"A little touch of burnout, maybe, is that what you're saying, Dr. Levien?"
A shadow of a smile appeared on her lips, the first sign of any human warmth that Hoskins had seen her display since she had entered his office. But it was gone almost as quickly as it had appeared.
"You might call it that, Dr. Hoskins."
"Yes, but would you?"
She looked startled at his unexpected sally. But then she drew a deep breath and reconstructed her all but imperturbable poise with hardly any show of effort.
"Burnout might be too extreme a term for my current attitudinal orientation. Let me just say that I'm interested in repositioning my energy expenditures-which as you see have been quite diffusely manifested-so that they're allocated to a single concentration of output."
"Ah-yes. Exactly so."
Hoskins regarded her with a mixture of awe and horror. Her voice was a perfectly pitched contralto; her eyebrows were flawlessly symmetrical; she sat splendidly upright with the finest posture imaginable. She was extraordinary in every way. But she didn't seem real.
He said, after a little pause, "And what is it, exactly, that led you to apply for this job, other than the aspect of allowing you a single concentration of energy expenditure?"
"The nature of the experiment fascinates me."
"Ah. Tell me."
"As every first-rate author of children's literature knows, the world of the child is very different from the world of adults-an alien world, in fact, whose values and assumptions and realities are entirely other. As we grow older, most of us make the transition from that world to this one so completely that we forget the nature of the world we've left behind. Throughout my work with children I've attempted to enter into dieir minds and comprehend the other-worldly nature of them as profoundly as my limitations as an adult will enable me to do."
Hoskins said, trying to keep the surprise out of his voice, "You think children are alien beings?"
"In a metaphorical way, yes. Obviously not literally."
"Obviously." He scanned her resume, frowning. "You've never been married?"
"No, never," she said coolly.
"And I assume you haven't gone in for single parenting, either?"
"It was an option I considered quite seriously some years ago. But my work has provided me with a sense of surrogate parenting that has been quite sufficient."
"Yes. I suppose that it has. -Now, you were saying a moment ago that you see the world of the child as a fundamentally alien place. How does that statement relate to my question about what led you to apply for this job?"
"If I can accept at face value the remarkable preliminary description of your experiment that I've been given, it would involve me in caring for a child who quite literally comes from an alien world. Not in space, but in time; nevertheless, the essence of the existential situation is equivalent. I'd welcome a chance to study such a child's fundamental differences from us, by way of obtaining some parallactic displacement that might provide additional insights for my own work."
Hoskins stared at her.
No, he thought. Not real at all. A cleverly made android of some sort. A robotic nursoid. Except they hadn't perfected robots of this level of quality yet-he was pertain of that. So she had to be a flesh-and-Wood human being. But she certainly didn't act like one.
He said, "That may not be so easy. There may be difficulties in communication. The child very likely will have a speech impediment, you know. As a matter of fact there's a good chance that it may be virtually incapable of speech at all."
"It?"
"He, she. We can't tell you which, just yet. You do realize that the child won't be arriving here for another three weeks, give or take a day or two, and until the moment it arrives we'll basically know nothing about its actual nature."
She seemed indifferent to that. "I'm aware of the risks. The child may be drastically handicapped vocally, physically, and perhaps intellectually."
"Yes, you may well have to deal with it the way you'd deal with a severely retarded child of our own era. We just don't know. We'll be handing you a complete unknown."
"I'm prepared to meet that challenge," she said. "Or any other. Challenge is what interests me, Dr. Hoskins."
He believed that. The conditional and even speculative nature of the job description had produced no reaction in her. She seemed ready to face anything and didn't seem concerned with the whys and wherefores.
It wasn't hard to see why Sam Aickman had been so impressed with her.
Hoskins was silent again for a moment, just long enough to give her an opening. Marianne Levien didn't hesitate to take advantage of it.
