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

They didn't, of course. About once a month I'd find a message from them.
These messages got nastier and more threatening. They appealed to my sense
of fair play. I remember one phrase as if it were yesterday: "тАж so just send
us the twenty dollars and we'll call it 'square'!" Call it square? Call it square
, you miserable bastards? After you've made my life a living hell? After you
misled me with offers of thousands of free stamps, after you cleverly tucked
your little time bomb in with the stamps, knowing full well, counting on the
fact, I shouldn't doubt, that a lot of dumb guys like me would get ourselves
in hock up to our eyeballsтАж you want to call it square"?
I had been reduced to a shattered bunch of nerves, a hollow-eyed wraith
whose dreams were now always haunted by the Littleton juggernaut, and I
didn't think things could get any worse, when things got worse. The next
communication from the Littleton Terror Company had this information:
Unless payment is received in forty-eight hours, your account will be
turned over to a Collection Agency.
Well, option number four suddenly started to look much better.
My visualization of a collection agency was necessarily a bit vague, but
no matter how I imagined it there were always policemen in the picture, or
shadowy guys in trenchcoats or other dark clothing pounding on the door
and shouting "Come outta there, Varley! We know you got the stamps!"
Oddly enough, they didn't carry guns. I was a lot more afraid of knives, so
they carried knives. Even the cops. And after breaking down the door they
always dragged me from the houseтАФ trying to make myself small and
harmless, trying to act as if this was no big deal, as if this sort of thing
happened every day and it would soon be straightened out, which was tough
to pull off, since I was usually naked or in my underwear when I envisioned
this scene, and a large crowd had always gathered.
 By then I realized that even killing myself would do no
Introduction
good. The Collection Agency would come around anyway, and they
probably wouldn't believe it when told I had recently done away with
myself, and would then visit all sorts of atrocities upon my innocent family.
So out of a sense of duty, to alert them to what was about to happen, I did
what I should have done when the first dunning letter appeared. I turned the
whole thing over to my mom.
And Mom took care of it.
I don't know what she did. To this day I have never asked her, and she has
probably forgotten by now. I doubt it was a very traumatic event for her. I
am now older than my mother >was then, and confronted by a similar
problem I would probably write an angry letter or make an angry phone call
(the LSC really was misleading children with its ads, though they did
nothing illegal), and if that didn't do it, I'd pay the stinking twenty dollars. A
double sawbuck certainly would have put a big hole in our monthly grocery
budget back then, but that business about feeding a family for years was
maybe a bit of an exaggeration. I've tried to remember if we ate a lot of
macaroni and cheese after I told my mother. It seems that we did, but we did
before I told her, too.
The point is, she took care of it. Bingo, and the problem that had been
tormenting me for the better part of a year just melted away as if it had never
existed. You want to talk about superheroes, you need go no farther than