OCR Text |
Show Acting Alone Page 348 the center aisle and out the chapel doors? Did Mr. Cicerone know this Goddamned nun was going to be in here, right in that ostensible fireball's path? Everybody back at the encampment had been battening down for the big cloudburst when Axelrad left a few minutes ago. The Companions had been making an unprecedented number of sawed-off-runt jokes as they battened. It was almost as though they somehow knew about this special thing the old man had secretly assigned him to do today, and they were trying to do Axelrad a big favor by stoking up the furnace of small-man rage they presumed to be smouldering inside him, adrenalizing him for this, his big act of - - of what? Was this just some petty act of vandalism? Just a little something to blister the paint on the nunnery walls? Was this just some busy work, like the phony sentry system back at the encampment? Something to keep Axelrad from jacking himself off out of boredom and sapping his strength before the real action, the real act of sabotage against a certain huge enormous Unspeakable? Or could that little tissue-wrapped bundle soaking up iris water on the altar at this moment be no firebomb at all? The only reason, besides his own deeprooted anal-expulsive arsonist lusts, that Axelrad had assumed it was a firebomb, was that some robot back at the encampment had broken his vow of silicone silence about two days ago and made a fricasseed-nun joke between sawed-off-runt jokes. It had so surprised Axelrad to hear something like that at the encampment that he's taken its implications for the gospel truth. |