THE FIRST TIME THAT SlR THOMAS MALORY DIED WAS ON EARTH in A.D. 1471.
The English knight got through the terrible weeks after Resurrection Day without too many body wounds, though he suffered grievously from spiritual shock. He found the food in his “littel greal” fascinating. It reminded him of what he had written in The Book of King Arthur concerning Galahad and his fellow knights when they ate of the food provided by the Sangreal. “... ye shall be fed afore this table with sweetmeats that never knights tasted.”
There were times when Malory thought he’d go mad. He’d always been tempted by madness, a state in which a person was both touched with holiness by’God and invulnerable to the cares and woes of the world, not to mention his own. But a man who’d spent so many years in prison on Earth without going crazy had to be basically tough. One of the things that had kept his mind unclouded in prison had been his writing of the first English prose epic. Though he knew that his readers would be very few, and most of them would probably not like it, he did not care one whit. Unlike his first work, which had been based on the great French Writers of the cycles about King Arthur of ancient Britain, this was about the rejections but final triumph of his sweet Jesu. Unlike so many once-devout Christians, Malory clung to his faith with fierce obliviousness to “facts”—in itself an indication that he had gone mad, if his critics were to be believed.
Twice slain by savage infidels, Malory ended up in an area inhabited on one side by Parthians and oh the other by Englishmen.
The Parthians were ancient horsemen who got their name from their habit of shooting backwards from their steeds as they retreated. In other words, they always got in a parting shot. At least, that was the explanation for their name according to one informant. Malory suspected that the grinning fellow was pulling his leg, but it sounded good, so why not accept it.
The Englishmen were chiefly of the seventeenth century and spoke an English which Malory had trouble understanding. However, after all these years, they also spoke Esperanto, that tongue which the missionaries of the Church of the Second •• Chance used as a universal medium of communication. The land, now known as New Hope, was peaceful, though it had not always been so. Once it had been a number of small states which had had a savage battle with the medieval German and Spanish states up north. These had been led by a man called Kramer, nicknamed the Hammer. After he had been killed, a long peace had come to the land, and the states eventually became one. Malory settled down there and took as his hutmate Philippa Hobart, daughter of Sir Henry Hobart. Though there was no longer a giving in marriage, Malory insisted that they be married, and he got a friend who had been a Catholic priest to perform the old ceremony. Later, he reconverted both his wife and the priest to their native faith.
He was set back somewhat, though, when he heard that the true Jesu Christ had appeared in this area with a Hebrew woman who had known Moses in Egypt and during the exodus. Jesu had also been accompanied by a man named Thomas Mix, an American, the descendant of Europeans who had emigrated to the continents discovered only twenty-one years after Malory had died. Jesu and Mix had burned to death together in bonfires ignited by Kramer.
At first, Malory had denied that the man calling himself Yeshua could be the real Christ. He might be a Hebrew of Christ’s time, but he was a fake.
Then Malory, after tracking down all the evidence he could of Yeshua’s statements and the events of his martyrdom, decided that perhaps Christ had truly been present. So he incorporated the tale told by the locals into the epic he was now writing with ink and a pen formed from the bone of a fish on bamboo paper. Malory also decided to canonize the American, and so Mix became Saint Thomas the Steadfast of the White Hat.
After a while Malory and his disciples forgot that the sainthood was a fiction and came to believe that Saint Thomas was indeed roaming The Valley in quest of his master, sweet Jesu, in this world which was purgatory, though not exactly the middle state between earth and heaven portrayed by the priests of lost Earth.
The ex-priest who’d married Thomas and Philippa, as a bishop ordained on Earth and so in the direct line of priesthood from Saint Peter, was able to instruct others and to make priests of them. The little group of Roman Catholics, however, had a different attitude in one respect from that they’d had in their Terrestrial days. They were tolerant; they did not attempt to bring back the Inquisition nor did they burn suspected witches. If they had insisted on these old customs, they would have quickly been exiled or perhaps even killed.
