Lessing had had enough. “Come on, damn it!” he snarled at Wrench. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
“Keep your socks on! We’ve got work to do, and now’s the best chance we’ll ever have! It’ll take a minimum of half an hour for reinforcements to get to us. We ought to be done by then. We’ve got a world to rebuild!”
“Oh, yes,” Eighty-Five said cheerily. “That sounds nice. Let’s do that!”
If we divide mankind into three categories — founders of culture, bearers of culture, and destroyers of culture — the Aryan alone can be seen as representing the first category. It was he who laid the groundwork and erected the walls of every great structure in human culture. Only the shape and color of such structures are to be attributed to the individual characteristics of the various nations. It is the Aryan who has furnished the great building-stones and the plans for the edifices of human progress; only the way in which these plans have been executed is to be attributed to the qualities of each individual race.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sunday, April 12, 2043
“And why not hold our first American Party Congress here next week?” Jennifer Caw stuck out her truculent chin still farther.
“Attracts attention,” Liese argued patiently. “Here in America? On April twentieth… the First Führer’s birthday? Noticed!”
“Good!” Bill Goddard yawned hugely into his breakfast plate. It had once held a dozen hotcakes; now it resembled the floor of a hyena cage.
“We’re part of Outram’s big national think-out here in New Orleans: what to do about Starak, Pacov, and the rest. If we quietly hold a side meeting of our own Party at the same time, nobody’ll pay any attention. We need to talk to our American leadership… plus anybody else who’s inclined our way.” Jennifer wadded up her napkin inexorably, as though disposing of both the subject and any benighted dissenters. “We don’ t need to say a word about our origins… our heritage. Who’ll care? The world’s got bigger problems.”
“Yes. but….”
“But what, dammit? Sure, the Jews would panic if we went around draped in swastikas, but as far as the world knows the Party of Humankind is just one more conservative organization among many, all under Outram’s conservative, ultra-patriotic, America-forever banner. He’s playing host to them all… even some right-of-center Jewish groups. So long as nobody yells ‘Nazi!’ we’re all ‘grass green,’ as the Bangers say. And we’re focusing on stuff everybody wants. Look who— all’s here: people from the old fuddy-duddy political parties, Catholics, Protestants, Born-Agains, Bangers, businessmen, students, farmers, good ole boys. Whites, Blacks, Jews, Chicanos, Arabs… anybody from anywhere… all billing and cooing together over in the Convention Center like… like….”
“Turkey doves?” Wrench supplied with malicious helpfulness.
“I wish we could have our convention in a friendlier city,” Goddard grumbled unhappily. “New Orleans is too racially mixed, too goddamned ‘liberal.’” With him, “liberal” was a bleep-word.
Liese made a sarcastic face at him across the pink plastic table. “Friendly like you? Scare people away!” She sat curled beside Lessing in the farthest comer of the coffee-shop booth. “Popular support? Not your way!”
Goddard’s broad nostrils flared, his eyes blazed, and he opened his mouth to reply.
“Shush,” Jennifer laid scarlet-tipped fingers on his wrist. “You know what we’re doing and why. Our immediate goals are to stop Pacov and Starak, end the half-war in Europe, and put civilization back together. We get in on the ground floor. No more exile out in the Third World where we can’t influence the mainstream. We do exactly what the First Führer did: organize, build a power base, appeal to other groups with similar views, even though they may not be identical, and work like hell! Later, if we do get anywhere, we can worry about restructuring society. Now we push for traditional, positive, American values: peace, prosperity, strength, enterprise, reconstruction, and moral and physical well-being.”
“You quote your own speeches beautifully… or rather the speeches Liese writes for you.” Goddard rumbled. “But you don’t mention the thing that sets us off from all the others: the ending of racial integration and the moral and spiritual mongrelization that goes with it! We ought to say what we really want, and let the chips… and the weak sisters… fall where they may!”
Wrench rattled his fork. “Nobody’s hiding anything. It’s all in our literature. We’re just not emphasizing some of our longer-range objectives in view of the present emergency.” He sounded as though he were reading from one of Outram’s interminable presidential memos. “Anyway, racial policy is only one of our planks. There ‘re others, some just as important.”
Goddard snorted. “You’ve been out in the ‘Third World’ too long… or just out in the sun! You don’t know what it’s like to hold our views and live here in the United Stales. I may not be a ‘Descendant’ like some of you, but I’ve seen it up close. We’ve got enemies, and they’re not going to give up, go away, or let us be. My father was falsely accused, hunted down, and shot by some of the ‘guardians of American liberties.’ His friends were hounded by the Jewish-run press and the government’s ‘special interest’ agencies. My mother ‘broke the law’… the Anti-Defamation Amendment of 2005… when she accused the Vigilantes for Zion of having my father killed, and I remember what they did to her and to my older brother. The way the media told it, we were like some kind of rabid monsters! Me, they just shoved into a school for brainwashing. Later I ‘accidentally’ got convicted of a burglary I didn’t commit, and school turned into a prison cell… until Mr. Mulder’s friends found me and got me out. I grew up hard. Real hard.”
“So did I,” Wrench stated flatly. He almost never talked about himself. They waited, but the little man only licked his lips and stared down at his plate.
“I’ve said my piece,” Goddard insisted. “We’ve got to take a tougher line; otherwise we’ll end up where my dad did: on a slab in the morgue. The cops and the coroner stood around smirking and telling me and my mother that the holes in his body must’ve been made by moths! They ‘lost’ the charge-sheet… the whole dossier. We have to be tough.”
“We go legitimate,” Liese said. “Party’s orders.”
Goddard grunted and looked away. The coffee shop was fulclass="underline" military people, officials from a score of government agencies, a scattering of businessmen. There were no tourists; the cataclysm of Starak was still too fresh.
Jennifer saw Lessing and Liese watching her. She winked at them and let her nails stray along Goddard’s bristle-thatched bare arm. To push the man any further would lead to a quarrel. Goddard gave her a possessive grin: Mr. Mucho Macho about to drag his prize off to his cave. Hans Borchardt wouldn’t like that, but then he was over at the Convention Center orchestrating the morning’s events.
Jennifer moved her hand away: mission accomplished. She said, “Already we’ve had people asking what we mean by the ‘ supremacy of the Western ethnos.’ Yet you’d be surprised: after all the world’s just been through, some meek, little liberal lambs find themselves very comfortable in our camp.”
Wrench hated to let any argument drop without a final word. He rubbed at his wounded shoulder, now mostly healed, and pointed his fork across the table at Goddard. “You linientreue Old Guard! You march, you sing the Horst Wessel Lied, you wear sexy uniforms, and you attract so much crappy publicity you might as well be working for the opposition! You don’t convince anybody! Your only members are the guys you started with… plus,” he sang, “four FBI agents, three CIA operatives, two kikibirds… and an Israeli in a pear tree!” He waved his fork in time to the old Christmas carol.