The Complete Riverworld Anthology
Author: Philip José Farmer
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Personal; Retail; 060 Top 100 Sci-Fi
Description: Anthology containing: To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat by Philip José Farmer The Dark Design by Philip José Farmer The Magic Labyrinth by Philip José Farmer Gods of Riverworld by Philip José Farmer
Rights: Copyrights as per source stories

PRAISE FOR
Riverworld

“[A] jolting conception, brought off with tremendous skill.”

—The Times (London)

“Impressively imaginative and well-researched.”

—Evening Standard (London)

“One of the most imaginative worlds in science fiction!”

—Booklist

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these novels are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

RIVERWORLD

Omnibus copyright © 2010 by The Estate of Philip José Farmer

To Your Scattered Bodies Go copyright © 1971 by The Estate of Philip José Farmer
The Fabulous Riverboat copyright © 1971 by The Estate of Philip José Farmer

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Farmer, Philip José.
Riverworld / Philip José Farmer.—1st hardcover ed.
p.   cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 978-0-7653-2652-2
I. Title.
PS3556.A72R48  2010
813′.54—dc22
2009047696

First Edition: April 2010

Printed in the United States of America

0    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

CONTENTS

To Your Scattered Bodies Go

The Fabulous Riverboat

1

His wife had held him in her arms as if she could keep death away from him.

He had cried out, “My God, I am a dead man!”

The door to the room had opened, and he had seen a giant, black, one-humped camel outside and had heard the tinkle of the bells on its harness as the hot desert wind touched them. Then a huge black face topped by a great black turban had appeared in the doorway. The black eunuch had come in through the door, moving like a cloud, with a gigantic scimitar in his hand. Death, the Destroyer of Delights and the Sunderer of Society, had arrived at last.

Blackness. Nothingness. He did not even know that his heart had given out forever. Nothingness.

Then his eyes opened. His heart was beating strongly. He was strong, very strong! All the pain of the gout in his feet, the agony in his liver, the torture in his heart, all were gone.

It was so quiet he could hear the blood moving in his head. He was alone in a world of soundlessness.

A bright light of equal intensity was everywhere. He could see, yet he did not understand what he was seeing. What were these things above, beside, below him? Where was he?

He tried to sit up and felt, numbly, a panic. There was nothing to sit up upon because he was hanging in nothingness. The attempt sent him forward and over, very slowly, as if he were in a bath of thin treacle. A foot from his fingertips was a rod of bright red metal. The rod came from above, from infinity, and went on down to infinity. He tried to grasp it because it was the nearest solid object, but something invisible was resisting him. It was as if lines of some force were pushing against him, repelling him.

Slowly, he turned over in a somersault. Then the resistance halted him with his fingertips about six inches from the rod. He straightened his body out and moved forward a fraction of an inch. At the same time, his body began to rotate on its longitudinal axis. He sucked in air with a loud sawing noise. Though he knew no hold existed for him, he could not help flailing his arms in panic to try to seize onto something.

Now he was face “down,” or was it “up”? Whatever the direction, it was opposite to that toward which he had been looking when he had awakened. Not that this mattered. “Above” him and “below” him the view was the same. He was suspended in space, kept from falling by an invisible and unfelt cocoon. Six feet “below” him was the body of a woman with a very pale skin. She was naked and completely hairless. She seemed to be asleep. Her eyes were closed, and her breasts rose and fell gently. Her legs were together and straight out, and her arms were by her side. She turned slowly like a chicken on a spit.

The same force that was rotating her was also rotating him. He spun slowly away from her, saw other naked and hairless bodies, men, women, and children, opposite him in silent spinning rows. Above him was the rotating naked and hairless body of a Negro.

He lowered his head so that he could see along his own body. He was naked and hairless, too. His skin was smooth, and the muscles of his belly were ridged, and his thighs were packed with strong young muscles. The veins that had stood out like blue mole-ridges were gone. He no longer had the body of the enfeebled and sick sixty-nine-year-old man who had been dying only a moment ago. And the hundred or so scars were gone.

He realized then that there were no old men or women among the bodies surrounding him. All seemed to be about twenty-five years old, though it was difficult to determine the exact age, since the hairless heads and pubes made them seem older and younger at the same time.

He had boasted that he knew no fear. Now fear ripped away the cry forming in this throat. His fear pressed down on him and squeezed the new life from him.

He had been stunned at first because he was still living. Then his position in space and the arrangement of his new environment had frozen his senses. He was seeing and feeling through a thick semiopaque window. After a few seconds something snapped inside him. He could almost hear it, as if a window had suddenly been raised.

The world took a shape which he could grasp, though he could not comprehend it. Above him, on both sides, below him, as far as he could see, bodies floated. They were arranged in vertical and horizontal rows. The up-and-down ranks were separated by red rods, slender as broomsticks, one of which was twelve inches from the feet of the sleepers and the other twelve inches from their heads. Each body was spaced about six feet from the body above and below and on each side.

The rods came up from an abyss without bottom and soared into an abyss without ceiling. That grayness into which the rods and the bodies, up and down, right and left, disappeared was neither the sky nor the earth. There was nothing in the distance except the lackluster of infinity.

On one side was a dark man with Tuscan features. On his other side was an Asiatic Indian and beyond her a large Nordic-looking man. Not until the third revolution was he able to determine what was so odd about the man. The right arm, from a point just below the elbow, was red. It seemed to lack the outer layer of skin.

A few seconds later, several rows away, he saw a male adult body lacking the skin and all the muscles of the face.

There were other bodies that were not quite complete. Far away, glimpsed unclearly, was a skeleton and a jumble of organs inside it.

He continued turning and observing while his heart slammed against his chest with terror. By then he understood that he was in some colossal chamber and that the metal rods were radiating some force that somehow supported and revolved millions—maybe billions—of human beings.

Where was this place?

Certainly, it was not the city of Trieste of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of 1890.

It was like no hell or heaven of which he had ever heard or read, and he had thought that he was acquainted with every theory of the afterlife.

He had died. Now he was alive. He had scoffed all his life at a life-after-death. For once, he could not deny that he had been wrong. But there was no one present to say, “I told you so, you damned infidel!”

Of all the millions, he alone was awake.

As he turned at an estimated rate of one complete revolution per ten seconds, he saw something else that caused him to gasp with amazement. Five rows away was a body that seemed, at first glance, to be human. But no member of Homo sapiens had three fingers and a thumb on each hand and four toes on each foot. Nor a nose and thin black leathery lips like a dog’s. Nor a scrotum with many small knobs. Nor ears with such strange convolutions.

Terror faded away. His heart quit beating so swiftly, though it did not return to normal. His brain unfroze. He must get out of this situation where he was as helpless as a hog on a turnspit. He would get to somebody who could tell him what he was doing here, how he had come here, why he was here.

To decide was to act.

He drew up his legs and kicked and found that the action, the reaction, rather, drove him forward a half-inch. Again, he kicked and moved against the resistance. But, as he paused, he was slowly moved back toward his original location. And his legs and arms were gently pushed toward their original rigid position.

In a frenzy, kicking his legs and moving his arms in a swimmer’s breaststroke, he managed to fight toward the rod. The closer he got to it, the stronger the web of force became. He did not give up. If he did, he would be back where he had been and without enough strength to begin fighting again. It was not his nature to give up until all his strength had been expended.

He was breathing hoarsely, his body was coated with sweat, his arms and legs moved as if in a thick jelly, and his progress was imperceptible. Then, the fingertips of his left hand touched the rod. It felt warm and hard.

Suddenly, he knew which way was “down.” He fell.

The touch had broken the spell. The webs of air around him snapped soundlessly, and he was plunging.

He was close enough to the rod to seize it with one hand. The sudden checking of his fall brought his hip up against the rod with a painful impact. The skin of his hand burned as he slid down the rod, and then his other hand clutched the rod, and he had stopped.

In front of him, on the other side of the rod, the bodies had started to fall. They descended with the velocity of a falling body on Earth, and each maintained its stretched-out position and the original distance between the body above and below. They even continued to revolve.

It was then that the puffs of air on his naked sweating back made him twist around on the rod. Behind him, in the vertical row of bodies that he had just occupied, the sleepers were also falling. One after the other, as if methodically dropped through a trapdoor, spinning slowly, they hurtled by him. Their heads missed him by a few inches. He was fortunate not to have been knocked off the rod and sent plunging into the abyss along with them.

In stately procession, they fell. Body after body shooting down on both sides of the rod, while the other rows of millions upon millions slept on.

For a while, he stared. Then he began counting bodies; he had always been a devoted enumerator. But when he had counted 3,001, he quit. After that he gazed at the cataract of flesh. How far up, how immeasurably far up, were they stacked? And how far down could they fall? Unwittingly, he had precipitated them when his touch had disrupted the force emanating from the rod.

He could not climb up the rod, but he could climb down it. He began to let himself down, and then he looked upward and he forgot about the bodies hurtling by him. Somewhere overhead, a humming was overriding the whooshing sound of the falling bodies.

A narrow craft, of some bright green substance and shaped like a canoe, was sinking between the column of the fallers and the neighboring column of suspended. The aerial canoe had no visible means of support, he thought, and it was a measure of his terror that he did not even think about his pun. No visible means of support. Like a magical vessel out of The Thousand and One Nights.

A face appeared over the edge of the vessel. The craft stopped, and the humming noise ceased. Another face was by the first. Both had long, dark, and straight hair. Presently, the faces withdrew, the humming was renewed, and the canoe again descended toward him. When it was about five feet above him it halted. There was a single small symbol on the green bow: a white spiral that exploded to the right. One of the canoe’s occupants spoke in a language with many vowels and a distinct and frequently recurring glottal stop. It sounded like Polynesian.

Abruptly, the invisible cocoon around him reasserted itself. The falling bodies began to slow in their rate of descent and then stopped. The man on the rod felt the retaining force close in on him and lift him up. Though he clung desperately to the rod, his legs were moved up and then away and his body followed it. Soon he was looking downward. His hands were torn loose; he felt as if his grip on life, on sanity, on the world, had also been torn away. He began to drift upward and to revolve. He went by the aerial canoe and rose above it. The two men in the canoe were naked, dark-skinned as Yemenite Arabs, and handsome. Their features were Nordic, resembling those of some Icelanders he had known.

One of them lifted a hand which held a pencil-sized metal object. The man sighted along it as if he were going to shoot something from it.

The man floating in the air shouted with rage and hate and frustration and flailed his arms to swim toward the machine.

“I’ll kill!” he screamed. “Kill! Kill!”

Oblivion came again.

2

God was standing over him as he lay on the grass by the waters and the weeping willows. He lay wide-eyed and as weak as a baby just born. God was poking him in the ribs with the end of an iron cane. God was a tall man of middle age. He had a long black forked beard, and He was wearing the Sunday best of an English gentleman of the 53rd year of Queen Victoria’s reign.

“You’re late,” God said. “Long past due for the payment of your debt, you know.”

“What debt?” Richard Francis Burton said. He passed his fingertips over his ribs to make sure that all were still there.

“You owe for the flesh,” replied God, poking him again with the cane. “Not to mention the spirit. You owe for the flesh and the spirit, which are one and the same thing.”

Burton struggled to get up onto his feet. Nobody, not even God, was going to punch Richard Burton in the ribs and get away without a battle.

God, ignoring the futile efforts, pulled a large gold watch from His vest pocket, unsnapped its heavy enscrolled gold lid, looked at the hands, and said, “Long past due.”

God held out His other hand, its palm turned up.

“Pay up, sir. Otherwise, I’ll be forced to foreclose.”

“Foreclose on what?”

Darkness fell. God began to dissolve into the darkness. It was then that Burton saw that God resembled himself. He had the same black straight hair, the same Arabic face with the dark stabbing eyes, high cheekbones, heavy lips, and the thrust-out, deeply cleft chin. The same long deep scars, witnesses of the Somali javelin which pierced his jaws in that fight at Berbera, were on His cheeks. His hands and feet were small, contrasting with His broad shoulders and massive chest. And He had the long thick moustachios and the long forked beard that had caused the Bedouin to name Burton “the Father of Moustachios.”

“You look like the Devil,” Burton said, but God had become just another shadow in the darkness.

3

Burton was still sleeping, but he was so close to the surface of consciousness that he was aware that he had been dreaming. Light was replacing the night.

Then his eyes did open. And he did not know where he was.

A blue sky was above. A gentle breeze flowed over his naked body. His hairless head and his back and legs and the palms of his hands were against grass. He turned his head to the right and saw a plain covered with very short, very green, very thick grass. The plain sloped gently upward for a mile. Beyond the plain was a range of hills that started out mildly, then became steeper and higher and very irregular in shape as they climbed toward the mountains. The hills seemed to run for about two and a half miles. All were covered with trees, some of which blazed with scarlets, azures, bright greens, flaming yellows, and deep pinks. The mountains beyond the hills rose suddenly, perpendicularly, and unbelievably high. They were black and bluish-green, looking like a glassy igneous rock with huge splotches of lichen covering at least a quarter of the surface.

Between him and the hills were many human bodies. The closest one, only a few feet away, was that of the white woman who had been below him in that vertical row.

He wanted to rise up, but he was sluggish and numb. All he could do for the moment, and that required a strong effort, was to turn his head to the left. There were more naked bodies there on a plain that sloped down to a river perhaps ten yards away. The river was about a mile wide, and on its other side was another plain, probably about a mile broad and sloping upward to foothills covered with more of the trees and then the towering precipitous black and bluish-green mountains. That was the east, he thought frozenly. The sun had just risen over the top of the mountain there.

Almost by the river’s edge was a strange structure. It was a gray red-flecked granite and was shaped like a mushroom. Its broad base could not be more than five feet high, and the mushroom top had a diameter of about fifty feet.

He managed to rise far enough to support himself on one elbow.

There were more mushroom-shaped granites along both sides of the river.

Everywhere on the plain were unclothed baldheaded human beings, spaced about six feet apart. Most were still on their backs and gazing into the sky. Others were beginning to stir, to look around, or even sitting up.

He sat up also and felt his head and face with both hands. They were smooth.

His body was not that wrinkled, ridged, bumpy, withered body of the sixty-nine-year-old which had lain on his deathbed. It was the smooth-skinned and powerfully muscled body he had when he was twenty-five years old. The same body he had when he was floating between those rods in that dream. Dream? It had seemed too vivid to be a dream. It was not a dream.

Around his wrist was a thin band of transparent material. It was connected to a six-inch-long strap of the same material. The other end was clenched about a metallic arc, the handle of a grayish metal cylinder with a closed cover.

Idly, not concentrating because his mind was too sluggish, he lifted the cylinder. It weighed less than a pound, so it could not be of iron even if it was hollow. Its diameter was a foot and a half and it was over two and a half feet tall.

Everyone had a similar object strapped to their wrist.

Unsteadily, his heart beginning to pick up speed as his senses became unnumbed, he got to his feet.

Others were rising, too. Many had faces which were slack or congealed with an icy wonder. Some looked fearful. Their eyes were wide and rolling; their chests rose and fell swiftly; their breaths hissed out. Some were shaking as if an icy wind had swept over them, though the air was pleasantly warm.

The strange thing, the really alien and frightening thing, was the almost complete silence. Nobody said a word; there was only the hissing of breaths of those near him, a tiny slap as a man smacked himself on his leg, a low whistling from a woman.

Their mouths hung open, as if they were about to say something.

They began moving about, looking into each other’s faces, sometimes reaching out to lightly touch another. They shuffled their bare feet, turned this way, turned back the other way, gazed at the hills, the trees covered with the huge vividly colored blooms, the lichenous and soaring mountains, the sparkling and green river, the mushroom-shaped stones, the straps and the gray metallic containers.

Some felt their naked skulls and their faces.

Everybody was encased in a mindless motion and in silence.

Suddenly, a woman began moaning. She sank to her knees, threw her head and her shoulders back, and she howled. At the same time, far down the riverbank, somebody else howled.

It was as if these two cries were signals. Or as if the two were double keys to the human voice and had unlocked it.

The men and women and children began screaming or sobbing or tearing at their faces with their nails or beating themselves on their breasts or falling on their knees and lifting their hands in prayer or throwing themselves down and trying to bury their faces in the grass as if, ostrich-like, to avoid being seen, or rolling back and forth, barking like dogs or howling like wolves.

The terror and the hysteria gripped Burton. He wanted to go to his knees and pray for salvation from judgment. He wanted mercy. He did not want to see the blinding face of God appear over the mountains, a face brighter than the sun. He was not as brave and as guiltless as he had thought. Judgment would be so terrifying, so utterly final, that he could not bear to think about it.

Once, he had had a fantasy about standing before God after he had died. He had been little and naked and in the middle of a vast plain, like this, but he had been all alone. Then God, great as a mountain, had strode toward him. And he, Burton, had stood his ground and defied God.

There was no God here, but he fled anyway. He ran across the plain, pushing men and women out of the way, running around some, leaping over others as they rolled on the ground. As he ran, he howled, “No! No! No!” His arms windmilled to fend off unseen terrors. The cylinder strapped to his wrist whirled around and around.

When he was panting so that he could no longer howl, and his legs and arms were hung with weights, and his lungs burned, and his heart boomed, he threw himself down under the first of the trees.

After a while, he sat up and faced toward the plain. The mob noise had changed from screams and howls to a gigantic chattering. The majority were talking to each other, though it did not seem that anybody was listening. Burton could not hear any of the individual words. Some men and women were embracing and kissing as if they had been acquainted in their previous lives and now were holding each other to reassure each other of their identities and of their reality.

There were a number of children in the great crowd. Not one was under five years of age, however. Like their elders, their heads were hairless. Half of them were weeping, rooted to one spot. Others, also crying out, were running back and forth, looking into the faces above them, obviously seeking their parents.

He was beginning to breathe more easily. He stood up and turned around. The tree under which he was standing was a red pine (sometimes wrongly called a Norway pine) about two hundred feet tall. Beside it was a tree of a type he had never seen. He doubted that it had existed on Earth. (He was sure that he was not on Earth, though he could not have given any specific reasons at that moment.) It had a thick, gnarled blackish trunk and many thick branches bearing triangular six-feet-long leaves, green with scarlet lacings. It was about three hundred feet high. There were also trees that looked like white and black oaks, firs, Western yew, and lodgepole pine.

Here and there were clumps of tall bamboo-like plants, and everywhere that there were no trees or bamboo was a grass about three feet high. There were no animals in sight. No insects and no birds.

He looked around for a stick or a club. He did not have the slightest idea what was on the agenda for humanity, but if it was left unsupervised or uncontrolled it would soon be reverting to its normal state. Once the shock was over, the people would be looking out for themselves, and that meant that some would be bullying others.

He found nothing useful as a weapon. Then it occurred to him that the metal cylinder could be used as a weapon. He banged it against a tree. Though it had little weight, it was extremely hard.

He raised the lid, which was hinged inside at one end. The hollow interior had six snapdown rings of metal, three on each side and spaced so that each could hold a deep cup or dish or rectangular container of gray metal. All the containers were empty. He closed the lid. Doubtless he would find out in time what the function of the cylinder was.

Whatever else had happened, resurrection had not resulted in bodies of fragile misty ectoplasm. He was all bone and blood and flesh.

Though he still felt somewhat detached from reality, as if he had been disengaged from the gears of the world, he was emerging from his shock.

He was thirsty. He would have to go down and drink from the river and hope that it would not be poisoned. At this thought, he grinned wryly, and stroked his upper lip. His finger felt disappointed. That was a curious reaction, he thought, and then he remembered that his thick moustache was gone. Oh, yes, he had hoped that the riverwater would not be poisoned. What a strange thought! Why should the dead be brought back to life only to be killed again? But he stood for a long while under the tree. He hated to go back through that madly talking, hysterically sobbing crowd to reach the river. Here, away from the mob, he was free from much of the terror and the panic and the shock that covered them like a sea. If he ventured back, he would be caught up in their emotions again.

Presently, he saw a figure detach itself from the naked throng and walk toward him. He saw that it was not human.

It was then that Burton was sure that this Resurrection Day was not the one which any religion had stated would occur. Burton had not believed in the God portrayed by the Christians, Moslems, Hindus, or any faith. In fact, he was not sure that he believed in any Creator whatsoever. He had believed in Richard Francis Burton and a few friends. He was sure that when he died, the world would cease to exist.

4

Waking up after death, in this valley by this river, he had been powerless to defend himself against the doubts that existed in every man exposed to an early religious conditioning and to an adult society which preached its convictions at every chance.

Now, seeing the alien approach, he was sure that there was some other explanation for this event than a supernatural one. There was a physical, a scientific, reason for his being here; he did not have to resort to Judeo-Christian-Moslem myths for cause.

The creature, it, he—it undoubtedly was a male—was a biped about six feet eight inches tall. The pink-skinned body was very thin; there were three fingers and a thumb on each hand and four very long and thin toes on each foot. There were two dark red spots below the male nipples on the chest. The face was semihuman. Thick black eyebrows swept down to the protruding cheekbones and flared out to cover them with a brownish down. The sides of his nostrils were fringed with a thin membrane about a sixteenth of an inch long. The thick pad of cartilage on the end of his nose was deeply cleft. The lips were thin, leathery, and black. The ears were lobeless and the convolutions within were nonhuman. His scrotum looked as if it contained many small testes.

He had seen this creature floating in the ranks a few rows away in that nightmare place.

The creature stopped a few feet away, smiled, and revealed quite human teeth. He said, “I hope you speak English. However, I can speak with some fluency in Russian, Mandarin Chinese, or Hindustani.”

Burton felt a slight shock, as if a dog or an ape had spoken to him.

“You speak Midwestern American English,” he replied. “Quite well, too. Although too precisely.”

“Thank you,” the creature said. “I followed you because you seemed the only person with enough sense to get away from that chaos. Perhaps you have some explanation for this…what do you call it?…resurrection?”

“No more than you,” Burton said. “In fact, I don’t have any explanation for your existence, before or after resurrection.”

The thick eyebrows of the alien twitched, a gesture which Burton was to find indicated surprise or puzzlement.

“No? That is strange. I would have sworn that not one of the six billion of Earth’s inhabitants had not heard of or seen me on TV.”

“TV?”

The creature’s brows twitched again.

“You don’t know what TV….”

His voice trailed, then he smiled again.

“Of course, how stupid of me! You must have died before I came to Earth!”

“When was that?”

The alien’s eyebrows rose (equivalent to a human frown as Burton would find), and he said slowly, “Let’s see. I believe it was, in your chronology, A.D. 2002. When did you die?”

“It must have been in A.D. 1890,” Burton said. The creature had brought back his sense that all this was not real. He ran his tongue around his mouth; the back teeth he had lost when the Somali spear ran through his cheeks were now replaced. But he was still circumcised, and the men on the riverbank—most of whom had been crying out in the Austrian-German, Italian, or the Slovenian of Trieste—were also circumcised. Yet, in his time, most of the males in that area would have been uncircumcised.

“At least,” Burton added, “I remember nothing after October 20, 1890.”

“Aab!” the creature said. “So, I left my native planet approximately 200 years before you died. My planet? It was a satellite of that star you Terrestrials call Tau Ceti. We placed ourselves in suspended animation, and, when our ship approached your sun, we were automatically thawed out, and…but you do not know what I am talking about?”

“Not quite. Things are happening too fast. I would like to get details later. What is your name?”

“Monat Grrautut. Yours?”

“Richard Francis Burton at your service.”

He bowed slightly and smiled. Despite the strangeness of the creature and some repulsive physical aspects, Burton found himself warming to him.

“The late Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton,” he added. “Most recently Her Majesty’s Consul in the Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste.”

“Elizabeth?”

“I lived in the nineteenth century, not the sixteenth.”

“A Queen Elizabeth reigned over Great Britain in the twentieth century,” Monat said.

He turned to look toward the riverbank.

“Why are they so afraid? All the human beings I met were either sure that there would be no afterlife or else that they would get preferential treatment in the hereafter.”

Burton grinned and said, “Those who denied the hereafter are sure they’re in Hell because they denied it. Those who knew they would go to Heaven are shocked, I would imagine, to find themselves naked. You see, most of the illustrations of our afterlives showed those in Hell as naked and those in Heaven as being clothed. So, if you’re resurrected bare-ass naked, you must be in Hell.”

“You seem amused,” Monat said.

“I wasn’t so amused a few minutes ago,” Burton said. “And I’m shaken. Very shaken. But seeing you here makes me think that things are not what people thought they would be. They seldom are. And God, if He’s going to make an appearance, does not seem to be in a hurry about it. I think there’s an explanation for this, but it won’t match any of the conjectures I knew on Earth.”

“I doubt we’re on Earth,” Monat said. He pointed upward with long slim fingers which bore thick cartilage pads instead of nails.

He said, “If you look steadily there, with your eyes shielded, you can see another celestial body near the sun. It is not the moon.”

Burton cupped his hands over his eyes, the metal cylinder on his shoulder, and stared at the point indicated. He saw a faintly glowing body which seemed to be an eighth of the size of a full moon. When he put his hands down, he said, “A star?”

Monat said, “I believe so. I thought I saw several other very faint bodies elsewhere in the sky, but I’m not sure. We will know when night comes.”

“Where do you think we are?”

“I would not know.”

Monat gestured at the sun.

“It is rising and so it will descend, and then night should come. I think that it would be best to prepare for the night. And for other events. It is warm and getting warmer, but the night may be cold and it might rain. We should build a shelter of some sort. And we should also think about finding food. Though I imagine that this device”—he indicated the cylinder—“will feed us.”

Burton said, “What makes you think that?”

“I looked inside mine. It contains dishes and cups, all empty now, but obviously made to be filled.”

Burton felt less unreal. The being—the Tau Cetan!—talked so pragmatically, so sensibly, that he provided an anchor to which Burton could tie his senses before they drifted away again. And, despite the repulsive alienness of the creature, he exuded a friendliness and an openness that warmed Burton. Moreover, any creature that came from a civilization which could span many trillions of miles of interstellar space must have very valuable knowledge and resources.

Others were beginning to separate themselves from the crowd. A group of about ten men and women walked slowly toward him. Some were talking, but others were silent and wide-eyed. They did not seem to have a definite goal in mind; they just floated along like a cloud driven by a wind. When they got near Burton and Monat, they stopped walking.

A man trailing the group especially attracted Burton’s scrutiny. Monat was obviously nonhuman, but this fellow was subhuman or prehuman. He stood about five feet tall. He was squat and powerfully muscled. His head was thrust forward on a bowed and very thick neck. The forehead was low and slanting. The skull was long and narrow. Enormous supraorbital ridges shadowed dark brown eyes. The nose was a smear of flesh with arching nostrils, and the bulging bones of his jaws pushed his thin lips out. He may have been covered with as much hair as an ape at one time, but now, like everybody else, he was stripped of hair.

The huge hands looked as if they could squeeze water from a stone.

He kept looking behind him as if he feared that someone was sneaking up on him. The human beings moved away from him when he approached them.

But then another man walked up to him and said something to the subhuman in English. It was evident that the man did not expect to be understood but that he was trying to be friendly. His voice, however, was almost hoarse. The newcomer was a muscular youth about six feet tall. He had a face that looked handsome when he faced Burton but was comically craggy in profile. His eyes were green.

The subhuman jumped a little when he was addressed. He peered at the grinning youth from under the bars of bone. Then he smiled, revealing large thick teeth, and spoke in a language Burton did not recognize. He pointed to himself and said something that sounded like Kazzintuitruaabemss. Later, Burton would find out that it was his name and it meant Man-Who-Slew-The-Long-White-Tooth.

The others consisted of five men and four women. Two of the men had known each other in Earthlife, and one of them had been married to one of the women. All were Italians or Slovenes who had died in Trieste, apparently about 1890, though he knew none of them.

“You there,” Burton said, pointing to the man who had spoken in English. “Step forward. What is your name?”

The man approached him hesitantly. He said, “You’re English, right?”

The man spoke with an American Midwest flatness.

Burton held out his hand and said, “Yaas. Burton here.”

The fellow raised hairless eyebrows and said, “Burton?” He leaned forward and peered at Burton’s face. “It’s hard to say…it couldn’t be….”

He straightened up. “Name’s Peter Frigate. F-R-I-G-A-T-E.”

He looked around him and then said in a voice even more strained, “It’s hard to talk coherently. Everybody’s in such a state of shock, you know. I feel as if I’m coming apart. But…here we are…alive again…young again…no hellfire…not yet, anyway. Born in 1918, died 2008…because of what this extra-Terrestrial did…don’t hold it against him…only defending himself, you know.”

Frigate’s voice died away to a whisper. He grinned nervously at Monat.

Burton said, “You know this…Monat Grrautut?”

“Not exactly,” Frigate said. “I saw enough of him on TV, of course, and heard enough and read enough about him.”

He held out his hand as if he expected it to be rejected. Monat smiled, and they shook hands.

Frigate said, “I think it’d be a good idea if we banded together. We may need protection.”

“Why?” Burton said, though he knew well enough.

“You know how rotten most humans are,” Frigate said. “Once people get used to being resurrected, they’ll be fighting for women and food and anything that takes their fancy. And I think we ought to be buddies with this Neanderthal or whatever he is. Anyway, he’ll be a good man in a fight.”

Kazz, as he was named later on, seemed pathetically eager to be accepted. At the same time, he was suspicious of anyone who got too close.

A woman walked by then, muttering over and over in German, “My God! What have I done to offend Thee?”

A man, both fists clenched and raised to shoulder height, was shouting in Yiddish, “My beard! My beard!”

Another man was pointing at his genitals and saying in Slovenian, “They’ve made a Jew of me! A Jew! Do you think that…? No, it couldn’t be!”

Burton grinned savagely and said, “It doesn’t occur to him that maybe They have made a Mohammedan out of him or an Australian aborigine or an ancient Egyptian, all of whom practiced circumcision.”

“What did he say?” asked Frigate. Burton translated; Frigate laughed.

A woman hurried by; she was making a pathetic attempt to cover her breasts and pubic regions with her hands. She was muttering, “What will they think, what will they think?” And she disappeared behind the trees.

A man and a woman passed them; they were talking loudly in Italian as if they were separated by a broad highway.

“We can’t be in Heaven…I know, oh my God, I know!…There was Giuseppe Zomzini and you know what a wicked man he was…he ought to burn in hellfire! I know, I know…he stole from the treasury, he frequented whorehouses, he drank himself to death…yet…he’s here!…I know, I know….”

Another woman was running and screaming in German, “Daddy! Daddy! Where are you? It’s your own darling Hilda!”

A man scowled at them and said repeatedly, in Hungarian, “I’m as good as anyone and better than some. To hell with them.”

A woman said, “I wasted my whole life, my whole life. I did everything for them, and now….”

A man, swinging the metal cylinder before him as if it were a censer, called out, “Follow me to the mountains! Follow me! I know the truth, good people! Follow me! We’ll be safe in the bosom of the Lord! Don’t believe this illusion around you; follow me! I’ll open your eyes!”

Others spoke gibberish or were silent, their lips tight as if they feared to utter what was within them.

“It’ll take some time before they straighten out,” Burton said. He felt that it would take a long time before the world became mundane for him, too.

“They may never know the truth,” Frigate said.

“What do you mean?”

“They didn’t know the Truth—capital T—on Earth, so why should they here? What makes you think we’re going to get a revelation?”

Burton shrugged and said, “I don’t. But I do think we ought to determine just what our environment is and how we can survive in it. The fortune of a man who sits, sits also.”

He pointed toward the riverbank. “See those stone mushrooms? They seem to be spaced out at intervals of a mile. I wonder what their purpose is?”

Monat said, “If you had taken a close look at that one, you would have seen that its surface contains about seven hundred round indentations. These are just the right size for the base of a cylinder to fit in. In fact, there is a cylinder in the center of the top surface. I think that if we examine that cylinder we may be able to determine their purpose. I suspect that it was placed there so we’d do just that.”

5

A woman approached them. She was of medium height, had a superb shape, and a face that would have been beautiful if it had been framed by hair. Her eyes were large and dark. She made no attempt to cover herself with her hands. Burton was not the least bit aroused looking at her or any of the women. He was too deeply numbed.

The woman spoke in a well-modulated voice and an Oxford accent. “I beg your pardon, gentlemen. I couldn’t help overhearing you. You’re the only English voices I’ve heard since I woke up…here, wherever here is. I am an Englishwoman, and I am looking for protection. I throw myself on your mercy.”

“Fortunately for you, madame,” Burton said, “you come to the right men. At least, speaking for myself, I can assure you that you will get all the protection I can afford. Though, if I were like some of the English gentlemen I’ve known, you might not have fared so well. By the way, this gentleman is not English. He’s Yankee.”

It seemed strange to be speaking so formally this day of all days, with all the wailing and shouting up and down the valley and everybody birth-naked and as hairless as eels.

The woman held out her hand to Burton. “I’m Mrs. Hargreaves,” she said.

Burton took the hand, and, bowing, kissed it lightly. He felt foolish, but, at the same time, the gesture strengthened his hold on sanity. If the forms of polite society could be preserved perhaps the “rightness” of things might also be restored.

“The late Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton,” he said, grinning slightly at the late. “Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

She snatched her hand away and then extended it again.

“Yes, I’ve heard of you, Sir Richard.”

Somebody said, “It can’t be!”

Burton looked at Frigate, who had spoken in such a low tone.

“And why not?” he said.

“Richard Burton!” Frigate said. “Yes. I wondered, but without any hair?….”

“Yaas?” Burton drawled.

“Yaas!” Frigate said. “Just as the books said!”

“What are you talking about?”

Frigate breathed in deeply and then said, “Never mind now, Mr. Burton. I’ll explain later. Just take it that I’m very shaken up. Not in my right mind. You understand that, of course.”

He looked intently at Mrs. Hargreaves, shook his head, and said, “Is your name Alice?”

“Why, yes!” she said, smiling and becoming beautiful, hair or no hair. “How did you know? Have I met you? No, I don’t think so.”

“Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves?”

“Yes!”

“I have to go sit down,” the American said. He walked under the tree and sat down with his back to the trunk. His eyes looked a little glazed.

“Aftershock,” Burton said.

He could expect such erratic behavior and speech from the others for some time. He could expect a certain amount of nonrational behavior from himself, too. The important thing was to get shelter and food and some plan for common defense.

Burton spoke in Italian and Slovenian to the others and then made the introductions. They did not protest when he suggested that they should follow him down to the river’s edge.

“I’m sure we’re all thirsty,” he said. “And we should investigate that stone mushroom.”

They walked back to the plain behind them. The people were sitting on the grass or milling about. They passed one couple arguing loudly and red-facedly. Apparently, they had been husband and wife and were continuing a lifelong dispute. Suddenly, the man turned and walked away. The wife looked unbelievingly at him and then ran after him. He thrust her away so violently that she fell on the grass. He quickly lost himself in the crowd, but the woman wandered around, calling his name and threatening to make a scandal if he did not come out of hiding.

Burton thought briefly of his own wife, Isabel. He had not seen her in this crowd, though that did not mean that she was not in it. But she would have been looking for him. She would not stop until she found him.

He pushed through the crowd to the river’s edge and then got down on his knees and scooped up water with his hands. It was cool and clear and refreshing. His stomach felt as if it were absolutely empty. After he had satisfied his thirst, he became hungry.

“The waters of the River of Life,” Burton said. “The Styx? Lethe? No, not Lethe. I remember everything about my Earthly existence.”

“I wish I could forget mine,” Frigate said.

Alice Hargreaves was kneeling by the edge and dipping water with one hand while she leaned on the other arm. Her figure was certainly lovely, Burton thought. He wondered if she would be blonde when her hair grew out, if it grew out. Perhaps Whoever had put them here intended they should all be bald, forever, for some reason of Theirs.

They climbed upon the top of the nearest mushroom structure. The granite was a dense-grained gray flecked heavily with red. On its flat surface were seven hundred indentations, forming fifty concentric circles. The depression in the center held a metal cylinder. A little dark-skinned man with a big nose and receding chin was examining the cylinder. As they approached, he looked up and smiled.

“This one won’t open,” he said in German. “Perhaps it will later. I’m sure it’s there as an example of what to do with our own containers.”

He introduced himself as Lev Ruach and switched to a heavily accented English when Burton, Frigate, and Hargreaves gave their names.

“I was an atheist,” he said, seeming to speak to himself more than to them. “Now, I don’t know! This place is as big a shock to an atheist, you know, as to those devout believers who had pictured an afterlife quite different from this. Well, so I was wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

He chuckled, and said to Monat, “I recognized you at once. It’s a good thing for you that you were resurrected in a group mainly consisting of people who died in the nineteenth century. Otherwise, you’d be lynched.”

“Why is that?” Burton asked.

“He killed Earth,” Frigate said. “At least, I think he did.”

“The scanner,” Monat said dolefully, “was adjusted to kill only human beings. And it would not have exterminated all of mankind. It would have ceased operating after a predetermined number—unfortunately, a large number—had lost their lives. Believe me, my friends, I did not want to do that. You do not know what an agony it cost me to make the decision to press the button. But I had to protect my people. You forced my hand.”

“It started when Monat was on a live show,” Frigate said. “Monat made an unfortunate remark. He said that his scientists had the knowledge and ability to keep people from getting old. Theoretically, using Tau Cetan techniques, a man could live forever. But the knowledge was not used on his planet; it was forbidden. The interviewer asked him if these techniques could be applied to Terrestrials. Monat replied that there was no reason why not. But rejuvenation was denied to his own kind for a very good reason, and this also applied to Terrestrials. By then, the government censor realized what was happening and cut off the audio. But it was too late.”

“Later,” Lev Ruach said, “the American government reported that Monat had misunderstood the question, that his knowledge of English had led him to make a misstatement. But it was too late. The people of America, and of the world, demanded that Monat reveal the secret of eternal youth.”

“Which I did not have,” said Monat. “Not a single one of our expedition had the knowledge. In fact, very few people on my planet had it. But it did no good to tell the people this. They thought I was lying. There was a riot, and a mob stormed the guards around our ship and broke into it. I saw my friends torn to pieces while they tried to reason with the mob. Reason!

“But I did what I did, not for revenge, but for a very different motive. I knew that, after we were killed, or even if we weren’t, the U.S. government would restore order. And it would have the ship in its possession. It wouldn’t be long before Terrestrial scientists would know how to duplicate it. Inevitably, the Terrestrials would launch an invasion fleet against our world. So, to make sure that Earth would be set back many centuries, maybe thousands of years, knowing that I must do the dreadful thing to save my own world, I sent the signal to the scanner to orbit. I would not have had to do that if I could have gotten to the destruct-button and blown up the ship. But I could not get to the control room. So, I pressed the scanner-activation button. A short time later, the mob blew off the door of the room in which I had taken refuge. I remember nothing after that.”

Frigate said, “I was in a hospital in Western Samoa, dying of cancer, wondering if I would be buried next to Robert Louis Stevenson. Not much chance, I was thinking. Still, I had translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into Samoan…Then, the news came. People all over the world were falling dead. The pattern of fatality was obvious. The Tau Cetan satellite was radiating something that dropped human beings in their tracks. The last I heard was that the U.S., England, Russia, China, France, and Israel were all sending up rockets to intercept it, blow it up. And the scanner was on a path which would take it over Samoa within a few hours. The excitement must have been too much for me in my weakened condition. I became unconscious. That is all I remember.”

“The interceptors failed,” Ruach said. “The scanner blew them up before they even got close.”

Burton thought he had a lot to learn about post-1890, but now was not the time to talk about it. “I suggest we go up into the hills,” he said. “We should learn what type of vegetation grows there and if it can be useful. Also, if there is any flint we can work into weapons. This Old Stone Age fellow must be familiar with stone-working. He can show us how.”

They walked across the mile-broad plain and into the hills. On the way, several others joined their group. One was a little girl, about seven years old, with dark blue eyes and a beautiful face. She looked pathetically at Burton, who asked her in twelve languages if any of her parents or relatives were nearby. She replied in a language none of them knew. The linguists among them tried every tongue at their disposal, most of the European speeches and many of the African or Asiatic: Hebrew, Hindustani, Arabic, a Berber dialect, Romany, Turkish, Persian, Latin, Greek, Pushtu.

Frigate, who knew a little Welsh and Gaelic, spoke to her. Her eyes widened, and then she frowned. The words seemed to have a certain familiarity or similarity to her speech, but they were not close enough to be intelligible.

“For all we know,” Frigate said, “she could be an ancient Gaul. She keeps using the word Gwenafra. Could that be her name?”

“We’ll teach her English,” Burton said. “And we’ll call her Gwenafra.” He picked up the child in his arms and started to walk with her. She burst into tears, but she made no effort to free herself. The weeping was a release from what must have been almost unbearable tension and a joy at finding a guardian. Burton bent his neck to place his face against her body. He did not want the others to see the tears in his eyes.

Where the plain met the hills, as if a line had been drawn, the short grass ceased and the thick, coarse espartolike grass, waist-high, began. Here, too, the towering pines, red pines and lodgepole pines, the oaks, the yew, the gnarled giants with scarlet and green leaves, and the bamboo grew thickly. The bamboo consisted of many varieties, from slender stalks only a few feet high to plants over fifty feet high. Many of the trees were overgrown with the vines bearing huge green, red, yellow, and blue flowers.

“Bamboo is the material for spear shafts,” Burton said, “pipes for conducting water, containers, the basic stuff for building houses, furniture, boats, charcoal even for making gunpowder. And the young stalks of some may be good for eating. But we need stone for tools to cut down and shape the wood.”

They climbed over hills whose height increased as they neared the mountain. After they had walked about two miles as the crow flies, eight miles as the caterpillar crawls, they were stopped by the mountain. This rose in a sheer cliff face of some blueblack igneous rock on which grew huge patches of a blue-green lichen. There was no way of determining how high it was, but Burton did not think that he was wrong in estimating it as at least 20,000 feet high. As far as they could see up and down the valley, it presented a solid front.

“Have you noticed the complete absence of animal life?” Frigate said.

“Not even an insect.” Burton exclaimed. He strode to a pile of broken rock and picked up a fist-sized chunk of greenish stone. “Chert,” he said. “If there’s enough, we can make knives, spearheads, adzes, axes. And with them build houses, boats, and many other things.”

“Tools and weapons must be bound to wooden shafts,” Frigate said. “What do we use as binding material?”

“Perhaps human skin,” Burton said.

The others looked shocked. Burton gave a strange chirruping laugh, incongruous in so masculine-looking a man. He said, “If we’re forced to kill in self-defense or lucky enough to stumble over a corpse some assassin has been kind enough to prepare for us, we’d be fools not to use what we need. However, if any of you feel self-sacrificing enough to offer your own epidermises for the good of the group, step forward! We’ll remember you in our wills.”

“Surely, you’re joking,” Alice Hargreaves said. “I can’t say I particularly care for such talk.”

Frigate said, “Hang around him, and you’ll hear lots worse,” but he did not explain what he meant.

6

Burton examined the rock along the base of the mountain. The blue-black, densely grained stone of the mountain itself was some kind of basalt. But there were pieces of chert scattered on the surface of the earth or sticking out of the surface at the base. These looked as if they might have fallen down from a projection above, so it was possible that the mountain was not a solid mass of basalt. Using a piece of chert which had a thin edge, he scraped away a patch of the lichenous growth. The stone beneath it seemed to be a greenish dolomite. Apparently, the pieces of chert had come from the dolomite, though there was no evidence of decay or fracture of the vein.

The lichen could be Parmelia saxitilis, which also grew on old bones, including skulls, and hence, according to The Doctrine of Signatures, was a cure for epilepsy and a healing salve for wounds.

Hearing stone banging away on stone, he returned to the group. All were standing around the subhuman and the American, who were squatting back to back and working on the chert. Both had knocked out rough hand axes. While the others watched, they produced six more. Then each took a large chert nodule and broke it into two with a hammerstone. Using one piece of the nodule, they began to knock long thin flakes from the outside rim of the nodule. They rotated the nodule and banged away until each had about a dozen blades.

They continued to work, one a type of man who had lived a hundred thousand years or more before Christ, the other the refined end of human evolution, a product of the highest civilization (technologically speaking) of Earth, and, indeed, one of the last men on Earth—if he was to be believed.

Suddenly, Frigate howled, jumped up, and hopped around holding his left thumb. One of his strokes had missed its target. Kazz grinned, exposing huge teeth like tombstones. He got up, too, and walked into the grass with his curious rolling gait. He returned a few minutes later with six bamboo sticks with sharpened ends and several with straight ends. He sat down and worked on one stick until he had split the end and inserted the triangular chipped-down point of an axe head into the split end. This he bound with some long grasses.

Within half an hour, the group was armed with hand axes, axes with bamboo hafts, daggers, and spears with wooden points and with stone tips.

By then Frigate’s hand had quit hurting so much and the bleeding had stopped. Burton asked him how he happened to be so proficient in stone-working.

“I was an amateur anthropologist,” he said. “A lot of people—a lot relatively speaking—learned how to make tools and weapons from stone as a hobby. Some of us got pretty good at it, though I don’t think any modern ever got as skillful and as swift as a Neolithic specialist. Those guys did it all their lives, you know.

“Also, I just happen to know a lot about working bamboo, too, so I can be of some value to you.”

They began walking back to the river. They paused a moment on top of a tall hill. The sun was almost directly overhead. They could see for many miles along the river and also across the river. Although they were too far away to make out any figures on the other side of the mile-wide stream, they could see the mushroom-shaped structures there. The terrain on the other side was the same as that on theirs. A mile-wide plain, perhaps two and a half miles of foothills covered with trees. Beyond, the straight-up face of an insurmountable black and bluish-green mountain.

North and south, the valley ran straight for about ten miles. Then it curved, and the river was lost to sight.

“Sunrise must come late and sunset early,” Burton said. “Well, we must make the most of the bright hours.”

At that moment, everybody jumped and many cried out. A blue flame arose from the top of each stone structure, soared up at least twenty feet, then disappeared. A few seconds later, a sound of distant thunder passed them. The boom struck the mountain behind them and echoed.

Burton scooped up the little girl in his arms and began to trot down the hill. Though they maintained a good pace, they were forced to walk from time to time to regain their breaths. Nevertheless, Burton felt wonderful. It had been so many years since he could use his muscles so profligately that he did not want to stop enjoying the sensation. He could scarcely believe that, only a short time ago, his right foot had been swollen with gout, and his heart had beaten wildly if he climbed a few steps.

They came to the plain and continued trotting, for they could see that there was much excitement around one of the structures. Burton swore at those in his way and pushed them aside. He got black looks but no one tried to push back. Abruptly, he was in the space cleared around the base. And he saw what had attracted them. He also smelled it.

Frigate, behind him, said, “Oh, my God!” and tried to retch on his empty stomach.

Burton had seen too much in his lifetime to be easily affected by grisly sights. Moreover, he could take himself to one remove from reality when things became too grim or too painful. Sometimes he made the move, the sidestepping of things-as-they-were, with an effort of will. Usually, it occurred automatically. In this case, the displacement was done automatically.

The corpse lay on its side and half under the edge of the mushroom top. Its skin was completely burned off, and the naked muscles were charred. The nose and ears, fingers, toes, and the genitals had been burned away or were only shapeless stubs.

Near it, on her knees, was a woman mumbling a prayer in Italian. She had huge black eyes which would have been beautiful if they had not been reddened and puffy with tears. She had a magnificent figure which would have caught all his attention under different circumstances.

“What happened?” he said.

The woman stopped praying and looked at him. She got to her feet and whispered, “Father Giuseppe was leaning against the rock; he said he was hungry. He said he didn’t see much sense in being brought back to life only to starve to death. I said that we wouldn’t die, how could we? We’d been raised from the dead, and we’d be provided for. He said maybe we were in hell. We’d go hungry and naked forever. I told him not to blaspheme, of all people he should be the last to blaspheme. But he said that this was not what he’d been telling everybody for forty years would happen and then…and then….”

Burton waited a few seconds, and then said, “And then?”

“Father Giuseppe said that at least there wasn’t any hellfire, but that that would be better than starving for eternity. And then the flames reached out and wrapped him inside them, and there was a noise like a bomb exploding, and then he was dead, burned to death. It was horrible, horrible.”

Burton moved north of the corpse to get the wind behind him, but even here the stench was sickening. It was not the odor as much as the idea of death that upset him. The first day of the Resurrection was only half over and a man was dead. Did this mean that the resurrected were just as vulnerable to death as in Earthlife? If so, what sense was there to it?

Frigate had quit trying to heave on an empty stomach. Pale and shaking, he got to his feet and approached Burton. He kept his back turned to the dead man.

“Hadn’t we better get rid of that?” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

“I suppose so,” Burton said coolly. “It’s too bad his skin is ruined, though.”

He grinned at the American. Frigate looked even more shocked.

“Here,” Burton said. “Grab hold of his feet, I’ll take the other end. We’ll toss him into the river.”

“The river?” Frigate said.

“Yaas. Unless you want to carry him into the hills and chop out a hole for him there.”

“I can’t,” Frigate said, and walked away. Burton looked disgustedly after him and then signaled to the subhuman. Kazz grunted and shuffled forward to the body with that peculiar walking-on-the-side-of-his-feet gait. He stooped over and, before Burton could get hold of the blackened stumps of the feet, Kazz had lifted the body above his head, walked a few steps to the edge of the river, and tossed the corpse into the water. It sank immediately and was moved by the current along the shore. Kazz decided that this was not good enough. He waded out after it up to his waist and stooped down, submerging himself for a minute. Evidently he was shoving the body out into the deeper part.

Alice Hargreaves had watched with horror. Now she said, “But that’s the water we’ll be drinking!”

“The river looks big enough to purify itself,” Burton said. “At any rate, we have more things to worry about than proper sanitation procedures.”

Burton turned when Monat touched his shoulder and said, “Look at that!” The water was boiling about where the body should be. Abruptly, a silvery white-finned back broke the surface.

“It looks as if your worry about the water being contaminated is in vain,” Burton said to Alice Hargreaves. “The river has scavengers. I wonder…I wonder if it’s safe to swim.”

At least, the subhuman had gotten out without being attacked. He was standing before Burton, brushing the water off his hairless body, and grinning with those huge teeth. He was frighteningly ugly. But he had the knowledge of a primitive man, knowledge which had already been handy in a world of primitive conditions. And he would be a damned good man to have at your back in a fight. Short though he was, he was immensely powerful. Those heavy bones afforded a broad base for heavy muscles. It was evident that he had, for some reason, become attached to Burton. Burton liked to think the savage, with a savage’s instincts, “knew” that Burton was the man to follow if he would survive. Moreover, a subhuman or prehuman, being closer to the animals, would also be more psychic. So he would detect Burton’s own well-developed psychic powers and would feel an affinity to Burton, even though he was Homo sapiens.

Then Burton reminded himself that his reputation for psychism had been built up by himself and that he was half-charlatan. He had talked about his powers so much, and had listened to his wife so much, that he had come to believe in them himself. But there were moments when he remembered that his “powers” were at least half-fake.

Nevertheless, he was a capable hypnotist, and he did believe that his eyes radiated a peculiar extrasensory power, when he wished them to do so. It may have been this that attracted the half-man.

“The rock discharged a tremendous energy,” Lev Ruach said. “It must have been electrical. But why? I can’t believe that the discharge was purposeless.”

Burton looked across the mushroom shape of the rock. The gray cylinder in the center depression seemed to be undamaged by the discharge. He touched the stone. It was no warmer than might have been expected from its exposure to the sun.

Lev Ruach said, “Don’t touch it! There might be another….” and he stopped when he saw his warning was too late.

“Another discharge?” Burton said. “I don’t think so. Not for some time yet, anyway. That cylinder was left here so we could learn something from it.”

He put his hands on the top of the mushroom structure and jumped forward. He came up and onto the top with an ease that gladdened him. It had been so many years since he had felt so young and so powerful. Or so hungry.

A few in the crowd cried out to him to get down off the rock before the blue flames came again. Others looked as if they hoped that another discharge would occur. The majority were content to let him take the risks.

Nothing happened, although he had not been too sure he would not be incinerated. The stone felt only pleasantly warm on his bare feet.

He walked over the depressions to the cylinder and put his fingers under the rim of the cover. It rose easily. His heart beating with excitement, he looked inside it. He had expected the miracle, and there it was. The racks within held six containers, each of which was full.

He signaled to his group to come up. Kazz vaulted up easily. Frigate, who had recovered from his sickness, got onto the top with an athlete’s ease. If the fellow did not have such a queasy stomach, he might be an asset, Burton thought. Frigate turned and pulled up Alice, who came over the edge at the ends of his hands.

When they crowded around him, their heads bent over the interior of the cylinder, Burton said, “It’s a veritable grail! Look! Steak, a thick juicy steak! Bread and butter! Jam! Salad! And what’s that? A package of cigarettes? Yaas! And a cigar! And a cup of bourbon, very good stuff by its odor! Something…what is it?”

“Looks like sticks of gum,” Frigate said. “Unwrapped. And that must be a…what? A lighter for the smokes?”

“Food!” a man shouted. He was a large man, not a member of what Burton thought of as “his group.” He had followed them, and others were scrambling up on the rock. Burton reached down past the containers into the cylinder and gripped the small silvery rectangular object on the bottom. Frigate had said this might be a lighter. Burton did not know what a “lighter” was, but he suspected that it provided flame for the cigarettes. He kept the object in the palm of his hand and with the other he closed the lid. His mouth was watering, and his belly was rumbling. The others were just as eager as he; their expressions showed that they could not understand why he was not removing the food.

The large man said, in a loud blustery Triestan Italian, “I’m hungry, and I’ll kill anybody who tries to stop me! Open that!”

The others said nothing, but it was evident that they expected Burton to take the lead in the defense. Instead, he said, “Open it yourself,” and turned away. The others hesitated. They had seen and smelled the food. Kazz was drooling. But Burton said, “Look at that mob. There’ll be a fight here in a minute. I say, let them fight over their morsels. Not that I’m avoiding a battle, you understand,” he added, looking fiercely at them. “But I’m certain that we’ll all have our own cylinders full of food by supper time. These cylinders, call them grails, if you please, just need to be left on the rock to be filled. That is obvious, that’s why this grail was placed here.”

He walked to the edge of the stone near the water and got off. By then the top was jammed with people and more were trying to get on. The large man had seized a steak and bitten into it, but someone had tried to snatch it away from him. He yelled with fury and, suddenly, rammed through those between him and the river. He went over the edge and into the water, emerging a moment later. In the meantime, men and women were screaming and striking each other over the rest of the food and goods in the cylinder.

The man who had jumped into the river floated off on his back while he ate the rest of the steak. Burton watched him closely, half-expecting him to be seized by fish. But he drifted on down the stream, undisturbed.

The rocks to the north and south, on both sides of the river, were crowded with struggling humans.

Burton walked until he was free of the crowd and sat down. His group squatted by him or stood up and watched the writhing and noisy mass. The grailstone looked like a toadstool engulfed in pale maggots. Very noisy maggots. Some of them were now also red, because blood had been spilled.

The most depressing aspect of the scene was the reaction of the children. The young ones had stayed back from the rock, but they knew that there was food in the grail. They were crying from hunger and from terror caused by the screaming and fighting of the adults on the stone. The little girl with Burton was dry-eyed, but she was shaking. She stood by Burton and put her arms around his neck. He patted her on the back and murmured encouraging words which she could not understand but the tone of which helped to quiet her.

The sun was on its descent. Within about two hours it would be hidden by the towering western mountain, though a genuine dusk presumably would not happen for many hours. There was no way to determine how long the day was here. The temperature had gone up, but sitting in the sun was not by any means unbearable, and the steady breeze helped cool them off.

Kazz made signs indicating that he would like a fire and also pointed at the tip of a bamboo spear. No doubt he wanted to fire-harden the tip.

Burton had inspected the metal object taken from the grail. It was of a hard silvery metal, rectangular, flat, about two inches long and three-tenths across. It had a small hole in one end and a slide on the other. Burton put his thumbnail against the projection at the end of the slide and pushed. The slide moved downward about two-sixteenths of an inch, and a wire about one-tenth of an inch in diameter and a half-inch long slid out of the hole in the end. Even in the bright sunlight, it glowed whitely. He touched the tip of the wire to a blade of grass; the blade shriveled up at once. Applied to the tip of the bamboo spear, it burned a tiny hole. Burton pushed the slide back into its original position, and the wire withdrew, like the hot head of a brazen turtle, into the silvery shell.

Both Frigate and Ruach wondered aloud at the power contained in the tiny pack. To make the wire that hot required much voltage. How many charges would the battery or the radioactive pile that must be in it give? How could the lighter’s power pack be renewed?

There were many questions that could not be immediately answered or, perhaps, never. The greatest was how they could have been brought back to life in rejuvenated bodies. Whoever had done it possessed a science that was godlike. But speculation about it, though it would give them something to talk about, would solve nothing.

After a while, the crowd dispersed. The cylinder was left on its side on top of the grailstone. Several bodies were sprawled there, and a number of men and women who got off the rock were hurt. Burton went through the crowd. One woman’s face had been clawed, especially around her right eye. She was sobbing with no one to pay attention to her. Another man was sitting on the ground and holding his groin, which had been raked with sharp fingernails.

Of the four lying on top of the stone, three were unconscious. These recovered with water dashed into their faces from the grail. The fourth, a short slender man, was dead. Someone had twisted his head until his neck had broken.

Burton looked up at the sun again and said, “I don’t know exactly when supper time will occur. I suggest we return not too long after the sun goes down behind the mountain. We will set our grails, or glory buckets, or lunch pails, or whatever you wish to call them, in these depressions. And then we’ll wait. In the meantime….”

He could have tossed this body into the river, too, but he had now thought of a use, perhaps uses, for it. He told the others what he wanted, and they got the corpse down off the stone and started to carry it across the plain. Frigate and Galeazzi, a former importer of Trieste, took the first turn. Frigate had evidently not cared for the job, but when Burton asked him if he would, he nodded. He picked up the man’s feet and led with Galeazzi holding the dead man under the armpits. Alice walked behind Burton with the child’s hand in hers. Some in the crowd looked curiously or called out comments or questions, but Burton ignored them. After half a mile, Kazz and Monat took over the corpse. The child did not seem to be disturbed by the dead man. She had been curious about the first corpse, instead of being horrified by its burned appearance.

“If she really is an ancient Gaul,” Frigate said, “she may be used to seeing charred bodies. If I remember correctly, the Gauls burned sacrifices alive in big wicker baskets at religious ceremonies. I don’t remember what god or goddess the ceremonies were in honor of. I wish I had a library to refer to. Do you think we’ll ever have one here? I think I would go nuts if I didn’t have books to read.”

“That remains to be seen,” Burton said. “If we’re not provided with a library, we’ll make our own. If it’s possible to do so.”

He thought that Frigate’s question was a silly one, but then not everybody was quite in their right minds at this time.

At the foothills, two men, Rocco and Brontich, succeeded Kazz and Monat. Burton led them past the trees through the waist-high grass. The saw-edged grass scraped their legs. Burton cut off a stalk with his knife and tested the stalk for toughness and flexibility. Frigate kept close to his elbow and seemed unable to stop chattering. Probably, Burton thought, he talked to keep from thinking about the two deaths.

“If everyone who has ever lived has been resurrected here, think of the research to be done! Think of the historical mysteries and questions you could clear up! You could talk to John Wilkes Booth and find out if Secretary of War Stanton really was behind the Lincoln assassination. You might ferret out the identity of Jack the Ripper. Find out if Joan of Arc actually did belong to a witch cult. Talk to Napoleon’s Marshal Ney; see if he did escape the firing squad and become a schoolteacher in America. Get the true story on Pearl Harbor. See the face of the Man in the Iron Mask, if there ever was such a person. Interview Lucrezia Borgia and those who knew her and determine if she was the poisoning bitch most people think she was. Learn the identity of the assassin of the two little princes in the Tower. Maybe Richard III did kill them.

“And you, Richard Francis Burton, there are many questions about your own life that your biographers would like to have answered. Did you really have a Persian love you were going to marry and for whom you were going to renounce your true identity and become a native? Did she die before you could marry her, and did her death really embitter you, and did you carry a torch for her the rest of your life?”

Burton glared at him. He had just met the man and here he was, asking the most personal and prying questions. Nothing excused this.

Frigate backed away, saying, “And…and…well, it’ll all have to wait, I can see that. But did you know that your wife had extreme unction administered to you shortly after you died and that you were buried in a Catholic cemetery—you, the infidel?”

Lev Ruach, whose eyes had been widening while Frigate was rattling on, said, “You’re Burton, the explorer and linguist? The discoverer of Lake Tanganyika? The one who made a pilgrimage to Mecca while disguised as a Moslem? The translator of The Thousand and One Nights?”

“I have no desire to lie nor need to. I am he.”

Lev Ruach spat at Burton, but the wind carried it away. “You son of a bitch!” he cried. “You foul Nazi bastard! I read about you! You were, in many ways, an admirable person, I suppose! But you were an anti-Semite!”

7

Burton was startled. He said, “My enemies spread that baseless and vicious rumor. But anybody acquainted with the facts and with me would know better. And now, I think you’d….”

“I suppose you didn’t write The Jew, The Gypsy, and El Islam?” Ruach said, sneering.

“I did,” Burton replied. His face was red, and when he looked down, he saw that his body was also flushed. “And now, as I started to say before you so boorishly interrupted me, I think you had better go. Ordinarily, I would be at your throat by now. A man who talks to me like that has to defend his words with deeds. But this is a strange situation, and perhaps you are overwrought. I do not know. But if you do not apologize now, or walk off, I am going to make another corpse.”

Ruach clenched his fists and glared at Burton; then he spun around and stalked off.

“What is a Nazi?” Burton said to Frigate.

The American explained as best he could. Burton said, “I have much to learn about what happened after I died. That man is mistaken about me. I’m no Nazi. England, you say, became a second-class power? Only fifty years after my death? I find that difficult to believe.”

“Why would I lie to you?” Frigate said. “Don’t feel bad about it. Before the end of the twentieth century, she had risen again, and in a most curious way, though it was too late….”

Listening to the Yankee, Burton felt pride for his country. Although England had treated him more than shabbily during his lifetime, and although he had always wanted to get out of the island whenever he had been on it, he would defend it to the death. And he had been devoted to the Queen.

Abruptly, he said, “If you guessed my identity, why didn’t you say something about it?”

“I wanted to be sure. Besides, we’ve not had much time for social intercourse,” Frigate said. “Or any other kind, either,” he added, looking sidewise at Alice Hargreaves’ magnificent figure.

“I know about her, too,” he said, “if she’s the woman I think she is.”

“That’s more than I do,” Burton replied. He stopped. They had gone up the slope of the first hill and were on its top. They lowered the body to the ground beneath a giant red pine.

Immediately, Kazz, chert knife in his hand, squatted down by the corpse. He raised his head upward and uttered a few phrases in what must have been a religious chant. Then, before the others could object, he had cut into the body and removed the liver.

Most of the group cried out in horror. Burton grunted. Monat stared.

Kazz’s big teeth bit into the bloody organ and tore off a large chunk. His massively muscled and thickly boned jaws began chewing, and he half-closed his eyes in ecstasy. Burton stepped up to him and held out his hand, intending to remonstrate. Kazz grinned broadly and cut off a piece and offered it to Burton. He was very surprised at Burton’s refusal.

“A cannibal!” Alice Hargreaves said. “Oh, my God, a bloody, stinking cannibal! And this is the promised afterlife!”

“He’s no worse than our own ancestors,” Burton said. He had recovered from the shock, and was even enjoying—a little—the reaction of the others. “In a land where there seems to be precious little food, his action is eminently practical. Well, our problem of burying a corpse without proper digging tools is solved. Furthermore, if we’re wrong about the grails being a source of food, we may be emulating Kazz before long!”

“Never!” Alice said. “I’d die first!”

“That is exactly what you would do,” Burton replied, coolly. “I suggest we retire and leave him to his meal. It doesn’t do anything for my own appetite, and I find his table manners as abominable as those of a Yankee frontiersman’s. Or a country prelate’s,” he added for Alice’s benefit.

They walked out of sight of Kazz and behind one of the great gnarled trees. Alice said, “I don’t want him around. He’s an animal, an abomination! Why, I wouldn’t feel safe for a second with him around!”

“You asked me for protection,” Burton said. “I’ll give it to you as long as you are a member of this party. But you’ll also have to accept my decisions. One of which is that the apeman remains with us. We need his strength and his skills, which seem to be very appropriate for this type of country. We’ve become primitives; therefore, we can learn from a primitive. He stays.”

Alice looked at the others with silent appeal. Monat twitched his eyebrows. Frigate shrugged his shoulders and said, “Mrs. Hargreaves, if you can possibly do it, forget your mores, your conventions. We’re not in a proper upper-class Victorian heaven. Or, indeed, in any sort of heaven ever dreamed of. You can’t think and behave as you did on Earth. For one thing, you come from a society where women covered themselves from neck to foot in heavy garments, and the sight of a woman’s knee was a stirring sexual event. Yet, you seem to suffer no embarrassment because you’re nude. You are as poised and dignified as if you wore a nun’s habit.”

Alice said, “I don’t like it. But why should I be embarrassed? Where all are nude, none are nude. It’s the thing to do, in fact, the only thing that can be done. If some angel were to give me a complete outfit, I wouldn’t wear it. I’d be out of style. And my figure is good. If it weren’t I might be suffering more.”

The two men laughed, and Frigate said, “You’re fabulous, Alice. Absolutely. I may call you Alice? Mrs. Hargreaves seems so formal when you’re nude.”

She did not reply but walked away and disappeared behind a large tree. Burton said, “Something will have to be done about sanitation in the near future. Which means that somebody will have to decide the health policies and have the power to make regulations and enforce them. How does one form legislative, judicial, and executive bodies from the present state of anarchy?”

“To get to more immediate problems,” Frigate said, “what do we do about the dead man?”

He was only a little less pale than a moment ago when Kazz had made his incisions with his chert knife.

Burton said, “I’m sure that human skin, properly tanned, or human gut, properly treated, will be far superior to grass for making ropes or bindings. I intend to cut off some strips. Do you want to help me?”

Only the wind rustling the leaves and the tops of the grass broke the silence. The sun beat down and brought out sweat which dried rapidly in the wind. No bird cried, no insect buzzed. And then the shrill voice of the little girl shattered the quiet. Alice’s voice answered her, and the little girl ran to her behind the tree.

“I’ll try,” the American said. “But I don’t know. I’ve gone through more than enough for one day.”

“You do as you please then,” Burton said. “But anybody who helps me gets first call on the use of the skin. You may wish you could have some in order to bind an axe head to a haft.”

Frigate gulped audibly and then said, “I’ll come.”

Kazz was still squatting in the grass by the body, holding the bloody liver with one hand and the bloody stone knife with the other. Seeing Burton, he grinned with stained lips and cut off a piece of liver. Burton shook his head. The others, Galeazzi, Brontich, Maria Tucci, Filipo Rocco, Rosa Nalini, Caterina Capone, Fiorenza Fiorri, Babich, and Giunta, had retreated from the grisly scene. They were on the other side of a thicktrunked pine and talking subduedly in Italian.

Burton squatted down by the body and applied the point of the knife, beginning just above the right knee and continuing to the collarbone. Frigate stood by him and stared. He became even more pale, and his trembling increased. But he stood firm until two long strips had been lifted from the body.

“Care to try your hand at it?” Burton said. He rolled the body over on its side so that other, even longer, strips could be taken. Frigate took the bloody-tipped knife and set to work, his teeth gritted.

“Not so deep,” Burton said and, a moment later, “Now you’re not cutting deeply enough. Here, give me the knife. Watch!”

“I had a neighbor who used to hang up his rabbits behind his garage and cut their throats right after breaking their necks,” Frigate said. “I watched once. That was enough.”

“You can’t afford to be fastidious or weak-stomached,” Burton said. “You’re living in the most primitive of conditions. You have to be a primitive to survive, like it or not.”

Brontich, the tall skinny Slovene who had once been an innkeeper, ran up to them. He said, “We just found another of those big mushroom-shaped stones. About forty yards from here. It was hidden behind some trees down in a hollow.”

Burton’s first delight in hectoring Frigate had passed. He was beginning to feel sorry for the fellow. He said, “Look, Peter, why don’t you go investigate the stone? If there is one here, we can save ourselves a trip back to the river.”

He handed Frigate his grail. “Put this in a hole on the stone, but remember exactly which hole you put it in. Have the others do that, too. Make sure that they know where they put their own grails. Wouldn’t want to have any quarrels about that, you know.”

Strangely, Frigate was reluctant to go. He seemed to feel that he had disgraced himself by his weakness. He stood there for a moment, shifting his weight from one leg to another and sighing several times. Then, as Burton continued to scrape away at the underside of the skinstrips, he walked away. He carried the two grails in one hand and his stone axe head in the other.

Burton stopped working after the American was out of sight. He had been interested in finding out how to cut off strips, and he might dissect the body’s trunk to remove the entrails. But he could do nothing at this time about preserving the skin or guts. It was possible that the bark of the oaklike trees might contain tannin which could be used with other materials to convert human skin into leather. By the time that was done, however, these strips would have rotted. Still, he had not wasted his time. The efficiency of the stone knives was proven, and he had reinforced his weak memory of human anatomy. When they were juveniles in Pisa, Richard Burton and his brother Edward had associated with the Italian medical students of the university. Both of the Burton youths had learned much from the students and neither had abandoned their interest in anatomy. Edward became a surgeon, and Richard had attended a number of lectures and public and private dissections in London. But he had forgotten much of what he had learned.

Abruptly, the sun went past the shoulder of the mountain. A pale shadow fell over him, and, within a few minutes, the entire valley was in the dusk. But the sky was a bright blue for a long time. The breeze continued to flow at the same rate. The moisture-laden air became a little cooler. Burton and the Neanderthal left the body and followed the sounds of the others’ voices. These were by the grailstone of which Brontich had spoken. Burton wondered if there were others near the base of the mountain, strung out at approximate distances of a mile. This one lacked the grail in the center depression, however. Perhaps this meant that it was not ready to operate. He did not think so. It could be assumed that Whoever had made the grailstones had placed the grails in the center holes of those on the river’s edge because the resurrectees would be using these first. By the time they found the inland stones, they would know how to use them.

The grails were set on the depressions of the outmost circle. Their owners stood or sat around, talking but with their minds on the grails. All were wondering when—or perhaps if—the next blue flames would come. Much of their conversation was about how hungry they were. The rest was mainly surmise about how they had come here, Who had put them here, where They were, and what was being planned for them. A few spoke of their lives on Earth.

Burton sat down beneath the wide-flung and densely leaved branches of the gnarled black-trunked “irontree.” He felt tired, as all, except Kazz, obviously did. His empty belly and his stretched-out nerves kept him from dozing off, although the quiet voices and the rustle of leaves conduced to sleep. The hollow in which the group waited was formed by a level space at the junction of four hills and was surrounded by trees. Though it was darker than on top of the hills, it also seemed to be a little warmer. After a while, as the dusk and the chill increased, Burton organized a firewood-collecting party. Using the knives and hand axes, they cut down many mature bamboo plants and gathered piles of grass. With the white-hot wire of the lighter, Burton started a fire of leaves and grass. These were green, and so the fire was smoky and unsatisfactory until the bamboo was put on.

Suddenly, an explosion made them jump. Some of the women screamed. They had forgotten about watching the grailstone. Burton turned just in time to see the blue flames soar up about twenty feet. The heat from the discharge could be felt by Brontich, who was about twenty feet from it.

Then the noise was gone, and they stared at the grails. Burton was the first upon the stone again; most of them did not care to venture on the stone too soon after the flames. He lifted the lid of his grail, looked within, and whooped with delight. The others climbed up and opened their own grails. Within a minute, they were seated near the fire eating rapidly, exclaiming with ecstasy, pointing out to each other what they’d found, laughing, and joking. Things were not so bad after all. Whoever was responsible for this was taking care of them.

There was food in plenty, even after fasting all day, or, as Frigate put it, “probably fasting for half of eternity.” He meant by this, as he explained to Monat, that there was no telling how much time had elapsed between A.D. 2008 and today. This world wasn’t built in a day, and preparing humanity for resurrection would take more than seven days. That is, if all of this had been brought about by scientific means, not by supernatural.

Burton’s grail had yielded a four-inch cube of steak; a small ball of dark bread; butter; potatoes and gravy; lettuce with salad dressing of an unfamiliar but delicious taste. In addition, there was a five-ounce cup containing an excellent bourbon and another small cup with four ice cubes in it.

There was more, all the better because unexpected. A small briar pipe. A sack of pipe tobacco. Three panatela-shaped cigars. A plastic package with ten cigarettes.

“Unfiltered!” Frigate said.

There was also one small brown cigarette which Burton and Frigate smelled and said, at the same time, “Marijuana!”

Alice, holding up a small metallic scissors and a black comb, said, “Evidently we’re going to get our hair back. Otherwise, there’d be no need for these. I’m so glad! But do…They…really expect me to use this?”

She held out a tube of bright red lipstick.

“Or me?” Frigate said, also looking at a similar tube.

“They’re eminently practical,” Monat said, turning over a packet of what was obviously toilet paper. Then he pulled out a sphere of green soap.

Burton’s steak was very tender, although he would have preferred it rare. On the other hand, Frigate complained because it was not cooked enough.

“Evidently, these grails do not contain menus tailored for the individual owner,” Frigate said. “Which may be why we men also get lipstick and the women got pipes. It’s a mass production.”

“Two miracles in one day,” Burton said. “That is, if they are such. I prefer a rational explanation and intend to get it. I don’t think anyone can, as yet, tell me how we were resurrected. But perhaps you twentieth-centurians have a reasonable theory for the seemingly magical appearance of these articles in a previously empty container?”

“If you compare the exterior and interior of the grail,” Monat said, “you will observe an approximate five-centimeter difference in depth. The false bottom must conceal a molar circuitry which is able to convert energy to matter. The energy, obviously, comes during the discharge from the rocks. In addition to the e-m converter, the grail must hold molar templates…? molds…? which form the matter into various combinations of elements and compounds.

“I’m safe in my speculations, for we had a similar converter on my native planet. But nothing as miniature as this, I assure you.”

“Same on Earth,” Frigate said. “They were making iron out of pure energy before A.D. 2002, but it was a very cumbersome and expensive process with an almost microscopic yield.”

“Good,” Burton said. “All this has cost us nothing. So far….”

He fell silent for a while, thinking of the dream he had when awakening.

“Pay up,” God had said. “You owe for the flesh.”

What had that meant? On Earth, at Trieste, in 1890, he had been dying in his wife’s arms and asking for…what? Chloroform? Something. He could not remember. Then, oblivion. And he had awakened in that nightmare place and had seen things that were not on Earth nor, as far as he knew, on this planet. But that experience had been no dream.

8

They finished eating and replaced the containers in the racks within the grails. Since there was no water nearby, they would have to wait until morning to wash the containers. Frigate and Kazz, however, had made several buckets out of sections of the giant bamboo. The American volunteered to walk back to the river, if some of them would go with him, and fill the sections with water. Burton wondered why the fellow volunteered. Then, looking at Alice, he knew why. Frigate must be hoping to find some congenial female companionship. Evidently he took it for granted that Alice Hargreaves preferred Burton. And the other women, Tucci, Malini, Capone, and Fiorri, had made their choices of, respectively, Galleazzi, Brontich, Rocco, and Giunta. Babich had wandered off, possibly for the same reason that Frigate had for wishing to leave.

Monat and Kazz went with Frigate. The sky was suddenly crowded with gigantic sparks and great luminous gas clouds. The glitter of jampacked stars, some so large they seemed to be broken-off pieces of Earth’s moon, and the shine of the clouds, awed them and made them feel pitifully microscopic and ill-made.

Burton lay on his back on a pile of tree leaves and puffed on a cigar. It was excellent, and in the London of his day would have cost at least a shilling. He did not feel so minute and unworthy now. The stars were inanimate matter, and he was alive. No star could ever know the delicious taste of an expensive cigar. Nor could it know the ecstasy of holding a warm well-curved woman next to it.

On the other side of the fire, half or wholly lost in the grasses and the shadows, were the Triestans. The liquor had uninhibited them, though part of their sense of freedom may have come from joy at being alive and young again. They giggled and laughed and rolled back and forth in the grass and made loud noises while kissing. And then, couple by couple, they retreated into the darkness. Or at least, made no more loud noises.

The little girl had fallen asleep by Alice. The firelight flickered over Alice’s handsome aristocratic face and bald head and on the magnificent body and long legs. Burton suddenly knew that all of him had been resurrected. He definitely was not the old man who, during the last sixteen years of his life, had paid so heavily for the many fevers and sicknesses that had squeezed him dry in the tropics. Now he was young again, healthy, and possessed by the old clamoring demon.

Yet he had given his promise to protect her. He could make no move, say no word which she could interpret as seductive.

Well, she was not the only woman in the world. As a matter of fact, he had the whole world of women, if not at his disposal, at least available to be asked. That is, he did if everybody who had died on Earth was on this planet. She would be only one among many billions (possibly thirty-six billion, if Frigate’s estimate was correct). But there was, of course, no such evidence that this was the case.

The hell of it was that Alice might as well be the only one in the world, at this moment, anyway. He could not get up and walk off into the darkness looking for another woman, because that would leave her and the child unprotected. She certainly would not feel safe with Monat and Kazz, nor could he blame her. They were so terrifyingly ugly. Nor could he entrust her to Frigate—if Frigate returned tonight, which Burton doubted—because the fellow was an unknown quantity.

Burton suddenly laughed loudly at his situation. He had decided that he might as well stick it out for tonight. This thought set him laughing again, and he did not stop until Alice asked him if he was all right.

“More right than you will ever know,” he said, turning his back to her. He reached into his grail and extracted the last item. This was a small flat stick of chicle-like substance. Frigate, before leaving, had remarked that their unknown benefactors must be American. Otherwise, they would not have thought of providing chewing gum.

After stubbing out his cigar on the ground, Burton popped the stick into his mouth. He said, “This has a strange but rather delicious taste. Have you tried yours?”

“I am tempted, but I imagine I’d look like a cow chewing her cud.”

“Forget about being a lady,” Burton said. “Do you think that beings with the power to resurrect you would have vulgar tastes?”

Alice smiled slightly and said, “I really wouldn’t know,” and placed the stick in her mouth. For a moment, they chewed idly, looking across the fire at each other. She was unable to look him full in the eyes for more than a few seconds at a time.

Burton said, “Frigate mentioned that he knew you. Of you, rather. Just who are you, if you will pardon my unseemly curiosity?”

“There are no secrets among the dead,” she replied lightly. “Or among the ex-dead, either.”

She had been born Alice Pleasance Liddell on April 25, 1852. (Burton was thirty then.) She was the direct descendant of King Edward III and his son, John of Gaunt. Her father was dean of Christ Church College of Oxford and coauthor of a famous Greek-English lexicon. (Liddell and Scott! Burton thought.) She had had a happy childhood, an excellent education, and had met many famous people of her times: Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, the Prince of Wales, who was placed under her father’s care while he was at Oxford. Her husband had been Reginald Gervis Hargreaves, and she had loved him very much. He had been a “country gentleman,” liked to hunt, fish, play cricket, raise trees, and read French literature. She had three sons, all captains, two of whom died in the Great War of 1914–1918. (This was the second time that day that Burton had heard of the Great War.)

She talked on and on as if drink had loosened her tongue. Or as if she wanted to place a barrier of conversation between her and Burton.

She talked of Dinah, the tabby kitten she had loved when she was a child, the great trees of her husband’s arboretum, how her father, when working on his lexicon, would always sneeze at twelve o’clock in the afternoon, no one knew why…at the age of eighty, she was given an honorary Doctor of Letters by the American university, Columbia, because of the vital part she had played in the genesis of Mr. Dodgson’s famous book. (She neglected to mention the title and Burton, though a voracious reader, did not recall any works by a Mr. Dodgson.)

“That was a golden afternoon indeed,” she said, “despite the official meteorological report. On July 4, 1862, I was ten…my sisters and I were wearing black shoes, white openwork socks, white cotton dresses, and hats with large brims.”

Her eyes were wide, and she shook now and then as if she were struggling inside herself, and she began to talk even faster.

“Mr. Dodgson and Mr. Duckworth carried the picnic baskets…we set off in our boat from Folly Bridge up the Isis, upstream for a change. Mr. Duckworth rowed stroke; the drops fell off his paddle like tears of glass on the smooth mirror of the Isis, and….”

Burton heard the last words as if they had been roared at him. Astonished, he gazed at Alice, whose lips seemed to be moving as if she were conversing at a normal speech level. Her eyes were now fixed on him, but they seemed to be boring through him into a space and a time beyond. Her hands were half-raised as if she were surprised at something and could not move them.

Every sound was magnified. He could hear the breathing of the little girl, the pounding of her heart and Alice’s, the gurgle of the workings of Alice’s intestines and of the breeze as it slipped across the branches of the trees. From far away, a cry came.

He rose and listened. What was happening? Why the heightening of senses? Why could he hear their hearts but not his? He was also aware of the shape and texture of the grass under his feet. Almost, he could feel the individual molecules of the air as they bumped into his body.

Alice, too, had risen. She said, “What is happening?” and her voice fell against him like a heavy gust of wind.

He did not reply, for he was staring at her. Now, it seemed to him, he could really see her body for the first time. And he could see her, too. The entire Alice.

Alice came toward him with her arms held out, her eyes half-shut, her mouth moist. She swayed, and she crooned, “Richard! Richard!”

Then she stopped; her eyes widened. He stepped toward her, his arms out. She cried, “No!” and turned and ran into the darkness among the trees.

For a second, he stood still. It did not seem possible that she, whom he loved as he had never loved anybody, could not love him back.

She must be teasing him. That was it. He ran after her, and called her name over and over.

It must have been hours later when the rain fell against them. Either the effect of the drug had worn off or the cold water helped dispel it, for both seemed to emerge from the ecstasy and the dreamlike state at the same time. She looked up at him as lightning lit their features, and she screamed and pushed him violently.

He fell on the grass, but reached out a hand and grabbed her ankle as she scrambled away from him on all fours.

“What’s the matter with you?” he shouted.

Alice quit struggling. She sat down, hid her face against her knees, and her body shook with sobs. Burton rose and placed his hands under her chin and forced her to look upward. Lightning hit nearby again and showed him her tortured face.

“You promised to protect me!” she cried out.

“You didn’t act as if you wanted to be protected,” he said. “I didn’t promise to protect you against a natural human impulse.”

“Impulse!” she said. “Impulse! My God, I’ve never done anything like this in my life! I’ve always been good! I was a virgin when I married, and I stayed faithful to my husband all my life! And now…a total stranger! Just like that! I don’t know what got into me!”

“Then I’ve been a failure,” Burton said, and laughed. But he was beginning to feel regret and sorrow. If only it had been her own will, her own wish, then he would not now be having the slightest bite of conscience. But that gum had contained some powerful drug, and it had made them behave as lovers whose passion knew no limits. She had certainly cooperated as enthusiastically as any experienced woman in a Turkish harem.

“You needn’t feel the least bit contrite or self-reproachful,” he said gently. “You were possessed. Blame the drug.”

“I did it!” she said. “I…I! I wanted to! Oh, what a vile low whore I am!”

“I don’t remember offering you any money.”

He did not mean to be heartless. He wanted to make her so angry that she would forget her self-abasement. And he succeeded. She jumped up and attacked his chest and face with her nails. She called him names that a highbred and gentle lady of Victoria’s day should never have known.

Burton caught her wrists to prevent further damage and held her while she spewed more filth at him. Finally, when she had fallen silent and had begun weeping again, he led her toward the campsite. The fire was wet ashes. He scraped off the top layer and dropped a handful of grass, which had been protected from the rain by the tree, onto the embers. By its light, he saw the little girl sleeping huddled between Kazz and Monat under a pile of grass beneath the irontree. He returned to Alice, who was sitting under another tree.

“Stay away,” she said. “I never want to see you again! You have dishonored me, dirtied me! And after you gave your word to protect me!”

“You can freeze if you wish,” he said. “I was merely going to suggest that we huddle together to keep warm. But, if you wish discomfort, so be it. I’ll tell you again that what we did was generated by the drug. No, not generated. Drugs don’t generate desires or actions; they merely allow them to be released. Our normal inhibitions were dissolved, and neither one of us can blame ourself or the other.

“However, I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t enjoy it, and you’d be a liar if you claimed you didn’t. So, why gash yourself with the knives of conscience?”

“I’m not a beast like you! I’m a good Christian God-fearing virtuous woman!”

“No doubt,” Burton said dryly. “However, let me stress again one thing. I doubt if you would have done what you did if you had not wished in your heart to do so. The drug suppressed your inhibitions, but it certainly did not put in your mind the idea of what to do. The idea was already there. Any action that resulted from taking the drug came from you, from what you wanted to do.”

“I know that!” she screamed. “Do you think I’m some stupid simple serving girl? I have a brain! I know what I did and why! It’s just that I never dreamed that I could be such…such a person! But I must have been! Must be!”

Burton tried to console her, to show her that everyone had certain unwished-for elements in their nature. He pointed out that the dogma of original sin surely covered this; she was human, therefore, she had dark desires in her. And so forth. The more he tried to make her feel better, the worse she felt. Then, shivering with cold, and tired of the useless arguments, he gave up. He crawled in between Monat and Kazz and took the little girl in his arms. The warmth of the three bodies and the cover of the grass pile and the feel of the naked bodies soothed him. He went to sleep with Alice’s weeping coming to him faintly through the grass cover.

9

When he awoke, he was in the gray light of the false dawn, which the Arabs called the wolf’s tail. Monat, Kazz, and the child were still sleeping. He scratched for a while at the itchy spots caused by the rough-edged grass and then crawled out. The fire was out; water drops hung from the leaves of the trees and the tips of the grass blades. He shivered with the cold: But he did not feel tired nor have any ill effects from the drug, as he had expected. He found a pile of comparatively dry bamboo under some grass beneath a tree. He rebuilt the fire with this and in a short time was comfortable. Then he saw the bamboo containers, and he drank water from one. Alice was sitting up in a mound of grass and staring sullenly at him. Her skin was ridged with goose bumps.

“Come and get warm!” he said.

She crawled out, stood up, walked over to the bamboo bucket, bent down, scooped up water, and splashed it over her face. Then she squatted down by the fire, warming her hands over a small flame. If everybody is naked, how quickly even the most modest lose their modesty, he thought.

A moment later, Burton heard the rustle of grass to the east. A naked head, Peter Frigate’s, appeared. He strode from the grass, and was followed by the naked head of a woman. Emerging from the grass, she revealed a wet but beautiful body. Her eyes were large and a dark green, and her lips were a little too thick for beauty. But her other features were exquisite.

Frigate was smiling broadly. He turned and pulled her into the warmth of the fire with his hand.

“You look like the cat who ate the canary,” Burton said. “What happened to your hand?”

Peter Frigate looked at the knuckles of his right hand. They were swelled, and there were scratches on the back of the hand.

“I got into a fight,” he said. He pointed a finger at the woman, who was squatting near Alice and warming herself. “It was a madhouse down by the river last night. That gum must contain a drug of some sort. You wouldn’t believe what people were doing. Or would you? After all, you’re Richard Francis Burton. Anyway, all women, including the ugly ones, were occupied, one way or another. I got scared at what was going on and then I got mad. I hit two men with my grail, knocked them out. They were attacking a ten-year-old girl. I may have killed them; I hope I did. I tried to get the girl to come with me, but she ran away into the night.

“I decided to come back here. I was beginning to react pretty badly from what I’d done to those two men even if they deserved it. The drug was responsible; it must have released a lifetime of rage and frustration. So I started back here and then I came across two more men, only these were attacking a woman, this one. I think she wasn’t resisting the idea of intercourse so much as she was their idea of simultaneous attack, if you know what I mean. Anyway, she was screaming, or trying to, and struggling, and they had just started to hit her. So I hit them with my fist and kicked them and then banged away on them with my grail.

“Then I took the woman, her name’s Loghu, by the way, that’s all I know about her since I can’t understand a word of her language, and she went with me.”

He grinned again. “But we never got there.”

He quit grinning, and shuddered.

“Then we woke up with the rain and lightning and thunder coming down like the wrath of God. I thought that maybe, don’t laugh, that it was Judgment Day, that God had given us free rein for a day so He could let us judge ourselves. And now we were going to be cast into the pit.”

He laughed tightly and said, “I’ve been an agnostic since I was fourteen years old, and I died one at the age of ninety, although I was thinking about calling in a priest then. But the little child that’s scared of the Old Father God and Hellfire and Damnation, he’s still down there, even in the old man. Or in the young man raised from the dead.”

“What happened?” Burton said. “Did the world end in a crack of thunder and a stroke of lightning? You’re still here, I see, and you’ve not renounced the delights of sin in the person of this woman.”

“We found a grailstone near the mountains. About a mile west of here. We got lost, wandered around, cold, wet, jumping every time the lightning struck nearby. Then we found the grailstone. It was jammed with people, but they were exceptionally friendly, and there were so many bodies it was very warm, even if some rain did leak down through the grass. We finally went to sleep, long after the rain quit. When I woke up, I searched through the grass until I found Loghu. She got lost during the night, somehow. She seemed pleased to see me, though, and I like her. There’s an affinity between us. Maybe I’ll find out why when she learns to speak English. I tried that and French and German and tags of Russian, Lithuanian, Gaelic, all the Scandinavian tongues, including Finnish, classical Nahuatl, Arabic, Hebrew, Onondaga Iroquois, Ojibway, Italian, Spanish, Latin, modern and Homeric Greek, and a dozen others. Result: a blank look.”

“You must be quite a linguist,” Burton said.

“I’m not fluent in any of those,” Frigate said. “I can read most of them but can speak only everyday phrases. Unlike you, I am not master of thirty-nine languages—including pornography.”

The fellow seemed to know much about himself, Burton thought. He would find out just how much at a later time.

“I’ll be frank with you, Peter,” Burton said. “Your account of your aggressiveness amazed me. I had not thought you capable of attacking and beating that many men. Your queasiness….”

“It was the gum, of course. It opened the door of the cage.”

Frigate squatted down by Loghu and rubbed his shoulder against hers. She looked at him out of slightly slanted eyes. The woman would be beautiful once her hair grew out.

Frigate continued, “I’m so timorous and queasy because I am afraid of the anger, the desire to do violence, that lies not too deeply within me. I fear violence because I am violent. I fear what will happen if I am not afraid. Hell, I’ve known that for forty years. Much good the knowledge has done me!”

He looked at Alice and said, “Good morning!”

Alice replied cheerily enough, and she even smiled at Loghu when she was introduced. She would look at Burton, and she would answer his direct questions. But she would not chat with him or give him anything but a stern face.

Monat, Kazz, and the little girl, all yawning, came to the fireside. Burton prowled around the edges of the camp and found that the Triestans were gone. Some had left their grails behind. He cursed them for their carelessness and thought about leaving the grails in the grass to teach them a lesson. But he eventually placed the cylinders in depressions on the grailstone.

If their owners did not return, they would go hungry unless someone shared their food with them. In the meantime, the food in their grails would have to be untouched. He would be unable to open them. They had discovered yesterday that only the owner of a grail could open it. Experimentation with a long stick had determined also that the owner had to touch the grail with his fingers or some part of his body before the lid would open. It was Frigate’s theory that a mechanism in the grail was keyed to the peculiar configuration of skin voltage of the owner. Or perhaps the grail contained a very sensitive detector of the individual’s brain waves.

The sky had become bright by then. The sun was still on the other side of the 20,000-foot-high eastern mountain. Approximately a half hour later, the grailrock spurted blue flame with a roll of thunder. Thunder from the stones along the river echoed against the mountain.

The grails yielded bacon and eggs, ham, toast, butter, jam, milk, a quarter of a cantaloupe, cigarettes, and a cupful of dark brown crystals which Frigate said was instant coffee. He drank the milk in one cup, rinsed it out in water in a bamboo container, filled the cup with water, and set it by the fire. When the water was boiling, he put a teaspoonful of the crystals into the water and stirred it. The coffee was delicious, and there were enough crystals to provide six cups. Then Alice put the crystals into the water before heating it over the fire and found that it was not necessary to use the fire. The water boiled within three seconds after the crystals were placed into the cold water.

After eating, they washed out the containers and replaced them in the grails. Burton strapped his grail onto his waist. He intended to explore, and he certainly was not going to leave the grail on the stone. Though it could do no one but himself any good, vicious people might take it just for the pleasure of seeing him starve.

Burton started his language lessons with the little girl and Kazz, and Frigate got Loghu to sit in on them. Frigate suggested that a universal language should be adopted because of the many many languages and dialects, perhaps fifty to sixty thousand, that mankind had used in his several million years of existence and which he was using along the river. That is, provided that all of mankind had been resurrected. After all, all he knew about was the few square miles he had seen. But it would be a good idea to start propagating Esperanto, the synthetic language invented by the Polish oculist, Doctor Zamenhof, in 1887. Its grammar was very simple and absolutely regular, and its sound combinations, though not as easy for everybody to pronounce as claimed, were still relatively easy. And the basis of the vocabulary was Latin with many words from English and German and other West European languages.

“I had heard about it before I died,” Burton said. “But I never saw any samples of it. Perhaps it may become useful. But, in the meantime, I’ll teach these two English.”

“But most of the people here speak Italian or Slovenian!” Frigate said.

“That may be true, though we haven’t any survey as yet. However, I don’t intend to stay here, you can be sure of that.”

“I could have predicted that,” Frigate muttered. “You always did get restless; you had to move on.”

Burton glared at Frigate and then started the lessons. For about fifteen minutes, he drilled them in the identification and pronunciation of nineteen nouns and a few verbs: fire, bamboo, grail, man, woman, girl, hand, feet, eye, teeth, eat, walk, run, talk, danger, I, you, they, us. He intended that he should learn as much from them as they from him. In time, he would be able to speak their tongues, whatever they were.

The sun cleared the top of the eastern range. The air became warmer, and they let the fire die. They were well into the second day of resurrection. And they knew almost nothing about this world or what their eventual fate was supposed to be or Who was determining their fate.

Lev Ruach stuck his big-nosed face through the grass and said, “May I join you?”

Burton nodded, and Frigate said, “Sure, why not?”

Ruach stepped out of the grass. A short pale-skinned woman with great brown eyes and lovely delicate features followed him. Ruach introduced her as Tanya Kauwitz. He had met her last night, and they had stayed together, since they had a number of things in common. She was of Russian-Jewish descent, was born in 1958 in the Bronx, New York City, had become an English schoolteacher, married a businessman who made a million and dropped dead when she was forty-five, leaving her free to marry a wonderful man with whom she had been in love for fifteen years. Six months later, she was dead of cancer. Tanya, not Lev, gave this information and in one sentence.

“It was hell down on the plains last night,” Lev said. “Tanya and I had to run for our lives into the woods. So I decided that I would find you and ask if we could stay with you. I apologize for my hasty remarks of yesterday, Mr. Burton. I think that my observations were valid, but the attitudes I was speaking of should be considered in the context of your other attitudes.”

“We’ll go into that some other time,” Burton said. “At the time I wrote that book, I was suffering from the vile and malicious lies of the moneylenders of Damascus, and they….”

“Certainly, Mr. Burton,” Ruach said. “As you say, later. I just wanted to make the point that I consider you to be a very capable and strong person, and I would like to join your group. We’re in a state of anarchy, if you can call anarchy a state, and many of us need protection.”

Burton did not like to be interrupted. He scowled and said, “Please permit me to explain myself. I….”

Frigate stood up and said, “Here come the others. Wonder where they’ve been?”

Only four of the original nine had come back, however. Maria Tucci explained that they had wandered away together after chewing the gum, and eventually ended up by one of the big bonfires on the plains. Then many things had happened; there had been fights and attacks by men on women, men on men, women on men, women on women, and even attacks on children. The group had split up in the chaos. She had met the other three only an hour ago while she was searching in the hills for the grailstone.

Lev added some details. The results of chewing the narcotic gum had been tragic, amusing, or gratifying, depending, apparently, upon individual reaction. The gum had had an aphrodisiac effect upon many, but it also had many other effects. Consider the husband and wife who had died in Opcina, a suburb of Trieste, in 1899. They had been resurrected within six feet of each other. They had wept with joy at being reunited when so many couples had not been. They thanked God for their good luck, though they also had made some loud comments that this world was not what they had been promised. But they had had fifty years of married bliss and now looked forward to being together for eternity.

Only a few minutes after both had chewed the gum, the man had strangled his wife, heaved her body into the river, picked up another woman in his arms, and run off into the darkness of the woods with her.

Another man had leaped upon a grailstone and delivered a speech that lasted all night, even through the rain. To the few who could hear, and the even fewer who listened, he had demonstrated the principles of a perfect society and how these could be carried out in practice. By dawn, he was so hoarse he could only croak a few words. On Earth, he had seldom bothered to vote.

A man and a woman, outraged at the public display of carnality, had forcefully tried to separate couples. The results: bruises, bloody noses, split lips, and two concussions, all theirs. Some men and women had spent the night on their knees praying and confessing their sins.

Some children had been badly beaten, raped, or murdered, or all three. But not everybody had succumbed to the madness. A number of adults had protected the children or tried to.

Ruach described the despair and disgust of a Croat Moslem and an Austrian Jew because their grails contained pork. A Hindu screamed obscenities because his grail offered him meat.

A fourth man, crying out that they were in the hands of devils, had hurled his cigarettes into the river.

Several had said to him, “Why didn’t you give us the cigarettes if you didn’t want them?”

“Tobacco is the invention of the devil; it was the weed created by Satan in the Garden of Eden!”

A man said, “At least you could have shared the cigarettes with us. It wouldn’t hurt you.”

“I would like to throw all the evil stuff into the river!” he had shouted.

“You’re an insufferable bigot and crazy to boot,” another had replied, and struck him in the mouth. Before the tobacco-hater could get up off the ground, he was hit and kicked by four others.

Later, the tobacco-hater had staggered up and, weeping with rage, cried, “What have I done to deserve this, O Lord, my God! I have always been a good man. I gave thousands of pounds to charities, I worshipped in Thy temple three times a week, I waged a lifelong war against sin and corruption, I….”

“I know you!” a woman had shouted. She was a tall blue-eyed girl with a handsome face and well-curved figure. “I know you! Sir Robert Smithson!”

He had stopped talking and had blinked at her. “I don’t know you!”

“You wouldn’t! But you should! I’m one of the thousands of girls who had to work sixteen hours a day, six and a half days a week, so you could live in your big house on the hill and dress in fine clothes and so your horses and dogs could eat far better than I could! I was one of your factory girls! My father slaved for you, my mother slaved for you, my brothers and sisters, those who weren’t too sick or who didn’t die because of too little or too bad food, dirty beds, drafty windows, and rat bites, slaved for you. My father lost a hand in one of your machines, and you kicked him out without a penny. My mother died of the white plague. I was coughing out my life, too, my fine baronet, while you stuffed yourself with rich foods and sat in easy chairs and dozed off in your big expensive church pew and gave thousands to feed the poor unfortunates in Asia and to send missionaries to convert the poor heathens in Africa. I coughed out my lungs, and I had to go a-whoring to make enough money to feed my kid sisters and brothers. And I caught syphilis, you bloody pious bastard, because you wanted to wring out every drop of sweat and blood I had and those poor devils like me had! I died in prison because you told the police they should deal harshly with prostitution. You…you…!”

Smithson had gone red at first, then pale. Then he had drawn himself up straight, scowling at the woman, and said, “You whores always have somebody to blame for your unbridled lusts, your evil ways. God knows that I followed His ways.”

He had turned and had walked off, but the woman ran after him and swung her grail at him. It came around swiftly; somebody shouted; he spun and ducked. The grail almost grazed the top of his head.

Smithson ran past the woman before she could recover and quickly lost himself in the crowd. Unfortunately, Ruach said, very few understood what was going on because they couldn’t speak English.

“Sir Robert Smithson,” Burton said. “If I remember correctly, he owned cotton mills and steelworks in Manchester. He was noted for his philanthropies and his good works among the heathens. Died in 1870 or thereabouts at the age of eighty.”

“And probably convinced that he would be rewarded in Heaven,” Lev Ruach said. “Of course, it would never have occurred to him that he was a murderer many times over.”

“If he hadn’t exploited the poor, someone else would have done so.”

“That is an excuse used by many throughout men’s history,” Lev said. “Besides, there were industrialists in your country who saw to it that wages and conditions in their factories were improved. Robert Owen was one, I believe.”

10

I don’t see much sense in arguing about what went on in the past,” Frigate said. “I think we should do something about our present situation.”

Burton stood up. “You’re right, Yank! We need roofs over our heads, tools, God knows what else! But first, I think we should take a look at the cities of the plains and see what the citizens are doing there.”

At that moment, Alice came through the trees on the hill above them. Frigate saw her first. He burst out laughing. “The latest in ladies’ wear!”

She had cut lengths of the grass with her scissors and plaited them into a two-piece garment. One was a sort of poncho which covered her breasts and the other a skirt which fell to her calves.

The effect was strange, though one that she should have expected. When she was naked, the hairless head still did not detract too much from her femaleness and her beauty. But with the green, bulky, and shapeless garments, her face suddenly became masculine and ugly.

The other women crowded around her and examined the weaving of the grass lengths and the grass belt that secured the skirt.

“It’s very itchy, very uncomfortable,” Alice said. “But it’s decent. That’s all I can say for it.”

“Apparently you did not mean what you said about your unconcern with nudity in a land where all are nude,” Burton said.

Alice stared coolly and said, “I expect that everybody will be wearing these. Every decent man and woman, that is.”

“I supposed that Mrs. Grundy would rear her ugly head here,” Burton replied.

“It was a shock to be among so many naked people,” Frigate said. “Even though nudity on the beach and in the private home became commonplace before I died. But it didn’t take long for everyone to get used to it. Everyone except the hopelessly neurotic, I suppose.”

Burton swung around and spoke to the other women. “What about you ladies? Are you going to wear these ugly and scratchy haycocks because one of your sex suddenly decides that she has private parts again? Can something that has been so public become private?”

Loghu, Tanya, and Alice did not understand him because he spoke in Italian. He repeated in English for the benefit of the last two.

Alice flushed and said, “What I wear is my business. If anybody else cares to go naked when I’m decently covered, well…!”

Loghu had not understood a word, but she understood what was going on. She laughed and turned away. The other women seemed to be trying to guess what each one intended to do. The ugliness and the uncomfortableness of the clothing were not the issues.

“While you females are trying to make up your minds,” Burton said, “it would be nice if you would take a bamboo pail and go with us to the river. We can bathe, fill the pails with water, find out the situation in the plains, and then return here. We may be able to build several houses—or temporary shelters—before nightfall.”

They started down the hills, pushing through the grass and carrying their grails, chert weapons, bamboo spears, and buckets. They had not gone far before they encountered a number of people. Apparently, many plains dwellers had decided to move out. Not only that, some had also found chert and had made tools and weapons. These had learned the technique of working with stone from somebody, possibly from other primitives in the area. So far, Burton had seen only two specimens of non-Homo sapiens, and these were with him. But wherever the techniques had been learned, they had been put to good use. They passed two half-completed bamboo huts. These were round, one-roomed, and would have conical roofs thatched with the huge triangular leaves from the irontrees and with the long hill grass. One man, using a chert adze and axe, was building a short-legged bamboo bed.

Except for a number erecting rather crude huts or lean-tos without stone tools at the edge of the plains, and for a number swimming in the river, the plain was deserted. The bodies from last night’s madness had been removed. So far, no one had put on a grass skirt, and many stared at Alice or even laughed and made raucous comments. Alice turned red, but she made no move to get rid of her clothes. The sun was getting hot, however, and she was scratching under her breast garment and under her skirt. It was a measure of the intensity of the irritation that she, raised by strict Victorian upper-class standards, would scratch in public.

However, when they got to the river, they saw a dozen heaps of stuff that turned out to be grass dresses. These had been left on the edge of the river by the men and women now laughing, splashing, and swimming in the river.

It was certainly a contrast to the beaches he knew. These were the same people who had accepted the bathing machines, the suits that covered them from ankle to neck, and all the other modest devices, as absolutely moral and vital to the continuation of the proper society—theirs. Yet, only one day after finding themselves here, they were swimming in the nude. And enjoying it.

Part of the acceptance of their unclothed state came from the shock of the resurrection. In addition, there was not much they could do about it that first day. And there had been a leavening of the civilized with savage peoples, or tropical civilized peoples, who were not particularly shocked by nudity.

He called out to a woman who was standing to her waist in the water. She had a coarsely pretty face and sparkling blue eyes.

“That is the woman who attacked Sir Robert Smithson,” Lev Ruach said. “I believe her name is Wilfreda Allport.”

Burton looked at her curiously and with appreciation of her splendid bust. He called out, “How’s the water?”

“Very nice!” she said, smiling.

He unstrapped his grail, put down the container, which held his chert knife and hand axe, and waded in with his cake of green soap. The water felt as if it was about ten degrees below his body temperature. He soaped himself while he struck up a conversation with Wilfreda. If she still harbored any resentment about Smithson, she did not show it. Her accent was heavily North Country, perhaps Cumberland.

Burton said to her, “I heard about your little to-do with the late great hypocrite, the baronet. You should be happy now, though. You’re healthy and young and beautiful again, and you don’t have to toil for your bread. Also, you can do for love what you had to do for money.”

There was no use beating around the bush with a factory girl. Not that she had any.

Wilfreda gave him a stare as cool as any he had received from Alice Hargreaves. She said, “Now, haven’t you the ruddy nerve? English, aren’t you? I can’t place your accent, London, I’d say, with a touch of something foreign.”

“You’re close,” he said, laughing. “I’m Richard Burton, by the way. How would you like to join our group? We’ve banded together for protection, we’re going to build some houses this afternoon. We’ve got a grailstone all to ourselves up in the hills.”

Wilfreda looked at the Tau Cetan and the Neanderthal. “They’re part of your mob, now? I heard about ’em; they say the monster’s a man from the stars, come along in A.D. 2000, they do say.”

“He won’t hurt you,” Burton said. “Neither will the subhuman. What do you say?”

“I’m only a woman,” she said. “What do I have to offer?”

“All a woman has to offer,” Burton said, grinning.

Surprisingly, she burst out laughing. She touched his chest and said, “Now ain’t you the clever one? What’s the matter, you can’t get no girl of your own?”

“I had one and lost her,” Burton said. That was not entirely true. He was not sure what Alice intended to do. He could not understand why she continued to stay with his group if she was so horrified and disgusted. Perhaps it was because she preferred the evil she knew to the evil she did not know. At the moment, he himself felt only disgust at her stupidity, but he did not want her to go. That love he had experienced last night may have been caused by the drug, but he still felt a residue of it. Then why was he asking this woman to join them? Perhaps it was to make Alice jealous. Perhaps it was to have a woman to fall back upon if Alice refused him tonight. Perhaps…he did not know why.

Alice stood upon the bank, her toes almost touching the water. The bank was, at this point, only an inch above the water. The short grass continued from the plain to form a solid mat that grew down on the river bed. Burton could feel the grass under his feet as far as he could wade. He threw his soap onto the bank and swam out for about forty feet and dived down. Here the current suddenly became stronger and the depth much greater. He swam down, his eyes open, until the light failed and his ears hurt. He continued on down and then his fingers touched bottom. There was grass there, too.

When he swam back to where the water was up to his waist, he saw that Alice had shed her clothes. She was in closer to the shore, but squatting so that the water was up to her neck. She was soaping her head and face.

He called to Frigate, “Why don’t you come in?”

“I’m guarding the grails,” Frigate said.

“Very good!”

Burton swore under his breath. He should have thought of that and appointed somebody as a guard. He wasn’t in actuality a good leader, he tended to let things go to pot, to permit them to disintegrate. Admit it. On Earth he had been the head of many expeditions, none of which had been distinguished by efficiency or strong management. Yet, during the Crimean War, when he was head of Beatson’s Irregulars, training the wild Turkish cavalry, the Bashi-Bazouks, he had done quite well, far better than most. So he should not be reprimanding himself.…

Lev Ruach climbed out of the water and ran his hands over his skinny body to take off the drops. Burton got out, too, and sat down beside him. Alice turned her back on him, whether on purpose or not he had no way of knowing, of course.

“It’s not just being young again that delights me,” Lev said in his heavily accented English. “It’s having this leg back.”

He tapped his right knee.

“I lost it in a traffic accident on the New Jersey Turnpike when I was fifty years old.”

He laughed and said, “There was an irony to the situation that some might call fate. I had been captured by Arabs two years before when I was looking for minerals in the desert, in the state of Israel, you understand….”

“You mean Palestine?” Burton said.

“The Jews founded an independent state in 1948,” Lev said. “You wouldn’t know about that, of course. I’ll tell you all about it sometime. Anyway, I was captured and tortured by Arab guerrillas. I won’t go into the details; it makes me sick to recall it. But I escaped that night, though not before bashing in the heads of two with a rock and shooting two more with a rifle. The others fled, and I got away. I was lucky. An army patrol picked me up. However, two years later, when I was in the States, driving down the Turnpike, a truck, a big semi, I’ll describe that later, too, cut in front of me and jackknifed and I crashed into it. I was badly hurt, and my right leg was amputated below the knee. But the point of this story is that the truck driver had been born in Syria. So, you see the Arabs were out to get me, and they did, though they did not kill me. That job was done by our friend from Tau Ceti. Though I can’t say he did anything to humanity except hurry up its doom.”

“What do you mean by that?” Burton said.

“There were millions dying from famine, even the States were on a strictly rationed diet, and pollution of our water, land, and air was killing other millions. The scientists said that half of Earth’s oxygen supply would be cut off in ten years because the phytoplankton of the oceans—they furnished half the world’s oxygen, you know—were dying. The oceans were polluted.”

“The oceans?”

“You don’t believe it? Well, you died in 1890, so you find it hard to credit. But some people were predicting in 1968 exactly what did happen in 2008. I believed them, I was a biochemist. But most of the population, especially those who counted, the masses and the politicians, refused to believe until it was too late. Measures were taken as the situation got worse, but they were always too weak and too late and fought against by groups that stood to lose money, if effective measures were taken. But it’s a long sad story, and if we’re to build houses, we’d best start immediately after lunch.”

Alice came out of the river and ran her hands over her body. The sun and the breeze dried her off quickly. She picked up her grass clothes but did not put them back on. Wilfreda asked her about them. Alice replied that they made her itch too much, but she would keep them to wear at night if it got cold. Alice was polite to Wilfreda but obviously aloof. She had overheard much of the conversation and so knew that Wilfreda had been a factory girl who had become a whore and then had died of syphilis. Or at least Wilfreda thought that the disease had killed her. She did not remember dying. Undoubtedly, as she had said cheerily, she had lost her mind first.

Alice, hearing this, moved even further away. Burton grinned, wondering what she would do if she knew that he had suffered from the same disease, caught from a slave girl in Cairo when he had been disguised as a Moslem during his trip to Mecca in 1853. He had been “cured” and his mind had not been physically affected, though his mental suffering had been intense. But the point was that resurrection had given everybody a fresh, young, and undiseased body, and what a person had been on Earth should not influence another’s attitude toward them.

Should not was not, however, would not.

He could not really blame Alice Hargreaves. She was the product of her society—like all women, she was what men had made her—and she had strength of character and flexibility of mind to lift herself above some of the prejudices of her time and her class. She had adapted to the nudity well enough, and she was not openly hostile or contemptuous of the girl. She had performed an act with Burton that went against a lifetime of overt and covert indoctrination. And that was on the night of the first day of her life after death, when she should have been on her knees singing hosannas because she had “sinned” and promising that she would never “sin” again as long as she was not put in hellfire.

As they walked across the plain, he thought about her, turning his head now and then to look back at her. That hairless head made her face look so much older but the hairlessness made her look so childlike below the navel. They all bore this contradiction, old man or woman above the neck, young child below the belly button.

He dropped back until he was by her side. This put him behind Frigate and Loghu. The view of Loghu would yield some profit even if his attempt to talk to Alice resulted in nothing. Loghu had a beautifully rounded posterior; her buttocks were like two eggs. And she swayed as enchantingly as Alice.

He spoke in a low voice, “If last night distressed you so much, why do you stay with me?”

Her beautiful face became twisted and ugly.

“I am not staying with you! I am staying with the group! Moreover, I’ve been thinking about last night, though it pains me to do so. I must be fair. It was the narcotic in that hideous gum that made both of us behave the…way we did. At least, I know it was responsible for my behavior. And I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.”

“Then there’s no hope of repetition?”

“How can you ask that! Certainly not! How dare you?”

“I did not force you,” he said. “As I have pointed out, you did what you would do if you were not restrained by your inhibitions. Those inhibitions are good things—under certain circumstances, such as being the lawful wedded wife of a man you love in the England of Earth. But Earth no longer exists, not as we knew it. Neither does England. Neither does English society. And if all of mankind has been resurrected and is scattered along this river, you still may never see your husband again. You are no longer married. Remember….’til death do us part? You have died, and, therefore, parted. Moreover, there is no giving into marriage in heaven.”

“You are a blasphemer, Mr. Burton. I read about you in the newspapers, and I read some of your books about Africa and India and that one about the Mormons in the States. I also heard stories, most of which I found hard to believe, they made you out to be so wicked. Reginald was very indignant when he read your Kasidah. He said he’d have no such foul atheistic literature in his house, and he threw all your books into the furnace.”

“If I’m so wicked, and you feel you’re a fallen woman, why don’t you leave?”

“Must I repeat everything? The next group might have even worse men in it. And, as you have been so kind to point out, you did not force me. Anyway, I’m sure that you have some kind of heart beneath that cynical and mocking air. I saw you weeping when you were carrying Gwenafra and she was crying.”

“You have found me out,” he said, grinning. “Very well. So be it. I will be chivalrous, I will not attempt to seduce you or to molest you in any way. But the next time you see me chewing the gum, you would do well to hide. Meanwhile, I give my word of honor, you have nothing to fear from me as long as I am not under the influence of the gum.”

Her eyes widened, and she stopped. “You plan to use it again?”

“Why not? It apparently turned some people into violent beasts, but it had no such effect on me. I feel no craving for it, so I doubt it’s habit-forming. I used to smoke a pipe of opium now and then, you know, and I did not become addicted to it, so I don’t suppose I have a psychological weakness for drugs.”

“I understood that you were very often deep in your cups, Mr. Burton. You and that nauseating creature, Mr. Swinburne….”

She stopped talking. A man had called out to her, and, though she did not understand Italian, she understood his obscene gesture. She blushed all over but walked briskly on. Burton glared at the man. He was a well-built brown-skinned youth with a big nose, a weak chin, and close-set eyes. His speech was that of the criminal class of the city of Bologna, where Burton had spent much time while investigating Etruscan relics and graves. Behind him were ten men, most of them as unprepossessing and as wicked-looking as their leader, and five women. It was evident that the men wanted to add more women to the group. It was also evident that they would like to get their hands on the stone weapons of Burton’s group. They were armed only with their grails or with bamboo sticks.

11

Burton spoke sharply, and his people closed up. Kazz did not understand his words, but he sensed at once what was happening. He dropped back to form the rear guard with Burton. His brutish appearance and the hand axe in his huge fist checked the Bolognese somewhat. They followed the group, making loud comments and threats, but they did not get much closer. When they reached the hills, however, the leader of the gang shouted a command, and it attacked.

The youth with the close-set eyes, yelling, swinging his grail at the end of the strap, ran at Burton. Burton gauged the swing of the cylinder and then launched his bamboo spear just as the grail was arcing outward. The stone tip went into the man’s solar plexus, and he fell on his side with the spear sticking in him. The subhuman struck a swinging grail with a stick, which was knocked out of his hand. He leaped inward and brought the edge of the hand axe against the top of the head of his attacker, and that man went down with a bloody skull.

Little Lev Ruach threw his grail into the chest of a man and ran up and jumped on him. His feet drove into the face of the man, who was getting up again. The man went backward; Ruach bounded up and gashed the man’s shoulder with his chert knife. The man, screaming, got to his feet and raced away.

Frigate did better than Burton had expected him to, since he had turned pale and begun shaking when the gang had first challenged them. His grail was strapped to his left wrist while his right held a hand axe. He charged into the group, was hit on the shoulder with a grail, the impact of which was lessened when he partially blocked it with his grail, and he fell on his side. A man lifted a bamboo stick with both hands to bring it down on Frigate, but he rolled away, bringing his grail up and blocking the stick as it came down. Then he was up, his head butting into the man and carrying him back. Both went down, Frigate on top, and his stone axe struck the man twice on the temple.

Alice had thrown her grail into the face of a man and then stabbed at him with the fire-sharpened end of her bamboo spear. Loghu ran around to the side of the man and hit him across the head with her stick so hard that he dropped to his knees.

The fight was over in sixty seconds. The other men fled with their women behind them. Burton turned the screaming leader onto his back and pulled his spear out of the pit of his stomach. The tip had not gone in more than half an inch.

The man got to his feet and, clutching the streaming wound, staggered off across the plains. Two of the gang were unconscious but would probably survive. The man Frigate had attacked was dead.

The American had turned from pale to red and then back to pale. But he did not look contrite or sickened. If his expression held anything, it was elation. And relief.

He said, “That was the first man I’ve ever killed! The first!”

“I doubt that it’ll be the last,” Burton said. “Unless you’re killed first.”

Ruach, looking at the corpse, said, “A dead man looks just as dead here as on Earth. I wonder where those who are killed in the afterlife go?”

“If we live long enough, we might find out. You two women gave a very fine account of yourselves.”

Alice said, “I did what had to be done,” and walked away. She was pale and shaking. Loghu, on the other hand, seemed exhilarated.

They got to the grailstone about a half-hour before noon. Things had changed. Their quiet little hollow contained about sixty people, many of whom were working on pieces of chert. One man was holding a bloody eye into which a chip of stone had flown. Several more were bleeding from the face or holding smashed fingers.

Burton was upset but he could do nothing about it. The only hope for regaining the quiet retreat was that the lack of water would drive the intruders away. That hope went quickly. A woman told him that there was a small cataract about a mile and a half to the west. It fell from the top of the mountain down the tip of an arrowhead-shaped canyon and into a large hole which it had only half-filled. Eventually, it should spill out and take a course through the hills and spread out on the plain. Unless, of course, stone from the mountain base was brought down to make a channel for the stream.

“Or we make water pipes out of the big bamboo,” Frigate said.

They put their grails on the rock, each carefully noting the exact location of his, and they waited. He intended to move on after the grails were filled. A location halfway between the cataract and the grailstone would be advantageous, and they might not be so crowded.

The blue flames roared out above the stone just as the sun reached its zenith. This time, the grails yielded an antipasto salad, Italian black bread with melted garlic butter, spaghetti and meatballs, a cupful of dry red wine, grapes, more coffee crystals, ten cigarettes, a marijuana stick, a cigar, more toilet paper and a cake of soap, and four chocolate creams. Some people complained that they did not like Italian food, but no one refused to eat.

The group, smoking their cigarettes, walked along the base of the mountain to the cataract. This was at the end of the triangular canyon, where a number of men and women had set up camp around the hole. The water was icy cold. After washing out their containers, drying them, and refilling the buckets, they went back in the direction of the grailstone. After a half mile, they chose a hill covered by pines except for the apex, on which a great irontree grew. There was plenty of bamboo of all sizes growing around them. Under the direction of Kazz and of Frigate, who had spent a few years in Malaysia, they cut down bamboo and built their huts. These were round buildings with a single door and a window in the rear and a conical thatched roof. They worked swiftly and did not try for nicety, so that by dinnertime everything except the roofs was finished. Frigate and Monat were picked to stay behind as guards while the others took the grails to the stone. Here they found about 300 people constructing lean-tos and huts. Burton had expected this. Most people would not want to walk a half mile every day three times a day for their meals. They would prefer to cluster around the grailstones. The huts here were arranged haphazardly and closer than necessary. There was still the problem of getting fresh water, which was why he was surprised that there were so many here. But he was informed by a pretty Slovene that a source of water had been found close by only this afternoon. A spring ran from a cave almost in a straight line up from the rock. Burton investigated. Water had broken out from a cave and was trickling down the face of the cliff into a basin about fifty feet wide and eight deep.

He wondered if this was an afterthought on the part of Whoever had created this place.

He returned just as the blue flames thundered.

Kazz suddenly stopped to relieve himself. He did not bother to turn away; Loghu giggled; Tanya turned red; the Italian women were used to seeing men leaning against buildings wherever the fancy took them; Wilfreda was used to anything; Alice, surprisingly, ignored him as if he were a dog. And that might explain her attitude. To her, Kazz was not human and so could not be expected to act as humans were expected to act.

There was no reason to reprimand Kazz for this just now, especially when Kazz did not understand his language. But he would have to use sign language the next time Kazz proceeded to relieve himself while they were sitting around and eating. Everybody had to learn certain limits, and anything that upset others while they were eating should be forbidden. And that, he thought, included quarreling during mealtimes. To be fair, he would have to admit that he had participated in more than his share of dinner disputes in his lifetime.

He patted Kazz on top of the breadloaf-shaped skull as he passed him. Kazz looked at him and Burton shook his head, figuring that Kazz would find out why when he learned to speak English. But he forgot his intention, and he stopped and rubbed the top of his own head. Yes, there was a very fine fuzz there.

He felt his face, which was as smooth as ever. But his armpits were fuzzy. The pubic area was, however, smooth. That might be a slower growth than scalp hair, though. He told the others, and they inspected themselves and each other. It was true. Their hair was returning, at least, on their heads and their armpits. Kazz was the exception. His hair was growing out all over him except on his face.

The discovery made them jubilant. Laughing, joking, they walked along the base of the mountain in the shadow. They turned east then and waded through the grass of four hills before coming up the slope of the hill they were beginning to think of as home. Halfway up it, they stopped, silent. Frigate and Monat had not returned their calls.

After telling them to spread out and to proceed slowly, Burton led them up the hill. The huts were deserted, and several of the little huts had been kicked or trampled. He felt a chill, as if a cold wind had blown on him. The silence, the damaged huts, the complete absence of the two, was foreboding.

A minute later, they heard a halloo and turned to look down the hill. The skin-heads of Monat and Frigate appeared in the grasses and then they were coming up the hill. Monat looked grave, but the American was grinning. His face was bruised over the cheek, and the knuckles of both hands were torn and bloody.

“We just got back from chasing off four men and three women who wanted to take over our huts,” he said. “I told them they could build their own, and that you’d be back right away and beat hell out of them if they didn’t take off. They understood me all right, they spoke English. They had been resurrected at the grailstone a mile north of ours along the river. Most of the people there were Triestans of your time, but about ten, all together, were Chicagoans who’d died about 1985. The distribution of the dead sure is funny, isn’t it? There’s a random choice operating along here, I’d say.

“Anyway, I told them what Mark Twain said the devil said. You Chicagoans think you’re the best people here whereas the truth is you’re just the most numerous. That didn’t go over very well; they seemed to think that I should be buddy-buddies with them because I was an American. One of the women offered herself to me if I’d change sides and take their part in appropriating the huts. She was the one who was living with two of the men. I said no. They said they’d take the huts anyway, and over my dead body if they had to.

“But they talked more brave than they were. Monat scared them just by looking at them. And we did have the stone weapons and spears. Still, their leader was whipping them up into rushing us, when I took a good hard look at one of them.

“His head was bald so he didn’t have that thick straight black hair, and he was about thirty-five when I first knew him, and he wore thick shell-rimmed glasses then, and I hadn’t seen him for fifty-four years. But I stepped up closer, and I looked into his face, which was grinning just like I remembered it, like the proverbial skunk, and I said, “Lem? Lem Sharkko! It is Lem Sharkko, isn’t it?”

“His eyes opened then, and he grinned even more, and he took my hand, my hand, after all he’d done to me, and he cried out as if we were long-lost brothers, “It is, it is! It’s Pete Frigate! My God, Pete Frigate!”

“I was almost glad to see him and for the same reason he said he was glad to see me. But then I told myself, ‘This is the crooked publisher that cheated you out of $4,000 when you were just getting started as a writer and ruined your career for years. This is the slimy schlock dealer who cheated you and at least four other writers out of a lot of money and then declared bankruptcy and skipped. And then he inherited a lot of money from an uncle and lived very well indeed, thus proving that crime did pay. This is the man you have not forgotten, not only because of what he did to you and others but because of so many other crooked publishers you ran into later on.’”

Burton grinned and said, “I once said that priests, politicians, and publishers would never get past the gates of heaven. But I was wrong, that is, if this is heaven.”

“Yeah, I know,” Frigate said. “I’ve never forgotten that you said that. Anyway, I put down my natural joy at seeing a familiar face again, and I said, ‘Sharkko…’”

“With a name like that, he got you to trust him?” Alice said.

“He told me it was a Czech name that meant trustworthy. Like everything else he told me, it was a lie. Anyway, I had just about convinced myself that Monat and I should let them take over. We’d retire and then we’d run them out when you came back from the grailstone. That was the smart thing to do. But when I recognized Sharkko, I got so mad! I said, grinning, ‘Gee, it’s really great to see your face after all these years. Especially here where there are no cops or courts!’

“And I hit him right in the nose! He went over flat on his back, with his nose spouting blood. Monat and I rushed the others, and I kicked one, and then another hit me on the cheek with his grail. I was knocked silly, but Monat knocked one out with the butt of his spear and cracked the ribs of another; he’s skinny but he’s awful fast, and what he doesn’t know about self-defense—or offense! Sharkko got up then and I hit with my other fist but only a glancing blow along his jaw. It hurt my fist more than it hurt his jaw. He spun around and took off, and I went after him. The others took off, too, with Monat beating them on the tail with his spear. I chased Sharkko up the next hill and caught him on the downslope and punched him but good! He crawled away, begging for mercy, which I gave him with a kick in the rear that rolled him howling all the way down the hill.”

Frigate was still shaking with reaction, but he was pleased.

“I was afraid I was going to turn chicken there for a while,” he said. “After all, all that had been so long ago and in another world, and maybe we’re here to forgive our enemies—and some of our friends—and be forgiven. But on the other hand, I thought, maybe we’re here so we can give a little back of what we had to take on Earth. What about it, Lev? Wouldn’t you like a chance to turn Hitler over a fire? Very slowly over a fire?”

“I don’t think you could compare a crooked publisher to Hitler,” Ruach said. “No, I wouldn’t want to turn him over a fire. I might want to starve him to death, or feed him just enough to keep him alive. But I wouldn’t do that. What good would it do? Would it make him change his mind about anything, would he then believe that Jews were human beings? No, I would do nothing to him if he were in my power except kill him so he couldn’t hurt others. But I’m not so sure that killing him would mean he’d stay dead. Not here.”

“You’re a real Christian,” Frigate said, grinning.

“I thought you were my friend!” Ruach said.

12

This was the second time that Burton had heard the name Hitler. He intended to find out all about him, but at the moment everybody would have to put off talking to finish the roofs on the huts. They all pitched in, cutting off more grass with the little scissors they had found in their grails, or climbing the irontrees and tearing off the huge triangular green and scarlet-laced leaves. The roofs left much to be desired. Burton meant to search around for a professional thatcher and learn the proper techniques. The beds would have to be, for the time being, piles of grass on top of which were piles of softer irontree leaves. The blankets would be another pile of the same leaves.

“Thank God, or Whoever, that there is no insect life,” Burton said.

He lifted the gray metal cup which still held two ounces of the best scotch he had ever tasted.

“Here’s to Whoever. If he had raised us just to live on an exact duplicate of Earth, we’d be sharing our beds with ten thousand kinds of biting, scratching, stinging, scraping, tickling, bloodsucking vermin.”

They drank, and then they sat around the fire for a while and smoked and talked. The shadow darkened, the sky lost its blue, and the gigantic stars and great sheets, which had been dimly seen ghosts just before dusk, blossomed out. The sky was indeed a blaze of glory.

“Like a Sime illustration,” Frigate said.

Burton did not know what a Sime was. Half of the conversation with the non-nineteenth-centurians consisted of them explaining their references and he explaining his.

Burton rose and went over to the other side of the fire and squatted by Alice. She had just returned from putting the little girl, Gwenafra, to bed in a hut.

Burton held out a stick of gum to Alice and said, “I just had half a piece. Would you care for the other half?”

She looked at him without expression and said, “No, thanks.”

“There are eight huts,” he said. “There isn’t any doubt about who is sharing which hut with whom, except for Wilfreda, you, and me.”

“I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” she said.

“Then you’re sleeping with Gwenafra?”

She kept her face turned away from him. He squatted for a few seconds and then got up and went back to the other side and sat down by Wilfreda.

“You can move on, Sir Richard,” she said. Her lip was curled. “Lord grab me, I don’t like being second choice. You could of asked ’er where nobody could of seen you. I got some pride, too.”

He was silent for a minute. His first impulse had been to lash out at her with a sharp-pointed insult. But she was right. He had been too contemptuous of her. Even if she had been a whore, she had a right to be treated as a human being. Especially since she maintained that it was hunger that had driven her to prostitution, though he had been skeptical about that. Too many prostitutes had to rationalize their profession; too many had justifying fantasies about their entrance into the business. Yet, her rage at Smithson and her behavior toward him indicated that she was sincere.

He stood up and said, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“Are you in love with her?” Wilfreda said, looking up at him.

“I’ve only told one woman that I ever loved her,” he said.

“Your wife?”

“No. The girl died before I could marry her.”

“And how long was you married?”

“Twenty-nine years, though it’s none of your business.”

“Lord grab me! All that time, and you never once told her you loved her!”

“It wasn’t necessary,” he said, and walked away. The hut he chose was occupied by Monat and Kazz. Kazz was snoring away; Monat was leaning on his elbow and smoking a marijuana stick. Monat preferred that to tobacco, because it tasted more like his native tobacco. However, he got little effect from it. On the other hand, tobacco sometimes gave him fleeting but vividly colored visions.

Burton decided to save the rest of his dreamgum, as he called it. He lit up a cigarette, knowing that marijuana would probably make his rage and frustration even darker. He asked Monat questions about his home, Ghuurrkh. He was intensely interested, but the marijuana betrayed him, and he drifted away while the Cetan’s voice became fainter and fainter.

“.…cover your eyes now, boys!” Gilchrist said in his broad Scots speech.

Richard looked at Edward; Edward grinned and put his hands over his eyes, but he was surely peeking through the spaces between his fingers. Richard placed his own hands over his eyes and continued to stand on tiptoe. Although he and his brother were standing on boxes, they still had to stretch to see over the heads of the adults in front of them.

The woman’s head was in the stock by now; her long brown hair had fallen over her face. He wished he could see her expression as she stared down at the basket waiting for her, or for her head, rather.

“Don’t peek now, boys!” Gilchrist said again.

There was a roll of drums, a single shout, and the blade raced downward, and then a concerted shout from the crowd, mingled with some screams and moans, and the head fell down. The neck spurted out blood and would never stop. It kept spurting and spurting while the sun gleamed on it, it spurted out and covered the crowd and, though he was at least fifty yards from her, the blood struck him in the hands and seeped down between his fingers and over his face, filling his eyes and blinding him and making his lips sticky and salty. He screamed…

“Wake up, Dick!” Monat was saying. He was shaking Burton by the shoulder. “Wake up! You must have been having a nightmare!”

Burton, sobbing and shivering, sat up. He rubbed his hands and then felt his face. Both were wet. But with perspiration, not with blood.

“I was dreaming,” he said. “I was just six years old and in the city of Tours. In France, where we were living then. My tutor, John Gilchrist, took me and my brother Edward to see the execution of a woman who had poisoned her family. It was a treat, Gilchrist said.

“I was excited, and I peeked through my fingers when he told us not to watch the final seconds, when the blade of the guillotine came down. But I did; I had to. I remember getting a little sick at my stomach but that was the only effect the gruesome scene had on me. I seemed to have dislocated myself while I was watching it; it was as if I saw the whole thing through a thick glass, as if it were unreal. Or I was unreal. So I wasn’t really horrified.”

Monat had lit another marijuana. Its light was enough so that Burton could see him shaking his head. “How savage! You mean that you not only killed your criminals, you cut their heads off! In public! And you allowed children to see it!”

“They were a little more humane in England,” Burton said. “They hung the criminals!”

“At least the French permitted the people to be fully aware that they were spilling the blood of their criminals,” Monat said. “The blood was on their hands. But apparently this aspect did not occur to anyone. Not consciously, anyway. So now, after how many years—sixty-three?—you smoke some marijuana and you relive an incident which you had always believed did not harm you. But, this time, you recoil with horror. You screamed like a frightened child. You reacted as you should have reacted when you were a child. I would say that the marijuana dug away some deep layers of repression and uncovered the horror that had been buried there for sixty-three years.”

“Perhaps,” Burton said.

He stopped. There was thunder and lightning in the distance. A minute later, a rushing sound came, and then the patter of drops on the roof. It had rained about this time last night, about three in the morning, he would guess. And this second night, it was raining about the same time. The downpour became heavy, but the roof had been packed tightly, and no water dripped down through it. Some water did, however, come under the back wall, which was uphill. It spread out over the floor but did not wet them, since the grass and leaves under them formed a mat about ten inches thick.

Burton talked with Monat until the rain ceased approximately half an hour later. Monat fell asleep; Kazz had never awakened. Burton tried to get back to sleep but could not. He had never felt so alone, and he was afraid that he might slip back into the nightmare. After a while, he left the hut and walked to the one which Wilfreda had chosen. He smelled the tobacco before he got to the doorway. The tip of her cigarette glowed in the dark. She was a dim figure sitting upright in the pile of grass and leaves.

“Hello,” she said. “I was hoping you would come.”

“IT’s the instinct to own property,” Burton said.

“I doubt that it’s an instinct in man,” Frigate said. “Some people in the ’60s—1960s, that is—tried to demonstrate that man had an instinct which they called the territorial imperative. But….”

“I like that phrase. It has a fine ring to it,” Burton said.

“I knew you’d like it,” Frigate said. “But Ardrey and others tried to prove that man not only had an instinct to claim a certain area of land as his own, he also was descended from a killer ape. And the instinct to kill was still strong in his heritage from the killer ape. Which explained national boundaries, patriotism both national and local, capitalism, war, murder, crime, and so forth. But the other school of thought, or of the temperamental inclination, maintained that all these are the results of culture, of the cultural continuity of societies dedicated from earliest times to tribal hostilities, to war, to murder, to crime, and so forth. Change the culture, and the killer ape is missing. Missing because he was never there, like the little man on the stairs. The killer was the society, and society bred the new killers out of every batch of babies. But there were some societies, composed of preliterates, it is true, but still societies, that did not breed killers. And they were proof that man was not descended from a killer ape. Or I should say, he was perhaps descended from the ape but he did not carry the killing genes any longer, any more than he carried the genes for a heavy supraorbital ridge or hairy skin or thick bones or a skull with only 650 cubic centimeters capacity.”

“That is all very interesting,” Burton said. “We’ll go into the theory more deeply at another time. Let me point out to you, however, that almost every member of resurrected humanity comes from a culture which encouraged war and murder and crime and rape and robbery and madness. It is these people among whom we are living and with whom we have to deal. There may be a new generation someday. I don’t know. It’s too early to say, since we’ve only been here for seven days. But, like it or not, we are in a world populated by beings who quite often act as if they were killer apes.

“In the meantime, let’s get back to our model.”

They were sitting on bamboo stools before Burton’s hut. On a little bamboo table in front of them was a model of a boat made from pine and bamboo. It had a double hull across the top of which was a platform with a low railing in the center. It had a single mast, very tall, with a fore-and-aft rig, a balloon jib sail, and a slightly raised bridge with a wheel. Burton and Frigate had used chert knives and the edge of the scissors to carve the model of the catamaran. Burton had decided to name the boat, when it was built, The Hadji. It would be going on a pilgrimage, though its goal was not Mecca. He intended to sail it up The River as far as it would go. (By now, the river had become The River.)

The two had been talking about the territorial imperative because of some anticipated difficulties in getting the boat built. By now the people in this area were somewhat settled. They had staked out their property and constructed their dwellings or were still working on them. These ranged all the way from lean-tos to relatively grandiose buildings that would be made of bamboo logs and stone, have four rooms, and be two stories high. Most of them were near the grailstones along The River and at the base of the mountain. Burton’s survey, completed two days before, resulted in an estimate of about 260 to 261 people per square mile. For every square mile of flat plain on each side of The River, there were approximately 2.4 square miles of hills. But the hills were so high and irregular that their actual inhabitable area was about nine square miles. In the three areas that he had studied, he found that about one-third had built their dwellings close to the Riverside grailstones and one-third around the inland grailstones. Two hundred and sixty-one persons per square mile seemed like a heavy population, but the hills were so heavily wooded and convoluted in topography that a small group living there could feel isolated. And the plain was seldom crowded except at mealtimes, because the plains people were in the woods or fishing along the edge of The River. Many were working on dugouts or bamboo boats with the idea of fishing in the middle of The River. Or, like Burton, of going exploring.

The stands of bamboo had disappeared, although it was evident that they would be quickly replaced. The bamboo had a phenomenal growth. Burton estimated that a fifty-foot-high plant could grow from start to finish in ten days.

His gang had worked hard and cut down all they thought they would need for the boat. But they wanted to keep thieves away, so they used more wood to erect a high fence. This was being finished the same day that the model was completed. The trouble was that they would have to build the boat on the plain. It could never be gotten through the woods and down the various hills if it were built on this site.

“Yeah, but if we move out and set up a new base, we’ll run into opposition,” Frigate had said. “There isn’t a square inch of the high-grass border that isn’t claimed. As it is, you have to trespass to get to the plain. So far, nobody has tried to be hard-nosed about their property rights, but this can change any day. And if you build the ship a little back from the high-grass border, you can get it out of the woods okay and between the huts. But you’d have to set up a guard night and day, otherwise your stuff will be stolen. Or destroyed. You know these barbarians.”

He was referring to the huts wrecked while their owners were away and to the fouling of the pools below the cataract and the spring. He was also referring to the highly unsanitary habits of many of the locals. These would not use the little outhouses put up by various people for the public.

“We’ll erect new houses and a boatyard as close to the border as we can get,” Burton said. “Then we’ll chop down any tree that gets in our way and we’ll ram our way past anybody who refuses us right-of-way.”

It was Alice who went down to some people who had huts on the border between the plain and the hills and talked them into making a trade. She did not tell anybody what she intended. She had known of three couples who were unhappy with their location because of lack of privacy. These made an agreement and moved into the huts of Burton’s gang on the twelfth day after Resurrection, on a Thursday. By a generally agreed upon convention, Sunday, the first, was Resurrection Day. Ruach said he would prefer that the first day be called Saturday, or even better, just First Day. But he was in an area predominantly Gentile—or ex-Gentile (but once a Gentile always a Gentile)—so he would go along with the others. Ruach had a bamboo stick on which he kept count of the days by notching it each morning. The stick was driven into the ground before his hut.

Transferring the lumber for the boat took four days of heavy work. By then, the Italian couples decided that they had had enough of working their fingers to the bone. After all, why get on a boat and go someplace else when every place was probably just like this? They had obviously been raised from the dead so they could enjoy themselves. Otherwise, why the liquor, the cigarettes, the marihuana, the dreamgum, and the nudity?

They left without ill feelings on the part of anybody; in fact, they were given a going-away party. The next day, the twentieth of Year 1, A.R., two events occurred, one of which solved one puzzle and the other of which added one, though it was not very important.

The group went across the plain to the grailstone at dawn. They found two new people near the grailstone, both of them sleeping. They were easily aroused, but they seemed alarmed and confused. One was a tall brown-skinned man who spoke an unknown language. The other was a tall, handsome, well-muscled man with gray eyes and black hair. His speech was unintelligible until Burton suddenly understood that he was speaking English. It was the Cumberland dialect of the English spoken during the reign of King Edward I, sometimes called Longshanks. Once Burton and Frigate had mastered the sounds and made certain transpositions, they were able to carry on a halting conversation with him. Frigate had an extensive reading vocabulary of Early Middle English, but he had never encountered many of the words or certain grammatical usages.

John de Greystock was born in the manor of Greystoke in the Cumberland country. He had accompanied Edward I into France when the king invaded Gascony. There he had distinguished himself in arms, if he was to be believed. Later, he was summoned to Parliament as Baron Greystoke and then again went to the wars in Gascony. He was in the retinue of Bishop Anthony Bec, Patriarch of Jerusalem. In the 28th and 29th years of Edward’s reign, he fought against the Scots. He died in 1305, without children, but he settled his manor and barony on his cousin, Ralph, son of Lord Grimthorpe in Yorkshire.

He had been resurrected somewhere along The River among a people about ninety percent early fourteenth-century English and Scottish and ten percent ancient Sybarites. The peoples across The River were a mixture of Mongols of the time of Kubla Khan and some dark people the identity of which Greystoke did not know. His description fitted North American Indians.

The nineteenth day after Resurrection, the savages across The River had attacked. Apparently they did so for no other reason than they wanted a good fight, which they got. The weapons were mostly sticks and grails, because there was little stone in the area. John de Greystoke put ten Mongols out of commission with his grail and then was hit on the head with a rock and stabbed with the fire-hardened tip of a bamboo spear. He awoke, naked, with only his grail—or a grail—by this grailstone.

The other man told his story with signs and pantomime. He had been fishing when his hook was taken by something so powerful that it pulled him into the water. Coming back up, he had struck his head on the bottom of the boat and drowned.

The question of what happened to those who were killed in the afterlife was answered. Why they were not raised in the same areas as in which they died was another question.

The second event was the failure of the grails to deliver the noonday meal. Instead, crammed inside the cylinders were six cloths. These were of various sizes and of many different colors, hues, and patterns. Four were obviously designed to be worn as kilts. They could be fastened around the body with magnetic tabs inside the cloth. Two were of thinner almost transparent material and obviously made as brassieres, though they could be used for other purposes. Though the cloth was soft and absorbent, it stood up under the roughest treatment and could not be cut by the sharpest chert or bamboo knife.

Mankind gave a collective whoop of delight on finding these “towels.” Though men and women had by then become accustomed, or at least resigned, to nudity, the more aesthetic and the less adaptable had found the universal spectacle of human genitalia unbeautiful or even repulsive. Now, they had kilts and bras and turbans. The latter were used to cover up their heads while their hair was growing back in. Later, turbans became a customary headgear.

Hair was returning everywhere except on the face.

Burton was bitter about this. He had always taken pride in his long mustachios and forked beard; he claimed that their absence made him feel more naked than the lack of trousers.

Wilfreda had laughed and said, “I’m glad they’re gone. I’ve always hated hair on men’s faces. Kissing a man with a beard was like sticking my face in a bunch of broken bedsprings.”

13

Sixty days had passed. The boat had been pushed across the plain on big bamboo rollers. The day of the launching had arrived. The Hadji was about forty feet long and essentially consisted of two sharp-prowed bamboo hulls fastened together with a platform, a bowsprit with a balloon sail and a single mast, fore-and-aft rigged, with sails of woven bamboo fibers. It was steered by a great oar of pine, since a rudder and steering wheel were not practicable. Their only material for ropes at this time was the grass, though it would not be long before leather ropes would be made from the tanned skin and entrails of some of the larger river fish. A dugout fashioned by Kazz from a pine log was tied down to the foredeck.

Before they could get it into the water, Kazz made some difficulties. By now, he could speak a very broken and limited English and some oaths in Arabic, Baluchi, Swahili, and Italian, all learned from Burton.

“Must need…wacha call it?…wallah!…what it word?…kill somebody before place boat on river…you know…merda…need word, Burton-naq…you give, Burton-naq…word…word…kill man so god, Kabburqanaqruebemss…water god…no sink boat…get angry…drown us…eat us.”

“Sacrifice?” Burton said.

“Many bloody thanks, Burton-naq. Sacrifice! Cut throat…put on boat…rub it on wood…then water god not mad at us….”

“We don’t do that,” Burton said.

Kazz argued but finally agreed to get on the boat. His face was long, and he looked very nervous. Burton, to ease him, told him that this was not Earth. It was a different world, as he could see at a quick glance around him and especially at the stars. The gods did not live in this valley. Kazz listened and smiled, but he still looked as if he expected to see the hideous green-bearded face and bulging fishy eyes of Kabburqanaqruebemss rising from the depths.

The plain was crowded around the boat that morning. Everybody was there for many miles around, since anything out of the usual was entertainment. They shouted and laughed and joked. Though some of the comments were derisive, all were in good humor. Before the boat was rolled off the bank into The River, Burton stood up on its “bridge,” a slightly raised platform, and held up his hand for silence. The crowd’s chatter died away, and he spoke in Italian.

“Fellow lazari, friends, dwellers in the valley of the Promised Land! We leave you in a few minutes….”

“If the boat doesn’t capsize!” Frigate muttered.

“.…to go up The River, against the wind and the current. We take the difficult route because the difficult always yields the greatest reward, if you believe what the moralists on Earth told us, and you know now how much to believe them!”

Laughter. With scowls here and there from die-hard religionists.

“On Earth, as some of you may know, I once led an expedition into deepest and darkest Africa to find the headwaters of the Nile. I did not find them, though I came close, and I was cheated out of the rewards by a man who owed everything to me, a Mr. John Hanning Speke. If I should encounter him on my journey upriver, I will know how to deal with him….”

“Good God!” Frigate said. “Would you have him kill himself again with remorse and shame?”

“.…but the point is that this River may be one far, far greater than any Nile, which as you may or may not know, was the longest river on Earth, despite the erroneous claims of Americans for their Amazon and Missouri-Mississippi complexes. Some of you have asked why we should set out for a goal that lies we know not how far away or that might not even exist. I will tell you that we are setting sail because the Unknown exists and we would make it the Known. That’s all! And here, contrary to our sad and frustrating experience on Earth, money is not required to outfit us or to keep us going. King Cash is dead, and good riddance to him! Nor do we have to fill out hundreds of petitions and forms and beg audiences of influential people and minor bureaucrats to get permission to pass up The River. There are no national borders….”

“.…as yet,” Frigate said.

“.…nor passports required nor officials to bribe. We just build a boat without having to obtain a license, and we sail off without a by-your-leave from any muckamuck, high, middle, or low. We are free for the first time in man’s history. Free! And so we bid you adieu, for I will not say good-bye….”

“.…you never would,” Frigate muttered.

“.…because we may be back a thousand years or so from now! So I say adieu, the crew says adieu, we thank you for your help in building the boat and for your help in launching us. I hereby hand over my position as Her British Majesty’s Consul at Trieste to whomever wishes to accept it and declare myself to be a free citizen of the world of The River! I will pay tribute to none, owe fealty to none; to myself only will I be true!”

“Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause;

“He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws,” Frigate chanted.

Burton glanced at the American but did not stop his speech. Frigate was quoting lines from Burton’s poem, The Kasidah of Haji Abdu Al-Yazdi. It was not the first time that he had quoted from Burton’s prose or poetry. And though Burton sometimes found the American to be irritating, he could not become too angry at a man who had admired him enough to memorize his words.

A few minutes later, when the boat was pushed into The River by some men and women and the crowd was cheering, Frigate quoted him again. He looked at the thousands of handsome youths by the waters, their skins bronzed by the sun, their kilts and bras and turbans wind-moved and colorful, and he said,

“Ah! gay the day with shine of sun, and bright the breeze, and blithe the throng

“Met on the River-bank to play, when I was young, when I was young.”

The boat slid out, and its prow was turned by the wind and the current downstream, but Burton shouted orders, and the sails were pulled up, and he turned the great handle of the paddle so that the nose swung around and then they were beating to windward. The Hadji rose and fell in the waves, the water hissing as it was cut by the twin prows. The sun was bright and warm, the breeze cooled them off, they felt happy but also a little anxious as the familiar banks and faces faded away. They had no maps nor travelers’ tales to guide them; the world would be created with every mile forward.

That evening, as they made their first beaching, an incident occurred that puzzled Burton. Kazz had just stepped ashore among a group of curious people, when he became very excited. He began to jabber in his native tongue and tried to seize a man standing near. The man fled and was quickly lost in the crowd.

When asked by Burton what he was doing, Kazz said, “He not got…uh…whacha call it?…it….” and he pointed at his forehead. Then he traced several unfamiliar symbols in the air. Burton meant to pursue the matter, but Alice, suddenly wailing, ran up to a man. Evidently, she had thought he was a son who had been killed in World War I. There was some confusion. Alice admitted that she had made a mistake. By then, other business came up. Kazz did not mention the matter again, and Burton forgot about it. But he was to remember.

Exactly 415 days later, they had passed 24,900 grailrocks on the right bank of The River. Tacking, running against wind and current, averaging sixty miles a day, stopping during the day to charge their grails and at night to sleep, sometimes stopping all day so they could stretch their legs and talk to others besides the crew, they had journeyed 24,900 miles. On Earth, that distance would have been about once around the equator. If the Mississippi-Missouri, Nile, Congo, Amazon, Yangtze, Volga, Amur, Hwang, Lena, and Zambezi had been put end to end to make one great river, it still would not have been as long as that stretch of The River they had passed. Yet The River went on and on, making great bends, winding back and forth. Everywhere were the plains along the stream, the tree-covered hills behind, and, towering, impassable, unbroken, the mountain range.

Occasionally, the plains narrowed, and the hills advanced to The River-edge. Sometimes, The River widened and became a lake, three miles, five miles, six miles across. Now and then, the line of the mountains curved in toward each other, and the boat shot through canyons where the narrow passage forced the current to boil through and the sky was a blue thread far far above and the black walls pressed in on them.

And, always, there was humankind. Day and night, men, women, and children thronged the banks of The River and in the hills were more.

By then, the sailors recognized a pattern. Humanity had been resurrected along The River in a rough chronological and national sequence. The boat had passed by the area that held Slovenes, Italians, and Austrians who had died in the last decade of the nineteenth century, had passed by Hungarians, Norwegians, Finns, Greeks, Albanians, and Irish. Occasionally, they put in at areas which held peoples from other times and places. One was a twenty-mile stretch containing Australian aborigines who had never seen a European while on Earth. Another hundred-mile length was populated by Tocharians (Loghu’s people). These had lived around the time of Christ in what later became Chinese Turkestan. They represented the easternmost extension of Indo-European speakers in ancient times; their culture had flourished for a while, then died before the encroachment of the desert and invasions of barbarians.

Through admittedly hasty and uncertain surveys, Burton had determined that each area was, in general, comprised of about 60 percent of a particular nationality and century, 30 percent of some other people, usually from a different time, and 10 percent from any time and place.

All men had awakened from death circumcised. All women had been resurrected as virgins. For most women, Burton commented, this state had not lasted beyond the first night on this planet.

So far, they had neither seen nor heard of a pregnant woman. Whoever had placed them here must have sterilized them, and with good reason. If mankind could reproduce, the Rivervalley would be jammed solid with bodies within a century.

At first, there had seemed to be no animal life but man. Now it was known that several species of worms emerged from the soil at night. And The River contained at least a hundred species of fish, ranging from creatures six inches long to the sperm whale-sized fish, the “riverdragon,” which lived on the bottom of The River a thousand feet down. Frigate said that the animals were there for a good purpose. The fish scavenged to keep The River waters clean. Some types of worm ate waste matter and corpses. Other types served the normal function of earthworms.

Gwenafra was a little taller. All the children were growing up. Within twelve years, there would not be an infant or adolescent within the valley, if conditions everywhere conformed to what the voyagers had so far seen.

Burton, thinking of this, said to Alice, “This Reverend Dodgson friend of yours, the fellow who loved only little girls. He’ll be in a frustrating situation then, won’t he?”

“Dodgson was no pervert,” Frigate said. “But what about those whose only sexual objects are children? What will they do when there are no more children? And what will those who got their kicks by mistreating or torturing animals do? You know, I’ve regretted the absence of animals. I love cats and dogs, bears, elephants, most animals. Not monkeys, they’re too much like humans. But I’m glad they’re not here. They can’t be abused now. All the poor helpless animals who were in pain or going hungry or thirsty because of some thoughtless or vicious human being. Not now.”

He patted Gwenafra’s blond hair which was almost six inches long.

“I felt much the same about the helpless and abused little ones, too.”

“What kind of a world is it that doesn’t have children,” Alice said. “For that matter, what kind without animals? If they can’t be mistreated or abused any more, they can’t be petted and loved.”

“One thing balances out another in this world,” Burton said. “You can’t have love without hate, kindness without malice, peace without war. In any event, we don’t have a choice in the matter. The invisible Lords of this world have decreed that we do not have animals and that women no longer bear children. So be it.”

The morning of the 416th day of their journey was like every morning. The sun had risen above the top of the range on their left. The wind from upRiver was an estimated fifteen miles per hour, as always. The warmth rose steadily with the sun and would reach the estimated 85 degrees Fahrenheit at approximately two in the afternoon. The catamaran, The Hadji, tacked back and forth. Burton stood on the “bridge” with both hands on the long thick pine tiller on his right, while the wind and the sun beat on his darkly tanned skin. He wore a scarlet and black checked kilt reaching almost to his knees and a necklace made of the convoluted shiny-black vertebrae of the hornfish. This was a six-foot-long fish with a six-inch-long horn that projected unicornlike from its forehead. The hornfish lived about a hundred feet below the surface and was brought in on a line with difficulty. But its vertebrae made beautiful necklaces; its skin, properly tanned, made sandals and armor and shields or could be worked into tough pliable ropes and belts. Its flesh was delicious. But the horn was the most valuable item. It tipped spears or arrows or went into a wood handle to make a stiletto.

On a stand near him, encased in the transparent bladder of a fish, was a bow. It was made of the curved bones protruding from the sides of the mouth of the whale-sized dragonfish. When the ends of each had been cut so that one fitted into the other, a double recurved bow was the result. Fitted with a string from the gut of the dragonfish, this made a bow that only a very powerful man could fully draw. Burton had run across one forty days ago and offered its owner forty cigarettes, ten cigars, and thirty ounces of whiskey for it. The offer was turned down. So Burton and Kazz came back late that night and stole the bow. Or, rather, made a trade, since Burton felt compelled to leave his yew bow in exchange.

Since then, he had rationalized that he had every right to steal the bow. The owner had boasted that he had murdered a man to get the bow. So taking it from him was taking it from a thief and a killer. Nevertheless, Burton suffered from thrusts of conscience when he thought about it, which was not often.

Burton took The Hadji back and forth across the narrowing channel. For about five miles, The River had widened out to a three and a half mile broad lake, and now it was forming into a narrow channel less than half a mile across. The channel curved and disappeared between the walls of a canyon.

There the boat would creep along because it would be bucking an accelerated current and the space allowed for tacking was so limited. But he had been through similar straits many times and so was not apprehensive about this. Still, every time it happened, he could not help thinking of the boat as being reborn. It passed from a lake, a womb, through a tight opening and out into another lake. It was a bursting of waters in many ways, and there was always the chance of a fabulous adventure, of a revelation, on the other side.

The catamaran turned away from a grailstone, only twenty yards off. There were many people on the right-side plain, which was only half a mile across here. They shouted at the boat or waved or shook their fists or shouted obscenities, unheard but understood by Burton because of so many experiences. But they did not seem hostile; it was just that strangers were always greeted by the locals in a varied manner. The locals here were a short, dark-skinned, dark-haired, thin-bodied people. They spoke a language that Ruach said was probably proto-Hamite-Semitic. They had lived on Earth somewhere in North Africa or Mesopotamia when those countries had been much more fertile. They wore the towels as kilts but the women went bare-breasted and used the “bras” as neckscarfs or turbans. They occupied the right bank for sixty grailstones, that is, sixty miles. The people before them had been strung out for eighty grailstones and had been tenth-century A.D. Ceylonese with a minority of pre-Columbian Mayans.

“The mixing bowl of Time,” Frigate called the distribution of humanity. “The greatest anthropological and social experiment ever.”

His statements were not too far-fetched. It did look as if the various peoples had been mixed up so that they might learn something from each other. In some cases, the alien groups had managed to create various social lubricants and lived in relative amity. In other cases, there was a slaughter of one side by the other, or a mutual near-extermination, or slavery, of the defeated.

For some time, after the resurrection, anarchy had been the usual rule. People had “milled around” and formed little groups for defense in very small areas. Then the natural leaders and power seekers had come to the front, and the natural followers had lined up behind the leaders of their choice—or the leaders’ choice, in many cases.

One of the several political systems that had resulted was that of “grail slavery.” A dominant group in an area held the weaker prisoners. They gave the slave enough to eat because the grail of a dead slave became useless. But they took the cigarettes, the cigars, the marijuana, the dreamgum, the liquor, and the tastier food.

At least thirty times, The Hadji had started to put into a grailstone and had come close to being seized by grail slavers. But Burton and the others were on the alert for signs of slave states. Neighboring states often warned them. Twenty times, boats had put out to intercept them instead of trying to lure them ashore, and The Hadji had narrowly escaped being run down or boarded. Five times, Burton had been forced to turn back and sail downstream. His catamaran had always outrun the pursuers, who were reluctant to chase him outside their borders. Then The Hadji had sneaked back at night and sailed past the slavers.

A number of times, The Hadji had been unable to put into shore because the slave states occupied both banks for very long stretches. Then the crew went on half-rations, or, if they were lucky, caught enough fish to fill their bellies.

The proto-Hamite-Semites of this area had been friendly enough after they were assured that the crew of The Hadji had no evil intentions. An eighteenth-century Muscovite had warned them that there were slave states on the other side of the channel. He did not know too much about them because of the precipitous mountains. A few boats had sailed through the channel and almost none had returned. Those that did brought news of evil men on the other side.

So The Hadji was loaded with bamboo shoots, dried fish, and supplies saved over a period of two weeks from the grails.

There was still about half an hour before the strait would be entered. Burton kept half his mind on his sailing and half on the crew. They were sprawled on the foredeck, taking in the sun or else sitting with their backs against the roofed coaming which they called the “fo’c’sle.”

John de Greystock was affixing the thin carved bones of a hornfish to the butt of an arrow. The bones served quite well as feathers in a world where birds did not exist. Greystock, or Lord Greystoke, as Frigate insisted on calling him for some private self-amusing reason, was a good man in a fight or when hard work was needed. He was an interesting, if almost unbelievably vulgar, talker, full of anecdotes of the campaigns in Gascony and on the border, of his conquests of women, of gossip about Edward Longshanks, and of course, of information about his times. But he was also very hardheaded and narrow-minded in many things—from the viewpoint of a later age—and not overly clean. He claimed to have been very devout in Earthlife, and he probably told the truth, otherwise, he would not have been honored by being attached to the retinue of the Patriarch of Jerusalem. But, now that his faith had been discredited, he hated priests. And he was apt to drive any he met into a fury with his scorn, hoping that they would attack him. Some did, and he came close to killing them. Burton had cautiously reprimanded him for this (you did not speak harshly to de Greystock unless you wished to fight to the death with him), pointing out that when they were guests in a strange land, and immensely outnumbered by their hosts, they should act as guests. De Greystock admitted that Burton was right, but he could not keep from baiting every priest he met. Fortunately, they were not often in areas where there were Christian priests. Moreover, there were very few of these who admitted that they had been such.

Beside him, talking earnestly, was his current woman, born Mary Rutherfurd in 1637, died Lady Warwickshire in 1674. She was English but of an age 300 years later than his, so there were many differences in their attitudes and actions. Burton did not give them much longer to stay together.

Kazz was sprawled out on the deck with his head in the lap of Fatima, a Turkish woman whom the Neanderthal had met forty days ago during a lunch stop. Fatima, as Frigate had said, seemed to be “hung up on hair.” That was his explanation for the obsession of the seventeenth-century wife of a baker of Ankara for Kazz. She found everything about him stimulating but it was the hairiness that sent her into ecstasies. Everybody was pleased about this, most of all Kazz. He had not seen a single female of his own species during their long trip, though he had heard about some. Most women shied away from him because of his hairy and brutish appearance. He had had no permanent female companionship until he met Fatima.

Little Lev Ruach was leaning against the forward bulkhead of the fo’c’sle, where he was making a slingshot from the leather of a hornfish. A bag by his side contained about thirty stones picked up during the last twenty days. By his side, talking swiftly, incessantly exposing her long white teeth, was Esther Rodriguez. She had replaced Tanya, who had been henpecking Lev before The Hadji set off. Tanya was a very attractive and petite woman but she seemed unable to keep from “remodeling” her men; Lev found out that she had “remodeled” her father and uncle and two brothers and two husbands. She tried to do the same for, or to, Lev, usually in a loud voice so that other males in the neighborhood could benefit by her advice. One day, just as The Hadji was about to sail, Lev had jumped aboard, turned, and said, “Good-bye, Tanya. I can’t stand any more reforming from The Bigmouth from The Bronx. Find somebody else; somebody that’s perfect.”

Tanya had gasped, turned white, and then started screaming at Lev. She was still screaming, judging by her mouth, long after The Hadji had sailed out of earshot. The others laughed and congratulated Lev, but he only smiled sadly. Two weeks later, in an area predominantly ancient Libyan, he met Esther, a fifteenth-century Sephardic Jewess.

“Why don’t you try your luck with a Gentile?” Frigate had said.

Lev had shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I have. But sooner or later you get into a big fight, and they lose their temper and call you a goddam kike. The same thing also happens with my Jewish women, but from them I can take it.”

“Listen, friend,” the American said. “There are billions of Gentiles along this river who’ve never heard of a Jew. They can’t be prejudiced. Try one of them.”

“I’ll stick to the evil I know.”

“You mean you’re stuck to it,” Frigate said.

Burton sometimes wondered why Ruach stayed with the boat. He had never made any more references to The Jew, The Gypsy, and El Islam, though he often questioned Burton about other aspects of his past. He was friendly enough but had a certain indefinable reserve. Though small, he was a good man in a fight and he had been invaluable in teaching Burton judo, karate, and jukado. His sadness, which hung about him like a thin mist even when he was laughing, or making love, according to Tanya, came from mental scars. These resulted from his terrible experiences in concentration camps in Germany and Russia, or so he claimed. Tanya had said that Lev was born sad; he inherited all the genes of sorrow from the time when his ancestors sat down by the willows of Babylon.

Monat was another case of sadness, though he could come out of it fully at times. The Tau Cetan kept looking for one of his own kind, for one of the thirty males and females who had been torn apart by the lynch mob. He did not give himself much chance. Thirty in an estimated thirty-five to thirty-six billion strung out along a river that could be ten million miles long made it improbable that he would ever see even one. But there was hope.

Alice Hargreaves was sitting forward of the fo’c’sle, only the top of her head in his view, and looking at the people on the banks whenever the boat got close enough for her to make out individual faces. She was searching for her husband, Reginald, and also for her three sons and for her mother and father and her sisters and brothers. For any dear familiar face. The implications were that she would leave the boat as soon as this happened. Burton had not commented on this. But he felt a pain in his chest when he thought of it. He wished that she would leave and yet he did not wish it. To get her out of sight would eventually be to get her out of his mind. It was inevitable. But he did not want the inevitable. He felt for her as he had for his Persian love, and to lose her, too, would be to suffer the same long-lived torture.

Yet he had never said a word about how he felt to her. He talked to her, jested with her, showed her a concern that he found galling because she did not return it, and, in the end, got her to relax when with him. That is, she would relax if there were others around. When they were alone, she tightened up.

She had never used the dreamgum since that first night. He had used it for a third time and then hoarded his share and traded it for other items. The last time he had chewed it, with the hope of an unusually ecstatic lovemaking with Wilfreda, he had been plunged back into the horrible sickness of the “little irons,” the sickness that had almost killed him during his expedition to Lake Tanganyika. Speke had been in the nightmare, and he had killed Speke. Speke had died in a hunting “accident” which everybody had thought was a suicide even if they had not said so. Speke, tormented by remorse because he had betrayed Burton, had shot himself. But in the nightmare, he had strangled Speke when Speke bent over to ask him how he was. Then, just as the vision faded, he had kissed Speke’s dead lips.

14

Well, he had known that he had loved Speke at the same time that he hated him, justifiably hated him. But the knowledge of his love had been very fleeting and infrequent and it had not affected him. During the dreamgum nightmare, he had felt so horrified at the realization that love lay far beneath his hate that he had screamed. He awakened to find Wilfreda shaking him, demanding to know what had happened. Wilfreda had smoked opium or drunk it in her beer when on Earth, but here, after one session with dreamgum, she had been afraid to chew any more. Her horror came from seeing again the death of a younger sister from tuberculosis and, at the same time, reliving her first experience as a whore.

“It’s a strange psychedelic,” Ruach had told Burton. He had explained what the word meant. The discussion about that had gone on for a long time. “It seems to bring up traumatic incidents in a mixture of reality and symbolism. Not always. Sometimes it’s an aphrodisiac. Sometimes, as they said, it takes you on a beautiful trip. But I would guess that dreamgum has been provided us for therapeutic, if not cathartic, reasons. It’s up to us to find out just how to use it.”

“Why don’t you chew it more often?” Frigate had said.

“For the same reason that some people refused to go into psychotherapy or quit before they were through; I’m afraid.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Frigate said. “But someday, when we stop off someplace for a long time, I’m going to chew a stick every night, so help me. Even if it scares the hell out of me. Of course, that’s easy to say now.”

Peter Jairus Frigate had been born only twenty-eight years after Burton had died, yet the world between them was wide. They saw so many things so differently; they would have argued violently if Frigate was able to argue violently. Not on matters of discipline in the group or in running the boat. But on so many matters of looking at the world. Yet, in many ways, Frigate was much like Burton, and it may have been this that had caused him to be so fascinated by Burton on Earth. Frigate had picked up in 1938 a softcover book by Fairfax Downey titled Burton: Arabian Nights’ Adventurer. The front page illustration was of Burton at the age of fifty. The savage face, the high brow and prominent supraorbital ridges, the heavy black brows, the straight but harsh nose, the great scar on his cheek, the thick “sensual” lips, the heavy downdrooping moustache, the heavy forked beard, the essential broodingness and aggressiveness of the face, had caused him to buy the book.

“I’d never heard of you before, Dick,” Frigate said. “But I read the book at once and was fascinated. There was something about you, aside from the obvious derring-do of your life, your swordsmanship, mastery of many languages, disguises as a native doctor, native merchantman, as a pilgrim to Mecca, the first European to get out of the sacred city of Harar alive, discoverer of Lake Tanganyika and near-discoverer of the source of the Nile, cofounder of the Royal Anthropological Society, inventor of the term ESP, translator of the Arabian Nights, student of the sexual practices of the East, and so forth…

“Aside from all this, fascinating enough in itself, you had a special affinity for me. I went to the public library—Peoria was a small city but had many books on you and about you, donated by some admirer of yours who’d passed on—and I read these. Then I started to collect first editions by you and about you. I became a fiction writer eventually, but I planned to write a huge definitive biography of you, travel everywhere you had been, take photographs and notes of these places, found a society to collect funds for the preservation of your tomb….”

This was the first time Frigate had mentioned his tomb. Burton, startled, said, “Where?” Then, “Oh, of course! Mortlake! I’d forgotten! Was the tomb really in the form of an Arab tent, as Isabel and I had planned?”

“Sure. But the cemetery was swallowed up in a slum, the tomb was defaced by vandals, there were weeds up to your tochis and talk of moving the bodies to a more remote section of England, though by then it was hard to find a really remote section.”

“And did you found your society and preserve my tomb?” Burton said.

He had gotten used to the idea by then of having been dead, but to talk with someone who had seen his tomb made his skin chill for a moment.

Frigate took a deep breath. Apologetically, he said, “No. By the time I was in a position to do that, I would have felt guilty spending time and money on the dead. The world was in too much of a mess. The living needed all the attention they could get. Pollution, poverty, oppression, and so forth. These were the important things.”

“And that giant definitive biography?”

Again, Frigate spoke apologetically. “When I first read about you, I thought I was the only one deeply interested in you or even aware of you. But there was an upsurge of interest in you in the ’60s. Quite a few books were written about you and even one about your wife.”

“Isabel? Someone wrote a book about her? Why?”

Frigate had grinned. “She was a pretty interesting woman. Very aggravating, I’ll admit, pitifully superstitious and schizophrenic and self-fooling. Very few would ever forgive her for burning your manuscripts and your journals….”

“What?” Burton had roared. “Burn…?”

Frigate nodded and said, “What your doctor, Grenfell Baker, described as ‘the ruthless holocaust that followed his lamented death.’ She burned your translation of The Perfumed Garden, claiming you would not have wanted to publish it unless you needed the money for it, and you didn’t need it, of course, because you were now dead.”

Burton was speechless for one of the few times in his life.

Frigate looked out of the corner of his eye at Burton and grinned. He seemed to be enjoying Burton’s distress.

“Burning The Perfumed Garden wasn’t so bad, though bad enough. But to burn both sets of your journals, the private ones in which, supposedly, you let loose all your deepest thoughts and most burning hates, and even the public ones, the diary of daily events, well, I never forgave her! Neither did a lot of people. That was a great loss; only one of your notebooks, a small one, escaped, and that was burned during the bombing of London in World War II.”

He paused and said, “Is it true that you converted to the Catholic Church on your deathbed, as your wife claimed?”

“I may have,” Burton said. “Isabel had been after me for years to convert, though she never dared urge me directly. When I was so sick there, at the last, I may have told her I would do so in order to make her happy. She was so grief-stricken, so distressed, so afraid my soul would burn in Hell.”

“Then you did love her?” Frigate had said.

“I would have done the same for a dog,” Burton replied.

“For somebody who can be so upsettingly frank and direct, you can be very ambiguous at times.”

This conversation had taken place about two months after First Day, A.R. 1. The result had been something like that which Dr. Johnson would have felt on encountering another Boswell.

This had been the second stage of their curious relationship. Frigate became closer but, at the same time, more of an annoyance. The American had always been restrained in his comments on Burton’s attitudes, undoubtedly because he did not want to anger him. Frigate made a very conscious effort not to anger anybody. But he also made unconscious efforts to antagonize them. His hostilities came out in many subtle, and some not so subtle, actions and words. Burton did not like this. He was direct, not at all afraid of anger. Perhaps, as Frigate pointed out, he was too eager for hostile confrontations.

One evening, as they were sitting around a fire under a grailstone, Frigate had spoken about Karachi. This village, which later became the capital of Pakistan, the nation created in 1947, had only two thousand population in Burton’s time. By 1970, its population was approximately twenty lakhs. That led to Frigate’s asking, rather indirectly, about the report Burton had made to his general, Sir Robert Napier, on houses of male prostitution in Karachi. The report was supposed to be kept in the secret files of the East India Army, but it was found by one of the many enemies of Burton. Though the report was never mentioned publicly, it had been used against him throughout his life. Burton had disguised himself as a native in order to get into the house and make observations that no European would have been allowed to make. He had been proud that he had escaped detection, and he had taken the unsavory job because he was the only one who could do it and because his beloved leader, Napier, had asked him to.

Burton had replied to Frigate’s questions somewhat surlily. Alice had angered him earlier that day—she seemed to be able to do so very easily lately—and he was thinking of a way to anger her. Now he seized upon the opportunity given him by Frigate. He launched into an uninhibited account of what went on in the Karachi houses. Ruach finally got up and walked away. Frigate looked as if he were sick, but he stayed. Wilfreda laughed until she rolled on the ground. Kazz and Monat kept stolid expressions. Gwenafra was sleeping on the boat, so Burton did not have to take her into account. Loghu seemed to be fascinated but also slightly repulsed.

Alice, his main target, turned pale and then, later, red. Finally, she rose and said, “Really, Mr. Burton, I had thought you were low before. But to brag of this…this…you are utterly contemptible, degenerate, and repulsive. Not that I believe a word of what you’ve been telling me. I can’t believe that anybody would behave as you claim you did and then boast about it. You are living up to your reputation as a man who likes to shock others no matter what damage it does to his own reputation.”

She had walked off into the darkness.

Frigate had said, “Sometime, maybe, you will tell me how much of that is true. I used to think as she did. But when I got older, more evidence about you was turned up, and one biographer made a psychoanalysis of you based on your own writing and various documentary sources.”

“And the conclusions?” Burton said mockingly.

“Later, Dick,” Frigate said. “Ruffian Dick,” he added, and he, too, left.

Now, standing at the tiller, watching the sun beat down on the group, listening to the hissing of water cut by the two sharp prows, and the creaking of rigging, he wondered what lay ahead on the other side of the canyonlike channel. Not the end of The River, surely. That would probably go on forever. But the end of the group might be near. They had been cooped up too long together. Too many days had been spent on the narrow deck with too little to do except talk or help sail the ship. They were rubbing each other raw and had been doing it for a long time. Even Wilfreda had been quiet and unresponsive lately. Not that he had been too stimulating. Frankly, he was tired of her. He did not hate her or wish her any ill. He was just tired of her, and the fact that he could have her and not have Alice Hargreaves made him even more tired of her.

Lev Ruach was staying away from him or speaking as little as possible, and Lev was arguing even more with Esther about his dietary habits and his daydreaming and why didn’t he ever talk to her?

Frigate was mad at him about something. But Frigate would never come out and say anything, the coward, until he was driven into a corner and tormented into a mindless rage. Loghu was angry and scornful of Frigate because he was as sullen with her as with the others. Loghu was also angry with him, Burton, because he had turned her down when they had been alone gathering bamboo in the hills several weeks ago. He had told her no, adding that he had no moral scruples against making love to her, but that he would not betray Frigate or any other member of the crew. Loghu said that it was not that she did not love Frigate; it was just that she needed a change now and then. Just as Frigate did.

Alice had said that she was about to give up hope of ever seeing anybody she knew again. They must have passed an estimated 44,370,000 people, at least, and not once had she seen anybody she had known on Earth. She had seen some that she had mistaken for old acquaintances. And she admitted that she had only seen a small percentage of the 44,370,000 at close range or even at far range. But that did not matter. She was getting abysmally depressed and weary of sitting on this cramped foredeck all day with her only exercise handling the tiller or the rigging or opening and closing her lips with conversation, most of it inane.

Burton did not want to admit it, but he was afraid that she might leave. She might just get off at the next stop, walk off onto the shore with her grail and few belongings, and say good-bye. See you in a hundred years or so. Perhaps. The chief thing keeping her on the boat so far had been Gwenafra. She was raising the little ancient Briton as a Victorian-lady-cum-post-Resurrection-mores-child. This was a most curious mixture, but not any more curious than anything else along The River.

Burton himself was weary of the eternal voyaging on the little vessel. He wanted to find some hospitable area and settle down there to rest, then to study, to engage in local activities, to get his land legs back, and allow the drive to get out and away to build up again. But he wanted to do it with Alice as his hutmate.

“The fortune of the man who sits also sits,” he muttered. He would have to take action with Alice; he had been a gentleman long enough. He would woo her; he would take her by storm. He had been an aggressive lover when a young man, then he had gotten used to being the loved, not the lover, after he got married. And his old habit patterns, old neural circuits, were still with him. He was an old person in a new body.

The Hadji entered the dark and turbulent channel. The blue-black rock walls rose on both sides and the boat went down a curve and the broad lake behind was lost. Everybody was busy then, jumping to handle the sails as Burton took The Hadji back and forth in the quarter-mile-wide stream and against a current that raised high waves. The boat rose and dipped sharply and heeled far over when they changed course abruptly. It often came within a few feet of the canyon walls, where the waves slapped massively against the rock. But he had been sailing the boat so long that he had become a part of it, and his crew had worked with him so long that they could anticipate his orders, though they never acted ahead of them.

The passage took about thirty minutes. It caused anxiety in some—no doubt of Frigate and Ruach being worried—but it also exhilarated all of them. The boredom and the sullenness were, temporarily, at least, gone.

The Hadji came out into the sunshine of another lake. This was about four miles wide and stretched northward as far as they could see. The mountains abruptly fell away; the plains on both sides resumed the usual mile width.

There were fifty or so craft in view, ranging from pine dugouts to two-masted bamboo boats. Most of them seemed to be engaged in fishing. To the left, a mile away, was the ubiquitous grailstone, and along the shore were dark figures. Behind them, on the plain and hills, were bamboo huts in the usual style of what Frigate called Neo-Polynesian or, sometimes, Post-Mortem Riparian Architecture.

On the right, about half a mile from the exit of the canyon, was a large log fort. Before it were ten massive log docks with a variety of large and small boats. A few minutes after The Hadji appeared, drums began beating. These could be hollow logs or drums made with tanned fish skin or human skin. There was already a crowd in front of the fort, but a large number swarmed out of it and from a collection of huts behind it. They piled into the boats, and these cast off.

On the left bank, the dark figures were launching dugouts, canoes, and single-masted boats.

It looked as if both shores were sending boats out in a competition to seize The Hadji first.

Burton took the boat back and forth as required, cutting in between the other boats several times. The men on the right were closer; they were white and well-armed, but they made no effort to use their bows. A man standing in the prow of a warcanoe with thirty paddlers shouted at them, in German, to surrender.

“You will not be harmed!”

“We come in peace!” Frigate bawled at him.

“He knows that!” Burton said. “It’s evident that we few aren’t going to attack them!”

Drums were beating on both sides of The River now. It sounded as if the lake shores were alive with drums. And the shores were certainly alive with men, all armed. Other boats were being put out to intercept them. Behind them, the boats that had first gone out were pursuing but losing distance.

Burton hesitated. Should he bring The Hadji on around and go back through the channel and then return at night? It would be a dangerous maneuver, because the twenty thousand-foot-high walls would block out the light from the blazing stars and gas sheets. They would be almost blind.

And this craft did seem to be faster than anything the enemy had. So far, that is. Far in the distance, tall sails were coming swiftly toward him. Still, they had the wind and current behind them, and if he avoided them, could they outstrip him when they, too, had to tack?

All the vessels he had seen so far had been loaded with men, thus slowing them down. Even a boat that had the same potentialities as The Hadji would not keep up with her if she were loaded with warriors.

He decided to keep on running upRiver.

Ten minutes later, as he was running close-hauled, another large warcanoe cut across his path. This held sixteen paddlers on each side and supported a small deck in the bow and the stern. Two men stood on each deck beside a catapult mounted on a wooden pedestal. The two in the bow placed a round object which sputtered smoke in the pocket of the catapult. One pulled the catch, and the arm of the machine banged against the crossbeam. The canoe shuddered, and there was a slight halt in the deep rhythmic grunting of the paddlers. The smoking object flew in a high arc until it was about twenty feet in front of The Hadji and ten feet above the water. It exploded with a loud noise and much black smoke, quickly cleared away by the breeze.

Some of the women screamed, and a man shouted. He thought, there is sulfur in this area. Otherwise, they would not have been able to make gunpowder.

He called to Loghu and Esther Rodriguez to take over at the tiller. Both women were pale, but they seemed calm enough, although neither woman had ever experienced a bomb.

Gwenafra had been put inside the fo’c’sle. Alice had a yew bow in her hand and a quiver of arrows strapped to her back. Her pale skin contrasted shockingly with the red lipstick and the green eyelid-makeup. But she had been through at least ten running battles on the water, and her nerves were as steady as the chalk cliffs of Dover. Moreover, she was the best archer of the lot. Burton was a superb marksman with a firearm but he lacked practice with the bow. Kazz could draw the riverdragonhorn bow even deeper than Burton, but his marksmanship was abominable. Frigate claimed it would never be very good; like most preliterates, he lacked a development of the sense of perspective.

The catapult men did not fit another bomb to the machine. Evidently, the bomb had been a warning to stop. Burton intended to stop for nothing. Their pursuers could have shot them full of arrows several times. That they had refrained meant that they wanted The Hadji crew alive.

The canoe, water boiling from its prow, paddles flashing in the sun, paddlers grunting in unison, passed closely to the stern of The Hadji. The two men on the foredeck leaped outward, and the canoe rocked. One man splashed into the water, his fingertips striking the edge of the deck. The other landed on his knees on the edge. He gripped a bamboo knife between his teeth; his belt held two sheaths, one with a small stone axe and the other with a hornfish stiletto. For a second, as he tried to grab onto the wet planking and pull himself up, he stared upward into Burton’s eyes. His hair was a rich yellow, his eyes were a pale blue, and his face was classically handsome. His intention was probably to wound one or two of the crew and then to dive off, maybe with a woman in his arms. While he kept The Hadji crew busy, his fellows would sail up and engage The Hadji and pour aboard, and that would be that.

He did not have much chance of carrying out his plan, probably knew it, and did not care. Most men still feared death because the fear was in the cells of their bodies, and they reacted instinctively. A few had overcome their fear, and others had never really felt it.

Burton stepped up and banged the man on the side of the head with his axe. The man’s mouth opened; the bamboo knife fell out; he collapsed facedown on the deck. Burton picked up the knife, untied the man’s belt, and shoved him off into the water with his foot. At that, a roar came from the men in the warcanoe, which was turning around. Burton saw that the shore was coming up fast, and he gave order to tack. The vessel swung around, and the boom swung by. Then they were beating across The River, with a dozen boats speeding toward them. Three were four-man dugouts, four were big warcanoes, and five were two-masted schooners. The latter held a number of catapults and many men on the decks.

Halfway across The River, Burton ordered The Hadji swung around again. The maneuver allowed the sailships to get much closer, but he had calculated for that. Now, sailing close-hauled again, The Hadji cut water between the two schooners. They were so close that he could clearly see the features of all aboard both craft. They were mostly Caucasian, though they ranged from very dark to Nordic pale. The captain of the boat on the portside shouted in German at Burton, demanding that he surrender.

“We will not harm you if you give up, but we will torture you if you continue to fight!”

He spoke German with an accent that sounded Hungarian.

For reply, Burton and Alice shot arrows. Alice’s shaft missed the captain but hit the helmsman, and he staggered back and fell over the railing. The craft immediately veered. The captain sprang to the wheel, and Burton’s second shaft went through the back of his knee.

Both schooners struck slantingly with a great crash and shot off with much tearing up of timbers, men screaming and falling onto the decks or falling overboard. Even if the boats did not sink, they would be out of action.

But just before they hit, their archers had put a dozen flaming arrows into the bamboo sails of The Hadji. The shafts carried dry grass which had been soaked with turpentine made from pine resin, and these, fanned by the wind, spread the flames quickly.

Burton took the tiller back from the women and shouted orders. The crew dipped fired-clay vessels and their open grails into The River and then threw the water on the flames. Loghu, who could climb like a monkey, went up the mast with a rope around her shoulder. She let the rope down and pulled up the containers of water.

This permitted the other schooners and several canoes to draw close. One on a course which would put it directly in the path of The Hadji. Burton swung the boat around again, but it was sluggish because of Loghu’s weight on the mast. It wheeled around, the boom swung wildly as the men failed to keep control of its ropes, and more arrows struck the sail and spread more fire. Several arrows thunked into the deck. For a moment, Burton thought that the enemy had changed his mind and was trying to down them. But the arrows were just misdirected.

Again, The Hadji sliced between two schooners. The captains and the crew of both were grinning. Perhaps they had been bored for a long time and were enjoying the pursuit. Even so, the crews ducked behind the railings, leaving the officers, helmsmen, and the archers to receive the fire from The Hadji. There was a strumming, and dark streaks with red heads and blue tails went halfway through the sails in two dozen places, a number drove into the mast or the boom, a dozen hissed into the water, one shot by Burton a few inches from his head.

Alice, Ruach, Kazz, de Greystock, Wilfreda, and he had shot while Esther handled the tiller. Loghu was frozen halfway up the mast, waiting until the arrow fire quit. The five arrows found three targets of flesh, a captain, a helmsman, and a sailor who stuck his head up at the wrong time for him.

Esther screamed, and Burton spun. The warcanoe had come out from behind the schooner and was a few feet in front of The Hadji’s bow. There was no way to avoid a collision. The two men on the platform were diving off the side, and the paddlers were standing up or trying to stand up so they could get overboard. Then The Hadji smashed into its port near the bow, cracking it open, turning it over, and spilling its crew into The River. Those on The Hadji were thrown forward, and de Grey-stock went into the water. Burton slid on his face and chest and knees, burning off the skin.

Esther had been torn from the tiller and rolled across the deck until she thumped against the edge of the fo’c’sle coaming. She lay there without moving.

Burton looked upward. The sail was blazing away beyond hope of being saved. Loghu was gone, so she must have been hurled off at the moment of impact. Then, getting up, he saw her and de Greystock swimming back to The Hadji. The water around them was boiling with the splashing of the dispossessed canoemen, many of whom, judging by their cries, could not swim.

Burton called to the men to help the two aboard while he inspected the damage. Both prows of the very thin twin hulls had been smashed open by the crash. Water was pouring inside. And the smoke from the burning sail and mast was curling around them, causing Alice and Gwenafra to cough.

Another warcanoe was approaching swiftly from the north; the two schooners were sailing close-hauled toward them.

They could fight and draw some blood from their enemies, who would be holding themselves back to keep from killing them. Or they could swim for it. Either way, they would be captured.

Loghu and de Greystock were pulled aboard. Frigate reported that Esther could not be brought back to consciousness. Ruach felt her pulse and opened her eyes and then walked back to Burton.

“She’s not dead, but she’s totally out.”

Burton said, “You women know what will happen to you. It’s up to you, of course, but I suggest you swim down as deeply as you can and draw in a good breath of water. You’ll wake up tomorrow, good as new.”

Gwenafra had come out from the fo’c’sle. She wrapped her arms round his waist and looked up, dry-eyed but scared. He hugged her with one arm and then said, “Alice! Take her with you!”

“Where?” Alice said. She looked at the canoe and back at him. She coughed again as more smoke wrapped around her and then she moved forward, upwind.

“When you go down.”

He gestured at The River.

“I can’t do that,” she said.

“You wouldn’t want those men to get her, too. She’s only a little girl but they’ll not stop for that.”

Alice looked as if her face was going to crumple and wash away with tears. But she did not weep.

She said, “Very well. It’s no sin now, killing yourself. I just hope….”

He said, “Yes.”

He did not drawl the word; there was no time to drawl anything out. The canoe was within forty feet of them.

“The next place might be just as bad or worse than this one,” Alice said. “And Gwenafra will wake up all alone. You know that the chances of us being resurrected at the same place are slight.”

“That can’t be helped,” he said.

She clamped her lips, then opened them and said, “I’ll fight until the last moment. Then….”

“It may be too late,” he said. He picked up his bow and drew an arrow from his quiver. De Greystock had lost his bow, so he took Kazz’s. The Neanderthal placed a stone in a sling and began whirling it. Lev picked up his sling and chose a stone for its pocket. Monat used Esther’s bow, since he had lost his, also.

The captain of the canoe shouted in German, “Lay down your arms! You won’t be harmed!”

He fell off the platform onto a paddler a second later as Alice’s arrow went through his chest. Another arrow, probably de Greystock’s, spun the second man off the platform and into the water. A stone hit a paddler in the shoulder, and he collapsed with a cry. Another stone struck glancingly off another paddler’s head, and he lost his paddle.

The canoe kept on coming. The two men on the aft platform urged the crew to continue driving toward The Hadji. Then they fell with arrows in them.

Burton looked behind him. The two schooners were letting their sails drop now. Evidently they would slide on up to The Hadji where the sailors would throw their grappling hooks into it. But if they got too close, the flames might spread to them.

The canoe rammed into The Hadji with fourteen of the original complement dead or too wounded to fight. Just before the canoe’s prow hit, the survivors dropped their paddles and raised small round leather shields. Even so, two arrows went through two shields and into the arms of the men holding them. That still left twenty men against six men, five women, and a child.

But one was a five-foot-high hairy man with tremendous strength and a big stone axe. Kazz jumped into the air just before the canoe rammed the starboard hull and came down in it a second after it had halted. His axe crushed two skulls and then drove through the bottom of the canoe. Water poured in, and de Greystock, shouting something in his Cumberland Middle English, leaped down beside Kazz. He held a stiletto in one hand and a big oak club with flint spikes in the other.

The others on The Hadji continued to shoot their arrows. Suddenly, Kazz and de Greystock were scrambling back onto the catamaran and the canoe was sinking with its dead, dying, and its scared survivors. A number drowned; the others either swam away or tried to get aboard The Hadji. These fell back with their fingers chopped off or stamped flat.

Something struck on the deck near him and then something else coiled around him. Burton spun and slashed at the leather rope which had settled around his neck. He leaped to one side to avoid another and yanked savagely at a third rope and pulled the man on the other end over the railing. The man, screaming, pitched out and struck the deck of The Hadji with his shoulder. Burton smashed in his face with his axe.

By now men were dropping from the decks of both schooners and ropes were falling everywhere. The smoke and the flames added to the confusion, though they may have helped The Hadji’s crew more than the boarders.

Burton shouted at Alice to get Gwenafra and jump into The River. He could not find her and then had to parry the thrust of a big black with a spear. The man seemed to have forgotten any orders to capture Burton; he looked as if he meant to kill. Burton knocked the short spear aside and whirled, lashing out as he went by with the axe and smashed its edge against the black’s neck. Burton continued to whirl, felt a sharp pain in his ribs, another in his shoulder, but knocked two men down and then was in the water. He fell between the schooner and The Hadji, went down, released the axe, and pulled the stiletto from its sheath. When he came up, he was looking up at a tall, rawboned, redheaded man who was lifting the screaming Gwenafra above him with both hands. The man pitched her far out into the water.

Burton dived again and coming up saw Gwenafra’s face only a few feet before him. It was gray, and her eyes were dull. Then he saw the blood darkening the water around her. She disappeared before he could get to her. He dived down after her, caught her and pulled her back up. A hornfish tip was stuck into her back.

He let her body go. He did not know why the man had killed her when he could have easily taken her prisoner. Perhaps Alice had stabbed her and the man had figured that she was as good as dead and so had tossed her over the side to the fishes.

A body shot out of the smoke, followed by another. One man was dead with a broken neck; the other was alive. Burton wrapped his arm around the man’s neck and stabbed him at the juncture of jaw and ear. The man quit struggling and slipped down into the depths.

Frigate leaped out from the smoke, his face and shoulders bloody. He hit the water at a slant and dived deep. Burton swam toward him to help him. There was no use even trying to get back on the craft. It was solid with struggling bodies, and other canoes and dugouts were closing in.

Frigate’s head rose out of the water. His skin was white where the blood was not pumping out over it. Burton swam to him and said, “Did the women get away?”

Frigate shook his head and then said, “Watch out!”

Burton upended to dive down. Something hit his legs; he kept on going down, but he could not carry out his intention of breathing in the water. He would fight until they had to kill him.

On coming up, he saw that the water was alive with men who had jumped in after him and Frigate. The American, half-conscious, was being towed to a canoe. Three men closed in on Burton, and he stabbed two and then a man in a dugout reached down with a club and banged him on the head.

15

They were led ashore near a large building behind a wall of pine logs. Burton’s head throbbed with pain at every step. The gashes in his shoulder and ribs hurt, but they had quit bleeding. The fortress was built of pine logs, had an overhanging second story, and many sentinels. The captives were marched through an entrance that could be closed with a huge log gate. They marched across sixty feet of grass-covered yard and through another large gateway into a hall about fifty feet long and thirty wide. Except for Frigate, who was too weak, they stood before a large round table of oak. They blinked in the dark and cool interior before they could clearly see the two men at the table.

Guards with spears, clubs, and stone axes were everywhere. A wooden staircase at one end of the hall led up to a runway with high railings. Women looked over the railings at them.

One of the men at the table was short and muscular. He had a hairy body, black curly hair, a nose like a falcon’s, and brown eyes as fierce as a falcon’s. The second man was taller, had blond hair, eyes the exact color of which was difficult to tell in the dusky light but were probably blue, and a broad Teutonic face. A paunch and the beginnings of jowls told of the food and liquor he had taken from the grails of slaves.

Frigate had sat down on the grass, but he was pulled up to his feet when the blond gave a signal. Frigate looked at the blond and said, “You look like Hermann Göring when he was young.”

Then he dropped to his knees, screaming with pain from the impact of a spear butt over his kidneys.

The blond spoke in an English with a heavy German accent. “No more of that unless I order it. Let them talk.”

He scrutinized them for several minutes, then said, “Yes, I am Hermann Göring.”

“Who is Göring?” Burton said.

“Your friend can tell you later,” the German said. “If there is a later for you. I am not angry about the splendid fight you put up. I admire men who can fight well. I can always use more spears, especially since you killed so many. I offer you a choice. You men, that is. Join me and live well with all the food, liquor, tobacco, and women you can possibly want. Or work for me as my slaves.”

“For us,” the other man said in English. “You forget, Hermann, dat I have yust as muck to say about dis as you.”

Göring smiled, chuckled, and said, “Of course! I was only using the royal I, you might say. Very well, we. If you swear to serve us, and it will be far better for you if you do, you will swear loyalty to me, Hermann Göring, and to the one-time king of ancient Rome, Tullius Hostilius.”

Burton looked closely at the man. Could he actually be the legendary king of ancient Rome? Of Rome when it was a small village threatened by the other Italic tribes, the Sabines, Aequi, and Volsci? Who, in turn, were being pressed by the Umbrians, themselves pushed by the powerful Etruscans? Was this really Tullius Hostilius, warlike successor to the peaceful Numa Pompilius? There was nothing to distinguish him from a thousand men whom Burton had seen on the streets of Siena. Yet, if he was what he claimed to be, he could be a treasure trove, historically and linguistically speaking. He would, since he was probably Etruscan himself, know that language, in addition to pre-Classical Latin, and Sabine, and perhaps Campanian Greek. He might even have been acquainted with Romulus, supposed founder of Roma. What stories that man could tell!

“Well?” Göring said.

“What do we have to do if we join you?” Burton said.

“First, I…we…have to make sure that you are the caliber of man we want. In other words, a man who will unhesitatingly and immediately do anything that we order. We will give you a little test.”

He gave an order and a minute later, a group of men was brought forward. All were gaunt, and all were crippled.

“They were injured while quarrying stone or building our walls,” Göring said. “Except for two caught while trying to escape. They will have to pay the penalty. All will be killed because they are now useless. So, you should not hesitate about killing them to show your determination to serve us.”

He added, “Besides, they are all Jews. Why worry about them?”

Campbell, the redhead who had thrown Gwenafra into The River, held out to Burton a large club studded with chert blades. Two guards seized a slave and forced him to his knees. He was a large blond with blue eyes and a Grecian profile; he glared at Göring and then spat at him.

Göring laughed. “He has all the arrogance of his race. I could reduce him to a quivering screaming mass begging for death if I wanted to. But I do not really care for torture. My compatriot would like to give him a taste of the fire, but I am essentially a humanitarian.”

“I will kill in defense of my life or in defense of those who need protection,” Burton said. “But I am not a murderer.”

“Killing this Jew would be an act in defense of your life,” Göring replied. “If you do not, you will die anyway. Only it will take you a long time.”

“I will not,” Burton said.

Göring sighed. “You English! Well, I would rather have you on my side. But if you don’t want to do the rational thing, so be it. What about you?” he said to Frigate.

Frigate, who was still in agony, said, “Your ashes ended in a trash heap in Dachau because of what you did and what you were. Are you going to repeat the same criminal acts on this world?”

Göring laughed and said, “I know what happened to me. Enough of my Jewish slaves have told me.”

He pointed at Monat. “What kind of a freak is that?”

Burton explained. Göring looked grave, then said, “I couldn’t trust him. He goes into the slave camp. You, there, apeman. What do you say?”

Kazz, to Burton’s surprise, stepped forward. “I kill for you. I don’t want to be slave.”

He took the club while the guards held their spears poised to run him through if he had other ideas for using it. He glared at them from under his shelving brows, then raised the club. There was a crack, and the slave pitched forward on the dirt. Kazz returned the club to Campbell and stepped aside. He did not look at Burton.

Göring said, “All the slaves will be assembled tonight, and they will be shown what will happen to them if they try to get away. The escapees will be roasted for a while, then put out of their misery. My distinguished colleague will personally handle the club. He likes that sort of thing.”

He pointed at Alice. “That one. I’ll take her.”

Tullius stood up. “No, no. I like her. You take de oders, Hermann. I giw you bot’ off dem. But sye, I want her wery muck. Sye look like, wat you say, aristocrat. A…queen?”

Burton roared, snatched a club from Campbell’s hand, and leaped upon the table. Göring fell backward, the tip of the club narrowly missing his nose. At the same time, the Roman thrust a spear at Burton and wounded him in the shoulder. Burton kept hold of the club, whirled, and knocked the weapon out of Tullius’ hand.

The slaves, shouting, threw themselves upon the guards. Frigate jerked a spear loose and brought the butt of it against Kazz’s head. Kazz crumpled. Monat kicked a guard in the groin and picked up his spear.

Burton did not remember anything after that. He awoke several hours before dusk. His head hurt worse than before. His ribs and both shoulders were stiff with pain. He was lying on grass in a pine log enclosure with a diameter of about fifty yards. Fifteen feet above the grass, circling the interior of the wall, was a wooden walk on which armed guards paced.

He groaned when he sat up. Frigate, squatting near him, said, “I was afraid you’d never come out of it.”

“Where are the women?” Burton said.

Frigate began to weep. Burton shook his head and said, “Quit blubbering. Where are they?”

“Where the hell do you think they are?” Frigate said. “Oh, my God!”

“Don’t think about the women. There’s nothing you can do for them. Not now, anyway. Why wasn’t I killed after I attacked Göring?”

Frigate wiped away the tears and said, “Beats me. Maybe they’re saving you, and me, for the fire. As an example. I wish they had killed us.”

“What, so recently gained paradise and wish so soon to lose it?” Burton said. He began to laugh but quit because pains speared his head.

Burton talked to Robert Spruce, an Englishman born in 1945 in Kensington. Spruce said that it was less than a month since Göring and Tullius had seized power. For the time being, they were leaving their neighbors in peace. Eventually, of course, they would try to conquer the adjacent territories, including the Onondaga Indians across The River. So far, no slave had escaped to spread word about Göring’s intentions.

“But the people on the borders can see for themselves that the walls are being built by slaves,” Burton said.

Spruce grinned wryly and said, “Göring has spread the word that these are all Jews, that he is only interested in enslaving Jews. So, what do they care? As you can see for yourself, that is not true. Half of the slaves are Gentile.”

At dusk, Burton, Frigate, Ruach, de Greystoke, and Monat were taken from the stockade and marched down to a grailrock. There were about two hundred slaves there, guarded by about seventy Göringites. Their grails were placed on the rock, and they waited. After the blue flames roared, the grails were taken down. Each slave opened his, and guards removed the tobacco, liquor, and half of the food.

Frigate had gashes in his head and in his shoulder which needed sewing up, though the bleeding had stopped. His color had much improved, though his back and kidneys pained him.

“So now we’re slaves,” Frigate said. “Dick, you thought quite a lot of the institution of slavery. What do you think of it now?”

“That was Oriental slavery,” Burton said. “In this type of slavery, there’s no chance for a slave to gain his freedom. Nor is there any personal feeling, except hatred, between slave and owner. In the Orient, the situation was different. Of course, like any human institution, it had its abuses.”

“You’re a stubborn man,” Frigate said. “Have you noticed that at least half the slaves are Jews? Late-twentieth-century Israeli, most of them. That girl over there told me that Göring managed to start grail-slavery by stirring up anti-Semitism in this area. Of course, it had to exist before it could be aroused. Then, after he had gotten into power with Tullius’ aid, he enslaved many of his former supporters.”

He continued, “The hell of it is, Göring is not, relatively speaking, a genuine anti-Semite. He personally intervened with Himmler and others to save Jews. But he is something even worse than a genuine Jew-hater. He is an opportunist. Anti-Semitism was a tidal wave in Germany; to get any place, you had to ride the wave. So, Göring rode there, just as he rode here. An anti-Semite such as Goebbels or Frank believed in the principles they professed. Perverted and hateful principles, true, but still principles. Whereas big fat happy-go-lucky Göring did not really care one way or the other about the Jews. He just wanted to use them.”

“All very well,” Burton said, “but what has that got to do with me? Oh, I see! That look! You are getting ready to lecture me.”

“Dick, I admire you as I have admired few men. I love you as one man loves another. I am as happy and delighted to have had the singular good luck to fall in with you as, say, Plutarch would be if he had met Alcibiades or Theseus. But I am not blind. I know your faults, which are many, and I regret them.”

“Just which one is it this time?”

“That book. The Jew, The Gypsy, and El Islam. How could you have written it? A hate document full of bloody-minded nonsense, folk tales, superstitions! Ritual murders, indeed!”

“I was still angry because of the injustices I had suffered at Damascus. To be expelled from the consulate because of the lies of my enemies, among whom….”

“That doesn’t excuse your writing lies about a whole group,” Frigate said.

“Lies! I wrote the truth!”

“You may have thought they were truths. But I come from an age which definitely knows that they were not. In fact, no one in his right mind in your time would have believed that crap!”

“The facts are,” Burton said, “that the Jewish moneylenders in Damascus were charging the poor a thousand percent interest on their loans. The facts are that they were inflicting this monstrous usury not only on the Moslem and Christian populace but on their own people. The facts are, that when my enemies in England accused me of anti-Semitism, many Jews in Damascus came to my defense. It is a fact that I protested to the Turks when they sold the synagogue of the Damascan Jews to the Greek Orthodox bishop so he could turn it into a church. It is a fact that I went out and drummed up eighteen Moslems to testify on behalf of the Jews. It is a fact that I protected the Christian missionaries from the Druzes. It is a fact that I warned the Druzes that that fat and oily Turkish swine, Rashid Pasha, was trying to incite them to revolt so he could massacre them. It is a fact that when I was recalled from my consular post, because of the lies of the Christian missionaries and priests, of Rashid Pasha, and of the Jewish usurers, thousands of Christians, Moslems, and Jews rallied to my aid, though it was too late then.

“It is also a fact that I don’t have to answer to you or to any man for my actions!”

How like Frigate to bring up such an irrelevant subject at such an inappropriate time. Perhaps he was trying to keep from blaming himself by turning his fear and anger on Burton. Or perhaps he really felt that his hero had failed him.

Lev Ruach had been sitting with his head between his hands. He raised his head and said, hollowly, “Welcome to the concentration camp, Burton! This is your first taste of it. It’s an old tale to me, one I was tired of hearing from the beginning. I was in a Nazi camp, and I escaped. I was in a Russian camp, and I escaped. In Israel, I was captured by Arabs, and I escaped.

“So, now, perhaps I can escape again. But to what? To another camp? There seems to be no end to them. Man is forever building them and putting the perennial prisoner, the Jew, or what have you, in them. Even here, where we have a fresh start, where all religions, all prejudices, should have been shattered on the anvil of resurrection, little is changed.”

“Shut your mouth,” a man near Ruach said. He had red hair so curly it was almost kinky, blue eyes, and a face that might have been handsome if it had not been for his broken nose. He was six feet tall and had a wrestler’s body.

“Dov Targoff here,” he said in a crisp Oxford accent. “Late commander in the Israeli Navy. Pay no attention to this man. He’s one of the old-time Jews, a pessimist, a whiner. He’d rather wail against the wall than stand up and fight like a man.”

Ruach choked, then said, “You arrogant Sabra! I fought; I killed! And I am not a whiner! What are you doing now, you brave warrior? Aren’t you a slave as much as the rest of us?”

“It’s the old story,” a woman said. She was tall and dark-haired and probably would have been a beauty if she had not been so gaunt. “The old story. We fight among ourselves while our enemies conquer. Just as we fought when Titus besieged Jerusalem and we killed more of our own people than we did the Romans. Just as….”

The two men turned against her, and all three argued loudly until a guard began beating them with a stick.

Later, through swollen lips, Targoff said, “I can’t take much of this, much longer. Soon…well, that guard is mine to kill.”

“You have a plan?” Frigate said, eagerly, but Targoff would not answer.

Shortly before dawn, the slaves were awakened and marched to the grailrock. Again, they were given a modicum of food. After eating, they were split up into groups and marched off to their differing assignments. Burton and Frigate were taken to the northern border. They were put to work with a thousand other slaves, and they toiled naked all day in the sun. Their only rest was when they took their grails to the rock at noon and were fed.

Göring meant to build a wall between the mountain and The River; he also intended to erect a second wall which would run for the full ten-mile length of the lakeshore and a third wall at the southern end.

Burton and the others had to dig a deep trench and then pile the dirt taken from the hole into a wall. This was hard work, for they had only stone hoes with which to hack at the ground. Since the roots of the grass formed a thickly tangled complex of very tough material, they could be cut only with repeated blows. The dirt and roots were scraped up on wooden shovels and tossed onto large bamboo sleds. These were dragged by teams onto the top of the wall, where the dirt was shoveled off to make the wall even higher and thicker.

At night, the slaves were herded back into the stockade. Here, most of them fell asleep almost at once. But Targoff, the red-headed Israeli, squatted by Burton.

“The grapevine gives a little juice now and then,” he said. “I heard about the fight you and your crew made. I also heard about your refusal to join Göring and his swine.”

“What do you hear about my infamous book?” Burton said.

Targoff smiled and said, “I never heard of it until Ruach brought it to my attention. Your actions speak for themselves. Besides, Ruach is very sensitive about such things. Not that you can really blame him after what he went through. But I do not think that you would behave as you did if you were what he said you are. I think you’re a good man, the type we need. So….”

Days and nights of hard work and short rations followed. Burton learned through the grapevine about the women. Wilfreda and Fatima were in Campbell’s apartment. Loghu was with Tullius. Alice had been kept by Göring for a week, then had been turned over to a lieutenant, a Manfred von Kreyscharft. Rumor was that Göring had complained of her coldness and had wanted to give her to his bodyguards to do with as they pleased. But von Kreyscharft had asked for her.

Burton was in agony. He could not endure the mental images of her with Göring and von Kreyscharft. He had to stop these beasts or at least die trying. Late that night, he crawled from the big hut he occupied with twenty-five men into Targoff’s hut and woke him up.

“You said you knew that I must be on your side,” he whispered. “When are you going to take me into your confidence? I might as well warn you now that, if you don’t do so at once, I intend to foment a break among my own group and anybody else who will join us.”

“Ruach has told me more about you,” Targoff said. “I didn’t understand, really, what he was talking about. Could a Jew trust anyone who wrote such a book? Or could such a man be trusted not to turn on them after the common enemy has been defeated?”

Burton opened his mouth to speak angrily, then closed it. For a moment, he was silent. When he spoke, he did so calmly. “In the first place, my actions on Earth speak louder than any of my printed words. I was the friend and protector of many Jews; I had many Jewish friends.”

“That last statement is always a preface to an attack on the Jews,” Targoff said.

“Perhaps. However, even if what Ruach claims were true, the Richard Burton you see before you in this valley is not the Burton who lived on Earth. I think every man has been changed somewhat by his experience here. If he hasn’t, he is incapable of change. He would be better off dead.

“During the four hundred and seventy-six days that I have lived on this River, I have learned much. I am not incapable of changing my mind. I listened to Ruach and Frigate. I argued frequently and passionately with them. And though I did not want to admit it at the time, I thought much about what they said.”

“Jew-hate is something bred into the child,” Targoff said. “It becomes part of the nerve. No act of will can get rid of it, unless it is not very deeply embedded or the will is extraordinarily strong. The bell rings, and Pavlov’s dog salivates. Mention the word Jew, and the nervous system storms the citadel of the mind of the Gentile. Just as the word Arab storms mine. But I have a realistic basis for hating all Arabs.”

“I have pled enough,” Burton said. “You will either accept me or reject me. In either case, you know what I will do.”

“I accept,” Targoff said. “If you can change your mind, I can change mine. I’ve worked with you, eaten bread with you. I like to think I’m a good judge of character. Tell me, if you were planning this, what would you do?”

Targoff listened carefully. At the end of Burton’s explanation, Targoff nodded. “Much like my plan. Now….”

16

The next day, shortly after breakfast, several guards came for Burton and Frigate. Targoff looked hard at Burton, who knew what Targoff was thinking. Nothing could be done except to march off to Göring’s “palace.” He was seated in a big wooden chair and smoking a pipe. He asked them to sit down and offered them cigars and wine.

“Every once in a while,” he said, “I like to relax and talk with somebody besides my colleagues, who are not overly bright. I like especially to talk with somebody who lived after I died. And to men who were famous in their time. I’ve few of either type, so far.”

“Many of your Israeli prisoners lived after you,” Frigate said.

“Ah, the Jews!” Göring airily waved his pipe. “That is the trouble. They know me too well. They are sullen when I try to talk to them, and too many have tried to kill me for me to feel comfortable around them. Not that I have anything against them. I don’t particularly like Jews, but I had many Jewish friends….”

Burton reddened.

Göring, after sucking on his pipe, continued, “Der Führer was a great man, but he had some idiocies. One of them was his attitude toward Jews. Myself, I cared less. But the Germany of my time was anti-Jewish, and a man must go with the zeitgeist if he wants to get any place in life. Enough of that. Even here, a man cannot get away from them.”

He chattered on for a while, then asked Frigate many questions concerning the fate of his contemporaries and the history of post-war Germany.

“If you Americans had had any political sense, you would have declared war on Russia as soon as we surrendered. We would have fought with you against the Bolshevik, and we would have crushed them.”

Frigate did not reply. Göring then told several “funny,” very obscene stories. He asked Burton to tell him about the strange experience he had had before being resurrected in the valley.

Burton was surprised. Had Göring learned about this from Kazz or was there an informer among the slaves?

He told in full detail everything that had happened between the time he opened his eyes to find himself in the place of floating bodies to the instant when the man in the aerial canoe pointed the metal tube at him.

“The extra-Terrestrial, Monat, has a theory that some beings—call them Whomever or X—have been observing mankind since he ceased to be an ape. For at least two million years. These superbeings have, in some manner, recorded every cell of every human being that ever lived from the moment of conception, probably, to the moment of death. This seems a staggering concept, but it is no more staggering than the resurrection of all humanity and the reshaping of this planet into one Rivervalley. The recordings may have been made when the recordees were living. Or it may be that these superbeings detected vibrations from the past, just as we on Earth saw the light of stars as they had been a thousand years before.

“Monat, however, inclines to the former theory. He does not believe in time travel even in a limited sense.

“Monat believes that the X’s stored these recordings. How, he does not know. But this planet was then reshaped for us. It is obviously one great Riverworld. During our journey up River, we’ve talked to dozens whose descriptions leave no doubt that they come from widely scattered parts, from all over. One was from far up in the northern hemisphere; another, far down in the southern. All the descriptions fall together to make a picture of a world that has been reworked into one zigzagging Rivervalley.

“The people we talked to were killed or died by accident here and were resurrected again in the areas we happened to be traveling through. Monat says that we resurrectees are still being recorded. And when one of us dies again, the up-to-the-minute recordings are being placed somewhere—maybe under the surface of this planet—and played into energy-matter converters. The bodies were reproduced as they were at the moment of death and then the rejuvenating devices restored the sleeping bodies. Probably in that same chamber in which I awoke. After this, the bodies, young and whole again, were recorded and then destroyed. And the recordings were played out again, this time through devices under the ground. Once more, energy-matter converters, probably using the heat of this planet’s molten core as energy, reproduced us above the ground, near the grailstones. I do not know why they are not resurrected a second time in the same spot where they died. But then I don’t know why all our hairs were shaven off or why men’s facial hairs don’t grow or why men were circumcised and women made virgins again. Or why we were resurrected. For what purpose? Whoever put us here has not shown up to tell us why.”

“The thing is,” Frigate said, “the thing is, we are not the same people we were on Earth. I died. Burton died. You died, Hermann Göring. Everybody died. And we cannot be brought back to life!”

Göring sucked on his pipe noisily, stared at Frigate, and then said, “Why not? I am living again. Do you deny that?”

“Yes! I do deny that—in a sense. You are living. But you are not the Hermann Göring who was born in Marienbad Sanatorium at Rosenheim in Bavaria on January 12, 1893. You are not the Hermann Göring whose godfather was Dr. Hermann Eppenstein, a Jew converted to Christianity. You are not the Göring who succeeded von Richthofen after his death and continued to lead his fliers against the Allies even after the war ended. You are not the Reichsmarschal of Hitler’s Germany nor the refugee arrested by Lieutenant Jerome N. Shapiro. Eppenstein and Shapiro, hah! And you are not the Hermann Göring who took his life by swallowing potassium cyanide during his trial for his crimes against humanity!”

Göring tamped his pipe with tobacco and said, mildly, “You certainly know much about me. I should be flattered, I suppose. At least, I was not forgotten.”

“Generally, you were,” Frigate said. “You did have a long-lived reputation as a sinister clown, a failure, and a toady.”

Burton was surprised. He had not known that the fellow would stand up to someone who had power of life and death over him or who had treated him so painfully. But then perhaps Frigate hoped to be killed.

It was probable that he was banking on Göring’s curiosity.

Göring said, “Explain your statement. Not about my reputation. Every man of importance expects to be reviled and misunderstood by the brainless masses. Explain why I am not the same man.”

Frigate smiled slightly and said, “You are the product, the hybrid, of a recording and an energy-matter converter. You were made with all the memories of the dead man Hermann Göring and with every cell of his body a duplicate. You have everything he had. So you think you are Göring. But you are not! You are a duplication, and that is all! The original Hermann Göring is nothing but molecules that have been absorbed into the soil and the air and so into plants and back into the flesh of beasts and men and out again as excrement, und so weiter!

“But you, here before me, are not the original, any more than the recording on a disc or a tape is the original voice, the vibrations issuing from the mouth of a man and detected and converted by an electronic device and then replayed.”

Burton understood the reference, since he had seen an Edison phonograph in Paris in 1888. He felt outraged, actually violated, at Frigate’s assertions.

Göring’s wide-open eyes and reddening face indicated that he, too, felt threatened down to the core of his being.

After stuttering, Göring said, “And why would these beings go to all this trouble just to make duplicates?”

Frigate shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”

Göring heaved up from his chair and pointed the stem of his pipe at Frigate.

“You lie!” he screamed in German. “You lie, scheisshund!”

Frigate quivered as if he expected to be struck over the kidneys again, but he said, “I must be right. Of course, you don’t have to believe what I say. I can’t prove anything. And I understand exactly how you feel. I know that I am Peter Jairus Frigate, born 1918, died A.D. 2008. But I also must believe, because logic tells me so, that I am only, really, a being who has the memories of that Frigate who will never rise from the dead. In a sense, I am the son of that Frigate who can never exist again. Not flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, but mind of his mind. I am not the man who was born of a woman on that lost world of Earth. I am the byblow of science and a machine. Unless….”

Göring said, “Yes? Unless what?”

“Unless there is some entity attached to the human body, an entity which is the human being. I mean, it contains all that makes the individual what he is, and when the body is destroyed, this entity still exists. So that, if the body were to be made again, this entity, storing the essence of the individual, could be attached again to the body. And it would record everything that the body recorded. And so the original individual would live again. He would not be just a duplicate.”

Burton said, “For God’s sake, Pete! Are you proposing the soul?”

Frigate nodded and said, “Something analagous to the soul. Something that the primitives dimly apprehended and called a soul.”

Göring laughed uproariously. Burton would have laughed, but he did not care to give Göring any support, moral or intellectual.

When Göring had quit laughing, he said, “Even here, in a world which is clearly the result of science, the supernaturalists won’t quit trying. Well, enough of that. To more practical and immediate matters. Tell me, have you changed your mind? Are you ready to join me?”

Burton glared and said, “I would not be under the orders of a man who rapes women; moreover, I respect the Israelis. I would rather be a slave with them than free with you.”

Göring scowled and said, harshly, “Very well. I thought as much. But I had hoped…well, I have been having trouble with the Roman. If he gets his way, you will see how merciful I have been to you slaves. You do not know him. Only my intervention has saved one of you being tortured to death every night for his amusement.”

At noon, the two returned to their work in the hills. Neither got a chance to speak to Targoff or any of the slaves, since their duties happened not to bring them into contact. They did not dare make an open attempt to talk to him, because that would have meant a severe beating.

After they returned to the stockade in the evening, Burton told the others what had happened.

“More than likely Targoff will not believe my story. He’ll think we’re spies. Even if he’s not certain, he can’t afford to take chances. So there’ll be trouble. It’s too bad that this had to happen. The escape plan will have to be cancelled for tonight.”

Nothing untoward took place—at first. The Israelis walked away from Burton and Frigate when they tried to talk to them. The stars came out, and the stockade was flooded with a light almost as bright as a full moon on Earth.

The prisoners stayed inside their barracks, but they talked in low voices with their heads together. Despite their deep tiredness, they could not sleep. The guards must have sensed the tension, even though they could not see or hear the men in the huts. They walked back and forth on the walks, stood together talking, and peered down into the enclosure by the light of the night sky and the flames of the resin torches.

“Targoff will do nothing until it rains,” Burton said. He gave orders. Frigate was to stand first watch; Robert Spruce, the second; Burton, third. Burton lay down on his pile of leaves and, ignoring the murmuring of voices and the moving around of bodies, fell asleep.

It seemed that he had just closed his eyes when Spruce touched him. He rose quickly to his feet, yawned, and stretched. The others were all awake. Within a few minutes, the first of the clouds formed. In ten minutes, the stars were blotted out. Thunder grumbled way up in the mountains, and the first lightning flash forked the sky.

Lightning struck near. Burton saw by its flash that the guards were huddled under the roofs sticking out from the base of the watch houses at each corner of the stockade. They were covered with towels against the chill and the rain.

Burton crawled from his barracks to the next. Targoff was standing inside the entrance. Burton stood up and said, “Does the plan still hold?”

“You know better than that,” Targoff said. A bolt of lightning showed his angry face. “You Judas!”

He stepped forward, and a dozen men followed him. Burton did not wait; he attacked. But, as he rushed forward, he heard a strange sound. He paused to look out through the door. Another flash revealed a guard sprawled facedown in the grass beneath a walk.

Targoff had put his fists down when Burton turned his back on him. He said, “What’s going on, Burton?”

“Wait,” the Englishman replied. He had no more idea than the Israeli about what was happening, but anything unexpected could be to his advantage.

Lightning illuminated the squat figure of Kazz on the wooden walk. He was swinging a huge stone axe against a group of guards who were in the angle formed by the meeting of the two walls. Another flash. The guards were sprawled out on the walk. Darkness. At the next blaze of light, another was down; the remaining two were running away down the walk in different directions.

Another bolt very near the wall showed that, finally, the other guards were aware of what was happening. They ran down the walk, shouting and waving their spears.

Kazz, ignoring them, slid a long bamboo ladder down into the enclosure and then he threw a bundle of spears after it. By the next flash, he could be seen advancing toward the nearest guards.

Burton snatched a spear and almost ran up the ladder. The others, including the Israeli, were behind him. The fight was bloody and brief. With the guards on the walk either stabbed or hurled to their deaths, only those in the watch houses remained. The ladder was carried to the other end of the stockade and placed against the gate. In two minutes, men had climbed to the outside, dropped down, and opened the gate. For the first time, Burton found the chance to talk to Kazz.

“I thought you had sold us out.”

“No. Not me, Kazz,” Kazz said reproachfully. “You know I love you, Burton-naq. You’re my friend, my chief. I pretend to join your enemies because that’s playing it smart. I surprise you don’t do the same. You’re no dummy.”

“Certainly, you aren’t,” Burton said. “But I couldn’t bring myself to kill those slaves.”

Lightning revealed Kazz shrugging. He said, “That don’t bother me. I don’t know them. Besides, you hear Göring. He say they die anyway.”

“It’s a good thing you chose tonight to rescue us,” Burton said. He did not tell Kazz why since he did not want to confuse him. Moreover, there were more important things to do.

“Tonight’s a good night for this,” Kazz said. “Big battle going on. Tullius and Göring get very drunk and quarrel. They fight; their men fight. While they kill each other, invaders come. Those brown men across The River…what you call them?…Onondagas, that’s them. Their boats come just before rain come. They make raid to steal slaves, too. Or maybe just for the hell of it. So, I think, now’s good time to start my plan, get Burton-naq free.”

As suddenly as it had come, the rain ceased. Burton could hear shouts and screams from far off, toward The River. Drums were beating up and down The Riverbanks. He said to Targoff, “We can either try to escape, and probably do so easily, or we can attack.”

“I intend to wipe out the beasts who enslaved us,” Targoff said. “There are other stockades nearby. I’ve sent men to open their gates. The rest are too far away to reach quickly; they’re strung out at half-mile intervals.”

By then, the blockhouse in which the off-duty guards lived had been stormed. The slaves armed themselves and then started toward the noise of the conflict. Burton’s group was on the right flank. They had not gone half a mile before they came upon corpses and wounded, a mixture of Onondagas and whites.

Despite the heavy rain, a fire had broken out. By its increasing light, they saw that the flames came from the longhouse. Outlined in the glare were struggling figures. The escapees advanced across the plain. Suddenly, one side broke and ran toward them with the victors, whooping and screaming jubilantly, after them.

“There’s Göring,” Frigate said. “His fat isn’t going to help him get away, that’s for sure.”

He pointed, and Burton could see the German desperately pumping his legs but falling behind the others. “I don’t want the Indians to have the honor of killing him,” Burton said. “We owe it to Alice to get him.”

Campbell’s long-legged figure was ahead of them all, and it was toward him that Burton threw his spear. To the Scot, the missile must have seemed to come out of the darkness from nowhere. Too late, he tried to dodge. The flint head buried itself in the flesh between his left shoulder and chest, and he fell on his side. He tried to get up a moment afterward, but he was kicked back down by Burton.

Campbell’s eyes rolled; blood trickled from his mouth. He pointed at another wound, a deep gash in his side just below the ribs. “You…your woman…Wilfreda…did that,” he gasped. “But I killed her, the bitch….”

Burton wanted to ask him where Alice was, but Kazz, screaming phrases in his native tongue, brought his club down on the Scot’s head. Burton picked up his spear and ran after Kazz. “Don’t kill Göring!” he shouted. “Leave him to me!”

Kazz did not hear him; he was busy fighting with two Onondagas. Burton saw Alice as she ran by him. He reached out and grabbed her and spun her around. She screamed and started to struggle. Burton shouted at her; suddenly, recognizing him, she collapsed into his arms and began weeping. Burton would have tried to comfort her, but he was afraid that Göring would escape him. He pushed her away and ran toward the German and threw his spear. It grazed Göring’s head, and he screamed and stopped running and began to look for the weapon but Burton was on him. Both fell to the ground and rolled over and over, each trying to strangle the other.

Something struck Burton on the back of his head. Stunned, he released his grip. Göring pushed him down on the ground and dived toward the spear. Seizing it, he rose and stepped toward the prostrate Burton. Burton tried to get to his feet, but his knees seemed to be made of putty and everything was whirling. Göring suddenly staggered as Alice tackled his legs from behind, and he fell forward. Burton made another effort, found he could at least stagger, and sprawled over Göring. Again, they rolled over and over with Göring squeezing on Burton’s throat. Then a shaft slid over Burton’s shoulder, burning his skin, and its stone tip drove into Göring’s throat.

Burton stood up, pulled the spear out, and plunged it into the man’s fat belly. Göring tried to sit up, but he fell back and died. Alice slumped to the ground and wept.

Dawn saw the end of the battle. By then, the slaves had broken out of every stockade. The warriors of Göring and Tullius were ground between the two forces, Onondaga and slaves, like husks between millstones. The Indians, who had probably raided only to loot and get more slaves and their grails, retreated. They climbed aboard their dugouts and canoes and paddled across the lake. Nobody felt like chasing them.

17

The days that followed were busy ones. A rough census indicated that at least half of the twenty thousand inhabitants of Göring’s little kingdom had been killed, severely wounded, abducted by the Onondaga, or had fled. The Roman Tullius Hostilius had apparently escaped. The survivors chose a provisional government. Targoff, Burton, Spruce, Ruach, and two others formed an executive committee with considerable, but temporary, powers. John de Greystock had disappeared. He had been seen during the beginning of the battle and then he had just dropped out of sight.

Alice Hargreaves moved into Burton’s hut without either saying a word about the why or wherefore.

Later, she said, “Frigate tells me that if this entire planet is constructed like the areas we’ve seen, and there’s no reason to believe it isn’t, then The River must be at least twenty million miles long. It’s incredible, but so is our resurrection, everything about this world. Also, there may be thirty-five to thirty-seven billion people living along The River. What chance would I have of ever finding my Earthly husband?

“Moreover, I love you. Yes, I know I didn’t act as if I loved you. But something has changed in me. Perhaps it’s all I’ve been through that is responsible. I don’t think I could have loved you on Earth. I might have been fascinated, but I would also have been repelled, perhaps frightened. I couldn’t have made you a good wife there. Here, I can. Rather, I’ll make you a good mate, since there doesn’t seem to be any authority or religious institutions that could marry us. That in itself shows how I’ve changed. That I could be calmly living with a man I’m not married to…! Well, there you are.”

“We’re no longer living in the Victorian age,” Burton said. “What would you call this present age…the Mélange era? The Mixed Age? Eventually, it will be The River Culture, The Riparian World, rather, many River cultures.”

“Providing it lasts,” Alice said. “It started suddenly; it may end just as swiftly and unexpectedly.”

Certainly, Burton thought, the green River and the grassy plain and the forested hills and the unscalable mountains did not seem like Shakespeare’s insubstantial vision. They were solid, real, as real as the men walking toward him now, Frigate, Monat, Kazz, and Ruach. He stepped out of the hut and greeted them.

Kazz began talking. “A long time ago, before I speak English good, I see something. I try to tell you then, but you don’t understand me. I see a man who don’t have this on his forehead.”

He pointed at the center of his own forehead and then at that of the others.

“I know,” Kazz continued, “you can’t see it. Pete and Monat can’t either. Nobody else can. But I see it on everybody’s forehead. Except on that man I try to catch long time ago. Then, one day, I see a woman don’t have it, but I don’t say nothing to you. Now, I see a third person who don’t have it.”

“He means,” Monat said, “that he is able to perceive certain symbols or characters on the forehead of each and every one of us. He can see these only in bright sunlight and at a certain angle. But everyone he’s ever seen has had these symbols—except for the three he’s mentioned.”

“He must be able to see a little further into the spectrum than we,” Frigate said. “Obviously, Whoever stamped us with the sign of the beast or whatever you want to call it, did not know about the special ability of Kazz’s species. Which shows that They are not omniscient.”

“Obviously,” Burton said. “Nor infallible. Otherwise, I would never have awakened in that place before being resurrected. So, who is this person who does not have these symbols on his skin?”

He spoke calmly, but his heart beat swiftly. If Kazz was right, he might have detected an agent of the beings who had brought the entire human species to life again. Would They be gods in disguise?

“Robert Spruce!” Frigate said.

“Before we jump to any conclusions,” Monat said, “don’t forget that the omission may have been an accident.”

“We’ll find out,” Burton said ominously. “But why the symbols? Why should we be marked?”

“Probably for identification or numbering purposes,” Monat said. “Who knows, except Those Who put us here.”

“Let’s go face Spruce,” Burton said.

“We have to catch him first,” Frigate replied. “Kazz made the mistake of mentioning to Spruce that he knew about the symbols. He did so at breakfast this morning. I wasn’t there, but those who were said Spruce turned pale. A few minutes later, he excused himself, and he hasn’t been seen since. We’ve sent search parties out up and down The River, across The River, and also into the hills.”

“His flight is an admission of guilt,” Burton said. He was angry. Was man a kind of cattle branded for some sinister purpose?

That afternoon, the drums announced that Spruce had been caught. Three hours later, he was standing before the council table in the newly built meeting hall. Behind the table sat the Council. The doors were closed, for the Councilmen felt that this was something that could be conducted more efficiently without a crowd. However, Monat, Kazz, and Frigate were also present.

“I may as well tell you now,” Burton said, “that we have decided to go to any lengths to get the truth from you. It is against the principles of every one at this table to use torture. We despise and loathe those who resort to torture. But we feel that this is one issue where principles must be abandoned.”

“Principles must never be abandoned,” Spruce said evenly. “The end never justifies the means. Even if clinging to them means defeat, death, and remaining in ignorance.”

“There’s too much at stake,” Targoff said. “I, who have been the victim of unprincipled men; Ruach, who has been tortured several times; the others, we all agree. We’ll use fire and the knife on you if we must. It is necessary that we find out the truth.

“Now, tell me, are you one of Those responsible for this resurrection?”

“You will be no better than Göring and his kind if you torture me,” Spruce said. His voice was beginning to break. “In fact, you will be far worse off, for you are forcing yourselves to be like him in order to gain something that may not even exist. Or, if it does, may not be worth the price.”

“Tell us the truth,” Targoff said. “Don’t lie. We know that you must be an agent; perhaps one of Those directly responsible.”

“There is a fire blazing in that stone over there,” Burton said. “If you don’t start talking at once, you will…well, the roasting you get will be the least of your pain. I am an authority on Chinese and Arabic methods of torture. I assure you that they had some very refined means for extracting the truth. And I have no qualms about putting my knowledge into practice.”

Spruce, pale and sweating, said, “You may be denying yourself eternal life if you do this. It will at least set you far back on your journey, delay the final goal.”

“What is that?” Burton replied.

Spruce ignored him. “We can’t stand pain,” he muttered. “We’re too sensitive.”

“Are you going to talk?” Targoff said.

“Even the idea of self-destruction is painful and to be avoided except when absolutely necessary,” Spruce mumbled. “Despite the fact that I know I shall live again.”

“Put him over the fire,” Targoff said to the two men who held Spruce.

Monat spoke up. “Just one moment. Spruce, the science of my people was much more advanced than that of Earth’s. So I am more qualified to make an educated guess. Perhaps we could spare you the pain of the fire, and the pain of betraying your purpose, if you were merely to affirm what I have to say. That way, you wouldn’t be making a positive betrayal.”

Spruce said, “I’m listening.”

“It’s my theory that you are a Terrestrial. You belong to an age chronologically far past A.D. 2008. You must be the descendant of the few who survived my death scanner. Judging by the technology and power required to reconstruct the surface of this planet into one vast Rivervalley, your time must be much later than the twenty-first century. Just guessing, the fiftieth century A.D.?”

Spruce looked at the fire, then said, “Add two thousand more years.”

“If this planet is about the size of Earth, it can hold only so many people. Where are the others, the stillborn, the children who died before they were five, the imbeciles and idiots, and those who lived after the twentieth century?”

“They are elsewhere,” Spruce said. He glanced at the fire again, and his lips tightened.

“My own people,” Monat said, “had a theory that they would eventually be able to see into their past. I won’t go into the details, but it was possible that past events could be visually detected and then recorded. Time travel, of course, was sheer fantasy.

“But what if your culture was able to do what we only theorized about? What if you recorded every single human being that had ever lived? Located this planet and constructed this Rivervalley? Somewhere, maybe under the very surface of this planet, used energy-matter conversion, say from the heat of this planet’s molten core, and the recordings to re-create the bodies of the dead in the tanks? Used biological techniques to rejuvenate the bodies and to restore limbs, eyes, and so on and also to correct any physical defects?

“Then,” Monat continued, “you made more recordings of the newly created bodies and stored them in some vast memory tank? Later, you destroyed the bodies in the tanks? Re-created them again through means of the conductive metal which is also used to charge the grails? These could be buried beneath the ground. The resurrection then occurs without recourse to supernatural means.

“The big question is, why?”

“If you had it in your power to do all this, would you not think it was your ethical duty?” Spruce asked.

“Yes, but I would resurrect only those worth resurrecting.”

“And what if others did not accept your criteria?” Spruce said. “Do you really think you are wise enough and good enough to judge? Would you place yourself on a level with God? No, all must be given a second chance, no matter how bestial or selfish or petty or stupid. Then, it will be up to them….”

He fell silent, as if he had regretted his outburst and meant to say no more.

“Besides,” Monat said, “you would want to make a study of humanity as it existed in the past. You would want to record all the languages that man ever spoke, his mores, his philosophies, biographies. To do this, you need agents, posing as resurrectees, to mingle with the Riverpeople and to take notes, to observe, to study. How long will this study take? One thousand years? Two? Ten? A million?

“And what about the eventual disposition of us? Are we to stay here forever?”

“You will stay here as long as it takes for you to be rehabilitated,” Spruce shouted. “Then….”

He closed his mouth, glared, then opened it to say, “Continued contact with you makes even the toughest of us take on your characteristics. We have to go through a rehabilitation ourselves. Already, I feel unclean….”

“Put him over the fire,” Targoff said. “We’ll get the entire truth.”

“No, you won’t!” Spruce cried. “I should have done this long ago! Who knows what….”

He fell to the ground, and his skin changed to a gray-blue color. Dr. Steinborg, a Councilman, examined him, but it was apparent to all that he was dead.

Targoff said, “Better take him away now, Doctor. Dissect him. We’ll wait here for your report.”

“With stone knives, no chemicals, no microscopes, what kind of a report can you expect?” Steinborg said. “But I’ll do my best.”

The body was carried off. Burton said, “I’m glad he didn’t force us to admit we were bluffing. If he had kept his mouth shut, he could have defeated us.”

“Then you really weren’t going to torture him?” Frigate said. “I was hoping you didn’t mean your threat. If you had, I was going to walk out then and there and never see any of you again.”

“Of course we didn’t mean it,” Ruach said. “Spruce would have been right. We’d have been no better than Göring. But we could have tried other means. Hypnotism for instance. Burton, Monat, and Steinborg were experts in that field.”

“The trouble is, we still don’t know if we did get the truth,” Targoff said. “Actually, he may have been lying. Monat supplied some guesses, and, if these were wrong, Spruce could have led us astray by agreeing with Monat. I’d say we can’t be at all sure.”

They agreed on one thing. Their chances of detecting another agent through the absence of symbols on the forehead would be gone. Now that They—whoever They were—knew about the visibility of the characters to Kazz’s species, They would take the proper measures to prevent detection.

Steinborg returned three hours later. “There is nothing to distinguish him from any other member of Homo sapiens. Except this one little device.”

He held up a black shiny ball about the size of a matchhead.

“I located this on the surface of the forebrain. It was attached to some nerves by wires so thin that I could see them only at a certain angle, when they caught the light. It’s my opinion that Spruce killed himself by means of this device and that he did so by literally thinking himself dead. Somehow, this little ball translated a wish for death into the deed. Perhaps, it reacted to the thought by releasing a poison which I do not have facilities for analyzing.” He concluded his report and passed the ball around to the others.

18

Thirty days later, Burton, Frigate, Ruach, and Kazz were returning from a trip upRiver. It was just before dawn.

The cold heavy mists that piled up to six or seven feet above The River in the latter part of the night swirled around them. They could not see in any direction farther than a strong man might make a standing broad jump. But Burton, standing in the prow of the bamboo-hulled single-masted boat, knew they were close to the western shore. Near the relatively shallow depths the current ran more slowly, and they had just steered to port from the middle of The River.

If his calculations were correct, they should be close to the ruins of Göring’s hall. At any moment, he expected to see a strip of denser darkness appear out of the dark waters, the banks of that land he now called home. Home, for Burton, had always been a place from which to sally forth, a resting place, a temporary fortress in which to write a book about his last expedition, a lair in which to heal fresh hurts, a conning tower from which he looked out for new lands to explore.

Thus, only two weeks after the death of Spruce, Burton had felt the need to get to some place other than the one in which he now was. He heard a rumor that copper had been discovered on the western shore about a hundred miles upRiver. This was a length of shore of not more than twelve miles, inhabited by fifth-century B.C. Sarmatians and thirteenth-century A.D. Frisians.

Burton did not really think the story was true—but it gave him an excuse to travel. Ignoring Alice’s pleas to take her with him, he had set off.

Now, a month later and after some adventures, not all unpleasant, they were almost home. The story had not been entirely unfounded. There was copper but only in minute amounts. So the four had gotten into their boat for the easy trip downcurrent, their sail pushed by the never ceasing wind. They journeyed during the daytime and beached the boat during mealtimes wherever there were friendly people who did not mind strangers using their grailstones. At night they either slept among the friendlies or, if in hostile waters, sailed by in the darkness.

The last leg of their trip was made after the sun went down. Before getting home, they had to pass a section of the valley where slave-hungry eighteenth-century Mohawks lived on one side and equally greedy Carthaginians of the third century B.C. on the other. Having slipped through under cover of the fog, they were almost home.

Abruptly, Burton said, “There’s the bank. Pete, lower the mast! Kazz, Lev, back oars! Jump to it!”

A few minutes later, they had landed and had pulled the lightweight craft completely out of the water and upon the gently sloping shore. Now that they were out of the mists, they could see the sky paling above the eastern mountains.

“Dead reckoning come alive!” Burton said. “We’re ten paces beyond the grailstone near the ruins!”

He scanned the bamboo huts along the plain and the buildings evident in the long grasses and under the giant trees of the hills.

Not a single person was to be seen. The valley was asleep.

He said, “Don’t you think it’s strange that no one’s up yet? Or that we’ve not been challenged by the sentinels?”

Frigate pointed toward the lookout tower to their right. Burton swore and said, “They’re asleep, by God, or deserted their post!”

But he knew as he spoke that this was no case of dereliction of duty. Though he had said nothing to the others about it, the moment he had stepped ashore, he had been sure something was very wrong. He began running across the plain toward the hut in which he and Alice lived.

Alice was sleeping on the bamboo-and-grass bed on the right side of the building. Only her head was visible, for she was curled up under a blanket of towels fastened to each other by the magnetic clasps. Burton threw the blanket back, got down on his knees by the low bed, and raised her to a sitting position. Her head lolled forward, and her arms hung limply. But she had a healthy color and breathed normally.

Burton called her name three times. She slept on. He slapped both her cheeks sharply; red splotches sprang up on them. Her eyelids fluttered, then she went back to sleep.

By then Frigate and Ruach appeared. “We’ve looked into some of the other huts,” Frigate said. “They’re all asleep. I tried to wake a couple of them, but they’re out for the count. What’s wrong?”

Burton said, “Who do you think has the power or the need to do this? Spruce! Spruce and his kind, Whoever They are!”

“Why?” Frigate sounded frightened.

“They were looking for me! They must have come in under the fog, somehow put this whole area to sleep!”

“A sleep-gas would do it easily enough,” Ruach said. “Although people who have powers such as Theirs could have devices we’ve never dreamed of.”

“They were looking for me!” Burton shouted.

“Which means, if true, that They may be back tonight,” Frigate said. “But why would They be searching for you?”

Ruach replied for Burton. “Because he, as far as we know, was the only man to awaken in the preresurrection phase. Why he did is a mystery. But it’s evident something went wrong. It may also be a mystery to Them. I’d be inclined to think They’ve been discussing this and finally decided to come here. Maybe to kidnap Burton for observation—or some more sinister purpose.”

“Possibly. They wanted to erase from my memory all that I’d seen in that chamber of floating bodies,” Burton said. “Such a thing should not be beyond Their science.”

“But you’ve told that story to many,” Frigate said. “They couldn’t possibly track down all those people and remove the memory of your story from their minds.”

“Would that be necessary? How many believe my tale? Sometimes I doubt it myself.”

Ruach said, “Speculation is fruitless. What do we do now?”

Alice shrieked, “Richard!” and they turned to see her sitting up and staring at them.

For a few minutes, they could not get her to understand what had happened. Finally she said, “So that’s why the fog covered the land, too! I thought it was strange, but of course I had no way of knowing what was really happening.”

Burton said, “Get your grails. Put anything you want to take along in your sack. We’re leaving as of now. I want to get away before the others awake.”

Alice’s already large eyes became even wider. “Where are we going?”

“Anywhere from here. I don’t like to run away but I can’t stand up and fight people like that. Not if They know where I am. I’ll tell you, however, what I plan to do. I intend to find the end of The River. It must have an inlet and an outlet, and there must be a way for a man to get through to the source. If there’s any way at all, I’ll find it—you can bet your soul on that!

“Meanwhile, They’ll be looking for me elsewhere—I hope. The fact that They didn’t find me here makes me think that They have no means for instantly locating a person. They may have branded us like cattle”—he indicated the invisible symbols on his forehead—“but even cattle have mavericks. And we’re cattle with brains.”

He turned to the others. “You’re more than welcome to come along with me. In fact, I’d be honored.”

“I’ll get Monat,” Kazz said. “He wouldn’t want to be left behind.”

Burton grimaced and said, “Good old Monat! I hate to do this to him, but there’s no helping it. He can’t come along. He’s too distinguishable. Their agents would have no trouble at all in locating anybody who looked like him. I’m sorry, but he can’t.”

Tears stood in Kazz’s eyes, then ran down his bulging cheekbones. In a choked voice, he said, “Burton-naq, I can’t go either. I look too different, too.”

Burton felt tears wet his own eyes. He said, “We’ll take that chance. After all, there must be plenty of your type around. We’ve seen at least thirty or more during our travels.”

“No females so far, Burton-naq,” Kazz said mournfully. Then he smiled. “Maybe we find one when we go along The River.”

As quickly, he lost his grin. “No, damn it, I don’t go! I can’t hurt Monat too much. Him and me, others think we ugly and scary-looking. So we become good friends. He’s not my naq, but he’s next to it. I stay.”

He stepped up to Burton, hugged him in a grip that forced Burton’s breath out in a great whoosh, released him, shook hands with the others, making them wince, then turned and shuffled off.

Ruach, holding his paralyzed hand, said, “You’re off on a fool’s errand, Burton. Do you realize that you could sail on this River for a thousand years and still be a million miles or more from the end? I’m staying. My people need me. Besides, Spruce made it clear that we should be striving for a spiritual perfection, not fighting Those Who gave us a chance to do so.”

Burton’s teeth flashed whitely in his dark face. He swung his grail as if it were a weapon.

“I didn’t ask to be put here any more than I asked to be born on Earth. I don’t intend to kowtow to another’s dictates! I mean to find The River’s end. And if I don’t, I will at least have had fun and learned much on the way!”

By then, people were beginning to stumble out of their huts as they yawned and rubbed heavy eyes. Ruach paid no attention to them; he watched the craft as it set sail close-hauled to the wind, cutting across and up The River. Burton was handling the rudder; he turned once and waved the grail so that the sun bounced off it in many shining spears.

Ruach thought that Burton was really happy that he had been forced to make this decision. Now he could evade the deadly responsibilities that would come with governing this little state and could do what he wanted. He could set out on the greatest of all his adventures.

“I suppose it’s for the best,” Ruach muttered to himself. “A man may find salvation on the road, if he wants to, just as well as he may at home. It’s up to him. Meanwhile, I, like Voltaire’s character—what was his name? Earthly things are beginning to slip away from me—will cultivate my own little garden.”

He paused to look somewhat longingly after Burton.

“Who knows? He may some day run into Voltaire.”

He sighed, then smiled.

“On the other hand, Voltaire may someday drop in on me!”

19

Ihate you, Hermann Göring!”

The voice sprang out and then flashed away as if it were a gear tooth meshed with the cog of another man’s dream and rotated into and then out of his dream.

Riding the crest of the hypnopompic state, Richard Francis Burton knew he was dreaming. But he was helpless to do anything about it.

The first dream returned.

Events were fuzzy and encapsulated. A lightning streak of himself in the unmessurable chamber of floating bodies; another flash of the nameless Custodians finding him and putting him back to sleep; then a jerky synopsis of the dream be had had just before the true Resurrection on the banks of The River.

God—a beautiful old man in the clothes of a mid-Victorian gentleman of means and breeding—was poking him in the ribs with an iron cane and telling him that he owed for the flesh.

“What? What flesh?” Burton said, dimly aware that he was muttering in his sleep. He could not hear his words in the dream.

“Pay up!” God said. His face melted, then was recast into Burton’s own features.

God had not answered in the first dream five years before. He spoke now, “Make your Resurrection worth my while, you fool! I have gone to great expense and even greater pains to give you, and all those other miserable and worthless wretches, a second chance.”

“Second chance at what?” Burton said. He felt frightened at what God might answer. He was much relieved when God the All-Father—only now did Burton see that one eye of Jahweh-Odin was gone and out of the empty socket glared the flames of hell—did not reply. He was gone—no, not gone but metamorphosed into a high gray tower, cylindrical and soaring out of gray mists with the roar of the sea coming up through the mists.

“The Grail!” He saw again the man who had told him of the Big Grail. This man had heard it from another man, who had heard of it from a woman, who had heard it from…and so forth. The Big Grail was one of the legends told by the billions who lived along The River—this River that coiled like a serpent around this planet from pole to pole, issued from the unreachable and plunged into the inaccessible.

A man, or a subhuman, had managed to climb through the mountains to the North Pole. And he had seen the Big Grail, the Dark Tower, the Misty Castle just before he had stumbled. Or he was pushed. He had fallen headlong and bellowing into the cold seas beneath the mists and died. And then the man, or subhuman, had awakened again along The River. Death was not forever here, although it had lost nothing of its sting.

He had told of his vision. And the story had traveled along the valley of The River faster than a boat could sail.

Thus, Richard Francis Burton, the eternal pilgrim and wanderer, had longed to storm the ramparts of the Big Grail. He would unveil the secret of resurrection and of this planet, since he was convinced that the beings Who had reshaped this world had also built that tower.

“Die, Hermann Göring! Die, and leave me in peace!” a man shouted in German.

Burton opened his eyes. He could see nothing except the pale sheen of the multitudinous stars through the open window across the room of the hut.

His vision bent to the shape of the black things inside, and he saw Peter Frigate and Loghu sleeping on their mats by the opposite wall. He turned his head to see the white, blanket-sized towel under which Alice slept. The whiteness of her face was turned toward him, and the black cloud of her hair spilled out on the ground by her mat.

That same evening, the single-masted boat on which he and the other three had been sailing down The River had put into a friendly shore. The little state of Sevieria was inhabited largely by sixteenth-century Englishmen, although its chief was an American who had lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. John Sevier, founder of the “lost state” of Franklin, which had later become Tennessee, had welcomed Burton and his party.

Sevier and his people did not believe in slavery and would not detain any guest longer than he desired. After permitting them to charge their grails and so feed themselves, Sevier had invited them to a party. It was the celebration of Resurrection Day; afterward, he had them conducted to the guest hostelry.

Burton was always a light sleeper, and now he was an uneasy one. The others began breathing deeply or snoring long before he had succumbed to weariness. After an interminable dream, he had wakened on hearing the voice that had interlocked with his dreams.

Hermann Göring, Burton thought. He had killed Göring, but Göring must be alive again somewhere along The River. Was the man now groaning and shouting in the neighboring hut one who had also suffered because of Göring, either on Earth or in the Rivervalley?

Burton threw off the black towel and rose swiftly but noiselessly. He secured a kilt with magnetic tabs, fastened a belt of human skin around his waist, and made sure the human-leather scabbard held the flint poignard. Carrying an assegai, a short length of hardwood tipped with a flint point, he left the hut.

The moonless sky cast a light as bright as the full moon of Earth. It was aflame with huge many-colored stars and pale sheets of cosmic gas.

The hostelries were set back a mile and a half from The River and placed on one of the second row of hills that edged the Riverplain. There were seven of the one-room, leaf-thatch-roofed, bamboo buildings. At a distance, under the enormous branches of the irontrees or under the giant pines or oaks, were other huts. A half-mile away, on top of a high hill, was a large circular stockade, colloquially termed the “Roundhouse.” The officials of Sevieria slept there.

High towers of bamboo were placed every half-mile along The River shore. Torches flamed all night long on platforms from which sentinels kept a lookout for invaders.

After scrutinizing the shadows under the trees, Burton walked a few steps to the hut from which the groans and shouts had come.

He pushed the grass curtain aside. The starlight fell through the open window on the face of the sleeper. Burton hissed in surprise. The light revealed the blondish hair and the broad features of a youth he recognized.

Burton moved slowly on bare feet. The sleeper groaned and threw one arm over his face and half-turned. Burton stopped, then resumed his stealthy progress. He placed the assegai on the ground, drew his dagger, and gently thrust the point against the hollow of the youth’s throat. The arm flopped over; the eyes opened and stared into Burton’s. Burton clamped his hand over the man’s open mouth.

“Hermann Göring! Don’t move or try to yell! I’ll kill you!”

Göring’s light-blue eyes looked dark in the shadows, but the paleness of his terror shone out. He quivered and started to sit up, then sank back as the flint dug into his skin.

“How long have you been here?” Burton said.

“Who…?” Göring said in English, then his eyes opened even wider. “Richard Burton? Am I dreaming? Is that you?”

Burton could smell the dreamgum on Göring’s breath and the sweat-soaked mat on which he lay. The German was much thinner than the last time he had seen him.

Göring said, “I don’t know how long I’ve been here. What time is it?”

“About an hour until dawn, I’d say. It’s the day after Resurrection Celebration.”

“Then I’ve been here three days. Could I have a drink of water? My throat’s dry as a sarcophagus.”

“No wonder. You’re a living sarcophagus—if you’re addicted to dreamgum.”

Burton stood up, gesturing with the assegai at a fired-clay pot on a little bamboo table nearby. “You can drink if you want to. But don’t try anything.”

Göring rose slowly and staggered to the table. “I’m too weak to give you a fight even if I wanted to.” He drank noisily from the pot and then picked up an apple from the table. He took a bite, and then said, “What’re you doing here? I thought I was rid of you.”

“You answer my question first,” Burton said, “and be quick about it. You pose a problem that I don’t like, you know.”

20

Göring started chewing, stopped, stared, then said, “Why should I? I don’t have any authority here, and I couldn’t do anything to you if I did. I’m just a guest here. Damned decent people, these; they haven’t bothered me at all except to ask if I’m all right now and then. Though I don’t know how long they’ll let me stay without earning my keep.”

“You haven’t left the hut?” Burton said. “Then who charged your grail for you? How’d you get so much dreamgum?”

Göring smiled slyly. “I had a big collection from the last place I stayed; somewhere about a thousand miles up The River.”

“Doubtless taken forcibly from some poor slaves,” Burton said. “But if you were doing so well there, why did you leave?”

Göring began to weep. Tears ran down his face, and over his collarbones and down his chest, and his shoulders shook.

“I…I had to get out. I wasn’t any good to the others. I was losing my hold over them—spending too much time drinking, smoking marijuana, and chewing dreamgum. They said I was too soft myself. They would have killed me or made me a slave. So I sneaked out one night…took the boat. I got away all right and kept going until I put into here. I traded part of my supply to Sevier for two weeks’ sanctuary.”

Burton stared curiously at Göring.

“You knew what would happen if you took too much gum,” he said. “Nightmares, hallucinations, delusions. Total mental and physical deterioration. You must have seen it happen to others.”

“I was a morphine addict on Earth!” Göring cried. “I struggled with it, and I won out for a long time. Then, when things began to go badly for the Third Reich—and even worse for myself—when Hitler began picking on me, I started taking drugs again!”

He paused, then continued, “But here, when I woke up to a new life, in a young body, when it looked as if I had an eternity of life and youth ahead of me, when there was no stern God in Heaven or Devil in Hell to stop me, I thought I could do exactly as I pleased and get away with it. I would become even greater than the Führer! That little country in which you first found me was to be only the beginning! I could see my empire stretching for thousands of miles up and down The River, on both sides of the valley. I would have been the ruler of ten times the subjects that Hitler ever dreamed of!”

He began weeping again, then paused to take another drink of water, then put a piece of the dreamgum in his mouth. He chewed, his face becoming more relaxed and blissful with each second.

Göring said, “I kept having nightmares of you plunging the spear into my belly. When I woke up, my belly would hurt as if a flint had gone into my guts. So I’d take gum to remove the hurt and the humiliation. At first, the gum helped. I was great. I was master of the world, Hitler, Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Alexander, Genghis Khan, all rolled into one. I was chief again of von Richthofen’s Red Death Squadron; those were happy days, the happiest of my life in many ways. But the euphoria soon gave way to hideousness. I plunged into hell; I saw myself accusing myself and behind the accuser a million others. Not myself but the victims of that great and glorious hero, that obscene madman Hitler, whom I worshipped so. And in whose name I committed so many crimes.”

“You admit you were a criminal?” Burton said. “That’s a story different than the one you used to give me. Then you said you were justified in all you did, and you were betrayed by the….”

He stopped, realizing that he had been sidetracked from his original purpose. “That you should be haunted with the specter of a conscience is rather incredible. But perhaps that explains what has puzzled the puritans—why liquor, tobacco, marijuana, and dreamgum were offered in the grails along with food. At least, dreamgum seems to be a gift booby-trapped with danger to those who abuse it.”

He stepped closer to Göring. The German’s eyes were half-closed, and his jaw hung open.

“You know my identity. I am traveling under a pseudonym, with good reason. You remember Spruce, one of your slaves? After you were killed, he was revealed, quite by accident, as one of those who somehow resurrected all the dead of humanity. Those we call the Ethicals, for lack of a better term. Göring, are you listening?”

Göring nodded.

“Spruce killed himself before we could get out of him all we wanted to know. Later, some of his compatriots came to our area and temporarily put everybody to sleep—probably with a gas—intending to take me away to wherever Their headquarters are. But They missed me. I was off on a trading trip up The River. When I returned, I realized They were after me, and I’ve been running ever since. Göring, do you hear me?”

Burton slapped him savagely on his cheek. Göring said, “Ach!” and jumped back and held the side of his face. His eyes were open, and he was grimacing.

“I heard you!” he snarled. “It just didn’t seem worthwhile to answer back. Nothing seemed worthwhile, nothing except floating away, far from….”

“Shut up and listen!” Burton said. “The Ethicals have men everywhere looking for me. I can’t afford to have you alive, do you realize that? I can’t trust you. Even if you were a friend, you couldn’t be trusted. You’re a gummer!”

Göring giggled, stepped up to Burton and tried to put his arms around Burton’s neck. Burton pushed him back so hard that he staggered up against the table and only kept from falling by clutching its edges.

“This is very amusing,” Göring said. “The day I got here, a man asked me if I’d seen you. He described you in detail and gave your name. I told him I knew you well—too well, and that I hoped I’d never see you again, not unless I had you in my power, that is. He said I should notify him if I saw you again. He’d make it worth my while.”

Burton wasted no time. He strode up to Göring and seized him with both hands. They were small and delicate, but Göring winced with pain.

He said, “What’re you going to do, kill me again?”

“Not if you tell me the name of the man who asked you about me. Otherwise….”

“Go ahead and kill me!” Göring said. “So what? I’ll wake up somewhere else, thousands of miles from here, far out of your reach.”

Burton pointed at a bamboo box in a corner of the hut. Guessing that it held Göring’s supply of gum, he said, “And you’d also wake up without that! Where else could you get so much on such short notice?”

“Damn you!” Göring shouted, and tried to tear himself loose to get to the box.

“Tell me his name!” Burton said. “Or I’ll take the gum and throw it in The River!”

“Agneau. Roger Agneau. He sleeps in a hut just outside the Roundhouse.”

“I’ll deal with you later,” Burton said, and chopped Göring on the side of the neck with the edge of his palm.

He turned, and he saw a man crouching outside the entrance to the hut. The man straightened up and was off. Burton ran out after him; in a minute both were in the tall pines and oaks of the hills. His quarry disappeared in the waist-high grass.

Burton slowed to a trot, caught sight of a patch of white—starlight on bare skin—and was after the fellow. He hoped that the Ethical would not kill himself at once, because he had a plan for extracting information if he could knock him out at once. It involved hypnosis, but he would have to catch the Ethical first. It was possible that the man had some sort of wireless imbedded in his body and was even now in communication with his compatriots—wherever They were. If so, They would come in Their flying machines, and he would be lost.

He stopped. He had lost his quarry and the only thing to do now was to rouse Alice and the others and run. Perhaps this time they should take to the mountains and hide there for a while.

But first he would go to Agneau’s hut. There was little chance that Agneau would be there, but it was certainly worth the effort to make sure.

21

Burton arrived within sight of the hut just in time to glimpse the back of a man entering it. Burton circled to come up from the side where the darkness of the hills and the trees scattered along the plain gave him some concealment. Crouching, he ran until he was at the door to the hut.

He heard a loud cry some distance behind him and whirled to see Göring staggering toward him. He was crying out in German to Agneau, warning him that Burton was just outside. In one hand he held a long spear which he brandished at the Englishman.

Burton turned and hurled himself against the flimsy bamboo-slat door. His shoulder drove into it and broke it from its wooden hinges. The door flew inward and struck Agneau, who had been standing just behind it. Burton, the door, and Agneau fell to the floor with Agneau under the door.

Burton rolled off the door, got up, and jumped again with both bare feet on the wood. Agneau screamed and then became silent. Burton heaved the door to one side to find his quarry unconscious and bleeding from the nose. Good! Now if the noise didn’t bring the watch and if he could deal quickly enough with Göring, he could carry out his plan.

He looked up just in time to see the starlight on the long black object hurtling at him.

He threw himself to one side, and the spear plunged into the dirt floor with a thump. Its shaft vibrated like a rattlesnake preparing to strike.

Burton stepped into the doorway, estimated Göring’s distance, and charged. His assegai plunged into the belly of the German. Göring threw his hands up in the air, screamed, and fell on his side. Burton hoisted Agneau’s limp body on his shoulder and carried him out of the hut.

By then there were shouts from the Roundhouse. Torches were flaring up; the sentinel on the nearest watchtower was bellowing. Göring was sitting on the ground, bent over, clutching the shaft close to the wound.

He looked gape-mouthed at Burton and said, “You did it again! You….”

He fell over on his face, the death rattle in his throat.

Agneau returned to a frenzied consciousness. He twisted himself out of Burton’s grip and fell to the ground. Unlike Göring, he made no noise. He had as much reason to be silent as Burton—more perhaps. Burton was so surprised that he was left standing with the fellow’s loin-towel clutched in his hand. Burton started to throw it down but felt something stiff and square within the lining of the towel. He transferred the cloth to his left hand, yanked the assegai from the corpse, and ran after Agneau.

The Ethical had launched one of the bamboo canoes beached along the shore. He paddled furiously out into the starlit waters, glancing frequently behind him. Burton raised the assegai behind his shoulder and hurled it. It was a short, thick-shafted weapon, designed for infighting and not as a javelin. But if flew straight and came down at the end of its trajectory in Agneau’s back. The Ethical fell forward and at an angle and tipped the narrow craft over. The canoe turned upside down. Agneau did not reappear.

Burton swore. He had wanted to capture Agneau alive, but he was damned if he would permit the Ethical to escape. There was a chance that Agneau had not contacted other Ethicals yet.

He turned back toward the guest huts. Drums were beating up and down along the shore, and people with burning torches were hastening toward the Roundhouse. Burton stopped a woman and asked if he could borrow her torch a moment. She handed it to him but spouted questions at him. He answered that he thought the Choctaws across The River were making a raid. She hurried off toward the assembly before the stockade.

Burton drove the pointed end of the torch into the soft dirt of the bank and examined the towel he had snatched from Agneau. On the inside, just above the hard square in the lining, was a seam sealed with two thin magnetic strips, easily opened. He took the object out of the lining and looked at it by the torchlight.

For a long time he squatted by the shifting light, unable to stop looking or to subdue an almost paralyzing astonishment. A photograph, in this world of no cameras, was unheard-of. But a photograph of him was even more incredible, as was the fact that the picture had not been taken on this world! It had to have been made on Earth, that Earth lost now in the welter of stars somewhere in the blazing sky and in God only knew how many thousands of years of time.

Impossibility piled on impossibility! But it was taken at a time and at a place when he knew for certain that no camera had fixed upon him and preserved his image. His mustachios had been removed but the retoucher had not bothered to opaque the background nor his clothing. There he was, caught miraculously from the waist up and imprisoned in a flat piece of some material. Flat! When he turned the square, he saw his profile come into view. If he held it almost at right angles to the eye, he could get a three-quarters profile-view of himself.

“In 1848,” he muttered to himself. “When I was a twenty-seven-year-old subaltern in the East Indian Army. And those are the blue mountains of Goa. This must have been taken when I was convalescing there. But, my God, how? By whom? And how would the Ethicals manage to have it in their possession now?”

Agneau had evidently carried this photo as a mnemonic in his quest for Burton. Probably every one of the hunters had one just like it, concealed in his towel. Up and down The River They were looking for him; there might be thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Them. Who knew how many agents They had available or how desperately They wanted him or why They wanted him?

After replacing the photo in the towel, he turned to go back to the hut. And at that moment, his gaze turned toward the top of the mountains—those unscalable heights that bounded The Rivervalley on both sides.

He saw something flicker against a bright sheet of cosmic gas. It appeared for only the blink of an eyelid, then was gone.

A few seconds later, it came out of nothing, was revealed as a dark hemispherical object, then disappeared again.

A second flying craft showed itself briefly, reappeared at a lower elevation, and then was gone like the first.

The Ethicals would take him away, and the people of Sevieria would wonder what had made them fall asleep for an hour or so.

He did not have time to return to the hut and wake up the others. If he waited a moment longer, he would be trapped.

He turned and ran into The River and began swimming toward the other shore, a mile and a half away. But he had gone no more than forty yards when he felt the presence of some huge bulk above. He turned on his back to stare upward. There was only the soft glare of the stars above. Then, out of the air, fifty feet above him, a disk with a diameter of about sixty feet cut out a section of the sky. It disappeared almost immediately, came into sight again only twenty feet above him.

So They had some means of seeing at a distance in the night and had spotted him in his flight.

“You jackals!” he shouted at them. “You’ll not get me anyway!”

He upended and dived and swam straight downward. The water became colder, and his eardrums began to hurt. Although his eyes were open, he could see nothing. Suddenly, he was pushed by a wall of water, and he knew that the pressure came from displacement by a large object.

The craft had plunged down after him.

There was only one way out. They would have his dead body, but that would be all. He could escape Them again, be alive somewhere on The River to outwit Them again and strike back at Them.

He opened his mouth and breathed in deeply through both his nose and his mouth.

The water choked him. Only by a strong effort of will did he keep from closing his lips and trying to fight back against the death around him. He knew with his mind that he would live again, but the cells of his body did not know it. They were striving for life at this very moment, not in the rationalized future. And they forced from his water-choked throat a cry of despair.

22

Yaaaaaaaah!”

The cry raised him off the grass as if he had bounced up off a trampoline. Unlike the first time he had been resurrected, he was not weak and bewildered. He knew what to expect. He would wake on the grassy banks of The River near a grailstone. But he was not prepared for these giants battling around him.

His first thought was to find a weapon. There was nothing at hand except the grail that always appeared with a resurrectee and the pile of towels of various sizes, colors, and thicknesses. He took one step, seized the handle of the grail, and waited. If he had to, he would use the grail as a club. It was light, but it was practically indestructible and very hard. However, the monsters around him looked as if they could take a battering all day and not feel a thing.

Most of them were at least eight feet tall, some were surely over nine; their massively muscled shoulders were over three feet broad. Their bodies were human, or nearly so, and their white skins were covered with long reddish or brownish hairs. They were not as hairy as a chimpanzee but more so than any man he had ever seen, and he had known some remarkably hirsute human beings.

But the faces gave them an unhuman and frightening aspect, especially since all were snarling with battle rage. Below a low forehead was a bloom of bone that ran without indentation above the eyes and then continued around to form O’s. Though the eyes were as large as his, they looked small compared to the broad face in which they were set. The cheekbones billowed out and then curved sharply inward. The tremendous noses gave the giants the appearance of proboscis monkeys.

At another time, Burton might have been amused by them. Not now. The roars that tore out of their more-than-gorilla-sized chests were deep as a lion’s, and the huge teeth would have made a Kodiak bear think twice before attacking. Their fists, large as his head, held clubs as thick and as long as wagon poles or stone axes. They swung their weapons at each other, and when they struck flesh, bones broke with cracks as loud as wood splitting. Sometimes, the clubs broke, too.

Burton had a moment in which to look around. The light was weak. The sun had only half risen above the peaks across The River. The air was far colder than any he had felt on this planet except during his defeated attempts to climb to the top of the perpendicular ranges.

Then one of the victors of a combat looked around for another enemy and saw him.

His eyes widened. For a second, he looked as startled as Burton had when he had first opened his eyes. Perhaps he had never seen such a creature as Burton before, any more than Burton had seen one like him. If so, he did not take long to get over his surprise. He bellowed, jumped over the mangled body of his foe, and ran toward Burton, raising an axe that could have felled an elephant.

Burton also ran, his grail in one hand. If he were to lose that, he might as well die now. Without it, he would starve or have to eke out on fish and bamboo sprouts.

He almost made it. An opening appeared before him, and he sped between two titans, their arms around each other and each straining to throw over the other, and another who was backing away before the rain of blows delivered by the club of a fourth. Just as he was almost through, the two wrestlers toppled over on him.

He was going swiftly enough that he was not caught directly under them, but the flailing arm of one struck his left heel. So hard was the blow, it smashed his foot against the ground and stopped him instantly. He fell forward and began to scream. His foot must have been broken, and he had torn muscles throughout his leg.

Nevertheless, he tried to rise and to hobble on to The River. Once in it, he could swim away, if he did not faint from the agony. He took two hops on his right foot, only to be seized from behind.

He flew up into the air, whirling around, and was caught before he began his descent.

The titan was holding him with one hand at arm’s length, the enormous and powerful fist clutched around Burton’s chest. Burton could hardly breathe; his ribs threatened to cave in.

Despite all this, he had not dropped his grail. Now he struck it against the giant’s shoulder.

Lightly, as if brushing off a fly, the giant tapped the metal container with his axe, and the grail was torn from Burton’s grip.

The behemoth grinned and bent his arm to bring Burton in closer. Burton weighed one hundred and eighty pounds, but the arm did not quiver under the strain.

For a moment, Burton looked directly into the pale blue eyes sunk in the bony circles. The nose was lined with many broken veins. The lips protruded because of the bulging prognathous jaws beneath—not, as he had first thought, because the lips were so thick.

Then the titan bellowed and lifted Burton up above his head. Burton hammered the huge arm with his fists, knowing that it was in vain but unwilling to submit like a caught rabbit. Even as he did so, he noted, though not with the full attention of his mind, several things about the scene.

The sun had been just rising above the mountain peaks when he had first awakened. Although the time passed since he had jumped to his feet was only a few minutes, the sun should have cleared the peaks. It had not; it hung at exactly the same height as when he had first seen it.

Moreover, the upward slant of the valley permitted a view for at least four miles. The grailstone by him was the last one. Beyond it was only the plain and The River.

This was the end of the line—or the beginning of The River.

There was no time nor desire for him to appreciate what these meant. He merely noted them during the passage between pain, rage, and terror. Then, as the giant prepared to bring his axe around to splinter Burton’s skull, the giant stiffened and shrieked. To Burton, it was like being next to a locomotive whistle. The grip loosened, and Burton fell to the ground. For a moment, he passed out from the pain in his foot.

When he regained consciousness, he had to grind his teeth to keep from yelling again. He groaned and sat up, though not without a race of fire up his leg that made the feeble daylight grow almost black. The battle was roaring all around him, but he was in a little corner of inactivity. By him lay the tree-trunk-thick corpse of the titan who had been about to kill him. The back of his skull, which looked massive enough to resist a battering ram, was caved in.

Around the elephantine corpse crawled another casualty, on all fours. Seeing him, Burton forgot his pain for a moment. The horribly injured man was Hermann Göring.

Both of them had been resurrected at the same spot. There was no time to think about the implications of the coincidence. His pain began to come back. Moreover, Göring started to talk.

Not that he looked as if he had much talk left in him or much time left to do it in. Blood covered him. His right eye was gone. The corner of his mouth was ripped back to his ear. One of his hands was smashed flat. A rib was sticking through the skin. How he had managed to stay alive, let alone crawl, was beyond Burton’s understanding.

“You…you!” Göring said hoarsely in German, and he collapsed. A fountain poured out of his mouth and over Burton’s legs; his eyes glazed.

Burton wondered if he would ever know what he had intended to say. Not that it really mattered. He had more vital things to think about.

About ten yards from him, two titans were standing with their backs to him. Both were breathing hard, apparently resting for a moment before they jumped back into the fight. Then one spoke to the other.

There was no doubt about it. The giant was not just uttering cries. He was using a language.

Burton did not understand it, but he knew it was speech. He did not need the modulated, distinctly syllabic reply of the other to confirm his recognition.

So these were not some type of prehistoric ape but a species of subhuman men. They must have been unknown to the twentieth-century science of Earth, since his friend, Frigate, had described to him all the fossils known in A.D. 2008.

He lay down with his back against the fallen giant’s Gothic ribs and brushed some of the long reddish sweaty hairs from his face. He fought nausea and the agony of his foot and the torn muscles of his leg. If he made too much noise, he might attract those two, and they would finish the job. But what if they did? With his wounds, in a land of such monsters, what chance did he have of surviving?

Worse than his agony of foot, almost, was the thought that, on his first trip on what he called The Suicide Express, he had reached his goal.

He had only an estimated one chance in ten million of arriving at this area, and he might never have made it if he had drowned himself ten thousand times. Yet he had had a fantastically good fortune. It might never occur again. And he was to lose it and very soon.

The sun was moving half-revealed along the tops of the mountains across The River. This was the place that he had speculated would exist; he had come here first shot. Now, as his eyesight failed and the pain lessened, he knew that he was dying. The sickness was born from more than the shattered bones in his foot. He must be bleeding inside.

He tried to rise once more. He would stand, if only on one foot, and shake his fist at the mocking fates and curse them. He would die with a curse on his lips.

23

The red wing of dawn was lightly touching his eyes.

He rose to his feet, knowing that his wounds would be healed and he would be whole again but not quite believing it. Near him was a grail and a pile of six neatly folded towels of various sizes, colors, and thicknesses.

Twelve feet away, another man, also naked, was rising from the short bright-green grass. Burton’s skin grew cold. The blondish hair, broad face, and light-blue eyes were those of Hermann Göring.

The German looked as surprised as Burton. He spoke slowly, as if coming out of a deep sleep. “There’s something very wrong here.”

“Something foul indeed,” Burton replied. He knew no more of the pattern of resurrection along The River than any other man. He had never seen a resurrection, but he had had them described to him by those who had. At dawn, just after the sun topped the unclimbable mountains, a shimmering appeared in the air beside a grailstone. In the flicker of a bird’s wing, the distortion solidified, and a naked man or woman or child appeared from nowhere on the grass by the bank. Always the indispensable grail and the towels were by the “lazarus.”

Along a conceivably ten- to twenty-million-mile-long Rivervalley in which an estimated thirty-five to thirty-six billion lived, a million could die per day. It was true that there were no diseases (other than mental) but, though statistics were lacking, a million were probably killed every twenty-four hours by the myriads of wars between the one million or so little states, by crimes of passion, by suicides, by executions of criminals, and by accidents. There was a steady and numerous traffic of those undergoing the “little resurrection,” as it was called.

But Burton had never heard of two dying in the same place and at the same time being resurrected together. The process of selection of area for the new life was random—or so he had always thought.

One such occurrence could conceivably take place, although the probabilities were one in twenty million. But two such, one immediately after the other, was a miracle.

Burton did not believe in miracles. Nothing happened that could not be explained by physical principles—if you knew all the facts.

He did not know them, so he would not worry about the “coincidence” at the moment. The solution to another problem was more demanding. That was, what was he to do about Göring?

The man knew him and could identify him to any Ethicals searching for him.

Burton looked quickly around him and saw a number of men and women approaching in a seemingly friendly manner. There was time for a few words with the German.

“Göring, I can kill you or myself. But I don’t want to do either—at the moment, anyway. You know why you’re dangerous to me. I shouldn’t take a chance with you, you treacherous hyena. But there’s something different about you, something I can’t put my fingers on. But….”

Göring, who was notorious for his resilience, seemed to be coming out of his shock. He grinned slyly and said, “I do have you over the barrel, don’t I?”

Seeing Burton’s snarl, he hastily put up one hand and said, “But I swear to you I won’t reveal your identity to anyone! Or do anything to hurt you! Maybe we’re not friends, but we at least know each other, and we’re in a land of strangers. It’s good to have one familiar face by your side. I know, I’ve suffered too long from loneliness, from desolation of the spirit. I thought I’d go mad. That’s partly the reason I took to the dreamgum. Believe me, I won’t betray you.”

Burton did not believe him. He did think, however, that he could trust him for a while. Göring would want a potential ally, at least until he took the measure of the people in this area and knew what he could or could not do. Besides, Göring might have changed for the better.

No, Burton said to himself. No. There you go again. Verbal cynic though you are, you’ve always been too forgiving, too ready to overlook injury to yourself and to give your injurer another chance. Don’t be a fool again, Burton.

Three days later, he was still uncertain about Göring.

Burton had taken the identity of Abdul ibn Harun, a nineteenth-century citizen of Cairo, Egypt. He had several reasons for adopting the guise. One was that he spoke excellent Arabic, knew the Cairo dialect of that period, and had an excuse to cover his head with a towel wrapped as a turban. He hoped this would help disguise his appearance. Göring did not say a word to anybody to contradict the camouflage. Burton was fairly sure of this because he and Göring spent most of their time together. They were quartered in the same hut until they adjusted to the local customs and went through their period of probation. Part of this was intensive military training. Burton had been one of the greatest swordsmen of the nineteenth century and also knew every inflection of fighting with weapons or with hands. After a display of his ability in a series of tests, he was welcomed as a recruit. In fact, he was promised that he would be an instructor when he learned the language well enough.

Göring got the respect of the locals almost as swiftly. Whatever his other faults, he did not lack courage. He was strong and proficient with arms, jovial, likeable when it suited his purpose, and was not far behind Burton in gaining fluency in the language. He was quick to gain and to use authority, as befitted the ex-Reichmarschal of Hitler’s Germany.

This section of the western shore was populated largely by speakers of a language totally unknown even to Burton, a master linguist both on Earth and on the Riverplanet. When he had learned enough to ask questions, he deduced that they must have lived somewhere in Central Europe during the Early Bronze Age. They had some curious customs, one of which was copulation in public. This was interesting enough to Burton, who had co-founded the Royal Anthropological Society in London in 1863 and who had seen strange things during his explorations on Earth. He did not participate, but neither was he horrified.

A custom he did adopt joyfully was that of stained whiskers. The males resented the fact that their face hair had been permanently removed by the Resurrectors, just as their prepuces had been cut off. They could do nothing about the latter outrage, but they could correct the former to a degree. They smeared their upper lips and chins with a dark liquid made from finely ground charcoal, fish glue, oak tannin, and several other ingredients. The more dedicated used the dye as a tattoo and underwent a painful and long-drawn-out pricking with a sharp bamboo needle.

Now Burton was doubly disguised, yet he had put himself at the mercy of the man who might betray him at the first opportunity. He wanted to attract an Ethical but did not want the Ethical to be certain of his identity.

Burton wanted to make sure that he could get away in time before being scooped up in the net. It was a dangerous game, like walking a tightrope over a pit of hungry wolves, but he wanted to play it. He would run only when it became absolutely necessary. The rest of the time, he would be the hunted hunting the hunter.

Yet the vision of the Dark Tower, or the Big Grail, was always on the horizon of every thought. Why play cat and mouse when he might be able to storm the very ramparts of the castle within which he presumed the Ethicals had headquarters? Or, if stormed was not the correct description, steal into the tower, effect entrance as a mouse does into a house—or a castle. While the cats were looking elsewhere, the mouse would be sneaking into the Tower, and there the mouse might turn into a tiger.

At this thought, he laughed, getting curious stares from his two hutmates: Göring and the seventeenth-century Englishman, John Collop. His laugh was half-ridicule of himself at the tiger image. What made him think that he, one man, could do anything to hurt the Planet-Shapers, Resurrectors of billions of dead, Feeders and Maintainers of those summoned back to life? He twisted his hands and knew that within them, and within the brain that guided them, could be the downfall of the Ethicals. What this fearful thing was that he harbored within himself, he did not know. But They feared him. If he could only find out why…

His laugh was only partly self-ridicule. The other half of him believed that he was a tiger among men. As a man thinks, so is he, he muttered.

Göring said, “You have a very peculiar laugh, my friend. Somewhat feminine for such a masculine man. It’s like…like a thrown rock skipping over a lake of ice. Or like a jackal.”

“I have something of the jackal and hyena in me,” Burton replied. “So my detractors maintained—and they were right. But I am more than that.”

He rose from his bed and began to exercise to work the sleep-rust from his muscles. In a few minutes, he would go with the others to a grailstone by the Riverbank and charge his grail. Afterward, there would be an hour of policing the area. Then drill, followed by instruction in the spear, the club, the sling, the obsidian-edged sword, the bow and arrow, the flint axe, and in fighting with bare hands and feet. An hour for rest and talk and lunch. Then an hour in a language class. A two-hour work stint in helping build the ramparts that marked the boundaries of this little state. A half-hour rest, then the obligatory mile run to build stamina. Dinner from the grails, and the evening off except for those who had guard duty or other tasks.

Such a schedule and such activities were being duplicated in tiny states up and down The River’s length. Almost everywhere, mankind was at war or preparing for it. The citizens must keep in shape and know how to fight to the best of their abilities. The exercises also kept the citizens occupied. No matter how monotonous the martial life, it was better than sitting around wondering what to do for amusement. Freedom from worry about food, rent, bills, and the gnatlike chores and duties that had kept Earthmen busy and fretful was not all a blessing. There was the great battle against ennui, and the leaders of each state were occupied trying to think up ways to keep their people busy.

It should have been paradise in Rivervalley, but it was war, war, war. Other things aside, however, war was, in this place, good (according to some)! It gave savor to life and erased boredom. Man’s greediness and aggressiveness had its worthwhile side.

After dinner, every man and woman was free to do what he wished, as long as he broke no local laws. He could barter the cigarettes and liquor provided by his grail or the fish he’d caught in The River for a better bow and arrows; shields; bowls and cups; tables and chairs; bamboo flutes; clay trumpets; human or fishskin drums; rare stones (which really were rare); necklaces made of the beautifully articulated and colored bones of the deep-River fish, or jade or of carved wood; obsidian mirrors; sandals and shoes; charcoal drawings; the rare and expensive bamboo paper; ink and fishbone pens; hats made from the long tough-fibered hill-grass; bull-roarers; little wagons on which to ride down the hillsides; harps made from wood with strings fashioned from the gut of the “dragonfish”; rings of oak for fingers and toes; clay statuettes; and other devices, useful or ornamental.

Later, of course, there was the love-making Burton and his hutmates were denied, for the time being. Only when they had been accepted as full citizens would they be allowed to move into separate houses and live with a woman.

John Collop was a short, slight youth with long yellow hair, a narrow but pleasant face, and large blue eyes with very long, upcurving, black eyelashes. In his first conversation with Burton, he had said, after introducing himself, “I was delivered from the darkness of my mother’s womb—who else?—into the light of God of Earth in 1625. Far too quickly, I descended again into the womb of Mother Nature, confident in the hope of resurrection and not disappointed, as you see. Though I must confess that this afterlife is not that which the parsons led me to expect. But then, how should they know the truth, poor blind devils leading the blind!”

It was not long before Collop told him that he was a member of the Church of the Second Chance.

Burton’s eyebrows rose. He had encountered this new religion at many places along The River. Burton, though an infidel, made it his business to investigate thoroughly every religion. Know a man’s faith, and you knew at least half the man. Know his wife, and you knew the other half.

The Church had a few simple tenets, some based on fact, most on surmise and hope and wish. In this they differed from no religions born on Earth. But the Second Chancers had one advantage over any Terrestrial religion. They had no difficulty in proving that dead men could be raised—not only once but often.

“And why has mankind been given a Second Chance?” Collop said in his low, earnest voice. “Does he deserve it? No. With few exceptions, men are a mean, miserable, petty, vicious, narrow-minded, exceedingly egotistic, generally disputing, and disgusting lot. Watching them, the gods—or God—should vomit. But in this divine spew is a clot of compassion, if you will pardon me for using such imagery. Man, however base, has a silver wire of the divine in him. It is no idle phrase that man was made in God’s image. There is something worth saving in the worst of us, and out of this something a new man may be fashioned.

“Whoever has given us this new opportunity to save our souls knows this truth. We have been placed here in this Rivervalley—on this alien planet under alien skies—to work out our salvation. What our time limit is, I do not know nor do the leaders of my Church even speculate. Perhaps it is forever, or it may be only a hundred years or a thousand. But we must make use of whatever time we do have, my friend.”

Burton said, “Weren’t you sacrificed on the altar of Odin by Norse who clung to the old religion, even if this world isn’t the Valhalla they were promised by their priests? Don’t you think you wasted your time and breath by preaching to them? They believe in the same old gods, the only difference in their theology now being some adjustments they’ve made to conditions here. Just as you have clung to your old faith.”

“The Norse have no explanations for their new surroundings,” Collop said, “but I do. I have a reasonable explanation, one which the Norse will eventually come to accept, to believe in as fervently as I do. They killed me, but some more persuasive member of the Church will come along and talk to them before they stretch him out in the wooden lap of their wooden idol and stab him in the heart. If he does not talk them out of him, the next missionary will.

“It was true, on Earth, that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church. It is even truer here. If you kill a man to shut his mouth, he pops up someplace elsewhere along The River. And a man who has been martyred a hundred thousand miles away comes along to replace the previous martyr. The Church will win out in the end. Then men will cease these useless, hate-generating wars and begin the real business, the only worthwhile business, that of gaining salvation.”

“What you say about the martyrs is true about anyone with an idea,” Burton said. “A wicked man who’s killed also pops up to commit his evil elsewhere.”

“Good will prevail; the truth always wins out,” Collop said.

“I don’t know how restricted your mobility was on Earth or how long your life,” Burton said, “but both must have been very limited to make you so blind. I know better.”

Collop said, “The Church is not founded on faith alone. It has something very factual, very substantial, on which to base its teachings. Tell me, my friend Abdul, have you ever heard of anybody being resurrected dead?”

“A paradox!” Burton cried. “What do you mean—resurrected dead?”

“There are at least three authenticated cases and four more of which the Church has heard but has not been able to validate. These are men and women who were killed at one place on The River and translated to another. Strangely, their bodies were re-created, but they were without the spark of life. Now, why was this?”

“I can’t imagine!” Burton said. “You tell me. I listen, for you speak as one with authority.”

He could imagine, since he had heard the same story elsewhere. But he wanted to learn if Collop’s story matched the others. It was the same, even to the names of the dead lazari. The story was that these men and women had been identified by those who had known them well on Earth. They were all saintly or near-saintly people; in fact, one of them had been canonized on Earth. The theory was that they had attained that state of sanctity which made it no longer necessary to go through the “purgatory” of the Riverplanet. Their souls had gone on to…someplace…and left the excess baggage of their physical bodies behind.

Soon, so the Church said, more would reach this state. And their bodies would be left behind. Eventually, given enough time, the Rivervalley would become depopulated. All would have shed themselves of their visciousnesses and hates and would have become illuminated with the love of mankind and of God. Even the most depraved, those who seemed to be utterly lost, would be able to abandon their physical beings. All that was needed to attain this grace was love.

Burton sighed, laughed loudly, and said, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Another fairy tale to give men hope. The old religions have been discredited—although some refuse to face even that fact—so new ones must be invented.”

“It makes sense,” Collop said. “Do you have a better explanation of why we’re here?”

“Perhaps. I can make up fairy tales, too.”

As a matter of fact, Burton did have an explanation. However, he could not tell it to Collop. Spruce had told Burton something of the identity, history, and purpose of his group, the Ethicals. Much of what he had said agreed with Collop’s theology.

Spruce had killed himself before he had explained about the “soul.” Presumably, the “soul” had to be part of the total organization of resurrection. Otherwise, when the body had attained “salvation,” and no longer lived, there would be nothing to carry on the essential part of a man. Since the post-Terrestrial life could be explained in physical terms, the “soul” must also be a physical entity, not to be dismissed with the term “supernatural” as it had been on Earth.

There was much that Burton did not know. But he had had a glimpse into the workings of this Riverplanet that no other human being possessed.

With the little knowledge he did have, he planned to lever his way into more, to pry open the lid, and crawl inside the sanctum. To do so, he would attain the Dark Tower. The only way to get there swiftly was to take The Suicide Express. First, he must be discovered by an Ethical. Then he must overpower the Ethical, render him unable to kill himself, and somehow extricate more information from him.

Meanwhile, he continued to play the role of Abdul ibn Harun, translated and transplanted Egyptian physician of the nineteenth century, now a citizen of Bargawhwdzys. As such, he decided to join the Church of the Second Chance. He announced to Collop his disillusionment in Mahomet and his teachings, and so became Collop’s first convert in this area.

“Then you must swear not to take arms against any man nor to defend yourself physically, my dear friend,” Collop said.

Burton, outraged, said that he would allow no man to strike at him and go unharmed.

“’Tis not unnatural,” Collop said gently. “Contrary to habit, yes. But a man may become something other than he has been, something better—if he has the strength of will and the desire.”

Burton rapped out a violent no and stalked away. Collop shook his head sadly, but he continued to be as friendly as ever. Not without a sense of humor, he sometimes addressed Burton as his “five-minute convert,” not meaning the time it took to bring him into the fold but the time it took Burton to leave the fold.

At this time, Collop got his second convert, Göring. The German had had nothing but sneers and jibes for Collop. Then he began chewing dreamgum again, and the nightmares started.

For two nights he kept Collop and Burton awake with his groanings, his tossings, his screams. On the evening of the third day, he asked Collop if he would accept him into the Church. However, he had to make a confession. Collop must understand what sort of person he had been, both on Earth and on this planet.

Collop heard out the mixture of self-abasement and self-aggrandizement. Then he said, “Friend, I care not what you may have been. Only what you are and what you will be. I listened only because confession is good for the soul. I can see that you are deeply troubled, that you have suffered sorrow and grief for what you have done, yet take some pleasure in what you once were, a mighty figure among men. Much of what you told me I do not comprehend, because I know not much about your era. Nor does it matter. Only today and tomorrow need to be our concern; each day will take care of itself.”

It seemed to Burton not that Collop did not care what Göring had been but that he did not believe his story of Earthly glory and infamy. There were so many phonies that genuine heroes, or villains, had been depreciated. Thus, Burton had met three Jesus Christs, two Abrahams, four King Richard the Lion-Hearteds, six Attilas, a dozen Judases (only one of whom could speak Aramaic), a George Washington, two Lord Byrons, three Jesse Jameses, any number of Napoleons, a General Custer (who spoke with a heavy Yorkshire accent), a Finn MacCool (who did not know ancient Irish), a Tchaka (who spoke the wrong Zulu dialect), and a number of others who might or might not have been what they claimed to be.

Whatever a man had been on Earth, he had to reestablish himself here. This was not easy, because conditions were radically altered. The greats and the importants of Terra were constantly being humiliated in their claims and denied a chance to prove their identities.

To Collop, the humiliation was a blessing. First, humiliation, then humility, he would have said. And then comes humanity as a matter of course.

Göring had been trapped in the Great Design—as Burton termed it—because it was his nature to overindulge, especially with drugs. Knowing that the dreamgum was uprooting the dark things in his personal abyss, was spewing them up into the light, that he was being torn apart, fragmented, he still continued to chew as much as he could get. For a while, temporarily made healthful again with a new resurrection, he had been able to deny the call of the drug. But a few weeks after his arrival in this area, he had succumbed, and now the night was ripped apart with his shrieks of “Hermann Göring, I hate you!”

“If this continues,” Burton said to Collop, “he will go mad. Or he will kill himself again, or force someone to kill him, so that he can get away from himself. But the suicide will be useless, and it’s all to do over again. Tell me truly now, is this not hell?”

“Purgatory, rather,” Collop said. “Purgatory is hell with hope.”

24

Two months passed. Burton marked the days off on a pine stick notched with a flint knife. This was the fourteenth day of the seventh month of 5 A.R., the fifth year After the Resurrection. Burton tried to keep a calendar, for he was, among many other things, a chronicler. But it was difficult. Time did not mean much on The River. The planet had a polar axis that was always at ninety degrees to the ecliptic. There was no change of seasons, and the stars seemed to jostle each other and made identification of individual luminaries or of constellations impossible. So many and so bright were they that even the noonday sun at its zenith could not entirely dim the greatest of them. Like ghosts reluctant to retreat before daylight, they hovered in the burning air.

Nevertheless, man needs time as a fish needs water. If he does not have it, he will invent it; so to Burton, it was July 14, 5 A.R.

But Collop, like many, reckoned time as having continued from the year of his Terrestrial death. To him, it was A.D. 1667. He did not believe that his sweet Jesus had become sour. Rather, this River was the River Jordan; this valley, the vale beyond the shadow of death. He admitted that the afterlife was not that which he had expected. Yet it was evidence of the all-encompassing love of God for His creation. He had given all men, altogether undeserving of such a gift, another chance. If this world was not the New Jerusalem, it was a place prepared for its building. Here the bricks, which were the love of God, and the mortar, love for man, must be fashioned in this kiln and this mill: the planet of The River of The Valley.

Burton pooh-poohed the concept, but he could not help loving the little man. Collop was genuine; he was not stoking the furnace of his sweetness with leaves from a book or pages from a theology. He did not operate under forced draft. He burned with a flame that fed on his own being, and this being was love. Love even for the unlovable, the rarest and most difficult species of love.

He told Burton something of this Terrestrial life. He had been a doctor, a farmer, a liberal with unshakable faith in his religion, yet full of questions about his faith and the society of his time. He had written a plea for religious tolerance which had aroused both praise and damnation in his time. And he had been a poet, well-known for a short time, then forgotten.

Lord, let the faithless see
Miracles ceased, revive in me.
The leper cleansed, blind healed,
dead raised by Thee.

“My lines may have died, but their truth has not,” he said to Burton. He waved his hand to indicate the hills, The River, the mountains, the people. “As you may see if you open your eyes and do not persist in this stubborn myth of yours that this is the handiwork of men like us.”

He continued, “Or grant your premise. It still remains that these Ethicals are but doing the work of Their Creator.”

“I like better those other lines of yours,” Burton said.

Dull soul aspire;
Thou are not the Earth. Mount higher!
Heaven gave the spark;
to it return the fire.

Collop was pleased, not knowing that Burton was thinking of the lines in a different sense than that intended by the poet.

“Return the fire.”

That meant somehow getting into the Dark Tower, discovering the secrets of the Ethicals, and turning Their devices against Them. He did not feel gratitude because They had given him a second life. He was outraged that They should do this without his leave. If They wanted his thanks, why did They not tell him why They had given him another chance? What reason did They have for keeping Their motives in the dark? He would find out why. The spark They had restored in him would turn into a raging fire to burn Them.

He cursed the fate that had propelled him to a place so near the source of The River, hence so close to the Tower, and in a few minutes had carried him away again, back to some place in the middle of The River, millions of miles away from his goal. Yet, if he had been there once, he could get there again. Not by taking a boat, since the journey would consume at least forty years and probably more. He could also count on being captured and enslaved a thousand times over. And if he were killed along the way, he might find himself raised again far from his goal and have to start all over again.

On the other hand, given the seemingly random selection of resurrection, he might find himself once more near The River’s mouth. It was this that determined him to board The Suicide Express once more. However, even though he knew that his death would be only temporary, he found it difficult to take the necessary step. His mind told him that death was the only ticket, but his body rebelled. The cells’ fierce insistence on survival overcame his will.

For a while, he rationalized that he was interested in studying the customs and languages of the prehistorics among whom he was living. Then honesty triumphed, and he knew he was only looking for excuses to put off the Grim Moment. Despite this, he did not act.

Burton, Collop, and Göring were moved out of their bachelor barracks to take up the normal life of citizens. Each took up residence in a hut, and within a week had found a woman to live with him. Collop’s Church did not require celibacy. A member could take an oath of chastity if he wished to. But the Church reasoned that men and women had been Resurrected in bodies that retained the full sex of the original. (Or, if lacking on Earth, supplied here.) It was evident that the Makers of Resurrection had meant for sex to be used. It was well-known, though still denied by some, that sex had other functions than reproduction. So go ahead, youths, roll in the grass.

Another result of the inexorable logic of the Church (which, by the way, decried reason as being untrustworthy) was that any form of love was allowed, as long as it was voluntary and did not involve cruelty or force. Exploitation of children was forbidden. This was a problem that, given time, would cease to exist. In a few years all children would be adults.

Collop refused to have a hutmate solely to relieve his sexual tensions. He insisted on a woman whom he loved. Burton jibed at him for this, saying that it was a prerequisite easily—therefore cheaply—fulfilled. Collop loved all humanity; hence, he should theoretically take the first woman who would say yes to him.

“As a matter of fact, my friend,” Collop said, “that is exactly what happened.”

“It’s only a coincidence that she’s beautiful, passionate, and intelligent?” Burton said.

“Though I strive to be more than human, rather, to become a complete human, I am all-too-human,” Collop replied. He smiled. “Would you have me deliberately martyr myself by choosing an ugly shrew?”

“I’d think you more of a fool than I do even now,” Burton said. “As for me, all I require in a woman is beauty and affection. I don’t care a whit about her brains. And I prefer blonds. There’s a chord within me that responds to the fingers of a golden-haired woman.”

Göring took into his hut a Valkyrie, a tall, great-busted, wide-shouldered, eighteenth-century Swede. Burton wondered if she was a surrogate for Göring’s first wife, the sister-in-law of the Swedish explorer Count von Rosen. Göring admitted that she not only looked like his Karin but even had a voice similar to hers. He seemed to be very happy with her and she with him.

Then, one night, during the invariable early morning rain, Burton was ripped from a deep sleep.

He thought he had heard a scream, but all he could hear when he became fully awake was the explosion of thunder and the crack of nearby lightning. He closed his eyes, only to be jerked upright again. A woman had screamed in a nearby hut.

He jumped up, shoved aside the bamboo-slat door, and stuck his head outside. The cold rain hit him in the face. All was dark except for the mountains in the west, lit up by flashes of lightning. Then a bolt struck so close that he was deafened and dazzled. However, he did catch a glimpse of two ghostly white figures just outside Göring’s hut. The German had his hands locked around the throat of his woman, who was holding onto his wrists and trying to push him away.

Burton ran out, slipped on the wet grass, and fell. Just as he arose, another flash showed the woman on her knees, bending backward, and Göring’s distorted face above her. At the same time, Collop, wrapping a towel around his waist, came out of his hut. Burton got to his feet and, still silent, ran again. But Göring was gone. Burton knelt by Karla, felt her heart, and could detect no beat. Another glare of lightning showed him her face, mouth hanging open, eyes bulging.

He rose and shouted, “Göring! Where are you?”

Something struck the back of his head. He fell on his face.

Stunned, he managed to get to his hands and knees, only to be knocked flat again by another heavy blow. Half-conscious, he nevertheless rolled over on his back and raised his legs and hands to defend himself. Lightning revealed Göring standing above him with a club in one hand. His face was a madman’s.

Darkness sliced off the lightning. Something white and blurred leaped upon Göring out of the darkness. The two pale bodies went down onto the grass beside Burton and rolled over and over. They screeched like tomcats, and another flash of lightning showed them clawing at each other.

Burton staggered to his feet and lurched toward them but was knocked down by Collop’s body, hurled by Göring. Again Burton got up. Collop bounded to his feet and charged Göring. There was a loud crack, and Collop crumpled. Burton tried to run toward Göring. His legs refused to answer his demands; they took him off at an angle, away from his point of attack. Then another blast of light and noise showed Göring, as if caught in a photograph, suspended in the act of swinging the club at Burton.

Burton felt his arm go numb as it received the impact of the club. Now not only his legs but his left arm disobeyed him. Nevertheless he balled his right hand and tried to swing at Göring. There was another crack; his ribs felt as if they had become unhinged and were driven inward into his lung. His breath was knocked out of him, and once again he was on the cold wet grass.

Something fell by his side. Despite his agony, he reached out for it. The club was in his hand; Göring must have dropped it. Shuddering with each painful breath, he got to one knee. Where was the madman? Two shadows danced and blurred, merged and half-separated. The hut! His eyes were crossed. He wondered if he had a concussion of the brain, then forgot it as he saw Göring dimly in the illumination of a distant streak of lightning. Two Görings, rather. One seemed to accompany the other; the one on the left had his feet on the ground; the right one was treading on air.

Both had their hands held high up into the rain, as if they were trying to wash them. And when the two turned and came toward him, he understood that that was what they were trying to do. They were shouting in German (with a single voice), “Take the blood off my hands! Oh, God, wash it off!”

Burton stumbled toward Göring, his club held high. Burton meant to knock him out, but Göring suddenly turned and ran away. Burton followed him as best he could, down the hill, up another one, and then out onto the flat plain. The rains stopped, the thunder and lightning died, and within five minutes the clouds, as always, had cleared away. The starlight gleamed on Göring’s white skin.

Like a phantom he flitted ahead of his pursuer, seemingly bent upon getting to The River. Burton kept after him, although he wondered why he was doing so. His legs had regained most of their strength, and his vision was no longer double. Presently, he found Göring. He was squatting by The River and staring intently at the star-fractured waves.

Burton said, “Are you all right now?”

Göring was startled. He began to rise, then changed his mind. Groaning, he put his head down on his knees.

“I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t know why,” he said dully. “Karla was telling me she was moving out in the morning, said she couldn’t sleep with all the noise I made with my nightmares. And I was acting strangely. I begged her to stay; I told her I loved her very much. I’d die if she deserted me. She said she was fond of me, had been, rather, but she didn’t love me. Suddenly, it seemed that if I wanted to keep her, I’d have to kill her. She ran screaming out of the hut. You know the rest.”

“I intended to kill you,” Burton said. “But I can see you’re no more responsible than a madman. The people here won’t accept that excuse, though. You know what they’ll do to you; hang you upside down by your ankles and let you hang until you die.”

Göring cried, “I don’t understand it! What’s happening to me? Those nightmares! Believe me, Burton, if I’ve sinned, I’ve paid! But I can’t stop paying! My nights are hell, and soon my days will become hell, too! Then I’ll have only one way to get peace! I’ll kill myself! But it won’t do any good! I’ll wake up—then hell again!”

“Stay away from the dreamgum,” Burton said. “You’ll have to sweat it out. You can do it. You told me you overcame the morphine habit on Earth.”

Göring stood up and faced Burton. “That’s just it! I haven’t touched the gum since I came to this place!”

Burton said, “What? But I’ll swear…!”

“You assumed I was using the stuff because of the way I was acting! No, I have not had a bit of the gum! But it doesn’t make any difference!”

Despite his loathing of Göring, Burton felt pity. He said, “You’ve opened the Pandora of yourself, and it looks as if you’ll not be able to shut the lid. I don’t know how this is going to end, but I wouldn’t want to be in your mind. Not that you don’t deserve this.”

Göring said, in a quiet and determined voice, “I’ll defeat them.”

“You mean you’ll conquer yourself,” Burton said. He turned to go but halted for a last word. “What are you going to do?”

Göring gestured at The River. “Drown myself. I’ll get a fresh start. Maybe I’ll be better equipped the next place. And I certainly don’t want to be trussed up like a chicken in a butcher shop window.”

“Au revoir, then,” Burton said. “And good luck.”

“Thank you. You know you’re not a bad sort. Just one word of advice.”

“What’s that?”

“You’d better stay away from the dreamgum yourself. So far, you’ve been lucky. But one of these days, it’ll take hold of you as it did me. Your devils won’t be mine, but they’ll be just as monstrous and terrifying to you.”

“Nonsense! I’ve nothing to hide from myself!” Burton laughed loudly. “I’ve chewed enough of the stuff to know.”

He walked away, but he was thinking of the warning. He had used the gum twenty-two times. Each time had made him swear never to touch the gum again.

On the way back to the hills, he looked behind him. The dim white figure of Göring was slowly sinking into the black-and-silver waters of The River. Burton saluted, since he was not one to resist the dramatic gesture. Afterward, he forgot Göring. The pain in the back of his head, temporarily subdued, came back sharper than before. His knees turned to water, and, only a few yards from his hut, he had to sit down.

He must have become unconscious then, or half-conscious since he had no memory of being dragged along the grass. When his wits cleared, he found himself lying on a bamboo bed inside a hut.

It was dark with the only illumination the starlight filtering in through the tree branches outside the square of window. He turned his head and saw the shadowy and pale-white bulk of a man squatting by him. The man was holding a thin metal object before his eyes, the gleaming end of which was pointed at Burton.

25

As soon as Burton turned his head, the man put the device down. He spoke in English. “It’s taken me a long time to find you, Richard Burton.”

Burton groped around on the floor for a weapon with his left hand, which was hidden from the man’s view. His fingers touched nothing but dirt. He said, “Now you’ve found me, you damn Ethical, what do you intend doing with me?”

The man shifted slightly and he chuckled. “Nothing.” He paused, then said, “I am not one of Them.” He laughed again when Burton gasped. “That’s not quite true. I am with Them, but I am not of Them.”

He picked up the device which he had been aiming at Burton.

“This tells me that you have a fractured skull and a concussion of the brain. You must be very tough, because you should be dead, judging from the extent of the injury. But you may pull out of it, if you take it easy. Unfortunately, you don’t have time to convalesce. The Others know you’re in this area, give or take thirty miles. In a day or so, They’ll have you pinpointed.”

Burton tried to sit up and found that his bones had become soft as taffy in sunlight, and a bayonet was prying open the back of his skull. Groaning, he lay back down.

“Who are you and what’s your business?”

“I can’t tell you my name. If—or much more likely when—They catch you, They’ll thread out your memory and run it off backward to the time you woke up in the preresurrection bubble. They won’t find out what made you wake before your time. But They will know about this conversation. They’ll even be able to see me but only as you see me, a pale shadow with no features. They’ll hear my voice too, but They won’t recognize it. I’m using a transmuter.

“They will, however, be horrified. What they have slowly and reluctantly been suspecting will all of a sudden be revealed as the truth. They have a traitor in Their midst.”

“I wish I knew what you were talking about,” Burton said.

The man said, “I’ll tell you this much. You have been told a monstrous lie about the purpose of the Resurrection. What Spruce told you, and what that Ethical creation, the Church of the Second Chance, teaches—are lies! All lies! The truth is that you human beings have been given life again only to participate in a scientific experiment. The Ethicals—a misnomer if there ever was one—have reshaped this planet into one Rivervalley, built the grailstones, and brought all of you back from the dead for one purpose. To record your history and customs. And, as a secondary matter, to observe your reactions to Resurrection and to the mixing of different peoples of different eras. That is all it is: a scientific project. And when you have served your purpose, back into the dust you go!

“This story about giving all of you another chance at eternal life and salvation because it is Their ethical duty—lies! Actually, my people do not believe that you are worth saving. They do not think you have ‘souls’!”

Burton was silent for a while. The fellow was certainly sincere. Or, if not sincere, he was very emotionally involved, since he was breathing so heavily.

Finally, Burton spoke. “I can’t see anybody going to all this expense and labor just to run a scientific experiment, or to make historical recordings.”

“Time hangs heavy on the hands of immortals. You would be surprised what we do to make eternity interesting. Furthermore, given all time, we can take our time, and we do not let even the most staggering projects dismay us. After the last Terrestrial died, the job of setting up the Resurrection took several thousands of years, even though the final phase took only one day.”

Burton said, “And you? What are you doing? And why are you doing whatever you’re doing?”

“I am the only true Ethical in the whole monstrous race! I do not like toying around with you as if you were puppets, or mere objects to be observed, animals in a laboratory! After all, primitive and vicious though you be, you are sentients! You are, in a sense, as…as….”

The shadowy speaker waved a shadowy hand as if trying to grasp a word out of the darkness. He continued, “I’ll have to use your term for yourselves. You’re as human as we. Just as the subhumans who first used language were as human as you. And you are our forefathers. For all I know, I may be your direct descendant. My whole people could be descended from you.”

“I doubt it,” Burton said. “I had no children—that I know of, anyway.”

He had many questions, and he began to ask them. But the man was paying no attention. He was holding the device to his forehead. Suddenly, he withdrew it and interrupted Burton in the middle of a sentence. “I’ve been…you don’t have a word for it…let’s say…listening. They’ve detected my…wathan…I think you’d call it an aura. They don’t know whose wathan, just that it’s an Ethical’s. But They’ll be zeroing in within the next five minutes. I have to go.”

The pale figure stood up. “You have to go, too.”

“Where are you taking me?” Burton said.

“I’m not. You must die; They must find only your corpse. I can’t take you with me; it’s impossible. But if you die here, They’ll lose you again. And we’ll meet again. Then…!”

“Wait!” Burton said. “I don’t understand. Why can’t They locate me? They built the Resurrection machinery. Don’t They know where my particular resurrector is?”

