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"Because you are one, or so I believe," she said, thinking of that "Ph.D."
label so proudly engraved on the name-plate in his office.
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"A doctorate in physics; that's all."
"A doctorate is a doctorate."
regarded as her superior.
Her husband had been a doctor, too-with a Ph.D. in physics, like
Hoskins. Miss Fellowes wondered strangely whether she would be calling him
"doctor" too, as she did Hoskins, if they had managed to stay married all
these years. A curious thought. She rarely thought of him at all any more; the
whole notion of being married, of having a husband, had come to seem remote
and implausible to her. She had been married for such a short time, such a
long time ago.
"What would you prefer?" she asked. "Should I call you 'Mr. Hoskins,'
then?"
"Most people around here call me 'Jerry.* "
Miss Fellowes looked at him strangely. "I couldn't do that!"
"You couldn't?"
"It-wouldn't feel right."
"Wouldn't feel right," Hoskins repeated, musingly. "To call me 'Jerry.' "
He studied her closely, as though seeing her for the first time. His wide,
fleshy face broke into a warm smile. "You really are a very formal person. I
hadn't realized quite how formal, I guess. All right, then: you can go on
calling me 'Dr. Hoskins,' if that's what you're most comfortable with. And
I'll go on calling you 'Miss Fellowes.' "
What did he mean by that? she wondered.
Hoskins was still looking steadily at her, still smiling.
There was something very warm about the man, she realized suddenly, very
likable. That too was a fact she hadn't noticed before. In their earlier
meetings he had struck her mainly as someone who presented himself to the
world as taut, guarded, inflexible, with only occasional moments when a little
humanity showed through. But possibly the tensions of the final days before
the Stasis experiment had made him seem that way; and now that the time-scoop
had done its work and the success of the project was confirmed, he was more
relaxed, more human, more himself. And quite a nice man indeed.
Miss Fellowes found herself wondering for an idle moment if Hoskins was
married.
The speculation astonished and embarrassed her. He had told her a couple of
weeks back that he had a son, hadn't he? A small son, barely old enough to
know how to walk. Of course he was married. Of course. What could she be
thinking of? She thrust the whole line of inquiry aside in horror.
"Timmie!" she called. "Come here, Timmie!"
Like Hoskins, the boy also appeared to be in a cheerful, outgoing mood this
morning. He had slept well; he had eaten well; now he came hustling
"Dr. Mclntyre's extremely conservative. He doesn't believe in jumping to
conclusions."
"Well, neither do I. But that's a genuine language or I'm not speaking one
myself."
"Let's hope so, Miss Fellowes. Let's certainly hope so. If we can't develop
any way of communicating with Timmie, then much of the value of having brought
him here will be lost. Naturally we want him to tell us things about the world
he came from. All manner of things."
"He will, doctor. Either in his language or in ours. And my guess is that
he'll learn to speak ours long before we've found out anything about his."
"You may be right, Miss Fellowes. Time will tell, won't it? Time will tell."
Hoskins crouched down so that his face was on the same level as
Timmie *s and let his hands rest lightly on the boy's rib-cage, fingers
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outspread. Timmie remained calm. Miss Fellowes realized after a moment that
Hoskins was ever so gendy tickling the boy, working his fingertips lighdy
around in an easy, playful way that bespoke more than a litde knowledge of how
to handle small boys. And Timmie liked being tickled.
"What a sturdy litde fellow," Hoskins said. "Tough as they come. -So you're
going to learn English, are you, Timmie? And then you'll dictate a book to us
all about life in the Paleolithic Era, and everybody will want to read it and
it'll be a big bestseller, and we'll start to see a little return on our
even for a moment- enough to power up a whole city for days-and the energy's
only one part of the overhead we run here. We've been right on the edge of
going under at least half a dozen times. We had to shoot the works on one big
show to save ourselves. It was everything-or nothing. And when I say the
works, I mean it. But Timmie here has saved us. He's going to put Stasis
Technologies, Ltd. on the map. We're in, Miss Fellowes, we're in!"
"I would have thought bringing back a live dinosaur would have sufficed to
achieve that, Dr. Hoskins."
"We thought so, too. But somehow that never captured the public's
imagination."
"A dinosaur didn't?"
Hoskins laughed. "Oh, if we had brought back a full-grown brontosaurus, I
suppose, or a rip-snorting tyran-nosaur, something on that order. But we had
our mass limitations to deal with, you know, and they tied our hands
considerably. Not that we would have known how to keep a tyrannosaur under
control, even if we'd been able to bring one back. -I
should take you across the way one of these days and let you see our dinosaur,
I guess."
"You should, yes."
"He's very cute."
looking but nevertheless something everyone can identify with and care deeply
about-that'll be our salvation. -Do you hear that, Timmie? You're our
salvation." To Miss Fellowes again Hoskins said, "If this hadn't worked out,
I'd have been through. No doubt about it. This whole corporation would have
been through."
"But we're all right now. We'll have plenty of money soon. Funds have been
promised from every source. This is all wonderful, Miss Fellowes. So long as
we can keep Timmie healthy and happy, and maybe get him to speak a few words
of English-'Hello, everybody out there, this is Timmie from the Stone Age'-"
"Or some such thing," Miss Fellowes said drily.
"Yes. Some such thing. -Healthy and happy, that's the key to it all. If
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