The boy's disappointment was all too obvious. His round face dissolved into wrinkles, his jutting brow knotted in a frown. "Why not today?"
"Today isn't Jerry's day, Timmie. Jerry has-a place to go today."
"What place?"
"A place," she said, being deliberately vague. How could she describe kindergarten to him? What would Timmie think, knowing that other children, many of them, came together to play games, to chase each other in laughter around a schoolyard, to daub pieces of paper with gloriously gooey fingerpaints. "Jerry'11 be here tomorrow,"
"I wish he could come every day."
"So do I," Miss Fellowes said.
(But do I? Really?)
The problem was not that Timmie had a friend, but that the friend was becoming too confident, too aggressive, as time went along. Jerry had overcome his initial timidity entirely by now, and he was very much the dominant member of the pair.
He had been bigger than Timmie to start with, and he seemed to be growing faster now. The height differential was close to an inch and a half by this time, and Jerry was heavier than Timmie as well. And quicker and stronger and-Miss Fellowes had trouble with this aspect of it-quite possibly more intelligent, too. Jerry seemed to figure out new toys much more swiftly than Timmie, and to find interesting things to do with them. And when she gave them paints or crayons or modeling clay to play with, Jerry quickly set to work creating designs and shapes, while Timmie simply made messes. Timmie appeared to have no artistic aptitude at all, not even the minimal skills one would expect from any reasonably intelligent child his age.
Of course, she argued, Jerry goes to kindergarten every day. He's learned all about how to use crayons and paints and clay there.
But Timmie had had them too, long before Jerry had first come here. He had never managed to master them, but that hadn't troubled Miss Fellowes at the time; she hadn't been comparing Timmie with any other children then, and she was making allowances for the blankness of his first few years.
Now she remembered what she had read in the books Dr. Mclntyre had given her. About the total absence of any known examples of Neanderthal art. No cave paintings, no statuettes, no designs carved on walls.
(What if they really were inferior? And that was why they died out when we came along.)
Miss Fellowes didn't want to think about that.
Yet here was Jerry, swaggering in here now twice a week as if he owned the place. "Let's play with the blocks," he would say to Timmie. Or "let's paint" or "let's watch the whirloscreen." And Timmie would go along with it, never suggesting some preference of his own, always blandly following Jerry's agenda. Jerry had forced Timmie into a completely secondary role. The only thing that reconciled Miss Fellowes to the developing situation was that, despite difficulties, Timmie looked forward with more and more delight to the periodic appearances of his playfellow.
Jerry is all he has, she told herself mournfully.
And once, as she watched them, she thought: Hos-kins' two children, one by his wife and one by Stasis.
Whereas she herselfHeavens, she thought, putting her fists to her temples and feeling ashamed: I'm jealous!
Chapter Ten. Reaching
Miss FELLOWES," Timmie said, "when will I be starting to go to school?"
The question, coming out of nowhere, hit her with the force of a thunderbolt.
She looked down at those eager brown eyes turned up to hers and passed her hand softly through his thick, coarse hair, automatically picking through the rough tangles of it and trying to straighten them. Timmie's hair was always disheveled. Miss Fellowes cut it herself while he squirmed restlessly under the scissors. The idea of having a barber in here for Timmie displeased her; and in any case the very clumsiness of the cut she gave him served to mask the retreating fore part of his skull and the bulging hinder part.
Carefully Miss Fellowes said, "Where did you hear about school, Timmie?"
"Jerry goes to school."
(Of course. Where else would he have heard of it but from Jerry?)
"Jerry goes to kin-der-gar-ten." Timmie pronounced the long word slowly and with unusual precision. "That's only one of the places he goes. He goes to the store with his mother. He goes to the movies. The zoo. All kinds of places outside. -When can I go outside, Miss Fellowes?"
A small pain centered in Miss Fellowes' heart.
It was inevitable, she knew, that Jerry would talk about the outside world with Timmie. They communicated freely and easily-two small boys who understood each other without difficulty. And Jerry, the emissary from the mysterious and forbidden world beyond the door of the Stasis bubble, would certainly want to tell Timmie all about it. There was no way of avoiding that.
But it was a world that Timmie could never enter.
Miss Fellowes said, with a studied gaiety that was her best attempt at distracting him from the anguish he must surely feel, "Why, whatever would you do out there, Timmie? Why would you want to go there? Do you know how cold it gets out there in the winter?"
"Cold?"
A blank look. He didn't know the word.
(But why would cold bother him, this boy who had learned how to walk in the snowfields of Ice Age Europe?)
"Cold is like the way it is in die refrigerator. You go outside and in a minute or two your nose begins to hurt from it, and your ears. But that's only in the winter. In the summer, outside gets very hot. It feels like an oven. Everyone sweats and complains about how hot it is outside. And then there's rain, too. Water falling down on you out of the sky, soaking your clothes, getting you all damp and nasty-"
It was a miserably cynical line of reasoning, and she knew it and felt dreadful about what she was trying to do. Telling a boy who could never go outside these few little rooms that the world out there held some minor physical discomforts was like telling a blind child that colors and shapes were boring, annoying distractions, that in fact, there was nothing very interesting worth seeing anyway.
But Timmie ignored her pitiful sophistries as though she hadn't said a thing.
"Jerry says that at school they can play all kinds of games that I don't have here. They have picture tapes and music. He says there are lots of children in the kin-der-gar-ten. He says-he says-" A moment of thought, then a triumphant upholding of both small hands with the fingers splayed apart. "He says this many."
Miss Fellowes said, "You have picture tapes."
"Just a few. Jerry says he sees more picture tapes in a day than I see all the time."
"We can get you more picture tapes. Very nice ones. And music tapes, too."
"Can you?"
"I'll get some this afternoon."
"Will you get me the Forty Thieves?"
"Is that a story Jerry heard in kindergarten?"
"There are these thieves in a cave, and these jars-" He paused. "Big jars. What are thieves?"
"Thieves are-people who take things that belong to other people."
"Oh."
"I can get you the Forty Thieves picture tape," Miss Fellowes told him. "It's a very famous story. And there are others like it. Sinbad the Sailor, who traveled everywhere in the world, who saw-everything." Her voice faltered for a moment. But Timmie hadn't picked up any depressing implications. "And Gulliver's Travels, I can get you that one. He went to a land of tiny people, and then afterward to a land of giants, and then-" Miss Fellowes faltered again. So many travelers, all these omnivorous devourers of experience! But maybe that was good: satisfy Timmie in his imprisonment with vicarious tales of far voyaging. He wouldn't be the first shut-in to revel in such narratives. "Then there's the story of Odysseus, who fought a war and spent ten years afterward trying to find his way home to his family." Again a pang. Her heart went out to the boy. Like Gulliver, like Sinbad, like Odysseus, Timmie too was a stranger in a strange land, and she could never forget that. Were all the great stories of the world about wanderers carried to strange places who were striving to reach their homes?
Timmie's eyes were glowing, though. "Will you get them right now? Will you?"
And so he was temporarily comforted.
She ordered all the picture tapes of myth and fable that were in the catalog. They stacked up higher dian Timmie in the playroom. On days when Jerry wasn't there he pored over them hour after hour.
How much he actually understood was hard to say. Certainly they were full of concepts, images, locales, that could make very little sense to him. But how much did any child of five or six understand of those stories? There was no way for an adult to enter a child's mind and know for sure. Miss Fellowes had loved those stories herself without fully understanding them when she was a child, though, and so had children before her for hundreds, even thousands of years; and whatever they might have lacked in detail-by-detail comprehension, all those children had made up for by using their own imaginations. So too was it with Timmie, she hoped.