The Fabulous Riverboat (10 page)

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 Eiffel Tower or a capacitor the size of Pike's Peak."

O'Brien 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 megakilowatts 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 neargreat men and women of all time. From mammoth subhuman Joe Miller of 1,000,000 B.C. to the delicatebodied but vast-brained scientist of the late twentiethcentury.

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 honeydipper 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."

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-ofmouth 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 make 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 bom."

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."

Sam grimaced but went after him. Lothar talked to twelve men he thought trustworthy enough for what he proposed. The sun began to climb down from the zenith while the details were arranged and then the men went to arm themselves. They came back from their huts with bamboo spears and knives. One had a bamboo bow with six arrows, effective only at close range.

Lothar von Richthofen and Sam Clemens leading, the group strode up to the Norse king's hut. Six Vikings stood guard outside.

"We want to talk to Bloodaxe," Sam said, trying to keep his voice from quavering. "He's in there with a woman," Ve Grimarsson said.

Sam raised his hand. Lothar ran past him and clubbed Grimarsson over the head. An arrow whistled past Sam's shoulder and stopped in the throat of a guard. Within ten seconds, the others had been killed or wounded too severely to continue fighting. There were shouts from a distance as a dozen other Vikings came running to protect their chief. Bloodaxe, naked, bellowing, his steel ax held high, rushed through the doorway. Von Richthofen lunged with his spear and impaled the Norseman on it. Bloodaxe dropped the ax and staggered back, driven by the German's weight on the spear, until he slammed into the bamboo wall of the hut. He stared; his mouth worked; blood ran from a corner of his lips; his skin was blue-gray.

The German then yanked the spear out of the Norseman's belly, and Bloodaxe crumpled.

There was a fight afterward with six of Clemens' men killed and four wounded. The Vikings did not give up until all were silenced and as dead as their king.

Sam Clemens, panting hoarsely, splashed with blood from others and bleeding from a gash on his shoulder, leaned on his spear. He had killed one man, Gunnlaugr Thorrfinnsson, puncturing his kidney from behind while the Viking was thrusting at von Richthofen. Too bad about Gunnlaugr. Of all the Norsemen, he enjoyed Sam's jokes the most. Now he was stabbed in the back by a good friend.

I've fought in 38 battles, Sam thought, and I've slain only two men. The other was a severely wounded Turk struggling to get to his feet. Sam Clemens, the mighty warrior, great-hearted hero. Thinking thus, he gazed with the horror and fascination that corpses had always had for him and would have if he lived 10,000 years.

And then he squawked with fright and yanked his left ankle away in a frantic effort to escape the hand gripping it. Unable to do so, he lifted his spear to drive it into the man who held him. He looked down into the pale blue eyes of Erik Bloodaxe. Life had surged up in Bloodaxe for a moment. The glaze was gone from his eyes and the skin was not so gray-blue. His voice was weak but strong enough for Sam, and others nearby, to hear him.

"Bikkja! Droppings of Ratatosk! Listen! I will not let you go until I have spoken! The gods have given me the powers of a voluspa. They want revenge for your treachery. Listen! I know there is iron beneath this bloodsoaked grass. I feel the iron flowing in my veins. Its grayness turns my blood thick and cold. There is iron enough and more than enough for your great white boat. You will dig up this iron, and you will build a boat to rival Skithblathnir.

"You will be captain of it, Bitch Clemens, and your boat will sail up The River for more miles than Sleipnir's eight legs could cover in a day. You will go back and forth, north and south, east and west, as the Rivervalley takes you. You will go around the world many times.

"But the building of the boat and the sailing thereof will be bitter and full of grief. And after years, two generations as known on Earth, after great sufferings, and some joys, when you think you are at long last near the end of the long long journey, then you will find me!