The Fabulous Riverboat (24 page)

He dreamed about Erik Bloodaxe, who chased him through the decks and into the hold of the Riverboat, and he awoke yelling. Joe was looming over him, shaking him. The rain was pounding the roof, and thunder was booming somewhere up along the face of the mountain.

Joe stayed awhile after making some coffee. He put a spoonful of dried crystals into cold water, and the coffee crystals heated the mixture in three seconds. They sipped their coffee and Sam smoked a cigarette while they talked about the days when they had voyaged down The River with Bloodaxe and his Vikings in search of iron.

"At leatht, ve uthed to have fun now and then," Joe said. "But not anymore. There'th too much vork to do and too many people out to thkin our hideth. And your voman vould thyow up vith that big-nothed Thyrano."

Sam chuckled and said, "Thanks for the first laugh I've had in days, Joe. Big-nosed! Ye Gods!"

"Thometimeth I'm too thubtle for even you, Tham," Joe said. He rose up from the table and walked back to his room.

There was little sleep thereafter. Sam had always liked to stay in bed even after a full night's sleep. Now he got less than five hours each night, though he did take a siesta sometimes. There always seemed to be someone who had to have a question answered or wanted to thrash out an issue. His chief engineers were far from agreeing on everything, and this alone disturbed Sam. He had thought engineering was a cut-and-dried thing. You had a problem, and you solved it the best way. But Van Boom, Velitsky and O'Brien seemed to be living in worlds that did not quite dovetail. Finally, to spare himself the aggravating and often wasted hours of wrangling, he delegated the final word to Van Boom. They were not to worry him about anything unless they needed his authorization.

It was amazing the number of things which he would have considered to be only in the engineering province which needed his authorization.

Iyeyasu conquered not only the Bushman-Hottentot area across The River from him but nine miles of the Ulmak territory. Then he sent a fleet down to the three-milelong area below the Ulmaks, where seventeenth-century A.D. Sac and Fox Indians lived. This area was conquered with resultant slaughter of half the inhabitants. Iyeyasu then began dickering with Parolando for a higher price for his wood. Also, he wanted an amphibian just like the Firedragon I. By then the second Firedragon was almost done.

At this time over five hundred blacks from Parolando had been exchanged for an equal number of Dravidians. Sam had steadfastly refused to accept the Wahhabi Arabs, or at least had insisted that the Asiatic Indians come first. Hacking apparently did not like this, but nothing had been said in the agreement about which group had priority.

Hacking, having heard from his spies about Iyeyasu's demands, sent a message. He wanted a Firedragon, too, and he was willing to exchange a great amount of minerals for it.

Publius Crassus and Tai Fung allied to invade the area across The River from them. This was occupied by Stone Age peoples from everywhere and every time and stretched for fourteen miles along the left bank. With their superior steel weapons and numbers, the invaders killed half the population and enslaved the rest. And they upped their price for the wood but kept it below Iyeyasu's.

Spies reported that Chernsky, who ruled the fourteenmile-long nation just north of Parolando, had made a visit to Soul City. What happened there was anybody's guess, since Hacking had set up a security system that seemed to be one hundred percent effective. Sam had gotten in eight blacks to spy for him, and he knew that John had sent in at least a dozen. The heads of all were tossed from boats in the mists late at night onto the top of the wall along the bank of Parolando.

Van Boom came to Sam late one night and said that Firebrass had cautiously approached him.

"He offered me the position of chief engineer on the boat," Van Boom said.

"He offered it to you?" Sam said, his cigar almost dropping.

"Yes. He didn't say so in so many words, but I got the idea. The Riverboat will be taken over by the Soul Citizens, and I will be chief engineer."

"And what did you say about his fine offer? After all, you can't lose, either way."

"I told him not to etch a pseudocircuit. Come out and say it. He wouldn't, though he grinned, and I told him I hadn't sworn any oath of loyalty to you, but I had accepted your offer and that was as good. I wasn't going to betray you, and if Soul City invaded Parolando, I'd defend it to the death."

