But to Miss Fellowes' surprise, she was still the only one who could understand Timmie's words with any degree of assurance. Some of the others who worked frequently inside the Stasis bubble-her assistants Morten-son, Elliott, and Stratford, Dr. Mclntyre, Dr. Jacobs- seemed able to pick out a phrase or two, but it was always a great effort and they usually misconstrued at least half of what Timmie was saying. Miss Fellowes was puzzled by that. In the beginning, yes, the boy had had a little difficulty in shaping words intelligibly; but time had gone by and he was quite fluent now. Or so it seemed to her. But gradually she had to admit that it was only her constant day-and-night proximity to Timmie that had made her so readily capable of understanding him. Her ear automatically compensated for the differences between what he said and the way the words really should be pronounced. He was different from a modern child, at least so far as his capacity to speak was concerned. He understood much of what was said to him; he was able to reply now in complex sentences-but his tongue and lips and larynx and, Miss Fellowes supposed, his little hyoid bone simply didn't appear to be properly adapted to the niceties of the twenty-first-century English language, and what came out was thick with distortions.
She defended him to the others. "Have you ever heard a Frenchman trying to say a simple word like 'the'? Or an Englishman trying to speak French? And there are letters in the Russian alphabet that we have to break our jaws to pronounce. Each linguistic group gets a different sort of training of the linguistic muscles from birth and for most people it's just about impossible to change. That's why there's such a thing as accents. Well, Timmie has a very pronounced Neanderthal accent. But it'll diminish with time."
Until that happened, Miss Fellowes realized, her own position would be one of unanticipated power and authority. She was not only Timmie*s nurse, she was also his interpreter: the conduit through which his memories of the prehistoric world were transmitted to the anthropologists who came to interrogate him. Without her as an intermediary, they would find it impossible to get coherent answers to the questions they wanted to put to die boy. Her help was necessary if the project was to achieve its full scientific value. And so Miss Fellowes became essential, in a way that no one including herself had expected, to the ongoing work of exploring the nature of human life in die remote past.
Unfortunately, Timmie's interrogators almost always went away dissatisfied with the boy's revelations. It wasn't diat he was unwilling to cooperate. But he had spent only three or four years in die world of the Neanderthals-the first three or four years, at that. There weren't many children of his age in any era who were prepared to offer a comprehensive verbal account of the workings of the society they lived in.
Most of what he did manage to convey were things that the anthropologists already suspected, and which, perhaps, they themselves planted in the boy's mind by the very nature of the questions which they had Miss Fellowes put to him.
"Ask him how big his tribe was," they would say."
"I don't think he has any word for tribe."
"How many people there were in the group that he lived with, then."
She asked him. She had begun teaching him recently how to count. He looked confused.
"Many," he said.
"Many," in Timmie's vocabulary, could be anything more than about three. It all seemed to be the same to him, beyond that point.
"How many?" she asked. She lifted his hand and ran her finger across the tips of his. "This many?"
"More."
"How many more?"
He made an effort. He closed his eyes for a moment as if staring into another world, and held out his hands, wriggling his fingers at her in rapid in-out gestures.
"Is he indicating numbers, Miss Fellowes?"
"I think so. Each hand movement is probably a five."
"I counted three movements of each hand. So the tribe was thirty people?"
"Forty, I think."
"Ask him again."
"Timmie, tell me again: how many people were there in your group?"
"Group, Miss Fellowes?"
"The people around you. Your friends and relatives. How many were there?"
"Friends. Relatives." He considered those concepts. Vague unreal words to him, very likely.
Then after a time he stared at his hands, and thrust his fingers out again, the same quick fluttery gesture, which might have been counting or might have been something else entirely. It was impossible to tell how many times he did it: perhaps eight, perhaps ten.
"Did you see?" Miss Fellowes asked. "Eighty, ninety, a hundred people, I think he's saying this time. If he's really answering the question at all." "The number was smaller before." "I know. This is what he's saying now." "It's impossible. A tribe that primitive couldn't have more than thirty! At most."
Miss Fellowes shrugged. If they wanted to taint the evidence with their own preconceptions, that wasn't her problem. "Then put down thirty. You're asking a child who was only around three years old to give you a census report. He's only guessing, and the amazing thing is that he can even guess what we're trying to get him to tell us. And he may not be. What makes you think he knows how to count? That he even understands the concept of number?"
"But he does understand it, doesn't he?" "About as well as any five-year-old does. Ask the next five-year-old how many people he thinks live on his street, and see what he tells you." "Well- "
The other questions produced results nearly as uncertain. Tribal structure? Miss Fellowes managed to extract from Timmie, after a lot of verbal gyration, that there the tribe had had a "big man," by which he evidently meant a chief. No surprise there. Primitive tribes of historic times always had chiefs; it was reasonable to expect that Neanderthal tribes had had them, too. She asked if he knew the big man's name, and Timmie answered with clicks. Whatever the chiefs name might be, the boy couldn't translate it into English words or even render a phonetic equivalent: he had to fall back on Neanderthal sounds. -Did the chief have a wife? the scientists wanted to know. Timmie didn't know what a wife was.
— How was the chief chosen? Timmie couldn't understand the question. -What about religious beliefs and practices?
Miss Fellowes was able, by dint of giving Timmie all sorts of scientifically dubious prompting, to get some sort of description from the boy of a holy place made of rocks, which he had been forbidden to go near, and a cult which might or might not have been run by a high priestess. She was sure it was a priestess, not a priest, because he kept pointing to her as he spoke; but whether he really understood what she was trying to learn from him was something not at all certain to her.
"If only they had managed to bring a child who was older than this across time!" the anthropologists kept lamenting. "Or a full-grown Neanderthal, for God's sake! If only! If only! How maddening, to have nothing but an ignorant little boy as our one source of information."
"I'm sure it is," Miss Fellowes agreed, without much compassion in her tone of voice. "But that ignorant little boy is one more Neanderthal than any of you ever expected to have a chance to interrogate. Never in your wildest dreams did you think you'd have any Neanderthals at all to talk to."
"Even so! If only! If only!"
"If only, yes," said Miss Fellowes, and told them that their time for interviewing Timmie was over for that day.
Then Hoskins reappeared, arriving at the dollhouse without advance word one morning.