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"They're afraid of each other!" Keeps The Past said, in astonishment.
"Hoooo."
"Hoooo."
"We should just charge at them," She Who Knows muttered. "They'd turn and run in a moment!"
"Hoooo."
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"Hoooo."
"Like owls," said Keeps The Past.
It was maddening. The stalemate could go on forever. She Who Knows was unable to take it any
longer. She went across to the place where Mammoth Rider was sitting, with the two bowls of war paint
on the ground in front of him, and stripped away her robe. Mammoth Rider looked up at her, puzzled.
"Give me the paint," She Who Knows said.
"But you can't--"
"I can."
She bent and quickly snatched up the bowl of blue pigment, and splattered some carelessly on each
of her breasts. Then she took up the red, and drew a big triangle on her middle, across the base of her
belly and up both her thighs, and one splash on the dark hair at her loins.
Everyone was staring at her now. She didn't bother asking Mammoth Rider to put stripes of war
paint on her back; she doubted that he would do it, and she didn't want to waste time discussing it with
him. It didn't matter. She wasn't planning to turn her back on any of the enemy down there.
Other Ones! she thought fiercely. Cowards, all of them!
Silver Cloud was coming toward her now, moving hesitantly, favoring his sore leg.
"What are you doing, She Who Knows?"
"Getting ready to fight your war for you," she said. And put her robe back on and started down the
hill toward the place of the shrine of the shining rocks.
CHAPTER SEVEN - Resisting
SAM AICKMAN said, "Play the bastard's call one more rime, will you, Jerry?"
Hoskins slipped the transcript cube into the access slot. On the screen at the front end of the
boardroom Bruce Mannheim's face appeared, reproduced just as it had been on the screen of Hoskins'
own telephone at the rime of the call. An insistently blinking green rosette at the lower right-hand corner
of the screen signaled that the call had been recorded with the knowledge and permission of the caller.
Mannheim was a youngish, full-faced man with dense waves of thick red hair clinging close to his
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scalp and a ruddy, florid complexion. Though beards had been out of fashion for some years except
among extremely young men and very old ones, he wore a short, neatly trimmed goatee and a bushy little
mustache.
The well-known advocate for the rights of children looked very sincere, very earnest, very serious.
To Hoskins he also looked very annoying.
On-screen, Mannheim said, "The situation is, Dr. Hoskins, dial our most recent discussion was not at
all fruitful, and I simply can't take your word any longer that the boy is being held under acceptable
conditions."
"Why?" the Hoskins on the screen replied. "Has my word suddenly become untrustworthy?"
"That's not the point, doctor. We have no reason to doubt your word. But we have no reason to take
it at face value, either, and some members of my advisory board have begun to feel that I've been too
willing up to now to accept your own evaluations of the boy's status. The point is that there's been no
on-site inspection."
"You speak of the child as though he's some kind of hidden weapon, Mr. Mannheim."
Mannheim smiled, but there wasn't much amusement visible in his pale gray eyes. "Please understand
my position. I'm under considerable pressure from the sector of public opinion that I represent, Dr.
Hoskins, Despite all your publicity releases, many people continue to feel that a child who was brought
here as this one was and who is kept in what amounts to solitary confinement for an indefinite period is a
child who is being subjected to cruel and inhuman punishment."
"You and I have been through all this more than once," said Hoskins. "The child is receiving the best
care in the world, and you know it. He has twenty-four-hour-a-day nursing attention and daily medical
checkups and he's on a perfectly balanced diet that has already done wonders for his physical condition.
We'd be crazy to do things any other way, and whatever else we may be, we aren't crazy."
"I grant you that you've told me all that. But you still aren't allowing any outside confirmation of the
things you claim. And the letters and calls that I'm receiving daily--the outcries, the pressure from
concerned individuals--"
"If you're under pressure, Mr. Mannheim," said Hoskins unceremoniously, "may I suggest that it's
because you've stirred this matter up by yourself in the first place, and now your own people are turning
on you a little of the heat that you single-handedly chose to generate?"
"That's the way to talk to him, Jerry-boy!" said Charlie McDermott, the comptroller.
"Maybe a bit on the blunt side, seems to me," Ned Cassiday said. He was the head of Legal: it was
his job to err on the side of prudence.
The recorded conversation was proceeding on the screen.
"--neither here nor there, Dr. Hoskins. We have to keep returning to one basic point here, which is
that a child has been ripped away from his parents and his home--"
"A Neanderthal child, Mr. Mannheim. Neanderthal Man was a primitive, savage, nomadic form of
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humanity. It's anybody's guess whether or not Neanderthals had homes of any real sort, or even that they
understood the concept of the parent-child relationship as we know it. For all we know we may have
pulled this child out of an absolutely brutish, hostile, miserable existence--much more likely, I'd say, than
the picture you offer of our callously yanking him out of his idyllic little Christmas-card family life back
there in the Pleistocene."
"Are you telling me that Neanderthals are no more than animals?" Mannheim asked. "That the child
you've brought back from the Pleistocene is actually just some kind of ape that walks on his hind legs?"
"Certainly not. We aren't trying to pretend anything of the sort. Neanderthals were primitive but they
were unquestionably human."
"Because if you're going to try to claim that your captive has no human rights because he isn't human,
Dr. Hoskins, then I must point out that scientists are completely unanimous in their belief that Homo
neanderthalensis is in fact simply a subspecies of our own race, Homo sapiens, and therefore--"
"Jesus Suffering Christ," Hoskins exploded, "aren't you listening to me at all? I just got through saying
that we concede the point that Timmie is human."
"Timmie?" Mannheim said.
"The child has been nicknamed Timmie around here, yes. It's been in all the news reports."
From the sidelines Ned Cassiday murmured, "Which was probably a mistake. Creates too much
identification with the child as child per se. You give them names, you start making them seem too real in
the eyes of the public, and then if there happens to be any sort of trouble--"
"The child is real, Ned," Hoskins said. "And there's not going to be any trouble."
On screen Mannheim was saying, "Very well, doctor. We both agree that we're talking about a
human child. And we have no real disagreement on another basic point, which as I said a few moments
back is that you've taken custody of this child by your own decision and you have no legal claim to him.
You've essentially kidnapped this child, I could quite accurately say."
"Legal claim? What legality? Where? Tell me what laws I've broken. Show me the Pleistocene court
where I can be brought to justice!"
"The fact that Pleistocene people have no courts doesn't mean that they have no rights," said [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]