"Timmie," she said, and ran her hand tenderly through die shaggy brown hair on his strangely shaped little head. "What's wrong?"
He said, "Where's Jerry? Will he be back to play with me today?"
"Not today, no."
"I'm sorry about what happened."
"I know you are, Timmie."
"And Jerry-?"
"Never mind about Jerry now, Timmie. Is that why you've been crying? Because you miss Jerry?"
He looked away. "Not just because of that, Miss Fel-lowes. I dreamed again."
"The same dream?" Miss Fellowes' lips set. Of course, the Jerry affair would bring back the dream.
He nodded. "The same dream, yes."
"Was it very bad this time?"
"Bad, yes. I was-outside. There were children there, lots of them. Jerry was there, too. They were all looking at me. Some were laughing, some were pointing at me and making faces, but some were nice to me. They said, Come on, come on, you can make it, Timmie. Just take one step at a time. Just keep on going and you'll be free. And I did. I walked right away from here into the outside. And I said, Now come and play with me, but then they turned all wavery and I couldn't see them any more, and I started sliding backward, back into here. I wasn't able to stop myself. I slid all the way back inside and there was a black wall all around me, and I couldn't move, I was stuck, I was-"
"Oh, how terrible. I'm sorry, Timmie. You know that I am."
His too-large teeth showed as he tried to smile, and his lips stretched wide, making his mouth seem to thrust even farther forward from his face than it actually did.
"When will I be big enough to go out there, Miss Fellowes? To really go outside? Not just in dreams?"
"Soon," she said softly, feeling her heart break. "Soon."
Miss Fellowes let him take her hand. She lovea the warm touch of the thick dry skin of his palm against hers.
He tugged at her, drawing her inward, leading her through the three rooms that made up the whole of Stasis Section One-comfortable enough, yes, but an eternal prison for the ugly little boy all the seven (Was it seven? Who could be sure?) years of his life.
He led her to the one window, looking out onto a scrubby woodland section of the world of is (now hidden by night). There was a fence out there, and a dour glaring notice on a billboard, warning all and sundry to keep out on pain of this or that dire punishment.
Timmie pressed his nose against the window.
"Tell me what's out there again, Miss Fellowes."
"Better places. Nicer places," she said sadly.
As she had done so many times before over the past three years, she studied him covertly out of the corner of her eye, looking at his poor little imprisoned face outlined in profile against the window. His forehead retreated in a flat slope and his thick coarse hair lay down upon it in tufts that she had never been able to straighten. The back of his skull bulged weirdly, giving his head an overheavy appearance and seemingly making it sag and bend forward, forcing his whole body into a stoop. Already, stark bulging bony ridges were beginning to force the skin outward above his eyes. His wide mouth thrust forward more prominendy than did his wide and flattened nose and he had no chin to speak of-only a jawbone that curved smoothly down and back. He was small for his years, almost dwarfish despite his already powerful build, and his stumpy legs were bowed. An angry red birthmark, looking for all the world like a jagged streak of lightning, stood out startlingly on his broad, strong-boned cheek.
He was a very ugly little boy and Edith Fellowes loved him more dearly than anything in the world.
She was standing with her own face behind his line of vision, so she allowed her lips the luxury of a tremor.
They wanted to kill him. That was what it amounted to. He was only a child, an unusually helpless one at that, and they were planning to send him to his death.
They would not. She would do anything to prevent it. Anything. Interfering with their plan would be a massive dereliction of duty, she knew, and she had never committed any act in her life that could be construed as going against her duty as she understood it, but that didn't matter now. She had a duty to them, yes, no question of that, but she had a duty to Timmie also, not to mention a duty to herself. And she had no doubt at all about which the highest of those three duties was, and which came second, and which was third.
She opened the suitcase.
She took out the overcoat, the woolen cap with the ear-flaps, and the rest.
Timmie turned and stared at her. His eyes were so very big, so brightly gleaming, so solemn.
"What are those things, Miss Fellowes?"
"Clothes," she said. "Clothes for wearing outside." She beckoned to him. "Come here, Timmie."
She had actually been the third one that Hoskins had interviewed for the job, and the other two had been the preferred choices of the Personnel people. But Gerald Hoskins was a hands-on kind of chief executive who didn't necessarily accept the opinions of those to whom he had delegated authority without taking the trouble to check those opinions out for himself. There were people in the company who thought that that was his biggest fault as a manager. There were times when he agreed with them. All the same, he had insisted on interviewing all three of the women personally.
The first one came with a three-star rating mom Sam Aickman, who was Stasis Technologies' Personnel chief. That in itself made Hoskins a little suspicious, because Aickman had a powerful bias in favor of hard-edge state-of-the-art sorts of people. Which was just the right thing if you happened to be looking for an expert in implosion-field containment, or someone who could deal with a swarm of unruly positrons on a first-name basis. But Hoskins wasn't convinced that one of Sam's high-tech types was exactly the right choice for this particular job.
Her name was Marianne Levien and she was a real tiger. Somewhere in her late thirties: sleek, lean, trim, glossy. Not actually beautiful-that wasn't the most precise word for her-but striking, definitely striking.
She had magnificent cheekbones and jet-black hair that was pulled back tight from her forehead and cool glittering eyes that didn't miss a thing. She was wearing an elegant business suit of deep rich brown with gold piping that she might have picked up in Paris or San Francisco the day before yesterday, and an oh-so-under-played little cluster of pearl-tipped gold strands at her throat that didn't strike Hoskins as the sort of jewelry one usually wore to a job interview, especially one of this sort. She looked more like an aggressive youngish executive who had a slot on the board of directors as her ultimate target than like his notion of what a nurse ought to be.
But a nurse was what she was, fundamentally, even if that seemed a very modest designation for someone of her professional affiliations and accomplishments. Her resume was a knockout. Doctorates in heuristic pedagogy and rehabilitative technology. Assistant to the head of Special Services at Houston General's childrens* clinic. Consultant to the Katzin Commission, the Federal task force on remedial education. Six years' experience in advanced artificial-intelligence interfacing for autistic kids. Software bibliography a mile long.
Just what Stasis Technologies, Ltd. needed for this job?
So Sam Aickman seemed to think, at any rate.
Hoskins said, "You understand, don't you, diat we'll be asking you to give up all your outside projects, the Washington stuff, the Houston affiliation, any consulting work that might require travel. You'll basically be pinned down here on a full-time basis for a period of several years, dealing with a single highly specialized assignment."
She didn't flinch. "I understand that."
"I see that in the last eighteen months alone you've appeared at conferences in Sao Paulo, Winnipeg, Melbourne, San Diego, and Baltimore, and that you've had papers read on your behalf at five other scientific meetings that you weren't able to attend personally."
"That's correct."
"And yet you're quite sure that you'll be able to make the transition from the very active professional career outlined in your resume to the essentially isolated kind of existence you'll need to adopt here?"
There was a cold, determined glint in her eyes. "Not only do I think I'll be completely capable of making the transition, I'm quite ready and eager to do so."
Something sounded just a little wrong about that to Hoskins.
He said, "Would you care to expand on that a bit? Perhaps you don't fully grasp how-ah-monastic we tend to be at Stasis Technologies, Ltd. And how demanding your own area of responsibility in particular is likely to be."
"I think I do grasp that, Dr. Hoskins."
"And yet you're ready and eager?"
"Perhaps I'm a trifle less eager to run around from Winnipeg to Melbourne to Sao Paulo than I used to be."