The Magic Labyrinth

by Philip José Farmer

  From the stern or verge staff, leaning at a forty-five-degree angle from the stern of the lowest deck, was another flag with a light-blue field and bearing a scarlet phoenix.

  Sam's boat was 550 feet and eight inches long. Its breadth over the paddleboxes, or paddlewheel guards, was 115 feet. Its draft was 18 feet when fully loaded.

  There were five major decks. The lowest, the A or boiler deck, held various storage rooms, the enormous batacitor, which rose from a well into the next deck, the four electrical motors which drove the paddlewheels, and a huge boiler.

  The batacitor was an enormous electrical device fifty feet wide and forty-three feet high. One of Sam's engineers had claimed it was a late twentieth- century invention. But, since the engineer had said he'd lived past 1983, Sam suspected that he was an agent. (He was long dead.)

  The batacitor (from battery-capacitor) could take in the enormous voltage discharged from a grailstone within a second and deliver it all within a second or in a mere trickle, as required. It was the power source for the four massive paddlewheel motors and for the other electrical needs of the boat, including the air-conditioning.

  The electrically heated boiler was sixty feet wide and thirty high and was used to heat water for the showers and to heat the cabins, to make alcohol, to power the steam machine guns and fighter-plane steam catapults, and to provide air for the compressed-air cannon and steam for the boat's whistles and the two smokestacks. The smokestacks were misnamed, since they only vented a steam which was colored to simulate smoke when Sam felt like putting on a show.

  At water level in the rear of the boiler deck was a big door which could be raised to admit or let out the two launches and the torpedo-bomber.

  The deck above, the B or main deck, was set back to provide an exterior passageway, called the promenade deck.

  On the Mississippi riverboats which Sam had piloted when young, the lowest deck had been called the main deck and the one above that the boiler deck. But since the boiler in the Not For Hire had its base in the lowest deck, Sam had renamed that the boiler deck. And he called the one above it the main deck. It had been confusing at first for his pilots, who were accustomed to Terrestrial usage, but they had gotten used to it.

  Sometimes, when the boat was anchored off the bank of a peaceable area, Sam gave the crew shore leave (except for the guards, of course). Then he would conduct a tour for the local high .muckymucks. Dressed in a white fishskin-leather jacket, a long white kiltcloth, and white calf-length boots and wearing a white leather captain's hat, he would take his guests from top to bottom of the boat. Of course, he and some marines kept a sharp eye on them, since the contents of the Not For Hire must have proved very tempting to landlubbing stay- at- homes.

  Puffing on a cigar between his sentences, Sam would explain everything, well, almost everything, to his curious party.

  Having led them through the A or boiler deck, Sam would then take them up the steps to the B or main deck.

  "Navy people would call this series of steps a ladder," he said. "But since most of my crew were landlubbers, and since we do have some real ladders aboard, I decided to call the stairways stairways. After all, you go up them on steps, not rungs. In the same spirit, I dictated, despite the outraged protests of naval veterans, that walls should not be called bulkheads but walls. However, I did allow a distinction between your ordinary door and hatches. Hatches are those thick airtight watertight doors which can be locked with a lever mechanism."

  "And what kind of weapon is that?" a tourist would ask. He'd point at a long tubular duraluminum device looking like a cannon and mounted on a platform. Big plastic tubes ran .into the breech.

  "That's a steam machine gun, .80 caliber. It contains a complicated device which permits a stream of plastic bullets, fed through a pipe from below, to be fired at a rapid rate from the gun. Steam from the boiler provides the propulsive power."

  Once, a person who'd been on the Rex said, "King John's boat has a .75-caliber steam machine gun, several of them."

  "Yes. I designed those myself. But the son of a bitch stole the boat, and when I built this one, I made my guns bigger than his."

  He showed them the rows of windows, "not ports but windows," along the exterior passageway. "Which some of my crew have the unmitigated ignorance or brazen gall to call corridors or even halls. Of course, they do that behind my back."

  He took them into a cabin to impress upon them its commodiousness and luxuriousness.