Late one night, Thomas Malory was lying in bed and pondering on the next chapter of his epic. Suddenly, there was a great shouting outside and a noise as of many running. He sat up and called to Philippa, who awoke frightened and trembling. They went out then to ask what the commotion was about. The people questioned pointed upward into the cloudless sky made bright as a full moon by the packed stars and flaming cosmic-gas sheets.
High up were two strange objects silhouetted against the celestial blaze. One, much smaller, was composed of two parts, a larger sphere above the other. Though those on the ground could not see any linkage between the two, they got the impression that the two were connected because they moved at the same speed. Then a woman who knew of such things said that it looked like a balloon. Malory had never seen one, but he had heard descriptions of them from nineteenth- and twentieth-centurians, and this did indeed look like the description.
The other object, far greater, resembled a gigantic cigar.
The same woman said that this was an airship or dirigible or perhaps was a vessel of the unknowns who’d made this planet.
“Angels?” Malory muttered. “Why would they have to use an airship? They have wings.”
He forgot about that and cried out with the others as the huge vessel of the air suddenly dived. And then he screamed with the others when the vessel exploded. Burning, it fell toward The River.
The balloon continued to travel northeastward, and after a while it was gone. Long before that, the flaming airship struck the water. Its skeletal framework sank almost at once, but some pieces of its skin burned for a few minutes before they, too, were extinguished.
NEITHER ANGELS NOR DEMONS HAD VOYAGED IN THAT VESSEL of the sky. The man whom Malory and his wife pulled out of the water and rowed to shore in their boat was no more and no less human than they. He was a tall dark rapier-thin man with a big nose and a weak chin. His large black eyes stared at them in the torchlight, and he said nothing for a long while. After he had been carried into the community hall, dried off and covered with thick cloths, and had drunk some hot coffee, he said something in French and then spoke in Esperanto.
“How many survived?”
Malory said, “We don’t know yet.”
A few minutes later, the first of twenty-two corpses, some very charred, were brought to the bank. One of them was a woman’s. Though the search continued through the night and part of the morning these were all that were found. The Frenchman was the single survivor. Though he was weak and still in shock, he insisted on getting up and taking part in the search. When he saw the bodies by a grailstone, he burst into tears and sobbed for a long time. Malory took this as a good indication of the man’s health. At least he wasn’t in such deep trauma that he was unable to express his grief.
“Where have the others gone?” the stranger demanded.
Then his sorrow became rage, and he shook his fist at the skies and howled damnation at someone named Thorn. Later, he asked if anybody had seen or heard another aircraft, a helicopter. Many had.
“Which way did it go?” he said.
Some said that the machine making the strange chopping noise had gone down-River. Others said that it had gone up-River. Several days later, the report came that the machine had been seen sinking into The River two hundred miles upstream during a rainstorm. Only one person had witnessed that, and he claimed that a man had swum from the sinking craft. A message via drum was sent to the area asking if any strangers had suddenly appeared. The reply was that none had been located.
A number of grails were found floating on The River, and these were brought to the survivor. He identified one as his, and he ate a meal from it that afternoon. Several of the grails were “free” containers. That is, they could be opened by anybody, and these were confiscated by the state of New Hope.
The Frenchman then asked if any gigantic boats propelled by paddlewheels had passed this point. He was told that one had, the Rex Grandissimus, commanded by the infamous King John of England.
“Good,” the man said. He thought for a while, then said, “I could just stay here and wait until the Mark Twain comes by. But I don’t think I will. I’m going after Thorn.”
By then, he felt recovered .enough to talk about himself. And how he talked about himself!
“I am Savinien de Cyrano II de Bergerac,” he said. “I prefer to be called Savinien, but for some reason most people prefer Cyrano. So I allow that small liberty. After all, later ages referred to me as Cyrano, and though it was a mistake, I am so famous that people cannot get used to my preference. They think they know better than I do.
“No doubt you’ve heard of me.”
He regarded his hosts as if they should feel honored to have such a great man as their guest.
“It pains me to admit that I have not,” Malory said.