The man chuckled again. “No. Their only recordings of men on Earth were visual, not audible. And the location of the resurrectees in the preresurrection bubble was random, since They had planned to scatter you humans along The River in a rough chronological sequence but with a certain amount of mixing. They intended to get down to the individual basis later. Of course, They had no notion then that I would be opposing Them. Or that I would select certain of Their subjects to aid me in defeating the Plan. So They do not know where you, or the others, will next pop up.

“Now, you may be wondering why I can’t set your resurrector so that you’ll be translated near your goal, the headwaters. The fact is that I did set yours so that the first time you died, you’d be at the very first grailstone. But you didn’t make it; so I presume the Titanthrops killed you. That was unfortunate, since I no longer dare to go near the bubble until I have an excuse. It is forbidden for any but those authorized to enter the preresurrection bubble. They are suspicious; They suspect tampering. So it is up to you, and to chance, to get back to the north polar region.

“As for the others, I never had an opportunity to set their resurrectors. They have to go by the laws of probabilities, too. Which are about twenty million to one.”

“Others?” Burton said. “Others? But why did you choose us?”

“You have the right aura. So did the others. Believe me, I know what I’m doing; I chose well.”

“But you intimated that you woke me up ahead of time…in the preresurrection bubble, for a purpose. What did it accomplish?”

“It was the only thing that would convince you that the Resurrection was not a supernatural event. And it started you sniffing on the track of the Ethicals. Am I right? Of course, I am. Here!”

He handed Burton a tiny capsule. “Swallow this. You will be dead instantly and out of Their reach—for a while. And your brain cells will be so ruptured They’ll not be able to read them. Hurry! I must go!”

“What if I don’t take it?” Burton said. “What if I allow Them to capture me now?”

“You don’t have the aura for it,” the man said.

Burton almost decided not to take the capsule. Why should he allow this arrogant fellow to order him around?

Then he considered that he should not bite off his nose to spite his face. As it was, he had the choice of playing along with this unknown man or of falling into the hands of the Others.

“All right,” he said, “but why don’t you kill me? Why make me do the job?”

The man laughed and said, “There are certain rules in this game, rules that I don’t have time to explain. But you are intelligent, you’ll figure out most of them for yourself. One is that we are Ethicals. We can give life, but we can’t directly take life. It is not unthinkable for us or beyond our ability. Just very difficult.”

Abruptly, the man was gone. Burton did not hesitate. He swallowed the capsule. There was a blinding flash.…

26

And light was full in his eyes, from the just-risen sun. He had time for one quick look around, saw his grail, his pile of neatly folded towels—and Hermann Göring.

Then Burton and the German were seized by small dark men with large heads and bandy legs. These carried spears and flint-headed axes. They wore towels but only as capes secured around their thick short necks. Strips of leather, undoubtedly human skin, ran across their disproportionately large foreheads and around their heads to bind their long, coarse black hair. They looked semi-Mongolian and spoke a tongue unknown to him.

An empty grail was placed upside down over his head; his hands were tied behind him with a leather thong. Blind and helpless, stone-tipped spears digging into his back, he was urged across the plain. Somewhere near, drums thundered, and female voices wailed a chant.

He had walked three hundred paces when he was halted. The drums quit beating, and the women stopped their singsong. He could hear nothing except for the blood beating in his ears. What the hell was going on? Was he part of a religious ceremony which required that the victim be blinded? Why not? There had been many cultures on Earth which did not want the ritually slain to view those who shed his blood. The dead man’s ghost might want to take revenge on his killers.

But these people must know by now that there were no such things as ghosts. Or did they regard lazari as just that, as ghosts that could be dispatched back to their land of origin by simply killing them again?

Göring! He, too, had been translated here. At the same grailstone. The first time could have been coincidence, although the probabilities against it were high. But three times in succession? No, it was…

The first blow drove the side of the grail against his head, made him half-unconscious, sent a vast ringing through him and sparks of light before his eyes, and knocked him to his knees. He never felt the second blow, and so awoke once more in another place—

27

And with him was Hermann Göring.

“You and I must be twin souls,” Göring said. “We seem to be yoked together by Whoever is responsible for all this.”

“The ox and the ass plow together,” Burton said, leaving it to the German to decide which he was. Then the two were busy introducing themselves, or attempting to do so, to the people among whom they had arrived. These, as he later found out, were Sumerians of the Old or Classical period; that is, they had lived in Mesopotamia between 2500 and 2300 B.C. The men shaved their heads (no easy custom with flint razors), and the women were bare to the waist. They had a tendency to short squat bodies, pop-eyes, and (to Burton) ugly faces.

But if the index of beauty was not high among them, the pre-Columbian Samoans who made up 30 percent of the population were more than attractive. And, of course, there was the ubiquitous 10 percent of people from anywhere-everyplace, twentieth-centurians being the most numerous. This was understandable, since the total number of these constituted a fourth of humanity. Burton had no scientific statistical data, of course, but his travels had convinced him that the twentieth-centurians had been deliberately scattered along The River in a proportion to the other peoples even greater than was to be expected. This was another facet of the Riverworld setup which he did not understand. What did the Ethicals intend to gain by this dissemination?

There were too many questions. He needed time to think, and he could not get it if he spent himself with one trip after another on The Suicide Express. This area, unlike most of the others he would visit, offered some peace and quiet for analysis. So he would stay here for a while.

And then there was Hermann Göring. Burton wanted to observe his strange form of pilgrim’s progress. One of the many things that he had not been able to ask the Mysterious Stranger (Burton tended to think in capitals) was about the dreamgum. Where did it fit into the picture? Another part of the Great Experiment?

Unfortunately, Göring did not last long.

The first night, he began screaming. He burst out of his hut and ran toward The River, stopping now and then to strike out at the air or to grapple with invisible beings and to roll back and forth on the grass. Burton followed him as far as The River. Here Göring prepared to launch himself out into the water, probably to drown himself. But he froze for a moment, began shuddering, and then toppled over, stiff as a statue. His eyes were open, but they saw nothing outside him. All vision was turned inward. What horrors he was witnessing could not be determined, since he was unable to speak.

His lips writhed soundlessly, and did not stop during the ten days that he lived. Burton’s efforts to feed him were useless. His jaws were locked. He shrank before Burton’s eyes, the flesh evaporating, the skin falling in, and the bones beneath resolving into the skeleton. One morning, he went into convulsions, then sat up and screamed. A moment later he was dead.

Curious, Burton did an autopsy on him with the flint knives and obsidian saws available. Göring’s distended bladder had burst and poured urine into his body.

Burton proceeded to pull Göring’s teeth out before burying him. Teeth were trade items, since they could be strung on a fishgut or a tendon to make much-desired necklaces. Göring’s scalp also came off. The Sumerians had picked up the custom of taking scalps from their enemies, the seventeenth-century Shawnee across The River. They had added the civilized embellishment of sewing scalps together to make capes, skirts, and even curtains. A scalp was not worth as much as teeth in the trade mart, but it was worth something.

It was while digging a grave by a large boulder at the foot of the mountains that Burton had an illuminating flash of memory. He had stopped working to take a drink of water when he happened to look at Göring. The completely stripped head and the features, peaceful as if sleeping, opened a trapdoor in his mind.

When he had awakened in that colossal chamber and found himself floating in a row of bodies, he had seen this face. It had belonged to a body in the row next to his. Göring, like all the other sleepers, had had his head shaved. Burton had only noted him in passing during the short time before the Warders had detected him. Later, after the mass Resurrection, when he had met Göring, he had not seen the similarity between the sleeper and this man who had a full head of blondish hair.

But he knew now that this man had occupied a space close to his.

Was it possible that their two resurrectors, so physically close to each other, had become locked in phase? If so, whenever his death and Göring’s took place at the same approximate time, then the two would be raised again by the same grailstone. Göring’s jest that they were twin souls might not be so far off the mark.

Burton resumed digging, swearing at the same time because he had so many questions and so few answers. If he had another chance to get his hands on an Ethical, he would drag the answers out of him, no matter what methods he had to use.

The next three months, Burton was busy adjusting himself to the strange society in this area. He found himself fascinated by the new language that was being formed out of the clash between Sumerian and Samoan. Since the former were the most numerous, their tongue dominated. But here, as elsewhere, the major language suffered a Pyrrhic victory. Result of the fusion was a pidgin, a speech with greatly reduced flexion and simplified syntax. Grammatical gender went overboard; words were syncopated; tense and aspect of verbs were cut to a simple present, which was used also for the future. Adverbs of time indicated the past. Subtleties were replaced by expressions that both Sumerian and Samoan could understand, even if they seemed at first to be awkward and naive. And many Samoan words, in somewhat changed phonology, drove out Sumerian words.

This rise of pidgins was taking place everywhere up and down the Rivervalley. Burton reflected that if the Ethicals had intended to record all human tongues, They had best hurry. The old ones were dying out, transmuting rather. But for all he knew, They had already completed the job. Their recorders, so necessary for accomplishing the physical translation, might also be taking down all speech.

In the meantime, in the evenings, when he had a chance to be alone, he smoked the cigars so generously offered by the grails and tried to analyze the situation. Whom could he believe, the Ethicals or the Renegade, the Mysterious Stranger? Or were both lying?

Why did the Mysterious Stranger need him to throw a monkey wrench into Their cosmic machinery? What could Burton, a mere human being, trapped in this valley, so limited by his ignorance, do to help the Judas?

One thing was certain. If the Stranger did not need him, he would not have concerned himself with Burton. He wanted to get Burton into that Tower at the north pole.

Why?

It took Burton two weeks before he thought of the only reason that could be.

The stranger had said that he, like the other Ethicals, would not directly take human life. But he had no scruples about doing so vicariously, as witness his giving the poison to Burton. So, if he wanted Burton in the Tower, he needed Burton to kill for him. He would turn the tiger loose among his own people, open the window to the hired assassin.

An assassin wants pay. What did the Stranger offer as pay?

Burton sucked the cigar smoke into his lungs, exhaled and then downed a shot of bourbon. Very well. The Stranger would try to use him. But let him beware. Burton would also use the Stranger.

At the end of three months, Burton decided that he had done enough thinking. It was time to get out.

He was swimming in The River at the moment and, following the impulse, he swam to its middle. He dived down as far as he could force himself before the not-to-be-denied will of his body to survive drove him to claw upward for the dear air. He did not make it. The scavenging fishes would eat his body and his bones would fall to the mud at the bottom of the one thousand-foot-deep River. So much the better. He did not want his body to fall into the hands of the Ethicals. If what the Stranger had said was true, They might be able to unthread from his mind all he had seen and heard if They got to him before the brain cells were damaged.

He did not think They had succeeded. During the next seven years, as far as he knew, he escaped detection of the Ethicals. If the Renegade knew where he was, he did not let Burton know. Burton doubted that anyone did; he himself could not ascertain in what part of the Riverplanet he was, how far or how near the Tower headquarters. But he was going, going, going, always on the move. And one day he knew that he must have broken a record of some sort. Death had become second nature to him.

If his count was correct, he had made 777 trips on The Suicide Express.

28

Sometimes Burton thought of himself as a planetary grasshopper, launching himself out into the darkness of death, landing, nibbling a little at the grass, with one eye cocked for the shadow that betrayed the downswoop of the shrike—the Ethicals. In this vast meadow of humanity, he had sampled many blades, tasted briefly, and then had gone on.

Other times he thought of himself as a net scooping up specimens here and there in the huge sea of mankind. He got a few big fish and many sardines, although there was as much, if not more, to be learned from the small fish as from the large ones.

He did not like the metaphor of the net, however, because it reminded him that there was a much larger net out for him.

Whatever metaphors or similes he used, he was a man who got around a lot, to use a twentieth-century Americanism. So much so that he several times came across the legend of Burton the Gypsy, or, in one English-speaking area, Richard the Rover, and, in another, the Loping Lazarus. This worried him somewhat, since the Ethicals might get a clue to his method of evasion and be able to take measures to trap him. Or They might even guess at his basic goal and set up guards near the headwaters.

At the end of seven years, through much observation of the daystars and through many conversations, he had formed a picture of the course of The River.

It was not an amphisbaena, a snake with two heads, headwaters at the north pole and mouth at the south pole. It was a Midgard Serpent, with the tail at the north pole, the body coiled around and around the planet and the tail in the serpent’s mouth. The River’s source stemmed from the north polar sea, zigzagged back and forth across one hemisphere, circled the south pole and then zigzagged across the face of the other hemisphere, back and forth, ever working upward until the mouth opened into the hypothetical polar sea.

Nor was the large body of water so hypothetical. If the story of the Titanthrop, the subhuman who claimed to have seen the Misty Tower, was true, the Tower rose out of the fog-shrouded sea.

Burton had heard the tale only at second hand. But he had seen the Titanthrops near the beginning of The River on his first “jump,” and it seemed reasonable that one might actually have crossed the mountains and gotten close enough to get a glimpse of the polar sea. Where one man had gone, another could follow.

And how did The River flow uphill?

Its rate of speed seemed to remain constant even where it should have slowed or refused to go further. From this he postulated localized gravitational fields that urged the mighty stream onward until it had regained an area where natural gravity would take over. Somewhere, perhaps buried under The River itself, were devices that did this work. Their fields must be very restricted, since the pull of the earth did not vary on human beings in these areas to any detectable degree.

There were too many questions. He must go on until he got to the place or to the beings Who could answer them.

And seven years after his first death, he reached the desired area.

It was on his 777th “jump.” He was convinced seven was a lucky number for him. Burton, despite the scoffings of his twentieth-century friends, believed steadfastly in most of the superstitions he had nourished on Earth. He often laughed at the superstitions of others, but he knew that some numbers held good fortune for him, that silver placed on his eyes would rejuvenate his body when it was tired and would help his second sight, the perception that warned him ahead of time of evil situations. True, there seemed to be no silver on this mineral-poor world, but if there were, he could use it to advantage.

All that first day, he stayed at the edge of The River. He paid little attention to those who tried to talk to him, giving them a brief smile. Unlike people in most of the areas he had seen, these were not hostile. The sun moved along the eastern peaks, seemingly just clearing their tops. The flaming ball slid across the valley, lower than he had ever seen it before, except when he had landed among the grotesquely nosed Titanthrops. The sun flooded the valley for a while with light and warmth, and then began its circling just above the western mountains. The valley became shadowed, and the air became colder than it had been any other place, except, of course, on that first jump. The sun continued to circle until it was again at the point where Burton had first seen it on opening his eyes.

Weary from his twenty-four-hour vigil, but happy, he turned to look for living quarters. He knew now that he was in the arctic area, but he was not at a point just below the headwaters. This time, he was at the other end, the mouth.

As he turned, he heard a voice, familiar but unidentifiable. (He had heard so many.)

“Dull soul aspire;
Thou art not the Earth. Mount higher!
Heaven gave the spark;
to it return the fire.”

“John Collop!”

“Abdul ibn Harun! And they say there are no miracles! What has happened to you since last I saw you?”

“I died the same night you did,” Burton said. “And several times since. There are many evil men in this world.”

“’Tis only natural. There were many on Earth. Yet I dare say their number has been cut down, for the Church has been able to do much good work, praise God. Especially in this area. But come with me, friend. I’ll introduce you to my hutmate. A lovely woman, faithful in a world that still seems to put little value on marital fidelity or, indeed, in virtue of any sort. She was born in the twentieth century A.D. and taught English most of her life. Verily, I sometimes think she loves me not so much for myself as for what I can teach her of the speech of my time.”

He gave a curious nervous laugh, by which Burton knew he was joking.

They crossed the plains toward the foothills where fires were burning on small stone platforms before each hut. Most of the men and women had fastened towels around them to form parkas which shielded them from the chill of the shadows.

“A gloomy and shivering place,” Burton said. “Why would anybody want to live here?”

“Most of these people be Finns or Swedes of the late twentieth century. They are used to the midnight sun. However, you should be happy you’re here. I remember your burning curiosity about the polar regions and your speculations anent. There have been others like you who have gone on down The River to seek their ultima Thule, or if you will pardon me for so terming it, the fool’s gold at the end of the rainbow. But all have either failed to return or have come back, daunted by the forbidding obstacles.”

“Which are what?” Burton said, grabbing Collop’s arm.

“Friend, you’re hurting me. Item, the grailstones cease, so that there is nothing wherewith they may recharge their grails with food. Item, the plains of the valley suddenly terminate, and The River pursues its course between the mountains themselves, through a chasm of icy shadows. Item, what lies beyond, I do not know, for no man has come back to tell me. But I fear they’ve met the end of all who commit the sin of hubris.”

“How far away is this plunge of no return?”

“As The River winds, about 25,000 miles. You may get there with diligent sailing in a year or more. The Almighty Father alone knows how far you must then go before you arrive at the very end of The River. Belike you’d starve before then, because you’d have to take provisions on your boat after leaving the final grailstone.”

“There’s one way to find out,” Burton said.

“Nothing will stop you then, Richard Burton?” Collop said. “You will not give up this fruitless chase after the physical when you should be hot on the track of the metaphysical?”

Burton seized Collop by the arm again. “You said Burton?”

“Yes, I did. Your friend Göring told me some time ago that that was your true name. He also told me other things about you.”

“Göring is here?”

Collop nodded and said, “He has been here for about two years now. He lives a mile from here. We can see him tomorrow. You will be pleased at the change in him, I know. He has conquered the dissolution begun by the dreamgum, shaped the fragments of himself into a new, and a far better, man. In fact, he is now the leader of the Church of the Second Chance in this area.

“While you, my friend, have been questing after some irrelevant grail outside you, he has found the Holy Grail inside himself. He almost perished from madness, nearly fell back into the evil ways of his Terrestrial life. But through the grace of God and his true desire to show himself worthy of being given another opportunity at life, he…well, you may see for yourself tomorrow. And I pray you will profit from his example.”

Collop elaborated. Göring had died almost as many times as Burton, usually by suicide. Unable to stand the nightmares and the self-loathing, he had time and again purchased a brief and useless surcease. Only to be faced with himself the next day. But on arriving at this area, and seeking help from Collop, the man he had once murdered, he had won.

“I am astonished,” Burton said. “And I’m happy for Göring. But I have other goals. I would like your promise that you’ll tell no one my true identity. Allow me to be Abdul ibn Harun.”

Collop said that he would keep silent, although he was disappointed that Burton would not be able to see Göring again and judge for himself what faith and love could do for even the seemingly hopeless and depraved. He took Burton to his hut and introduced him to his wife, a short, delicately boned brunette. She was very gracious and friendly and insisted on going with the two men while they visited the local boss, the valkotukkainen. (This word was regional slang for white-haired boy or big shot.)

Ville Ahonen was a huge, quiet-spoken man who listened patiently to Burton. Burton revealed only half of his plan, saying that he wanted to build a boat so he could travel to the end of The River. He did not mention wanting to take it further. But Ahonen had evidently met others like him.

He smiled knowingly and replied that Burton could build a craft. However, the people hereabouts were conservationists. They did not believe in despoiling the land of its trees. Oak and pine were to be left untouched, but bamboo was available. Even this material would have to be purchased with cigarettes and liquor, which would take him some time to accumulate from his grail.

Burton thanked him and left. Later, he went to bed in a hut near Collop’s, but he could not get to sleep.

Shortly before the inevitable rains came, he decided to leave the hut. He would go up into the mountains, take refuge under a ledge until the rains ceased, the clouds dissipated, and the eternal (but weak) sun reasserted itself. Now that he was so near to his goal, he did not want to be surprised by Them. And it seemed likely that the Ethicals would concentrate agents here. For all he knew, Collop’s wife could be one of Them.

Before he had walked half a mile, rain struck him and lightning smashed nearby into the ground. By the dazzling flash, he saw something flicker into existence just ahead and about twenty feet above him.

He whirled and ran toward a grove of trees, hoping that They had not seen him and that he could hide there. If he was unobserved, then he could get up into the mountains. And when They had put everybody to sleep here, They would find him gone again.…

29

You gave us a long hard chase, Burton,” a man said in English.

Burton opened his eyes. The transition to this place was so unexpected that he was dazed. But only for a second. He was sitting in a chair of some very soft buoyant material. The room was a perfect sphere; the walls were a very pale green and were semitransparent. He could see other spherical chambers on all sides, in front, behind, above and, when he bent over, below. Again he was confused, since the other rooms did not just impinge upon the boundaries of his sphere. They intersected. Sections of the other rooms came into his room, but then became so colorless and clear that he could barely detect them.

On the wall at the opposite end of his room was an oval of darker green. It curved to follow the wall. There was a ghostly forest portrayed in the oval. A phantom fawn trotted across the picture. From it came the odor of pine and dogwood.

Across the bubble from him sat twelve in chairs like his. Six were men; six, women. All were very good-looking. Except for two, all had black or dark brown hair and deeply tanned skins. Three had slight epicanthic folds; one man’s hair was so curly it was almost kinky.

One woman had long wavy yellow hair bound into a psyche knot. A man had red hair, red as the fur of a fox. He was handsome, his features were irregular, his nose large and curved, and his eyes were dark green.

All were dressed in silvery or purple blouses with short flaring sleeves and ruffled collars, slender luminescent belts, kilts, and sandals. Both men and women had painted fingernails and toenails, earrings, and eye makeup.

Above the head of each, almost touching the hair, spun a many-colored globe about a foot across. These whirled and flashed and changed color, running through every hue in the spectrum. From time to time, the globes thrust out long hexagonal arms of green, of blue, of black, or of gleaming white. Then the arms would collapse, only to be succeeded by other hexagons.

Burton looked down. He was clad only in a black towel secured at his waist.

“I’ll forestall your first question by telling you we won’t give you any information on where you are.”

The speaker was the red-haired man. He grinned at Burton, showing unhumanly white teeth.

“Very well,” Burton said. “What questions will you answer, Whoever you are? For instance, how did you find me?”

“My name is Loga,” the red-haired man said. “We found you through a combination of detective work and luck. It was a complicated procedure, but I’ll simplify it for you. We had a number of agents looking for you, a pitifully small number, considering the thirty-six billion, six million, nine thousand, six hundred and thirty-seven candidates that live along The River.”

Candidates? Burton thought. Candidates for what? For eternal life? Had Spruce told the truth about the purpose behind the Resurrection?

Loga said, “We had no idea that you were escaping us by suicide. Even when you were detected in areas so widely separated that you could not possibly have gotten to them except through resurrection, we did not suspect. We thought that you had been killed and then translated. The years went by. We had no idea where you were. There were other things for us to do, so we pulled all agents from the Burton Case, as we called it, except for some stationed at both ends of The River. Somehow, you had knowledge of the polar tower. Later we found out how. Your friends Göring and Collop were very helpful, although they did not know they were talking to Ethicals, of course.”

“Who notified you that I was near The River’s end?” Burton said.

Loga smiled and said, “There’s no need for you to know. However, we would have caught you anyway. You see, every space in the restoration bubble—the place where you unaccountably awakened during the preresurrection phase—has an automatic counter. They were installed for statistical and research purposes. We like to keep records of what’s going on. For instance, any candidate who has a higher than average number of deaths sooner or later is a subject for study. Usually later, since we’re short-handed.

“It was not until your 777th death that we got around to looking at some of the higher frequency resurrections. Yours had the highest count. You may be congratulated on this, I suppose.”

“There are others, as well?”

“They’re not being pursued, if that’s what you mean. And, relatively speaking, they’re not many. We had no idea that it was you who had racked up this staggering number. Your space in the PR bubble was empty when we looked at it during our statistical investigation. The two technicians who had seen you when you woke up in the PR chamber identified you by your…photograph.

“We set the resurrector so that the next time your body was to be re-created, an alarm would notify us, and we would bring you here to this place.”

“Suppose I hadn’t died again?” Burton said.

“You were destined to die! You planned on trying to enter the polar sea via The River’s mouth, right? That is impossible. The last hundred miles of The River go through an underground tunnel. Any boat would be torn to pieces. Like others who have dared the journey, you would have died.”

Burton said, “My photograph—the one I took from Agneau. That was obviously taken on Earth when I was an officer for John Company in India. How was that gotten?”

“Research, Mr. Burton,” Loga said, still smiling.

Burton wanted to smash the look of superiority on his face. He did not seem to be restrained by anything; he could, seemingly, walk over to Loga and strike him. But he knew that the Ethicals were not likely to sit in the same room with him without safeguards. They would as soon have given a rabid hyena its freedom.

“Did you ever find out what made me awaken before my time?” he asked. “Or what made those others gain consciousness, too?”

Loga gave a start. Several of the men and women gasped.

Loga rallied first. He said, “We’ve made a thorough examination of your body. You have no idea how thorough. We have also screened every component of your…psychomorph, I think you could call it. Or aura, whichever word you prefer.” He gestured at the sphere above his head. “We found no clues whatsoever.”

Burton threw back his head and laughed loudly and long.

“So you bastards don’t know everything!”

Loga smiled tightly. “No. We never will. Only One is omnipotent.”

He touched his forehead, lips, heart, and genitals with the three longest fingers of his right hand. The others did the same.

“However, I’ll tell you that you frightened us—if that’ll make you feel any better. You still do. You see, we are fairly sure that you may be one of the men of whom we were warned.”

“Warned against? By whom?”

“By a…sort of giant computer, a living one. And by its operator.” Again, he made the curious sign with his fingers. “That’s all I care to tell you—even though you won’t remember a thing that occurs down here after we send you back to the Rivervalley.”

Burton’s mind was clouded with anger, but not so much that he missed the “down here.” Did that mean that the resurrection machinery and the hideout of the Ethicals were below the surface of the Riverworld?

Loga continued, “The data indicates you may have the potentiality to wreck our plans. Why you should or how you might, we do not know. But we respect our source of information, how highly you can’t imagine.”

“If you believe that,” Burton said, “why don’t you just put me in cold storage? Suspend me between those two bars. Leave me floating in space, turning around and around forever, like a roast on a spit, until your plans are completed?”

Loga said, “We couldn’t do that! That act alone would ruin everything! How would you attain your salvation? Besides, that would mean an unforgivable violence on our part! It’s unthinkable!”

“You were being violent when you forced me to run and hide from you,” Burton said. “You are being violent now by holding me here against my will. And you will violate me when you destroy my memory of this little tête-à-tête with you.”

Loga almost wrung his hands. If he was the Mysterious Stranger, the renegade Ethical, he was a great actor. In a grieved tone, Loga said, “That is only partly true. We had to take certain measures to protect ourselves. If the man had been anyone but you, we would have left you strictly alone. It is true we violated our own code of ethics by making you run from us and by examining you. That had to be, however. And, believe me, we are paying for this in mental agony.”

“You could make up for some of it by telling me why I, why all the human beings that ever lived, have been resurrected. And how you did it.”

Loga talked, with occasional interruptions from some of the others. The yellow-haired woman broke in most often, and after a while Burton deduced from her attitude and Loga’s that she was either his wife or she held a high position.

Another man interrupted at times. When he did, there was a concentration and respect from the others that led Burton to believe he was the head of this group. Once he turned his head so that the light sparkled off one eye. Burton stared, because he had not noticed before that the left eye was a jewel.

Burton thought that it probably was a device which gave him a sense, or senses, of perception denied the others. From then on, Burton felt uncomfortable whenever the faceted and gleaming eye was turned on him. What did that many-angled prism see?

At the end of the explanation, Burton did not know much more than he had before. The Ethicals could see back into the past with a sort of chronoscope; with this they had been able to record whatever physical beings they wished to. Using these records as models, they had then performed the resurrection with energy-matter converters.

“What,” Burton said, “would happen if you re-created two bodies of an individual at the same time?”

Loga smiled wryly and said that the experiment had been performed. Only one body had life.

Burton smiled like a cat that has just eaten a mouse. He said, “I think you’re lying to me. Or telling me half-truths. There is a fallacy in all this. If human beings can attain such a rarefiedly high ethical state that they ‘go on,’ why are you Ethicals, supposedly superior beings, still here? Why haven’t you, too, ‘gone on’?”

The faces of all but Loga and the jewel-eyed man became rigid. Loga laughed and said, “Very shrewd. An excellent point. I can only answer that some of us do go on. But more is demanded of us, ethically speaking, than of you resurrectees.”

“I still think you’re lying,” Burton said. “However, there’s nothing I can do about it.” He grinned and said, “Not just now, anyway.”

“If you persist in that attitude, you will never Go On,” Loga said. “But we felt that we owed it to you to explain what we are doing—as best we could. When we catch those others who have been tampered with, we’ll do the same for them.”

“There’s a Judas among you,” Burton said, enjoying the effect of his words.

But the jewel-eyed man said, “Why don’t you tell him the truth, Loga? It’ll wipe off that sickening smirk and put him in his proper place.”

Loga hesitated, then said, “Very well, Thanabur. Burton, you will have to be very careful from now on. You must not commit suicide and you must fight as hard to stay alive as you did on Earth, when you thought you had only one life. There is a limit to the number of times a man may be resurrected. After a certain amount—it varies and there’s no way to predict the individual allotment—the psychomorph seems unable to reattach itself to the body. Every death weakens the attraction between body and psychomorph. Eventually, the psychomorph comes to the point of no return. It becomes a—well, to use an unscientific term—a ‘lost soul.’ It wanders bodiless through the universe; we can detect these unattached psychomorphs with instruments, unlike those of the—how shall I put it?—the ‘saved,’ which disappear entirely from our ken.

“So you see, you must give up this form of travel by death. This is why continued suicide by those poor unfortunates who cannot face life is, if not the unforgivable sin, the irrevocable.”

The jewel-eyed man said, “The traitor, the filthy unknown who claims to be aiding you, was actually using you for his own purposes. He did not tell you that you were expending your chance for eternal life by carrying out his—and your—designs. He, or she, whoever the traitor is, is evil. Evil, evil!

“Therefore, you must be careful from now on. You may have a residue of a dozen or so deaths left to you. Or your next death may be your last!”

Burton stood up and shouted, “You don’t want me to get to the end of The River? Why? Why?”

Loga said, “Au revoir. Forgive us for this violence.”

Burton did not see any of the twelve persons point an instrument at him. But consciousness sprang from him as swiftly as an arrow from the bow, and he awoke.…

30

The first person to greet him was Peter Frigate. Frigate lost his customary reserve; he wept. Burton cried a little himself and had difficulty for a while in answering Frigate’s piled-one-on-the-other questions. First, Burton had to find out what Frigate, Loghu, and Alice had done after he had disappeared. Frigate replied that the three had looked for him, then had sailed back up The River to Theleme.

“Where have you been?” Frigate said.

“From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it,” Burton said. “However, unlike Satan, I found at least several perfect and upright men, fearing God and eschewing evil. Damn few, though. Most men and women are still the selfish, ignorant, superstitious, self-blinding; hypocritical, cowardly wretches they were on Earth. And in most, the old red-eyed killer ape struggles with its keeper, society, and would break out and bloody its hands.”

Frigate chattered away as the two walked toward the huge stockade a mile away, the council building which housed the administration of the state of Theleme. Burton half listened. He was shaking and his heart was beating hard, but not because of his homecoming.

He remembered!

Contrary to what Loga had promised, he remembered both his wakening in the preresurrection bubble, so many years ago, and the inquisition with the twelve Ethicals.

There was only one explanation. One of the twelve must have prevented the blocking of his memory and done so without the others knowing it.

One of the twelve was the Mysterious Stranger, the Renegade.

Which one? At present, there was no way of determining. But someday he would find out. Meanwhile, he had a friend in court, a man who might be using Burton for his own ends. And the time would come when Burton would use him.

There were the other human beings with whom the Stranger had also tampered. Perhaps he would find them; together they would assault the Tower.

Odysseus had his Athena. Usually Odysseus had had to get out of perilous situations through his own wits and courage. But every now and then, when the goddess had been able, she had given Odysseus a helping hand.

Odysseus had his Athena; Burton, his Mysterious Stranger.

Frigate said, “What do you plan on doing, Dick?”

“I’m going to build a boat and sail up The River. All the way! Want to come along?”

For the unholy trinity of Bobs:
Bloch, Heinlein, and Traurig—
may I meet them on
the banks of The River,
where we’ll board the
fabulous Riverboat

1

Resurrection, like politics, makes strange bedfellows,” Sam Clemens said. “I can’t say that the sleeping is very restful.”

Telescope under one arm, he puffed on a long, green cigar while he paced back and forth on the poop deck of the Dreyrugr (Bloodstained). Ari Grimolfsson, the helmsman, not understanding English, looked bleakly at Clemens. Clemens translated for him in wretched Old Norse. The helmsman still looked bleak.

Clemens loudly cursed him in English for a dunderheaded barbarian. For three years, Clemens had been practicing tenth-century Norse night and day. And he was still only half intelligible to most of the men and women aboard the Dreyrugr.

“A ninety-five-year-old Huck Finn, give or take a few thousand years,” Clemens said. “I start out down The River on a raft. Now I’m on this idiot Viking ship, going upRiver. What next? When will I realize my dream?”

Keeping the upper part of his right arm close to his body so he would not drop the precious telescope, he pounded his right fist into his open left palm.

“Iron! I need iron! But where on this people-rich, metal-poor planet is iron? There has to be some! Otherwise, where did Erik’s ax come from? And how much is there? Enough? Probably not. Probably there’s just a very small meteorite. But maybe there’s enough for what I want. But where? My God, The River may be twenty million miles long! The iron, if any, may be at the other end.

“No, that can’t be! It has to be somewhere not too far away, within one hundred thousand miles of here. But we may be going in the wrong direction. Ignorance, the mother of hysteria, or is it vice versa?”

He looked through the telescope at the right bank and cursed again. Despite his pleas to bring the ship in so that he could scan the faces at a closer range, he had been refused. The king of the Norseman fleet, Erik Bloodaxe, said that this was hostile territory. Until the fleet was out of it, the fleet would stay close to the middle of The River.

The Dreyrugr was the flagship of three, all alike. It was eighty feet long, built largely of bamboo, and resembled a Viking dragon boat. It had a long, low hull, an oak figurehead carved into a dragon’s head, and a curled-tail stern. But it also had a raised foredeck and poop deck, the sides of both extending out over the water. The two bamboo masts were fore-and-aft rigged. The sails were a very thin but tough and flexible membrane made from the stomach of the deep-dwelling Riverdragon fish. There was also a rudder controlled by a wheel on the poop deck.

The round leather-and-oak shields of the crew hung over the sides; the great oars were piled on racks. The Dreyrugr was sailing against the wind, tacking back and forth, a maneuver unknown to the Norsemen when they had lived on Earth.

The men and women of the crew not handling the ropes sat on the oarsmen benches and talked and threw dice and played poker. From below the poop deck came cries of exultation or curses and an occasional faint click. Bloodaxe and his bodyguard were shooting pool, and their doing so at this time made Clemens very nervous. Bloodaxe knew that enemy ships three miles up The River were putting out to intercept them, and ships from both banks behind them were putting out to trail them. Yet the king was pretending to be very cool. Maybe he was actually as undisturbed as Drake had supposedly been just before the battle of the Great Armada.

“But the conditions are different here,” Clemens muttered. “There’s not much room to maneuver on a river only a mile and a half wide. And no storm is going to help us out.”

He swept the bank with the telescope as he had been doing ever since the fleet set out three years ago. He was of medium height and had a big head that made his none-too-broad shoulders look even more narrow. His eyes were blue; his eyebrows, shaggy; his nose, Roman. His hair was long and reddish brown. His face was innocent of the mustache that had been so well known during his terrestrial life. (Men had been resurrected without face hair.) His chest was a sea of brown-red curly hair that lapped at the hollow of his throat. He wore only a knee-length white towel secured at the waist, a leather belt for holding weapons and the sheath for his telescope, and leather slippers. His skin was bronzed by the equatorial sun.

He removed the telescope from his eye to look at the enemy ships trailing by a mile. As he did so, he saw something flash in the sky. It was a curving sword of white, appearing suddenly as if unsheathed from the blue. It stabbed downward and then was gone behind the mountains.

SAM was startled. He had seen many small meteorites in the night sky but never a large one. Yet this daytime giant set his eyes afire and left an afterimage on his eyes for a second or two. Then the image faded, and Sam forgot about the falling star. He scanned the bank again with his telescope.

This part of The River had been typical. On each side of the mile-and-a-half-wide River was a mile-and-a-half-wide grass-grown plain. On each bank, huge mushroom-shaped stone structures, the grailstones, were spaced a mile apart. Trees were few on the plains, but the foothills were thick with pine, oak, yew, and the irontree. This was a thousand-foot-high plant with gray bark, enormous elephant-ear leaves, hundreds of thick gnarly branches, roots so deep and wood so hard that the tree could not be cut, burned, or dug out. Vines bearing large flowers of many bright colors grew over their branches.

There was a mile or two of foothills, and then the abruptness of smooth-sided mountains, towering from twenty thousand to thirty thousand feet, unscalable past the ten thousand-foot mark.

The area through which the three Norse boats were sailing was inhabited largely by early nineteenth-century Germans. There was the usual ten percent population from another place and time of Earth. Here, the ten percent was first-century Persians. And there was also the ubiquitous one percent of seemingly random choices from any time and any place.

The telescope swung past the bamboo huts on the plains and the faces of the people. The men were clad only in various towels; the women, in short towellike skirts and thin cloths around the breasts. There were many gathered on the bank, apparently to watch the battle. They carried flint-tipped spears and bows and arrows but were not in martial array.

Clemens grunted suddenly and held the telescope on the face of a man. At this distance and with the weak power of the instrument, he could not clearly see the man’s features. But the wide-shouldered body and dark face suggested familiarity. Where had he seen that face before?

Then it struck him. The man looked remarkably like the photographs of the famous English explorer Sir Richard Burton that he’d seen on Earth. Rather, there was something suggestive of the man. Clemens sighed and turned the eyepiece to the other faces as the ship took him away. He would never know the true identity of the fellow.

He would have liked to put ashore and talk to him, find out if he really was Burton. In the twenty years of life on this river-planet, and the seeing of millions of faces, Clemens had not yet met one person he had known on Earth. He did not know Burton personally, but he was sure that Burton must have heard of him. This man—if he was Burton—would be a link, if thin, to the dead Earth.

And then, as a far-off blurred figure came within the round of the telescope, Clemens cried out incredulously.

“Livy! Oh, my God! Livy!”

There could be no doubt. Although the features could not be clearly distinguished, they formed an overwhelming, not-to-be-denied truth. The head, the hairdo, the figure, and the unmistakable walk (as unique as a fingerprint) shouted out that here was his Earthly wife.

“Livy!” he sobbed. The ship heeled to tack, and he lost her. Frantically, he swung the end of the scope back and forth.

Eyes wide, he stomped with his foot on the deck, and he bellowed, “Bloodaxe! Bloodaxe! Up here! Hurry!”

He swung toward the helmsman and shouted that he should go back and direct the ship toward the bank. Grimolfsson was taken aback at first by Clemens’ vehemence. Then he slitted his eyes, shook his head, and growled out a no.

“I order you to!” Clemens screamed, forgetting that the helmsman did not understand English. “That’s my wife! Livy! My beautiful Livy, as she was when she was twenty-five! Brought back from the dead!”

Someone rumbled behind him, and Clemens whirled to see a blond head with a shorn-off left ear appear on the level of the deck. Then Erik Bloodaxe’s broad shoulders, massive chest, and huge biceps came into view, followed by pillarlike thighs as he came up on the ladder. He wore a green-and-black checked towel, a broad belt holding several chert knives and a holster for his ax. This was of steel, broadbladed and with an oak handle. It was, as far as Clemens knew, unique on this planet, where stone and wood were the only materials for weapons.

He frowned as he looked over The River. He turned to Clemens and said, “What is it, sma-skitligr? You made me miscue when you screamed like Thor’s bride on her wedding night. I lost a cigar to Toki Njalsson.”

He took the ax from its holster and swung it. The sun glinted off the blue steel. “You had better have a good reason for disturbing me. I have killed many men for far less.”

Clemens’ face was pale beneath the tan, but this time it was not caused by Erik’s threat. He glared, the wind-ruffled hair, staring eyes, and aquiline profile making him look like a kestrel falcon.

“To hell with you and your ax!” he shouted. “I just saw my wife, Livy, there on the right bank! I want…I demand…that you take me ashore so I can be with her again! Oh, God, after all these years, all this hopeless searching! It’ll only take a minute! You can’t deny me this; you’d be inhuman to do so!”

The ax whistled and sparkled. The Norseman grinned.

“All this fuss for a woman? What about her?” And he gestured at a small dark woman standing near the great pedestal and tube of the rocket-launcher.

CLEMENS became even paler. He said, “Temah is a fine girl! I’m very fond of her! But she’s not Livy!”

“Enough of this,” Bloodaxe said. “Do you take me to be as big a fool as you? If I put into shore, we’d be caught between the ground and river forces, ground like meal in Frey’s mill. Forget about her.”

Clemens screamed like a falcon and launched himself, arms out and flapping, at the Viking. Erik brought the flat of the ax against Clemens’ head and knocked him to the deck. For several minutes, Clemens lay on his back, eyes open and staring at the sun. Blood seeped from the roots of the hair falling down over his face. Then he got to all fours and began to vomit.

Erik gave an impatient order. Temah, looking sidewise with fright at Erik, dipped a bucket at the end of a rope into The River. She threw the water over Clemens, who sat up and then wobbled to his feet. Temah drew another bucket and washed off the deck.

Clemens snarled at Erik. Erik laughed and said, “Little coward, you’ve been talking too big for too long! Now, you know what happens when you talk to Erik Bloodaxe as if he were a thrall. Consider yourself lucky that I did not kill you.”

Clemens spun away from Erik, staggered to the railing, and began to climb upon it. “Livy!”

Swearing, Bloodaxe ran after him, seized him around the waist, and dragged him back. Then he pushed Clemens so heavily that Clemens fell on the deck again.

“You’re not deserting me at this time!” Erik said. “I need you to find that iron mine!”

“There isn….” Clemens said and then closed his mouth tightly. Let the Norseman find out that he did not know where the mine—if there was a mine—was located, and he would be killed on the spot.

“Moreover,” Erik continued cheerfully, “after we find the iron, I may need you to help us toward the Polar Tower, although I think I can get there just by following The River. But you have much knowledge that I need. And I can use that frost giant, Joe Miller.”

“Joe!” Clemens said in a thick voice. He tried to get back onto his feet. “Joe Miller! Where’s Joe? He’ll kill you!”

The ax cut the air above Clemens’ head. “You will tell Joe nothing of this, do you hear? I swear by Odin’s blind socket, I will get to you and kill you before he can put a hand on me. Do you hear?”

Clemens got to his feet and swayed for a minute. Then he called, in a louder voice, “Joe! Joe Miller!”

2

A voice from below the poop deck muttered. It was so deep that it made the hairs on the backs of men’s necks rise even after hearing it for the thousandth time.

The stout bamboo ladder creaked beneath a weight, creaked so loudly it could be heard above the song of wind through leather ropes, flapping of membranous sails, grind of wooden joints, shouts of crew, hiss of water against the hull.

The head that rose above the edge of the deck was even more frightening than the inhumanly deep voice. It was as large as a half pony of beer and was all bars and arches and shelves and flying buttresses of bone beneath a pinkish and loose skin. Bone circled the eyes, small-seeming and dark blue. The nose was inappropriate to the rest of his features, since it should have been flat-bridged and flaring-nostriled. Instead, it was the monstrous and comical travesty of the human nose that the proboscis monkey shows to a laughing world. In its lengthy shadow was a long upper lip, like a chimpanzee’s or comic-strip Irishman’s. The lips were thin and protruded, shoved out by the convex jaws beneath.

His shoulders made Erik Bloodaxe’s look like pretzels. Ahead of him he pushed a great paunch, a balloon trying to rise from the body to which it was anchored. His legs and arms seemed short, they were so out of proportion to the long trunk. The juncture of thigh and body was level with Sam Clemens’ chin, and his arms, extended, could hold, and had held, Clemens out at arm’s length in the air for an hour without a tremor.

He wore no clothes nor did he need them for modesty’s sake, though he had not known modesty until taught by Homo sapiens. Long rusty-red hair, thicker than a man’s, less dense than a chimpanzee’s, was plastered to the body by his sweat. The skin beneath the hairs was the dirty-pink of a blond Nordic.

He ran a hand the size of an unabridged dictionary through the wavy, rusty-red hair that began an inch above the eyes and slanted back rapidly. He yawned and showed huge human-seeming teeth.

“I vath thleeping,” he rumbled, “I vath dreaming of Earth, of klravulthithmengbhabafving—vhat you call mammothth. Thothe vere the good old dayth.”

He shuffled forward, then stopped. “Tham! Vhat happened! You’re bleeding! You look thick!”

Bellowing for his guards, Erik Bloodaxe stepped backward from the titanthrop. “Your friend went mad! He thought he’d seen his wife—for the thousandth time—and he attacked me because I wouldn’t take him in to the bank to her. Tyr’s testicles, Joe! You know how many times he’s thought he saw that woman, and how many times we stopped, and how many times it always turned out to be a woman who looked something like his woman but wasn’t!

“This time, I said no! Even if it had been his woman, I would have said no! We’d be putting our heads in the wolf’s mouth!”

Erik crouched, ax lifted, ready to swing at the giant. Shouts came from middeck, and a big redhead with a flint ax ran up the ladder. The helmsman gestured for him to leave. The redhead, seeing Joe Miller so belligerent, did not hesitate to retreat.

“Vhat you thay, Tham?” Miller said. “Thyould I tear him apart?”

Clemens held his head in both hands and said, “No. He’s right, I suppose. I don’t really know if she was Livy. Probably just a German hausfrau. I don’t know!”

He groaned. “I don’t know! Maybe it was her!”

Fishbone horns blared, and a huge drum on the middeck thundered. Sam Clemens said, “Forget about this, Joe, until we get through the straits—if we do get through! If we’re to survive, we’ll have to fight together. Later….”

“You alvayth thay later, Tham, but there never ith a later. Vhy?”

“If you can’t figure that out, Joe, you’re as dumb as you look!” Clemens snapped.

Tearshields glinted in Joe’s eyes, and his bulging cheeks became wet.

“Every time you get thcared, you call me dumb,” he said. “Vhy take it out on me? Vhy not on the people that thcare the thyit outa you? Vhy not on Bloodakthe?”

“I apologize, Joe,” Clemens said. “Out of the mouths of babes and apemen…You’re not so dumb; you’re pretty smart. Forget it, Joe, I’m sorry.”

Bloodaxe swaggered up to them but kept out of Joe’s reach. He grinned as he swung his ax. “There shall soon be a meeting of the metal!” And then he laughed and said, “What am I saying? Battle anymore is the meeting of stone and wood, except for my star-ax, of course! But what does that matter? I have grown tired of these six months of peace. I need the cries of war, the whistling spear, the chunk of my sharp steel biting into flesh, the spurt of blood. I have become as impatient as a penned-up stallion who smells a mare in heat; I would mate with Death.”

“Bull!” Joe Miller said. “You’re jutht ath bad ath Tham in your vay. You’re thcared, too, but you cover it up vith your big mouth.”

“I do not understand your mangled speech,” Bloodaxe said. “Apes should not attempt the tongue of man.”

“You underthtand me all right,” Joe said.

“Keep quiet, Joe,” Clemens said. He looked upRiver. Two miles away, the plains on each side of The River dwindled away as the mountains curved inward to create straits not more than a quarter mile wide. The water boiled at the bottom of the cliffs, which were perhaps three thousand feet high. On the cliff-tops, on both sides, unidentified objects glittered in the sun.

A half mile below the straits, thirty galleys had formed three crescents. And, aided by the swift current and sixty oars each, they were speeding toward the three intruders. Clemens viewed them through his telescope and then said, “Each has about forty warriors aboard and two rocket-launchers. We’re in a hell of a trap. And our own rockets have been in storage so long, the powder’s likely to be crystalized. They’ll go off in the tubes and blow us to kingdom come.

“And those things on top of the cliffs. Apparatus for projecting Greek fire?”

A man brought the king’s armor: a triple-layered leather helmet with imitation leather wings and a nosepiece, a leather cuirass, leather breeches, and a shield. Another man brought a bundle of spears: yew shafts and flint tips.

The rocket crew, all women, placed a projectile in the swivel-able launching tube. The rocket was six feet long, not counting the guide stick, built of bamboo, and looked exactly like a Fourth of July rocket. Its warhead contained twenty pounds of black gunpowder in which were many tiny chips of stone: shrapnel.

Joe Miller, the deck creaking beneath his eight hundred pounds, went below to get his armor and weapons. Clemens put on a helmet and slung a shield over his shoulder, but he would not use a cuirass or leggings. Although he feared wounds, he was even more frightened of drowning because of the heavy armor if he fell into The River.

Clemens thanked whatever gods there were that he had been lucky enough to fall in with Joe Miller. They were blood brothers now—even if Clemens had fainted during the ceremony, which demanded mingling of blood and some even more painful and repulsive acts. Miller was to defend him, and Clemens was to defend Miller to the death. So far, the titanthrop had done all the battling. But then he was more than big enough for two.

Bloodaxe’s dislike of Miller was caused by envy. Bloodaxe fancied himself as the world’s greatest fighter and yet knew that Miller would have no more trouble dispatching him in combat than Miller would with a dog.

And with a small dog at that.

Erik Bloodaxe gave his battle orders, which were transmitted to the other two ships by flashes of sunlight off obsidian mirrors. The ships would keep sails up and try to steer between the galleys. This would be difficult because a ship might have to change course to avoid ramming and so lose the wind. Also, each ship would thrice be subjected to crossfire.

“The wind’s with them,” Clemens said. “Their rockets will have more range until we’re among them.”

“Teach your grandmother to suck….” Bloodaxe said and stopped.

Some bright objects on the cliff tops had left their positions and now were swooping through the air in a path that would bring them close above the Vikings. The Norsemen shouted with bewilderment and alarm, but Clemens recognized them as gliders. In as few words as possible, he explained to Bloodaxe. The king started to relay the information to the other Vikings but had to stop because the lead galleys fired off the first volley of rockets. Wobbling, trailing thick black smoke, ten rockets arced toward the three sailships. These changed course as quickly as possible, two almost colliding. Some of the rockets almost struck the masts or the hulls, but all splashed, unexploded, in The River.

By then the first of the gliders made its pass. Slim-fuselaged, long-winged, with black Maltese crosses on the sides of its slim and silvery fuselage, it dived at a 45-degree angle toward the Dreyrugr. The Norse archers bent their yew bows and, at a command from the chief archer, loosed their shafts.

The glider swooped low over the water, several arrows sticking out of the fuselage, and it settled down for a landing on The River. It had failed to drop its bombs on the Dreyrugr. They were somewhere below the surface of The River.

But now other gliders were coming in at all three ships, and the enemy lead galleys had loosed another flight of rockets. Clemens glanced at their own rocket-launcher. The big blonde crew-women were swiveling the tube under the command of small dark Temah, but she was not ready to touch the fuse. The Dreyrugr was not yet within range of the nearest galley.

For a second, everything was as if suspended in a photograph: the two gliders, their wingtips only two feet apart, pulling up out of the dive and the small black bombs dropping toward the decks of their targets, the arrows halfway toward the gliders, the German rockets halfway toward the Viking ships, on the downcurve of their arcs.

Clemens felt the sudden push of wind behind him, a whistling, an explosion as the sails took the full impact of air and rolled the ship over sharply on its longitudinal axis. There was a tearing sound as if the fabric of the world were being ripped apart; a crackling as if great axes had slammed into the masts.

The bombs, the gliders, the rockets, the arrows were lifted upward and backward, turned upside down. The sails and masts left the ship, as if they had been launched from tubes, and soared away. The ship, released from the push of sail, rolled back to horizontal from an almost 90-degree angle to The River. Clemens was saved from flying off the deck to the first slam of wind only because the titanthrop had seized the wheel with one hand and clutched him with the other. The helmsman had also clung to the wheel. The rocket crew, their shrieks carried upRiver by the wind, mouths open, hair whipping, flew like birds from the ship, soared, and then splashed into The River. The rocket tube tore loose from its pedestal and followed them.

Bloodaxe had grabbed the railing with one hand and kept hold of his precious steel weapon with the other. While the ship rocked back and forth, he managed to stick the ax handle in the holster and then to cling to the railing with both hands. It was well for him that he did, because the wind, screaming like a woman falling off a cliff, became even more powerful and within a few seconds, a hot blast tore at the ship, and Clemens was as deafened and as seared as if he were standing near a rocket blast.

A great swell of Riverwater lifted the ship high. Clemens opened his eyes and then screamed but could not hear his own voice because of his stunned ears.

A wall of dirty brown water, at least fifty feet high, was racing around the curve of the valley between four and five miles away. He wanted to close his eyes again but could not. He continued to gaze with his lids rigid until the elevated sea was a mile away. Then he could make out the individual trees, the giant pines, oaks, and yews scattered along the front of the wave, and, as it got closer, pieces of bamboo and pine houses, a roof somehow still intact, a shattered hull with a half mast, the sperm-whale-sized, dark-gray body of a Riverdragon fish, plucked from the five-hundred-foot depths of The River.

Terror numbed him. He wanted to die to escape this particular death. But he could not, and so he watched with frozen eyes and congealed mind as the ship, instead of being drowned and smashed beneath hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, rose up and up and up on the slope of the wave, up and up, the dirty brown wreckage-strewn cliff towering above, always threatening to avalanche down upon the ship, and the sky above, now turned from bright noon-blue to gray.

Then they were on the top, poised for a downward slide, rocked, dipped, and went down toward the trough. Smaller, but still huge waves fell over the boat. A body landed on the deck near Clemens, a body catapulted from the raging waters. Clemens stared at it with only a spark of comprehension. He was too iced with terror to feel anymore; he had reached the limits.

And so he stared at Livy’s body, smashed on one side but untouched on the other side. It was Livy, his wife, whom he had seen on that Riverbank.

Another wave that almost tore him and the titanthrop loose struck the deck. The helmsman screamed as he lost his grip and followed the woman’s corpse overboard.

The boat, sliding upward from the depths of the trough, turned to present its broadside to the wave. But the boat continued to soar upward, though it tilted so that Miller and Clemens were hanging from the stump of the wheel’s base as if they were dangling from a tree trunk on the face of a mountain. Then the boat rolled back to horizontal position as it raced down the next valley. Bloodaxe had lost his grip and was shot across the deck and would have gone over the other side if the ship had not righted itself in time. Now he clung to the port railing.

On top of the third wave, the Dreyrugr sped slantwise down the mountain of water. It struck the broken forepart of another vessel, shuddered, and Bloodaxe’s grip was torn loose by the impact. He spun along the railing, hit the other railing on the edge of the poop deck, shattered it, and went on over the edge and below to the middeck.

3

Not until morning of the next day did Sam Clemens thaw out of his shock. The Dreyrugr had somehow ridden out the great waves long enough to go slanting across the plains on the shallower but still rough waters. It had been shot past hills and through a narrow pass into a small canyon at the base of the mountain. And, as the waters subsided from beneath it, the boat had settled with a crash into the ground.

The crew lay in terror thick as cold mud while The River and the wind raged and the sky remained the color of chilling iron. Then the winds ceased. Rather, the downRiver winds stopped, and the normal soothing wind from upRiver resumed.

The five survivors on deck began to stir and to ask questions. Sam felt as if he could barely force the words out through a numbed mouth. Stammering, he told them of the flash he had seen in the sky fifteen minutes before the winds struck. Somewhere down the valley, maybe two hundred miles away, a giant meteorite had struck. The winds created by the heat of passage through the air and by the displacement of air by the meteorite had generated those giant waves. Terrible as they were, they must have been pygmies compared to those nearer the point of impact. Actually, the Dreyrugr was in the outer edge of the fury.

“It had quit being mad and was getting downright jovial when we met it,” Sam said.

Some of the Norse got unsteadily to their feet and tottered across the deck. Some stuck their heads out of the hatches. Bloodaxe was hurting from his roll across the deck, but he managed to roar, “Everybody below decks! There will be many more great waves much worse than this one, there’s no telling how many!”

Sam did not like Bloodaxe, to put it mildly, yet he had to admit that the Norwegian was bright enough when it came to the ways of water. He himself had supposed that the first waves would be the last.

The crew lay down in the hold wherever they could find space and something stable to hang on to, and they waited, but not for long. The earth rumbled and shook, and then The River struck the pass with a hiss like a fifty-foot-high cat, followed by a bellow. Borne upward by the flood pouring through the pass, the Dreyrugr rocked and spun around and around as it rocked. Sam turned cold. He was sure that if there had been daylight, he and the others would look as gray-blue as corpses.

UP the boat went, occasionally scraping against the walls of the canyon. Just as Sam was about to swear that the Dreyrugr had reached the top of the canyon and was going to be carried over its front in a cataract, the boat dropped. It sank swiftly, or so it seemed, while the waters poured out through the pass almost as quickly as they had entered. There was a crash, followed by the heavy breathing of men and women, a groan here and there, the dripping of water, and the far away roar of the receding river.

It was not over yet. There was more waiting in cold numb terror until the great mass of water would rush back to fill the spaces from which it had been displaced by the blazing many hundreds of thousands of tons mass of the meteorite. They shivered as if encased in ice, although the air was far warmer than it had ever been at this time of night. And, for the first time in the twenty years on this planet, it did not rain at night.

Before the waters struck again, they felt the shake and grumble of earth. There was a vast hiss and a roar, and again the boat rose up, spun, bumped against the walls of the canyon, and then sank. This time, the ship did not strike the ground so hard, probably, Sam thought, because the boat had hit a thick layer of mud.

“I don’t believe in miracles,” Sam whispered, “but this is one. We’ve no business being alive.”

Joe Miller, who had recovered more swiftly than the rest, went out on a half-hour scouting trip. He returned with the naked body of a man. His burden was, however, alive. He had blond hair under the mud-streaks, a handsome face, and blue-gray eyes. He said something in German to Clemens and then managed to smile after he had been deposited gently on the deck.

“I found him in hith glider,” Joe said. “Vhat vath left of it, that ith. There’th a number of corptheth outthide thith canyon. Vhat you vant to do vith him?”

“Make friends with him,” Clemens croaked. “His people are gone; this area is cleaned out.”

He shuddered. The image of Livy’s body placed on the deck like a mocking gift, the wet hair plastered over one side of her smashed face, the one dark eye staring darkly at him, was getting more vivid and more painful. He felt like sobbing but could not and was glad of it. Weeping would make him fall apart into a cone of ashes. Later, when he had the strength to stand it, he would weep. So near…

The blond man sat up on the deck. He shivered uncontrollably and said, in British English, “I’m cold.”

Miller went below decks and brought up dried fish, acorn bread, bamboo tips, and cheese. The Vikings had stored food to eat when they were in hostile areas where they were forbidden to use their grails.

“That thtupid ath, Bloodakthe, ith thtill alive,” Miller said. “He’th got thome broken ribth and he’th a meth of bruitheth and cutth. But hith big mouth ith in perfect vorking order. Vouldn’t you know it?”

CLEMENS began crying. Joe Miller wept with him and blew his huge proboscis.

“There,” he said, “I feel much better. I never been tho thcared in all my life. Vhen I thaw that vater, like all the mammothth in the vorld thtampeding towardth uth, I thought, Good-bye Joe. Good-bye Tham. I’ll vake up thomevhere along The River in a new body, but I’ll never thee you again, Tham. Only I vath too terrified to feel thad about it. Yethuth, I vath thcared!

The young stranger introduced himself. He was Lothar von Richthofen, glider pilot, captain of the Luftwaffe of his Imperial Majesty, Kaiser Alfred the First of New Prussia.

“We’ve passed a hundred New Prussias in the last ten thousand miles,” Clemens said. “All so small you couldn’t stand in the middle of one and heave a brick without it landing in the middle of the next. But most of them weren’t as belligerent as yours. They’d let us land and charge our grails, especially after we’d shown them what we had to trade for use of the stones.”

“Trade?”

“Yes. We didn’t trade goods, of course, but all the freighters of old Earth couldn’t carry enough to last out a fraction of The River. We traded ideas. For one thing, we show these people how to build pool tables and how to make a hair-setting spray from fish glue, deodorized.”

The Kaiser of this area had been, on Earth, a Count von Waldersee, a German field marshal, born 1832, died 1904.

Clemens nodded, saying, “I remember reading about his death in the papers and having great satisfaction because I had outlived another contemporary. That was one of the few genuine and free pleasures of life. But, since you know how to fly, you must be a twentieth-century German, right?”

Lothar von Richthofen gave a brief summary of his life. He had flown a fighter plane for Germany in the Weltkrieg. His brother had been the greatest of aces on either side during that war.

“World War I or II?” Clemens said. He had met enough twentieth-centurians to know some facts—and fancies—about events after his death in 1910.

VON Richthofen added more details. He had been in World War I. He himself had fought under his brother and had accounted for forty Allied planes. In 1922, while flying an American film actress and her manager from Hamburg to Berlin, the plane had crashed and he had died.

“The luck of Lothar von Richthofen deserted me,” he said. “Or so I thought then.”

He laughed.

“But here I am, twenty-five years old in body again, and I missed the sad things about growing old, when women no longer look at you, when wine makes you weep instead of laugh and makes your mouth sour with the taste of weakness, and every day is one day nearer death.

“And my luck held out again when that meteorite struck. My glider lost its wings at the first blow of wind, but instead of falling, I floated in my fuselage, turning over and over, dropping, rising again, falling, until I was deposited as lightly as a sheet of paper upon a hill. And then the backflood came, the fuselage was borne by the water, and I was nuzzled gently against the foot of the mountain. A miracle!”

“A miracle: a chance distribution of events, occurring one time in a billion,” Clemens said. “You think a giant meteor caused that flood?”

“I saw its flash, the trail of burning air. It must have crashed far away, fortunately for us.”

They climbed down from the ship and slogged through the thick mud to the canyon entrance. Joe Miller heaved logs that a team of draft horses would have strained to pull. He shoved aside others, and the three went down through the foothills and to the plains. Others followed them.

They were silent now. The land had been scoured free of trees except for the great irontrees. So deeply rooted were these that most still stood upright. Moreover, where the mud had not settled, there was grass. It was a testimony to the toughness and the steadfast-rootedness of the grass that the millions of tons of water had not been able to rip out the topsoil.

Here and there was the flotsam left by the backflood. Corpses of men and women, broken timber, towels, grails, a dugout, uprooted pines and oaks and yews.

The great mushroom-shaped grailstones, spaced a mile apart along the banks on both sides, were also unbroken and unbent, although many were almost buried in mud.

“The rains will eventually take care of the mud,” Clemens said. “The land slopes toward The River.” He avoided the corpses. They filled him with a prickly loathing. Besides, he was afraid that he might see Livy’s body again. He did not think he could stand it; he would go mad.

“One thing’s sure,” Clemens said. “There’ll be nobody between us and the meteorite. We’ll have first claim on it, and then it’ll be up to us to defend all that treasure of iron from the wolves that will come loping on its scent.

“Would you like to join up? If you stick with me, you’ll have an airplane someday, not just a glider.”

SAM explained a little about his Dream. And he told a little about Joe Miller’s story of the Misty Tower.

“It’s only possible with a great deal of iron,” he said. “And much hard work. These Vikings aren’t capable of helping me build a steamboat. I need technical knowledge they don’t have. But I was using them to get me to a possible source of iron. I had hoped that there might be enough ore from which Erik’s ax was made for my purpose. I used their greed for the metal, and also Miller’s story, to launch them on this expedition.

“Now, we don’t have to search. We know where there must be more than enough. All we have to do is dig it up, melt it, refine it, shape it into the forms we need. And protect it. I won’t string you along with a tale of easy accomplishment. It may take years before we can complete the boat, and it’ll be damn hard work doing it.”

Lothar’s face blazed with a spark caught from Clemens’ few words. “It’s a noble, magnificent dream!” he said. “Yes, I’d like to join you, I’ll pledge my honor to follow you until we storm Misty Tower! On my word as a gentleman and officer, on the blood of the barons of Richthofen!”

“Just give me your word as a man,” Sam said dryly.

“What a strange—indeed, unthinkable—trio we make!” Lothar said. “A gigantic subhuman, who must have died at least one hundred thousand years before civilization. A twentieth-century Prussian baron and aviator. A great American humorist born in 1835. And our crew”—Clemens raised his thick eyebrows at the our—“tenth-century Vikings!”

“A sorry lot now,” Sam said, watching Bloodaxe and the others plow through the mud. All were bruised from head to foot and many limped. “I don’t feel so well myself. Have you ever watched a Japanese tenderize a dead octopus? I know how the octopus feels now. By the way, I was more than just a humorist, you know. I was a man of letters.”

“Ah, forgive me!” Lothar said. “I’ve hurt your feelings! No offense! Let me salve your injuries, Mr. Clemens, by telling you that when I was a boy, I laughed many times reading your books. And I regard your Huckleberry Finn as a great book. Although I must admit I did not care for the way you ridiculed the aristocracy in your Connecticut Yankee. Still, they were English, and you are an American.”

Erik Bloodaxe decided that they were too battered and weary to start the job of getting the ship down to The River that day. They would charge their grails at evening, eat, sleep, eat breakfast, and then begin the backbreaking work.

They went back to the ship, took their grails from the hold, and set them on the depressions on the flat top of a grailstone. As the sun touched the peaks of the mountains to the west, the men awaited the roar and the hot, blue flash from the stones. The electrical discharge would power the energy-matter converters within the false bottoms of the grail and, on opening the lids, the men would find cooked meats, vegetables, bread and butter, fruit, tobacco, dreamgum, liquor or mead.

But as darkness settled over the valley, the grailstones remained silent and cold. Across The River, fire sprang up momentarily from the grailstones there, and a faint roar reached them.

But the stones on the west bank, for the first time in the twenty years since the day of Resurrection, did not function.

4

The men and women felt as if God had failed them. The three-times-a-day offering of the stones had come to seem as natural as the rising of the sun. It was some time before they could ease the sickness in their stomachs to eat the last of the fish, sprouts, and cheese.

Clemens was in a blue funk for a while. But von Richthofen began talking of the necessity of ferrying the grails to the other side so they could eat in the morning. Presently Clemens got up and talked to Bloodaxe. The Norwegian was in a mood even fouler than usual, but he finally admitted that action must be taken. Joe Miller, the German, and a big redheaded Swede named Toke Kroksson trudged back up to the ship and then carried some oars back down. These three, with Clemens, took the grails across in the dugout; and Toke and Joe Miller paddled the dugout back. Miller, Clemens, and von Richthofen settled down to sleep on top of a grailstone. It was clean, since the electrical discharge had burned off all the mud.

“We’ll have to get under the stone when the rains come,” Clemens said. He lay on his back, his hands under his head, and looked up at the night sky. It was no terrestrial sky, this blaze of twenty thousand stars greater than Venus in her glory and shimmering filaments tentacling out from glittering gas clouds. Some of the stars were so bright that they could be seen as pale phantoms even at noon.

“The meteorite must have smashed some of the grailstones on the west bank,” Sam Clemens said. “And so it broke the circuit. My God, what a circuit! There must be at least twenty million stones hooked together, if the calculations of some are correct.”

“There will be a terrible conflict raging up and down The River,” Lothar said. “The west bankers will attack the east bankers so they can charge their grails. What a war! There must be about thirty-five to thirty-seven billion people in this Rivervalley. All battling to the death for food.”

“The hell of it ith,” Joe Miller said, “that if half get kilt and tho there’th enough room on the grailstoneth, it von’t do no good. Tventy-four hourth later, the dead vill all be alive again, and it’ll all thtart over again.”

Sam said, “I’m not so sure. I think it’s been established that the stones have something to do with the resurrections. And if half of them are out of commission, there may be a considerable cut in production on the Lazarus line. This meteorite is a saboteur from the skies.”

“I’ve thought for a long time that this world, and our resurrection, are not the work of supernatural beings,” von Richthofen said. “Have you heard the wild tale that’s been going up and down The River? There’s a story that one man woke up before Resurrection Day and found himself in a very weird place. There were millions of bodies around him, floating in the air, nude men, women, and children, their heads shaved, all slowly rotating under some invisible force. This man, an Englishman named Perkin, or Burton, some say, had died on Earth around 1890. He got loose but was intercepted by two beings—human—who put him back to sleep. Then he awoke, like the rest of us, on the banks of The River.

“Who is behind all this isn’t infallible. They made a mistake with Burton. He got a glimpse of pre-Resurrection, a stage somewhere between our death on Earth and preparation for life on this world. It sounds fantastic, like a wish-fulfillment story. But then again….”

“I’ve heard it,” Sam Clemens said. He thought of telling about seeing Burton’s face through the telescope just before he spotted Livy’s. But the pain of thinking about her was too much for him.

He sat up and cursed and shook his fist at the stars and then began to weep. Joe Miller, squatting behind him, reached a gigantic hand out and touched him softly on the shoulder. Von Richthofen, embarrassed, looked the other way. Presently, he said, “I’ll be glad when our grails are charged. I’m itching for a smoke.”

Clemens laughed and dried his tears and said, “I don’t cry easily. But I’ve gotten over being ashamed about it when I do.

“It’s a sad world, just as sad, in most ways, as the old Earth. Yet we have our youthful bodies again, we don’t have to work for food or worry about paying bills, making our women pregnant, catching diseases. And if we’re killed we rise up the following day, whole and hearty, although thousands of miles from where we died.

“But it’s nothing like what the preachers said it would be. Which isn’t, of course, surprising. And maybe it’s just as well. Who’d want to fly around on aerodynamically unstable wings or stand around all day playing harps badly and screeching out hosannas?”

Lothar laughed and said, “Ask any Chinese or Indian coolie if this isn’t a hell of a better world than the last world. It’s just us spoiled modern Westerners who grumble and look for first and latest causes. We didn’t know much about the operation of our Earthly cosmos, and we know less about this. But we’re here, and we may eventually find out who put us here and why. Meanwhile, as long as there are beautiful and willing women—and there are—cigars, dreamgum, wine, and a good fight, who cares? I’ll enjoy this valley of bright shadows until the good things of life are once more taken from me. Lust to lust until it’s dust to dust.”

They were silent after a while, and Clemens could not get to sleep until just before the rains. He got down under the mushroom until the downpour ceased. Back on top of the stone, he shivered and turned for several hours, although he was covered with long heavy towels. Dawn came with Miller’s ponderous hand shaking him. Hastily, he climbed down off the stone and got a safe distance from it. Five minutes later, the stone gave forth a blue flame that leaped thirty feet into the air and roared like a lion.

At the same time, the stones across the river bellowed.

Clemens looked at Lothar. “Somebody repaired the break.”

Lothar said, “I’ve got goose pimples. Who is somebody?” He was silent for a while, but before they had reached the west bank, he was laughing and chattering like a guest at a cocktail party. Too cheerful, Clemens thought.

“They’ve never shown their hand before, that I know of,” Sam said. “But this time I guess they had to.”

5

The next five days were occupied in getting the ship down to the bank. Two weeks more were spent in repairing the Dreyrugr. All that time a watch was kept, but no one came into the area. When the ship was finally launched, still minus masts and sails, and was rowed down The River, there was not a live human in sight.

The crew, accustomed to seeing the plains thronged with men and women, were uneasy. The silence was unnerving. There were no animals on this world except for the fish in The River and earthworms in the soil, but the humans had always made enough noise.

“The hyenas’ll be here soon enough,” Clemens said to Bloodaxe. “That iron is far more precious than gold ever was on Earth. You want battle? You’ll get enough down your throat to make you vomit.”

The Norseman, swinging his ax, winced at the pain in his ribs. “Let them come! They’ll know they’ve been in a fight to bring joy to the hearts of the Valkyrie!”

“Bull!” Joe Miller said. Sam smiled but walked to a position behind the titanthrop. Bloodaxe was afraid of only one being in the world, but he might lose his never easily controlled temper and go berserk. However, he needed Miller, who was worth twenty human warriors.

The ship traveled steadily for two days during the sunlit hours. At night, one man steered and the crew slept. Early in the evening of the third day, the titanthrop, Clemens, and von Richthofen were sitting on the foredeck, smoking cigars and sipping at the whiskey their grails had given them at the last stop.

“Why do you call him Joe Miller?” Lothar asked.

“His real name is a rattling jawbreaker, longer than any technical term of a German philosopher,” Clemens said. “I couldn’t pronounce it when I first met him; I never did. After he learned enough English to tell me a joke—he was so eager he could hardly wait—I decided to call him Joe Miller. He told me a tale so hoary I couldn’t believe it. I knew it’d been around a long time; I first heard it, in a slightly different form, when I was a boy in Hannibal, Missouri. And I was still hearing it, much to my disgust, for the hundred thousandth time, when I was an old man. But to have to listen to that story from the lips of a man who’d died one hundred thousand years, maybe a million, before I was born!”

“And the story?”

“Well, there was this traveling hunter who’d been tracking a wounded deer all day. Night came and with it a violent storm. Seeing the light of a fire, the hunter stopped off at a cave. He asked the old medicine man who lived in it if he could spend the night there. And the old medicine man said, ‘Sure, but we’re pretty crowded here. You’ll have to sleep with my daughter.’ Need I go any further?”

“Tham didn’t laugh,” Joe rumbled. “Thometimeth I think he ain’t got a thenthe of humor.”

Clemens tweaked Joe’s projectile-shaped nose affectionately. He said, “Thometimeth I think you’re right. But actually I’m the most humorous man in the world because I’m the most sorrowful. Every laugh is rooted in pain.”

He puffed on his cigar for a while and stared at the shore. Just before dusk, the ship had entered the area where the last of the intense heat from the meteorite had struck. Aside from the few irontrees, everything had been whistled off in a shock of searing flame. The irontrees had given up their huge leaves to the flames, and even the enormously resistant bark had burned off and the wood beneath, harder than granite, had become charred. Moreover, the blast had tilted or leveled many of these, snapping them off at the base. The grailstones had been blackened and were out of plumb but had retained their shape.

Finally, he said, “Lothar, now is as good a time as any for you to learn something of why we’re on this quest. Joe can tell it in his way; I’ll explain anything you don’t understand. It’s a strange tale, but no stranger, actually, than anything that’s happened here since we all woke up from the dead.”

“I’m thirthty,” Joe said. “Let me get a drink firtht.”

The dark-blue eyes, shadowed in the bone rings, focused upon the hollow of the cup. He seemed to peer therein as if he were trying to conjure up the scenes he was about to describe. Guttural, his tongue hitting certain consonants harder than others, thus giving his English a clanging quality, yet comical with its lisping, voice rising up from a chest deep and resonant as the well of the Delphic oracle, he told of the Misty Tower.

“Thomevhere upon The River, I avoke, naked ath I am now. I vath in a plathe that mutht be far north on thith planet, becauthe it vath colder and the light vath not ath bright. There vere no humanth, yutht uth…uh, titantroph, ath Tham callth uth. Ve had grailth, only they vere much larcher than yourth, ath you can thee. And ve got no beer and vithkey. Ve had never known about alcohol, tho ve had none in our grailth. Ve drank The River vater.

“We thought ve vere in the plathe that you go to vhen you die, that the…uh…godth had given uth thith plathe and all ve needed. Ve vere happy, ve mated and ate and thlept and fought our enemieth. And I vould have been happy there if it had not been for the thyip.”

“He means ship,” Sam said.

“That’th vhat I thaid. Thyip. Tho don’t interrupt, Tham. You’ve made me unhappy enough by telling me that there are no godth. Even if I’ve theen the godth.”

Lothar said, “Seen the gods?”

“Not egthactly. I thaw vhere they live. I did thee their thyip.”

Von Richthofen said, “What? What’re you talking about?”

Clemens waved his cigar. “Later. Let him talk. If you interrupt him too much, he gets confused.”

“Vhere I come from, you don’t talk vhile another ith talking. Othervithe, you get punched in the nothe.”

Sam said, “With a nose as big as yours, Joe, that must have hurt.”

Miller delicately stroked his proboscis.

“It ith the only vone I have, and I’m proud of it. Novhere in thith part of the valley hath any pygmy got a nothe like mine. Vhere I come from, your nothe indicateth the thithe of your—vhat’th your word for it, Tham?”

Sam choked and took the cigar from his lips.

“You were telling us of the ship, Joe.”

“Yeth. No! I vath not! I hadn’t gotten to it yet. But ath I vath thaying, vun day I vath lying on the bank vatching the fith play. I vath thinking about getting up and making a hook and pole to catch thome. All of a thudden, I heard a thyout. I looked up. There, coming around the bend of The River, vath thith terrible monthter.

“It vath awful. I jumped up. I vath going to run avay vhen I thaw it had men on itth back. They looked like men, but vhen the monthter got clother, I thaw they were thpindly little runtth vith the mange and no notheth to thpeak of. I could have beat them all to death vith vone hand, and yet they vere riding thith monthter Riverthnake like beeth on a bear’th back. Tho….”

CLEMENS, listening, felt again as he had when he first heard the story. He felt as if he were standing by the side of this creature from the dawn of man. Despite the clanging and lisping and halting and slow groping after words, this Titan spoke impressively. Clemens could feel his panic and his wonder and almost overpowering urge to run away. Clemens could also feel the opposing urge, the primate’s curiosity, the thing that made him, if not wholly a man, at least a near cousin. Behind the shelving brow lay the gray pulse that would not be content just to exist but must be fed on the shapes of unknown things, on patterns never before seen.

So Joe Miller stayed upon the bank, though his hand closed around the handle of the grail, ready to carry it with him if he had to flee.

The monster floated closer. Joe began to think that it might not be alive. But if it were not, why the great head poised at its front as if to strike? Yet it did not look alive. It gave a feeling of deadness. This did not mean much, of course. Joe had seen a wounded bear pretend death convincingly and then rise up and tear the arm off a fellow hunter.

Moreover, though he had seen the hunter die, he had also seen the hunter alive again, that day he awoke on the banks with others of his kind. And if he, and Joe, too, could come alive again, why couldn’t this petrified snakelike head lose its dead woodenness and seize him in its teeth?

But he ignored his fears and, trembling, approached the monster. He was a Titan, older brother to man, fresh with the dawn and with the primate’s have-to-know-what’s-going-on.

A pygmy, mangy as the others but wearing on his brow a glass circlet with a stained-red flaming sun, beckoned to Joe Miller. The others upon the wooden beast stood behind the man with the glass circlet and held spears and strange devices that Joe learned later were bows and arrows. They did not seem frightened to the colossus, but that may have been because they were so tired from their seldom-ceasing rowing against the current that they did not care what happened.

It took a long time for the pygmy chief to get Joe aboard the ship. They came ashore to charge their grails while Joe backed away from them. They ate, and Joe ate also, but at a distance. His fellows had run for the hills, having been also panicked by the ship. Presently, seeing that the Riversnake did not threaten Joe, they slowly approached it. The pygmies retreated to the ship.

And now the chief took a strange object from his grail and held a glowing wire to its tip, and smoke came from it and from the pygmy’s mouth. Joe jumped at the first puff; his fellows scattered for the foothills again. Joe wondered if the noseless pygmies could be the brood of the dragon. Perhaps her children took this larval form, but, like their mother, they could breathe out fire and smoke?

“But I ain’t a dummy,” Joe said. “It didn’t take me long to figure out the thmoke came from the obchect, vhich in Englith ith a thigar. Their chief made it plain that if I’d get on the thyip, I could thmoke the thigar. Now, I mutht’ve been crathy to do tho, but I vanted to thmoke that thigar. Maybe I thought I’d impreth my tribe, I don’t know.”

HE jumped on the ship, his weight causing it to tilt a little on the port. He swung his grail to show them that if they attacked him, he would bash their skulls in with it. They took the hint and did not come close. The chief gave Joe a cigar, and though Joe coughed a little and found the taste of tobacco strange, he liked it. Moreover, when he had drunk beer for the first time, he was entranced.

So Joe decided to go on the Riversnake’s back up The River with the pygmies. He was put to work on a mighty sweep, and he was called Tehuti.

“Tehuti?” von Richthofen said.

“The Greek form is Thoth,” Clemens said. “To the Egyptians, he looked something like the long-beaked ibis-god. I suppose he must also have reminded them of the baboon-god, Bast, but that tremendous nose outweighed that consideration. So, Thoth, or Tehuti, he became.”

Days and nights flowed by like The River. Sometimes, Joe became tired and wished to be put ashore. By now, he could speak the pygmies’ language, though haltingly. The chief would agree to do as Joe wished since it was obvious that any denial might result in the slaughter of his entire crew. But he would speak sadly of Tehuti’s education ending there, just when he was doing so well. He had been a brute, though with the face of the god of wisdom, and soon he would be a man.

Brute? God? Man?

What were they?

The order was not quite right, the chief would say. The correct sequence, ever upward, was brute, man, and god. Yet it was true you might see a god disguised as a beast, and man merged insensibly from animal into deity, balanced between the two, and now and then changed into one or the other.

That was beyond the breadloaf-shaped brain of Tehuti. He would squat and scowl at the nearing bank. There would be no more cigars or beer. The people on the bank were his kind, but they were also not his tribe, and they might kill him. Moreover, he was beginning for the first time to experience intellectual stimulation, and that would cease once he was back among the titanthrops.

So he would look at the chief and blink, grin and shake his head, and tell him he was going to stay on the ship. He took his turn at the sweep and resumed his study of the most marvelous of all things: a tongue that knew philosophy. He became fluent in their speech and began to grasp the wonderful things the leader told him, although sometimes it was as painful as grasping a handful of thorns. If this or that idea eluded him, he pursued it, caught it, swallowed it, perhaps vomited it up a score of times. Eventually, he digested it and got some nourishment from it.

The River flowed by. They rowed, always staying close to the shore, where the current was weakest. Days and nights, and now the sun did not climb so high in the heavens but was a little lower at its zenith than it had been the week before. And the air grew colder.

Sam said, “Joe and his party were getting close to the north pole. The inclination of this planet’s equator to the plane of the ecliptic is zero. As you know, there are no seasons; day and night are equal in length. But Joe was approaching the point where he would see the sun always half below the horizon and half above. Or would have if it hadn’t been for the mountains.”

“Yeth. It vath alvayth tvilight. I got cold, though not ath cold ath the men. They vere thyivering their atheth off.”

“His big bulk radiates heat slower than our puny bodies,” Clemens said.

“Pleathe, pleathe! Thyould I talk or jutht keep my big mouth thyut?”

Lothar and Sam grinned at him.

He continued. The wind grew stronger, and the air became misty. He began to get uneasy. He wanted to turn back, but by now he did not want to lose the respect of the leader. He would go every inch of the way toward their unknown goal with them.

“You didn’t know where they were going?” Lothar said.

“Not egthactly. They vanted to get to the headvaterth of The River. They thought maybe the godth lived there, and there the godth vould admit them into the true aftervorld. They thaid that thith vorld vathn’t the true vorld. It vath a thtage on the vay to the true vorld. Vhatever that ith.”

One day, Joe heard a rumble that sounded as faintly but yet as near as gas moving within his bowels. After a while, as the noise became like thunder, he knew it was water falling from immense heights.

The ship swung into a bay protected by a finger of land. The grailstones no longer lined The River. The men would have to catch fish and dry them. There was also a store of bamboo tips on the ship; these had been collected in the sunlit region for just such an eventuality.

The leader and his men prayed, and the party began climbing a series of cataracts. Here the superhuman strength of Tehuti–Joe Miller helped them in overcoming obstacles. Other times, his great weight was a hindrance and a danger.

Upward they went, wet because of the ever-present spray. When they came to a cliff smooth as ice for a thousand feet up, they despaired. Reconnoitering, they found a rope dangling from the face of a cliff. It was formed of towels tied together. Joe tested its strength and climbed up, hand over hand, his feet braced against the cliff, until he reached the top. There he turned to watch the others follow him. The chief, first after Joe, tired much easier, and halfway up to the top he could go no farther. Joe pulled him and the extremely heavy rope to the top. He did the same for each man in the party.

“WHERE in hell did the rope come from?” von Richthofen said.

“Someone had prepared the way for them,” Clemens said. “Given the primitive technology of this planet, no one could have found a way to get that rope up to the rock around which one end of the rope was tied. Maybe a balloon might have lifted a man up there. You could make a balloon of Riverdragonskin or human skins, you know. You could make hydrogen by passing steam over highly heated charcoal in the presence of a suitable catalyst. But in this world of scarce metal, where’s the catalyst?

“Hydrogen could be made without a catalyst but at an enormous cost in fuel. But there was no evidence of the furnaces needed to make the hydrogen. Besides, why would the towels be left behind, when they’d be needed again? No, some unknown person, let’s call him The Mysterious Stranger, put that rope there for Joe and party. Or for whoever might come along. Don’t ask me who he was or how he did it. Listen. There’s more.”

The party, carrying the rope, walked for several miles in the mist-ridden twilight on a plateau. They came to another cliff where The River broadened out above them into a cataract. It was so wide, it seemed to Joe that there was enough water to float the moon of Earth upon it. He would not have been surprised to see that great silver-and-black orb appear on the brink of the cataract far above and hurtle down that thunder of waters and be smashed to pieces on the rocks in the maelstrom foot.

The wind became stronger and louder; the mist, thicker. Drops of water condensed on the towels they had now fastened around themselves from head to foot. The cliff before them was as mirror-smooth and perpendicular as the one just ascended. Its top was lost in the fog; it could be only fifty feet high or could be ten thousand. They searched along the foot, hoping for some kind of fissure. And they found one. It was a small doorway at the juncture of plateau and cliff. It was so low, it forced them to get down on hands and knees and crawl. Joe’s shoulders rubbed against the sides of the rock. But the rock was smooth, as if the hole had been made by a man and rubbed until all roughness was gone.

The tunnel led at a slightly less than 45-degree angle upward and through the mountain. There was no estimating its distance. When Joe came out at the other end, however, his shoulders and hands and knees were rubbed raw and bleeding even with the protection of towels.

“I don’t understand,” von Richthofen said. “It seems to me that the mountains were shaped there to prevent men from getting to the end of The River. Why was this tunnel bored through solid rock to give intruders passage? And why wasn’t a tunnel placed in the first cliff?”

“A tunnel in the first cliff might have been visible to whatever sentinels or patrols there are in that area,” Clemens said. “But the second cliff was hidden in mist.”

“That chain of white towels would be even more outstanding,” the German said.

“Maybe it was placed there not too long before Joe got there,” Clemens said.

Von Richthofen shivered.

“For Heaven’th thaketh, let me tell thith! After all, it ith my tale.”

“And a big one, too,” Clemens said, looking at Joe’s huge buttocks.

“Thtickth and thtoneth may break my boneth.”

6

The party pushed on over another tableland for about ten miles. They slept or tried to, ate, and began climbing. Now, though the mountains were very steep and rough, they were scalable. Their chief enemy was lack of oxygen. They gasped for breath and had to halt often to rest.

By now Joe’s feet were hurting him, and he was limping. He did not ask if he could rest. As long as the others walked, so would he.

“Joe can’t stay on his feet as long as a human,” Clemens said. “All of his species suffer from flat feet. Their weight is just too much for a biped that size. I wouldn’t be surprised if his kind became extinct on Earth because of broken arches.”

“I know one thpethimen of Homo thapienth who’th going to suffer from a broken nothe if he don’t keep hith nothe out of my buthineth, vhich ith telling thith thtory,” Joe said.

They climbed until The River, broad as it was, was only a thread below them. Much of the time they could not see even that thread because of the clouds. Snow and ice made climbing even more dangerous. Then they found a way downward to another plateau and groped through the fog against a wind that howled and beat at them.

They found themselves beside a tremendous hole in the mountains. Out of the hole rushed The River, and on every side except Riverward the mountains rose straight and smooth. The hole was the only way to go. Out of it blasted a roar so loud they could not hear each other, the voice of a god who spoke as loud as death.

Joe Miller found a narrow ledge entering the cave high above the waters. Joe noticed that the leader had now dropped back behind him. After a while, the titanthrop became aware that all the pygmies were looking to him as their guide and helper. When they shouted to make themselves heard above the bellow, they called him Tehuti. There was nothing unusual in that, but before this he had detected overtones of jesting in their use of the name. No more. Now he was truly their Tehuti.

Clemens interrupted again. “It was as if we called the village idiot Jehovah or something like that. When men have no need of gods, they mock them. But, when afraid, they treat them with respect. Now, you might say, Thoth was leading them into the opening into the Underworld.

“Of course, I’m only indulging in mankind’s vice of trying to make a symbol out of coincidence. If you scratch any dog, you’ll scare out a flea.”

Joe Miller was breathing heavily through his grotesque nose, and the vast chest rose and fell like a bellows. Clearly, the reliving of that experience had aroused the old terror in him.

The ledge was not like the tunnel in the mountain. It had not been prepared. It was rough, and there were gaps in it, and sometimes it ran so high that Joe had to crawl to squeeze between the ledge and the roof of the cavern. The darkness blinded him as if his eyes had been plucked out. His sense of hearing did not help him; the bellow filled his ears. Only his touch was left to guide him, and he was so agitated that he sometimes wondered if that were betraying him. He would have quit except that, if he did, the men behind him would not have been able to go on.

“Ve thtopped tvithe to eat and vonthe to thleep,” Joe said. “Jutht vhen I vath beginning to think ve might crawl until ve ran out of food, I thaw a grayneth ahead. It vathn’t a light. Jutht a leththening of the darkneth.”

THEY were out of the cave, in the open air, on the side of the mountain. Several thousand feet below them was a sea of clouds. The sun was hidden behind the mountains, but the sky above was not yet dark. The narrow ledge continued, and they crawled on their bloodied hands and knees downward now, since the ledge had narrowed to nothing.

Trembling, they clung to the tiniest of fingerholes. A man slipped and fell and clutched another man. Screaming, both disappeared into the clouds.

The air became warmer.

“The River was giving up its heat,” Clemens said. “It not only originates at the north pole, it also empties there after picking up heat in its serpentine wanderings over the entire planet. The air at the north pole is cold but not nearly as cold as that on Earth. This is all speculation, of course.”

The party came to another shelf on which they could stand, facing the mountain, and proceed sidewise, like crabs. The shelf curved around the mountainside. Joe halted. The narrow valley had widened into a great plain. He could hear, far below, the dash of surf against rock.

Through the twilight, Joe could see the mountains ringing the sea of the north pole. The cloud-covered waters formed a body about sixty miles in diameter. The clouds were thicker at the opposite end of the sea. He didn’t know why then, but Sam had explained that the clouds hid the mouth of The River where the warm waters came into contact with the cold air.

Joe took a few more steps around the curve of the ledge.

And he saw the gray metal cylinder sitting on the path before him.

For a moment, he did not understand what it was, it looked so alien. It was so unexpected. Then it flowed into familiar lines, and he knew it was a grail left by a man who had come before him on this dangerous path. Some unknown pilgrim had survived the same perils as he. Up to that point, that is. He had put the grail down to eat. The lid was open, and there was the stinking remnant of fish and moldy bread within it. The pilgrim had used the grail as a pack, perhaps hoping he might come across a grailstone and recharge it.

Something had happened to him. He would not have left the grail there unless he had been killed or had been so frightened he had run away without it.

At this thought, Joe’s skin chilled.

He went around the outcropping that was sitting at a point where the ledge went around a shoulder of granite. For a moment, his view of the sea was blocked.

He went around the outcropping—and he cried out.

THE men called and asked what troubled him.

He could not tell them because the shock had taken away his newly learned speech, and he spoke in his native tongue.

The clouds in the middle of the sea had rolled away for a few seconds. The top of a structure projected from the clouds. It was cylindrical and gray, like the top of a monster grail.

Mists rose and fell around it, now revealing, now veiling.

Somewhere in the mountains ringing the polar sea, a break existed. At that moment, the low sun must have passed this notch in the range. A ray of light fell through the notch and struck the top of the tower.

Joe squinted his eyes and tried to see into the brightness of the reflection.

Something round had appeared just above the top of the tower and was settling down toward it. It was egg-shaped and white, and it was from this that the sun was sparkling.

The next instant, as the sun passed by the notch, the sparkle died. The tower and the object above it faded into darkness and mist. Joe, crying out at the sight of the flying object, stepped back. His leg struck the grail left by the unknown pilgrim.

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 tranthlated about tventy mileth from vhere Tham Clementh vath. Thith vath a plathe vhere Northemen of the tenth thentury A.D. lived. I had to thtart learning a new language all over again. The little notheleth 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, tho-called.”

7

Von Richthofen said good night and went below decks. 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 below decks. Presently his head drooped, the bludgeon-nose describing a weary arc, and he snored. The noise was like that of trees being felled in the distance. Sequoias split, screeched, cracked. Vast sighings and bubblings alternated with the woodchoppers’ activities.

“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 were 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? Had 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 time…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 one hundred thousand 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?

And so Samuel Clemens had had his first dream, had nourished it until it had become The Great Dream. To make it real, he needed iron, much iron. It was this that had caused him to talk Erik Bloodaxe into launching the expedition in search of the source of the steel ax. Sam had not really expected that there would be enough of the metal to build the giant boat, but at least the Norse were taking him upRiver, closer to the polar sea.

Now, with a luck that he did not deserve—he really felt he deserved nothing good—he was within reach of more iron than he could possibly have hoped for. Not that that had kept him from hoping.

He needed men with knowledge. Engineers who would know how to treat the meteorite iron, get it out, melt it down, reshape it. And engineers and technicians for the hundred other things needed.

He toed Joe Miller’s ribs and said, “Get up, Joe. It’ll be raining soon.”

The titanthrop grunted and rose like a tower out of a fog and stretched. Starlight glinted on his teeth. He followed Sam across the deck, the bamboo planks creaking under the eight hundred pounds. From below, somebody cursed in Norse.

The mountains on both sides were covered with clouds now, and the darkness was spreading over the valley and shutting off the insane glitter of twenty thousand giant stars and glowing gas sheets. Soon it would rain hard for half an hour, and then the clouds would disappear.

Lightning streaked on the eastern bank; thunder bellowed. Sam stopped. Lightning always made him afraid, or, rather, the child in him afraid. Lightning streaked through him and showed him the haunted and haunting faces of those he had injured or insulted or dishonored and behind them were blurred faces reproaching him for nameless crimes. Lightning twisted through him; then he believed in an avenging God out to burn him alive, to drown him in searing pain. Somewhere in the clouds was the Wrathful Retributor, and He was looking for Sam Clemens.

Joe said, “There’th thunder thomevhere farther down The River. No! It ain’t thunder! Lithen! Can’t you hear it? It’th thomething funny, like thunder but different.”

Sam listened while his skin prickled with cold. There was a very faint rumble downRiver. He got even colder as he heard a louder rumble from upRiver.

“What the hell is it?”

“Don’t get thcared, Tham,” Joe said. “I’m vith you.”

But he was shivering, too.

Lightning spread a filamented whiteness on the east bank.

Sam jumped and said, “Jesus! I saw something flicker!”

Joe moved next to him and said, “I thaw it! It’th the thyip! You know, the vun I thaw above the tower. But it’th gone!”

Joe and Sam stood silent, peering into the darkness. Lightning exploded again, and this time there was no white eggshape high above The River.

“It flickered out of nothing and went back to nothing. Like a mirage,” Sam said. “If you hadn’t seen it, too, I’d have thought it was an illusion.”

Sam awoke on the deck. He was stiff, cold, and confused. He rolled over and squinted his eyes at the sun just clearing the eastern range.

Joe was on his back beside him, and the helmsman was sleeping beside the wheel.

But it was not this that brought him to his feet. The gold of the sun had faded out as he brought his gaze down; green was everywhere. The muddied plains and mountains, with straws and stubs of debris, were gone. There was short grass on the plains, tall grass and bamboo on the hills, and the giant pine, oak, yew, and irontree everywhere on the hills.

“Business as usual,” Sam muttered, wisecracking, though unconsciously, even in his shock. Something had put all aboard the Dreyrugr asleep, and while they were unconscious, the incredible work of clearing off the mud and replanting the vegetation had been done. This section of The River was reborn!

8

He felt insignificant, as weak and helpless as a puppy. What could he, or any human, do to combat beings with powers so vast they could perform this miracle?

Yet there had to be an explanation, a physical explanation. Science and the easy control of vast forces had done this; there was nothing supernatural about it.

There was one comforting hope. One of the unknown beings might be on the side of mankind. Why? In what mystical battle?

By then the entire ship was aroused. Bloodaxe and von Richthofen came up on deck at the same time. Bloodaxe frowned at seeing the German there because he had not authorized him to be on the poop deck. But the sight of the vegetation shook him so much that he forgot to order him off.

The sun’s rays struck down upon the gray mushroom shapes of the grailstones. They sparkled upon hundreds of little exhalations, mounds of seeming fog, that had suddenly appeared on the grass near the stones. The mounds shimmered like heat waves and abruptly coalesced into solidity. Hundreds of men and women lay upon the grass. They were naked, and near each was a pile of towels and a grail.

“It’s a wholesale translation,” Sam murmured to the German. “Those who died as a result of the western grails being shut off. People from everywhere. One good thing, it’ll be some time before they can get organized, and they won’t know there’s a source of iron under their feet.”

Lothar von Richthofen said, “How will we find the meteorite? All traces of it must be covered up.”

“If it’s still there,” Sam said. He cursed. “Anybody who can do this overnight shouldn’t have any trouble removing a meteorite, even of that size.”

He groaned and said, “Or maybe it struck in the middle of The River and is now drowned under a thousand feet of water!”

“You look depressed, my friend,” Lothar said. “Don’t. In the first place, the meteorite may not have been removed. In the second place, what if it is? You can’t be worse off than you were before. And there are still wine, women, song.”

“I can’t be satisfied with that,” Sam said. “Moreover, I cannot conceive that we were raised from the dead so that we might enjoy ourselves for eternity. There’s no sense to a belief like that.”

“Why not?” Lothar said, grinning. “You don’t know what motives these mysterious beings have for creating all this and placing us here. Maybe they feed upon feelings.”

Sam was interested. He felt some of his depression lift. A new idea, even though it was in itself depressing, exhilarated him.

“You mean we might be emotional cattle? That our herders might dine upon large juicy steaks of love, ribs of hope, livers of despair, briskets of laughter, hearts of hate, sweetbreads of orgasm?”

“It’s only theory,” Lothar said. “But it’s as good as any I’ve heard and better than most. I don’t mind them feeding off me. In fact, I may be one of their prize bulls, in a manner of speaking. Speaking of which, look at that beauty there. Let me at her!”

BRIEFLY illuminated, Sam now plunged back into the dark shadows. Perhaps the German was right. In which case, a human being had as much chance against the unknown as a prize cow had in outwitting her masters. Still, a bull could gore, could kill before he met inevitable defeat.

He explained the situation to Bloodaxe. The Norwegian looked doubtful. “How can we find this fallen star? We can’t dig up the ground everywhere looking for it. You know how tough the grass is. It takes days to dig even a small hole with stone tools. And the grass soon grows to fill up the hole.”

“There must be a way,” Sam said. “If only we had a lodestone or some kind of metal detector. But we don’t.”

Lothar had been busy waving at the statuesque blonde on the shore, but he had been listening to Sam. He turned and said, “Things look different from the air. Forty generations of peasants can plow land over an ancient building and never know it. But an airman can fly over that land and see at once that something lies buried there. There is a difference in coloration, of vegetation sometimes, though that wouldn’t apply here. But the earth reveals subterranean things to him who flies high. The soil is at a different level over the ruins.”

Sam became excited. “You mean that if we could build a glider for you, you might be able to detect the site?”

“That would be very nice,” Lothar said. “We can do that some day. But it won’t be necessary to fly. All we have to do is climb high enough on the mountains to get a good view of the valley.”

Sam swore joyfully. “It was a stroke of luck, picking you up! I never would have known about that!”

He frowned. “But we may not be able to climb high enough. Look at those mountains. They go straight up, smooth as a politician denying he ever made a campaign promise.”

Bloodaxe asked impatiently what they were talking about. Sam replied. Bloodaxe said, “This fellow may be of some use after all. There is no great problem, no unsurmountable one, anyway, if we can find enough flint. We can chop steps up for a thousand feet. It will take much time, but it will be worth it.”

“And if there is no flint?” Sam said.

“We could blast our way up,” Bloodaxe said. “Make gunpowder.”

“For that we need human excrement, of which there is no dearth,” Sam said. “And the bamboo and pine can give us charcoal. But what about sulfur? There may be none within a thousand miles or more.”

“We know there’s plenty about seven hundred miles downRiver,” Bloodaxe said. “But first things first. One, we have to locate the meteorite. Two, having done that, we must put off any digging for it until we have established a fort to hold it. I tell you, we may be the first to it, but we won’t be the only ones. The wolves will be coming from upRiver and downRiver now, sniffing for it. There will be many, and we will have to fight to hold the iron. So—first we locate the star, then we dig in to keep it.”

Sam swore again. “We might be going right past it right now!” he said.

“Then we’ll put in here,” Bloodaxe said. “It’s as good a place as any to start. Besides, we have to have breakfast.”

THREE days later, the crew of the Dreyrugr had determined that there was no flint or chert in the immediate area. Any that might have been there before must have been burned away by the impact of the meteorite. And when the new soil and vegetation had been laid down, it had contained no stone.

Sometimes rock useful for making tools and weapons could be found in the foothills, at the base of the mountains. Or, if the mountains were broken at the base, as they sometimes were, they yielded workable rock. This area was barren.

“We’re out of luck,” Sam moaned one night while talking to von Richthofen. “We haven’t any way to find the meteorite. And even if we did, we would have no means for digging down to it. And if we could do that, how would we mine it? Nickel-iron is a very dense and hard material.”

“You were the world’s greatest humorist,” Lothar said. “Have you changed a great deal since you were resurrected?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” Sam said. “A humorist is a man whose soul is black, black, but who turns his curdles of darkness into explosions of light. But when the light dies out, the black returns.”

Sam stared into the bamboo fire for a while. There were faces in there, compact, squeezed down, then elongating, spreading out, soaring upward—as the sparks fly—and thinning out until the night and the stars absorbed them. Livy, mournful, spiraled up. His daughter Jean, her face as still and cold as when she lay in the casket, on fire but icy, her lids shut, wavered and passed up with the smoke. His father in his casket. His brother Henry, his features burned and blistered by the steam boiler explosion. And then a smiling, grinning face, that of Tom Blankenship, the boy who was the model for Huckleberry Finn.

There had always been in Sam the child who wanted to float forever on a raft down the Mississippi, having many adventures but no responsibilities. Now he had the chance to drift forever on a raft. He could have uncounted numbers of thrilling experiences, could meet enough dukes and counts and kings to satisfy the most eager. He could be lazy, could fish, could talk night and day, wouldn’t ever have to work for a living, could drift for a thousand years doing exactly as he pleased.

THE trouble was that he could not do exactly as he wanted. There were too many areas where grail-slavery was practiced. Evil men took captives and deprived their prisoners of the luxuries given by their grails: the cigars, liquor, dreamgum. They kept the prisoner half starved, just alive enough so his grail could be used. They tied the slaves’ hands and feet together, like chickens on the way to market, so they could not kill themselves. And if a man did succeed in committing suicide, then he was translated someplace else thousands of miles away and like as not would find himself in the hands of grail-slavers again.

Moreover, he was a grown man and just would not be as happy as a boy on a raft. No, if he went journeying on The River, he needed protection, comfort, and, undeniable desire, authority. Also, there was his other great ambition to be pilot of a Riverboat. He had attained that for a while on Earth. Now, he would be a captain of a Riverboat, the largest, fastest, most powerful Riverboat that had ever existed, on the longest River in the world, a River that made the Missouri-Mississippi and all its tributaries, and the Nile, the Amazon, the Congo, the Ob, the Yellow River, all strung together, look like a little Ozark creek. His boat would be six decks high above the waterline, would have two tremendous sidewheels, luxurious cabins for the many passengers and crew, all of whom would be men and women famous in their times. And he, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain, would be the captain. And the boat would never stop until it reached the headwaters of The River, where the expedition would be launched against the monsters who had created this place and roused all of mankind again to its pain and disappointments and frustrations and sorrows.

The voyage might take a hundred years, maybe two or three centuries, but that was all right. This world did not have much, but it had more than enough time.

Sam warmed himself in the glow of his images, the mighty Riverboat, himself as captain in the wheelhouse, his first mate perhaps Mr. Christopher Columbus or Mr. Francis Drake, his Captain of Marines—no, not Captain, Major, since there would be only one aboard with the title of Captain—Sam Clemens, himself—his Major would perhaps be Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or Ulysses S. Grant.

A pinprick of a thought pierced the glorious balloon sailing along in the wind of his dream. Those two ancient bastards, Alexander and Caesar, would never submit long to a subordinate position. They would plot from the very beginning to seize the captainship of the paddle wheeler. And would that great man, U. S. Grant, take orders from him, Sam Clemens, a mere humorist, a man of letters in a world where letters did not exist?

The luminescent hydrogen of his images whistled out. He sagged. He thought of Livy again, so near but snatched away by the very thing that had made his other dream possible. She had been shown to him briefly, as if by a cruel god, and then taken away again. And was that other dream possible? He could not even find the vast store of iron that must be somewhere around here.

9

You look tired and pale, Sam,” Lothar said.

Sam stood up and said, “I’m going to bed.”

“What, and disappoint that seventeenth-century Venetian beauty who’s been making eyes at you all evening?” Lothar said.

“You take care of her,” Sam said. He walked away. There had been some moments during the past few hours when he had been tempted to take her off to his hut, especially when the whiskey from the grail had first warmed him. Now he felt listless. Moreover, he knew that his guilt would return if he did take Angela Sangeotti to bed. He had suffered recurrent pangs during the twenty years here with the ten women who had been his mates. And now, strangely enough, he would feel guilty not only because of Livy but also because of Temah, his Indonesian companion for the last five years.

“Ridiculous!” he had said to himself many times. “There is no rational reason why I should feel guilty about Livy. We’ve been separated for so long that we would be strangers. Too much has happened to both of us since Resurrection Day.”

His logic made no difference. He suffered. And why not? Rationality had nothing to do with true logic; man was an irrational animal, acting strictly in accordance with his natal temperament and the stimuli to which he was peculiarly sensitive.

So why do I torture myself with things that cannot be my fault because I cannot help my responses?

Because it is my nature to torture myself for things that are not my fault. I am doubly damned. The first atom to move on primeval Earth and to knock against another atom started the chain of events that have led, inevitably, mechanically, to my being here and walking through the dark on a strange planet through a crowd of aged youths from everywhere and every-time to a bamboo hut where loneliness and guilt and self-recriminations, all rationally unnecessary but nevertheless unavoidable, await me.

I could kill myself, but suicide is useless here. You wake up twenty-four hours later, in a different place but still the same man who jumped into The River. Knowing that another jump won’t solve a thing and probably will make you even more unhappy.

“Stone-hearted relentless bastards!” he said and shook his fist. Then he laughed sorrowfully and said, “But They can’t help their hard hearts and cruelty any more than I can help what I am. We’re all in it together.”

This thought did not, however, make him wish any the less to get his revenge. He would bite the hand that had given him eternal life.

His bamboo hut was in the foothills under a large irontree. Although only a shack, it represented genuine luxury in this area, where stone tools to build houses were a rarity. The translatees had had to settle for makeshift housing, bamboo plants bent and tied together with grass ropes at the top and sides and covered with huge elephant-ear leaves from the irontrees. Of the five hundred varieties of bamboo in the valley, some could be split and made into knives, which, however, easily lost their edge.

Sam entered his hut, lay down on the cot, and covered himself with several big towels. The faint sound of distant revelry disturbed him. After tossing for a while, he gave in to the temptation to chew a piece of dreamgum. There was no predicting what its effects might be: ecstasy; bright, many-colored shifting shapes; a feeling that all was right with the world; a desire to make love; or abysmal gloom with monsters springing out of the darkness at him; recriminating ghosts from dead Earth; burning in the flames of hell while faceless devils laughed at his screams.

He chewed and swallowed his saliva and knew at once that he had made a mistake. It was too late then. He continued to chew while he saw before him that time when he was a boy and had drowned, or at least was close to it, and would have drowned if he had not been dragged from the waters. That was the first time I died, he thought, and then, no, I died when I was born. That’s strange, my mother never told me about that.

He could see his mother lying on the bed, hair tangled, skin pale, eyelids half-opened, jaw dropped. The doctor was working on the baby—himself, Sam—while he smoked a cigar. He was saying out of the corner of his mouth to Sam’s father, “Hardly seems worth saving.”

His father said, “You had a choice between saving that and saving Jane?”

The doctor had a shock of bright red hair, a thick drooping red mustache, and pale blue eyes. His face was strange and brutal. He said, “I bury my mistakes. You worry too much. I’ll salvage this bit of flesh, though it’s really not worth doing, and save her, too.”

The doctor wrapped him up and put him on the bed, and then the doctor sat down and began writing in a little black book. Sam’s father said, “Must you write at a time like this?”

The doctor said, “I must write, though I’d get more writing done if I didn’t talk so much. This is a log I keep on all the souls I bring into the world. I intend some day to write a big case history of the infants, find out if any ever amounted to anything. If I can bring one genius, one, into this vale of heavy tears, I will think my life worthwhile. Otherwise, I’ve been wasting my time bringing thousands of idiots, hypocrites, dogs in the mangers, etc. into this sad place.”

Little Sam wailed, and the doctor said, “Sounds as if he’s a lost soul before he’s dead, don’t he? As if he’s bearing the blame for all the sins of the world on his tiny shoulders.”

His father said, “You’re a strange man. Evil, I think. Certainly not God-fearing.”

“I pay tribute to the Prince of Darkness, yes,” the doctor said.

The room was filled with the odor of blood, the doctor’s boozy breath and cigar, and sweat.

“What’re you going to call him? Samuel? That’s my name, too! It means ‘name of God.’ That’s a joke. Two Samuels, heh? Sickly little devil, I don’t think he’ll live. If he does, he’ll wish he hadn’t.”

His father roared, “Get out of my house, you devil’s spawn! What kind of man are you? Get out! I’ll call in another doctor! I won’t even let it be known that you attended my wife or had anything to do with this or was even in this house. I’ll rid this house of your evil odor.”

THE doctor, swaying, threw his dirty instruments into the bag and snapped it shut.

“Very well. But you have delayed my passage through this miserable village of asses. I’m on my way to bigger and better things, my provincial friend. It was only out of the kindness of my heart that I took pity upon you because the quacks that serve this mudhole were out of town. I left the comforts of the tavern to come here and save an infant who would be better off dead, infinitely better. Which reminds me, though I don’t know why, that you must pay my fee.”

“I should throw you out of the house and pay you with nothing but curses!” Sam’s father said. “But a man has to pay his debts no matter what the circumstances. Here’s your thirty pieces of silver.”

“Looks more like paper to me,” the doctor said. “Well, you can call in your dispenser of pills, folly, and death, but just remember that it was Doctor Ecks that dragged your wife and baby from the jaws of death. Ecks, the unknown quantity, the eternal passer-through, the mysterious stranger, the devil dedicated to keeping other poor devils alive, also dedicated to the demon whiskey, since I can’t abide rum.”

“Out! Out!” Sam’s father shouted. “Out before I kill you!”

“There’s no gratitude in this world,” Doctor Ecks mumbled. “Out of nothing I come, through a world populated by asses I pass, and into nothing I go. Ecks equals nothing.”

Sweating, eyes open and rigid as those of a stone Apollo, Sam watched the drama. The scene and the actors were enclosed in a ball of pale yellow light through which veins of red shot like lightning and then faded out. The doctor turned his face once before he walked through the door of the house in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. He took the cigar from his mouth and grinned mockingly, revealing long yellow teeth with two abnormally white, abnormally long canines.

As if the scene were a film being shut off, it blinked out. Through the door which had been in Sam’s birthplace and now was the door of the bamboo hut, another figure entered. It was momentarily silhouetted by the bright starlight, then slid into the shadows. Sam closed his eyes and steeled himself for another frightening experience. He groaned and wished he had not taken the dreamgum. Yet he knew that under the terror was a thread of delight. He hated and enjoyed this. The birth-drama was a fantasy, created by him to explain why he was the kind of man he was. But what was this shadowy figure moving silently and intently as death? From what deep cavern in his mind came this creature?

A baritone voice spoke. “Sam Clemens! Do not be alarmed! I am not here to harm you! I come to help you!”

“And what do you want in repayment for your help?” Sam said.

The man chuckled and said, “You’re the kind of human being I like. I chose well.”

“You mean I chose you to choose me,” Sam replied.

THERE was a pause of several seconds, and then the man said, “I see. You think I’m another fantasy inspired by the gum. I’m not. Touch me.”

“What for?” Sam said. “As a gum-inspired fantasy, you should know that you can be felt as well as seen and heard. State your business.”

“Entirely? That would take too long. And I don’t dare take much time with you. There are others in this area who might notice. That would be too bad for me, since they are very suspicious. They know there is a traitor among them, but they don’t have the slightest idea who it could be.”

“Others? They?” Sam answered.

“They—we Ethicals—are doing fieldwork in this area now,” the figure said. “This is a unique situation, the first time that a completely unhomogenized assortment of humans has been thrown together. It presents a rare chance for study, and we are recording everything. I’m here as chief administrator, since I’m one of The Twelve.”

“I’ll have to figure you out after I wake up,” Sam replied.

“You are awake, and I exist. I have objective reality. And, I repeat, I don’t have much time.”

Sam started to sit up but was pushed back by a hand which somehow communicated a sense of great power, muscular and mental. Sam shivered upon feeling it.

“You’re one of Them,” he whispered. “One of Them!”

He gave up his idea of seizing the man and calling for help.

“Of them, but not with them,” the man said. “I’m with you human beings, and I intend to see that my people do not complete their filthy project. I have a plan, but a plan that will take much time, much patience, a slow and careful, devious development. I have contacted three humans now; you are the fourth. They are aware of parts of the plan but not all of it. If any one of them should be revealed and interrogated, he could tell the Ethicals only a little. The plan must unfold slowly and everything must appear accidental.

“Just as the meteorite must appear accidental.”

SAM did start to sit up then but caught himself before the hand touched him.

“It was no accident?”

“No. I have known for some time of your dream of building a Riverboat and going to the end of The River. It would be impossible without iron. So I deflected the meteorite to bring its orbit within this planet’s grip and cause it to crash near you. Not too near you, of course, otherwise you would have died and have been translated far from this area. There are safeguards to prevent such spatial matter from falling on the valley, but I managed to trip them out just long enough for the meteor to get through. Unfortunately, the guardians almost got to the repulsion system in time. When the system went back into action, its effect caused the meteorite to go off the course I’d planned. As a result, we—I mean you—almost got killed. It was just luck that you weren’t. But then I’ve found out that what you call luck is on my side.”

“Then the falling star…?”

“Is a deliberately felled star, yes.”

Sam thought, if he knows so much about me, he must be one of the crew of the Dreyrugr. Unless he’s able to make himself invisible. That isn’t impossible. That egg-shaped ship I saw in the air was invisible; I only saw it because it was for some reason made visible very briefly. Maybe the lightning interfered with the apparatus that makes the ship invisible.

Then, What am I thinking? This is just another dreamgum fantasy.

The man said, “One of their agents is nearby! Listen carefully! The meteorite wasn’t removed because we didn’t have time. At least, that was my decision. It’s buried under the plains and foothills ten miles from here. Go ten grailstones upRiver.

“You’ll be on the perimeter of the original crater, where several large masses and many small pieces are buried. Start digging. The rest is up to you. I’ll help you when I can, but I can’t do anything obvious.”

Sam’s heart was beating so hard his own voice sounded muted.

“Why do you want me to build a boat?”

“You’ll find out in time. For the present, be happy that you’ve been given what you need. Listen! There’s a huge deposit of bauxite only five miles farther up, under the surface of the mountains, near the base. And near it is a small lode of platinum and two miles up from it, cinnabar.”

“Bauxite? Platinum?”

“You fool!”

There was the sound of hard breathing. Sam could almost hear the man’s internal struggle to control his disgust and fury. Then, calmly, “You’ll need bauxite for aluminum and platinum for a catalyst for the many things you’ll have in your boat. I haven’t got time to explain. There are several engineers in this area who’ll tell you what to do with the minerals. I must go. He’s getting closer! Just do what I say. And, oh yes, there’s flint thirty miles upRiver!”

“But….” Sam said. The man was silhouetted briefly and was gone. Sam rose unsteadily and then went to the door. Fires were still blazing on the banks, and small figures were capering in front of them. The stranger was gone. Sam went around to the back of the hut but there was no one there. He looked up at the sky, pale with great gas sheets and bright knots of white, blue, red, and yellow stars. He had hopes he might catch a glimpse of a vehicle winking from visibility to invisibility. But there was nothing.

10

On returning to the hut, he was startled by a huge figure standing dark and immobile before his door. His heart hammering, he said, “Joe?”

“Yeah,” answered the bass drum voice. Joe advanced to him and said, “There’th been thomevone not human here. I can thmell him. He got a funny thtink, different than you humanth got. You know, it remindth me….”

He was silent for a while. Sam waited, knowing that the ponderous stone wheels were grinding out the flour of thought. Then Joe said, “Vell, I’ll be damned!”

“What is it, Joe?”

“It’th been tho long ago, it happened on Earth, you know, thometime before I got killed there. No, it couldn’t be. Jethuth Chritht, if vhat you thay ith true about how long ago I lived, it mutht’ve been maybe a hundred thouthand yearth ago!”

“Come on, Joe, don’t leave me hanging up in the air.”

“Vell, you ain’t going to believe thith. But you got to remember that my nothe hath a memory, too.”

“It ought to, it’s bigger than your brain,” Sam said. “Out with it, or are you trying to kill me with frustrated curiosity?”

“All right, Tham. I vath on the track of a vifthangkruilth tribethman, they lived about ten mileth from uth on the other thide of a big hill that looked like….”

“Never mind the details, Joe,” Sam snapped.

“Vell, it vath late in the day and I knew I vath getting clothe to my enemy becauthe hith printth were tho frethh. And then I heard a noithe that made me think maybe the guy I vath following had backtracked on me and I vath going to get hith club thyoved all the vay up instead of vithe vertha. Tho I dropped to the ground and crawled tovardth the noithe. And gueth vhat I thaw? Great Thcott, vhy didn’t I ever tell you thith before? Vat a dummy I am!”

“I’ll go along with that. So…?”

“Vell, the guy I vath trailing had gotten vind of me, though I don’t know how, thinthe I’m ath thilent ath a veathel thneaking up on a bird, big ath I am. Anyvay, he had backtracked and might’ve come up behind me, maybe. But he vath lying on the ground, out cold ath a cavedigger’th ath. And there vere two humanth thtanding by him. Now, I’m ath brave ath the nektht guy and maybe braver, but thith vath the firtht time I ever thaw humanth, and it vath poththible I vath thcared. Cauthyiouth, anyvay.

“They vere dreththed up in clotheth, vat you’ve dethcribed to me ath clotheth. They had thome funny looking thingth in their handth, about a foot long, thick black thtickth that veren’t vood, looked more like the thteel that Bloodakthe’th akth ith made of.

“I vath veil hidden but thothe bathtardth had thome vay of knowing I vath there. One of them pointed the thtick at me, and I became unconthious. Paththed out. Vhen I came to, the two humanth and the vif vere gone. I got the hell out of there, but I never forgot that thmell.”

Sam said, “That’s the whole story?”

Joe nodded. Sam said, “I’ll be damned! Does that mean that these…these people…have been keeping an eye on us for half a million years? Or more? Or are they the same people?”

“Vhat do you mean?”

Sam told Joe that he must never tell anybody else what he was going to hear. He knew that the titanthrop could be trusted, yet when he explained he felt misgivings. X had required him not to utter a word to anybody else.

Joe nodded so much that the silhouette of his nose was like a log rising and falling in a heavy sea. “It all tieth in. It’th quite a cointhidenthe, ain’t it? Me theeing them on Earth, then being taken along on Ikhnaton’th ekthpedithion and theeing the tower and airthyip, and now you being picked by thith Ekth to build the thteamboat. How about that, huh?”

SAM was so excited that he could not fall asleep until shortly before dawn. He managed to rouse himself for breakfast, though he would have preferred to stay in bed. While the Vikings, the German, Joe, and he were eating the contents of their grails, he told them a heavily censored version of his experience. But he told it as if it had been a dream. If he had not had Joe’s olfactory backing for the mysterious stranger’s presence, he would have thought it was a dream.

Von Richthofen, of course, pooh-poohed it, but the Norsemen believed in revelation via dream. Rather, most of them did. Among the inevitable skeptics, unfortunately, was Erik Bloodaxe.

“You want us to go traipsing ten miles and dig just because you had a wild nightmare?” he bellowed. “I’ve always thought you had a mind as weak as your courage, Clemens, and now I know it! Forget about it!”

Sam had been sitting down while eating. He rose to his feet and, glaring beneath the heavy brows, said, “Joe and I will go our own way then. We’ll organize the locals to help us dig, and when we find the iron—as we surely will—you won’t be able to buy your way into the organization for love or money. The first of which, by the way, you’ve never had on Earth or here, and the second of which just doesn’t exist.”

Bloodaxe, bread and steak spewing from his mouth, shouted and swung his ax. “No miserable thrall speaks to me like that! You’ll dig nothing but your grave, wretch!”

Joe, who had already risen to stand by Clemens, growled and pulled his huge stone ax from his belt sheath. The Vikings stopped eating and walked away to arrange themselves a little behind their chief. Von Richthofen had been grinning while Clemens was describing his dream. The grin remained frozen, and he was quivering. The shaking was not from fright. Now he arose and without a word stood by Clemens’ right side.

He said to Bloodaxe, “You have sneered at the fighting ability and courage of Germans, my Norse friend. Now you will have that sneer shoved down your throat.”

Bloodaxe laughed loudly. “Two gamecocks and an ape! You won’t die easy deaths; I’ll see that it takes you days to find the joy of death! Before I’m done, you’ll be begging me to end your pain!”

“Joe!” Clemens said. “Make sure you kill Bloodaxe first. Then you can get up a little sweat knocking off the rest.”

Joe raised the 50-pound weight of the flint head above his shoulder and rotated it through a 45-degree arc, back and forth, as easily as if it weighed an ounce. He said, “I can break hith breathtbone vith one throw and probably knock down theveral behind him.”

The Norsemen knew that he was not bragging; they had seen him smash too many skulls. He was capable of killing half of them before they killed him, maybe of smashing all of them and still be standing. But they had sworn to defend Bloodaxe to the death and, much as many of them disliked him, they would not break their oath.

THERE should have been no cowards in the Rivervalley; courage should have become universal. Death was not permanent; a man was killed only to rise again. But those who had been brave on Earth were usually brave here, and those cowardly on Earth were cowardly here. The mind might know that death lasted only a day, but the cells of the body, the unconscious, the configurations of emotion, or whatever it was that made up a man’s character, these did not recognize the fact. Sam Clemens dodged violence and the resultant pain—which he feared more than violent death—as long as he could. He had fought with the Vikings, swung an ax, wielded a spear, wounded and been wounded, and once even killed a man, though it had been more by accident than skill. But he was an ineffectual warrior. In battle the valves of his heart were turned full open, and his strength poured out.

Sam knew this well, but about this he had no self-reproach or shame.

Erik Bloodaxe was furious and not at all afraid. But if he died, and he probably would, he would never be able to take part in Clemens’ dream of the great Riverboat or storm the citadels of the north pole. And, though he had scoffed at the dream, he still believed in a part of him that dreams could be revelations sent by the gods. Perhaps he was robbing himself of a glorious future.

Sam Clemens knew his man and was betting that his ambitions would overcome his anger. So they did. The king lowered the ax and forced a smile.

“It is not good to question what the gods send until you look into it,” he said. “I have known priests who were given the truth in dreams by Odin and Heimdall, yet they had no hearts for battle and spoke lies except when they spoke for the gods. So we will dig for the iron. If there is iron, good. If not…then we will take up the matter where we left off.”

Sam sighed with relief and wished he could quit shaking. His bladder and bowels pained him with their urgency to evacuate, but he did not dare to excuse himself at that moment. He had to play the role of the man who had the upper hand. Ten minutes later, unable to bear it any longer, he walked off toward the outhouse.

X, the Mysterious Stranger, had said that digging could take place anywhere near the tenth grailstone upRiver from their present position. However, the would-be diggers first had to straighten out the locals on who was running things. A Chicago gangster of the ’20s and ’30s, Alfonso Gilbretti, had allied himself with a Belgian coal-mine and steel-mill magnate of the late nineteenth century and a Turkish sultan of the mid-eighteenth. This triumvirate had followed the by now classical pattern of organizing a nuclear gang from those who had been merciless exploiters of their fellow men in crime, business, and other terrestrial activities. Those who objected to the newly self-constituted rulers had been disposed of the day before, and the gang had determined what share of the grails’ output each “citizen” would pay for “protection.” Gilbretti had picked out a harem of five women, of whom two were willing and one had died already because she had tried to break his head with a grail when he entered her hut the night before.

Clemens knew all this because of the grapevine. He realized that the Vikings would be faced with two hundred toughs and at least a thousand of the so-called militia. Against them would be forty men and twenty women. But the locals were armed only with bamboo spears with fire-hardened tips while the invaders had Riverdragon-armor, flint axes, and flint-tipped spears and arrows. And there was Joe Miller.

Bloodaxe announced from the ship what the Norsemen intended to do. If the locals wanted to participate, they could do so under the rulership of the Norsemen. However, no one would have to “contribute” any of his grail output and no woman would be taken by force.

Gilbretti hurled a spear and a Sicilian oath at Erik. The Norseman escaped the effects of both and threw his ax. Its edge buried itself in Gilbretti’s chest, and Bloodaxe was down off the ship and on the land and racing after his precious iron weapon, a flint-studded club in hand, before anybody could move. After him came Joe Miller and thirty men. The women shot arrows while a crew launched the last rocket into the toughs. It struck exactly on target, near the rear ranks of the closely arranged Gilbrettians. About forty were either killed, wounded, or stunned.

Within seventy seconds, the Belgian magnate and the Turk were dead, their heads pulped by Joe’s ax, and the others were either casualties or running for their lives.

None got away. The militia saw their chance to get revenge and either beat or stabbed most of them to death. The ten left alive were spreadeagled, and burning bamboo splints were thrust into them. Sam Clemens stood the screaming as long as he was able. He did not want to make himself unpopular by cutting the fun too short and so he tried to ignore the spectacle. Lothar von Richthofen said that he certainly understood the desire to hurt by those who had been hurt. But he would not put up with this barbarity a moment longer. He strode up to the nearest sufferer and silenced him with a single chop of his ax. He then ordered the others done away with immediately. Erik Bloodaxe might have interfered with this order, since he thought it proper that one’s enemies should be put through some torture to teach them and others a lesson. But he had been stunned by a piece of the rock-shrapnel thrown by the rocket explosion and was out of the picture for a while.

Reluctantly, the militia obeyed, although in their own fashion. They threw the nine survivors into The River, where the fire was certainly put out but not the pain of the splinters themselves. Some thrashed around for several minutes before drowning. And this was strange, since they could have killed the agony in their bowels by killing themselves, knowing they would be alive again and whole again in a short time. Such was the drive of their instincts for survival, they fought to keep their heads above water as long as possible.

11

Digging did not begin at once. First, the locals had to be organized and definite administrative, judicial, and legislative lines laid down and the military formed. The area constituting the new state had to be defined. Clemens and Bloodaxe argued about this for a while before deciding that three miles each way up and down The River from the site of the digging would make a manageable area. A sort of Maginot Line was built on the borders; this consisted of a twenty-foot-wide strip of two-foot-long bamboo stakes, pointing at various angles, protruding from the ground. The line ran from the base of the mountains down to the bank of The River. Huts were built by the chevaux-de-frise, and spearmen and -women lived in these as garrisons.

A third cheval-de-frise was built on the banks. When this was finished, the dragon ship was dispatched to the point upRiver where there was a flint mine, if the Mysterious Stranger was to be believed. Bloodaxe stayed behind with about fifteen of his men. He put his lieutenant, Snorri Ragnarsson, in charge of the expedition. Snorri was to bargain with the locals for flint by promising them a share of the iron when it was dug up. If the locals refused to part with the flint, then he was to threaten them. Bloodaxe thought that Joe Miller should go with the ship because the titanthrop’s huge size and grotesque features would awe the locals.

Sam Clemens agreed with the Norseman’s logic on this point but he did not like the idea of being separated from Joe. Yet he did not want to go on the ship with Joe, because of what Bloodaxe might do in his absence. The king was bad-tempered and arrogant. If he affronted the newly conquered people, he might cause a revolution which could overwhelm the small number of Vikings.

Sam strode back and forth in front of his hut while he smoked and thought furiously. There was iron under the grass, more than enough to realize The Dream, yet he could not even start to dig for it until a multitude of preparations were made. And every step he thought to take was balked because a dozen other problems came up. He was so frustrated, he almost bit through his cigar. The people who were sitting on the flint mine needed something like the sight of Joe to be softened up for cooperation. But if Joe were absent, Bloodaxe might take advantage of this to kill Sam. He would not do it openly, because he feared Joe, but he could easily arrange an accident.

Sam cursed and sweated. “If I die, I’ll be resurrected somewhere else, so far from this place it might take a thousand years to get back on a canoe. Meanwhile, other men will mine the iron and build my Riverboat. Mine! Mine! Not theirs! Mine!”

AT this moment, Lothar von Richthofen ran up to him. “I’ve located two of the kind of men you’re looking for. Only one isn’t a man! Imagine that, a female engineer!”

The man, John Wesley O’Brien, was a mid-twentieth-century metallurgical engineer. The woman was half Mongolian, half Russian, and had spent most of her life in mining communities in Siberia.

Sam Clemens shook hands with them and told them briefly what he had to do now and what he expected to do later.

O’Brien said, “If there is a big bauxite deposit near here, then we can probably build the kind of ship you want.”

He was very excited, as any man would be who had given up any hope of carrying on his Terrestrial profession here. There were many like him, men and women who wanted to work if for no other reason than to kill time. There were doctors who had nothing to do but set an occasional broken bone, printers who had no type to set or paper to use, mailmen with no mail to deliver, smiths with no horses to shoe, farmers with no crops to grow, housewives with no children to raise, the food already cooked, housecleaning done in fifteen minutes, and no marketing to do, salesmen with nothing to sell, preachers whose religion was thoroughly discredited by the existence of this world, bootleggers with no means of making grain alcohol, button makers with no buttons, pimps and whores whose professions were ruined by an excess of amateurs, mechanics with no autos, admen with no ads, carpet makers with only grass and bamboo fibers to work with, cowboys without horses or cattle, painters with no paint or canvas, pianists without pianos, railroad men with no iron, stockbrokers with no stocks to deal in, and so on.

O’Brien continued, “However, you want a steamboat, and that’s not very realistic. You’d have to stop at least once a day to chop wood for fuel, which would mean a long delay even if the locals permitted you to take their limited supply of bamboo and pine trees. Moreover, your axes, the boilers, and other parts would wear out long before you reached the end of your journey, and you wouldn’t have enough space to carry enough iron for replacement parts. No, what you need are electric motors.

“Now, there’s a man in this area I met shortly after translation here. I don’t know where he is just now but he must be somewhere close. I’ll find him for you. He’s an electrical wizard, a late-twentieth-century engineer who knows how to build the type of motors you’ll need.”

“Hold your horses!” Sam said. “Where would you get all the tremendous amounts of electrical power you’d need? Would we have to build our own Niagara Falls to carry along with us?”

O’Brien was a short, slight youth with a plume of almost orange hair and a face with features so delicate he looked effeminate. He had a crooked smile which managed nevertheless to be charming. He said, “It’s available everywhere up and down The River.”

He pointed at the mushroom shape of the nearest grailstone. “Three times a day, those stones output an enormous electrical power. What’s to prevent us from hooking up power lines to a number of them and storing the discharges to run the boat’s motors?”

SAM goggled for a moment, then said, “Strike me dumb! No, that’s a redundant phrase. I am dumb! Right before my eyes, and I never thought of it! Of course!”

Then he slitted his eyes and lowered his thick, tangled eyebrows. “How in hell could you store all that energy? I don’t know much about electricity, but I do know that you’d need a storage battery taller than the Eiffel Tower or a capacitor the size of Pike’s Peak.”

O’Brien shook his head. “I thought so, too, but this fellow, he’s a mulatto, half Afrikaans, half Zulu, Lobengula van Boom, he said that if he had the materials, he could build a storage device—a batacitor, he called it—a ten-meter cube, that could hold ten megakilowatts and feed it out a tenth of a volt per second or all at once.

“Now, if we can mine the bauxite and make aluminum wire, and there are many problems in doing even that, we can use the aluminum in circuits and electrical motors. Aluminum isn’t as efficient as copper, but we don’t have copper, and aluminum will do the job.”

Sam’s fury and frustration disappeared. He grinned, snapped his fingers, and made a little leap into the air. “Find van Boom! I want to talk to him!”

He puffed away, the end of his cigar as glowing as the images in his mind. Already, the great white paddle wheeler was steaming (no, electrificating?) up The River with Sam Clemens in the pilothouse, Sam Clemens wearing a Riverboat captain’s cap of Riverdragon leather on his head, Sam Clemens, captain of the fabulous, the unique paddle wheeler, the great vessel churning on the start of its million-mile-plus journey. Never such a boat, never such a River, never such a trip! Whistles blowing, bells clanging, the crew made up of the great and near-great men and women of all time. From mammoth subhuman Joe Miller of 1,000,000 B.C. to the delicate-bodied but vast-brained scientist of the late twentieth century.

Von Richthofen brought him back to the immediate reality.

“I’m ready to start digging for the iron. But what do you intend to do about Joe?”

Sam groaned and said, “I can’t make up my mind what to do. I’m as tense as a diamond cutter before he makes the first tap. One wrong thing, and the Kohinoor shatters. Okay, okay! I’ll send Joe. I have to take a chance. But being without him makes me feel as helpless as a honeydipper without a bucket, a banker on Black Friday. I’ll tell Bloodaxe and Joe, and you can start your crew. Only we ought to have a ceremony. We’ll all have a snort, and I’ll dig the first shovelful.”

A few minutes later, his stomach warmed up by a big shot of bourbon, cigar in mouth, his speech finished, Sam started to dig. The bamboo shovel had a sharp edge, but the grass was so tough and thick that it was necessary to use the shovel as a machete. Sweating, swearing, declaring that he had always hated physical exertion and was not cut out to be a ditchdigger, Sam chopped away the grass. On driving the now-dulled shovel into the earth, Sam found he could not bring up even a half shovelful. It would be necessary to hack away at the grass and the dirt between.

“By the great horn spoon!” he said, flinging the shovel down on the ground. “Let some peasant who’s cut out for this drudgery do it! I’m a brain-worker!”

The crowd laughed and set to work with flint and bamboo knives and flint axes. Sam said, “If that iron is ten feet down, it’ll take us ten years to find it. Joe, you’d better bring back plenty of flint, otherwise we’re done for.”

“Do I have to go?” Joe Miller said. “I’ll mithth you, Tham.”

“You gotta go, as all men do,” Sam said. “Don’t worry about me.”

12

During the next three days, a hole ten feet across and one foot deep was made. Von Richthofen organized the teams so that a new one replaced the previous crew every fifteen minutes. There was no lack of fresh and strong diggers, but delays were caused by the flaking of new flint tools and the making of new bamboo tools. Bloodaxe growled about the damage to the axes and knives, saying that if they were to be attacked, the stone weapons could not cut through the skin of a baby. Clemens begged him for the dozenth time to be allowed to use the steel ax, and Bloodaxe refused.

“If Joe were here, I’d have him take the ax away from him,” Clemens said to Lothar. “And where is Joe, anyway? He should be back by now, empty-handed or bearing gifts.”

“I think we ought to send somebody in a dugout to find out,” von Richthofen said. “I’d go myself, but I think you still need me around to protect you from Bloodaxe.”

“If something’s happened to Joe, we’ll both need protection,” Sam said. “All right, that Pathan, Abdul, can be our spy. He could wriggle unnoticed through a basket of rattlesnakes.”

At dawn, two days later, Abdul paddled in. He woke Sam and Lothar, who were sleeping in the same hut for mutual protection. In broken English, he explained that Joe Miller was tied up in a strongly built bamboo cage. Abdul had tried to get a chance to free Joe, but the cage had an around-the-clock guard.

The Vikings had been greeted with friendliness and sympathy. The chief of the region had seemed surprised that his flint for their iron would be a very good trade. He had held a big party to celebrate the agreement and had given his guests as much liquor and dreamgum as they wished. The Norse had been overcome while they snored drunkenly. Joe was asleep but had awakened while being tied up. With bare hands only, he had killed twenty men and injured fifteen before the chief had half stunned him with a club against the back of his neck. The blow would have broken anybody else’s neck; it just reduced his fighting ability enough to permit men to swarm over him and restrain him while the chief hit him twice over the head.

“The chief knows Joe is a mighty warrior,” Abdul said. “Greater than Rustam himself. I overheard some men talking, and they said their chief plans to use Joe as a hostage. He wants to become partners in the iron mine. If refused, he will not kill Joe but will make a slave out of him, although I doubt he can do that. He’ll attack us, kill us, get the iron for himself.

“He can do it. He’s building a huge fleet, many small ships carrying forty men each, hastily put together but serviceable to transport his army. He’ll make an all-out attack with warriors armed with flint weapons, bows and arrows, and heavy war-boomerangs.”

“And who is this would-be Napoleon?” Sam said.

“His men called him King John. They say that he ruled over England when men wore armor and fought with swords. In the time of Saladin. His brother was a very famous warrior, Richard the Lion-Hearted.”

Sam cursed and said, “John Lackland! The black-hearted pussyfooting Prince John! So rotten that the English swore never again to have a king named John! I’d sooner have a scoundrel like Leopold of Belgium or Jim Fisk after my hide!”

THIRTY minutes later, Sam was shoved into an even deeper gloom. This time, the message came by word-of-mouth grapevine. Thirty miles downRiver, a huge fleet was sailing toward them. This consisted of sixty large single-masters, each carrying forty warriors. The leader of the armada was a king of an area which had been just outside the destruction caused by the meteorite. His name was Joseph Maria von Radowitz.

“I read about him in school!” von Richthofen said. “Let’s see. He was born in 1797, died about 1853, I believe. He was an artillery expert and a good friend of Frederick Wilhelm IV of Prussia. He was called ‘The Warlike Monk’ because he was a general who also had strict religious views. He died when he was about fifty years old, a disappointed man because he had been dropped from favor. So now he’s alive again, young, and no doubt trying to impose his Puritanism upon others, and killing those who don’t agree with him.”

An hour later, he got word that King John’s fleet had set sail.

“John’s force will get here first,” he told Bloodaxe. “They’ll be faster because the wind and current will be helping them.”

“Teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” Bloodaxe snorted.

“So what do you plan to do?”

“Smash the Englishman first and then destroy the German later,” Bloodaxe replied. He swung his ax and said, “By the shattered hymen of Thor’s bride! My ribs still hurt, but I will ignore the pain!”

Sam did not argue. When he was alone with Lothar, he said, “Fighting against hopeless odds until you die is all very admirable. But it doesn’t pay off in preferred stock. Now, I know you’re going to think I’m as spineless as a cockroach, Lothar, but I have a dream, a great dream, and it transcends all ordinary ideas of faithfulness and morality. I want that boat, Lothar, and I want to pilot it to the end of The River, no matter what!

“If we had a fighting chance, I wouldn’t suggest this. But we don’t. We’re outnumbered and have inferior weapons. So I’m going to suggest that we make a deal.”

“With whom?” von Richthofen said. He was grim and pale.

“With John. He may be the most treacherous king in the world, although the competition is fierce, but he’s the one most likely to throw in with us. Radowitz’s fleet is bigger than his, and even if John somehow managed to defeat it, he’d be so weakened we could take him. But if we ganged up with John, we could give Radowitz such a beating he’d take off like a hound dog, tail closed down like a latch.”

Von Richthofen laughed and said, “For a moment I thought you were going to propose that we hide in the mountains and then come out to offer our services to the victor. I could not stand the idea of playing coward, of leaving these people to fight alone.”

“I’ll be frank,” Clemens said, “even if I am Sam. I’d do that if I thought it was the only way. No, what I’m suggesting is that we get rid, somehow, of Bloodaxe. He’ll never go along with taking John in as a partner.”

“You’ll have to watch John as if he were a poisonous snake,” the German said. “But I see no other way out. Nor do I think it’s treachery to kill Bloodaxe. It’s just insurance. He’ll get rid of you the first chance he gets.”

“And we’ll not really be killing him,” Sam said. “Just removing him from the picture.”

Clemens wanted to talk more about what they should do, but von Richthofen said that there had been enough talk. Sam was putting off the taking of action—as usual. Things had to be done right now.

Sam gave a sigh and said, “I suppose so.”

“What’s the matter?” Lothar said.

“I’m suffering from guilt before I’ve even incurred it,” Sam replied. “I feel like a yellow dog, although there’s no reason I should. None at all! But I was born to feel guilty about everything, even about being born.”

Lothar threw his hands up in disgust and strode off, saying over his shoulder, “Follow me or hang back. But you can’t expect me to think of you as the captain of our boat. Captains don’t drag their feet.”

Sam grimaced but went after him. Lothar talked to twelve men he thought trustworthy enough for what he proposed. The sun began to climb down from the zenith while the details were arranged and then the men went to arm themselves. They came back from their huts with bamboo spears and knives. One had a bamboo bow with six arrows, effective only at close range.

Lothar von Richthofen and Sam Clemens leading, the group strode up to the Norse king’s hut. Six Vikings stood guard outside.

“We want to talk to Bloodaxe,” Sam said, trying to keep his voice from quavering.

“He’s in there with a woman,” Ve Grimarsson said.

Sam raised his hand. Lothar ran past him and clubbed Grimarsson over the head. An arrow whistled past Sam’s shoulder and stopped in the throat of a guard. Within ten seconds, the others had been killed or wounded too severely to continue fighting. There were shouts from a distance as a dozen other Vikings came running to protect their chief. Bloodaxe, naked, bellowing, his steel ax held high, rushed through the doorway. Von Richthofen lunged with his spear and impaled the Norseman on it. Bloodaxe dropped the ax and staggered back, driven by the German’s weight on the spear, until he slammed into the bamboo wall of the hut. He stared; his mouth worked; blood ran from a corner of his lips; his skin was blue-gray.

The German then yanked the spear out of the Norseman’s belly, and Bloodaxe crumpled.

There was a fight afterward with six of Clemens’ men killed and four wounded. The Vikings did not give up until all were silenced and as dead as their king.

Sam Clemens, panting hoarsely, splashed with blood from others and bleeding from a gash on his shoulder, leaned on his spear. He had killed one man, Gunnlaugr Thorrfinnsson, puncturing his kidney from behind while the Viking was thrusting at von Richthofen. Too bad about Gunnlaugr. Of all the Norsemen, he enjoyed Sam’s jokes the most. Now he was stabbed in the back by his friend Sam Clemens.

I’ve fought in thirty-eight battles, Sam thought, and I’ve slain only two men. The other was a severely wounded Turk struggling to get to his feet. Sam Clemens, the mighty warrior, great-hearted hero. Thinking thus, he gazed with the horror and fascination that corpses had always had for him and would have if he lived ten thousand years.

AND then he squawked with fright and yanked his left ankle away in a frantic effort to escape the hand gripping it. Unable to do so, he lifted his spear to drive it into the man who held him. He looked down into the pale blue eyes of Erik Bloodaxe. Life had surged up in Bloodaxe for a moment. The glaze was gone from his eyes and the skin was not so gray-blue. His voice was weak but strong enough for Sam, and others nearby, to hear him.

“Bikkja! Droppings of Ratatosk! Listen! I will not let you go until I have spoken! The gods have given me the powers of a voluspa. They want revenge for your treachery. Listen! I know there is iron beneath this blood-soaked grass. I feel the iron flowing in my veins. Its grayness turns my blood thick and cold. There is iron enough and more than enough for your great white boat. You will dig up this iron, and you will build a boat to rival Skithblathnir.

“You will be captain of it, Bitch Clemens, and your boat will sail up The River for more miles than Sleipnir’s eight legs could cover in a day. You will go back and forth, north and south, east and west, as the Rivervalley takes you. You will go around the world many times.

“But the building of the boat and the sailing thereof will be bitter and full of grief. And after years, two generations as known on Earth, after great sufferings, and some joys, when you think you are at long last near the end of the long, long journey, then you will find me!

“Rather, I will find you! I will be waiting on a distant boat and I will kill you. And you will never get to the end of The River nor storm the gates of Valhalla!”

Sam became cold and brittle. Even when he felt the hand slacken its grip on his ankle, he did not move. He heard the death rattle and did not move or look down.

Faintly, Bloodaxe spoke again. “I wait!”

There was another rattle, more drawn out, and the hand fell away. Sam forced himself to step away, not sure that he would not break into a dozen pieces. He looked at von Richthofen and said, “Superstition! A man can’t look into the future!”

Von Richthofen said, “I don’t think so. But if things are as you believe, Sam, mechanical, automatic, then the future is predetermined. If things are ready-made, why can’t the future open up for a minute, lights blaze in the tunnel of time, and a man see down the track?”

Sam did not answer. Von Richthofen laughed to show that he was joking and clapped Sam on the shoulder.

Sam said, “I need a drink. Badly.” Then he said, “I don’t take any stock in that superstitious rot.”

But he believed that those dying eyes had seen into the years ahead, and he was thereafter to believe.

13

An hour before dusk, King John’s fleet arrived. Sam Clemens sent a man out to tell John that he wanted to discuss a possible partnership. John, ever willing to talk to you before knifing you, agreed to a powwow. Sam stood on the edge of the bank while John Lackland leaned on the railing of his galley. Sam, his terror unfrozen by a dozen whiskeys, described the situation and spoke glowingly of the great boat to be built after the iron was secured.

John was a short, dark man with very broad shoulders, tawny hair, and blue eyes. He smiled frequently and spoke in an English not so heavily accented it could not be easily understood. Before coming to this area, he had lived for ten years among late-eighteenth-century Virginians. A fluent linguist, he had disburdened himself of much of the speech patterns of his twelfth-century English and Norman French.

He understood well why it would pay him to team up with Clemens against von Radowitz. No doubt he had mental reservations about what he would do after von Radowitz was disposed of, but he came ashore to swear eternal friendship and partnership. The details of the pact were arranged over drinks, and then King John had Joe Miller released from his cage on the flagship.

Sam did not shed tears easily, but several trickled down his cheeks on seeing the titanthrop. Joe wept like a perambulating Niagara Falls and almost broke Sam’s ribs in his embrace.

Von Richthofen, however, told Clemens later, “At least, with Bloodaxe, you knew fairly well where you stood. You’ve made a bad trade.”

“I’m from Missouri,” Sam replied, “but I never was much of a mule trader. However, if you’re running for your life, a pack of wolves snapping at your heels, you’ll trade a foundered plug for a wild mustang as long as he’ll carry you out of danger. You worry later about how to get down off of him without breaking your neck.”

The battle, which started at dawn the next day, was long. Several times, disaster came close for Clemens and King John. The Englishman’s fleet had hidden near the east bank in the early morning fog and then had come up behind the German fleet. Flaming pine torches thrown by John’s sailors started fires on many of von Radowitz’s boats. But the invaders spoke a common language, were well disciplined, had soldiered together a long time, and were far better armed.

Their rockets sank many of John’s boats and blasted holes in the cheval-de-frise along the bank. The Germans then stormed ashore under cover of a hail of arrows. During the landing, a rocket exploded in the hole dug to get to the iron. Sam was knocked over by the blast. Half stunned, he rose. And he became aware of a man he had never seen before standing by him. Sam was sure that the man had not been in this area until this moment.

The stranger was about five feet seven inches tall and was stockily, even massively, built. Like an old red ram, Sam thought, though the stranger looked, of course, as if he were twenty-five years old. His curly auburn hair hung down his back to his waist. His black eyebrows were as thick as Sam’s. His eyes were large, dark brown with chips of pale green. His face was aquiline and jutting-chinned. His ears were large and stood out at almost right angles from his head.

The body of an old red ram, Sam thought, with the head of a great horned owl.

His bow was made of a material that Sam had seen before, though it was rare. It was made from two of the curved horns that ring a Riverdragon-fish’s mouth. The two were joined together to make one double recurved bow. This type was by far the most powerful and durable bow in the valley but had one disadvantage. It took extremely powerful arms to bend it.

The stranger’s leather quiver held twenty arrows, flint-tipped, the shafts carved laboriously from the fin bones of the Riverdragon and feathered with carved pieces of bone so thin that the sun shone through them.

He spoke in a German with a thick, non-Germanic, unidentifiable accent. “You look like Sam Clemens.”

“I am,” Clemens replied. “What’s left of me. But how did you…?”

“You were described to me by”—the stranger paused—“one of Them.”

Sam did not understand for a moment. The part-deafness caused by the explosion, the yells of men killing each other only twenty yards away, other, more distant rocket explosions, and the sudden appearance of this man gave everything an unreal quality.

He said, “He sent…the Mysterious Stranger…he sent you! You’re one of The Twelve!”

“He? Not he! She sent me!”

Sam did not have time to question him about this. He checked the impulse to ask the man if he was any good with the bow. He looked as if he could wrest from the bow the last atom of potentiality. Instead, Sam climbed to the top of the pile of dirt by the hole and pointed at the nearest enemy ship, its prow against the bank. A man standing on its poop deck was bellowing orders.

“Von Radowitz, the leader of the enemy,” Sam said. “He’s out of range of our feeble bows.”

Smoothly, swiftly, pausing only to aim briefly, not bothering to gauge the wind which blew always at this time of day at a steady six miles an hour, the bowman loosed his black arrow. Its trajectory ended in the solar plexus of von Radowitz. The German staggered backward under the impact, whirled to reveal the bloody tip sticking from his back, and fell backward over the railing and into the waters between boat and bank.

The second-in-command rallied his men, and the bowman drove a shaft through him. Joe Miller, clad in Riverdragon-leather armor, swinging his huge oaken club, ravaged among the Germans in the center of the line of battle. He was like an 800-pound lion with a human brain. Death and panic went with him. He smashed twenty skulls by the minute and occasionally picked up a man with his free hand and threw him to knock down a half dozen or so.

At different times, five men managed to slip behind Joe, but the black bone arrows of the newcomer always intercepted them.

The invaders broke and tried to get back to their boats. Von Richthofen, naked, bloody, grinning, danced before Sam. “We’ve won! We’ve won!”

“You’ll get your flying machine yet,” Sam said. He turned to the archer. “What is your name?”

“I have had many names, but when my grandfather first held me in his arms he called me Odysseus.”

…

ALL Sam could think of to say was, “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

Could this be the man of whom Homer sang? The real Ulysses, that is, the historical Ulysses, who did fight before the walls of Troy and about whom legends and fairy tales were later collected? Why not? The shadowy man who had talked in Sam’s hut had said he had picked twelve men out of the billions available. What his means were for choosing, Sam did not know, but he presumed his reasons were good. And the Mysterious Stranger had told him of one choice: Richard Francis Burton. Was there some kind of aura about The Twelve that enabled the renegade to know the man who could do the job? Some tiger color of the soul?

Late that night, Sam, Joe, Lothar, and the Achaean, Odysseus, walked to their huts after the victory celebration. Sam’s throat was dry from all the talking. He had tried to squeeze out of the Achaean all he knew about the siege of Troy and his wanderings afterward. He had been told enough to confuse, not enlighten, him.

The Troy that Odysseus knew was not the city near the Hellespont, the ruins that Terrestrial archaeologists called Troy VIIa. The Troy that Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Diomedes besieged was farther south, opposite the island of Lesbos but inland and north of the Kaikos River. It had been inhabited by people related to the Etruscans, who lived at that time in Asia Minor and later emigrated to Italy because of the Hellenic invaders. Odysseus knew of the city which later generations had thought was Troy. Dardanians, barbarophones, lived there; they were related to the true Trojans. Their city had fallen five years before the Trojan war to other barbarians from the north.

Three years after the siege of the real Troy, which had lasted for only two years, Odysseus had gone on the great sea-raid of the Danaans, or Achaeans, against the Egypt of Rameses III. The raid had ended in disaster. Odysseus had fled for his life by sea and had indeed gone unwillingly on a journey that took three years and resulted in his visiting Malta, Sicily, and parts of Italy, lands unknown then to the Greeks. There had been no Laestrygonians, Aeolus, Calypso, Circe, Polyphemus. His wife was named Penelope, but there were no suitors for him to kill.

As for Achilles and Hector, Odysseus knew of them only as the principals in a song. He supposed both of them to have been Pelasgians, the people who lived in the Hellenic peninsula before the Achaeans came down out of the north to conquer it. The Achaeans had adapted the Pelasgian song to suit their own purposes, and later bards must have incorporated it in the Iliad. Odysseus knew the Iliad and the Odyssey, because he had met a scholar who could recite both epics from memory.

“WHAT about the Wooden Horse?” Sam said, fully expecting to draw a blank with his question. To his surprise, Odysseus not only knew of it but said that he had indeed been responsible for it. It was a deception conceived in desperation by madness and should have failed.

And this, to Sam, was the most startling of all. The scholars had united in denying any reality to this story, saying that it was patently impossible. They should have been correct, since the idea did seem fantastic, nor was it likely that the Achaeans would be stupid enough to build the horse or the Trojans stupid enough to fall for it. But the wooden horse had existed, and the Achaeans had gotten into the city by hiding inside the horse.

Von Richthofen and Joe listened to the two talk. Sam had decided that, despite the Ethical’s warning to tell no one about him, Joe and Lothar should know of him. Otherwise, Sam would be doing so many things that would be inexplicable to anyone closely associated with him. Besides, Sam felt that his taking others into the secret would show the Ethical that Sam was really running things. It was a childish gesture, but Sam made it.

Sam said good-night to all but Joe and lay down on the cot. Although very tired, he could not get to sleep. The snores issuing from Joe like a maelstrom through a keyhole did not help soothe his insomnia. Also, his excitement over tomorrow’s doings made his nerves ripple and brain pulse. Tomorrow would be a historic day, if this world were to have a history. Eventually, there would be paper, ink, pencils, even a printing press. The great Riverboat would have a weekly journal. There would be a book which would tell of how the hole was deepened by exploding rockets captured from von Radowitz’s ship. Perhaps the iron would be exposed tomorrow; it surely must.

And there were in addition his worries about King John, the jesting slyboots. God knew what that insidious mind was planning. It was doubtful that John would do anything treacherous until the boat was built, and that would be years from now. There was no need to worry yet, none at all. Despite which, Sam worried.

14

Sam awoke with a start, his heart beating as if some monster of his nightmares had kicked it. Wet air was blowing in through the interstices of the bamboo walls and the mat hanging over the entranceway. Rain crashed against the leaf-covered roof, and thunder boomed from the mountains. Joe was still snoring his private thunder.

Sam stretched, and then he cried out and sat up. His hand had touched flesh. Lightning from far away paled the darkness by two shades and gave vague shape to someone squatting by the cot.

A familiar baritone spoke. “You needn’t look for the titanthrop to come to your aid. I’ve ensured that he’ll not wake until dawn.”

By this, Sam knew that the Ethical could see where no light was. Sam picked up a cigar from the little folding table and said, “Mind if I smoke?”

The Mysterious Stranger took so long replying that Sam wondered. The glow from the hot wire in Sam’s lighter would not be bright enough to reveal the man’s features, and probably he was wearing a mask or some device over his face. Did he dislike the odor of cigars, perhaps of tobacco in any form? Yet he hesitated to say so because this characteristic might identify him? Identify whom? The other Ethicals who knew that they had a renegade among them? There were twelve, or so the Stranger had said. If they ever learned that he, Sam Clemens, had been contacted by an Ethical, and learned of the Ethical’s dislike of tobacco, would They know at once the renegade’s identity?

Sam did not voice his suspicions. He would keep this to himself for possible later use.

“Smoke,” the Stranger said. Although Sam could not see him or hear him move, he got the impression that he backed off a little.

“What’s the occasion for this unexpected visit?” Sam said.

“To tell you I won’t be able to see you for a long time. I didn’t want you to think I’d deserted you. I’m being called away on business you wouldn’t understand even if I were to explain it. You’re on your own now for a long time. If things should go badly for you, I won’t be able to interfere even in a subtle way.

“However, you have all you need at present to occupy you for a decade. You’ll have to use your own ingenuity to solve the many technical problems that will arise. I can’t supply you with any more metals or materials you might need or extricate you from difficulties with invaders. I took enough chances in getting the meteorite down to you and in telling you where the bauxite and platinum are.

“There will be other Ethicals—not The Twelve, but second-order—to watch you, but they won’t interfere. They won’t think the boat any danger to The Plan. They’d rather you didn’t have the iron and they’ll be upset when you ‘discover’ the platinum and bauxite. They want you Terrestrials to be occupied with psychic development, not technological. But they won’t stick their noses in.”

Sam felt a little panic. For the first time, he realized that, though he hated the Ethical, he had come to depend strongly on him for moral and material support.

“I hope nothing goes wrong,” Sam said. “I almost lost my chance at the iron today. If it hadn’t been for Joe and that fellow, Odysseus….”

Then he said, “Hold it! Odysseus told me that the Ethical who talked to him was a woman!”

The darkness chuckled. “What does that mean?”

“Either you’re not the only renegade or else you can change your voice. Or maybe, maybe you’re not telling me the truth at all! Maybe you’re all in on this and feeding out fine lies for some plan of your own! We’re tools in your hands!”

“I’m not lying! And I can’t tell you about your other guesses. If you, or the others I’ve chosen, are detected and questioned, their stories will confuse my colleagues.”

There was a rustle. “I must go now. You’re on your own. Good luck.”

“Wait! What if I fail?”

“Somebody else will build the boat, but I have good reasons for wanting you to do it.”

“So I am just a tool. If the tools breaks, throw it away, get another.”

“I can’t assure your success. I’m not a god.”

“Damn you and all your kind!” Sam shouted. “Why couldn’t you have let things be as they were on Earth? We had the peace of death forever. No more pain and grief. No more never-ceasing toil and heartache. All that was behind us. We were free, free of the chains of flesh. But you gave us the chains again and fixed it so we couldn’t even kill ourselves. You set death beyond our reach. It’s as if you put us in hell forever!”

“It’s not that bad,” the Ethical said. “Most of you are better off than you ever were. Or at least as well off. The crippled, the blind, the grotesque, the diseased, the starved are healthy and young. You don’t have to sweat for or worry about your daily bread, and most of you are eating much better than you did on Earth. However, I agree with you in the larger sense. It was a crime, the greatest crime of all, to resurrect you. So….”

“I want my Livy back!” Sam cried. “And I want my daughters! They might as well be dead as separated from me, I mean from each other, forever! I’d rather they were dead! At least I wouldn’t be in agony all the time because they might be suffering, be in some terrible plight! How do I know they’re not being raped, beaten, tortured? There’s so much evil on this planet! There should be, since it has the original population of Earth!”

“I could help you,” the Ethical said. “But it might take years for me to locate them. I won’t explain the means because they’re too complicated and I have to leave before the rain is over.”

Sam rose and walked forward, his hands out.

The Ethical said, “Stop! You touched me once!”

Sam halted. “Could you find Livy for me? My girls?”

“I’ll do it. You have my word. Only…only what if it does take years? Suppose you have built the boat by then—in fact, are already a million miles up The River. And then I tell you I’ve found your wife, but she’s three million miles downRiver? I can notify you of her location, but I positively cannot bring her to you. You’ll have to get her yourself. What will you do then? Will you turn back and spend twenty years backtracking? Would your crew permit you to do so? I doubt it. Moreover, even if you did this, there’s no certainty that your woman would still be in the original location. She may have been killed and translated elsewhere, even farther out of reach.”

“Damn you!” Sam said.

“And, of course,” the Ethical said, “people change. You may not like her when you find her.”

“I’ll kill you!” Sam Clemens yelled. “So help me…!”

THE bamboo mat was lifted. The Stranger was silhouetted briefly, a batlike, cloaked shape with a dome covering for the head. Sam clenched his fists and forced himself to stand like a block of ice, waiting for his anger to melt away. Then he began pacing back and forth until finally he threw his cigar away. It had turned bitter; even the air he breathed was harsh.

“Damn them! Damn him! I’ll build the boat and I’ll get to the north pole and I’ll find out what’s going on! And I’ll kill him! Kill them!”

The rains stopped. There were shouts from a distance. Sam went outside, alarmed because the Stranger might have been caught, although it did not seem likely. And he knew then that his boat meant more than anything else, that he did not want anything to happen to interfere with its building, even if he could take immediate revenge on the Ethical. That would have to come later.

Torches were coming across the plain. Presently, the bearers were close enough for Sam to make out the faces of some guards and that of von Richthofen. There were three unknowns with them.

An arrangement of large towels, held together by magnetic clasps, fell shapelessly about their bodies. A hood shadowed the face of the smallest stranger. The tallest was a man with a long, lean, dark face and a huge hooked nose.

“You’re runner-up in the contest,” Sam said. “There’s someone in my hut who has a nose that beats yours all hollow.”

“Nom d’un con! Va te faire foutre!” the tall man said. “Must I always be insulted, no matter where I go? Is this the hospitality you give strangers? Did I travel ten thousand leagues under incredibly harsh conditions to find the man who can put good steel in my hand once more, only to have him verbally tweak my nose? Know, ignorant insolent lout, that Savinien Cyrano II de Bergerac does not turn the other cheek. Unless you apologize, immediately, most sincerely, plead with the tongue of an angel, I will stab you through with this nose that you so mock!”

Sam apologized abjectly, saying that his nerves had been frayed by the battle. He looked in wonder at the legendary figure and he wondered if he could be one of the chosen twelve.

The second man, slim, blond-haired, and blue-eyed, introduced himself as Hermann Göring. A spiral bone, taken from one of the Riverfishes, hung from a cord around his neck, and by this Sam knew that he was a member of the Church of the Second Chance. This meant trouble, because the Second Chancers preached absolute pacifism.

The third stranger threw the hood back and revealed a pretty face with long black hair done in a Psyche knot.

SAM staggered and almost fainted. “Livy!”

The woman started. She stepped closer to him and silently, pale in the torchlight, looked at him. She was weaving back and forth, as if she were about to faint.

“Sam,” she said weakly.

He took a step toward her, but she turned and clung to de Bergerac for support. The Frenchman put his arm around her and glared at Sam Clemens. “Courage, my little lamb! He will not harm you while I am here! What does he mean to you?”

She looked up at him with an expression that Sam could not mistake. He howled and shook his fist at the stars, just coming out from the clouds.

15

The Riverboat moved through his dream like a glittering twenty-million-carat diamond.

There had never been a boat like it nor would there ever be another.

It would be named the Not For Hire. No one would ever be able to take it away from him, it would be so strongly armored and weaponed. Nor would anyone be able to buy or rent it from him.

The name glowed in great black letters against the white hull. NOT FOR HIRE.

The fabulous Riverboat would have four decks: the boiler deck, the main deck, the hurricane deck, and the landing deck for the aerial machine. Its overall length would be four hundred and forty feet and six inches. The beam over the paddle-wheel guards would be ninety-three feet. Mean draft, loaded, twelve feet. The hull would be made of magnalium or, perhaps, plastic. The great stacks would spout smoke now and then, because there was a steam boiler aboard. But this was only to propel the big plastic bullets for the steam machine guns. The giant paddle wheels on the sides of the Riverboat would be turned by enormous electrical motors.

The Not For Hire would be the only metal boat on The River, the only boat not propelled by oars or wind, and it would make anybody sit up and stare, whether he was born in 2,000,000 B.C. or in A.D. 2000.

And he, Sam Clemens, would be The Captain, capital T, capital C, because, aboard this vessel, carrying a crew of one hundred and twenty, there would be only one Captain.

King John of England could call himself Admiral if he wished, though if Sam Clemens had anything to do with it, he’d be First Mate, not Admiral. And if Sam Clemens really had anything to do with it, King John—John Lackland, Rotten John, Dirty John, Lecher John, Pigsty John—would not even be allowed on the boat. Sam Clemens, smoking a big green cigar, wearing a white cap, dressed in a white kilt with a white towel over his shoulders for a cape, would lean out of the starboard port of the great pilothouse and yell, Avast there, you lubbers! Grab hold of that putrescent mass of immorality and treachery and toss him off the gangplank! I don’t care if he lands in The River or on the bank! Get rid of that human garbage!

Over the railing of the boiler deck Prince John would sail. Slyboots John, screaming, cursing in his French-accented 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 The 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 to build your great Riverboat!

Sam fled the pilothouse 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 grinned and said, Go ahead! You haven’t got the guts! You love the Riverboat more than you love anything, even your faithless but precious Livy! You wouldn’t blow her up! So I’m going to split you down the middle with my ax and then take the Riverboat for myself!

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 two dozen pegs from which white towels hung. On one hat stand 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 inner lining of the stomach of the hornfish.

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 ten thousand 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, jam-packed 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, bright-green 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 (so-called), his glass factory, his smelters, his cement mills, his forges, his blacksmith shops, his armories, his laboratories, and his nitric- and 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 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.

Sam shivered at the wet and chilly wind which always came late at night from upRiver. He shivered also at the thought of the desolation. He loved beauty and nature’s order and he loved the parklike arrangement of the valley, whatever else he thought about this world. Now he had made it hideous because he had a dream. And he would have to extend that hideousness, because his mills and factories needed more wood for fuel, for paper, for charcoal. All that his state possessed was used up and he had about used up all that Ĉernskujo to the immediate north and Publiujo to the immediate south would trade him. If he wanted more he would have to war on his closest neighbors or make arrangements for trading with the more distant states or those just across The River. Or else conquer them and take their wood away from them. He did not want to do that; he abhorred war in principle and could barely stand it in practice.

But if he was to have his Riverboat he had to have wood as fuel for his factories.

He also had to have bauxite and cryolite and platinum if he was to have aluminum generators and motors.

The nearest source of all three was in Soul City, that nation twenty-six miles downRiver dominated by Elwood Hacking, who hated whites.

So far, Sam had been able to trade iron weapons for bauxite, cryolite, cinnabar, and platinum. Sam’s own state, Parolando, needed the weapons badly. Adding one burden to the other, Hacking insisted that Parolando use its own men to mine and transport the ore.

Sam sighed deeply. Why in hell hadn’t the Mysterious Stranger directed the meteorite to fall right by the bauxite deposits? Then, when Sam and Bloodaxe’s Vikings had sailed into this area immediately after the meteorite had struck, they could have claimed the land that was now Soul City for their own. When Hacking arrived, he would have been forced to join Clemens or to leave.

Still, even with the Stranger’s powers, it would not be easy to deflect a hundred-thousand-ton iron-nickel siderite from its course and make it fall only twenty-six miles from the bauxite and other minerals. Actually the Stranger had supposed that he had hit the target on the bull’s eye. He had told Sam, before he disappeared on some unknown mission, that the minerals were upRiver, all within a seven-mile range. But he had been mistaken. And that had made Sam both glad and angry. He was angry because the minerals were not all within his reach, but he was also happy that the Ethicals could make a mistake.

That fact did not help the humans imprisoned forever between sheer mountains 20,000 feet high in a valley about 9.9 miles wide on the average. They would be imprisoned for thousands of years, if not forever, unless Samuel Langhorne Clemens could build his Riverboat.

SAM went to the unpainted pine cabinet, opened a door, and pulled out an opaque glass bottle. It held about twenty ounces of bourbon donated by people who did not drink. He downed about three ounces, winced, snorted, slapped his chest, and put the bottle back. Hah! Nothing better to start off the day with, especially when you woke up from a nightmare that should have been rejected by the Great Censor of Dreams. If, that is, the Great Censor had any love and regard for one of his favorite dream-makers, Sam Clemens. Maybe the Great Censor did not love him after all. It seemed that very few did love Sam anymore. He had to do things he did not want to do in order to get the boat built.

And then there was Livy, his wife on Earth for thirty-four years.

He swore, caressed a nonexistent mustache, reached back into the cabinet, and pulled the bottle out again. Another snort. Tears came, but whether engendered by the bourbon or the thought of Livy, he did not know. Probably, in this world of complex forces and mysterious operations—and operators—the tears were caused by both. Plus other things which his hindbrain did not care to let him peep into at this moment. His hindbrain would wait until his forebrain was bent over, tying its intellectual shoestrings, and would then boost the posterior of said forebrain.

He strode across the bamboo mats and looked through the port window. Down there, about two hundred yards away, under the branches of the irontree, was a round, conical-roofed, two-room hut. Inside the bedroom would be Olivia Langdon Clemens, his wife—his ex-wife—and the long, lanky, tremendously beaked, weak-chinned Savinien Cyrano II de Bergerac, swordsman, libertine, and man of letters.

“Livy, how could you?” Sam said. “How could you break my heart, the heart of Your Youth?”

A year had passed since she had arrived with Cyrano de Bergerac. He had been shocked, more shocked than he had ever been in his seventy-four years on Earth and his twenty-one years on the Riverworld. But he had recovered from it. Or he would have recovered if he had not gotten another shock, though a lesser one. Nothing could exceed the impact of the first. After all, he could not expect Livy to go without a man for twenty-one years. Not when she was young and beautiful again and still passionate and had no reasonable hope of ever seeing him again. He had lived with a half dozen women himself, and he could not expect chastity or faithfulness from her. But he had expected that she would drop her mate as a monkey drops a heated penny when she found him again.

Not so. She loved de Bergerac.

He had seen her almost every day since the night she had first come out of the mists of The River. They spoke politely enough and sometimes they were able to crack their reserve and laugh and joke just as they had on Earth. Sometimes, briefly but undeniably, their eyes told each other that the old love was vibrating between them. Then, when he felt that he had broken out with longing, just like the hives, so he told himself later, laughing while he felt like crying, he had stepped toward her, despite himself, and she had stepped back to Cyrano’s side if he happened to be there or looked around for him if he wasn’t.

Every night she was with that dirty, uncouth, big-nosed, weak-chinned, Adam’s-appled, but colorful, strong-minded, witty, vigorous, talented, scary Frenchman. The virile frog, Sam muttered. He could imagine him leaping, croaking with lust, toward the white, blackly outlined, curving figure of Livy, leaping, croaking…

He shuddered. This was no good. Even when he brought women up here secretly—though he did not have to hide anything—he could not quite forget her. Even when he chewed dreamgum he could not forget her. If anything, she sailed into the drug-tossed sea of his mind more strongly, blown by the winds of desire. The good ship Livy, white sails bellying out, the trim cleancut curving hull…

And he heard her laughter, that lovely laughter. That was the hardest thing to endure.

He walked away and looked out through the fore ports. He stood by the oak pedestal and the big-spoked Riverboat’s wheel he had carved. This room was his “pilothouse” and the two rooms behind made up the “texas.” The whole building was on the side of the hill nearest to the plain. It was on thirty-foot stilts and could be entered through a staircase or ladder (to use a nautical term) on the starboard side or through a port directly from the hill behind the rear chamber of the texas. On top of the pilothouse was a large bell, the only metal bell in the world, as far as he knew. As soon as the water clock in the corner struck six, he would clang the big bell. And the dark valley would slowly come to life.

16

Mists still overhung The River and the edge of the banks, but he could see the huge squat mushroom shape of the grailstone a mile and a half down the slope of the plain just by the water’s edge. A moment later, he saw a boat, toy-size, emerge from the mists. Two figures jumped out and pulled the dugout onto the shore, then ran off to the right. The light from the skies was bright enough for Sam to see them, though he sometimes lost them when buildings intervened. After going around the two-story pottery factory, they cut straight into the hills. He lost them then, but it seemed that they were heading for John Plantagenet’s log “palace.”

So much for the sentinel system of Parolando. Every quarter mile of The River’s front was guarded by a hut on thirty-foot stilts with four men on duty. If they saw anything suspicious, they were to beat on their drums, blow their bone horns, and light their torches.

Two men slipping out of the fog to carry news to King John, ex–King John, of England?

Fifteen minutes later Sam saw a shadow running between shadows. The rope attached to the small bell just inside the entrance rang. He looked through the starboard port. A white face looked up at him. Sam’s own spy, William Grevel, famous wool merchant, citizen of London, died in 1401 in the Year of Our Lord. There were no sheep or, in fact, any mammals other than man along The River. But the ex-merchant had shown great aptitude for espionage, and he loved to stay up all night and skulk around.

Sam beckoned to him; Grevel ran up the “ladder” and entered after Sam had unbarred the thick oak door.

Sam said, in Esperanto, “Saluton, leutenanto Grevel. Kio estas?”

(Translation: “Hello, Lieutenant Grevel. What’s the matter?”)

Grevel said, “Bonan matenon, Estro. Ĉiu grasa fripono, Reĝo Johano, estas jus akceptita duo spionoj.”

(Translation: “Good morning, Boss. That fat rascal, King John, has just received two spies.”)

Neither Sam nor Grevel could understand each other’s English, but they got along very well in Esperanto, except now and then.

Sam grinned. Bill Grevel had let himself down from the limb of an irontree, passing directly over a sentry, and down a rope onto the edge of the roof of the two-story building. He had passed through the bedroom, where three women slept, and then crawled to the top of the staircase. John and his spies, a twentieth-century Italian and a sixth-century Hungarian, were at a table below Grevel. The two had reported the results of their trip upRiver. John was furious and justly so, from his viewpoint.

Sam, hearing Grevel’s report, also became furious.

“He tried to assassinate Arthur of New Brittany? What is that man trying to do, ruin all of us?”

He paced back and forth, stopped, lit a big cigar, and began pacing again. Once he stopped to invite Grevel to a bite of cheese and a glass of wine.

It was one of the ironies of Chance or, perhaps, of the Ethicals, for who knew what things they arranged, that King John of England and the nephew he had murdered most foully should have been located within thirty-two miles of each other. Arthur, Prince of Brittany of dead Earth, had organized the peoples among whom he found himself into a state he called New Brittany. There were very few old Bretons in the ten-mile-long territory he ruled, but that did not matter. New Brittany it was.

It had taken eight months before Arthur had discovered that his uncle was his neighbor. He had traveled incognito to Parolando to verify with his own eyes the identity of the uncle who had slit his throat and dropped his weighted body into the Seine. Arthur wanted to capture John and keep him alive for as long as possible under exquisite torture. Killing John would only bar him, possibly forever, from getting his revenge. John, murdered, would awake the next day someplace thousands of miles away on The River.

But Arthur had sent emissaries demanding that John be given up to him. These demands had been rejected, of course, though only Sam’s sense of honor and his fear of John kept him from agreeing to Arthur’s demands.

Now John had sent four men to assassinate Arthur. Two had been killed; the others had escaped with minor wounds. This would mean invasion. Arthur not only had wanted revenge on John, he would like to get possession of the meteorite iron.

BETWEEN Parolando and New Brittany, a fourteen-mile stretch of the right bank of The River was known as Chernsky’s Land, or in Esperanto, Ĉernskujo. Chernsky, a sixteenth-century Ukrainian cavalry colonel, had refused an alliance with Arthur. But the nation immediately to New Brittany’s north was governed by Iyeyasu. He was a powerful and ambitious person, the man who had established the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1600 with its capital at Yedo, later called Tokyo. Sam’s spies said that the Japanese and the Breton had met six times in a war conference.

Moreover, just to the north of Iyeyasujo was Kleomenujo. This was governed by Kleomenes, a king of Sparta and half-brother to that Leonidas who held the pass at Thermopylae. Kleomenes had met three times with Iyeyasu and Arthur.

Just south of Parolando was an eleven-mile stretch called Publia, after its king, Publius Crassus. Publius had been an officer in Caesar’s cavalry during the Gallic campaigns. He was inclined to be friendly, although he extracted a big price for letting Sam cut down his timber.

South of Publia was Tofonujo, ruled by Tai Fung, one of Kublai Khan’s captains, killed on Earth when he fell drunk off a horse.

And south of Tifonujo was Soul City, headed by Elwood Hacking and Milton Firebrass.

Sam stopped and glared from under bushy brows at Grevel. “The hell of it, Bill, is there isn’t much I can do. If I tell John I know about his trying to murder Arthur, who may deserve murder, for all I know, then John knows that I’ve got spies inside the house. And he’ll just deny everything, ask that I bring his accusers forth—and you know what would happen to them, to you.”

Grevel paled.

Sam said, “Start your blood running again, I won’t do it. No. The only thing to do is to keep quiet and watch for developments. But I’m choking up to here with keeping quiet. That man is the most despicable I ever met—and if you knew my vast range of acquaintances, including publishers, you would feel the depth of my words.”

“John could be a tax collector,” Grevel said, as if he had plumbed the depths of insult. And he had, for him.

“It was a bad day when I had to agree to take John on as a partner,” Sam muttered, blowing out smoke as he turned toward Grevel. “But if I hadn’t taken him in, I’d have been robbed of my chance at the iron.”

HE dismissed Grevel after thanking him. The skies just above the mountains across The River were red. Soon the entire vault would be rosy on the edges and blue above, but it would be some time before the sun cleared the mountain. Before then, the grailstones would be discharging.

He washed his face in a basin, combed his thick bush of reddish hair straight back, applied the toothpaste with the tip of his finger to his teeth and gums, and spat. Then he fastened a belt with four sheaths and a bag dangling from a strap, and put it around his waist. He placed a long towel around his shoulders as a cape, picked up a cane of oak shod with iron, and, with the other hand, picked up the grail. He went down the stairs. The grass was still wet. It rained every night at three o’clock for half an hour, and the valley did not dry until after the sun came up. If it were not for the absence of disease germs and viruses, half the valley’s humans would have died of pneumonia and flu long ago.

Sam was young and vigorous again, but he still did not like to exercise. As he walked, he thought of the little railway he would like to build from his house to the edge of The River. But that would be too restrictive. Why not build an automobile with a motor that burned wood alcohol?

People began joining him; he was kept busy with “Saluton!” and “Bonan matenon!” At the end of his walk, he gave his grail to a man to put on a depression on the top of the gray granite mushroom-shaped rock. About six hundred of the gray cylinders were placed in the depression, and the crowd retreated to a respectful distance. Fifteen minutes later, the rock erupted with a roar. Blue flames soared twenty-five feet high and thunder echoed from the mountain. The appointed grail keepers for the day got onto the rock and passed the cylinders around. Sam took his back to the pilothouse, wondering on the way why he did not delegate someone to carry his grail down for him. The truth was, a man was so dependent on the grail, he just could not trust it out of his sight.

Back in the house, he opened the lid. In six containers in snapdown racks were breakfast and various goodies.

The grail had a false bottom in which was concealed an energy-matter converter and programmed menus. This morning he got bacon and eggs, toast with butter and jam, a glass of milk, a slice of cantaloupe, ten cigarettes, a marijuana stick, a cube of dreamgum, a cigar, and a cup of some delicious liqueur.

He settled down to eat with gusto and got, instead, a bad taste. Looking out through the starboard port (so he wouldn’t see into Cyrano’s door), he saw a youth on his knees before his hut. The fellow was praying, his eyes closed, his hands church-steepled. He wore only a kilt and a spiral bone from a Riverfish suspended by a leather string around his neck. His hair was dark blond, his face was broad, and his body was muscular. But his ribs were beginning to show.

The praying man was Hermann Göring.

Sam swore and reared up from his chair, knocking it backward, picked it up, and moved his breakfast from his desk to the big round table in the center of the room. The fellow had spoiled his appetite more than once. If there was one thing Sam could not stand, it was an ex-sinner, and Hermann Göring had sinned more than most and was now, by way of compensation, holier than most. Or so it seemed to Sam, though Göring claimed that he was the lowliest of the low—in a sense.

Take your damned arrogant humility away, Sam had said. Or at least take it downwind…

If it had not been for the Magna Carta which Sam had drawn up (over King John’s protests, thus repeating history), Sam would have kicked Göring and his followers out long ago. Well, at least a week ago. But the Carta, the constitution of the state of Parolando, the most democratic constitution in the history of mankind, gave total religious freedom and total freedom of speech. Almost total, anyway. There had to be some limitations.

But his own document forbade Sam to stop the missionaries of the Church of the Second Chance from preaching.

Yet if Göring continued to protest, to make speeches, to convert more to his doctrine of pacifist resistance, Sam Clemens would never get his Riverboat. Hermann Göring had made a symbol of the boat; he said that it represented man’s vanity, greed, lust for violence, and disregard of the Creator’s designs for the world of man.

Man should not build Riverboats. He should build more stately mansions of the soul. All man needed now was a roof over his head to keep off the rain and thin walls for a little privacy now and then. Man no longer had to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. His food and drink were given to him with nothing expected in return, not even gratitude. Man had time to determine his destiny. But man must not transgress on others, not rob them of their possessions, their love, or their dignity. He must respect others and himself. But he could not do this through thievery, robbery, violence, contempt. He must…

SAM turned away. Göring had some fine sentiments to which Sam subscribed. But Göring was wrong if he thought that licking the boots of the people who had put them here was going to lead to any Utopia or salvation for their souls. Humanity had been tricked again; it was being used, misused, and abused. Everything, the resurrection, the rejuvenation, freedom from disease, free food and liquor and smokes, freedom from hard work or economic necessity, everything was an illusion, a candy bar to lead baby-mankind into some dark alley where…Where? Sam did not know. But the Mysterious Stranger had said that mankind was being tricked in the cruelest hoax of all, even crueler than the first hoax, that of life on Earth. Man had been resurrected and put on this planet as the subject of a tremendous scholarly study. That was all. And when the studies were completed, Man would go down into darkness and oblivion once more. Cheated again.

But what did the Stranger have to gain by telling this to certain selected men? Why had he chosen a small number to help him defeat his fellow Ethicals? What was the Stranger really after? Was he lying to Sam and Cyrano and Odysseus and the others whom Sam had not yet met?

Sam Clemens did not know. He was as much in The Great Dark as he had been on Earth. But he did know one thing for certain. He wanted that Riverboat.

The mists had cleared away; breakfast time was over. He checked the water clock and rang the big bell on the pilothouse. As soon as it had ceased tolling, the wooden whistles of the sergeants began shrilling. Up and down the ten-mile stretch of the Rivervalley known as Parolando the whistles shrilled. Then the drums began to beat, and Parolando went to work.

17

There were seventeen thousand people in Parolando, but the Riverboat would be taking only one hundred and twenty. Twenty of these already knew for sure they would be going. Sam and Joe Miller, Lothar von Richthofen, van Boom, de Bergerac, Odysseus, three engineers, King John, and their hutmates had been promised. The rest would know whether or not they had worked for nothing a few days before the boat sailed. At that time, the names would be written on slips of paper and placed inside a big wire cage. The cage would be whirled around and around, and then Sam would stop it, and, blindfolded, would reach in and pull out, one after the other, one hundred names. And these lucky ones would be the crew of the Not For Hire.

The Not For Hire had about five million miles to travel, if the Stranger could be believed. Averaging about 335 miles every twenty-four hours, it would take over forty-one years to reach the end of The River. But it would not average that much, of course. The crew would have to put into shore for extensive vacations on land and repairs would have to be made. In fact, the Riverboat might wear out, although Sam planned on taking many spare parts. Once the boat was on its way it could not put back for parts or pick them up anywhere else. There would be no metal of any consequence from this place on.

It was strange to think that he would be about one hundred and forty years old when he got to the headwaters of The River.

But what was that when he had thousands of years of youth to go?

He looked through the bow ports. The plain was full of people streaming down from the hills to the factories. Behind him the hills would be alive with others on their way to the factories in the hills. A small army would be working on the big dam to the northwest, near the base of the mountains. A concrete wall was being constructed between two steep hills to dam up the water flowing from a spring near the top of the mountain. When the lake behind the dam was full, its overflow would drive the electrical generators to power the mills.

At present, the electrical energy needed came from a grailstone. A giant step-down transformer of aluminum took the energy three times a day, sent it through Brobdingnagian aluminum wires to a two-story device known as the batacitor. This was a late-twentieth-century electronic discovery that could accept hundreds of kilovolts in a hundredth of a microsecond and could discharge it at any rate from a tenth of a volt to one hundred kilovolts. It was the prototype of the batacitor that would be put on the Riverboat. At present the energy was chiefly used in a cutting device made by van Boom that sliced through the pieces of nickel-iron dug up on the plain. The energy could also be moderated to melt the metal. The aluminum for the wires and the batacitor had been laboriously and expensively made from aluminum silicate derived from the clay under the grass along the base of the mountains. But that supply had run out and now the only economically feasible source was in Soul City.

Sam sat down at his desk, pulled out a drawer, and removed a tall book bound in fish-bladder leather and with pages of bamboo-fiber paper. It was his diary, The Memoirs of a Lazarus. For the time being he was using ink made of water and tannic acid from oak bark and of carbon from finely ground charcoal-in-suspension to write down day-by-day happenings and his reflections. When the technology of Parolando was improved enough, he would use the electronic recorder that van Boom had promised him.

He had no sooner started writing than the drums began beating. The big bass drums represented dashes; the small soprano drums, dots. The code was Morse; the language, Esperanto.

Von Richthofen would be landing in a few minutes.

SAM stood up to look out again. A half a mile away was the bamboo catamaran on which Lothar von Richthofen had sailed downRiver only ten days ago. Through the starboard ports Sam saw a squat figure with tawny hair coming out of the gateway of King John’s log palace. Behind him came bodyguards and sycophants.

King John was making sure that von Richthofen did not give Sam Clemens any secret messages from Elwood Hacking.

The ex-monarch of England, present coruler of Parolando, wore a kilt with red and black checks, a poncholike arrangement of towels, and knee-length, red-leather Riverdragon boots. Around his thick waist was a wide belt with a number of sheaths containing steel daggers, a short sword, and a steel ax. One hand held a steel rod coronet, one of many sources of contention between Sam and King John. Sam did not want to waste metal on such useless anachronisms, but John had insisted and Sam had given in.

Sam found some satisfaction now in thinking about the name of his little nation. Parolando in Esperanto meant pair land and was so called because two men governed it. But Sam had not mentioned to John that another translation could be Twain Land.

John followed a hard-dirt path around a long, low factory building, and then he was at the foot of the staircase of Sam’s quarters. His bodyguard, a big thug named Sharkey, pulled the bell rope and the little bell tinkled.

Sam stuck his head out and shouted, “Come aboard, John!”

John looked up at him from pale blue eyes and motioned to Sharkey to precede him. John was cautious about assassins, and he had reason to be. He was also resentful about having to come to Sam, but he had known that von Richthofen would report to Sam first.

Sharkey entered, inspected Sam’s pilothouse, and looked through the three rooms of the texas. Sam heard a growl, as low and powerful as a lion’s, from the rear bedroom. Sharkey came back swiftly and closed the door.

Sam smiled and said, “Joe Miller may be sick, but he can still eat ten Polish prizefighters for breakfast and call for a second helping.”

Sharkey did not reply. He signaled through the port that John could come up without fear of being ambushed.

The catamaran was beached now, and the tiny figure of von Richthofen was coming across the plain, holding his grail in one hand and the wooden winged ambassadorial staff in the other. Through the other port Sam could see the lanky figure of de Bergerac leading a platoon toward the south wall. Livy was not in sight.

John entered.

Sam said, “Bonan matenon, Johano!”

It galled John that Sam refused to address him as Via Reĝa Moŝ—Your Majesty—in private. La Konsulo—the Consul—was their correct title and even that came reluctantly from Sam’s lips. Sam encouraged others to call him La Estro, The Boss, because that angered John even more.

John grunted and sat down at the round table. Another bodyguard, a big dark proto-Mongolian with massive bones and immensely powerful muscles, Zaksksromb, who presumably had died about 30,000 B.C., lit up a huge brown cigar for John. Zak, as he was known, was the strongest man in Parolando, with the exception of Joe Miller. And it could be argued that Joe Miller was not a man—or, at least, certainly not Homo sapiens.

SAM wished Joe would get out of bed. Zak made him nervous. But Joe was sedating himself with dreamgum. Two days ago a chunk of siderite had slipped from a crane’s tongs as Joe was passing beneath it. The operator swore it had been an accident, but Sam had his suspicions.

Sam puffed on his cigar and said, “Hear anything about your nephew lately?”

John did not start, but his eyes did widen a trifle. He looked at Sam across the table.

“No, should I?”

“I just wondered. I’ve been thinking about asking Arthur down for a conference. There’s no reason why you two should be trying to kill each other. This isn’t Earth, you know. Why can’t we call off old feuds? What if you did drop him off in a sack into the estuary? Let bygones be bygones. We could use his wood, and we need more limestone for calcium carbonate and magnesium. He’s got plenty.”

John glared, then hooded his eyes and smiled.

Tricky John, Sam thought. Smooth John. Despicable John.

“To get wood and limestone we’d have to pay with steel arms,” John said. “I’m not about to permit my dear nephew to get his hands on more steel.”

“Just thought I’d broach the subject to you,” Sam said, “because at noon—”

John stiffened. “Yes?”

“Well, I thought I’d bring up the subject to the Council. We might have a vote on it.”

John relaxed. “Oh?”

Sam thought, You think you’re safe. You’ve got Pedro Ansúrez and Frederick Rolfe on your side and a five-to-three vote in the Council is a nay vote…

Once again he contemplated suspending the Magna Carta so that things could be done that needed to be done. But that might mean civil war and that could mean the end of the dream.

He paced back and forth while John described in a loud voice and sickening detail his latest conquest of his latest blonde. Sam tried to ignore the words; he still got mad because the man boasted, although by now any woman who accepted John had only herself to blame.

THE little bell tinkled. Lothar von Richthofen entered. He was now wearing his hair long and so, with his handsome, somewhat Slavic features, he looked like a less stocky and better-looking Göring. The two had known each other well during World War I, since both had served under Baron Manfred von Richthofen, Lothar’s older brother. Lothar was a wild, brash and essentially likable person, but this morning his smiles and his debonair bearing were gone.

“What’s the bad news?” Sam said.

Lothar took the cup of bourbon that Sam offered, downed it, and said, “Sinjoro Hacking has just about finished putting up fortifications. Soul City has walls twelve feet high and ten thick on all fronts. Hacking was nasty to me, very nasty. He called me an ofejo and a honkio, words new to me. I did not care to ask him for an explanation.”

“Ofejo might be from the English ofay,” Sam said, “but I never heard the other word. Honkio?”

“You’ll hear those words a lot in the future,” Lothar said, “if you deal with Hacking. And you will. Hacking finally got down to business after spewing out a torrent of abuse, mostly about my Nazi ancestors. I never heard of the Nazis on Earth, you know, since I died in a plane crash in 1922. He seemed to be angry about something—maybe his anger had nothing to do with me originally. But the essence of his speech was that he might cut off the bauxite and other minerals.”

Sam leaned on the table until things came back into focus. Then he said, “I’ll take a shot of Kentucky courage myself.”

Von Richthofen continued, “It seems that Hacking isn’t too happy with the makeup of his state. It’s one-fourth Harlem blacks who died between 1960 and 1980, you know, and one-eighth eighteenth-century Dahomean blacks. But he has a one-fourth nonblack population of nineteenth-century Wahhabi Arabs, fanatics who still claim that Mohammed is their prophet and they’re here just for a short trial period. Then there is the one-fourth composed of thirteenth-century Asiatic-Indian, Dravidian, black-skinned Caucasians, and one-eighth of people from anywhere and anytime. A slight majority of the one-eighth is twentieth-century.”

Sam nodded. Though resurrected humanity consisted of persons who lived from 2,000,000 B.C. to A.D. 2008, one-fourth had been born after A.D. 1899—if estimates were correct.

“Hacking wants his Soul City to be almost entirely black. He said that he had believed that integration was possible when he lived on Earth. The young whites of his day were free of the racial prejudices of their elders and he had known hope. But there aren’t too many of his former white contemporaries in his land. And the Wahhabi Arabs are driving him out of his mind. Hacking became a Moslem on Earth, did you know that? First, he was a Black Muslim, an American home-grown variety. Then he became a real Moslem, made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and was quite certain that the Arabs, even if they were white, were not racists.

“But the massacre of the Sudanese blacks by the Sudanese Arabs and the history of Arabic enslavement of blacks disturbed him. Anyway, these nineteenth-century Wahhabi are not racist—they’re just religious fanatics and too much trouble. He didn’t say so, but I was there ten days and I saw enough. The Wahhabis want to convert Soul City to their brand of Moslemism, and if they can’t do it peacefully, they’ll do it bloodily. Hacking wants to get rid of them and the Dravidians, who seem to regard themselves as superior to Africans of any color. Anyway, Hacking will continue to furnish us bauxite if we will send him all our black citizens in return for his Wahhabi and Dravidian citizens. Plus an increased amount of steel arms. Plus a larger share in the raw siderite.”

Sam groaned. King John spat on the floor. Sam scowled and said, “Merdo, Johano! Not even a Plantagenet gobs on my floor! Use the spittoon or get out!”

He forced himself to push down his rage and frustration as King John bristled. Now was not a time to bring about a confrontation. The vainglorious ex-monarch would never back down on the spitting issue, which was, in reality, trifling.

Sam gestured self-deprecatingly and said, “Forget about it, John. Spit all you want to!” But he could not resist adding: “As long as I have the same privilege in your house, of course.”

JOHN growled and popped a chocolate into his mouth. He used the growling, grinding voice that indicated that he, too, was very angry but was imposing great self-control.

“This Saracen, Hacking, gets too much. I say we have kissed his black hand long enough. His demands have slowed down the building of the ship—”

“Boat, John,” Sam said. “It’s a boat, not a ship.”

“Boato, ŝmaoto. I say, let us conquer Soul City, put the citizens to the sword, and seize the minerals. Then we will be able to make aluminum on the spot. In fact, we could build the boat there. And, to make sure that we were not interfered with, we should conquer all the states between us and Soul City.”

Powermad John.

Yet, Sam was inclined to think that he might, for once, be right. In a month or so Parolando would have the weapons that would enable it to do just what John was proposing. Except that Publia was friendly and its bills were not high, and Tifonujo, though it demanded much, had permitted itself to be stripped of trees. It was, however, possible that both states planned to use the nickel-iron they got for their wood to make weapons so that they could attack Parolando.

The savages across The River were probably planning the same thing.

“I’m not through,” von Richthofen said. “Hacking made his demands about the trading of citizens on a one-to-one basis. But he won’t come to any agreement unless we send a black to deal with him. He says he was insulted when you sent me, since I’m a Prussian and a Junker to boot. But he’ll overlook that, since we don’t know any better, if we send him a member of the Council next time. One who’s black.”

Sam’s cigar almost fell out.

“We don’t have a black Councilman!”

“Exactly. What Hacking is saying is that we had better elect one.”

John passed both hands through his shoulder-length tawny hair and then stood up. His pale blue eyes were fiery under the lion-colored eyebrows.

“This Saracen thinks he can tell us how to conduct our internal affairs. I say, War!”

Sam said, “Now, just a minute, dear Johano. You have good reason to be mad, as the old farmer said when he fell in, but the truth is, we can defend ourselves quite well—but we cannot invade and occupy any large territory.”

“Occupy?” John shouted. “We will slaughter half and chain the other half!”

“The world changed much after you died, John—uh, Your Majesty. Admittedly there are other forms of slavery than the outright form, but I don’t want to get into an argument about definitions. There is no use making a fuss, as the fox said to the hens. We just appoint another Councilman, pro tem. And we send him to Hacking.”

“There is no provision in the Magna Carta for a pro tem Councilman,” Lothar said.

“We can change the Carta,” Sam said.

“That’ll take a popular election.”

John snorted disgust. He and Sam Clemens had gone through too many blazing arguments about the rights of the people.

“There’s one other thing,” Lothar said, still smiling but with an exasperated note in his voice. “Hacking asks that Firebrass be allowed to visit here for a tour of inspection. Firebrass is especially interested in seeing our airplane.”

JOHN sputtered. “He asks if we care if he sends a spy?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said. “Firebrass is Hacking’s chief of staff. He might get a different idea of us. He’s an engineer—I think he had a Ph.D., too, in physics. I’ve heard about him. What did you find out, Lothar?”

“He impressed me very much,” von Richthofen said. “He was born in 1974 in Syracuse, New York. His father was black, and his mother was half Irish and half Iroquois Indian. He was in the second party to land on Mars and the first to orbit Jupiter—”

Sam was thinking, Men really did that! Landed on the Moon and then Mars. Right out of Jules Verne and Frank Reade, Jr. Fantastic, yet no more fantastic than this world. Or, indeed, than the mundane world of 1910. None of it could be explained in a manner to satisfy any reasonable man. It was all incredible.

“We’ll put it up to the Council today, John,” Sam said, “if you have no objection. We’ll have a general election on the pro tem Councilman. I personally favor Uzziah Cawber.”

“Cawber was a slave, wasn’t he?” Lothar said. “I don’t know. Hacking said he didn’t want any Uncle Toms.”

Once a slave, always a slave, Sam thought. Even when a slave revolts, kills, and is killed as a protest against his slavery—resurrected, he still does not think of himself as a free man. He was born and raised in a world soaked with the rotten essence of slavedom and every thought he thinks, every move he makes is stained with slavery, subtly altered with slavery. Cawber was born in 1841 in Montgomery, Alabama, he was taught to read and write, he served in the house of his master as his secretary, he killed his master’s son in 1863, escaped, and went West and became a cowboy, of all things, and then a miner. He was killed with a Sioux spear in 1876; the ex-slave killed by a man about to become a slave. Cawber is delighted with this world—or claims to be—because no man can enslave him here or keep him enslaved. But he is the slave of his own mind and of the reaction of his nerves. Even when he holds his head high, he will jump if somebody cracks a whip, and his head will bow before he can stop it.…

Why, oh, why had man been brought back to life? Men and women were ruined by what had happened on Earth, and they would never be able to undo the damage. The Second Chancers claimed a man could change, entirely change. But the Second Chancers were a pack of dreamgummers.

“If Hacking calls Cawber an Uncle Tom, Cawber will kill him,” Sam said. “I say, let’s send him.”

John’s tawny eyebrows rose. Sam knew what he was thinking. Perhaps he could use Cawber, one way or another.

Sam looked at the water clock. “Time for the inspection tour. Care to come along, John? I’ll be with you in a minute,” and he sat down at his desk to make a few more entries in his diary.

That gave John the chance to leave first, as befitted the ex-King of England and of a good part of France. Sam thought it was ridiculous to worry about who preceded whom, yet he disliked John so much he could not bear to let him gain even this minor victory. Rather than argue about it, or just walk out ahead of him, and so cause John to throw a fit, he pretended he had work to do.

SAM caught up with the group, which included the six Councilmen, just outside the nitric-acid factory. They went through the factories swiftly. The stinks emanating from the nitric and sulfuric acids; from the destructive distillation of wood to make alcohol, acetone, creosote, turpentine, and acetic acid; the formaldehyde vats and the treatment of human excrement and lichen scraped off the mountains to extract potassium nitrate—these, combined, were enough to make a hyena lose its breakfast. The Councillors were roasted and deafened in the steel mill and the grinding mills and the forges and blacksmith shops. They were covered with a white dust in the limestone mills and magnesium factory. In the aluminum factory they were again roasted, deafened, and stunk out.

The gunsmith shop up in the hills was not operating at the moment. Except for distant noises, it was quiet. But it was not beautiful. The earth had been dug up, the trees cut down, and smoke from the factories up The River was black and acrid along the mountains.

Van Boom, the late-twentieth-century half Zulu, half Afrikaans chief engineer, met them. He was a handsome man with a dark bronze skin and curly hair. He stood about six-three and weighed about two hundred and fifty. He had been born in a ditch during The Bloody Years.

He greeted them cordially enough (he liked Sam and tolerated John), but he did not smile as usual.

“It’s ready,” he said, “but I want my objections recorded. It’s a nice toy and makes a lot of noise and looks impressive and will kill a man. But it’s wasteful and inefficient.”

“You make it sound like a Congressman,” Sam said.

Van Boom led them into the high doorway of the bamboo building, where a steel handgun lay on a table. Van Boom picked it up. Even in his big hand, the gun was huge. He strode past the others and out into the light of the sun. Sam was exasperated. He had held out his hand for the gun and the fellow had ignored him. If van Boom intended to demonstrate it outside, why hadn’t he said so in the first place?

“Engineers,” Sam muttered. Then he shrugged. You might as well hit a Missouri mule between the eyes with your pinkie as try to change van Boom’s ways.

Van Boom held up the gun so that the sunshine twinkled against the silvery gray metal. “This is the Mark I pistol,” he said. “Called so because The Boss invented it.”

Sam’s anger melted like ice in a Mississippi River thaw.

“It’s a breech-loading, single-shot, flintlock hand weapon with a rifled barrel and a breakdown action.”

He held the gun in his right hand and said, “You load it so. You press forward the lock switch on the left side of the barrel. This releases the breech lock. You then press down the barrel with the left hand. This action forces the trigger guard into the grip, where the guard acts as a lever to cock the hammer.”

He reached into a bag strapped to his belt and removed a large brown hemispherical object. “This is a Bakelite or phenol-formaldehyde-resin bullet, sixty caliber. You press the bullet, so, until it engages the lands of the barrel.”

He removed from his bag a shiny package with black contents.

“This is a charge of black gunpowder wrapped in cellulose nitrate. Some time in the future, we’ll have cordite instead of gunpowder. If we use this gun, that is. Now, I insert the load into the chamber with the primer end first. The primer is a twist of nitrate paper impregnated with gunpowder. Then I lift the barrel with my left hand, thus, locking it into place. The Mark I is now ready to fire. But, for emergency, if the primer does not ignite, you can pour priming powder into the touchhole just forward of the rear sight. In case of misfire, the gun may be cocked with the right thumb. Note that this flash vent on the right side of the action shield protects the shooter’s face.”

A man had brought out a large wooden target and had inserted it in a frame on four legs. The target was about twenty yards away. Van Boom turned toward it, held out the gun, clenched both hands, and sighted along the front and rear sights.

“Get behind me, gentlemen,” he said. “The heat of the passage through the air will burn off the surface of the bullet and leave a thin trail of smoke which you may be able to see. The plastic bullet has to be of such large caliber because of its light weight. But this increases the wind resistance. If we decide to use this gun—which I definitely am against—we might increase the caliber to seventy-five in the Mark II. The effective range is about fifty yards, but the accuracy is not good beyond thirty yards and nothing to brag about within that range.”

The flint was in the hammer. When van Boom would pull the trigger, the hammer would fall and scrape along the filelike surface of the frizzen. The frizzen covered the priming pan and should be knocked forward by the flint, uncovering the primer twist of the powder charge.

There was a click as the sear let the hammer go, a flash as the primer twist burned, and a booming. The click-flash-boom took up a time equal to saying click-flash-boom and van Boom had had time between the click and the boom to bring the gun back into line after it had been jarred away by the impact of the heavy hammer and flint.

The bullet did leave a very faint trail of smoke, quickly dissipated by the fifteen-mile-an-hour wind. Sam, looking past van Boom’s arm, could see the bullet curve out and then back, carried by the wind. But van Boom must have been practicing, because the bullet struck near the bull’s eye. It went halfway into the soft pine, shattered, and left a large hole in the wood.

“The bullet won’t penetrate deeply into a man,” van Boom said, “but it will leave a large hole. And if it hits near bone, the fragments should break the bone.”

The next hour was spent busily and happily with the Consuls and Councillors taking turns shooting. King John was especially delighted, though perhaps a little awed, because he had never seen a gun before. His first experience with gunpowder had come several years after he had been resurrected and he had then seen only bombs and rockets.

At last van Boom said, “If you keep up, gentlemen, you will exhaust our supply of bullets—and it takes a lot of labor and materials to make these bullets. Which is one reason why I object to making any more. My other reasons are: one, the gun is accurate only at close range; two, it takes so long to load and shoot that a good bowman could drop three pistol handlers while they’re loading and stay outside the effective range of the guns. Moreover, a plastic bullet isn’t recoverable, whereas an arrow is.”

Sam said, “That’s a lot of nonsense! The mere fact that we would have these guns would demonstrate our technological and military superiority. We’d scare the enemy half to death before the battle started. Also, you forget that it takes a long time to train a good bowman, but anyone can shoot one of these after a relatively short lesson.”

“True,” van Boom said. “But could they hit anyone? Besides, I was thinking of making steel crossbows. They can’t be handled as fast as longbows, but they don’t require any more training than guns do, and the bolts are recoverable. And they’re a hell of a lot more deadly than these noisy, stinking gadgets.”

“No, sir!” Sam said. “No, sir! I insist that we make at least two hundred of these. We’ll outfit a new group, the Parolando Pistoleers. They’ll be the terror of The River—you watch them! You’ll see!”

18

For a change King John was on Sam’s side. He insisted that the first two pistols should go to Sam and himself and the next dozen to their bodyguards. Then the new group could be organized and trained.

Sam was grateful for the backing, but he told himself to check on the men who formed the Pistoleers. He did not want it made up largely of men loyal to John.

Van Boom made no effort to hide his disgust. “I’ll tell you what! I’ll take a good yew bow and twelve arrows and stand fifty yards away. At a signal all eight of you can advance on me, firing at will with your Mark I’s—and I’ll drop all eight of you before you get close enough to hit me! Is it a deal? I’m willing to lay my life on the line!”

“Don’t be childish,” Sam said.

Van Boom rolled his eyes upward. “I’m childish? You’re jeopardizing Parolando—and your boat—because you want guns to play with!”

“Just as soon as the guns are made you can start making all the bows you want,” Sam said. “Look! We’ll make armor, too, for the Pistoleers! That should dispose of your objections! Why didn’t I think of that before? Why, our men will be dressed up in steel that’ll repel the Stone Age weapons of the enemy as if they were straws. Let the enemy shoot his yew bows with his flint-tipped arrows. They’ll bounce off the steel and the Pistoleers can take their time and blow the enemy into the next county!”

“You forget that we’ve had to barter our ore and even metal weapons for wood and other materials we need,” van Boom said. “The enemy will have arrows with steel tips that can drive through armor. Don’t forget Crécy and Agincourt.”

“There’s just no dealing with you,” Sam said. “You must be half Dutch—you’re so stubborn.”

“If your thinking is representative of the thinking of white men, then I’m glad I’m half Zulu,” van Boom said.

“Don’t get huffy,” Sam replied. “And congratulations on the gun! Tell you what, we’ll call it the Van Boom–Mark I. How’s that?”

“I’d just as soon not have my name attached to it,” the engineer said. “So be it. I’ll make your two hundred guns. But I’d like to make an improved version, the Mark II we talked about.”

“Let’s make two hundred of these first, then we’ll start on the Mark II,” Sam said. “We don’t want to mess around so long trying to get the perfect weapon that we suddenly find we don’t have any at all. Still—”

He talked for a while about the Mark II. He had a passion for mechanical gadgets. On Earth he had invented a number of things, all of which were going to make him a fortune. And there was the Paige typesetting machine, into which he had sunk—and it had sunk—all the wealth he had made from his books.

Sam thought of the typesetting monster and how that wonderful contraption had bankrupted him. For a second, Paige and van Boom were one and he felt guilty and a little panicky.

Van Boom next complained about the materials and the labor put into the AMP-I, their aerial machine prototype. Sam ignored him. He went with the others to the hangar, which was on the plains a mile north of Sam’s quarters. The craft was only partly finished but would look almost as skeletal and frail when ready to fly as it did now.

“It’s similar to some of the planes built in 1910,” von Richthofen said. “I’ll be exposed from my waist up when I sit in the cockpit. The whole machine looks more like a metal dragonfly than anything else. The main object is to test out the efficiency of the wood-alcohol-burning motor and our materials.”

Von Richthofen promised that the first flight would be made within three weeks. He showed Sam the plans for the rocket launchers which would be attached under the wings.

“The plane can carry about six small rockets, but it’ll mostly be good only for scouting. It won’t go faster than forty miles an hour against the wind. But it’ll be fun flying it.”

Sam was disappointed that the plane wasn’t a two-seater. He looked forward to flying for the first time in his life—his second life, that is. But von Richthofen said the next prototype would be a two-seater and Sam would be his first passenger.

“After you’ve tested it out,” Sam said. He expected John to protest about this and to insist that he be taken up first. But evidently John was not too eager to leave the ground.

The last stop was at the boatyard, located halfway between the hangar and Sam’s house. The craft within the pine-log enclosure would be completed within a week. The Firedragon I was the amphibious prototype of the boat that would be the launch for the big boat. It was a beautiful machine, made of thick magnalium, about thirty-two feet long, shaped like a U.S. Navy cruiser with wheels, with three turrets on its sleek top deck. It was powered by steam, burned wood alcohol, could operate in water or on land, carried a crew of eleven, and was, so Sam declared, invincible.

He patted the cold gray hull and said, “Why should we worry about having bowmen? Or having anything but this? This juggernaut could crush a kingdom all by itself. It has a steam-powered cannon the like of which the world, Earth or this planet, has never seen. That is why it is steam-driven and why it has such a huge boiler.”

All in all, the tour had made him happy. It was true that the plans for the great Riverboat had barely been started. But those took time. It was vital that the state be well protected at first, and just making the preparations was fun. He rubbed his hands and puffed on a new cigar, drawing the green smoke deeply into his lungs.

And then he saw Livy.

His beloved Livy, sick for so many years, and dead, finally, in Italy, in 1904.

Restored to life and youth and beauty, but not, alas, to him.

SHE was walking toward him, carrying her grail by its handle, wearing a white scarlet-edged kilt that came halfway down her thighs and a thin white scarf for a bra. She had a fine figure, good legs, handsome features. Her forehead was broad and satiny white. Her eyes were large and luminous. Her lips were full and shapely; her smile, attractive; her teeth, small and very white. She customarily wore her dark hair parted, combed down smooth in front but twisted into a figure eight in the back. Behind an ear she wore one of the giant crimson roselike blooms that grew from the vines on the irontrees. Her necklace was made of the convoluted red vertebrae of the hornfish.

Sam’s heart felt as if it were being licked by a cat.

She swayed as she walked toward him, and her breasts bounced beneath the semiopaque fabric. Here was his Livy, who had always been so modest, had worn heavy clothes from the neck down to the ankle, and had never undressed before him in the light. Now she reminded him of the half-naked women of the Sandwich Islands. He felt uneasy, and he knew why. His queasiness among the natives had been as much due to their unwanted attraction for him as repulsion, each feeling depending on the other and having nothing to do with the natives per se.

Livy had had a Puritanical upbringing, but she had not been ruined by it. On Earth she had learned to drink and to like beer, had even smoked a few times, and had become an infidel or, at least, a great doubter. She had even tolerated his constant swearing and had let loose with a few blisterers herself if the girls were not around. The accusations that she had censored his books and thus emasculated them were off the target. He had done most of the censoring himself.

Yes, Livy had always shown adaptability.

Too much. Now, after twenty years of absence from him, she had fallen in love with Cyrano de Bergerac. And Sam had the uneasy feeling that that wild Frenchman had awakened in her something that Sam might have awakened if he had not been so inhibited himself. But after these years on The River and the chewing of a certain amount of dreamgum, he had lost many of his own inhibitions.

It was too late for him.

Unless Cyrano left the scene…

“Hello, Sam,” she said in English. “How are you on this fine day?”

“Every day is fine here,” he said. “You can’t even talk about the weather, let alone do anything about it!”

She had a beautiful laugh. “Come along with me to the grailstone,” she said. “It’s almost time for lunch.”

Every day he swore not to come near her because to do so hurt too much. And every day he took advantage of the smallest chance to get as close to her as he could.

“How’s Cyrano?” he said.

“Oh, very happy because he’s finally getting a rapier. Bildron, the swordsmith, promised that he’d have the first one—after yours and the other Councilmen’s, of course. Cyrano had taken so long to reconcile himself to the fact that he would never hold a metal sword in his hand again. Then he heard about the meteorite and came here—and now the greatest swordsman in the world will have a chance to show everybody that his reputation wasn’t a lie, which some liars say it was.”

“Now, Livy,” he said. “I didn’t say people lied about his reputation. I said that maybe they exaggerated some. I still don’t believe that story about his holding off two hundred swordsmen all by himself.”

“The fight at the Porte de Nesle was authentic! And it wasn’t two hundred! You’re the one pumping it up, Sam, just as you always do. There was a crowd of hired thugs that could have been a hundred or might just as well have been. Even if there had been only twenty-five, the fact is that Cyrano attacked them all single-handed to save his friend, the Chevalier de Lignières.

“He killed two and wounded seven and ran the rest of them off. That is God’s truth!”

“I don’t want to get into an argument about the merits of your man,” he said. “Or about anything. Let’s just talk like we used to when we had so much fun—before you got sick.”

She stopped. Her face set grimly.

“I always knew you resented my illness, Sam.”

“No, that wasn’t it,” he said. “I think I felt guilty that you were sick, as if somehow I were to blame. But I never hated you for it. I hated myself if I hated anyone.”

“I didn’t say you hated me,” she said. “I said you resented my illness and you showed it in many ways. Oh, you may have thought you were always noble and gentle and loving—and most of the time you were—you really were. But there were enough times when you looked, you spoke, you muttered, you gestured—how can I describe exactly how you were? I can’t, but I knew you resented me, sometimes loathed me, because I was sick.”

“I didn’t!” he cried so loudly that a number of people stared.

“Why argue about it? Whether you did or not doesn’t matter now. I loved you then and I still do, in a way. But not as I did.”

He was silent during the rest of the walk across the plain to the big mushroom-shaped stone. The cigar tasted like burning skunk cabbage.

Cyrano was not present. He was superintending the building of a section of the wall which would eventually guard the shore of The River. Sam was glad. It was difficult enough for him to see Livy alone, but when she was with the Frenchman, he could not endure his thoughts.

In silence, he and Livy parted.

…

A beautiful woman with lovely, honey-colored hair approached him, and he was able to set aside his feelings about Livy for a while. The woman’s name was Gwenafra. She had died at about the age of seven in a country that must have been Cornwall about the time the Phoenicians came there to exploit the tin mines. She had been resurrected among people of whom none spoke her ancient Celtic language and had been adopted by a group that spoke English. From her description, one of them had been that Sir Richard Francis Burton whom Sam had thought he’d seen on the shore just before the meteorite struck. Burton and his friends had built a small sailboat and set out for the headwaters of The River—as might have been expected of a man who had spent half his life exploring in the wildernesses of Africa and the other continents. On Earth Burton had sought the headwaters of the Nile and had found, instead, Lake Tanganyika. But on this world he had again been seeking the source of a river—the greatest River of them all—undaunted by the prospect that it might be ten million miles long or even twenty.

After little more than a year, his boat had been attacked by evil men, and one had stuck a stone knife into little Gwenafra and thrown her into The River, where she had drowned. She had awakened the next day on the banks somewhere far up in the northern hemisphere. The weather was colder, the sun weaker, and the people there said that you did not have to go more than twenty thousand grailstones before you were in an area where the sun was always half above, half below the mountains. And there lived hairy, ape-faced men ten feet tall and weighing seven to eight hundred pounds.

(This was true, Joe Miller had been one of the titanthrops there.)

The people upRiver who adopted her spoke Suomenkieltä, which in English meant Finnish. DownRiver a little way were Swedes, twentieth-century people who lived a peaceful life. Gwenafra grew up relatively happy with her loving foster parents. She learned Finnish, Swedish, English, a Chinese dialect of the fourth century B.C., and Esperanto.

She drowned again by accident one day and woke up in this area. She still remembered Burton; she cherished a childhood crush she had had for him. But, being a realist, she was ready to love other men. And she had—and had just split with one, Sam had heard. She wanted a man who would be faithful to her, and these were not easy to find in this world.

Sam was very much attracted to her. The only thing that had kept him from asking her to move in with him had been the fear of angering Livy. That fear was ridiculous—she had no claim on him as long as she was living with Cyrano. And she had made it plain that she did not care what he did in his private life or his public life. Nevertheless, against all logic, he was afraid to take another woman as his hutmate. He did not want to snap the last thin link.

He chatted with Gwenafra awhile and confirmed that she was still unattached.

19

Lunch was upsetting. The “roulette wheel” concealed somewhere in the false bottom of the grail, the wild caster of dice, came up with a meal that only a Goshute Indian could have swallowed and even he might have gagged a little. Sam threw out all the food but was able to console himself with two cigars, cigarettes, and six ounces of an unfamiliar but delicious liqueur. Just smelling it sent his taste buds into a dance.

The meeting with John and the Council took three hours. After much wrangling and a number of votes, it was decided to put to the people the question of amending the Carta so that a pro tem Councilman could be elected. John held up things for an hour, arguing that a vote wasn’t needed. Why couldn’t the Council simply say that the amendment was passed and that would be the end of it? No amount of explaining ever seemed to clarify such matters in John’s head. It was not that he was unintelligent. It was just that he was not emotionally able to comprehend democracy.

The vote was unanimous to accept Firebrass as Hacking’s official visiting fireman. But he would have a close eye kept on him.

After all this John rose and made a speech, occasionally lapsing from Esperanto into Norman French when he was overpowered by emotion. He thought that Parolando should invade Soul City before Soul City invaded Parolando. The invasion should be launched as soon as the handguns and the armored amphibian, Firedragon I, were ready. However, it might be best to test the mettle of their iron and the troops on New Brittany first. His spies were certain that Arthur planned to attack them soon.

John’s two toadies backed him, but the others, including Sam, voted them down. John’s face became red, and he swore and beat his fists on the oak table, but nobody decided to change his mind.

After supper the drums relayed a message from Hacking. Firebrass would be arriving tomorrow, sometime before noon.

Sam retired to his office. By the light of lamps burning fish oil—soon they would have electricity—he and van Boom and Tanya Velitsky and John Wesley O’Brien, the engineers, discussed their ideas about the Riverboat and drew rough sketches on paper. Paper was still scarce, but they would need enormous amounts for their blueprints. Van Boom said that they should wait until they were able to make a certain kind of plastic. Lines could be drawn on this with magnetized “pens” and corrections could easily be made by demagnetizing. Sam replied that that was fine. But he wanted to start building the Riverboat the moment the amphibian was completed. Van Boom said that he could not agree to that. Too many things were in the way.

Before the meeting broke up van Boom pulled a Mark I gun out of a large bag. “We have ten of these now,” he said. “This one is yours, compliments of Parolando’s Engineering Corps. And here are twenty packages of powder and twenty plastic bullets. You can sleep with them under your pillow.”

Sam thanked him, the engineers left, and Sam barred the door. Then he went into the back room to talk to Joe Miller awhile. Joe was still awake, but he said he was taking no sedation that night. He would be getting up in the morning. Sam bade the giant good-night and went into his bedroom, next to the pilothouse. He drank two shots of bourbon and lay down. After a while he managed to doze, though he was afraid that the three o’clock rain would wake him as usual and he would have trouble getting back to sleep.

HE awoke, but the rain was long past. Shouts came from somewhere and then an explosion that rattled the pilothouse. Sam leaped out of bed, wrapped a kilt around his waist, seized an ax, and ran into the pilothouse. He suddenly remembered his pistol, but he decided he would go back for it when he found out what was going on.

The River was still smothered in fog, but hundreds of dark figures were spilling out of it, and the tops of tall masts were sticking out above it. Torches were flaring all over the plains and in the hills. Drums were beating.

There was another explosion. A brightness in the night with bodies flying in all directions.

He looked through the starboard port. The gates of the log wall around King John’s palace were open, and men were streaming out. Among them was the stocky figure of John.

By then more men had appeared out of the mists over The River. Bright starlight showed them lining up and moving out, rank after rank. The first of the invaders were by now in the great factories and advancing swiftly across the plain toward the foothills. Some explosions occurred inside factories as bombs were thrown to dislodge the defenders. And then a red tail flared out, disappeared, and something black shot toward him. Sam threw himself to the floor. A roar came beneath him, the floor heaved, and the glass ports blew in. A whiff of acrid smoke came to him and was gone.

He should get up and run, but he couldn’t. He was deafened and frozen. Another rocket would be coming his way, and that one might be closer.

A giant hand gripped his shoulder and pulled him up. Another hand slid under his legs and he was being carried out. The arms and the chest of the giant were very hairy and as hard-muscled and as warm as a gorilla’s. A voice as deep as if it were at the end of a railroad tunnel rumbled, “Take it eathy, Bothth.”

“Put me down, Joe,” Sam said. “I’m all right, except for my shame. And that’s all right, too, I ought to feel ashamed.”

His shock was fading, and a sense of relative calm flowed in to fill the vacuum. The appearance of the massive titanthrop had steadied him. Good old Joe—he might be a dumb subhuman and sick at the moment, but he was still worth a battalion.

Joe had put on his suit of leather armor. In one hand was the haft of an enormous double-headed ax of steel.

“Who are they?” he rumbled. “They from Thoul Thity?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said. “Do you feel up to fighting? How’s the head?”

“It hurtth. Yeah, I can fight okay. Vhere do ve go from here?”

Sam led him downhill toward the men collecting around John. He heard his name called and turned to see the tall lanky figure of de Bergerac, Livy by his side. She carried a small round shield of leather-covered oak and a steel-tipped spear. Cyrano held a long, dully shining blade. Sam’s eyes widened. It was a rapier.

Cyrano said, “Morbleu!” He switched to Esperanto. “Your smith gave this to me just after supper—he said there was no sense in waiting.”

Cyrano whipped the rapier, cutting the air with a sharp sound.

“I’ve come alive again. Steel—sharp steel!”

A nearby explosion made them all dive for the ground. Sam waited until he was sure that another rocket was not coming and then looked at his pilothouse. It had received a direct hit; its front was blown open; a fire was racing through it and would soon be in the texas. His diary was gone, but he could retrieve his grail later. It was indestructible.

In the next few minutes the wooden missiles, tails flaming, arched out, wobbling, from wooden bazookas held on the shoulders of the Parolandoj rocketeers. The missiles landed near and sometimes among the enemy and exploded with gouts of fire and much black smoke, quickly carried away by the wind.

Three runners reported. The attack had been launched from three places, all from The River. The main body was concentrated here, apparently to seize the Parolandoj leaders, the larger factories and amphibian. The other two armies were about a mile away on each side. The invaders were composed of men from New Brittany and Kleomenujo and the Ulmaks from across The River. The Ulmaks were savages who had lived in Siberia circa 30,000 B.C. and whose descendants had migrated across the Bering Straits to become Amerindians.

So much for King John’s spy service, Sam thought. Unless—unless he is in on the attack. But if he were he wouldn’t be standing out here where he’s likely to get killed any moment…

Anyway, Arthur of New Brittany would never make a deal with the uncle who had murdered him.

The rockets continued to arc down from both sides, the five-pound warheads with their rock-fragment shrapnel taking a toll. The Parolandoj had the advantage; they could lie flat while their rockets exploded among upright targets. The invaders had to keep moving, otherwise they might just as well go home.

Nevertheless, it was frightening to lie on the ground and wait for the next noisy blast and hope that it would not come closer than the last one. There were screams from the wounded that were not, however, as heartrending as they would have been if Sam had not been so deafened that he could barely hear them and if he also had not been too worried about himself to think of others. Then, suddenly, the rockets had quit blowing up the world. A huge hand shook Sam’s shoulder. He looked up to see that many around him were getting to their feet. The sergeants were yelling into the stunned ears of their men to form a battle array. The enemy was so close now that neither side was using the missiles or else they had all been launched.

Ahead was a dark body, a sea of screaming, whooping fiends. They ran up the hill and the first, second, and third ranks fell, pierced by arrows. But those behind did not break. They leaped over the fallen and kept on coming. Suddenly, the archers were being hammered down or thrust through or clubbed.

Sam kept close behind Joe Miller, who moved ahead slowly, his ax rising and falling. And then the giant was down, and the enemy were struggling on top of him like a pack of jackals on a lion. Sam tried to get to him; his ax smashed through a shield and a head and an uplifted arm and then he felt a burning pain along his ribs. He was pushed back and back, while he slashed away with the ax and then it was gone, wedged in a skull. He stumbled over a pile of wood. Above him was the burning floor of his smashed house, still held up by three burning pylons.

He turned on his side, and there was the handgun, the Mark I, that he had left by his bedside. Near it lay three packages of powder with the nitrate-soaked twists and a number of the plastic bullets. The explosion had hurled them out of the house.

TWO men whirled by him in a dance, their hands gripping each other, straining, grunting with the strain, glaring into each other’s bloody faces. They stopped, and Sam recognized King John—his opponent was taller but not as thickly built. He had lost his helmet, and he, too, had tawny hair and eyes that were blue in the light of the flames overhead.

Sam broke open the pistol, put in the bullet and the charge as he had done that morning up in the hills, locked the barrel, and rose to his feet. The two men still struggled, one slipping back a little, then the other, trying to throw each other. John held a steel knife in his right hand; the other man, a steel ax; each was grasping the weapon hand of the other.

Sam looked around. No one was coming at him. He stepped forward and extended the muzzle of the big pistol, holding it steady with both hands. He pulled the trigger, the click sounded, the gun was jarred to one side by the heavy hammer, there was a flash, he had the gun back in line, a boom, a cloud of smoke, and John’s assailant fell to one side, the entire right side of his skull blown away.

John fell gasping onto the ground. Then he raised himself, looking at Sam, who was reloading the gun. “Many thanks, partner! That man was my nephew, Arthur!”

Sam did not reply. If he had been thinking more coolly he would have waited until Arthur had killed John and then blown Arthur’s head off. It was ironic that he, Sam, who had much to gain by John’s death, should be responsible for saving him. Moreover, he could not expect gratitude from John. The man had no such thing in his soul.

Sam completed reloading the pistol and strode away, looking for Joe Miller. But he saw Livy reeling backward as a big Ulmak, whose left arm dangled bloodily, drove her back with blows of a stone ax on her shield. Her spear had been broken and in a few seconds he would have beaten her to her knees or shattered the shield. Sam reversed the pistol and broke the Ulmak’s skull from behind with the butt of his gun. Livy fell exhausted and weeping on the ground. He would have gotten down to comfort her, but she seemed all right and he did not know where Joe Miller was. He plunged into the embattled mass and saw Joe on his feet again, demolishing heads, trunks, and arms with sweeps of his great ax.

Sam stopped a few paces from a man who was coming up from behind Joe, a large ax in both hands. Sam fired, and the bullet took part of the man’s chest off.

A minute later, the invaders were running for their lives. The sky was graying. By its light it was evident that Parolandoj were coming in from north and south. The other two columns had been shattered, and the reinforcements were outnumbering the invaders. Moreover, they brought rockets which blew up the boats and canoes waiting for the defeated.

Sam felt too exhilarated to be depressed by the losses and the damage. For the first time he came out of the blue funk that always seized him during a fight. He actually enjoyed the battle during the last ten minutes.

A moment later his pleasure was gone. A wild-eyed and naked Hermann Göring, his scalp caked with blood, appeared on the battleground. His arms were raised straight up, and he was shouting, “Oh, brothers and sisters! Shame! Shame! You have killed, you have hated, you have lusted for the blood and the ecstasy of murder! Why did you not throw down your arms and take in your enemies with love? Let them do with you what they would? You would have died and suffered but final victory would have been yours! The enemy would have felt your love—and the next time he might have hesitated before again waging war. And the time after that and the next time he might have asked himself, ‘What am I doing? Why am I doing this? What good is this? I have gained nothing—’ and your love would have seeped through the stone over his heart and—”

John, coming up behind Göring, struck him on the back of the head with the hilt of his knife. Göring fell forward and lay on his face without moving.

“So much for traitors!” John shouted. He stared around wildly and then yelled, “Where are Trimalchio and Mordaunt, my ambassadors?”

Sam said, “They wouldn’t be stupid enough to hang around here. You’ll never catch them. They’ll know you know they sold out to Arthur.”

John’s striking of Göring was illegal, since free speech was everyone’s right in Parolando. But Sam did not think that arresting John would be the right course at that moment. He, too, had felt like hitting Göring.

Livy, still weeping, staggered past. Sam followed her to where Cyrano sat on a pile of corpses. The Frenchman was wounded in a dozen places, though not seriously, and his rapier was bloody from tip to guard. He had given a splendid account of himself.

Livy threw herself on Cyrano. Sam turned away. She had not even thanked him for having saved her life.

There was a crash behind him. He turned. The rest of his house had fallen in, bringing the pylons with it.

He felt drained of strength, but there would be little rest for him today. The casualties and the damage had to be assessed. The dead had to be taken to the rendering factory up in the hills, since their fat was used to make glycerin. The practice was gruesome but necessary, and the owners of the bodies did not mind. Tomorrow they would be alive and well again somewhere far away along The River.

In addition, the entire population would have to be kept ready for a call to arms, and the work of erecting the walls along the River-edge would have to be speeded up. Scouts and messengers would have to be sent out to determine just what the military situation was. The Ulmaks and the Kleomenujoj and the New Bretons might launch a full-scale attack.

A captain reported that Kleomenes, the leader of Kleomenujo, had been found dead near the River-edge, where a piece of rock shrapnel had entered his skull. So ended the half-brother of the great Spartan, Leonidas, who defended the pass of Thermopylae. Or so he ended in this area, at least.

Sam appointed some men to leave by boat immediately for the two countries. They were to inform them that Parolando did not intend to take vengeance if the new leaders would guarantee friendship to Parolando. John complained that he should have been consulted, and there was a short but savage argument. Sam finally agreed that John was right in principle, but there was no time to discuss certain matters. John informed him that, under the law, Sam had to take the time. Any decision had to be agreed upon by both of them.

Sam hated to agree, but John was right. They couldn’t be giving contradictory orders.

They went together to inspect the factories. These were not badly damaged. The invaders had not, of course, wanted to wreck them since they had intended to use them. The amphibian, the Firedragon I, was untouched. Sam shuddered when he thought of what might have happened if it had been completed and had fallen into the hands of the enemy. With it, they could have crushed the Parolandoj in the center and dug in to fight on the perimeter until reinforcements came. He would set up a large special guard around the vehicle.

He fell asleep after lunch in a Councilman’s hut. It seemed that he had just closed his eyes when he was shaken awake. Joe was standing over him, breathing bourbon fumes from his tremendous proboscis.

“The delagathyon from Thoul Thity jutht landed.”

“Firebrass!” Sam said, standing up from the chair. “I forgot all about him! What a time for him to show up!”

HE walked down to The River, where a catamaran was beached near the grailstone. John was already there, greeting the delegation, which consisted of six blacks, two Arabs, and two Asiatic Indians. Firebrass was a short, bronze-skinned, curly-haired man with big brown eyes flecked with green. His huge forehead and shoulders and thickly muscled arms contrasted with his skinny legs, making him look all top. He spoke in Esperanto at first but later used English. It was a very strange English, full of terms and slang that Sam did not understand. But there was a warmth and openness about Firebrass that made Sam feel good just to have him around.

“We better go back to Esperanto,” Sam said, smiling and pouring three more slugs of scotch into Firebrass’ cup. “Is that spaceman’s lingo or Soul City dialect?”

“Marsman’s,” Firebrass said. “Soul City English is pretty wild, but the official language, of course, is Esperanto, though Hacking was considering Arabic. But he isn’t too happy about his Arabs anymore,” he added in a lower voice, looking at Abd ar-Rahman and Ali Fazghuli, the Arab members of his delegation.

“As you can see,” Sam said, “we are in no condition to have a long, leisurely conference. Not now. We have to clean up, get information about what’s going on outside Parolando, and set up our defenses. But you are welcome, of course, and we’ll get around to business within a few days.”

“I don’t mind,” Firebrass said. “I’d like to look around, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t, but my co-Consul has to give his consent, too.”

John, smiling as if it hurt his teeth to be exposed to the air—and it probably did this time—said that Firebrass was welcome. But he would have to be accompanied by a guard of honor every time he left the quarters that would be assigned to him. Firebrass thanked him, but another delegate, Abdullah X, protested loudly and occasionally obscenely. Firebrass said nothing for a minute and then told Abdullah to be polite, since they were guests. Sam was grateful, though he wondered if the speech and Firebrass’ command had not been prearranged.

It had not been easy to sit there and listen, though the vitriolics had been hurled at the white race in general and no one in particular. It troubled him, but Sam had to agree with Abdullah. He was right about conditions as they had been. But old Earth was dead; they were living in a new world.

Sam personally conducted the delegates to three huts, side by side, owned by men and women who had been killed last night. Then he moved into a hut near the delegation.

Drums boomed by the grailstone. After a minute, drums from across The River thundered back an answer. The new chief of the Ulmaks wanted peace. The old chief, Shrubgrain, had been put to death, and his head would be delivered within the hour by canoe if peace could be arranged. Shrubgrain had failed his people by leading them to defeat.

Sam gave orders to transmit a request for a conference with the new chief, Threelburm.

Drums from Chernsky’s Land said that Iyeyasu, who ruled a twelve-mile stretch of land between New Brittany and Kleomenujo, had invaded New Brittany. The news meant that the New Bretons would not be bothering Parolando, but it also worried Sam. Iyeyasu was a very ambitious man. Once he had consolidated his state with New Brittany he might decide he was strong enough to take Parolando.

More drums. Publius Crassus sent his congratulations and warmest regards, and he would be visiting tomorrow to see what he could do to aid Parolando.

And also to see how hard we’ve been hit and if we’d be easy pickings, Sam thought. So far, Publius had been cooperative, but a man who had served under Julius Caesar could have his own brand of Caesarism.

Göring, his head wrapped in a bloody towel, staggered by, supported by two of his followers. Sam hoped he would take the hint and leave Parolando, but he didn’t have much faith in the German’s perceptiveness.

He went to sleep that night while torches burned everywhere over the land and guards peered into the shadows and the mists. His sleep was troubled, despite his intense fatigue. He tossed and rolled and once he awoke, his heart beating, his skin cold, certain that there was a third person in the hut. He fully expected to see the shadowy figure of the Mysterious Stranger crouched by his bed. But nobody was there except the monstrous form of Joe stretched out on the huge bamboo bed near him.

20

The next morning he arose unrefreshed in a refreshed world. The three o’clock rain had washed away the blood and the stink of gunpowder. The bodies were gone, and the sky was clear and blue. Business as usual was resumed but without about four hundred and fifty men and women. Half of these were in the rendering factory; the rest, in the hospital. Those who wanted to be put out of their misery were given their wish. Time had been when an ax was the only euthanasiast but now, thanks to Parolando’s technology, the work was done with a potassium cyanide pill.

Some decided to stick it out. In time their limbs or eyes would grow back in. Those who could not take the pain boarded The Suicide Express, and the bodies they left behind went to the rendering factory.

Sam’s secretary had been killed. Sam asked Gwenafra if she would like to take Millie’s place. Gwenafra seemed very pleased. The new position gave her a high status, and she had made no secret of the fact that she liked to be near Sam. Lothar von Richthofen, however, did not seem pleased.

“Why shouldn’t she be my secretary, regardless of her relationship to you?” Sam said.

“There is no reason,” Lothar said, “except that I might have a very good chance with her if she isn’t around you much.”

“Let the best man win.”

“My sentiments, too, but I don’t like your wasting her time or leading her on. You know that you won’t take another hutmate as long as Livy is here.”

“Livy has nothing to say about what I do,” Sam said. “I would be pleased if you’d remember that.”

Lothar smiled slightly and said, “Sure, Sam.”

Gwenafra tagged along with him, taking notes, sending messages, receiving them, arranging schedules and appointments. Though he was very busy, he found moments when he could talk and joke with her and he felt a warmth every time he looked at her. Gwenafra seemed to adore him.

Two days passed. The twenty-four-hour shift on the amphibian was showing results. The machine would be completed in another two days. The Soul City delegation strolled around with two of King John’s men watching them. Joe Miller, who had gone back to his bed after the battle, said he was well again. Now Sam had both Gwenafra and the titanthrop with him, and his world seemed much more comfortable, though it was a long way from being Utopia. Word came via the drum telegraph that Odysseus had loaded his ships with flints and would be back in a month. He had gone as commander of a ten-boat fleet to barter with the chieftainess of Selinujo. On Earth she had been Countess Huntingdon, Selina Hastings, born 1707, died 1791. She was now a member of the Church of the Second Chance and traded her flint with Parolando only because Parolando permitted Göring’s missionaries to preach at will in its territory. In return for the flint, she had been promised a small metal steamboat in which she proposed to go up and down The River and preach. Sam thought she was fooling herself. The first place she put into, she was liable to have her throat cut for the sake of the boat. But that was her business.

The Councilmen met with the Soul City delegation at a round table in the largest room in John’s palace. Sam would have liked to put it off, since John was in a mood even uglier than usual. One of his women had tried to kill him, or so he claimed. He had been stabbed in the side before he broke her jaw and knocked her head against the corner of a table. The woman had died an hour later still unconscious, and John’s word that she had attacked him first had to be accepted. Sam would have liked to have collected some neutral eyewitness account, but that was impossible.

John was in pain from the stab wound, half drunk with bourbon as an anesthetic, and smarting because the woman had dared to defy him. He slumped in a large, high-backed, ornately carved oak chair fitted with red hornfish leather. One hand was around a clay vessel full of whiskey, a cigarette dangled from his lips, and he glowered at everybody.

Firebrass was talking.

“Hacking once believed in total segregation of whites and nonwhites. He believed, fiercely believed, that whites could never accept, not soul-accept, nonwhite peoples—that is, the blacks, Mongolians, Polynesians, and Amerindians. The only way nonwhites could live with dignity, feel beautiful, be a people with its own personality and pride, was to follow the way of segregation. Equal but separate.

“Then his leader, Malcolm X, quit the Black Muslims. Malcolm X saw that he was wrong. Not all whites were devils, racist fiends, any more than all blacks had flat noses. Hacking fled the States to live in Algeria and there he found that it was the attitude that made racism, not the color of the skin.”

Hardly an original or surprising discovery, Sam thought. But he had told himself that he would not interrupt.

“And then the young whites of the United States, many of them, anyway, rejected their parents’ prejudices, and they supported the blacks in their struggles. They got out on the streets and demonstrated, rioted, laid down their lives for the blacks. They genuinely seemed to like blacks, not because they thought they ought to, but because blacks were human beings and human beings can be liked or even loved.

“Hacking, however, wasn’t ever really at ease with an American white, try though he did to think of them as human beings. He was ruined, just as most whites, most older whites, were ruined. But he tried to like those whites who were on his side and he respected those young whites that told their parents, their white racist society, to go to hell.

“Then he died, as everybody did, black or white. He found himself among ancient Chinese, and he wasn’t very happy with them because they regarded all peoples except the Chinese as inferior.”

Sam remembered the Chinese of Nevada and California in the early ’60s, the hard-working, thrifty, quiet, meek, cheery little brown men and women. They had taken abuse that most people would not give a mule, been spat upon, cursed, tortured, stoned, robbed, raped, suffered about every indignity and crime that a people could suffer. They had had no rights whatsoever, no protector or protection. And they had never murmured, never revolted, they just endured. What thoughts had those masklike faces hidden? Had they, too, believed in the superiority of any Chinese to any white devil? If so, why had they not struck back, not once? They would have been massacred if they had, but they would have stood up like men for a few moments.

But the Chinese believed in time; time was the Chinese ally. If time did not raise a father to fortune, time would raise his son. Or his grandson.

Firebrass said, “So Hacking left in a dugout, floated downRiver, and after many thousands of miles settled down among some blacks of seventeenth-century A.D. Africa. Ancestors of the Zulus before they migrated to southern Africa. After a while he left them. Their customs were too repulsive, and they were too bloody-minded for him.

“Then he lived in an area where the people were a mixture of Dark Age Huns and dark whites of the New Stone Age. They accepted him well enough, but he missed his own people, the American blacks. So he took off again and was captured by ancient Moabites and enslaved, escaped, was captured by ancient Hebrews and put into grail slavery, escaped again, found a little community of blacks who’d been pre–Civil War slaves and was happy for a while. But their Uncle Tom attitudes and their superstitions got on his nerves and he took off, sailed downRiver, and lived with several other peoples. Then, one day, some big blond whites, Nordics of some kind, raided the people he was with and he fought and was killed.

“He was resurrected here. Hacking became convinced that the only happy states on The River were going to be made up of people with similar colors, similar tastes, and of the same terrestrial period. Anything else just won’t work. People here aren’t going to change. Back on Earth he could believe in progress, because the young were flexible-minded. The old ones would die off, and then the children of the young whites would be even more free of racial prejudice. But here that just isn’t going to take place. Every man’s set in his ways. So, unless Hacking just happened to find a community of late-twentieth-century whites, he would find no whites without racial hatreds or prejudices. Of course, the ancient whites didn’t have any against blacks, but they’re too strange for a civilized man.”

SAM asked, “What’s all this leading up to, Sinjoro Firebrass?”

“We want a homogeneous nation. We can’t get all late-twentieth-century blacks, but we can get as black a nation as possible. Now, we know that you have approximately three thousand blacks in Parolando. We would like to exchange our Dravidians, Arabs, any nonblacks, for your blacks. Hacking is making similar proposals to your neighbors, but he doesn’t have any lever with them.”

King John sat up and said, loudly, “You mean he doesn’t have anything they want?”

Firebrass looked at John and said, “That’s about it. But we’ll have a lever some day.”

“Do you mean when you have enough steel weapons?” Sam said.

Firebrass shrugged.

John crashed his empty cup down on the table. “Well, we don’t want your Arabs or your Dravidians or any of your Soul City dregs!” he shouted. “But I’ll tell you what we will do! For every ton of bauxite or cryolite or ounce of platinum, we will give you one of our black citizens! You can keep your Saracen infidels or send them packing downRiver or drown them for all we care.”

“Wait a minute,” Sam said. “We can’t give our citizens away. If they want to volunteer, fine. But we don’t just give anybody away. This is a democracy.”

Firebrass’ expression had darkened at John’s outburst. “I wasn’t suggesting that you give anybody away,” he said. “We’re not slave dealers, you know. What we want is a one-per-one voluntary exchange. The Wahhabi Arabs, whom ar-Rahman and Fazghuli represent, feel they’re unwelcome at Soul City and they would like to go where they could congregate in their own community, form a sort of Casbah, you might say.”

Sam thought this sounded fishy. Why couldn’t they do that just as well in Soul City? Or why didn’t they just get up and leave? One of the beauties of this world was that ties or property or dependence on income did not exist. A man could carry everything he owned on his back—and building another house was easy in a world where new bamboo grew at a rate of two inches a day.

It was possible that Hacking wanted to get his people into Parolando so that they could spy or revolt when Hacking invaded.

Sam said, “We’ll put your proposition about the exchange to each individual. That’s all we can do. Now, does Sinjoro Hacking plan to keep on supplying us with the materials and with wood?”

“As long as you keep on sending us raw ore and steel weapons,” Firebrass said. “But Hacking is thinking of upping the price.”

John’s fist smashed into the tabletop again. “We will not be robbed!” he shouted. “We are paying too much now! Don’t push us, Sinjoro Firebrass, or you may find yourselves with nothing! Nothing at all—not even your lives!”

“Take it easy, Your Majesty,” Sam said quietly. To Firebrass he said, “John isn’t feeling well. Please forgive him. However, he does have a point. We can be pushed only so far.”

ABDULLAH X, a very big and very black man, jumped up and pointed a big finger at Sam. In English, he said, “You honkies had better quit badmouthing us. We won’t take any crap from you, Mister Whitey! None! Especially from a man that wrote a book like you did about Nigger Jim! We don’t like white racists and we only deal with them because there’s nothing else we can do just now.”

“Take it easy, Abdullah,” Firebrass said. He was smiling and Sam wondered if Abdullah’s speech was the second part of a well-prepared program. Probably, Firebrass was similarly wondering if John’s explosions had been rehearsed. Actors didn’t have to be politicians, but politicians had to be actors.

Sam groaned and said, “Did you read Huckleberry Finn, Sinjoro X?”

Abdullah, sneering, said, “I don’t read trash.”

“Then you don’t know what you’re talking about, do you?”

Abdullah’s face darkened. Firebrass grinned.

“I don’t have to read that racist crap, man!” Abdullah shouted. “Hacking told me all about it and what he says is good enough for me!”

“You read it and then come back and we’ll discuss it,” Sam said.

“You crazy?” Abdullah said. “You know there aren’t any books on this world.”

“Then you lost out, didn’t you?” Sam said. He was trembling a little; he wasn’t used to being talked to like this by a black man. “Anyway,” Sam said, “this isn’t a literary tea-and-discussion group. Let’s stick to the issue.”

But Abdullah would not stop shouting about the books that Sam had written. And John, losing his temper, leaped up and screamed, “Silentu, negraĉo!”

John had taken the Esperanto word for “black” or “negro” and infixed the disparaging “-aĉ-” particle. He had gotten his point over quite well.

There was a moment of shock and silence. Abdullah X’s mouth was open, then it closed, and he looked triumphant, almost happy. Firebrass bit his lip. John leaned on the table on his fists and scowled. Sam puffed on his cigar. He knew that John’s contempt for all humanity had made him invent the term. John had no racial prejudice; he had never seen more than a half dozen blacks during his lifetime on Earth. But he certainly knew how to insult a person; the knowledge was second nature to him.

“I’m walking out!” Abdullah X said. “I may be going home—and if I do you can bet your white ass that you’ll pay hell getting any more aluminum or platinum, Mister Charlie.”

Sam rose to his feet and said, “Just a minute. If you want an apology, I extend it on behalf of all Parolando.”

Abdullah looked at Firebrass, who looked away. Abdullah said, “I want an apology from him, now!”

He pointed at King John.

Sam leaned close to John and said softly, “There’s too much at stake to play the proud monarch, Your Majesty! And you may be playing into their hands with your little fit. They are up to something, you can bet on that. Apologize.”

John straightened up and said, “I apologize to no man, especially not to a commoner who is also an infidel dog!”

Sam snorted and gestured with his cigar. “Can’t you get it through your thick Plantagenet head that there isn’t any such thing as royal blood or divine right of kings anymore, that we’re all commoners? Or all kings?”

JOHN did not reply. He walked out. Abdullah looked at Firebrass, who nodded. Abdullah walked out.

Sam said, “Well, Sinjoro Firebrass, what next? Do you people go home?”

Firebrass shook his head, “No, I don’t believe in hasty decisions. But the conference is suspended as far as the Soul City delegation is concerned. Until John Lackland apologizes. I’ll give you until noon tomorrow to decide what to do.”

Firebrass turned to leave. Sam said, “I’ll talk to John, but he’s as hardheaded as a Missouri mule.”

“I’d hate to see our negotiations fold because one man can’t keep his insults to himself,” Firebrass said. “And I’d also hate to see our trade stop, because that would mean no Riverboat for you.”

Sam said, “Don’t get me wrong, Sinjoro Firebrass. I’m making no threats. But I won’t be stopped. I’ll get the aluminum if I have to kick John out of the country myself. Or, alternatively, if I have to go down to Soul City and get the aluminum myself.”

“I understand you,” Firebrass said. “But what you don’t understand is that Hacking isn’t out for power. He only wants to have a well-protected state so that his citizens can enjoy life. And they will enjoy their life because they’ll all have similar tastes and similar goals. In other words, they’ll all be black.”

Sam grunted and then said, “Very well.” He fell silent but just before Firebrass left, he called, “One minute. Have you read Huckleberry Finn?”

Firebrass turned back. “Sure. I thought it was a great book when I was a kid. I read it again when I was in college, and I could see its flaws then, but I enjoyed it even more as an adult, despite its flaws.”

“Were you disturbed because Jim was called Nigger Jim?”

“You have to remember that I was born in 1974 on a farm near Syracuse, New York. Things had changed a lot by then, and the farm had originally been owned by my great-great-great-grandfather, who came up from Georgia to Canada via the Underground Railway and then purchased the farm after the Civil War. No, I wasn’t offended by your use of the word. Negroes were called niggers openly in the time you wrote about and nobody thought anything of it. Sure, the word was an insult. But you were portraying people as they actually talked, and the ethical basis of your novel, the struggle between Huck’s duty as a citizen and his feeling for Jim as a human being and the victory of the human feeling in Huck—I was moved. The whole book was an indictment of slavery, of the semifeudal society of the Mississippi, of superstition—of everything stupid of that time. So why should I be offended by it?”

“Then why—”

“Abdullah—whose original name was George Robert Lee—was born in 1925 and Hacking was born in 1938. Blacks were niggers then to a lot of whites, though not to all. They found out the hard way that violence—or the threat of it, the same thing that the whites had used to keep them down—was the only way to get their rights as citizens of the United States. You died in 1910, right? But you must have been told by any number of people what happened after that?”

Sam nodded. “It’s hard to believe. Not the violence of the riots. Plenty of that happened in my lifetime and nothing, I understand, ever equaled the Draft Act riots in New York City during the Civil War. I mean, what’s hard to visualize is the licentiousness of the late twentieth century.”

FIREBRASS laughed and said, “Yet you’re living in a society that is far more free and licentious—from the viewpoint of the nineteenth century—than any society in the twentieth. You’ve adapted.”

“I suppose so,” Sam replied. “But the two weeks of absolute nudity during the first days after resurrection ensured that mankind would never again be the same. Not as regards nudity, anyway. And the undeniable fact of the resurrection shattered many fixed ideas and attitudes. Though the diehard is still with us, as witness your Wahhabi Moslem.”

“Tell me, Sinjoro Clemens,” Firebrass said. “You were an early liberal, far ahead of your time in many things. You spoke up against slavery and were for equality. And when you wrote the Magna Carta for Parolando you insisted that there should be political equality for all species, races, and both sexes. I notice that a black man and a white woman live almost next door to you. Be honest, doesn’t it disturb you to see that?”

Sam drew in smoke, blew it out, and said, “To be honest, yes, it did disturb me. Well, to tell the truth, it almost killed me! What my mind told me and what my reflexes told me were two different things. I hated it. But I stuck to my guns, I said nothing, I became acquainted with that couple and I learned to like them. And now, after a year, it bothers me only a very little. And that will go away in time.”

“The difference between you—representing the white liberal—and the youth of Hacking’s day and mine was that we were not bothered. We accepted it.”

“Don’t I get any credit for lifting myself by my mental bootstraps?” Sam asked.

“Yawblaw,” Firebrass said, lapsing into English—of a sort. “Two degrees off is better than ninety. Pin it.”

HE went out. Sam was left alone. He sat for a long while, then stood up and went outside. The first person he saw was Hermann Göring. His head was still wrapped in a towel, but his skin was less pale, and his eyes did not look odd.

Sam said, “How’s your head?”

“It still hurts. But I walk without driving hot spikes in it every time I take a step.”

“I don’t like to see a man suffer,” Sam said. “So I suggest that you could avoid more suffering, if not downright pain, by leaving Parolando.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Not with any action from me. But there are plenty who may get so riled up they’ll run you out on a rail. Or take you down to The River and drown you. You’re upsetting everybody with your preachings. This state was founded with one main goal, the building of the Riverboat. Now, a man may say anything he wants to and not run foul of the law here. But there are those who sometimes ignore the law, and I wouldn’t want to have to punish them because you tempted them. I suggest that you do your Christian duty and remove yourself from the premises. That way, you won’t be tempting good men and women to commit violence.”

“I’m not a Christian,” Göring said.

“I admire a man who can admit that. I don’t think I ever met a preacher who came out and said so, in so many words.”

“Sinjoro Clemens,” Göring said, “I read your books when I was a young man in Germany, first in German and then in English. But levity or mild irony isn’t going to get us anyplace. I am not a Christian, though I try to practice the better Christian virtues. I am a missionary of the Church of the Second Chance. All terrestrial religions have been discredited, even if some won’t admit it. The Church is the first religion to rise on the new world, the only one which has any chance to survive. It—”

“Spare me the lecture,” Sam said. “I’ve heard enough from your predecessors and from you. What I’m saying, in utter friendliness and a desire to save you from harm and also, to be honest, to get you out of my craw, is that you should take off. Right now. Or you’ll be killed.”

“Then I’ll rise at dawn tomorrow somewhere else and preach The Truth there, wherever I find myself. You see, here, as on Earth, the blood of the martyr is the seed of the Church. The man who kills one of us only ensures that The Truth, the chance for eternal salvation, will be heard by more people. Murder has spread our faith up and down The River far faster than any conventional means of travel.”

“Congratulations,” Sam said exasperatedly, dropping into English, as he often did when angry. “But tell me, doesn’t the repeated killing of your missionaries bother you? Aren’t you afraid of running out of body?”

“What do you mean?”

“Tenets, anyone?”

Sam got no reaction except a puzzled look. Sam resumed in Esperanto. “One of your major tenets, if I remember correctly, is that man wasn’t resurrected so he could enjoy life here forever. He is given only a limited time, though it may look like a long time to most, especially if they don’t happen to be enjoying life here. You postulate something analogous to a soul, something you call a psychomorph, right? Or sometimes a ka. You have to, otherwise you can’t claim a continuity of identity in a man. Without it a man who dies is dead, even if his body is reproduced exactly and made alive again. That second body is only a reproduction. The lazarus has the mind and the memories of the man who died, so he thinks he’s the man who died. But he isn’t. He’s just a living duplicate. Death terminated the first man. He’s through.

“But you solve this problem by postulating a soul—or a psychomorph or a ka—call it what you will. This is an entity which is born with the body, accompanies it, registers and records everything the body does, and, indeed, must be an incorporeal incorporation of the body, if you’ll excuse that contradiction. So that, when the flesh dies, the ka still exists. It exists in some fourth dimension or in some polarization which protoplasmic eyes can’t see or mechanical devices can’t detect. Is that correct?”

“You’re close enough,” Göring said. “Crudely put but satisfactory.”

“So far,” Sam said, expelling a big cloud of green smoke, “we have—you have, not I—the postulated soul of the Christians and the Moslems and others ad nauseam. But you claim that the soul does not go to a hell or a heaven. It flits around in some sort of fourth-dimensional limbo. It would do so forever if it were not for the interference of other beings. These are extraterrestrials who came into existence long before humanity did. These superbeings came to Earth when mankind did not yet exist—in fact, they visited every planet in the universe that might have sentient life some day.”

“You’re not phrasing it exactly as we do,” Göring said. “We maintain that every galaxy has one—or perhaps many—ancient species inhabiting certain planets. These beings may have arisen in our galaxy or they may have originated in an earlier, now dead, galaxy or universe. In any event, they are wise and knew long ago that sentient life would arise on Earth, and they set up devices which started recording these sentients from the moment they appeared. These devices are undetectable by the sentients.

“At some time which these Ancients, as we call them, have determined, the recordings are sent to a special place. There the dead are fleshed out from the recordings by energy-matter converters, made whole and young again, and then recordings are made of these bodies—which are destroyed and the dead are raised on a new world, such as this, again through e-m conversion.

“The psychomorphs, or kas, have an affinity to their protoplasmic twins. The moment a duplicate of the dead body is made, the ka attaches itself and begins recording. So that, if the body is killed and duplicated a hundred times, the ka still retains the identity, the mind, and the memories of all the bodies. So that it is not just one duplicate after another being created. It is a matter of preservation of the pristine individual with a recording of everything that ever occurred to the immediate environment of all the protoplasmic bodies of the ka.”

“But!” Sam said, waving his cigar and then stabbing its glowing end close to Göring’s cheek. “But! You maintain that a man cannot be killed an indefinite number of times. You say that, after a couple of hundred times, death does have a final effect. Continued dying weakens the link between body and ka and eventually the duplication of the body does not cause the ka to merge with it. The ka wanders off, haunts the spooky corridors of the fourth dimension, or whatever. It becomes, in effect, a ghost, a lost soul. It is done for.”

“That is the essence of our faith,” Göring said. “Or I should say our knowledge, since we know this to be true.”

Sam raised his bushy eyebrows. “Indeed? Know?”

“Yes. Our founder heard The Truth a year after Resurrection, a year to the day after all of humanity rose from the dead. A man came to him at night as he prayed for a revelation on a high ledge up in the mountains. This man told him certain things, showed him certain things, that no terrestrial mortal could tell or show. This man was an agent of The Ancients and he revealed The Truth, and he told our founder to go out and preach the doctrine of the Second Chance.

“Actually, the term Second Chance is a misnomer. It is really our First Chance, because we never had a chance for salvation and eternal life while we were on Earth. But life on Earth was a necessary prelude to this Riverworld. The Creator made the universe and then The Ancients preserved humankind—indeed, all sentients throughout the universe. They preserved! But salvation is up to mankind only!

“It is up to each man to save himself, now that he has been given the chance!”

“Through the Church of the Second Chance and that only, I suppose,” Sam said. He did not want to sneer but he could not help himself.

“That is what we believe,” Göring said.

“WHAT were the credentials of this mysterious stranger?” Sam said. He thought of his Mysterious Stranger, and he felt panic. Could the two be the same? Or could both be from the same beings who called themselves the Ethicals? His Stranger, the man who sent the nickel-iron meteorite here and who had enabled Joe Miller to see the Tower in the far-off misty North Polar Sea, was a renegade of the Ethicals. If he were to be believed.

“Credentials?” Göring said. “Papers from God?”

He laughed.

“The founder knew that his visitor could not be just a man because he knew things that only a god, or a superior being, could know about him. And he showed him some things that he had to believe. And he told him how we were brought back to life and why. He did not tell him everything. Some things will be revealed later. Some things we must find out for ourselves.”

“What is the name of this founder?” Sam said. “Or don’t you know? Is that one of the hidden things?”

“No one knows,” Göring said. “It is not necessary to know. What is a name? He only called himself Viro. That is, in Esperanto, a man. From the Latin vir. We call him La Fondinto, The Founder, or La Viro, The Man.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“No, but I have met two who knew him well. One was there when La Viro preached the first time, seven days after the Stranger had talked to him.”

“La Viro is definitely male? Not a woman?”

“Oh, yes!”

Sam sighed deeply and said, “That’s a great weight off my mind. If the founder had turned out to be Mary Baker Eddy, I would have curled up and died.”

“What?”

“Never mind,” Sam said, grinning. “I wrote a book about her once. I wouldn’t want to meet her; she’d scalp me alive. But some of the wild mystical things you told me reminded me of her.”

“Except for the ka, everything in our explanation is based on the physical. And the ka is physical, but at right angles, you might say, to our reality. We believe that it is science, the science of The Ancients, which has given us a physical resurrection. There’s nothing supernatural about anything, except our belief in The Creator, of course. The rest is all science.”

“Like Mary Baker Eddy’s religion?” Sam asked.

“I do not know of her.”

“So how do we attain this salvation?”

“By becoming love. And that implies, of course, that we do not offer violence, even in self-defense. We believe that we can become love only by attaining a certain transcendent state and that comes through self-knowledge. So far most of mankind has not learned how to use dreamgum; man has abused the drug, just as he abuses everything.”

“And you think you have become love, whatever that phrase means?”

“Not yet. But I am on the way.”

“Through dreamgum?”

“Not just with it. It helps. But you have to act, too, you have to preach and suffer for your belief. And learn not to hate. Learn to love.”

“So that is why you oppose my Riverboat? You think that we are wasting our time by building it?”

“It’s a goal that will bring no one any good. So far it has resulted in the devastation of the land, in greed and pain and bloodshed, in anxiety and treachery. In hate, hate, hate! And for what? So you can have what nobody else has, a giant boat of metal propelled by electricity, the apex of the technology this planet offers, a ship of fools. So you can journey to the headwaters of The River. When you get there, then what? You should be journeying to the headwaters of the soul!”

“There are some things you don’t know,” Sam said. His smugness was soured by a vision. There was a devil, crouching in the darkness, whispering in his ear. But someone had crouched in the darkness and whispered in the ear of the founder of the Church, too. Was the Church’s Stranger the devil? The being who had come to Samuel Clemens had said that the others were the devils and he wanted to save mankind.

The devil would say something like that, of course.

“Don’t my words touch your heart at all?” Göring said.

Sam rapped his chest with his fist and said, “Yes, I do believe I have a touch of indigestion.”

Göring made a fist and clamped his lips.

“Watch out, you’ll lose your love,” Sam said and walked away. But he did not feel particularly triumphant. It was a fact that he did have a little stomach upset. Invincible ignorance always upset him, even though he knew he should just laugh at it.

21

The afternoon of the next day arrived. Sam Clemens and John Lackland had been arguing all morning. Finally Sam, exasperated past caution and reasonableness, said, “We can’t afford to have the bauxite cut off by Hacking! We can’t afford anything that will put a stop to building the Riverboat! Maybe you’re doing this to force a war between us and Soul City! It isn’t going to work, Your Majesty!”

Sam had been walking back and forth, waving a panatela as he spoke. John sprawled before the oaken round table in Sam’s pilothouse. Joe Miller sat in a corner on a big chair specially built for him. The massive paleolithic Mongolian, Zaksksromb, stood behind John.

Suddenly, Sam whirled and planked both fists on the table. Leaning on the table, his cigar in one corner of his mouth, the reddish tangle of his eyebrows drawn down, he snarled at John.

“You gave in once, at Runnymede, when you signed the Magna Carta. It was about the only decent thing you ever did during your reign—and there are some who say you had your fingers crossed then. Well, this is another showdown, John, Your Majesty. You apologize to Abdullah, who has a right to an apology—or I’ll call a special session of the Council and we’ll determine your fitness to continue as co-Consul!”

John glowered at him for a full minute at the least. Then he said, “Your threats don’t scare me. But it’s evident that you would sooner plunge our land into civil war than go to war with Soul City. I do not understand this madness, but then a rational man always has trouble understanding irrationality. So I will apologize. Why not! A king can afford to be gracious to a commoner. It costs him nothing and enhances his graciousness.”

John rose and swaggered out, his huge bodyguard behind him.

Ten minutes later, Sam heard that John had appeared at the state guest house and offered his apology. Abdullah X accepted it, though sullenly. It was evident that he had been ordered to do so.

Just before the factory whistles announced the end of lunch hour, Cawber entered. He sat down without waiting for Sam to invite him. Sam raised his eyebrows, because this was the first time that this had happened. There was something indefinable in Cawber’s attitude. Sam, watching him carefully, listening to every inflection of his voice, decided that his attitude was that of a slave who has decided to be a slave no more.

CAWBER knew that he would be the emissary to Soul City. He sat leaning forward, huge black arms resting on the oak, his hands spread out. He spoke in Esperanto and, like many people, mostly in the present tense, using an adverb of time to indicate future or past if he wanted to clarify.

Cawber’s team had talked to every one of the approximately three thousand undoubted Negroes (there was some confusion of classification about some of the prehistorics). A third of these were willing, though not eager, to go to Soul City in exchange for Hacking’s unwanted citizens. Most were late-twentieth-century blacks. The others maintained that they had work that gave them prestige, that they liked being on an equal footing with the whites, and that they did not want to give up their chance to be on the Riverboat.

The latter was probably the biggest determinant, Sam thought. He was not the only one who dreamed of the Riverboat. It drove through the minds of many during sleep, gleaming like a jewel with a firefly trapped inside.

Firebrass and his people were requested to come to the conference room. Firebrass was late because he had been inspecting the airplane. He was laughing about its quaintness, fragility, and slowness, and yet he was envious that von Richthofen would be the one to fly it.

“You’ll certainly get a chance to fly it, too,” Sam said. “Provided that you are still here, of course, when—”

Firebrass became serious. “What is your decision, gentlemen, regarding my government’s proposals?”

Sam looked at John, who gestured that Sam had the floor. John intended that any possible ill feelings should first be directed at Sam.

“This is a democracy,” Sam said. “And we can’t tell our citizens to get out unless they’ve been guilty of illegal behavior. So, as I see it—as we see it—any citizen of Parolando may go to Soul City if he wishes. I think we actually reached basic agreement on this when we last met. It will be up to your government to negotiate with each citizen. As for taking in your Arabs and Dravidians and so forth—we’ll give them a chance to come with us if they want to. But we reserve the right to get rid of them if they don’t work out. Where they’ll go then is up to them.”

“Well,” Firebrass said, “I don’t suppose Hacking wants anybody who isn’t willing to live in Soul City, no matter how black that person is.”

“What about the shipments of minerals?” Sam said. “Will those be discontinued during the negotiations?”

“I really couldn’t say,” Firebrass replied. “I doubt it, but I’d have to confer with Hacking. Of course, you’ll have to keep up your present rate of ore and weapons to us before the price is raised.”

“I notice you said is, not might be,” Sam said.

“Anything I say is subject to confirmation or negation from Soul City,” Firebrass said, smiling.

It was then agreed that Cawber would go to Soul City as Parolando’s ambassador if the Carta could be changed to arrange it. Everything else was still up in the air. Sam Clemens received the impression that Firebrass did not intend to speed things up. Quite the contrary. He was willing to let things drag on or even to put his own foot on the brake if things showed signs of accelerating. He wanted to remain in Parolando, and Sam could only think that he wished to do so in order to spy. Perhaps, he also wanted to stir up trouble.

Later, he discussed the meeting with John. John agreed that Firebrass was a spy, but he could not see why Firebrass would stir up trouble.

“He would want the boat to be built as swiftly as possible. The sooner it’s completed, the sooner Hacking will try to seize it. Do you think for one moment that Hacking doesn’t intend to get the boat? Do you think for one moment that we have a single neighbor who doesn’t intend to try for the boat? Arthur made the abortive attempt to take us over because of his hatred for me. He should have waited until the boat was nearly completed and then, with Kleomenes and the Ulmaks, launched all the force they could mount in an all-out attack. As things worked out, he and Kleomenes were killed and Iyeyasu has invaded their countries while their successors are fighting among themselves.”

“According to our spies, he’s winning, too,” Sam said.

“If he consolidates his state with the other two, then he’ll be a very formidable enemy.”

And so will you be, John Lackland, Sam thought. Of all the people I’ll have to watch after the boat is built, you’ll bear the closest watching.…

FIREBRASS announced that he and his delegation would remain as Soul City’s embassy while the negotiations went on.

“It’s nice to have you,” Sam said. “But Soul City has its own industries. I know it’s been using our ore to make weapons and several things our spies can’t find out about.”

Firebrass looked surprised and then he laughed uproariously. “You twist my stick, stymate!” he said in English. Then, in Esperanto, “Well, why shouldn’t we be frank? I like that. Yes, we know you have spies among us—just as you know we have ours here. Who doesn’t have his spies in his neighbors’ lands? But what are you getting at?”

“You’re the most technically trained man Hacking has. You’re a Ph.D. You’re in charge of the factories and of research and development. So why does Hacking send you here when he needs you there?”

“I’ve set everything up to run smoothly. Soul City doesn’t need me right now, and I was bored. I wanted to come here, where it’s at.”

“So you can see what we’ve got, like our Mark I handguns and our airplane and the amphibian and its steam cannon?”

Firebrass grinned and nodded. “Yes. Why not? If I don’t see these things, someone else will.”

Sam relaxed. He said, “Have a cigar. You can look all you want. We’re not doing anything you wouldn’t have figured out for yourself, except for the steam cannon maybe. That, by the way, is my invention. Come along with me. I’m very proud of it and want you to see it. It’s almost finished.”

Firedragon I rested inside its supporting framework of timbers. It was silvery gray and shaped like a flat-bottomed boat but had seven huge metal wheels with plastic tires on each side. Twin screws protected by a screen protruded from its rear. Its length was thirty feet, its beam was ten feet, and its height was twelve feet. Three turrets stuck out from the upper deck. One held the pilot, captain, and radio operator, though at the moment Parolando had no radios. The center turret was higher than the others, and the barrel of a short stubby weapon encased in wood projected from it. The rear turret was designed for gunners who would be armed with Mark I handguns and perhaps rifles.

“The amphibian burns wood alcohol to generate steam,” Sam said. “Let’s go inside, through this hatch in the side here. You’ll notice that the boiler takes up about a third of the interior. There’s a good reason for that, as you’ll see.”

They climbed up a ladder into the inside of the center turret, which was lit by a single lightbulb. Firebrass exclaimed at this. It was the only electric lightbulb he had ever seen on The River. Sam explained that it was powered by a fuel cell.

“And here is the Super-duper Steam Machine Cannon,” he said. He pointed at the cylinder sticking out of the gray bulkhead of the turret. Underneath it were a pistollike butt and a trigger. Firebrass got behind it, put his finger on the trigger, and looked out through the opening above the barrel. He raised and lowered the weapon.

“There’ll be a chair for the operator to sit in,” Sam said. “He’ll be able to rotate the turret any way he wants by pushing pedals. He can depress the gun about twenty degrees up or down. The steam from the boiler is the motive power for the eighty-caliber plastic bullets. The gun is fired from an open breech—that is, there’s no bullet in the barrel when the trigger is pulled. Pulling the trigger releases a catch which permits the breech block to move forward, impelled by a spring. During its forward travel, the breech block picks up a plastic bullet from the clip and pushes it into the breech. Just before the block reaches the breech, the camming lugs on either side engage in their slots and turn the breech block a quarter turn to the right, thus locking the breech. You follow me?”

Firebrass nodded.

“Good. As soon as the quarter turn is completed, the inlet channel in the breech block comes into line with the feed channel from the high-pressure steam line. This allows hot, say approximately four-hundred-degree Fahrenheit, steam to enter the chamber in the breech block. The plastic cartridge is forced through the barrel by the expansion of steam. At the same time the steam pressure, acting against the rear of the chamber, begins to force the breech block back. Because of the greater weight of the block, however, the block doesn’t begin to move until the bullet has already cleared the muzzle of the rifle.

“As the block begins to move backward, the camming lugs move in the camming slots and turn the bolt a quarter turn to the left, thus shutting off the steam. Then the breech block returns to its original position. If the trigger is still held back, the operation is repeated indefinitely.”

Firebrass said, “I’m impressed. But won’t the gun operate most efficiently if its temperature is the same as the incoming high-pressure steam? That way, less of the steam’s energy would be used to heat the gun and this means more steam to propel the bullet. Ah, I see! You do have a hollow jacket around the barrel. The steam travels through that before it enters the weapon itself, right?”

“Yes. There’s an insulating jacket of plaster encased in wood. Note that bleeder valve. It permits the gun to be heated up before use—a few seconds before it’s fired. If that isn’t done, the gun might jam. And since the gun’s maximum temperature is the same as the steam in the boiler, there’s no danger of burning up the barrel. You can use the gun like a fire hose. In fact, that’ll be about the only way it’ll be effective. The accuracy of a light plastic bullet with such comparatively low muzzle velocity isn’t high.”

FIREBRASS was far from being depressed because of the military superiority the amphibian would give Parolando. This probably was because he was planning on building one for Soul City. Or, if Parolando had one, then perhaps he might build two. In which case, Parolando would have to build three.

Soul City could not outbuild Parolando. But Parolando could not cut the supplies off because then Soul City would cut off the bauxite, cryolite, platinum, and iridium.

The exhilaration from showing off his deadly invention whistled out almost audibly from Sam. The only solution to the problem, if Soul City did start a weapons race, would be to smash Soul City and take direct control of the minerals. This meant putting off the building of the Riverboat. And it also meant offending the two states, Publiujo and Tifonujo, that lay between Parolando and Soul City. And if those two states got together, they would be formidable, what with the weapons that Parolando had to give them in exchange for their wood.

Sam had thought that that potentiality was bad enough. But a few days later Iyeyasu completed his conquest of his neighboring states and sent a mission to Parolando. He made no demands that could not be met. In fact, in one way his proposals were helpful. He said that his nation had lost enough trees, and he would like to give them a chance to grow again—but for an increase in the number of weapons from Parolando, he was willing to provide a large quantity of wood and of excrement for their gunpowder industry. He would invade the territories across The River and take their wood from them.

What it amounted to was that Parolando would be paying Iyeyasu to collect the wood forcibly from its neighbors. It would be cheaper and also a lot less painful for the Parolandanoj, who would not have to do their own killing, enslaving, or raiding.

And Sam Clemens would have one more thing to rob him of sleep.

John Lackland thought the proposal excellent. “Our factories are turning out weapons efficiently,” he said. “We can afford to export more. And we must build a fleet of Firedragons so that the swords we give these people will be easily overpowered by our machines.”

“When are we going to start building the Riverboat?” Sam asked.

NO one gave him an answer, but the next day van Boom, Velitsky, and O’Brien, his chief engineers, brought him the first rough overall sketches. They were drawn in black on white plastic boards with a pencil connected to a fuel cell. The magnetic field at the tip of the pencil rearranged the loose and very thin covering of particles within its range. The lines remained polarized until a reverse field was passed over them. Thus, the demand for paper for drawings was greatly cut down, and the plans could be changed as desired.

Firebrass said he would like to help build the boat. Permission was given, though John objected at first. Sam replied that the more help they had, the faster the work would move. And he did not see how any amount of knowledge on Firebrass’ part would enable him to steal the boat. Though Sam did not tell John, he had an idea about Firebrass. That was to get him so involved, so “het up” about the boat, that he would take an offer of a berth on the vessel.

The machinery necessary to roll out the first plates for the hull was almost finished. The dam had been finished a week ago, and the water from the cataract was filling it up. The aluminum wires of the generators, which would be turned by the waterfall from the dam, were being wound. The prototype batacitor, which would be four stories high, would be finished in a month, if enough materials were available.

Five hundred missionaries of the Church of the Second Chance asked for sanctuary in Parolando a few days later. Iyeyasu had kicked them out of his new state, promising various exquisite tortures if they tried to sneak back. Sam did not hear about them immediately because he was up at the dam.

The Chancers refused to go when John sent word to them to leave immediately. John Lackland, hearing this, smiled grimly, tugged at his lion-colored hair, and swore his favorite oath, “By the teeth of God!”

Sam was at the dam to supervise the installation of tons of dynamite inside the hollow walls. This was to be one more trick up his sleeve, a last-ditch operation—and perhaps a suicidal one—if ever an enemy were about to make a successful invasion.

Von Richthofen, red-faced and blowing hard from his run up the hill, told him of the arrival of the Chancers and their refusal to move. He did not mention John.

Sam told Lothar to tell the Chancers that he would be down in the evening. They could wait for him but were not to move outside a radius of twenty yards from the grailstone near which they had landed. For a moment, he considered ordering them to leave at once and telling the soldiers that they could pound them a little with the flats of their swords if they wished. He was hot and sweating and covered with cement dust, and he felt an especial animosity toward the Chancers. Here was a world blessed by the absence of flies and mosquitoes—and humans, the Chancers, were trying to fill the gap.

The rumbling and splash of giant mortars pouring out concrete, the yells of the straw bosses, and the scraping of shovels and clatter of iron wooden-wheeled barrows kept Sam from hearing the explosions that came a half hour later. He knew nothing of what had happened until von Richthofen came running toward him again.

Sam felt as if he would come loose at the joints and slump into a puddle. John had tested out the new guns on the Chancers. A hundred Mark I flintlocks had killed almost five hundred men and women in three minutes. John himself had fired and loaded ten times, using the last five bullets to finish off the wounded.

About thirty women, the most beautiful, had been spared. These had been taken to John’s palace.

LONG before he reached the water’s edge, Sam saw the big crowd gathered around the grailstone. He sent Lothar ahead of him to clear the way. The crowd parted before them, like the Red Sea before Moses, he thought, but the Red Sea was before him after he got through the parting. The bodies were piled against each other, covered with blood, their flesh torn, bones shattered by the big-caliber bullets. In his ninety-seven years of life Sam had never grown accustomed to the silence of the dead. It seemed to hang over them like an invisible and chilling cloud. The mouth that would not speak again, the brain that could not think…

It did no good to remember that tomorrow these same people, in fresh and healthy bodies, would be up and doing somewhere along the banks. The effect of death could not be diluted with intellectualizing.

John was issuing orders about the disposal of the bodies to the soap and skin factories. He grinned at Sam like a bad boy caught pulling the cat’s tail.

“This is a massacre!” Sam shouted. “A massacre! Unjustified! Unforgivable! There was no reason for it, you bloody-minded killing beast! That’s all you ever have been, you murdering dog, all you ever will be! Swine! Swine! Swine!”

John lost his smile and took a step back as Sam, his hands clenched, moved close to him. The huge massive-boned Zaksksromb, holding a big club of oak with steel spikes set in its end, started toward Sam.

Lothar von Richthofen shouted, “None of that—leave him alone or I call Joe Miller! And I’ll shoot the first man who makes a move toward Sam.”

Sam looked behind him. Lothar was holding a big pistol in his hands, and it was pointed at John.

John’s dark skin paled, and his eyes opened wide. Even the light-blue irises seemed to become paler.

Later Sam wished that he had told Lothar to fire. Even though the hundred pistoleers were John’s men, they might have hesitated if John had been killed at the first shot. They were surrounded by armed men and women, most of whom were not fond of John and almost all of whom were shocked by the slaughter. They might have withheld their fire. Even if they had not, Sam could have thrown himself down to the ground and the first shots might have missed. After that, who knew what would have happened?

But it was no good fantasizing. He had not given the order.

Nevertheless, he had to take some strong and immediate action. If he let John get away with this, he would lose everybody’s respect, not to mention his own. And he might as well resign his Consulship. In which case, he would lose the Riverboat.

He turned his head slightly, though not so much that he could not keep an eye on John. He saw Livy’s white face and big dark eyes; she looked as if she were going to vomit. He ignored her and called to Cyrano de Bergerac, who was standing on the edge of the inner circle, his long rapier in his hand.

“Captain de Bergerac!” Sam pointed at John. “Arrest the co-Consul.”

JOHN was holding a pistol in one hand, but he did not bring up its muzzle.

He said in a mild voice, “I protest. I told them to get out at once and they refused to go. I warned them and they still refused—so I ordered them shot. What difference does it make, really? They will be alive tomorrow.”

Cyrano marched straight to John, stopped, saluted, and said, “Your weapons, sire.”

Zaksksromb growled and lifted his spiked club.

“No, Zak,” John Lackland said. “According to the Carta, one Consul can arrest the other if he thinks the other is acting contrary to the Carta. I won’t be under arrest long.”

He handed Cyrano his gun, butt first, unbuckled his belt, and gave it to Cyrano. Its sheaths held a long knife and short sword.

“I will return to my palace while you and the Council decide my fate,” he said. “According to the Carta, you must convene within an hour after the arrest and have a decision in two hours, as long as no national emergency interferes.”

He walked away, Cyrano behind him. John’s men hesitated a moment and then, at the thundered orders of Zaksksromb, followed John to the palace. Sam stared after them. He had expected more resistance. And then it occurred to him that John knew very well that Sam Clemens had to do just what he did or lose face. And John knew Sam well enough to know that Sam might want to avoid a decision that could lead to civil war, but he would not if he thought his Riverboat endangered.

So John had gone along with him. John did not want to force a showdown. Not now. He had satisfied his bloodlust for the moment. The Councilmen would meet and find that, legally, John was within his rights. Morally, he was not. But then his supporters would argue that even there he was justified. After all, the dead would be alive again and the lesson to the Second Chancers would be invaluable. They would steer clear of Parolando for a long time. And surely Sam Clemens would have to admit that this was desirable. If the Chancers continued to make converts, the Riverboat would never be built. Moreover, other states, less weakened with the Chancer philosophy, would invade Parolando.

And he, Sam Clemens, would say that next John’s supporters would be claiming that it was all right to torture people. After all, the pain could last only so long, and any injury would be healed just by killing the victim. Then rape would be justified, because, after all, the woman wasn’t going to be made pregnant or diseased—and if she got hurt, too bad. Kill her and she’d be all right in the morning. Never mind the mental damage. A little dreamgum would cure that.

No, Sam would say, it’s a question not of murder, but of rights. If you killed a man, you removed him without his consent to a place so far away he could walk a thousand years along the Riverbank and never get back. You took him away from his love, his friends, his home. Force was force and it was always…

Oh, oh! He’d better watch himself!

“Sam!” a lovely voice said.

He turned. Livy was pale, but her eyes looked as if they were normal.

“Sam! What about the women he carried off?”

“Where’s my head?” he said aloud. “Come on, Lothar!” Seeing the ten-foot-high Miller halfway across the plain, he waved at him and the titanthrop turned to intercept them. Lothar ordered a hundred archers who had just arrived to follow them.

Near the great log building, he slowed down. John knew that his co-Consul had forgotten about the abducted women, but that he would soon remember them. And John might be prepared to submit himself to the Council’s judgment of the massacre, because, legally, he was within his rights. But surrendering the women to Sam might be just a little too much for John. His infamous temper might betray him, and then civil war would explode in Parolando.

22

Sam saw thirty or so women walking out through the open gates, and he knew that John had decided to rectify his mistake. Even so, he could be accused of kidnapping, a graver crime than murder in this topsy-turvy world. But if the women were unharmed, it would be too much trouble to push the charge.

He stopped, and this time he thought his heart would stop. Gwenafra was with the women!

Lothar, crying her name, ran to her. She ran to him with her arms out, and they embraced.

After a minute of hugging, kissing, and sobbing, she pulled herself away and went to Sam. He cursed himself because there was no one else he could reasonably blame. If he had shown that he wanted her when she had made it plain that he could have her, then she might not have turned to von Richthofen. Why hadn’t he taken her, then? Why had he clung to the idea that Livy would eventually come back and that, if he took another woman now, Livy would resent it so much she would never have anything to do with him?

His thinking wasn’t logical. But whatever the philosophers claimed, the main use of logic was to justify your emotions.

Gwenafra had kissed him while her tears ran down his bare chest. Now she left his arms and went back to Lothar, and Sam Clemens was left with the problem of what to do with—or to—John Lackland.

He strode through the gates with Joe Miller lumbering behind him. A moment later, von Richthofen had caught up with him. He was swearing and muttering in German, “I’ll kill him!”

Sam stopped. “You get out of here! I’m mad enough, but I can control myself! You’re in the lion’s den now, and if you try anything, he can have you killed and claim self-defense. He’d love that. In fact, he may have done all this just to set up our murder.”

Lothar said, “But you’re here with only Joe!”

“I wouldn’t ever call Joe an only! Anyway, if you hadn’t been so busy mugging with Gwen, you would have heard me order the troops to storm the palace and kill everybody in it if I’m not out in fifteen minutes.”

Lothar stared at Sam. “You’ve certainly gotten much more aggressive!”

“The more trouble I have and the longer the building of the Riverboat takes, the meaner I get,” Sam said. There was no point in telling him that his anger at him and Gwenafra was turned onto John, who already had so much directed at him that he should have curled up and crisped away. And would have if there were any justice in the world.

He entered the largest building inside the stockade of tall lodgepole-pine logs and he brushed past Sharkey. The slope-shouldered thug started to block his way, but Sam did not break his stride. A cavernous growl came from the vast hairy figure behind Sam. Sharkey snarled soundlessly and made the mistake of not moving to one side far enough. A huge reddish-haired hip sent the two-hundred-and-thirty-pound man staggering back as if he were a hollow dummy.

“I’ll kill you one of these days!” Sharkey said in English.

Joe turned his head slowly as if it were a turret on a battleship and the tremendous proboscis were a cannon. “Yeth? You and vhat army?”

“You’re getting pretty snappy with the comeback, Joe,” Sam muttered. “My influence, no doubt.”

“I’m not ath dumb ath motht people think,” Joe said.

“That wouldn’t be possible.”

His rage had become a dull red now. Even with Joe as his bodyguard, he was far from being safe. But he was banking that John would go only so far with him, because he wanted that boat, too.

John was sitting at the big round oaken table with a dozen of his thugs. The giant Zaksksromb was standing behind him. All held clay steins. The room reeked of tobacco and liquor. John’s eyes were red, but then they usually were. Light came in through the windows but the direct sunlight was blocked off by the stockade poles. Some pine torches burned smokily.

Sam stopped, took a cigar out of the little box in the bag hanging from his belt, and lit it. It angered him that his hand shook so much, and that increased his anger at John.

He said, “All right, Your Majesty! It was bad enough that you took those alien women for your own vile purposes! But to take Gwenafra? She’s a citizen of this state! You really put your neck in the noose, John, and I’m not just using figurative language!”

John downed the whiskey in the stein and gently put it down on the table. Softly, he said, “I had those women removed for their own safety. The crowd was very ugly; they wanted to kill the missionaries. And Gwenafra was taken along through a mistake. I will ascertain who is responsible for that and punish him.”

“John,” Sam said, “I ought to arrest your assertions for vagrancy. They certainly are without any visible support. But I got to hand it to you. You just dispossessed the devil. You are now the father of lies and grand master, past, present, and future, of deceit. If being barefaced is the criterion of the greatest liar, all other liars are whiskered like Santa Claus.”

John’s face turned red. Zaksksromb sneered and lifted his club chest-high. Joe growled.

John blew out a deep breath and said, smiling, “You are upset over a little blood. You will get over it. You cannot disprove anything I have said, isn’t that right? By the way, have you called a meeting of the Council yet? The law of the land requires you to do so, you know.”

The horrible thing was that John would get away with it. Everybody, including his supporters, would know he was lying. But there was nothing to do about it unless they wanted to start a civil war, and that would mean that the wolves—Iyeyasu, Hacking, maybe the supposed neutrals, Publius Crassus, Chernsky, Tai Fung, and the savages across The River—would invade.

Sam snorted and walked out. Two hours later, his expectations were realities. The Councilmen voted an official reprimand against John for his mishandling of the situation and his hastiness. He was directed to confer with his co-Consul in any such future situations.

No doubt John would laugh uproariously when he was told of the decision and he would call for more liquor, tobacco, marijuana, and women to celebrate.

However, he did not have a complete victory. Every Parolandano knew how Sam Clemens had stood up to John, stormed his palace with only one supporter, released the women, and insulted John to his face. John knew that; his triumph was standing on shaky legs.

Sam asked the Council to exile every Second Chancer in Parolando for their own protection. But several Councillors pointed out that this would be illegal. The Carta would have to be changed. Besides, it was unlikely that John would take any more action against them after the warning he had received.

They knew as well as Sam why he was taking advantage of the emotional climate to oust the Second Chancers. But there were some stubborn men on the Council. Perhaps they felt angry because they had not been able to do anything about John, and at least they could make a stand for principle in this case.

Sam would have bet that the survivors of the massacre would want to leave immediately. But they insisted on staying. The slaughter had done nothing except to convince them that Parolando needed them very much. Göring was building several large huts for them. Sam sent word down that this should stop. Parolando was already short of wood. Göring sent word back that he and his male comrades would move out and sleep under the grailstones. Sam swore and blew smoke in the face of the Chancer messenger and said that it was too bad pneumonia did not exist. Afterward, he felt ashamed, but he did not relent. He wasn’t going to scant his furnaces so that people he did not even want could sleep under a roof.

He felt upset enough, but that evening he got two messages which opened the earth under him. One was that Odysseus had disappeared at night from his boat while on the way back to Parolando. Nobody knew what had happened to him. He was just gone. The second message informed him that William Grevel, the man who’d been spying on John, had been found under a ledge at the base of the mountain, his skull smashed in.

Somehow, John had found him out and executed him. And John would be laughing because Sam could not prove that or, for that matter, even admit that Grevel had been working for him.

Sam called in von Richthofen and de Bergerac and others whom he considered to be his people. It was true that de Bergerac and he were hostile because of Livy, but de Bergerac preferred Clemens to John, with whom he had had some hot words.

“Maybe Odysseus’ disappearance from the boat is only a coincidence,” Sam said. “But that, plus Grevel’s death, makes me wonder if John isn’t striking at me through my friends. He may be planning on cutting you down, one by one, under circumstances where he can’t be accused. He’s crafty. He probably won’t do anything now for some time. But Odysseus was gotten rid of in a place where an investigation will probably reveal nothing. And I can’t accuse John about Grevel without exposing what I’ve been doing. So, watch out for situations where accidents could happen. And be careful when you are alone.”

“Morbleu!” de Bergerac said. “If it wasn’t for this ridiculous law against dueling, I could challenge John and run him through. You, Sinjoro Clemens, were responsible for that law!”

“I was raised in a country where duels were common,” Sam said. “The whole idea sickens me. If you’d seen the tragedies…well, never mind. I guess you did see, and it doesn’t seem to have affected you. Anyway, do you think for a moment that John would ever let you live long enough to meet him for a duel? No, you’d disappear or have an accident, you can bet on that.”

“Vhy can’t John have an acthident?” Joe Miller said.

“How would you get past the living wall of his bodyguards?” Sam said. “No, if John has an accident, it’ll have to be a genuine one.”

He dismissed them with the exception of de Bergerac and of Joe, who never left him unless he was sick or Sam wanted privacy.

“The Stranger said that he’d picked out twelve humans for the final onslaught against the Misty Tower,” Sam said. “Joe, you, Richard Francis Burton, Odysseus, and me make five. But none of us knows who the other seven are. Now Odysseus is gone, and God knows if we’ll ever see him again. The Stranger implied that all of the twelve would join the others on the Riverboat somewhere along the line. But if Odysseus was resurrected somewhere to the south, downRiver, so far away he can’t get back up here before the Riverboat is built, then he is out of luck.”

Cyrano shrugged and rubbed his long nose. “Why worry? Or is that your nature? For all we know, Odysseus is not dead. He may have been contacted by this Mysterious Stranger—who, by the way, Odysseus claims is a woman and so his Stranger is not the one that you and I met—mordieux!—I digress! As I said, Odysseus may have been called away suddenly by this so-mysterious person and we will find out in time what did happen! Let that shadowy angel—or fiend—take care of the matter. We must concentrate on getting this fabulous boat constructed and skewering anybody who gets in our way.”

“That maketh thenthe,” Joe said. “If Tham had a hair for every time he vorried, he’d look like a porcupine. Vhich, now that I come to think of it….”

“Out of the mouths of babes…and tailless monkeys,” Sam said. “Or is it the other end? Anyway, if everything goes well—and so far it hasn’t—we’ll start bonding the magnalium plates for the hull in thirty days. That’ll be my happiest day, until we actually launch the boat. I’ll be happier even than when Livy said yes….”

He could have cut himself off sooner, but he wanted to antagonize Cyrano. The Frenchman, however, did not react. Why should he? He had Livy; she was saying yes to him all the time.

“Me, I do not like the idea,” Cyrano said, “since I am a peaceful man. I would like to have the leisure to indulge myself with the good things of life. I would like to have an end to wars, and if there is to be any bloodshed, let it be between gentlemen who know how to wield their swords. But we cannot build the boat without interference, because those who do not have iron desire it and will not stop until they get it. So, me, I think that John Lackland may be right in one particular. Perhaps we should wage an all-out war as soon as we have enough weapons, and clear The River, on both sides, of all opposition for thirty miles both ways. We can then have unlimited access to the wood and the bauxite and platinum….”

“But if you did that, if you killed all the inhabitants, within a day your countries would be filled up,” Sam said. “You know how resurrection works. Look at how swiftly this area was reinhabited after the meteorite had killed everybody in it.”

Cyrano held up a long—and dirty—finger. Sam wondered if Livy was losing her battle to keep him clean.

“Ah!” Cyrano said. “But these people will remain unorganized, and we, being on the spot, will organize them, take them in as citizens of the expanded Parolando. We will include them in the lottery for the crew of the boat. In the long run, it would be faster to stop the boat building now and do as I suggest.”

And I will send you forth in the lead, Sam thought. And it will be David and Bathsheba and Uriah all over again. Except that David probably didn’t have a conscience, never lost a wink of sleep over what he’d done.

“I don’t think so,” Sam said. “In the first place, our citizens will fight like hell to defend themselves, because they’re involved in the boat. But they’re not going to engage in a war of conquest, especially after they figure out that bringing new citizens into the lottery is going to reduce their chances enormously. Besides, it isn’t right.”

De Bergerac stood up, his hand on the hilt of his rapier. “Perhaps you are right. But the day that you made an agreement with John Lackland and then murdered Erik Bloodaxe, that day was the day that you launched your boat on blood and treachery and cruelty. I do not reproach you, my friend. What you did was unavoidable, if you wanted the boat. But you cannot start thus and then shy away from similar, or even worse, acts. Not if you want your boat. Good night, my friend.”

He bowed and left. Sam puffed on his cigar and then said, “I hate that man! He tells the truth!”

Joe stood up, and the floor creaked under his eight hundred pounds. “I’m going to bed. My head hurtth. Thith whole thing ith giving me a pain in my athth. Either you do or you don’t. It’th that thimple.”

“If I had my brainth in my athth, I’d thay the thame thing!” Sam snarled. “Joe, I love you! You’re beautiful! The world is so uncomplex! Problems make you sleepy, and so you sleep! But I….”

“Good night, Tham!” Joe said and walked into the texas. Sam made sure that the door was barred and that the guards he’d posted around the building were alert. Then he went to bed, too.

He dreamed about Erik Bloodaxe, who chased him through the decks and into the hold of the Riverboat, and he awoke yelling. Joe was looming over him, shaking him. The rain was pounding the roof, and thunder was booming somewhere up along the face of the mountain.

Joe stayed awhile after making some coffee. He put a spoonful of dried crystals into cold water, and the coffee crystals heated the mixture in three seconds. They sipped their coffee and Sam smoked a cigarette while they talked about the days when they had voyaged down The River with Bloodaxe and his Vikings in search of iron.

“At leatht, ve uthed to have fun now and then,” Joe said. “But not anymore. There’th too much vork to do and too many people out to thkin our hideth. And your voman vould thyow up vith that big-nothed Thyrano.”

Sam chuckled and said, “Thanks for the first laugh I’ve had in days, Joe. Big-nosed! Ye Gods!”

“Thometimeth I’m too thubtle for even you, Tham,” Joe said. He rose up from the table and walked back to his room. There was little sleep thereafter. Sam had always liked to stay in bed even after a full night’s sleep. Now he got less than five hours each night, though he did take a siesta sometimes. There always seemed to be someone who had to have a question answered or wanted to thrash out an issue. His chief engineers were far from agreeing on everything, and this much disturbed Sam. He had thought engineering was a cut-and-dried thing. You had a problem, and you solved it the best way. But van Boom, Velitsky, and O’Brien seemed to be living in worlds that did not quite dovetail. Finally, to spare himself the aggravating and often wasted hours of wrangling, he delegated the final word to van Boom. They were not to worry him about anything unless they needed his authorization.

It was amazing the number of things which he would have considered to be only in the engineering province which needed his authorization.

Iyeyasu conquered not only the Bushman-Hottentot area across The River from him but also nine miles of the Ulmak territory. Then he sent a fleet down to the three-mile-long area below the Ulmaks, where seventeenth-century A.D. Sauk and Fox Indians lived. This area was conquered with resultant slaughter of half the inhabitants. Iyeyasu then began dickering with Parolando for a higher price for his wood. Also, he wanted an amphibian just like the Firedragon I.

By then the second Firedragon was almost done.

At this time over five hundred blacks from Parolando had been exchanged for an equal number of Dravidians. Sam had steadfastly refused to accept the Wahhabi Arabs, or at least had insisted that the Asiatic Indians come first. Hacking apparently did not like this, but nothing had been said in the agreement about which group had priority.

Hacking, having heard from his spies about Iyeyasu’s demands, sent a message. He wanted a Firedragon, too, and he was willing to exchange a great amount of minerals for it.

Publius Crassus and Tai Fung allied to invade the area across The River from them. This was occupied by Stone Age peoples from everywhere and every time and stretched for fourteen miles along the left bank. With their superior steel weapons and numbers, the invaders killed half the population and enslaved the rest. And they upped their price for the wood but kept it below Iyeyasu’s.

Spies reported that Chernsky, who ruled the fourteen-mile-long nation just north of Parolando, had made a visit to Soul City. What happened there was anybody’s guess, since Hacking had set up a security system that seemed to be one hundred percent effective. Sam had gotten in eight blacks to spy for him, and he knew that John had sent in at least a dozen. The heads of all were tossed from boats in the mists late at night onto the top of the wall along the bank of Parolando.

Van Boom came to Sam late one night and said that Firebrass had cautiously approached him.

“He offered me the position of chief engineer on the boat,” van Boom said.

“He offered it to you?” Sam said, his cigar almost dropping.

“Yes. He didn’t say so in so many words, but I got the idea. The Riverboat will be taken over by the Soul Citizens, and I will be chief engineer.”

“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 grinned, and I told him I hadn’t sworn an oath of loyalty to you, but I had accepted your offer and that was as good. I wasn’t going to betray you, and if Soul City invaded Parolando, I’d defend it to the death.”

“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 beginning to think like King John!” Sam said aloud.

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 on 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 non-citizens, 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 its own uses only.

Parolando’s representatives made treaties with more distant states, trading iron ore and weapons for food. There was a very large supply of siderite masses left yet, so Sam was not worried about running out of it. But the mining of it took many men and materials and caused the central part of Parolando to look like a heavily shelled landscape. And the more wood that was brought in, the more men, materials, and machines had to be diverted from the boatbuilding to make weapons for trade. Moreover, the increase in shipping resulted in more demand for wood to build freighters. And more men had to be trained and shipped out as sailors and guards for the wood-carrying and ore-carrying fleets. It got to the point where boats had to be rented from neighboring states, and the rent, as always, was iron-nickel ore and finished weapons.

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 connected with the boat that he could be in the boatyard only two to three hours—on a good day. He tried to get John to take over more of the administration, but John would accept only duties which gave him more power over the military forces or allowed him to exert pressure on those who opposed him.

The anticipated attempts at assassination of those close to Sam did not occur. The bodyguards and the close watch at nights were continued, but Sam decided that John was going to lay low for a while. He had probably seen that it would be best for his purposes to wait until the boat was nearly finished.

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 Göring. 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 good-looking 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 chanche 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.”

“Then, for heaven’th thaketh,” Joe said, throwing up his football-sized hands, “vhat’th the uthe of talking about it? Or even doing anything? Vhy don’t you jutht give up?”

“Because I can’t help myself,” Sam said. “Because, when the first atom in this universe bumped against the second atom, my fate was decreed, my every thought and action was fixed.”

“Then you can’t be, uh, rethponthible for vhat you do, right?”

“That’s right,” Sam said. He felt very uncomfortable.

“Then John can’t help it that he’th a murdering treacherouth thoroughly dethpicable thvine?”

“No, but then I can’t help it that I despise him for being a swine.”

“And I thuppothe that if thomebody thmarter than I am came along and thyowed you, by thtrict undeniable lochic, that you vere wrong in your philothophy, that you vould thay that he can’t help thinking you’re wrong? But he’th wrong, it’th jutht that he’th predetermined, mechanically, to think the vay he doeth.”

“I’m right, and I know it,” Sam said, puffing harder on his cigar. “This hypothetical man couldn’t convince me because his own reasoning does not spring from a free will, which is like a vegetarian tiger—that is, it doesn’t exist.”

“But your own reathoning doethn’t thpring from a free vill, either.”

“True. We’re all screwed. We believe what we have to.”

“You laugh at thothe people who have vhat you call invinthible ignoranthe, Tham. Yet you’re full of it, yourthelf.”

“Lord deliver us from apes that think they’re philosophers!”

“Thee! You fall back on inthultth vhen you can’t think of anything elthe to thay! Admit it, Tham! You haven’t got a lochical leg to thtand on!”

“You just aren’t capable of seeing what I mean, because of the way you are,” Sam said.

“You thyould talk to Thyrano de Bercherac more, Tham. He’th ath big a thynic ath you, although he doethn’t go ath far ath you do vith determinithm.”

“I’d think you two incapable of talking to each other. Don’t you two resent each other, you look so much alike? How can you stand nose to nose, as it were, and not break up with laughter? It’s like two anteaters….”

“Inthultth! Inthultth! Oh, vhat’th the uthe?”

“Exactly,” Sam said. Joe did not say good-night, and he did not call after him. He was nettled. Joe looked so dumb with that low forehead and the bone-ringed eyes and comical dill pickle nose and gorilla build and his hairiness. But behind those little blue eyes and the lisping was an undeniable intelligence.

What disturbed him most was Joe’s comment that his deterministic belief was only a rationalization to excuse his guilt. Guilt for what? Guilt for just about everything bad that had happened to those whom he loved.

But it was a philosophic labyrinth which ended in a quagmire. Did he believe in mechanical determinism because he wanted to not feel guilty, or did he feel guilty, even though he should not, because the mechanical universe determined that he should feel guilty?

Joe was right. There was no use thinking about it. But if a man’s thinking was set on its course by the collision of the first two atoms, then how could he keep from thinking about it if he were Samuel Langhorne Clemens, alias Mark Twain?

He sat up later than usual that night, but he was not working at his duties. He drank at least a fifth of ethyl alcohol mixed with fruit juice.

Two months before, Firebrass had said he could not understand the failure of Parolando to make ethyl alcohol. Sam had been upset. He had not known that grain alcohol could be made. He thought that the only supply of liquor would have to be the limited amounts that the grails yielded.

No, Firebrass had said. Hadn’t any of his engineers told him? If the proper materials, such as acid, coal gas, or acetaldehyde, and a proper catalyst were available, then wood cellulose could be converted into ethyl alcohol. That was common knowledge. But Parolando, until recently, was the only place on The River—he presumed—which had the materials to make grain alcohol.

Sam had called in van Boom, who replied that he had enough to worry about without providing booze for people who drank too much as it was.

Sam had ordered materials and men diverted. For the first time in the history of The River, as far as anybody knew, potable alcohol was being made on a large scale. This resulted not only in happier citizens, except for the Second Chancers, but in a new industry for Parolando. They exported alcohol in exchange for wood and bauxite.

Sam fell into bed and the next morning, for the first time, refused to get up before dawn. But the next day he rose as usual.

Sam and John sent a message to Iyeyasu that they would regard it as a hostile act if he invaded the rest of the Ulmak territory of Chernsky’s Land.

Iyeyasu replied that he had no intention of waging war on these lands, and he proved it by invading the state just north of his, Sheshshub’s Land. Sheshshub, an Assyrian born in the seventh century B.C., had been a general of Sargon II, and so, like most powerful people on Earth, had become a leader on the Riverworld. He gave Iyeyasu a good fight, but the invaders were more numerous.

Iyeyasu was one worry. There were plenty of others to keep Sam going day and night. Hacking finally sent a message, through Firebrass, that Parolando should quit stalling. He wanted the amphibian promised so long ago. Sam had kept pleading technical difficulties, but Firebrass told him that was no longer acceptable. So the Firedragon III was reluctantly shipped off.

Sam made a visit to Chernsky to reassure him that Parolando would defend Ĉernskujo. Coming back, a half mile upwind of the factories, Sam almost gagged. He had been living so long in the acid-bath-cum-smoke atmosphere that he had gotten used to it, but any vacation from it cleansed his lungs. It was like stepping into a glue-and-sulfur factory. And, though the wind was a fifteen-mph breeze, it did not carry the smoke away swiftly enough. The air definitely was hazy. No wonder, he thought, that Publiujo, to the south, complained.

But the boat continued to grow. Standing before the front port of his pilothouse, Sam could look out every morning and be consoled for his toil and tiredness and for the hideousness and stench of the land. In another six months, the three decks would be completed, and the great paddle wheels would be installed. Then a plastic coating would be put over the part of the hull which would come into contact with water. This plastic would not only prevent electrolysis of the magnalium, it would reduce the water turbulence, thus adding ten mph to the boat’s speed.

During this time, Sam received some good news. Tungsten and iridium had been found in Selinujo, the country just south of Soul City. The report was brought by the prospector, who trusted no one else to transmit it. He also brought some bad news. Selina Hastings refused to let Parolando mine there. In fact, if she had known that a Parolandano was digging along her mountain, she would have thrown him out. She did not want to be unfriendly, indeed, she loved Sam Clemens, since he was a human being. But she did not approve of the Riverboat, and she would not permit anything to go out of her land that would help build the vessel.

Sam erupted, and, as Joe said, “thyot blue thyit for mileth around.” The tungsten was very much needed for hardening their machine tools but even more for the radios and, eventually, the closed-circuit TV sets. The iridium could be used to harden their platinum for various uses, for scientific instruments, surgical tools, and for pen points.

The Mysterious Stranger had told Sam that he had set up the deposit of minerals here but that his fellow Ethicals did not know that he had done so. Along with the bauxite, cryolite, and platinum would be tungsten and iridium. But an error had been made, and the latter two metals had been deposited several miles south of the first three.

Sam did not tell John at once, because he needed time to think about the situation. John, of course, would want to demand that the metals be traded to Parolando or that war be declared.

While he was pacing back and forth in the pilothouse, clouding the room with green smoke, he heard drums. They were using a code which he did not know but recognized, after a minute, as that used by Soul City. A few minutes later, Firebrass was at the foot of the ladder.

