ref: b9fbb17c04e4ccfb2021dac818e514351ca8f646
dir: /troff/0620.ms/
.LP \& .ce .sp |4.25i .PP .ps 12 .CW ░ New York, 2020. .PP .ps 12 Finally back at his desk, Tom removed his visor and rubbed his ruined eyes. Everything was safely in its place: the framed picture of his family, the lucite block containing a laser etching of a Lockheed Martin F\-35A (a paperweight, get it?), the news clippings, the magazine photos of the original A.C.T.R.O.N. team he still kept pinned to the wall. He sipped his coffee and pressed the button that called his secretary. .PP .ps 12 "Eva, could you come in here, please." .PP .ps 12 Chrysler Building Classic systems must have been on the fritz. Several minutes elapsed, and finally Tom wasn't sure if his secretary had got the message. Just as he was about to try again, the speaker on his desk squawked to life. .PP .ps 12 "I'm not your secretary," she finally said. And it was true. Instead, she was his wife. "What do you want?" .PP .ps 12 "Have the comics been delivered yet?" he asked, sounding rather more desperate than he had intended. .PP .ps 12 She had no idea. Why was he asking \fIher?\fR .PP .ps 12 "Oh. Well, okay. Sorry to bother you." .PP .ps 12 It was Wenesday. The comics \fIshould\fR have been delivered by now, but Eva didn't care about that kind of thing, so it had probably slipped her mind. .PP .ps 12 He sunk back into his chair. Was he really going to have to walk all the way down to the comic shop by himself? .PP .ps 12 Enter Piro, the pirate. .PP .ps 12 "Why don't you just download them?" he said. .PP .ps 12 "Down\fIwhat?"\fR Tom asked, forever perplexed. Head of an interstellar drug empire for nearly three decades, he hadn't yet found out about comics piracy. .PP .ps 12 But there would be no reply to his very many questions. .PP .ps 12 Piro was really dead.