The Fabulous Riverboat

by Philip José Farmer

  Gilbretti hurled a spear and a Sicilian oath at Erik. The Norsemen escaped the effects of both and threw his ax. Its edge buried itself in Gilbretti's chest, and Bloodaxe was down off the ship and on the land and racing after his precious iron weapon, a flint-studded club in hand, before anybody could move. After him came Joe Miller and thirty men. The women shot arrows while a crew launched the last rocket into the toughs. It struck exactly on target, near the rear ranks of the closely arranged Gilbrettians. About forty were either killed, wounded or stunned.

  Within seventy seconds, the Belgian magnate and the Turk were dead, their heads pulped by Joe's ax, and the others were either casualties or running for their lives.

  None got away. The militia saw their chance to get revenge and either beat or stabbed most of them to death. The ten left alive were spread-eagled, and burning bamboo splints were thrust into them. Sam Clemens stood the screaming as long as he was able. He did not want to make himself unpopular by cutting the fun too short and so he tried to ignore the spectacle.

  Lothar von Richthofen said that he certainly understood the desire to hurt by those who had been hurt. But he would not put up with this barbarity a moment longer. He strode up to the nearest sufferer and silenced him with a single chop of his axe. He then ordered the others done away with immediately.

  Erik Bloodaxe might have interfered with this order, since he thought it proper that one's enemies should be put through some torture to teach them and others a lesson. But he had been stunned by a piece of the rock-shrapnel thrown by the rocket explosion and was out of the picture for a while.

  Reluctantly, the militia obeyed, although in their own fashion. They threw the nine survivors into The River, where the fire was certainly put out but not the pain of the splinters themselves. Some thrashed around for several minutes before drowning. And this was strange, since they could have killed the agony in their bowels by killing themselves, knowing they would be alive again and whole again in a short time. Such was the drive of their instincts for survival, they fought to keep their heads above water as long as possible.

  Chapter 11

  * * *

  Digging did not begin at once. First the locals had to be organized and definite administrative, judicial and legislative lines laid down and the military formed. The area constituting the new state had to be defined. Clemens and Bloodaxe argued about this for a while before deciding that three miles each way up and down The River from the site of the digging would make a manageable area. A sort of Maginot line was built on the borders; this consisted of a twenty-foot-wide strip of two-foot-long bamboo stakes, pointing at various angles, protruding from the ground. The line ran from the base of the mountains down to the bank of The River. Huts were built by the Chevauxdefrise, and spearmen and women lived in these as the garrisons.

  A third cheval-de-frise was built on the banks. When this was finished, the dragon ship was dispatched to the point upRiver where there was a flint mine, if the Mysterious Stranger was to be believed. Bloodaxe stayed behind with about fifteen of his men. He put his lieutenant, Snorri Ragnarsson, in charge of the expedition. Snorri was to bargain with the locals for flint by promising them a share of the iron when it was dug up. If the locals refused to part with the flint, then he was to threaten them. Bloodaxe thought that Joe Miller should go with the ship because the Titanthrop's huge size and grotesque features would awe the locals.

  Sam Clemens agreed with the Norseman's logic on this point but he did not like the idea of being separated from Joe. Yet he did not want to go on the ship with Joe, because of what Bloodaxe might do in his absence. The king was bad-tempered and arrogant. If he affronted the newly conquered people, he might cause a revolution which could overwhelm the small number of Vikings.

  Sam strode back and forth in front of his hut, while he smoked and thought furiously. There was iron under the grass, more than enough to realize The Dream, yet he could not even start to dig for it until a multitude of preparations were made. And every step he thought to take was balked because a dozen other problems came up. He was so frustrated, he almost bit through his cigar. The people who were sitting on the flint mine needed something like the sight of Joe to be softened up for cooperation. But if Joe were absent, Bloodaxe might take advantage of this to kill Sam. He would not do it openly, because he feared Joe, but he could easily arrange an accident.

  Sam cursed and sweated. "If I die, I'll be resurrected somewhere else, so far from this place it might take a thousand years to get back on a canoe. Meanwhile, other men will mine the iron and build my Riverboat. Mine! Mine! Not theirs! Mine!"

