“Well, then, you can’t read a book with ordinary-sized print if it is held six feet from your eyes, but you can read it if you hold it one foot from your eyes. So far, the closer the better. If you bring the book to within one inch of your eyes, however, you’ve lost it again. There is such a thing as being too close, you see.”
“Hmm,” said Deveney.
“Or take another example. Your right shoulder is about thirty inches from the tip of your right forefinger and you can place your right forefinger on your right shoulder. Your right elbow is only half the distance from the tip of your right forefinger; it should by all ordinary logic be easier to reach, and yet you cannot place your right finger on your right elbow. Again, there is such a thing as being too close.”
Deveney said, “May I use these analogies in my story?”
“Well, of course. Only too glad. I’ve been waiting long enough for someone like you to have a story. I’ll give you anything else you want. It is time, finally, that we want the world looking over our shoulder. They’ll see something.”
(Miss Fellowes found herself admiring his calm certainty despite herself. There was strength there.)
Deveney said, “How far out will you reach?”
“Forty thousand years.”
Miss Fellowes drew in her breath sharply.
Years?
There was tension in the air. The men at the controls scarcely moved. One man at a microphone spoke into it in a soft monotone, in short phrases that made no sense to Miss Fellowes.
Deveney, leaning over the balcony railing with an intent stare, said, “Will we see anything, Dr. Hoskins?”
“What? No. Nothing till the job is done. We detect indirectly, something on the principle of radar, except that we use mesons rather than radiation. Mesons reach backward under the proper conditions. Some are reflected and we must analyze the reflections.”
“That sounds difficult.”
Hoskins smiled again, briefly as always. “It is the end product of fifty years of research; forty years of it before I entered the field.—Yes, it’s difficult.”
The man at the microphone raised one hand.
Hoskins said, “We’ve had the fix on one particular moment in time for weeks; breaking it, remaking it after calculating our own movements in time; making certain that we could handle time-flow with sufficient precision. This must work now.”
But his forehead glistened.
Edith Fellowes found herself out of her seat and at the balcony railing, but there was nothing to see.
The-man at the microphone said quietly, “Now.”
There was a space of silence sufficient for one breath and then the sound of a terrified little boy’s scream from the dollhouse rooms. Terror! Piercing terror!
Miss Fellowes’ head twisted in the direction of the cry. A child was involved. She had forgotten.
And Hoskins’ fist pounded on the railing and he said in a tight voice, trembling with triumph,
Miss Fellowes was urged down the short, spiral flight of steps by the hard press of Hoskins’ palm between her shoulder blades. He did not speak to her.
The men who had been at the controls were standing about now, smiling, smoking, watching the three as they entered on the main floor. A very soft buzz sounded from the direction of the dollhouse.
Hoskins said to Deveney, “It’s perfectly safe to enter Stasis. I’ve done it a thousand times. There’s a queer sensation which is momentary and means nothing.”
He stepped through an open door in mute demonstration, and Deveney, smiling stiffly and drawing an obviously deep breath, followed him.
Hoskins said, “Miss Fellowes! Please!” He crooked his forefinger impatiently.
Miss Fellowes nodded and stepped stiffly through. It was as though a ripple went through her, an internal tickle.
But once inside all seemed normal. There was the smell of the fresh wood of the dollhouse and—of—of soil somehow.
There was silence now, no voice at last, but there was the dry shuffling of feet, a scrabbling as of a hand over wood—then a low moan.
“Where is it?” asked Miss Fellowes in distress. Didn’t these fool men
The boy was in the bedroom; at least the room with the bed in it.
It was standing naked, with its small, dirt-smeared chest heaving raggedly. A bushel of dirt and coarse grass spread over the floor at his bare brown feet. The smell of soil came from it and a touch of something fetid.
Hoskins followed her horrified glance and said with annoyance, “You can’t pluck a boy cleanly out of time, Miss Fellowes. We had to take some of the surroundings with it for safety. Or would you have preferred to have it arrive here minus a leg or with only half a head?”
“Please!” said Miss Fellowes, in an agony of revulsion. “Are we just to stand here? The poor child is frightened. And it’s
She was quite correct. It was smeared with encrusted dirt and grease and had a scratch on its thigh that looked red and sore.
As Hoskins approached him, the boy, who seemed to be something over three years in age, hunched low and backed away rapidly. He lifted his upper lip and snarled in a hissing fashion like a cat. With a rapid gesture, Hoskins seized both the child’s arms and lifted him, writhing and screaming, from the floor.
Miss Fellowes said, “Hold him, now. He needs a warm bath first. He needs to be cleaned. Have you the equipment? If so, have it brought here, and I’ll need to have help in handling him just at first. Then, too, for heaven’s sake, have all this trash and filth removed.”
She was giving the orders now and she felt perfectly good about that. And because now she was an efficient nurse, rather than a confused spectator, she looked at the child with a clinical eye—and hesitated for one shocked moment. She saw past the dirt and shrieking, past the thrashing of limbs and useless twisting. She saw the boy himself.
It was the ugliest little boy she had ever seen. It was horribly ugly from misshapen head to bandy legs.
She got the boy cleaned with three men helping her and with others milling about in their efforts to clean the room. She worked in silence and with a sense of outrage, annoyed by the continued strugglings and outcries of the boy and by the undignified drenchings of soapy water to which she was subjected.
Dr. Hoskins had hinted that the child would not be pretty, but that was far from stating that it would be repulsively deformed. And there was a stench about the boy that soap and water was only alleviating little by little.
She had the strong desire to thrust the boy, soaped as he was, into Hoskins’ arms and walk out; but there was the pride of profession. She had accepted an assignment, after all.—And there would be the look in his eyes. A cold look that would read: Only pretty children, Miss Fellowes?
He was standing apart from them, watching coolly from a distance with a half-smile on his face when he caught her eyes, as though amused at her outrage.
She decided she would wait a while before quitting. To do so now would only demean her.
Then, when the boy was a bearable pink and smelled of scented soap, she felt better anyway. His cries changed to whimpers of exhaustion as he watched carefully, eyes moving in quick frightened suspicion from one to another of those in the room. His cleanness accentuated his thin nakedness as he shivered with cold after his bath.
Miss Fellowes said sharply, “Bring me a nightgown for the child!”
A nightgown appeared at once. It was as though everything were ready and yet nothing were ready unless she gave orders; as though they were deliberately leaving this in her charge without help, to test her.
The newsman, Deveney, approached and said, “I’ll hold him, Miss. You won’t get it on yourself.”
“Thank you,” said Miss Fellowes. And it was a battle indeed, but the nightgown went on, and when the boy made as though to rip it off, she slapped his hand sharply.
