The Fabulous Riverboat

Over the railing of the boiler deck Prince John would sail. Slyboots John, screaming, cursing in his Frenchaccented Middle English or in Anglo-Norman French or in Esperanto. Then the gangplank would be drawn up, bells would ring, whistles would blow, and Sam Clemens, standing behind the pilot, would give the order to begin the voyage.

The voyage! Up a River for maybe ten million miles or maybe twenty million miles, for maybe forty years or a hundred years. Such a Riverboat, such a River, such a voyage had never been dreamed of on Earth, long dead Earth! Up The River, the only one on this world, on the only boat like this, with Sam Clemens as La Sipestro, The Captain, and also addressed as La Estro, The Boss. He was so happy!

And then, as they headed out toward the middle of The River, just to test the current, which was strongest in the center of the mighty stream, as the thousands along the bank waved and cheered or wept after the boat, after him, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, alias Mark Twain—The Captain, The Boss—he saw a man with long yellow hair and broad shoulders pushing through the crowd.

The man wore a towellike cloth, secured by magnetic tabs under the material, as a kilt. His leather sandals were made of the hide of the whale-sized Riverdragon-fish, Around his thickly muscled neck he wore a string of brilliantly colored hornfish vertebrae. In his huge powerful hand he gripped the wooden shaft of a large war ax of iron. His pale-blue eyes were fixed on Samuel Clemens and that broad hawk-nosed face was grim.

Sam Clemens screamed to the pilot, "Faster! Faster! Full speed ahead!"

The great paddle-wheels began to dip into the water more swiftly—Chunk—chunk. Even through the fiberglass-insulated deck the vibrations made the deck quiver. Suddenly the blond man, Erik Bloodaxe, tenth-century Viking King, was in the pilothouse.

He shouted at Sam Clemens in Old Norse. Traitor! Droppings of Ratatosk! I told you I would wait along the banks of The River! You betrayed me so you could get the iron from the fallen star and build your great Riverboat!

Sam fled the pilot house and down the ladders from deck to deck and down into the dark bowels of the hold, but Erik Bloodaxe was always two steps behind.

Past the colossal rotating electric motors Sam Clemens ran, and then he was in the chemistry room, where the engineers were making potassium nitrate from human excrement and mixing it with sulfur and charcoal to make gunpowder. Sam grabbed hold of a lighter and a resin torch, pressed the slide, and a white-hot glowing wire slid out of the case. Stop, or I'll blow up the whole boat! Sam screamed.

Erik had stopped, but he was swinging the big ax around and around over his head. He gri

No! No! Sam screamed. You wouldn't dare! You can't! You can't! This is my dream, my love, my passion, my life, my world! You can't!

The Norseman stepped closer to him; the ax whistled over his head. I can't? Just stand there and see!

Over his shoulder Sam saw a shadow. It moved forward and became a tall, faceless figure. It was X, the Mysterious Stranger, the renegade Ethical who had sent the meteorite crashing into the Rivervalley so that Sam could have the iron and nickel to build his Riverboat on this mineral-poor planet. And so he could sail up The River to the North Polar Sea where the Misty Tower, the Big Grail, call it what you would, was hidden in the cold fog. And there Sam, with the eleven men chosen by X for his as-yet-unrevealed plan, would storm the Tower, and find—find what? Whatever was there. Stranger! Sam called. Save me! Save me!

The laughter was like a wind from the polar sea, turning his guts to crystal. Save yourself, Sam!

No! No! You promised! Sam yelled. And then his eyes were open and the last of his groans died away. Or had he dreamed that he was groaning?

He sat up. His bed was made of bamboo. The mattress was a bamboo fiber cloth stuffed with giant leaves of the irontree. The blanket was made up of five towels secured together by magnetic tabs. The bed was against the wall of a room twenty feet square. It held a desk and a round table and about a dozen chairs, all of bamboo or pine, and a fired-clay chamber pot. There were also a bamboo bucket half full of water, a tall broad case with many pigeonholes for rolls of paper, a rack with bamboo and pine spears with flint and iron tips, yew bows and arrows, a war ax of nickel-iron and four long steel knives. On the wall were a number of pegs from which white towels hung. On one hatstand was a naval cap, an officer's, made of leather covered with a thin white cloth.

On the table was his grail, a gray metallic cylinder with a metal handle.

On the desk were glass bottles containing a soot-black ink, a number of bone pens, and one nickel-iron pen. The papers on the desk were of bamboo, though there were a few sheets of vellum from the i

Glass windows (or ports, as he called them) looked out all around the room. As far as Sam Clemens knew, this was the only house with glass windows in the entire rivervalley. Certainly, it was the only one for 10,000 miles either way from this area.

The sole light came from the sky. Though it was not yet dawn, the light was a trifle brighter than that cast by the full moon on Earth. Giant stars of many colors, some so big they looked like chipped-off pieces of the moon, jampacked the heavens. Bright sheets and streamers hung between the stars, behind them, and even, seemingly, in front of some of the brightest. These were cosmic gas clouds, glories that never ceased to thrill the more sensitive of humanity along The River.

Sam Clemens, smacking his lips at the sour taste of the liquor he had drunk that evening and the even sourer taste of the dream, stumbled across the floor. He opened his eyes completely when he reached the desk, picked up a lighter, and applied the extended hot wire to a fish-oil lamp in a stone bracket.

He opened a port and looked out toward The River. A year ago he would have seen only a flat plain about a mile and a half wide and covered with short, tough, brightgreen grass. Now it was a hideous mass of piled-up earth, deep pits and many buildings of bamboo and pine containing brick furnaces. These were his steel mills (socalled), his glass factory, his smelters, his cement mills, his forges, his blacksmith shops, his armories, his laboratories, and his nitricand sulfuric-acid factories. A half a mile away was a high wall of pine logs enclosing the first metal boat he would build.

Torches flared to his left. Even at night the men were digging out the siderite chunks, hauling up pieces of the nickel-iron.

Behind him had been a forest of thousand-foot-high irontrees, red pine, lodgepole pine, black oak, white oak, yew trees and thick stands of bamboo. These had stood on the foothills; the hills were mostly still there but the trees, except for the irontrees, were all gone, along with the bamboo. Only the huge irontrees had withstood the steel axes of Clemens' people. The tall grasses had been cut down and their fibers chemically treated to make ropes and paper, but their roots were so tough and so tangled that there had not been enough reason to chop them out. The labor and the materials used in chopping through the roots of the short grass of the plains to get to the metal there had been very expensive. Not in terms of money, because that did not exist, but in terms of sweat, worn-out stone and dulled steel.

Where this area had been beautiful with its many trees and bright grass and the colored blooms of the vines that covered the trees, it was now like a battlefield. It had been necessary to create ugliness to build a beautiful boat.