  At this moment, Lothar von Richthofen ran up to him. "I've located two of the kind of men you're looking for. Only one isn't a man! Imagine that, a female engineer!"

  The man, John Wesley O'Brien, was a mid-twentieth century metallurgical engineer. The woman was half Mongolian, half Russian, and had spent most of her life in mining communities in Siberia.

  Sam Clemens shook hands with them and told them briefly what he had to do now and what he expected to do later.

  O'Brien said, "If there is a big bauxite deposit near here, then we can probably build the kind of ship you want."

  He was very excited, as any man would be who had given up any hope of carrying on his Terrestrial profession here. There were many like him, men and women who wanted to work if for no other reason than to kill time. There were doctors who had nothing to do but set an occasional broken bone, printers who had no type to set or paper to use, mailmen with no mail to deliver, smiths with no horses to shoe, farmers with no crops to grow, housewives with no children to raise, the food already cooked, housecleaning done in fifteen minutes and no marketing to do, salesmen with nothing to sell, preachers whose religion was thoroughly discredited by the existence of this world, bootleggers with no means of making grain alcohol, button makers with no buttons, pimps and whores whose professions were ruined by an excess of amateurs, mechanics with no autos, admen with no ads, carpet makers with only grass and bamboo fibers to work with, cowboys without horses or cattle, painters with no paint or canvas, pianists without pianos, railroad men with no iron, stockbrokers with no stocks to deal in, and so on.

  O'Brien continued, "However, you want a steamboat, and that's not very realistic. You'd have to stop at least once a day to chop wood for fuel, which would mean a long delay even if the locals permitted you to take their limited supply of bamboo and pine trees. Moreover, your axes, the boilers and other parts would wear out long before you reached the end of your journey, and you wouldn't have enough space to carry enough iron for replacements parts. No, what you need are electric motors.

  "Now, there's a man in this area I met shortly after translation here. I don't know where he is just now but he must be somewhere close. I'll find him for you. He's an electrical wizard, a late twentieth-century engineer who knows how to build the type of motors you'll need."

  "Hold your horses!" Sam said. "Where would you get all the tremendous amounts of electrical power you'd need? Would we have to build our own Niagara Falls to carry along with us?"

  O'Brien was a short, slight youth with a plume of almost orange hair and a face with features so delicate he looked effeminate. He had a crooked smile which managed nevertheless to be charming. He said, "It's available everywhere up and down The River."

  He pointed at the mushroom shape of the nearest grailstone. "Three times a day, those stones output an enormous electrical power. What's to prevent us from hooking up power lines to a number of them and storing the discharges to run the boat's motors?"

  Sam goggled for a moment, then said, "Strike me dumb! No, that's a redundant phrase. I am dumb! Right before my eyes, and I never thought of it! Of course!"

  Then he slitted his eyes and lowered his thick tangled eyebrows. "How in hell could you store all that energy? I don't know much about electricity, but I do know that you'd need a storage battery taller than the EiffelTower or a capacitor the size of Pike's Peak."

  O'B
rien shook his head. "I thought so, too, but this fellow, he's a mulatto, half Afrikaans, half Zulu, Lobengula Van Boom, he said that if he had the materials, he could build a storage device – a batacitor, he called it – a ten-meter cube, that could hold ten mega-kilowatts and feed it out a tenth of a volt per second or all at once.

  "Now, if we can mine the bauxite and make aluminum wire, and there are many problems in doing even that, we can use the aluminum in circuits and electrical motors. Aluminum isn't as efficient as copper, but we don't have copper, and aluminum will do the job."

  Sam's fury and frustration disappeared. He grinned, snapped his fingers, and made a little leap into the air. "Find van Boom! I want to talk to him!"

  He puffed away, the end of his cigar as glowing as the images in his mind. Already, the great white paddle-wheeler was steaming (no, electrificating?) up The River with Sam Clemens in the pilothouse, Sam Clemens wearing a Riverboat captain's cap of Riverdragon leather on his head, Sam Clemens, captain of the fabulous, the unique paddle-wheeler, the great vessel churning on the start of its million mile-plus journey. Never such a boat, never such a River, never such a trip! Whistles blowing, bells clanging, the crew made up of the great and near-great men and women of all time, from mammoth subhuman Joe Miller of 1,000,000 B.C. to the delicate-bodied but vast-brained scientist of the late twentieth century.

