The Magic Labyrinth (3 page)

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 “Foulweather 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 paddle wheels. 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 ax 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 t 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 downRiver. 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, that 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 upRiver.

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 Valleydwellers 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.