During Waldo’s childhood he had hoped constantly that the child would die, since he was so obviously destined for tragic uselessness, while simultaneously, as a physician, doing everything within his own skill and the skills of numberless consulting specialists to keep the child alive and cure it
Naturally, Waldo could not attend school; Grimes ferreted out sympathetic tutors. He could indulge in no normal play; Grimes invented sickbed games which would not only stimulate Waldo’s imagination but encourage him to use his flabby muscles to the full, weak extent of which he was capable
Grimes had been afraid that the handicapped child, since it was not subjected to the usual maturing stresses of growing up, would remain infantile. He knew now, had known for a long time, that he need not have worried. Young Waldo grasped at what little life was offered him, learned thirstily, tried with a sweating tenseness of will to force his undisciplined muscles to serve him
He was clever in thinking of dodges whereby to circumvent his muscular weakness. At seven he devised a method of controlling a spoon with two hands, which permitted him, painfully, to feed himself. His first mechanical invention was made at ten
It was a gadget which held a book for him, at any angle, controlled lighting for the book, and turned its pages. The gadget responded to fingertip pressure on a simple control panel. Naturally, Waldo could not build it himself, but he could conceive it, and explain it; the Farthingwaite-Joneses could well afford the services of a designing engineer to build the child’s conception
Grimes was inclined to consider this incident, in which the child Waldo acted in a role of intellectual domination over a trained mature adult neither blood relation nor servant, as a landmark in the psychological process whereby Waldo eventually came to regard the entire human race as his servants, his hands, present or potential
‘What’s eating you, Doc?
‘Eh? Sorry, I was daydreaming. See here, son – you mustn’t be too harsh on Waldo. I don’t like him myself. But you must take him as a whole.
‘You take him.
‘Shush. You spoke of needing his genius. He wouldn’t have been a genius if he had not been crippled. You didn’t know his parents. They were good stock, fine, intelligent people, but nothing spectacular. Waldo’s potentialities weren’t any greater than theirs, but he had to do more with them to accomplish anything. He had to do everything the hard way. He had to be clever
‘Sure. Sure, but why should he be so utterly poisonous? Most big men aren’t.
‘Use your head. To get anywhere in his condition he had to develop a will, a driving one-track mind, with a total disregard for any other considerations. What would you expect him to be but stinking selfish?
‘I’d- Well, never mind. We need him and that’s that.
‘Why?
Stevens explained. It may plausibly be urged that the shape of a culture, its mores, evaluations, family organization, eating habits, living patterns, pedagogical methods, institutions, forms of government, and so forth, arise from the economic necessities of its technology. Even though the thesis be too broad and much oversimplified, it is nonetheless true that much which characterized the long peace which followed the constitutional establishrnent of the United Nations grew out of the technologies which were hot-house-forced by the needs of the belligerents in the war of the forties. Up to that time broadcast and beam-cast were used only for commercial radio, with rare exceptions. Even telephony was done almost entirely by actual metallic connexion from one instrument to another. If a man in Monterey wished to speak to his wife or partner in Boston, a physical, copper neuron stretched bodily across the continent from one to the other
Radiant power was then a hop dream, found in Sunday supplements and comic books
A concatenation, no, a meshwork of new developments was necessary before the web of copper covering the continent could be dispensed with. Power could not be broadcast economically; it was necessary to wait for the co-axial beam, a direct result of the imperative military shortages of the Great War. Radio telephony could not replace wired telephony until ultra micro-wave techniques made room in the ether, so to speak, for the traffic load. Even then it was necessary to invent a tuning device which could be used by a nontechnical person, a ten-year-old child, let us say ,as easily as the dial selector which was characteristic of the commercial wired telephone of the era then terminating