  "There are one hundred and twenty-eight cabins, each of which is fitted for two persons. Notice the snap-up bed, made from brass. Eye-ball the porcelain toilets, the shower stall with hot and cold running water, the wash basin with brass plumbing, the mirrors framed in brass, the oak bureaus. They're not very large, but then we don't carry many changes of clothes aboard. Notice also the weapons rack, which may hold pistols, rifles, spears, swords, and bows. The carpeting is made of human hairs. And pop your eyes out at the painting on the wall. It's an original by Motonobu, A.D. 1476 to 1559, the great Japanese painter who founded the style of painting called Kano. In the next cabin are some paintings by Zeuxis of Heraclea. There are ten in there. As a matter of fact it's Zeuxis' own cabin. He, as you may or may not know, was the great fifth-century B.C. painter born in Heraclea, a Greek colony in south Italy. It's said of him that he painted a bunch of grapes so realistically that birds tried to eat it. Zeuxis won't confirm or deny this tale. For myself, I prefer photographs, but I do have some paintings in my suite. One by a Pieter de Hooch, a Dutch painter of the seventeenth century. Near it is one by the Italian, Giovanni Fattori, A.D. 1825 to 1908. Poor fellow. It may be his final work, since he fell overboard during a party and was smashed to shreds by the paddle wheel. Even if he were resurrected, which isn't likely, he won't find pigments enough for a single painting anywhere but on this boat and the Rex"

  Sam took them along the outside or promenade deck to the bow. Here was mounted an 88-millimeter cannon. So far, Sam said, it hadn't been used, and new gunpowder would soon have to be made to refill the charges.

  "But when I catch up with the Rex, I'll blow Rotten John out of the water with this."

  He also pointed out the rocket batteries on the promenade, heat-seeking missiles with a range of a mile and a half and carrying warheads of forty pounds of plastic explosive.

  "If the cannons miss, these'll shred his ass."

  One of the women tourists was well acquainted with Clemens' work and biographies about him. She spoke in a low voice to her companion. "I never realized that Mark Twain was so bloodthirsty."

  "Madame," Sam said, having overheard her, "I am not bloodthirsty! I am the most pacifistic of men! I loathe violence, and the idea of war puts my bowels into an uproar. If you'd read my essays about war and those who love it, you'd know that. But I have been forced into this situation and many like it. To survive, you must lie better than the liars, deceive more than the, deceivers, and kill the killers first! For me, it's sheer necessity, though justified! What would you do if King John had stolen your boat after you'd gone through years of search for iron and other metals to build your dream! And years of fighting others who wanted to take them away from you after you'd found them, and on every side treachery and murder all directed against you! And what would you do if that John killed some of your good friends and your wife and then sped away laughing at you! Would you let him get away with it? I think not, not if you've got an ounce of courage."

  "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord," a man said.

  "Yes. Maybe. But if there is a Lord, and He works His vengeance, how's He going to do it without using humans as His hands? Did you ever hear of any wicked person being struck down by lightning, except by accident? Lightning also strikes thousands of innocents every year, you know! No, He has to use human beings as His instruments, and who else is better qualified than me? Or more made by circumstances into His keen and purposefully designed tool?"

  Sam was so upset that he had to send a marine up to the grand salon t
o get four ounces of bourbon to settle his nerves.

  Before the drink was brought down to Sam, a tourist muttered, "Bullshit!"

  "Throw that man off the boat!" Sam shouted. And it was done.

  "You're a very angry man," the woman who knew his works said.

  "Yes, ma'am, I am. And with good reason. I was angry on Earth, and I'm angry here."

  The marine brought Sam's whiskey. He downed it quickly and then continued the tour with his good humor restored.

  He led the group up the grand staircase to the grand salon. They paused in the entrance, and the tourists oohed and ahed. It was two hundred feet long and fifty wide and the ceiling was twenty feet above the floor. Along the center of the ceiling was a line of five huge cut-glass chandeliers. There were many windows making the huge room well lighted and many wall and ceiling lights and towering ornate brass floor lamps.

