By some sixth sense—not to mention the mighty din that the column sent as a herald before it—the people of Walder were alerted to its passage long enough beforehand to line the streets before their sturdy and spotless brick homes as Feric's car sped by. The clean concrete streets, the bright houses with their lawns and flower patches, the robust working folk in their clean blues, grays, and browns, the shopkeepers in their white tunics trimmed with all sorts of piping, the healthy-cheeked children—all presented a most pleasant aspect to Feric's eye as he drove past the crowded walkways. The scene spoke well of the Helder gene pool and the healthy quality of the life of the city; it was bracing to view so many fine specimens of true humanity among such spotless surroundings.
As the column drove deeper into the city, the crowds on the walkways thickened somewhat, and the buildings grew somewhat larger; four- and five-story apartment dwellings dominated now, rather than private houses. They too were of brick, much of it glazed in bright colors, and were graced with all manner of ornately carved wooden facades and private balconies. Trees and shrubbery provided shade and a soothing spectacle to the eye. The folk in this neighborhood seemed to Feric to be somewhat less prosperous, for their garb was somewhat drabber and the shops a bit plainer, but he found the cleanliness and repair of everything in sight nothing less than exemplary.
Here, too, the street was wider, and there was traffic of sorts which was constrained to scatter out of the path of the motorized parade: great numbers of bicycles, some gas cars and motorcycles, steamtrucks of various sorts, and a municipal roadsteamer or two. Every time the column was forced to swerve around some oafish vehicle that was unable to clear the road in time, the command car and the motorcycles roared around the roadblock without slackening speed, and with a great loud rapping of the motorcycles' engines, to the delight of the crowds on the walkway, who broke into spontaneous cheering. The ragged army of bicyclists and assorted motorized vehicles that trailed along in the van of the storm troop had to follow the line of the parade as best they could.
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The proportion of shops to residential buildings increased as the parade neared the center of the city, and the buildings themselves were more imposing. Many reached ten or even fifteen stories in height and they were constructed of brick or concrete or cement, faced with marble, brasswork, or carved stone fa?ades. On street level, the buildings housed broad-windowed shops offering a rich variety of goods: foods of all sorts, wearing ap-parel, steam engines for the home with slave devices, home furnishings of every description, paintings and wall hangings, statuary, even private gas cars for those who could afford them. Judging from the sounds of machinery that could be heard and the bustling workers Feric glimpsed occasionally through the upper windows, the upper stories of these great buildings were devoted to craft and industry. No doubt many of the goods offered for sale in the shops below were turned out right on the spot.
There was a certain amount of dust in the air in this beehive of commerce and industry, but still the streets were free of any sort of offal, the walkways in every way admirably maintained and inviting. What a far cry from the ghastly sweat pits of Gormond! Feric could sense the power of the city all around him in these precincts. No one could doubt that the racial genotype which constructed cities such as these was the genetic superior of any other population of sapient beings on the face of the earth. The world was rightfully Helder by dint of evolutionary fitness.
Here in the commercial center of the city, the crowds, stopping along the walkways as the spectacle roared by with a grand flourish of scarlet and swastikas, were quite impressed, and many of the good folk shouted out their spontaneous approval. Though few or none of them could have any idea of what the parade was about, or who the hero riding in state was, Feric felt constrained to reward their instinctive approval with an occasional modest Party salute. The good people would comprehend the significance of the gesture soon enough, and the spirit of enthusiasm that was being generated surely required some formal acknowledgment.
Feric was delighted at the great throngs that greeted the motorcade^ as it debouched upon the Emerald Promenade, the great wide boulevard which ran through the 86
cultural and governmental heart of the city; throngs appropriate to the heroic scale of the official architecture.
