THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

There was no sound now except for Gwenafra's breathing and the far-off chuff-chuff of the great paddlewheels. Their cycling sent slight vibrations throughout the ship. When he had his hand on the duraluminum frame of the bed, he could feel the faint waves. The four wheels turned by the colossal electrical motors were driving the vessel toward his goal.

Out there, on both banks, people were sleeping. Night lay over this hemisphere, and an estimated 8.75 billion were abed, dreaming. What were their shadowy visions? Some would be of Earth; some, of this world.

Was the ex-caveman turning restlessly in his sleep, moaning, dreaming of a sabertooth prowling outside the fire in the entrance? Joe Miller often dreamed of mammoths, those hairy curving-tusked leviathans of his time, food to stuff his capacious belly and skin to make tents and ivory to make props for the tents and teeth to make enormous necklaces. He also dreamed of his totem, his ancestor, the giant cave bear; the massive shaggy figure came to him at night and advised him on matters that troubled him. And he dreamed sometimes of being beat with clubs on the soles of his feet by enemies. Joe's eight hundred pounds plus his bipedal posture caused flat feet. He could not walk all day like the Homo sapiens pygmies; he had to sit down and ease his aching feet.

Joe also had nocturnal emissions when dreaming of a female of his kind. Joe was sleeping with his present mate, a six-foot seven-inch beauty, a Kassubian, a Slavic speaker of the third century A.D. She loved Joe's massiveness and hairiness and the grotesque nose and the gargantuan penis and most of all his essentially gentle soul. And she may have gotten a perverse pleasure from making love to a not-quite-human being. Joe loved her, too, but that didn't keep him from dreaming amorously of his Terrestrial wife and any number of other females of his tribe. Or, like humans everywhere, of a mate constructed by the Master of Dreams, an ideal living only in the unconscious.

"Every man is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody."

So Sam Clemens had written. How true. But the Master of Dreams, that master of ceremonies of bizarre circuses, trotted out his caged beasts and trapeze artists and tight-rope walkers and side-show freaks every night.

In last night's dream, he, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, had been locked in a room with an enormous machine on the back of which rode his alter ego, Mark Twain. The machine was a monstrous and weird creature, squat, round-backed, a cockroach with a thousand legs and a thousand teeth. The teeth in the oblong mouth were bottles of patent medicine, "snake oil." The legs were metal rods with round feet on the bottoms of which were letters from the alphabet. It advanced toward him, teeth clinking together while the legs squeaked and squealed from lack of oil. Mark Twain, seated in a gold-plated diamond-encrusted howdah on its back, pulled levers to direct it. Mark Twain was an old man with bushy white hair and a white bushy mustache. He wore an all-white suit. He gri

Sam was only eighteen, his famous mustache not yet grown. He clutched the handle of a carpetbag in one hand.

Round and round the room Sam fled, while the machine clinked and squeaked as it spun around and ran toward him and then backed up. Mark Twain kept yelling things at Sam, such as: "Here's a page from your own book, Sam," and "Your publisher sends you his regards, Sam, and asks for more money!"

Sam, squealing like the machine, was a mouse trapped by a mechanical cat. No matter how fast he ran, how he spun, whirled, and leaped, he was inevitably going to be caught.

Suddenly, ripples passed over the metal shell of the monster. It stopped, and it groaned. A clicking issued from its mouth; it squatted, the legs bending. From an orifice in its rear spurted a stream of green paper. They were thousand-dollar bills, and they piled against the wall and then began to flow over the machine. The pile grew and grew and then fell into the howdah, where Mark Twain was screaming at the machine that it was sick, sick, sick.

Fascinated, Sam crept forward, keeping a wary eye on the machine. He picked up one of the bills. "At last," he thought, "at long last."

The paper in his hand became human feces.

Now he saw that all the bills had suddenly turned to feces.

But a door had opened in the hitherto unbroken wall of the room.

H. H. Rogers stuck his head through. He was the rich man who'd aided Sam during his troubles, even though Sam had excoriated the big oil trusts. Sam ran toward him, yelling, "Help! Help!"

Rogers stepped into the room. He wore nothing except red longjohns, the rear flap of which -hung unbuttoned. On his chest in gold letters was the legend: IN STANDARD OIL WE TRUST; ALL OTHERS, GOD.

"You've saved me, Henry!" Sam gasped.

Rogers turned his back for a minute, exposing the sign on his buttocks: PUT IN A DOLLAR AND PULL THE LEVER.

Rogers, frowning, said, "Just a minute." He reached behind him and pulled out a document.

"Sign here, and I'll let you out."

"I haven't got a pen!" Sam said. Behind him, the machine was begi

"I don't have a pen," Sam said again. "I'll take your shadow for collateral," Rogers said. "I already sold it," Sam said. He groaned as the door swung shut behind Rogers.

And that had been the end of that nightmare. Where now were his wife Livy, Clara, Jean, and Susy, his daughters? What dreams were they dreaming? Did he figure in them? If so, as what? Where was Orion, his brother? Inept bumbling ne'er-do-well optimistic Orion. Sam had loved him. And where was his brother Henry, poor Henry, burned so badly when the paddlewheeler Pe

Resurrection had restored Orion's charred skin, but it would never heal his interior wounds. Just as it had failed to heal Sam's.

And where was the poor old whiskey-sodden tramp who had died when the Ha

Some hours before the marshal had picked up the bum, Sam had given the bum some matches to light his pipe. It was one of these that must have set fire to the straw bed in the cell. Sam knew that he was responsible for the tramp's terrible death. If he had not felt sorry for him and gone home to get the matches for him, the man would not have died. An act of charity, a moment of sympathy, had caused him to be burned to death.

And where was Nina, his grandaughter? She was born after he'd died, but he had learned about her from a man who'd read her death notice in the Los Angeles Times of January 18, 1966.

RITES PENDING FOR NINA CLEMENS, LAST DESCENDANT OF MARK TWAIN