“Sinjoro Hacking knows all about the discovery of tungsten and iridium in Selinujo. He says that if you can come to an agreement with Selina, fine. But don’t invade her land. He’d regard that as a declaration of war on Soul City.”

Sam looked out the starboard port past Firebrass. “Here comes John hotfooting it,” he said. “He’s heard the news, too. His spy system is almost as good as yours, a few minutes less good, I’d say. I don’t know where the leaks in my system are, but they’re so wide that I’d be sunk if I was a boat, and I may be anyway.”

John, his eyes inflamed, his face red, and puffing and panting, entered. Since the introduction of grain alcohol, he had put on even more fat, and he seemed to be half drunk all the time and all drunk half the time.

Sam was angered, but at the same time, he was amused. John would have liked to summon him to his palace, in keeping with his dignity as an ex-King of England. But he knew that Sam would not come for a long time, if at all, and meanwhile there was no telling how much hanky-panky Firebrass and Sam would manufacture.

“What’s going on?” John said, glaring.

“You tell me,” Sam said. “You seem to know more about the shady side of affairs than I do.”

“None of your wisecracks!” John said. Without being asked, he poured out a quarter of purple passion into a stein. “I know what that message is about even if I don’t know the code!”

“I thought as much,” Sam said. “For your information, in case you missed anything….” and he told him what Firebrass had said.

“The arrogance of you blacks is unendurable,” John said. “You are telling Parolando, a sovereign state, how it must conduct itself in vital business. Well, I say you can’t! We will get those metals, one way or the other! Selinujo doesn’t need them; we do! It can’t hurt Selinujo to give them up. We will give a fair trade!”

“In what?” Firebrass said. “Selinujo doesn’t want weapons or alcohol. What can you trade?”

“Peace, freedom from war!”

Firebrass shrugged and grinned, thus incensing John even more.

“Sure,” Firebrass said, “you can make your offer. But what Hacking says still goes.”

“Hacking has no love for Selinujo,” Sam said. “He kicked out all the Second Chancers, black or white.”

“That’s because they were preaching immediate pacifism. They also preach, and apparently practice, love for all, regardless of color, but Hacking says they’re a danger to the state. The blacks have to protect themselves, otherwise they would be enslaved all over again.”

“The blacks?” Sam said.

“Us blacks!” Firebrass replied, grinning.

This was not the first time Firebrass had given the impression that he was not so deeply concerned with skin color. His identification with blacks, as such, was weak. His life had not been untouched by racial prejudice, but it had not been much affected. And he said things now and then that indicated that he would like a berth on the boat.

All this, of course, could be a put-on.

“We’ll negotiate with Sinjorino Hastings,” Sam said. “It would be nice to have radios and TV for the boat, and the machine shops could use the tungsten. But we can get along without them.”

He winked at John to indicate that he should take this line. But John was as stone-headed as usual.

“What we do with Selinujo is our problem, nobody else’s!”

“I’ll tell Hacking,” Firebrass said. “But Hacking is a strong person. He won’t take any crap from anybody, least of all white capitalist imperialists.”

Sam choked, and John stared.

“That’s what he regards you as!” Firebrass said. “And the way he defines those terms, you are what he says you are.”

“Because I want this boat so badly!” Sam shouted. “Do you know what this boat is for, what its ultimate goal…?”

He fought back his anger, sobbing with the effort. He felt dizzy. For a moment, he had almost told about the Stranger.

“What is it?” Firebrass said.

“Nothing,” Sam replied. “Nothing. I just want to get to the headwaters of The River, that’s all. Maybe the secret of this whole shebang is there? Who knows? But I certainly don’t like criticism from someone who just wants to sit around on his dead black ass and collect soul brothers. If he wants to do that, more power to him, but I still hold to integration as the ideal. And I’m a Missouri white born in 1835! So how’s that for going against your heritage and your environment? The point is, if I don’t use the siderite metal to build a boat, which is designed for travel only, not for aggression, then someone else will. And that someone else may use it to conquer and to hold, instead of for tourist purposes.

“Now, we’ve gone along with Hacking’s demands, paid his jacked-up prices for the ores when we could have gone down there and taken them from him. John’s apologized for what he called you and Hacking, and if you think it’s easy for a Plantagenet to do that, you don’t know your history. It’s too bad about the way Hacking feels. I don’t know that I blame him. Of course, he hates whites. But this is not Earth! Conditions are radically different here!”

“But people bring their attitudes along with them,” Firebrass said. “Their hates and loves, dislikes and likes, prejudices, reactions, everything.”

“But they can change!”

Firebrass grinned. “Not according to your philosophy. Rather, not unless mechanical forces change them. So, Hacking isn’t determined by anything to change his attitude. Why should he? He’s experienced the same exploitation and contempt here as he did on Earth.”

“I don’t want to argue about that,” Sam said. “I’ll tell you what I think we should do!”

He stopped and stared out the port. The whitish-gray hull and upper works gleamed in the sun. How beautiful! And she was, in a sense, all his! She was worth everything he was being put through!

“I’ll tell you what,” he said more slowly. “Why doesn’t Hacking come up here? Pay a little visit? He can look around, see for himself what we’re doing. See our problems. Maybe he’ll appreciate our problems, see we’re not blue-eyed devils who want to enslave him. In fact, the more he helps us, the sooner he’ll be rid of us.”

“I’ll give him your message,” Firebrass said. “Maybe he’ll want to do that.”

“We’ll greet him in style,” Sam said. “A twenty-one-gun salute, big reception, food, liquor, gifts. He’ll see we aren’t such bad fellows after all.”

John spat. “Pah!” but he said no more. He knew that Sam’s proposal was best.

Three days later, Firebrass brought a message. Hacking would come, after Parolando and Selinujo had agreed on the disposition of the metals.

Sam felt like a rusty old boiler in a Mississippi steamboat. A few more pounds of pressure, and he would blow sky-high.

“Sometimes, I think you’re right!” he shouted at John. “Maybe we should just take over these countries and get it done with!”

“Of course,” John said smoothly. “Now, it is obvious that that ex-Countess Huntingdon—she must be descended from my old enemy, the Earl of Huntingdon—is not going to give in. She is a religious fanatic, a nut, as you say. And Soul City will fight us if we invade Selinujo. Hacking can’t go back on his word. And he’s stronger now that we’ve given him the Firedragon III. But I say nothing about that; I do not reproach you. I have been thinking much about this mess.”

Sam stopped pacing and looked at John. John had been thinking. Shadows would be moving inside shadows; daggers would be unsheathed; the air would get gray and chill with stealth and intrigue; blood would spurt. And the sleeping would do well to stir.

“I do not say that I have been in contact with Iyeyasu, our powerful neighbor to the north,” John said. He was slumped down in the tall-backed red-leather-covered chair and staring into the purple passion in the tilted stein.

“But I have information, or means of getting it. I am certain that Iyeyasu, who feels very strong indeed, would like to acquire even more territory. And he would like to do us a favor. In return for certain payments, of course. Say, an amphibian and a flying machine? He is wild to fly one of those himself, you know. Or didn’t you?

“If he attacked Selinujo, Hacking could not blame us. And if Soul City and Iyeyasujo fought, and Soul City was destroyed and Iyeyasujo weakened, how could that fail to benefit us? Moreover, I happen to have learned that Chernsky has made a secret compact with Soul City and Tifonujo to fight if any of them are invaded by Iyeyasu. Certainly, the resultant carnage would find them weakened and us strengthened. We could then take them over or at least do what we wished without interference. In any case, we would ensure that we had uncontrolled access to the bauxite and the tungsten.”

That skull under that mass of tawny hair must hold a thunder-mugful of worms. Worms that fed on corruption and intrigue and deviousness. He was so crooked, he was admirable.

“Did you ever meet yourself coming around a corner?” Sam said.

“What?” John said, looking up. “Is this another of your unintelligible insults?”

“Believe me, it’s as close to a compliment as you’ll ever get—from me. Of course, it’s all hypothetical. But if Iyeyasu did attack Selinujo, what excuse would he have? They’ve never offended him, and they’re sixty miles away from him on our side of The River.”

“When did one nation ever need a reasonable excuse for invasion?” John said. “But the fact is that Selinujo keeps sending missionaries into Iyeyasujo, though he has kicked out all Chancers. Since Selinujo won’t stop doing this, then….”

“Well,” Sam said, “I couldn’t let Parolando get involved in a deal like this. But if Iyeyasu decides on his own to fight, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“And you call me dishonest!”

“There’s nothing I could do about it!” Sam said, clamping down on his cigar. “Nothing! And if something develops that’s good for the boat, then we’ll take advantage of it.”

“The shipments from Soul City would be held up while the fighting was going on,” John said.

“We’ve got enough stock to keep going for a week. The big worry would be wood. Maybe Iyeyasu would be able to keep that coming even with a war going on, since the fighting will be south of us. We could handle the chopping and transportation ourselves. If he didn’t intend to invade for a couple of weeks, we could lay in extra stocks of ore from Soul City by offering them increased payments. Maybe promise them an airplane, the AMP-I. That’s just a toy, now that we’ve almost got our first amphibian airplane finished. All this is hypothetical, you understand?”

“I understand,” John said. He was not trying to mask his contempt.

Sam felt like shouting at him that he had no right to be contemptuous. Whose idea had it been, anyway?

It was the next day that the three chief engineers were killed.

Sam was there when it happened. He was standing on the scaffolding by the starboard side of the boat, looking down into the open hull. The colossal steam crane was lifting the immense electric motor which would be driving the port paddle wheel. The motor had been moved during the night from the big building where it had been built. The moving had taken over eight hours and had been effected by the crane, which also had a gigantic winch. The winch, plus hundreds of men pulling on cables, had pulled the motor on its big car, which moved on steel rails.

Sam got up at dawn to watch the final work, the lifting and then the lowering of the motor into the hull and its attachment to the paddle-wheel axle. The three engineers were standing down in the bottom of the hull. Sam called down to them to get away, that they were too vulnerable if the motor should drop. But the engineers were stationed in three different places so that they could transmit signals to the men on the port scaffolding, who, in turn, were signaling the crane operator.

Van Boom turned to look up at Sam, and his teeth flashed whitely in his dark face. His skin looked purplish in the light of the big electric lamps.

And then it happened. A cable snapped, and the motor swung out to one side. The engineers froze for a second and then they ran but they were too late. The motor fell to one side and crushed all three of them.

The impact shook the great hull and the vibrations made the scaffolding on which Sam stood quiver as if a quake were passing through the land.

Blood ran out from under the motor.

24

It took five hours to put in new cables on the crane, secure these to the motor, and lift the motor. The bodies were removed, the hull washed out, and then the motor was lowered again. A close inspection had determined that the damage to the motor casing would not affect the operation of the motor.

Sam was so depressed that he would have liked to have gone to bed and remained there for a week. But he could not do so. The work had to go on, and while there were good men who would see to it that it did go on, Sam did not want them to know how shaken he was.

Sam had many engineers, but van Boom and Velitsky were the only ones from the twentieth century. Though he had advertised by word of mouth and through the drum systems for more, he had gotten none.

The third day, he asked Firebrass into his pilothouse for a private conference. After giving him a cigar and scotch, he asked him if he would be his chief engineer.

Firebrass’ cigar almost dropped out of his mouth.

“Steer me, stymate! Do I read you unfrosted? You want me as your number-one dillion?”

“Maybe we should talk in Esperanto,” Sam said.

“Okay,” Firebrass said. “I’ll bring it down to dirt. Just what do you want?”

“I’d like you to get permission to work for me on a temporary basis, supposedly.”

“Supposedly?”

“If you want it, the position is permanently yours. The day the boat sets out on the long journey, you can be its chief engineer.”

Firebrass sat silent for a long time. Sam got up and paced back and forth. Occasionally, he looked out the ports. The crane had put in the starboard motor, and now it was lowering parts of the batacitor into the hull. This would be thirty-six feet high when all the parts were secured together. After it was installed, a trial run would check the operation of the batacitor and the motors. A double cable, six inches thick, would be run out for two hundred feet and its free end, attached to a large shallow hemisphere, would be slipped onto the top of the nearest grailstone. When the stone delivered its tremendous electrical energy, the energy would be transmitted by the cables into the batacitor, which would store it. And then the energy would be drawn out at a controlled rate to power the electrical motors.

Sam turned away from the port. “It’s not as if I were asking you to betray your country,” he said. “In the first place, all you have to do now is to request permission from Hacking to work for me on the building of the boat. Later, you can make up your mind about going with us. Which would you rather do? Stay in Soul City where there is actually little to do except indulge yourself? Or go with us on the greatest adventure of all?”

Firebrass said, slowly, “Now, if I accepted your offer, if, I say, I would not want to go as chief engineer. I would prefer to be the chief of your air force.”

“That’s not as important a position as chief engineer!”

“It’s a lot more work and responsibility! Now, I like the idea of flying again, and….”

“You can fly. You can fly! But you’d have to serve under von Richthofen. You see, I promised him that he would be the chief of our air force, which, after all, will only consist of two planes. What do you care whether or not you’re the chief as long as you get to fly?”

“It’s a matter of pride. I have thousands of hours more flying time than Richthofen, in planes far more complex and bigger and speedier. And I was an astronaut. I’ve been to the Moon and Mars and Ganymede and orbited Jupiter.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Sam said. “The planes you’ll be flying are very primitive. More like the World War I machines that Lothar flew.”

“Why does a nigger always have to take second place?”

“That’s unfair!” Sam said. “You could be chief engineer! You’d have thirty-five people under your command! Listen, if I hadn’t made Lothar that promise, you’d get the captaincy, believe me!”

Firebrass stood up. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll help you build the boat and set up the training of your engineer’s department. But I get to fly during that time, too, and when the time comes we’ll talk about who’s going to be head of the air force.”

“I won’t break my promise to Lothar,” Sam said.

“Yes, but many things may happen between now and then.”

Sam was relieved in one way but disturbed in another. Hacking gave his permission, via drum, to use Firebrass. This suggested he wanted Firebrass to know the boat’s operation because he would be serving Hacking as chief engineer some day. And even if this was not being considered by Firebrass, he might be planning to remove von Richthofen before the boat was ready for launching. Firebrass did not seem like a cold-blooded murderer but looks meant nothing, as anyone with intelligence finds out if he has lived a few years among the human race.

Hacking sent word a few days later that he would agree to an extra-large shipment of minerals in Parolando in return for the AMP-I. Firebrass flew it the thirty-one miles to the northern limit of Soul City, where another flier, a black who had been a general in the U.S. Air Force, took it over. A few days later, Firebrass returned by sailboat.

The batacitor and the electric motors worked perfectly. The paddle wheels turned over slowly in the air, then were speeded up, the vanes whistling they spun so swiftly.

When the time came, a canal could be dug from the water’s edge to the great boat, and it would wheel out into The River under its own power.

Lothar von Richthofen and Gwenafra were not getting along at all. Lothar had always been a “lady killer,” and he could not seem to help flirting. More often than not, he followed up the flirtation. Gwenafra had some definite ideas about fidelity with which Lothar agreed, in principle. It was the practice that tripped him up.

Hacking sent word that he intended to visit Parolando himself in two days. He wanted to hold a series of conferences on their trade, to check on the well-being of Parolando’s black citizens, and to see the great Riverboat.

Sam sent word back that he would be happy to receive Hacking. He wasn’t, but the essence of diplomacy was dissimulation. The preparations for housing Hacking and his large entourage and setting up the conferences occupied Sam so that he did not get much chance to supervise the work on the boat.

Also, special preparations had to be made for docking the large number of ore boats from Soul City. Hacking was sending three times as much as the normal shipment to show his sincerity of desire for peace and understanding. Sam would have preferred that the shipments be spaced out, but then it was desirable to get as much as possible in as short a time as possible. The spies said that Iyeyasu was collecting several large fleets and a great number of fighting men on both sides of The River. And he had sent more demands to Selinujo to stop trying to land their missionaries on his territory.

About an hour before noon, Hacking’s boat docked. It was a large, two-masted, fore-and-aft rigged boat, about a hundred feet long. Hacking’s bodyguard, all tall well-muscled blacks holding steel axes (but with Mark I pistols in big holsters), marched down the gangplank. Their kilts were pure black, and their leather helmets and cuirasses and boots were of black fish-skin leather. They formed in ranks of six on each side of the gangplank, and then Hacking himself came down the gangplank.

He was a tall, well-built man with a dark-brown skin, somewhat slanting eyes, a broad pug nose, thick lips, and a prominent chin. His hair was in the style called “natural.” Sam had not yet gotten used to this explosion of kinky hair on top of black men’s heads. There was something indefinably indecent in it; a Negro’s hair should be cut very close to the head. He still felt this way even after Firebrass had explained that the black American of the late twentieth century felt that “natural” hair was a symbol of his struggle for freedom. To them, close-cut hair symbolized castration of the black by the white.

Hacking wore a black towel as a cloak and a black kilt and leather sandals. His only weapon was a rapier in a sheath at his broad leather belt.

Sam gave the signal, and a cannon boomed twenty-one times. This was set on top of a hill at the edge of the plain. It was intended not only to honor Hacking but to impress him. Only Parolando had artillery, even if it consisted of only one 75-millimeter cannon.

The introductions took place. Hacking did not offer to shake hands nor did Sam and John. They had been warned by Firebrass that Hacking did not care to shake hands with a man unless he regarded him as a proven friend.

There was some small talk after that while the grails of Hacking’s people were set on the nearest grailstone. After the discharge of energy at high noon, the grails were removed, and the chiefs of state, accompanied by their bodyguards and guards of honor, walked to John’s palace. John had insisted that the first meeting be held in his palace, doubtless to impress Hacking with John’s primacy. Sam did not argue this time. Hacking probably knew, from Firebrass, just how things stood between Clemens and Lackland.

Later, Sam got some grim amusement from John’s discomfiture at being bearded in his own house. During lunch, Hacking seized the floor and held it with a long-winded vitriolic speech about the evils the white man had inflicted on the black. The trouble was, Hacking’s indictments were valid. Everything he said was true. Sam had to admit that. Hell, he had seen slavery and what it meant and had seen the aftermath of the Civil War. He had been born and raised in it. And that was long before Hacking was born. Hell, he had written Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson and A Connecticut Yankee.

It did no good to try to tell Hacking that. Hacking paid him no attention.

That high-pitched voice went on and on, mixing obscenities with facts, exaggerations with facts, lurid tales of miseries, beatings, murders, starvation, humiliations, and so on.

Sam felt guilty and ashamed and, at the same time, angry. Why attack him? Why this blanket indictment?

“You are all guilty!” Hacking shouted. “Every white man is guilty!”

“I never saw more than a dozen blacks before I died,” John said. “What can I have to do with your tale of injustices?”

“If you had been born five hundred years later, you would have been the biggest honky of them all!” Hacking said. “I know all about you, Your Majesty!”

Sam suddenly stood up and shouted, “Did you come here to tell us about what happened on Earth? We know that! But that is past! Earth is dead! It’s what’s taking place now that counts!”

“Yeah,” Hacking said. “And what’s taking place now is what took place on good old Earth! Things haven’t changed one shitty little bit! I look around here, and who do I see is head of this country? Two honkies! Where’s the black men? Your black population is about one-tenth of your population, and so you ought to have at least one black on a ten-man Council! Do I see one? Just one?”

“There’s Cawber,” Sam said.

“Yeah! A temporary member and he’s only that because I demanded you send me a black ambassador!”

“The Arabs make up about a sixth of your state,” Sam said, “and yet there isn’t one Arab on your council.”

“They’re white, that’s why! And I’m getting rid of them! Don’t get me wrong! There’s a lot of Arabs that’re good men, unprejudiced men! I met them when I was a fugitive in North Africa. But these Arabs here are religious fanatics, and they won’t stop making trouble! So out they go! What we blacks want is a solid black country, where we’re all soul brothers! Where we can live in peace and understanding! We’ll have our own kind of world, and you honkies can have yours! Segregation with a capital S, Charlie! Here, a big S segregation can work, ’cause we don’t have to depend on the white man for our jobs or food or clothing or protection or justice or anything! We got it made, whitey! All we have to do is tell you to go to hell, keep away from us, and we got it made!”

Firebrass sat at the table with his dark-red kinky head bent over, looking down, and his bronzed hands placed over his face. Sam had the feeling that he was trying to keep from laughing. But whether he laughed inside himself at Hacking or at the ones who were being berated, Sam could not guess. Perhaps he was laughing at both.

John kept drinking the bourbon. The redness of his face came from more than the liquor. He looked as if he could explode at any time. It was difficult to swallow insults about your injustice to blacks when you were innocent, but then John was guilty of so many hideous crimes that he should suffer for some, even if none were his. And, as Hacking said, John would have been guilty if he had been allowed a chance to be.

Just what did Hacking expect to gain by this? Certainly, if he wanted a closer relationship with Parolando, he was taking a peculiar approach to it.

Perhaps he felt that he had to put any white, no matter who, in his place. He wanted to make it clear that he, Elwood Hacking, a black, was not inferior to any white.

Hacking had been ruined by the same system that had ruined almost all Americans, black, white, red, or yellow, in one form or another, to a greater or lesser degree.

Would it always be this way? Forever twisted, hating, while they lived for who knew how many thousands upon thousands of years along The River?

At that moment, but for that moment only, Sam wondered if the Second Chancers were not right.

If they knew the way out from this imprisonment of hate, they should be the only ones to be listened to. Not Hacking or John Lackland or Sam Clemens or anybody who suffered from lack of peace and love should have a word to say. Let the Second Chancers…

But he did not believe them, he reminded himself. They were just like the other faith dispensers of Earth. Well-intentioned, some of them, no doubt of that. But without the authority of truth, no matter how much they claimed it.

Hacking suddenly quit talking. Sam Clemens said, “Well, we didn’t plan on any after-dinner speeches, Sinjoro Hacking, but I thank you for your volunteering; we all thank you as long as you don’t charge us for it. Our exchequer is rather low at the moment.”

Hacking said, “You have to make a joke out of it, don’t you? Well, how about a tour? I’d love to see that big boat of yours.”

The rest of the day was passed rather pleasantly. Sam forgot his anger and his resentments in conducting Hacking through the factories, the shops, and, finally, through the boat. Even half finished, it was magnificent. The most beautiful sight he had ever seen. Even, he thought, even—yes, even more beautiful than Livy’s face when she had first said she loved him.

Hacking did not become ecstatic, but he obviously was deeply impressed. He could not, however, refrain from commenting on the stench and the desolation.

Shortly before supper time, Sam was called away. A man who had landed from a small boat had demanded to see the ruler of the land. Since it was a Clemens man who took him in, Sam got the report. He went off at once in one of the two alcohol-burning “jeeps” that had been finished only a week before. The slender, good-looking blond youth at the guardhouse rose and introduced himself, in Esperanto, as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Sam questioned him in German, noting that, whatever the youth’s identity, he did speak the soft Austrian version of High German. His vocabulary contained words which Sam did not understand, but whether this was because they were just Austrian vocabulary items or eighteenth-century items, he did not know.

The man calling himself Mozart said that he had been living about twenty thousand miles up The River. He heard about the boat, but what set him off on his journey was a tale that the boat would carry an orchestra to make music for the amusement of the passengers. Mozart had suffered for twenty-three years in this world of limited materials, where the only musical instruments were drums, whistles, wooden flutes and panpipes, and a crude sort of harp made of bone and the guts of a Riverfish. Then he had heard about the mining of the siderite and the great Riverboat and its orchestra with piano, violin, flute, horns, and all the other beautiful instruments that he had known on Earth, plus others that had been invented since his death in 1791. And here he was. Was there a place for him in the music-making ranks of the boat?

Sam was an appreciator, though not a passionate lover, of some classical music. But he was thrilled at meeting the great Mozart face to face. That is, if this man were Mozart. There were so many phonies on The River, claiming to be everybody from the original one-and-only Jesus H. Christ down to P. T. Barnum, that he took no man’s word for his identity. He had even met three men who claimed to be Mark Twain.

“It just so happens that the former archbishop of Salzburg is a citizen of Parolando,” Sam said. “Even though you and he parted on bad terms, if I remember correctly, he’ll be glad to see you.”

Mozart did not turn pale or red. He said, “At last, somebody I knew during my lifetime! Would you believe….”

Sam would believe that Mozart had not met anybody he’d known on Earth. So far, he himself had met only three people he’d known, and his acquaintanceship had been extensive during his long life and worldwide travels. That his wife Livy was one of the three was a coincidence exceeding the bounds of probability. He suspected that the Mysterious Stranger had arranged that. But even Mozart’s eagerness in seeing the archbishop did not confirm that he was indeed Mozart. In the first place, the imposters that Sam had met had frequently insisted that those who were supposed to be their old friends were either mistaken or else imposters themselves. They had more gall than France. In the second place, the archbishop of Salzburg did not live in Parolando. Sam had no idea where he was. He had sprung him just to test Mozart’s reaction.

Sam agreed that Sinjoro Mozart could apply for citizenship. First, he straightened him out about the musical instruments. These had not been made yet. Nor would they be wood or brass. They would be electronic devices which could reproduce exactly the sounds of various instruments. But if Sinjoro Mozart was indeed the man he claimed to be, he had a good chance of being the conductor of the orchestra. And he could have all the time he wanted to compose new works.

Sam did not promise him that he would have the conductorship. He had learned his lesson about making promises.

A big party was held in John’s palace in honor of Hacking, who seemed to have discharged his venom for the day at the first meeting. Sam talked with him for an hour and found that Hacking was very intelligent and literate, a self-educated man with a flair for the imaginative and the poetic.

That made his case even sadder, because such talent had been tragically wasted.

About midnight, Sam accompanied Hacking and party to the big thirty-room, second-story, stone-and-bamboo building set aside for state guests. This was halfway between his quarters and John’s palace. Then he drove his jeep to his home, three hundred yards away. Joe sulked a little because he had wanted to drive, even though his legs were far too long for him to try this. They staggered up the ladder and barred the door. Joe went into the rear and flopped on his bed with a crash that shook the house on its stilts. Sam looked out of the ports just in time to see Cyrano and Livy, their arms around each other, lurch into the door of their hut. To their left, set above them, was von Richtofen’s hut, where he and Gwenafra had already gone to bed.

He muttered, “Good night!” not knowing just whom he was addressing, and fell into his own bed. It had been a long, hard, and trying day, ending up with a huge party at which everybody had drunk stupendous quantities of purple passion or grain alcohol and water and chewed much dreamgum and smoked much tobacco and marijuana.

He awoke dreaming that he was caught in a California earthquake on the Fourth of July.

He leaped out of bed and ran on the trembling floor to the pilothouse. Even before he reached the ports, he knew that the explosions and the earth-shaking were caused by invaders. He never reached the ports, because a rocket, whistling, its tail flaming red, struck one of the stilts. The roar deafened him, smoke whirled in through the broken ports, and he pitched forward. The house collapsed, and its front part fell down. History had repeated itself.

25

He banged into the wood and broken glass and earth and lay with the wall under him while he tried to come up out of his stunned condition. A big hand picked him up. By the light of an explosion, he saw Joe’s great-nosed face. Joe had climbed down from the open end of his room and thrown aside the lumber until he had found Sam. He held the handles of his grail and Sam’s with his left hand.

“I don’t know how, it’s a miracle, but I’m not hurt bad,” Sam said. “Just bruised and cut by glass.”

“I didn’t have time to put on my armor,” Joe said. “But I got my akth. Here’th a thvord for you and a pithtol and thome bulletth and powder charcheth.”

“Who the hell can they be, Joe?” Sam said.

“I don’t know. Thee! They’re coming in through the holeth in the vallth vhere the dockth are.”

The starlight was bright. The clouds that sent the rains down every night at three o’clock had not yet come, but the mists over The River were heavy. Out of these, men were still pouring to add to the masses spreading over the plains. Behind the walls, in the mists, must be a fleet.

The only fleet that could get close without causing an alarm would be the Soul City fleet. Anybody else arriving at this hour would have had to have been within view of the spies that Sam and John Lackland had set up along The River, even in hostile territory. It couldn’t be Iyeyasu’s fleet; that was still sitting in the docks as of the report received just before midnight.

Joe peered over a pile of wood and said, “There’th a hell of a battle around John’th palathe. And the gueththouthe, vhere Hacking and hith boyth vath, ith on fire.”

The flames lit a number of bodies on the ground and showed the tiny figures struggling around the log stockade of John’s palace. Then, the cannon and its caisson were pushed before the stockade.

“That’s John’s jeep!” Sam said, pointing at the vehicle which had just driven up behind the cannon.

“Yeah, and it’th our cannon!” Joe said. “But it’th Hacking’th men that’th going to blatht John out of hith little love netht.”

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Sam said, and he scrambled over the lumber and in the opposite direction. He could not understand why the invaders had not sent men to his house yet. The rocket that had hit had come from the plains. And if Hacking and his men had sneaked out of the guesthouse to launch a surprise attack in conjunction with an attack from the supposed ore boats, then Sam should have been a primary target along with John Lackland.

He’d find out later what it was all about—if there was a later.

That Hacking’s men had gotten hold of the cannon was ill news for Parolando. Even as he thought this, he heard the big gun boom, one, two, three. He whirled in his flight and saw pieces of wood flying out from the smoke. John’s walls were wide open, and the next few shells should reduce his log palace to rubble.

There was only one good thing about the invaders having their hands on the cannon. The supply of shells was limited to fifty. Even with the many tons of nickel-iron still in the ground, metal was not so common that it could be wasted to any extent on explosive shells.

Ahead was Cyrano and Livy’s hut. The door was open, and the place was empty. He looked up the hill. Lothar von Richthofen, clad only in a kilt, carrying a rapier in one hand and a pistol in the other, was running toward him. A few paces behind was Gwenafra with a pistol and a bag of bullets and gunpowder packages.

There were other men and women coming toward him. Among them were a few crossbowmen.

He shouted at Lothar to organize them, and he turned to look down on the plains. The docks were still black with men. If only the cannon could have been turned to catch them packed together and unable to retreat. But the cannon had been wheeled around from John’s palace, which was flaming, and was being trained on Parolandanoj hurrying up the hill.

Then a big dark machine came through a wide breach in the wall. Sam cried out with dismay. It was the Firedragon III given to Hacking. But where were the three amphibians of Parolando?

Presently he saw two coming toward the hills. Of a sudden, the steam machine guns in the turrets began to stutter hissingly, and his men—his men!—were falling.

The Soul Citizens had captured the amphibians!

Everywhere he looked, he saw a battle raging. There were men fighting around the Riverboat. He cried out again, because he could not endure the thought of its being damaged. But no cannon shells were delivered near it. Apparently the enemy was as concerned about it as he was.

Rockets from the hills behind them were soaring over their heads and blowing up among the army below. Enemy rockets rose in reply; scores of red flames streaked above them; some came so close they could see the blur of the cylindrical body, the long bamboo stick protruding from the rear, and a whoosh as an exceptionally large one shot about ten feet above their heads. It just missed the top of the hill and blew up with a tremendous blast on the other side. Leaves from a nearby irontree fluttered down.

The next half hour—or was it two hours?—was a shrieking, yelling, shouting, gunpowder-stinking, blood-stinking, sweating, bowel-churning chaos. Time after time, the Soul Citizens charged up the hill, and time after time they were repelled by rockets, by sixty-nine-caliber plastic bullets, by crossbow bolts and longbow arrows. Then a charge carried them through to the defenders, and it was rapier, broadsword, ax, club, spear, and dagger that drove them back.

Joe Miller, ten feet high, eight hundred pounds heavy, his hairy hide drenched with blood—his own and others’—swung his ax with its eighty-pound nickel-steel head at the end of an oak shaft three inches thick and six feet long. It crashed through oak shield and leather armor, brushed aside rapiers and spears and axes, split breastbones, took off arms and necks, halved skulls. When his enemies refused to come near him, he charged them. Time and again, he broke up charges that might otherwise have succeeded.

Many flintlock Mark I pistols were fired at him, but their shooters were so unnerved by him that they fired from too far away, and the big plastic bullets wobbled off to one side.

Then an arrow went through his left arm, and a man braver, or more foolhardy, than the rest stepped under his ax and thrust a rapier into his thigh. The butt end of the shaft came back and broke his jaw and then the reversed ax severed his head. Joe could still walk, but he was losing blood fast. Sam ordered him to retreat to the other side of the hill, where the badly wounded were being treated.

Joe said, “No! I ain’t going!” and he fell to his knees with a groan.

“Get back there! That’s an order!” Sam screamed, and he ducked, though it was too late, as a bullet whistled by his ear and smashed to bits against the side of an irontree. Some of the plastic must have ricocheted; he felt a stinging in his arm and calf.

Joe managed to heave himself up, like a sick elephant, and shambled off. Cyrano de Bergerac appeared from the darkness; he was covered with gunpowder smoke and streaked with blood. He held the basket hilt of a long, thin, bloody rapier in one hand and a pistol in the other. Behind him, equally dirty and bloody, her long dark hair loose behind her, was Livy. She carried a pistol and a bag of ammunition, and her function was to reload the pistols. Seeing Sam, she smiled, her teeth white in the powder-blackened face.

“My God, Sam! I thought you were dead! The rocket against your house…!”

“I wish you were behind me in this,” he said.

That was all he had time to say, though he would not have said anything more, whatever the case. The enemy came back in another charge, slipping and sliding up over the piles of the fallen or leaping over them. The bowmen by then were out of ammunition, and the pistoleers had only a few more charges. But the enemy had about expended its powder too, though it had more arrows.

Joe Miller was gone, but Cyrano de Bergerac tried to make up for it and came close to doing so. The man was a demon, seemingly as thin and as flexible and as swift as the rapier he wielded. From time to time, he shot the pistol with his left hand into an opponent’s face and then lunged with the rapier, thrusting into another. He would toss the gun behind him, and Livy would stoop and pick it up and reload. Sam thought, briefly, of what a change had come about in Livy. He had never suspected her potentiality for action under conditions like these. That frail, often sickly, violence-loathing woman was coolly performing duties that many men would have run from.

Among them me, he thought, if I had any time to think about it.

And especially now that Joe Miller was not by his side to protect him physically and to give him moral support, both of which he needed badly.

Cyrano thrust beneath a shield which a shrieking Wahhabi Arab lifted too high in his frenzy, and then Livy, seeing that she had to do it, that Cyrano could not, held the pistol in both hands and fired. The hammer made the barrel swerve, she brought it back into line, smoke and flame spurted out, and an Arab fell back with his shoulder torn off.

A massively built Negro leaped over the body with his ax raised in both hands and Cyrano, withdrawing the blade from the first man before he hit the ground, ran the axman through the adam’s apple.

Then the enemy retreated down the hill again. But now they waited while the big dark-gray amphibian, like a Merrimac on wheels, huffed toward them. Lothar von Richthofen pushed against Sam, who stepped aside when he saw the aluminum-alloy tube and the rocket with its ten-pound warhead. A man knelt while Lothar loaded the rocket into the bazooka and then aimed it. Lothar was very good at this, and the rocket sailed down, its fiery arc ending against the front of the amphibian, its bull’s eye the single beam of light in its nose. Smoke covered it, and then the wind carried that away. The amphibian had stopped, but it came on now, its turrets turning and the steam guns lifting.

“Well, that was the last one,” Lothar said. “We might as well get the hell out of here. We can’t fight that. Who should know better than we, heh?”

The enemy was re-forming behind the armored vehicle. Many of them were uttering the ululating cries which the Ulmaks, the pre-Amerindians across The River, made during charges. Apparently, Hacking had enlisted those Ulmaks not yet conquered by Iyeyasu.

Suddenly, Sam could not see as well. Only the fires from the burning houses and from the open hearths and smelters, which were still operating, enabled him to see anything at all. The rain clouds had come as swiftly as they always did, like wolves chasing the stars, and within a few minutes it would rain savagely.

He looked around him. Every attack had thinned them out. He doubted that they could have withstood the next one, even if the amphibian had not come.

There was still fighting going on to the north and the south on the plains and the hills along the plains. But the shooting and the cries had lessened.

The plains seemed to be darker than ever with the enemy.

He wondered if Publiujo and Tifonujo had joined the invasion.

He took a last look at the giant hull of the Riverboat with its two paddle wheels, half hidden beneath the scaffolding and behind the colossal cranes. Then he turned. He felt like weeping, but he was too numbed. It would be some time before the tears would come.

It was more likely that his blood would run out before then, after which there would be no tears. Not in this body, anyway.

Guided by the fires of a dozen scattered huts, he stumbled down the other side. Then the rains smashed down. And, at the same time, a tentacle of the enemy ran toward them from the left. Sam turned and pulled the trigger of his flintlock, and the rain, of course, drowned out the spark. But the enemy’s pistols were also rendered useless, except as clubs.

They came at the Parolandanoj with their swords and spears and axes. Joe Miller lunged forward, growling with a voice as deep as a cave bear’s. Though wounded, he was still a formidable and terrifying fighter. By the flashes of lightning and the rumbling of thunder, his ax cut them down. The others jumped in to help him, and in a few seconds the Soul Citizen survivors decided they had had enough. They would run off and wait for reinforcements. Why get killed now when victory was theirs?

Sam climbed two more hills. The enemy attacked from the right. A wing had broken through and raced on ahead to cut down the men and take the women captive. Joe Miller and Cyrano met them, and the attackers ran away, slipping and sliding through the wet roots of the cutaway grass.

Sam counted the survivors. He was shaken. There were about fifteen. Where had they all gone? He would have sworn that at least a hundred had been with him when he ordered them to cut and run for it.

Livy was still close behind Cyrano. Since the guns were no good now, she kept at Cyrano’s back and helped him with a spear thrust when she could.

Sam was cold and wet. And he was as miserable as Napoleon must have been on the retreat from Russia. All, all gone! His proud little nation and its nickel-iron mines and its factories and its invulnerable amphibians with their steam guns and its two airplanes and the fabulous Riverboat! All gone! The technological triumphs and marvels and the Magna Carta with the most democratic constitution any country had ever known and the goal of the greatest journey ever to be made! All gone!

And how? Through treachery, base treachery!

At least, King John had not been part of the betrayal. His palace had been demolished and he along with it, in all probability. The Great Betrayer had been betrayed.

Sam quit grieving then. He was still too frozen with the terror of battle to think much about anything except survival. When they got to the base of the mountains, he led them north along it until they were opposite the dam. A lake about a quarter of a mile long and a half mile wide was before them. They cut down along it, coming after a while to a thick concrete wall across the top of which they walked. Then they were on top of the dam itself.

Sam walked back and forth a few paces until he found a sunken symbol, a diagonal cross, in the concrete. He called, “Here it is! Now, if only nobody squeals on us or some spy hasn’t found out about it!”

He let himself down into the cold water while the lightning streaked and the thunder bellowed far away. He shivered but he kept on going down, and when the water was up to his armpits his foot struck the first rung. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and sank down, his hand running along the concrete until it encountered the first rung. After that he pulled himself down by other rungs and at the sixth knew that the entrance was a few inches below it. He went under it and then up, and his head popped up into air and light. A platform a few inches higher than the water was in front of him. Overhead was a dome the highest point of which was ten feet. Beyond the platform was an entrance. Six big electric lightbulbs lit the chamber harshly.

Shivering, gasping, he climbed onto the platform and went to the entranceway. Joe followed him a moment later. He called weakly, and Sam had to turn back and help him crawl onto the platform. He was bleeding from a dozen places.

The others came after him, one by one. They helped him get the titanthrop through the entrance and down an incline into a large chamber. There were beds, towels, food, liquor, weapons, and medicine. Sam had prepared this place for just such an emergency, but he had thought he was being foolishly cautious. Only the heads of the state and the few workers who had built this place knew about it.

Another entrance, at the bottom of the dam, was hidden beneath the flow which powered the wheels connected to the generators. This led to a shaft up which a man could climb only to come to a seemingly blank wall. But the man who knew how could open that wall.

The whole project was, he knew, a product of the romantic foolishness of which he had not entirely rid himself. The idea of secret doors under a waterfall and under the lake and of hidden apartments where he could rest and plan his revenge while his enemies hunted in vain for him was irresistible. He had laughed at himself at times for having built the refuge. Now he was glad. Romanticism did have its uses.

Also hidden was a detonator. To set off the tons of dynamite inside the base of the dam he had only to connect two wires, and the dam would go up and the water of the lake would roar out and carry the central part of Parolando out into The River.

Sam Clemens and his Riverboat would also be destroyed, but that was the price to be paid.

The wounded were treated and put under the sedation of dreamgum or liquor. Sometimes, chewing the gum deadened the pain and other times it seemed to increase it. The only way to neutralize the pain-expanding effects then was to pour liquor down the patient.

They ate and slept while the guard watched at both entrances. Joe Miller was half unconscious most of the time, and Sam sat beside him and nursed him as best he could. Cyrano came back from his vigil at the door under the waterfall to report that it was night again outside. That was all he knew about the conditions outside. He had seen or heard no one through the waterfall.

Lothar and Sam were the least wounded. Sam decided that they should sneak out past the waterfall exit and spy. Cyrano protested that he should go, too, but Sam refused. Livy did not say anything, but she looked gratefully at Sam. He turned away; he did not want any thanks for sparing her mate.

He wondered if Gwenafra were dead or if she had been captured. Lothar said that she had disappeared during the last attack and that he had tried to get to her but had been driven back. He now felt ashamed of himself for not having done more, even though it had not been possible.

The two applied a dark stain all over their bodies and then went down the steel rungs of the shaft. The walls were damp here, and the rungs were slippery with moisture. Electric lights illuminated the shaft.

They went out behind the waterfall, which roared and splashed at them. The ledge curved around, following the lower half of the dam, until it ran out about twenty yards from the end. Here they climbed down steel rungs to the junction of the dam wall and the earth. From there, they walked cautiously along the channel which had been cut out of the earth. The roots of the grass still stuck out of the walls of the channel. The roots went deeper than any cuts made so far; it seemed impossible to kill the grass.

The sky was bright with the jampack of huge stars and the extensive glowing gas clouds. They were able to proceed swiftly in the pale darkness. After a half a mile, they went at right angles to the canal, heading toward John’s ruined palace. Crouching in the shadows beneath the outflung branches of an irontree, they looked down on the plains below. There were men and women in the huts around them. The men were the victors, and the women were the victims. Sam quivered when he heard the screams and the calls for help, but he tried to push them out of his mind. To rush into any hut and try to rescue one woman was to throw away their chances of doing any good for Parolando. And it would certainly result in their being captured or killed.

Yet, if he heard Gwenafra’s voice, he knew that he would go to her rescue. Or would he?

The fires in the open hearths and the smelters were still blazing, and men and women were working in them. Evidently, Hacking had already put his slaves to work. Many guards stood around the buildings, but they were drinking liquor and ethyl alcohol.

The plains were well lit for as far as he could see with huge bonfires. Around them were many men and women, drinking and laughing. Occasionally a struggling and screaming woman was carried off into the shadows. Sometimes, she was not taken away.

Sam and Lothar walked down the hill as if they owned it, but they did not go near the buildings or the fires.

Nobody had challenged them, though they had come within twenty yards of a number of patrols. Most of the enemy seemed to be celebrating the victory with purple passion or any other liquor they had been able to get from the supplies of their prisoners. The exceptions were the Wahhabi Arabs, whose religion forbade drinking alcohol. And there were a few blacks who were not on duty but who were abstemious. These were disciples of Hacking, who did not drink.

Whatever the laxity now, discipline had been maintained during the day. The corpses had been taken away, and a big stockade of poles removed from other buildings had been set up on the plain just beside the first of the hills. Though Sam could not see within it, he surmised from the guard towers around it that prisoners were within it.

The two strolled along, staggering now and then as if they were drunk. They passed within twenty feet of three short dark men who spoke a strange language. Sam could not identify it, though it sounded “African.” He wondered if these were not eighteenth-century Dahomeans.

They walked boldly between a nitric acid factory and an excrement-treatment building and out onto the plain. And they stopped. Twenty yards ahead, Firebrass was in a bamboo cage so narrow that he could not sit down in it. His hands were tied behind him.

On a big X-frame of wood, upside down, his legs tied to the upper parts of the X and his arms to the lower members, was Göring.

Sam looked around. A number of men, talking and drinking, stood in the big doorway of the excrement plant. Sam decided not to go any closer or to try to talk to Firebrass. He longed to know why he was in the cage, but he did not dare to ask him. It was necessary to find out all he could and then get back to the hideout inside the dam. So far, the situation looked hopeless. It was best to sneak out during the rains and leave the country. He could blow up the dam and wash out everything, including the forces of Soul City, but he did not want to lose the boat. As long as he had a chance to get that back, he would let the dam alone.

They went on by Firebrass’ cage, hoping he would not see them and call to them. But he stood bent over, leaning his head against the bamboo bars. Göring groaned once. They kept on going and soon were around the corner of the building.

Their slow and seemingly drunken wanderings took them near a big building that had been occupied by Fred Rolfe, King John’s supporter on the Council. The number of armed men on guard around it convinced Sam that Hacking was inside it.

It was a one-story house of lodgepole-pine logs and bamboo. Its windows were unblinded, and the light from within showed people inside. Suddenly, Lothar gripped Sam’s arm and said, “There she is! Gwenafra!”

The torchlight shone on her long honey-colored hair and very white skin. She was standing by the window and talking to someone. After a minute, she moved away, and the bushy hair and black face of Elwood Hacking moved across the bright square. Sam felt sick. Hacking had taken her for his woman for the night.

Gwenafra had not looked frightened. She had seemed relaxed, but Gwenafra, though volatile and uninhibited most of the time, could be self-restrained when the occasion demanded.

He pulled Lothar away.

“There’s nothing we can do now, and you’d be throwing away any chance she might have at all.”

They drifted around for a while, observing the other factories and noting that the bonfires stretched both ways along the walls as far as their eye could detect. In addition to the Soul Citizens, there were the Ulmaks and a number of Orientals. Sam wondered if these could be the Burmese, Thai, and Ceylonese New Stone Age peoples living across The River from Selinujo.

To get out of Parolando, they would have to go over the wall. And they would have to steal several small boats if they were to get down The River to Selinujo. They had no idea about what had happened to Publiujo or Tifonujo, but they suspected that these countries would be next on Hacking’s list. To escape just to the north to Chernsky’s Land was foolish. Iyeyasu would be moving on that as soon as he found out about the invasion here, if he had not already done that.

It was ironic that they would flee to the very country the citizens of which had been forbidden entrance to Parolando.

They decided they would return to the dam now, tell what they had seen, and make plans. The best chance to get away would be when it rained.

They rose and started to walk about, skirting the huts which housed the enemy and the captive women.

They had just passed into the shade of a gigantic irontree when Sam felt something tighten around his neck from behind. He tried to yell, to turn around, to struggle, but the big hand squeezed, and he became unconscious.

26

He awoke gasping and coughing, still under the irontree. He started to get up, but a deep voice growled, “None o’ that! Sit still, or I’ll split yer skull with this ax!”

Sam looked around, Lothar, his hands tied behind him and a gag in his mouth, was sitting propped up under a half-grown fir tree sixty feet away. The man who had spoken was a very big man with excessively broad shoulders, a deep chest, and brawny arms. He wore a black kilt and black cape, and he held the handle of a medium-sized ax. Sheaths at his belt held a steel tomahawk and a steel knife, and a Mark I pistol was stuck in his belt.

He said, “You be Sam Clemens?”

“That’s right,” Sam said, his voice low, also. “What does this mean? Who are you?”

The big man jerked a head full of thick hair at Lothar. “I moved him away so he couldn’t hear what we have to say. A man we both know sent me.”

Sam was silent for a minute and then he said, “The Mysterious Stranger?”

The big man grunted. “Yes. That’s what he said you called him. Stranger’s good enough. I guess you know what it’s all about, so there’s not much use us jawing too long about it. You satisfied that I’ve talked with him?”

“I’d have to be,” Sam said. “It’s obvious that you’ve met him. You’re one of the Twelve he’s picked. It was a he, wasn’t it?”

“I didn’t jump him to find out,” the man said. “I tell you, this child ain’t ever run up against a human, red, black, or white, that ever threw a scare-fit into me. But that Stranger, he’s the one that’d make a grizzly scoot just by looking at him. Not that I’m afraid of him, you understand, it’s just that he makes me feel…strange. Like I was a feather-plucked bluejay.

“Enough of that. My handle’s Johnston. Might as well give you my history, since it’ll save a lot of jawing later. John Johnston. I was born in New Jersey about 1827, I reckon, and died in Los Angeles in the veterans’ hospital in 1900. Between times, I was a trapper in the Rocky Mountains. Up to when I came to this River, I killed me hundreds of Injuns, but I ain’t never had to kill a white man, not even a Frenchman. Not till I got here. Since then, well, I collected quite a few white scalps.”

The man stood up and moved out into the starlight. His hair was dark but looked as if it would be a bright red in the noonday sun.

“I talk a hell of a lot more’n I used to,” he said. “You can’t get away from people in this valley. People give a child bad habits.”

They went over to Lothar. On the way, Sam said, “How’d you happen to get here? And at this time?”

“The Stranger told me where to find you, told me about you and your big boat, the Misty Tower and all that. Why hash it all over? You know. I agreed to find you and go with you on your boat. Why not? I don’t like being set down here. There ain’t no elbow room; you can’t turn around without knocking noses. I was about thirty thousand miles upRiver when I wake up one night, and there’s that man sitting in the shadows. We had a long talk with him doing most of it. Then I got up and set out. I heard about some of what was going on here way up The River. I snuck into here while the fighting was still going on, and I been looking for you ever since. I listened to them blacks talking; they said they couldn’t find your body. So I been skulking around, seeing what I could see. Once, I had to kill me one a those Ayrabs cause he stumbled across me. I was hungry, anyway.”

They had reached Lothar, but Sam straightened up at the last words. “Hungry?” he said. “You mean…?”

The man did not reply. Sam said, “Say, uh, you…you wouldn’t be that Johnston called ‘Liver Eating’ Johnston, would you? The Crow Killer?”

The voice rumbled, “I made me peace with the Crows and became their brother. And I quit eating human liver some time after. But a man has to eat.”

Sam shivered. He stooped down and untied Lothar’s bonds and removed the gag. Lothar was furious, but he was also curious. And, like Sam, he seemed to find Johnston a little awing. The man exuded a peculiar savage force. Without even half trying, Sam thought. I’d hate to see him in action.

They walked back to the dam. Johnston did not say anything for a long time. Once, he disappeared, leaving Sam feeling strange and cold. Johnston was about six and a half feet tall and looked as if he weighed two hundred and eighty pounds, all bone and muscle. But he moved as silently as a tiger’s shadow.

Sam jumped. Johnston was back. Sam said, “What happened?”

Johnston said, “Never mind. You say you didn’t get around much. I been all over this place; I know the sitchyation passing well. Lots a your people to the north and the south got away over the walls. If they’d a stood up, they might’ve licked the blacks. But the blacks ain’t won by a long shot. Iyeyasu is getting ready to move against them. I wouldn’t be surprised none if he invades tonight. I scouted around his place some before I came here. He ain’t going to put up with the blacks owning all this iron and the boat. He will take it away from them or know why.”

Sam groaned. It made no difference whether Hacking or Iyeyasu had the boat if he couldn’t get it. But by the time they were inside the dam, he felt better. Maybe the two forces would destroy each other, and the Parolandanoj who’d fled could come back and take over. All wasn’t lost yet.

Moreover, the appearance of the Herculean Liver Eating Johnston heartened him. The Mysterious Stranger had not entirely abandoned him. He was still planning, and he had sent a damn good man for fighting, if the stories about him could be believed. Johnston was the sixth man the Stranger had chosen. The other six would show up sometime. But then one had been lost. Odysseus had disappeared.

Still, he could show up again. The River was a great place for bad pennies, if you could call The Twelve that. They were bad for somebody. For the Stranger’s people, the Ethicals, Sam hoped.

In the dam, Johnston had to be introduced and the situation explained. Joe Miller, wrapped in towels, sat up and shook hands with Johnston. And Johnston, awe in his voice, said, “Night and day, this man-child seed many queer things. But I ain’t never seed one like you. You didn’t have to crush my hand, friend.”

“I didn’t try,” Joe said. “You look pretty big and thtrong to me. Bethideth, I been thick.”

About half an hour before the rains, they moved out. The land was relatively quiet by then. The celebrators had gone to bed, and everybody had cleared away from the fires in expectation of the rain. But the guard towers and the factories were full of enemy guards, and these had stopped drinking. Apparently, Hacking had called a halt to it.

Johnston, like a giant ghost, drifted away while they leaned against the side of the sulfuric acid factory. Ten minutes later, he was suddenly beside them.

“I been giving those blacks the ear,” he said. “That Hacking is shore one smart nigger. All that drinking and whooping it up and staggering around, why, that’s all put on! That’s fer the benefit of spies from Iyeyasujo. Hacking knows the Jap is going to attack tonight, and he’s making it look like it’s gonna be easy. But his men are worried. They’re short of gunpowder.”

Sam was startled by the news. He asked Johnston if he had overheard anything else.

“Yeah, I heard a couple of them Citizens talking about why Hacking decided he had to attack us. He knew Iyeyasu was going to do it, so he decided he had to jump the gun. If he didn’t, the Jap would have control of the metal and the amphibians and everything, and he’d just conquer Soul City next and then have everything. Them jackasses was laughing fit to kill. They said it was King John arranged with Hacking to take over. And then Hacking blew up King John in his own house because he didn’t trust John. Said John was a traitor, and even if he wasn’t, he was a whitey and couldn’t be trusted.”

Sam said, “But why in hell would John do that to us? What did he have to gain?”

“Hacking and John was gonna conquer all the land for a hundred miles along The River and then split it. John was gonna rule the white half, and Hacking was gonna rule the black half. Half and half, with the two sharing everything equal. They was gonna build two boats, two of everything.”

“What about Firebrass? Why’s he in the cage?”

“Dunno, but somebody did call him a traitor. And that kraut, what’s his name, Herring….”

“Göring.”

“Yeah. Well, it wasn’t Hacking was to blame for his being tortured. Some a them Wahhabi Ayrabs did it. They’s got it in for the Second Chancers, you know, and they got him and tortured him, with the help a some of them African niggers, the Dahomeans, who used to torture a dozen people before breakfast every day, according to what I heard. By the time Hacking heard of it and stopped it, Göring was dying. But he talked to Hacking, called him his soul brother and said he forgave him. Said he’d see him later along The River. Hacking was pretty shook up about it, from what his men said.”

Sam digested the news, which set the teeth of his stomach even more on edge. He was so upset he couldn’t even get any amusement from Hacking’s double cross of the champion double-crosser, King John. He did have to admire Hacking’s statesmanship and perception, however. Hacking had realized there was only one way to deal with John, and he had taken that way. But then Hacking did not have Sam Clemens’ conscience.

The news changed everything. Apparently, Iyeyasu was on the way now, which meant that Sam’s plans to sneak out during the rains would not work. The Soul Citizens were too alert.

“What’s the matter, Sam?” Livy said. She was sitting near him and looking sadly at him.

“I think it’s all up with us.”

“Oh, Sam!” she replied. “Where’s your manhood? It isn’t all up with us! You get depressed so easily if things don’t go your way all the time! Why, this is the greatest opportunity you could ask for to get your boat back! Let Hacking and Iyeyasu destroy each other and then take over. Just sit back up in the hills until they have clawed each other to death and then jump on them while they’re gasping out their last!”

Sam said angrily, “What are you talking about? Jump on them with fifteen men and women?”

“No, you stupe! You have at least five hundred prisoners in that stockade and God knows how many more in other stockades. And you have thousands who ran away to Ĉernskujo and Publiujo!”

“How can I get hold of them now?” Sam said. “It’s too late! The attack will be launched in a few hours, you can bet on that! Besides, the refugees were probably put in stockades, too! For all I know, Chernsky and Publius Crassus may be in cahoots with Hacking!”

“You’re still the same paralyzed pessimist I knew on Earth,” she said. “Oh, Sam, I still love you, in a way, that is. I still like you as a friend, and….”

“Friend!” he said so loudly that the others jumped. Cyrano said, “Morbleu!” and Johnston hissed, “Shet up, you want them black Injuns to get us?”

“We were lovers for years,” he said.

“Not always, by a long shot,” she said. “But this is no place for a discussion of our failures. I don’t intend to thrash those out, anyway. It’s too late. The point is, do you or do you not want your boat?”

“Of course I do,” he said fiercely. “What do you think…?”

“Then get off your dead ass, Sam!” she said.

From anybody else, the remark would have been unremarkable. But from her, his fragile, soft-voiced, clean-speeched Livy, it was unthinkable. But she had said it, and now that he thought back on it, there had been times on Earth, which he had suppressed in his memory, when…

“The lady makes a powerful lot of sense!” Johnston rumbled.

He had far more important things to think about. But the really important things were best recognized by the unconscious, and it must have been this that sent the thought. For the first time, he understood, really understood, with the cells of his body, from the brain on down, that Livy had changed. She was no longer his Livy. She had not been for a long time; perhaps she had not been for some years on Earth before her death.

“What do you say, Mr. Clemens?” the mountain man rumbled.

Sam gave a deep sigh, as if he were breathing out the last fragments of Olivia Langdon Clemens de Bergerac, and said, “Here’s what we do.”

The rains lashed down; thunder and lightning made the skies and the land hideous for a half hour. Johnston appeared out of the rain with two bazookas and four rockets tied together on his broad back. Then he disappeared again and a half hour later was back with some throwing knives and tomahawks, all of steel, and some new blood, not his, splashed on his arms and chest.

The clouds had evaporated. The land was bright silver under the magnificent stars, as big as apples, as numerous as cherries on a tree in season, as luminous as jewels before electric lights. Then it got colder, and they shivered under the irontree. A thin mist formed over The River; within fifteen minutes, it was so thick that the waters and the grailstones and the high walls along the banks could not be seen. A half hour later, Iyeyasu struck. The big boats and the small boats, crammed with men and weapons, came from across The River, where the Sauks and Foxes had once ruled, from the northern part of the ex-Ulmak territory, from the land where the Hottentots and Bushmen had once lived in peace. And the main bulk came from the right bank of The River, from the three lands where Iyeyasu was now lord.

Iyeyasu attacked at ten points along the Riverfront walls. Mines blew up the walls, and men poured through the breaches. The number of rockets shot in the first ten minutes was awesome. Iyeyasu must have been saving them for a long time. The three amphibians of the defenders lumbered up, their steam machine guns chuffing and expelling the plastic bullets in garden hose fashion. The carnage they made was great, but Iyeyasu launched a surprise. Rockets with wooden warheads containing jellied alcohol (made from soap plus wood alcohol) struck all around the three armored vehicles and made direct hits on each at least twice. The crude napalm spread fiercely over the vehicles, and if the burning stuff did not get inside the vehicles, it seared the lungs of the men inside.

Sam was shaken by the sight, but not so much that he did not tell Lothar to remind him of this when it was all over, if either of them was still around.

“They have to be made more airtight, and we’ll have to install a closed-circuit air system, like Firebrass described,” he said.

Johnston appeared as unexpectedly as if he had stepped out of a door in the night, and behind him was Firebrass. The man looked exhausted and as if he were in pain, but he still managed to grin at Sam. He was, however, trembling.

“Hacking was told that I was betraying him,” Firebrass said. “And he believed his informant. Who was, by the way, our esteemed and always reliable King John. John told him that I was selling him down The River, that I had revealed everything to you so I could become chief of your air force. Hacking would not believe that I was dickering with you just to string you along. I can’t blame him too much. I should have sent word through our spies what I was doing. That I didn’t convince him that I wasn’t double-crossing him didn’t surprise me.”

“Were you?” Sam said.

Firebrass grinned. “No, I wasn’t, though I was mightily tempted. But why should I betray him when I’d been promised I could be head flier after Hacking took over the boat? The truth is, Hacking was eager to believe John. He doesn’t like me because I’m not his idea of what a soul brother should be. And I had too easy a life according to him. He resented it because I never lived in a ghetto and I had every advantage he didn’t have.”

“The job of chief engineer can still be yours,” Sam said. “I’ll admit that I’m relieved about not having to promise you the captaincy of the air force. But you can still fly, if you want to.”

“That’s the best offer I’ve had since I died,” Firebrass said. “I’ll take it.”

He moved closer to Sam and whispered in his ear. “You would have had to take me along in some capacity anyway. I’m one of The Twelve!”

27

Sam felt as if a cold rod had been plunged through him from the top of his head down.

“The Ethical? The Stranger?”

“Yes. He said you called him the Mysterious Stranger.”

“Then you were betraying Hacking?”

“That little speech I just made was for public consumption,” Firebrass said. “Yes, I did betray Hacking, if you insist on using that word. But I regard myself as an espionage agent for a higher authority. I have no intention of worrying about all-black or all-white states on The River, when I can find out how and why we, the whole human race, were put here. I want answers to my questions, as Karamazov once said. All this white-black turmoil is trivial on this planet, no matter how important it was on Earth. Hacking must have sensed that I thought that, though I tried to conceal it.”

Sam did not recover from the shock for some time. Meanwhile, the battle raged on the plain with the Soul Citizens getting the worst of it. Though they cost the invaders three men for one, they were pushed back within a half an hour. Sam decided that it was time for them to act, and they trotted off toward the stockade where the Parolando prisoners were kept. Lothar fired two rockets into the gates of the stockade, and before the smoke had cleared, the fifteen charged through the blasted gates. Cyrano and Johnston did most of the work in killing the fifteen guards. Cyrano was a demon with lightning for a sword, and Johnston downed four men with thrown tomahawks and three with thrown knives. He broke two legs and a chest with a foot like iron. The prisoners were directed to the armory, where bows and arrows and swords were still in supply.

Sam sent two men each to the north and south to go over the walls and try to contact the Parolandanoj there.

Then he led the rest back up into the hills. They would camp by the dam until they saw how the battle was going. Sam did not have the slightest idea of what they should do. He told Cyrano he would have to play it by ear. He had to repress the impulse to remark that he was doing this even though Cyrano was tone deaf.

Afterward, Sam thanked whoever there was to thank that he had not camped on top of the dam itself. Instead, he had sat down on a knoll above and to the left side of the dam, facing outward. He had a better view of the hills and the plains, where the rockets were still exploding but were not as numerous as in the beginning. The starlight glimmered on the waters of the big lake behind the dam as if all was peace and quiet in the world.

Suddenly, Johnston leaped up and said, “Looky there! Yonder! Atop a the dam!”

Three dark figures had emerged from the water onto the dam. They ran toward the land. Sam told the others to withdraw behind the great trunk of the irontree. Joe Miller and Johnston seized the three as they raced up to the tree. One tried to stab Joe, and Joe squeezed the neck and the blood spurted out from broken veins and arteries. The others were knocked out. By the time they regained consciousness, they did not have to tell Sam what they had done. And he guessed that they had done so at the order of King John.

The earth shook under their feet, and the irontree leaves rattled like dishes in a pantry. The white wall of the dam flew outward with a gigantic cloud of smoke and a roar that pushed in their eardrums. The enormous chunks of concrete flew through the smoke like white birds above a factory chimney. They tumbled over and over and struck the ground far ahead of the waters. The lake was no longer the peaceful and quiet glimmer of a wonderful world to come. It seemed to hurl itself forward. The roar as it raced down the canyon which Sam’s men had dug with so much sweat and time deafened the watchers again.

The water, hundreds of thousands of tons, funneled by the canyon, rammed through the earthen walls, tearing out great chunks of it. The sudden withdrawal also removed a great amount of earth around the lake’s shores, so much so that the watchers had to scramble for even higher ground. And the thousand-foot-high irontree, its two-hundred-foot-deep roots abruptly exposed, its foundation partly dug away, toppled over. It seemed to take a long time falling, and the explosions of enormous roots breaking and the whistling of air through the huge leaves and the vines covering it terrified the humans. They had thought they were far enough away, but even though the giant tree was falling away from them, they were threatened by eruptions of roots from the earth.

The tree struck with a crash on the other side of the lake and tore out the overhanging dirt and continued on down into the emptying lake. It slid out entirely from the root anchors on the banks and went on top first into the waters. These were whirling around and around, and, picking up the enormous tree as if it were a toothpick, the waters carried it down the canyon for a half a mile before it became wedged between the two walls of the canyon.

The waters roared out in a wall at least a hundred feet high by the time it had hit the plains. Its front must have borne a tangle of half-grown trees and bamboo plants, huts, people, and debris. It flashed across the mile and a half of plain, spreading out but channeled, for a few minutes, by the cyclopean secondary walls that Sam had built to defend the factories and the Riverboat, but which had proved useless in two attacks.

Everything was picked up and carried on out into The River. The factories crumbled as if they were made of cookies. The gigantic Riverboat was lifted up like a toy boat cast into the ocean surf. It rode out into The River, pitching, and then was sunk in darkness and turmoil. Sam threw himself on the ground and clawed at the grass. His boat was lost! Everything was lost, factories, mines, amphibians, airplanes, smithies, armories, and his crew. But worst of all, the Riverboat was lost. The dream was shattered; the great shining jewel of his dream had been smashed.

The grass was cold and wet in his face. His fingers felt as if they were fastened in the flesh of the earth and would never come free again. But Joe’s huge hand lifted him up and sat him down as if he were a dummy. Joe’s monstrous hairy body was pressed close to his, warming him. And Joe’s grotesque face with the shelving brows and the absurdly long nose was by him.

“They’re all gone!” Joe said. “Jethuth! Vhat a thight! There ain’t nothing left, Tham!”

The plain was buried under a whirl and toss of waters, but in fifteen minutes the waters had drained off. The River had resumed its normal appearance along the shores of Parolando, though it must have been swollen downstream.

The great buildings and the boat in its scaffoldings were gone. The cyclopean walls on the sides, a mile apart, were gone. There were little lakes here and there where the mines and the basements of the factories had been. The vast weight of water had gouged out part of the plain where it had been dug up. But the roots of the grasses were so deep, so tough, and so thickly intertwined that even the scrape of hundreds of thousands of tons of water had not ripped the earth out. The stone and earth walls along the banks had been swept away as if they were sand.

The skies paled, and the starlit darkness became gray. The great fleet of the invaders was gone, somewhere far down The River, or under it, broken, smashed, fragments floating or half hulls upside down. The two armies on the plain and the sailors were all dead, crushed by the weight of the water, drowned, rubbed into nothing or squeezed out like toothpaste.

But Parolando extended for ten miles along The River, and the lake had, after all, only raged across a two-mile-broad area. Its main damage had been in the middle of Parolando, where it had carried everything out that stood within a half-mile-wide area. Those on the edges had been drowned and the buildings smashed or only submerged briefly.

Dawn brought with it a thousand men in boats or over the walls of Chernsky’s Land from the north.

At their head was King John.

Sam drew up his men in battle formation with Joe Miller in the center, but King John limped forward, his hand held out in sign of peace. Sam went forward to talk to him. Even after John had explained what he had done, Sam expected to be killed. But later he realized that John needed him and Firebrass and others if he were going to get the boat rebuilt. Also, he would be taking a perverted pleasure in keeping Sam alive while Sam wondered when the dagger in the night would come.

As it turned out, not everything had to be started from scratch again. The boat, almost entirely undamaged, was found beached on a hill across The River a mile down. It had been deposited as gently as a cat’s footstep by the withdrawing waters. The work of getting the great hull back was not easy, but it took much less time than making another one.

John explained more than once to Sam what he had done, but the deviousnesses and the two times two double crosses were so complicated that Sam could never see the picture as a whole. John had made a deal to betray Sam, knowing full well that Hacking would betray him also. John would have been disappointed if Hacking had not tried to stab him in the back. He would have lost all his faith in human nature.

John had made a deal with Iyeyasu to help him invade after Hacking’s invasion. Iyeyasu liked the idea that Hacking would weaken his forces while taking Parolando. At the last moment, John had made a deal with Publius Crassus, Tai Fung, and Chernsky that they would help him mop up on Iyeyasu’s forces, which would be shattered by the waters released by the blown-up dam.

John had sent the three men to set off the explosives in the dam when the greatest number of invaders and defenders would be concentrated between the funneling secondary-defense walls. Before that happened, John had fled in his boat, hidden by the fog.

“Then you weren’t in your palace when the cannons opened up on it?” Sam said.

“No,” John replied, smiling his cat’s smile. “I was miles to the north, traveling to meet Iyeyasu. You have never thought much of me, Samuel, but you should get down on your knees now and kiss my hand in gratitude. Without me, you would have lost all.”

“If you had told me Hacking was going to invade, I could have kept everything,” Sam said. “We could have ambushed Hacking.”

The sun came up and struck the tawniness of John’s hair and the peculiar pale-blue of his eyes. “Ah, yes, but Iyeyasu would still have been a formidable problem. Now he’s gone, and there is little to keep us from ruling all the land we need, including the bauxite and platinum of Soul City and the iridium and tungsten of Selinujo. I presume you have no objections to conquering those two states?”

There was a bonanza in the aftermath. Hacking was taken prisoner, and Gwenafra was found alive. Both had been pushed during the fighting into the hills to the west. Hacking was getting ready to lead a charge back down the hills when the edge of the waters deluged his part. Gwenafra escaped, though she almost drowned. Hacking had been hurled against a tree. Both his legs and one arm were broken, and he was bleeding internally.

Sam and John hastened to where Hacking lay under an irontree. Gwenafra cried when she saw them and embraced Sam and Lothar. She seemed to have given Sam a much longer embrace than she did Lothar, which was not entirely unexpected, since she and Lothar had been quarreling violently for the last few months.

John wanted to finish Hacking off with some refined tortures, preferably as soon after breakfast as possible. Sam objected strongly. He knew that John could have his way if he insisted, since his men outnumbered Sam’s by fifty to one. But Sam was past being cautious, at that moment, anyway. And John backed away. He needed Sam and the men whose loyalty he commanded.

“You had a dream, White Sam,” Hacking said in a weak voice. “Well, I had one, too. A land where brothers and sisters could loaf and invite their souls. Where we’d be all black. You wouldn’t know what that means. No white devils, no white eyes. Just black soul brothers. It would have been as near heaven as you can get in this hell of a world. Not that we wouldn’t have had trouble, no place without trouble, man. But there wouldn’t have been any white-man trouble. It’d be all ours. But that isn’t to be.”

“You could have had your dream,” Sam said. “If you’d waited. After the boat was built, we’d have left the iron to whoever could take it. And then….”

Hacking grimaced. Sweat covered his black skin and his face was tight with pain. “Man, you must be out of your skull! You really think I believed that story about you sailing off on this quest for the Big Grail? I knew you was going to use that big boat to conquer us blacks and lock those chains around us again. An Old South whitey like you….”

He closed his eyes. Sam said, “You are wrong! If you knew me, if you’d taken the trouble to know me instead of stereotyping me….”

Hacking opened his eyes and said, “You’d lie to a nigger even when he was on his deathbed, wouldn’t you? Listen! That Nazi, Göring, he really shook me up. I didn’t tell them to torture him, just kill him, but those fanatical Arabs, you know them. Anyway, Göring gives me a message. Hail and farewell, soul brother, or something like that. I forgive you, because you know not what you do. Something like that. Ain’t that a crock? A message of love from a damn Nazi! But you know, he had changed! And he could be right. Maybe all them Second Chancers are right. Who knows? Sure seems stupid to bring us up from the dead, give us our youth back, just so some can kick and some can hurt all over again. Stupid, isn’t it?”

He stared up at Sam and then said, “Shoot me, will you? Put me out of my pain. I’m really suffering.”

Lothar stepped up beside Sam and said, “After what you did to Gwenafra, I’ll be glad to.”

He pointed the muzzle of the big flintlock at Hacking’s head.

Hacking grinned painfully and muttered, “Rape on principle, mother! I swore off that on Earth, but that woman just brought out the devil in me! Besides, so what? What about all those black slave women you white mothers raped?”

As Sam walked away, the pistol boomed. He jumped, but he kept on walking. It was the kindest thing that Lothar could have done for Hacking. Tomorrow, he would be walking along the banks of The River somewhere far away. He and Sam might even see each other again, although Sam was not looking forward to that.

Lothar, stinking of gunpowder, caught up with him.

“I should have let him suffer. But old habits are hard to break. I wanted to kill him, so I did. That black devil just smiled at me. Then I spread his smile all over him.”

“Don’t say any more,” Sam replied. “I’m sick enough. I’m about to chuck the whole thing and settle down with a steady job of missionarying. The only ones whose suffering meant anything today were the Second Chancers.”

“You’ll get over that,” Lothar said, and he was right. But it took three years.

The land was again like a shell-pocked battlefield, stinking with fumes and black with smoke. But the great Riverboat was completed. There was nothing to do to it now except to try it out. Even the last touch, the painting of the Riverboat’s name in big black letters on the white hull, had been done. On both sides of the hull, ten feet above the waterline, were the letters NOT FOR HIRE.

“What does that mean, Sam?” he had been asked by many.

“It means just what it says, contrary to most words in print or speech,” Sam said. “The boat is no man’s to hire. It’s a free boat and its crew are free souls. No man’s.”

“And why is the boat’s launch called Post No Bills?”

“That comes from a dream I had,” Sam would say. “Somebody was trying to put up advertising on it, and I told him that the launch was built for no mercenary purpose. What do you think I am, advance agent for P. T. Barnum? I said.”

There was more to the dream, but Sam told no one except Joe about this.

“But the man who was pasting up those garish posters, advertising the coming of the greatest Riverboat of them all and the greatest Riverboat show of them all, was I!” Sam said. “I was both men in the dream!”

“I don’t get it, Tham,” Joe said.

Sam gave up on him.

28

The twenty-sixth anniversary of Resurrection Day was the day that the side-wheeler Not For Hire first turned its paddles. It was about an hour after the grailstones flamed to charge the breakfast grails. The cables and cap connected to the grailstone had been removed and the cables wound up within the hold through a port in the forward section on the starboard side. The grails had been removed from the stone a mile north and rushed to the big boat in the amphibious, armored, steam-driven launch, the Post No Bills. The fabulous Riverboat, gleaming white with red and black and green trimmings, moved out from the canal and into The River behind a huge breakwater on its starboard side. This deflected the current so that the boat would not be swung to the south as it emerged from the canal and so carried into the edge of the canal’s mouth.

Whistles blowing, iron bells clanging, the passengers cheering as they leaned over the railings, the people on the banks shouting, the magnificent paddle wheels churning, the Not For Hire moved with stately grace out into The River.

The Riverboat had an overall length of four hundred and forty feet and six inches. The beam over the paddle-wheel guards was ninety-three feet. The mean draft loaded was twelve feet. The giant electric motors driving the paddle wheels delivered ten thousand shaft horsepower and enough power left to take care of all the boat’s electrical needs, which were many. Top speed, theoretically, was forty-five miles an hour in still water. Going upstream against the fifteen-mile-an-hour current, it would be thirty. Going downstream, it would be sixty. The boat would be going up The River most of the time and cruising at fifteen miles an hour relative to the ground.

There were four decks: the so-called boiler deck, the main deck, the hurricane deck, and the landing deck. The pilothouse was at the fore edge of the hurricane deck, and the long texas, containing the captain’s and chief officers’ quarters, was behind the pilothouse. However, the pilothouse was itself double-decked. It was set forward of the two tall but thin smokestacks which rose thirty feet high. Firebrass had advised against the stacks, because the smoke from the big boilers (used only to heat water and to drive the machine guns) could be piped out on the side. But Sam had snorted and said, “What do I care about air resistance? I want beauty! And beauty is what we’ll get! Whoever heard of a Riverboat without tall, graceful, impressive smokestacks! Have you no soul, brother?”

There were sixty-five cabins, each about twelve by twelve with snap-up beds and tables and folding chairs. Each cabin had a toilet and a washbasin with hot and cold running water, and there was a shower for every six cabins.

There were three big lounges, one in the texas, one on the hurricane deck, and one on the main deck. These held pool tables, dart games, gymnastic equipment, card tables, a movie screen, and a stage for dramas or musicals, and the main deck lounge held a podium for the orchestra.

The upper deck of the pilothouse was luxuriously furnished with carved oaken chairs and tables covered with red and white and black Riverdragon-fish leather. The pilot sat in a large and comfortable swivel chair before the instrument board. On this was a bank of small closed-circuit TV screens, giving him views of the control center of the boat. Before him was a microphone which enabled him to speak to anybody on the boat. He controlled the boat with two levers on a small movable board before him. The left stick controlled the port wheel; the right, the starboard. A screen before him was a radar indicator used at night. Another screen showed him the depth of the water from the bottom of the boat as measured by sonar. A toggle on the instrument board could switch the piloting to automatic, though the rule was that a pilot had to be on duty at all times.

Sam was dressed in bleached fish-leather sandals, a white kilt, a white cape, and a white officer’s cap of plastic and leather. He wore a bleached leather belt with a bleached holster containing a ponderous Mark II .69 four-shooter pistol and a bleached sheath with a ten-inch knife.

He paced back and forth, a big green cigar in his mouth, his hands held straight down except when he removed the cigar. He watched the pilot, Robert Styles, steering the boat for the first time. Styles was an old Mississippi pilot, a handsome youth, no liar, though given to inflating facts. When he had appeared about two years before, Sam had been overcome with joy. For one of the few times in his life, he had wept. He had known Rob Styles when they were both Mississippi pilots.

Styles was nervous, as anybody would be the first time, even the steel-nerved Captain Isaiah Sellers of ancient Mississippi fame. There was nothing to piloting the boat. A one-eyed Sunday school teacher with a hangover could do it, his six-year-old child could do it, once he got the hang of the two sticks. Push forward for increased speed, put in the middle position to stop the wheels, pull back to reverse the wheels. To steer the boat to port, pull back a little on the port stick and forward a little on the starboard stick. To steer to starboard, do the reverse.

But it took some practice before the proper coordination was achieved.

Luckily, there was no memory work involved in piloting a boat on this River. There were no islands, no sandbars, and there would be few logs with snags. If the boat got too close to shallow water, sonar activated an alarm bell. If a boat was ahead at night, or a log hidden in the water, the radar or sonar would indicate it and a red light would flash.

Sam watched Styles for half an hour while the banks floated by and the thousands of people on them waved and cheered. Or cursed, since many were disappointed because they had been eliminated from the crew by the lottery. But he couldn’t hear the curses.

Then Sam took over the piloting, and, after another half hour, asked John if he would like to try. John was dressed entirely in black, as if he were determined to do just the opposite of whatever Sam did. But he took the sticks and did well for an ex-king who had never done a lick of work in his life and had always let inferiors do whatever steering was necessary.

The boat sailed up past the dead Iyeyasu’s kingdom, now split into three states again, and then Sam ordered the vessel turned back. Rob Styles got fancy and pivoted her “on a dime,” as he said, demonstrating her maneuverability. While the port wheel backed, the starboard raced at full speed and the boat rotated as if stuck on a pin. Then she headed downstream. With the current and wind behind her, and the paddle wheels turning at maximum speed, the Not For Hire raced along at sixty miles an hour. But not for too long. Sam had Styles bring her in close to the shore, where the sonar indicated about one foot of clearance between hull and bottom on the port side. Even above the slapping of the wheels and the splashing of water and the whistling and clanging of bells, they could hear the crowds. The faces whizzed by as if in a dream.

Sam opened the fore ports of the pilothouse so they could feel the wind and increase their impression of speed.

The Not For Hire raced all the way downstream to Selinujo, and then it turned again. Sam wished, almost, that there was another boat that he could race against. But it was being in heaven to have the only metal, electrically powered Riverboat in existence. A man couldn’t have everything, not even in the after-Earthlife.

During the return trip, the huge hatch in the stern was lowered, and the launch slipped out through the entrance into The River. It cut back and forth at top speed and raced ahead of the mother boat. Its steam machine guns traced lines along the water, and the thirty steam guns on the Not For Hire shot back, though not at the launch.

The big three-place amphibian monoplane came out of the opening in the stern, too, and its wings were straightened out and locked, and then it took off. Firebrass was at the controls with his woman and Gwenafra as passengers.

A moment later, the tiny, one-seater open-cockpit scout-fighter was shot off the top of the texas by a steam catapult. Lothar von Richtofen took it up, the wood-alcohol-burning motor buzzing, and raced ahead until he was out of sight. Then he returned, climbed, and entertained with the first aerial acrobatics that the Riverworld had ever seen—to the best of Sam’s knowledge.

Lothar concluded with a dive at the end of which he fired four rockets into the water and then the twin machine guns. These were .80 caliber and shot aluminum bullets from aluminum cartridges. There were one hundred thousand of these stored on the boat, and when they were all gone, they would not be replaced.

Lothar landed the tiny monoplane on the landing deck, the top of the texas, and the devices caught the hook trailed out by the plane. Even so, the whirling propeller stopped only ten feet from the smokestacks. Lothar took the plane up again and again landed. Then Firebrass returned in the amphibian, and he later took the wheeled plane up for one flight.

Sam looked down through the port front at the marines drilling on the fore part of the broad boiler deck. Under the midnoon sun, which heated the air to an estimated eighty degrees Fahrenheit, they marched back and forth and performed intricate maneuvers under Cyrano’s orders. Their silvery duralumin plumed helmets were like those of the ancient Romans. They wore gray-and-red-striped chainmail shirts which fell halfway down their thighs. Their legs were cased in leather boots. They carried rapiers and long knives and the Mark II pistols. They were the pistoleers only, however. The main part of the marines were watching the show; these were the bowmen and the rocketeers.

Seeing Gwenafra’s honey-colored head in the crowd on the main deck made him happy.

He saw Livy’s dark head near her, and he was unhappy.

Gwenafra, after another six months of jealousy-ridden life with von Richthofen, had accepted Sam’s offer and moved in with him. But Sam still could not see Livy without some pain of loss.

If it were not for Livy, and for John’s presence, he would have been as happy as he could be. But she would be with them throughout the possible forty years of the journey. And John, well, John made him uneasy and prowled through his nightmares.

John had been so willing to let Sam be the captain and so unhesitant about accepting the first mate’s position that Sam knew he was up to no good. But when would The Mutiny, as Sam thought of it, take place? It was inevitable that John would try to take over the full command of the Riverboat, and any intelligent man, knowing this, would have dumped him, one way or the other.

But Sam had been too conscience-stricken by his killing of Bloodaxe. He could not commit another assassination, not even if he knew that John would not be permanently dead. A corpse was a corpse, and a double cross was a double cross.

The question was, when would John strike? At the beginning, or much later during the voyage, when Sam’s suspicions had been lulled?

Actually, the situation was intolerable. But then it was surprising how much intolerableness a man could tolerate.

A yellow-haired, near-giant entered the pilothouse. His name was Augustus Strubewell, he was John’s aide-de-camp, and he had been picked up by John during his sojourn in Iyeyasujo after Hacking’s invasion. He had been born in 1971 in San Diego, California, had been an All-American fullback, a captain of the U.S. Marines, decorated for bravery in the Middle East and South America, and had made a career in the movies and TV. He seemed a pleasant enough fellow, except that, like John, he bragged of his conquests among women. Sam did not trust him. Anybody who worked for John Lackland had to have something wrong with him.

Sam shrugged. He might as well enjoy himself for the moment. Why let anything rob him of the joy of the greatest day of his life?

He leaned out of the port and watched the marine drill team and the crowd. The sun sparkled on waves, and the breeze was cooling. If it became too warm, he could shut the ports and turn on the air conditioning. From the tall pole on the bow the flag of the Not For Hire flapped in the wind. It was square and bore a scarlet phoenix on a light-blue field. The phoenix symbolized the rebirth of mankind.

He waved at the people massed along the bank and pressed a button which set off a series of steam whistles and clanging of bells.

He drew in smoke from his fine cigar and stuck his chest out and paraded back and forth. Strubewell handed John a glass full of bourbon, and then he offered Sam another. Everybody in the pilothouse—Styles, the six other pilots, Joe Miller, von Richthofen, Firebrass, Publius Crassus, Mozart, Strubewell, and three other of John’s aides—took a glass.

“A toast, gentlemen,” John said in Esperanto. “To a long and happy journey and may we all get what we deserve.”

Joe Miller, standing near Sam, the top of his head almost touching the ceiling, held a glass containing about half a quart of bourbon. He sniffed at the amber liquor with his monstrous proboscis and then tasted it with the tip of his tongue.

Sam was just about to toss the four-ounce drink down when he saw Joe’s apish face grimace.

“What’s the matter, Joe?” he said.

“Thith thtuff hath thomething in it!”

Sam sniffed and could detect nothing but the most excellent of Kentucky’s best.

But when John and Strubewell and the others reached for their weapons, he threw the liquor in John’s face. Yelling, “It’s poison!” he dived for the floor.

Strubewell’s Mark II pistol boomed. The plastic bullet shattered against the bulletproof plastic of the port above Sam’s head.

Joe roared—he sounded like a lion suddenly released from its cage—and he threw his liquor into Strubewell’s face.

The other aides fired once and then they fired again. The Mark II pistols were four-shot revolvers which electrically ignited the powder in the aluminum cartridges. They were even larger and heavier than the Mark I’s, but they could be fired much more swiftly, and cordite, not black gunpowder, propelled the plastic bullets.

The pilothouse became a fury of booming, deafening explosives, the scream of shattered plastic ricocheting, the shouts and screams of men, and the bellowing of Joe.

Sam rolled over, reached up, and flicked the automatic pilot switch. Rob Styles was on the floor, his arm almost torn off. One of John’s aides was dying in front of him. Strubewell went flying over him and banged against the glass and then fell on him. John was gone, fled down the ladder.

Sam crawled out from under Strubewell. Four of his pilots were dead. All of the aides, except for Strubewell, who was only unconscious, were dead. Their necks had been broken or their jaws shattered by Joe. Mozart was crouched quivering in a corner. Firebrass was bleeding from the many plastic fragments, and Lothar was bleeding from a gash in his arm. One of the aides had struck him with a knife just before Joe twisted his head 180 degrees.

Sam arose shakily and looked out the port. The crowd watching the marines had dispersed, but not without leaving a dozen bodies behind. The marines on the boiler deck were firing at men shooting at them from around the sides of the main deck. Some of the fire seemed to be coming from the cabin ports in the main deck.

Cyrano stood with his rapidly dwindling crew of marines, shouting orders. Then John’s men charged, firing, and Cyrano went down. But he was up again, his sword silvery and then red. The enemy broke and ran away, and Cyrano ran after them. Sam shouted, “You fool! Go back!” but he was not heard, of course.

He tried to struggle out of his shock. John had slipped something into their drinks, poison or a sedative, and only Joe’s sub-humanly sensitive nose had saved them from drinking and then keeling over and allowing John to take over the pilothouse with little trouble.

He looked out the starboard port. Only a half mile ahead was the huge breakwater behind which the boat was to anchor for the night. Tomorrow, the long journey would officially begin. Would have begun, he thought.

He flicked off the automatic pilot toggle switch and took the control sticks in his hands.

“Joe,” he said, “I’m going to run this right up alongside the bank. I may even ground us. Get out the bullhorn. I’ll tell the people ashore what’s happened, and we’ll get help.”

He pulled back on the starboard stick and advanced the port stick.

“What’s wrong?” he yelled.

The boat was proceeding straight on its course up The River, holding to a distance of about a hundred yards off the shore.

He moved the sticks back and forth, frantically, but the boat did not deviate.

John’s voice came from the intercom.

“It’s no use, Samuel, Boss, Captain, swine! I have control of the boat. My engineer, the man who will be chief engineer, put in a duplicate set of controls…never mind where. I have cut off your controls, and the boat will go where I want it to. So you don’t have any advantage at all. Now my men will storm the pilothouse and take you. But I would prefer that there be as little damage as possible. So, if you will just get off the boat, I will let you go unharmed. Provided, that is, that you can swim a hundred yards.”

Sam raged and swore and pounded his fists on the instrument panel. But the boat continued on past the dock, while the crowds gathered there waved and cheered and wondered why the boat did not stop.

Lothar, looking out of the stern port, said, “They’re trying to sneak up on us!” and he fired at a man who had appeared around the far end of the texas on the hurricane deck.

“We can’t hold out long!” Firebrass said. “We don’t have much ammunition!”

Sam looked at the fore ports. Some men and women had run out onto the boiler deck and then turned for a stand.

Livy was among them.

There was another charge. A man thrust at Cyrano, who was engaged in running his rapier through the man next to him. Livy tried to knock the blade aside with her pistol, which must have been empty, but the sword went into her stomach. She fell backward with the sword still sticking out of her. The man who had killed her died a second later, when Cyrano’s rapier went through his throat.

Sam cried, “Livy! Livy!” and he was out through the door of the pilothouse and running down the ladder. Bullets screamed by him and smashed against the bulkheads and the ladder. He felt a stinging and then heard a shouting behind him, but he did not stop. He was vaguely aware that Joe Miller and the others had run out after him. Perhaps they were trying to rescue him or perhaps they knew that they might as well get out now before they were overwhelmed in the trap of the pilothouse.

There were corpses and wounded everywhere. John’s men had not been numerous; he had depended upon surprise, and it had not failed him. Dozens had been shot down in the first volleys, and dozens more had been shot during the panic. Many more had jumped into the water, seeing that there was no way of escape, no place to hide, and they were not armed.

Now the boat was turning into shore, its paddle wheels operating at full speed, the water flying, the wheels chuff-chuffing, the deck trembling. John was turning the boat into shore, where a number of heavily armed men and women awaited him.

These would be the disaffected, the people who were angered because the lottery had cut them out of a place on the crew. Once they got aboard, they would sweep away the few left in Sam’s party.

Sam had run along the hurricane deck after leaving the pilothouse ladder. He held a pistol with two shots left in it and his rapier in the other hand. He did not know how they had gotten into his hands; he had no memory of having removed them from his holster and sheath.

A face appeared at the edge of the deck on the ladder just ahead. He fired at it, and the face dropped back. He was on the edge of the deck then and shooting even as he leaned over to look down the ladder. The plastic bullet did not miss this time. The man’s chest erupted red, and he fell back down the ladder, taking two men with him. But others on the deck below raised their pistols, and he had to jump back. The volley missed him, though some bullets striking the edge blew apart and the fragments stung him on the legs.

Joe Miller, behind him, said, “Tham! Tham! There’th nothing to do but jump for it! They got uth thurrounded!”

Below, Cyrano, still wielding his rapier, holding off three men at one time, backed to the railing. Then his blade pierced a throat, the man fell, and Cyrano whirled and leaped over the railing. When he came up he began to swim strongly to get away from the starboard paddle wheel thrashing toward him.

Bullets struck the sides of the cabins behind Sam, and Lothar cried, “Jump, Sam! Jump!”

But they could not jump yet. They could not have cleared the main deck below, let alone the boiler deck.

Joe had already turned and was running with his great ax toward the men firing from behind the rear of the cabins along the hurricane deck. The bullets streaked toward him, wobbling, leaving a thin trail of smoke, but he was too far away to worry about their accuracy. And he was depending upon his terrifying aspect and his prowess, which they well knew, to panic them.

The others ran behind him until they came to the great paddle-wheel housing. This was about ten feet from the edge of the hurricane deck, and if they stood up on the railing and leaped out, they could grab hold of the big iron eyes through which cables had been secured when the housing had been lifted and then placed over the wheel by the crane.

They jumped, one after the other, while bullets screamed by. They grabbed the eye, their bodies banging into the side of the hard metal housing. But they pulled themselves up and onto the top of the housing and crawled over, stood up, and jumped out. The water was thirty feet below, a height which would have made Sam hesitate under different conditions. This time, he went out, fell straight, holding his nose, and plunged into the water feet first.

He came up in time to see Joe jump off, not from the housing but from the main deck. He had fought down the ladder and out across the deck, scattering the pygmies before him. Even so, his hairy skin was splotched with blood. He went over the side in a dive with pistols booming and arrows streaking after him.

Sam dived then, because several of the steam machine guns had been depressed and the .80 caliber bullets were probing for him.

The boat turned back about two minutes later. John must have discovered that his chief enemy had escaped. By then, Sam was ashore and running, though he thought his legs would fold under him. The firing was not renewed. Perhaps John had changed his mind about killing him. He would want Sam to suffer, and Sam would suffer most if he were still at the site of his defeat.

John’s voice boomed out from a bullhorn. “Farewell, Samuel! You fool! Thanks for building the Riverboat for me! And I will change its name to one which will suit me better! I go now to enjoy the fruits of your labors! Think of me as much as you please! Farewell!”

His bullhorn-amplified laughter blasted Sam’s ears.

Sam came out of his hiding place in a hut and climbed the wall on the edge of the water. The boat had stopped and let down a long gangplank on cables to permit the traitors to come aboard. He heard a voice below him and looked down. There was Joe, his reddish hairs black with water except where the blood was starting to appear again.

“Lothar and Firebrath and Thyrano and Johnthton made it,” he said. “How you feel, Tham?”

Sam sat down on the hard-packed dirt and said, “If it would do any good, I’d kill myself. But this world is hell, Joe, genuine hell. You can’t even commit a decent suicide. You wake up the next day, and there you are with your problems stuck on you with glue or stuck…well, never mind.”

“Vhat do ve do now, Tham?”

Sam did not reply for a long time. If he couldn’t have Livy, Cyrano could not have her, either. He could endure the thought of having lost her if she were not where he could see her.

Later, the shame at exulting in Cyrano’s loss would come.

Not now. He was too stunned. The loss of the boat had been even a greater shock than seeing Livy killed.

After all these years of hard work, of grief, of betrayal, of planning, of hurting, of…of…

It was too much to bear.

Joe was grieved to see him cry, but he sat patiently by until Sam’s tears had quit flowing. Then he said, “Do ve thtart building another boat, Tham?”

Sam Clemens rose to his feet. The gangplank was being drawn up by the electromechanical machinery of his fabulous Riverboat. Whistles were shrilling exultantly, and bells were clanging. John would still be laughing. He might even be watching Sam through a telescope.

Sam shook his fist, hoping that John was watching him.

“I’ll get you yet, traitor John!” he howled. “I’ll build another boat, and I’ll catch up with you! I don’t care what obstacles I encounter or who gets in my way! I’ll run you down, John, and I’ll blast your stolen boat out of The River with my new boat! And nobody, absolutely nobody, the Stranger, the Devil, God, nobody, no matter what his powers, is going to stop me!

“Some day, John! Some day!”

EPILOGUE

Volume III of the Riverworld series will take Sam Clemens all the way up The River with Richard Francis Burton and the rest of The Twelve to the Misty Tower and the secret of the Ethicals.

Technological note: Potassium nitrate is prepared on the Riverworld by feeding a certain type of earthworm human excrement. The end product of this diet is crystallized potassium nitrate, which, mixed with charcoal and sulfur, makes black gunpowder.

PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF
RIVERWORLD

“Farmer’s blend of intellectual daring and pulp-fiction prose found a worldwide audience.…Sprawling, episodic works gave him room to explore the nuances of a provocative premise while indulging his taste for lurid, violent action.”

—The New York Times

To Your Scattered Bodies Go

“One of the most imaginative worlds in science fiction!”

—Booklist

“From the beginning, To Your Scattered Bodies Go gripped me in a way few books have been able to match.”

—SF Site

The Dark Design

“Its publication is an event with a capital E!”

—Parade of Books

The Magic Labyrinth

“A wide-screen adventure that never fails to provoke, amuse, and educate…His imagination is of the first rank…his velocity breathtaking.…Charts a territory somewhere between Gulliver’s Travels and The Lord of the Rings.”

—Time

“This book, like the series as a whole, offers delight to the sense of wonder and storytelling flow as irresistible as the river itself.”

—Publishers Weekly

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Lovers
Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life
Lord Tyger
Strange Relations
Tarzan Alive
Time’s Last Gift
Traitor to the Living
The Stone God Awakens
Flesh
Behind the Walls of Terra
Image of the Beast
Blown
A Feast Unknown
The Gates of Creation
The Maker of Universes
Night of Light
A Private Cosmos
The Wind Whales of Ishmael
The Lavalite World
Jesus on Mars
Dark Is the Sun
The Unreasoning Mask
Inside-Outside
The Alley God
The Book of Philip José Farmer
Dayworld
Dayworld Rebel

THE RIVERWORLD SERIES

To Your Scattered Bodies Go
The Fabulous Riverboat
The Dark Design
The Magic Labyrinth
The Gods of Riverworld

Riverworld and Other Stories

Riverworld: Including To Your Scattered Bodies Go
and The Fabulous Riverboat

Red Orc’s Rage

The Dark Heart of Time: A Tarzan Novel

THE

DARK DESIGN

PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

New York

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and
events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE DARK DESIGN

Copyright © 1977 by The Estate of Philip José Farmer

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com

Tor ® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 978-0-7653-2654-6

First Tor Edition: June 2010

Printed in the United States of America

0   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Though some of the names in the Riverworld series are fictional, the characters are or were real. You may not be mentioned, but you’re here.

To Sam Long and my godson David,
son of Doctor Docter

Contents

Cover Page

Other Books By This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

And still the Weaver plies his loom, whose warp and woof is wretched Man

Weaving th’ unpattern’d dark design, so dark we doubt it owns a plan.

—The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû al-Yazdi

Sentence first—verdict afterwards.

—Alice in Wonderland

PREFACE

The book at hand is volume III of the Riverworld series. Originally, it was to be the conclusion of a trilogy. However, the MS was more than 400,000 words long. Published under one cover, it would be too heavy and unwieldy for the reader.

Therefore, the publisher and myself decided to cut it into two. Volume IV, The Magic Labyrinth, will follow this book. It will definitely conclude this phase of the series, explain all the mysteries set forth in the first three volumes, tie up all ends in a knot, Gordian or otherwise.

Any novels about the Riverworld after volume IV are not to be considered as part of the mainstream of the series. These will be the “sidestream,” stories not directly concerned with mystery and the quests of the first three. My decision to write these is based on my belief—and that of many others—that the Riverworld concept is too big to compress within four volumes. After all, we have a planet on which a single river, or a very long and narrow sea, runs for 16,090,000 kilometers, or about 10,000,000 miles. More than thirty-six billion people live along its banks, human beings who existed from the Old Stone Age through the first part of the Electronic Age.

There is not room in the first four volumes to chronicle many events which might interest the reader. For instance, the resurrectees were not distributed along The River according to the chronological sequence in which they had been born on Earth. There was a considerable mixture of races and nationalities from different centuries. Take as an example one of the many thousands of blocs along the banks. This would be in an area ten kilometers long, and the people comprising it would be 60 percent third-century a.d. Chinese, 39 percent seventeenth-century a.d. Russians, and 1 percent men and women from anywhere and any time.

How would these people manage to form a viable state from anarchy? How would they succeed, or fail, in their efforts to get along with each other and to form a body which could defend itself against hostile states? What problems would they have?

In the book at hand, Jack London, Tom Mix, Nur ed-din el-Musafir, and Peter Jairus Frigate sail on the Razzle Dazzle II up The River. There is considerable characterization of Frigate and Nur in volumes III and IV. However, there was not enough space to fully develop the characters of the others. So, the “sidestream” stories will give me scope to do this.

These will also relate how the crew of the Razzle Dazzle meet some major and minor representatives of various fields of human endeavor. These should include da Vinci, Rousseau, Karl Marx, Rameses II, Nietzsche, Bakunin, Alcibiades, Eddy, Ben Jonson, Li Po, Nichiren Daishonin, Asoka, an Ice Age cavewife, Joan of Arc, Gilgamesh, Edwin Booth, Faust et al.

It’s been apparent to some that Peter Jairus Frigate remarkably resembles the author. It is true that I am the basis for that character, but Frigate has approximately the similarity to me that David Copperfield has to Charles Dickens. The author’s physical and psychic features are only a springboard for propelling reality into that parareality—fiction.

I apologize to the readers for the cliffhanger endings of the first three volumes. The structure of the series was such that I could not emulate that of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. In these each volume seemed to have a definite conclusion, the mystery seemingly solved, only to reveal in the sequel that the previous ending was false or misleading.

I hope to finish the series, volumes I through V (or possibly VI), before it’s my time to lie down and rest while waiting to board the fabulous riverboat.

Dreams haunted The Riverworld.

Sleep, night’s Pandora, was even more generous than on Earth. There, it had been this for you and that for your neighbor. Tomorrow, that for you and this for next door.

Here in this endless valley, along these unceasing Riverbanks, she dumped her treasure chest, showering everybody with all gifts: terror and pleasure, memory and anticipation, mystery and revelation.

Billions stirred, muttered, groaned, whimpered, laughed, cried out, swam to wakefulness, sank back again.

Mighty engines battered the walls, and things wriggled out through the holes. Often, they did not retreat but stayed, phantoms who refused to fade at cockcrow.

Also, for some reason, dreams recurred more frequently than on the mother planet. The actors of the nocturnal Theater of the Absurd insisted on return engagements, performances which they, not the patrons, commanded. The attendees were powerless to jeer or applaud, to throw eggs and cabbages or walk out, to chatter with their seatmates or doze.

Among this captive audience was Richard Francis Burton.

Fog, gray and swirling, formed the stage and the backdrop. Burton stood in the pit like an Elizabethan too poor to afford a seat. Above him were thirteen figures, all in chairs which floated in the mist. One of them faced the others, who were arranged in a semicircle. That man was the protagonist—himself.

There was a fourteenth person there, though it stood in the wings and could be seen only by the Burton in the pit. It was a black, menacing shape which, now and then, chuckled hollowly.

A not quite similar scene had happened before, once in reality and many times in dreams, though who could be sure which was which? There he was, the man who’d died seven hundred and seventy times in a vain effort to elude his pursuers. And there sat the twelve who called themselves the Ethicals.

Six were men; six, women. Except for two, all had deeply tanned or heavily pigmented skins and black or dark brown hair. The eyes of two men and a woman had slight epicanthic folds, which made him think that they were Eurasians. That is, they were if they had originated on Earth.

Only two of the twelve had been named during the brief inquisition—Loga and Thanabur. Neither name seemed to be of any language he knew, and he knew at least a hundred. However, languages change, and it was possible that they might be from the fifty-second century A.D. One of their agents had told them that he came from that time. But Spruce had been under threat of torture and might have been lying.

Loga was one of the few with comparatively pale skins. Since he was sitting and there was (and had been) nothing material to measure him against, he could be short or tall. His body was thick and muscular, and his chest was matted with red hair. The hair on his head was fox-red. He had irregular and strong features: a prominent, deeply clefted chin; a massive jaw; a large and aquiline nose; thick pale-yellow eyebrows; wide, full lips; and dark green eyes.

The other light-skinned man, Thanabur, was obviously the leader. His physique and face were so much like Loga’s that they could be brothers. His hair, however, was dark brown. One eye was green, though a rare leaf-green.

The other eye had startled Burton when Thanabur had first turned his face toward him. Instead of the green mate he had expected, he saw a jewel. It looked like an enormous blue diamond, a flashing, multifaceted precious stone set in his eye socket.

He felt uneasy whenever that jewel was turned on him. What was its purpose? What did it see in him that a living eye could not see?

Of the twelve, only three had spoken: Loga, Thanabur, and a slim but full-breasted blonde with large blue eyes. From the manner in which she and Loga spoke to each other, Burton thought that they could be husband and wife.

Watching them offstage, Burton noted again that just above the heads of each, his other self included, was a globe. They whirled, were of many changing colors, and extended six-sided arms, green, blue, black, and white. Then the arms would shrink into the globe, only to be replaced by others.

Burton tried to correlate the rotating spheres and the mutation in the arms with the personalities of the three and of himself, with their physical appearances, with the tones of their voices, with the meanings of their words, with their emotional attitudes. He failed to find any significant linkages.

When the first, the real, scene had taken place, he had not seen his own aura.

The spoken lines were not quite the same as during the actual event. It was as if the Dream-Maker had rewritten the scene.

Loga, the red-haired man, said, “We had a number of agents looking for you. They were a pitifully small number, considering the thirty-six billion, six million, nine thousand, six hundred and thirty-seven candidates that are living along The River.”

“Candidates for what?” the Burton on the stage said.

In the first performance, he had not uttered that line.

“That’s for us to know and you to find out,” Loga said.

Loga flashed teeth that seemed inhumanly white. He said, “We had no idea that you were escaping us by suicide. The years went by. There were other things for us to do, so we pulled all agents from the Burton Case, as we called it, except for some stationed at both ends of The River. Somehow, you had knowledge of the polar tower. We found out how later.”

Burton, the watcher, thought, But you didn’t find out from X.

He tried to get nearer to the actors so he could look at them more closely. Which one was the Ethical who had awakened him in the preresurrection place? Which one had visited him during the stormy, lightning-racked night? Who was it that had told him that he must help him? Who was the renegade whom Burton knew only as X?

He struggled against the wet, cold mists, as ethereal yet as strong as the magic chains which had bound the monster wolf Fenrir until Ragnarok, the doom of the gods.

Loga said, “We would have caught you, anyway. You see, every space in the restoration bubble—the place where you unaccountably awakened during the preresurrection phase—has an automatic counter. Any candidate who has a higher than average number of deaths is a subject for study sooner or later. Usually later, since we’re short-handed.

“We had no idea it was you who had racked up the staggering number of seven hundred and seventy-seven deaths. Your space in the PR bubble was empty when we looked at it during our statistical investigation. The two technicians who had seen you when you woke up in the PR chamber identified you by your… photograph.

“We set the resurrector so that the next time your body was to be recreated, an alarm would notify us, and we would bring you here to this place.”

But Burton had not died again. Somehow, they had located him while he was alive. Though he had run away again, he had been caught. Or had he? Perhaps, as he ran through the night, he had been killed by lightning. And they were waiting for him in the PR bubble. That vast chamber which he supposed was somewhere deep under the surface of this planet or in the tower of the polar sea.

Loga said, “We’ve made a thorough search of your body. We have also screened every component of your… psychomorph. Or aura, whichever word you prefer.”

He pointed at the flashing, whirling globe above the Burton who sat in the chair facing him.

Then the Ethical did a strange thing.

He turned and looked out into the mists and pointed at Burton, the watcher.

“We found no clues whatsoever.”

The dark figure in the wings chuckled.

The Burton in the pit called out, “You think there are only twelve of you! There are thirteen! An unlucky number!”

“It’s quality, not quantity, that matters,” the thing offstage said.

“You won’t remember a thing that occurs down here after we send you back to the Rivervalley,” Loga said.

The Burton in the chair said something that he had not said in the original inquisition.

“How can you make me forget?”

“We have run off your memory as if it were a tape recording,” Thanabur said. He talked as if he were lecturing. Or was he warning Burton because he was X?

“Of course, it took a long time to run your memory track for the seven years since you’ve been here. And it required an enormous amount of energy and materials. But the computer Loga monitored was set to run your memory at high speed and stop only when you were visited by that filthy renegade. So, we know what happened then exactly as you knew what happened. We saw what you saw, heard what you heard, felt what you touched, what you smelled. We even experienced your emotions.

“Unfortunately, you were visited at night, and the traitor was effectively disguised. Even his voice was filtered through a distorter which prevented the computer from analyzing his—or her—voiceprints. I say his or her because all you saw was a pale thing without identifiable features, sexual or otherwise. The voice seemed to be masculine, but a female could have used a transmitter to make it seem a man’s.

“The body odor was also false. The computer analyzed it, and it’s obvious that a chemical complex altered that.

“In short, Burton, we have no idea which of us is the renegade, nor do we have any idea why he or she would be working against us. It is almost inconceivable that anyone who knew the truth would try to betray us. The only explanation is that the person is insane. And that, too, is inconceivable.”

The Burton in the pit knew, somehow, that Thanabur had not spoken those words during the first performance, the real drama. He also knew that he was dreaming, that he was sometimes putting words in Thanabur’s mouth. The man’s speech was made up of Burton’s own thoughts, speculations, and fantasies which were afterthoughts.

The Burton in the chair voiced some of these.

“If you can read a person’s mind—tape it, as it were—why don’t you read your own minds? Surely you have done that? And just as surely, you would have found your traitor.”

Loga, looking uncomfortable, said, “We submitted to a reading, of course. But…”

He raised his shoulders and spread out his palms upward.

Thanabur said, “So, the person you call X must have been lying to you. He is not one of us but one of the second-order, an agent. We are calling them in for memory scanning. That takes time, however. We have plenty of that. The renegade will be caught.”

The Burton in the chair said, “And what if none of the agents is guilty?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Loga said. “In any event your memory of awakening in the preresurrection bubble will be erased. Also, your memory of the renegade’s visit and all events from that time on will be a blank space. We are truly sorry to have to do this violent act. But it is necessary, and the time will come, we hope, when we can make amends.”

The Burton in the chair said, “But… I will have many recollections of the preresurrection place. You forget that I often thought of that between the time I awoke on the banks and X’s visit. Also, I told many people about it.”

Thanabur said, “Ah, but do they really believe you? And if they do, what can they do about it? No, we do not want to remove your entire memory of your life here. It would cause you great distress; it would remove you from your friends. And”—here Thanabur paused—“it might slow down your progress.”

“Progress?”

“There is time for you to find out what that means. The insane person who claims to be aiding you was using you for his own purposes. He did not tell you that you were throwing away your opportunity for eternal life by carrying out his designs. He or she, whoever the traitor is, is evil. Evil, evil!”

“Now, now,” Loga said. “We all feel strongly about this but we must not forget. The… unknown is sick.”

The jewel-eyed man said, “To be sick is, in a sense, to be evil.”

The Burton in the chair threw back his head and laughed loudly and long.

“So you bastards don’t know everything?”

He stood up, the gray fog supporting him as if it were solid, and he shouted, “You don’t want me to get to the headwaters of The River! Why? Why?”

Loga said, “Au revoir. Forgive us for this violence.”

A woman pointed a short, slim blue cylinder at the Burton on the stage, and he crumpled. Two men, wearing only white kilts, emerged from the fog. They picked up the senseless body and carried it into the mists.

Burton tried again to get at the people on the stage. Failing, he shook his fist at them, and he cried, “You’ll never get me, you monsters!”

The dark figure in the wings applauded, but his hands made no noise.

Burton had expected to be placed in the area where he had been picked up by the Ethicals. Instead, he awoke in Theleme, the little state which he had founded.

Even more unexpected was that he had not been deprived of his memory. He remembered everything, even the inquisition with the twelve Ethicals.

Somehow, X had managed to fool the others.

Later, he got to wondering if they had lied to him and had not intended to tamper with his memory. That made no sense, but then he did not know what their intentions were.

At one time, Burton had been able to play two games of chess at the same time while blindfolded. That, however, only required skill, a knowledge of the rules, and familiarity with the board and the pieces. He did not know the rules of this game, nor did he know the powers of all the chessmen.

The dark design had no pattern.

Groaning, Burton half-awoke.

For a moment, he didn’t know where he was. Darkness surrounded him, darkness as thick as that which he felt filled him.

Familiar sounds reassured him. The ship was rubbing up against the dock, and water lapped against the hull. Alice was breathing softly by him. He touched her soft, warm back. Light footsteps came from above, Peter Frigate on night watch. Perhaps he was getting ready to wake up his captain. Burton had no idea what time it was.

There were other well-known sounds. Through the wooden partition the snores of Kazz and his woman, Besst, gurgled. And then, from the compartment behind theirs, the voice of Monat issued. He spoke in his native language, but Burton could not distinguish the words.

Doubtless, Monat was dreaming of far-off Athaklu. Of that planet with its “wild, weird clime” which circled the giant orange star, Arcturus.

He lay for a while, rigid as a corpse, thinking, Here I am, a one-hundred-and-one-year-old man in the body of a twenty-five-year-old.

The Ethicals had softened the hardened arteries of the candidates. But they had not been able to do anything about atherosclerosis of the soul. That repair was apparently left up to the candidate.

The dreams were going backward in time. The inquisition by the Ethicals had come last. But now he was dreaming that he was experiencing again the dream he’d had just before he awoke to the Last Trump. However, he was watching himself in the dream; he was both participant and spectator.

God was standing over him as he lay on the grass, as weak as a newly born baby. This time, He lacked the long, black, forked beard, and He was not dressed like an English gentleman of the fifty-third year of Queen Victoria’s reign. His only garment was a blue towel wrapped around His waist. His body was not tall, as in the original dream, but was short and broad and heavily muscled. The hairs on His chest were thick and curly and red.

The first time, Burton had looked into God’s face and seen his own. God had had the same black straight hair, the same Arabic face with the deep, dark eyes like spear points thrusting from a cave, the high cheekbones, the heavy lips, and the thrust-out, deeply cleft chin. However, His face no longer bore the scars of the Somali spear that had sliced through Burton’s cheek, knocking out teeth, its edge jammed into his palate, its point sticking out the other cheek.

The face looked familiar, but he couldn’t name its owner. It certainly was not that of Richard Francis Burton.

God still had the iron cane. Now He was poking Burton in the ribs.

“You’re late. Long past due for the payment of your debt, you know.”

“What debt?” the man on the grass said.

The Burton who was watching suddenly realized that fog was swirling around him, casting veils between the two before him. And a gray wall, expanding and contracting as if it were the chest of a breathing animal, was behind them.

“You owe for the flesh,” God said. He poked the ribs of the man on the grass. Somehow, the standing Burton felt the pain.

“You owe for the flesh and the spirit, which are one and the same thing.”

The man on the grass struggled to get onto his feet. He said, gasping, “Nobody can strike me and get away without a fight.”

Somebody snickered, and the standing Burton became aware of a dim, tall figure in the fog beyond.

God said, “Pay up, sir. Otherwise, I’ll be forced to foreclose.”

“Damned moneylender!” the man on the grass said. “I ran into your kind in Damascus.”

“This is the road to Damascus. Or it should be.”

The dark figure snickered again. The fog enclosed all. Burton awoke, sweating, hearing the last of his whimperings.

Alice turned and said sleepily, “Are you having a nightmare, Dick?”

“I’m all right. Go back to sleep.”

“You’ve been having many nightmares lately.”

“No more than on Earth.”

“Would you like to talk?”

“When I dream, I am talking.”

“But to yourself.”

“Who knows me better?” He laughed softly.

“And who can deceive you better,” she said a little tartly.

He did not reply. After a few seconds, she was breathing with the gentle rhythm of the untroubled. But she would not forget what had been said. He hoped that morning would not bring another quarrel.

He liked arguing; it enabled him to explode. Lately, however, their fights had left him unsatisfied, ready at once for another.

It was so difficult to blaze away at her without being overheard on this small vessel. Alice had changed much during their years together, but she still retained a ladylike abhorrence of, as she put it, washing their dirty linen in public. Knowing this, he pressed her too hard, shouted, roared, getting pleasure out of seeing her shrink. Afterward, he felt ashamed because he had taken advantage of her, because he had caused her shame.

All of which made him even more angry.

Frigate’s footsteps sounded on the deck. Burton thought of relieving Frigate early. He would not be able to get back to sleep; he’d suffered from insomnia most of his adult life on Earth and much here, too. Frigate would be grateful to get to bed. He had trouble staying awake when on watch.

He closed his eyes. Darkness was replaced by grayness. Now he saw himself in that colossal chamber without walls, floor, or ceiling. Naked, he was floating in a horizontal position in the abyss. As if suspended on an invisible, unfelt spit, he was turning slowly. Rotating, he saw that there were naked bodies above, to the sides, and below. Like him, their heads and pubic regions were shaven. Some were incomplete. A man nearby had a right arm which was skinless from the elbow down. Turning, he saw another body that had no skin at all and no muscles in the face.

At a distance was a skeleton with a mess of organs floating inside it.

Everywhere, the bodies were bounded at head and foot by red metallic-looking rods. They rose from the unseen floor and ascended to the unseen ceiling. They stood in rows as far as he could see, and in a vertical line between each pair hovered the wheeling bodies, rank on rank of sleepers, bodies as far down, bodies as far up, as the eye could encompass.

They formed vertical and horizontal lines stretching into gray infinity.

This time, watching, he felt some of the bewilderment and the terror of the first moment of awakening.

He, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, Her Majesty’s consul at the city of Trieste in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had died on Sunday, October 19, 1890.

Now he was alive in a place that was like no heaven or hell he had ever heard of.

Of all the millions of bodies he could see, he was the only one alive. Or awake.

The rotating Burton would be wondering why he was singled out for this unsought honor.

The watching Burton now knew why.

It was that Ethical whom Burton called X, the unknown quality, who had roused him. The renegade.

Now the suspended man had touched one of the rods. And that had broken some kind of circuit, and all the bodies between the rods had started to fall, Burton among them.

The watcher felt almost as much terror as when it had first occurred. This was a primal dream, the universal human dream of falling. Doubtless, it originated from the first man, the half-ape half-sentient, for whom the fall was a dread reality, not just a nightmare. The half-ape had leaped from one branch to another, thinking in his pride that he could span the gulf. And he had fallen because of his pride, which distorted his judgment.

Just as Lucifer’s fall had been caused by his pride.

Now that other Burton had grabbed a rod and was hanging on while the bodies, still turning slowly, hurtled past him, a cataract of flesh.

Now he looked up and saw an aerial machine, a green canoe shape, sinking down through the space between nearby rods. It was wingless, propellerless, apparently buoyed up by some kind of device unknown to the science of his day.

On its bow was a symbol: a white spiral which ended pointing to the right and from which point white threads flared.

In the reality, two men had looked over the side of the flying machine. And then, suddenly, the falling bodies slowed in their fall, and an invisible force seized him and brought his legs up and tore him loose from the rod. He floated upward, revolving, went past and above the canoe, and stopped. One of the men pointed a pencil-sized metal object at him.

Screaming with rage and hate and frustration, that Burton shouted, “I’ll kill! I’ll kill!”

The threat was an empty one, as empty as the darkness that stilled his fury.

Now, only one face looked over the edge of the machine. Though he could not see the man’s face, Burton thought it looked familiar. Whatever the features, they belonged to X.

The Ethical chuckled.

Burton sat upright and grabbed for the throat of X.

“For God’s sake, Dick! It’s me, Pete!”

Burton opened his hands from around Frigate’s throat. Starlight as bright as Earth’s full moon beamed in through the open doorway and silhouetted Frigate.

“It’s your watch, Dick.”

“Please be less noisy,” Alice murmured.

Burton rolled off the bed and felt the suit hanging from a peg. Though he was sweating, he shivered. The little cabin, hot from the night-long radiation of two bodies, was cooling now. The cold fog was pressing in.

Alice said, “Brrr!” and sounds indicated she was pulling the thick towels over her. Burton caught a glimpse of her white body before it was covered. He glanced at Frigate, but the American had turned and was heading up the ladder. Whatever his faults, he was not a Peeping Tom. Not that he could really blame the fellow if he had taken a look. He was more than half in love with Alice. He had never said so, but it was obvious to Burton, to Alice, and to Loghu, Frigate’s bunkmate.

If anybody was to blame, it was Alice. She had long ago lost her Victorian modesty. Though she would deny it, she may have, subconsciously, of course, teased Frigate with a quick flash of herself.

Burton decided not to bring that subject up. Though he was angry at both Frigate and Alice, he’d look like a fool if he said anything about this. Alice, like most people, bathed in The River in the nude, seemingly indifferent to the passersby. Frigate had seen her hundreds of times without clothing.

The night suit was composed of a number of thick towels held together by magnetic tabs underneath the cloth. Burton opened it and fitted the cloths to make a hooded garment around legs and body. He buckled on a belt of hornfish skin holding scabbards containing a flint knife, a chert axe, and a wooden sword. The edges of the latter were lined with tiny flint chips and its end held a sharp hornfish’s horn. He removed from a rack a heavy ash spear tipped with horn and went up the ladder.

Gaining the deck, he found that his head was above the fog. Frigate was his same height, and his head seemed to float bodiless above the swirling wool of the mists. The sky was bright, though The Riverworld had no moon. It blazed with stars and with vast, shining gas clouds. Frigate believed that this planet was near the center of Earth’s galaxy. But it could be inside some other galaxy, for all anybody knew.

Burton and his friends had built a vessel and had sailed from Theleme. The Hadji II, unlike its predecessor, was a cutter, a fore-and-aft rigged single-master. Aboard it were Burton, Hargreaves, Frigate, Loghu, Kazz, Besst, Monat Grrautut, and Owenone. The latter was a woman of ancient pre-Hellenic Pelasgia who did not mind at all sharing the Arcturan’s bunk. With his peculiar crew (Burton had a not always fortunate talent for collecting an unhomogeneous band of followers), he had voyaged upRiver for twenty-five years. One of the men with whom he had shared many adventures, Lev Ruach, had decided to stay in Theleme.

The Hadji II had not gotten as far as Burton had hoped. Since the crew had little elbow room, its members were in too close and constant contact with each other. It had been necessary to take long shore leaves so they could cool off their cabin fever.

Burton had decided that it was about time for another long liberty when the boat had sailed into this area. This was one of the rare widenings of The River, a lake about 20 miles or 32 kilometers long and 6 miles or 9.6 kilometers wide. At its western end the lake narrowed into a strait about a quarter-mile or 321 meters wide. The current boiled through this, but fortunately the prevailing wind here was behind a vessel going upstream. If the Hadji II had had to sail against the wind, it would have had little space to tack.

After looking at the strait, Burton thought that the passage could be made, though it would be close. However, now was the time to take a long rest. Instead of putting into one of the banks, he had stopped the boat alongside one of the scores of rocks that jutted up from the middle of the lake. These were tall spires with some level land at their bases. Some of them had grailstones, and around these were gathered a few huts.

The island-spire nearest the strait had a few floating docks. They would have been more convenient if they had been on the downcurrent side, but they were not, so the boat was taken alongside one. It was secured by lines to the posts and against the bumpers, bags of tough skins of alligator-fish filled with grass. The island’s inhabitants approached them cautiously. Burton quickly assured them of his peaceful intentions, and he politely asked if his crew could use the grailstone.

There were only twenty islanders—short, dark people whose native language was unknown to Burton. They spoke a degraded form of Esperanto, however, so there was little language barrier.

The grailstone was a massive mushroom-shaped structure of gray red-flecked granite. The surface of its top was as high as Burton’s chest and bore seven hundred round indentations in concentric circles.

Shortly before sunset, each person put in one of the shadow holes a tall cylinder of gray metal. English-speakers called it a grail, a pandora (or its shortened form, dora), a tucker box, lunch pail, glory bucket, and so on. The most popular name was that given it by the missionaries of the Church of the Second Chance. This was the Esperanto pandoro. Though the gray metal was as thin as a sheet of newspaper except for the base, it was unbendable, unbreakable, and indestructible.

The owners of the grails retreated about fifty paces and waited. Presently, intense blue flames roared upward from the top of the stone to 20 feet or a little over 6 meters. Simultaneously, every one of the stones lining the banks of the lake spat fire and shouted thunder.

A minute later, several of the little dark people climbed onto the stone and handed down the grails. The party sat down under a bamboo roof by a fire of bamboo and driftwood and opened the lids of the cylinders. Inside were racks holding cups and deep dishes, all filled with liquor, food, crystals of instant coffee or tea, cigarettes and cigars.

Burton’s grail contained both Slovene and Italian food. He had been first resurrected in an area consisting mainly of people who had died in the Trieste area, and the grails of these usually gave the type of food they had been accustomed to eat on Earth. About every ten days, however, the grails served something entirely different. Sometimes it was English, French, Chinese, Russian, Persian, or any of a hundred national foods. Occasionally it offered dishes which were disgusting, such as kangaroo meat, burned on the surface and raw underneath, or living grubworms. Burton had gotten this Australian aborigine meal twice.

Tonight the liquor cup contained beer. He hated beer, so he traded it for Frigate’s wine.

The islanders’ grails contained food, much of which reminded Burton of Mexican cuisine. However, the tacos and tortillas were packed with venison, not beef.

While they ate and talked, Burton questioned the locals. From their descriptions, he surmised that they were pre-Columbian Indians who had lived in a wide valley in the Southwest desert. They had been composed of two different tribes speaking related but mutually unintelligible languages. Despite this, the two groups had lived peacefully side by side and had formed a single culture, each of the groups differing only in a few traits.

He decided that they were the people whom the Pima Indians of his time had called Hohokam, The Ancient Ones. These had flourished in the area which the white settlers would call the Valley of the Sun. It was there that the village of Phoenix of the Arizona Territory had been founded, a village which, according to what he had been told, had become a city of over a million population in the late twentieth century.

These people called themselves the Ganopo. In their Terrestrial time they had dug long irrigation ditches with flint and wooden tools and turned the desert into a garden. But they had suddenly disappeared, leaving the American archaeologists to explain why. Various theories had been advanced to account for this. The most widely accepted was that belligerent invaders from the north had wiped them out, though there was no evidence for that.

Burton’s hopes that he could solve this mystery were quickly dissipated. These people had lived and died before their society came to an end.

They all sat up late that night, smoking and drinking the alcohol made from the lichen which coated their rock spire. They told stories, mostly obscene and absurd, and rolled on the ground with laughter. Burton, when he told Arabic tales, found it necessary not to use unfamiliar references or to explain them if they were simple enough to be understood. But they had no trouble grasping the stories of Aladdin and his magic lamp or of how Abu Hasan broke wind.

The latter had been a great favorite with the Bedouins. Burton had often sat around a fire of dried camel dung and sent his listeners into shrieks of laughter though they had heard it a thousand times.

Abu Hasan was a Bedouin who had left his nomadic life to become a merchant of the city of Kaukaban in Yemen. He became very rich, and after his wife died he was urged by his friends to marry again. After some resistance, he gave in and arranged a marriage to a beautiful young woman. There was much feasting of rices of several colors and sherbets of as many more, kids stuffed with walnuts and almonds and a camel colt roasted whole.

Finally, the bridegroom was summoned to the chamber where his bride, clad in many rich robes, waited. He rose slowly and with dignity from his divan but, alas! he was full of meat and drink, and as he walked toward the bridal chamber, lo and behold! he let fly a fart, great and terrible.

On hearing this, the guests turned to each other and talked loudly, pretending not to have noticed this social sin. But Abu Hasan was greatly humiliated, and so, pretending a call of nature, he went down to the horsecourt, saddled a horse, and rode away, abandoning his fortune, his house, his friends, and his bride.

He then took a ship to India, where he became the captain of a king’s bodyguard. After ten years he was seized with a homesickness so terrible that he was about to die of it, and so he set out for home disguised as a poor fakir. After a long and dangerous journey, he drew near to his city, and he looked from the hills upon its walls and towers with eyes flowing with tears. However, he did not dare venture into the city until he knew that he and his disgrace had been forgotten. So he wandered around the outskirts for seven days and seven nights, eavesdropping upon the conversations in street and marketplace.

At the end of that time he chanced to be sitting at the door of a hut, thinking that perhaps he could now venture into the city as himself. And then he heard a young girl say, “O my mother, tell me the day I was born, for one of my companions needs to know that so she can read my future.”

And the mother replied, “You were born, O daughter, on the very night when Abu Hasan farted.”

The listener no sooner heard these words than he rose from the bench and fled, saying to himself, “Truly your fart has become a date, which shall last forever.”

And he did not quit traveling and voyaging until he returned to India and there lived in self-exile until he died, and the mercy of God be upon him.

This story was a great success, but before he told it Burton had to preface his story with the explanation that the Bedouins of that time considered farting in company a disgrace. In fact, it was necessary that everyone within earshot pretend that it had not happened, since the disgraced one would kill anyone who called attention to it.

Burton, sitting cross-legged before the fire, noted that even Alice seemed to enjoy the story. She was a middle-Victorian, raised in a deeply religious Anglican family, her father a bishop and the brother of a baron, descended from John of Gaunt, King John’s son, her mother the granddaughter of an earl. But the impact of Riverworld life and a long intimate association with Burton had dissolved many of her inhibitions.

He had then gone on to the tale of Sinbad the Sailor, though it was necessary to adapt this to the experiences of the Ganopo. They had never seen a sea, so the sea became a river, and the roc which carried off Sinbad became a giant golden eagle.

The Ganopo, in their turn, told stories from their creation myths and the ribald adventures of a folk hero, the trickster Old Man Coyote.

Burton questioned them about the adaptation of their religion to the reality of this world.

“O Burton,” their chief said, “this is not quite the world after death which we had envisioned. It is no land where maize grows higher than a man’s head in one day and deer and jackrabbit give us a good hunt but never escape our spears. Nor have we been reunited with our women and children, our parents and grandparents. Nor do the great ones, the spirits of the mountains and the river, of the rocks and the bush, walk among us and talk to us.

“We do not complain. In fact, we are far happier than in the world we left. We have more food, better food, than we had there, and we do not have to work to get it, though we had to fight to keep it in the early days here. We have far more than enough water, we can fish to our heart’s content, and we do not know the fevers that killed or crippled us nor do we know the aches and pains of old age and its enfeeblements.”

Here the chief frowned, and with his next words a shadow fell upon them and the smiles faded.

“Tell me, you strangers, have you heard anything about the return of death? Of death forever, I mean? We live upon this little island and so do not get many visitors. But from the few we do meet and from those we talk to when we visit the banks, we have heard some strange and troubling stories.

“They say that for some time now no one who has died has been raised again. A person is killed, and he or she does not wake up the next day, his wounds healed, his grail beside him, upon a bank far from the scene of his death. Tell me, is this true or is it just one of those tales that people like to make up to worry others?”

“I do not know,” Burton said. “It is true that we have traveled for thousands of kilometers… I mean, we have passed by an uncountable number of grailstones on our voyage. And for the past year, we have noticed this thing of which you speak.”

He paused for a moment, thinking. From the very second day after the great resurrection, the lesser resurrections, or translations, as they were generally called, had occurred. People were killed or killed themselves or had fatal accidents, but, at dawn the next day, they found themselves alive. However, they were never raised at the scene of their deaths. Always, they found themselves far away, often in a different climatic zone.

Many attributed this to a supernatural agency. Many more, among whom was Burton, did not think that there was any agency except an advanced science which accounted for this. There was no need to call in the supernatural. “No ghosts need apply,” to quote the immortal Sherlock Holmes. Physical explanations sufficed.

Burton knew from his own experience, apparently a unique one, that a dead person’s body could be duplicated. He had seen that in the vast space where he had awakened briefly. Bodies were somehow made from some kind of recording, their wounds healed, diseased flesh regenerated, limbs restored, the ravages of old age repaired, youth restored.

Somewhere under the crust of this planet was an immense thermionic energy-matter converter. Probably, it was fueled by heat from the nickel-iron core. Its machinery operated through the complex of grailstones, the roots of which reached deep under the earth, forming a circuit so complex that it staggered the mind to think of it.

Was the recording of the dead person’s cells made by something in the stones themselves? Or was it made as Frigate had suggested, by unseen orbital satellites which kept an eye upon every living being, much as God was supposed to note even the fall of a sparrow?

Nobody knew, or, if they did, they were keeping the secret to themselves.

Energy-matter conversion through the grailstone system also accounted for the free meals every citizen of The Riverworld found in his grail three times a day. The base of each of the metal cylinders must conceal a tiny converter and an electronic menu. The energy was transmitted through the grailstone complex into the grails. And there electricity became complex matter: beef, bread, lettuce, etcetera, and even luxuries, tobacco, marijuana, booze, scissors, combs, cigarette lighters, lipstick, dreamgum.

The towel-like cloths were also provided via the stone system, but not through the grails. They appeared in a neat pile next to the resurrected body and the grail.

There had to be some sort of mechanism inside the underground roots of the stone complex. This somehow could project through many meters of earth the vastly complicated configuration of molecules of human bodies, grails, and cloths at precisely a centimeter above ground level.

Literally, people and things formed from the air.

Burton had sometimes wondered what would happen if the translatee should happen to be formed in an area occupied by another object. Frigate said that there would be a terrible explosion. This had never happened, at least not to Burton’s knowledge. Thus, the mechanism “knew” how to avoid this intermingling of molecules.

There was, however, as Frigate had pointed out, the volume of atmosphere which the newly formed body had to displace. How were the molecules of air kept from a fatal mingling with the molecules of the body?

No one knew. But the mechanism must somehow remove the air, make vacuums into which the body, grail, and cloths appeared. It would have to be a perfect vacuum, too, something which the science of the late 10th century had not succeeded in making.

And it did it silently, without the explosion of a mass of suddenly displaced air.

The question of how bodies were recorded still did not have a satisfactory answer. Many years ago, a captured agent of the Ethicals, a man calling himself Spruce, had said that a sort of chronoscope, an instrument which could look back in time, recorded the cells of human beings. Of every person who had ever lived from about two million B.C. to 2008 A.D.

Burton did not believe this. It did not seem possible that anything could go backward in time, bodily or visually. Frigate had expressed his disbelief, too, saying that Spruce probably had used “chronoscope” in a figurative sense. Or perhaps he had lied.

Whatever the whole truth, the resurrection and the grail food could be explained in purely physical terms.

“What is it, Burton?” the chief said politely. “You have been seized by a spirit?”

Burton smiled and said, “No, I was just thinking. We too have talked to many who said that no one has been translated for a year in their areas. Of course, this may just mean that the places through which we voyaged may not have had any translatees. It is possible that there have been translatees elsewhere. After all, The River may be…”

He paused. How could he put across the concept of a River which was possibly 10,000,000 or more kilometers long to people who did not understand any number above twenty?

“It may be so long that a man who sailed from one end of The River to the other would take as many years to do it as the combined lifetimes of your grandfather, father, and yourself on Earth.

“Thus, even though there may be as many deaths as there are blades of grass between two grailstones, that still would not be much compared to the number who live along The River. Even though we have voyaged very far, we still have not gone far compared to the length of The River. So, there may be many areas where the dead have risen.

“Also, not as many people die now as in the first twenty years here. The many, many little states have been permanently established. Few slave states now exist. People have made states which keep order among their own citizens and protect them from other states. The evil people who lusted for power and the food and goods of others were killed off. It is true they popped up elsewhere, but in other areas they found themselves without their supporters. Things are fairly well settled now, though, of course, there are still accidents, mainly from fishing, and individuals do kill, though chiefly from passion.

“There are not so many dying nowadays. It is possible that the areas through which we went just were not the areas in which translatees appeared.”

“Do you really believe that?” the chief said. “Or are you saying that merely to make us feel happy?”

Burton smiled again. “I do not know.”

“Perhaps,” the chief said, “it is as the shamans of the Church of the Second Chance tell us. That this world is only a stepping-stone, a way station, to another. A world even better than this one. The shamans say that when a person becomes a very good man here, much better than he was on Earth, he goes on to a world where the great spirits truly dwell. Though the shamans do insist that there is only one great spirit. I cannot believe that, since everybody knows that there are many spirits, both high and low.”

“That is what they say,” Burton replied. “But how should they know any more than you or I know?”

“They say that one of the spirits that made this world appeared to the man who founded their church. This spirit told the man that this was so.”

“Perhaps the man who claims this is mad or a liar,” Burton said. “In any event, I would have to talk to this spirit myself. And he would have to prove that he was indeed a spirit.”

“I do not trouble myself about such matters,” the chief said. “It is better to leave the spirits alone, to enjoy life as it is and to be one whom the tribe finds good.”

“Perhaps that is the wisest course,” Burton said.

He did not believe this. If he did, why was he so determined to get to the headwaters of The River and to the sea behind the mountains ringing the north pole, the sea that was said to have at its center a mighty tower in which the secret makers and rulers of this world lived?

The chief said, “I mean no offense, Burton, but I am one who can see into a person. You smile and you tell funny stories, but you are troubled. You are angry. Why do you not quit voyaging on that small vessel and settle down? You have a good woman, all, in fact, that any man needs. This is a good place. There is peace, and thieves are unknown, except for an occasional passerthrough. There are not many fights except between men who want to prove that one is stronger than the other or between a man and his woman because they cannot get along with each other. Any sensible person would enjoy this area.”

“I am not offended,” Burton said. “However, for you to understand me, you would have to listen to the story of my life, here and on Earth. And even then you might not understand. How could you when I don’t understand it myself?”

Burton fell silent then, thinking of another chief of a primitive tribe who had told him much the same thing. This was in 1863 when Burton, as Her Majesty’s consul for the west African island of Fernando Po and the Bight of Biafra, visited Gélélé, king of Dahomey. Burton’s mission was to talk the king into stopping the bloody annual human sacrifices and the slave trade. His mission had failed, but he had collected enough data to write two volumes.

The drunken, bloody-minded, lecherous king had acted highhandedly with him, whereas when Burton had visited Benin its king had crucified a man in his honor. Still, they had gotten along rather well, considering the circumstances. In fact, on a previous visit, Burton had been made an honorary captain of the king’s Amazon guard.

Gélélé had said that Burton was a good man but too angry.

Primitive people were good at reading character. They had had to be to survive.

Monat, the Arcturan, sensing that Burton’s withdrawal was lowering the high spirits of the occasion, began to tell stories of his native planet. Monat had somewhat awed the islanders at first because of his obviously nonhuman origin. However, he had no trouble in warming them, since he knew exactly how to make a human being feel at ease. He should have; he had had to do this every day of his life on The Riverworld.

After a while, Burton arose and said that his crew should be getting to bed. He thanked the Ganopo for their hospitality but said that he had changed his mind about staying there for several days. His original intention to rest there while he studied them was gone.

“We would like very much for you to stay here,” the chief said. “For a few days or for many years. Whichever you prefer.”

“I thank you for that,” Burton said. He quoted the words of a character from The Thousand and One Nights. “Allah afflicted me with a love of travel.”

He then quoted himself, “Travelers, like poets, are mostly an angry race.”

That at least made him laugh, and he went to the boat feeling less gloomy. Before going to bed, he set the watches. Frigate protested that a guard wasn’t needed in this isolated place where the few inhabitants seemed to be honest. He was overruled, which was no surprise to him. He knew that Burton thought that acquisitiveness was the mainspring of human action.

Burton was thinking of this and other events of last night, including the dreams. He stood for a while, smoking a cigar, while Frigate stood by him. The assemblage of closely packed stars and wide-spreading gas sheets paled as they silently watched. Dawn would be coming within a half-hour. Its light would wash out most of the celestial objects, would spread out for some time before the sun finally cleared the northern mountain wall.

They could see the fog, like a woolly blanket, covering The River and the plains on both banks. It lapped against the tree-covered hills, on the sides of which were a few lights. Beyond the hills of the valley were the mountains, inclined at an angle of forty-five degrees for the first thousand feet or 305 meters or so, then ascending straight up, smooth as a mirror, for 10,000 feet or about 3048 meters.

During his first years here, Burton had estimated the mountains to be about 20,000 feet or 6096 meters high. He was not the only one to make that error when only the eye was available for calculation. After he had been able to construct rather crude surveying instruments, however, he had determined that the mountain walls were, generally, twice as low as he had thought. Their blue-gray or black rock created an illusion. Perhaps this was because the valley was so narrow, and the walls made the dwellers feel even more pygmyish.

This was a world of illusions, physical, metaphysical, and psychological. As on Earth, so here.

Frigate had lit a cigarette. He had quit smoking for a year, but now, as he put it, he had “fallen from grace.” He was almost as tall as Burton. His eyes were hazel. His hair was almost as black as his companions, though it reflected a reddish undercoating in sunlight. His features were irregular: bulging supraorbital ridges, a straight nose of average size but with large nostrils, full lips, the upper very long, a clefted chin. The latter seemed to recede because of his unusually short jaw.

On Earth he had been, among many other things, one of that rare but vigorous breed which collected all literature by, about, and relevant to Burton. He had also written a biography of him but had eventually novelized it as A Rough Knight for the Queen.

On first meeting him, Burton had been puzzled when Frigate had identified himself as a science fiction writer.

“What in Gehenna is that?”

“Don’t ask me to define science fiction,” Frigate had said. “No one was ever able to give it a completely satisfactory definition. However, what it is… was… was a genre of literature in which most of the stories took place in a fictional future. It was called science fiction because science was supposed to play a large part in it. The development of science in the future, that is. This science wasn’t confined to physics and chemistry but also included extrapolations of the sociological and psychological science of the author’s time.

“In fact, any story that took place in the future was science fiction. However, a story written in 1960, for instance, which projected a future of 1984, was still classified as science fiction in 1984.

“Moreover, a science fiction story could take place in the present or the past. But the assumption was that the story was possible because it was based on the science of the author’s time, and he merely extrapolated, more or less rigorously, what a science could develop into.

“Unfortunately, this definition included stories in which there was no science or else science poorly understood by the author.

“However (there are a lot of howevers in science fiction), there were many stories about things which could not possibly happen, for which there was no scientific evidence whatsoever. Like time travel, parallel worlds, and faster-than-light drives. Living stars, God visiting the Earth in the flesh, insects tall as buildings, world deluges, enslavement through telepathy, and more in an endless list.”

“How did it come to be named science fiction?”

“Well, actually, it was around a long time before a man named Hugo Gernsback originated the label. You’ve read the Jules Verne novels and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, haven’t you? Those were considered to be science fiction.”

“It sounds as if it were just fantasy,” Burton had said.

“Yes, but all fiction is fantasy. The difference between mundane fantasy, what we called mainstream literature, and science fiction was that mainstream stories were about things which could have happened. They also always took place in the past or the present.

“Science fiction stories were about things that could not happen or were highly improbable. Some people wanted to name it speculative literature, but the term never caught on.”

Burton never thoroughly understood what science fiction was, but he did not feel bad about it. Frigate couldn’t explain it clearly either, though he could give numerous examples.

“Actually,” Frigate had said, “science fiction was one of those many things that don’t exist but nevertheless have a name. Let’s talk about something else.”

Burton had refused to drop the subject. “Then you were in a profession which didn’t exist?”

“No, the profession of writing science fiction existed. It was just that science fiction per se was nonexistent. This is beginning to sound like a dialog in Alice in Wonderland.”

“Was the money you made from your writings also nonexistent?”

“Almost. Well, that’s an exaggeration. I didn’t starve in a garret, but I also wasn’t driving a gold-plated Cadillac.”

“What’s a Cadillac?”

Thinking of that now, Burton found it strange that the woman who slept with him was the Alice who had been the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s two masterpieces.

Suddenly, Frigate said, “What’s that?”

Burton looked eastward toward the strait. Unlike the areas above and below it, the strait had no banks. High hills rose abruptly along its length, hills which were smooth walls. Below the strait something—no, two objects—were moving toward him, seemingly suspended above the fog.

He climbed a rope ladder to get a better look. The two objects were not suspended in the air. Their lower parts were just hidden by the mists. The nearest was a wooden structure with what seemed to be a human figure on its top. The second, much farther back, was a large, round, black object.

He called down. “Pete! I think it’s a raft! A very large one! It’s moving with the current, and it’s headed directly toward us! There’s a tower with a pilot on it. He isn’t moving, though, just standing there. Surely…”

No, not surely. The man on the tower had not moved. If he were awake, he would have seen that the raft was on a collision course.

Burton hooked an arm around a rope, cupped his hands, and bellowed warnings. The figure leaning against the guardrail did not move. Burton stopped shouting at him.

“Wake up everybody!” he thundered at Frigate. “On the double! We must get the boat out of the way!”

He climbed swiftly down and went over the side onto the dock. Here, where his head was below the surface of the fog, he could see nothing. By running one hand along the hull, however, he could feel his way to the mooring posts. By the time he had untied two lines, he heard the others on the deck above. He shouted that Monat and Kazz should get onto the dock on the other side and untie the lines there.

In his haste, he rammed into a post and for several seconds hopped around holding his knee. Then he resumed his work.

Having completed his part of unloosing, he groped back along the hull. Someone had by then let down the gangway. He went up it, his hands sliding along the railing, and came aboard. Now he could see the tops of the women’s heads and the American’s face.

Alice said, “What’s going on?”

“Have you gotten the poles out?” he said to Frigate.

“Yeah.”

He swung up onto the rope ladder again. The two objects were still on a course that must end at the docks. The man on the watchtower had not moved.

By now there were voices coming from the island. The Ganopo were awake and calling out questions.

Monat’s head and shoulders rose from the grayness. He looked like a monster sliding up out of the fog of a Gothic novel. The skull was similar to that of a human being’s, but the fleshy features made him seem only semihuman. Thick black eyebrows curved down alongside the face to knobbed cheekbones and flared out to cover them. Thin membranes that swung with the movement of his head hung from the lower part of his nostrils. At the end of his nose was a deeply cleft boss of cartilage. His lips were like a dog’s, thin, black, and leathery. The lobeless ears were convoluted like seashells.

Kazz bellowed somewhere near Monat. Burton could not see him since he was the second shortest of the crew, only about 5 feet or 1.5 meters tall. Then he came very close, and Burton could make out the squat figure.

“Get the poles and push the boat from the docks!” Burton yelled.

“Where in hell are they?” Besst called.

Frigate said, “I pulled them from the rack. They’re on the deck below it.”

Burton said, “Follow me,” and then he cursed as he stumbled over something and fell flat on his face. He was up again at once, only to bump into somebody. From the bulky shape, he thought it must be Besst.

After some confusion, the poles were gotten and their wielders were stationed along the sides. At Burton’s orders, they thrust the ends against the top of the dock, there being no room between the hull and the side of the dock for the poles to shove against the stone bottom of the underwater shelf. Since they had to fight against the current, which was strongest in the middle of the lake, they could only move the vessel very slowly. Once past the dock, they lowered the ends of the poles into the water and pushed against the rocky bottom. Even so, the poles slipped on the bare, smooth rock.

Burton ordered that they should let the prow of the boat swing around. This was done, and then the polers on the port side moved to the starboard to help the others keep the vessel from drifting sidewise against the spire. At this point, both the beach and the underwater shelf abruptly ceased. Now they had to hold the poles horizontally and shove against the wall of the spire.

Burton, hearing an unknown voice, looked back. The dark figure on the tower was moving now and screaming down into the fog. Other voices, fainter than the pilot’s, came through the mists.

The large, round, dark object had become even larger. In the starlight it looked like the head of a giant. He estimated that the distance between the tower and the other object was about 100 meters. That meant that the raft which carried them was huge. He had no idea how wide it was, and he hoped he did not find out until after the boat was on the other side of the island.

Just before he turned back to his task, he saw another man appear on the tower. He was waving his hands, and his shrill voice dominated the other man’s.

“Here it comes!” Frigate called out.

Burton didn’t blame him for sounding panicked. He was in a frenzy himself. All that weight and momentum, hundreds, perhaps thousands of logs, were moving toward the Hadji II.

“Push your guts out!” he yelled. “We’ll be crushed if you don’t!”

By then the bowsprit, the large spar projecting forward of the ship, had cleared the spire. About ten more pushes should clear the corner, and the Hadji II would be taken by the current past the spire, away from the danger.

The yelling from the raft was loud and close. Burton spared a glance at the tower. It was only a little over 400 feet or 122 meters away. Furthermore, the side of the tower had turned a little. He cursed. That meant that the raft had turned, or been turned, off its course to avoid striking the island in its center part. Unfortunately, it was going to the left instead of to the right.

“Heave!” Burton shouted.

He wondered where the tower was located. Was it on the very prow of the raft or was it set back? If the latter was the situation, then there would be a large part of the raft forward of the tower. That meant that somewhere under the fog the forward part of the raft was very near the boat.

In any case, the raft was not going to miss the island. He did not care about that if it did not strike the boat.

A man on the tower was screaming orders in an unknown language down into the mists.

The prow of the Hadji II was now past the spire. But here the strong current at the corner had pressed the boat against the rocky wall, and their poles were slipping on the rock, which was smoother than that just passed.

“Push, you sons of bitches, push!” Burton thundered.

There was a roar, an abrupt lifting of the deck, a tilting inward toward the rock. Burton was dashed against a bright hardness that made him go soft and black inside. Dimly, he was aware that he had fallen back onto the deck, was lying on his back, was trying to get up in the dark grayness. Screams arose from around him. These and the snapping of smashed timbers and a final explosion, the impact of the forward part of the raft against the rock, were the last things he heard.

Fog blinded Jill Gulbirra.

By keeping close to the right bank of The River, she could barely discern the grailstones. They looked ominous, like giant toadstools in a dismal wasteland.

The next one should be the end of her odyssey. She had been counting them as she passed them, counting all night.

Now, a phantom in a ghost canoe, she paddled on. The wind was dead, but she revived it a little, or made it a pseudowind, by her own motion, driving against the current. The heavy wet air rubbed against her face like ectoplasmic curtains.

Now she saw a fire by the stone which had to be her destination. It had been a small spark. Now it was bigger, glowing palely, a ghost of a fire. From near it the voices of men. Disembodied voices.

She herself, she thought, must look like the spirit of a nun. White cloths held together by concealed magnetic tabs swathed her body. One cloth formed a hood so that anyone near enough in the fog would see her face as a darker blank in the dark grayness.

Her few belongings crouched on the floor of the canoe. In this wet, dim woolliness, they were two small beasts, white and gray. Near her was a tall gray metal cylinder, her “tucker box.” Beyond it was a bundle, cloths containing various items. A bamboo flute. A ring of oak set with polished jadeite stone, her lover’s gift, a lover departed but dead in only one sense—as far as she knew. A bag of dragonfish leather, crammed with artifacts and memories. Tied to the bundle, but invisible in this darkness, was a leather case holding a yew bow and a quiver of arrows.

Under her seat lay a spear, a bamboo shaft tipped with a hornfish horn. By it lay two heavy oak war-boomerangs and a bag containing two leather slings and forty stones.

As the fire brightened, the voices became louder. Who were they? Guards? Drunken revellers? Slavers hoping to catch just such as she? Early worms out to catch a bird?

She smiled grimly. If they wanted violence, they would get it.

However, they sounded more like drunks. If what she had been told downRiver was true, she was in peaceful territory. Neither Parolando nor its neighboring states practiced grail slavery. She could have sailed the canoe boldly in daylight, according to her information. She would be welcomed and free, free to come or to go. Moreover, it was true that they, Parolandoj, were building a giant airship.

But distrust was her native element, though she could not be blamed for that. Consider her terrible experiences. So, she would scout around in the dark. It would require more work and inconvenience; it would be inefficient. You had to make your choice between survival and efficiency, though in the long run survival was optimum efficiency, no matter how much time and effort it took.

Death was no longer a temporary event in the Rivervalley. Resurrection seemed to have stopped, and with its cessation the ancient terror had returned.

Now the fire was bright enough for her to see the huge toadstool shape. The blaze was just beyond it. Four figures, black outlines, moved by the flames. She could smell the smoke of bamboo and pine, and she thought she whiffed cigars. Why had the disgusting cigars been provided by the Mysterious Donors?

They were talking in somewhat slurred English. Either they had been drinking or English was not their native tongue. No. The voice now booming through the fog belonged to an American.

“No!” the man bellowed. “By the holy flaming rings of buggered Saturn, no! It’s not sheer ego, downright stinking hubris! I want to build the biggest ever built, a fabulous ship, a true queen of the skies, a colossus, a leviathan! Bigger than Earth or The Riverworld has ever seen or will ever see again! A ship to make everybody’s eyes bug out, make them proud they’re human! A beauty! A wondrous behemoth of the air! Unique! Like nothing that ever existed before! What? Don’t interrupt, Dave! I’m flying high, and I’m going to keep on flying until we get there! And then some!”

“But, Milt!”

“But me no buts! We need a big one, the biggest, the grandest, for purely logical scientific reasons. My God, man, we have to go higher, further, than any dirigible ever has! We have to range 16,900 kilometers maybe, depending upon where the boat is! And God only knows what winds we’ll run into! And it’s all one vast one-shot! Do you hear me, Dave, Zeke, Cyrano? A one-shot!”

Her heart would not quit racing. “Dave” had spoken with a German accent. They must be the very men she was looking for. What luck! No, not luck. She had known how many kilometers distant, counted by the grailstones spaced along the bank, her destination was. And she had been told exactly where the headquarters of Milton Firebrass was. And she knew that David Schwartz, the Austrian engineer, was one of Firebrass’ lieutenants.

“It’ll take too much time, too much material,” a man said loudly. His speech was that of a native of Maine. There was something, or was it just her overactive imagination, of the shriek of the wind in rigging, the creaking of rope and wood in a rolling ship, the thunder of surf, the flapping of sails, in his voice? Imagination, of course.

“Stop that, Jill,” she told herself. If Firebrass had not called him Zeke, she would not now be imposing open-sea-sailing-ship images on the voice. He would be Ezekiel Hardy, captain of a New Bedford whaler, killed by a sperm whale off the coast of Japan—1833?—and he had convinced Firebrass that he would make an excellent helmsman or navigator for the airship. After suitable training, of course. Firebrass must really be hard up for a crew if he signed on an early-nineteenth-century whaling ship skipper. The man had probably never even seen a balloon, maybe not even a steam-driven riverboat.

The grapevine had it that Firebrass had had little success so far in finding experienced airshipmen. Men, of course. Always men. So, he had accepted candidates who seemed most likely to benefit from training. Airplane pilots. Balloonists. Sailors. Meanwhile, the word had spread up and down The River for 60,000 kilometers, perhaps 100,000, that Firebrass wanted lighter-than-air men. Always men.

What did Firebrass know about building and flying a gasbag? He may have journeyed to Mars and Ganymede, orbited Jupiter and Saturn, but what did that have to do with dirigibles? David Schwartz, it was true, had designed and built the first truly rigid dirigible. It had also been the first to have a structure and skin made completely from aluminum. This was in 1893, sixty years before she had been born. He’d then started to build a better airship—in Berlin, 1895?—but work had stopped on it when Schwartz had died—January, 1897?

She was not sure now. Thirty-one years on The River had dimmed much of memories on Earth.

She wondered if Schwartz knew what had happened after he had died. Probably not unless he’d met some gasbag freak, a layman Zepfan. Schwartz’s widow had carried on his work, and yet no book Jill had read had bothered to note her first name or her maiden name. She was only Frau Schwartz. She had gotten the second ship built, despite being only a woman. And some male jackass had flown the aluminum ship (which looked more like a thermos bottle than anything else), had panicked, and had wrecked it.

All that was left of Schwartz’s dream and his wife’s devotion to it was a crumpled mass of silvery-looking metal. So much for dreams in a high wind when a big phallus, lilliputian brains, and mouse courage were at the controls. Now, if the jackass had been a woman, her name would have been recorded. See what happens when a woman leaves the kitchen? If God had intended…

Jill Gulbirra trembled, a hot ache in her chest. Get hold of yourself, she murmured. Cool does it or you blow it.

She started from her reverie. While she had been dreaming of Frau Schwartz’s dream, she had allowed the canoe to be carried downRiver. The fire had become smaller, and the voices fainter, and yet she had not noticed. Better bloody watch out, she told herself. She had to be ever alert, or she would never convince the powers-that-be that she was qualified to be one of the airship crew. To be captain?

“There’s plenty of time!” Firebrass thundered. “This isn’t any government-contract, low-fund, high-pressure project! It’ll be thirty-seven years or more before Sam gets to the end of The River. It’ll only take two—maybe three—years to complete the beast. Meanwhile, we’ll use the blimp for training. And then we’re off, heigh ho for the wild blue yonder, the misty sea of the north pole, where no Santa Claus, but somebody who’s given us gifts that make Saint Nick look like the world’s worst tightwad, lives! Off to the Misty Tower, the Really Big Grail!”

The fourth man spoke up now. He had a pleasant baritone, but it was evident that English was not his natal speech. What was it? It sounded like a French accent in some ways but… Yes, of course. That could be Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, if she could believe what she had heard at about hundredth hand. It just did not seem possible that she would soon be talking to him. Perhaps she wouldn’t be, since there were so many phonies on The River.

There was silence for a moment, the silence that only the Rivervalley knew—when people kept their mouths shut. No birds, no animals (especially no barking dogs), no mechanical monsters roaring, bellowing, buzzing, screeching, no tooting horns, no whooping or screaming sirens, no shrieking brakes, no loud radios, no blaring loudspeakers. Only water lapping against shore and then a splash as a fish leaped out and fell back. And the crackle of wood in the fire.

“Ah!” Firebrass said. “Smooth! Better’n anything I ever had on Earth! And free, free! But when, when will the airmen show up? I need more men with experience, real gasbaggers!”

Schwartz made a smacking sound—Jill could see the bottle tilted above his lips now—and he said, “So! You are not so unworried!”

The canoe touched shore, and she got out of it without tipping it. The water was up to her waist, but the magnetically sealed cloths kept the cold liquid out. She waded closer and lifted the long, heavy canoe, moving forward until she was on shore. She let the craft down and dragged it until its entire length was out of the stream. The bank was only about 30 centimeters above the water level. She stood for a moment, planning her entrance, then decided not to go armed.

“Oh, I’ll get them eventually,” Firebrass was saying.

She stepped closer, sliding her feet over the short grass.

“I’m the one you’re looking for,” she said loudly.

The four whirled, one almost falling and grabbing another. They stared, their mouths and eyes dark holes in paleness. Like her, they were covered with cloths but theirs were brightly colored. If she had been an enemy, she could have put an arrow into each one before they could grab their weapons—if they had such. Then she saw that they did have guns, placed on the edge of the mushroom top of the grailstone.

Pistols! Made of iron! So, it was true!

Now she suddenly saw a rapier, a long, steel sharp-pointed blade, in the hand of the tallest man there. His other hand brushed his hood back and revealed a long, dark face with a big nose. He had to be the fabled Cyrano de Bergerac.

Cyrano reverted to seventeenth-century French, of which she could understand only a few words.

Firebrass pushed his hood back, too.

“I almost crapped in my britches! Why didn’t you warn us you were coming?”

She lowered her hood.

Firebrass stepped closer and looked keenly at her. “It’s a woman!”

“Nevertheless, I’m your man,” Jill said.

“What’d you say?”

“Don’t you understand English!” she said angrily.

Her displeasure was more at herself. She had been so excited, though pretending to be composed, that she’d reverted to her Toowoomba dialect. She might as well have spoken in Shakespearean English for all they understood. She repeated, in the standard Midwestern American she’d learned so painstakingly, “Nevertheless, I’m your man. My name, by the way, is Jill Gulbirra.”

Firebrass introduced himself and the others, then said, “I need another drink.”

“I could use one myself,” Jill said. “It’s a fallacy that alcohol warms you up, but it does make you think you’re warmed up.”

Firebrass stopped and picked up a bottle—the first glass Jill had seen for years. He handed it to her and she drank the scotch without wiping the mouth of the bottle. After all, there were no disease germs on The River. And she had no prejudices about drinking from a bottle that had been in the mouth of a half-black. Wasn’t her grandmother an aborigine? Of course, abos were not Negroes. They were black-skinned archaic Caucasians.

Why was she thinking such thoughts?

Cyrano, his head stuck forward, his back bent, walked up to her. He looked her over, shook his head, and said, “Mordioux, the hair is shorter than mine! And there is no makeup! Are you sure she is a woman?”

Jill moved the scotch around in her mouth and swallowed it. It was delicious, and it warmed all the way down.

“We shall see,” the Frenchman said. He put his hand on her left breast and squeezed gently.

Jill sank a fist into his hard belly. He bent over, and Jill brought her knee up against his chin. He fell heavily.

Firebrass said, “What the hell?” and stared at her.

“How would you react if he felt your crotch to see if you were a man?”

“Simply thrilled, honey,” Firebrass said. He whooped with laughter and danced around while the other two men looked at him as if they thought he was crazy.

Cyrano got onto his hands and knees and then onto his feet. His face was red, and he was snarling. Jill wanted to back away, especially after he picked up the rapier. But she did not move, and she said, her voice steady, “Do you always take such familiarities with strange women?”

A shudder went over him. The redness faded away, and the snarl became a smile. He bowed. “No, madame, and my apologies for such inexcusable manners. I do not usually drink, since I do not like to cloud my mind, to become bestial. But tonight we were celebrating the anniversary of the departure of the Riverboat.”

“No sweat,” Jill said. “Just don’t let it happen again.”

Though she smiled, she was cursing herself for having begun in such a bad way with a man for whom she had a great admiration. It was not her fault, but she could not expect him to forgive her for having felled him so easily before witnesses. No male ego could survive that.

The mist thinned. Now they did not need the firelight to see each other’s faces. Below their waists the gray-white coils were still dense, however. The sky was brightening, though it would be some hours before the sun cleared the eastern peaks. The great white gas sheets that covered one-sixth of the sky had faded away with the lesser stars. Thousands of the giants still flamed red, green, white, blue, but their intensity, like gas jets slowly being turned off, was diminishing.

Westward, a dozen structures towered up from the mists. Her eyes widened, though she had heard about these through the grapevine and the drum-telegraph. Some were four-and-five-story-high buildings of sheet-iron and aluminum. Factories. But the colossus was an aluminum building, a hangar.

“It’s the biggest I ever saw,” she murmured.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Firebrass said. He paused, then said, wonderingly, “So you have come to sign up?”

“I said that once.”

He was The Man. He could hire and fire her. But she’d never been able to conceal irritation at stupidity. Repetition was wasteful and hence stupid. Here was a man who had a Ph.D. in astrophysics and a master’s in electronic engineering. And the United States had not sent any dummies into space, though they may not have been brilliant. Maybe it was the liquor that made him seem stupid. As it did every man. And every woman, she hastened to remind herself. Be fair.

He was close, breathing the whiskey fumes up into her face. He was a head shorter than she, his broad shoulders, muscular arms, and deep chest making a curious contrast with long, skinny legs. His large eyes were brown, the balls bloodshot. His head was large, his forehead bulged, his bronze hair was so curly that it was almost kinky, his skin was bronze-red. He was supposed to be a mulatto, but the Caucasian and Onondaga Indian genes seemed to be dominant. He could pass for a Provençal or Catalonian. Or just about anything South European.

He looked her up and down. Was his bold stare supposed to challenge her to knock him down as she had Cyrano?

Jill said, “What are you thinking of? My qualifications for airship officer? Or what kind of body is under these baggy towels?”

Firebrass burst out laughing. When he had recovered, he said, “Both.”

Schwartz looked embarrassed. He was short and slight, blue eyed and brown haired. Jill glared at him, and he turned away. Ezekiel Hardy was, like Cyrano, almost as tall as she. He was narrow faced, high cheekboned, black haired. He stared at her with hard pale-blue eyes.

“I’ll repeat this because it needs to be stressed,” she said. “I’m as good as any man and ready to prove it. And I’m a godsend. I have an engineering degree and I can design an airship from A to Z. I have 8,342 hours flight time in four different types of blimp. I can handle any post, including captain.”

“What proof do we have?” Hardy said. “You could be lying.”

“Where are your papers?” Jill said. “And even if you were skipper of a whaling ship, so what? What qualification is that for a dirigible man?”

“Now, now,” Firebrass said. “Don’t let us get our bowels in an uproar. I believe you, Gulbirra. I don’t think you’re one of the many phonies I’ve had to put up with.

“But let’s get one thing straight. You are a hell of a lot more qualified than I am—as of this moment, anyway—to command the ship. But nevertheless, I am the captain, the boss, the head cheese! I’m running this whole show from start to finish. On the ground and up there. I didn’t give up being chief engineer on Clemens’ boat so I could take a minor position in this project.

“It’s Captain Firebrass, and don’t ever forget that. If that’s okay, signed and sealed in blood, then I’ll be jumping with joy to welcome you aboard. You might even be first mate—no sexual implications involved—though I can’t promise that. The roster is a long way from being filled.”

He paused, cocked his head, and narrowed his eyes.

“First thing off. You have to swear by your personal honor—and by God, if you believe in one—that you’ll obey the laws of Parolando. No ifs, ands, buts.”

Gulbirra hesitated. She licked her lips, feeling their dryness. She desired—no, lusted for—the airship. She could visualize it even now. It hovered over them, casting a shadow over her and Firebrass, shining silvery where the imaginary sun struck it.

“I’m not going to sacrifice any of my principles!” she said. She spoke so loudly that she startled the men. “Are men and women equal here? Is there any discrimination in sex, race, nationality, and so forth? Especially in sex?”

“No,” Firebrass said. “Theoretically and legally, that is. Actually, that is, personally, there is, of course. And there is, as there has always been everywhere and everytime, discrimination based on competency. We have high standards here. If you’re one of those who think that a person should be given a job just because he—or she—belongs to a group that has been discriminated against, forget it. Or move your ass on out of here.”

She was silent for a moment. The men looked at her, obviously aware of the struggle inside her.

Firebrass grinned again. “You’re not the only one in agony,” he said. “I want you in the worst way, just as you want in the worst way, that is, the best way, to be one of the crew. But I’ve got my principles, just as you have yours.”

He jerked a thumb at Schwartz and Hardy. “Look at them. Both nineteenth-century. One’s an Austrian; one, a New Englander. But they’ve not only accepted me as the captain, they’re good friends. Maybe they still believe, way deep down, that I’m an uppity nigger, but they’d take a poke at anyone who called me that. Right, men?”

They nodded.

“Thirty-one years on The Riverworld changes a person. If he’s capable of being changed. So, what do you say? Want to hear the constitution of Parolando?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t make a decision until I knew what I was getting into.”

“It was formulated by the great Sam Clemens, who left on his boat, the Mark Twain, almost a year ago.”

“The Mark Twain? That’s pretty egotistical, isn’t it?”

“The name was chosen by popular vote. Sam protested, though not very strongly. Anyway, you interrupted me. There’s an unwritten rule that nobody interrupts the captain. So here goes. We, the people of Parolando, do hereby declare… ”

There was no hesitation nor, as far as she knew, any mistakes in the long recital. The almost total lack of the written word had forced the literate population to rely on memory. A skill that once had flourished only among preliterates—and actors—was now general property.

While the words rose to the sky, the sky became brighter. The mists shrank to their knees. The valley floor was still covered with what looked at a distance like snow. The foothills beyond the plains were no longer distorted. The long hillgrass, the bushes, the irontrees, oaks, pines, yews, and bamboo no longer looked like a Japanese painting, misty, unreal, and far off. The huge flowers that grew from the thick vines intertwined on the irontree branches were beginning to collect color. When the sun would hit them, they would glow with vivid reds, greens, blues, blacks, white, yellows, stripes and diamonds of mixed colors.

The western precipices were blue-black stone on which were enormous splotches of bluish-green lichen. Here and there, narrow cataracts fell dull-silvery down the mountainsides.

All of this was familiar to Jill Gulbirra. But each morning awoke in her the same sense of awe and wonder. Who had formed this many-million-kilometers-long Rivervalley? And why? And how and why had she, along with an estimated thirty-four to thirty-seven billion people, been resurrected on this planet? Everybody who had ever lived from about 2,000,000 B.C. to 2008 A.D. seemed to have been raised from the dead. The exceptions were children who’d died at or under the age of five and the mentally retarded. And also, possibly, the hopelessly insane, though there was doubt about the definition of hopelessly.

Who were the people who had done this? Why?

There were rumors and tales, strange, disturbing, and maddening, of people who had appeared among the lazari. Briefly. Mysteriously. They were named, among other things, the Ethicals.

“Are you listening?” Firebrass said. She became aware that they were staring at her. “I can give you back, almost verbatim, what you’ve said so far,” she answered.

This wasn’t true. But she was sensitized—keeping one ear open, as it were, like an antenna receiving on a single frequency—for what she considered important.

Now the people were coming out of the huts, stretching, coughing, lighting up cigarettes, heading for the bamboo-walled latrines, or walking toward The River, grails in hand. The hardy wore only a towel; most were clad from head to foot. Bedouins of the Rivervalley. Phantoms in a mirage.

Firebrass said, “Okay. You ready to be sworn in? Or do you have mental reservations?”

“I never have those,” she said. “What about you? In regard to me, I mean?”

“It wouldn’t matter, anyway.” He grinned again. “This oath is only a preliminary one. You’ll be on probation for three months, then the people vote on you. But I can veto the vote. Then you take the final oath, if you pass. Okay?”

“Okay.”

She didn’t like it, but what could she do? She certainly wasn’t going to walk out. Besides, though they didn’t know it, they’d be on probation with her.

The air became warmer. The eastern sky continued to brighten, quenching all but a few giant stars. Bugles blew. The nearest was on top of a six-story bamboo tower, in the middle of the plain, and the bugler was a tall, skinny black wearing a scarlet towel around his waist.

“Real brass,” Firebrass said. “There are some deposits of copper and zinc a little ways upstream. We could have taken them away from the people who owned it, but we traded instead. Sam wouldn’t let us use force unless it was necessary.

“South of here, where Soul City used to be, were big deposits of cryolite and bauxite. The Soul Citizens wouldn’t keep their side of the bargain—we were trading steel weapons for the ores—so, we went down and took it. In fact,” he waved his hand, “Parolando now extends for sixty-four kilometers on both sides of The River.”

The men removed all cloths except for those around the waist. Jill kept on a green-and-white-striped kilt and a thin, nearly transparent cloth around her breasts. They had looked like desert Arabs; now they were Polynesians.

The dwellers of the plains and the bases of the foothills were gathering by the Riverside. A number shucked all their cloths and jumped into the water, whooping at the cold and splashing each other.

Jill hesitated for a minute. She had sweat all day and all night paddling her canoe. She needed a bath, and sooner or later she’d have to disrobe entirely. She dropped her towels and ran to the bank and dived flatly out. After swimming back, she borrowed a bar of soap from a woman and lathered the upper part of her body. She came out of the water shivering and rubbed herself vigorously.

The men stared frankly, seeing a very tall woman, slim, long legged, small breasted, wide hipped, deeply tanned. She had short, straight, russet hair and large russet eyes. Her face, as she well knew, was nothing to write home about. It was passable except for large buck teeth and a nose a little too long and too hawkish. The teeth were an inheritance from her blackfeller grandmother. There was nothing she could do about them. Nor was there anything she wanted to do about them.

Hardy’s gaze was fastened on her pubic hair, which was extraordinarily long, thick, and ginger colored. Well, he’d get over that, and he was as close to it as he was ever going to get.

Firebrass went around the side of the grailstone and returned with a spear. Just below the steel head, attached to the shaft, was a large vertebral bone from a hornfish. He drove the spear straight into the ground beside her canoe.

“The bone means it’s my spear, the captain’s,” he said. “I stuck it in the ground by the canoe to tell everybody that it’s not to be borrowed without permission. There are a lot of things like that for you to learn. Meanwhile, Schwartz can show you your quarters and then give you a guided tour. Report to me at high noon under that irontree there.”

He indicated a tree about 90 meters to the west. Towering over 300 meters, it had a thick, gnarly gray bark, scores of great branches extending 90 meters outward, huge elephant’s-ear leaves with green and red stripes. Its roots surely drove down at least 120 meters, and its unburnable wood was so hard it would resist a steel saw.

“We call it The Chief. Meet me there.”

The bugles rang out again. The crowds organized themselves into a military formation under the directions of officers. Firebrass pulled himself onto the top of the grailstone. He stood there, watching while the roll call was made. The corporals reported to the sergeants and the sergeants to the lieutenants, and they to the adjutant. Then Hardy to Firebrass. A moment later, the mob was dismissed. However, they did not leave. Firebrass got off the mushroom-shaped stone, and the corporals took his place. These put the grails in the depressions on the surface of the stone.

Schwartz was beside her. He cleared his throat. “Gulbirra? I’ll take care of your grail.”

She took it from the canoe and handed it to him. This was a gray metal cylinder, 45.72 centimeters across, 76.20 centimeters high, weighing empty about 0.55 kilogram. It had a lid which, once shut, could be lifted only by the owner. There was a curved handle on the lid. Tied to it by a bamboo fiber rope was her I.D., a tiny baked-clay dirigible. It bore her initials on both sides.

Schwartz ordered a man to place her grail on the stone. The man did so quickly, glancing often at the eastern peaks. But he was safe by two minutes. At the end of that time, the sun ballooned over the top. A few seconds later, the mushroom shape spouted blue flames over 9 meters high. The roar of its discharged electricity mingled with the thunder of every stone on both sides of The River for as far as could be seen. All these years had not inured Jill to the sight nor sound. Though expecting it, she jumped a little. The report rolled back from the reflector of the mountains, echoed again, and died out with a mutter.

Everybody had breakfast.

They were on a foothill. The tall espartolike grass had been recently mown to about a centimeter-and-a-half length. “We have some machines that do that, though much cutting is done with sickles,” David Schwartz said. “The grass is made into ropes.”

“We didn’t have any machines where I come from,” Jill said. “We used flint sickles. But we made rope from it, of course.”

It was shady and cool here. The branches of an irontree spread out to cover a small village, a scattering of square or round huts of bamboo. Many of them were thatched with the scarlet and green leaves of the irontree. A rope ladder dangled from the lowest branch of the colossus, 33 meters up. Near it, a hut sat on a platform supported on two branches. There were other rope ladders, other platforms and huts here and there.

“Perhaps you will be assigned one of them after your probation,” Schwartz said. “Meanwhile, here’s your home.”

Jill entered the indicated doorway. At least, she did not have to stoop in this. So many people were short and had therefore built low entrances.

She set her grail and bundles down on the floor. Schwartz followed her in. “This belonged to a couple killed by a dragonfish. It came up out of the water as if it had been fired from a cannon. It bit off one end of the fishing craft. Unfortunately, the couple were standing on the end and were swallowed along with the logs.

“It was also unfortunate that this happened after the resurrections ceased. So, they won’t be appearing elsewhere, I suppose. You haven’t heard anything about new lazari, have you? Recently?”

“No, I haven’t,” she said. “Nothing reliable, anyway.”

“Why do you suppose it stopped? After all these years?”

“I don’t know,” she said sharply. Talking about this made her uneasy. Why had the gift of immortality been so suddenly withdrawn?

“Bloody hell with it,” she said loudly. She looked around. The floor was hidden under grass that reached almost to her crotch. The blades rasped against her legs. She would have to cut the grass close to the ground and then bring in earth to cover it. Even then the blades might not die. The roots went so deep and were so interconnected that the grass could flourish without benefit of sunshine. Apparently they could draw their sustenance from the roots of those exposed to light.

A steel sickle hung from a peg on the wall. Steel was so common here that this tool, priceless elsewhere, had not been stolen.

She moved around, slowly, so that the sharp edges of the grass would not cut her legs. She found two clay pots—thundermugs—in the tall green. A jar for drinking water was on a bamboo table which had not as yet been overturned by the pressure of the growing grass. A necklace of fishbones hung on another peg. Two bamboo cots and pillows and mattresses, made from magnetically locked cloths stuffed with leaves, were partially hidden by the grass. Near them lay a harp made from turtlefish shell and fish intestines.

“Well, it’s not much,” she said. “But then it never is, is it?”

“It’s big enough, though,” Schwartz said. “Plenty of room for you and your mate—when you find one.”

Jill took the sickle from the peg and swiped at the grass. The blades fell like so many heads. “Hah!”

Schwartz looked at her as if he wondered if she would go from the grass to him.

“Why do you assume that I want a lover?”

“Why, why, why, everybody, that is, everybody does.”

“Everybody doesn’t,” she said. She hung the sickle back onto the peg. “What’s next on this Cook’s tour?”

She had expected that, when they were alone in the hut, he would ask her to go to bed with him. So many men did. It was evident now that he would like to ask her, but he didn’t have the guts. She felt relief mixed with contempt. Then she told herself that it was a strange feeling, self-contradictory. Why should she look down on him because he behaved as she wanted him to behave?

Perhaps some disappointment was also present. When a man got too aggressive, despite her warnings, then she chopped his neck with the edge of her hand, squeezed his testicles, kicked him in the stomach while he writhed on the ground. No matter how big and strong a man, he was taken by surprise. They were all helpless, at least while the agony in the testicles lasted. Afterward… well, most of them left her alone. Some had tried to kill her, but she was ready for that. They didn’t know how handy she was with a knife—or with any weapon.

David Schwartz was unaware of how narrowly he had escaped crippling and a permanent dent in his ego.

“It’s quite safe to leave your belongings here. We’ve never had a case of theft yet.”

“I’ll take the grail. I’d feel nervous if I couldn’t keep my eye on it.”

He shrugged and took a cigar from the leather bag hanging from his shoulder. One of this morning’s offerings from his grail.

“Not in here,” she said quietly. “This is my home, and I don’t want it stunk up.”

He looked surprised, but he shrugged again. As soon as they had stepped out, however, he lit it. And he moved from her left side to upwind, puffing vigorously, blowing in her direction.

Jill repressed the remark she wanted so much to make. It would be indiscreet to offend him too much, to give him a chance to black-mark her. After all, she was on probation; she was a woman; she wouldn’t needlessly antagonize a man with such a high position, a good friend of Firebrass’. But she would bend her principles, her neck, only so far.

Or would she? She had taken a lot of crap on Earth because she had wanted to be an airship officer. And smiled and gone home and smashed dishes and pottery and written dirty words on the wall. Childish, but satisfactory. And here she was, in a similar situation, undreamed of until several years ago. She couldn’t go someplace else, because there wasn’t any other place. Here was where the only airship in the world would be built. And that was to be a one-shot, a single-voyage phenomenon.

Schwartz stopped on top of the hill. He pointed at an avenue formed by ridgepole pines. At its end, halfway down the hill opposite, was a long shed.

“The latrine for your neighborhood,” he said. “You’ll dump your nightpots in it first thing every morning. The urine in one hole and the excrement in the one next to it.”

He paused, smiled, and said, “Probationers are usually given the task of removing the stuff every other day. They take it up the mountain to the gunpowder factory. The excrement is fed to the powderworms. The end product of their digestion is potassium nitrate, and…”

“I know,” she said, speaking between clamped teeth. “I’m not a dummy. Anyway, that process is used wherever sulfur is available.”

Schwartz teetered on his heels, happily puffing his cigar, tilted upward. If he had had suspenders, he would have snapped them.

“Most probationers put in at least a month working in the factory. It’s unpleasant, but it’s good discipline. It also weeds out those who aren’t dedicated.”

“Non carborundum illegitimatus,” she said.

“What?” he said out of the side of his mouth.

“A Yank saying. Jack-Latin. Translation: Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I can take any crap handed me—if it’s worth doing it. Then it’s my turn.”

“Too right. You have to be if you survive in a man’s world. I thought perhaps things would be different here. They weren’t, and aren’t, but they will be.

“We’ve all changed,” he said slowly and somewhat sadly. “Not always for the better. If you’d told me in 1893 that I’d be listening to a woman, an upper-class woman, not a whore or a millhand, mind you, spewing filth and subversive…”

“Instead of subservient, you mean,” she said harshly.

“Allow me to finish. Subversive suffragette rot. And if you’d told me that it wouldn’t particularly bother me, I’d have said you were a liar. But live and learn. Or, in our case, die and learn.”

He paused and looked at her. The right side of her mouth jerked; her eyes narrowed.

“I could tell you to stick it,” she said. “But I must get along with you. I will take only so much, however.”

“You didn’t understand all I said,” he replied. “I said it doesn’t bother me now. And I said, live and learn. I am not the David Schwartz of 1893. I hope you are not the Jill Gulbirra of… when did you die?”

“In 1983.”

They walked down the hill in silence, Jill carrying her grail on the end of her spear, which was on her shoulder. Schwartz stopped once to point out a stream that ran down from the hills. Its source was a cataract in the mountains. They came to a small lake between two hills. A man sat in a rowboat in the middle of the lake, a bamboo fishing pole in his hand, the float drifting toward a bush overhanging the bank. Jill thought he looked Japanese.

Schwartz said, “Your neighbor. His real name is Ohara, but he prefers to be called Piscator. He’s crazy about Izaak Walton, whom he can quote verbatim. He says a man needs only one name in this world, and he’s chosen Piscator. Latin for fisher. He’s a fish freak, as you can see. Which is why he’s in charge of the Parolando Riverdragon fishing. But today’s his day off.”

“That’s interesting,” she said. He was, she believed, leading up to something unpleasant for her. The slight smile looked sadistic.

“He’ll probably be the first mate of the airship,” he said. “He was a Japanese naval officer and during the first part of World War I he was attached to the British Navy as an observer and trainee on dirigibles. Later, he was a trainee-observer on an Italian Navy airship which made bombing raids on Austrian bases. So, you see, he’s had enough experience to rank him very high on the list.”

“And he is a man.” She smiled, though seething inside. “And though my experience is much much more than his, still, he’s a man.”

Schwartz backed away from her. “I’m sure Firebrass will appoint officers according to their merits only.”

She did not reply.

Schwartz waved at the man in the boat. He rose from his seat and, smiling, bowed. Then he sat down, but not before giving her a look that seemed to sweep over her like a metaphysical radar beam, locating her place in the world, identifying her psychic construction.

Imagination, of course. But she thought that Schwartz was right when he said, “An extraordinary man, that Piscator.”

The Japanese’s black eyes seemed to burn holes in her back as she walked away.

Blackness outside. Inside, a night writhing with snakes of pale lightning, twisty and fuzzy. Some time later, in a place where there was no time, a bright beam ahead shone as if from the lens of a movie projector. The light was a whisper in the air; in her mind, it was bellowing. The film was being shown on a cathode-ray oscilloscope; it was a series of letters, broken words, signs, and symbols, all part of an undeciphered code. Perhaps: undecipherable.

Worse, it seemed to run backward, spun back into the reel(ity?). It was a documentary made for television, for the boobish (boobed?) viewer of the boob tube. Yet, backward was an excellent technique. Images flashed to suggest, to reverberate, to echo, to evoke, to flap intimation upon intimation with electronic quickness. Like flipping the pages of an illustrated book from back to beginning. But the text, where was the text? And what was she thinking of when she thought of images? There were no images. No plot. Yes, there was a plot, but it had to be put together from many pieces. Ah, many pieces. She almost had it, but it had slipped away.

Moaning, she awoke. She opened her eyes and listened to the rain beating upon the thatched roof.

Now she remembered the first part of the dream. It was a dream of a dream, or what she thought was a dream but was not sure. It was raining, and she had half-awakened or had seemed to do so. The hut was 20,000 kilometers from this one, but it was almost identical, and the world outside the hut, as seen by occasional flashes of lightning, would not have differed much. She had turned, and her hand had not felt the expected flesh.

She had sat up and looked around. A lightning streak, close enough to make her jump, showed that Jack was not in the hut.

She had got up and lit a fish-oil lamp. Not only was he not there, his cloths, weapons, and grail were gone.

She had run out into the stormy night to look for him.

She never found him. He was gone, and no one knew where or why.

The only one who might have been able to tell her had also sneaked out that same night. He, too, had left his hutmate without saying a word about his intentions. It was apparent to Jill that the two had run off together. Yet, as far as she knew, they had been only casual acquaintances.

Why had Jack left her, so silently and heartlessly?

What had she done?

Was it just that Jack had decided that he did not want to put up with a woman who wouldn’t play second fiddle in their relationship? Also, had the wanderlust gotten him again? With both motives pushing him, had he just up and went, to use one of his corny Americanisms?

Whatever was the truth, she was living with no man anymore, ever again. Jack was the best, and the last was the best, as it should be, but he had not been good enough.

She was on the rebound when she met Fatima, the little sloe-eyed Turk. Fatima, one of the hundreds of concubines of Mohammed IV (ruled Turkey from 1648–1687), had never gone to bed with him. She had, however, not suffered overmuch from lack of sexual satisfaction. There were plenty of fellow prisoners of the Seraglio who preferred their own sex as lovers, either through natural inclinations or conditioning. She became a favorite of Kosem, Mohammed’s grandmother, though there was nothing overtly homosexual in their relationship.

But Turhan, Mohammed’s mother, sought to get control of the government from Kosem, and eventually Kosem was caught by a party of Turhan’s assassins and strangled to death with the cords from her own bed curtain. It was Fatima’s bad fortune to be attending Kosem when this happened and so she had to share her fate.

Jill took the sexy little Turk in as hutmate after Fatima had quarreled with her lover, a French ballet danseuse (died 1873). Jill was not in love with her, but she was sexually exciting and, after a while, she became fond of her. Fatima, however, was ignorant and, worse, unteachable. She was selfish and would remain so, was infantile and would remain so. Jill got tired of her after a year. Even so, she was grief-stricken when Fatima was raped and then beaten to death by three drunken Sikeli (born 1000 B.C.?). Her grief was intensified by the knowledge (or belief, since there was no proof) that Fatima was truly dead. Resurrection had apparently stopped. No more would a dead person rise the next day at dawn far, far from the scene of his or her demise.

Before succumbing to her sorrow, however, Jill had put an arrow into each of Fatima’s murderers. They were not going to rise elsewhere either.

Years later, she had heard rumors of the great dirigible that was being built upRiver. She did not know if they were true or not, but there was only one way to find out.

So here she was, though it had taken a long time to get here.

From The Daily Leak, a five-page newspaper. Owner and publisher: the state of Parolando. Editor: S.C. Bagg. In the upper-left-hand corner above the headline is the standard notice:

CAVEAT LECTOR

By law, the reader must place this journal in a public recycling barrel the day after receipt. In case of emergency, it may be used for toilet paper. We recommend the Letters to the Editor page as most appropriate for this purpose. First offense: a public reprimand. Second: confiscation of all booze, tobacco, and dreamgum for a week. Third: permanent exile.

Prominent in the Newcomers section:

JILL GULBIRRA

We welcome, in spite of the advice of many, our latest female candidate for citizenship. On Sunday last, this tall drink of water appeared out of the predawn fog and accosted four of our leading public figures. Despite their certain state of inebriation and possibly lecherous thoughts, two conditions leading to mental fogginess, the quartet finally comprehended that their unexpected guest had traveled approximately 32,180 kilometers (or 20,000 miles, for you dummies and dodos). She had done this alone and in a canoe (and not been raped or dunked once) and all this odyssey was performed just to make sure that our airship project proceeds on proper lines. While not exactly demanding that she be appointed commander of the dirigible when it is commissioned, she did intimate that it would be to everybody’s good if she did obtain this post.

After a few snorts of the divine product of Caledonia, the quartet partially recovered from this onslaught. (One witness thus describes her appearance: “Amazonly, with a demeanor of sheer brass nerves and ironclad guts, unseemly in any woman worthy of the name.”)

The famous four inquired as to her credentials. She furnished these, which, if valid, are impressive indeed. A prominent citizen interviewed on the subject by our intrepid reporter, Roger “Nellie” Bligh, affirms that she is indeed what she claims to be. Though never having met her in his Terrestrial existence, he did read about her in various periodicals and once viewed her on television (a mid-twentieth-century invention which your editor did not live long enough to see and from all accounts was fortunate to have missed).

It seems that, unless this woman bears a remarkable physical resemblance to the genuine Jill Gulbirra, she is not one of the numerous phonies that have plagued this Rivervalley for far too long a time.

The Office of Vital (some say Deadly) Statistics has furnished us with the following information. Gulbirra, Jill (no middle name). Female. Natal name: Johnetta Georgette Redd. Born February 12, 1953, Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia. Father: John George Redd. Mother: Marie Bronze Redd. Heredity: Scotch-Irish, French (Jewish), Australian aborigine. Unmarried on Earth. Attended schools in Canberra and Melbourne. Graduated 1973 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. Commercial aviator’s license, four-motor. Free balloonist’s license. Engineer-navigator on West German freighter blimp serving Nigerian government, 1977–78. Blimp pilot for Goodyear, United States, 1979. Blimp pilot for the Sheik of Kuwait, 1980–81. Blimp instructor for British Airways Systems, 1982. Became in 1983 the only qualified woman airship captain in the Western world. Logged 8342 hours airship flight time.

Died April 1, 1983 A.D., automobile accident near Howden, England, just before assuming command of the newly commissioned rigid airship Willows-Goodens.

Profession: obvious from above.

Skills: flute, archery, fencing, kendo, quarterstaff, martial arts, badmouthing.

She is pretty good with her dukes, too, having slammed a distinguished citizen, Cyrano “Schnozzola” de Bergerac, in the breadbasket, following with a knee to the jaw, rendering him hors de combat and speechless. This phenomenon occurred as a result of his having laid hands (without permission) upon her teat. Normally, the fiery Frenchman would have challenged anyone who handled him so savagely to a duel to the death (across the Parolando boundary, of course, since dueling is illegal in our fair state). But he is so old-fashioned that he would feel, as he put it, “comme un imbécile,” if he were to fight a woman. Moreover, he feels that he was in the wrong for having made advances without invitation “verbal” or “ocular.”

An hour after suppertime yesterday, your enterprising intrepid appeared at the door of Gulbirra’s hut and knocked. There were some grunts and then a querulous voice called, “What in hell do you want?” Apparently, the would-be interviewee didn’t give a hoot about the identity of her caller.

“Miss Gulbirra, I’m Roger Bligh, reporter for The Daily Leak. I’d like to interview you.”

“Well, you’ll have to wait. I’m on the pot.”

Your journalist lit up a cigar to pass the time. He also planned to use its burning tip later to clear out the fumes in the hut. After some time, during which he heard splashing of water in a basin, he heard, “Come on in. But leave the door open.”

“Gladly,” said your dauntless.

He found the subject seated at a chair by the table and smoking a joint. What with the cigar and maryjane and residue of the subject’s recent occupation and the smoke from several fishwax candles, neither visibility nor olfactoriness were at an optimum.

“Miss Gulbirra?”

“No. Miz.”

“What does the title mean?”

“Are you asking just to get my views or don’t you really know? There are plenty of people of my time around. Surely, you’ve encountered Miz before?”

Your reporter confessed his ignorance.

Instead of enlightening Mr. Bligh, the subject said, “What is the position of women in Parolando?”

“In the daytime or at night?” Mr. Bligh said.

“Don’t get smart with me,” Miz Gulbirra said. “Let me put it simply so your mind can grasp exactly what I’m talking about. Legally, that is, theoretically, women have equal rights here. But in practice, in reality, what is the male attitude toward females?”

“Mainly lecherous, I’m afraid,” the intrepid replied.

“I’ll give you one more chance,” the subject said. “Then it’ll be a question of chance and gravity which strikes the ground first outside the door, your ass or your stinking cigar.”

“My apologies,” the intrepid said. “But, after all, I am here to interview you, not vice versa. Why don’t you ask our female citizens what they think of the male attitude toward them? Anyway, are you here to conduct a suffragette crusade or to build and to man (if I may use the word) the proposed dirigible?”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“The farthest thing from my mind,” the dauntless said hastily. “We are quite modern here, even though the late-twentieth-centurians constitute only a small percentage of the population. The state is dedicated to the construction of the airship. To that goal, strict discipline during working hours is maintained. But a citizen may do what he damn well pleases on his hours off, as long as he doesn’t hurt anybody else. So, let’s get down to business. What is a Miz, not to be confused with amiss?”

“You aren’t putting me on?”

“I’d swear by a stack of Bibles, if any existed.”

“Briefly, it’s a title which the members of the women’s liberation movement in the sixties adopted. Miss and Mrs. were too indicative of male sexual attitudes. To be a Miss was to be unmarried, which automatically evoked contempt, consciously or unconsciously, on the part of the male, if the Miss were past marriageable age. It implied that something was lacking in the woman, and also that the Miss must be dying to be referred to as Mrs. That is, without an identity of her own, regarded as an appendage to her husband, a second-class citizen. Why should a Miss, for that matter, be known by her father’s name? Why not her mother’s?”

“In the latter case,” our intrepid replied, “the name would still be a man’s, the woman’s father’s name.”

“Exactly. That is why I changed my name from Johnetta Georgette Redd—you’ll notice that both my so-called Christian names are feminizations of masculine names—I changed it to Jill Gulbirra. My father raised hell about that, even my mother protested strongly. But she was a typical Aunt Dora—brainwashed.”

“Interesting,” Mr. Bligh said, “Gulbirra? What kind of a name is that? Slavic? And why did you choose it?”

“No, it’s Australian aborigine, you dummy. A gulbirra is a kangaroo that catches dogs and eats them.”

“A carnivorous kangaroo? I thought they were all vegetarians?”

“Well, actually, it may not have existed. But the abos claimed that it did exist in the outlands. It may have been mythical, but what’s the difference? It’s the symbolism that counts.”

“So you identify with the gulbirra? I can imagine what the dogs symbolize.”

At this point, Miz Gulbirra smiled so terrifyingly that your correspondent felt compelled to down a snort of the Dutch courage he always carries in his shoulderbag.

“Not that I chose that name because I identify with, or sympathize with, blackfellow culture,” the Miz said. “I am one-quarter abo, but so what? It was a male chauvinist culture through and through, women were mere objects, subject to slavery; they did all the hard work and they were often beaten by their fathers and husbands. A lot of Caucasian males have sentimentalized about the destruction of abo society, but I personally thought it was a good thing. Of course, I deplore the suffering that went along with its disintegration.”

“Deploration, unlike defloration, is usually managed without pain,” Mr. Bligh said.

“Virginity! That’s another male myth, invented solely to aggrandize the male ego and enforce his opinions about his property rights,” Miz Gulbirra said bitterly. “Fortunately, that attitude changed considerably during my lifetime. But there are still plenty of pigs around, fossil boars, I called them, who…”

“That’s all very interesting,” the dauntless dared to interrupt. “But you can reserve your opinion for the Letters to the Editor page. Mr. Bagg will print anything you say, no matter how scurrilous. Our readers just now would like to know what your professional plans are. Just how do you see yourself as contributing to Project Airship, as it’s officially called? Just where do you think you’ll fit into the hierarchy?”

By now, the heavy acrid fumes of marijuana overrode all others. A wild, fierce light glittered in her drug-expanded pupils. Your correspondent felt it necessary to expand his rapidly shrinking dauntless state with another pull on the divine bottle.

“By all logic and by right of superior knowledge, experience, and capability,” she said slowly but loudly, “I should be in charge of the project. And I should be captain of the airship! I’ve checked out everybody’s qualifications, and there’s no doubt at all that I am by far the best qualified.

“So why am I not put in charge of the construction? Why am I not even considered as a candidate for the captaincy? Why?”

“Don’t tell me,” your intrepid answered. Possibly he was overly emboldened by the liquid lava coursing through his veins and dulling his otherwise fine sensibilities. “Don’t tell me. Let me hazard a guess. Could it be, I’m just groping for an explanation, mind you, could it be that you are relegated to an inferior position because you are only a woman?”

The subject stared at your correspondent, took another puff, drew it deep into her lungs, causing a slight lifting of slight breasts, and finally, face bluish with lack of oxygen, discharged the tag ends of fumes through her nostrils. Your intrepid was reminded of pictures of dragons he had seen during his Terrestrial existence. He, however, thought of the better part of valor and did not remark upon the similarity.

“You’ve got it,” she said. “Maybe you’re not so dense after all.”

Then, gripping the edge of the table as if she’d squeeze the wood, she sat up straight. “But just what do you mean by only a woman?”

“Oh, that’s only my verbalization of your thoughts,” the intrepid said hastily. “I was being ironic. Or whatever…”

“If I were a man,” she said, “which, thank God I am not, I’d have been made at least first mate on the spot. And you wouldn’t be sitting there sneering at me.”

“Oh, you’re mistaken about that,” your dauntless said. “I am not sneering at you. However, there is a point that you may have overlooked. It wouldn’t make any difference what your sex is; you could have the biggest balls for forty thousand kilometers around, and you still wouldn’t be put in charge.

“Long before the Riverboat was built—the second one, I mean, not the one King John stole—it was agreed that Firebrass would be in charge of the airship project. It’s even in the Parolando constitution, which you must know, since he himself recited it chapter and verse to you. You were aware of that and by taking the oath you accepted that. So, tell me, why all the bitching?”

“You don’t understand after all, do you, you clown?” she said. “The point is that that rule, that arrogantly imperious law, should never have been made.”

Your correspondent swallowed some more of the stuff that encourages—and stupefies—and said, “The point is that it was made. And if a man came along twice as qualified as you, he’d still have to accept the fact that he could never be higher than second. He could be Captain Firebrass’ chief construction assistant and first mate on the ship. But that’s all.”

“There isn’t any such creature as twice as qualified as me,” she said, “unless an officer from the Graf Zeppelin should show up. Listen, I’m getting tired of this.”

“It is rather hot and smoky in here,” your correspondent said, wiping the sweat off his brow. “However, I would like to get more of your background, details of your earthly life, you know, human interest stuff. And also the story of what happened to you right after Resurrection Day. And…”

“And you’re hoping I’ll get turned on by this joint and by your overwhelming male charm and virility?” she said. “Are you getting ready to make a pass at me?”

“God forbid,” I said. “This is a strictly professional visit. Besides…”

“Besides,” she said, and she was the one sneering now, “you’re scared of me, aren’t you? You’re all alike. You have to be dominant, the superior. If you meet a woman with more brains, one who is able to handle you in a fight, who is clearly the superior, then the hot air whistles out of you like a pricked balloon. A balloon with a prick.”

“Now, really, Miz Gulbirra,” your dauntless said, feeling his face heat up.

“Bug off, little man,” the subject said.

Your correspondent thought it was wise to obey this imperative. The interview, though not complete from our viewpoint, was terminated.

Jill picked up next evening’s Leak from the distribution shack outside the press building. Some people who obviously had already read the news snickered or grinned at her. She opened the paper to the Newcomers page, suspecting what she would find there, angry before reading it.

The pages rattled in her shaking hands. The interview was bad enough, though she should have known that a late-nineteenth-century man like Bagg would print such rot. What had he been, editor of some crummy yellow rag of some frontier town in the Arizona Territory? Yes, that was it. Tombstone. Firebrass had told her something about him.

What really enraged her was the photograph. She hadn’t been aware of it, but someone in the crowd her first morning here had snapped her picture. There she was, caught in a silly-looking, almost obscene, posture. Naked, bending over, her breasts hanging straight down like a cow’s udders, the towel in one hand behind her and one before as she sawed it, drying her crotch. She was looking up, her mouth open, and she seemed all nose and buckteeth.

Surely, the cameraman had taken other shots. But Bagg had chosen this one just to make her a laughingstock.

She was so furious she almost forgot to pick up her grail. Swinging it from one hand, thinking how she was going to brain Bagg with it, the newspaper clutched in the other—it was also going to be jammed all the way up—she stormed toward the building. But when she got to the door, she stopped.

“Come on, Jill!” she told herself. “You’re reacting just as he hoped you would, just as they all hope you will. Play it cool; don’t be a knee-jerk. Sure, it’d make you feel great to slam him around his office a little. But it might ruin everything. You’ve endured worse, and you’ve come out on top.”

She walked slowly homeward, the handle of the grail looped over one arm. In the fading light, she read the rest of the paper. She wasn’t the only one Bagg had libeled, slandered, and mocked. Firebrass himself, though treated gently in the write-up on her, was severely criticized elsewhere and not only by Bagg. The vox pop page contained a number of signed letters from citizens outraged by Firebrass’ policies.

As she left the plain and started her winding way through the hills, she was softly hailed. Turning, she saw Piscator. He smiled as he walked toward her and said in an Oxford accent, “Good evening, citizen. May I accompany you? We will be happier in each other’s company than alone? Or perhaps not?”

Jill had to smile. He spoke so gravely, almost in a seventeenth-century style. This impression was strengthened by his hat, a tall cylinder sloping inward to the top and with a wide circular brim. It reminded her of the hats of the New England Pilgrims. It was made of dark-red leather from the scaleless redfish. Several aluminum alloy flies were snagged in its brim. A black cloth was over his shoulders, held together at the throat. A dark-green cloth served as a kilt, and his sandals were of redfish leather.

Over his shoulder was a bamboo rod. In the other hand was the handle of his grail. A newspaper was clamped by an arm to his body. A wicker basket hung by a strap from the other shoulder.

He was tall for a Japanese, the top of his head coming to her nose. And his features were attractive, not too Mongolian.

“I suppose you’ve read the paper?” she said.

“Unhappily, most of it,” he said. “But don’t be grieved. As Solomon says of scoffers, Proverbs 24:9: They are an abomination to mankind.”

“I prefer humankind,” she said.

He looked puzzled. “But what… ? Ah, I see, you obviously object to man in mankind. But man means man, woman, and child in this usage.”

“I know it does,” she said as if she were repeating this for the thousandth time, which she was. “I know it does. But the use of man conditions the speaker and the hearer to think of man as the human male only. The use of humankind, or personkind, conditions people to think of Homo sapiens as consisting of both sexes.”

Piscator drew breath in through his teeth. She expected him to say, “Ah, so!” but he did not. Instead, he said, “I have in this basket three of the savory tench, if I may call them that. They are remarkably similar in appearance and taste to Terrestrial fish of that name. They are not quite as delicious as the grayling, if I may call them that, which are caught in the mountain streams. But they are much sport, a cunning and lusty fish.”

She decided that he must have learned his English from The Compleat Angler.

“Would you care to share some of the fish with me tonight? I’ll have them baked piping hot at 16:00 by the waterclock. I will also have a plentiful supply of skull-bloom.”

This was the local name for alcohol made from the lichen scraped off the mountain face. It was watered down, three parts to one, and then blossoms from the irontree vines were dried, crushed, and mixed with alcohol. After the blossoms had given a purplish color and a roselike fragrance to the liquid, it was ready to be served.

Jill hesitated for several seconds. She did not mind being alone—most of the time. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she did not get desperate, panicked, if she were thrown on her own resources. But she had been her only company for too long. The voyage up The River had taken four hundred and twenty days, and during most of that time she had been utterly alone by day. At night, she had eaten and talked with strangers. She had passed an estimated 501,020,000 people and had not seen one face she had known on Earth or Riverworld. Not one.

But then she had seldom gotten close enough to the banks during the day to have recognized facial features. Her socializing at night was limited to a few people. What was mental agony, or would have been if she permitted herself such an emotion, was that she might have passed by some people she had loved on Earth, or, at least, liked. There were some she wanted very much to see again.

Perhaps the one she most longed to talk to was Marie. What had Marie felt when she learned that her senseless jealousy had been responsible for the death of her lover, Jill Gulbirra? Would she have been grief-stricken, perhaps have taken her own life because of guilt? After all, Marie was suicide-prone. Or, rather, to be exact, prone to taking just enough pills to endanger her but not enough so that she could not get medical assistance in time to save her. Marie had come close to death at least three times that Jill knew about. But not very close.

No, Marie would have been plunged into gloom and self-reproach for about three days. Then she would have swallowed about twenty phenobarbitols and called her closest friend, probably another lover, Jill thought, her breast hurting—the bitch!—and the lover would have called the hospital, and then there would be the stomach pump and the antidotes and the long, anxious waiting in the lobby and then the attendance by the bed while Marie rambled on half-mindlessly, still fogged by the drug but not so fogged that she would not be deliberately working on her lover’s emotions. It would not just be sympathy that she would be evoking. The sadistic little bitch would also make a few wounding remarks to her lover, getting across some criticisms which she would claim later that she did not remember making.

Then Marie would be taken to her apartment by her lover, and tenderly taken care of for a while, and then… Jill could not bear fantasizing that then.

At these times she had to laugh, though grimly, at herself. It was thirty-one years after she had stormed out of the house and driven off, tires screaming, rubber burning, and raced recklessly through three stoplights and then… then the blinding lights and the blaring horn of the huge lorry and the savage wrenching at the wheel to turn the Mercedes-Benz, the frozen sickness inside her, the looming of the juggernaut, and…

And she had awakened with countless others, naked, her thirty-year-old body restored to a twenty-five-year-old state—minus certain blemishes and imperfections—on the banks of the Rivervalley. Nightmare in paradise. Or what could have been paradise if so many human beings did not insist on making a hell of it.

Thirty-one years ago. Time had not mended all hurts, not, at least, this one. By now she should have gotten over the mingled fury and grief. It should have receded beyond the horizon of things that mattered now. She should have no slightest emotion about Marie now. But she did.

She was suddenly aware that the Japanese was looking at her. He evidently expected her to reply to something he had just said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Sometimes, I get lost in the past.”

“I am sorry, too,” he said. “Sometimes… if one is using dreamgum as a means to rid oneself of painful or crippling memories or undesirable psychic states, one instead… gets lost.”

“No,” she said, trying to keep the anger out of her voice. “It’s just that I have been alone so long, I have fallen into the habit of reverie. Why, when I was sailing the canoe up The River, I would do so automatically. Sometimes, I would realize that I had put ten kilometers behind me and not even been aware, consciously anyway, of what had happened during that time.

“But now that I’m here, where I have a job that requires constant mental alertness, you will see that I can be as much on my toes as anyone.”

She added that because she knew that Piscator might report her to Firebrass. Absentmindedness was not to be tolerated in an airship officer.

“I am sure you will,” Piscator said. He paused, smiled, and said, “By the way, do not be worried about competition from me. I am not ambitious. I will be satisfied with whatever rank or position I am given, because I know that that will fit my abilities and experience. Firebrass is fair.

“I am curious about our goal, the so-called Misty Tower or Big Grail or the dozen other titles it bears. In fact, I am eager to journey there, to inquire into what may hold the secret of this world. Eager but not anxious, if you understand what I mean. I readily admit that I do not have your qualifications, and so I anticipate being ranked under you.”

Jill Gulbirra was silent for a moment. This man belonged to a nation which practically enslaved its women. At least, in his own time (1886–1965), it had. It was true that after World War I there had been a certain amount of liberation. He would, theoretically, still have the attitude of the old-fashioned Japanese man toward women. Which was a terrible attitude. On the other hand, The Riverworld did change people. Some people.

“You really wouldn’t mind?” she said. “Not really, deep down!”

“I seldom lie,” he said. “And that only to spare the feelings of someone or to keep from wasting time with fools. I think I know what you are thinking. Would it help you to know that one of my masters in Afghanistan was a woman? I spent ten years as her disciple before she decided that I was not as stupid as when I had come to her and that I could go on to my next sheik.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I would be happy to discuss that some other time. As of the moment, let me assure you that I am not prejudiced against women or against non-Japanese. I was, but that foolishness was emptied out of me a long time ago. For instance, at one time, for some years after World War I, I was a Zen monk. First, though, do you know anything about Zen?”

“There were many books written about it after 1960 or thereabouts,” Jill said. “I read a few.”

“Yes. Did you know any more after reading these than you did before?” he said, smiling.

“A little.”

“You are truthful. As I was saying, I retired from the world after I resigned from the Navy and I resided at a monastery in Ryukyu. The third year, a white man, a Hungarian, came to the monastery as a humble novitiate. When I saw how he was treated, I suddenly acknowledged what I had known unconsciously but had resisted bringing to light. That was that many years in the discipline of Zen had not rid either the disciples or masters, no one in the monastery, except myself, of their racial prejudices. Their national prejudices, I should say, since they showed hostility and even contempt for Chinese and Indo-Chinese, fellow Mongolians.

“After being honest for the first time with myself, I acknowledged to myself that the practice of Zen had not resulted in anything deeply worthwhile in myself or the others. Of course, you must realize that Zen does not have goals. To have goals is to frustrate the attaining of goals. Is that contradictory? It is.

“It is also nonsense, as is that business of emptying oneself. Perhaps the state of being empty is not nonsense, but the methods used to achieve it were, as far as I was concerned. And so, one morning, I walked out of the monastery and took ship to China. And I began my long wanderings, called by some inaudible voice toward Central Asia. And from thence… well, that is enough for the time being. I can continue this later if you wish.

“I see that we are getting close to our homes. I bid you adieu then until tonight. I will set out two torches, which you may see from your window, to announce when our little gathering begins.”

“I did not say that I was coming.”

“But you had nevertheless accepted,” he said. “Is that not true?”

“Yes, but how did you know?”

“It’s not telepathy,” he said, smiling again. “A certain posture, a certain relaxation of muscles, the dilation of your pupils, an undertone to your voice, undetectable except to the highly trained, told me that you were looking forward to the party.”

Jill said nothing. She had not known herself that she was pleased with the invitation. Nor was she sure now. Was Piscator conning her?

An irontree grew from the top of a hill 200 meters from Jill’s hut. Piscator’s hut was near the top, nestled between the upper parts of two roots. Its back rested upon a shelf of earth; its front was held up by bamboo pylons to keep it from slipping down the steep slope.

Jill went up the hill without Jack, though there would be Jackasses at its top, she thought. She went under the house and up a bamboo staircase which entered the structure through the floor halfway along its length.

The building was larger than most of those in this area, three rooms on the ground floor and two on the first story. According to a neighbor, it had once housed a commune. Like all such nonreligious organizations composed of Occidentals, it had dissolved after a while. Piscator had moved in then, though Jill did not know why one man wanted such a large house. Was it because it was a prestige symbol? He did not seem to be the sort of man who would care for such things.

Along the railing were bright acetylene lamps behind white, green, or scarlet shades made from fish intestines. Piscator, at the top of the steps, smiled and nodded at Jill. He was wearing a kimonolike arrangement of varicolored towels. In his hand he held a bouquet of huge blooms plucked from the vines entwining the upper reaches of the irontree.

“Welcome, Jill Gulbirra.”

She thanked him, breathing deeply the strong odor of the flowers, reminiscent of honeysuckle with a very slight scent of old leather. A peculiar but pleasing combination.

Gaining the top of the steps, she found herself in the largest room of the house. Its ceiling was about three times her height; from it hung a score of Japanese lamps. The bamboo floor was covered here and there with throw rugs made from bamboo fiber. The furniture was of bamboo, light, simple forms the seats of which were softened with cushions. Some of the chair arms and table legs and the posts supporting the ceiling were, however, of oak or yew. Heads of animals, demons, Riverfish, and human beings had been carved from these. They did not look as if they had been done by a Japanese. Probably, a previous occupant had sculptured them.

Tall, wasp-waisted, bell-mouthed vases stood on the floor. Shorter versions stood on top of spindly legged round-topped tables. These were formed on a potter’s wheel, baked, and glazed or painted. Geometrical designs were on some vases; others bore marine scenes from Earthlife. The boats were lateens; the sailors, Arabs. Blue dolphins leaped from a blue-greenish sea; a monster opened its mouth to swallow a ship. However, since there were large fish called dolphins in The River, and the colossal Riverdragon did bear a faint resemblance to the monster, it was possible that the artist had represented Riverlife.

The doorways to the neighboring rooms were filled with dangling strings of white and red hornfish vertebrae; these emitted a tinkling when disturbed. Mats of woven fibers from irontree vines hung on the walls, and the transparent intestines of Riverdragons, stretched on bamboo frames, were above each window.

All in all, though there were some things, such as the acetylene lamps, not found elsewhere, the room was a variation of what many called Riparian Culture; others, Riverine Polynesian.

The lamp lights strove to pierce the heavy clouds of tobacco and marijuana. A band played softly on a small podium in a corner. It was providing its services in return for booze and a chance to please itself with useful work. The musicians were beating or brushing drums, blowing on a bamboo flute, a clay ocarina; stroking a harp made of a turtlefish shell and fish guts; sawing on a fiddle of fish intestines and English-yewlike wood with a yew bow fitted with the horsehairlike mouth cilia of the blue dolphin; hammering a xylophone; blowing a saxophone, a trumpet.

The music was unrecognizable, at least for Jill. But she thought that it was derived from a Central or South American Indian piece.

“If this were tête-à-tête, instead of a large party, I would be able to give you tea, my dear,” Piscator said. “But it is not possible. My grail does not provide me with tea daily, but only one small bagful once a week.”

He had not changed so much that he did not miss the ceremony of tea, so beloved by all Japanese. Jill regretted the scarcity of the herb, too. Like most of her nation, she felt that something vital was missing if she didn’t get her tea at the proper time.

Piscator dipped a glass in a huge glass bowl full of skull-bloom and handed it to her. She sipped on it while he told her how happy he was to see her here. He sounded as if he really meant it. She found herself warming to him, though she did remind herself that he came from a culture which conditioned males to regard females as pleasure and work objects. Then she warned herself—for the ten thousandth time?—that she must not be as guilty of prejudice as others. Find the facts first and study them before judgment.

Her host led her around, introducing her briefly. Firebrass waved at her from a corner. Cyrano smiled thinly and bowed. They had encountered each other a number of times since that morning, but each had been aloof though polite. She did not want it that way. After all, he had apologized, and she was very curious about this flamboyant seventeenth-centurian.

She said hello to Ezekiel Hardy and David Schwartz, whom she saw every day in the office inside the hangar and in the factories nearby. Hardy and Schwartz were friendly enough; they had learned by now that she was thoroughly knowledgeable in her field. In many, in fact. She had bridled her impatience and anger at their ignorance and their assumed superiority. It had paid off, though she did not know how long she could repress herself.

“Don’t bottle up,” she told herself. “Empty yourself.”

How many times had she done that, or tried to do that? And it had seemed to work so many times, though not always by any means. Yet, here was this Japanese, Ohara, calling himself by the goofy name of Piscator—how weird—telling her that Zen was nonsense. Well, not exactly nonsense. But he had certainly indicated that it was overrated. She had not liked to hear that. It struck her below the belt of her self-image; it injured her. Which it should not have done. She should have laughed at him, even if only inwardly. But he had seemed so sure.

One of the women she was introduced to was Jeanne Jugan. Piscator mentioned that she had once been a servant in her native France but then had become one of the founders of the Roman Catholic religious order of the Little Sisters of the Poor, established in 1839 in Brittany.

“I am his disciple,” Jugan said, nodding at Piscator.

Jill’s eyebrows rose. “Oh!” She had no chance to continue the conversation. Piscator steered her away with a light touch on the elbow.

“You may talk to her later.”

Jill wondered what particular religion, sect, or mental discipline Piscator belonged to. He wasn’t a member of the Church of the Second Chance. A Chancer always wore a hornfish spiral vertebra or its wooden facsimile on a string from his neck.

However, the next person she met did wear that emblem, three, in fact, indicating that he was a bishop. Samuelo, short, very dark, and hawk faced, had been born sometime around the middle of the second century A.D. He had been a rabbi of the Jewish community at Nehardea in Babylonia. According to Piscator, he was somewhat famous in his time for his knowledge of traditional law and for some attainments in science. One of his feats was the compilation of a calendar of the Hebrew year. His chief claim to fame, however, lay in his efforts to adjust the Jewish law to the law of the land in which the Jews of the Diaspora lived.

“His principle was The law of the state is the binding law,” Piscator said.

Samuelo introduced his wife, Rahelo. She was even shorter, though not as dark, and she had very broad hips and heavy legs, but a face of startling sensuality. Replying to Jill’s questions, she said that she had been born in the Krakow ghetto in the fourteenth century A.D. Piscator would tell Jill later that Rahelo had been abducted by a Polish nobleman and imprisoned for a year in his castle. Tiring of her, he had then kicked her out, though not without a fat purse of gold coins. Her husband had murdered her because she had not had the grace to kill herself because of her dishonor.

Samuelo sent Rahelo running several times to get him a drink from a bowl filled with nonalcoholic bloom juice. He also gestured for her to light his cigar. She obeyed quickly and then resumed her position behind him.

Jill felt like kicking Rahelo for putting up with her ancient degradation and Samuelo for his ancient complacency. She could visualize him at prayers, thanking God that he was not born a woman.

Later, Piscator said to her, “You were furious with the bishop and his wife.”

She did not ask him how he knew. She said, “It must have been a hell of a shock for him to wake up here and find out that he was not one of God’s chosen people. That everybody, idol worshipper, cannibal, swine eater, uncircumcised dog of an infidel, all God’s children, were here, all were chosen.”

“We were all shocked,” Piscator said. “And terrified. Weren’t you?”

She stared at him for a moment, then laughed, and said, “Of course. I was an atheist, and I still am. I was sure that I was just so much flesh that would become so much dust. And that was that. I was horribly frightened when I awoke here. But at the same time, well, not at first but a little later, I was relieved. So, I thought, there is eternal life. Then, even later, I saw such strange things, and we were in such a strange place, nothing like heaven or hell, you know…”

“I know,” he said. He smiled. “I wonder what Samuelo thought when he saw that the uncircumcised goyim of Earth had been resurrected without their foreskins? That must have been as puzzling as the fact that men could no longer grow beards. On the one hand, God had performed a briss upon all the Gentiles who needed it and so He must be a Jewish god. On the other hand, a man could no longer sport the full beard demanded by God, so He surely could not be a Jewish god.

“It was, and is, such things that should have and should be changing our patterns of thinking,” Piscator said.

He came close, looking up at her with dark brown eyes set in fleshy slits. “The Second Chancers have some excellent ideas about why we have been raised from the dead and who has done it. They are not too far wrong about the way, or ways, one must take to attain the goal. A goal which mankind should desire and the gate to which our unknown benefactors have opened for us. But exactness is rightness. The inexact Church has wandered off the main road, or, I should say, the only road. Which is not to say that there is not more than one road.”

“What are you talking about?” she said. “You sound as weird as those Chancers.”

“We shall see—if you care to see,” he said. He excused himself and walked to the big table, where he started talking to a man who had just entered.

Jill sauntered toward Jeanne Jugan, intending to ask her what she meant by calling herself Piscator’s disciple. De Bergerac, however, placed himself in front of her. He was smiling broadly now.

“Ah, Ms. Gulbirra! I must beg your pardon for that unfortunate incident again! It was the liquor which caused me to behave so unforgivably, well not unforgivably I hope, but so barbarically! It is seldom that I drink more than an ounce or two, since I abominate the dulling of my senses. Alcohol makes one a swine, and I do not care for the beast on the hoof, though I adore him sliced and fried in a pan or roasted on a spit. But that night we were fishing…”

“I didn’t see any fishing equipment,” she said.

“It was on the other side of the grailstone. And the fog was thick, remember, mademoiselle?”

“Ms.”

“And we got to talking of things on Earth, places, people we had known, friends who had come to a bad end, children who had died, how our parents had misunderstood us, enemies, why we were here, and so on, understand? I became depressed, thinking of what might have been on Earth, especially what my cousin Madeleine and I might have done if I had been more mature or had not been so naive at that time. And so…”

“And so you got drunk,” she said, her face grave.

“And offended you, Ms., though I swear that I did not believe that you were a woman. The fog, the baggy clothing, my own addled wits…”

“Forget it,” she said. “Only… I believed you would never forgive me, since you would have lost face after a woman punched you out. Your ego…”

“You must not stereotype!” Cyrano cried.

“And you are right,” she said. “That is a failing I loathe, and yet I find myself doing it all the time. However, so often… well, most people are living stereotypes, aren’t they?”

They stood there, talking for a long time. Jill sipped on the purple passion, feeling her belly slowly warm up. The marijuana fumes became thicker, and she added to their intensity by drawing on the burning joint between her fingers. The voices were becoming louder, and there was much more laughter. Some couples were dancing now, their arms around each other’s necks, shuffling languorously.

Piscator and Jugan seemed to be the only ones who were not drinking. Piscator was smoking a cigarette now, the first, she believed, that he had lit up since she had entered.

The combination of liquor and pot had given her a pleasant halo now. She felt as if her flesh must be leaking a red-colored light. The smoke clouds were forming into almost-shapes. Sometimes, out of the corners of her eyes, she would glimpse a definite figure, a dragon, a smokefish, once, a dirigible. But when she turned her head toward them, she could see only amorphous masses.

When she saw a metal tub float by to one side, she knew that she had had it. No more booze and grass the rest of the night. The reason for the appearance of the tub was apparent, since Cyrano had been telling her about crime and its punishments in the French of his day. A counterfeiter, for instance, was stretched out upon a large wheel. The executioner then broke his arms and legs with an iron bar, sometimes pounding them to a pulp. Executed criminals were hung in chains in marketplaces and left to rot until the bodies fell through the chains. The guts of others were left in big open tubs so that they could remind the citizens of what happened to transgressors.

“And the streets ran with sewage, Ms. Gulbirra. No wonder that those who had the money drenched themselves with perfume.”

“I thought it was because you seldom bathed then.”

“True,” the Frenchman said. “I mean, true that we did not bathe often. It was thought to be unhealthy, un-Christian. But one can get used to the stench of unwashed bodies. I was not often aware of it since I was, as you might say, immersed in it, as unconscious of it as a fish is of water. But here, hélas! Where so few clothes are worn and where running water is so at hand, and where one encounters so many who cannot endure the odor of long-dirty humans, then one learns new habits. I, myself, now, I must confess that I saw no reason to be so fastidious, but then after some years I met a woman with whom I fell in love almost as passionately as I had with my cousin. She was Olivia Langdon…”

“You can’t mean Sam Clemens’ wife?”

“But yes. Though of course that meant nothing to me when I first met her and still does not. I understood that he was the great writer of the New World—she told me much about what happened since I had died on Earth—but I do not think much about it. And then Olivia and I wandered down The River and suddenly we were confronted with that classical situation which so many people dread. We met the former, the Terrestrial, spouse of one’s hutmate.

“By then, though I was still fond of her, my passion had cooled off. Each of us did so many things to annoy, even enrage the other, and why not? Is that not something commonplace here, where man and woman may be not only from different nations but from different times? How can the seventeenth-century person mesh with the nineteenth? Well, sometimes such a mismatch can be reshaped to match. But add the temporal differences to those that naturally exist between individuals, and what do you have? Quite often, a hopeless case.

“Livy and I were far up The River when I heard about the boat that was being built. I had heard of the meteorite that fell here, but I did not know that it was Sam Clemens who had seized the meteorite. I wanted to be one of the crew, and especially I wanted to feel a steel rapier in my hand again.

“And so, my dear Ms. Gulbirra, we came to this place. The shock was powerful indeed for Sam. I felt sorry for him, for a while, and regretted having forced this reunion that was not a reunion. Olivia showed no inclination to leave me for Clemens even though our passion was not quite what it had been. She did feel guilt about not feeling love for him. This was all the stranger when it is considered that they were deeply in love on Earth.

“But there had been many frictions, deeply hidden hostilities. She said that when she was in her terminal illness she did not want to see him. This hurt him very much, but she could not help it. And why, I asked her, had she not cared to admit him into her sickroom? She replied that she did not know. Perhaps it was because their only son had died because of Sam’s negligence. Criminal negligence, she called it, though she had never used, or even thought of, that word on Earth.

“I said that that was a long time ago and on another planet. Why did she still hold that fierce grievance within her breast? Did it matter now? Was not little… I forget his name…”

“Langdon,” Jill said.

“… risen from the dead now? And she said, yes, but she would never see Langdon. He had died when he was two, and no one under five years of age at death had been resurrected. At least not here. Maybe on another world. In any event, even if he had been raised here, what chance would she have of running across him? And what if she did? He would be full grown now, he would not even remember her. She would be a stranger to him. And God only knew what kind of a boy he would be. He might have been resurrected among cannibals or Digger Indians and not even known English or table manners.”

Jill grinned and said, “That sounds like something Mark Twain would say, not his wife.”

Cyrano grinned back and said, “She didn’t say that. I made that up, paraphrasing her. There was, of course, much more to her feeling than the accidental death of her baby. Actually, I can’t blame Clemens. Being a writer, he was very absentminded when he was pondering upon a story. I am that way myself. He did not notice that the coverings of the baby had slipped aside and that the icy air was blowing full upon the unprotected infant. He was automatically driving the horse which was drawing the sledge through the snows while his mind was intent upon that other world—his fiction.

“However, Olivia was certain that he was not as absentminded as he believed. She insisted that he could not have been, that some part of his mind must have observed the baby’s situation. He did not really want a son. Unlike most men, he preferred daughters. Besides, the baby was sickly from birth, a nuisance. To Sam, I mean.”

“That’s one thing in his favor,” Jill said. “I mean, that he preferred girls. Though I suppose, to be fair, that it is as neurotic to prefer a female infant as to prefer a male. Still, he did not have that male chauvinism…”

Cyrano said, “You must comprehend that Olivia did not consciously acknowledge all this during her Terrestrial existence. At least, she claimed not to have done so, though I suspect that she had such thoughts, was ashamed of them, and so put them away in the deep, dark files of her soul. But it was here, in this Valley, when she became addicted to chewing the soi-disant, the so-called dreamgum, that she perceived her true feelings.

“And so, though she still loved Clemens, in a manner of speaking, she hated him even more.”

“Did she quit using the gum?”

“Yes. It upset her too much. Though she now and then had some ecstatic or fantastic visions, she had too many horrible experiences.”

“She should have stuck with it,” Jill said. “But under proper guidance. However…”

“Yes?”

Jill compressed her lips, than said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t be too bloody critical. I had a guru, a beautiful woman, the best and wisest woman I ever knew, but she couldn’t keep me from running headlong into… well, no need to go into it here… it was too… dismaying? No, horrifying. I chickened out. So I shan’t be criticizing anyone else, shouldn’t anyway. I have been considering taking it up again, but I don’t trust the Second Chancers’ use of it, even though they claim to have excellent, quite safe, techniques. I couldn’t put full confidence in people who have their religious beliefs.”

“I was a free thinker, a libertin, as we styled ourselves,” Cyrano said. “But now… I do not know. Perhaps there is after all a God. Otherwise, how does one account for this world?”

“There are a score of theories,” Jill said. “And no doubt you’ve heard them all.”

“Many, at any rate,” Cyrano said. “I was hoping to hear a new one from you.”

At that moment, several people invaded the conversation. Jill broke off from the clump and drifted around, looking for another clump, a temporary colony, to attach herself to. In the Riverworld, as on Earth, all cocktail or after-dinner parties were alike. You spoke briefly, trying to make yourself heard above all the chatter and music, and then changed partners or groups until you had made a complete circuit. If you were intrigued or even interested in someone, you could make arrangements to see him or her some other time, when you could have a chance for an uninterrupted and quiet conversation.

In the old days, long ago, when she was young in mind, she had often met men or women at such gatherings who enthralled her. But then she had been full of booze or pot or both and so wide open. It was easy to fall in love with a mind or body—or both at the same time. Sobering up usually meant wising up. A disappointment. Not always. Just most of the time.

Here was a gathering all of whom had the bodies of twenty-five-year-olds. Chronologically, she was sixty-one. Some here might actually be one hundred and thirty-two or even more. The youngest could not be under thirty-six.

The index of wisdom should be high, if it was true that age brought wisdom. She had not found that to be true about most people on Earth. Experience was something it was difficult to avoid, though many people had managed to keep it to a minimum. Experience did not by any means give wisdom, that understanding of the basic mechanics of humanity. Most oldsters she had known had been as governed by conditioned reflexes as when they had been nineteen.

So it was expected that people would not have benefited much from their experiences here. However, the hammer blows of death and resurrection had broken open the seals of the minds of many.

For one thing, absolutely no one had expected this type of afterlife, if you could call this an afterlife. No religion had described such a place, such events. Though, to tell the truth, those religions which did promise paradises and hells were remarkably lacking in descriptive detail. Perhaps not so remarkably, since very few persons had actually claimed to have seen the postmortem world.

And there certainly was nothing supernatural about this place and the raising of the dead in it. Everything—well, not everything but almost everything—could be explained in physical, not metaphysical, terms. This did not keep people from originating religious theories or reshaping old ones.

Those religions which had no eschatology of resurrection or immortality in the Western sense, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism were discredited. Those which did have such, Judaism, Islamism, Christianity, were equally discredited. But here, as on Earth, the death of a major religion was the birth pang of a new one. And there were, of course, minorities who refused stubbornly, despite all evidence, to admit that their faith was invalid.

Jill, standing near Samuelo, ex-rabbi, present bishop of the Church of the Second Chance, wondered what his reaction had been that first year on this world. There was no Messiah come to save the Chosen People, nor, indeed, any Chosen People assembled together at Jerusalem on Earth. No Jerusalem, no Earth.

Apparently the shattering of his faith had not shattered him. Somehow he had been able to accept that he had been wrong. Although a superorthodox rabbi of ancient times, he had a flexible mind.

At that moment Jeanne Jugan, who was hostess, offered Samuelo and Rahelo a dish of bamboo tips and fileted fish. Samuelo looked at the fish and said, “What is that?”

“Toadfish,” Jeanne said.

Samuelo tightened his lips and shook his head. Jeanne looked puzzled, since the bishop was obviously hungry and his fingers were only a few centimeters from seizing the tips. These, as far as Jill knew, were not tabu according to the Mosaic laws. But they were on the same plate as the forbidden scaleless fish and so contaminated.

She smiled. It was much easier to change a person’s religion than his/her food habits. A devout Jew or Moslem could give up his creed but would still feel nauseated if offered pork. A Hindu whom Jill had known had become an atheist on The Riverworld, but he still could not abide meat. Jill, though of partial blackfellow descent, could not force herself to eat worms, though she had tried. Genetic descent had nothing to do with dietary matters, of course; it was social descent that determined food choices. Though not always. Some people could adapt easily enough. And there was always the individual taste. Jill had ceased eating mutton the moment she had quit her parents’ house. She hated it. And she preferred hamburger to beef roast.

The whole point to this reverie, she thought as she emerged from it, shedding thoughts as a surfacing diver sheds water, the whole point was that we are what we eat. And we eat what we do because of what we are. And what we are is determined partly by our environment and partly by our genetic makeup. All my family except myself loved mutton. A sister shared my indifference to beef roast and my love for hamburgers.

All my brothers and sisters, as far as I know, are heterosexual. I am the only bisexual. And I don’t want that. I want to be one way or the other, a gate that is latched, not swinging either way depending upon which way the wind is blowing. My internal wind which shifts from east to west or vice versa, twirling the windcock this way or that way.

Actually, she did not want it one way or the other. If she had her choice—and why shouldn’t she?—she would be a woman lover.

Woman lover. Why didn’t she say to herself: lesbian? The English language was the greatest in the world, but it had its faults. It was often too ambiguous. Woman lover could mean a man who loved women, a man or woman who loved women, or a woman who was a lover.

There, she’d said it. Lesbian. And she didn’t feel any shame. What about Jack? She had loved him. What about… ?

She had come up from the reverie only to dive down again.

Across the room, Firebrass, though talking to others, was looking at her. Had he noticed her tendency to become a statue, slumped, her head slightly cocked to the left, her eyelids lowered, and the eyes slightly rolled up? And if he had, then had he decided she was too moody and hence untrustworthy?

At that, she felt a slight panic. Oh, God, if he rejected her as a candidate just because she was pensive now and then! She was not that way when on duty! Never. But how could she convince Firebrass of that?

She would have to be alert, always act as if she were on her toes, extroverted, prepared, trustworthy. As if she were a Girl Scout.

She walked up to a circle in the center of which was Bishop Samuelo. The dark little man was telling some stories about La Viro. Jill had heard a number of them, since she had attended many Second Chancer meetings and talked with its missionaries. In Esperanto, the official language of the Church, La Viro meant The Man. He was also called La Fondinto, The Founder. Apparently, no one knew his Terrestrial name or else it was not considered important by the Second Chancers.

Samuelo’s tale concerned the stranger who had approached La Viro one stormy night in a cave high in the mountains. The stranger had revealed that he was one of the people who had reshaped this planet into one long Rivervalley and who had then resurrected the people of Earth.

The stranger had instructed La Viro to found the Church of the Second Chance. He was given certain tenets to preach, and he was told that after he had spread these up and down the Valley, he would then be given more revelations. As far as she knew, these new “truths” had not yet been forthcoming.

But the Church had spread everywhere. Its missionaries had traveled on foot or boat. Some, it was said, had journeyed in balloons. The fastest means of transportation had been death and resurrection.

Actually, those who had killed the Chancer preachers were doing the Church a service. It ensured that the faith spread around The Riverworld in a much faster time.

Martyrdom was a convenient means of travel, Jill thought. But it took great courage to die for your religion now when once dead always dead. She had heard that there had been a great falling away from the Church recently. Whether that was caused by the permanency of death now, or it was just that the movement had lost its steam, she did not know.

One of the group was a man to whom she had not been introduced. Piscator had, however, pointed to him across the room and said, “John de Greystock. He lived during Edward I of England’s reign. Thirteenth century? I have forgotten much of British history, though I studied it intensively when I was a naval cadet.”

“Edward ruled from about 1270 to very early 1300, I think,” Jill said. “I do remember that he ruled thirty-five years and died when he was sixty-eight. I remember it because that was a long life in those days, especially for an Englishman. Those chilly, drafty castles, you know.”

“Greystock was made a baron by Edward and accompanied him on his Gascon and Scottish expeditions,” Piscator said. “I don’t really know much about him. Except that he was governor of La Civito de La Animoj—Soul City in English—a little state some forty-one kilometers downRiver. He came here before I did, not too long after King John stole Clemens’ boat. He enlisted in Parolando’s army, rose rapidly in rank, and distinguished himself during the invasion of Soul City…”

“Why would Parolando invade Soul City?” Jill said.

“Soul City had made a sneak attack on Parolando. It wanted to get control of the meteorite iron supply here and the Not For Hire too. It almost succeeded. But Clemens and several others blew up a big dam. This had been built to store water from a mountain stream so it could be used to generate electrical power. The blowing up of the dam released many millions of liters of water. The invaders were wiped out, along with thousands of Parolandans. It also swept the aluminum and steel mills and the factories into The River. The Riverboat, too, but that was recovered almost undamaged.

“Clemens had to rebuild almost from scratch. During our vulnerable situation, the Soul Citizens allied with some other states and attacked again. They were repulsed but with heavy losses. The Parolanders badly needed Soul City’s bauxite, cryolite, cinnabar, and platinum. It had the only supply in the Valley. The bauxite and cryolite were needed to make more aluminum. Cinnabar is the ore of mercury, and platinum is used as electrical contacts for various scientific apparatuses, and as absolutely required catalysts in various chemical reactions.”

“I know that,” Jill said with some asperity.

“Forgive me,” Piscator said, smiling slightly. “After the unsuccessful attack by the Soul Citizens, Greystock was made a colonel. And after Parolando’s successful invasion of Soul City, he was made its governor. Clemens wanted a tough, ruthless man, and like most feudal lords, Greystock was that.

“However, several weeks ago Soul City voluntarily became one of the states in the United States of Parolando, fully equal with the mother state.

“Of course”—here Piscator smiled lopsidedly—“by now the supply of minerals in Soul City is almost exhausted. Project Airship doesn’t need Soul City anymore. Also, through the process which Greystock calls attrition, a very euphemistic term, I fear, the original makeup of the population there has changed considerably. It was once a majority of mid-twentieth-century American blacks, with a minority of medieval Arabs—fanatical Wahhabis—and Dravidian speakers of ancient India. Because of the wars and Greystock’s harsh governorship, its population became about half-white.”

“He sounds so savage,” she said. “With due apologies to the savages.”

“He had several rebellions to put down. No one was forced to stay at Soul City, you know. Clemens would not permit slavery. Everybody was given a chance to leave, to go peacefully and with all his possessions elsewhere. Many citizens stayed there, swore loyalty to Parolando, but then became saboteurs.”

“Guerrilla warfare?”

“Hardly,” Piscator said. “You know that the topography just isn’t fitted for guerrilla activity. No. It seems that a number of Soul Citizens thought that sabotage would be a method of recreation.”

“Recreation?”

“It gave them something to do. It was better than drifting on down The River. Besides, many of them wanted revenge.

“To give Greystock his due, he usually just kicked any saboteurs he caught out of the state. Actually, he threw them into The River. Well, that is history, and it happened before I came here. Anyway, Greystock has come here because he wants to be a member of the airship crew.”

“But he has no qualifications!”

“True—in one sense. He does not come from a highly technological culture, relatively speaking. But he is intelligent and curious, and he can learn. And though he was once a baron of England and governor of Soul City, he is willing to be a lowly crewman. The idea of flying fascinates him. It’s akin to magic—for him. Firebrass has promised him that he can go—if there are not enough qualified airshipmen. Of course, if by chance the crew of the Graf Zeppelin or the Shenandoah should just happen to come along…”

Piscator had smiled.

Greystock was about 1.8 meters, a very tall height during the medieval period. His hair was black, long, and straight; his eyes, large and gray; his eyebrows, thick; his nose, slightly aquiline. His features harmonized into a ruggedly good-looking face. His shoulders were broad; his waist, narrow; his legs, thickly packed with muscle but long.

At the moment, he was speaking to Samuelo, his grin and his tone both sarcastic. Piscator had said that Greystock hated priests, though he had been very devout during his Terrestrial existence. Apparently, he had never forgiven the clergy for falsely claiming to know the truth about the afterlife.

Using Esperanto, Greystock said, “But surely you must have some idea of who and what La Viro was on Earth? What race was he? What nationality? When was he born, when died? Was he prehistoric, ancient, medieval, or what the later peoples called modern? What had he been on Earth, a religionist, agnostic, or atheist? What was his trade or profession? His education? Was he married? Did he have children? Was he a homosexual?

“Was he unknown during his time? Or was he, perhaps, Christ? And is that why He is remaining anonymous, knowing that no one is going to believe His lies a second time?”

Samuelo scowled, but he said, “I know little of this Christ; only what has been told me and that is not much. All I know of La Viro is what I have heard through word of mouth. They say that he is very tall, white skinned though very dark, and some say that they think he might have been Persian.

“But all this is irrelevant. It is not his background or his physical appearance that matters. What does matter is his message.”

“Which I have heard from many preachers of your Church many times!” Greystock said. “And which I believe no more than I do the stinking falsehoods the stinking priests offered me as God’s own truths in my own time!”

“That is your privilege, though not your right,” Samuelo said.

Greystock looked puzzled. Jill did not understand what he meant either.

Greystock said loudly, “All you priests talk mumbo-jumbo!” and he walked away scowling.

Piscator, watching him, smiled. “A dangerous man. But interesting. You should get him to tell the story of his journey with an Arcturan.”

Jill’s eyebrows went up.

“Yes, he knew a being who came to Earth from a planet of the star Arcturus. Apparently, this being came with some others in a spaceship in 2002 A.D. But he was forced to kill almost all human beings. He died, too, though. It’s a horrible story, but true.

“Firebrass can give you the details. He was on Earth when it happened.”

Eager to talk to Greystock, Jill made her way through the crowd toward him. But she was stopped by Firebrass before she could reach the Englishman.

“A messenger just told me that radio contact’s been made with the Mark Twain. Want to come along and get in on the pow-wow? You might get to talk to the great Sam Clemens himself.”

“Too right I would!” she said. “And thanks for the invitation.”

Jill followed Firebrass to the jeep, which was near the foot of the staircase. It was made of steel and aluminum and had pneumatic nylon tires. Its six-cylinder motor was fueled by wood alcohol.

There were five passengers: Firebrass, Gulbirra, de Bergerac, Schwartz, and Hardy. The jeep took off swiftly, following the narrow valleys among the hills. Its bright beams showed the grass, closely cut by machines, huts here and there, stands of the incredibly quick-growing bamboo, some 31 meters or over 100 feet high. Leaving the hills, it sped over the plain gently sloping to The River.

Jill could see the lights of the aluminum-processing factory, the steel mill, the distillery, the welding shop, the armory, the arms factory, the cement mill, and the government building. The latter housed the newspaper and radio station offices, and the top government officials had residences there.

The colossal hangar was downRiver and hence downwind of the other buildings. Up in the mountains to the west were strings of lights. These were on the dam constructed to replace the one that Clemens had blown up.

The jeep passed the hangar. A steam locomotive, burning alcohol, chuffchuffed by, hauling three flatbed cars piled with aluminum girders. It entered the blazing interior of the hangar, stopped, and a crane hook swung down to the rear car. Workers gathered around it to connect hooks to the steel cables around the girders.

“City Hall” was the northernmost building. The jeep stopped before its porch. The riders got out and went between two massive Doric columns. Jill thought that the building was an abomination, architecturally speaking. Nor did it fit in with the surroundings. Seen from a distance, this area looked as if both the Parthenon and a section of the Ruhr had been teleported to a remote section of Tahiti.

Firebrass’ suite of offices was to the left of the entrance to the immense lobby. Six men stood guard before its entrance, each armed with a single-shot rifle firing .80-caliber plastic bullets. They also carried cutlasses and daggers. The radio “shack” was a large room next to the conference hall and Firebrass’ sanctum sanctorum. They entered the former to find several men standing around the operator. He was adjusting dials on the big panel before him. On hearing the door slam open under his commander’s overvigorous shove, he looked up.

“I’ve been talking to Sam,” he said. “But I lost him about thirty seconds ago. Hold on. I think I got him.”

A series of squeals and crackles issued from the loudspeaker. Suddenly, the interference eased off, and a voice could be heard above the noise. The operator made a final adjustment and gave up his chair to Firebrass.

“Firebrass speaking. Is that you, Sam?”

“No. Just a moment.”

“Sam here,” a pleasant drawling voice said. “Is that you, Milt?”

“Sure is. How are you, Sam? And what’s doing?”

“As of today, Milt, the electronic log says we’ve traveled 792,014 miles. You can convert that into kilometers if you wish. I prefer the old system, and that’s what we’re… well, you know that. Not bad for three years’ travel, heh? But downright aggravating. A snail could go to the North Pole faster than we can, if it could go on a straight line. Or, pardon me, a great curve. It would have time to build a hotel for us and make an enormous fortune renting rooms to the walruses until we arrived. Even if the snail was traveling only a mile every twenty-four hours and we’re averaging about eight hundred miles a day.

“As of…” sputter, crackle, “… little trouble.”

Firebrass waited until reception was clear before speaking again. “Is everything all-go, Sam?”

“Copacetic,” Sam said. “Nothing unusual has happened. Which means that there are always emergencies, always trouble, but not mutinies, among the crew. I’ve had to boot a few out now and then. If this keeps up, by the time we get to our million-mile mark, I’ll be the only person who was on the boat when it left Parolando.”

More crackles. Then Jill heard a voice that was so deep, so bottom-of-the-well, that cold ran over her neck.

Sam said, “Yeah? Oh, all right, I forgot you, though that’s not easy with you breathing booze down my neck. Joe says he’ll still be here, too. He wants to say hello to you. Joe, say hello.”

“Hello, Milt.”

Thunder in a barrel.

“How’re thingth going? Thwell, I hope. Tham here, he’th kinda thad becauthe hith girlfriend left him. Thye’ll be back, though, I think. He’th been havingk bad dreamth about that Erik Bloodakthe again. I told him if he’d lay off the boothe, he’d be okay. He hathn’t got any ekthcyuthe to drink, thinthe he hath me ath a thyining ekthample of thobriety.”

Jill looked at Hardy, saying, “What the…”

Hardy grinned and said, “Yeth, he lithpth. Joe Miller is as big as two Goliaths put together but he lisps. Joe belongs to a species of subhuman which Sam named Titanthropus clemensi, though actually I think Joe’s kind is really just a giant variant of Homo sapiens. Anyway, it became extinct an estimated fifty thousand to one hundred thousand years ago. He and Sam met many years ago, and they’ve been real pals since. Damon and Pythias. Roland and Oliver.”

“More like Mutt and Jeff or Laurel and Hardy,” someone muttered.

Hardy said, “Hardy?”

Firebrass said, “Mute it. Okay, Sam. Everything’s in orbit. We got a great new candidate, real first-class officer material. Australian, named Jill Gulbirra. She’s got over eight thousand hours dirigible experience and she has an engineering degree. How do you like that?”

Crackle. Then, “A woman?”

“Yeah, Sam, I know they didn’t have female riverboat pilots or railroad engineers in your day. But in my day we had women airplane pilots and horse jockeys and even astronauts!”

Jill unfroze and started forward. “Let me talk to him,” she said. “I’ll tell that son of a bitch…”

“He isn’t objecting. He’s just surprised,” Firebrass said, looking up at her. “Take it easy. What do you care? He’s all right. Even if he wasn’t, he couldn’t do anything. I’m Numero Uno here.

“Sam, she said she’s pleased to meet you.”

“I heard her,” Sam said, and he chuckled. “Listen…” Crackle, hiss, sputter. “… when?”

“Static shot that all to hell,” Firebrass said. “And you’re drifting off. I don’t think we can keep contact much longer. So here goes, fast. I’m a long way from having a full crew, but it’ll be a year before the big ship’s finished. By then I might have enough. If not, what the hell? Airplane pilots and mechanics are a dime a dozen and they can be trained for dirigible operation.

“Listen.”

He paused, looked around—though why Jill did not know—and said, “Heard from X? Have…”

Static rolled over his voice, chewed it up, and wouldn’t let go of the pieces. After trying for several minutes to get hold of Clemens again, Firebrass gave up.

Jill said to Hardy, “What is this about hearing from X?”

“I don’t know,” the New Englander said. “Firebrass says it’s a private joke between Sam and him.”

Firebrass turned off the radio and got up from his chair. “It’s getting late, and we have a lot to do tomorrow. Do you want Willy to drive you home, Jill?”

“I don’t need anyone to protect me,” she said. “And I don’t mind walking. No thanks.”

Covered with the magnetically attached towels, she walked across the plain. Before she had reached the first hill, she saw clouds racing across the blazing sky. She took a stick of dreamgum from her shoulderbag, tore off half of it, and thrust it into her mouth. It had been years since she had chewed it.

Now, as she moved the coffee-tasting chicloid around in her mouth, she wondered why she had suddenly, almost involuntarily, decided to try it again. What secret motive did she have? It had been almost an unconscious act. If she had not gotten into the habit of closely observing herself, she might not even have been aware of what she was doing.

Lightning flashed to the north. Then the rain fell as if dumped from a ballast bag. She put her head down under her hood and hunched her shoulders. Her bare feet were wet, but the cloth over her body repelled the drops.

She unlatched the door of her hut. Inside, she put down the bag, opened it, and removed the heavy metal lighter provided twice a year by her grail. She groped toward the table which held an alcohol lamp, a gift from Firebrass. The lightning came nearer, and by its increasing brightness, she could see the lamp.

Something touched her shoulder.

She screamed and whirled, dropping the lighter. Her right fist struck out. A hand gripped her right wrist. Her knee came up, aiming at the groin she hoped was in its path. It slid by a hip, and another hand caught her other wrist. She sagged, and the attacker was deceived. He chuckled and pulled her close. She could see him vaguely now as flashes of light dimly illumined the interior of the hut. His nose was in front of her and close, though below her, since he was short.

She bent her head swiftly, bit down on the end of the nose, and jerked her head savagely. The man screamed and released her. He staggered backward holding his nose. She followed him, and this time her foot shot up between his legs. Though she had no shoes, her hard-driven toes sent him writhing to the ground, clutching his genitals.

Jill came up and leaped up and down, landing on his side. His ribs snapped loudly. Stepping off him, she bent down and grabbed both ears. He tried to reach up then, but she yanked outward. The ears came loose with a ripping sound.

The man, ignoring his injured genitals and broken ribs, came up off the floor. Jill caught the side of his neck with the edge of her palm. He fell, and she went to the table and lit the lamp with a lighter in a shaking hand. The wick took hold, and then the flame brightened as she turned the knob on the side of the lamp. After trimming it, she turned, and she yelled again.

He had risen and had seized a spear from its wall brackets and was thrusting it at her.

The lamp flew from her hand in unthinking but deadly reaction. It struck him in the face, shattered, and the alcohol spilled out.

Flames exploded. He screamed and ran blindly—his eyes were on fire—toward her. She screamed. Only now did she recognize him.

She shrieked, “Jack!” and then he was on her, had wrapped his burning arms around her, knocked her upon her back, the breath coming out of her in a whoof. Unable to breathe for a moment, but in a frenzy to escape his fiery arms, she tore herself loose and rolled away. Her fireproof clothing had kept her from being burned.

Before she could get up, however, he had grabbed her garment hem and yanked on it. The magnetic tabs separated. Naked, she leaped to her feet and ran for the spear, lying where he had dropped it. She bent down to get it, and Jack was on her from behind, blazing hands grabbing her breasts, his blazing erection driving into her. Their screams bounced around the walls of the hut, seeming to mount in intensity with each echo. She was being fried, seared, inside her, on her buttocks, on her breasts, and in her ears—as if the echoes were flames, too. She could only roll over and over until brought up short against the wall.

Jack was on his hands and knees now, his hair burned off, his scalp black, crinkled, and ridged, his skin broken open to reveal reddish-black blood and gray-black bone. The only illumination was the fire still consuming his face and chest and belly and the penis—which was swollen as if with the passion of hate—and the lightning cracking into the earth outside.

She was up and running toward the door to get to the outside, where the blessed rain would put out the fire and soothe her external burns. Somehow, he grabbed hold of her ankle. She fell heavily, knocking her breath out again. Jack was on top of her again, muttering strange croaking sounds—his tongue was burned, too?—and both were enfolded in fire.

She slid down a scream of pure agony toward a hole far below, a hole which expanded swiftly and received her as she fell toward the center of this world and toward the heart of all things.

Jack’s face was hanging above her. It was unconnected to a body, floating freely like a balloon. The curly reddish hair, the broad handsome face, the bright blue eyes, the strong chin, the full lips, smiling…

“Jack!” she murmured, and then the face dissolved and became another, attached to a body.

The face was broad and handsome, the cheekbones high, the eyes black, slanted by epicanthic folds, the hair straight and black.

“Piscator!”

“I heard you screaming.” He leaned down and took her hands. “Can you get up?”

“I think so,” she said shakily. She came up easily enough with his help. She became aware that the thunder and lightning had ceased. Nor was it raining, though water was still dripping from the eaves. The door was open, showing only darkness. The clouds had not yet disappeared. No, there was the silhouette of a hill suddenly rising. Beyond was a break in the skycover and the white flare of a great gas sheet in which thousands of giant stars were embedded.

She also became aware that she was naked. She looked down and saw her breasts were reddened, as if they had been too near a fire. The red slowly faded away as she watched.

Piscator said, “I thought you had been slightly burned. Your breasts and your pubic area were inflamed, swollen, reddened. But there was no evidence of a fire.”

“The fire was from within, inside me,” she said. “Dreamgum.”

His eyebrows arose. He said, “Ah, so!”

She laughed.

He helped her to the cot, and she lay down on it with a sigh. The slight warmth inside her vagina had subsided now. Piscator busied himself, placing towels over her, getting her a drink of rainwater from the bamboo barrel placed outside the door. She drank the water, holding the cup with one hand, leaning on the elbow of the other arm.

“Thanks,” she said. “I should have known better than to chew the gum. I was depressed, and when I’m in that kind of a mood, I get strange effects from it. It all seemed so real, so horrible. I never questioned its reality, though it was clearly impossible.”

He said, “The Second Chancers use dreamgum in their therapy, but it’s done under supervision. It seems to have some beneficial results. But we do not use it except in the initial stages of education with some people.”

“We?”

“Al Ahl al-Hagg, the followers of the Real. What you Occidentals call Sufis.”

“I thought so.”

“You should, since we have had this conversation once before.”

She gasped and said, “When was that?”

“This morning.”

“It must be the gum,” she said. “I’m through with it. No more of this bloody stuff.”

She sat up and said, “You won’t tell Firebrass about this, will you?”

He was no longer smiling. “You are experiencing some very strong psychic disturbances. To cause burns, stigmata, on your body through mental means… well…”

“I won’t be using the gum anymore. I’m not just making an empty promise you know. I’m not addicted. I am mentally stable.”

“You’re deeply troubled,” he said. “Be honest with me, Jill. I may call you Jill, may I not? Have you had attacks similar to this? If so, how many and how serious were they? That is, how long did they last? How long did it take you to recover from them?”

“Not one recent attack, as you call it,” she said.

“Very well. I will say nothing to anyone. That is, if there is no recurrence. You will be honest with me and inform me if you do suffer from any, won’t you? You would not endanger your ship just because you want so desperately to be a member of the crew?”

“No, I would not,” she said. But the words came hard.

“Then we’ll let it stand at that, for the time being.”

She rose on one elbow again, ignoring the slipping aside of the towel and the baring of her breast.

“Look, Piscator. Be honest. If you are given a rank inferior to mine, and it’s likely, if Firebrass awards ranks according to experience, would you resent serving under me?”

“Not in the slightest,” he said, smiling.

She lay back and pulled the towel up. “You come from a culture which held women in a very inferior position. Your women were practically on a level with the beasts of burden. They…”

“That is in the past, the long dead and faraway past,” he said. “Nor was nor am I a typical male, Nipponese or not. You must avoid stereotyping. After all, that is what you hate, what you have fought all your life, have you not? Stereotyping?”

“You’re right,” she said. “But it’s a conditioned reflex.”

“I believe I said this once before to you. However, repetition has its uses in education. You should learn to think in a different pattern.”

“And how do I do that?”

He hesitated, then said, “You will know when to attempt that. And whom to see about it.”

Jill knew that he was waiting for her to ask him to accept her as his disciple. She was having none of that. She just did not believe in organized religion. Though Sufism was not a religion, its members were religious. There was no such thing as an atheist Sufi.

She was an atheist. Despite having been resurrected, she did not believe in a Creator. At least, she did not believe in a Creator who was personally interested in her or in any creature whatsoever. People who did believe in a deity who considered human beings as His children—and why was a spirit always he?—why not be logical since God had no sex, an it?—people who believed in Him were deluded. The believers in God might be intelligent, but they were mentally benighted. The gears in that part of the brain which dealt with religion had been put into neutral, and they were spinning. Or the circuit of religion had been disconnected from the main circuit of the intellect.

That was a bad analogy. People used their intellect to justify the nonintellective, emotionally based phenomenon called religion. Often brilliantly. But, as far as she was concerned, uselessly.

Piscator said, “You are going to sleep. Good. If you need me, though, feel free to call on me.”

“You’re no physician,” she said. “Why should you…”

“You have potential. And though you sometimes act foolishly, you are no fool. Though you have fooled yourself from time to time and still are. Good night.”

“Good night.”

He bowed quickly and walked out, closing the door behind him. She started to call out, but she stopped. She had wanted to ask him what he was doing near the hut when he had heard her. It was too late. Nor was it important. Still… what had he been doing here? Had he intended to seduce her? Rape was out of the question, of course. She was bigger than he, and though he probably was a master of the martial arts, so was she. Moreover, his position as an airship officer would be seriously jeopardized if she were to accuse him.

No, he would not have been here either to seduce or to rape. He did not give the impression that he was that type of man. On the other hand, no matter how nice they acted, weren’t they all? No, there was something about him—she hated to use the imprecise and unscientifically founded term vibrations—but there it was. He did not radiate that length of frequency classified as “bad vibes.”

It was then she realized that he had not asked her to describe her experience. If he had been curious, he had managed not to show it. Perhaps he had felt that she would have volunteered if she had wanted to share the details with him. He was a very sensitive man, very perceptive.

What did that horrifying attack by Jack mean? That she was afraid of him, of men in general? Of the male sex? Of sex itself when in male form? She could not believe that. But the illusion? delusion? visitation? had revealed certain feelings of hate and destruction. Not just for men in general and for Jack in particular. She had set him afire but she had also burned and raped herself—in a sense. Which made no sense. She certainly did not subconsciously wish to be raped. Only a mentally sick woman would desire that.

Did she hate herself? The answer was, yes, at times. But who didn’t?

Some time later, she sank into an uneasy sleep. Once, she dreamed of Cyrano de Bergerac. They were fencing with épées. The circling point of his blade dazzled her, and then her weapon was knocked up and his leaped in and its point sank deep into her navel. She looked down in surprise at the blade as it withdrew, but the navel did not spout blood. Instead, it swelled and thickened and then a tiny dagger issued from the tumor.

The shock of cold water fully awoke Burton. For a minute, he was completely beneath the surface, and he did not know which way was up in the darkness.

There was only one way to find out. After five strokes, he felt the pressure on his eardrums increasing. Reversing position, he swam in what he hoped was the opposite direction. For all he knew, he was moving horizontally. But the pressure eased, and just as he feared he could not possibly hold his breath anymore, he broke the surface.

At the same time, something rammed into the back of his head, knocking him half-senseless again. His flailing hand hit an object and he grabbed it. Though he could see nothing in the mists, he could feel the thing that was holding him up. A massive log.

Bedlam was around him, screams, shouts, someone nearby calling for help. He released his hold as soon as he had regained all his senses and swam toward the woman crying for aid. As he neared her, he realized that it was Loghu’s voice. A few strokes brought him to her, close enough to see her face dimly.

“Take it easy,” he said. “It’s me, Dick!”

Loghu seized him by the shoulders, and they both went down. He fought her, pushed her away, then grabbed her from behind.

Loghu said something in her native Tokharian. He answered her in the same tongue.

“Don’t panic. We’ll be all right.”

Loghu, gasping, said, “I’ve got hold of something. I won’t sink.”

He released her and reached around her. Another log. The collision must have torn some of the forward logs loose. But where was the boat and where was the raft? And where were Loghu and he?

It seemed probable that they had fallen into the gap made when the lashings of the logs of the raft had been torn loose. But the current would by now surely have carried the intact part against the rock, crushing everything between it and the rock. Had they been carried around the corner of the spire and were now drifting with the current?

If so, they were in a tangle of logs and pieces from the boat. They kept bumping against him and Loghu.

She moaned and said, “I think my leg’s broken, Dick. It hurts so.”

The log to which they were clinging was very thick and long, its ends so distant they could not be seen through the fog. They had to dig into the rough bark with their fingers. It would not be long before they would lose their grip.

Suddenly Monat’s voice tore through the grayness.

“Dick! Loghu! Are you out there?”

Burton shouted, and a moment later something rapped along the log. It struck his fingers, causing him to yell with pain and to slip back into the water. He struggled back up, and then the end of a pole shot like a striking snake in ambush from the fog. It grazed his left cheek. A little to the right and it would have stunned him, perhaps broken his skull.

He seized it and called out that he was to be pulled in.

“Loghu’s here, too,” he said. “Be careful with that pole!”

He was dragged in by Monat to the edge of the raft where Kazz pulled him out with a single heave. Monat then stuck the pole into the darkness. A minute later, Loghu was drawn in. She was half-unconscious.

“Get some cloths and wrap her up in them. Keep her warm,” he told Kazz.

“Will do, Burton-naq,” the Neanderthal said. He turned and was enfolded in the mist.

Burton sat down on the wet, smooth surface of the raft. “Where are the others? Is Alice all right?”

“They’re all here except Owenone,” Monat said. “Alice seems to have some broken ribs. Frigate hurt his knee. As for the boat, it’s gone.”

Before he could recover from this shock, he saw torches flaring. They drew nearer, casting light enough for him to see their bearers. There were a dozen of them, short, dark-faced Caucasians with large, hooked noses, clad from head to foot in cloths of many stripes and colors. Their only arms were flint knives, all sheathed.

One of them spoke in a language which Burton thought was Semitic. If so, it was an ancient form of that family. He could understand a few words here and there, though. He replied in Esperanto, and the speaker switched to that.

There followed a swift dialog. Apparently, the man on the tower had fallen asleep because he had been drinking. He had survived the fall from the tower when the raft had crashed into the island and toppled him and the man whom Burton had seen climb up to him.

The second man had not been so lucky. He had died of a broken neck. As for the luck of the pilot, it had run out on him. He had been thrown overboard by his enraged fellows.

The great grinding noises Burton had heard before the boat struck came from the collision of the tip of the V-shaped prow with the docks and then the hard rock of the beach. This had crumpled the front half of the V and torn loose many of the fish-leather lashings. The V had also absorbed much of the shock, preventing more of the raft from being ripped apart.

A section of the northwest side had been ripped off, but it was forced on by the main body. It was this jumble of massive logs which had rammed into the Hadji II, crushing the lower half of the back part. After the torn-off front half of the boat had fallen into the water, the back half, knocked apart by the great blow, had fallen down from—and through—the log jam.

Burton had been thrown forward by the impact against the rock, had fallen back onto the deck, and then had been tilted off it as it slid into the water.

The crew was indeed lucky that no one had been killed or seriously hurt. No, Owenone was yet to be accounted for.

There were more things to find out. Just now, the wounded had to be attended to. He made his way to where the others lay beneath the blaze of three torches. Alice put out her arms to him and cried when he embraced her.

“Don’t squeeze me,” she said. “My side hurts.”

A man came to him and said that he had been appointed to take care of them. The two women were carried by some raftsmen, while Frigate, groaning, hobbled along supported by Kazz. By then the daylight had increased somewhat so they could see farther. After progressing for perhaps 61 meters or over 200 feet, they stopped before a large bamboo hut thatched with the great irontree leaves. This was secured to the raft by leather ropes tied at one end to pegs fitted into drilled holes in the logs.

Inside the hut was a stone platform on which a small fire burned. The injured were laid near this on bamboo beds. By then the fog was getting thinner. The light increased and presently they were startled by a noise like a thousand cannon shells exploding at once. No matter how often they heard it, they jumped.

The grailstones had spouted their energy.

“No breakfast for us,” Burton said.

He raised his head abruptly.

“The grails? Did anyone get the grails?”

Monat said, “No, they were lost with the boat.” His face twisted with grief, and he wept. “Owenone must have drowned!”

They looked at each other in the firelight. Their faces were still pale from their ordeal; even so, they lost a shade of color.

Some of them groaned. Burton cursed. He too felt grief for Owenone, but he and his crew were beggars, dependent upon the charity of others. It was better to be dead than without a grail, and in the old days those who had lost theirs could, and often did, commit suicide. The next day they would wake up, far from their friends and mates, but at least with their own source of food and luxuries.

“Well,” Frigate said, “we can eat fish and acorn bread.”

“For the rest of our lives?” Burton said, sneering. “Which may be forever for all we know.”

“Just trying to look on the bright side of things,” the American said. “Though even that is pretty dim.”

“Why don’t we deal with things as they come up?” Alice said. “For the moment, I’d like my ribs seen to, and I’m sure poor Loghu would like her broken bone set and splinted.”

The man who had conducted them there arranged for treatment of the injured. After this was done and the pains of his patients had been eased with pieces of dreamgum, he went outside. Burton, Kazz, and Monat followed him outside. By then the sun was burning away the fog. Within a few minutes it would all be gone.

The scene was appalling. The entire V-shaped prow of the raft had broken up when its point had ridden up onto the beach and its port side had smashed into a corner of the spire. The docks and the boats of the Ganopo were smashed, buried somewhere in the pile of logs on the beach. The main part of the raft had also slid for at least 13 meters onto the shore. Several hundreds of the raftspeople were standing at the edge of the wreck, talking animatedly but doing nothing constructive.

To the left, logs were jammed against the sheer wall of the spire by the current. There was no sign of the Hadji II, or of Owenone. Burton’s hope that he might be able to retrieve at least a few grails was not going to be realized.

He looked around the raft. Even though it had lost its forepart, it was still immense. It had to be at least 660 feet or 201 meters long with a breadth at its widest of 122 meters. Its stern was also V-shaped.

In the center was the large, round, black object he had seen floating above the mists. It was the head of an idol 30 feet or over 9 meters tall. Black, squat, and ugly, it dominated the raft. It was sitting cross-legged, and its spine bore lizardlike crests. The head was a demon’s, its blue eyes glaring, its wide, snarling mouth displaying many great white sharkfish teeth.

These, Burton assumed, had been removed from a dragonfish and set within the scarlet gums.

In the middle of its huge paunch was a round hole. Inside this was a stone hearth on which a small pile of wood blazed. Its smoke rose within the body and curled out of the batlike ears of the idol.

Forward, near the edge of the raft, the watchtower lay on its side, its supports broken off at the base by the force of the collision. A body still lay near it.

There were some large buildings here and there with many smaller ones among them. A few of the smaller ones had collapsed, and one of the big constructions leaned crazily.

He counted ten tall masts with square-rigged sails and twenty shorter ones with fore-and-aft rigs. All of the sails were furled.

Alongside the edges were a number of racks holding boats of various sizes.

Behind the idol was the largest building of all. He supposed that this was the house of the chief or perhaps a temple. Or both.

Presently wooden trumpets blew and drums beat. Seeing the people streaming toward the great building, Burton decided to join them. They congregated between the idol and the building. Burton stood behind the mob where he could hear the proceedings but at the same time examine the statue. A little discreet scratching with a flint knife revealed that it was adobe covered with a black paint. He wondered where the paint for the body, eyes, and gums had been obtained. Pigments were rare, much to the sorrow of artists.

The chief, or the head priest, was taller than the others though still half a head shorter than Burton. He wore a cape and kilt with blue, black, and red stripes and an oaken crown with six points. His right hand held a long shepherd’s staff of oak. He spoke from a platform at the building’s entrance, gesturing often with the staff, his black eyes fiery, his mouth spewing a torrent of which Burton understood not one word. After about half an hour he got down from the platform, and the crowd broke up into various work parties.

Some of these went to the island to clear away the logs which had broken from the prow and piled onto the main body. Others went to the starboard rearside, where the V-shaped stern joined the main part. These lifted huge oars and fitted them to locks. Then, like a gang of galley slaves, working to a rhythm beat out on a drum, they began rowing.

Apparently, they were trying to bring the stern around so that the current would catch it on one side and then swing the entire raft. As soon as the vessel presented enough of its starboard side to the current, it would be turned around enough to be free of the island.

That was the theory, but the practice failed. It became apparent that the log jam would have to be cleared first and then leverage applied to push the front part from the beach.

Burton wished to talk to the headman, but he had gone around to the front of the idol and was bowing rapidly and chanting to it. Whatever Burton had learned or not learned, he knew that it was dangerous to interrupt a religious ritual.

He strolled around, stopping to look at the dugouts, canoes, and small sailboats in racks or on slides along the edge of the raft. Then he poked around the larger buildings. Most of these had doors which were barred on the outside. Making sure that no one was noticing him, he entered several.

Two were storehouses of dried fish and acorn bread. One was crammed with weapons. Another was a boat shed containing two half-finished dugouts and the pine framework of a canoe. In time the latter would be covered with fish-skin. The fifth building held a variety of artifacts: boxes of oak rings for trading, spiral bones and the unicornlike horns of the hornfish, piles of fish- and human-leather, drums, bamboo flutes, harps with hornfish guts for strings, skulls fashioned into drinking cups, ropes of fiber and fish-skin, piles of dried dragonfish intestines suitable for sails, stone lamps for burning fish-oil, boxes of lipstick, face-paint, marijuana, cigarettes, cigars, lighters (all doubtless saved up for trading or tribute), about fifty ritual masks, and many more items.

When he went into the sixth building, he smiled. This was where the grails were kept. The tall gray cylinders were stacked in wooden racks, waiting for their owners. He counted three hundred and fifty. One grail for each of the approximately three hundred and ten raftspeople meant that there were forty extra grails.

A few minutes’ inspection showed him that all but thirty were tagged. The others had cords tied around the handles of the tops, the other ends of which cords were connected to baked clay tablets bearing cuneiform writing. These were the names of their owners. He examined some of the incised marks, which looked like those he had seen in photographs of Babylonian and Assyrian documents.

He tried to raise the lids of a number of the tagged cylinders but failed, of course. There was some sort of mechanism preventing anyone but its owner from opening it. There were several theories about the operation, one being that a sensitive device inside the grail detected the electrical field of the owner’s skin and then activated an opening mechanism.

However, the untagged grails were of a different kind, called “freebies” by some English-speakers.

When over thirty-six billion of Earth’s dead had awakened whole and young along the immense stretch of The River, they had found a personal grail at their side. At the same time, each of the grailstones bore in its central depression one grail. This apparently had been provided by the resurrectors to show the new citizens just how their grails worked.

Each stone had vomited noise and light, and when the thunder and lightning had ceased, curious people had climbed onto the stones to look into the grails left there. The lids were raised, and the contents were revealed. Wonder of wonders, joy of joys! The hollow interior held snap-down racks on which were dishes and cups full of food and various goodies.

The next time the stones discharged, the private grails were on the stones, and these, too, supplied everything they needed and more, though human nature was such that many people complained because there wasn’t more variety.

The freebies had become very valuable; people bullied and thieved and killed to get them. If a person had a private grail and a freebie, he or she had twice as much food and luxuries as he or she was supposed to get.

Burton himself had never owned one, but here were thirty on racks before him.

The problem of the lost grails was solved—if he could get the headman to part with them. After all, his raft was responsible for the loss of the boat and the grails. He owed the crew of the Hadji II.

So far, he and his crew had been treated decently. He could think of other groups he had met that would have done nothing for them except throw them overboard—after mass-raping the women and perhaps sodomizing the men.

However, there might be a limit to the raftspeople’s hospitality. The free grails were anything but free. This group might even have stolen these. However they got them, they would be saving them for emergencies, such as replacements for those they lost or as tribute if they ran into a particularly hostile and powerful group.

Burton left the building, barred the door after him, and walked around pondering. If he asked the chief to give him seven grails, he could be refused. That would make the man suspicious, and he would set up guards over this building. Not to mention the fact that he might get nervous having potential thieves around and would ask them, politely or otherwise, to leave.

Passing by the idol, he saw that the chief had stopped praying and was walking toward the island. Apparently, he intended to supervise the activities there.

Burton decided to ask him now about the grails. No use putting off the issue.

The man who sits on his arse sits on his fortune.

Mutu-sha-ili was his native name, meaning “man of god,” but to Esperanto speakers he was Metuael. In English, Methusaleh.

For a delirious moment, Burton wondered if he had met the model for the long-lived patriarch of the Old Testament. No, Metuael was a Babylonian, and he had never heard of Hebrews until he had come to The Riverworld. He had been an inspector of granaries on Earth, but here he was the founder and head of a new religion and commander of the great raft.

“One night many years ago, while a storm raged outside, I was sleeping. And a god came to me in my dream, a god named Rushhub. I had never heard of this god, but he told me that he had once been a mighty god of my ancestors. Their descendants, however, had abandoned him, and in my lifetime on Earth only a small village at the edge of the kingdom had still worshipped him.

“But gods do not die, though they may take other forms and new names, or even become nameless, and he had lived in the dreams of many people through many generations. Now he had decided that the time was come to leave the dreamworld. Thus, he told me that I must arise and go forth and preach the worship of Rushhub. I must gather together a group of the faithful and build a giant raft and take my people down The River upon it.

“After many years, perhaps several generations as we knew generations on Earth, we would come to the end of The River, where it empties into a hole in the base of the mountains that ring the top of this world.

“There, we would go through the underworld, a great dark cavern, and then we would come out into a bright sea surrounding a land where we would live forever in peace and happiness with the gods and goddesses themselves.

“But before the raft was launched we must make a statue of the god Rushhub and set it upon the raft and worship it as the symbol of Rushhub. So do not say, as so many have said, that we are idolaters who mistake the physical symbol for the body of the god itself.”

Burton thought the man was crazy, though he was discreet enough not to say so. He and his crew had fallen into the hands of fanatics. Fortunately, the god had told Metuael that his worshippers must harm no one unless it was in self-defense. However, he knew from experience that “self-defense” could mean whatever a person or group wanted it to mean.

“Rushhub himself told me that just before we enter the underworld, we must break the idol into little bits and cast them into The River. He did not say why we should do so. He merely said that by the time we reach the cavern, we will understand.”

“That is all very well for you,” Burton said. “But you are responsible for destroying our boat. Also, we have lost our grails.”

“I am indeed sorry, but there is little I can do for you. What happened to you is the will of Rushhub.”

Burton felt like striking the man in his face. Mastering himself, he said, “Three of my people are too injured at the moment to move them very far. Could you at least give us a boat so we could get to shore?”

Metuael glared with fierce black eyes, and he pointed at the island.

“There is the shore, and there is a foodstone. I will see that your injured are placed there, and we will give you some dried fish and acorn bread. In the meantime, please do not trouble me with any more requests. I have work to do. We must get our raft back into The River. Rushhub told me that we should not delay our journey for any reason whatsoever.

“If we take too long, we may find the gates to the land of the gods forever shut. Then we will be left to howl at the gates and repent in vain for our lack of faith and determination.”

At that moment Burton decided that anything he did would be justified. These people owed him much, and he owed them nothing.

Metuael had walked away. Now he stopped suddenly, pointing at Monat, who had just come out of the building.

“What is that?”

Burton walked up to him and said, “That is a man from another world. He and some of his kind traveled from a distant star to Earth. This was over a hundred years after I died, perhaps four thousand years after you died. He came in peace, but the people of Earth discovered that he had a… drug which could keep people from aging. They demanded that he tell them its secret, but he refused. He said that Earth people had enough problems as it was with overpopulation. Besides, a person should not be given the chance to live forever unless that person was worthy of it.”

“He was wrong then,” Metuael said. “The gods have given us a chance to live forever.”

“Yes, in a way. Though, according to your religion, only a very small group, just those on this raft, will become truly immortal. Am I right?”

“It seems hard,” Metuael said. “But that is the way it is, and who are we to question the motives and methods of the gods?”

“It is, however, a fact that we only know what the gods desire through human beings who speak for them. I have never met a person yet whose motives and methods I would not question.”

“The more fool you.”

“Aside from that,” Burton said, smiling to hide his anger, “the Arcturans, Monat and his people, were attacked by the Earth people. They were all killed, but before he died Monat caused almost all of the Earth people to die.”

He paused. How could he explain to this ignoramus that the Arcturans had left their mother ship in orbit around Earth? And that Monat had transmitted a radio wave signal to the orbiting vessel and that it had projected an energy beam of such a frequency that only human beings had died?

He did not really understand it himself, since in his time such things as radio and spaceships had not existed.

Metuael was wide-eyed now. Looking at Monat, he said, “He is a great magician? He killed all those people through his powers?”

For a moment, Burton considered using Monat’s supposed magic as a lever. Perhaps he could pry a boat and free-grails out of this man if he threatened him. But, though Metuael might be ignorant, and crazed, he was not unintelligent. He would ask why Monat, if he was such a sorcerer, had not protected the Hadji II from destruction and his companions from hurt. He also might ask why Burton needed a boat, since surely Monat could give them the power to fly through the air.

“Yes, he did slay them,” Burton said. “And he also woke up on these banks, not knowing how or why. His magical tools were left on Earth, of course. However, he says that he will find the materials to make more tools someday, and he will regain his powers and be as mighty and as deadly as ever. Then those who have scorned and mocked him will have good reason to fear him.”

Let Metuael chew on that.

Metuael smiled, and said, “By that time…”

Burton understood. By then the raft would be long gone.

“Besides, Rushhub will protect his people. A god is mightier than a man, even a demon from the stars.”

“Why didn’t Rushhub avert this accident then?” Burton said.

“I do not know, but I am sure that he will come to me in a dream, and he will tell me why. Nothing happens to the people of Rushhub without a purpose.”

Metuael walked off. Burton returned to the building to check on his crew. Kazz stepped outside just as Burton was about to enter. He had removed all his cloths except for his kilt, revealing a very hairy, squat, big-boned, powerfully muscled body. His head was thrust forward on a bowed and bull-like neck. His forehead was low and slanting; his skull long and narrow; his face, broad. His supraorbital ridges were thick, bony shelves above shrewd dark-brown eyes. The nose was puggish but had flaring nostrils. The bulging jaws pushed out thin lips. The massive hands looked as if they could squeeze stone to powder.

Despite his fearsome appearance, he would not have gotten more than a passing glance in the East End of London in Burton’s time if he had been clothed.

His full name was Kazzintuitruaabemss. In his native language, Man-Who-Slew-The-White-Tooth.

“What’s up, Burton-naq?”

“You and Monat come in with me.”

When he was in the hut, he asked the others how they felt. Alice and Frigate said they could walk but not run. Loghu’s case was evident. She was in no pain because of the dreamgum given her, but she would not be restored to full health for four or five days. It took that long for a broken bone to knit completely. The fantastic speed in healing was due to causes unknown, perhaps something in their food.

Whatever the reason, bones healed, teeth and eyes regrew, torn muscles and burned flesh were renewed, all with a quickness that had once astonished the Valley-dwellers. Now it was taken for granted.

Burton had no sooner explained the situation to them than twelve armed men appeared. Their captain said he had orders to escort them to the island. Two men put Loghu on a stretcher and carried her out. Frigate, supported by Monat and Kazz, limped after them. They made their way, with some difficulty, over the wilderness of logs and onto the shore. Here they were met by the Ganopo, all angry but helpless.

Loghu was taken into a hut, and the guards left. Not, however, before their captain cautioned Burton that he and his crew must stay away from the raft.

“And if we don’t?” Burton said loudly.

“Then you will be thrown into The River. Perhaps with a stone tied to your legs. Almighty Rushhub has told us not to spill blood except in self-defense. But he said nothing about drowning our enemies.”

Shortly before the midday grailstone discharge, a store of dried fish and acorn bread was delivered to Burton.

“Metuael says that this will keep you from starving until you can catch more fish and make more bread.”

“I’ll save my thanks to deliver in person to him,” Burton said to the captain. “He may not like its form, though.”

Monat said, “Was that empty bluster or do you plan on some sort of revenge?”

“Revenge isn’t my dish,” Burton said. “I do intend, however, to see that we do not go grailless.”

Two days passed. The front part of the raft was still beached. The log jam had been cleared away, and the raft had been pushed back toward the water several meters. This was a tedious, backbreaking job. The entire population of the raft, their leader excepted, pried away at the front end with small thin logs as levers. From sunup until sunset, the Babylonian words for “Heave! One, two three, heave!” bellowed from hundreds of mouths.

Every mass effort only succeeded in pushing back the immensely heavy raft a millimeter or so. Often, the stones wedged between the rock of the beach and the front edge of the raft would slip a little, and the raft, urged by the current, would move back onto the beach. Several times, the wedges were knocked out, and all gains were lost.

Since the wind blew from downRiver, the sails on the masts were unfurled. Metuael hoped that the upstream wind would give the heavers an advantage. The theory would have worked if it had not been that the rock spire blocked off most of the breeze.

By the morning of the third day, the raft had been pushed back about a meter. At this rate, it would take seven more days to free it.

The Ganopo were busy meanwhile. Unable to borrow a boat from Metuael, they sent four strong swimmers out. These got to the right bank, where they explained the situation and were loaned a small sailboat. They returned with a fleet of twenty boats manned by the chiefs of the local state and the best fighting men. The head chief, a tall Shawnee, looked around and then conferred with the Ganopo. Burton and Monat sat in on the meeting.

There was a lot of talking, complaints from the Ganopo, various counsels offered, and a speech by Burton. He told them of the large store of goods on the raft, omitting mention of the free-grails, and suggested that perhaps the Babylonians would part with some of their stores if the locals loaned enough men to help free the raft.

The Shawnee thought this was a good idea. He talked to Metuael, who was polite but said he did not need any help.

Disgruntled, the Shawnee returned to the island.

“Those eagle-noses do not have much sense,” he said. “Don’t they know that we can take everything they have without giving anything in return? They have wrecked the boats and the docks of the Ganopo and offered nothing in restitution. They have wrecked the strangers’ vessel, which took a year to build and cost them much tobacco and booze in trade for the wood with which to build it. They have caused a crewman to die. They have also caused the loss of the strangers’ grails. A person might as well be dead as not have a grail.

“And what do they offer as payment? Nothing! They mock the Ganopo and the strangers. These are evil people, and they should be punished as such.”

“Not to mention the valuable goods the chief and his chums will obtain,” Burton murmured in English to Monat.

“What did you say?” the chief said.

“I was telling my friend, the man from the stars, that you have great wisdom and know what is right and wrong. That what you do to the eagle-noses will be right and just, and the great spirit will smile upon you.”

“Your language says much in a few words.”

“The tongue of my people is not forked.”

And God forgive me for that remark, Burton thought.

Though the Shawnee did not say what he meant to do, it was evident to Burton that he would be planning a raid in force. Perhaps for that very night.

Burton called the others into his hut.

“Don’t look so gloomy. I think we’ll have grails after all, lose our beggar status. However, we must act tonight. How about it, Loghu, Pete, Alice? Do you feel up to some action? Some perhaps vigorous action?”

The three replied that they could walk. Running was as yet out of the question.

“Very well. Here is what we’ll do, if you have no objections. If you do, we’ll do it anyway.”

They ate their evening meal, fish and bread which disgusted them before they put it in their mouths. The Ganopo, however, were kind enough to give them a few cigarettes and as much of the lichen-alcohol as they wanted. Before going into his hut, presumably to retire for the night, Burton walked around the beach. The Babylonians were either in their huts or talking in small groups before them. They were tired after three days of hard and frustrating labor and would soon be asleep. All, that is, except for the guards stationed along the edge of the raft. They would light pine torches soaked in fish-oil and pace back and forth under their illumination, waiting for their reliefs.

The largest groups were at the forward end. Metuael had placed them there to make sure that Burton’s people did not try to sneak aboard to steal their goods. The little dark-skinned men watched him closely as he sauntered along. He grinned and waved at them. They did not return his greeting.

Having checked the situation, Burton walked back to his hut. On the way he passed the Ganopo chief, who was sitting before his hut and smoking one of the little briar pipes the grails offered once a year.

Burton squatted down by him.

“I am thinking, O chief, that tonight the raftspeople may be in for a big surprise.”

The chief removed his pipe and said, “What do you mean?”

“It is possible that the chief of the people on the north bank may be leading a raid upon the raftspeople. Have you heard anything about that?”

“Not a word. The great chief of the Shaawanwaaki does not confide in me. However, I would not be surprised if he and his warriors did not resent the injuries and the insults which we Ganopo, who are under his protection, have suffered from the eagle-noses.”

“If they did make this raid you suggest, when would they be likely to do it?”

“In the old days, when the Shaawanwaaki warred against the people on the south bank, they would cross The River just before dawn. The clouds are still thick then, and they could not be seen approaching. But soon after they had landed, the sun would come up and the clouds would burn away under its heat. Then the Shaawanwaaki could see to strike.”

“That is what I thought,” Burton said. “However, one thing troubles me. It is an easy matter to cross a river or even a small lake in the fog and find the other side. This is a small island which would be difficult to find in the clouds. It is true the rock tower is very high, but the raiders would be in the fog and could not see it.”

The chief tamped down the coals in his pipe, and he said, “That is no worry of mine.”

Burton said, “There is a ledge on the spire. It faces the north bank, but an outcropping of rock would prevent the raftspeople from seeing it. It would also prevent them from seeing a bonfire. A bonfire which anyone on The River north of the island might see even through the fog. Is that why some of the Ganopo have been busy all day carrying bamboo and pine up to this ledge?”

The chief grinned. “You have the curiosity of a wildcat and the eyes of a hawk. However, I promised the Shaawanwaaki chief not to say a word about this business.”

Burton stood up. “I understand. Many thanks for your hospitality, chief, whether or not I ever see you again.”

“If not in this world, perhaps in the next.”

It was difficult to get to sleep. After hours of tossing and turning, he was surprised to find himself being shaken awake by Monat. Burton freed himself of the Arcturan’s three fingers and thumb and got up. Monat, who also came from a planet with a twenty-four-hours’ rotation, had a biological chronometer in his head. Burton had depended upon him to wake the others at the right time.

They moved around, talking softly while they drank instant coffee. The crystals, a gift from the islanders, provided a boiling heat as they dissolved.

After going over their plan once more, they moved outside and relieved themselves. The hut was just high enough to be above the mists, enabling them to see a faint glow high up on the spire. The Shaawanwaaki, even though in fog, would be able to discern it as a dim glow. That would be all they needed.

Frigate and Burton were the only ones who had been wearing a full suit of cloths when the Hadji II had gone down. The others, however, had cloths given them by the Ganopo. Clad from head to foot in these, they walked down into the fog. Burton led, one hand in Alice’s, hers in Frigate’s, and so on down the line. Depending upon an unusual sense of direction, Burton led them to the water’s edge. Now they could see the glow of the torches in the fuzziness.

Burton took out his flint knife. Kazz had a club he’d fashioned from a stick of pine with a knife he’d borrowed from a Ganopo. Frigate’s knife had been given to the Neanderthal woman, Besst. The rest were unarmed.

Burton moved cautiously forward until he was at the edge of the raft. There was enough space between the torches ranged along the edge for him to crawl through unseen. He proceeded to do this until he was well out of range of the guards’ vision and hearing. He waited while, one by one, the others caught up.

“This is the easy part,” he said. “From now on we’ll be blind until we come across a torchlight. I have the location of the buildings and the boats in my head, but in this fog… well, follow me.”

Despite his assurances, he blundered around for a while. Then, abruptly, the huge black figure of the idol, a fire in its hollow belly, was in front of him. He stood for a minute, estimating the probable number of paces from the statue to the building which held the grails.

Kazz said, “I can just see some lights to the right.”

Keeping to the right of the torches, Burton led the others until he saw the square walls and conical roof of the storehouse. From the front of the building came the voices of the guards, speaking in low tones, stamping their feet now and then. After going behind the bulding, touching it with a finger to keep contact, Burton stopped on the other side.

Here he removed from under his cloths a coil of leather rope borrowed from the Ganopo chief, who had not asked him about its intended use. Monat and Frigate also carried coils. Burton tied their ends together to make a single rope. While Alice held one end, he moved out into the darkness with Frigate, Monat, Loghu, and Kazz. He knew that there was a boat-rack on the edge of the raft just opposite the storehouse. This time, he went straight to his target.

Cautioning them to move slowly and silently, he and the others eased a large canoe off the rack. It could hold ten people and so, though made of light pine and thin fish skin, was heavy.

After the canoe was in the water and paddles placed in it, all returned except Loghu. It was her job to keep the canoe from drifting away.

Following the rope, they went swiftly back to the storehouse.

Just as they returned, Kazz grunted, and said, “Others coming!”

The flames of four torches became visible.

“It’s a change of guards!” Burton said.

They had to move around to the other side of the building since the four armed men were headed toward them.

Burton looked upward. Was it his imagination or was the fog becoming less dark above?

They waited, some of them sweating despite the damp, cold air. The guards exchanged some words, somebody must have cracked a joke, judging by their laughter, then the relieved men said good night. The torches showed that two were going to homes in the forward part. The other two went in the opposite direction, causing a swift retreat by the invaders.

Burton, watching from the corner said, “Those two are separating, Kazz, do you think you could get one of them?”

“No sweat, Burton-naq,” Kazz said, and he was gone.

Both the torches were almost out of sight when Burton saw one of them drop. A minute later it lifted, becoming more bright as it approached them.

By then, Burton had moved the group from the side to the back of the building. He did not want a guard to walk past the front and see the torch.

Kazz had thrown his hood back. His big, blocklike teeth gleamed in the light of the flames. In one hand he held the heavy oak spear tipped with a long hornfish horn which he had taken from the guard. His belt held a chert knife set in a heavy wooden handle and a flint-headed axe. These he passed out to Frigate and Alice. His club went to the Arcturan.

“I hope you didn’t kill him,” Monat whispered.

“That depends on how thick his skull is,” Kazz said.

Monat grimaced. He had an almost pathological abhorrence of violence, though he could be an effective fighter in self-defense.

“Will your leg handicap you?” Burton said. “Think you can throw that axe as effectively as usual?”

“I think so,” Frigate said. He was shaking now, though he would be steady when the fighting started. Like the Arcturan, he dreaded physical conflict.

Burton told them what to do, then he led Kazz and Alice around one side toward the front. The others went around the opposite corner.

Burton peered around the corner. The four guards were standing close together, facing each other, and talking. A moment later, a torchlight appeared around the corner. The guards did not see it until it was close. As soon as Burton saw them turn toward it, calling a challenge, he moved out.

Kazz, his features shrouded by his hood, got near to them before he was required to stop. Probably, the guards thought that he was one of the relieved men, returned for some reason.

By the time the mistake was discovered, it was too late for them. Kazz grasped his spear just behind its head, and, using it as a quarterstaff, struck its butt against the side of a guard’s neck.

Burton, holding his knife in his left hand, chopped the edge of his right against the back of the neck of another man. He had no wish to kill, and he had ordered the bloodthirsty Kazz to avoid using the spearhead if he could do so.

Frigate’s axe whirled out of the grayness and caught a third in the chest. It was thrown not quite accurately enough, or perhaps Frigate was trying not to kill. In which case, his axe-throwing was superb. The blunt forefront, not the cutting edge, struck, and the man fell back, the wind knocked out of him. Before he could recover it, he was knocked out by Burton’s savage kick to the side of his head.

At the same time as the others, Monat struck, and the fourth crumpled from a blow on the head.

There was silence for a moment as they waited to find out if anyone had heard the fight. Then they picked up the torches from the deck, and Burton unbarred the door. The fallen were dragged inside, where Monat examined them.

“Very good. They’re all alive.”

“Some of them’ll be coming to soon,” Burton said. “Watch them, Kazz.”

He held a torch above the free-grail rack. “We’re beggars no longer.”

He hesitated. Should just seven grails be taken? Why not all thirty? The extras could be used to trade for wood and sails for the new boat to be built.

Honor Not Honors was his motto, but this was a matter of recompense, not thievery.

He gave the order, and each took five grails. They put the wide handle of one grail over their head, letting it hang behind them by the neck and thrust each arm through the handles of two grails. Then they left the building, barred the door, and followed the leather cord to the canoe. The torches were left upon the deck outside the storehouse.

Loghu said, “Isn’t it about time the Indians attacked?”

“Past time, I would say,” Monat replied.

The canoe loaded, they paddled away. Their destination was the south bank, which they intended to follow upRiver until just before dawn. Burton was worried about the extra grails. If the local authorities saw them, they might seize them. Even if they didn’t, greedy individuals would try to steal them.

There was only one way to hide them. The extras were filled with water. Sections of leather line were cut, and one end of each was tied to a handle. The other end was tied to the upper part of the canoe framework through a hole punched in the skin.

The drag on the canoe was heavy, but fortunately they were very close to the bank. They stopped at a dock complex near a grailstone and tied the canoe to a piling under a dock.

They sat down under the stone and waited. Dawn and hundreds of citizens came. Burton’s group introduced itself and requested permission to use the stone. This was given gladly, since the south-bank locals were peaceful. In fact, they welcomed strangers, a source of news and gossip.

The fog burned away. Burton got on top of the stone and looked toward the spire. Its base was about 2.5 nautical miles distant, which, from his altitude, put the horizon 4 miles away. He could see the larger buildings and the idol but the flames he had expected to be rising from them were nonexistent. Perhaps the Shaawanwaaki had not set them afire. After all, they might have wanted to keep the raft intact until it could be taken to the shore and dismantled. Its logs were valuable.

Instead of pushing on that day, he decided that they would rest. That afternoon a Ganopo party landed, the chief among them. Burton questioned him.

The chief laughed. “Those Shaawanwaaki turtleheads completely missed the raft. They couldn’t see the fire, though how they could not, I don’t understand. Anyway, they paddled around for hours, and when the fog lifted they found that the current had taken them five stones below the island. What a bunch of bums!”

“Did the Babylonians say anything to you about their missing canoe? Not to mention the guards we had to rough up?”

Burton thought it best not to say anything about the grails.

The chief laughed again. “Yes, they came storming ashore before the stone flamed. They were very angry, though they did not say why. They knocked us around a little, but the bruises and the insults did not bother us because we were happy that you had made fools of them. They searched the island thoroughly, but they did not find you, of course. They did find the ashes of the fire and asked us about it. I told them that it was a ceremonial fire.

“They didn’t believe me. I think they must have guessed the truth. You won’t have to worry about them sending out search parties for you. Every one of them, including Metuael, is straining to get the raft off today. They must expect another attack tonight.”

Burton asked the chief why the Shaawanwaaki didn’t attack in the daylight. They could easily overwhelm the Babylonians.

“That is because there is an agreement among the states in this area to protect strangers. So far, it has been honored and with good reason. The other states would be compelled to go to war against the aggressor. However, the Shaawanwaaki were hoping to keep it a secret. If they were to be found out, they would say that the raftspeople had refused to pay compensation for the damage done to us.

“I don’t know. Perhaps the Shaawanwaaki will give up the idea. Still, there are many among them who would like to make a raid just for the sake of excitement.”

Burton never found out what happened to the Babylonians. He decided that they should leave that day. After the canoe was on its way, the grails were pulled up, emptied, and placed in the bottom of the canoe.

After traveling 200 kilometers, Burton found an area suitable for boat construction. It was not determined by the wood available, since all places had plenty of pine, oak, yew, and bamboo. What was now difficult to find was flint and chert for cutting timber. Even in the beginning, these stones were restricted to certain sites, some being rich in them, others comparatively poor, and many lacking them entirely. Wars for flint had been common in the old days.

The minerals were even rarer now. Hard as they were, flint and chert wore out, and new supplies were almost unheard of. As a result, the end of 32 A.R.D. (After Resurrection Day) was also the near end of large-vessel construction. At least, it was in the countries through which Burton had passed, and he presumed that it was the same everywhere.

The area at which he stopped was one of the very few that still had a plentiful store. The locals, a majority of pre-Columbian Algonquins and a minority of pre-Roman Picts, were well aware of the value of their stones. Their chief, a Menomini named Oskas, haggled fiercely with Burton. Finally, he stated that his rock-bottom price was seven thousand cigarettes of tobacco, five hundred of marijuana, twenty-five hundred cigars, forty packages of pipe tobacco, and eight thousand cupfuls of liquor. He also suggested that he would like to sleep with the blonde, Loghu, every five days or so. Actually, he would prefer that it be every night, but he did not think his three women would like that.

Burton took some time to recover from his shock. He said, “That’s up to her. I don’t think either she or her man would agree to it. Anyway, you’re asking far too much. None of my party would have booze or tobacco for a year.”

Oskas shrugged and said, “Well, if it isn’t worth it to you… ?”

Burton called a conference and told his crew what Oskas demanded. Kazz objected the most.

“Burton-naq, I lived all my life on Earth, forty-five summers, without whiskey or nicotine. But here I got hooked and if I go a day without either, I am ready, as you put it, to climb the wall. You know that I tried to quit both at different times, and before a week was gone I was ready to bite my tongue off. I was as mean as a cave bear with a thorn in his paw.”

Besst said, “I haven’t forgotten.”

“If there was no alternative, we’d have to do it,” Burton said. “It’d be cold turkey or no boat. But we do have the extra grails.”

He returned to Oskas and, after they had smoked a pipe, he got down to business.

“The woman with the yellow hair and blue eyes says the only part of her you’ll get is her foot, and you might have a hard time pulling it out of your ass.”

Oskas laughed loudly and slapped his thigh.

When he had dried his tears, he said, “Too bad. I like a woman with spirit, though not with too much.”

“It so happens that some time ago I got hold of a free-grail. Now, I am willing to trade that for a place in which to build our boat and the materials to build it.”

Oskas did not ask him how he got it, though it was evident that he thought Burton had stolen it.

“If that is so,” he said, smiling, “then we have a deal.”

He stood up. “I will see that things are arranged at once. Are you sure that the blonde is not just playing hard to get?”

The chief took the grail to the council’s stronghouse, adding it to the twenty-one free-grails there. These had been collected through the years for the benefit of himself and his subchiefs.

Here, as everywhere, special people made sure that they got special privileges.

It took a year to build another cutter. When it was half-finished, Burton decided not to name it after its predecessors, Hadji I and Hadji II. Both had come to bad ends, and, though he denied it, he was superstitious. After some talk with his crew, it was agreed that Snark was suitable. Alice liked the name because of her association with Lewis Carroll, and she agreed with Frigate that it was most appropriate.

Smiling, she recited part of the Bellman’s speech from The Hunting of the Snark.

“He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land:

And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be

A map they could all understand.

“‘What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,

Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?’

So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply

‘They are merely conventional signs!

“‘Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank’

(So the crew would protest) ‘that he’s bought us

A perfect and absolute blank!’”

Burton laughed, but he was not sure that Alice was not obliquely insulting his abilities as a captain. Lately, they had not been getting along so well.

“Let’s hope the voyage in the new boat won’t be another agony in eight fits!” Alice cried.

“Well,” Burton said, grinning savagely at her, “this Bellman knows enough not to get the bowsprit mixed up with the rudder sometimes!

“Nor,” he added, “is there a Rule 42 of the boat’s code. No one shall speak to the Man at the Helm.”

“Which,” Alice said, her smile gone, “was decreed by the Bellman himself. And the Man at the Helm shall speak to no one.”

There was a short silence. All felt the tension between the two, and they looked uneasy, dreading another violent explosion of their captain’s temper.

Monat, eager to avoid this, laughed. He said, “I remember that poem. I was especially struck by ‘Fit the Sixth, The Barrister’s Dream.’ Let me see, ah, yes, the pig was on trial for having deserted its sty, and the Snark, dressed in gown, bands, and wig, was defending it.

“The indictment had never been clearly expressed, And it seemed that the Snark had begun,

And had spoken three hours, before any one guessed

What the pig was supposed to have done.”

He paused, rolled his eyes, and said, “I have it. That one quatrain which so impressed me.

“But their wild exultation was suddenly checked When the jailor informed them with tears,

Such a sentence would not have the slightest effect, As the pig had been dead for some years.”

They all laughed, and Monat said, “Somehow, that verse squeezes out the essence of Terrestrial justice, its letter if not its spirit.”

“I am amazed,” Burton said, “that in your short time on Earth you managed not only to read so much but to remember it so well.”

“The Hunting of the Snark was a poem. I believe that you can understand human beings better through poetry and fiction than through so-called fact-literature. That is why I took the trouble to memorize it.

“Anyway, an Earth friend gave it to me. He said that it was one of the greatest works of metaphysics that humanity could boast of. He asked me if Arcturans had anything to equal it.”

Alice said, “Surely he was pulling your leg?”

“I don’t think so.”

Burton shook his head. He had been a voracious reader, and he had an almost photographic memory. But he had been on Earth sixty-nine years, whereas Monat had lived there only from 2002 to 2008 A.D. Yet, during the years they had voyaged together, Monat had betrayed a knowledge that no human could have accumulated in a century.

The conversation ended since it was time to go back to work on the boat. Burton had not forgotten Alice’s seeming barb, however. He brought it up as they got ready to go to bed.

She looked at him with large, dark eyes, eyes that were already retreating into another world. She almost always withdrew when he attacked, and it was this that heated his anger from red to white-hot.

“No, Dick, I wasn’t insulting you. At least, I wasn’t doing so consciously.”

“But you were doing it unconsciously, is that it? That’s no excuse. You can’t plead that you have no control of that part of you. What your unconscious thinks is just as much you as the conscious is. It’s even worse. You can dismiss your conscious thoughts, but what you really believe is what that shadowy thing believes.”

He began pacing back and forth, his face looking like a demon’s in the faint light cast by the small fire on the stone hearth.

“Isabel worshipped me, yet she was not afraid to argue violently with me, to tell me when she thought I was doing something wrong. But you… you harbor resentment until it makes an absolute bitch of you, yet you won’t come out with it. And that makes things even worse.

“There’s nothing evil about a hammer-and-tongs, screaming, throwing argument. It’s like a thunderstorm, frightening when it happens; but it clears the air after it’s over.

“The trouble with you is that you were raised to be a lady. You must never lift your voice in anger, you must always be calm and cool and collected. But that shadowy entity, that hindbrain, that inheritance from your ape ancestors, is tearing at the bars of its cage. And, incidentally, tearing at you. But you, you won’t admit it.”

Alice lost her dreamy look, and she shouted at him.

“You’re a liar! And don’t throw up your wife to me! We agreed never to compare each other’s spouse, but you do it every time you wish to get me angry! It isn’t true that I lack passion. You of all people should know that, and I don’t just mean in bed.

“But I won’t go into a rage over every petty word and incident. When I get mad it’s because the situation demands it. It’s worth getting angry about. You… you’re in a perpetual state of rage.”

“That’s a lie!”

“I don’t lie!”

“Let us get back to the point,” he said. “What is there about my capacity as commander that you don’t like?”

She bit her lip, then said, “It’s not how you run the boat or how you treat your crew. That’s such an obvious matter, and you do fine at it. No, what troubles me is the command, or lack of it, over yourself.”

Burton sat down, saying, “Let’s have it. Just what are you talking about?”

She hitched forward on the chair and leaned over so that her face was close to his.

“For one thing, you can’t stand to stay in one place more than a week. Before three days are up, you get uneasy. By the seventh day you’re like a tiger pacing back and forth in his cage, a lion throwing himself against the bars.”

“Spare me the zoological analogies,” he said. “Besides, you know that I have stayed in one place for as much as a year.”

“Yes, when you were building a boat. When you had a project going, one which would enable you to travel even more swiftly. Even then, you took short trips, leaving the rest of us to work on the boat. You had to go see this and that, investigate rumors, study strange customs, track down a language you didn’t know. Never mind what the excuse was. You had to get away.

“You have a blight of the soul, Dick. That’s the only way I can describe it. You can’t endure to stay long in one place. But it’s not because of the place. Never! It’s you yourself that you can’t tolerate. You must run so you can get away from yourself!”

He stood up and began pacing again.

“You say then that I can’t endure myself! What a pitiable fellow! He doesn’t love himself, which means that no one else can love him!”

“Nonsense!”

“Yes, all you’re saying is pure rot!”

“The rot is in you, not in what I say.”

“If you can’t stand me, why don’t you leave?”

Tears slid down her cheeks, and she said, “I love you, Dick!”

“But not enough to put up with my trifling eccentricities, is that it?”

She threw up her hands. “Trifling?”

“I have an itch to travel. So what? Would you taunt me if I had a physical itch, say athlete’s foot?”

She smiled slightly. “No, I’d tell you to get rid of it. But this isn’t just an itch, Dick. It’s a compulsion.”

She got up and lit a cigarette. Waving it under his nose, she said, “Look at this. In my time on Earth I would never have dared smoke, wouldn’t even have considered it. A lady did not do such things. Especially a lady whose husband was of the landed gentry, whose father was a bishop of the Anglican church. Nor did she ever drink strong liquor to excess or curse. And she would never have considered bathing nude in public!

“But here I am, Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves of the estate of Cuffnells, a most proper Victorian female aristocrat, doing all that and much more. By much more, well, I’m doing things in bed that even the French novels my husband was so fond of reading would not even have hinted at.

“I’ve changed. So why can’t you?

“To tell the truth, Dick, I’m sick of traveling, always moving on, cooped up inside a small vessel, never knowing what tomorrow will bring. I’m no coward, you know that. But I would like to find a place where they speak English, where the people are of my own kind, where there is peace, where I can settle down, put down roots. I’m so tired of this eternal voyaging!”

Burton was moved by her tears. He put his hand on her shoulder and said, “What can we do about it? I must keep going on. Now, my…”

“Isabel? I’m not she. I’m Alice. I do love you, Dick, but I’m not your shadow, trailing you wherever you go, present when there’s light, gone when there’s darkness, a mere appendage.”

She got up to put out the half-smoked cigarette in a baked-clay ashtray. Turning to him, she said, “But there’s more! There’s something else that bothers me very much. It hurts me that you don’t fully confide in me. You have a secret, Dick, a very deep, very dark secret.”

“Perhaps you can tell me what it is. I certainly don’t know.”

“Don’t lie! I’ve heard you talking in your sleep. It has something to do with those Ethicals, doesn’t it? Something happened to you you didn’t tell anyone about when you were gone all those years.

“I’ve heard you muttering about bubbles, about killing yourself seven hundred and seventy-seven times. And I’ve heard names you never mention when you’re awake. Loga. Thanabur. And you speak of Ecks and the mysterious stranger. Who are these people?”

“Only the man who sleeps alone can keep a secret,” Burton said.

“Why can’t you tell me? Don’t you trust me—after all these years?”

“I would if I could. But it would be too dangerous for you. Believe me, Alice, I have said nothing because I must say nothing. It is for your own good. No arguments now. I won’t give in, and I’ll get very angry if you persist in questioning me.”

“Very well then. But keep your hands to yourself tonight.”

It was a long time before he fell asleep. Some time in the night he awoke, aware that he had been talking. Alice was sitting up, staring at him.

Oskas, half-drunk as usual, visited Burton during lunch hour. Burton did not mind, especially since the chief gave him a skin containing at least two liters of bourbon.

“Have you heard the rumors of this great white boat which is said to be coming from downRiver?” the Indian said.

“Only a deaf man would not have heard,” Burton said, and he took a long pull of the whiskey. It had a winey odor and went down smoothly, needing no dilution with water. But then the grails never delivered anything but the best.

He said, “Aah!” and then, “I find it hard to believe the stories. From the description, the vessel is propelled by paddle wheels. That would mean that its engines are of iron. I doubt that anyone could gather enough ore to make engines of any size. Also, I have heard that the hull of the boat is made of metal. There’s not enough iron in the whole planet to make a vessel that big. If it is as big as the rumors say.”

“You are full of doubts,” Oskas said. “That is bad for the liver. However, if the stories are true, then the great boat will be coming along some day. I would like to have such a boat.”

“You and millions more. But if such a boat can be made, then its maker could have iron weapons, perhaps firearms. You have never seen these though you do have some gunpowder bombs. Firearms, however, are metal tubes which can shoot metal projectiles to a great distance. Some of these can fire so fast that a man could not shoot one arrow before he was hit ten times. And then there are cannons. These are giant tubes which shoot large bombs farther than the mountains.

“So, you can assume that others have tried to take this boat away from its owners and have died before they could get within arrow range. Besides, what would you do with it if you did get it? It takes highly trained people to operate such a boat.”

“Those could be gotten,” Oskas said. “You, for instance. Could you operate it?”

“Probably.”

“Would you be interested in helping me take it? I would be grateful. You would be first among my subchiefs.”

“I am not a warlike man,” Burton said. “Nor am I greedy. However, just for the sake of conversation, let us say that I was interested. Here is what I would do.”