  Von Richthofen brought him back to the immediate reality.

  "I'm ready to start digging for the iron. But what do you intend to do about Joe?"

  Sam groaned and said, "I can't make up my mind what to do. I'm as tense as a diamond cutter before he makes the first tap. One wrong thing, and the Kohinoor shatters. Okay, okay! I'll send Joe. I have to take a chance. But being without him makes me feel as helpless as a honey dipper without a bucket, a banker on Black Friday. I'll tell Bloodaxe and Joe, and you can start your crew. Only we ought to have a ceremony. We'll all have a snort, and I'll dig the first shovelful."

  A few minutes later, his stomach warmed by a big shot of Bourbon, cigar in mouth, his speech finished, Sam started to dig. The bamboo shovel had a sharp edge, but the grass was so tough and thick that it was necessary to use the shovel as a machete. Sweating, swearing, declaring that he had always hated physical exertion and was not cut out to be a ditch-digger, Sam chopped away the grass. On driving the now-dulled shovel into the earth, Sam found he could not bring up even a half shovelful. It would be necessary to hack away at the grass and the dirt between.

  "By the great horn spoon!" he said, flinging the shovel down on the ground. "Let some peasant who's cut out for this drudgery do it! I'm a brain-worker!"

  The crowd laughed and set to work with flint and bamboo knives and flint axes. Sam said, "If that iron is ten feet down, it'll take us ten years to find it. Joe, you'd better bring back plenty of flint, otherwise we're done for."

  "Do I have to go?" Joe Miller said. "I'll mithth you, Tham."

  "You gotta go, as all men do," Sam said. "Don't worry about me."

  Chapter 12

  * * *

  During the next three days, a hole ten feet across and one foot deep was made. Von Richthofen organized the teams so that a new one replaced the previous crew every fifteen minutes. There was no lack of fresh and strong diggers, but delays were caused by the flaking of new flint tools and the making of new bamboo tools. Bloodaxe growled about the damage to the axes and knives, saying that if they were to be attacked, the stone weapons could not cut through the skin of a baby. Clemens begged him for the dozenth time to be allowed to use the steel ax, and Bloodaxe refused.

  "If Joe were here, I'd have him take the ax away from him," Clemens said to Lothar. "And where is Joe, anyway? He should be back by now, empty-handed or bearing gifts."

  "I think we ought to send somebody in a dugout to find out," von Richthofen said. "I'd go myself, but I think you still need me around to protect you from Bloodaxe."

  "If something's happened to Joe, we'll both need protection," Sam said. "All right, that Pathan, Abdul, can be our spy. He could wriggle unnoticed through a basket of rattlesnakes."

  At dawn, two days later, Abdul paddled in. He woke Sam and Lothar, who were sleeping in the same hut for mutual protection. In broken English, he explained that Joe Miller was tied up in a strongly built bamboo cage. Abdul had tried to get a chance to free Joe, but the cage had an around-the-clock guard.

  The Vikings had been greeted with friendliness and sympathy. The chief of the region had seemed surprised that his flint for their iron would be a very good trade. He had held a big party to celebrate the agreement and had given his guests as much liquor and dreamgum as they wished. The Norse had been overcome while they snored drunkenly. Joe was asleep but had awakened while being tied up. With bare hands only, he had killed twenty men and injured fifteen before the chief had half stunned him with a dub against the back of his neck. The blow would have broken anybody else's neck; it just reduced his fighting ability enough to permit men to swarm over him and restrain him while the chief hit him twice over the head.

  "The chief knows Joe is a mighty warrior," Abdul said. "Greater than Rustam himself. I overheard some men talking, and they said their chief plans to use Joe as a hostage. He wants to become partners in the iron mine. If refused, he will not kill Joe but will make a slave out of him, although I doubt he can do that. He'll attack us, kill us, get the iron for himself.

