A press conference! Miss Fellowes thought bitterly. For a four-year-old. The poor suffering child! What will they do to him next?
After a time she went out of the room again, Bushed with indignation, closing Timmie's door behind her. The three reporters were still there, huddling in the space just outside the bubble. She stepped through the Stasis boundary and confronted them out there.
"Haven't you had enough?" she demanded. "It's going to take me all afternoon to repair the damage to the boy's peace of mind that you've done here today. Why don't you go away?"
"We have just a few more questions, Miss Fellowes. If you don't mind-"
She looked toward Hoskins in appeal. He shrugged and gave her a weak smile as though to counsel patience.
"If we could know a little about your own background, Miss Fellowes-" said the woman from Reuters.
Hoskins said quickly, "We can provide you with a copy of Miss Fellowes' professional credentials, if you wish, Ms. Crawford."
"Yes. Please do."
"Is she a time-travel scientist?"
"Miss Fellowes is a highly experienced nurse," said Hoskins. "She was brought to Stasis Technologies, Ltd., specifically for the purpose of caring for Timmie."
"And what do you expect to do with-Timmie," asked the man from the Times, "now that you have him?"
"Well," Hoskins said, "from my point of view the chief purpose of the Neanderthal project was simply to find out whether we could aim our scoop at the relatively short-range target of the Paleolithic era with sufficient accuracy to bring back a living organism. Our previous successes, as you know, have all involved a target zone in the millions of years, rather than a mere forty thousand. That has now been accomplished, and we are continuing to work on ever narrower refinements of our process with the goal of even shorter-range targeting. -But of course we also now have a live Neanderthal child in our midst, a creature which is at the edge of being human or indeed must actually be considered to be human. The anthropologists and the physiologists are naturally very much interested in him and he'll be the subject of intensive study."
"How long will you keep him?"
"Until such a time as we need the space more than we need him. Quite a while, perhaps."
The man from Globe-Net Cable said, "Can you bring him out into the open so we can set up a sub-etheric transmission and give our viewers a real show?"
Miss Fellowes cleared her throat loudly.
But Hoskins was a step ahead of her. "I'm sorry, but the child can't be removed from Stasis."
"And what is Stasis again, actually?" asked Ms. Craw-ford of Reuters.
"Ah." Hoskins permitted himself one of his short smiles. "That would take a great deal of explanation- more, I think, than your readers would care about at this point. But I can give you a brief summary. -In Stasis, time as we know it doesn't exist. Those rooms are inside an invisible bubble that is not exactly part of our universe. A self-contained inviolable environment, one might say. That's why the child could be plucked out of time the way it was."
"Wait a minute, now," Underbill of the Times objected. "Self-contained? Inviolable? The nurse goes into the room and out of it."
"And so could any of you," said Hoskins matter-offactly. "You would be moving parallel to the lines of temporal force and no great energy gain or loss would be involved. The child, however, was taken from the far past. It moved across the time lines and gained temporal potential. To move it into the universe-our universe, and into our own time-would absorb enough energy to burn out every line in the place and probably to knock out power in the entire city. When he arrived, all sorts of trash came with him-dirt and twigs and pebbles and things-and we've got every crumb of it all stored out back of this area. When we get a chance we'll ship it back where it came from. But we don't dare let it out of the Stasis zone."
The media people were busily jotting down notes as Hoskins spoke to them. Miss Fellowes suspected that they didn't understand very much and that they were sure that their audience wouldn't either. But it sounded scientific and that was what counted.
The Globe-Net man said, "Would you be available for an all-circuit interview tonight, Dr. Hoskins?"
"I think we can manage that," said Hoskins at once.
"But not the boy," said Miss Fellowes.
"No," said Hoskins. "Not the boy. But I'll be happy to answer any further questions you might have. And now, please, if we can clear the area-"
Miss Fellowes watched them go with no regret.
She closed the door and heard the electronic locks kicking in and stood there for a moment, reflecting on all that had just been said.
Once again, this business of the build-up of temporal potential, of power surges, of the fear of removing anything from Stasis that had come forward in time, had come up. She remembered how agitated Dr. Hoskins had been when Professor Adamewski was caught trying to sneak a rock sample out of his research area, and the explanations he had given her then. Much of that had quickly become hazy to her; but, reminded of it now, Miss Fellowes saw one thing with terrible clarity, a conclusion to which she had given no serious thought when she had brushed against it earlier.
Timmie was doomed never to see anything of the world into which he had-without his comprehension or consent-been thrust. The bubble would be his entire universe so long as he remained in modern time.
He was a prisoner and always would be. Not by the arbitrary fiat of Dr. Hoskins, but by the inexorable laws of the process by which he had been snatched out of his own time. It wasn't that Hoskins would not ever let him out of the Stasis bubble. Hoskins could not let him out.
Words came back to her from her conversation with Hoskins on the night of Timmie's arrival.
The point to bear in mind is simply that he must never be allowed to leave these rooms. Never. Not for an instant. Not for any reason. Not to save his life. Not even to save your life, Miss Fellowes.
Miss Fellowes hadn't really paid much attention then to the perfunctory explanation Hoskins had offered. A matter of energy, he had said. There are conservation laws involved. She had had other things to think about then, much more urgent things. But it was all as clear to her now as it needed to be. The few little rooms of this doll-house were forever to be the boundaries of Timmie's world.
Poor child. Poor child.
She became suddenly aware that he was crying and she hastened into the bedroom to console him.
Hoskins was getting ready to call the meeting of the board of directors to order when his telephone rang. He stared at it in irritation. What now?
It went on ringing.
"Excuse me, will you?" he said, looking around the room. He switched it to audio-only and said, "Hoskins."
"Dr. Hoskins, this is Bruce Mannheim. Of the Children's Advocacy Council, as I think you know."
Hoskins choked back a cough.
"Yes, Mr. Mannheim. What can I do for you?"
"I saw your telecast last night, of course. The little Neanderthal boy. Fascinating, fascinating, an absolutely miraculous scientific achievement!"
"Why, thank you. And-"
"But of course, the situation raises some moral and ethical problems. As I think you know. To have taken a child of an alien culture from his own nurturing family situation, and to bring him into our own era-" Mannheim paused. "I think we need to talk about this. Dr. Hoskins."
"Perhaps we do. But right at this moment-"
"Oh, not at this moment," Mannheim said airily. "I didn't intend that at all. I simply want to propose that we set up a time for a more extended discussion of the issues which-"
"Yes," Hoskins said, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. "Of course. Of course, Mr. Mannheim. If you'll leave your number with my secretary, she'll get back to you just as soon as possible, and we can organize aR-ap-pointment."
"Very good, Dr. Hoskins. Thank you very much."
Hoskins put the telephone down. He stared bleakly around the room.
"Brace Mannheim," he said dolefully. "The famous children's advocate. Wants to talk to me about the boy. -My God, my God! It was inevitable, wasn't it? And now here it all comes."
In the weeks that followed, Miss Fellowes felt herself grow to be an integral part of Stasis Technologies, Ltd. She was given a small office of her own with her name on the door, an office quite close to the dollhouse (as she never stopped calling Timmie's Stasis bubble). Her original contract was torn up and Hoskins offered her a new one providing for a substantial raise. She and Hoskins might be destined to be adversaries now and again but she had clearly won his respect. The dollhouse was covered with the ceiling she had requested at the outset; its furnishings were elaborated and improved; a second washroom was added, and better storage facilities for Miss Fellowes' belongings.