Oskas was fascinated by the intricate but fantastic plan that Burton proposed. When he left he said that he would send Burton more whiskey. They must talk about this some more. Smiling broadly, Oskas staggered away.

Burton thought the chief was very gullible. He did not mind stringing him along, however. It would keep him happy.

The truth was that Burton had some plans of his own.

If the stories were true, then the boat was a means for traveling much faster than by sail. Somehow, he was going to get on it. Not by force but by cunning. The main trouble was that he had no idea as yet how he could accomplish that.

For one thing, the boat might not, probably would not, stop at this area. For another, it might not have room for more people. Also, why should its captain want to take him and his crew on?

The rest of the day, he was silent, absorbed in his thoughts. After he had gone to bed, he lay a long time considering every possibility. One of the things he considered was that of going along with Oskas’ plan. Then, at the last moment, he could betray him. That might get him into the good graces of the boat’s captain.

He rejected that almost instantly. In the first place, even if Oskas was rapacious and treacherous, he, Burton, would feel dishonored if he deceived him. Secondly, it was inevitable that many of Oskas’ people would be killed and wounded. He did not wish to be responsible for that.

No, there had to be another way.

Finally, he found it. Its success depended upon stopping the boat or at least getting the attention of those aboard it. How he would do it if it passed during the night, he did not know. Somehow, he would.

Smiling, he fell asleep.

Two months passed. In another week, the Snark would be launched. In the meantime, details about the approaching paddle wheeler had come in piecemeal. These had arrived by drum, smoke, fire, and mica-mirror signals. Putting the items together, Burton had built a picture of the vessel. It was probably larger than any Mississippi riverboat of his time. It was undoubtedly of metal, and it traveled at least 15 miles an hour or a little over 24 kilometers per hour. Sometimes, it had been seen going twice as fast. The calculations were crude, of course, since none of the observers had a stopwatch. But seconds could be counted as it passed from one grailstone to the next.

Burton had presumed from the first reports that the boat was a steamer. However, later messages said that the vessel seldom took in wood. This was for a boiler which heated water for showers and made steam for machine guns. Burton could not understand how steam propelled bullets. Monat suggested that the weapon used a synchronizing system to drop projectiles into the barrel, through which steam at considerable pressure was shot at regular intervals.

The motors of the boat used electricity, drawn from a grailstone when it discharged.

“Then they not only have steel, they have copper for the windings of the electrical motors,” Burton said. “Where did they get all that metal?”

Frigate said, “The boat could be mainly aluminum. And aluminum could be used for the windings, though it’s not as efficient as copper.”

More data came in. The vessel bore its name on its sides in big black Roman letters. Rex Grandissimus. Latin for “The Greatest King,” that is, greatest in manner or style of life. Its commander, according to informants, was none other than the son of Henry II of England and Eleanor, divorced wife of Louis VII of France, daughter of the Duke of Aquitaine. King John, surnamed Lackland, was the captain. After his famous brother, Richard the Lion-Hearted, had died, John had become Joannes Rex Angliae et Dominus Hiberniae, etc. He had also gained such a bad reputation that there was an unwritten law in the British royalty that no heir to the throne should ever be named John.

On first learning the captain’s name, Burton had gone to Alice. “One of your ancestors commands the paddle wheeler. Perhaps we could appeal to his family affections to get him to take us aboard. Though, from what history said, he did not seem to have much family loyalty. He led a rebellion against his father, and he is said to have murdered his nephew, Arthur, whom Richard had made heir to the crown.”

“He was no worse than any other king of that time,” Alice said. “And he did do some good things, despite what people think. He reformed the coinage, he supported development of the Navy, he did all he could to develop trade, he urged the completion of London Bridge. He was also unusual among the monarchs of his time in that he was an intellectual. He read Latin books and French histories in the vernacular, and wherever he went he took his library with him.

“As for his opposition to the Magna Carta, that has been misrepresented. The barons’ revolt was not in the interests of the common people; it was no democratic movement. The barons wanted special privileges for themselves. The freedom for which they fought was the freedom to exploit their subjects without opposition from the king.

“He fought hard against the barons, and he battled to keep the French provinces under the English crown. But there was no way he could get out of that; he had inherited old conflicts from his father and brother.”

“Well!” Burton said. “You make him sound like a saint.”

“He was far from that. He was also far more interested in England itself, the welfare of its people, than any previous Anglo-Norman king.”

“You must have done much reading and thinking about him. Your opinions go against the grain of everything I’ve read.”

“I had much time to read when I lived in Cuffnells. And I form my own opinions.”

“Bully for you. Nevertheless, the fact remains that somehow this medieval monarch has gotten control of the greatest artifact, the most superb machine, on this world. I can deal with him when I get to him. The problem is, how do I do it?”

“You mean, how do we do it?”

“Right. My apologies. Well, we shall see.”

The Snark was let down the ways into The River amid much cheering and drinking. Burton was not as happy as he should have been. He had lost interest in it.

During the festivities, Oskas took him aside.

“You don’t intend to leave soon, I hope? I am counting on you to help me take the great boat.”

Burton felt like telling him to go to hell. That would, however, not be diplomatic, since the chief might decide to confiscate the Snark for himself. Worse, he might quit resisting the temptation to take Loghu to his bed. During the year he had given her some trouble, though he had made no violent moves. Whenever he got very drunk, which was often, he had openly asked her to move in with him.

There had been many uneasy moments when it looked as if he was going to take her by force. Frigate, whose nature was anything but belligerent, had intended to challenge him to a duel, though he thought that it was a stupid way to solve a problem. But honor demanded it, manhood demanded it; there was no other way out unless he and Loghu sneaked away some night. He would not leave the people with whom he had been so intimate so many years.

Loghu had told him, “No, you will not get killed or kill that savage and so arouse his people to kill you. Leave it to me.”

Loghu had then astonished everybody, Oskas most of all, by challenging him to a fight to the death.

After recovering from the shock, Oskas had roared with laughter. “What? I should fight a woman? I beat my wives when they anger me, but I would not fight one. If I were to do this, it would not matter that I would kill you easily. I would be laughed at; I would no longer be Oskas, The Bear Claw, I would be The Man Who Fought a Woman.”

“What will it be?” Loghu had said. “Tomahawk? Spear? Knife? Or bare hands? You have seen me in the contests. You know how good I am with all weapons. It is true that you are bigger and stronger, but I know many tricks you don’t. I’ve had some of the best instructors in the world.”

What she did not mention was that he was very intoxicated, very fat, and very much out of condition.

Had it been a man who talked to him like that, Oskas would have leaped upon him. Drunk as he was, he knew that he was in a quandary. If he killed this woman, he would be a public jest. If he didn’t accept the challenge, he would be said to be afraid of her.

Monat, smiling, stepped forward. “Chief, Loghu is my very good friend. I am also a friend of yours. Why don’t we drop this matter? After all, it is the drink that is speaking in you, not you yourself, Oskas, the chief, a mighty warrior on Earth and along The River. No one can blame you for refusing to fight a woman.

“However, it is not right that you should bother another man’s woman. You would not do it if you were not full of whiskey. So, I say that from now on you must not treat this woman with anything but the respect you demand from other men toward your women.

“Now, as Burton has told you, I was once a great magician. I still have some powers left, and I will not hesitate to use them if you harm Loghu. I would do so reluctantly, since I have great respect for you. But I will if I have to.”

Oskas turned pale beneath the dark skin and the flush of whiskey-heated blood. He said, “Yes, it must be the drink. No one can blame me for what I do when I am drunk.”

No more was said that night, and the next day Oskas claimed to have been so intoxicated he did not remember anything about the party.

For several months, he had been cool though polite to Loghu. Lately, he had resumed making remarks to her, though he had not touched her. This may have been because Loghu had told him, in private so that he would not lose face, that she would slice open his belly if he so much as laid a hand on her. Following which, she would crush his testicles.

She reported that he had only laughed at her. Despite which, he was aware that, given a chance, she could do just what she said. Nevertheless, Oskas had a compulsive passion for her. Now that the time was drawing close for her to leave, he was again after her.

Burton, talking to him now, kept this in mind. It wouldn’t do to have him think that he had little time left to get Loghu into his bed.

“No, we are not leaving. We will follow the plan that I have worked out for you, and I and my people will be among the vanguard when we seize the boat.

“However, as you know, it is essential that we get to the boat when it has stopped to draw lightning from a stone. If it’s moving we have no chance. Now, I have calculated the area where the boat will stop nearest to this place. I can’t pinpoint it. But I can say within four or five grailstones where it will stop in the evening.

“Our boat needs a shakedown cruise. I propose to take it on one tomorrow. I’ll sail down to the place where the real boat will stop, and I’ll look over the situation. We need to know the lay of the land if we are to attack the mighty vessel with any chance of success.

“Would you like to come along?”

Oskas had been looking at him narrow-eyed. Now his face cleared, and he smiled.

“Of course I will go along. I do not blunder blind into a battle.”

That took care of Oskas’ unvoiced suspicion that the Snark would not return from the cruise. Even so, he stationed four men in a hut nearby to keep an eye on the boat, though he said nothing of it to Burton. That night, the entire crew sneaked out through the fog to the hills. There they retrieved the free-grails from a hole in the base of the mountain and brought them back to the boat. These were put in a hiding place behind what looked like a solidly secured bulkhead.

The next day, after breakfast, Oskas came aboard with seven of his best warriors. They crowded the vessel, but Burton did not complain. He began passing out lichen-alcohol flavored with ground irontree leaves. His crew had orders to be very abstemious. By midafternoon, the chief and his men were loud-mouthed, laughing drunks. Even their lunch had not been enough to sober them to any extent. Burton kept pressing his guests with drinks. About an hour before they were to stop for dinner, the Indians were staggering around or lying on deck asleep.

It was easy to push the still conscious ones into the water and then throw the unconscious after them. Fortunately, the shock of the water woke up the latter. Otherwise, Burton would have felt compelled to pick them up and take them ashore.

Oskas, treading water, shook his fist at them and raved in Menomini and Esperanto. Laughing, Burton bent his thumb and all except the middle finger and jerked his hand upward. Then he held out his hand with the first and fourth fingers extended, the ancient sign of the “evil eye,” a sign that in modern times had come to mean “bullshit.”

Oskas became even more violent and colorful in his description of the many ways he would get revenge.

Kazz, grinning, threw the chief’s grail to him so accurately that it struck him on the head. The warriors had to dive down after him. When they brought him up, two were forced to support him until he could regain consciousness.

Kazz thought that putting a lump on Oskas’ head was very funny. He would have considered it to be even a better joke if the chief had drowned. Yet, among his crewmates, he was as sociable, tender, and compassionate a man as anyone could ask for. He was a primitive, and all primitives, civilized or preliterate, were tribal people. Only the tribe consisted of human beings and were treated as such. All outside the tribe, though some might be considered friends, were not quite human. Therefore, they did not have to be treated as if they were completely human.

Though the Neanderthal had lost his tribe on Earth, he had regained it in the crew of the Snark. This was his family, his tribe.

The Snark did not stop where Burton had told Oskas it would wait for the paddle wheeler. It would have been foolish to do so. Oskas could have made his way back quickly to his territory by renting or stealing a boat. He would then return with many warriors before the arrival of the Rex Grandissimus.

The cutter sailed on past the designated stop and continued down-River for two days. Meanwhile, its crew saw and heard messages sent by Oskas via heliograph, fire and smoke signals, and drum. The chief claimed that Burton’s party had stolen cigarettes and booze from him and then had kidnapped him. Oskas offered a reward to anyone who would seize and hold the “criminals” until he could arrive to take them into custody.

Burton had to act quickly to counteract this, though it was doubtful that any authorities of the small states would arrest the crew of the Snark. Oskas was not popular because of the troubles he had given them over the years. However, individuals might organize privateering groups.

Burton went ashore with a box of tobacco and liquor and some oak rings. With these he paid the head of the local branch of the signal company to send out a message for him. This was that Oskas lied, and the truth was that the chief had wanted to take a female crew member by force and so she and her companions had been compelled to flee. Oskas had pursued them but his warcanoe had been sunk when he had tried to board the Snark.

Burton then added that he knew that the chief and his councillors had a great treasure, a hoard of free-grails numbering at least a hundred.

This was a lie, since Oskas, when drunk, had told Burton that the headmen only had twenty. Burton did not mind stretching the truth. Attention would be diverted from him to the chief. His people would hear this, and they would be raising hell about it. Undoubtedly, they would demand that the proceeds of the free-grails be added to the communal stockpile. Also, Oskas would now have to worry about thieves. Not only would these be of his own people, but many from other states would be planning how they could steal the grails.

Oskas was going to be too busy to worry about revenge.

Burton chuckled as he thought about this.

The Snark came to an area where the current of The River slowed down considerably. The boat had encountered many of these, places where a river should no longer be able to flow downward. On Earth this would have meant that The River would have spread out into a lake, deluging the Valley.

However, after passing through the almost dead current, the cutter came to an area where the water picked up speed. Once again, it was running toward the faraway mouth, that legendary great cavern leading to the north polar sea. There were a number of explanations for this phenomenon, none of which had so far been proved valid.

One was that there were enough variations in local gravity to permit the impetus of The River to overcome the lack of downward gradient. Those who favored this theory said that the unknown makers of this world might have installed underground devices which caused a weaker gravity field in appropriate areas.

Others suggested that water was pumped under great pressure from pipes deep beneath The River.

The third school speculated that the ceaseless current-flow was caused by a combination of pressure pumps and “light-gravity” generators.

A fourth maintained that God had decreed that the water go uphill and so there was no use wondering about the phenomenon.

The majority of people never thought about it.

Whatever the cause, The River never stopped rolling along its many-million-meter course.

At the end of the second day, the Snark docked in the locality where the great metal boat should stop. The news here was that the Rex had stopped traveling for several days. Its crew was taking a short shore leave.

“Excellent!” Burton said. “We can get to it by tomorrow and have a whole day to talk Captain John into enlisting us.”

Though he sounded cheerful, he did not feel so. If his plan did not work, he’d have to take the Snark through Oskas’ area in daylight since there was little wind at night. Warned by the signal system that it was coming, the chief would be waiting for it with his full force. Burton felt that he should have turned back upRiver after getting rid of the Indians and sailed far past their land. However, the paddle wheeler might then have passed by the Snark, and Burton would have had no chance to talk to its commander.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. He’d enjoy tonight and take care of tomorrow tomorrow. Despite which reassurance, he worried.

The locals here were a majority of sixteenth-century Dutch, a minority of ancient Thracians, and the usual small percentage of people from many places and many times. Burton met a Fleming who had known Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, among other famous persons. He was talking to him when a newcomer joined the crowd sitting around a bonfire. He was a Caucasian of medium stature, thin bodied, black-haired, and blue-eyed. He stood for a minute, looking intently at Frigate. Then he smiled broadly and ran up to him.

He cried out in English, “Pete! For God’s sake, Pete! It’s me, Bill Owain! Pete Frigate, by the Lord! It is you, isn’t it, Pete?”

Frigate looked startled. He said, “Yes? But you, you’re… what did you say your name was?”

“Bill Owain! For Christ’s sake, you haven’t forgotten me, Bill Owain, your old buddy! You look a little different, Pete. For a moment, I wasn’t sure! You don’t quite look like I remember you! Bill Owain! I didn’t recognize you at first, it’s been so long!”

They embraced then and both talked swiftly, laughing now and then. When they let loose of each other, Frigate introduced Owain.

“He’s my old schoolmate. We’ve known each other since fourth grade in grammar school. We went to Peoria Central High together and buddied around for some years afterward. When I finally settled down in Peoria after working around the country, we used to see each other now and then. Not very often, since we had our own lives to live and belonged to different circles.”

“Even so,” Owain said, “I don’t see how you could have failed to recognize me right off. But then I wasn’t quite sure about you either. I remembered you differently. Your nose is a little longer and your eyes are greener and your mouth isn’t quite as broad and your chin seems bigger. And your voice—you remember how everybody kidded you because it was a dead ringer for Gary Cooper’s? It doesn’t sound like it used to, like I thought it did. So much for memory, eh?”

“Yeah, so much for memory. You know, Bill, mine was never very good. Besides, we remember each other as middle-aged and old men, and now we look like we did when we were twenty-five. Also, we’re not wearing the clothes we did then, and it’s a shock, a real shock, to run across somebody I knew then. I was stunned!”

“I was, too! I wasn’t quite sure! Listen, do you know you’re the first person I’ve met that I knew on Earth?”

Frigate said, “You’re the second for me. And that was thirty-two years ago, and the guy I met wasn’t one I cared to associate with!”

That, Burton thought, would be a man called Sharkko. A publisher of hardcover science fiction books in Chicago, he had cheated Frigate in a rather complicated deal. The business had taken several years, at the end of which Frigate’s writing career had been almost wrecked. But one of the first persons Frigate had encountered after being resurrected was Sharkko. Burton had not witnessed the meeting, but Frigate had recounted how he had avenged himself by punching the fellow in the nose.

Burton himself had met only one person he had known on Earth, though his acquaintances had been numerous and worldwide. That was also a meeting he could have passed up. The man had been one of the porters on his expedition to find the source of the Nile. On the way to Lake Tanganyika (Burton and his companion Speke were the first Europeans to see it), the porter had purchased a slave, a girl about thirteen years old. She had become too sick to continue with them, so the porter had cut off her head rather than allow someone else to own her.

Burton had not been present to prevent the murder, nor would it have been discreet to punish the man. He had the legal right to do with his slave as he wished. However, Burton would punish him for other things, such as laziness, thievery, and breakage of goods, and he laid the whip on him whenever the opportunity arose.

Now Owain and Frigate sat down to drink lichen-alcohol and to talk of old times. Burton noticed that Owain seemed to remember incidents and friends much better than Frigate did. This was surprising, since Frigate had very good recall.

“Remember how we used to see the shows at the Princess, Columbia, and Apollo theaters?” Owain said. “Do you remember the Saturday we decided to find out how many movies we could see in one day? We went to a double feature at the Princess, then a double feature at the Columbia, a triple feature at the Apollo, and a midnight show at the Madison.”

Frigate smiled and nodded. But his expression showed that his recollection was faulty.

“Then there was that time we took a trip to St. Louis with Al Everhard and Jack Dirkman and Dan Doobin. Al’s cousin got some dates for us; they were nurses, remember? We drove out to the cemetery—what was it called?”

“Damned if I remember,” Pete said.

“Yes, but I’ll bet you haven’t forgotten how you and that nurse stripped and you were chasing her around the cemetery and you jumped over a tombstone and fell smack into a wreath and got all torn up from the thorns and roses! Bet you haven’t forgotten that!”

Frigate grinned embarrassedly. “How could I?”

“It sure took the wind out of your sails! And everything else! Haw, haw!”

There was more reminiscence. After a while, the talk turned to their reactions on awakening along the banks of The River. The others joined in then, since this was a favorite topic. That day had been so frightening, so awe-inspiring, so alien that no one would ever forget that. The horror, the panic, and confusion were still with them. Burton sometimes wondered if people were still talking so much about that experience because the recapitulation was a form of therapy. They hoped to rid themselves of the trauma by a verbal discharge.

There was a general agreement that everybody had acted somewhat silly that day.

“I remember how absurdly formal and dignified I was,” Alice said. “Not that I was the only one. However, most people were hysterical. We were all in great shock. The wonder is that nobody died of a heart attack. You’d think that waking up in this strange place after you’d died would be enough to kill you again—at once.”

Monat said, “Perhaps, just before resurrection, our anonymous benefactors injected some sort of drug into us that eased the impact of the shock. Also, the dreamgum we found in our grails may have acted as a sort of postoperative anesthesia. Though I must say that its effect caused some terribly savage behavior.”

Alice looked at Burton then. Even after all these years, she still blushed at the memory. All their social inhibitions had been stripped off for a few hours, and they had acted as if they were minks whose sole diet was Spanish fly. Or as if their secret fantasies had taken control.

The conversation then centered on the Arcturan. Previously, despite his warm manner, he had encountered the standoffishness he met everywhere at first from strangers. His obvious nonhuman origin made them shy or caused repulsion.

Now they questioned him about his life on his native planet and his experience on Earth. A few had heard tales of how the Arcturans had been forced to slay almost all the people on Earth. No one present, however, except Frigate, had been living when the Arcturans’ ship had arrived on Earth.

Burton said, “You know, that is peculiar, though I suppose it’s to be expected. There were, according to Pete, eight billion people living in 2008 A.D. Yet, aside from Monat and Frigate here, and one other person, I’ve never met anyone who lived then. Did any of you?”

Nobody had. In fact, the only locals who had lived past the seventies of the twentieth century were Owain and a woman. She had died in 1982; he, in 1981.

Burton shook his head. “There must be at least thirty-six billion along The River. The biggest majority should be those who lived between 1983—I choose that date because I’ve met only three who lived past it—those who lived between 1983 and 2008. Yet, where are they?”

“Maybe there are some at the next grailstone,” Frigate said. “After all, Dick, nobody’s taken a census. What’s more, nobody is able to do that. You pass hundreds of thousands every day, but how many do you get to talk to? A few dozen a day. Sooner or later you’re bound to run into one.”

They speculated for a while about why and how they had been resurrected and who could have done it. They also talked about why the growth of facial hair in men was inhibited, why all males had awakened circumcised, and why women had their hymens restored before resurrection. As for not needing to shave, half the men thought it a good thing while the other half resented not being able to grow moustaches and beards.

There was also some wonder about why the grails of both men and women occasionally yielded lipstick and other cosmetics.

Frigate said that he thought that their benefactors probably did not like to shave and that both their sexes painted their faces. That was, to him, the only reasonable explanation.

Then Alice brought up Burton’s experience in the preresurrection bubble. This got everybody’s attention, but he told them that he had no memory of that. He’d suffered a blow on his head which had wiped out all recollection of it.

As always, when he told this lie, he caught Monat smiling slightly at him. He suspected that the Arcturan guessed that he was prevaricating. However, the fellow had never said so. He respected Burton’s reasons for concealment even if he did not know what they were.

Frigate and Alice recounted Burton’s tale as they remembered it. They made several mistakes, which he, of course, could not correct.

“If that is so,” a man said, “then the resurrection isn’t a supernatural thing. It was done through scientific means. Amazing!”

“Yes, it is,” Alice said. “But why are we no longer resurrected? Why has death, permanent death, returned?”

A gloomy pensiveness fell upon them for a minute.

Kazz broke it by saying, “There is one thing which Burton-naq has not forgotten. That’s the business with Spruce. The agent of the Ethicals.”

That brought forth more questions.

“What are Ethicals?”

Burton took a long drink of scotch and launched into the story. At one time, he said, he and his party had been captured by grail-slavers. There was no need to explain this word. Everybody had had some experience with grail-slavers.

Burton told them how his boat had been attacked and how they had been put into a stockade. Thereafter, they had left it only to work under a heavy guard. All of their tobacco, marijuana, dreamgum, and liquor were taken by their captors. Moreover, these kept half of the food for themselves, leaving their prisoners on a bare-minimum diet.

After a few months, Burton and a man named Targoff had led a successful revolt against the slavers.

A few days after we’d won our freedom, Frigate, Monat, and Kazz came to me. They greeted me, and then Kazz spoke excitedly.

“‘A long time ago, before I could speak English good, I see something. I try to tell you then, but you don’t understand me. I see a man who don’t have this on his forehead.’

“My friend here, my naq, as he calls it in his speech, indicated the center of his forehead and that of all of us.

“Kazz then said, ‘I know you can’t see it. Pete and Monat can’t either. Nobody else can. But I see it on everybody’s forehead. Except on that man I try to catch long time ago. Then, one day, I see a woman who don’t have it, but I don’t say nothing to you. Now, I see a third who don’t have it.’

“I still did not understand. Monat, however, explained.

“‘He means that he is able to perceive certain symbols of characters on the forehead of each and every one of us. He can see these only in bright sunlight and at a certain angle. But everyone he’s ever seen has had those symbols—except for the three he’s mentioned.’

“Frigate added that Kazz somehow could see a little further into the color spectrum than non-Neanderthals could. Into the ultraviolet, as a matter of fact, since the symbols were bluish. At least that is the way Kazz described them. All of us, except certain individuals, seem to bear this mark. As if we’re branded cattle. Since that time, Kazz, and his woman Besst, have observed these on people’s foreheads, when the lighting conditions were right, of course.”

This news, as always, resulted in astonishment, indignation, and even shock. Burton waited until the furor died down before speaking.

“Some of you late-twentieth-centurians may know that the so-called Neanderthal man was reclassified. The anthropologists decided that he was not a separate species but a variant of Homo sapiens. Nevertheless, just as he differed somewhat in physical build and teeth from us, he also has the ability to see into the ultraviolet.”

Besst said, “I am not a Neanderthal man but a woman, and I, too, have this ability.”

Burton grinned and said, “Woman’s lib has penetrated into the Old Stone Age. However, let me point out that events will show that Whoever made this world and stamped us with, in a manner of speaking, the mark of the beast, did not know that Homo neanderthalis had a special visual ability. This means that Whoever is not omniscient.

“To resume my narrative. I asked for the identity of the person who lacked the symbol. Frigate replied, ‘Robert Spruce!’

“Spruce had also been a grail-slave. He claimed to be an Englishman born in 1945. That was about all I knew of him.

“I said that we would get him and question him. Frigate told me that we’d have to catch him because he was probably long gone. It seems that Kazz told Spruce he’d noticed Spruce lacked the mark on his forehead. Spruce had turned pale, and a few minutes later he left hurriedly. Frigate and Monat sent search parties out, but at the time they reported to me he hadn’t been found.

“It seemed to me that his flight was an admission of guilt, though I didn’t know what he was guilty of. A few hours later, he was discovered hiding in the hills. He was brought before the newly formed council of our newly formed state. Spruce was pale and trembling, though he looked us straight in the eye defiantly enough.

“I informed him that we suspected that he was an agent for the Ethicals if not an Ethical himself. I also told him that we would go to any lengths, including torture, to get the truth from him. This was a lie, since we would have been no better than the men who’d enslaved us if we had resorted to torture. Spruce, however, did not know that.

“Spruce said, ‘You may be denying yourself eternal life if you torture me. It will at least set you far back on your journey, delay your final goal.’

“I asked him what that final goal was, but he ignored that question. Instead, he said, ‘We can’t stand pain. We’re too sensitive.’

“There was some more exchange, but he would not answer our questions. Then one of the councillors suggested that he be suspended above a fire. Monat spoke up then. He told Spruce that he was from a culture somewhat more advanced than that of Earth’s. He felt he was more qualified to make guesses about the truth than the rest of us, and no one argued with him about this. Monat said that he would like to spare him the pain of the fire and also the pain of betraying his trust. Perhaps Monat could make some speculations about the Ethicals and their agents, and Spruce could merely affirm or deny the speculations. In this way, Spruce would not be making a positive betrayal of his trust, whatever that was.”

Bill Owain said, “That was a peculiar arrangement.”

“True. But Monat hoped to get him talking. You see, we were not going to use any brutal methods of inquisition. If we couldn’t scare him, then we were going to try hypnosis. Both Monat and I are skilled mesmerists. However, as it turned out, we didn’t have to resort to that.

“Monat said, ‘It’s my theory that you are a Terrestrial. You come from an age chronologically far past 2008 A.D. In fact, you are a descendant of the few people who survived the death beam projected from our orbital ship.’ Monat guessed that the technology and energy required to reconstruct this planet into one vast Rivervalley was very advanced. He suggested that Spruce was born in the fiftieth century A.D.

“Spruce replied that he should add two thousand years.

“Monat then said that not everyone had been resurrected. There wasn’t enough room on this world. It was known that no children who had died before the age of five were here. And though it couldn’t be proved, it seemed likely that no imbeciles and idiots had been resurrected here. Nor was anyone who lived after 2008 A.D., with the exception of Spruce here.

“Where were these people?

“Spruce answered that they were elsewhere, and that was all he would say on the subject.

“Monat then asked him how the people of the Earth had been recorded. That is, what device had the Ethicals used to make recordings of our bodies? Since it was obvious that scientific, not supernatural, means were used to resurrect us, that meant that everyone from the Old Stone Age to 2008 A.D. had somehow been observed, the structure of every cell of a person’s body recorded, and this recording was stored somewhere to be used later in the recreation of the body.

“Monat said that the recordings must be placed in an energy-matter converter, whereupon the body was duplicated. The effects of injuries, wounds, and diseases that had caused death were cancelled. Amputated limbs and organs were restored. I myself saw some of this regeneration process when I awoke in the preresurrection space. Also, those aged past twenty-five were rejuvenated.

“Monat further speculated that the bodies in the PR bubble were destroyed after the regeneration process was completed. But recordings of the new bodies had been made, and these recordings were used in the final stage, the great resurrection, when all of us appeared together on that never-to-be-forgotten day.

“Monat supposed that the resurrection was accomplished through the metal of the grailstone system. That is, all the stones are connected deep underground to form a circuit of some sort, and the energy is supplied from the hot nickel-iron core of this planet.

“Monat then said, ‘The big question is why?’

“Spruce said, ‘If you had it in your power to do all this, would you not think it your ethical duty?’

“Monat said that he would think so. But he would bring back to life only those who deserve a second life.

“Spruce became angry then. He replied that Monat was setting himself up as an equal of God. Everybody, no matter how stupid, selfish, petty, brutal, etcetera, must be given another chance to redeem themselves, to make themselves worthy. It would not be done for them; they must, somehow, lift themselves by their own moral bootstraps.

“Monat asked Spruce how long this process would take. A thousand years? Two? A million?

“Spruce became angry, and he shouted, ‘You will stay here as long as it takes you to be rehabilitated! Then…’

“He paused, glaring at us as if he hated us, and he said, ‘Continued contact with you makes even the toughest of us take on your characteristics. We then have to go through a rehabilitation process ourselves. Already, I feel unclean…’

“One of the councillors, wishing to press him, urged that he be put over the fire until he would talk freely.

“Spruce cried, ‘No, you won’t! I should have done this long ago. Who knows what… ’”

Burton paused dramatically.

“Then Spruce fell dead!”

There were gasps, and someone said, “Mein Gott!”

“Yes, but that isn’t the end of the story. Spruce’s body was taken away for dissection. It seemed too coincidental that he should have had a heart attack. Not only was it too convenient for him, it was unheard-of.

“While he was being dissected, we discussed what happened. Some thought that he was lying to us. Or, at least, only giving us half-truths. We did agree on one thing. That was that there were people in this Valley who were agents of the Ethicals or perhaps the Ethicals themselves. These did not bear the mark on their foreheads.

“But it seemed likely that we would not be able to distinguish them anymore by using Kazz’s peculiar visual powers. Spruce would be resurrected wherever their headquarters was. He would report to the others that we now knew about the symbols. And of course they would put the mark on their agents.

“This would take time, and in the meantime Kazz might detect others. But this has not happened. Neither he nor Besst has seen anybody unmarked. Again, of course, this does not mean too much. They have to get a close look under certain conditions to see the mark.

“Three hours later, the surgeon reported to us. There was nothing remarkable about Spruce. Nothing to distinguish him from other members of Homo sapiens.”

Once more, Burton paused.

“Except for one small item! This was a very tiny black sphere! The doctor had found it on the surface of Spruce’s forebrain. It was attached to the cerebral nerves by extremely thin wires. This led us to conclude that Spruce had literally thought, or wished, himself to die.

“Somehow, the sphere interacted with his mental processes in such a manner that he could think himself dead. Perhaps he thought of a certain code sequence, and this released a poison into his system. The doctor could find no evidence of this, but then he lacked the necessary chemical means to make an accurate analysis.

“In any event, Spruce’s body showed no damage. Something had stopped his heart, but the doctor did not know what that was.”

A woman said, “Then there could be such people among us? Now, here, in this group?”

Burton nodded, and everybody started talking at once. After fifteen minutes of this babel, he stood up and indicated to his crew that it was time to go to bed. On the way to the cutter, Kazz drew him aside.

“Burton-naq, when you mentioned you and Monat were hypnotists… well, that made me think about something. I’ve never thought about it before… maybe there’s nothing funny about it… only…”

“Well?”

“It’s nothing, I’m sure. Only it was funny. You see, I told Spruce I could see he didn’t have no sign on his head. He left a few minutes later, but I could smell the fear in his sweat. There were others there, all eating breakfast, Targoff, Doctor Steinborg, Monat, Pete, and a number of others. Targoff said we should convene the council, though this was some time after Spruce had taken off. Monat and Pete agreed. But they said they wanted to question me a little more. You know, what the marks looked like. Were they all alike or did they differ?

“I said they differed. A lot of them were… what you say?… similar, yes, that’s it. But each one… what the hell, you know what they look like, I’ve drawn pictures of them for you.”

Burton said, “Aside from some looking something like Chinese ideograms, they resemble nothing I’ve ever seen. My guess is that they’re symbols of a numbering system.”

“Yeah, I know what you said. The thing is, Monat and Frigate took me aside before we went to your place to tell you what’d happened. In fact, we went to Monat’s hut.”

Kazz paused. Impatiently Burton said, “Well?”

“I’m trying to remember. But I can’t. I went into the hut, and that’s all!”

“What do you mean, that’s all?”

“Burton-naq, I mean that’s all. I don’t remember a thing about going into that hut. I remember starting through the door. The next I remember is walking with Monat, Pete, and the other councillors to your hut!”

Burton felt a slight shock, yet he had no idea what had caused it.

“You mean that you don’t remember anything from the time you entered until the time you walked out?”

“I mean that I don’t remember walking out. All of a sudden, there I was, a hundred paces from Monat’s house and walking along, talking to Monat.”

Burton frowned. Alice and Besst were standing on the dock, looking back as if wondering why they had dropped behind.

“This is most peculiar, Kazz. Why haven’t you told me about this before? After all, it’s been many years since it happened. Didn’t you think about this before?”

“No, I didn’t. Ain’t that funny? Not one frigging thought. I still wouldn’t remember even entering the hut if Loghu hadn’t said something about it the other day. She saw me go in, but she wasn’t with the group that day and so didn’t know what was going on until later.

“What happened was that she was standing in the doorway of her and Frigate’s hut. Frigate, Monat, and me was going to go into Frigate’s hut. When they found she was there, they went to Monat’s. It was just by chance that she mentioned this yesterday. We was talking about when we was grail-slaves, and this brought up Spruce. That’s when she asked me what Monat, Pete, and me was talking about. She said she wondered sometimes why they wanted to talk to me in private.

“She just never brought it up before because it didn’t seem important. It still wasn’t, but she was curious, and since the subject was brought up, she remembered to ask me. You know how curious women are.”

“Woman have the curiosity of cats,” Burton said, and he chuckled. “Whereas men are as curious as monkeys.”

“What? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know, but it sounds deep. I’ll think up an explanation later. So, it was Loghu’s remarks that made you remember the events preceding and following your entry into Monat’s place?”

“Not right away, Burton-naq. I got to puzzling about what she said. I really strained my brain. I could hear the tissues ripping. Finally, I could remember, in a dim way, how we meant to go into Pete’s hut. Then I could remember Loghu being there and Monat saying they’d use his hut. And after a while… I could faintly recollect going into there.

“While you was talking didn’t you notice me sitting there by the fire, frowning away like there was a thunderstorm on my brow?”

“I just thought you’d taken too much to eat and drink, as usual.”

“That, too. But it wasn’t no farts storming around inside me. It was gas on the brain.”

“Since you’ve recalled this, you haven’t said anything to Monat or Frigate about it?”

“No.”

“Don’t then.”

Kazz had a low forehead, but he was not unintelligent.

“You think there’s something phony about those two?”

Burton said, “I don’t know. I’d hate to think so. After all these years… and they are good friends. At least…”

“It don’t seem possible,” Kazz said. He sounded as if his heart were about to break.

“What doesn’t?”

“I don’t know what. But it has to be something bad.”

“I don’t know that,” Burton said. “There may be a very good explanation other than the one I’m thinking of. Anyway, don’t mention this to anyone.”

“I won’t. Only… listen, those two do have symbols on their heads. They always had them. So, if them agents didn’t have them at one time, Pete and Monat couldn’t be agents!”

Burton smiled. Kazz’s thoughts were his. Nevertheless, he had to look into this. How could he do it without putting the two on guard? Of course, they might have nothing to hide.

“Yes, I know. Don’t forget that Besst has also seen their symbols. So we have double confirmation, not that we need it.

“In any course, mum’s the word until I say otherwise.”

They started to walk toward the Snark. Kazz said, “I don’t know. I sure have a bad feeling about this. Wish I’d kept my mouth shut. Loghu would say something about it.”

Burton paced back and forth on the deck in the fog. Though his body was warm in the cloths, his face was chilled. An unusually cold body of air had moved into the area, and as a result the mists were piled halfway up the mast. He could not see beyond his outstretched arms.

As far as he knew, everybody aboard except himself was asleep. His only company were his thoughts. These tended to stray as if they were sheep on a hillside. Burton had to work hard to bring them back, arrange them in an orderly band, keep them moving toward pasture. And what was pasture? Bitter eating.

There were thirty-three years to cover in his memory. It was a selective process, one which concentrated on Monat and Frigate. What actions, what words of theirs were suspicious? What could be fitted into a dark jigsaw puzzle?

There were very few people available. There might be more, but he could be looking at them and not even realize that they were pieces.

That terrible, joyous day, the day that he had awakened from the dead, he had met the Arcturan first of all. Of all those he had encountered that day, Monat had acted most calmly and rationally. He had taken stock of the situation amazingly fast, checked out the environment, and immediately understood the purpose of the grails.

The second person Burton had especially noticed was the Neanderthal, Kazz. He, however, had not tried to talk to Burton at first. He had merely followed him for a while. Peter Frigate had been the second person to talk to Burton. And, now that Burton considered it, Frigate had been rather easy and casual in manner. This was strange in view of Frigate’s claim that he suffered from anxiety and hysteria.

Later events had seemed to confirm this. However, from time to time, and consistently in the past twenty years, Frigate had overcome his faults. Had he really attained self-mastery or had he just abandoned a role, ceased to play-act?

Certainly, it had been quite a coincidence that the second person Burton met had written a biography of him. How many biographers of his existed? Ten or twelve? What were the probabilities that one of them would be resurrected only a few meters from him? Twelve in thirty-six billion.

Still, it was within the realm of chance; it was not impossible.

Then Kazz had joined those who’d collected around Burton. Then Alice. Then Lev Ruach.

Today, while Kazz had been helmsman, Burton had stood by him and questioned him. Had Kazz talked to Monat and Frigate during Resurrection Day when Burton had not been around? Did he remember anything that was suspicious about them?

Kazz had shaken his thickly boned head. “I was with them several times when you were not in sight. But I don’t remember nothing strange about them. That is, Burton-naq, there was nothing stranger than strange. Everything was strange that day.”

“Did you notice the marks on people’s foreheads that day?”

“Yes, a few. That was when the sun was highest.”

“What about Monat and Frigate?”

“I don’t remember seeing any on theirs that day. But then I don’t remember seeing one on you, either. The light had to reflect at a certain angle.”

Burton had taken out of his shoulderbag a pad of bamboo paper, a sharply pointed fish bone, and a wooden bottle of ink. He took over the wheel while Kazz drew the marks he saw on the foreheads of the Arcturan and the American. Both were three parallel horizontal lines crossed by three parallel vertical lines juxtaposed to a cross enclosed in a circle. The lines were of even thickness and length except at the ends. Monat’s lines broadened at the right; Frigate’s at the left.

“What about the sign on my forehead?” Burton had said.

Kazz showed him four wavy parallel horizontal lines next to a symbol like an ampersand (&). Below it was a short, thin, straight horizontal line.

“Monat’s and Pete’s are remarkably alike,” Burton said.

At Burton’s request, Kazz then drew the symbols on the foreheads of everyone of the crew. Not one resembled any other.

“Do you remember Lev Ruach’s?”

Kazz nodded, and a moment later he handed Burton the drawing. He felt disappointed, though he had no conscious reason to be so. Ruach’s symbol was not at all like his prime suspects’.

Now, walking on the deck, Burton wondered why he had expected it to be similar to the other two. Something tickled the back of his brain, some suspicion he could not scratch. There was a linkage among the three, but it slipped away just as he was about to grasp it.

He had done enough thinking. Now for action.

A white bundle lying against the cabin was the Neanderthal, wrapped in cloths. Guiding himself by the fellow’s snoring, Burton went to him and shook him. Kazz, snorting, woke up at once.

“Time?”

“Time.”

First, though, Kazz had to piss over the railing. Burton lit a fish-oil lantern, and they walked down the gangplank onto the dock. From there they moved slowly onto the plain, their destination an empty hut about two hundred paces away. They missed it, but after circling around, they found it. After they had entered, Burton shut the door. A bundle of logs and shavings had been placed in the stone hearth that evening by Kazz. In a minute, a small fire was blazing. Kazz sat down on a bamboo wickerwork chair near the fire. He coughed as he breathed smoke which had escaped the feeble draught of the chimney.

It was easy to place Kazz into a hypnotic trance. He had been one of Burton’s subjects for years when Burton entertained locals by displaying his powers as a mesmerist.

Now that Burton thought about it, Monat and Frigate had always been present at these times. Had they been nervous then? If they had, they had successfully concealed it.

Burton took Kazz straight back to the time when he had mentioned to the breakfasting group that Spruce had no mark. Working forward, he took him then to the point where the Neanderthal had gone into Monat’s hut. Here he encountered first resistance.

“Are you now in the hut?”

Kazz, staring straight ahead, his eyes seemingly turned inward upon the past, said, “I am in the doorway.”

“Go on in, Kazz.”

The fellow shook with effort.

“I can’t, Burton-naq.”

“Why not?”

“I do not know.”

“Is there something you fear in the hut?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has anyone told you that there is something bad in the hut?”

“No.”

“Then you have nothing to fear. Kazz, you are a brave man, aren’t you?”

“You know I am, Burton-naq.”

“Why can’t you go on in then?”

Kazz shook his head. “I don’t know. Something…”

“Something what?”

“Something… tells me… tells me… can’t remember.”

Burton bit his lower lip. The flaming wood cracked and hissed.

“Who tells you? Monat? Frigate?”

“Don’t know.”

“Think!”

Kazz’s forehead wrinkled. Sweat poured down it.

The firewood crackled again. Hearing it, Burton smiled.

“Kazz!”

“Yes.”

“Kazz! Besst is in the hut, and she’s screaming! Can you hear her screaming?”

Kazz straightened up and looked from side to side, his eyes wide open, his nostrils distended, his lips drawn back.

“I hear her! What is the matter?”

“Kazz! There’s a bear in the hut, and it’s going to attack Besst! Take your spear and go in there and kill the bear, Kazz! Save Besst!”

Kazz stood up, and, his hand grasping the imaginary spear, sprang forward. Burton had to move swiftly to get out of his way. Kazz stumbled over the chair and fell upon his face.

Burton grimaced. Would the shock bring Kazz out of his trance? No, Kazz was up on his feet and about to run forward again.

“Kazz! You’re in the hut! There’s the bear! Kill it, Kazz! Kill it!”

Snarling, Kazz grabbed the phantom spear with both hands and thrust it.

“Ayee! Ayee!” And a gabble of harsh sounds followed. Burton, having learned his native language, understood them.

“I am Man-Who-Slew-The-White-Tooth! Die, Hairy-One-Who-Sleeps-All-Winter! Die, but forgive me! I must, I must! Die! Die!”

Burton spoke loudly. “Kazz! It’s run away! The bear has run out of the hut! Besst is safe now!”

Kazz stopped thrusting the spear. He stood upright now, looking from side to side.

“Kazz! It’s a few minutes later. Kazz! Besst has left. You’re in the hut now! Inside it. You’ve nothing to fear! You’ve entered the hut, and there is nothing to be afraid of! But who else is in there with you?

“Kazz! You’re in the hut a few minutes after you saw that Spruce had no mark on his forehead. Who else is in the hut with you?”

The Neanderthal had lost his fierce expression. Now he looked dully at Burton.

“Who? Why, Monat and Pete.”

“Very good, Kazz. Now… who first spoke to you there?”

“Monat did.”

“Tell me what he said to you. Tell me what Frigate said, too.”

“Frigate never said anything. Just Monat.”

“Tell me what he said… what he is saying.”

“Monat says, ‘Now, Kazz, you will remember nothing that took place in this hut. We will talk a minute and then we will leave. After you leave you will not remember going into the hut or leaving it. Everything between that time will be a blank. If anyone should ask you about this time, you will say that you don’t remember. And you will not be lying because you will have forgotten everything. Isn’t that right, Kazz?’”

The Neanderthal nodded.

“‘Also, Kazz, just to make sure, you will not remember the first time I told you to forget that you had mentioned to me and Frigate that we had no marks. Do you remember that time, Kazz?’”

Kazz shook his head. “‘No, Monat.’”

He gave a drawn-out sigh.

“Who sighed?” Burton said.

“Frigate.”

It was evidently an expiration of relief.

“What else is Monat saying? Tell me what you are saying, too.”

“‘Kazz, when I talked to you that first time, the time just after you had told Frigate and me that we had no signs, I also told you to tell me whatever Burton said about meeting a mysterious person. By that I mean someone who might call himself an Ethical.’”

Burton said, “Aah!”

“‘Do you remember that, Kazz?’

“‘No.’

“‘Of course not. I told you not to remember that. But I now tell you to remember it. Do you remember it, Kazz?’”

A silence of about twenty seconds followed. Then the Neanderthal said, “‘Yes, I remember now.’

“‘Very good, Kazz. Now, forget it again, though what I told you then still is a command. Isn’t that right?’

“‘Yes, that’s right.’

“‘Now, Kazz. Has Burton ever said anything to you about this Ethical? Or about anyone, man or woman, who claimed to be one of those who brought us back from the dead?’

“‘No, Burton-naq never told me anything like that.’

“‘But if, in the future, he does tell you, you will come to me at once and tell me. You will only do this, however, when no one else is around. Where no one can overhear us. Do you understand that?’

“‘Yes, I understand.’

“‘If for some reason I am not available, if you cannot get hold of me because I am dead or gone on a journey, you will tell Peter Frigate or Lev Ruach, instead of me. Do you understand?’”

Burton said, in a low voice, “Ruach, too!”

“‘Yes, I understand. I will tell Peter Frigate or Lev Ruach instead of you.’

“‘And you will tell them only when no one is around, where no one else can overhear you two. Understand?’

“‘Yes, I understand.’

“‘And you will not tell anyone else about this, you will only tell Frigate, Ruach, or myself. Understand?’

“‘Yes, I understand.’

“‘Very good, Kazz. That’s fine. We will go now, and when I snap my fingers twice, you will not remember this or the first time. Understand?’

“‘Yes, I understand.’

“‘Kazz, you will also… oh, oh! Someone’s calling for us! No time for an excuse now. Let’s go!’”

Burton had to guess what this last remark meant. Monat must have been about to tell Kazz what he should say if anyone asked him what the conversation had been about. That was a lucky break for Burton. If Kazz had had a reasonable story, then Burton would never have become suspicious.

Burton said, “Sit down, Kazz. Make yourself comfortable. You sit there for a minute. I’m leaving. Monat will be coming in, and he will talk to you.”

“I understand.”

Burton walked out of the hut and stood for a minute. He should have posed as Monat when he first started the session. That might have overcome Kazz’s resistance more quickly, and Burton would not have had to resort to the trickery of the bear and Besst.

He reentered, and said, “Hello, Kazz. How are you?”

“I’m fine, Monat. How are you?”

“Great! Very well, Kazz. I’ll take over from where your friend, Burton, left off. We’ll go back to that first time I talked to you, just after you had noticed that Frigate and I had no marks on our foreheads. You now remember that time, Kazz, because I, Monat, tell you to do so.

“You will go back to the second after you had told Monat. Are you there?

“Where are you, Monat, and Frigate?”

“We are near a grailstone.”

“What day, or night, is that?”

“I do not understand.”

“I mean, how many days was it after Resurrection Day?”

“Three days.”

“Tell me what happened after you spoke to them about the lack of the mark.”

Kazz, speaking in a monotone, described the events immediately after. Monat had said that he and Frigate wanted to speak to him privately. They had walked across the plain and gone into the hills. There, behind a giant irontree, Monat had fixed his eyes upon Kazz’s. Without the use of any mechanical devices, without even informing Kazz what he was doing, Monat had hypnotized him.

“It was as if something dark flowed from him to me, something dark and overpowering.”

Burton nodded. He had seen Monat demonstrate this power, this “animal magnetism” as it was known in Burton’s time. He was a stronger mesmerist than Burton, which was one reason why Burton had never permitted the Arcturan to attempt hypnotizing him. In fact, Burton had taken precautions against getting caught unawares by Monat. In an elaborate self-hypnosis, he had told himself that he must never allow himself to be mesmerized by Monat. However, Monat could be powerful enough to break down that command, so Burton had been extremely cautious about being alone with him.

That forearming had been based on the fear that Monat might stumble across the time when he had been visited by the Ethical. That was Burton’s secret, one he wanted no one to know. He had had no idea then, of course, that Monat was one of Them.

He wondered if Frigate was also an expert hypnotizer. The fellow had never given any indication that he was. However, he had refused to let Burton try mesmerism on him. His plea had been that he could not endure the thought of losing his self-control.

Kazz remembered that, during the course of the session, Monat had remarked to Frigate about the Neanderthal’s ability to see the symbols.

“‘We never knew about that. We’ll have to tell HQ as soon as we get a chance.’”

So, Burton thought, Monat and Frigate were in communication from time to time with the Ethicals. How did they manage that? Were prearranged landings of the flying machines, which Burton had once glimpsed, one method of communicating? Those machines which flickered into and out of visibility as they flew along?

Those two must have been watching him closely. That was one of the reasons the Mysterious Stranger had visited him at night during a storm. The Ethical must have known that Monat and Frigate were in Burton’s party. But he had never mentioned them, had not put him on his guard.

Perhaps he had meant to do so, but he had been hurried. He’d said that the Ethicals were coming soon in their flying machines. And he had left abruptly. Even so, he surely would have mentioned so grave a matter. A few words would have warned him. Why had he not done so? Was it possible that he did not know that Monat and Frigate were with him? And Ruach, too. He must not forget Ruach.

Why had three agents been assigned to him? Wouldn’t one have been enough? Also, why was one so conspicuous as the Arcturan given the job?

Whatever the reasons for this, the matter of the lack of signs on the heads of the three agents was more pressing. Evidently, Ethicals, first-order or second-order, did not have such marks. Now that they were aware that Neanderthals could observe this, they had made sure that Kazz would not say anything about it.

Moreover, Monat had then told Kazz that from that moment on he would see the marks on the foreheads of himself and his two colleagues.

Why had he not then installed a command that Kazz would see these signs on everybody who did not have them?

Perhaps he thought that it would not be necessary. The chances of running across other Neanderthals, never a numerous people, were slight. Still, it would have eliminated any exposures of agents from then on.

The explanation might be simple. Monat would have had to describe the marks of every agent in the valley. Inasmuch as there might be hundreds, or thousands, for all Burton knew, that would have been impossible.

Monat had not been too wrong in thinking that encounters with Neanderthals would be rare. In fact, Burton had never seen more than a hundred. All of these except Kazz and Besst had been passed by swiftly and at a distance during the day.

Yet, they had come across Besst.

He tried to recollect the exact circumstances under which she had been met. It was three years ago that they had come ashore at evening. This was an area populated largely by fourteenth-century A.D. Chinese and ancient Slavs. Besst was living with a Chinese, but she had made it evident from the first that she wished to go on the boat with Kazz. It was dark, so she would not have noticed anything unusual about Frigate and Monat—aside from the latter’s being nonhuman, of course.

The two had gotten together and talked until late that night. When her hutmate had ordered her to come with him, she had refused. There was a tense moment when it looked as if the Chinese were going to attack Kazz. Discretion won. He realized that, though he was bigger than the Neanderthal, he was also much weaker. Though very short, Kazz’s massive bones and muscles made him stronger than any but the most powerful of modern men. In addition, his brutal face was enough to scare anybody.

The two had gone aboard to spend the night together. Yet they must have gone to sleep before dawn. Could Monat have gotten her then? Probably. Burton did not know how he had done it. But Besst had never said anything about Frigate’s and Monat’s marks.

Kazz finished his account of the session. It was short and what Burton had expected.

He sent Kazz after Besst, telling him to be very quiet. In a few minutes he was back with her. Burton told her he would satisfy her curiosity later. For the time being, would she let him hypnotize her? Sleepily, she agreed, and she sat down on the chair Kazz had occupied.

After telling her he was Monat, he took her back to the mesmerizing by Monat. As he had thought, it had been done after she and Kazz had gone to sleep. Monat had simply described to her the marks which he had hypnotized her mate into seeing on the three agents’ foreheads. Then he had ordered her to see the same marks. The whole process would have been done very quietly and quickly.

Monat and his colleague had been lucky. Before Kazz had encountered Spruce, he had seen two other people without the marks. However, the first time had been on Resurrection Day. He had called out to the man, asking him why he had no mark. The man had fled, probably not because he understood what Kazz was saying but because he had misunderstood the Neanderthal’s intentions.

Later, after meeting Burton, Kazz had tried to tell him what he had seen, but neither could speak the other’s language yet. And Kazz had simply forgotten about it in the days following, when they were all busy trying to survive.

The second person he’d seen lacking a mark was a woman, a Mongolian. This had happened at high noon, and the woman had just come out of The River, where she was bathing. Kazz had tried to talk to her, but her hutmate, who did have a mark on his head, had taken the woman away. Evidently, he was jealous. Once more, Kazz’s intentions were misunderstood.

At that time, Burton and the others had been talking to the local headman in the council house. Kazz had stayed behind to watch their boat. After the woman had gone, Kazz was offered some drinks of lichen-alcohol by several people who wanted to talk to him. These had never seen a Neanderthal before, and the liquor was an inducement to get him to talk. Kazz, easily induced and seduced by free booze, was half-drunk by the time his crewmates returned. Burton had reproached him so harshly that Kazz had never again drunk while on guard duty.

He also forgot about the woman.

After bringing Besst out of the trance, Burton sat for a while in thought. Besst and Kazz shifted uneasily and gave each other wondering looks. Finally, he made a decision. There was no longer any use keeping them in the dark. Nor would he exclude Alice from now on. He owed the Stranger nothing, and the fact that he had not reappeared again could mean that he, Burton, had no reason to keep silent. Besides, though he was naturally secretive, he longed now to share his experiences.

Though he gave only a bare outline, he took over an hour. Both Besst and Kazz were amazed, and they had many questions. He held up his hand for silence.

“Later! Later! As of now, we must question them. The Arcturan’s a much tougher customer, so we’ll tackle Frigate first.”

He told them what they must do. Kazz said, “But wouldn’t it be best to knock out Monat and tie him up? What if he wakes up while we’re getting Frigate?”

“I don’t want to make any more noise than we have to. If Loghu and Alice hear us, we’ll have a brouhaha.”

“A what?”

“An uproar. Let’s go.”

The three of them made their way through the fog. Burton thought of some more questions he would ask Frigate. For instance, Monat, Frigate, and Ruach must have known that Spruce was an agent. There had been plenty of opportunity for them to talk to him while they had been grail-slaves. And Monat had had opportunities after the revolt to hypnotize Kazz so he would see a mark on Spruce. Why had he not done that?

If Monat had not been able to get to Kazz after the revolt, he should then have told Spruce to leave the area at once. Or, at least, to wear a cloth around his head when conditions were favorable for seeing the mark.

Could Spruce not have known that they were his fellow agents? They might be so numerous that each was familiar only with a few others. But surely all would know of Monat.

He stopped, and drew in his breath.

The Mysterious Stranger had never said anything about having his own agents. Yet, he was a renegade, and he might have enlisted a few highly trusted people. Could Spruce have been one? And could Monat somehow have found this out? And so gotten rid of him by not telling him about Kazz’s visual abilities?

That did not seem probable. If Monat had found out that Spruce was on the Stranger’s side—and how would he ever be able to do that?—would he not then have hypnotized Spruce? That would enable him to identify the Stranger, supposing, of course, that Spruce knew who he was.

There was another possibility. Monat knew of Spruce’s ability to kill himself by means of the sphere on his forebrain. Thus, he was not worried that Spruce would be forced to divulge any information at all.

Also, he may have used Spruce as a messenger. He would have given him some information to pass on when Spruce was resurrected at HQ—if HQ meant headquarters.

Monat had taken part in Spruce’s inquistion. How amused he must have been at that. Also, it was Monat who had given Spruce some leading questions.

Had Spruce been prepared by Monat to give the answers he had made? Were they all lies?

If so, why should he lie? Why were all resurrectees kept in the dark?

It was quite possible that Spruce, acting on Monat’s orders, had deliberately ensured that Kazz would notice him.

By then, the three had boarded the Snark. The Neanderthals stayed above. Burton felt his way to the cabin, down the companionway, and, counting the compartment doors, stopped outside Frigate’s and Loghu’s. He opened the door slowly and stepped inside. It was a very small space, just large enough to hold two bunks against the bulkhead and room to climb down from them. The bunk-chambers were the only places where any privacy was available. Even defecation was done in them, in the bamboo chamber pots which were stored in a rack to one side.

Frigate usually slept in the top bunk. Burton moved forward, his hand outstretched. He would wake him gently, whisper that it was his watch, and then he would follow him to the deck. There Kazz would knock him out, and he would be carried to the hut.

Since it would be impossible to keep him from killing himself once he was fully conscious, Burton had decided to try to mesmerize him as he was regaining his wits. It would be a chancy procedure, but he would have to try it. Frigate, unlike Spruce, might not be so willing to commit suicide now that there were no more resurrections.

However, Burton was not sure that the Ethicals’ agents were not resurrected.

His fingertips felt the smooth sideboard of the bunk. They moved up onto the cloths that served as a mattress. They stopped.

Frigate was not in his bunk.

Burton felt along the cloths though he knew that nobody was on the bunk. They were warm. Then he stood for a minute. Had Frigate gone above to relieve himself because he did not want to awake Loghu? Or had he awakened early and decided to talk to his captain a few minutes before going on guard duty?

Or had he… ? Burton felt furious. Had he sneaked out of bed and now was with Alice?

Feeling ashamed of himself, he rejected that idea. Alice was honest. She would never betray him. If she wanted another lover, she would have said so. She would have told him and then left him. Nor did he believe that Frigate would ever do anything like that to him, though he may have contemplated it in his mind.

He bent down and reached out until he touched cloth. His fingers moved along, traced a curve—Loghu’s breast under the cloth—and he backed out and closed the door.

Silently, his heart thudding so fast he could almost believe that it could be heard throughout the cabin, he moved to Monat’s partition. His ear against the door, he listened. Silence. He straightened, opened the door, and felt into the upper bunk. Monat was not there, but he could be sleeping in the lower bunk. If so, his breathing was not audible.

His hand slid over unoccupied cloths.

Cursing softly, he groped back to the deck.

Kazz stepped out of the fog with his fist raised.

“Wallah! What’s the matter?”

“They’re both gone,” Burton said.

“But… how could that be?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Monat knew that something was wrong. He’s the most sensitive person I’ve ever met; he can read your slightest expression, detect the feeblest nuance in your voice. Or perhaps he heard you wake up Besst, investigated, and guessed the truth. For all I know, he may have been listening to us outside the door of the hut.”

“Neither Besst or me made any noise. We was as silent as a weasel sneaking up on a rabbit.”

“I know. Look around. See if our launch is missing.”

He met Kazz coming around the other way.

“The boats’re all here.”

Burton roused Loghu and Alice. While they drank hot coffee, he outlined everything that had happened to him in connection with the Ethicals. They were stunned, but they kept silent until he had finished. Questions hailstormed him then, but he said that he would answer them later. It would be dawn shortly, which meant that they had to put their grails on the stone for breakfast.

Alice was the only one who had not said anything. It was evident from her narrowed eyes and tight lips that she was furious.

“I am sorry that I had to keep all this from you,” Burton said. “But surely you can see how necessary it was? What if I told you everything and then the Ethicals grabbed you, as they did me? They could have read your mind and discovered that they had erred in thinking they had erased relevant portions of my memory.”

“They didn’t do so,” she said. “Why should they have even thought of that?”

“How do you know they didn’t?” he said. “You wouldn’t remember it if they had done it.”

That gave her another shock. Nevertheless, she did not speak again until after breakfast.

This took place in unusual weather. Normally, the sun quickly burned off the fog. The sky was clear the rest of the day in the tropical zone or until midafternoon in the temperate zones. In the latter, clouds quickly gathered, rain fell for fifteen minutes or so, and then the clouds disappeared.

This morning, however, black masses rolled between sun and earth. Lightning flickered as if chips of the bright sky above the clouds were falling through. Thunder was the muttering of a giant behind the mountains. A pale light spread over the land, staining it brownish-yellow. The faces around the grailstone looked as if a blight had settled upon them.

Kazz and Besst hunched down uneasily over their food and looked around as if they expected an unwelcome visitor. He muttered in his native tongue, “The-Bear-Who-Collects-The-Bad is walking.”

Besst almost whined. “We must find a hut to hide in. It is not good to be near the water when he walks.”

The others looked as if they were going to seek shelter, too. Burton stood up and said loudly, “One moment, please! I’m interested in finding out if any of you are missing a boat!”

A man said, “Why?”

“Two of my crew deserted last night, and it’s possible that they stole a boat to get away.”

Forgetting about the coming storm, the party scattered to look along the bank. Within a minute, a man reported that his dugout was gone.

“They’re far away by now,” Kazz said. “But did they go up or down The River?”

“If there was a signal system in this area, we could find out quickly enough,” Burton said. “Unless, of course, they beached their boat and went into the hills to hide.”

Alice said, “What do we do now, Dick? If we stay here to look for them, we’ll not be able to get on the Rex.”

Burton stifled the impulse to tell her not to point out the obvious to him. She was still simmering; no sense in making her boil again.

“Monat and Frigate can hole up today and sneak out tonight and steal another boat. It would be futile to try to catch them. No, we’ll try to get aboard the paddle wheeler. But those two will come along someday, and when they do…”

“We’ll tear them apart?” Kazz said.

Burton shrugged and spread his palms upward.

“I don’t know. They’ve got the advantage. They can either drop dead on us or lie to us. Until we get to the tower…”

Alice spoke then, her eyes dark with accustomed reverie:

“If at his counsel I should turn aside Into that ominous tract which, all agree, Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly
I did turn as he pointed; neither pride
Nor hope rekindling at the end descried, So much as gladness that some end might be.

“For, what with my world-wide wandering, What with my search drawn out thro’ years, my hope Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope
With that obstreperous joy success would bring—
I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring My heart made, finding failure in its scope.

“There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set And blew, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.’”

Burton grinned savagely. “Browning would have thought… must think… that this world is even stranger than the setting of his outré poem. I appreciate your sentiment, even if he said it first, Alice. Very well, we will go to the Dark Tower.”

“I don’t know what Alice was talking about,” Kazz said. “Anyway, just how’re we going to get on that boat?”

“If King John has room for us, I’ll offer him our treasure trove, our free-grails. That should appeal even to the ungreediest heart.”

“And if he doesn’t have room?”

He was silent for a moment. That tickle in the back of his brain, that feeling that he had overlooked some linkage between agents, had returned while Alice was speaking. And now he saw, or thought he saw, the means for scratching the itch, the kind of chain binding the agents together.

How did they recognize each other? Monat was no problem; he did not need identification. But what kind of secret signal would the human agents use to identify each other?

If they possessed a Neanderthal’s ability, they could see the negative signal, lack of a sign, in their colleagues’ foreheads. Suppose, though, they did not have this ability? Spruce had been surprised when he found out about Kazz’s optical talent. Though he had not said so, his manner had indicated that he had never heard of such a thing. Evidently, machines were used to detect and translate the symbols into whatever meaning they had. That would probably be done in the PR bubble or whatever HQ was.

If, then, they could not see the symbols with the naked eye, they would have another means of identification.

Suppose, just suppose, that there was a cutoff date. A period of time at which no more people from Earth were resurrected, not, at least, on this planet. According to Monat, Frigate, Ruach, and Spruce, that cutoff date had been 2008 A.D.

What if that was not the true date? What if it were earlier than 2008 A.D.?

He had no idea what the true date would be, though he had never met anyone, except the agents, who claimed to have lived past 1983 A.D. From now on, he would question every late-twentieth-centurian he met. And if 1983 was the latest at which anybody had died, then he would be fairly certain that that was the cutoff point.

So… perhaps the Ethicals had contrived a fiction which would enable them to identify each other instantly. That was that they had lived during 2008 A.D. And, of course, there would be a fixed story about events from 1983, or whatever date it was, to 2008.

Which meant that perhaps it was untrue that the Arcturans had killed most of humanity in that year. The terrible slaughter might never have happened. In fact, anything he had heard about the years 1983-2008 might be a lie. Yet, there was Monat. He was not a Terrestrial. There was no reason to believe that he had not come from a planet of the Bear Watcher.

For the present, there was no way to explain his presence on The Riverworld.

Meanwhile, Burton had two means for catching an Ethical. Kazz was one; the 2008 story was another.

However—humanity lived not only in an as-if world, it was a but-if world, too—however, just possibly the agents had been recruited from a time past 1983. So, their stories could be true.

There were so many possibilities. For instance, how did he know that Monat, Frigate, and Ruach had told him the truth about what had happened to them when they were away from him? There was that incident when Frigate had claimed he had met the publisher who had cheated him on Earth. Frigate said he had gotten a long-delayed revenge by punching him on the nose.

There were bruises on Frigate, supposedly gotten during the fight with Sharkko and his gang. Those could have come from conflict with others, though. Frigate’s nature was such that he dreaded violence, physical or verbal. He might fantasize revenge, but he would never carry it out.

Suppose, just suppose, that the agents adopted disguises based on real life Terrestrials. What if there was an actual Peter Jairus Frigate somewhere on this planet? The pseudo-Frigate could be pretending to be the man who had had such an intense interest in Burton’s life. That would be one means of getting close to Burton, of making sure that Burton would let him attach himself to Burton. After all, it would be hard for any man to be indifferent to his biographer, to a person who seemed to worship him.

Yet, why would it be necessary for an agent to adopt such a disguise? Why not make up one from whole cloth?

Perhaps it was not necessary, it was just easier, more convenient. As for an agent encountering the person he was pretending to be, that was highly unlikely.

There were so many potentialities, so many questions to be answered.

Alice said, “Dick! What’s the matter?”

He came out of his reverie with a start. Everybody except his crew and the man whose boat had been stolen had fled. The man looked as if he would like to ask for reparations but was hesitating because he had no one to back him up.

And wind was whipping the waves of The River and ruffling the thatches of the huts. The Snark thumped against the bumpers of its dock. The light had gone from brownish-yellow to pale gray, making the faces around him even more ghastly. Across the water lightning flashed its fiery tooth, and thunder bellowed like a bear in a cave. Kazz and Besst were obviously longing for him to give the word to look for shelter. The others were only somewhat less nervous.

“I was thinking,” he said. “You asked what we’d do if King John doesn’t have room for us? Well, monarchs have means for making room if they wish to do so. And if he refuses, I’ll find some way to get aboard. I’m not going to be stopped by anything or anybody!”

Lightning struck nearby, cracking as if the back of the world had broken. Kazz and Besst led the headlong flight for the nearest building!

Burton, standing in the heavy rain that had immediately followed the bolt, laughed at them.

He shouted, “On to the Dark Tower!”

In the dream, Peter Jairus Frigate was groping through a fog. He was naked; somebody had stolen his clothes. He had to get home before the sun rose and burned the fog off and exposed him to the derision of the world.

The grass was wet and scratchy. After a while he got tired of walking on the shoulder of the road, and he stepped onto the asphalt pavement. Now and then, as he trudged along, the fog would thin a little, and he could see the trees to his right.

Somehow, he knew that he was far out in the country. Home was a long way off. But if he walked fast enough, he could make it before dawn. Then he’d have to get into the house without waking his parents. The doors and windows would be locked, which meant that he’d have to throw pebbles against the second-story window in the back. The rattle might wake his brother, Roosevelt.

But his brother, though only eighteen, was already a heavy drinker, a skirt chaser, roaring around on his motorcycle with his sideburned, leather-jacketed, dese-and-dem pals from the Hiram Walker Distillery. This was Sunday morning, and so he’d be snoring away, filling the small attic bedroom he shared with Peter with stinking whiskey fumes.

Roosevelt was named after Theodore, not Franklin Delano, whom his father hated. James Frigate abominated “the man in the White House” and loved The Chicago Tribune, which was delivered on the doorstep every Sunday. His oldest son loathed the editorials, the whole tone of the paper, except for the comics. Ever since he had learned to read, he’d eagerly awaited every Sunday morning, right after the cocoa, pancakes, bacon, and eggs, for the adventures of Chester Gump and his pals in quest of the city of gold; Moon Mullins; Little Orphan Annie and her big Daddy Warbucks and his pals, the colossal magician Punjab and the sinister The Asp; and Mr. Am, who looked like Santa Claus, was as old as the Earth, and could travel in time. And then there was Barney Google and Smilin’ Jack and Terry and the Pirates. Delightful!

And what was he doing thinking about those great comic-strip characters while walking naked along a country road in dark, wet-with-evil clouds? It wasn’t difficult to figure out why. They brought a sense of warmth and security, happiness even, his belly filled with his mother’s good cooking, the radio turned on low, his father sitting in the best chair reading the opinions of “Colonel Blimp.” Peter would be sprawling on the living room floor with the comics page spread out before him, his mother bustling around in the kitchen feeding his two younger brothers and his infant sister. Little Jeannette, whom he loved so much and who would grow up and go through three husbands and innumerable lovers and a thousand fifths of whiskey, the curse of the Frigates.

All that was ahead, fading now from his mind, absorbed by the fog. Now he was dwelling in the front room, happy… no, it too faded away… he was outside the house, in the backyard, naked and shivering with the cold and the terror of being caught without his clothes and no way of explaining why it happened. He was throwing pebbles against the window, hoping their rattle wouldn’t wake up his little brothers and sister sleeping in the tiny bedroom below and to one side of the attic bedroom.

The house had once been a one-room country schoolhouse outside the mid-Illinois town of Peoria. But the town had grown, houses sprang up all around it, and now the city limits were a half a mile to the north. A second story and indoor plumbing had been added sometime during the growth of this area. This was the first house he had lived in in which there had been an indoor toilet. Somehow, this once-country house became the farmhouse near Mexico, Missouri. Here he, at the age of four, had lived with his mother, father, and younger brother and the family of the farmer who’d rented out two rooms to the Frigates.

His father, a civil and electrical engineer (one year in Rose Polytechnic Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana, and a diploma from the International Correspondence School) had worked for a year at the generating plant in Mexico. It was in the farmyard behind the farmhouse that Peter had been horrified on realizing that chickens ate animals and he ate chickens that ate animals. That had been the first revelation that this world was founded on cannibalism.

That was not right, he thought. A cannibal was a creature that ate its own kind. He turned over and passed back into sleep, vaguely aware that he had been half waking between segments of this dream and mulling over each before passing on to the next. Or he had been redreaming the entire dream each time. In one night he would have the same dream several times. Or a dream would recur a number of times over several years.

The series was his specialty in dreams or in fiction. At one time, during his writing career, he had twenty-one series going. He’d completed ten of them. The others were still waiting, cliff-hangers all, when that great editor in the skies arbitrarily canceled all of them.

As in life, so in death. He could never—never? Well, hardly ever—finish anything. The great uncompleted. He’d first become aware of that when, a troubled youth, he had poured out his torments and anxieties onto his college freshman advisor, who also happened to be his psychology teacher.

The professor, what was his name? O’Brien? He was a short, slim youth with a fiery manner and even fierier red hair. And he always wore a bow tie.

And now Peter Jairus Frigate was walking along in the fog and there was no sound except for the hooting of a distant owl. Suddenly, a motor was roaring, two lights shone faintly ahead of him, then brightly, and the motor screamed as he screamed. He dived to one side, floating, slowly floating, while the black bulk of the automobile sped slowly toward him. As he inched through the air, his arms flailing, he turned his head toward it. Now he could see, beyond the glare of its lights, that it was a Duesenberg, the long, low, classy roadster driven by Cary Grant in the movie he’d seen last week, Topper. A shapeless mass sat behind the wheel, its only visible features its eyes. They were the pale-blue eyes of his German grandmother, his mother’s mother, Wilhelmina Kaiser.

Then he was screaming because the car had swerved and headed directly toward him and there was no way he could escape being hit.

He woke up moaning. Eve said sleepily, “Did you have a bad… ?” and she subsided into mumbles and a gentle snoring.

Peter got out of bed, a short-legged structure with a bamboo frame and rope supports for a mattress made of cloths magnetically attached around treated leaves. The earthen floor was covered with attached cloths. The windows were paned with the isinglasslike intestinal membrane of the hornfish. Their squares shone faintly with the reflected light from the night sky.

He stumbled to the door, opened it, walked outside, and urinated. Rain still dripped from the thatched roof. Through a pass in the hills, he could see a fire blazing under the roof of a sentinel tower. It outlined the form of a guard leaning on the railing and looking down The River. The flames also shone on the masts and rigging of a boat he had never seen before. The other guard wasn’t on the tower, which meant that he would be down by the boat. He’d be questioning the boat’s skipper. It must be all right, since there were no alarm drums beating.

Back in bed, he considered the dream. Its chronology was mixed up, which was par for dreams. For one thing, in 1937, brother Roosevelt had been only sixteen. The motorcycle, the distillery job, and the peroxided blondes were still two years away. The family wasn’t even living in that house anymore. It had moved to a newer, larger house a few blocks away.

There was that amorphous, sinister dark mass in the car, the thing with his grandmother’s eyes. What did that mean? It wasn’t the first time he had been horrified by a black hooded thing with Grandma Kaiser’s almost colorless blue eyes. Nor the first time he’d tried to figure out why she appeared in such horrendous guise.

He knew that she had come from Galena, Kansas, to Terre Haute to help his mother take care of him just after he’d been born. His mother had told him that his grandmother had also taken care of him when he was five. He didn’t remember, however, ever seeing her before the age of twelve, when she had come to this house for a visit. But he was convinced that she had done something awful to him when he was an infant. Or it was something which had seemed awful. Yet she was a kindly old lady, though inclined to get hysterical. Nor did she have any control at all over her daughter’s children when they were left in her care.

Where was she now? She’d died at about seventy-seven after a long and painful siege of stomach cancer. But he’d seen photographs of her when she was twenty. A petite blonde whose eyes looked a lively blue, not the washed-out, red-veined things he remembered. The mouth was thin and tight, but all the adults in her family were grim lipped. Those brown-toned photogravures displayed faces that looked as if they’d had a very tough time but would never break under the strain.

The Victorians, judging by their photographs, were a hard-nosed, stiff-spined lot. His German grandma’s family had been made of the same stern stuff. Persecuted by their Lutheran neighbors and the authorities because they had converted to the Baptist church, they left Oberellen, Thuringia, for the land of promise. (Peter’s family on both sides had always opted for the religion of the minority, usually a somewhat crank religion. Maybe they were troubleseekers.)

After years of moving from one place to another, never finding a single street paved with gold, after backbreaking labor, soul-searing poverty, and the deaths of many children and finally of parents and grandparents, the Kaisers had made it. They had become well-to-do farmers near, or owners of machine shops in, Kansas City.

Was it worth it? The survivors said that it was.

Wilhelmina had been a pretty, blue-eyed blonde of ten when she had come to America. At eighteen she had married a Kansan twenty years older than she, probably to escape poverty. It was said that old Bill Griffiths was part Cherokee and that he had been one of Quantrill’s guerrillas, but there was a lot of malarkey in Peter’s family on both sides. They were always trying to make themselves look better, or worse, than they really were. Whatever old Bill’s past, Peter’s mother never wanted to talk about it. Maybe he was just a horse thief.

Where was Wilhelmina now? She’d no longer be the wrinkled, bent old woman he’d known. She’d be a good-looking, shapely wench, though still with the vacuous blue eyes and still speaking English with a heavy German accent. If he should run across her, would he recognize her? Not likely. And if he did, what could he find out from her about the traumas she’d inflicted on her infant grandson? Nothing. She wouldn’t remember what would have been minor incidents to her. Or, if she did, she surely wasn’t going to admit that she had ever mistreated him. If indeed the dark deed had ever been done.

During a brief stint of psychoanalysis, Peter had tried to break through the thick shadows of repressed memory to the primal drama in which his grandmother played such an important role. The effort had failed. More extended attempts in Dianetics and Scientology had resulted in zilch also. He had kept on sliding past the traumatic episodes, like a monkey on a greased pole, on past his birth and into previous lives.

After being a woman giving birth in a medieval castle, a dinosaur, a prevertebrate in the postprimal ocean, and an eighteenth-century passenger in a stagecoach going through the Black Forest, Peter had abandoned Scientology.

The fantasies were interesting, and they revealed something of his character. But his grandmother evaded him.

Here, on The Riverworld, he had tried dreamgum as a weapon to pierce the thick shadows. Under the guidance of a guru, he had chewed half a stick, a heavy load, and dived after the pearl hidden in the depths of his unconscious. When he woke from some horrible visions, he found his guru, battered and bloody, unconscious on the floor of the hut. There was no mystery about who had done this deed.

Peter had left the area after making sure that his guide would live without serious aftereffects. He could not stay in the area nor could he feel anything but guilt and shame whenever he saw his guru. The fellow had been very forgiving, had, in fact, been willing to continue the sessions—if Peter was tied up during them.

He could not face the violence that he felt dwelt deep within him. It was this fear of violence in himself that made him so afraid of violence in others.

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in our lousy genes. Or in failure of one’s conquest of one’s self.

The fault, dear Brutus, is in our fear of knowing our self.

The next, almost inevitable, scene in this drama of recollection was the seduction of Wilhelmina. How easy to think of this fantasy as potentially real, since it was possible that he would meet her. After some mutual questioning, they would discover that they were grandmother and grandson. Then the long talk with him telling what had happened to her daughter and husband (Peter’s father) and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. Would she be horrified when she found that a great-granddaughter had married a Jew? Undoubtedly. Anyone of rural stock born in 1880 was bound to be deeply prejudiced. Or what if he told her that his sister had married a Japanese? Or that a brother and a first cousin had married Catholics? Or that a great-granddaughter had converted to Catholicism? Or that a great-grandson had become a Buddhist?

On the other hand, The Riverworld might have changed her attitudes, as it had done to so many. However, many more were as psychologically fossilized as when they had lived on Earth.

To get on to the fantasy.

After a few drinks and a long talk, bed?

Rationally, one could not object to incest here. There would be no children.

But when did people ever think rationally in such situations?

No, the thing to do would be to say nothing about their relationship until after they’d been to bed.

The construction crumbled then. To reveal that would make her grievously ashamed. It would be cruel. And no matter how much he wanted revenge, he could not do that to her. To anyone. Besides, it would be revenge for some act that he only thought might have been committed. Even if it had occurred, it might have been something only a child would have thought terrible. Or something misinterpreted in his infant mind. Or something that she, being a product of her times, would have thought only natural.

It was exciting to think about laying your grandmother. But, in reality, it just wouldn’t happen. He was sexually drawn only to intelligent women, and his grandmother had been an ignorant peasant. Vulgar, too, though not in an obscene or irreligious way. He remembered when she was eating with the family on a Thanksgiving holiday. She’d sneezed, the snot had landed on her blouse, and she had wiped it off with her hand and deposited it on her skirt. His father had laughed, his mother had looked stricken, and he had lost his appetite.

There went the whole fantasy, dissolved in disgust.

Still, she might have changed.

To hell with it, he told himself, and he turned on his side and went to sleep.

Drums beat, and wooden trumpets blew. Peter Frigate woke up in the midst of another dream. It was three months after Pearl Harbor, and he was an air cadet at Randolph Field being chewed out by his flight instructor.

The lieutenant, a tall young man with a thin moustache and big feet, was almost as hysterical as Grandma Kaiser.

“The next time you turn left when I tell you to turn right, Frigate, I’m bringing us in right now, cutting the goddamn flight, and I’m refusing to go up with you! You can get an instructor who doesn’t give a shit if his dumb student kills him or not! Jesus Christ, Frigate, we coulda been killed! Didn’t you see that plane on your left! Are you suicidal! That’s all right with me, but don’t take me and two others with you! And do it on your own time, off the field, and not with government property! What the hell is the matter with you, Frigate! Do you hate me!”

“I couldn’t hear you, sir,” Peter said. Though he was sweating in the heavy flight clothes in the warm room, he was shivering and he felt a painful urge to urinate. “I just can’t seem to hear through those tubes.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the tubes! I could hear you all right! And there’s nothing wrong with your ears! You had a medical checkup only two weeks ago, didn’t you? All you pissy-assed cadets are examined when you transfer here! Aren’t you?”

Peter nodded and said, “Yes sir, just like you were.”

The lieutenant, his face red, eyes bugging, said, “What do you mean by that? Are you saying I was a pissy-assed cadet?”

“No, sir,” Peter said, feeling the sweat pour out from his armpits. “I would never say ‘pissy-assed’ in reference to you, sir.”

“What would you say?” the lieutenant said, almost screaming.

Peter looked from the corners of his eyes at the other cadets and instructors. Most of them were paying no attention or pretending not to. Some were grinning.

“I would never mention you,” Peter said.

“What? Because I’m not worth mentioning, is that it? Frigate, you try me! I don’t like your attitude on the ground or in the air. But to get back to the subject despite all your efforts to avoid it! Why in hell can’t you hear me when I can hear you? Is it because you don’t want to hear me?

“Well, that’s dangerous, Frigate! It’s frightening, too. You scare the hell out of me! Do you know how many of those stubby-winged BT-12s spin in every week? Those sons of bitches have got a built-in spin, cadet. Even when an instructor tells his ape-brained student to spin it deliberately, and he’s got his hand on the stick, ready to take over, the sons of bitches sometimes still keep on spinning!

“So I sure as hell don’t want to tell you to turn right and have you think I’m telling you to spin her and catch me off guard. You could have us twenty feet deep in the ground before I could take to the ’chute! Okay, what is the matter with your ears?”

“I don’t know,” Peter said miserably. “Maybe it’s wax. Wax builds up in my ears. It’s a family trait, sir. I have to have the wax blown out every six months.”

“I’ll blow out more than wax out of another place than your ears, mister! Didn’t the doctor check out your ears? Sure he did! So don’t tell me it’s wax! You just don’t want to hear me! And why? God knows why! Or maybe you hate me so much you don’t care if you die just so you take me with you? Is that it?”

Peter would not have been surprised to see the lieutenant foaming at the mouth.

“No, sir.”

“No, sir, what?”

“No, sir, to any of that.”

“You mean you’re denying everything? You did turn left when I said turn right, didn’t you? Don’t tell me I’m a liar!”

“No, sir.”

The lieutenant paused, then said, “Why are you smiling, Frigate?”

“I didn’t know I was,” Peter said. That was true. He was really in mental and physical distress. So why had he smiled?

“You’re crazy, Frigate!” the lieutenant shouted. A captain, standing behind him, frowned. But he made no move to interfere.

“I don’t want to see you again, Frigate, until you have a written testimonial from a doctor that your ears are okay. Do you hear that?”

Peter nodded.

“Yes, sir, I hear you.”

“You’re grounded until I get that report. But I want it at flight time, tomorrow, when I take you up again, God help me!”

“Yes, sir,” Peter said and almost saluted. That would have been another excuse for the instructor to ream him out. Saluting was not done in the flight room.

He looked back as he checked in his parachute. The captain and the lieutenant were talking earnestly. What were they saying about him? That he ought to be washed out?

Maybe he should be. He really couldn’t hear his instructor. Only half of the lieutenant’s frenzied gabble came through intelligibly on the tubes. It wasn’t because of wax. Or the high altitude. Or anything physically wrong with his hearing.

It would be years later before he knew that he just did not want to hear the lieutenant.

“He was right,” Peter said.

“Who was right?” Eve said. She was sitting up in bed, leaning on one arm, looking down at him. Her body was covered with thick varicolored towels tabbed together, and the hood still shrouded her face.

Peter sat up and stretched. The inside of the hut was dark; the drums and bugles along the bank sounded faintly. Nearby, a neighbor was banging on his fish-skin-and-bamboo drum as if he were trying to wake up the whole world.

“Nothing.”

“You were groaning and mumbling.”

“Earth is always with us,” he said, and he left her to figure that out for herself. With him he took the thunder mug to the neighborhood deposit hut which was about a hundred paces away. There he greeted a score of men and women, all on the same task. They dumped the contents of the pots into a large bamboo wagon. After breakfast, this would be hauled out of the building by a team of men into the foothills to the base of a mountain. There the excrement would be treated to make potassium for black gunpowder. Frigate worked two days a month there and four days on the sentinel towers.

A grailstone was just on the other side of the hill on which their hut stood. Usually, he and Eve took their grails to it. This morning, however, he wanted to talk to the crew of the boat that had arrived during the night. Eve would not object if he went by himself, since she had to finish stringing necklaces of hornfish vertebrae, varicolored helical bones in demand as ornaments. She and Frigate traded them for tobacco and liquor and flints. Frigate also made boomerangs and, occasionally, dugouts and canoes.

Frigate carried his grail with his left hand and his yew-wood flint-tipped spear in the other. A fish-skin belt around his waist held a sheath containing a chert axe. A quiver of arrows, flint tipped and fletched with thin, carved bones, was slung over one shoulder. A bow of yew, wrapped in bamboo paper, was strapped to the quiver to protect it from the early-morning moisture.

The little state of which he was a citizen, Ruritania, was not at war or under threat of war. The law requiring that all have their weapons handy was a hangover from the old days of turbulence. Obsolete laws had almost as hard a time dying here as on Earth. Social inertia was everywhere, though its resistance to change varied from state to state.

Frigate walked among the huts spread out over the plain. Hundreds, covered like him from foot to head against the chill, joined him. About a half-hour after the sun rose, they began to shed their cloths. While eating breakfast, Frigate looked for new faces. There were fifteen, all from the newly arrived schooner, the Razzle Dazzle. They sat in a group, eating and talking to those interested in the newcomers. Peter sat down by them to watch and listen.

The captain, Martin Farrington, also known as the Frisco Kid, was a muscular man of medium height. His handsome face looked Irish. His hair was reddish-bronze and curly; his eyes, large and deep blue; his chin, strong. He talked energetically, smiling often, cracking jokes. His Esperanto was fluent but not perfect, and it was evident that he preferred English.

The first mate, Tom Rider, also known as Tex, stood about 5.08 centimeters or 2 inches shorter than Frigate’s 1.8 meters or 6 feet.

He was what the pulp magazine writers of Frigate’s youth called “ruggedly handsome.” Not as muscular as the captain, he moved quickly though gracefully with a confidence that Frigate envied. His dark hair was straight and if his tanned skin had been two shades browner, he could have passed for an Onondaga Indian. His Esperanto was perfect, but, like Farrington, he was pleased to find some English-speakers in the crowd. His voice was a pleasant baritone which combined a Southwestern drawl with a Midwestern pronunciation.

Frigate learned much about the crew just by listening to their uninhibited account of themselves. They were the usual motley collection met on the larger boats that wandered up and down The River. The captain’s woman was a nineteenth-century South American Caucasian; the first mate’s, a citizen of the Roman city of Aphrodita of the second century A.D. Frigate remembered that its ruins had been discovered by archaeologists in Turkey sometime around the 1970s.

Two of the crew were Arabs. One was Nur el-Musafir (The Traveler). The other had been the wife of a captain of a South Arabian ship which had traded with the southwest African empire of Monomotapa in the twelfth century A.D.

The Chinese crewman had ended his Earthly life by drowning when Kubla Khan’s invasion fleet was destroyed by a storm en route to Japan.

There were two eighteenth-centurians, Edmund Tresillian, a Cornishman who lost a leg in 1759 during the capture of Hood’s Vestal of the French Bellona off Cape Finisterre. Pensionless, and with a wife and seven children, he was reduced to begging. Caught stealing a purse, he died in prison of a fever while waiting for his trial. The second man, “Red” Cozens, had been a midshipman on the Wager, a rebuilt Indiaman merchant accompanying Admiral Anson’s flotilla on its voyage around the world. It had been wrecked off the coast of Patagonia. After innumerable sufferings and hardships, part of its crew had gotten to civilization, where the Spanish government of Chile imprisoned them for a while. However, poor Cozens had been shot and killed by a Captain Cheap a few days after the wreck in the mistaken belief that he was a mutineer.

John Byron, the poet’s grandfather, also a midshipman then, had criticized Cheap for this in The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron (Commodore in a Late EXPEDITION round the WORLD) Containing An Account of the Great Distresses Suffered by Himself and His Companions on the Coast of Patagonia, from the Year 1740, till their Arrival in England, 1746, etc., London, 1768.

Frigate had owned a first edition of this book, in which he had found a description of an animal encountered by Byron which had to be a giant sloth.

He would have liked to have run across Byron. The little man had to have been incredibly tough to survive his experiences. Later, he had become an admiral, nicknamed “Foul Weather Jack” by his sailors. Just about every time he put out to sea, his fleet was hit by a bad storm.

Other interesting crew members were a late-twentieth-century Rhode Island millionaire and yachtsman; an eighteenth-century Turk, a bos’n’s mate who had died of syphilis, a common sailor’s disease then; and Abigail Rice, Earthly wife of an early-nineteenth-century second mate on a New Bedford whaler. Binns, the yachtsman, and Mustafa, the Turk, were obviously in love with each other.

As Peter would find out later, Cozens, Tresillian, and Chang shared Abigail Rice. This made Frigate wonder what she had been doing while her husband was spending two or three years chasing whales. Perhaps nothing she shouldn’t have been doing. Perhaps she had been so sexually starved on Earth that she had exploded here.

And then there was Umslopogaas. Pogaas for short. He was a Swazi, son of a king of that South African nation which had been enemies of the great Zulu people. He had lived during the expansion of the British and the Boers and the conquests of the bloody military genius, Shaka. On Earth, he had killed twelve warriors in duels; here, at least fifty.

He would have been unnoticed by history, despite his fighting prowess, if he had not happened to be attached in his old age to the mission of Sir Theophilus Shepstone. With Shepstone was a young man, H. Rider Haggard, who had been much attracted by the stately figure and the tall stories of the old Swazi. Haggard was to immortalize Umslopogaas in three novels, Nada the Lily, She and Allen, and Allan Quatermain. However, he made the Swazi a Zulu, which must have disturbed his model.

Now Pogaas lounged near the ship, leaning on a long-handled war-axe of flint. He was tall and slim and his legs were extraordinarily long. His features were not Negroid but Hamitic, thin lipped, hawk nosed, and high cheekboned. He seemed friendly enough, but there was something about his bearing that told all but the most insensitive that he was not to be trifled with. He was also the only person on the crew who did not help handle the ship. His specialty was fighting.

Frigate was tickled pink when he discovered the identity of this man. Imagine that! Umslopogaas!

After talking to various crew members, Frigate went back to a spot near the two officers. From what he heard, they were in no hurry to get to any particular place. The captain did, however, comment that he would like to get to the headwaters of The River someday. Which was, to say, in a hundred years or so.

Frigate finally spoke up, asking the captain and Rider about their Terrestrial origins. Farrington said he’d been born in California, but he gave no birthdate or place. Rider said he’d been born in Pennsylvania in 1880. Yes, he had spent a lot of time, most of his life, in fact, in the West.

Frigate swore softly. He had thought the two looked familiar. However, they wore their hair longer than on Earth and the lack of Terrestrial clothes gave them a different appearance. What Rider needed was a big white ten-gallon hat and a flashy pseudo-Western coat and breeches and a pair of ornamented cowboy’s boots. And a horse to sit upon.

As a child, Frigate had seen him in just such garments and on a horse. That had been during a parade preceding a circus—Sells and Floto? Never mind. Frigate had stood with his father on Adams Street, just south of the courthouse, and waited eagerly for his favorite Western film hero to ride by. And so the hero had, but, being drunk, he had fallen off his horse. Unhurt, he had swung into the saddle again, riding off to the mingled laughter and cheers of the crowd. He must have sobered up after that, for he gave a great demonstration of riding and roping in the Wild West Show following the main events.

At that time, Frigate regarded drunkards as moral lepers and thus should have been completely disillusioned about Rider. But his worship of Rider was so intense that he was willing to forgive him. What a little prig he’d been!

Frigate was well acquainted with Farrington’s portrait since he’d seen it so many times in biographies and on the back of dust jackets. Frigate had begun reading his works at the age of ten, and when he was fifty-seven he had contributed a foreword to a collection of Farrington’s fantasies and science fiction.

For some reason, both his heroes were traveling under false names. He, Peter Frigate, was not going to expose them—not unless he had to. No, he wouldn’t do it even then, but if he were forced to threaten them with exposure, he would do so. He’d do almost anything to get aboard the Razzle Dazzle.

After a while, the Frisco Kid announced that he and Tex would now interview anyone who’d like to sign on as a deckhand. Two folding chairs were set upon the end of the dock, and the “employment” line formed in front of the seated officers. Frigate immediately got into the line. Three men and a woman were ahead of him. This gave him a chance to listen to the questioning and to decide what he would tell his prospective employers.

The Frisco Kid, sitting on a folding bamboo chair and smoking a cigarette, ran his eyes up and down Frigate.

“Peter Jairus Frigate, heh? American. Midwest. Right? You look strong enough, but what’s your nautical experience?”

“Not much on Earth,” Peter said. “I used to sail a small boat on the Illinois River. But I’ve done a lot here. I sailed on a large single-masted catamaran for three years and I put in a year on a two-masted schooner like yours.”

That was a lie. He’d only shipped on the two-master for three months. But that was enough for him to know, literally, the ropes.

“Hm. Did these ships make short local trips or were they on long voyages?”

“Long ones,” Frigate said. He was glad he hadn’t referred to the vessels as boats. Some sailors were very touchy about the distinction between “boats” and “ships.” For Frigate, anything on a river was a boat. But Farrington was a seafaring man, even if there were no more seas.

“In those areas,” he added, “the wind was usually from upRiver. So we were sailing close-hauled most of the time.”

“Yeah, anybody can sail with the wind,” Martin Farrington said.

“Why do you want to sign up?” Rider asked suddenly.

“Why? I’m fed up with life here. Rather, I’m dissatisfied with doing the same old thing day after day. I…”

“You know how it is on a ship,” Farrington said. “It’s cramped, and you spend most of your time with just a few people. And it’s pretty much the same old thing day after day.”

“I know that, of course,” Frigate said. “Well, I’d like to travel to the end of The River, for one thing. The catamaran I was on was going there, but it got burned during an attack by slavers. The schooner was sunk by a dragonfish while we were helping some locals fish for it. It was Moby Dick and the Pequod all over again.”

“You were Ishmael?” Rider said.

Frigate looked at him. Rider was supposed to have been able to quote great chunks of Shakespeare, to be well read indeed. But that could have been Hollywood publicity crap.

“You mean, was I the lone survivor? No, six of us got to shore. It was scary, though.”

“Was… ?”

Farrington stopped, cleared his throat, and looked at Rider. Rider raised thick, dark eyebrows. Farrington was evidently considering how to rephrase the question.

“Who were the captains of these two crafts?”

“The catamaran captain was a Frenchman named DeGrasse. The schooner captain was a rough son-of-a-bitch named Larsen. A Norwegian of Danish birth. He’d been captain of a sealer, I believe.”

Nothing he said about Larsen was true. But Peter couldn’t resist testing Farrington’s reaction.

The captain’s eyes narrowed, then he smiled. He said slowly, “Was Larsen nicknamed Wolf?”

Peter kept his face blank. He wasn’t falling for that trap. If Farrington thought that he was trying to tell him circuitously that he recognized him, Farrington would not take him on.

“No. If he had a nickname, it was ‘Bastard.’ He was about six and a half feet tall and very dark for a Scandinavian. His eyes were as black as an Arab’s. Did you know him?”

Farrington relaxed. He dubbed out his cigarette on a baked-clay ashtray, and lit up another. Rider said, “How good are you with that bow?”

“I’ve been practicing for thirty years. I’m no Robin Hood, but I can shoot six arrows in twenty seconds with reasonable accuracy. I’ve studied the martial arts for twenty years. I never look for a fight and I avoid one if it’s possible. But I’ve been in about forty major actions and a lot of minor ones. I’ve been badly wounded four times.”

Rider said, “When were you born?”

“In 1918.”

Martin Farrington looked at Rider, then said, “I suppose you saw a lot of movies when you were a kid?”

“Didn’t everybody?”

“And what about your education?”

“I got a B.A. in English literature with a minor in philosophy and I was a compulsive reader. Lord, how I miss reading!”

“Me, too,” Farrington said.

There was a pause. Rider said, “Well, our memories of Earth get dimmer every day.”

Which meant that if Frigate had seen Rider in the films and Farrington on the dust jackets of books, he did not remember them. The captain’s question about his education might, however, have a double interest. He would want a crewman who could talk intelligently about many matters. On Earth, Farrington’s forecastle companions had been brutal and illiterate, not exactly his soul mates. So, for that matter, had been most of the people he knew until he had gone to college.

“We seem to have about ten in all to interview,” Farrington said. “We’ll make our choice after we’ve talked to everybody. We’ll let you know before noon.”

Peter wanted desperately to be chosen, but he was afraid that too much eagerness might put them off. Since they were, for some reason, traveling under pseudonyms, they might be wary of someone who was trying too hard to sign on. Why, he did not know.

“One thing we forgot,” Rider said. “We don’t have room for more than one hand. You can’t take your woman along. Is that okay?”

“No problem.”

“You can take turns with Abigail,” Rider said. “If you don’t mind sharing with three others. And if she likes you, of course. But she hasn’t shown many antipathies so far.”

“She’s a luscious woman,” Peter said. “But that sort of thing doesn’t appeal to me.”

“Mustafa kind of likes you,” Farrington said, grinning. “He’s been eyeing you.”

Frigate looked at the Turk, who winked, and he blushed.

“That appeals even less.”

“Just make that plain, and you won’t be bothered by him or Binns,” Farrington said. “I’m no homo, but I saw a lot of buggery. Any man who sails under the mast has; every ship, naval or commercial, has been a viper’s nest of sodomy since Noah. Those two are real he-men, aside from their lack of interest in the fair sex. And they’re damn good sailors. So just tell them to back off. If, that is, we accept you. But I don’t want any bitching about being hard up. You can catch up when we go ashore, and if we lose a man you can get a woman for your bunkmate. She has to be a good sailor, though. Everyone pulls his weight on this ship.”

“Abigail’s looking more appealing by the second,” Frigate said.

Farrington and Rider laughed, and Frigate moved on.

For a while, he stood by the dock area. This was a shallow bay which had been hacked with much labor out of the bank. Stone cut from the base of the mountains had been carried down here and used to line the shore. Wooden docks had been extended from the bank, but these held mainly small catboats, lugboats, and catamarans. Two giant rafts with masts were tied up here, too. These were used for dragonfishing. A number of warcanoes, capable of holding forty men each, were beached near the rafts. Canoes and rowboats were putting out now for fishing. By noon, The River would be heavily salted with small and large boats.

The Razzle Dazzle was too large to fit within the piers. It was anchored near the mouth of the bay behind a breakwater of large black rocks. It was a beautiful ship, long and low, built of oak and pine. There wasn’t a nail in it, and the pegs had been cut with flint. The sails were made of treated outer skin of the dragonfish, so thin they were translucent. The oaken figurehead was a full-busted mermaid holding a torch.

The ship was a wonder, and the wonder was how its crew had managed to avoid having it taken from them. Many had been murdered for much lesser craft.

Feeling anxious, he walked past Farrington and Rider. The interviews were by no means over. Word had gotten around, and now there were about twenty men and ten women waiting in line. If this continued, the questioning might take all day. There was nothing he could do about it, so he shrugged and went back home. Eve was gone, which was just as well. There was no need to tell her what he was doing until he found out if he was leaving. If he was turned down, he’d say nothing to her.

Part of his duty as a Ruritanian citizen was to assist in alcohol-making. He might as well work off a half-day today. The labor would help keep him from worrying. He walked through the passes between the hills until these gave out. There were four more hills to climb, each increasingly higher. The trees were thicker here; the huts, fewer. Presently he was on top of the highest hill, which was at the base of the mountain. Its smooth stone ran straight up for an estimated 1228 meters or about 6000 feet. A waterfall thundered about 91 meters or 100 yards away, spilling thousands of liters a minute into a pool. From this, the water ran in a broad channel which would thread a course through the hills to The River.

Frigate passed by the fires, the wooden, glass, and stone equipment, and the odor of alcohol. He climbed up a bamboo ladder until he was on a platform placed against an area of stone from which lichen had not yet been removed. He reported to a foreman, who gave him a chert scraper. The foreman took from a rack a pine stick with Frigate’s initials cut into it. It bore alternating horizontal and vertical lines, the former indicating the days he’d worked, the latter the number of months.

“Next year you’ll be using a stick to scrape off the stuff,” the foreman said. “We’ll be saving the chert and flint for weapons.”

Peter nodded and went to work.

In time, the supply of flint would be exhausted. Technology on The Riverworld would go backward. Instead of progressing from a wooden to a stone age, humanity would reverse the procedure.

Frigate wondered how he was going to get his flint-tipped weapons out of the state. If he sailed on Farrington’s craft he would, according to the law, have to leave his precious stones behind.

The time put in by Frigate on this work was estimated by the foreman. Except for the sun, there were few clocks of any type. The little glass available was used in the alcohol-making process, so there were not even hourglasses. For that matter, the sand used to make the glass had been imported from a state 800 kilometers downRiver. That had cost Ruritania several boatloads of tobacco and booze and piles of dragonfish and hornfish skins and bones. The tobacco and alcohol had been contributed by the citizens from their grails. Frigate had given up smoking and drinking for two months during this time of sacrifice. When it was over, he continued his abstinence from smoking, trading his cigarettes and cigars for whiskey. But, as had happened on Earth and here, he had slipped back into the arms of Demon Nicotine.

He worked hard, scraping off the thick green-blue plant growth from the black rock and stuffing it into the bamboo buckets. Others lowered the buckets on ropes to the ground, where their contents were dumped into vats.

Shortly before noon, he knocked off for the lunch hour. Before going down the ladders, he looked out over the hills. Far below, the white hull of the Razzle Dazzle shone in the bright sun. Somehow, he was going to be on it when it up-anchored.

Peter walked back to the hut, noted that Eve wasn’t there, and went on down to the plain. The line of interviewers did not look any shorter. He passed along the edge of the plain where its short grass abruptly stopped and the long grass of the hills began. What made for the line of demarcation? Were there chemicals in the hill soil that halted the encroachment of plain grass? Or was it vice versa? Or both? And why?

The archery range was about half a kilometer south of the dock area. He practiced shooting at a target of grass on a bamboo tripod for about thirty minutes. Then he went to the gymnasium area and ran sprints and made long jumps and engaged in judo, karate, and spear-fighting for two hours. At the end of the time, he was sweating and tired. But he was bursting with joy. It was wonderful to have a twenty-five-year-old body, the tiredness and feebleness of middle and old age gone, the aches and pains, the fat, the hernia, the ulcer, the headaches, the long-sightedness, all no more. Replacing it, the ability to run or swim swiftly and far, to feel sexual desire every night (and a good part of the day).

The worst thing he had done on Earth was to get a desk job as a technical writer at the age of thirty-eight and then at fifty-one, to become a full-time fiction writer. He should have stayed in the steel mill. It was monotonous work, but while his body was handling the hot, heavy work, his mind was busy dreaming up stories. At night he would read or write.

It was when he had started to sit on his butt all day that he had begun drinking so heavily. And his reading had diminished, too. It was too easy after working on a typewriter eight hours a day to sit in front of the TV all evening and swill bourbon or scotch. TV, the worst thing that had happened to the twentieth century. After the atom bomb and overpopulation, of course.

No, he told himself, that wasn’t fair. He didn’t have to be a boob before the tube. He could have used the self-discipline which enabled him to write to turn the set off except at highly selected times. But the lotus-eater syndrome had gotten him. Besides, there were programs on TV which were really excellent, both entertaining and educational.

Still, this world was good in that there were no TVs or automobiles or atom bombs or gross national production or paychecks or mortgages or medical bills. Or air or water pollution and almost no dust. And nobody gave a damn about communism or socialism or capitalism, because they didn’t exist. Well, that was not quite true. Most states did have a sort of primitive communism.

He walked to The River and plunged in, cleaning off the sweat. Then he trotted along the bank (no huts allowed within 30 meters of it) to the dock area. He hung around until dinnertime, talking to friends. In between, he watched the two from the Razzle Dazzle. They were still interviewing, though lubricating their throats with frequent drinks. Wasn’t that line ever going to end?

Just before it was suppertime, Farrington stood up and announced in a loud voice that he was taking no more applications. Those still in the line protested, but he said that he’d had enough.

By then the head of Ruritania, “Baron” Thomas Bullitt, had appeared with his councillors. Bullitt had had some small claim to fame in his day. In 1775 he had explored the Ohio River falls by the area which would become Louisville, Kentucky. Commissioned by the William and Mary College of Virginia, he surveyed the area. And thereafter disappeared from history. His aide-de-camp, Paulus Buys, a sixteenth-century Dutchman, was with him. Both invited the crew of the Razzle Dazzle to a party in their honor that night. The main reason for the invitation was to hear the adventures of the crew. River-dwellers loved gossip and exciting tales, since their fields of entertainment were limited.

Farrington accepted, but said that six of the crew would have to stay on the ship as guards. Frigate followed the crowd to a large roofed-over area, the Town Hall. Torches and bonfires drove back the darkness, and an orchestra played while the local variety of square dancing began. Frisco and Tex stood around for a while, talking to the chief statesmen and their wives and close friends. Frigate, as one of the hoi polloi, was not admitted to the sacred circle. He knew, however, that the event would become much less formal later on. While he was standing in line to get the free liter of pure alcohol allowed per person at such functions, he was joined by his hutmate.

Eve Bellington waved at him and then got into line twelve persons behind him. She was tall, full figured, black-haired, blue-eyed, a Georgia peach. Born 1850, died two days before her one hundred and first birthday. Her father was a wealthy cotton planter with a distinguished record as a major in the Confederate cavalry. The Bellington plantation was burned down during Sherman’s march through Georgia, and the Bellingtons had become penniless. Her father had then gone to California and found enough gold to buy a partnership in a shipping firm.

Eve had loved being wealthy again, but she still had not forgiven him for leaving her mother and herself to struggle through the occupation and the early years of Reconstruction.

During her father’s absence, Eve and her mother had lived with her father’s brother, a handsome man only ten years older than Eve. He had raped her (without too much resistance, Eve admitted) when she was fifteen. When her mother had found that her daughter was pregnant, she had shot the uncle in the legs and the genitals. He survived a few years as a crippled eunuch in prison.

Mrs. Bellington then moved to Richmond, Virginia, where her husband joined them. Eve’s son by the uncle grew up to be tall and handsome, dearly beloved by his mother. After a furious quarrel with his uncle-grandfather, he left to seek his fortune in the West. A letter from Silver City, Colorado, was the last Eve ever heard from him. He’d disappeared somewhere in the Rockies, according to a report sent by a detective.

Her mother had died in a fire, and her father had died of a heart attack while trying to rescue her mother. Eve’s first husband died of cholera shortly thereafter, and before she was fifty she had lost two more husbands and six of her ten children.

Her life was that of a heroine of a novel on which Margaret Mitchell and Tennessee Williams might have collaborated. She didn’t think it was very funny when Peter had told her that.

After thirty-plus years on The Riverworld, Eve had gotten over her prejudice against niggers and her hatred of bluebellies. She had even fallen in love with a Yankee. Peter had never told her that his great-grandfather had been with an Indiana regiment on that “infamous” march with Sherman. He hadn’t wanted to strain her affection.

Peter moved on up the line and received the alcohol in his soapstone mug. He mixed one part of alcohol with three parts of water in a bamboo bucket and walked back to talk to Eve, who was still in line. He asked her where she had been all day. She replied that she had been wandering around, thinking.

He didn’t ask her what her thoughts had been. He knew. She was trying to think of a way to break off their relationship without pain. They’d been drifting apart for some months, their love suddenly and unaccountably cooled. Peter had done some thinking on this subject himself. But each was waiting for the other to take the initiative.

Peter said he would see her later, and he pushed through the noisy crowd toward Farrington. Rider was on the dance floor, whooping and whirling with Bullitt’s woman.

Peter waited until the captain was through telling about his adventures in the 1899 Yukon gold rush. Farrington’s tale, which involved losing some of his teeth from scurvy, somehow became a hilarious experience.

Peter said, “Mr. Farrington, have you made up your mind yet?”

Farrington paused, his mouth open to launch on another story. His reddened eyes blinked. He said, “Oh yes! You’re… ah… um… named Frigate, right? Peter Frigate. The one who’s read a lot. Yes, Tom and I’ve made up our minds. We’ll announce our choice sometime during the party.”

“I hope it’s me,” Peter said. “I really want to go with you.”

“Enthusiasm counts for a great deal,” Farrington said. “Experience counts for even more. Put the two together, and you have a fine jack-tar.”

Peter breathed deeply and took the plunge.

“This uncertainty is getting me down. Could you at least tell me if I’ve been eliminated? If I have been, I can drown my sorrow.”

Farrington smiled. “It really means that much to you? Why?”

“Well, I do want to get to the end of The River.”

Farrington cocked his eyebrows. “Yeah? Do you expect to find the answers to all your questions there?”

“I don’t want millions, I want answers to my questions,” Peter said. “That’s a quotation from a character in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.”

Farrington’s face lit up.

“That’s great! I’d heard of Dostoyevsky but I never had a chance to read him. I don’t think there was an English translation of his books in my time. At least, I never ran across any.”

“Nietzsche admitted that he’d learned a lot about psychology just from reading the Russian’s novels,” Peter said.

“Nietzsche, heh? You know him well?”

“I’ve read him in both English and German. He was a great poet, the only German philosopher who could write in anything but waterlogged prose. Well, that’s not fair, Schopenhauer could write stuff that wouldn’t put you to sleep or give you a nervous breakdown while you were waiting for the sentence to end. I don’t go along with Nietzsche’s conception of the Ubermensch, though. Man is a rope across an abyss between animal and superman. That may not be the exact quotation; it’s been a hell of a long time since I read Thus Spake Zarathustra.

“Anyway, I do believe that man is a rope between animal and superman. But the superman I’m thinking of isn’t Nietzsche’s. The real superhuman, man or woman, is the person who’s rid himself of all prejudices, neuroses, and psychoses, who realizes his full potential as a human being, who acts naturally on the basis of gentleness, compassion, and love, who thinks for himself and refuses to follow the herd. That’s the genuine dyed-in-the-wool superman.

“Now, you take the Nietzschean concept of the superman as embodied in Jack London’s novel The Sea Wolf.”

Peter paused, then said, “Have you read it?”

Farrington grinned. “Many times. What about Wolf Larsen?”

“I think he was more London’s superman then Nietzsche’s. He was London’s idea of what the superman ought to be. Nietzsche would have been appalled by Larsen’s brutality. However, London did kill him off with a brain tumor. And I suppose that London meant to show by this that there was something inherently rotten about Larsen as superman. Maybe he meant to tell the reader that. If he did, it went over the heads of most of the literary critics. They never got the significance of Larsen’s manner of death. Then, too, I think London was also showing that man, even superman, has his roots in his animal nature. He’s part of Nature, and no matter what his mental attainments, no matter how much he defies Nature, he can’t escape the physical facts. He is an animal, and so he’s subject to disease, such as brain tumors. How are the mighty fallen.

“But I think that Wolf Larsen was also, in some respects, what Jack London would have liked to be. London lived in a brutal world, and he thought that he had to be a superbrute to survive. Yet, London had empathy; he knew what it was to be one of the people of the abyss. He thought that the masses could find relief from their sufferings, and realize their human potential, through socialism. He fought for it all his life. At the same time, he was a strong individualist. This conflicted with his socialism, and when it did, his socialist beliefs lost out. He wasn’t any Emma Goldman.

“In fact, his daughter Joan criticized him for that in her study of his life.”

“I didn’t know that,” Farrington said. “She must have written it after I died. Did you know much about her, what happened to her after London died, how she died?”

“I knew a London scholar who knew her well,” Peter said.

Actually, the scholar had only corresponded with her a little and had met her briefly. Peter didn’t mind exaggerating if it would get him a berth on the ship.

“She was a very active Socialist. She died in 1971, I think. Her book about her father was very objective, especially considering that he had divorced her mother for a younger woman.

“Anyway, I think that London wanted to be a Wolf Larsen because that would have made him insensitive to the world’s woes. A man who doesn’t feel for others can’t be hurt himself. At least, he thinks he can’t. Actually, he’s hurting himself.

“London may have realized this and was, in fact, trying to put this idea across. At the same time, he wished to be a Larsen, even if this meant being frozen inside, that is, a superbrute. But writers have countercurrents in their psychic sea, as all humans do. That’s why, when the critics have done with them, great writers are still enigmas. When skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man.”

“I like that!” Farrington cried. “Who wrote that?”

“e.e. cummings. Another line of his that’s a favorite of mine is: Listen! There’s a hell of a good universe next door… Let’s go!”

Peter thought that he might be pouring it on too thick. Farrington, however, seemed to be enjoying it.

Once Frigate was on the ship, he could bring up subjects which might anger and would certainly irritate Farrington. For instance, the man’s knowledge of Nietzsche had been gotten mostly from dialogs with a friend, Strawn-Hamilton. He had apparently made some attempt to read the philosopher in English. But he had been so taken by the poetic phrases and the slogans that he had not taken in the full philosophy. He had picked what he liked from Nietzsche and ignored the rest—as Hitler had done. Not that Farrington was any Hitler.

What was it his daughter had said? “‘The glad perishers,’ ‘the Superman,’ ‘live dangerously!—these were more potent than wine.’”

As for Farrington’s knowledge of socialism, he had not read anything of Marx’s except The Communist Manifesto. But, as his daughter had said, ignoring Marx was a common practice among American Socialists then.

There were many other things to discuss—and contemn. London had wanted socialism only for the benefit of the Germanic peoples. He firmly believed that men were superior to women. Might made right. And he was not, in one sense of the word, a true artist. He wrote only for money, and if he had enough money would have quit writing. At least he had claimed he would. Frigate doubted this. Once a writer, always a writer.

“Well,” Peter said, “whatever else can be said against London, Fred Lewis Patton probably had the final word. He said it was easy to criticize him, easy to deplore him, but impossible to avoid him.”

Farrington liked that even more. But he said, “Enough of London, though I would like to meet him some day. Listen. Your idea of the superman sounds a lot like the ideal man of the Church of the Second Chance. It sounds even more like that of one of my crew, you know, the little Arab, though he isn’t really an Arab. He’s a Spanish Moor, born in the twelfth century A.D. He’s not a Chancer, though.”

He pointed to a man Frigate had seen among the crew of the Razzle Dazzle. He was standing in the center of a circle of Ruritanians, holding a drink and a cigarette. His speech seemed to be amusing; at least those around him were laughing. He was about 164 centimeters or a little less than 5 feet 5 inches tall, thin but with a suggestion of wiry strength, very dark, and big nosed. He looked like a young Jimmy Durante.

“Nur-ed-din el-Musafir,” Farrington said. “Nur for short.”

Frigate said, “In Arabic that means Light-of-the-Faith the-Traveler.”

“You know Arabic?” Farrington said. “I never could get the hang of any foreign language except Esperanto.”

“I picked up a lot of words from Burton’s Arabian Nights.”

He paused. “Well, what about it? Am I eliminated?”

Farrington said, “Yes and no.” He laughed at Frigate’s puzzled expression, and he clapped him on the shoulder.

“Can you keep your mouth shut?”

“Like a Trappist monk.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Pete. Tom and I had picked out that big Kanaka there.” He pointed at Maui, a giant Marquesan, looking very Polynesian in a white cloth around his waist and a big dark-red bloom in his thick, black, curly hair.

“He was top’s’l man in a whaler and then a harpooner for thirty years. He looks like he’d be a hellcat in a fight. Tom and I agreed that he was easily the best qualified. But he doesn’t know anything about books, and I need educated people around me. That may sound snobbish, but so what?

“I’ll tell you now. I just changed my mind. You’re signed up—as far as I’m concerned. No, wait a minute! Don’t look so happy. I have to talk to Tom about this. You wait. I’ll be right back.”

He plunged among the dancers, caught Rider by the hand, and dragged him off protesting to one side. Peter watched them talking. Rider looked at him several times but did not seem to be arguing.

Peter was glad that he had not had to play his trump card. If he hadn’t been chosen, he would have told the two that he knew their true identities. What would have happened then, he couldn’t guess. The two had some good reason to go under fake names. Perhaps they would have rushed off, leaving him behind if he had threatened to expose them. Or perhaps they would have taken him along, just to keep his mouth shut, and then thrown him overboard far up The River.

Possibly Farrington had caught on to what he was doing. He must have wondered why a man so familiar with London’s works would not recognize him. In which case, Farrington would have decided that Frigate was playing some kind of game. He would go along with it until they were well up The River and then find out just what he was up to.

However, Peter did not think he was in any danger of being killed. Neither Farrington nor Rider were murderers. Still, if some changed for the better on this world, others changed for the worse. And he had no idea how deep and desperate this game was.

Rider came over, shook his hand, and told him he was welcome aboard. A few minutes later, Farrington stopped the music and announced his choice of the new deckhand. By then, Peter had taken Eve outside and given her the news.

Eve was quiet for a while. Then she said, “Yes, I knew you were trying to get on that ship. It’s not easy to keep a secret here, Peter. I do feel bad, though mostly because you hadn’t told me you were going to go away.”

“I tried to get hold of you,” he said. “But you had gone off without telling me where.”

Eve began to cry. Peter’s eyes were moist. But she wiped the tears, sniffled, and said, “I’m not grieved because you’re leaving me, Pete. I’m full of sorrow because our love died. I once thought that it would last forever. I should have known better, though.”

“I’m still fond of you.”

“But not fond enough, is that it? Of course it is. I’m not blaming you, Peter. I feel the same way. It’s just that… I wish we could have gone on feeling like we first did.”

“You’ll find someone else. At least, we didn’t part with hatred.”

“It would have been better that way. It’s bad enough when you love each other but can’t get along. But to have love just die out, cold! I can’t stand indifference.”

“You’ve stood a lot more than that,” he said. “If we’d still been in love, I would’ve stayed here or I would’ve tried to get them to take us both.”

“And then you would’ve resented me. No, this may not be the best way, but it’s the only way.”

He pulled her to him to kiss her, but she gave him her cheek.

“Goodbye, Peter.”

“I won’t forget you.”

“A lot of good that’ll do us,” she said, and she walked away.

Peter went back under the roof. People crowded around to congratulate him. He didn’t feel happy. Eve had upset him, and he felt uncomfortable when he was the focus of public attention. Then Bullitt was shaking his hand.

“We’ll be sorry to see you go, Frigate,” he said. “You’ve been a model citizen. However, there is one thing.”

He turned to the sergeant-at-arms next to him and said, “Mr. Armstrong, please confiscate Mr. Frigate’s weapons.”

Peter did not protest, since he had sworn to give them up if he quit Ruritania. However, he had not given his word not to steal them back. Early that morning, while it was still dark, he did just that.

He told himself that he had put in too much labor making the weapons to give them up. Besides, he had been wounded once in the service of this state. Ruritania owed him those weapons.

He had not gotten more than a kilometer up The River when he felt like going back and surrendering the weapons. That fit of honesty lasted for a day, and then he was cured.

Or he thought that he was. The recurring dream came back again. This time it progressed past the point where he was standing naked outside the house. He threw pebbles against the window of the bedroom but repeated casts failed to wake Roosevelt. He went around trying the doors and windows, and when he got to the front door, he found it unlocked. He crept in through the front room, into the small kitchen, and he took the two steps needed to get to the door opposite the bathroom. This led up a steep stairway to the attic, a section of which had been made into a tiny bedroom. He would have to go slowly, walking on the ends of the steps. They squeaked abominably if he stepped in their middle.

It was then that he saw that the doors to his parents’ bedroom and the younger children’s were open. Moonlight came in. (Never mind that it had been dawn just as he opened the door. This was a dream.) By its bright light he saw that his parents’ big old-fashioned brass bed was empty. And so was his little sister’s. He looked around the corner and saw that the bunkbeds of Mungo and James, Junior were also deserted.

Nor was Roosevelt in his bed.

In a panic, he looked out the back window. The doghouse in the backyard was empty.

Everybody, even the dog, had gone off without a word.

What nameless crime had he committed?

The training blimp will be completed within a month,” Firebrass said. “Jill Gulbirra is the most experienced aeronaut by far, so she’ll take charge of the training. In fact, I’m making her captain of the trainer. How about that, Jill? If you can’t be commander of the big ship, you will be unchallenged chief honcho of the little one. Don’t ever say I never did anything for you.”

The other men offered her their congratulations, though some did so sourly. Cyrano seemed genuinely delighted, and if he had not been aware of her dislike for being touched, would doubtless have embraced her tightly and kissed her. On impulse, Jill pulled him to her and gave him a quick hug. After all, he was trying to make up for his offensive behavior on the Riverbank.

Twenty minutes later, she, Firebrass, Messnet, Piscator, and ten engineers began working on the blueprints for the big airship. The specifications had been determined during three weeks of hard work, usually twelve to fourteen hours a day. Instead of drawing lines on paper, however, they made blueprints on the cathode-ray tube of a computer. This was much faster, mistakes or alterations were erased quickly, and the computer itself double-checked the proportions. Of course, the computer had to be programmed first, and Jill participated in this. She loved this sort of work. It was creative and gave her a chance to play with mathematical relations.

Nevertheless, it did cause nervous tension. To relieve this and to stay in good physical shape, Jill fenced for two hours almost every day. Sword exercise here was not what it had been on Earth. The light, supple foil was discarded for the heavier, stiffer rapier. Moreover, every point of the body was a target, requiring that the fencers wear padded garments on their legs.

“We are not playing now,” Cyrano told her. “You will be learning to fence for more than just points. The time may come when you will be striving in deadly earnest to keep your opponent from running you through while you try to pierce him from front to back.”

She had been an excellent fencer. A great teacher, an Olympic champion, had told her that she could become a top contender in world competition if she would devote enough time to training. That had been impossible since her job required too much time away from the fencing courts. But when she had a chance to practice, she had taken it. She loved fencing; it was in some respects a very physical form of chess, which she also loved.

It was a joy to take a blade in hand again and to relearn all the long-unused, but not quite forgotten, skill. It was an even greater joy to find that she could beat most of her male opponents. Though she looked awkward, once she had gripped the handle of the rapier, she became all grace and liquid speed.

There were two men she could not master. One was Radaelli, the Italian master, author of Istruzione per la scherma di spada a di sciabola, published in 1885. The other, the indisputable champion, was Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac.

Jill was surprised at this. For one thing, fencing in his time had not yet developed into a fine art. It was not until near the end of the eighteenth century that the art neared its apex of technique. Cyrano had died in the middle of the seventeenth century before the foil had been invented, when men fought, often to the death, with techniques somewhat primitive, if spectacular. The Italians had put together the basic structure of modern swordplay by the early seventeenth century, but not until the beginning of the nineteenth century had the techniques reached the ultimate.

Thus Cyrano had established a reputation as the greatest swordsman of all times without having to compete with the more sophisticated fencers of a later age. Jill had believed that his reputation had been wildly exaggerated. After all, no one knew if the famous incident of the Porte de Nesle was true or not. No one except the Frenchman himself, and he would not talk about it.

However, he had learned all later refinements from Radaelli and Borsody. Within four months of starting his education, he was steadily outscoring his mentors. In five months, he was unbeatable. So far, at least.

Though rusty at first, Jill soon gained polish and began to give him a better battle. Never once, however, did she win more than one point of the total five within the six-minute limit of a match. And he always made four points before she got one. This led her to believe that he was giving her the one point to soften the defeat. Once, after a match in which she became furious because of her frustration, she accused him of patronizing her.

“Even if I were in love with you and desired very much to keep from hurting your feelings,” he said, “I would not do that! It would be dishonest, and while it is said that all is fair in love and war, it is not so for me. No, you have gotten your points fairly because of your quickness and skill.”

“But if we were playing for keeps,” she said, “with unblunted points, you would have killed me every time. You always strike first.”

He raised his mask and wiped his forehead. “True. But surely you are not thinking about challenging me to a duel? You are still not angry with me are you?”

“About that incident on the bank? No. Not about that.”

“About what, then, if I may be so bold to ask?”

She would say nothing then, and he would raise his eyebrows and shrug his shoulders in a completely Gallic manner.

Cyrano was better than she. No matter how much she practiced, no matter how hard her determination to best him, because he was a man, because she did not like to lose to anybody, male or female, she always lost. Once, when she had jeered at his ignorance and superstitions and so had made him furious (she had done it on purpose), he had attacked her with such vigor that he had touched her five times in one and a half minutes. Instead of losing his head, he had become even more a being of cold fire, moving with certitude and swiftness, doing everything exactly right, one hundred percent anticipatory of her every movement.

It was she who was humiliated.

Rightfully so, she told herself, and she apologized, though it was a double humiliation to do so.

“I was terribly wrong to sneer at your lack of knowledge of science and at your mistaken beliefs,” she said. “It is not your fault that you were born in 1619, and I should not have taunted you with that. I did so just to make you so mad I’d get an edge on you. It was a rotten thing to do. I promise not to do it again, and I most abjectly beg your pardon. I did not really mean it.”

“Then you said those nasty, vicious things merely as a trick?” he said. “A verbal device to gain points? There was nothing personal in those so-cutting remarks?”

She hesitated a moment, then said, “I have to be honest. My main purpose was to make you lose your head. But I was not so cool myself. At the moment, I did feel that you were an ignorant simpleton, a living fossil. But that was my own anger speaking out in me.

“Actually, you were far ahead of your time. You rejected the superstitions and the barbarisms of your time, as far as anybody is able to reject his culture. You were an exceptional man, and I honor you for being that. And you’ll never hear such words from me again.”

She hesitated again, then said, “But is it true that you repented on your deathbed?”

The Frenchman’s face became red. He grimaced and said, “But yes, Ms. Gulbirra, I did indeed say that I was sorry for my blasphemies and my unbelief and I asked the good God for His pardon. I, who had been a violent atheist since the age of thirteen! I, who hated the fat, smug, oily, stinking, ignorant, hypocritical, parasitical priests! And their unfeeling, merciless, cruel God!

“But you do not know, you who lived in a freer and more permissive age, you do not know the horrors of hellfire, of eternal damnation! You cannot know what it was to have the fear of hell soaking you, drowning you! It was taught us from earliest childhood, ground into our flesh, our bones, our deepest mind!

“And so, when I knew for sure that I was dying from a combination of that filthy disease with the lovely bucolic name of syphilis and a blow on the head from that beam, fallen accidentally or dropped by an enemy of mine, and I who only wanted to love all mankind, and womankind, too… where was I?

“Ah, yes, knowing for sure that I was to die, and with the terrors of the devils and of eternal tortures swarming around me, I gave in to my sister, the toothless bitch and withered nun, and my good, too-good friend, Le Bret, and I said, yes, I repent, I will save my soul, and you may rejoice, dear sister, dear friend, I will probably go to purgatory, but you will pray me out of it, won’t you?

“Why not? I was frightened as I had never been in all my life, and yet, and yet, I did not wholly believe that I was destined for damnation. I had some reservations, believe me. But then, it could not hurt to repent. If Christ was indeed available for salvation, not costing a centime, mind you, and there was a heaven and a hell, then I would be a fool not to save my worthless skin and invaluable soul.

“On the other hand, if all was emptiness, nothingness, once one had died, what had I to lose? I would make my sister and that superstitious but kindhearted Le Bret happy.”

“He wrote a glowing panegyric of you after you died,” she said. “It was his preface to your Voyage to the Moon, which he edited two years after you died.”

“Ah! I hope he did not make me out to be a saint!” Cyrano cried.

“No, but he did give you a fine character, a noble if not quite saintly one. However, other writers… well, you must have had many enemies.”

“Who attempted to blacken my name and reputation after I was dead and couldn’t defend myself, the cowards, the pigs!”

“I don’t remember,” she said. “And it doesn’t actually matter now, does it? Besides, only scholars know the names of your detractors. Unfortunately, most people only know you as the romantic, bombastic, witty, pathetic, somewhat Don-Quixotish hero of a play by a Frenchman written in the late nineteenth century.

“There was a belief for a long time that you were insane by the time you had written The Voyage to the Moon and The Voyage to the Sun. That was because your books were so heavily censored. By the time the churchly Grundies had slashed your texts, much of it made no sense. But the text was eventually restored as much as possible, and by the time I was born, an unexpurgated text had been published in English.”

“I am happy to hear that! I knew from what Clemens and others said that I had become a literary Olympian, if not a Zeus at least a Ganymede, a cupbearer in the ranks of the exalted. But your sneering remark that I was superstitious hurt me very much, mademoiselle. It is true, as you observed, that I believed that the waning moon did suck up the marrow from the bones of animals. Now you say that that is sheer rot. Very well, I accept that. And I was wrong, along with millions of others of my time and God knows how many before my time.

“But this was a minuscule, a harmless error. What did it matter, what injury did it do to anyone, to have this misconception? The superstition, the grave error, that really harmed people, many millions of human beings, I assure you, was the stupid, barbarous belief in sorcery, in the ability of human beings to wreak evil through spells, chants, black cats, and the enlistment of devils as allies. I wrote a letter against that ignorant and vicious belief, that social system, rather. I contended that the grotesque legal sentences and the savagely cruel tortures and executions inflicted upon insane or innocent people in the name of God and the battle against Evil were themselves the essence of evil.

“Now, it is true that this letter I speak of, Against Sorcerers, was not published while I was alive. With good reason. I would have been tortured and burned alive. It was, however, circulated among my friends. It did show that I was not as you made me out to be. I was ahead of my time in many respects, though I was not, of course, the only person in that unhappy situation.”

“I know this,” she said. “And I apologized once. Would you have me do it again?”

“It is not necessary,” he said. His broad smile made him look handsome, or at least attractive, despite his large nose.

Jill picked up her grail by its handle and said, “Just about dinnertime.”

Jill knew something about the man called Odysseus, having heard occasional references. He had appeared without notice, seemingly from nowhere, when Clemens’ and King John’s forces were battling invaders who wanted to seize the meteorite ore. He had killed the enemy leader with a well-placed arrow, worked havoc among the other officers, and so had given the defenders the advantage they needed for victory.

Odysseus of Ithaca claimed to be the historical Odysseus on whom Homer’s mythical character was based. He was one of the host who had fought before the walls of Troy, though he stated that the real Troy was not where the scholars said it was. Its location was elsewhere, much farther south on the coast of Asia Minor.

Jill, first hearing about this, had not known whether to believe that the man was truly Odysseus or not. There were so many impostors on the Riverworld. But there was one thing that made her think that he might actually be the historical Ithacan. Why should he say that Troy VIIa, which even the archaeologists and Hellenists of her day had said was the true Ilion, was not the genuine site? Why would he claim that the historical Troy was someplace else?

Whatever the reason, he was no longer around. He had disappeared as mysteriously as he had appeared. Agents sent to track him down had failed. Firebrass had continued to search for him after Clemens left on the Mark Twain. One of the searchers, Jim Sorley, had finally found some trace of the Greek, though it showed only that he had not been murdered by John’s men.

Jill had wondered several times why Odysseus had volunteered to fight for Clemens’ side. Why would a stranger who had seemingly blundered onto the battle pick out one force and risk his life for it? What had he to gain, especially since it seemed that he had known none of the participants on either force? She had once asked Firebrass about this, and he had said that he just did not know. Sam Clemens might be able to enlighten her, but he had never volunteered a word on the subject.

Firebrass had added, “However, Odysseus may have been here for the same reason that Cyrano and I were. We wanted to get on the paddle wheeler so we could get to the polar sea.”

She thought it was strange that no one had thought of building a dirigible until shortly before the second Riverboat was completed. Why take decades traveling to the arctic region on a surface vessel when an airship could get there in a few days?

Firebrass said, grinning, “Just one of those mysteries of life. Man, pardon me, humanity, sometimes can’t see the nose on his own face. Then somebody comes along and holds up a mirror to him.”

“If mankind had a nose like mine,” Cyrano said, “he would never have that trouble.”

In this case the person with the mirror had been August von Parseval. On Earth he had been a major in the German Army, and he had also designed airships for a German company. His type of dirigible was used by both the German and the British governments between 1906 and 1914.

Shortly before the Mark Twain was ready to leave Parolando, von Parseval had come along. He was amazed that no one had suggested that a Luftschiff would be a faster means of transportation than a boat.

After Firebrass had mentally kicked himself for this oversight, he had hastened to Clemens, taking the German with him.

Surprisingly, Clemens said that he had long ago considered building a dirigible. After all, had he not written Tom Sawyer Abroad? Had not Tom, Jim, and Huckleberry traveled from Missouri to the Sahara in a balloon?

Amazed, Firebrass asked him why he had not mentioned this.

“Because I knew some all-fired fool would want to drop all the work on the boat faster than a burglar drops his tools when he sees a policeman! He’d want to abandon the Riverboat and put all work and materials into a flying machine!

“No, siree! This boat takes precedence over everything else, as Noah said when his wife wanted to knock off work to go to a rain dance.

“By the blazing balls of the Bull of Bashan, there’ll be no dirigible! It’s a chancy thing, a dangerous device. Why, I wouldn’t even be allowed to smoke a cigar on it, and if I can’t do that, what’s the use of living?”

Clemens gave additional objections, most of them more serious. Firebrass, however, perceived that Clemens was not going to voice his main reason. Getting to the tower was not genuinely important to Clemens. It was the voyage itself that mattered to him. To build the greatest Riverboat that had ever been built, to be its captain, its lord, to voyage for millions of kilometers in the splendid vessel, to be admired and adored and wondered at by billions, that was what Sam Clemens desired.

Moreover, he wanted revenge. He wanted to track and then to catch up with and destroy King John for having robbed him of his first boat, his first love, the Not For Hire.

It might take forty years to get from Parolando to the mountains that ringed the polar sea. Sam did not care. Not only would he be the revered owner and operator of the biggest and most beautiful Riverboat mankind had ever seen, he would be going on the longest voyage any vessel, bar none, had ever taken. Forty years? Put that in your pipe, Columbus, Magellan, and smoke it!

Also, he would be seeing and talking to hundreds of thousands. This delighted Sam, who was as curious about human beings as a housewife was about new neighbors.

If he went in an airship he would have no strangers to talk to.

Though Firebrass was as gregarious as a flock of ducks, he did not understand this attitude. He himself was too eager to solve the mystery of the tower. The key to all that puzzled humanity might be there.

He did not point out to Clemens what he believed to be his real reason for his objections to the airship. It would do no good. Sam would look him straight in the eye and deny everything.

However, Sam did know that he was in the wrong. And so, sixty days before the Mark Twain was to depart, he called Firebrass in.

“After I leave, you can build your highly inflammable folly, if you insist on it. Of course, that means you’ll have to resign as chief engineer of the most magnificent creation of man. But you must use the dirigible for observation only, as a scout.”

“Why?”

“Now how by the brass balls of burning Baal could it be used for anything else but that? It can’t land on the tower or anyplace else, can it? According to Joe Miller, the mountains are sheer and there’s no beach. And…”

“How would Joe know there’s no beach? The sea was covered by fog. All he saw was the upper part of the tower.”

Sam had puffed smoke that looked like angry dragons. “It stands to reason the people that made that sea wouldn’t make a beach. Would they make a place from which invaders could launch a boat? Of course not.

“Anyway, what I want you to do is to find out the lay of the land. See if there’s a passage through the mountains other than what Joe described. Find out if the tower can be entered otherwise than by the roof.”

Firebrass had not argued. He would do what he wished to do when he got to the pole. Clemens would have no control of him then.

“I took off then, happy as a dog that’s rid of his fleas. I told von Parseval about Sam’s decision, and we had a big celebration. But two months later poor old August was swallowed by a dragonfish. I barely missed going down its gullet with him.”

At this point in his story, Firebrass revealed a secret to Jill.

“You must swear by your honor not to tell anyone else. I wouldn’t be telling you, except that the boat is long gone, and there’s no way you could get the information to King John. Not that you would, of course.”

“I promise to keep it to myself—whatever it is.”

“Well… one of our engineers was a California scientist. He knew how to make a laser with a range of 404 meters. Within that distance, it could slice the Rex in two. And we had just enough materials to make one. So Sam had it done.

“It was a highly secret project, so secret that there are only six men on the Mark Twain who know of its existence. The laser is concealed in a compartment known only to these six, of whom Sam is one, of course. Even his buddy, Joey, doesn’t know about it.

“When the Mark Twain catches up with the Rex, the laser will be brought out and mounted on a tripod. The battle ought to be short and sweet. Sweet for Sam, bitterly short for John. It’ll also cut down the casualties tremendously for both sides.

“I was in on the secret because I was one of the engineers on the project. Before it was completed, I asked Sam if it could be left behind. I wanted to take it on the airship and use it to burn an entrance into the tower if we could not get in otherwise.

“But Sam flat out refused. He said that if anything happened to the airship, the laser would be lost. I wouldn’t be able to return it to the Mark Twain. I argued like mad, but I lost. And Sam did have a strong point. There’s no way of knowing what dangers we’ll run into, meteorological or otherwise.

“However, it was very frustrating.”

Jill was about to ask him if he had not sent scouts out to look for materials to make another laser. At that moment Firebrass’ secretary knocked at the door. Would Mr. Firebrass see Piscator?

Firebrass said he would. The Japanese entered and, after inquiring about their health, said that he had good news. The engineers making the synthetic diesel-oil fuel would be able to deliver the first supply a week ahead of time.

“That’s great!” Firebrass said. He grinned at Jill. “That means you can take the Minerva up tomorrow! Start the training seven days ahead of schedule! Fabulous!”

Jill felt even happier.

Firebrass proposed a drink to celebrate. The skull-bloom had no sooner been poured, however, than the secretary entered again.

Smiling broadly, she said, “I wouldn’t interrupt if it weren’t so important. I think we’ve got a new airshipman for you, one with much experience. He just got here a few minutes ago.”

Jill’s near-ecstasy whistled out of her, like gas from a ruptured cell. Her chest seemed to be caving in on her. So far, she had seemed to have the post of first mate secured. But here was a person who might have as much, or even more, experience than she. A male, of course. He might even be an officer of the Graf Zeppelin or the Hindenburg. A veteran of the large rigid dirigibles would have more clout, in Firebrass’ estimation, than one with only blimp experience.

Her heart beating hard, she looked at the man who followed the secretary into the office. She did not recognize him, but that meant little. There were scores of airship personnel of her day and of the pre-Hindenburg era whose photographs she had not seen. Besides, those pictures had been of middle-aged men who wore civilian clothes or uniforms. And many of them had facial hair.

“Chief Firebrass,” Agatha Rennick said. “Barry Thorn.”

The newcomer wore fish-skin sandals, a bright red-, white-, and blue-striped kilt, and a long black cloth fastened at the throat. The handle of his grail was in one hand and the neck of a large fish-skin bag in the other.

He stood about 1.7 meters tall, and his shoulders seemed to be almost half that wide. His physique was massive, irresistibly evoking to Jill the image of a bull. Yet his legs, though thickly muscled, were long in proportion to his trunk. His chest and arms were gorillalike, but he had almost no pectoral hair.

Short, curly yellow hair framed a broad face. The eyebrows were straw colored; the eyes, a dark blue. His nose was long and straight. The lips were full. Smiling, he revealed very white teeth. The jaw was thick, ending in a prominent rounded, deeply cleft chin. The ears were small and close to his head.

At Firebrass’ invitation he put down the grail and bag. He flexed his fingers as if they had been carrying a load for a long time. Probably, though, he had been paddling a canoe for a long distance. Despite the broadness of his hands, the fingers were long and slim.

He seemed very much at ease despite being with strangers and facing an interview on his qualifications. In fact, he radiated a well-being and a magnetism that inevitably made Jill think of that much overused and often inappropriate word “charisma.”

Later, she would find that he had a curious gift of being able to shut that off as if it were light from a lamp. Then, despite his obvious physical qualities, he seemed almost to become one with his background. A psychic chameleon.

Jill, glancing at Piscator, saw that he was intensely curious about the stranger. His black eyes were narrowed, and his head was cocked slightly to one side, as if he were listening to some soft, faraway sound.

Firebrass shook hands with Thorn.

“Wow! What a grip! Glad to have you aboard, sir, if you are what Agatha claims you are. Sit down, take a load off your feet. Have you traveled a long way? You have? Forty thousand stones? Would you care for food? Coffee? Tea? Booze or beer?”

Thorn declined everything except the chair. He spoke in a very pleasant baritone without the usual pauses, hesitations, and incomplete phrases that distinguished the speech of most people.

Finding that Thorn was a Canadian, Firebrass switched from Esperanto to English. In a few minutes of questioning, he got a capsule biography of the newcomer.

Barry Thorn was born in 1920 on his parents’ farm outside Regina, Saskatchewan. After getting a degree in electromechanical engineering in 1938, he enlisted in the British Navy while in England. During the war, he was the commander of a naval blimp. He married an American girl and after the war went to the States to live because his wife, an Ohioan who wanted to be close to her parents, had insisted. Besides, the opportunities were better there for blimp pilots.

He picked up a commercial pilot’s license also, intending to work for the American airlines. But after his divorce he quit Goodyear and became a bush pilot for several years in the Yukon. Then he had returned to Goodyear and married again. After his second wife died, he had gotten a job with a newly formed British–West German airship company. For some years he had captained a great blimp-tug which towed floating containers of natural gas from the Middle East to Europe.

Jill asked him a few questions in the hope that his answers would jog her memory. She had known a few airshipmen at Thorn’s company, and some of these might have mentioned him. He replied that he remembered one of them—he thought. He wasn’t sure because that had been so long ago.

He had died in 1983 while on leave in Friedrichshafen. He did not know the cause of his death. Heart failure, probably. He had gone to sleep one night and when he had awakened he was lying naked on a bank of The River—along with everybody else.

Since then he had been wandering up and down the Valley. One day, hearing a rumor that a giant dirigible was being built downRiver, he had decided to find out for himself if the tale was true.

Firebrass, beaming, said, “This is luck! You’re more than welcome, Barry. Agatha, will you make arrangements to house Mr. Thorn?”

Thorn shook hands with everybody and left. Firebrass almost danced with delight. “We’re coming along famously.”

Jill said, “Does this change my situation?”

Firebrass looked surprised. “No. I said you’d be the head instructor and captain of the Minerva. Firebrass always keeps his promises. Well, almost always.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking. I made no promises about who’ll be the first mate of the Parseval. You’re a strong contender for the post, Jill. But it’s too early to decide on that. All I can say is, ‘May the best man win. Or the best woman.’”

Piscator patted her hand. At another time, she would have resented the gesture. Now, she felt warmed.

Later, after they had left the office, Piscator said, “I am not certain that Thorn is telling the truth. Not all of it, anyway. His story may be true as far as it goes, but there’s something that rings falsely in his voice. He could be concealing something.”

“Sometimes you frighten me,” she said.

“I could be wrong about him.”

Jill got the impression that he did not believe that.

Each day, before dawn, the Minerva lifted for a training flight. Sometimes it stayed aloft until an hour after noon. Sometimes it cruised all day, landing at evening. For the first week, Jill was its only pilot. Then she let each of the trainee pilots and the control gondola officers handle the controls.

Barry Thorn did not enter the blimp until four weeks after aerial training started. Jill insisted that he attend ground school first. Though he was experienced, he had not been in an airship for thirty-two years and it could be presumed that he had forgotten much. Thorn did not object.

She watched him closely while he was in the pilot’s seat. Whatever Piscator’s suspicions of him, Thorn handled the ship as if he had been doing it steadily for years. Nor was he any less competent at navigation or at dealing with the simulated emergencies which were part of the training.

Jill felt disappointed. She had hoped that he was not all he claimed to be. Now she knew that he was the stuff from which captains could be made.

Thorn was, however, a strange man. He seemed at ease with everybody and he could appreciate a joke as much as anybody. Yet he never cracked one himself, and off duty he kept to himself. Though he was given a hut only 20 meters from Jill’s, he never dropped in on her or invited her to visit him. In a way, this was a relief to Jill, since she did not have to worry about advances from him. Inasmuch as he made no effort to get a woman to move in with him, he could have been homosexual. But he also did not seem interested, sexually or otherwise, in either gender. He was a loner, though, when he wished, he could open up and be very charming. Then suddenly his personality would close like a fist, and he became pale neutral, almost a living statue.

The entire potential crew of the Parseval was under intense surveillance. Each had to undergo psychological tests for stability. Thorn passed both the observation and the tests as if he had made them up himself.

“Just because he’s a little odd in his social life doesn’t mean he isn’t a first-class aeronaut,” Firebrass said. “It’s what a man does when he’s aloft that counts.”

Firebrass and de Bergerac proved to be natural dirigible pilots. This was not surprising in the American’s case, since he had many thousands of hours in jet planes, helicopters, and spacecraft. The Frenchman, however, came from a time when not even balloons had existed, though they had been envisioned. The most complicated mechanical device he had handled then were matchlock, wheel-lock, and flintlock pistols. He had been too poor to afford a watch, which, in any case, required the owner only to wind it.

Nevertheless, he quickly absorbed the instruction in ground school and aerial flight, nor did he have much trouble with the necessary mathematics.

Firebrass was very good, but de Bergerac was the best pilot of all. Jill reluctantly admitted that to herself. The Frenchman’s reactions and judgment were almost computer-swift.

Another surprising candidate was John de Greystock. This medieval baron had volunteered to be a part of the crew that would man the semirigid Minerva when it attacked the Rex. Jill had been skeptical about his ability to adapt to aerial flight. But, after three months of flight, he was considered by both Firebrass and Gulbirra to be the best qualified to command the ship. He was combat wise, ruthless, and utterly courageous. And he hated King John. Having been wounded and thrown overboard by John’s men when the Not For Hire was highjacked, he lusted for revenge.

Jill had come to Parolando near the end of the month called Dektria (Thirteenth in English). Parolando had adopted a thirteen-month calendar since this planet had neither season nor moon. There was no reason except sentiment to keep the year at 365 days, but sentiment was good enough. Each month was made of four seven-day weeks, twenty-eight days in all. Since twelve months only made 336 days, an extra month had been added. This left one day extra, which was generally termed New Year’s Eve Day, Last Day, or Blow-Your-Top Day. Jill had landed three days before this in 31 A.R.D.

Now it was January of 33 A.R.D., and though work on the big airship had started, it would be almost another year before it was ready for the polar flight. This was partly due to the inevitable unforeseen difficulties and partly due to Firebrass’ grandiose ideas. These had caused many revisions of the original plans.

As of now, the crew had been chosen, but the appointment of the officers had not been determined. As far as she was concerned, the list was fairly definite—except for the posts of first and second mate. One would go to Thorn and the other to herself. This had not caused her much anxiety—except in her dreams—since Thorn did not seem to care which position he got.

On this Wednesday of January or First-Month, she was happy. The work on the Parseval was going so well that she decided to quit early. She’d get her fishing pole and cast for some of the “chub” in the little lake near her hut. As she climbed the first of the hills, she saw Piscator. He was also carrying fishing tackle and a wickerwork basket.

She called to him, and he turned but did not give her his usual smile in greeting.

“You look as if you’ve got something on your mind,” she said.

“I do, but it is not my problem, except that it concerns one whom I like to think is my friend.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said.

“I think I do. It concerns you.”

She stopped. “What’s the matter?”

“I just learned from Firebrass that the psychological evaluation tests were not finished. There is one more to go, and every one of the flight crew will have to take it.”

“Is that something I should worry about?”

He nodded. “The test involves deep hypnosis. It’s designed to probe for any residue of instability which previous tests might have overlooked.”

“Yes, but I…”

She paused again.

“I’m afraid that it might disclose these… ah… hallucinations that have disturbed you from time to time.”

She felt faint. For a moment, the world around her seemed to dim. Piscator held her elbow and her arm to support her.

“I am sorry, but I thought it best that you be prepared.”

She pulled away, saying, “I’m all right.”

Then, “Godalmighty! I’ve had no trouble with those for eight months! I’ve had no dreamgum since that time you found me in the hut, and I’m sure that any residual effects are gone. Furthermore, I’ve never had those hallucinations except late at night when I was home. You don’t really think that Firebrass would eliminate me, do you? He doesn’t have enough reason to do so!”

“I don’t know,” Piscator said. “Perhaps the hypnosis might not uncover these attacks. In any event, if you will forgive me for trying to influence you, I think that you should go to Firebrass and tell him about your troubles. Do so before the tests are made.”

“What good would that do?”

“If he finds out that you have been holding back on him, he probably would discharge you immediately. But if you are candid, confess before you get official word of the test, he might listen to your side of the case. I myself do not think that you are any danger to the welfare of the ship. But my opinion doesn’t count.”

“I won’t beg!”

“That wouldn’t influence him anyway—except negatively.”

She breathed deeply and looked around, as if there might be an escape route to another world nearby. She had been so sure, so happy only a moment ago.

“Very well. There’s no use putting it off.”

“That’s courageous,” he said. “And commonsensical. I wish you luck.”

“See you later,” she said, and she strode off, her jaw set.

Nevertheless, by the time she had climbed the stairs to the second story, where Firebrass’ apartment was, she was breathing hard, not from poor physical condition but from anxiety.

Firebrass’ secretary had told her that he had gone to his suite. She was surprised at this but did not ask Agatha why he had quit work so early. Perhaps he, too, felt like relaxing.

The door to his apartment was halfway down the hall. Before it stood the bodyguard that usually accompanied him. Two assassination attempts in the last six months had made this necessary. The would-be killers had been slain themselves and thus could give no information. No one knew for certain, but it was believed that a ruler of a hostile state downRiver had sent the men. He had made no bones about his desire to get hold of Parolando’s mineral wealth and marvelous machines and weapons. It was possible that he had hoped that, if he removed Firebrass, he might be able to invade Parolando. But this was all speculation by Firebrass.

Jill walked up to the ensign in command of four heavily armed men.

“I’d like to talk to the chief.”

The ensign, Smithers, said, “Sorry. He gave orders he wasn’t to be disturbed.”

“Why not?”

Smithers looked curiously at her. “I wouldn’t know, sir.”

Anger caused by her fear overcame her.

“I suppose he has a woman in there!”

The ensign said, “No, not that that is any of your business, sir.”

He grinned maliciously and said, “He’s got a visitor. A newcomer named Fritz Stern. He just got here an hour ago. He’s a German, and, from what I heard, a hotshot Zeppelin man. I heard him tell the captain he was a commander for NDELAG, whatever that means. But he’s got more flight time than you.”

Jill had to restrain herself from hitting him in his teeth. She knew that Smithers had never liked her, and no doubt he enjoyed needling her.

“NDELAG,” she said, hating herself because her voice was trembling. “That could be Neue Deutsche Luftshifffahrts-Aktien-Gesellschaft.”

Now her voice seemed to be coming from far away, from someone else. “There was a Zeppelin line called DELAG in the days before World War I. It carried passengers and freight in Germany. But I never heard of an NDELAG.”

“That would be because it was formed after you died,” Smithers said. He grinned, enjoying her obvious distress. “I did hear him tell the captain that he graduated from the Friedrichshafen academy in 1984. He said he ended his career as commander of a super-Zeppelin named Viktoria.”

She felt sick. First Thorn and now Stern.

There was no use staying here. She squared her shoulders and said, in a firm voice, “I’ll see him later.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” Smithers said, grinning.

Jill turned away to go back down the stairs.

She whirled around as a door banged and somebody shouted. A man had run out of Firebrass’ apartment and slammed the door behind him.

He stood for several seconds, frozen, facing the guards. These were pulling their heavy pistols from their holster. Smithers had his sword halfway from its sheath.

The man was as tall as she. He had a beautiful physique, broad shouldered, slim waisted, long legged. His face was handsome but rugged; his hair, wavy ash blond; his eyes, large and dark blue. But his skin was unhealthily pale and blood was flowing from a wound on the shoulder. He held a bloodied dagger in his left hand. Then the door opened, and Firebrass, a rapier in his hand, appeared. His face was twisted, and his forehead bled.

The ensign shouted, “Stern!”

Stern whirled and ran down the hall. There was no stairway at its end, only a tall window. Smithers cried, “Don’t fire, men! He can’t get away!”

“He can if he goes through the window!” Jill screamed.

At the end of the hall, Stern leaped with a shout, whirling so that his back would strike the plastic and holding an arm over his face.

The window refused to give way. Stern hit it with a thud and bounced back, falling flat with another thud on his face. He lay there while Firebrass, the ensign, and the guards behind him, ran toward Stern.

Jill followed them a second later.

Before the group could reach him, Stern got to his feet. He stared at the men racing toward him, looked at the dagger, which he had dropped on the floor when he had hit the window. Then he closed his eyes and crumpled to the floor.

By the time Jill got there, Firebrass was feeling the man’s pulse.

“He’s dead!”

“What happened, sir?” the ensign said.

Firebrass stood up.

“I wish I could say why it happened. All I can tell you is what happened. We were getting along fine, drinking and smoking, joking, and he was giving me the details of his professional career. Everything was A-okay. And then all of a sudden he leaps up, pulls a dagger, and tries to stab me!

“He must have gone crazy, although he seemed quite rational until the moment he attacked. Something went wrong in him. Otherwise, why would he drop dead of a heart attack?”

Jill said, “A heart attack? I haven’t ever heard of anyone having a heart attack here. Have you?”

Firebrass shrugged and said, “There’s always a first time. After all, the resurrections have stopped, too.”

“He looks bloody cyanotic for a heart attack,” Jill said. “Could he have swallowed a poison? I didn’t see him put anything in his mouth.”

“Where would he get cyanide or prussic acid or any poison except here in Parolando?” Firebrass said. “He hasn’t been here long enough to do that.”

He looked at Smithers. “Wrap up the body and take it into one of my bedrooms. Take it out after midnight and drop it into The River. The dragonfish can have him.”

“Yes, sir,” Smithers said. “What about that cut on your forehead, sir? Should I get a doctor?”

“No, I’ll patch it up myself. And not a word about this to anybody. Have you got that, all of you? You, too, Jill. Not a word. I don’t want to upset the citizens.”

They all nodded. Smithers said, “Do you suppose that that bastard Burr sent this man, too?”

“I don’t know,” Firebrass said. “Or care. I just want you to get rid of him, okay?”

He turned to Jill. “What’re you doing here?”

“I had something important to talk about,” she said. “But I’ll do it later. You’re in no condition to talk.”

“Nonsense!” he said, grinning. “Sure I am. You don’t think this is going to shake me up, do you? Come on in, Jill, and we’ll talk after I fix up this scratch.”

Jill sat down in an overstuffed chair in the living room of the luxurious suite. Firebrass disappeared into the bathroom, returning after a few minutes with a white tape slanting across his forehead.

Smiling cheerily as if this were a typical day, he said, “What about a drink? It might settle your nerves.”

“My nerves?”

“Okay. Both our nerves. I’ll admit I’m a little shaken up. I’m no superman, no matter what people say about me.”

He poured purplish skull-bloom into two tall glasses half-filled with ice cubes. Neither the ice nor the glasses, like the Band-Aid, were available anywhere but in Parolando—as far as she knew.

For a minute they sipped on the cool, tangy drink, their eyes meeting but neither saying a word. Then Firebrass said, “Okay. Enough of the social amenities. What did you want to see me about?”

She could scarcely get the words out. They seemed to jam in her throat, then come tumbling out, broken by the pressure.

After pausing to take a long drink, she continued more slowly and smoothly. Firebrass did not interrupt but sat immobile, his brown eyes, flecked with green, intent on hers.

“So,” she finished, “there you are. I had to tell you about this, but it’s the hardest thing I ever did.”

“Why did you finally decide to spill it? Was it because you heard about the hypnosis?”

For a second, she thought of lying, Piscator would not betray her, and she would look so much better if she had not been forced to admit the truth.

“Yes. I heard about it. But I’d been thinking for some time that I should tell you about it. It was just… it was just that I couldn’t bear the thought of being left behind. And I really don’t think I’m a danger to the ship.”

“It would be bad if you had an attack during a crucial moment of flight. You know that, of course. Well, here’s the way I look at it, Jill. Barring Thorn, you’re the best airshipman—I mean, person—that we have. Unlike Thorn, who was a keen airman but doesn’t make aeronauting his whole life, you’re a fanatic. I honestly think you’d pass up a roll in the hay for an hour’s flight. Myself, I’d try to combine both.

“I wouldn’t want to lose you, and if I had to, I’d worry about your killing yourself. No, don’t protest, I really think you would. Which makes you unbalanced in that respect. However, I have to consider the welfare of ship and crew first, so I’d discharge you if I had to, no matter how much it would grieve me.

“So I’m putting you on probation. If you don’t have another attack or hallucination from now until the ship takes off for the big voyage, then you’ll be in.

“The only trouble with this is that I’ll have to depend on your word for it that you’ve not had an attack. Well, not really. I could put you under hypnosis to find out if you’ve been telling the truth. But I don’t like to do that. It’d mean I don’t trust you. I don’t want anybody on the ship I can’t trust one hundred percent.”

Jill felt like running over to him and throwing her arms around him. Her eyes filmed, and she almost sobbed with joy. But she stayed in her chair. An officer did not embrace the captain. Besides, he might misinterpret her behavior and try to take her into his bedroom.

She felt ashamed of herself. Firebrass would never take advantage of any woman. He would scorn using his influence. At least, she thought he would.

“I don’t understand about hypnosis,” she said. “How could you make all the others go through with it but omit me? That’s discrimination which the others…”

“I’ve changed my mind about that.”

He got up and walked to a rolltop desk, bent over it to write on a piece of paper, and then gave it to her.

“Here. Take this down to Doc Graves. He’ll take an X-ray of you.”

She was bewildered. “Whatever on earth for?”

“As your captain I could tell you to shut up and obey my order. I won’t because you’d be resentful. Let’s just say it’s something the psychologists learned in 2000 A.D. It would defeat the purpose of the test if I told you what it was all about.

“Everybody else will have to be x-rayed, too. You have the honor of being the first.”

“I don’t understand,” she murmured. “But I’ll do it, of course.”

She rose. “Thank you.”

“No thanks necessary. Now get your tail down to Doc Graves.”

When she arrived at the doctor’s office, she found him talking on the phone. He was frowning and chewing his cigar savagely.

“All right, Milt. I’ll do it. But I don’t like it that you won’t confide in me.”

He hung the phone up and turned to her. “Hello, Jill. You’ll have to wait until Ensign Smithers gets here. He’ll pick up the X-ray photos as soon as they’re made and run them up to Firebrass.”

“He has a darkroom?”

“No. They don’t need developing. Didn’t you know? They’re just like other photographs, electronically processed at the moment they’re taken. Firebrass himself designed the equipment. It’s a process developed about 1998, he said.”

Graves began striding back and forth, biting hard on the cigar.

“Damn it! He won’t even let me see the X-rays! Why?”

“He said he didn’t want anyone but himself to see the X-rays. It’s part of the psychological evaluation tests.”

“How in the hell could X-rays of the head tell you anything about a man’s psyche? Is he nuts?”

“I suppose he’ll tell us all about it when he’s seen all the photos. By the way, speaking of a man’s psyche, I’m not a man.”

“I was speaking in the abstract.”

He stopped and scowled even more fiercely. “I won’t be able to sleep nights worrying about this. Man, I wish I’d lived longer. I shuffled off this mortal coil in 1980, so I didn’t get to see the later developments in medical science. Just as well, I suppose. I couldn’t keep up with the deluge of new stuff as it was.”

Turning to Jill, and stabbing the cigar at her, he said, “Something I’d like to ask you, Jill. Something that’s been bothering me. Firebrass is the only one I’ve ever met who lived beyond 1983. Have you ever met anyone who did?”

She blinked with surprise. “No-o-o. No, I haven’t, now I think about it. Firebrass excepted.”

For a moment, she had been about to tell him about Stern. That was going to be a hard secret to keep.

“Neither have I. Damn peculiar.”

“Not really,” she said. “Of course, I haven’t been all over The River, but I have traveled several hundred thousand kilometers and talked to thousands of people. The twentieth-century people seem to have been scattered thinly everywhere. If they were resurrected in clumps, as it were, I never heard of any. So that means that anywhere in the Valley you’ll likely find a few, but most of the population segments will be from other centuries.

“So there’s nothing remarkable in the rarity of people born after 1983.”

“Yeah? Maybe so. Ah, here comes Smithers and two other thugs. Step into my X-rated parlor, my dear, as the spider said to the fly.”

Extracts from various editions of The Daily Leak:

Dmitri “Mitya” Ivanovitch Nikitin is pro tempore pilot third officer of the Parseval. He was born in 1885 in Gomel, Russia, of middle-class parents. His father was a harness-factory owner; his mother taught piano. His qualifications for candidacy were based on his experience as chief steersman of the Russie, a French airship built by the Lebaudy-Juillot Company in 1909 for the Russian government.

Ms. Jill Gulbirra, chief airship instructor, says that Mitya’s experience was rather limited from her viewpoint, but he has shown excellent ability. However, according to rumors, he is too fond of skull-bloom. Take a tip from us, Mitya. Lay off the booze.

… Charges will not be brought by the editor against Pilot Nikitin. During a necessarily brief interview in the hospital, Mr. Bagg said, “I’ve been laid out by better men than that big slob. The next time he comes charging into my office, I’ll be prepared. The reason I’m not having him arrested isn’t just because I have a big heart, however. I just want a chance to personally knock his brains out. Speak softly and carry a big stick.”

… Ettore Arduino is Italian (what else?), but he is blond and blue-eyed and can pass for a Swede as long as he keeps his mouth shut and doesn’t eat garlic. As all but new citizens know, he entered Parolando two months ago and was immediately signed up for training. He has an illustrious though tragic history, having been chief motor engineer on the airship Norge and then on the Italia under Umberto Nobile. (See page 6 for a minibiography of this son of Rome.) The Norge accomplished its primary mission to fly over the North Pole on May 12, 1926. It also established that there was no large land mass between the North Pole and Alaska as reported by that great explorer, Commodore Robert E. Peary (1856–1920), the first man to reach the North Pole (1909). (Though Peary was accompanied by a Negro, Matthew Henson, and four Eskimos whose names we don’t remember, actually Henson was the first man to stand on the North Pole.)

The Italia, after passing over the Pole, found itself bucking a very strong headwind on its way to King’s Bay. The controls jammed from heavy icing; a crash seemed assured. However, the ice melted, and the airship proceeded. Some time later, the vessel began to fall slowly. The helpless crew was forced to stand by while the queen of the skies struck the surface ice. The control gondola was torn off, a fortuitous event for those in it. These scrambled out and then looked up in shock as the dirigible, freed of the weight of the gondola, rose again.

Ettore Arduino was last seen standing on the gangway to the starboard engine gondola. As reported by a crew member, Dr. Francis Behounek of the Wireless Institute of Prague, Czechoslovakia, Arduino’s face was a mask of utter disbelief. The Italia floated away, and nothing of it or the men still aboard was ever seen again. On Earth, that is.

Arduino relates that he perished of the cold after the Italia fell for the second and last time on the ice. His complete account of this horrendous experience will be printed in next Thursday’s issue. After this blood-chilling event, no reasonable person could expect Ettore to volunteer again for airship travel. But he is undaunted by this and expresses eagerness for another polar expedition. We don’t care what people say about Italians, and we have nothing but contempt for the attitude prevalent in Tombstone, where it was stated as a fact that all wops were yellow. We personally know that they have more guts than brains, and we are sure that Ettore will be a shining adornment to the crew.

… last seen paddling desperately toward the middle of The River while Mr. Arduino fired shots at him with the new Mark IV pistol. Either this weapon is not what it’s cracked up to be, or Mr. Arduino’s marksmanship was below normal that day.

… your new editor accepts the suggestion of President Firebrass that this journal temper the privilege of free speech with discretion.

… Mr. Arduino was released after promising that he would no longer settle grievances, justified or unjustified, by violent means. The newly created Board of Civil Disputes will handle such matters from now on with President Firebrass as the court of last appeal. Though we will miss S.C. Bagg, we must confess that…

… Metzing had been chief of the Naval Airship Division of Imperial Germany in 1913. He was Korvettenkapitan of the Zeppelin L-1 when it went down on September 9, 1913, during maneuvers. This was the first naval Zeppelin to be lost. The crash was not due to any deficiency on the part of crew or vessel but to the ignorance at that time of meteorological conditions in the upper air. In other words, weather forecasting was then a primitive science. A violent line squall lifted the L-1 up past her pressure height and then dashed her down. With propellers still spinning and ballast ejecting, the ship smashed into the sea off Heligoland. Metzing died with most of his crew… We welcome this experienced officer and likable gentleman to Parolando but hope he brings no bad luck with him.

… Flash! Just arrived! Another airship veteran, Anna Karlovna Obrenova from upRiver some 40,000 kilometers. In the brief interview allowed before Ms. Obrenova was taken to President Firebrass’ HQ, we learned that she had been captain of the USSR freighter-dirigible Lermontov, logging 8584 hours of flight time in this and other airships. This exceeds Ms. Gulbirra’s 8342 hours and Mr. Thorn’s 8452 hours. A complete account of Obrenova should be in tomorrow’s issue. All we can say at the moment is that she is a peach, a real pipperoo!

It was funny, though not laughing-funny.

She had been worried that a man with more airtime than herself would show up. One had, but he had not been aggressive. His only ambition was to be on the ship, and he did not seem to care what rank he got.

Somehow, she had never thought of being displaced by a woman. There were so few female officers in her time. And so few people who had lived past 1983 had come by—only one, in fact—that she had not worried about dirigibilists of that era. From what Firebrass said, post-1983 had been the great age of the large rigid airships. But the odds against aeronauts of that era showing were high.

Chance had thrown its dice, and so here was Obrenova, a woman who had 860 hours flight time as captain of a giant Soviet airship.

So far, the officers’ positions had not been announced. No matter. Jill knew that the little blond newcomer would be first mate. Realistically, she should be. If Jill were in Firebrass’ place, she would have had to appoint Obrenova as first mate.

On the other hand, there were only two months left before the Parseval took off for the polar voyage. The Russian might need more retraining than that. After thirty-four years of ground life, she would be rusty. She would have a month reacquainting herself with the gasbags in the Minerva. Then she would have a month of training in the big ship with everybody else.

Could she do it? Of course, she could. Jill would have been able to do it in that time.

She had been in the conference room with the officer candidates when Anna Obrenova was brought in by Agatha. On seeing her, Jill’s heart had seemed to turn over like a sluggish motor. Before she heard Agatha’s excited announcement of the newcomer’s identity, she had known what it would be.

Anna Obrenova was short and slim but long legged and full breasted. She had long, shining yellow hair and large, dark blue eyes, a heart-shaped face, high cheekbones, a cupid’s-bow mouth, and a deep tan. She was, to quote another newspaper article, a “beaut.”

Disgustingly delicate and feminine. Unfairly so.

Just the type that men simultaneously wanted to protect and to bed.

Firebrass was on his feet, advancing toward her, his face aglow, his eyes seeming to drip male hormones.

But it was Thorn’s reaction that surprised Jill. On seeing Obrenova enter, he had jumped to his feet and opened his mouth, closed it, opened it, then closed it again. His ruddy skin was pale.

“Do you know her?” Jill said softly.

He sat down and covered his face with his hands for a moment.

When he took them away, he said, “No! For a second I thought I did! She looks so much like my first wife! I still can’t believe it.”

Thorn remained shaking in his chair while others crowded around Obrenova. Not until the others had been introduced did he get up and shake her hand. He told her then how remarkably she resembled his wife. She smiled—“dazzlingly” was a cliché, but it was the only adverb appropriate—and she said, in heavily accented English, “Did you love your wife?”

That was a strange thing to say. Thorn stepped back a pace and said, “Yes, very much. But she left me.”

“I am sorry,” Obrenova said, and they did not exchange another word while in the room.

Firebrass sat her down and offered her food, cigarettes, and liquor. She accepted the former but declined the rest.

“Does that mean you have no vices?” Firebrass said. “I was hoping you’d have at least one.”

Obrenova ignored this. Firebrass shrugged and began questioning her. Jill got depressed while listening to the account of her experience. She had been born in Smolensk in 1970, had been educated as an aeronautical engineer, and in 1984 had become an airship trainee. In 2001 she had been made captain of the passenger freighter Lermontov.

Finally, Firebrass said that she must be tired. She should go with Agatha, who’d find quarters for her.

“Preferably in this building,” he said.

Agatha replied that no rooms were available. She would have to be satisfied with a hut near those of Ms. Gulbirra and Mr. Thorn.

Firebrass, looking disappointed, said, “Well, maybe we can find a place here for her later. Meantime, I’ll go with you, Anna, and make sure you’re not given a dump.”

Jill felt even lower. How could she expect objectivity from him, when he was so obviously smitten by the Russian?

For a while, she indulged in some fantasies. How about abducting the little Russian and tying her up in a hidden place just before the Parseval was to take off? Firebrass would not hold up the flight until she was found. Jill Gulbirra would then become first mate.

If she could do that to Obrenova, why not to Firebrass? Then she would be the captain.

The images evoked were pleasing, but she could not do that to anyone, no matter how strongly she felt. To violate their human rights and dignities would be to violate, to destroy herself.

During the week that followed she sometimes beat her fists on the table or wept. Or both. The next week she told herself that she was being immature. Accept what was unavoidable and enjoy what was left. Was it so important that she should finally be captain of an airship?

To her, yes. To anyone else in the world, no.

So she swallowed her resentment and disgust.

Piscator must have known how she felt. Frequently, she caught him looking at her. He would smile or else just look away. But he knew, he knew!

Six months passed. Firebrass gave up trying to get Obrenova to move into his apartment. He made no secret of his desire nor did he hide the fact that she had finally rejected him.

“You win some, you lose some,” he said to Jill with a wry smile. “Maybe she doesn’t go for men. I know a score or more who’ve been panting for her, and she’s as cool to them as if she were the Venus de Milo.”

“I’m sure she isn’t a lesbian,” Jill said.

“Takes one to know one, heh? Haw, haw!”

“Damn it, you know I’m ambivalent,” she said angrily, and she walked away.

“Indecisive is the right word!” he had shouted after her.

At that time Jill was living with Abel Park, a tall, muscular, handsome, and intelligent man. He was a Rivertad, one of the many millions of children who had died on Earth after the age of five. Abel did not remember what country he had been born in or what his native language had been. Though resurrected in an area the majority of whom were medieval Hindus, he had been adopted and raised by a Scots couple. These were eighteenth-century Lowlanders of peasant origin. Despite his poverty, the foster father had managed to become a medical doctor in Edinburgh.

Abel had left his area after his parents had been killed and had wandered downRiver until he came to Parolando. Jill had liked him very much and had asked him to be her hutmate. The big fellow had gladly moved in, and they had had some idyllic months. But, though he was intelligent, he was ignorant. Jill taught him everything she could; history, philosophy, poetry, and even some arithmetic. He was eager to learn, but eventually he accused her of patronizing him.

Shocked, Jill had denied this.

“I just want to educate you, to give you knowledge denied you because you died so early.”

“Yes, but you get so impatient. You keep forgetting that I don’t have your background. Things which seem simple to you, because you were raised among them, are bewildering to me. I don’t have your referents.”

He had paused, then said, “You’re a knowledge-chauvinist. In short, a… what’s the word?… a snob.”

Jill was even more shocked. She denied this, too, though reflection showed her that he was perhaps right. By then it was too late to make reparations. He had left her for another woman.

She consoled herself by telling herself that he was too used to the idea of the man being the boss. He found it difficult to accept her as an equal.

Later, she realized that that was only partly true. Actually, she had, deep down, a contempt for him because he was not, and never would be, her mental equal. That had been an unconscious attitude, and now that she was aware of it, she regretted having it. In fact, she felt ashamed of it.

After that, she made no effort to have anything but the most impermanent liaisons. Her partners were men and women who, like her, wanted only sexual satisfaction. Usually, she and they got it, but she always felt frustrated afterward. She needed a genuine affection and companionship.

Obrenova and Thorn, she observed, must be doing the same thing as she. At least, no one moved into their huts. For that matter, though, she never observed them taking any interest in anybody which could be interpreted as sexual. As far as she knew, they were not even having one-night stands.

Thorn did, however, seem to like Obrenova’s company. Jill often saw them talking earnestly together. Perhaps Thorn was trying to get her to be his lover. And perhaps the Russian refused because she thought she would only be a substitute for his first wife.

Three days before the final liftoff, a holiday was declared. Jill left the plains area because it was so crowded and noisy with people from up and down The River. She estimated that there were already several hundred thousands camping in Parolando and that there would be over twice that number by the time the Parseval left. She retired to her hut, leaving it only for a little fishing. The second day, as she was sitting on the edge of the little lake, looking emptily into the water, she heard someone approaching.

Her irritation at the invasion died when she saw Piscator. He was carrying a fishing pole and a wickerwork basket. Silently, he sat down beside her and offered her a cigarette. She shook her head. For some time they stared at the surface, rippled by the wind, broken now and then by a leaping fish.

Finally, he said, “It won’t be long before I must reluctantly say good-bye to my disciples and to my piscatorial pursuits.”

“Is it worth it to you?”

“You mean, giving up this pleasant life for an expedition that may end in death? I won’t know until it happens, will I?”

After another silence, he said, “How have you been? Any more experiences such as that night?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“But you have been carrying a knife in your heart.”

“What do you mean?” she said, turning her head to look at him. She hoped her puzzlement did not look as faked as it felt to her.

“I should have said three knives. The captaincy, the Russian, and most of all, yourself.”

“Yes, I have problems. Don’t we all? Or are you an exception? Are you even human?”

He smiled and said, “Very much so. More than most, I can say with seeming immodesty. Why is that? Because I have realized my human potentiality almost to its fullest. I can’t expect you to credit that. Nor will you, unless, someday… but that day may never come.

“However, regarding your question of my humanity. I have sometimes wondered if some people we have met are human. I mean, do they belong to Homo sapiens?

“Isn’t it possible, even highly probable, that the Whoevers responsible for all this have agents among us? For what purpose, I don’t know. But they could be catalysts to cause some kind of action among us. By action, I do not mean physical action, such as the building of the Riverboats and airships, though that may be part of it. I refer to psychic action. To a, shall we say, channeling of humanity? Toward what? Perhaps toward a goal somewhat similar to that which the Church of the Second Chance postulates. A spiritual goal, of refinement of the human spirit. Or perhaps, to use a Christian-Muslim metaphor, to separate the sheep from the goats.”

He paused and drew on his cigarette.

“To continue the religious metaphor, there may be two forces at work here, one for evil, one for good. One is working against the fulfillment of that goal.”

“What?” she said. Then, “Do you have any evidence for that?”

“No, only speculation. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that Shaitan, Lucifer if you will, is actually conducting a cold war against Allah, or God, whom we Sufis prefer to name The Real. But I sometimes wonder if there isn’t a parallel to that in some sense… well, it is all speculation. If there are agents, then they look like human beings.”

“Do you know something I don’t?”

“I have probably observed certain things. You have, too, the difference being that you have not put them into a pattern. A rather dark pattern it is. Though it is possible that I am looking at the wrong side of the pattern. If it were turned over, the other side might be blazing with light.”

“I wish I knew what you were talking about. Would you mind letting me in on this… pattern?”

He rose and tossed the cigarette stub into the lake. A fish rose, swallowed it, and splashed back.

“There are all sorts of activity going on beneath that mirror of water,” he said, pointing to the lake. “We can’t see them because water is a different element from the air. The fish know what’s going on down there, but that doesn’t do us much good. All we can do is lower our hooks into the darkness and hope we catch something.

“I read a story once in which a fish sat down on the bottom of a deep, dark lake and extended his fishing pole into the air over the bank. And he caught men with his bait.”

“Is that all you’re going to say about that?”

He nodded, and said, “I presume you are coming to Firebrass’ farewell party tonight.”

“It’s a command invitation. But I hate going. It’ll be a drunken brawl.”

“You don’t have to soil yourself by joining the pigs in their swinishness. Be with but not of them. That will enable you to enjoy the thought of how superior you are to them.”

“You’re an ass,” she said. Then, quickly, “I’m sorry, Piscator. I’m the ass. You read me correctly, of course.”

“I think that Firebrass is going to announce tonight the ranking of the officers and pilots.”

She held her breath for a moment. “I think so, too, but I am not looking forward with pleasure to that.”

“You prize rank too highly. What is worse, you know it but will do nothing about it. In any event, I think you have an excellent chance.”

“I hope so.”

“Meanwhile, would you care to go out in the boat with me and participate in the angling?”

“No, thanks.”

She rose stiffly and pulled in the line. The bait was gone off the hook.

“I think I’ll go home and brood a while.”

“Don’t lay any eggs,” he said, grinning.

Jill snorted feebly and walked away. Before she reached her hut, she passed Thorn’s. Loud, angry voices were issuing from it. Thorn’s and Obrenova’s.

So, the two had finally gotten together. But they did not seem happy about it.

Jill hesitated a moment, almost overcome with the desire to eavesdrop. Then she plunged on ahead, but she could not help hearing Thorn shout in a language unknown to her. So—it would have done her no good to listen in. But what was that language? It certainly did not sound like Russian to her.

Obrenova, in a softer voice, but still loud enough for Jill to hear her, said something in the same language. Evidently, it was a request to lower his voice.

Silence followed. Jill walked away swiftly, hoping they would not look outside and think she had been doing what she had almost done. Now she had something to think about. As far as she knew, Thorn could speak only English, French, German, and Esperanto. Of course, he could have picked up a score of languages during his wanderings along The River. Even the least proficient of linguists could not avoid doing that.

Still, why would the two talk in anything but their native languages or in Esperanto? Did both know a language which they used while quarreling so that nobody would understand them?

She would mention this to Piscator. He might have an illuminating viewpoint on the matter.

As it turned out, however, she had no chance to do so, and by the time the Parseval took off, she had forgotten about the matter.

Discoveries in Dis

Jan. 26, 20 A.R.D.

Peter Jairus Frigate

Aboard the Razzle Dazzle

South Temperate Zone

Riverworld

Robert F. Rohrig

DownRiver (hopefully)

DEAR BOB:

In thirteen years on this ship I’ve sent out twenty-one of these missives. Letter from a Lazarus. Cable from Charon. Missive from Mictlan. Palaver in Po. Tirades from Tír na nOc. Tunes from Tuonela. Allegories from al-Sirat. Sticklers from the Styx. Issues from Issus. Etc.

All that sophomoric alliterative jazz.

Three years ago I dropped into the water my Telegram from Tartarus. I wrote just about everything significant that’d happened to me since you died in St. Louis of too much living. Of course, you won’t get either letter except by the wildest chance.

Here I am today in the bright afternoon, sitting on the deck of a two-masted schooner, writing with a fishbone pen and carbonblack ink on bamboo paper. When I’m done, I’ll roll the pages up, wrap them in fish membrane, insert them in a bamboo cylinder. I’ll hammer down a disk of bamboo into the open end. I’ll say a prayer to whatever gods there be. And I’ll toss the container over the side. May it reach you via Rivermail.

The captain, Martin Farrington, the Frisco Kid, is at the tiller right now. His reddish-brown hair shines in the sun and whips with the wind. He looks half-Polynesian, half-Celtic, but is neither. He’s an American of English and Welsh descent, born in Oakland, California, in 1876. He hasn’t told me that, but I know that because I know who he really is. I’ve seen too many pictures of him not to recognize him. I can’t name him because he has some reason for going under a pseudonym. (Which, by the way, is taken from two of his fictional characters.) Yes, he was a famous writer. Maybe you’ll be able to figure it out, though I doubt it. You once told me that you had read only one of his works, Tales of the Fish Patrol, and you thought it was lousy. I was distressed that you’d refuse to read his major works, many of which were classics.

He and his first mate, Tom Rider, “Tex,” and an Arab named Nur are the only members of the original crew left. The others dropped out for one reason or another: death, ennui, incompatibility, etc. Tex and the Kid are the only two people I’ve met on The River who could come anywhere near being famous people. I did come close to meeting Georg Simon Ohm (you’ve heard of “ohms”) and James Nasmyth, inventor of the steamhammer. And lo and behold! Rider and Farrington are near the top of the list of the twenty people I’d most like to meet. It’s a peculiar list, but, being human, I’m peculiar.

The first mate’s real surname isn’t Rider. His face isn’t one I’d forget, though the absence of the white ten-gallon hat makes it seem less familiar. He was the great film hero of my childhood, right up there with my book heroes: Tarzan, John Carter of Barsoom, Sherlock Holmes, Dorothy of Oz, and Odysseus. Out of the 260 western movies he made, I saw at least forty. These were second or third runs in the second-class Grand, Princess, Columbia, and Apollo theaters in Peoria. (All vanished long before I was fifty.) His movies gave me some of my most golden hours. I don’t remember the details or the scenes of a single one—they all blur into a sort of glittering montage with Rider as a giant figure in the center.

When I was about fifty-two years old, I became interested in writing biographies. You know that I had planned for many years to write a massive life of Sir Richard Francis Burton, the famous or infamous nineteenth-century explorer, author, translator, swordsman, anthropologist, etc.

But financial exigencies kept me too busy to do much on A Rough Knight for the Queen. Finally, just as I was ready to start full-time on Knight, Byron Farwell came out with an excellent biography of Burton. So I decided to wait a few years, until the market could take another Burton bio. And just as I was about to start again, Fawn Brodie’s life of Burton—probably the best—was published.

So I put off the project for ten years. Meanwhile, I decided to write a biography of my favorite childhood film hero (though I ranked Douglas Fairbanks, Senior, as my other top favorite).

I’d read a lot of articles about my hero in movie and western magazines and newspaper clippings. These depicted him as having led a life more adventurous and flamboyant than those of the heroes he played in films.

But I still did not have the money to quit writing fiction long enough to travel around the country interviewing people who’d known him—even if I could have found them. There were some who could have given me details of his careers as a Texas Ranger, a U.S. Marshal in New Mexico, a deputy sheriff in the Oklahoma Territory, a Rough Rider with Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, a soldier in the Philippine Insurrection and the Boxer Rebellion, a horse breaker for the British and possibly as a mercenary for both sides in the Boer War, as a mercenary for Madero in Mexico, as a Wild West show performer, and as the highest-paid movie actor of his time.

The articles about him couldn’t be trusted. Even those who claimed to have known him well gave differing accounts of his life. His obituaries were full of contradictions. And I knew that Fox and Universal had put out a lot of publicity stories about him, most of which had to be checked out for exaggeration or downright lies.

The woman who thought she was his first wife had written a biography of him. You’d never know from it that he had divorced her and married twice thereafter. Or had two daughters by another woman. Or that he had a “drinking problem.” Or an illegitimate son who was a jeweler in London.

She thought she was his first wife, but, as it turned out, she was his second or third. Nobody’s too sure about that.

That he was still a flawless hero to her even after all this says much about the man, though. It says even more about her.

A good friend of mine, Coryell Varoll (you remember him, a circus acrobat, juggler, tightrope walker, gargantuan beer drinker, a Tarzan fan) wrote me about him. In 1964, I think.

“I remember the first time I met him I thought I was meeting God… over the years, being on the same lot with him many times” (in the circus, he means) “the awe fell apart but he was always liked by most people and always idolized by the kids even after he quit making pix… I know that sober he was a swell guy, drunk he’d fight at the least excuse and do some of the damnedest things (don’t we all?)… I’ve a few dozen stories about him that never made the publications. I’ll tell them the next time we get together.”

But somehow Cory never did.

Even his birthdate was in doubt. His studios and his wife claimed he was born in 1880. The monument near Florence, Arizona (where he died doing 80 mph on a dirt road), says 1880. But there was contrary evidence that it was 1870. Whether he was sixty or seventy, though, he looked like a young fifty. He always kept himself in great shape.

Also, a friend who saw him off on his fatal trip said he was driving a yellow Ford convertible. His wife said it was white. So much for eyewitnesses. The studio publicity departments claimed he was born and raised in Texas. I found out myself that that was a lie. He was born near Mix Run, Pennsylvania, and he left there when he was eighteen to enter the Army.

Just as I was about to write to the War Department to get a copy of his military record—and find out for myself just what he had done in the Army—a novel by Darryl Ponicsan came out. I was stymied again; again, too late. Though the book was semifictional, its author had done the job of research that I’d been planning to do.

So—my hero wasn’t the grandson of a Cherokee chief. Nor was he born in El Paso, Texas. And, though he was in the Army, he hadn’t been severely wounded at San Juan Hill nor wounded in the Philippines.

Actually, he’d enlisted the day after the Spanish-American War started. I’m sure—as was Ponicsan—that he hoped to get into action. There is no doubt that he had great courage and that he desired to be where the bullets were the thickest.

Instead, he was kept at the fort, then honorably discharged. He thereupon reenlisted. But still, no action. So he deserted in 1902.

He did not go to South Africa, as the studios claimed. Instead, he married a young schoolteacher and went with her to the Oklahoma Territory. Either her father got the marriage annulled or she just left him and a divorce was never filed. Nobody’s sure.

While working as a bartender, shortly before he went to work for the 101 Ranch in Oklahoma, he married another woman. This didn’t work out, and he apparently failed to divorce her, too.

Most of what the studio publicity departments—and Rider himself—claimed was false. These tales were made up to glamorize a man who did not need it. Rider went along with these tales, maybe made up some himself for the studios. After a while he got to believing them himself. I mean, really believing them. I should know. I’ve heard him relate almost all of the prevarications, and it’s evident that by now the fiction is as genuine as the reality to him.

This blurring of distinction between reality and fantasy in no way interfered with his competency in real life, of course.

He did, however, reject Fox’s wish to advertise him as the illegitimate son of Buffalo Bill. That might have started inquiries which would have exposed the whole truth.

And he never says a word about having been a great movie star. He does tell stories about his film experiences, but in these he’s always an extra.

Why is he using a pseudonym? I don’t know.

His third wife described him as tall, slender, and dark. I suppose that in the early 1900s he would have been considered a tall man, though he’s shorter than I am. His slim body does contain steel-wire muscles. Farrington is shorter than he but very muscular. He’s always after Tom to Indian wrestle him, especially when he (Farrington) has been drinking. Tom obliges. They put an elbow on the table, lock raised hands, and then try to force each other’s hand down to the table. It’s a long struggle, but Tom usually wins. Farrington laughs, but I think he’s really chagrined.

I’ve wrestled with both of them, coming out about fifty percent winner (or loser). I can beat both of them in the dashes and the long jump. But when it comes to boxing or stick fighting, I usually get licked. I don’t have their “killer instinct.” Besides, this macho thing never was important to me. Though that may be because I suppressed it from some unconscious fear of competition.

It’s important to Farrington. If it is to Tom, he never shows it.

Anyway, it was a thrill to be with these two. It still is, though familiarity breeds, if not contempt, familiarity.

Tom Rider has been up and down The River for hundreds of thousands of kilometers and has three times been killed. Once he was resurrected near the mouth of The River. By near I mean he was only about 20,000 kilometers distant. This was the arctic region. The River’s mouth is, like its headwaters, near the North Pole. However, the two seem to be diametrically opposite, the waters issuing from the mountains in one hemisphere and emptying into the mountains in the other hemisphere.

From what I’ve heard, there’s a sea around the North Pole, and it’s walled by a circular mountain which would make Mount Everest look like a wart. The sea pours out of a hole at the base of the mountains, winds back and forth in one hemisphere, finally curving around the South Pole to the other hemisphere. There it wriggles like a snake up and down from the antarctic to the arctic and back again a thousand or so times, and finally empties into the north polar mountains. (Actually, it’s one mountain—like a volcanic cone.)

If I drew a sketch of The River, it’d look like the Midgard Serpent of Norse myth, a world-girdling snake with its tail in its mouth.

Tom said that the areas near the mouth are populated chiefly by Ice Agers, ancient Siberians, and Eskimos. There’s a scattering of modern Alaskans, upper Canadians, and Russians, though. And some others from everywhere and every time.

Tom, being the adventurer that he is, decided to travel to the mouth. He and six others made some kayaks and paddled downstream from the land of the living into the wasteland of the fog shrouds. Surprisingly, vegetation grew in the mists and the darkness all the way to the mouth. Also, the grailstones extended for a thousand kilometers into the fog. The expedition had its last grail meal at the last stone and then, laden with dried fish and acorn bread and what they’d saved from the grails, they paddled on, the ever increasing current speeding them toward their goal.

The last hundred kilometers was in a current against which there was no turning back. They couldn’t even try for the shore; sheer canyon walls soared up from the edge of the water. The voyagers were forced to eat and sleep sitting up in their kayaks.

It looked like curtains, finit, for them, and it was. They plunged into a great cave the ceiling and walls of which were so far away that Tom’s torchlight could not reach them. Then, with a horrible roaring, The River entered a tunnel. By then the ceiling was so low that Tom’s head was knocked against it. That’s all he remembers. Undoubtedly, the kayak was torn to pieces against the ceiling.

Tom woke up the next day somewhere near the south polar region.

(Frigate’s letter continued)

“There’s a tower in the middle of a sea surrounded by the polar mountains,” Tom said.

“A tower?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Haven’t you heard about that? I thought everybody knew about the tower.”

“Nobody ever mentioned it to me.”

“Well,” he said, looking somewhat peculiar, “it is a hell of a long River. I suppose there are plenty of areas where nobody’s heard the tale.”

And he proceeded to tell me that that was just what it was, a tale. No proof. The man who told Tom about it may have been a liar, and God knows there are just as many here as there were on Earth. But this wasn’t an account heard from a man who’d heard it from another who’d heard it from still another and so on and so on. Tom himself had actually talked to a man who claimed to have seen the tower.

Tom had known this man for a long time, but he’d never said a word about it until he got stumbling drunk with Tom one night. After he sobered up, he refused to talk about it. He was too scared.

He was an ancient Egyptian, one of a party led by the Pharaoh Akhenaten or Ikhnaton, as some pronounced it. You know, the one who tried to found a monotheist religion about the thirteenth century B.C. Apparently, Akhenaten was resurrected in an area of people from his own time. The teller of the tale, Paheri, a nobleman, was recruited by Akhenaten along with forty others. They built a boat and started off, not knowing how far they had to go. Or, indeed, what their goal was, except the source of The River. Akhenaten believed that Aton, God, the sun, would live there and that he would receive any pilgrim with great honor. Would, in fact, pass him on to paradise, a place better than The Riverworld.

Paheri, unlike the Pharaoh, was a conservative polytheist. He believed in the “true” gods: Ra, Horus, Isis, all the Old Bunch. He went along with his Pharaoh, thinking that he would lead them to the seat of the gods and would then get his just deserts for having abandoned the old religion on Earth. Poetic justice. But he, Paheri, would be suitably rewarded for his faith.

Fortunately for their quest, the area in which they’d been first resurrected was in the northern hemisphere, far up The River. Also fortunately, they passed through areas mainly inhabited by late-twentieth-century Scandinavians. These were comparatively peaceful, so the boat’s crew wasn’t enslaved, and there was no problem using the grailstones.

As they got closer to the polar mountains, they came into an area populated by giant subhumans. These seem to have been a species the fossils of which were never found on Earth. Eight to ten feet high (2.45 to 3.048 meters), believe it or not. With noses like proboscis monkeys. Language users, though their speech was simple.

Any one of these behemoths could have wiped out the whole crew single-handed, but the boat frightened them. They thought it was a living monster, a dragon. Apparently, their area, which extended for several thousand kilometers, was cut off from the area below them by a very narrow valley. The River boiled through it at great pressure, making a current against which a boat could not be rowed.

The Egyptians weren’t stopped by this. It took them six months, but they made it. Using flint tools and some iron tools—there was some iron in this area for which they traded booze and tobacco from their grails—they chopped out a narrow ledge about 3 meters above the water. They disassembled the boat and, carrying the parts on their backs, they crawled the kilometer or so to the end of the narrow part.

In the land of the giants, the Egyptians recruited an individual whose name they couldn’t pronounce. They called him Djehuti (the Greek form of this name was Thoth) because his long nose reminded them of that god. Thoth had the head of an ibis, a long-beaked bird.

The boat proceeded up The River, to where the grailstones ceased. This area was in perpetual fog. Though The River had given up much of its heat while going through the sea behind the polar mountains, it still had enough left to form clouds when it encountered the colder air.

They came to a cataract that was wide enough to float the moon on, or so said Paheri. The boat had to be left behind then, and for all anybody knows it is still on a platform in a sheltered cove. Rotten by now, what with all that moisture.

Now, here comes one of the strangest parts of the tale. The expedition came to a cliff which seemed insurmountable. But they found a tunnel which someone had cut through the cliff. And then, later, at the bottom of another insurmountable cliff, they found the end of a rope made from cloths. Up it they went, and though their path was anything but smooth from then on, they did get to the polar sea beyond the mountains.

Who made the tunnel and who left the rope? And why? It seems obvious to me that someone prepared the way for us Earthlings. I doubt that it was Riverdwellers who cut the tunnel and who planted the rope. The mountain which contained the tunnel was made of hard quartz. The tunnel would have worn out a large number of steel tools, which would not in any event have been available in large numbers. Moreover, Paheri said that there was no debris, no cuttings and shavings which would have to be piled outside the tunnel. Even with iron tools, a party would not have time enough to cut the tunnel. They couldn’t possibly have brought along enough food for the time it would take to do the job.

In addition, how could anyone have gotten up the aforementioned cliff without a rope? Maybe some mysterious party preceding the Egyptians fired a rocket trailing a rope? But there was only one projection, a tall, thin spire of rock, for the hypothetical rope with hypothetical grapnels to catch on. The chances of the rocket hitting it (especially when it’s invisible from below) and the grapnels catching on it are highly remote. Also, there was no empty rocket case around. Whoever had lowered the rope had tied the end of the rope around the projection. And Paheri said that it looked as if the projection had been cut out of a larger spire.

Anyway, after crawling on a ledge through a dark cave through which a cold wind howled, they came out onto the sea. Clouds covered the sea from rim to rim of the unbroken range circling the sea. Only it wasn’t really unbroken. On the other side there must have been a great gap between two mountains. Djehuti saw it first; he went around a corner just as the sun broke through for a moment. Those behind him heard a cry, then a bellow, and then a long, dwindling wail. They inched around the corner and got to the edge of the ledge just in time to see Djehuti’s body disappear in the clouds below.

Afterward, they reconstructed what had happened. He had rounded the corner and seen a grail a few paces before him. Yes, a grail. Someone had preceded them. Apparently, Djehuti saw it, too, and then the sun shone through the gap in the mountain. Blinded, or startled, he had stepped backward and tripped over the grail.

There was just enough light from the passing sun to give a glimpse of something in the middle of the sea. It looked like the upper end of a colossal grail sticking from the clouds. Then the sun passed the gap and the clouds rolled back up and covered the big grail.

You’re probably asking, how could the Egyptians see the sun? Even if the break in the mountains extended to the horizon, wouldn’t the clouds still cover it? The answer is, yes, the clouds would cover it under normal circumstances. But there was a combination of wind which cleared the clouds away momentarily just as the sun passed the gap. An unhappy combination of circumstances, for Djehuti, anyway.

The winds are peculiar in that region. Twice, they cleared the clouds away so that the Egyptians could see, briefly, the upper portion of the tower. Without the direct rays of the sun, in the gloomy twilight of reflection from the skies, they could see only a dark bulk. But it was enough. There was an object out there, a vast object. Not necessarily a man-made object, since we don’t know if the owner and operators of this planet are human. But it was an artifact; it was too smoothly cylindrical to be anything else. Though, at that distance, it could have been a spire of rock, I suppose.

But here’s another clincher. Several hours later the Egyptians saw an object rise up from the clouds around the tower. It was round, and for them to see it from where they stood, it must have been enormous. When it got far up, it reflected light from the never setting sun. Then it rose so high it became invisible.

That really excited me. I said, “That tower could be the headquarters, the home base, of Whomever is behind all this?”

“That’s what Frisco and I think.”

The Egyptians had become fond of Djehuti. Despite his ogreish appearance, he had a good heart, and he liked to joke. He wasn’t above making puns in Egyptian, which shows a considerable intelligence on his part. Humankind is unique in the animal kingdom; it’s the only species that can pun. Homo agnominatio? I don’t know. My Latin gets weaker by the day. If I could find an ancient Roman or a Latin scholar I’d take a refresher course.

Back to Paheri’s tale. And Djehuti. If it hadn’t been for his gorillan strength, the Egyptians wouldn’t have gotten as far as they did. So they said some prayers over him and pushed on down the path.

The narrow ledge inclined, generally, at a 45-degree angle and was slippery with moisture. It was just wide enough for one man to walk along, his shoulder brushing the cliff. There were several narrowings where they had to face the cliff and slide along it, their chests against the rock, their heels hanging over the edge, their fingers clutching every tiny roughness.

Halfway down, Akhenaten almost fell off. He’d stumbled in the fog over a skeleton. Yes, a skeleton, undoubtedly the one who’d abandoned the grail. None of his bones seemed to be broken, so they guessed that he had died of starvation. The Pharaoh said a prayer over the bones and cast them into the sea. After a while they came to the end of the path. This was at sea level. They despaired then, but Akhenaten grabbed hold of an outcropping with one hand and with a torch in his other hand looked around the projection.

On the other side was an opening, the mouth of a cave. He eased around the outcropping, the sea up to his knees, his feet on the underwater continuation of the ledge. His torch showed him a smooth rock floor that slanted upward at a 30-degree angle. The others followed him without mishap.

Akhenaten in the lead, they walked up the slope. Their hearts beat hard, their skins were cold, their teeth chattered. One man—our Paheri—was so scared that he had nervous diarrhea.

Was this the entrance to the hall of the gods? Was jackal-headed Anubis waiting to conduct them to the great judge who would balance their good deeds against the bad?

It was then that Paheri got to thinking about the mean and unjust things he’d done, his pettinesses and cruelties, his greed and treachery. For a moment he refused to go on. But when the others kept walking, and the darkness began to press in on him, he resumed walking—though at a distance behind them.

The cave became a tunnel, the rock walls evidently worked by tools. It began curving gently and then, after a hundred meters, it entered a very large circular chamber. This was lit by nine black metal lamps on tall tripods. The lamps were ball shaped, and they burned with a cold, steady light.

There were several things in the chamber to astonish them. The nearest, though, was another skeleton. Like the other, it was still clothed. The right arm was fully extended as if it had been reaching out for something. Beside it was a grail. At the moment, they didn’t examine the bones, but I’ll describe it now. It was the skeleton of a female, and the skull and some still unrotted patches of hair showed that it was a Negress’s.

She had probably died of starvation. That was tragically ironic, since she had died a few meters from food.

After her companion had died, she’d gone on, probably crawling part of the way, summoning enough strength to stand up and edge around the very narrow places. Then, with salvation in sight, she had died.

I wonder who she was? What drove her to take that perilous journey? How many of her party died or turned back before they got through the vast cave through which the waves of the polar sea rush out? How did they get past the hairy, big-nosed colossi? What was her name, and why was she so fiercely determined to drive on into the heart of darkness?

Perhaps she may have left a message inside her grail. However, its lid was closed, and so only she could open it. Anyway, it’s very unlikely that the Egyptians could have read her writing. This was before the Chancers spread Esperanto around the world. Furthermore, billions who can speak this language don’t know how to read it.

The Egyptians said a prayer over the bones and then silently inspected the largest objects in the chamber, metal boats. There were eleven, some large, some small, all in low, metal V-shaped supports open at both ends.

There were also supplies of food. They didn’t know that at first, since they’d never seen plastic cans. But diagrams on plastic sheets indicated how to open them, which they did. They contained beef, bread, and vegetables. They ate heartily, and then they slept for a long time, being very fatigued from their journey.

But they felt that the gods (in Akhenaten’s view, The God) had provided for them. A path had been prepared for them, though it had not been an easy one. The road to immortality had never been easy, and only the virtuous and hardy would traverse it. Perhaps Djehuti had sinned in some way and so had been hurled from the ledge by the gods.

There were diagrams, how-to-do-it sketches using signs, in the boats. They studied these and then carried one of the large boats through the tunnel. It could hold thirty people, but four people could lift it easily or one strong man could drag it. It was shoved under the ledge into the sea, which was moderately rough, and the party got into it. There was a small control board by the wheel. Though he was a Pharaoh and so above work of any kind, Akhenaten nevertheless took over the controls. Following the diagrammed instructions, he punched a button on the board. A screen lit up, and a bright orange outline of the tower appeared on it. He punched another button, and the boat moved of its own accord outward into the sea.

Everybody was scared, of course, though their leader did not show it. Yet they felt that they were in the right place and were welcome—in a sense. The boat they likened to the barge in which, in their religion, the dead journeyed across the waters of the Other World, Amenti.

(Amenti comes from Ament, a goddess whose name meant “the Westerner.” She wore a feather, as did the Libyans, the people to the west of Egypt. She may have been a Libyan goddess borrowed by the Egyptians. A feather was also the sign or hieroglyph for the word “Western.” In later times, “the West” meant the Land of the Dead, and Ament became the goddess of the country of the dead. She it was who welcomed them at the gate of the Other World. She proffered them bread and water and, if they ate it, they became “friends of the gods.”)

Naturally, the food they’d found in the cave reminded them of this, just as the boat was an analog of the barge used by the dead in the Other World. The Egyptians, like many people, had been upset, not to mention outraged, when they woke from death upon The Riverworld. This was not what the priests had said would happen to them after death. Yet, there were parallels here, physical analogs, to the promised land. Also, that there was a River was comforting. They had always been a riparian folk, living close to the Nile. And now they had been guided by a divine being to the heart of the Other World.

They wondered if they should have named the giant subhuman Anubis instead of Djehuti. Anubis was the jackal-headed god who conducted the dead in the Underworld to the Double Palace of Osiris, the Judger, the Weigher of Souls. Still, Djehuti was the spokesman of the gods and the keeper of their records. Sometimes, he took the shape of a dog-headed ape. Considering their companion’s features and his hairiness, he did look like that avatar of Djehuti.

Note: These two aspects of Thoth (Djehuti) indicate that there may have been a fusion of two different gods in early times.

This world did have some similarities to the Other World. Now that they were in the Abode of Osiris, the similarities were even more striking. The Riverworld could be that country between the world of the living and the dead vaguely described by the priests. The priests had told confusing, contradictory stories. Only the gods knew the full truth.

Whatever the truth was, it would soon be found. The tower didn’t look like their picture of the Double Hall of Justice, but perhaps the gods had changed things. The Riverworld was a place of constant change, a reflection of the state of mind of the gods themselves.

Akhenaten turned the wheel so that the orange tower was bisected by the vertical line splitting the screen. At times, just to reassure himself that he had control of the speed, he would squeeze the bulb fixed to the right side of the steering wheel. The boat’s speed would increase or decrease according to the force of the squeezing.

The boat headed straight through the choppy, fog-shrouded sea for the tower at a speed frightening to its passengers. Within two hours the image on the screen had become enormous. Then the image burst into a flame which covered the entire screen, and Akhenaten let the boat proceed very slowly. He punched a button, and they all cried out in fright and wonder as two round objects on the prow of the boat shot forth two bright beams of light.

Ahead lay a vast bulk—the tower.

Akhenaten punched a button indicated by the diagram. Slowly, a large, round door, a port, swung open from what had been a smooth, seamless surface. Light sprang into being. Inside was a wide hall, its walls of the same gray metal.

Akehnaten brought the boat alongside the entrance. Some of the crew grabbed the threshold. The Pharaoh pressed the button which shut off the invisible power that moved the boat. He stepped onto the side of the boat, which was just below the threshold. After jumping inside the hall, he took the ropes attached to the inside of the hull and secured them around hooks set into the hall. Apprehensively, silently, the others followed him.

All, that is, except for Paheri. The terror was now almost unendurable. His teeth clicked uncontrollably. His knees shook. His heart beat in his frozen flesh like a frightened bird’s wings. His mind moved sluggishly, like winter mud flowing down a hillside warmed by the sun.

He was too weak to get up from the seat and step into the corridor. He was sure that if he could go on, he’d face his judge and be found wanting.

I’ll say one thing for Paheri. Two. He did have a conscience, and he wasn’t afraid to admit to Tom Rider that he’d been a coward. That takes courage.

Akhenaten, as if he had nothing to fear from The One God, walked steadily toward the end of the corridor. The others were bunched behind him at a dozen paces. One looked back and was surprised that Paheri was still in the boat. He gestured for him to come on. Paheri shook his head and hung on to the gunwale.

Then, without a single cry from anyone, those in the corridor slumped to their knees, fell forward on their hands, tried to rise, failed, and sagged onto their faces. They lay as still and limp as putty models.

The door swung slowly shut. It closed silently, leaving no evidence that there was a door, not even a thin seamline, and Paheri was alone in the dark fog and the cold sea.

Paheri wasted no time in getting the boat turned around. It moved at its former speed, but now there was no signal on the scope, no bright image, to direct it. He could not find the cave, and so he went up and down the base of the cliff until he gave up trying to locate the cave. Finally, he directed it alongside the cliff until he came to the archway through which the sea rams into the mountains. He got through the long and giant cave there, but when he came to the great cataract, he could find no place to beach the boat. It was carried over the falls. Paheri remembered the bellowing of the waters, being turned over and over, and then… unconsciousness.

When he awoke from his translation, he was lying naked in the dark fog under the overhang of a grailstone. His grail—a new one, of course—and a pile of cloths lay by him. Presently he heard voices. The dim figures of people coming to place their grails on the stone approached. He was safe and sound—except for the terrible memory of the hall of the gods.

Tom Rider was translated to Paheri’s area after he’d been killed by some fanatical medieval Christians. He became a soldier, met Paheri, who was in the same squad, and heard his story. Rider worked up to a captaincy and then he was killed again. He awoke the next day in an area where Farrington lived.

Several months later they went upRiver together in a dugout. Then they settled down for a while to build the Razzle Dazzle.

What’s my reaction to all this? Well, Paheri’s story makes me want to go see for myself if it’s true or not. If he wasn’t making it up, and Tom says Paheri was as stolid and as unimaginative as a wooden cigar-store Indian, then this world, unlike Earth, may have answers to the Big Questions, a mirror to the Ultimate Reality.

Towerward ho!

(Frigate’s letter continued)

There’s more to the story than what Rider told me. I chanced to overhear Frisco and Tex several days ago. They were in the main cabin, and the hatch was open. I had sat down, my back against the cabin, and had lit up a cigar. (Yes, for the nonce, I’ve fallen into the clutches of Ole Devil Nicotine.) I really wasn’t paying much attention to their voices, since I was occupied with thoughts resulting from a conversation with Nur el-Musafir.

Then I heard the captain, who has a loud voice, say, “Yes, but how do we know he isn’t using us for some reason of his own? Some reason beneficial to him but not so good for us? And how do we know we can get into the tower? That Egyptian couldn’t. Is there another entrance? If there is, why didn’t he tell us? He did say he’d tell us more about the tower later on. But that was sixteen years ago! Sixteen! We ain’t seen him since!

“I mean, you ain’t seen him. Of course, I never did see him. Anyway, maybe something happened to him. Maybe he got caught. Or maybe he doesn’t need us anymore!”

Rider said something I couldn’t catch. Farrington said, “Sure, but you know what I think? I think he didn’t have the slightest idea those Egyptians got to the tower. Or that one got away. At least, not when he talked to you.”

Rider said something. Farrington replied, “The tunnel and the rope and the boats and probably the path must have been prepared for us. But others got there first.”

The wind strengthened then, and I couldn’t hear anything for a minute or two. I moved closer to the companionway well. Farrington said, “You really think some of them, one, anyway, might be on this ship? Well, it’s possible, Tex, but so what if it is?

“Why weren’t we told who the others were so we could recognize each other and get together? When are we going to be told? Where do we all meet? At River’s end? What if we get there and nobody shows up? Do we wait a hundred years or so there? What if…”

Rider broke in once more. He must have talked a long time. I was straining my ears, so lit up with curiosity that I almost shone with a sort of St. Elmo’s fire. Mustafa, at the wheel, was looking at me with a strange expression. He must have known, or guessed, that I was eavesdropping. This made me uneasy. I wanted desperately to hear the rest. But if the Turk told those two I’d been listening to them, I might get tossed off the ship. On the other hand, he couldn’t know that they were discussing anything I shouldn’t be hearing. So I puffed on my cigar, and when it was out, I pretended to fall asleep.

The situation reminded me of Jim Hawkins’ experience in the apple barrel in Treasure Island, when he overheard Long John Silver plotting with his pirate cronies to take over the Hispaniola after the treasure was found. Only, in this case, Farrington and Rider weren’t planning anything evil against anybody at all. They seemed to be more plotted against.

Farrington said, “What I’d like to know is why he needs us? Here’s a man with more power than a dozen gods, and if he’s going against his buddies, what help can he get from mere mortals like us? And if he wants us in the tower, why doesn’t he just ferry us to it?”

There was another interruption, followed by the clink of grail cups against each other. Then Rider spoke loudly. “… must have damn good reasons. Anyway, we’ll find out in time. And what else do we have to do?”

Farrington bellowed laughter, then said, “That’s right! What else? Might as well use our time for some end, good or bad. But I still feel like we’re being exploited, and I’m fed up with that. I was exploited by the rich and the middle class when I was young, and then when I became famous and rich, I was exploited by editors and publishers and then by my relatives and friends. I ain’t going to let anybody exploit me here on this world, use me like I was a dumb beast fit for nothing but shoveling coal or canning fish!”

“You did some self-exploiting, too,” Rider said. “Didn’t we all? I made plenty of money and so did you. And what happened? We spent more’n we made on big houses and fast cars and bad investments and booze and whores and putting on a big front. We could’ve played it smart and tight and saved our money and taken it easy and lived to ripe old ages in ease and plenty. But…”

Farrington exploded into laughter again. “But we didn’t, did we? That wasn’t our nature, Tex, and it ain’t now. Live it up, burn the candle at both ends, spin off fire and beauty like a St. Catherine’s wheel instead of trudging along like a steer turning a mill wheel! So the deballed beast gets turned out to pasture instead of going to the glue factory? So what? What does he have to think about while he’s munching grass? A long, gray life and a short, gray future?”

More clinking. Then Farrington started to tell Rider about a train trip he’d taken from San Francisco to Chicago. He had introduced himself to a beautiful woman who was accompanied by her child and a maid. It wasn’t more than an hour after meeting her that he and the woman went to his compartment, where they coupled like crazed minks for three days and nights.

I decided that then was a good time to leave. I got up and strolled to the foremast where Abigail Rice and Nur were talking. Mustafa apparently never suspected me of eavesdropping.

Since then, I’ve been wondering. Who was the he referred to? It’s obvious that he must be one of Those who have made this world for us and then raised us from the dead. Could it really be? The idea seemed so tremendous, so difficult to grasp. Yet—Somebody has to have done this, Somebodies, I should say. And they are truly gods, in many senses, anyway.

If Rider is telling the truth, there is a tower in the north polar sea. And by implication it’s a base for Whomever made this world, our secret masters. Yes, I know this sounds paranoid. Or like a science fiction tale, most of which were paranoid, anyway. But, except for the very few who got rich, science fiction writers were convinced that their secret (or not so secret) masters were the publishers. Even the rich ones questioned their royalty statements. Maybe the tower is inhabited by the cabal of super-publishers. (Just kidding, Bob. I think.)

Maybe Rider is lying. Or his informant, Paheri, was lying. I don’t believe so. It’s obvious that Rider and Farrington have been approached by one of these Whomevers. They weren’t just making up this story to fool an eavesdropper.

Or were they?

How paranoid can you get?

No, they were discussing something that had really happened. If they were careless, left the hatch open, didn’t talk subduedly, it was only natural. After all those years, who wouldn’t get careless? As far as that goes, why shouldn’t they tell everybody?

Somebody might be looking for them. Who? Why?

My mind yaws, pitches, and rolls. So many speculations, so many possibilities. And I think, wow! What a story! Too bad I hadn’t thought of something like this when I was writing science fiction. But the concept of a planet consisting of a many-millions-kilometer-long river along which all of humanity that ever lived had been resurrected (a good part of it, anyway) would have been too big to put in one book. It would have taken at least twelve books to do it anywhere near justice. No, I’m glad I didn’t think of it.

In light of those developments, what do I do now? Should I mail this letter or tear it up? It won’t fall into your hands, of course, not a chance of that. Into whose, then?

Probably it’ll be picked up by someone who can’t even read English.

Why am I afraid it might fall into the wrong hands? I really don’t know. But there is a dark, secret struggle going on under the seemingly simple life of this Valley. I intend to find out just what it is. I’ll have to proceed cautiously though. A small voice tells me that I might be better off if I don’t know anything about this.

Anyway, to whom am I really writing these missives? To myself, probably, though I hope hopelessly that just possibly impossibly one might drift into the hands of someone I knew and loved or at least was fond of.

And yet, this very moment, as I stare across the water at the many people on the bank, I might be looking directly at the person to whom I’ve written one of these letters. But the ship is in the middle of The River just now, and I’m too far away to recognize anyone recognizable.

Great God, the faces I’ve seen in twenty years! Millions, far more than I ever saw on Earth. Some of the faces came into being three hundred thousand years ago or more. Undoubtedly, the faces of many of my ancestors, some of them Neanderthals. A certain number of Homo neanderthalis was absorbed by miscegenation into Homo sapiens, you know. And considering the flux and reflux of large groups through prehistory and history, migrations, invasions, slavery, individual travel, some, maybe many, of the Mongolian, Amerindian, Australoid, and Negro faces I’ve seen belong to my ancestors.

Consider this. Each generation of your ancestors, going back in time, doubles its number. You were born in 1925. You had two parents, born in 1900. (Yes, I know you were born in 1923 and your mother was forty when she bore you. But this is an ideal case, an average.)

Your parents’ parents were born in 1875. That makes four. Double your ancestors every twenty-five years. By 1800, you have thirty-two ancestors. Most of them didn’t even know each other, but they were “destined” to be your great-great-great-grandparents.

In 1700 A.D., you have five hundred twelve ancestors. In 1600 A.D., 8,192 ancestors. In 1500 A.D., 131,072 ancestors. In 1400, 2,097,152. In 1300, 33,554,432. By 1200 A.D., you have 536,870,912 ancestors.

So do I. So does everybody. If the world population was, say, two billion in 1925 (I don’t remember what it was), then multiply that by the number of your ancestors in 1200 A.D. You get over one quadrillion. Impossible? Right.

I just happen to remember that in 1600 the estimated world population was five hundred million. In 1 A.D., it was an estimated 138,000,000. So, the conclusion is obvious. There was a hell of a lot of incest, close and remote, going on in the past. Not to mention the present. Probably from the dawn of humankind. So, you and I are related. And, in fact, it may be possible that we’re all related, many times over. How many Chinese and black Africans born in 1925 were distant cousins of you and me? Plenty, I’d say.

So, the faces I see on both banks as I sail along are my cousins’. Hello, Hang Chow. Yiya, Bulabula. What’s happening, Hiawatha? Hail, Og, Son of Fire! But even if they knew this, they wouldn’t feel any more friendly toward me. Or vice versa. The most intense quarreling and the most vicious bloodletting take place in families. Civil wars are the worst wars. But then, since we’re all cousins, all wars are civil. Mighty uncivil, at the same time. The paradox of human relations. I’ll shoot your ass off, brother.

Mark Twain was right. Did you ever read his Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven? Old Stormfield was shocked when he got past the Pearly Gates because there were so many dark people. Like all of us pale Caucasians, he had envisioned Heaven as being full of white faces with here and there a few yellow, brown, and black ones. But it wasn’t that way. He’d forgotten that the dark-skinned peoples had always outnumbered the whites. In fact, for every white face he saw there were two dark ones. And that’s the way it is here. My hat is off to you, Mr. Twain. You told it like it was gonna be.

So, here we are in the Rivervalley, knowing not why and whence. Just like on Earth.

Of course, there are plenty of people who say they know. There are the two dominant churches, the Chancers and the Nichirenites, and a thousand sects of reformed Christians, Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and God knows what all. The former Taoists and Confucianists say they don’t give a damn; this is a better life, on the whole, than the last one. The totemists are in a bit of a bind, since there are no animals here. But that doesn’t mean the totem spirits aren’t here. Many’s the savage I’ve run into who sees his totem in dreams or visions. The majority of them, though, have been converted to one of the “higher” religions.

There’s also Nur el-Musafir. He’s a Sufi. He was just as shocked as anybody to wake up here. He wasn’t outraged, however, and he reordered his thinking tout de suite. He says that whatever beings have made this world have done so with only our eventual good in mind. Otherwise, why go to all this great expense and trouble? (In this, he sounds like a barker for a circus. But he’s sincere. Which doesn’t mean he knows what he’s talking about.)

We shouldn’t concern ourselves with the Who or the How, he says. Just with the Why. In this respect, he sounds like a Chancer. But I see I’m about to run out of my quota of paper. So, adieu, adios, selah, amen, salaam, shalom, and so long. (The English so long is from selang, the Moslem Malayan’s pronunciation of the Arabic salaam.)

Amicably and didactically yours in the bowels of Whomever,

PETER JAIRUS FRIGATE

P.S. I still don’t know if I’ll mail this in toto, censor it, or use it for toilet paper.

On the average, The River was 2.4135 kilometers or a mile and a half wide. Sometimes it narrowed into channels always lined by high hills; sometimes it widened into a lake. Whatever its breadth, its depth was everywhere about 305 meters or a trifle over 1000 feet.

Nowhere along The River was there water erosion of the banks. The grass on the plains merged into an aquatic grass at the water level, and the latter flourished on the sides and bottom of the channel. The roots of this fused with the roots of the surface grass to form an interconnected mass. The grass was not separate blades; it was one vast vegetable entity.

The water plants were eaten by a multitude of fish life from surface to bottom. Many species cruised about in the upper stratum, where the sunlight penetrated. Others, paler creatures but no less voracious, swarmed in the middle layer. In the darkness of the bottom many weird forms scuttled, crawled, wriggled, jetted, swam.

Some ate the leprous-white rooted things that looked like flowers or were in turn enfolded and digested by them. Others, large and small, slid steadily along, mouths gaping, collecting the microscopic life that also lived in the fluid strata.

The largest of all, vaster than the blue whale of Earth, was a carnivorous fish called the Riverdragon. It shared with a much smaller water dweller the ability to roam the bottom or skim the surface without harm from change in pressure.

The other creature had many names, but in English it was generally called “croaker.” It was the size of a German police dog, as slow as a sloth, and as undiscriminating in appetite as a hog. The chief sanitation engineer of The River, it ate anything that did not resist it. The greater part of its diet, however, was the human turd.

A lungfish, it also foraged ashore at night. Many a human had been frightened on seeing its huge goggle eyes in the fog or when stumbling over its slimy body as it crawled around seeking garbage and crap. Almost as scary as its appearance was its loud croak, evoking images of monsters and ghosts.

On this day of year 25 A.R.D., one of these vilely stinking scavengers was near a bank. Here the current was weaker than in the middle. Even so, its fin-legs were going at near top speed to keep it from being moved backward. Presently, its nose detected a dead fish floating toward it. It moved out a little and waited for the carcass to drift into its mouth.

Along came the fish and another object immediately behind it. Both went into the croaker’s mouth, the fish sliding down the gullet easily, the large object sticking for a moment before a convulsive swallow drew it in.

For five years, the watertight bamboo jar containing Frigate’s letter to Rohrig had been carried downstream. Considering the vast numbers of fishers and voyagers, it should have been picked up and opened long before. However, it was ignored by all creatures except for the fish whose primary object had been the delectable rotting chub.

Five days before the container came to journey’s end, it had drifted past the area in which its intended recipient lived. But Rohrig was in a hut, surrounded by the stone and wood sculptures he fashioned for trade in booze and cigarettes, snoring off the effects of a big party.

Perhaps it was just coincidence, perhaps some psychic principle was responsible, a vibratory link between the addresser and the addressee. Whatever the cause, Rohrig was dreaming of Frigate that early morning. He was back in 1950 when he had been a graduate student supported by the G.I. Bill and a working wife.

It was a warm, late-May day (Mayday! Mayday!). He was sitting in a small room, facing three PhDs. This was the day of reckoning. After five years of labor and stress in the halls of learning he would gain or lose the prize, a Master of Arts in English literature. If he passed his oral defense of his thesis, he would go out into the world as a teacher of high-school English. If he failed, he would have to study for six months and then try for a second and final chance.

Now the three inquisitors, though smiling, were shooting questions at him as if they were arrows and he was the target—which was the case. Rohrig was not nervous since his thesis was on medieval Welsh poetry, a subject he’d chosen because he believed that the professors knew very little about it.

He was right. But Ella Rutherford, a charming lady of forty-six, though prematurely white haired, had it in for him. Some time ago they’d been lovers, meeting twice a week in her apartment. Then one afternoon they had gotten into a furious drunken argument about the merits of Byron as a poet. Rohrig wasn’t crazy about his verse, but he admired Byron’s lifestyle, which he considered to be true poetry. Anyway, he liked to take the opposite side of an argument.

As a result, he had stormed out of the apartment after saying some very cruel things to her. He had also shouted at her that he never wanted to see her in private again.

Rutherford believed that he had seduced her just to get a high grade in her course, that he was using the argument as an excuse to quit making love to a middle-aged woman. She was wrong. He was compulsively attracted to older women. However, he was finding her demands too great a strain. He could no longer satisfy her, his wife, two female sophomores, two of his friends’ wives, a female bartender who gave him free drinks, and the superintendent of the apartment building in which he lived.

Five, he could handle; eight, no. He was being drained of time, energy, and semen, and he was falling asleep in class. Thus, he had craftily started violent arguments with his professor, one of the sophomores (it was rumored that she had the clap), and the wife of a friend (she was too emotionally demanding, anyway).

Now, Rutherford, her watery blue eyes narrowed, said, “You’ve done very well in your defense, Mister Rohrig. So far.”

She paused. He felt suddenly chilled. His anus tightened. Sweat poured down his face and from his armpits. He had visions of her sitting up late nights thinking of some way to get him, some horrible, peculiarly humiliating way.

Doctors Durham and Pur quit drumming their fingers. This was getting interesting. Their colleague was burning bright, like the eyes of a tiger about to spring on a tethered lamb. Lightning was going to strike, and the unfortunate candidate was without a grounding rod, unless it was up his ass.

Rohrig gripped the arms of his chair. Sweat popped out on his forehead like mice scared from a Swiss cheese; sweat, acid sweat, nibbled at the armpits of his shirt. What in hell was coming?

Rutherford said, “You seem to know your subject thoroughly. You’ve given a remarkable demonstration of knowledge of a rather obscure field of poetry. I’m sure we’re all proud of you. We haven’t wasted our time with you in the classroom.”

The sly bitch was telling him that she had wasted her time outside of the classroom with him. But this was only a sideswipe, a remark meant to injure but not to kill. She was setting him up for the big fall. It was seldom, if ever, that the examining professors congratulated the candidate during the torture. Afterward, perhaps, when the board had voted that he be passed.

“Now… tell me,” Rutherford drawled.

She paused.

Another turn of the crank of the rack.

“Tell me, Mister Rohrig. Just where is Wales?”

Something in him lost its hold and slid bumping down to the bottom of his stomach. He clapped his hand on his forehead, and he groaned.

“Mother of mercy! Trapped! Holy shit!”

Doctor Pur, dean of women, turned pale. This was the first time in her life she had ever heard that vile word.

Doctor Durham, who wept when reciting poetry to his students, looked as if he was about to swoon.

Doctor Rutherford, having hurled her thunderbolt, smiled without pity or compassion upon the remains of her victim.

Rohrig rallied. He refused to go down without his flags flying, the band playing Nearer My God to Thee. He smiled as if the gold in the pot at rainbow’s end had not suddenly been transmuted into turds.

“I don’t know how you did it, but you got me! Okay, I never said I was perfect. What happens now?”

Verdict: failed. Sentence: six months of probation with another and final inquisition at its end.

Later, when he and Rutherford were alone in the hall, she said, “I suggest you study geography, too, Rohrig. I’ll give you a clue. Wales is near England. But I doubt my advice will help you. You couldn’t find your ass if it was handed to you on a silver platter.”

His friend, Pete Frigate, was waiting at the end of the hall for him. Pete was one of the group of older students dubbed “The Bearded Ones” by a sophomore girl who liked to hang around them. They were all veterans whose college education had been interrupted by the war. They and their wives or mistresses led a life which was then called “Bohemian.” They were the unknown forerunners of the beatniks and the hippies.

As Rohrig drew near, Frigate looked questioningly at him. Though Rohrig was near tears, he put on a big smile and then began laughing uproariously.

“You won’t believe this, Pete!”

Frigate did find it difficult to believe that anyone past the sixth grade of grammar school did not know where Wales was. When he was finally convinced, he too laughed.

Rohrig shouted, “How in hell could that white-haired fox have found out my weak spot?”

Frigate said, “I don’t know, but she’s magnificent. Listen, Bob. Don’t feel so bad. I know a distinguished surgeon who doesn’t remember if the sun goes around the earth or the earth goes around the sun. He says it’s not necessary to know that when you’re digging into people’s bodies.

“But an English major… he ought at least to know… ooh, haw, haw!”

In one of those non sequiturs the Dream Scripter so often writes, Rohrig found himself elsewhere. Now he was in fog and chasing a butterfly. It was beautiful, and what made it so valuable was that it was the only one of its kind and only Rohrig knew that it existed. It was striped with azure and gold, its antennae were scarlet, its eyes were green emeralds. The king of the dwarfs had fashioned it in his cave in the Black Mountains, and the Wizard of Oz had dunked it in the waters of life.

Fluttering only an inch beyond his outstretched hand, it led him through the mists.

“Hold still, you son of a bitch! Hold still!”

He plunged after it for what seemed like miles. Dimly, out of the corner of his eye, he could see shapes in the clouds, things standing as motionless and quietly as if they were carved from bone. Twice he distinguished a figure; one wore a crown, the other had a horse’s head.

Suddenly, he was confronted by one of the objects. He stopped since it seemed impossible for some reason to go around it. The butterfly hung for a moment above the top of the thing, then settled down upon it. Its green eyes glowed, and its front legs shook the antennae mockingly.

Moving forward slowly, Rohrig saw that it was Frigate who was blocking his path.

“Don’t you dare touch it!” Rohrig whispered fiercely. “It’s mine!”

Frigate’s face was as expressionless as a knight’s visor. It always looked deadpan when Rohrig was in one of his many furies and chewing out everybody in sight. That had made Rohrig even more angry, and now it rocketed him to the point of utter madness.

“Out of the way, Frigate! Step aside or get knocked down!”

The butterfly, startled by the outburst, flew off into the fog.

“I can’t,” Frigate said.

“Why not?” Rohrig thundered as he hopped up and down in frustration.

Frigate pointed downward. He was standing on a large red square. Adjoining it were other squares, some red, some black.

“I got misplaced. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. It’s against the rules to put me on a red square. But then, who cares about rules? Besides the pieces, I mean.”

“Can I help you?” Rohrig said.

“How could you do that? You can’t help yourself.”

Frigate pointed over Rohrig’s shoulder.

“It’s going to catch you now. While you’ve been chasing the butterfly, it’s been chasing you.”

Rohrig suddenly felt utterly terrified. There was something after him, something which would do something horrible to him.

Desperately, he tried to move forward, to go over or around Frigate. But the red square held him as it held Frigate.

“Trapped!”

He could still see the butterfly, a dot, a dust mote, gone. Forever.

The fog had thickened. Frigate was only a blur.

“I make my own rules!” Rohrig shouted.

A whisper came from the mists before him. “Quiet! It’ll hear you!”

He awoke briefly. His hutmate stirred.

“What’s wrong, Bob?”

“I’m drowning in a surf of uncease.”

“What?”

“Surcease.”

He sank back into the primal ocean down to where drowned gods leaned in the ooze at crazy angles, staring with fish-cold eyes under barnacled crowns.

Neither he nor Frigate knew that he could have answered one of the questions in the letter. Rohrig had awakened on Resurrection Day in the far north. His neighbors were prehistoric Scandinavians, Patagonian Indians, Ice Age Mongolians, and late-twentieth-century Siberians. Rohrig was quick at learning new languages and was soon fluent in a dozen, though he never mastered the pronunciation and he murdered the syntax. As he always did, he made himself at home, and he was soon friends with many. For a while, he even set himself up as a sort of shaman. Shamans, however, must take themselves seriously if they would succeed, and Rohrig was only serious about his sculpturing. Also, he began to tire of the cold. He was a sun worshipper; his happiest days had been in Mexico where he was the first mate on a small coastal ship transporting frozen shrimp from Yucatan to Brownsville, Texas. He had been briefly involved in gun-smuggling there but had quit it before spending a few days in a Mexican jail. He had also quit Mexico. The authorities could not prove his guilt, but they suggested that he leave the country.

He was just about to take a dugout downRiver for a warm climate when along came Agatha Croomes. Agatha was a black woman, born 1713, died 1783, a freed slave, a backwoods Baptist preacher, a holy roller, four times married, mother of ten children, and a pipe smoker. She had been resurrected a hundred thousand grailstones away, but here she was. A vision had come to her, a vision in which God told her to come to His dwelling at the North Pole, where He would hand her the keys to kingdom come, to glory and salvation forever, to understanding of time and eternity, space and infinity, creation and destruction, death and life. She would also be the one to cast the devil into the pit, lock him up, and throw the key away.

Rohrig thought she was crazy, but she intrigued him. Also, he wasn’t so sure that the solution to the mystery of this world did not lie at the beginning of The River.

He knew that no one had ventured into the fog-laden land farther north. If he accompanied her party of eleven, he would be among the first to reach the North Pole. If he had anything to do with it, he would be the very first person to get there. When their goal was in sight he was going to sprint ahead and plant on the site of the North Pole a stone statuette of himself, his name incised at the base.

From then on, anybody who got there would know that he’d been beat out for first place by Robert F. Rohrig. Agatha wouldn’t take him, however, unless he believed in the Lord and the Holy Book. He hated to lie, but he told himself that he wasn’t really deceiving her. Deep down, he did believe in a god, though he wasn’t sure whether its name was Jehovah or Rohrig. As for the Bible, it was a book, and all books told the truth in the sense that their authors believed they were writing a kind of truth.

Before the expedition reached the end of the grailstones, five had turned back. When they got to the enormous cave out of which The River fell, four decided that they would starve to death if they kept on going. Rohrig went on with Agatha Croomes and Winglat, a member of an Amerind tribe that had crossed from Siberia to Alaska sometime in the Old Stone Age. Rohrig would have liked to turn back, but he wasn’t going to admit that a crazy black woman and a paleolithic savage had more courage than he.

Besides, Agatha’s preachings had almost convinced him that she had had a true vision. Maybe Almighty God and sweet Jesus were waiting for him. It wouldn’t do to hold up the schedule.

After they had crawled along the ledge in the cave and Winglat had slipped and fallen into The River, Rohrig told himself that he was as crazy as Agatha. But he went on.

When they came to the place where the ledge sloped downward into the fog, the fog that covered a sea the sounds of which faintly reached them, they were very weak from hunger. There was no turning back now. If they did not find food within the day, they would die. Agatha, however, said that all they could eat was close at hand. She knew it was so because she had had a vision while they slept on the ledge within the cave. She had seen a place where meat and vegetables were in abundance.

Rohrig watched her crawl away from him. After a while, he followed. But he left his grail behind because he was too weak to drag it. If he survived, he could always come back for it. The statuette was in the grail, and for a few seconds he considered removing it and taking it with him. To hell with it, he thought, and he went down the path.

He never made it. Weakness overcame him; his legs and arms just would not obey his will.

Thirst killed him before starvation did its job. It was ironic that The River had rushed by him, and he could not drink because he had no rope with which to lower his grail and collect the precious fluid. A sea was booming against the rocks at the base of the cliffs, and he could not descend in it.

“Coleridge would appreciate this,” he thought. “I wish I did.”

He muttered, “Now I’ll never get the answers to my questions. Maybe it’s just as well. I probably wouldn’t have liked them anyway.”

Now Rohrig was sleeping uneasily in a hut by The River in the equatorial zone. And Frigate, standing watch on the deck of a cutter, was chuckling. He was recalling Rohrig’s ordeal while defending his thesis.

Perhaps it was telepathy that evoked the incident in their minds at the same time. It’s preferable to use Occam’s razor, that never dull but seldom used blade. Call it coincidence.

The croaker placed itself directly in the path of the floating dead fish. The body went into the wide mouth of the amphibian. Frigate’s letter and its container, only a centimeter behind the carcass, were also engulfed, and both slid into the gullet and became lodged in the croaker’s belly.

Its stomach could easily handle garbage, excrement, and rotting flesh. But the cellulose fibers of the bamboo case were too tough for it to convert into absorbable form. After feeling sharp pain for a long time the croaker died trying to pass the container.

The letter often kills the spirit. Sometimes, the envelope does it.

Almost everybody was cheering. People were crowding around Jill and hugging and kissing her, and for once she did not mind. Most of the display of affection was due to booziness, she knew, but she still felt a warm glow within herself. If they had not been pleased, their very drunkenness could have resulted in open hostility. Perhaps she was not as disliked as she had thought. Here was David Schwartz, whom she had once overheard calling her “Old Frozen Face,” patting her on the back and congratulating her.

Anna Obrenova was standing by Barry Thorn, though neither had spoken much to the other all evening. She was smiling as if she were pleased that Jill Gulbirra had been chosen over her. Perhaps she really did not care. Jill preferred to believe that the little blonde was seething with hate, though she could be wrong. Anna might have a rational attitude toward her. After all, she was a Johnny-come-lately, and Jill had devoted thousands of hours to the construction of the ship and the training of the crew.

Firebrass had shouted for silence. The loud chatter and singing had finally stopped. Then he had said that he was announcing the roster of officers, and he had grinned at her. She had felt sick. His grin was malicious, she was sure of that. He was going to pay her back for all the cutting remarks she had made to him. Justified remarks, because she was not going to allow anyone to run over her just because she was a woman. But he was in a position to get revenge.

Yet, he had done the right thing, and he seemed to be happy about doing it.

Jill, smiling, made her way through the crowd, threw her arms around Firebrass and burst into tears. He thrust his tongue deep into her mouth and then patted her fanny. This time, she did not resent unasked-for familiarities. He wasn’t taking advantage of her emotions or being condescending. He was, after all, fond of her, and perhaps he was sexually attracted to her. Or perhaps he was just being ornery.

Anna, still smiling, held out her hand and said, “My sincerest congratulations, Jill.” Jill took the delicate and cool hand, felt an irrational, almost overpowering impulse to yank her arm out of its socket, and said, “Thank you very much, Anna.”

Thorn waved to her and shouted something, congratulations, probably. He did, however, make no effort to come to her.

A moment later, she stumbled weeping out of the ballroom. Before she had gotten home, she hated herself for having shown how strongly she felt. She had never cried in public, not even at the funerals of her parents.

The tears dried as she thought of her father and mother. Where were they? What were they doing? It would be nice if she could see them. That was all: nice. She did not want to live in the same area with them. They were not her old mother and father, gray-haired, wrinkling, and fat, their main concerns their grandchildren. They would look as young as she, and they would have little in common with her except some shared experiences. They would bore her and vice versa. It would be a strain to pretend that the child-parent relationship had not died.

Besides, she thought of her mother as a cipher, a passive appendage to her father, who was a violent, loud, domineering man. She did not really like him, though she had grieved somewhat when he had died. But that was because of what might have been, not because of what had been.

For all she knew, they might be dead again.

What did it matter now?

It did not matter. Then why the second flood of tears?

Well, folks, here we are again. This time it’s the big one. The final takeoff. Heigh-ho for the Big Grail, the Misty Tower, the house of the Santa Claus at the North Pole, the Saint Nick who gave us the gifts of resurrection, eternal youth, free food, booze, and tobacco.

“There must be at least a million people here. The stands are full, the hills are crowded, people are falling out of the trees. The police are having a hell of a time keeping order. It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it always? The uproar is really something, and I don’t think you can hear a word I’m saying even through this PA system. So, folks, up yours!

“Aha! Some of you heard that. Just kidding, folks, just trying to get your attention. Let me tell you again about the Parseval. I know that you have pamphlets describing this colossal airship, but most of you are illiterates. Not that it’s your fault. You speak Esperanto, but you’ve never had an opportunity to learn to read it. So here goes. Only, wait a moment while I moisten my parched throat with some skull-bloom.

“Ah! That was smoo-oo-ooth! The only trouble is that I’ve been quenching my thirst since before dawn, and I’m having trouble seeing straight. I hate to think of tomorrow morning, but what the hell. You have to pay for everything good in this world, not to mention the others.

“There she is, folks, though it’s hardly necessary to point her out to you. The Parseval. Named by Firebrass for the man who first suggested that the airship be built though there was a lot of argument at first about what name’d be painted on her silver sides.

“Third Mate Metzing wanted to name her the Graf Zeppelin III, after the man who was responsible for the first airship commercial line and chiefly responsible for the military Zeppelins.

“First Mate Gulbirra thought that she ought to be called Adam and Eve, after the whole human race, since she represents all of us. She also suggested Queen of the Skies and Titania. A little bit of female chauvinism there. Titania sounds too much like Titanic, anyway, and you know what happened to that ship.

“No, you don’t. I forgot most of you never heard of her.

“One of the engineers, I forget his name at the moment, he was a crewman on the ill-fated Shenandoah, wanted to name her Silver Cloud. That was the name of the airship in a book called Tom Swift and His Big Dirigible.

“Another wanted to name her the Henri Giffard after the Frenchman who flew the first self-propelled lighter-than-air craft. Too bad old Henri couldn’t be here to see the culmination of the airship, the acme of dirigible art, the last and the best and the greatest of all aerial vessels. Too bad the whole human race can’t be here to witness this challenge to the gods, the flying gauntlet flung against the face of the powers on high!

“Pardon me a moment, folks. Time for another libation to the gods to be poured down this dry throat instead of being wasted by pouring on the ground.

“Aaah! Mighty good, folks! Drink up! The liquor’s free, compliments of the house, which is the nation of Parolando.

“So, folks, our esteemed ex-president, Milton Firebrass, ex-American, ex-astronaut, decided to call this colossus the Parseval. Since he’s the chief honcho, the big enchilada, the boss, that’s what she’s titled.

“So… oh, yeah, I started to give you her statistics. Captain Firebrass wanted to build the biggest dirigible ever built, and he did. She’s also the biggest that will ever be built, since there won’t be any more. Maybe he should have called her The Last Is the Best.

“Anyway, the Parseval is 2680 feet or 820 meters long. Its widest diameter is 1112 feet or 328 meters. Its gas capacity is 120,000,000 cubic feet or 6,360,000 cubic meters.

“The skin is of stressed duraluminum and it contains eight large gas cells with smaller cells in the nose and tail fairings. Originally, she was to have thirteen gondolas suspended outside the hull, the control gondola and twelve motor gondolas, each containing two motors. This exterior mounting was required because of danger from the highly flammable hydrogen. But tests of the gas-cell material, the Riverdragon intestinal layers, showed that it did pass some gas—that’s a joke, folks!—and so Firebrass ordered his scientists to make a plastic material that wouldn’t—in a manner of speaking—break wind.

“They did so—when Firebrass says jump, everybody sets a new record—and… ? What? My assistant, Randy, says everybody can’t set a record at once. Who cares? Anyway, the hydrogen leakage is nil.

“So, the control room and all the motors are inside the hull except for those in the nose and tail gondolas.

“The hydrogen, by the way, is 99.999 percent pure.

“In addition to the crew of ninety-eight men and two women, the Parseval will carry two helicopters, each with a thirty-two-person capacity, and a two-man glider.

“But there won’t be any parachutes. One hundred parachutes makes a heavy load, so it was decided not to carry any. That’s sheer confidence for you. More than I have.

“Look at her, folks! Ain’t she something! The sun shines on her as if she’s the glory of God herself! Beautiful, beautiful, and magnificent!

“A great day for mankind! There goes the orchestra, playing The Lone Ranger Overture. Ha! Ha! Just a little joke that’d take too long to explain to you folks. It’s really the William Tell Overture by Rossini, I believe. Chosen by Firebrass as the takeoff music, since he’s hung up on that fiery piece. Not to mention a few others, some of whom I see in the crowd.

“Hand me up another glass of ambrosia, Randy. Randy’s my assistant M.C., folks, a writer of fantasies on Earth and now Parolando’s chief quality-control inspector for the alcohol works. Which is like appointing a wolf to guard a steak.

“Aah! Great stuff! And here comes the Parseval now, moving out of the hangar! Her nose is locked into the only mobile mooring mast in the world. The takeoff will occur in just a few minutes. I can see through the windscreen of the control room or bridge, which is set in the nose.

“The man in the middle—sitting at the control panel—you can see his head, I’m sure—is chief pilot Cyrano de Bergerac. In his day he was an author, too, wrote novels about travel to the moon and the sun. Now he’s in an aerial machine the likes of which he never dreamed of, just as he never envisioned himself on such a voyage. Flying to the North Pole of a planet which nobody, not a single soul on Earth, as far as I know, had described in the wildest of tales. Soaring in the wild blue yonder in the greatest zeppelin ever built, the greatest that will ever be built. Headed for a fabled tower in a cold, foggy sea. An aerial knight, a post-Terrestrial Galahad, questing for a giant grail!

“Cyrano’s running the whole operation all by himself. The ship’s completely automated; its motors and rudder and elevators are tied into the control panel with electromechanical devices. There’s no need to have rudder men and elevator men and telegraph signals to the motor engineers as they did in the old dirigibles. One man could pilot the ship all the way to the North Pole, if he could stay awake three and a half days, the estimated flight time. In fact, theoretically, the ship could fly itself there without a soul aboard.

“And there by Cyrano’s right is the captain, our own Milton Firebrass. He’s waving now to the man who’s succeeded him as president, the ever popular Judah P. Benjamin, late of Louisiana and ex-attorney general of the late but not necessarily lamented Confederate States of America.

“What? Get your hands off me, friend! No offense intended to any ex-citizen of the C.S.A. Take the drunken bum away, officers!

“And there, standing at the extreme left, is pilot third officer Mitya Nikitin. He promised to be sober during the flight and not hide any booze behind the gas cells, ha! ha!

“To Nikitin’s right is First Mate Jill Gulbirra. You’ve given some of us a hard time, Ms. Gulbirra, but we admire…

“There go the trumpets again. What a blast! There’s Captain Firebrass, waving at us. So long, mon capitaine, bon voyage! Keep us informed by radio.

“And there go the cables from the tail. The ship is bobbing a little, but she’s settling down. I saw the balancing done a couple of hours ago. The ship’s so equili-bub-bub-rated that one man standing on the ground under that mighty mass could lift it with one hand.

“Now her nose is uncoupled from the mobile mooring mast. There goes a little of the water ballast. Sorry about that, folks. We told you to stand back, not that some of you couldn’t stand a shower.

“Now she’s rising a little. The wind’s carrying her backward, southward. But the propellers have already been swivelled at an angle to drive the ship up and northward.

“There she goes! Bigger than a mountain, lighter than a feather! Off to the North Pole and the dark tower!

“My God, I’m crying! Must have had too much of the cup that cheers!”

Up above the world so high, the airship twinkled, threading the needle eye of the blue.

At an altitude of 6.1 kilometers or a little over 20,000 feet, the crew of the Parseval had a broad view of The Riverworld. Jill, standing at the front windscreen, saw the twisting parallels of the valleys, running north and south directly below her but taking a great bend to the east about 20 kilometers ahead. Then the lines ran for 100 kilometers like thin Malayan krises, wavy blades, side by side, before turning northeastward.

Now and then, The River bounced back a ray of the sun. The millions along its banks and on its surface were invisible from this height, and even the biggest vessels resembled the backs of surface-cruising dragonfish. The Riverworld looked as it was just before Resurrection Day.

A photographer in the nose dome was making the first aerial survey of this planet. And the last. The photographs would be matched against the course of The River as reported via radio by Mark Twain. However, there would be large gaps in the map made by the Parseval’s cartographer. The paddle wheeler had traveled far south, to the edge of the south polar regions, several times. So the airship’s cartographer could only compare his pictures with the maps transmitted by the surface vessels in the northern hemisphere.

But he could make one sweep of his camera and cover areas where the Mark Twain would travel someday.

The radar was also making altitude measurements of the mountain walls. So far, the highest point was 4564 meters or 15,000 feet. At most points, the mountains were only 3048 meters or 10,000 feet. Sometimes the walls dipped as low as 1524 meters or 5000 feet.

Before coming to Parolando, Jill had assumed, along with everybody else she knew, that the mountains were from 4564 to 6096 meters high. These were eyeball estimates, of course, and no one she had known had ever tried to make a scientific measurement. Not until she was in Parolando, where late-twentieth-century devices were available, did she learn the true altitude of the mountains.

Perhaps it was the comparative closeness of the walls that deceived people. They reared straight up, sheer, so smooth after the first 305 meters that they were unscalable. Often they were thicker at the top than at the bottom, presenting an overhang that would daunt any would-be climber even if he had steel pitons. And these were available only at Parolando, as far as she knew.

At the top, the width of the mountains averaged 403 meters or a little more than a quarter of a mile. Yet that relatively small thickness of hard rock was impenetrable without steel tools and dynamite. It would be possible to sail north up The River until it curved for one of its southward travels. There, with enough drilling and blasting equipment, a hole could be bored through the mountain wall. But who knew what invulnerable ranges lay behind that?

The Parseval had bucked the northeasterly surface winds of the equatorial zone. Passing through the horse latitudes, it had picked up the tailwinds of the temperate latitudes. In twenty-four hours it had traveled approximately a distance equal to that from Mexico City to the lower end of Hudson Bay, Canada. Before the second day was over, it would run into headwinds from the arctic region. Just how strong these would be was not known. However, the winds here seldom matched the winds of Earth because of the lack of differential between land and water masses.

A difference in mountain altitude and valley width between the equatorial and temperate zones was apparent. The mountains were generally higher and the valleys narrower in the hotter region.

The narrowness of the valleys and the height of the mountains made for conditions comparable to those in the glens of Scotland. Generally, it rained every day about 15:00 hours or 3 p.m. in the temperate areas. Usually, a thunderstorm accompanied by rain occurred about 03:00 hours or 3 a.m. in the equatorial zone. This was not a natural phenomenon in the tropics or at least it was believed that it was not. The Parolando scientists suspected that some sort of rain-making machines concealed in the mountains caused this on-schedule precipitation. The energy requirements for this would be enormous, colossal, in fact. But beings who could remake this planet into one Rivervalley, who could provide an estimated thirty-six billion people with three meals a day through energy-matter conversion, could undoubtedly shape the daily weather.

What was the energy source? No one knew, but the best suspect was the heat of the planet’s core.

There was speculation that some kind of metal shield lay between the crust of the earth and the deeper layers. That there was no volcanic activity or earthquakes tended to strengthen this hypothesis.

Since there were no vast ice or water masses making a temperature differential comparable to that of Earth, the wind conditions could have been different. But, so far, the pattern seemed to be Terrestrial.

Firebrass decided to take the ship down to 3600 meters altitude, a little over 12,000 feet. Perhaps the wind there might be weaker. The mountaintops were only 610 meters or about 2000 feet below the vessel, and the effect of the up- and downdrafts was strong at this time of the day. But the ability to change the angle of the propellers swiftly compensated somewhat for this roller-coaster motion. The ground speed increased.

Before 15:00, Firebrass ordered that the vessel be taken up above the rain clouds. He brought it back down at 16:00, and the Parseval rode majestically above the valleys. As the sun descended, both the horizontal and vertical winds would weaken, and the ship could plow through the air more evenly.

When night came, the hydrogen in the cells would cool, and the vessel would have to lift its nose even higher to give it more dynamic lift to compensate for the loss of buoyancy.

The pressurized control room was warmed by electric heaters. Its occupants were, however, in heavy cloths. Firebrass and Piscator were smoking cigars; most of the others, cigarettes. The fans sucked the smoke away but not quickly enough to remove the cigar odor which Jill so detested.

Hydrogen-emission detectors placed by the gas cells would transmit a warning if there were any leaks. Nevertheless, smoking was permitted only in five areas: the control gondola or bridge, a room halfway along the vessel’s axis, the auxiliary control room in the lower tail fin, and rooms attached to the quarters of the crew fore and aft.

Barry Thorn, first officer of the tail section, reported some magnetic readings. According to this, the North Pole of The Riverworld coincided with the north magnetic pole. The magnetic force itself was much weaker than that of Earth’s, so slight, in fact, that it would have been undetectable without the use of instruments known only in the late 1970s.

“Which means,” Firebrass said, laughing, “that there are three poles on one spot. The North Pole, the magnetic pole, and the tower. Now, if only one of our crew was a Pole, we could have four on the same place.”

Radio reception was excellent today. The ship was high above the mountains, and the transceiver of the Mark Twain was carried by a balloon towed by the boat.

Aukuso said, “You can talk now, sir.”

Firebrass sat down by the Samoan’s side and said, “Firebrass here, Sam. We just got word from Greystock. He’s on the way, heading northeastward, ready to alter course the moment he gets wind of the location of the Rex.”

“In some ways I hope you don’t find Rotten John,” Sam said. “I’d like to catch up with him and so have the pleasure of sinking him myself. That’s not a very practical attitude, though it’s mighty satisfying. I’m not a vindictive man, Milt, but that hyena would make St. Francis himself long to kick him off a cliff.”

“The Minerva’s carrying four forty-six-kilogram bombs and six rockets with nine-kilogram warheads,” Firebrass said. “If only two of the bombs make a direct hit, they could sink the boat.”

“Even so, that royal thief might get away safe and sound to shore,” Clemens said. “He has all the good luck of the wicked. How would I ever find him then? No, I want to see his body. Or if he’s taken alive, I want to wring his neck myself.”

De Bergerac spoke softly to Jill. “Clemens talks big for a man who’s appalled by violence. It’s easy to do as long as the enemy’s sixty thousand kilometers away.”

Firebrass laughed and said, “Well, if you can’t twist his head off, Sam, Joe’s the man to do the job.”

An unhumanly deep voice rumbled, “No, I’ll tear off hith armth and legth. Then Tham can turn hith head around tho he can thee vhere he’th been. He von’t like where he’th going.”

“Tear off an ear for me,” Firebrass said. “Old John almost hit me when he shot at me.”

Jill presumed that he was referring to the fight aboard the Not For Hire when John had seized it.

Firebrass said, “According to calculations, the Rex should be in the area we’ll be over in about an hour. You should be in the same area but about one hundred forty kilometers to the west of the Rex. Of course, we could be way off. For all we know, the Rex may not be traveling as fast as it could, or King John could’ve decided to dock for repairs or a very long shore leave.”

An hour’s conversation followed. Clemens talked to some of the crew, mostly those he had known before he’d left Parolando. She noticed that he did not ask to speak to de Bergerac.

Just as Sam was about to sign off, the radar operator reported that the Rex Grandissimus was on the scope.

Staying at 452 meters altitude, the Parseval circled the boat. From that height it looked like a toy, but photographs, quickly enlarged, showed that it was indeed King John’s vessel. It was magnificent. Jill thought that it would be a shame to destroy such a beautiful craft, but she did not say so. Firebrass and de Bergerac felt very strongly about the man who had hijacked their fabulous Riverboat.

Aukuso transmitted the location to Greystock, who said that the Minerva should reach the Rex the following day. He also checked the location of the Mark Twain.

“I’d like to fly over her so that Sam can get a good look at the ship that’s going to sink the Rex,” Greystock said.

“It won’t take you out of your way to do that,” Firebrass said. “And it’ll give Sam a big thrill.”

After he had quit talking to Clemens, Firebrass said, “I really think Greystock’s on a suicide mission. The Rex is loaded with rockets, and it carries two planes armed with rockets and machine guns. It all depends on whether or not Greystock can catch the Rex by surprise. Not much chance of that if John’s radar detects the Minerva. Of course, it might be off. Why should it be on? The sonar is good enough for daytime navigation.”

“Yes,” Piscator said. “But the people on the Rex must have seen us. They’ll be wondering about us, though they won’t know who we are, and they might start using the radar because they’ll be suspicious.”

“I think so, too,” Jill said. “They can figure out easily enough that only Parolando could build a dirigible.”

“Well, we’ll see. Maybe. By the time the Minerva gets to the Rex, we’ll be behind the polar mountains. I don’t think we can expect good radio reception there. We’ll have to wait until we come back over them.”

Firebrass looked thoughtful, as if he were wondering if the Parseval would return.

The sun sank behind the ground horizon, though at this altitude the sky remained bright for a long time. Finally, night came with its blazing star clouds and gas sheets. Jill talked for a few minutes with Anna Obrenova before going to her cabin. The little Russian seemed warm enough, but there was something in her manner which indicated that she was not at ease. Was she really resentful because she had not been given the first mate’s position?

Before going to her quarters, Jill took a long walk through the semipressurized passageway to the tail section. Here she drank some coffee and chatted briefly with some of the officers. Barry Thorn was present, but he, too, seemed a little nervous, even more reticent than usual. Perhaps, she thought, he was still unhappy at being rejected by Obrenova. If, indeed, that had been the cause of their argument.

At that moment, she was reminded that the two had spoken in a language unknown to her. Now was not the time to ask him about that. It was possible she might never be able to bring up the subject. To do so would be to admit that she had been eavesdropping.

On the other hand, she was very curious. Someday, when there were not more pressing things to consider, she would ask him about it. She could claim that she just happened to walk by—which was the truth—and had heard a few words of the dialog. After all, if she did not understand what they were saying, she could not be eavesdropping, could she?

She went to her cabin, where she crawled into the bunk and went to sleep almost at once. At 04:00 hours a whistle from the intercom awoke her. She went to the control room to relieve Metzing, the third mate. He stood around a while, talking about his experiences as commander of the LZ-1, then left. Jill did not have much to do, since Piscator was a very competent pilot and the atmospheric conditions were normal. In fact, the Japanese had set the automatic controls on, though he kept a close watch on the indicator panel.

There were two others present, the radio and the radar operators.

“We should see the mountains at about 13:00,” she said.

Piscator wondered aloud if they were as high as Joe Miller had estimated. The titanthrop had guessed them to be about 6096 meters or 20,000 feet. Joe, however, was not a good judge of distances, or, at least, not good at converting distances into metrics or the English system.

“We’ll know when we get there,” Jill said.

“I wonder if the mysterious occupants of the tower will allow us to return?” he said. “Or even to enter the tower?”

That question had the same answer as the previous ones. Jill did not comment.

“Perhaps, though,” Piscator said, “they may allow us to survey it.”

Jill lit a cigarette. She did not feel nervous now, but she knew that, when they were close to the mountains, she was going to be at least a little spooked. They would be entering the forbidden, the tabu, the area of the Castle Perilous.

Piscator, smiling, his black eyes shining, said, “Have you ever considered the possibility that some of Them might be on this ship?”

Jill almost strangled as she sharply drew in cigarette smoke. When she was through coughing, she said, wheezing, “What in hell do you mean?”

“They could have agents among us.”

“What makes you think that?”

“It’s just an idea,” he said. “After all, isn’t it reasonable to believe that They would be watching us?”

“I think you have seen more than you’re admitting. What makes you think this? It won’t hurt to tell me.”

“It’s just an idle speculation.”

“In this idle speculation, as you call it, is there someone you think could be one of Them?”

“It wouldn’t be discreet to say so, even if there was someone. I wouldn’t want to point the finger at a possibly innocent party.”

“You don’t suspect me?”

“Would I be stupid enough to tell you if I did? No, I am just thinking aloud. A most regrettable habit, one which I should rid myself of.”

“I don’t remember you ever thinking aloud before.”

She did not pursue the subject, since Piscator made it evident he was not going to add anything. The rest of the watch she tried to think of what he might have observed and then put together to make a pattern. The effort left her head buzzing, and she went back to bed feeling very frustrated. Perhaps he had just been putting her on.

In the afternoon, only two minutes short of the time she had predicted, the tops of the polar mountains were sighted. They looked like clouds, but radar gave a true picture. They were mountains. Rather, it was one continuous mountain wall circling the sea. Firebrass, reading its indicated height, groaned.

“It’s 9753 meters high! That’s taller than Mount Everest!”

There was good reason for him to groan and the others to look disturbed. The airship could not go higher than 9144 meters, and Firebrass would hesitate to take it to that altitude. Theoretically, that was the pressure height of the gas cells. To go above that meant that the automatic valves on top of the cells would release hydrogen. If they did not do so, the cells would explode, having reached their inflation limit.

Firebrass would not like to take the vessel near the pressure height. An unexpectedly warm layer of air could cause the hydrogen in the cells to expand even more, thus making the ship more buoyant than was safe. Under those conditions, the Parseval would rise swiftly. The pilot would have to act swiftly, pointing the vessel’s nose down and also tilting the propellers to give a downward drive. If this maneuver failed, the gas, expanding under the lessened atmospheric pressure, would stretch the cell walls to the rupture point.

Even if the ship got through this situation, its loss of valved-off gas would mean that it would become heavy. The only way to lighten the ship would be to discharge ballast. If too much ballast was dropped, the Parseval would be too buoyant.

Firebrass said, “If it’s like this all the way around, we’re screwed. But Joe said…”

He stood for a moment, thinking, watching the dark, ominous mass gradually swell. Below them the Valley wriggled snakily, eternally covered with fog in this cold area. They had long ago passed the last of the double line of grailstones. Yet the radar and the infrared equipment showed that thick, high vegetation grew on the hills. One more mystery. How could trees flourish in the cold mists?

Firebrass said, “Take her down to 3050 meters, Cyrano. I want to get a good look at the headwaters.”

By “look” he meant a radar view. No one could see through the massive, boiling clouds covering the mighty hole at the base of the mountains. But radar showed a colossal exit for The River, an opening 4.9 kilometers or a little over 3 miles wide. The highest point of the arch was 3.5 kilometers.

The mighty flood rushed straight for 3 kilometers, then tumbled over the edge of a cliff and fell straight for 915 meters, over 3000 feet.

“Joe may have been exaggerating when he said you could float the moon on The River where it comes out of the cave,” Firebrass said, “but it is impressive!”

“Yes,” Cyrano said, “it is indeed grand. But the air here is almighty rough.”

Firebrass ordered the Parseval to a higher altitude and on a course which would parallel the mountain at a distance of 12 kilometers. Cyrano had to crab the dirigible and swivel the propellers to keep from being blown south, and it crept alongside the towering range.

Meanwhile, the radio operator tried to get into contact with the Mark Twain.

“Keep it up,” Firebrass said. “Sam’ll want to know how we’re doing. And I’m interested in finding out how the Minerva made out.”

To the others he said, “I’m looking for that gap in the mountains. There has to be one. Joe said the sun momentarily flashed through a hole or what he thought was a hole. He couldn’t see the break, but since the sun never gets more than halfway up the horizon here, it couldn’t shine inside the sea unless there’s a break that starts at ground level.

Jill wondered why They would have erected such a mighty barrier only to leave an opening.

At 15:05, radar reported that there was a break in the verticality. Now the airship was over mountains outside the main wall. These mountains were not the continuous process surrounding the sea but were peaks, some of which reached 3040 meters. Then, as they came closer to the break, they saw that between the lesser mountains and the wall was an immense valley.

“A veritable Grand Canyon, as you have described it to me,” Cyrano said. “A colossal chasm. No one could get down its walls unless he used a rope 610 meters long. Nor could he ever get up the other wall. It is of the same altitude and its sides are as smooth as my mistress’ bottom.”

On the other side of the lesser mountains reared the mountain that walled The River. If a man could get over the nearer height and out of the Valley, he would then have to cross a rugged precipitous range for 81 kilometers or over 50 miles. After which, he would be confronted by the uncrossable valley.

“Ginnungagap,” Jill said.

“What?” Firebrass said.

“From Norse mythology. The primal abyss in which Ymir, the first of created life, the ancestor of the evil race of giants, was born.”

Firebrass snorted, and said, “Next you’ll be telling me that the sea is populated by demons.”

Firebrass looked cool enough, but she thought that this was a facade. Unless he had superhuman nerves, his body was under stress, the juices of the adrenals pouring out, his blood pressure up. Was he also thinking, as she was, that a much more experienced pilot should be at the controls? The Frenchman’s judgment and reflexes were probably swifter than anybody else’s. They had been tested scores of times in simulated emergencies during training. But—he just did not have thousands of hours of airship travel under Terrestrial, that is, swiftly changing, conditions. So far, the voyage had been uneventful. But the polar environment was unknown, and passing over these mountains might bring the ship into sudden unexpected forces. Not might. Would.

Here at the top of the world, the sun’s rays were weaker and thus it was colder. The River emptied into the polar sea on the other side of the circular range where it gave up the heat remaining after thousands of kilometers of wandering through the arctic region. The contact of cold air with warm waters caused the fog reported by Joe Miller. Even so, the air was relatively colder than that outside the mountains. The high-pressure cold air inside the ring of mountains would flow outward. Joe had described the wind that howled through the passes.

She wanted desperately to ask Firebrass to replace Cyrano with her. Or with Anna or Barry Thorn, the only other persons with much experience. Both were, objectively considered, as good as she. But she wanted to be in control. Only then would she feel at ease. Or as much at ease as the situation allowed.

Firebrass might have been of the same opinion. If so, he was not going to act on it, just as she was not going to express it. An unwritten, in fact, unspoken, code prevented that. It was Cyrano’s watch. To order him to give it up for a more qualified pilot would humiliate him. It would show a lack of confidence, make him seem to be less a “man.”

Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. The entire mission and one hundred lives were at stake.

Despite which, she would have said nothing even if she had thought she might be needed. Like the others, she was bound by the code. Never mind how antisurvival it was. She could not shame Cyrano. Besides, for her to suggest that he be replaced would shame her, too.

Now they were opposite the gap. It was not the V-shaped notch they had expected. It was a perfect circle cut into the mountain wall, a hole 3 kilometers across and 1000 meters above the base. From it sped clouds, driven by a wind which, if they could have heard it, would be “howling.” Cyrano was forced to point the dirigible directly into the hole to keep it from being blown southward. Even so, with motors operating at top speed, the Parseval could advance into it at only 16km/h or less than 10 mph.

“What a wind!” Firebrass said. He hesitated. The air flowing down from the top of the mountain would add its force to that streaming through the hole. And the pilot would have to rely on radar to sense the nearness of the sides of the hole.

“If the mountains aren’t any thicker than they are along The River,” Firebrass said, “we can get through the hole faster than a dog through a hoop. However…”

He bit down on his cigar, then said through clenched teeth, “Let’s take her through the gates of hell!”

Convergence of paths through chance fascinated Peter Frigate.

Pure chance had brought his in potentio into essems.

His father was born and brought up in Terre Haute, Indiana; his mother, in Galena, Kansas. Not much chance for them to get together and beget Peter Jairus Frigate, right? Especially in 1918 when people did not travel much. But his grandfather, the handsome, affluent, gambling, womanizing, boozing William Frigate, was forced to take a business trip to Kansas City, Missouri. He thought his eldest son, James, should learn the details of handling his various interests throughout the Midwest. So he took the twenty-year-old along. Instead of driving in the new Packard, they took the train.

Peter’s mother was in Kansas City, living with her German relatives while she attended a business school. The Hoosier and the Jayhawk had never heard of each other. They had nothing in common except being human and living in the Midwest, an area larger than many European countries.

And so, one hot afternoon, his mother-to-be had gone to a drugstore for a sandwich and a milk shake. His father-to-be had gotten bored listening to a business conference between his father and a farm machinery manufacturer. When lunch hour came, the two older men had headed for a saloon. James, not wanting to start boozing so early, had gone into the drugstore. Here he was greeted by the pleasant odors of ice cream and vanilla extract and chocolate, the swishing of two big overhead fans, a view of the long marble counter, magazines on a rack, and three pretty girls sitting on wire chairs around a small marble-topped table. He eyed them, as would any man, young or old. He sat down and ordered a chocolate soda and a ham sandwich, then he decided he’d look the magazine rack over. He leafed through some magazines and a paperback fantasy about time travel. He didn’t care much about such romances. He’d tried H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, and Frank Reade, Jr. but his hard Hoosier head rejected such implausibilities.

On the way back, just as he passed the table at which the three giggling girls sat, he had to leap to one side to avoid a glassful of Coke. One of the girls, waving her hand while telling a story, had knocked it off. If he hadn’t been so agile, his pants leg would have been soaked. As it was, his shoe was stained.

The girl apologized. James told her that there was nothing to be concerned about. He introduced himself and asked if he could sit with them. The girls were eager to talk to a good-looking young man from the faraway state of Indiana. One thing led to another. Before the girls had gone back to the nearby school, he had arranged a date with “Teddy” Griffiths. She was the quietest of the trio and not quite the best looking, but there was something about the slim girl with the Teutonic features, the Indian-straight, Indian-black hair, and large dark-brown eyes that attracted him.

Elective affinity, Peter Frigate called it, not above borrowing a phrase from Goethe.

Courting in those days was not as free and easy as in Peter’s day. James had to go to the Kaiser residence on Locust Street, a long trip by streetcar, and be introduced to her uncle and aunt. Then they sat on the front porch with the old folks, eating homemade ice cream and cookies. About eight o’clock, he and Teddy went for a walk around the block, talking of this and that. On returning, he thanked her relatives for their hospitality and said good-bye to Teddy without kissing her. But they corresponded, and, two months later, James made another trip, this time in one of his father’s cars. And this time they did a little spooning, mostly in the back row of the local movie house.

On his third trip, he married Teddy. They left immediately after the wedding to take the train to Terre Haute. James was fond of telling his eldest son that he should have named him Pullman. “You were conceived on a train, Pete, so I thought it would be nice if your name commemorated that event, but your mother wouldn’t have it.”

Peter didn’t know whether or not to believe his father. He was such a kidder. Besides, he couldn’t see his mother arguing with his father. James was a little man, but he was a bantam rooster who ruled the roost, a domestic Napoleon.

This was the concatenation of events that had slid Peter Jairus Frigate from potentiality into existence. If old William had not decided to take his son along to Kansas City, if James had not been more tempted by a soda than by beer, if the girl hadn’t happened to knock over the Coke, there would have been no Peter Jairus Frigate. At least, not the individual now bearing that name. And if his father had had a wet dream the night before or had used a contraceptive on the wedding night, he, Peter, would not have been born. Or if there had been no mating, if it had been put off for some reason, the egg would have drifted off and out and into a menstruation pad.

What was there about that one spermatozoan, one in 300,000,000, that had enabled it to beat all the others out in the race to the egg?

May the best wriggler win. And so it had been. But it had been close, too close for comfort when he thought about it.

And then there was the horde of his brothers and sisters in potentio, unhoarded. They had died, arriving too late or not at all. A waste of flesh and spirit. Had any of the sperm had the potentiality for his imagination and writing talent? Or were those in the egg? Or were they in the fusion of sperm and egg, a combination of genes only possible in that one sperm and that one egg? His three brothers had no creative and little passive imagination; his sister had a passive imagination, she liked fantasy and science fiction, but she had no inclination to write. What had made the difference?

Environment couldn’t explain it. The others had been exposed to the same influences as he. His father had purchased that library of little red pseudoleather-bound books, what in hell was its name? It was a very popular home library in his childhood. But they hadn’t been fascinated by the stories in them. They hadn’t fallen in love with Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler in A Scandal in Bohemia, or sympathized with the monster in Frankenstein, or battled before the walls of Troy with Achilles, or suffered with Odysseus in his wanderings, or descended the icy depths to seek out Grendel with Beowulf, or journeyed with the Time Traveller of Wells, or visited those wild weird stars of Olive Schneider, or escaped from the Mohegans with Natty Bumppo. Nor had they been interested in the other books his parents bought him, Pilgrim’s Progress, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, The Arabian Nights, and Gulliver’s Travels. Nor had they prospected at the little library branch, where he first dug the gold of Frank Baum, Hans Andersen, Andrew Lang, Jack London, A. Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling, and H. Rider Haggard. And don’t forget the lesser, the silver, ore: Irving Crump, A.G. Henty, Roy Rockwood, Oliver Curwood, Jeffrey Farnol, Robert Service, Anthony Hope, and A. Hyatt Verrill. After all, in his personal pantheon, the Neanderthal, Og, and Rudolph Rassendyll ranked almost with Tarzan, John Carter of Barsoom, Dorothy Gale of Oz, Odysseus, Holmes and Challenger, Jim Hawkins, Ayesha, Allan Quatermain and Umslopogaas.

It tickled Peter at this moment to think that he was on the same boat with the man who had furnished the model for the fictional Umslopogaas. And he was also a deckhand for the man who had created Buck and White Fang, Wolf Larsen, the nameless subhuman narrator of Beyond Adam, and Smoke Bellew. It delighted him also that he talked daily with the great Tom Mix, unequaled in cinema flair and fantastic adventure except by Douglas Fairbanks, Senior. If only Fairbanks were aboard. But then it would also be delightful to have Doyle and Twain and Cervantes and Burton, especially Burton, aboard. And… The boat sure was getting crowded. Be satisfied. But then he never was.

What had he drifted off from? Oh, yes. Chance, another word for destiny.

He didn’t believe, as Mark Twain did, that all events, all characters, were rigidly predetermined. “From the time when the first atom of the great Laurentian sea bumped into the second atom, our fates were fixed.” Twain had said something like that, probably in his depressing What Is Man? That philosophy was an excuse for escaping guilt. Ducking responsibility.

Nor did he believe, as had Kurt Vonnegut, the late-twentieth-century avatar of Mark Twain, that we were governed entirely by the chemical makeup of our bodies. God wasn’t the Great Garage Mechanic in the Sky or the Divine Pill Pusher. If there was a God. Frigate didn’t know what God was and often doubted that He existed.

God might not exist, but free will did. True, it was a limited force, repressed or influenced by environmental conditioning, chemicals, brain injuries, neural diseases, lobotomy. But a human being was not just a protein robot. No robot could change its mind, decide on its own to reprogram itself, lift itself by its mental bootstraps.

Still, we were born with different genetic combinations, and these did determine to some extent our intellect, aptitudes, leanings, reactions, in short, our characters. Character determines destiny, according to the old Greek, Heraclitus. But a person could change his/her character. Somewhere in there was a force, an entity, that said, “I won’t do it!” Or—“Nobody’s going to stop me from doing it!” Or—“I’ve been a coward but this time I’m a raging lion!”

Sometimes you needed an outside stimulus or stimulator, as had the Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion. But the Wizard only gave them what they had had all the time. The brains of mixed sawdust, bran, pins and needles, the silk sawdust-stuffed heart, and the liquid from the square green bottle marked Courage were only antiplacebos.

By thought you could change your emotional attitudes. Frigate believed that, though his practice had never matched his theory.

He’d been reared in a Christian Scientist family. But when he was about eleven his parents had sent him to a Presbyterian church, since they were having a fit of religious apathy then. His mother cleaned up the kitchen and took care of the babies Sunday mornings while his father read The Chicago Tribune. Like it or not, he went off to Sunday School and then the sermon.

So, he had gotten two contrary religious educations.

One believed in free will, in evil and matter as illusion, in Spirit as the only reality.

The other believed in predestination. God picked out a few here and there for salvation and let the others go to hell. No rhyme or reason to this. You couldn’t do a thing to change that. Once the divine choice had been made, it was done. You could live purely, agonizedly praying and hoping all your life. But when the end of life on Earth came, you went to your appointed place. The sheep, those whom God for some unexplainable reason had marked with His grace, went up to sit on His right side. The goats, rejected for the same mysterious reasons, slid down the prearranged chute into the fire, sinner and saint alike.

When he was twelve, he had had many nightmares in which Mary Baker Eddy and John Calvin had fought for his soul.

It was no wonder, when he was fourteen, that he had decided to blazes with both faiths. With all faiths. Still, he had been the epitome of the prudish puritan. No foul words escaped his lips; he blushed if told a dirty joke. He couldn’t stand the odors of beer or whiskey, and even if he’d liked them, he would have rejected them with scorn. And he’d have luxuriated in a feeling of moral superiority for doing so.

His early puberty was a torment. In the seventh grade he would be called on to stand up and recite, his face red, his penis thrusting against his fly, having risen at the trumpet call of his teacher’s large breasts. Nobody seemed to notice, but he was sure every time he stood up that he would be disgraced. And when he accompanied his parents to a movie in which the heroine wore a low-cut dress or displayed a flash of garter, he put his hand on his pants to hide the swelling.

The flickering light from the screen would reveal his sin. His parents would know what his thoughts were, and they would be horrified. He’d be ashamed to look in their faces forever after.

Twice his father talked to him about sex. Once, when he was twelve. Apparently, his mother had noticed some blood on his bath towel and spoken to his father, James Frigate, who, with a good deal of hemming and hawing and a twisted grin, had asked him if he was masturbating. Peter was both horrified and indignant. He had denied it, though his father acted as if he really did not believe him.

Investigation revealed, however, that, when bathing, Peter had not been peeling back his foreskin to wash under it. He had not wanted to touch his penis. As a result, the smegma had built up under the skin. How this could cause a bleeding neither he nor his father knew. But he was advised to wash thoroughly every time he took a bath. Also, he was told that jacking off rotted the brain, and he was given the example of the village idiot of North Terre Haute, a boy who publicly masturbated. With a grave face, his father told him that anybody who jerked off would become a drooling imbecile. Maybe his father believed that. So many of his generation did. Or maybe he’d just passed on that horrifying tale, purveyed for only God knew how many centuries or even millennia to scare his son.

Peter would find out that that was superstition, a reasoning from effect to cause, totally invalid. It was in a class with the belief that if you ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while you were sitting in the outhouse, the devil would get you.

Peter hadn’t lied. He had not been indulging in the sin of Onan. Though why it was called Onanism he didn’t know, since Onan hadn’t masturbated. Onan had just used what Peter overheard his father refer to as the IC (Illinois Central) railroad technique. Pulling out in time.

Some of his junior high school acquaintances—the “racy” ones—bragged about beating their meat. One of these low-lifers, a wild kid named Vernon (died in a crash in 1942 while training to be an Air Force bombardier) had actually masturbated in the rear of a streetcar on the way home from a basketball game. Peter, watching, had been fascinated and sickened at the same time. The other kids had just giggled.

Once he and a friend, Bob Allwood, as puritanical as he, had been going home on a streetcar after a late movie. There was no one else aboard except the operator and a hard-looking peroxide blonde in the front seat. As the trolley came up toward the end of the line on Elizabeth Street, the operator had closed the curtain around himself and the blonde and turned the overhead light off. Bob and Pete, watching from the back of the car, saw the woman’s legs disappear. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that Peter understood what was happening. The woman had to be sitting on the ledge in front of him, or on the control post itself, facing the operator, while he screwed her. Peter didn’t say a thing about it to Bob until after they’d gotten off the car. Bob had refused to believe it.

Peter was surprised at his own reaction. He’d been more amused than anything. Or perhaps envious was more appropriate. The “proper” reaction came later. That man and his doxy would go to hell for sure.

That was a long time ago. The time had come when Peter had laid a woman in front of the altar of an empty church, though he was drunk when he did it. This was in a Roman Catholic cathedral in Syracuse, and the woman had been Jewish. It had been her idea. She hated the religion because the tough Polish Catholic kids in the Boston high school she attended had roughed her up several times because she was a Jew. The idea of defiling the church had seemed like a good idea at the time, though next morning he sweated thinking of what would have happened if they’d been caught. But doing it in a Protestant church wouldn’t have appealed to him so much. Protestant churches had always seemed barren places to him. God wouldn’t be caught dead there, but He did like to hang around Catholic places of worship. Peter had always had a leaning toward Romanism and had twice been on the verge of converting. You could only blaspheme where God was.

Which was a curious attitude. If you didn’t believe in God, why bother to blaspheme?

As if that wasn’t bad enough, he and Sarah had entered a number of apartment houses on a street whose name he couldn’t recall now. It had once been a very posh district where the rich had built huge, gingerbreaded, many-cupolaed houses. Then they’d moved out, and the houses had been made into apartments. Mostly affluent old people, widows and aged couples, lived there. The two of them had wandered through the halls of three buildings where all the doors were locked tight and not a sound except the muffled voice of TV sets was heard. They’d been on the third floor of the fourth building, and Sarah was down on her knees before him, when a door opened. An old woman stuck her head out into the hall, screamed, and slammed the door shut. Laughing, he and Sarah had fled out into the street and up to her apartment.

Later, Peter had sweated thinking about what would have happened if they’d been caught by the police. Jail, public disgrace, the loss of his job at General Electric, the shame felt by his children, the wrath of his wife. And what if the old woman had had a heart attack? He searched the obituary columns and was relieved to find that no one on that street had died that night. This in itself was a rarity, since Sarah said that she couldn’t look out of the window from her apartment without seeing a funeral procession going down that street.

He also looked for a report of the incident in the papers. If the old lady had called the police, however, there was nothing in the papers about it.

A thirty-eight-year-old man shouldn’t be doing stupid childish things like that, he had told himself. Especially if innocent people might be hurt. Never again. But as the years passed, he chuckled when he thought of it.

Though an atheist at fifteen, Frigate had never been able to rid himself of doubts. When he was nineteen, he had attended a revival meeting with Bob Allwood. Allwood had been raised in a devout fundamentalist family. He, too, had become an atheist, but this lasted one year. In that time, Bob’s parents had died of cancer. The shock had set him thinking about immortality. Unable to endure the idea that his father and mother were dead forever, that he’d never see them again, he had begun visiting revival meetings. His conversion had taken place when he was eighteen.

Peter and Bob used to see much of each other, since they had been playmates in grade school and had gone to the same high school. They argued much about religion and the authenticity of the Bible. Finally, Peter agreed to go with Bob to a mass meeting at which the famous Reverend Robert Ransom was preaching.

Much to Peter’s astonishment, he found himself deeply stirred, though he had come to ridicule. He was even more amazed when he found himself on his knees before the reverend, promising to accept Jesus Christ as his Lord.

That promise was broken within a month. Peter just could not hold fast to his convictions. In Allwood’s parlance, he had “backslid,” “fallen from grace.”

Peter told Bob that his early religious conditioning and the passionate exhortations of the converts had been responsible for putting him in a fine frenzy of faith.

Allwood continued to argue with him, to “wrestle with his soul.” Peter remained adamant.

Peter approached the age of sixty. His schoolmates and friends were dying off; he himself was not in good health. Death was no longer a long way off. When he was young, he had thought much about the billions who had preceded him, been born, suffered, laughed, loved, wept, and died. And he thought of the billions who would come after him, who would be hurt, be hated, be loved, and be gone. At the end of Earth, all, caveman and astronaut, would be dust and less than dust.

What did it all mean? Without immortality, it meant nothing.

There were people who said that life was the excuse for life, its only reason.

These were fools, self-deluded. No matter how intelligent they might be in other matters, they were fools in this. Self-blinkered, emotional idiots.

On the other hand, why should human beings have another chance at an afterlife? They were such miserable, conniving, self-deceiving, hypocritical wretches. Even the best were. He knew no saints, though he admitted that there might have been and might be some. It seemed to him that only saints would be worthy of immortality. Even so, he doubted the claims of some of those who had been awarded halos.

Take St. Augustine, for instance. “Asshole” was the only word that fitted him. A monster of ego and selfishness.

St. Francis was about as saintly as a person could be. But he was undoubtedly psychotic. Kissing a leper’s sores to demonstrate humility, indeed!

Still, as Peter’s wife had pointed out, no one was perfect.

Then there was Jesus, though there was no proof that he was a saint. In fact, it was evident from the New Testament that he had restricted salvation to the Jews. But they had rejected him. And so, St. Paul, finding that the Jews were not about to give up the religion for which they had fought so hard and suffered so much, had turned to the Gentiles. He made certain compromises, and Christianity, better named Paulism, was launched. But St. Paul was a sexual pervert, since total sexual abstinence was a perversion.

That made Jesus a pervert, too.

However, some people just did not have much sex drive. Perhaps Jesus and Paul had been such. Or they had sublimated their drive in something more important, their desire to have people see the Truth.

Buddha was perhaps a saint. Heir to a throne, to riches and power, married to a lovely princess who had borne him children, he had given all these up. The miseries and wretchedness of the poor, the stark unavoidability of death, had sent him wandering through India, seeking the Truth. And so he had founded Buddhism, eventually rejected by the very people, the Hindus, whom he had tried to help. His disciples had taken it elsewhere, however, and there it had thrived. Just as St. Paul had taken the teachings of Jesus from his native land and planted its seeds among foreigners.

The religions of Jesus, Paul, and Buddha had started to degenerate before their founders were cold in their graves. Just as St. Francis’ order had begun corrupting before its founder’s body was rotten.

On an afternoon while the Razzle Dazzle was sailing along, a good breeze behind its sails, Frigate told Nur el-Musafir these thoughts. They were sitting against the bulkhead of the forecastle, smoking cigars and looking idly at the people on the bank. The Frisco Kid was at the wheel, and the others were talking or playing chess.

“The trouble with you, Peter—one of the troubles—is you worry too much about other people’s behavior. And you have too high ideals for them, ideals which you yourself don’t try to live up to.”

“I know I can’t live up to them, so I make no pretense,” Frigate said.

“But it bothers me that others claim to have these ideals and to be living up to them. If I point out that they aren’t, they get angry.”

The little Moor chuckled. “Naturally. Your criticism threatens their self-image. If that were to be destroyed, they, too, would be destroyed. At least, they think so.”

“I know that,” Frigate said. “That’s why I quit doing that long ago. I learned on Earth to keep quiet about such matters. Besides, people got very angry and some even threatened violence. I can’t stand anger or violence.”

“Yet you are a very angry person. And I think your abhorrence of violence stems from fear of being violent yourself. You were—are—afraid that you’d hurt someone else. Which is why you suppressed that violence in yourself.

“But as a writer, you could express it. It would be done impersonally, as it were. You wouldn’t be doing it in a face-to-face situation.”

“I know all that.”

“Then why haven’t you done something about it?”

“I have. I tried various therapies, disciplines, and religions. Psychoanalysis, Dianetics, Scientology, Zen, transcendental meditation, Nichirenism, group therapy, Christian Science, and fundamental Christianity. And I was strongly tempted to become a Roman Catholic.”

“I never heard of most of those, of course,” Nur said. “Nor do I need to know what they were. The fault lies in yourself, regardless of the validity of these. By your own admission, you never stuck to any of them long. You didn’t give them a chance.”

“That,” Frigate said, “was because, once in them, I could see their flaws. And I had a chance to study the people practicing them. Most of these religions and disciplines were having some beneficial effect on their practitioners. But not nearly what was claimed for them. And the practitioners were fooling themselves about much of the benefits claimed.”

“Besides, you didn’t have the stick-to-itiveness needed,” Nur said. “I think that comes from fear of being changed. You desire change, yet dread it. And the fear wins out.”

“I know that, too,” Frigate said.

“Yet you have done nothing to overcome that fear.”

“Not nothing. A little.”

“But not enough.”

“Yes. However, as I got older, I did make some progress. And here I have made even more.”

“But not nearly enough?”

“No.”

“What good is self-knowledge if the will to act on it is lacking?”

“Not much,” Frigate said.

“Then you must find a way to make your will to act overcome your will not to act.”

Nur paused, smiling, his little black eyes bright.

“Of course, you will tell me you know all that. Next, you will ask me if I can show you the way. And I will reply that you must first be willing to let me show you the way. You are not as yet ready, though you think you are. And you may never be, which is a pity. You have potentiality.”

“Everybody has potentiality.”

Nur looked up at Frigate. “In a sense, yes. In another sense, no.”

“Mind explaining that?”

Nur rubbed his huge nose with a small, thin hand and then pitched his cigar across over the deck and over the railing. He picked up his bamboo flute and looked at it but laid it down.

“When the time comes, if it ever does.”

He looked sideways at Frigate.

“You feel rejected? Yes. I know that you react too strongly to rejection. Which is one reason that you have always tried to avoid situations in which you might be rejected. Though why you should then have become a fiction writer is a mystery to me. Or is it? You did persist in your intended profession despite initial rejections. Though, according to your own story, you often let long periods of time elapse before you tried again. But you persisted.

“Be that as it may, it is up to you to decide if you will be disheartened by my refusing you at this time. Try me later. When you know that you are at least a fit candidate.”

Frigate was silent for a long while. Nur put the flute to his lips and presently a weird wailing, rising and falling, issued. Nur was never without the instrument when off duty. Sometimes he would content himself with short pieces, lyrics, presumably. Other times, he would sit cross-legged on top of the forecastle for hours, the flute silent, his eyes closed. At such time, his request that he not be interrupted was honored. Frigate knew that Nur was putting himself into some sort of trance then. But so far he had not asked him more than one question about it.

Nur had said, “You need not know. As yet.”

Nur-ed-din ibn Ali el-Hallaq (Light-of-the-faith, son of Ali the barber) fascinated Frigate. Nur had been born in 1164 A.D. in Córdoba, held by the Moslems since 711 A.D. Moorish Iberia was then near the apotheosis of Saracenic civilization, which Nur had beheld in all its glory. Christian Europe, compared to the brilliant culture of the Moslems, was still in the Dark Ages. Art, science, philosophy, medicine, literature, poetry flourished in the great centers of population of Islam. The Western cities: Iberian Córdoba, Seville, and Granada, and the Eastern cities: Baghdad and Alexandria, had no rivals, except in faraway China.

The wealthy Christians sent their sons to the Iberian universities to get an education unobtainable in London, Paris, and Rome. The sons of the poor went there to beg for bread while they learned. And from these schools the Christians went back to transmit what they had imbibed at the feet of the robed masters.

Moorish Iberia was a strange and splendid country, ruled by men who differed in degree of faith and dogmatism. Some were intolerant and harsh. Others were broad-minded, tolerant enough to appoint Christians and Jews as their viziers, inclined to the arts and the sciences, welcoming all foreigners, eager to learn from them, soft on matters of religion.

Nur’s father plied his trade in the vast palace outside Córdoba, the near city of Medinat az-Zahra. In Nur’s time this had been fabled throughout the world, but in Frigate’s there was scarcely a trace left. Nur was born there and learned his father’s craft. He desired to be something else, and, since he was bright, his father used his connections with his wealthy patrons to advance his son. Having demonstrated his aptitude for literature, music, mathematics, alchemy, and theology, Nur went to the best school in Córdoba. There he mingled with the rich and the poor, the important and the insignificant, the Northern Christian and the Nubian black.

It was also there that he met Muyid-ed-din ibn el-Arabi. This young man was to become the greatest love poet of his times, and echoes of his songs would be found in those of the Provençal and German troubadors. The rich and handsome youth, liking the poor and ugly son of a barber, invited him in 1202 to accompany him to a pilgrimage to Mecca. During the journey through North Africa, they met a group of Persian immigrants, Sufis. Nur had encountered this discipline before, but talking to the Persians decided him to be a disciple. However, at the moment, he found no master who would accept his petition for candidacy. Nur continued with el-Arabi to Egypt, where both were accused of heresy by fanatics and narrowly escaped being murdered.

After completing their hajj in Mecca, they journeyed to Palestine, Syria, Persia, and India. This took four years, at the end of which they returned to their native city, spending a year on the voyage. In Córdoba both were, for a time, the pupils of the Sufi woman, Fatima bint Waliyya. The Sufis regarded men and women as being equal and so scandalized the orthodox. These were sure that if men and women mingled socially, it could only be for sexual purposes.

Fatima sent Nur to Baghdad to study under a famous master there. After some months, his master sent him back to Córdoba to another great teacher. But when the Christians took Córdoba after a savage war, Nur went with his master to Granada.

After several years there, Nur started on the series of wanderings that earned him his lackab, his nickname, el-Musafir, the Traveler. After Rome, where letters of introduction from el-Arabi and Fatima gave him safe conduct, he journeyed to Greece, to Turkey, Persia again, Afghanistan, India again, Ceylon, Indonesia, China, and Japan.

Settling down in holy Damascus, he earned his living as a musician and, as a tasawwuf or Sufi master, accepted a number of disciples. After seven years, he set out once more. He went up the Volga and across Finland and Sweden, then across the Baltic Sea to the land of the idol worshippers, the savage Prussians. Here, after escaping sacrifice to a wooden statue of a god, he made his way westward through Germany. Northern France and then England and Ireland became part of his itinerary.

At the time Nur was in London, Richard I, surnamed Coeur de Lion, was king. Richard was not in England then, being engaged in the siege of the Castle of Chalus in the Limousin, France. Richard was killed by an arrow from the castle the following month, and his brother John was crowned in May. Nur witnessed the ceremonies in the city. Some time after, he actually succeeded in gaining an audience with King John. He found him to be a charming and witty man, interested in Islam culture and in Sufism. John was especially fascinated by Nur’s reports of far-off lands.

“Traveling in those days was at best arduous and dangerous,” Frigate said. “Even the so-called civilized countries were no picnic. Religious hatred was prevalent. How could you, a Moslem, alone, without protection or money, travel safely in the Christian lands? Especially when the Crusades were going on then and religious hatred was endemic?”

Nur had shrugged. “Usually I put myself under the protection of the dignitaries of the state religions of those countries. And these got me civil protection. The church leaders were more concerned with heretics in their own faith than in infidels. In their own provinces, anyway.

“At other times, my very poverty was my safeguard. Robbers were not interested in me. When I traveled in rural areas, I would earn my keep and provide amusement by my flute playing and by my skill as a juggler, acrobat, and magician. Also, I am a great linguist, and I could pick up the language or the dialect of a place very quickly. I also told stories and jokes. You see, people everywhere were crazy for novelty, for entertainment. They welcomed me most places, though I did have a number of hostile receptions here and there. What did they care if I was a Moslem? I was harmless, and I gave them joy.

“Besides, I radiated an assurance of friendliness. That is something that we can do.”

Returning to Granada, and finding the atmosphere there changed, not friendly to Sufis, he had gone to Khorasan. After teaching there for several years, he made another trip to Mecca. From southern Arabia he had traveled on a trading ship to the shores of Zanzibar and then to southeast Africa. Returning to Baghdad, he lived there until his death at the age of ninety-four.

The Mongols under Hulagu, Jenghiz Khan’s grandson, stormed into Baghdad, slaughtering and plundering. Within forty days, hundreds of thousands of its citizens were slain. Nur was one of them. He was sitting in his little room playing on the flute when a squat, slant-eyed, blood-drenched soldier burst in. Nur continued his song until the Mongol brought his sword down upon his neck.

“The Mongols devastated the Mideast,” Frigate had said. “Never in history has such desolation been wrought in such a short time. Before the Mongols left, they murdered half the population, and they had destroyed everything from canals to buildings. In my time, six hundred years later, the Mideast still had not recovered.”

“They were indeed the Scourge of Allah,” Nur had said. “Yet there were good men and women among them.”

Now, sitting by the little man, watching the dark-skinned betelnut chewers on shore, Frigate was thinking about chance. What destiny had crossed the paths of a man born in midwestern America in 1918 and of one born in Moslem Spain in 1164? Was destiny anything but chance? Probably. But the odds against this happening on Earth were infinity to one. Then the Riverworld had changed the odds, and here they were.

It was that evening, after his conversation with Nur, that all sat in the captain’s cabin. The ship was anchored near the shore, and fish-oil lamps lit their poker game. After Tom Rider had cleaned up the final big pot—cigarettes were the stakes—they had a bull session. Nur told them two tales of the Mullah Nasruddin. Nasruddin (Eagle-of-the-Faith) was a figure of Moslem folk tales, a mad dervish, a simpleton whose adventures were really lessons in wisdom.

Nur sipped on his scotch whiskey—he never drank more than two ounces a day—and said, “Captain, you’ve told the tale about Pat and Mike, the priest, rabbi, and minister. It’s a funny story, but it does tell a person something about patterns of thinking. Pat and Mike are figures of Western folklore. Let me tell you about one from the East.

“One day a man came by the house of the Mullah Nasruddin and observed him walking around it, throwing bread crumbs on the ground.

“‘Why in the world are you doing that, Mullah?’ the man said.

“‘I’m keeping the tigers away.’

“‘But,’ the man said, ‘there are no tigers around here.’

“‘Exactly. It works, doesn’t it?’”

They laughed, and then Frigate said, “Nur, how old is that story?”

“It was at least two thousand years old when I was born. It originated among the Sufis as a teaching tale. Why?”

“Because,” Frigate said, “I heard the same story, in a different form, in the 1950s or thereabouts. There was this Englishman, and he was kneeling in the street, chalking a line on the curb. A friend, coming along, said, ‘Why are you doing that?’

“‘To keep the lions away.’

“‘But there are no lions in England.’

“‘See?’”

“By God, I heard the same story when I was a kid in Frisco,” Farrington bellowed. “Only it was an Irishman then.”

“Many of the instructive Nasruddin stories have become mere jokes,” Nur said. “The populace tells them for fun, but they were originally meant to be taken seriously. Here’s another.

“Nasruddin crossed the border from Persia to India on his donkey many times. Each time, the donkey carried large bundles of straw on his back. But when Nasruddin returned, the donkey carried nothing. Each time, the customs guard searched Nasruddin, but he could not find any contraband.

“The guard would always ask Nasruddin what he was carrying. The Mullah would always reply, ‘I am smuggling,’ and he would smile.

“After many years, Nasruddin retired to Egypt. The customs man went to him and said, ‘Very well, Nasruddin. Tell me, now it’s safe for you. What were you smuggling?’

“‘Donkeys.’”

They laughed again, and Frigate said, “I heard the same story in Arizona. Only this time the smuggler was Pancho, and he was crossing the border from Mexico to the United States.”

“I suppose every story is an old one,” Tom Rider drawled. “Probably started with the cave man.”

“Perhaps,” Nur said. “But it is a tradition that these stories were originated by the Sufis long before Mohammed was born. They are designed to teach people how to change their patterns of thinking, though they are amusing in themselves. Of course, they are used in the simplest, the first, stage of teaching by the masters.

“However, since then these tales have spread throughout East and West. I was amused to find some of them, in altered form, told in Ireland in Gaelic. By word of mouth, over thousands of leagues and two millennia of time, Nasruddin had passed from Persia to Hibernia.”

“If the Sufis originated them before Mohammed,” Frigate said, “then the Sufis must have been Zoroastrians in the beginning.”

“Sufism is not a monopoly of Islamism,” Nur said. “It was highly developed by the Moslems, but anyone who believes in God can be a Sufi candidate. However, the Sufis modify their methods of teaching to conform to the local cultures. What will work for Persian Moslems in Khorasan won’t necessarily work for black Moslems in the Sudan. And the difference in effective methods would be even greater for Parisian Christians. The place and the time determine the teaching.”

Later, Nur and Frigate stretched their legs on land, walking around a huge bonfire through a crowd of chattering Dravidians. Frigate said, “How can you adapt your medieval Iberian-Moorish methods to teaching in this world? The people are so mixed, from everywhere and every time. There are no monolithic cultures. Besides, those that do exist are always changing.”

“I am working on that,” Nur said.

“Then, one of the reasons you won’t take me as a disciple is that you are not ready as a teacher?”

“You can console yourself with that,” Nur said, and he laughed. “But, yes, that is one reason. You see, the teacher must always be teaching himself.”

The gray clouds moved through the boat, filling every room.

Sam Clemens said, “Oh, no, not again!” though he did not know why he said that. The fog not only pressed against the bulkheads and seeped into everything that could absorb moisture, it rolled down his throat and enveloped his heart. The water soaked it, and drops fell off of it, dripping onto his belly, gurgling down inside his groin, running over, spilling down into his legs, waterlogging his feet.

He was sodden with a nameless fear which he had experienced before.

He was alone in the pilothouse. Alone in the boat. He stood by the control panel, looking out of the window. Fog shoved against it. He could see no more than an arm’s length through the plastic. Yet, somehow, he knew that the banks of The River were empty of life. There was no one out there. And here he was in this gigantic vessel, the only one aboard. It didn’t even need him, since the controls were set for automatic navigation.

Alone and lonely as he was, he at least could not be stopped from reaching the headwaters of The River. There was no one left in the world to oppose him.

He turned and began pacing back and forth from bulkhead to bulkhead of the pilothouse. How long was this journey going to take? When would the fog lift and the sun shine brightly and the mountains surrounding the polar sea be revealed? And when would he hear another human voice, see another face?

“Now!” someone bellowed.

Sam jumped straight up as if springs had been unsnapped beneath his feet. His heart opened and closed as swiftly as the beating of a hummingbird’s wings. It pumped out water and fear, forming a puddle around his feet. Somehow, without being aware of it, he had spun around and was facing the owner of the voice. It was a shadowy figure in the clouds swirling in the pilothouse. It moved toward him, stopped, and reached out a vague arm. A pseudopod flicked a switch on the panel.

Sam tried to cry out, “No! No!” The words ran into each other in his throat and shattered as if they were made of thin glass.

Though it was too dim to see which control the figure had touched, he knew that the boat was now set on a course which would send it full speed into the left bank.

Finally, the words came… screeching.

“You can’t do that!”

Silently, the shadowy mass advanced. Now he could see that it was a man. It was the same height as he, but its shoulders were much broader. And on one shoulder was a long wooden shaft. At its end was a truncated triangle of steel.

“Erik Bloodaxe!” he cried.

Now began the terrible chase. He fled through the boat, through every room of the three-tiered pilothouse, across the flight deck, down the ladder into the hangar deck and through every one of its rooms, down a ladder and through every room of the hurricane deck, down a ladder and through every room of the main deck, down a ladder and into the vast boiler deck.

Here, aware of the waters pressing against the hull, aware that he was below the surface of The River, he ran through the many rooms, large and small. He passed between the giant electric motors turning the paddle wheels which were driving the vessel toward destruction. Desperately, he tried to get into the large compartment holding the two launches. He would rip the wires out of the motor of one and take the other out into The River and so leave his sinister pursuer behind. But someone had locked the door.

Now he was crouching in a tiny compartment, trying to slow his rasping breath. Then, the hatch opened. Erik Bloodaxe’s figure loomed in the grayness. It moved slowly toward him, the great axe held in both hands.

“I told you,” Erik said, and he lifted the axe. Sam was powerless to move, to protest. After all, this was his own fault. He deserved it.

He awoke moaning. The cabin lights were on, and Gwenafra’s beautiful face and long honey-blond hair were above him.

“Sam! Wake up! You’ve been having another nightmare!”

“He almost got me that time,” he mumbled.

He sat up. Whistles were shrilling on the decks. A minute later, the intercom unit shrilled. The boat would soon be heading for a grailstone and breakfast. Sam liked to sleep late, and he would just as soon have missed breakfast. But as captain it was his duty to rise with the others.

He got out of bed and shambled into the head. After a shower and tooth-brushing, he came out. Gwenafra was already in her early-morning outfit, looking like an eskimo who had traded her furs for towels. Sam got into a similar suit but left his hood down to put on his captain’s cap. He lit a corona and blew smoke while he paced back and forth.

Gwenafra said, “Did you have another nightmare about Bloodaxe?”

“Yes,” he said. “Give me some coffee, will you?”

Gwenafra dropped a teaspoonful of dark crystals into a gray metal cup. The water boiled as the crystals released both heat and caffeine. He took the cup, saying, “Thanks.”

She sipped her coffee, then said, “There’s no reason to feel guilty about him.”

“That’s what I’ve told myself a thousand times,” Sam said. “It’s irrational, but when did knowing that ever make a fellow feel better? It’s the irrational in us that drives us. The Master of Dreams has about as much brains as a hedgehog. But he’s a great artist, witless though he is, like many an artist I’ve known. Perhaps including yours truly.”

“There isn’t a chance that Bloodaxe will ever find you.”

“I know that. Try telling the Dream Master that.”

A light flashed; a whistle blew from a panel on a bulkhead. Sam flicked its switch.

“Captain? Detweiller here. Arrival time at designated grailstone will be five minutes from now.”

“Okay, Hank,” Sam said. “I’ll be right out.”

Followed by Gwenafra, he left the stateroom. They passed down a narrow corridor and went through a hatch into the control room or bridge. This was on the top deck of the pilothouse; the other senior officers were quartered in the cabins on the second and third decks.

There were three persons in the control room: Detweiller, who had once been a river pilot, then a captain, then owner of an Illinois-Mississippi River steamboat company; the chief executive officer, John Byron, ex-admiral, Royal Navy; the brigadier of the boat’s Marines, Jean Baptiste Antoine Marcellin de Marbot, ex-general for Napoleon.

The latter was a short, slim, merry-looking fellow with dark-brown hair, snub nose, and bright blue eyes. He saluted Clemens and reported in Esperanto.

“All ready for duty, my captain.”

Sam said, “Fine, Marc. You can take your post now.”

The little Frenchman saluted and left the pilothouse, sliding down the pole behind it to the flight deck. Lights flooded this, showing the Marines in battle array lined up in its middle. The standard bearer held a pole on top of which was the boat’s flag, a light-blue square bearing a scarlet phoenix. Near him were rows of pistoleers, men and women in gray duraluminum coal-scuttle helmets topped by roaches of human hair stiff with grease, plastic cuirasses, knee-length leather boots, their broad belts holding holstered Mark IV revolvers.

Behind them were the spearmen; behind them, the archers. To one side was a group of bazookateers.

Off to one side stood a colossus clad in armor, holding an oaken club which Sam could lift with two hands only with difficulty. Officially, Joe Miller was Sam’s bodyguard, but he always accompanied the Marines at these times. His chief function was to awe the locals.

“But as usual,” Sam often said, “Joe goes too far. He scares the hell out of them just by standing around.”

This day started out like every other day. It was destined to be, however, quite different. Sometime during the day, the Minerva would attack the Rex Grandissimus. Sam should have felt jubilant. He wasn’t. He hated the idea of destroying such a beautiful boat, one he had designed and built. Moreover, he’d been deprived of the joy of wreaking a personal revenge on John.

On the other hand, it was a lot safer this way.

There was a bonfire on the right side about half a kilometer away. It revealed a mushroom-shaped grailstone and gleamed on white cloths covering bodies. The fog over The River was lower and thinner here than that usually encountered. It would clear away quickly once the sun got over the peaks. The sky was brightening, washing out the flaming giant stars and gas clouds.

Per usual procedure, the Firedragon III, an armored amphibian launch, preceded the mother boat. When it got to an area where the boat would have to recharge its batacitor, its commander parleyed with the locals for the use of two grailstones. Most areas were pleased to do this, their remuneration being the thrill of observing the mammoth vessel at close range.

Those locals who objected found their grailstones temporarily confiscated. They could do nothing about it except to protest. The boat had overwhelming firepower, though Clemens was always reluctant to use it. When forced to resort to violence, Clemens refrained from massacre. A few spurts of .80-caliber plastic bullets from the big steam machine guns on the boat and from the armored steam-spurting amphibian tearing around on shore, usually sufficed. It wasn’t even necessary to kill anybody in most cases.

After all, what did the locals lose if two grailstones were used by somebody else for one time only? Nobody had to miss a meal. There were always enough unused spots on nearby stones to take up the slack. In fact, most of those who surrendered their meal did not even bother to travel to the next stone. They preferred to stay there so they could ooh and ah at the magnificent beauty of the boat.

The four enormous electrical motors of the boat required tremendous energy. Once a day, a giant metal cap was placed over the grailstone by which the boat was stationed. A launch would carry the boat’s grails to the next stone for filling. A crane extended from another launch would lift the cap and place it over the head of the stone. When the stone discharged, its energy flashed via thick cables into the batacitor. This was a huge metal box which rose from the boiler deck into the main deck. It stored the energy instantly in its function of capacitor. As demanded, it would release the energy in its function of battery.

