"Of course. That would be the last thing I'd want also." "
"All right, then. We can move along. My other question has to do with the nature of the commitment to your work that we'll be demanding of you here. -Miss Fellowes, do you think you can love a difficult, strange, perhaps unruly and even highly disagreeable child?"
"Love? Not merely care for?"
"Love. To stand in loco parentis. To be its mother, more or less, Miss Fellowes. And rather more than less. This will be the most lonely child in the history of the world. It won't just need a nurse, it'll need a mother. Are you prepared to take on such a burden? Are you willing to take on such a burden?"
He was staring at her again, as though trying to stare through her. Once again she met the intensity of his gaze with unwavering strength.
"You say he'll be difficult and strange and- What was the word? -highly disagreeable. In what way, disagreeable?"
"We're talking about a prehistoric child. You know that. He-or she, we don't know which yet-may very well be savage in a way that goes beyond the most savage tribe on Earth today. This child's behavior may be more like that of an animal than a child. A ferocious animal, perhaps. That's what I mean by difficult, Miss Fellowes."
"I haven't only worked with premature infants, Dr. Hoskins. I've had experience with emotionally disturbed children. I've dealt with some pretty tough little customers."
"Not this tough, perhaps."
"We'll see, won't we?"
"Savage, very likely, and miserable and lonely, and furious. A stranger and afraid, in a world it never made. Ripped from everything that was familiar to it and put down in circumstances of almost complete isolation-a true Displaced Person. Do you know that term, 'Displaced Person,' Miss Fellowes? It goes back to the middle of the last century, to the time of the Second World War, when uprooted people were wandering all over the face of Europe, and-"
"The world is at peace now, Dr. Hoskins."
"Of course it is. But this child won't feel much peace. It'll be suffering from the total disruption of its life, a genuine Displaced Person of the most poignant kind. A very small one, at that."
"How small?"
"At present we can bring no more than forty kilograms of mass out of the past with each scoop. That includes not only the living subject but the surrounding inanimate insulation zone. So we're talking about a little child, a very little child."
"An infant, is that it?"
"We can't be sure. We hope to get a child of six or seven years. But it might be considerably younger."
"You don't know? You're just going to make a blind grab?"
Hoskins looked displeased. "Let's talk about love, Miss Fellowes. Loving this child. I guarantee you that it won't be easy. You really do love children, don't you? I don't mean in any trivial sense. And I'm not talking now about proper performance of professional duties. I want you to dig down and examine the assumptions of the word, what love really means, what motherhood really means, what the unconditional love that is motherhood really means."
"I think I know what that love is like."
"Your bio data says that you were once married, but that you've lived alone for many years."
She could feel her face blazing. "I was married once, yes. For a short while, a long time ago."
"There were no children." ^
"The marriage broke up," she said, "mainly because I turned out to be unable to have a child."
"I see," said Hoskins, looking uncomfortable.
"Of course, there were all sorts of twenty-first-cen-tury ways around the problem-ex utero fetal chambers, implantations, surrogate mothers, and so forth. But my husband wasn't able to come to terms with anything short of the ancient traditional method of sharing genes. It had to be our child all the way, his and mine. And I had to carry the child for the right and proper nine months. But I couldn't do that, and he couldn't bring himself to accept any of the alternatives, and so we-came apart."
"I'm sorry. -And you never married again."
She kept her voice steady, unemotional. "The first try was painful enough. I could never be sure that I wouldn't get hurt even worse a second time, and I wasn't able to let myself take the risk. But that doesn't mean I don't know how to love children, Dr. Hoskins. Surely it isn't necessary for me to point out that my choice of profession very likely has something to do with the great emptiness that my marriage created in my-in my soul, if you will. And so instead of loving just one or two children I've loved dozens. Hundreds. As though they were my own."
"Not all of them very nice children."
"Not all of them nice, no."
"Not just nice sweet children with cute little button-noses and gurgly ways? You've taken them as they come, pretty or ugly, gentle or wild? Unconditionally?"
"Unconditionally," Miss Fellowes said. "Children are children, Dr. Hoskins. The ones that aren't pretty and nice are just the ones who may happen to need help most. And the way you begin to help a child is by loving it."
Hoskins was silent, thinking for a moment. She felt a sense of letdown building up in her. She had come in here prepared to talk about her technical background, her research in electrolyte imbalances, in neuroreceptors, in physiotherapy. But he hadn't asked her anything about that. He had concentrated entirely on this business of whether she could love some unfortunate wild child- whether she could love any child, maybe-as though that were a real issue. And on the even less relevant matter of whedier she had ever done anything that might stir up some sort of political agitation. Obviously he wasn't very interested in her actual qualifications. Obviously he had someone else in mind for the job and was going to offer her some bland, polite dismissal as soon as he had figured out a tactful way to do it.
At length he said, "Well, how soon can you give notice at your present place of employment?"
She gaped at him, flustered.
"You mean you're taking me on? Right here and now?"
Hoskins smiled briefly, and for a moment his broad face had a certain absent-minded charm about it. "Why else would I want you to give notice?"
"Doesn't this have to go to some committee first?"
"Miss Fellowes, I'm the committee. The ultimate committee, the one that gives final approval. And I make quick decisions. I know what sort of person I'm looking for and you seem to be it. -Of course, I could be wrong."
"And if you are?"
"I can reverse myself just as quickly, believe me. This is a project that can't afford any errors. There's a life at stake, a human life, a child's life. For the sake of sheer scientific curiosity, we're going to do what some people surely will say is a monstrous thing to that child. I have no illusions about that. I don't for a moment believe that we're monsters here-no one here does-and I have no qualms or regrets about what we propose to do, and^ I believe that in the long run the child who is the subject of our experiment will only stand to benefit from it. But I'm quite aware that others will disagree radically with drat position. Therefore we want that child to be as well cared for as possible during its stay in our era. If it becomes apparent diat you're not capable of providing that care, you'll be replaced without hesitation, Miss Fellowes. I don't see any delicate way of phrasing that. We aren't sentimental here and we don't like to gamble on anything that's within our power to control, either. So the job is to be considered no more than tentatively yours, at this point. We're asking you to cut yourself loose from your entire present existence with no guarantee that we'll keep you on here past the first week, or possibly even the first day. Do you think you're willing to take the chance?"
"You certainly are blunt, Dr. Hoskins."
"I certainly am. Except when I'm not. Well, Miss Fellowes? What do you say?"
"I don't like to gamble, either," she said.
His face darkened. "Is that a refusal?"
"No, Dr. Hoskins, it's an acceptance. If I doubted for one moment that I was die wrong woman for the job, I wouldn't have come here in the first place. I can do it. I will do it. And you'll have no reason to regret your decision, you can be certain of that. -When do I start?"
"We're bringing the Stasis up to critical level right now. We expect to make the actual scoop two weeks from tonight, on the fifteenth, at half-past seven in the evening sharp. We'll want you here at die moment of arrival, ready to take over at once. You'll have until then to wind down your present outside-world activities. It is clear that you'll be living on these premises full-time, isn't it, Miss Fellowes? And by full-time I mean twenty-four hours a day, at least in the early phases. You did see that in the application specifications, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Then we understand each other perfectly." No, she thought. We don't understand each other at all. But that's not important. If there are problems, we'll work them out somehow. It's the child that's important.