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

been congratulating themselves on having steered their fifth offspring safely through the college crisis and
into a high-status Eastern. Hobie announced that he had applied for the United States Air Force
Academy.

This was a bomb, because Hobie had never shown the slightest interest in things military. Just the
opposite, really. Hobie's parents took it for granted that the educated classes viewed the military with
tolerant distaste. Why did their son want this? Was it another of his unstable motivational orientations?

But Hobie persisted. He didn't have any reasons, he had just thought carefully and felt that this was for
him. Finally they recalled that early model rocket collection; his father decided he was serious and began
sorting out the generals his research firm did business with. In September Hobie disappeared into
Colorado Springs. He reappeared for Christmas in the form of an exotically hairless, erect, and polite
stranger in uniform.

During the next four years, Hobie the person became effectively invisible behind a growing pile of
excellent evaluation reports. There seemed to be no doubt that he was working very hard, and his
motivation gave no sign of flagging. Like any cadet, he bitched about many of the Academy's little ways
and told some funny stories. But he never seemed discouraged. When he elected to spend his summers in
special aviation skills training, his parents realized that Hobie had found himself.

EnlightenmentтАФof a sortтАФcame in his senior year when he told them he had applied for and been
accepted into the new astronaut training program. The U.S. space program was just then starting up
again after the revulsion caused by the tragic loss of the manned satellite lab ten years before.

"I bet that's what he had in mind all along," Hobie's father chuckled. "He didn't want to say so before he
made it." They were all relieved. A son in the space program was a lot easier to live with, statuswise.

When she heard the news, Dog, who was now married and called herself Jane, sent him a card with a
picture of the Man in the Moon. Another girl, more percipient, sent him a card showing some stars.

But Hobie never made it to the space program.

It was the summer when several not-very-serious events happened all together. The British devalued their
wobbly pound again, just when it was found that far too many dollars were going out of the States. North
and South Korea moved a step closer to reunion, which generated a call for strengthening the U.S.
contribution to the remains of SEATO. Next there was an expensive, though luckily nonlethal, fire at
Kennedy, and the Egyptians announced a new Soviet aid pact. And in August it was discovered that the
Gu├йvarrista rebels in Venezuela were getting some very unpleasant-looking hardware from their Arab
allies.

Contrary to the old saying that nations never learn from history, the U.S. showed that it had learned from
its long agony in Vietnam. What it had learned was not to waste time messing around with popular
elections and military advisory and training programs, but to ball right in. Hard.

When the dust cleared, the space program and astronaut training were dead on the pad and a third of
Hobie's graduating class was staging through Caracas. Technically, he had volunteered.

He found this out from the task force medico.
"Look at it this way, Lieutenant. By entering the Academy, you volunteered for the Air Force, right?"