  At the far end was a stage which Clemens said was used for live dramas and comedies and for orchestras. It also had a big screen which could be pulled down when movies were shown.

  "We don't use chemically treated film to shoot these," he said. "We have electronic cameras. We make original films and also remake the classics of Earth. Tonight, for instance, we're showing The Maltese Falcon. We don't have any of the original cast except Mary Astor, whose real name is Lucille Langehanke, and she plays Sam Spade's secretary. Astor was, from what I've been told, miscast. But then I don't suppose most of you know what I'm talking about."

  "I do," the woman who'd called him angry said. "Who played her part in your version?"

  "An American actress, Alice Brady."

  "And who played Sam Spade? I can't imagine anyone else but Humphrey Bogart in the role."

  "Howard da Silva, another American actor. His real name was Howard Goldblatt, if I remember correctly. He's very grateful to get this role, since he claims he never had a chance to show his real acting ability on Earth. But he's sorry that his audience will be so small."

  "Don't tell me the director is John Ford?"

  "I never heard of him," Sam said. "Our director is Alexander Singer."

  "I never heard of him."

  "I suppose so. But I understand that he was well known in Hollywood circles."

  Irked at what he considered an irrelevant interruption, he pointed out the sixty- foot- long polished oak bar on the port side and the neatly stacked row of liquor bottles and decanters. The group was quite impressed with these and the leadglass goblets. They were even more affected by the four grand pianos. Sam told them that he had aboard at least ten great pianists and five composers. For instance, Selim Palmgren (1878-1951), a Finnish composer and pianist who had been prominent in establishing the school of Finnish national music. There was also Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1526-1594), the great composer of madrigals and motets.

  "Amadeus Mozart was once on this boat," Sam said. "He's a really great composer, some say the greatest. But he turned out to be such a failure as a human being, such a sneak and lecher and coward, that I kicked him off the boat."

  "Mozart?" the woman said. "My God, Mozart! You beast, how could you treat such a wonderful composer, a genius, a, god, like that?"

  "Ma'am," Clemens said, "believe me, there was more than enough provocation. If you don't like my attitude, you may leave. A marine will escort you to shore."

  "You're no fucking gentleman," the woman said.

  "Oh, yes, I am."

  5

  * * *

  They went down a passageway toward the bow, passing more cabins. The last one on the right-hand side was Clemens' suite, and he showed them that. Their exclamations of surprise and delight gratified Sam. Across from his cabin, he said, was that of his bodyguard, Joe Miller, and Joe's mate.

  Beyond his quarters was a small room which contained an elevator. This led into the lowest of the three rooms of the pilothouse structure. This was the E deck or observation room, furnished with overstuffed chairs, lounges, and a small bar. There were also mounts in the windows for machine guns which shot plastic or wooden bullets.

  The next room of the pilothouse structure was the F or cannon deck, called so because of the emplacement of four 20-millimeter steam cannons. These were fed ammunition by belts enclosed in a shaft which ran from the boiler deck.

  The very highest deck, the pilothouse or control or G deck, was twice as large as the one beneath it.

  "Big enough to hold a dance in," said Clemens, who didn't mind exaggeration at all, especially when he was the exaggerator.

  He introduced them to the radio and radar operators, the chief executive officer, the communications officer, and the chief pilot. The latter was Henry Detweiller, a Frenchman who'd emigrated to the American Midwest in the early nineteenth century and become a river pilot, then a captain, and finally the owner of several steamboat companies. He'd died in Peoria, Illinois, in his palatial mansion.

  The exec, John Byron, was an Englishman (1723-1786) who'd been a midshipman on Anson's famous naval expedition around the world but was shipwrecked off the coast of Chile. When he became an admiral, he earned the nickname of "Foul-weather Jack" because every time his fleet put to sea it ran into very bad storms.

  "He is also the grandfather of the famous or infamous poet, Lord Byron," Sam said. "Isn't that right, admiral?"

  Byron, a small blond man with cold blue eyes, nodded.

  "Admiral?" said the woman who'd been bugging Clemens. "But if you're the captain . . . ?"