“What? I was the greatest swordsman of my time, perhaps, no, undoubtedly, of all times. There is no reason for me to be modest. I do not hide my light under a bushel or, in fact, under anything. I was also the author of some remarkable literary works. I wrote books about trips to the sun and to the moon, very pointed and witty satire. My play, The Pedant Out-Witted, was, I understand, used with some modifications by a certain Monsieur Moliere and presented as his own. Well, perhaps I exaggerate. Certainly he did use much of the comedy. I also understand that an Englishman named Jonathan Swift used some of my ideas in his Gulliver’s Travels. I do not blame them, since I myself was not above using the ideas of others, though I improved upon them.”
“That is all very well, sir,” Malory said, forbearing to mention his own works. “But if it does not make you overwrought, you could tell us how you came here in that airship and what caused it to burst into flames.”
De Bergerac was staying with the Malorys until an empty hut could be found or he could be loaned the tools to construct one for himself. At this time, though, he and his hosts and perhaps a hundred more were seated or standing by a big fire outside the hut.
It was a long tale, more fabulous even than the teller’s own fictions or Malory’s. Sir Thomas, however, had the feeling that the Frenchman was not telling all that had happened.
When the narrative was finished, Malory mused aloud, “Then it is true that there is a tower in the center of the north polar sea, the sea from whence flows The River and to which it returns? And it is true that whoever is responsible for this world lives in that tower? I wonder what happened to this Japanese, this Piscator? Did the residents of the tower, who surely must be angels, invite him to stay with them because, in a sense, he’d entered the gates of paradise? Or did they send him elsewhere, to some distant part of The River, perhaps?
“And this Thorn, what could account for his criminal behavior? Perhaps he was a demon in disguise.”
De Bergerac laughed loudly and scornfully.
When he had stopped, he said, “There are no angels nor demons, my friend. I do not now maintain, as I did on Earth, that there is no God. But to admit to the existence of a Creator does not oblige one to believe in such myths as angels and demons.”
Malory hotly insisted that there were indeed such. This led to an argument in the course of which the Frenchman walked away from his audience. He spent the night, from what Malory heard, in the hut of a woman who thought that if he was such a great swordsman he must also be a great lover. From her accounts, he was, though perhaps too much devoted to that fashion of making love which many thought reached its perfection, or nadir of degeneracy, in France. Malory was disgusted. But later that day de Bergerac appeared to apologize for his ingratitude to the man who’d saved his life.
“I should not have scoffed at you, my host, my savior. I tender you a thousand apologies, for which I hope to receive one forgiveness.”
“You are forgiven,” Malory said, sincerely. “Perhaps, though you forsook our Church on Earth and have blasphemed against God, you would care to attend the mass being said tonight for the souls of your departed comrades?”
“That is the least I can do,” de Bergerac said.
During the mass, he wept copiously, so much so that after it Malory took advantage of his high emotions. He asked him if he was ready to return to God.
“I am not aware that I ever left Him, if He exists,” the Frenchman said. “I was weeping with grief for those I loved on the Parseval and for those whom I did not love but respected. I was weeping with rage against Thorn or whatever his real name is. And I was also weeping because men and women are still ignorant and superstitious enough to believe in this flummery.”
“You refer to the mass?” Malory said icily.
“Yes, forgive me again!” de Bergerac cried.
“Not until you truly repent,” Malory said, “and if you address your repentance to that God whom you have offended so grievously.”
“Quelle merde!” de Bergerac said. But a moment later he embraced Malory and kissed him on both cheeks. “How I wish that your belief was indeed fact! But if it were, then how could I forgive God!”
He bade adieu to Malory, saying that he would probably never see him again. Tomorrow morning, he was setting out up-River. Malory suspected that de Bergerac would have to steal a boat to do so, and he was right.
Malory often thought of the man who’d leaped from the burning dirigible, the man who had actually been to the tower which many spoke about but none had seen except for the Frenchman and his crewmates. Or if the story could be believed, a group of ancient Egyptians and a huge hairy subhuman.
