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

So Hobie was tagged as some kind of an underachiever, but nobody knew what kind because of those
grades. And something about that smile bothered them; it seemed to stop sound.

The girls liked him, though, and he went through the usual phases rather fast. There was the week he and
various birds went to thirty-five drive-in movies. And the month he went around humming "Mrs.
Robinson" in a meaningful way. And the warm, comfortable summer when he and his then-girl and two
other couples went up to Stratford, Ontario, with sleeping bags to see the Czech multimedia thing.

Girls regarded him as different, although he never knew why. "You look at me like it's always good-bye,"
one of them told him. Actually, he treated girls with an odd detached gentleness, as though he knew a
secret that might make them all disappear. Some of them hung around because of his quick brown hands
or his really great looks, some because they hoped to share the secret. In this they were disappointed.
Hobie talked and he listened carefully, but it wasn't the mutual talk-talk-talk of total catharsis that most
couples went through. But how could Hobie know that?

Like most of his peer group, Hobie stayed away from heavies and agreed that pot was preferable to
getting juiced. His friends never crowded him too much after the beach party where he spooked
everybody by talking excitedly for hours to people who weren't there. They decided he might have a
vulnerable ego-structure.

The official high school view was that Hobie had no real problems. In this they were supported by a test
battery profile that could have qualified him as the ideal normal control. Certainly there was nothing to get
hold of in his routine interviews with the high school psychologist.

Hobie came in after lunch, a time when Dr. Morehouse knew he was not at his most intuitive. They went
through the usual openers, Hobie sitting easily, patient and interested, with an air of listening to some
sound back of the acoustical ceiling tiles.

"I meet a number of young people involved in discovering who they really are. Searching for their own
identities," Morehouse offered. He was idly trueing up a stack of typing headed Sex Differences in the
Adolescent Identity Crisis.

"Do you?" Hobie asked politely.

Morehouse frowned at himself and belched disarmingly.

"Sometimes I wonder who I am," he smiled.

"Do you?" inquired Hobie.

"Don't you?"

"No," said Hobie.

Morehouse reached for the hostility that should have been there, found it wasn't. Not passive aggression.
What? His intuition awoke briefly. He looked into Hobie's light hazel eyes and suddenly found himself
slipping toward some very large uninhabited dimension. A real pubescent preschiz, he wondered
hopefully? No again, he decided, and found himself thinking, What if a person is sure of his identity, but it
isn't his identity? He often wondered that; perhaps it could be worked up into a creative insight.