Hoskins said, "We'll go inside now."
"Into the Stasis field?" Deveney asked, looking uneasy.
"It's perfectly safe to enter Stasis. I've done it a thousand times. There's a queer sensation when you pass through the envelope of the field, but it's momentary and it doesn't mean a thing. Trust me."
He stepped through an open door in mute demonstration. Deveney, smiling stiffly and drawing an obviously deep breath, followed him an instant later.
Hoskins said, "You too, Miss Fellowes. Please!"
He crooked his forefinger impatiently.
Miss Fellowes nodded and stepped across the threshold. She felt the field unmistakably. It was as though a ripple had gone through her, an internal tickle.
But once she was inside she was aware of no unusual sensations. Everything seemed normal. She picked up the clean fresh smell of the newly constructed wooden rooms, and something else-an earthy smell, the smell of a forest, somehowThe panicky screaming, she realized, had ended some time ago. Everything was quiet inside the stasis field now. And then she heard the dry shuffling of feet, a scrabbling as of fingers against wood-and, she thought, a low moan.
"Where is the child?" asked Miss Fellowes in distress.
Hoskins was examining some dials and meters just inside the entrance to the dollhouse. Deveney was gaping idiotically at him. Neither one seemed in any hurry to look after the child-the child that this vast and incomprehensible mass of machinery had just ripped out of some unthinkably ancient era.
Didn't these fool men care?
Miss Fellowes went forward on her own authority, around an elbow-bend corridor that led to the room with the bed in it.
The child was in there. A boy. A very small boy, very dirty, very scrawny, very strange-looking.
He might have been three years old-certainly not very much more than that. He was naked. His small dirt-smeared chest was heaving raggedly. All around him lay an untidy sprawl of loose earth and pebbles and torn-off tufts of coarse grass, all of it strewn around the floor in a broad arc as though a bushel load of landfill had been casually upended in the room. The rich smell of soil rose up from it, and a touch of something fetid, besides. Miss Fellowes saw some large dark ants and what might have been a couple of furry little spiders moving around slowly near the boy's bare brown feet.
Hoskins followed her horrified glance and said with a sharp thrust of annoyance in his voice, "You can't pluck a boy cleanly out of time, Miss Fellowes. We had to take some of the surroundings with him for safety's sake. Or would you have preferred to have him arrive here minus one of his legs or with only half a head?"
"Please!" said Miss Fellowes, in an agony of revulsion. "Are we just going to stand here? The poor child is frightened. And it's filthy."
Which was an understatement. She had never seen a child that was quite so disreputable-looking. Perhaps he hadn't been washed in weeks; perhaps not ever. He reeked. His entire body was smeared with a thick layer of encrusted grime and grease, and there was a long scratch on his thigh that looked red and sore, possibly infected.
"Here, let me have a look at you-" Hoskins muttered, stepping forward in a gingerly way.
The boy hunched low, pulling his elbows in against his sides and drawing his head down close against his shoulders in what seemed like an innate defensive stance, and backed away rapidly. His eyes were fiery with fear and defiance. When he reached the far side of the room and could go no farther, he lifted his upper lip and snarled in a hissing fashion, like a cat. It was a frightening sound- savage, bestial, ferocious.
Miss Fellowes felt a cold shock wave sweeping through her nervous system. This was her new charge? This? This little-animal?
It was as bad as she had feared.
Worse. Worse. He hardly seemed human. He was hideous; he was a little monster.
Hoskins reached out swiftly and seized both of the child's wrists, pulling his arms inward across his body and crossing them over his belly. In the same motion Hoskins lifted him, kicking and writhing and screaming, from the floor.
Ghastly banshee howls came forth from the child. They erupted from the depths of his body with astonishing force. Miss Fellowes realized that she was trembling, and forced herself to be calm. It was a frightful noise, ear-splitting, repellent, sub-human. It was almost impossible to believe that a boy so small could make sounds so horrendous.
