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Show Acting Alone pa g e 381 the boy turned out to be totally inappropriate for the Elder's original purposes anyway. A second glance at the bulletin boards - not so much at the language (which seemed unremarkable enough, just typical anal-expulsive scatology inspired by late-adolescent father-anger), as at the pugnacious depth and obsessive care with which the words themselves had been carved into the cork and lined with red ink - strongly suggested that the boy would be far too energetic, far too self-willed for the purposes of the Temple project. No mere batch of sleazy documents from the files of church intelligence could ever reveal as much as a couple of first-hand glances at an actual piece of work by a subject's own hand, a holograph as it were. Too, a second consideration of the sheer height at which the blasphemy had been carved drove home the undeniable physical facts that were easily ascertainable from the personal-data slots in the photostat of his expired driver's license: he would be too large to move with anything resembling stealth and would' probably eat the encampment out of house and home in a week. So Elder Cicerone had come all this way to the university and still had not found his youngster. The disappointment had been palpable; but still he continued the probe, for Nimrod, Jr.'s sake. Now, expressly for the purposes of this project, the Elder had looked into the habits of the one type of person that would most easily and naturally capture the full attention of English department types: the literary agent, he had read up on the commercial book world in America today, and had found that he took naturally to its basic precepts, methodologies and ethical |