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

"Maybe it's the other way around," Hobie was saying before the pause grew awkward.

"How do you mean?"

"Well, maybe you're all wondering who you are." Hobie's lips quirked; it was clear he was just making
conversation.

"I asked for that," Morehouse chuckled. They chatted about sibling rivalry and psychological statistics
and wound up in plenty of time for Morehouse's next boy, who turned out to be a satisfying High Anx.
Morehouse forgot about the empty place he had slid into. He often did that too.

It was a girl who got part of it out of Hobie, at three in the morning. "Dog" she was called then, although
her name was Jane. A tender, bouncy little bird who cocked her head to listen up at him in a way Hobie
liked. Dog would listen with the same soft intensity to the supermarket clerk and the pediatrician later on,
but neither of them knew that.

They had been talking about the state of the world, which was then quite prosperous and peaceful. That
is to say, about seventy million people were starving to death, a number of advanced nations were
maintaining themselves on police terror tactics, four or five borders were being fought over, Hobie's
family's maid had just been cut up by the suburban peacekeeper squad, and the school had added a
charged wire and two dogs to its patrol. But none of the big nations were waving fissionables, and the
U.S.-Sino-Soviet d├йtente was a twenty-year reality.

Dog was holding Hobie's head over the side of her car because he had been the one who found the maid
crawling on her handbones among the azaleas.

"If you feel like that, why don't you do something?" Dog asked him between spasms. "Do you want some
Slurp? It's all we've got."

"Do what?" Hobie quavered.

"Politics?" guessed Dog. She really didn't know. The Protest Decade was long over, along with the New
Politics and Ralph Nader. There was a school legend about a senior who had come back from Miami
with a busted collarbone. Sometime after that the kids had discovered that flowers weren't really very
powerful and that movement organizers had their own bag. Why go on the street when you could really
do more in one of the good jobs available Inside? So Dog could offer only a vague image of Hobie
running for something, a sincere face on TV.

"You could join the Young Statesmen."

"Not to interfere," gasped Hobie. He wiped his mouth. Then he pulled himself together and tried some of
the Slurp. In the dashlight his seventeen-year-old sideburns struck Dog as tremendously mature and
beautiful.

"Oh, it's not so bad," said Hobie. "I mean, it's not unusually bad. It's just a stage. This world is going
through a primitive stage. There's a lot of stages. It takes a long time. They're just very, very backward,
that's all."
"They," said Dog, listening to every word.

"I mean," he said.