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." The old man shoved his stump out. "This doesn't make me a cripple. I see more with my one eye than you do with two. I am growing deaf . . . but not as deaf as you are, because what I hear, I remember. Which one of us is the cripple? But, son, you aren't going to stay crippled, for I am going to renshaw you if I have to beat your silly head in!"
As Thorby learned to use his mind, he found that he liked to; he developed an insatiable appetite for the printed page, until, night after night, Baslim would order him to turn off the viewer and go to bed. Thorby didn't see any use in much of what the old man forced him to learn -- languages, for example, that Thorby had never heard. But they were not hard, with his new skill in using his mind, and when he discovered that the old man had spools and reels which could be read or listened to only in these "useless" tongues, he suddenly found them worth knowing. History and galactography he loved; his personal world, light-years wide in physical space, had been in reality as narrow as a slave factor's pen. Thorby reached for wider horizons with the delight of a baby discovering its fist.
But mathematics Thorby saw no use in, other than the barbaric skill of counting money. But presently he learned that mathematics need not have use; it was a game, like chess but more fun.
The old man wondered sometimes what use it all was? That the boy was even brighter than he had thought, he now knew
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