The Fabulous Riverboat

He swung his arms to regain his balance, but not even his apelike agility could save him. He toppled backward, bellowing horror as he turned over and over. Once he glimpsed the faces of his companions, a row of dark brown objects with the darker O's of mouths, watching his descent to the clouds and waters beneath.

"I don't remember hitting the vater," Joe said. "I avoke translated about tventy mileth from where Tham Clementh vath. Thith vath a plathe vhere Northmen of the tenth thentury A.D. lived. I had to thtart learning a new language all over again. The little nothelethth people vere thcared of me, but they vanted me to fight for them. Then I met Tham, and ve became buddieth."

They were silent for a while. Joe lifted his glass to his thin and chimpanzee-flexible lips and poured out the rest of the liquor. Somber, the other two watched him. The only sign of brightness about them was the glow of their cigar ends.

Von Richthofen said, "This man who wore a glass circlet with a sunburst. What did you say his name was?" "I didn't." "Well, then, what was it?"

"Ikhnaton. Tham knowth more about him than I do, and I lived for four yearth with him. At leatht, that'th vhat Tham thayth. But—" here Joe looked smug—"I know the man and all Tham knowth ith a few hithtorical factth, thocalled."

7

Von Richthofen said good night and went belowdecks. Sam paced back and forth, stopping once to light a cigarette for the helmsman. He wanted to sleep but could not. Insomnia had been skewering him for years; it drove through the middle of his brain, which spun on it like a wild gear, disengaged from his body's need for rest.

Joe Miller sat hunched against the railing and waited for his friend—the only man he trusted and loved—to go belowdecks. Presently his head drooped, the bludgeo

"Thleep veil, little chum," Sam said, knowing that Joe dreamed of that forever-lost Earth where mammoths and giant bears and lions roamed and where beautiful—to him—females of his own species lusted after him. Once he groaned and then whimpered, and Sam knew that he was dreaming again of being seized by a bear which was chomping on his feet. Joe's feet hurt day and night. Like all of his kind, he was too huge and heavy for bipedal locomotion. Nature had experimented with a truly giant subhuman ^species and then she had dismissed them as failures.

"The Rise and Fall of the Flatfeet," Sam said. "An article I shall never write."

Sam gave a groan, a weak echo of Joe's. He saw Livy's half smashed body, given him briefly by the waves, then taken away. Or had she really been Livy? Had he not seen her at least a dozen times before while staring through the telescope at the multitudes on the banks? Yet, when he had been able to talk Bloodaxe into putting ashore just to see if the face was Livy's, he had always been disappointed. Now there was no reason to believe the corpse had been his wife's.

He groaned again. How cruel if it had been Livy! How like life! To have been so close and then to have her taken away a few minutes before he would have been reunited with her. And to have her cast upon the decks as if God—or whatever sneering forces ran the universe—were to laugh and to say, "See how close you came! Suffer, you miserable conglomeration of atoms! Be in pain, wretch! You must pay with tears and agony!"

"Pay for what?" Sam muttered, biting on his cigar. "Pay for what crimes? Haven't I suffered enough on Earth, suffered for what I did do and even more for what I didn't do?"

Death had come to him on Earth, and he had been glad because it meant the end forever to all sorrow. He would no longer have to weep because of the sickness and deaths of his beloved wife and daughters nor gloom because he felt responsible for the death of his only son, the death caused by his negligence. Or was it carelessness that had made his son catch the disease that killed him? Hadn't his unconscious mind permitted the robe to slip from little Langdon, while taking him for a carriage ride that cold winter day?" -

"No!" Sam said so loudly that Joe stirred and the helmsman growled something in Norse.

He smacked his fist against his open palm, and Joe muttered again.

"God, why do I have to ache now with guilt for anything I've done?" Sam cried. "It doesn't matter now! It's all been wiped out; we've started with clean souls."

But it did matter. It made no difference that all the dead were once more alive and the sick were healthy and the bad deeds were so remote in time and space that they should be forgiven and forgotten. What a man had been and had thought on Earth, he still was and thought here.

Suddenly, he wished he had a stick of dreamgum. That might remove the clenching remorse and make him wildly happy.

But then it might intensify the anguish. You never knew if a horror so terrifying would come that you wanted to die. The last time he had taken the gum, he had been so menaced by monsters that he had not dared try the gum again. But maybe this tune... no!

Little Langdon! He would never see him again, never! His son had been only twenty-eight months old when he had died, and this meant that he had not been resurrected in the Rivervalley. No children who had died on Earth before the age of five had been raised again. At least, not here. It was to be presumed that they were alive somewhere, probably on another planet. But for some reason, whoever was responsible for this had chosen not to place the infant dead here. And so Sam would never find him and make amends.

Nor would he ever find Livy or his daughters, Sarah, Jean, and Clara. Not on a River said to be possibly twenty million miles long with possibly thirty-seven billion people on its banks. Even if a man started at one end and walked up one bank and looked at every person on that side and then, on reaching the end, walked back down the other side and did not miss a person, he would take—how long? A square mile a day would mean a round trip of, say 365 into 40,000,000,—what was that? He wasn't any good at doing sums in his head, but it must be over 109,000 years.

And even if a man could do this, could walk all those weary miles and make sure he never missed a face, at the end of over 100,000 years he still might not find the face. The longed-for person might have died somewhere ahead of the searcher and been translated back down The River, behind the searcher. Or the searchee may have passed by the searcher during the night, perhaps while the searchee was looking for the searcher. Yet there might be another way to do this. The beings responsible for this Rivervalley and the resurrection might have the power to locate anybody they wished to. They must have a central file or some means of ascertaining the identity and location of the valley dwellers.

Or, if they did not, they could at least be made to pay for what they had done.

Joe Miller's story was no fantasy. It had some very puzzling aspects, but these hinted at something comforting. That was, that some nameless person—or being—wanted the valley dwellers to know about the tower in the mists of the north polar sea. Why? Sam did not know, and he could not guess. But that hole had been bored through the cliff to enable human beings to find out about the tower. And in that tower must be the light to scatter the darkness of ignorance. Of that Sam was sure. And then there was the widespread story of the Englishman, Burton or Perkin, probably Burton, who had awakened prematurely in the preresurrection phase. Was the awakening any more of an accident than the hole bored through the polar cliff?