ith it
as he chose.

Henry had never gone in. He had started up the steps once, got almost
to the door, but then he remembered Agnes, her questions and shouting,
and he had turned away.

He was going in now though, almost crawling, his breath coming in
stabbing gasps, his hands torn and bleeding. His trouser leg was
sticky red where the wound in his leg had soaked through the
handkerchief. It was throbbing badly but Henry didn't care. He had
reached his destination.

Part of the inscription was still there, over the now doorless
entrance. P-U-B--C L-I-B-R---. The rest had been torn away. The place
was in shambles. The shelves were overturned, broken, smashed, tilted,
their precious contents spilled in disorder upon the floor. A lot of
the books, Henry noted gleefully, were still intact, still whole,
still readable. He was literally knee deep in them, he wallowed in
books. He picked one up. The title was "Collected Works of William
Shakespeare." Yes, he must read that, sometime. He laid it aside
carefully. He picked up another. Spinoza. He tossed it away, seized
another, and another, and still another. Which to read first ... there
were so many.

He had been conducting himself a little like a starving man in a
delicatessen--grabbing a little of this and a little of that in a
frenzy of enjoyment.

But now he steadied away. From the pile about him, he selected one
volume, sat comfortably down on an overturned shelf, and opened the
book.

Henry Bemis smiled.

There was the rumble of complaining stone. Minute in comparison which
the epic complaints following the fall of the bomb. This one occurred
under one corner of the shelf upon which Henry sat. The shelf moved;
threw him off balance. The glasses slipped from his nose and fell with
a tinkle.

He bent down, clawing blindly and found, finally, their smashed
remains. A minor, indirect destruction stemming from the sudden,
wholesale smashing of a city. But the only one that greatly interested
Henry Bemis.

He stared down at the blurred page before him.

He began to cry.

THE END

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Time Enough at Last, by Lyn Venable

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