Snake Oil - Waiting For The Galactic Bus - Snake Oil - Waiting for the Galactic Bus Part 16
Library

Snake Oil - Waiting for the Galactic Bus Part 16

"You?" Booth derided. "The bawdy-house school of fencing?"

"Oh, did I tax you beyond competence?"

"Beyond patience, Kean. You know the disengage one-two-three always comes before the parry-quatre-thrust-lunge and you always forget. Not to mention that you lunged when I was out of my light."

"Allowance must be made for colonials. Let us rehearse once more," Kean said. "And whilst we do, remember who was called in his day the very Sun's Bright Child - and who merely assassin."

"Oh, base prompter's boy!" Booth recoiled, wounded. "Come you over me still with that? I shot one Republican. Have at you, villain."

Ned Kean crouched en garde - then lowered his point. "Stay, it's no fun without an audience. She sorrowed with heart, that girl, and raged with natural fire. But that accent . . . ?"

"Allegheny," Booth agreed. "Eerie, isn't it?"

"Nor did I recognize your death music."

"Oh, that? Walton: the passacaglia from the film Henry V. Falstaff's death."

"The death of a clown; how apt," Kean sniped. "Now my choice was Shostakovich."

Booth sniffed. "Bit much on the kettles and brass."

"It likes me well. The ghost and duel music from Hamlet. Ah, those minor thirds in the horns - ominous, fated. I say, Dimitri?" Ned Kean petitioned the dark overhead. "Could I hear my entrance again, old boy? Rather fancied it. And, Wilksey, do shorten those pauses when you die. One tends to nap."

Together in their universe, the circle of light, the actors listened to the reprise of music and were stirred.

15 - Aryans in the fast lane

No pain, nothing clear except terror.

When Roy could think straight, he found himself in a small chamber inviting as a dentist's waiting room. Table, lamp, modern chair, a copy of Soldier of Fortune, a worn book with no dust jacket - and to Roy's huge relief a cotton bathrobe hanging on the coat rack. He put it on immediately; he found it hard to feel secure fully clothed, but naked was unbearable.

Time, if there was such a thing for him now, passed and kept on passing. Nothing. No sound. No one came. His tension began to ebb to the point where he could relate to his surroundings. Dr. Corbett once had a waiting room just like this, and the magazines were just as out-of-date. The copy of Soldier of Fortune was six months old. Roy paged through the book's first leaves. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, who was one of his gods along with George Lincoln Rockwell and Rambo.

"Never knew he wrote a book."

He tried a few pages and gave up. Hitler was an unappreciated hero of the race struggle, but whoever wrote it in English made it boring as hell. Suffice to say, Roy never spent an evening trapped with the inexhaustible Austrian.

More waiting. Roy thought of Charity: where did they take her? More to the point right now: what would they do to him?

The very silence was oppressive. "If this is it for eternity," he judged aloud to shatter it, "I think I can handle it."

When the door opened behind him, he jumped clear out of the chair, clutching the bathrobe around him.

"Roy Stride? I'm Drumm."

"I didn't do anyth - "

Roy caught himself, not knowing whether to be scared or plain laugh. A squat, unimposing little man, Drumm was decked - stuffed, rather, into the dress finery of the White Paladins: tailored camouflage fatigues, white silk scarf and red beret, web belt under a double strain to contain his girth and support the heavy Magnum revolver in its tooled holster. With all the authority these might have lent, Drumm didn't make it. His paunch betrayed the military intentions of his blouse. His glasses were thick enough to make his eyes look like small, distant clams within concentric rings. The vague mustache added no character, merely coexisted with his upper lip. Drumm removed his beret with the care of a cardinal divesting after Mass to reveal a toupee neither subtly matched nor firmly allied with his sparse indigenous hair. He greeted Roy with the fervor of adoration.

"At last the day. We've been waiting, sir."

Roy backed away, trying to keep the bathrobe closed. "Hey, look, I just got here."

"On a trumped-up charge."

"I'm innocent . . . who are you?"

"My cause is yours," Drumm said with dramatic urgency.

"You with the Paladins?"

"We're everywhere." Drumm patted the toupee for evidence of wanderlust since last contact. The two clams fixed on Roy. "We know you; we intercept the dossiers. And Charity? Was she pure?"

"We're gonna get married," Roy maintained, but the tense was obviously wrong. "Were gonna get married."

"I mean was she Aryan?"

"One hunnert percent pure White American Aryan like me. The purest."

"And like so many capable men, you are here through the judgment of inferiors." Drumm rubbed his pudgy hands together. "As myself. I was with Rockwell in Arlington."

Roy regarded Drumm with new respect. "The American Nazi Party." The last of his fear vanished. Drumm was no threat but an ally with major-league credentials.

"With me to guide him, George Rockwell formed and headed the ANP. He saw the merit and the truth in the plays I wrote that no one would produce; that no one here will do anything but throw back at me, thanks to Jason Blythe, our pristine prime minister. The truth of the world was in my work, Roy Stride. And that truth is the God-ordained and inevitable supremacy of the White Race."

Roy even found the composure to grin. "Right on."

"Your hand, sir."

"Gimme five."

"There are those who guide, those who lead, many who follow. I am a prophet; you may be much more than that. Wait." Drumm peered suspiciously about the chamber with an air of habitual caution, bent to inspect the inside of the lampshade and under the table, ample rump presented to Roy, who quelled a profitless urge to boot it.

Satisfied, Drumm beckoned him close. "I don't think we're bugged, but Blythe's spies are everywhere. All of us are marked. We must move soon. You may be the leader we have waited for. Rockwell was shot, cut down in his prime. His followers wait even here to carry on his cause, needing only the day and the man. Are you fit for it? A leader seizes the moment. Will you?"

Will I? Roy felt ambition surge in him like a shot of whiskey. Damned, no chance at all, call thata trial we had? All of you just watch. Just one chance, all I ask, and he's handing it to me. Get set up, find Charity, and won't be any son of a bitch on two legs big enough to fuck me over anymore.

"Okay. Your people ready?"

"And waiting. A coup," Drumm said. "A purge. One lightning strike."

This wasn't hell but heaven. "Weapons?"

"All we need, the latest. AR rifles, ammo, C-4 plastic, LAW rockets, men in the right place ready to move. The government has a rotted will; the danger is in fanatics and interference from Topside. But the time and stars are right, Roy Stride!"

"Lead me to it." Roy felt marvelous - until second thoughts nudged him. "No, wait. I gotta get some decent clothes." Not even Hitler could conquer in a bathrobe.

"Before all else." Drumm clicked his heels and flung open the door. "The Whip & Jackboot will furnish all you need. Run by a nigger and a Jew, but we can't purge them all."