Yesterday morning, I was awakened by a loud whirring outside my house. Peering out the window, I saw a robotic Oc-tocopter (NN, Mar. 2014, p. 116), with the American Nuclear Society logo painted on its side, land on my stoop. It deposited a flat brown cardboard package on the welcome mat and then tilted its rotors at me in greeting as if to say, "This is for you." Then without further ceremony, it whirred upward out of sight into the cosmos. Eagerly I threw on my robe, bounded downstairs as quickly as a person my age can bound, retrieved the package from the mat, and tore it open. It was the copy of Gail Marcus's book, Nuclear Firsts: Milestones on the Road to Nuclear Power Development, that I had ordered on the Internet a couple of days before.
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