Less than three years later, the second great paddlewheeled boat came by. This was even more huge than the Rex and it was more luxurious and faster and better armored and weaponed. But it was not called the Mark Twain. Its captain, Samuel Clemens, an American, had renamed it the Not For Hire. Apparently, he’d heard that King John was calling his own boat, the original Not For Hire, the Rex Grandissimus. So Clemens had taken back the name and ceremoniously had it painted on the hull.
The boat stopped off to recharge its batacitor and to charge its grails. Malory didn’t get a chance to talk to the captain, but he did see him and his surprising bodyguard. Joe Miller was indeed an ogre, ten feet high and weighing eight hundred pounds. His body was not as hairy as Malory expected from the tales. He was no more hirsute than many men Malory had seen, though the hairs were longer. And he did have a face with massive prognathic jaws and a nose like a gigantic cucumber or a proboscis monkey’s. Yet he had the look of intelligence.
ON DROVE THE PURSUER.
It was an hour to high noon. In another hour, the fabulous riverboat would be anchored, and a very thick aluminum cable would connect a copper cap placed over a grailstone to the batacitor in the vessel. When the stone delivered its tremendous voltage, the batacitor would be charged again and the grails on another copper plate in the boat would be filled with food, liquor, and other items.
Its hull was white except over the paddle boxes, or wheel guards, over the four paddlewheels. On these were painted in big black letters: NOT FOR HIRE. Under this in smaller letters: Samuel Clemens, Captain. And under this line, in still smaller letters: Owned and Operated By The Avengers, Inc.
Above the pilothouse was a jack staff flying a square light-blue flag on which was a scarlet phoenix.
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 reah 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 two 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 Clem-ens’ work and biographies about him. She spoke in a low voice to her companion. “I neyer 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 to 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.”
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.”
“Who did it?”
“They had to be the beings who made this Rivervalley and resurrected us. I’ve heard that they are human beings like us, in fact, Earthmen who lived ages after we did. However...”
“No, not human beings,” the man said. “Surely not. It was God who made all this for us.”
“If you’re so well acquainted with Him,” Clemens said, “give me His address. I’d like to write Him.”
He continued, “My group was the first to get to the site of the meteorite. The crater, which might have been as wide and deep as the famous one in Arizona, was buried by then. But we staked out a claim, and we began digging. Some time later, we heard that large deposits of bauxite and cryolite were under the land of a state down-River. Its citizens, however, had no means of digging it up or then using it. But my state, Parolando, could make aluminum from the ores after we’d fashioned iron tools. That state, Soul City, attacked us to get the iron. We beat them and confiscated the bauxite and cryolite. We also found that some other states relatively nearby had some copper and tin deposits. Also, some vanadium and tungsten. We traded our iron artifacts for these.”
The woman, frowning, said, “Isn’t it strange that there was so much metal in that area, and elsewhere there is almost none? It’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it, that you were looking for these metals and just happened to be in the neighborhood when the meteorite fell?”
“Maybe God directed me to that place,” Sam said sneeringly.
No, he thought, it wasn’t God. It was that Mysterious Stranger, the Ethical who called himself X, who had arranged, who knew how many thousands of years ago, mat the deposits should be so concentrated in that area. And who then directed that meteorite to fall near them.
For what purpose? To build a riverboat and to provide weapons so that Sam could voyage up The River, perhaps for ten million miles, and get to the headwaters. And from there to the tower which reared high in the mists of the cold northpolar sea.
And then do what?
He didn’t know. The Ethical was supposed to visit him again during a thunderstorm at night, as he always did. Apparently, he came at that time because the lightning interfered with the delicate instruments the Ethicals used to try to locate the renegade. He would give him more information. In the meantime, others visited by X, his chosen warriors, would find Sam and get on his boat and go with him up-River.
But things had gone awry.
He’d not seen or heard from the Mysterious Stranger again. He’d built his boat, and then his partner, King John Lackland, had hijacked it. Also, some years later, the “little resurrections,” the “translations,” had ceased, and permanent death had come to the dwellers in The Valley again.