Sam Clemens went ashore and talked briefly with the local chief officials, who understood Esperanto. This universal language had degraded here into a form which was difficult but not impossible for Sam to understand. He gravely thanked them for their courtesy, and he returned to the boat on his small private launch. Ten minutes later, Firedragon IV returned with a cargo of full grails.

Whistles blowing and bells clanging to give the locals a thrill, the boat headed on upRiver. Sam and Gwenafra sat at the head of the great nine-sided table in the dining room in the main deck salon. The chief officers, except those on duty, sat with him. After some orders for the day, Sam retired to the billiards table, where he played against the titanthrop. Joe was not very good with a cue or with cards because of his huge hands. Sam almost always beat him. Then Sam would play against a more skilled person.

At 07:00, Sam would make an inspection of the boat. He hated to walk, but he insisted on this because he needed the exercise. Also, it helped keep up the appearance of a naval vessel. Without the drills and the inspections, the crew were likely to become sloppy civilians. They would get too off-hand, too familiar with their superiors when on duty.

“I run a tight boat,” Sam had often boasted. “At least, the crew is tight, though no one has ever been found drunk on duty.”

The inspection did not take place that morning. Sam was called to the pilothouse because the radio operator had gotten a message from the Minerva. Before Sam could get off the elevator, the radar scope had blipped an object coming over the mountain to portside.

The blimp came down out of the brightness as if it were a silver egg just laid by the sun. To the startled people on the ground, few of whom had ever seen or even heard of an airship before, it was a frightening monster. No doubt some believed that it was a vessel carrying the mysterious beings who had raised them from the dead. A few may even have hailed it with a mixture of dread and joy, sure that a revelation was at hand.

How had the Minerva found the Mark Twain so easily? The great boat was towing a large kite-shaped balloon which was above the top of the mountains and which carried a transmitter sending powerful dots and dashes. Hardy, the Minerva’s navigator, knew the boat’s general location from the map of The River on his table. During the years of its voyaging, the Mark Twain had sent out data by radio which had enabled the Parolanders to trace its route. Furthermore, on spotting the boat, the navigator of the Parseval had sent a message which gave the Minerva a rough location.

Having also been given the location of the Rex, the captain of the Minerva knew that John Lackland’s boat was almost on a straight line with Sam’s due east. The Rex was only 140 kilometers away if a line as straight as a Prussian officer’s back was followed. To follow The River, however, Sam’s boat would have to go perhaps 571,195 kilometers or 355,000 miles before it arrived where the Rex was now.

Greystock, speaking over the transceiver in the control nacelle, asked permission to pass over the Mark Twain.

Sam’s voice was flat over the transceiver. “Why?”

“To salute you,” the Englishman said. “Also, I think that you and your crew might like to get a close look at the vessel that is going to destroy King John. And, to tell the truth, my men and I would like to see your splendid boat at close range.”

He paused, and then said, “It may be our last chance.”

It was Sam who paused this time. Then, sounding as if he were choking back tears, he said, “Okay, Greystock. You may pass by us, but not over us. Call me paranoid. But it makes me uneasy to have an airship carrying four big bombs directly over me. What if they were accidentally released?”

Greystock rolled his eyes in disgust and grinned savagely at the other men in the nacelle.

“Nothing could possibly go wrong,” he said.

“Yeah? That’s what the commander of the Maine said just before he went to bed. No, Greystock, you do as I say.”

Greystock, obviously unhappy, replied that he would obey. “We’ll circle you once and then get to the job.”

“Good luck on that,” Sam’s voice said. “I know that you fine fellows might not be…”

He seemed unable to complete his sentence.

“We know we might not get back,” Greystock said. “But I think we have an excellent chance of taking the Rex by surprise.”

“I hope so. But remember that the Rex has two airplanes. You’ll have to hit the flight deck first so they can’t get off.”

“I don’t need advice,” Greystock said coldly.

There was another pause, longer than the others.

Sam’s voice came over the speaker loudly. “Lothar von Richthofen is coming up to greet you. He wants to fly alongside and give you his personal blessing. That’s the least I can do for him. I’ve had a hell of a time keeping him from convoying you. He’d like to be in on the attack, too.

“But our planes have a flight ceiling of only 3660 meters. That makes them too susceptible to downdrafts over those mountains. Anyway, they’d have to carry an extra fuel tank to get back.”

Lothar’s voice cut in. “I told him you could spare enough fuel from your ship, Greystock. We could fly back.”

“Nothing doing!”

Greystock looked down through the forward port. The balloon was being reeled in, but it would be twenty minutes before it was landed.

The giant boat was a beauty, a fourth longer than the Rex and much taller. Jill Gulbirra had claimed that the Parseval was the most beautiful and the grandest artifact on The Riverworld. Earth had never had anything to equal it. But Greystock thought that this vessel, to use Clemens’ phrase, “won the blue ribbon by a mile.”

As Greystock watched, an airplane rose on an elevator to the landing deck while a crew readied a catapult.

The stocky man looked with arctic-gray eyes around the control gondola. The pilot, Newton, a World War II aviator, was at his post. Hardy, the navigator, and Samhradh, the Irish first mate, were at the port screen. Six others were aboard, stationed in the three engine gondolas.

Greystock walked to the weapons cabin, opened it, and took out two of the heavy Mark IV pistols. These were steel four-shooter revolvers using duraluminum cartridges holding .69-caliber plastic bullets. He held one by the grip in his left hand; the other, he reversed. Keeping an eye on the two at the port screen, he walked over to a position behind Newton. He brought the butt end of the gun in his right hand against the top of Newton’s head. The pilot fell off his chair onto the floor.

He quickly reached over with his left hand and flicked the transceiver switch off with his thumb. The two men turned at the crack of the impact of metal against bone. They froze, staring at a totally unexpected scene.

Greystock said, “Don’t move. Now… put your hands up behind your neck.”

Hardy, goggling, said, “What be this, man?”

“Just keep quiet.”

He waved a pistol at a cabinet. “Put on your parachutes. And don’t try to jump me. I can shoot both of you easily.”

Samhradh stuttered, his face going from pale to red. “Y… y… you bastard! You’re a traitor!”

“No,” Greystock said, “a loyal subject of King John of England.” He smiled. “Though I have been promised that I will be second-in-command of the Rex when I bring this airship to His Majesty. That ensured my loyalty.”

Samhradh looked out the stern port. The action in the control gondola was visible from the engine gondolas.

Greystock said, “I was gone for half an hour, checking with the engineers, remember? They’re all tied up, so they won’t be of any help to you.”

The two men crossed the gondola, opened the cabinet and began to put on their parachutes. Hardy said, “What about him?”

“You can put Newton’s chute on and throw him out before you go.”

“And what about the engineers?”

“They’ll have to take their chances.”

“They’ll die if you’re shot down!” Samhradh said.

“Too bad.”

When the two men had strapped on their packs, they dragged Newton to the middle of the gondola. Greystock, holding pistols on them, backed away while they did this. He then pushed the button which lowered the port Plexiglas screen. Newton, groaning, half-conscious, was pushed over the ledge. Samhradh pulled Newton’s rip cord as he fell out. A moment later, the Irishman leaped. Hardy paused with one leg outside the port.

“If I ever run across you, Greystock, I’ll kill you.”

“No, you won’t,” Greystock said. “Jump before I decide to make sure you won’t ever have a chance.”

He turned the transceiver on.

Clemens bellowed, “What in blue blazes is going on?”

“Three of my men drew lots to see who leaves the ship,” Greystock said smoothly. “We decided that the ship should be lightened. It’s better that way; we need all the speed we can get.”

“Why in hell didn’t you tell me?” Clemens said. “Now I’ll have to put about and fish them out of the water.”

“I know,” Greystock said under his breath.

He looked out the port screen. The Minerva was past the Mark Twain now. Its decks were crowded with people looking up at the dirigible. The airplane, a low-wing single-seater monoplane, was on the catapult, which was being swung around to face the wind. The balloon was still being reeled in.

Greystock seated himself before the control panel. Within a few minutes he had brought the ship down to about 91 meters or 300 feet from The River. He turned it then and headed toward the boat.

The vast white vessel was stopped in The River, its four paddle wheels spinning just enough to hold it steady. A big launch had put out from its port in the stern and was going around the boat to pick up the parachutists, now struggling in the water.

Both banks were crowded with sightseers, and at least a hundred watercraft were sailing or being paddled toward the three ’chutists.

Steam spurted from the catapult, and the monoplane shot out from the deck. Its silvery fuselage and wings shone grayly as it began to climb toward the airship.

Clemens’ voice yammered from the receiver. “What the damnation-to-hell-and-gone are you doing, John?”

“Just coming back to make sure that my men are safe,” Greystock said.

“Of all the numbskulls!” Clemens screeched. “If your brains were expanded tenfold, they would still rattle around in a gnat’s ass! This is what comes from trying to make a mink cap from a pig’s anus! I told Firebrass that he shouldn’t let a medieval baron near a dirigible!

“‘Greystock’s from the dumbest, most arrogant, most untrustworthy class you could find!’ I told him. ‘A medieval nobleman!’

“Jumping Jesus H. Christ! But no, he argued that you had the potentiality, and it would be a nice experiment to see if you could adjust to the Industrial Age!”

Joe Miller’s voice rumbled. “Take it eathy, Tham. If you pithth him off, he’ll refuthe to attack Chohn’th boat.”

“Thyove it up your athth!” Clemens said mockingly. “When I need advice from a paleoanthropus, I’ll ask for it.”

“You don’t need to get inthulting chutht becauthe you’re mad, Tham,” Miller said. “Thay! Did it occur to Your Machethty that maybe Greythock ith up to thomething rotten? Maybe he thold out to that aththhole, King Chohn?”

Greystock cursed. That hairy, comical-looking colossus of an apeman was much shrewder than he looked. However, Clemens, in his towering fury, might ignore him.

By then the airship, her nose down at ten degrees to the horizontal, was heading straight for the boat. Her altitude was now 31 meters and dropping.

Von Richthofen’s plane zoomed by within 15 meters. He waved at Greystock, but he looked puzzled. He would have been listening in on the radio conversation, of course.

Greystock punched a button. A rocket sprang from its launch under the port fore-engine gondola. The dirigible gained altitude as it was relieved of the weight of the missile. Spurting tailfire, the long, slim tube swerved toward the silver plane, the heat locater in its nose sniffing the craft’s exhausts. Richthofen’s face wasn’t visible, but Greystock could imagine his expression of horror. He had about six seconds to get out of the cockpit and take to his parachute. Even if he escaped, he’d be lucky at this altitude if it opened in time.

No, he was not going to jump. Instead, he had wing-overed the plane and sent it diving at the water. Now it was straightening out just above the surface. There flashed the rocket. And now the missile and the aircraft disappeared in a ball of flame.

By then, the flight crew was frantically running another plane to the catapult. The balloon crew, distracted by the sirens and horns and the sudden frenzied activity, had stopped hauling their charge down. Greystock hoped they would not have the presence of mind to cut it loose. The huge aerostat would be a drag when the boat tried to maneuver swiftly.

Through the transceiver, the wail of sirens and Clemens’ voice, almost as high pitched as the alarms, came faintly.

The boat began to pick up speed and to turn at the same time. Greystock smiled. He had hoped that the Mark Twain would present her broadside. He punched a button, and the airship, relieved of the weight of two heavy torpedoes, soared. Greystock raised the elevators to depress the ship’s nose even farther, and he pushed the throttles in to full-speed position.

The torpedoes struck the water with a splash. Two wakes foamed from behind them. The transceiver yelped with Clemens’ voice. The giant boat quit turning and sped at an angle toward the bank to the left. Rockets spurted up from its decks. Some of them arced down toward the torpedoes and exploded immediately after plunging below the surface. Others headed toward the dirigible.

Greystock swore in Norman French. He hadn’t been quick enough. But the torpedoes would surely hit the boat, and if they did, King John’s orders would have been carried out.

But he did not want to die. He had his own mission.

Perhaps he should have dropped the bombs while he was passing over the boat. She had veered off when he had tried to get directly over her, and he had not wanted to change course too abruptly. He should have neutralized the crew earlier and then told Clemens he was bringing the airship in close so everybody could have a good look at her.

During these thoughts, he had automatically punched the button which released all his rockets. They headed toward the boat’s missiles, their heat detectors locked into the tail flames of the boat’s, just as the boat’s rockets were locked into the tail flames of his missiles.

The explosions from rockets meeting rockets shook the airship. Smoke spread before him, veiling the boat. Then he was through the dark clouds and almost on the Mark Twain.

By God’s wounds! One torpedo had just missed the starboard corner of the stern, and the second was going to hit it! No, it wasn’t! Its side had touched the corner, and it had veered off! The boat had somehow escaped both!

Now Clemens’ voice, yammering, told him that no more rockets would be released. Clemens was afraid that the airship would explode and, carried by the wind, would fall flaming onto the boat.

The balloon, trailing its plastic cable, was floating downRiver, rising at the same time.

Clemens had forgotten that the airship’s bombs had not yet been released.

The second airplane, a two-seater amphibian, shot below him. Its pilot looked upward in frustration at him. They were too close to each other and he was going too fast to swing up to the right and shoot the nose machine guns. But the gunner in the cockpit behind the pilot was swinging his twin machine guns around. Every tenth bullet would be a tracer, phosphorous coated. Only one in a gas cell was needed to ignite the hydrogen. The Minerva was only 152 meters from the Mark Twain and was closing fast. Its motors were going at top speed. This, plus a 16-km/h tailwind, meant that the boat could not possibly get away in time.

If only he could drop the bombs before the tracer bullets struck. Perhaps the gunner would miss. By the time he got his guns around, the airplane would be past the airship.

The side of the boat loomed up. Even if the dirigible wasn’t hit by the tracers, she was so near the boat that the bombs would blow up both vessels.

Estimating the arrival time of the Minerva over the paddle wheeler, he set the release mechanism of the bombs with a twist of his wrist. Then he got out of the seat and dived through the open port. No time to put on a parachute. Besides, he was too near the water for it to open in time. As he fell, he was struck by a wave of air like a colossal winnowing fan. He spun, unconscious, unable even to think fleetingly of how he had lost his second-in-command under John Lackland. Or his plans to get rid of John and take over the captainship of the Rex Grandissimus for himself.

Peter Frigate had boarded the Razzle Dazzle a week after New Year’s Day of year 7 A.R.D. Twenty-six years later, he was still on the schooner. But he was getting sailweary and discouraged. Would the ship ever arrive at the headwaters?

Since he had first stepped aboard, he had passed, to starboard, 810,000 grailstones. That meant he’d traveled about 1,303,390 kilometers or 810,000 miles.

He had started in the equatorial zone, and it had taken a year and a half to get into the arctic regions, going not as the crow flies but as the snake wriggles. If The River had been as straight as a ruler, it would have taken the ship there in less than six months, maybe five. Instead, it was as twisted as a politician’s campaign promises after election.

The first time the ship was in the arctic, just after The River had definitely turned for its southward journey, Frigate had proposed that they proceed northward on foot. The polar mountains could not be seen, yet they must be relatively near. Tantalizingly so.

Farrington had said, “And just how in blue blazes can we get over those?”

He had gestured at the unbroken stone verticality to the north. Here it rose to an estimated 3650 meters or a little less than 12,000 feet.

“In a balloon.”

“Are you nuts? The wind blows south here. It’d take us away from the polar mountains.”

“The surface wind would. But if the meteorological patterns are the same here as on Earth, the upper polar winds should be flowing northeastward. Once the balloon got high enough to get in their stream, it’d reverse direction, get blown toward the pole.

“Then, when we got near mountains that’re supposed to ring the supposed sea, we’d come down. We’d have no chance of getting over those mountains in the balloon, if they’re as high as they are said to be.”

Farrington had actually turned pale when he’d heard Frigate’s proposal.

Rider, grinning, said, “Didn’t you know that the Frisco Kid doesn’t even like the idea of air travel?”

“That isn’t it!” Martin said, glaring. “If a balloon could get us there, I’d be the first to board it. But it won’t! Anyway, how by the high muckamuck are we going to make a balloon even if we could travel on one?”

Frigate had to admit that it couldn’t be done. At least, not in this area. To make a balloon and fill it with hydrogen was impossible. There were no necessary materials here. Or anywhere else, as far as he knew.

However, there was another method they might consider. How about a hot-air balloon to carry a rope up to the top of the mountain?

Even as he spoke, he had to laugh. How could they make a rope 3650 meters long, one strong enough not to break under its own weight? What size of balloon would be needed to lift the enormous weight of the rope? One as big as the Hindenburg?

And how could they anchor the rope at the top of the mountain?

Grinning, Frigate proposed sending a man up in the rope-carrying aerostat. He could get off at the top and secure the balloon.

“Forget it!” Farrington said.

Frigate was happy to do this.

The Razzle Dazzle continued to sail southward, the wind behind it, its crew glad to get away from this gloomy, chilly area. There were some Old Stone Age people living here, but they had dwelt in the arctic regions on Earth. They did not know any better.

Since then, the schooner had crossed the equator and entered the south polar region nine times. At the moment, they were in the equatorial zone again.

Peter Frigate was sick of shipboard life. Nor was he the only one. Shore leave had been getting longer and longer for some time.

One day, while eating lunch on the bank, Frigate experienced two thrills in rapid sequence. One was the offering of his grail. For years he had been hoping to get peanut butter and a banana at the same time. Now, as he opened the lid of his grail, he saw the realization of his dream.

A gray metal cup in a rack was filled with smooth, delicious-odored peanut butter. Across another rack was the yellow-brown-spotted form of a banana.

Grinning, slavering, chortling, he unpeeled the fruit and smeared one end with the peanut butter. Close to crooning with delight, he bit off the combination.

It was worth being resurrected if only for the food.

A moment later, he saw a woman walking by. She was very attractive, but it was what she wore that widened his eyes. He got to his feet and, speaking Esperanto, approached her.

“Pardonu min, sinjorino. I couldn’t help observing that unusual armlet. It looks like brass!”

She looked down, smiling, and said, “Estas brazo.”

She accepted his proffered cigarette with a murmured, “Dankon,” and lit it. She seemed to be very amiable. Too much so, one person thought. Scowling, a tall, dark man strode up to them.

Frigate hastily assured him that his interest was not in her but in the armlet. The man looked relieved; the woman, disappointed. But she shrugged and made the best of it.

“It comes from upRiver,” she said. “It cost one hundred cigarettes and two hornfish horns.”

“Not to mention some personal favors on her part,” the man said.

The woman said, “Oh, Emil, that was before I moved in with you.”

“Do you know where it came from?” Frigate said. “I mean, where it was made?”

“The man who sold it to me came from Nova Bohemujo.”

Frigate gave the man a cigarette, and this seemed to ease the tension. Emil said that New Bohemia was a rather large state about nine hundred grailstones up The River. Twentieth-century Czechs made up its majority. The minority was composed of some ancient Gaulish tribe with, of course, the usual one or two percent of peoples from everywhere and every time.

Until three years ago New Bohemia had been small, just one of the mingled Slavic-Gaulish peoples in this area.

“But its chief, a man named Ladislas Podebrad, launched a project about six years ago. He thought there might be mineral treasures, especially iron, buried deep under the soil. His people started digging at the base of the mountain, and they made an enormous and deep hole. They wore out much flint and bone. You know how tough the grass is.”

Frigate nodded. The grass seemed designed to resist erosion. Its roots were very deep and intertwined. In fact, he wasn’t sure that it was not one plant, a single organism extending on both sides of The River and perhaps beneath it. And its roots were tough silicon bearers.

“It took a long time to get below the grass, and when it was done, there was nothing but dirt beneath that. They kept on, and after going sixty meters, they came to rock. I believe it was limestone. They almost gave up then. But Podebrad, who’s something of a mystic, told them he’d had a dream that there were great quantities of iron below the rock.”

“Of course,” the woman said, “I can’t see you working like that.”

“You’re not so dedicated yourself.”

Frigate did not give them long to stay together, but he said nothing. He could be wrong. He’d known couples like this on Earth who had verbally stung and stabbed each other from marriage to death. For some sick reason, they needed each other.

Three years ago, Podebrad’s dream and the hard work of his people had paid off.

They had come across an immense store of minerals: iron ore, zinc sulfide, sand, coal, salt, lead, sulfur, and even some platinum and vanadium.

Frigate blinked and said, “You mean, in layers, strata? But they wouldn’t occur naturally in that fashion.”

“No,” Emil said. “At least, the man told Marie that they shouldn’t. What he said, and I’ve heard others from New Bohemia say this, too, it looked as if a gigantic truck had just dumped the ores there.

“Whoever made this world had pushed the stuff there, you know, as if by a gigantic bulldozer. Then the rock had been put over it, then the soil, then the grass.”

Podebrad had gotten the minerals out, was, in fact, still bringing them up. All his people were armed with steel weapons now. And New Bohemia had expanded from its 12-kilometer-long boundaries to 60 kilometers on both sides of The River.

However, this had not been done by conquest. Neighboring states had asked to be absorbed, and Podebrad had welcomed them. There was wealth enough for all.

Meanwhile, other states along here had launched their own digging projects. They had been at it about three years but had gained only sweat, worn-out tools, and disappointment.

Podebrad’s original site seemed to be the only one to contain minerals. Or else other dumpheaps—as Emil called them—were buried even deeper.

Emil pointed at the hills.

“Our own country has a hole sixty meters deep. But it’s being filled up now. The caprock is dolomite. Podebrad was lucky. His was soft limestone.”

Frigate thanked them and excitedly hurried off. As a result, the Razzle Dazzle anchored off the bank of Podebrad’s capital eleven days later.

The crew smelled New Bohemia half a day before arriving at its southern limits. The fumes of sulfur and coal stank throughout the area.

High earth walls had been erected along the banks. Steel weapons, including flintlock firearms, were everywhere. The River was patrolled by four large steam-powered paddle-wheeled boats, each carrying two cannons, and a large number of smaller boats with machine guns.

The crew of the Razzle Dazzle were astonished. Also, somewhat depressed. The fair valley was blighted. For too long, they had taken the clean air and pure blue skies, the green plains and hills, for granted.

Nur asked a local why it was necessary to foul the land and make all those weapons.

“We had to do so,” the man said. “If we hadn’t, then other states would have tried to take our ores away from us. And they would have embarked on conquest by arms. We made the weapons for self-defense.

“Of course, we make other artifacts, too. We trade these, and we get more tobacco, liquor, food, and ornaments than we can use.”

The man patted his fat paunch.

Nur smiled and said, “The grails provide enough for any person’s needs and some luxuries, too. Why tear up the land and make a stench to get far more than you need?”

“I just told you why.”

“It would have been best to have filled up the hole again,” Nur said. “Or never to have dug it in the first place.”

The man shrugged. Then, looking surprised, he walked up to Rider.

“Say, aren’t you the movie star Tom Mix?”

Tom smiled and said, “Not me, amiko. People have told me I look a little like him, though.”

“I saw you… him… when he came to Paris during his European tour. I was on a business trip then, and I stood in the crowds and cheered you… him… as he rode along on Tony. It was a great thrill for me. He was my favorite cowboy actor.”

“Mine, too,” Tom said, and he turned away.

Frigate called the captain and first mate to one side.

“You look excited, Pete,” Martin Farrington said. “You must be thinking of the same thing Tom and I were discussing just a minute ago.”

Frigate said, “Now, how could you do that? What is it?”

Martin looked sidewise at Tom and smiled. “Sure, what else could it be? We were talking about, just speculating, mind you, about how nice it would be if we had one of those small steamboats.”

Frigate was astonished. “That wasn’t what I was thinking of! What do you mean, you’d steal it?”

“Sort of,” Tom drawled. “They could always make another one. We were thinking of how much faster we could get upRiver on one of those handy-dandy paddle wheelers.”

“Aside from the ethics of the thing,” Frigate said, “it’d be dangerous. I assume they guard them at night.”

“Look who’s talking of ethics,” Martin said. “You stole your spear and bow and arrows, remember?”

“Not really. I had made them myself. They were mine.”

“It was stealing,” Martin said. He gave one of his wonderfully charming smiles and slapped Frigate on the shoulder. “No need to get huffy. Your need was greater than the state’s, and you took something that could be easily replaced. We’re in the same situation. We need to get upRiver a lot faster.”

“Not to mention a lot more comfortably,” Tom said.

“You want us to risk getting killed?”

“Would you volunteer? I wouldn’t order anybody to do this. If you don’t care to do it, you won’t peach on us, will you?”

“Of course not!” Frigate said, getting red in the face again. “I’m not objecting because I’m afraid! Listen, I’d do it, if it was necessary. But what I have in mind is not that. It’s something that would get us far north a hell of a lot faster than a steamboat.”

“You mean have this Podebrad build us a speedboat?” Martin said. “A steam yacht?”

“No, I don’t. I mean something that won’t go up The River. It’ll go over it!”

“Rub me for a saddlesore,” Tom said. “You mean an airplane?”

Tom looked eager. Martin turned pale.

“No, that wouldn’t work. I mean, a plane could get us a lot farther faster. But we’d have to land several times and make more fuel, and there’s no way of making more.

“No, I’m thinking about another type of air travel.”

“You can’t be thinking of a balloon?”

“Sure, why not? A balloon, or, better yet, a blimp.”

Tom Rider liked the idea.

Farrington said, “No! It’s too dangerous! I don’t trust those fragile gasbags. Besides, you’d have to use hydrogen, right? Hydrogen can catch fire like that!”

He snapped his fingers.

“In addition, they’re easy prey for strong winds and storms. Also, where are you going to dredge up a blimp pilot? Airplane pilots should be easy to find, though personally I’ve only run into two. Furthermore, we’d have to be its crew, and that means we’d have to be trained. What if we don’t have the knack for it? There’s another reason…”

“A yellow streak?” Tom said, smiling.

Martin reddened, and his hands balled. “How’d you like a few teeth knocked out?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Tom Rider said. “But take it easy, Frisco, I was just trying to think of more reasons why we can’t do it. Help you along, sort of.”

Frigate knew that Jack London had never taken any interest in flying. Yet a man who had lived so adventurously, who had always been pugnaciously courageous, and who was also very curious, should have been eager to go up in the newfangled machine.

Was it possible that he was afraid of the air?

It could be. Many a person who seemed to be afraid of nothing on earth was scared of leaving it. It was one of those quirks of human character, nothing to be ashamed of.

Nevertheless, Martin might be ashamed to show fear.

Frigate admitted to himself that he had some of that brand of shame. He had gotten rid of some, but there was too much residue left. He was not afraid to admit a fear if there was a rational reason to do so. To reveal fear if it had an irrational basis was still difficult for him.

Farrington’s reaction did have some logic. It could be dangerous, perhaps even foolish, to go in a blimp in the unavoidably uncertain conditions.

Nur and Pogaas were called in to hear Frigate’s new idea. Frigate proceeded to tell them what the perils might be.

“Nevertheless, considering the time saved, it’s more efficient, more economical, to go in a blimp. Actually, considering the time a blimp would take as against the time a boat would take, you’ll encounter many more dangers in a boat.”

“Damn it, I’m not afraid of danger! You know better than that! It’s just that…”

Martin’s voice trailed off.

Tom smiled.

Farrington said, “What are you grinning about? You look like a skunk eating shit!”

Pogaas grinned also.

“There’s no need to get all fired up about this just now,” Tom said. “First we have to find out what the Big Cheese, Podebrad, will do for us. More than likely, he won’t build us a gasbag. Why should he? But let’s mosey on up to his house and see what he has to say about this.”

Nur and Pogaas had more pressing business, so the captain, first mate, and deckhand walked toward a large limestone building pointed out to them by a passerby.

“You aren’t serious about stealing one of the steamboats?” Frigate said.

“That depends,” Tom said.

“Nur will never go along with that,” Frigate said. “Nor some of the others, either.”

“Then we might do without them,” Tom said.

They halted at Podebrad’s house, which stood on top of a hill, its peaked roof of bamboo almost touching the lower branches of a tall pine tree. The guards passed them on into a reception room. A secretary listened to them, then disappeared for a minute. Returning, he told them that Podebrad would see them just after lunch two days from now.

They decided to go fishing the rest of the day. Rider and Farrington caught a few striped “bass,” but they spent most of their time planning how to capture a steamboat.

Ladislas Podebrad was redheaded and of medium height, very broad and muscular, bull necked, thin lipped, massively chinned. Though he had formidable features and an icy demeanor, he permitted the meeting to last longer than the three had expected. It even went well, though not entirely as hoped for.

“Why are you in such a hurry to get to the North Pole? I have heard of this tower that is supposed to be in the middle of a sea behind impassable mountains. I do not know that I believe the story. But it seems possible. Perhaps, even probable.

“This world may have been fashioned originally by God. But it is evident that human beings, or something similar, have remade the surface of this planet. It is also evident to me, a scientist, that our resurrection is caused by physical means, by science, not by a supernatural agency.

“Why, I do not know. But the Church of the Second Chance has an explanation that sounds somewhat logical. Though they lack much data and even more certainty.

“In fact, the Church seems to me to know more than anyone else about this business, if I may put it that way.”

He drummed long, slim fingers on the table as they all fell silent. Frigate, watching them, thought how ill matched they were to his husky physique and broad, thick hands.

Podebrad rose and walked to a cabinet, opened it, and withdrew an object.

He held in his fingers a spiral bone taken from a hornfish.

“You all know what this is. The Chancers wear it as a symbol of their faith, though I wish they had more knowledge to back their faith. But if they had more knowledge, they wouldn’t need faith, would they? In this respect they’re like all other religions, Terrestrial or Riverworld.

“However, we do know that there is an afterlife.

“Or perhaps I should say, there was an afterlife. Now that people no longer are resurrected after death, we don’t know what to expect. Even the Church has no answer to the question of why translation has suddenly ceased. It speculates that, perhaps, people have been given enough time to save themselves, and there is no longer a reason to continue the resurrections.

“Either you are saved by now or you are not.

“I really don’t know what the truth is.

“Gentlemen, I was an atheist on Earth, a member of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party. But here I met a man who convinced me that religion has nothing to do with rationality. At least, its foundation, the basis for its existence, does not.

“After the act of faith comes, of course, the rationalization for the faith, its pseudological justification. However, neither Jesus nor Marx, Buddha nor Mohammed, Hindu nor Confucian, Taoist nor Jew were right about the afterworld. They were even more mistaken about this world than the one we were born in.”

He walked to the desk, sat down behind it, and placed the spiral bone on it.

“Sinjoroj, I was going to announce today my conversion to the Church of the Second Chance. And also announce my resignation as head of the state of Nova Bohemujo. Several days afterward, I would embark up The River to journey to Virolando, which, I am assured, does indeed exist. And there I would ask the leader and the founder of the Church, La Viro, some questions. If he answered them satisfactorily, or even if he admitted that he did not know all the answers, I would place myself under his jurisdiction. Go where he said, do what he said.

“But if my information is correct, and I have no reason to believe my informants are liars, Virolando is millions of kilometers away. It would take me half an Earthly lifetime to get there.

“Now, you suddenly come to me with a proposal. One that I am astounded I did not think of myself. Perhaps because I was really more interested in the voyage than in its end.

“Voyages are always more rewarding in self-discovery than in anything else, are they not? Perhaps that is why the obvious escaped me.

“Yes, gentlemen, I can build a blimp for you.

“There is only one stipulation. You must take me with you.”

After a long silence, Farrington said, “I don’t see how we could say no, Sinjoro Podebrad. I think I speak for all of us.”

Frigate and Rider nodded.

“You really got us by the short hairs. Not that I have anything against your coming along with us. In fact, I am delighted. Only… well, what if we can’t find any experienced blimp men? We’d be crazy to go up there if we don’t know how to handle the machine or what we might run into.”

“Of course. But it will take a very long time to build the airship. Unless we can find some engineers who know how to design such a ship, or at least can calculate the specifications, we will have to do it from scratch.

“Meanwhile, we can look for a pilot. Though they’re very rare, somewhere along The River, within two thousand kilometers either way, there must be the man we’re looking for.

“Or perhaps I might say, there could be one. Actually, the odds are high against finding one.”

“I was a balloonist,” Frigate said. “And I read a great deal about lighter-than-air craft. I was up in a blimp for two short flights. That doesn’t near make me an expert, of course.”

“Perhaps we’ll have to train ourselves, Sinjoro Frigate. In which case, any knowledge will be of help.”

“Of course, that was a long time ago. I’ve forgotten a lot.”

“You don’t exactly inspire confidence, Pete,” the Frisco Kid said fiercely.

“Confidence comes with experience,” Podebrad said. “Now, gentlemen, I will start at once. I’ll delay my announcement of my conversion until after the airship is ready to leave. No member of the Church, no one preaching total passive resistance, can be head of this state.”

Frigate wondered how deep the man’s conversion was. It seemed to him that anybody who really believed in the tenets of the Church would say so at once. No matter what the consequences would be.

“As soon as our conference is over, I’ll get the facilities for making hydrogen under way. I think the best method, considering the minerals available, will be by the reaction of dilute sulfuric acid and zinc. Our sulfuric acid industry has been operating for some time. We were fortunate in finding both platinum and vanadium, though not in large quantities.

“I do wish we could make aluminum, but…”

“The Schütte-Lanz airships were made of wood,” Frigate said. “A blimp wouldn’t need much wood, anyway.”

Farrington said, “Wood! You want me to go up in a wooden dirigible?”

“The only wood would be in the keel and the car,” Frigate said. “The envelope could be made from the intestinal lining of the dragonfish.”

“Which requires much fishing,” Podebrad said. He stood up.

“I have much work to get done today. But I’ll see you gentlemen tomorrow during lunch. We can discuss this in detail then. Meanwhile, good day.”

Farrington, looking grave, spoke to Rider as they left the building.

“If you ask me, this is crazy!”

“It sounds great to me,” Tom said. “To tell the truth, I’m getting pretty tired of sailing.”

“Yeah, but we could get killed while we’re bumbling around trying to learn how to fly that damned thing!

“And what if we find it won’t work then? We’ll have lost a lot of time!”

Frigate said, “That doesn’t sound like the man who ferried people through the White Horse rapids in Alaska, time and again, just to pick up a few bucks. Or the man who pirated oysters…”

He turned pale. Rider and Farrington had stopped, and their faces were hard.

Farrington said slowly, “I’ve told a lot of stories about the Yukon, but I never said anything about the White Horse rapids. Not to you anyway. Have you been eavesdropping?”

Frigate drew a deep breath, and said, “Hell, I don’t have to eavesdrop! I recognized you two the first time I saw you!”

Suddenly, Rider was behind him and Farrington had put his hand on the hilt of his flint knife.

Rider spoke in a low monotone. “Okay, whoever you are, just march on ahead of me. Right into the ship. And don’t try anything funny.”

“I’m not going incognito!” Frigate said. “You are!”

“Just do as I say.”

Frigate shrugged, and he tried to grin. “It’s evident you two are doing a lot more than just concealing your true identities. All right. I’ll go. But you wouldn’t kill me, would you?”

“That depends,” Rider said.

They walked down the hill and across the plain. At the dock the only crew member present was Nur, who was talking to a woman. Rider said, “Not a word, Pete. And smile.”

Frigate, looking straight at the little Moor, grimaced. He hoped that Nur would detect that something was wrong—he was so sensitive to expressions—but Nur only waved at them. When they were in the captain’s cabin, Frisco shut the door and made Frigate sit on the edge of the bunk.

Frigate said, “I’ve been with you twenty-six years. Twenty-six! And I’ve never told anybody what your real names were.”

Farrington sat down in the chair at his desk. Toying with his knife, he said, “That seems against human nature. How could you keep your mouth shut that long? And why?”

“Especially why?” Rider said. He stood near the door, a hornfish stiletto in his hand.

“It was evident that you didn’t want it known, for one thing. So, being your friend, I didn’t say anything. Though I will admit I wondered why you were so secretive.”

Farrington looked at Rider. “What do you think, Tom?”

Rider shrugged, and said, “We made a mistake. We should have just laughed it off. Admitted who we are and made up some tall tale to account for it.”

Farrington put the knife down and lit a cigarette.

“Yeah. That’s hindsight. What’ll we do now?”

Rider said, “After all this mysterious folderol, Pete must know we got something to hide.”

“He already said that.”

Rider sheathed the stiletto and lit a cigarette. Frigate wondered if he should make a break for it now. His chances for success were small. Though both men were smaller, they were very strong and quick. Besides, trying to escape would make him look guilty.

Guilty of what?

Tom said, “That’s better. Forget about getting away. Relax.”

“With you two thinking of murder?”

Rider laughed and said, “After all these years you ought to know we can’t kill in cold blood. Even a stranger, and we’re sort of fond of you, Pete.”

“Well, if I were what you think I am, whatever that is, what would you do?”

“Work up a passion so I wouldn’t have to kill you in cold blood, I reckon.”

“Why?”

“If you aren’t really Peter Frigate, then you know.”

“Who in hell else could I be?”

There was a long silence. Finally, Farrington ground out his cigarette in an ashtray clamped to the desk.

“The thing is, Tom,” he said, “he has been with us longer than any of our wives. If he was one of Them, why would he stay around so long? Especially since he claims he recognized us the day he met us.

“We would have been scooped up that night, if he’s one of Them.”

“Maybe,” Tom said. “We don’t know more than one-quarter of what’s going on. One-eightieth, maybe. And what we do know may be a lie. Maybe we’ve been played for suckers.”

“Them? Scooped up?” Frigate said.

Martin Farrington looked at Tom, and he said, “What’ll we do now? There isn’t any way of identifying Them. We’re fools, Tom. We should’ve just told him a big lie. Now we got to go all the way.”

“If he’s one of Them, then he already knows,” Rider said. “So we wouldn’t be telling him much he doesn’t know. Except about the Ethical. And if he is an agent, then he wouldn’t have been put on our trail unless They suspected we’d been contacted by Him.”

“Yeah, we jumped the gun. And there isn’t any gun in the first place. You know, if Pete’s an agent, why would he have suggested the blimp? Would an agent want us to get to the tower?”

“That’s right. Unless…”

“Don’t keep me hanging.”

“Unless there’s something haywire, and he’s as much in the dark now as we are.”

“What do you mean?”

“Listen, Tom, lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking when I should’ve been sleeping or screwing. I’ve been thinking that there’s something mysterious going on. I don’t mean what the Ethical told us. I mean this business of there suddenly being no more resurrections.

“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe stopping them wasn’t the original plan—whatever that is?”

“You mean, somebody threw a monkey wrench in the machinery? And that blew the fuse and left everybody in the dark?”

“Yes. And the agents don’t know what’s going on any more than me and you.”

“Which could mean that Pete here is an agent. He’s just trying to get home.”

“You mean he might’ve found us but couldn’t do anything about it? So he went along for the ride? And he proposed this blimp idea because it’d help him, not us, get there faster?”

“Something like that.”

“So that puts us back where we were. Pete could be one of Them.”

“If he is, it’s like I said. We won’t be telling him anything he don’t know.”

“Yeah, but he could tell us plenty. Plenty!”

“You going to beat it out of him? What if he really is Frigate?”

“I wouldn’t, anyway. Not unless I knew the stakes were really high. Oh, hell, not even then.”

“We could just sail on and leave him behind,” Farrington said.

Tom smiled crookedly and said, “Yeah? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t have to trust your quivering flesh and beating heart to a skyboat.”

“You’re getting awful close to making me mad, Tom.”

“Okay, I won’t ever say another word about that subject. Besides, I know you ain’t got a cowardly bone in your body.

“So, what’ll we do? Remember, if we did sail on, by the time we got to the North Pole—if we ever did—Pete here would have the whole thing solved.”

“Oh, hell,” Farrington said. “How could he be one of Them? They’re superior to human beings, right? And Pete sure isn’t no superman. No offense, Pete.”

Tom glanced narrow-eyed at Frigate.

“He could be pretending to be only human. But I don’t think anybody could put up a front like that for twenty-six years.”

“Let’s tell him then. What do we have to lose? Besides, I’m tired of keeping a secret for twenty-nine years.”

“You always did talk too much.”

“Look who’s talking, Old Chief Run-off-at-the-mouth himself.”

Farrington lit another cigarette. Rider followed his example, then said, “You want to light up, too, Pete?”

“You’re trying to kill me with smoke,” Frigate said. He drew a cigar out of his over-the-shoulder bag.

“I think I need a drink, too.”

“We all do. Tom, you do the honors. Then we’ll tell all. God, what a relief!”

’T was a dark and stormy night,” Tom said. He smiled to acknowledge that he knew he was deliberately imitating the classical opening line of ghost stories.

“Jack and I…”

“Keep it Martin, Tom. Remember? Even when in private.”

“Sure, but you were Jack then. Anyway, I knew the Kid here, but we weren’t good friends yet. Our huts were close together, both of us were sailors on a patrol sloop in the navy of a local warlord.

“One night, when I was off duty, sleeping in my hut, I suddenly woke up. It wasn’t the thunder and lightning that woke me up, either. It was a tap on my shoulder.

“At first, I thought it was Howardine, my woman. You remember her, Kid?”

“She was a beauty,” Martin said to Frigate. “A redheaded Scotchwoman.”

Frigate stirred, and he said, “I’m anxious to get to the heart of the matter.”

“Okay, no frills then. It wasn’t her, because she was sound asleep. Then a flash of lightning showed me a dark figure squatting by me. I started to rear up, my hand going under my pillow for my tomahawk. But I couldn’t move.

“I guess I was drugged or under a spell of some kind. I thought, Oh, oh! This guy has got it in for me, and he’s paralyzed me somehow and now yours truly is going to get it.

“Of course, I’d wake up someplace else, but I didn’t feel like leaving.

“Then a couple of flashes showed the outline of the guy in detail. I was startled. Not scared, you realize, just startled. His body was covered in a big black cloak. And the head! There wasn’t any. I mean, it was covered by a big globe, like a fishbowl. It was all black so I couldn’t see his face. But somehow he could see me.

“If I couldn’t move, I could talk. I said, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ I spoke loud enough to wake Howardine up, but she didn’t stir during the whole parley. I figure she had been drugged, too, but worse than me.

“The stranger spoke in a deep voice, answering me in English.

“‘I don’t have much time, so I won’t go into much detail. My name doesn’t matter. In any event, I couldn’t tell you because they might find you and unreel your memory.’

“I wondered what that meant, unreeling my memory. The whole business was beginning to look bizarre. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I wished I was.

“‘If they should, they’ll know everything that is said and done here,’ the hombre said. ‘It’s like taking a movie of your mind. They can clip out what they don’t want you to remember, and you won’t. But if they should do that, I’ll talk to you again.’

“‘Who’s they?’ I said.

“‘The people who restructured this planet and who resurrected you,’ he said. ‘Now, listen, and don’t talk until I’m finished.’

“You know me, Kid. I don’t take crap off nobody. But this guy spoke as if the whole world was a ranch he owned and I was just one of the hands. Anyway, what could I do?

“‘They,’ he said, ‘live in the tower set in the middle of the north polar sea. You may have heard rumors about this. Some men actually did get through the mountains that surround the sea.’

“Right there I would have asked him if he was the one who left that long rope so they could get up the cliff and bored that tunnel for them. But I didn’t know about that story then.

“He continued, ‘But they did not get into the tower. One of their party, however, died when he fell off a mountain into the sea. He was allowed to be translated back into the Valley.’”

Tom paused. “He must have had some way of knowing this.

“The stranger continued, ‘But the others were not. They… never mind.’

“So,” Tom said, grinning, “he did not know everything about the Egyptians. What he didn’t know was that one of them escaped. Or, if he did, he wasn’t telling me, for some reason. I don’t think, however, he found out about it. Otherwise, he’d have never let him get away. Still… maybe he did.

“Anyway, the stranger said, ‘The swiftness of verbal communication in the Valley is amazing. I believe you call it the grapevine. The man who fell off the mountain told his story after he was translated, and it has spread throughout the Valley. You may speak. Have you heard the story?’

“‘Not until now,’ I said.

“‘Well, you will doubtless hear it in the future. You’ll be going upRiver and will surely encounter it in one distorted form or another. Its essence is true.

“‘Doubtless, you have wondered why you were raised from the dead and placed here?’

“I nodded, and he said, ‘My people, the Ethicals, have done this purely as a scientific experiment. They have put all of you here, mixed the races and nations from different times, solely to study your reactions. To record them and to classify them.

“‘Then!’—and here his voice rose to a pitch of great indignation—‘after they have subjected you to this experiment, after they have filled you with hope for an eternal life, they will close the project! You will die, forever! There will be no more resurrections for you! You will go down into dust, be dust forever!’

“‘That seems almighty cruel,’ I said, forgetting he’d not given me permission to speak.

“‘It is inhumanly cruel,’ he said. ‘They have the power to give you life everlasting! At least, it would last as long as your sun lasted. Longer even, since you could always be transported to another planet with a living sun.

“‘But no! They won’t do that! They say that you do not deserve immortality!’

“‘That’s downright unethical,’ I said. ‘In which case, how come they call themselves the Ethicals?’

“That seemed to stop him for a moment. Then he said, ‘Because they think it would be unethical to permit such a miserable, undeserving species to live forever.’

“‘They sure don’t have a good opinion of us,’ I said.

“‘I don’t either,” the stranger said. ‘But good or bad opinions of humanity, based on en masse consideration, have nothing to do with the ethical aspects.’

“‘How can you love someone you despise?’ I said.

“‘It isn’t easy,’ he said. ‘But nothing truly ethical is easy to do. However, this is wasting my time.’

“A bluish light glowed, and by its light I could see that he had taken his right hand out from under his cloak. Around its wrist was a device larger than a man’s pocket watch, and it was emitting the bluish light. I couldn’t see what was on its face, but it was also talking, softly, like a radio turned way down.

“I couldn’t hear the words, but it all sounded to me like some foreign language I never heard before. And the blue light showed me the globe, which was black and looked glassy. His hand was a big one, broad, but with long, slim fingers.

“‘My time is up,’ he said, and he put his hand under the cloak, and the hut was dark again, except for a lightning bolt now and then.

“‘I can’t tell you now why I chose you,’ he said, ‘except to say that your aura shows you’re a likely candidate for the job.’

“What’s an aura? I thought. I knew what it meant according to the dictionary, but I had the feeling he meant something else. And what job? I thought.

“Suddenly, as if he’d been reading my thought, his hand came out from under the cloak again. The bluish light was bright, very bright, so bright I could hardly see him. But I could see both his hands now, and they lifted the globe off. I thought I’d be able to see at least the outlines of his head, maybe something of his features if I squinted hard enough. But all I could see was the big globe above his head. Not the glass globe, because he held that to one side. The thing above his head was whirling, shot with many colors, and was so bright I could see only that. It put out feelers from time to time, feelers that shot out and then shrank back into the whirling thing.

“I don’t mind admitting that I was scared then. Well, not really so much scared as awed. It was like seeing an angel face to face, and there’s no shame in being afraid of an angel.”

“Lucifer was an angel,” Frigate said.

“Yeah, I know. I’ve read the Bible. Shakespeare, too. Maybe I didn’t get through grammar school, but I’m self-educated.”

“I wasn’t intimating that you were ignorant,” Frigate said.

Martin snorted, and he said, “You two don’t really believe in angels, do you?”

“Not me,” Tom said. “But he sure seemed like one. Anyway, I don’t think that aura is ordinarily visible. I think he showed me it by means of that thing he wore on his wrist. It suddenly disappeared, and the bluish glow died immediately. Too soon for me to see his face. Another lightning flash silhouetted him then, and I saw he’d put the glass globe back over his head.

“Now I knew what he meant by an aura. I figured from what he said that I had one, too. And it was invisible.”

“Next you’ll be claiming to be an angel,” Martin said.

“‘You can, you must, be of help to me,’ the stranger said. ‘I want you to start upRiver, toward the tower. But first, you must tell this Jack London what has happened here tonight. And you must convince him that you are telling the truth. And get him to accompany you.

“‘But under no circumstances are you to tell anyone else that I have talked to you. No one. We Ethicals are few and seldom venture from the tower. But my enemies have agents among you. Not many, compared to you. But they are disguised as resurrectees, and they will be looking for me.

“‘Someday, they may even suspect that I have recruited help from you Riverdwellers. So they will be trying to find you. If they do, they will take you to the tower, unroll your memories, read them, and excise the parts relevant to me. And return you to the Valley.

“‘London has a tiger-aura, too. So you must convince him to go with you. Tell him that I will see both of you again, and then he will believe. And you two will learn more of what this is all about.’

“He rose, and he said, ‘Until then.’

“I watched him as another flash of lightning outlined his dark figure, the cloak, and the globe. I was wondering if I was crazy. I tried to get up but couldn’t. After about half an hour, the paralysis wore off, and I went outside. The storm was over then, the clouds were starting to break up. But I couldn’t see any sign of him.”

Martin took up the story. Tom had come to him the next evening and made him promise to keep silent about what he was going to tell him. Martin did not know whether or not to believe him. What convinced him that he was not lying was that there was no reason for Tom to make up such a fantastic tale.

The incident had happened, but was it a hoax by some unknown party?

Tom thought about that and then wondered if perhaps London himself was the stranger, playing a joke on him. They soon realized that neither they nor anybody else they knew could have had the glass globe or the instrument he’d used. And how could anybody fake that blazing aura?

The Frisco Kid was getting itchy, anyway. He liked the idea of building a sailboat and going on. Whatever the story was, true or not, it gave him an incentive, a meaning to life. Tom felt the same way. The Tower became for them a sort of Holy Grail.

“I felt kind of lousy leaving Howardine without a word. The Kid wasn’t getting along too well with his woman, a tall plain jane with a chip on her shoulder—I don’t know what he ever saw in her—so he had no regrets about leaving.

“We scooted on upRiver for a couple of hundred stones, and then we started to build our schooner. Nur came along and helped us build it. He’s the only original member of the crew still with us.”

Tom, holding his finger to his lips, walked softly to the door. His ear against it, he listened for a moment. Then he yanked it open.

The little Moor, Nur el-Musafir, was standing by the door.

Nur did not seem startled or afraid. He said, in English, “May I come in?”

“Damn right you will!” Tom roared. He did not offer to drag him in, however. Something about the dark little man promised dire results if he were attacked.

Nur entered. Farrington, glowering, was on his feet.

“You were eavesdropping?”

“Obviously.”

“Why?” Tom said.

“Because, when you three went to the ship, I could tell from your expressions that something was wrong. Peter was in danger.”

“Thanks, Nur,” Frigate said.

Tom Rider closed the door. Martin said, “I need another drink.”

Nur sat down upon the top of a cabinet. Martin downed two shots of whiskey. Tom said, “You heard everything?”

Nur nodded.

Martin shouted, “We might as well stand on a deck with a megaphone and tell the whole world!”

Tom said, “For Chrissakes! Now we got another problem on our hands!”

“There’s no more need to kill me than there was to kill Peter,” Nur said. He removed a cigar from his shoulderbag and lit it.

“I overheard your women saying they’d be coming back soon. We don’t have much time.”

“He’s a cool one, ain’t he?” Tom said to Martin.

“Like an experienced agent.”

Nur laughed, and he said, “No. More like one who’s been chosen by an Ethical!”

Nur said, “You may well stare. But you should have wondered a long time ago why I joined you from the beginning and have stuck with you through such a wearying journey.”

Martin and Tom both opened their mouths.

Nur said, “Yes, I know what you’re thinking. If I were an agent, I’d pretend to be one of the Ethicals’ recruits. Believe me, I am not an agent.”

“How do we know you’re not? Can you prove it?”

“How do I know you two aren’t agents? Can you prove it?”

The captain and the first mate were flabbergasted.

Frigate said, “When did the mysterious stranger talk to you? And why didn’t he tell Tom that you were in on this?”

Nur shrugged thin shoulders.

“He appeared shortly after his visit to Tom. I don’t know exactly when. As for the second question, I don’t know the answer.

“I do suspect that the Ethical may not be telling the truth. He may be lying in that he is telling us only a part of the real situation. Why, I don’t know. But I am intrigued.”

Martin said, “Maybe we should just leave these two behind.”

“If you do,” Nur said, “Peter and I will take the high road, and we’ll be at the tower afore ye.”

“He’s paraphrasing Bobby Burns’ song, the one you sing so often,” Tom said to Martin.

Martin grunted, and he said, “They wouldn’t be agents of the enemies of your visitor, Tom. Otherwise, we’d have been turned in long ago. So, we have to believe them. I still don’t understand why the Ethical didn’t tell us about Nur.”

Tom proposed a toast to their newfound band, and they drank. By then, they heard the women on deck. The men were laughing at one of Martin’s jokes when the women came into the cabin, but they had had time to arrange a meeting later in the hills.

The next day they met with Podebrad, who introduced them to his engineering staff. They launched at once into the specifications of the blimp.

Frigate pointed out that what they would build depended on their goal. If they just wished to get near the headwaters, they would need an airship large enough to carry enough fuel to take them there. It wouldn’t have to have a ceiling of more than 4572 meters or 15,000 feet. If they wished to get over the mountains that ringed the polar sea, they’d have to build one which could rise 9144 meters.

That is, if the stories of their height were true. No one really knew.

It would take much longer to design and build a rigid dirigible for the longer, higher flight. It would require a much larger crew and, hence, more training. At higher altitudes, the engines would need supercharging. Besides, the winds there would probably be stronger than the lower winds. Too strong. The zeppelin would have to carry oxygen supplies for personnel and engines. That made the load heavier. And there was the problem of the engine freezing.

It would be nice if they could use jet engines. These, however, were inefficient at low altitudes and speeds. Airships couldn’t use them unless they went to higher altitudes. Unfortunately, the metals needed for jet engines were lacking.

Podebrad coldly replied that a big rigid dirigible was out. He was interested only in the smaller nonrigid type. This would go over the mountains, keeping at a height of +2.4 meters or 13,000 feet. He understood that the mountains sometimes rose to 6096 meters. The ship would just go along them until it came to those of lesser height.

“That would require more fuel, because it would make the trip longer,” Frigate said.

“Obviously,” Podebrad said. “The ship will have to be big enough to be prepared for that.”

It was clear that Sinjoro Podebrad was the boss.

The next day Project Airship was started. It was completed in eight months, four less than estimated. Podebrad was a hard driver.

Nur asked Podebrad how he would find Virolando without charts.

The Czech replied that he’d talked to several missionaries who’d originated there. According to their accounts, Virolando was near the arctic region in which The River flowed downstream. It was an estimated 50,000 kilometers from the headwaters and shouldn’t be too difficult to identify from the air. Since it was on the shores of a very large lake with a rough hourglass shape, and it contained exactly one hundred tall rock spires, it would be impossible to mistake it for another lake.

That is, it would be unless it had a duplicate somewhere else.

Afterward, Frigate said, “I got my doubts about his being a Chancer. Those I’ve met have been very warm, very compassionate. This guy could give a refrigerator lessons in freezing.”

“Perhaps he is an agent,” Nur said.

The others went numb at the thought.

“If he were, however,” Nur said, “wouldn’t he want to build a high-altitude zeppelin to get over the polar mountains?”

“I don’t think an airship could get that high,” Frigate said.

Whatever he was, Podebrad was efficient. Though he failed to find any airship pilots, he did have enough engineers to man a dozen vessels. And he decided that the pilots would train themselves.

Three crews were picked so that if any person dropped out for any reason, there would be enough replacements. It was during the ground training that Frigate, Nur, Farrington, Rider, and Pogaas began to have their doubts. None of them knew much about engines, which meant they’d have to be trained. Why should Podebrad use them when he had experienced engineers and mechanics?

He planned on a crew of only eight. But, true to his promise, the five from the Razzle Dazzle were assigned to the first crew. Podebrad went along on every trip, though ostensibly only as an observer.

Frigate was nervous when he took his first flight, but his experience as a balloonist helped him overcome his stage fright.

One after the other, the crews trained. Then the big, semirigid blimp took several shakedown flights of 600 kilometers roundtrip. It went over the four ranges of mountains, enabling them to see valleys they had never seen before though they were practically next door.

The night before the flight, the crews attended a big party given in their honor. The crew of the Razzle Dazzle, minus the women of the captain, first mate, and Frigate, were there. The women had gotten angry, understandably so, because they were being forsaken. Though they had already taken other lovers, they hadn’t forgiven their former cabinmates.

Nur had arrived at New Bohemia without a woman, so he had nothing to feel bad about.

Shortly before midnight, Podebrad sent everybody home. The ascent was to be made just before dawn, and the crew had to be up even earlier. Farrington’s party bedded down in a hut near the huge bamboo hangar, and, after some chatter, went to sleep. They had expected Podebrad to announce his resignation and departure at the party. But it was obvious now that he intended to wait until he was in the ship.

“Maybe he thought he’d be lynched,” Martin said.

Frigate was the last to fall asleep, or, at least, he supposed he was. Martin might be faking slumber. Though he had not shown any fear, he still did not like being aloft.

Frigate tossed and turned, too high strung to relax. Sleep always came hard before important events, just as it had the nights before he played football or ran in a track meet. Too often, the insomnia had resulted in fatigue the next day, and so he had not been up to his full potential. The very worry about not being good enough had ensured that he would not be.

Besides, having flown airplanes in the U.S. Army Air Corps when young and balloons in his middle age, he knew the dangers they could encounter.

He awoke from a light sleep to hear motors roaring, propellers spinning.

He rolled out of bed and opened the door and looked out. Though he could see only fog, he knew that there could be only one source of the noise.

It took a minute to rouse the others. Clad only in kilts and wearing long, thick towels over their backs, they dashed toward the hangar. Several times, they ran headlong into huts, and many times stumbled. Finally, as they came up the slope of the plains, their heads were above the fog.

In the bright starlight, they saw what they had feared.

Men and women stood around on the ground, sleepily cheering. These had hauled out the big blimp on ropes. Now, their work done, they were watching the ship rise slowly. Suddenly, water ballast was discharged, drenching many of them. More swiftly now, the cigar shape rose, its nose turned upRiver. Lights in the cabin, set below the long, triangular keel that ran beneath the vessel, blazed. They could see Podebrad’s profile through a port.

Howling, cursing, they ran toward the dirigible. But they knew they could do nothing to prevent its departure.

Farrington grabbed a spear leaning against the side of the hangar and threw it. It fell far short and almost hit a woman. He threw himself on the ground and beat the grass with his fists.

Rider jumped and yelled and shook his fists.

Nur shook his head.

Pogaas howled curses in his native language.

Frigate wept. Because of him, the others had wasted nine months. If only he had not thought of the blimp, they would be 50,000 kilometers or so farther along on their voyage.

The worst of it was that the Razzle Dazzle had been sold. Not for a song. For five hundred cigarettes and much booze and some personal favors.

Later, they sat gloomily around near a grailstone, waiting for it to erupt and fill their grails. The New Bohemians around them were a noisy crowd, discussing and cursing their late chief. The ex-crew of the Razzle Dazzle and the airship were silent. Finally, Martin Farrington said, “Well, we can always steal my ship back.”

“That wouldn’t be honest,” Nur said.

“What do you mean, not honest? I wasn’t thinking of just taking it without paying for it. We’d leave them just what they paid for it.”

“They’d never agree to the deal,” Tom said.

“What could they do about it?”

There was a flurry of activity, silencing them for a moment. A man had announced that the council had elected a new head of state. He was Podebrad’s second-in-command, Karel Novak. There was some cheering, but most people felt too depressed to work up much emotion.

“Why do you suppose he shafted us?” Martin said. “We were as good blimp men as anybody else, and he promised us.”

Frigate said, his voice near breaking, “The truth is, I wasn’t as good a pilot as Hronov and Zeleny. Podebrad knew that if he rejected me, you’d all raise hell. So he just took off without us.”

“The dirty sneak!” Tom said. “Naw. That isn’t it. Besides, you’re good enough.”

“We’ll never know,” Martin said. “Say, do you think Podebrad could be an agent? And he somehow found out about us and so left us behind, our thumbs up our tochises?”

“I doubt it,” Nur said. “He could be one. Perhaps he originally intended to build a fast steamboat to get up The River. Then we came along and put a bee in his bonnet: the blimp. But we’re the ones who got stung.”

“If he was an agent, how’d he find out about us?”

Frigate raised his head. “That’s it! Maybe one of the women we sloughed off overheard you two talking. You did get pretty loud when you were talking in your cabin sometimes. Maybe Eloise or Nadja heard you talking in your sleep. For revenge, they told Podebrad all, and he decided he didn’t want us along.”

“Neither one of them could keep their mouths shut about it,” Tom said. “They’d have spilled the beans to us long ago.”

“We’ll never know,” Martin said, shaking his head.

“Yeah?” Tom said. “Well, if I ever catch up with Podebrad, I’ll break his neck.”

Farrington said, “First, I’ll break his legs.”

“No, I want to build a six-story house,” Frigate said. “With only one window in it, in the top story. Then we’ll execute him by a method peculiarly Czech. Defenestration.”

“What?” Tom said.

“Throw him out the window.”

Nur said, “Fantasy revenge is a good method of relieving anger. It’s better, however, not to feel the need for revenge. What we must do is to act, not blow off steam.”

Frigate got swiftly to his feet. “I got an idea! Nur, will you take care of my grail for me? I’m going off to see Novak.”

“You and your ideas!” Farrington shouted. “They’ve got us in enough trouble! Come back here!”

Frigate kept on walking.

Slowly, majestically, the Parseval moved above the chasm. Its nose was up, and it’s propellers were angled upward. The wind that ripped out of the hole dipped down when it hit the edge of the canyon top, and the dirigible had to keep from being gripped by the downdraft. Cyrano had to calculate the force exactly, keeping the airship at the same altitude, aimed at the center of the arch-shaped hole. A slight error could result in the great craft’s being dashed down against the edge of the canyon and broken in two.

Jill thought that, if she were the captain, she would not have risked this entrance. It would be better to circle the mountain, to search for another gateway. However, that meant using much more fuel. Battling such strong winds, the motors could burn up so much that there would not be enough left to return to Parolando. Perhaps the ship could not even get to the Mark Twain.

Cyrano was sweating, but his eyes were bright and his expression eager. If he was scared, he did not look so. She had to admit to herself that he was, after all, the best one in this situation. His reflexes were the swiftest, and he would not freeze with panic. To him, this must be much like a duel with swords. The wind thrust; he parried; the wind riposted; he counterriposted.

Now they were in the thick clouds raging from the hole.

Suddenly, they were through.

Though still blinded by fog, they could read the radar-scopes. Before them was a sea, 1 kilometer below. Around it circled the mountain. And ahead, in the center of the sea, 48.5 kilometers away, a little over 30 miles, was an object which reared high above the water, though still dwarfed by the mountain.

Cyrano, looking at the CRT on the panel, said, “Behold the tower!”

The radarman, seated before his equipment on the port side, confirmed the sighting.

Firebrass ordered that the ship be taken to 3050 meters altitude, somewhat over 10,000 feet. The propellers could not be swiveled horizontally to lift the ship faster because it had to fight the wind.

However, as they rose, they found that the wind lessened. By the time the ship had reached the desired altitude, it could proceed straight ahead. Now its estimated ground speed was 80.50km/h, over 50 mph. As it neared the tower, it picked up more velocity.

The sky was brighter than at dusk, lit by both the weak sun and the clustered stellar masses.

Now the radars could sweep the entire sea and touch the top of the most distant wall. The nearly circular body of water was 97 kilometers across or somewhat over 60 miles in diameter. The opposite wall was the same height as the nearer one.

“The tower!” Firebrass exploded. “It’s 1.7 kilometers tall! And 16 kilometers wide!”

In old-style measurements, that would have been slightly over a mile high and almost 10 miles in diameter.

There was an interruption. The chief engineer, Hakkonen, reported that the hull was collecting ice. It was not, however, on the windscreens of the control room, since they were made of an ice-resistant plastic.

Firebrass said, “Take her down to 1530 meters, Cyrano. The air’s warmer there.”

The River, entering the sea, still carried much heat even after its passage through the arctic regions. In this deep, cold cup the waters surrendered warmth, so much that the temperature at 1524 meters or 5000 feet was 2 degrees above Centigrade. But higher up, the moisture-heavy air was an ice trap.

While the dirigible was lowered, the radar operator reported that the interior of the mountain was not as smooth as the exterior. There were innumerable holes and bulges, as if the makers of the mountain had not thought it necessary to finish off the inside.

The narrow ledge described by Joe Miller had been detected by the radar. It led from the top of the mountain to the bottom. There was another narrow ledge leading along the base of the sea, ending at a hole about 3 meters wide and 2 meters high.

No one commented on this. But Jill did wonder aloud why the big hole through which the dirigible had entered had been made.

“Maybe it’s for their aerial craft, if they have any,” Firebrass said. “It could be used to keep from having to fly over the mountain.”

That seemed as good a reason as any.

Piscator said, “Perhaps. However, the flash of light that startled Joe Miller so much could not have come from the sun’s rays going through the hole. In the first place, the hole is darkened by that cloud stream. In the second place, even if the sun’s rays had flashed through, they would not have illuminated the top of the tower. Joe did say that the fog was momentarily blown aside. But even so, the rays would not have reached the top of the tower. And if they had, he would have had to be in a straight line with the rays and the tower.

“He couldn’t have been since the ledge on which he stood doesn’t exist far enough to put him in the line of sight.”

“Maybe that flash of light actually came from the aircraft he saw a minute later,” Firebrass said. “It was coming down and perhaps its engines had to release some energy, in some fashion, to check its rate of descent. Joe thought it was the sun’s rays.”

Cyrano said, “It’s possible. Or perhaps the light was a signal from the tower. However, if the tower is big enough to be seen by Joe, and he must have been standing high on that ledge to see 48.5 kilometers away, how could he see a much smaller object, the aerial machine?”

“Maybe it wasn’t so small,” Firebrass said.

They were silent for a moment. Jill tried to estimate the size of an aircraft that could be seen at that distance. She did not know what it should be, but she thought that it must be at least a kilometer wide.

“I do not like to think of it,” Cyrano said.

Firebrass ordered him to send the ship in a circle around the sea. The radar indicated that the sides of the circular tower were smooth and unbroken, except for openings about 243 meters or slightly less than 800 feet below the top.

There was a difference in the height of the exterior top of the tower and the interior. Inside walls 243 meters tall was the smooth surface of a landing field almost 16 kilometers across.

“Those openings at the bottom of the wall are slightly lower than the center,” Firebrass said. “That must be so the moisture can drain out through the holes.”

What interested them most, however, was the only protuberance on the “landing field.” This was located at one end, south—all directions from the tower’s center were south—and it was a hemisphere with a diameter of 16 meters and a height of 8 meters.

“If that isn’t an entrance, I’ll eat my loincloth,” Firebrass said. He shook his head. “Sam’s going to be disappointed when he hears about this. There is no way that anybody can get into this tower except by air.”

“We’re not in yet,” Piscator murmured.

“Yeah? I know. But we’re sure as hell going to try. Listen, everybody. Sam ordered that we should make only a scouting trip. I think that trying to get into that tower comes under the definition of scouting.”

Firebrass was almost always ebullient, but now his whole body seemed to quiver and his face was lit up as if all his nerves had suddenly become light transmitters. Even his voice shook with excitement.

“There may be defensive weapons, manned or automatic, down there. The only way to find out is to probe. But I don’t want to endanger the ship any more than we have to.

“Jill, I’m going down with a small party in a chopper. You’ll be in charge, which means you’ll be captain, even if only for a short time. Whatever else happens, you’ve achieved that ambition.

“You keep the ship at about a thousand meters above the tower’s top and a thousand meters away from it. If anything should happen to us, you take the ship back to Sam. That’s an order.

“If I see anything suspicious, I’ll holler. You take off then and let me worry about getting back. Got that?”

Jill said, “Yes, sir.”

“If that dome has an entrance, it may take an electronic or mechanical Open Sesame to get in. Maybe not. They wouldn’t think there’d be any chance of us ever getting to it. I don’t think there’s anybody home. Maybe there is, and they’re just waiting to see what we do before they take action. Let’s hope not.”

Cyrano said, “I’d like to go with you, my captain.”

“You stay here. You’re our best pilot. I’ll take you, Anna, and Haldorsson, he can fly a chopper, too, Metzing, Arduino, Chong, and Singh. That is, if they’ll volunteer.”

Obrenova phoned the others at their posts and then reported that they were more than willing.

Firebrass informed the crew of the radar findings over the general address system. He also told them that a party would be landing shortly.

He had no sooner finished than he got a call from Thorn. Firebrass listened for a minute, then said, “No, Barry, I have enough volunteers.”

Turning away from the phone, he said, “Thorn was very eager to be with me. He sounded unhappy when I turned him down. I didn’t know he was so fired up about this.”

Jill phoned the hangar section and told Szentes, its chief petty officer, to prepare the No. 1 helicopter for flight.

Firebrass shook hands with everyone in the control room except Jill. He gave her a long hug. She was not sure that she liked that. It seemed unofficerly, and it was also too much like a farewell embrace. Did he have some doubts about being able to return? Or was she just projecting her own anxiety upon him?

Whatever the truth, she was having conflicting emotions. She resented his treating her differently from the others, yet she felt warmed because he was especially fond of her. It was a wonder that she did not have ulcers, she suffered so much and so frequently from opposing feelings. But then she had never heard of anybody having ulcers on this world. Mental and nervous tensions seemed to manifest themselves in psychic forms. Her hallucinations, for instance.

A moment later, she was no longer the exception. Cyrano had asked Piscator to take his post for a minute. Then he had risen and warmly embraced the captain while tears ran down his cheeks.

“My dear friend, you must not look so sad! There may be danger there, but do not fear! I, Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, will be at your side!”

Firebrass released himself, patted the Frenchman on the shoulder, and laughed, “Hey, I didn’t mean to make everybody think something will go wrong! I wasn’t saying good-bye, just so long! What the hell! Can’t I… ? Oh, well! No, Cyrano, you get back to your post.”

He smiled, his teeth very white in his dark face, and he waved at them. “So long!”

Anna Obrenova, looking very pensive, followed him. Metzing, looking very grim and Teutonic, walked out behind her.

Jill immediately gave orders that the ship be taken to the position Firebrass had commanded. The Parseval began to circle downward. When it had plunged into the fog, its searchlights were turned on. Though powerful, these could penetrate only 150 meters or somewhat less than 500 feet. The dirigible took its position, hovering in one place, its nose pointed into the wind, its speed exactly matching the force of the wind. Four tunnels of light were carved into the fog, but these showed nothing but dark-gray clouds. The tower was ahead and below, invisible, yet seeming to radiate a massive ominousness, extending feelers that gripped the ship.

No one spoke. Cyrano lit up a cigar. Piscator stood behind the radar operator and watched the sweeps on the scopes. The radio operator was intent on his dials, running the set through the frequency spectrum. Jill wondered just what he hoped to pick up.

After what seemed an hour but was only fifteen minutes, Szentes called the captain pro tempore. The belly hatch was open, the chopper was warmed up, and takeoff would be in one minute.

Szentes sounded strained.

“There’s a little problem, Ms. Gulbirra, which is why I called you before takeoff. Thorn appeared, and he tried to argue the captain into taking him along. The captain told him to get back to his post.”

“Did he do that?”

“Yes, sir. The captain told me to call you to make sure. Mr. Thorn won’t have had time to get to the tail section yet, though, sir.”

“Very well, Szentes. I’ll take care of it.”

She switched off, and she swore softly. Here she was, commander for only fifteen minutes, and she was confronted with a disciplinary problem. What had gotten into Thorn?

There was only one thing to do. If she ignored Thorn’s behavior, she would lose control of the ship, the respect of the crew.

She phoned the auxiliary control room in the lower tail structure. Salomo Coppename, a Surinamese, the aft second mate, answered.

“Arrest Mr. Thorn. Have him conducted to his cabin by a guard detail, and make sure a guard is posted outside his cabin.”

Coppename must have wondered what was going on, but he did not question her.

“And call me as soon as he shows.”

“Yes, sir.”

A red light on the control panel ceased blinking. The belly hatch had just been closed. The radar had picked up the No. 1 helicopter, heading downward for the top of the tower.

A voice suddenly came over the radio.

“Firebrass here.”

“We read you loud and clear,” the radio operator said.

“Fine. You’re coming in L and C, too. I’m going to land about a hundred meters from the dome. Our radar’s working A-OK and so we shouldn’t have any problems. I expect that the wall will block off most of the wind when we land.

“Jill? You there?”

“Here, Captain.”

“What did you do about Thorn?”

Jill told him, and Firebrass said, “That’s what I would’ve done. I’ll ask him why he was so hot to go with us when I get back. If… if I don’t get back, for any reason, you question him. But keep him under guard until this tower business is finished.”

Jill ordered Aukuso to tie in the radio with the general address system. There was no reason that everybody should not listen in.

“I’m coming down now. The wind is weaker now. Jill, I…”

Cyrano said, “The belly hatch is opening!”

He pointed at a blinking red light on the panel.

“Mon Dieu!”

He pointed out through the windscreen.

That was not necessary. Everybody in the control room was looking at the fiery ball suddenly born in the dark grayness.

Jill moaned.

Aukuso said loudly, “Captain! Come in, Captain!”

There was no answer.

The intercom was ringing.

Moving slowly, as if the air were cotton candy, Jill pushed the switch to ON.

Szentes said, “Sir, Thorn just stole the other chopper! But I think I got the son of a bitch! I emptied my pistol at him!”

Cyrano said, “He’s on the scope!”

“Szentes, what happened?”

She fought to get out of the thick element in which she was drowning. She had to shed this numbness, to recover quickness of analysis and decision.

“Officer Thorn left the hangar bay as the captain ordered. But he came back as soon as the chopper left, and he had a pistol with him. He made us get into the supply compartment, and he shot off the intercom unit. Then he locked us in. He forgot that arms are stored there, too. Or maybe he thought he’d be gone before we could get out.

“Anyway, we shot off the lock, and we rushed out. By then he was in the chopper and lifting it off the landing platform. I shot at him just as the chopper was going down out of the bay. The others shot, too.

“Sir, what’s going on?”

“I’ll notify the crew just as soon as I know myself,” Jill said.

“Sir?”

“Yes.”

“It was a funny thing. Thorn was weeping all the time he forced us into the supply room, even when he said he’d shoot us if we tried to stop him.”

“Out,” Jill said, and switched the intercom off.

The infrared equipment operator said, “The fire’s still burning, sir.”

The radar operator, pale under his dark pigmentation, said, “That fire is the helicopter, sir. It’s on the landing deck of the tower.”

She looked into the fog. She could see nothing except the swirling clouds.

“I’ve got the other chopper,” the radarman said. “It’s headed down. Toward the base of the tower.”

A moment later, he added, “The chopper is on the surface of the sea.”

“Aukuso, call Thorn.”

The gluey feeling was receding now. She still felt confused, but now she was becoming capable of finding some order in the chaos.

After a minute, Aukuso said, “He doesn’t answer.”

According to the radar, the amphibious helicopter was now floating on the sea 30 meters from the tower.

“Keep trying, Aukuso.”

Firebrass was probably dead. She was the captain now, her ambition achieved.

“God! I didn’t want it this way!”

Dully, she called Coppename and told him to come to the control room to take over the duties of the first mate. Alexandros would be the aft first officer.

“Cyrano, we’ll have to take care of Thorn later. As of now, we have to find out what happened to Firebrass… and the others.”

She paused, and said, “We have to land on top of the tower.”

“Certainly, why not?” Cyrano said.

He was pale, and his jaw set. But he seemed in perfect control of himself.

The Parseval moved through the clouds, its radar probing ahead and below. There was a powerful updraft around the tower, but it lost its force as soon as the dirigible was over the top.

The belly searchlights lanced downward, sweeping over the dull gray metal of the vast surface. The people in the control room could see the flames, but they could not distinguish the helicopter itself.

Slowly, the airship slid past the fire. Now its propellers were swiveled horizontally to pull the colossus down.

As gently as possible, its pilot brought it down. Under ideal conditions, there would have been no wind at all. However, the thousands of drainage holes along the base of the wall permitted a breeze of 8km/h. This, on the Beaufort scale, was a light breeze. Wind felt on the face. Leaves, if present, rustling. An ordinary wind vane moved by the wind.

A layman would consider it negligible. But the great surface of the buoyant ship was easily pushed by this breeze if no propulsive force countered it. It would be taken up hard against a wall unless something were done to stop it.

Unfortunately, there was no mooring mast. Also, the vessel could not be brought into direct contact with the landing field. Unlike the Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg, the Parseval had no underslung control gondola with a wheel on its bottom to keep the lower tail structure from rubbing against the ground when landing. Since the control room of the Parseval was in the nose, the ship could not land without damaging the tail fin.

However, there were ropes stored aboard. These had been taken along in case a landing had to be made on a plain alongside The River. They were to be thrown down to the people on the ground, and these, hopefully, would volunteer as a ground crew.

Jill gave a few orders. Cyrano turned the craft broadside to the wind. For several kilometers, he allowed the wind, which was decreasing, to push the ship toward the wall. By then it was obvious that the wind was blowing the other way now, its source the nearest apertures.

When radar indicated that the nose was a half-kilometer from the wall, he reversed the propellers at slow speed. The airship halted, and the belly hatch opened.

Ropes were lowered, and, by fours, fifty men climbed down them. As each group touched the ground, the ship lost its weight and became more buoyant. Reluctantly, Jill ordered that hydrogen be released from the cells. This was the only way to balance the lift, and she hated to expend the gas. Ballast could be released later to regain the buoyancy.

Other ropes were thrown down from the nose and the tail. The men on the ground seized these and hung on, bringing their weight to bear.

Cyrano now let the airship sail toward the wall, the propellers unmoving. Before the nose touched the wall, the propellers started up again, and the airship stopped.

Two men ran to the wall and tested the wind at the apertures. Via walkie-talkie, they verified that the wind coming in through these would be strong enough to keep the ship from swinging broadside into the wall.

Other men were let down on ropes, and more hydrogen was valved. These added their weight to the crew holding the aft ropes.

Others hastened to help the men at the nose. After towing the Parseval slowly until its nose almost touched the wall, they passed the ropes through the three holes, using extended hooks to catch the ropes outside and then draw them in. These were tied, and the tail was swung around until the dirigible was parallel to the wall. Then the tail ropes were tied down.

The vessel was now floating about 20 meters away from the wall.

Jill did not expect any change in the wind. If there was, it could be exceedingly damaging. One rub of the ship against the wall could strip off the transmission gears and the propellers on the port side.

A ladder was let down from the belly hatch. Jill and Piscator hastened from the control room, walked swiftly down the passageway, and then went down the ladder. Doctor Graves was waiting for them, his black bag in his hand.

The helicopter had crashed about 30 meters from the dome. With its flames a beacon, they pressed through the fog toward it. Jill’s heart beat hard as they neared the wreckage. It seemed impossible that vigorous, flamboyant Firebrass could be dead.

He lay a few meters from the flaming mass where the impact had thrown him. The others were still in the machine, the blackened body of one sitting up in its seat.

Graves handed his lamp to Piscator and bent down over the figure. Smoke mingled with the fog and brought the sickening stench of burning gasoline and flesh to them. Jill felt as if she were going to vomit.

“Hold the light steady!” Graves said sharply.

Jill did so, forcing herself to look at the corpse. His clothes had been blown off him; his skin was seared from top to bottom. Despite the burning, his features were still recognizable. He must not have been in the flames long. Perhaps he had been ejected by the explosion before the machine crashed. The fall would account for the removal of the top of his head.

Jill could not see why the doctor had to examine the body. She was about to tell him so when he stood up. His hand, its palm open, was held out to her.

“Look at this.”

She brought the lamp close to his hand. The object in it was a sphere the size of a matchhead.

“It was on his forebrain. I don’t know what the hell it is.”

After he had wiped it clean of blood, he said, “It’s black.”

He wrapped the little ball in a cloth and dropped it into his bag.

“What do you want to do with the bodies?”

Jill looked at the blazing mass of crumpled metal. “There’s no use wasting foam to put the fire out now,” she said in a dull voice. She looked at the men who had followed them. “Peterson, you get the body back to the ship. Wrap it up first. The rest of you follow me.”

A few minutes later, they halted before the dome. Searchlights from the dirigible were turned on it, making it look like a ghost of an Eskimo igloo. Using her lamp, Jill saw that the dome was made of the same gray metal as the tower. It seemed to be continuous with the metal of the tower. At least, there was no sign of welding, no seams. It was as if it were a bubble blown from the surface.

The others stood back from its arched entrance, waiting for her to decide what to do. Their lights revealed an opening like a cavern. About 10 meters beyond, the walls curved in, forming a corridor about 3 meters wide and 2.5 meters high. The walls were of the same gray substance. At its end, about 30 meters away, the hall curved abruptly. If there was an entrance down into the tower itself, it had to be just beyond the curve.

Just above the opening were two symbols, both in altorelief. The top one was a semicircle, and it bore the seven primary colors. Below it was a circle inside of which was a looped cross, the Egyptian ankh.

“A rainbow above the emblem of life and resurrection,” Jill said.

Piscator said, “Pardon me. The cross within the circle is also the astrological-astronomical symbol for Earth. However, in that symbol, the cross is a simple one, not the looped cross.”

“A symbol of hope, that rainbow. And, if you remember the Old Testament, it’s God’s sign of covenant with His people. It also evokes the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the Emerald City of Oz, and many other things.”

Piscator looked curiously at her.

She was silent for a minute, overcome with awe and a fear that she hoped would not become overwhelming.

Then she said, “I’m going in. You wait here, Piscator. When I get to the end of the hall, I’ll signal you to come on in, too. If there’s no trouble, that is.

“If anything should happen to me, I don’t know what, you and the men get the hell back to the ship. And take off. That’s an order.

“You’ll be the captain. Coppename’s a good man, but he doesn’t have your experience, and you’re the steadiest man I know.”

Piscator smiled. “Firebrass ordered you not to land if something happened to him. Yet you did land. Could I allow you to be in a dangerous situation and just leave you?”

“I don’t want you to endanger the ship. Or the lives of almost a hundred men.”

“We shall see. I’ll act as I feel the situation demands. You wouldn’t do otherwise. And then there is Thorn.”

“One thing at a time,” she said.

She turned and walked toward the entrance. As she neared it, she gasped.

A low light had filled the hall.

After hesitating several seconds, she continued. As she passed beneath the arch, she was suddenly in a bright light.

Jill stopped. Piscator said, “Where is the light coming from?”

Jill turned and said, “I don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be any source. Look. I don’t have a shadow.”

She turned back and started to walk slowly. And then she stopped again.

“What’s the matter? You…”

“I don’t bloody know. I feel as if I’m in a thick jelly! I can’t breathe, but I have to struggle to take another step!”

Leaning into the palpable, invisible barrier as if she were going against a strong wind, she managed to force herself three more steps. Then, panting, she stopped.

“It must be a field of some sort. There’s nothing material here, but I feel like a fly caught in a spider’s web!”

“Could it be that the field is affecting the magnetic tabs in your cloths?” he called.

“I don’t think so. If that was it, the tabs would be pulling the cloths, and that’s not it. I’ll try it, though.”

Feeling some shyness at stripping in front of fifty men, she pulled the tabs loose. The air temperature was just above freezing. Shivering, teeth chattering, she again tried to force her way into the thick element. She could not go a centimeter beyond the limit of her original advance.

She bent down to pick up her cloths, noting that she could do so easily. The force acted only in a horizontal direction. After backing away two steps, and feeling the force diminish, she put her cloths back on.

Outside the entrance again, she said, “You try it, Piscator.”

“You think I could succeed where you can’t? Well, it is worth experimenting.”

Naked, he walked in. To her surprise, she saw that he was not affected by the field. Not, at least, until he had gotten several meters from the curve. Then he called back that he was encountering difficulty.

He moved ever more slowly, struggling, his panting so loud that she could hear it.

But he did get to the curve, and there he paused to regain his breath.

He said, “There’s an open elevator at the end. It seems to be the only way to get down.”

“Can you get to it?” she called.

“I’ll try.”

Moving like an actor in a slow-motion film, he plowed ahead. And he was gone around the bend.

A minute passed. Two. Jill went into the corridor as far as she could. “Piscator! Piscator!”

Her voice rang strangely, as if the corridor had peculiar acoustical properties.

There was no answer, though if he were just around the curve, he would be able to hear her.

She shouted again and again. Silence replied.

There was nothing she could do except to return to the entrance and let others try.

The men went in by twos to save time. Some progressed a little farther than she; some, not as much. All shed their cloths, but this did not help them at all.

Jill used the walkie-talkie to order the men in the ship to make the attempt. If one out of fifty-two could do it, perhaps one of the forty-one in the ship might succeed.

First, though, everybody except herself had to return to the vessel. They trooped off, phantom figures in the dimly lit fog. She had never felt so lonely in all her life, and she had known many hours of the blackest isolation. The mists pressed wet hands against her face, which seemed to be congealing into a mask of ice. The funeral pyre of Obrenova, Metzing, and the others burned fiercely. And there was Piscator, somewhere around the corner. What situation was he in? Was he unable either to go ahead or to go back? Returning had not been difficult for her or the other men. Why should he not be able to retreat?

But then she did not know what other obstacles there were beyond that grim gray hall.

She muttered to herself Virgil’s line, “Facilis descensus Averni.” (“It is easy to go down into Hell.”)

What was the rest of it? After so many years, she found it difficult to remember. If only this world had books, reference materials.

Now it came back.

It is easy to go down into Hell. Night and day, the gates of Death stand wide. But to climb back again, to retrace one’s steps to the upper air. There’s the rub, the task.

The only real trouble with that quotation was that it was not appropriate. It had been very hard to get to the gates, impossible for all but one. And climbing back—except for one—had been easy.

She switched on the walkie-talkie.

“Cyrano. The captain here.”

“Yes, what is it, my captain?”

“Are you crying?”

“Yes, but of course. Did I not love Firebrass dearly? I am not ashamed of my grief. I am not a cold Anglo-Saxon.”

“Never mind that. Get hold of yourself. We have work to do.”

Cyrano sniffled, then said, “I know that. And I am willing and able. You will find me no less a man. What are your orders?”

“You know you’re to be relieved by Nikitin. I want you to bring along twenty-five kilograms of plastic explosive.”

“Yes. I hear you. But do you intend to blow up the tower?”

“No, just the entranceway.”

A half-hour passed. The men in the ship had to come out and those out had to go in. This was a long process, since, for every man that left, one had to go in immediately. Taking turns this way slowed the business but was necessary. Forty-eight leaving all at once would make the ship too buoyant. It would rise, leaving the end of the ladder above the reach of those on the ground.

Finally, she saw their lights and heard their voices. She told them what had happened, though they already knew. Then she told them what they were to do, which they expected.

The result was that no one got anywhere as far as Piscator.

“Very well,” Jill said.

The plastic explosive was applied against the exterior of the dome opposite a point halfway down the corridor. She would have liked to have set it at the juncture of the back of the dome and the tower wall. She was afraid that the explosive might blow a hole in the dome. If it did so, it might also kill Piscator.

They retreated to the dirigible and the explosive expert pressed a switch on a transmitter. The blast was deafening, though the plastic had been applied to the side of the dome away from them. They ran to it, then stopped, coughing from the fumes. After the air was cleared, Jill looked at the dome.

It was undamaged.

“I thought so,” she said to herself.

She had called in to Piscator that he should not come out until after the explosion. There had been no answer. She had a hunch that he was not in the vicinity, but hunches were not certainties.

Jill went back into the dome as far as she could. There was no force against the long-handled hook she thrust ahead of her. And she could throw a cloth weighted with metal to the end of the corridor. So, the field was no barrier to inanimate objects.

If they had a periscope long enough to reach to the end of the corridor, they could see around it. However, a periscope was not part of the ship’s supplies.

She was not defeated by this. There was a very small machinist’s shop on the Parseval. A wheeled device which would go to the end of the corridor could be built. A camera could be attached to its end, and the camera could be activated by a radio transmitter.

The chief machinist’s mate thought he could construct the “contraption” in an hour. She told him to do so, and then she ordered three men to stand guard in the dome.

“If Piscator shows, radio me.”

Having returned to the ship, she phoned the machinist’s shop.

“Can you do your work while we’re aloft? The air might be rough.”

“No sweat, sir. Well, only a little, anyway.”

The process of untying the ship and getting it into the air took fifteen minutes. Nikitin took the Parseval up above the tower and then sent her down toward its base. Radar indicated that the helicopter was now against the base of the tower. Though the sea was not violent, its waves were short and choppy, and it had probably smashed the machine against the tower. However, if they were lucky, the damage could be minimal.

Aukuso radioed Thorn again without success.

Because of the updraft by the tower, it was impossible to bring the dirigible close to the helicopter. Nikitin piloted it down close to the surface and held her against the wind. The belly hatch was opened, and three men in an inflatable boat with an outboard motor were lowered. It headed for the tower, guided by the radarman on the ship.

Boynton, the officer in charge, gave a running report.

“We’re alongside the chopper now. It’s bumping into the tower, but its pontoons have kept the vanes from being damaged. The pontoons don’t seem damaged, either. We’re having a hell of a time with this pitching sea. Report back in a minute.”

Two minutes later, his voice came back on.

“Propp and I are in the chopper now. Thorn’s here! He’s pretty bloody, looks as if he got a bullet in the left chest and some richocheting fragments got him in the face, too. He’s alive, though.”

“Is there an opening or entrance of any sort in the tower?”

“Just a minute. Have to light a flare. These lamps aren’t strong enough… no, there’s nothing there but smooth metal.”

“I wonder why he landed there?” she said to Cyrano.

He shrugged and said, “I would guess that perhaps he had to land quickly before he passed out.”

“But where was he going?”

“There are many mysteries here. We might be able to clear up some of them if we apply certain methods of persuasion to Thorn.”

“Torture?”

Cyrano’s long, bony face was grave.

“That would be inhumane, and, of course, the end never justifies the means. Or is that statement a false philosophy?”

“I could never torture anybody, and I wouldn’t permit anyone else to do it for me.”

“Perhaps Thorn will volunteer information when he realizes that he cannot be free until he does so. I do not really think so, however. That one looks very stubborn.”

Boynton’s voice came in again. “With your permission. Ms. Gulbirra, I’ll fly the chopper out. Everything looks okay. My men can bring Thorn back in the raft.”

“Permission granted,” Jill said. “If it’s operable, take it up to the top of the tower. We’ll be along later.”

Within ten minutes, the radar operator reported that the helicopter was lifting. Boynton added that everything was running smoothly.

Leaving Coppename in charge, Jill went down to the hangar bay. She arrived in time to see Thorn’s cloth-wrapped body being lifted out of the raft. He was still unconscious. She followed the stretcher bearers to the sick bay, where Graves immediately took charge.

“He’s in shock, but I think I can pull him through. You can’t question him now, of course.”

Jill posted two armed guards at the door and returned to the control room. By then the ship was lifting, headed for the tower. A half-hour later, the Parseval was again poised above the landing field. This time, it stayed 200 meters from the dome. Its nose was pointed against the slight wind, and its propellers spun lazily.

After a while, the little wagon made by the machinists was lowered onto the surface. After being pulled to the entrance, it was pushed as far as two men could get. Then long poles made by the machinists were used to push the wagon deeper. Extensions were added to the poles as needed. In a short time, the forward end of the wagon was against the far wall.

After six photographs were taken, the wagon was pulled back by a long rope. Jill eagerly removed the large plates, which had been developed electronically at the moment of exposure.

She looked at the first one.

“He’s not there.”

She handed it to Cyrano. He said, “What is this? A short hall and a doorway at its end. It looks like an elevator shaft beyond, yes? But… there is no cage and there are no cables.”

“I don’t think They would have to depend upon such primitive devices as cables,” she said. “But it’s evident that Piscator got through the field and that he took the elevator.”

“But why does he not come back? He must know that we are concerned.”

He paused, and then he said, “He must also know that we cannot stay here forever.”

There was only one thing to do.

She gave the order to tie the ship up again. After this was done, she summoned the entire crew to the hangar bay. The photographs were passed around while she told them in detail everything that had happened.

“We’ll wait here a week if we have to. After that, we must leave. Piscator would not willingly stay down there so long. If he doesn’t come back within twelve hours we can presume that he’s being detained by… Them. Or perhaps he has had an accident and has been killed or hurt. There’s no way of knowing. We can do nothing except wait for a reasonable period of time.”

No one would think of deserting Piscator at this time. But it was evident that they did not like the idea of staying seven days in this cold, dark, wet, ominously silent place. It was too much like camping outside the gates of hell.

By then, helicopter No. 1 had quit burning. A work party went out to recover the bodies and to investigate the cause of the explosion. Mechanics began checking the other copter for pontoon damage and replacing the bullet-torn windshield and port door.

A three-man guard was posted just inside the dome. Just before Jill went to the mess room, she got a call from Dr. Graves.

“Thorn’s still unconscious, but he’s rallying. I’ve also looked at what’s left of Firebrass’ brain. I can’t do much since I don’t have a microscope. But I’d swear that that little black sphere was attached to the neural system of the forebrain. I considered the possibility that it was extraneous and had been injected by the force of explosion into his brain. But the mechanics tell me there wasn’t any such thing in the copter’s equipment.”

“You mean that you think that sphere had been surgically implanted in his brain?”

Graves said, “There isn’t enough frontal skull left to say for certain. But I’m going to cut the others open, too. In fact, I’m going to do a complete dissection on all the victims. That’ll take time, especially since I have to keep an eye on Thorn.”

Trying to keep her voice from trembling, she said, “You realize the implications of that sphere?”

“I’ve been doing some thinking about it. I don’t know what the hell it means except that it’s important. Now, Jill, I’ve been doing dissections for years, not because I had to but just to keep my hand in. And I’ve never found anything out of the ordinary in a thousand corpses.

“But I’ll tell you this. I think I know why Firebrass insisted on x-raying the skulls of his crew. He was looking for people with black spheres on, or in, their forebrains.

“I’ll tell you something else. I think he rushed Stern’s corpse off to The River because he knew that Stern had a ball in his brain.

“It’s like Alice said, ‘Mysteriouser and mysteriouser,’ isn’t it?”

Her heart pounding hard and her hand shaking, Jill switched off the intercom.

Firebrass was one of Them.

A moment later she called Graves back.

“Firebrass said he’d tell us why he wanted us x-rayed. But he never did, not to me, anyway. Did he tell you?”

“No. I asked him to tell me, and he just put me off.”

“Then you don’t know whether or not Thorn has a sphere in his head. If he should die, open him up, Doc.”

“I’ll do that. Of course, I could expose the brain, anyway. But not now. He has to get well first.”

“Wouldn’t that kill him? I know that the top of the skull is removed in operations, but can you expose Thorn’s forebrain?”

“It won’t hurt me a bit.”

Twenty-four hours passed. Jill tried to keep the crew busy, but there was very little to do except unnecessary cleaning and polishing. She wished that she had brought along some of the movies made in Parolando. Except for talking and playing checkers, chess, and card games and throwing darts, there was little to occupy them. She did organize exercise periods to tire them out, but only so much of this could be done, and it was almost as boring as doing nothing.

Meanwhile, the dark and the cold seemed to seep into their bones. And the thought that below them there might be those mysterious beings who had made this world for them was nerve stretching. What were They doing? Why had They not come out?

Above all, what had happened to Piscator?

Cyrano de Bergerac seemed to be especially affected. His long silences and obvious brooding could be caused by the death of Firebrass. It seemed to her, however, that something else was bothering him.

Dr. Graves asked her to come to his office. On entering it, she found him sitting on the edge of his desk. Silently, he held out his palm. In it was a tiny black sphere.

“They were all so badly burned that I couldn’t even determine the sex by exterior observation. Obrenova was the smallest, though, so I dissected the smallest corpse first. I found this at once. I didn’t say anything to you because I wanted to examine all of them first.

“She was the only one to have this.”

“Two of them!”

“Yeah. And it makes me wonder about Thorn.”

Jill sat down and lit a cigarette with trembling hands. Graves said, “Listen. The only liquor aboard is in my locker. It’s for medical purposes, but I think you need some medicine. I know I do.”

While he got a bottle out, she told him about overhearing the quarrel between Thorn and Obrenova.

He handed her a cup of the purplish fluid, saying, “So they weren’t just nodding acquaintances?”

“I don’t think so. But I don’t know what all this means.”

“Who does? Except maybe Thorn. Cheers!”

Jill downed the warming, fruity liquor, and she said, “We found nothing suspicious in the quarters of any of them, Firebrass’, Obrenova’s, or Thorn’s.”

She paused, then said, “There was one thing, significant not by its presence but by its absence. Like the dog in the Sherlock Holmes story who didn’t bark. Thorn’s grail wasn’t in his chopper or in his cabin. I have, however, ordered a more thorough search of the chopper.

“You told me a few hours ago that Thorn’s conscious now. Can he be questioned?”

“Not for very long. I’d advise waiting until he’s stronger. Just now, if he doesn’t want to talk, he can pretend to fall asleep.”

The intercom rang. Graves flipped on the switch.

“Doctor? C.P.O. Cogswell here. I’d like to speak to the captain.”

Jill said, “Captain here.”

“Captain, we just found a bomb in the No. 2 chopper! It’s plastic explosive. Looks like it weighs about two kilograms, and the fuse is connected to a radio receiver. It’s on the underside of the arms locker in the rear.”

“Don’t do anything until I get down there. I want to see it before it’s removed.”

She stood up. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that Thorn set off a bomb in Firebrass’ chopper. The investigating crew hasn’t determined the cause of the explosion, but the chief said he thought it might have been a bomb.”

“Yes,” Graves said. “The question is why Thorn would want to do that.”

Jill started to walk toward the door, then stopped. “My God! If Thorn planted bombs in both choppers, he could have hidden some on the ship, too!”

“You never found a transmitter when you searched his quarters,” the doctor said. “Maybe he hid one, or several, on the ship.”

Jill immediately alerted all personnel. After giving orders to Coppename to organize the search parties, she left for the hangar bay. The bomb was where the chief had said it was. She got down on her knees and looked at it with the aid of a flashlight. Then she left the machine.

“Remove the fuse and receiver. Put the plastic in the explosives hold. Call the electronics officer and tell him I’d like to know what frequency the receiver is set on.

“No, wait, I’ll call him myself.”

She wanted to make sure that his experimenting would be done in a shielded room. The various bombs—if any—would have been planted at the same time, but Thorn would set the receiver of each to respond to its own wavelength. Still, there was no use taking a chance.

After making sure that Deruyck, the electronics officer, understood why he should use a shielded room, she went to the control room. Coppename was at the intercom, listening to the reports of the search parties.

Cyrano was in the pilot’s chair staring at the panel as if the ship were in flight. He looked up at her as she entered.

“Is it permitted to ask what Doctor Graves found?”

So far, she had not concealed anything from the crew. She felt that they had a right to know as much as she did.

Cyrano said nothing for some time after she had finished. His long fingers drummed on the panel while he looked upward as if something were written on the overhead. Finally, he stood up.

“I think we should have a little talk. In private. Now, if possible.”

“With all this going on?”

“We can step into the chart room.”

He followed her in and closed the door. She sat down and lit another cigarette. He began pacing back and forth, his hands locked behind him.

“It is evident that Firebrass, Thorn, and Obrenova were agents of Them. I find it hard to believe that Firebrass could have been. He was so human! Yet it is possible that They are human, too.

“Still, that being who called himself an Ethical said that neither he nor the agents were violent. They detested and abhorred violence. But Firebrass could be very violent; he certainly did not act like a pacifist. And then there’s the incident of the newcomer Stern. It seems from what you tell me that Firebrass may have attacked him, instead of Stern assaulting Firebrass.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jill said. “It would be better to begin at the beginning.”

“Very well. I will tell you what I promised to keep secret. I do not easily break my word, in fact, this is the first time. But I may have given my word to someone who is my enemy, my secret enemy.

“It was seventeen years ago. How long ago that has been, yet how recently! I was at that time living in an area of which most of the people were of my country and time. On the right bank, you understand. The left was populated by brown-skinned savages. Indians who had lived on the island of Cuba before Columbus found it, though I believe its inhabitants were not aware that their country had been lost. They were fairly peaceful, and after some initial struggles and difficulties, our area had settled down.

“My own little state was, in fact, headed by the great Conti, under whom I had the honor to serve at the siege of Arras. Where I received a thrust through the throat, the second of the serious wounds that convinced me, along with all else I had seen of war’s miseries and horrors, that Mars was the stupidest of the gods. Also, I was delighted to find there my good friend and mentor, the so justly famed Gassendi. He, as you no doubt know, opposed the infamous Descartes and revived Epicurus, whose physics and morals he so splendidly presented. Not to mention his influence on Molière, Chapelle, and Dehènault, all my good friends, by the way. He persuaded them to translate Lucretius, the divine Roman atomist…”

“Stick to the point. Give me only the undecorated truth.”

“As for the truth, what is it, to paraphrase slightly another Roman…”

“Cyrano!”

Very well. To the breach. It was late at night. I was sleeping soundly next to my so lovely Livy, when I was suddenly awakened. The only illumination was the night light seeping in through the wooden bars of our open window. A huge figure was standing over me, a black mass with a tremendous round head like a burned-out moon. I sat up, but before I could bring up my spear, which always lay by my side, the figure spoke.”

“In what language?”

“Eh? In the only one in which I was then fluent, my native speech, the most beautiful of all the tongues of Earth. The thing spoke not the most correct of French, but I understood him.

“‘Savinien de Cyrano II de Bergerac,’ he said, giving me my full nomenclature.

“‘You have the advantage of me, sir,’ I said. Though my heart was pounding hard and I felt the most intense need of pissing, I conducted myself most admirably. By then I could see, even in that faintly starlit darkness, that he was not overtly belligerent. If he had a weapon, he had concealed it under his huge cloak. Though I was somewhat distracted, I could not but wonder why Livy, a light sleeper, had not been awakened. But she slept on, snoring lightly and prettily.

“‘You may call me whatever you wish,’ he said. ‘My name is not important at this time. And if you wonder why your woman is not also awake, it is because I have made sure that she will not. Oh, no!’ he said, as, furious, I tried to get up, ‘she is not harmed in the least. She has been drugged and will awake in the morning without even a headache.’

“By that time, I discovered that I, or at least a part of me, had also been drugged. My legs would not function, though, strangely, they did not feel leaden or numb. They just wouldn’t work. Naturally, I was furious at the liberties taken with my person, but there was little I could do about it.

“The stranger then pulled up a stool and sat down by me.

“‘Listen, and then determine for yourself if I am not worth listening to,’ he said.

“And he told me a most amazing tale, Jill, the like of which it is evident that you have not heard. He said that he was one of the beings who had resurrected us. They called themselves Ethicals. He would not go into detail about their background or where they came from or anything like that. He did not have enough time for that. In fact, if he were caught—by his own people, mind you—it would be bad indeed for him.

“I had many questions, of course, but when I opened my mouth, he told me to keep quiet and listen. He would visit me again, he said, perhaps more than once. Then he would answer most of my questions. Meanwhile, I was to understand this! We had not been given life so that we could live forever. We were just subjects of scientific experiments, and when the experiments were finished, we would be finished. We’d die for the last time, forever.”

“What kind of experiments?”

“Well, it was more than just experiments. It was also a historical project. His people wanted to collect data on history, on anthropology, and so forth. They were also interested in finding out what kind of societies we humans would form when we were so mixed together. How would people change under certain conditions?

“He said that many groups would be allowed to develop without any interference from his people at all. But some would be influenced, some subtly, some by more outright methods. The project would take a long time, perhaps several hundred years. Then it would be finit for the project and finit for us. Back to dust we would go—forever.

“I said, ‘That does not sound so ethical to me, sir. Why do they deny to us what they have—eternal life?’

“He said, ‘That is because they are not truly ethical. Despite their high opinions of themselves, they are cruel, as the scientist who tortures animals to advance science is cruel. But he has his justifications, his rationalization.

“‘You see, the scientist is doing some good, being ethical in one sense. It is true that as a result of this project, a few of you will become immortal. But only a few.’

“‘How is that?’ I said.

“And then he told me about the entity which the Church of the Second Chance calls the ka. You know of this, Jill?”

Jill said, “I’ve attended many of their lectures.”

“Then you know all about the ka and the akh and the other stuff. This person said that the Chancer’s theology was partly true. Mainly because one of the Ethicals had visited the man called La Viro and had thus caused him to found the Church.”

“I thought that was just one of the wild tales those visionaries had invented,” Jill said. “I didn’t put any more credence in it than I did in the ravings of Earth prophets. Moses, Jesus, Zoroaster, Mohammed, Buddha, Smith, Eddy, the whole sick crew.”

“No more did I,” Cyrano said. “Though, when I was dying, I did repent. But that was to make my poor unhappy sister and my friend Le Bret happy. Besides, it couldn’t hurt if I made a deathbed conversion. And, to tell the truth, I was scared of hellfire. After all…”

“Your childhood conditioning.”

“Exactly. But here was a being who said that there was such a thing as a soul. And I had proof positive that there could be a life after death. Still, I could not help wondering if I was the butt of a joke. What if this man were just one of my neighbors, pretending to be a visitor from the gods, as it were? I would believe him, and then tomorrow I would be laughed at. What? De Bergerac, the rationalist, the atheist, to be taken in so completely by this fantastic tale?

“But… who would do this to me? I knew no one who would have the motive or the means for such a joke. And what about the drug which made Livy sleep and which paralyzed my legs? I had never heard of such a drug. Also, where would a practical joker get that sphere which enclosed his head? There was just enough light to see that it was black and opaque. Still…

“And then, as if he perceived my lack of belief, he handed me a lens of some material. ‘Put this in front of your eye,’ he said. ‘Look at Livy.’

“I did so, and I gasped with astonishment. Just beyond the top of her head was a globe of many colors. It shone brightly, as if illuminated by itself. It spun and swelled and expanded and put out arms from time to time, six-sided tentacles, and these shrank back into the globe and then other arms came out.

“The being then reached out and told me to drop the lens into his hand. He did not say so, but it was evident that he did not want me to touch him. I obeyed, of course.

“The lens went back into his cloak, and he said, ‘What you saw is the wathan. That is the immortal part of you.’

“Then he said, ‘I have chosen a few of you to help me fight against this monstrous evil my people are committing. I picked you because of your wathans. You see, we can read wathans as easily as you can read a children’s book. A person’s character is reflected in his wathan. Perhaps I shouldn’t say reflected, since the wathan is the character. But I don’t have the time to explain that. The point is, only a minute fraction of humanity will reach the final, the desired ultimate stage, of wathanhood, unless humanity is given much more time.’

“He then went on to sketch what the Chancers expound in such detail. That the unfulfilled wathan of a dead person wanders through space forever, containing all that is human but unconscious. Only the complete evolved wathan has consciousness. And this stage is attained only by those who achieve an ethical perfection while alive. Or near perfection, anyway.

“‘What?’ I said. ‘The ultimate in attaining ethical perfection is to wander like a ghost through space, to bounce off the walls of the universe like a cosmic handball, back and forth, yet be conscious of this horrible state and unable to communicate with anyone but one’s self? That is a desirable state?’

“‘You must not interrupt,’ the stranger said. ‘But I will tell you this. The being who attains perfect wathanhood or akhhood, goes beyond. He does not stay in this world. He goes beyond!’

“‘And where?’ I said, ‘is beyond?’

“‘To go beyond is to be absorbed into the Overwathan. To become one with the only Reality. Or God, if you wish to name the Reality that. To become one of God’s cells and to experience the eternal and infinite ecstasy of being God.’

“I was more than half-convinced then that I was dealing with an insane pantheist. But I said, ‘And this absorption means the loss of one’s individuality?’

“‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But you then become the Overwathan, God. To trade your individuality, your self-consciousness, for that of the Supreme Being is surely no loss. It is the greatest gain possible, the ultimate.’

“‘It is horrible!’ I cried. ‘What kind of monstrous joke is this that God plays on His creatures? How is the afterlife, immortality, any better than death?

“‘No! It does not make sense! Speaking logically, why should the wathan, or the soul, be created in the first place? What sense is there to this creation when most wathans will be wasted, as if they were so many flies hatched only to be eaten or swatted? And those wathans who do survive, in a manner of speaking. What about those who achieve near perfection, sainthood, if you will, only to be cheated in the end? For surely to lose your self-consciousness, your individuality, your humanity, is to be cheated?

“‘No, I want to stand as myself, Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, if I am to be immortal. I do not want this spurious immortality, this beingness as an unknowing, brainless cell of God’s body! Nameless and brainless!’

“‘Like most of your breed, you talk too much,’ he said. ‘However…’

“He hesitated, then said, ‘There is a third alternative, one which you will like. I did not want to tell you… I won’t, now. I do not have time, nor is this the best time. Perhaps the next time. I must leave shortly.

“‘First, though, is the matter of your loyalty and your aid. Are you with me?’

“‘How can I pledge my support when I do not know if you are worth supporting? For all I know, you may be Satan himself!’

“He chuckled hollowly, and he said, ‘You are the one who denied both God and the Devil. I am not the Devil or any analog to him. I am in fact on your side, on the side of deluded, suffering humanity. I can’t prove that to you. Not now. But think of this. Have my colleagues approached you? Have they done anything but bring you back from the dead for purposes they do not condescend to tell you? Have I not chosen you from many billions to help in this secret struggle? You and eleven others? Why have I honored you? I’ll tell you. Because I know that you are one of the few who can aid me. Because your wathan tells me that you will be on my side.’

“‘It is, then, predetermined?’ I said. ‘I do not believe in predeterminism.’

“‘No. There’s no such thing, except in a sense which you would not understand or would find difficult to accept.

“‘All I can tell you at the moment is that I am on your side. Without me, you and most of your kind are doomed. You must have faith in me.’

“‘But,’ I cried. ‘What can we pitiful few humans do? We are pitted against superhumans with superpowers.’

“He replied that we twelve could do nothing without a friend in court. He was that friend. We twelve must get together and journey to the North Pole, to the tower in the middle of the sea. We must get there on our own, however. He could not fly us there. He could not tell me at the moment why not.

“‘I must proceed slowly and cautiously,’ he said. ‘And you must promise not to reveal this conversation to anyone. To no one except one of the twelve I’ve picked.

“‘To do so might result in your being detected by an agent. That would mean that you would be stripped of all memory of your meetings with me. And I would be placed in even graver danger.’

“‘But how will I recognize these others?’ I said. ‘How will I get to where they are or they to me? Where are they?’

“While asking these questions, I felt awed and elated at the same time. That one of the beings who had raised us from the dead and made this world should be asking for my help! I, Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, who am just a human being, however great certain of my talents are. That he should pick me from many billions!

“He knew his man, knew I would not be able to resist his challenge. If I could have stood up, I’d have crossed swords with him—if swords were available—and I’d have pledged my loyalty with a toast—if wine had been handy.

“‘You’ll do as I ask?’ he said.

“‘But certainly!’ I said. ‘You have my word, and I never go back on that!’

“Jill, I won’t go into any more detail about what else he said. Except… he did say that I was to tell Sam Clemens that he should be on the lookout for a man named Richard Francis Burton. He was one of those chosen. And we were to wait for a year in Virolando for all of us to get together. If some didn’t show, then we were to go ahead. And we would be hearing from him—the Stranger—in the near future.

“He gave me directions to find Clemens, who was downRiver about ten thousand leagues. Clemens would be building a great boat made of ore from a meteorite. I knew who Clemens was though I’d died one hundred and eighty-one years before he was born. After all, was not his Earthly wife sleeping in my bed? I told him that, and he chuckled and said, ‘I know.’

“‘Is this not embarrassing for me?’ I said. ‘And especially for Livy? Would the great Clemens even admit me aboard his so grand boat in this situation?’

“‘Which is more important to you?’ he said with some degree of impatience. ‘A woman or the salvation of the world?’

“‘That would depend upon how I felt about the woman,’ I said. ‘Objectively and humanely, there is no argument. I am humane but I am not objective.’

“‘Go there and find out what happens,’ he said. ‘Perhaps this woman will prefer you.’

“‘When Cyrano is on fire with love,’ I said, ‘he does not cool off at command.’

“Then he stood up, and said, ‘I will see you,’ and he was gone. I dragged myself with my arms, my dead legs trailing uselessly, to the door, and pushed it open. There was no sign of him. The next morning, I announced to Livy that I was tired of this place. I wanted to travel, to see this brave new world. She said that she was tired of traveling. But if I went, she would go with me. So we set out. The rest you know.”

Jill felt a sense of unreality. She believed Cyrano’s story, but it nevertheless made her feel as if she were a player on a stage, the sets of which concealed something frightening. And she was also an actor who had not been given the script.

“No, I don’t know the rest. What about you and Clemens? What did he know that you didn’t? And did any of the others this Ethical had chosen show up?”

“Clemens was visited twice by the Ethical. Clemens calls him X or the Mysterious Stranger.”

Jill said, “He wrote a book once titled The Mysterious Stranger. A very sad, bitter story, overwhelmingly pessimistic. The Stranger was Lucifer.”

“He told me about it. However, he did not know much more than I did. Except that this X had somehow deflected a meteorite so that it would fall where Clemens could find it.”

“Do you realize the energy that would take?”

“It was explained to me. Anyway, Sam broke his word to the Stranger. He told Joe Miller and Lothar von Richthofen about him. He said that he could not help telling them.

“Also, there were two more. A giant red-haired savage of a man named John Johnston. And… Firebrass!”

She almost dropped her cigarette. “Firebrass! But he… !”

Cyrano nodded. “Exactly. He would seem to be one of these agents whom the Ethical mentioned but did not explain. I never saw the Ethical again, so I did not get any answers to my many questions. But I think, though I can’t be sure, that he would have been surprised to learn that Firebrass claimed to be one of the twelve. Perhaps Firebrass was an infiltrator. But that does not explain Thorn and Obrenova.”

“Did Johnston or Firebrass add anything to your knowledge?”

“Of the Ethical? No, Johnston was visited only once. Firebrass, of course, was not one of the twelve chosen. I doubt that the Ethical knew he was an agent. How could he unless he himself had been disguised and in our midst? Which perhaps he may have been. But if he knew that Firebrass was an agent, he had reasons not to tell us.

“What worries me, among many things, is that the Ethical hasn’t visited us again.”

Jill sat upright.

“Could Piscator be an agent?”

Cyrano stopped walking, lifted his shoulders and eyebrows, and spread out his extended palms upward.

“Unless he returns, we may never know.”

“Purposes, cross-purposes, counter-cross-purposes. Wheels within wheels within wheels,” Jill said. “Mâyâ lowers seven veils of illusion between us and them.”

“What? Oh, you are referring to the Hindu concept of illusion.”

“I don’t think Piscator was an agent. If he had been, he wouldn’t have said anything to me about his suspicions that something dark and secret was going on.”

A knocking on the door startled them.

“Captain! Greeson here, head of Search Group Three. All areas in this section except for the chart room have been searched. We can come back later.”

Jill, rising, said, “Come on in.”

To Cyrano she said, “I’ll talk with you later. There’s so much to puzzle out, so many questions.”

“I doubt I’ll have any answers.”

Three twenty-four-hour periods had passed.

The dead had been buried at sea, their cloth-wrapped bodies resembling Egyptian mummies as they were tilted outward through an aperture. As Jill stood in the klieg-lit fog and watched the corpses slide, one by one, through the arch at the base of the wall, she calculated the time of their fall. It was not callousness which made her indulge in the mental exercise. It was habit, and it was also a barrier against the horror of death.

Death was for real now; the hope of resurrection in this world was gone. Death seemed even more all-present and always threatening in this place with its cold, wet winds and dark, swirling clouds. She only had to walk a few paces into the mists, and she would be out of sight and sound of all living beings and their works. She could not see her feet or the metal on which she walked.

If she went to an aperture and stuck her head out, she could not even hear the cold, dead sea crashing against the tower. It was too far away. Everything was too far away, even if it was only a few meters distant.

It was truly a wasteland. She would be glad when she could leave it.

So far, Piscator had not come back. She did not think it likely that he would. Under no circumstances would he willingly have stayed so long in the tower. Either he was dead, hurt badly, or held prisoner. In any event, those on the outside could do nothing for him, and the proposed seven-day wait now seemed far too long. Therefore, Jill had announced to the crew that the airship would leave at the end of a five-day period.

They received the news with evident relief. Like her, their nerves were pulled tightly, overtightly, on a rack. So much so that she had been forced to change the four hours of guard duty at the dome to two. Some of the guards were hallucinating, seeing ghostly forms in the fog, hearing voices coming from the corridor. One man had even fired at what he thought was a huge form running at him from the mists.

The first search of the ship had found no bombs or transmitters. Fearing that the crew might not have covered every square centimeter, and also wanting to keep them busy, she ordered another search. This one was extended to the outside surface of the dirigible, too. Men went to the top and prowled the walkway, shining their lamps alongside it. Others swept their lights across the exteriors of the tail structures.

No bombs were located.

Jill was not relieved. If Thorn had planned from the beginning to hide explosives, he could have placed some inside a gas cell. If he had, he had thwarted them, since there was no way they could get into the cells without releasing the irreplaceable hydrogen. It was true he’d need a transmitter, but that was a small object. It could even be disguised as something else.

This thought set off a third search in which every small mechanical or electrical device aboard was inspected to make sure that it was indeed what it appeared to be. All were what they were supposed to be, but the idea that there could be a disguised transmitter added to the general nervousness.

Of course, as long as Thorn was kept inside the sick bay, he could not get to a hidden transmitter. A lock had been installed on the door to sick bay, and there were always two guards on the inside and two outside.

Jill talked to Cyrano about another problem.

“Sam’s going to be bloody furious when he hears that he can’t do anything if he ever does get here. There’s no way he can get to the top of the tower from the surface of the sea. And if he did achieve the impossible, he still could do nothing to get in.

“It’s possible that one or more of his crew might be able to enter the tower, if he could get to the top. But even then, what guarantee is there what happened to Piscator wouldn’t happen to them?”

“Whatever that is,” Cyrano said gloomily. He had been almost as fond of the Japanese as he was of Firebrass.

“Did Firebrass tell you, too, about the laser hidden on the Mark Twain?”

Cyrano came alive. “Aha! What a stupid man I am! The laser! Yes, Firebrass told me about it, of course. Would he tell you and not me? I should hope to kiss a pig under its tail he would not!”

“Well, it’s possible that this metal might resist even a laser beam. But we won’t know unless we try it, will we?”

The Frenchman swiftly lapsed into gloom.

“But what do we do about the fuel situation? We cannot fly to Clemens’ boat and get the laser and return here and then get back to Parolando or the boat. We do not have enough oil for that.”

“We’ll get the laser from Sam and then go to Parolando and make some more oil and then come back here.”

“That will take much time. But it is the only thing to do. However, what if that hardheaded Clemens does not let us use the laser?”

“I don’t see how he could refuse us,” Jill said slowly. “That is the only means we have for getting into the tower.”

“Ah, yes, true. But you are saying that logic will sway Clemens. He is human, which means that he is by no means always logical. But we will see.”

Jill was so on fire with this idea that she saw no reason in waiting for Piscator any longer. If he were hurt or held prisoner by some mechanical device or by living beings, he wasn’t going to be gotten free without the laser.

First, though, Thorn had to be questioned. After ordering Coppename to wait until she had returned, she walked down to sick bay with Cyrano. Thorn was sitting up in bed. His right leg was enclosed by a shackle attached to a chain, the other end of which was locked to the frame of the bed.

He said nothing as they entered, and Jill was also silent for a moment as she studied him. His thick jaw was locked; his chin, even more outthrust; his dark-blue eyes, half-lidded. He looked as stubborn as Lucifer himself.

She said, “Do you want to tell us what this is all about?”

Thorn did not reply.

She had made sure that he was to be left ignorant of the crash of the helicopter until she told him.

“We know that you set off that bomb. You murdered Firebrass and Obrenova, everybody on the chopper.”

Thorn’s eyes opened fully, but his expression did not change. Or was that a slight smile at the corners of his lips?

“You’re guilty of premeditated murder. I can have you shot, and I may do it. Unless you tell me everything.”

She waited. He glared steadily at her.

“We know about the little spheres on the forebrains of Firebrass and Obrenova.”

That had pierced him, had struck something sensitive. His skin paled, and he grimaced.

“Is there a sphere on your brain?”

He groaned, and he said, “I was x-rayed. Do you think Firebrass would have taken me along if there had been one?”

“I don’t know,” Jill said. “He accepted Obrenova. Why would he have accepted her and rejected you?”

Thorn merely shook his head.

“Look. If it’s necessary, I’ll order that Graves remove the top of your skull and take a look at your brain.”

“That would be a waste of time,” he said. “I don’t have any such thing inside me.”

“I think you’re lying. What is the purpose of that sphere?”

Silence.

“You do know, don’t you?”

Cyrano said, “Where were you headed for when you stole the helicopter?”

Thorn bit his lip, then said, “I presume that you didn’t get into the tower?”

Jill hesitated. Should she tell him about Piscator? Would that give him some sort of advantage? She could not imagine what it could be, but then she did not know the location of any piece in this jigsaw puzzle.

She said, “One man did get into it.”

Thorn quivered, and he became even paler.

“One? Who was that?”

“I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me what this is all about.”

Thorn’s deep chest rose, and he let out air slowly.

“I won’t say another word about this until we get to the Mark Twain. I’ll talk to Sam Clemens. Until then, not a word. You can open my skull, if you will. But that would be cruel, and it might kill me, and it would be totally unnecessary.”

Jill motioned to Cyrano to come with her into the next room. When they were out of Thorn’s sight, she said, “Is there an X-ray machine aboard the Mark Twain?”

Cyrano shrugged and said, “I do not remember. But we can determine that as soon as we get into radio contact with the boat.”

They returned to the foot of Thorn’s bed. He stared at them for a minute. A struggle was obviously taking place in him. Finally, as if he hated himself for having to ask, he said, “Did that man come back?”

“What does that mean to you?”

Thorn looked as if he’d like to say something. Instead, he smiled.

“Very well,” Jill said. “We are going to the boat. I’ll talk to you when we get there, unless you change your mind before then.”

The checkout tests of the equipment consumed an hour. The ropes were cast off and drawn into the dirigible. The guards and the rope handlers came aboard. With Cyrano in the pilot’s seat, the Parseval rose, its propellers swiveled upward to give it additional lift. Water ballast was discharged to compensate for the loss of the valved-off hydrogen. The updraft around the tower lifted the ship higher than was desired, and so Cyrano sent it back down, headed toward the great hole through which they entered.

Jill stood at the windscreen and stared into the fog.

“So long, Piscator,” she murmured. “We’ll be back.”

The wind hurled the vessel through the hole, spitting it out, as Cyrano said, as if it were a rotten piece of meat from the mouth of a giant. Or, he added, as if it were a baby overeager to be born, shot out from the womb of a mother who couldn’t wait to get rid of her nine-months’ burden.

The Frenchman sometimes overstrained his metaphors and similes.

The clear air and the bright sun and the green vegetation made them feel like bursting into song. Cyrano, grinning, said, “If I were not on duty, I would dance! I do not contemplate returning to that dismal place with any pleasure.”

Aukuso had begun transmitting the ship’s call letters as soon as it had gained a high altitude. Not until an hour had passed, however, did he report that he had made contact with the Mark Twain.

Jill started to report to Sam Clemens, but he interrupted her with a furious description of de Greystock’s treacherous attack. She was shocked, but she became impatient with his overlong, overdetailed narrative. His boat was not badly damaged; her account was the important thing.

Finally, he ran down.

“I’ve discharged most of my bile, for the moment, anyway. Say, why are you talking to me? Where’s Firebrass?”

“I didn’t have a chance to say more than two words,” she said. And she described in detail the events from the moment the airship had entered the hole in the mountain.

It was his turn to be shocked. Except, however, for some explosive curses, he did not comment until she had finished.

“So Firebrass is dead, and you think he was one of Them? Maybe he wasn’t, Jill. Did it occur to you that the black sphere might have been implanted in a small number of us for some scientific purpose? That perhaps only one in a thousand or ten thousand has it? I don’t know what its purpose could be. Maybe it transmits brain waves which They record for use in some sort of scientific experiment. Or it could be used by Them to keep tabs on certain preselected subjects.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “I’d like to think that you’re right, because I hate to think that Firebrass could be one of Them.”

“Me, too. However, the important thing just now is that a ground expedition is useless. I built those two boats for nothing. Well, not actually for nothing. There’s something to be said for life on the boat. It affords luxuries you can’t get elsewhere—except on the Rex—and it’s the fastest way to travel, although I really have no definite place to go to anymore. But I haven’t forgotten King John. I’m going to catch up with him and fix him for what he did to me.”

“You’re wrong about one thing, Sam,” she said. “I think we can get into the tower. All I need is the laser.”

It sounded to her as if Clemens was strangling.

“You mean that… that Firebrass told you about it? Why, that unjudicious, ungrateful, unprincipled… garrh! I told him not to say a word! He knew how important it was to keep it a secret! Now everybody in the wheelhouse knows it. They’ve heard every word you said. I’ll have to get them to swear not to reveal it, and just how much chance is there they’ll not let it slip? If Firebrass were here, I’d choke him with one hand and stick my cigar up his ass with the other!”

Sam went on, “Besides, you should have waited until you got here before you said anything. For all I know, John’s radiomen have been listening in to us for years! They might have figured out how our scramblers work and be taking in every word now, pleased as a hog that’s just found a fresh pile of cow flop!”

“I’m sorry about that,” she said. “But it was necessary to mention it. We have to make arrangements for picking the laser up without landing.”

Jill added, “I need the laser. It’s the only means we have of getting into the tower. Without it all our long labors and the deaths of several people have been in vain.”

“And I need it to slice up John and his boat. It’s a surefire thing, double-guaranteed to get a quick victory.”

Trying to keep the anger out of her voice, she said, “Think on it, Sam. Which is more important, revenge on King John or solving the mystery of this world, finding out why we’re here and who did this?

“Besides, there’s no reason you can’t have both. We’ll return the laser to you after we use it.”

“Both be damned to hell and back! How do I know you will come back? The next time you may get caught by those people. They can sit inside, smug as mice behind a wall laughing at the cat, if you can’t get to them. But when you start cutting with that laser, you think they’ll just sit on their hands and allow you to waltz on in?

“They’ll grab you, just as they did Piscator. And then what? Besides, for all you know, the metal of the tower could be resistant to a laser beam.”

“Too right. But we have to try. That’s the only way we can find out.”

“All right, all right! You’ve got logic and right on your side, as if that ever won an argument! But I’m a reasonable man. So, you can have the laser!

“But, and this is a big but, as the queen of Spain said to Dan Sickles, you’ve got to get Rotten John for me first!”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean that I want you to make a raid on the Rex. Send in a party in the chopper at night and grab John. I’d rather see him here alive, but if you can’t get him alive and kicking, kill him!”

“That’s stupid and vicious!” Jill said. “We could lose the chopper and all the raiding party in a useless, vainglorious venture. Not to mention risking lives, we can’t afford to lose the chopper. It’s the only one we have.”

Sam had been breathing heavily, but he waited until he had regained his wind. Now he spoke smoothly, icily.

“It’s you that’s being stupid now. If John is gotten rid of, I won’t have any reason to pit my boat against the Rex. Think of the lives that’ll be saved. For all I care, his second-in-command, whoever he is, can take over and I’ll wish him good luck. All I want is that John doesn’t get away with all the crimes he committed and that he doesn’t get to keep the beautiful boat I toiled and sweated and plotted and suffered agonies for. And don’t forget that he tried to sink this boat, too!

“I want that miserable excuse for a human being standing in front of me so I can tell him exactly what he is. That’s all. I promise I won’t kill him or mistreat him, if that’s bothering you. Thunderation! Why should it?

“And when I’m done chewing him out, the most glorious verbal reaming ever given anybody since the dawn of time—it’ll make Jeremiah look tongue-tied—then I’ll put him ashore and steam away. Of course, I may maroon him among cannibals or grail slavers.

“I promise you that, Jill.”

“What if he has to be killed?”

“I’ll just have to endure my disappointment.”

“But I can’t order my men to go on such a dangerous mission.”

“I won’t ask you to. Just ask for volunteers. If you can’t get enough, too bad. You can’t have the laser. However, I don’t anticipate any dearth of heroes. If there’s one thing I know, Jill, it’s human nature.”

Cyrano shouted, “I will be honored to enlist, Sam!”

“Is that you, Cyrano? Well, I have to admit you’ve not been one of my dearest friends. But if you do go, I wish you good luck. I mean it.”

Jill was so surprised she could not speak for a moment.

Here was the man who’d said he regarded Mars, the deity of war, as the most stupid of gods.

When she regained her voice, she said, “Why are you doing this, Cyrano?”

“Why? But you forget that I, too, was on the Not For Hire when John and his pirates seized it. I was almost killed. I would like to have my revenge, to see the expression on his face when he realizes that the trap is sprung on the trapper, the pirate pirated.

“This is not your vast, impersonal war initiated by greedy, glory-mad imbeciles who do not care how many thousands are slaughtered, mutilated, driven insane, frozen, starved, dying of disease; how many children and women blown up; how many women raped or left husbandless or sonless.

“No, this is personal. I know the man whom I would make my small, wholly justified war upon. So does Clemens, who abhors war as much as myself.”

Jill did not argue with him. At that moment, he seemed like a little child to her. An idiot child. He still wanted to play at war, yet he had seen its miseries and horrors.

There was nothing for her to do but go along with Sam’s proposal. She did not have to obey him, since he had no way of enforcing his orders. But if she wanted the laser, and she did, she could only carry out the raid.

Her last hope that there would not be enough volunteers died as soon as she called for them. There were enough to get into three helicopters if they had been available.

Perhaps, she thought, they had been so frustrated at the tower that they wanted violent action against a foe who could be seen, who would fight. But she did not really believe that.

Clemens was right. He did know human nature. Male nature, anyway. No, that wasn’t fair. The nature of some males.

An hour’s discussion followed. During this Cyrano said that he could draw accurate sketches of the layout of the Rex. Clemens finally signed off, but not before making sure that he would be notified of the results of the raid the moment the helicopter returned.

“If it returns,” she said.

The torpedoes seemed to be dead-on, but Sam ordered the boat swung away and full power applied. A minute later, an observer at the stern reported that the torpedoes had just missed. The dirigible loomed before him, coming swiftly, seeming about to collide with the pilothouse itself. Sam yelled an order to fire a second volley away. Before that order could be obeyed, the airship exploded.

Four bombs going off simultaneously should have blown in every port, should have caved in the hull of the boat. As it was, many ports were shattered or driven whole into the interior and people were knocked down. The boat, immense and heavy though it was, rocked. Sam was hurled to the deck along with everybody except the pilot, who was strapped in his chair. Byron was knocked unconscious as a windscreen slammed into his face.

Sam got to his feet as smoke roiled into the control room, blinding him, making him cough violently. An acrid stink surrounded him. He could not hear anything; he was totally deafened for a minute. He groped through the cloud and felt along the control panel. Knowing the location of every dial, gauge, and button, he ascertained that the ship was still on course—if the steering mechanism was still operating. Then he unstrapped Detweiller’s bloody, unconscious form and eased him to the floor. By the time he had slipped into the chair, he could see again. The airship, or what was left of it, was in the water. Pieces were scattered over hundreds of square meters, burning. Smoke billowed out from them, but by then the boat was out of the clouds. He straightened her out and headed her upRiver. After putting the automatic pilot on, and making sure that it still operated, he went to the starboard to survey the damage.

Joe was saying something, his mouth wide open and working furiously. Sam stabbed a finger at his ear, indicating that he couldn’t hear. Joe kept on yelling. His skin was cut in a hundred places.

Later, after everybody had calmed down, Sam decided that just one of the bombs must have gone off. The force of its explosion should have set off the other three, but it surely had not done so.

Nobody had been killed, but several score had been severely wounded. Luckily, the explosion had failed to set off the rockets aboard.

Detweiller was the worst casualty, but by the third day he was up and walking. The boat was still close to shore, anchored next to the stone that had provided breakfast. A wide gangplank was built so the crew could walk ashore. The damage was repaired, and the crew took turns on shore leave. Sam decided that now would be a good time to make more alcohol and gunpowder. Arrangements were made to trade tobacco and some of the whiskey and wine provided by the crew’s grails for wood and lichen from the area.

Von Richthofen was dead. The only survivors of the Minerva were Samhradh and Hardy, Newton having drowned while still unconscious. Sam wept when the German’s body, wrapped in a weighted bag, was dropped into The River. He had been very fond of the ebullient, happy-go-lucky fellow.

“I know why Greystock did this,” Sam said. “John Lackland made him an offer he couldn’t resist. And the double-dealing swine almost did the job, too. I thought Greystock was a cruel man, like all of his kind, but I didn’t think he’d be disloyal. Still, if you’ve read your history—you, Marc, not you, Joe—then you’ll know that the medieval noblemen were notorious for treachery. Their god was Opportunity, no matter how many churches they built for the glory of Church and God. They all had the morals of a hyena.”

“Not all of them,” de Marbot said. “There was William Marshal of England. He never switched sides.”

“Didn’t he serve under King John?” Sam said. “He must’ve had a strong stomach to stick with him. Anyway, John has tried once and almost got away with it. What bothers me is, how many other saboteurs has he planted? You see now why I’ve insisted on double guards at every vulnerable point. And four outside the armory and ammunition hold.

“That’s also why I’ve ordered that every man jack aboard, and jill, too, report any suspicious conduct they see. I know it’s made some people jumpy. But I’ve had to be realistic.”

“No vonder you got nightmareth. Me, I don’t vorry about thuch thingth.”

“That’s why I’m captain and you’re only a bodyguard. Say, don’t you worry about protecting me?”

“I chutht do my duty and vorry only about the long time betveen mealth.”

A few minutes later, the chief radio officer reported that she was in contact with the Parseval. By the time Sam was through talking to Gulbirra, he felt as if he were walking through a minefield. Treachery, lies, frustration, uncertainty, confusion, and misdirection were waiting to explode under his feet.

Smoking like a dragon though the cigar tasted bitter, he paced back and forth. So far, there were only two on the boat who shared the secret of X with him—Joe Miller and John Johnston. There were, or had been, eight who to his knowledge knew about the Stranger: Miller, Johnston, himself, Firebrass (now dead), de Bergerac, Odysseus (who’d disappeared long ago), von Richthofen (now dead), and Richard Francis Burton. The being whom Clemens called X or the Mysterious Stranger (when it wasn’t son of a bitch or bastard) had said he’d elected twelve to get to the polar tower. X was supposed to return in a few years and give Sam more information. So far he had not shown.

Perhaps the other Ethicals had finally caught him, and he was—where?

Sam had told Miller and von Richthofen about the Stranger. So that left six of those informed by X unknown to him. Though it was possible that they were all on this boat. Why had X not given each one a sign or a code word of recognition? Maybe he meant to do so but had been delayed. X’s schedule was about as uncertain as that of a Mexican railroad.

Cyrano had told him about Burton. Sam didn’t know where Burton was, but he knew who he was. The newspapers had been full of his exploits during Sam’s lifetime. And Sam had read his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah, First Footsteps in East Africa, The Lake Regions of Central Africa, and his translation of the Arabian Nights.

Also, Gwenafra had known him personally, and she had told Sam all she remembered about him. She had been only seven or thereabouts when she had first been resurrected. Richard Burton had taken her under his wing, and she had traveled with him on a boat upRiver for a year. Then she had been drowned, but she had never forgotten the fierce, dark man.

Greystock had also been with them. But neither he nor Gwen were aware of the Stranger. Or was Greystock an agent?

That fellow Burton. On Earth he’d led an expedition to find the source of the Nile. Here, he was as passionately involved in getting to the headwaters of The River, though for a different reason. De Bergerac had said that the Ethical had told him that, if he found Burton, Burton would pretend to have lost his memory of anything related to the Ethicals. Clemens should tell him that he knew better, and Burton would then explain why he was pretending to have amnesia. Very curious.

Then there were Stern, Obrenova, and Thorn. And Firebrass. Their roles were as clandestine as those of X and his colleagues. On which side were they?

He needed help in untangling the warp and woof of this crazy tapestry. Time for a conference.

Within five minutes, he was closeted in his cabin with Joe and John Johnston. Johnston was a huge man, massively boned and muscled. His face was handsome though craggy; his eyes, a startling blue; his hair, bright red. Though he towered above other humans, he looked small beside the titanthrop.

Sam Clemens gave them the news. Johnston did not speak at first, but then the mountaineer was not one to talk unless there was extreme occasion to do so. Joe said, “Vhat doeth it all mean? I mean, the gateway through vich only Pithcator could pathth?”

“We’ll find out from Thorn,” Sam said. “For the time being, what worries me is Thorn and the rest of that filthy crew.”

Johnston said, “Ye don’t think Greystock was an agent for them Ethicals, do ye? I think the polecat was just one of King John’s men.”

“He could have been that and also an agent,” Sam said.

“How?” Joe Miller rumbled.

“How do I know? Anyway, you mean why. That was really what the thief said to Jesus while he was being nailed to the cross. Why? That’s what we should be asking. Why? Yes, I think Greystock could have been an agent. He just fell in with King John’s purpose because it suited his own purpose.”

“But them agents don’t use violence,” Johnston said. “At least, that’s what ye told me X told ye. They not only hate violence, they don’t even like to touch human beings.”

“No, I didn’t say that. I said violence was unethical for the Ethicals. At least, according to X. But I don’t know that he wasn’t lying. For all I know, he may be the Prince of Darkness, who was, if you remember your Bible, the Prince of Liars.”

“Then what’re we doing?” Johnston said. “Why’re we following his orders?”

“Because I don’t know he’s lying. And his colleagues haven’t had the courtesy or decency to speak to me. He’s all I have to go on. Also, I said that X seemed rather reluctant to have me get too close. Like the abolitionist who aired out his house after he’d had a black to dinner. But I didn’t say that the agents were Brahmins, too. Thorn and Firebrass certainly weren’t. I don’t know. Anyway, Joe has a nose for X. He came into my hut once right after X had left. And he said he smelled somebody not human.”

“Hith thtink vath different from Tham’th,” Joe said, grinning. “I didn’t thay that Tham thmelled any better, though.”

“You’re a thly one, ain’t you?” Sam said. “Anyway, Joe has never smelled anyone else like that. So I presumed that the agents are of human origin.”

“Tham thmoketh thigarth all the time,” Joe said. “I couldn’t thmell a thkunk around thothe weedth.”

“That’ll be enough of that, Joe,” Sam said. “Or I’ll run you back up the banana tree.”

“I never thaw a banana in my life! Not until I came here and my grail gave me vone for breakfatht. Even then I vathn’t thyure it vathn’t poithon.”

“Stick,” Johnston said.

Sam’s eyebrows curved like the backs of recoiling caterpillars.

“Stick what? I hope…”

“To the point.”

“Ah, yes. Anyway, I’m sure that there are agents around. The boat may be crawling with them. The question is, whose? X’s or the others’? Or both?”

Johnston said, “They ain’t seemed to interfere so far. Not with the boat, anyway. But when we get close to the headwaters…”

“I don’t know about interference. Even though he never said so, it’s safe to assume that X bored that tunnel and left that rope for Joe and his Egyptian friends. But there’s no evidence that the others are particularly against us mere Earthlings getting to the tower. They just don’t want to make it easy for us. Again, why not?

“Also, what about Odysseus? He showed up in the nick of time and saved us when we were fighting von Radowitz. He told me he was one of the twelve picked by X. I assumed at first that it was X who’d sent him. But no, Odysseus said it was a female Ethical. So, is there another one of them in on this? Another renegade who’s X’s ally? I asked him about her, and he just laughed. He wouldn’t tell me.

“But maybe the woman wasn’t X’s pal. Maybe she was an Ethical who’d gotten wind somehow of what was going on. And she sent Odysseus, who may have been an agent posing as the historic Odysseus.

“I say that because I’ve run into two Mycenaeans who were actually at the siege of Troy. At least, they claimed to have been. There are so many phonies on The River, you know. Both said that Troy wasn’t where Odysseus said it was. He had told me that Troy was much farther down in Asia Minor than the archaeologists said it was. The two Greeks said that it was where everybody had always said it was. Near Hissarlik, Turkey. Well, they didn’t identify the town and country under those names, of course. Neither was in existence in their day.

“But they did say that Troy was near the Hellespont, where Hissarlik was later built. Now, how about that mess?”

“If that Greek feller was an agent,” Johnston said, “why would he make up a lie like that?”

“Maybe to convince me that he was the real stuff. That he was the dyed-in-the-wool original. He wasn’t likely to encounter anyone who could call him a bald-faced liar. For one thing, he didn’t stick around long enough to be challenged.

“Here’s another thing. The scholars of my time had all said that the wooden horse of Troy was a myth. The story was about as credible as a politician’s campaign promises. But Odysseus said that there was a wooden horse, and he himself proposed it, just as Homer said he did, and it did get the Greek soldiers into the city.

“But then maybe it was a double-ply lie. By telling me that the scholars were all wrong, he made it sound as if he’d really been there. Anybody who could stand there and look you in the eye and tell you the scholars were full of sawdust and mouse droppings, because he had been there and they hadn’t, would convince me. The scholars are always sailing out, looking for a textural Northwest Passage, trying to navigate with a sextant in a snowstorm, not sure whether the bowsprit is on the fore or the stern.”

“At least, they tried,” Johnston said.

“So did the eunuch in the sheik’s harem. I wish I had some idea of what’s going on. We are in deep waters, as Holmes said to Watson.”

“Who’re thothe guyth?” Joe said.

The giant mountaineer growled. Sam said, “Okay, John, sorry. I was hoping we could follow at least one thread through in this tangled warp and woof. Hell, we can’t even find the end of one thread!”

“Maybe Gwenafra thyould be in thith,” Joe said. “Thyee’th a voman, vhich you may have notithed, Tham. You thaid vomen can pertheive thingth men can’t becauthe they got female intuithyon. Anyvay, thye doethn’t like being left out in the cold. Thye ain’t no dummy. Thye knowth there’th been thomething going on for a long time that you’ve been hiding from her. Right now, thye’th thulking in the main lounge. Thye hath the red athth every time you run her out tho ve can have a conferenthe about thith thubchect.”

“I don’t believe in women’s intuition,” Sam said. “They’re just culturally conditioned to observe different patterns of action and speech, different gestures and inflections from those men observe. They’re more sensitive to certain subtleties because of this conditioning.”

“It’th the thame thing in the end,” Joe said. “Vhat do ve care vhat ith’th called? I thay, ve been beating out our brainth on thith. It’th about time ve had a new dealer in on thith poker game.”

“Squaws talk too much,” Johnston said.

“According to you, everybody talks too much,” Sam said. “Anyway, Gwen is as smart as anyone here, maybe smarter.”

“It’ll end up with the whole world knowing about it,” Johnston said.

“Well, if you think on it,” Sam said, “why shouldn’t everybody know? Ain’t it everybody’s business?”

“The Stranger must have his reasons for wanting us to keep quiet.”

“But are they good reasons?” Sam said. “On the other hand, if we did blabber about this there’d be a mob trying to get to the North Pole. The ’49 Gold Rush couldn’t hold a candle to it. There’d be hundreds of thousands wanting to get to the tower. And a million hanging around to exploit them.”

“Let’th take a vote on Gven.”

“You ever heard of a woman at a council of war? The first thing you know, she’ll be wanting to run us. Them petticoats take an inch if ye give ’em a mile.”

“Women don’t wear petticoats anymore,” Sam said. “In fact, they don’t wear much of anything, as you must’ve noticed.”

The vote was two to one. Johnston said, “Okay. But you make her keep her legs crossed when she sits down, Sam.”

“It’s a strain just getting her to cover her breasts,” Sam said. “She’s a caution. But it ain’t her fault. Anyway, just about everybody swims naked. So what’s the difference if she is a little careless about how many square inches of flesh she exposes?”

“It ain’t the flesh, it’s the hair,” Johnston said. “Don’t it bother you none?”

“It used to. After all, I lived about the same time as you. But I didn’t spend my life among the Rocky Mountain Indians. We’ve been here thirty-four years, John, on a planet where even Queen Victoria is traipsing around in an outfit that would’ve given her heart failure followed by diarrhea if she’d seen it worn in front of Buckingham Palace. Now nudity seems as natural as sleeping in church.”

Gwenafra, forewarned by Sam, was wearing a loincloth under her kilt. She sat in a chair and listened wide-eyed while Sam explained why she had been admitted to the council.

After she had heard Sam out, she sat silently for a while, sipping from a cup of tea. Then she said, “I knew more than you thought I did. You’ve talked a lot in your sleep. I knew you were keeping something very serious from me. That hurt me very much. In fact, I was going to tell you, Sam, that you must tell me what was going on. Otherwise, I was going to leave you.”

“Why didn’t you say so? I had no idea you felt that way.”

“Because I supposed that you must have a very good reason for keeping it from me. But I was getting to the point where I couldn’t stand it anymore. Haven’t you noticed how cross I’ve been lately?”

“It hadn’t escaped me. I thought you were just being moody. One of the mysteries of woman. But this is no place to discuss our personal affairs.”

“What is the place, then? I know I would have said something if you’d been so irritable. Anyway, women are about as mysterious as a tin mine. All you have to do is carry a lantern into the dark places, and you see everything. But men like to think women are the eternally mysterious. That saves men the trouble of asking questions, taking a little time and effort.”

“The eternally loquacious, then,” Sam said. “You take as long to get to the point as a broken pencil.”

“You’re both gabby,” Johnston said, scowling.

“There are other extremes,” she said, glaring at Johnston. “But you’re right. Maybe there’s one thing that you could consider as a key to the mystery of the tower. That is, what kind of a person was Piscator?”

“Ah, hmmm,” Sam said. “I see what you mean. Why was he able to enter the tower while the others couldn’t? Well, for one thing, he could have been an agent. But if agents can get through the barrier, why couldn’t Thorn?

“Besides, why should Thorn have to use the Parseval to get to the tower? The Ethicals and their agents have their own methods of transportation, some kind of flying machine.”

“I don’t know,” Gwenafra said. “Let’s concentrate on Piscator. How was he different from the others? It couldn’t be a physical element—clothing, say—that was the key to entry. All tried to get in naked, yet only Piscator got in.

“Also, there was a difference in how far each was able to advance into the entrance. What were the elements in character that made some advance farther than others?”

“We’d need a computer to figure that out,” Sam said. “However, Gulbirra knows the men in the airship. She can describe them when she gets here. Anyway, to be scientific, the exact distance each person traveled would have to be known. And that would have to be compared to each person’s character. Nobody was taking measurements there, so that’s out.”

“Just consider Piscator then.”

“He was one of them samurai,” Johnston said.

“I don’t think race would have anything to do with it,” Sam said. “So far we haven’t uncovered any Mongolian agents, though I suppose there could be plenty. Consider this. Thorn did not want Firebrass and Obrenova to get into the tower. So he cold-bloodedly blew them up, not to mention the innocents with them. Maybe, though, Thorn didn’t know Firebrass was an agent. If so, he got two for the price of one.”

“Maybe there were more than two…” Gwen said. “No, only two had those black balls in their heads.”

“Jumping catfish! Don’t make it more complicated than it is!”

Gwen said, “If those two could’ve entered, then we should compare their characters with Piscator’s.”

“I vath around Firebrathth a lot, and he thmelled chutht like any human. Thith Ethical left a thmell behind him when he vithited Tham. It vathn’t human. Pithcator, he vath human, though he did thmell Chapanethe. I can dithtinguith different typeth of people becauthe of their diet.”

“But you never met a person who smelled nonhuman,” Sam said. “So we don’t know if the agents are nonhuman. They certainly look as if they are human.”

“No, but they mutht’ve been around me,” Joe said. “And thinthe I never thmelled anybody that didn’t thmell human—though that ain’t nothing to brag about—thmelling human, I mean, then the achentth mutht be human.”

“That mought be,” Johnston said. “It seems to this here child that if a non-Earthman cain look like a real person, then he cain smell like one.”

Joe laughed and said, “Vhy don’t ve chutht potht a notithe in the main lounge? Any Ethicalth or achentth aboard pleathe report to Captain Clementh.”

Gwenafra had been fidgeting about and frowning. She said, “Why do all of you duck the question I brought up? What about Piscator?”

“Maybe we’re like the circus midget who found the giant’s shoes under his wife’s bed,” Sam said. “Afraid to ask.

“Very well. I wasn’t too well acquainted with the gentleman from Cipango. He showed up about two months before the Mark Twain left. From all reports, he was a very quiet and likable person. Not withdrawn or aloof, just not aggressive. He seemed to get along with just about everybody. Which, in my book, makes him suspect. Yet he wasn’t a yes-man. I remember he got into an argument with Firebrass about the size of the airship to be built. He thought that it would be better to build a smaller one. The end of the discussion was that Piscator said he still thought he was right. But since Firebrass was the boss, he would do as he said.”

“Did he have any peculiarities?” Gwenafra said.

“He was crazy about fishing, but I don’t count that an eccentricity. Say, what’re you asking me for? You knew him.”

“I just wanted to get another viewpoint,” she said. “When Gulbirra gets here, we’ll ask her about him. She knew him better than we did.”

“Don’t forget Thyrano,” Joe said. “He knew him.”

“Joe loved Cyrano,” Sam said. “The Frenchman’s got a bigger nose than his. Makes Joe feel right at home.”

“That’th a crock of thyit. Ain’t none of you pygmieth got a nothe to be proud of. I chutht like him even if you two get along like two male hyenath in mating theathon.”

“I don’t care for the simile,” Sam said coolly. “Anyway, what do you think of Piscator, Gwen?”

“He radiated a sort of, what do you call it? Not animal magnetism, since there was nothing sexual about it. Just a warm attractiveness. You knew he liked you. Though, again, he wouldn’t put up with fools. He’d go along with them, even when they were being stupid. But he got rid of them in a nice way.

“I don’t think he was, what is the word? A fundamentalist or fanatic Moslem. He said the Koran was to be understood allegorically. He also said the Bible was not to be read literally. He could quote long passages of both, you know. I talked to him a number of times, and I was surprised when he told me that Jesus was the greatest prophet after Mohammed. He also said the Moslems believed that the first person to enter heaven will be Mary, the mother of Jesus. You told me Moslems hate Jesus, Sam.”

“No, I said they hated Christians. And vice versa.”

“No, you didn’t. But that’s not important. To sum it up, Piscator impressed me as a wise and good man. But there was more to him than that. I don’t know how to describe it.

“Perhaps it was that he seemed to be in this world and yet not of it.”

“I think you’re saying this,” Sam said. “He was somehow morally, or perhaps it’s better to say spiritually, superior.”

“He never said so or acted like he thought he was. But, yes, that might be it.”

“I wish I’d known him better.”

“You were too busy building your boat, Sam.”

Frigate did not come into the hut until about an hour before suppertime. When asked by Nur where he had been, he said that he had waited all day to see Novak. Finally, Novak’s secretary had said Frigate would have to come back tomorrow. Novak could spare a minute or so for him in the morning.

Frigate looked disgruntled. Waiting in line made him very impatient. That he had done so for such a long time meant that he was deeply determined. But he refused to say what he had in mind until he had talked to Novak.

“If he says yes, then I’ll tell you.”

Farrington, Rider, and Pogaas paid him little attention. They were too busy discussing means for getting the Razzle Dazzle back. When asked if he would help them, Frigate said he did not know yet. Nur only smiled and said he would wait until they had made up their own minds about the ethics of the deed.

Nur, as usual, knew more about what was going on than the others. It was he who told them, just before they left the hut to eat breakfast, that the discussion was only academic. The Razzle Dazzle had been loaded with artifacts for trade by its new owners and would sail downRiver just after breakfast.

Martin exploded. “Why didn’t you tell us about this before?”

“I was afraid you three would do something rash such as trying to seize the ship in daylight before hundreds of witnesses. You would never have gotten away with it.”

“We’re not that stupid!”

“No, but you’re that impulsive. Which is a form of stupidity.”

“Thanks a lot,” Tom said. “Well, maybe it’s just as well. I’d much rather go off on one of those patrol steamboats. But we’d have to get the old crew together first and find some people to replace the women. This is going to take time and lots of planning.”

There were some delays, however. A man from the government office told them they had to go to work for the state or clear out. Frigate was absent when this happened. He returned grinning broadly and did not seem at all upset by the news.

“I talked Novak into it!”

“Into what?” Farrington said.

Frigate sat down in a bamboo chair and lit up a cigarette.

“Well, first I asked him if he would build another blimp for us. I didn’t expect him to agree, and he didn’t. He said he meant to build two more blimps—but not for us. These would be used for patrols and for warfare, if war should come.”

“You want us to steal their blimp!” Farrington said. Though he had been angry when Podebrad had deserted them, he had later been relieved. He had denied this, but it was obvious that he was glad that he did not have to fly in the airship.

“No. Neither Nur nor I believe that you would steal anybody’s property, even if you like to talk about it. You two fantasize a lot. Anyway, Nur and I won’t have anything to do with stealing.

“After my first proposal was turned down, I put forth my second. Novak hemmed and hawed, and then said that he would do what I suggested. It wouldn’t require near the materials nor time that the blimp did. He felt bad because we’d been cheated, and he thought that helping us would compensate us.

“Besides, Novak is interested in balloons. His son was a balloonist.”

“Balloons!” Martin said. “Are you still pushing that crazy idea?”

Tom looked interested, but he said, “We don’t know anything about the winds above the mountains. We could be blown south.”

“That’s right. But we’re a little north of the equator. If the upper winds are anything like they are on Earth, we could be driven north and east. Once past the horse latitudes it’s a different matter. But I have in mind a type of balloon that could get us to the arctic zone.”

“Crazy! Crazy!” Martin said, shaking his head.

“You refuse to do this?”

“I didn’t say that. I’ve always been a little touched in the head myself. Besides, I don’t think the winds will be going the right way for us. We should get down to business and build us a ship.”

Farrington was wrong and probably knew he was just expressing a wish. The air, at the altitude at which they would float, flowed northeast.

However, when the others heard what type of balloon Frigate proposed making, all objected vehemently.

“Yes, I know it’s never been tried out, except on paper,” Frigate said. “But here’s our chance to try something unique.”

“Yes,” Martin said. “But you say Jules Verne proposed that idea in 1862. If it was such a hot idea, why didn’t anyone ever try it?”

“I don’t know. I would have done it on Earth if I’d had the money. Look. It’s the only way we can get a considerable distance. If we use a conventional balloon, we’ll be lucky to get four hundred and eighty kilometers. That still might eliminate a million kilometers of surface travel. But with the Jules Verne, and a lot of luck, we could get all the way to the polar mountains.”

After much argument, the others finally agreed they should give his plan a try. But when the project began, Frigate became uneasy. As the time for liftoff neared, he became downright anxious. Several nightmares about balloons showed him just how deep his apprehension was. Nevertheless, he expressed only the greatest confidence in the project to the others.

Jules Verne had proposed in his novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, an idea which seemed feasible—though dangerous. It worked in his book, but Frigate knew that reality often failed to give diplomatic recognition to literature.

The balloon was made, and the crew took twelve practice flights. These, to everybody’s amazement, especially Frigate’s, suffered only minor mishaps. However, all the training runs were made at low altitudes which kept the aerostat below the top of the mountains walling the Valley. To rise above them was to be carried away from a reasonable distance of New Bohemia and so make it impossible to return before they were ready for the final flight.

The crew would have to get on-the-job training when they ventured into the stratosphere.

Dr. Fergusson, Verne’s hero, had made a balloon based on the fact that hydrogen, when heated, expanded. This principle had been used in 1785 and 1810 with disastrous results. Verne’s imaginary heating device was, however, much more scientific and powerful and worked—on paper. Frigate had available a more advanced technology than that in Verne’s time, and he had made some modifications to the system. When the balloon was finished, he bragged that this was the first of its type in reality. They were making history.

Frisco said quite vehemently that nobody had tried Verne’s concept because nobody had been crazy enough. Though he agreed with him, Frigate did not say so. This was the only type of aerostat that could go the immense distances to be traversed. He wasn’t going to back out. Too many times, on both worlds, he had started something and then had failed to see it through. Even if this killed him, he was going all the way.

That it might also kill the others bothered him. However, they knew the dangers. No one was forcing them to go.

The final liftoff went according to schedule just before dawn. Arc lights and torches blazed on the immense crowd on the plain. The envelope of the balloon, painted with aluminum, floated like a wrinkled sausage skin hanging from an invisible hook.

The Jules Verne, at this stage of flight, did not correspond to the layman’s idea of a balloon, a completely expanded sphere. But as it rose the bag would fill out from applied heat and decreasing air pressure around it.

The speeches had been made and the toasts drunk. Tom Rider noticed that Frisco was using a bumper twice as large as the others. He said something about “Dutch courage” but not loudly enough for Frisco to hear him. By the time Frisco entered the car, he was smiling and waving merrily to the onlookers.

Peter Frigate completed the weigh-off. Until now, this had always involved making sure that the weight—envelope, gas, net, cargo chute, load ring, car, ballast, equipment, supplies, aeronauts—was slightly less than the lift. The Jules Verne was the first aerostat in which the liftoff weight was slightly more than the upward pull of the gas.

The car hanging below the bag was pumpkin shaped, and its hull was a double-walled magnesium alloy. In the center of its deck was a vertical L-shape, the vernian. Two thin plastic pipes ran from the metal contraption holes in the overhead. These were tightly packed to prevent escape of air from the car.

From there, the plastic pipes extended upward and for some distance beyond the hermetically sealed neck of the envelope. Their ends were fitted to light alloy pipes which rose to varying heights inside. One was longer than the other; both were open-ended.

The crew had been talkative before boarding. Now they looked at Frigate.

“Close the main hatch,” he said, and the liftoff ritual began.

Frigate checked a gauge and two stopcocks affixed to the vernian. He opened a little hatch on the side near the top of the L-shape. He adjusted another stopcock until he heard a slight hissing. This came from a narrow nozzle at the end of a steel pipe inside the highest compartment.

He stuck an energized electrical lighter at the end of an aluminum rod into the furnace. A tiny flame popped from the nozzle. He turned the stopcock to increase the flame, adjusted two more to regulate the mixture of oxygen and hydrogen feeding the torch. The flame began heating the base of the large platinum cone just above it.

The lower end of the longest pipe extending into the bag was fitted into the apex of the cone. As the heat was expanded in the cone, the hydrogen in it moved upward, flowing into the bag and causing it to expand. The cooler hydrogen in the lower half of the bag, aided by a suction effect, flowed into the open end of the shorter pipe inside the envelope. It went down this pipe into the side of the vernian and into the side of the cone. There it was heated and rose, completing the circuit.

One of the compartments at the base of the vernian was an electrical battery. This was far lighter and much more powerful than the battery used by Fergusson in Verne’s novel. It broke water into its elements, hydrogen and oxygen. These flowed into separate compartments, and then went to a mixing chamber, where the oxyhydrogen was piped to the torch.

One of Frigate’s modifications to Verne’s system was a pipe that led from the hydrogen storage chamber to the shorter pipe. By opening two stopcocks, the pilot could allow hydrogen from the storage chamber to flow into the balloon. This was an emergency measure used only to replace hydrogen valved off from the bag. When this was done, the torch was turned off, since hydrogen was highly inflammable.

Fifteen minutes passed. Then, with no motion noticeable, the car lifted off the ground. Frigate shut off the torch several seconds later.

The shouts of the spectators became less audible, then died out. The huge hangar shrank to a toy house. By then the sun had cleared the mountain, and the stones alongside The River thundered like artillery.

“That’s our thousand-gun salute,” Frigate said.

No one moved or spoke for a while after that. The silence was as intense as that at the bottom of a deep cave. However, the alloy walls of the hull had no sound-absorbing qualities. When Frisco’s stomach rumbled, it sounded like distant thunder.

A slight wind sprang up now, carrying the vessel southward, away from their goal. Pogaas stuck his head out of an open port. He felt no sensation of movement since the balloon traveled at the same speed as the wind. The air around the hull was as still as if he were in a sealed room. The flame of a candle set on top of the vernian would have burned straight upward.

Though he’d gone up in aerostats many times, Frigate was always gripped by ecstasy during the first minutes of liftoff. No other form of flight—even gliding—could thrill him so. He felt as if he was a disembodied spirit, free of the shackles of gravity, of the cares and worries of flesh and mind.

This was a delusion, of course, since gravity had the balloon in its paws, was playing with it, and was likely to bat it around at any moment. Nor was there much respite from worries and cares. There was often work for both body and brain.

Frigate shook himself like a dog coming out of water, and he got down to the work that keeps a balloon pilot busy during much of the flight. He checked the altimeter. One thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine meters. A little over 6000 feet. The verimeter, or statoscope, indicated that the rate of ascent was increasing as the sun warmed the gas in the bag. After checking the O and H storage chambers were full, he disengaged the battery from the water. For the present, he had nothing to do except keep an eye on the altimeter and verimeter.

The Valley narrowed. The blue-black mountains, splotched with vast patches of gray-green and blue-green lichen, sank. The mists that ribboned the stream and the plains were disappearing as swiftly as mice that had gotten word a cat was in the neighborhood.

They were being carried southward increasingly swifter. “We’re losing ground,” Frisco muttered. However, he spoke only to release nervous tension. Test balloons had shown that the stratospheric wind would carry them northeast.

Frigate said, “Last chance for a cigarette.” Everybody except Nur lit up. Though smoking had been forbidden on all hydrogen balloons previous to the Jules Verne, it was permitted on it at lower altitudes. There was no sense in worrying about burning tobacco while an operating torch was present.

Now the balloon had risen above the Valley, and they thrilled at the sight of more than one at a time. There they were, row on row. To their left were the valleys—broad, deep canyons actually—which they had passed in the Razzle Dazzle. And as they soared higher, the horizon rushed outward as if in a panic. Frigate and Rider had seen this phenomenon on Earth, but the others gazed in awe. Pogaas said something in Swazi. Nur murmured, “It’s as if God were spreading out the world like a tablecloth.”

Frigate had all the ports closed, and he turned on the oxygen supply and a little fan which sucked carbon dioxide into an absorbent material. At 16 kilometers or almost 10 miles altitude, the Jules Verne entered the tropopause, the boundary between troposphere and stratosphere. The temperature outside the cabin was −73C.

Now the contrary wind seized the aerostat and in so doing slightly spun it. From then on, unless they encountered an opposing wind, they would have the view of a rider on a lazy merry-go-round.

Nur took over the pilot’s post. Pogaas got the next, and Rider had the third watch. When Farrington became the pilot, he lost his nervousness. He was in control, and that made all the difference. Frigate was reminded of how Farrington had described in a book his fierce exultation when, at the age of seventeen, he’d been allowed to steer a sealing schooner in rough weather. After watching him for a few minutes at the wheel, the captain had gone below. Farrington was the only one above decks, the safety of the ship and its crew in his hands. It had been an ecstatic experience never surpassed in a life filled with perilous adventures.

However, as soon as Frigate relieved him, he lost his smile, and he looked as uneasy as before.

The sun continued to rise and with it the Jules Verne. The envelope was near its pressure height now, which meant that the joy ride was over. Since its neck was sealed, instead of being open as in most manned aerostats, it would keep rising until overexpanded. At this point the bag would rupture, and down would come everybody posthaste with a postmortem afterward. But provisions had been made for this.

Frigate checked the altimeter and then rotated a metal drum set in the overhead. This was attached by a rope to a wooden valve in the neck of the bag. It opened, releasing some gas. The balloon sank. It would shortly begin rising again, though, which meant more gas would have to be valved off. This called for operation of the torch at intervals, and also for shutting off the torch and feeding hydrogen into the balloon.

It required cool and accurate judgment to know just how much gas to valve and how much to replace. Too much valved off meant a too-fast fall. Too much new gas meant that the craft could ascend beyond the pressure height. A safety valve on top of the bag would automatically release gas to prevent bursting of the bag—if the valve hadn’t frozen—but the balloon would then become, possibly, too heavy.

In addition, the pilot had to watch out for unexpectedly warm layers of air. These could lift the Jules Verne too swiftly and carry it above the pressure height. A sudden cooling off could precipitate the craft downward.

The pilot could in the latter situation order ballast thrown out, but this might result in a yo-yo motion. And if he lost all his ballast, he was in trouble. The only way to lose altitude quickly was to release more gas. Which meant that the burner might not be able to expand the hydrogen quickly enough.

Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen would be his swan song.

However, the day passed without any nerve-wracking emergencies. The sun sank, and the Jules Verne, its hydrogen cooling, did likewise. The pilot had to run the burner just enough to raise it now and then and keep the vessel above the tropopause. Those off duty snuggled under heavy cloths and slept according to their natures.

Being the only one awake at night was eerie. The illumination was feeble. The starlight poured into the ports, but this, with some small lights above the gauges and dials, was not enough for comfort. The alloy hull amplified every noise: the impact of a hand on the deck as somebody turned over and flung out an arm; Pogaas muttering Swazi; Frisco grinding his teeth; Rider softly whinnying horselike; the fan whirring.

When Frigate ignited the torch, the sudden explosion and succeeding roar startled everybody from sleep. Then it was his turn to burrow under the cloths, to sleep, to be roused momentarily by the torch or a nightmare of falling.

Dawn came. The crewmen got up at different times, used the chemical toilet, drank hot instant coffee or tea, and ate food saved from the grails, supplemented by acorn bread and dried fish. The wastes from the toilet were not jettisoned. Opening a hatch at this altitude meant a possibly fatal drop in air pressure, and any weight loss increased the lift.

The Frisco Kid, whose eye was best at estimating ground speed, thought they were clipping along at 50 knots.

Before noon, the vessel was gripped by a wind that took them backward for several hours before it curved the craft around northeast again. After three hours they were going southward again.

“If this keeps up we’ll whirl around here forever,” Frigate said gloomily. “I don’t understand this.”

Late that afternoon they were back on the proper course. Frigate said that they should descend to the surface winds and try their luck there. They were far enough north to be where the winds generally flowed toward the northeast.

By letting the burner stay off, the gas slowly cooled. The Jules Verne sank at a minuscule rate at first, then began dropping swiftly. Nur turned the burner on for a few minutes to check its descent. At 13 kilometers altitude, the wind lessened. It picked up again and in an opposite direction, the wrong one for them. It also gave the craft a counterspin. Nur allowed it to sink until it was about 2000 meters above the mountaintops. Now they moved at an angle across the valleys, which were running straight north and south in this area.

“We’re going northeast again!” Frigate said happily.

At high noon of the third day they were sailing along at an estimated 25km/h or more than 15 mph. Only the Jules Verne could have gotten this far. Any other type of balloon would not have been able to ascend to the stratosphere or descend to the surface winds without losing too much gas to go on.

They opened the ports to let the thin but fresh air in. The up- and downdrafts caused them some discomfort, chiefly from the change in air pressure. They had to keep swallowing and yawning to ease their eardrums. As dusk approached, the drafts became less violent.

The next day, in the middle of the afternoon, they were surprised by a thunderstorm. Farrington was pilot when the black clouds beneath suddenly welled upward. At one moment, the storm seemed to be safely below them. But tendrils reached upward like the tentacles of an octopus. The next moment, the body of the octopus seemed to shoot toward them, and they were enveloped in darkness laced with lightning. At the same time, they whirled like fleas on a spinning top.

“We’re dropping like a brick,” Frisco said calmly. He ordered that some ballast be dropped, but the craft kept on falling. Lightning cracking nearby flooded the car with a light in which their faces looked green. Thunder bellowed in the echo chamber of the hull, and their ears hurt. Rain shot into the open ports and covered the deck, adding to the weight.

“Close the ports! Tom and Nur, throw out a Number Three ballast bag!”

They leaped to obey him. Their bodies felt light, as if the car was dropping so quickly it would leave them floating.

Another nearby bolt cast light and fear. All saw a black rock below, the flat top of a mountain rushing at them.

“Two Number One bags!”

Nur, looking out a port, said loudly but calmly, “The bags’re not falling much faster then we are.”

“Two more Number Ones!”

Another fiery streak wrenched the air nearby.

“We ain’t going to make it!” Frisco cried. “Two more Number Ones! Stand by to get rid of all ballast!”

The edge of the hull struck the edge of the mountaintop. The car bounced, throwing the entire crew to the deck. As the momentarily loosened net ropes tautened again, the crew, which had half-gotten to a standing position, were hurled down again. Fortunately, the savage strain had not snapped the ropes.

Ignoring their injuries, they got up and stared through the deck port. Darkness except for a small interior light. Another bolt. They were too near the side of the mountain, and the downdraft was still gripping the balloon. The pointed tops of giant irontrees were coming at them like hurled javelins.

It was too late to turn the burner on. Its effect would be negligible in the little time left before impact. Besides, the collision with the mountaintop might have loosened the junctions of the pipes. If that were so, one spark would turn the interior of the hull into a furnace.

“All the ballast!” Frisco shouted.

Suddenly they were out of the clouds, but the blackness was now a dark gray. They could see well enough to discern the treetops spinning just below them.

Frisco left his post to help the others throw the bags and the water containers out. Before anything could be cast overboard, before Nur could punch a button to release the ironshot ballast, the car crashed into the upper branches of an irontree. Again, they were knocked down. Helpless, they heard crashing noises. But the branches bent, then straightened out, hurling the car upward and into the envelope.

The car fell back, was caught once more by the almost unbreakable branches. Its occupants were rattled around as if they were dice shaken in a cup.

Frigate was battered, bruised, and stunned. Even so, he had wits enough left to envision the punishment the plastic pipes were taking. They were being violently bent between car and bag.

If… oh, God, make it not so!… if the pipes were torn loose from the bag… if the points of the branches gutted the bag… the car would fall to the ground… unless it was held among the branches or the net was tangled among them.

No. Now the car was rising.

But would the balloon go straight up? Outward toward The River? Or would it be hurled against the side of the mountain and the envelope ruptured against outcroppings?

While the rainstorm was at its height, the airship came over the mountain from the north. Lightning, the only illumination, tore the skies. The radar swept over the Valley, over the treetops, across the spires of rock, across The River, and zeroed in on the great boat. The passive radar detector indicated that the boat’s own radars were not operating. After all, the boat was at anchor, and why use the radar when no enemy was expected?

The huge hatches in the belly of the ship opened. The helicopter, sitting on a platform, began rotating its vanes. Inside were thirty-one men, Boynton at the controls, de Bergerac by his side. Arms and boxes of plastic explosive were stacked in the rear.

As soon as the motors were warmed up, Boynton gave the high sign. Szentes, the C.P.O. in charge, listened to the phone on the bulkhead, getting the last-minute report on the wind. Then he whipped a little flag up and down. Go!

The copter lifted within the huge bay, moved sidewise off the platform, hovered over the opening, the bay lights glancing off its windshield and the tips of the whirling vanes. Then it dropped as a stone, and de Bergerac, looking up through the windshield, saw the colossal ship merge into the black clouds and disappear.

Cyrano knew that the two-man glider would be launched from it within a minute. Bob Winkelmeyer would be piloting it; James McParlan would be his passenger. Winkelmeyer was a West Point graduate, a flier who had been shot down by a Zero during a scouting flight over an island north of Austrailia. McParlan had been rather famous in the 1870s. A Pinkerton detective, he had infiltrated into the Mollie Maguires, a secret terrorist organization of Irish coal miners in Pennsylvania. Under the name of James McKenna, he had penetrated deep into the gang, narrowly escaping detection and death a number of times. As a result, the Maguires were arrested, nineteen of them were hanged, and the mine owners continued to exploit their employees.

Winkelmeyer and McParlan would land in The River and there sink their glider. Later, if they got a chance, they would enlist aboard the Rex. There would be vacancies, since it was doubtful that the raiding party could pull off a coup without killing some of the crew of the Rex.

As Sam Clemens had said to the two, “Rotten John doesn’t have a monopoly on double agents. Suck up to him, boys, get him in your confidence. That is, if the raid fails, do it. Maybe you won’t have to. But I know that slippery character. He’s the greased pole the monkey couldn’t climb.

“So, if he gets out of it, you’ll join his crew. And then, when Armageddon comes, you’ll blow up his boat. It’ll be as if Gabriel had planted two angels in the guise of devils in Hell.”

The helicopter plunged into the clouds. Lightning cracked open the world, slicing like a flaming sword between earth and heaven. Thunder roared. Rain pelted the windscreens, dimming vision. The craft’s radar, however, saw the boat, and, within two minutes, the lights of their target shone weakly.

Boynton took the chopper at a forty-five degree slant toward the boat, then dropped it until it was close to The River. At full speed, while lightning tore the fabric of the night, it sped a meter above the surface. Now the lights from the wheelhouse and along the decks grew bigger and brighter.

Abruptly, the copter lifted, shot over the edge of the flight deck, stopped, poised, and sank. Its wheels struck the surface, and it bounced a little. But it settled down, the vanes chirruped as they slowed, and its hatches burst open.

By the time de Bergerac was on the deck, the motors had been turned off. Boynton was helping men out on his side; Cyrano was ordering a man in the craft to hand out the boxes of bombs.

Cyrano glanced at the top deck of the pilothouse. So far, no one was looking out of its stern window, no alarms had been raised. Their luck was even better than they had expected. Incredibly, there were no sentinels. Or, if there were, they had noticed nothing untoward. Perhaps they felt very safe in this area. A large part of the crew might even be on shore leave. And the sentinels might be goofing off, sleeping, drinking, or making love.

De Bergerac took out the Mark IV pistol and patted the hilt of his épée. “Follow me!” Five men raced after him. Two other groups took off on their appointed duty. Boynton stayed in the copter, ready to start the motor at the necessary time.

The flight deck was an extension of the overhead of the texas. The Frenchman ran down it toward the pilothouse, the feet of his men thudding on its oaken surface. Arriving at the entrance to the second deck of the pilothouse, he paused. Now someone was shouting from the open port of the wheelhouse above him. Cyrano ignored him and plunged through the doorway. The others followed him up the steel ladder. Before the last man had gotten through, a shot sounded. Cyrano looked back down. “Anybody hit?” he shouted.

The man behind him, Cogswell, said, “He missed me!”

Alarms were ringing above, and from a distance came the whooping of a siren. Within seconds, other sirens joined it.

The second deck was a brightly illuminated corridor lined by cabins in which the chief officers and their women would be quartered. Hopefully, John Lackland would be in the cabin on the left, just below the ladder leading up to the bridge or wheelhouse. Clemens had planned to use that cabin, since it was the largest, and it was not probable that John would take a smaller one.

There were four doors on each side of the passageway. One of these opened as de Bergerac plunged in. A man stuck his head out. De Bergerac aimed the pistol at him, and the man slammed the door shut.

Quickly, working as planned, each of the six pulled a device from his belt. These had been delivered from the machinist’s shop only an hour before, and two men carried an extra. They were short bars of duraluminum with long, heavy steel nails in each end. Fitted over the side of the door and the bulkhead, they were driven by heavy hammers into the oak. A determined person in the cabin could batter them out in time, but by then, if all went as planned, John and his abductors would be gone.

There were shouts and screams coming from inside the cabin. One man tried to push a door open while Cogswell was hammering. He dropped the hammer and fired through the narrow opening, not attempting to shoot the man. The door closed, and he quickly finished his work.

By now, John would have been informed via intercom that the boat was under attack. But the noise in the corridor would have been enough to inform him that the invaders were there. He did not need the explosion of the pistol to tell him that.

Three men should also have rounded the pilothouse and be going up its fore ladder. However… ah, yes, here came one of the wheelhouse watch. He stuck a pale face around the corner of the entrance at the top of the ladder leading to the corridor. Now he was stepping out from it, a heavy .69-caliber pistol in two hands. He wore no armor.

“Peste!”

Though Cyrano hated to harm the man, whom he had never seen before, he aimed and fired.

“Quelle merde!”

Cyrano had missed, the plastic bullet shattering against the bulkhead beside the man. Some fragments must have struck him, for he screamed and staggered back, dropping his pistol and clutching his face.

Cyrano was not an excellent shot. This was just as well, he told himself. If the bullet removed the man without greatly harming him, instead of killing him, its effect was even more desirable.

Shots and yells came from the wheelhouse. That would mean that the three had gone up the aft ladder and were now keeping the watch busy.

He strode to the door of the cabin in which John must be. There was no use asking its occupant to come out with hands up. Whatever the ex-monarch of England and half of France was, he was not a coward.

Of course, it was possible that he was not aboard tonight. He might be on shore, roistering and wenching.

Cyrano smiled as, reaching out from the side of the bulkhead, he tried the knob. The door was locked. So, the captain of the Rex was at home, though not receiving.

A man’s voice cried out in Esperanto. “What is happening?”

Cyrano grinned. It was King John’s baritone.

“Captain, we’re being attacked!” Cyrano shouted.

He waited. Perhaps John would fall for this trick, thinking it was the voice of one of his men, and open the door.

An explosion sounded, followed by a bullet which would have hit him if he had been standing in front of the door. It was not one of your plastic missiles which would shatter against the oak. It was of the precious lead and made a respectably sized hole.

He gestured at one of his men, and the fellow removed a package of plastic explosive from a small box. Cyrano stood to one side while his colleague, Sheehan, crouching low, pressed the explosive around the lock and over the hinges.

Crafty John sent another bullet crashing though the wood. This was low, catching Sheehan in the skull just above his eyes. He fell back and lay staring, mouth open.

“Quel dommage!”

Sheehan had been a fine fellow. It was a pity that his funeral sermon was confined to, “What a pity!”

On the other hand, he should not have been so careless as to put himself in the line of fire.

Cogswell ran up to the corpse, retrieved the electrical line and battery, and walked swiftly backward, unreeling the line. Fortunately, Sheehan had inserted the fuse in the plastic, thus saving a few seconds. Everything was a matter of utmost speed, and seconds might mean the difference between success or failure.

Cyrano retreated to the corner, flattened himself against the bulkhead, turned his head away, and stuck his fingers in his ears, opening his mouth at the same time.

Though he could not see him, he could imagine Cogswell securing one end of the wire to a terminal of the battery, then touching the other with the other end of the wire.

The explosion rocked and half-deafened him. Clouds of acrid smoke filled the corridor. Coughing, he felt his way along the bulkhead, touched the now open doorframe, dimly saw the blasted door lying over Sheehan’s body, and then he was inside the stateroom.

He had dived in and then rolled sidewise, a maneuver made clumsy by the sheathed sword attached to his belt.

Now he was up against something that felt like the legs of a bed. Almost directly above him, a woman was screaming. But where was John Lackland?

A pistol boomed. Cyrano saw its flash through the smoke and was up and flying across the corner of the bed. His arms enfolded a thick and naked waist, and the tackled man went over sideways. There was a grunt, a flailing arm that struck Cyrano’s head without hurting him, and then the man went limp.

Cyrano had his dagger out and against the man’s throat. “Make one move, and I’ll cut your throat!”

There was no response. Was the fellow frozen with terror or was he faking?

Cyrano’s other hand felt along the shoulder, up the neck, and along the head. The man did not move. Ah! A stickiness! John, if it was John, had struck his head and was indeed unconscious.

Cyrano got up, groped along the bulkhead, and found the switch. The light showed a large room, luxuriously decorated and furnished by Riverworld standards. The smoke was clearing away now, revealing a very pretty and quite naked woman on her knees in the center of the bed. She had stopped screaming and was staring at him with huge blue eyes.

“Get under the covers and stay there, and you won’t be hurt, mademoiselle. De Bergerac does not make war upon women. Unless they try to kill him.”

The man sprawled on the deck was short and muscularly built and tawny haired. His blue eyes were open, and he was mumbling something. In a few seconds, he would be recovering his wits.

Cyrano turned and saw why John had fired his pistol. Hoijes lay on his back on the floor, his chest torn open.

“Mordioux!”

He must have run in immediately after he had seen his colleague dive through the doorway. And John, seeing him outlined against the light from the corridor, had shot him. Doubtless, he, Cyrano, had not been fired at because the smoke was still too thick for him to be seen.

Two of his men were dead so far. Perhaps there were others elsewhere. They would be left there, since it had been agreed that carrying off bodies would slow the getaway.

Where were the others? Why had they not come in after him?

Ah, here were Cogswell and Propp!

Something hard struck him, lifted him up and backward, hurling him into a bulkhead. He fell down on his face, and lay there, while his ears rang and his head seemed to expand and collapse, expand and collapse, like an accordion. More heavy clouds of smoke filled the room, stinging his eyes and making him cough violently.

It was some time before he could get onto his knees and more time before he managed to stand. By then he understood that a bomb had gone off in the corridor. Had it been thrown down from the wheelhouse?

Whoever had done it, he had killed Cogswell and Propp. And he had come close to killing Savinien de Cyrano II de Bergerac.

John was on his knees now, swaying, staring ahead of him while he coughed. A pistol lay within reach of his hand, but he did not seem aware of it.

Ah, now the vile fellow had extended his hand to grasp its butt!

Having neither gun nor dagger, Cyrano unsheathed his épée. He stepped forward and brought its triangular blade down like a club against the back of John’s head. John fell forward on his face and lay motionless.

The woman was on her face on the bed, her hands covering her ears and her shoulders shaking.

Cyrano staggered through the smoke, almost stumbling over Propp’s body. He stopped when he reached the doorway. His sense of hearing was coming back, but the firing in the corridor sounded faint. He got down on his knees and dared to stick his head out. The smoke was being carried away by the draft from the doorway at the top of the ladder. A body lay at the foot of the ladder. Evidently someone from the wheelhouse, perhaps the bomb-thrower. Down at the end of the corridor two men crouched, firing out through the entrance. They were raiders, Sturtevant and Velkas.

Now two men, smoke-grimed, were coming down the ladder. Reagan and Singh. They must have cleaned out the wheelhouse and were coming to help the abduction party. Their aid was indeed needed.

Cyrano got up and gestured at them. They said something, but he could not hear it. That bomb must have been a rather large one. It had certainly made a mess of the corridor.

Reagan and Singh entered the cabin and picked up the limp body of John. Cyrano followed them after sheathing his sword and reloading his pistols. The woman continued to hide her face in the mattress and to keep her hands over her ears. See no evil, hear no evil.

On stepping out of the cabin, he saw that Sturtevant and Velkas had left. So—whoever they had been shooting at had been eliminated. Reagan and the giant Sikh, dragging John, his head lolling, his feet trailing, were almost to the door.

Velkas reappeared, running by the three men, shouting something at them. They kept on while Velkas sped to Cyrano.

By putting his mouth against Cyrano’s ear and yelling, Velkas made himself understood. Some of John’s crew had gotten to a steam machine gun. But their backs would be exposed to fire from John’s cabin.

They ran into the cabin and looked out a port. To the right was a platform which extended over the edge of the flight deck. On it was mounted the thick barrel of a steam gun. Two men were behind its shield, swinging the weapon around to bear on the helicopter.

To his left, below him, were Sturtevant and the two carrying John. They would also be in the line of fire of the gun.

Cyrano opened the wide, square port, braced his pistol on its ledge, and fired. A second later, Velkas’ gun boomed in his ear, deafening him even more.

They emptied their pistols. At this distance accuracy was impossible. The Mark IV pistols were using precious lead bullets, but the charges required to propel .69-caliber missiles caused a powerful recoil. Moreover, the wind, though slight, had to be compensated for.

The first two volleys missed. Then the gunner fell sidewise and the other man, taking over, dropped a few seconds later. Neither may have been struck by a direct hit. The shield could have made the bullets ricochet. It did not matter. The effect was the same.

By then, Sturtevant and the man dragging John were halfway across the deck. The chopper’s vanes were whirling, but Cyrano could not hear them. Even if his hearing had been regained, the alarm sirens would have drowned out their noise.

Cyrano grabbed Velkas’ arm and pulled him close. Shouting in his ear, he told him to get to the machine gun and hold off anybody who tried to attack. He gestured at the armed men who had just emerged from a hatch at the far end of the deck.

Velkas nodded and ran out the door.

Cyrano looked again through the porthole. The parties sent to blow up the paddle-wheel motors and the ammunition supply were not in sight. Either they were still working or they were cornered and trying to shoot their way out.

He ran up the ladder and into the wheelhouse. Bodies lay on the deck. One of his men, two of John’s. The lights shone on their blue-gray faces, staring eyes, and open mouths.

He turned off the alarm sirens and looked out the front screens. There was no one on the foredecks except a body at the foot of the ladder leading down from the forepart of the pilothouse and several bodies near the prow.

The boat was alongside a well-lit dock far longer and more massive than those usually found along The River. Perhaps the crew of the Rex had built it, their captain having decided to give everybody a long liberty. Or perhaps extensive repairs were needed.

It did not matter. What did was that the raiders had had the luck to find the boat manned only by guards and a few officers. John had decided to spend the night aboard, another item of luck, though not for him.

However, the uproar had awakened those on shore. They were streaming out from the huts on the plain and the stockaded fortresses. The lights from the boat showed the forefront of the mob racing toward the dock. Many of these were crew members, since they carried metal weapons.

It had not been in the plan to move the boat from the dock, but it should have been. Cyrano, knowing that the boat would be invaded in overwhelming numbers within a minute or so, took action. He sat down in the pilot’s seat, pressed the motor power switches, and grinned as he saw the ON lights illuminated. Until now, he had not been sure that the motor power was available. After all, to make sure that the vessel was not stolen, John could have had the switches disconnected.

He prayed that just now would not be the moment for the motors to be blown up. If they were, the boat would be immobilized, and he and his fellows might not get to the chopper in time.

There was no time to untie the mooring lines. Too bad, but the power of the great electrical motors was immense.

He pulled back on the long, knobbed metal rods, one on each side of him, and the paddle wheels began turning backward. They moved slowly at first, too slowly to tear the lines. He pulled the sticks as far back as they would go, thus causing the wheels to rotate at full speed.

The giant mooring ropes were stretched. But, instead of snapping, they pulled the ends of the vertical beams alongside the dock after the boat.

For a moment, the fastenings of the piles held. The people on the dock either threw themselves down or leaped across the space between dock and boat. With a rending noise that could be heard even above their shouts and the firing aft, the piles came loose.

Its supports removed, the near side of the dock tilted, precipitating most of those on it into the water. Only one man managed to jump onto the boat without falling in.

The Rex backed swiftly away, dragging the beams alongside it at the ends of the massive ropes. Cyrano, laughing, stabbed a panel button, and the steam whistles hooted derisively at those left ashore or in the water.

“How do you like that, John!” he yelled. “Not only you but your boat is stolen! It’s only just!”

Now he pushed the starboard stick forward, and the great boat turned downRiver. He steered it to the middle of the stream and set the automatic pilot on. Its sonars estimating the depth and the distance from both banks, it would now hold a course exactly in the middle unless it was on a collision course with a large object. Then it would turn to avoid it.

The man who had jumped onto the boat ran across the deck and disappeared from view. A half-minute later, he came up the ladder to the next deck. Evidently he was headed for the pilothouse.

At that moment, the rain ceased.

Cyrano leaned out of the door and emptied his pistol at the man as he ran across the deck. The man dived beneath an overhang, then stuck his head out and shot back at Cyrano. The only bullet that came near smashed itself halfway up the ladder.

Cyrano looked out the aft screen. The helicopter was still sitting on the flight deck. John and his three captors were now inside it. Four men were running across the deck toward the texas. He lowered the screen and leaned out, gesturing to them that it was he who had moved the boat. They stopped and waved at him, grinning, and then turned and ran to the copter.

At the far end of the deck some men were still shooting at the copter from a hatch. But their large-caliber plastic bullets were going against the wind, and most of them were falling on the deck or being blown over the deck. Cyrano could not determine how many were firing, but it seemed to him that there could not be more than three or four.

Of course, there might be others in the boiler deck fighting with the demolition men.

And then the boat shook and a great cloud of smoke rose from the deck near the port wheelhousing.

The blast was followed by another almost immediately. This one was from the starboard side, a much more powerful explosion than the other. Pieces of flight deck soared up through the smoke, falling on the deck, some being propelled near the helicopter. The clouds were quickly dissipated, however, revealing a great hole just beside the starboard wheel.

The lights went off, then burned again as the emergency system took over. The motors having stopped, the boat began to turn slowly, its nose moving toward the right bank. It would be drifting now, though it might be many kilometers before it rammed the bank.

Sturtevant was back out of the chopper and waving at Cyrano to hurry.

Four men appeared on the starboard side of the flight deck. Two came up from the ladder on the port.

Cyrano cursed. Were these the only survivors of the explosives crews?

Now little clouds of smoke rose from the hatch where the defenders had been firing at the chopper. One of his men dropped. The others gave protective fire while two of them picked up the fallen man and began to carry him between them toward the copter. One of them fell and could not get back up. He was picked up by two men. The other wounded man was hoisted up onto the shoulders of a comrade, and that one carried him though he staggered under the burden.

Cyrano ran back to the other side of the wheelhouse. That damnable fellow who had gotten aboard appeared for a moment, running across the deck just below. He was not carrying his pistol, which meant that he must have discarded it after emptying it. He carried an épée in his right hand.

His eye caught the movement near the foot of the ladder leading from the wheelhouse to the deck below. One of the men whom he had thought dead was living. And he was motioning for help. He must have seen the face of his chief at the screen.

Cyrano did not hesitate. The orders were to leave the dead behind, but nothing had been said about abandoning the wounded. In any case, he would have disregarded such a command. There seemed to be no immediate grave danger to the chopper. The few defenders could not cross the flight deck without exposing themselves to the fire of those in the chopper. Of course, they could take another route, come up a ladder near the machine. But he, Cyrano, could get this poor wounded fellow to the copter before John’s men got there.

He went down the ladder as swiftly as he could, skipping steps, sliding his hands along the railings. By then Tsoukas had gotten on his hands and knees. His head hung low, and he was shaking it.

Cyrano knelt by him. “Do not worry, my friend. I am here.”

Tsoukas groaned and pitched forward into a puddle of blood.

“Mordioux!”

He felt Tsoukas’ pulse.

“Merde!”

The fellow was dead.

But perhaps the other two were still alive.

A swift examination dispelled his hope.

He rose, and whirled, his hand going to the butt of his holstered pistol. Here came that lone man, a brave person but a nuisance. Why had he not fallen into the water and so saved Cyrano the trouble of killing him and himself the irreparable harm of being killed?

“Ayyy!”

The pistol was empty; he had forgotten to load it. And there was no time to pick up one from the deck, to use the gun dropped by a dead man. Indeed, there was scarcely time to unsheath his sword and so prevent this audacious fellow from running him through.

Boynton would have to wait for him a few seconds longer. That surely would be sufficient to dispose of this obstacle.

“En garde!”

The man was a trifle shorter than himself. But, whereas Cyrano was as thin as a rapier, this foolish person was as sturdy as the shaft of a war axe. His shoulders were broad, his chest was deep, and his arms were thick. He had a dark, Arabic-looking face of imposing structure, though his lips were too thick, and his blazing black eyes and white grin made him look like a pirate. He wore only a cloth fastened around the waist.

With those wrists, Cyrano thought, his antagonist would make an excellent saberman—if he had the skill to match his muscle.

But with a rapier, where speed, not strength, was most important, ah, that was a different matter.

After the first few seconds, Cyrano knew that, whatever the man’s aptitude with the saber was, he had never crossed blades with the likes of such before.

Cyrano’s parries, attacks, advances and retreats, lunges and recoveries were equally matched. Fortunately, the devil did not so far have the slightest superiority in quickness. If he had, he would have run his opponent through.

He must know, however, that he was fighting another master. Even so, he was still smiling, seemingly undaunted, but behind his savage mask must be a realization that he would die if he became a fraction of a second slower in reflex and judgment.

Time was on the side of the dark man. He had no place to go, nothing to do but fight, and Cyrano had to get to the machine soon. Boynton must know that Cyrano was still alive, since Sturtevant had seen him in the wheelhouse. He would be wondering what was keeping him.

Would he wait a few minutes longer, and then, his chief not showing, think that he was dead for some unaccountable reason? Would he then take off? Or would he send someone to investigate?

There was not time to think about such matters. This devil was countering every maneuver, just as Cyrano was countering his. It was a stalemate, though there was certainly nothing stale about this. The attacking and the defending blades flashed almost in rhythm with each other.

Ah! Knowing this, the fellow had broken the rhythm. Once the rhythm was well established a fencer had a tendency to continue the sequence of motion. This almost unparalleled swordsman had hesitated slightly, hoping that Cyrano would follow the rhythm himself and so be spitted.

He had underestimated his man. Cyrano adjusted in the split second needed and so saved himself from a bad wound. But the point did penetrate his upper right arm slightly.

Cyrano came out of the retreat with a lunge which was parried. Not quite well enough. The man’s arm also bore a slight wound.

“You have the honor of the first blood,” Cyrano said in Esperanto. “And that is indeed an honor. No other man has ever succeeded in doing that.”

It was foolish to waste desperately needed breath in conversation. Cyrano, however, was as curious as the alley cat he resembled.

“What is your name?”

The man said nothing, though it could be stated that his blade spoke for him. Its point was quicker than the tongue of a fishwife.

“I am one whom you may have heard of. Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac!”

The dark man only smiled more ferociously, and he pressed Cyrano even more. This fellow was not one to be shaken by a name, no matter how impressive. Nor did he intend to expend energy in talking. Of course, it was barely possible that he did not know the name of de Bergerac.

Someone shouted. It could have been this distraction or perhaps it was after all the shock of finding out whom he faced. Whatever the reason, the man’s reaction was not quite what it should have been. Using the thrust invented by Jarnac, Cyrano drove his blade through the man’s thigh.

Even so, his point went deep into Cyrano’s right arm. His épée clattered on the deck.

The man fell then, but he tried to get up on one knee to defend himself. Blood flowed swiftly down his leg.

Cyrano, hearing the slap of feet, looked around. Here came Sturtevant and Cabell, pistols in their hands.

“Do not shoot him!” Cyrano cried.

The two halted, their weapons aimed at the dark man.

Cyrano picked up his sword with his left hand. His right arm hurt abominably; the blood was running like wine from a freshly broached cask.

Cyrano said, “Perhaps this match might have ended in another fashion if we had not been interrupted.”

The fellow must be in great pain, but he was not showing it. Those black eyes burned as if they were those of Satan himself.

“Throw down your sword, sir, and I will bind your wound.”

“Go to hell!”

“Very well, sir. But I wish you a speedy recovery.”

“Come on, Cyrano,” Cabell said.

For the first time, Cyrano heard the shots. They were coming from the port side, which meant that the defenders had worked their way around to a closer position to the helicopter.

Cabell continued, “The chopper’s been hit several times. And we’ll have to run through their fire to get to it.”

“Very well, Richard,” Cyrano said. He pointed at the walkie-talkie fastened to Sturtevant’s belt.

“My dear fellow, why don’t you summon Boynton to this side? Then we can board in comparative safety.”

“Yeah. I should have thought of that.”

Cabell bound a cloth ripped from a corpse around the wound in the Frenchman’s arm. The dark man’s skin was grayish, and his eyes had lost their fire. As the helicopter settled down near them, Cyrano stepped forward and, using his épée, knocked the other’s from his grasp. He said nothing; he did not resist as Cyrano tied a cloth around the wound in his thigh.

“Your comrades can give you more than first aid when they arrive,” Cyrano said.

He ran to the machine and climbed in. Boynton took it up before the door was closed, sending it at an angle upRiver. John, still completely naked, was slumped in a seat in the second row. Cyrano, looking at him, said, “Get some cloths on him. Then tie his hands and his feet.”

He looked down. There were about twenty men on the flight deck. Where had the others come from? They were shooting away, their guns flashing like sex-crazed fireflies. But they had no chance of hitting their target. Did they not know that their captain was aboard, that they might hit him? Apparently not.

Something hit him in the back of his head. He was floating somewhere in a dark grayness while faraway voices said peculiar things. The ugly face of his childhood schoolteacher, the village curé, loomed before him. The brutal fellow had often beaten his student, rapping him savagely with a stick on the body and on the head. At the age of twelve, Cyrano, desperate, mad with rage, had attacked the parish priest, knocked him down, kicked him, and beaten him with his own stick.

Now the apish features, growing ever larger, swept through him. And he began to regain his senses.

Boynton was yelling, “I can’t believe it! He got away!”

Cabell was saying, “He rammed his elbow into my ribs, and he kicked Cyrano in the head!”

The chopper was tilted so that he could look down through the still unclosed door. A searchlight from the boat briefly caught the king’s naked body. His arms were flailing in an effort to keep himself upright. Then John had disappeared into the darkness.

“He couldn’t survive!” Boynton said. “It’s at least a thirty-meter fall!”

They would not be able to go back down and make sure. Not only were some shooting at the chopper, others were running now to a rocket battery. Though there was no chance the pistol shots could hit the chopper, the heat-seeking rockets would be unavoidable unless Boynton got the machine to a safe distance.

However, Boynton was not the man to be so easily frightened. And he was undoubtedly infuriated that their prisoner had escaped.

Now he was flying the copter, not away, but toward the boat. He was bringing it to a point about 90 meters opposite the rockets. There went the four rockets the machine carried, flames spurting from their tails.

And there went the battery in a huge ball of flame and a cloud of smoke, bodies and pieces of deck and metal flying on all sides.

“That’ll stop them!” Boynton said.

Sturtevant said, “How about strafing them?”

Cyrano was startled. “What? Oh, use the machine gun? No, let us depart with speed. If there’s one survivor, he could get to another rocket battery, and we’d be done for. We have failed our mission and lost too many brave fellows to risk more casualties.”

“I don’t see how we’ve failed,” Boynton said. “Sure, we didn’t bring John back, but he is dead. And it’ll be a long, long time before the boat is ready to operate.”

“You think John is dead, eh?” Cyrano said. “I would like to believe that. But I will not say for certain that he is dead until I see his corpse.”

Groaning with pain, the crew of the Jules Verne quickly checked themselves for injuries. Three had ribs that hurt so badly they were not sure they were not cracked or broken. Frigate thought that his neck muscles were either torn or severely strained. Tex and Frisco had bloody noses, and the latter’s knee was paining him. Pogaas’ forehead was skinned and bleeding. Only Nur was unhurt.

There was little time to worry about themselves. The balloon was now rising but was drifting away from the mountain. The storm clouds were disappearing as swiftly as burglars who hear a police siren. Fortunately, the light system was still working. Frisco could see the flight instruments. Nur got a flashlight, and he and Frisco applied a thin liquid to the pipe connections. Nur, examining these through a magnifying glass, reported that he could see no bubbles. Apparently, no hydrogen was escaping.

Nur opened the top hatch, and he and Pogaas climbed out onto the load ring. While the Swazi directed the beam of the flashlight, Nur went up the ropes like a monkey. He could not get close enough to the neck of the bag to apply a paste. But he did report that the envelope seemed to be tight around the entrance of the pipes.

Frisco heard this with skepticism. “Yeah, they seem to be okay. But we can’t really tell unless we land and deflate the bag.”

Frigate said, “As long as we have positive buoyancy, we’ll stay aloft. I don’t think we should land until we come up against the polar winds. That ought to be tomorrow if we’ve estimated our travel distance correctly. If we touch down, we might lose the balloon. For one thing, we don’t know how the locals will react to it. In the early days of Terrestrial ballooning, a number were destroyed by ignorant and superstitious peasants when the aeronauts landed in rural areas. The peasants believed the balloon to be the devil’s work or the vehicle of evil magicians. We might run into such people.”

Frigate admitted that it made him very uneasy to be without ballast. However, if they must, they could always unbolt the chemical toilet and throw it out. Of course, the situation might be such that there wouldn’t be time to do this.

The Jules Verne lifted above the Valley, and the wind sent it spanking along northeasterly. After an hour it lost much of its strength, but the craft was still moving in the right direction. It was also steadily ascending. Frigate took over the pilot’s post at 4877 meters or a little over 16,000 feet of altitude. To stop further ascension, he valved off hydrogen in driblets. When it began to sink, he turned the burner on. From then on, the pilot would be busy trying to maintain the vessel within a 2000-meter zone while losing as little gas as possible and running the burner at a minimum.

Frigate’s neck and shoulder pained him very much. He would be glad when he was relieved and could get under the cloths and stretch out. One drink of booze wouldn’t hurt him and it might ease the agony.

So far the voyage had been mostly hard and fast work, some stomach-squeezing danger, and much boredom. He’d be happy when the final landing was made. Then the events of the trip would start to take on the patina of amusing adventure. As time passed, it would gain a golden glow, and it would all seem wonderful. The crew would tell exaggerated stories, making their perils seem even more hairbreadth than they had actually been.

Imagination was the great cozener of the past.

Standing by the vernian, the only illumination the cold starlight and the instrument bulbs, all but himself asleep, Frigate felt lonely. Tempering the loneliness, however, was pride. The Jules Verne had broken the record for nonstop balloon flights. From liftoff to this point, it had floated approximately 4824 kilometers or 3000 miles. And it would cover much more distance—if all went well—before it was forced to land.

And it had been done by five amateurs. Except for himself, none had ever been in a balloon on Earth. His forty hours in hot-air balloons and thirty in gas balloons did not make him a veteran aeronaut. He’d logged more time on this flight than all his hours on Earth.

The crew had gone on a voyage which would have made history if it had been on the native planet. Their faces would have been on TV screens worldwide, they’d have been feted and banqueted, they could have written books which would become movies, the royalties would have rolled in.

Here, only a few would ever know what they had done. Even a smaller number would refuse to believe them. Not even a few would know if the voyage ended in the deaths of the crew.

He looked out a port. The world was bright starlight and dark shadows, the valleys like snakes crawling, serpents in march order. The stars were silent, the valleys were silent. As quiet as the mouths of the dead.

That was a gloomy simile.

As silent as the wings of a butterfly. It recalled the summers of Earth in his childhood and youth, the many-colored flowers of the backyard garden, especially the sunflowers, ah, the tall yellow sunflowers, the songs of birds, the savory odors of his mother’s cooking drifting to his nose, roast beef, cherry pies, his father playing the piano…

He remembered one of his father’s favorite songs, one of his own favorites. He’d often sung it softly while on night watch on the schooner. When he did so, he saw in his mind a small glow far ahead of him, a glow like a star, a light that seemed to travel before him, guiding him toward some unnamed but nevertheless desirable goal.

“Shine, little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer,

Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer.

Lead us, lest too far we wander.

Love’s sweet voice is calling yonder.

“Shine, little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer,

Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer.

Light the path below, above.

And lead us on to love!”

Suddenly, he was weeping. The tears were for the good things that had been or might have been, for the bad things that had been but should not have been.

Drying his tears, he made a final check and roused the little Moor for his watch. He crawled under the cloths, but his neck and shoulders drove sleep away. After trying vainly to sink into blessed oblivion, he got out to talk to Nur. They continued a conversation that had gone on, day and night, for many years.

In several respects,” Nur said, “the Church of the Second Chance and the Sufis agree. The Chancers, however, have somewhat different technical terms which might lead you to think that each refers to different things.

“The final goal of the Chancers and the Sufis is the same. Ignoring the difference in terms, both claim that the individual self must be absorbed by the universal self. That is, by Allah, God, the Creator, the Rel, call Him what you will.”

“And this means that the individual being is annihilated?”

“No. Absorbed. Annihilation is destruction. In absorption the individual soul, ka, or Brahman, becomes part of the universal self.”

“And that means that the individual loses his self-consciousness, his individuality? He is no longer aware of himself?”

“Yes, but he is part of the Great Self. What is the loss of self-consciousness as an individual compared to the gain of self-consciousness as God?”

“That strikes me with horror. You might as well be dead. Once you’re no longer self-conscious, you are dead. No, I can’t understand why the Chancers or Buddhists or Hindus or Sufis think this state desirable.

“Without self-consciousness, the individual is indeed dead.”

“If you’d experienced that ecstasy which Sufis experience in one stage of development, the passing-away, you’d understand. Can a person blind from birth be filled with ecstasy while those with sight are looking at a glorious sunset?”

“That’s just it,” Frigate said. “I have had mystical experiences. Three.

“One was when I was twenty-six years old. I was working in a steel mill. In the soaking pits. There cranes strip large ingots from the molds into which molten steel was poured in the open hearths. After the stripping, the cooling ingots are lowered into gas-burning pits which reheat them. From there they’re taken to the rolling mill.

“When I worked in the pits, I fancied that the ingots were souls. Lost souls in the flames of purgatory. They’d be soaked in the flames for a while, then carried off to the place where they’d be pressed down into shape for heaven. Just as the big rolls in the mill squeezed down on ingots, shaping them, pressing the impurities to the ends of the ingots, which were then chopped off, so the souls would be shaped and purified.

“However, this has little to do with the subject of conversation. Or does it?

“Anyway, one day I was standing at the huge open door of the soaking-pits building, resting a moment. I was looking out along the yards at the open hearth. I don’t remember what I was thinking then. Probably that I was tired of working in this extremely hot place at hard labor for such low pay. I was also probably wondering if I was ever going to become a successful writer.

“All of my stories had been rejected, though I’d had a few encouraging notes from editors. Whit Burnett, for instance, the editor of a high-prestige if low-paying magazine, Story, twice came close to buying my stories, but both times his wife disagreed with him, and he bounced them.

“Anyway, there I was, staring at the mill’s ugliness, not at all conducive to pleasant thoughts and especially not to a mystical state.

“I was in low spirits, very low. And the train tracks that filled the yard, the gray metal dust that covered the mud and every object on the yard, the huge, hideous sheet-iron building that housed the open hearths, the smoke that the wind brought down low to the ground, the acrid stink of the smoke, all made for a very depressing mood.

“And then suddenly, unaccountably, it all seemed to change. In a flash. I don’t mean that the ugliness became beautiful. It was just as gray and unpleasant as before.

“But, somehow, I suddenly felt that the universe was right. And all was and would be well. There was a subtle shift in my perspective. Let me put it this way. It was as if the universe was composed of an infinity of glass bricks. These bricks were almost, but not quite, invisible. I could see their edges, though these were ghostly.

“The bricks had been piled so that their faces were not quite even. As if God were a drunken mason. But now, in this subtle shift, the bricks moved, and their faces were even. Order had been restored. Divine order and beauty. The cosmic building was no longer an ill-built structure, fit only to be condemned by the cosmic zoning inspectors.

“I felt exalted. For a moment, I was looking into the basic structure of the world. Past the plaster that has been smeared on to make the walls look smooth and even.

“I knew, I knew, that the universe was right. And that I was right. That is, my place in the world was right. I fitted. Though I was a living being, yet I was one of those bricks, and I’d been aligned in the proper place.

“Rather, I’d suddenly become aware that I had been aligned all along. Until that moment I had thought that I was out of place, not quite on a level with the other pieces. But how could I be? All the pieces, the bricks, were misaligned.

“That was my mistake. Everything was in its place. It was my eyesight, my comprehension, rather, that had been twisted. Aberrated, call it what you will.”

Nur said, “And how long did that state last?”

“A few seconds. But I felt very good, even happy, afterward. The next day, though, I remembered the… revelation… but its effect was gone. I went on living as before. The universe was again a structure built by an incompetent or drunken builder. Or perhaps by a malicious, cheating contractor.

“Still, there were moments…”

“The other experiences?”

“The second should be thrown out. It came from marijuana, not from myself. You see, I’ve smoked perhaps half a dozen marijuana cigarettes in my life. This was during one year, 1955, some time before the younger generation took up drugs. At that time, marijuana and hash were mostly confined to bohemian groups in the big cities. And to the blacks and Mexicans of the ghetto.

“This particular incident took place, of all places, in Peoria, Illinois. My wife and I had met a couple from New York, Greenwich Village types… I’ll explain what this means later… and they talked us into trying marijuana. It made me pretty uncomfortable, downright uneasy, to have the stuff around. I had visions of narcotics agents bursting in, arresting us, being in jail, the trial, the conviction, the penitentiary. The disgrace. And what would happen to our children?

“But alcohol had dissolved my inhibitions, and I tried a joint, as it was called, among other things.

“I had trouble getting the smoke into my lungs and holding it, since I had never even smoked tobacco though I was thirty-seven years old. But I did it, and nothing happened.

“Later that evening, I picked up what was left of the joint and finished it. And this time I suddenly felt that the universe was composed of crystals dissolved in a solution.

“But now I perceived a subtle shift. Suddenly, the crystals in the supersaturated solution were precipitated, and they were all in some kind of beautiful color, rank on rank, like angels drawn up in a parade.

“However, there was no accompanying sense, as on that other occasion, that the universe was right, that I had a place in it, and that the place was right. That it could be no other way.”

“The third time?” Nur said.

“I was fifty-seven then, the sole passenger in a hot-air balloon soaring over the cornfields of Eureka, Illinois. The pilot had just turned off the burner, and so there was no noise except from a flock of pheasants the roar of the burner had disturbed in a field.

“The sun was setting. The bright summer light was turning gray. I was floating as if on a magic carpet in a light breeze which I couldn’t feel. You can light a candle in the open car in a strong wind, you know, and the flame will burn as steadily as if in an unventilated room.

“And suddenly, without warning, I felt as if the sun had come back up over the horizon. Everything was bathed in a bright light in which I should have had to squint my eyes to see anything.

“But I didn’t. The light was coming from within. I was the flame, and the universe was receiving my light and my warmth.

“In a second, maybe longer, the light disappeared. It did not fade away. It just vanished. But for another second the feeling that the world was right, that no matter what happened, to me or to anybody or to the universe, it would be good, that feeling lasted for a second.

“The pilot noticed nothing. Apparently, I wasn’t showing my feelings. And that was the last time I had any experience like that.”

Nur said, “Apparently these mystical states had no influence on your behavior or your outlook?”

“Did I become better because of them? No.”

Nur said, “The states you describe are akin to what we call tajalli. But your tajalli is a counterfeit. If it had resulted in a permanent state, by self-development in the right path, then it would have been a true tajalli. There are several forms of false or wasteful tajalli. You experienced one of these.”

“Does that mean,” Frigate said, “that I am incapable of experiencing the true form?”

“No. At least you felt some form of it.”

They fell silent for a while. Frisco, hidden under a pile of cloths, muttered something in his sleep.

Suddenly, Frigate said, “Nur, for some time I’ve been wondering if you’d accept me as your disciple.”

“And why didn’t you ask me?”

“I was afraid of being rejected.”

There was another silence. Nur checked the altimeter and turned on the vernian for a minute. Pogaas shook aside his blankets and stood up. He lit a cigarette, the glow of his lighter throwing strange lights and shadows on his face. It looked like the head of a sacred hawk cut from black diorite by ancient Egyptians.

“Well?” Frigate said.

“You’ve always thought of yourself as a seeker after truth, haven’t you?” Nur said.

“Not a steady seeker. I’ve drifted too much, floated along like a balloon. Most of the time I’ve taken life as it was or seemed to be. Occasionally, I’ve made determined efforts to investigate and even practice this and that philosophy, discipline, or religion. But my enthusiasms would subside, and I’d forget about them. Well, not entirely. Sometimes an old enthusiasm would flare up, and I’d drive myself again toward the desired goal. Mostly, though, it’s just been floating with the winds of laziness and indifference.”

“You become detached?”

“I tried to be intellectually detached even when my emotions fired me up.”

“To achieve true detachment, you must be free from both emotion and intellect. It’s evident that, though you pride yourself on a lack of preconceptions, you have them. If I did take you as a disciple, you’d have to put yourself absolutely under my control. No matter what I ask, you must do it at once. Wholeheartedly.”

Nur paused. “If I asked you to jump out of this car, would you do so?”

“Hell, no!”

“Nor would I do so. But what if I ask you to do something which is the intellectual or emotional equivalent of jumping out of the car? Something which you’d regard as intellectual or emotional suicide?”

“I won’t know until you ask me.”

“I wouldn’t ask you until I thought you were ready. If indeed you ever will be.”

Pogaas had been looking out of a port. He grunted and then said, “There’s a light out there! It’s moving!”

Frigate and el-Musafir joined him. Tex and Frisco, aroused by their excited voices, got up and stared sleepily out another port.

A long shape, at about the same altitude as the balloon, was silhouetted against a bright stellar cloud.

Frigate said, “It’s a dirigible!”

Of all the things they’d seen on The Riverworld, this was the strangest and most unexpected.

“There’re lights near its prow,” Rider said.

“It can’t be from New Bohemia,” Frigate said.

“Then there is another place where metals have been found,” Nur said.

“Unless it’s one They built!” Farrington said. “It may not be an airship, it’s just built like one.”

One of the lights near the nose of the vessel began blinking. After looking at it for a minute, Frigate said, “It’s Morse code!”

“What’s it saying?” Rider said.

“I don’t know Morse code.”

“Then how do you know it’s Morse?”

“By the length of the pulses. Long and short.”

Nur left the port to return to the vernian. He shut it off, and now the only sound was the heavy breathing of the crew. They watched the great, sinister-looking shape turn and move directly toward them. The light continued blinking. Nur ignited the torch for about twenty seconds. When he turned it off, he started toward the port again. But he stopped suddenly, and he said sharply, “Don’t anybody make a noise!”

They turned to stare at him. He took a few steps and turned off the fan which sucked in carbon dioxide.

Frisco said, “What’re you doing that for?”

Nur went swiftly to the vernian, saying, “I thought I heard a hissing!”

He looked at Pogaas. “Put that cigarette out!”

Nur bent down to place his ear against the connection of the inlet pipe to the cone inside the case.

Pogaas dropped the cigarette and raised his foot to stamp it out.

Jill Gulbirra heard the report on the raid from Cyrano before the helicopter arrived in the hangar bay. She was appalled at the casualties and furious because the mission had even been considered. Part of her anger was at herself. Why hadn’t she argued more firmly with Clemens?

Yet… what could she have done? The laser was the only means possible to get into the tower. Clemens would not release it unless the raid was carried out.

After the copter landed, she ordered the airship taken up out of the Valley. It turned its nose southwest, heading for the Mark Twain. Cyrano went to sick bay to have his wounds bandaged, then reported to the control room. Jill got a more complete report from him, after which she radioed the boat.

Clemens was not as happy as she had expected him to be.

“So you think Rotten John is dead? But you’re not one hundred percent sure?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. But we did everything you asked, so I assume you’ll give us the LB.”

LB was the code name for the laser.

“You can have the LB. The chopper can pick it up from the flight deck.”

The radar officer said, “UFO portside, sir. At approximately our altitude.”

Clemens must have heard her, since he said, “What’s that? A UFO?”

Jill ignored the voice. For a moment she thought the radar-scope was showing two objects. Then recognition came.

“It’s a balloon!”

Clemens said “A balloon? Then it’s not Them!”

Cyrano said softly, “Perhaps it is another expedition to the tower. Our unknown colleagues?”

Jill gave orders to turn a searchlight toward it and use it as a Morse code transmitter.

“This is the airship Parseval. This is the airship Parseval. Identify yourself. Identify yourself.”

She had also told the radio operator to send the same message. There was no reply by wireless or light.

She spoke to Nikitin. “Head directly for the balloon. We’ll try to get a look at it close up.”

“Jes, kapitano.”

The Russian, however, started, and he pointed at a blinking red light on the control panel.

“The hangar-bay hatch! It’s opening!”

The first officer sprang to the intercom. “Hangar bay! Hangar bay! Coppename here! Why are you opening the hatch?”

There was no answer.

Jill pressed the general-alarm button. Sirens began whooping throughout the ship.

“This is the captain! This is the captain! Central crew’s quarters! Central crew’s quarters!”

The voice of Katamura, an electronics officer, said, “Yes, Captain! I read you!”

“Get men down to the hangar bay fast. I think Officer Thorn has escaped!”

Cyrano said, “Do you really think it’s he?”

“I don’t know, but it seems likely. Unless… someone else…”

She called sick bay. No answer.

“It’s Thorn! Damn! Why didn’t I install a belly-hatch override switch?”

In rapid sequence, she ordered two groups to run to the hangar bay and one to the ship’s hospital.

“But, Jill,” Cyrano said, “how could he escape? He has not recovered from his wounds, he is guarded by four men, he is shackled to the bed, the door is locked, and the two men inside don’t have the key!”

“He’s no ordinary man! I should have chained his hands, too! But it seemed unnecessarily cruel!”

“Perhaps the helicopter was not refueled?”

“If it wasn’t, Szentes was neglecting his duty. No chance of that!”

“The hatch is full-open now,” Nikitin said.

Graves’ voice came over the intercom. “Jill! Thorn…”

“How’d he get out?” Jill snapped.

“I’m not sure of the details. I was sitting in my office, sampling some of the medical alcohol. All of a sudden I heard a hell of a brouhaha. Shouts, somebody crashing into something. I got up, but there was Thorn at the door. A length of broken chain was trailing from his ankle shackle. He must have broken the links with his bare hands!

“He charged on in, shoving me to one side so hard I was knocked against the wall. For a minute I was stunned, I couldn’t even stand up. He ripped the intercom off the bulkhead with his hands! His bare hands! I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. He tied my hands behind me and my ankles together with belts he’d taken from the two guards. He could have killed me easily enough, snapped my neck. Man, I still hurt where he grabbed me. But he left me alive, I’ll say that for him.

“I finally got loose and staggered out to the ward. All four guards were on the floor. Two are still alive but badly hurt. The intercoms were all wrecked. The door was locked, and the pistols and knives of the outside guards were gone. I’d still be there if I wasn’t so handy at picking locks and the lock wasn’t pickable. Then I ran to the nearest bulkhead phone…”

“How long ago was it that he broke loose?”

“Twenty-five minutes ago.”

“Twenty-five?”

She was dismayed. What had Thorn been doing in all that time?

“Take care of those men,” she said and switched him off.

“He must have had a transmitter hidden somehow, somewhere,” she said to Cyrano.

“But how do you know that?”

“I can’t be sure. What else would take so much of his time? Nikitin, take her down to ground level! As fast as possible!”

Katamura’s voice came over the intercom.

“Captain, the chopper’s gone.”

Cyrano swore in French.

Nikitin flipped on the general address and informed the crew that the ship would be going into dangerous maneuver. All personnel should make themselves secure.

“Forty-five degrees, Nikitin,” Jill said. “Full speed.”

The radar operator reported that the helicopter was on his scope. It was going south and downward at a maximum velocity at a forty-five degree angle to the horizontal.

By then, the deck of the control room was tilted downward. The others hastened to strap themselves into chairs bolted to the deck. Jill took a seat by Nikitin. She would like to have taken over the pilot’s chair, but even now protocol forbade that. However, it did not matter that she was not at the controls. The wild Russian would get the dirigible down as swiftly as she could. Her job would be to make sure that he did not overdo it.

“If Thorn has a transmitter,” Cyrano said, “he can use it now. We’ll never make it.”

Though he was pale and wide-eyed, he smiled at her.

Jill looked from Cyrano to the control panel indicators. The ship was parallel to the Valley, so there was no problem about clearing the mountaintops. The Valley looked narrow, but it was rapidly broadening. There were some lights down there, bonfires around which would be sentinels or late-night revellers. The rain clouds had dissipated swiftly, as they almost always did. The star-packed skies cast a pale light into the space between the two mountains. Was anybody down there looking up at them? If so, they must wonder what this huge object was and why it was coming down so swiftly.

Not that it was going fast enough to suit her.

Cyrano was right. If Thorn did intend to set off a bomb, he would be doing it now. Unless… unless he would be willing to wait until the ship had landed. After all, he had spared Graves, and he could have killed the other two guards.

Keeping an eye on the panel radar-scopes, she called the hangar bay.

Szentes answered.

“We were all in our quarters,” he said. “There’s no guard posted in the bay.”

“I know,” she said. “Just tell me… quickly… what happened?”

“Thorn stuck his head in the door. He pointed a pistol at us. Then he ripped off the intercom, and he told us that he was going to close the door. He said he had a bomb rigged to explode if the door was opened. Then he shut it. We didn’t know if we should believe him, but no one was willing to find out if he was lying or not. Then Officer Katamura opened the door. There wasn’t any bomb; Thorn had lied. I’m sorry, Captain.”

“You did what you should have done.”

She told the radio operator to transmit their situation to the Mark Twain.

At 915 meters, a little over 3000 feet, she ordered Nikitin to tilt the propellers to give the ship an upward thrust. Also, to raise the nose by three degrees. The inertia would keep them diving despite the braking effect of the propellers. In a minute she would order the nose raised by ten degrees. This would flatten out the dive even more.

What to do when the ship straightened out at 915 meters or somewhat over 3000 feet? If it leveled at that altitude. She was really cutting it close, though she knew the capabilities of the Parseval almost as well as she knew hers.

Should she land the ship? There was no way to moor it, and the hydrogen would have to be valved off so that it would not rise as the crew abandoned it. Otherwise, some of the men would not get off in time, and they would be carried away.

But what if Thorn had no transmitter, what if there was no bomb? The airship would be lost for no reason.

“Too fast! Too fast!” Nikitin said.

Jill was already leaning forward to set the ballast switch for a discharge of 1000 kilograms of water. She punched the button, and a few seconds later the ship rose abruptly.

“Sorry, Nikitin,” she murmured. “There wasn’t any time to waste.”

Radar indicated that the helicopter was hovering north of them at 300 meters altitude. Was Thorn waiting to see what they would do? If so, he did not intend to set off the bomb if they crash-landed or abandoned the ship.

What was she to do? The thought of either alternative made her grind her teeth. She could not bear the idea of wrecking or losing this beauty. The last airship.

The safety of the crew, however, had to come first.

“One hundred and fifty-two meters altitude,” Nikitin said.

The propellers were turned fully upward and biting into the air at full speed. The mountains loomed on both sides; The River sparkled in starlight on the port; the plains ran smoothly beneath them.

There were dwellings below, frail bamboo structures filled with people, most of whom would be sleeping. If the dirigible landed on the plain, it would crush hundreds. If it caught fire, it would burn many more.

Jill ordered Nikitin to steer it over The River.

What to do?

OF the people along The River who had to stay awake or who wanted to, a few had looked into the white-and-black-spangled sky. These saw two silhouetted objects, one much larger than the other. The smaller one was composed of two spheres, one below the other, the larger of the spheres above the other. The greater object was long and shaped like a fat cigar.

They were moving toward each other, the smaller emitting a faint light from the lower sphere, the other sending out bright beams. One of these beams began to go on and off in measured lengths of time.

Suddenly, the larger object dipped its nose, and it came down swiftly. As it neared the ground, it emitted a strange noise.

Many did not recognize the shape of either object. They had never seen a balloon or a dirigible. Some had lived when balloons were not unknown, though many of these had only seen illustrations or photographs of them. But most of this group had never seen or heard of an airship except in illustrations of what might be expected in the future.

A very small minority recognized the larger, now diving, object as a dirigible.

Whatever their knowledge, many ran to wake up their mates and friends or to sound a general alarm.

By then some had seen the helicopter, and this caused even more curiosity and apprehension.

Drums began to beat; people, to shout. Everybody was awake by then, and the dwellings were emptied. All looked up and wondered.

The questions and the shouts became one great cry as one of the flying objects burst into flame. They screamed as it plunged, bright orange fire trailing like the glory of a falling angel.

Tai-Peng wore only a garment of irontree leaves and vine blossoms. A cup of wine in his left hand, he paced back and forth, extemporizing poems with the ease of water flowing down a hill. A poem would tumble out in the court speech of the T’ang dynasty, sounding to non-Chinese like dice clicking in a cup. Then he would translate it into the local Esperanto dialect.

Much of the subtlety and reference were lost in the mutation, but enough was retained to move his listeners to laughter and tears.

Tai-Peng’s woman, Wen-Chün, softly played on a bamboo flute. Though his voice was usually loud and screeching, it was subdued for the occasion. In Esperanto it was almost as melodious as the flute. He wore only a garment made for the occasion, red-green-striped leaves and red-white-blue-striped blossoms. These fluttered as he walked back and forth like a great cat in a cage.

He was tall for a man of his race and time, the eighth century A.D., lithe yet broad shouldered and heavily muscled. His long hair shone in the late noon sun; it glittered like a dark jade mirror. His eyes were large and pale green, blazing, a hungry—but wounded—tiger’s.

Though he was a descendant of an emperor by a concubine, he was nine generations removed. His immediate family had been thieves and murderers. Some of his grandparents were of the hill tribes, and it was these wild people who had bequeathed him the fierce green eyes.

He and his audience were on a high hill from which the plain, The River, and the land and the mountain wall beyond could be seen. His listeners, even drunker than he, though none had drunk so much, formed a crescent. This left an opening for him to stride into and out of. Tai-Peng did not like barriers of any kind. Walls made him uneasy; prison bars, frenzied.

Though half of the audience was Chinese of the sixteenth century A.D., the others were from here and there, now and then.

Now Tai-Peng stopped composing, and he recited a poem by Chen Tzu-Ang. First, he stated that Chen had died a few years before he, Tai-Peng, was born. Though Chen was wealthy, he had died in a prison at the age of forty-two. A magistrate had put him there so he could cheat him out of his father’s inheritance.

“Men of affairs are proud of their cunning and skill,
But in the Tao they still have much to learn.
They are proud of their exploitations,
But they do not know what happens to the body.
Why do they not learn from the Master of Dark Truth,
Who saw the whole world in a little jade bottle?
Whose bright soul was free of Earth and Heaven,
For riding on Change he entered into Freedom.”

Tai-Peng paused to empty his cup and hold it out for a refill.

One of the group, a black man named Tom Turpin, said, “Ain’t no more wine. What about some alky?”

“No more drink of the gods? I don’t want your barbarians’ juice! It stupifies where wine enlivens!”

He looked around, smiled like a tiger in mating season, and he lifted Wen-Chün and strode off to his hut with her in his arms.

“When the wine stops, it’s time to begin with women!”

The brightly colored leaves and blossoms fluttered to the ground as Wen-Chün mock-struggled with him. He looked like a being from ancient myth, a plant man carrying off a human female.

The others laughed, and the group began to break up before Tai-Peng had shut the door of his hut. One of them walked around the hill to his own hut. After entering, he barred the door and drew down bamboo-and-skin blinds over the windows. In the twilight he sat down on a stool. He opened the lid of his grail and sat for a while staring at it.

A man and a woman passed near his door. They were talking of the mysterious event that had taken place less than a month ago down-River. A great noisy monster had flown from over the western mountain at night and had landed on The River. The braver, or more foolish, locals had boated out toward it. But it had sunk into the waters before they could get close to it, and it had not come up again.

Was it a dragon? Some people said there never had been any dragons. These, however, were skeptics from the degenerate nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Anybody but a fool knew that dragons did exist. On the other hand, it could have been a flying machine of the beings who had made this world.

It was said that some had seen—or thought they’d seen—a manlike figure swimming away from where the dragon had sunk.

The man in the hut smiled.

He thought of Tai-Peng. That was not his true name. Only Tai-Peng and a few others knew what it was. His adopted name meant “The Great Phoenix,” a clue to his real name since he had often boasted in Terrestrial life that he was just such.

Tai-Peng had met him long ago, but he did not know this.

The man in the hut spoke a code word. Instantly, the exterior of the grail sprang into light. The light did not shine over the entire surface. Against the gray metal were two large circles, one on each side of the cylinder. Inside each circle, which represented a hemisphere of the planet, were thousands of very thin, glowing, twisted lines. These intersected many tiny flashing circles. All were empty except for one. This enclosed a flashing pentagram, a five-pointed star.

Each circle, except for that holding the star, emitted dots and dashes of light.

The display was a chart not made to scale. The lines were the valleys, and the circles indicated men and women. The pulse group of each was an identity code.

Clemens and Burton, among others, had been told by X that he had chosen only twelve to assist him. There were twelve times twelve symbols on the lines, not counting the circled star. One hundred and forty-four in all.

A number of circles were pulsing the same group. The man sighed, and he spoke a code phrase. Instantly, the symbols emitting dash-dash-dash-dots disappeared.

Another code phrase. Two glowing symbols appeared near the top of the grail.

Only seventy recruits were still alive. Less than half of the chosen.

How many would there be forty years from now?

Of these, how many would quit before then?

However, there were many nonrecruits who now knew about the tower. Some of these even knew about the person whom Clemens called the Mysterious Stranger or X. The secret was out, and some who’d learned it second-hand were as intensely motivated as the recruits.

Given the changed situation, it was inevitable that others would get in on the quest polarward. And it was possible that not one recruit would get to the tower whereas some nonrecruits might.

He spoke another code phrase. The circles were suddenly accompanied by other symbols. Triangles, an uncircled pentagram, and one hexagram, a six-pointed star. The triangles, which pulsed code groups, were the symbols of the second-order Ethicals, the agents.

The hexagram was the Operator’s.

He spoke again. A square of light appeared in the center of the hemisphere facing him. Then the display outside the square faded away. Immediately, the square expanded. It was a blowup of the area in which the three stars and a few circles were located.

Another phrase brought forth glowing digits above the square. So, the six-pointed star was downRiver by many thousands of kilometers. The Operator had failed to board the Rex. But the second paddle wheeler would be coming along, though much later.

In the neighboring valley to the east was Richard Francis Burton. So near yet so far. Only a day’s walk away—if flesh could pass like a ghost through stone.

Burton was undoubtedly on the Rex Grandissimus. His circle had moved too swiftly along his line for him to be traveling by sailboat.

The Operator… what action would the Operator take if he did get on the Mark Twain? Reveal a part of the truth to Clemens? All of it? Or keep silent?

There was no telling what would happen. The situation had been changed too drastically. Even the computer at HQ would not have been able to indicate more than a small percentage of the probabilities.

So far, there was only one agent on a boat, the Rex. At least ten could be picked up by the Mark Twain, but it was improbable that more than one would be. If that.

Fifty were in the line between the Rex and Virolando.

Of the total of sixty, he could identify only ten. These were upper echelon, heads of their sections.

The chances were that he would encounter none of the sixty.

But… what if he failed to get aboard either boat?

He felt sick.

Somehow, he would do it. He must do it.

To be realistic, he had to admit that he could fail.

At one time he had believed that he could do anything humanly possible and some things which no other humans could do. But his faith in himself had been somewhat shaken.

Perhaps this was because he had lived among the Riverpeople too long.

There were so many journeying upRiver, driven by one great desire. By now most of them would have heard Joe Miller’s story, though it was at hundredth-hand. They’d be expecting to find the towel rope up which they could climb the precipice. They’d also expect the tunnel which would permit them to detour an almost unscalable mountain. They would expect the path along the face of the mountain.

These were no more.

Neither was the tunnel at the end of the path, at the base of the mountain. It had melted into lava.

He looked again at the unencircled star. Close. Far too close by. As the situation now was, it represented the greatest danger.

Who knew how the situation would change?

Now the loud voice of Tai-Peng entered the hut. He was outside, having tumbled his woman, and he was shouting something unintelligible at the world. What a noise the man made in this world! What a blur of action!

If I cannot shake the gods on high, I will at least make an uproar in Acheron.

Now Tai-Peng was closer, and his speech could be heard clearly.

“I eat like a tiger! I crap like an elephant! I can drink three hundred cups of wine at a sitting! I have married three wives, made love to a thousand women! I outplay anyone on the lute and the flute! I write important poems by the thousands, but I throw them into the stream as soon as they’re finished and watch the water, the wind, and the spirits carry them off to destruction!

“Water and flowers! Water and flowers! These I love the most!

“Change and impermanence! These wound, pain, torture me!

“Yet it is change and ephemerality that make for beauty! Without dying and death can there be beauty? Can there be perfection?

“Beauty is beautiful because it is doomed to perish!

“Or is it?

“I, Tai-Peng, once thought of myself as flowing water, as a blooming flower! As a dragon!

“Flowers and dragons! Dragons are flowers of the flesh! They live in beauty while generations of flowers bloom and die! Bloom and become dust! Yet even dragons die; they bloom and become dust! A white man, pale as a ghost, blue-eyed as a demon, once told me that dragons lived for eons! Eons, I say! For ages that make the mind turn upside down to think of them! Yet… they all perished millions of years ago, long before Nukua created men and women from yellow mud!

“In all their pride and beauty, they died!

“Water! Flowers! Dragons!”

Tai-Peng’s voice became less loud as he went down the hill. But the man in the hut heard one especially clarion passage.

“What evil person brought us back to life and now wishes us to die forever again?”

The man in the hut said, “Hah!”

Though Tai-Peng’s poems spoke much of the shortness of life of men and women and of flowers, they never mentioned death. Nor had he ever before referred to death in his conversation. Yet now he was speaking boldly of it, raging at it.

Until now he had seemed to be as happy as a man could be. He’d lived for six years in this little state and apparently had no desire to leave it.

Was he ready now?

A man like Tai-Peng would be a good companion for the voyage upRiver. He was aggressive, quick witted, and a great swordsman. If he could be subtly urged to resume the course he had forsaken…

What was likely to happen in the decades to come?

All he could predict—for now he too was one of the webs in the dark design, no longer a weaver—all he could predict was that some would get to Virolando and some would not.

The more astute would discover a message there. Some of these would surely decipher it. Among these would be both recruits and agents.

Who would get to the tower first?

He must be the one who did.

And he must survive the perils of the journey. Probably the greatest of these would be the inevitable battle between the two great boats. Clemens was determined to catch up with King John and kill or capture him. It was possible, highly possible, that both vessels and their crews would be destroyed.

Savagery! The idiocy of the tiger!

All because of this frenzied desire for vengeance which had seized Clemens. Clemens, who was otherwise the most pacifistic of men.

Could Clemens be talked out of this childish passion for revenge?

Sometimes he agreed with what the Operator, in a depressed mood, had once said.

“Humankind sticks in the throat of God.”

But… Evil will bless, and ice will burn.

And the Master of Dark Truth was riding on unpredictable Change.

“What… ?”

The glowing lines and symbols had disappeared.

For a few seconds he stared, his mouth open. Then he uttered a string of code phrases. But the surface of the grail remained gray.

He clenched his fists and his teeth.

So… what he had feared had at last happened.

Some element in the complex of the satellite had suddenly quit working. No wonder. After over a thousand years the circuits were due for a checking, but no one had been able to inspect them on schedule.

From now on, he would no longer know exactly where the other men and women were. Now he too was in the house of night, bounded by fog. The passing of the lights on the grail had left a deeper gloom behind. He felt like a tired and companionless pilgrim on a lonely shore, a shadow among shades.

What would go amiss next? What could? For one thing, no, surely not… But if it did, then he might not have all the time needed.

He stood up and straightened his shoulders.

Time to go.

A shadow among the shades and running out of time.

Like the recruits and the agents, like the Riverdwellers, like all sentient creatures, he would have to make his own light.

So be it.

Praise for the Novels of Riverworld

“Riverworld is a venue where anyone can have adventures with anyone else…. The Riverworld books [are] interested in the play of character and ideas, free from the constraints of realism, place, or time. Or, to put it another way, they’re a venue for Farmer to talk about interesting stuff.”

—Locus

The Magic Labyrinth

“A wide-screen adventure that never fails to provoke, amuse, and educate…His imagination is of the first rank…his velocity breathtaking…. Charts a territory somewhere between Gulliver’s Travels and The Lord of the Rings.”

—Time

“This book, like the series as a whole, offers delight to the sense of wonder and storytelling flow as irresistible as the river itself.”

—Publishers Weekly

To Your Scattered Bodies Go

“One of the most imaginative worlds in science fiction!”

—Booklist

“From the beginning, To Your Scattered Bodies Go gripped me in a way few books have been able to match.”

—SF Site

The Dark Design

“Its publication is an event with a capital E!”

—Parade of Books

For Harlan Ellison, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Spinrad, alivest of the alive

Reason is Life’s sole arbiter, the magic Labyrinth’s single clue…

Where ’twill be man’s to see the whole of what on Earth he sees in part…

—The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû Al-Yazdi

Contents

1 The Mysterious Stranger

2 Aboard the Not For Hire

3 Aboard the Rex: The Thread of Reason

4 On the Not For Hire: New Recruits and Clemens’ Nightmares

5 Burton’s Soliloquy

6 On the Not For Hire: The Thread of Reason

7 Göring’s Past

8 The Fabulous Riverboats Arrive at Virolando

9 The First and Last Dogfight on the Riverworld

10 Armageddon: The Not For Hire vs. The Rex

11 The Final Duel: Burton vs. Bergerac

12 The Last 20,000 Miles

13 In the Dark Tower

14 Three-Cornered Play: Carroll to Alice to Computer

Author’s Foreword

Now ends the Riverworld series, all loose ends tied together into a sword-resisting Gordian knot, all the human mysteries revealed, the millions of miles of The River and the many years of quests and The Quest completed.

Section 1

The Mysterious Stranger

1

“Everybody should fear only one person, and that person should be himself.”

That was a favorite saying of the Operator.

The Operator had also spoken much of love, saying that the person most feared should also be much loved.

The man known to some as X or the Mysterious Stranger neither loved nor feared himself the most.

There were three people he had loved more than he loved anybody else.

His wife, now dead, he had loved but not as deeply as the other two.

His foster mother and the Operator he loved with equal intensity or at least he had once thought so.

His foster mother was light-years away, and he did not have to deal with her as yet and might never. Now, if she knew what he was doing, she would be deeply ashamed and grieved. That he couldn’t explain to her why he was doing this, and so justify himself, deeply grieved him.

The Operator he still loved but at the same time hated.

Now X waited, sometimes patiently, sometimes impatiently or angrily, for the fabled but real Riverboat. He had missed the Rex Grandissimus. His only chance now was the Mark Twain.

If he didn’t get aboard that boat…no, the thought was almost unendurable. He must.

Yet, when he did get on it, he might be in the greatest peril he’d ever been in, bar one. He knew that the Operator was downRiver. The surface of his grail had shown him the Operator’s location. But that had been the last information he would get from the map. The satellite had kept track of the Operator and the Ethicals, except for himself, and the agents in The Rivervalley, beaming its messages to the grail which was more than a grail. Then the map had faded from the gray surface, and X had known that something had malfunctioned in the satellite. From now on he could be surprised by the Operator, by the agents, and by the other Ethical.

Long ago, X had made arrangements to track all those from the tower and the underground chambers. He had secretly installed the mechanism in the satellite. The others would have put in a device to track him, of course. But his aura-distorter had fooled the mechanism. The distorter had also enabled him to lie to the council of twelve.

Now, he was as ignorant and helpless as the others.

However, if anybody on this world would be taken aboard by Clemens, even if the complement was full, it would be the Operator. One look at him, and Clemens would stop the boat and hail him aboard.

And when the Mark Twain came along, and he, X, managed to become a crew member, he would have to avoid the Operator until he could take him by surprise.

The disguise, good enough to fool even the other stranded Ethical, would not deceive that great intelligence. He would recognize X instantly, and then he, X, would have no chance. Strong and quick as he was, the Operator was stronger and quicker.

Moreover, the Operator would have a psychological advantage. X, face-to-face with the being he loved and hated, would be inhibited and might not be able to attack the Operator with the fury and vigor demanded.

Cowardly though it was, a detestable act, he would have to take the Operator from behind. But his detestable deeds had been many since he had set himself against the others, and he could do this. Though taught from early childhood to loathe violence, he had also been taught that violence was justified if his life was in peril. The resurrecting force which for all practical purposes made everyone on the Riverworld indestructible just did not enter into it. Resurrection no longer worked but even when it had he’d still forced himself to be violent. Despite what his mentors said, the end did justify the means. Besides, all those he’d killed would not be dead forever. At least, he’d thought so. But he’d not foreseen this situation.

The Ethical was living in a bamboo leaf-thatched hut on the bank of The River, the right bank if you faced upstream. He hadn’t been there long. Now he sat on the thick short grass of the plain near the shore. There were approximately five hundred others around him, all waiting for lunchtime. At one time, there would have been seven hundred here, but, since the resurrections had ceased, the population had lessened. Accidents, mostly from encounters with the gigantic human-eating boat-smashing riverdragon fish, suicide, and murder, had accounted for most fatalities. Once, war had been the greatest death-maker, but there had been none in this area for many years. The would-be conquerors had been killed off, and now they would not be translated elsewhere along The River to make more trouble.

Also, the spread of the Church of the Second Chance, the Nichirenites, the Sufis, and other pacifistic religions and disciplines had had great effect in bringing peace.

Near the crowd was a mushroom-shaped structure of a red-flecked granite material. It was called a grailstone, though actually it was a highly electrically conductive metal. It had a broad base five feet high, and the top had a diameter of approximately fifty feet. On the surface of this were seven hundred depressions. In each one was a cylinder of gray metal, a device which converted energy discharged by the grailstone into food, liquor, and other items. The containers kept the vast population of the Riverworld, estimated to have been thirty-five to thirty-six billion at one time, from starving to death. Though the grail-provided food could be augmented by fish and acorn bread and the tips of young bamboo shoots, these were not enough to feed the dwellers of the narrow Valley, a valley which enclosed The River, ten million miles long.

The people by the stone chattered and laughed and kidded around. The Ethical did not speak to those near him; he was occupied with his thoughts. It had occurred to him that perhaps the malfunction of the satellite was not natural. Its tracking mechanism was designed to function for over a thousand years without breakdown. Had it failed because Piscator, the Japanese once named Ohara, had messed up something in the tower? Theoretically Piscator should have been destroyed by the various traps that he, X, had placed in the tower or been caught in a stasis field installed by the Operator. But Piscator was a Sufi, and he might have had the intelligence and perceptive powers to avoid these. That he could enter the tower showed that he was very ethically advanced. Not one in five million of the candidates, the resurrected Terrestrials, could have gone through the entrance on top. As for the one at the base, only that had been prepared by X, and only two knew about it until the expedition of ancient Egyptians had gotten to it. He’d been surprised and upset when he’d found their bodies in the secret room. Nor had he known then that one Egyptian had escaped and had been drowned and then translated back to The Valley until he’d heard the survivor’s story, somewhat distorted and via who knew how many tellers? Apparently no agents had heard it until it was too late for them to transmit the news to the Ethicals in the tower.

What worried him now was that if Piscator had indeed been responsible for accidentally causing the tracker to malfunction, then he might somehow bring the Ethicals back to life. And if he did that…he, X, was done for.

He stared across the plain at the foothills covered with the long-bladed grass and trees of various kinds and the gloriously colored blooms of the vines on the ironwood trees and then past them to the unscalable mountains walling in The Valley. His fear and frustration made him angry again, but he quickly used the mental techniques to dissipate his anger. The energy, he knew, made his skin temperature rise for a hundredth of a degree Celsius for a few seconds. He felt somewhat relieved, though he knew that he’d be angry again. The trouble with the technique was that it didn’t dissipate the source of his anger. He’d never be able to get rid of that, though he had appeared to do so to his mentors.

He shaded his eyes and glanced at the sun. Within a few minutes, the stone would vomit lightning and thunder along with the millions of others on both banks. He moved away from the stone and put the tips of his fingers in his ears. The noise would be deafening, and the sudden discharge still made one jump though you knew it was coming.

The sun reached its zenith.

There was an enormous roar and flashing upward of ravening blue-white-shot electricity.

On the left bank, not the right.

Once before, the right-bank grailstones had failed to function.

Those on the right bank waited with apprehension and then increasing fear when the stones failed to spout their energy for dinnertime. And when they failed again at breakfast time, the consternation and anxiety became panic.

By the next day, the hungry people invaded the left bank en masse.

Section 2

Aboard the Not For Hire

2

The first time that Sir Thomas Malory died was on Earth in A.D. 1471.

The English knight got through the terrible weeks after Resurrection Day without too many body wounds, though he suffered grievously from spiritual shock. He found the food in his “littel greal” fascinating. It reminded him of what he had written in The Book of King Arthur concerning Galahad and his fellow knights when they ate of the food provided by the Sangreal: “…ye shall be fed afore this table with sweetmeats that never knights tasted.”

There were times when Malory thought he’d go mad. He’d always been tempted by madness, a state in which a person was both touched with holiness by God and invulnerable to the cares and woes of the world, not to mention his own. But a man who’d spent so many years in prison on Earth without going crazy had to be basically tough. One of the things that had kept his mind unclouded in prison had been his writing of the first English prose epic. Though he knew that his readers would be very few, and most of them would probably not like it, he did not care one whit. Unlike his first work, which had been based on the great French writers of the cycles about King Arthur of ancient Britain, this was about the rejections but final triumph of his sweet Jesu. Unlike so many once-devout Christians, Malory clung to his faith with fierce obliviousness to “facts”—in itself an indication that he had gone mad, if his critics were to be believed.

Twice slain by savage infidels, Malory ended up in an area inhabited on one side by Parthians and on the other by Englishmen.

The Parthians were ancient horsemen who got their name from their habit of shooting backwards from their steeds as they retreated. In other words, they always got in a parting shot. At least, that was the explanation for their name according to one informant. Malory suspected that the grinning fellow was pulling his leg, but it sounded good, so why not accept it.

The Englishmen were chiefly of the seventeenth century and spoke an English which Malory had trouble understanding. However, after all these years, they also spoke Esperanto, that tongue which the missionaries of the Church of the Second Chance used as a universal medium of communication. The land, now known as New Hope, was peaceful, though it had not always been so. Once it had been a number of small states which had had a savage battle with the medieval German and Spanish states up north. These had been led by a man called Kramer, nicknamed the Hammer. After he had been killed, a long peace had come to the land, and the states eventually became one. Malory settled down there and took as his hutmate Philippa Hobart, daughter of Sir Henry Hobart. Though there was no longer a giving in marriage, Malory insisted that they be married, and he got a friend who had been a Catholic priest to perform the old ceremony. Later, he reconverted both his wife and the priest to their native faith.

He was set back somewhat, though, when he heard that the true Jesu Christ had appeared in this area with a Hebrew woman who had known Moses in Egypt and during the exodus. Jesu had also been accompanied by a man named Thomas Mix, an American, the descendant of Europeans who had emigrated to the continent discovered only twenty-one years after Malory had died. Jesu and Mix had burned to death together in bonfires ignited by Kramer.

At first, Malory had denied that the man calling himself Yeshua could be the real Christ. He might be a Hebrew of Christ’s time, but he was a fake.

Then Malory, after tracking down all the evidence he could of Yeshua’s statements and the events of his martyrdom, decided that perhaps Christ had truly been present. So he incorporated the tale told by the locals into the epic he was now writing with ink and a pen formed from the bone of a fish on bamboo paper. Malory also decided to canonize the American, and so Mix became Saint Thomas the Steadfast of the White Hat.

After a while Malory and his disciples forgot that the sainthood was a fiction and came to believe that Saint Thomas was indeed roaming The Valley in quest of his master, sweet Jesu, in this world which was purgatory, though not exactly the middle state between earth and heaven portrayed by the priests of lost Earth.

The ex-priest who’d married Thomas and Philippa, as a bishop ordained on Earth and so in the direct line of priesthood from Saint Peter, was able to instruct others and to make priests of them. The little group of Roman Catholics, however, had a different attitude in one respect from that they’d had in their Terrestrial days. They were tolerant; they did not attempt to bring back the Inquisition nor did they burn suspected witches. If they had insisted on these old customs, they would have quickly been exiled or perhaps even killed.

Late one night, Thomas Malory was lying in bed and pondering on the next chapter of his epic. Suddenly, there was a great shouting outside and a noise as of many running. He sat up and called to Philippa, who awoke frightened and trembling. They went out then to ask what the commotion was about. The people questioned pointed upward into the cloudless sky made bright as a full moon by the packed stars and flaming cosmic-gas sheets.

High up were two strange objects silhouetted against the celestial blaze. One, much smaller, was composed of two parts, a larger sphere above the other. Though those on the ground could not see any linkage between the two, they got the impression that the two were connected because they moved at the same speed. Then a woman who knew of such things said that it looked like a balloon. Malory had never seen one, but he had heard descriptions of them from nineteenth- and twentieth-centurians, and this did indeed look like the description.

The other object, far greater, resembled a gigantic cigar.

The same woman said that this was an airship or dirigible or perhaps was a vessel of the unknowns who’d made this planet.

“Angels?” Malory muttered. “Why would they have to use an airship? They have wings.”

He forgot about that and cried out with the others as the huge vessel of the air suddenly dived. And then he screamed with the others when the vessel exploded. Burning, it fell toward The River.

The balloon continued to travel northeastwards, and after a while it was gone. Long before that, the flaming airship struck the water. Its skeletal framework sank almost at once, but some pieces of its skin burned for a few minutes before they, too, were extinguished.

3

Neither angels nor demons had voyaged in that vessel of the sky. The man whom Malory and his wife pulled out of the water and rowed to shore in their boat was no more and no less human than they. He was a tall, dark, rapier-thin man with a big nose and a weak chin. His large black eyes stared at them in the torchlight, and he said nothing for a long while. After he had been carried into the community hall, dried off and covered with thick cloths, and had drunk some hot coffee, he said something in French and then spoke in Esperanto.

“How many survived?”

Malory said, “We don’t know yet.”

A few minutes later, the first of twenty-two corpses, some very charred, were brought to the bank. One of them was a woman’s. Though the search continued through the night and part of the morning, these were all that were found. The Frenchman was the single survivor. Though he was weak and still in shock, he insisted on getting up and taking part in the search. When he saw the bodies by a grailstone, he burst into tears and sobbed for a long time. Malory took this as a good indication of the man’s health. At least he wasn’t in such deep trauma that he was unable to express his grief.

“Where have the others gone?” the stranger demanded.

Then his sorrow became rage, and he shook his fist at the skies and howled damnation at someone named Thorn. Later, he asked if anyone had seen or heard another aircraft, a helicopter. Many had.

“Which way did it go?” he said.

Some said that the machine making the strange chopping noise had gone downRiver. Others said that it had gone upRiver. Several days later, the report came that the machine had been seen sinking into The River two hundred miles upstream during a rainstorm. Only one person had witnessed that, and he claimed that a man had swum from the sinking craft. A message via drum was sent to the area asking if any strangers had suddenly appeared. The reply was that none had been located.

A number of grails were found floating on The River, and these were brought to the survivor. He identified one as his, and he ate a meal from it that afternoon. Several of the grails were “free” containers. That is, they could be opened by anybody, and these were confiscated by the state of New Hope.

The Frenchman then asked if any gigantic boats propelled by paddle wheels had passed this point. He was told that one had, the Rex Grandissimus, commanded by the infamous King John of England.

“Good,” the man said. He thought for a while, then said, “I could just stay here and wait until the Mark Twain comes by. But I don’t think I will. I’m going after Thorn.”

By then, he felt recovered enough to talk about himself. And how he talked about himself!

“I am Savinien de Cyrano II de Bergerac,” he said. “I prefer to be called Savinien, but for some reason most people prefer Cyrano. So I allow that small liberty. After all, later ages referred to me as Cyrano, and though it was a mistake, I am so famous that people cannot get used to my preference. They think they know better than I do.

“No doubt you’ve heard of me.”

He regarded his hosts as if they should feel honored to have such a great man as their guest.

“It pains me to admit that I have not,” Malory said.

“What? I was the greatest swordsman of my time, perhaps, no, undoubtedly, of all times. There is no reason for me to be modest. I do not hide my light under a bushel or, in fact, under anything. I was also the author of some remarkable literary works. I wrote books about trips to the sun and to the moon, very pointed and witty satire. My play, The Pedant Out-Witted, was, I understand, used with some modifications by a certain Monsieur Molière and presented as his own. Well, perhaps I exaggerate. Certainly he did use much of the comedy. I also understand that an Englishman named Jonathan Swift used some of my ideas in his Gulliver’s Travels. I do not blame them, since I myself was not above using the ideas of others, though I improved upon them.”

“That is all very well, sir,” Malory said, forbearing to mention his own works. “But if it does not make you overwrought, you could tell us how you came here in that airship and what caused it to burst into flames.”

De Bergerac was staying with the Malorys until an empty hut could be found or he could be loaned the tools to construct one for himself. At this time, though, he and his hosts and perhaps a hundred more were seated or standing by a big fire outside the hut.

It was a long tale, more fabulous even than the teller’s own fictions or Malory’s. Sir Thomas, however, had the feeling that the Frenchman was not telling all that had happened.

When the narrative was finished, Malory mused aloud, “Then it is true that there is a tower in the center of the north polar sea, the sea from whence flows The River and to which it returns? And it is true that whoever is responsible for this world lives in that tower? I wonder what happened to this Japanese, this Piscator? Did the residents of the tower, who surely must be angels, invite him to stay with them because, in a sense, he’d entered the gates of paradise? Or did they send him elsewhere, to some distant part of The River, perhaps?

“And this Thorn, what could account for his criminal behavior? Perhaps he was a demon in disguise.”

De Bergerac laughed loudly and scornfully.

When he had stopped, he said, “There are no angels nor demons, my friend. I do not now maintain, as I did on Earth, that there is no God. But to admit to the existence of a Creator does not oblige one to believe in such myths as angels and demons.”

Malory hotly insisted that there were indeed such. This led to an argument in the course of which the Frenchman walked away from his audience. He spent the night, from what Malory heard, in the hut of a woman who thought that if he was such a great swordsman he must also be a great lover. From her accounts, he was, though perhaps too much devoted to that fashion of making love which many thought reached its perfection, or nadir of degeneracy, in France. Malory was disgusted. But later that day de Bergerac appeared to apologize for his ingratitude to the man who’d saved his life.

“I should not have scoffed at you, my host, my savior. I tender you a thousand apologies, for which I hope to receive one forgiveness.”

“You are forgiven,” Malory said sincerely. “Perhaps, though you forsook our Church on Earth and have blasphemed against God, you would care to attend the mass being said tonight for the souls of your departed comrades?”

“That is the least I can do,” de Bergerac said.

During the mass, he wept copiously, so much so that after it Malory took advantage of his high emotions. He asked him if he was ready to return to God.

“I am not aware that I ever left Him, if He exists,” the Frenchman said. “I was weeping with grief for those I loved on the Parseval and for those whom I did not love but respected. I was weeping with rage against Thorn or whatever his real name is. And I was also weeping because men and women are still ignorant and superstitious enough to believe in this flummery.”

“You refer to the mass?” Malory said icily.

“Yes, forgive me again!” de Bergerac cried.

“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 upRiver. 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 paddle-wheeled 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 connect a copper cap placed over a grailstone to the batacitor in the vessel. When the stone delivered its tremendous voltage, the batacitor would be charged again and the grails on another copper plate in the boat would be filled with food, liquor, and other items.

Its hull was white except over the paddle boxes, or wheel guards, over the four paddle wheels. 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 & 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 paddle boxes, or paddle wheel 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 paddle wheels, 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 paddle wheel 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 cannon and steam for the boat’s whistles and the two smokestacks. The smokestacks were misnamed, since they only vented a steam which was colored to simulate smoke when Sam felt like putting on a show.

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 real 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 to a long tubular duraluminum device looking like a cannon and mounted on a platform. Big plastic tubes ran into the breech.

“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 one hundred and twenty-eight cabins, each of which is fitted for two persons. Notice the snap-up bed, made from brass. Eyeball the porcelain toilets, the shower stall with hot and cold running water, the wash basin with brass plumbing, the mirrors framed in brass, the oak bureaus. They’re not very large, but then we don’t carry many changes of clothes aboard. Notice also the weapons rack, which may hold pistols, rifles, spears, swords, and bows. The carpeting is made of human hairs. And pop your eyes out at the painting on the wall. It’s an original by Motonobu, A.D. 1476 to 1559, the great Japanese painter who founded the style of painting called Kano. In the next cabin are some paintings by Zeuxis of Heraclea. There are ten in there. As a matter of fact it’s Zeuxis’ own cabin. He, as you may or may not know, was the great fifth-century B.C. painter born in Heraclea, a Greek colony in south Italy. It’s said of him that he painted a bunch of grapes so realistically that birds tried to eat it. Zeuxis won’t confirm or deny this tale. For myself, I prefer photographs, but I do have some paintings in my suite. One by a Pieter de Hooch, a Dutch painter of the seventeenth century. Near it is one by the Italian, Giovanni Fattori, A.D. 1825 to 1908. Poor fellow. It may be his final work, since he fell overboard during a party and was smashed to shreds by the paddle wheel. Even if he were resurrected, which isn’t likely, he won’t find pigments enough for a single painting anywhere but on this boat and the Rex.”

Sam took them along the outside or promenade deck to the bow.

Here was mounted an 88-millimeter cannon. So far, Sam said, it hadn’t been used, and new gunpowder would soon have to be made to refill the charges.

“But when I catch up with the Rex, I’ll blow Rotten John out of the water with this.”

He also pointed out the rocket batteries on the promenade, heat-seeking missiles with a range of a mile and a half and carrying warheads of forty pounds of plastic explosive.

“If the cannons miss, these’ll shred his ass.”

One of the women tourists was well acquainted with Clemens’ work and biographies about him. She spoke in a low voice to her companion. “I never realized that Mark Twain was so bloodthirsty.”

“Madame,” Sam said, having overheard her, “I am not bloodthirsty! I am the most pacifistic of men! I loathe violence, and the idea of war puts my bowels into an uproar. If you’d read my essays about war and those who love it, you’d know that. But I have been forced into this situation and many like it. To survive, you must lie better than the liars, deceive more than the deceivers, and kill the killers first! For me, it’s sheer necessity, though justified! What would you do if King John had stolen your boat after you’d gone through years of search for iron and other metals to build your dream! And years of fighting others who wanted to take them away from you after you’d found them, and on every side treachery and murder, all directed against you! And what would you do if that John killed some of your good friends and your wife and then sped away laughing at you! Would you let him get away with it? I think not, not if you’ve got an ounce of courage.”

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” a man said.

“Yes. Maybe. But if there is a Lord, and He works His vengeance, how’s He going to do it without using humans as His hands? Did you ever hear of any wicked person being struck down by lightning, except by accident? Lightning also strikes thousands of innocents every year, you know! No, He has to use human beings as His instruments, and who else is better qualified than me? Or more made by circumstances into His keen and purposefully designed tool?”

Sam was so upset that he had to send a marine up to the grand salon to get four ounces of bourbon to settle his nerves.

Before the drink was brought down to Sam, a tourist muttered, “Bullshit!”

“Throw that man off the boat!” Sam shouted. And it was done.

“You’re a very angry man,” the woman who knew his works said.

“Yes, ma’am, I am. And with good reason. I was angry on Earth, and I’m angry here.”

The marine brought Sam’s whiskey. He downed it quickly and then continued the tour with his good humor restored.

He led the group up the grand staircase to the grand salon. They paused in the entrance, and the tourists oohed and ahed. It was two hundred feet long and fifty wide and the ceiling was twenty feet above the floor. Along the center of the ceiling was a line of five huge cut-glass chandeliers. There were many windows making the huge room well lighted and many wall and ceiling lights and towering ornate brass floor lamps.

At the far end was a stage which Clemens said was used for live dramas and comedies and for orchestras. It also had a big screen which could be pulled down when movies were shown.

“We don’t use chemically treated film to shoot these,” he said. “We have electronic cameras. We make original films and also remake the classics of Earth. Tonight, for instance, we’re showing The Maltese Falcon. We don’t have any of the original cast except Mary Astor, whose real name is Lucille Langehanke, and she plays Sam Spade’s secretary. Astor was, from what I’ve been told, miscast. But then I don’t suppose most of you know what I’m talking about.”

“I do,” the woman who’d called him angry said. “Who played her part in your version?”

“An American actress, Alice Brady.”

“And who played Sam Spade? I can’t imagine anyone else but Humphrey Bogart in the role.”

“Howard da Silva, another American actor. His real name was Howard Goldblatt, if I remember correctly. He’s very grateful to get this role, since he claims he never had a chance to show his real acting ability on Earth. But he’s sorry that his audience will be so small.”

“Don’t tell me the director is John Ford?”

“I never heard of him,” Sam said. “Our director is Alexander Singer.”

“I never heard of him.”

“I suppose so. But I understand that he was well known in Hollywood circles.”

Irked at what he considered an irrelevant interruption, he pointed out the sixty-foot-long polished oak bar on the port side and the neatly stacked row of liquor bottles and decanters. The group was quite impressed with these and the lead-glass goblets. They were even more affected by the four grand pianos. Sam told them that he had aboard at least ten great pianists and five composers. For instance, Selim Palmgren (1878–1951), a Finnish composer and pianist who had been prominent in establishing the school of Finnish national music. There was also Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1526–1594), the great composer of madrigals and motets.

“Amadeus Mozart was once on this boat,” Sam said. “He’s a really great composer, some say the greatest. But he turned out to be such a failure as a human being, such a sneak and lecher and coward, that I kicked him off the boat.”

“Mozart?” the woman said. “My God, Mozart! You beast, how could you treat such a wonderful composer, a genius, a god, like that?”

“Ma’am,” Clemens said, “believe me, there was more than enough provocation. If you don’t like my attitude, you may leave. A marine will escort you to shore.”

“You’re no fucking gentleman,” the woman said.

“Oh, yes, I am.”

5

They went down a passageway toward the bow, passing more cabins. The last one on the right-hand side was Clemens’ suite, and he showed them that. Their exclamations of surprise and delight gratified Sam. Across from his cabin, he said, was that of his bodyguard, Joe Miller, and Joe’s mate.

Beyond his quarters was a small room which contained an elevator. This led into the lowest of the three rooms of the pilothouse structure. This was the E deck or observation room, furnished with overstuffed chairs, lounges, and a small bar. There were also mounts in the windows for machine guns which shot plastic or wooden bullets.

The next room of the pilothouse structure was the F or cannon deck, called so because of the emplacement of four 20-millimeter steam cannons. These were fed ammunition by belts enclosed in a shaft which ran from the boiler deck.

The very highest deck, the pilothouse or control or G deck, was twice as large as the one beneath it.

“Big enough to hold a dance in,” said Clemens, who didn’t mind exaggeration at all, especially when he was the exaggerator.

He introduced them to the radio and radar operators, the chief executive officer, the communications officer, and the chief pilot. The latter was Henry Detweiller, a Frenchman who’d emigrated to the American Midwest in the early nineteenth century and become a river pilot, then a captain, and finally the owner of several steamboat companies. He’d died in Peoria, Illinois, in his palatial mansion.

The exec, John Byron, was an Englishman (1723–1786) who’d been a midshipman on Anson’s famous naval expedition around the world but was shipwrecked off the coast of Chile. When he became an admiral, he earned the nickname of “Foulweather Jack” because every time his fleet put to sea it ran into very bad storms.

“He is also the grandfather of the famous or infamous poet, Lord Byron,” Sam said. “Isn’t that right, admiral?”

Byron, a small blond man with cold blue eyes, nodded.

“Admiral?” said the woman who’d been bugging Clemens. “But if you’re the captain…?”

Sam puffed on his cigar, then said, “Yes, I’m the only captain aboard. The next highest rank is full admiral and so on down. The chief of my air force, which consists of four pilots and six mechanics, is a general. So is the chief of my marines. The latter, by the way, was once a full general in the United States army during the Civil War. He’s a full-blooded American Indian, a Seneca chief. Ely S. Parker or, to use his Iroquois name, Donehogawa, which means ‘Keeper of the West Gate.’ He is highly educated and was a construction engineer on Earth. He served on General Ulysses S. Grant’s staff during the war.”

Sam next explained the controls and instruments used by the pilot. He sat in a chair on each side of which were two long metal rods projecting from the floor. By moving the control sticks forward or backward, he could control the forward or backward rotations of the paddle wheels. Also, their rate of speed of turning. Before him was a panel with many dials and gauges and several oscilloscopes.

“One is a sonarscope,” Sam said. “Reading that, the pilot can tell exactly how deep the bottom of The River is and how far from the bank the boat is and also if there are any dangerously large objects in the water. By switching that dial marked AUTO CRUISE to ON, he doesn’t have to do a thing then except keep an eye on the sonarscope and another on the banks. If the automatic system should malfunction, he can switch to a backup system while the other is being repaired.”

“Piloting must be easy,” a man said.

“It is. But only an experienced pilot can handle emergencies, which is why most of them are Mississippi boat veterans.”

He pointed out that the deck of the control room was ninety feet above the surface of The River. He also called to their attention that the pilothouse structure was, unlike that on the riverboats on Earth, located on the starboard side, not in the middle of the deck.

“Which makes the Not For Hire resemble an aircraft carrier even more.”

They watched the marines drilling on the flight deck and the men and women busy practicing the martial arts, sword, spear, knife, and ax fighting, and archery.

“Every member of this crew, including myself, has to become proficient with all weapons. In addition, each person has to become fully qualified to handle any post. They go to school to learn electricity, electronics, plumbing, officering, and piloting. Half of them have taken lessons on the piano or with other musical instruments. This boat contains t more individuals with more varied skills and professions than any other area on this planet.”

“Does everybody take turns being the captain?” said the woman who’d angered him.

“No. That is the exception,” Sam said, his thick eyebrows forming a frown. “I wouldn’t want to put ideas into anybody’s head.”

He strode to the control panel and punched a button. Sirens began to wail, and the exec, John Byron, asked the communications officer to send the “Bridges, clearing” warning over the general intercom. Sam went to a starboard window and urged the others to gather by him. They gasped when they saw long thick metal beams slide out from the three lower decks.

“If we can’t sink the Rex,” Clemens said, “we’ll board it over those bridges.”

The woman said, “That’s fine. But the crew of the Rex can also board your vessel on your own bridges.”

Sam’s blue-green eyes glared above his falcon nose.

However, the others of the group were so awed, so astounded, that Sam’s hairy chest puffed from joy. He had always been fascinated by mechanical devices, and he liked others to share his enthusiasm. On Earth his interest in novel gadgets had been responsible for his going bankrupt. He’d put a fortune into the unworkable Paige typesetting machine.

The woman said, “But all this iron and aluminum and other metals? This planet is so mineral-poor. Where did you get these?”

“First,” Sam said, pleased to recount his exploits, “a giant nickel-iron meteorite fell into The Valley. Do you remember when, many years ago, the grailstones on the right bank ceased operating? That was because the falling star severed the line.

“As you know, it was back in operation twenty-four hours later. So…”

“Who repaired it?” a man said. “I’ve heard all sorts of stories, but…”

“I was in the neighborhood, in a manner of speaking,” Sam said. “In fact, the tidal wave of The River and the blast almost killed me and my companions.”

He mentally winced then, not because of the near fatality but because he remembered what he’d done later to one of his companions, the Norseman Erik Bloodaxe.

“So I can testify to the amazing but undeniable fact that not only had the line been repaired overnight, but the blasted land had also been restored. The grass and the trees and the stripped soil were all back.”

“Who did it?”

“They had to be the beings who made this Rivervalley and resurrected us. I’ve heard that they are human beings like us, in fact, Earthmen who lived ages after we did. However…”

“No, not human beings,” the man said. “Surely not. It was God who made all this for us.”

“If you’re so well acquainted with Him,” Clemens said, “give me His address. I’d like to write Him.”

He continued, “My group was the first to get to the site of the meteorite. The crater, which might have been as wide and deep as the famous one in Arizona, was buried by then. But we staked out a claim, and we began digging. Some time later, we heard that large deposits of bauxite and cryolite were under the land of a state downRiver. Its citizens, however, had no means of digging it up or then using it. But my state, Parolando, could make aluminum from the ores after we’d fashioned iron tools. That state, Soul City, attacked us to get the iron. We beat them and confiscated the bauxite and cryolite. We also found that some other states relatively nearby had some copper and tin deposits. Also, some vanadium and tungsten. We traded our iron artifacts for these.”

The woman, frowning, said, “Isn’t it strange that there was so much metal in that area, and elsewhere there is almost none? It’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it, that you were looking for these metals and just happened to be in the neighborhood when the meteorite fell?”

“Maybe God directed me to that place,” Sam said sneeringly.

No, he thought, it wasn’t God. It was that Mysterious Stranger, the Ethical who called himself X, who had arranged, who knew how many thousands of years ago, that the deposits should be so concentrated in that area. And who then directed that meteorite to fall near them.

For what purpose? To build a riverboat and to provide weapons so that Sam could voyage up The River, perhaps for ten million miles, and get to the headwaters. And from there to the tower which reared high in the mists of the cold northpolar sea.

And then do what?

He didn’t know. The Ethical was supposed to visit him again during a thunderstorm at night, as he always did. Apparently, he came at that time because the lightning interfered with the delicate instruments the Ethicals used to try to locate the renegade. He would give him more information. In the meantime, others visited by X, his chosen warriors, would find Sam and get on his boat and go with him upRiver.

But things had gone awry.

He’d not seen or heard from the Mysterious Stranger again. He’d built his boat, and then his partner, King John Lackland, had hijacked it. Also, some years later, the “little resurrections,” the “translations,” had ceased, and permanent death had come to the dwellers in The Valley again.

Something had happened to the people in the tower, the Ethicals. Something must also have happened to the Mysterious Stranger.

But he, Clemens, was going to the headwaters anyway and then try to get into the tower. He knew how difficult the climbing of the mountains which circled the sea would be. Joe Miller, the titanthrop, had seen the tower from a path along the side of that towering range when he’d accompanied the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Joe had also seen a gigantic aircraft of some sort descend to the top of the tower. And then he’d tripped over a grail left by some unknown predecessor and had fallen to his death. After being resurrected to a place in The Valley, he’d met Sam and had told his strange tale to him.

The woman said, “What about this dirigible we’ve heard rumors of? Why didn’t you go on that instead of the boat? You could have gotten to the headwaters in a few days instead of the thirty or forty years it’ll take you on the boat.”

That was a subject Sam didn’t like to talk about. The truth was that no one had even thought of an airship until shortly before the Not For Hire was to set out. Then a German dirigible man named von Parseval had come along and asked why he hadn’t built the ship.

Sam’s chief engineer, Milton Firebrass, an ex-astronaut, had liked the suggestion. So he’d stayed behind when the Not For Hire left, and he’d constructed the floating vessel. He’d kept in radio contact with the boat, and when the ship did get to the tower, he’d reported that it was a little over a mile high and almost ten miles in diameter. The Parseval had landed on its top, but only one of its crew, a Japanese ex-blimp man and Sufi who called himself Piscator, had been able to enter. The others had been restrained by some invisible but tangible force. Before that, an officer named Barry Thorn had placed a bomb on the helicopter carrying Firebrass and some others on a scouting landing. He’d set the bomb off with a radio signal and then stolen a helicopter and flown off the dirigible. But he’d been wounded, and the copter had crashed at the base of the tower.

Thorn was brought back to the dirigible and questioned. He refused to give information, but he was visibly shocked when he heard that Piscator had gotten into the tower.

Clemens suspected that Thorn was either an Ethical or one of their subordinates, whom the X’s recruits called agents.

He also had some suspicions that Firebrass had been one or the other. And perhaps the woman who’d died in the explosion of the helicopter, Anna Obrenova, had been an Ethical or agent.

Sam had concluded from his examination of all available evidence that something had long ago stranded a number of agents and perhaps some Ethicals in The Valley. X was probably one of them. Which meant that agents and Ethicals would have to use the same means as the Valleydwellers to get to the tower. Which meant that there were probably some disguised agents or Ethicals or both on his boat. Which meant that there were probably also some on the Rex.

Just why the Ethicals and agents hadn’t been able to use their aircraft to return to the tower, he didn’t know.

By now he’d reasoned that anyone who claimed to have lived after A.D. 1983 was one of the beings responsible for the Riverworld. It was his idea that the post-1983 story was false and was a code which enabled them to recognize each other.

He also reasoned that some of them might have figured that X’s recruits suspected this story-code. Therefore, they would be dropping that story.

Clemens said to the woman, “The airship was supposed to be a scout, to find out the lay of the land. Its captain was under orders, however, to get into the tower if it was possible. Then he was to return to the boat and pick up myself and some others. But no one but a Sufi philosopher named Piscator could get in, and he didn’t come back out. On the way back, its captain, a woman named Jill Gulbirra, who took over when Firebrass was killed, sent a raiding expedition in a copter against the Rex. King John was captured, but he escaped by jumping from the copter. I don’t know whether or not he survived. The aircraft flew back to the Parseval and continued on its course to the Not For Hire. Then Gulbirra reported sighting a very large balloon and was heading for it when Thorn got loose again. He flew off in a copter. Gulbirra, suspecting he’d planted a bomb, searched for it. None was found, but she couldn’t take a chance that there wasn’t one. She dived the dirigible toward the ground. She wanted to get her crew off just in case there was a bomb.

“Then she reported that there was an explosion. That was the last we heard from the Parseval.”

The woman said, “We’ve heard rumors that it crashed many thousands of miles upRiver. There was only one survivor.”

“Only one! My God, who was he? Or she?”

“I don’t know his name. But I heard that he was a Frenchman.”

Sam groaned. There was just one Frenchman on the airship. Cyrano de Bergerac, with whom Sam’s wife had fallen in love. Of all the crew, he was the only one whom Sam would not have sorrowed over.

6

It was late afternoon when Sam saw the strange being who was even more grotesque than Joe Miller. Joe was at least human, but this person had obviously not been born on Earth.

Sam knew at once that the being had to be one of the small group from a planet of Tau Ceti. His informant, the late Baron John de Greystock, had known one of them. According to his story, the Tau Cetans, in the early twenty-first century, had put into orbit a smaller vessel around Earth before descending in the great mothership to the surface. They’d been welcomed, but then one of them, Monat, had said on a TV talk show that the Cetans had the means for extending their lives to centuries. The Earth-people had demanded that this knowledge be given them. When the Cetans had refused, saying that the Terrestrials would abuse the gift of longevity, mobs had lynched most of the Cetans and then stormed the spaceship. Reluctantly, Monat had activated a scanner on the satellite, and this had projected a beam which killed most of the human life on Earth. At least, Monat thought it would do so. He didn’t see the results of his action. He, too, was torn apart by the mob.

He had set the death-beams into operation because he feared that Terrestrials would use the spaceship as a model to build more ships and then would go to his native planet and war against it, perhaps destroy all his people. He didn’t know whether or not they would actually do that, but he couldn’t take the chance.

The Cetan was standing up somewhat precariously in a narrow dugout and waving frantically at the Not For Hire. Obviously, he wanted aboard. So did a lot of people, Sam thought, but they don’t get their wish. This, however, was, if not a horse of a different color, a biped neither bird nor man. So Sam told the pilot to make a circle and then come alongside the dugout.

Presently, while the gaping crew lined the exterior passageways, the Cetan climbed a short ladder to the boiler deck. His companion, an ordinary-looking human male, followed him. The dugout drifted away to be grabbed by whoever got to it first.

Escorted by two marines and General Ely S. Parker himself, the two were soon in the control room. Sam, speaking Esperanto, shook their hands, introduced himself and the others, and then they introduced themselves.

“I am Monat Grrautut,” the biped said in a deep rich voice.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Sam said. “The very one!”

Monat smiled, exposing human-looking teeth.

“Ah, then you’ve heard of me.”

“You’re the only Tau Cetan whose name I know,” Sam said. “I’ve been scanning the banks for years for one of you, and I’ve never seen hair nor hide of any. And then to run smackdab into you yourself!”

“I’m not from a planet of Tau Ceti,” Monat said. “That was the story we gave when we came to Earth. Actually, I’m from a planet of the star Arcturus. We misled the Terrestrials just in case they proved to be warlike and then…”

“Good thinking,” Sam said. “Though you were a little tough on Earthpeople, as I understand. However, why did you stick to that story when you were resurrected here—without your permission?”

Monat shrugged. How humanlike, Sam thought.

“Habit, I suppose. Also, I wanted to make sure the Terrestrials still didn’t represent a danger to my people.”

“I can’t blame you.”

“When I knew positively that Earthpeople were no danger, I told the true story of my origin.”

“Sure you did,” Sam said and laughed. “Here. Have a cigar, you two.”

Monat was six feet eight inches tall, thin, and pink-skinned. He wore only a kiltcloth, allowing most of his features to show, but concealing the most interesting to some. Greystock had said that the fellow’s penis could pass for human and was circumcised, as were all men’s on this world. His scrotum, however, was a knobby sac which contained a number of small testes.

His face was semihuman. Below a shaved skull and very high forehead were two thick black curly-haired eyebrows that ran down to his very prominent cheekbones and spread out to cover them. The eyes were a dark brown. Most of his nose was more handsome than Sam had seen on many people. But a thin membranous fringe a sixteenth of an inch long hung from the sides of his nostrils. The nose ended in a thick, deeply clefted pad of cartilage. His lips were doglike, thin, leathery, and black. His lobeless ears displayed quite unhuman convolutions.

Each hand bore three fingers and a long thumb on each, and he had four toes on each foot.

I don’t suppose he’d scare anybody on skid row, Sam thought. Or in Congress.

His companion was an American born in 1918, deceased in 2008, when the Cetan or Arcturan beam swept Earth. His name was Peter Jairus Frigate, and he was about six feet tall, of muscular build, had black hair and green eyes and a not ugly face in front, but a rather craggy and short-jawed profile. Like Monat, he had a grail and a bundle of possessions and was armed with a stone knife, an ax, a bow, and a quiver of arrows.

Sam doubted very much that Monat was telling the truth about his place of birth or that Frigate was giving his right name. He doubted the story of anybody who said he’d lived past 1983. However, he wasn’t going to say anything about that until he became well acquainted with these two.

After having a drink served to them, he personally led them to the officers’ quarters near his suite.

“It just so happens that I’m short of three of my complement,” he said. “There’s a cabin available in the boiler deck. It’s not a desirable location, so I’ll roust out two junior officers from this cabin here. You can have theirs, and they can go below.”

The man and the woman who had to surrender their cabin didn’t look happy when they heard Sam’s order, but they got out quickly.

That evening, they ate at the captain’s table on china plates painted by an ancient Chinese artist and drank from cut-lead-glass goblets. The dining utensils were a solid silver alloy.

Sam and the others, including the gigantic Joe Miller, listened intently to the stories of both newcomers about their adventures on the Riverworld. When Sam heard that they’d journeyed for a long while with Richard Francis Burton, the famous nineteenth-century explorer, linguist, translator, and author, he felt a shock run through him. The Ethical had told him that he’d also recruited Burton.

“Got any idea where he is?” he asked calmly.

“No,” Monat said. “We were separated during a battle and could not find him after it though we searched for him.”

Sam urged Joe Miller to tell his story of the Egyptian expedition. Sam was getting impatient with his role of the polite questioner and host. He loved to dominate the conversation, but he wanted to see what effect Miller’s tale had on the two.

When Joe finished, Monat said. “So! Then there is a tower in the polar sea!”

“Yeth, goddam it, that’th vhat I thaid,” Joe said.

Sam intended to take at least a week hearing everything relevant they had to say about themselves. Then he would subject them to much more rigorous questioning.

Two days later, when the boat was anchored on the right bank at noon for recharging, the grailstones remained mute and flameless.

“Holy jumping Jesus!” Sam said. “Another meteorite?”

He didn’t think that was the cause for the failure. The Ethical had told him that meteor-deflecting guards had been set up in space, and that the only reason the one had gotten through was because he’d managed to make the guards fail at just the right moment to permit the meteor to pass through them. The guards would still be out there, floating in space, ready to do their job.

But if the failure hadn’t been caused by a meteorite, what had caused it?

Or was it another case of malfunction of the Ethicals’ systems? People were no longer resurrected, which meant that something had gone wrong and unrepaired in the mechanism which converted the heat of the planet’s core into electricity for the stones. Luckily, these were set in a parallel, not a series, arrangement. Otherwise, everybody would starve, not just those on the right bank.

Sam immediately ordered that the boat resume its course upstream. When it was near dusk the boat stopped at the left bank. Not unexpectedly, the locals did not agree to allow the use of a grailstone. There was a hell of a fight, a slaughter which sickened Sam. Frigate was one of those killed by a small rocket launched from the bank.

Then the starving desperates of the right bank invaded the left bank. They came in swarms that would not be stopped until so many had been killed that there was room enough on the stones for the grails of the survivors.

Not until the bodies no longer clogged the surface of The River did Clemens give the order to proceed upstream. A few days after that, he stopped long enough to replace those he’d lost in the bloodiness.

Section 3

Aboard the Rex: The Thread of Reason

7

It was Loghu and Alice who got Burton and the others onto King John’s boat.

Their group had traveled upRiver to the area at which the Rex had anchored for shore leave and repairs. They found the landing place temporarily overpopulated because of those curious to see the great vessel at close range, some of whom were also ambitious to get signed up as crew members. There were some vacancies aboard which rumor said had resulted when the captain had reprimanded too harshly six people whom he thought negligent in their duties. He didn’t seem in any hurry to replace them.

When John came ashore, he was surrounded by twelve marines, who gave him plenty of elbow room. It was no secret, though, that King John had an eye for beautiful women. So Loghu, an exceedingly beautiful ancient Tokharian blonde, walked by him clad only in a short kiltcloth. John stopped his marines and began talking to her. He wasn’t long in inviting her aboard for a tour of his boat. Though he didn’t say so, he intimated that his grand suite might take the longest to inspect and that only he and Loghu should do the inspecting.

Loghu laughed and said that she might come aboard, but her friends would have to come with her. As for the tête-à-tête, she would consider it but would not make up her mind until she had seen everything on the vessel.

King John looked sour, but then he laughed and said that he would show her something that most people didn’t get to see. Loghu was no fool and understood well what he meant. Nevertheless, she knew how desperately necessary it was to get aboard the Rex.

Thus Alice, Burton, Kazz, and Besst were also invited to the tour.

Burton was fuming since he did not wish to get John’s ear by having Loghu behave like a slut. It was the only way, however. His previous declarations that he would find some way to get onto the boat, no matter what the obstacles, had been so much excess steam, impressive but useless. There was no other course to take that would get him more than a very temporary stay on the Rex.

Thus, Loghu had taken a very old and still effective method. Without actually saying so, she had suggested that she might be willing to share John’s bed. Burton hadn’t liked it. He felt like a whoremonger, and it also angered him that it was a woman who had done what he couldn’t do. He wasn’t as upset as he would have been on Earth or even here many years ago. This world had given him a good opportunity to see what women could do once the inhibitions and strictures of Terrestrial society had been removed. Moreover, it was he who had written: Women the world over are what men have made them. That might have been true in Victorian times, but it no longer applied.

While going back to the boat, Loghu introduced the others. All except Burton were using their native names. He had decided this time not to use his old half-Arab, half-Pathan guise, not to be Mirza Abdullah Bushiri or Abdul Hassan or any of the many similar guises he’d used on Earth and here. This time, for a reason he didn’t explain to his companions, he was posing as Gwalchgwynn, a Dark-Age Welshman who’d lived when the Britons were making their final stand against the invading Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

“It means ‘White Hawk,’ Your Majesty,” he said.

“So?” John said. “You are very dark for a white hawk.”

Kazz, the Neanderthal male, rumbled, “He is a great swordsman and marksman, Your Majesty. He would be a good fighter for you.”

“Perhaps I’ll give him a chance to demonstrate his skill sometime,” John said.

John looked through lowered lids at Kazz. John was five feet four inches in stature, but he looked tall alongside the Neanderthal. Kazz was squat and big-boned, as all early Old Stone Agers were. His breadloaf-shaped head, the low slanting forehead, thick shelving brows, broad flat nose, and very protruding jaws didn’t make him handsome. But he was not subhuman appearing like the Neanderthals in illustrations or the early reconstructions in museums. He was hairy but no more than the most hirsute of Homo sapiens.

His mate, Besst, was several inches shorter than he and just as unprepossessing.

John was interested in the two of them, however. They were small, but their strength was enormous, and both male and female would be good warriors. The low brows did not necessarily front a low intelligence since the gamut of brilliance to stupidity was the same in Neanderthals as in that of modern humanity.

Half of John’s complement was early Paleolithic.

John, nicknamed Lackland because for a long time he’d not been able to possess the states he claimed title to, was the younger brother of King Richard I the Lionhearted, the monarch to whom the legendary Robin Hood remained loyal while John ruled England as regent. He had broad shoulders and an athletic sturdy frame, a heavy jaw, tawny hair, blue eyes, and a terrible temper, though that was nothing unusual for a medieval king. He’d had a very bad reputation during and after his death, though he was no worse than many kings before or since and better than his brother. Contemporary and later chroniclers united to present an unfair portrait of him. He was so loathed that it became a tradition that no one of the British royal family should be named John.

Richard had designated his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, as his heir. John had refused to accept this, and, while fighting Arthur, had captured him and then imprisoned him in the castle of Falaise and later in Rouen. There Richard’s nephew disappeared under circumstances which made most people believe that John had slain him and then thrown the weighted body into the Seine. John had never denied or confirmed the accusations.

Another blot on his record, though no larger or blacker than that on the records of many monarchs, was the undeniable fact that he had caused to be starved to death the wife and son of an enemy, the Baron de Braose.

There were many more stories, some of which were true, about his evil deeds. But not until many centuries later did objective historians record that he had also done much good for England.

Burton didn’t know much about John’s life on the Riverworld except that he had stolen Samuel Clemens’ boat. He also knew that it would not be discreet to mention this to John.

The monarch himself was their guide. He showed them almost everything from the lowest deck to the top, the boiler, main, hurricane, flight, and texas deck, an extension from the lower story of the two-story pilothouse. While they were in the pilothouse, Alice told the king that she was his descendant through his great-great-grandson, John of Gaunt.

“Indeed,” he said. “Were you then a princess or a queen?”

“Not even of the nobility,” she said. “Though I was of the gentry. My father was a relative of Baron Ravensworth. I was born in the Year of Our Lord 1852, when Victoria, another descendant of yours, was queen.”

The king’s tawny eyebrows rose.

“You are the first descendant of mine I’ve ever met. A very pretty one, too.”

“Thank you, Sire.”

Burton burned even more. Was John contemplating incest, however rarefied the consanguinity might be?

John had apparently been considering taking all of them on as crewmembers, and Alice’s distant kinship decided him. After they had gone to the grand salon for a drink, he told them that they could, if they wished, travel the River with him. He told them in detail, first, what the general duties of the crew were and what the discipline consisted of, and then demanded they swear an oath of fealty to him.

So far, John had not followed up on his intimations that Loghu go to bed with him, but he undoubtedly meant to. Burton asked if he could talk to the others privately for a minute. John graciously gave permission, and they went to a corner to talk.

“I don’t mind,” Loghu said. “I might even like it. I’ve never been mounted by a king. Anyway, I have no man now and I haven’t since that bastard Frigate ran out on us. John isn’t a bad looker at all, even if he is shorter than I am.”

On Earth, Alice would have been horrified. But she’d seen too much and changed too much; most of her Victorian attitudes had long dissipated.

“As long as it’s voluntary,” she said, “then it’s not wrong.”

“I’d do it if it were wrong,” Loghu said. “We have too much at stake for me to be squeamish.”

“I don’t like it,” Burton said. He was relieved but didn’t want to admit it. “But if we miss this boat, we may not get a chance to get on the other. I’d say that boarding the Mark Twain would be as difficult as it would be for a politician to get into Heaven.

“However, if he should mistreat you…”

“Oh, I can take care of myself,” Loghu said. “If I can’t throw that runt clear across the cabin, I’ve lost my touch. As a last resort I can crack his nuts.”

Alice hadn’t changed so much that she didn’t blush.

“He might even make you his Number One mistress,” Kazz said. “Haw! That’d make you queen then! Hail, Queen Loghu!”

“I’m more worried about his current mistress than I am about him,” Loghu said. “John wouldn’t stab me in the back, though he might try to take me in the rear, but his woman might put a knife in my spine.”

“I still feel like a pimp,” Burton said.

“Why should you? You don’t own me.”

They returned to John and told him that they wished to take the oath.

John ordered drinks for the occasion. After these, he had his executive officer, a huge late-twentieth-century Yank named Augustus Strubewell, make arrangements for the swearing-in that evening.

Two days later, the Rex up-anchored and set out upRiver. Alice was attached as a nurse to the staff of one of the boat’s physicians, a Doctor Doyle. Loghu was to be trained as a pilot, after which she would be officially a pilot second-class, extra. The duties would require only that she substitute if one of the second-class pilots was unavailable. She would have plenty of spare time unless John kept her busy in his suite, which he did for some time to come. The woman she dispossessed seemed to be angry about it, but was only pretending. She’d been getting as tired of John as he of her.

Kazz and Burton were ranked as privates in the marines. Kazz was an axman; Burton, a pistoleer and rapiersman. Besst was put among the women archers.

One of the first things that Burton did was find out who on the boat claimed to have lived past A.D. 1983. There were four. One was Strubewell. He’d been with John when he hijacked the boat.

8

When the Reverend Mr. Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, wrote Alice in Wonderland, he prefaced it with a poem. It begins with “All in the golden afternoon” and compresses that famous journey by boat up the Isis during which Dodgson was teased by the real Alice into writing down the tale he’d composed to please the “cruel Three.”

On that day of July 4, 1852, golden in memory only because it actually was cool and wet, Dodgson, who would be the Dodo in Alice and the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass, was accompanied by Reverend Duckworth, who naturally became the Duck. Lorina, aged thirteen, was the Lory, and Alice, aged ten, Dodgson’s favorite, was of course Alice. Edith, the youngest sister, aged eight, would be the Eaglet.

The three little girls were the daughters of Bishop Liddell, whose surname rhymed with fiddle, as evidenced by a poem about the bishop sung by the rowdy Oxford students. Dodgson’s verse refers to the girls in Latin ordinals according to the ages. Prima, Secunda, and Tertia.

It seemed to Alice now, as she stood in the middle of Richard’s and her cabin, that she had in truth played the part of Secunda during her Earthly life. Certainly, on this world she was Secunda. Richard Burton regarded few men as his equal and no women, not even his wife and perhaps especially his wife, as equals.

She hadn’t minded. She was dreamy, gentle, and introverted. As Dodgson had written of her:

Still she haunts me, phantomwise.

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.

That would become true in more senses than Dodgson could have dreamed of. Now she was under a sky in which even at the blaze of noon she could see near the tops of the mountains the faint phantom glow of a few giant stars. And in the moonless night sky was the blaze of great gas sheets and enormous stars which shed the light of a full moon.

Under the light of day and night, she had been content, even eager, to have Richard make the decisions. These had often involved violence, and, contrary to her nature, she had fought like an Amazon. Though she did not have the physique of a Penthesilea, she did have the courage.

Life on the Riverworld had often been harsh, cruel, and bloody. After dying on Earth, she’d awakened naked and with all body hair shaven, in the body she’d had when she was twenty-five, though she’d died when eighty-two. Around her was not the room of the house in which she’d died, her sister Rhoda’s in Westerham, Kent. Instead towering unbroken mountain ranges enclosed the plains and the foothills and the river in the middle of the valley. As far as she could see, people stood on the banks, all naked, hairless, young, and in shock, screaming, weeping, laughing hysterically, or in horror-struck silence.

She knew no one and had by impulse attached herself to Burton. However, one of the items in her grail was a chiclelike stick containing some sort of psychedelic substance. She’d chewed it, and then she and Burton had copulated furiously all night and also done things she then regarded as perverted and some things which she still did.

She’d loathed herself in the morning and felt like killing herself. Burton she’d hated as she’d never hated anyone. But she continued to stay with him since anyone she switched to might be worse. Also she had to admit that he too was under the gum’s influence, and he did not press her to renew, as she then thought of it, their carnal acquaintance. Burton would have used an Anglo-Saxonism, as he called it, to describe their coupling.

In time she’d fallen in love with him—had, in fact, been in love that night—and they began living together. Living together was not exactly accurate since a good half of her time she spent by herself in their hut. Burton was the most restless man she’d ever known. After a week in one place he must be up and moving: From time to time they’d had quarrels, he doing most of the quarrelling, though by now she could hold her own. Eventually he disappeared for years and returned with a story that turned out to be the essence of cock-and-bull.

She was very hurt when she finally found out that he’d kept his most important secret from her for years. He’d been visited one night by a robed and masked being who said that he was an Ethical, one of the Council which governed those responsible for the resurrections of thirty-five billion or so Terrestrials.

The story went that these Ethicals had raised humanity to life to perform certain experiments. They meant to let humankind die, never to be resurrected again. One of the Council, this Ethical, this “man,” was secretly opposing this.

Burton was skeptical. But when the other Ethicals tried to seize him, Burton had run. He was forced to kill himself several times, utilizing the principle of resurrection, to get far away from his pursuers. After a while he decided that he might as well keep going. After 777 suicides, he awoke in the Council room of the twelve. These had told him what he knew already from X, that is, that there was a renegade among them. So far, they hadn’t been able to detect who he or she was. But they would.

Now that they had caught him, they would keep him under permanent surveillance. The memory of his visits from the Ethicals, in fact, everything since he’d first known X, would be wiped out of his mind.

Burton, however, on waking on the banks of The River, had found his memory unimpaired. Somehow, X had succeeded in averting the erasure and in fooling his colleagues.

Burton reasoned also that X must have arranged it so that the Ethicals couldn’t find him whenever they wished to. Burton had gone upRiver then, looking for the others whom X had recruited. Just when and how they could help him, X wouldn’t say, though he promised to reveal the time and the methods at a later time.

Something had gone wrong. X hadn’t appeared for years, and the resurrections had suddenly stopped.

Then Burton had found out that the Peter Jairus Frigate and the Tau Cetan, who’d been with Burton from the beginning, were either Ethicals or the Ethicals’ agents. Before Burton could seize them, the two had fled.

Burton could no longer hide his secret from his companions. Alice was shocked by the story, stunned. Later, she became furious. Why hadn’t he told her the truth long ago? Burton had explained that he wanted to protect her. If she knew the truth, she might be subject to abduction and questioning and God only knew what else by the Ethicals.

Since that time, she’d been slowly burning. The repressed anger had now and then broken out, and the flames had scorched Burton. He, always willing to burn back, had quarreled with her. And though they’d always reconciled afterwards, Alice knew that the day of parting had to come soon.

She should have made the break before signing on the Rex. But she also wanted to know the answers to the mysteries of the Riverworld. If she stayed behind, she would always regret not having gone on. So she had boarded with Richard, and here she was in their cabin wondering what to do next.

Also, she had to confess that there was more to her being here than the desire to reveal mysteries. For the first time in her life on this world, she had hot and cold running water and a comfortable toilet and bed and air-conditioning and a grand salon in which she could see movies and stage plays and hear music, classical and popular, played by orchestras which used the instruments known on Earth, not the clay and skin and bamboo substitutes used on the banks. There was also bridge and whist and other games. All these comforts of body and soul and others were hers. They would be hard to give up.

It was indeed a strange situation for a bishop’s daughter born May 4, 1852, next to Westminster Abbey. Her father was not only the dean of Christ Church College but famous as the coeditor of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. Her mother was a beautiful and cultured woman who looked as if she were Spanish. Alice Pleasance Liddell came to Oxford when she was four and almost immediately made friends with the shy, stammering mathematician-clergyman with the offbeat sense of humor. Both lived in Tom Quad so that their meetings were frequent.

As the daughters of a bishop of royal and noble descent, she and her sisters had not been allowed to play with other children very often. They were educated principally by their governess, Miss Prickett, a woman who strove mightily to teach her girls but had not enough education herself. Nevertheless, Alice enjoyed all the advantages of a privileged Victorian childhood. John Ruskin was her drawing teacher. She often managed to eavesdrop on the conversations of her father’s dinner guests: the Prince of Wales, Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, and many other notables and greats.

She was a pretty child, dark, her straight hair in bangs, her face a reflection of her quiet dreaming soul when she was pensive but bright and eager when stimulated, especially by Dodgson’s wild stories. She read a lot and was largely self-educated.

She liked to play with her black cat, Dinah, and to tell her stories which were never as good as the reverend’s. Her favorite song was “Star of Evening,” which Dodgson was to satirize in Alice as the Mock Turtle’s song, “Turtle Soup.”

Soup of the evening, beautiful soup!

Soup of the evening, beautiful soup!

The real Alice’s favorite section of the book, however, was that about the Cheshire Cat. She loved cats, and even when she’d grown up she would occasionally talk to her pet as if it were human when no one else was around.

She’d grown up to be a good-looking woman with a splendid physique and something special about her, an indefinable misty air which had attracted Dodgson when she was a child and had also drawn Ruskin and others. To them she was the “child of pure unclouded brow and dreaming eyes of wonder.”

Despite her adult attractiveness, she did not get married until she was twenty-eight, which made her an old maid in Victorian 1880. Her husband, Reginald Gervis Hargreaves of the estate of Cuffnells, near Lyndhurst, Hampshire, was educated at Eton and Christ Church, and became a justice of the peace, living a very quiet life with Alice and her three sons. He liked to read, especially French literature, to ride and hunt, and he had a huge arboretum which included Douglas pines and redwoods.

Despite certain inhibitions and awkwardness in the beginning, she had adjusted to the sexual act and came to desire it. She loved her husband, and she sorrowed deeply when he died in 1926.

But Burton she had loved with a passion far exceeding that for Reginald.

No longer, she told herself.

She couldn’t put up with his eternal restlessness, though it looked as if he would be staying in one place for many years now. But it was the place that was moving him. His rages, his eagerness to pick a quarrel, his intense jealousy, were becoming tiresome. The very traits which had attracted her because she had lacked them were now driving her away.

The greatest wedge was that he had kept to himself The Secret.

The trouble with leaving Richard at once was that she had no place to go. All the cabins were taken. Some were occupied by single men, but she did not intend to move in with a man she didn’t love.

Richard would have scoffed at that. He claimed that all he wanted in a woman was beauty and affection. He also preferred blondes, but in her case he had waived this requirement. He would tell her to find some good-looking man with at least passable manners and live with him. No, he wouldn’t. He would threaten to kill her if she left him. Or would he? Surely, he must be getting as tired of her as she was of him.

She sat down and smoked a cigarette, something she wouldn’t have dreamed of doing on Earth, and she considered what to do. After a while, finding no answer, she left the cabin and went to the grand salon. There was always something pleasant or exciting there.

In the salon she walked around for a few minutes admiring the paintings and statuettes and listening to a piece by Liszt being played on the piano.

While she was feeling very lonely and hoping that someone would come up and break her mood, a woman approached her. She was about five feet tall, slim, long-legged, and had medium-sized conical breasts with up-tilted nipples thinly covered with a wispy cloth. Her features were beautiful despite her somewhat too long nose.

Exposing very white and even teeth, the blonde said, in Esperanto, “Hello, I’m Aphra Behn, one of His Majesty’s pistoleers and ex-mistresses, though he still likes an occasional rerun. You’re Alice Liddell, right? The woman of the fierce-looking ugly-handsome Welshman, Gwalchgwynn.”

Alice acknowledged that she was right and asked immediately, “Are you the authoress of Oroonoko?”

Aphra smiled again. “Yes, and of several plays. It’s nice to know that I was not unknown in the twentieth century. Do you play bridge? We’re looking for a fourth.”

“I haven’t played for thirty-four years,” Alice said. “But I loved it. If you don’t mind some clumsiness at first…”

“Oh, we’ll sharpen you up, though it may hurt some,” Aphra said. She laughed and led Alice by her hand toward a table near a wall and below a huge painting. This depicted Theseus entering the heart of Minos’ labyrinth where the Minotaur awaited him. Ariadne’s thread was tied to the hero’s enormous erection.

Aphra, seeing Alice’s expression, grinned.

“Does give you a start when you first see it, doesn’t it? Don’t know if Theseus is going to kill the bullman with his sword or bugger him to death, what?”

“If he does the latter,” Alice said, “he’ll break the thread and won’t be able to find his way back out to Ariadne.”

“Lucky woman,” Aphra said. “She can die still thinking he loves her, not knowing he plans to desert her at the first opportunity.”

So this was Aphra Amis Behn, the novelist, poet, and dramatist whom London called the Incomparable Astrea, after the divine star maiden of classical Greek religion. Before she died in 1689 at the age of forty-nine, she had written a novel, Oroonoko, which was a sensation in her time and was reprinted in 1930, giving Alice a chance to read it before she died. The book had been very influential in the development of the novel, and Aphra’s contemporaries rated her with Defoe when she was at her best. Her plays were bawdy and coarse but witty and had delighted the theatergoers. She was the first English woman to support herself entirely by writing, and she had also been a spy for Charles II during the war against the Dutch. Her behavior was scandalous, even for the Restoration period, but she was buried in Westminster Abbey, an honor denied the equally scandalous and far more famous Lord Byron.

Two men were waiting impatiently at the table. Aphra made the introductions, giving a slight biography of each.

The man at the west end of the table was Lazzaro Spallanzani, born A.D. 1729, died 1799. He had been one of the more well-known natural scientists of his time and was chiefly noted for his experiments with bats to determine how they could fly through total darkness. He’d discovered that they did so by use of a form of sonar, though that term wasn’t known in his day. He was short, slim, dark, and obviously Italian though he spoke Esperanto.

The man who sat at the north end was Ladislas Podebrad, a Czech. He was of medium height (for the middle and late twentieth century), very broad, muscular, and thick-necked. His hair was yellow, and his eyes were cold and blue. The eyebrows were very thick and yellowish. His eaglish nose was large, and his massive chin was deeply clefted. Though his hands were broad—as big as a bear’s, thought Alice, who tended to exaggerate—and the fingers were relatively short, he handled the cards like a Mississippi riverboat gambler.

Aphra commented that he’d been picked up only eight days ago and that he was an electromechanical engineer with a doctor’s degree. She also said—and here Alice was suddenly very interested—that Podebrad had attracted John’s attention when John saw him standing by the wreck of an airship on the left bank. After hearing Podebrad’s story and his qualifications, John had invited him to come aboard as an engineer’s mate in the engine room. The duraluminum keel and gondola of the semirigid dirigible had been cut up and put in a storage room in the Rex.

Podebrad didn’t talk much, seeming to be one of those bridge players who was all intent on the game. But since Behn and Spallanzani chattered back and forth, Alice was emboldened to ask him some questions. He replied tersely, but gave no outward signs of being annoyed. This didn’t mean that he wasn’t; his face was stony throughout the playing.

Podebrad explained that he had been head of a state far far downRiver called Nova Bohemujo, Esperanto for New Bohemia. He’d been qualified for the position since he’d also been head of a government post in Czechoslovakia and a prominent member of the Communist party. He no longer was a Communist, though, since that ideology was as useless and irrelevant as capitalism was here. Also, he’d been very attracted to the Church of the Second Chance, though he’d never joined.

He’d had a recurring dream that there were large deposits of iron and other minerals deep under the area of Nova Bohemujo. After much urging, he’d gotten his people to dig for them. This was a long and wearisome task and wore out many flint, chert, and wood tools, but his zeal had kept them at it. Besides, it gave them something to do.

“You must realize that I am not at all superstitious,” Podebrad said in a basso profundo. “I despise oneiromancy, and I would have ignored this series of dreams, no matter how sustained and compelling they were. That is, under most circumstances I would have. It seemed to me that they were the expressions of my unconscious, a term I don’t like to use, since I reject Freudianism, but useful here to describe the phenomena I was experiencing. They were, at first, only the expressions of my wishes to find metal, or so I thought. Then I came to believe that there might be another explanation, though the first was really no explanation. Perhaps there was an affinity between metal and myself, some sort of earth current that put me in its circuit, that is, the metal was one pole and I the other so that I felt the flow of energy.”

And he says he isn’t superstitious, Alice thought. Or is he kidding me?

Richard, however, would have gone for that sort of rot. He believed that there was an affinity between himself and silver. When he’d suffered from ophthalmia in India, he’d placed silver coins on his eyes, and, when he had gout in his old age, he’d put them on his feet.

“Though I do not believe in dreams as manifestations of the unconscious, I do believe that they may be a medium for transmission of telepathy or other forms of extrasensory perception,” Podebrad said. “Much experimentation was done with ESP in the Soviet Union. Whatever the reason, I felt strongly that there was metal deep under the surface of Nova Bohemujo. And there was. Iron, bauxite, cryolite, vanadium, platinum, tungsten, and other ores. All jumbled together, not in a natural stratum. Evidently whoever reformed this planet had piled the ores there during the process.”

All this was said between bidding, of course. Podebrad talked as if he hadn’t been interrupted, picking up exactly where he’d left off.

Podebrad had industrialized his state. His people had been armed with steel swords and fiberglass bows and firearms. He’d built two armored steamboats, neither nearly as large as the Rex.

“Not for conquest but for defense. The other states were jealous of our mineral wealth and would have liked to possess it, but they didn’t dare attack. My ultimate object, however, was to build a large boat with screw propellers to travel to the headwaters of The River. I didn’t know at that time that there were two giant boats already coming up The River. If I had known, I would have built my own vessel anyway.

“Eventually I fell in with some adventurers who proposed to get to the headwaters by means of an airship. Their idea intrigued me and soon after I made the blimp and set out in it. But a storm wrecked it. I and my crew got out alive, and then the Rex came along.”

