So it happened. All of the upset people were pacified and the company even provided a new Volume One to replace the damaged one when the full set was delivered. Horrie said nothing further on the subject, unless you counted the two years of ear-splitting expletives emitted from under the car as he maintained a desperate battle to keep it running. And through it all, I read on through the various volumes with such rigid regularity that I didn’t discover the alphabetical index until I got to the end of Volume Ten. But that didn’t matter because I didn’t need it until then anyway. From it all, I probably learned nothing in particular, but that didn’t matter either. What I had gained was a general, if somewhat distorted, picture of everything I would ever want to know, and I felt safe in the knowledge that I could find anything I needed to know in those books, any time I liked.
    As far as I know, those encyclopedias weren’t paid off for a long time. I still have them—the only thing I still possess that my parents bought for me, over sixty years ago. And I still use them too, if the information I need is simplistic enough and will not be bothered by being dated or biased. Mostly I use them to remind me of the way my world was, before the invasion of the Americans.