Hoskins held him at arms' length in midair and looked around in obvious distress at Miss Fellowes.
"Yes, hold him, now. Don't put him down. Watch out for his toenails when he kicks. Take him into the bathroom and let's clean him up. That's what he needs before anything else, a good warm bath."
Hoskins nodded. Small as the child was, it didn't seem to be any easy matter to keep him pinioned that way. A grown man and a little child: but there was tremendous wild strength in the child, small as he was. And beyond any doubt he thought that he was fighting for his life.
"Fill that tub, Miss Fellowes!" Hoskins yelled. "Fill it fast!"
There were other people inside the Stasis area now. In the midst of the confusion Miss Fellowes recognized her three assistants and singled them out.
"You, Elliott-get the water running. Mortenson, I want antibiotics for that infection on his leg. In fact, bring the whole antisepsis kit into the bathroom. Stratford, find yourself a cleanup crew and start getting all this trash and filth removed from here!"
They began to snap to it. Now that she was giving the orders, her initial shock and horror were starting to drop away and some degree of professional aplomb returned to her. This was going to be difficult, yes. But she was a specialist in managing difficult cases. And she had been up against plenty of them during the course of her career.
Workmen appeared. Storage canisters were brought in. The workmen began to sweep away the soil and debris and carry the canisters off to a containment area somewhere in back. Hoskins called to them, "Remember, not a scrap goes outside the bubble!"
Miss Fellowes strode after Hoskins into the bathroom and signaled for him to plunge the boy into the tub, which Elliott was rapidly filling with warm water. No longer just one of a group of confused spectators, but now an efficient and experienced nurse swinging into action, she was collected enough to pause and look at the child with a calm, clinical eye, seeing him clearly as though for the first time.
What she saw overwhelmed her with new dismay. She hesitated for one shocked moment, fighting against the sudden emotions that swirled up through her unguarded mind. She saw past the dirt and shrieking, past the thrashing of limbs and useless twisting. She saw the boy himself.
Her first impression in that moment of chaos had been right. He was the ugliest boy she had ever seen. He was horribly ugly-from misshapen head to bandy legs.
His body was exceptionally stocky, very deep through the chest and broad in the shoulders. All right; nothing terribly unusual about that, really. But that long oversized skull! That bulging, sloping forehead! That immense potato of a nose, with its dark cavernous nostrils, which opened outward as much as downward. The great staring eyes framed in those huge bony rims! The receding chin, the short neck, the dwarfish limbs!
Forty thousand years, Miss Fellowes told herself numbly.
Not human. Not really.
An animal. Her worst-case scenario had come true. An ape-child; that was what he was. Some kind of chimpanzee, more or less. That was what they were paying her all this money to look after! How could she? What old she know about caring for little savage prehistoric apes?
And yet-yetMaybe she was wrong about him. She hoped so most profoundly. There was the glow of unmistakably human intelligence in those huge, gleaming, furious eyes of his. His skin, light brown, almost tawny, was covered only with fine golden down, not the coarse shaggy pelt that one would imagine an animal-child to have. And his face, ugly as it was-it wasn't really the face of any kind of ape. You had to look behind the superficial strangeness, and when you did you saw that he was really just a little boy.
A little boy, yes, an ugly little boy, a strange little boy, a human boy-a dirty little frightened child with bandy legs and a peculiarly shaped head and a miserable excuse for a chin and an infected cut on his thigh and a curious red birthmark on his cheek that looked like a jagged bolt of lightning-yes, yes, he wasn't at all like any child she had ever seen, but nevertheless she would try to think of him as a human being, this poor lost frightened child who had been snatched out of time. Perhaps she would succeed. Perhaps.
But Lord, he was ugly! Lord, Lord, Lord, it was going to be a real challenge to love anything that looked as ugly as this child did! Miss Fellowes wasn't at all sure that she would be able to do it, despite everything that she had told Dr. Hoskins when he had interviewed her. And that was a deeply troubling thought.