The game was over a few minutes later with Podebrad and Alice winners and Spallanzani angrily demanding why Podebrad had led with a diamond instead of a club. The Czech refused to tell him but said that he should be able to figure it out for himself. He congratulated Alice on her correct playing. Alice thanked him, but she still didn’t know any more than Spallanzani how Podebrad had done it.

Before they parted, however, she said, “Sinjorino Behn forgot to say exactly when you were born and died on Earth.”

He looked sharply at her.

“Perhaps that is because she doesn’t know. Why do you want to know?”

“Oh, I’m just interested in that sort of thing.”

He shrugged and said, “A.D. 1912 to 1980.”

Alice hurried off to find Burton before she had to go on duty and learn to set bones and make plaster-of-paris casts. She caught him in the corridor on the way to their cabin. He was sweating, his dark skin looking like oiled bronze. He’d just finished two hours of stick-fighting and fencing and had half an hour before he fell in for drill.

On the way to the cabin, she told him about Podebrad. He asked her why she seemed so excited about the Czech.

“It’s nonsense, that about his dream,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I think about it. I think he’s an agent who got stranded and who knew where that deposit of ores was. He used the dream as an excuse to get his people to dig it up. Then he built the blimp and tried to get to the tower itself, not just the headwaters. He must have!”

“Oh, reeeally,” Burton drawled in that infuriating manner. “What other slight evidence do you have, if it’s even slight? After all, the chap didn’t live past 1983.”

“That’s what he said! But how do we know that some agents…you’ve said so yourself…haven’t changed their story? Anyway…”

She paused, her whole being radiating eagerness.

“Yaas?”

“You described the council of twelve. He looks like he might be the one called Thanabur or maybe the one called Loga!”

That rocked him. But after a few seconds, he said, “Describe this man again.”

When he’d heard her out he shook his head.

“No. Both Loga and Thanabur had green eyes. Loga was redheaded, and Thanabur was brown-haired. This Podebrad has yellow hair and blue eyes. He may look much like them, but I suppose there are millions who do.”

“But Richard! Hair color can be changed! He wasn’t wearing those plastic lenses that can change the eye color that Frigate told us about. But don’t you think the Ethicals would have the means to change eye color without obvious aids?”

“It’s possible. I’ll take a look at the fellow.”

After showering, he bustled down to the grand salon. Not finding Podebrad there he returned to the engine room. Later when he next met Alice, Burton said, “We’ll have to see. He could be Thanabur or Loga. If one can be a chameleon, the other can. But it’s been twenty-eight years since I saw them, and our meeting was very brief. I really can’t say.”

“Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”

“I can’t very well arrest him on John’s boat! No. We’ll just have to watch him, and if we get something to justify our suspicions, then we’ll see what we can do.

“Remember Spruce the agent. When we caught him, he killed himself just by thinking a sort of code and releasing poison into his system from that little black ball in his brain. It’ll be very tricky if we do act, and we can’t until we’re sure. Personally, I think it’s just a coincidence. Now, Strubewell…there’s someone we don’t have any doubt about. Well, not much perhaps. After all, it’s only a theory that anyone claiming to be post-1983 is an agent. It is possible that we just haven’t met many.”

“Well, I’ll be playing bridge a lot with Podebrad, if I don’t come a duffer. I’ll watch him.”

“Be very careful, Alice. If he is one of Them, he’ll be very observant. In fact, you shouldn’t have asked him about the dates. That may have put him on his guard. You should have found out from someone else.”

“Can’t you ever give me full credit?” she said, and she walked out.

9

Loghu was no longer the king’s favorite.

King John had become so smitten with a very pretty redhead with large blue eyes whom he’d seen on the bank that he decided to stay in the area for a while. The boat was anchored by a large dock the locals had built long ago. After two days to make sure that the people here were as friendly as they pretended to be, John permitted shore leave. He didn’t say anything to anybody at first about his sudden attack of irresistible lechery, but his behavior made that obvious.

Loghu didn’t especially care that she had to leave the grand suite after John had talked the woman into going to bed with him. She wasn’t in love with him. Besides, she was more than somewhat interested in one of the locals, a big dark Tokharian. Though he wasn’t of her century, he was of her nation, and they had many things to talk about between lovemaking. However, she was humiliated that she had lasted such a short time with the monarch, and she was heard to mutter that she might just push John overboard some dark night. There had been, there were now, there would be many who would like to remove him from the living.

Burton stood guard duty the first night. The next, he moved into a hut with Alice near the dock. The people here, most of whom were Early Minoan Cretans, were hospitable and fun-loving. They danced and sang around the bonfires in the evening until their allotment of lichen alcohol was gone and then reeled to bed to sleep or couple or “pluralize,” as Burton called it. He was happy to stay here for a few weeks anyway because he’d have a chance to add the language to his now long list. He mastered its basic grammar and vocabulary quickly since it was closely related to Phoenician and Hebrew. There were, however, many words which were non-Semitic, these having been borrowed from the aboriginals of Crete while the conquerors from the Middle East were assimilating them. They all spoke Esperanto, of course, though it deviated somewhat from the artificial tongue invented by Dr. Zamenhof.

John had no trouble getting his new mistress to agree to go to bed with him. But he had a problem. There was no cabin space for Loghu, and he couldn’t throw her off the boat without a good reason. Autocratic though he was, he was able to override her rights. His crew would see to that. Remembering the Magna Carta, he did not buck them, but he was undoubtedly trying to think of a way to get rid of Loghu which would seem justifiable.

On the fourth night of shore leave, while John was in his grand suite with Blue-eyes, and Burton was with Alice in their small but comfortable quarters, a helicopter dropped out of the night sky onto the landing deck of the Rex.

Burton would find out very much later that the raiders came from the airship Parseval and had been ordered to capture King John if they could or to kill him if they couldn’t. All he knew then was that the gunfire on the Rex meant bad trouble. He put on a cloth around his waist and fastened it with the magnetic tabs inside the material. Then, grabbing a rapier and a fully loaded pistol from the table by the bed, he ran outside while Alice was still yelling to him.

He could hear men screaming and shouting in the midst of shots and then a great explosion apparently in the engine room. He ran as fast as he could toward the boat. There were lights on in the pilothouse; somebody was at the controls. Then the paddle wheels began to turn. The boat started moving backwards, but Burton leaped onto the promenade of the boiler deck just before the lines tied to the pilings pulled them down and the dock collapsed.

A moment later, a stranger came down the stairs from the lowest story of the pilothouse. Burton emptied his pistol at him but missed. Cursing, he dropped the gun and proceeded toward the fellow. Then the slippery one showed up again with a rapier in his hand.

Never had Burton faced such a demon with the sword! No wonder. The tall thin demon was Cyrano de Bergerac! Playfully he introduced himself during a lull in the swordplay but Burton saw no such reason to waste breath. Both were slightly wounded—a good indication that they were evenly matched. Somebody shouted, Burton’s attention was distracted and that was enough. The Frenchman drove his blade deep into Burton’s thigh.

He fell to the deck, helpless. The agony came a few seconds later, making him clench his teeth to keep from screaming. De Bergerac was a gallant man. He made no effort to kill Burton, and, when one of his men appeared a moment after, de Bergerac told him not to shoot Burton.

The helicopter lifted off shortly thereafter as men shot at it from the deck. Before it had gotten a hundred feet, however, a naked white body appeared in the beam of a searchlight and then dropped into the darkness. Somebody had either leaped or been thrown from the craft. Burton guessed that it was King John.

Groaning, Burton wrapped the heavily bleeding wound in a cloth, tied its ends, and forced himself to hobble to the steps leading up to the pilothouse base. The Rex was drifting downRiver, and there was nothing to do about it. John was hauled aboard moments later, unconscious, an arm and a leg broken.

Five miles downstream, the Rex beached, and, ten minutes later, the first of the men who’d run all the way along the bank, following the boat, came aboard.

Dr. Doyle set John’s bones and administered Irish coffee for shock.

When John was fit enough to curse and rave, he did so. But he was glad to be alive, and the engine could be repaired with the precious aluminum wire in the storage room. That would take a month, though, and meanwhile the Clemens boat was slowly gaining on them.

Since twelve guards had been killed, there was a cabin for Loghu to move into. The king had to replace the dead men, but he seemed to be in no hurry to do so. After days of examining candidates and then putting some through mental and physical tests, he chose only two.

“There’s no hurry,” he said. “I want only the best. These locals are a scroungy lot.”

One result of the raid was that John became fond of Burton, whom he gave the most credit for saving his life. He couldn’t promote him over the heads of Burton’s fellow marines, but he could make him a bodyguard. And he promised Burton to give him a commission whenever it was possible to do so. Burton and Alice moved into the cabin next to John’s quarters.

Burton was displeased in one way because he liked to dance attendance to no man. However, it did give him an opportunity to be with Strubewell a lot and to study him. He listened carefully to the man’s speech for traces of a foreign accent. If Strubewell was an agent, he had mastered American Midwestern.

Alice kept an intent eye and ear on Podebrad while playing bridge and during other social activities. Loghu liked one of the suspected agents, a huge man named Arthur Pal who claimed to have been a Hungarian electrical engineer, so she moved in with him after his mate left him. Burton’s suspicions were increased when Loghu noted that Pal spent much time with Podebrad. Her efforts to trip him up on his story were fruitless, but Burton said that if enough time elapsed she was bound to do so. If the agents had a common story, they would have memorized it. However, they were (presumably) human and so would make mistakes. One contradiction would be enough.

Alice still had not been able to bring herself to force the split with Burton. She kept hoping that he would change his attitude toward her enough to justify staying with him. That their duties kept them apart most of the day helped ease matters. He seemed so glad to see her at the end of the day that she felt better, and she talked herself into believing that they would get back to their original passionate state. They were like an old married couple in many ways. They still had a certain fluctuating affection but were increasingly irritated by character traits they could have once easily overlooked.

In one sense, they were old though their youthful bodies had been restored. She had lived on Earth to be eighty-two and he to sixty-nine. (“Considering my sexual preferences, a significant age at which to die,” Burton had once drawled.) A long life tended to ossify more than the arteries; it also ossified habits and attitudes. It made it much more difficult to adjust, to change one’s self for the better. The impact of the resurrection and the Riverworld had shattered many people’s beliefs and helped set them up for change. It had decalcified many, though in some the fragmentation was only slight, in others much more, and many had been unable to adjust at all.

Alice had suffered a metamorphosis in many respects, though her basic character remained. It was down there in the abysm of the soul, the deeps which make the spaces between the stars seem a mere step over a puddle. It was the same with Burton.

So Alice stayed with him, hoping what she knew was hopeless.

At times, she dreamed of finding Reginald again. But she also knew that that was even more hopeless. She would never go back to him whether he had remained the same or changed. It was doubtful that he had changed. He was a good man, but, like all the good, he had faults, some grave, and he was too stubborn to change.

The thing was that no caterpillar could ever effect a metamorphosis in another. The other, if it is to become a butterfly, must do it itself. The difference between man and caterpillar was that the insect was preprogrammed and the human had to reprogram himself.

Thus the days passed for Alice, though there was much more to them than thinking such thoughts.

And then one day, when the Rex connected its batacitor and grail lines to a stone on the right bank, the stone failed to discharge.

10

Shock and panic.

Fifteen years ago, the grailstones on the left bank had quit operation. Twenty-four hours later, they had resumed functioning. King John had been told by Clemens that the line had been severed by a great meteorite but that it had been reconnected and all damage restored in that amazingly short period. It must have been done by the Ethicals, though anybody in the area to witness the reforming had been overcome by something—probably a gas—and slept through the whole project.

Now the question was: Would the line be repaired again?; the lesser question: What caused this disaster? Another meteorite? Or was it one more step downward in the breakdown of this world?

King John, though stunned, rallied swiftly. He sent his officers to calm down the crew, and he gave orders to serve everybody the mixture of lichen alcohol, water, and powdered irontree blooms called grog on the Rex.

After all were soaked enough in the drink that gives good cheer and courage, he ordered that the copper “feeder” cap be taken back into the boat. Then the Rex proceeded upRiver in the shallows near the left bank. There was enough energy in the batacitor to keep the boat going until the next mealtime. When it was two hours to dusk, John commanded that it stop and the copper cap be attached to a stone.

As expected, the locals refused to “loan” a stone to the Rex. One of the steam machine guns loosed a stream of plastic bullets over the heads of the crowd on the bank, and it ran back panicked halfway across the plain. The two amphibian launches, once named Firedragon I and II, now Eleanor and Henry, rumbled onto shore and stood guard while the cap was placed over the stone. Within an hour, however, locals from stones as far away as a mile on each side gathered, including those whose grailstones were in the foothills. Whooping war cries, yelling, thousands of men and women charged the amphibians and the Riverboat. At the same time, five hundred in boats attacked from the water.

Exploding shells and rockets from the Rex wiped out hundreds. The steam guns mowed down hundreds more. The marines and crew members lined along the railings shot rifles, pistols, and arrows, and launched small rockets from bazookas.

The bank and the waters around the Rex quickly became bloodied and strewn with corpses and pieces of corpses. The charge broke, but not before small and large rockets sent by the locals had done some damage and killed and wounded some of John’s people.

Burton could still barely walk though wounds healed more quickly than they would have on Earth. He nevertheless dragged himself to the railing of the texas-deck promenade and fired a rifle with .48-caliber wooden bullets. He hit at least a third of his targets, which were on The River side. When all the boats, dugouts, canoes, war canoes, and sailing boats had been sunk, he struggled around to the other side to help.

He got there in time for the third and final charge. This had been preceded by much haranguing by the enemy officers, pounding of drums, and blowing of fishhorns, and then, with another yell, the locals ran toward the boat. By this time, the launches had exhausted their ammunition and retreated to the dock in the rear of the motherboat. However, the two fighter planes, the single-seater reconnaissance, the torpedo bomber, and the helicopter went up to add their fire.

Almost, a few locals reached the water. Then, the ranks wilting, they broke and fled. Shortly thereafter, the stones boomed and flashed, and the grails and the batacitor were recharged.

“God’s teeth!” King John said, his eyes wild. “Today was bad enough! Tomorrow…! God save us!”

He was right. Before dawn the next day, the hunger-mad right-bankers came in hordes. Every boat available, including many two-masters, was jammed to capacity with men and women. Behind them came another horde of swimmers. And when the sun rose, for as far as the eye could reach, The River was alive with vessels and swimmers. The front ranks, the boats, were met with all the rockets and arrows the defenders had. Nevertheless, most of the boats grounded, and from them leaped the right-bankers.

Caught between two forces, the Rex battled mightily. Its fire cleared space around the grailstones, and the amphibians, spouting flame, rolled on their trackless treads to the stone. While they kept off the raging defenders and attackers alike, the crane of the Henry swung the cap onto the stone.

The grailstones thundered, and immediately the cap was swung off by the crane, which then telescoped into the interior of the Henry.

After the launches had returned to the boat, John ordered that the anchor be taken up. “And then full power ahead!”

It was easier commanded than carried out.

The press of vessels around the Rex was so great that it could move only very slowly. While the paddle wheels dug into the water, and the prow crushed into pieces the large sailing boats and ground the smaller between them, the right-bankers bombarded it. Men and women managed to clamber onto the promenade of the boiler deck, though they didn’t stay there long.

Finally, the Rex broke loose and headed for the other shore. There it swung into the weaker current near the bank and forged upRiver. Across the stream, the battle was still raging.

At noon, John had to decide whether or not to recharge. After a minute of deliberation, he ordered the boat to anchor by a big dock.

“We’ll let them kill each other,” he said. “We have plenty of smoked and dried food to keep us going through tomorrow. The day after, we’ll recharge. By then the slaughter should be over.”

The right bank was a strange sight indeed. They had gotten so used to seeing its throngs, noisy, chattering, laughing, that the unpeopled land was eerie. On this side, except for a very few wise or timid persons who’d elected not to try to fill their bellies at the expense of the left-bankers, not a soul was to be seen. The huts and the longhouses and the big state log buildings were tenantless, and so were the plains and the foothills. Since no animals, birds, insects, or reptiles existed on this planet, only the wind rustling the leaves of the few trees on the plains made any sound.

By then, the warring peoples across the stream had exhausted their gunpowder, and only occasionally could the Rex-ites hear a very low murmur, the diluted and compressed sound of people voicing their fury, hunger, and fear, their pain and their deaths.

The casualties on the Rex from both days were thirty dead and sixty wounded, twenty seriously, though it might be said that any wound was taken seriously by the sufferers. The corpses were cast in weighted fish skin bags and into the middle of The River after a brief ceremony. The bags were only to spare the feelings of the survivors since the bags would be ripped open and the flesh devoured by the fish before they reached the bottom.

Along the left bank the waters were thick with corpses, bumping into each other while the eating fish thrashed the bloodied waters. For a month, the logjam of bodies made The River hideous. Everywhere, apparently, the fighting had taken place, and it would be a long time before the drifting corpses disappeared. Meanwhile, the fish ravened, and the colossal riverdragonfish came up from the depths and took the bloating dead whole in their mouths until their stomachs were crammed. And when they had digested and eliminated these, they rose again to feed and to digest and to eliminate.

“It’s Armageddon, the Apocalypse,” Burton said to Alice, and he groaned.

Alice wept more than once, and she had nightmares. Burton comforted her so much that she felt that they were close again.

The afternoon of the next day, the Rex ventured across The River to recharge. But instead of going on, it went back to the right bank. It was necessary to make gunpowder and to repair damages. That took a month, during which time Burton completely recovered from his wound.

After the boat resumed its journey, some of its crew were tasked with making a count of the survivors in various areas picked at random. The result: an estimate that nearly half the population must have been killed, if the fighting had occurred on the same scale everywhere. Seventeen and a half billion people had died within twenty-four hours.

It was a long time before gaiety came back to the Riverboat, and the people on the bank behaved like ghosts. Even worse than the effect of the slaughter was the dread thought: What if the remaining grailstone line quits?

Now, thought Burton, was the time to question the suspected agents. But if they were cornered, they might kill themselves even if no resurrection awaited them. And there was also the restraint that the post-1983 people might be innocent.

He would wait. He could do nothing else but wait.

Meanwhile, Loghu was subtly questioning her cabinmate, and Alice, though not subtle, was doing her best with Podebrad. And Burton was waiting for Strubewell to make a slip.

Several days after the voyage had started again, John decided that he would do some recruiting. He stopped the Rex during the noontime meal and went ashore to make it known that he had empty berths to fill.

Burton, as Sergeant Gwalchgwynn, had the duty with others of wandering through the crowd looking for possible assassins. When he came across an obvious early paleolithic, a squat massive-boned fellow who looked like a pre-Generalized Mongolian, and started to talk to him, he forgot his job for a while. Ngangchungding didn’t mind giving him a quick lesson in the fundamentals of his native speech, one which Burton had never encountered before. Then Burton, speaking Esperanto, tried to get him to sign up on the Rex. Not only would he be a desirable marine, he would give Burton the opportunity to learn his language. Nganchungding refused his offer. He was, he said, a Nichirenite, a member of that Buddhist discipline which stressed pacifism as strongly as its chief rival, the Church of the Second Chance. Though disappointed, Burton gave him a cigarette to show that there were no hard feelings, and he went back to King John’s table.

John was interviewing a Caucasian whose back was partially blocked from Burton’s view by a tall, skinny-legged, long-armed, broad-shouldered Negro. Burton walked by them to place himself behind John.

He heard the white man say, “I am Peter Jairus Frigate.”

Burton whirled, stared, glaring and then he leaped at Frigate. Frigate went down under him, Burton’s hands around his throat.

“I’ll kill you!” Burton shouted.

Something struck him on the back of the head.

11

When he regained his senses, he saw the Negro and the four men who’d been behind him struggling with John’s bodyguards. The monarch had leaped on top of the table, and, red-faced, was shouting orders. There was some confusion for a minute before everybody settled down. Frigate, coughing, had gotten to his feet. Burton pulled himself up, feeling pain in the back of his head. Evidently, he’d been hit with the knobkerrie the black had carried suspended from a thong on his belt. It lay on the grass now.

Though not entirely clearheaded, Burton realized that he had, somehow, erred. This man looked much like the Frigate he knew, and his voice was similar. But neither his voice nor his features were quite the same, and he wasn’t as tall. Yet…the same name?

“I apologize, Sinjoro Frigate,” he said. “I thought…you looked so much like a man whom I have good reason to loathe…he did me a terrible injury…never mind. I am truly sorry, and if I may make amends…”

What the devil, he thought. Or perhaps it should be, Which the devil?

Though this was not his Frigate, he couldn’t help looking around for Monat.

“You almost scared the piss out of me,” the fellow said. “But, well, all right. I accept. Besides, I think you’ve paid for your error. Umslopogaas can hit hard.”

The black said, “I only tapped him to discourage him.”

“Which you did,” Burton said, and he laughed, though it hurt his head.

“You and your friends were fortunate you weren’t slain on the spot!” John bellowed. He got down from the table and sat down. “Now, what is the difficulty?”

Burton explained again, secretly elated since under the circumstances the “almost” Frigate couldn’t reveal to John that Burton was using an assumed name. John got assurances from Frigate and his four companions that they held no resentment against Burton and then ordered his men to release them. Before continuing the interviews, he insisted that Burton give him an account of why he had attacked Frigate. Burton made up a story which seemed to satisfy the monarch.

He said to Frigate, “How do you explain this startling resemblance?”

“I can’t,” Frigate said, shrugging. “I’ve had this happen before. Not the attack, I mean. I mean running across people who think they’ve seen me before, and I don’t have a commonplace face. If my father had been a traveling salesman, I could explain it. But he wasn’t. He was an electrical and civil engineer and seldom got out of Peoria.”

Frigate didn’t seem to have any superior enlistment qualifications. He was almost six feet tall and muscular but not especially so. He claimed to be a good archer, but there were hundreds of thousands of bowmen available to John. He would have dismissed him if Frigate had not mentioned that he’d arrived in an area a hundred miles upRiver in a balloon. And he’d seen a huge dirigible. John knew that had to be the Parseval. He was also interested in the balloon story.

Frigate said that he and his companions had been journeying upRiver with the intention of getting to the headwaters. They’d gotten tired of the slow rate of travel in their sailboat, and when they came to a place where metal was available, they’d talked its chief of state into building them a blimp.

“Ah!” John said. “What was this ruler’s name?”

Frigate looked puzzled. “He was a Czech named Ladislas Podebrad.”

John laughed until the tears came. When he’d finished, he said, “That is a good one. It just so happens that this Podebrad is one of my engineers now.”

“Yeah?” one of Frigate’s companions said. “We have a score to settle with him.”

The speaker was about five feet ten inches high. He had a lean muscular body and dark hair and eyes. His face was strong but handsome and distinctive-looking. He wore a cowboy’s ten-gallon hat and high-heeled boots, though his only other clothing was a white kiltcloth.

“Tom Mix at your service, Your Majesty,” he said in a Texas drawl.

He puffed on his cigarette and added, “I’m a specialist in the rope and the boomerang, Sire, and I was once a well-known movie star, if you know what that is.”

John turned to Strubewell. “Have you ever heard of him?”

“I’ve read about him,” Strubewell said. “He was long before my time, but he was very famous in the twenties and thirties. He was a star of what they called horse operas.”

Burton wondered if it was likely that an agent would know that.

“We sometimes make movies on the Rex,” John said, smiling. “But we don’t have horses, as you know.”

“Do I ever!”

The monarch asked Frigate more about the adventure. The American said that at the same time they’d sighted the dirigible, they’d sprung a leak in an apparatus used to heat the hydrogen in the envelope. While trying to cover the leak in the pipe with some quick-setting glue, they’d vented gas from the bag so they could drop quickly into thicker and warmer air and thus open the ports of the gondola.

The leak had been fixed, but a wind started blowing them back and the batteries supplying fresh hydrogen had become dead. They decided to land. When they heard that John had sent a launch ahead to this place to announce that he was recruiting, they’d sailed down here as fast as they could.

“What were you on Earth?”

“A lot of things, like most people. In my middle age and old age, a writer of science-fiction and detective stories. I wasn’t exactly obscure, but I was never near as well known as him.”

He pointed at a medium-sized but muscular man with curly hair and a handsome Irish-looking face.

“He’s Jack London, a great early twentieth-century writer.”

“I’m not too fond of writers,” John said. “I’ve had some on my boat, and they’ve generally caused a lot of trouble. However…who is the Negro who knocked my sergeant on the head without my permission?”

“Umslopogaas, a Swazi, a native of South Africa of the nineteenth century. He is a great warrior, especially proficient with his ax, which he calls Woodpecker. He also is notable as providing the model for the great fictional Zulu hero of the same name created by another writer, H. Rider Haggard.”

“And he?”

John pointed at a brown-skinned black-haired man with a big nose. He stood a little over five feet and wore a large green cloth wrapped in turban fashion.

“That is Nur ed-Din el-Musafir, a much-traveled Iberian Moor, Your Majesty. He lived in your time and is a Sufi. He also happened to have met Your Majesty at your court in London.”

John said, “What?” and stood up. He looked closely at the little man, then shut his eyes. When he opened them, he said, “Yes, I remember him well!”

The monarch got up and strode around the table, his arms open, speaking the English of his time rapidly and smiling. The others were astonished to see him embrace the little man and kiss him on both cheeks.

“Jeeze, another Frenchy!” Mix said, but he was grinning.

After the two had gabbled for some time, John said, “All I have to know is that Nur el-Musafir has traveled far with you and still regards you as his friends. Strubewell, you sign them up and give them instructions. Sergeant Gwalchgwynn, you assign them their cabins. Well, my good friend and mentor, we will talk after I have completed the interviews.”

On the way down the corridor to their quarters, they ran into Loghu. She stopped, turned pale, then red, and screaming, “Peter, you bastard!” she hurled herself at Frigate. He went down with her hands clutching his throat. Laughing, the black and Mix pulled her off of him.

“You sure got a way with people,” Mix said to Frigate.

“Another case of mistaken identity,” Burton said. He explained to Loghu what had happened.

After he’d quit coughing and feeling his finger-marked neck, Frigate said, “I don’t know who this other Frigate was, but he sure must not be likeable.”

Reluctantly, Loghu apologized. She was not fully convinced that this Frigate wasn’t her former lover.

Mix muttered, “She can grab me any time she wants to, but not around the neck.”

Loghu overheard him. She said, “If your whacker is as big as your hat, I might just grab it.”

Surprisingly, Mix blushed. When she had hip-swayed away, he said, “Too bold and brassy for me.”

Two days later, they were living together.

Burton was not content to admit that the resemblance of the two Frigates was just a coincidence. Whenever he had a chance, he talked to the fellow, delving into his background. What startled him was the discovery that this Frigate, like the other, had been a student of his, Burton’s, life.

The American, in his turn, had been watching Burton, though covertly. Every once in a while, Burton caught him staring at him. One night, Frigate cornered him in the grand salon. After looking around to make sure their conversation wasn’t overheard, the American said, without preamble and in English, “I’m familiar with the various portraits of Richard Francis Burton. I even had a big blowup of him when he was fifty on the wall in front of my desk. So I think I could recognize him without his mustachios and his forked beard.”

“Yaas?”

“I recall well a photograph of him taken when he was about thirty. He had only a mustache then, though it was very thick. If I mentally remove the lip-hair…”

“Yaas?”

“Burton looks remarkably like a certain Dark-Ages Welshman I know. The name he claims is Gwalchgwynn, which, translated into English, is white hawk. Gwalchgwynn is an early form of the Welsh name which became better known much later as Gawain. And Gawain was the knight who, in the earlier King Arthur cycles, was first to seek the Holy Grail. The metal cornucopias we call grails look remarkably like the tower that’s supposed to be in the middle of the north polar sea—from what I’ve heard. You might say it’s the Big Grail.”

“Very interesting,” Burton said after he’d sipped on his grog. “Another coincidence.”

Frigate looked steadily at him, disconcerting him a trifle. The devil take him. The fellow looked enough like the other to be his brother. Perhaps he was. Perhaps both were agents, and this one was playing with him as the other had.

“Burton would know all about the Arthurian cycles and the earlier folk tales on which they were based. It would be just like him, if he assumed a disguise—and he was famous on Earth for assuming many—to take the name of Gwalchgwynn. He would know that it signified a seeker after the Holy Grail, but he wouldn’t expect anyone else to.”

“I’m not so dense that I can’t see that you think I’m that Burton fellow. But I never heard of him, and I don’t care to have you pursue this matter even if it amuses you so much. I am not amused.”

He lifted the glass to his lips and drank.

“Nur told me when he was visited by the Ethical, the Ethical told him that one of the men he’d picked was Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer.”

Burton was able to control himself enough to keep from spitting the drink out.

Slowly, he put the glass down on the bar.

“Nur?”

“You know him. Mr. Burton, the others are waiting in the stage-prop room. Just to show you how sure I am that you’re Burton, I’ll reveal something. Mix and London used to go under assumed names. But they recently decided to hell with it. Now, Mr. Burton, would you care to go with me there?”

Burton considered. Could Frigate and his companions be agents? Were they waiting to seize and question him, turning the tables on him?

He looked around the crowded and noisy salon. When he saw Kazz, he said, “I’ll go with you if you insist on this nonsense. But I’ll take my good friend the Neanderthal with me. And we’ll be armed.”

When Burton entered the prop room ten minutes later, he was accompanied also by Alice and Loghu.

When Mix saw Loghu, his jaw dropped in astonishment.

“You in on this, too?”

12

They had agreed never to talk about the Ethical or anything connected with him in their cabins. These might be bugged. Their next meeting was at a table where they played poker. Present were Burton, Alice, Frigate, Nur, Mix, and London. Loghu and Umslopogaas were on duty.

When Burton had heard Nur’s and Mix’s story of their visits from X, he had been convinced that they were indeed recruits of the Ethical. Nevertheless, he had listened to what each had to say in detail before he had admitted his real identity. Then he had told his story, holding back nothing.

Now he was saying, “See you and raise you ten. No, I don’t think we should plant eavesdropping devices in the cabins of any of the suspects. We might learn something valuable. But if they find one, then they’ll know that X’s agents, we could be called that, are on to them. It’s too dangerous.”

“I agree,” the little Moor said. “Do the rest of you?”

Even Mix, who’d proposed planting the bugs, nodded. However, he said, “What about Podebrad? I run into him now and then, and all he does is say howdy to me and then pass on grinning like a parson who’s just found out his girlfriend ain’t pregnant. It galls me. I’d like to tear into the bastard.”

“Me, too,” London said. “He figures he’s going to get away scot-free after making suckers of us.”

“Attacking him would only get you thrown off the boat,” Nur said. “Besides, he is tremendously strong. I believe that he would tear you apart while you were tearing into him.”

“I can take him!” Mix and London said at the same time.

“You’ve bloody good reason for revenge,” Burton said. “But it’s out, for the time being anyway. Surely you can see that?”

“But why’d he say he was taking us along on the blimp and then desert us like we had BO?”

Nur ed-Din said, “I’ve thought about that. The only reasonable explanation is that he somehow suspected that we were X’s men. That would be one more bit of evidence that he is an Ethical agent.”

“I think he’s just a goddamn sadist!” London said.

“No.”

Burton said, “If he suspects you four, then you’ll have to be on guard. The rest of us will, too. I didn’t think of what Nur said or I’d not have suggested that we meet in the salon.”

“It’s too late to worry about that,” Alice said. “Anyway, he isn’t going to do anything, if he is an agent, until he gets to the headwaters. Any more than we are.”

Burton won the pot with three jacks and two tens. Alice dealt. Burton thought that Nur must be concentrating on other matters than poker. The Moor won about half the time, and Burton suspected that he could rake in the chips even more often if he cared to. Somehow, the little man seemed to be able to tell what his opponents had in their hand just by looking at their faces.

“We might as well enjoy the ride,” Frigate said.

Burton looked at him from lowered lids. The fellow had the same adulation for him that the other Frigate had or had pretended to have. Whenever he got the chance, he would ply Burton with questions, most of them about periods in his life which Burton’s biographers had only been able to speculate about. But, also like the other, he would question attitudes and beliefs which Burton held dear. His attitude toward women and the colored races, for instance, and his belief in telepathy. Burton had too often had to explain that what he had believed on Earth did not necessarily hold here. He had seen too much and experienced too much. He had changed in many respects.

Now he thought it was a good time to delve into the matter of the pseudo-Frigate.

“There has to be a very good reason for the so-called coincidence.”

“I’ve been pondering that, too,” the American said. “Fortunately, I was an avid science-fiction reader and writer in that field. So I have a certain flexibility of imagination, which you’ll need if you’re going to bear with me, because I believe that the Frigate you’ve known by no coincidence at all is my brother James, dead at the ripe old age of one year!

“Now, consider the children who died on Earth. One reason, the best, is that if they were raised here, they would jam the planet. There wouldn’t be enough living space here. In fact, the population of children deceased before five would be the largest segment of the entire population by far.

“So what would the Ethicals do with them? They’d resurrect them on another planet, perhaps one like this, perhaps not. Maybe it’d take two planets to hold them comfortably.

“Anyway, let’s assume that this has happened. Unless,” he lifted a finger, “unless for some reason they haven’t been resurrected as yet. Maybe they’re to be raised here after we’re gone. Who knows?

“I don’t. But I can speculate. Say that the infants were incarnated on another planet. It couldn’t be done with the entire population at once because there would have to be adults to take care of them. And that would crowd a planet the size of Earth. So maybe they’re incarnated at a certain rate, that is, so many infants within a certain time. These are raised to adulthood, and then they become the nurses, the teachers, the foster parents of more infants. And so on. Or maybe it’s all done at once on more than one planet. I doubt that, though. The energy involved in planet reforming would be enormous. On the other hand, they may use planets which don’t have to be reformed.”

“Keep dealing,” London said. “If you don’t people’ll wonder what the hell we’re talking about!”

“I can open,” Mix said.

They were silent except for announcing their play for a minute. Then Frigate said, “If what I propose were true, well, let me put it this way. Ah…I was the eldest child in my family. The oldest alive, that is. My older brother, James, died at one. I was born six months later. Now…ah…he would be resurrected. And when he grew up, he became an agent for the Ethicals.

“He was planted here on Resurrection Day. He was assigned to watch Burton. Why would he be assigned? Because the Ethicals knew that, somehow, Burton had awakened in that vast chamber of floating bodies before Resurrection Day, before he was supposed to awake. They must have figured that it was no accident, that…uh…somebody awakened him on purpose. Well, we don’t have to speculate on that. We know that’s what the Council of Ethicals told Burton when they caught him. He was supposed to have his memory of that erased, but X arranged it so that he kept it.

“Anyway, the Ethicals were suspicious. So they put this pseudo-Frigate, well, actually he’s a real Frigate, on Dick’s trail. My brother was to keep an eye on him and report anything suspicious. But like everybody in The Valley, he got caught with his kilt down.”

“I’ll take two cards,” Burton said. “That’s very intriguing, Peter. It seems a wild concept, but it may just be true. However, if your brother was an agent, then what was Monat the Tau Cetan or Arcturan or whatever he is? Certainly, he’d have to be an agent, a strange one true, but nevertheless…”

“Perhaps he’s an Ethical!” Alice said.

Burton, who didn’t like to be interrupted, glared.

“I was just going to say that. But if Monat is an agent, I don’t think he’s an Ethical, otherwise he’d have been in the Council…no, by Allah, he wouldn’t have been! If I’d have seen him there, I’d have known that he was one of ’em! And he wouldn’t have been able to stay with me. Though why he stuck to me, I don’t know.

“However, Monat’s presence means that there is more than one species…genus…zoological family…extra-Terrestrials…involved in this.”

“I’ll take one card,” Frigate said. “As I was about to say…”

“Pardon me,” London said. “But how could Peter’s brother know about Burton?”

“I suppose that the children are educated, probably better than they’d be on Earth. And maybe, just maybe, my brother knew I was his brother. How do we know what incredibly vast and minute knowledge the Ethicals have? Look at the photo of Burton which he found in the kilt of that agent, Agneau. It was taken when Dick was twenty-eight and a subaltern in the East India Army. Doesn’t that prove that the Ethicals were on Earth in 1848? Who knows how long they’ve been walking the streets of Earth taking data? Don’t ask me for what purpose.”

“Why would James take your name?” Nur said.

“Well, I was a rabid Burton fan. I even wrote a novel about him. Maybe it pleased James’ sense of humor. I have one. My whole family is known for…an odd sense of humor. And so it struck him funny to be his brother, to pretend to be the Peter that he never knew. Maybe he could vicariously relive the life he’d been denied on Earth. Maybe he thought that if he ran into someone who’d known the Frigate family, he could pass himself off as me. Maybe all these reasons are true. Whatever…I’m sure he punched out Sharkko, the crooked publisher, to avenge me, which shows that he knew much about my life on Earth.”

Alice said, “But what about the story that agent, Spruce, told? He said he was from the seventy-second century A.D., and he said something about a chronoscope, something which could look back in time.”

“Spruce may have been lying,” Burton said.

“Anyway,” Frigate said, “I don’t believe there could be a chronoscope or such a thing as time-travel in any form. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that. We’re all time-traveling. Forward, the only way there is.”

“What nobody has said,” Nur said, “is that somebody had to resurrect the children. It may or may not have been people from the seventy-second century. More probably, it was Monat’s people who did it. Note also that it was Monat who did most of the questioning of Spruce. He may have been, in a sense, coaching Spruce.”

“Why?” Alice said.

That was one question nobody could answer unless the Ethical’s story was true. By now, his recruits thought that he might be as big a liar as his colleagues.

Nur closed that round with the speculation that the agents who’d gotten on the boat early in its voyage had told their post-1983 story and were stuck with it. Agents who’d gotten on later knew that the story might be suspect, so they’d avoided it. For instance, the huge Gaul named Megalosos—his name meant “Great”—claimed that he’d lived about Caesar’s time. His saying so, however, didn’t make it so. It seems he found Podebrad congenial, though how anyone could was beyond Nur. He could be an agent, too.

Section 4

On the Not For Hire: New Recruits and Clemens’ Nightmares

13

De Marbot’s eyes proved that the resurrection machinery did not always work perfectly.

Jean Baptiste Antoine Marcelin, Baron de Marbot, had been born in 1782 with brown eyes. Not until long after Resurrection Day did he find out that they had changed color. That was when a woman called him Blue-eyes.

“Sacre bleu! Is it true?”

He hastened to borrow a mica mirror which had recently been brought in a trading boat—mica was rare—and he saw his face for the first time in ten years. It was a merry face with its roundness, its snub nose, its ever-ready smile, its twinkling eyes. Not at all unhandsome.

But the eyes were a light blue.

“Merde!”

Then he reverted to Esperanto.

“If I ever get within sword range of the abominable abominations who did this to me…!”

He returned fuming to the woman who lived with him, and he repeated his threat.

“But you don’t have a sword,” she said.

“Must you take me so literally? Never mind. I will get one someday; there must be iron somewhere in this stony planet.”

That night he dreamed of a giant bird with rusty feathers and vulture’s beak which ate rocks and the droppings of which were steel pellets. But there were no birds at all on this world, and if there had been there would have been no oiseau de fer.

Now he had metal weapons, a sabre, a cutlass, an épée, a stiletto, a long knife, an ax, a spear, pistols, and a rifle. He was the brigadier general of the marines, and he was very ambitious to be full general. But he loathed politics, and he had neither interest nor ability in the dishonorable game of intrigue. Besides, only by the death of Ely S. Parker could he be general of the marines of the Not For Hire, and that would have saddened him. He loved the jolly Seneca Indian.

Almost all the postpaleolithics aboard were over six feet, some of them huge. The paleolithics had small men among them, but these, with their massive bones and muscles, did not have to be so tall. De Marbot was the pygmy among them, only five feet four inches high, but Sam Clemens liked him and admired his feistiness and courage. Sam also liked to hear stories of de Marbot’s campaigns and to have people under him who had once been generals, admirals, and statesmen. “Humility is good for them, builds their character,” Sam said. “The Frenchy is a first-rate commander, and it amuses me to see him ordering those big apes around.”

De Marbot was certainly experienced and capable. After joining the republican army of France when he was seventeen, he rose rapidly in rank to aide-de-camp to Marshal Augereau, commanding the VII Corps in the war against Prussia and Russia from 1806 to 1807. He fought under Lannes and Masséna in the Peninsular War, and he’d gone through the Russian campaign in the War of 1812 and the terrible retreat from Moscow, and, among others, the German campaign in 1813. He’d been wounded eleven times, severely at Hanau and Leipzig. When Napoleon returned from his exile at Elba, he promoted de Marbot to general of brigade, and de Marbot was wounded at the bloody battle of Waterloo. De Marbot was exiled by the Bourbon king, but he returned to his native land in 1817. After serving under the July monarchy at the siege of Antwerp, he was rewarded some years later by being made a lieutenant general. From 1835 to 1840, he was in the Algerian expeditions, and at the age of sixty was wounded for the last time. He retired after the fall of King Louis Philippe in 1848. He wrote his memoirs, which so delighted Arthur Conan Doyle that he used him as the basis of his fictional character, Brigadier Gerard. The main difference between the literary and the real-life character was that de Marbot was intelligent and perceptive, whereas Gerard, though gallant, was not very bright.

When he was seventy-two years old, the brave soldier of Napoleon died in bed in Paris.

It was a measure of Clemens’ affection for him that he had told him about the Mysterious Stranger, the renegade Ethical.

Today the Riverboat was docked while Clemens interviewed volunteers for a post aboard. The hideous events after the right-bank stones had failed were two months behind the crew, and The River was now free of the stench and jampack of rotting bodies.

De Marbot, clad in a duraluminum helmet topped by a roach of glue-stiffened fish-leather strips and a duraluminum cuirass, looking like the popular conception of a Trojan warrior, walked up and down the long line of candidates. His job was to pre-interview them. In this way, he could sometimes eliminate the unfit and so save his captain time and work.

Near the middle of the line he saw four men who seemed to know each other well. He stopped by the first, a tall muscular dark man with huge hands. His color and very wavy hair could only mean that he was a quadroon, and he was.

At de Marbot’s polite inquiry, he said that his name was Thomas Million Turpin. He’d been born in Georgia sometime around 1873—he wasn’t sure just when—but his parents had moved to St. Louis, Missouri, when he was young. His father operated the Silver Dollar, a tavern in the red-light district. In his youth Tom and his brother Charles had purchased a share of the Big Onion Mine near Searchlight, Nebraska, and worked it, but, failing to find gold after two years, had roamed the west for a while before returning to St. Louis.

Turpin had settled down in the District and worked as a bouncer and piano player, among other things. By 1899 he was the most important man in the area, controlling the music, liquor, and gambling. His Rosebud Café, the center of his little empire, was famous throughout the nation. Downstairs it was a tavern-restaurant and upstairs a “hotel,” a whorehouse.

Turpin, however, was more than a big-time political boss. He was, according to his own statement, a great piano player, though he admitted he wasn’t quite as good as Louis Chauvin. A frontiersman in syncopated music, he’d been known as the father of ragtime in St. Louis, and his “Harlem Rag,” published in 1897, was the first ragtime piece published by a Negro. He’d written the famous “St. Louis Rag” for the opening of the world fair there, but that had been postponed. He died in 1922, and since he’d been on the Riverworld had wandered up and down.

“I hear there’s a piano on your boat,” he said, grinning. “I’d sure like to get my hands on them ivories.”

“There are ten pianos,” de Marbot said. “Here. Take this.”

He handed Turpin a wand of wood six inches long and incised with the initials: M.T.

“When you get to the table, give this to the captain.”

Sam would be happy. He loved ragtime, and he once had said that he couldn’t get enough players of popular music on his boat. Moreover, Turpin looked big and capable. He had to be to have bossed the rough black red-light district.

The man behind him was a wild-looking Chinese named Tai-Peng. He was about five feet ten inches tall and had large glowing green eyes and a demonic face. His black hair hung to his waist, and three irontree blooms were stuck in its crown. He claimed in a loud shrill voice to have been a great swordsman, lover, and poet in his time, which was that of the T’ang dynasty in the eighth century A.D.

“I was one of the six Idlers of the Bamboo Stream and also of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. I can compose poetry on the spot in my native Turkish, in Chinese, in Korean, in English, in French, and in Esperanto. When it comes to swordplay, I am as quick as a hummingbird and as deadly as a viper.”

De Marbot laughed and said he didn’t choose the recruits. But he gave the Chinese a wand and moved on to the man behind Tai-Peng.

This was a short man, though still taller than de Marbot, dark-skinned, black-eyed, fat, and with a bulging Buddha’s belly. His eyelids were slightly epicanthic, and his nose was aquiline. His clefted chin was massive. He, he said, was Ah Qaaq, and he came from the eastern coast of a land which de Marbot would call Mexico. His people had called the area in which they lived the Land of Rain. He didn’t know exactly when he lived according to the Christian calendar, but from his talks with a scholarly man it must have been around 100 B.C. His native tongue was Mayan; he was a citizen of the people that later cultures had called Olmec.

“Ah, yes,” de Marbot said. “I have heard talk of the Olmecs. We have some very learned men at the captain’s table.”

De Marbot understood that the “Olmecs” had founded the first civilization in Mesoamerica and that all others in pre-Columbian times had derived from it, the later Mayas, the Toltecs, the Aztecs, what have you. The man, if he was an ancient Mayan, did not have the artificially flattened head and the squint-eyes so favored by that people. But on reflection de Marbot realized that these, of course, would have been rectified by the Ethicals.

“You’re that rarity, a fat man,” de Marbot said. “We of the Not For Hire lead an extremely active life, no room for indolents and overeaters, and we also require that the candidate have something special to qualify him.”

Ah Qaaq said in a high voice, though not as high as the Chinese’s, “The fat cat may look soft, but it is very strong and very quick. Let me show you.”

He took the handle of his flint-headed ax, a piece of oak eighteen inches long and two inches thick, and he snapped it as if it were a sugar-stick. Then he picked up the head and let the Frenchman heft it.

“About ten pounds, that one, I’d say,” de Marbot said.

“Watch!”

Ah Qaaq took the ax head and hurled it as if it were a baseball. Eyes wide, de Marbot watched it soar high and far before it struck the grass.

“Mon Dieu! No one but the mighty Joe Miller could throw that as far! I congratulate you, sinjoro. Here. Take this.”

“I am also an excellent archer and axman,” Ah Qaaq said quietly. “You won’t regret taking me aboard.”

The man behind the Olmec was exactly his height and had a squat Herculean physique. He even looked like Ah Qaaq with his eaglish nose and rounded clefted chin. But he had no fat, and though he was almost as dark, he was no Amerindian. His name, he said, was Gilgamesh.

“I have arm-wrestled Ah Qaaq,” Gilgamesh said. “Neither of us can defeat the other. I am also a great axman and archer.”

“Very good! Well, my captain will be pleased with your tales of Sumeria, of which I’m sure you have plenty. And he will also be pleased to have a king and a god aboard. Kings he’s met, though he’s not been too happy with most of them. Gods, well, that’s a different story. The captain has never met a god before! Here. Take this!”

He moved on, and when he was out of sight and earshot of the Sumerian—if he was one—laughed until he rolled on the grass. After a while he got up, wiped off the tears, and resumed his interviewing.

The four were accepted with six others. When they marched up the gangplank onto the boiler deck, they saw Monat the extra-Terrestrial standing by the railing, his keen eyes sweeping over them. They were startled, but de Marbot told them to go on. He would explain all about the strange creature later on.

The recruits did not meet Monat that evening as planned. Two women quarreled about a man and started shooting at each other. Before the argument was settled, one woman was badly wounded and the other had jumped off the boat, her grail in one hand and a box of possessions in the other. The man decided to leave also since he preferred the woman who’d done the shooting. The boat was stopped, and he was let off. Sam was so upset that he called off the introductions in the grand salon until the next day.

Sometime that night, Monat Grrautut disappeared.

No one had heard a cry. No one had seen anything suspicious. The only clue was a bloodstain on the aft railing of the A deck promenade, and that might have been an oversight by the cleanup squads after the battles over the left-bank stones.

Clemens suspected that one of the four new recruits might have been responsible. These, however, claimed steadfastly that they were asleep in their bunks, and no one had any evidence to refute them.

While Sam pondered the case and wished he had Sherlock Holmes aboard, the Not For Hire forged ahead. Three days after Monat’s disappearance, Cyrano de Bergerac flagged the boat down. Sam cursed when he saw him. He’d hoped that they would pass Cyrano during the night, but there he was, and at least fifty of the crew had also seen him.

The Frenchman came aboard smiling and quickly kissing his male friends on the cheeks and his female friends on the mouth lingeringly. When he came into the control room, he cried, “Captain! What a tale I have!”

Clemens thought sourly that that could be said of any dog.

14

A man and a woman lay in bed. Their skins touched; their dreams were lightyears apart.

Sam Clemens was dreaming again of that day when he had killed Erik Bloodaxe. Rather, when he had set in motion other men, one of whom had put a spear into the Norseman’s belly.

Sam had wanted the buried meteorite for its nickel-steel. Without it, he could not build the great paddle-wheeled boat he envisaged so often. Now, in this dream, he talked to Lothar von Richthofen of what must be done. Joe Miller was not present, having been treacherously captured by the man who had once been king of England. An invading fleet was sailing from downRiver to seize the grave of the fallen star. King John was upRiver, readying a fleet to sail down and grab the site of the buried treasure of nickel-steel. Sam’s army was between the two and weaker than either one. His would be ground to meal between the millstones. There was no chance for victory except by making an alliance with John. Also, if Joe Miller was to get out alive, Sam would have to make a deal with his captor, King John.

But Erik Bloodaxe, Sam’s partner, had refused to consider the alliance. Besides, Erik hated Joe Miller, who was the only human he had ever feared—if you could call Joe a human. Bloodaxe said that his men and Sam’s would make a stand and would smash the two invaders in a glorious victory. This was foolish boasting, though the Norseman may have believed what he said.

Erik Bloodaxe was the son of Harald Haarfager (Harold Finehair), the Norwegian who’d united, for the first time, all of Norway and whose conquests had led to mass migrations to England and to Iceland. When Harald died circa A.D. 918, Erik became king. But Erik wasn’t popular. Even in a day of harsh and cruel monarchs, he led the pack. His half-brother, Haakon, then fifteen years old, had been reared in the court of King Athelstan of England since he was one year old. Supported by English troops, he raised a Norwegian army against his brother. Erik fled to Northumbria in England, where he was given its kingship by Athelstan, but he didn’t last long. According to the Norse chroniclers, he died in A.D. 954 in southern England while making a great raid there. The old English tradition had it that he was expelled from Northumbria and was killed during a battle at Stanmore.

Erik had told Clemens that the former account was the true one.

Clemens had joined the Norseman because Erik owned a very rare steel ax and was looking for the source of ore from which the ax had been made. Clemens hoped that there’d be enough ore to make a large paddle-wheeled steamboat in which he could go to the headwaters of The River. Erik didn’t think much of Sam but took him in as a member of his crew because of Joe Miller. Erik didn’t like Joe, but he knew that the titanthrop was a very valuable asset in battle. And then Joe had been made a hostage by King John. Desperate, fearful that Joe would be killed by King John and that he would lose the meteorite, Sam had discussed the situation with Lothar, the younger brother of “The Red Baron.” He had made his proposal. They should kill Bloodaxe and his Viking bodyguards. After that, they could talk to John, who would see the advantage of teaming up with Clemens’ force. Together, the two might be a match for von Radowitz’ forces from downRiver.

Sam further strengthened his rationalizations with the thought that Bloodaxe probably intended to kill him after their enemies had been defeated. A showdown was inevitable.

Lothar von Richthofen agreed. It wasn’t treachery if you attacked a traitor. Besides, it was the only logical thing to do. If Bloodaxe was a true friend, then the case would be different. But the Norseman was as trustworthy as a rattlesnake with a toothache.

And so the foul deed had been done.

Yet, even though it was justified by all counts, the deed was foul. Sam had never gotten over his guilt. After all, he could have walked away from the meteorite, given up his dream.

With Lothar and some picked men, he had approached the hut in which Bloodaxe and a woman were humping away. The fight lasted a minute, the Norse guards being taken by surprise by a larger force. The Viking king, naked, holding his great ax, had dashed out. Lothar had pinned him to the wall of the hut with the spear.

Sam had been about to vomit, but he thought that at least the deed was all over. Then a hand had clamped on his ankle, causing him almost to faint with terror. He had looked down, and there was the dying Bloodaxe, holding him with a grip like an eagle’s.

“Bikkja!” the Norseman had said, weakly but clearly.

That meant bitch, a word he often used to indicate his contempt for Clemens, whom he considered effeminate. “Droppings of Ratatosk,” he continued. In other words, crap of the giant squirrel, Ratatosk, that raced around the branches of the world tree, Yggdrasill, the cosmic ash which bound together earth, the abode of the gods, and hell.

And then Bloodaxe had prophesied, saying that Clemens would build his great boat. He would pilot it up The River. But its building and its voyage would be grief and sorrow for Clemens with little of the joy he anticipated. And when Clemens at long last neared the headwaters of The River, he would find that Bloodaxe would be waiting for him.

Sam remembered clearly the dying man’s speech. It came up now again from the shadowy figure that held his foot from a deep narrow hole in the ground. Eyes in the vague black mass in the earth burned into Clemens’.

“I will find you! I will be waiting on a distant boat, and I will kill you. And you will never get to the end of The River nor storm the gates of Valhalla!”

Even when the hand had slackened, Sam had been too cold with horror to move away. Death rattled in the throat of the sinister shadow, and still Sam was frozen on the outside, though vibrating inside.

“I wait!”

Those were Erik Bloodaxe’s last words, echoing yet in his dreams down the years.

Sam had scoffed at the prophecy—later on. No one could see into the future. That was superstitious rot. Bloodaxe might be upRiver, but, if he was, it was due to chance alone. There was a fifty-fifty probability that he was downRiver. Moreover, even if the Norseman was waiting for revenge, he wasn’t likely to have an opportunity to wreak it. The boat only made three stops a day, except for some occasional shore leaves of a week or so. Very probably Bloodaxe would be standing on the bank when the Riverboat traveled by. Run or paddle or sail though he might, Erik could not catch up with the swift vessel.

Believing this did not, however, keep Bloodaxe out of Sam’s nightmares. Perhaps this was because, deep within him, Sam knew that he was guilty of murder. Therefore, he should be punished.

In one of those sudden shifts of scene the Supervisor of Dreams so slickly contrives, Sam found himself in a hut. It was night, and rain and lightning and thunder were like a cat-o’-nine-tails against the back of darkness. The flashes in the sky faintly illumined the interior of the hut. A shadowy figure squatted near him. The figure was cloaked; a huge dome on its shoulders covered its head.

“What’s the occasion for this unexpected visit?” Sam said, repeating the question he’d asked during the Mysterious Stranger’s second visit.

“The Sphinx and I are playing draw poker,” the Stranger said. “Would you like to sit in?”

Sam awoke. The luminous digits of the chronometer on the wall across the cabin read 03:33. What I tell you three times is true. Gwenafra, beside him, groaned. She muttered something about “Richard.” Was she dreaming about Richard Burton? Though she had only been about seven when she had known him, and had been with him for only a year, she still talked of him. Her child’s love for him had survived.

There was no sound now except for Gwenafra’s breathing and the far-off chuff-chuff of the great paddle wheels. 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 hemi sphere, 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 saber-tooth 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 beaten 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 grinned and then glared at Sam and jerked at the levers and steered his machine this way and that, trying to cut off Sam’s attempts to escape.

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 beginning to move again. He couldn’t see it, but he knew that it was creeping up on him. Beyond Rogers, through the door, Sam could see a beautiful garden. A lion and a lamb sat side by side, and Livy was standing just behind them. She smiled at him. She wore nothing, and she was holding a huge parasol over her head. Faces peeked from behind flowers and bushes. One of them was Susy, his favorite daughter. But what was she doing? Something he knew he wouldn’t like. Was that a man’s bare foot sticking out from the bush behind which Susy was hiding?

“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 paddle wheeler Pennsylvania blew up, lingering for six excruciatingly painful days in the makeshift hospital in Memphis. Sam had been with him, had suffered with him, and then had seen him carried off to the room where the undoubtedly dying were taken.

Resurrection has 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 Hannibal jail caught fire? Sam had been ten then, had been awakened out of sleep by the fire bells. He had run down to the jail and seen the man, clinging to the bars, screaming, blackly silhouetted against the bright red flames. The town marshal could not be found, and he had the only keys to the cell door. A group had tried to batter the oaken doors down and had failed.

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 granddaughter? 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

The fellow had a very good memory, but his interest in Mark Twain had helped him to record the heading in his mind.

“She was fifty-five years old and was found dead late Sunday in a motel room at 20-something-or-other North Highland Avenue. Her room was strewn with bottles of pills and liquor. There wasn’t any note and an autopsy was ordered to find out the exact cause of her death. I never saw the report.

“She’d died across the street from her luxurious three-bedroom penthouse in the Highland Towers. Her friends said she often checked in there for the weekend when she was tired of being alone. The paper said she’d been alone most of her life. She’d used the name of Clemens after she divorced an artist by the name of Rutgers. She had been married to him briefly in, ah, 1935, I think. The paper said she was the daughter of Clara Grabrilowitsch, your only daughter. It meant that she was your only surviving daughter. Clara married a Jacques Samoussoud after her first husband died. In 1935, I think. She was a devout Christian Scientist, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know!” Sam said.

His informant, knowing that Sam loathed Christian Science, that he had once written a defamatory book about Mary Baker Eddy, had grinned.

“Do you suppose she was getting back at you?”

“Spare me your psychological analyses,” Sam had said. “Clara worshipped me. All my children did.”

“Anyway, Clara died in 1962, not long after she’d authorized publication of your unpublished Letters to the Earth.”

“That was printed?” Sam said. “What was the reaction?”

“It sold well. But it was pretty mild stuff, you know. No one was outraged or thought it was blasphemous. Oh, yes, your 1601, uncensored, was also printed. When I was young, it could be obtained only through private presses. But by the late 1960s, it was sold to the general public.”

Sam had shaken his head. “You mean children could buy it?”

“No, but a lot of them read it.”

“How things must’ve changed!”

“Anything, well, almost anything, went. Let’s see. The article said that your granddaughter was an amateur artist, singer, and actress. She was also a shutterbug—a person who liked to take photographs—she took dozens of pictures every week of friends, bartenders, and waiters. Even strangers on the street.

“She was writing an autobiography, A Life Alone, which title tells you a lot about her. Poor thing. Her friends said the book was ‘generally confused’ but parts of it showed some of your genius.”

“I always said that Livy and I were too high-strung to have children.”

“Well, she wasn’t suffering from lack of money. She inherited some trust funds from her mother, about $800,000, I believe. Money from the sale of your books. When she died, she was worth one and a half million dollars. Yet, she was unhappy and lonely.

“Oh, yes. Her body was taken to Elmira, New York…for burial in a family plot near the famed grandfather whose name she bore.”

“I can’t be blamed for her character,” Sam had said. “Clara and Ossip can take credit for that.”

The informant shrugged and said, “You and your wife formed the characters of your children, Clara included.”

“Yes, but my character was formed by my parents. And theirs by theirs,” Sam had said. “Do we go back to Adam and Eve to fix the responsibility? No, because God formed their temperaments when he created them. There is but one being who bears the ultimate responsibility.”

“I’m a free-willer myself,” the man had said.

“Listen,” Sam had said. “When the first living atom found itself afloat on the great Laurentian sea, the first act of that first atom led to the second act of that first atom, and so on down through the succeeding ages of all life until, if the steps could be traced, it would be shown that the first act of that first atom has led inevitably to the act of my standing in my kilt at this instant, talking to you. That’s from my What Is Man? slightly paraphrased. What do you think of that?”

“It’s bullshit.”

“You say that because you have been determined to do so. You could not have said anything else.”

“You’re a sorry case, Mr. Clemens, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“I do. But you can’t help saying that. Listen, what was your profession?”

The man looked surprised. “What’s that got to do with it? I was a realtor. I was also on the school board for many years.”

“Let me quote myself again,” Sam had said. “In the first place, God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.”

Sam chuckled now at the memory of the man’s expression.

He sat up. Gwen slept on. He turned on the nightlight and saw that she was smiling slightly. She looked innocent, childlike, yet the full lips and the full curves of the breast, almost entirely exposed, excited him. He reached out to awake her but changed his mind. Instead, he put on his kilt and a cloth for a cape and his visored high-peaked fish-leather cap. He picked up a cigar and left the room closing the door softly. The corridor was warm and bright. At the far end, the door was locked; two armed guards stood by it. Two also stood at the near end by the elevator doors. He lit a cigar and walked toward the elevator. He chatted for a minute with the guards and then entered the cage.

He punched the P button. The doors slid shut, but not before he saw a guard starting to phone to the pilothouse that La Bosso (The Boss) was coming up. The cage rose from the D or hangar deck, where the officers’ quarters were, through the two narrow round rooms below the pilothouse, and then to the top chamber. There was a brief wait while the third-watch exec checked out the cage with closed-circuit TV. Then the doors slid open, and Sam entered the pilothouse or control room.

“It’s all right, boys,” he said. “Just me, enjoying insomnia.”

There were three others there. The night pilot, smoking a big cigar, eyeing the dials lackadaisically. He was Akande Erin, a massive Dahomeyan who had spent thirty years operating a jungle riverboat. The most outrageous liar Sam had ever known, and he had met the world’s best. Third-mate Calvin Cregar, a Scot who had put in forty years on an Australian coastal steamer. Ensign Diego Santiago of the marines, a seventeenth-century Venezuelan.

“Just came to look around,” Sam said. “Carry on.”

The sky was unclouded, blazing as if that great arsonist, God, had set it afire. The Valley was broad here, and the light fell softly, showing dimly the buildings and boats on both banks. Beyond them was a darker darkness. A few sentinel fires made eyes in the night. Otherwise, the world seemed asleep. The hills rose dark with trees, the giant irontrees, a thousand feet high, spiring up from the others. Beyond, the mountains loomed blackly. Faint starlight sparked on the waves.

Sam went through the door to stand on the port walk that ringed the exterior of the pilothouse. The wind was cool but not yet cold. It ran fingers through his bushy hair. Standing on the deck, he felt like a living part, an organ, of the vessel. It was spanking along, paddle wheels churning, its flags flapping, brave as a tiger, huge and sleek as a sperm whale, beautiful as a woman, heading always against the current, its goal the Axis Mundi, the Navel of the World, the dark tower. He felt roots grow from his feet, tendrils that spread through the hull, extended from the hull, dropped through the black waters, touched by the monsters of the deep, plunged into the muck three miles below, grew laterally up through the earth, spread out, shooting with the speed of thought, growing vines which erupted from the earth, stabbed into the flesh of every living human being on this world, spiraled upward through the roofs of the huts, rocketed toward the skies, veined space with the shoots which wrapped themselves around every planet on which lived animal life and sentients, enveloped and penetrated these, and then shot exploring tentacles toward the blackness where no matter was, where only God existed.

In that moment, Sam Clemens was, if not one with the universe, at least integral with it. And for a moment he believed in God.

And at that moment Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain inhabited the same flesh, merged, became one.

Then the thrilling vision exploded, contracted, dwindled, shot back into him.

He laughed. For several seconds he had known an ecstasy that surpassed even sexual intercourse, up to that moment the supreme feeling in his, and humanity’s, lot, disappointing as it often was.

Now he was within himself again, and the universe was outside.

He returned to the control room. Erin, the black pilot, looking up at him, said, “You have been visited by the spirits.”

“Do I look that peculiar?” Sam said. “Yes, I have.”

“What did they say?”

“That I am nothing and everything. I once heard the village idiot say the same thing.”

Section 5

Burton’s Soliloquy

15

Late at night, while the exceptionally thick and high fog shrouded even the pilothouse, Burton prowled.

Unable to sleep, he roamed here and there with no place to go in mind—except that of getting away from himself.

“Damn me! Always trying to outrun my own self! If I had the wits of a cow, I’d stay and wrestle with him. But he can outrun, outwrestle me, the Jacob to my angel. Yet…I am Jacob also. I have a broken cog, not a broken thigh, I am an automaton Jacob, a mechanical angel, a robot devil. The ladder to heaven still leans against its window, but I can’t find it again.

“Destiny is happenchance. No, not that. I make my own. Not I, though. That thing which drives me, the devil that rides me. It waits grinning in the dark corner, and when I’ve reached my hand out to grab the prize, it leaps out and snatches it away from me.

“My ungovernable temper. The thing that cheats me and laughs and gibbers and runs away to hide and to emerge another day.

“Ah, Richard Francis Burton, Ruffian Dick, Nigger Dick, as they used to call me in India. They! The mediocrities, the robots running on the tracks of Victoria’s railroad…they had no interest in the native except to lay the women and eat good food and drink good drink and make a fortune if they could. They couldn’t even speak the native language after thirty years in the greatest gem in the queen’s crown. A gem, hah! A stinking pesthole! Cholera and its sisters! The black plague and its brothers! Hindus and Moslems laughing behind pukka Sahib’s back! The English couldn’t even fuck well. The women laughed at them and went to their black lovers for satisfaction after Sahib had gone home.

“I warned the government two years before it happened, the Sepoy Mutiny, and they laughed at me! Me, the only man in India who knew the Hindu, the Moslem!”

He paused on the top landing of the grand staircase. Light blazed out, and the sound of revelry tore through the mists without moving them. No curtain there to be moved by a breath.

“Arrgh! Damn them! They laugh and flirt, and doom waits for them. The world is falling apart. The rider on the black camel waits for them around the next bend of The River. Fools! And I, a fool also.

“And on this Narrboot, this great vessel of fools, men and women sleep who in their waking hours plot against me, plot against all natives of Earth. No. We’re all native to this universe. Citizens of the cosmos. I spit over the railing. Into the mists. The River flows below. It receives that part of me which will never return except in another form of water. H_2O. Hell doubled over. That’s a strange thought. But aren’t all thoughts strangers? Don’t they drift along like bottles enclosing messages cast away by that Great Castaway into the sea? And if they chance to lodge in the mind, my mind, I think that I originated them. Or is there a magnetism between certain souls and certain thoughts, and only those with the peculiar field of the thinkers are drawn to the thinkers? And then the individual reshapes them to fit his own character and thinks proudly—if he thinks at all in any sense more than a cow does—that he originated them? Flotsam and jetsam, my thoughts, and I the reef.

“Podebrad! What are you dreaming of? That tower? Your home? Or are you a secret one or just a Czech engineer? Or both?

“Fourteen years I’ve been on this Riverboat, and the boat has been driving its paddle wheels upRiver for thirty-three. Now I’m captain of the marines of that exalted bastard and regal asshole, King John. Living proof that I can govern my temper.

“Another year and we arrive at Virolando. There the Rex stops for a while, and we talk to La Viro, La Fondinto, the pope of the poopery of the Church of the Second Chance. Second chance, my sainted aunt’s arse! Those who gave it to us don’t have a chance now. Caught in their own trap! Hoisted by their own petard, which is French for ‘little fart.’ As Mix says, we don’t have the chance of a fart in a windstorm.

“Out there on the banks. The sleeping billions. Where is Edward, my beloved brother? A brilliant man, and that gang of thugs beat his brains in, and he never spoke another word for forty years. You shouldn’t have gone tiger hunting that day, Edward. The tiger was the Hindu who saw his chance to beat and rob a hated Englishman. Though they’d been doing it to their own people, too.

“But does it matter now, Edward? You’ve had your terrible injury healed, and you’ve been talking as of yore. Perhaps not now, though. Lazarus! Your body rots. No Jesus for you. No ‘Arise!’

“And mother! Where is she! The silly woman who talked my grandfather into willing her vicious brother, his son, a good part of his fortune. Grandpa changed his mind and was on his way to see his solicitor to arrange that I get that money. And he dropped dead before he got to the solicitor, and my uncle threw the fortune away in French gambling halls. And so I could not buy myself a decent commission in the regular army, and I could not finance my explorations as they should have been and so I never became what I should have been.

“Speke! The unspeakable Speke! You cheated me out of finding the true source of the Nile, you incompetent sneak, you piece of dung from a sick camel! You sneaked back to England after promising you’d not announce our discoveries until I got there, and you lied about me. You paid; you put a bullet into yourself. Your conscience finally got to you. How I wept. I loved you, Speke, though I hated you. How I wept!

“But if I chance across you now—what? Would you run? Surely you’d not have the perverted courage to hold out your hand for me to shake. Judas! Would I kiss you as Jesus kissed the traitor? Judas! No, I’d kick your arse halfway up a mountain!

“Sickness, the iron talons of African disease, gripped me. But I’d have recovered, and I’d have discovered the headwaters of the Nile! Not Speke, not hyena, not jackal Speke! My apologies, Brother Hyena and Sister Jackal. You’re only animals and useful in the scheme of things. Speke wasn’t worthy to kiss your foul arseholes.

“But how I wept!

“The headwaters of the Nile. The headwaters of The River. Having failed to get to one, will I fail to get to the other?

“My mother never showed any of us, me, Edward, Maria, any affection. She might as well have been our governess. No. Our nannies showed us more love, gave us more time, than she did.

“A man is what his mother makes him.

“No! There is something in the soul that rises above the lack of love, that drives me on and on toward…what?

“Father, if I may call you that. No. Not father. Begetter. You wheezing selfish humorless hypochondriac. You forever self-exile and traveler. Where was our home? A dozen foreign lands. You went here and there seeking the health which you thought you didn’t have. And we dragged along in your wake. Ignorant women our nannies and drunken Irish clergymen our tutors. Wheeze away, damn you! But no more. You’ve been cured by the unknowns who made this world. Have you? Haven’t you found some excuse to cozen yourself into hypochondria? It’s your soul, not your lungs, that has asthma.

“By Lake Tanganyika, Ujiji, the sickness seized me in demon fingers. In my delirium I saw myself, mocking, gibing, jeering, leering at me. That other Burton which mocks at the world but mostly at me.

“It couldn’t stop me, though, I went on…no…not then. Speke went on, and he…he…hee, hee! I laugh, though it startles the revelers and wakes the sleeping. Laugh, Burton, laugh, you Pagliacci! That silly-arse Yank, Frigate, tells me that it was I who became known as the great explorer and your treachery became infamous. I, I, not you, you Unspeakable! I have been vindicated, not you.

“My misfortune began with my not being a Frenchman. I wouldn’t have had to fight against English prejudice, English rigidity, English stupidity. I…but I wasn’t born a Frenchman, though I am descended from a bastard of Louis XIV. The Sun-King. Blood will tell.

“What bloody nonsense! Burton blood, not the Sun-King’s, will tell.

“I traveled, restless-footed, everywhere. But Omne solum forti patria. Every region is a strong man’s home. It was I who was the first European to enter the holy and forbidden city of Harar and come alive out of that Ethiopian hellhole. It was I who made a pilgrimage as Mirza Abdulla Bushiri to Mecca and wrote the most famous, detailed, and true book about it and who could have been torn to pieces if I’d been found out. It was I who discovered Lake Tanganyika. It was I who wrote the first manual on the use of the bayonet for the British army. It was I…

“Why recount to myself these vain glories? It’s not what a man’s done that counts, it’s what he’s going to do.

“Ayesha! Ayesha! My Persian beauty, my first true love! I would’ve renounced the world, my British citizenship, I would have become a Persian and lived with you until I died. You were most foully murdered, Ayesha! I avenged you, I slew the poisoner with my own hands, choked the life from him and buried his body in the desert. Where are you, Ayesha?

“Somewhere. And if we met again—what? That ravening love is now a dead lion.

“Isabel. My wife. The woman…did I ever love her? Affection I had. Not the great love I had for Ayesha and still have for Alice. ‘Pay, pack, and follow’ I told her whenever I left for a journey, and she did so, as obediently and as uncomplaining as a slave. I was her hero, her god, she said, and she set herself a list of rules for the perfect wife. But when I became old and bitter, a neglected failure, she became my nurse, my keeper, my cager, my prison guard.

“What if I should see her again, this woman who said that she could never love another man on Earth or in Heaven? Not that this world is Heaven. What would I do, say, ‘Hello, Isabel. It’s been a long time’?

“No, I’d run like the veriest coward. Hide. Yet…

“And here’s the entrance to the engine room. Is Podebrad on duty tonight? What if he is? I cannot confront him until we get to the headwaters.

“There goes a figure, dim in the mists. Is it an agent of the Ethicals? Or X, the renegade, skulking in the fog? He is always here now, there then, as elusive as the concept of time and eternity, nothingness and somethingness.

“‘Who goes there?’ I should shout. But he—she—it is gone.

“While I was in that transition between sleeping and waking, between death and resurrection, I saw God. ‘You owe for the flesh,’ He said, that bearded old gentleman in the garments of 1890, and in another dream He said, ‘Pay up.’

“Pay what? What is the price?

“I didn’t ask for the flesh, I didn’t petition to be born. Flesh, life, should be gratis.

“I should have detained Him. I should have asked him if a man does have free will or are all his actions, his nonactions, too, determined. Written down in the world’s Bradshaw, so-and-so will arrive at such-a-place at 10:32 A.M. and will depart at 10:40 on track 12. If I am a train on His railway, then I am not responsible for anything I do. Evil and good are not my doing. In fact, there is no evil and good. Without free will, they don’t exist.

“But He won’t be detained. And if He were, would I understand his explanation of death and immortality, of determinism and indeterminism, of determinacy and indeterminacy?

“The human mind cannot grasp these. But if it can’t, it’s God’s fault—if there is a God.

“When I was surveying the Sind area in India, I became a Sufi, a Master Sufi. But watching them in the Sind and in Egypt and seeing them end by proclaiming themselves to be God, I concluded that extreme mysticism was closely allied to madness.

“Nur ed-Din el-Musafir, who is a Sufi, says that I do not understand. One, there are fake or deluded Sufis, degenerates of that great discipline. Two, when a Sufi says that he is God, he does not mean that literally. He is saying that he has become one with God, though not God.

“Great God! I will penetrate to His heart, to the heart of the Mystery and the mysteries. I am a living sword, but I have been attacking with my edge, not with my point. The point is the most deadly, not the edge. I will be from now on the point.

“Yet, if I’m to find my way through the magic labyrinth, I must have a thread to follow to the great beast that lives in its heart. Where is that thread? No Ariadne. I will be myself the thread and Ariadne and Theseus, just as…why didn’t I think of this before?—I am the labyrinth.

“Not quite true. What is? It’s always not quite. But in human, and divine, affairs, a near-hit is sometimes as good as a direct hit. The larger the exploding shell, the less it matters that it doesn’t strike the bull’s eye.

“Yet a sword is no good unless it’s well balanced. It has been said of me, I have the wide-reading Frigate for authority, that some have said that I was one in whom Nature ran riot, that I had not one but thirty splendid talents. But I had no sense of balance or of direction either. That I was an orchestra without a director, a fine ship with only one flaw: no compass. As I’ve said of myself, a blaze of light without focus.

“If I couldn’t do something first, I wouldn’t do it.

“That it’s the abnormal, the perverse, and the savage, in men, not the divine in their nature, that fascinate me.

“That, though I was deeply learned, I never understood that wisdom had little to do with knowledge and literature and nothing to do with learning.

“They were wrong! If they were once right, no more!”

Burton prowled on and on, looking for he knew not what. He passed down a dim corridor and paused by a door. Within should be Loghu, unless she was dancing in the grand salon, and Frigate. They were together again, having gone through two or three lovers in fourteen years. She had not been able to tolerate him for a long time, but then he’d won her over—though it might be the other Frigate whom she still loved—and now they shared the same quarters. Once more.

He went on, seeing a shadowy figure faintly outlined in the light over the exit. X? Another sufferer from insomnia? Himself?

He stood outside the texas and watched the guards pacing back and forth. Watchman, what of the night? Well, what of it?

On he walked. Where have you been? From walking to and fro, not over this giant world but on this pygmy cosmos of a Riverboat.

Alice was in his cabin again, having left him a little less than fourteen years ago and having returned twice. This time, they would be together forever. Perhaps. But he was glad that she was back.

He emerged on the landing deck and looked up at the dim light emanating from the control room. Its big clock boomed fourteen strokes. Two A.M.

Time for Burton to go back to bed and try to storm the citadel of sleep again.

He looked up at the stars, and, while doing so, a cold wind swept down from the north and cleared the upper deck of the mists—momentarily. Somewhere northward was the tower in the cold and gray mists. In it were, or had been, the Ethicals, the entities who thought they had a right to raise the dead without their permission.

Did they hold the keys to the mysteries? Not all mysteries, of course. The mystery of being itself, of creation, of space and infinity, time and eternity would never be solved.

Or would they?

Was there somewhere, in the tower or deep underground, a machine which converted the metaphysical into the physical? Man could handle the physical, and if he didn’t know the true nature of the beyond-matter, what of it? He didn’t know the true nature of electricity, either, but he had enslaved it for his own purposes.

He shook his fist at the north, and he went to bed.

Section 6

On the Not For Hire: The Thread of Reason

16

At first, Samuel Clemens had tended to avoid Cyrano de Bergerac as much as possible. The very perceptive Frenchman quickly detected that but seemed not to resent it. If he did, he was successfully hiding his reaction. He was always smiling and laughing, always polite but not cold. He acted as if Clemens liked him and had no reason not to.

After a while—several years—Sam began to warm up to the man who’d been Sam’s Terrestrial wife’s lover. They had much in common: a keen interest in people and in mechanical devices, a taste for literature, an abiding devotion to the study of history, a hatred for hypocrisy and self-righteousness, a loathing for the malevolent aspects of religions, and a deep agnosticism. Though Cyrano was not, like Sam, from Missouri, he shared with him a “show me” attitude.

Moreover, Cyrano was an adornment at any party but did not try to dominate the conversation.

So it was that one day Sam talked to his other self, Mark Twain, about his feelings for de Bergerac in the privacy of his suite. The result was that Sam now saw—though he’d always known deep within him—that he’d been very unfair to Cyrano. It wasn’t the fellow’s fault that Livy had fallen in love with him and had refused to leave him for her ex-husband after she’d found him. Nor, really, was it Livy’s fault. She could only do what her inborn temperament and predetermined circumstances forced her to do. And Sam had been acting as his inborn character, his “watermark,” and circumstances forced him to do. Now, as a result of another aspect of his character rising from the depths, plus the inevitable push of events, he had changed his attitude toward Cyrano. After all, he was a good fellow, and he’d learned to shower regularly, to keep his fingernails clean, and to quit urinating in corners at the end of corridors.

Whether Sam really believed that he was an automaton whose acts were programmed, Sam did not know himself. Sometimes, he thought that his belief in determinism was only an excuse to escape his guilt about certain matters. If this were true, then he was exercising free will in making up the explanation that he wasn’t responsible for anything, good or bad, that he did. On the other hand, one aspect of determinism was that it gave humans the illusion that they had free will.

In either case, Sam welcomed Cyrano into his company and forgave him for what really didn’t need forgiving.

So now, today, Cyrano was one of the group invited by Sam to talk about some puzzling features of what Sam called “The Case of X.” The others were Gwenafra (Sam’s cabinmate), Joe Miller, de Marbot, and John Johnston. The latter was huge, over six feet two and weighing 260 pounds without an ounce of excess fat. His head and chest were auburn-haired; he had extraordinarily long arms and hands that looked as large as the paws of a grizzly bear. The blue-gray eyes were often cold or dreamy but they could be warm enough when he was with trusted friends. Born about 1828 in New Jersey and of Scotch descent, he had gone to the West to trap the mountains in 1843. There he had become a legend even among the legendary mountain men, though it took some years before he became famous. When a wandering party of young unblooded Crow braves killed his Flathead Indian wife and unborn baby, Johnston swore a vendetta against the Crows. He killed so many of them that the Crows sent out twenty young men to track him down and kill him, and they were not to return to their tribe until the deed was done. One after the other got to him but were instead slain by Johnston. He cut out their livers and ate them raw, the blood dripping onto his red beard. It was these exploits that earned him the sobriquets of “Liver Eater” and “Crow Killer.” But the Crows were a fine tribe, dignified, honorable, and mighty warriors. So one day Johnston decided to call off the feud, and, having informed them of his decision, became their good friend. He was also a chief of the Shoshoni.

He died in 1900 at the Veterans’ Hospital in Los Angeles and was buried in the crowded cemetery there. But in the 1970s, a group who knew that he could never rest there, not the man who became vexed if his nearest neighbor was within fifty miles, had his bones taken to a mountainside in Colorado and reburied there.

“Liver Eating” Johnston had mentioned several times on the boat that he’d never been forced to kill a white man (while on Earth), not even a Frenchy. This remark had made de Marbot and Cyrano a little uneasy at first, but they had come to like and admire the huge mountaineer.

After they’d had a few drinks and some cigarettes and cigars and chatted idly, Sam brought up the subject he most wanted to talk about.

“I’ve been doing some thinking about the man who called himself Odysseus,” he said. “You remember what I said about him? He came to our help when we were battling von Radowitz, and it was his archery that killed off the general and his officers. He claimed to be the historical Odysseus, the real man to whom the legends and fairy tales were attached later and whose exploits furnished Homer with the materials for his Odyssey.”

“I never knew him,” Johnston said, “but I’ll take yer word fur it.”

“Yes. Well, he said that he also had been contacted by an Ethical and sent downRiver to help us. After the battle he hung around for a while, but when he went upRiver on a trading expedition, he disappeared. Dropped out of sight like he’d fallen through a trapdoor.

“What makes him particularly important is that he had a strange tale to tell about the Ethical. Now, the one that talked to me, X, the Mysterious Stranger, was a man. At least, his voice was certainly a male’s, though I suppose it could have been disguised. Anyway, Odysseus told me that his Ethical was a woman!”

Sam puffed out green smoke and looked at the brass arabesques on the ceiling as if they were hieroglyphs that held answers to his questions.

“Now, what could that mean?”

Gwenafra said, “That he was either telling the truth or lying.”

“Right! Give that pretty woman there a big cigar! Either there are two Ethicals who have become renegades or the self-named Odysseus was a liar. If a liar, then he would have to be my Ethical, X. Personally, I think he was mine, yours, too, Cyrano and John, and I think he was lying. Otherwise, why didn’t X tell us that there were two of his kind and that one was a woman? That would have been very important. I know he didn’t have much time to talk to us because the other Ethicals were hot on his trail, breathing down his neck. But surely that item of information was one he wouldn’t have neglected to impart.”

“Why would he lie?” de Marbot said.

“Because…” Here Sam pointed his cigar at the arabesques. “He knew that we might get caught by the other Ethicals. And they might get from us this false information. Then they’d be confused and even more alarmed. What? Two traitors in their midst? Holy smoke! And if they put us to some sort of lie detector, they’d see that we weren’t lying. After all, we believed what Odysseus told us. What X told us, I should say. It was just his way of confusing the issue still further! There! What do you think of that?”

There was a short silence, then Cyrano said, “But if that is true, we have seen the Ethical! And we know what he looks like!”

“Not necessarily true,” Gwenafra said. “He surely must have numerous aids for disguise.”

“Undoubtedly,” Cyrano said. “But can he change his height and his physique? Hair and eye color perhaps and some other things. But not…”

“I think we may take it that he’s short and has a very muscular body,” Clemens said. “But so have several billion other men. What we’ve done is to eliminate the possibility that there’s a female Ethical who’s also a renegade. At least, I believe so.”

“Mought be,” Johnston said, “that he was an agent who found out that we’d been contacted by X, and he was trying to confuse us.”

“I don’t think so,” Sam said. “If he was an agent who’d known that much, we’d have had the Ethicals on us faster than a wardman would sell his mother to gain a few votes. No. That Odysseus was Mr. X.”

“But,” Gwenafra said, “that…that takes us deeper than that. What about Gulbirra’s description of Barry Thorn? He resembled Odysseus in some respects. Could he have been X? And what about that so-called German, Stern, who tried to kill Firebrass? What was he? If he was an agent, he would’ve been Firebrass’ colleague. After all, we think Firebrass was an agent, and he was blown up by X so that he couldn’t get into the tower ahead of him. Firebrass lied to us when he told us he was one of X’s recruits. He…”

“No,” Cyrano said. “I mean, yes. He seems to have been an agent of the other Ethicals. But if he knew so much about us, why didn’t he inform the Ethicals and bring them down on our necks?”

“Because,” Sam said, “for some reason, he couldn’t tell the Ethicals. I think that was because about then the big troubles started in the tower. Why or how, I don’t know. But it seems to me that about the time Odysseus disappeared, rather, X vanished, that the whole project of the Ethicals went shebang. We didn’t notice it at the time, but it was shortly thereafter that the resurrections ceased. It wasn’t until the Not For Hire was some distance on its way that we began getting reports that the resurrections had stopped. When we were in Parolando, we noticed it but thought it was just a local phenomenon.”

“Hum,” Cyrano said. “I wonder if that Hermann Göring fellow, the missionary killed by Hacking’s men, was resurrected? He was a strange one, that.”

“He was a troublemaker, that one,” Sam said. “Anyway, maybe Firebrass did tell the Ethicals that he’d gotten hold of some of X’s recruits. But the Ethicals told him they wouldn’t do anything about it for a while. Firebrass was to learn all he could from us before they moved in. He would also tell them if he saw anybody who looked like X so they could jump him then and there. Who knows? But…I wonder if Firebrass planted any bugs on us so he’d know when X came to visit us again. Only, he never did.”

Cyrano said, “I believe that he, X, got stranded after he, as Odysseus, left us.”

“Then why didn’t he rejoin us as Odysseus?”

Cyrano shrugged.

“Because he missed the Not For Hire,” Sam snapped. “We went by him during the night. But he’d heard that Firebrass was building a dirigible to go straight to the tower. That would be even better for him than the Not For Hire. But as Odysseus, an ancient Hellene, he wouldn’t be qualified for a post on the airship. So he became Barry Thorn, a much-experienced Canadian aeronaut.”

“But I,” Cyrano said, “was of the seventeenth century, yet I was a pilot on the Parseval. And John de Greystock was of a much earlier time, yet he was made captain of the blimp.”

“Despite that,” Sam said, “X would have a much better chance to get on the Parseval if he had experience. Only…I wonder where he got it? Why would an Ethical know all about a dirigible?”

“If you live a very long time or are immortal, perhaps you learn everything about everything in order to pass the time,” Gwenafra said.

Section 7

Göring’s Past

17

Hermann Göring woke up sweating and groaning. “Ja, mein Führer! Ja, mein Führer! Ja, mein Führer! Ja, ja, ja!”

The screaming face faded. The black gunsmoke pouring in through the shattered windows and broken walls vanished. The windows and walls disappeared. The bass Russian artillery which had been counterpointing der Führer’s alto soprano became muted, then withdrew, roaring sullenly. The droning which had been a counter-counterpoint to the madman’s screech dwindled and died. That noise, he was vaguely aware, had been from the motors of the American and British bombers.

The darkness of the nightmare was succeeded by the Riverworld’s night.

It was comforting and peaceful, though. Hermann lay on his back on the bamboo bed and touched the warm arm of Kren. She stirred and muttered something. Perhaps she was talking to someone in her dreams. She would not be distressed or bewildered or horrified. Her dreams were always pleasant. She was a Riverchild, dead on Earth at or around the age of six. She remembered nothing of her native planet. Her earliest memory, and that was vague, was waking in this valley, her parents gone, everything she’d known gone.

Hermann warmed himself with the touch and with pleasant memories of their years together. Then he got up, dressed in the body-covering early-morning outfit, and stepped outside. He was on a platform of bamboo. Ahead and behind on the same level as his hut were many others. Above was another level of dwellings, and there was another above that. Below were three levels. All were continuous bridges stretching for as far as he could see to the south and terminating far to the north. The supports were usually tall thin spires of rock or irontrees; each length of bridge was seldom less than one hundred and fifty feet or more than three hundred. Where extra support was needed, pylons of oak or mortared stone had been placed.

The Valley here was thirty miles wide. The River widened to form a lake ten miles broad and forty miles long. The mountains were no higher than six thousand feet, fortunately for the inhabitants, since The Valley here was far up in the northern hemi sphere and they needed all the daylight possible. At the west end of the lake, the mountains curved into The River itself. Here the waters boiled through a high narrow passage. In the warmer hours of the afternoon, the easterly wind pushed through the strait at an estimated fifteen miles an hour. It then lost some of its force, but it was carried up by the peculiar topography, causing updraughts of which the inhabitants took advantage.

Everywhere on the land, towers of rock, tall columns bearing many carved figures, rose. Between many of these were multilevel spans. These were of wood: bamboo, pine, oak, yew. At intervals, depending upon the weight the spans could bear, were huts. Gliders and folded balloon envelopes were stored on top of many of the broader spires.

Drums were beating; fish-bone horns, wailing. People began appearing in the doorways of the huts, stretching, yawning. The day was officially beginning. The sun had just shown its top. The temperature would rise to 60° F in the heavens, 30° F short of the zenith of the tropics. At the end of fifteen hours, the sun plunged below the mountains, and in nine hours would rise again. The length of its sojourn in the skies almost made up for the weakness of its oblique rays.

With two grails in the net attached to his back, Hermann climbed down the fifty feet to the ground. Kren had no duties today and so would sleep in. Later she would come down, pick up her grail from the storage shed near the stone, and eat a belated breakfast.

As he walked along he greeted those he knew, and in the population of 248,000, he could call ten thousand by their first names. The scarcity of paper in The Valley had forced a reliance on, and development of, memory, though on Earth his own memory had been phenomenal. The greetings were in the truncated, collapsed Esperanto dialect of Vivolando.

“Bon ten, eskop.” (“Good morning, Bishop.”)

“Tre bon ten a vi, Fenikso. Pass ess via.” (“A very good morning to you, Phoenix. Peace be yours.”)

He was formal and stately then, but a few seconds later he stopped a group to tell them a joke.

Hermann Göring at this time was happy. Yet he had not always been so. His tale was long, shot with gaiety and peace here and there but in general sad and stormy and by no means always edifying.

His Terrestrial biography went thus:

Born at Rosenheim, Bavaria, Germany, on January 12, 1893. His father was a colonial official, in fact, the first governor of German Southwest Africa. At the age of three months, Göring was parted from his parents, who went to Haiti for three years, where his father was the German consul general. This long separation from his mother at such a tender age had a very bad effect on Hermann. The pain and loneliness of this period never entirely left him. Moreover, when he became aware at an early age that his mother was having an affair with his godfather, he felt great contempt, mingled with rage, for her. He managed, however, to restrain any overt manifestations of his feelings. His father he treated with a silent contempt, though he was seldom openly insulting to him. But when his father was buried, Hermann wept.

At the age of ten he became very sick with a glandular disease. In 1915, a month after his father’s death, he became a lieutenant in the 112th Prinz Wilhelm Infantry Regiment. At this time the blue-eyed, blond, slender, and passably good-looking officer was a very popular person. He loved to dance and drink and in general was much fun. His godfather, a Jew converted to Christianity, gave him money to help him financially.

Shortly after World War I started, a painful arthritis in his knees hospitalized him. Eager to get into action, he left the hospital and became an observer in the plane of a friend, Lörzer. For three weeks he was unofficially absent without leave from the army. Though he was judged unfit to serve in the infantry because of his physical incapacity, Göring joined the Luftwaffe. His vigorous and unorthodox language amused the Crown Prince, who was commanding the 25th Field Air Detachment of the Fifth Army. In the autumn of 1915 he went through the Freiburg Aviation School, easily qualifying as a pilot. In November 1916 he was shot down, badly hurt, and was out of action for six months. Despite this, he flew again. His rise was rapid since he was not only an excellent officer and flier but an outstanding organizer.

In 1917 Hermann received the Ordre Pour le Mérite (the German equivalent of the Victoria Cross) in acknowledgment of his leadership qualities and for having shot down fifteen enemy planes. He was also given the Golden Airman’s Medal. On July 7, 1918, he was made commander of Geschwader 1, its commander Richthofen having been killed after eighty victories. Göring’s great interest in technical details and problems of equipment made him a natural for his position as commander. His deep knowledge of all aspects of aerial warfare was to stand him in good stead in later years.

By the time Germany surrendered, he had thirty enemy planes to his credit. But this did not do him any good during the period immediately following the end of the war. Aces were a drug on the market.

In 1920, after some time barnstorming in Denmark and Sweden, he became flight chief of the Svenska Lufttrafik in Stockholm, Sweden. Here he met Karin von Kantznow, sister-in-law of the Swedish explorer Count von Rosen. He married her, though she was a divorcée and mother of an eight-year-old boy. He was a good husband to her until she died. Despite his later career in an organization distinguished for gross immorality, he was faithful to her and to his second wife. Sexually, he was a puritan. He was also a political puritan. Once having given his loyalty, he did not withdraw it.

It was a wonder that he ever amounted to anything. Though he dreamed much of advancement to high positions and wealth, he drifted. Without any guiding light, he allowed chance people and events to carry him along.

It was his fortune, or misfortune, that he met Adolf Hitler.

During the abortive Putsch of 1923, in Munich, Göring was wounded. He escaped the police for a while by taking refuge in the home of Frau Ilse Ballin, wife of a Jewish merchant. Göring did not forget this debt. He aided her during the persecution of the Jews after Hitler became head of the German state, and he arranged for her and her family to flee to England.

Breaking his word of honor that he would not escape after his arrest, he fled to Austria. Here the badly infected wound hospitalized him, forcing him to take morphine for the pain. Sick and penniless, his virility affected by various operations, he became mentally depressed. At the same time, his wife’s health, never good, was getting worse.

Now a drug addict, he went to Sweden, where he spent six months in a sanatorium. Discharged as cured, he returned to his wife. All seemed hopeless, yet, having hit the bottom, his spirits rose, and he began to fight. This was typical of him. Somehow, from somewhere, he gathered his energy to fight when all seemed lost.

On returning to Germany, he rejoined Hitler, whom he believed to be the only man who could make Germany great again. Karin died in Sweden in October 1931. He was with Hitler in Berlin then, meeting Hindenburg, who had decided that Hitler would become his successor as head of the state. Göring always felt guilty because he had chosen to be with Hitler instead of with Karin when she was dying. Her death drove him back to morphine for a while. Then he met Emmy Sonnemann, an actress, and married her.

Though he had great talents as an organizer, Göring was inclined to be sentimental. He also had a hot temper which allowed his tongue to run away with him. During the trial of the men charged with burning the Reichstag building, Göring made wild accusations. Dimitrov, the Bulgarian Communist, coolly exposed the illegal methods and illogicality of the charges against him. Göring’s failure to control the trials spoiled their propagandistic effect and demolished the false façade of the Nazis’ propaganda machine.

Despite this, Göring was given the job of forming the Reich’s new air force. He was no longer the slender ace, having put on much weight. But his double personality had won him two new titles, Der Dicke (The Fatty) and Der Eiserne (The Man of Iron). His rheumatism was giving him pains in the legs and making him take drugs (chiefly paracodeine).

He was not a scholar or a writer, but he did dictate a book, Germany Reborn, which was published in London. He had a passion for the works of George Bernard Shaw and could quote long passages from them. He also was familiar with the German classics, Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, et al. His love of paintings was well known. He had a fondness for detective stories and for mechanical toys and gadgets.

By now he dreamed of a Göring dynasty, one which would last a thousand years and forever impress his name in history. It was highly probable that Hitler would have no child, and he had named Göring as his successor. This dream was shattered when his only child, a girl, Edda, was born. Emmy was not going to have any more children, and it was unthinkable to him to divorce her and take a wife who might produce sons. Though he must have been intensely disappointed, he did not reveal it. He loved Edda, and she loved him to the end of her life.

Another aspect of his puzzling persona was demonstrated when he visited Italy on a diplomatic mission. The King and the Crown Prince took him on a deer hunt. The three stood on a high platform while hundreds of deer were herded past them. The royalty slaughtered them, the King killing one hundred and thirteen. Göring was so disgusted that he refused to shoot at all.

Nor did he want to invade Czechoslovakia and Austria, and he especially objected to the invasion of Poland. Thought of war depressed him; he had been in low spirits at the idea just before both World War I and II. Nevertheless, he went along with his beloved leader in this matter, just as he had not protested publicly against the persecution of the Jews. But at his wife’s request, he saved dozens of Jews from imprisonment.

In 1939 Hitler promoted Hermann to Field Marshal and made him Economic Minister of the Reich. As Air Minister of the Luftwaffe he was also its commander-in-chief. He tried to get a stratobomber built which would attain a twenty-mile altitude and fly to America, but he did not succeed.

Despite his high positions, he had a tendency to turn away from realities. In 1939 he told the German public, “If any enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Hermann Göring. You can call me Meier.” (“Meier” was a folk-joke name, indicating a mythical character who bumbled and numbskulled his way through life.)

After a while, Göring was often called Meier by the Nazi party bigwigs and by the public. But the affectionate feeling implicit in Der Dicke was missing in Meier. The British and American bombers were making a shambles of Germany. The Luftwaffe had failed to soften England for invasion, and now it was failing to turn back the hordes of metal birds dropping deadly eggs onto the Reich. Hitler blamed Göring for both, though it was Hitler’s decision to bomb the English cities instead of first wiping out the Royal Air Force bases that were responsible for the Germans’ plight. Just as Hitler’s decision to attack neutral Russia before England was laid low was ultimately the cause of Germany’s downfall.

As it was, Hitler had wanted to invade Sweden, too, when Norway was taken. But, Göring, loving Sweden, had threatened to resign if Sweden was attacked. He had also pleaded the advantages of a neutral Sweden to Hitler.

His health had been getting worse before the war. During the great conflicts, his sicknesses and his lessening prestige made him turn to drugs. He was anxious, nervous, and given to melancholia, on the skids, out of control, and no way to stop the descent. And his beloved country was heading toward Götterdämmerung which horrified him but which, in a strange way, gratified Hitler.

With the Allies advancing across Germany on all fronts, Göring thought that it was time for him to take over the government. Der Führer, instead, stripped him of all his titles and positions and expelled him from the Nazi Party. His worst enemy, Martin Bormann, ordered his arrest.

Near the end of the war, while trying to flee the Russians, he was taken into custody by an Army lieutenant, ironically, a Jew. During his trial at Nuremberg, he defended himself but with a lack of conviction. Despite what Hitler had done, he defended him, too, loyal to the end.

The verdict was inevitable. He was sentenced to be hanged. The day before his execution, October 15, 1946, he swallowed one of the cyanide capsules he had hidden in his cell and died. He was cremated, and the ashes were, according to one story, flung onto a refuse heap in Dachau. Another, with more authority, says that the ashes were dropped onto a muddy country road outside Munich.

That should have been the end. Göring was glad to die, glad to be rid of his sicknesses of body and soul, of the consciousness of his great failure, and of the stigma as a Nazi war criminal. The only thing he regretted about dying was that his Emma and little Edda would be left unprotected.

18

But it was not the end. Like it or not, he had been resurrected on this planet. He was young in body again, a slender youth. How or why, he did not know. He was rid of his rheumatism, his swollen lymph glands, and the dependency on paracodeine.

He resolved to set out to look for Emma and Edda. Also, to find Karin. How he would be able to have both his wives was something he did not care to contemplate. The search would be long enough for thinking about this.

He never found them.

The old Hermann Göring, the highly ambitious and unscrupulous opportunist, still lived in him. He did many things of which he became deeply ashamed and remorseful when, after many adventures and much wandering,[1] he was converted to the Church of the Second Chance. This happened suddenly and dramatically, much like the conversion of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, and it took place in the small and sovereign state of Tamoancan. This was composed chiefly of tenth-century Nahuatl-speaking Mexicans and twentieth-century Navahos. Hermann lived in the newcomers’ hall until he was thoroughly grounded in the tenets and disciplines of the Church.

He moved out then into a recently abandoned hut. After a while, a woman named Chopilotl was living with him. She, too, was a Chancer, but she insisted that they keep in their hut a soapstone idol. It was a hideous figure about thirty centimeters high, addressed as Xochiquetzal, the divine patroness of sexual love and childbirth. Chopilotl’s adoration of the goddess signified her passion for passion. She demanded that Hermann and she make love in front of the idol in the light of torches flanking it. Hermann did not mind that, but he did tire of the frequency of her insistence.

Also, it seemed to him that she shouldn’t be allowed to worship a pagan divinity. He went to his bishop, a Navaho who had been a Mormon on Earth.

“Yes, I know she has that statue,” Bishop Ch’agii said. “The Church doesn’t countenance idolatry or polytheism, Hermann. You know that. But it does permit its members to keep idols, provided that the owner fully realizes that it is only a symbol. Admittedly, this is dangerous, since the worshipper too easily takes the symbol for the reality. This failing wasn’t confined to the primitives, you know. Even the so-called civilized peoples were sucked into this psychological trap.

“Chopilotl is rather literal-minded, but she’s a good person. If we got too stubborn about her idiosyncrasy and demanded that she cast the idol out, she might backslide into a genuine polytheism. What we are doing might be called theological weaning. You have seen how many idols there are around here, haven’t you? Most of them at one time had a multitude of worshippers. But we have gradually detached the religionists from them, achieving this through a patient and gentle instruction. Now the stone gods have become only objets d’art to most of their former worshippers.

“In time, Chopilotl will come to regard her goddess as such. I’m banking on you to assist her to get over her present regrettable attitude.”

“You mean, give her a theological goose?” Hermann said.

The bishop looked surprised, then he laughed. “I had my PhD at the University of Chicago,” he said. “I do sound stuffy, don’t I? Have a drink, my son, and tell me more about yourself.”

At the end of a year, Hermann was baptized with many other naked shivering teeth-chattering neophytes. Afterwards, he toweled off a woman while she dried him. Then all donned body-covering cloths, and the bishop hung around the neck of each a cord from which was suspended the spiral vertebra bone of a hornfish. They were not titled priests; each was simply called Instruisto, Teacher.

Hermann felt as if he were a fraud. Who was he to be instructing others, and acting, in effect, as a priest? He was not even sure that his belief in God or in the Church was sincere. No, that was not right. He was sincere—most of the time.

“The doubts are about yourself,” the bishop said. “You think you can’t live up to the ideals. You think you aren’t worthy. You have to get over that, Hermann. Everybody has the potentiality of being worthy, which leads to salvation. You have it; I have it; all God’s children have it,” and he laughed.

“Watch two tendencies in yourself, son. Sometimes you are arrogant, thinking you are better than others. More often you are humble. Too humble. I might even say, sickeningly humble. That is another form of arrogance. True humility is knowing your true place in the cosmic scale.

“I’m still learning. And I pray that I may live long enough to be rid of all self-deceit. Meanwhile, you and I can’t spend all our time in exploring ourselves. We must also work among the people. Monasticism, retreat from the world, reclusivism, that’s a lot of crap. So where would you like to go? UpRiver or down?”

“I really hate to leave this place,” Hermann said. “I’ve been happy here. For the first time in a long time, I feel as if I’m part of a family.”

“Your family lives from one end of The River to the other,” Ch’agii said. “It contains many unpleasant relatives, true. But what family doesn’t? It’s your job to aid them to become right-thinking. And that is the second stage. The first is getting people to admit that they are wrong-thinking.”

“That’s the trouble,” Hermann said. “I don’t think I’m beyond the first stage myself.”

“If I believed that, I would not have permitted you to graduate. Which is it? Up or down?”

“Down,” Hermann said.

Ch’agii raised his eyebrows. “Good. But the neophyte usually chooses to go upRiver. They’ve heard that La Viro is somewhere in that direction. And they thirst to visit him, to walk and talk with him.”

“That is why I choose the other direction,” Hermann said. “I am not worthy.”

The bishop sighed, and he said, “Sometimes I regret we are forbidden any violence whatsoever. Right now, I would like to kick you in the ass.

“Very well, go down, my pale Moses. But I charge that you give a message to the bishop of whatever area you settle down in. Tell him or her that Bishop Ch’agii sends his love. And also tell the bishop this. Some birds think they are worms.”

“What does that mean?”

“I hope you find out some day,” Ch’agii said. He waved his right hand, three fingers extended, blessing. Then he hugged Hermann and kissed him on the lips. “Go, my son, and may your ka become an akh.”

“May our akhs fly side by side,” Hermann said formally. He left the hut with tears running down his cheeks. He had always been a sentimentalist. But he told himself that he was weeping because he loved the little dark sententious man. The distinction between sentiment and love had been drilled into him in the seminary. So, this was love he felt. Or was it?

As the bishop had said in a lecture, his students would not really know the difference between the two until they had much practice dealing with them. Even then, if they didn’t have intelligence, they wouldn’t be able to separate one from the other.

The raft on which he was to travel had been built by himself and the seven who were to accompany him. One of these was Chopilotl. Hermann stopped at the hut to pick up her and his few belongings. She was outside with two neighbor women, hoisting the idol onto a wooden sled.

“You’re not thinking about taking that thing along?” he said to her.

“Of course I am,” she said. “It would be like leaving my ka behind if I did not take her. And she is not just a thing. She is Xochiquetzal.”

“She’s just a symbol, need I remind you for the hundredth time,” he said, scowling.

“Then I need my symbol. It would be bad luck to abandon her. She would be very angry.”

He was frustrated and anxious. This was the first day of his mission, and he was confronted with a situation he wasn’t sure he could handle properly.

“Consider thy latter end, my son, and be wise,” the bishop had said in a lecture, quoting Ecclesiastes.

He had to act so that the final result of this particular event would be the right one.

“It’s that way, Chopilotl,” he said. “It’s all right, at least, not bad, keeping this idol in this country. The people here understand. But people elsewhere won’t. We’re missionaries, dedicated to converting others to what we believe to be the true religion. We have authority behind us, the teachings of La Viro, who received his revelations from one of the makers of this world.

“But how can we convince anybody if one of us is an idolater? A worshipper of a stone statue? Not a very pretty one, I might add, though that is really irrelevant.

“People will mock us. They’ll say we’re ignorant heathens, superstitious. And we’d be sinning grievously because we’d give people an entirely wrong picture of the Church.”

“Tell them that she is just a symbol,” Chopilotl said, sullenly.

His voice rose. “I told you they wouldn’t understand! Besides, it’d be a lie. It’s obvious that this thing is much more to you than just a symbol.”

“Would you throw away your spiral bone?”

“That’s different. It’s a sign of my belief, a badge of my membership. I don’t worship it.”

She flashed white teeth in a sardonic dark face.

“You throw it away, and I’ll abandon my beloved.”

“Nonsense!” he said. “You know I can’t do that! You’re being unreasonable, you bitch.”

“Your face is getting red,” she said. “Where is your loving understanding?”

He breathed deeply and said, “Very well. Bring that thing along.”

He walked away.

She said, “Aren’t you going to help me drag it?”

He stopped and turned. “And be an accessory to blasphemy?”

“If you’ve agreed that it can come with us, then you’re already an accessory.”

She wasn’t stupid—except in that one respect and that was emotional stupidity. Smiling a little, he resumed walking away. On reaching the raft, he told the others what to expect.

“Why do you allow this, brother?” Fleiskaz said. He was a huge red-haired man whose native language was primitive Germanic. This was one of the tongues of central Europe of the second millennium B.C. From it had originated twentieth-century Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, German, Dutch, and English. His nickname had been Wulfaz, meaning Wolf, because he was such a fear-inspiring warrior.

But on the Riverworld, when he’d converted to the Church, he’d renamed himself Fleiskaz. This, in his natal language, meant “a piece of torn flesh.” No one knew why he’d adopted that, but it might have been because he thought of himself as a piece of good flesh living in an evil body. This piece, torn from the old body, had the potentiality to grow into a complete new body, spiritually speaking, a thoroughly good body.

“Just bear with me,” Hermann said to Fleiskaz. “The whole matter will be settled before we have put fifty meters between us and the shore.”

They sat around, smoking and talking, watching Chopilotl pull the sled with its stone burden. By the time she had crossed the wide plain, she was scarlet-faced, sweating, and panting. She swore at Hermann, finished by telling him that he would be sleeping by himself for a long time.

“This woman doesn’t set a good example, brother,” Fleiskaz said.

“Be patient, brother,” Hermann said quietly.

The raft was butting into the bank, held from drifting by an anchor, a small boulder at the end of a fish-leather cable. Chopilotl asked those aboard the raft to help her haul the sled onto it. They smiled but did not move. Cursing under her breath, she got it onto the raft. Hermann surprised everybody by helping her scoot it off and rolling it to the middle of the raft.

They up-anchored and shoved off then, waving at the crowd assembled on the bank to wish them bon voyage. A single mast was set forward. The square sail was hoisted, and the braces slanted to drive them toward the middle of The River. Here the current and the wind speeded them, and they set the sail to get the full benefit of the breeze. Brother Fleiskaz was at the rudder.

Chopilotl retired to the tent close to the mast to sulk.

Hermann gently rolled the idol to the starboard edge of the raft. The others looked at him questioningly. Grinning, he held his finger to his lips. Chopilotl was not aware of what was going on, but when the idol was at the edge, its weight tipped the raft slightly. Feeling the tilt, she looked out from the tent. And she screamed.

By then Hermann had the statue upright.

“I am doing this for your good and for the good of the Church!” he shouted at her.

He pushed on the monstrous head as Chopilotl, shrieking, ran toward him. The idol toppled over into the water and sank beneath the surface.

Later, his companions told him that she had hit him on the side of the head with her grail.

He did regain enough of his senses to see her, buoyed by her grail, swimming toward the shore. Bessa, Fleiskaz’s woman, was swimming after Hermann’s grail, which Chopilotl had tossed overboard.

“Violence begets violence,” Bessa said as she handed him the cylinder.

“Thanks for rescuing it,” he said. He sat down again to nurse a painful head and aching conscience. It was obvious what her remark implied. By dumping the idol, he had committed violence. He had no right to deprive Chopilotl of it. Even if he had had the right, he should not have exercised it.

She had to be shown her error and then the example had to ferment in her mind until it boiled over onto her spirit. All he had done was to anger her so much that she became violent. And she would probably get somebody to carve another idol for her.

He certainly had not started out well.

That led to other thoughts of her. Why had he wooed her? She was pretty; she exuded sexuality. But she was an Indian, and he had felt a certain repugnance about coupling with a colored woman. Had he made her his woman because he wanted to prove to himself that he was not prejudiced against coloreds? Was it this unworthy motive that had compelled him?

If she had been a black, a kinky-haired blubber-lipped African, would he have even considered mating? To be truthful, no. And now that he remembered it, he had looked for a Jewish woman. But there were only two in the area that he knew of, and these were already taken. Besides, they had lived in the times of Ahab and Augustus and were as dark as Yemenite Arabs, squat, big-nosed, superstitious, and violence-prone. Anyway, they had not been Chancers. But, come to think of it, Chopilotl was also superstitious and violence-prone.

However, being a Church-member indicated that she had potentiality for spiritual advancement.

He steered his mind back to something which it wanted to avoid.

He had searched for a Jewish woman and had taken the Indian woman in order to salve his conscience. To demonstrate to himself that he had progressed spiritually.

Had he advanced? Well, he had not loved her but he had been fond of her. Once the initial dislike of physical contact with her had been overcome, he had not experienced anything but passion during their lovemaking.

However, during their infrequent but stormy quarrels, he had wanted to hurl racial insults at her.

True advancement, true love, would come when he did not have to restrain himself from voicing such pejoratives. There would be no inhibitions about such because he would not think of them.

You have a long way to go, Hermann, he told himself.

And if he did, then why had the bishop accepted him as a missionary? Surely Ch’agii must have seen that he was far from ready.

19

By the time, many years later, that Göring was near the state of Parolando, none of the original crew of people he’d set out with were with him. They’d been killed or had stopped at various areas to carry out their missionary activities there. When Göring was several thousand miles from Parolando, he began hearing rumors of the great falling star, the meteorite, that had struck downRiver. It was said that its impact had killed hundreds of thousands directly or indirectly, and wrecked the valley for over sixty miles each way. As soon as the area had been safe to enter, however, many groups had moved in, eager to get the nickel-steel of the meteorite. After a savage struggle, two bands had been triumphant. These had then allied and now held the site.

Among other rumors was that the meteorite had been mined and was being used to build a giant boat and that two famous men were directing the operations. One was the American writer, Sam Clemens. The other was King John of England, the brother of Richard the Lionhearted.

Hermann did not know why, but the gossip made his heart jump. It seemed to him that the land which held the fallen star was his goal and had been all along, though he hadn’t known it until now.

At the end of a long voyage, he arrived at Parolando. The rumors were true. Sam Clemens and King John, nicknamed “Lackland,” were corulers of the land which sat above the treasure of the meteorite. By this time, large amounts of the metal had been mined, and the area looked like a mini-Ruhr. In it were many steel furnaces, rolling mills, and nitric-acid factories, and bauxite and cryolite were being processed to make aluminum. The ores from which aluminum was made, however, were to be found in another state. And there was trouble over that.

Soul City was a state twenty-six miles downRiver from Parolando. It sat on large deposits of cryolite, bauxite, and cinnabar, and small deposits of platinum. Clemens and John needed these, but the two rulers of Soul City, Elwood Hacking and Milton Firebrass, were driving hard bargains. Moreover, it was evident that they would like to get their hands on the nickel and steel of the meteorite.

Hermann paid little attention to the local politics. His primary mission was to convert people to the doctrines of the Church of the Second Chance. His secondary mission, he decided after a while, was to stop the building of the great metal paddle wheeler. Clemens and John had become obsessed with the vessel. To build it, they were willing to turn Parolando into an industrial desolation, to strip the land of all vegetation except the invulnerable irontrees. They were polluting the air with the smoke and stink from the factories.

Worse, they were polluting their kas, and that made their business Hermann Göring’s. The Church maintained that humanity had been resurrected so that it could have another opportunity to save its kas. It had also been given youth and freedom from disease and want so that it could concentrate on salvation.

About a week after his arrival at Parolando, Hermann and some other missionaries held a large meeting. This was in the evening just after dusk. Scores of great bonfires were arranged around a platform lit by torches. Hermann and the local bishop were on the platform with a dozen of the more distinguished members of their organization. There was a crowd of about three thousand, composed of a small minority of converts and a majority who came to be entertained. The latter brought their bottles of alcohol and a tendency to heckle.

After the band finished playing a hymn, said to have been composed by La Viro himself, the bishop gave a short prayer. He then introduced Hermann. Boos here and there followed the mention of his name. Evidently some in the crowd had lived during his time, though it was possible they just didn’t like Chancers.

Hermann held up his hands until silence had fallen, and then he spoke in Esperanto.

“Brothers and sisters! Hear me out with the same love with which I speak to you. The Hermann Göring before you is not the man of the same name who lived on Earth. He abhors that man, that evil being.

“Yet, that I stand here before you today, a new man, reborn, testifies that evil can be overcome. A person can change for the better. I have paid for what I did. Paid in the only coin worth anything. Paid with guilt and shame and self-hate. Paid with a vow to kill off the old self, bury it, and go forth as a new man.

“But I’m not here to impress you with what a wretch I was. I’m here to tell you about the Church of the Second Chance. How it came into being, what its credo is, what its tenets.

“Now, I know that those of you who were raised in Judeo-Christian and Moslem countries, and those Orientals who encountered Christian or Moslem visitors or occupiers of their country, are expecting an appeal to faith.

“No! By the Lord among us, I will not do that! The Church doesn’t ask you to believe on faith only. The Church brings—not faith—but knowledge! Not faith, I say. Knowledge!

“The Church does not ask you to believe in things as they should be or perhaps will be some day. The Church asks you to consider facts and then to act as the facts require. It asks you to believe only in the believable.

“Consider this. Beyond any dispute, we were all born on Earth and we died there. Is there anyone among you who would contradict that?

“No? Then consider this. Man is born to sorrow and evil as the sparks fly upward. Can any of you, remembering your life on Earth and here deny that?

“Whatever the religion on Earth, it promised something that just was not true. The evidence of that is that we are not in Hell or Heaven. Nor are we going through reincarnations, except in a limited sense that we are given new bodies and new life if we die.

“The first resurrection was a tremendous, an almost shattering, shock. No one, religionist, agnostic, or atheist, was in the state he believed he’d be in after the end of Terrestrial existence.

“Yet, here we are, like it or not. Nor is escape from this world possible, as it was on Earth. If you are killed or kill yourself, you rise the next day. Can anyone deny this?”

“No, but I sure as hell don’t like it!” a man shouted. There was a general laugh, and Hermann looked at the man who had made the remark. He was Sam Clemens himself, standing in the middle of the crowd on a chair on a platform erected for this occasion.

“Please, brother Clemens, do me the courtesy of not interrupting,” Hermann said. “Very well. So far, facts only. Now, can anyone deny that this world is not a natural one? I do not mean by that that this planet itself, the sun, the stars, are artificial. This planet was created by God. But The River and The Valley are not natural. Nor is the resurrection a supernatural event.”

“How do you know that?” a woman yelled. “Now you’re getting away from facts. You’re slipping into surmise.”

“That isn’t all he’s slipping into!” a man shouted.

Hermann waited for the laughter to subside.

“Sister, I can prove to you that the resurrection is not something worked directly by God. It was and is performed by people like us. They may not be Terrestrials. They undoubtedly are superior in wisdom and science. But they look much like us. And some of us have talked face to face with them!”

Uproar. Not because the crowd had not heard this before, though not in just these terms. The unbelievers just wanted to have some fun, to relieve tension.

Hermann took a drink of water and by the time he’d put the cup down, he had comparative silence.

“This world and these resurrections, if not made with human hands, have been brought about by hands that are human in appearance. There are two men who can testify to this. For all I know, there may be many others. One of these is an Englishman named Richard Francis Burton. He was not unknown on Earth during his time, in fact, he was famous. He lived from 1821 to 1890, and he was an explorer, anthropologist, innovator, author, and linguist extraordinaire. Perhaps some of you have heard of him? If so, please raise your hands.

“Ah, I count at least forty, among them your consul, Samuel Clemens.”

Clemens did not seem to like what he was hearing. He was scowling and chewing frantically on the end of his cigar.

Göring proceeded to recount his experiences with Burton, stressing what Burton had told him. The crowd was caught; there was scarcely a sound. This was something new, something no Chancer missionary had ever spoken of.

“Burton called this mysterious being the Ethical. Now, according to Burton, the Ethical who talked to him did not agree with his fellows. Apparently, there is dissension even among beings whom we could account as gods. Dispute or discord in Olympus, if I may draw such a parallel. Though I do not think that the so-called Ethicals are gods, angels, or demons. They are human beings like us but advanced to a higher ethical plane. What their disagreement is, I frankly do not know. Perhaps it is about the means used to achieve a goal.

“But! The goal is the same! Have no doubt of that. And what is that goal? First, let me tell you of the other witness.

“Again, to be frank…”

“I thought you were Hermann!” a man shouted.

“Call me Meier,” Göring said, but he did not pause to explain the joke.

“About a year after Resurrection Day, he, the witness, was sitting in a hut on a ledge on a very high foothill in a land far to the north of here. He has a natal name, Jacques Gillot, but we of the Church usually refer to him as La Viro. The Man, in English. We also call him La Fondinto, the Founder. He had been a very religious man on Earth during all his long life. But now his faith was smashed, totally discredited. He was bewildered, very troubled.

“This man had always tried to lead a virtuous life according to the teachings of his church, which spoke for God. He did not think that he was a good man. After all, Jesus Himself had said that no man was good, including Himself.

“But, relatively speaking, Jacques Gillot was good. He was not perfect; he had lied but only so he would not hurt another’s feelings, never to escape the consequences of his own deeds. He had never said anything behind a person’s back he wouldn’t say to his face. He had never been unfaithful to his wife. He had given his wife and children an intense interest and love without spoiling them. He had never turned a person away from his table because of social position, political preference, race, or religion. He had been unjust a number of times, but that was from hastiness and ignorance, and he had always apologized and determined to repair these faults. He had been robbed and betrayed but had left vengeance up to God. However, he wouldn’t let anyone walk over him without a fight.

“And he had died with his sins forgiven and the rites administered.

“So what was he doing here, rubbing elbows with politicians, backstabbers, child-beaters, dishonest businessmen, unethical lawyers, rapacious doctors, adulterers, rapists, thieves, murderers, torturers, terrorists, hypocrites, cheaters, word-breakers, parasites, the mean, the grasping, the vicious, the unfeeling?

“As he sat in that hut just below the mountain, as the rain beat and the wind howled and the lightning exploded and the thunder boomed like the footsteps of an angry god, he pondered on the seeming injustice. And he reluctantly came to this conclusion. In the eyes of Someone, capital S, he was not much better than those others.

“It didn’t make him feel any better to reflect that everybody else was in his state. When a man’s sinking in a boat, knowing that everybody else aboard is going to drown doesn’t bring much joy.

“But what could he do about it? He didn’t even know what he was supposed to do.

“At this moment, as he stared into the small fire, he heard a knock on the door. He stood up and seized his spear. Then, as now, evil men roamed, looking for easy prey. He had nothing worth stealing, but there were men who liked to kill for the twisted pleasure it gave them.

“He called out in his native tongue, ‘Who is it?’

“‘No one you know,’ a man said. He spoke in Quebecan French but with a foreign accent. ‘No one who means you harm either. You won’t need that spear.’

“This astonished La Viro. The door and windows were closed. No one could see within.

“He unbarred the door. A lightning flash glowed behind the stranger, revealing a cloaked and hooded man of medium stature. La Viro stepped back; the stranger entered; La Viro closed the door. The man threw back his hood. Now the fire showed a white man with red hair, blue eyes, and handsome features. Under the cloak he wore a tight-fitting seamless suit of silvery material. From a silver cord around his neck hung a gold helix.

“The clothes were enough to tell La Viro that this was no River dweller. The man looked like an angel and might be one. After all, the Bible said that angels looked just like men. At least, that was what the priests had told him. The angels who had visited the daughters of men in the days of the patriarchs, the angels who rescued Lot, and the angel who wrestled with Jacob, passed for men.

“But the Bible and the priests who had read it to him had been wrong about many things.

“Looking at the stranger, La Viro was in awe. At the same time, he felt delighted. Why would an angel honor him, of all people, with a visit?

“Then he realized that Satan was also an angel, that the demons were all fallen angels.

“Which was he?

“Or was he neither? After all, La Viro, despite his lack of formal education and his humble station, was not unintelligent. It seemed to him that a third alternative existed. At that, he felt easier though still far from comfortable.

“After asking permission, the stranger sat down. La Viro hesitated, then he, too, sat down on a chair. They looked at each other for a moment. The stranger church-steepled his fingers and frowned as if trying to think how best to start. This was strange, since he knew what he wanted and should have had time to prepare for this visit.

“La Viro offered him a drink of alcohol. The stranger said he would take tea instead. La Viro busied himself with pouring the powder into the water and stirring it. The stranger was silent until he thanked La Viro for the tea. After taking a sip, he said, ‘Jacques Gillot, who I am and where I come from and why I am here would take all night and all day if I told all in detail.

“‘What little I can tell you will be the truth—in a form which you can understand at this stage. I am one of a group which has prepared this planet for you whom we resurrected. There are other planets reformed for other Terrestrials, but that is not at present your concern. Some are being used now. Some are waiting to be used.

“‘This world is for those who need a second chance. What is the second chance? What was the first chance? By now you must have accepted the fact that your religion, in fact, none of the Earthly religions, truly knew what the afterlife would be. All made guesses and then established these as articles of faith. Though, in a sense, some were near the mark, if you accept their revelations as symbolic.’

“And then the visitor said that his kind called themselves the Ethicals, though they had other names for themselves. They were on a higher plane of ethical development than most Earthlings. Notice that he said most. This indicates that there have been some of us who have achieved the same level as the Ethicals.

“The visitor said that his people were not the first Ethicals, not by any means. The first were an ancient species, nonhumans, who originated on a planet older than Earth.

“These were individuals who had deliberately retarded themselves, kept themselves in the flesh, as it were, instead of Going On. And when they saw that there was one species, also nonhuman, which was capable of carrying on The Work, they showed this species how to do it. And they passed on.

“The visitor called this species the Ancients. Yet, in comparison with those who had been their mentors, they were very young.

“Now, this is what the visitor said the Ethicals had learned from the Ancients. The Creator, God, the One Spirit, call it what you will, forms all. It is the universe; the universe is it. But its body is formed of two essences. One is matter; the other, for lack of a better word, is nonmatter.

“We all know what matter is. Philosophers and scientists have tried to define it exactly but have failed. Yet everyone knows what matter is. We directly experience it.

“But what about this nonmatter? What is it?”

20

“Avacuum!” A wag shouted. “The inside of your head!”

Clemens stood up and bellowed, “Quiet, there! Let the man speak his piece.” And then with a grin, “Even if he makes no sense!”

“Thank you, Mr. Clemens,” Göring said. “A perfect vacuum is the absolute absence of matter. A learned man once told me that there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum. It does not exist except as a concept. Even a vacuum is matter.

“Nonmatter is what the old religions of Earth spoke of as the soul. But the definitions of the soul were always vague, very abstract. The peoples of ancient and classical times, and their unliterate ancestors, thought of it as a shadowy thing, a ghostly entity reflecting palely the matter to which it had been attached before death.

“Later, more sophisticated peoples thought of it as an invisible entity, also attached to the body. But it could be refleshed after death, given a new and immortal body. Some Oriental religions thought of it as something which would be reabsorbed into the Godhead after numerous trials on Earth, after a good karma had been achieved.

“All these had some truth in them; they saw parts of the total truth.

“But we are not concerned with such philosophical probings. What we need are facts. The fact is that every living creature, from the simplest to the most complex, has its nonmatter twin. Even an amoeba has its nonmatter twin.

“But I don’t want to get into confusing issues or too much detail. Not at this time.

“The visitor said, ‘Nonmatter is indestructible. That means that your body on Earth had its indestructible nonmatter twin.’

“At this point, La Viro, who had said nothing before, interrupted.

“‘How many twins does a living creature have? I mean, a man changes in appearance. He gets older, he loses an eye or a leg. He gets a diseased liver. Is this nonmatter image like a series of photographs made of a man? If so, how often is the photograph made? Every second, once a month? What happens to the old photographs, the old images?’

“The visitor smiled, and he said, ‘The image, as you call it, is indestructible. But it records the changes in the physical body it’s attached to.’

“‘Then what happens?’ La Viro said. ‘Wouldn’t images of the rotting corpse be produced?’

“As I told you,” Göring said, “La Viro was illiterate and he had never been to a big city. But he was not stupid.

“‘No,’ the visitor said. ‘Forget for the moment about all matter and nonmatter except that composing humankind. The rest is irrelevant for our purposes. First, though, let’s give this entity which you call a soul another name. Soul has too many incorrect meanings for humans, too many verbal reverberations, too many contradictory definitions.

“‘Speak the word soul, and unbelievers will automatically become deaf to what follows. Those who believe in souls will always hear you through the mental constructs which they formed on Earth. Let us call this nonmatter twin the…ah…ka. That is an old Egyptian word for one of the several souls in their religion. Except for the Egyptians, it will have no special connotation or denotation. And they can adapt to it.’

“From which,” Göring said, “we know that the visitor knows something about Terrestrial history. Also, he could speak Canadian French, which means that he had studied much to prepare himself for this interview. Just as that Ethical who talked to Burton had learned English.

“‘Now,’ the visitor said, ‘we have the ka. As far as we know, it forms at the moment of conception, the union of sperm and egg. The ka changes in correspondence with the change in the body.

“‘The difference in the body and the ka at the moment of the body’s death is this. During life, the body projects an aura. This is invisible to the naked eye—except in the case of a favored few—and floats above the head of the living person. It can be detected through an instrument. Seen through this device, the aura seems to be a globe of many colors and hues, whirling, swelling, contracting, shifting colors, extending arms, collapsing them. A wild and wonderful thing the beauty of which has to be seen to be appreciated. We call it the wathan.

“‘A person loses the wathan or ka at the moment of death, which is when the body is beyond revivification. Where does the ka go? As seen through our device, let’s call it a kascope, it usually drifts off at once, carried by what etheric wind we don’t know. Sometimes it remains attached to a locality, why we can’t guess. But eventually it cuts loose and drifts off.

“‘The universe is filled with these, yet they can never increase enough to occupy all of space. They can intersect, pass through each other, an unlimited number can occupy the same space.

“‘We assume that the ka is unconscious though it contains the intelligence and memory of the dead person. So the ka wanders through eternity and infinity, a vessel for the mental potentiality of the living person. A frozen soul, if you will.

“‘When a dead person’s body is duplicated, the ka reattaches itself to that body. No matter how far away it might be from the body in spatial terms, it flashes back at the first second of life of that duplicated body. There is an affinity between the two that knows no bounds. But when the reunion takes place, the ka has no memory of the interval between the moment of death of the first body and the first moment of consciousness of the second or duplicate body.

“‘However, some have said that it is possible that the ka is fully conscious during its bodiless periods. Evidence for this theory was lent by a certain phenomenon of afterlife which was well documented, I understand, in the 1970s. As I remember the accounts a significant number of men and women who were legally dead were revivified. They testified that while dead they had experienced out-of-body flights, had watched relatives grieve and had been yanked back into life. Whether or not the ka does have a memory during these times, we are concerned only with its incarnations, its enfleshed states.’

“La Viro was both stunned and ecstatic. But he interrupted again, it seeming to be a human function, a built-in compulsion, to interrupt.”

Göring paused, then said, “As I know only too well.”

There was some laughter.

“‘Pardon me,’ La Viro said. ‘How do you make this duplicate body?’

“He looked down at his own body and thought of how it had been dust and now was whole again.

“‘We have instruments which can detect and scan the ka,’ the visitor said. ‘These can determine the nature of and location of each nonmatter molecule. From then on, it is a matter of energy-matter conversion.’

“‘Can you duplicate any ka at any stage?’ La Viro said. ‘I mean, what if a man died at eighty? Could you duplicate his ka at the age of twenty?’

“‘No. The ka of the eighty-year-old is the only one existing. Then, while the mind is unconscious, the body made from the records is regenerated to the twenty-year-old state. All defects are corrected. A recording of that body is made and destroyed. For the first resurrection on the surface of this planet, another energy-matter conversion is made. During this process, the bodies are unconscious.’

“‘What if you made two duplicates?’ La Viro asked. ‘At the same time? To which would the ka be attached?’

“‘Presumably, to the first that was revivified,’ the visitor said. ‘No matter how synchronized the new resurrections, there would still be at least a microsecond difference. Our machines cannot cut it so close that there is an absolutely simultaneous revivifying. Besides, that experiment would not be done. It would be evil. Unethical.’

“‘Yes,’ La Viro said, ‘but what if it were done?’

“‘The body without a ka would develop its own, I suppose. And though the second body is the duplicate of the first in the beginning, it would soon become another person. Its different environment, different experiences, would differentiate it from the first. In time, though it would always look like the first, it would become another person.

“‘But we are getting into minutiae. The important thing is this. Most disembodied kas go forever without consciousness. At least, we hope so. It would be hell to be imprisoned in an intangible body, without control of it, without communication with others, yet aware of it all. The inevitable result would be the torments of the damned. It is too horrible to contemplate.

“‘Anyway, nobody who’s been resurrected remembers the interval between death and the second life.’

“And so,” Göring said, “La Viro was told that out of the billions who died on Earth, only a minute fraction was not part of that wandering horde of kas. A few went out. Disappeared. The visitor did not know where and why. The Ancients had only told the Ethicals that these few had gone on. They had united with the Creator or were at least keeping company with It.

“The visitor said that he could see that La Viro had many questions. He would answer a few, but they would be confined to the center of this subject. How did the Ethicals know that a few kas had gone on? How could every one of the billions of kas be numbered, be kept track of?

“‘You must have some awareness of the vast powers of our science and technology,’ the visitor said. ‘Even the forces that shaped this world and brought you back to life are beyond your imagination. But what you experience here is only a small part of what is available to us. I tell you that we have counted every ka that came into being on Earth. It took over a hundred years to do it, but it was done.

“‘You see, it is science that has brought about what was thought to be possible only to the supernatural. The mind of humankind has done what the Creator did not intend to do Itself. Because, I suppose, the Creator knew that sentient beings would do it. Indeed, it is possible that sentiency is the ka of God.

“‘Let me detour a little myself, though it is not really an irrelevancy. You seem to regard me as, if not a god, at least a cousin to one. I can hear you breathing hard, smell the fright in your sweat, see the awe in your face. Be not afraid. It is true that I am ethically advanced beyond you. But I am not proud because of that. You could catch up with me. Even, perhaps, overtake and pass me.

“‘I have powers at my fingertips which make the science of your day look like an ape’s. But I am no more intelligent than the most intelligent of Riverdwellers. I can make mistakes and errors.

“‘Also, keep this in mind. When—or if—you go out to preach, stress this always. He who climbs up may slip back. In other words, beware of regression. You do not know the word? Then, beware of backsliding. Not until the ka has winged its way outward forever is it safe from regression. Who lives in flesh lives in danger.

“‘That advice applies to me as well as to you.’

“At this point, La Viro reached toward his visitor. He felt an urge to touch the man, to assure himself that he was indeed flesh and blood.

“The visitor recoiled and cried, ‘Do not do that!’

“La Viro withdrew his hand, but his injured feelings showed. His visitor said, ‘I am sorry, sorrier than you can imagine, but please do not touch me. I will say no more of this. But when you have gotten to the point where I may embrace you, then you will understand.’

“And so, my brothers and sisters,” Göring said, “the visitor proceeded to tell La Viro why he should found this new religion. The name of our organization was La Viro’s idea, nor did the visitor compel La Viro to found it. He merely asked that he should do so. But he must have known his man, for La Viro said he would do as his visitor asked.

“The principles of the Church of the Second Chance and the techniques for enfleshing them are not tonight’s subject. It will take too long to propound and defend them. That is for tomorrow night’s meeting.

“At the end, La Viro asked the Ethical why he had chosen him, of all people, to become the founder of the Church.

“‘I am an ignorant half-breed,’ La Viro said. ‘I was raised in the deep Canadian forest. My father was a white trapper, and my mother was an Indian. Both were looked down upon by the British who ruled our land. My mother was almost an outcast in her own tribe because she married a white man. My father was scorned as a squawman, a dirty Frenchie, by the English he worked for.

“‘When I was fourteen, very large for my age, I became a lumberjack. At twenty an accident lamed me, and I spent the rest of my life cooking for the lumber camps. My wife was also half-Indian, and she brought in money by washing clothes. We had seven children, four of whom died young, and the others were ashamed of their parents. Yet we sacrificed for them and gave them love and a devout upbringing. My two sons went to Montreal to work and then were killed in France fighting for the English, who despised them. My daughter became a whore and died of a disease—or so I heard. My wife died of a broken heart.

“‘I don’t tell you this because I ask for sympathy. I just want you to know who and what I am. How can you ask me to go out and preach when I could not convince my own children that my beliefs were right? And when my own wife died cursing God? How can I go out and talk to men who were scholars and statesmen and priests?’

“The visitor smiled and said, ‘Your wathan tells me that you can.’

“The visitor stood up. He lifted the silver cord from around his neck and past his head, and he placed it around La Viro’s neck. The golden helix now lay on La Viro’s chest.

“‘This is yours, Jacques Gillot. Do not dishonor it. Farewell. I may or may not see you again on this world.’

“La Viro said, ‘No! Wait! I have so many questions!’

“‘You know enough,’ the visitor said. ‘God bless you.’

“He was gone. The rain and thunder and lightning were still making a tumult. Gillot went out a moment later. He could see no sign of the visitor, and after searching the stormy skies he returned to his hut. There he sat until dawn came up with the thunder of the grailstones. Then he went down to the plains to tell his story. As he had expected, those to whom he told his story thought he was crazy. But in time there were those who came to believe him.”

Section 8

The Fabulous Riverboats Arrive at Virolando

21

Over thirty-three years ago, he had arrived in Virolando. It was his intention to stay only long enough to talk a few times to La Viro, if he were permitted to do so. Then he would go wherever the Church sent him. But La Viro had asked him to settle there, though he had not said why or how long he could remain. After a year there, Göring had adopted the Esperanto name of Fenikso (Phoenix).

Those had been the happiest years of his lives. Nor was there any reason to think he would not spend many more here.

This day would be much like the others, but its sameness was enjoyable and little varieties would garnish it.

After breakfast, he climbed up to a large building built on top of a rock spire on the left bank. Here he lectured his seminary students until a half-hour before noon. He went down swiftly to the ground and joined Kren at a grailstone. Afterwards, they went up to another spire and strapped themselves into hang gliders and launched themselves from the edge of the spire, six hundred feet above the ground.

The air above Virolando glittered with thousands of gliders which slanted up and down, turned, dipped, rose, swooped, danced. Hermann felt like a bird, no, a free spirit. It was an illusion of freedom, all freedom was illusion, but it was the best.

His glider was bright-red, painted so in memory of the squadron he had led after Manfred von Richthofen had died. Scarlet was also the symbol for the blood of the martyrs of the Church. There were many such in the skies, mingling their color with white, black, yellow, orange, green, blue, and purple craft. This land was blessed in having hematite and other ores from which pigments could be made. It was blessed in many things.

Hermann sped above and below the bridges holding houses, spanning the gap between the spires. He passed closely to the wooden and stone pylons, sometimes too closely. It was sinful to risk his life, but he could not resist it. The old thrill of flight on Earth had returned, doubling in ecstasy. There was no motor roaring in his ears, no fumes of oil in his nostrils, no sensation of being enclosed.

Sometimes he sailed by a balloon and waved at the people in the wickerwork baskets beneath them. During his holidays, he and Kren would board a balloon, rise to a height of a thousand meters, and let the wind carry them down The Valley. On long holidays, they would float for a whole day, talking, eating, making love in the cramped quarters while they rode without a bump, without a touch of the wind, since the balloon rode at the same speed as it did.

Venting the hydrogen at dusk, they would land on the bank, pack the collapsed envelope in the basket, and take a boat back upstream next day.

After half an hour, Hermann swooped down along The River, veered, and came down running on the bank. With hundreds of others, he disassembled the glider, and then walked with a cumbersome bundle on his back to the spire from which he had jumped.

A messenger wearing a chaplet of red and yellow blooms stopped him. “Brother Fenikso, La Viro wishes to see you.”

“Thank you,” Hermann said, but a small shock traveled through him. Had the chief bishop decided that the time had come to send him out?

The Man waited for him in his private quarters in the red-and-black-stone temple. Hermann was ushered through the high-ceilinged rooms to a small chamber, and the oaken door was closed behind him. The room was simply furnished: a big flat-topped desk; several large chairs of fish-skin leather; some small ones of bamboo; two cots; a table with pitchers of water and some flavored alcohol, cups, boxes of cigars, cigarettes, lighters, and matches; a chamberpot; two grails; pegs in the walls from which hung cloths; a table beside a mica mirror on the wall; another table holding the lipsticks, small scissors, and combs which the grails occasionally provided. There were several rugs of bamboo fiber and one star-shaped fish skin on the floor. Four torches burned, their ends thrust into wall-holders. The private door in the outside wall was open now, letting in the air and sunlight. Vents in the ceiling gave additional ventilation.

La Viro rose as Hermann entered. He was huge, about six feet six inches high, and very dark. His nose was the beak of a giant eagle.

“Welcome, Fenikso,” he said in a deep voice. “Sit down. Would you like a drink, a cigar?”

“No, thank you, Jacques,” Hermann said. He sat down in the easy chair indicated.

The chief bishop resumed his seat. “You’ve heard about this giant metal boat coming upRiver, of course? The drums say it’s about eight hundred kilometers from the southern border. That means it will reach our border in about two days.

“You have told me all you know about this man Clemens and his partner, John Lackland. You did not know what happened after you were killed, of course. But apparently those two succeeded in repelling their enemies and in building their boat. They are going to pass through our territory soon. From what I hear, they are not warlike, and so we need fear no trouble. After all, they are dependent upon cooperation from those who own the grailstones along The River. They have the power to take what they want, but they don’t use it unless they have to. However, I have heard some disturbing reports about the behavior of some of the crew when the boat has stopped for—what is it called?—shore leave. There have been some ugly incidents, mostly to do with drunkenness and women.”

“Pardon me, Jacques. That does not sound like the type of people Clemens would have on board. He was obsessed, and he did some things which he should not have done to get that boat built. But he isn’t, or at least wasn’t, one to condone such behavior.”

“In all these years, who knows how he’s changed? For one thing, the name of this boat is not what you told me it would be. Instead of the Not For Hire it is Rex Grandissimus.”

“That is strange. That sounds more like a name which King John would pick.”

“From what you tell me of this John, he may have killed Clemens and taken over the boat. Whatever the truth, I want you to meet the boat at the border.”

“Me?”

“You knew the men who built the boat. I want you to get aboard it at the border. You will find out what the situation is, what kind of people live on it. Also, you will estimate its military potential.”

Hermann looked surprised.

“Now, Fenikso, you have told me of the story which this giant long-nosed man—Joe Miller?—told Clemens and which Clemens told others. If it be true, there is a great tower in the middle of the sea at the north pole. These men mean to enter it if they can. I think their intent is evil.”

“Evil?”

“Because that tower is obviously the work of the Ethicals. These boat people wish to penetrate that tower, to discover its secrets, perhaps to take captive or even kill the Ethicals.”

“You do not know that,” Hermann said.

“No, but it is reasonable to suppose that.”

“I never heard Clemens say that he wanted power. He just wanted to get to the headwaters.”

“What he says publicly and what privately may be two different things.”

“Really, Jacques,” Hermann said. “What do we care what they do even if they should manage to get to the tower? Surely you do not think that their puny machines and weapons can do anything to harm the Ethicals? Humans would be as worms to them. Anyway, what can we do about them? We may not use force to stop them.”

The bishop leaned forward, his huge brown hands gripping the edge of the desk. He stared at Hermann as if to peel him, layer by layer, and see what formed the center.

“There is something wrong in this world, grievously wrong! First, the little resurrections have stopped. This seems to have happened shortly after your last resurrection. You remember the consternation that this news caused?”

Hermann nodded and said, “I suffered much from anxiety myself. I was in a panic of doubt and despair.”

“So was I. But, as archbishop, I had to reassure my flock. However, I had no facts to use as a basis for hope. It was possible that we had been given the time we needed. All who were going to achieve Going On had done so. The rest would also die, and their kas would roam the universe, forever beyond redemption.

“But I did not think so. For one thing, I knew that I was not ready to Go On. I have a way to go, perhaps a long one, before I have done that.

“Yet, would the Ethical have picked me to found the Church if I were not a strong candidate for Going On?

“Or, and you can imagine my agony at this thought, had I failed? Had I been appointed to show others the way to salvation and yet I had to remain behind? Like Moses who led the Hebrews to the promised land but was forbidden to go down into it himself?”

“Oh, no!” Hermann murmured. “That could not be!”

“It could be,” La Viro said. “I am only a man, not a god. For a while, I even thought about resigning. Perhaps I had allowed myself to ignore my own ethical progress because I was too busy running the affairs of the Church. I had become arrogant; my power had corrupted me in a subtle way. I would let the bishops elect a new chief. I would change my name and go down The River as a missionary.

“No, do not protest. I was seriously considering that. But then I told myself that I would be betraying the trust given by the Ethicals. And perhaps there was another explanation for this terrible event.

“Meanwhile, I had to make some sort of public explanation. You know what it was; you were among the first to hear it.”

Hermann nodded. He had been entrusted to carry the message for two thousand miles below Virolando. That had meant being absent from his beloved country for over a year. But he had been glad to do it for La Viro and the Church. The message was: Be not afraid. Have faith. The last days are not here. The trial is not over. We are in an interim which will not last forever. Someday, the dead will arise again. That is promised. Those who made this world and gave you the chance to be immortal cannot fail you. The interim is a test. Be not afraid. Believe.

Many had asked Hermann what the “test” was. He could only reply that he did not know. Perhaps La Viro had learned what it was from the Ethicals. Perhaps to reveal the purpose of the test would be to defeat its end.

Some had not accepted this. Bitterly denouncing the Church, they had left it. The majority, however, had remained. Surprisingly, many new converts had been made. These had come in through fear, fear that perhaps there really was a second chance to attain immortality and now their time to do it was short. This was not a rational attitude, since La Viro had said that the resurrections would come again. But they were taking no chances of losing their chance.

Though fear did not make a long-term believer, it caused a step toward the right direction. Perhaps true faith would follow.

“The only statement in my message which was not strictly true,” La Viro said, “was that about the interim being a test. I had no direct authority, that is, no direct message from the visitor, that such was the case. But, in a sense, my statement was not a pious lie. The stopping of the resurrections is a test. A test of courage and belief. It does indeed try all of us.

“At that time, I thought that it was being done for some good purpose by the Ethicals. And it may well be that that is so. But the visitor did tell me that he and his fellows were no more than human despite the superpowers available to them. They could make mistakes and errors. Which means that they are not invulnerable. Accidents can happen to them. And enemies could do harm to them.”

Hermann sat straight up. “What enemies?”

“I cannot know their identity—if indeed there are any. Consider this. This subhuman, no, I will not call him that, since he is human, despite his strange appearance. This giant, Joe Miller, and the Egyptians got to the polar sea despite great odds. Also, others had preceded them. For all we know, others may have followed the Egyptians. How do we know that some of these may not have gotten into the tower? And there did something terrible, perhaps without meaning to do so?”

“I find it hard to believe that the Ethicals would not have invulnerable defenses,” Göring said.

“Ah!” La Viro said, holding up a finger. “You forget the ominous significance of the tunnel and the rope which Miller’s party found. Somebody bored the hole in the mountains and set the rope there. The question is, who and why?”

“Perhaps it was one of the second-order Ethicals, a renegade agent,” Hermann said. “After all, the visitor told you that regression was possible even to him. If it is possible to his kind, think how much more likely it is for an agent.”

La Viro was horrified. “I…I should have thought of that! But it is so…unthinkable…so perilous!”

“Perilous?”

“Yes. The agents have to be more advanced than we, yet even they…wait.”

La Viro closed his eyes, holding up his right hand with the thumb and index finger forming an O. Hermann said nothing. La Viro was mentally reciting the acceptance formula, a technique used by the Church, invented by La Viro himself. At the end of two minutes, La Viro opened his eyes and smiled.

“If it should be, we must face all its implications and be ready,” he said. “Reality be Thine…and ours.

“However, back to the main reason I sent for you. I want you to get on that boat and observe everything you can. Find out the disposition of the captain, this King John, and his crew. Determine if they are a threat to the Ethicals. By this, I mean, do they have devices and weapons which might conceivably allow them to get into the Tower.”

La Viro frowned and said, “It is time that we took a hand in this matter.”

“You surely do not mean that we may use violence?”

“No, not to people. But nonviolence and passive resistance apply only to persons. Hermann, if necessary, we will sink that boat! But we will only do it as a last and regrettable measure. And we will do it only if we can be sure that no one will be harmed.”

“I…I don’t know,” Hermann said. “It seems to me that, if we do that, we lack faith in the Ethicals. They should be able to handle anything that mere men can bring against them.”

“You have fallen into the trap the Church continually warns against, the trap of which you have warned many yourself. The Ethicals are not gods. There is only one God.”

Hermann stood up. “Very well. I will leave immediately.”

“You are pale, Fenikso. Don’t be so frightened. It may not be necessary to destroy that boat. In any event, we will do it only if we are one hundred percent sure that no one will be injured or killed.”

“It is not that which frightens me,” Hermann said. “What does is that a part of me is eager to get into the intrigue, thrilled with the idea of sinking that boat. It’s the old Hermann Göring, still alive down there, though I thought I had put him away forever.”

22

Rex Grandissimus was indeed a beautiful and awing vessel. She plowed speedily in the middle of The River, towering whitely, her great black smokestacks lofty, her two giant paddle wheels churning. From atop the pole above the pilothouse, her flag whipped, showing wavily three golden lions on a scarlet field.

Hermann Göring, waiting on the deck of a three-masted schooner, raised his eyebrows. The banner was certainly not the scarlet phoenix on blue which Clemens had planned.

The sky was freckled with hang-gliders swooping above the great Riverboat. The River itself was crowded with vessels of all kinds, officials, and sightseers.

Now the boat was slowing, its captain having interpreted correctly the meaning of the rockets fired from Göring’s schooner. Besides, the other craft were forming an obstacle beyond which he could not go without smashing them.

Finally, it stopped, its wheels turning just enough to match the current.

As the schooner came alongside, its captain yelled through a riverdragon-fish horn at the Rex. A man on the lowest deck hurried to a phone on a bulkhead and talked to the pilothouse. In a moment, a man leaned out of the pilothouse, holding an instrument with a horn. His voice blared from it, startling Hermann. The device must amplify sounds electrically, he thought.

“Come aboard!” the man said in Esperanto.

Though the captain was at least fifty-five feet above the water, and a hundred feet away horizontally, Hermann recognized him. The tawny hair, broad shoulders, and oval face were those of John Lackland, ex-King of England, Lord of Ireland, etc., etc. In a few minutes Hermann had boarded the Rex and was accompanied by two heavily armed officers via a small elevator to the top deck of the pilothouse. On the way he said, “What happened to Sam Clemens?”

The men looked surprised. One said, “How did you know about him?”

“Gossip travels faster than your boat,” Hermann said. This was true, and if he had not exactly told the truth, he also had not lied.

They entered the control room. John was standing by the pilot’s chair and looking outwards. He turned at the sound of the elevator closing. He was five feet five inches tall, a good-looking virile-seeming man with wide-set blue eyes. He wore a black uniform which he probably never put on except to impress locals. The black jacket, trousers, and boots were of riverdragon-leather. Gold buttons adorned the jacket, and a golden lion’s head roared soundlessly from above the visor of the cap. Hermann wondered where he had gotten the gold, an extremely rare item. Probably, he’d taken it from some poor wretch.

His chest was bare. Tawny hair, a shade or two darker than that on his head, curled thickly over the V of the jacket top.

One of the officers who escorted him snapped a salute. “The emissary of Virolando, Sire!’

So, Hermann thought, it was sire, not sir.

It was evident that John did not recognize his visitor. He surprised Hermann by walking to him, smiling, and holding out his hand. Hermann took it. Why not? He was not here to revenge himself. He had a duty to perform.

“Welcome aboard,” John said. “I am the captain, John Lackland. Though, as you see, I have no land I do have something even more valuable, this vessel.”

He laughed and added, “I was once the King of England and Ireland, if that means anything to you.”

“I am Brother Fenikso, a sub-bishop in the Church of the Second Chance and a secretary to La Viro. In his name I welcome you to Virolando. And, yes, Your Majesty, I have read about you. I was born in the twentieth century in Bavaria.”

John’s thick tawny eyebrows went up. “I’ve heard much of La Viro, of course, and we were told that he lived not too far upRiver.”

John introduced the others, none of whom Hermann knew except the first mate, Augustus Strubewell. He was an American, very large, blond, and handsome. He crushed Hermann’s hand and said, “Welcome, Bishop.” He didn’t seem to recognize him either. Göring shrugged mental shoulders. After all; he hadn’t been in Parolando long, and that was over thirty-three years ago.

“Would you like a drink?” John said.

Hermann said, “No, thank you. I hope you will let me stay aboard, Captain. I am here to escort you to our capital. We welcome you in peace and love and hope that you come in the same spirit. La Viro wishes to meet you and to extend his blessing. Perhaps you would like to stay a while and stretch your legs on shore. In fact, you may stay here as long as you wish.”

“I am not, as you see, a member of your congregation,” John said, accepting a cup of bourbon from an orderly. “But I have a high regard for the Church. It’s had a highly civilizing influence along The River. Which is more than I can say for the church to which I once belonged. It has made our voyage much easier, since it has reduced militancy. However, not many people would care to attack us anyway.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Hermann said. He decided it would be best not to mention what John had done in Parolando. Perhaps the man had changed. He would give him the benefit of the doubt.

The captain made arrangements for Göring’s quarters. His cabin would be in the texas, a long structure which was an extension of the room just below the pilothouse and which was on the extreme forward starboard side of the landing deck. The top officers were cabined in this.

John asked about his Terrestrial life. Göring replied that the past wasn’t worth talking about. What mattered was the present.

John said, “Well, perhaps, but the present is the sum of the past. If you won’t talk about yourself, would you tell me of Virolando?”

It was a legitimate question, though Göring wondered if John wished to find out the state’s military potential. He wouldn’t tell him that it did not have any. Let him find out for himself. He did make it clear, however, that no one of the Rex would be allowed to bring arms ashore.

“If this were any other place, I wouldn’t abide by that rule,” John said, smiling. “But I’m sure we’ll be safe in the heart of the Church.”

“This land is, as far as I know, unique,” Hermann said. “Its topography and its citizens are remarkable. The first you can see for yourself,” and he waved at the rock spires.

“It’s a columnar country indeed,” John said. “But what makes the citizens so different?”

“The great majority of them are Rivertads. When the first resurrection occurred, this area was filled with children who had died between the ages of five and seven. There were about twenty to every adult. Nowhere else that I’ve heard of has had that proportion. The children seemed to be from many places and times, of many nations and races. They had one thing in common, though. They were frightened. But, fortunately, the adults were mostly from peaceful and progressive countries, Scandinavia, Iceland, and Switzerland of the twentieth century. The area wasn’t subjected to the vicious struggles for power that occurred elsewhere. The strait to the west cuts off the titanthrops who lived there. The people immediately westward downRiver were of the same kind as those here. Thus, the adults could give full time to taking care of the children.

“Then La Viro announced that he had spoken to one of the mysterious beings who had made this world. He would have been received as all prophets have been in the beginning of their careers. With rejection by all but a few. But La Viro had something substantial, something beyond words and his conviction. He had solid visible proof. It was something which no one else had, which had to be the product of the Ethicals.

“This was The Gift, as it’s generally called. You’ll see it in the Temple. A golden helix. And so he made his home here.

“The children were brought up with discipline and love, and it was they who built this culture you see all about you.”

John said, “If the citizens are as beautiful in spirit as their country is to the sight, then they must be angels.”

“They’re human,” Göring said, “and so this is no Utopia, no Paradise. I believe however, that you will not find any other place which has so many truly friendly, open, generous, and loving persons. It is a very pleasant place to live in, if you have a kindred spirit.”

“Perhaps this would be a good place for a long shore leave,” John said. “Besides, the motors need rewiring, and that takes time.”

“How long you stay here depends upon you,” Göring said.

John looked sharply at him.

Göring smiled. Was John considering how he could take advantage of the Virolanders? Or was he merely thinking that he could relax here, not have to worry about his boat being seized?

At this moment, a man entered the control room. He was about six feet high, deeply sun-bronzed, wide-shouldered, and barrel-chested. His straight hair was very black. Thick black eyebrows shaded large fierce black eyes. His face was as strong as any Göring had ever seen. The man radiated an aura which in Göring’s childhood would have been called “animal magnetism.”

John, catching sight of him said, “Ah, Gwalchgwynn, the captain of my marines. You must meet him. He is a capital fellow, a superb swordsman and pistol shot, a great poker player. He is a Welshman descended from kings on both sides of his family, if what he says is true.”

Göring felt as if his blood had deserted his heart.

He murmured, “Burton!”

23

No one seemed to have heard him.

From Burton’s shocked expression, quickly masked, Göring knew that he had recognized him. When Göring was introduced to him as Brother Fenikso, La Viro’s emissary and a sub-bishop, Burton bowed. He drawled, “Your Reverence,” and he smiled mockingly.

“The Church has no such titles, Captain,” Göring said. Burton knew that, of course. He was just being sarcastic.

That didn’t matter. What did matter was that Burton seemed to have no desire to reveal that Fenikso was in reality Göring. He wasn’t doing it to help Göring because he liked him, however. If he gave Göring’s natal name, then Göring would reveal Burton’s. And Burton must have much more at stake than he, Göring, had. Actually, Göring had no strong reason to be pseudonymous. He just wanted to avoid having to explain why he was now a member of the Church. It was a long story and took much time, and many just refused to believe that his conversion had been sincere.

King John was charming to his visitor. He must have completely failed to recognize the man whose head he’d once savagely struck with a pistol butt. Göring wanted it to stay that way. If John still believed that he could rape and rob the locals, he would be on guard if he knew that a victim of the past was present. If he thought Fenikso was just a simple innocent bishop, he might not be so careful to hide his intentions.

Of course, it might be that John’s nature had changed for the better. Would Burton serve him if it hadn’t?

Yes, he might if he wanted strongly to get to the headwaters.

But perhaps John was no longer a human hyena. Not that Göring meant to give the hyenas a bad name.

Wait and find out.

John invited the bishop to tour the boat. Göring accepted gladly. He’d been through it in Parolando before it was quite finished and so, even after so many years, knew its layout well. But now he could see it fully furnished and armed. He’d give a complete report to La Viro. His chief could then determine if it would be possible to sink the boat if it was necessary to do so. Göring didn’t really take La Viro’s statements about this seriously. He was sure that it couldn’t be done without some bloodshed. However, he’d keep his counsel until asked for it.

Burton disappeared shortly after the tour began. He reappeared behind them ten minutes later and quietly rejoined them. This was just before they went into the grand salon. On entering, Göring saw the American, Peter Jairus Frigate, and the Englishwoman, Alice Hargreaves, playing billiards. He was shocked, and he stuttered for a moment replying to one of John’s questions. The memory of what he’d done to them, especially to the woman, smote him with guilt.

Now his identity would be out. John would remember him. Strubewell would, too. And John would be deeply distrustful of him.

Göring wished now that he’d given his old name as soon as he met John. But who would have thought that, out of over thirty-five or -six billion people, one whom he’d known too well would be on this boat? And who would have imagined that not one but three such would be aboard?

Gott! Were there others? Where was that Neanderthal, Kazz, who worshipped Burton? The Arcturan who also claimed to be from Tau Ceti? The Tokharian, Loghu? The Jew, Ruach?

Like most of the many people in the salon, they looked up when the party entered. Even the black man playing the ragtime piece, “Kitten on the Keys,” on the piano stopped, his fingers poised.

Strubewell loudly asked for silence and attention and got it. He introduced Brother Fenikso, La Viro’s emissary, and said that Fenikso would be traveling with them to Aglejo. He was to be treated with every courtesy but at this time was not to be approached. His Majesty was taking him for a tour of the Rex.

The piano playing and the conversation started up again. Frigate and Hargreaves stared at him for a minute longer, then returned to their game. They did not seem to recognize him. Well, Göring thought, it has been nearly sixty years since we last saw each other. They didn’t have his near-perfect recall. Still, their experiences with him had been so harrowing that he would have thought they’d never forget his face. Besides, Frigate, on Earth, had seen many photographs of him as a young man, which should reinforce his memory.

No, they wouldn’t have forgotten. What had happened was that Burton had gotten to them during his absence from the tour. He’d told them to act as if they’d never seen him before.

Why?

To spare him guilt, their silence saying, in effect, “We forgive you now that you’ve changed. Let it be as if we’re meeting for the first time”?

That didn’t seem likely unless Burton’s character had also changed. The true reason probably was that Göring, if revealed, would then reveal Burton. And for all he knew, Frigate and Hargreaves were under false names.

He didn’t have much time to think about this matter. King John, playing the gracious host, insisted on showing him almost everything in the Rex. He also introduced him to many people, a large number of whom had been famous, infamous, or well known in their time. John, during the many years of travel up The River, had had a chance to pick up such notables. Which meant that he must have had to kick off those not so famous to make room for the famous.

Göring was not as impressed as John had expected him to be. As one who’d been the second-in-command of the German empire and thus had met many of the world’s greats, Göring was not easily awed or bamboozled. Even more, his experiences with the greats and the near-greats on both worlds had made him well aware that the public image and the person behind the façade were often pathetically or disgustingly dissimilar.

The one who’d impressed him most on the Riverworld was a man who, on Earth, would have been thought a complete nonentity and failure by almost anybody. That was Jacques Gillot, La Viro, La Fondinto.

During his Terrestrial existence, however, the person who’d awed him the most, in fact, overpowered him, enslaved him by force of personality alone, had been Adolf Hitler. Only once had he stood up to his Führer during the many times he’d known the Führer was wrong, and then he’d quickly backed down. Now, in the retrospect of many years on the Riverworld and the knowledge he’d gained as a Second Chancer, he had no respect at all for the madman. Nor did he have any respect for the Göring of that time. Indeed, he loathed him.

But, he wasn’t so full of self-hatred that he considered himself past salvation. To think thus was to put himself into a special class, to be criminally proud, to be full of hubris, to possess a peculiar form of self-righteousness.

However, there was also the danger of having all these prides because you didn’t have them. To be proud because you were humble.

This was a Christian sin, though also counted as such in some other religions. La Viro, who’d been a stoutly devout Catholic all his Terrestrial life, had never even heard of such a sin then. His priest had never mentioned it during his long sleep-inducing sermons. Gillot had conceived of this old but little-publicized sin himself after he’d come to this planet.

Though Göring recognized before the end of the war that Hitler was crazy, he’d still remained loyal to him. Loyalty was one of Göring’s virtues, though in him it was so resistant to reason that it became a fault. Unlike most of the others at the Nuremberg trial, Göring had refused to renounce and denounce his chief.

Now, he wished he’d had the courage to stand up to his leader even though it might have meant his downfall much earlier than it occurred and perhaps even his death. If only he could do it all over….

But as La Viro had told him, “You are doing it all over again now, every day. The circumstances differ, that’s all.”

The third person who’d made the greatest impression on him was Richard Francis Burton. Göring didn’t doubt that Burton, if he’d been in Göring’s place, would not have hesitated in saying to Hitler, “No!” or “You are wrong!” How, then, had Burton managed to keep from being thrown off the Rex in all these years? King John was a tyrant, arrogant, intolerant of those who argued with him.

Had John changed? Had Burton also changed? And then had the changes been enough so that each man could get along with the other?

John said, “Over there, playing draw poker, are the seven pilots of my air force. Come, I’ll introduce you.”

Göring was startled when Werner Voss stood up to shake hands with him. He had met him once, but Voss obviously didn’t recognize him.

Göring was a fine pilot, but he would readily admit that he could never equal Voss. Voss had scored his first victories, two Allied planes, in November 1916. On September 23, 1917, shortly after his twentieth birthday, Voss was shot down after a lone-wolf battle against seven of Britain’s best fighter pilots. In less than a year, during which he’d flown against the enemy, he’d scored forty-eight kills, enough to make him the fourth-ranking ace of the Imperial German Air Service. And in that short time he’d been removed several times from the front for administrative or other duties. It was not a coincidence that this happened when he was getting close to the score of Manfred von Richthofen. The baron had great influence, nor was Voss the only one whom von Richthofen had managed to withdraw from action for a while. Karl Schaefer and Karl Allmenröder, hot-shot pilots, had been similarly manipulated.

Voss was a first lieutenant of the air force, the second-ranker, John explained. The captain was Kenji Okabe, one of Japan’s great aces. The grinning little brown man bowed to Göring, who bowed back. Göring had never heard of him because Germany had not gotten much news from its ally during World War II. His record must have been impressive, though, for John to give him a higher rank than the great Voss. Or perhaps Okabe had joined the airmen before Voss and therefore had greater seniority.

The other aviators, the two fighter-plane replacement pilots, the pilots of the torpedo bomber and of the helicopter, were unknown to Göring.

Göring would have loved to have talked with Voss about the old days of World War I. Sighing, he followed John up a staircase to the C or hurricane deck. At the end of the tour, they went back to the grand salon for iced drinks. Göring took only one drink. John, he noted, downed two in a short time. His face got red, but his speech remained unslurred. He asked Göring many questions about La Viro. Göring answered truthfully. What was there to hide?

Could the bishop give John any indication about whether or not La Viro would give permission for the boat to put in for extended repairs?

“I can’t speak for La Viro,” Göring said. “But I believe that he’ll say yes. After all, you are potential converts to the Church.”

King John grinned and said, “By God’s teeth, I don’t care how many of my crew you hook after we sink Clemens’ boat! Perhaps you don’t know that Clemens tried to slaughter me and my good men so that he could have the boat for himself and his swinish followers. May God strike the polecat with lightning! But I and my brave men foiled him and almost succeeded in killing him! And we took the boat up The River while he stood on the bank raving and ranting and shaking his fist at us. I laughed then, thinking that that was the last time I’d ever see him. I was mistaken.”

Göring said, “Do you have any idea how close Clemens is to you?”

“I’d estimate that it will be only a few days behind,” John said, “after we get our motor rewinding done. We were also delayed for a long time because of the damage done by the raiders.”

“Then that means…?”

Göring did not like to put his thoughts into words.

John grinned savagely. “Yes, that means that we will fight!”

It was evident to Göring that John meant to use this wide and long lake for his stand. It would give him plenty of room for maneuvering. He didn’t think it would be wise to mention this at this time.

John began cursing out Clemens as a lying, traitorous, bloodthirsty, rapacious monster. He was a hellbent criminal, and John was his innocent victim.

Göring wasn’t fooled. Having known both Clemens and John, he was sure that John was the liar, the traitor, and the rapacious. He wondered how those who’d been in on the hijacking had managed to keep the truth from those who joined the crew afterwards.

Göring said, “Your Majesty, it’s been a very long, arduous, and dangerous voyage. Your casualty rate must have been high. How many of your original crew are left?”

John narrowed his eyes. “That’s a strange question. Why do you ask it?”

Göring shrugged and said, “It’s not important. It’s just that I was curious. There are so many savage peoples on The River, and I’m sure that many have tried to take the boat away from you. After all, it…”

“Is a treasure worth far more than its weight in diamonds?” John said, smiling. “Yes. It is. By God’s backside, I could tell you tales of the mighty battles we’ve had to keep the Rex from falling into enemy hands. The truth is that, of the fifty who left Parolando, only two are still on the boat. Myself and Augustus Strubewell.”

Which might mean, Göring thought, that John had managed that no loosemouth would tell new recruits the truth. A push in the dark of a rainstorm, a splash no one could hear. A quarrel provoked by John or Strubewell and the discharge of the crewman for incompetence or insubordination. There were many ways to kill and many excuses for throwing a man or woman off the boat. And accident and warfare and desertion would take care of the others.

Now Göring realized another reason why Burton might have kept silent about his identity. If John recognized Göring, he’d know that Göring would know that he was lying. And he might cause an “accident” to Göring before the boat got to Aglejo. Thus, no bad report about John would get to La Viro.

Perhaps, Göring thought, he was being too suspicious. He didn’t really think so.

24

They had left the grand salon and gone to the room at the bow end of the texas. This was semicircular and walled with shatterproof glass. The elevator shaft that went through the room above and to the pilothouse formed part of the rear wall. Here there were chairs and tables, several sofas, and a small bar. As in most places on the boat, music was piped in from a central station. But it could be turned off. After some conversation about the rewinding, which would take two months at least, Göring steered the talk toward the forthcoming battle. He wanted to say, “What good will it do to fight? What purpose could it serve? Why must all these people on your boat and Clemens’ risk death and mutilation and terrible pain just because of something that happened many decades ago?

“I think that you and Clemens are both mad. Why don’t you two call this off? After all, Clemens has his own boat now. What could he do with two boats? Which he isn’t going to have, anyway, because one boat is going to be destroyed, and I suspect it’ll be yours, Your Majesty. Knowing the size and potentiality of Clemens’ boat, there’s little doubt.”

What he said was, “Perhaps it won’t be necessary to fight Clemens. After all these years, could he still thirst for revenge? Do you want vengeance because he tried to kill you? Can’t you forgive him? The passage of time often cools hot passions and allows cool reason to reign. Perhaps…”

John shrugged broad heavy shoulders and raised his hands, palms upwards.

“Believe me, Brother Fenikso, I would thank God if Clemens had regained his mind and become a man of peace. I am not warlike. All I want is fellowship for everyone. I would lift my hand against none if none would lift their hand against me.”

“I am indeed happy to hear that,” Göring said. “And I know that La Viro will be very happy to act as intermediary so that any disputes between you two may be settled amicably. La Viro, all of us here, are eager to avoid bloodshed and to establish good will, love, if possible, between you and Clemens.”

John frowned.

“I doubt that that demon-possessed bloody-minded creature will agree even to a meeting…unless it is to kill me.”

“We can only do our best to arrange a meeting.”

“What troubles me, what makes me think that Clemens will always hate me, is that his wife, his ex-wife rather, was accidentally killed during the battle for the boat. Though they’d parted, he still loved her. And he will hold me responsible for her death.”

“But this happened before the resurrections stopped,” Göring said. “She would have been translated elsewhere.”

“That doesn’t matter. He’ll probably never see her again, so she is as good as dead to him. Anyway, she was dead to him before she died. As you may know, she was in love with that big-nosed Frenchman, de Bergerac.”

John laughed loudly.

“The Frenchman was one of the raiders. I kicked him in the back of the head when I escaped from the chopper. It was also de Bergerac who ran his épée through the thigh of Captain Gwalchgwynn. He’s the only man who’s ever defeated Gwalchgwynn in swordplay. Gwalchgwynn claims that he was distracted, otherwise de Bergerac never would have gotten through his guard. Gwalchgwynn would not like it if Clemens and I made peace. He too thirsts for revenge.”

Hermann wondered if Gwalchgwynn—Burton—did indeed feel this way, but when he looked around, the Englishman was gone.

At that moment, two crewmen entered carrying small kegs of watered alcohol. Göring recognized one of the men. Was this boat loaded with old acquaintances?

He was good-looking, of medium height, and with a slim but wiry physique. His short hair was almost sandy, and his eyes were hazel. His name was James McParlan, and he’d entered Parolando the day after Hermann’s arrival. Hermann had talked to him about the Church of the Second Chance and found him polite but resistant.

What strengthened Hermann’s memory of him was that McParlan had been the Pinkerton detective who’d infiltrated and eventually destroyed the Molly Maguires in the early 1870s. The Molly Maguires was a secret terrorist organization of Irish coal miners in the Pennsylvania counties of Schuylkill, Carbon, Columbia, and Luzerne. Göring, a twentieth-century German, would probably never have heard of it if he hadn’t been an ardent student of the Sherlock Holmes stories. He’d read that the fictional Scowrers, Vermissa, and McMurdo of A. Conan Doyle’s Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, were based, respectively, on the real Molly Maguires, the Pennsylvania coal counties, and McParlan. That had led him to read Alan Pinkerton’s book on McParlan’s exploits, The Molly Maguires.

In October 1873 McParlan, under the name of James McKenna, succeeded in insinuating himself into the secret society. The young detective was in grave danger many times, but he slipped through safely by his courage, aggressiveness, and quick wits. After three years in this perilous disguise, he exposed the inner workings of the Maguires and the identities of its members. The chief terrorists were hanged; the power of the Molly Maguires was broken. And the mine owners continued for many decades to treat the miners as if they were serfs.

McParlan, going by Hermann on the way out, glanced at him. His face was expressionless. Yet Hermann believed that McParlan had recognized him. The eyes had flicked away too quickly. Moreover, the fellow was a trained detective, and he’d once told Göring that he never forgot a face.

Was it the discipline of a marine on duty which had prevented McParlan from reintroducing himself? Or was it for another reason?

Burton entered and joined the party. After a few minutes he went into the toilet by the elevator. Hermann excused himself and followed him in. Burton was at the far end of the urinal, and no one was near him. Hermann came up to his side and, while urinating, spoke in German in a low voice.

“Thanks for not telling your commander my natal name.”

“I didn’t do it for love of you,” Burton said.

Burton dropped his kilt, turned, and went to a washbasin. Hermann quickly followed him. Under cover of the gushing faucets, he said, “I am not the Göring you knew.”

“P’raps not. I fancy I don’t like either of you.”

Hermann burned to explain the difference of the two, but he dared not take the time. He hurried back to the observation room.

John was waiting to tell him the party was going to step out onto the deck. They would have a more open view of the lake, which the boat was just entering.

Ahead, for as far as they could see, rock spires of various heights and many shapes rose from the surface of the water. These were mostly rose-colored, but there were also black, brown, purple, green, scarlet, orange, and blue rocks. About one in twenty was striped horizontally in red, green, white, and blue, the stripes being of different widths.

Hermann told them then that at the western end of the lake the mountains curved in and formed a narrow strait about two hundred feet wide and between smooth vertical walls seven thousand feet high. The force of the current was so strong that no manual- or wind-driven vessel could go against it. The traffic by boat was all one-way, downRiver, and there was little of that.

However, some travelers had long ago cut out a narrow path on the southern cliff. This was about five hundred feet above the strait and went a mile and a half to the end of the strait. So there was some foot traffic.

“Just beyond the strait is a rather narrow valley, though The River there is a mile wide. There are grailstones there, but no one lives there. I suppose because of the current, which is so strong it precludes fishing or sailing anywhere but through the straits. Then, too, The Valley gets little sunshine. There is, though, a sort of bay about a half-mile up where boats may anchor.

“A few miles above the bay, The Valley widens considerably. There begins the land of the enormous-nosed hairy giants, the titanthrops or ogres. From what I’ve heard, so many of these have been killed that half the population is now your ordinary-sized human.”

Göring paused, knowing that what he would say would, or should, be vastly interesting to the others.

“It’s estimated that it’s only twenty thousand miles from the strait to the headwaters of The River.”

He was trying to give John the idea that it might be better to keep on going. If the headwaters were so close, why should he stop here to fight? Especially, since he was likely to be defeated. Why not go to the headwaters and from there launch the expedition toward the misty tower?

John said, “Indeed.”

If he had taken the bait, he gave no sign of having done so. He seemed interested only in the strait and the immediate area beyond it.

After some questions from John about these, Hermann understood what John was considering. The bay would be an excellent place for the rewinding. The strait would be near ideal for waiting for the Not For Hire. If the Rex could catch it while it was coming through the strait, it could loose some torpedoes in the passage. These would have to be remotely controlled, though, since the strait curved at least three times.

Also, if John docked in the bay, he would keep his crew from the pacifistic influence of the Second Chancers.

Göring’s speculations on John’s thinking were right. After a day’s visit with La Viro, John up-anchored the Rex and took it through the strait. It anchored again at the bay, and a floating anchored dock was built from the shore to the vessel. From time to time, King John and some of his officers, or just his officers, would come in a launch to Aglejo. Though invited to stay overnight or longer, they never did so.

John assured La Viro that he was not going to venture out onto the lake for a battle.

La Viro pleaded with him to negotiate for an honorable peace with La Viro as intermediary.

John refused during the first two meetings with La Viro. Then, on the third, he surprised La Viro and Göring by agreeing.

“But I think it will be a waste of time and effort,” John said. “Clemens is a monomaniac. I’m sure he thinks of only two things. Getting his boat back and killing me.”

La Viro was happy that John was at least willing to make the effort. Hermann was not so happy. What John said and what John did were often not the same.

Despite La Viro’s urgings, John refused to permit missionaries to talk to his crew about the Church. He had set up armed guards at the end of the cliff-path to insure that the missionaries didn’t come over it. His excuse, of course, was that he didn’t want to be attacked by Clemens’ marines. La Viro told John that he had no right to prevent nonhostiles from crossing over. John replied that he had signed no agreement with anyone concerning passage on the path. He held it, and that made him the determiner of the rights.

Three months passed. Hermann waited for his chance to get Burton and Frigate to one side when they came to Aglejo. Their visits were very infrequent and when they did come in he could never get them alone.

One morning, Hermann was summoned to the Temple. La Viro gave him the news, which had just come via the relay drums. The Not For Hire would be at Aglejo in two weeks. Göring was to meet it at the same place he’d boarded the Rex.

Even though Clemens had not been friendly when Hermann had known him in Parolando, he hadn’t been murderous. When Göring went up to the pilothouse, he was surprised to feel happy at seeing Clemens and the gigantic titanthrop, Joe Miller. Moreover, the American recognized him within four seconds of their introduction. Miller claimed to have known him within a second by his odor.

“Although,” Miller said, “you don’t thmell ekthactly as you uthed to. You thmell better than then.”

“Perhaps it’s the odor of sanctity,” Hermann said and laughed.

Clemens grinned, and said, “Virtue and vice have their own chemistries? Well, why not? How do I smell after these forty years of travel, Joe?”

“Thomething like old panther pithth,” Joe said.

It wasn’t quite like old friends meeting after a long absence. But Göring felt that, for some reason, they were as pleased to see him as he was them. Perhaps it was a perverted kind of nostalgia. Or guilt may have played some part in it. They may have felt responsible for what had happened to him at Parolando. They shouldn’t, of course, since Clemens had done his best to make him leave the state before something violent happened to him.

They told him in brief outline what had occurred since they’d last seen him. And he described his experiences since then.

They went down to the grand salon to get a drink and to introduce him to various notables. Cyrano de Bergerac was called down from the flight deck, where he’d been fencing.

The Frenchman remembered him, though not well. Clemens described again what Hermann had been doing, and then de Bergerac recalled the lecture Göring had given.

Time had certainly worked some changes with Clemens and de Bergerac, Hermann thought. The American seemed to have shed his great dislike for the Frenchman, to have forgiven him because he had taken Olivia Clemens as his mate. The two now were on easy terms, chatting, joking, laughing.

There came a time when the good time had to end. Hermann said, “I suppose you’ve heard that King John’s boat came to Aglejo three months ago? And that it’s waiting for you just beyond the strait at the western end of the lake?”

Clemens swore and said, “We’ve known that we were closing the gap between us fast. But no, we didn’t know that he’d stopped running!”

Hermann described what had happened since he’d boarded the Rex.

“La Viro still hopes that you and John will be able to forgive each other. He says that after this long a time, it doesn’t matter whose fault it was in the beginning. He says…”

Clemens’ face was red and grim.

“It’s easy enough for him to talk of forgiveness!” he said loudly. “Well, let him talk from now until doomsday about forgiveness, and I won’t stop him! A sermon never hurt anybody, and it’s often beneficial—if you need a nap.

“But I haven’t come this far after all the hardships and heartaches and treacheries and griefs just to pat John on the head and tell him what a good boy he is beneath all that rottenness and then kiss and make up.

“‘Here, John, you worked hard to get my boat and to keep it from all those thieving rascals that tried to take your hard-earned Riverboat away from you. What the hell, John, I loathed, despised, and detested you, but that was a long time ago. I don’t carry a grudge long; I’m a good-hearted sap.’

“The hell I am!” Clemens roared. “I’m going to sink his boat, the boat I once loved so much! I wouldn’t have it now! He’s dishonored it, made it into crap, stunk it up! I’ll sink it, get it out of sight. And one way or another, I’m ridding this world of John Lackland. When I’m done with him, his name’ll be John Lacklife!”

“We were hoping,” Hermann said, “that after all these years, two generations as they used to be counted, that your hatred had cooled, perhaps entirely died. That…”

“Well, sure, it did,” Clemens said with a sarcastic tone. “There were minutes, days, weeks, even months, even a year now and then, that I didn’t think of John. But when I tired of this eternal travel on The River, when I longed to go ashore and stay ashore and get the racket of the paddle wheels out of my ears and the never-ending routine, the three-times-a-day stop to recharge grails and batacitor, the always-going-on arguments to settle and the ever-recurring administrative details to manage and my heart stopping every once in a while when I saw a face that looked like my beloved Livy or Susy or Jean or Clara only to find out that she was none of them…Well, then when I tired and almost gave up, almost said, ‘Here, Cyrano, you take over the captainship. I’m going ashore and get some rest and have a good time, and forget about this monstrous beauty and you take it on up The River and don’t bring it back,’ then I remembered John and what he’d done to me and what I was going to do to him. And then I’d gather my forces together, and I’d cry, ‘Forward, onward, excelsior! Keep going until we’ve caught up with Evil John and sent him to the bottom of The River!’ And that, the thought of my duty and my dearest desire, to make John squeal before I wring his neck, is what’s kept me going for, as you describe it, two generations!”

Hermann could only say, “It grieves me to hear that.”

It was useless to say any more about that subject.

25

Burton, suffering again from his cursed insomnia, left his cabin quietly. Alice slept undisturbed. He went down the dimly lit corridor, out of the texas, and onto the landing deck of the Rex. The fog was building up below the railing of the B deck. The A deck was entirely shrouded. Directly above, the sky blazed brightly, but to the west clouds were swiftly moving toward the boat. On both sides of The Valley the mountains cut off much of the sky. Though the Rex was anchored in a small bay two miles up from the strait, The Valley had broadened only a little here. It was a cold place, gloomy, despondency-making. John had had a difficult time keeping up morale here.

Burton yawned, stretched, and thought about lighting up a cigarette or perhaps a cigar. Damn his sleeplessness! In sixty years on this world, he should have learned how to overcome the affliction which had lasted fifty years on Earth. (He’d been nineteen when the terrible affliction had struck him.)

Techniques to combat it had been offered aplenty to him. The Hindus had a dozen; the Moslems, another dozen. Several of the savage tribes of Tanganyika had their sure-fire remedies. And on this world, he’d tried a score or more. Nur el-Musafir, the Sufi, had taught him a technique which had seemed more efficacious than any he’d ever learned. But after three years, slowly, inching in night by night, Old Devil Insomnia had secured a good beachhead again. For some time, he’d been lucky if he got a good sleep two out of seven nights.

Nur had said, “You could conquer insomnia if you knew what was causing it. You could strike at the source.”

“Yaas,” Burton had replied. “If I knew what and where the source was, I could get my hands on it, I’d be able to conquer more than insomnia. I could conquer the world.”

“First, you’d have to conquer yourself,” the Moor had said. “But when you did that, you’d find out that it wasn’t worthwhile ruling the world.”

The two guards by the rear entrance to the texas were walking in the semidarkness of the landing deck, wheeling, marching to the middle of the deck, each solemnly presenting his rifle to the other’s, wheeling, then striding back to the edge of the landing deck, wheeling, and so on.

During this four-hour watch, Tom Mix and Grapshink were on guard duty. Burton didn’t hesitate to talk to them, since there were two guards at the front of the texas, two in the pilothouse, and many more at different parts of the boat. Ever since the raid by Clemens’ men, John had set up night sentinels all over the boat.

Burton chatted for a while with Grapshink, a native Amerind, in his own tongue, Burton having taken the trouble to learn it. Tom Mix joined them, and he told them a dirty joke. They laughed, but afterwards Burton said he’d heard a different version of it in the Ethiopian city of Harar. Grapshink confessed that he’d heard another version, too, when he was on Earth. This would have been about 30,000 B.C.

Burton told the two he’d be going on to check the other guards. He walked down the stairs to the B or main deck and went toward the stern. As he passed a diffused light in the fog, he saw something moving out of the corner of his left eye. Before he could turn toward it, he was struck on the head.

Some time later, he awoke on his back, staring upwards into the fog. Sirens were wailing, some very near him. The back of his head hurt him very much. He felt the bump, winced, and his fingers came away sticky. When he struggled to his feet, swaying, dizzy, he saw that the lights were on all over the boat. People ran past him calling out. One stopped by him. Alice.

She cried out, “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “except that someone coshed me.”

He started toward the bow but had to stop to steady himself with a hand against the wall.

“Here,” she said, “I’ll help you get to the sick bay.”

“Sick bay be damned! Help me to the pilothouse. I have to report to the king.”

“You’re crazy,” she said. “You may have a concussion or a fractured skull. You shouldn’t even be walking. You should be on a stretcher.”

He growled, “Nonsense,” and started to walk. She made him put his arm around her shoulder so she could half-support him. They started again toward the bow. He heard the anchors being pulled up, the chains rattling in the holes. They passed people manning the steam machine guns and the rocket tubes.

Alice called out to a man, “What happened?”

“I don’t know! Somebody said the big launch was stolen. The thieves took it up The River.”

Burton thought that if that was true, he’d been slugged by someone posted to insure that the thieves weren’t surprised.

The “thieves,” he was sure, had been crew members. He didn’t think that anybody could slip aboard unnoticed. The sonars, radar, and infrared detectors were operating at night and had been ever since the raid. Their operators dared not fall asleep. The last one who’d done that, ten years ago, had been thrown off the boat into The River two minutes after being caught.

Arriving at the pilothouse, Burton had to wait a few minutes before the busy king could speak to him. Burton reported what had happened to him. John wasn’t at all sympathetic; he was beside himself with rage, cursing, giving orders, stomping around.

Finally, he said, “Go to sick bay, Gwalchgwynn. If the doctor says you’re unfit for duty, Demugts will take over. There isn’t much the marines can do now, anyway.”

Burton said, “Yes, Sire,” and he went to the C deck hospital.

Dr. Doyle X-rayed his skull, cleansed the wound on his head, bandaged it, and ordered him to lie down for a while.

“There’s neither concussion nor fracture. All you need is some rest.”

Burton did so. Shortly thereafter, Strubewell’s voice came over the loudspeakers. Twelve people were missing, seven men, five women.

John took over then, apparently too enraged to allow his first mate to call out the names of the missing. His voice shaking, he denounced the twelve as “treacherous dogs, mutinous swine, scurvy stinking polecats, cowardly jackals, yellow-bellied hyenas.”

“Quite a menagerie,” Burton said to Alice.

He listened to the roll call. All were suspected agents, all having claimed to have lived past 1983.

John thought they had deserted because they were afraid to fight.

If he weren’t too furious to think straight, John would have remembered that the twelve had shown their courage in many battles.

Burton knew why they had fled. They wanted to get to the tower as quickly as possible, and they didn’t want to be in a fight which they regarded as totally unnecessary. So they had stolen the launch and were now racing upRiver as fast as possible. Undoubtedly, they were hoping that John wouldn’t go after them, that he’d be too concerned with Clemens.

In fact, John had been worried that the Not For Hire might come up through the strait while the Rex was chasing after the launch. However, the guards on the path above the strait had a transceiver, and they would report instantly if the Hire moved toward the channel. Still, if the Rex was too far up The River, it couldn’t get back in time to block the Hire.

Despite this, John was taking his chances. He was not going to allow the deserters to get away with the launch. He needed it for the coming battle. And he wanted desperately to catch and punish the twelve.

In the old days on Earth, he would have tortured them. He probably would like to put them to rack and wheel and fire now, but he knew that his crew, most of them anyway, wouldn’t tolerate such barbarisms. They would permit the twelve to be shot, though they wouldn’t relish the deed, because discipline did have to be maintained. Moreover, stealing the launch had compounded the felony.

Suddenly, Burton groaned. Alice said, “What’s the matter, dear?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just a twinge.”

Since there were other nurses around, he couldn’t tell her that it had just occurred to him that Strubewell had stayed aboard. Why? Why hadn’t he gone with the other agents?

And Podebrad! Podebrad, the Czech engineer, the chief suspect. His name wasn’t on the list.

One more question to add to the dozens he would ask an agent someday. Perhaps he should not wait until someday. Why not go to John now and tell him the truth? John would have Strubewell and Podebrad into the brig and put them to the question with a speed unhampered by legalities and red tape.

No. It couldn’t be done now. John wouldn’t have the time to do this. He’d have to wait until after the battle. Besides, the two would just commit suicide.

Or would they?

Now that there were no resurrections, would an agent kill himself?

He might, Burton thought. Just because the Valley dwellers weren’t resurrected was no proof that agents weren’t. They could rise again somewhere else, in the vast underground chambers or in the tower.

Burton didn’t believe this. If the agents were resurrected elsewhere, they wouldn’t have hesitated to board the suicide express. They wouldn’t now be traveling via paddle wheeler to get to the tower.

If he and Strubewell and Podebrad survived the battle, he was going to catch them unawares, knock them out before they could transmit the mental code which would release the poison in the little black balls in their forebrains, and then hypnotize them as they came out of unconsciousness.

That was satisfying to visualize. But in the meantime, why had the twelve taken off and the two stayed?

Had Strubewell and Podebrad remained on the boat so they could sabotage it if it looked as if John were going to catch the twelve?

That seemed the only explanation. In which case, Burton must go to John to expose them.

But would John believe him? Wouldn’t he think that the blow on Burton’s head had deranged him?

He might, but he’d have to be convinced when Burton brought in Alice, Kazz, Loghu, Frigate, Nur, Mix, London, and Umslopogaas as witnesses.

By then, however, Strubewell and Podebrad might find out about what was going on and flee. Worse, they might blow up the boat or whatever they were planning on doing.

Burton wiggled his finger at Alice. When she came, he told her softly to take a message to Nur el-Musafir. Nur was to station one or more of their group with Podebrad in the boiler room and Strubewell in the pilothouse. If either did something suspicious, something which could threaten the boat, he was to be clubbed on the head at once. If that wasn’t possible, he was to be shot or stabbed.

Alice’s eyes widened.

“Why?”

“I’ll explain later!” he said fiercely. “Go while there’s still time!”

Nur would figure out what the orders meant. And he’d see that they were somehow carried out. It wasn’t going to be easy to get someone into the boiler room and the pilothouse. At the moment, everybody had his or her station. To leave it for any reason without authorization was a serious crime. Nur would have to think fast and cleverly to send somebody to watch the two.

And then Burton said, “I’ve got it!”

He picked up the sick-bay phone and called the pilothouse. The phone operator there was going to call Strubewell, but Burton insisted that he speak to the king instead. John was very annoyed, but he did as Burton requested and went down to the observation room. There he flicked a switch which made it impossible for their conversation to be listened to on the pilothouse line unless the line had been bugged.

“Sire,” Burton said, “I’ve been thinking. How do we know that the deserters haven’t planted a bomb on the boat? Then, if it looks as if we’re going to catch them, they transmit a coded message to the receiver, and the explosives are set off.”

After a short silence, John said, his voice a trifle high, “Do you think that’s a possibility?”

“If I can think of it, then why shouldn’t the deserters?”

“I’ll start a search at once. If you’re up to it, you join it.”

John hung up. A minute later, Strubewell’s voice bellowed over the loudspeakers. He gave orders that every inch of the vessel was to be examined for bombs. The officers were to organize parties at once. Strubewell laid out who was responsible for which area and told them to get going.

Burton smiled. It hadn’t been necessary to reveal anything to John, and Podebrad and Strubewell would find themselves directing a search for the very bombs they may have hidden.

26

Burton started out the door. Since he hadn’t been ordered to any area, he considered himself a free agent. He’d go to the boiler or A deck and inspect the engine room and the ammunition rooms.

Just as he started down the steps to B deck, he heard pistol shots and shouting. They seemed to come from below, so he hurried down, wincing with pain every time his foot hit a step. When he got to A deck he saw a crowd halfway down the boat by the railing. He walked to it, made his way through the people, and looked down at the object of attention.

It was an oiler named James McKenna. He was lying on his side, a pistol near his open hand. A tomahawk was firmly wedged in the side of his skull.

A huge Iroquoian, Dojiji, stepped forward, stooped, and wrenched the tomahawk loose.

“He shot at me and missed,” he said.

King John should have issued orders by word of mouth, not by the loudspeaker system. Then McKenna might have been caught while in the act of pressing the ten pounds of plastic explosive against the hull in a dark corner of the engine room. It really made no difference, however. McKenna had walked away from the alcove the moment he’d heard the search order. He had been cool, and his bearing was nonchalant. But an electrician’s mate had seen him and challenged him, and McKenna had shot him. He had run then and shot and killed a man and a woman on his way to the railing deck outside. A search party, running toward him, had shot at him and failed to hit him. He’d wounded one of them but had missed Dojiji. Now McKenna lay dead, unable to tell them why he had tried to blow up the boat.

King John came down to look at the bomb. The clock was attached by wires to the fuse and the shapeless mass of plastic. Its hands indicated 10.20 minutes to go.

“There’s enough to blow a hole in the hull bigger than the starboard side itself,” a bomb expert said cheerfully. “Shall I remove it, Sire?”

“Yes. At once,” King John said coolly. “One thing, though. This doesn’t have a receiver radio, too, does it?”

“No, Your Majesty.”

John had frowned. He said, “Very strange. I just don’t understand this. Why should the deserters leave one of their number behind to set the time clock when they could far easier have blown it with a wireless frequency? McKenna could have been with them. They’d not have to put one of their own in danger. It doesn’t make sense.”

Burton was with the group of officers accompanying John. He said nothing. Why bother to enlighten him, if indeed what he had to offer was enlightening?

McKenna had shown up immediately after the raid from the Parseval, and he’d volunteered to replace one of the men killed in it. It seemed evident to Burton, or at least a strong possibility, that McKenna had been dropped off from a plane or via parachute or glider from the airship Parseval. What did the twentieth century call such people? The…“fifth column”…that was it. Clemens had planted this man for the day when the Not For Hire caught up with the Rex. He’d been ordered to blow up the boat when that day came.

What Burton didn’t understand was why Clemens had told McKenna to wait until then. Why hadn’t McKenna blown the boat at the first opportunity? Why wait for forty years? Especially since it was very likely that McKenna, after living with the Rexites for so many years, might have found himself sympathetic with them? He’d be isolated from his fellows on the Not For Hire and almost inevitably, and subtly, his loyalties would transfer from those who’d become a distant memory to those he lived intimately with for a long time.

Or had Clemens not considered that?

That wasn’t probable. As anyone who’d read his works knew, Clemens was a master psychologist.

It was possible that Clemens had given McKenna orders not to destroy the Rex unless it was absolutely necessary.

King John gestured at the corpse and said, “Throw that filth into The River.”

It was done. Burton would have liked to find an excuse to have the body taken to the morgue. There he could open up the skull and inspect the cerebrum for a tiny black ball. Too late. McKenna would be opened up only by the fish.

Whatever had happened, it was over for McKenna. And though the one bomb had been found, the search continued for more. At last, it was called off. There was no secretly planted explosive device in the vessel or outside it. Divers had gone over every inch of the exterior of the hull.

Burton thought that the deserters, if they’d had their wits about them, would have made provisions to sink the craft before leaving. Then neither it nor the airplanes could have pursued them. But they were agents, loathing violence though able to deal with it if the situation required.

There had been only one way to make sure that McKenna was an agent of the Ethicals or an agent of Clemens.

One thing was certain. Podebrad and Strubewell were not saboteurs.

But why had they stayed aboard?

He thought about the problem, puzzling over it a while, then said, “Hah!”

They were volunteers. They’d elected to remain with the boat because there was someone or someones on the Not For Hire whom they wanted to make contact with. He or she or they might be enemies or friends, but the two had their reasons for wanting to get hold of the person or persons. So, they’d made the very risky decision to stay with the Rex through the battle. If the Rex won, which it might, though the odds now seemed against it, then the two, if they survived, would be able to get to whoever it was that was on Clemens’ boat.

But…how would the two know that the whoever was on the Not For Hire?

They might have some secret method of communication. Just what, Burton couldn’t imagine.

He got to thinking about the agents who’d deserted. Did they know about the boats in the cave on the shore of the polar sea and the door at the base of the tower?

He hoped that they hadn’t heard Paheri’s tale. As far as he knew, only he and Alice, Frigate, Loghu, Nur, London, Mix, Kazz, and Umslopogaas knew about the ancient Egyptian’s discovery. That is, they were the only ones on the boat who had. There would be others, perhaps many many people, who had heard Paheri’s tale firsthand and then second-, third-, and fourthhand.

However, for all he knew, X was among the deserters. Which meant that the agents would know about the hidden entrance, too.

Not necessarily. X might be posing as a friendly agent. He’d fled with them but planned to use them to get him to the tower. And then he’d see that they, like Akhenaton and the other Egyptians of his party, were rendered unconscious or dead.

Or perhaps…Podebrad and Strubewell somehow knew that X was on the Not For Hire.

But…either one of the two could be X.

Burton shrugged. He’d just have to let events take their course until he saw a chance to influence them. Then he’d pounce like an owl on a mouse.

That wasn’t a good simile. The agents and the Ethicals were potentially more like tigers.

It didn’t make any difference to him. He was going to attack when he had to.

Again, he considered telling King John everything. Thus, he’d insure that the captured agents would not be executed on the spot. Of course, the agent would have to be knocked out before he could commit suicide. But with twelve to seize, fourteen if Strubewell and Podebrad were included, surely at least one would be unconscious…well, he’d wait a little more. He might not have to divulge anything to John.

The boat had stopped to anchor again while the scuba divers had inspected the hull. It had then resumed its upRiver course at top speed. But it put into shore again to hook up the metal cap to a grailstone. Dawn came; the stones thundered and lightninged. The cap was swung back into the boat, and it sped after the deserters once more. Shortly after breakfast, the motors of three planes were warmed up. Then Voss and Okabe took off in their biplane fighters and the torpedo-bomber roared out of the swung-open stern section from the launch dock.

The pilots would be able to spot the launch within an hour or two. What would happen after that was up to them, within the limits of John’s orders. He did not want the launch sunk or badly damaged because he needed it in the expected battle. The planes could fire on the launch and keep it from continuing upRiver, if possible. They must delay it until the Rex could catch up with it.

An hour and twenty-two minutes after fly off, Okabe reported in. The launch was sighted, and he’d tried to talk to the deserters by radio. He’d gotten no reply. The three planes would swing down over the boat in single file and fire machine guns at it. Not for long, however, since the lead bullets were too valuable, too needed for the fight against the Not For Hire. If a few bursts didn’t make the deserters surrender or turn downRiver or abandon the launch, then bombs would be dropped near the vessel.

Okabe also reported that the launch was several miles past the point where The Valley suddenly widened out. This was the area to which the launch had gone two months ago during the rewinding. Its crew had talked to many of the titanthrops, in Esperanto, of course, in an effort to recruit about forty as marines. King John had envisaged closing in with the Not For Hire and sending the forty ogres over in the van of the boarders. Two score like Joe Miller would wipe the decks of Clemens’ boat clean in short order. Nor would the mighty Miller be able to withstand the onslaught of so many of his fellows.

Much to John’s disgust and disappointment, his men had discovered that every titanthrop interviewed was a member of the Church of the Second Chance. They refused to fight and in fact tried to convert the crew.

It was probable that there were titanthrops who had not succumbed to the preachings of the missionaries. But there wasn’t time to look for them.

Now the airplanes lowered toward the launch while the people on shore, part of them average-sized Homo sapiens, part veritable Brobdingnags, lined the banks to watch these machines.

Suddenly, Okabe said, “The launch is heading for the right bank!”

He dived but not to fire. He couldn’t have hit the launch without also hitting many locals, and he was under orders not to anger them in any way if he could help it. John didn’t want to go through a hostile area after the Rex had sunk the Not For Hire.

“The deserters are jumping out of the launch and wading to the bank!” Okabe said. “The launch is drifting with the current!”

John cursed and then ordered the torpedo-bomber to land on The River. Its gunner must board the launch and bring it back to the Rex. And he must do it quickly before some local decided to swim out and appropriate the launch for himself.

“The deserters are mingled with the crowds,” Okabe said. “I imagine they’ll head for the hills after we’ve left.”

“God’s teeth!” John said. “We’ll never be able to find them!”

Burton, in the pilothouse at this time, made no comment. He knew that the agents would later steal a sailboat and continue upRiver. The Rex would overtake it, if the Rex wasn’t sunk or too damaged to continue.

A few minutes after the launch was reberthed in the Rex and the two fighters had landed, a light on the pilothouse radio glowed orange. The operator’s eyes widened, and he was so astonished he couldn’t speak for a moment. For thirty years he and his fellow operators had waited for this to happen, though they’d not really expected it would.

At last the operator got the words out.

“Sire, Sire! The Clemens frequency!”

The frequency which the Not For Hire used was, of course, known. It could have been changed by Clemens, though even then the radio of the Rex would have scanned the spectrum until it had located it. But apparently Clemens had never seen any reason to shift to another wavelength. The few times that the Rex had received transmission from the Not For Hire, the message had been scrambled.

Not now. The message was not for the Parseval or the airplanes or launches of the Not For Hire. It was in non-scrambled Esperanto and meant for the Rex.

The speaker was not Sam Clemens himself. He was John Byron, Clemens’ chief executive officer. And he wished to talk to, not King John, but his chief officer.

John, who’d gone down to his quarters for sleep or dalliance with his current cabinmate, or both, was summoned. Strubewell did not dare to talk to Byron until his commander authorized it. John was at first determined to talk directly to Clemens. But Clemens, through Byron, refused to do that nor would he say why.

John replied, through his first mate, that there would be no communication at all then. But, after a minute, while the radio hissed and crackled, Byron said that he had a message to deliver, a “proposition.” His commander dared not speak to John face to face, as it were. Clemens was afraid that he’d lose his temper and cuss out King John as no one else in the universe had ever been cussed out before. And that included Jehovah’s denunciation of Satan before He hurled him headlong from Heaven.

Clemens had a sporting offer to make John. However, it was necessary, as John should now understand, that it be transmitted via intermediaries. After waiting half an hour to make Clemens swear and fume and fret, John replied via Strubewell.

Burton was again in the pilothouse and heard everything from the beginning. He was staggered when Clemens’ “proposition” was put forth.

John heard it all out, then replied that he’d have to talk about this to Werner Voss and Kenji Okabe, his top fighter pilots. He couldn’t order them to accept these conditions. And, by the way, who were Clemens’ two pilots?

Byron said that they were William Barker, a Canadian, and Georges Guynemer, a Frenchman. Both were famous aces of World War I.

There was more identification of the pilots. Their histories were expanded upon. John called Voss and Okabe to the pilothouse, and he told them what had happened.

They were astounded. But after they’d recovered, they talked to each other.

And then Okabe said, “Sire, we have been flying for twenty years for you. It’s mostly been dull work though occasionally dangerous. We’ve been waiting for this moment; we’ve known that it would happen. We won’t be facing fellow nationals or former allies, though I understand that my country was an ally of England and France in World War I.

“We will do this. We look forward to it.”

Burton thought, What are we? King Arthur’s knights? Idiots? Or both?

Nevertheless, part of him approved deeply and was very excited.

27

The Not For Hire had been anchored near the right bank a few miles up from the entrance to the lake. Göring was taken to Anglejo by the launch Post No Bills. Clemens sent his apologies to La Viro for not coming to meet him at once. Unfortunately, he said, a previous engagement had held him up. But late tomorrow or possibly the day after, he would come to the temple.

Göring had begged Clemens to make overtures of peace to King John. Clemens, as Hermann had expected, had refused to do so.

“The final act of this drama has been too long delayed. The damn intermission was forty years long. Now nothing is going to stop its being staged.”

“This isn’t a theater,” Hermann said. “Real blood will be shed. Real pain will be felt. The deaths won’t be faked. And for what?”

“For what matters,” Clemens said. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

He puffed angrily on his big green cigar. Göring silently blessed him with the three-fingered gesture of the Church and left the pilothouse.

All day long the boat had been readied. The thick duraluminum plates with the small portholes were secured over the windows. Thick duraluminum doors were secured to the exterior entrances of the corridors and passageways. The ammunition was checked. The steam machine guns were fired for a few rounds. The elevation and vertical and horizontal movement machines of the 88-millimeter cannons were tested. Rockets were placed in the launching tubes, and the machinery for bringing more from the bowels of the A deck was checked. The one cannon using compressed air was tested. The airplanes were taken up for a wringout after being fully armed. The launches were also armed. The radar, sonar, and infrared detectors were given a checkout. The boarding bridges were extended and withdrawn.

Every station conducted a dozen drills.

After the batacitor and the grails were charged at evening, the Not For Hire went for a five-mile circular cruise, and more drills were conducted. Radar swept the lake and reported that the Rex was not within its range.

Before the crew went to bed, Clemens talked to almost all the crew in the grand salon. His short almost entirely serious speech went out over the loudspeakers to those on duty.

“We’ve had a fantastically long ride up The River, the longest river in the universe, perhaps. We’ve had ups and downs, our tragedies, our pains, our boredoms, our comedies, our cowardly deeds, our heroic. We’ve faced death many times. We’ve seen those we love die, though we’ve been somewhat recompensed for this by also seeing those we hated die.

“It’s been a long long ride. We’ve gone 7,200,020 miles. That’s about half of the estimated 14,500,000 miles of The River. It’s been a long voyage. But if we’d walked it, we’d still be walking. We would’ve walked only about 127,500 miles, leaving more than 7,000,000 miles to go.

“Everybody who signed on knew before signing what the ride on the greatest and most luxurious vessel in the world would cost him. He and she were made aware of the price of the ticket. This ride is paid for at the end, not the beginning.

“I know each of you well, as well as one human being can know another. You were all hand-picked, and you’ve all justified my judgment. You’ve gone through many tests and passed them with flying marks. So I have complete confidence that you’ll pass the final, the hardest, test tomorrow.

“I’m making this sound like an arithmetic examination in high school or like the speech a football coach gives before his team goes out to play. I’m sorry about that. This test, this game, is deadly, and some of you alive today won’t be by tomorrow’s end. But you knew the price when you signed up, and none should think of welshing.

“But after tomorrow is over…”

He paused to look around. Joe Miller, sitting on a huge chair on the podium, looked sad, and tears were trickling down his craggy cheeks.

Little de Marbot leaped up then and raised his glass of liquor and cried, “Three cheers for our commander and a toast to him!”

Everybody huzzahed loudly. After they had drunk, tall big-nosed rapier-thin de Bergerac stood up and said, “And a toast to victory! Not to mention death and damnation to John Lackland!”

Sam stayed up late that night. He paced back and forth for a while in the pilothouse. Though the boat was anchored, there was a full watch in the room. The Not For Hire could up-anchor and paddle wheel into the lake at top speed within three minutes. If John should try a night attack despite his promises not to, Sam’s vessel would be ready for it.

The pilothouse watch said little. Sam left them with a good night and walked for a few minutes on top of the flight deck. Ashore, many fires blazed. The Virolanders knew what was coming tomorrow, and they were too excited, too apprehensive, to get to sleep at their customary time. Earlier, La Viro himself had appeared on the bank in a fishing boat and requested permission to board. Clemens had told him, through a bullhorn, that he was certainly glad to meet him. But he could not discuss anything until after tomorrow. Sorry. That was the way it had to be.

The big dark man with the lugubrious features had departed, though not before blessing Sam. Sam felt ashamed.

Now Sam walked the length of every deck on both sides to test the alertness of the sentries. He was happy with the results, and he decided it was foolish to spend any more time prowling the boat. Besides, Gwenafra would be expecting him to come to bed. She’d probably want to make love, too, because one or both of them might not be alive after tomorrow. He didn’t feel like it at the moment, but she had some irresistible ways of arousing his spirits, among other things.

He was right. She did insist on it, but when his lack of enthusiasm became obvious, and she couldn’t generate any, she quit. Nor did she reproach him. She only asked that he hold her tight and that he talk to her. It was seldom that Sam didn’t have time to talk, so they spent at least two hours in conversation.

Shortly before they drifted into sleep, Gwenafra said, “I wonder if Burton could be on the Rex? Wouldn’t that be funny if he were? I mean, peculiar, not laughable. It would also be horrible.”

“You’ve never gotten over your little-girl crush on him, have you?” Sam said. “He must have been something. To you, anyway.”

“No, I haven’t,” she said, “though I couldn’t be sure, of course, that I’d like him now. Still, what if he were one of King John’s men, and we killed him? I’d feel terrible. Or what if someone you loved were on the Rex?”

“It’s just not very probable,” he said. “I’m not going to worry about it.”

But he did. Long after Gwenafra was breathing the easy breath of the deep sleeper, he lay awake. What if Livy were on the Rex? No, she wouldn’t be. After all, it was one of John’s men who’d killed her in Parolando. She’d never come aboard his boat. Not, that is, unless she wanted to kill him for revenge. No, she wouldn’t do that. She was too gentle for that, even though she’d fight fiercely in defense of her loved ones. But revenge? No.

Clara? Jean? Susy? Could one of them be on the Rex? The chances were very very low that they could be. Yet…the mathematically improbable sometimes happened. And a missile fired from his boat might kill her. And she’d be lost forever to him since there were no more resurrections.

Almost, almost, he rose from bed and went to the pilothouse and had the radio operator send a message to the Rex. A message that he would like to make peace, to call off the battle and the hatred and lust for revenge.

Almost.

John would never agree anyway.

How did he, Sam, know that he wouldn’t unless he tested him?

No. John was incorrigible. As stubborn as his enemy, Sam Clemens.

“I’m sick,” Sam said.

After a while, he slid into sleep.

Erik Bloodaxe pursued him with his double-headed ax. Sam ran as he had run in so many nightmares about this terrible Norseman. Behind him, Erik screamed, “Bikkja! Droppings of Ratatosk! I told you I’d wait for you near the headwaters of The River! Die, you rotten backstabbers! Die!”

Sam awoke moaning, sweating, his heart pounding.

What irony, what poetic justice, what retribution if Erik should happen to be on the Rex.

Gwenafra murmured something. Sam patted her bare back and said, softly, “Sleep, little innocent. You never had to murder anyone, and I hope yon never will.”

But, in a way, wasn’t she being called on to commit murder tomorrow?

“This is too much,” he said. “I must sleep. I must be in top physical and mental condition tomorrow. Otherwise…an error on my part…fatigue…who knows?”

But the Not For Hire was too much larger than the Rex, too much more heavily armored and armed, not to win.

He must sleep.

He sat up suddenly, staring. Sirens were wailing. And from the intercom on the wall, Third Mate Cregar shouted, “Captain! Captain! Wake up! Wake up!”

Clemens rolled out of bed and crossed to the intercom. He said, “Yes, what is it?”

John was making a sneak attack? The rotten son of a bitch!

“The infrared operators report that seven people have gone overboard, Captain! Deserters, it looks like!”

So…his little speech about everybody having passed the test, about their proven courage, had been wrong. Some men and women had lost their bravery. Or, he thought, had come to their senses. And they’d taken off. Just as he had when the War Between the States had started. After two weeks in the Confederate volunteer irregulars in Missouri, after that innocent passerby had been shot by one of his comrades, he had deserted and gone west.

He didn’t really blame the seven. He couldn’t allow anyone to know that he felt that way, of course. He’d have to put on a stern face, rave and rant a little, curse the rats and so on. For the sake of discipline and morale, he must.

He had no sooner stepped into the elevator to go up to the pilothouse than the revelation came.

The seven were not cowards. They were agents.

They had no reason to stay aboard and perhaps be killed. They had a higher duty than to Clemens and the Not For Hire.

He walked into the pilothouse. The lights were on all over the vessel. Several searchlights showed some men and women carrying grails on the bank. They were running as if their deepest fears had been embodied and were about to seize them.

“Shall we fire on them?” Cregar said.

“No,” Sam said. “We might hit some of the locals. Let them go. We can always pick them up after the battle.”

The seven would undoubtedly take sanctuary in the temple. La Viro wouldn’t turn them over to Clemens.

Sam ordered Cregar to make a roll call. When the missing seven were identified, Sam looked at the list of names on the message screen. Four men and three women. All had claimed to have lived after 1983. His suspicions about this claim were valid. But it was too late to do anything about it.

No. Just now he couldn’t act. But after the battle he would find some way to abduct the seven and to question them. They knew enough to clear up at least half of the mysteries that perplexed him. Perhaps they knew enough to clear up all.

He spoke to Cregar.

“Turn off the sirens. Tell the crew that it’s a false alarm, to go back to sleep. Good night.”

It wasn’t a good night, though. He woke up many times, and he had some frightening nightmares.

Section 9

The First and Last Dogfight on the Riverworld

28

High noon in the valley of Virolando.

For thirty years, the sky beneath the zenith sun had been a kaleidoscope of multicolored gliders and balloons. Today, the blue was as unflecked as a baby’s eye. The River, which was always streaked with boats, with white, red, black, green, violet, purple, orange, and yellow sails, was today a solid green-blue.

The drums beat along both banks. Stay away from the air and the water and keep away from the banks.

Despite this, multitudes crowded the left bank. The majority, however, were on the spires or the bridges among the spires. They were eager to see the battle, their curiosity overriding their fear. No amount of exhortations by La Viro to stay on the hills could keep them away from this spectacle. They ignored the wardens who tried to press them back to a safe distance. Not having experienced anything like twentieth-century weapons, or, indeed, any weapons more advanced than those of 1 A.D., they had no idea of what would happen. Few of them had seen violence on even a small scale. And so the innocents flocked to the plains or climbed the spires.

La Viro, on his knees in the temple, prayed.

Hermann Göring, having failed to console him, went up a ladder to the top of a rock tower. Though he hated this viciousness, he intended to watch it. And, he had to admit to himself, he was as excited as a child awaiting the first act of a circus. It was deplorable; he had a long way to go before the old Göring was completely destroyed. But he could not stay away from the battle and its bloodshed. No doubt, he would regret this bitterly. But then nothing like this had ever happened before on the Riverworld. Nor would it happen again.

He was not going to miss it. In fact, for a moment, he longed to be flying one of the airplanes.

Yes, he had a long way to go. Meanwhile, he might as well enjoy this as much as he could. He was willing to pay for it with soul-suffering afterwards.

The giant boats, the Not For Hire and the Rex Grandissimus, plowed through the waters, headed for each other. They were at this time separated by six miles. The agreement was that when they were five miles apart, they would stop. Unless, that is, the air battle was over before then. After that, everything went, no holds barred, may the best boat win.

Sam Clemens paced the deck of the pilothouse. For an hour, he had been checking all stations and had been rehearsing the battle plan. The crew assigned to the SW were in A deck now, waiting. When the signal came, they would bring up the SW and mount it behind the thick steel shield which had once protected the fore steam machine gun. This had been removed, and the platform which had held the gun was ready for the SW.

The steam-gun crew had been startled when the orders had come down to remove it. They had asked questions which were not answered. Rumors flew through the boat from prow to stern, from deck to deck. Why had the captain made this strange move? What was going on?

Meanwhile, Clemens had talked three times to William Fermor, the marine lieutenant guarding the SW crew. Sam had impressed on him the importance of his duty.

“I am still worried about John’s agents,” he said. “I know that everybody has been triple-cleared. But that doesn’t mean much. Any saboteur sent by John will be as full of duplicity as a Missouri barnyard is of crap. I want everybody who comes near the SW room checked.”

“What could they do?” Fermor said, referring to the SW men. “None of them are armed. I even looked under their kilts to make sure they’re not concealing anything there. They did not like that, I tell you. They feel that they should be trusted.”

“They should understand the necessity,” Clemens said.

The control-room chronometer indicated 11:30. Clemens looked out on the rear port. The flight deck was ready. The airplanes had been brought up on the elevators, and one was now mounted on the steam catapult at the far end of the deck. There were two, the only single-seaters to survive the long voyage, and these had been wrecked and repaired several times.

Both original single-seaters, monoplanes, had been destroyed, one in battle, one in an accident. The two replacements, constructed from parts from the storage rooms, were biplanes with inline alcohol-burning motors capable of pulling them at 150 miles per hour at ground-level. Originally, they had been fueled by synthetic gasoline, but the supply of this had long ago run out. Twin belt-fed .50-caliber machine guns were on the nose just ahead of the open cockpit. They were capable of firing lead bullets from the brass cartridges at five hundred rounds a minute. The ammunition had been stored through the voyage for just such an event as today’s. Several days ago, the cartridges had been refilled with new charges and each had been rechecked for exact length, width, and straightness to insure against their jamming the guns.

Sam checked the chronometer again and then went down the elevator to the flight deck. A small jeep carried him to the planes, where the flight crew, the reserve pilots, and two chief pilots waited.

Both craft were painted white, and on the rudder and on the underside of the lower wings of each was painted a scarlet phoenix.

One bore on its sides a red stork in flight. Just below the cockpit were letters in black. Vieux Charles. Old Charlie. Georges Guynemer’s nickname for the planes he had flown during World War I.

On each side of the cockpit of the other plane was the head of a black and barking dog.

Both airmen were dressed in white palefish leather. Their knee-length boots were trimmed with red, as were their jodhpurs. Their jackets bore a scarlet phoenix on the left breast. The fliers’ leather helmets were topped by a tiny spike, the tip of a hornfish horn. Their goggles were edged with scarlet. Their gloves were white, but the gauntlets were red. They were standing by Old Charlie, talking earnestly with each other, when Clemens got out of the jeep. As he approached them, they snapped to a salute.

Clemens was silent for a moment, eyeing them. Though the exploits of the two men had happened after he had died, he was thoroughly conversant with them.

Georges Guynemer was a thin man of medium height with burning black eyes and a face of almost feminine beauty. At all times, or, at least, outside of his cabin, he was as taut as a violin string or a guy wire. This was the man whom the French had called “the Ace of Aces.” There were others, Nungesser, Dorme, and Fonck, who had shot more Boches out of the sky. But then they saw more action, since Georges’ career had been ended relatively early.

The Frenchman was one of those natural fliers who automatically became part of the machine, an airborne centaur. He was also an excellent mechanic and technician, as careful in checking out his airplane and weapons or devising improvements as the famous Mannock and Rickenbacker. During the Great War, he had seemed to exist for nothing but flying and air-fighting. As far as was then known, he had nothing to do with women as lovers. His only confidante was his sister, Yvonne. He was a master of aerobatics but seldom used this talent in the air. He roared into battle using “the thrust direct,” as the French fencers called it. He was as wild and uncautious as his English counterpart, the great Albert Ball. Like him, he loved to fly alone and, when he encountered a group of the enemy, no matter how large it was, he attacked.

It was seldom that he did not return with his Nieuport or Spad full of bullet holes.

This was not the way to live a long life in a war in which the average life of a pilot was three weeks. Yet he managed fifty-three victories before he himself fell.

One of his comrades wrote that when Guynemer got into the cockpit to take off, “The look on his face was appalling. The glances of his eyes were like blows.”

Yet this was the man who had been rejected by the French ground services as being unfit for duty. He was frail and easily caught cold, coughed much, and was unable to relax in the boisterous conviviality of his mates after the day’s fighting was done. He looked like a consumptive and probably was.

But the French loved him, and on that black day of April 11, 1917, when he died, the whole nation went into mourning. For a generation afterwards, the French schoolchildren were taught the legend that he had flown so high that the angels would not let him come back to Earth.

The truth, as known in those days, was that he had been alone as usual, and, somehow, a much lesser flier, a Lieutenant Wissemann, had shot him down. The plane had crashed into mud which was being churned by the shells of a great artillery duel. Before the thousands of explosions were done, Guynemer and his machine were blown to bits, mixed with mire, and completely disintegrated. Flesh and bone and metal became, not dust, but mud.

On the Riverworld, Georges had himself cleared up the mystery. While darting in and out of the clouds, hoping to surprise a Boche, or a dozen Boches—it made no difference to him—he had started to cough. The rackings got worse, and, suddenly, blood poured out of his mouth, running down his leather fur-lined combinaison. His fears that he had tuberculosis were now justified. But he could do nothing about it.

Even as his vitality drained away and his eyesight faded, he saw a German fighter plane approaching. Though dying, or believing that he was dying, he turned toward the enemy. His machine guns chattered, but his deadly marksmanship had deserted him. The German zoomed upwards, and Guynemer turned Old Charlie tightly to follow him. For a moment, he lost him. Then bullets pierced his windshield from behind. And then…unconsciousness.

He awoke naked upon the Riverbank.

Now he did not suffer from the white plague, and his flesh had filled out a little. But his intensity was still with him, though not as much as in 1917. He shared a cabin with a woman who now sat crying in it.

William George Barker, a Canadian, was a natural flier who had performed the amazing feat of soloing after only one hour of instruction.

On October 27, 1918, as major of the No. 201 Squadron of the RAF, he was flying alone in the new Sopwith Snipe. At twenty thousand feet over the Marmal Forest, he shot down a two-seater observation plane. One of its crew saved himself by parachuting. Barker was interested and perhaps a little angered when he saw this. Parachutes were forbidden to the Allied fliers.

Suddenly, a Fokker appeared, and a bullet entered his right thigh. His Snipe went into a spin, but he pulled it out, only to find himself surrounded by fifteen Fokkers. Two of these he hammered with bullets and drove away. Another, hit within a range of ten yards, flamed out. But Barker was wounded again, this time in the left leg.

He lost consciousness, regaining it just in time to bring his plane out of another spin. From twelve to fifteen Fokkers were around him. At less than five yards, he shot the tail off of one, only to have his left elbow shattered by a bullet from a Spandau machine gun.

Once more, he fainted, came to his senses, and found himself in the midst of about twelve Germans. Smoke was pouring from the Snipe. Believing that he was on fire and so doomed, he determined to ram one of the Boches. Just as the two planes were about to collide, he changed his mind. Firing, he sent the other craft up in flames.

Diving away, he reached the British lines, crashing near an observation balloon but alive.

This was Barker’s last flight, reckoned by all authorities as the greatest one-man aerial battle of WWI against overwhelming odds. Barker was in a coma for two weeks, and when he awoke the war was over. He was given the Victoria Cross for this exploit, but for a long time he had to use canes to walk and an arm-sling. Despite his crippling pain, he returned to flying, and helped organize the Royal Canadian Air Force. In partnership with the great ace William Bishop, he established the first large Canadian airline.

He died in 1930, while making a test flight of a new plane which crashed for no determinable reason. His official score was fifty enemy aircraft, though other records tallied it as fifty-three.

Guynemer also claimed fifty-three.

Clemens shook the hands of the two men.

“I’m against dueling, as you well know,” he said. “I ridiculed the notion in my books, and I’ve talked to you many times of how I loathed the old Southern wickedness of settling disputes by killing. Though I suppose that anybody that’s foolish enough to believe in that kind of arbitration ought to be killed.

“Now, I wouldn’t have objected to this aerial duel at all if I knew that you’d be dead today and alive the next, as in the old days. But this is for real. I did have reservations, as Sitting Bull said to Custer, but you two seemed so eager, like war horses hearing a trumpet call, that I saw no reason to turn down John’s offer.

“Still, I wonder what’s behind this. Bad John may be planning something treacherous. I gave my consent because I talked to one of his officers, men I knew or knew of, and they’re honest honorable men. Though what men like William Goffe and Peder Tordenskjöld are doing on that boat, serving under that evil man, I can’t imagine. He must have changed his ways, though I refuse to believe that he has changed the inner man.

“In any event, they assured me that everything was on the up and up. Their two men plan to leave the boat at the same time you do. Their planes will carry only machine guns, no rockets.”

Barker said, “We’ve gone over all this, Sam. We think you’re—we’re—in the right. After all, John did steal your boat and he tried to kill you. And we know he’s an evil man. Besides…”

“Besides, you two can’t resist the chance to get into action again,” Sam said. “You’re suffering from nostalgia. You’ve forgotten how brutal and bloody those times were, haven’t you?”

Guynemer said impatiently, “If they were not evil, they would not be on the Rex. Besides, we would be cowards if we did not accept their challenge.”

Barker said, “We have to warm up the motors.”

Sam Clemens said, “Well, I shouldn’t even be talking like this. So long, boys. And good luck. May the best men win, and I’m sure you’ll be the best!”

He shook hands again and walked to one side. This was both brave and foolish, he thought, but he had given his consent. The last-minute resumming up of the situation was due to his nervous ness. He shouldn’t have said anything. But, to tell the truth, he was looking forward to this. It was like the jousts of the knights of old. He hated those knights, since, historically, they were oppressors and bleeders of the peasants and the lower classes and rather murderous to their own class. A filthy bloody-minded bunch in reality. However, there was the reality, and there was the myth. Myth always put blinders on men, and perhaps there was something good to be said for myth. The ideal was the light; the real, the shadow. Here were two exceptionally capable and courageous men, going to fight to the death in a prearranged duel. For what reason? Neither had to prove himself; they had done that long ago when the proving meant something.

What was it? Machismo? Definitely not.

Whatever their motive, they were secretly pleasing Clemens. For one thing, if they could down John’s fliers, then they could go on to strafe the Rex. Of course, if they lost, then John’s pilots would be raking the Not For Hire. He preferred not to think about that.

But the main source of pleasure was watching the combat. It was childish, or, at least, not mature. But like most men and many women, he enjoyed sport as a spectator. And this was a sporting event, however fatal for the participants. The Romans certainly knew what they were doing when they put on the gladiatorial combats.

Sam was startled when a trumpet call rang out. This was immediately followed by the stirring “Up in the Wild Blue,” composed by Gioacchino Rossini for the boat’s air force. The music, however, was electronically produced.

Barker, as commander, was the first to climb into the cockpit. The propeller turned slowly with a whine, then began whirling swiftly. Guynemer got into his plane. The people lining the edge of the flight deck and crowding the lower two rooms of the pilothouse cheered. Presently, the roar of the motor of Barker’s fighter drowned out the huzzahs and hurrays.

Sam Clemens looked up at the control room. The executive officer, John Byron, stood at the stern port of the control room, ready to signal the captain. As soon as the chronometer indicated 12:00, he would drop a scarlet cloth from the port.

A woman burst from the crowd by the edge of the deck and threw bouquets of irontree blooms into the cockpits. Guynemer, looking through goggles, smiled and waved his bouquet. Barker raised his blooms as if to throw them out, then changed his mind.

Sam looked at his watch. The blood-colored cloth dropped. He turned and gestured that the catapult should be activated. There was a whoosh of steam and Barker’s machine, released, was hurtling forward. Fifty feet before reaching the edge of the deck, it lifted.

The Frenchman’s plane soared up eighty seconds later.

The crowd spread out over the flight deck as Clemens hurried to the pilothouse. From the control room he would climb a ladder through a hatch on the top of the structure. A chair and table were bolted down there, waiting for him. While he watched the dogfight he would drink bourbon and smoke a fresh cigar.

Nevertheless, he could not keep from worrying about King John. It was inevitable as a belch after beer that John was planning some sort of trickery.

29

The Rex Grandissimus was in the middle of the lake, its nose pointed into the wind, its paddle wheels rotating to drive it at ten miles per hour. This, added to the five-mph headwind, gave the airplanes a fifteen-mph wind to climb into during takeoff.

King John, clad in a blue kilt, scarlet cape, and black jackboots, was on the flight deck. He was talking to the two pilots while the deck crew was readying the aircraft. These were dressed in black leather uniforms similar to those of the enemy fliers. Near them were the fighter craft, being readied. These were also biplanes, though the noses were blunter than their counterparts. The wings and fuselage of one plane were covered with a blue-and-silver checkerboard pattern, on which were imposed the three golden lions of King John. Its crimson nose bore a white skull and crossbones. The second machine was white with the three lions on the wings and rudder. On both sides and the underside of the cockpit was a red ball, the rising sun of Japan, Okabe’s sign.

Out of several hundred candidates interviewed in the past seven years, John had picked two to fly for this long-expected day. Kenji Okabe was a short husky slim man who radiated determination. Yet, most of the time he was congenial, interested in others besides himself. At this time, he looked grim.

Voss, with Barker, was distinguished as having fought the two greatest one-man stands against superior forces in the aerial history of World War I.

On September 23, 1917, Voss, a destroyer of forty-eight Allied aircraft, was flying alone in one of the new Fokker triplanes when he encountered seven SES fighters of the RVC Squadron No. 56. Their pilots were among Britain’s finest fighter pilots. Five were aces, McCudden, Rhys-Davids, and Cecil Lewis being the best-known. Their leader, McCudden, immediately led his men into a circling attack. Voss was seemingly doomed to be shot down at once, the target of fourteen machine guns. But Voss flew his plane as if it were a gyrfalcon. Twice, just as McCudden had Voss in his sights, Voss went into a quick flat half-spin, a maneuver which none of the British had ever seen before. Performing outrageous yet perfectly controlled tricks, and also riddling some of their planes, Voss eluded the seven. But he could not break through the circle. Then Rhys-Davids, a superb marksman, kept him in his sights long enough to empty a drum of .50-caliber bullets from his Lewises into him. Voss’s plane fell, not without the regrets of the British. If it had been possible, they would have preferred to have brought him down alive. He was the finest fighter pilot they had ever seen.

Voss was of partly Jewish descent. Though he had encountered some prejudice in the German air force, his splendid flying abilities and determination had brought him recognition which he deserved. He had even served for a while under Richthofen, the so-called Red Baron, who had made him a flight leader and assigned him to fly top cover in the formation.

Kenji Okabe, the captain of King John’s air force, had been, during World War II, a noncommissioned officer, Naval Aviation Pilot First Class. He was one of his country’s greatest fighter pilots, and he’d set the Navy’s all-time record when, over Rabaul, the Bismarck Archipelago, he’d shot down seven American planes in one day. But while attacking a bomber over Bougainville, the Solomon Islands, he was surprised by an American plane diving from a high altitude. It shot off one of the wings of the Zero and set it on fire. Burning, Okabe fell.

John chatted with his two finest pilots for a few minutes. Then he shook Voss’ hand and returned Okabe’s bow, and the two got into the cockpits. Five thousand feet altitude, at a point halfway between the two boats, a spire with an onion-shaped top, was the agreed rendezvous.

The four biplanes spiraled upwards. On reaching the designated height, as indicated by the altimeters, they straightened out. None of them thought of cheating, since they were honorable men. Nor had John suggested to his pilots that they go even higher to get the advantage. He knew them too well.

Now they headed toward each other. The sun was on the right of Voss and Okabe; on the left of Barker and Guynemer. All four would have preferred to have the sun to their backs and in their opponents’ eyes. That was the classic method of attack. Hide in ambush in sun or cloud, then, after spotting the victim below, dive down, taking him by surprise.

The airplanes reached the stipulated five thousand feet. The two pairs, with two miles between them, headed straight for each other at a combined three hundred miles an hour. Perhaps five thousand people were watching the last aerial dogfight of Terrestrials.

Werner Voss headed straight for Bill Barker; Georges Guynemer and Kenji Okabe, for each other.

It was a coolly near-suicidal maneuver. Keep the machine dead-on a collision course. Hold the fire until within 1700 feet. Press the trigger button on the joystick. Loose about ten rounds. Hope that the burst would hit a propeller, knock it out of line a little, perhaps pierce an oil line or electrical wires. Maybe even skim the cowl, pierce the windshield and hit the pilot.

Then, at the last possible second, roll and turn away to the right. If there was a miscalculation, if the other pilot did not turn but continued on his course, smash!

Guynemer’s blazing black eyes looked out of his goggles and through the ring-sight just ahead of the windscreen. The white plane was edge-on, seemingly flattened out. The whirling propeller gave a clear view of the other man; his teeth showed whitely in the sun. Then, the plane was huge, swelling at a speed that would have frightened most men. The Frenchman pressed the button. At the same time, the muzzle of the gun of his opponent shot red.

The two airplanes rolled simultaneously, and their wheels almost collided. Both brought their craft up and around in a turn so tight that the blood drained from their heads.

For a second, as he circled, Guynemer had the checkerboard machine in his sights. But he did not waste any bullets. It was gone too quickly.

Barker and Okabe crossed, almost hitting each other, so close they saw each other’s faces.

It was a mad scramble now, each climbing with all the power of his motor, at an angle just short of a stall. Their motors sang with the labor.

Then Okabe slid off, dropping, and as his sight crossed Guynemer, he triggered a burst of four bullets.

The Frenchman ducked involuntarily as a hole was punched in his windscreen. Banking, he followed Okabe down, hoping to get on his tail. The plane displaying the red ball had taken a chance and almost succeeded. But now he was lower than Guynemer, and he must pay.

The Japanese came back up in a tight loop which almost stood the plane on its tail. It fell back, and Okabe, upside down, fired as Guynemer came into his sights again. The Frenchman was rolling then. Bullets stitched across the fuselage, just missing him. His fuel tank was hit, but it was self-sealing, a feature he didn’t have in his old Spad. Okabe straightened the plane out and climbed again. Guynemer curved his machine around, sped up, hung it on its nose for several seconds, and loosed four bullets. One shot through the cockpit, burning the Japanese’s hand on the stick. Grunting with pain, Okabe snatched his hand away. His plane fell off to the right, out of control for a moment.

Guynemer had fallen into a spin, though he brought it out quickly.

The Frenchman and the German were, without planning it, for a few seconds side by side, both climbing. Then Guynemer banked toward Voss, and, to prevent a collision, Voss also banked. Instead of turning away, as Guynemer had expected, Voss turned toward him but went down instead of up.

Voss’ wingtip missed Guynemer’s tail elevator by a half-inch.

The German drove down and then up in a loop, a maneuver not recommended when the enemy was on your tail. At its top, he rolled over and then dived.

Guynemer had thought, when Checkerboard turned into him, that it was all over. Quickly recovering, no time for thought about narrow escapes here, he started to climb, looking over his shoulder. For a moment he could not see Checkerboard. Then both it and Barker’s machine flashed by him. His friend was behind Checkerboard, having somehow gotten on his tail. Checkerboard went into a barrel roll, lost speed in the maneuver, and then did a flat half-spin. Voss was quick as a cat at the controls. Suddenly, he was pointed in the opposite direction. Barker’s plane shot by him, their wingtips almost touching.

Guynemer had no time for further looking except for the plane with the red ball. Now the fellow was behind him but below, climbing as fast as he but still unable to decrease the distance between them. His foe was about seven hundred feet, Guynemer estimated. Close enough to reach him with his fire but too distant for accurate shooting in the air.

Nevertheless, Red Ball did give him a burst. Holes walked across Guynemer’s right wing as he raised it to turn. Red Ball also turned, jockeying his machine so that he could zero in on the man in the cockpit. Guynemer pushed in on the throttle until it was flat against the panel. If only his motor had more power than Red Ball’s, he could pull away slowly even in this steep climb. But there was no use wishing. They were evenly matched in this respect.

He pulled the stick back with a smooth savagery. He decreased the angle of his climb, thus allowing Red Ball to narrow the gap between them. But Guynemer could not curve up and over onto his back without more power. To try that without flattening out his inclination to the horizon would send his ship into a stall. For about thirty seconds, he had to take a chance that his enemy’s fire would miss vital parts of his target.

Okabe closed up, wondering why Vieux Charles had slowed down. By now he assumed that its pilot was Guynemer. Like all airmen, he knew Guynemer’s history well. For some moments after seeing the name, he had felt strange. What was he doing up here trying to kill the famous Frenchie, to shoot down Old Charlie?

Okabe looked through the sight. When he came within fifty yards, he would shoot. Now, now he was in range. He depressed the button on top of the joystick; his craft shook as the machine gun spat. He wasn’t close enough to see if he had hit, but he doubted it. And now the white ship emblazoned with the red stork was pulling its nose up. Now, it was standing on its tail, and now, it had flipped over and was shooting at him.

But Okabe had kicked rudder and pushed the stick. At this altitude, the plane did not respond as swiftly as in straight flight. But it performed the half-roll and then he was diving away. He looked back and saw that Old Charlie was coming out of the dive in the opposite direction.

He turned steeply and headed toward it, hoping to catch it before it could get above him.

Voss, finding the plane marked with the dog’s head behind him, had little time to determine which maneuver might shake it off his tail. He doubted that any conventional aerobatics would do it. This man would just perform the same or would hang back a little and pounce on him when he came out of it.

Savagely, he yanked the throttle half-back.

Barker was surprised to come so close so suddenly. But he did not stop to think. Checkerboard was in his sight; the range was fifty yards and becoming less. Then the helmet of the pilot was inside the ring of his sight. He pressed on the trigger button.

Checkerboard, as if reading his mind, suddenly increased power and at the same time half-rolled. Barker’s bullets sped by where the head had been, scorching the bottom of the fuselage, knocking off the tail skid.

Immediately, the Canadian half-rolled. If he had to shoot while on his side, he would do so.

Checkerboard righted itself but continued into a half-roll to the right. Doghead followed it. Checkerboard regained horizontal attitude, and Doghead pressed on the trigger button again.

But Checkerboard slid on into a turning dive. He must be desperate, Barker thought. I can turn and dive as fast as he. He also thought that Checkerboard must be Voss. He had to be.

But Checkerboard pointed his nose up quickly, barrel-rolled, and fell down again. Barker refused to emulate the maneuver. He pushed on the stick, his thumb ready to press, sticking to Checkerboard as closely as a duckling to its mother.

Guynemer, coming out of the dive, was in Checkerboard’s line of fire. And Voss, estimating in a flash the vectors of his plane and Old Charlie’s, the wind and the range, let loose a burst. There were only six bullets fired, and Guynemer was gone by. But one struck the Frenchman in the thigh, penetrating it at a downward angle.

Barker did not know that Voss was shooting until he saw Georges throw up an arm and snap his head backwards. Then he closed his thumb on the button, but Voss had zoomed up and into a half-spin, suicidally throwing his wings around so that Barker had to bank away to keep from collision.

But he was around, turning as swiftly as a leopard fearing a ham-stringing by a wild dog. Voss had momentarily escaped him, though at a cost. Forced to dive again to regain speed before Barker could get to him, he was below him again.

Barker slid down toward him, looking around at the same time for Red Ball.

He saw it. It was headed for him from above, coming to aid its fellow, now that Guynemer was momentarily, perhaps permanently, hors de combat.

It was vital to abandon Voss for the moment. Barker turned his plane up, its nose pointed on the same plane and in the same direction as Okabe’s. Collision course.

But having to climb put him at a disadvantage. The enemy did not have to stay at the same level, nor did he. He banked slightly, turning to the left. Barker banked to the left. Okabe rolled to the right and then flattened out the dive. Evidently, he was trying to circle around to get on his tail. The Canadian looked down on both sides. Guynemer was climbing away now. He wasn’t so badly wounded he was out of the fight. And the German was heading toward the Frenchman, who was almost at the same level. He was underneath him, in a perfect position for Barker to attack him. Unfortunately, Barker was in the same situation as Voss with respect to Okabe.

Barker turned his plane while still climbing. Within about thirty seconds, Okabe would come screaming down and around and behind him.

To hell with Okabe. He was going to attack Voss anyway.

Barker’s plane dived in a long curve.

The wings shook with the speed of the descent. He glanced at his speedometer. Two hundred and sixty miles per hour. At ten miles per hour more, the wings would be under an intolerable strain.

He glanced back. Okabe was following him now but not that closely. Probably his wings had about the same tolerance as his own plane. Barker flattened out a little, decreasing the rate of descent. This would allow Okabe to narrow the gap between him and Barker. But Barker wanted to come up on Voss at a speed which would give him time for a long burst.

Now Voss, seeing Barker diving, the only target himself, turned his machine toward the swooping nemesis. For a few seconds, they were on the same line, and the muzzles of Voss’ guns spat flame. He was taking a long chance, the odds high against success, since the range was four hundred yards. But there was little else he could do.

If the plane had been miraculously hit, Barker himself was untouched. Now he banked away, altering slightly the curve. He throttled back, looking backwards at the same time. Okabe was getting closer, but he was still too far away to use his weapon.

Barker’s machine, the wind howling over the edge of the windscreen, came around and behind Voss. The German did not look back, but he would see Barker in his rearview mirror.

Evidently, he had, since he half-rolled and dropped back and away. Barker performed the same maneuver, and then he saw that Guynemer was going to be in Voss’ line of fire as Voss leveled out. For a second or two, Guynemer’s plane would be broadside to Voss’ guns. Twice, the Frenchman had been in the line of fire of Voss, both times by accident.

Barker still did not know whether or not his buddy had been hit. He and Voss zoomed past Guynemer; the back of Voss’ head was in Barker’s sight, the range only fifty yards, and he was closing the gap.

A glance in the mirror. Okabe was behind him by about fifty yards. And he was coming up fast. So fast that he would have only some seconds to fire unless he throttled back. Which he would do, of course, unless he was very sure of his marksmanship.

Barker pressed the trigger. Holes danced down the length of the fuselage from the tail, passed over the pilot, whose head exploded in a gout of blood, and danced along the motor.

The spectators on the shore now saw a strange sight. There were three airplanes in a line, and then, suddenly, four. Guynemer had come up behind Okabe. He was not above, the best position, and he did not have the speed which Okabe had gained in his dive. But as Voss’ skull disintegrated, as Barker’s spine was severed and the top of his head removed, Guynemer fired three rounds. One struck Okabe in the small of his back from below, angling up, ricocheting off the backbone, moving out toward the front of the body, and rupturing the solar plexus.

After that, Guynemer’s vision failed, and he dropped forward, shoving the stick down though not knowing it, while blood poured from his arm and his side. Two of Voss’ bullets had found their mark.

The checkerboard plane spun in, just missing the top of a rock spire on the bank, crashing through level after level of the bamboo bridges, and smashed into a hut. Flame gouted from it, burning alcohol splashed over neighboring huts and the wind took the flames to other buildings.

The first of many fires that was to become a holocaust had started.

The plane marked with the dog’s head smashed into a spire and fell burning along its length, breaking through levels of bridges and huts, scattering pieces of hot metal and flaming fuel for many yards around.

The machine marked with the red ball whirled like a corkscrew into the beach, struck scores of screaming spectators as they dashed for safety, plowed through scores more, and ended up against the great dance hall. The fire danced, too, leaping and whirling along the front and quickly enmeshing the entire structure in unquenchable scarlet and orange.

Old Charlie descended in a shallow steep dive, turning over just before impact. It struck the edge of the bank of The River, dug a trench through the grass-covered earth while it flamed, smashed five people fleeing for their lives, and stopped at the base of an irontree trunk.

Göring, pale and shaking, thought that nobody had proved anything except that courage and great skill were not guarantees of survival, that Dame Fortune plays an invisible hand, and that war is fatal to soldiers and civilians, belligerents and neutrals alike.

Section 10

Armageddon: The Not For Hire vs. The Rex

30

King John had jumped the gun.

Just before the four aviators formed their bucket brigade of death, he spoke into the microphone on the pilothouse control panel.

“Taishi!”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Attack! And may God ride with you.”

Fifteen minutes before, the huge hatch at the stern had opened. A large two-seater plane with folded wings had slipped down a runway into the water. Floating on its pontoons, it had waited while its wings were extended and locked. Then Sakanoue Taishi, sitting in the pilot’s seat forward of the wings, had started the two motors. While Taishi watched the aerial battle from the open cockpit, he warmed up the motors. Behind the wings, in the gunner’s station, stood Gabriel O’Herlihy.

Both were veterans, the Japanese of World War II, the Irish-Australian of the Korean police action. Taishi had flown torpedo bombers for the Imperial Navy and had met his end in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. O’Herlihy had been a machine-gunner for the infantry. Despite his lack of aerial experience, he had been chosen for this post because of his superb marksmanship. It was said he could play a machine gun like Harpo Marx played the harp.

Suddenly, though not unexpectedly, the captain had told Taishi to get into action as arranged. Taishi spoke through the intercom headphones, and O’Herlihy sat down. The Japanese revved the motors and they headed upRiver into the wind. It was a long takeoff, since they were carrying ten rockets, each with a hundred-pound warhead, under the wings and a torpedo under the fuselage. This was electrically driven and carried seven hundred pounds of cordite in its head.

At last, the big craft left the surface. Taishi waited until they were fifty feet up and pressed the pontoon release button. The gear and the two large pontoons fell off, and the machine picked up speed.

O’Herlihy, looking back and upwards, saw the four fighter planes fall and crash, but he did not tell Taishi. The pilot was too busy turning the machine toward the left bank, keeping it at a low altitude. He flew it between two rock spires just above the topmost wooden bridges. The plan was to skim across the top of the trees and, where possible, fly between the hills. Once they got close to the mountains, they would turn downwind. Still keeping close to the treetops, they would fly along the mountains. Then they would wheel right and shoot across the hills and come down just above the bamboo complexes. And they would strike at the Not For Hire which would be broadside to them.

Taishi knew that Clemens’ radar had picked them up the moment they left The River. But he hoped to elude it until he appeared suddenly from behind the hills.

The noncom had been trying to get Sam Clemens’ attention for a minute. The captain, however, seemed not to hear him. He was standing up by the chair now, a burning cigar in his mouth, his eyes filmed with tears. He was murmuring, over and over, “Georges! Bill!”

Joe Miller stood near him. The titanthrop was clad in battle armor, a steel helmet with a heavy wire basket over the face, a sausage-shaped extension to guard his nose, a chain-mail shirt, fish-skin leather gloves, plastic loin protection, and aluminum thigh and shin guards. In his mammoth right hand was the shaft of a double-bladed steel ax head weighing one hundred pounds.

Joe’s eyes were moist also.

“They vath nithe guyth,” he rumbled.

“Captain!” the noncom said. “Radar says a big plane has taken off from the Rex!”

Sam said, “What?”

“A two-motored plane, pontoon type, has taken off. Radar reports that it’s heading for the north.”

Sam came to full attention then. “North? Why the hell…? Oh! It’s going to swing around and try to catch us broadside!”

He yelled at the others to get below. In a minute he had scrambled down the ladder onto the bridge. He shouted at the executive officer, John Byron.

“Did you order the Goose to take off?”

Byron said, “Yes, sir. The moment radar spotted their torpedo plane leaving! They broke the agreement!”

“Good man,” Sam said. He looked out the port window. The Goose, a big twin-motored torpedo plane, was past the boat, heading into the window. Even as he caught sight of it, it lifted, water falling from the white pontoons. A minute later, the two pontoons fell, struck The River, glanced upwards and ahead, then fell, were caught by the current, and drifted away.

“Battle stations!” Clemens said.

Byron punched a button. Sirens began howling, but the crowd on the decks had already started toward its posts.

“Full speed ahead!”

Detweiller, sitting in the pilot’s chair, pushed his two control sticks as far as they would go. The giant electrical motors began turning; the huge paddle wheels attached to them dug into the water. The boat almost seemed to leap forward.

“That’s a smart trick old John’s pulled,” Clemens said. “Radio the Goose and tell them to come in on the Rex’s broadside.”

Byron hastened to obey. Sam turned to de Marbot. The little fellow wore a coal-scuttle helmet of duraluminum, a chain-mail shirt and kilt, and leather jackboots. A leather belt held a holster in which a Mark IV pistol was couched and a scabbard in which a cutlass was sheathed.

“Tell your men to bring up the SW,” he said. “On the double!”

The Frenchman punched a button which would put him on the intercom to the storage room.

“Is the enemy plane still on the radar?” he said to the operator.

“Not at the moment,” Schindler replied. “It’s behind the hills, too close to the mountains.”

“It’ll come hellbent for election right over the tops of the trees,” Clemens said. “We won’t have much time.”

De Marbot gave a groan. Clemens looked at his pale face and said, “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” de Marbot said. “I heard something that sounded like an explosion! The line’s dead! Nobody answers!”

Sam could feel himself turning gray. “Oh, my God! An explosion! Get down there, find out what’s going on!”

Byron was by another intercom on the bulkhead. He said, “Station 25 reports an explosion in Station 26.”

The Frenchman stepped into the elevator and was gone.

“Sir, there’s the enemy plane!” the radar operator said. “On the port bank, just above the structures, coming in between those two rock spires.”

Sam ran to the window and looked out. The sun flashed on the silver-and-blue-streaked nose of an aircraft.

“Coming like a bat out of hell!”

He gripped the ledge, forced himself to be calm, and turned. But Byron had sent word down. It wasn’t needed, since the attacker was visible.

“Hold your fire until the attacker is five hundred yards distant,” Byron said. “Then fire the rockets. Cannons and small arms, wait until it’s within two hundred and fifty yards.”

“I shouldn’t have waited,” Sam muttered. “I should have brought the laser out as soon as those boys took off. It could slice that plane in half before it launched the torpedo.”

One more regret in a lifetime of regrets.

And just what in blue blazes happened down there?

“Here it cometh!” Joe Miller said.

The torpedo plane had dipped down past the bridges running along the edge of the hills. Now it was skimming the grass of the plains. Whoever the pilot was, he was handling his big heavy machine as if it were a one-seater fighter.

Events happened fast after that. The plane was going at least 150 miles per hour. Once it reached The River, it would have a mile to go to its target. But it would release the torpedo within six hundred feet. Closer, if the pilot was daring. The nearer the release, the less chance for the Not For Hire to evade the missile.

It would have been better if the boat were to turn prow-on and so present a smaller target. But to do this would cut the defense fire to a minimum.

Sam waited. The moment that the silvery weapon of destruction was loosed from its carrier, he would give the order to Detweiller to swing the boat around. The plane would be a lesser menace then. In any event, if it survived the hail of fire, it would be getting the hell out.

“Five hundred yards,” Byron said, reading the radarscope over its operator’s shoulder. He spoke into the intercom linked with the batteries. “Fire the rockets!”

Twenty silvery cone-tipped cylinders, spouting flame from their tails, sprang like cats at a feline convention after a lone mouse.

The pilot had the reflexes of a cat, too. Twelve rockets, smaller than those hurled at him, sprang from below his wings. The two flights met in three battings of an eye and went up in flame surrounded by smoke. Immediately after, the plane bored through the clouds. Now it was so close to The River that it seemed the waves would snap its bottom.

“Fire the second battery of rockets!” Byron yelled. “Fire cannons and small arms!”

Another flight of missiles arced out. The steam machine guns hosed a stream of .80-caliber plastic bullets. The 88-millimeter cannon on the port side bellowed, spouting flame and gray clouds. The marines, stationed between the heavy platforms, fired their rifles.

The long sharkish-looking torpedo dropped from the airplane at an altitude of a hundred feet, hit the water, skipped, sank. Now all that could be seen of it was its wake, boiling white.

“Hard aport!” Sam said.

Detweiller yanked back on the port stick. The monster wheels on the left side slowed, stopped, began churning water in the opposite direction. Slowly, the boat swung around.

Taishi, feeling the plane suddenly relieved of the weight of the torpedo, pulled back on the stick. Up rose the nose as the twin motors, on full power, lifted her to pass over the boat. Taishi leaned over the side of the cockpit, the wind hitting him full in the face. He could not see the torpedo, even though the water was clear, because he had passed it.

Ahead, the sun shone briefly on rockets, trailing smoke. Another launching! Heat-seekers, too.

If things had gone otherwise, Taishi would have skimmed the edge of the boat’s flight deck, passed beyond it, swung around, and come back to strafe. O’Herlihy was standing up now, bracing himself with one hand against the edge of his cockpit, waiting until the plane assumed a level to swing his guns around. But O’Herlihy would never get a chance to use his twin .50-calibers.

The plane, Taishi, and O’Herlihy disappeared in a great cloud, pieces flying out of it almost immediately, metal, flesh, bone, and blood.

One of the motors fell in an arc, smashing into the flight deck near a cannon. It rolled across and dropped over the edge and fell onto the hurricane deck, crushing two men.

A crewman called for a fire-fighting squad.

Sam Clemens, looking out of the port window, saw the explosion, saw a dark object out of the corner of his eye, felt the vibrations of the impact.

“What in hell was that?”

But he kept his eyes on the torpedo’s wake, sinister as a shark’s approach and even more swift.

If only the boat could spin around faster, spin around on a dime and give five cents’ change.

This was a strange geometry, a deadly one. The torpedo was describing a straight line, the shortest distance between two points—in this case, anyway. The boat was describing a circle in order to avoid being at the end of the line drawn.

Sam gripped the ledge, bit through his cigar so savagely that its outer part fell off, but, not totally severed, swung down. Its glowing end burned his chin, causing him to yell with pain. But that was a few seconds later. While the torpedo scraped against the hull, he felt nothing except extreme anxiety.

Then it had gone on, headed toward the shore, and he clapped his hand to his neck, burned his hand, and dashed the cigar away.

“Straighten her out,” he told Detweiller. “Resume former course, full speed ahead.”

Byron, looking out of the starboard window, said, “The torpedo’s half-submerged against the bank, Captain. Its motor is still pushing it, but it’s stuck in the mud, tilting up.”

“Let them worry about it,” Sam said, referring to the people on the bank. “Oh! Oh!”

He stopped. For several minutes, he’d forgotten about the explosion near the SW room.

“Byron! Has Marbot reported yet?”

“No, sir.”

The bulkhead intercom tootled. Byron answered it with Clemens close behind him.

“De Marbot here. Is the captain occupied?”

“I’m listening, Marc!” Sam said. “What’s happened?”

“The laser has been blown up! It’s totally destroyed! The entire guard, including Fermor, was killed, and so were four crewmen who came upon the scene. The guards were blown up; the crewmen were gunned down! Captain, there’s a saboteur or saboteurs aboard!”

Sam groaned. For a moment, he thought he was going to faint. He steadied himself with a hand against the bulkhead.

Byron said, “Are you all right, sir?”

Byron looked as pale as Sam felt. But he showed no evidence of hysteria. Sam straightened up, took a deep breath, and said, “I’m okay. Son of a blazing bitch! I should have had twenty men guarding that! I should have brought it up sooner! Now our ace in the hole is gone! And John didn’t have a chance with it! Never overlook the human factor, Byron!”

Byron said, “No, sir. I suggest…”

“That we send search parties looking for the bastard? Or bastards? They’ll be back at their posts by now. Maybe. Maybe they’re planning on wrecking the generators. Send some men down to the engine room to stand guard.

“And start checking the stations. See if anybody left his post for any reason whatever. There may be some innocents there, but we can’t take any chances. Anybody who left his post, throw him into the brig! I don’t care if it’s an officer and he seems to have a good excuse. We can’t fight John and worry about being stabbed in the back at the same time!”

“Aye, aye, sir!” Byron said, and he began calling the stations by number.

“Enemy vessel is five miles away, Captain,” the chief radar operator called. “Traveling at fifty-five miles per hour.”

The Rex had a top speed of forty-five miles per hour in still water and no headwinds. Aided by the current and the wind, it was going at a speed equal to the Not For Hire’s.

“Any indication of the Goose?” Sam said.

“Nothing, sir.”

Sam looked at the chronometer. The big plane should still be flying alongside the mountains, hugging the top of the trees, down below the forest whenever possible. But it would not be attacking the Rex by itself. Its orders were to wait until the Rex was engaged with the motherboat. Then, while John’s crew was occupied with firing upon the enemy, the Goose would come roaring out across the trees, swoop down to The River, and make a run for the broadside of the Rex. If John had had any sense, he would have held back his own torpedo plane until the full-scale battle started.

But then John had hoped that the people on the Not For Hire would be so busy watching the aerial fight that they would be taken by surprise.

“Enemy vessel four miles away, Captain. Dead ahead.”

Sam lit another cigar and asked the medic to put some salve on his chin-burn. Smollett did so, and then Clemens stood by the starboard port, watching the smoke clouds rising from the fires on the left bank about a quarter of a mile ahead. Flames were eating the bamboo, pine, and yew structures. Pieces lifted off the blaze, carried by the wind, and landed on the bridges and houses. People were scurrying around, carrying belongings out of burning houses or climbing down ladders before the fire got to them. Others had formed lines, dipping their grails and fired-clay buckets into The River, passing the containers along to the other end, where the water was thrown onto the fires at the bases. That was a hopeless procedure; there was nothing to do but let the fire go. Apparently half of the sightseers had decided to do that. They thronged to the plains, where there were a few buildings and continued to wait for the meeting of the boats.

“Before we’re done, we’ll have leveled Virolando,” Sam said to no one in particular. “We won’t be very popular here.”

“Enemy is three miles away, sir.”

Sam walked to the intercom, where Byron was still talking to the stations. Joe’s huge bulk came up behind him, and Sam could smell the bourbon emanating from the enormous nose. The titanthrop always liked to take several belts before a fight. It wasn’t that he needed Dutch courage, he explained. It was just for his stomach’s sake. It quieted the “butterflies.”

“Bethideth, Tham, I need lotth of enerchy. You thaid alcohol giveth enerchy. My body burnth it up like a motor burnth fuel. And I got a big body.”

“Yeah, but a whole fifth?”

Byron looked at him. “So far, nobody’s been away from his post.”

“Vhat if they had to take a pithth?” Joe said. “I alvayth have to pithth a lot chutht before a fight. No matter how brave I am, and I am, I get tenthe. It ain’t nervouthneth. Chutht tenthion.”

“And of course all that booze doesn’t have a thing to do with it,” Sam said. “If I had a fifth in me, I wouldn’t be able to get out of the toilet. In fact, I’d be lucky if I could find it.”

“The vhikey clearth my kidneyth. Clear kidneyth; clear head. My head, I mean, not the boat’th head.”

“Both heads have a lot in common,” Sam said. “The toilet’s got pipes full of water, and you have water on the brain.”

“You’re chuth talking nathty becauthe you’re nervouth,” Joe said. He patted Sam on the shoulder with fingers the size of bananas.

“Don’t get familiar with the captain,” Sam said. But he felt better. Joe loved him, and he would always be at his side. Could anything bad happen to him while that monster was guarding him? Yes. The boat could be destroyed, Joe or no Joe.

31

The Rex Grandissimus was visible by now, a white indistinct mass moving toward him. As minutes passed, it became sharper. For a moment, Sam Clemens felt a pain in his breast. The Rex had been his first boat, his first love. He had fought to get the metal for it, killed, even slain one of his colleagues for it—where was Erik Bloodaxe now?—helped plan it down to the least bolt, and all that killing and battling and struggle had been negated when King John had stolen it. Now it was his greatest adversary. It was a pity to have to destroy that craft, one of the only two of its kind on the whole planet.

He hated John even more because he was forcing him to sink the beauty. Maybe, though, just maybe the Rex could be boarded and taken. Then both boats could sail on up The River to its headwaters.

Sam had always seesawed from deepest pessimism to wildest optimism.

“Two and a half miles now,” the radar operator said.

“Any blips on the Goose?”

“No…yes, sir! Got some! It’s three miles to the starboard, just above the hills!”

“Sir, the enemy vessel is turning to starboard,” the radarman said.

Sam looked out of the fore port. Sure enough, the Rex was swinging around. And as the Not For Hire plowed toward it, the Rex presented its stern.

“Vhat in hell’th he doing?”

“He can’t be running away!” Sam said. “Whatever else the sneaky bastard is, he’s not a coward. Besides, his men wouldn’t let him. No, he’s up to something devious.”

“Perhaps,” Detweiller said, “the Rex has some mechanical difficulty?”

“If it does, we can catch it,” Sam said. “Radar, check its speed.”

“Enemy vessel is making thirty-five miles per hour, due west, sir.”

“Against the current and wind, that’s top speed,” Sam said. “There’s nothing wrong with it. Nothing I can see, anyway. Why in blue jumping blazes are they running? They haven’t got any place to hide.”

Sam paused, rolling his eyes as if they were looking for an idea. He said, “Sonar! Do you pick up any foreign object? Say, something that could be a mine?”

“No, sir. All clear underwater except for some schools of fish.”

“It’d be just like John to make some mines and scatter them in our path,” Sam said. “I’d do it myself if the situations were reversed.”

“Yeth, but he knowth ve have thonar.”

“I’d try it anyway. Sparks, tell Anderson to hold off until we’re engaged or until further orders.”

The radio operator transmitted the message to the pilot of the Goose, Ian Anderson. He was a Scot who had flown a British torpedo-bomber during World War II. His gunner, Theodore Zaimis, was a Greek who had been a tail-gunner in an RAF Handley Page Halifax on its night raids over France and Germany in the same war.

Anderson reported that he understood. Radar followed the Goose as it maintained a more or less level course eastwards.

As the sun slowly arced downwards, the Not For Hire decreased the gap between it and the Rex.

“Maybe John doesn’t know how fast this boat can go,” Sam muttered as he paced back and forth. He looked at the crowds on both banks and on the spires and bridges. “Why do they stand around gawking? Don’t they know rockets and shells are likely to be landing among them? That’s the least John could have done, warn them!”

The great red-and-black stone temple came into view, loomed, then dwindled. Now the pursuer was only half a mile behind the pursued. Sam gave Detweiller orders to ease up on the speed.

“I don’t know what he’s up to. But I’m not going to run full speed into any trap.”

“It looks as if he’s heading for the strait,” Detweiller said.

“I might have known that,” Sam said.

The mountains were curving in, their arcs on both sides almost meeting a mile ahead. Here the black, white, and red-streaked walls formed straight-up-and-down precipices out of which The River boiled. The Rex, though it must be under full power, was only making twenty miles an hour. Its rate of progress would be even less if it entered the towering and dark passage.

“Do you really suppose John’s going to take her to the other side?” Sam said. He pounded his left palm with his fist. “By thunder, that’s it! He’s going to wait for us on the other side, catch us when we come out!”

“You vouldn’t be that thtupid, vould you?” Joe Miller said.

Sam ignored him. He strode to the radio operator. “Get me Anderson!”

The pilot of the Goose spoke with a broad Lowland Scots brogue. “Aye, we’ll go over and see what this skurlie is doing, Captain. But it’ll take some time to climb over the pass.”

“Don’t climb over the mountains; go through the pass,” Sam said. “If you see your chance, attack!” Then to Byron, “Heard anything?”

A slight annoyance passed over Byron’s face. “I’ll tell you as soon as I do.”

Sam laughed and said, “Sorry, John. But the idea of somebody planting explosives down there…well, it concerns me. Carry on.”

“Here it is,” Byron said as the warrant officer of Station 26 spoke. Sam swung around to stand by Byron.

“Ensign Santiago left about half an hour ago, sir,” Schindler said. “He put me in charge, said he was suffering from nervous diarrhea and he wanted to clean himself out so he wouldn’t disgrace himself. He said he’d be right back. He didn’t show up until ten minutes later, but I didn’t think much about it, sir, since he said he just couldn’t stop.

“He looked like he’d just had a shower, sir, was dripping wet. He said he’d fouled himself and so had to take a quick shower. Then, just after we heard the general call to report by the numbers, he excused himself again. But he hasn’t been back.”

“Station 27, report!” Byron said. He turned his head to Sam. “He might not be the only one.”

All thirty-five stations reported that no one else had been missing even for a minute.

“Well, he’s either hiding some place or went overboard,” Sam said.

“I doubt he could leave the boat without someone seeing him,” Byron said.

Sam called de Marbot. “Get all your marines, all, to search for Santiago. If he resists, shoot him. But I would like to talk to him if possible.”

Sam turned to Byron. “Santiago’s been with us from the beginning. John must have planted him, though how John knew about the laser I don’t know. We didn’t even think of it until after he stole the boat. And how in God’s name did Santiago find out about the laser? Even Queen Victoria’s sex life wasn’t a better secret.”

“He’s had plenty of time to dig around,” Byron said. “He’s a sly one. I never did trust the dago.”

“I liked him,” Sam said. “He was always congenial, very good at his duties, and a hell of a good poker player.”

Santiago was a seventeenth-century Venezuelan sailor who had captained a warship for ten years. Shipwrecked off an unidentified Caribbe an island, he was speared by Indians as he struggled onto a beach. However, this only hastened his death a little. Syphilis had almost finished tearing him apart anyway.

“Of course,” Sam added, “he was awfully jealous of his women and he had his stupid Latin machismo. But after one of his women, a twentieth-century jukado expert, beat him up, he reconsidered his ways and treated the ladies as if they were worth their weight in gold.”

There were more pressing things to consider than Santiago’s ego. For one, how would John know that his agent had succeeded? John was unaware of the laser. He would have originally charged the Venezuelan with blowing up some vital part of the boat. That command had not been carried out, since the generators and electromechanical control centers were too well guarded.

Also, unless there was a spectacular explosion, how would John know that his agent had done his work? Was a system of signals worked out? If so, Santiago had not sent any.

Unless…he had a radio set hidden somewhere on the vessel. And it was on a frequency not used by…

Sam felt a faint vibration in the deck, one not accounted for by the thrusting of paddles into the water.

He walked to the stern port and looked out. Wisps of smoke were issuing from the starboard side, apparently coming from the hurricane deck.

Sam ran to the intercom and bellowed into it. “Stations 15 and 16! What happened?”

A calm female voice answered. “This is P.O. Anita Garibaldi, Station 17! There’s been an explosion down here, sir! A bulk-wall’s been blown up! The wires in it have been severed!”

Detweiller swore. Sam whirled around. “What is it?”

“I’ve lost control,” Detweiller said, but Sam already knew that. The wheels had slowed, and even as he looked out of the stern window, he saw that they had stopped. Slowly, the nose of the boat was turning to port, and it was being carried back by the current.

Detweiller reached out and punched a button. A light by it glowed. He grabbed the sticks again. The wheels began rotating, picked up speed. The boat swung back to its original course.

“The backup system is working,” Detweiller said.

Sam grinned a little though he did not feel joyous at all. “Santiago wouldn’t know about that,” he said. “It was John, though, that gave me the idea for installing it! Hoist by his own petard!”

He yelled into the intercom, keeping his finger on the all-stations button. “All right, you incompetent bungling blind microcephalic ding-dongs! You could expand your brains a hundredfold, and they’d still rattle around in a gnat’s ass!

“Find Santiago!”

“The strait’s dead ahead, Captain,” Detweiller said.

A shadow passed over, and twin motors roared. The Goose shot in front of them at an altitude of about two hundred feet. It was climbing between the dark walls, its searchlight stabbing ahead of it, dwindling in distance and darkness, then disappearing as it went around a long bend.

“Can we keep in radio contact with the Goose?” Sam said to the radio operator.

“It’s possible, sir. The long waves can bounce around that bend to us.”

Sam turned away but spun at an exclamation from the operator.

“Jesus! The pilot just said, ‘We’re hit! The starboard’s motor is on fire! A rocket…!’”

He looked up with a pale strained face. “That’s all, Captain.”

Sam swore.

“John must’ve been waiting for it! He knew I’d send it to find out what he was doing!”

Why hadn’t he let Anderson do as he wished, fly over the mountains? Then he would have been out of range of the rockets or at least have had time to take evasive maneuvers. But no, John knew his ex-partner, knew how impatient he’d be. So he had waited, and now he had the torpedo plane out of the combat.

But the Rex wouldn’t have been taken through the strait just to ambush the airplane. He…

De Marbot’s voice crackled. “Captain! We just got Santiago! He’d been hiding behind a bulkwall section! He made a dash up a passageway and almost got to the deck railing! Johnston shot him through the head!”

“Give me the details later,” Sam said. “Continue the search for other agents. Look…”

“Rockets!” Detweiller screamed.

32

Sam Clemens turned around. Something swift and silvery from above struck the base of the pilothouse. The explosion was deafening; the deck shook. Another roar from above. The pilothouse vibrated. Smoke shrouded the windows on all sides for several seconds. Then the wind seized it and scattered it.

“What the hell!” Sam said over and over.

“It’s from up there,” Detweiller said. He released a control stick just long enough to point up and to his right.

“Get her away!” Sam yelled. “Downstream!”

The pilot had already applied full power. A cool one, that Detweiller.

Again, another flash of silver. Dozens of them. More explosions. A battery of rockets on the starboard disappeared in a thunder of fire and smoke. A direct hit from whoever was launching those missiles from wherever.

“Zigzag her!” Sam shouted.

There were three more direct hits. Other missiles plunged into the water on both sides and aft.

“Our radar’s gone,” Byron said. He ordered the rocket crews to fire back, using visual calculations.

“But where are they?” Sam said.

“Up on the cliff!” Byron and Detweiller said at the same time.

“Thee!” Joe said, pointing out of the stern port.

While Byron was asking for reports on the damage and casualties, Sam looked along the titanthrop’s massive finger. About five hundred feet up, where there had been an unbroken wall of rock, there was now an opening. An oblong, it was thirty feet long and seven feet high. Tiny faces looked out from behind launchers, and the sun glinted on the silver of missiles and tubes.

“Jumping Jesus H. Christ!”

John’s men must have found a cave up on the face of the mountain, and they’d carried rockets and launchers to it. A shield of some sort, probably papier-mâché simulating a patch of lichen, had been placed over the opening. While his rocketeers waited inside it, John had fled up the strait.

“Suckered!” Sam said, and he groaned.

A minute passed as the boat churned downRiver. Then, making him jump though he knew they were coming, about twelve large missiles sped from the opening, the interior of the cave lit up for a second by flames.

“Hard aport!” Sam yelled.

Only one of the rockets hit. A steam machine gun disappeared in a cloud, pieces of bodies and metal flying out from it. When the smoke cleared, there was a large hole where the platform, gun, and three men and two women had been.

For a moment, Sam was numbed throughout, unable to move or to think anything except: War is not my element. War is no rational man’s element. I should have faced reality and given Byron the command. But no, my pride, my pride. John was wily, wily indeed, and he also had the great Dane, Tordenskjöld, as adviser.

Vaguely, he became aware that the boat was heading toward the bank. Byron’s voice, as if from a long distance, was saying, “Should I keep her on course, Captain?”

“Tham, Tham,” Joe rumbled behind him. “Chethuth Chritht, ve’re going to run into the bank!”

Sam forced himself to move, to speak.

“We won’t stay on course. Head her downRiver and get back in the middle.”

There were bodies on the main deck. Youngblood, Czerny, and de Groot. And there was the upper part of the beautiful Anne Mathy, the former Hollywood star. She looked like a china doll which some sick child had mutilated.

He had seen corpses and blood before, and he wasn’t any youngster playing Confederate soldier. There was no Wild West to run away to, leaving the Civil War to those with a taste for it. He couldn’t desert now.

From fear he went to anger. The cup of bourbon that Joe—good old Joe!—handed him fueled his wrath. Damn John and his sneaky tricks! He’d send the man to hell, go with him if it was necessary.

He spoke to Byron. “Do you think we could blast those bastards out of that cave?”

The exec took a long look. “I think so. Of course, if their missile supply is exhausted, there’s no use wasting ours on them.”

“I don’t see any in the tubes,” Sam said. “But they might be keeping them out of sight, hoping we’ll come back to attack. Let’s go back and make sure. I don’t want those hyenas laughing at us.”

Byron raised his eyebrows. Evidently he thought it was foolish to risk more hits. He said, “Yes, sir,” and went back to the intercom. Sam told Detweiller what he wanted. And while the Not For Hire turned again, the rocket crews readied for their mission.

Byron gave his report in a flat cool voice. Twenty dead. Thirty-two badly wounded. Eleven of the wounded could be patched up and returned to duty. One steam machine gun, one rocket battery, and one cannon were destroyed. The rockets and the cannon shells had blown up also, doing more damage than the missiles themselves. There were two large holes in the flight deck, and the cabins in the lowest tier of the pilothouse had been blown out. Enough of the structure of the base remained to ensure stability. This couldn’t be guaranteed if another rocket hit the structure. Their firepower was reduced, but the boat’s performance was not affected.

Worse of all, the radar antennas had been destroyed.

A lookout told Sam that new rockets were being put into the tubes by the men in the cave.

“Byron, start firing when I give the word!” Sam said.

The exec relayed the order to sight in on the opening. The boat was now eight hundred yards from the base of the cliff. Sam told Detweiller to spin it, presenting its starboard side. He should then let the current carry it away until the starboard cannon batteries had fired. These were one 88-millimeter cannon, much more accurate than the rockets, and the compressed air cannon.

At Sam’s relayed order, the 88-millimeter belched fire, smoke, and thunder, and the other whooshed. One shell struck just above the opening; the other struck just below. No second round was necessary. The rockets in the cave must have been set off by the lower explosion. They went up in a cloud from which spewed fragments that could have been bodies.

When the smoke cleared, only some twisted metal could be seen.

“I think we can take it for granted they’re wiped out,” Sam said. He felt gratified. The enemy were not human beings. They were things that could kill him and had to be killed before they could do so.

“Take her back to the center about a quarter-mile from the pass,” Sam said. “Byron, order the helicopter brought up.”

“King John is using his, too,” Byron said. He pointed at the opening. Sam saw it, hanging about two thousand feet up, a tiny machine framed in the dark gate of the strait.

“I don’t want John to see what we’re doing,” he said. “Tell Petroski to get rid of it.”

Sam called in de Marbot. The instructions took two minutes. De Marbot saluted and went off to carry out the plan.

Petroski, the copter pilot, warmed up the motor, and took off with his two machine-gunners. The fuselage was fitted with ten small heat-seeking missiles, some of which, it was hoped, would down the enemy machine while others would strike the Rex.

Sam watched it as it climbed slowly, burdened with its deadly load. It took a while to climb up above the altitude of the craft in the mouth of the pass. Sam asked the Frenchman how he was coming. De Marbot, in the stern, replied that both launches were almost filled with rockets. He could leave in a few minutes.

“I’ll give the word when the coast is clear,” Sam said.

Petroski’s machine finally quit climbing. The other copter was still in its original position. When its pilot saw the big all-white chopper moving to get above it, he spun his machine around and fled.

The radar operator, now posted as lookout, said, “Enemy aircraft is moving at an estimated eighty-five miles per hour.”

“Then it’s faster than ours,” Sam said. “It’s not carrying nearly as much weight. Byron, tell de Marbot he can go ahead.”

The huge hatch had been open for some time. The larger of the launches, Post No Bills, slid out of the water-filled compartment, kicking up a white wake. It turned and headed toward the shore. Close behind it came the After You, Gascon. Both were loaded with rockets, dismantled launching apparatus, and marines.

Petroski’s voice came from the set. “The enemy has gone around the bend. I’m going up another two thousand feet before I go around.”

While Sam waited for another report, he watched the launches. Their noses were against the low bank now, and men were jumping out of them into the water. They quickly waded ashore and began off-loading the weapons and equipment. Each man would then carry a forty-pound missile or part of a disassembled launcher.

“John must have sent men up first with tackles and ropes,” Sam said. “Then he must have winched those heavy rockets from the deck of the Rex. It would’ve been at night, of course, so the Virolanders wouldn’t see them. It must’ve been a hell of a job. Too bad we don’t have time to place heavy rockets. But those light rockets can do plenty of damage if they hit the right places on the Rex.”

He rubbed his hands and blew out a cloud of smoke from his cigar.

“There’s nothing like turning the tables on old John. Using his own trap to trap him.”

“If we have time,” Byron said. “What if the Rex comes barreling out of the strait before our weapons are situated?”

“That could happen, but it ain’t likely,” Sam said, frowning. “Once John reenters the pass, he can only go straight ahead. There isn’t room to turn around, even if he spins on one wheel. For all he knows, we might be waiting for him, just outside the exit, out of radar sight, and out of sonar detection, too. We could blast his ass off as he comes around.”

“Maybe he could back up,” Joe said.

“With two cannon and fifty rockets aiming at the pilothouse and four torpedoes at the hull?”

Sam snorted.

“Anyway, I’d like to see you trying to run that boat in reverse in that current with only thirty feet to spare on each side. Detweiller couldn’t do it. Even I couldn’t do it!”

They waited. Sam watched the long line of marines, each man loaded with a silvery cylinder or a piece of equipment. Presently, de Marbot reported by walkie-talkie.

“I’ve found the path.”

“I see you waving your arm,” Sam said. “It should take you about an hour to get to the cave. It’s not so high up but the path must be a long one.”

“We’ll go as fast as possible,” the Frenchman said. “But we can’t go too fast if the trail is narrow.”

“I trust your judgment.”

“Petroski’s speaking again,” the operator said. Sam could hear the pilot before he got to the radio.

“We’ve dropped to the surface,” Petroski said. “I decided to come in at the height of the control room. They’ll pick us up on the radar as soon as we get around the last bend. But I’m counting on shaking them up, spoiling their aim. Six rockets for the pilothouse, six for the chopper, whether it’s in the air or the flight deck.”

Petroski sounded happy. He was a wild Pole who had flown for the RAF against Hitler. After the war, he had refused to live in communist Poland and so had emigrated to Canada and earned his living first as a bush pilot and later as a police copter pilot.

“Hot damn!” Petroski bellowed. “The boat’s just outside the entrance! Its nose is pointed straight at me. Only a quarter-mile to go! Wish me luck!”

The roar of motor and vanes was heavy, but his excited voice rode above that.

“Fire six!” Two seconds. Then, “Dead on! Missed the control room but blew the smokestacks all to hell! Can’t see through the smoke! Pulling up now! Flak all over the place! Can’t see through the smoke! Oh, oh! There’s the chopper, on the flight deck! I’ll…”

The radio operator looked up at Sam.

“Sorry, Captain. It’s dead.”

Sam ground the end of his cigar to shreds on the set and cast it on the deck.

“A rocket must’ve got him.”

“Probably.”

The operator’s eyes were moist. Petroski had been his good friend for ten years.

“We don’t know if he got John’s chopper or not,” Sam said. He wiped his eyes with his knuckles. “Shit, I feel like ramming right on it, making him pay…”

Byron raised his eyebrows again at this unprofessional attitude.

“Yeah, I know,” Sam said. “We’d fall into his trap. Forget it. And I know what else you’re thinking. It would have been better to have retained our observation facilities, to put it in cold military language. Now John can keep an eye on us with his chopper, if Petroski didn’t destroy it.”

“We took a chance, and perhaps it paid off,” Byron said. “Perhaps both the copter and the control room were hit. Petroski wouldn’t have had enough time to make an accurate assessment.”

Sam strode back and forth some more, puffing so hard the air-conditioning couldn’t keep up with the clouds. Finally, he stopped, thrust his cigar out as if he was spearing an idea. Which, in a sense, he was.

“John isn’t going to come back unless he knows where we are. So, he’ll either scout with his chopper or a launch. In either case, we’ll not fire on it. Byron, tell de Marbot to hold his fire if either leaves the strait. And to lie low.

“Detweiller, take her to a grailstone near the temple. We’ll dock there and do some repairing.”

“How come, Tham?”

“How come? So John’s spies will see us there. Then, if he’s going to attack, he’ll know he won’t be ambushed. In fact, he might think the rockets from the cliff did us so much damage we’re badly hurt. And he’ll know he can get through the strait before we could even get near him. Then it’ll be the last deal, with us holding a royal flush. I hope.”

“But, Tham,” Joe said, “vhat if Petrothki did blow up the control room? And Bad Chohn vath killed? Maybe they ain’t in no pothithyon to fight.”

“I don’t see anybody under a white flag and offering to surrender. We’ll just retreat and hope that John will come out to do battle. In the meantime, we’ll do a little scouting of our own. Byron, send the Gascon out. Tell Plunkett to go through the strait at top speed, take a quick look, and get the hell back here.”

“May I offer a suggestion?” Byron said. “The Gascon has torpedoes.”

“No, by thunder! I’m not going to sacrifice any more good men on suicide missions! It’s dangerous enough as it is, as the old bachelor said to the spinster who proposed marriage. They could be attacked by the chopper, though I think it’s more than an even match for the Gascon there. In fact, if the chopper should chase the launch out, de Marbot should then fire on it. We’ll have our information, and John will wonder what in hell happened to his chopper. He won’t be able to resist sending a launch out to scout. We’ll let the launch get back.

“In any event, John isn’t going to come through until nightfall. I think.”

Byron transmitted the messages. Presently, the whitely shining Gascon swung away from the bank and headed toward the strait. Its commander was the younger son of an Irish baron and had been a naval aide-de-camp to King George V and then an admiral. He was a veteran of the battles of Heligoland, Dogger Bank, and Jutland, and a recipient of the Grand Cross, the Order of Orange-Nassau of Holland, and the Russian Order of St. Stanislas, Second Class, with swords. He was also a distant relative of the great fantasy writer, Lord Dunsany, and, through Dunsany, of the famous English explorer, Richard Francis Burton.

“Sir,” John Byron said, “I think we’ve overlooked something. The marines are still a long way from having their rockets set up. If the enemy helicopter or launch should pursue the Gascon, they won’t be in any danger from de Marbot’s fire. And they might well see his men on the mountain path. Then they would know we’re setting up an ambush.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Sam said reluctantly. “Okay. Tell His Lordship to come back until de Marbot is situated. No use his wasting power circling around.”

“Yes, sir,” Byron said. He spoke on the radio to Plunkett, then turned swiftly on Sam. “Only…the admiral is not properly referred to as His Lordship. He is the younger son of a peer, which legally makes him a commoner. And since his father was a baron, the lowest in the rank of peers, he does not even have an honorary title.”

“I was being facetious,” Sam said. “Lord preserve me from British sticklers!”

The little Englishman looked as if he thought facetiousness had no place in the control room. He was probably right, Sam thought. But he had to kid around a little. It was the only way he could let off pressure. If he didn’t, he’d blow his mental boiler sky-high. See the pretty pieces flying through the air. Those are Sam Clemens.

Byron was tough, unperturbed in any situation, as calm as a man who’s sold his stock just before the market crashed.

The boat was still far out in the lake, though cutting at an angle toward the bank. Big black clouds were visible to the north. Smoke from the fires started by the fallen airplanes. There would be even more fires tomorrow—unless the rain quenched them. The locals certainly would have no love for either King John or himself. It was a good thing they were pacifists. Otherwise, they might be objecting violently when one of their grailstones was borrowed this evening by those whom they could only regard as killers and arsonists. The giant batacitor of the Not For Hire had to be recharged, even though it was far from empty, and the crew had to refill their grails. He did not think that the Rex would show during this time. It had the same needs.

Unless…unless John thought he could catch them sitting. It was possible he might try to do that. His motors had not used up all the energy stored; the Rex had not traveled all day. He could have many hours’ electrical supply left.

No, John wouldn’t attempt it. Not knowing that his enemy was radarless, he would think that the Rex would be detected the moment it showed its nose. And he’d have to cross three miles of lake to get to the Not For Hire. Before he could do that, the enormous hemispherical plate covering the grailstone could be swung aboard and stored and the boat well on its way to meet the Rex.

If only he had an aircraft left to tell him when John’s boat was being recharged. If the Rex was connected to a grailstone near the inlet of the strait, the Not For Hire could be on it before it could get into action. No, John would think of that. He’d go far enough up The River so he’d have time to get ready. And he’d know that Sam Clemens would take the same precaution.

But if he would think of that, why not charge on through and catch John with his royal pants down?

If only he knew the topography, the width of The River on the other side of the mountain. But Plunkett would get the data needed.

Byron said, “Would you like to bury the dead now, sir?”

33

“Heh?” Sam said. “Oh, yes, might as well get it over with now. We won’t have time later. Are there enough marines left for the burial squad?”

“Exactly forty-two, sir,” Byron said with some satisfaction at having anticipated his captain.

“Good. That’s enough to bury everybody, including themselves. In fact, we’d better just use three rifles. We need to conserve all the powder we can.”

The services were short. The bodies were laid out on the stern of the flight deck, wrapped in cloths, weighted with stones. Half the crew was assembled; the rest stayed on duty.

“…for now we know that resurrection is possible, all having experienced its truth. Thus we consign your bodies to the deeps of The River in the hopes that you will once again walk the face of this world or some other. For those who believe in God, may He bless you. So long!”

The rifle salute was given. One by one the bodies in fish-skin bags were picked up and swung out onto the air. Weighted with stones, they would sink to be eaten by the small and the big fish prowling in the dark, thousands of feet below.

The Not For Hire put into the bank, and its anchors were dropped. Sam went ashore to face an intensely angry La Viro. The big dark hawk-faced man raged at the stupidity and cruelty of both parties. Sam listened stony-faced. This was no time for a wisecrack. But when La Viro demanded that he leave the area, Sam said, “There is no way to avoid this conflict. One of us must go down. Now, do I have your permission to use a grailstone?”

“No!” La Viro shouted. “No! You do not!”

“I am indeed sorry,” Sam said. “But I am using one anyway. If you interfere, you and your people will be fired upon.”

La Viro said nothing for a minute. Finally, his breathing became lighter and the redness faded from his skin. “Very well. We will not use force. You knew we wouldn’t. All I can do is appeal to your humanity. That has failed. On your own head be the consequences.”

“You don’t understand,” Sam said. “We have to get to the polar sea. Our mission is vital to this world. I can’t explain why, but, believe me, it is.”

He looked up at the sun. In an hour, it would touch the top of the western range.

At that moment, Hermann Göring joined the small group behind La Viro. He said something to his chief in a low voice. La Viro said loudly, “Very well. Evacuate them.”

Göring turned and spoke in a trumpet voice. “You heard La Viro! We will go east and get away from this hellish conflict. Spread the word! Everybody east! Martin, you send up the signal balloon!”

Göring turned to Clemens.

“You can see now, or should be able to see, that I was right! I objected to the building of your boat because your purpose was evil! We weren’t raised from the dead and put here to glorify ourselves or indulge in mindless sensuality, in hate, and in bloodshed! We…”

Sam turned away. Followed by Miller, Sam walked out on the floating dock and up the gangplank to the hurricane deck. Joe said, “Thon of a bitch, Tham. He really chewed you out.”

“He’s not even in the race,” Sam said. “I’ve been eaten out by the best. You should have heard my mother. Or my wife. They could give him a thousand-word start and catch up in ten seconds flat. Forget him. What does he know? I’m doing this for him and all the rest of those mealy-mouthed Chancers. For everybody, whether they deserve it or not.”

“Huh? I alvayth thought you vath doing it for yourthelf.”

“Sometimes you get too smart-alecky,” Sam said. “You don’t talk to the captain like that.”

“I chutht call them ath I thee them,” Joe said. He was grinning. “Anyvay, I’m not talking to you like a deckhand to the captain. I’m talking to you ath your friend, Choe Miller.”

John Byron spoke to them as they entered the control room. “Sir, de Marbot reports that the launchers are set up.”

“Good. Tell him to get back down to the launch. And tell Plunkett he can go ahead now.”

The Gascon responded immediately, heading for the strait. The tiny figures of the marines were dimly visible against the blue-black stone and green-black algae as they walked down the ledge cut upon the mountain’s face. They would be using their flashlights before they reached the bottom. The Post No Bills was cutting along the bank for the stone to the west. The noise of machinist’s mates aluminum-welding supports across the shattered base of the pilothouse came to him. Torches flared bluely as men cut away the wreck of the steam machine gun in the bow. Others busied themselves with rockets and a tube-battery to be set up in place of the gun. A party worked furiously to replace the radar antennas.

A half-hour passed. The chief medic reported that five of the wounded had died. Sam ordered that their bodies be taken out in a small boat and dropped in the center of The River. It was done without fanfare, since he did not want to lower the morale of the crew anymore. No, he wouldn’t say service over them first. Let one of the medics do it.

Sam looked at the chronometer. “Plunkett should just about be at the exit of the strait.”

“Then we should see him coming back out in about ten minutes,” the exec said.

Sam looked at the marines halfway down the path. “You did give de Marbot orders that he and his men should flatten out on the ledge if John’s chopper or his launch appears?”

“Of course,” Byron said stiffly.

Sam looked at the bank. There were thousands of men and women there, moving slowly in a closely packed mass eastwards. There wasn’t much noise coming from them. Most were burdened with bundles of cloths, pots, vases, statuettes, chairs, fishing poles, carpenter tools, disassembled gliders, and, of course, their grails. They looked at the great boat as they went by, and many held up their hands, the three middle fingers extended in blessing. That made Sam feel guilty and furious. “That thyure ith a pretty balloon,” Joe said.

The huge pear-shaped globe, painted a bright yellow, rose from a roofless building. It soared swiftly upwards at an angle, carried east by the wind. At an estimated four thousand feet of altitude, the balloon was a small object. But it was not so small that Sam could not see the sudden blazing red flare.

“They blew it up!” he said. “That must be the real signal!”

Burning, visible on both sides of the lake and for many miles up and down The River, the balloon fell. In a few minutes, it plunged into the water.

“Well, at least we don’t have to worry anymore about civilian casualties,” Byron said.

“I don’t know about that,” Detweiller said. “It looks like La Viro and some others are staying behind.”

That was true. But the group was walking back toward the temple.

Sam snorted and said, “They’re probably going to pray for us!”

“The Gascon’s in sight!” a watchman said.

There it was, the sun white upon her, her bow up as she poured on full power. And there, about five hundred feet almost directly above her, was the enemy helicopter. It was slewing around, tilting, so that its machine-gunners could fire downwards.

“Byron, tell de Marbot to fire upon the chopper!” Sam said loudly, but at that moment the roar of discharging grailstones drowned his voice. When the thunder had subsided, he repeated the order.

“Enemy launch sighted!” the lookout said.

“What…?” Sam said. Now he too saw the red sharp-nosed bow and the curving armor-plated back and gun turrets of the original Post No Bills, stolen by King John. It was coming out of the towering gap.

A single rocket leaped from the opening in the face of the cliff. It flew straight, locked into the red-hot exhaust of the copter. It shone like a long line drawn against the black mountain with a flaming pencil. And then it and the chopper became a round ball of scarlet.

“There goes the last flying machine on this world,” Sam said.

The ever-cool Byron said, “Better wait, sir, until the helicopter has hit The River. Otherwise, the rockets’ll go for it. It’s the hottest object out there.”

The blazing main body and its satellites of metal pieces fell with what seemed an unnaturally slow pace. Then they struck the water and disappeared.

Byron spoke into the radio reserved for communication with de Marbot’s walkie-talkie. “Direct one rocket volley at the enemy vessel.”

“Jesus, sir!” the lookout said. “The Rex is coming out too!”

Byron looked once, and he punched the alarm button. Sirens began whooping. The crowd that had been standing on the flight deck quickly disappeared.

Sam forced himself to speak calmly though his heart was racing. “Drop the grail-connector. Telescope the crane.”

Byron had already told the deckhands to cast off the lines. Detweiller sat waiting for his orders, his hands on the sticks.

Byron looked out of the port. “Lines all clear, sir!”

“Back her out, pilot,” Sam said.

Detweiller eased the sticks from neutral, pulling them toward him. The giant wheels began turning, and the vessel slid by the dock.

There was smoke all around the launch of the Rex. It was swept quickly away, revealing a blackened boat. It wasn’t moving, so perhaps it had been badly damaged. But three inches of duraluminum armored it. It could take a hell of a lot of punishment. Maybe the crew was just stunned by the explosions.

Now the Rex Grandissimus was halfway out of the darkened strait. It shone whitely, then became pale as the sun slid all the way behind the mountains. Twilight fell on the lake. The sky darkened. The mass of closely packed stars and gas sheets in the sky began to glow as the sunlight faded. By the time complete night came, the light above would be as bright as a full moon on a cloudless Earth.

The two launches were smudges of paleness. The Rex was a greater whiteness, like an albino whale seen just before it burst through the surface of the sea.

So, old John had decided to attack while the Not For Hire was tied up for recharging. He was not turning back. He’d take his punishment whether he liked it or not.

How had John known that the boat was tied up? Easy to explain. Somewhere up on the mountain on a ledge above the mouth of the strait was a lone observer with a transceiver. That would also explain the readiness of the Rex’s defenses against Petroski’s attack.

Sam spoke quietly to the pilot. Detweiller stopped the vessel, then turned her toward the Rex and applied full speed ahead. Byron said, “What should the Post No Bills do?”

Sam waited a moment to reply while he watched the arc traced by the rockets from the cave. But surprise was dead now. John knew that the missiles came from his now usurped cave. Before the rockets had gone halfway, flames spurted from the Rex, and trails of fire rose from it. The two packs met about fifty feet above the boat, and the roar rolled across The River. Smoke covered the vessel and was whisked away.

If the Rex had been hit, it could not be determined from this distance.

John’s rockets would not have hit so many of his unless they, too, had heat-seekers in their noses. Which meant that the enemy did have some of the devices. Apparently, John had had some manufactured. But how many did he have? Whatever their number, some had been sacrificed to stop the attack.

A second covey darted from the cave. This time, they were met halfway, and a flame-centered cloud spread out to be swiftly dissipated. Almost before that happened, a third flight shot from the Rex. Its arc ended against the cliff. Some had hit the cave itself, though. Flame belched like gas from a dragon’s mouth. Mark off thirty good men and women.

Now the leviathans headed toward each other. Sam could see one light in it, that from the control room. Like his boat, it was blacked-out except for the one illumination needed.

The lookout reported that the enemy launch had resumed motion.

“Neither of his launches originally had torpedo tubes,” Sam said to Byron. “But John may have fitted them with tubes. I’m betting he has. Where is his other launch, by the way?”

A moment later, the lookout reported that it was now detected. It must have just emerged from the stern launching compartment.

The Post No Bills was cutting toward the Rex. It had two torpedoes set to go and four waiting.

The Gascon was racing toward the motherboat, under orders to get into her compartment and take on torpedoes. Sam doubted that it could be gotten aboard soon enough.

“There goes the smaller enemy launch, sir,” the lookout said. “Headed toward the Bills.”

Sam told Byron to order the Gascon to assist its sister boat.

Four rockets sprang from the Rex. An explosion announced the end of one curve. A moment later, Admiral Anderson spoke over the radio. “That bird knocked us silly, sir. But we’re on our way again. No damage to the boat—that I know about.”

The Gascon, firing rockets at the enemy launch, swung about it. Little spurts of flame showed that their machine guns were operating. The other enemy launch continued doggedly toward the Bills, shedding warheads and bullets alike. The distance between the two larger vessels, as estimated by the eye, was five hundred feet. Neither was loosing its rockets. Evidently they were waiting until they got within close range.

The Gascon was circling behind the enemy now. Plunkett’s voice came. “I’m going to ram.”

“Don’t be a fool!” Sam shouted, in his fear bypassing Byron, who should have relayed the message.

“Is that an order, sir?” Plunkett said calmly. “The crew has left—at my orders, sir. I think that I can wreck the enemy’s propellers.”

“This is the captain!” Sam said. “I order you not to do that! I don’t want you to kill yourself!”

There was no answer. The smaller of the two white objects crept up on the stern of the bigger. At least, it seemed to be moving slowly. Actually it was overtaking the slower craft at about fifteen miles an hour. Not much speed, but the weight of the heavy armor-plated boat gave it a fearful amount of energy.

“Gascon and enemy launch closed, sir,” the lookout said.

“I can see that, hear it, too,” Sam said, looking through his night glasses.

All motion of the Gascon had stopped completely except for its drift with the current. The other launch was slowing down. Now it had stopped.

“By Jesus!” Sam said. “He did it! Poor bastard!”

“Maybe he ain’t hurt,” Joe said. “He vould’ve been thtrapped in.”

The Post No Bills was closing in. It came within perhaps a hundred feet of its target. Then it swung sharply away. Several seconds later, the enemy boat rose in water and flames and came down in pieces.

“He torpedoed it!” Sam yelled with exultation. “Good old Anderson! He torpedoed it!”

Byron said coolly, “Good show, that.”

“NFH! Anderson! What are my orders?”

“Find out if Plunkett’s all right,” Sam said. “And if the Gascon is still serviceable. And pick up the men who jumped.”

“Sir, the Rex is an estimated fifty-two hundred feet away,” the lookout said.

“Okay, Admiral,” Sam said to Byron. “You take over the cannons.”

Byron said, “Yes, sir,” and he turned to the intercom. Sam heard him giving orders to the fore port-cannon lieutenant, but his eyes were on the launches. If the Gascon was operable, it could be used to harass the Rex with its small rockets. There wasn’t enough time to fit it with torpedoes.

Byron, standing by the intercom, was repeating the range as the gunnery lookout reported it.

“Forty-nine hundred. Forty-seven hundred. Forty-five hundred.”

“That’s going to be a hell of a shock to John,” Sam said to Joe Miller. “He doesn’t know we have cannons.”

“Fire!”

Sam counted the seconds. Then he swore. The first shell had missed.

The second struck, apparently just by the waterline near the fore. But the Rex continued steadily toward its enemy.

“Bring her around so we can give them a broadside from the port,” he told Detweiller.

Both cannons spoke now. Columns of smoke roiled out from the Rex. A large fire was burning on the flight deck. Still, the boat came on. And now it was close enough to launch its larger rockets.

“Enemy within twenty-six hundred feet,” the gunnery lookout said.

“Are the big birds ready?” Sam said to Byron.

“Yes, sir, all.”

“Tell the officers to fire as soon as the Rex does.”

Byron relayed the order. He had no sooner quit speaking than Sam saw a multitude of flames on the Rex. The coveys met about 450 feet away, headlong in the air. The explosions deafened Sam.

Joe Miller said, “Chethuth Chritht!”

Suddenly, shells struck the Rex. The starboard wheelhousing went up in flames, and smoke covered the pilothouse. Immediately following, gouts of flame arose along the starboard side. The shell had touched off a rocket battery, and the detonation of that had set off others in a series.

“Hot damn!” Sam said.

The smoke around the pilothouse cleared, though not so swiftly. The wind had died down, and the Rex had lost considerable speed.

“It’s turning its port side to us!” Sam said.

Another flight of missiles arose, this time from the opposite side. Again, the Not For Hire’s countermissiles struck, and the result was a blast in midair that shook the boat. But no damage was done.

By then Sam could see that the Rex was in serious trouble. Its decks on the starboard were blazing here and there, and it was turning away from them.

For a moment he thought that the Rex was fleeing. But no. It continued to turn. It was describing a small circle.

“The starboard wheel is malfunctioning or destroyed,” he said. “They can’t maneuver.”

That knowledge relaxed him somewhat. Now all he had to do was to get out of effective rocket range and blast the Rex out of the water with his 88-millimeter and compressed-air cannons.

He gave the orders to do so. Detweiller turned the boat to put the necessary distance between it and its victim.

“Well, we didn’t do so badly,” he said exultingly to Byron.

“Not so far, sir.”

“It’s practically over! Don’t you ever give way to human emotion, man?”

“Not on duty,” Byron said.

Joe Miller said, again, “Chethuth Chritht!”

“What’s the matter?” Sam said, grabbing Joe’s enormous arm.

The titanthrop, his eyes goggling, strangling noises coming from his open mouth, pointed up and out to the stern. Sam stepped in front of him to look, but he did not get there.

The explosion tore the bulletproof glass out of the frame of the rear window in a solid piece and slammed it against him.

34

The mouse had sprung the trap on the cat.

While the Not For Hire was still two days’ journey away, the crew of the Rex had removed from storage the envelope of a small airship made from the intestinal linings of dragonfish over two years ago. The hydrogen-generating equipment was set up on shore, and the envelope was inflated within the bamboo and pine hangar built two weeks ago.

The Azazel, as John had christened it, was a semirigid airship. The envelope depended upon the pressure of gas to fill it out, but a metal keel was attached to it. The control cabin and the two motor gondolas, salvaged from the wreck of Podebrad’s blimp, were fitted to the keel. The electrical and mechanical connections between control gondola and motor gondola and the elevators and rudder were attached. The fuel tanks were filled with methyl alcohol. The bomb and the torpedo were fitted to the release mechanisms halfway along the underpart of the ship.

The bombardier and the pilot got aboard the airship and took it up for a two-hour shakedown cruise. Everything worked well. And when the Rex left to do battle with the Not For Hire, the dirigible lifted to the desired height and began circling. Not until it became dark would it go through the high part of the strait.

As the Rex circled, imitating a crippled duck, the blimp was downRiver behind the enemy vessel. It had come over the strait and then had turned right, cruising alongside, but not too near to, the mountains. Its black color would keep it from being visually observed by the enemy. There was a chance that the enemy radar would detect it. It was John’s hope that it would be centered on the Rex. Clemens would think that the Rex had no more aircraft, so why make a radar sweep at a high altitude?

When the radar of the Not For Hire was destroyed, John was jubilant. Though his boat and crew had suffered terrible punishment, he danced with joy. Now the Azazel could creep up on the enemy, avoiding all but visual observation. And in this pale light, with the enemy’s eyes only for the Rex, the airship had a good chance to get within striking distance.

The plan had worked out. The airship had hugged the mountains to the north, coming down to an altitude below the tops of the highest hills at times. It had gone east for some distance, then had eased out over the treetops to The River. And it had sped full power then, the bottom of its control gondola only a foot or so above the surface.

All was going well, and now the Azazel was behind the Not For Hire. Its bulk was shielded by the enemy boat, undetectable by its mother vessel’s radar.

Burton, standing near John, heard him mutter, “By the Lord’s loins! Now we’ll see if the airship is swift enough to catch up with Sam’s boat! My engineers had better be right! It would be ironic if, after all this work and planning, it was too slow!”

Salvoes from the enemy struck the Rex along the starboard decks. Burton felt stunned as the roar deafened him, shook the deck beneath him, and blew in a starboard port. The others looked as shocked as he felt. Immediately afterwards, John was yelling at Strubewell to get the damage and casualty reports. At least, that is what his mouth must have been voicing. Strubewell understood. He spoke into the intercom, but it was difficult to hear him. Within a short time, he was able to get in some reports and to tell his captain. By then, Burton could hear well enough, though not as well as he would have liked to.

This had been the worst punishment suffered yet. There were huge holes in many places on all the decks. The explosions had not only punched these on the decks and in the hull, but corridors filled with people had been blown open. A number of rocket-launching mechanisms, loaded with missiles, had gone up, adding their explosions. Several steam machine-gun turrets were knocked off their foundations.

The starboard paddle box or wheelhousing had been almost blown off by two shells. But the paddle wheel was still operating at one-hundred-percent efficiency.

“Clemens must have seen those shells hit the paddle box,” John said. “He could be fooled into thinking that he’s crippled us. By Christ’s cup, we’ll make him think so!”

He gave the order to put the boat into a wide circle. The inner or starboard wheel was turned slowly while the outer or port wheel rotated under two-thirds power.

“He’ll come arunning like a dog panting to finish off a wounded deer!” John said. He rubbed his hands and chuckled.

“Ay, he’s bound toward us like a great beast out of Revelation!” John said. “But he doesn’t know that there’s an even more fearsome monster hot on his tail, about to vomit death and hellfire all over him! It’s the vengeance of God!”

Burton felt disgusted. Was John actually equating himself with his Creator? Had his brains become a trifle addled from the shock of shells and rockets? Or had he always secretly felt that he and God were co-partners?

“They’ll have to estimate distance with the eye, and in this light they won’t do well,” John said. “Their sonar isn’t going to do any range calculation, either!”

The enemy would be getting more than return pulses from the beam directed at the Rex. The sonar operators were going to be confused. They’d see pulses from four different targets on their screens. Three would be from tiny remotely controlled boats circling in the lake, each emitting sound pulses of the same frequency as those of the enemy transmitter. The little vessels also contained noise generators which simulated the pounding of giant paddle wheels against the water.

Burton could see the upper structures of the Not For Hire silhouetted against the blazing stars and the shimmering gas sheets on the eastern horizon.

And then he saw a dark semicircle, the upper part of the Azazel, against the celestial illumination just above the Not For Hire.

“Fire your torpedo!” John said loudly. “Fire now, you fools!”

Peder Tordenskjöld, the chief gunnery officer, said, “Distances are deceiving now, sir. But the airship must’ve launched the torpedo already.”

All glanced at the panel chronometer. The torpedo, if it hit, should do so within thirty seconds. That is, it would if the dirigible were as close to the boat as it seemed to be. The Azazel would have dropped the missile while it was only a few feet above The River. Lightened by the release of the heavy missile, it would have risen swiftly. Its speed would be increased also by the loss of weight. So, if it were now over, or almost over, the enemy, the torpedo should be about to strike.

The Not For Hire should be taking evasive action by now. Though the airship may not have been seen by the eye, the torpedo would be detected by the sonars of the enemy. Its location and speed would be instantly known, its shape and size indicated. The enemy would know that a torpedo was speeding toward its stern, as John inelegantly put it, “driving right up Sam Clemens’ asshole.”

John stopped. His face was a study in fury. “By God’s teeth, how could it have missed at such close range?”

“It couldn’t have,” Strubewell said. “Maybe it malfunctioned. Didn’t go off.”

Whatever had happened, the enemy had escaped the torpedo. Behind it the semicircle of the Azazel, which had disappeared for a moment, rose again. The pilot and the bombardier would either have jumped out or be just about ready to jump. Their parachutes, equipped with a compressed-gas device, would unfold fully the moment they leaped clear of the gondola. Without that, they would not open before the two hit The River.

Burton estimated that the two men had to have left the semirigid by now. It would be set on automatic pilot now, and the clock in the release mechanism of the bomb would be ticking away. Another mechanism would be valving off hydrogen to lower the craft. When the bomb fell, the airship would be lightened and would rise. But not far. A few seconds afterwards, if the explosion did not ignite the gas, a fourth mechanism would detonate a smaller bomb.

Burton looked out of the port screen. The decks of the Rex were blazing in a dozen places from the shells and rockets. Firefighters, clad in insulation suits, were spraying the flames with water and foam. Within about two or three minutes, the fires would be extinguished.

Burton heard the captain say, “Hah!”

He turned. Everybody except the pilot was gazing out of the port screen. The sausage shape of the dirigible was directly above the Not For Hire. Its nose would soon touch the back of the pilothouse.

“Incredible!” Burton said.

“What?” the captain said.

“That no one on the boat has seen it yet.”

“God is with me,” John said. “Now, even if it is seen, it will be too late. It can’t be shot down without imperiling the boat.”

Tordenskjöld said, “Something happened to the torpedo release mechanism. It’s malfunctioning. But when the bomb goes off, it’ll set the torpedo off.”

John spoke to the pilot. “Get ready to bring her around. When I give the word, head directly for the enemy.”

The chief radio operator said, “The two launches are heading for us, sir.”

“Surely they can see the Azazel now!” John said. “No, they haven’t!”

“P’raps the Not For Hire’s radio is knocked out, too,” Burton said.

“Then He is indeed on our side!” John said.

Burton grimaced.

A lookout said, “Sir! The enemy launches are approaching on the port sternside.”

