"Ah," said Hoskins finally. "You call him 'Timmie.' "
"I have to call him something, Dr. Hoskins."
"Ah. Yes. Yes. 'Timmie.' "
" 'Timmie,' " Miss Fellowes said firmly.
" Timmie.' Yes. Very well. -I'll send Dr. Mclntyre in now, if that's all right, Miss Fellowes. To see Timmie."
Dr. Mclntyre turned out to be slender and dapper and very much younger than Miss Fellowes had been expecting-no more than thirty or thirty-five, she guessed. He was a small man, delicately built, with fine gleaming golden hair and eyebrows so pale and soft that they were virtually invisible, who moved in a precise, fastidious, elaborately mannered way, as if following some mysterious inner choreography. Miss Fellowes was taken aback by his elegance and daintiness: that wasn't at all how she had expected a paleoanthropologist to look. Even Timmie seemed mystified by his appearance, so very different from that of any of the other men he had encountered since his arrival. Eyes wide with wonder, he stared at Mclntyre as though he were some glittering godlike creature from another star.
As for Mclntyre, he appeared so overwhelmed by the sight of Timmie that he was barely able to speak. For a long moment he stood frozen just within the door, staring at the boy just as intently as Timmie was staring at him; then he took a few steps to his left, halted, stared again; and then he moved back past the door to the othfer side of the room, stopped there, stared some more.
A trifle acidly Miss Fellowes said, "Dr. Mclntyre, this is Timmie. Timmie-Dr. Mclntyre. Dr. Mclntyre has come here to study you. And I suppose you can study him also, if you want to."
Mclntyre's pallid cheeks reddened. "I don't believe it," he said in a light voice husky with emotion. "I absolutely can't bring myself to believe it. The child is a pure Neanderthal! Alive, right before my eyes, an actual Neanderthal! -Forgive me, Miss Fellowes. You have to understand-this is something completely staggering for me, so utterly phenomenal, so totally astounding-"
He was virtually in tears. It was an embarrassing display, all this effusiveness. Miss Fellowes found it a little irksome. But then, abruptly, her annoyance dissolved and empathy took its place. She imagined how a historian would feel if he were to walk into a room and find himself offered a chance to hold a conversation with Abraham Lincoln or Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great: or how a Biblical scholar would react if confronted with the authentic stone tablets of the Law that Moses had carried down from the summit of Mount Sinai. Of course he'd be overwhelmed. Of course. To have spent years studying something that was known only from the sketchiest of ancient relics, trying to understand it, painstakingly recreating the lost reality of it in your mind, and then unexpectedly to encounter the thing itself, the actual genuine itemBut Mclntyre made a swift recovery. In that deft graceful manner of his he moved quickly across the room and knelt just in front of Timmie, his face just a short distance from the boy's. Timmie showed no sign of fear. It was the first time he had reacted so calmly to anyone new. The boy was smiling and humming tunelessly and rocking lightly from side to side as though enjoying a visit from a favorite uncle. That bright glow of wonder still was gleaming in his eyes. He seemed altogether fascinated by the paleoanthropologist.
"How beautiful he is, Miss Fellowes!" Mclntyre said, after a long moment of silence.
"Beautiful? I haven't heard many people say that about him so far."
"But he is, he is! What a perfect little Neanderthal face! The supraorbital ridges-they've only just begun to develop, yet already they're unmistakable. The platycephalic skull. The elongated occipital region.
— May I touch his face, Miss Fellowes? I'll be gentle. I don't want to frighten him, but I'd like to check a few points of the bony structure-"
"It looks as though he'd like to touch yours," Miss Fellowes said.
Indeed, Timmie's hand was outstretched toward Mc-Intyre's forehead. The man from the Smithsonian leaned a little closer and Timmie's fingers began to explore Mc-Intyre's brilliant golden hair. The boy stroked it as though he had never seen anything so wondrous in his life. Then, suddenly, he twined a few strands of it around his middle finger and tugged. It was a good hard tug.
Mclntyre yelped and backed away, his face reddening.
"I think he wants some of it," Miss Fellowes said.
"Not that way. -Here, let me have a scissors." Mclntyre, grinning now, snipped a bit of hair from his forehead and passed the shining strands to Timmie, who beamed and gurgled with pleasure. -"Tell me, Miss Fellowes, has anyone else who's been in here had blond hair?"
She thought a moment. Hoskins-Deveney-Elliott
— Mortenson-Stratford-Dr. Jacobs-all of them had brown hair or black or gray. Her own was brown shading into gray.
"No. Not that I recall. You must be the first." "The first ever, I wonder? We have no idea, of course, what color Neanderthal hair might have been. In the popular reconstructions it's almost always shown as dark, I suppose because Neanderthals are commonly thought of as brutal apish creatures, and most of the modern great apes have dark hair. But dark hair is more common among warm-weather peoples than it is in northern climates, and the Neanderthals certainly were well adapted to extreme cold. So they might have been as blond as your average Russian or Swede or Finn, for all we know."
"And yet his reaction to your hair, Dr. Mclntyre-"
"Yes. No doubt about it, the sight of it does something special for him. -Well, maybe the tribe he came from was entirely dark-haired, or perhaps the entire population in his part of the world. Certainly there's nothing very Nordic about this dusky skin of his. But we can't draw much that's conclusive from a sample consisting of just one child. At least we have that one child, though! And how wonderful that is, Miss Fellowes! I can't believe - I absolutely can't believe-" For an instant she feared that Mclntyre was going to allow himself to be overcome by awe all over again. But he seemed to be keeping himself under control. With great delicacy he pressed the tips of his fingers to Timmie's cheeks, his sloping forehead, his little receding chin. As he worked he muttered things under his breath, technical comments, apparently, words plainly meant for himself alone.
Timmie endured the examination with great patience.
Then, after a time, the boy launched into an extended monolog of clicks and growls, the first time he had spoken since the paleoanthropologist had entered the room.
Mclntyre looked up at Miss Fellowes, his face crimsoning with excitement.
"Did you hear those sounds? Has he made any sounds like that before?"
"Of course he has. He talks all the time."
"Talks?"
"What do you think he's doing, if not talking? He's saying something to us,"
"You mean you assume that he's saying something to us."
"No," Miss Fellowes said, beginning to grow annoyed. "He's speaking, Dr. Mclntyre. In the Neanderthal language. There are definite patterns in the things he says. I've been trying to make them out, even to imitate them, but so far no luck."
"What kind of patterns, Miss Fellowes?"
"Patterns of clicks and growls. I'm starting to recognize them. There's one set of sounds to tell me that he's hungry. Another to show impatience or restlessness. One that indicates fear. -I know these are only my own interpretations, and not very scientific. But I've been in here with this boy around the clock since the moment of his arrival, and I've had some experience in dealing with speech-impaired children, Dr. Mclntyre. I listen to them very carefully."
"Yes, I'm sure you do." Mclntyre gave her a skeptical glance. "This is important, Miss Fellowes. Has anyone been taping these clicks and growls of his?"
"I hope so. I don't know." (She realized that she had been going to ask Dr. Hoskins about that. But she had forgotten all about it.)
Timmie said something again, this time with a different intonation, more melodic, almost plaintive.