Something had happened to the people in the tower, the Ethicals. Something must also have happened to the Mysterious Stranger.
But he, Clemens, was going to the headwaters anyway and then try to get into the tower. He knew how difficult the climbing of the mountains which circled the sea would be. Joe Miller, the titanthrop, had seen the tower from a path along the side of that towering range when he’d accompanied the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Joe had also seen a gigantic aircraft of some sort descend to the top of the tower. And then he’d tripped over a grail left by some unknown predecessor and had fallen to his death. After being resurrected to a place in The Valley, he’d met Sam and had told his strange tale to him.
The woman said, “What about this dirigible we’ve heard rumors of? Why didn’t you go on that instead of the boat? You could have gotten to the headwaters in a few days instead of the thirty or forty years it’ll take you on the boat.”
That was a subject Sam didn’t like to talk about. The truth was that no one had even thought of an airship until shortly before the Not For Hire was to set out. Then a German dirigible man named von Parseval had come along and asked why he hadn’t built the ship.
Sam’s chief engineer, Milton Firebrass, an ex-astronaut, had liked the suggestion. So he’d stayed behind when the Not For Hire left, and he’d constructed the floating vessel. He’d kept in radio contact with the boat, and when the ship did get to the tower, he’d reported that it was a little over a mile high and almost ten miles in diameter. The Parseval had landed on its top, but only one of its crew, a Japanese ex-blimp man and Sufi who called himself Piscator, had been able to enter. The others had been restrained by some invisible but tangible force. Before that, an officer named Barry Thorn had placed a bomb on the helicopter carrying Firebrass and some others on a scouting landing. He’d set the bomb off with a radio signal and then stolen a helicopter and flown off the dirigible. But he’d been wounded, and the copter had crashed at the base of the tower.
Thorn was brought back to the dirigible and questioned. He refused to give information, but he was visibly shocked when he heard that Piscator had gotten into the tower.
Clemens suspected that Thorn was either an Ethical or one of their subordinates, whom the X’s recruits called agents.
He also had some suspicions that Firebrass had been one or the other. And perhaps the woman who’d died in the explosion of the helicopter, Anna Obrenova, had been an Ethical or agent.
Sam had concluded from his examination of all available evidence that something had long ago stranded a number of agents and perhaps some Ethicals in The Valley. X was probably one of them. Which meant that agents and Ethicals would have to use the same means as the Valley-dwellers to get to the tower. Which meant that there were probably some disguised agents or Ethicals or both on his boat. Which meant that there were probably also some on the Rex.
Just why the Ethicals and agents hadn’t been able to use their aircraft to return to the tower, he didn’t know.
By now he’d reasoned that anyone who claimed to have lived after A.D. 1983 was one of the beings responsible for the Riverworld. It was his idea that the post-1983 story was false and was a code which enabled them to recognize each other.
He also reasoned that some of them might have figured that X’s recruits suspected this story-code. Therefore, they would be dropping that story.
Clemens said to the woman, “The airship was supposed to be a scout, to find out the lay of the land. Its captain was under orders, however, to get into the tower if it was possible. Then he was to return to the boat and pick up myself and some others. But no one but a Sufi philosopher named Piscator could get in, and he didn’t come back out. On the way back, its captain, a woman named Jill Gulbirra, who took over when Firebrass was killed, sent a raiding expedition in a copter against the Rex. King John was captured, but he escaped by jumping from the copter. I don’t know whether or not he survived. The aircraft flew back to the Parseval and continued on its course to the Not For Hire. Then Gulbirra reported sighting a very large balloon and was heading for it when Thorn got loose again. He flew off in a copter. Gulbirra, suspecting he’d planted a bomb, searched for it. None was found, but she couldn’t take a chance that there wasn’t one. She dived the dirigible toward the ground. She wanted to get her crew off just in case there was a bomb.
“Then she reported that there was an explosion. That was the last we heard from the Parseval.”
