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Show Acting Alone Page 439 unrelated to the immediate survival of the organism, might be worth devoting one's life to. "And he feels nothing. He feels nothing, just as he has felt nothing throughout the entire Endtime process: through the blinding fireball; through the year-long and still too-short sojourn underground where he had to defend his very earth-filtered drinking water from his own wife with a piece of broken mayonnaise jar; through his emergence, a prematurely old man with leukemia, into the cinders. He felt, and feels, nothing. "Then he turns to the inside back cover and his eyes espy a pair of complete sentences - the first complete, unfragmented sentences of his beloved language that he has laid eyes on in over fifteen years, for complete sentences, or well-written grammatical constructions of any description, were rare enough in the years before the Endtime. He reads, with great appetite - "'Much time and thought have gone into the writing, editing, publishing, distributing, and preparation of this book. Please treat it with care and respect and return it to the proper branch of your public library in good condition so that others may enjoy the riches it contains.' "The young idealists working in the reborn library hear a loud noise, a bark or laugh or screech. They turn and see nothing, nobody. Nobody sees the scribe and alchemist again - though some children report seeing some ashes in the bent configuration of an old man vaporizing momentarily from the surface of the mass of perpetually molten and re-melting metal that was formerly designated Ground-Zero by the Mighty Bringers of All That is Warm and Bright - "And so on, and so on, Sammy. Like all parables, this trails off into |