The Fabulous Riverboat (3 page)

The crew lay in terror thick as cold mud while The River and the wind raged and the sky remained the color of chilling iron. Then the winds ceased. Rather, the downRiver winds stopped, and the normal soothing wind from upRiver resumed.

The five survivors on deck began to stir and to ask questions. Sam felt as if he could barely force the words out through a numbed mouth. Stammering, he told them of the flash he had seen in the sky fifteen minutes before the winds struck. Somewhere down the valley, maybe two hundred miles away, a giant meteorite had struck. The winds created by the heat of passage through the air and by the displacement of air by the meteorite had generated those giant waves. Terrible as they were, they must have been pygmies compared to those nearer the point of impact. Actually, the Dreyrugr was in the outer edge of the fury.

"It had quit being mad and was getting downright jovial when we met it," Sam said.

Some of the Norse got unsteadily to their feet and tottered across the deck. Some stuck their heads out of the hatches. Bloodaxe was hurting from his roll across the deck, but he managed to roar, "Everybody belowdecks! There will be many more great waves much worse than this one, there's no telling how many!"

Sam did not like Bloodaxe, to put it mildly, yet he had to admit that the Norwegian was bright enough when it came to the ways of water. He himself had supposed that the first waves would be the last.

The crew lay down in the hold wherever they could find space and something stable to hang onto, and they waited, but not for long. The earth rumbled and shook, and then The River struck the pass with a hiss like a fifty-foot-high cat, followed by a bellow. Borne upward by the flood pouring through the pass, the Dreyrugr rocked and spun around and around as it rocked. Sam turned cold. He was sure that if there had been daylight, he and the others would look as grayblue as corpses.

Up the boat went, occasionally scraping against the Walls of the canyon. Just as Sam was about to swear that the Dreyrugr had reached the top of the canyon and was going to be carried over its front in a cataract, the boat dropped. It sank swiftly, or so it seemed, while the waters poured out through the pass almost as quickly as they had entered. There was a crash, followed by the heavy breathing of men and women, a groan here and there, the dripping of water, and the far-away roar of the receding river.

It was not over yet. There was more waiting in cold numb terror until the great mass of water would rush back to fill the spaces from which it had been displaced by the blazing many hundreds of thousands of tons mass of the meteorite. They shivered as if encased in ice, although the air was far warmer than it had even been at this time of night. And, for the first time in the twenty years on this planet, it did not rain at night.

Before the waters struck again, they felt the shake and grumble of earth. There was a vast hiss and a roar, and again the boat rose up, spun, bumped against the walls of the canyon and then sank. This time, the ship did not strike the ground so hard, probably, Sam thought, because the boat had hit a thick layer of mud. "I don't believe in miracles," Sam whispered, "but this is one. We've no business being alive."

Joe Miller, who had recovered more swiftly than the rest, went out on a half-hour scouting trip. He returned with the naked body of a man. His burden was, however, alive. He had blond hair under the mud-streaks, a handsome face and blue-gray eyes. He said something in German to Clemens and then managed to smile after he had been deposited gently on the deck.

"I found him in hith glider," Joe said. "Vhat vath left of it, that ith. There'th a number of corptheth outthide thith canyon. Vhat you vant to do vith him?"

"Make friends with him," Clemens croaked. "His people are gone; this area is cleaned out."

He shuddered. The image of Livy's body placed on the deck like a mocking gift, the wet hair plastered over one side of her smashed face, the one dark eye staring darkly at him, was getting more vivid and more painful. He felt like sobbing but could not and was glad of it. Weeping would make him fall apart into a cone of ashes. Later, when he had the strength to stand it, he would weep. So near. ...

The blond man sat up on the deck. He shivered uncontrollably and said, in British English, "I'm cold."

Miller went belowdecks and brought up dried fish, acorn bread, bamboo tips and cheese. The Vikings had stored food to eat when they were in hostile areas where they were forbidden to use their grails.

"That thtupid ath, Bloodakthe, ith thtill alive," Miller said. "He'th got thome broken ribth and he'th a meth of bruitheth and cutth. But hith big mouth ith in perfect vorking order. Vouldn't you know it?"

