THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

"Not until you truly repent," Malory said, "and if you address your repentance to that God whom you have offended so grievously."

"Quelle merde!" de Bergerac said. But a moment later he embraced Malory and kissed him on both cheeks. "How I wish that your belief was indeed fact! But if it were, then how could I forgive God!"

He bade adieu to Malory, saying that he would probably never see him again. Tomorrow morning, he was setting out up-River. Malory suspected that de Bergerac would have to steal a boat to do so, and he was right.

Malory often thought of the man who'd leaped from the burning dirigible, the man who had actually been to the tower which many spoke about but none had seen except for the Frenchman and his crewmates. Or if the story could be believed, a group of ancient Egyptians and a huge hairy subhuman.

Less than three years later, the second great paddlewheeled boat came by. This was even more huge than the Rex and it was more luxurious and faster and better armored and weaponed. But it was not called the Mark Twain. Its captain, Samuel Clemens, an American, had renamed it the Not For Hire. Apparently, he'd heard that King John was calling his own boat, the original Not For Hire, the Rex Grandissimus. So Clemens had taken back the name and ceremoniously had it painted on the hull.

The boat stopped off to recharge its batacitor and to charge its grails. Malory didn't get a chance to talk to the captain, but he did see him and his surprising bodyguard. Joe Miller was indeed an ogre, ten feet high and weighing eight hundred pounds. His body was not as hairy as Malory expected from the tales. He was no more hirsute than many men Malory had seen, though the hairs were longer. And he did have a face with massive prognathic jaws and a nose like a gigantic cucumber or a proboscis monkey's. Yet he had the look of intelligence.

4

ON DROVE THE PURSUER.

It was an hour to high noon. In another hour, the fabulous riverboat would be anchored, and a very thick aluminum cable would co

Its hull was white except over the paddle boxes, or wheel guards, over the four paddlewheels. On these were painted in big black letters: NOT FOR HIRE. Under this in smaller letters: Samuel Clemens, Captain. And under this line, in still smaller letters: Owned and Operated By The Avengers, Inc.

Above the pilothouse was a jack staff flying a square light-blue flag on which was a scarlet phoenix.

From the stern or verge staff, leaning at a forty-five-degree angle from the stern of the lowest deck, was another flag with a light-blue field and bearing a scarlet phoenix.

Sam's boat was 550 feet and eight inches long. Its breadth over the paddleboxes, or paddlewheel guards, was 115 feet. Its draft was 18 feet when fully loaded.

There were five major decks. The lowest, the A or boiler deck, held various storage rooms, the enormous batacitor, which rose from a well into the next deck, the four electrical motors which drove the paddlewheels, and a huge boiler.

The batacitor was an enormous electrical device fifty feet wide and forty-three feet high. One of Sam's engineers had claimed it was a late twentieth-century invention. But, since the engineer had said he'd lived past 1983, Sam suspected that he was an agent. (He was long dead.)

The batacitor (from battery-capacitor) could take in the enormous voltage discharged from a grailstone within a second and deliver it all within a second or in a mere trickle, as required. It was the power source for the four massive paddlewheel motors and for the other electrical needs of the boat, including the air-conditioning.

The electrically heated boiler was sixty feet wide and thirty high and was used to heat water for the showers and to heat the cabins, to make alcohol, to power the steam machine guns and fighter-plane steam catapults, and to provide air for the compressed-air ca

At water level in the rear of the boiler deck was a big door which could be raised to admit or let out the two launches and the torpedo-bomber.

The deck above, the B or main deck, was set back to provide an exterior passageway, called the promenade deck.

On the Mississippi riverboats which Sam had piloted when young, the lowest deck had been called the main deck and the one above that the boiler deck. But since the boiler in the Not For Hire had its base in the lowest deck, Sam had renamed that the boiler deck. And he called the one above it the main deck. It had been confusing at first for his pilots, who were accustomed to Terrestrial usage, but they had gotten used to it.

Sometimes, when the boat was anchored off the bank of a peaceable area, Sam gave the crew shore leave (except for the guards, of course). Then he would conduct a tour for the local high muckymucks. Dressed in a white fishskin-leather jacket, a long white kiltcloth, and white calf-length boots and wearing a white leather captain's hat, he would take his guests from top to bottom of the boat. Of course, he and some marines kept a sharp eye on them, since the contents of the Not For Hire must have proved very tempting to landlubbing stay-at-homes.

Puffing on a cigar between his sentences, Sam would explain everything, well, almost everything, to his curious party.

Having led them through the A or boiler deck, Sam would then take them up the steps to the B or main deck.

"Navy people would call this series of steps a ladder," he said. "But since most of my crew were landlubbers, and since we do have some reah ladders aboard, I decided to call the stairways stairways. After all, you go up them on steps, not rungs. In the same spirit, I dictated, despite the outraged protests of naval veterans, that walls should not be called bulkheads but walls. However, I did allow a distinction between your ordinary door and hatches. Hatches are those thick airtight watertight doors which can be locked with a lever mechanism."

"And what kind of weapon is that?" a tourist would ask. He'd point at a long tubular duraluminum device looking like a ca

"That's a steam machine gun, .80 caliber. It contains a complicated device which permits a stream of plastic bullets, fed through a pipe from below, to be fired at a rapid rate from the gun. Steam from the boiler provides the propulsive power."

Once, a person who'd been on the Rex said, "King John's boat has a .75-caliber steam machine gun, several of them."

"Yes. I designed those myself. But the son of a bitch stole the boat, and when I built this one, I made my guns bigger than his."

He showed them the rows of windows, "not ports but windows," along the exterior passageway. "Which some of my crew have the unmitigated ignorance or brazen gall to call corridors or even halls. Of course, they do that behind my back."

He took them into a cabin to impress upon them its commodiousness and luxuriousness.

"There are two hundred and twenty-eight cabins, each of which is fitted for two persons. Notice the snap-up bed, made from brass. Eye-ball the porcelain toilets, the shower stall with hot and cold ru