"Donald A. Wollheim -The Man from the Future" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wollheim Donald A)

It was a great idea; we could have odd clothes made for the dwarf to wear, and
write him a script in the best science-fiction style to read.
Jack was always the more forward of the two of us and he approached the dwarf
with a casual comment. I was a bit leery of that part for these midgets are
often inclined to be very touchy about their heights and to take offense.
However the dwarf took it in good spirit and proved to be quite amiable.
It turned out that he was not a circus actor at all. He didn't work for a living
because he would have had difficulty getting jobs outside of freak shows, and he
didn't have to work, fortunately, because he had a small inherited income. Or so
he said.
He had a sense of humor anyway and saw the fun in the idea of attending the
convention as a man from the future. He waved aside queries as to how much we
would have to pay him as he said he would enjoy the stunt himself.
We met him a couple of times during the next two weeks at my place. He preferred
that we didn't visit him and we didn't. He turned out to be quite an interesting
conversationalist and had a number of odd ideas on things. We fitted him up with
an outlandish costume for the part which we modeled from some of the
illustrations from fantastic stories. A vividly colored shirt with a bright
purple cape dropping from the shoulders, green shorts, yellow leggings. He
supplied an oddly designed pair of slippers himself and we topped it off with a
wide metal studded belt.
THE CONVENTION met in a hall in Manhattan and was quite a success. About three
hundred people from California, Texas and other far away states had traveled all
the way across the continent to attend.
The regular business of the convention had been disposed of and we introduced
the star visitor, our "Man from the Future."
The dwarf played his part to perfection. He strode on to the dais with perfect
ease and looked great. His normal sized head really looked quite gigantic in
comparison with his stunted body and we had emphasized his brow with a metallic
helmet. He had clipped a number of things to the trick belt, a couple of dials,
a leather pouch, and a couple of tubes which I supposed were chrome flashlights
he might have bought in the five-and-ten.
He started his little talk nicely. The audience was quite spell-bound, he really
looked the part you know. And with that helmet, you couldn't see that he wasn't
bald as a real man from the future ought to be.
Anyway he was getting along famously, following our script closely, telling how
he had come back from the future in his time machine to investigate the
Twentieth Century for the historians of his day.
Then one of those nuisances from the science-fiction club that meets in the
Bronx recovered his breath and started to heckle. Just for explanation, I might
say that our clubs are sort of rivals, friendly-like, but rivals. They had a
movie they made themselves and were going to projct and they were afraid our Man
from the Future would prove to be the more memorable attraction.
Anyway this chap over in the Bronx section near the back of the hall kept
calling out annoying questions and trying to confuse our dwarf. I could see that
the dwarf wasn't taking thls very well for he was getting a bit mixed up and was
looking quite angrily in the direction of his persecutor.
Finally the heckler called out something about why don't you go back to Coney
Island where you came from and that got the speaker rattled once too often.
The dwarf stopped, stared at the heckler from his raised dais, dramatically