Clemens began crying. Joe Miller wept with him and blew his huge proboscis.

"There," he said, "I feel much better. I never been tho thcared in all my life. Vhen I thaw that vater, like all the mammothth in the vorld thtampeding towardth uth, I thought, Good-bye Joe. Good-bye, Tham. I'll vake up thomevhere along The River in a new body, but I'll never thee you again, Tham. Only I vath too terrified to feel thad about it. Yethuth, I vath thcared!"

The young stranger introduced himself. He was Lothar von Richthofen, glider pilot, captain of the Luftwaffe of is Imperial Majesty, Kaiser Alfred the First of New Prussia.

"We've passed a hundred New Prussias in the last ten thousand miles," Clemens said. "All so small you couldn't stand in the middle of one and heave a brick without it landing in the middle of the next. But most of them weren't as belligerent as yours. They'd let us land and charge our grails, especially after we'd shown them what we had to trade for use of the stones." "Trade?"

"Yes. We didn't trade goods, of course, but all the freighters of old Earth couldn't carry enough to last out a fraction of The River. We traded ideas. For one thing, we show these people how to build pool tables and how to make a hair-setting spray from fish glue, deodorized."

The Kaiser of this area had been, on Earth, a Count von Waldersee, a German field marshal, born 1832, died 1904.

Clemens nodded, saying, "I remember reading about his death in the papers and having great satisfaction because I had outlived another contemporary. That was one of the few genuine and free pleasures of life. But, since you know how to fly, you must be a twentieth-century German, right?"

Lothar von Richthofen gave a brief summary of his life. He had flown a fighter plane for Germany in the Weltkrieg. His brother had been the greatest of aces on either side during that war.

"World War I or II?" Clemens said. He had met enough twentieth-centurians to know some facts—and fancies—about events after his death in 1910.

Von Richthofen added more details. He had been in World War I. He himself had fought under his brother and had accounted for forty Allied planes. In 1922, while flying an American film actress and her manager from Hamburg to Berlin, the plane had crashed and he had died.

"The luck of Lothar von Richthofen deserted me," he said. "Or so I thought then."

He laughed.

"But here I am, twenty-five years old in body again, and I missed the sad things about growing old, when women no longer look at you, when wine makes you weep instead of laugh and makes your mouth sour with the taste of weakness and every day is one day nearer to death.

"And my luck held out again when that meteorite struck. My glider lost its wings at the first blow of wind, but instead of falling, I floated in my fuselage, turning over and over, dropping, rising again, falling, until I was deposited as lightly as a sheet of paper upon a hill. And when the backflood came, the fuselage was borne by the water and I was nuzzled gently against the foot of the mountain. A miracle!"

"A miracle: a chance distribution of events, occurring one time in a billion," Clemens said. "You think a giant meteor caused that flood?"

"I saw its flash, the trail of burning air. It must have crashed far away, fortunately for us."

They climbed down from the ship and slogged through the thick mud to the canyon entrance. Joe Miller heaved logs that a team of draft horses would have strained to pull. He shoved aside others, and the three went down through the foothills and to the plains. Others followed them.

They were silent now. The land had been scoured free of trees except for the great irontrees. So deeply rooted were these that most still stood upright. Moreover, where the mud had not settled, there was grass. It was a testimony to the toughness and steadfast-rootedness of the grass that the millions of tons of water had not been able to rip out the topsoil.

Here and there was the flotsam left by the backflood. Corpses of men and women, broken timber, towels, grails, a dugout, uprooted pines and oaks and yews.

The great mushroom-shaped grailstones, spaced a mile apart along the banks on both sides, were also unbroken and unbent, although many were almost buried in mud.

"The rains will eventually take care of the mud," Clemens said. "The land slopes toward The River." He avoided the corpses. They filled him with a prickly loathing. Besides, he was afraid that he might see Livy's body again. He did not think he could stand it; he would go mad.

"One thing sure," Clemens said. "There'll be nobody between us and the meteorite. We'll have first claim on it, and then it'll be up to us to defend all that treasure of iron from the wolves that will come loping on its scent.