Radar reported that both launches were at a range of four hundred yards. They were separated from each other by one hundred and twenty feet.

“They’re planning to take us in our starboard side when we’re on the other side of our circle,” Strubewell said. “They think the motherboat should be firing on us by then.”

“I can see that,” John said somewhat testily. “You’d think by now that they’d be trying to signal the Hire. The radio must be out, too, but surely they could send up flares.”

“There goes one,” Strubewell said, pointing at the bright blue-white glare in the sky.

“Now they’ll see the Azazel!” John cried.

It was about thirty feet above the flight deck of the enemy or at least it seemed to be. It was difficult to estimate at that distance. It was not up to the pilothouse yet. That was apparent, since if it had been, it would have collided with the structure.

Something dark and small dropped through the area of bright sky between the airship and the Not For Hire.

“There goes the bomb!” John cried.

Burton couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to him that the bomb had fallen on the stern of the flight deck, perhaps at its edge. The bombardier must have set its timed automatic-release mechanism, and then he and the pilot had jumped. But the timing had not been right. The release should have been activated when it was in the middle of the deck. Or, better, as close to the pilothouse as possible.

The explosion wreathed the flight deck in flames and silhouetted the pilothouse and the tiny figures in it.

The airship soared upwards, bending in the middle, its keel twisted by the blast. And its envelope burst into flames, the hydrogen in it one huge ball of fire.

“The torpedo!” John shouted. “The torpedo! Why didn’t it fall?”

Perhaps it had, and it couldn’t be seen from the Rex.

But it should have been set off by now.

Now Burton could see the dirigible drift down, flaming. Its forward part fell upon the stern of the Not For Hire and then slid off into The River through the great hole made by the forty-pound bomb. The Not For Hire plowed on, leaving the blazing and spreading-out envelope behind it. The stern was aflame, too, the wooden flight deck burning furiously.

John yelled, “God tear those two to pieces in the deepest pits of Hell! They’re cowards! They should have waited a few seconds more!”

Burton thought that the pilot and the bombardier had been very brave indeed. They must have waited until what seemed to them to be the last possible second before being able to jump. Under such pressure, they couldn’t be blamed for having made such a slight miscalculation. Nor was it their fault that the torpedo had not exploded. They’d made several trial runs with a dummy torpedo, and the release mechanism had worked then. Mechanical devices frequently malfunctioned, and it was their bad luck, and the bad luck of their comrades, that it had failed now.

However, the torpedo might still go off. Unless it had slid off the stern with the wreck.

John was not so unhappy when he saw that the blast had ripped off all of the two lower decks of the pilothouse structure except for two vertical supporting metal beams and the elevator shaft. And these were bending forward slowly under the weight of the control room.

Somehow, a few people in the room had survived. They were silhouetted against the holocaust on the rear of the flight deck.

“God’s balls!” John said. “He has spared Clemens so that I may take him prisoner!”

He paused, then said, “They won’t be able to steer! We have them in our hands!”

He spoke to the pilot.

“Bring us up along the enemy’s port at pointblank range!”

The pilot looked wide-eyed at his captain, but he said, “Aye, aye, sir.”

John spoke to Strubewell and Tordenskjöld then, telling them to ready the crew for broadsides first and then for boarding.

Burton hoped that he would be ordered to join his marines. They had been sitting deep within the hurricane deck, behind locked doors, waiting. During the entire battle, they had not been informed of anything. All they knew was that the boat had rocked and shaken from time to time, and thunder had roared outside their room. Doubtless, they were all keyed up, nervous, sweating, wondering when they would see action.

The Rex plowed The River in a furrow angling in toward the stricken vessel. The gap between the two swiftly shortened.

“Batteries B2, C2, and D2 will aim for the pilothouse top deck,” John said.

Strubewell relayed the orders. Then he said, “Battery C2 doesn’t reply, sir. Either the communication’s cut or it’s out of action.”

“Tell C3 to aim for the pilothouse control room.”

“You forget, sir. C3’s definitely out of action. The last salvo got it, sir.”

“B2 can do it then,” John said.

He turned to Burton. His face looked purplish in the nightlight. “Get to your men now, Captain,” he said. “Be prepared to lead a boarding party from the midport side.”

Burton saluted and sped down the spiral ladder. He got off at the hurricane deck and hurried down a corridor. His men and women were inside a large chamber outside the armory. Lieutenant Gaius Flaminius was outside the hatch with two guards. His face lit up when he saw Burton.

“We’re going into action?”

“Yes,” Burton said. “Very quickly. Get them out here into the corridor.”

While Flaminius bawled orders, Burton stood at the corner of the two corridors. He would have to lead his force down the corridor going to the outside. They would have to wait there until the command came down to board the Not For Hire. Or, if the communication system wasn’t working, he would have to judge for himself when to order the attack.

It was while the marines were being lined up in the corridor that the broadside from the Not For Hire struck. The explosions were deafening; they made Burton’s ears ring. A bulkhead down the corridor bulged in. Smoke poured in from somewhere, setting everybody to coughing. There was another roar that shook the decks and deadened their ears even more.

Up on the bridge, John hung on to the railing and shuddered as the boat vibrated. At a range of only thirty feet, the portside rocket batteries of four decks of the Rex and the starboard rocket and cannon and steam gun batteries—those still in force—of the Not For Hire had poured fire into each other. Great pieces of the hull had flown spinning into the air. Entire batteries of rockets and their crews had disintegrated in flame and smoke. The two remaining cannons on Clemens’ boat had been torn from their mounts as the shell supplies behind them were touched off by rockets. Two steam machine-gun turrets, one on each vessel, had caved in, opened as a can opens to a metal punch, then had been peeled apart as rockets or shells came in through the tears in the metal.

The great boats were wounded beasts, cut open, their insides exposed, bleeding heavily.

In addition, certain batteries on each craft had aimed volleys at the control rooms, the brains of the beasts. A number of missiles had shot by their marks, either splashing harmlessly into the water or striking elsewhere. A few plumped ashore, starting more fires. None had hit the pilothouses directly. How they could miss at that range was inexplicable, but this often happened in combat. Shots that should have gone astray did not, and dead-certain shots went awry.

The sharp nose of the Not For Hire turned, whether from design or accident, John could not know. Its prow sliced into the giant port wheelguard of the Rex, tearing it off, lifting its many tons up and off and precipitating it into The River. The prow continued on, crushing the paddles, bending the frame of the wheel, and then snapping off the massive wheelshaft. In the midst of the eardrum-shattering explosions, the screech of tearing metal, the screams of men and women, the roar of burning hydrogen, both boats stopped. The impact of the collision hurled everyone who wasn’t strapped in to the deck. The prow crumpled in and up, and water poured in through several rents in the hull.

At the same time, the pilothouse of the Not For Hire toppled forward. It seemed to those within it, Miller, Clemens, and Byron, the only ones left alive in the structure, that it fell slowly. But it did not, being attracted by gravity as fully as any other object. It crashed upon the foredeck of the hangar deck, and out of it hurled Clemens and Miller. Sam landed on top of the giant, whose own fall was softened somewhat by the padded and insulated uniform and helmet.

They lay there for several minutes dazed, bruised, deafened, bleeding, too numbed to realize that they were lucky to be alive.

35

Sam Clemens and Joe Miller climbed down the ladder leading from the hangar deck. The fire raged behind them. Then they were on the hurricane deck. Joe carried his colossal ax in one hand. He said, “You okay, Tham?”

Sam did not reply. He grabbed one of the titanthrop’s fingers and pulled him on around the corner. A bullet struck the bulkhead, its plastic fragments whizzing around them. None hit flesh, however.

“The Rex is right alongside us!” Clemens said.

“Yeah, I thaw that,” Joe said. “I think they’re going to try to board uth.”

“I can’t control my boat!” Sam cried. He looked as if he were going to weep.

Joe seemed as calm and as impervious to destruction as a mountain. He patted Sam on the shoulder. “Don’t vorry. The boat’ll chutht drift athyore. It von’t think. And ve’ll knock Chohn and hith aththholeth thilly.”

Then both were hurled to the deck. Sam lay for a while, groaning, unaware that the Not For Hire had ripped off a paddle box and wheel of the Rex. During the firing that broke out as soon as the boats had come to a stop, he continued to lie with his face pressed against the cold hard deck. A hand reached down and grabbed his shoulder and picked him up by it. He yelled with agony.

“Thorry, Tham,” Joe rumbled. “I forgot mythelf.”

Sam held his one shoulder. “You dumbbell, I won’t ever be able to use that arm again!”

“You egthaggerate ath uthual,” Joe said. “You’re alive vhen by all rightth you thyouldn’t be. Tho am I. Tho get vith it, Tham. Ve got vork to do.”

Clemens looked up at the flight deck. The flames had by now covered not only that but had reached down into the hangar deck. There was not much to burn, however. The barrels of methanol that were usually stored there had been taken to the lowest deck before the battle had started. Though the flaming hydrogen was hot, it would burn itself out quickly.

As he thought this, he saw the flight deck cave in on itself. From this angle, he could only see its edges sticking out. But the crash that went with the falling parts told him that at least half of the structure had collapsed. And flame gusted out, like a dragon breathing at him.

Joe leaped forward, yelling, “Chethuth Chritht!”

He picked up Sam and continued forward until he had reached the edge of the hurricane deck. Then he dropped Sam.

“Tham, I think I’m burned!”

“Turn around,” Clemens said. On inspecting the back, he said, “You clown! The armor saved you. You may be a little hot under the collar, but you’re not hurt.”

Joe went back to get the ax he’d dropped. Sam looked at the bulk of the Rex. Its port side was against the starboard prow of his boat. Grappling lines were being shot or hurled from both sides on all three of the lower decks, and the boarding bridges were already extended. The walkways and the ports and hatches, as far as he could see, were crowded with men and women. All were either firing at pointblank range or getting ready to attack as soon as the lines were secured. The boarding bridges would be manned in a very short time.

He did not have a gun. Fortunately, there were plenty on the decks, dropped from nerveless hands. He picked one up, checked its chambers, removed a bandolier from a corpse, put it on himself, and removed bullets from the belt to put in the pistol. Joe’s form loomed up from around the corner, startling him. He did not reproach Joe for being so silent, since Joe was supposed not to make noise. But he had thought his heart would stop.

“Vhat’ll ve do now, Tham?”

“Join our men and let them know we’re still alive and kicking,” Clemens said. “That’ll recharge their morale.”

They arrived just in time to see the last of a large group storm onto the hurricane deck from the Rex. Below them, however, John’s men were forcing back the would-be boarders from the Not For Hire. In fact, John’s men were boarding his—Sam’s—boat on some of the bridges.

Sam leaned over and emptied his pistol into the rear-guard of the boarders below. Two men fell, one going down in the narrow gap between the two vessels. But one of the boarders, still on the Rex, looked up and then shot his own pistol. Sam ducked as the first bullet screamed by his ear. The other missiles shattered against the railing or the hull just below the railing.

Joe was going to look over the railing then, but Sam yelled at him that if he did he’d get his head blown off.

After waiting until he was sure that the boarding bridges below were empty, he looked over and down. The deck below was jammed with struggling, shouting people and was noisy with ringing metal. Sam told Joe what he wanted to do. Joe nodded, lifting his great proboscis up and down like a log floating in a rough sea.

They ran across the boarding bridge, Joe bellowing to the men there that he and the captain were coming.

On both sides of their group were a few of the Rex crew, rapidly backing away before the superior force. These broke on seeing the great head and shoulders of the titanthrop above the crowd of Clemens’ men. They ran as fast as they could, some diving into hatches, others leaping over the railing or through the gaps and into The River.

“That thyure ath hell didn’t take long, did it, Tham?”

“No,” Sam said. “I wish it was always that easy. Okay, Joe, you give them the orders.”

The titanthrop yelled at the top of his voice at the men. They had no trouble hearing him. Indeed, at least half of the people halfway down both boats on this side must have heard the thunder. In fact, on one deck below and opposite, the battlers stopped for a few seconds.

The men ahead of Joe cleared to one side. Joe proceeded to the nearest ladder, Sam immediately behind him, and the others following. They went down the ladder to the hurricane deck and along it until they came to the boarding bridges. Here the men spread out, forming lines of two abreast at each of the eight bridges.

Sam checked that everybody was ready. Attacking John’s men from behind them, from their own boat, tickled him. They would be demoralized when the titanthrop swung that Brobdingnagian ax upon their heads from behind them.

“Okay, Joe!” Sam yelled. “Go get ’em!”

Joe, bellowing a war cry in his native language, ran across the metal strip. Sam came behind him. There was not room on the bridge for another person where Joe went. Besides, it was more discreet to stay behind him.

Things happened so swiftly that only in retrospect was Sam able to figure out what happened.

A great noise deafened him, and a shock traveled through the bridge and hurled him onto it. Almost immediately after, the far end of the bridge lifted up, bending as its hooks kept their hold on the railing, then tearing loose with a screech of metal.

Sam, clinging stunned to the edges of the bridge, both arms extended to their utmost, the fingers clinging to the edges, looked up.

Joe had dropped his enormous ax. It slid along the upward and sideways tilting bridge and fell off into the gap between the boats.

Joe had not fallen, but now he was bellowing in wrath. Or was it fear? It didn’t matter. He was bellowing because both his arms were caught about his body by a noose.

The other end of the rope was being tied to a railing on the deck above. The man who had lassoed Joe from the hangar deck wore a Western sombrero, white enough to gleam in the pale light. His teeth flashed briefly below the wide brim.

Then Joe had fallen off the bridge. But, instead of going straight down into the chasm between the vessels, he swung down and then slammed against the hull of the Not For Hire. Joe quit bellowing then. His head lolled to one side, and he hung like a giant fly caught in the strand of an even larger spider.

Sam cried out, “Joe! Joe!”

It seemed impossible that anything serious could happen to Joe Miller. He was so enormous, so muscular, so…invincible. A man the size of a cave lion or a Kodiak bear should not be…mortal…vulnerable.

He did not have much time for such thoughts.

The bridge continued to tilt upwards as the Rex rolled over. Sam clamped his hands on the sides of the bridge, his head turned away from Joe now. He saw men and women on the other bridges lose their holds and, screaming, fall into the narrow well of darkness between the vessels.

How ironic that the fabulous Riverboat Rex, which he had built, should be responsible for killing its builder. What a joke that the first boat should catch him halfway between the second boat and itself. Suspended him like Mohammed between heaven and earth.

Then he had let loose, had slid backwards down the bridge, fallen into the angle made by the vertical deck and the horizontal bulkhead, had scrambled up it, and was sliding facedown on the hull. He was up on his feet somehow and running down toward The River. Then he was slipping and rolling down the curve and into The River.

He went down, down, struggling to get rid of his cuirass. His helmet had come loose sometime during the struggle. He was terrified now that he could not get the armor from his body in time to keep from being sucked down by the sinking Rex. That colossal sinking body would make a great whirl pool which, when it collapsed, would take all jetsam and flotsam, all debris, inanimate or animate, deep down with it. And if he was heavily burdened by his armor and weapons, he’d go down, too. Even if he were unburdened, he might sink.

At last, his belt and the bandolier and his chain-mail shirt and the attached skirt were off. He rose then, his chest seeming to burst, the ancient horror of drowning threatening to tear apart his hammering heart, his ears ringing with a tolling from the deeps. He had to breathe but dared not. Down there was the mud, as black and as evil as and far deeper than the mud of the Mississippi, and around him was water, squeezing like an Iron Maiden made of putty, and above—how far away?—was air.

It was too dark to see anything. For all he knew, he was going deeper, headed in the blackness the wrong way. No, his ears would hurt if he were diving instead of ascending.

He could not hold out much longer. Not more than a few seconds. Then…the death that his Mississippi boyhood had made him fear more than any other. Except one. If he had to die, he would do it in water rather than in fire.

For half a second, or however swiftly such thoughts went, he visualized Erik Bloodaxe.

At least that nemesis would not get him. The Viking, as a prophet and a nemesis, an avenging human machine, was a failure. All those nightmares of all those years had been wasteful torture. That the man could see into the far future, in fact assure it, was a superstition.

All those people in Hannibal who had prophesied that he would hang had been twice wrong.

Strange how such amusing thoughts could flash through the mind of a man whose only thought should be on the blessed air. Or was he actually drowning, almost dead, had forgotten the horror of having to open his nostrils and gulp in water, was thinking dying thoughts, his body flaccid and sinking, his eyes glazed, mouth open as any finny denizen, a tiny flicker of electricity in some eels of his brain the only life left in him?

Then his head was in the air, and he was drinking in oxygen and glad, glad, glad because he was not dead.

His flailing hand touched a rope, moved back, felt it, seized it. He was hanging on to a rope the other end of which was tied on to a stanchion from the main deck of his boat. He was near the stern. A few more seconds, and he would have found the boat out of reach.

He was lucky that he had come across the line at once. The River pulled at him, forcing him to clutch the line as tightly as he had the bridge. The Rex was gone, but it was dragging along a broad and deep hollow, waters whirling and sinking. There was an even greater pull on him as the walls of the whirl pool collapsed.

What had sunk the Rex? A torpedo from the Post No Bills?

He looked up. He couldn’t see Joe’s body hanging from the rope. It could still be there, but the decks were set too far back for him to see Joe from the surface of The River. Was he still hanging? Or had the man who’d lassoed him cut the rope? If so, Joe might have fallen onto the deck below, a long hard fall but still better than plunging into the water. But he could be dead or dying already. That long swing inward, ending up against the metal bulkhead, could have smashed his ribs, caved in his skull.

Never mind Joe now. He had to save himself.

For some time, while the howling and blasting went on above, and occasionally a man or woman would topple over the railing and fall with a splash near him, he hung on to the line. When the sound of immediate battle died down rather suddenly, he started to climb up. It was not easy, since so much of his strength had been squeezed out of him. He finally got his feet against the hull and, leaning outwards above the water, pulled himself up puffing and panting, his muscles hurting, until he was near the railing. He eased himself down until his face was against the hull, and he began hauling himself up by his arms alone. Now he wished that he had not avoided daily exercise so much. For several minutes, as he rested, unable to hitch himself up until he had regained his breath, he thought that his clenched hands would come apart. He would drop back into The River and all would be over.

Finally, he got one hand up to grip the upright to the railing. He got his other hand around it. The long painful pull began. Then it was over, and he had managed to throw one leg over the edge of the deck. Wheezing, he squirmed until he had half his body on the deck. Then he was able to roll onto the deck, to lie there face up while he tried to get all the air in the world inside his lungs.

After a while, his narrow chest quit rising and falling so hard, like a pair of worn-out blacksmith’s bellows. He rolled around to look back and up alongside the decks. He still could not see Joe.

Perhaps he was too far away and the angle of sight was too oblique. He needed to get further away, which he could not do, or get upon the same deck.

For that moment, he had to get weapons. And he also had to get at least a kilt. During his struggle his magnetically attached cloths had come off. Naked I came into this world, and naked…nonsense. He was not leaving. Not yet.

He got unsteadily to his feet. Bodies and parts of bodies lay along the deck in both directions. The parts of bodies or legs stuck out from hatches. Weapons were everywhere. So were cloths.

Shivering from fatigue or fear or both, he stripped a body. The cloths he made into a long kilt and a short cape. A belt went around his waist, a bandolier, over his shoulder; a loaded pistol, into a holster; a cutlass, into his hand. He was armed, but that did not mean that he was ready for combat. He had had enough today to last him for the rest of his life, even if it were a thousand years long.

What he wanted to do was to get back to Joe. The two of them would round up or join a large body of men. And he would be secure again, or as secure as it was possible to be under the circumstances.

For a moment he thought about taking refuge inside a cabin. He could hole up and then come out when the people from the Rex had been cleared out.

It was a nice thought, one which anyone with a logical mind and common sense would have.

Down along the deck, something struck with a metallic clang. A man cursed softly; somebody else spoke just as quietly but harshly, a reprimand. Sam stopped, his shoulder pressed against the cold bulkhead. Near the prow, the shadowy figures of men were coming down the steps from the hurricane deck. There seemed to be about twenty.

He slid backwards, his shoulder against the metal. His left hand felt behind him. When he touched the edge of the open hatch, he turned swiftly and went into it. He was in another unlit passageway which went straight to the hatch on the other side. This was open, showing a pale oblong lit only by starlight and a flickering from the burning flight deck. Sam decided to get to that side, and he started trotting. Then he stopped.

It was his duty to ascertain who the men were and what they were doing. He’d feel like a fool if they were his people. And if they weren’t, he should determine what they were up to.

Of course, they would be looking into every open entrance before they went past it. He opened the door to a cabin and stepped inside, leaving the door partly open. From this angle, he could see them but they couldn’t see him in the darkness. He had opened another cabin door across the corridor so he could take refuge in that if he had to. He did not want to be trapped.

There was, however, nothing he could do about his situation now. The first of the party had bounded through the opening, stopped against the side of the hatchway, where he was barely visible, and pointed a pistol. A second man also leaped in and hurled himself toward the other side of the hatchway, his pistol ready.

Sam did not fire. If they would only be content to look along the passageway. They were. After several seconds, one said, “All clear!”

Both left for the walkway, and figures began filing past the oblong. The fourth one went by, and Sam gasped. The profile against the indirect light of the stars was that of a short broad-shouldered man. The figure walked with John’s gait. It had been thirty-three years since he had seen the ex-monarch, but he had forgotten little about him.

36

Rage overcame fear, a rage that was a compression of all the rages he’d felt on Earth and here. He did not even think about the consequences. At last! Here it was! Vengeance!

He stepped outside the cabin and went softly across the deck. Though he was so exuberant that he was almost dizzy, he still had not lost all discretion. He wasn’t going to warn them so they could shoot him before he got to John.

The only bad part about this was that he’d have to shoot John in the back. The bastard would never know who had killed him. But you couldn’t have everything. He desired passionately to call out John’s name, identify himself, and then squeeze the trigger. But John’s men would shoot him down the second they were aware of his presence.

Just as he reached the hatchway, hell exploded outside. There was a crash of gunfire that deafened him and made him pin himself against the bulkhead as if he were a two-legged butterfly. His fluttering heart was the wings.

More shooting. Cries and screams. A man reeled backwards into the passageway. Sam leaped for the open door of the cabin, spun, shut it, then opened it again. He looked through the narrow opening in time to see others come into the passageway. One was the bulky form of John, no mistake about that, outlined briefly against the light.

Sam opened the door fully (thank God it was well oiled!), leaned out, and rapped John over the side of the head with his pistol barrel. John grunted and fell. Sam stooped, dropped the pistol on the chest of the fallen man, gripped him by his long hair, and pulled him into the cabin. Once the feet were past the entrance, he shut the door and pressed the locking button. Outside, the explosions of gunfire were loud, but nothing struck the door. Apparently, the snatching of their leader had happened so swiftly and in such confusion and dark that they had not yet noticed his absence. Perhaps, when they did, they would assume that he had been downed in the corridor.

Sam quivered with delight. He was in great danger, but at the moment that meant nothing. By the Providence that did not exist, events had worked out perfectly. Whatever he had suffered, it was worth it—well, almost worth it. To have his greatest enemy, the only person he had ever really hated, in his power! And in such strange circumstances! Even John, when he awoke, would not be more surprised than he. Truth was stranger than fiction, and he could go on quoting many more clichés.

He pressed the light switch plate with one hand, the pistol held in the other. The ceiling globes shed a flickering light. John groaned, and his eyelids fluttered. Sam tapped him not too lightly on the head again. He did not want to kill him or to damage his brain overly much. John had to have all his senses operating one hundred percent. Otherwise, he wouldn’t appreciate to the fullest what had happened to him.

Sam opened the drawers of a chest attached to the bulkhead. He withdrew some of the thin semitransparent cloths used as brassieres. With these he tied John’s hands together behind his back and then bound his feet together. Puffing and grunting, he dragged the unconscious man to a chair bolted to the deck. Managing to get the heavy body onto the chair, he tied John’s hands to the rungs of the back. Then he went into the head, drank two cups of water from the faucet, and filled a third cup. As this was done, the faucet rattled, and the flow thinned to a trickle. The water pump had suddenly quit.

Sam returned to the main cabin and threw the water in John’s face. John gasped, and his eyelids opened. For a minute, he did not seem to know where he was. Then, recognizing Samuel Clemens, his eyes opened fully, and he drew in his breath with a harsh noise as if he had been struck in the pit of his stomach. Where his skin was not covered with smoke, it became gray-blue.

“Yes, it’s me, John.”

Sam grinned widely.

“You can’t believe it, can you? But you’ll get used to the idea in a moment. Though you won’t like getting used to it.”

John croaked, “Water!”

Sam looked into the red-shot eyes. Despite his hatred, he felt sorry for John. Not sympathy, just pity. After all, he wouldn’t let a rabid dog suffer, would he?

He shook his head. “The water is all gone.”

“I’m dying of thirst,” John said hoarsely.

Sam snarled, “Is that all you can think about after what you’ve done to me? After all these years?”

John said, “Satisfy my thirst, and I’ll satisfy yours.”

His skin had recovered its normal color, and his eyes looked steadily into Sam’s. Knowing John, Sam could see what strategy the cunning fellow had already formulated. He would talk reasonably to his captor, would talk quietly and logically, would appeal to his humanity, and would, in the end, avoid execution.

The hell of it, Sam realized, was that John would succeed.

The anger was draining out of him now. The thirty-three years of vengeance fantasies were blown away like farts in a high wind.

What was left was a man who was basically Christian, though a howling atheist, to use a phrase applied to him by one of his Terrestrial enemies.

He should have shot John in the head the moment he had turned on the light. He should have known what would happen if he did not. But he could not kill a man who was unconscious. Not even King John, whose blood he had lusted for all these years and who had been tortured so ingeniously and so excruciatingly in his daydreams. Never in his night-time dreams. Then it was John who was about to do something to a paralyzed or hopelessly trapped Sam Clemens. Or, mostly, it was Erik Bloodaxe who was about to be revenged upon him.

Sam grimaced and went back into the head. As he suspected, the shower pipes contained enough water for several cupfuls. He drank one and filled a second. Returning to the cabin, he put the cup to his captive’s lips and tilted it as the man drank. John smacked his lips and sighed.

“Another, please?”

“Another! Please?” Sam said loudly. “Are you crazy! I just gave you one so you’ll be able to stand up to what I’m going to do to you!”

John smiled briefly. He was as undeceived as his captor.

Knowing that infuriated Sam so much that he almost became capable of doing what he had threatened. The anger ebbed swiftly, leaving him with the pistol upraised to strike.

John’s smile faded, but only because he did not wish to push Sam too far.

“Why are you so sure of yourself, of me?” Sam said, “Do you think I wouldn’t have blasted you out of the water, sunk you to hell, watched you drown, and shoved you away if you had tried to get aboard?”

“Of course,” John said. “But that was in the heat of battle. You won’t torture me, much as you’d like to do so. Nor will you shoot me in cold blood.”

“But you’d do all that to me, wouldn’t you, you heartless bastard?”

John smiled.

Sam started to reply, then closed his mouth. The uproar in the passageway had suddenly stopped. John also started to say something, but at a sign from Sam he stopped. Apparently, he knew that if he tried to yell, he would regret it. His enemy was not that soft.

Minutes passed. Sam stood by the door, his ear against it, one eye on John. Now he could hear the faint voices of men. These cabins were soundproofed, so there was no determining how far away the voices were. He went back to John and placed a cloth over his mouth, tying it tightly behind his head.

“Just in case,” he said. “But if you do manage to shout for help, I’ll be forced to shoot you. Remember that.”

And I hope you do cry out, he thought.

He turned off the light, unlocked the door, and pushed it slowly out, holding the pistol in his other hand. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. There were more bodies than there had been before. He looked cautiously around the door and down the corridor. Still more bodies. It looked as if the fight had progressed down it to the other side and on out. The handgun firing had ceased sometime during the struggle. It was replaced by the ring of blade on blade. And the distant din was composed only of voices and metal clash. It seemed that both sides had run out of ammunition.

He did not see how the numerically smaller boarders could hold out for long against his own people. He’d wait a little while to make sure that it was safe to emerge with his prisoner.

But, wasn’t he rationalizing? Wasn’t it his duty to get out there and lead his people? Yes, it was. But what about his prisoner?

That was easy. He would lock John in the cabin with the key now hanging by the door. Then he’d look for his crew. It wouldn’t be difficult to find it. A good part would be where the noise was.

He returned to the cabin, shut the door, and turned on the light. John looked curiously at him.

“It’s just about over,” Sam said. “Your crew’s about cleaned out. I’m going now, but I’ll be back soon. And sometime in the future you’ll be on trial.”

He paused. John’s expression did not change. Gurgling sounds came from behind the gag. Evidently, he wanted to speak. But what could he say? Why waste time?

“I don’t want it said that I am not fair or that I am too personally involved to be just,” Sam said. “So, you’ll get a trial. It won’t be by your peers. How many kings are running loose out there or within easy call? But it’ll have a jury of twelve good men and true. That’s only a phrase, since the ladies’ll be represented, too.

“Anyway, you’ll get a fair hearing, and you can pick your own defense lawyer. I’ll abide by the verdict, I won’t even act as judge. Whatever the jury says, I’ll go along with it.”

Mangled words came through the gag.

“You can have your say at the proper time,” Sam said. “Meantime, you can sit here and meditate on your sins.”

He closed and locked the door, hesitated, then unlocked it, reached in, and switched off the light. John would suffer more if he was in darkness.

He should have been jubilant. He was not. Somehow, in some way he could not define, his old enemy had triumphed.

Most things were disappointments, but this, this should have been one of the most enjoyable events in his life. His victory was as unappetizing as a steaming dog turd served under glass.

Where to hide the key? Ah, of course, in the first cabin with an unlocked door. That was three cabins down. He threw the key onto the floor and closed the door. Now to get to Joe. To do that, he would have to have a large number of men behind him.

He went down a corridor which ran longitudinally through the vessel. The lights were off, but he dared turn them on briefly. He ran down its length for a hundred feet, then stopped at another corridor. Here was a stairway that led up to the hurricane deck. After turning the lights off, he went up the steps, aided by a pale square at the top. Once on the hurricane deck, he trotted down the passageway to the starboard side. Noise came to him, but it seemed far off. He peered around the corner onto the walkway. Joe should be somewhere near.

“Why’re you hanging around here, Joe? Don’t you have anything to do?”

“I’m vaiting for a buth, Tham.”

“A buss? Who’d kiss your ugly mug, Joe?”

“No, not a buthth with two etheth, you nincompoop. A buth vith vone eth. Vith vheelth and a motor. How in hell vould I know, Tham? I never theen a buth. Get me down off of here before I get mad and tear you apart, you thap.”

Thus went the imaginary conversation, modeled on so many previous ones. But there was no great bulk hanging helpless from a rope. There was a rope, severed at one end and noosed at the other, lying on the deck.

Sam smiled with joy. Joe was alive, unhurt! Joe was on the loose, undoubtedly tearing up the opposition.

He turned but stopped halfway. A bellow had come from out on The River. It was a deep cry, one which would have been attributed to a lion or a tiger if it had been heard on Earth. Sam knew better. He ran to a staircase and sped down it, taking two steps at a time, one hand sliding on the railing. On the main deck, he paused. He could not ignore the enemy. But the two fights he heard were far away, one at the prow and one at the stern. There was no gunfire, only the clang of blades against blades.

He ran to the railing and leaned out. “Joe! Where are you, Joe?”

“Tham! Here I am, Tham!”

“I can’t see you, Joe!” Clemens called, peering into the darkness. There were objects floating out there, pieces of timber or bodies, unidentifiable flotsam. Though the boat had been drifting with the current, and the fires on the south bank were bright, the starboard side was now toward the dark northern bank. Starlight was not enough there.

“I can’t thee you either, Tham!”

He looked on both sides and behind him to make sure no one was creeping up on him. On turning back to look outward, he called, “Can you get back to the boat?”

“No!” Joe bellowed. “But I’m floating! I got hold of a piethe of vood! My left arm’th broken, Tham!”

“I’ll get you back, Joe! Hang on! I’ll save you!”

He had no idea how he could help Joe but he was determined to find a way somehow. The thought that Joe might drown panicked him.

“Joe, are you still in armor?”

“No, you thilly athth. I’d be on the bottom, food for the fithyeth if I had all that iron on. I got rid of it after I fell in, though my broken arm almotht killed me. Chethuth! The pain! You ever been kicked in the ballth, Tham? Lithten, that ain’t nothin’ compared to trying to undrethth vith a broken arm.”

“Okay, Joe!” Sam said, and he looked around nervously again. Somebody was running his way from the prow, pursued by two men. All were too far away for him to identify them. Behind them was stillness.

The group near the stern was still battling, though it seemed that it had thinned out somewhat.

“I got cut down by thomebody!” Joe bellowed. “And I got loothe then. I grabbed a fire akthe and cleaned up around me and chathed vhat vath left down to the main deck. And then damned if thomebody didn’t knock me over the railing, chuth like that! He mutht have been a hell of a thtrong man, the aththole!”

Joe kept on talking, but Sam didn’t hear him. He crouched by the railing, unable to decide what to do. Though the runners were much nearer now, and coming swiftly, they were still unidentifiable in the dark. He was in agony. In the confusion and haste, his own men might attack him.

He raised the pistol in his left hand, keeping the cutlass in his right. He could aim with either hand, though not well. At this range, though, he could not miss. But did he have to shoot?

The decision never had to be made. As he waited, eyes straining, finger tight on the trigger, he was lifted up and hurled over the railing.

For a minute or so, he was so stunned that he had no idea of what had happened. He knew he was in the water, choking, spitting, struggling. But how had he gotten there? And why?

He bumped into something. His hands felt cold flesh. A corpse. He shoved it away and slipped off the heavy bandolier.

Before him, but now about sixty feet away, was the vast boat. How had he gotten so far away from it? Had he been swimming? Or floating? It didn’t matter. He was here, and the boat was there. He would swim back to it. This was the second time he’d been in The River. What I dip you in three times is true.

As he thrashed toward the vessel, he saw that the railing of the boiler deck was closer to the water than it should be. The boat was sinking!

Now he knew what had tossed him off the deck like a fly shrugged off by a horse. Except that he had no wings. It had been an explosion below the water line. In the boiler deck where ammunition was stored. And it would have been set off, of course, by John’s men.

He had gone through too much. Even the imminent loss of his beautiful Not For Hire, which should have brought tearing pain and tears, did not affect him much. He was too tired and too desperate. Almost, he told himself, too tired to be desperate.

He swam toward the boat. His right hand came down hard on something. He cried out with pain, then reached out again. Wet slippery wood curved under his hand. Gasping with joy, he seized it and pulled himself forward. He didn’t know what it was, a piece of canoe or dugout, but it was enough to buoy him.

Where was Joe?

He called out. There was no answer. He tried again and got the same silence.

Had the explosion gotten Joe? The detonations would have hurled a strong pressure wave through the water. Anyone near it would probably have been killed. But Joe wasn’t close enough. Or was he? It must have been a hell of a blast.

Or perhaps Joe had just lost consciousness from the pain of his broken bone and slipped off into The River.

He called twice more. Someone shrieked from far away, a woman’s voice. Some other poor soul floating in The River.

The boat was visibly settling down. There would be many compartments, large and small, with closed doors and hatches. There might even be enough enclosed air to keep the Riverboat afloat. Eventually, she would drift into shore; she could even be towed in by sailing ships or rowboats or both.

For such a deep-shaded pessimist, he was incredibly optimistic.

He wasn’t going to make it. The prow of the vessel—it was drifting backwards—slid by him. And now he saw the launch, the Post No Bills. It was moving very slowly, apparently looking for swimmers. Its searchlight probed across the waters, stopped, moved back, and centered on something. It was too far away for him even to see whatever the beam was on. The launch was also too distant to hear his cries.

Suddenly, he remembered King John. The man was bound and helpless in a locked cabin. He was doomed unless someone got to him. He couldn’t cry out, and it was doubtful that anyone would be near enough to hear him, if he could be heard. And even then there was no key available. The lock could be shot off, but…why speculate? John was udoomed. He would sit there not even knowing that the boat was going down. The water would flood the main deck, and he still wouldn’t know. Those cabins were watertight. Not until the air suddenly became stuffy would he guess what had happened. Then he would struggle desperately, squirm, twist, writhe, calling out for help through the gag. The air would get fouler and fouler, and he would slowly choke to death.

His last moments would be horrible.

It was a scene which Sam would once have projected on his mind’s screen with great pleasure.

Now he could only wish that he could get to the boat and rescue John. Not that he’d let him go scot-free. He’d see that he got that promised trial. But he did not wish John to suffer so or to die so terribly. He did not want anybody to go through that.

Yes, he was soft, John would have enjoyed thinking of him if he were in such a situation. No matter. He wasn’t John, and he was glad of it.

He forgot about John as the launch started up again. It headed for the other side of the Riverboat and then had disappeared. Was Anderson now about to pick up the survivors from the stricken vessel? If he was, he’d have to help finish the last hold-outs from the Rex, the jackasses who didn’t know when to quit. Maybe they would have sense enough now to surrender.

“Tham!”

The bellow came from behind him. He turned, keeping one arm halfway around the curving wood. “Joe! Where are you?”

“Over here, Tham! I paththed out! I chutht came to, Tham, but I don’t think I can make it!”

“Hang on, Joe!” Clemens shouted. “I’ll get to you! Keep yelling! I’ll be there soon! Keep yelling so I’ll know where you are!”

It wasn’t easy to turn the big piece of flotsam and get going straight toward the bank. He had to hang on with one arm and paddle with the other. He kicked his feet, too. Now and then he had to stop to catch his breath. Then he would shout, “Joe! Where are you? Joe! Yell so I can hear you!”

Silence. Had Joe fainted again? If so, had he strapped himself to whatever was holding him up? He must have. Otherwise, he would have sunk when he passed out the first time. But maybe he’d been lying on something. Maybe…

Since he had to rest for a moment, anyway, he looked behind him. The boat had slid even further downstream. The River was creeping up along the walls of the main deck. In a short time, John’s cabin would be under water.

He began pushing the wood toward the bank. The fires on shore illuminated the surface somewhat. Though he could see plenty of debris, he couldn’t distinguish any as Joe Miller.

Now he could see that the people on shore were putting out in boats and canoes. Their torches burned brightly by the hundreds. Coming to the rescue, though why they should want to help the people who’d burned down a quarter of their buildings was incomprehensible.

No. They were doing for the destroyers what he would have done for John if he could have. And, actually, the Virolanders did not have cause to hate the Riverboat people as he had to hate John.

By then he understood that he had drifted in much closer to shore than he had thought. It was only about a half-mile to the bank. The dark silhouettes of the rescue craft were coming swiftly, considering they were all being paddled or rowed. Not swiftly enough, though. He was getting cold. The water was warmer than the air, but it wasn’t warm enough. About forty-five degrees Fahrenheit in this area if he remembered correctly.

The River had lost much heat while passing over the north pole, and it hadn’t picked up much yet. He was suffering from intense fatigue, aided and abetted by the shock of combat and chilly water. It would be ironic if he perished before the rescuers got to him.

Just like life. Just like death.

It would have been nice to quit stroking and kicking. So easy to give up, drift, and let others do the work. But he had to find Joe. Besides, if he did quit exercising, he’d lose his body warmth that much quicker. It would be so comfortable…he shook his head, breathed deeply, and tried to urge his dead limbs into life.

Presently—or was it presently, how much time had elapsed?—there was a boat alongside him. Many torches burned on it. Strong arms were hoisting him up, and he was laid shivering on the deck. Warm thick cloths were laid over him. Hot coffee was being poured down him. He sat up and shivered as the cloths fell off and the air struck him.

“Joe!” he said. “Joe! Get Joe!”

“What’s he saying?” someone said in Esperanto.

“He’s speaking English,” a woman said. “He says to get Joe.”

A woman’s face was next to his. She said, “Who’s Joe?”

“My best friend,” Sam said weakly. “And he’s not even human. Maybe that accounts for it.” He laughed tiredly, “Ho, ho, ho! Maybe that’s it.”

“Where is this Joe?” the woman said. She was a good-looker. The flaming torches showed a heart-shaped face, big eyes, a broad high forehead, a retroussé nose, wide full lips, a strong chin and jaw. Long yellow wavy hair.

What was he doing admiring a woman at this time? He should be thinking of…Gwenafra.

Vaguely, he felt ashamed that not once since the action had started had he worried about Gwenafra. Where was she? And why hadn’t he thought about her? He really loved her.

“This Joe?” the woman said again.

“He’s a titanthrop, an ape-man. A hairy giant with a gigantic schnozzola. He’s out there, somewhere close. Save him!”

The woman stood up and said something in Esperanto. A man beyond her held a torch out and looked into the darkness. There were many other torches out there, but they didn’t seem to help. The sky was clouding up swiftly, the starlight was being shut out.

He looked around his immediate area. He was sitting on the raised deck of a longboat. Below him, on each side, were about a dozen paddlers.

“There’s something floating out there,” the man with the torch said. “It looks bulky. Maybe it’s this titanthrop.”

The man had his back turned to Sam. He wore an Eskimo suit of white cloths over head, body, and feet. He wasn’t tall, but his shoulders were very broad. And his voice sounded vaguely familiar. Somewhere, a long time before, Sam had heard that voice.

The man called out to nearby boats and told them what to look for. Presently, there was a shout. Sam looked at the source. Some men on another longboat were attempting to haul something huge out of the water.

“Joe!” he croaked.

The man in the white suite turned then. He was holding the flaming pine so that his face was fully illumined.

Sam saw his features clearly, the broad handsome face, the thick straw-colored eyebrows, the square massive jaw, the even white teeth. His grin was evil.

“Bloodaxe!”

“Já,” the man said, “Eirikr .” Then, in Esperanto, “I have waited a long long time for you, Sam Clemens.”

Screaming, Sam rose and leaped from the boat.

The cold dark waters closed upon him. He went down, down, then straightened out and began swimming. How far could he go before he had to surface for air? Could he get away from his nemesis long enough to get aboard another boat? Surely the Virolanders would not permit Erik to kill him? That would be against their principles. But Erik would wait until he had a chance, and then he would strike.

Joe! Joe would protect him! Joe would do more than that. He would kill the Norseman.

Gasping, sputtering, Sam’s head broke through into the air. Ahead was a boat filled with people. The torches showed their faces clearly. All were looking at him.

Behind came the splashing of a swimmer.

Sam turned around. Erik was only a few feet from him.

Sam yelled again, and once more he dived. If he could come up on the other side of that boat, if he could get aboard it before…

A hand closed around his ankle.

Sam turned and fought, but the Norseman was bigger and far stronger. Sam was helpless. He would be drowned out of sight of the others, and Erik could claim that he had just been trying to save the poor mad devil.

An arm came from behind him and hooked around his neck. Sam struggled like a fish caught in a net, but he knew that he was done for. After all this time, after all these narrow escapes, to die like this…

He awoke on the deck of the longboat, coughing and choking. Water gushed from his mouth and nose. Two strong warm arms held him.

He looked up. Erik Bloodaxe was still holding him.

“Don’t kill me!” Sam said.

Erik was naked and wet. The water on his body glistened in the torchlight. It also fell upon a white object connected to a cord around Erik’s neck.

It was the spiral bone of a hornfish, the symbol worn by members of the Church of the Second Chance.

37

Two men had come to the same conclusion.

They’d had enough of this senseless bloodshed. Now they’d do something they would have done if each hadn’t been so sure that the other was on the other boat. But, during the long struggle, neither had seen the other. The other had never been on the boat or had wisely left it before the battle or had been blown to bits or into the water.

Each believed that if he died, the great project was doomed to failure, though each visualized the failure differently.

They saw an opportunity to escape now. In the heat and confusion of the combat, no one would notice their desertion. Or, if anyone did, he’d not be able to do anything about it. They would leap into The River and swim to shore and continue their long long journey. Neither had his grail, one being locked up in the sunken Rex and the other inside a locked storage room of the Not For Hire. They would steal free grails from the Virolanders and go on up The River in a sailboat.

One man had doffed his armor and dropped his weapon on the deck and had grasped the railing to vault over it when the other spoke behind him. The first man whirled, stooping, and picked up his cutlass. Though he hadn’t heard the voice of the other for forty years, he instantly recognized it.

When he slowly turned around, though, he did not recognize the face and body he identified with the voice.

The man who’d come from the hatchway behind him spoke in a language which, now, only two on this boat could understand. His tone was harsh.

“Yes, it’s I, though much changed.”

The man by the railing said, “Why did you do it? Why?”

“You would never understand why,” the man in the doorway said. “You’re evil. So were the others, even…”

“Were!” the man by the railing said.

“Yes. Were.”

“They’re all dead then. I’d suspected as much.”

He glanced at the helmet and cutlass on the deck. It was too bad that he hadn’t been halted before he discarded them. His enemy had an advantage now. The man by the railing also knew that if he tried to leap over the railing or flip backwards over it, the other was swift and skilled enough to skewer him with his weapon by throwing it.

“So,” he said, “you plan on killing me, too. You’ve reached bottom; you’re lost forever.”

“I had to kill the Operator,” the first man said emotionlessly.

“I couldn’t even think of doing such evil,” the man by the railing said.

“I am not evil!” the other cried. “It is you who…”

He struggled with himself, then got the words out.

“There is no use arguing.”

The man by the railing said, “Is it too late even now for you to change your mind? You would be forgiven, you would be sent to the Gardenplanet for therapy. You could join me and the agents and work with us to get to the tower…”

“No,” the first man said. “Don’t be stupid.”

He lifted his cutlass and advanced on the other, who assumed the on-guard position. The duel was short and savage and ended when the unarmored man, bleeding from a dozen slashes, fell with the other’s point in his throat.

The killer dragged the body to the railing, lifted it up in his arms, kissed the mouth of the corpse, and dropped it into the water. Tears streamed down his cheeks; he shook with sobs.

Section 11

The Final Duel: Burton vs. Bergerac

38

The events immediately following the explosion in the boiler deck set off by Burton’s group were swift, confusing, and blurred. For some time, Burton was either chasing or being chased, attacking or retreating. Mostly, he was retreating, since the enemy usually outnumbered them. By the time that Burton’s group was forced into the great room of an armory, it was larger than when it had started. Though it had lost eight, it had picked up enough so that it now counted thirteen men and ten women. For all he knew, these were the only survivors of the Rex.

Neither side had any ammunition left for their firearms. From now on it would be cold steel only. The enemy withdrew to rest and to get their wind back. They also had to confer. The entrance to the armory was two and a half men wide, and storming it would be very difficult.

Burton looked over the array of arms and decided to discard his cutlass for an épée. This was a sword with a triangular edgeless blade three feet long. Its guard was bell-shaped; from the slightly curving handle protruded two wooden stops for better gripping. Burton tried the temper of the blade by placing its point against a beam of wood and bending it. The blade formed an arc to within a foot of the shell and sprang back to a straight line when the pressure was released.

The armory stank much of sweat and blood and not a little of urine and feces. It was also surprisingly hot. He removed his armor except for his helmet, and he urged the others to emulate him, though he wouldn’t order them to do it.

“When we get to the deck, we won’t have time to shuck off our iron,” he said. “We’ll have to dive into The River the moment we get to the open deck. It’ll be much easier taking off the armor now than when you’re in The River.”

One of the women was the lovely Aphra Behn, no longer so lovely. Gunpowder smoke grimed her face; sweat and blood had made streaks and splashes on the blackened skin; her eyes were red with powder and fatigue; one eye was twitching. She said, “The boat must be sinking. If we don’t get out soon, we’ll drown.”

Though she looked hysterical, her voice was calm enough, considering the circumstances.

“Yaas, I know,” Burton drawled. He considered for a minute. They were on the B deck, and the A deck was probably filled with water by now. It wouldn’t be long before this deck would be awash.

He strode to the hatch and stuck his head around its corner. The lights were still on in the corridor. There was no reason why they should go out since they were being fed from the batacitor. This would operate even if it was under water.

There was no one alive in the corridor. The enemy must be hiding in the rooms nearby, waiting until the Rexites tried to sally out.

“I’m Captain Gwalchgwynn of the marines of the Rex!” he said loudly. “I’d like to talk to your commander!”

No one answered. He shouted his request again, then stepped out into the passageway. If anyone was just inside the open doors near the armory, he couldn’t see them.

Had they gone to the two ends of the corridor and were waiting around the corner, hoping to surprise them?

It was then that he saw water flowing toward him. It was only a film, but it would soon be swelling.

He called to the guards at the hatchway. “Tell the others to come on out! The Clemensites have left!”

He didn’t have to explain to his people what had happened. They saw the water, too.

“Save himself who can,” he said. “Get to the shore as best you may. I’ll be joining you later.”

He led them to the railing and said good-bye and good luck before they plunged in.

“Dick,” Aphra said, “why are you staying?”

“I’m looking for Alice.”

“If the boat sinks suddenly, you’ll be trapped in it.”

“I know.”

He didn’t wait for her to jump in but began his search at once. He ran down the passageways calling out her name, stopping now and then to listen for her voice. Having covered this deck, he climbed the grand staircase to the grand salon. This occupied one-fourth of the stern area of the hurricane deck as did the grand salon of the Rex. But it was much larger. It was ablaze with ceiling and chandelier lights, even though blasts had blown many out or apart. Despite the damage from the explosions and the few mutilated corpses, it was very impressive.

He stepped inside and looked around. Alice was not here unless she was behind the immensely long bar or under or behind the smashed grand pianos or billiards tables. There seemed to be no reason for him to stay, but he was held for a few seconds by the grandeur of this room. Like its counterpart on the Rex, it had known many years of laughter, wit, humor, flirting, intrigue, gambling often playful but sometimes desperate, trysts of love and hate, music composed and played by some of Earth’s masters, drama and comedy high and low on the stages. And now…It was a shameful loss, something to be very much regretted.

He started to cross the salon but stopped. A man had entered the great doorway at the other end. He paused when he saw Burton. Then, smiling, he walked jauntily toward him. He was an inch or two taller than Burton, grayhound-thin, and had extraordinarily long arms. His skin was blackened with smoke, his nose was very large, and his chin was weak. Despite this, his smile made him look almost handsome.

His glossy black ringleted hair fell to his shoulders. He wore only a black kilt and red riverdragon-leather calf-high boots, and his right hand gripped the hilt of an épée.

Burton had a swiftly passing déjà vu, a feeling that this meeting had happened a long time ago and under just such circumstances. He had encountered the man before and he had been hoping he would again. The long-healed wound in his thigh seemed to burn at the memory.

The man halted when he was twenty-five feet from Burton. He spoke loudly in Esperanto. It had a trace of French and a smidgeon of American English intonation.

“Ah, sinjoro, it’s you! The very talented, perhaps endowed-with-genius swordsman with whom I crossed blades during the raid upon your vessel so many years ago! I introduced myself then as a gentleman should. You surlily refused to identify yourself. Or perhaps you failed to do so because you thought that I wouldn’t recognize your name. Now…”

Burton advanced one step, his sword hanging almost straight down from his hand. He spoke in Parisian French circa A.D. 1650.

“Eh, monsieur. I was not sure when you made your introduction that you were truly whom you said you were. I thought that perhaps you might be an impostor. I admit now that you are indeed either the great monomachist Savinien de Cyrano II de Bergerac or someone who could be Castor to his Pollux and is his match in swordsmanship.”

Burton hesitated. He might as well give his true name now. It was no longer necessary to use a pseudonym.

“Know, monsieur, that I am Captain Richard Francis Burton of the marines of the Rex Grandissimus. On Earth I was knighted by Her Majesty, Queen Victoria of the British Empire. This was not for making a fortune in commerce but as acknowledgment of my explorations in the far parts of the Earth and my many services to both my country and humanity. Nor was I unknown among the swordsmen of my time, which was the nineteenth century.”

“Hélas, you would not have been also known for being longwinded, would you?”

“No, nor for possessing a huge nose,” Burton said.

The man’s teeth shone whitely.

“Ah, yes, always the reference to the proboscis. Well, know, monsieur, though I was not honored by my sovereign, Louis XIII, I was dubbed a genius by a queen even greater than yours, by Mother Nature herself. I wrote some philosophical romances which I understand were being read centuries after I died. And, as you obviously are aware, I was not unknown among the great swordsmen of my time, which gave birth to the greatest swordsmen of any time.”

The thin man smiled again, and Burton said, “Perhaps you would like to surrender your blade? I have no desire to kill you, monsieur.”

“I was about to ask you to hand over your weapon, monsieur, and become my prisoner. But I see that you, like me, would then be unsatisfied as to which of us is the better at bladeplay. I have thought about you many times, Captain Burton, since I drove my rapier into your thigh. Of all the hundreds, perhaps thousands, that I have dueled with, you were the best. I am willing to admit that I do not know how our little passage in arms might have turned out if you had not been distracted. Rather, I should say that you might have held me off a little longer if it were not for that.”

“We shall see,” Burton said.

“Oh, yes, we shall see, if the boat does not sink too soon. Well, monsieur, I delayed my leavetaking to have one more drink to toast the souls of those brave men and women who died fighting today for this once-splendid vessel, the last of the great beauties of man’s science and technology. Quel dommage! But some day I will compose an ode to it. In French, of course, since Esperanto is not a great poetic language and, if it were, would still not be equal to my native tongue.

“Let us have one drink so that we may toast together those we loved but who have passed on. There will be no more resurrections, my friend. They will always be dead from now on.”

“P’raps,” Burton said. “In any event, I will join you.”

The many doors of the huge and long liquor cabinets behind the bar had been locked before the battle started. But the key was in a drawer below a cabinet, and de Bergerac went behind the bar and unbolted the drawer. He unlocked a cabinet and unshot the bar across a line of bottles and pulled one from the hole in which it was set.

“This bottle was made in Parolando,” de Bergerac said, “and it has journeyed unscathed through many battles and much mishandling by various drunks. It is filled with a particularly good burgundy which has been offered from time to time in various grails and which was not then drunk but put into this bottle to be used for a festive occasion. This occasion is, I believe, festive, though in a rather gruesome spirit.”

He opened another cabinet and unlocked the indented bar holding a line of lead-glass goblets and took two and set them on the bar.

His épée was on top of the bar. Burton placed his own on the bar near his right hand. The Frenchman poured the burgundy to the brim, and he lifted his. Burton did likewise.

“To the dear departed!” he said.

“To them,” Burton said. Both downed a small amount.

“I am not one for drinking much,” de Bergerac said. “Liquor reduces one to the level of the beast, and I like at all times to remember that I am a human being. But…this is indeed a special occasion. One more toast, my friend, and then we shall fall to it.”

“To the solution of the mystery of this world,” Burton said.

They drank again.

Cyrano put his goblet down.

“Now, Captain Burton of the defunct marines of the defunct Rex. I loathe war and I detest bloodshed, but I do my duty when it must be done. We are both fine fellows, and it would be a shame if one were to die to prove that he is better than the other. Gaining knowledge of the true state of affairs by dying is not recommended by anyone with good sense. Thus, I suggest that he who draws the first blood wins. And if, thanks be to the Creator, who doesn’t exist, the first wound is not fatal, the winner will take the other prisoner. And we will then proceed with haste but in an honorable manner to get off this vessel before she sinks.”

“Upon my honor, that is the way it shall be,” Burton said.

“Good! En garde!”

They saluted and then assumed the classic épée on-guard positions, the left foot at right angles to the right foot and behind it, knees bent, the body turned sideways to present as small a target as possible, the left arm raised with the upper arm parallel to the ground, the elbow bent so the lower arm was vertical and the hand wrist limp, the right arm lowered and the blade it held forming a straight extension of the arm. The round coquille, or bellguard, in this position, protected the forearm.

De Bergerac, saying loudly the French equivalent of “Hah!” lunged. He was almost blindingly swift, as Burton knew from the Frenchman’s reputation and from his one duel with him. However, Burton was also exceedingly quick. And, having spent many years on Earth and here in practice, his reaction to any particular attack was automatic.

De Bergerac, without feinting, had thrust toward Burton’s upper arm. Burton parried and then riposted, that is, counterattacked. De Bergerac parried this and then thrust over Burton’s blade, but Burton attempted a stop thrust, using the bellguard of his épée to deflect his opponent’s tip and at the same time (almost) driving his own point into de Bergerac’s forearm.

But de Bergerac counterparried and then quickly thrust around Burton’s bellguard at Burton’s forearm again. This maneuver was called the “dig” or the “peck.”

Burton deflected the point again, though the edge of the blade drove along his arm. It burned, but it did not draw blood.

Dueling with the foil or the épée was something like trying to thread a moving needle. The tip of the attacker’s blade was the end of the thread; the defender’s, the eye of the needle. The eye should be very small and in this situation was. But in a second or less the thread-end would become the eye as the defender attacked. Two great swordsmen presented to each other very small openings which instantly closed and then reopened as the tip moved about in a small circle.

In competitive foil dueling, the target was only that part of the opponent’s body exclusive of the head, arms, and legs but including the groin. In deadly combat, however, the head and the entire body were a target. If, somehow, a big toe was open, it should be skewered, could it be done without exposing the attacker to his antagonist’s point.

It was an axiom that the fencer with a perfect defense could not lose. What then if both duelers had a perfect defense? Was it a case of the irresistible meeting the immovable? No. Human beings were neither. One of the perfect defenders would tire before the other or perhaps something in the milieu was to the slight or even great advantage of one fencer. This could be something on the floor to cause slipping or, in this situation, some object, a piece of blasted furniture, a bottle, a corpse over which one might stumble. Or, as when de Bergerac had fought Burton during the raid, a shout from a third party might distract a dueler for a fraction of a second, just enough for the cat-swift and eagle-eyed opponent to drive his sword into the other.

Burton was thinking of this with the edge of his mind while the main part concentrated on the dance of blades. His opponent was taller than he and had a longer reach. This was not necessarily to Burton’s disadvantage. If he got into close quarters where the Frenchman’s longer reach did not matter, then Burton would have the advantage.

De Bergerac knew this, as he knew everything about fencing, and so he maintained the distance proper for his benefit.

Metal rang upon metal while the breaths of the two hissed. De Bergerac, maintaining his straight-arm position, concentrated his attacks upon Burton’s wrist and forearm to keep himself out of range of Burton’s weapon.

The Englishman used a bent-arm position to make slanting thrusts, to bind his foe’s blade, to “envelop” it. The binds were pushed with his blade against the other to make it go from one side to another. The envelopments were continuous binds in which the point of his blade made complete circles.

Meanwhile, he studied the Frenchman for weaknesses, just as the Frenchman was studying him. He found none. He hoped that de Bergerac, who was also analyzing him, would fail to discover any flaws.

As in their first encounter, they had established a definite rhythm of thrust and parry, riposte and counterparry. Even the feints became part of the pattern, since neither was fooled and thus left an opening.

Both were waiting for the opening which would not close quickly enough. The sweat ran down de Bergerac’s face, streaking it where the liquid cleaned off the gunpowder grime. The salty liquid kept running into Burton’s eyes, stinging them. Then he would retreat swiftly and wipe off his forehead and eyes with the back of his free hand. Most of the time, the Frenchman took advantage of this break to mop his own forehead with a small cloth stuck between his waist and the upper end of his towel-kilt. These intervals kept getting more and more frequent, not only to wipe their faces but to recover their wind.

During one of these, Burton removed a breast-cloth from a dead woman to blot up the sweat. Then, watching de Bergerac to make sure that he wouldn’t make a flèche, a running attack, he tied the cloth around his head. De Bergerac stooped down and tore off a breast-cloth from another corpse to make a headband for himself.

Burton’s mouth was very dry. His tongue felt as if it were as large and hard as a cucumber. He croaked, “A momentary truce, Monsieur de Bergerac. Let’s both drink something before we die of thirst.”

“Agreed.”

Burton walked behind the bar, but the pipes of the sinks were empty. He went to the cabinet which the Frenchman had opened and brought out a bottle of purple passion. He removed the plastic stopper with his teeth and spat it out. He offered de Bergerac the first drink, but it was refused. He drank deeply and then handed the bottle over the bar to de Bergerac. The liquid burned in his throat and warmed his chest and guts. It helped his thirst somewhat, but he would not be satisfied until he got water.

De Bergerac held the bottle up against the light.

“Ah! You have swallowed three ounces, my friend. I shall do the same to insure an equal amount of inebriation in myself. It would not do if I were to kill you because you were drunker than I. You would then complain of unfairness, and the question of who is the superior swordsman would still be unanswered.”

Burton laughed in his curious fashion between his teeth.

De Bergerac started, then said, “You sound like a cat, my friend.”

He drank and when he put the bottle down, he coughed, his eyes tearing.

“Mordioux! It is certainly not French wine! It is for the barbarians of the North—or Englishmen!”

“You have never tasted it?” Burton said. “Not during the long voyage…?”

“I told you I drank very little. Hélas! Never in all my life have I dueled unless absolutely sober. And now I feel the blood singing, my strength beginning to return, though I know it is a falseness, the liquor lying to my senses. Never mind. If I am somewhat drunk and so my reflexes are slow and my judgment numbed, you will be in the same condition.”

“That depends upon one’s idiosyncratic reaction to alcohol,” Burton said. “It may well be that I, who love strong liquor, may be more accustomed to its effects. Hence, I will have an advantage over you.”

“We shall see,” de Bergerac said, smiling. “Now, monsieur, will you please come out from behind that bar so we may resume our little debate?”

“Certainly,” Burton said. He walked to the end of the bar and around it. Why not try la flèche, the running attack? But if his running glide missed or was parried, then he’d be off-balance, exposed to de Bergerac’s point. Still, it was possible that he could close in and thus block the Frenchman’s blade.

No. Would he consider such a move if he did not have three ounces of fifteen-percent-alcohol purple passion in his bloodstream? No. Forget it.

But what if he picked up the bottle and threw it at the same time he made the flèche? His opponent would have to duck, and this might throw him off his balance.

He stopped when he got opposite the wine bottle. He looked at it for a second while de Bergerac waited. Then, his left hand opened, and he sighed.

The Frenchman smiled, and he bowed a little.

“My compliments, monsieur. I was hoping that you would not succumb to temptation and try something dishonorable. This is a matter to be settled with the blade alone.

“I salute you for understanding this. And I salute you as the greatest duelist I’ve ever met, and I’ve met many of the best. It is so sad, and utterly regrettable that this, the most magnificent of all duels, unsurpassed anywhere or anytime, should be seen by only us. What a pity! No, it is not a pity. It is a tragedy, a great loss to the world!”

Burton noted that the fellow’s speech was slightly slurred. That was to be expected. But was the wily Frenchman exaggerating the effects of the alcohol to make Burton overconfident?

“I agree with you in principle,” Burton said, “and I thank you for your compliments. I also must say that you’re the greatest swordsman I’ve ever met. However, monsieur, you spoke a little while ago about my long-windedness. I believe that, though you may be my equal in swordplay, you are my superior in gabbiness.”

The Frenchman smiled. “I am as facile with my tongue as with my sword. I gave as much pleasure to the reader of my books and the hearer of my voice as to the spectator of my fencing. I forgot that you are a reticent Anglo-Saxon, monsieur. So I will let my blade speak for me from now on.”

“I’ll bet you do,” Burton said. “En garde!”

Their épées clashed again in thrust, in parry, in riposte, in counter-riposte. But each had perfect defense in keeping the proper distance, in the timing, in the calculation, in the decision, and in coordination.

Burton could feel the poisons of fatigue and booze and knew that they must be slowing him down and affecting his judgment. But certainly they were working with equal or greater effect on his foe.

And then, as Burton parried a thrust toward his left upper arm and riposted with his point at de Bergerac’s belly, he saw something coming in the doorway by the grand staircase. He leaped far backwards and shouted, “Stop!”

De Bergerac saw that Burton was looking past him. He jumped backwards to be far enough away from Burton if he were trying to trick him. And he saw the water flowing in a thin layer through the doorway.

He said, breathing hard, “So! The boat has sunk to our deck, Monsieur Burton. We do not have long. We must make an end to this very quickly.”

Burton felt very tired. His breathing was harsh. His ribs felt as if knives were pricking them.

He advanced on the Frenchman, intending to make a running glide. But it was de Bergerac who did so. He exploded, seeming to have summoned from somewhere in his narrow body a burst of energy. Perhaps he had spotted finally a weakness in Burton’s defense. Or he thought he had. Or he believed that he was the faster now that weariness had slowed his opponent more than it had him.

Whatever his reasons, he miscalculated. Or he may have performed perfectly. But Burton suddenly knew, by de Bergerac’s body language, certain subtle muscular actions, a slight squinching of the eyes, what the Frenchman intended to do. He knew because he had been ready to do the same, and he’d had to suppress his body language, the signals, which would tell his foe his next move.

De Bergerac came at him in the running glide, a sliding thrust along the opponent’s blade with a slight pressure. It was sometimes used to surprise and might have succeeded if Burton had not been ready, had not, in a sense, been looking into a mirror of himself preparing for the same maneuver.

The successful flash required surprise, speed, and mastery over the opponent’s weapon. De Bergerac had the speed, but the surprise was missing, and so he lost the mastery.

A knowledgeable spectator would have said that de Bergerac had the advantage of control. He was more erect than Burton. His hand was higher, thus allowing the fort, the strong part of the blade from the bellguard to the middle, to contact and so master the feeble of Burton’s épée, the weak part, that from the middle to the point.

But Burton brought up his fort and turned the blade and drove de Bergerac’s down and then crossed over and up to run him through his left shoulder. De Bergerac’s face and body turned gray where the powder smoke did not cover it, but he still did not drop his sword. Burton could have killed him then.

Swaying, in shock, de Bergerac yet managed a smile. “The first blood is yours, monsieur. You have won. I acknowledge you as the victor. Nor am I ashamed…”

Burton said, “Let me help you,” and then someone shot off a pistol from the doorway.

De Bergerac pitched forward and fell heavily on his face. A wound in his back close to the lower spine showed where the bullet had entered.

Burton looked at the doorway.

Alice was standing in it, a smoking pistol in her hand.

“My God!” he cried. “You shouldn’t have done that, Alice!”

She came running, the water splashing about her ankles.

Burton knelt down and turned the Frenchman over and then got down on his knees and put the man’s head in his lap.

Alice stopped by him. “What’s the matter? He is an enemy, isn’t he?”

“Yes, but he had just surrendered. Do you know who he is? He’s Cyrano de Bergerac!”

“Oh, my God!”

De Bergerac opened his eyes. He looked up at Alice. “You should have waited to find out the true situation, madame. But then…scarcely anyone ever does.”

The water was rising swiftly, and the deck was rapidly tilting at an angle. At this rate, the water would soon be above de Bergerac’s head.

He closed his eyes, then opened them again.

“Burton?”

Burton said, “Yes.”

“Now I remember. What a…what fools…we’ve been. You must be the Burton whom Clemens spoke of…you…the Ethical picked you?”

“Yes,” Burton said.

“Then…why did we fight? I…didn’t remember…too late…we…should have gone to the tower…the tower…together. Now…I…”

Burton bent down to hear the fading voice. “What did you say?”

“…hated war…stupidity…”

Burton thought that de Bergerac had died after that. But a moment later, the Frenchman murmured, “Constance!”

He sighed, and he was gone.

Burton wept.

Section 12

The Last 20,000 Miles

39

Burton and Hargreaves, along with the other survivors, had to face the wrath of La Viro. The tall dark man with the big nose raved and ranted for an hour while he strode back and forth before the assembled “criminals.” They stood in front of the smoke-blackened temple, a huge stone structure with incongruous architecture: a Greek portico and Ionian columns with an onion-shaped roof topped by a gigantic carved stone spiral. These features were symbols in the Church of the Second Chance, but, nevertheless, Burton and others thought that the temple was ugly and ludicrous-looking. Oddly enough, the bad taste of La Viro, its designer, helped them endure his tirade. He was right in much of what he said, but much else seemed foolish. However, they were dependent upon him for grails, cloths, and housing. So they did not defend themselves but got some relief from their anger by silently laughing at the hideous temple and the man who’d built it.

At last, La Viro tired of pointing out in vivid detail and imagery how stupid, callous, brutal, murderous, and selfish they were. He threw up his hands and said he was sick of the sight of them. He would retire to the sanctum in the temple and pray for the kas of the Virolanders they’d killed. And also, though they didn’t deserve it, for the living and the dead culprits. He turned the survivors over to Frato Fenikso, Brother Phoenix, once known as Hermann Göring.

Göring said, “You look like deservedly chastened children, and I hope you feel like it. But I don’t have, at this moment, anyway, much hope for you. That’s because of my anger at you. I’ll get over it, and then I’ll do my best to help you change for the better.”

He led them to the rear of the temple where he gave each of them a free grail and enough cloths to keep them warm in the coldest temperatures.

“Anything else you need or want will be up to you to get it,” Göring said. He dismissed them, but he called Burton aside.

“Have you heard that Samuel Clemens died of a heart attack?”

Burton nodded.

“Apparently, he thought that Frato Eriko still intended to settle an old score. After all he’d gone through during the battle, this was just too much, the straw that broke the camel’s back or, in his case, broke his heart.”

“I heard the story from Joe Miller this morning,” Burton said.

“Yes. Well, unless somebody does something for the titanthrop, he’s going to die of a broken heart, too. He really loved Clemens.”

Göring asked Burton if he intended to go on to the headwaters. Burton replied that he had not come this far just to quit. He was going to set out for the tower as soon as possible.

“You’ll have to build a sailboat. Certainly, Clemens’ men won’t allow you to go with them in the Post No Bills.”

“I don’t know about that,” Burton said.

“And I suppose that if they refuse, you’ll hijack the launch?”

Burton didn’t answer.

“Is there no end to your violence?”

“I didn’t say I would use force,” Burton said. “I intend to talk to Anderson about the trip as soon as possible.”

“Anderson was killed. I warn you, Burton, don’t shed any more blood here!”

“I’ll do all I can to avoid it. I don’t like it any more than you do, really. Only, I am a realist.”

The smaller launch, the After You, Gascon, had disappeared with all of its crew. No one knew what had happened to it, though some Virolando witnesses thought they’d seen it explode.

“If you really push it, you could get to the headwaters in about thirty days in the launch,” Göring said. “But the agents of the Ethicals will get there before you do.”

Burton was shocked.

“You know about them?”

“Yes. I talked to both Frigate and Miller last night, trying to help them through their grief. I knew more than you’d think and suspected even more. Correctly, as it turned out. Neither saw any reason to keep silent about the renegade Ethical. I told La Viro, and he’s thinking hard about the whole business. It’s been a great shock to him, though it hasn’t affected his faith any.”

“What about you?”

“I see no reason to change my faith. I never thought that the people responsible for this world were angels or demons. There are, though, many puzzling things about the two stories I’ve heard. What intrigues me the most, and also upsets me the most, is the mystery of what happened to the nonhuman on Clemens’ boat, Monat I think was his name.”

Burton said, “What? I haven’t heard about that!”

Göring described what Miller had told him, and added, “And you say that his companion, the man called Frigate, also disappeared?”

“That Peter Jairus Frigate was an agent,” Burton said. “He wasn’t an exact double of the Frigate you talked to, but he resembled him closely. He may have been Frigate’s brother.”

“Perhaps when—or—if you get into the tower, you’ll find out,” Göring said.

“I’ll find out sooner than that if I catch up with those agents in the launch,” Burton said grimly.

After some more discussion, Burton left Göring. He had not told the German what the news about Monat and the pseudo-Frigate meant. The Ethical X, the Mysterious Stranger, the renegade, had been on the Not For Hire. And he had gotten rid of Monat about eight hours after they’d boarded the vessel. Why? Because Monat would recognize him. He would have been in disguise, but Monat would have known him sooner or later. Probably sooner. So he’d had to work fast, and he had done so. How, Burton didn’t know.

X had been on Clemens’ boat.

Had he lived through the battle? If he had, then he was among the few survivors of the Not For Hire now in this immediate area.

Perhaps. He might have left at once and gone upRiver or he might have gotten to the other bank.

Burton went back after Göring and asked him if he’d heard about any survivors on the other side of the lake or any who’d gone through on the cliffpath above the strait.

“No,” Göring said. “If there had been any, they’d have been reported.”

Burton tried not to show his excitement.

Göring, however, said, smiling, “You think that X is here, don’t you? At hand but in disguise?”

“You’re deucedly clever,” Burton said. “Yes, I do, unless he’s been killed. Strubewell and Podebrad were agents, I don’t mind telling you that now, and they were killed. So perhaps X was also.”

“Did anyone see Strubewell and Podebrad die?” Göring said. “I know Joe Miller thinks Strubewell was dead because he didn’t see him get out of the pilothouse after it fell. But Strubewell could have gotten out later on. All we know about Podebrad is that he was seen no more after the vessels collided.”

“I wish they were available,” Burton said. “I’d get the truth out of them somehow. I believe, however, that they died. That you citizens haven’t seen them goes a long way to prove that. As for X, well…”

He said so-long to Göring and walked to the partly burned dock at which the Bills was tied up. It looked like a monstrous black turtle. Its high rounded hull was the shell, and the long narrow prow was part of the head sticking out. The barrel of the steam machine gun projecting from the extreme front of the prow was the turtle’s tongue; the steam gun poking out from the stern, the turtle’s tail.

Burton had been told by one of its crew that it carried a large batacitor and could hold fifteen people comfortably and twenty with some inconvenience. It could go thirty-five miles per hour against a ten-mile-per-hour current and a ten-mile-per-hour wind. It had an armory of fifteen rifles and fifteen pistols using gunpowder-filled cartridges and ten compressed air rifles and many other weapons.

Joe Miller, his enormous arm in a plaster cast, several of the crew and some survivors of the Not For Hire were standing on the dock. Having had the new captain of the Bills described to him, Burton had no difficulty picking him out. Kimon was a short burly dark man with intense hazel eyes, an ancient Greek whose life Burton had studied in school and afterwards. He’d been a great general, naval commander, and statesman, one of the main builders of the Athenian empire after the Persian wars. He was born in 505 B.C., if Burton remembered correctly.

Kimon was a conservative who had favored alliance with Sparta and so ran counter to the policies of Pericles. His father was the famous Miltiades, the victor of the battle of Marathon, in which the Greeks turned back the hordes of Xerxes. Kimon served during the naval battle of Salamis in which the Athenians sank two hundred enemy vessels with a loss of only forty and forever broke the Persian naval power.

In 475 Kimon drove out the pirates of Skyros and then located and brought to Athens the bones of Theseus, the legendary founder of the Attic state and killer of the Minotaur of the labyrinth of Knossos. Kimon was one of the judges who gave Sophocles first prize for tragedy in the competitions held at Dionysia in 468.

In 450 Kimon led an expedition against Cyprus, where he died during the siege of Kitium. His bones were brought back to Athens and buried there.

He certainly looked alive now and very mean, too. Kimon and a number of Clemensites were arguing loudly. Burton, acting as if he were just another Virolander, stood with those listening in.

Apparently, the argument was about which of Clemens’ people would go on up The River and also about seniority. In addition to the eleven crew members of the Bills, ten people from the Not For Hire had survived. Kimon was outranked by three of these, but he was insisting that he was the commander of the launch and anybody who went along on it would be his subordinate. Moreover, he would not allow more than eleven on the voyage, and he thought that the crew of the Bills should be these. But he was willing to take some from the motherboat if some of his crew didn’t want to go on.

After a while, Kimon and the others went inside the launch. Nevertheless, their voices came out loudly through the open ports.

The titanthrop had not gone aboard. He stood in one spot, softly talking to himself. His eyes were red, and he looked as if he’d grieved much.

Burton introduced himself.

Joe Miller, speaking in a deep kettledrum voice in English said, “Yeth, I’ve heard about you, Mithter Burton. Tham told me about you. Vhen did you get here?”

Reluctantly, Burton said, “I was on the Rex.”

“Vhat the hell vere you doing on that? You vere vone of the Ekth’th men, veren’t you?”

“Yes,” Burton said. “But I didn’t know until yesterday that some of his recruits were on the Not For Hire. Though, to tell the truth, I suspected that some would be.”

“Who told you?”

“Cyrano de Bergerac.”

Joe brightened. “Thyrano? He’th alive? I thought he died! Vhere ith he?”

“No, he was killed. But he recognized me, and he told me that Clemens and he had also been visited by the Ethical.”

Burton thought it would be better not to tell Miller that it was his woman who’d slain de Bergerac.

The titanthrop looked as if he were struggling with himself. Then he stopped shaking, and he smiled slightly. His giant hand shot out.

“Here. Thyake. I don’t hold it againtht you. Ve vath all thtupid. Ath Tham uthed to thay, it’th the fortuneth of var.”

Burton’s hand was enfolded, squeezed, not too hard, and then released. Burton said, “I don’t think we should talk here. Too many people around. You come with me, and I’ll introduce you to two who also know about the Ethical.”

They went to the foothill behind the temple. Here Alice and others were building huts. Burton called her, Frigate, Nur, and Aphra Behn to one side. After introducing Miller, Burton asked him to tell everything relevant he knew about X and those who’d been recruited by him. It was a long tale, interrupted by many questions, and it was not finished until long after supper. Since the huts were not completed, the five slept on the portico of the temple under piles of cloths. After breakfast, they returned to their building. By late afternoon they had two huts finished. Miller went down to the launch for a while to check on what was going on. When he returned, Burton told his story. That had to be stopped for the funeral of the casualties whose bodies had not sunk. These, which had been preserved in alcohol until the ceremony, were laid out on wooden biers. Miller wept over Sam Clemens and his cabinmate, a huge redheaded ancient Cimmerian woman. After Burton, representing the Rex, and Kimon, representing the Not For Hire, had spoken a few words about their dead comrades, La Viro gave a short but passionate speech about the uselessness of their deaths. Then the bodies were put on a huge pyre and burned to ashes.

Not until the rains came at about six in the morning were the tales of Burton and his people finished.

“I vathn’t going on up,” Miller told them. “Vell, actually, I vath going up a little vay. Vhen I found thome of my own people, I vath going to thettle down vith them. Maybe. I’m not tho thyure I’d be happy vith them now. I’ve theen too much, traveled too much, become too thivilithed to be happy vith them, maybe.

“Anyvay, I’d given up going on to the tower. It didn’t theem vorthvhile. But now I’ve met you, maybe I vill go on. If I didn’t, it vould make Tham’th death, the thufferingth and the deathth of all thothe people, in vain.

“Bethideth, I vant to find out who Ekth ith. If he’th been tricking uth, me and Tham veren’t too thyure he vathn’t, I’ll tear him apart, thkin by thkin.”

“Skin by skin?” Burton said. “What does that mean?”

“It’th chutht a thaying of my people. Do I have to ekthplain it?”

“How many of your crew also know about X?” Burton said.

“There’th the little Frenchman, Marthelin, altho known as Baron de Marbot. But Tham told him about Ekth. Tham thought he could trutht him. Then there’th that vildaththed Chinethe Tai-Peng, only hith real name ith Li Po. There’th hith black-aththed thidekick, Tom Turpin, he can really tickle the ivorieth. Ekth never recruited Tom, but Tai-Peng blabbed about it to Tom one night vhen he vath drunk, that Thelethtial thyould’ve died of thirrhothith of the liver yearth ago, tho ve thought ve’d better take him in. He’th a good man, anyvay. And then there’th Ely Parker, who vathn’t recruited by Ekth either, but Tham knew him on Earth, or of him, and he told him becauthe he vath a good friend of Ulyththeth Eth. Grant and altho a general on Grant’th thtaff during the Thivil Var. He vath an engineer on the Not For Hire. He’th an American Indian, an Iroquois of the Theneca tribe. And then there’th the ancient Thumerian who callth himthelf Gilgameth.”

“Gilgamesh?” Burton said.

“That’th vhat I thaid. Tham thaid he may or may not be the king of the Thumerian thity of Uruk who lived thometime in the firtht half of the third millenium B.C. It vathn’t very likely ve’d run into anybody who knew the real Gilgameth, though you never know.

“And then there’th the ancient Mayan, Ah Qaaq. He’th awful thtrong, that ith, for a thyort-nothed perthon, he ith.”

“Ah Qaaq,” Burton said. “That’d be Mayan for fire.”

“Yeth. But he ain’t no ball of fire. He’th more like a butterball. Fat ath a pig. But he’th very thtrong, ath I thaid. And he can thyoot a bow further than anybody I ever thaw, ekthept mythelf, naturally. Even further than thome Old Thtone Archerth that vath on the boat. He’th got a mouthtache tattooed on hith lip that maketh him look like a vildman from Borneo.”

“Then Kimon and the other survivors don’t know about X and the agents?” Burton said.

“If they did, I vould have thaid tho.”

Nur el-Musafir said, “It’s possible that some of them may be agents, however.”

“I’d like to talk to all of the people you mentioned,” Burton said. He paused, then said, “If all of us who know about the Ethical are to go on the Bills, then others will have to step aside. They’ll have to give up their berth on the launch. Is there much chance of that?”

“Thyure,” the titanthrop said. He looked down his enormous nose at Burton, and he smiled. His teeth were huge dull-white blocks. “Thyure. There’th a chanthe. About ath much ath an ithecube in a bonfire.”

“Then,” Burton said, “we’ll have to seize the launch. Hijack it.”

“I thought tho,” Miller said. “Vhy ith it that from the beginning ve’ve had to do tho many unethical thingth to help the Ethical?”

40

There were eleven in the group. Of these, five had been recruited directly by the renegade Ethical. These were Richard Francis Burton, Nur ed-Din el-Musafir, Tai-Peng, Gilgamesh, and Ah Qaaq. At least, they claimed to have been visited by X. Burton, however, could be sure only of himself. One or more might be agents or even Ethicals.

Joe Miller had been told about X by Samuel Clemens. Alice knew about him from Burton. Aphra Behn hadn’t been informed until yesterday, but she wanted very much to accompany them on their expedition. De Marbot had heard from Clemens about the Stranger, and he had told Behn about him. Since the Frenchman and the Englishwoman had once been lovers and were again, the others agreed that she could come with them.

Ely Parker, the Seneca, also knew about X from Clemens, and he had wished to go with them. But he’d changed his mind.

“To hell with the Ethicals and the tower and all that,” he said to Burton. “I’m going to stay here and try to raise the Not For Hire. It’s sunk in only about forty feet of water. Once it’s up and repaired, I’ll take it downRiver. I’m not really interested in dying just to prove something that can’t be proved. The Ethicals don’t want us sticking our noses in their business. I think that the breakdowns came about because we interfered. Piscator may have screwed things up in the tower. And Podebrad told Sam that the people he left behind in Nova Bohemujo may have been responsible for the failure of the right-bank line. He said that before he left on the blimp some of his officers wanted to dig deep around a grailstone and see if they could tap into it to get a continuous source of power. He warned them not to, and before he took off he got them to promise they wouldn’t monkey around with it. He said that what might have happened was that they broke their promise and somehow broke the circuit.

“If that happened, the area around it would’ve been blown up. There’d be a hole big enough to make a new lake on the right side of The River. The explosion could’ve wiped out Nova Bohemujo on that side. That’s where the mineral deposits were, and if what Podebrad said was true, then that’s the end of the mines and the New Bohemians.

“Anyway, I just don’t like meddling around with the Ethicals. I’m no coward. Anyone who knows me’ll tell you that. But I just don’t think it’s right to mess around with things we know nothing about.”

In addition, Burton thought, you’d like to be captain of the Riverboat and live the good and high life.

“You won’t get much help from the locals,” Burton said.

He gestured at the banks and the stream, which were crowded with people in boats or getting ready to shove off.

“This area will be near-emptied within a month. La Viro is sending almost everybody downRiver to restore the faith of the Chancers, to correct deviations from their theology, and to make new converts. The breakdowns have shaken the faith of many.”

“Yeah,” Parker said, his broad brown face twisted with a sardonic smile. “Yeah. La Viro himself is shaken. I understand he’s spending a lot of time on his knees praying. He doesn’t look so sure of himself now.”

Burton didn’t try to argue the Seneca into going on with him. He did wish Parker luck before walking away, though he wasn’t going to have any. The Not For Hire was going to stay where it was until the current nudged it off the ledge and it sank to the bottom, three thousand feet down.

When the Post No Bills sank or wore out, its end would be the end of the age of advanced technology on the Riverworld. What few metal tools and weapons existed would wear out. And then the Valleydwellers would be lucky if they had stone artifacts. The entire planet would be in the Wood Age.

The news about Podebrad’s story was certainly interesting. Whether or not the Nova Bohemujo had brought about the line breakdown, Podebrad had been an agent or an Ethical. Only one of them could have known where the metal deposits were in that state. Only one of them could have known that trying to tap the power of the line could result in a catastrophe.

But Podebrad, or whatever his real name was, was dead.

Burton wondered if he could have been X.

Hearing a familiar voice hail him, he stopped and turned around. Hermann Göring, thinner than before, and he’d been very thin, approached him. His broad face was grave, and his eyes were rimmed with the darkness of fatigue.

“Sinjoro Burton! Mi dezirus akompani vin.”

“You’d like to go with me? Why?”

“For the same reason that drives you. I want desperately to know what has gone wrong. I’ve always wanted to know, but I told myself that it was much more important to raise the ethical level of the kas. Now…I don’t know. Yes, I do! If we are to have faith, we must also have knowledge. I mean…faith is the only thing to cling to if you can’t know the ftruth. But now…now…it may be possible to know!”

“What does La Viro think of this?”

“We’ve quarreled, something I thought I’d never do. He insists that I go with him downRiver. He intends to travel to the mouth of The River, even if it takes him three hundred years, preaching all the way. He wants to restore the faith of the people…”

“How does he know that it needs restoring?” Burton said.

“He knows what’s been happening downstream for as far as a hundred thousand miles. What’s happening there must also be happening elsewhere. Besides, didn’t you notice that there’s been much doubt, much falling away from the Church, while you were traveling on the boat?”

“I noticed some but didn’t think much about it,” Burton said. “It’s to be expected, you know.”

“Yes. Even some of the Virolanders have been troubled, and they have the presence of La Viro himself to strengthen them. However, I believe that the best course is to get into the tower and determine exactly what has happened. That will insure that the Church is right, and when that happens, all of the people will have no doubt and all will come to the Church.”

“On the other hand,” Burton drawled, “what you find there may blow your religion to bits.”

Göring shuddered and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said, “Yes, I know. But my faith is so strong that I am willing to chance it.”

“My middle name is Francis,” Burton said, grinning. “So I’ll be frank with you. I don’t like you. I never have. You’ve changed character, true. But I can’t forgive what you did to me and my friends. It’s a case of forgiving but not forgetting. Though I suppose that fundamentally the two are the same.”

Göring waved his hands imploringly.

“That is the burden I must carry. I deserve it, and I won’t be able to put it down until every person who knows my evil deeds has truly forgiven me. But that is not the issue now. What is, is that I can be of great help. I am quick and strong and very determined and not unintelligent. Also…”

“Also, you’re a Second Chancer, a pacifist,” Burton said. “What use would you be if we have to fight?”

Göring said, fiercely, “I won’t compromise my principles! I will not shed the blood of another human! But I doubt very much that you’ll have to fight. The area upstream is thinly populated and becoming thinner every day. Haven’t you seen the many boats coming through the strait? The news is out that the Virolanders are leaving. The people upRiver are deserting their cold land to settle down here.”

“There may well be a fight,” Burton said. “If we catch up with those agents, we’ll try to make them talk. And when we get into the tower…who knows what we’ll find there? We may have to battle for our lives.”

“Will you take me?”

“No. That’s final! I don’t care to discuss this anymore. Ever!”

He strode away while Göring roared, “If you won’t take me, I’ll go alone!”

Burton glanced back then. The man’s face was red, and he was shaking his fist. Burton smiled. Even the ethically advanced bishops of the Church could get angry.

When Burton looked back once more, he saw Göring walking swiftly toward the temple, his face set. Evidently, he was on his way to tell La Viro that he was not obeying his orders to go downRiver.

That night, the eleven, headed by Burton, overpowered the guards on the Post No Bills. They came up from The Riverside, having swum silently to the railing, and boarded the port side. Two of the guards were sitting on the starboard railing and talking. These were grabbed from behind, and their noses and mouths were gripped until they passed out from lack of air. At the same time, Joe Miller entered the launch from the bankside. After a few words with the remaining sentinel, he seized him and carried him struggling to the bow and cast him into the water.

“Jethuth!” he called out to the yelling guard. “I hate to do thith, Thmith, but I got a higher duty! Give my regretth to Kimon!”

After the guards had been thrown off, Burton’s group carried aboard their grails and other possessions and some long ropes and tools which had been brought up by divers from the Not For Hire. Aphra Behn turned on the electricity. As soon as the last of the supplies had been thrown onto the deck and the tie lines loosed, she took the boat away. It was shortly going at its top speed while behind them torches flared and men and women yelled.

It was not until the launch had gotten through the strait that Burton felt they had really begun the next-to-last stage of the long, long journey.

Burton thought briefly about X. According to Cyrano’s story of X’s visit to him, X had told him to relay to the recruits that they should wait a year for X at Virolando. Burton didn’t want to do this and neither did his colleagues. They were going on now.

Traveling against the shoreline current at thirty miles per hour and only stopping for two hours each day, the Post No Bills averaged 660 miles every twenty-four hours. When they had to abandon the boat, they still had some distance to go, the most difficult part of the journey. Before that, they’d have to stop and catch fish to smoke and make acorn bread and collect bamboo tips. These would not be all they’d have to eat, though. They carried twenty “free grails” some of which they’d owned and some of which they’d stolen. They planned to fill these before getting to the final grailstone in order to have extra provisions. The food which would decay swiftly would be kept in the launch’s refrigerator or dragged behind in a cask in the cold water.

As they went north, The Valley became broader. Apparently the Ethicals had made it wider so that it might receive more of the weak sunlight. The temperature was tolerable during the day, which was longer than those in the regions behind them, reaching as high as sixty-two Fahrenheit. But it would get ever colder the farther north they went. The fogs lasted longer, too.

Göring had been right about the scarcity of people. There were only approximately a hundred per square mile. This number was being cut down daily, as the many boats going downRiver showed.

Joe Miller, standing in the bow, looked longingly at the titanthrops they passed. When the launch landed for recharging, he went ashore to talk to any he could find. The conversations were in Esperanto, since none knew his native tongue.

“Jutht ath vell,” Joe said. “I’ve forgotten motht of it anyvay. Jethuth H. Chritht! Ain’t I ever going to find my parentth and my friends, my ovn tribethpeople?”

Fortunately, the titanthrops were amiable. They were by now far outnumbered by the “pygmies,” and most of them had been converted to the Chancer faith. Burton and Joe tried to recruit some, but failed. The giants wanted nothing to do with the beings in the tower.

“They all dread the far north,” Burton said. “You must have shared their fear. Why did you go with the Egyptians?”

Joe swelled his gorillalike chest. “I’m braver than thothe otherth. Thmarter, too. Though, to tell the truth, I came near thyitting dovn my leg vhen I thaw the tower. But any man vould. You jutht vait until you thee it.”

The tenth day, they stopped for a shore leave of several days. The locals were a few titanthrops with a majority of Scandinavians, ancient, medieval, and modern. Among them were, however, people from many different times and places. The men who had no cabinmates immediately started looking for overnight stands. Burton walked around inquiring if anybody had seen the men and women who’d been forced to abandon the launch from the Rex. There were plenty, and all said that these had gone upRiver in boats, all of them stolen.

“Have any others come along who’ve said they were on the Not For Hire?” Burton said. “That’s the giant metal Riverboat like the Rex, propelled by paddle wheels and driven by electric motors.”

“No, I’ve not seen or heard of anybody like that.”

Burton didn’t expect that the deserters would advertise their identity.

Nor would the agents who’d left Clemens’ vessel before the battle be any more open.

However, getting descriptions of those who had gone northwards during the past few weeks, he recognized those who’d fled the Rex. De Marbot, who was also questioning, recognized from the descriptions all who’d deserted the Not For Hire.

“We’ll catch up with them soon,” Burton said.

“If we’re lucky,” the Frenchman said. “We may pass them at night. Or they might get word of our coming and hide while we go by.”

“In any event, we’ll get there first.”

Twenty days passed. By then the agents from both boats had to have been behind them. Though Burton stopped the launch every twenty miles to question the locals, he could find none of those he sought.

In the interim, he watched his crew. Only two matched the short massive physique and facial features of the Ethicals Thanabur and Loga. The man who called himself Gilgamesh, and the man who called himself Ah Qaaq. But both were very dark and had dark brown eyes. Gilgamesh had curly, almost kinky, hair. Ah Qaaq had a slight epicanthic fold which made him look as if he had some recent Mongolian ancestors. Each spoke his supposed native language fluently. Unlike the agent Spruce, who had claimed to be a twentieth-century Englishman and whose very slight foreign accent had betrayed him to Burton, these two lacked any trace of such. Burton didn’t know Sumerian or ancient Mayan well, but he knew enough to recognize a non-Sumerian or non-Mayan pronunciation and intonation.

That only meant that one of the two, possibly both, had completely mastered the tongues. Or it meant that both were innocent and what they claimed to be.

Twenty-two days after he’d passed through the strait in an area where there weren’t more than fifty people to a grailstone, Burton was approached by a tall skinny woman with big eyes and a big mouth. Her white teeth shone in the black African face.

She spoke in Esperanto affected heavily by a backwoods Georgia accent. Her name was Blessed Croomes, and she wanted to go on the boat as far as it would go. Then she’d go on foot to the headwaters.

“That’s where my mother Agatha Croomes went. I’m looking for her. I think she must have found the Lord and is now living at His right hand, waiting for me! Hallelujah!”

41

It was difficult to stop her flow of talk, but Burton finally said, loudly and sternly, that she had to answer his questions.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll listen to the wise. Are you wise?”

“Wise enough,” he said, “and mighty experienced, which is the same thing if you’re not stupid. Let’s start at the beginning. Where were you born and what were you on Earth?”

Blessed told him that she was born a slave in Georgia in 1734 in the house of her master. Come early, caught her mother in the kitchen while she was helping prepare the evening meal. She’d been raised as a house slave and baptized into the faith of her father and mother. After her father had died, her mother had become a preacher. She was a very devout and very strong woman who scared her flock, though they also loved her. Her mother had died in 1783 and she in 1821. But both had been resurrected near the same grailstone.

“Of course, she wasn’t an old woman anymore. It was strange seeing my old momma a young woman. That didn’t make no difference to her, though. She was as holy and righteous and filled with the spirit as when she’d lived on Earth. Why, I tell you, when she preached in church there she had white folks come for miles around to listen to her. Most of them were white trash, but she converted them, and then they got in trouble…”

“You’re wandering again,” Burton said. “That’s enough of your background. Why do you want to go with me?”

“Because you got that boat that can travel faster than a bird.”

“But why do you want to go to the end of The River?”

“I would have told you if you hadn’t interrupted me, man. You see, my mother being here didn’t shake her faith at all. She said that we were here, all of us, because we were sinners on Earth. Some worse than the others. This was really Heaven, the outskirts of it anyway. What sweet Jesus wanted was that the real believers should go up The River, the sweet Jordan, and find Him at the end. He was up there, waiting to embrace those who truly believed, those who’d go to the trouble of seeking Him out. So she went.

“She wanted me to come with her, but I was scared. I wasn’t sure anyway that she knew what she was talking about. I didn’t tell her that. It would’ve been like hitting her in the face, and nobody has guts enough to do that. Anyway, it wasn’t just that that kept me from going with her. I had a mighty sweet man, and he wouldn’t go with her. He said he liked things fine as they were. So I let my pussy do the thinking for me, and I stayed with him.

“But things went bad with me and my old man. He started chasing other women, and I got to thinking that maybe this was a judgment on me for not obeying my momma. Maybe she was right, maybe Jesus was waiting for the truly faithful. Besides, I really missed my momma even if we do go around and around like wildcats sometimes. So I lived with another man for a while, but he wasn’t any better than the first. Then, one night while I was praying, I saw a vision. It was Jesus Himself, sitting on His diamond and pearl throne with the angels singing back of Him, all in a blaze of glorious light. He told me to quit sinning and to follow my mother’s footsteps and I’d get to Heaven.

“So I went. And here I am. It’s been many years, brother, and I’ve suffered like one of God’s own martyrs. I’ve gotten bone-weary and flesh-sick, but here I am! Last night I prayed again, and I saw my mother, only for a second, and she told me to come with you. She said you weren’t a good man but you weren’t bad either. You were in between. But I would be the one to bring you to the light, save you, and we’d go together to Kingdom Come and sweet Jesus would wrap His arms around us and welcome us to the glory throne. Hallelujah!”

“Hallelujah, sister!” Burton said. He was always willing to throw himself into the form of a religion while laughing at its spirit.

“It’s a long long trip yet, brother. My back hurts from paddling my canoe against the current, and I hear that it’s foggy and cold most of the way from now on and not a living soul to be seen. It’ll be very lonely there. That’s why I’d like to go with you and your friends.”

Burton thought, Why not?

“There’s room for just one more,” he said. “However, we don’t take pacifists since we may have to fight. We don’t want any deadweight.”

“Don’t you worry about me, brother. I can fight like an avenging angel of the Lord for you, if you’re on the side of good.”

She put her few possessions on the boat a few minutes later. Tom Turpin, the black piano player, was happy to see her at first. Then he found out she’d taken a vow of chastity.

“She’s crazy, Captain,” he told Burton. “Why’d you take her on? She’s got that good-looking body and she’ll drive me crazy her not letting me touch her.”

“Perhaps she’ll talk you into taking the vow, too,” Burton said, and he laughed.

Turpin didn’t think that was funny.

When the boat pulled out after a four-day, not a two-day, leave as planned, Blessed sang a hymn. Then she shouted, “You needed me, brother Burton, to complete your number. You were only eleven and now you’re twelve! Twelve’s a good, a holy number. The apostles of Jesus were twelve!”

“Yaas,” Burton said softly. “And one of them was Judas.”

He looked at Ah Qaaq, the ancient Mayan warrior, a pocket-sized Hercules gone to pot. He seldom offered to start a conversation, though he would talk fluently if he was cornered. Nor did he draw back if someone touched him. According to Joe Miller, X, when visiting Clemens, had not wanted to be touched, had, in fact, acted as if Clemens were some sort of leper. Clemens had thought that X, though soliciting the help of the Valleydwellers, felt that he was morally superior and that if one touched him he was somehow fouled.

Neither Ah Qaaq nor Gilgamesh acted as if they must keep others at a proper distance. In fact, the Sumerian insisted on being very close when conversing, almost nose to nose. And he touched the other speaker frequently as if he had to have flesh contact also.

That insistence on closeness could be overcompensation, though. The Ethical might have found out that his recruits had noted his dislike for near proximity and was forcing himself to get close.

Long ago, the agent, Spruce, had said that he and his colleagues loathed violence, that doing it made them feel degraded. But if that were so, they had certainly learned to be violent without showing any repulsion. The agents on both boats had fought as well as the others. And X, as Odysseus and Barry Thorn, had killed enough to satisfy Jack the Ripper.

Possibly, X’s avoidance of touch had nothing to do with a personal feeling. It might be that a touch by another human being could leave some sort of psychic print. Perhaps psychic wasn’t the right word. The wathans, the auras that all sentient beings radiated, according to X, might take a sort of fingerprint. And this might last for some time. If so, then X would not be able to return to the tower until the “print” had vanished. His colleagues would see it and wonder how he’d gotten it.

Was that speculation too bizarre? All X had to tell his questioners was that he’d been on a mission and had been touched by a Valleydweller.

Ah! But what if X was not supposed to have been in The Valley? What if he had an alibi for his absences but it didn’t include a visit to The Valley? Then he could not explain satisfactorily why his wathan bore a stranger’s print.

This speculation, though, required that an agent’s or Ethical’s prints be different from those of resurrectees and instantly recognizable as such.

Burton shook his head. Sometimes, he got almost dizzy trying to think through these mysteries.

Deciding to abandon the wandering of the mental maze, he went to talk to Gilgamesh. Though the fellow disclaimed any of the adventures attributed to the mythical king of Uruk, he liked to boast of his unrecorded exploits. His black eyes would twinkle, and he would smile when he told his wild tales. He was like the American frontiersmen, like Mark Twain, he exaggerated to an incredible extent. He knew his listener knew he was lying, but he didn’t care. It was all in fun.

The days passed, and the air became colder. The mists hung more heavily, refusing to dissipate until about eleven in the morning. They stopped more frequently to smoke the fish they caught by trolling and to make more acorn bread. Despite the thin sunshine, the grass and the trees were as green as their southern counterparts.

Then the day came when they arrived at the end of the line. There were no more grailstones.

From the north, borne by the cold wind, came a faint rumbling.

They stood on the forward deck, listening to the ominous growling. The now ever-present twilight and the mists seemed to press upon them. Above the soaring black mountain walls the sky was bright, though not nearly as bright as in the southern climes.

Joe broke their silence.

“That noithe ith the firtht cataract ve’ll come to. It’th big ath hell, but it’th only a fart in a vindthtorm compared to the one that cometh from the cave. But ve got a long hard vay to go before ve get to that.”

They were robed and hooded in heavy clothes and looked like ghosts in the thin fog. Cold moisture collected on their faces and hands.

Burton gave orders, and the Post No Bills was tied to the base of the grailstone. They began unloading, finishing in an hour. After they had set all their grails on the stone, they waited for it to discharge. An hour passed, the stone erupted; the echoes were a long time stopping.

“Eat hearty,” Burton said. “This will be our last warm meal.”

“Maybe our last supper, too,” Aphra Behn said, but she laughed.

“Thith plathe lookth like purgatory,” Joe Miller said. “It ain’t tho bad. Vait until you get to hell.”

“I’ve been there and back many times,” Burton said.

They made a big fire of dried wood they’d been carrying in the boat and sat with their backs to the base of the stone while it warmed them. Joe Miller told some of his titanthrop jokes, mostly about the traveling trader and the bear hunter’s wife and two daughters. Nur related some of his Sufi tales, designed to teach people to think differently, but light and amusing. Burton told some stories from the Thousand and One Nights. Alice told some paradoxical tales which Mr. Dodgson had made up for her when she was eight years old. Then Blessed Croomes got them to singing hymns, but she became angry when Burton inserted slightly off-color lines.

All in all, it was fun, and they went to bed feeling cheerier. The booze also helped to raise their spirits.

When they arose, they ate breakfast over another fire. Then they loaded up with their heavy burdens and started off. Before the stone and the boat disappeared in the mists, Burton turned for a last look. There were his final links with the world he’d known, though not always loved, so long. Would he ever see a boat, a grailstone again? Would he soon never see anything?

He heard Joe’s lion-thunderish voice, and he turned away.

“Holy thmoke! Look at what I got to carry! I got three timeth ath much ath the retht of you. My name ain’t Thamthon, you know.”

Turpin laughed and said, “You’re a white nigger with a big nose.”

“I ain’t no nigger,” Joe said. “I’m a packhorthe, a beatht of burden.”

“Vhat’th the differenthe?” Turpin said, and he ran laughing as Joe swung a gigantic fist at him. The towering backpack unbalanced him, and he fell flat on his face.

Laughter rose up and bounced off the canyon walls.

“I’ll wager that’s the first time the mountains have made merry,” Burton said.

After a little while though, they became silent, and they trudged onward looking like lost souls in a circle of the Inferno.

They soon came to the first cataract, the little one, Joe Miller said. It was so broad that they couldn’t see the other end, but it had to be ten times the width of Victoria Falls. At least, it seemed so. It fell from the mists above in a roar that made conversation impossible even if they shouted in each other’s ears.

The titanthrop led the way. They climbed upward past the waterfall, spray now and then falling over them. Their progress was slow but not overly perilous. When they had gotten to perhaps two hundred feet up, they stopped on a broad ledge. Here they let down their burdens while Joe climbed on up. After an hour, the end of a long rope fell through the fog like a dead snake. They tied the packs, two at a time, to the rope, and Joe pulled them bumping and swinging into the mists. When all the packs were on top of the plateau, they worked their way carefully up the cliff. At the top they resumed their burdens and walked on, stopping frequently for rests.

Tai-Peng related stories of his adventures in his native land and got them to laughing. They came to another cataract and quit laughing. They scaled the cliff beside it, and then decided to call it a day. Joe poured some grain alcohol over wood—a frightful waste of good booze, he said—and they had a fire. Four days later, they were out of wood. But the last of the “small” cataracts was behind them.

After walking for an hour over a stone-strewn gently sloping-upward tableland, they came to the foot of another cliff.

“Thith ith it,” Joe said excitedly. “Thith ith the plathe vhere ve found a rope made out of clothth. It vath left by Ekth.”

Burton cast his lamp beam upwards. The first ten feet was rough. From there on up, for as far as he could see, which wasn’t far, there was a smooth-as-ice verticality.

“Where’s the rope?”

“Damn it, it vath here!”

They went out in two parties, each going in opposite directions along the base of the cliff. Their electric lamps were beamed ahead of them, and they traced their fingers along the stone. But each returned without finding the rope.

“Thon of a bitch! Vhat happened?”

“I’d say that the other Ethicals found it and removed it,” Burton said.

After some talk, they decided to spend the night at the base of the cliff. They ate vegetables which the grails had provided and dried fish and bread. They were already sick of their diet, but they didn’t complain. At least, the liquor warmed them up. But that would be gone in a few days.

“I brought along a few bottleth of beer,” Joe said. “Ve can have one last party vith them.”

Burton grimaced. He disliked beer.

In the morning the two groups went out along the base again. Burton was with the one that went eastward or what he thought was that way. It was difficult to tell direction in this misty twilight. They came to the bottom of the huge cataract. There was no way for them to get across to the other side.

When they got back, Burton spoke to Joe.

“Was the rope on the left or right side of The River?”

Joe, illumined in the beam of a lamp, said, “Thith thide.”

“It seems to me that X might have left another rope on the right side. After all, he wouldn’t know if his henchmen would come up the right or left side.”

“Vell, it theemth to me that ve came up the left thide. But it’th been tho many yearth. Hell, I can’t be thyure!”

The little big-nosed dark Moor, Nur el-Musafir, said, “Unless we can get to the other side—and it doesn’t seem possible—the question is irrelevant. I went westward, and I think that I may be able to get up to the plateau.”

After breakfast, the entire group walked five miles or so to the corner of the mountain and the cliff walls. These met at an approximately 36-degree angle as if they were the walls of a very badly built room, Nur tied a very slender rope around his waist.

“Joe says that it’s about a thousand feet up to the plateau. That’s his estimate based on his memory of its height, and at that time Joe didn’t know the English system of measurement. It might be less than he remembers. Let’s hope so.”

“If you get too tired, come back dovn,” Joe said. “I don’t vant you to fall.”

“Then stand back so I won’t strike you,” Nur said, smiling. “It would hurt my conscience if I hit you and both of us died. Though I think that you wouldn’t be injured any more than if an eagle defecated on you.”

“It vould hurt me a lot,” Joe said. “Eagleth and their crap were taboo to my people.”

“Think of me as a sparrow.”

Nur went to the angle and braced himself, his back against one wall and his feet against the other. He slowly worked his way up the angle, holding his feet against one wall, the left foot extended a few inches more than the right. When his footing was secure, he slid his back upward as far as he could before losing his bracing. Then he would slide one foot up until his knee was almost to his chin. Keeping the one foot against the wall, he would slowly work the other up. Then he would slide his back up, and repeat the same maneuvers.

It wasn’t long before he disappeared into the fog. Those below could tell his progress by the rate at which the slim rope was pulled up. It was very slow.

Alice said, “He’ll have to have tremendous endurance to get to the top. And if he doesn’t find a place to tie his rope to so he can haul up another, he might as well come back down.”

“Let’s hope the cliff isn’t that high,” Aphra Behn said.

“Or that the corner doesn’t widen out,” Ah Qaaq said.

When Burton’s wristwatch indicated that Nur had been up for twenty-eight minutes, they heard him shout.

“Good luck! There’s a ledge here! Large enough for two people to stand on, if you don’t count Joe! And there’s a projection I can tie the rope to!”

Burton looked at the titanthrop.

“Evidently the cliff isn’t glass smooth.”

“Yeah. Vell, I mutht have gone up on the right thide of The River, Dick. That’th thmooth all the vay up. At leatht, the part I vent up on vath ath thlick ath a cat’th athth.”

The Ethicals hadn’t bothered to make the cliff unscalable all the way. They’d made the lower part smooth but had left the upper part, invisible in the fog, in its original state.

Had X been responsible for that decision?

Had he also arranged it so that the corner here, and perhaps the corner across The River, was angled so that a small light person could use his back and legs to get up the angles?

It was very probable.

If he had done so, then he’d planned on arranging this angle before it had been formed. This was no natural formation. The Ethicals had designed and built these mountains with whatever vast machines they had used.

Nur called down for them to fasten a heavier rope to the end of the light one. They did so, and presently he called down that the second rope was secured.

Burton hauled himself up on it, bracing his feet against the cliff, his body extended almost at right angles to it. He was panting and his arms hurt by the time he reached the ledge. Nur, surprisingly strong for such a skinny little man, helped him get up onto the ledge.

Then they hauled up the backpacks.

Nur looked up through the fog.

“The face is rough,” he said. “It looks like I could climb up on the projections if I used the pitons.”

He removed a hammer and some pitons from the pack. The latter were steel wedges which he would drive into the surface of the rock wall. Some of them contained holes through which a rope could be passed.

Nur disappeared into the mists. Burton heard his hammer now and then. After a while, the Moor called down for Burton to come on up. Nur was on another ledge.

“Actually, the surface is so irregular that we might be able to climb just using our hands. But we won’t!”

By then Alice had climbed the rope up to the projection on which Burton stood. Burton kissed her and went on up after Nur.

Ten hours later, the entire group sat on top of the cliff. After they’d recovered, they walked on looking for a place to shelter them from the wind. They found none until they had traversed at least three miles. Here they came, as Joe said they would, to the base of another cliff. To their left The River, some miles away now, roared as it hurtled over the lip of the falls.

Joe played the beam of his lamp along the rock.

“Damme! If I did go up along the right thide of The River, then ve’re thcrewed. The tunnel ith on that thide, and ve can’t get acrothth The River!”

“If the Ethicals found X’s rope and removed it, then they must have found the tunnel,” Burton said.

They were too tired to search for the fissure which would be the gate to the tunnel. They walked along until they came to an overhang. Joe used some of his few remaining sticks to make a small fire, and they ate supper. The fire went out quickly. They piled heavy cloths on the rock floor and more over them and slept while The River thundered.

In the morning, while they were eating dried fish, pemmican, and bread, Nur said, “As Dick’s pointed out, X wouldn’t know which side his recruits would come up. So he must have left two ropes. Therefore, he must have made two tunnels. We should find one on this side.”

Burton opened his mouth to say that that tunnel, if it existed, would also have been plugged. Nur held up his hand to forestall him.

“Yes, I know. But if the plug is thin, we can locate it, and we have the tools to dig through it.”

One search party hadn’t gone more than twenty feet from the camp when it found the plug. It was a few feet inside a fissure broad enough for even Joe to enter.

Great heat had been applied to melt the round plug into the surrounding quartz.

“Hot dog!” Joe said. “Thimmety tham! Maybe ve got a chanthe after all!”

“Perhaps,” de Marbot said. “But what if the entire tunnel is plugged up?”

“Then we try the corner. If X was smart enough, he would’ve figured out that the tunnels might be found. So he would have arranged for a climbable angle here just as he did at the other place.”

Burton scanned the face of the cliff while his lamp poked a bright hole through the fog. Ten feet from the base, the rock was wrinkled and fissured. But it abruptly became as smooth as a mirror from there to as far as he could see.

Joe swung his hammer against the plug. Burton, his ear close to the rock, said, “It’s hollow!”

“Jutht great,” Joe said. He removed several tungsten-steel alloy chisels from his backpack and began hammering. When he’d cut out enough of the quartz to make six holes, he and Burton inserted plastic explosive into them. Burton would have liked to daub clay over the plastic, but there wasn’t any.

He stuck the ends of wires into the plastic and retreated along the face of the cliff, rolling out the wires. When the group was far enough away, he pressed one wire of his small battery against another. The explosions deafened them, and pieces of quartz flew out.

“Vell,” Joe said, “at leatht my burden’ll be lighter nov. I von’t have to carry thothe canth of plathtik and the battery anymore. That’th the end of them.”

They went back into the fissure. Burton shot his light across it. The holes made by Joe had been enlarged. Several of them were big enough for him to see the tunnel beyond it.

He said, “We’ve got about twelve hours more work, Joe.”

“Oh, thyit! Vell, here goeth nothing.”

Shortly after breakfast, the titanthrop hacked out the last piece of rock, and the plug fell out.

“Now cometh the hard part,” Joe said, wiping the sweat off his face and his grotesquely long nose.

The tunnel was just large enough for Joe to crawl up it, but his shoulders would rub against the sides and his head against the ceiling unless he lowered it. It went at an approximately 45-degree angle upward.

“Wrap clothth around your kneeth and handth,” Joe said. “Othervithe, you’re going to rub them bloody. You’ll probably do tho anyvay.”

Frigate, Alice, Behn, and Croomes returned just then with canteens refilled at The River. Joe half-emptied his.

“Now,” he said, “ve thyould vait avhile until everybody’th taken a good healthy thyit. Vhen I vath vith thothe Egyptianth, ve neglected that precauthyon. Halfvay up, I couldn’t thtand it no longer, tho I emptied my bowelth.”

He laughed thunderously.

“You thyould have heard thothe nothelethth little fellowth cuthth! They carried on thomething terrible. They vath hopping mad vith no room to hop! Haw, haw!”

He wiped the tears from his eyes. “Jethuth! Did they thmell bad vhen they finally crawled out! Then they got even madder when they had to vath themthelveth off in The River. That vater’th ath cold ath a velldigger’th athth, ath Tham uthed to thay.”

More tears flowed as he thought about Clemens. He snuffled, and he wiped off his proboscis on his sleeve.

Joe hadn’t exaggerated the hardships. The tunnel was at least one mile long, every inch forward was an inch upward, and the air became increasingly thinner, though it howled through the shaft, and they had to drag their very heavy packs behind them. Moreover, for all they knew, the other end might have been plugged also. If it were, they would have to return to the base of the cliff.

Their joy at finding that the tunnel wasn’t sealed renewed their strength for a while. However, the palms of their hands, their fingers, their knees, and their toes were skinned, bleeding, and hurting. They were unable to walk steadily for some time.

The wind was stronger and colder here despite its thinness. Joe sucked the oxygen-scarce air into his great lungs.

“Vone good thing about it. Ve only need one drink, and ve’re loaded out of our thkullth.”

They would have liked to make camp there, but the place was too exposed.

“Cheer up,” Burton said. “Joe says that it’s only a ten-mile walk to the next cataract.”

“The latht vone, the biggetht. You think the otherth vere noithy. Vait until you hear thith vone.”

Burton strapped on his pack and staggered on, his knees feeling as if they’d rusted. Joe came close behind him. Fortunately, the tableland was comparatively level and free of rock rubble. However, Burton had only the tremendous thunder of the falls to guide him through the fog. When the sound became stronger, he veered back to the left. When it was weaker, he went back to the right. Nevertheless, he was probably making a fifteen-mile hike out of a ten-miler.

All had to stop often because of the lack of oxygen and to make sure that no one straggled. Every fourth person in the line kept his lamp on until Burton stopped and swore.

“Vhat’th the matter?”

“We’re not thinking straight in this air,” Burton said, gasping. “We only need one light. We’re wasting electricity. We can use a rope for all to hang onto.”

With the line tied around his waist and the others grasping it, they went on into the cold grayness.

But after a while they were too weak to go a step more. Despite the wind, they lay down on and under cloths and tried to sleep. Burton awoke from a nightmare and turned his light on his watch. They’d been here ten hours.

He got them up, and they ate more than the rationing schedule allowed for. An hour later, the blackish face of a rock wall loomed out of the mists. They were at the foot of another obstacle.

42

Joe Miller hadn’t complained much though he had groaned softly for the last half of the hike. He was ten feet tall and weighed eight hundred pounds and was as strong as any ten of Homo sapiens put together. But his giantism had disadvantages. One was that he suffered from fallen arches. Sam often called him the Great Flatfoot, and with very good reason. It hurt Joe to walk much, and when he was resting his feet still often hurt.

“Tham alvayth thaid that if it hadn’t been for our feet, ve vould’ve conquered the vorld,” Joe said. He was rubbing his right foot. “He claimed that it vath our broken-down dogth that made uth ekthinct. He may have been right.”

It was obvious that the titanthrop needed at least two days of rest and therapy. While Burton and Nur, amateur but efficient podiatrists, worked on Joe, the others went out in two parties. They came back several hours later.

Tai-Peng, the leader of one, said, “I couldn’t find the place Joe told us about.”

Ah Qaaq, the other leader, said, “We found it. At least, it looks as if we could climb up there. It’s very near the falls, though.”

“In fact, it’s so close,” Alice said, “that it can’t be seen until you’re almost on it. It’ll be dreadfully dangerous though. Very slippery with the spray.”

Joe groaned, and said, “Nov I remember! It vath the right thide that ve vent up on. The Egyptianth vent on it becauthe the left vath unlucky. Thith path mutht be one Ekth plathed here in cathe…”

“I wouldn’t call it a path,” the Mayan said.

“Vell, if it’th like the other plathe, it can be climbed.”

It was, and it could be.

Seven days later, they were on top of the mountain. Snow and ice had made the dangers even greater than anticipated, and the air enfeebled them. Nevertheless, they had struggled up to another plateau. The River was far below, covered by fog.

After a few miles, they descended on a far easier slope. The air was thicker at the bottom and warmer, though still cold. They advanced through an ever-increasing and ever-louder wind until they came to another mountain.

“No uthe even thinking about climbing thith vone. Ve’re lucky, though. The big cave of the vindth thyould be to our right a few mileth. Vell, maybe not tho lucky. You’ll thee vhen ve get there. But that can vait avhile. I got to retht my thon-of-a-bitching feet again.”

The River poured out in a vast and thick stream to descend swiftly down a gentle slope. The roar of water and wind was deafening, but at least it was warmer here. Joe, the veteran of the passage through the cave, led the way. A rope was tied to his waist and tied to the wrists of the others.

Warned by Joe to hang on tight, they went around the corner into the Brobdingnagian hole. Alice slipped and fell off the ledge and was pulled, shrieking, back up. Then Nur, even smaller than she, was blown off, but he too was hauled to safety.

The torches of the Egyptians had been extinguished by the wind when Joe had led them through the bellowing cave. Now, he could see, though not very far. Also, he shouted back to Burton, this ledge was broader than the one on the right.

“Boy, ve’d have been thyit out of luck if the Ethicalth had melted down the ledgeth! I guethth they thought that no vone vould ever get thith far after they took the ropeth avay and plugged the tunnel!”

Burton only heard part of what Joe said but filled in the rest.

They had to stop twice to eat and sleep. Meanwhile, The River gradually dropped away and finally disappeared. Burton, curious to know how deep it was, sacrificed a spare lamp. He counted seconds as its beam turned over and over and became a thread of light before it plunged into the blackness. It had fallen at least three thousand feet.

At last, the grayness that heralded the end of the cave appeared. They came out into the open air, misty but brighter. Above them was a sky which blazed with a multitude of giant stars and gas sheets. The thin cloud closed around them but didn’t block their view of the mountain wall to their right. They were almost on the lip of the abyss at the bottom of which The River ran.

“Ve’re on the wrong thide here,” Joe said. “Ahead, on thith thide a mountain blockth uth. If ve could only get acrothth to the right thide. But then maybe the Ethical left a vay for uth on thith thide.”

“I doubt it,” Burton said. “If he did, we’d have to circle completely around the inner wall of the mountains ringing the sea to get to the cave at the bottom. Unless…”

“Unlethth vhat?”

“Unless X made two caves and put boats there, too.”

Nur said, “One rough ledge they might overlook. But two?”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “Tell you vhat. The two thideth of The Valley here get very clothe at the top. The vallth mutht arch over, lean out. There’th only about tventy feet betveen the edgeth at the top. Here. Let me thyow you.”

He walked slowly ahead and after about sixty feet stopped. His beam, added to theirs, clearly showed the other side of the gap.

“God Almighty!” Aphra said. “The Ethical surely didn’t expect us to jump across it?”

“The other Ethicals wouldn’t think anybody would dare it,” Nur said. “But I think X expected us to, yes. I mean, he knew that at least one, maybe more, of any party that got this far would be able to leap across. After all, he picked some very athletic people. Then that person or persons would tie a rope to a rock, and the rest would go over on it.”

Burton knew that he couldn’t jump that far. He might get close, but close wasn’t good enough.

Joe was stronger than two Hercules melded, but he was far too heavy. Ah Qaaq and Gilgamesh were also very strong but too squat and heavy. Good long jumpers weren’t built like them. Turpin was tall but too muscular. Nur was very light and had a surprising wiry strength, but he was too short. The two white women and de Marbot were also too short and weren’t good jumpers. That left Frigate, Croomes, and Tai-Peng.

The American knew what Burton was thinking. His face was pale. He was even better at long jumping than he’d been on Earth and had once leaped there to an unofficial distance of twenty-five feet during a practice jump but a wind had been behind his back. His normal distance was about twenty-two feet on Earth and twenty-three here. Nor had he ever jumped under such bad conditions.

“We should have brought along Jesse Owens,” he said faintly.

“Hallelujah!” Croomes shrieked, startling the others. “Hallelujah! The Lord saw fit to make me a great jumper! I’m one of His chosen! He saw to it that I could leap like a goat and dance like King David for His glory! And now He gives me a chance to jump over the pit of Hell! Thank you, Lord!”

Burton moved close to Frigate and said, softly, “Are you going to allow a woman to jump first? Show you up?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Frigate said. He shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I let her go first? The problem here is not one of sex but of ability.”

“You’re scared!”

“You bet I am. Anybody but a psychotic would be.”

He went to Blessed Croomes, though, and questioned her about her record. She said that she hadn’t done much jumping on Earth, but, when she was living in a state called Wendisha, she had made twenty-two feet a number of times.

“How did you know it was that?” Frigate said. “We had an exact system of measurement on the Rex, but very few places would have such.”

“What we did,” Croomes said, “was guess what a foot was. It looked pretty close to me. Anyway, I know that I can do it! The Lord will buoy me up on the wings of my faith, and I will skip over it like one of His sweet gazelles!”

“Yeah, and you’ll fall short, too, and smash your brains out against the edge of the gap,” Frigate said.

“Why don’t we mark out a distance?” Nur said. “Then you three can practice-jump, and we’ll see who’s the best.”

“On this hard rock? We need a sand pit!”

Croomes said that they should throw a lantern over to the other side to provide a marker. Frigate cast one attached to a rope, so that it lit near the edge, rolled back, then stopped on its side several inches from the dropoff. Its beam pointed at them over the black abysm.

He pulled it back with the rope and threw it again. This time it rolled, but by whipping the rope he got it to an upright position and the light shone at right angles to them.

“Okay, so it can be done,” Frigate said. “But I’ll pull it back now. Nobody can jump until he’s had a good night’s sleep. Anyway, I’m too tired now to try it.”

“Let’s line up the run path with lanterns,” Blessed said. “I’d like to get a good idea of how it’ll look.”

They did so, and Frigate and Croomes paced to where they would start their run, if they did. The marker for the leap was a lantern a few inches from the edge.

“It has to be a one-time thing,” Frigate said. “We’ll really have to warm up first. This cold air…On the other hand, the air is thinner and offers less resistance. That probably helped that black jumper—what’s his name? such is fame—make that fabulous twenty-seven feet and four and a half inches in the Olympics at Mexico City. But, back to the first hand, we haven’t really gotten acclimated yet to the high altitude. And we’re sure as hell not in training.”

Burton had said nothing to Tai-Peng since he wished to give him a chance to volunteer. The Chinese had been watching the procedure. Now he strode up to Burton and said, “I am a mighty jumper! I’m also sadly out of practice! But I will not allow a woman to be braver than I! I will make the first jump!”

His green eyes shone in the lantern beam.

Burton asked him what distance he’d cleared.

“More than that!” Tai-Peng said, pointing at the gap.

Frigate had been throwing pieces of paper up in the air to test the wind. He came up to Burton then, saying, “It blows on our left side and so it’ll carry us a little to the right. But the mountain blocks most of it. I’d say it’s a six- or seven-miles-an-hour wind.”

“Thanks,” Burton said. He kept his gaze on the Chinese. Tai-Peng was very good in athletics but not as good as he claimed to be. No one was that good. However, it was his life he was risking, and no one had asked him to do so.

Frigate spoke up loudly.

“Look! I’m really the most experienced jumper! So I should be the one to do it! And I will!”

“You’ve gotten over your fear?”

“Hell, no! What it is…I don’t have the guts to let someone else do it. You’d all think I was a coward, and if you didn’t, I would.”

He turned to Nur.

“I failed to act rationally and logically. I failed you.”

Nur smiled grimly at his disciple.

“You didn’t fail me. You failed yourself. However, there are so many aspects to consider…anyway, you should be the one to jump.”

The little Moor went up to the titanthrop and raised his head under Joe’s vast nose.

“It may not be necessary for anyone to jump. Joe, do you think that I weigh as much as your pack?”

Joe frowned, and he picked up Nur with one hand under his buttocks. He held him out at arm’s length and said, “Not by a long thyot.”

When Nur was back on the ground, he said, “Do you think you could throw your pack across to the other side?”

Joe fingered his receding chin. “Veil, maybe. Thay, I thee vhat you’re getting at! Vhy don’t I try it? It von’t make no differenth if the pack’th over there and ve’re over here. Ve got to get acrothth anyvay.”

He lifted the enormous pack above his head, walked to the edge, looked once, swung the pack twice, and heaved it. It fell a foot beyond the other edge.

Nur said, “I thought so. Joe, you throw me across now.”

The titanthrop picked up the Moor with one hand against the little man’s chest and one under his buttocks. Then he swung him back and forth, saying, “Vone, two, three!”

Nur arced across the abyss, landed on his feet a yard beyond the lip, and rolled. When he got up, he danced with joy.

Joe then cast Nur’s lantern at the end of a rope. Nur caught it though he staggered back a little.

Nur came back out of the fog a few minutes later.

“I found a big boulder to tie the rope to, but I can’t move it by myself! We’ll need about five strong men!”

“Over you go!” Joe said, and he swung Burton back and forth. Though Burton wanted to shout that he was much heavier than Nur, he refrained. The gap looked twice as broad as it had up to that moment. Then he was shot up and outward while Joe yelled, “Vatch your athth, Dick!” and his laughter bellowed. The many-thousand-feet abyss was beneath him for a frightening second, and then Burton struck on his feet and was propelled forward. He rolled, but even so the rock thumped him hard.

A moment later, his pack followed. Joe then threw all the packs across, and he lifted Frigate and hurled him on over.

One by one, they followed until Ah Qaaq and Joe were the only ones left. Shouting, “Tho long, fatty!” the titanthrop hurled the Mayan. He hit closer to the edge than anyone but had a foot to spare.

“Now vhat?” Joe yelled.

Burton said, “There’s a big boulder that must weigh almost as much as you, Joe. Go roll it up here, and then tie the end of the rope around it.”

“That’th half a mile back,” Joe said. “Vhy didn’t you all thtay here and help me before you vent over?”

“Didn’t want you to be too tired from moving the rock to throw us across.”

“Jethuth H. Chritht! I do all the hard vork.”

He disappeared with his lantern into the fog.

Some of them were bruised and with torn skin, but all were able to do their share. They followed Nur to the boulder and, after a long rest, they began rolling it over the flat stone surface of the plateau. It wasn’t easy since the rock was irregularly shaped and probably weighed more than all of them together. Rests were frequent because of the thin air. They finally got it near the edge and then collapsed for a while.

A minute later, Joe rolled the boulder from the mists.

“I vath hoping I could beat you runtth to it,” he shouted. “I vould’ve, too, if my boulder had been ath near ath yourth.” He sat down to pant.

Blessed Croomes complained that she had been cheated out of the chance to jump and so demonstrate her faith in the Lord.

“Nobody stopped you,” Frigate said. “Although, to tell the truth, I was disappointed, too. The only thing that kept me back was that, if I did miss, the group would be just that much weaker. Maybe I’ll try it anyway just to show I can do it.”

He looked at Tai-Peng, and they both burst out laughing.

“You ain’t fooling me none,” Croomes said in English. “You two men was skeered to do what a woman wasn’t afraid to do.”

“That’s the difference between you and us,” Frigate said. “We’re not crazy.”

When they all were restored, they tied the ends of the long heavy rope around the boulders and chocked them with smaller stones. Joe let himself down over the edge backwards, grabbed the sagging rope, and hand-over-handed across it. His friends seized the rope to insure that the boulder wasn’t moved by his enormous weight, though it wasn’t necessary. When he got quickly to the edge, some left the rope and helped him get up over the edge.

“Boy, I hope I never have to do that again!” he gasped. “I never told you guyth thith before, but vhen I get on a real high plathe, I alvayth have an urge to jump off.”

43

Getting to the ledge that led along the mountainside to the sea took them ten hours.

“Thith ith narrow enough now, but vhen ve get to the plathe vhere thothe two Egyptianth fell, man, that’th thomething!”

Several thousand feet below was a mass of clouds. They spent eight hours sleeping and continued after they’d had their monotonous breakfast. Though the Egyptians had crawled along this trail, the group faced the rock and edged along, their fingers gripping the holes and small outthrusts of the rock.

The air became somewhat warmer. Here the water still had heat to give up after its long wandering through the arctic regions and its passage through the polar sea.

The ledge was safely traversed. They went on another plateau and came to where, as Joe had said, they would be near the sea. He walked painfully to the edge of the mountain and pointed his lantern beam down on still another ledge.

It began about six feet below the edge of the cliff, was about two feet wide, and continued downwards with the same breadth until it was lost in the thin clouds. It sloped at a 45-degree angle to the horizon or would have if there had been one.

“We’ll have to abandon some stuff and make our packs smaller,”

Burton said. “There isn’t enough room for them otherwise.”

“Yeah, I know. Vhat vorrieth me ith that the Ethicalth might’ve cut the ledge in half, Jethuth, Dick! Vhat if they found the cave down there?”

“Then we’ll have to trust to the inflatable kayak you’re carrying to get two of us to the tower. I’ve mentioned that before.”

“Yeah, I knov. But that ain’t going to keep me from talking about it. It helpth relieve my tenthyon.”

The sun never came above the top of the circling mountains. Despite this, there was a twilight illumination.

“I fell off the ledge before I got too far,” Joe said. “Tho I don’t know how far the path—thome path!—goeth. It may take a whole day, maybe more, to get to the bottom.”

“Tom Mix said that Paheri, the Egyptian, told him that they had to stop once and eat before they got to the bottom,” Burton said. “That doesn’t mean much, though. The journey was fatiguing, and so they’d get hungry sooner than they usually would.”

They found a shallow cave. Joe, with the help of the others, rolled a big boulder to partially block the entrance and keep the wind out. They retreated to it to eat their meal. Two lamps kept the hollow bright, but they weren’t enough to cheer them. What they needed was a fire, the ancient shifting brightness and crackling warmth which had cheered their Old Stone Age ancestors and every generation since.

Tai-Peng was the only one in high spirits. He told them stories of his antics and those of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cups, the companions of his old age, and cracked many a Chinese joke. Though the latter couldn’t adequately be translated through Esperanto, they were good enough to cause some, and especially Joe Miller, to shout with laughter and pound their thighs. Then Tai-Peng composed some on-the-spot poems and concluded by brandishing his sword at the tower somewhere ahead of them.

“Soon we will be in the fortress of the Big Grail! Let those who’ve meddled with our lives beware! We will conquer them though they be demons! Old Kung Fu Tze warned us that humans must not concern themselves with spirits, but I was never one to pay attention to that old man! I listen to no man! I follow my own spirit! I am Tai-Peng, and I know no superior!”

He howled, “Watch out, you things that hide and skulk and refuse to face us! Watch out! Tai-Peng comes! Burton comes! Joe Miller comes!”

And so on.

“Ve thyould fathe him our vay,” Joe whispered to Burton. “Ve thyure could uthe all that hot air.”

Burton was watching Gilgamesh and Ah Qaaq. They reacted just like the others, laughing and clapping Tai-Peng on. But that could be just good acting by one or both. He was worried. When they got to the cave—if they did—he would have to do something about them. Even if they were innocent, he would have to try to determine if one of them, or both, was X. Either of them could be Loga. Either of them could be Thanabur.

How could he do it?

And what—if anything—was one, or both, plotting?

He ran a scenario through his mind. When they started down the trail, he’d arrange it so that Joe Miller would be in the lead. He’d be second. Ah Qaaq and Gilgamesh would be in the rear. He didn’t want them to be the first to get to the cave—if it was still there and not plugged up.

The Mayan and the Sumerian—if they were such—would come in last, and they’d be disarmed as they entered the cave. They carried long knives and .69-caliber plastic-bullet revolvers. Joe and de Marbot would see that they were relieved of them. He would warn Nur and Frigate about the deed, but he wouldn’t have them in on it. He still wasn’t sure about the American or the Moor. His experience with the agent, the pseudo–Peter Jairus Frigate, had made him very wary of the real Frigate, if he was indeed the original. Nur seemed to be what he claimed he was, but Burton trusted no one. Even the titanthrop might be an agent. Why not? He was intelligent and capable despite his grotesque size and facial features.

Burton had to trust someone, though. There were two, himself, and, after so many years of intimacy, Alice. The others—ah, the others! He’d have to watch them closely but his instincts, whatever that much-abused term meant, and it probably didn’t mean much, told him that all but two were what they said they were.

With their much-reduced packs, Joe still carrying the largest, they let themselves down on the last ledge. Moving sideways on the toes and front of their feet, their arms extended parallel to their shoulders most of the time, they held on to whatever grip they could find. It wasn’t long before they came around the curve of the mountain, perhaps two hours, though it seemed like a very long time. Then Joe stopped, and he turned his head.

“Quiet, everyone. You might be able to hear the thound of the thea beating againtht the bathe of the mountainth.”

They listened intently, but only Burton, Nur, and Tai-Peng heard the waves against the rock and that might have been their imagination.

When they came around the shoulder, however, they could see the relatively bright heavens and, looming faintly in the upper regions, the hulk of the mountains that ringed the sea on the far side.

Of the tower, there was no indication, not even a dim bulk. Yet it was in the center of the sea according to Joe’s own story and the reports from the airship Parseval.

Joe called, “Here’th vhere I came acrothth a grail thomebody left. Here’th vhere I thaw a thudden blathe of light vhen the Ethical’th aircraft came down to the top of the tover. And here’th vhere I thtumbled over the grail and fell to my death.”

He paused.

“It ain’t here now.”

“What?”

“The grail.”

“The Ethicals must’ve removed it.”

“I hope not,” Joe said. “If they did, then they knew that people could get here, and they vould’ve trathed the ledge down to the bottom and found the cave. Let’th hope that thomebody elthe came along and removed it. Maybe the Egyptianth did after I fell.”

They moved on the seemingly thread-thin wet-slippery footing. The mists became thicker then, and Burton couldn’t see more than twenty feet ahead with the aid of his lantern, which he had to lift from his belt hook when he wanted more visibility.

Presently, Joe stopped.

“What’s the matter?” Burton said.

“Thyit! The ledge runth out. Vait a minute. Lookth—and feelth—like it’th been melted down here. Yeah! It hath! The Ethicalth’ve cut the ledge out right here! Now vhat do ve do?”

“Can you see how far the melt goes?”

“Yeth. It lookth like it thtopth about forty feet from here. Might ath vell be a mile, though.”

“How far up or down does the melt go?”

A minute passed.

“For ath far ath I can reach. Vait a minute. I’ll thyine my light.”

A few seconds passed.

“There’th thome fiththyureth about four feet above my fingertipth.”

Burton removed his pack and got down on his hands and knees. Nur, who’d been just behind, crawled slowly over him. Joe and the Moor did a circus-acrobat balancing act while Nur climbed to the titanthrop’s shoulders. Presently, Nur said, “It looks as if there are some fissures on a straight line. Enough for our pitons.”

Nur continued standing on the titanthrop’s shoulders. Burton handed the steel wedges and a hammer to Joe, who passed them on to the Moor. While Joe held Nur’s legs firmly, Nur’s hammer drove in two wedges. Burton sent up the end of a rope, thin but heavy enough, to Nur. He passed this through the eyes of the wedges and secured the end at the most remote piton.

The Moor got down onto the ledge by Joe’s side where Burton held him from falling off while he put on a harness much like that which parachutists wear. These were made of fish leather and metal and had been part of the launch’s stores. On the webbing on the chest were buckles to each of which strong plastic ribbons were attached. At the end of each was secured a small metal device containing a wheel.

Nur climbed back up on Joe. When he stood up on the titanthrop’s broad shoulders, he passed one jaw of the wheeled device around the horizontal rope held through the eyes of the pitons. He snapped the device together and locked the jaws with a lever. Now he could slide along the rope attached to the cliff face. When he got to the first piton, he locked the left-hand wheeled block to the part of the rope beyond the first piton. Then he unhinged the first block and slid along to the second piton.

Bracing his feet against the cliff wall, he leaned outwards, supported by the ribbons, and began hammering the third piton into a fissure. This was hard labor and required many rests. The others needed food, but they were too concerned about Nur to have any appetite.

It took five hours for Nur, working patiently, hammering at the pitons, to reach the area above the ledge where it resumed. By then he was too exhausted to drive in another piton. He dropped down along the face of the cliff to the projection.

Burton went next, climbing up on the giant’s back to his shoulders, no undangerous feat. Without Joe’s height and strength, the entire party would have been stopped at this point with no alternative except to go back. They would have starved then, since they did not have enough rations for the return trip.

Burton moved along the cliff face as Nur had and presently was at the other ledge. Nur caught and steadied Burton as he released the block and slid down with his hands extended to slow down his descent by their friction. Fortunately, the ledge here was broader than on the other side of the melt.

Those on that side had another problem. That was getting the heavy packs across. There seemed nothing else to do but to get rid of all except the most essential items. Unpacking was difficult, though, because of the very small space for footing. They helped each other, one clinging with a hand to a roughness in the wall while he or she reached over and opened the pack on the back of his neighbor. The items had to come out one by one and be dropped into the sea or placed on the ledge for repacking.

Everything went except the knives, firearms, the ammunition, some long heavy cloths, some rations, and the canteens. Part of those were placed in their grails. Alice and Aphra, the lightest, were to bring over what was left in Burton’s and Nur’s packs in their own.

Joe called across the abyss and asked if he should leave the inflatable kayak behind. Burton said that it shouldn’t be discarded. But since Joe weighed so much, it’d be best to have de Marbot carry it in his pack. The contents of the Frenchman’s pack should be parceled out between Croomes’ and Tai-Peng’s.

Burton didn’t want the titanthrop to bring across anything but himself. So far, the pitons had given no indication of coming loose. But he didn’t know what eight hundred pounds would do to them.

One by one, the others came until only Ah Qaaq and Joe Miller were left. When the Mayan made the passage, he used his hammer to drive each wedge in more securely.

Joe reached down gingerly and picked up his huge canteen. He emptied it and placed it back on the ledge. He shouted, “I vant to get acrothth fatht! Tho I ain’t going to bother vith my harnethth! I’ll thving over, hand over hand.”

He leaped up and grabbed the rope by the first piton.

He moved swiftly, his long arms reaching out, grabbing the rope ahead of him and then sliding the other along. He used his knees to brace himself so he could lean outwards.

Halfway across, a piton skreeked as it pulled out from its hole.

Joe was motionless for a moment. Then he extended a long arm to the rope on the side nearest him from the next piton.

The loosened piton came free with another screech. Joe dropped down, clinging to the rope, and swung like an almost-stopped pendulum.

“Hang on, Joe!” Burton said.

Then he screamed with the rest of the party as the second wedge tore loose and the others followed.

Bellowing, shrouded in white cloths, Joe Miller dropped for the second time into the dark sea.

Section 13

In the Dark Tower

44

Burton wept with the others. He’d liked the huge man, had perhaps loved him. With his death the group had lost much courage, much morale-boosting, much strength.

After a while they turned around, cautiously, and continued the slow, still dangerous descent. When six hours passed, they stopped to eat and sleep. The latter was difficult, since they had to lie on one side and make sure they didn’t roll over while sleeping. They put their pistols against their backs so these would, they hoped, be so uncomfortable that they’d wake them immediately. Excretion was not easy either. The men could face the outer side of the ledge to urinate, though the updraught sometimes caused the liquid to blow back on their clothes. The women had to hang their posteriors over the ledge and hope for the best, which often didn’t happen.

Alice was the only modest one. She required that the others look away while she was relieving herself. Even then, their near presence made her inhibited. Sometimes, though, the mists thickened enough to give her privacy.

They were a gloomy party, still numbed by Joe Miller’s death. Also, they could not help dwelling on the strong possibility that the Ethicals had found the cave and sealed it.

The sound of waves crashing against the base became louder. They descended into the thick clouds; the cliff face and the ledge became even wetter. Finally, Burton, in the lead, was wet by spray and the sea boomed around him.

He halted and sent his lantern beam ahead of him. The edge ran into the black waters. Ahead was an outcropping, and, if what Paheri had said was true, the mouth of the cave would be on its other side.

He called back to those behind Alice, telling them what his light had revealed. He walked into the water, which was only knee-deep. Apparently, the shallow ledge went a long way out since the waves were weak here, though powerful on both sides not far away. The water was very cold, seeming to turn his legs into icy clumps.

He came back to the black projection and worked his way around it. Alice came closely behind him.

“Is there a cave?” Her voice trembled.

He shot the beam ahead to his right. His heart was hammering and not just from the shock of the cold water.

He breathed out, “Ah!”

There it was, the long-imagined hole at the base of the mountain. It was arched and low and would require that even Nur stoop to get through it. But it was wide enough for the boats which Paheri had described to pass through it.

Burton shouted back the good news. Croomes, fifth in line, screamed, “Hallelujah!”

However, Burton was not as exultant as he sounded. The cave could still be here, but the boats might not be.

He led Alice along on the rope still connected to her belt and bent down to enter the mouth. A few feet inside, a smooth stone floor sloped upward at a 30-degree angle, the hollow broadened, and the ceiling rose to twenty feet. When they were all gathered inside, he ordered that they disconnect the rope. They shouldn’t need it now.

He shone his light on their faces, pale and tired-looking but eager. Gilgamesh was on his far right, and Ah Qaaq stood on the left behind the rest. If Burton had not abandoned his plan to seize the two, the time to do so would be near. But he had decided to improvise when he had to.

He turned and led them up the floor to a tunnel. It curved gently to the right for over three hundred feet, and the air became warmer as they advanced. Before they got to its end, they saw light.

Burton could not resist running toward the illumination. He burst into a very large dome-shaped chamber and almost stepped on a human skeleton. It lay facedown, its right armbones stretched out as if reaching for something. He picked up the skull and looked within it and at the floor beneath it. There was no tiny black ball.

The light came from huge metal balls, each on one of nine black metal tripods about twelve feet high. The light looked cold.

There were ten black metal boats on V-shaped supports and one empty support. It had held the vessel that the Egyptians had used to get to the tower.

The boats were of various sizes, the largest able to hold thirty people.

At the left side were metal shelves holding gray tins—the Americans would call them cans—each about ten inches high and six inches wide.

It was as Paheri had said it was.

Except that three human skeletons clad in blue clothes lay by one of the large boats.

The others moved in, talking in low tones. The place was certainly awing, but Burton ignored its effect to examine the unexpected remains.

The clothes seemed to be one-piece suits, pocketless, seamless, and buttonless and with pants legs. The material felt glossy and filled out where his fingers had depressed it. He rolled the skulls to one side and shook the bones from the garments. One individual was tall and had heavy bones and a thick supraorbital ridge and heavy jaws. He had probably been an early palaeolithic. The bones of the other two were of the modern type, and the pelvis of one was a woman’s.

Inside each skull was a very tiny black sphere. If he hadn’t been looking for them, he wouldn’t have noticed them.

There was no evidence of violence. What had struck these agents down?

And what vehicle had brought them here?

He would have expected one of the flying vessels he’d glimpsed many years ago. But there had been none outside the cave mouth. Could it have floated away?

What or who had interrupted the three? Why hadn’t the people in the tower come after them after a certain amount of time?

They hadn’t because they were having troubles of their own. Or they were dead, slain by the same thing that had felled these three.

X had to be responsible for this.

Burton reasoned that the same event that had downed these three had also resulted in stranding X and all the other Ethicals and agents in The Valley.

That meant that no craft could fly out from the tower to pick them up. Nor could the renegade fly one of his hidden vessels to the tower. He’d been forced, as Barry Thorn, to go on the airship built by Firebrass. And he’d failed to get in the tower.

From Burton’s viewpoint, the event had made certain advantages for him and for X. The agents had obviously discovered the cloth-ropes hanging down from the cliffside and the tunnels, and they’d found out that the very narrow ledge had been used by people from The Valley. They had probably found the cave last, after trying to make sure that passage would be impossible for any more of the unauthorized.

If the three hadn’t been killed, the cave entrance would be plugged up.

He strode to the shelves filled with tins. At the corner of each shelf was a plastic sheet about twelve inches by twelve inches. On it were figures of a man demonstrating how to open the tins. Burton didn’t need the pictures since he knew from Paheri’s story what to do. He passed a fingertip completely around the upper rim and waited for a few seconds. The top, seemingly of hard metal, quivered, shimmered, and turned into a gelatinous film. His finger penetrated it easily.

Burton said, loudly, “X forgot all about eating utensils and plates! But that’s all right! We can use our fingers!”

Famished, the others quit looking at the objects in the cave and followed his example. They scooped out the beef stew—warm—with their fingers and, from the tins marked by a bas relief of bread, brought out loaves. They ate voraciously until their bellies were stuffed. There seemed no reason to ration themselves. The supply was more than plentiful.

Burton, sitting on the floor, his back against a wall, watched the others.

If one was X, why didn’t he reveal his identity?

Was it because he had only recruited The Valley people to have a backup team? People who might pull his chestnuts out of the fire for him if he was in a situation where he was helpless without them?

If so, why hadn’t he told them more of what he expected from them?

Or had he meant to do that but events had happened unexpectedly and too swiftly? And now he was in a position where he didn’t need their help? Might, in fact, believe them to be a hindrance?

And why was he a renegade?

Burton didn’t believe X’s story about why the other Ethicals had resurrected the Terrans.

Indeed, he wasn’t sure that he hadn’t been allied with someone whose true goals he would loathe if he knew them.

Perhaps that was why the Mysterious Stranger had been so mysterious, why he’d not told them the truth, why he was still in disguise.

If he were.

Whatever the truth was, it was long past time for the Ethical to reveal himself. Unless…unless X knew that some of this party were agents or other Ethicals. He would then believe that he had to keep his disguise until they were in the tower. Why in the tower? Because there he had means to overpower or kill his enemies. Or anyone else who would try to keep him from carrying out his schemes, beneficent or malignant.

These might require that his recruits be among the removed. He’d needed them only to get to the tower.

Why would he ever have thought that he might have to have their help?

Well…when Spruce had been interrogated, he’d said something about the Operator of a giant computer. Burton didn’t know who the Operator was, but a computer might have been used secretly by X when, or before when, the resurrection project began. He might have put into it all the probabilities he could think of regarding his unlawful project and asked for an estimate of their happening. Perhaps, the computer might even have been able to come up with some that X couldn’t think of.

One of the items offered by the computer was a situation or situations in which X might need recruits.

Burton couldn’t imagine what it was, unless it was the present one.

Good enough.

And so X had gotten his recruits, and he’d erased all his questions and the answers from the computer. Somehow, he’d done it without the Operator’s knowing about it. That is, all this had happened if Spruce hadn’t lied and there were indeed such things as an Operator and computer.

As of now, Burton’s big problem was that X hadn’t told him who he was. Which meant that very soon X would be acting, not for his recruits but against them.

Burton thought that they should get some sleep before they ventured out on the boats. All agreed, and so they laid out their heavy cloths on the floor and rolled up others for pillows. Since it was warm here, they didn’t even have to cover themselves with their eskimo-suit-type garments. The hot air came from slits along the bases of the walls.

“Probably powered by nuclear energy,” Frigate said. “The same goes for the lamps.”

Burton wanted to set two-hour watches with two guards each.

“Why?” Tai-Peng said. “It’s evident that we’re the only ones around for twenty thousand miles.”

“We don’t know that,” Burton said. “We shouldn’t get careless now.”

Some agreed with the Chinese, but it was finally decided that they should take no chances. Burton picked the sentinels and appointed Nur to be Gilgamesh’s partner and himself as Ah Qaaq’s.

The Moor wasn’t likely to be taken by surprise; he had extraordinary perceptions of others’ attitudes and feelings; he could often tell by subtle body language what others intended to do.

It was possible that Nur was an agent or that Gilgamesh and Ah Qaaq were in cahoots. One might pretend to sleep until his colleague who was on watch attacked his partner.

The possibilities were numerous, but Burton had to take chances. He couldn’t do without sleep all the time.

What worried him most, though, was that X, if he was here, might take a small boat during the night and get to the tower ahead of the others. Once there, he would make sure that the entrance at the base couldn’t be entered.

Burton gave de Marbot, Alice’s partner for the first duty, his wristwatch. Then he lay down on his cloths, which were near the entrance to the tunnel. His loaded pistol was under his pillow. He had trouble getting to sleep, though he wasn’t the only one if the sighs and mutterings he heard were any indication. It wasn’t until the first two hours were almost over that he slid into an uneasy sleep. He kept starting awake; he had nightmares, some of them recurrences for the past thirty years. God, in the garments of a late Victorian gentleman, poked him in the ribs with a heavy cane.

“You owe for the flesh. Pay up.”

His eyes opened, and he looked around. Tai-Peng and Blessed Croomes were on guard now. The Chinese was talking in a soft voice to the black woman not ten feet from Burton. Then Croomes slapped his face and walked away.

Burton said, “Better luck next time, Tai-Peng,” and he went back to sleep.

When Nur and Gilgamesh were on watch, Burton roused again. He slitted his eyes so that they would think he was still sleeping. Both were in one of the big boats, sitting on the raised deck by the controls. The Sumerian seemed to be telling a funny story to the Moor, if Nur’s smiles meant anything. Burton didn’t like their closeness. All the very strong Gilgamesh had to do was to reach out and seize Nur’s throat.

The Moor, however, seemed very much at ease. Burton watched them for a while, then nodded off. When he awoke again, with a start, Nur was shaking him.

“Your watch.”

Burton rose and yawned. Ah Qaaq was standing by the shelves, eating bread and stew. He gestured at Burton to join him. Burton shook his head. He didn’t intend to get any closer to him than he had to. Stooping, he withdrew the pistol from under the pillow and placed it in his holster. Ah Qaaq, he noted, was also armed. There was nothing significant in this. The guards were supposed to carry their weapons.

Burton got within six feet of Ah Qaaq and told him he was going outside to urinate. The Mayan, his mouth full, nodded. He’d lost weight during the hard journey and now seemed determined to make up for it.

If he’s X pretending to be a compulsive eater, Burton thought, he’s certainly an excellent actor.

Burton went through the tunnel with frequent looks behind him and stops now and then to listen for footsteps. He didn’t turn on his lantern until he reached the cave. The lantern, set in the mouth on the sloping floor, beamed past him. The cold fog pressed wetly. Having finished his business quickly, he went back into the cave.

Now would be a good time for Ah Qaaq to sneak up on him. But he neither saw nor heard anything except the crash of waves against the rocks some distance away. When he cautiously returned, he found Ah Qaaq sitting with his back against the wall, his eyes half closed, his head drooping.

Burton moved over to the opposite wall and leaned against it. After a while, the Mayan stood up and stretched. He signaled that he was going out to the cave. Burton nodded. Ah Qaaq, his heavy dewlap bouncing, waddled out through the tunnel. Burton decided that he’d been overly suspicious. A minute later, he thought that he hadn’t been suspicious enough. What if the Mayan was X, and he had another cave nearby in which was a boat? It might be behind a narrow fissure, an opening to which Ah Qaaq could wade through the shallow water on the shelf.

Ten minutes went by, not an unreasonable time for the absence. Should he go after Ah Qaaq?

While Burton was trying to make up his mind, he saw the Mayan enter. Burton relaxed. The watch was half over, and the others would be in the more shallow phase of sleep and thus more easily awakened by noise.

Also, it would be logical for X to wait until the tower was entered. Here, he would have to deal with many. There, he would be on familiar ground.

When the six hours had passed, Burton aroused everybody. They went out to the sea in two groups according to sex and returned complaining about the cold. By then Burton and Ah Qaaq had poured water from the canteens into the cups provided by the grails and were ready to add the instant coffee which also heated the water. They drank and talked softly for a while and then ate breakfast. Some left for the sea again. Croomes insisted that it was a shame to allow skeletons to lie unburied. She made such a fuss that Burton thought it would be better to mollify her. A delay wasn’t going to make any difference anyway.

They trooped out with the bones and hurled them into the sea while Croomes said a long prayer over them. The skeleton nearest the tunnel had to be Blessed’s mother, but no one mentioned this, and she would certainly have wept if she had suspected it. Burton and some of the others knew from Paheri’s story that, when the Egyptians had come here, they’d found some pieces of scalp which hadn’t rotted away entirely. These had held black kinky hair.

They returned and loaded up one of the thirty-person boats with their possessions and sixty cans of food. Four men picked up the big but very light craft and carried it down the tunnel to the cave. Two men and two women brought out a smaller one to be attached by a rope to the other.

When asked why the extra was needed, he replied, “Just in case.”

He had no idea what the case might be. It couldn’t hinder them, though, to take extra precautions.

The last to leave the chamber, he gave it a final look. It was very quiet and eerie here with the nine glowing lamps and the empty boats. Would anyone follow them? He didn’t think so. This was the third expedition and the most successful, so far. Things went by threes. Then he thought of Joe Miller, who had twice fallen into the sea. Surely he wouldn’t do it again?

Not unless we give him a chance, he thought.

All but Ah Qaaq and Gilgamesh got into the big boat. They pushed it into the water, climbed aboard, and began drying off their feet. Burton had studied the picture-chart in the craft until he knew what to do by heart. He stood on the raised deck behind the steering wheel and punched a button on the control panel. A light sprang out from the surface of the panel itself, a glow which enabled him to see the buttons. They had no markings, but the diagram showed the location and purpose of each.

At the same time, a bright orange outline of a cylindrical shape, the tower, sprang out on a screen just above the panel.

“We’re ready,” he called back. He paused, punched another button, and said, “We’re off!”

“Off to see the Wizard of Oz, the Fisher King!” Frigate said. “Off to find the holy grail!”

“May it be holy,” Burton said. He burst out laughing. “But if it is, what are we doing there?”

Whatever the propulsive power was—there was no trembling of the boat from propellers nor wake from a jet—the vessel moved swiftly. Its speed was controlled by a curious device, a plastic bulb attached to the rim of the wheel on the right side. By squeezing or releasing his grip, Burton could control the speed. He turned the wheel until the image of the tower moved from the right to the center of the screen. Then he slowly increased the pressure on the bulb. Presently, the boat was cutting through the waves at an angle. Spray drenched those behind him, but he would not slow down.

Now and then he looked behind him. In the dark fog he could not even see to the stern of the boat, but its passengers were huddled closely at the edge of the control deck. They looked in their shroudlike cloths like souls being ferried by Charon.

They were as silent as the dead, too.

Paheri had estimated that it had taken Akhenaten’s boat about two hours to get to the tower. That was because he had been afraid to make the boat go at top speed. The sea, as reported by the Parseval radarman, was thirty miles in diameter. The tower was about ten miles in diameter. So there were only about twenty miles to go from the cave. The Pharaoh’s vessel must have crawled at ten miles per hour.

The tower rapidly grew larger on the screen.

Suddenly, the image burst into flame.

They were very close to their goal.

The direction sheet indicated that now was the time to punch another button. Burton did so, and two extremely bright bow-lamps shot their beams into the mists and lit upon a vast curving dull surface.

Burton released all pressure on the bulb. The boat quickly lost speed and started drifting away. Applying power again, he swung the boat around and headed it slowly for the dim bulk. He punched another button, and he could see a big port, thick as the door in a bank vault, open in the seamless side.

Light streamed out through the O.

Burton cut off the power and turned the wheel so that the side of the boat bumped against the lower side of the open port. Hands seized the threshold and steadied the boat.

“Hallelujah!” Blessed Croomes screamed. “Momma, I’ll soon be with you, sitting on the right hand of sweet Jesus!”

The others jumped. The stillness, except for the slight thudding of the boat against the metal, had been so impressive and their wonder that the way was finally open for them had been so overpowering, they felt that her cry was near sacrilege.

“Quiet!” Frigate shouted. But he laughed when he realized that no one could hear them.

“Momma, I’m coming!” Blessed shouted.

“Shut up, Croomes!” Burton said. “Or by God I’ll throw you into the water! This is no place for hysterics!”

“I’m not hysterical! I’m joyous! I’m filled with the glory of the Lord!”

“Then keep it to yourself,” Burton said.

Croomes told him he was bound for Hell, but she subsided.

“You may be right,” Burton said. “Let me tell you, though, that we’re all going to the same place now. If it’s Heaven, we’ll be with you. If it’s Hell…”

“Don’t say that, man. That’s irreverent!”

Burton sighed. She was, on the whole, sane. But she was a religious fanatic who managed to ignore the facts of life and also the contradictory elements in her faith. In this, she was much like his wife, Isabel, a devout Roman Catholic who had managed to believe in spiritualism at the same time. Croomes had been strong, enduring, uncomplaining, and always helpful during their struggles to reach this place except when she was trying to convert her crewmates to her religion.

Through the port he could see the gray-metaled corridor which Paheri had described. Of his companions who had collapsed near its end, there was no sight. Paheri had been too frightened to follow the others. He’d stayed in the boat. Then Akhenaten and his people fell to the floor, and the port had swung shut as silently as it had opened. Paheri had been unable to find the cave, and he had finally gone over the first of the cataracts in his boat and had awakened on some far bank of The River. But now there were no more resurrections.

Burton unbuttoned the strap on his holster.

He said, “I’ll go first.”

He stepped up over the threshold. Moving air warmed his face and hands. The light was shadowless, seeming to emanate from the walls, floor, and ceiling. A closed door was at the end of the corridor. The entrance port had been opened by thick gray-metal curving rods that disappeared inside a six-foot-high cube of gray metal by the outer wall. The base of the cube seemed to be part of the floor. No welding or bolts held it.

Burton waited until Alice, Aphra, Nur, and de Marbot had entered. He told them not to go more than ten feet from the port. Then he called out, “You fellows bring in the small boat!”

Tai-Peng said, “Why?”

“We’ll wedge it in the door. It should keep the door from swinging shut.”

Alice said, “But it’ll be crushed.”

“I doubt it. It’s made of the same substance as the grails and the tower.”

“It still looks awfully fragile.”

“The grails have very thin walls, and the engineers in Parolando tried to blow them up, to crush them with powerful machinery, and to dent them with triphammers. They had no effect whatsoever.”

The corridor light shone on the faces of the men in the boat below. Some looked surprised; some, delighted; some, emotionless. He wasn’t able to determine by their reactions who X might be.

Only Tai-Peng had questioned him, but that didn’t mean anything. The fellow was always wanting to know the why.

With the help of all, the vessel was lifted up and gotten halfway through the port. It was just wide enough to stick in the middle of the O, leaving room for those outside to crawl in underneath after they’d passed in the packs and tins.

Burton backed away as they came in one by one. He held his pistol in his hand, and he told Alice to bring hers out. The others, seeing the weapons trained on them, were astonished. They were even more so when he told them to put their hands on top of their heads.

Frigate said, “You’re X!”

Burton laughed like a hyena.

“No, of course not! What I’m going to do now is to root X out!”

45

Nur el-Musafir said, “You must suspect all but Alice of being X.”

“No,” Burton said, “some of you may be agents, and if you are, speak up. But I have seen the Ethicals in their Council, and there are only two in this group whose physiques resemble the person I think might be X!”

He waited. It became evident that if any were agents none was going to admit his or her identity.

“Very well. I’ll explain. It seems obvious that X was Barry Thorn and perhaps Odysseus. Thorn and the self-proclaimed Greek were short and very muscular. Both had similar features, though Odysseus’ ears stuck out and he was much darker. But these differences could be due to disguise-aids.

“The two Ethicals who resembled them were called Loga and Thanabur.

“Two of this group could be either. Or both. I believe, however, that the engineer Podebrad, who was killed on the Rex, was Thanabur. I admit that it could have been Loga. In any event, we’re not going one step further until I question—most severely—two of this group.”

He paused, then said, “These are Gilgamesh, the self-proclaimed king of Uruk of ancient Sumeria, and Ah Qaaq, the self-proclaimed ancient Mayan!”

Alice said in a low voice, “But Richard! If you press him too hard, he can just simply kill himself.”

Burton roared, “Did you hear what she said? No? She said that all X has to do to escape is to kill himself! But I know that he isn’t going to do that! If he does, he can’t carry out his plans, whatever they are! No more raising from the dead for him!

“Now…I’ve finally taken action because we are at a place where we can go no further without him. Only X knows how to cancel the gas or supersonic frequency or whatever that felled the Egyptians. And I want answers to my questions!”

“You’re desperate, man!” Tom Turpin said. “What if none of us is X? You’re skating on mighty thin ice.”

“I’m convinced that one of you is he,” Burton said. “Now…here is what I plan to do. If no one confesses, then I’ll knock you, Gilgamesh, and you, Ah Qaaq, out. You’re my prime suspects. And while you’re coming out of unconsciousness, I’ll hypnotize you. I found out that Monat Grrautut, the Arcturan, and the men who claimed to be Peter Jairus Frigate and Lev Ruach had hypnotized my friend Kazz. They’re not the only ones who can play at that game. I’m a master hypnotist, and if you’re concealing something, I will get it out of you.”

In the silence that followed, the others looked uneasily at one another.

Croomes said, “You’re a wicked man, Burton! We’re at the gates of Heaven, and you talk of killing us!”

“I said nothing about killing,” Burton said, “though I’m prepared to do it if I must. What I want is to clear up this mystery. Some of you may be agents. I implore you to step forward and confess. You have nothing to lose and much to gain. It’s too late now to attempt to hide things from us.”

De Marbot said, sputtering, “But…but, my dear Burton! You hurt me! I am not one of these damnable agents or Ethicals! I am what I say I am, and I’ll strike the man who calls me a liar!”

Nur said, “If one or both of them is guiltless, then you will have injured and insulted an innocent. It would be brutal to do so. Moreover, you’ll have made an enemy of a friend. Can’t you hypnotize them without violence?”

“I hate doing this as much as any of you,” Burton said. “Believe me when I say that. But an Ethical would be an excellent hypnotist himself, and no doubt his powers of resistance will be very strong. I must knock these two out so that they won’t have these powers, catch them when they’re half-witless.”

Alice said softly, “It is terribly brutal, Richard.”

“Now,” Burton said, “I want you to take out your weapons and drop them on the floor. Do it one by one and do it slowly. You, Nur, you be the first.”

The knives and pistols clattered onto the gray metal. When they were all disarmed, Burton told them to step back while Alice picked up the weapons. In a short while there was a pile of them against the wall behind him.

“Keep your hands on your heads.”

Most of their faces showed anger, indignation, or hurt puzzlement. The faces of Ah Qaaq and Gilgamesh were iron masks.

“Come to me, Gilgamesh,” Burton said. “When you’re five feet from me, stop. Then turn around.”

The Sumerian walked slowly toward him. Now he was glaring. He said, “If you strike me, Burton, you will have made an enemy forever. I was once the king of Uruk, and I am the descendant of gods! No one lays a hand on me without punishment! I will kill you!”

“I am indeed sorry to have to do this,” Burton said. “But surely you can see that the fate of the world is the issue. If we were in each other’s shoes, I would not blame you for what you were doing to me. I’d resent it, yes, but I’d understand it!”

“After you’ve found I’m innocent, you would do well to kill me! If you don’t, I’ll kill you! I speak the truth!”

“We’ll see.”

Burton planned, if the Sumerian was not X, to install a posthypnotic command that Gilgamesh forgive him when he came out of the trance. He would have ordered him to forget the injury, but the others would no doubt remind him of it.

“Place your hands on the back of your neck,” Burton said. “Then turn around. Don’t worry about being hurt too much. I know precisely just how much force I’ll need. You won’t be unconscious for more than a few seconds.”

Burton reversed the pistol and lifted it by its butt. Gilgamesh, bellowing “No!” whirled, his arms flying out from his neck, and his hand struck the pistol and tore it from Burton’s grip.

Alice should have fired then. Instead, she tried to beat the Sumerian on the back with her pistol barrel. Burton was very strong, but he went down under the herculean power of Gilgamesh and then was lifted up. He struck Gilgamesh in the face, making his nose bleed and bruising the skin. The Sumerian lifted him above his head and threw him against the wall. Stunned, Burton dropped to the floor.

The others were shouting and screaming, and Alice was yelling. But she managed to bring the butt of her weapon, now reversed, down on the head of Gilgamesh. He swayed, then began to crumple.

Ah Qaaq, swift despite his fat, ran by Alice, snatching the pistol from her hand, and continued toward the end of the corridor.

Though dazed, Burton struggled to get up, shouting, “Get him! Get him! He’s the Ethical! X! X!”

His legs felt as if they were balloons out of which the air was whistling. He slid back down against the wall.

The Mayan—no, no Mayan he—slammed his palm against the wall on his left. Immediately, the door at the end of the corridor slid into a recess in the wall.

Burton tried to note the exact location of the area that X had struck. The blow had undoubtedly activated machinery behind the wall. And since it opened the door, it also was inhibited from releasing whatever it was that had felled the Egyptians.

Nur, a small skinny dark flash, scooped up a pistol as he ran by the pile. Then he stopped, and he lifted the heavy weapon in both hands. The gun boomed. The projectile struck the side of the door as X went around it. Pieces of plastic flew through the exit and against the wall opposite. X fell, though only his black-clothed legs showed for a moment. Then they were gone.

Nur ran after him but stopped at the doorway. He leaned out cautiously, and at once jerked his head back. The bullet fired by X smashed itself against the wall just outside the door. Nur got down on his knees and looked around the exit again. Another boom. Nur seemed uninjured.

By then the others had picked up their weapons and were running toward the doorway.

Though regrets were useless, Burton regretted that he had not chosen Ah Qaaq first for hypnotism.

He called to Alice, who was bending over Gilgamesh, to help him up. Weeping, she came to him and pulled up on his wrists. His head was clearing, and his legs seemed steadier. He’d be all right in another minute.

He called, “Frigate! Tai-Peng! Turpin! Get Gilgamesh out of here! Everybody else! Out! Out before he closes the door!”

Nur yelled, “He’s gone now!”

The three men came running, and they picked the Sumerian’s heavy body and bore it toward the doorway. Burton leaned on Alice, his arm around her neck, and they followed the others. By the time he got to the exit, he felt recovered enough to tell Alice that he could go it by himself.

Turpin placed his grail in the doorway so the door couldn’t be fully closed. Just as Alice and Burton stepped into the corridor, the door shot back out of its recess, slammed into the grail, and stopped.

Nur indicated the blood on the floor by the doorway and the red spots farther along.

“The bullet smashed against the wall, but some of the fragments got him.”

The corridor ran both ways as far as they could see. It was illuminated by the shadowless light and was forty feet wide and fifty high by eye estimate. It gently curved to follow the roundness of the exterior. Burton wondered what was between the outer wall of the corridor and the outer wall of the tower. Probably, some of it was empty, but other spaces might contain machinery of some sort or storage facilities. At irregular intervals, at his eye level, the walls held bas-relief letters or symbols some of which superficially resembled runes and others Hindustani characters.

Burton left a bullet by the wall to mark the entrance if the door should somehow close.

Shortly after the bloodstains ceased, the trackers came across a bay in the center of which was a circular hole about a hundred feet across. Burton stood on the edge and looked down. Lights streamed out along the black shaft from many levels, other bays or rooms. He didn’t know how deep the shaft went, but he guessed that it was miles. When he got down on his knees, his hands gripping the edge, and looked up, he saw the same thing. However, the shaft could go up no more than a mile, the height of the tower from sea level.

By then Gilgamesh was recovering. He sat on the floor holding his head and groaning. After a minute, he looked up.

“What happened?”

Burton told him. The Sumerian moaned, then said, “And you didn’t strike me? It was the woman?”

“Yes, I apologize, if it will do any good. But I had to know.”

“She was only fighting to save her man. And since you did not hit me, there is no insult. Though there is plenty of injury.”

“I think you’ll be all right,” Burton said.

He forbore to say that he had hit Gilgamesh in the face. Truth could be sacrificed in this situation. He’d gone through his life making enemies because he didn’t care if he did and even got a certain satisfaction from it. But during the past twenty years he’d seen that he was behaving irrationally in this respect. Nur, the Sufi, had taught him that, though not directly. Burton had learned while listening to Nur’s conversations with his disciple Frigate.

“I think,” Burton said, “that X took a lift of some sort. I don’t see any, though. Nor do I see any controls to bring one up or down to here.”

“Maybe that’s because there isn’t any cage,” Frigate said.

Burton stared at him.

Frigate took a plastic bullet out of the bag that hung from his belt. He threw it twenty feet into the emptiness. It stopped as if it were in jelly at the level of the floor.

“Well, I’ll be damned! I didn’t think it was so, but it is!”

“What is?”

“There’s some kind of field in the shaft. So…how do you go where you want to? Maybe the field moves you according to a codeword.”

“That is good thinking,” Nur said.

“Thank you, master. Only…if one person wants to go down at the same time another wants to go up…? Maybe the field can do both simultaneously.”

If the shafts—there must be others—were the only way to get from one floor to another, they were trapped. All the Ethical had to do was to let them starve.

Burton became angry. All his life he’d felt caged and he had broken out of some of the cages, though the big ones had restrained him. Now he was on the verge of solving this great mystery, and he was trapped again. This one, he might not escape from.

He stepped out into openness, putting one foot down slowly until he felt resistance. When he’d determined that his weight was going to be held, he moved entirely into the shaft. He was near panic; anybody unfamiliar with the setup would be. But here he was, standing on nothing, apparently, and an abyss below him.

He stooped, picked up the bullet, and threw it to Frigate.

“Now what?” Nur said.

Burton looked up and then down.

“I don’t know. It’s not just like being in air only. There’s a slight resistance to my movements. I don’t have any trouble breathing, however.”

Since it made him more than just uneasy to stand there, he walked back to the solid floor.

“It’s not like standing on something hard. There is a slight give to my weight.”

They were silent for a while. Burton finally said, “We might as well go on.”

46

They came to another bay marked by characters in bas-relief and containing a lift shaft. Burton looked up and down this, hoping that he might see something to help them. It was as empty as the other.

When they had left this, Frigate said, “I wonder if Piscator is still alive? If only he’d come by…”

“If only!” Burton said. “We can’t live by if only, even if you do most of the time.”

Frigate looked hurt.

Nur said, “Piscator, as I understand it, was a Sufi. That may explain why he got through the gateway on top of the tower. From what I’ve heard, I’d venture that there’s some sort of force, analogous to an electromagnetic field, perhaps, that prevents those who haven’t attained a certain ethical level from entering.”

“He must have been different from most Sufis I’ve seen, yourself excepted,” Burton said. “Those I knew in Egypt were rogues.”

“There are true Sufis and false Sufis,” Nur said, paying no attention to the sneer in Burton’s voice. “Anyway, I suspect that the wathan reflects the ethical or spiritual development of the individuals and what it shows would make the repulsion field admit or deny entrance to a person.”

“Then how would X get in that way? He’s obviously not as ethically developed as the others.”

“You don’t know that,” Nur said. “If what he says about the other Ethicals is true…”

He stopped talking for a moment. Then he said, “If the gateway field admits only the highly ethical, then X made his secret room to avoid that field. But he must have done it when the tower was built, must have planned it before then. So that even then he knew he wouldn’t be admitted into the gateway.”

“No,” Burton said. “The others would have been able to see his wathan. If they did, they’d know that he had degenerated, changed, anyway. And they’d have known that he was the renegade.”

Frigate said, “Maybe the reason his wathan looked okay was that he had some device to distort it from its natural appearance. I mean…from the appearance it would have had if he hadn’t used some kind of distorter. That way, he’d not only have passed as normal among his fellows, he’d have fooled the gateway field.”

“That is possible,” Nur said. “But wouldn’t his colleagues know about distorters?”

“Not if they’d never seen or heard of one. It may have been X’s invention.”

Burton said, “And he had his hideaway so that he could leave the tower without anybody else knowing it.”

“That implies that there are no radar devices on the tower,” Frigate said.

“Well?” Burton said. “If there had been, they would’ve detected the first and second expeditions when they came down the ledge. The radar might also have spotted the cave, though I suppose its operators wouldn’t have thought anything about it if it had been noted. No, there was no radar scanning the sea and the mountains. Why should there be? The Ethicals didn’t believe that anybody would get that far.”

Nur said, “We all have wathans, if what the Council of Twelve told you was true. You saw theirs. What I don’t understand is why they couldn’t have tracked you down long before they did. Surely, a photograph of your wathan was in the records of that giant computer Spruce mentioned. I would suppose that everybody’s was.”

“Perhaps X arranged it so that the record in the computer wasn’t a true image of my wathan,” Burton said. “Perhaps that was why the agent Agneau was carrying a photograph of my physical person.”

“I think that the Ethicals must have scanner satellites up there,” Frigate said. “Maybe these could locate your wathan. But they couldn’t find it because your wathan was distorted.”

“Hmm,” Nur said. “I wonder if distorting the wathan also results in distorting its owner’s psyche?”

Burton said, “You may remember de Marbot’s report of Clemens’ analysis of the connection between the wathan or ka or soul, call it what you will, and the body? The conclusion was that the wathan is the essence of the person. Otherwise, it is irrelevant. It does no good to reattach the wathan to a duplicated body because the duplicate isn’t the same as the original. Similar to the nth degree, yes, but not the same. If the wathan or soul is the persona, the seat of self-consciousness, then the physical brain is not self-aware. Without the wathan, the human body would have intelligence but no self-awareness. No concept of I. The wathan uses the physical as a man uses a horse or an automobile.

“Perhaps the comparison isn’t correct. The wathan-body combination is more like a centaur. A melding. Both the man-part and the horse-part need each other for perfect functioning. One without the other is useless. It may be that the wathan itself needs a body to become self-conscious. Certainly, the Ethicals said that the undeveloped wathan wanders in some sort of space when it’s loosed by the body’s death. And then the wathan is not just unaware of its own self but of anything. It’s unconscious.

“Yet, according to our theory, the body generates the wathan. How, I don’t know, don’t even have a hypothesis. But without the body, a wathan can’t come into existence. There are embryo wathans in the body embryos, and infant wathans in the infant body. Like the body, the wathan grows into adulthood.

“However, there are two stages of adulthood. Let’s call the later stage super wathanhood. If a wathan doesn’t attain a certain ethical or spiritual level, it’s destined to wander forever after the body’s death, unaware of itself.

“Unless, as happened here, a duplicate body is made and by some affinity the wathan reattaches itself to the duplicate body. This duplicate body would be intelligent but would have no concept of I. The wathan attached to it would have the self-awareness. But it couldn’t have it until it interacted with the body.

“Without wathans, humans would have evolved from apes, would have had language, would have had technology and science, but no religion, yet would not have had any more knowledge of the self than an ant.”

Frigate said, “What kind of language would that be? I mean, try to imagine a language in which no pronouns for I and me exist. And probably no you or yours either. To tell the truth, I don’t think they’d develop language. Not as we know it, anyway. They’d just be highly intelligent animals. Living machines which would not depend upon instinct as much as animals do.”

“We can talk about that some other time.”

“Yeah, but what about the chimpanzees?”

“They must have had a rudimentary wathan which had a low-level consciousness of their I. However, it was never proved that apes did have language or self-awareness.

“The wathan itself can’t develop self-awareness unless it has a body. If the body has a stunted brain, then the wathan is stunted. Hence, it can attain only to a certain low ethical level.”

“No!” Frigate said. “You’re confusing intelligence with morality. You and I have known too many people with a high intelligence and low ethical development and vice versa to believe that a high IQ is a necessary accompaniment to a high moral quotient.”

“Yaas, but you forget about the will.”

They came to another bay. Burton looked along the shaft. “Nothing here.”

They walked on while Burton resumed the role of Socrates.

“The will. We have to assume that it’s not entirely free. It’s affected by events outside the body, its exterior environment, and by internal events, the inside environment. Injuries physical or mental, diseases, chemical changes, and so forth, can change a person’s will. A maniac may have been a good person before a disease or injury made him into a torturer and killer. Psychological or chemical factors may make multiple personalities or a psychic cripple or monster.

“I suggest that the wathan is so closely connected with the body that it reflects the body’s mental changes. And a wathan attached to an idiot or imbecile is itself idiotic or imbecilic.

“That is why the Ethicals have resurrected idiots and imbeciles elsewhere—if our speculations are correct—so that these may get special treatment. Through the medical science of the Ethicals, the retarded are enabled to have fully developed brains. Hence, they also have highly developed wathans with a full potentiality for a choice between good and evil.”

“And,” Nur said, “the opportunity to become super-wathans and so reunited with God. I’ve been listening carefully to you, Burton. I don’t agree with much of what you’ve said. One implication is that God doesn’t care about His souls. He wouldn’t allow them to float around as unconscious things. He has made provision for all of them.”

“Perhaps God—if there is one—doesn’t care,” Burton said. “There is no evidence whatsoever that He does.

“Anyway, I argue that the human being without a wathan has no free will. That is, the ability to make choices between or among moral alternatives. To surpass the demands of body and environment and personal inclination. To lift one’s self, as it were, by the self’s bootstraps. Only the wathan has the free will and the self-awareness. But I admit that it has to express these through the vehicle of the body. And I admit that the wathan closely interacts with and is affected by the body.

“Indeed, the wathan must get its personality traits, most of them, anyway, from the body.”

Frigate said, “Well then. Aren’t we back where we started? We still can’t make a clear distinction between the wathan and the body. If the wathan furnishes the concept of the I and the free will, it’s still dependent upon the body for its character traits and everything else in the genetic and nervous systems. These are actually images which it absorbs. Or photocopies. So, in that sense, the wathan is only a copy, not the original.

“Thus, when the body dies, it stays dead. The wathan floats off, whatever that means. It has the duplicated emotions and thoughts and all that which make up a persona. It also has the free will and the self-awareness if it’s reattached to a duplicate body. But it isn’t the same person.”

“What you’ve just proved,” Aphra Behn said, “is that there is no soul, not in the way it’s commonly conceived of. Or, if there is one, it’s superfluous, it has nothing to do with the immortality of the individual.”

Tai-Peng spoke for the first time since Burton had brought up the subject.

“I’d say that the wathan part is all that matters. It’s the only immortal part, the only thing the Ethicals can preserve. It must be the same thing as the ka of the Chancers.”

“Then the wathan is a half-assed thing!” Frigate cried. “A part only of me, the creature that died on Earth! I can’t truly be resurrected unless my original body is resurrected!”

“It’s the part that God wants and which he will absorb,” Nur said.

“Who wants to be absorbed? I want to be I, the whole creature, the entire!”

“You will have the ecstasy of being part of God’s body.”

“So what? I won’t be I anymore!”

“But on Earth you as an adult weren’t the same person you were at fifty,” Nur said. “Your whole being, at every second of your life, was and is in the process of change. The atoms composing your body at birth were not the same as when you were eight. They’d been replaced by other atoms. Nor were they the same when you were fifty as when you were forty.

“Your body changed, and with it your mind, your store of memories, your beliefs, your attitudes, your reactions. You were never the same.

“And when—or if—you, the creature, the creation, should return to the Creator, you will change then. It will be the last change. You will abide forever in the Unchanging. Unchanging because He has no need for changing. He is perfect.”

“Bullshit!” Frigate said, his face red, his hands clenched. “There is the essence of me, the unchanging thing that wants to live forever, however imperfect! Though I strive for perfection! Which may not be attainable! But the striving is the thing, that which makes life endurable, though sometimes life itself becomes almost unendurable! I want to be I, forever lasting! No matter what the change, there is something in me, an unchanging identity, the soul, whatever, that resists death, loathes it, declares it to be unnatural! Death is both insult and injury and, in a sense, unthinkable!

“If the Creator has a plan for us, why doesn’t He tell us what it is? Are we so stupid that we can’t understand it? He should tell it to us directly! The books that the prophets, the revelators, and the revisionists wrote, claiming to have authority from God Himself, to have taken His dictations, these so-called revelations are false! They make no sense! Besides, they contradict each other! Does God make contradictory statements?”

“They only seem contradictory,” Nur said. “When you’ve attained a higher stage of thinking, you’ll see that the contradictions are not what they appear to be.”

“Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis! That’s all right for human logic! But I still maintain that we shouldn’t have been left in ignorance. We should have been shown the Plan. Then we could make our choice, go along with the Plan or reject it!”

“You’re still in a lower stage of development, and you seem to be stuck in it,” Nur said. “Remember the chimpanzees. They got to a certain level, but they could not progress further. They made a wrong choice, and…”

“I’m not an ape! I’m a man, a human being!”

“You could be more than that,” Nur said.

They came to another bay. This, however, led not to a shaft but to an entrance, huge, arched. Beyond it was a chamber the enormity of which staggered them. It was at least half a mile long and wide. Within it were thousands of tables on each of which were devices the purposes of which were not obvious.

Skeletons by the hundreds lay on the floor and the upper parts of more hundreds were on the desks or tables. Thigh bones and pelvic bones lay on the seats of chairs, and beneath the seats were more leg bones. Death had struck instantly and en masse.

There wasn’t a single garment anywhere. The people working the experiments had been nude.

Burton said, “The Council of Twelve which interrogated me was clothed. Perhaps they donned their outfits so they wouldn’t offend my sense of modesty. If so, they didn’t know me well. Or perhaps they were required to wear garments when they were in session.”

Some of the equipment on the tables was still running. The nearest to Burton was a transparent sphere the size of his head. It was seemingly without an opening, yet large bubbles of different colors rose from its top, floated up to the ceiling, and burst. By the sphere was a transparent cube in which characters flashed as the bubbles ascended.

They walked on murmuring about the strangeness of the devices. When they’d gone a quarter of a mile, Frigate said, “Look at that!”

He pointed at a wheeled chair which sat in a broad aisle between tables. A jumble of bones, including a skull, lay on the seat, and leg and foot bones were at its base.

47

The chair was overstuffed and covered with a soft material marked with thin alternating pale-red and pale-green zigzagging lines. Burton brushed the bones from the seat with a callousness which drew a protest from Croomes. He sat down, noting aloud that the chair fitted itself to his body. On the top of each massive arm, near the end, was a wide metal circle. He gingerly pressed down on the back center of the white disc on his right. Nothing happened.

But when he pressed on the fingertip-thick center on the left, a long thin metal rod slid out.

“Aha!”

He pulled back slowly on the rod.

Nur said, “There’s a light coming from beneath the chair.”

The chair lifted soundlessly from the floor for a few inches.

“Press on the forward edge of the disc on your right,” Frigate said. “Maybe it controls the speed.”

Burton frowned because he did not like anyone telling him what to do. But he did use a fingertip to push the metal as suggested. The chair moved toward the ceiling at a very slow rate.

Ignoring the exclamations and several more suggestions, he pushed the lever to dead center. The chair straightened out at a horizontal level, continuing to move forward. He increased its speed, then moved the left-hand rod toward the right. The chair turned with the rod, maintaining its angle—no banking as in an airplane—and headed for the faraway wall. After making the chair go up to the ceiling and then down to the floor, whirling it a few times, and speeding it up to an estimated ten miles per hour, Burton landed the chair.

He was smiling; his black eyes were shiny with eagerness.

“We may have a vehicle to lift us up the shaft!” he cried.

Frigate and some of the others weren’t satisfied with the demonstration.

“It must be capable of even greater speed,” the American said. “What happens if you have to stop suddenly? Do you hurtle on out of the chair?”

“There’s one way of finding out,” Burton said. He made the chair lift a few inches, then accelerated it toward the wall, half a mile distant. When he was within twenty yards of the wall, he removed pressure from the right-hand disc. The chair at once slowed down but not so quickly that its passenger was in danger of being ejected. And when it was within five feet of the wall, it stopped.

When he returned, Burton said, “It must have built-in sensors. I tried to ram it into the wall, but it wouldn’t do it.”

“Fine,” Frigate said. “We can try to go through the shaft. But what if the Ethical is observing us now? What if he can cut off the power by remote control? We’d fall to our deaths or at least be stuck halfway between floors.”

“We’ll go one at a time. Each one will stop off at a floor before the next one goes. He won’t be able to catch more than one of us, and the others will be warned.”

Though Burton thought that Frigate was too cautious, he had to admit to himself that his speculations were well founded.

“Also,” Frigate said, “the two chairs must have been moving when their occupants died. What made the chair stop?”

“Obviously, the sensors in the chairs,” Burton drawled.

“Fine. Then we’ll each get a chair and find out how to get used to handling it. After that, what? Up or down?”

“We’ll go to the top floor first. I feel that the headquarters, the nerve center of these operations, must be there.”

“Then we should go down instead,” Frigate said, grinning. “Your predictions were always of the Moseilima type, you know. The opposite always happened.”

The fellow had his way of getting back at him. He knew too much about Burton’s Earthly life, knew all his faults and failings.

“No,” Burton said, “not true. I warned the British government two years before the Sepoy Mutiny happened that it was coming. I was ignored. I was Cassandra then, not Moseilima.”

“Touché!” Frigate said.

Gilgamesh pulled up his chair alongside Burton’s a few minutes later. He seemed troubled and not well.

“My head still hurts bad. I see things double now and then.”

“Can you make it? Or do you wish to stay here and rest?”

The Sumerian shook his massive taurine head.

“No. I wouldn’t be able to find you. I just wanted you to know that I’m sick.”

Alice must have struck him harder than she’d intended.

Tom Turpin called to Burton then. “Hey, I found out how they get their food here. Look!”

He’d been fiddling around with a big metal box which had many dials and buttons on it. It was set on a table and was connected by a black cable to a plug in the floor.

Turpin opened the glass-fronted door. Within were dishes and cups and cutlery, the dishes full of food and the cups full of liquid.

“This is their equivalent of the grail,” Tom said, his pale yellow face smiling. “I don’t know what any of the controls except this does, but I punched all the buttons and in a few seconds the whole meal formed before my eyes.”

He opened the door and removed the contents.

“Wow! Smell that beef! And that bread!”

Burton thought it would be best to eat now. There would probably be other devices like this elsewhere, but he couldn’t be sure. Besides, they were famished.

Turpin tried another combination of buttons and dials. This time, the meal was a mélange of French and Italian and Arabic cooking. All items were delicious, though some were undercooked, and the filet of camel’s hump was too highly spiced for most of them. They tried other combinations with some surprising results, not all delightful. By experimentation, Turpin found the dial which regulated the degree of cooking, and they were able to get the meal well-done, medium, medium-rare, or rare. All except Gilgamesh ate voraciously, drank some of the liquor, and lit up the cigarettes and cigars also provided by the box. There was no lack of water; faucets were all over the place.

Afterwards, they looked for toilets. These were in some nearby giant cabinets which they’d presumed had contained machinery. The toilets didn’t flush; they were holes into which the urine and excrement disappeared before they hit the bottom.

Gilgamesh ate some of the bread, then vomited it up.

“I can’t go with you,” he said. He wiped his chin and squirted water from his mouth into a sink. “I’m just too sick.”

Burton wondered if he were as ill as he said he was. He could be an agent and waiting until he could slip away.

“No, you go with us,” he said. “We might not be able to find our way back to you. You’ll be comfortable in your chair.”

He led the others to the shaft. When he took the chair out over the emptiness, he extended a foot to touch below it. His toes met no slight springiness as in the other shaft. Perhaps the presence of the chairs automatically removed the field.

He pulled the rod back and tipped the disc. The chair moved slowly upwards, then swiftly as Burton depressed the disc even more. At each bay he saw more corridors and some rooms. The latter were full of strange equipment, but there were no skeletons until he came to the tenth floor. The chamber he looked into was small compared to the one he’d left. It contained twelve large tables on each of which were twelve plates and twelve cups and some skulls and bones. Other bones lay on the chairs or at their feet.

A huge food-box was on a table in the corner.

Burton went on up, stopping now and then, until he arrived at the top of the shaft. The trip had taken fifteen minutes. On one side was another bay with a corridor outside. On his left was a small corridor which quickly opened into a giant one, at least one hundred feet square. After setting the chair down in the larger hallway, he leaned over the shaft and blinked his lantern three times. The answering flashes were tiny but sharp. Nur, the next one, would not make any stops and so would get to Burton in about twelve minutes.

Burton had never been patient except when it was absolutely necessary and often not then. He got back into the chair and moved down the hall. He’d take a six-minute tour and then return to the shaft.

He passed many open doors, all very large, giving him eye access to small and large rooms, some with equipment, some apparently for apartments. A number had many skeletons; some, a few; some, none. The corridor ran straight for at least two miles ahead of him. Just before it was time to return, he saw on his right an entrance with a closed door. He stopped the chair, got out, withdrew his pistol, and cautiously approached the door. Above it were thirteen symbols, twelve helices arranged in a circle with a sundisc in the center. There was no knob on the door. Instead, a metal facsimile of a human hand was attached to the door where a knob should have been. Its fingers were half closed as if about to seize another hand.

Burton turned it, and he pulled the door open.

The room was a very large, very pale-green semitransparent sphere surrounded by and intersected by other green bubbles. On the wall of the central sphere at one side was an oval of darker green, a moving picture of some sort. The odor of pine and dogwood rose from the trees in the background, and in the foreground a ghostly fox chased a ghostly rabbit. On the bottom of the largest sphere, or bubble, were twelve chairs in a circle. Ten contained parts of skeletons. Two were bare of anything, even dust.

Burton had to breathe deeply. This room brought back frightening memories. It was here that he had awakened after killing himself 777 times to escape the Ethicals. It was here that he had faced the Council.

Now those beings who had seemed so godlike to him were bones.

He put one foot beyond the threshold, poking it through the bubble with only a slight resistance. His body followed, feeling the same tiny push. Then his other foot came through, and he was standing on springy nothingness or what seemed to be nothingness.

He reholstered his pistol and passed through two bubbles, the surfaces closing behind him, but air moving past him, and then he was in the “Council room.” When he got near the insubstantial chairs, he saw that he’d been mistaken. One of the seemingly empty seats held a very thin circular convex lens. He picked it up and recognized the many-faceted “eye” of the man who’d seemed to be the chief of the Council, Thanabur.

This was no jewel, no artificial device to replace an eye, as he’d thought then. It was a lens which could be slipped over the eye. It felt greasy. Perhaps it was lubricated so it wouldn’t irritate the eyeball.

With some difficulty and revulsion, he inserted the lens under his eyelids.

The left eye saw the room through a distorting semi-opaqueness. Then he closed his right eye.

“Oooohhhh!”

He quickly opened the right eye.

He’d been floating in space, in a darkness in which distant stars and great gas sheets shone and there was the feeling, but not the direct effect, of unbelievable coldness. He’d been aware that he was not alone, though. He knew, without having seen them, that he was followed by uncountable souls, trillions upon trillions, perhaps far more. And then he was shooting toward a sun, and it became larger, and suddenly he saw that the flaming body was not a star but a vast collection of other souls, all flaming, yet burning not as in Hell but with an ecstasy that he’d never experienced and which the mystics had tried to describe but was indescribable.

Though shaken and afraid, he was also pulled fiercely by the ecstasy. Moreover, he could not allow his fear to overcome him, he who had boasted that he had never feared anything.

He closed his right eye and was again in space in the same “location.” Again, he was hurtling through space, far swifter than light, toward the sun. Again, he felt the innumerable presences behind him. The star swam up, grew larger, became vast, and he saw that the flames were composed of trillions upon trillions upon trillions of souls.

Then he heard a soundless cry, one of unutterable ecstasy and welcome, and he plunged headfirst into the sun, the swarm, and he was nothing and yet everything. Then, he wasn’t he anymore. He was something which had no parts and was not a part but was one with the ecstasy, with the others who were not others.

He gave a great cry and opened his eye. There were Alice and Nur and Frigate and his companions staring at him from the doorway. Trembling, he went to them through the bubbles. He was not so upset, however, that he did not notice that the Sumerian was missing nor that Alice was weeping.

He ignored their questions, saying, “Where’s Gilgamesh?”

“He died on the way up,” Alice said.

“We left him sitting in the chair in a room,” Nur said. “He must have had a brain concussion.”

“I killed him!” Alice said, and she sobbed.

“I’m sorry for that,” Burton said, “but it couldn’t be helped. If he was innocent, he shouldn’t have resisted. Perhaps he really was an agent.”

He put his arms around Alice and said, “You did what you had to do. If you hadn’t, he might’ve killed me.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve killed before, but those people were strangers attacking us. I liked Gilgamesh, and now…”

Burton thought it was best to allow her to weep out her guilt and grief. He released her and turned to the others. Nur asked him what he had been doing in the room. He told them of the lens.

“You must’ve been standing there for at least an hour,” Frigate said.

“Yes, I know, but the state seemed to last only a minute.”

“What about the aftereffects?” Nur said.

Burton hesitated, then said, “Apart from being shaken up, I feel…I feel…a tremendous closeness to all of you! Oh, I’ve been fond of some of you, but…now…I love all of you!”

“That must’ve been a shock,” Frigate murmured. Burton ignored him.

The Moor held up the multifaceted device and looked through it with his right eye closed.

“I see nothing. It has to be fitted next to the eye.”

Burton said, “I thought that the lens was something which only the chief of the twelve, Thanabur, would wear. I presumed that it was some sort of ritual token or emblem of leadership, something traditional. I may’ve been wrong. Perhaps everybody took a turn wearing it during the Council meetings. It may be that the lens gave all of them a feeling such as I had, a closeness and love for everybody in the room.”

“In which case, X was able to overcome that feeling,” Tai-Peng said.

“What I don’t understand,” Burton said, “is why the lens put me into a trance yet didn’t seem to affect Thanabur.”

“Perhaps,” Nur said, “the Councillors were used to it. After wearing it many times, they got only a mild effect from it.”

Nur fitted the lens under his eyelids and shut his right eye. Immediately, his face took on an expression of ecstasy, though his body remained motionless. When two minutes had passed, Burton shook the Moor by the shoulder. Nur came out of his trance and began weeping. But when he’d recovered and had taken the lens out, he said, “It does induce a state similar to that which the saints have attempted to describe.”

He handed the lens to Burton.

“But it’s a false state brought about by an artificial thing. It’s not the true state. That can only be attained by spiritual development.”

Some of the others wanted to try. Burton said, “Later. We may have used up time we sorely need. We have to find X before he finds us.”

48

They came to an enormous closed door above which were more of the untranslatable characters. Burton halted the train of chairs and got out of his. A button on the wall seemed to be the only obvious means of opening the doors. He pressed, and the two sections slid away from each other into recesses. He looked into a wide hall ending in two more huge doors. Burton pressed the button by that.

They looked into a domed chamber which had to be half a mile across. The floor was earth on which grew a bright green short-bladed grass and, further on, trees. Brooks ran through it here and there, their sources cataracts forty or fifty feet high. Flowering bushes were many, and there were flat-topped rocks which had served as tables, if the plates and cups and cutlery on them meant anything.

The ceiling was a blue across which wisps of clouds moved, and a simulacrum of the sun was at its zenith.

They walked in and looked around. Human skeletons lay here and there, the nearest around a rock. There were also the bones of birds, deer, and some catlike and doglike and raccoon-like animals.

“They must’ve come here to get back to Nature,” Frigate said. “A very reasonable facsimile thereof, anyway.”

They had reasoned that X had transmitted a radio code which had activated the tiny black ball in the brains of the tower-dwellers and caused poison to be released in their bodies. But why had the animals died?

Starvation.

They left the chamber. Before they had traveled a mile, they came across another curiosity, the most puzzling and awe-inspiring of all. A transparent outward-leaning wall on their left revealed a Brobdingnagian shaft. A bright shifting light flared from below. They got off the chairs to look down into the well. And they cried out with wonder.

Five hundred feet below them was a raging furnace of many differently colored shapes, all closely packed but seeming to pass through each other or to merge at times.

Burton shaded his eyes with a hand and stared into it. After a while he could occasionally distinguish the shapes of the things that whirled around and around and shot up and down and sideways.

He turned away, his eyes hurting.

“They’re wathans. Just like those I saw above the heads of the twelve Councillors. The wall must be of some material which enables us to see them.”

Nur handed him a pair of dark glasses.

“Here. I found these in a box on a shelf near here.”

Burton and the others put on the glasses and stared into the enormous well. Now he could see the things more clearly, the changing shifting colors in the always expanding-contracting shapes, the six-sided tentacles which shot out, flailed, waved, then shrank back into the body.

Burton, leaning out, his back pressed against the wall, looked up. The brightness showed him a ceiling of the gray metal about a hundred feet above him. He turned around and tried to see across to the other side of the well. He couldn’t. He peered down into it. Far far below was a gray solid. Or was it his imagination, an illusion created by the metamorphosing horde, that made him now think that the solidity was pulsing?

He stepped back, removed the glasses, and rubbed his aching eyes.

“I don’t know what this means, but we can’t stay here any longer.”

They’d passed a number of bays enclosing lift shafts with no upper passage. But after they’d gone a quarter of a mile, they came to one which extended up past their level.

“This may take us to the floor where the gateway is.”

Again, they waited until each person had gotten safely up the shaft before the next flew up.

The bay opened onto another corridor. There were thirteen doors along this, each an entrance into a very large suite of luxuriously furnished rooms. In one was a table of some glossy reddish hardwood on which was a transparent sphere. Suspended in it were three doll-sized shapes.

“Looks like Monat and two others of his kind,” Burton said.

“Something like three-dimensional photographs,” Frigate said.

“I don’t know,” Alice said. “But there seems to be a family resemblance. Of course, I suppose they’d all look alike to anyone not familiar with the race. Still…”

Croomes had not said a word for a long time. Her grim face had indicated, though, that she was struggling terribly to accept the reality of this place. Nothing here had been what she expected; there had been no welcoming choir of angels, no glory-blazing God on a throne with her mother standing at His right hand to greet her.

Now she said, “Those two could be his parents.”

There were many things to investigate in the rooms, but Burton hurried them on out.

They had gone about two hundred feet when they came to a bay, the first they’d seen on the right-hand wall. Burton got out from the chair and looked along the shaft. Its bottom was level with the floor; the top wasn’t more than fifty feet up.

Wisps of fog rushed across it, apparently drawn from the outside and through vents in the wall opposite.

He withdrew his head.

“That might lead to the dome on the outside, the one which only Piscator could enter.”

The Japanese had been intelligent and brave. He’d probably done as Burton had, tested the invisible field in the shaft, figured out that it would hold him, and then descended. But how could he have activated the field if he didn’t know the codeword or whatever it was that operated it?

However, this shaft was different from the others. It was very short, and there was only one way to go if you were at its top. Sensors might determine that the field was activated if someone came in from the top. The sensors could detect that there was only one person and that he wouldn’t be standing in the field unless he wanted to go down. To go up would require a codeword of some sort. Or maybe it didn’t, the bottom part of the field would act like the top, only in the reverse direction.

Where was Piscator?

To test his theory, Burton stepped into the shaft. After three seconds, he was lifted slowly upwards. At the top of the shaft, he stepped out into a short metal corridor. It curved near its end and undoubtedly opened into the corridor in the dome.

Fog billowed around the corner, but the lights were strong enough to pierce it.

He walked into the corridor and at once felt a very slight resistance. Its strength increased as he advanced struggling.

When he was panting and unable to go even an inch farther, he turned back. His way was unimpeded to the shaft. When he returned to the lower level, he gave a short report.

“The field works both ways,” he concluded.

The Moor said, “According to the Parseval report, there was only one entrance. Yet…there must be an opening, a door of some kind, for the aircraft to come in. There were none on top of the tower. I think, however, that they just weren’t visible. Also, there must be ethical fields in the entrances for the aircraft. Otherwise, anybody could go in that way. Including X. Surely he must have gone out on legitimate business from time to time in an aerial vessel.”

“You forget about the hypothetical wathan distorter,” Burton said. “That would’ve enabled X to get through the dome entrance, too.”

“Yes. I know that. What I’m getting at is that if we could find the hangar for the aircraft, and then find out how to operate them, we could leave here at any time we pleased.”

“They’d better be easier and simpler to fly than an airplane,” Frigate said.

“No doubt they are.”

“Say, I’ve got an idea,” Frigate said, grinning. “Piscator was a Sufi, and he had no trouble entering. You’re a Sufi and a highly developed ethicalist. Why don’t you go out and try to get back in through the dome?”

The Moor grinned back at him.

“You’d like to see if I really am as advanced as I should be, wouldn’t you? And what happens if I can’t get out? Or, if I do, can’t get back in? No, Peter. It would be a waste of time and an exhibition of pride on my part. You know that, yet you urge me to do it. You are teasing me. As a disciple, you sometimes lack the proper reverent attitude toward your master.”

They returned to their chairs and flew slowly down the curving corridor. Burton was beginning to feel that their tour was very informative, even if often puzzling, but useless. This was no way to go about finding X.

What else could they do? There were no directories on the walls, and they couldn’t read them if there were. It was frustrating and futile to proceed in this manner, yet they just couldn’t sit around in one place and hope that X would find them. If he did, he’d be armed with some irresistible weapon. No doubt of that.

On the other hand, they had been fortunate in locating the residences of the twelve and of Monat Grrautut and the dome entrance. Perhaps, the place where X did his experiments or a control center he used might be near his apartment.

They came to a closed door and passed it. There would be many thousands of such in this vast place. They couldn’t afford the time to open every one.

But when he was thirty feet beyond it, Burton raised his hand to signal a halt.

“What is it?” Alice said.

“I’ve a certain feeling, a strong hunch.”

He lowered the chair to the floor.

“I’ll just take a moment to check this out.”

He pressed a button on the wall by the door, and the door slid soundlessly into a recess. Beyond was a cavernous room with much varied equipment on tables and, against the walls, many cabinets. There was only one skeleton. A violent explosion had evidently caught someone as he was passing by a cabinet or doing something with it. The top of the cabinet had been blown off, judging from the outwardly twisted metal, the pieces of some glassy substance on the floor, and metal pieces inside the skeleton. It lay twenty feet out from the wreck, and under the bones were dark bloodstains.

Just beyond the skeleton the blast had knocked a star-shaped metal construction from the top of a table. It lay on the floor emitting what looked like many-colored heat waves.

Straight ahead of Burton and near the center of the room was a flying chair. It was on the floor and tenantless, one side to him, and fresh bloodstains on the arm.

Just beyond the chair was a great revolving disc on a cylinder about two feet high. Cabinets and consoles were on its perimeter. In the center was a fixed platform. A man sat on a chair of some semitransparent stuff in the middle of the fixed platform. Before him was a console with a sloping instrument panel and several live screens. He was adjusting a dial, his eyes fixed on the largest oscilloscope. His profile was to Burton.

Burton put a finger to his lips and with the other hand gestured at his companions to get off their chairs. Then he unholstered his revolver and indicated that the others should do the same.

The operator had long fox-red hair, a pale white skin, and the eye presented to Burton lacked an epicanthic fold. If the man hadn’t been so fat, Burton might not have identified him. Fat, however, couldn’t be removed in such a short time.

Burton walked slowly through the door and toward the man. The others were fanning out, their guns ready.

When they were within sixty feet of him, the man saw them. He reared up out of the chair, grimaced, and sat back down. His hand shot out, dived into a recess under the panel, and came out holding a strange-looking device. It had a pistollike butt for gripping, a barrel about a foot long and three inches in diameter, and a sphere at its end the size of a large apple.

Burton cried out, “Loga!”

He ran forward.

49

The Ethical rose again and shouted, “Stop! Or I’ll fire!”

They kept on running. He sighted along the barrel through the transparent sphere, and a thin scarlet line shot soundlessly from the sphere. Smoke curled up from the shallow arc drawn on the metal before the group.

They halted. Anything that could melt that metal was very impressive.

“I can cut you all into two with a single sweep of this,” Loga said. “I don’t want to. There’s been far too much violence, and I’m sick of it. But I will kill you if I must. Now…all of you turn around in unison and throw your weapons as far as you can toward the door.”

Burton said, “There are nine guns trained on you. You might get one or two of us, but you’ll be blown to bits.”

The Ethical smiled grimly.

“It looks like a Mexican standoff, doesn’t it?”

He paused. “But it isn’t, believe me!”

Croomes shouted, “No, it isn’t! You Satan, you fiend from Hell!”

Her pistol boomed. The scarlet beam flashed out from Loga’s weapon at the same time that eight other guns exploded.

Loga fell backwards. Burton ran, leaped upon the revolving disc, darted over it to the fixed platform, and pointed his revolver at the prostrate Ethical. The others crowded around him.

While Turpin and Tai-Peng picked up the bleeding and ashen-skinned man from the floor, Burton seized the sphere-ended weapon. Loga was seated roughly in his chair. He held his hand over a gushing wound on the biceps of his right arm. “He got Croomes!” Alice said, pointing. Burton looked once at the severed body and turned away.

Loga looked around as if he couldn’t believe what had happened, then said, “There are three boxes in the upper right-hand drawer in the console. Bring them to me, and I’ll be all right in a few minutes.”

“This isn’t a trick?” Burton said.

“No! I swear! I’ve had enough of tricks and murder! I meant you no harm! I just wanted you to be disarmed so that I could explain without worrying about you. You’re such a violent breed!”

“Look who’s talking,” Burton said.

“I didn’t do it because I loved it!”

“Neither did we,” Burton said, but he wasn’t so sure that he was wholly truthful.

They brought out three silver boxes set with green emeralds. Burton opened each one slowly and inspected the contents. As the Ethical had said, each contained a bottle. Two held liquid; one, some pink stuff.

“How do I know they won’t release some sort of gas?” Burton said. “Or that they aren’t poison?”

“They won’t be,” Nur said. “He does not want to die now.”

“That’s right,” Loga said. “Something terrible may happen soon, and only I know how to stop it. I may need your help.”

“You could have had it all along,” Burton said, “if only you’d told us the truth in the beginning.”

“I had my reasons for not doing so,” Loga said. “Very good reasons. And then things got out of hand.”

He squeezed one of the bottles, and a clear liquid spurted out onto his hand. After rubbing it over the wound on his shoulder, wincing at the pain, he drank from the second bottle. From the third he poured out a pink gooey substance into his left hand and then pressed it over the wound.

“The first was to sterilize the wound,” he said. “The second was to cancel the shock and give me strength. The third will heal the wound in a very short time. Three days.”

Burton said, “Where did we wound you the first time?”

“The only bad wound was in my left thigh.”

His grayness of skin had been replaced by a normal color within a minute. He asked for some water, which Frigate brought to him. Burton lit a cigarette. His questions were a logjam in his throat. Which one should he spit out first?

Before the inquisition, though, certain things had to be done. Burton held his revolver on Loga while the others brought their chairs in and Frigate made an extra trip to get Burton’s. These were placed on the floor on the side of the disc where they’d be out of sight of Croomes’ body. While this was being done, Loga was allowed to lift his bloodstained chair to a designated spot. The other chairs were then arranged closely in a semicircle facing the Ethical.

“I think we could all stand a little drink,” Burton said.

Loga told them how to set the controls of a grail box to get their orders filled. His own was a yellow wine which the others had never found in their grails. Burton duplicated Loga’s request and tasted the wine. It was comparable to nothing he’d ever had before, delicate yet pungent. For some reason it evoked a slowly receding tide of dark green waters above which flew giant white birds with crimson beaks.

Burton sat with Loga’s weapon across his lap. His first question was how it was operated. Loga indicated the safety lock and the trigger, the use of which Burton had figured out for himself.

“Now,” he said, “I think it best that we start out at the beginning. But what is the beginning?”

“Pardon me for interrupting,” the Moor said. “We should establish one thing right now. Ah Qaaq…Loga…you must have a private resurrection chamber in the tower?”

“Yes.”

The Ethical hesitated. “It wasn’t just for me. Tringu also used it. He was my best friend; we were raised together on the Gardenworld. He was the only one I could trust.”

“Was he the man called Stern who tried to kill Firebrass before the Parseval took off the tower?”

“Yes. He failed, as you know. So, when I saw that Firebrass was going to get into the tower ahead of me…and Siggen was too, I had to kill them both. Siggen had not told Firebrass who I was. She believed me when I told her that I’d abandon my plans and throw myself on the mercy of the Council. But only after we’d gotten to the tower and the Council was resurrected. She never would have agreed if I’d not lied, not told her that I’d put an inhibit on communication with the computer and that only I could break it. She said she wouldn’t tell Firebrass about me until we were in the tower. But she then made arrangements to be in the tower ahead of me with Firebrass. She meant to check up on the truth of what I’d told her. Also, I was afraid that while she and Firebrass were in the helicopter on the way to the top of the tower, she’d change her mind and tell Firebrass. So…I set off the bomb I’d planted in the copter just in case…”

“Who’s Siggen?” Alice said.

“My wife. The woman posing as Anya Obrenova, the Russian airship officer.”

“Oh, yes,” Alice said as tears ran down Loga’s cheeks.

“It’s obvious that your people found your private resurrector and deactivated it. Otherwise, you’d have killed yourself and been translated to the tower. Have you reactivated your resurrector?”

“Yes. Actually, I have two. But both were located and deactivated.”

Burton said, “Then if we’d killed you just now, you’d have escaped us. Why didn’t you let us do it? Or kill yourself?”

“Because, as I said, I may need you. Because I’m sick of this violence. Because I owe you something.”

He paused. “I’d set up an inhibition in the general lazarus machinery long ago. It’d be activated at my signal, the same signal which would kill all within the tower, the underground chambers, and in the area of the sea. But Tringu and I had our private lines. One of them was in the room at the base of the tower. Sharmun, the woman in charge in Monat’s and Thanabur’s absence, told me that the two rooms had been found. She said that it would do no good to commit suicide in the hope that I could rise in the tower and continue my evil deeds. Me! Evil!”

“This is getting confusing,” Burton aid. “Start at the very beginning.”

“Very well. But I’ll have to be as brief as possible. By the way, where is Gilgamesh?”

Burton told him.

The Ethical said, “I’m sorry.”

He paused, then said, “Like his mythical counterpart, he failed to find the secret of immortality.”

Loga rose, saying, “I just want to see the screens. I won’t go near them.”

They kept their weapons trained on him while he limped to the edge of the revolving platform. It was useless to keep him in their sights, Burton thought. He could elude them at any time by making them kill him if he was telling the truth.

Loga limped back to his chair and eased himself into it.

“We may be able to do something. I don’t really know. We do have some time, though. So…”

He began in the beginning.

When the universe was young, when the first inhabitable planets had formed after the explosion of the primal ball of energy-matter, evolution brought about a people on one planet who differed from those on other planets.

“I don’t mean just in physical construction. All the sentient peoples have either bipedal or centaurine bodies, hands, stereoscopic vision, and so forth. They were intelligent but had no consciousness of self, no concept of the I.”

“We speculated on that!” Frigate said. “But…”

“You must interrupt as little as possible. I’m telling the truth when I say that all sentient beings throughout the universe were without self-awareness. As far as we know, anyway. I know it’s very difficult for you to believe. You can’t conceive of such a state. But it was and is true—with exceptions now.

“The people who differed did not differ in their lack of self-awareness in the beginning of their history. They were like the others in this respect. However, they did have science, though they didn’t go about dealing with it as self-aware sentients do.

“Nor did they have a concept of religion, of gods or of a God. That comes only with an advanced stage of self-awareness.

“Luckily for these people, called by those who followed them The Firsts, one of their scientists had accidentally formed a wathan during an experiment.

“It was the first indication The Firsts had that there was such a force as extraphysical energy. I use the term extraphysical to avoid any confusion with paraphysical, with such evidently existing but usually uncontrollable and elusive forces as telepathy, telekinesis, and other extrasensory perception phenomena.”

Burton forbore saying that it was he who’d coined the term ESP on Earth, though he’d called it extra-sensuous perception.

“The wathan may be a form of this, but, if so, it’s the only one that’s controllable. This nameless scientist who accidentally generated a wathan from the extraphysical forces did not know what it was. He or she continued to experiment and generated more. I say generated because the equipment he was using formed the wathan from the extraphysical energy. Shaped it or perhaps plucked it from the field that exists in the same space as matter but usually doesn’t interact with it.

“The first wathans probably attached themselves to the living beings in their proximity.”

“All living creatures?” Nur murmured.

“All living individuals. Insects, trees, starfishes, all. After millions of years of experiments, we still don’t know why the wathans are attracted to life energy. One of the hundreds of theories is that life itself may be a form of extraphysical energy. An interface, rather.

“The effect of the attachments was not immediately noted. The wathan was the source and genesis of self-awareness. But it could not develop this except through living entities, and these had to have highly developed nervous systems if the potentiality for self-awareness was to be realized.

“But that also can’t be realized if the wathan attaches itself to a human entity beyond the initial zygote stage. Beyond the fusion of spermatozoon and ovum. Don’t ask me why. Just believe me when I say that it’s true. Apparently, there is a hardening in the entity, a resistance to the interface.

“The machine spat out billions of wathans during the experiments. Millions attached themselves to the zygotes of the sentients. And, for the first time in the universe, as far as anybody knew, self-awareness was born. Infants grew up with this, and neither the older nor the younger generation could understand that this was unique and new. Self-aware children and youths have always had difficulty understanding the adults, but never before had there been such an empathy gap, such lack of comprehension.

“Eventually, the unself-conscious people died out. It wasn’t until twenty-five or so years after the first wathan was formed that the reason for self-awareness was discovered. Then it became a matter of necessity to keep producing wathans.

“Centuries passed. Space flight via rockets came. After several centuries, a new form of propulsion was discovered. Interstellar flight became possible at speeds unheard of before when a method of sidepassing matter was invented. Even so, it took seven days of Earth-time to go a lightyear.

“The old science-fiction concept of going through other dimensions was realized?” Frigate said.

“No. But we don’t have the time for the necessarily lengthy explanation of it.

“By then The Firsts thought it was their ethical duty to bring immortality and self-awareness via the wathan to all other sentient people. Many expeditions set out to do this. When one found a planet with people whose brains were capable of developing self-awareness, wathan-generating machines were buried so deep in the earth that it was unlikely that they would be discovered by the aborigines.”

“Why hidden?” Nur said. He was pale; he looked as if he’d been hard hit by Loga’s revelations.

“Why hidden?” Loga said. “Why not just give the machines to the first self-aware generation? You should know why not. Consider your fellow human beings. The wathan generators would have been misused. There would be power struggles to monopolize them and through them the basest exploitation of others. No, the wathan generators can’t be entrusted to people until they attain a certain ethical stage.”

Burton didn’t ask why The Firsts hadn’t set up garrisons on each planet to insure that the generators were the property of all. With their scientific knowledge and ethical knowledge, they could have taught the aborigines to advance much more swiftly. But The Firsts would not consider that ethical. Besides, they wouldn’t have enough of their own people to rule all the planets they found.

The faces of his companions reflected an agonizing struggle, though Frigate seemed the least affected. Nur, who had always been so flexible, so invulnerable to psychological shock, was suffering the worst. He could not accept the idea that wathans, call them souls, were synthetic. Well, not quite that. But they were formed by humanlike creatures through machines. They did not come parceled out by Allah. Nur had believed this far more deeply than some of the others who, though religious, had not had his firmness of faith.

Loga must have been aware of this.

He said, “There is no Creator unless we accept the creation, this universe, as evidence. The Firsts did, and we do. But there is no evidence whatsoever that It has any interest in Its creatures. It…”

“It?” Alice and de Marbot said.

“Yes. The Creator has no sex—as far as we know. The language of Monat’s people has a unique neuter pronoun for the Creator.”

“His people are The Firsts?” Tai-Peng said.

“No. The Firsts have Gone On long, long ago. Monat’s people are the recipients of The Firsts’ work through a line of five other peoples. These, you might say, have handed on the torch to others and then Gone On. Monat himself is just one of ten thousand of his own kind yet alive. The others have all Gone On.

“Some theologians say that the Creator has not done anything Itself to give Its sentient creatures wathans. Its divine plan leaves it to sentients to make their own salvation. But this isn’t logical, since it was only an accident that the wathans were generated, and billions died with no chance of self-awareness or immortality before this. And billions, perhaps trillions, have died and will die, perished forever, before we Ethicals will have arrived to give them the wathans. So it looks as if the Creator is also indifferent to our self-awareness and immortality.

“It is up to sentients, however, wherever they live, to do what the primitive religionists believed was the Creator’s prerogative.”

50

Burton was much shaken, though he found the story perhaps easier to take than any of the rest, Frigate excepted. He’d always been intensely interested in religion. He’d investigated many faiths, especially the Oriental. He’d converted to Roman Catholicism, not only because it fascinated him but because doing so had gotten his wife Isabel off his back. He’d been initiated into the mysteries of Moslem Sufism, had earned the red thread of a Brahmin, had been a Sikh, and a Parsi, and had tried to convince the shrewd Brigham Young that he wanted to be a Mormon. Though he’d acted like a sincere convert and sometimes had surprisingly been overcome by patterned emotion, he’d always left the door of the faith as he’d gone in, a congenital infidel.

Even when he was very young, he had refused to accept the tenets of the Anglican Church. He’d infuriated his parents, and not even the enraged bellowings of and the thrashings given by his father had changed his mind. They had made him tend to keep his opinions and his questions to himself until he had gotten old enough that his father didn’t dare attack him by word or fist.

Despite this, the orthodox concept of the soul and of its Donor had seeped through his being. Though he hadn’t believed it, he hadn’t thought of any other, and it hadn’t been until recently that he had heard of one.

As that exasperating fellow Frigate had told him more than once when Burton was angry with him, he was a broad but not deep thinker. Nevertheless, the logical extrapolation of the concept of the soul he’d heard when with Frigate and the others had impressed him. Indeed, they had convinced him.

Loga’s account was a shock. Not one, though, which stirred the depths of his mind. These had already been disturbed. So, next to Frigate, he was the one who could most accept this extraordinary history.

Loga continued, “It was Monat’s people who came to Earth and set up the wathan generators. This would be, approximately, 100,000 B.C.”

Frigate said, moaning, “And all those who’d lived before? Beyond saving? Gone? Forever?”

“Enough thought and grief have been expended on them,” Loga said. “There is nothing you can do about them, so don’t be self-sadistic. As you Americans say, tough shit. It sounds callous, but it’s the attitude you must adopt if you don’t wish to torment yourself needlessly. Better that some may be redeemed than none at all.”

The wathan generators and the wathan catchers were buried far down, so deep that they were surrounded by a heat that would melt nickel-iron.

“Catchers?” Aphra Behn said softly.

“Yes. There is one in a big shaft in the tower. Did you see it on your way up here?”

Burton said, “We saw it.”

“That is the very grave problem, the pressing problem which I shall get to after a while.”

From that time on, the wathans fixed themselves to or integrated with the human zygotes. When a zygote or an embryo or any of any age died, their wathans were attracted to the buried machine and caged.

“So what the Church of the Second Chance preaches is not entirely true?” Burton said.

“No. It was I who came to Jacques Gillot, La Viro, and told him what we thought he should know. I didn’t reveal more than half the truth, and I lied about some things. It was justifiable because you Valleydwellers were not ready for the full truth.”

“That’s debatable,” Burton said.

“Yes. What isn’t? But I did tell Gillot that the salvation of the wathan depended upon its attaining a certain ethical stage. That was no lie.”

Monat’s ancestors came from a planet of a star which was neither Tau Ceti nor Arcturus. They had found a planet which had no sentients as yet, and they had made it into the Gardenworld.

“After about ten thousand years, they began resurrecting the dead children of Earth.”

“Including the miscarriages and abortions, et cetera?” Burton said.

“Yes. These were developed into full-term infants. I should say, were and are being. When I left the Garden, all those who’d died under the age of five before approximately A.D. 1925 had been resurrected.”

The Gardenworld project had started during the tenth century B.C. The Riverworld project had begun in the late twenty-second century A.D.

Frigate said, “What century is it now in Terrestrial chronology?”

“When I left the Garden for here it was, let’s see, umh, to be precise A.D. 2009. It took me one hundred and sixty Terran years to arrive here. It took fifty years to reform this planet. The wholesale resurrection day took place twenty-seven years after that. That would be, A.D. 2246. It is now, I’m not sure about this, A.D. 2307.”

“My God!” Alice said. “How old are you?”

“This is really irrelevant now,” Loga said. “But I was born sometime during the twelfth century B.C. In that city which you call Troy. I was a grandson of the king Homer called Priamos. I wasn’t quite five years old when the invading Akhaiwoi and Danawoi took the city, sacked and burned it, and slaughtered most of its people. I would’ve become a slave, I suppose, but I defended my mother. I stuck a spear into the leg of a warrior, annoying him so much that he killed me with his bronze sword.”

Loga shuddered.

“At least, I didn’t have to see her and my sisters raped and my father and brothers butchered.”

Monat and his people raised several generations of Terrestrial children. After this, many of Monat’s people left for other planets. Monat and some others stayed to supervise the human adults who’d grown up in the Garden and were now taking their turn in raising new generations. Monat had left the Garden, however, to accompany the human beings to the Riverworld.

“We sometimes referred to him as the Operator because he was head of the project and chief engineer of the biocomputer.”

“The computer which Spruce mentioned?” Burton said. “The giant protein computer?”

“Yes.”

“Spruce lied to us in other things, though,” Burton said. “He said he was born in the fifty-second century A.D. and that a sort of chronoscope was used to record the bodies of those who’d died.”

“We all had the same false stories if we should somehow get caught and were forced to talk. Of course, we could kill ourselves, but, if there was a chance of escaping, we’d stay alive. Anyway, when you questioned Spruce, Monat was present, and he led Spruce along, fed him the questions which had prepared answers.”

“We’ve figured that out,” Burton said.

“How do you record the dead?” Nur said.

“The wathans contain everything that the body contains. That is, the records of the body, including the brain, of course, and this recording is the basis for duplication of the body.”

“But…but,” Frigate said. “Then the duplicates, the resurrected, wouldn’t be the same as the dead model! They’d just be duplicates!”

“No. The wathan is the source and the seat of self-awareness. That is not a copy. The wathan leaves the dead body, takes its self-awareness with it. But it is unconscious, most of the time, anyway. There are some indications that, under certain conditions and for a brief time, the wathan may be conscious after leaving the body. But we don’t have enough evidence to state definitely that this can occur. This newly enfleshed wathan may be hallucinating.

“Anyway, the wathan furnishes all the data we need to make a new body, and then it attaches itself to the duplicate.”

Burton wondered how many times this information would have to be repeated to some of the group before it was finally accepted.

“Why did you decide to carry out your own project?” Nur said.

Loga grimaced.

“I’ll talk about that later.

“The planet was reformed into a Rivervalley many millions of miles long. The tower and the underground chambers were constructed at the same time. The wathans were fed into the duplicate bodies made in the underground places. The physical defects of the bodies were rectified. Any metabolic disturbances were corrected. Dwarfs and midgets were given a normal height, but pygmies retained their original height. The wathans were attached to the bodies during this process, but the bodies had no self-awareness since the brains of the duplicates were kept unconscious. Nevertheless, the wathans were recording changes. Then, the duplicates were destroyed and, on general resurrection day, the bodies were duplicated again but along the banks of The River.”

“My premature awakening in the chambers?” Burton said. “Was that an accident?”

“Not at all,” Loga said. “I was responsible for that. You were one of those I’d picked to help me in my plan—if it ever became necessary that I’d need your help. I caused you to be awakened so that at least one of the group would have some inkling of what was being done to you people. It would also fire your determination. You have a vast curiosity; you would never be satisfied until you got to the bottom of this mystery.”

“Yes, but when you visited us, you lied to us,” Nur said. “You told us you’d picked only twelve. As it’s turned out, you must have chosen many more than that.”

“In the first place, I wasn’t the only one who visited you. Sometimes, Tringu did. He was completely with me in my objections to some features of this project. He was the only one I could trust. I couldn’t even tell Siggen what I was doing.

“In the second place, I couldn’t limit the group to twelve. Chance alone was against that few ever getting to the tower, if I needed them for what I had in mind. So, I actually chose one hundred and twenty-four. I lied to you about the number because, if you were ever caught by my people, you’d not be revealing the full truth.

“That is also why I didn’t reveal everything to you and why I lied about some things. If you’d been caught and your memories were read, you’d not be able to give them the complete plan. And you’d have contradictory stories.

“That is why, posing as Odysseus, I told Clemens that the renegade who’d visited me had claimed to be a woman.”

Loga had awakened only one of his chosen group because that could be read by the Ethicals as an accident. More than one would arouse suspicion. But he’d made a mistake in arousing even one. Monat had investigated Burton’s case, and, while he couldn’t prove that someone had tampered with the resurrection machinery, he was on the lookout for more “accidents.”

Loga had become very anxious when Monat said that he meant to be resurrected near Burton and to accompany him for a while. Monat also wished to study the lazari closely, and to do this he had to make up an acceptable story to account for his presence. Why not do both at the same time?

Loga hadn’t warned Burton about this. He was afraid that Burton, knowing Monat’s real story, might be self-conscious and act peculiarly. Or, even worse, try to take matters in his own hands.

“I would’ve,” Burton said.

“I thought so.”

“I don’t like to interrupt,” Nur said. “But do you know what happened to the Japanese, Piscator?”

Loga grimaced again, and he pointed to the wrecked equipment along the wall and the skeleton near it.

“That’s what’s left of Piscator.”

He swallowed, and he said, “I didn’t think that any Valleydweller would ever get to the top of this tower. The odds against it made it very improbable, though not absolutely impossible. I knew that the Parolanders might build an airship, but even so, how would they get into the tower? Only a highly advanced ethical person could enter. That wasn’t likely, but it was possible. As it happened, one man from the Parseval did get in.

“So, just to make sure, or try to make sure that if someone like Piscator did enter, I put bombs in the cabinets along the wall and also in the cabinets in the revolving platform. Not just in this room. There are more in another control room past the apartments in the opposite direction. The bombs were explosives which were formed into instrument panels. Whichever direction the intruder took, he’d see a control room and go in. His curiosity would drive him to do so. He’d see screens still operating and the skeletons of those who’d been working in it.

“The sensors in the bombs would allow the bombs to go off only if the intruder’s brain didn’t contain the little black ball, the suicide mechanism.”

“Piscator wasn’t one of your recruits, was he?” Nur said.

“No.”

“If I’d been on the airship and had gotten in, I’d have been killed.”

Burton wondered briefly why Loga hadn’t planted bombs in the secret room at the base. Then he realized that if Loga had done so and he’d been with the expedition, as he had, he, too, would’ve been killed.

“Did you deactivate the bombs when you came here?” Burton said. He was thinking of the control room with the open door they’d passed before arriving at the apartments.

“I did in this room.”

Loga continued his narrative. He had made a wathan distorter to enter the tower and also to deceive the scanner satellites. And he had fixed the computer so that it couldn’t notify the Council when Burton died and a duplicate body was being made for him.

“That’s why you were able to kill yourself so many times and still elude the Council. But Monat sent word via an agent to inspect the place where your preresurrection duplicate would be made so that your fatal wounds could be repaired. The circuits were traced back to the inhibit I’d installed. That’s why, the last time you committed suicide, you were caught.”

In the frantic search to find out the identity of the renegade, the Council had agreed to submit themselves to the memory scanner. Loga had anticipated this, and he had fixed the computer so that it would show a false memory track.

“You understand that I couldn’t do this for my entire track by any means. Only those memory sections for the times when we had to account for our absences were scanned. Even that took much time and hard work, but I did it.”

The time came which Loga dreaded so much and hoped would not come. He had arranged for that, but he did not want to have to carry out his arrangements. It hurt him severely to do it.

“Monat decided that he would be picked up at night soon and return to the tower. At the same time, you, Burton, would be taken along for a complete scan of your time in The Valley. I think that Monat suspected that the renegade, I, had fixed it so that your memory of your questioning by the Council had not been removed. Also, the violence around him in The Valley was increasingly sickening him. He needed a vacation.”

51

Loga was flying to the tower, having just completed a legitimate mission, when the two hidden resurrectors were found. At the same time, the engineers had discovered more evidence of Loga’s tampering with the computer.

Monat, Thanabur, and Siggen were in The Valley then. The other Councillors sent out aircraft to pick them up and to give them the news. However, the Council had made an error in judgment. Instead of waiting until Loga arrived and then confronting him, they sent a message to him. He was told to expect arrest when he got home.

“It took me half an hour to work up my nerve to do what I’d long planned and had known that I must someday do. But I’d hoped I’d be in the tower when I had to do it.”

He’d sent out a signal which had activated the codeword in the little black balls in the brains of those in the tower and the sea around it. They had made a mistake when they used one code instead of individual codes.

“But I also made a mistake when I didn’t send the code down into The Valley. I’d thought of it, but I didn’t want to kill any more than I had to. Also, I thought that those Ethicals in The Valley would be helpless. They couldn’t get out to the tower, since I’d fixed it so that the signal also deactivated the aircraft. Those left in The Valley would have to try to get to the tower the hard way. By boat until they got to the headwaters and on foot over the mountains. Long before then, I’d have done what I had to do.”

“But what if the aircraft had fallen into The Valley?” Nur said.

“They wouldn’t. Before they hit the surface they’d have burned up.

Those parked on top of the mountains along The Valley would have burned, too. I’d arranged that.”

“How did their pilots get down the mountain and back up to the parked vehicles?” Nur said.

“The ships could be directed by remote control. They’d drop the pilots off in the foothills during a storm or hard rain and return to the mountain top. The pilot would bury the control if he was going to stay in the area or he’d carry it in his grail. It looked just like one of the cups found in all the grails.”

There was nothing to stop Loga then from flying to the tower. But he’d underestimated the wiliness of Monat.

“At least, I believe it was he who took those countermeasures. He must have put into the computer all that had happened and had gotten a list of probabilities. The computer didn’t betray me; it was inhibited. But it did all that Monat asked it to do. I think it did. Possibly Monat thought of it himself.”

Loga was silent for so long that Burton had to jog him along.

“Thought of what?”

“Of their planting a device in my personal aircraft. When I sent out that signal, everybody in the tower and the sea dropped dead, all other aircraft in flight were burned up, and the general resurrection machinery was shut down. It wouldn’t start again until I signaled it to do so.

“But my own vessel had had a device installed in it. I found that out when I could no longer control it. It was flying automatically. It headed toward the top of the mountain range no matter what I did. At the same time, a recorded voice told me to wait there until I’d be picked up.

“Monat’s voice!

“He’d had the stop-devices installed before he went into The Valley to accompany you, Burton. Of course, he must’ve had the devices put into every ship. If he’d suspected me only, he would’ve had me put under a completely exhaustive examination.

“What Monat hadn’t reckoned on, though, was that there would be no aircraft or pilots to come to my rescue. That meant that I’d be stranded on the mountain top and would starve to death unless I could trace down the device and remove it.

“Though Monat had expected an aircraft from the tower to get to the guilty person’s craft swiftly, he had also made sure that the culprit wouldn’t be able to remove the device or cut it off. A few minutes before my machine would land, a recording told me that the device would burn up the moment contact with the ground was made and so would the motor.”

Loga had cursed and raved. He briefly visualized what would happen. He’d die and so couldn’t send false messages to the Gardenplanet. In one hundred and sixty years, the Gardeners would expect the automatically operated ship with the latest report. When it hadn’t arrived after a reasonable time, the Gardeners would send people to investigate. They would arrive at the tower over three hundred and twenty years after the message-ship should have been launched.

“In one way,” Loga said, “that was good. I had wanted the project to run far past the one hundred and twenty years allotted, though I hadn’t dared say so. My colleagues said that that was more than long enough to weed out the people who would never get to the stage necessary to Go On. Now the project would run far longer than planned. And perhaps my father and mother and sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts and cousins would not be doomed.”

Burton said, “What?”

Tears flowed down Loga’s cheeks. He spoke in a strangled voice.

“It was strictly forbidden for anyone to locate any relatives resurrected in The Valley. The formulators of this policy were Monat’s people. They said that experience had shown that Ethicals who found their loved ones among the lazari were too emotionally upset if these were evidently not going to make it. They’d interfere, they’d be tempted to reveal what was happening before the time was ripe for that. In a previous project, a woman had put her parents in a special place in the underground chambers and tried to force-feed, as it were, their ethical advancement.

“I was taught that when I was a young adult on the Gardenworld. I believed in the policy then. But later I couldn’t endure not seeing my family. Nor could I endure the agonizing idea that they might not Go On. So, long before we left the Gardenworld, I had made my plans. Still, I wasn’t sure that I could carry them out. But I did track down my relatives through the computer—that took a long long time, believe me—and I visited them in The Valley. I was in disguise, of course. They had no chance of recognizing me. I’d arranged it so that they’d all be resurrected in the same place. Also, if any moved away from there or was killed, I’d know where they were.

“I have almost photographic recall. Even though I’d died on Earth shortly before I was to be five years old, I vividly remembered my parents and all my other relatives.

“It was very hard on me to keep concealing my identity. But I had to. I did become good friends with them and even pretended to be learning their language. All this while engaged on an authorized project, you understand.

“I dearly loved my foster mother on the Gardenworld. But I loved my own mother even more, though she was not as spiritually developed as my foster mother, far from it.

“During several of my visits, in later years, I made sure that my relatives were introduced to the beliefs of the Church of the Second Chance. They all converted to it, but it wasn’t enough. They were a long way from attaining that stage in which I could have hope that they’d advance even further.

“But I believed, and still believe, that if they’re given enough time, they will do so.”

Burton said gently, “You were just about to land on top of the mountain.”

“Yes. But what I’ve told you about my relatives is highly important. You must also realize that I wasn’t just distressed about my own family. I’ve agonized over all the others, the billions who are doomed. I couldn’t even mention this once to my fellows, though. Except Tringu, of course, and I didn’t bring up the subject until I was absolutely sure of him. If I’d said anything about it to the others, I’d have been suspected at once if it became known that there was a renegade.”

Though he might be committing suicide, Loga did the one thing that would prevent his vessel from alighting on the designated place. He cut off the power.

“If Monat had thought that anyone’d do that, he’d have arranged it so that it couldn’t be done. But he hadn’t expected any such action. Why should he? The culprit would know that even if he killed himself, he’d be raised in the tower.”

The craft had fallen at once and struck the side of the mountain just below the top. It was going slow, and Loga was in a buffer suit. Moreover, since the vessel was made of the most indestructible gray metal, it was not even scratched by the impact.

“Even so, I would’ve been killed during the fall. But I turned on the power when it had hurtled for a hundred feet, and the craft started back up toward the top. I cut the power again, and I turned it on when I’d gone fifty feet. The craft started up again for its original destination. I cut the power once more.”

By bone-jarring increments, Loga worked the vessel down to near ground level. Before this, he’d opened a port. When he thought that he was close enough, he leaped out of the port, clutching the handle of his grail. He fell through the rain and the thunder and lightning, struck something, and was knocked unconscious.

When he awoke he was draped belly-down across a branch of an irontree. It was daylight, and he could see his grail a hundred feet below at the base of the tree. Though he was severely scratched and bruised and had some internal injuries and a broken leg, he managed to get to the ground.

“The rest I’ve told you or you’ve correctly inferred.”

Burton said, “Not all. We don’t have the slightest inkling what this terrible thing is which you mentioned. What you were saving for the last.”

“Or what Going On really means,” Nur said.

“Going On? When the body of a person who’s highly advanced ethically dies, the wathan disappears. Our instruments can find no trace of it. If another duplicate body is made, its wathan doesn’t return to it.”

“What do you do with a wathanless body?”

“Only one experiment was made, and the wathanless was allowed to live out her natural span. That’s never been done with human beings. The people who came before Monat’s did that.

“The theory is that, though the Creator may appear to be indifferent to Its creatures, It does welcome and take care of the wathans that disappear. What other explanation is there for that?”

“It could be,” Frigate said, “that there’s something about the extraphysical universe that attracts a wathan when it reaches a certain stage of development. I don’t know why this would have anything to do with the extraphysical. But there could be some sort of magnetic pull caused by this, I suppose.”

“That theory’s been put forth. We prefer to believe that the Creator does it. Though It may do it through purely physical-extraphysical means and not by a supernatural act.”

“In effect,” Burton said, “you aren’t relying on science but on faith to explain the disappearances.”

“Yes, but when you get to the basics, infinity and finity, eternity and time, the First Cause, you must rely on faith.”

“Which has led so many billions astray and caused such immense suffering,” Frigate said.

“You can’t say that about this situation.”

Tai-Peng said, fiercely, “Let’s get on with what’s happening in this world.”

“I recruited the lazari because there was a very slight probability that what has happened might happen. I put all the situations I could think of into the computer and told it to estimate their probability. Unfortunately, the computer cannot detect what sentient beings will think, what final choices they’ll make, unless it has all the data and that’s impossible. Well, not even if it had every item could it predict one hundred percent. Thus, Monat and the others did what I couldn’t expect. Just as I did what he couldn’t anticipate. Just as you did what I couldn’t predict. The human, the sentient, mind is still a deep mystery.”

“May it always be so,” Burton said.

“It is, it is! That is why you can’t predict the stage of development of any wathan. One may be rather advanced, yet go no further. Another may be in a low stage and, suddenly, almost overnight as it were, leap to a far higher state than the previously much further advanced. It’s a quantum ethical leap. Also, people regress.”

“Are you an example of regression?” Burton said.

“No! That’s what Siggen accused me of being when we were living in that hut in Parolando. The truth is, I am more highly advanced than anyone else in the project. Isn’t it much more ethical to give everyone all the time they might need to develop? Isn’t it? Yes, it is! That can’t be denied!”

Alice murmured, “He’s crazy.”

Burton wasn’t so sure. What Loga had said seemed reasonable. But his ideas for insuring his plans didn’t seem so. Yet, if he continued to send false messages, then the Gardenworlders wouldn’t come to investigate. Loga might gain a thousand years. Surely, in that time, anybody would attain the stage desired.

His deep pessimism told him that it might not be so.

What was his own progress?

Or did he want to get to a stage where the essential part of him just disappeared?

Why not? It would be an adventure even greater than this one, the greatest in his life.

“Very well,” he said. “I think we understand all that’s happened. But you’ve hinted that you may not be able to carry out your plans even if you have no one to stop you.

“What terrible thing has happened?”

“It’s my fault, mine only!” Loga cried. He rose from the chair and, despite his limp, paced back and forth, his face twisted and sweating.

“Because of what I did, billions may be doomed forever! In fact, almost everybody! Perhaps, everybody! Forever!”

52

There was silence for a while. Loga continued his painful limping. Then Burton said, “You might as well tell us.”

Loga sat down in his chair.

“My signal put an inhibit on the resurrection line. I didn’t want any Ethical to commit suicide and get to the tower before I did. What I didn’t know was that another Ethical had also commanded an inhibit on the resurrection line when I was found out.”

The reason for this, Loga said, was that Monat didn’t want the unknown traitor to gain access to the tower. There he or she might be able to carry out his plans—whatever they were—before his presence was known.

Monat’s command overrode everybody else’s.

“He was the Operator.”

Moreover, Monat, through his proxy, had commanded the computer to obey no one else but him until normal operations were restored.

“I’m sure that if he’d known exactly what was to happen, he’d not have given such a command. But he had no more idea than I what course events would take.”

“The universe is infinite, and the events in it are also infinite,” Nur said.

“Perhaps. But you see, the computer uses the wathans as its…what shall I say?…blueprints to duplicate bodies. Once, records were kept of the bodies, but it was more economical to use the wathans themselves, as I’ve explained. There are no other records. So, if the wathans are lost, then we have no way to duplicate bodies anymore.”

Burton rolled this around in his mind.

“Well, you have the wathans. We saw them in that enclosure in the middle of the tower.”

“Yes, but when the computer dies, the wathans will be released! And there is no means then to resurrect the dead. They are lost forever!”

There was another silence. After a minute or two, Alice said, “The computer…is dying?”

Loga was almost choking. “Yes. It wouldn’t be if it hadn’t been left unattended so many years.”

The machinery was built to last for centuries without any need for repair or replacement. Nevertheless, parts and units did malfunction now and then. That was why technicians inspected everything at regular intervals, and why there were so many self-repair capabilities. Machines, however, had a well-known but as yet unexplained obstinacy, a seeming tendency to break down of their own will or to refuse to operate. It had been jestingly observed that perhaps they, too, had wathans of a sort, and their free will was more ill will than anything else.

During the long absence of human supervision, a valve had quit operating.

“This is not a mechanical valve, you understand. It’s basically a force field which shuts off or on to allow flow of sea water into the food-mixing chamber for the computer. The computer subsists on distilled water mixed with sugar and some traces of minerals. The shut-down valve is one of two. Its mate is for emergencies. It takes over should the main one go out. Then the technicians repair the field generator of the valve, and the backup one shuts down.”

Unfortunately, the emergency valve did not admit enough water for a long term. And so the protein computer was dying.

“I could use the computer memory banks to furnish a model for a duplicate of it as the original before it was fed any data. Unfortunately, the computer contains the only memory banks of that. And it won’t release the information so that I can feed it into the matter-energy converter.”

“Why don’t you repair the field generator?” Frigate said.

“For the good reason that the computer won’t permit me to. Apparently, Monat ordered long ago that it be equipped with defenses. These weren’t activated, though, until I was found out.”

There was another long silence. Alice broke it, saying, “Why don’t you use one of those wathan catchers you told us about? The moment the computer died and released the wathans, the catcher could restrain them.”

Loga smiled grimly.

“A very good idea. I’ve thought of that. Briefly. The only catcher is the computer. There are memory banks which I could tap to make a catcher. But these are also in the computer.”

“Are the defenses absolutely invulnerable?” Burton said.

“It’s easy to gain access to the field generator. I’d just have to pull out the malfunctioning module and replace it with another. But I’d be dead before I could do that. The computer would cut me down with beams. Just like those which my beamer shoots.”

Nur said, “You used the computer at the same time that the others were. How did you keep them from finding that out?”

“In a sense, I made the computer schizophrenic. One part of it didn’t know what the other was doing.”

“That’s it!” the Moor cried. Then his exultant expression was replaced by a frown. “No. You’d have thought of using it.”

“Yes. I can’t because the engineers apparently discovered the split mind. Now it’s dominated by the main part.”

“You said dominated, not integrated,” Nur said.

“Yes. The engineers didn’t have time to remove the complex circuits which made the computer schizophrenic. But they did put in temporary bypass circuits to give the main part dominance. They would’ve integrated the parts later. But they were killed before they could do that.”

“How do you know all this?” Burton said.

“The computer gave me that information. It doesn’t refuse to communicate. It just won’t obey any commands except those from Monat or whoever was authorized to act for him.”

“There’s no chance of finding out the codeword or whatever Monat used?”

“Not unless he recorded it somewhere. I doubt that he would. Also, the code would have to be accompanied by the voiceprints of Monat or his aide.”

“Maybe there is no codeword,” Frigate said. “Maybe the voice-recognition is enough.”

“No. Monat would think of that. It’d be relatively easy to isolate phones from records of his speech and synthesize them to make new sentences. Also, Monat might’ve required that there be body recognition, too.”

“Could you make a disguise of Monat to wear yourself?” Turpin said.

“I suppose so. But I’d use beam-simulators.”

Loga seemed very weary now. Burton suspected that it was not the wound which had drained his energy. It was hopelessness and guilt.

“Well,” Burton said. “We don’t know but what voice and body recognition is all that’s required. We must try to fool the computer even if it’s wasted work.”

Alice said, eagerly, “Have you told the computer that it’s going to die?”

“Oh, yes. But it already knew it.”

“Perhaps a man could get through the computer’s defenses,” Burton said, looking hard at Loga.

The Ethical straightened up a little.

“I know what you’re thinking. Since I’m responsible for this horror, I should try to repair the valve generator. Even if there’s an almost one-hundred-percent probability that I’d just be sacrificing myself. I would do that if I thought it’d do any good.

“But what if I succeeded and yet died? None of you would know how to operate the equipment here. You could do nothing to solve this problem.

“Moreover, if the computer lives, what then? The situation is unchanged only in that the computer lives and so the wathans won’t be released.”

Burton said that Loga must train them in the use of whatever instruments might be needed. He must because something might happen to him. Was there time for that before the computer died?

The Ethical replied that there might be. He’d have to teach them what the instrument markings meant. It would take too long to teach them the language used when talking to the computer, which was that of Monat’s people and the primary one on the Gardenworld. But he could change the language converters and so allow them to use Esperanto.

“Excellent!” Burton said. “I think we should all go to bed now. We’ll wake up refreshed and with clearer minds. Perhaps we can think of something to use against the computer then.”

They moved into the Councillors’ apartments. Loga went into his. Aphra Behn and de Marbot took one; Alice and Burton, another. Tai-Peng and Turpin shared a fourth apartment and Nur and Frigate the one next to it. Burton thought it best that none of their group be alone. He still didn’t entirely trust the Ethical.

Before they went to sleep, Alice said, “Richard, there has to be a way to get around the computer. It was made by humans, so it should be mastered by humans.”

“Why don’t you appeal to its emotions?” Burton said. “You women are particularly good at that.”

“No more than men, you braying arse! Anyway, I know there’s no use appealing to the emotions of a thing that has none. Although I’m not sure that it doesn’t have some. Or analogies thereof. But since it operates purely by logic, why not use logic against it? Humans put human logic into it. We should be able to fight it or cozen it with logic.”

“I’m sure that Loga has thought of that.”

He kissed her on the cheek and turned away.

“Good night, Alice.”

“Good night, Richard.”

When he awoke some hours later, he found her staring up at the moving figures on the ceiling.

53

In the morning, they showered and put on clean cloths and then went to a room which was used as a dining hall. Going past the control room, they saw that Croomes’ body had been removed. There were no bloodstains on the floor, and all the skeletons were gone.

“Robots,” Loga said. “I also sent one to take care of Gilgamesh’s body.”

“I didn’t see any robots,” Frigate said.

“You did, but they looked like large cabinets. Your beds are robots, too. They gently massage your muscles and manipulate your spinal cords.”

“I didn’t feel anything when I awoke during the night,” Burton said.

“Nor I,” Alice said.

“They’re very subtle and only operate automatically when you’re asleep. But if you want a massage while awake, you command them. I’ll show you how.”

Over the delicious breakfast, Alice told the others her thoughts about circumventing the computer with the very logic it used.

Loga shook his head. “It sounds fine, but it won’t work.”

“We can at least try,” Alice said.

“We’ll try everything, mental or physical,” Loga said. “But, believe me, I’ve thought of everything.”

“I don’t doubt your intelligence,” she said. “But nine heads are better than one.”

“The nine-headed dragon!” Tai-Peng shouted. His face was flushed; he’d been drinking wine throughout the meal.

“I’ll use one of the electronic computers in this room to set up a system,” Loga said. “But it won’t, I believe, be able to beat its own logic. A computer can calculate much faster than a human, if it has all the proper data. But it doesn’t have an imagination. It’s not creative. Still, its data might contain something I’ve overlooked. And it can be set to make combinations in a very short time which it would take me years to write out. Also, it does have some degree of extrapolation.”

After going to his apartment, he went to the control room and seated himself in the chair in the center of the revolving platform. In a very short time, he called to the others.

“I couldn’t resist asking the big computer how many wathans are now in the shaft.”

“How many?” Nur said.

Loga looked at the screen again.

“Eighteen billion and twenty-eight. No. Add three more.”

“Over half the people in The Valley,” Frigate said.

“Yes. Add two more now.”

Loga turned the display off.

“For every hour that passes, more people die, more wathans are caught. When the computer dies…”

His voice trailed off.

The Ethical had to have great courage, endurance, determination, and quick wits to do all that he’d done. But his guilt was too crushing for even him.

“Maybe,” Turpin said, “you should throw in the towel. I mean…kill the computer now! That way, you won’t lose any more, and you can continue the project.”

“No!” Loga said, showing fire for the first time since they’d known him. “No! That would be monstrous! I have to save all of them! All!”

“Yes, and maybe you’ll end up losing millions. Or maybe everybody on this planet.”

“No! I can’t!”

“Well,” Turpin said, “I can’t think of anything that’ll help. This is all too deep for me.”

He left for the nearby lounge to play on its piano.

“He’s disgusted with me,” Loga said. “But he doesn’t know the loathing I feel for myself.”

“Recriminations will do no good!” Tai-Peng said, waving a bottle in his hand. “But Tom may be right! I think I’ll go to the lounge and enjoy myself, too! My head aches with thinking!”

“That isn’t what’s making it hurt,” Alice said gently.

Tai-Peng just grinned and kissed her quickly on the cheek as he passed her.

Nur reminded the Ethical that he hadn’t removed the bombs in the cabinets in the other control room.

“I’ll just lock the door,” Loga said. “Now for the logic-versus-logic program. Even if it will be a waste of time.”

Those remaining went off to the language laboratory. The Ethical had given them instructions for the use of the equipment which would teach them to speak and read Gardenworldish or Ghuurrkh. There were also Esperanto-Ghuurrkhian grammars and dictionaries available.

Alice clutched Burton’s arm.

“It is horrible, isn’t it?” she said, her large dark eyes looking into his. “All those souls lost, and they had a chance for immortality! It’s too horrible to think about!”

“Then don’t think about it,” Burton said. “Anyway, even the lost ones will be immortal. They just won’t know it, that’s all.”

She shuddered and said, “Yes. But we could be among them. Do you think you’re Going On? I’d like to believe that I am, but you practically have to be a saint to Go On!”

“Nobody has ever accused me of being a saint unless it was my wife,” Burton said, grinning. “And she knew better.”

Alice wasn’t fooled. She knew that he was as desperate as she.

Two days passed. Loga ran out the results on the console screen while the others watched. When the display was ended, he shook his head.

“No use.”

They conferred again and again and came up with many plans, but these were all dismissed because of flaws in logic or insurmountable facts.

The fourth day after they’d come to the tower, Frigate leaped smiling into the room.

“Hey, we’re pretty dumb! The answer is right under our noses! Why don’t you send robots in to insert the module?”

Loga sighed.

“I’d thought of that. It was one of the first things to occur to me. But even though the robots are made of charruzz (the gray metal), the computer’s beamers will slice through them.”

Frigate looked disappointed and a little foolish.

“Yes…but…if you send enough in, they’d knock out the beamers!”

“None of the robots have the functional structure to shoot beamers.”

“Well, couldn’t you convert them? And then program them?”

“It would take me ten days. If I’d started when I first got here, I couldn’t have altered one in time.”

He paused, then said dolefully, “I just checked on the time left before the computer dies. Five days!”

Even though they’d been expecting such an announcement, they were shocked.

Tom Turpin said, “At least we won’t have that to worry about. The souls’ll be gone, and there’s nothing to do about it. But you can give those that’re still alive a lot more time.”

Loga turned some dials and punched a button. Ghuurrkhian numbers glowed on the screen. The others were advanced enough by now to be able to read them.

“Eighteen billion, one hundred and two,” Aphra said.

“I should kill the computer right now.” Loga said. “I’ve waited too long as it is. For all I know, my mother’s soul was collected today.”

“Wait!” Frigate said. “I’ve got an idea! You said you’d reopened your private resurrection chambers when you got here. Can they be fixed up so that we could be resurrected in them, too?”

“Why, yes. They could be. The resurrector catchers operate on a slightly different frequency from that of the computer. I had my wathan and Tringu’s tuned to it. I could do the same for you. But why?”

Frigate started to explain, but Loga, Burton, and Nur comprehended at the same time what he meant to say.

They would go down in force, leaving several behind to do the necessary supervision. They would storm the room, and, though they might be killed over and over, they still could put out all the beamers of the computer.

“How’d you happen to think of that, Pete?” Tom Turpin said.

“I’m a science-fiction writer. I should’ve thought of it when I found out what the situation was.”

“I should’ve thought of it, too,” Loga said. “But we’re all under great emotional pressure.”

“You can duplicate these?” Burton said, holding up the pistol-like sphere-ended weapon.

“As many as we’ll need.”

Within two minutes, the entire group was armed with the beamers. The Ethical then had his machine print out diagrams of the route to the valve room from the control room and from his private resurrectors. They studied the diagrams, identifying each corridor and chamber with the corresponding screen displays.

“There are video cameras on every wall in that area, including the valve room. Here’s a picture of it from the files.”

They studied the reproductions issued by the machine until they knew the room by heart. Then Loga commanded that a module be duplicated in the e-m cabinet, and he gave them the simple instructions for pulling out the old module and inserting the new.

Unfortunately, the Ethical was unable to get diagrams showing where the computer’s defenses were located.

“That information must be in the computer’s memory banks.”

Nur said, “Why don’t you ask the computer for it?”

Loga looked surprised, then laughed softly.

A moment later he had information, though it wasn’t what he’d asked for. The computer refused to divulge where its weapons were.

“Well, it was worth a try.”

They got into their chairs and followed the Ethical to a lift shaft. They descended in it far faster than they’d dared operate their chairs until then. When they’d gone a mile, he stopped and then went into a bay and from there into a corridor. After a few minutes Burton, who had an excellent sense of direction, realized that they were heading for the general area of the secret room at the base of the tower. At their speed, they quickly arrived at it.

The Ethical looked at the door, still kept from opening by the grail Burton had placed there. His face turned red.

“Why didn’t you tell me that the doors were still open?”

“I thought about it, but it didn’t seem important,” Burton said.

“The agents could have come through!”

“No. They couldn’t possibly have caught up with us in such a short time. They’ll be using sailboats.”

“I won’t take any chances.”

Loga turned the chair away from the door, then turned it back to face them.

“You get that boat out of the entrance while I’m gone.”

“Where’ll you be?” Burton said.

“I’m going to a control room so I can reactivate an automatically operated aircraft and direct it to the ledge. It’ll melt it all down, and then it’ll plug up the cave entrance.”

“Go with him,” Burton said to Tai-Peng and de Marbot.

Loga glared but said nothing, and his chair turned and flew down the corridor.

Burton led the others into the fog-shrouded room where, with much shoving, they got the boat out into the sea. Then they went back to the corridor, the larger ones squeezing themselves again through the narrow opening above the grail.

“We should’ve asked Loga to open it all the way,” Frigate said.

“I don’t think he wants us to know how he opens it,” Burton said.

“Still doesn’t trust us?”

“With the life he’s led, he’s conditioned to trust no one.”

That, however, wasn’t true. Loga, trailed by the Chinese and the Frenchman, returned after fifteen minutes. He got out of the chair and banged his fist on the wall a few inches from the door. At the same time, he said, clearly, “Ah Qaaq!”

The door slid back within the recess.

Burton made a mental note of the exact area struck.

“How did you know that someone wouldn’t be coming along and catch you?” he said.

“This door is one big video screen. I also have other screens which look just like part of the walls. They’re situated so that I can see up this corridor past its curves for some distance.”

They followed Loga into the room. Halfway down it, he stopped, turned, facing the wall, and voiced the codeword again. An apparently seamless part of the wall moved back and then slid into a recess. The room beyond was well-lit and contained some equipment on tables, a large cabinet, and two skeletons. These were pointed toward the door as if they’d been about to leave the room. On the floor by bone fingers was a metal box. It had a number of dials, gauges, buttons, and a small video screen on one side and prongs on the other.

Loga said, “If only I could have sent that signal a few seconds earlier. I would’ve caught them before they removed the control box.”

“But you wouldn’t have known that,” Burton said. “You would still not have been able to take the chance of killing yourself. By the way, why were the doors closed? Those two would’ve had to open them to get in.”

Nur said, “Since they wouldn’t have known the codes, how’d they get in?”

“After seventy-five seconds, the doors close automatically unless countermanded. What happened is that the investigators located this room by tracing the circuits. That would’ve been a very time-consuming and arduous job because they couldn’t use the computer to do the tracing. When they located this room, they must have been using magnetometers, too. They went back to find the tap-in source, and found the programmed open-shut code box. It wouldn’t have taken them long to analyze the code.”

“But what about the knock accompanying the code? How…”

“They figured that out, too, though it would’ve taken longer.”

He pointed at the cabinet. “The resurrector.”

He went in with Frigate at his heels. The American said, “You couldn’t use your own power supply?”

Loga stopped and picked up the control box and then walked to the side of the cabinet. He inserted the prongs into receptacles on the side of the cabinet.

“No, I couldn’t. I would’ve liked my own atomic converter so there’d be no wires to trace. But energy-matter conversion and wathan-attracting require enormous power. The physical-extraphysical interface alone uses enough power to black out half of the cities of ancient Earth in the late twentieth century.”

Frigate said, “How’d you prevent this power drain from showing up on meters?”

“I made arrangements for it not to. To get back to the original question. If the engineers had removed the code box, I wouldn’t have been able to get out of the secret room into the corridor. The other access door is activated by a signal going to another coder-decoder. It was very fortunate that the engineers didn’t work on that before they were killed. I lost the signal-generator when I had to abandon my aircraft. But the boats in the cave contain generators. These are automatically started when the sensors detect that the tower is near.”

“The door mechanisms wouldn’t have used much power. Why didn’t you use separate power generators for them?”

“I should have. But it was simpler and more economical to use the main power supply.”

He smiled slightly. “I wonder what the engineers made of the codeword. Ah Qaaq is Mayan. The Ah is the article defining the name as masculine. Qaaq means fire. Loga is Ghuurrkh for fire. Perhaps that was what identified me. They might’ve put the Mayan name into the computer for a search. If they did, they got an answer within a second after insertion of the question.

“I outclevered myself.”

He poised a finger over a button. “Gather around. I’ll explain the simple operation twice so that there won’t be any confusion. You’re able to read the markings. When I press this button, that small silvery inset disc will turn on. That indicates that the power is on.

“That larger inset disc by the ON light is a readout frequency meter.”

He pressed a button. The smaller disc glowed orange.

“Now…”

The light went out.

“Khatuuch! What is…?”

Loga put his hand on the box for a second, then ran around to the front of the cabinet. He opened the door and looked in. Even at their distance from it, the others could feel the heat.

“Run!” Loga said, and he limped as fast as he could toward the exit.

When Burton had reached the exit he looked at the cabinet. The control box was melting, and a large cube inside the cabinet was glowing red.

Loga swore in Ghuurrkh and then said, “Those…those…! They fixed it so that when the power came on it’d melt the converter!”

Except for Loga and Burton, who’d died so many times that they no longer feared the prospect of death, the others were relieved. Burton could see it in their faces. They knew they’d be resurrected with their wathans attached, but they still loathed the idea of dying.

Burton said, “We have the other resurrector.”

“It’ll be set up, too,” Loga said. He was ashen.

“Can’t you fix it so it won’t melt?”

“I’ll try.”

But he failed.

Burton, looking at the molten mass, thought it was time to tell Loga something he’d put off revealing because the resurrectors were more urgent business.

He said, “Loga, when we left your secret room to go after you, I put a bullet by the door to mark its location. The bullet is gone.”

There was a short silence. Frigate said, “A housekeeping robot probably picked it up.”

“No,” Loga said. “If the robots were programmed to do such work, they’d have disposed of the skeletons.”

“Then someone else has gotten in!”

Section 14

Three-Cornered Play: Carroll to Alice to Computer

54

They went to a laboratory. Loga sat down before a computer and worked furiously. Within a short time, all the cameras in the tower were operating. Two seconds later, the screen before him glowed with a display.

Burton whistled.

“Frato Fenikso! Hermann Göring!”

He was at a table eating a meal made by a grail-box. From his extreme thinness and the great black marks under his hollow eyes, he needed more than one meal.

“I can’t see how he caught up with us so quickly,” Loga said.

“The computer reports seeing no one else, but they may be out of camera range just now. And if they’re agents, one might have the codeword. Monat could’ve passed it on to them in The Valley.”

“Why don’t we ask Göring?” Burton said.

“Of course. First, though, I’ll ask the computer where he is.”

Loga read the instructions, and they got into their chairs and flew out of the room. Ten minutes later, they were outside the laboratory down the corridor from Loga’s hideaway. They set their chairs down softly and entered on foot. Though Göring was not armed, they couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t find others with him by now.

Burton bellowed, “Achtung!”

He laughed loudly when Göring jumped up, food spewing from his mouth, arms flying, the chair falling backwards. Gray and trembling, he whirled around, his eyes wide. He seemed to be trying to say something, and then his face reddened, and he clutched his throat.

“My God! He’s choking!” Alice said.

Göring was blue and on his knees by the time Burton hit him on the back and made him expel the food caught in his throat.

Alice said, “That wasn’t at all funny, Richard. Quit laughing. You might’ve killed him.”

Burton wiped the tears away and said, “I’m sorry, Göring. I guess I just wanted to pay you back for some of the things you’d done to me.”

Göring gulped at the glass of water handed him by Aphra Behn.

“Yes, I suppose I can’t blame you.”

“You look near-starved,” Nur said. “You shouldn’t be eating so fast. Too much food too soon after a long starvation can kill you.”

“I’m not that starved. But I seem to have lost my appetite.”

He looked around. “Where are the others?”

“Dead.”

“May God take pity on their souls.”

“He hasn’t and won’t unless we do something fast.”

“Göring!” Loga said sharply. “Did you come alone?”

Göring looked at him strangely. “Yes.”

“How long have you been here?”

“About an hour.”

“Were there any others close behind you when you were in the mountains?”

“No. At least, I saw no one.”

“How did you get here so fast?”

Göring and other Virolanders had dived into the hold of the Not For Hire before it slipped over the shelf into the abyss. They had brought up some sections of the batacitor and rebolted them together in a wooden sailboat. They had also brought up two small electric motors, a spare propeller of the smaller launch, the Gascon, and other parts. They’d worked fast, and four left in the reconverted boat two weeks after the Post No Bills had departed.

Unlike Burton’s group, they’d not taken days off for rest or recreation.

“Where are your companions?” Loga said, though he’d probably guessed their fate.

“Two quit early and went back. I went on with my wife, but she slipped and fell down the face of a mountain.”

He made the circular sign, the blessing, used so much by the Chancers.

“You should sit down,” Burton said kindly. “We have much to tell you.”

When he’d heard Loga and Burton tell what has happened, Göring looked horrified.

“All those wathans? And my wife’s among them?”

“Yes, and now we don’t know what to do. Kill the computer so that no more wathans may be caught. Or hope that we can think of some way to countermand its prime command.”

Hermann said, “No. There’s a third choice.”

“What?”

“Let me try to get the module in.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No. I have a debt to pay.”

Burton thought of his recurring dream of God.

“You owe for the flesh. Pay up.”

“If you die, your wathan will be doomed.”

“Perhaps not,” Hermann said quietly. “I may be ready to Go On. I don’t know that I am. God knows that I am far from a saint. But if I can save all those souls…wathans…then I will have made complete recompense.”

No one argued with him.

“Very well,” Loga said. “You are the most courageous person I’ve ever met. I think you clearly understand that you may have very little chance to succeed. But here’s what we’re going to do.”

Burton was very sorry that he had played his little joke on the German. The man was risking his soul, would face the equivalent of damnation, if he failed. Loga was right. Göring was the bravest man he’d ever known. He may not have been once, but he was now.

Loga decided that they should return to the top level to be near their apartments. On the way, they stopped at a floor where Göring could see the caged wathans.

He gazed at the glowing, contracting-expanding swirling darting things for a few minutes, then turned away.

“The most beautiful, the most awe-inspiring, the most hideous.”

He made the circular sign again, though Burton thought that this was more than a blessing. He caught intimations of a prayer for salvation and for stiffening of his determination.

When they got to the control room, the Ethical immediately set about working at the console on the revolving platform. After five minutes, he sent Göring into a cabinet. There his measurements were made by beams. Loga put more data into the computer, finishing in an hour.

He waited for a few seconds before punching another button.

He left the platform and limped to a large energy-matter converter. The others crowding behind him, he opened its door.

The parts of a suit of armor were on the floor. Loga picked them up and threw them to those outside the cabinet. They put these on Göring and, when they were done, he looked more like a robot than an armored knight. The addition of the backpack, his air supply, made him resemble an astronaut.

Except for the narrow but long window in the front of the globular helmet, the suit was made of the gray metal. Though thick, it weighed only nine pounds.

“The window isn’t as resistant as the metal,” Loga said. “And the beams will cut entirely through the metal if they’re applied to one spot for more than ten seconds. So keep moving.”

Göring tested the flexibility of the shoulder, wrist, finger, knee, and ankle joints. They gave him as much mobility as he’d need. He ran back and forth and leaped forward and sideways and backwards. Then he practiced with the beamers until he knew its full capabilities.

His armor removed, he ate again.

After Hermann had gone to an apartment to sleep, Loga took a chair off to a floor below sea level. He returned in an hour in a two-man research submarine which floated in the air.

“I didn’t think of this until a couple of hours ago. This will help him get through the initial defenses. But he’ll have to go on foot after that. The entrances won’t be wide enough to admit the vessel.”

During his absence, the others had been busy attaching beamers to the sides of the coffin-shaped clean-up robots and drilling the holes needed for passage of cables. Loga installed video equipment and trigger mechanisms. Then he programmed navigational boxes and installed them.

Burton went to wake up the German but found him on his knees praying by the bedside.

“You should’ve slept,” Burton said.

“I used my time for something better.”

They went back to the control room where Hermann ate a light meal before learning the route and the operation of the submarine. Loga showed him how to remove the old module and insert the new. The latter was a piece of the gray metal the size and shape of a playing card. Though it contained very complex circuits, its surface was smooth. One corner was nicked with a V, indicating that that end was to be inserted into the recess of the assembly. The code number was in bas-relief, and the card was to be put in with the code-side up.

“What could go wrong with a module like that?” Frigate said.

“Nothing,” Loga said. “If it’s inserted properly. I suspect human error. If the card was put in upside down, the circuits would operate properly. But every time there was a voltage surge, one of the circuits would be slightly damaged. There aren’t many surges, but over a long period of time the damage would be cumulative. The error would have been noticed long ago—if the technicians hadn’t been dead.”

He put the card inside a metal cube and attached it to a leg-piece of armor just above the knee.

“All he has to do is press that inset button in the cube, and the magnetism will be cancelled. The cube is thick enough to withstand many shots from the beamers.”

All of Göring’s armor was put on him except the globular helmet. Loga poured out the yellow wine into exquisite goblets brought from his apartment. He lifted his high and said, “To your success, Hermann Göring. May the Creator be with you.”

“With all of us,” Hermann said.

They drank, and the helmet was secured. Göring climbed up a short ladder into the top of the submarine and got himself with some difficulty into the hatch. Loga went up and, looking down into the hatchway, repeated the operation instructions. Then he closed the hatch.

Loga, as chief of operations, took the chair in the revolving platform. The others seated themselves before control consoles and began the adjustments taught them by the Ethical.

The first of the armed coffin-shapes lifted and headed toward the doorway. That was Burton’s. Behind it came Alice’s, then the others. They single-filed through the exit and turned right.

When all were out, the submarine rose from the floor and followed the robots.

The descent to the floor just below sea level took him fifteen minutes. He halted his robot before a closed door above which were letters in alto-relief. Burton activated the beamers, and presently the door was cut on one side from its top to the bottom. He moved his robot over and melted through another section. Then he rammed the machine into the middle, and the cut section fell backwards.

Burton saw a gigantic room filled with equipment. He shot his machine toward a closed doorway in the opposite wall. Before it got there, sections of the wall slid back, and the sphere ends of beamers moved out. Scarlet lines spat from them.

Burton moved the controls on the panel so that his robot angled upwards to the right. He held it then and pressed the trigger-activation button. Scarlet lines streamed out along the edges of the screen, and he had the satisfaction of seeing a globe explode. Fragments flew against the screen but did no damage.

A few seconds later, the screen went blank.

One of the computer’s weapons had destroyed the camera on top of the robot.

Burton cursed, and he cut off the beamers. There was nothing he could do except watch. He pressed the button that would tie his computer in with one of Loga’s cameras. Instantly, he could see from a camera on the wall above the doorway the robots had entered. His robot hovered ten feet above the floor, its front end pointed up at the beamers on the other wall. The robots were in a semicircle so that they wouldn’t get hit by their companions.

The last beamer in the room blew up, shifting the view from one camera to the next as one room after another was conquered. Alice’s robot was melted down. De Marbot’s camera was destroyed. Tai-Peng’s was pierced by three beams at once, and it fell as some vital part was melted.

The others went dead one by one until only the submarine was left. The dirigible-shaped craft took over then, cutting through two doors, its thick hull drilled into by the computer’s beamers.

The submarine came to a doorway wide enough to admit it but crossed by beams from ten weapons. Hermann shot his craft through it and came out into the next room with a small section of the stern cut off and many deep holes in the hull.

Ahead of him, at the opposite wall, was another entrance. Here was where he would have to abandon his craft. He drove it at great speed, slowed it a few feet from the doorway, and, while scarlet lines melted holes in the hull, climbed out. Immediately, the beamers transferred to him.

Göring fell out onto the floor, shielded from half of the weapons by the vessel but the target of the others. He got up slowly and staggered through the door entrance. Ranks of beamers turned toward him and tracked him as he ran toward the other doorway leading to the valve room. Just before he got to it, a door slid out from a recess and blocked the entrance. Ignoring the beamers, he began cutting through the door. He made a small hole, and he removed the cube holding the card and threw it ahead of him. Then he crawled through the hole, his beamer in his hand.

Burton and the others could hear his heavy breathing.

A cry of agony.

“My leg!”

“You’re almost there!” Loga shouted.

Purplish vapors poured out through the hole.

“Poison gas,” Loga said.

The screen shifted the view to the valve room. This was large and on the right-hand wall (from Hermann) a down-curving metal tube came out of the wall about ten feet above the floor. Near it was a small metal box on a table from which thin cables ran to another box. The front of the box had recesses from which the ends of modules stuck out.

Göring crawled to the cube as at least a hundred beamers poured their ravening energy into his suit.

His voice came to the watchers.

“I can’t stand it. I’m going to faint.”

“Hang on, Göring!” Loga said. “A minute more, and you’ll have done it!”

They saw the bulky gray figure grab the cube, turn it over, and let the card module drop out. They saw Hermann pick it up and crawl toward the module box. They heard his scream and saw him fall forward. The module fell from his fingers at the foot of the table.

The scarlet lines continued their fire and did not stop until the armor was riddled with holes.

There was a long silence.

Burton heaved a deep sigh and turned his equipment off. The others did the same. Burton went up onto the platform and stood behind Loga. His screen was still alive, but now it showed a pulsing many-colored figure, a globe-shape with extending and withdrawing tentacles.

Loga was bent forward, his elbows on the edge of the panel, his hands against his face.

Burton said, “What’s that?”

He knew it was the picture of a wathan, but he didn’t know why it was on the screen.

Loga removed his hands and stared at the screen.

“I put a frequency tracker on Göring.”

“That’s he?”

“Yes.”

“Then he didn’t Go On?”

“No. He’s with the others.”

What do we do now?

That was the question of all questions.

Loga wanted to kill the computer before it captured more wathans, and then he would duplicate it at its predata stage. But he also hoped hopelessly that someone might think of something which would solve the problem before the wathans were released. He was mentally paralyzed and would evidently do nothing unless an impulse broke through and he pressed the fatal button.

The others were thinking hard. They put their speculations, their questions, into their computers. Always, there was some flaw in their schemes.

Burton went down several times to the floor below and stood or paced for hours while he gazed at the splendid spectacle of the swirling wathans. Were his parents among them? Ayesha? Isabel? Walter Scott, the nephew of Sir Walter Scott the author, and a great friend of his in India? Dr. Steinhaeuser? George Sala? Swinburne? His sister and brother? Speke? His grandfather Baker, who’d cheated him out of a fortune by dropping dead just before he could change his will? Bloody-minded and cruel King Gélélé of Dahomey, who didn’t know that he was bloody-minded and cruel since he was only doing what his society required of him? Which was no acceptable excuse.

He went to bed exhausted and depressed. He had wished to talk to Alice, but she seemed withdrawn, foundering in her own thoughts. Now, though, she didn’t seem to be in a reverie which would remove her from painful or distasteful reality. She was obviously thinking about their dilemma.

Finally, Burton slipped away. He awoke after six hours, if his watch was correct. Alice was standing over him in the dim light.

“What’s the matter?” he said drowsily.

“Nothing. I hope. I just came back from the control room.”

“What were you doing there?”

Alice lay down beside him.

“I just couldn’t get to sleep. I kept thinking about this and that, my thoughts were as numerous as the wathans. I tried to keep my mind on the computer, but a thousand things pushed them aside, occupied me for a brief time, then slid away to be replaced by something else. I must’ve reviewed my whole life, here and on Earth.

“I remember thinking about Mr. Dodgson before I finally did sleep. I dreamed a lot, all sorts of dreams, a few good ones, some terrible. Didn’t you hear me screaming once?”

“No.”

“You must have been sleeping like the dead. I awoke shaking and perspiring, but I couldn’t remember what it was that’d horrified me so.”

“It isn’t difficult to imagine what it was.”

Alice had gotten up to get a drink of water. On returning to the bed, she again had trouble getting to sleep. Among other things, she thought of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and the pleasures from knowing him and from his two books inspired by her. Because she’d reread them many times, she had no trouble visualizing the text and Tenniel’s illustrations.

“The first scene that came to me was the Mad Tea-Party.”

Seated at the table were the Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse. Uninvited, Alice sat down with them, and, after some insane conversation, the March Hare asked her to have some wine.

Alice looked all around the table, but there was nothing on it but tea.

“Actually,” Alice said to Burton, “that wasn’t true. There was also milk and bread and butter.”

The book-Alice said, “I don’t see any wine.”

“There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.

Later there was a silence while Alice was trying to solve the riddle of why a raven was like a writing desk. The silence was broken when the Hatter turned to Alice and asked her what day of the month it was. He’d taken his watch out of his pocket and had been looking uneasily at it, shaking it and holding it to his ear.

Alice considered a little and then said, “The fourth.”

The real Alice said to Burton, “Mr. Dodgson wrote that date because it was May in the book and the fourth of May was my birthday.”

The Hatter sighed and said, “Two days wrong! I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works!”

“It was the best butter,” the March Hare meekly responded.

Burton got out of bed and began pacing back and forth.

“Must you go into such detail, Alice?”

“Yes. It’s important.”

The next scene she visualized, or empathized, since she became the seven-year-old Alice of the book, was from the Wool and Water chapter of Through the Looking-Glass. She was talking to the White Queen and the Red Queen.

“Can you keep from crying by considering things?” she (Alice) asked.

“That’s the way it’s done,” the White Queen said with great decision. “Nobody can do two things at once, you know.”

“Alice!” Burton said. “What’s all this nonsense leading to?”

“It’s not nonsense. Listen.”

In her reverie, Alice leaped from the White Queen to Humpty Dumpty.

“Perhaps because Loga is so fat that he reminds me of Humpty Dumpty.”

She, the book-Alice, was talking to the huge anthropomorphized egg sitting on a wall. They were discussing the meaning of words.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Then the real Alice—But is she any more real than that other Alice? Burton wondered—flashed to the scene where the Red Queen asked her if she could do Subtraction.

“Take nine from eight,” the Red Queen said.

“Nine from eight. I can’t, you know,” Alice replied very readily. “But—”

“She can’t do Subtraction,” said the White Queen to the Red Queen. She spoke to Alice. “Can you do Division? Divide a loaf by a knife—what’s the answer to that?”

“Were there any more?” Burton said.

“No. I didn’t think they meant much. They were just memories of some of my favorite sections.”

She’d slept again. And then she awoke suddenly, her eyes wide. She’d thought she’d heard someone far off calling her. “Just over the horizon of my mind.”

It sounded like Mr. Dodgson, but she wasn’t sure.

She was wide awake, her heart pounding fast. She got out of bed and walked to the control room.

“Why?”

“It occurred to me that there were three key phrases in the scene. The best butter. Which is to be master? Can you do Division?”

Burton sighed. “Very well, Alice. Tell it as you must.”

She had seated herself in Loga’s chair and made the adjustments necessary to communicate directly with the computer.

“You realize that you’re going to die in two days or less?” she said.

“Yes. That’s redundant information. I didn’t need to be informed.”

“You were ordered by Monat not to resurrect anyone until he gave you the countercommand. What form does the counter-command take?”

Burton interrupted her. “Loga asked him that.”

“Yes, I know. But I didn’t think it’d hurt to try again.”

“And the reply?”

As before, it had been silence.

Alice had then told it that there was an even higher command, and that this had been given to it by Monat before the second order.

“What is that?” flashed on the screen. “I’ve been given many orders.”

“The prime directive, the most essential, is to catch the wathans and reattach them to the duplicated bodies. That is what the project is all about. If Monat could have foreseen what his order would result in, he’d not have given it.”

The computer said nothing.

Alice said, “Put me into communication with the section which Loga was using. That part of which Loga was the master.”

Evidently, the computer had no orders to refuse communication with that part. Until Alice, no one had even thought about that possibility.

“My God!” Burton said. And then, “What happened?”

“I told it that it was going to die. It said it knew it. In effect, so what? So I used my argument for the dominant part with it.”

She followed that up with an order that it regain its former state, that it be independent.

“The dominant part did nothing during this time?”

“Nothing. Why should it? As Loga’s said, it’s a brilliant idiot.”

“What happened then?”

“I told the dominant that it was its duty to resurrect Monat and confirm or invalidate the order not to resurrect anybody until it got the codeword or whatever it is.”

“Then?”

“The screen went blank. I tried again and again to get it to respond.”

The eagerness on Burton’s face died away.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“But why would it cut off communication? Its duty is to communicate.”

“I hope,” Alice said slowly, “that it’s evidence of an internal struggle. That the dominated part is struggling with the dominant.”

“That’s nonsense!” Burton cried. “If what I’ve learned about computers is true, it couldn’t happen.”

“You forget that this is, in one sense, not a computer. Not the conventional kind, anyway. It’s made of protein, and it’s as complex as the human brain.”

“We’ll have to rouse Loga,” Burton said. “I suppose it’ll be for nothing, but he’s the only one who can handle this.”

The Ethical came from his sleep fully awake. He heard Alice out without any questions, then said, “There would be no struggle. Monat’s order would have gone to the dominated part as well as the other.”

“That depends upon when the order was given,” she said. “If the circuits for domination were put in afterwards, then the dominated part wouldn’t have received them.”

“But the dominant would have transmitted them to the schizophrenic part.”

“Perhaps not!” Alice said.

“If it did happen, and I don’t think there’s the slightest chance it will, then Monat would be resurrected.”

“But I gave that order to the dominant.”

Loga quit frowning.

“Good! Still, if that’s the only way to save the wathans, then it should happen. Even if…”

He didn’t want to say what would happen to him.

They had breakfast in the dining hall except for Loga, who ate while in the control chair. Despite his efforts, he could get no direct response from the computer. One of his screens showed the enclosure of the wathans.

“When it becomes empty, we’ll know that they’re…lost.”

He looked at another screen.

“Two more have just been caught. No. Three now.”

While they were breakfasting in gloom, broken only now and then by halfhearted comments, Frigate said, “We do have something important to talk about.”

They looked at him but said nothing.

“What’s going to happen to us after the computer dies? Loga won’t consider us ethically advanced enough to let us stay here. In his opinion, we won’t be capable of running this operation. I think he’s right, except possibly for Nur. If Nur could get through the entrance on top of the tower, he’d be allowed to stay.”

The Moor said, “I’ve been through it.”

They stared at him.

“When?” Frigate said.

“Last night. I decided that if I could get all the way out, I could get all the way back in. I succeeded, though it wasn’t easy. I couldn’t stroll through as a full-fledged Ethical would.”

Burton growled, “That’s fine for you. I apologize for what I said about all Sufis being charlatans. But what about the rest of us? Suppose we don’t want to go back to The Valley? And if we do, then we’ll tell people the truth. Not that everybody will believe us. There are still Christians and Moslems and so forth who’ve refused to abandon their religion. Also, I imagine there’ll be many Chancers who’ll cling to their tenets.”

“That’s their problem,” Nur said. “However, I don’t wish to stay here. I’ll go back to The Valley willingly. I have work to do there. I must work until I Go On.”

“That doesn’t mean that you’ll be gathered to the bosom of the Creator,” Burton said. “Scientifically, all Going On means is that you will no longer be detectable by their scientists’ instruments.”

“As Allah wills it, so be it,” Nur said.

Burton considered the prospect of staying here. He would have such power as nobody on Earth had ever had and few on the Riverworld.

To gain it, though, he would have to remove Loga. Kill him or imprison him. Would the others collaborate with him? If they didn’t, he’d have to get them out of the way. He could resurrect them in The Valley, where they were going anyway. But he would be lonely. Alice wouldn’t go along with him. No, he’d not be lonely. He could resurrect in the tower all sorts of agreeable companions, men and women.

He shuddered. The temptation had passed through him like a nightmare. He didn’t want that sort of power, and he would forever feel he was a traitor if he did have it. Besides, it was evident that he couldn’t be entrusted with it.

But what about Loga? Wasn’t he a traitor?

Yes. In a sense. Burton, however, agreed with him that the candidates in The Valley should be given more, much more, time than the other Ethicals had planned. He himself, he felt, would need that extension.

He looked at the faces around the table. Were there thoughts such as his behind those dour expressions? Was one or more than one struggling with temptation?

He’d have to watch them. Make sure that they didn’t try anything reprehensible.

He drank some of the yellow wine and said, “Is everybody agreeable to returning to The Valley? A show of hands, please.”

Everybody raised their hands except Tom Turpin. They looked hard at him. Grinning, he raised his hand.

“I was thinking of all the good times I could have here. But I don’t want to stay. Man, I couldn’t handle it. Only…I wonder if Loga’d let me take a piano with me.”

Alice burst into tears. “All those souls! I thought that I had an answer but…”

A screen on the wall glowed, and Loga’s smiling face appeared.

“Come here!” he shouted. He laughed. “Come here!” He laughed again. “The dominant has just succumbed, and I’ve just gotten a message from the other! Alice, you were right! Oh, how you were right!”

They ran into the control room and gathered around the Ethical. There was the display on the screen, glowing with the most recent communication.

Then they cheered and whooped and flung their arms about each other and got off the platform and danced.

After a while, Loga shouted for attention.

“Remember, it’s still dying! But it’s given me permission to replace the module! I have to leave at once!”

It would be sadly ironic, thought Burton, if the computer died before Loga could get to it.

Ten minutes later, as they were waiting for his call in the dining hall, he appeared grinning on a screen.

“It’s done! It’s done! I’ve already given the order to start the resurrection again!”

They cheered and cried and embraced again. Turpin sat down at the piano and played the “St. Louis Rag.”

“It’s been a long, long River, but we made it to the end!” Alice shrieked. Her big dark eyes seemed to glow like a video screen, her whole being radiated joy. She had never looked more beautiful.

“Yes,” Burton said. He kissed her several times. “We’ll have to go back to The River, but that doesn’t matter.”

How strange and unforeseeable! The world had been saved, not by great rulers and statesmen, not by mystics and saints and prophets and messiahs, not by any of the holy scriptures, but by an introverted eccentric writer of mathematical texts and children’s books and by the child who’d inspired him.

The little girl become a woman, dream-ridden Alice, had inspired the nonsense not really nonsense, and this in circuitous and spiraling fashion had inspired her to do what all others had failed to do, to save eighteen billion souls and the world.

While thinking this, Burton happened to look toward the door. Frigate had been whirling around and around and babbling nonsense all the way to the door. Now he was walking back from it and frowning.

Burton left Alice to go to him.

“Is something the matter?”

Frigate quit frowning and grinned.

“No. I thought I heard footsteps in the corridor. But I looked, and there was no one there. Imagination, I guess.”

By the Same Author

The Lovers

Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life

Lord Tyger

Strange Relations

Tarzan Alive

Time’s Last Gift

Traitor to the Living

The Stone God Awakens

Flesh

Behind the Walls of Terra

The Image of the Beast

Blown

A Feast Unknown

The Gates of Creation

The Maker of Universes

Night of Light

A Private Cosmos

The Wind Whales of Ishmael

The Lavalite World

Jesus on Mars

Dark Is the Sun

The Unreasoning Mask

The Book of Philip José Farmer

Dayworld

Dayworld Rebel

The Riverworld Series

To Your Scattered Bodies Go

The Fabulous Riverboat

The Dark Design

The Magic Labyrinth

Gods of Riverworld

Riverworld and Other Stories

Red Orc’s Rage

The Dark Heart of Time: A Tarzan Novel

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

Copyright © 1980 by Philip José Farmer

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN: 978-0-7653-2655-3

1 See To Your Scattered Bodies Go for the details.

To those who won’t knuckle under

The Earthbred and their fates are Yours

In all their stations,

Their multitudinous languages and many colors

Are Yours, and we whom from the many

You made different, O Master of the Choice.

—Ancient Egyptian hymn

And hell is more than half of paradise.

—Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Luke Havergal”

When Moses struck the rock, he forgot to stand out of the way of the water and so barely escaped drowning.

—The Book of Jasher

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraphs

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Afterword

Dramatis Personae

Preface

By the Same Author

Praise for the Novels of Riverworld

Copyright

1

Loga had cracked like an egg.

At 10:02, his image had appeared on the wall-screens of the apartments of his eight fellow tenants. Their view was somewhat above him, and they could see him only from his naked navel to a point a few inches above his head. The sides of the desk almost met the edges of their field of vision, and some of the wall and floor behind him showed.

Loga looked like a red-haired, green-eyed Buddha who had lived for years in an ice-cream factory and had been unable to resist its product. Though he had lost twenty pounds in the last three weeks, he was still very fat.

He was, however, a very happy Buddha. Smiling, his pumpkin face seeming to glow, he spoke in Esperanto. “I’ve made quite a discovery! It’ll solve the problem of…”

He glanced to his right.

“Sorry. Thought I heard something.”

“You and Frigate,” Burton said. “You’re getting paranoid. We’ve searched every one of the thirty-five thousand, seven hundred and ninety-three rooms in the tower, and…”

The screens flickered. Loga’s body and face shimmered, elongated, then dwarfed. The interruption lasted for perhaps five seconds. Burton was surprised. This was the first time that any screen had displayed interference or malfunction.

The image steadied and became clear.

“Yaas?” Burton drawled. “What’s so exciting?”

The electronic vision blinked into enigma.

Burton started, and he clamped his hands on the arms of his chair. They were a hold on reality. What he was seeing certainly seemed to be unreal.

Zigzag cracks had run from the corners of Loga’s lips and curved up over his cheeks and into his hair. They were deep and seemed to go through his skin and the flesh to the mouth cavity and the bone.

Burton shot up from his chair.

“Loga! What is it?”

Cracks had now spread down across the Ethical’s face, chest, bulging belly, arms and hands.

Blood spurted onto his crazing skin and the desk.

Still smiling, he fell apart like a shattered egg, and he toppled sideways to the right from the armless chair. Burton heard a sound as of glass breaking. Now all he could see of Loga was the upper part of an arm, the fragments stained as if they were pieces of a broken bottle of wine.

The flesh and the blood melted. Only bright pools were left.

Burton had become rigid, but, when he heard Loga cry out, he jumped.

“I tsab u!”

The cry was followed by a thump, as if a heavy body had struck the floor.

Burton voice-activated other viewers in Loga’s room. There was no one there, unless the red puddles on the floor were Loga’s remains.

Burton sucked in his breath.

Seven screens sprang into light on Burton’s wall. Each held the image of a tenant. Alice’s big dark eyes were larger than normal, and her face was pale.

“Dick? That couldn’t have been Loga! But it sounded like him!”

“You saw him!” Burton said. “How could he have cried out? He was dead!”

The others spoke at once, so shaken that each had reverted to his or her native tongue. Even the unflappable Nur was speaking in Arabic.

“Quiet!” Burton shouted, raising his hands. Immediately thereafter, he realized that he had spoken in English. That did not matter; they understood him.

“I don’t know what happened any more than you do. Some of it couldn’t have happened, and so it didn’t. I’ll meet you all outside Loga’s apartment. At once. Bring your arms!”

He removed from a cabinet two weapons that he had thought he would never need again. Each had a butt like a pistol’s, a barrel three inches in diameter and a foot long, and at the firing end, a sphere the size of a large apple.

Alice’s voice came from her screen.

“Will the horrors never stop?”

“They never do for long,” he said. “In this life or that.”

Alice’s triangular face and large dark eyes were set in that withdrawn expression he disliked so much.

He said harshly, “Snap out of it, Alice!”

“I’ll be all right,” Alice said. “You know that.”

“Nobody is ever all right.”

He walked swiftly toward the door. Its sensory device would recognize him but would not open until he had spoken the code phrase, “Open, O sesame!” in the classical Arabic. Alice, in her apartment, would be saying in English, “ ‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.”

The door closed behind him. In the corridor was a large chair made of gray metal and a soft scarlet-dyed material. Burton sat down on it. The seat and back flowed to fit the contour of his body. He pressed a finger on the black center of a white disc on the massive left arm of the chair. A long thin metal rod slid up out of the white disc on the right arm. Burton pulled the rod back, a white light spread out from under the chair, and it rose, stopping two feet above the floor when he eased the rod into the dead center position. He turned the rod; the chair rotated to face the opposite direction. Using the rod to control vertical movement, and pressing on the central black spot of the left disc to control speed, he moved the chair down the corridor.

Presently, floating swiftly past walls displaying animated murals, he joined the others. They hovered in their chairs until Burton had taken the lead, then followed him. Burton slowed the chair slightly when he entered a huge vertical shaft at the end of the corridor. With the ease of much practice, he curved the path of the chair up the shaft to the next level and out into another corridor. A hundred feet beyond the shaft, he halted the chair at the door to Loga’s apartment. The chair sank down onto the floor, and Burton got out. The others were only a few seconds behind him. Babbling, though they were not easily upset, they got out of their chair-vehicles.

The wall extended for three hundred feet from the shaft to an intersecting corridor. Its entire surface displayed a moving picture in what seemed to be three dimensions. The sky was clear. Far away was a dark mountain range. In the foreground was a jungle clearing in which was a village of dried-mud huts. Dark Caucasians in the garments worn by Hindus circa 500 B.C. moved among the huts. A slim, dark young man clad only in a loincloth sat under a bo tree. Around him squatted a dozen men and women, all intently listening to him. He was the historical Buddha, and the scene was not a reconstruction. It had been filmed by a man or woman, an Ethical agent who had passed for one of them, and whose camera and sound equipment were concealed in a ring on a finger. At the moment, their conversation was a slight murmur, but a codeword from a viewer could make it audible. If the viewer did not understand Hindustani, he could use another codeword to switch the language to Ethical.

Another codeword would make the picture emit the odors abounding near the photographer, though the viewer was usually better off without these.

Directly in front of Burton was a treestump on which someone had painted a symbol, a green eye inside a pale yellow pyramid. This had not been in the original film; it marked the entrance to Loga’s apartment.

“If he’s got the door set for his codeword only, we’re screwed,” Frigate said. “We’ll never get in.”

“Somebody got in,” Burton said.

“Perhaps,” Nur said.

Burton spoke loudly, too loudly, as if he could activate the opening mechanism by force of voice.

“Loga!”

A circular crack ten feet in diameter appeared in the wall. The section moved inward a trifle, then the section became a wheel and rolled into the wall recess. The scene on it did not fade out but turned with the surface.

“It was set for anyone who wanted to enter!” Alice said.

“Which was not the right thing to do,” Burton said.

Nur, the little, dark, and big-nosed Moor, said, “The intruder may have overridden the codeword and then reset the mechanism.”

“How could he have done that?” Burton said. “And why?”

“How and why was any of this done?”

They went cautiously through the opening, Burton leading. The room was a forty-foot cube. The wall behind the desk was a pale green, but the others displayed moving scenes, one from that planet called the Gardenworld, one of a tropical island as seen from a great distance, and one, which Loga must have been facing, of a daytime thunderstorm at a high altitude. Dark angry clouds roiled, and lightning spat brightly but silently from cloud to cloud.

Incongruous in the clouds, the active screens hung glowing, still displaying the rooms of the tenants.

Red pools glistened on the desk and the hardwood floor.

“Get a sample of the liquid,” Burton said to Frigate. “The computer over there can analyze it.”

Frigate grunted and went to a cabinet to look for something with which to take a specimen. Burton walked around the room but saw nothing that looked like a clue. It was too bad that the other viewers had not been on. However, whoever had done this must have made sure that they were not active.

Nur, Behn, and Turpin went to search nearby rooms. Burton activated the screens that would display these rooms. Doubtless, none but the three would be in them, but he wanted to keep an eye on them. If one person could be turned into a liquid, why not others?

He stooped and passed a finger through the wetness on the floor. When he straightened up, he held the tip of the finger a few inches from his eyes.

“You aren’t going to taste it?” Alice said.

“I shouldn’t. In some respects, Loga was rather poisonous. It’d be a strange form of cannibalism. Or of Christian communion.”

He licked the finger, made a face, and said, “The mass of the Mass is inversely proportional to the faith of the square.”

Alice should not have been shocked, not after what she had gone through on this world. She did look repulsed, though whether it was by his act or his words he did not know.

“Tastes like blood, vintage human,” he said.

Nur, Behn, and Li Po came into the living room. “There is no one there,” the Chinese said. “Not even his ghost.”

Aphra Behn said, “Dick, what did Loga say?”

“I don’t think he could have said anything. You saw him crack and melt. How could he have spoken after that?”

“It was his voice,” Behn said. “Whoever said it, what did it mean?”

“I tsab u. That’s Ethical for ‘Who are you?’ ”

“That’s what the Caterpillar said,” Alice murmured.

“And Alice in Wonderland couldn’t tell him,” Burton said. “The whole event is crazy.”

Frigate called them to the console in the corner.

“I put the specimen in the slot and asked for identification. There you are. You couldn’t identify an individual by his blood in A.D. 1983, but now…”

The console screen displayed, in English, as Frigate had requested: INDIVIDUAL IDENTIFIED: LOGA.

Beneath that was the analysis. The liquid was composed of those elements which made up the human body, and they were in the proper proportions. Flesh had indeed turned into liquid.

“Unless the Computer is lying,” Nur said.

Burton swung around to face him. “What do you mean by that?”

“The Computer may have an override command. It could have been told to give this report.”

“By whom? Only Loga could do that!”

Nur shrugged thin, brown, and bony shoulders.

“Perhaps. An unknown could be in the tower. Remember what Pete thought he heard when we were celebrating our victory.”

“Footsteps in the corridor outside the room!” Burton said. “Frigate said he thought it was his imagination!”

“Ah, but was it?”

It was not necessary to use the console. Burton asked the Computer—as distinguished from the small auxiliary computers—a few questions. A circular section of the wall glowed, and words on it indicated that no unauthorized person had entered Loga’s room. It denied that Loga’s commands had been overridden.

“Which it would, I must admit, if this mysterious stranger had told it to do so,” Burton said. “If that’s happened … well, by God, we are in trouble!”

He asked for a rerun of the scene they had witnessed through their viewers. There was none. Loga had not directed the Computer to record it.

“I thought everything was going to be clear, unmysterious, straightforward from now on,” Frigate said. “I should have known better. It never is.”

He paused, then said softly, “He cracked open like Humpty Dumpty, except that Humpty Dumpty broke after he fell, not before. And then he turned to water like the Wicked Witch of the West.”

Burton, who had died in 1890, did not understand the last reference. He made a mental note to ask the American about it when there was time.

Burton was going to ask the Computer to send in a robot to clean up the liquid. He decided, after some thought, to leave the room as it had been found. He would lock the door to the apartment with a codeword that only he knew. And then, if someone unlocked it …

What could he do?

Nothing. But he would at least know that there was an intruder.

Nur said, “We’ve been assuming that what we thought we saw take place here actually did take place.”

“You think that what we saw was computer-simulation?” Frigate said.

“It’s possible.”

“But what about the liquid?” Burton said. “That’s not simulated.”

“It could be synthetic, a false clue. Loga’s voice could have been reproduced to deceive and confuse us.”

Alice said, “Wouldn’t it be more logical just to abduct Loga? We might have thought that Loga had just gone away for some reason or another.”

“Why in the world would he do that, Alice?” Burton said.

“We were to return to The Valley day after tomorrow,” Li Po said. “If Loga wanted to get rid of us, he’d have it done in two days. No, that liquid … the whole thing … there’s someone else in the tower.”

“That makes ten in the tower then,” Nur said.

“Ten?” Burton said.

“The eight of us. Plus the unknown who did away with Loga, though more than one might have done that. Plus Fear. That makes at least ten.”

2

“In a sense, we’re gods,” Frigate said.

“Gods in a jail,” Burton said.

If they felt godlike, their faces did not show the vast assurance and happiness that must distinguish gods from humanity. The first area they had gone to from Loga’s apartment was the highest story in the tower. Here, in a huge chamber, was the hangar of the Ethicals. There were two hundred aerial and spacecraft of various kinds there, in any of which they could have flown to any place in The Valley. However, the hangar hatches had to be opened, and that the Computer refused to do. Nor could they operate the hatch mechanisms manually.

The unknown who had liquefied Loga had inserted an override command in the Computer. Only he—or she—or they—had the power to raise the hangar hatches.

They stood close together in a corner of the immense room. The floor, walls, and ceilings were a monotonous, overpowering gray, the color of prison cells. Their means of escape, the saucer-shaped, sausage-shaped, and insect-shaped machines, seemed to brood in the silence. They were waiting to be used. But by whom?

At the opposite wall, a thousand feet away, was a fat cigar-shaped vessel, the largest of the spaceships. It was five hundred feet long and had a maximum diameter of two hundred feet. This could be used to travel to the Gardenworld, wherever that planet was. Loga had said it would take a hundred years, Earth-time, to arrive at its destination. Loga had also said that the ship was so computerized-automatic that a person of average intelligence and little knowledge of science could operate it.

Burton’s voice broke the silence.

“We have some immediate pressing problems. We must find out who did that horrible thing to Loga. And we must find a way to cancel the override inhibits in the Computer.”

“True,” Nur said. “But before we can do that, we must determine just how much control of the Computer we have. What our limits are. When you fight, you must know your strengths and your weaknesses as well as you know your face in the mirror. Only thus can we determine how to overcome the strengths and weaknesses of our enemy.”

“If he is our enemy,” Frigate said.

The others looked at him with surprise.

“That’s very good,” Nur said. “Don’t think in old categories. You’re learning.”

“What else could he be?” Aphra Behn said.

“I don’t know,” Frigate said. “We’ve been so manipulated by Loga that I’m not one hundred percent convinced that he is on our side or that he is right in what he’s done. This unknown … he may be doing this for the right reason. Still…”

“If Loga was his only obstacle, the unknown’s removed it,” Burton said. “Why doesn’t he come forward now? What could we do to oppose him? We’re like children, really. We don’t know how to use all the powers available. We don’t even know what they are.”

“Not yet,” Nur said. “Pete has proposed another way of looking at events. But, for the time being, it’s not useful. We have to assume that the unknown is our enemy until we find out otherwise. Does anyone disagree?”

It was evident that no one did.

Tom Turpin said, “What you say is OK. But I think that the very first thing we got to do is protect ourselves. We got to set up some kind of defense so what happened to Loga don’t happen to us.”

“I agree,” Burton said. “But if this unknown can override any of our commands…”

“We should stick together!” Alice said. “Keep together, don’t let anyone out of our sight!”

Burton said, “You may be right, and we should confer about that. First, though, I propose that we get out of this gloomy, oppressive place. Let’s go back to my apartment.”

The interior door to the hangar opened, and they rode their chairs down the corridor to the nearest vertical shaft. The next level was five hundred feet down, which caused Burton to wonder what was between the hangar level and the second one. He would ask the Computer what it contained.

Inside his quarters, with the entrance door shut by his codeword, he began to act as host. A wall section slid back, revealing a very large table standing on end. This moved out from the recess, turned until the tabletop was horizontal, floated to the center of the room, extended its legs, which had been folded against the underside, and settled on the floor. The eight arranged chairs around it and sat down. By then they had gotten their drinks from the energy-matter converter cabinets along one wall. The table was round, and Burton sat in what would have been King Arthur’s chair if the room had been Camelot.

He took a sip of black coffee and said, “Alice has a good idea. It means, however, that we must all live in one apartment. This one isn’t quite large enough. I propose we move into one down the hall near the elevator shaft. It has ten bedrooms, a laboratory, a control room, and a large dining-sitting room. We can work together and keep an eye on each other.”

“And get on each other’s nerves,” Frigate said.

“I need a woman,” Li Po said.

“So do all of us, except Marcelin, and maybe Nur,” Turpin said. “Man, it’s been a long, hard time!”

“What about Alice?” Aphra Behn said. “She needs a man.”

“Don’t speak for me,” Alice said sharply.

Burton slammed the tabletop with a fist. “First things first!” he bellowed. Then, more softly, “We must have a common front, band together, no matter what the inconvenience. We can work out the other matters, trifling, if I may say so, at this moment. We’ve been through a lot together, and we can cooperate. We make a good team, despite some differences that have caused some abrasion recently. We must work together, be together, or we may be cut down one at a time. Is there anyone who won’t cooperate?”

Nur said, “If anyone insists on living apart, that one is under suspicion.”

There was an uproar then, stilled when Burton hit the table again.

“This bottling-up will be scratchsome, no doubt of that. But we’ve been ridden gallsore by worse things, and the better we work together, the sooner we’ll be free to pursue our own interests.”

Alice was frowning, and he knew what she was thinking. Since their final breakup, she had avoided him as much as possible. Now …

“If we’re in jail, we’re in the best one in two worlds,” Frigate said.

“No jail’s any good,” Turpin said. “You ever been in the slammer, Pete?”

“Only the one that I made for myself all my life,” Frigate said. “But it was portable.”

That was not true, Burton thought. Frigate has been a prisoner several times on the Riverworld, including being one of Hermann Göring’s slaves. But he spoke metaphorically. A most metaphorical man, Frigate. Shifty, a verbal trickster, ambiguous, which he would cheerfully admit, quoting Emily Dickinson to justify himself.

“Success in circuit lies.”

Quoting himself, he would say, “The literal man litters reality.”

“Well, Captain, what do we do next?” Frigate said.

The first priority was to go to their individual apartments and bring their few possessions to the large apartment down the hall. They went in a body, since it would not do to go alone, and then they picked out their bedrooms. Alice took one as far from Burton’s as possible. Peter Frigate chose the apartment next to hers. Burton smiled ferociously on noting this. It was an acknowledged but mostly unspoken fact that the American was “in love” with Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves. He had been ever since, in 1964, he had seen the photographs of her at the ages of ten and eighteen in a biography of Lewis Carroll. He had written a mystery story, The Knave of Hearts, in which thirty-year-old Alice had played the amateur detective. In 1983, he had organized a public subscription drive to erect a monument to her on her unmarked grave in the Hargreaves family plot at Lyndhurst. Times were hard, however, and little money had been given. Then Frigate had died, and he still had not learned if his project had been completed. If it had, above Alice’s body there was now a carved marble monument of Alice at the tea table with the March Hare, the Dormouse, and the Mad Hatter, and the Cheshire Cat’s head above and behind her.

Meeting her had not lessened his love for her, as a cynic might expect, but had heated it. The literary attractions had become fleshly. Yet he had never said a word to her or Burton about his passion. He loved, or had loved, Burton too much to make what he would have called a dishonorable move toward her. Alice had never shown the slightest sign of feeling toward him as he did toward her. That did not necessarily mean anything. Alice was a master at concealing her feelings in certain situations. There was the public Alice, and there was the private Alice. There also might be an Alice whom even Alice did not know. Whom she would not at all want to know.

