"Why not?" Hoskins asked.
"Any child needs stimulation and this one lives a life of solitary confinement. I intend to do what I can, but I can't replace an entire cultural matrix. What I'm saying, Dr. Hoskins, is that he needs another boy to play with."
Hoskins nodded slowly. "Unfortunately, there's only one of him, isn't there? Poor child."
Miss Fellowes watched him shrewdly, hoping that she had picked the right moment for this.
"If you could bring a second Neanderthal forward to share his quarters with him-"
"Yes. That would be ideal, Miss Fellowes. -But of course it can't be done."
"It can't?" said Miss Fellowes, with sudden dismay.
"Not with the best will in the world, which I like to think is what we have. We couldn't possibly expect to find another Neanderthal close to his age without incredible luck-it was a very sparsely populated era, Miss Fellowes; we can't just dip casually into the Neanderthal equivalent of a big city and snatch a child-and even if we could, it wouldn't be fair to multiply risks by having another human being in Stasis."
Miss Fellowes put down her spoon. Heady new ideas were flooding into her mind. She said energetically, "In that case, Dr. Hoskins, let me take a different tack. If it's impossible to bring another Neanderthal child into the present, so be it. I'm not even sure I could cope with a second one, anyway. But what if- a little later, once Timmie is better adapted to modern life - what if we were to bring another child in from the outside to play with him?"
Hoskins stared at her in concern. "A human child?"
"Another child," said Miss Fellowes, with an angry glare. "Timmie is human."
"Of course. You know what I meant. - But I couldn't dream of such a thing."
"Why not? Why couldn't you? I don't see anything wrong with the idea. You pulled that child out of time and made him an eternal prisoner. Don't you owe hint something? Dr. Hoskins, if there is any man who, in this present-day world, can be considered that child's father - in every sense but the biological - it's you. Why can't you do this litde thing for him?"
Hoskins said, "His father?" He rose, somewhat unsteadily, to his feet. "Miss Fellowes, I think I'll take you back now, if you don't mind."
They returned to the dollhouse that was Stasis Section One in a bleak silence that neither broke.
As he had promised, Mclntyre sent over a stack of reference works that dealt with Neanderthals. Miss Fellowes plunged into them as if she were back at nursing school and a critical exam was coming up in a couple of days.
She learned that the first Neanderthal fossils had been discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century by workmen digging in a limestone quarry near Diisseldorf, Germany, at a place called the Neander Valley - Neandtr-thal, in German. While cleaning away the mud that covered a limestone deposit in a grotto sixty feet above the valley floor, they came across a human skull embedded in the grotto floor, and other bones not far away.
The workmen gave the skull and a few of the other bones to a local high school teacher, who took them to Dr. Hermann Schaafhausen of Bonn, a well-known anatomist. Schaafhausen was startled by their strangeness. The skull had many human features, but it was curiously primitive in appearance, long and narrow, with a sloping forehead and an enormous bony ridge bulging above the brows. The thighbones that accompanied the skull were so thick and heavy that they scarcely looked human at all.
But Schaafhausen did think the Neanderthal bones were human relics-extremely ancient ones. In a paper he read at a scientific meeting early in 1857, he termed the unusual fossils "the most ancient memorial of the early inhabitants of Europe."
Miss Fellowes looked up at Timmie, who was playing with some toy on the far side of the room.
"Listen to that," she said. " 'The most ancient memorial of the earfy inhabitants of Europe.' That's one of your relatives he's talking about, Timmie."
Timmie didn't seem impressed. He uttered a few indifferent clicks and went back to his game.
Miss Fellowes read on. And quickly the book confirmed what she already vaguely knew: that the Neanderthal people, while certainly ancient inhabitants of Europe, were far from being the most ancient ones.
The discovery of the original Neanderthal fossils had been followed, later in the nineteenth century, by similar discoveries in many other parts of Europe-more fossilized bones of prehistoric human-like creatures with sloping foreheads, huge beetling brows, and-another typical characteristic-receding chins. Scientists debated the meaning of these fossils, and, as Darwin's theories of evolution came to gain wide acceptance, general agreement developed that the Neanderthal-type specimens were the remains of a brutish-looking prehistoric kind of human being, ancestral to modern humanity, perhaps midway on the evolutionary scale between apes and humans.
" 'Brutish-looking.' " Miss Fellowes sniffed. "All in the eye of the beholder, eh, Timmie?"
But then had come the discovery of other types of fossil humans-in Java, in China, elsewhere in Europe- that seemed even more primitive in form than the Neanderthals. And in the twentieth century, when reliable methods of dating ancient sites were developed, it became clear that the Neanderthal people must have lived relatively recently on the time-scale of human evolution. The Javan and Chinese forms of primitive human being were at least half a million years old, perhaps even more, whereas the Neanderthals had not appeared on the scene until something like 150,000 years ago. They had occupied much of Europe and the Near East, apparently, for over a hundred thousand years, flourishing until about 35,000 years ago. Then they had disappeared-replaced at all locations by the modern form of the human race, which evidently had already come into existence at the time the first Neanderthals emerged. It appeared that humans of the modern type had lived alongside the Neanderthals, peacefully or otherwise, for thousands of years before undergoing a sudden population explosion and completely displacing the other human form.
There seemed to be several different theories to explain why the Neanderthals had suddenly become extinct. But one thing all the experts agreed on was that they had vanished from the Earth late in the period of the ice ages.
The Neanderthals, then, hadn't been some brutish' ape-like ancestor of modern man. They weren't ancestral at all. They were simply humans of another form, different in various ways from their contemporaries, who were the kind of human that had survived into modern times. Distant cousins, perhaps. The two races had had a parallel existence in Ice Age times, an uneasy coexistence. But only one of the two forms had lasted beyond the time when the great glaciers had covered Europe.
"So you are human, Timmie. I never really doubted it-" (though she had, for a bad moment right at the beginning, for which she still felt shame) "-but here it is in black and white. You're just a little unusual-looking, that's all. But you're as human as I am. As human as anybody here."
Clicks and murmurs came from Timmie.
"Yes," Miss Fellowes said. "You think so, too, don't you?"
And yet, the differences, the differences-r
Miss Fellowes' eyes raced over the pages. What had the Neanderthals really looked like? At first there had been hot debates over that, because so few fossil specimens of Neanderthals had been found, and one of the earliest skeletons to be discovered turned out to be that of a man whose bones had been crippled by osteoarthritis, creating a distorted impression of how a normal man of his people would have appeared. But gradually, as more skeletal evidence was uncovered, a generally accepted picture of the Neanderthal people had emerged.
They had been shorter than modern humans-the tallest of the men were probably no more than about five-feet-four in height-and very stocky, with wide shoulders and deep barrel-chests. Their foreheads sloped backward, their brow ridges were enormous, they had rounded lower jaws instead of chins. Their noses were big and broad and low-bridged, and their mouths jutted forward like muzzles. Their feet were flat and very wide, with short stubby toes. Their bones were heavy, thick, and large-jointed and their muscles probably were extremely well developed. Their legs were short in proportion to their torsos and possibly were naturally bowed, with permanently flexed knees, so that they might have walked in a sort of shuffle.