"Would you like to join up? If you stick with me, you'll have an airplane some day, not just a glider."

Sam explained a little about his Dream. And he told a little about Joe Miller's story of the Misty Tower.

"It's only possible with a great deal of iron," he said. "And much hard work. These Vikings aren't capable of helping me build a steamboat. I need technical knowledge they don't have. But I was using them to get me to a possible source of iron. I had hoped that there might be enough ore from which Erik's ax was made for my purpose. I used their greed for the metal, and also Miller's story, to launch them on this expedition.

"Now, we don't have to search. We know where there must be more than enough. All we have to do is dig it up, melt it, refine it, shape it into the forms we need. And protect it. I won't string you along with a tale of easy accomplishment. It may take years before we can complete the boat, and it'll be damn hard work doing it."

Lothar's face blazed with a spark caught from Clemens' few words. "It's a noble, magnificent dream!" he said. "Yes, I'd like to join you, I'll pledge my honor to follow you until we storm Misty Tower! On my word as a gentleman and officer, on the blood of the barons of Richthofen!" "Just give me your word as a man," Sam said dryly.

"What a strange—indeed, unthinkable—trio we make!" Lothar said. "A gigantic subhuman, who must have died at least 100,000 years before civilization. A twentieth-century Prussian baron and aviator. A great American humorist born in 1835. And our crew—" Clemens raised his thick eyebrows at the our—"tenth-century Vikings!"

"A sorry lot now," Sam said, watching Bloodaxe and the others plow through the mud. All were bruised from head to foot and many limped. "I don't feel so well myself. Have you ever watched a Japanese tenderize a dead octopus? I know how the octopus feels now. By the way, I was more than just a humorist, you know. I was a man of letters."

"Ah, forgive me!" Lothar said. "I've hurt your feelings! No offense! Let me salve your injuries, Mr. Clemens, by telling you that when I was a boy, I laughed many times reading your books. And I regard your Huckleberry Finn as a great book. Although I must admit I did not care for the way you ridiculed the aristocracy in your Connecticut Yankee. Still, they were English, and you are an American."

Erik Bloodaxe decided that they were too battered and weary to start the job of getting the ship down to The River that day. They would charge their grails at evening, eat, sleep, eat breakfast and then begin the backbreaking work.

They went back to the ship, took their grails from the hold and set them on the depressions on the flat top of a grailstone. As the sun touched the peaks of the mountains to the west, the men awaited the roar and the hot, blue flash from the stones. The electrical discharge would power the energy-matter converters within the false bottoms of the grail and, on opening the lids, the men would find cooked meats, vegetables, bread and butter, fruit, tobacco, dreamgum, liquor or mead.

But as darkness settled over the valley, the grailstones remained silent and cold. Across The River, fire sprang up momentarily from the grailstones there, and a faint roar reached them.

But the stones on the west bank, for the first time in the twenty years since the day of Resurrection, did not function.

The men and women felt as if God had failed them. The three-times-a-day offering of the stones had come to seem as natural as the rising of the sun. It was some time before they could ease the sickness in their stomachs to eat the last of the fish, sprouts, and cheese.

Clemens was in a blue funk for a while. But von Richthofen began talking of the necessity of ferrying the grails to the other side so they could eat in the morning. Presently Clemens got up and talked to Bloodaxe. The Norwegian was in a mood even fouler than usual, but he finally admitted that action must be taken. Joe Miller, the German, and a big redheaded Swede named Toke Kroksson trudged back up to the ship and then carried some oars back down. These three, with Clemens, took the grails across in the dugout; and Toke and Joe Miller paddled the dugout back. Miller, Clemens and von Richthofen settled down to sleep on top of a grailstone. It was clean, since the electrical discharge had burned off all the mud.

"We'll have to get under the stone when the rains come," Clemens said. He lay on his back, his hands under his head, and looked up at the night sky. It was no terrestrial sky, this blaze of twenty thousand stars greater than Venus in her glory and shimmering filaments tentacling out from glittering gas clouds. Some of the stars were so bright that they could be seen as pale phantoms even at noon.