The woman said, “We’ve heard rumors that it crashed many thousands of miles up-River. There was only one survivor.”
“Only one! My God, who was he? Or she?”
“I don’t know his name. But I heard that he was a Frenchman.”
Sam groaned. There was just one Frenchman on the airship. Cyrano de Bergerac, with whom Sam’s wife had fallen in love. Of all the crew, he was the only one whom Sam would not have sorrowed over.
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON WHEN SAM SAW THE STRANGE BEING who was even more grotesque than Joe Miller. Joe was at least human, but this person had obviously not been born on Earth.
Sam knew at once that the being had to be one of the small group from a planet of Tau Ceti. His informant, the late Baron John de Grey stock, had known one of them. According to his story, the Tau Cetans, in the early twenty-first century, had put into orbit a smaller vessel around Earth before descending in the great mothership to the surface. They’d been welcomed, but then one of them, Monat, had said on a TV talk show that the Cetans had the means for extending their lives to centuries. The Earthpeople had demanded that this knowledge be given them. When the Cetans had refused, saying that the Terrestrials would abuse the gift of longevity, mobs had lynched most of the Cetans and then stormed the spaceship. Reluctantly, Monat had activated a scanner on the satellite, and this had projected a beam which killed most of the human life on Earth. At least, Monat thought it would do so. He didn’t see the results of his action. He, too, was torn apart by the mob.
He had set the death-beams into operation because he feared that Terrestrials would use the spaceship as a model to build more ships and then would go to his native planet and war against it, perhaps destroy all his people. He didn’t know whether or not they would actually do that, but he couldn’t take the chance.
The Cetan was standing up somewhat precariously in a narrow dugout and waving frantically at the Not For Hire. Obviously, he wanted aboard. So did a lot of people, Sam thought, but they don’t get their wish. This, however, was, if not a horse of a different color, a biped neither bird or man. So Sam told the pilot to make a circle and then come alongside the dugout.
Presently, while the gaping crew lined the exterior passageways, the Cetan climbed a short ladder to the boiler deck. His companion, an ordinary-looking human male, followed him. The dugout drifted away to be grabbed by whoever got to it first.
Escorted by two marines and General Ely S. Parker himself, the two were soon in the control room. Sam, speaking Esperanto, shook their hands, introduced himself and the others, and then they introduced themselves.
“I am Monat Grrautut,” the biped said in a deep rich voice.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Sam said. “The very one!”
Monat smiled, exposing human-looking teeth.
“Ah, then you’ve heard of me.”
“You’re the only Tau Cetan whose name I know,” Sam said. “I’ve been scanning the banks for years for one of you, and I’ve never seen hair nor hide of any. And then to run smackdab into you yourself!”
“I’m not from a planet of Tau Ceti,” Monat said. “That was the story we gave when we came to Earth. Actually, I’m from a planet of the star Arcturus. We misled the Terrestrials just in case they proved to be warlike and then...”
“Good thinking,” Sam said. “Though you were a little tough on Earthpeople, as I understand. However, why did you stick to that story when you were resurrected here—without your permission?”
Monat shrugged. How humanlike, Sam thought.
“Habit, I suppose. Also’, I wanted to make sure the Terrestrials still didn’t represent a danger to my people.”
“I can’t blame you.”
“When I knew positively that Earthpeople were no danger, I told the true story of my origin.”
“Sure you did,” Sam said and laughed. “Here, have a cigar, you two.”
Monat was six feet eight inches tall, thin, and pink-skinned. He wore only a kiltcloth, allowing most of his features to show, but concealing the most interesting to some. Grey stock had said that the fellow’s penis could pass for human and was circumcised, as were all men’s on this world. His scrotum, however, was a knobby sack which contained a number of small testes.
