Her husband had been a doctor, too-with a Ph.D. in physics, like Hoskins. Miss Fellowes wondered strangely whether she would be calling him "doctor" too, as she did Hoskins, if they had managed to stay married all these years. A curious thought. She rarely thought of him at all any more; the whole notion of being married, of having a husband, had come to seem remote and implausible to her. She had been married for such a short time, such a long time ago.
"What would you prefer?" she asked. "Should I call you 'Mr. Hoskins,' then?"
"Most people around here call me 'Jerry.* "
Miss Fellowes looked at him strangely. "I couldn't do that!"
"You couldn't?"
"It-wouldn't feel right."
"Wouldn't feel right," Hoskins repeated, musingly. "To call me 'Jerry.' " He studied her closely, as though seeing her for the first time. His wide, fleshy face broke into a warm smile. "You really are a very formal person. I hadn't realized quite how formal, I guess. All right, then: you can go on calling me 'Dr. Hoskins,' if that's what you're most comfortable with. And I'll go on calling you 'Miss Fellowes.' "
What did he mean by that? she wondered.
Had he been thinking of calling her 'Edith'?
Nobody did that. Hardly anyone, at any rate: maybe six people in all the world. Most of the time she was 'Miss Fellowes' even to herself, whenever she thought of herself in the third person, which wasn't often. It was just a habit: she never gave it any thought at all. But how odd, she told herself now, to think of yourself diat way. How austere, how stiff. I have really become someone quite peculiar now that I'm middle-aged, Miss Fellowes thought. And I've never even noticed it.
Hoskins was still looking steadily at her, still smiling.
There was something very warm about the man, she realized suddenly, very likable. That too was a fact she hadn't noticed before. In their earlier meetings he had struck her mainly as someone who presented himself to the world as taut, guarded, inflexible, with only occasional moments when a little humanity showed through. But possibly the tensions of the final days before the Stasis experiment had made him seem that way; and now that the time-scoop had done its work and the success of the project was confirmed, he was more relaxed, more human, more himself. And quite a nice man indeed.
Miss Fellowes found herself wondering for an idle moment if Hoskins was married.
The speculation astonished and embarrassed her. He had told her a couple of weeks back that he had a son, hadn't he? A small son, barely old enough to know how to walk. Of course he was married. Of course. What could she be thinking of? She thrust the whole line of inquiry aside in horror.
"Timmie!" she called. "Come here, Timmie!"
Like Hoskins, the boy also appeared to be in a cheerful, outgoing mood this morning. He had slept well; he had eaten well; now he came hustling out of his bedroom, showing no uneasiness whatever at Hoskins' presence. He walked boldly up to Hoskins and uttered a stream of clicks.
"Do you think he's saying something, Miss Fellowes? Not just making sounds for the fun of hearing his own voice?"
"What else can he be doing but saying something, doctor? Dr. Mclntyre asked me the same thing yesterday when he heard Timmie speaking. How can anybody doubt that the boy's using a language-and a very elaborate one at that?"
"Dr. Mclntyre's extremely conservative. He doesn't believe in jumping to conclusions."
"Well, neither do I. But that's a genuine language or I'm not speaking one myself."
"Let's hope so, Miss Fellowes. Let's certainly hope so. If we can't develop any way of communicating with Timmie, then much of the value of having brought him here will be lost. Naturally we want him to tell us things about the world he came from. All manner of things."
"He will, doctor. Either in his language or in ours. And my guess is that he'll learn to speak ours long before we've found out anything about his."
"You may be right, Miss Fellowes. Time will tell, won't it? Time will tell."
Hoskins crouched down so that his face was on the same level as Timmie*s and let his hands rest lightly on the boy's rib-cage, fingers outspread. Timmie remained calm. Miss Fellowes realized after a moment that Hoskins was ever so gendy tickling the boy, working his fingertips lighdy around in an easy, playful way that bespoke more than a litde knowledge of how to handle small boys. And Timmie liked being tickled.
