"Joe Haldeman - None So Blind (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

(This story, which won the Locus and Hugo Awards for "Best Short Story
of 1995,"
first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.)


Author, hiding behind his work

None So Blind
by
Joe Haldeman

Copyright ┬й 1995 by Joe Haldeman

It all started when Cletus Jefferson asked himself "Why aren't all
blind people
geniuses?" Cletus was only 13 at the time, but it was a good question,
and he
would work on it for 14 more years, and then change the world forever.
Young Jefferson was a polymath, an autodidact, a nerd literally without
peer. He
had a chemistry set, a microscope, a telescope, and several computers,
some of
them bought with paper route money. Most of his income was from
education,
though: teaching his classmates not to draw to inside straights.
Not even nerds, not even nerds who are poker players nonpareil, not
even nerdish
poker players who can do differential equations in their heads, are
immune to
Cupid's darts and the sudden storm of testosterone that will accompany
those
missiles at the age of 13. Cletus knew that he was ugly and his mother
dressed
him funny. He was also short and pudgy and could not throw a ball in
any
direction. None of this bothered him until his ductless glands started
cooking
up chemicals that weren't in his chemistry set.
So Cletus started combing his hair and wearing clothes that mismatched
according
to fashion, but he was still short and pudgy and irregular of feature.
He was
also the youngest person in his school, even though he was a senior--
and the
only black person there, which was a factor in Virginia in 1994.
Now if love were sensible, if the sexual impulse was ever tempered by
logic, you
would expect that Cletus, being Cletus, would assess his situation and
go off in
search of someone homely. But of course he didn't. He just jingled and