The Fabulous Riverboat

"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 gri

"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.

23

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 begi

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 ru

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 co

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."