  Sam puffed on his cigar, then said, "Yes, I'm the only captain aboard. The next highest rank is full admiral and so on down. The chief of my air force, which consists of four pilots and six mechanics, is a general. So is the chief of my marines. The latter, by the way, was once a full general in the United States army during the Civil War. He's a full-blooded American Indian, a Seneca chief. Ely S. Parker or, to use his Iroquois name, Donehogawa, which means 'Keeper of the West Gate.' He is highly educated and was a construction engineer on Earth. He served on General Ulysses S. Grant's staff during the war."

  Sam next explained the controls and instruments used by the pilot. He sat in a chair on each side of which were two long metal rods projecting from the floor. By moving the control sticks forward or backward, he could control the forward or backward rotations of the paddlewheels. Also, their rate of speed of turning. Before him was a panel with many dials and gauges and several oscilloscopes. •

  "One is a sonarscope," Sam said. "Reading that, the pilot can tell exactly how deep the bottom of The River is and how far from the bank the boat is and also if there are any dangerously large objects in the water. By switching that dial marked auto cruise to on, he doesn't have to do a thing then except keep an eye on the sonarscope and another on the banks. If the automatic system should malfunction, he can switch to a backup system while the other is being repaired."

  "Piloting must be easy," a man said.

  "It is. But only an experienced pilot can handle emergencies, which is why most of them are Mississippi boat veterans."

  He pointed out that the deck of the control room was ninety feet above the surface of The River. He also called to their attention that the pilothouse structure was, unlike that on the riverboats on Earth, located on the starboard side, not in the middle of the deck.

  "Which makes the Not For Hire resemble an aircraft carrier even more."

  They watched the marines drilling on the flight deck and the men and women busy practicing the martial arts, sword, spear, knife, and axe fighting, and archery.

  "Every member of this crew, including myself, has to become proficient with all weapons. In addition, each person has to become fully qualified to handle any post. They go to school to learn electricity, electronics, plumbing, officering, and piloting. Half of them have taken lessons on the piano or with other musical instruments. This boat contains more individuals with more varied skills and professions than any other area on this planet."

  "Does everybody take turns being the captain?" said the woman who'd angered
him.

  "No. That is the exception," Sam said, his thick eyebrows forming a frown. "I wouldn't want to put ideas into anybody's head."

  He strode to the control panel and punched a button. Sirens began to wail, and the exec, John Byron, asked the communications officer to send the "Bridges, clearing" warning over the general intercom. Sam went to a starboard window and urged the others to gather by him. They gasped when they saw long thick metal beams slide out from the three lower decks.

  "If we can't sink the Rex," Clemens said, "we'll board it over those bridges."

  The woman said, "That's fine. But the crew of the Rex can also board your vessel on your own bridges."

  Sam's blue-green eyes glared above his falcon nose.

  However, the others of the group were so awed, so astounded, that Sam's hairy chest puffed from joy. He had always been fascinated by mechanical devices, and he liked others to share his enthusiasm. On Earth his interest in novel gadgets had been responsible for his going bankrupt. He'd put a fortune into the unworkable Paige typesetting machine.

  The woman said, "But all this iron and aluminum and other metals? This planet is so mineral-poor. Where did you get these?"

  '"First," Sam said, pleased to recount his exploits, "a giant nickel-iron meteorite fell into The Valley. Do you remember when, many years ago, the grailstones on the right bank ceased operating? That was because the falling star severed the line.

  "As you know, it was back in operation twenty-four hours later. So . . ."

  "Who repaired it?" a man said. "I've heard all sorts of stories, but . . ."

  "I was in the neighborhood, in a manner of speaking," Sam said. "In fact the tidal wave of The River and the blast almost killed me and my companions."

  He mentally winced then, not because of the near-fatality but because he remembered what he'd done later to one of his companions, the Norseman Erik Bloodaxe.

  "So I can testify to the amazing but undeniable fact that not only had the line been repaired overnight, but the blasted land had also been restored. The grass and the trees and the stripped soil were all back."