"That's fine, superb!" Sam said. "Here, have a snort of bourbon! And a cigar! I'm proud of you and proud of myself, to command such loyalty. But I wish ... I wish ..." Van Boom looked over the cup. "Yes?"

"I wish you'd strung him along. We could have found out a lot with you feeding us information."

Van Boom put the cup down and stood up. His handsome brown features were ugly. "I am not a dirty spy!"

"Come back!" Sam said, but Van Boom ignored him. Sam buried his head in his arms for a minute and then picked up Van Boom's cup. Never let it be said that Samuel Langhorne Clemens wasted good whiskey. Or even bad, for that matter. Although the grail never yielded any but the best.

The man's lack of realism irritated him. At the same time, he had a counterfeeling of warm pleasure. It was good to know that incorruptible men existed. At least, Sam did not have to worry about Van Boom.

In the middle of the night, he awoke wondering if he did have to worry after all. What if Van Boom was not as upright as he said? What if the clever Firebrass had told Van Boom to go to Clemens with his story? What better way to put a man off his guard? But then it would have been better if Van Boom had pretended to Sam that he was pretending to go along with Firebrass.

"I'm beginning to think like King John!" Sam said aloud.

He finally decided that he had to trust Van Boom. He was stiff and sometimes a little strange, which was what you'd expect from an engineer, but he had a moral backbone as inflexible as a fossilized dinosaur's.

The work on the great Riverboat went on day and night. The plates of the hull were bonded, and the beams were welded on. The batacitor and the giant electric motors were built, and the work of the transportation system of the cranes and engines was ended. The cranes themselves were enormous structures on huge rails, powered by electricity from the prototype batacitor. People came from thousands of miles up and down The River, in catamarans, big galleys, dugouts and canoes, to see the fabulous works.

Sam and King John agreed that so many people wandering about would get in the way of the work and would enable spies to function more efficiently.

"Also, it'll put the temptation to steal before them, and we don't want to be responsible for tempting people. They have enough trouble as it is," Sam said.

John did not smile. He signed the order that expelled all noncitizens, except for ambassadors and messengers, and that kept any more from coming in. This still did not prevent many boats from sailing by while the occupants gawked. By then the dirt walls and stone walls along the bank were about finished. There were, however, many breaks through which the curious could stare. These were left for ingress of freight boats bringing in wood and ore and flints. Moreover, since the plain sloped up toward the hills, the tourists could see many of the factories and the cranes, and the great structure of the boatyard was visible for miles around.

After a while, the tourist trade petered off. Too many were getting picked up along the way by grail slavers. Word got around that it was getting dangerous to travel The River in that section. Six months passed. The wood supply in the area was cut off. Bamboo grew to full length in from three weeks to six weeks; the trees took six months to grow to full maturity. Every state for fifty miles both ways from Parolando had enough wood for their own uses only.

Parolando's representatives made treaties with more distant states, trading iron ore and weapons for wood. There was a very large supply of siderite masses left yet, so Sam was not worried about running out of it. But the mining of it took many men and materials and caused the central part of Parolando to look like a heavily shelled landscape. And the more wood that was brought in, the more men, materials, and machines had to be diverted from the boatbuilding to make weapons for trade. Moreover, the increase in shipping resulted in more demand for wood to build freighters. And more men had to be trained and shipped out as sailors and guards for the wood-carrying and ore-carrying fleets. It got to the point where boats had to be rented from neighboring states, and the rent, as always, was iron-nickel ore and finished weapons.

Sam wanted to be at the boatyard from dawn to dusk and even later, because he loved every minute of progress in the construction of the great boat. But he had so many administrative duties only indirectly or not at all connected with the boat that he could be in the boatyard only two to three hours—on a good day. He tried to get John to take over more of the administration, but John would accept only duties which gave him more power over the military forces or allowed him to exert pressure on those who opposed him. The anticipated attempts at assassination of those close to Sam did not occur. The bodyguards and the close watch at nights were continued, but Sam decided that John was going to lay low for a while. He had probably seen that it would be best for his purposes to wait until the boat was nearly finished.

