"Robert A. Heinlein - Waldo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

The deceleration tanks, which are now standard equipment
for the lunar mail ships, traced their parentage to a flotation
tank in which Waldo habitually had eaten and slept up to
the time when he left the home of his parents for his present,
somewhat unique home. Most of his basic inventions had
originally been conceived for his personal convenience,
and only later adapted for commercial exploitation. Even
the ubiquitous and grotesquely humanoid gadgets known
universally as тАШwaldocsтАЩ - Waldo F. JonesтАЩs Synchronous
Reduplicating Pantograph, Pat #296,001,437, new series,
et al - passed through several generations of development
and private use in WaldoтАЩs machine shop before he
redesigned them for mass production. The first of them,
a primitive gadget compared with the waldoes now to be
found in every shop, factory, plant, and warehouse in the
country, had been designed to enable Waldo to operate
a metal lathe.
Waldo had resented the nickname the public had fastened
on them-.I It struck him as overly familiar, but he had coldly
recognized the business advantage to himself in having
the public identify him verbally with a gadget so useful
and important.
When the newscasters tagged his spacehouse
тАШWheelchairтАЩ, one might have expected him to regard it as
more useful publicity. That he did not so regard it, that
he resented it and tried to put a stop to it, arose from
another and peculiarly Waldo-ish fact: Waldo did not
think of himself as a cripple.
He saw himself not as a crippled human being, but as
something higher than human, the next step up, a being so
superior as not to need the coarse, brutal strength of the
smooth apes. Hairy apes, smooth apes, then Waldo - so the
progression ran in his mind. A chimpanzee, with muscles that
hardly bulge at all, can tug as high as fifteen hundred
pounds with one hand. This Waldo had proved by obtaining
one and patiently enraging it into full effort. A well-
developed man can grip one hundred and fifty pounds with
one hand. WaldoтАЩs own grip, straining until the sweat sprang
out, had never reached fifteen pounds.
Whether the obvious inference were fallacious or true, Waldo
believed in it, evaluated by it. Men were overmuscled canaille,
smooth chimps. He felt himself at least ten times superior to
them.
He had much to go on.
Though floating in air, he was busy, quite busy. Although be
never went to the surface of the Earth his business was there.
Aside from managing his many properties he was in regular
practice as a consulting engineer, specializing in motion
analysis. Hanging close to him in the room were the
paraphernalia necessary to the practice of his profession.