James Tiptree Jr. - Beam Us Home

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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

for—who knows?—a 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.

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

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