As she had done so many times before over the past three years, she studied him covertly out of the corner of her eye, looking at his poor little imprisoned face outlined in profile against the window. His forehead retreated in a flat slope and his thick coarse hair lay down upon it in tufts that she had never been able to straighten. The back of his skull bulged weirdly, giving his head an over-heavy appearance and seemingly making it sag and bend forward, forcing his whole body into a stoop. Already, stark bulging bony ridges were beginning to force the skin outward above his eyes. His wide mouth thrust forward more prominently than did his wide and flattened nose and he had no chin to speak of--only a jawbone that curved smoothly down and back. He was small for his years, almost dwarfish despite his already powerful build, and his stumpy legs were bowed. An angry red birthmark, looking for all the world like a jagged streak of lightning, stood out startlingly on his broad, strong-boned cheek.
He was a very ugly little boy and Edith Fellowes loved him more dearly than anything in the world.
She was standing with her own face behind his line of vision, so she allowed her lips the luxury of a tremor.
They wanted to kill him. That was what it amounted to. He was only a child, an unusually helpless one at that, and they were planning to send him to his death.
They would not. She would do anything to prevent it. Anything. Interfering with their plan would be a massive dereliction of duty, she knew, and she had never committed any act in her life that could be construed as going against her duty as she understood it, but that didn't matter now. She had a duty to them, yes, no question of that, but she had a duty to Timmie also, not to mention a duty to herself. And she had no doubt at all about which the highest of those three duties was, and which came second, and which was third.
She opened the suitcase.
She took out the overcoat, the woolen cap with the ear-flaps, and the rest.
Timmie turned and stared at her. His eyes were so very big, so brightly gleaming, so solemn.
"What are those things, Miss Fellowes?"
"Clothes," she said. "Clothes for wearing outside." She beckoned to him. "Come here, Timmie."
She had actually been the third one that Hoskins had interviewed for the job, and the other two had been the preferred choices of the Personnel people. But Gerald Hoskins was a hands-on kind of chief executive who didn't necessarily accept the opinions of those to whom he had delegated authority without taking the trouble to check those opinions out for himself. There were people in the company who thought that that was his biggest fault as a manager. There were times when he agreed with them. All the same, he had insisted on interviewing all three of the women personally.
The first one came with a three-star rating mom Sam Aickman, who was Stasis Technologies' Personnel chief. That in itself made Hoskins a little suspicious, because Aickman had a powerful bias in favor of hard-edge state-of-the-art sorts of people. Which was just the right thing if you happened to be looking for an expert in implosion-field containment, or someone who could deal with a swarm of unruly positrons on a first-name basis. But Hoskins wasn't convinced that one of Sam's high-tech types was exactly the right choice for this particular job.
Her name was Marianne Levien and she was a real tiger. Somewhere in her late thirties: sleek, lean, trim, glossy. Not actually beautiful--that wasn't the most precise word for her--but striking, definitely striking.
She had magnificent cheekbones and jet-black hair that was pulled back tight from her forehead and cool glittering eyes that didn't miss a thing. She was wearing an elegant business suit of deep rich brown with gold piping that she might have picked up in Paris or San Francisco the day before yesterday, and an oh-so-under-played little cluster of pearl-tipped gold strands at her throat that didn't strike Hoskins as the sort of jewelry one usually wore to a job interview, especially one of this sort. She looked more like an aggressive youngish executive who had a slot on the board of directors as her ultimate target than like his notion of what a nurse ought to be.
But a nurse was what she was, fundamentally, even if that seemed a very modest designation for someone of her professional affiliations and accomplishments. Her resume was a knockout. Doctorates in heuristic pedagogy and rehabilitative technology. Assistant to the head of Special Services at Houston General's children's' clinic. Consultant to the Katzin Commission, the Federal task force on remedial education. Six years' experience in advanced artificial-intelligence interfacing for autistic kids. Software bibliography a mile long.
Just what Stasis Technologies, Ltd. needed for this job?
So Sam Aickman seemed to think, at any rate.
Hoskins said, "You understand, don't you, that we'll be asking you to give up all your outside projects, the Washington stuff, the Houston affiliation, any consulting work that might require travel. You'll basically be pinned down here on a full-time basis for a period of several years, dealing with a single highly specialized assignment."
She didn't flinch. "I understand that."
"I see that in the last eighteen months alone you've appeared at conferences in Sao Paulo, Winnipeg, Melbourne, San Diego, and Baltimore, and that you've had papers read on your behalf at five other scientific meetings that you weren't able to attend personally."
"That's correct."
"And yet you're quite sure that you'll be able to make the transition from the very active professional career outlined in your resume to the essentially isolated kind of existence you'll need to adopt here?"
There was a cold, determined glint in her eyes. "Not only do I think I'll be completely capable of making the transition, I'm quite ready and eager to do so."
Something sounded just a little wrong about that to Hoskins.
He said, "Would you care to expand on that a bit? Perhaps you don't fully grasp how--ah--monastic we tend to be at Stasis Technologies, Ltd. And how demanding your own area of responsibility in particular is likely to be."
"I think I do grasp that, Dr. Hoskins."
"And yet you're ready and eager?"
"Perhaps I'm a trifle less eager to run around from Winnipeg to Melbourne to Sao Paulo than I used to be."
"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 their 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 certain of that. So she had to be a flesh-and-bone human being. But she certainly didn't act like one.