  "He can do it. He's building a huge fleet, many small ships carrying forty men each, hastily put together but serviceable to transport his army. He'll make an all-out attack with warriors armed with flint weapons, bows and arrows and heavy war-boomerangs." "And who is this would-be Napoleon?" Sam said.

  "His men called him King John. They say that he ruled over England when men wore armor and fought with swords. In the time of Saladin. His brother was a very famous warrior, Richard the Lion-Hearted."

  Sam cursed and said, "John Lackland! The blackhearted pussyfooting Prince John! So rotten that the English swore never again to have a king named John! I'd sooner have a scoundrel like Leopold of Belgium or Jim Fiske after my hide!"

  Thirty minutes later, Sam was shoved into an even deeper gloom. This time, the message came by word-of-mouth grapevine. Thirty miles downRiver, a huge fleet was sailing toward them. This consisted of sixty large single-masters, each carrying forty warriors. The leader of the armada was a king of an area which had been just outside the destruction caused by the meteorite. His name was Joseph Maria von Radowitz.

  "I read about him in school!" von Richthofen said. "Let's see. He was born in 1797, died about 1853, I believe. He was an artillery expert and a good friend of Fredrick Wilhelm IV of Prussia. He was called 'The Warlike Monk' because he was a general who also had strict religious views. He died when he was about fifty years old, a disappointed man because he had been dropped from favor. So now he's alive again, young, and no doubt trying to impose his Puritanism upon others, and killing those who don't agree with him."

  An hour later, he got word that King John's fleet had set sail.

  "John's force will get here first," he told Bloodaxe. "They'll be faster because the wind and current will be helping them."

  "Teach your grandmother to suck eggs," Bloodaxe snorted. "So what do you plan to do?"

  "Smash the Englishman first and then destroy the German later," Bloodaxe replied. He swung his ax and said, "By the shattered hymen of Thor's bride! My ribs still hurt, but I will ignore the pain!"

  Sam did not argue. When he was alone with Lothar, he said, "Fighting against hopeless odds until you die is all very admirable. But it doesn't pay off in preferred stock. Now, I know you're going to think I'm as spineless as a cockroach, Lothar, but I have a dream, a great dream, and it transcends all ordinary ideas of faithfulness and morality. I want that boat, Lothar, and I want to pilot it to the end of The River, no matter what!

  "If we had a fighting chance, I wouldn't suggest this. But we don't. We're outnumbered and have inferior weapons. So I'm going to suggest that we ma
ke a deal."

  "With whom?" von Richthofen said. He was grim and pale.

  "With John. He may be the most treacherous king in the world, although the competition is fierce, but he's the one most likely to throw in with us. Radowitz's fleet is bigger than his, and even if John somehow managed to defeat it, he'd be so weakened we could take him. But if we ganged up with John, we could give Radowitz such a beating he'd take off like a hound dog, tail closed down like a latch."

  Van Richthofen laughed and said, "For a moment I thought you were going to propose that we hide in the mountains and then come out to offer our services to the victor. I could not stand the idea of playing coward, of leaving these people to fight alone."

  "I'll be frank," Clemens said, "even if I am Sam. I'd do that if I thought it was the only way. No, what I'm suggesting is that we get rid, somehow, of Bloodaxe. He'll never go along with taking John in as a partner."

  "You'll have to watch John as if he were a poisonous snake," the German said. "But I see no other way out. Nor do I think it's treachery to kill Bloodaxe. It's just insurance. He'll get rid of you the first chance he gets."

  "And we'll not really be killing him," Sam said. "Just removing him from the picture."

  Clemens wanted to talk more about what they should do, but von Richthofen said that there had been enough talk. Sam was putting off the taking of action – as usual. Things had to be done right now. Sam gave a sigh and said, "I suppose so." "What's the matter?" Lothar said.

  "I'm suffering from guilt before I've even incurred it," Sam replied. "I feel like a yellow dog, although there's no reason I should. None at all! But I was born to feel guilty about everything, even about being born."

  Lothar threw his hands up in disgust and strode off, saying over his shoulder, "Follow me or hang back. But you can't expect me to think of you as the captain of our boat. Captains don't drag their feet."