A bloated figure works its laborious way through the night streets of Düsseldorf, keeping away from the lights, seeking a refuge in dimness, pliable flesh and bottles of darkness – it’s Pierre Périte, from Liège originally, and he’s entering a basement containing a small, deeply degenerated Satansbrut of deadbeats, too disgusting for the taverns and beerhalls: drug addicts, prostitutes and boozehounds spread across the floor, twisted into swastikas, a woman offering her bottom to a man too drunk to count his own fingers, yet somehow still standing, pants around his ankles. The stink of liquor, piss and God knows what else is so pervasive, it’s coming out of the floorboards, mixing with various mind-fogging smokes and the smells of unhealthily-prepared foods into a demonic fart of an atmosphere that gets into the hair of Périte’s globoid belly, where it mixes with his bodily sweats and greases into a veritable sheen. This fat man has a fat wad of marks with him, and he’s ready to pay handsomely for some discreet entertainment, quality food and fine beverages. But don’t go thinking he’s some kind of mindless hedonist, here – his mighty appetites are matched by a mighty brain, and a noble heart besides. Under his arm, he has a copy of La Guerre du feu, which he has nearly read all the way through – he has read nearly every story published to date in French, and what little he could find in German, dealing with other times, alien life forms, spectacular technologies, fantastical human progress. Somehow, sometime, there would be an event which would cut the catapult’s rope, and the world would be sent hurtling toward utopia, a spontaneous scientific revolution that would, through means that our base, modern minds cannot even fathom, ensure profound and lasting satisfaction for the entire species, the biological secrets of human happiness unlocked. The thought of this epiphany takes up a great deal of his mental space, and sometimes he even carries the conceit that it would occur to him specifically. To him, Germany, with its deeply biological politics, seems the place this would happen. If at first biology was to be the queen of the sciences in society, it was only a matter of time before physics, chemistry and mathematics rose as well, each with an equal crown, forming a hydraic monarch in the mind of every citizen, who would all begin to see the world objectively, without the troublesome rumblings of the less sophisticated cranial meats which, alas and alack, he knows too well.