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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
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
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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
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
"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."
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"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!"
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.
[32]
Jacobs and Mclntyre were still very much in evidence, of course. They had been
lucky enough to have first shot at Timmie, and they still had the inside track
with him because of their priority status. But they were aware that they could [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]