemming from the work she's been doing."
"Really. Really," Aickman said, crestfallen. He looked more abashed than amazed now. "Hell, Jerry, I had no idea at all that she was tangled up with that colossal pain in the neck. And we questioned her very thoroughly; let me tell you. -Not dioroughly enough, I guess."
"That's all we'd need, hiring somebody for this job who's already on Mannheim's hit-list."
"She's terrific, though, isn't she? Absolutely the most motherly human being I ever-"
"Yes. Absolutely. And comes with a money-back guarantee that we'll have Mannheim's legal vultures sinking their claws into us as soon as he finds out she's here. Or don't you agree, Sam?"
"Looks like you're going to go for Marianne Levien, then, is that it?"
"I'm not through interviewing yet," Hoskins said, "But Levien looks pretty good."
"Yes, doesn't she," said Aickman, with a grin.
Edith Fellowes had no way of knowing that she was merely the Number Three candidate for the job, but it wouldn't have surprised her to learn it. She was accustomed to being underestimated. There was nothing flashy about her, nothing very dramatic, nothing that registered immediate top-rank qualifications in anything. She was neither stunningly beautiful nor fascinatingly ugly, neither intensely passionate nor interestingly aloof, neither daringly insightful nor painstakingly brilliant. All through her life people had tended to take her for granted. But she was a stable, firmly balanced woman who knew her own worth perfectly well, and, by and large, she had had a satisfying, fulfilling existence-by and large.
The campus-like headquarters of Stasis Technologies, Ltd. was a place of mystery to her. Ordinary-looking gray buildings, bare and plain, rose from pleasant green lawns studded by occasional small trees. It was a research center very much like a thousand odiers. But within these buildings. Edith Fellowes knew, strange things were going on
— things beyond her understanding, things virtually beyond her powers of belief. The idea that she might actually be working in one of those buildings soon filled her with wonder.
Like most people, she had only the haziest notion of what the company was or the way it had accomplished the remarkable things it had done. She had heard, of course, about the baby dinosaur that they had managed to bring out of the past. That had seemed pretty miraculous to her, once she overcame her initial reaction of skepticism. But the explanations on television of how Stasis Technologies had reached into the past to bring the extinct reptile into the twenty-first century had been incomprehensible to her. And then the expedition to the moons of Jupiter had pushed Stasis and its dinosaur into the back pages of the newspapers, and she had forgotten all about them both. The dinosaur had been just another nine days' wonder, one of many in what was turning out to be a century of wonders.
But now, apparently, Stasis was planning to bring a child out of the past, a human child, a prehistoric human child. They needed someone to care for that child.
She could do that.
She wanted to do that.
She might just be able to do that better than anyone else. Certainly she would be able to do it very, very well.
They had said the job was going to be challenging, unusual, extremely difficult. She wasn't troubled by any of that. It was the unchallenging, ordinary, simple jobs that she had always preferred to avoid.
They had advertised for a woman with a background in physiology, some knowledge of clinical chemistry, and a love for children. Edith Fellowes qualified on all three counts.
The love for children had been built in from the start
— what normal person, she wondered, didn't have a love for children? Especially a woman?
The knowledge of physiology had come as part of her basic nursing training. The clinical chemistry had been something of an afterthought-it had seemed a good idea, if she was going to work with sickly children, many of them premature or otherwise starting life under some handicap-to have the best possible understanding of how their troubled little bodies could be made to function more effectively.
Challenging, difficult job involving an unusual child
— yes, it was her kind of thing. The salary they were offering was pretty phenomenal, too, enough to catch her attention even though the pursuit of money had never been much of a factor in her scheme of living. And she was ready for a new challenge. The all-too-familiar routines of children's-hospital life were beginning to pall on her now, even to make her a little resentful. That was a terrible thing, she thought, to resent your own work, particularly work like hers. Maybe she needed a change.
To care for a prehistoric childYes. Yes.
"Dr. Hoskins will see you now," the receptionist said.
An electronically actuated door rolled silently open. Miss Fellowes stepped forward into a surprisingly unostentatious-looking office that contained an ordinary sort of desk, an ordinary data-screen, and an ordinary-looking man of about fifty, with thinning sandy-colored hair, the beginnings of jowls, and a curiously down-curved mouth that looked more sullen, perhaps, than it really should.