Vienna in the year 2032: »Friendly greenish settlements line the city«, skyscrapers are growing in the city center, »but old Steffl is still there and takes on all the high-rise buildings«. In the archives of the City of Vienna, the old archivist tells his grandson how old Vienna tried to oppose the new era a hundred years ago. "Old Vienna" is a conservative, anti-progressive place here, from which social democracy has made a "red island in the sea of capitalism".
Among the travelers of varied backgrounds that meet and interact on one night at Union Depot, a metropolitan train station, are Chick and his friend Scrap Iron, both newly released from prison after serving time for vagrancy.
A group of drinking, smoking and card-playing society women are getting obesely flabby. They go to a gym where various methods are used to reduce their fat.
Eight Girls concerns an all-female rowing team with its own club-house. One of the team announces she pregnant and finds herself torn between men (father and fiancé) who want the child aborted and the women who want her to keep it and bring it up at the club.
Tex Robbins, a Texas Ranger, posing as "Wolf" Cassidy, a notorious Chicago gangster, works his way into the rustling gang and hideout of "Three-Star" Henley, but his plans go wrong and he has to fight his way to victory.
A foreword warns against the peril of yellow journalism, and the story illustrates it by following events in the upstate New York town of Cornwall after prominant financier George Ferguson is killed.
