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Show Acting Alone a Page 464 memory, which he revealed now as tearfully as any Mormon bearing testimony. "And I found my dog, my purebred doberman Liebchen, my friend, hanging mangled from a tree by her pink-and-white jaw ligaments, her eyes torn out - by what or whom nobody standing outside the vestibule of hell will ever know. . ." Polly decided that she couldn't separate the ignorance from the insanity from the theater. Probably it couldn't be done. What had Sammy called this man? The Parasite Upon the Cosmic Insecurites of -? She couldn't recall the rest. She just wished Bopp would hurry up and finish relieving himself here among the charred sacristy timbers. Six-thirty was rolling around. It was almost certain that they were all breaking several state safety codes by piling into the chapel here. But Saint Paphnutius, from its inception and consecration, had been an entity all to itself, not prone to observing anyone's statutes but God's and Mother Pudentiana's. Like the rest of the convent, the chapel was an unrecognizable ruin, partially firegutted and mostly collapsed. One end of the floor was caved in over a certain remote section of the black geothermal tunnels. The chaplain was of the opinion that these were "esthetical ruins," a la the famous bombed-out "Phoenix" church at Coventry, England, that monument to the effectiveness of the bombs of another limited apocalypse of recent memory, that so-called "Cathedral" owned and operated by what Bopp sometimes simperingly referred to as the "Great Unmentionable Cult of Henry VIII, Holy Father's recent efforts |