"Goulart, Ron - Cure for Baldness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goulart Ron)

RON GOULART

A CURE FOR BALDNESS

*
In an issue filled with terrorists, ghosts, and Martians, we need a bit of
levity. Fortunately, we had this story by Ron Goulart on hand. "A Cure for
Baldness," according to Ron, "explains the various aspects of growing older."
Hmmm. Would that aging could be so interesting for everyone.

It was about a half hour after the second bomb scare that his real trouble got
going. Roger Snow had hidden in a closet the second time the fifteen story
Tandem Brothers Publishing Building on Park Avenue South was evacuated. Trooping
out into the hot, glaring Manhattan street once a day was sufficient. The
building never blew up anyway.

Roger had sneaked back into his office after five minutes or so, sat again at
his drawing board and started working on thumbnail sketches for the latest
paperback cover in the Lizardworld series.

"Swordsmen of Lizardworld," he'd said aloud, allowing himself to sigh some. "Can
you fall from grace if you never had any in the first place?"

After awhile he noticed that his hand kept sticking to the layout paper, which
meant the air conditioning was on the fritz again. Sighing once more, he leaned
back in his chair. The chair produced the usual resentful groaning.

Roger was a plump, moderately tall man in his middle forties and his hair was
thinning. Well, actually he was going to be forty-seven next month and he was
just a shade under five foot eight. He was at least thirty pounds overweight and
there was extremely little of his brindle-colored hair left on his head at all.

"I'm starting to sound like a resume when I describe myself," he reflected. "But
you can't romance the fact that I'm going to seed. As a person, as an artist,
and --"

"Just where's your damn loyalty, Rog?"

"I had it when I came in this --"

"Enough wiseass stuff. How do you explain this?"

While Roger had been woolgathering at his board, everybody in the Fiction
Division of Tandem Brothers had returned. Lex Tandem himself was in the doorway
of the small office, holding a partially crumpled fax message in his tanned
hand.

"You have some words written in reverse across the front of your suit,"