His face was semihuman. Below a shaved skull and very high forehead were two thick black curly-haired eyebrows that ran down to his very prominent cheekbones and spread out to cover them. The eyes were a dark brown. Most of his nose was more handsome than Sam had seen on many people. But a thin membranous fringe a sixteenth of an inch long hung from the sides of his nostrils. The nose ended in a thick, deeply clefted pad of cartilage. His lips were doglike, thin, leathery, and black. His lobeless ears displayed quite unhuman convolutions.
Each hand bore three fingers and a long thumb on each, and he had four toes on each foot.
I don’t suppose he’d scare anybody on skid row, Sam thought. Or in Congress.
His companion was an American born in 1918, deceased in 2008, when the Cetan or Arcturan beam swept Earth. His name was Peter Jairus Frigate, and he was about six feet tall, of muscular build, had black hair and green eyes and a not ugly face in front, but a rather craggy and short-jawed profile. Like Monat, he had a grail and a bundle of possessions and was armed with a stone knife, an axe, a bow, and a quiver of arrows.
Sam doubted very much that Monat was telling the truth about his place of birth or that Frigate was giving his right name. He doubted the story of anybody who said he’d lived past 1983. However, he wasn’t going to say anything about that until he became well acquainted with these two.
After having a drink served to them, he personally led them to the officers’ quarters near his suite.
“It just so happens that I’m short of three of my complement,” he said. “There’s a cabin available in the boiler deck. It’s not a desirable location, so I’ll roust out two junior officers from this cabin here. You can have theirs, and they can go below.”
The man and the woman who had to surrender their cabin didn’t look happy when they heard Sam’s order, but they got out quickly.
That evening, they ate at the captain’s table on china plates painted by an ancient Chinese artist and drank from cut-lead-glass goblets. The dining utensils were a solid silver alloy.
Sam and the others, including the gigantic Joe Miller, listened intently to the stories of both newcomers about their adventures on the Riverworld. When Sam heard that they’d journeyed for a long while with Richard Francis Burton, the famous nineteenth-century explorer, linguist, translator, and author, he felt a shock run through him. The Ethical had told him that he’d also recruited Burton.
“Got any idea where he is?” he said calmly.
“No,” Monat said. “We were separated during a battle and could not find him after it though we searched for him.”
Sam urged Joe Miller to tell his story of the Egyptian expedition. Sam was getting impatient with his role of the polite questioner and host. He loved to dominate the conversation, but he wanted to see what effect Miller’s tale had on the two.
When Joe finished, Monat said. “So! Then there is a tower in the polar sea!”
“Yeth, goddam it, that’th vhat I thaid,” Joe said.
Sam intended to take at least a week hearing everything relevant they had to say about themselves. Then he would subject them to much more rigorous questioning.
Two days later, when the boat was anchored on the right bank at noon for recharging, the grailstones remained mute and flameless.
“Holy jumping Jesus!” Sam said. “Another meteorite?”
He didn’t think that was the cause for the failure. The Ethical had told him that meteor-deflecting guards had been set up in space, and that the only reason the one had gotten through was because he’d managed to make the guards fail at just the right moment to permit the meteor,to pass through them. The guards would still be out there, floating in space, ready to do their job.
But if the failure hadn’t been caused by a meteorite, what had caused it?
Or was it another case of malfunction of the Ethicals’ systerns? People were no longer resurrected, which meant that something had gone wrong and unrepaired in the mechanism which converted the heat of the planet’s core into electricity for the stones. Luckily, these were set in a parallel, not a series, arrangement. Otherwise, everybody would starve, not just those on the right bank.
Sam immediately ordered that the boat resume its course upstream. When it was near dusk the boat stopped at the left bank. Not unexpectedly, the locals did not agree to allow the use of a grailstone. There was a hell of a fight, a slaughter which sickened Sam. Frigate was one of those killed by a small rocket launched from the bank.
Then the starving desperates of the right bank invaded the left bank. They came in swarms that would not be stopped until so many had been killed that there was room enough on the stones for the grails of the survivors.
Not until the bodies no longer clogged the surface of The River did Clemens give the order to proceed upstream. A few days after that, he stopped long enough to replace those he’d lost in the bloodiness.