She reached into her attache case and drew forth a hand-held computer, no bigger than a large coin. "I've brought with me," she said, "a program that I've been working on since the word came across on the computer network that you were open for applications for this position. It's a variation on some work I did with braindamaged children seven yean ago in Peru: six algorithms defining and modifying communications flow. Essentially they bypass the normal verbal channels of the mind and-"
"Thank you," Hoskins said smoothly, staring at the tiny device in her outstretched hand as though she were offering him a bomb. "But there are all sorts of legal complexities preventing me from looking at your material until you're actually an employee of Stasis Technologies, Ltd. Once you're under contract, naturally, I'U be glad to discuss your prior research with you in detail, but until then-"
"Of course," she said. Color flooded her flawless cheeks. A tactical error, and she knew it: overeagerness, even pushiness. Hoskins watched her elaborately making her recovery. "I quite see the situation. It was foolish of me to try to jump past the formalities like that. But I hope you can understand, Dr. Hoskins, tliat despite this very carefully burnished facade of mine that you see I'm basically a researcher, with all the enthusiasm of a brand-new graduate student setting out to uncover the secrets of the universe, and sometimes despite all my knowledge of what's feasible and appropriate I tend to sidestep the customary protocols out of sheer feverish desire to get to the heart of-"
Hoskins smiled. Hoskins nodded. Hoskins said, "Of course, Dr. Levien. It's no sin to err on the side of enthusiasm. -And this has been a very valuable conversation. We'll be in touch with you just as soon as we've made our decision."
She gave him an odd look, as though surprised he wasn't hiring her on the spot. She had the good sense not to say anything else except "Thank you very much" and "Goodbye," though.
At the door of his office she paused, turned, flashed one final high-voltage smile. Then she was gone, leaving an incandescent image behind on the retina of Hoskins' mind.
Whew, Hoskins thought.
He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead.
The second candidate was different from Marianne Levien in almost every way. She was twenty years older, for one thing; for another, there was nothing in the least elegant, cool, intimidating, incandescent, or androidal about her. Dorothy Newcombe was her name. She was plump, matronly, almost overabundant; she wore no jewelry and her clothing was simple, even dowdy; her demeanor was mild and her face was pleasantly jolly.
A golden aura of maternal warmth seemed to surround her. She looked like any child's ideal fantasy grand-mother. She seemed so simple and easy-going that it was hard to believe that she had the prerequisite background in pediatrics, physiology, and clinical chemistry. But it was all there on her resume, and one other surprising specialty besides-a degree in anthropological medicine. For all the wonders of twenty-first-century civilization, there still were primitive regions here and there on the globe, and Dorothy Newcombe had worked in six or seven of them, in various parts of the world-Africa, South America, Polynesia, Southeast Asia. No wonder she had Sam Aickman's seal of approval. A woman who could have served as a model for a statue of the goddess of motherly love, and who was experienced besides in the handling of children in backward societiesShe seemed exactly right in every way. After the oppressive hyperglossy perfection of the too-awesome Marianne Levien, Hoskins felt so much at ease in this woman's presence that he had to fight back a strong impulse to offer her the position right away, without even bothering to interview her. It wouldn't have been the first time that he had allowed himself the luxury of giving way to a spontaneous feeling.
But he managed to master it.
And then, to his astonishment and dismay, Dorothy Newcombe managed to disqualify herself for die job before the interview had lasted five minutes.
Everything had gone beautifully up to the fatal point. She was warm and personable. She loved children, of course: she had had three of her own, and even before that, as the eldest child in a large family with an ailing mother, she had been involved in child-rearing from an early age, caring for her many brothers and sisters as far back as she could remember. And she had the right professional background. She came with the highest recommendations from the hospitals and clinics where she had worked; she had stood up under the strangest and most taxing conditions of remote tribal areas without difficulty; she enjoyed working with disadvantaged children of all sorts and was looking forward with the greatest excitement to tackling the unique problems that the Stasis Technologies project was certain to involve.