"What a sturdy litde fellow," Hoskins said. "Tough as they come. -So you're going to learn English, are you, Timmie? And then you'll dictate a book to us all about life in the Paleolithic Era, and everybody will want to read it and it'll be a big bestseller, and we'll start to see a little return on our investment in you, eh, Timmie? Eh?" He glanced up at Miss Fellowes. -"We've got a tremendous amount riding on this boy, you know. I hardly need tell you. Not simply money, but our entire professional futures."
"Yes. I imagine you do."
Hoskins tousled Timmie's thick unruly hair, patted the boy, and stood up. "We've been working on a shoestring budget for years, scrounging funds a dime at a time wherever we could. You can't believe the energy costs involved in maintaining Stasis, even for a moment- enough to power up a whole city for days-and the energy's only one part of the overhead we run here. We've been right on the edge of going under at least half a dozen times. We had to shoot the works on one big show to save ourselves. It was everything-or nothing. And when I say the works, I mean it. But Timmie here has saved us. He's going to put Stasis Technologies, Ltd. on the map. We're in, Miss Fellowes, we're in!"
"I would have thought bringing back a live dinosaur would have sufficed to achieve that, Dr. Hoskins."
"We thought so, too. But somehow that never captured the public's imagination."
"A dinosaur didn't?"
Hoskins laughed. "Oh, if we had brought back a full-grown brontosaurus, I suppose, or a rip-snorting tyran-nosaur, something on that order. But we had our mass limitations to deal with, you know, and they tied our hands considerably. Not that we would have known how to keep a tyrannosaur under control, even if we'd been able to bring one back. -I should take you across the way one of these days and let you see our dinosaur, I guess."
"You should, yes."
"He's very cute."
"Cute? A dinosaur?"
"You'll see. Yes. A cute little dinosaur. Unfortunately, people don't seem to be very excited by cute little dinosaurs. 'How interesting,' they said, 'these scientists have brought a live dinosaur back from prehistoric times.' But then they got a look at the dinosaur on television and they didn't find it very interesting at all, because it wasn t twice as high as a house and breathing fire, I guess. A
Neanderthal boy, now-an actual prehistoric human being, quite strange-looking but nevertheless something everyone can identify with and care deeply about-that'll be our salvation. -Do you hear that, Timmie? You're our salvation." To Miss Fellowes again Hoskins said, "If this hadn't worked out, I'd have been through. No doubt about it. This whole corporation would have been through."
"But we're all right now. We'll have plenty of money soon. Funds have been promised from every source. This is all wonderful, Miss Fellowes. So long as we can keep Timmie healthy and happy, and maybe get him to speak a few words of English-'Hello, everybody out there, this is Timmie from the Stone Age'-"
"Or some such thing," Miss Fellowes said drily.
"Yes. Some such thing. -Healthy and happy, that's the key to it all. If anything happens to him, our name is mud, and worse than mud, Miss Fellowes. Which makes you the central figure in our whole operation, do you realize that? We depend on you to provide a supportive, nourishing environment for our boy..Your word will be law: whatever Timmie needs, Timmie gets. You were absolutely right yesterday when you refused to let the media have a whack at him so soon."
"Thank you."
"Naturally, you understand that we do want to have a press conference just as soon as possible-that it's vital to everybody's interests that we maximize the publicity value of the Timmie project as quickly as we can-"
Suddenly Hoskins seemed less genial and likable again, more the driven executive who said things like "Trust me" when he was at his least trustworthy.
Coolly Miss Fellowes said, "Does that mean you want to bring them in here this afternoon?"
"Well, If you thought he was ready for-"
"I don't. Not yet."
Hoskins moistened his lips. "Your word is law. Just tell us when."
"I will."
"I mean, can you give us an estimate now? What about our having the press conference tomorrow? -The day after tomorrow?"