"James Tiptree Jr. - Beam Us Home" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tiptree James Jr)

Beam Us Home

By James Tiptree, Jr.
Hobie's parents might have seen the first signs if they had been watching about eight-thirty on Friday
nights. But Hobie was the youngest of five active bright-normal kids. Who was to notice one more
uproar around the TV?

A couple of years later, Hobie's Friday-night battles shifted to ten PM, and then his sisters got their own
set. Hobie was growing fast then. In public he featured chiefly as a tanned streak on the tennis courts and
a ninety-ninth percentile series of math grades. To his parents, Hobie featured as the one without
problems. This was hard to avoid in a family that included a diabetic, a girl with an IQ of 185 and another
with controllable petit mal, and a would-be ski star who spent most of his time in a cast. Hobie's own IQ
was in the fortunate 140s, the range where you're superior enough to lead but not too superior to be
followed. He seemed perfectly satisfied with his communications with his parents, but he didn't use them
much.

Not that he was in any way neglected when the need arose. The time he got staph in a corneal scratch,
for instance, his parents did a great job of supporting him through the pain bit and the hospital bit and so
on. But they couldn't know all the little incidents. Like the night when Hobie called so fiercely for Dr.
McCoy that a young intern named McCoy went in and joked for half an hour with the feverish boy in his
dark room.

To the end, his parents probably never understood that there was anything to understand about Hobie.
And what was to see? His tennis and his model rocket collection made him look almost too normal for
the small honors school he went to first.

Then his family moved to an executive bedroom suburb where the school system had a bigger budget
than Monaco and a soccer team loaded with National Merit Science finalists. Here Hobie blended right
in with the scenery. One more healthy, friendly, polite kid with bright gray eyes under a blond bowl-cut
and very fast with any sort of ball game.

The brightest eyes around him were reading The Double Helix to find out how to make it in research, or
marking up the Dun & Bradstreet flyers. If Hobie stood out at all, it was only that he didn't seem to be
worried about making it in research or any other way, particularly. But that fitted in too. Those days a lot
of boys were standing around looking as if they couldn't believe what went on, as if they were waiting
forтАФwho knows?тАФa better world, their glands, something. Hobie's faintly aghast expression was not
unique. Events like the installation of an armed patrol around the school enclave were bound to have a
disturbing effect on the more sensitive kids.

People got the idea that Hobie was sensitive in some indefinite way. His usual manner was open but
quiet, tolerant of a put-on that didn't end.

His advisor did fret over his failure to settle on a major field in time for the oncoming threat of college.
First his math interest seemed to evaporate after the special calculus course, although he never blew an
exam. Then he switched to the precollege anthropology panel the school was trying. Here he made good
grades and acted very motivated, until the semester when the visiting research team began pounding on
sampling techniques and statistical significance. Hobie had no trouble with things like chi-square, of
course. But after making his A in the final, he gave them his sweet, unbelieving smile and faded. His
advisor found him spending a lot of hours polishing a six-inch telescope lens in the school shop.