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Show Acting Alone pa g e 39 hire him scores of years ago as idea man, "esoteric" specialist, free running agent, like the forward point man on a basketball team or a military reconnaissance maneuver. As secret Thirteenth of the Twelve, the highest nominal rank he could ever rise to in the church was Elder; but he wore that rank proudly, in place of a first name, and was more than willing to live in such relative obscurity in exchange for the freedom to act on his brainstorms. And, in Chicago, after so many years on the back burner, Elder Cicerone had been so eager to act upon this particular brainstorm that the details were only just barely beginning to solidify in his mind even as he was riding a taxi across town. He was going, for reasons still vague to him, to wander the campus of the University of Chicago. It was a brave, strange idea to go there, because he was not accustomed to the university environment. That alienness of setting was a major part of the audacity of it all. Elder Cicerone had no idea precisely what he was going to do or say until his outdated university map brought him to the old mock-Gothic structure that had formerly housed the anthropology department, but now (unbeknownst to the Elder at the time, thanks to a faulty cog in the church intelligence apparatus that would be immediately taken care of as soon as he got home) housed the newly-blooming College of Business. He had naturally and unwittingly gravitated to the only place on a university campus resembling home to a man with the Elder's background. At first he was wondering why the professors of something so abstruse and secular-humanistic as anthropology were wearing leisure suits and no |