Editing Time Enough at Last (section)

==Plot==
Bank teller and avid [[bookworm]] Henry Bemis reads [[David Copperfield (novel)|''David Copperfield'']] while serving a customer. He is so engrossed in the novel that he attempts to regale the increasingly annoyed woman with information about the characters, and shortchanges her. Bemis' angry boss, and later his nagging wife, both complain to him that he wastes far too much time reading "[[doggerel]]". As a cruel joke, his wife asks him to read poetry to her from one of his books; he eagerly obliges, only to find that she has crossed out the text on every page. Seconds later, she destroys the book by ripping the pages from it.

The next day, as usual, Henry takes his [[lunch break]] in the [[bank vault|bank's vault]], where his reading cannot be disturbed. Moments after he sees a [[newspaper headline]], which reads "[[thermonuclear weapon|H-Bomb]] Capable of Total Destruction", an enormous explosion outside shakes the vault, knocking Bemis unconscious. After regaining consciousness and recovering his thick glasses, Bemis emerges from the vault to find the bank demolished and everyone in it dead. Leaving the bank, he sees that the entire city has been destroyed, and realizes that, while a nuclear war has devastated Earth, him being in the vault has saved him.

{{blockquote|Seconds, minutes, hours—they crawl by on hands and knees for Mr. Henry Bemis, who looks for a spark in the ashes of a dead world. A telephone connected to nothingness. A neighborhood bar, a movie, a [[baseball diamond]], a [[hardware store]], the mailbox at what was once his house is now a rubble. They lie at his feet as battered monuments to what was but is no more. Mr. Henry Bemis, on an eight-hour tour of a graveyard.}}

Finding himself alone in the broken world with [[canned food]] to last him a lifetime and no means of leaving to look for other survivors, Bemis succumbs to despair. As he prepares to kill himself using a [[revolver]] he has found, Bemis sees the ruins of a [[public library]] in the distance. Investigating, he finds that the books are still intact; all the books he could ever hope for are his for the reading, and all the time he could ever hope for, to read them without interruption.

His despair gone, Bemis contentedly sorts the books he looks forward to reading for years to come, with no obligations to get in the way. Just as he bends down to pick up a book, he stumbles, and his glasses fall off and shatter. In shock, he picks up the broken remains of his glasses and breaks down in tears, surrounded by books he now can never read.