"Forceful?" she said. "I suppose I am. At least where my children are concerned."
Jacobs was a burly, blunt-faced man of about sixty, with thick white hair cropped close to his skuD, military-fashion. He had an efficient, no-nonsense manner, a little on the brusque side, which some might say would be more suitable for an army doctor than for a pediatrician. But Miss Fellowes knew from long experience that children weren't troubled by mat sort of brusqueness, so long as it was tempered by a fundamental kindliness. They expected a doctor to be an authority-figure. They wanted him to be one. They looked elsewhere for gentleness, tenderness, comfort. The doctor was supposed to be godlike, the solver of problems, the dispenser of cures.
Miss Fellowes wondered what kind of doctors had ministered to the needs of the little boy's tribe back there in 40,000 B.C. Witch-doctors, no doubt. Terrifying figures with bones through their noses and painted red circles around their eyes, who performed their diagnoses by leaping and cavorting around campfires that burned blue and green and scarlet. How would Dr. Jacobs look with a bone through his nose? she wondered. With a bear-skin around his shoulders instead of that prosaic white coat?
He offered her a quick, uncondescending handshake. "I've heard good things about you, Fellowes."
"So I would hope."
"You worked under Gallagher at Valley General, didn't you? Or so Hoskins said. Fine man, Gallagher. Dogmatic son of a bitch, but at least he swore by the right dogmas. How long were you in his department?"
"Three and a half years."
"You like him?"
Miss Fellowes shrugged. "Not particularly. I heard him say some things once to a young nurse that I thought were out of line. But he and I worked well together. I learned a great deal from him."
"A shrewd man, yes." Jacobs shook his head. "Pity about the way he handled his nurses. In more than one sense of the word. -You didn't happen to have any sort of run-in with him yourself, did you?"
"Me? No. No, nothing of the kind!"
"No, I guess he wouldn't have tried anything with you," Jacobs said.
Miss Fellowes wondered what he had meant by that. Not Gallagher's type, maybe? She wasn't anyone's type.
and that was the way she had preferred things to be for many years. She let the remark pass.
Jacobs seemed to have memorized her entire resume. He mentioned this hospital and that, this doctor and that one, spoke with easy familiarity of heads of nursing and boards of directors. Plainly he had been around. All she knew of Dr. Jacobs, on the other hand, was that he was something big at the state medical institute and had a considerable private practice on the side. Their paths had never crossed professionally. If Hoskins had seen fit to let him see her resume, he might have thought of letting her see his. But Miss Fellowes let that point pass, too.
"And I suppose that now it's about time that we had a look at this little Neanderthal of yours," Jacobs said. "Where's he hiding?"
She gestured toward the other room. The boy was lurking uneasily in there, now and again peeping out, with a lock of his matted hair showing behind the barrier of the door and, occasionally, the corner of an eye.
"Shy, is he? That's not what I heard from the orderlies. They said he's as wild as a little ape."
"Not any more. His initial terror has worn off, and now he simply feels lost and frightened."
"As well he should, poor little critter. But we've got to get down to this. Call him out here, please. Or will you have to go in there and get him?"
"Maybe I can call him," Miss Fellowes said.
She turned to face the boy. "You can come out, Tim-mie. This is Dr. Jacobs. He won't hurt you."
Timmie?
Where had that come from? She had no idea.
The name had just surged up out of the well of her unconscious that moment. She had never known a Timmie in her life. But the boy had to be called something, didn't he? And it seemed that she had named him, now.
Timothy. Timmie for short. So be it. A real name, a human name. Timmie.
"Timmie?" she said again, liking the sound of it, enjoying being able to call him by name. She could stop thinking of him as "the child," "the Neanderthal," "the ugly little boy." He was Timmie. He was a person. He had a name.
And as she approached the other room Timmie slipped back behind the door, out of sight.
"All right," Jacobs said, with some impatience. "We can't spend all day at this. Go in there and bring him out, will you, Fellowes?"
He slipped a surgical mask over his face-as much for his protection, Miss Fellowes guessed, as for Timmie's.
But the mask was a mistake. Timmie peeked out and saw it and let out a shrill piercing howl as though he had seen some demon out of his Stone Age nightmares. As Miss Fellowes reached the door, he flung himself violently against the wall on the far side of the room, like a caged creature fleeing its keeper, and pressed up against it, shivering fearfully.
"Timmie- Timmie-"
No use. He wouldn't let her near him, not with Jacobs anywhere about. The boy had tolerated Hoskins' presence well enough, but Jacobs seemed to scare the daylights out of him. So much for her theory that children wanted their doctors to be brusque no-nonsense military types. Not this child, at any rate.
She rang the bell and summoned Mortenson and Elliot.
"We're going to need a little help, I think," Miss Fellowes told them.
The two husky orderlies looked at each other uncertainly. There was a visible bulge along Elliot's left arm, under his uniform jacket-a bandage, no doubt, covering the scratch that Timmie had inflicted yesterday.
"Oh, come on," Miss Fellowes said. "He's only a small child, you know."
But the boy, in his terror, had reverted completely to his original feral mode. Flanked by Mortenson and El-liott, Miss Fellowes entered his room and attempted to take hold of him, but he went scrambling wildly around the room with truly anthropoid agility, and they were hard put to get a grip on him. Finally Mortenson, with a lunge, caught him by the midsection and spun him up off the ground. Elliott cautiously took hold of him by the ankles and tried to prevent him from kicking.
Miss Fellowes went over to him. Softly she said, "It's all right, Timmie-no one will hurt you-"
She might just as well have said, "Trust me." The boy struggled furiously, with nearly as much enterprise as he had shown the day before when they were trying to give him a bath.
Feeling preposterous. Miss Fellowes tried crooning the litde tune of the night before at him in an attempt to lull him into cooperating. That was useless, too.
Dr. Jacobs leaned close. "We'll have to sedate him, I guess. -God, he's an ugly little thing!"
Miss Fellowes felt a sharp stab of fury, almost as though Timmie were her own child. How dare he say anything like that! How dare he!
Crisply she retorted, "It's a classic Neanderthal face. He's very handsome, by Neanderthal standards." She wondered where she had gotten that from. She knew practically nothing about what a classic Neanderthal face was supposed to be like, and nothing whatever about Neanderthal standards of handsomeness. "-I don't much like the idea of sedating him. But if there's no other alternative-"
"I don't think there is," said the doctor. "We aren't going to get anywhere holding him down by brute force while I try to take my readings."
No, Miss Fellowes thought. The boy wasn't going to have any enthusiasm for having a tongue depressor pushed into his mouth or lights shined into his eyes, no tolerance at all for surrendering a sample of his blood, no willingness to have his temperature taken, even by a remote-control thermocouple relay. Reluctantly she nodded.
Jacobs produced an ultrasonic tranquilizer ampoule from his kit and started to activate it.
"You don't know anything about the appropriate dose," Miss Fellowes said.
The doctor looked at her in surprise. "These doses are calibrated for a body weight of up to thirty kilograms. This should be well within tolerance."