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Page 10.
 What a fiasco.
In the gray dawn, Louis stood on the rough surface of the heliport atop the Raritania Business Building and cursed the day he'd heard of Cindy or Joe Ramo. He'd slogged through the rain, holding a copy of his precious book wrapped in cellophane. The studio had been in a dingy brick building, at the top of a long flight of rickety wood stairs, complete with a fat hooker in the doorway and a wino sagging in a last testament of watery barf.
Despite misgivings, Louis had gone in, shaken Joe Ramo's hand -- a little man of mixed race, with a snide, too-wide mouth and blue-black hair rolling in greasy waves -- and signed a contract of some sort. "Just while you're on," Cindy had explained. She was a skinny woman of fifty or so, with scraggly gray hair, huge glasses, and old acne scars filled with a pink paste. "It's for the insurance," she'd said, "in case you fall down and break your neck, or someone in the audience breaks it for you."
"Nobody will break my neck," Louis had said. He'd smoothed down his expensive New York-tailored overcoat. Her eyes had followed his hands, blinking once as his left hand hopped over the bump where a Luger pistol rested by his waist.
Cindy had cleared her throat and said in a whisper: "It clears us of any responsibility, in other words."
What a fiasco. He'd sat under hot lights while an audience fit for a zoo shouted insults and made rude noises. Somehow, in that fog of cigarette smoke and lynch mob rumbling, Joe Ramo held court with an iron hand. After ten minutes, when Joe Ramo waved a copy of "The Future of the Race" in the air to a crescendo of boos, Louis grabbed the book from him, threw his tiny little speaker into the audience, and departed with a wall of laughter and boos behind him.
Out on the sidewalk, in the relative peace and quiet of swishing traffic and plashing gutters, several big, tough young men waited for him. As he reached for his Luger, they showed their hands disarmingly and he took his hand from the gun but remained wary. They wore outlandish clothing -- tight-fitting jeans, torn shirts, colorful bandannas, steel-toed boots -- and their heads were shaved to a gritty stubble. "We heard you in there," their leader said. "Man, you were right on."
Louis shook his head. "I was what?"
"Like, rad, baby," said a second young man.
"Dude, that book!"
"You want to read my book?"
They laughed. "Man, we ain't got time for reading. Maybe you'd like to explain to us what it's all about."
"Yeah, man, we're up for it. Heil Hitler!" They offered sloppy but sincere fascist salutes.
Louis nearly laughed. He could see they hung on him for his every word. "Those fools in there were not about to listen."
"Amen, bro." "Right on." "You're talking now."
"You men want to be of service?"
"Yeah!" "Oh yes!" "Dude!"
"I could use the services of a car. And a safe place to hide out."
They clapped him on the back. "Aw man, we gotcha covered."
Their leader, a 24-year-old who called himself Turk, said solemnly: "We may be like maggots in this giant trashcan, but we got a van, we got connections, we can help you. Say, you fixin' to bump someone?"
Louis grinned. "Not quite yet. Say, do you have a telephone where you can be reached?"
"Sure!" Turk said, fumbling until he found a pencil stub and a grimy pocket notebook. As he wrote, he said: "Say, man, you from another country or something? You gotta little accent?"
After they had parted company under a corner street lamp, Louis walked alone toward the Matterhorn Motel. He felt light-headed, confused by rapidly changing events. Now there was not only the pressure of time, the grim crush of failure, the bright hope in the next editor he'd selected for his book, but this unlikely new alliance. Rain set in, whipping the streets in windy cascades, and he ducked into the maw of one of the sky-scraping clock tower buildings. Flitting like a shadow past an elderly guard, he clambered nocturnal flights of stairs.
When he emerged on the roof, the rain had let up somewhat. Fools, Louis thought. What a wasted future, when so much could have been done. He walked in a blistering wet wind to the edge and looked down upon honking streets. He would show them. Somebody here would have to listen. This was a junk world, addicted to noisy radios and zeniths. Few people read and discussed books. That was how it had always been. Books were king. Forget these warped brains with their radios. He must reach a publisher and see his ideas in print.
Louis stared at a skyscape of mournful clock faces.
Somewhere down there, another editor was perusing his manuscript, entitled "The Future of Race." That editor was one Robert Courtney, of the Modern Publishing Company. Louis had chosen carefully; Modern seemed like an open-minded publisher, and Robert Courtney was neither a Jew, nor a member of any other inferior race, but an upstanding gentleman of English heritage.
As Louis Beering stood on the wind-whipped heights of the Raritania Business Building, he congratulated himself on the choice of Robert Courtney. The Fuehrer had made much of the affinity between the Germanic and English peoples. Hopefully, Mr. Courtney would finally be one to see sense in this modern age of foolishness. It was probably still not too late to save the world for the master race.
He stared across the blighted cityscape. How drab and sad the buildings looked. Where were the marvelous flying arches he had expected? The thousands of bee-shaped monoplanes buzzing among spires? The looping walkways in the sky?
Ah you fools, Louis thought, the past had such promise. The future is ruined, for now, but we can change that.
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