Once, Joe Miller said, "Tham, don't you think maybe you're wrong about John? Maybe he'th going to be content vith being thecond-in-command of the boat?" "Joe, would a sabertooth part with his canines?" "Vhat?"

"John is rotten to the core. The old kings of England were never any great shakes, morally speaking. The only difference between them and Jack the Ripper was that they operated openly and with the sanction of Church and State. But John was such a wicked monarch that it became traditional to never name another English king John. And even the Church, which had a high tolerance for evil in high places, could not stomach John. The Pope slapped the Interdict on the entire nation and brought John crawling and begging to the feet of the Pope, like a whipped puppy. But I suppose that even when he was kissing the Pope's foot, he managed to suck a little blood from the big toe. And the Pope must have checked his pockets after he embraced John.

"What I'm trying to put across is that John couldn't reform even if he wanted to. He'll always be a human weasel, a hyena, a skunk."

Joe puffed on a cigar even longer than his nose and said, "Vell, I don't know. Humanth can change. Look at vhat the Church of the Thecond Chanthe hath done. Look at Goring. Look at you. You told me that in your time vomen vore clotheth which covered them from the neck to the ankleth, and you got ekthited if you thaw a goodlooking ankle, and a thigh, oh my! Now you aren't too dithturbed if you thee..."

"I know! I know!" Sam said. "Old attitudes and what the psychologists call conditioned reflexes can be changed. That's why I say that anybody who still carries in him the racial and sexual prejudices he had on Earth is not taking advantage of what The River offers. A man can change, but..."

"He can?" Joe said. "But you alvayth told me that everything in life, even the vay a man actth and thinkth, ith determined by vhat vent on long before he vath even born. Vhat ith it? Yeth, it'th a determinithtic philothophy, that'th vhat. Now, if you believe that everything ith fikthed in itth courthe, that humanth are mathyineth, tho to thpeak, then how can you believe that men can change themthelveth?"

"Well," Sam drawled, looking fierce, his excessively bushy eyebrows pulled down, his blue-green eyes bright above the falcon nose, "well, even my theories are mechanically determined and if they conflict, that can't be helped."

"Then, for heaven'th thaketh," Joe said, throwing up his football-sized hands, "vhat'th the uthe of talking about it? Or even doing anything? Vhy don't you jutht give up?"

"Because I can't help myself," Sam said. "Because, when the first atom in this universe bumped against the second atom, my fate was decreed, my very thought and action was fixed."

"Then you can't be, uh, rethponthible for vhat you do, right?" "That's right," Sam said. He felt very uncomfortable.

"Then John can't help it that he'th a murdering treacherouth thoroughly dethpicable thvine?"

"No, but then I can't help it that I despise him for being a swine."

"And I thuppothe that if thomebody thmarter than I am came along and thyowed you, by thtrict undeniable logic, that you vere wrong in your philothophy, that you vould thay that he can't help thinking you're wrong? But he'th wrong, it'th jutht that he'th predetermined, mechanically, to think the vay he doeth."

"I'm right, and I know it," Sam said, puffing harder on his cigar. "This hypothetical man couldn't convince me because his own reasoning does not spring from a free will, which is like a vegetarian tiger—that is, it doesn't exist."

"But your own reathoning doethn't thpring from a free vill, either." "True. We're all screwed. We believe what we have to."

"You laugh at thothe people who have vhat you call invinthible ignoranthe, Tham. Yet you're full of it, yourthelf."

"Lord deliver us from apes that think they're philosophers!"

"Thee! You fall back on inthultth vhen you can't think of anything elthe to thay! Admit it, Tham! You haven't got a lochical leg to thtand on!"

"You just aren't capable of seeing what I mean, because of the way you are," Sam said.

"You thyould talk to Thyrano de Bercherac more, Tham. He'th ath big a thynic ath you, although he doethn't go ath far ath you do vith determinithm."

"I'd think you two incapable of talking to each other. Don't you two resent each other, you look so much alike? How can you stand nose to nose, as it were, and not break up with laughter? It's like two anteaters..." "Inthultth! Inthultth! Oh, vhat'th the uthe?"