"John Varley - Anthology - Super Heroes - Various Authors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

feed a family of five for years on that kind of money. I don't have the exact
figures, but think of fifty or sixty thousand in 1993 dollars. You don't
believe me? Just try to find a 60 Coke today. Go ahead! Try!)
Please remit twenty dollars. The words burned themselves into my brain
(though not, apparently, the numbers). What to do? What were my options?
First, I could ask my parents for it.
Oh, sure. That ought to be real easy. You remember that family of five we
could have fed for years? That was my family of five we were talking about.
There was no way I was going to be responsible for having my mother and
my sisters eat dog food for three years. The idea didn't exactly appeal to me,
either, for that matter. (Though maybe I ought to get used to it, a part of me
was sayingтАФa very pessimistic part that,
Introduction
I'm sorry to say, is with me to this dayтАФbecause it will be good
preparation for prison food.)
It was while trying to imagine ways of breaking this to my parents that I
came up with my second course of action, because it would be the first
question they would ask me after they'd grasped the enormity of the
situation: Why don't you just give them back?
Because it's too late't
By then I'd learned a little about stamp collecting. I'd learned some of the
terminology collectors used. I now understood the meaning of words like
uncirculated, original gum, >mint, light cancellation. For those of you lucky
enough never to have been involved with this terrible hobby there is a
simple rule you should be aware of: In philately, the closer a stamp is to the
state it was in on the day of its creation, the more it is worth. It should show
no wear and tear. It should not have a postmark. And it must have the same
awful-tasting, sticky, easily-breakable glue on the back as it had when it
rolled off the press.
Like most young collectors, I'd been using a drop of glue on the backs of
most of my stamps. Later, I learned of the stamp hinge, but I never liked
them much as they never kept the stamps in place in the album. With the
stolen approvals, things were dead easy. Just lick them and paste them in,
like you would on an envelope.
Thereby rendering them worthless. (Sorry, all you librarian aunts. With
very rare exceptions, any canceled stamp torn from an envelope is of no
value.)
My third option was really a lot of assorted options. Option 3A: Run
away to sunny California and live at Disneyland. Option 3B: Run away to
New York City. 3C: Run away and join the circus. You get the picture.
While I spent a lot of time considering these options, I knew deep down I
was not the running-away type. Not that I wouldn't like to get out and see
the world. I just had barely enough sense to realize I had not the foggiest
idea what I'd do once I got out there.
Killing oneself was always an option. It certainly eliminated all one's
problems. Let's put that one on hold, until we see what prison's like.
John Varley
This brought me to the fifth option, the one that had served me so badly
up to that point. Sit still and do nothing and maybe the dreaded LSC would
forget about me and go away.