Hoskins told her that an apartment of her own could be made available on the company grounds, so she could get away from having to be on duty twenty-four hours a day. But she refused. "I want to stay close to Timmie while he's sleeping," she explained. "He wakes up crying almost every night. He seems to have very vivid dreams- terrifying ones, I'd guess. I can comfort him. I don't think anyone else would be able to."
Miss Fellowes did leave the premises occasionally, more because she felt that she should than because she wanted to. She would go into town to carry out little chores-making a bank deposit, perhaps some shopping for clothing or toys for Timmie, even seeing a movie once. But she was uneasy about Timmie all the*1 time, eager to get back. Timmie was all that mattered to her.
She had never really noticed, in the years when she had worked at the hospital, how totally her life was centered around her work, how sparse were her connections to the world outside. Now that she actually lived at the place where she worked, it was exceedingly clear. She desired little contact with the outside, not even to see her few friends, most of them nurses like herself. It was sufficient to speak with them by telephone; she felt little impulse to visit them.
It was on one of these forays into the city that Miss Fellowes began to realize just how thoroughly accustomed to Timmie she had become. One day she found herself staring at an ordinary boy in the street and finding something bulgy and unattractive about his high domed forehead and jutting chin, his flat brows, his insignificant little nub of a nose. She had to shake herself to break the spell.
Just as she had come to accept Timmie as he was, and no longer saw anything especially strange or unusual about him, Timmie, too, seemed to be settling fairly quickly into his new life. He was becoming less timid with strangers; his dreams appeared not to be as harrowing as they had been; he was as comfortable with Miss Fellowes now as though she were his actual mother. He dressed and undressed himself, now, climbing in and out of the overalls that he usually wore with distinct signs of pleasure in the accomplishment. He had learned to drink from a glass and to use-however clumsily-a plastic fork to convey his food to his mouth.
He even seemed to be trying to learn how to speak English.
Miss Fellowes had not managed to get anywhere in decoding Timmie's own language of clicks and growls. Though Hoskins had indeed recorded everything, and she had listened over and over to the playbacks of Timmie's statements, there didn't seem to be any intelligible verbal pattern behind them. They were just clicks, just growls. He made certain sounds when he was hungry, certain sounds when he was tired, certain sounds when he was frightened. But, as Hoskins had pointed out long ago, even cats and dogs made recognizable sorts of sounds in response to particular situations, but no one had ever identified specific "words" in any cat or dog "language."
Perhaps she was just failing to hear the linguistic patterns. Perhaps they all were. She still was sure that there was a language there-one so remote in its structure from modern tongues that no one alive today could begin to comprehend how it was organized. But in darker moments Miss Fellowes feared that Timmie simply wasn't going to turn out to be capable of learning true language at all-either because Neanderthals were too far back along the evolutionary path to have the intellectual capacity for speech, or else because, having passed his formative years among people who spoke only the simplest, most primitive of languages, it was too late now for Timmie to master anything more complex.
She did some research on the subject of feral children -children who had spent prolonged periods living wild, virtually animal lives, on their own in primitive regions- and discovered that even after these children had been found and brought back into civilization, they usually never did develop the knack of uttering more than a few crude grunts. It appeared that even where the physiological and intellectual capability for speech existed, the right learning stimuli needed to be provided in the early years of life, or else the child would never learn how to speak.
Miss Fellowes desperately wanted Timmie to prove her-and Dr. Mclntyre-wrong about that, so that no one could doubt that he was human. And what trait was there that more clearly distinguished human beings from beasts than that of being able to speak?
"Milk," she said, pointing. "A glass of milk."
Timmie made what she took to be the hunger-clicks.
"Yes. Hungry. Do you want some milk?"
No response.
She tried a different tack.
"Timmie-you. You-Timmie." Pointing.
He stared at her finger but said nothing.
"Walk."
"Eat."
"Laugh."
"Me-Miss Fellowes. You-Timmie."
Nothing each time.
Hopeless, Miss Fellowes thought bitterly. Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless!
"Talk?"
"Drink?"
"Eat?"
"Laugh?"
"Eat," Timmie said suddenly.
She was so astounded that she nearly dropped the plate of food she had just prepared for him.
"Say that again!"
"Eat."
The same sound. Not really clear. More like "Eeeh." She hadn't been able to detect the final consonant either time. But it was the right sound for the context.
She held the plate toward him, too high for him to be able to reach it.
"Eeeh!" he said again, more insistently.
"Eat?" she asked. "You want to eat?"
"Eeeeh!" Real impatience now.
"Here," Miss Fellowes said. "Eat, yes, Timmie. Eat! Eat your food!"
"Eeeh," he said in satisfaction, and seized his fork and fell to vigorously.
"Was it good?" she asked him afterward. "Did you like your lunch?"
But that was expecting too much of him. Even so, she wasn't going to give up now. Where there was one word there might be others. Had to be others.
She pointed to him. "Timmie."
"Mmm-mmm," he said.
Was that his way of saying "Timmie"?
"Does Timmie want to eat some more? Eat?"
She pointed to him, then to her mouth, and made earing motions. He looked at her and said nothing. Well, why should he? He wasn't hungry any longer.
But he knew that he was Timmie. Didn't he?
"Timmie," she said again, and pointed to him.
"Mmm-mmm," he said, and tapped his chest.
There could be no mistake about that. A stunning surge of-was it pride? Joy? Astonishment?-ran through her. All three. Miss Fellowes thought for a moment that she was going to burst into tears.
Then she ran for the intercom. "Dr. Hoskins! Will you come in here, please? And you'd better send for Dr. Mclntyre, too!"
"It's Bruce Mannheim again, Dr. Hoskins." Hoskins stared at the telephone in his hand as though it had turned into a serpent. This was the third call from
Mannheim in less than two weeks. But he tried to sound jovial.
"Yes, Mr. Mannheim! Good to hear from you!"
"I just wanted to let you know that I've discussed the results of my very amiable conversation with you last week with my board of advisers."
"Yes?" Hoskins said, not so jovially. He hadn't found the last conversation quite as amiable as Mannheim apparently had. He had found it prying and intrusive and generally outrageous.
"I told them that you had answered my preliminary queries very satisfactorily."
"I'm glad to hear that."
"And the general feeling around here is that we don't intend to take action at this time concerning the Neanderthal boy, but that we'll need to monitor the situation closely while we complete our studies of the entire question. I'll be calling you next week with a further list of points that need to be satisfied. I thought you'd like to know that."
"Ah-yes," Hoskins said. "Thank you very much for telling me, Mr. Mannheim."
He closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe slowly in and out.
Thank you very much, Mr. Mannheim. How kind of you to allow us to continue our work for the time being. While you complete your studies of the entire question, that is. Thank you. Very much. Very, very, very, much.
The day Timmie spoke his first words of English was a wondrous one for Miss Fellowes. But other days followed soon afterward that were much less wondrous.
The problem was that Timmie wasn't just a little boy who happened to have been placed in her care. He was an extraordinary scientific specimen, and scientists from all over the world were jostling with one another for the privilege of studying him. Dr. Jacobs and Dr. Mclntyre had been only the tip of the wave, the first indications of the deluge to follow.