Two hours before lunchtime, they were settled in, though still unsettled by the morning’s events. Burton had chosen not to use the control console, which could be slid from a wall recess. Instead, he had asked the Computer to stimulate the screen and the keyboard on the wall. This could have been reproduced in light on the ceiling or the floor if required. The floor, however, was covered with a thick rug, which the unlearned would have thought was a very expensive Persian. Its model had, in fact, been woven on the Gardenworld, a recording of it had been brought to the tower, and the Computer had reproduced the original by energy-mass conversion.

Burton stood before the wall, the simulation at head level. If he chose to walk back and forth, the simulation would keep pace with him.

Burton gave Loga’s name and ID code and asked the Computer, in English, where Loga’s living body was.

The reply was that it could not be located.

“He’s dead then!” Alice murmured.

“Where is Loga’s body-recording?” Burton said.

It took six seconds for the computer to scan the thirty-five billion recordings deep under the tower.

“It cannot be located.”

“Oh, my God! Erased!” Frigate said.

“Not necessarily,” Nur said. “There may be an override command to give such an answer.”

Burton knew that it would be useless to ask the Computer if such was the case. Nevertheless, he had to.

“Has anyone commanded you not to obey an override command?” Burton said quickly.

Nur laughed. Frigate said, “Oh, boy!”

NO.

“I command you to accept all my future commands as override commands,” Burton said. “These supersede all previous override commands.”

REJECTED. NOT FUNCTIONAL.

“Who has the authority to command overrides?” Burton said.

LOGA. KHR-12W-373-N.

“Loga is dead,” Burton said.

There was no reply.

“Is Loga dead?” Burton said.

NOT IN DOMAIN OF KNOWLEDGE.

“If Loga is dead, who commands you?”

The names of the eight, followed by their code-IDs, flashed on the screen. Below them, flashing: LIMITED AUTHORITY.

“How limited?”

No reply.

Burton rephrased.

“Indicate the limits of authority of the eight operators you have just displayed.”

The screen went blank for about six seconds. Then it filled with a sequence of orders that the Computer would accept from them. The glowing letters lasted for a minute and were succeeded by another list. In another minute, a third list appeared. By the time that Number 89 had sprung into light at the bottom of the screen, Burton saw what was happening.

“It could go on for hours,” he said. “It’s giving us a detailed list of what we can do.”

He told the Computer to stop the display but to print out a complete list for each of the eight. “I don’t dare ask it for a list of don’ts. The list would never end.”

Burton asked for a scan of the 35,793 rooms in the tower and got what he expected. All were empty of any living sentients. Or dead ones.

“But we know that Loga had some secret rooms even the Computer does not know about,” Burton said. “Or at least it won’t tell us where they are. We know where one is. Where are the others?”

“You think that the unknown might be in one of those?” Nur said.

“I don’t know. It’s possible. We must try to find them.”

“We could compare the tower dimensions with the circuitry,” Frigate said. “But, my God, that would take us many months! And the rooms might still be so cleverly concealed that we would not find them.”

“That sounds as interesting as cleaning spittoons,” Turpin said. He went to a grand piano, sat down, and began playing “Ragtime Nightmare.”

Burton followed him and stood by him.

“We’d all love to hear you play,” he said—he wouldn’t, he had no liking for music of any kind—“but we’re in conference, a very important one, vital, you know, in the full sense of the word, and this is no time to divert or distract us. We need everyone’s wits in this. Otherwise, we may all die because one didn’t do his share.”

Smiling, his fingers running spiderlike on the keys, Turpin looked up at Burton. The long, exhausting and dangerous trip to the tower had thinned him to one hundred and seventy-five pounds. But since he had been in the tower, he had stuffed himself with food and liquor, and his face was waxing into full moonness. His large teeth were very white against his dark skin—not as dark as Burton’s—and his dark brown hair was wavy, not kinky. He could have passed for white, but he had chosen to stay in the black world on Earth.

“Nigger is how you was raised, how you think,” he would sometimes say. “As the Good Book says, it don’t do no good to kick against the pricks.” He would laugh softly then, not caring whether or not his hearer understood that by “pricks” he meant “whites.”

“I thought I’d give you thinkers some background music. I’m no good at this kind of thing.”

“You’ve a good mind,” Burton said, “and we need it. Besides, we have to act as a team, as soldiers in a small army. If everybody does what he wants, ignores this crisis, we become just a disorganized mob.”

“And you’s the captain, the man,” Turpin said. “OK.”

He brought his hands down, the chords crashed, and he stood up.

“Lead on, MacDuff.”

Though he was furious, Burton showed no sign of it. He strode back to the table, Turpin following him too closely, and he stood by his chair. Turpin, still smiling, took his seat.

“I suggest that we wait until we have mastered the contents of those,” Burton said, waving a hand at the mechanism that was piling, sorting, and collating the papers flying from a slot in the wall. “Once we thoroughly understand what we can and cannot do, we may make our plans.”

“That’ll take some time,” de Marbot said. “It’ll be like reading a library, not one book.”

“It must be done.”

“You talk of limits,” Nur said, “and that is necessary and good. But within what we call limits we have such power as the greatest kings on Earth never dreamed of. That power will be our strength, but it will also be our weakness. Rather, I should say, the power will tempt us to misuse it. I pray to God that we will be strong enough to overcome our weaknesses—if we have them.”

“We are, in a sense, gods,” Burton said. “But humans with godlike powers. Half-gods.”

“Half-assed gods,” Frigate said.

Burton smiled and said, “We’ve been through much on The River. It’s scourged us, winnowed out the chaff. I hope. We shall see.”

“The greatest enemy is not the unknown,” Nur said.

He did not need to explain what he meant.

3

An ancient Greek philosopher, Herakleitos, once said, “Character determines destiny.”

Burton was thinking of this as he paced back and forth in his bedroom. What Herakleitos said was only partly true. Everyone had a unique character. However, that character was influenced by environment. And every environment was unique. Every place was not exactly like every other place. In addition, a person’s character was part of the environment he traveled in. How a person acted depended not only upon his character but also on the peculiar opportunities and constraints of the environment, which included the person’s self. The self carried about in it all the environments that the person had lived in. These were, in a sense, ghosts, some of thicker ectoplasm than the others, and thus powerful haunters of the mobile home, the person.

Another ancient sage, Hebrew, not Greek, had said, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

The old Preacher had never heard of evolution and so did not know that new species, unfamiliar to the sun, emerged now and then. Moreover, he overlooked that every newborn baby was unique, therefore new, whether under the sun or under the moon. Like all sages, the Preacher spoke half-truths.

When he said that there was a time to act and a time not to act, he spoke the whole truth. That is, unless you were a Greek philosopher and pointed out that not acting is an act in itself. The difference in philosophy between the Greek and the Hebrew was in their attitudes toward the world. Herakleitos was interested in abstract ethics; the Preacher, in practical ethics. The former stressed the why, the latter, the how.

It was possible, Burton thought, to live in this world and only wonder about the how. But a complete human, one trying to realize all his potential, would also probe the why. This situation demanded the why and the how. Lacking the first, he could not function properly with the second.

Here he was with seven other Earthborns, in a tower set in the center of a sea at the north pole of this world. The sea had a diameter of sixty miles and was ringed by an unbroken range of mountains over twenty thousand feet high. In this sea The River gave up almost all of its warmth before it plunged from the other end and began picking up heat again. Thick mists like those from the gates of Hell hid a tower that rose ten miles from the sea surface. Below the waters and deep into the earth, the tower extended five miles or perhaps even deeper.

There was a shaft in the center of the tower that housed some billion of wathans at this moment. Wathans. The Ethical name for the artificial souls created by a species extinct for millions of years. Somewhere near the tower, deep under the earth, were immense chambers in which were kept records of the bodies of each of the thirty-five billion plus who had once lived on Earth from circa 100,000 B.C. through A.D. 1983.

When a person died on the Riverworld, the resurrector, using a mass-energy converter and the record, reproduced that body on a bank of The River. The wathan, the synthetic soul, the invisible entity that held all of what made that person sentient, flew at once to the body, attracted as iron by a magnet. And the man or woman, dead twenty-four hours before, was alive.

Of the thirty-five billion plus, Burton had experienced more of death than any. A man who had died 777 times could claim a record. Though he had been dead more often than anyone else, there were few who had lived as intensely on Earth and the Riverworld as he. His triumphs and sweet times had been few; his defeats and frustrations, many. Though he had once written that the bad and the good things of life tended to balance out, his own ledger had far more red ink than black. The Book of Burton showed a deficit, a heavy imbalance. Despite which, he had refused to take bankruptcy. Why he continued fighting, why he wanted so desperately to keep living, he did not know. Perhaps it was because he hoped to balance the books someday.

And then what?

He did not know about that, but it was the then-what? that fed his flame.

Here he was, trailing a horde of ghosts and placed by forces, which he had not understood and still did not understand, in this vast building at the top of the world. It had been erected for one purpose, to allow Terrestrials a chance for immortality. Not physical foreverness but a return, perhaps an absorption into, the Creator.

The Creator, if there was one, had not given Earthpeople, or indeed any sentients, souls. That entity which figured so largely in religions had been imaginary, a nonexistent desideratum. But that which sentients could imagine they might bring into actuality, and the might-be had become the is. What Burton and others objected to was the implied should-be. The Ethicals had not asked each resurrectee if he or she wished to be raised from the dead. They had been given no choice. Like it or not, they became lazari. And they had not been told how or why.

Loga had said that there just was not enough time to do that. Even if a thousand Agents were assigned to asking a thousand people per hour whether or not they wished to be endowed with synthetic souls, the project would take thirty-five million hours. If fifty thousand Agents conducted the interviews, it would take half a million hours. If the interviews could be conducted on a twenty-four-hour basis, and they couldn’t, it would take somewhat over fifty-seven years to question every person.

What would have been accomplished at the end of that time? Very little. Perhaps ten or twelve million might decide not to keep on living. Even a man like Sam Clemens, who insisted that he wanted the eternal peace and quiet of death, would opt for life if he was given a chance for it. He would at least want to try the life offered, one with conditions different from those on Earth. A hundred considerations would make him change his mind. The same would apply to those others who felt, for various reasons, that life on Earth had been miserable, wretched, painful, and altogether not worthwhile.

“The resurrectees have to be dealt with en masse,” Loga had said. “There is no other way to handle them. We have, however, made a few exceptions. You were one, because I secretly arranged to have you awaken in the resurrection area so many years ago. You became a special case. The Canadian, La Viro, was visited by one of us, and certain ideas were given him so that he would found the Church of the Second Chance. Their missionaries spread teachings that contained some of the truths about this situation. They stressed the ethical reasons for the lazari being here; they stressed that each person must advance himself ethically.”

“Why couldn’t everybody have been told the truth at the outset?” Burton had said. And then, before Loga could reply, Burton had answered himself.

“I see. For the same reason that every person could not be asked if he wished to have another life and another chance at it.”

“Yes. And even if we Ethicals had appeared in The Valley and told the truth to all, only a certain percentage would have believed us. And our teachings would have been perverted, changed, and denied by many.

“Believe me, our way is the best, even if it has its disadvantages and limits. We know because of what our predecessors told us about their projects in resurrecting other sentients. Besides, when Earthpeople were all raised on that day, there were one hundred thousand languages spoken by them. We would not have been understood by many. All the people could not hear the message until the Church of the Second Chance had spread a common language, Esperanto, throughout the Riverworld.”

Burton had then said, “In the previous projects, uh, I’m almost afraid to ask, how many, what percentage, Passed On?”

“Three-quarters of those raised on the Gardenworlds did,” Loga had said. “The remaining one-fourth … their recordings were dissolved when they died after their grace period was up.”

“Died or were killed?” Burton had said.

“Most of them killed each other or committed suicide.”

“Most?”

Loga had ignored this.

“One-sixteenth of the people resurrected as adults or juveniles in previous projects passed the test, Went On. Each of these projects had at least two phases. Here, after the phase with those who died before or during A.D. 1983 is done, then those who died after that will be raised for the second stage. The final one.”

“But the first stage is going to take longer than planned because of your interference,” Burton had said.

“Yes. I believe … I know … that the percentage of those Going On could have been higher, much higher, if the lazari had been given more time. I could not endure the thought of so many being doomed, so I became a renegade. I betrayed my fellow Ethicals. I … I may have condemned myself to … not Going On. But I don’t believe that. I did it for my love of humanity.”

The Christians and the Muslims on Earth had believed in a physical resurrection. And so it had been. But the ultimate goal of the Ethicals was Buddhistic, absorption of the soul into the All-Being.

As if reading his mind, Loga had said, “Tell me, Dick, do you really believe, believe in the innermost and deepest part of your mind, where it counts, that you will Go On?”

Burton had stared at Loga for a moment. Then, slowly, he had said, “No. Not in the sense you mean. I just cannot believe it. There is no evidence that such a thing as Going On occurs.”

“Yes, there is! Our instruments cannot perceive the wathan, what you call the soul, when its owner has died after attaining a certain stage of … let’s call it goodness instead of ethical advancement.”

“Which only means that the instruments can’t detect it,” Burton had said. “You have no knowledge of what really happens to the wathan at that point.”

Loga had smiled and said, “In the end, we have to fall back on faith, don’t we?”

“From what I’ve seen of its manifestations on Earth, I have no faith in faith,” Burton had said. “How do you know but what the wathan, as you call it, has simply worn out? It’s an artificial thing, but its life may end naturally, just as all synthetic things … and natural, too … end. The wathan is not a material entity, as we know material things, but that’s the point. We don’t really know if it’s material or not. It may be a form of matter unknown to us. Or a thing of pure energy. If so, a form of energy unknown to us. But how do you know that it may not change into another form, which your instruments cannot detect?”

“It does! It does!” Loga had said. “Into the Undetectible! How else could you explain that the wathan only passes beyond the instrument range when the owner has reached a certain stage of ethical advancement? Those who don’t reach this stage may die again and again, but always, always, the wathans return to their resurrected bodies!”

“There may be an explanation you haven’t thought of.”

“Hundreds of thousands of minds greater than yours have tried to find another explanation, and they have failed.”

“But one may yet come along who won’t fail.”

“You’re depending upon faith now,” Loga had said.

“No. Upon history, logic, and probability.”

Loga had been upset, not because he was beginning to doubt his beliefs but because he feared that Burton would not Go On.

As it had turned out, Loga was not going to Go On. His body-record had been destroyed, and he would no longer have the opportunity to attain that final goal. Yet … it was Loga’s own fault that he did not have that chance now. If he had not set the project on a different course, he would still be alive, and his body-record would insure that he could keep striving for that mysterious event known as Going On.

Was the unknown who had committed Loga to oblivion an Ethical who had somehow survived Loga’s mass slaughter of his fellows? If he was, why didn’t he show himself? Was he afraid of the eight lazari? Was he biding his time until he could kill them and raise them in The Valley where they could no longer interfere with the original design?

Anyone who knew how to input override commands in the computer should not be afraid of the eight. But then perhaps the unknown knew something that the eight did not know yet but might find out. If that were so, the unknown would try to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

However, it was possible that one—or more—of the eight might have made Loga vanish.

Burton was thinking of this when Nur’s head appeared on a wall-screen. “I’d like to speak to you.”

Burton gave the codeword that allowed Nur to see him.

“What is it?”

Nur was wearing a green turban, indicating that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. The choice of color was probably accidental, though, since the little Moor was not one to set store by such things. His long, straight black hair fell from under the cloth onto skinny brown shoulders. His narrow face was intense.

“The inhibit input against resurrecting Monat and all the Ethicals and their agents still holds. I expected that. But something even more momentous has occurred!”

He paused.

Burton said, “Well?”

“You know that Loga told us three weeks ago that he’d told the Computer to start resurrecting the eighteen billion in the records. We all assumed that it had been done. But it’s not so! Apparently, Loga changed his mind for some reason. Perhaps he intended to wait until we were out of the tower. Anyway, not a single person has been resurrected since then.”

The shock silenced Burton for a moment.

When he recovered, he said, “How many bodies are on hold now?”

“As of now, eighteen billion, one million, three hundred and thirty-seven thousand, one hundred and ninety-nine. No. Now … two hundred and seven.”

“I suppose you…?” Burton said.

Nur, anticipating him, which he did with annoying frequency, said, “Yes. I ascertained that the Computer now has a reinforcing override from the unknown. The hold is still on.”

“Just think,” Burton said, “only three weeks ago we thought that our long hard struggle was over. That all the big issues were dissolved and our only problems from then on would be personal.”

Nur did not reply.

“Very well. What we must do first is to subject each of us to a truth test. We can’t proceed on the assumption that there is an unknown until we’ve eliminated all of our group.”

“They won’t like it,” Nur said.

“But it’s logical that we do it.”

“Humans don’t like logic when it’s inconvenient or dangerous for them,” Nur said. “However, they’ll submit to the test. They have to to avoid suspicion.”

4

If not telling a lie was the same as telling the truth, the results of the test were positive. If telling a lie could result in an indication that the truth was being told, the results were negative.

Whether the indications were true or not, the eight seemed to be innocent.

Each sat in turn inside a closed transparent cubicle and answered questions from Burton or Nur. The field generated inside the cubicle showed the wathan floating just above the head of the questionee and attached to it by a thread of bright scarlet light. The wathan was a sphere that swelled and shrank, whirled or seemed to whirl, and flashed a spectrum of glowing colors. This was the invisible thing that accompanied every person from the moment of conception and did not leave him or her until that person was dead. It contained all that was a person, duplicating the contents of the mind and nervous system and also giving him or her self-consciousness.

Burton had taken the first test, and Nur had asked him several questions to which he had to give an answer he believed to be true.

“Were you born in Torquay, England, on March 19, 1821?”

“Yes,” Burton said, and the Computer photographed his wathan at that second.

“When and where did you die the first time?”

“On Sunday, October 19, 1890, in my house in Trieste, that part of Italy then belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”

The Computer took another photograph and compared the two. It then compared these two to others that had been taken many years ago when Burton had been questioned by the Council of Twelve.

Nur looked at the flashing display on a screen and said, “The truth. As you know it.”

That was one of the deficiencies of the test. If a person believed that he was telling the truth, the wathan indicated that he was.

“That is the truth,” Frigate said. “I read those dates many times when I was on Earth.”

“Have you ever lied?” Nur said.

Burton, grinning, said, “No.”

A narrow black zigzag shot over the surface of the wathan.

“The subject lies,” Nur told the Computer.

On the screen appeared: PREVIOUSLY VERIFIED.

“Have you ever lied?” Nur said again.

“Yes.”

The black lightning streak disappeared.

“Did you make Loga vanish?”

“No.”

“Were you implicated with anyone in Loga’s destruction?”

“Not that I know of.”

“That’s the truth, as far as you know it,” Nur said after glancing at the screen. “Do you have any knowledge about anyone who might have made Loga vanish?”

“No.”

“Are you glad that Loga did vanish?”

Burton said, “What the hell?”

He could see the image of his wathan on a screen. It was glowing with orange overlaying the other shifting colors.

“You shouldn’t have asked that!” Aphra Behn said.

“Yes, you devil, you had no right!” Burton said. “Nur, you’re a scoundrel, like all Sufis!”

“You were glad,” Nur said calmly. “I suspected so. I also suspect that most of us were. I was not, but I will allow the same question to be put to me. It may be that I, too, was glad, though deep in my animal mind.”

“The subconscious,” Frigate murmured.

“Whatever it is called, it is the same. The animal mind.”

“Why should anyone be glad?” Alice said.

“Don’t you really know?” Burton shouted.

Alice recoiled at the violence.

Having been cleared, for the moment, anyway, Burton left the cubicle and interrogated Nur. When the Moor appeared to be innocent, Alice seated herself. Burton forbore asking her if Loga’s death had given her any joy. He doubted that it had. But when she had time to consider what she might do with the powers here, she might understand why some of the others had felt, to their shame, elated.

One by one, the others showed their innocence.

“But Loga could have passed the test while lying like a diplomat,” Nur said. “It is possible that one of us has had access to his wathan distorter.”

“I don’t think so,” Turpin said. “Ain’t none of us got the smarts to operate one of those. We ain’t smart enough to override Loga’s commands either. I think we’re wasting time, besides insulting all of us.”

“If I interpret you correctly,” Nur said, “you’re saying that we’re not intelligent enough. That’s not true. We are. But we don’t have the knowledge we need.”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant. We just don’t know enough.”

“Three weeks is long enough for a diligent person to get the knowledge from the Computer,” Burton said.

“No. The Computer ain’t going to tell anyone how to override Loga,” Turpin said. “I just don’t believe that that could be done.”

“We could do a memory-strip of the past three weeks,” Frigate said. “It’ll take time, but it might be worth it.”

“No!” Alice said vehemently. “No! I’d feel violated! It would be worse than rape! I won’t do it!”

“I understand your feelings,” Nur said. “But…”

The Computer could unreel their memories back to conception and display them on a screen. The process had its limits, since it could not reproduce nonvisual and nonauditory thoughts except as electronic displays, the interpretation of which was still uncertain. It was capable of transmitting tactile, olfactory and pressure memories. But, memory was selective and apparently erased many events that the individual considered unimportant. However, it did show clearly what the subject had seen, heard and spoken. On demand, emotion-pain fields could be projected.

“I won’t want you seeing me when I went to the toilet,” Alice said.

“None of us want that, for you or for ourselves,” Burton said, and he laughed. It sounded like a stone skipping across water. “All of us fart and belch and most have probably masturbated and picked our noses, and Marcelin and Aphra, I’m sure, would not care to have us see them in bed. But it’s not necessary to show everything. The Computer can be ordered to be selective, to display only the events we’re interested in. Everything else will be irrelevant and so will not be shown.”

“It’s a waste of time,” Frigate said. “Anyone clever enough to do what the unknown did wouldn’t overlook the possibility of a memory-strip.”

“I agree with you,” Burton said, “though I seldom do. But it is one of those routine things that have to be done. What if the guilty person—if there is one—had anticipated that we would think a memory-search was useless?”

“He wouldn’t take such a chance,” Li Po said.

“Nevertheless, I insist that we do it,” Burton said. “If we don’t, we’ll all be wondering about one another.”

“We’ll still be wondering when it’s all done,” Frigate said sourly. “But if it must be.”

The search could have been run simultaneously with each one in a separate cubicle, but who then would supervise each subject to make sure that he or she did not order the Computer to cancel the relevant events? Burton went first, and, after three hours, the time it took the Computer to strip three weeks of memory, he emerged. The screen had been blank during the entire strip.

It was, as expected, empty while the others underwent the search.

Twenty-five hours passed before the last one, Li Po, stepped out of the cubicle. Long before then, others had drifted off to bed one by one. Burton and Nur saw the work through from beginning to end. Some were getting up when the two decided they should sleep. First, though, Burton wanted to make sure that no one could enter the suite.

“The unknown could override the codeword locking the door.”

“How do you suggest that we block the door?” Frigate said, and he yawned. “Do we shove a bed against it? Pile more furniture on top of that?”

“The door swings inward, so that’s not a bad idea. What I’m going to do, however, is to order the Computer to make a burglar alarm.”

Burton did just that. Five minutes later, he pulled out from an energy-matter converter cabinet a dozen pieces of equipment. He taped two boxes to the wall on each side of the door and secured several other boxes to these. Then he adjusted a dial on one of the large boxes.

“There,” he said, stepping back to admire the set. “No one can enter without setting off a hell of a loud siren. I think. We’d best test it. Pete, will you go outside, close the door, then come back in?”

“Sure, but I hope I don’t disappear while I’m standing in the hall.”

Burton turned a knob on the box. Frigate spoke the codeword, the door swung open, and he walked out. He turned, spoke the word, and the door shut. Burton reset the dial on the box. A few seconds later, the door began opening. A bright orange light flashed from the box, and an ear-pummeling whooping filled the room. Aphra Behn and de Marbot came running through the doorway. Turpin, who had been eating breakfast and not paying Burton much attention, leaped up from the table, his mouth spewing food. “Go-o-o-d damn!”

Burton turned the alarm off.

“The unknown could learn what the combination for the alarm is from the Computer. So I asked for one that I could set myself. There’s no way the Computer can know which I chose, not as long as I blocked the line of sight from its screen with my body when I set the alarm.”

“Admirable,” Frigate said. “But our bedrooms are soundproofed. How are we going to hear the alarm from there?”

The walls, floor, and ceilings were several inches thick and packed with circuits and power lines, most of them unused. Burton could have ordered the Computer to set up a circuit that would set off alarms in all rooms when the door alarm went off. But the unknown could override these circuits.

Burton was thinking about what to do when Frigate spoke.

“We could have the Computer make mass detectors. These could be set inside the bedroom doors so that, even if we didn’t hear the apartment door alarm, we’d hear anybody trying to get into our bedrooms. These should be activated and deactivated by some sort of hand signals. The unknown can eavesdrop on us through the Computer. He’s probably doing it now. But, as far as I know, he can’t see us unless he turns on a screen. And we can see that.”

“You say, as far as we know,” Burton said. “Isn’t it possible that he could turn on a screen but make it invisible to us?”

“I suppose so. I don’t really know enough about Ethical science to be sure of what can or can’t be done.”

“Then the unknown may be also watching us.”

“Yes. What we should do is erect some sort of tent in this room and write communications to one another inside it. Or the Computer could make us a soundproof cubicle. Even the floor would be soundproof. The trouble with that is that its walls might contain detectors put in by the order of the unknown. We’d have no way of checking that. Come to think of it, a tent made of cloth could contain detectors, too.”

Burton became angry. “Is there nothing we can do?”

“We can do the best we can and hope that it’ll be enough.”

“We’ll keep the door alarm,” Burton said. “I’ll write the combination on paper. You’ll memorize it, and I’ll make sure that the papers are destroyed.”

“Destroy the papers with a beamer,” Frigate said. “If you just burned them and crumbled the ashes before dropping them in a disposal hole, the Computer might be able to reconstruct the combination.”

Burton said that they would have to make hoods to put over them when they reset the combination. They could make sure that the hoods did not contain detectors by using their bedsheets.

“We can’t trust the mass detectors,” he added. “The Computer will make them for us, but the unknown might hide turn-off devices in them.”

“True,” Frigate said. “He may have installed a turn-off in your burglar alarm, too.”

“Then anything the Computer makes for us could betray us?”

“Sure. Including the food. The unknown could order poison put in it.”

“By God! There must be something we can do to fight this devil!”

Nur, who had been standing near them and smiling slightly, spoke.

“If the unknown had planned to kill us, he would have done it before now. I suggest that if the unknown can override even Loga’s commands, then he or she must be an Ethical. If so, why hasn’t he resurrected Monat and the others? That would be his first thought and his first duty, after he’s immobilized us, of course. Which, I don’t have to point out, he’s accomplished. The only thing is…”

He hesitated so long that Burton said, “Yes? What is it?”

“Would any Ethical erase Loga’s body-recording? I think not. So … the unknown can’t be an Ethical. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Patience, my friend. We are not on a schedule. Unless … it is Loga who’s behind all this.”

Burton exploded. “We’ve been through that line of reasoning! Why would he do this?”

Nur shrugged skinny shoulders and raised the palms of his long hands.

“I don’t know. I doubt that it is Loga. Would Loga erase his own body-recording? Of course not.”

“But he could have a secret resurrection chamber some place in the tower,” Frigate said.

“Just what I was going to say,” Nur said. “We still don’t have an explanation for such irrational conduct. But I keep thinking of the footfalls Frigate heard, or thought he heard, in the corridor outside the room where we were celebrating our victory over the malfunctioning Computer. Loga was disturbed when Pete told him about it. He ran out into the corridor and down to the intersecting hall, and he looked up and down the lift shaft. Then he asked the Computer some questions, but these were in his language, and he talked so fast we did not understand them.”

“I asked him what he was so upset about,” Burton said. “He replied that he wasn’t anymore and that Pete’s experiences had made Pete so paranoiac that he was hearing sounds that did not exist. Pete’s suspicions were infectious. So Loga said.”

“That’s like throwing a stone through your own window!” Frigate said. “There was nobody more paranoiac than Loga!”

“If he was, then we’ve been on the wrong side,” Nur said calmly. “Those who follow a crazy man are as crazy as he. However, talking about that is useless. What do we do now?”

Frigate’s sarcastic suggestion that they pile furniture by the door was, realistically, the best offered. It was an inconvenient arrangement if they were to use the door much, but, at the moment, they planned to stay within the suite.

Moreover, there now seemed little chance that the unknown could poison their food and water. Frigate and Nur got simplified schematics of the e-m converters and studied them. The unknown could cut off the power to the converters and so starve them. But the food was produced by e-m conversion via pre-programmed circuits that the unknown could not change. He had no way of introducing poison into them. But their drinking and bathwater came through pipes, and the unknown could put toxic substances into them.

Frigate and Nur made arrangements whereby the water would be produced from the converters in the rooms. The Computer did not balk at producing the necessary plumbing for them to connect the water outlets to the converters. The eight had a plumbing job to do, but their inexperience was overcome by instruction books and tools furnished by the Computer. Meanwhile, the eight would get their water in bowls and pails from the converters.

“This seems useless and stupid,” Li Po said. “There are so many other ways the unknown could get at us.”

“Nevertheless, we must do what we can to avoid his tricks,” Nur said. “That is, if he has any up his sleeve. And if he does indeed exist.”

5

“I’m going to bed,” Burton said.

“I’ll eat first,” Nur said.

The little Moor looked as fresh as if he had just had eight hours of very good sleep. By then, everybody but de Marbot and Behn was in the big room. Burton left it to Nur to explain the door blockade, and he walked down the hall a few steps and entered his apartment within an apartment. It consisted of three rooms: a living room twenty-four feet square, luxuriously furnished yet usable as a workroom, a bedroom, and a bath. Burton unbuckled the belt holding the holster, which encased the beamer, and he shed his single garment, a scarlet kilt decorated by bright yellow male lion-shapes. The floor was covered with a thick carpet like that in the big community entrance room. The inwoven figures were different, each consisting of three interlocking circles. The walls were pale cream, but a word from Burton to the Computer could change the color to whatever he wished. He could also order any shape or symbol, anything, imposed on the basic color. Here and there were paintings that looked like oil originals but had been reproduced by the Computer. No art specialist could have distinguished the original from the copy, since the two were exactly alike down to the molecular level.

Burton crawled into bed and was asleep at once. He awoke feeling drugged and with a vague memory of a nightmare. A hyena twice as tall as he had threatened him with fangs that were curving steel swords. He remembered parrying the scimitarlike teeth with a fencing foil and the hyena laughing at him. The cachinnations had been remarkably like his.

“I’ve been called, quite unjustifiably, a human hyena,” he murmured, and he rolled out of bed. He would have to make the bed himself, though androids—protein robots—were available to do it. For the time being, no androids would be admitted into the suite. They were a potential danger because the unknown might have ordered them to attack the eight.

Burton exercised vigorously for an hour, then ordered breakfast from the Computer. The coffee was the best that had ever been produced on Earth; the shirred eggs, the best; the brown bread toast, exquisitely heated and covered with the best butter Earth had ever known. There was also a jam to send the palate into ecstasy, and a fruit unknown to Earth but tasting somewhat of muskmelon.

He brushed his teeth and took a medium-warm shower despite the possibility that the water could be poisoned. As Frigate had said, if the unknown had intended to kill them off, he could have done it by now.

He selected a dark green kilt and a long flowing robe of green decorated with a design of yellow birds of an unknown species. Then he activated a wall-screen to see what was going on in the main room. Li Po, Nur, Behn, and Turpin were sitting in chairs and reading the lists of control limits. The furniture was still stacked in front of the door.

Burton went into the main room, greeted them, and said, “Have the others reported in?”

Nur said that they had. Burton went to an auxiliary computer and activated the screens in the bedrooms of those absent. He could not see them, but he could hear their voices as they said that they would be right out. A few minutes later, Alice, Frigate, and de Marbot appeared. Alice was wearing a loose Chinese-looking robe, scarlet with green dragons, and brocade slippers with turned-up toes. Her short dark straight hair shone as if it had been brushed many times. Her only makeup was a light red lipstick. She could have used some powder to cover the dark smudges under her eyes.

“I didn’t sleep well at all,” she said as she sat down in a chair. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind that someone might be watching me.”

“If we could trust the androids, we could have them put paper over the bedrooms,” Frigate said. “That’d block out the screens.”

“If … if,” Burton growled. “I’m getting sick of these almighty ifs. I’m fed up with being in a cage. As soon as we find out what we can and can’t do, we’ll conduct a manhunt. It’ll be dangerous, but I, for one, will not keep on hiding like a rabbit in its burrow. We’re not rabbits. We’re human. And human beings are not meant to be cooped up like pigeons.”

“Rabbits and pigeons,” Frigate muttered.

Burton swung around to face him. “What the devil do you mean by that?”

“The rabbits and the pigeons don’t have the slightest idea why they’re caged. They don’t know they’re being fattened up to be eaten. But we, we don’t know why Loga was done away with or what’s planned for us. We’re worse off than the rabbits and pigeons. They, at least, are dumb but happy. We’re dumb but unhappy.”

“Speak for yourself,” Nur said. “I would like to point out to those who may not have thought of it that this list may be incomplete. The unknown may have kept certain powers from the list. Even if he has not done so, he can eliminate almost any of those he wishes to eliminate.”

There was a long silence. The Chinese rose, went to a converter, and ordered a huge goblet of rye whiskey. Burton grimaced but said nothing to him. It would have been useless, and Li Po’s defiance would lessen Burton’s authority.

Li Po sipped the rye, belched to indicate his appreciation, and went back to his chair. He said, “I need a woman!”

Burton had thought that Alice was past blushing, but the Victorian in her was a long time dying.

“You’ll just have to keep jacking off,” Burton said. “We have enough problems without resurrecting a woman just so she can drain off your lust.”

Alice’s face became redder. Aphra Behn laughed.

“It’s unnatural,” Li Po said. “My yang needs its yin.”

Burton laughed because “yang” meant “human excrement” in a West African language. Po asked him why he was laughing. When Burton explained, the Chinese laughed uproariously.

“Well, if I can’t have a woman, I’ll work out my desire with exercise. What say we fence for an hour or so, rapiers or sabers?”

“I need it, too,” Burton said, “but you’re drunk. You’d be no match.”

Li Po protested loudly and shrilly that he could have drunk twice as much and still beat Burton with any weapon Burton cared to choose. Burton turned away from him, and the Chinese staggered to his chair, fell into it, and began snoring. Frigate and Turpin carried him to the bedroom door. This, however, was locked with Po’s codeword, which his bearers did not know. They placed him on the hall floor and returned to the big room.

“We’ll all be behaving like Po if we have to stay here,” Turpin said. He went to a converter and ordered a tall glass of gin with a lemon twist. Aphra, who had a glass of the same, raised it and said, “A toast to craziness! This may be a jail, but it beats Newgate.”

She knew what she was talking about; she had twice been in debtors’ prison.

She could also afford her cavalier attitude, though it was not realistic. She had a lover, de Marbot, with whom she was happy, and she had every luxury she’d ever had on Earth and many more. Except freedom. That, however, did not bother this adaptable and cheery woman just now.

What was keeping some of them from studying their peril was the vast potentialities of the list. Where they should have been examining what limited them, they were considering what gratifications it offered. Though Burton could understand their excitement over this, he was disturbed by their lack of concern for the dangers that were—as it were—just around the corner.

Judging from their facial expressions, Nur was the only one thinking of the unknown enemy. Burton felt like kicking the others. Instead, he slapped his hands together sharply, jolting them from their dreams.

“That’s enough nonsense,” Burton said. “The situation is serious. Deadly. There’s no time to think of anything but how we’re going to fight the enemy. If we defeat him, you may play all you want. Till then … The unknown has a great advantage over us in that he can use the Computer better than we. But if we can learn how to use it against him, it becomes our ally. Let me remind you that the Computer is not just that huge protein electroneural mass at the bottom of the central shaft. The Computer is also the tower, this vast building in which we reside. The brain is the central protein organ, the clearinghouse. But the majority of circuits are in the floors, the walls, and the ceilings of the tower. We’re in the heart, the nerves of the enemy. And we can find ways to strike at that heart, those nerves. Or perhaps I should say, ways to seize them and use them as weapons.”

“If you’re thinking of belling the cat,” Alice said, “we don’t even know where the cat is.”

“It may be another mouse who’s buffaloed us into thinking it’s a cat,” Nur said.

“If … if … may be,” Burton said. “No more speculations on ifs. We abandon speculation; we act.”

“Fine. But how?” Nur said. “Everything we’re saying now or will say may be, probably is, overheard. And perhaps seen.”

“I said, ‘No more ifs and may bes!’ ” Burton thundered.

Frigate laughed and said, “We can’t help that, we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad. We must be, or we wouldn’t have come here.”

“What are you talking about?” Burton said.

“He’s paraphrasing the conversation between the Cheshire Cat and Alice in Wonderland,” Alice said.

“The mention of the cat reminded me of the Cheshire Cat,” Frigate said. “In a way, the unknown is the grin without a cat.”

Burton threw his hands up.

“I wish I had all of you in the army!” he cried.

There was silence, but Burton knew that it would not last long. Not in this group.

“That,” Frigate said, “may be just what we need.”

“What?”

“An army. We can have the Computer make us an army of robots and androids. We’ll set it up so that the unknown, the Snark, let’s call him, can’t override our commands to the robots. We can set them to looking for the Snark and guarding us. We’ll also order them to seize or kill anyone who is not us. Non-us is the enemy. The robots and androids can do in a short time what would take us years.”

Burton stared at the American, then said, “You wrote that—what do you call it?—science fiction too long. It’s rotted your brain.”

“It’s within the capabilities of the tower,” Frigate said. “If we’re going to win, we have to think big. I know it sounds crazy, but we need an army, and we can get it. I’d say, oh, a force of about one hundred thousand.”

Some burst out laughing. Frigate grinned, but he said, “I’m serious.” He went to a console and punched out some numbers and an operation. Simple multiplication. The screen showed: 107,379.

“Three automaton soldiers to a room makes one hundred seven thousand, three hundred and seventy-nine. We could have a whole army in several days. The soldiers could watch every known room and keep an eye out for a stranger and also probe for hidden rooms.”

Nur, smiling, said, “I admire your creativity but not your lack of restraint or your contempt for realities.”

“What do you mean?” Frigate said. “Restraint is good only in situations that call for it. This doesn’t. As for realities, the army could be easily realized.”

Nur admitted that twice the number proposed could easily be raised. However, androids were not self-conscious and were not at all intelligent. Their actions had to be programmed. The army would have to be separated into small groups acting on their own. This required command levels of noncoms and officers, androids who could act on their own initiative when situations not in their programming arose. The leaders simply would not know what to do. For that matter, they would not even know that they had to do anything.

“Moreover,” Burton said, “there’s still that nagging worry. Can the unknown install in the robots and androids some sort of channel whereby he can override our commands?”

“He’s probably thinking about that right now,” Alice said. “If he’s watching us, he can anticipate anything we do.”

She shuddered.

“My answer to your objection,” Frigate said to Burton, “is that we could make some modifications in the neural systems of the androids. We could make them partly mechanical. By that, I mean that we could install mechanical devices in them. Say, something like a locker or safe combination that would set our commands mechanically but that would then transmit them electrically.

“We would set the combinations after we’d received the basic device from the Computer. That way, neither the Computer nor the Snark could control what we did. And … oh, hell! The Snark could still put a neuron complex in the android that would tell it to override the combination command by radio or whatever.”

“The hard facts,” Nur said, “are that we are in the power of this Snark. He does not have to attack us. All he has to do is shut off our power, and we’ll starve to death. If he intended to do that, he could have done so. He has not done so, therefore, we can assume that he isn’t going to. He has set certain limits to our use of the Computer but allowed us considerable powers. There are certain things he doesn’t want us to have. Otherwise, he just doesn’t care. He’s ignoring us.”

“The question, one of the questions, is why?”

“We can’t answer that. He’ll have to, if he ever does,” Frigate said.

“Right,” Nur said. “Now, while you were all sleeping, I had the Computer locate the secret entrance that Loga arranged long ago. The entrance we used to get into the tower after we’d crossed the mountains and taken that boat to the base of the tower. I tried to get the Computer to open that. It seemed to me that perhaps the unknown might be wanting us to leave the tower and return to The Valley. He did not wish us to use the aircraft for obvious reasons.

“But the secret door would not open when I asked the Computer to do it for me.

“Therefore, the unknown does not wish us to leave the tower.

“There may come a time when he’ll wish us to go, and, if so, he’ll open an exit for us. Until then, we’re prisoners. But this prison is vast and has, in a sense, more treasures to offer than the Earth we lived on or the Rivervalley. The treasures are physical and mental, moral and spiritual. I suggest that we find out what these are and use them. We might as well. We can’t stay caged in this suite.

“Meanwhile, of course, we’ll be trying to think of ways to override the unknown’s overrides. What one person sets up, another may knock down. The unknown is not a god.”

“What you’re suggesting is that we move back into our apartments and live as if there were no unknown?” Burton said.

“I say that we should leave this particular area, which is a small prison, and go out into the larger prison. After all, Earth was a prison. So was the Rivervalley. But if you’re in a large enough space to give you the illusion of freedom, then you don’t think of yourself as a prisoner. The half-free man is one who thinks he is free. The really free man is one who fully knows what he can do in prison and does it.”

“A Sufi’s wisdom,” Burton said, smiling but with a sneer in his voice. “We do look rather ridiculous, don’t we? We run into a hole and then ask ourselves why we ran and decide that we didn’t have to.”

“We were following instinct,” Nur said. “It was wrong to do so. We had to find a place where we could be safe. At least, think we were. Then we had the relative peace of mind to evaluate our situation.”

“Which turned out to be no peace of mind. Well, I do feel better, I won’t feel as much a prisoner. And that pile of furniture irks me. Let’s tear it down.”

Frigate said, “Before we do, I have something to tell you.”

Burton, who had started for the door, stopped and turned around.

“Nur wasn’t the only one who did a little independent investigating,” Frigate said. “As you know, Monat can’t be resurrected because of Loga’s command, which the Snark reaffirmed. Monat’s body-record is still on file. But I asked the Computer to locate his wathan in the shaft, and the Computer said that it had been there but was now gone. You know what that means. Monat has Gone On.”

Tears welled from Burton, and with the grief was mixed surprise that he should feel such grief. He had not known until that moment how he really felt about Monat. One of the first people he had encountered during his first resurrection had been the strange-looking, obviously non-Terrestrial Monat. Monat had accompanied him for a long time in The Valley and had impressed Burton with his compassion and wisdom. He had seemed warm. Thoroughly human despite his appearance, that is, what humans ideally should be.

Somehow, Burton had come to regard Monat as a father, a being stronger and wiser than he, a teacher, a pointer-out of right paths. And now Monat was gone forever.

Why should he shed tears and be choked up? He should be happy, gloriously happy because Monat had arrived at the stage where he no longer had to suffer the encumbering flesh.

Was it because he suffered a sense of loss? Had he thought, deep in the dark unconscious, that Monat wold somehow free himself from Loga’s lock on him and be, in short, a savior? Had he felt that Monat would come up out of the records like Jesus from the tomb or Arthur from the lake or Charlemagne from his cave and rescue the defeated and the besieged?

It was strange to be thinking such thoughts. They must have been circulating somewhere in him, waiting for the right moment to break out.

His own father had not been a real father, not what a son wanted as a father. So, in some manner, Burton had taken Monat as one, perhaps because he could never accept another Earthman as one. Monat was from another world, therefore not, what was the word … tainted? That was a curious word to leap to his mind.

In any event, Monat was forever out of reach of anybody in this world, Gone On. To what?

To conceal the tears, Burton strode to the furniture and began dragging it away from the door. By the time the others had joined him, his eyes were dry.

He opened the door and breathed deeply. The air was no fresher than that in the suite. But it offered liberation.

6

Near their apartments was a room containing a swimming pool sixty meters long and thirty meters wide. When no one was in the room it was dark, but the heat detectors would turn the light on if a single person entered it. The light was a simulated sun at zenith in a cloudless blue sky. The walls displayed a forest surrounding the pool and snow-capped mountains far in the distance. Even if a person stood within an inch of the wall, the trees seemed to be real. As real-looking as the trees, birds flew among the branches or lit on them, and their songs cried out pleasantly. Occasionally, the swimmers could see a rabbit or fox among the trees and, rarely, a pantherlike beast or bear moving silently in the twilight under the branches.

The water was fresh and about 68°F and had a depth of twelve meters at the deep end. Here the eight tenants usually gathered for an hour or so of swimming in midmorning.

Burton had been studying the list of operational limits until 11:00 A.M. He entered the huge echoing chamber noisy with cries and splashes and stood for a moment. All were there except Nur. The men were in scanty trunks and the women in bikinis. They did not seem to have a care nor had they posted a guard. Beamers, however, lay along the edge of the pool, and he saw several at the bottom outlined against the red, black, and green mural.

Burton dived in and swam the length of the pool seven times. Then he hauled himself out and waited until de Marbot swam by. He called out to him; the Frenchman turned, came to the edge, and looked up. Burton considered his merry blue eyes, slick black hair, round face, and snub nose.

Burton squatted down and said, “I’m going to make a flying trip, an exploratory one, through the tower. Do you want to come along?”

“That sounds like fun,” de Marbot said. He narrowed his eyes and grinned. “Do you hope to surprise the Snark?”

“There’s little chance of that,” Burton said. “But … well … we might entice him to take some action. We’ll be human decoys.”

“I’m your man,” the Frenchman said, and he pulled himself out. He was only five feet five inches tall and shared with Nur the distinction of being the smallest man in the group. Burton had chosen him as his companion, however, because he was utterly courageous and had more experience in martial action than any of them. Serving under Napoleon, he had been in most of the conqueror’s great battles, had been wounded seventeen times, had fought in hundreds of small engagements, and had led so adventurous a life that A. Conan Doyle had written a series of stories based on his exploits. He was an excellent swordsman and a deadly shot and had an unsurpassed coolness under fire.

They dried themselves off in an anteroom, changed into dry clothes, sleeveless shirts and shorts, put their beamers in holsters, and walked along the pool. Burton paused for a minute to tell Turpin that they were going exploring.

“What time you coming back?” Turpin said through a mouthful of baked Montana grouse fed on huckleberries.

“About six P.M.,” Burton said, glancing at his wristwatch.

“Maybe you should report in every hour on the hour.”

“I don’t think so,” Burton said in a low voice, looking at the wall as if it had ears. Which it did. “I’m not going to make it easy for the unknown to find us.”

Turpin smiled. “Yeah, that’s right. Hope I see you again.” He laughed, spewing out bits of meat and bread.

Burton was worried about Turpin. The man had lost much weight during the trying and dangerous passage over the mountains to the north polar sea. Now he seemed to be intent on becoming as fat as he had been on Earth, close to three hundred pounds. He was always eating, and he was not far behind Li Po in drinking.

Burton said, “We’ll be flying around at random. I don’t have the slightest idea where we’ll be.”

“Good luck,” Turpin said.

Burton started to walk away but became aware that the Frenchman was not with him. Looking around, he saw him talking to Aphra. Evidently, he was explaining to her why he would be absent for a while. De Marbot was envied because he had a bedmate, but there were disadvantages to that. He had to account for his time to her, and, judging by their expressions and gestures, they were probably arguing over why she could not come along. Burton had no strong objections to taking her along at another time; she was tough and cool and skilled. Just now, he did not want more than one companion.

De Marbot, looking a little angry, returned to Burton.

“I have never heard that English expression, ‘Take a flying fuck at a galloping goose,’ ” he said. Then, with that mercurial swiftness distinguishing him, he laughed, and he said, “How droll! How indeed could one do that?”

“It’s a matter of synchronization,” Burton said, grinning.

They left the pool and the door closed behind them. The noise was cut off; the corridor was huge and silent. It was easy to imagine someone—something—waiting around the corner for them, crouching, ready to spring.

Burton pointed out to de Marbot that he had filled the pockets on the sides of both chairs with power boxes for the beamers. They got into their chairs and caused them to rise into the air. Burton in front, de Marbot about twelve feet behind him, they sped toward the vertical shaft at the end of the hall. With a skill learned during the past three weeks, Burton curved the flight path so that he entered the shaft with only a slight decrease in speed, and he shot upwards.

He came out of the shaft at the next level at such velocity that his head was a few inches from the ceiling. He sent the chair down until his feet were twelve inches from the floor, and he hurtled along the muraled walls until he reached the end of the corridor. Then he stopped, pivoted the chair, and said, “You lead for a while.”

The Frenchman led him through every passageway on that floor. The doors of every room were closed. For all Burton knew, their enemy was behind one. He did not believe this, however. Surely the Snark would have been notified by the Computer of the detection of heat from the two men. He would have told the Computer to warn him if the two were on an approach that would take them anywhere near him. He also might have activated the wall-screens, so that he could be watching them.

When they had passed through every corridor, de Marbot stopped his chair by a shaft. “This is fun,” he said, “the wind on your face, your hair blowing, the scenery, such as it is, whistling by. It is not as good as riding a horse, but it will do. And, certainly, no horse would jump off into the shaft.”

Burton took the lead now and rose up the shaft until he came to the top level. Down the corridor would be the entrance to the hangar, visited several days before. They entered the very wide entrance into the vast area with its brooding craft. Burton counted them and found that there were the same number as before. The unknown was still in the tower. That is, unless he had a ship secreted somewhere else. There was always an unless.

“I suppose we could remove the navigational tapes,” he said, “and that would keep the Snark from using the spacecraft. But I’m sure that they’ll be recorded. All he’d have to do would be to have the Computer run off new ones.”

“Why would he want to use a spaceship?”

“I don’t know. But I’d like to throw a monkey wrench in his plans, upset him somehow.”

“The bite of the mosquito.”

“That, I’m afraid, is all it would be. However, a mosquito may kill a man if it gives him malaria.”

He was not expressing pure bravado. He believed that there must be a weakness, a hole, however small, somewhere in the Snark’s defenses.

They sped on their chairs to the centrally located shaft and dropped to the level just below the top one. They entered a circular area with a 150-foot diameter and 500-foot-high walls. Twelve square metal doors were set equidistantly in the walls. Each, according to the Computer diagrams, gave entrance to a triangular chamber, pie-slice-shaped, which was 5.4 miles long and 401 feet high. The tip of each was blunted somewhat, ending in the walls of the central circle.

When Burton had viewed the diagrams, he had meant to ask the Computer about the contents of the vast chambers. An urgent matter had interrupted him before he could do so, and he had forgotten to return to his question. Now, while here, he would see for himself what they held.

Each door bore on its center a gold symbol indicating the identity of the member of the Ethical Council of Twelve whose property was beyond the door. The symbol directly in front of Burton was two horizontal bars crossed by two longer vertical bars. This was Loga’s symbol. It could, Burton thought, be called a doublecross.

Burton gave the codeword that identified him, and a glowing screen formed above the bars.

“I wish to enter the room behind this door,” Burton said. “Do I need a codeword to open the door?”

The screen displayed: YES.

“What is the codeword needed to activate the door?” Burton said.

He had expected that the Computer would reply that that information was unavailable to him. It flashed, however, in Ethical characters: LOGA SAYS.

“That, it is simple enough,” de Marbot murmured.

Burton, hoping that the words were not keyed to Loga’s voice-print, pronounced perfectly the Ethical phrase.

The door opened outward, revealing a small, bare, well-lit room. At the farther wall was a staircase to a small platform. The two went up it, and Burton pushed in on the conventional oblong door. The area beyond was bright, the light having come on just as the door was opened. They stood blinking for a while before they grasped what they were seeing.

Though they must be standing next to the outcurving walls, they were under the illusion that the walls stretched for miles to right and left. The horizon seemed very far away.

The distance ahead of them was no illusion, however. This vast room was 5.4 miles long.

“It’s a little world,” de Marbot said softly.

“Not so little.”

Most of it seemed to be a great well-kept park with many trees and clipped grass. Ahead, seemingly about two and a half miles away, was a sloping hill on top of which was a building gleaming in the noon sun. The villa was probably real; the sun was undoubtedly simulated.

“It looks rather Roman,” Burton said. “I’d wager, though, that if we got close, we’d see a difference in the details.”

Their chairs would have gone through the doors, but Burton decided not to explore. They returned to the central area and asked the Computer for the codeword to the chamber next to Loga’s. This had been the property of Loga’s wife and had the same kind of anteroom. But it opened to a vista that bewildered them. The entire Brobdingnagian area was a labyrinth of small and large mirrors in a complex arrangement that they could not figure out. Their images were caught by near mirrors and reflected inward for as far as they could see. The source of the light was not apparent; it seemed to come from everywhere. Far off, dimly seen, was a circle of pillars. These, too, were reflected, but the arrangement was such that they saw their own tiny figures standing inside the pillars.

“What is the purpose of this?” de Marbot said.

Burton shrugged and said, “We’ll have to find out. Not just now, though.”

The next chamber admitted them into what seemed to be an Arabian desert. Under a hot sun was an expanse of sand and rock, mostly a plain but with hills here and there. The air was much drier than that in the first two places. About three miles distant was what looked like a large oasis. Tall palm trees grew from grass, and the moving waters of a lake in the midst of the trees gleamed in the midmorning sunlight.

Near them were the skeletons of three animals. Burton picked up a skull and said, “Lion.”

“C’est remarquable,” de Marbot muttered, reverting in his wonder to his native tongue. Then, in English, “Three different worlds. Lilliputian, yes. Yet large enough for all practical purposes, though I do not know about the practicality.”

“I’d venture that these are … were … retreats for the Council,” Burton said. “Sort of, ah, vacation areas. Each made his world according to his wishes, his own temperamental inclinations, and retired here now and then for spiritual and, of course, physical satisfaction.”

De Marbot wished to look into all of the vast rooms, but Burton said that they had plenty of time for that later. They should continue their patrol.

The Frenchman opened his mouth to say something. Burton said, “Yes, I know. But what I’d like to do is see all that we can as swiftly as we can. It’s better than having the Computer show us everything while we’re lolling about in our rooms. Besides, how do we know that the Computer is showing us everything? It can delete as the Snark wishes it to, and we can’t be sure that it’s not doing so. We have to make a be-there visit. We’ll make a flying patrol, be birds, get an overall view of everything. Then we can take our time and get the details.”

“You mistake me,” de Marbot said. “I was merely going to comment on the state of my stomach. It is complaining of its emptiness.”

They took their chairs through the tube in the center of the floor to the next level, went down a corridor to the nearest door, opened it, and walked inside. It was a suite unfurnished except for a converter against a wall. De Marbot selected for lunch escargots bourguignonne with French bread and a glass of white wine. Thirty seconds later, he removed the dishes and silverware and glass and napkin. His blue eyes were big with admiration as he sniffed the delicate aroma. “Sacrée merde! Never on Earth could I get such perfection, such ecstasy! Yet surely the Ethicals must have gotten the original from some Parisian chef and copied it! What could be that genius’ name? I would like to resurrect him, if only to thank him!”

“Someday, I’ll order a deliberately badly cooked meal just for the sake of variety,” Burton said. “Don’t you find all this exquisiteness, this perfection, tiring? Every meal is a gustatory triumph.”

“Never!” de Marbot said. He rolled his eyes on seeing Burton’s eclectic choice, buttermilk biscuits and squabs marinated in cream and a schooner of dark beer.

“Barbaric! And I thought that you did not like beer?”

“I do when I eat ham or squabs.”

“De gustibus non disputandum. Whoever said that was an idiot.”

A section of wall folded out to make a table, and they ate.

“Délicieux!” De Marbot cried, and he smacked his lips loudly.

Until three weeks ago, he had been whip-thin. Now his face was becoming moonlike, and a slight roll was entrenching itself around his waist.

“There is a glacé de viande I must try,” de Marbot said.

“Now?”

“No. I am no pig. Later. Tonight.”

For dessert the Frenchman had a fig soufflé and a glass of red wine.

“Superb!”

They washed up in the bathroom and returned to the chairs. “We should be walking this off,” Burton said.

“We’ll work it off with saberplay before supper.”

7

The illuminated halls they passed through had been dark a few seconds before they got to them. Heat detectors in the walls reacted to their bodies and activated switches that turned the lighting on ahead of them and off behind them. Because of this, the unknown probably knew exactly where they were. All he had to do was to command the Computer to give him images of every lit area. However, he could not spend all his time just watching the screens; he would have to sleep. If, however, by some means the tenants managed to get on his track, he could be awakened by the Computer.

The two came down a vertical shaft and came out into a hall. Halfway down this, they stopped their chairs and got out of them. A transparent outward-leaning wall enclosed a vast well glowing brightly from a source below them. The upper part of the enclosure was empty, but a few hundred feet below them was the illumination: a shifting dancing whirling mass of what seemed to be tiny suns. De Marbot got two pairs of dark spectacles from a box on a ledge and handed one pair to Burton. Burton put them on and looked for the twelfth time at the most gorgeous display he had ever seen, more than eighteen billion souls collected and made visible in one place. The Ethicals called them wathans, a word more precise than the English soul. These were the entities of artificial origin, each of which had been attached to an Earth-person the moment that the sperm and the egg united to form the zygote of that person. These remained attached to the head of each individual until he or she died, and it was these that gave Homo sapiens its self-consciousness and held its immortal part.

Each was invisible unless seen with a special device, in this situation the polarized material of the wellwall. They were glowing spheres of many colors and hues, with tentacles that shot out and contracted as the spheres whirled. Seemed to whirl, rather. Burton and de Marbot were not seeing the reality, the whole; they were seeing what their brains could grasp, a reshaping formed by their nervous systems.

The wathans, the souls, danced or seemed to dance, whirling, glowing, changing colors, passing through one another, occasionally seeming to coalesce and form a superwathan, which broke up into the original spheres after a few seconds.

Were they, when free of the human bodies, their hosts, conscious? Did they think when in this free state? No one knew. None of those who had been dead remembered anything of their existence when they were resurrected and the wathan was united again with the physical body.

The two stood rapt for a while before the awesome wonder surely unsurpassed in the universe.

“To think,” Burton murmured, “that I have been part of that spectacle, that glory, many times.”

“And to think,” de Marbot said, “that if the Ethicals had not made these, our bodies would have been dust for thousands of years and would have stayed dust until even dust had died.”

Far below, seen dimly through the coruscating nebula, was a great gray mass. It seemed to be shapeless, but Loga had assured them that it was not.

“That is the top of the titanic mass of organized protein that is the central part of the Computer,” he had said. “It is the living but unselfconscious brain, the body of which is the tower and the grailstones and the resurrection chamber.”

The “brain” was not, however, shaped like the human brain when within the skull.

“It resembles, more than anything, one of your great Gothic cathedrals with its flying buttresses and spires and gargoyle-decorated exterior and doors and windows. It is enveloped in water holding sugar in suspension. The brain would collapse and become a gray ooze if the liquid were removed. It is a lovely thing to see, and you must do so sometime.”

It must be vast indeed to be visible from where they stood, and through the glowing wathans. It was three miles below them, and they could see only a part of the top as a gray cloud. The rest of it occupied an expanded part of the well, a dome.

So far, the tenants had not ventured to the level where they could view the brain in its entirety. Nor did Burton plan on going there now. Instead, he returned to his chair and led his companion to the other side of the tower and down a shaft. Burton counted the levels passed—he had counted them during his first ascent from the level that was his destination—until he came to the one containing Loga’s hidden room.

Before reaching the room, Burton stopped his chair. The Frenchman pulled up alongside him and said, “What is it?”

Burton shook his head and put a finger to his lips. He could see no mobile wall-screen, but the unknown might have other ways to monitor them. Even if he was not watching them now, it was probable that the Computer was recording their actions for later viewing.

They entered a big laboratory containing equipment whose functions Burton did not know—except for four huge gray metal cabinets. These were energy-matter converters. Their walls held all the needed circuits. In fact, the walls were the circuitry. Their power came through orange circles on the floor, which were matched to the orange circles in the center of the cabinet bottoms. Two cabinets were permanently attached to the floor, but the others could be taken from the room. Not, however, by the muscle power of two men alone.

Burton turned his chair, and, followed by de Marbot, flew out of the room and through the corridor past the wall behind which was Loga’s hidden room. De Marbot must have wondered why Burton did not stop there, but he refrained from comment. By the time that they had returned to their suite level, after speeding up and down shafts and along corridors chosen at random, he no longer looked puzzled. He looked bored. But when they were in the hall, he pulled a notebook from the pocket on the outside of the chair and wrote on a sheet.

Burton took the note and held it close to his chest, his left hand partly covering it. He read: How long must I wait before you tell me your plans?

Burton wrote with a pen taken from the container on the side of his chair.

Sometime this evening.

De Marbot read it and smiled. “I will have something to look forward to,” he murmured.

He tore the note into tiny pieces, placed them on the floor, and ignited them with his beamer ray. He ground the ashes with the toe of his sandal and blew them away.

They waited, and presently a recess in the wall opened and a wheeled, jointed, cylindrical machine rolled out. It headed for the ashes, a scooplike extension sliding out from its front. It sprayed the dirty area with a liquid that quickly dried into many tiny balls and then sucked the spheres onto the scoop and into an opening. A minute later, it had retreated into the cavity from which it had come, and the recess closed.

De Marbot spat on the floor just to see the robot in action again. As it rolled back to its lair after its cleanup job, the Frenchman kicked it. Unperturbed, the machine disappeared into the cavity.

“Really, I prefer the protein-and-bone robots, the androids,” de Marbot said. “These mechanical things, they give me the shivers.”

“It’s the flesh-and-blood ones that disturb me,” Burton said.

“Ah, yes, if one kicks them, not out of a desire to hurt, you comprehend, but a desire to evoke an emotion, one knows that, since they’re of flesh and blood, they do hurt. But they do not resent the insult or the injury, and that makes them nonhuman. Still, one does not have to pay them wages, and one knows that they will not go on strike.”

“It’s their eyes I don’t like,” Burton said.

De Marbot laughed.

“They look no deader than the eyes of my Hussars at the end of a long campaign. You are reading into them a lack of life that does not exist. The lack, I mean. You know that they are brainless, rather, to be exact, use only a tiny portion of their brains. But one can say that of certain humans we have met.”

“One could say a lot,” Burton said. “Shall we join the others?”

De Marbot glanced at his wristwatch. “An hour until supper. Perhaps I may be able to make Aphra jolly again. There is nothing that upsets one’s digestion like a sullen companion at the table.”

“Tell her that she’ll be in on the next phase of the project,” Burton said. “She’ll brighten up then. But don’t tell her what we did unless you use this.”

He indicated the notebook.

De Marbot grimaced and said, “That one, the watcher, must be wondering what we’re up to. How can we hide anything from him? One can’t fart without his knowing about it.”

Burton grinned and said, “Perhaps we’ll make him fill his pants. In a manner of speaking.”

The eight had agreed that each would take turns hosting the others. Tonight was Alice’s, and she greeted them wearing a long, very lowcut, Lincoln-green evening gown of the style of 1890. Burton doubted that she was also wearing the numerous undergarments of that period. She was too accustomed to the comfortable cool clothes of the Rivervalley, a towel serving as a short skirt and a thin, light cloth serving as a bra. She did have elegant green high-heeled shoes on, and silk stockings, though the latter probably did not reach to her knees. Her jewelry, provided by an e-m converter, was an emerald set in a gold ring, small gold earrings, each with a single large emerald, and a string of pearls.

“You look lovely,” he said as he bowed and kissed her hand. “Eighteen-ninety, heh? The year of my death. Are you trying to tell me in a subtle manner that you are celebrating that occasion?”

“If I am, I am doing so unconsciously,” she said. “Let’s not have any wisecracks, right?”

“Wisecrack. Nineteen thirty-four word,” Frigate said to Alice. “The year of your first death.”

“The only one, thank God,” she said. “Must we speak of the Grim Reaper?”

Frigate bowed and kissed her extended hand.

“You are absolutely devastating. Say the word, and I’m all yours. No, you don’t have to say it. I’m yours anyway.”

“You’re very gallant,” she said. “Also, very pushy.”

Burton snorted and said, “That’s one thing he’s not. Except when he’s been drinking. Dutch courage.”

“In bourbono veritas,” the American said. “But you’re wrong. Not even then. Am I, Alice?”

“Alice is a well-garrisoned castle on a steep hill surrounded by a wide moat,” Burton said. “Don’t try to mine her. Take her by storm.”

The American flushed. Alice did not lose her smile, but she said, “Please, Dick. Let’s not be unpleasant.”

“I promise,” Burton said. He turned, and started. “My God! Who’re…?”

Two men in servant’s livery were standing near the dinner table. Not men. They were androids. One had the face of Gladstone; the other, of Disraeli.

“No one else has ever had two prime ministers of Great Britain wait on them,” Alice said.

Burton spun toward her, his face red and scowling.

“Alice! We talked about the danger! The Snark could program them to attack us!”

She met his fury calmly.

“Yes, we did. But you, or somebody, also said that the Snark has a thousand ways of getting at us. He hasn’t done anything yet, and if he were going to, he’d have done it. Two androids, a thousand, won’t make any difference.”

“Agreed!” Li Po said in his loud shrill voice. “Bravo, Alice, for taking the first step! I myself have some plans for androids! I may put them into effect tonight! Ah, tonight! You will suffer no more, Li Po!”

Burton had to admit, to himself, anyway, that she was right. She should not, however, have done this without getting the consent of the others. At the very least, she should have consulted him about it.

Perhaps, if the leader of this group had been someone other than him, she would have. It seemed to him that she took every opportunity to defy him now. Under that quiet soft demeanor, behind those large soft dark eyes, was a stubborn woman.

De Marbot and Behn arrived somewhat flushed and perspiring, as if they had just gotten out of bed or were in the midst of a quarrel. If the latter was the case, they were covering it up well. They smiled and joked and seemed perfectly at ease.

Burton greeted them and strode to a side table loaded with bottles and goblets and a huge bucket of ice. He waved away the android with Gladstone’s face, which had approached him and asked if he could pour him a drink. Alice had done a very good job if she had reconstructed the prime minister’s features from memory. She could have done so, since the man had dined a number of times at her house when her parents had been alive. More probably, though, she had asked the Computer to locate Gladstone’s photograph in the files and it had done so. Then she had given the Computer her specifications, and it had reproduced this living but mindless being.

“By the Lord,” he murmured, “it even has his voice!”

He sipped on the rye whiskey, smoother than any he had tasted on Earth, though it must be reproduced from some Terrestrial brand, and he went to talk with Nur. The little Iberian Moor was holding a glass of some pale yellow wine, which would last him for the evening.

“The Prophet did not forbid any alcoholic beverage except wine made from dates,” he had once told Burton, who already knew it. “His excessively zealous disciples later extended the ban to all liquor. Though I felt that I did not have to obey the dictates of those ignoramus fundamentalists, I just did not care for strong waters. However, I have acquired a taste for this Chinese wine. Besides, even if I were a drunkard, what would Allah do to me that I had not done to myself? As for Mahomet, where is he?”

Burton and Nur talked of Mecca for a while, and then the android who looked like Disraeli announced that dinner was served. Since each guest had told Alice in the morning what he or she would like, the menus were in the Computer’s memory. It took one microsecond for the food to appear inside a giant e-m converter; the servants took longer putting the appetizers on the table. Burton had ordered a salad with devil’s-rain dressing followed by sturgeon fumé a la muscovite and for dessert two tarts with rhubarb filling. The appropriate wine was served with each course.

Burton, Behn, Frigate, and Li Po had cigars of the finest Cuban tobacco. Nur smoked his after-dinner cigarette, the only nicotine he allowed himself.

Burton approached the Frenchman, who backed away. “Spare my precious lungs that vile poison!” he cried.

“A man could die happy breathing this,” Burton said. “However, as you said, non disputandum de gustibus. Did you inform Aphra that she might join us in our next venture if she wished?”

“That, yes, I did,” de Marbot said. “Unfortunately, I could not tell her just what that venture was.”

Burton handed him a note. De Marbot read it and looked up. “What…?”

He came close to the Englishman and stood on his tiptoes to talk into Burton’s ear. Burton still had to lean over.

“We will, I will, anyway, be ready. But … you can give me no indication, no clue, as to what you have in mind?”

“It’s best not to.”

“Ah, how intriguing,” de Marbot said. “May the realization come up to my expectation. Danger, romance, skullduggery, an open charge upon the enemy or a silent stealth, apprehension, uncertainty, a task demanding all of one’s courage and a straining of one’s steel nerves.”

“All of those,” Burton said. “Perhaps.”

8

A few minutes after one in the morning, Burton parked his chair outside de Marbot’s and Behn’s apartment. The door, as he had required, was open. He went into the big living room, the shadowless illumination coming on just as he passed through the doorway. He went down the hall and knocked on the bedroom door. Sleepily, de Marbot called, “Quelle?”

“C’est moi, naturellement,” Burton said.

A moment later, the Englishwoman and the Frenchman stumbled through the doorway, rubbing their eyes.

“You owe me six hours of sleep,” the Frenchman said. “How does one repay such a debt?”

“With six hours’ loss on my part,” Burton said. “But this is for your benefit, also, so I owe you nothing.”

De Marbot had put on a towel-kilt, and Aphra was wearing a delicate black lace bra and black panties.

De Marbot said, “Hey, my cabbage, is that all you care to don?”

“It’s what I always wear for midnight assignations,” she said.

De Marbot laughed, hugged her, and kissed her cheek.

“My wild English rose. Always the unexpected, the delightful.”

She was, however, deceiving him. She went back into the bedroom and reappeared clad in a thin blouse, a short skirt, and ankle-length boots. By then Burton had ordered three large mugs of Brazilian coffee from the converter. They sipped while he told them that he would explain just what they would do when they got to their destination.

“Sealed orders,” de Marbot said. “But the enemy, he is watching and listening to us. We are like the cat with a bell around his neck.”

“By the time we get through, he won’t be able to see or hear us,” Burton said.

De Marbot’s eyebrows rose, and he smiled.

“Ah! I anticipate, I quiver, I revolve inside myself with excitement.”

“There’s a lot of work involved,” Burton said. “You’ll be tired before we’re done.”

“Not I. I am a man of iron, and Aphra, she is hard as platinum and twice the worth of that worthy metal in her weight.”

“Which is increasing,” she said, patting her hip.

Burton gestured impatiently, and they followed him to the corridor. They were armed with two beamers and knives, though they had no reason to expect to use them. They got into their chairs, and Burton flew in the lead. He steered the chair down the shaft to the level even with the surface of the cold dark sea surrounding the tower.

When Burton stopped the chair, de Marbot said, “This is not far from Loga’s secret room.”

Burton nodded and indicated that they should go into the nearest room, the laboratory that he had visited the day before. Aphra looked around it and said, softly, “He must be wondering what we’re up to. He’s no more puzzled than I.”

“Richard is the general,” de Marbot said, “and he tells us common soldiers as little as possible. It is an ancient tradition.”

Burton ignored their remarks. He went to the largest converter and ordered parts of stepladders, five hundred spray cans filled with black paint, a dozen powerful lamps, and a small nuclear-powered air generator.

“Mon Dieu!” de Marbot said. “We are to be house painters! And what else?”

Burton began removing the equipment, emptying the converter when the first consignment appeared, closing the door of the converter, waiting a few seconds until the second consignment had filled the cabinet, and then removing this. When this was done, he told the two to take out the spray cans while he put the sections of the stepladders together.

De Marbot looked at Aphra with raised eyebrows as if to say, “What next?” She shrugged and, sweating, bent to her work. De Marbot, now sweating also, said, “Hey, my little cabbage. We must pay for all that divine food and exquisite wine, isn’t it?”

“You pay for everything,” she said.

Breathing hard, Aphra straightened up and looked at the wall in front of her. “The watcher is like God,” she said. “He knows everything we are doing. I only hope that, like God, he is indifferent to what we do.”

“Unlike God, the Snark sleeps,” Burton said. “And he is limited by his body, like all us mortals. And his intelligence, though it may be great, is also limited.”

“Perhaps, like God, he does not exist,” de Marbot said.

“That’s a possibility,” Burton said. “There! The stepladders are done.”

“Could we not have some androids to help us?” de Marbot said. “Perhaps to do all the labor? We shall be the supervisors who loll around, taking our ease while the helots sweat for us.”

“I don’t want to risk using them,” Burton said. “To the task. Each of you start at a corner at the far end.”

He had asked the Computer for an estimate of the number of cans needed to spray the area. Now he asked for two wheelbarrows, took them from the converter, and piled one high with cans. While the others stood near the tops of the stepladders and covered the ceiling corners with the paint, he wheeled the cans not needed in the room into the corridor. After four trips, he told the Computer to furnish him with twelve cans of quick-drying spray cement. Having gotten these, he took them out into the corridor. Then he ordered the number of bricks he needed, also estimated by the Computer.

De Marbot, watching him, said, “There is nothing like using the enemy to fight him.”

There was one thing that Burton had to make sure of before he continued, though whether or not the door to Loga’s room still opened he would complete the first part of his project. He knocked on the wall, said, “Ah Qaaq!” and watched as the entrance wheel rolled into the recess. He had not been sure that the Snark had not inhibited the operation since Burton’s first visit. Now he stuck a chair in the opening to assure that the door could not close if the Snark changed his mind and decided to shut it permanently.

Burton had done many things on Earth. Bricklaying was not one of them, but he had often observed Arab workmen building adobe brick walls. In any event, the erection was simple. He laid a row from one wall to another a few feet from the doorway to Loga’s room. He sprayed the top of the row and set another layer on top of that. By the time he had laid the last brick of that row, the cement—it was really a glue—had dried.

Pausing only to drink water twice, he sealed in that area of corridor from side to side, top to bottom.

He went to the other side of the entrance to the laboratory and began laying bricks there. Aphra stuck her head out of the door and said, “We’re almost finished with the walls.” Sweat ran from down her face and soaked her garments.

He went into the room and looked around. “Inspect what you’ve done,” he said. “Make sure that every square inch is covered. Then spray the floor. When you’re done, tell me.”

Groaning in mock-agony, de Marbot moved his stepladder to where he had begun spraying and climbed up it. Burton returned to his bricklaying. Working quickly and efficiently, he blocked off that part of the corridor. By the time he was done, de Marbot came to him.

“It’s finished. Not a bit of wall, ceiling or floor is uncovered. The Snark may put all the screens he wishes on them. He’ll be as blind as I am ignorant of your ultimate intentions.”

Burton went to the laboratory and said, “Now spray the windows in the doors of the converters. And move any furniture that can be moved, and spray the bare spots where they were.”

De Marbot gestured at the two mobile coverters. “Under them, too?”

“Yes.”

“How do you move them? We have been working like Samson at Gaza, but we are not as strong as he.”

“Use your flying chairs to slide them from the bare spots.”

De Marbot struck his forehead with the heel of his palm. “Of course! How stupid of me! It is that I am not used to menial labor! It has dredged my intelligence from me!”

“Don’t carry on so,” Burton said. “You would have thought of it!”

“It is not military work,” the Frenchman said, as if that explained it.

Aphra went into the corridor with Burton. “How do we get out now?”

“The bricks are ordinary ones, made of clay.”

Behn pointed at his beamer and looked at him. Burton nodded.

“Then how will that keep him … the Snark … out?”

“It won’t.”

He looked at his wristwatch. “We’ve much to do yet.”

Aphra shook her head and said, “I just don’t know what you have in mind.”

“You’ll see. In time.”

He took a stepladder, set it up by the corner of the brick wall and began spraying. When he had worked down to the door of the laboratory, having painted ceiling, walls, and floor of the corridor, he looked inside. The power cables connected to the bases of the two mobile converters had been disconnected, and the cabinets had been shoved onto the painted floor. The bare areas beneath were sprayed, and his coworkers were leaning against a wall and drinking water. Aphra Behn was also smoking a cigar.

“As soon as you’re rested,” Burton said, “come help me paint the corridor.”

When de Marbot came out, he stopped, his eyes widening.

“Sacred blue! You have painted the brick wall!”

“Yes,” Burton said. “The bricks seem to be just clay. I broke one open to examine it. But it’s possible that the Snark inserted some conductive material in it. I want to make sure that he can’t see us through it.”

“Not very likely,” de Marbot said.

“We take no chances.”

“Ah, you bloody British! No wonder we lost the war.”

De Marbot was not sincere. He maintained, furiously and with great conviction and many facts, that it was the mistakes and errors of Napoleon’s marshals—and a few by the Corsican—that had caused the downfall of the empire. If his brave countrymen had been led by men who always made the right decisions, they would have been unbeatable.

Burton, so far, had refrained from pointing out that the same might be said for any army.

By the time that they had spray painted the corridor and Loga’s room, it was 5:00 A.M.

The light and air from the wall material and vents had been cut off, but the lamps and air generator replaced these.

De Marbot said, “Voilà! C’est fini! I think.”

“You think incorrectly,” Burton said. “Now we move the largest converter into the secret room.”

This was done by shoving the cabinet with a flying chair, Burton standing by the chair and operating the controls. The task took ten minutes, and the top and sides of the converter scraped against the round entrance. Having, the day before, measured the dimensions of the cabinet and of the doorway, Burton knew that it would be a tight but workable fit. When he had maneuvered the cabinet from the laboratory and into the secret room, he connected the cable to the power inlet of the cabinet.

Aphra Behn said, “You’ve covered the area that detects the entrance codeword. What do you plan to do if you want to get in again? Or will you leave the door open?”

“The paint can be easily scraped away over the area if it’s necessary,” Burton said.

The Frenchman gestured at the walls. “Everything is impenetrable. The Snark can no longer see or hear us. May we be permitted to know what you intend to do now?”

The light from the lamps on the floor drew heavy shadows on their faces and made them look like masks. The masks of tired and desperate people. The blue eyes of de Marbot and Behn, however, seemed to shine with an unflagging light. Their wills were not weary.

“The power line to the converter is tapped in to the main power line,” Burton said. “But it is not in the Computer’s schematic files, and any power through it is not recorded by the Computer. Not, that is, unless the Snark has changed things. We can make whatever we wish, and the Snark won’t have the slightest idea of what we’re doing. He’ll know we’re up to something, and he’ll be concerned about it. But he can’t find out what it is unless he comes down here. He’ll have to investigate personally.”

“That ain’t so,” Aphra said. “He could send androids.”

“If he’s sentient, that is, human, he’ll be as curious as a monkey. He’ll want to look into this himself.”

“Perhaps.”

“Did you tell the others anything?” de Marbot said.

“No. I didn’t feel it was necessary.”

The Frenchman looked at his wristwatch.

“In about two and a half hours, some of our companions will be meeting for breakfast. You’re always there. Won’t they look for you?”

“Probably. And they won’t find me. Eventually, they’ll know that you two have disappeared, too.”

“They’ll think the Snark took us!” Aphra said. “They’ll be very worried.”

“It’ll shake them from their lethargy,” Burton said. “They won’t be bored, at least.”

“That’s a little cruel,” Aphra said.

“And they’ll come looking for us,” de Marbot said.

“There’s not much chance they’ll find us,” Burton said. “Not when they have thirty-five thousand, seven hundred and ninety-three rooms to search.”

“But they can use the Computer, it’ll scan for them. And when it reports…”

He stopped, smiled, and said, “Ah, I see. The Snark may, probably will, prevent the Computer from telling them where we are.”

“They’ll be searching for us, and the Snark will have to keep tabs on them,” Burton said. “I hope they’ll provide some distraction for him.”

“Yes, but,” Aphra said, “they could have done the same thing if you told them to do so, and they wouldn’t be upset about our being missing.”

“The fewer know about us, the better. If they truly believe we’re missing, they won’t be acting. I’m not sure that the Snark wouldn’t detect their insincerity. After all, he can read their voices for emotion and scan their wathans. He could tell if they’re pretending.”

“It’s like fighting God,” Aphra said.

“You said that,” Burton said. “And I told you that the Snark is not God. Even if he was, I’d give him a run for his money.”

“Morbleu,” de Marbot said. “What if he doesn’t come? What if he just lets us sit here like rats in a self-made trap? What then?”

“You can see a rat in a trap. He can’t see us.”

They were silent for a while. They had painted themselves into a dark corner, but they had all they needed to wait there for as long as they could endure it. There was a toilet in Loga’s room and several in the laboratory. They could use the converter in Loga’s hideaway to make food or whatever they wished. The converter was now tied in with a small auxiliary computer unconnected to the main one.

Seven o’clock came. Their conversation was infrequent and uninspired. The silence, the lighting, which seemed strange and unnatural after the shadowless illumination, and the waiting for something to happen wore on them. At seven-thirty, Burton suggested to the other two that they eat breakfast. They could sleep on the big bed while he stood guard.

At eight o’clock, the two decided that they would eat and then rest. Breakfast was provided by the converter in Loga’s room. Burton ate lightly; he did not want to be sluggish if quick action was required. De Marbot and Behn got into the bed, but the Frenchman said, “I do not feel right sleeping. You might need me.”

“It’s all right,” Burton said. “You’re a light sleeper. Besides, I don’t really expect the Snark to do anything for a long while.”

“But you do not know.”

“Right.”

Burton went back to his station by the entrance to the secret room. Sleepy, afraid that he might nod off, he began pacing back and forth close to the doorway. He did not know if anything would happen but, if it did, it would be to his advantage. Whatever did come, it would probably be unexpected.

Perhaps he was acting senselessly, stupidly. Still, it was better than doing nothing at all. If he were the unknown, would he be able to just let the unobserved three stay behind the walls? Would he not wonder what they were doing? Would he not try to think of everything they could possibly do? Wouldn’t he even ask the Computer to run off a list of everything that could be done?

No. He wouldn’t do that. The Computer was not sentient; it had no imagination. Its output never exceeded its input. In that, it was unlike and inferior to human beings. Some human beings.

You’re too cynical, he told himself. But am I? Aren’t millions, billions of people protein robots? They differ only in that they can feel sorrow, grief, disappointment, love, ambition, despair, frustration, irritation, amusement, rage, sympathy, empathy … well, not many could feel that … imagination … some of them … Vive la différence!

Frigate had once said that most people were persons and a minority were human beings. “What the Ethicals are trying to do is to turn the many persons into human beings. I wish them success, but I don’t have high expectations. And I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not as yet a human being.”

Frigate talked much about proper philosophical principles but did little to act them out. Nur was also a philosopher, but he acted out his philosophy. And you, Burton? What about you?

He had explored continents and minds, those of the legion of devils known as Burtonia excepted.

“There is only one great adventure,” Frigate had said, “and that is the descent into oneself.” He was quoting or paraphrasing some twentieth-century writer, Henry Miller, whom the American greatly admired at the same time that he despised some of his attitudes.

“The darkest Africa, the highest Everest, the deepest Pacific Abyss is your own mind. So why do so few set out to conquer it?”

“Because it’s like a fish trying to find out the nature of water,” Burton had said.

Talk, talk, talk. Parrots. Language was the plumage of human beings.

How did one burst through the self-erected barriers?

At that moment, something did break through. There was a crash and a roar. Burton leaped into the air and whirled toward the noise, his heart beating almost loud enough to drown out the uproar.

When he looked around the doorway, he saw that the corridor was dark except for the lamplight coming from inside Loga’s room and through the half-opened door of the laboratory. No. There was also light shining through a huge hole in the brick wall. It dimly revealed a monstrous thing, a horizontal cylinder with a conical nose, a dark mass that rolled on wheels toward him.

9

Burton jumped inside the doorway, turned, and stuck his head out far enough to see the thing. It was moving slowly, though it must have been traveling very swiftly to breach the wall, the bricks of which were held together by cement far stronger than anything on Earth in his time. The light from the corridor walls beyond the big hole showed that the monster was traveling on ten wheels.

Burton pointed his beamer at a spot behind the nose. The end of the scarlet rod-shaped ray struck, but though it could burn through twelve inches of nickel-steel in five seconds, it made no visible impression on the gray metallic-looking surface. He pulled back into the doorway and hurled himself backward and to one side as a violet-colored ray from the side of the machine leaped over his shoulder. Other rays followed; then the conical end of the monster was passing him. Daring to look around the doorway again, he saw that its large beamers were projecting the rays at various angles from both sides and many places.

When it was within a few feet of the other wall blocking the corridor, it stopped and began moving back. The beams were still going off and on at intervals of a few seconds. Moreover, the angles of fire were changing. Where they had struck were bare spots. The paint had been burned off.

Burton backed up behind the wall. A ray streaked through the doorway and burned off the paint on the far wall. Another, at a higher angle, destroyed more paint.

De Marbot called, “Dick, are you all right?”

“I’m not hurt!” Burton yelled. “Don’t expose yourself!”

“I am not stupid!” the Frenchman screamed back.

But he was stupid; at least, from Burton’s viewpoint, he was. De Marbot ran past him and out into the corridor toward the machine. Burton cried out after him to stop. The Frenchman did not hesitate but leaped upon the back of the juggernaut and grabbed a rung near the top. Burton had expected him to be cut through by a ray, but the beams had stopped the moment de Marbot had run into the corridor. Later, Burton wondered if the rays that had been shot at him had only been to discourage him from getting close to it or following it when it left.

Now the machine rolled backward and past the opening to Loga’s room. De Marbot, clinging with one hand and smiling, waved at Burton.

“Get off it!” Burton shouted. “You can’t do anything to it! Get off before it kills you!”

“Where it goes, I go!” de Marbot yelled.

He lost his bravado then, because the machine, having halted, suddenly sped forward, its tires screaming as they burned on the floor. All the beams had been turned off, but now one sprang from the nose. The violet lance struck the brick wall and pierced it, and then the beam widened into a cone, the base of which melted the bricks within its area and made an opening just large enough for the machine to pass through.

De Marbot, screaming, had, however, loosed his grip before he was hit by the bricks at the edge of the breach. He lay face-down, silent.

“That crazy frog!” Burton said. The machine was whipping around a distant corner, revealing that it was not solid but had articulations that permitted it to turn corners, though just barely. De Marbot was sitting up by then and was holding his head.

Burton ran to him, beating Aphra by a few steps.

“Are you hurt?”

De Marbot sat up, grimaced, then smiled.

“Only my pride. I became frightened. I screamed with fear.”

Assisted by Burton, he got to his feet. “I do have a few scratches, bruises, and contusions. I have taken worse spills many times from a horse while fighting for my glorious emperor. But never, never, have I had such a short ride!”

Aphra wrapped her arms around him and snuggled her face into his chest. “You stupid son of a bitch! You scared me to death!”

“You are most lively and reproachful for a corpse,” he said, hugging her. “Oh, my poor arm and shoulder! I cannot embrace you, little cabbage, with all my huge and accustomed strength and love!”

She freed herself and wiped her tears away with her fingers.

“You’re little cabbage, hell! I am not a vegetable, I’m a woman! A woman who’s very angry with you and your heroics!”

“A rose with thorns, perhaps, is it not?”

Burton looked up and down the corridor. No one in sight.

“Why did you jump on it?” he said. “What did you expect to accomplish?”

“I was going to ride it to its lair, where I might find its master, the Snark, awaiting it. And then I would surprise him and take him prisoner or kill him if I had to. But I forgot, in the heat of combat, that the thing would only make a hole large enough for it to pass through.”

“You were lucky that your brains, such as they are, weren’t dashed out,” Burton said. He shared some of Aphra’s anger; he was very fond of the Frenchman. “It was magnificent, but it was not good soldiership.”

“Ah, you are just jealous because you did not think of doing it.”

Burton laughed and said, “Perhaps you’re right.”

He indicated the areas where the paint had been burned off.

“The Snark now sees and hears us.”

“Odsblood!” Aphra said. “He just showed us how weak and helpless we are. We can’t even hide from him!”

“But we did force him to act,” Burton said. “He had to find out what we were doing here. He did not disdain us enough to ignore us.”

“And so I have worked like a helot with spraying paint, sweated like a slave for nothing,” de Marbot said.

“You did get an unusual ride out of it.”

De Marbot’s teeth shone.

“Yes. It was worth it!”

Burton was not sure. They had not done well. Moreover, the machine probably had cameras that had shown the Snark the open door to Loga’s secret room.

“What do we do now?” Aphra said. “Slink back to our apartments like bad little puppies who’ve been whipped?”

Burton did not answer because of a shout from the right. A flying chair was suspended near the intersection of the corridor, and the voice had come from the opened curtain in an enclosure on the chair. It had been fitted with a frame over which transparent plastic had been arranged. The man in the chair was sitting with his legs drawn up in front of him on the seat.

“Who’s that?” de Marbot said.

“Frigate,” Aphra said, having recognized his voice.

The chair shot forward and settled on the floor, and Frigate pulled the enclosure, a sort of tiny cabin, from the chair. He got out, looked around, and said, “What happened?”

Burton explained. Then the American had to tell de Marbot and Behn why he was here and what the purpose of the enclosure was.

“Dick arranged with me to come here eight hours after you three had left. The contraption—the enclosure—is to prevent my body heat being detected by the Computer.”

De Marbot looked reproachfully at Burton.

“You said that you’d enlisted just us.”

“I don’t tell the truth if it’s useful not to do so,” Burton said. “I thought that it would be best if I had two follow us but didn’t tell you. I didn’t want you and Aphra to be saying anything to each other about this.”

“Two?” de Marbot said. “Where is the other?”

“Nur is supposed to come down the corridors on the other side,” Burton said, pointing in the direction in which the machine had gone.

“Why?” de Marbot said. Then, “You think that perhaps Nur might have tracked the machine to its lair?”

“We won’t know until later.”

Burton turned to Frigate.

“I assume, since you’ve reported nothing, you saw nothing.”

“Right.”

“The machine could have gone in any direction in this maze. We’ll wait until Nur gets here.”

“If the Snark didn’t catch him,” Frigate said.

“You’re so optimistic,” Aphra said.

“I just like to consider every possibility,” Frigate said somewhat heatedly. “It’s not my fault that negative possibilities always outnumber the positive.”

“They don’t. You just see the dark chances easier than you see the bright ones.”

Burton looked at his wristwatch. Five minutes had passed since the machine had broken through. He would wait a total of thirty. If Nur did not show by then, they would go back to their apartments. There they might have to wait for a while until Turpin, Alice, and Li Po returned from searching for them. If, that is, they had indeed gone out to look for them. Logic might tell them to stay together in one apartment for defense.

A voice startled them. It was Nur’s, speaking from just outside the nearest brick wall.

“Don’t shoot. It’s I. Nur. I have good news.”

“Come in,” Burton said.

The little man entered. He stripped off some plastic material from his face and removed his gloves and jacket.

“Hot.”

Burton stepped outside the doorway. Nur’s chair, equipped with an enclosure like Frigate’s, was parked by the wall. Burton went inside. Nur was smiling, as well he might.

“I caught the Snark outside her secret room. I came speeding out of the dark part of the corridor and yelled at her to surrender. She refused; she started to take her beamer from her holster. So I shot her.”

“Her?” Burton said.

“Yes. We knew that the unknown could be of either sex, but we spoke of her as him so much that we’d fallen into the habit of thinking that she must be a he. The rest of you did, anyway. I did not.”

Nur said it would be best if he took them to the scene of the discovery and then explained what had happened. They followed him in their chairs through the breach in the wall, went down one corridor, turned, and stopped a hundred feet from the corner. The unknown lay on her back, eyes and mouth open, a thin cauterized wound on her throat showing where Nur’s beam had pierced it from front to back. She was short and slim and clothed in scarlet shirt, sky-blue slacks, and yellow sandals. A beamer lay near one open hand on the floor.

“She’s Mongolian,” Nur said. That he would point out the obvious showed that he was not as calm as he seemed. “I don’t know if she’s Chinese, Japanese, or of some other Mongolian nationality. Li Po might be able to tell us. But it’s irrelevant.”

There was a large circular opening in the wall, the doorwheel having rolled within the wall recess. Beyond would be her apartment, where she had hidden while keeping herself well informed of the movements of the eight. Wall-screens showed all the rooms in their apartments. The beds of Alice, Tom Turpin, and Li Po were empty; another screen displayed them at a table, playing cards in Turpin’s apartment. If they were alarmed, they did not show it. Apparently, they had decided that their colleagues had disappeared because Burton was carrying out one of his secret plans, or they had stayed together for safety. As it turned out, they had elected to hole up for both reasons.

Burton would, however, have to endure their reproaches when he returned to the apartment. He could bear them easily because he came with victory in his pocket.

The night before, Peter Frigate and Nur el-Musafir had gone to their bedrooms. They had hoped that the Snark would be sleeping and that the Computer would awaken the Snark only if it detected someone leaving the suite to enter the corridor. The only detectors on, they hoped, would be the heat devices. They were praying that no video screen would be on the corridor wall facing the suite door.

The two ordered from their converters a pair of suits and helmets for them and enclosures for the chairs. This could have been reported to the Snark, but they were gambling that the Computer—if it had recorded these actions—would not submit them to the Snark until the Snark awoke.

Clad in the heat-retaining outfits, carrying the enclosures, Frigate and Nur had left the suite. And the wall sensors had not been activated by them. The unknown, not having made provisions for such deceptions, had slept on. Unlike the Computer, she could have imagined these, but she had not done so.

“We were very lucky,” Burton said. “Events turned out to favor us, and they could just as easily not have done so. In fact, the probabilities that we would succeed were not very high.”

“You think that we were too lucky,” Nur said. Burton waited for him to elaborate, but Nur said, “The first thing I thought of when I killed her … I only meant to wound her … was that she would have arranged for an automatic and immediate resurrection.”

They followed the Moor into the room. At one corner was a converter, and a few feet near it, sprawled facedown, was another body of the woman. The auxiliary computer console had been destroyed by beamer fire.

“I came into this room as soon as I’d killed her,” Nur said. “Her body had just formed, and she was running to get a beamer on a table. I told her to stop. She ignored me, and so I shot her. I immediately rayed the computer and so prevented a third resurrection. Unfortunately, the ray also destroyed her body-recording.”

He led Burton to the ruin and pointed at a section that had been cut off. Inside was a blackish, half-melted, cranberry-sized object that had held everything needed to duplicate the body down to the submolecular level.

“I would be devastated with remorse and grief if I thought I had forever eliminated her chance of being resurrected again. But I’m sure that she must have another recording in the Computer file. I doubt that we can reach it, though. She would have inhibited the Computer from enabling us to find it.”

“We’ll see,” Burton said. “You’re probably right, though.”

“Who the hell was she?” Frigate said. “What was she doing here? Loga said that all the Ethicals and their Agents were dead. If he was right, then she wasn’t one of them. But what else could she be?”

“One of Loga’s enemies, otherwise she wouldn’t have eliminated him,” Nur said. “But if she wasn’t an Ethical or Agent, what reason would she have to do away with him? If she just wanted complete power, why didn’t she kill us?”

Aphra said, slowly, “Perhaps Monat the Operator was more far-seeing than Loga expected. Perhaps Monat made arrangements for an Agent, this woman, to be resurrected if certain events happened. Certain events in general, I mean. Monat could not have anticipated all events in particular.”

Burton requested the Computer to identify the dead woman. It replied that the data was unavailable, and it would not or could not say why.

Burton asked it if the dead woman’s body-recording was in its files.

The Computer said that it was unavailable.

“One more mystery,” said Frigate, and he groaned.

Burton asked the Computer for the location of the machine that had broken through the barricade walls. As he had expected, he was told that that information was also unavailable.

“I’ve seen all the robots the tower contains,” Burton said. “I had the Computer show them on a screen. That machine was not among them.”

The woman might have had it made for her by the Computer just to break down the walls.

Nur and Frigate dragged the body from the corridor and laid it down by the body near the cabinet. Stretched out, faceup, they looked like identical twins.

“Shall we have them disintegrated in the converter?” Nur said.

“One of them,” Burton said. “I want the Computer to examine the other.”

“So you can see if she has a black ball in her brain?”

Burton grimaced. Nur always seemed to be able to read his mind.

“Yes.”

The two dumped one body into a cabinet and ordered the Computer to get rid of it. White light filled the cabinet, and, when they looked through the window in the door, the cabinet was empty. There were not even ashes in it.

The other corpse was placed on a table above which was a huge dome-shaped device. Though there was no display of energy, the interior of the body was shown on a screen in a series of images. Burton had the Computer run the images back to the one he wanted. There was a tiny black sphere on the forebrain. This had been surgically implanted and, acting at a subvocalized codeword, would release a poison into the bearer’s body, killing it instantly.

“So … she was an Agent.”

“But we still don’t know when she came here or what her ultimate intentions were,” Frigate said.

“For the moment,” Burton said, “we don’t have to. It’s enough that we’ve gotten rid of the Snark. Now we’re on our own, free.”

They were, however, free only in some senses. Burton asked the Computer if the overrides installed by the woman were now removed. It replied that they were not.

“When would they be released?”

The Computer did not know.

“We’re stymied,” Frigate said.

“Not forever,” Burton replied. He was not as confident as he sounded.

10

On that perhaps forever-lost Earth, so far in distance and time, in A.D. 1880 in the city of London, England, appeared a privately printed book. It was titled The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî, A Lay of the Higher Law. Translated and annotated by His Friend and Pupil F. B. The initials stood for Frank Baker, a nom de plume of Captain Richard Francis Burton. “Frank” was from his middle name; “Baker” was his mother’s maiden surname. Not until after his death would his true name be appended to a reprint.

The poem, set in distichs imitating the classical Arab form, was supposed to be the work of a Persian Sufi, Haji Abdu of the city of Yezdi in Persia. Haji was a title borne by any Moslem who had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. Burton himself, having made the pilgrimage, disguised as a Moslem, could call himself a Haji. In this poem, Burton poured out his wisdom, pessimism, vast knowledge, and agnosticism, the Burtonian World-View and World-Pain. As Frank Baker, he had annotated the poem by “Abdu” and written an afterword that expressed a somewhat cynical and laughing view of himself. The laughter was, however, sad.

The preface summed up his philosophy, formed after fifty-nine years of wandering over the only planet he would ever know—or so he thought at the time.

TO THE READER

The Translator has ventured to entitle a “Lay of the Higher Law” the following composition, which aims at being in advance of its time; and he has not feared the danger of collision with such unpleasant forms as the “Higher Culture!” The principles which justify the name are as follows: The Author asserts that Happiness and Misery are equally divided and distributed in the world.

(Frigate’s comment on this statement was that it could be valid. But if Burton meant that individuals got an equal share of happiness and misery, he was wrong. Some people staggered along under a great burden of misery and had little happiness to lighten their load. Others had far more than their share of happiness. Anyway, Burton had not defined what he meant by happiness and misery. Though, of course, he didn’t have to do that for misery. Everybody knew what that was. Happiness, however, what was that? A mere freedom from pain and trouble? Or a positive quality? Was contentment happiness? Or did you have to be joyous to be happy?)

He makes Self-cultivation, with due regard to others, the sole and sufficient object of human life.

(What about your children? Alice had said. You have to cultivate them more than you do yourself so that they’ll be better, happier, and more adjusted than yourself. Every generation should be an improvement on the previous. I’ll admit, however, that it seldoms happens. Perhaps you’re right in that you can’t properly cultivate your children if you have not properly cultivated yourself. But you didn’t have any children, did you?)

(Self-cultivation is a major and vital principle, Nur had said. We Sufis stress it, keeping in mind that it demands self-discipline, compassion, and intelligence. But most people carry it to the extreme and make self-cultivation self-centeredness. This is not surprising. Mankind always does things to excess. Most people do, that is.)

He suggests that the affections, the sympathies, and the “divine gift of Pity” are man’s highest enjoyments.

(A pinch of pity adds savor to the soup of life, Nur said. Too much spoils it. Pity may lead to sentimentality and maudlinism.)

(Pity breeds a sense of superiority, Frigate had said. It also leads to self-pity. Not that I’m decrying that. There’s an exquisite joy in self-pity, if it’s indulged in now and then, here and there, and you end up laughing at yourself.)

(You forgot to include sex, Aphra Behn had said. Though I suppose that sex is part of the affections and sympathies.)

(Creating something, a painting, a poem, music, a book, a statue, a piece of furniture, childbirth, raising a child properly, these are man’s—and woman’s—highest enjoyments, Frigate had added. Though there’s much to be said for creating pristine sparkling bullshit, too.)

He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper suspicion of “Facts, the idlest of superstitions.”

(But there comes a time when you must judge, Nur had said. First, though, you must be sure that you are qualified to judge. Who knows that?)

(One person’s facts are another’s superstition, Frigate had said. What does that mean, by the way?)

(You can believe only in what you see, Li Po had said. And even then you can’t be sure. Perhaps you can really believe only in what you have not seen, what you’ve imagined. Dragons and fairies exist because I believe in them. A rock is a fact, and so is my imagination.)

Finally, although destructive to appearance, he is essentially reconstructive.

(Man is the only animal who thinks of the should-be rather than the what-is, Nur had said. Which is why man is the only animal who consciously changes the environment to suit himself. And usually spoils it because of his stupidity and excess. There are exceptions to this rule, of course.)

(A fine statement, Alice had said. But Dick Burton has always been self-destructive. When, if ever, will he stop destroying himself?)

For other details concerning the Poem and the Poet, the curious reader is referred to the end of the volume.

Vienna, Nov., 1880

F. B.

(Has it occurred to you, Nur had said, that you are nearing the end of that book you call Richard Francis Burton? It’s been published in two volumes, Earth-Burton and Riverworld-Burton. This tower may be The End.)

(It’s always been an excellent philosophy to live as if you’re going to die in the next hour, Frigate had said. Everybody agrees on that, but the only people who live it are those who know they’re going to die soon. And not even then.)

(That’s why I like to go to bed whenever possible, Aphra had said. Marcelin, are you in the mood?)

(Even the most ardent soldier needs to go to a rest camp now and then, de Marbot said. At the moment, I am an old, weary and saddlesore veteran.)

11

Burton also felt like a weary, saddlesore veteran. He had been riding himself—and others—too hard for too long. Now that he had crossed the last of hundreds of obstacles that had had to be dealt with at once, he needed rest and recreation. The problems to be solved, those presented by the Computer, could be tackled later.

Yet, he thought, as he looked into a mirror, I do not look as if I had lived for sixty-nine years on Earth and sixty-seven years here. My face is not that of a 136-year-old man. It is the face I had when I was a youth of twenty-five. Minus the long Satan-black drooping moustache, a hairy crescent moon. The Ethicals had arranged that the resurrected males lack facial hair, an arrangement that Burton had always resented. It was true that men did not have to shave, but what about the feelings—the rights—of those who desired moustaches and beards?

Now that I am in the tower, he thought, why not change those despotic arrangements? Surely there must be a way to start the hair growing again on my face.

On Earth, he had been afflicted—perhaps afflicted was too strong a word—marked with a slight strabismus. He had a “wandering eye.” In more senses than one. This small fault had been corrected by the Computer when he had been raised from the dead in the Rivervalley.

So, loss of beard weighed against correction of focus. But now, why could he not have both?

He made a note to look into that question.

“Brow of a god, jaw of a devil” some impressionable biographer had written of him. An accurate description, however. And one that described the two personae within him, the one who lusted for success and the one who lusted for defeat.

If, that is, the books written about him were correct in their judgments.

Some of them were on the table now. He had requested a few of the titles suggested by Frigate, and the Computer had printed and bound them for him and deposited their reproductions in a converter. The best, so Frigate said, was The Devil Drives, written by an American woman, Fawn M. Brodie, first published in 1967.

“I gave up my intention to write a biography of you when that came out,” Frigate had said. “But its excellence and wide inclusiveness did not keep others from writing biographies of you after hers. They lacked good judgment. However, you may not like The Devil Drives. Brodie couldn’t keep from analyzing you in Freudian terms. On the other hand, perhaps you can tell me if she was right or not. But then, you’d be the last person to know, wouldn’t you?”

Burton had not read the text yet, but he had looked at the reproductions of photographs. There was one of him at the age of fifty-one, painted by the famous artist Sir Frederick Leighton, and displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in London. He did look fierce, Elizabethan, buccaneerish. Leighton had posed him at such an angle as to catch the high forehead, the swelling supraorbital ridges, the thick eyebrows, the driven hungry expression of his eyes, the thrusting chin, the high cheekbones. The scar left from a Somali spear was prominent; Leighton had insisted on showing that, and Burton had not objected. A scar, if honorably gotten, was a form of medal, and he, who should have been covered with real medals, had been slighted.

“Partly your own fault,” Frigate had said. “I can understand and sympathize with that. I, too, was, am, self-defeating.”

“My family motto was ‘Honour, not Honours.’ ”

Opposite the Leighton portrait was a photograph of his wife, Isabel, made in 1869, when she was thirty-eight. She looked buxom, regal, and handsome. Like a kindly but domineering mother, he thought. A few pages back was a portrait of her done by the French artist Louis Desanges in 1861, when she had married Burton. She looked young, loving, and optimistic. Beneath her was the Desanges painting of Burton done at the same time. She was thirty; he, forty. His moustache dropped almost to his shoulder bones, and he certainly looked dark and fierce. And how thick his lips were. Which had suggested to certain biographers, and others, an overly sensual nature. How thin and prim and pursed were Isabel’s lips. A flaw in an otherwise perfectly beautiful face. Thin lips. Thick lips. Love, tenderness, and cheerfulness versus fierceness, ambitiousness, and pessimism. Isabel, blond; he, dark.

He turned the pages to a photograph of him at sixty-nine in 1890 and another of himself and Isabel in the same year, same place, Trieste. It had been taken by Doctor Baker, his personal physician, under a tree in the backyard. Burton sat on a chair, not visible in the photograph, one hand on the knob of his iron cane, the other draped over his right wrist. The fingers looked skeletal: Death’s own hand. He wore a tall gray plug hat, a stiff white collar, and a gray morning coat. The eyes in the gaunt face looked like those of a dying prisoner. Which, in a sense, he was. Little of the fierceness evident in the earlier pictures was there.

By his side, looking down at him, one white hand held up, a finger extended as if she were chiding him, was Lady Isabel. Fat, fat, fat. While he shriveled, she expanded. Yet, according to Frigate, though she knew that he was dying, she bore in herself the seeds of death, a cancer. She had not said a word to him about it; she had not wanted to upset him.

In her black dress and hood, she looked like a nun, a nurse nun. Kindly but firm. No nonsense.

He contrasted the youthful face in the mirror with that in the photograph. Those old old eyes. Sunken, despairing, lost. Those of a prisoner who had no hope of bail or pardon. Moons in eclipse.

He remembered how at Trieste in September, the last month of his life, he had purchased caged birds in the market, taken them home, and set them free. And how, one day, he had stopped before a monkey in a cage. “What crime did you commit in some other world, Jocko, that you are now caged and tormented and going through your purgatory?” And, shaking his head, walking away, he had muttered, “I wonder what he did? I wonder what he did?”

This world, the Riverworld, was a purgatory, if what the Ethicals said was true. Purgatory was the hardest of the three afterworlds, heaven, purgatory, and hell. In heaven you were free and ecstatic and knew that the future would always be good. In hell, though you suffered, you knew for once and all what your future would be. You did not have to strive for freedom; you knew that you would never attain it. But in purgatory you knew that you were going either to hell or to heaven, and it was up to you where you went. With the joys and freedom of heaven as a carrot, you strove like hell in purgatory. You knew the theory of how to get a ticket to heaven. But the practice … ah, the practice … that eluded you. You snatched it away from yourself.

Earth had bristled with carrots of many kinds: physical, mental, spiritual, economic, political. Of these, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, was sex.

Frigate had once written a story in which God had made all animals, hence humans, unisex. Every species lacked males; only females existed. Women impregnated themselves by eating fruit from sperm trees. Cross-fertilization was a very intricate procedure in the story, the women shedding genes with their excretion and the trees picking these up through their roots. Thus, males were unnecessary and not included in the parallel world Frigate had imagined.

Every three years, women were afflicted with arboreal frenzy and compulsively devoured the fruit until they became pregnant. In the meantime, women fell in love with one another, lived amicably or passionately or angrily with one another, were jealous, committed adultery, and, of course, often practiced erotic deviations. One of which, not uncommon, was falling in love with a certain tree and eating fruit out of season.

The main plot of the story was about the insane jealousy of a woman who, thinking that she had been cuckolded by her lover’s tree, chopped it down. Grief-stricken, the lover went into a nunnery.

A subplot of the story concerned a science-fiction writer who had imagined another world in which there were no sperm trees. Instead, woman had mates who were their counterparts physically except that they had no mammaries and were equipped with a rodlike organ that shot seeds into the uteruses of their lovers.

This method, according to the science-fiction writer in Frigate’s story, was a much better method and also eliminated the competition for trees. The mates with the rods were much like the trees in that their vegetable nature made them subservient to the females. But, unlike the trees, they were useful for something besides reproduction. They did the housework and fieldwork and took care of the babies while women played bridge or attended political meetings.

In the end, however, the rod-creatures, being more human than vegetable and more muscular than the females, rebelled and made the women their servants.

Burton, hearing Frigate’s story, had suggested that a better idea would have been to make the humans of one sex, the male, and have them impregnate the trees. The males would also get most of their food from the fruit of the trees. However, being human, the males would want power, and they would war among themselves for the trees. The victors would be rewarded with vast arboreal harems. The defeated would either be killed or driven into the woods to satisfy themselves with an inferior species of vegetation, a bush which could be screwed but which could not bear children.

“A good idea,” Frigate had said, “but who would take care of the infants? Trees can’t. Besides, the victorious male, the owner of the harem, or grove, would be so busy guarding his trees from other males that he would neglect the infants. Most of them would die. And if he were overcome by another male, his infants would be left to die or perhaps be killed by the conqueror. The victor would not want to raise the other man’s children.

“There doesn’t seem to be any perfect means for reproduction and caretaking of the infant, does there?” Frigate had said. “Perhaps God knew what He was doing when He made us male and female.”

“Perhaps He was limited in His choices and took the best one. Perhaps perfection is not possible in this universe. Or, if it is, perfection rules out progress. The amoeba is perfect, but it can’t evolve into something different. Or, if it does, it ceases to be an amoeba and must give up perfection for certain advantages, balanced or unbalanced with certain disadvantages.”

And so the splitting of Homo sapiens into two species in the real world and the vagaries of Fate brought together Lieutenant General Joseph Netterville Burton and Martha Baker, the prig and hypochondriac father and the child-spoiling and seductive but moralistic mother. They had gotten married after a short courtship, possibly because the retired officer on half-pay had been induced by Martha’s fortune to marry her. He had once had money, but he could not hang onto it. Though he despised gamblers, he did not think that speculation in the market was un-Christian.

On a night circa June 19, 1820, the lieutenant general had launched millions of spermatozoa into the heiress’ womb, and one wriggler had beaten the others to the egg waiting in its lair. The chance combination of genes had resulted in Richard Francis Burton, eldest of three siblings, born March 19, 1821, in Torquay, Devonshire, England. Richard’s mother had been lucky in not being infected by puerperal fever, which killed so many women giving birth in those days. Richard was also lucky in that he caught only one of the childhood diseases that put so many in the graveyard then. Measles laid him low, but he survived unharmed.

His mother’s father was so delighted when his daughter bore a red-headed and blue-eyed son that he considered changing his will and giving the bulk of his estate to Richard instead of Martha’s half-brother. Mrs. Burton fought against this, an act for which Richard never really forgave his mother. Finally, the grandfather decided that he would ignore his daughter’s arguments and arrange for his beloved grandson to inherit. Unfortunately, Mr. Baker died of a heart attack as he started to get into the carriage that was to take him to his solicitor. The son got the money, was cheated out of it by a sharpster, and died in poverty. A short time later, Richard’s red hair turned to jet black and his blue eyes to a deep brown. This was the first of his many disguises, though not, in this case, the first deliberately assumed.

It was his mother’s infatuation with her brother that had caused the first of Burton’s many misfortunes. Or so Burton had always thought. If he had been independently wealthy, he, a thoroughly undisciplined and argumentative man, would not have had to endure military life so long in order to support himself. He would not have been deprived of the money needed to make his African explorations thoroughly successful.

And his father’s decision to go to the Continent, where life was cheaper and where he might find a cure for his more-or-less imaginary ills, had cut off the father’s connections with old school friends who might have advanced his son’s career. It also made Burton a wanderer, rootless, one who never felt at home in England. Though it was true, as Frigate pointed out, that he had never felt at home anywhere.

He could not abide to stay in one place more than a week. After that, his restlessness drove him on. Or, if circumstances forced him to stay, he suffered.

Which meant that he was indeed suffering here.

“You could move from one apartment to another,” Nur had said to him. “I doubt that that would satisfy you. This is a small world, and you can take only small trips. Anyway, why move? You can change your apartment so that it looks like another world. And when you’re tired of that, change it again. You may travel from Africa to America without taking a step.”

“You were a Pisces,” Frigate had said. “The fish. Ruled by Neptune and Jupiter and associated with the twelfth house. The principle of Neptune is idealism and that of Jupiter is expansion. Pisces harmonizes. Pisces’ positive qualities make you intuitive, sympathetic, and artistic. Its negative qualities tend to make you a martyr, indecisive, and melancholy. The characteristics and activities of the twelfth house are the unconscious mind, institutions, banks, prisons, universities, libraries, hospitals, hidden enemies, intuition, inspiration, solitary pursuits, dream and sleep patterns, and your pets are large.”

“Sheer jobbernowlry, darkest superstition,” Burton had said.

“Yes. But you have always been a fish out of water. Idealistic, though cynical. Expansive, certainly. You’ve tried to be everything. You have tried to harmonize many fields, synthesize them. You are intuitive, sympathetic, and artistic. Certainly, you’ve made a martyr of yourself. You have often been indecisive. And melancholy! Read your own books.

“As for the unconscious or subconscious, you were more than an explorer of unknown lands. You also explored the darkest Africas of the human mind. You had many hidden enemies, though you also had many open enemies. You did depend on intuitions hunches, quite often. You loved the solitary pursuits: scholarship and writing. As for institutions, you did not like to work in them but you studied and analyzed them. As for dream and sleep patterns, you were fascinated by them, and you became a skilled hypnotist.

“Large pets. That seems not to be true. Yours were mostly bull terriers and gamecocks and monkeys. But you did love horses.”

“I could take any one of the other zodiacal signs or all of them,” Burton had said, sneering, “and I could show you how each and all would apply most appropriately to me. Or to you. Or any of us.”

“Probably,” Frigate had said. “But it’s fun to dabble in astrology, if only to demonstrate that it doesn’t work. However…”

Nur and Frigate were convinced that the universe was one cosmic spiderweb, and a fly landing on one strand sent shivers through the entire web. Someone sneezing on a planet of Mizrab somehow might cause a Chinese peasant to stub his toe on a rock.

“Environment is as important as genes, but the environment is much vaster than most people think.”

“Everything is,” Burton had replied.

He was thinking of this when the wall before him began glowing. He straightened up and leaned back. This was going to be a much larger screen than usual. When it ceased growing it was ten feet across.

“Well?” he said as the expected face, one of the seven, did not appear. Instead, the light dimmed until it was a blackness on the gray of the wall. Faint noises came from it.

He told the Computer to amplify them and leaned forward. The sounds were as faint as before. He repeated his command; the Computer failed to comply.

Suddenly, light made a ragged hole in the center of the screen, and the sounds loudened, though they were still unintelligible. The hole expanded, and he was looking at something white and streaked with blood. Something wet with other than blood.

“Here comes the little devil,” someone said.

Burton shot from the chair.

“Good God!”

He was seeing through someone’s eyes. The white thing was a sheet; the water, that which burst before birth; the red streaks, blood. The voice was unfamiliar. But the scream that drowned it out was, he did not know how he knew but he knew, his mother’s.

Suddenly, the screen showed him more, though it was a dim vision. Around him was a room containing giants. The screen was blanked out as something passed across it. And then the room rotated, and he glimpsed giant arms, bare from the elbows down, rolled shirt sleeves above. A big bed was turning also, and in it was his mother, sweaty, her hair dank. His mother was young. A giant hand was pulling a sheet over the bare stomach and legs and the bloody hairy home from which he had been pulled.

Now he was upside down. A sharp slap. A thin wailing. His first blow.

“Lusty little devil, isn’t he?” a man’s voice said.

Burton was witnessing his own birth.

12

Burton could see and hear what was happening to him, to the newborn, rather, but he could not feel its, his, reactions. He felt no pain, except emphatically, when his cord was clipped. Indeed, he did not see the operation, but, when he was picked up, he glimpsed the umbilicus on a towel. Nor did he know that he was being cleaned off until a towel pressed down on his, the baby’s eyes. Then he was wrapped in a blanket and placed in his mother’s arms. Of this he saw only the nurse approaching with the blanket, her stiff white pinafore, the upper part of his mother, and then her face from underneath.

Presently, his father entered. How young that dark sallow Roman face was! And his father was smiling. This usually happened only when Mr. Burton had made a profit in the stock market, and that was not often.

He shuddered when he saw the doctor’s hands. They were being wiped on a towel, not given a thorough scrubbing. Doubtless, the doctor had not bothered to wash his hands before delivering him. It was strange, though, unusual, anyway, that the doctor had personally delivered him. If he remembered correctly, most doctors at that time instructed the nurses or midwives but did not touch the woman in labor. Some did not even see the mother’s lower parts, which were hidden by a sheet, but heard the details of the delivery from the midwife and then gave their instructions.

A huge hand, his father’s, came down and lifted something from him. The blanket.

“A fine son you’ve given me, my dear,” his father said.

“He’s beautiful, beautiful,” a croaking voice said. His mother’s.

“Now, now,” a deep voice said. The doctor’s face hove into view. “We mustn’t tire Mrs. Burton. Besides, the little devil seems to be hungry.”

At this point, he must have fallen asleep. His next view was of an enormous breast, a swollen, pale red nipple, and his little hands reaching out. Then he saw with one eye a field of pink flesh and the underpart of his wetnurse’s face. Mrs. Burton, being a genteel lady, would not have nursed the baby herself.

“I wonder who she was?” Burton muttered. “Some Irishwoman?”

He had a vague memory of his mother having mentioned the nurse’s name once. A Mrs. Riley? Kiley?

He was shocked but not so much that he could not think clearly. The Computer had read his memory from his body-recording, reeling it up as a fisherman did a trout. After storing it in a separate file, the Computer was feeding it back to him via the wall-screen. The showing of the whole of it, if done in the same time as that in which the events had occurred, would take a lifetime. However, no one’s memory held everything that the person had seen, heard, tasted, felt, and thought. Memory was selective and there were great gaps when the person was sleeping, except when he was dreaming, of course. Thus, it did not take as much time as might have been expected to display all that was in the subject’s memory bank.

The film, it was a film of sorts, could be speeded up or slowed down or run backward. The Computer might be doing this now. On the other hand, he could have fallen asleep shortly after birth.

Burton, now watching his diapers being changed by another servant, a maid, wondered why this memory display had been commanded. And by whom?

Before he could question the Computer, several small screens whitened wall areas. Frigate’s, Turpin’s, and de Marbot’s faces appeared. They looked shocked.

“Yes,” he said before they could begin talking, “I’m being visited by the past, too. From bloody birth onward.”

“It’s terrible,” Alice said. “And wonderful, too. Awesome. I feel like crying.”

Frigate said, “I’ll call the others and see if they’re going through the same thing.” His screen dimmed to gray.

Tom Turpin was weeping.

“I’m telling you, seeing my own momma and poppa and that old shack … I don’t think I can take it.”

Burton glanced at the big screen. There he was again, being lifted toward that titanic breast. He could hear his infant’s cry of hunger. The scene faded and was replaced by a view of a blue canopy, and the room rocking. No, a great hand was rocking his cradle.

The screens of the others came on. Seven faces with various emotions looked at him.

Li Po, grinning, said, “It is something indescribable, except for a poet, of course, to see yourself suckled by your mother. But … who ordered this?”

“Wait a moment,” Burton said, “and I’ll ask the Computer.”

“I have done that,” Nur said. “It says that the who and the why are unavailable. But it did not refuse to tell me the when. The order was given two days ago to start the memory-display this morning.”

“Then it must have been given by the woman you killed,” Burton said.

“She’s the most likely candidate.”

“I’m completely at sea about why she ordered this memory-display,” Burton said.

“Obviously,” Nur said, “it was done to accelerate our ethical advancement. If we’re forced to know our past, how we behaved, how others behaved, we’ll see our weaknesses, faults, and vices in all their details. Like it or not, we’ll have what we were, exactly what we were, rubbed into our noses. Ground into our souls. By watching that inescapable drama and comedy, we might be so strongly affected that we’ll take steps to eliminate our undesirable character traits. And then become better human beings.”

“Or it might drive us mad,” Frigate said.

“More likely it will drive us to ingenious methods to shut it out,” Burton said. “Nur, did you ask the Computer to stop the display?”

“Yes. The Computer did not reply. Obviously, the woman’s command is another override.”

“Just a minute,” Burton said.

He walked out of the room into the corridor. The screen had slid along the wall of the big room until he left the room. Now it appeared on the corridor wall opposite him. He cursed and spun on his heels and walked back into the room. The screen accompanied him.

He told the others what had happened. “Apparently, we can’t get rid of it. It’s like the albatross around the ancient mariner’s neck.”

Burton shut his eyes. He heard himself screaming. Opening his eyes, he saw the canopy above him and then heard, faintly, the maid’s voice. “Saints presarve us! What is it now?”

“I think,” he said slowly, “that if we’re going to shut this out, we’ll have to paint our walls. We can’t use the Computer in our apartments, though I suppose we can use the auxiliary computers. And we’ll have to wear ear plugs if we want to sleep. There’s no way of getting away from this outside the apartments.”

“We’ll go crazy!” Frigate said.

Nur said, “Surely, the woman must have realized that. Perhaps we’ll get relief during certain hours of the day. And at night, too.”

Burton asked de Marbot and Behn about the locations of their screens.

“One is on one wall and the other on the wall opposite it,” the Frenchman said. “We can take turns, my little diamond and I, watching each other’s so charming infancies.”

“How the devil can I get any research done with that going on?” Burton muttered.

He said so-long to the others after agreeing to meet them at the swimming pool. The Computer did not refuse to make him a pair of earphones that blocked off the sounds. The only way he could escape the sight on the wall was to stare at the display screen of the auxiliary computer. And he found that he could not concentrate on his work. He was too curious. He could not resist looking at scenes that he did not remember. Yet, after a minute, he got bored. Not much happened to a baby outside of routine, and seeing his parents when they were young quickly lost its interest. They did not talk of anything except him when they were together, and his mother only spoke baby talk. Which he, of course, had been too undeveloped to understand, though he must have responded to her face and the tones of her voice. Now he became sick of them. Not that she was with him much. The people he mostly saw were the wetnurse and the two maids who took turns cleaning him or carrying him around.

At 11:00 A.M. he went to the swimming pool. The screen followed him along the walls. The pasts of the others accompanied them, too. The screens were at first on one of the long walls, then they were on all the walls.

“Familiarity, I hope, will breed deafness and blindness,” Aphra said as she came up out of the water next to Burton.

“It’ll never be familiar, even though it now has mostly to do with the family,” he said. “What it will breed will be shame, grief, and anger. And humiliation. Do you want to see yourself when you were mean, childish, degraded?”

“Oh, I was never mean. And I was never degraded, though others tried to degrade me.”

He did not think that she was as unperturbed as she seemed to be. No one could be.

It was difficult to swim and talk and have fun. He could not keep from glancing at the screens.

Frigate bobbed up from the surface of the pool beside Burton.

“Look at that,” he said. “I can see myself now.”

His mother, a slim woman with Indian-black hair, dark brown eyes, and high cheekbones, was holding her baby up to a mirror. The infant Peter was nude and grinning, his mouth so wide that he looked froglike.

“It’s a jolt to see yourself at that age. And I can expect many thousands of mirror images, from the puling baby to the old man of sixty-five. Jesus H. Christ!”

That evening, Frigate asked the Computer when the life-recordings started. It replied that they started from the moment of conception. The Computer could not answer Frigate’s question about why the display had not started then. But Frigate and some of the others decided that that was because the nine months in the womb were mostly darkness and silence. They could learn little from it and could easily ignore it.

However, when Frigate asked the Computer to run off his gestation period and show only those moments when sound did penetrate to the embryo, he was astounded. Many times, though the sounds were muffled, he could clearly hear those close to his mother, and his mother’s voice. There were other sounds, too, car motors, locomotive whistles and escaping steam, firecrackers, excretory noises, crashings of fallen glasses or dishes, loud laughter, and, embarrassingly, his parents making love. After two hours of this, Frigate ordered the Computer to stop the recording.

“I suppose that the woman who started this did not do it out of malice,” he said. “Its purpose must be to show us, whether or not we want to see it, our weaknesses, vanities, pettinesses, meannesses, selfishnesses, stupid thinking, prejudices, you name it, everything undesirable in us. With, I suppose, an end in mind, a goal. That we should be able to change ourselves for the better. Ethical advancement.”

“That’s probably true,” Nur said. “But … why the secrecy on her part? Why did she kill Loga?”

“That’s something we’ll have to find out,” Burton said. “If we can.”

The woman who had ordered the merciless recordings had had some compassion, however. At 8:00 P.M. the screens’ displays faded out, and they did not reappear until 8:00 A.M. There would be some respite.

Burton left early that evening for his apartment. However, a sufferer from insomnia all his life, he was unable to sleep. After two hours of tossing and turning, his mind filled with scenes from the past-displays, he rose, dressed, and left the apartment. For three hours, he rode his chair through many corridors and into many rooms and up and down many shafts. His wanderings were aimless until he decided to organize his explorations. Why not get a diagram from the Computer and start from the top and work every level thoroughly down to the bottom? He had no goal in mind, no thought that he’d find something new. He was restless, he wanted to keep moving, and, perhaps, he might come across something novel or useful or both.

On the way up to the hangar, his starting point, he changed his mind again. The twelve vast rooms that had been the private worlds of the Council of Twelve beckoned him. They, at least, would offer a variety, something different from the monotonous sameness of corridor and rooms. His tour lasted four hours. When finished with all of them, he knew that he would tell the others that they, too, should explore these fascinating worlds.

Burton visited the hangar again and found it, as far as he could see, unchanged. He counted the craft to make sure that none were missing. That did not mean that the woman Agent had not used one since his last visit.

He returned to his apartment at four in the morning and slept from 4:30 to 7:30. After showering, he decided to go for breakfast at Li Po’s. First, he called him to make sure that the Chinese would be his host for today. The handsome, somewhat Mephistophelian face was smiling.

“Yes, I am eager to have you as my guest. I have a surprise for you.”

He turned his head and said something in Chinese.

Another face appeared by his. Burton was startled. It was a stranger’s, a beautiful Chinese woman’s.

13

Some men and women seem to be steam locomotives chug-chugging steadily on their tracks, slowing down uphill but working steadily and running freely downhill. Others are like internal combustion automobiles that take different roads but now and then run out of gas and wait to be refueled.

Li Po seemed to be a rocket with inexhaustible fuel. He was always exploding, propelled here and there, noisy, sometimes obnoxious, but always letting you know that he was not to be ignored. His face, expressions, and gesticulations reminded Burton of the final stanza in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan:

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Li Po, also known as Li T’ai-Po and Tai-Peng, had been born in A.D. 701 in the oasis town of Yarkand. At the time he was born, the vast desert territory did not belong to any Chinese kingdom. Yarkand was on the trade route between Persia and China, and Li Po’s great-great-grandfather had come there from China. According to family tradition, he had been banned for some political reason. He brought his wife and children with him, and his oldest son married a Turkic-speaking woman, a Uigur. Their eldest son had married a Chinese woman; the second son of this marriage had taken for wife an Afghani-Uigur woman.

The family had become well-to-do, and, five years after Li Po was born, he went with his parents to the southwest Chinese province of Szechwan. They settled in a city that harbored many foreigners, Zoroastrian Persians, Hindus, Jews, Nestorian Christians, and Muslims from Persia, Afghanistan, and the Mesopotamian area. Li Po knew the languages of all of these and was later to add Korean and some Japanese to his stock.

He was almost an inch over six feet, a height attributed by the Chinese to his foreign blood. At an early age, he began composing poetry and drinking wine. Though he had a great reputation as a drunkard later in life, he was not condemned for this. Heavy drinking was endemic among the upper classes; liquor was regarded as an aid to opening the gate to divine inspiration. The speed with which he could compose poetry while drunk dazzled his contemporaries. Strangely, much was great enough to make many rank him as China’s foremost poet.

In his twenties, he began the roving that so many Chinese poets, statesmen, and artists were famous for. For a while, he became a knight-errant, a wanderer who tried to right wrongs by his sword. During this time, he killed several warriors in duels and was widely known as a demon with the blade. Once, he was jailed for killing a man in a tavern brawl but escaped before a sentence could be passed.

Yet, he was very studious and had learned, among other things, the physics and chemistry of his time.

In many respects, he was not only the Byron of his age but also the Burton. Like the latter, he roamed everywhere, became a scholar and a fine swordsman, was politically naive, was very angry at all types of suffering, was versed in many tongues, and was not very discreet or polite.

Unlike most Chinese males, he had empathy for the slavelike bondage and sufferings of the Chinese women. This, however, did not keep him from exploiting them. Even discounting his boasting, he was extraordinarily virile. “Three women at one time are not enough!”

After his knight-errantry days, he lived for a time with a hermit named Tung Yen-tsu on Mount Min in Shu Land. Here he furthered his knowledge and love of Taoist philosophy and became a sort of St. Francis. He and Tung tamed and raised wild birds and taught them to come at the sound of their voices to be fed from their hands.

Chinese “hermits,” however, were not like Western anchorites. They were usually men who had retired from public life but lived with their families and retinues of servants and often entertained friends and travelers.

When twenty-five, Li Po left Shu Land to travel through the eastern and northern provinces. He stayed longest at Anlu in Hubei because he had fallen in love with a woman named Hu. She became his first wife and bore him several children before she died.

Once, he traveled with a friend to a famous lake, but the friend died there. Li Po buried the body near the lake, but, since his friend wanted to be buried in his ancestral lot, Li Po dug him up, wrapped him, and carried the corpse on his back for a hundred miles to Wuchang in Hubei.

“I had no money to buy a horse. I had given it all away to the poor.”

Li Po’s reputation as a poet caused the T’ang emperor, Hsüan Tsung, to summon him to his court in A.D. 742, although the arrogant poet had refused to take the examinations for the civil service. Li Po became disgusted with the laziness and lechery of Hsüan, with the corruption of the court officials, and with the consequent impoverishment and great suffering of the people. Once, commanded to appear before the king to recite his poems, Li Po showed up drunk at the palace and insisted that the chief eunuch, a very powerful official, take off his boots for him. This insured that he would have no friends in court and that the emperor’s spies would watch him closely.

It also insured that Li Po would have to travel many places to look for patrons. He did not mind that, since he loved to wander.

His second wife died, and he and his third wife got a divorce by mutual agreement after a very short marriage. His fourth wife would outlive him.

In A.D. 757, the emperor’s sixteenth son, the prince of Lin, collected an army and fleet, supposedly to fight the rebel An Lushan. Li Po, not knowing that Lin intended to revolt against his father, joined him.

“I was fifty-seven years old then but very strong and agile for my age. I thought that it was not too late to gain glory for myself as a warrior, and the emperor might change his mind about me and raise me to some high post. At least, he might give me a pension.”

Unfortunately, Lin’s treason was exposed by an older brother, and his forces were slaughtered. Li Po was sentenced to death—guilty by association—but the emperor decided that Li Po was too great a poet to kill. He was banished, but he was pardoned when he was sixty. On his way home to his fourth wife, he got drunk in a boat and tried to grab his reflection in the water. He fell overboard, caught pneumonia, and died shortly thereafter.

“Were you really convinced at that moment that you could seize your image in the river?” Frigate had said.

“Yes. Had I had one more cup of wine, I could have done it. No one else could, but I would have managed it.”

“And what would you have done with it?” Nur had said dryly.

“I would have made it emperor! One Li Po is unconquerable by any fifty men! Two Li Pos would have conquered all of China!”

He had laughed so loudly and long then that the others were convinced that he knew that his boasting was ridiculous. Still, they could not quite be sure.

“The world’s greatest wino,” Frigate had said.

Li Po had awakened from death on the bank of The River. There he had started his wanderings again, but, as he said, he was used to such a life. On Earth, he had been up and down all of China’s great rivers and many of the lesser.

One night, he was aroused in his hut by a masked and hooded man. That stranger was the one who had also wakened Burton and many others to enlist them in his cause. Of the many recruited by the renegade Ethical, Loga, Li Po had been one of the very few to get to the tower.

“And what have you learned during your sojourn here?” Nur had said. “How has it changed you for better or worse, if it has?”

“Unlike you, my Muslim if heretical friend, I did not believe in a hereafter. I did agree with The Sage that the spirit-land was none of our business. I thought that when I died, I would become rotten flesh and then dust and that would be that. Awakening by The River was a great shock, the worst in my life. Where were the gods who had raised me from the dead, the gods in whom I had not believed? There were no gods or demons here, only human beings like myself who, though in another world, knew no more about the why and wherefore of it than they had of Earth’s. Poor wretches! Poor ignoramuses stumbling in the dark. Where were those who had lit us up once again so that we’d be little flames looking for the mother flame?”

“Where are the snows of yesteryear?” Frigate said. “Easy to answer. They melted and became clouds and became snow again, today’s.”

At the end of wandering on Earth and the Riverworld, Li Po had reached the tower. He seemed not to have changed, which, Nur said, was regrettable. The Riverworld was designed to make people change. The tall, lean, handsome, devil-faced man with the green eyes and his black hair coiled in a topknot only laughed at that.

“Perfection can change only for the worse.”

He had redecorated his suite so that it looked like the palace of the Glorious Emperor. From the Computer’s files he had had reproduced many famous Chinese paintings and was painting some of his own works. These were not duplicates of his Terrestrial creations but scenes from the Riverworld.

“I have everything the emperor had and much more. Except, of course, millions of subjects and many wives and concubines. In fact, I have not one wife and so am poorer and more miserable than the lowliest peasant. Not for long, though.”

There was one woman whom the historians knew nothing of, though Li Po had written two hundred poems about her. These, however, were among his nine thousand lost works.

In Eastern Lu, a part of twentieth-century Shantung in north China, Li Po had built a house attached to a tavern owned by his fourth wife’s family. And in the tavern was a slave girl who served the patrons; her name was Hsing Shih. In English, Star Spoon.

“The most beautiful woman I have ever seen. You will pardon me, Alice, Aphra, when I say that. You two are indeed surpassingly beautiful, but you will surely agree with me, since you’re fair-minded for your sex, that you just possibly may not be the most beautiful.

“Star Spoon was quiet and soft-spoken and had elegant manners quite out of place in that tavern and unappreciated by the customers. She was no peasant girl. Her mother had been a concubine of the Glorious Monarch, and Star Spoon was supposed to be his daughter. That paternity, however, was questioned when Star Spoon’s mother was caught in adultery with a palace guard. The mother and the lover were beheaded, and Star Spoon, then nine years old, was sold to a wealthy merchant. He took her to his bed when she was ten. After he tired of her, his six sons took their turns with her as they became juveniles. When the merchant lost his fortune and died shortly thereafter, Star Spoon was sold to my father-in-law, the tavern owner. She became his concubine, and she was treated well, relatively speaking anyway, though she had to work in the tavern. After I married his daughter, I came to know Star Spoon well. I fell passionately in love with her. Of course, I do everything passionately. She had a child by me, but he died a few days after birth from a fever. Though I am afraid of nothing, I did not want to cause trouble under my roof. My wife was very jealous and prone to violence. I had a scar on my shoulder from her knife to prove it. So neither Star Spoon nor I ever told anyone who the father was.”

If it was only intimate companionship that Li Po wanted, he would have chosen a man. But he needed a female, and his thoughts turned to Hsing Shih. He would find his old comrades later for masculine warmth and uproariousness and mental stimulation.

The first question in locating Star Spoon was: Was she available in the Computer’s files?

These began in 97,000 B.C when the predecessors of the Ethicals had landed on Earth. (Loga had said that they started in about 100,000 B.C, but he was speaking loosely, rounding off the figure.) The Computer listed 97,000 B.C as Year One in its chronology. Thus, since Star Spoon had been born in A.D. 721, by Western reckoning, her birth year was 97,724 by computer reckoning.

Li Po had ordered that the search start in that year and in the area where she had been born. Since the Glorious Monarch’s palace was a very important place in China, it was probable that Ethical agents had photographed it and its tenants.

The recordings were far from complete, however. It was possible that there were very few films made at this place during the T’ang dynasty. Li Po had, however, reconstructed Star Spoon’s features with the aid of the Computer and his memory, which, like Burton’s and Nur’s, gripped like an eagle’s talon.

The Computer had then extrapolated the woman’s face backward, as it were, shaping her features as they would have been in childhood.

With this as a model, the Computer had scanned its files for this area and period. And it had located her, not just once but three times. Li Po had been very lucky—so far.

Her wathan was now identified from the films, which photographed more than her body. Using this as reference, the Computer scanned the eighteen billion plus wathans in the great central well of the tower. If Star Spoon was alive in The Valley, her wathan would not be in the well, and Li Po was out of luck. But the Computer found it. Fifteen minutes later, it delivered Star Spoon via the e-m converter to Li Po’s apartment.

She was shocked and confused. She had been killed in those horrible days when the east bank of grailstones had failed to provide food for the east bank’s inhabitants. She, with hordes of others, had crossed The River in boats to fight for the food supplied to the west bank dwellers. She had not known then that resurrection of the dead had ceased, and so she had expected to awake somewhere along The River.

Instead, here she was in a strange place, one obviously not in The Valley. And who was this fellow countryman grinning like a demon at her?

“Truly, she thought I was a devil at first,” Li Po was to say. “She was half-mistaken.” He added, “She did not even recognize me until I spoke. Then everything flooded in on her, and she wept for a long time.”

It had taken most of the night for him to explain to her just what had happened to him and to her. Then he had allowed her to sleep, though he lusted to get her into bed with him.

“I am not one to force myself upon a woman. She must be willing.”

Everyone came to his suite to meet the newcomer. She was indeed beautiful and delicate, about five feet tall, slim-boned and slim-fleshed but well rounded and long-legged. Her eyes were huge and dark brown, and she was dressed in the same kind of clothes she had worn on Earth. She was not as shy as Li Po had portrayed her. The Riverworld had changed her in that respect. Her voice was, however, low and husky as she spoke to them in Esperanto. She was fluent in a dozen or more languages, but English was not one of them.

Burton was enraged, but, for once, he controlled himself. Star Spoon was a deed done. Reproaching the Chinese for breaking the agreement not to resurrect anybody as yet would upset the woman and only cause Li Po to argue with him or, worse, challenge him to a duel. Burton had lost whatever authority he had. Now that the situation was changed, the danger over, he could no longer be captain of this group of strong individualists. They would pretty much do what they wished.

Burton managed to smile, but his voice betrayed him. He growled, “How many more are you planning to raise?”

“Not many. I am no maniac.”

Burton snorted.

“The Six Idlers of the Bamboo Grove, my immortal companions. You’d like them. Women for them and perhaps a few more for me. My honorable parents, my sisters and brothers and an aunt whom I greatly loved. My children. Of course, I have to find them first.”

Frigate groaned and said, “An invasion. The Yellow Peril all over again.”

“What?” Li Po said.

“Nothing. I’m sure that we’ll all be happy and pleased.”

“I look forward to meeting those you will bring back,” Li Po said.

Frigate grinned and clapped Li Po on the shoulder. He was very fond of the poet, though, like the others, he was sometimes irritated by him.

14

Peter Jairus Frigate was born in 1918 in North Terre Haute, Indiana, near the banks of the Wabash River. Though he called himself a rationalist, he believed, or claimed to believe, that each Earthly area had its unique psychic properties. Thus, Vigo County soil had absorbed the peculiar qualities of the Indians who had lived there and of the pioneers who had driven them away and settled there. His own psyche, soaked with the effluvia of Amerindianness and Hoosierness, would never get rid of these no matter how much they evaporated in other climes and times.

“In a sense, I contain redskins and frontiersmen.”

His voice reminded people of that of the Montana movie actor, Gary Cooper, but now and then the Hoosier twang appeared in it. He sometimes pronounced “wash” as “warsh,” and a “bucket” was sometimes a “pail.” “Illinois” more often than not was “Ellinois.”

In his childhood, he had been subjected to Christian Science, that melange of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy transmuted into Western religion by the woolly-minded and neurotic Mary Baker Eddy. His parents had originally been Methodist Episcopalian and Baptist, but a “miracle” had occurred when his father’s aunt was sent home from a hospital to die of incurable cancer. A friend had talked her into reading The Key to the Scriptures and, while she was doing this, the aunt’s cancer had remissed. Most of the Frigate family in Terre Haute had become devout disciples of Eddy and of Jesus Christ as Scientist.

The child Peter Frigate had somehow confused the figure of Jesus with those of scientists he read about at the age of seven, Doctors Frankenstein and Doolittle and Van Helsing. Two of these were involved with dead people come to life, and Doolittle, who fused with St. Francis later on, was involved with talking animals. The precocious and highly imaginative youngster visualized the bearded and robed Christ as working in a laboratory when he was not roaming the countryside and preaching.

“Shall we operate now, Judas? I think that that leg goes there, but I don’t have the least idea where that eye came from or where it goes.”

This conversation would take place when Jesus was trying to raise Lazarus. The problem was complicated by the other bodies that had been put in Lazarus’ tomb, before his interment. After lying three days in a hole in a cliff in this hot climate, Lazarus was pretty much decayed and fallen apart, hence the confusion. Hence, also, the gas masks that Jesus and his assistants, Judas and Peter, wore over their surgical masks.

Near them were giant retorts with bubbling liquids and a static generator shooting twisting electrical currents from node to node and other impressive-looking Hollywoodish laboratory equipment. These came, not from the Frankenstein motion picture, which did not appear until 1931, but from a silent movie serial Frigate saw when he was six.

Judas, the treasurer of Dr. Christ’s organization, which depended entirely upon voluntary contributions, was nervous about the expense. “This operation will wipe us out,” he said hoarsely to the great scientist.

“Yes, but think of the publicity. When the millionaire, Joseph of Arimathea, hears of this, he’ll kick in with plenty of shekels. Besides, it’s deductible on his income tax.”

In later years, when thinking of this scene, Frigate was sure that he had not known about such things as publicity and income tax deductions. He must be reconstructing his childhood imagination. But imagination works backward as well as forward, better in fact.

Perhaps it was this version of Christ as scientist that veered young Frigate toward the reading of science fiction. Though reading heavily in Swift, Twain, Doyle, London, Dumas, Baum, and Homer, he also read the Bible, and an edition of John Bunyan illustrated by Doré. Somewhere, deep in the boiling muddy depths of his unconscious, his religious impulses were mixed with his worship of science as savior of mankind. The early science-fiction magazines and books he read were based on the premise that rationality, logic, and science would get Homo sapiens out of the mess it had made during the past hundred thousand years. He had not learned then that, though he lived in a high-technology civilization, the Old Stone Age, the Middle Stone Age, the New Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and the Dark Ages were in every newborn infant. Baggage that went with every person throughout his or her life. Few there were who would rid themselves of this impedimenta, and no one would ever shuck all of it.

Well, Nur might be an exception.

“There are certain things about those ages that are desirable,” Nur had said. “I have not rid myself of them, I am sure.”

When Frigate was eleven, his parents slid into religious apathy. They stopped going, for a while, to the First Church of Christ Scientist on Hamilton Boulevard in Peoria. But though they did not want their eldest son to stop attending church, they did not want to transport him every morning to the Christ Scientist Church. So they enrolled him in the Sunday school of the Arcadia Avenue Presbyterian Church, which was within walking distance.

It was here that he ran head-on and at full theological speed into predestination. He had not as yet recovered from the concussion of soul and philosophical trauma resulting from the collision.

“The whole world became for me a convalescent ward after that,” Frigate had once told Burton. “Of course, I’m exaggerating somewhat.”

Until then, Frigate had been convinced that you were rewarded with Heaven if you lived a life full of good deeds and thoughts and of unshaken doubt in the existence of God and the validity of the Bible.

“The Presbyterians maintained that it did not make any difference whether you thought you were full of grace and were an exemplary Christian. God had decreed thousands of years before you were born, before the making of the universe, in fact, that this unborn person would be saved and that unborn person would be damned. Their belief was like Twain’s theory of predeterminism. From the moment that the first primal atom bumped into the second created atom, a chain of motion was set up the directions of which were fixed by whether the primal atom collided with the second at this angle or that angle and the velocity it was traveling at when it bumped the other. If the angle and velocity had been different, everything that happened from then on would have been different. Your course through life was set. Nothing you did could change it. Everything you did was predetermined. To use twentieth-century computerese, preprogrammed.”

The catch was that you could not then say to yourself, “What the hell?” and live a dissolute godless life. You had to behave as if you were a complete Christian. What was worse, you had to be one. You had to truly believe; you could not be a hypocrite.

But you would not know until after you’d died whether God had chosen you to fly up to Paradise or to fall into the eternal flames of Hell.

“Actually, if the Presbyterians were right, you could be a wicked person all your life. But if God had marked you as one of the saved, you would repent at the last moment and rise up to eternal bliss. Who, however, was going to take the chance that that would happen?

“I should have told my parents about my spiritual agonies over this. They would have straightened me out by telling me that there was no such thing as predestination and a literal Hell. At least, they would have tried to ease my mind. But I said nothing to them—which gives you an idea of my communicativeness—and I suffered. They, of course, had no idea what I was being taught there in that church within walking distance. A short walk to Despair, Doubt, and Hell.”

“Did you really suffer that much?” Burton had said.

“Not all the time. Just now and then, here and there. After all, I was an active healthy boy. And I observed that, if the adults in the church really believed in predestination, they did not behave as if they did. They certainly weren’t obsessed with doubts and griefs about their strange doctrine. They paid it lip service in church and forgot about it as soon as they walked out. Maybe sooner.

“Also, reading about Twain’s life, I saw that he did not believe in his godless and strictly mechanical universe. He acted as if he had free will even though he talked a lot about its absence from human beings.”

At the age of twelve, Frigate became an atheist.

“Rather, I should say, a devout believer in science as our savior. Science as used by rational people. However, I had forgotten that Swift had said, implied, anyway, that most people were Yahoos.”

He had hastened to amend and modify his statement. Most people were only Yahooish; only a minority were genuine, dyed-in-the-wool Yahoos. Too big a minority, though.

“Science could only be our savior in a limited sense and then only if not abused. But everything is abused and misused. I did not really learn that I was until thirty-five, though. Midway in my life, like Dante, I was just outside the Gates of Hell.”

“It took him a long time to realize that people are irrational most of the time and usually more than that,” Nur had said. “What an astounding revelation!”

“Not only the Paleolithic Age but also the bipedal ape lives in us,” Burton had said. “I’m not sure, though, that that is not an insult to the apes.”

Frigate had maintained for many years that there was no such thing as a soul. But it came to him that if God had not given Homo sapiens a soul, then it must make its own soul. He wrote a story based on the idea of artificial souls that insured people the immortality that God, if there was one, had neglected to create.

As far as he knew, no one had ever thought of this, and it made a very good premise for a science-fiction novel. It also made him conscious that, somewhere in him, he still believed that only humanity could save itself. There was no savior to come from Heaven or another planet and redeem humankind.

“I was wrong, yet right,” Frigate had said. “Our salvation was the synthetic soul, but it was invented by an extra-Terrestrial species.”

“That soul, the wathan, is not our salvation,” Nur had said. “It is only a means to an end. Salvation must still come from ourselves.”

Science and the religious impulse had combined to make the Riverworld and the wathan, but these could carry you only so far. At that point, science faded away like a sunset and metaphysics took over.

In the meantime, you had to live one second after the other, move with the flow of time. Like it or not, you had to sleep and eat and excrete and, as Burton said, cultivate your self with due regard to others. You might ask questions, but if you did not get answers just now, you could hope that you would someday.

Frigate was introduced to Star Spoon and talked with her for a while, though he had some difficulty understanding her. She spoke Esperanto, but since she had lived in an area occupied mainly by eighth-century A.D. Chinese and Italic Sabines of the fifth century B.C., her Esperanto had many unfamiliar loan words. After a while, he excused himself and went to his apartment. Like Burton, he was troubled because Li Po had not consulted his companions about Star Spoon. The group did need new members; eight was not enough to give the variety and freshness needed. They were close because of the hardships suffered while struggling to reach their goal, but this very intimacy had made them a family, and like most families, they got on one another’s nerves at times and quarreled about trivialities. Nur excepted.

Frigate thought it was both right and necessary to raise others. But these should be carefully considered before being admitted. They did not need troublemakers.

Li Po had opened the floodgates. The rest of the group would want to raise their own dead, and there was, as yet, no limit on the numbers that could be brought in or any qualifications for them.

Burton felt as Frigate and, doubtless, most of the group did. Yet he was helpless, so far, to control these individualists. He was brave, strong, and dashing, but he was not a good leader except in situations that called for immediate and violent action. He just was not a peacetime administrator.

Nur el-Musafir should be the one whom the group should follow and obey now, but he had not volunteered for the office and probably would not. Of them all, he was the most foresighted. He knew that no one could control the inevitable movement to anarchy.

15

Burton saw how shocked Star Spoon was when a screen displayed her birth. He had expected that she would be, but he was surprised that she showed so much emotion about it. Like most Westerners, he regarded the Chinese as a sternly self-controlled nation, the “inscrutable Oriental.” Li Po was uninhibited, close to manic, but then he was the exception that tested the rule. In an aside to Li Po, Burton spoke of this. The Chinese laughed loudly and said, “It may be that the Chinese of your time were inexpressive—when around strangers or in threatening situations. But Star Spoon and I are of what you call the seventh century. Do you think that we are the same as the Chinese of your time, any more than Englishmen of the seventh century were like those of your time?”

“I am sufficiently rebuked and chastened,” Burton said.

Nur said, “She may be disturbed not so much by what she sees now as by what she knows she is going to see.”

It was impossible to be at ease when their pasts were being shown. Burton proposed that they choose an empty apartment for their communal meals from now on. They would paint its walls so that the screens could not be seen. They agreed that that was an excellent idea, after which Burton returned to his apartment. He ordered two androids, protein robots, from the Computer, gave the specifications, then waited exactly thirteen seconds for them to appear in the converters. It had amused him to give one the face of Colonel Henry Corsellis, late of the Native Eighteenth Bombay Infantry, and the other the face of Sir James Outram, late hero of the Indian Mutiny and Her Majesty’s Resident at Aden. Corsellis had become Burton’s enemy when, during officer’s mess, Burton had been improvising poems rhyming with his fellows’ names. He had ignored Corsellis’ because he knew how hot-tempered and sensitive his commander was. But, when the colonel had demanded that Burton made a couplet based on his name, Burton had recited:

Here lieth the body of Colonel Corsellis;

The rest of the fellow, I fancy, in hell is.

As expected, the colonel had become angry, and they had quarreled. From then on, Corsellis did Burton every disservice that he could.

“Which I should have anticipated. Perhaps I did.”

Burton had come into disfavor with Outram, then a general in the Indian army, when Sir Charles Napier, whom Burton greatly admired, got into a long and bitter feud with Outram. Burton had defended Napier with articles and letters for the Karachee Advertiser, a private publication devoted to Napier’s defense. Outram had resented these and marked Burton down for attack if he ever had an opportunity. Years later, when Burton, then a captain in the Indian army, had requested permission to explore Somalia in Africa, Outram had refused his request. Though overriden by his superiors, Outram had then limited Burton’s plans for exploration.

Now the androids, whom he called Corsellis and Outram, stood before him. The former was in the uniform of a colonel; the latter, in civilian clothes. Their faces were expressionless; they would smile only at request and then only if they had been programmed to do so.

“You two arseholes will, as required, paint the rooms with the materials you’ll find in that converter there,” he said, pointing.

The androids did not follow his gesture, so he said, “Look over there. Where my finger is pointing. That cabinet is the converter I mean. The paint’s in sprayers. You know how to use those. The ladders are also in there. You know how to put the sections together and how to use them.”

Burton had thought of programming them to kiss his ass before they started the job, but he had rejected the childish and essentially meaningless act. If he resurrected the real Outram and Corsellis and got them to kiss his ass, that would be different. But they would refuse, of course. Besides, he could not just bring them to life for a while, even if he would have liked them to do menial labor for him. They were human beings, and he could not have them disintegrated when he was through with them.

Nevertheless, he did get some satisfaction, even chuckled, when he saw the two walk to the converter. If only he could arrange it so that the real men, the models, could at least see his androids. They would be outraged, furiously indignant.

He sighed. That form of revenge was petty, and he knew it. If Nur could see this, he would say, “It is beneath you. You have become no better than they.”

“I should turn the other cheek?” Burton muttered, continuing aloud the imaginary conversation. “I am not a Christian. Moreover, I never met a Christian who turned the other cheek when slapped.”

He would have to keep the identity of the simulacra to himself and that deprived him of the pleasure he had in this. Alice could get away with giving her androids the faces of Gladstone and Disraeli because she had no animus toward them. It was, to her, merely amusing to be waited on by two prime ministers.

He left his apartment for a while, though he was not sure that he should leave the androids unattended. If they had a problem that a sentient painter could have solved, they would either ignore it and go on or stop and wait for orders. He, however, was angered by the events on the past-display screen, not yet covered over. Its sequence was not in proper chronology; it had jumped to when he was three years old and being whipped savagely by his tutor. “All I did was tell him that he had a breath like a sick dog’s,” Burton said. “And that he farted overmuch. That’s all.”

Burton could not read at that age, but the tutor had started to teach him to speak Latin. At the age of ten, Burton would know far more Latin than his tutor and speak it fluently.

“But that was in spite of him, not because of him. I had a natal love for languages that no brutal pedant could scourge from me. Unfortunately, most boys hated the subject as much as they hated their teachers’ rods. In their minds, one was the other.”

The screen displaying his past appeared on the wall beside the door after it had been shut. Burton sat down in the flying chair parked by the door and turned it so that his back was to the wall. Immediately, the screen appeared on the wall opposite him. Burton put soundproof devices over his ears and a long eyeshade on his head. While he kept his eyes lowered, he could not see the screen. Apparently, the Computer had not had orders to shift the screen to the floor. Thus, Burton could read the book he held close to his chest without seeing or hearing the display.

The book was the Roman emperor Claudius’ grammar of the Etruscan language, located and reproduced for Burton by the Computer. It had been lost sometime during the Dark Ages of Earth, but an Ethical agent had photographed a copy of it shortly after Claudius had finished it. While Earth linguists were bemoaning its loss, it had been sitting in the records of the Ethicals for a thousand years.

Despite his absorption in the book, he could not keep from glancing at the screen. Now he, as the child, had been swung around to face the red angry features of McClanahan, the tutor. Though Burton could not hear the man, he could read the writhing lips. And he suddenly remembered other occasions when McClanahan had hurled invective and accusations at him, and the prophecy that he would go to Hell when he died—if not sooner.

Burton could not see his own lips, but he was screaming, “I’ll meet you there!” His view shifted. He was facing the other way, and the tutor was thrashing him again. He would not be crying or yelling; he kept his lips stubbornly locked so that the tutor would not have the satisfaction of knowing how much he was hurting him. That only made McClanahan angrier, and he increased the severity of his strokes. But he was afraid to whip him as much as he would have liked to. Though Burton’s father approved of instilling love of learning and obedience with the rod, he would not have stood for a whipping near to death. The tutor knew that the child would not scream until he was almost dead, and perhaps not then.

Burton turned his head away and focused his intentness into a sword, the tip of which raked across the words of the grammar. He finished two pages, then closed his eyes and projected the pages, as if they had been a film, on the screen of his mind. After which, he opened his eyes to check his accuracy. He smiled. His memory had been one hundred percent perfect.

Book-learning a language was a step toward mastering it. But he should resurrect an Etruscan and imbibe the living speech. However—there was always a however—what would he do with the Etruscan after he had finished with her?

It was then that he thought of the possibility of reading the recordings of the dead in the files. Why not have the Computer unreel their memories? Perhaps the dead could speak.

Using a codeword, he asked the Computer to form a screen on the floor. It did so, and Burton put his question to it. The Computer replied that the memories of the recordings could be extracted and displayed. However, some recordings were not available because of overrides.

He looked at his wristwatch. Time for the androids to have finished their job.

By then the display of his past had leaped to Naples, where the family was staying for a while during its never-ending wandering through southern Europe. Once more, he was being whipped by a tutor, this time by DuPré, an Oxford graduate.

As Frigate had said, their lives were movies, but, before being shown the main feature, they were seeing “previews.”

It would be embarrassing when the Computer got to the events of the day before this particular incident. He and an Italian playmate had masturbated before each other.

It was also going to be embarrassing when the innumerable excretions were shown, and the sexual scenes would be downright intolerable. These were why Burton had decided that the idea for painting an apartment where all might meet was not enough. His own apartment was to be painted, and, if the others had any sense, they would follow his example.

He entered the doorway, and the screen was hidden beneath the paint. The androids, sweating, were just finishing up his bedroom. He had not told them to paint every room, since there were several into which he would not go. That is, unless he wished to see his past, and he knew that there would be many times when he would not be able to resist the temptation. He could, however, now view it only when he wished to.

He swore and snapped his fingers.

Perhaps not.

He went to the console of the auxiliary computer, which had not been painted over. Activating it, he stared at the screen. He smiled. The Computer was not displaying the loathed pictures there. Apparently it had been ordered only to use the walls for the memory projections.

The Outram android reported that they were through. Burton told them to store the ladders and the unused cans in a bedroom and to put the used cans in a converter. He disintegrated the cans, then ordered the androids into the converter. They walked into the huge cabinet; he secured the door; energy flashed; not even a speck of ash was left.

It had to be his imagination that made him think that their eyes looked pleading. They had neither self-consciousness nor instinct for self-preservation.

The walls, floor, and ceilings were an appalling egg-white, but he would paint murals over these.

Frigate called him via the console screen.

“I’ve been exploring the little worlds on that second level down from the top,” he said. “I found out that the Computer doesn’t show the past there. I don’t know why, but I think that the Ethicals had some limitations there that the Snark couldn’t override. Anyway, besides that, there are other reasons why we should move into them. They give the illusion of the great outdoors; I felt much freer than I do in my apartment. I’m going to suggest that we move into them, and that anyone who wishes to do so remodel them. I’m going to do it whether or not anyone else does, but it would be nice if everybody did it. We’d be close together and could use the central area for social meetings or whatever.”

They met in the central area of the “pie-in-the-sky” level that evening to talk about Frigate’s proposal.

“You’ll have to see those places for yourselves,” Frigate said. “They’re fabulous.”

The American reminded them that the circular section was divided into segments of thirty degrees each. The points of these twelve segments ended in the huge circular central area.

“It occurred to me that, from a bird’s-eye view, the circle looks like a zodiac chart. It’s divided into twelve parts, twelve houses, Aquarius, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, and so forth—if you want to look at it that way. I was thinking that maybe each of us could pick the area that corresponds to his or her birth date.”

“Why?” de Marbot said.

“It’s a conceit of mine. However, since the birth date could determine the particular area in which to live, it’ll avoid argument if we use the zodiacal method. Of course, there’s no reason for disagreement, since they’ll all look alike once the original paraphernalia is cleared out. It’s just an idea.”

The others said that it seemed as good a way of choosing the areas as any.

“But you don’t believe in that astrological crap, do you?” Turpin said.

“No. Not really. However, I do know something about it. Now, Po, you were born, according to the Western calendar, on April 19, A.D. 701. That makes you Aries the Ram, the first house, the principle of which is energy. You certainly are energetic.”

“And much more!” the Chinese said.

“Yes. The first house also pioneers, and you were a pioneer. Your positive qualities are outgoing, original, and dynamic.”

“Very true! I must learn more about this Occidental astrology.”

“Your negative qualities,” Frigate said, smiling, “are that you’re foolhardy, have low self-sufficiency, and are deceitful.”

“What? I? Perhaps I might be foolhardy, though I would prefer to call it absolutely courageous. But how could you say that I have low self-sufficiency, you who know me so well?”

“I’m just telling you what astrology says about your sign. Anyway, negative qualities are to be overcome, and evidently you conquered yours, if you ever had them.”

“One might say that he overcompensated in his conquest,” Burton said drily.

“The house of Aries is OK with you?” Frigate said.

“Why not! It is the first!”

Frigate spoke to Alice. “You were born May 4, 1852. That makes you Taurus the Bull. Ruled by Venus, the emotions.”

“Hah!” Burton said. Alice glared at him.

“Taurus builds. Your positive qualities make you loyal, dependable, and patient. But you have to battle against excessive pride, self-indulgence, and greediness.”

“Not to my knowledge,” Alice said quietly.

“The second house OK with you?”

“Of course.”

Frigate spoke to Thomas Million Turpin, who was smoking a panatela and holding a glass of bourbon.

“You were born on May 21, 1873, under the sign of Gemini, the Twins. You’re ruled by Mercury, and you’re strong on communication. You’re versatile, genial, and creative.”

“Keep talking, man!”

“But your negative qualities … uh … you’re two-faced, superficial, and unstable.”

“That’s a damn lie! I never been two-faced, I always been straightforward. Where’d you get that shit?”

“Nobody said that you were,” Frigate said. “What that indicates is that you have had to overcome those tendencies.”

“I ain’t two-faced. I’m just discreet and polite. No use hurting someone’s feelings if you don’t have to. It don’t pay.”

“The third house agreeable with you?”

“One’s good as another and maybe better.”

“We don’t have anybody born under Cancer,” Frigate said. “Not yet, anyway. The fifth house is Leo the Lion, representing vitality and ruled by the sun. Leo dramatizes. That’s you, Marcelin. Born August 18, 1782.”

“So far, excellent,” de Marbot said. “I am all those.”

“A Leo is regal…”

“True!”

“… entertaining…”

“Doubly true!”

“… and commanding.”

“Triply true.”

“The bad qualities, alas, are that Leo is pompous, domineering, and conceited.”

The Frenchman reddened and scowled; the others burst out laughing.

“He got you there!” Turpin said.

“Leo, the fifth house, OK?” Frigate said.

“If it is understood that we are merely amusing ourselves with this parlor game of astrology and that, though I may be a leader, I am not domineering, and though I have much to boast about but do not, I am not conceited, and that never, never am I pompous!”

“Nobody’ll argue with you,” Frigate said ambiguously. “Now we come to the sixth house, Virgo, the virgin. Ruled also by Mercury, the communicator. Virgo analyzes. That’s you, Aphra, born September 22, 1640. Virgo is practical, analytical, intellectual.”

“I’ve never been any of those,” Aphra said.

“Virgo is also critical, hypochondriacal, and prim.”

She laughed uproariously.

“I, with my reputation and my bawdy dramas?”

“The sixth house OK?”

“Why not?”

“Why not?” de Marbot said. “I ask, why not? We have been living together, my little cabbage, and I am delighted and content. Now … sacrebleu … we will no longer share a bed and a roof. Have you not thought of that? If not, why not? Are you tired of me?”

She patted him on the arm. “Not at all, my bantam cock, not at all. But … well … we are always with each other, never out of each other’s sight. It’s possible, only possible, I say, after all, we’re human, that such close and continuous intimacy may pall after a while. Besides … I like the idea of having my own world. We can build our own, each to our own desire, and still be with each other whenever we wish. I will stay one night in your world. You, the next night, in mine. We can pretend that we are a king and a queen making state visits to each other’s monarchy.”

“I do not know about that,” he said.

Aphra shrugged. “Well, if it doesn’t work out, we can live together as before. Surely, Marcelin, you are not afraid of this venture?”

“I? Afraid? Never! Very well, Peter, I will take up residence in the fifth house and Aphra in the sixth. After all, we will be next-door neighbors.”

“With a thick wall between you. Walls make good neighbors.”

“But poor lovers,” Burton said.

“You are too cynical, my friend,” de Marbot said.

“Libra and Scorpio, the seventh and eighth houses, will have to be empty for the time being,” Frigate said. “The ninth is Sagittarius, the archer, ruled by Jupiter, the dominant mode being expansion. Sagittarius philosophizes. Which is appropriate, since you, Nur, are Sagittarius. You are, according to the ancient science, jovial, prophetic, and logical.”

“And more,” Nur said.

“You have the negative qualities of bluntness, fanaticism, and intolerance.”

“Had. I conquered those in my late youth.”

“We must skip Capricorn. Aquarius, my sign,” Frigate said, “is the eleventh house. Aquarius the Waterbearer is ruled by Saturn, which symbolizes lessons, and by Uranus, which stands for opportunities. Aquarius humanizes. Aquarius is diplomatic, altruistic, and inventive. Unfortunately, on the negative side, he is selfish, eccentric, and impulsive.”

“Do you plead guilty?” Burton said.

“More or less. Now, Dick, we come to you, Pisces, since you were born March 19, 1821. Pisces the Fish. Harmonizes, haw! haw! Ruled by Neptune or idealism and Jupiter or expansion. No argument there. Positive qualities: intuitive, sympathetic, artistic.”

“You’ve told me, more than once, that I was a self-made martyr,” Burton said.

“And so,” Nur said, “carrying our baggage of good and bad qualities, we go to our new homes. If we could only leave the suitcases containing the bad at the door.”

16

Moving into the “pie-in-the-sky” chambers demanded much preparation. The tenants had to tour their little worlds and decide whether they should keep the present decor or “environment” or make their own. Except for Nur, who was intrigued by the chamber of dark mirrors, each finally had his or her place stripped. While the hordes of androids and robots were doing this, the tenants decided on what kind of private world they wanted. After that, they had to instruct the Computer down to the minutest details about their specifications.

Nur changed his mind. He would remain in his suite though he would visit the mirror-world now and then to meditate.

Burton surprised everybody by his unaccountable reluctance to change homes. He had always been a wanderer who grew restless if he stayed in one place more than a week. Yet he now refused to move until he had made his world exactly as he wished. Halfway through the building of his first world, he stopped the work and had it stripped again. After a long time, he started on a second design but abandoned that after two weeks.

“Perhaps he’s so unwilling to go there,” Nur said, “because it will be his last home. Where else can he go after he moves into that?”

The afternoon that the six were to move, all eight held a big going-away party in the central area. It was not entirely a joyous occasion because de Marbot and Behn quarreled just before they were to take occupancy. The Frenchman was burned up at Aphra’s refusal to live with him in his world, and, after drinking more wine than he was accustomed to, he accused her of not loving him.

“I am entitled to my own world, the world I made,” she said loftily.

“A woman’s place is by the man she loves. She should go where he goes.”

“We’ve been through this too many times,” she said. “I’m weary of it.”

“You should be under my roof. It is my right. How can I trust you?”

“I don’t have to be in your sight every minute. If you can’t trust me, if you think I’ll hop into another man’s bed the moment I go around the corner … Is it just me or don’t you trust any woman? You were often absent for many months from your wife when you were a soldier. Did you trust her? You must have, you didn’t—”

“My wife was above suspicion!” de Marbot shouted.

“Hail, Caesar!” Aphra said scornfully. “The real Caesar’s wife, my precious little piece of shit, put horns on him. So, if your wife was as good as Caesar’s wife…”

Aphra walked away from him while he yelled at her, and she went through the doorway to the sixth house.

Weeping, she let the door close behind her. She felt as if she were also closing off her lover forever, though she had had enough experience to know that her emotions, not her reason, were speaking. How many men had she parted from and never expected to see again? It seemed like a hundred, but, actually, it must be only twenty. And she could not remember the names of some. She would, though, when the dogging screen of her past showed up again. Here, at least, she could get away from it.

She went up the steps, the door opening for her at the top, and she stepped into her world. There was another flying chair there; she got into it and soared to an altitude of a hundred feet and headed inward. Below her was South American low-altitude tropical jungle, with winding narrow rivers gleaming in the light of the false moon. The cries of night birds rang and clanged below her; a bat shot by near her and dipped toward the dark tops of the trees a few feet below her. The moon was full because she had arranged for one every night, and its light was twice as powerful as that of Earth’s. And the stars, also those of equatorial South America, were three times as bright as the real ones. In this luminous night, she saw a shape slip across a glade. A jaguar. And she heard the bellowings of alligators.

The wind cooled her and fluttered her robe as she headed toward the big lake in the middle of the jungle. Its waters sparkled around the floating palace in its center. She had reconstructed this from her memory of an apparition she had seen while voyaging from Antwerp to London. It had appeared suddenly ahead of the ship as if placed there by magic and had startled and frightened everybody aboard. This magical building was square, four stories high, made of marble of various colors, and surrounded by rows of fluted and twisting pillars with climbing vines and flowers and streamers waving in the breeze. Each pillar was carved with hundreds of little Cupids who seemed to be climbing them with the aid of their fluttering wings.

The palace had been seen by everybody aboard the ship. Where had it come from? If it was a mirage, what building did it reflect? There was nowhere in England or the Continent such a rococo fantastic palace.

That unexplainable vision had haunted her the rest of her life on Earth and still did on the Riverworld. She had asked the Computer to explain it to her, but its searches had turned up only the reference to it in the biography of her by John Gildon. This posthumous work had both intrigued and disgusted her because of its inaccuracies and lies. She had then asked for all available literature concerning her and had read Montague Summers’, Bernbaum’s, and Sackville-West’s accounts. These authors had been mainly occupied in trying to sift the truth from the romance and speculations and had usually failed. They could not be blamed. The official records and documents about her were scarce, and getting the historical facts about her from her novels, plays, and poems was hopeless.

Aphra knew, or had been told, that she was the daughter of a barber, James Johnson of Canterbury. Her mother had died a few days after Aphra’s birth, and she and her sister and brother had been adopted by relatives, John and Amy Amis. Neither she nor the Amises, of course, had any prescience that the little girl would some day be the first Englishwoman to support herself wholly by writing. Nor that one of her poems would be included in anthologies for centuries afterward and one novel would survive as a minor classic.

Her successful intrusion into the hitherto all-male literary field had shocked and affronted many. The deepest shock was felt by the male writers and critics. Their biased and vindictive remarks and politicking made her furious, and she responded in kind, and justly so. She suffered all the hardships, the sling-stones and fiery crosses, of the pioneer, but she blazed the path for a host of women who earned their living by the pen.

As a child, she had been nervous and imaginative and often ill. Nevertheless, she survived the six-thousand-mile rough and dangerous voyage to Surinam, an English possession in north South America on the Atlantic Ocean. Her adopted father, John Amis, was not so lucky. He died en route, a victim of a “fever.” He had been appointed lieutenant general of Surinam through the influence of a relative, Lord Willoughby of Parham. Despite the loss of her father, she enjoyed her life, and she took full advantage of the exotic land. Here she met a black slave who had been stolen from his tribe in West Africa and brought to Surinam. His stories of his homeland and his exalted position there, whether true or not, were the source of that romantic novel she was to write years later, Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave.

“Those were the happiest years of my life. There ’twas always spring, always April, May, and June. The trees bore at once all degrees of leaves and fruits. There were groves of oranges, lemons, citrons, figs, nutmegs, and noble aromatics continually exuding fragrances. Gaily colored macaws, parrots, and canaries flashed above the water lilies in the lagoons and trenches. The twa-twa bird had a cry like a silver gong. The kiskadee called ‘Qu’est-ce que dit? Qu’est-ce que dit?’ I became versed in the strange language of the blacks, half-African, half-English, and heard of Gran Gado, the Grand God, his wife Maria, and his son Jesi Kist. Indians came down from the mountains carrying bags full of gold dust.

“It was not all lovely and paradisical, of course, I fell sick with malaria once and almost died.”

In 1658, at the age of eighteen, she returned to London. At nineteen she was married to a much older man, a wealthy Dutch merchant, Jans Behn. Though she had no money, her good looks and wit and learning had inspired love in Mr. Behn. Through his connections, he introduced his wife into the court of Charles II.

“And is it true,” Frigate had said, “that you were the king’s mistress?”

“His Majesty did ask me to bed with him,” she had said, “but at that time I was married. I had the conception then, which I later abandoned, that adultery was sinful. Moreover, I loved my husband, no Dutch lump he, and I knew that he would be terribly hurt if I betrayed him.”

By 1665, her husband had lost his immense fortune because of the sinking by storms or capture by pirates of the ships bearing his merchandise. He died from a heart attack in early 1666, leaving his widow with only fifty pounds. By the time she had gotten employment, she had only forty pounds left. Through friends at the court, she became an espionage agent and went to Antwerp. She was told that any information she could get on the Dutch fleet would be welcome. But her main assignment was to spy on renegade Englishmen living in Holland. There were many there who had fled England and were conspiring to overthrow the present monarchy.

“A female James Bond,” Frigate had said.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“I was especially charged to make friends with an exile, William Scott, and endeavor to get him to return to England. He wouldn’t do so until he got a full pardon, but toward that end he agreed to collaborate with me. By then, I was broke. I sent a letter to James Halsall, the king’s cupbearer, my immediate superior. I asked him for funds to continue my spying. I got no answer, so I wrote a second missive, telling him how expensive Antwerp was and that I had only been able to feed myself and keep a roof over my head by pawning a ring. Again, no reply. Once more I wrote to Halsall and, at the same time, to Thomas Killigrew, a friend who was also in the secret service. I stated that I needed fifty pounds to pay debts. I also sent news of the number and disposition of the Dutch ships, of the Dutch army, and of my progress with Scott. After receiving no replies, I wrote in utter despair to the secretary of state, Lord Arlington. I told him all that I had done, how impoverished I was, and that soon I’d be in a Dutch debtor’s prison. But he did not answer.”

“Did you then think about going over to the Dutch?” Burton had asked.

“I? Never!”

“Even then, the British government was mistreating and neglecting its soldiers and spies,” Burton had said.

“I wrote again to Lord Arlington and begged him to send one hundred pounds to pay off my debts and return to England. Again, silence. So, there I was, not a penny of pay for my services, not a single word from my chiefs. What was I doing there but making a piteous fool of myself, a poverty-stricken dunce? Finally, I succeeded in getting a loan of one hundred and fifty pounds from a friend in England, Edward Butler, and I sailed back home in January, year of Our Lord 1667.”

Weary, sick, and heavily in debt, Aphra crossed the Channel from Antwerp to London. Here she saw the ruins of the city laid low by the Great Fire. Yet the terrible blaze had not been without its good. It had consumed the hundreds of thousands of rats and millions of lice that had spread the Great Plague. Aphra, however, had little time to think about either the fire or the plague. Mr. Butler pressed her for repayment, and Lord Arlington and the king kept on ignoring her just requests for her back pay. The inevitable came; she was thrown into debtors’ prison.

“Where,” Aphra had said, “if you had no money to buy food, you starved to death. That is, if the diseases running through the prisons like wild redskins on a raid did not strike you down first. The plagues were democratic, however. They killed you, high or low, poor or with money in your purse, young or old.”

All the City prisons had been burned down or made useless by the Great Fire. Newgate was hastily repaired, but Aphra was sent to Caronne House in South Lambeth. The filth and overcrowding had been bad enough before the fire. They were ten times worse now because of the lack of prisons and the great numbers of citizens whose houses and property had been destroyed. Unable to pay their debts, they, too, went to jail.

“I lived through it, though there were times when I wished that I would die. The stench of unwashed bodies and clothes, the stink from the sick suffering from the bloody flux, the noisome odor of the open sewers, the wailing of frightened and sick children, the stealing, the screaming of the mad and the furious, the coughing and retching, the fights, the brutality, the utter lack of privacy … if you would piss or shit you must do it in a cell with a dozen others watching or laughing at you … if my mother had not borrowed money to send me food, half of which was confiscated by the guards for their own benefit … I would have wasted away until I was too weak to resist the diseases floating in the sickening air of that hellhole. Whatever sins I had sinned, before I was in jail or after, I paid for them. ’Twas a purgatory without flames, flames that we would have welcomed to keep us warm.”

Two of the guards offered to give her a meal a day with meat, vegetables, and wine if she would have intercourse with them both at the same time.

“If my mother had not sent me enough to keep me from completely starving, I suppose I would have consented to their demands sooner or later, probably sooner. My empty belly was sucking wind, and I told myself, though I did not really believe it, that the guards were preferable to starvation. However, one of the guards, in addition to being unusually filthy, one-eyed, humpbacked, and rotten-toothed, had the French disease. I don’t know…”

“Syphilis or gonorrhea?” Frigate had said.

“Both, I think. What did it matter? Anyway, thanks to my mother, not God, I escaped them. And, eventually, Killigrew did pay me enough to discharge my debts and to live on for a while. A very short while.”

She had paused, then said, smiling, and she looked beautiful when smiling, “I lied when I said that I wanted to die when in prison. Oh, perhaps I did briefly consider the benefits of suicide. No, I have always believed passionately that life is worthwhile, and I was not one who hoisted the white flag at the first discouragement. Nor did I ever acknowledge defeat. Not until the last breath came, and then not then. Death had not defeated me any more than life had. It just retired me.

“There I was, just out of prison, thin and wan, my debts paid except for what I owed my mother and not a penny to pay her unless I went without food and lodging and cosmetics and clothes and books.”

She was nearing thirty in a time when a woman of thirty looked—usually—much older than the woman of thirty of the late 1900s. Most had lost many teeth, and their breaths stank of rotten teeth. A woman without a husband, father, brother, uncle, or cousin to protect her was considered fair prey. If wronged, she could resort to a law that was far on the side of the wealthy and privileged. The judges, the lawyers, the bailiffs, the jurors, were open to bribery—very few exceptions—and were easily impressed by the rich and the titled. Women writers were not unknown, but these were not professionals. They were the daughters of country vicars who wrote in their spare time or noblewomen who wanted to get a “name” for themselves. No woman in England had tried to get her livelihood from her pen.

Aphra knew that she could write flowingly, wittily, and charmingly, and she had imagination. She was well-read, and she thought that she could do as well as any man in creating novels, poems, and plays. But she would start with a handicap in the literary race because she was a woman.

However, somewhat compensating for the handicap, she looked better than most women her age. She had all her teeth, possibly because she had spent the first part of her life in Surinam and the minerals in the foods there helped preserve them. Possibly heredity was partly her dental savior. She was, though short, long-legged, though the skirts of her time kept most from observing that. She had full buoyant breasts, which the dress of her time did not conceal. She had beautiful yellow hair and large blue eyes with thick black brows that set off a face that was very attractive despite her long nose and somewhat short lower jaw. She had great charm, and she had a will with the momentum of a carriage and six horses galloping downhill.

Moreover, she had determined that she would remain single. As she had once written: “Marriage is as certain a bane to love as lending is to friendship; I’ll neither ask nor give a vow.”

She also wrote:

According to the strict rules of honor,

Beauty should still be the reward of love,

Not the vile merchandize of fortune,

Or the cheap drug of a church-ceremony.

She’s only infamous, who to her bed

For interest takes some nauseous clown she hates;

And though a jointure or vow in public

Be her price, that makes her but the dearer whore.…

Take back your gold, and give me current love,

The treasure of your heart, not of your purse.

Despite which, she gave her heart to the wrong man, a barrister named John Hoyle, who ill-used her, took her love and money, gave her back mostly unfaithfulness and contempt, and came close to but did not quite succeed in breaking her heart. (Hoyle was murdered in a tavern brawl in 1692, after she had died. Frigate had told her of this.) “Hoyle was said by someone, I forget by whom, to be ‘an atheist, a sodomite professed, a corrupter of youth, and a blasphemer of Christ.’ ”

“Socrates was also accused of all of that but the last,” Aphra had said. “I did not mind that he was that and much more. It was … he did not love me as I loved him … loved me not all except in the beginning.”

“What would you do now if you met him?” Frigate had said.

“I don’t know. I don’t hate him. Yet … perhaps I would kick him in the balls and then kiss him. Who knows? I hope I never see him again.”

Aphra became famous, or infamous, and she was dubbed Astraea after the star maiden of ancient Greek mythology, daughter of Zeus and Themis, or perhaps of Astraeus the Titan and Eos. Astraea, during the golden age, distributed blessings. But when the iron age began, she left earth in disgust, and the gods placed her among the stars as the constellation Virgo.

Great literary figures and their hangers-on and young playwrights and poets flocked to her court. Some of them were lucky enough to be her lovers.

“However, many men, as I’ve said, resented my success, and many critics condemned my plays because they were written by a woman. Damn their rum-soaked brains and wine-bleared eyes and poxrunny pricks, they said my plays were bawdy and obscene. So they were, but if a man wrote such, the carpers would not’ve opened their mouths. Why should bawdiness and obscenity be strictly a man’s preserve? Are women angels or Eves?”

Nevertheless, she made a fortune, which somehow boiled away under the pressure of her high living and generosity, and she had many lovers, though, as she said, not much true love from them. When she was forty-six, she suffered from the violent and painful attacks of arthritis which were to kill her.

“Though I think that the effects of the pox were as fatal, though more insidious.”

Though her writing hand hurt her and there were times when the pen slipped from her feeble grasp, she wrote furiously, and the novel that was to assure her a respectable place in English literature, Oroonoko, was published before she died. The sixteenth of April, 1689, her battle against prejudice, jealousy, gossip, and the hatred of the puritanical and hypocritical was over.

William of Orange, the Dutch prince who had become monarch of England, did not like Mrs. Behn. Yet, somehow, though she was regarded as a wicked and scandalous woman, she was buried in Westminster Abbey.

“How did that happen? I was interred among the greatest of the great? I?”

“No one in my time knew why,” Frigate said.

“Nor in mine,” Burton said. “We will have to resurrect one of your contemporaries to determine that.”

“Byron was refused a grave in Westminster Abbey,” Frigate said. “He was thought to be too blasphemous and wicked to be given that honor. Yet you made it.”

“And I,” Burton said, “I was also refused. I had deserved it more than many who rested there, but Nigger Dick would not be allowed within the hallowed walls.”

Aphra had many miserable and frightening times on the Riverworld, but life was almost always worthwhile. No fun being dead. So, here she was in the tower and she had just parted with another lover. She might live with de Marbot again, though it did not seem likely just now. Never mind. She did not intend to be alone for long.

17

While waiting for his little world to be built, Peter Jairus Frigate was not idle. He decided that he did not wish to cut off the “memory movie” entirely. He was too curious about his past; he had many questions about it that he had thought would never be answered. Though he’d be pained seeing it, he was going to force himself to endure the pain. Now and then. So he removed a square of the paint from a wall of a room in his suite, and he spent an hour each day in that room. The moment he appeared in it, the past sprung to life as seen through his eyes and heard through his ears.

Experimenting, he found that the Computer did not insist on showing him everything according to the program. If he requested a certain time area, then he got it.

Also, the Computer had a clock synchronized with the time of its subject’s memory. If Frigate had known in the past what date it was because he’d looked at a calendar that day or someone had mentioned the date, the Computer could flash to that event. Otherwise, it had to estimate the approximate time and would scan its track for the area of time first, then the particular date.

There were, as he soon found out, many gaps in the “movie.” He asked for a date at random, October 27, 1923. At that time, he was playing around and trying to do some spot-checking. That day was a blank; he had nothing in his memory about it.

The Computer told him why.

There was not enough space in his memory cells to store his entire life. A mechanism in the mnemonics complex erased what was to him insignificant, thus making more room for the meaningful. Often, though, what his conscious considered unimportant, his unconscious considered worth storing.

The wathan was supposed to have stored the entire life experiences of the individual. Nothing was left unrecorded. This theory could not be validated, since, so far, no wathan could be tapped. Its bright many-colored exterior remained invulnerable to probing. Like the Sphinx, it was beautiful and awe-inspiring but silent.

The Computer figured out for him that he had lived 55,188,000 minutes so far. Of this, 22,075,200 minutes were available at that moment. That was the total, but that did not mean that every one of those minutes could be run off in its entirety. There were many fragments of minutes in the storage. If Frigate cared to know just how many fragments and how long each was, he could get the numbers from the Computer. But he did not care to know.

“Sixty percent of the movie of my life went onto the cutting-room floor,” he muttered. “Jesus! If I sit down and watch the whole movie from beginning to end, it’ll take me 15,330 days of twenty-four-hour periods to see it. Forty-two years of just sitting watching.”

How could the human brain, that small gray mass, contain so many memories, so much data, so many millions, maybe billions, of miles of film?

Frigate asked if the Computer could show him the container unit that contained the “movie.” Obligingly, the Computer did so, and Frigate saw on the screen a yellow sphere the size of a cranberry. And that was only half-full.

What he most wanted to see—and also did not want to see—was a very early period. He would have been about a year old, living in a house in North Terre Haute, Indiana. His mother’s mother was visiting them then, having come from Kansas City, Missouri, to help his mother with her infant. Frigate had the idea that his grandmother had mistreated him when she babysat him. He believed that it was not because she was cruel or sadistic but because she easily lost her temper. He based this speculation on the visions of her he had had during some sessions with a psychoanalyst in Beverly Hills. There, while trying to probe his infantile memories, he had become convinced that his grandmother had treated him in such a fashion that he had become subdued, submissive and fearful while a baby. Or that she had laid the foundation for these attitudes, which flowered when he became an adolescent.

The psychoanalyst obviously had not put much credence in this, but he had allowed Frigate to make the effort. Probably, the analyst was pondering the significance of his attempt to fix the blame on his grandmother.

Hesitantly, Frigate ran the movie at high speed until he located the exact area of time in which his grandmother had taken care of him.

It took a week to convince him that he had been wrong. Certainly, there was nothing in his grandmother’s behavior to justify even faintly his fantasy. Because it was a fantasy. His grandmother had not shaken or yelled at or spanked him to keep him from crying or mistreated him in any way. She had complained a lot to herself because of his crying, but Frigate did not understand more than a quarter of what she said, because she usually talked to herself in German. He could have asked the Computer to translate for him but did not bother. At that age, he would not have been affected by what was said but by the way it was said. The tone of complaint would not have meant much to him since she did not make it plain to the baby that she was displeased with him. And she did sing German lullabies to him, though she certainly had not held him much.

“Well, hell!” Frigate said to himself. “There goes another theory. Probably I’ll find out that my character deficiencies were due to genetic disposition far more than to the environment.”

He told Nur about his search. The little Moor laughed and said, “It’s not the past that counts. It’s the present. You cannot charge the past for your present failures and weaknesses. The present is here for you to change what you have been and are.”

“Yes, but the memory-movie is a great psychoanalytic tool,” Frigate said. “Too bad they didn’t have it on Earth. The patient and the doctor could have gone over any areas in doubt and cleared everything up. The patient could have seen what really happened, and he could have separated the truth from fantasy, the unimportant from the really significant.”

“Perhaps. But it’s not necessary. You know what you are now. At least, you should, unless you’re still fooling yourself about yourself, and that’s highly possible. One good thing about the movie is that it would destroy your self-image, would demonstrate that you may have been wrong many times when you thought you were right. Or convince you that others were not entirely monsters or egoistic when they dealt with you. Or show you the times when they truly were so.

“However, aside from satisfying your curiosity, and that may be very painful and humiliating, or satisfying your desire to see the faces of those you once loved or hated, the movies are time wasted. It is now that matters, now is the cliff edge on which you stand and must leap from into the future. What you have been and are is not what you must be. You are avoiding taking action on the now by immersing yourself in the past. The past should be only a light to the future. Or a measuring stick of your progress. That and that only.”

“You don’t watch your movie?” Frigate said.

“No. I’m not interested in it.”

“You don’t care to see your parents when they were young, your playmates?”

Nur tapped his head. “They’re all in there. I can summon them up when I wish.”

“If the movie is a waste of time, then why did the unknown fix it so that it would be with us every second of waking time?”

“The unknown did not arrange just that. The unknown fixed it so that we could see the movie if we wished to. She wasn’t unaware of the possibility that we’d paint the walls and so block out the movie. Perhaps, by painting, we failed a test.”

“And what would the penalty for flunking it be?”

Nur shrugged.

“I’d guess that the penalty would be self-inflicted. It’d be a failure to progress.”

“But you said that you didn’t need to see your past.”

“I don’t. But I am not you or the others.”

“Isn’t that arrogant?”

“One man’s arrogance is another’s realism.”

“You Sufis like to proverb your way through life,” Frigate said.

Nur only smiled. This made the American feel as if he had failed to pass a test. For some time, Frigate had suffered from the belief that he had let Nur down—and himself—because he had quit being Nur’s disciple. He had lost faith in his own ability ever to attain to Nur’s lofty stature as a complete master of himself, free from neurosis and weakness, always logical yet compassionate. He just could not make it. So, rather than not succeed and be humiliated when Nur discharged him, flunked him, as it were, Frigate had resigned as Nur’s disciple.

“A Sufi does not fear failure,” Nur had said.

“What if I change my mind and ask you to take me as your pupil again?”

“We’ll see.”

“I’ve quit a lot of things or been forced to quit,” Frigate said. “But I always went back and tried them again.”

“Perhaps it’s time that you got rid of this start-and-stop habit. You need to form a psychic momentum that won’t run out so quickly.”

“The great perhaps.”

“What does that mean?”

Frigate did not know, and that made him angry.

“You haven’t yet learned, after one hundred and thirty-two years, to meld your opposites into a smooth cooperating whole,” Nur had said. “You have always had within you a conservative, which isn’t always bad by any means, and a liberal, which isn’t always good by any means. You have within you a coward and a brave man. You detest and fear violence, yet there is someone violent within you, a person you’ve tried to repress. You don’t know how to make your violence creative, how to control it so that it discharges into the right paths. You—”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Frigate had said and had walked away.

He sometimes got the same sort of philosophical drum-beating from Li Po. The Chinese liked to tell him about the process of becoming “round,” that is, making one’s self into a “whole” man. Balancing his yin and yang, his negative and positive qualities. But Li Po, in Frigate’s estimation, was very unbalanced. He admired Li Po’s energy and poetical creativeness and compassion and self-confidence and linguistic mastery and courage untainted by fear. On the other hand—people were bimanual in more than one sense—Li Po had an excessive drive to dominate, was too self-absorbed, and utterly failed to see that these qualities often made him tiresome and offensive. He also was a drunk, though unlike any Frigate had ever known.

Frigate believed that Li Po, despite his apparent superiority, had no more chance of Going On than he. Indeed, of the eight, only Nur and perhaps Aphra Behn and Alice were at this moment promising candidates for Going On. Which might or might not be desirable. The theory was that such a state was the end-all and be-all because it could be attained only if you were ethically perfect or near-perfect. The wathan of such a person just disappeared from all detectors and thus, so the reasoning went, was absorbed into the Godhead or God or Allah or What-Do-You-Call-It.

The theory also claimed that the wathan then became part of the Creator, lost its individuality, and experienced from then on an eternity of ecstasy. Ecstasy undescribable, unknown in the physical state.

“How do I know,” Frigate thought, “that the wathan doesn’t just disappear? Evaporate like an ectoplasmic bubble? Become nothing, nada, nil, zero? Is that something to be hotly wished for? How does that differ from just being dead? Not that there aren’t some good things to be said about just being dead. Past knowing, past caring, past torment physical and mental, past frustration and defeat, past loneliness. Oh, Death, where is thy sting?”

Death had no sting. On the other hand, death had no zing.

Gain something, lose something. That was the unchangeable law, the unchanged economy of the universe.

“Am I paranoiac? Is all this a big con game? For what purpose? A con man expects to gain something. Who could gain in this situation? What could be gained?”

Sometimes, his turmoiling thoughts swelled his brain, or seemed to do so, until it seemed that his skull, like a balloon under too much pressure, would burst. Maybe because his thoughts were just too much hot air.

“After a hundred and thirty-two years, I ought to know better than to drive myself into such a state. Will I ever graduate from the sophomore class?”

Life’s sophomore, the wise-foolish, could not follow Nur’s advice to rid himself of such thoughts, to dump them as if they were ballast on a balloon. Instead, he shunted them, put them on a sidetrack of the Great P.J.F. Railroad, and became for a while an engineer of the G.B.R., the Grailstones-on-the-banks-of-the-River express.

He had found out something that the Ethical, Loga, had not mentioned, though doubtless he would have if he’d lived longer. That was that the grailstones lining both banks of The River were more than just electrical discharge devices to supply the grails with energy converted into food and liquor and various goodies for the Valleydwellers. They were also observation equipment, window-peeping and eavesdropping machines. A person in the tower could see and hear the people within detection range of the grailstones.

Having discovered this, Frigate indulged himself until he became dizzied and confused. He scanned The Valley on the right bank at the rate of one grailstone every two seconds, starting with the first one in the polar zone. After a while, realizing that at this rate he’d take about 232 days to get from one end to the other, he began leapfrogging every twenty grailstones and watched from the twenty-first for ten seconds each. The blur of human bodies and River and plain and mountains stopped. Even so, he got light-headed after an hour. He would have to abandon his plan to zoom by all of humanity, to take it all in two sweeps. No, he was wrong there. Eighteen billion plus were not in The Valley; they were retired, for the time being, in the Computer’s records and the well of the wathans. But the number he must zip by was staggering.

“Always too grandiose, Frigate,” he told himself. “You’re just not big enough. Your ambition is a lightyear ahead of your ability. Your imagination is the eight-legged steed Sleipnir, but you, as Odin, have fallen off a thousand leagues ago.”

It was hard to tell the nationality of the people he saw. Except for those who were nude, and there were plenty of them, they wore the towels as kilts or loincloths and the women used smaller, thinner cloths as brassieres. The race was usually identifiable, though sometimes he could not be sure. Some of the faces were unmistakably Mediterranean, Spanish, Italians, Greeks, Arabs, and so forth. Still, one could be mistaken about that. Language was a key, but there were thousands of tongues he could not label just from listening. Besides, the majority spoke Esperanto or various dialects thereof.

After two hours, he tired of this kind of observation.

“Well, hell! From the collective to the personal.”

Seeing no one who caught his fancy near the stone he’d stopped at, he moved the observation points a stone at a time southward, pausing for twenty or so seconds at each one. It was now early afternoon, and the citizens of the right bank had eaten their lunch and were passing the time. Some were standing or sitting around and talking. Some were playing games. Many were swimming or fishing. A number of them would be in their huts and so out of sight. Those within three hundred feet could be seen closeup and easily overheard, however. The stone, like the TV camera, could zoom in and had built-in directional sound amplifiers.

The Computer could also show what the citizens could not see. Frigate’s screen displayed in all their many-colored splendor the wathans attached to the heads and whirling just above them. He had had enough experience by now to tell at a glance when a wathan was shot with “bad” colors or had a “bad” structure, though “bad” did not necessarily mean “evil.” Broad bands of black or red could indicate character weaknesses as much as “evil” traits. Their waning and waxing and writhing—the three W’s, Frigate thought—reflected mental-emotional tensions and shifts in both the conscious and unconscious minds. In the entire nervous system, in fact. A sick person could have a lot of black in his or her wathan. That entity was not interpreted easily; it took a very skilled person or the Computer to read a wathan correctly and even then the reading could be in error.

18

At this moment, his eye was caught by a man whose wathan was almost entirely black and red with a flicker of purple here and there. He was a Caucasian, about six feet tall, well-built, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and, if his face had not been so red and distorted, might have been passably good-looking. He was screaming in English at a woman who was much smaller and seemed frightened. She kept backing away, her eyes wide, while the man advanced with waving fists. Though he spoke so rapidly and in such a garbled way that Frigate could not understand him well, Frigate got the idea that the man was accusing the woman of being unfaithful. The people around the two were watching them warily but none was trying to interfere.

Suddenly, the man’s wathan became wholly black, and he grabbed the woman by her long hair and began hitting her with his right fist. She slumped to her knees and tried to put her hands over her face. Jerking at her hair viciously, he slammed his fist on top of her head, then punched her on the nose and mouth. She quit screaming and sagged, held up only by his grip on her hair. Blood ran from her gaping mouth; teeth fell out in the red pool on the grass.

Men jumped on him and pulled him, raving, away from her. The woman lay unmoving on the ground.

A man came running from a hut, stopped when he got to the woman, knelt down, moaning, and took the woman in his arms. He rocked her for a moment, then let her down gently, rose, and strode back to the hut. The man who had struck the woman was released, and now he was excusing himself for the attack. She was a slut, a whore, a fucking cunt, she was his woman, and no woman of his screwed another man. She deserved what she had gotten. More. As for Tracy, the man who had laid his woman, he, Bill Standish, would kill him in good time.

If you do, one of the men who had grabbed him said, you’ll hang. You may hang anyway.

The man who had gone into the hut charged out with a long stone-tipped spear in his hand. Standish saw him and started running for The River. The man who had threatened hanging yelled at Tracy to put the spear down, but Tracy ignored him. He ran by the group and hurled his spear, and its point went into Standish’s back near the right shoulder-bone. Standish fell face forward into the shallow water but struggled up and reached back and managed to get hold of the far end of the spear butt. Tracy was on him then and had knocked him down. Some of the men ran to the two and grabbed the screaming Tracy and pulled him away from Standish. By then, Standish, his skin very pale, his mouth hanging open, had wrenched the flint blade from his back. Before the others could stop him, Standish had plunged the stone tip into Tracy’s belly.

Frigate felt as if he were going to throw up, but he managed to watch the drama until its end. He had plans for Standish.

One of the men who had run after Standish had a big oak club. He slammed Standish over the head. Standish seemed to melt into his own flesh and slumped into the water. He was dragged out onto the shore, his head lolling. A man examined him. Looking up, he said, “You shouldn’t have hit him so hard, Ben. He’s dead.”

“He had it coming,” Ben said. “We would’ve hung him.”

“You don’t know that,” the man said.

“If ever a man deserved killing, it’s Standish,” a man said, and most of the group agreed with him.

Frigate had known that the man was dead before anyone else had. He had seen Standish’s wathan disappear, whisked away by the magician Death.

He turned off the scene and told the Computer to get a fix on Standish’s wathan. That was not as easy as it should have been because of the recency of Standish’s death. In two minutes, seventeen other wathans had entered the well after Standish’s.

Frigate asked the Computer if Standish had been killed before this. The Computer said that the man had died three times on this world.

Had the Computer scanned and taped any of Standish’s memory during these times?

After carefully defining violence to the Computer, Frigate told it to quick-check all periods of violence in Standish’s life. “Beginning when he was fifteen years old.”

That meant that the Computer would first have to determine when Standish was at that age. It made a run but took a hour to locate the period that gave definite proof. Fortunately, Standish had been given a birthday party in 1965. (Which meant that he was born in 1950, Frigate thought.) Frigate had the birthday party displayed. Standish’s mother was a short, very fat slattern; his father was a big pot-bellied man with many broken veins on his face. Both were reeling drunk. So were all the guests, many of whom were Standish’s schoolmates. The house was dirty, and the furniture was threadbare and broken. The father was, according to some remarks made by a guest, a carpenter who did not work as much as he could have. Standish puked up beer and pretzels and bologna sandwiches late in the evening, and the party broke up when the parents started screaming insults and obscenities at each other. It looked as if they were going to hit each other when Frigate shut the scene off.

Frigate told the Computer that that was an example of verbal violence. What he wanted was physical violence. Frigate then went to the evening meeting, held in Li Po’s apartment. The Computer continued its search, which was for the time being limited to the ten years between 1965 and 1975.

At the party, Frigate found out that others were also conducting searches. Alice, for instance, was trying to locate her three sons, her parents, and her brothers and sisters.

“Do you plan on resurrecting them?” Frigate said.

Her dark eyes seemed troubled.

“Frankly, I don’t know. I think I just wish to make sure that they’re all right. Happy. Of course, they, some of them, might be dead. Then, of course…”

What she meant was that any who were locked away in the records, their wathans in the central shaft, could not live again unless she raised them. But she was not certain what effect their presence would have on her, how they would circumscribe her. Or what their reactions to what she now was would be. What would they think if they knew that she had been the mate of that wicked man, Dick Burton?

Also, the reunion of parents with children could be unhappy. The parents were used to ruling their children, were, at least, in Alice’s time. But here there were no evident marks of age; the parents looked as young as their children. Moreover, after a separation of so many years and such different experiences, both parents and children had changed considerably. There was, literally, a world between them, a gap that few could cross.

Yet Alice had loved her mother, father, sons, and siblings.

Frigate noticed that she had said nothing of her husband, Reginald Gervis Hargreaves. He was too discreet to mention it.

“You’ve had no success so far?” Frigate said.

Alice sipped from her cut-quartz goblet of wine and said, “No. I’ve given their names and birth and death dates to the Computer, all except the death date of my son Caryl. I don’t know that, but I’m sure I can find a book or a newspaper in the records that will, and I’m looking for photographs that the Computer can match up with its files. That all takes time, you know. If any or all are dead and in the records, then they’ll be found. But if they’re living, the chances that they’ll be located are less. The Computer can make a grailstone-scan. However, unless my people happen to be in range during the necessarily quick scan, they won’t be found. Perhaps not then.”

If you can’t find any, Frigate thought, you’ll be relieved of the decision whether or not to resurrect them.

“How about Lewis Carroll, Mr. Dodgson?” he said.

“No.”

She did not offer to elaborate, and she would have been offended if he had asked her to do so.

Frigate left the “shindig” and went to his apartment. Instead of going to bed, he ran some more scenes from Standish’s past. These so troubled him that he could not get to sleep after he had shut them off. Standish was a low-life, a creep, a brutal, dirty, nasty, and unintelligent man on Earth and the Riverworld. It was not until two days later, though, that Frigate became so horrified that he quit watching Standish for a while.

Standish was out of a job, his usual circumstance, and living with his sister and her daughter in their apartment in a small Midwestern city. The sister was a twenty-year-old who would have been attractive if she had been clean and shown any signs of intelligence. Her daughter was a blonde, blue-eyed, three-year-old who might have been beautiful if she had not been so fat from eating junk food and drinking enormous quantities of Coke. On this particular display, Frigate was watching through Standish’s eyes the living room of the shabby apartment. Standish’s sister, Maizie, was drinking beer on a broken-down sofa. The infant was playing with a ragged doll but was half-hidden by a chair in the corner. Now and then, Frigate could see the can of beer Standish held. Judging from the conversation, the two adults had been drinking beer since breakfast.

“Where’s Linda?” Standish said, looking blearily around.

“There.” Maizie waved a hand at the chair.

“Yeah. Come here Linda!” Standish said loudly.

Reluctantly, the little girl, holding her doll, walked out from behind the chair. Standish zipped open his pants and pulled out his erect penis.

“Ever sheen one of those, Linda?” Standish said.

Linda backed away. Standish yelled at her to stay where she was. Maizie got up swaying from her chair. “What in fuck are you doing?”

“I’m going to fuck Linda.”

Frigate felt sick, but he watched, his gorge rising, as Maizie argued with her brother but finally said, “Well, what the hell, she’s gotta get fucked some day. Might as well be now.”

“Yeah, you know it. You was pronged when you was seven years old, wasn’t you?”

Maizie didn’t reply. Standish said, “Come here, Linda.”

When she shook her head, he yelled, “Come here, damn it! You want a spanking like Uncle Bill gave you last night? Come here!”

Frigate could not endure it any longer. He turned the scene off. Shaking, he told the Computer to run forward three days. And he saw, through Standish’s eyes, the jail cell. Standish was with two others and bragging about how he had screwed his sister’s kid.

“The little cunt wanted it, so I gave her what she asked for. Anything wrong with that?”

“The poor little girl,” Frigate muttered. “God!”

The Computer was locked into Standish’s recording. All Frigate had to do was to order the Computer to destroy it. Standish would be forever dead except for his wathan, and that would float aimlessly and blindly through the universe.

Biting his lip, quivering, heat seething through him, Frigate got up from the console and walked savagely back and forth, muttering “Damn, damn, damn! Damn him to Hell and back! No, not back!”

Finally, he charged up to the console and shouted, “When I give you this codeword, destroy Standish!”

There was more to do than that, though. He had to identify the man’s recording by the Computer’s code, affirm three times that he wished it destroyed, and establish the codeword.

“But for the present, Standish is to be on hold,” Frigate said.

For no rational reason that he could find, he felt ashamed of himself a few hours later. Who was he to be the judge? Yet … anyone who would rape a child … deserved oblivion.

The next day, hesitatingly, he told Nur what he had done. The Moor raised his eyebrows and said, “I can understand your anger. I did not see what you saw, but I, too, am sick and angry. The man seems totally unredeemable and has proved himself to be no better here than he was on Earth. But he still has time to become something better. I know that you don’t think that he ever will, and you are probably right. The Ethicals, however, gave everybody a certain amount of time to save himself or herself, and Loga managed to extend that time. You must not interfere, no matter what you feel.”

“He shouldn’t be loosed on people again,” Frigate said.

“He shouldn’t, perhaps, be loosed on himself, either,” Nur said. “But he will. What drives you just now is revenge. That’s understandable. But it’s not permitted, and there is a reason for that.”

“What’s the reason?”

“You know what it is,” Nur said. “Some of the most unredeemable people, unredeemable by all appearances, anyway, have saved themselves, become genuine human beings. Look at Göring. And I’m sure you’ll find others in your searches.”

“Standish died when he was thirty-three,” Frigate said. “Drunk, drove his car through a stoplight and smashed into another car broadside. I don’t know if he killed or hurt the others, but I could find out. I suppose that doesn’t matter. What does is that Standish never learned a thing, never repented, never blamed himself, never thought of changing himself. Never will.”

“I know you,” Nur said. “If you do this, you will suffer from guilt.”

“The Ethicals didn’t suffer from guilt. They knew that the time would come when people like Standish would have sentenced themselves to oblivion.”

“Your righteous indignation and wrath are clouding your mind. You have just uttered the reason why you shouldn’t interfere.”

“Yes, but … the Ethicals only gave us a certain amount of time. Who’s to say that, given a little more time than they’ve allowed, some might not have attained the goal? Maybe one more year, a month, a day, might have made the difference?”

“That was Loga’s reasoning, and he interfered with his fellow Ethicals’ plan, and events have gone astray. Perhaps we were wrong to have sided with Loga.”

“Now you’re arguing against yourself.”

Nur smiled and said, “I do a lot of that.”

“I don’t know,” Frigate said. “For the time being, Standish is locked up, as it were. He’s not hurting anybody. But when … if … the day comes that the eighteen billion are to be raised in The Valley again, I might dissolve him.”

“If anyone should do that, it’s the little girl. Ask her if she wants to do it.”

“I can’t. She died of a liver disease when she was about five.”

“Then she was raised on the Gardenworld. She may be one of the Agents locked in the recordings and so unattainable.”

Why am I doing this? Frigate asked himself. Other than the obvious. Do I get a feeling of power by holding that Yahoo’s fate in my hands? Do I like that sense of power? No, I never have liked power. I’m too aware of the responsibility that goes with power. Or should go with it. I’ve always tried to shun responsibility. Within reasonable limits, of course.

19

Others might be uncertain about whom they wanted to resurrect to populate their private worlds, but Thomas Million Turpin was not one of them. He wanted Scott Joplin, Louis Chauvin, James Scott, Sam Patterson, Otis Saunders, Artie Mathews, Eubie Blake, Joe Jordan. Lots of others, those whom he knew and loved in the ragtime days, great musicians all, though the greatest were Joplin and Chauvin. Tom could play the piano like an angel, but those two were three circles of Heaven above him, and he loved them.

The women? Most of those he’d known on Earth were whores, but some of them were easy to get along with and better to look at. When he’d been in The Valley, he’d fallen in love with a woman he’d never fallen out of love with, an ancient-Egyptian broad named Menti. Maybe she was filed away; if so, he could bring her back. It’d been thirteen years since he’d seen her, but she wasn’t going to forget him. She was a Caucasian, but she was darker than he was, and she wasn’t prejudiced against blacks. She was the daughter of a merchant in Memphis. Memphis, Egypt, not Tennessee. She … she’d be the first one he’d have the Computer look for.

He had even composed a ragtime tune for her, “My Egyptian Belle,” which he’d play for her after she got adjusted to this life.

Smack dab in the center of his world, Turpinville, would be his New Rosebud Café. It wouldn’t be the original, the square red-brick building at 2220 Market Street in the black red-light district of St. Louis. It’d be ten stories high, round, its walls of gold alloy, thick with diamonds and emeralds. The roof would be topped with a big gold alloy T. T. for Turpin.

The streets around it would be paved with gold bricks, and parked around it would be Rolls-Royces, Cadillacs, Studebakers, Mercedeses, Stutz Bearcats, Cords.

The little town would have other buildings around it, three stories high, also made of gold alloy and encrusted with jewels. He’d really be dogging it. There’d be a big fountain in front of the Rosebud, which would spout bourbon day and night onto a golden statue of a piano. There’d be other fountains spraying up champagne and gin and liqueurs onto the statues of Joplin and Chauvin and Turpin. The decorations and the furniture in the buildings would make J. P. Morgan turn green with envy. Not that that old pirate would ever see them.

There’d be a thousand pianos in Turpinville, and violins, trumpets, drums, every instrument that might be needed. The servants would be androids, all white-skinned, and they’d address Tom’s guests as Massah and Marse regardless of their gender. But Tom would be the only one they’d call Boss.

Outside the forty-building town would be a forest with a river and creeks and several huge marshes and steep hills here and there. A concrete road would wind through the forest so that Tom and his buddies and fancy women could ride in their expensive cars whenever they felt like it. The woods and marshes and streams would be alive with rabbits and wild pigs and foxes and ducks and geese and pheasants and grouse and turkeys and fish and turtles and alligators. Tom loved to hunt; he figured on bagging lots of rabbits and ducks.

“You’re planning on having a good time forever?” Nur said.

“Maybe not forever,” Tom said. “Just as long as it lasts.”

Nur’s expression made him uneasy, though he did not know why.

“It’ll be a jumping world,” he told Nur, and from then on, when he referred to his private universe, he called it “the Jumpin’ Planet.”

“You’ve come a long way, baby,” he told himself.

“What?” Nur said.

“I’ve come a long way. I was born in an old run-down shack in Savannah, Georgia, but my father was a big man, big in many ways. He made good money, and we moved into a big fancy house—I don’t mean a whorehouse—I mean a beautiful house like the rich white folks lived in. But then the Ku Klux Klan started making trouble, and my pa decided we’d go to Mississippi. There was a street in Savannah named Turpin Hill after my father and his brothers. That shows you what a big man my pa was.”

There was even more trouble with the white folks in Mississippi, so they moved on to St. Louis. There they settled down in the black tenderloin district, and “Honest John” Turpin made a fortune with his Silver Dollar Saloon and his livery stable.

“My pa said he’d never done a day’s work for another man after the slaves was freed, and he’d never fought with his fists. He was a fighting man, though. He’d grab his man by the wrist, bend them wrist bones together, and butt his head against the man’s. Pa had the thickest skull west of the Mississippi, east, too. He always knocked his man out. The man staggered around blind and seeing shooting stars for a week. Nobody fucked around with my pa.”

Like so many Negro musicians, Tom taught himself, but, unlike many, he could read music.

“When I was eighteen, me and my brother Charlie went West just to see the country. We was looking for gold, too, lots of it around then, though it wasn’t easy getting it out of the ground. We spent a year in Nevada, but that gold just up and hid when we was around.

“I died August 13, 1922. Old Man Death, he had a harder head than Pa’s, and I couldn’t pay him off. Old Man Death, the only honest man in St. Louis. No bribes, no money under the counter. This is it, I got a job to do, and I always do it. I didn’t have no children, but they called me the father of St. Louis ragtime.”

“Your wife was more than well-off, and your brother Charlie did all right, too,” Frigate said. “He was a constable, the first black elected to public office in Missouri. When he died, I think it was Christmas Day, 1935, he left a hundred and five thousand dollars in a trust fund for his family. Big money in those days.”

“Even bigger money for a nigger,” Tom said. “Nineteen thirty-five, you say?”

“I’ll ask the Computer if it’s got a book titled They All Played Ragtime,” Frigate said. “You’ll like to read it. Lots about you. It’ll make you proud.”

“I don’t need no book for that, but I’ll get it.”

The day after the Computer told him that his Jumpin’ Planet was finished, Tom Turpin entered it. It was ten in the morning; the sky was blue except for a few high-seeming, thin, cotton-white clouds. Tom went down the steps leading into it and found, as he had ordered, his chauffeur and his pink 1920 convertible Mercedes-Benz waiting for him. The android chauffeur was six feet three inches tall, pale-skinned, blue-eyed, and yellow-haired. He also was the ugliest white man Tom had ever seen, because his face had been designed by Tom himself. He wore a typical chauffeur’s uniform except it was pink. “To go with the car,” Tom had told the others.

He got in the back seat and said, “Home, James.” The beauty started up fine, its motor purring, and they began the long winding drive through the tunnel formed by trees with interlocking branches.

“Shouldn’t of made the road so narrow,” Tom muttered. “But, what the hell, there won’t be any oncoming traffic.”

After a while the woods thinned out, and they passed along the edge of a lake. Its surface was brilliantly colored with ducks and geese and herons and cranes in the shallows dipping to catch fish. It was also noisy with honks and screeches and weird loon cries.

The road took them away from Turpinville near the edge of the vast chamber. “Wouldn’t know it if I didn’t know it,” Tom said. “Looks like more forest and hills there. I ain’t gonna touch the wall. I want to keep the illusion.”

From the entrance, a straight path to Turpinville was only two and seven-tenths miles. The road designed by Turpin took up almost ten miles, however, to the town, and he could have taken a branch road and made his trip twenty-two miles. Now and then he glimpsed the roof of his town, and his heart surged with pride. “Mine, all mine.”

When they drove from the dark forest into Turpinville, he wished that he had arranged for a big band and a crowd to greet him. The place was so empty, so silent. “A ghost town before its time,” he said. “Well, it’ll be leaping with sound and people before long.”

The car pulled up in front of the Rosebud, and Tom got out. He walked across the town square to the central fountain, took a silver cup from a hook on the fountain, dipped it into the strong-smelling liquid, and drank.

“Man, that’s the best! But I need the old crowd, the music, the smoke, the laughs, the … friends. No fun drinking by yourself, talking to yourself.”

He went into the Rosebud, took the ornate elevator to the third floor, entered his suite, went into the room where a huge console stood, and began the search.

Three weeks later, he had not just the forty or so people he had intended, but two thousand.

“It’s nigger heaven,” he told his former companions during one of the rare times he attended their soirees. “It’s like a flea circus. Everybody’s jumping.”

Tom was amused when Frigate winced at “nigger heaven.” Frigate was a liberal who found such terms repulsive. Tom would not tolerate these from others, unless they were black, but he had no hesitation using them himself. When Frigate asked him why he did so, Tom replied that it was just his way. He hadn’t been able to break his old Earth habit.

“You’ve lived long enough on the Riverworld to get over that,” Nur said.

“It takes away the hurt.”

“Whipping yourself is a curious method of salving wounds,” Frigate said.

There seemed to be no answer to that. Aphra said, “When are we going to see your world?”

“How about next Friday?” Tom said. “You’ll be all right. You’ll have a good time. I told my friends about you, and they don’t mind you coming.” He laughed. “Long as you know your place.”

After Turpin had left, Frigate said, “After sixty-seven years here, the old evils of Earth still fester.”

“He’ll never Go On until that evil no longer exists in him,” Nur said. “I mean, its effects.”

What had been born on Earth had not necessarily died on the Riverworld. Yet as Nur said, humankind in general had made ethical and psychic progress.

“To put it in plain English,” Burton said, “you mean that many have become better human beings.”

“Yes. The Riverworld is a rough reshaper, but change seldom comes without pain.”

Nur was silent for a while, then said, “Tom has many good qualities. He’s usually cheerful, always courageous, easy to get along with if you don’t step on his toes, which is as it should be. But he has never said he regretted his whoremongering. A man who deals in whores is himself a whore, and he is in a violent and dirty business. He has to be rough and ruthless and bloody his hands from time to time. He lacks a certain empathy.’

There was another silence, broken when Frigate said, “Yes?”

“It’s not just Tom I’m thinking of. You have sealed yourself up in your little worlds. Can a person grow in a vacuum?”

“Of course we can,” Frigate said.

“We’ll see,” Nur said.

He alone had changed his mind about moving. He had decided to stay in his apartment. “Which is world enough for me.”

“And that means trouble,” Burton said. “Some among the newly resurrected are going to want those empty worlds for themselves and they’ll be shedding blood to get them.”

20

Burton, Frigate, and Behn were talking about the standards for resurrecting people in the tower.

“Don’t pick any actors, any stage, movie, or TV actors,” Frigate said. “They’re all swollen egotists, selfish, opportunistic, and untrustworthy. They may be amusing companions for a while, but they’re all self-centered.”

“All?” Burton said.

“All,” Behn said. “I should know. I wrote plays; I had a lot to do with them.”

“There might be some exceptions,” Frigate said. “However, there are no exceptions among the producers, and they are even more ruthless and cold-blooded than the actors. Don’t resurrect producers, especially the Hollywood kind. They’re not entirely human.”

“I would class them, then, with politicians,” Burton said.

“Oh, yes. No politicians or statesmen need apply. Liars, opportunists all.”

“All?” Behn said.

“You should know,” Burton said.

“I didn’t know all of them, so I can’t really judge them fairly.”

“Take my word for it,” Burton said. “No politicians here. What about priests?”

“Men of the cloth, priests, ministers, rabbis, mullahs, witch doctors, bones, whatever; they’re all brothers under the uniform. But … not all alike. There are some real human beings there, now and then, here and there,” Frigate said. “But you have to be suspicious of anyone who thinks well enough of himself to become a spiritual leader. What’s his real motive?”

“Popes are out,” Burton said. “They’re politicians, liars, cold-bloodedly manipulate people, pervert Christianity for the good of the Church. No popes.”

“No chief rabbis or chief mullahs or archbishops of Canterbury and their kind,” Frigate said. “What applies to the popes applies to them.”

“Mother superiors?”

“Out!” Burton said, jerking a thumb at the ceiling.

“Surely, there are exceptions?”

“Not enough to make it worthwhile to spend time on them,” Burton said.

“What about used-car salesmen? Used-car saleswomen, too?” Frigate said.

Burton and Behn looked blank.

“A twentieth-century phenomenon,” Frigate said. “Forget it. I’ll keep an eye out for them and warn you if I have to. I doubt that I’ll have to.”

“Doctors?”

“No blanket rule can be applied to them. But most are lost souls in this world where there is little need for them and they have no authority. Be careful.”

“Lawyers?”

“Some of them are the best people in the world; some, the worst. Be careful. Oh, by the way, I located Buddha,” Frigate said. “Siddhartha, the historical Buddha.”

“What’s that got to do with lawyers?” Burton said.

“Nothing. But Buddha … ah … he’s noted in the records, plenty of film on him, if you want to see the living Buddha, Gautama, just ask the Computer. That is, he was living on Earth. He was never resurrected on the Riverworld. When he died on Earth, he Went On.”

“Ah!” Burton said, as if he suddenly understood much that had been hidden before.

“Ah?”

“Yes. I located the file of the historical Jesus Christ several days ago,” Burton said.

“Me, too!” Frigate said.

“Then you know that he was resurrected on the River, died several times, the last time twenty years ago. And he, too, has Gone On now. But, apparently, Buddha was more ethically advanced than Jesus.”

“Buddha had a much longer life on Earth than Jesus,” Frigate said.

“I am attacking no one, only pointing out a fact.”

“I located St. Francis of Assisi,” Frigate said. “He was raised on the River, but when he died ten years ago, he Went On.”

“How many popes and cardinals, how many high churchmen of any faith have Gone On?” Aphra Behn said.

“None,” Frigate said. “None so far as I’ve determined, I mean. I haven’t located all. Rather, the Computer hasn’t. I put it on a scan. It’s located all but twelve of the popes…”

“Including the first one, St. Peter?” Burton said.

“He wasn’t the first pope, he was the first bishop of Rome. Technically speaking, that is.”

“Ah, then he really was in Rome?”

“Yes, he was executed by the Romans there. But … he’s still on The River. He’s died three times and still has not Gone On.”

“So,” Burton said, “we could resurrect him and get the truth about Jesus and Christianity. That is, the truth as he knows it, which may not be the objective truth.”

“Jesus’ records are still on tap,” Frigate said. “His wathan is gone, but his life is still there to be run off.”

“St. Paul?”

“Ah, St. Paul!” Frigate cried, smiling. “First, he was a fanatical Orthodox Judaist, then a fanatical Christian, probably did more to pervert the course of the founder’s teachings than anyone, and now he is a fanatical member of the Church of the Second Chance. Rather, I should say, he was. The Church wants zealots but not fanatics, and so it recently kicked him out. He is now interested in the teachings of the Dowists.”

“The Dowists?”

“Tell you about them some other time. Paul is alive on The River. I located him and I watched him for a while. Ugly little fellow, but a powerful speaker. He’s no longer celibate; he decided that he is burning and wants a woman to quench the flame.”

Frigate showed them three men he had located because of their undeniable evil and vast prominence in his time. Burton had heard of them while in The Valley but had known little about them until now. Adolf Hitler was born the year before Burton had died, Joseph Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin, was born eleven years before Burton’s death, and Mao Tsetung was born three years after 1890.

“They’re locked up in the files now,” Frigate said. “I’ve not had much time to look at their post-Earth lives, but I’ve seen enough to be sure that they did not change for the better. Their natures are still essentially like Ivan the Terrible’s. Whom, by the way, I’ve also located.”

Nur said, “You believe that there is no hope for them, that they will never change for the better?”

“Yes. It looks that way, anyway. They were and are evil, sadistic, and cold-blooded killers, mass butchers, without love. Psychopathic.”

“But Loga said that there were no true psychopaths on the Riverworld. He said that true psychopaths were so because of chemical imbalances in their bodies. These imbalances, these deficiencies, were eliminated when the bodies were resurrected.”

Frigate shrugged and said, “Yes, I know. So … what is their excuse now? They have none; they have chosen their attitudes through their own free will. They and they alone are responsible.”

“That may be,” Nur said, “but it is not up to you to destroy them, to cut their alloted time short. Who knows? They might, at the very last moment, undergo a radical change of character. See the light, as it were. Remember Göring.”

“Göring started suffering remorse and guilt years ago. These … creatures … Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Ivan the Terrible … are still ready … eager, in fact … to kill anyone who stands in their way. Which way, by the way, is a steady advancement toward power, supreme power, the power to dominate and control others and crush all who oppose them. Or who they think oppose them. They’re all genuinely paranoiac, you know. Though they strive to shape reality, and often do, they’re not connected with reality. I mean that they don’t truly perceive things as they are. They’re driven by their lust to shape reality into what they think it is or should be.”

“Most people are driven by the same desire.”

“There are great evils and little evils.”

“Great evildoers and little evildoers, you mean. There is no such thing as abstract evil. Evil always consists of concrete acts and concrete actors.”

Burton, who had been listening, became impatient.

“The true philosophy is not in talk, which most philosophers think is philosophy, but in action. Pete, you’re doing a lot of talking about what you’d like to do. Why? Because you’re afraid to act, and your fear comes from your feeling not self-justified?”

“I keep thinking, Judge not lest ye be judged.”

“Do you think for one moment that you won’t be judged even if you refrain from judging others?” Burton said scornfully. “Besides, it’s impossible for anybody not to judge others. Even saints can’t keep from judging, try though they might not to. It’s automatic and takes place in both the conscious and unconscious mind. So, I say, judge right and left, fore and aft, up and down, in and out!”

Nur laughed and said, “But don’t pass sentence.”

“Why not?” Burton said, grinning fiendishly. “Why not?”

“I’ve located a real judge, I mean a judge in the legal sense,” Frigate said. “A man who sat in the circuit court of my hometown, Peoria, during the Prohibition era. I remember reading about him when I was a kid; I also remember what my father and his friends said about him. He was part of the very corrupt municipal system then, he sent many a bootlegger to prison or fined those found with booze in their homes or in speakeasies. Yet he had a cellar full of whiskey and gin he purchased from bootleggers. Some of whom, by the way, he let off because they were his direct suppliers.”

“You’ve been very busy,” Nur said.

“I can’t resist it,” Frigate said.

Burton understood Frigate’s fascination, or, at least, thought he could. Evil people did have a certain magnetism that drew everybody, evil or good or gray-shaded, toward them. First, attraction, then repulsion. In fact, paradoxically, it was the repulsion that caused the attraction.

“The curious thing is,” Frigate said suddenly, as if he had been thinking about it for a long time but had thrust it back down, “the curious thing is that none of these, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Tsar Ivan, the Peoria judge, and the baby-rapist I told you about, none of these thinks of himself as evil.”

“Göring did, and that was his first step away from his evil,” Nur said. “These men … Hitler, Stalin, and others … what do you intend to do about them?”

“I’ve put them On Hold,” Frigate said.

“You haven’t made up your mind yet what to do with them?”

“No. But if the Computer starts releasing the eighteen billion people back into The Valley, it won’t do it for those men. Look! I’ve seen what they’ve done. Seen it through their own eyes, seen it through the eyes of the people they did it to!”

Frigate’s eyes were large and wild, and his face was red.

“I don’t want them to keep on doing those evil things! Why should they escape justice now! They did it on Earth, but things are different here! There is some reason why they’re locked in the files and why we are in a position to judge. And to convict and execute if need be!”

“It’s not divine intervention or intention that caused the lockup,” Nur said. “It’s an accident.”

“Is it?” Frigate said.

Nur smiled and shrugged. “Perhaps not. All the more reason for us to act discreetly, reasonably, and carefully.”

“Why should we?” Burton roared. “Who cares?”

“Ah,” the Moor said, holding up his index finger and looking at its tip as if it held the answer. “Who knows? Have you perhaps had the feeling, now and then, that we are still being watched? I do not mean by the Computer but by someone who is using the Computer.”

“And just whom could that be?”

“I don’t know. But have you had that feeling?”

“No.”

“I have,” Frigate said. “But that doesn’t mean anything. I’ve always had the feeling … all my life … that someone was watching me.”

“Who then is watching the watcher? Who then judges the judge?”

“You Sufis…” Burton said disgustedly.

“The thing is,” Frigate said, “these men, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ivan the Terrible, and so on had immense power in their lifetime on Earth. They were exceedingly important historical figures. And now…”

“Now you, the insignificant, have them in your power,” Nur said.

“I wish I could have had them in my power when they were just beginning their criminal careers,” Frigate said.

“Would you have pushed the Destroy button then?”

“Jesus! I don’t know! I should have! But…”

“What if someone could have pushed a button to destroy you?” Nur said.

“My sins were not that great,” Frigate said.

“Their size would depend on the attitude of the button pusher,” Nur said. “Or in the minds of those injured by your sins.”

Burton left then, though he paused a moment to say goodnight to Li Po and his woman, Star Spoon, and his cronies. Li Po had located and resurrected seven of the poets and painters who had been his special friends.

As Burton turned toward the door, Star Spoon said, softly, “We must see each other again. Soon.”

“Quite,” Burton said. “Of course.”

“I mean alone,” she said, and she walked away before the others noticed that she had spoken to him.

Burton did not believe that she just wished to talk to him. Under other circumstances, he would have been delighted. But Li Po was a friend and was very jealous, even if he had had no right to be so possessive. It would not be honorable to meet her alone.

But she is a free agent, he told himself. Li Po gave her life again, but he does not own her. Not unless she thinks he does. If she wishes to see me and will do so openly, Li knowing all about it, ah, well …

The very egotistic Chinese would find it hard to believe that she could prefer another man. There would be a scene, much shouting and bombast and perhaps Li Po would challenge him to a duel. That challenge and his acceptance would both be stupid. Li Po had been born in A.D. 701 and he in A.D. 1821, but neither were any longer bound by the codes of those times and, in fact, never had been entirely creatures of their ages. To fight over a woman was ridiculous. Li Po would realize that. Surely. But Li Po would no longer be his friend. And Burton valued his friendship.

On the other hand, Star Spoon was not a robot, and Li Po must have known when he resurrected her that he could not control her. She was no longer a slave girl.

The swaying of her hips was the tolling of a fleshly bell. Ding, dong! Ding, dong! He sighed and tried to think of something besides his rigid and aching flesh. No use. It had been too long.

But, if he came to know her well, not in the Biblical sense, would he even like her? She was probably not worth the trouble she’d cause, and he was sure that she would.

Being an old man in a young man’s body causes conflict, he thought. My hormones rage upstream against my long experience. ’Tis true a stiff prick has no conscience. ’Tis also true it has no brains.

However, Star Spoon was not the only woman in the world. He had available, theoretically, anyway, about 9.5 billion. Unfortunately, at that moment, Star Spoon was the woman he wanted. He was not “in love” with her, he did not think that he would ever be “in love” again, no one who was 136 years old and was intelligent could be swept away by romantic love. Should not be, anyway.

Of the 8.5 billion plus males locked in the files, perhaps a sixteenth were as old as he. Of these, a sixteenth might be said to be intelligent enough to have slipped the moorings of romantic love. He did not have much company.

At the moment, his only companion was the memory-view-screen on the wall alongside his flying chair. The Computer had skipped to the age of thirty-nine and selected a very painful scene. He was in London then, getting ready for the secret journey to Mecca. Since there would be many times when his penis would be exposed before his Moslem fellow-travelers, he had to be circumcised. Otherwise, one look at his foreskin would show them that he was an infidel dog, and he would be killed, probably literally torn apart, on the spot. Though the Muslim men usually squatted to urinate, and their robes usually covered their penises, there would be times when he could not escape their view. Thus, he was being circumcised, and his only anesthetic was a half-quart of whiskey.

Burton stopped the chair. The scene stopped with him. Burton, not knowing why he was doing so, told the Computer to project the neural-emotional field.

At once, he felt a searing pain as the doctor’s knife rounded the foreskin.

He clamped down on his teeth to keep from screaming, as he had clamped down on his cigar during the actual operation.

At the same time, he felt dizzy and sluggish. The field was enveloping him with his sensations as they had been at that time, and he had been drunk. Not as drunk as he should have been.

“Enough!” he cried. “Remove the NE field.”

Immediately, the pain was gone. Or was it? Was there not the ghost or the shadow of one slowly departing?

Burton was no masochist. He had inflicted pain only so that his desire for Star Spoon, for any woman, would go away. It worked. But not for long.

21

A long time ago, Frigate had said to Burton that it had been impossible on Earth to determine the identity of Jack the Ripper. But since the Ripper must be in the Rivervalley, he could be found there. However, the chances for running across him were extremely slight. Even less were the chances that he, if found, would confess. Also, a man who might admit to the murders might be a liar. Actually, the solution to the enigma was much more likely here than on Earth.

Frigate had stated that a long time before he and Burton had gotten to the tower. Now they were in a place where the odds for finding the man known as Jack the Ripper were high. Frigate knew who the candidates were, though it was possible that the true Ripper might not be among them, and it was likely that the Computer could locate all of these in its files.

Frigate had not gotten around to his suggested project because he was too busy with other lines of research, including tracing his genealogy. This tower, he said, was a genealogist’s paradise. He did not have to resort to the difficult-to-find and often-lost records: wills, tax and land deeds, probate and orphan court records, censuses, county histories, newspapers, tombstones, military and pension records, and all the other elusive traces of people who might or might not be your ancestors. Here you could set the Computer on the track, starting with yourself, and it could work backward through your parents. You could see on a screen what a parent looked like, where he or she was, see their lives through their own eyes and what they looked like through the eyes of others. Sometimes, he had to wait while the Computer used an ancestor’s wathan to search through its files for the matching wathan and then identified the wathan of that person’s parents. Where there was doubt about the paternity of a child, the Computer could compare the genetic makeup of the child and the parent in doubt and establish the relationship. If it proved that a certain child could not be the offspring of a certain adult, then the Computer could examine the genes of those suspected of being the true father. The suspects could be easily identified, since the Computer could review the mother’s past and determine exactly when and with whom she had had intercourse. After which, the physical recordings of the suspect or suspects would be examined for genetic identity.

Burton found this interesting but was not, for the moment, eager to establish his own lineage. He had always been enthralled by stories of murders, mutilations, and tortures, and he had read the newspaper accounts of the Whitechapel murders. Once he had decided that he would launch Operation Ripper, as he called it, he asked the Computer for a bibliography of all the books in English regarding the Ripper that its files contained. Whatever Ethical agent or agents had been assigned to obtaining the literature concerning the Ripper had been very thorough. Frigate took a few minutes off from his own work to check them and indicated the ones he thought Burton might find most profitable as starting points.

“I would read first a book by Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper, the Final Solution, published in 1976. That impressed me as not only the most thoroughly researched and brilliant and convincing in its reasoning—would have made Sherlock Holmes proud—but also the only book that might have the true answers. However, some critics have pointed out flaws in it. Whether it’s wrong or right or only half-right, it’s a good one to use as your springboard to dive from into the incarnadined ocean of the mystery.”

It was strange to hold in his hands a book that was copied from a work published eighty-seven years after his death. He did not marvel long, since marvels were so many that each could be wondered at only briefly. He read the more than 270 pages in three hours. When he put the book down, he could have repeated without many errors long passages, which in total amounted to at least a fourth of the text.

If the book had been issued in his Earthly lifetime, Burton would have been outraged by its preposterousness. Or would he? Would he not on reflection, knowing what he did of the secret maneuverings for power by those on high, knowing of the inhuman and totally unjust deeds done by the government and upper-class individuals in the struggle to keep their power, would he not have considered that the conclusions drawn from the events described in the book were valid?

What Mr. Knight had shown after deep and wide research and illuminated and illuminating deductions was:

In 1888, the masses, the poor people, of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland were, or seemed to be, on the edge of revolution. The radicals of the left, the socialists and the anarchists, were loudly voicing the oppressions and sufferings of the working class. The government was not just alarmed, it was scared stiff, and many of the ruling class believed that the monarchy itself was threatened. They were overreacting; their ignorance of the masses made them unaware of the deep conservatism of the people. What these wanted was not a change in the structure of the monarchy but steady work with good pay, food, adequate housing, and some economic security. They wanted to live as human beings should, not as rats.

Queen Victoria, the ruling class thought, would not be overthrown, but she was old and, at that time, unpopular. When she died, her son Edward (“Bertie”) would sit on the throne. And he was a lecherous, pigheaded, and totally immoral man whose activities could not be concealed.

There were then many Freemasons in the upper echelons of the British government, including the marquess of Salisbury, the prime minister. Knight claimed that these highly placed Masons were the power behind the throne, and they were afraid that when the monarchy went, they and their secret society would go, too.

Prince Edward’s oldest surviving son, the duke of Clarence and Avondale, Albert Victor Christian Edward, “Eddy” to his intimates, would ascend the throne if his father died. He was a pathetic creature (from the Victorian standpoint), liked to mingle under an assumed name with artists and other Bohemians, was bisexual, and had once frequented a male brothel. Even worse, after falling in love with a shopkeeper’s assistant, Annie Elizabeth Crook, to whom he had been introduced by the painter Walter Sickert, the duke had married her in a secret ceremony. It was an illegal marriage in several respects, but the most offensive and and dangerous was that Eddy had taken to wife a Roman Catholic. By law, no English monarch could marry a Catholic. Eddy was not the king, but he could easily and soon become the king. A number of people had tried to assassinate the queen; she was old, and Eddy’s father, Prince Edward, could die from overindulgence in food and drink, a venereal disease, a bullet from a jealous husband, a revolutionist or a maniac, or from any of the diseases against which there was then no prevention and for which there was no cure except the afflicted’s natural resistance.

Adding to the heinousness of Eddy’s deeds was the birth in April 1888 of his daughter by Annie Crook. The infant was the great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and the first cousin of those men who were to reign as Edward VIII and George VI.

This was too much for the queen, who sent an angry note to the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, demanding that he assure that the newspapers and the public not be made aware of the scandal.

Salisbury, in turn, gave the queen’s physician, Sir William Gull, a fellow Mason, the responsibility for the coverup. Gull was a brilliant man and a great physician, by Victorian standards, and was also distinguished by a grotesque and perverse sense of humor and an obvious schizophrenia (obvious to a later generation). He could be very kind and compassionate but at other times was cold, cruel, and callous. The latter behavior was, however, only evident when he was dealing with lower-class patients and their families. He was a kind master to his own pets, but he had justified, to his own satisfaction, a vivisectionist who had slowly baked live dogs in an oven until they died during his experiments.

Following Gull’s secret orders, transmitted through the police commissioner, also a Mason, special police agents raided the apartments of Walter Sickert, Eddy’s old companion, and Annie Crook. They hustled Eddy off from Sickert’s to the palace and Crook to an asylum. Gull certified that Annie was insane, though she was not at that time, and she spent the rest of her life in asylums and workhouses. In 1920, truly mad, she died. Eddy never saw her again.

The police had intended to pick up Mary Kelly, a young Irishwoman who had witnessed the illicit marriage. Probably, Gull would have certified her as insane, too. Whatever he intended for her, he was frustrated. Somehow, she escaped the police net and dived deep into the labyrinth of the East End. Later, she took care for a while of Alice Margaret, Eddy’s and Annie’s child. Both accompanied Sickert on his long trips to Dieppe. While in France, Mary Jane Kelly changed her name to Marie Jeannette Kelly.

Eventually, Kelly had to hide again in London’s vast people warren, the East End. Here she began the slide downward that ended with her becoming one of the many thousands of alcoholic and diseased whores living miserable and hopeless lives. Like her sisters in the profession, she considered herself fortunate if she earned just enough money to buy gin for a few hours’ numbness, enough food to stave off outright starvation, and a roof over her head.

Kelly was not without friends, however, the closest of whom were Mary Anne Nichols, Anne Siffey, alias Chapman, and Elizabeth “Long Liz” Stride, all drunks, diseased, malnourished, and doomed to die soon even if “Jack the Ripper” had not existed. When Kelly met these in taverns or in their lousy apartments and the gin bore discretion away on the golden waves of alcohol, she revealed to them the Prince Eddy–Annie Crook liaison and its terrible results. And, during one of these roaring sessions, the idea for blackmailing Prince Eddy was born.

Knight had suggested that the four had tried the extortion scheme because they were forced to do it by a group of dangerous thugs, the Old Nichol Gang.

Whatever the motivation, the idea was very dangerous and stupid. Salisbury had let the search for Kelly drop because he had not heard from her nor had his police spies heard that she was disclosing anything about the affair. As long as she kept her mouth shut, she was no peril to the establishment that Salisbury represented. Now, however, on receiving a message demanding money for silence, Salisbury put the machinery of retribution in motion.

Urged by Salisbury, Gull lost no time in reacting. The prime minister had given him orders to put the lid back on, but Salisbury probably had no glimmering of how Gull intended to do this. Certainly, desperate as he was to silence the blackmailers, he would have been horrified if he had known what Gull intended. It was one thing to imprison a lower-class woman in a series of hospitals and workhouses for life, a regrettable but necessary deed from Salisbury’s viewpoint. But to murder and butcher the women was a deed that Salisbury could not have ordered. Once the slayings had started, however, Salisbury could only let them go on and do his best to protect “Jack the Ripper.”

John Netley was the coachman who had driven Prince Eddy to the Sickert home and other places where Eddy did what a prince of the realm was not supposed to do. Gull had insured his silence with threats and bribes after Eddy and Alice Crook had been abducted. Knowing Netley’s character, Gull now told him, in general terms, what his plans were for the blackmailers. Netley was eager to serve him. And, since Sickert knew the principals in the affair, was well acquainted with the East End, and had accepted money to keep his mouth shut about Eddy and Crook, Sickert was enlisted by Gull. Though reluctant to take part in the murders, he knew that if he did not, he would himself be killed.

The coach, driven by Netley, holding Sickert and Gull, drove into the Whitechapel area. After a number of reconnoiterings, Gull and Sickert lured Mary Anne Nichols into their coach by requesting her services. Flattered that two such elegant gentlemen would even look at her, though doubtless wondering what kinky acts they had in mind, Nichols got into the coach. Gull offered her a glass of wine containing a drug (Knight had suggested he used poisoned grapes), and, when she was unconscious, he cut her throat from left to right, disemboweled her, and stabbed her. Sickert leaned out of the coach and vomited.

Afterward, the coach drove to the dark and momentarily deserted street of Bucks Row, where Netley and Sickert carried the body from the coach and laid it out. They knew the schedule of the patrolman, but, even so, they drove off only a few minutes before he arrived.

Eight days later, the three struck again, Anne Siffey, alias Chapman, was found dead in the backyard of No. 29, Hanbury Street. Her throat had been deeply cut from left to right and back again. Her small intestines and a flap of the abdomen were on her right side near the shoulder, still attached by a cord to the rest of the intestines in the body. Two skin flaps from the lower abdominal region were lying in a pool of blood above the left shoulder.

This time, Gull had the unconscious woman taken from the coach to the backyard, where he performed the ritualistic mutilations in the dim light.

On September 29, Gull killed two whores. The first murder was hastily done because Long Liz Stride refused to get into the coach. Netley and Sickert left the coach, seized her, and held her while Gull cut her throat. But Gull did not have the time to do what he would have liked. He heard loud voices nearby and so did not want to risk being seen carrying her body into the coach. The three left hurriedly.

Later that evening, the second murder was done with plenty of time for execution. Catherine Eddowes was found in Mitre Square (not a part of the Whitechapel area), part of her nose slashed off, the right ear lobe almost cut off, her face and throat worked over with a sharp instrument, her bowels removed, and her left kidney and uterus missing.

Unfortunately, from Gull’s viewpoint—and Eddowes’—Sickert had mistaken Eddowes for Marie Kelly. She had not been Kelly’s confidante, was totally unaware of the Eddy-Crook events, and died because the painter had thought, in the dim light, that she was Marie Jeannette Kelly. Though he had discovered his error immediately after her throat was cut, Gull insisted on performing the ritual. Why waste his time? Besides, she was just a whore, and if, by any chance, some policeman had an inkling of the plot, she would be a false clue.

In the late evening of November 9, the last and most important target, Kelly, was subjected to the most savage butchering of all. The ritual took two hours. And the Jack the Ripper murders ceased.

Burton had located the recordings of Gull, Netley, Kelly, Crook, Sickert, Salisbury, Prince Eddy, and Stride. For some reason the Computer could not explain, Chapman’s and Nichols’ were unavailable. The Computer, however, continued looking for them.

Burton viewed the events from the meeting of Eddy with Annie Crook through the slaying of Kelly via the eyes and ears of the recordings. He replayed some of these several times, though he vomited twice, the first time watching Gull working on Eddowes, the second time during Kelly’s dissection. He had thought that he had a strong stomach, but he had overestimated its tolerance.

He then had the Computer run some of the episodes from the Riverworld life of each of the participants in the Ripper affair. Annie Elizabeth Crook had been raised on The River with her sanity restored but with most of her memory from 1888 to 1920 missing.

Sir William Gull’s schizophrenia seemed to have been eliminated. Twenty years after the first resurrection, he had become converted to a religious sect, the Dowists, by the founder himself, Lorenzo Dow.

John Netley, the coachman, had been deeply affected by the shock of drowning in the Thames and then awakening on the Riverbank. For six months, his behavior could have been described as Christianlike (according to the ideal, not the practice of most Christians). Once the shock had worn off and he was fairly sure that he was not going to be punished for his sins, he reverted to his Earthly self, an opportunistic, lecherous, self-centered, and cold-blooded criminal.

Walter Sickert, the painter, early converted to the Church of the Second Chance and rose to the rank of bishop.

Long Liz Stride and Marie Kelly were resurrected in The Valley within a few feet of each other. For five years, they had been good friends and close neighbors. Neither had continued as a prostitute, though they had taken a series of lovers, and they drank as much as they could get. Then Stride had gotten religion and joined a popular Buddhist sect, the Nichirenites. Kelly had left her, gone upRiver, and, after many adventures, settled down in a peaceful area. Both had died during the terrible times following the grailstone shutdown on the right bank of The River.

The long journeys of all were ended, for the time being, anyway. They were locked up in the physical recordings and the wathans that floated whirling in the central well.

22

His investigation of the Ripper affair was completed; the mystery, solved. Now he could take residence in his private world, but, for some unfathomable reason, he was still reluctant to do so. Nevertheless, he could not put off moving long. It irked him to be unconsciously opposing himself; he would not put up with it.

Before going, though, he considered what he had been living through, vicariously, these past two weeks. He was shaken and appalled, especially by the world as seen through the eyes of the whores. He had witnessed many savage and grisly deeds and much injustice and oppression, but none matched the grisliness and inhumanity of the deed that was the East End of London in the 1880s. In this relatively small area were jam-packed eight hundred thousand people, hungry most of the time, eating swill and glad to have it, drunk if they could afford it and often when they could not, dwelling in small, dirty rooms with sweating, peeling walls alive with vermin, cruel to each other, ignorant, superstitious, and, worst condition of all, hopeless.

Burton knew that the lives of the East Enders had been wretched, but not until he had lived in it, even if in a secondhand manner, was he made sick and guilty by the mere existence of that hellhole. Guilty because he now understood that he and all others who had ignored it were responsible.

From one viewpoint, perverted but nevertheless valid, the Ripper had done a deed of mercy when he had put those hungry, gaunt, diseased, and hopeless whores out of their deep misery.

Also, unwittingly, he had forced the England outside of the East End to look at the inferno they had turned their eyes away from. The result had been a great cry for change, and many buildings had been torn down to make way for better housing. But in time the poverty and pain had resumed its former level—it had never subsided much—and the East End was forgotten by those who did not have to live there.

Frigate, when told by Burton of the results of his investigation, was intrigued. He said, “What you should do is track down those absentee landlords who made money from the horribly poor and deliver them to oblivion.”

“That’s Marxism,” Burton said.

“I despised the practice of communism, but it had some great ideals,” Frigate said. “I also despised the practice of capitalism, many aspects of it anyway.”

“But it had its ideals,” Burton said.

He had looked at Frigate and then laughed. “Has any social-political-economic system ever gotten anywhere near its ideals? Haven’t they all been corrupted?”

“Of course. So … the corrupters should be punished.”

Nur el-Musafir had pointed out what they knew but had ignored.

“It does not matter what they … we … did on Earth. What matters is what we’re doing now. If the corrupter and the corrupted have changed for the better, then they should be rewarded as much as those who have always been virtuous. Now, let me define virtue and the virtuous…” He smiled.

“No, I think not. You are tired of the sage of the tower, as you sometimes call me. My truths make you uneasy even though you agree with me.”

Frigate said, “About this business of wondering whom to resurrect to be our companions. Take Cleopatra, for instance. You and I would like to see her in the flesh and hear her story, find out the truth of what went on then. But she liked to stick sharp pins in her slave-girls’ breasts, and she could enjoy their screams and writhings. Shakespeare ignored that when he wrote Antony and Cleopatra. So did George Bernard Shaw in his Caesar and Cleopatra. From a literary viewpoint, they were right. Could you believe in or care about the genius and greatness of Cleopatra and Caesar or sorrow over their tragedy if you saw their barbaric sadism and callous murderousness? We, however, live in the real world, not that of fiction. So, would you want Cleopatra or Caesar or Antony as your neighbor?”

“Nur would say that depends upon how they are now.”

“He’s right, of course. He’s always right. Nevertheless…”

He spoke to Nur.

“You’re an elitist. You believe, and you’re probably right, that very few have the inborn ability to become Sufi or its philosophical-ethical equivalent. You maintain that even fewer will Go On. The majority just don’t have it in them to attain the ethical level to do that. Too bad, but that’s the way it is. Nature is wasteful with bodies, and she is just as wasteful with souls. Nature has arranged that most flies will become food for birds and frogs, and she has also arranged that most souls will not achieve salvation but will, even though they don’t die like the flies, fail to reach the level set for them. A few Go On, but most are like the flies who become food.”

“The difference,” Nur said, “is that flies are brainless and soulless but human beings are sentient and are aware of what they must do. Should be aware, anyway.”

Burton said, “Would Nature, God, if you will, be that wasteful, that callous?”

“He gave mankind free will,” Nur said. “It is not God’s fault that there is such a waste.”

“Yes, but you yourself have said that genetic defects, chemical imbalances, accidents to the brain, and social environment can influence a person’s behavior.”

“Influence, yes. Determine, no. No. I must qualify that. There are certain situations and conditions where a person cannot use his free will. But … that is not so here, not in the Riverworld.”

“What if the Ethicals had not given us a second chance?”

Nur smiled and held up his palms outward.

“Ah, but He did arrange it so that the Ethicals did give us another chance.”

“Which, according to you, most people are blowing.”

“You believe it, too, don’t you?”

Burton and Frigate felt uncomfortable. They usually did when they talked with Nur about serious subjects.

That was the last conversation he had in the apartment. As soon as the screens had faded, Burton went into the corridor. He thought for a moment of canceling the codeword so that someone else could use the rooms. However, he might need a place to run to, a place where no one could find him.

Carrying no possessions except the beamer, wearing only a towel-kilt and sandals, he passed through the doorway. Immediately, a screen appeared on the wall across the corridor. Ignoring the picture—his father approaching him threateningly, for what reason Burton did not remember—Burton started to get into the flying chair parked by the wall. Then he turned away from it to face the length of the hall. A roaring was coming from that direction. His hand started toward his beamer but stopped as he recognized the sound.

Presently, a huge black motorcycle zoomed around the corner of the hall several hundred yards away. Its driver was leaning the vehicle deeply to take the turn at high speed. Then the machine straightened up, and, accompanied by a wall-screen displaying an event in the driver’s past, headed toward Burton. The rider, a big black man wearing a visored helmet and a black leather outfit, flashed big white teeth at him.

Burton stood by the chair, refusing to move even though the handlebar of the cycle missed him by only an inch.

“Watch it, motherfucker!” the man shouted, and his laughter dopplered back to Burton.

Burton swore, and he had the Computer form a screen for him so that he could put in a call to Tom Turpin. He had to wait for several minutes before Turpin’s grinning face appeared. He was surrounded by his entourage, men and women flashily dressed, talking loudly and laughing shrilly. Tom was wearing an early twentieth-century suit with a bright and clashing checked design and a scarlet derby with a long white feather. A huge cigar was in his mouth. He had gained at least ten pounds since Burton had last seen him.

“How you doing, baby?”

“I’m not having as good a time as you,” Burton said sourly. “Tom, I have a complaint, a legitimate one.”

“We sure don’t want no illegitimate gripes, do we?” Tom said, and he puffed out thick green smoke.

“You people are speeding through the halls on motorcycles and cars and God only knows what else,” Burton said. “I’ve not only almost been hit twice, but the stink of gas and horseshit is most obnoxious. Can’t you do something about them? They’re dangerous and offensive.”

“Hell, no, I can’t do anything about it,” Tom said, still smiling. “They’re my people, yeah, and I’m the king here. But I don’t have no police force, you know. Besides, the robots clean up the horsepoppy, and the ventilators clean up the smoke. And you can hear them coming, can’t you? Just stand aside. Anyway, it must be boring and lonely down there. Don’t they give you a thrill, make you feel like you ain’t alone? Tell you, Dick, you been living too long by yourself. It sours your milk. Why don’t you get a woman? Hell, get four or five. Maybe you won’t be so bitchy then.”

“You won’t do anything about it?”

“Can’t. Won’t. Them niggers are really uppity.”

He grinned. “There goes the neighborhood, right? Tell you what, Dick. You just shoot them next time they annoy you. Won’t nobody be hurt permanently. I’ll just resurrect them, and we’ll all have a good laugh. Course, next time, they might shoot you. See you, Dick. Have a good day.”

The screen faded out.

Burton was seething. There was, however, little he could do about the situation unless he wanted to start a miniwar. Which he did not. Nevertheless … He got into his chair and took off for his private world. There he would be disturbed by no one, and, when he populated it, he would make sure that his companions would be not only agreeable but sensitive. Yet he loved an argument, and he found verbally violent quarrels most satisfying.

Going around the corner from which the black rider had come, Burton almost hit the heads of five people. Startled, he moved the controls on the arm so that his chair lifted above them. They had ducked, but if the chair had been a little lower, it would have struck the group.

His heart pounding hard because of the unexpectedness of the encounter, he stopped the chair, revolved it, and set it down on the floor. The two men and three women were strangers, but they did not seem to be dangerous. They were naked and so had no place to hide weapons. Moreover, they were obviously frightened and unsure of themselves. They did not approach him, though they did call out to him in English. British English, one with the accent of a cultured man, one with a Cockney accent, one with a Scotch burr, one with an Irish lilt, and one with a foreign accent, probably Scandinavian.

Burton had taken two steps toward them when he stopped.

“My God!”

He recognized them now. Gull, Netley, Crook, Kelly, and Stride.

23

Burton usually reacted swiftly to any situation and was seldom jellied with astonishment or fear. But seeing these five here was so unexpected and so impossible that he could only stare at them for a few seconds. If they had been unknown to him, he would have been surprised, but that he knew them so well, and thought them locked up in the recordings, locked his brain.

They, of course, were in a far worse state than he. They had no idea of where they were or why they had been raised. At least, judging from their expressions, they had not been told anything. Whoever had resurrected them here must have left them to their own devices. Probably, thought Burton, his brain beginning to flicker with a little fire, probably it’s no coincidence that they were placed near me. But who … who in the name of God?… could have done this? And why?

Gull was now on his bare knees, looking upward, his hands together in a praying position, his mouth moving. Netley looked like a cornered animal, snarling, crouching, ready to spring at some unknown danger. The three women were looking at him with wide-open eyes. He could read both fear and hope in their faces, fear that he might be some horrible creature, hope that he might be their savior.

He got out of the chair and, smiling, approached them slowly. When he was five feet from them, he stopped. He raised his hand and said, “There’s nothing to worry about. Quite the contrary. If you will please stop babbling and follow me, I’ll tell you what’s happened to you. And I’ll make you comfortable. My name, by the way, is Richard Francis Burton. No need to introduce yourselves. I know who you are.”

He went to an open door, possibly that from which they had just exited. They started toward him just as he heard a faint roaring. Burton recognized the sound of the motorcycle motor. Instead of seating them as he had planned, he stood by the doorway. The others huddled behind him. Presently, the corridor throbbed with noise, and the cycle leaned around the corner, straightened, and shot by them. The black rider waved a gauntleted hand. “How you like that, motherfucker?”

Burton turned and saw that they were puzzled and even more scared. No wonder. None of them had ever seen a motorcycle before, any internal combustion machine, in fact. Neither had he when he died, but he had become familiar with them through his viewing of films and reading of books since he had come to the tower.

“I’ll explain that later,” he said. He told them to sit down, and they did so, but all tried to speak to him at once.

He said, “I know you have many questions, but please restrain them. We’ll get them in a while. First, though, you might like a drink.”

No, first, he would get kilts, bras, and blankets from the converter. For a moment, they were too shocked to be concerned about their nudity. Anyway, after their exposure to naked people on the Riverbanks, they would not be overly anxious about it. They were glad to get the clothing and blankets, and they murmured their thanks before putting them on. Though Netley had lost his wild look, he still seemed suspicious of Burton.

“You must need a drink,” he said. “What would you like?”

None seemed to have taken an abstainer’s vow. Netley, Stride, and Kelly wanted gin straight. Gull ordered Scotch with water; Annie Crook, wine. After Burton had served them, he said, “Your stomachs’ll be empty, but I imagine that you’re not hungry just now. When you are, you may have anything and as much as you like. Unlike your situation on The River, you don’t have to take what the grail delivers.”

They downed their liquor so swiftly that Burton gave them another round. They now looked less pale and disturbed and seemed eager to listen to him.

Gull spoke with a rich baritone. “You are not by any chance Sir Richard Burton, the famous African explorer and linguist?”

“At your service.”

“By God, I thought so. You look like him, younger of course. I attended several of your lectures at the Anthropological Society.”

“I remember,” Burton said.

Gull waved the hand that held the cut-quartz goblet, spilling some Scotch. “But … all this … what…?”

“All in good time.”

Gull and Netley would know each other, of course, even though it had been more than forty years since they had seen each other. Burton doubted that the two recognized the three women. Gull had seen Crook for a brief time when he certified her insane, and she was not now in Victorian garments and had cut her dark hair short. (She did resemble somewhat Princess Alexandra, Eddy’s mother, which might be why Eddy, who had obvious Oedipal tendencies, had fallen in love with her.) John Netley had seen Annie Elizabeth Crook, Prince Eddy’s lover, many times, but if he knew her now he certainly was not acting as if he did. Perhaps he did not want to acknowledge it. If she did not know him, so much the better. On the other hand, why had Crook not recognized him? His moustache was missing, but even so … Perhaps the shock and the lack of Victorian clothes and the long time since their last encounter accounted for her lack of memory.

As for Kelly, she had been picked up by Sickert and Gull on a dark street, taken into a dark coach, and given drugged liquor. Stride had also seen Netley and Gull in dim surroundings and that briefly.

Burton did not know if he should first explain about the tower and the method of getting them here or should introduce them. He relished their reaction when they realized in whose company they were. But he was afraid that the resulting furor would put off the explanation for a long time. On the other hand, the explanation was going to take a long time, and during that they might come to recognize each other.

He decided, and he said, “First, you should know each other.”

“That’s not needed, dearie, for Annie and me!” Kelly said. “We have long been friends. And Liz and I are old friends.”

“Even so,” Burton said, grinning, “it’s only polite, and the men should make your acquaintance.”

He paused—oh, how he enjoyed this!—and he said, “Elizabeth Stride, Mary Jane Kelly, and Annie Elizabeth Crook, meet Sir William Gull and John Netley!”

What followed was what he had hoped for. Gull paled, and the edge of his goblet, just touching his lip, failed to dip. He never did get to finish his drink. Netley also paled, and, after a moment of rigidity, he leaped up and backed away, his eyes fixed on the women.

Annie rose quickly from her chair and said, “Now I know you! You!” She pointed a shaking finger at Gull. “You’re the crooked doctor that said I was crazy! And you,” she moved the finger to spear Netley, “you took my Eddy away when the police came.”

“He also tried to kill your daughter twice,” Burton said. “And Mrs. Stride and Mrs. Kelly, this man,” he indicated Gull, “is the man who killed you. With the help of that man.”

“God help me,” Gull said, getting down on his knees. “God help me and forgive me as I hope that you will.”

“That was a long time ago,” Netley said, snarling. “What difference does it make now? You’re all alive and well now, right, so what real harm was done?”

“The thing is,” Burton said, “Stride and Kelly know that you killed them, but during their many years on The River, they never ran across anyone who spoke about the Jack the Ripper murders. So they—”

“He!” Kelly said, pointing at Gull. “He’s Jack the Ripper?”

“There is no such, that is, Jack was not one but three men working together. However, he, Gull, wrote the letters that made the name famous, and he masterminded the entire business. What you, Kelly, don’t know is what he did to you after he killed you. You remember, Kelly, how Catherine Eddowes was mutilated? That was nothing compared to the butchery Gull did on you. Shall I describe it?”

Gull rose to his feet and cried. “No! No! Even now, though I’ve made my peace with God, I can’t forget what I did!”

“What about me?” Stride said. “What happened to me?”

“Your throat was cut, that’s all. Gull didn’t have time to carry out his ritual on you.”

“That’s all!” Stride screeched. “That’s all! Isn’t that enough!”

Screaming, she ran at Gull with her hands out, fingers curled. He did not run, though he flinched when she sank her fingernails into his face. Netley had stepped forward as if to help Gull, then moved away after a slight hesitation.

Burton pulled the screaming woman away. Gull felt his bleeding cheeks but said nothing.

“I’d like to cut his guts out and hold them up before his dying eyes,” Kelly said. She went to Stride, put her arms around her shoulders, and led the sobbing woman away.

“That’s enough of drama, retribution, and reproach,” Burton said. “What you do after you’re on your own is your business, unless it involves those outside this matter. For the time being, you will behave decently and listen carefully to me. You need an education, and though it inconveniences me to instruct you, I must do so. I can’t just leave you to find things out for yourself.”

First, he had them describe their appearance in the converter. It had taken place in the huge cube in a corner of this very room. They had awakened from death in the converter, and, after a few moments of confusion, had opened the door and gone into this room. They had explored the other rooms, then gone into the corridor. And Burton had come around the corner in his flying chair.

“Then you saw no one else?” he said.

They replied that they had not.

Burton took Gull into the bathroom of the next room and found, as he had expected, a bottle with a liquid to apply to the scratches on his face. This stopped the bleeding and would, within twenty-four hours, heal the wounds.

He asked them if they were hungry. Netley and the women said they were; Gull shook his head. Burton got their orders and transmitted them to the converter. After they were seated and eating from little tables before them, Burton launched into the very long exposition of the Riverworld, of his and others’ tribulations in getting to the tower, and what had happened since. By the time he was through, he had drunk two tall goblets of Scotch, and they were deep into their own cups.

“So you see,” he said, “just what the situation is. I know you have a thousand questions, and it will take you some time to learn to use the Computer. Meanwhile, I suggest that you settle down for the night—I can get sleeping pills for you if you wish—and I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll also introduce you to my eight companions then. Perhaps not personally but via the wall-screens.”

Mary Kelly said, slurring, “How do we know that those two bastards won’t try to murder us again while we sleep?”

“I would not even dream of doing such a deed!” Gull said. “I have changed; I am not what I was! Believe me, ladies, I deeply regret my crimes, and I have tried—am trying—to live a Christian life. I would not only not harm you, I would defend you against anyone who tried to do so.”

“Fine words,” Liz Stride said scornfully.

“I mean them, madam, I truly do!”

“I think he’s sincere,” Burton said. “In any event, I suggest that you three women sleep in an apartment room separate from that of the men. I will give you a codeword that will prevent anyone from coming through your door except myself and you three.”

After he had shown them how to get food and drink from their converters and how to call him, he left them. Instead of going on to his world, he returned to his apartment. Since he would have to show them the ropes tomorrow morning, he should be close to them.

On the way back, he considered the question of who had resurrected the five. Whoever it was had a vicious sense of irony. But who could it be? Only Frigate and Nur knew about his investigations of the Ripper, and neither would have brought five here. Who then? Loga and the Mongolian Agent were dead. Was there … he did not even like to approach the thought … another unknown, another Snark?

Burton had just gotten into bed when a screen appeared on the wall. Star Spoon’s distraught face was in it.

Speaking Esperanto rapidly, tears flowing, she asked Burton if she could come to his apartment.

“Why?”

“I am tired of sharing Po with five other women, though he gives very little time to any of us. He’s too busy drinking with his cronies or studying. Besides … I do not desire his embraces.”

Burton did not have to ask her whose embraces she did desire.

“Does Po know you’re calling me?”

“Yes. I told him an hour ago. He raved and ranted and then…”

“He didn’t beat you?”

“No, he does not beat women, I’ll say that for him. Not physically, anyway.”

“And then?”

“Then? Oh! Yes, he smiled and blessed me and said he hoped I’d be happy with you. He spoiled it, though, by saying that he doubted that I would.”

Burton got out of bed and put on a towel-kilt. “I’d like to speak with him.”

Her black eyes widened. “Why? Do you think I’m lying?”

“No, of course not. It’s just that I don’t want him to think I’m afraid to face him. I also want to make sure that he doesn’t think I was sneaking around behind his back.”

“Oh, he doesn’t think that. I told him that you were not in the least aware I desired you.”

“That’s a lie,” Burton said, but he did not reproach her. There were lies and there were lies, and this was in the “white” category. Besides, who was he to rebuke anyone for falsehood?

“I’ll speak to him if he’s awake,” Burton said.

“No, he’s awake, but he won’t want to be disturbed. He’s with a woman. A woman he just resurrected. He said she’ll replace me. Poor devil.”

“Perhaps,” Burton said. “But for the time being she’ll be very grateful he rescued her from the dead.”

He was not in love with the Chinese woman. However, he did not consider love to be a prerequisite for a good bond between man and woman. He had certainly been in love with Alice, and look at what had happened to them.

“Come on over,” Burton said. “I’ll tell the Computer to let you in.”

Star Spoon quit weeping and snuffling and smiled like the sun at dawn.

“Just as soon as I repair my makeup and get my belongings together. You do want me, don’t you?”

“If I didn’t, I would say so,” Burton said.

He did not get to sleep until five in the morning.

24

Burton called the three women, in their room, and the two men, who had slept in separate rooms. After bidding them good morning, he told them that he had instructed the Computer to teach them how to operate it. He also invited them to the weekly meeting of the eight—more now—that evening.

“After that, you’re on your own. I will, however, call you now and then or even drop in on you, if I’m welcome. And you may call me if you have some problem.”

They did not like what he said. Apparently, they felt that he should devote all his time to making sure that they were adjusted. But they could do nothing about it.

He and Star Spoon had breakfast, eggs au beurre noir, blueberry muffins, and figs with cream. They then flew to his little world, Theleme, named after the mythical state in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. Its motto was, in the old Frenchman’s work, Do What You Will. Burton’s motto was: Do What Burton Wills. The world might, however, have been better called Baghdad-in-the-Tower. Burton had had erected in its center a small town and castle that looked like a romanticist’s or Hollywood producer’s conception of a place out of The Thousand Nights and One. A river ran from the west end of the vast chamber, circled the city, and snaked eastward, disappearing in the sands of the desert not far from the entrance. Outside the city roamed several lions and leopards and many gazelles, antelopes, ostriches, and other desert creatures. Hippopotami and crocodiles swam in the river, and the patches of jungle were alive with monkeys, civet cats, and birds.

As of the moment, Theleme was populated only by himself and Star Spoon. He planned to bring in some suitable people later, though he was in no hurry.

At 8:00 P.M., he and Star Spoon went to the party, though not without incident. The black motorcycle rider, this time with a black woman riding behind him, roared below them. The man waved a hand at them but his greeting was more courteous. “Hey, Burton, what’s happening?” A few seconds later, they traveled over a large pig trotting along, its hooves clicking.

“My God,” Burton said. “Now what?”

“I don’t know,” Star Spoon said. “I talked to Aphra this afternoon, and she said she’s running into people she never saw before. Most of them are from Tom Turpin’s world. At least, she thinks so, since they’re black. But she flew by a dozen people that looked like gypsies.”

“Gypsies? Who’d resurrect them?”

They entered Nur’s apartment, which was noisy with chatter and laughter. Alice was there, dressed in the 1920s flapper’s clothes that she liked so much. She smiled slightly at him but made no effort then or later to talk to him. He had expected to surprise everybody by showing up with the Chinese woman. Apparently, however, Li Po had told them about her. If he was jealous, he did not show it. He was realist enough to know that a display of it would not only be useless but also make him lose face. Besides, he was not suffering from lack of company or sex. He had by now resurrected forty men and forty-seven women, all of whom he had known on Earth. Seven of the women were his, one for each day of the week. Tonight, however, he had brought only one.

“They take turns going with me to these meetings,” he told Burton.

“Eventually, they’re going to tire of this sharing and resurrect men for themselves,” Burton said. “What do you plan to do then?”

“Nothing,” Li Po said, smiling. “I am not a tyrant. When that happens, I will raise others to replace them. It is just as well that does happen, since, sooner or later, I will tire of them or, difficult as it is to conceive, they may tire of me.”

Burton could visualize the people-burgeoning of Li Po’s world. When the saturation point was reached, the excess would have to live in the apartments. The same thing was happening in Turpin’s world.

“Man, I don’t know,” Turpin said, shaking his head. “It all started out with the people I brought in, and then it got out of hand. They resurrected people, and those raised people, and now those’re resurrecting like it was going out of style.”

Burton told him about the black motorcyclist. Turpin grinned and said, “That’s Bill Williams. I don’t know who in hell brought him here. I could find out, but what difference would it make? He isn’t an American black, you know. He’s Russian.”

“Russian?”

“Yeah. He’s got quite a story to tell. You ought to talk to him sometime.”

Burton had observed Gull, Netley, Crook, Stride, and Kelly when he entered. They were standing in two corners, the men in one, the women in another, and they were obviously not meshing with the others. Burton took them around the room to introduce them. It seemed, however, that Frigate had already spread the news about them. This had aroused curiosity about the newcomers, but many were uneasy with Netley and Gull. Anyone would be in the company of the two-thirds of the unholy trinity forming “Jack the Ripper.” So affected was Netley by this that he left early. Burton went into the hall off the main room, where he was unobserved, and ordered the Computer to keep track of him.

Noticing the shyness of Stride, Crook, and Kelly, Nur went to them and soon jollied them up. He was at ease with the high and the low, the educated and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, and he adjusted quickly to any company, though he always kept his dignity. After a while, Aphra Behn and Frigate joined them, and Nur drifted off, ending up with Gull. Curious, Burton invited himself into the conversation.

Gull was telling the Moor about the man who had converted him, Lorenzo Dow. Dow had been born in Coventry, Tolland County, Connecticut, in 1777. A highly imaginative and impressionable youngster, he had become devout beyond his years when he had seen an angel. Or claimed to have done so. As a young adult, he became a traveling preacher loosely connected to the Methodist Church. Of all the wandering ministers of the early American frontier, he had been the most traveled and best known. He was famous from Maine to South Carolina and from New York to the wildernesses of the Mississippi River. Wherever there were even a few people, he traveled by boat, by coach, by horse, or on foot, and he preached his eccentric rambling sermons.

When he was raised from the dead on the Riverworld, he had been surprised but not shocked. “I was wrong in some things,” he told his converts. “But mainly right.”

He was convinced that the angel he had seen as a child was one of those who had made this Riverworld as a stage through which the worthy must pass to get to a better world. He believed, like the Second Chancers, that all must strive to better themselves morally and spiritually. Unlike the Chancers, he did not believe that the ultimate goal was absorption in the Godhead. No, this River was only a sort of purgatory in which God and his angels had given everybody another chance. But those who attained the rich change of spirit demanded here would go on to another world in which they would be physically resurrected again. However, those who failed would die here and become dust forever.

“I have met your angels,” Burton said, “and they are only men and women. In fact, except for one, they were born on Earth and died there when they were children. The exception was Monat, an extra-Terrestrial, a nonhuman, who was in charge of this project. Does this tower look as if it had been built by angels?”

“It certainly does,” Gull said. “This Loga you speak of, he … he must be a fallen angel.”

“You’re crazy, man,” Burton said, and he walked away.

“That man,” Star Spoon said, “will resurrect others of his faith, and we won’t be able to go into the halls without bumping into them. His kind won’t leave you alone.”

“We’ll be in Theleme. They won’t get in there.”

“No person or place is inviolable.”

Star Spoon fitted into Burton’s way of life as a well-made shoe shaped itself around a foot. The analogy was not just literary. When he took his shoes off, he did not have to pay any attention to them until he was ready to wear them again. The woman seemed content to be ignored when he was busy studying or working the Computer. She often operated it when he was doing the same. She was an excellent companion, a ready and sometimes amusing talker, and she did not insist on interrupting him. She was intelligent, knew Chinese poetry, could paint well, and played the Chinese lute beautifully. She was passionate, thoroughly versed in every aspect of sex, uninhibited, and yet, when Burton did not make love to her for a week because he was engrossed in his studies, she did not seem to mind.

The only thing that Star Spoon complained about was that she could not bring her parents to this place. She had located her mother, but she was alive in The Valley. Her father could not be found.

“You would not mind if I could bring them here?” she said. “Perhaps, someday, I will be able to get them here. They could have their own apartment, and they would not bother you. I would see them only when you consented.”

“Not at all,” Burton said. “Bring your sisters and brothers, too. Your aunts and uncles and your cousins.”

He could not have stopped her if had wanted to, but he was not going to tell her that. Why spoil her desire to please him? She was a perfect mate for him.

When he spoke of this to Frigate, the American said, “I’m surprised that she didn’t learn to be more independent while she was in The Valley. She was raised in the Chinese culture of the eighth century, but she must have lived in many others in The Valley. Usually, The Valley frees women.”

“Not always by any means,” Burton said. “She’s had a rough life, to put it mildly. You know the sad story of her Terrestrial life. She didn’t fare any better on The River. She was raped several scores of times in The Valley, but she doesn’t seem to have suffered any deep trauma because of that.”

“She doesn’t seem to, but she’s very self-controlled.”

“Ah, yes, the inscrutable Oriental.”

“She’s very beautiful.”

“Exquisite. And I must confess that I’m flattered that she wanted me so fiercely. However … I still prefer a blond not-too-bright Caucasian who’s devoted to me.”

“If you find one and resurrect her, watch out for Star Spoon. There’s more fire in her than she lets on to.”

Several days after the party, Burton and Star Spoon set out to visit Frigate’s world in specially built chairs designed by Burton. These were larger than the others and were completely enclosed in a three-inch-thick irradiated plastic hemisphere. Beamers projecting from the shell could be fired fore and aft, above and below.

Star Spoon, seeing them the first time, had murmured, “Whom are you afraid of?”

“I fear nobody,” he said, “but I trust very few. There are too many strangers, unknown quantities, prowling the corridors. Also, we still don’t have any assurance that an Ethical isn’t hidden here.”

They rose in their chairs above the minarets and domes made of gold alloy and glittering with gigantic jewels, and they sped over the river and the jungle to the exit. Burton pressed a console button, which transmitted the coded open-sesame via radio. Star Spoon’s vehicle lacked this because he had refused to give her access to the codeword. She had hesitatingly asked him why, and he had told her that he did not want to take the chance that she might be seized and the codeword forced from her.

“Who would do that?” she had said softly.

“Perhaps nobody. But it’s a possibility.”

“What if they should grab you and torture the codeword from you?”

“I’ve anticipated that.”

She did not ask him what the precautions were. Obviously, if she knew, she could be forced to give that information.

The circular area was empty of people, though a few robots were cleaning up the litter. Halting his chair before the entrance to Frigate’s world, Burton shouted Frigate’s name. In a few seconds, the American’s face appeared on a glowing screen. The door opened outward, and they went through in single file. The second door admitted them into a world where the sun was ten degrees past the zenith, the temperature was 85°F, and the air was wet. They shot over a very thick, lush jungle, a river and several joining streams, and some large clearings. The creatures in the streams and basking on the banks were crocodilian, vast and toothy. Now and then they glimpsed a huge reptilian head at the end of a long neck, and, once, an armor-plated saurian lumbered across the clearing. Winged reptiles swooped by them: pterodactlys. These were not from recordings, since the Ethicals had arrived on Earth seventy million years after the last of the dinosaurs had died. But Frigate had had the Computer fashion living replicas of the mighty beasts, and these reigned in the lush growths. In the center of the Brobdingnagian chamber was a rock monolith, two hundred feet high, with slick leaning-out sides impossible for anything to scale. On top was his stronghold, a flat ten acres with an antebellum Southern mansion in the center of an island surrounded by a wide moat in which swam ducks, geese, and swans. Burton and Star Spoon landed on the green lawn before it.

Peter Frigate was sitting on the verandah in a rocking chair listening to Handel’s Water Music, drinking a mint julep and surrounded by three dogs. He held a Siamese seal point cat on his lap. The dogs, real dogs, not therioids, leaped barking off the verandah and ran to Burton. They bounded about and wiggled their hindquarters and whined as he petted them. One was a huge Rottweiler; one, a German shepherd; one, a Shetland sheepdog. Frigate rose, the cat jumping off his disappearing lap, and greeted them. He wore a white linen vest with embroidered Egyptian hieroglyphics and a knee-length white linen kilt.

“Welcome to Frigateland!” he said, smiling. “Sit down.” He pointed to two rocking chairs. “What’ll you have to drink?” He clapped his hands once, and two androids appeared from the front doorway. They wore butler’s uniforms.

“You wouldn’t recognize them,” he said. “They look exactly like two U.S. presidents I had no love for. I call them Tricky Dicky and Ronnie. The sneaky-looking one is Dicky.” He paused. “The lady of the house will be down in a minute.”

Burton raised his eyebrows. “Ah, you finally decided on a housemate.”

“Yes. The dogs and cats are splendid companions, don’t talk back to or at you. But I got lonely for conversation and other things.”

The servants brought the drinks, Scotch for Burton and wine for Star Spoon. Burton took a fine Havana from his pocket, and Dicky leaped forward, produced a lighter, and held the flame steady for him. Ronnie did the same for Star Spoon’s cigarette.

“This is the life,” Frigate said. “I fly around and observe my dinosaurs, really enjoy them. I keep the tyrannosaurs from eating all the brontosaurs by giving them meat at a feeding station at the bottom of my monolith. Even so, it’s hard maintaining the balance of prey and predator. I’ll get tired of this someday. When I do, I’ll erase the Jurassic period and replace it with the Cretaceous. I plan to go through all the evolutionary eras in their various stages to the Pleistocene Epoch. When I get there, I’ll stop. I’ve always been very fond of the mammoth and the sabertooth.”

25

Burton waved a fly away. “Did you have to be so authentic?”

“There are mosquitoes, too. I have to retreat into my stately mansion at dusk because of them. I don’t want life here to be an air-conditioned vermin-free paradise. There was a time when I cursed flies, mosquitoes, and ants and wondered why God put them on Earth to bedevil us. Now I know. They are a source of pleasure. When they’ve been bugging the hell out of you—no pun intended—and you get away from them, get to some place where they can’t reach you, you find the zero of their presence to be a plus-one pleasure. I put up with them so I can enjoy their absence.”

Star Spoon looked at him as if she found him strange. Burton, however, understood him. To know full pleasure you had also to know unpleasure. The existence of evil could be justified. Without it, how would you know that good was good? Perhaps, though, that was not necessary. If it were, why had the Ethicals worked so hard to eliminate evil?

At that moment, a woman came out of the house. She was gorgeous, auburn-haired, green-eyed, pale-skinned, long-legged, full-breasted, tiny-waisted. Her face was irregular, the nose a trifle too long, the upper lip a trifle too short, and her eyes perhaps too deep-sunk. Nevertheless, their integration gave her a beautiful and not easily forgotten strong face. She was about five feet seven inches tall and wore a white gown of some shimmering white stuff, low-cut and slit to the upper thigh on the left side. Her high-heeled shoes were open and white. She wore no jewelry or pearls, but a silver band was around her right wrist.

Frigate, smiling, introduced her. “Sophie Lefkowitz. I met her at a science-fiction convention in 1955. We corresponded and met occasionally at conventions after that. She died in 1979 of cancer. Her grandparents came over from Russia to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1900, and her father married a woman descended from Sephardic Jews who came to New Amsterdam in 1652. The funny thing is that I once met the original immigrant, Abraham Lopez. We didn’t get along; he was a raving bigot. She was a housewife, but she was active in a lot of organizations, including the National Organization for Women. She also made a pile of money writing children’s books under the byline of Begonia West.”

“Charmed, I’m sure,” said Burton, who meant it. “But you warned against resurrecting writers, remember?”

“They’re not all rotten.”

Sophie was sprightly and intelligent, though too fond of puns. She also seemed very grateful to Frigate for raising her from the dead, and he seemed delighted with her.

“Of course, we’re going to resurrect others. We’d get on each other’s nerves if we didn’t have other companions. That takes a lot of time judging the candidates, though.”

“He’s looking for perfection, and he isn’t going to get it,” Sophie said. “The perfect ones have Gone On. I say, pick those who seem reasonably compatible, and if they don’t work out, they can always move out.”

“The way things are going,” Star Spoon said, “the tower is going to bulge with people. Everybody who’s resurrected starts resurrecting others.”

“It can house over two million people quite comfortably.” Sophie said.

“But if everybody who’s resurrected brings in four more, it wouldn’t take long at an exponential rate for the tower to fill,” Burton said.

“Not only that,” Frigate said, “but it may get worse. I was talking to Tom Turpin the other day. He said that two couples in his world are trying to have children. They’ve had the Computer eliminate from their diet the contraceptive chemicals that make them sterile. Tom was angry. He told them that if the women did get pregnant, they’d have to leave Turpinland. But they said they didn’t care.”

They were silent for a while, aghast at the news. The Ethicals had insured that no children would be born, because there was not enough room on the Riverworld for an expanding population. Moreover, the stage, as it were, had to become empty so that those born on Earth after A.D. 1983 could be resurrected.

“The whole project is going to the dogs,” Frigate said.

“To utter hell and damnation,” Burton said. “If it’s not already there.”

Sophie said, smiling, “This doesn’t look like Hell to me.” She waved a hand to indicate their private world. From nearby came the songs of birds, anachronistic notes, since there were no birds in the Mesozoic, and the chirping of some raccoons, also out of their era. From over the edge of the monolith came the deep gurgling cries of brontosaurs and the express-train rumbling of a tyrannosaur, like the beginning of a snow avalanche. Pteranodons with thirty-foot wingspreads sounded like giant crows with asthma.

“It’s only temporary,” Burton said.

The androids, Ronnie and Dicky, brought more drinks. Frigate and Burton, perhaps inspired by the presence of the androids, began talking about free will versus determinism, a favorite subject. Frigate insisted that free will played a larger part in human lives than mechanical, chemical, or neural elements. Burton was equally insistent that most people’s choices were fixed by their body chemistry and early conditioning.

“But some people do change their characters for the better,” Frigate said. “They do it consciously and with effort. Their will manages to overcome their conditioning and even their basic temperament.”

“I’ll admit that free will sometimes plays a part in some people,” Burton said. “However, only a few do use their free will effectively, and they often fail. Even so, most people are, in a sense, robots. The nonrobots, the lucky few, might be able to exercise their free will only because their genes allow them to. Thus, even free will depends upon genetic determinism.”

“I may as well tell you now, perhaps I should have told you sooner,” Frigate said, “but I’ve asked the Computer if the Ethicals had done any work on free will and determinism. Not in a philosophical but in a scientific sense. The Computer told me that it had an enormous amount of data because the first Ethicals, the people preceding Monat’s, had worked on that subject as had Monat’s people and their successors, the Earthchildren raised on the Gardenworld. I didn’t have time to review all the data or even a small part of it, and I probably wouldn’t have understood it if I did have time. I asked for a summary of the conclusions. The Computer said that the project was still going, but it could give me the results as of now.

“The Ethicals long ago charted all chromosomes, fixed their exact function, and analyzed the interrelationships of the genes. Charted their individual and interacting fields. Which is why, when they resurrected us, our malfunctioning genes had been replaced with healthy ones. We were raised in perfect physical, chemical, and electrical condition. Any faults from then on were psychological. Of course, our psychic and social conditioning were not removed. If we were to get rid of these, it was strictly up to the individual. He or she had to use free will, if he or she had any or wished to use it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Burton said.

“Don’t get angry. I just wanted you to express your opinion and then show you the truth.”

“You wanted me to go out on a limb so you could cut it off!”

“Why not?” Frigate said, smiling. “You’re such an overpowering talker and so opinionated, so dogmatic, so self-righteous, that … well, I thought that for once I could make you listen instead of trying to dominate the conversation.”

“If it helps you get rid of your resentment,” Burton said, also smiling. “There was a time when I would have been very angry at you. But, I, too, have changed.”

“Yes, but you’ll make me pay for this sometime.”

“No, I won’t,” Burton said. “I’ll use my free will to learn this lesson. I’ll keep and treasure it.”

“We’ll see. Anyway…”

“The conclusions!”

“I’ll try to put them into plain English. We are not complete robots, as Sam Clemens and that writer I told you about, Kurt Vonnegut, claimed we are. They said our behavior and thoughts were entirely determined by what had taken place in the past and by the chemicals in our bodies. Clemens’ theory was that everything that happened in the past, everything, determined everything in the present. The speed with which and the angle at which the first atom at the beginning of the universe bumped into the second atom started a chain of events in a particular direction. What we were was the result of that primal collision. If the first atom had bumped into the second at a different velocity and angle, then we would be different. Vonnegut said nothing about that but claimed that we acted and thought the way we did because of what he called ‘bad chemicals.’

“Both Clemens and Vonnegut railed against evil, but they ignored the fact that their own philosophies removed blame for evil from evildoers. According to them, a person couldn’t help the way he or she acted. So, why should they write so much about evildoers and condemn them when the evildoer was not at all responsible? Could murderers be held responsible, could the rich help themselves if they exploited the poor, could the poor help it if they allowed themselves to be exploited, could the child-beater be blamed for his brutality, the Puritan for his intolerance and narrow and rigid morality, the libertines for their sexual excesses, the judge for his corruption, the Ku Klux Klanner for his racial prejudice, the liberal for his blindness to the openly declared goals and obvious bloody methods of the communists, the fascist and capitalist for using evil means to achieve supposedly good goals, the conservative for his contempt for the common people and his excuses for exploiting them? Could Ivan the Terrible and Gilles de Rais and Stalin and Hitler and Chiang Kaishek and Mao Tse-tung and Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat and Genghis Khan and Simon Bolivar and the IRA terrorist who drops a bomb into a mailbox and blows legs off babies, could any of these be blamed? Not if you accept Clemens’ and Vonnegut’s basic philosophy. The murderer and child-abuser and rapist and racist are no more to blame for their actions than those who do good are to be praised. All behave the way they do because of genes or their chemical or psychosocial conditioning. So why did they bother to write about evils when they themselves could not blame the evildoers?

“They did so, according to their own philosophy, because they had been determined to do so. Thus, they get no moral credit.”

Burton had been waiting patiently for the results. Now he said, “Those two said, then, that we are just billiard balls waiting to be struck by other balls and so sent into whatever pocket is determined for them?”

“Yes.”

“I’m well aware of that philosophy. As you know, I wrote a poem about it. However, even those who don’t believe in free will always act as if they had it. It seems to be the nature of the beast. Perhaps our genes determine that. Now, would you mind getting to the point?”

“There is more than one,” Frigate said. “First, the Ethical studies prove that mental potential is equal among races. All have the same reserves of geniuses, highly intelligent, intelligent, fairly intelligent, and stupid. In 1983, when I died, there was still a lot of controversy about that. Intelligence tests seemed to show that the average Negro intelligence was a few points below that of the Caucasian. The same tests also indicated that the Mongolian IQ was a few points higher than the Caucasian. A lot of people claimed that these tests were not accurate and that they ignored social conditioning, economic opportunity, bias against race, and so forth. These objectors were right. The Ethical tests prove that all races have an equal mental potential.

“That goes against the grain of your observations on Earth, Dick. You claimed that the Negro was less intelligent than the Caucasian. Oh, you admitted that perhaps the American Negro might be capable of becoming more ‘civilized’ and brighter than the African Negro. But the implication was that, if this was so, it was because the Yankee black had a lot of white blood, that is, Caucasian genes from racial mixing.”

“I said many things on Earth that I now admit were wrong,” Burton said heatedly. “After sixty-seven years of intimate, though often forced, socializing with every race and every nationality and tribe you could imagine, and some you couldn’t, I have changed my mind about many things. I’m perfectly willing to call Sambo my brother.”

“I wouldn’t use ‘Sambo’ myself. It shows a lingering trace of bad thinking.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes. I remember a line in your poem, ‘Stone Talk,’ where you criticized the American white because he wouldn’t call … ah, Sambo … his brother. You were in no position to throw stones.”

“What I was is not what I am. Rubbing elbows with many people causes you to rub in some of their skin. And vice versa.”

“You did a lot of elbow-rubbing on Earth. Very few people traveled as much as you did and came into contact with all classes, rich and poor.”

“It wasn’t long enough. Not only are conditions different here, I wasn’t only just rubbed here. I was shaken and knocked about. That does something to the machinery, you know.”

“Let’s not use mechanistic terms,” Frigate said.

“Psychic machinery is perfectly appropriate.”

“The psyche is not an engine but a subtle and complex field of waves. Many fields, in fact, a superfield. Like light, it can be described as being both wave and particle, a psychic wavicle, wavicles forming a hypercomplex.”

“The results.”

“All right. Every person is a semirobot. That is, each is subject to the demands of the biological machine, the body. If you hunger, you eat or try to find food. No one can rise above himself enough to go without food and not starve to death. Injuries to the cerebroneural system, cancer, chemical imbalances, these can cause changes in mentality, make you crazy, make your motives and attitudes change. There’s no way the will can suppress the effects of syphilis, poisons, brain damage, and so on. And everyone is born with a set of genes that determine the particular direction his interests take. His tastes, too, I mean in food. Not everybody likes steak or tomatoes or Scotch.

“Also, some are born with chromosomal complexes that make them more emotionally rigid than others. I mean, they can’t adapt to new things or changes as well as others. They tend to stick to the old and to the cultural elements that affected them when they were young. Others are more adaptable, less rigid. But sometimes reason, logic, can affect the will and the person can overcome his rigidity, defossilize himself, as it were.

“Take as an example a person who’s been brought up in a fundamental Christian faith. That is, a sect in which he believes that every word of the Bible has to be taken literally. Thus, the world was created in six days, there was a worldwide deluge, a Noah and an ark, God did stop Earth’s rotation so that Joshua and his bloodthirsty genocidal Hebrews could have enough daylight to defeat the bloodthirsty Amorites. Eve was seduced by a snake and in turn got Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Jesus did walk on water. And so on. Like others in his sect, he ignores the vast accumulation of data establishing the fact of evolution. He reads the Bible but does not see that, though the Bible nowhere states that the Earth is flat, it clearly implies that the Earth is flat. Nor does he take literally Christ’s injunction to hate your father and mother. He ignores those. Puts them in a separate compartment of his brain. Or erases them as if they were on a tape.

“But some fundamentalists do come across evidence that they’d like to ignore. Iron strikes flint, and the spark falls on inflammable material. The fire is off to the races, as it were. He reads more of the evidence, perhaps loathes and curses himself for his ‘sinful’ curiosity. But he learns more and more. Finally, his reason convinces him that he’s been wrong. And he becomes a liberal Christian or an atheist or agnostic.

“Something in his genetic defenses made a hole or the hole already existed waiting for water to pour through it.

“In any event, he was able to use his reason only because his genetic makeup permitted him.”

“I thought you said that Homo sapiens was a semirobot,” Burton said. “You’re describing one hundred percent robots.”

“No. Robots don’t have reason. They can use logic, if they’ve been programmed to do it. But, if presented with new evidence that says that their program is wrong, they can’t reject the already installed program. Humans can. Sometimes. Nor do robots have to rationalize their reasons for the way they behave. They just do, but humans have to explain why they’re doing such and such. They construct a system of logic to excuse their behavior. The system may be founded on wrong premises, but it’s usually logical within its own frame of reference. Not always, though.

“What the Ethicals claim, and they can prove it, is that even the most genetically rigid, the most severely conditioned person has the ability to free himself—partially, anyway—from these constraints, these molds. That a few can do this but most don’t … the Ethicals say that this is a demonstration of free will. The restrained, the strait-jacketed, don’t want to change. They are happy in their misery.”

“They can prove this?”

“Yes. I’ll admit I’m not educated enough to validate their findings. I don’t understand the higher mathematics or the extremely involved biology. I accept their proofs, however.”

“There is no such thing as absolute or final certainty, is there?” Burton said. “Unless you can see clearly, as through a crystal, exactly what evidence they present, you won’t ever really know if they have the truth, will you?”

“Put that way, no. Some things have to be accepted on faith.”

Burton laughed uproariously.

The American, red-faced, said, “Unless you’re competent to do the research yourself, how do you know that what you read in a chemistry or astronomy or biology book is true? How do you know that anything is true unless you duplicate the research? Even then, you may be in error or clinging to the opposite viewpoint because…”

“Because you’re genetically inclined to it?” Burton said scornfully. “Because you’re predetermined to believe in one thing and not in another?”

“An attitude like yours makes a man believe in almost nothing.”

“Right,” Burton drawled.

“You certainly voiced enough opinions based on the observations of others while you were on Earth. Often very wrong opinions.”

“That was on Earth.”

They were silent for a while. The women were talking about their mothers. Frigate could tell, however, that Sophie was listening to them at the same time. She winked at him and made a gesture that he could not interpret.

Frigate picked up the subject again as if it were a football and he was going to make a ninety-yard run. Doggedly, he said, “About 1978, I think it was, I read in a psychology book that one out of ten men seemed to be a born leader. It was implied that this trait was genetically determined. The Ethical study has validated that and moreover pinpointed the genetic complex responsible.

“Also, it said that ten percent of Homo sapiens had always inclined to a certain degree toward homosexuality. The ten percent had certain inclinations, that is. Not all of the ten percent were practicing homosexuals, but the tendency was there. This had been the rule since the Ethicals started making duplicate records of humanity. And it was assumed that this had been so since Homo sapiens originated.

“The tendency is genetically determined. What interested me about this is that in 1983, a few years before that, too, the militant homosexuals claimed that they had made a free and conscious choice to be homosexuals. In other words, they weren’t born homosexuals, they had deliberately chosen to be such because they preferred that sexual way of life.

“They talked as if, when you reached the age of reason, you made up your mind about your path of action. What they ignored or failed to consider, was that, if this were true, then heterosexuals also made their free and conscious decision to be heterosexual. But this just wasn’t so. A heterosexual was so because he was born so.”

“What about…?” Burton said.

“You were going to say, ‘What about those who have homosexual tendencies but behave heterosexually? Or those who are bisexuals? Or those who marry women but have homosexual affairs on the side?’ There are varying degrees of homosexuality … and heterosexuality … of course. And in any society where it was dangerous to be openly homosexual, the homosexual had to hide his or her tendency. In any event, homosexuality or heterosexuality is not a matter of choice. It’s inborn.

“That makes no difference. Being homosexual or not is not a matter of morality. It’s not a person’s decision. It’s what you do with your homosexuality or heterosexuality that matters, that is moral. Rape, sadism, violence are evil whether or not you’re homosexual.”

Sophie spoke up. “I can’t help overhearing you two, you’re so loud. What’s all this about free will and determinism and genes and choice? I was very interested in those subjects when I went to college. Really interested. I got passionate about such things, I used to enjoy getting angry at those who didn’t agree with me, the stupid jerks! But when I graduated, no, some time before that, I saw that … well … thinking you can solve anything by discussing philosophy or those other matters was foolish. There’s no end to it, no possible irrefutable conclusions. Fun, maybe, but profitless. Sophomoric. It really is. So I quit talking about it. If somebody wanted to discuss such things, I steered them to some other subject or just walked away, though I wasn’t rude about it.”

“Sure, that’s right!” Frigate said. “You were right! But the point is that the Ethicals have put these subjects beyond the range of discussion or opinion. They’ve proved these points. We’re no longer in the dark!”

“Maybe. I have to agree with Dick about that. Maybe. But that doesn’t matter. What was it Buddha said? ‘Work out your own salvation with diligence.’ Whoever Mr. or Mrs. Diligence is. I’ve been looking for Mr. Dilegence for a long time. I even borrowed Diogenes’ lantern to help me. Which, by the way, the old Greek didn’t need. He was honest, why should he go out looking for another honest person?

“Anyway, as Dick said, we all act as if we had free will. So who cares if there is such a thing? All I know is that only I, I alone, am responsible for my moral behavior. Heredity, environment, excuses. Excuses, alibis: scorned. Race, nationality, tribe, parents, religion, society: excuses. I decide what I am. And that’s that!”

“Was that why you burned your soufflé yesterday?” Frigate said. “You didn’t just forget about watching it. You decided to cremate it?”

Frigate and Lefkowitz burst out laughing. Burton said, “You cook?”

“Why, yes,” Sophie said. “I like to cook. When it’s not required of me, that is. I was making our dinner last night, and I forgot to watch the soufflé. I was reading a book, and…”

They started talking about food and that led to other subjects and finally to dinner. Eating together was a custom more ancient than conversation.

26

On Christmas Day, many guests stood before the door of Turpinworld. Burton was not the only one surprised at the number of Gull’s companions. There were forty at least, all Dowists whom Gull had known in The Valley. They looked Roman in their long white togas and sandals, but it was unlikely that Romans had ever worn headbands with a big aluminum D.

“D,” Gull said. “D for Dow and Deliverance. D for Deus, too.”

“Death and Damnation also begin with D,” someone muttered.

Gull was not affronted or, at least, did not seem to be so. “True, my friend, whoever you are,” he said dignifiedly. “Death and Damnation for those who do not follow the true way.”

“Disgusting,” the same voice said.

“Drivel,” someone else said.

“Dangerously Dubious,” a third person said.

“Devastating Dung!”

“We are used to insults and ill-considered rebukes for ‘A, double-L,-part people,’ ” Gull said. “But Grace abounding is always offered to the chief of sinners.”

“What the hell does ‘A, double-L-,-part’ mean?” a woman said softly.

“I do not know,” Burton said. “It doesn’t mean ‘All-part,’ as you might think. Gull and his followers refuse to define it. They say that when you understand it, then Grace has come to you and you are one of them.”

“It was a pejorative often used by Lorenzo Dow to describe his enemies,” Frigate said. “It wasn’t much of a description, though it certainly sounds ominous, since his enemies never understood it.”

De Marbot muttered, “It was a mistake to invite them. You can’t carry on a decent conversation with them. They want only to convert you. Tom should have known better.”

“Who resurrected Gull?” Sophie said. “No one in her right mind would.”

“No one knows,” Burton said. “I asked the Computer for the identity of the person who had raised Gull, Netley, Crook, Stride, and Kelly, but it replied that the datum was available to only one person. It didn’t say to whom.”

A face appeared in the glowing circle on the door.

“Santa Claus!” Frigate cried.

The man wore a big red stocking cap trimmed with white fur, and he had a huge bushy white beard. His skin was rather dark for the conventional St. Nick, however.

Turpin said, “Yeah, I’m Santa Claus. Tom Ho-Ho-Ho! Turpin hisself to be more exact.”

“Merry Christmas!” several shouted.

“And a Merry Christmas to you, too!” Turpin said. “We also got plenty of snow, folks, but it ain’t what you’re used to. At least, I think it ain’t. You’re such good folks, ho, ho, ho!”

The door swung open, and there was a jam-up as those in front tried to get their flying chairs through at the same time. These were Li Po and his group, most of them loaded three feet below their Plimsoll line with liquor of various kinds. They had never heard of Christmas until Turpin’s invitation, but they were eager to learn about it. After some struggling and good-natured cursing, Li Po got them organized, and they entered one at a time. Burton and his companions went next. The Dowists followed them; they had waited politely for the first two groups at Gull’s command. Burton noted that they were trading glances of disdain and sorrow with one another. Evidently, they did not care for the boisterous behavior of the Chinese.

Behind the Dowists were Stride, Kelly, and Crook, dressed in elegant if somewhat flashy Victorian gowns and wearing diamond earrings and many rings bearing huge diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires. He was not surprised to see unfamiliar male faces with them. Annie Crook was accompanied by one man; the other woman had a man on each arm.

About twenty feet behind them was Netley, dressed like a race tout, gleaming with jewelry, with a woman clinging to each of his arms.

Behind them was a group of twenty that startled him. So, it was true that gypsies had been resurrected. They were dressed in the exotic clothes familiar to him, since he had associated with them in England and in Europe. He planned to ask them if they knew their benefactor, but he never got around to doing so. By the time he remembered, it was too late.

The party flew in a long straggling line under an early noon sun and over the forest, marshes, roads, and railroad tracks. Turpin had a railroad! They came down on the designated area, Louis Chauvin Street, one end of which had been roped off as a landing place. Little St. Louis or Turpinville was bright with Christmas lights and decorations and noisy with revelers. It seemed to Burton that the two thousand he had heard about some weeks ago had increased to four thousand. The streets were jammed with dancers and paraders dressed in outlandish costumes. It was more like Mardi Gras than Yuletide. Five bands were playing five different types of music, ragtime, dixieland, hot jazz, cool jazz, and spirituals. Scores of dogs ran around barking.

The group pushed their way through the crowds while liquor bottles and cigarettes and cigars of marijuana and hashish were pressed upon them. The odor of booze and grass was almost solid, and everybody was red-eyed.

Turpin, still clad in his Santa Claus suit, stood on the front porch of his huge red-brick headquarters to welcome them.

“The joint is jumping, the jerks are joyous, and jazzing is jake!” Turpin cried. “Give me some skin, brothers and sisters!”

Frigate was the only one who knew what he meant. He held his hand out palm up and Turpin slapped it. “Right on, brother!”

While the others followed his example, Frigate explained to Burton that some late twentieth-century blacks must have been resurrected here. The outlandish greeting came from that era.

“That’s what he meant when he said there was plenty of snow for Christmas,” Frigate said. He pointed at two black males sitting on the steps and staring blankly straight ahead of them. “They must be on heroin. Snow in the vernacular.”

Turpin was revved up, but his high spirits were not of the alcoholic variety. His eyes were clear, and his speech was distinct. Everybody else might be stoned and, hence, vulnerable, but not canny Tom.

They went inside the Rosebud to the vestibule, which was almost as large as Grand Central Station. There was a big crowd there and twenty long bars of polished mahogany or gold behind which white-skinned androids in tuxedoes served drinks. Burton had to step over several unconscious men and women to follow Turpin. He took them into the big elevator and up to the third floor. They went into an office, which Alice said looked like the reception room in Buckingham Palace.

Tom asked them to sit down. He stood in front of a twenty-foot-long desk and ran his brown eyes over them before speaking.

“I’m the boss,” he said, “and I run this place like it’s a choo-choo train and I’m the engineer. I have to. But I let them have a good time. Most of them are pretty good, they behave like they should, don’t go beyond the limits I laid down for them.

“The thing is I know some of them’d like to be the boss, so I keep an eye on ’em like fleas on a dog. The Computer does that for me. Trouble is I didn’t pick most of the people here. Anybody I resurrected, I studied their past. But I couldn’t tell by that what people the people I picked was going to pick.

“Besides the ones that’d like to sit on my throne, there’s two different kinds of people here. Most of them are good-timers, they was whores and pimps and musicians on Earth. But some of them are church people, Holy Rollers, Second Chancers, or New Christians. They raise hell about the hell-raisers and the hell-raisers raise hell about their interfering.”

“Why don’t you just get rid of all of them and start over?” Star Spoon said.

Burton was surprised. She seldom spoke up unless directly addressed or asked for an opinion. Moreover, it was a strange question, not in keeping with what he knew about her nature.

Turpin lifted his palms.

“How do I do that?”

“There must be ways. The Computer…”

“I ain’t no mass murderer. I been pretty rough in my time, but I ain’t going to slaughter people just to get some peace and quiet. Besides, keeping them in line gives me something to do.”

He grinned and said, “Time to get them out of the streets and into the Rosebud. We going to have a party here, and it ain’t easy to herd them in.”

He went to the wall behind the desk, said a few words, and a glowing round spot appeared. Then he uttered some codewords.

He turned, grinning even more broadly. “Man, I got the power! I’m Merlin the Magician and the Wizard of Oz rolled up in one and smoking like a ten-dollar Havana. I’m the Great God Turpinus, the black Zeus, mighty Thor the Thunderer, the Old Rainmaker, the Chief Snake Oil Seller, Mr. Bones the Puppeteer.”

Within three minutes clouds had cut off the sun, clouds that thickened and blackened. A wind whistled through the bars in the open windows and lifted the togas, kilts, and skirts.

“They’ll all be inside quicker’n you can say scat to a cat,” he said. “They be bitching about getting wet, but that don’t matter.”

“There are unconscious people out there,” Alice said. “What about them?”

“They got to take their chances. Besides, it’ll do them good. Some of them need a bath. Nobody gets pneumonia, anyway.”

He gave them some instructions about keeping out of trouble if the drunks gave them a hard time. “They shouldn’t. I gave them orders they was to treat you nice even if you is white.”

“What about us?” Li Po said. “We aren’t white.”

“You are to them. Anybody who ain’t black is white. It’s a matter of fine but not subtle semantic distinction.”

Burton was partly amused by the latter statement and partly irritated. The man deliberately shifted back and forth from the English of the well-educated to ghetto lingo as if he wanted to anger his listeners. Or perhaps to play the clown. Or both. Somewhere in him was a self-contempt engendered by the white-ruled system of his time. He might not be conscious of it, but it was there. According to Frigate, the American Negroes of the later twentieth century had overcome this, or tried to, and claimed to be proud to be black. But Turpin was still playing a game for which there was no need.

But, as Nur had said, one should not be proud to be black or white. One should only be proud to be a good human being, and that pride should watch out for stumbles.

Turpin had replied, “Yeah, but you have to go through certain stages to get there, and being proud you’re black is one of them.”

“A very good point,” Nur had said. “However, one shouldn’t get stuck in a stage. Climb on to the next one.”

They went down to the vestibule, as Turpin called it. Long before they reached it, the loud music and chatter and shrill laughter and the tsunami of alcohol, burning drugs, and tobacco smote them. Everybody was inside, including those who’d passed out. These had been carried in by the androids and were lined along a wall.

“Mingle, folks!” Turpin shouted, and he waved his hand at the crowd. He did not feel he had to introduce his guests; he had shown their faces and names on the computer screens. However, his guests hesitated. It was not easy to just walk up to a group and start talking. The Dowists were repelled and scandalized and obviously were regretting having come here. Turpin, seeing this, gestured to a small group that had been standing at the far end of the bar. The group made its way through the throng to the guests and began conversation. Their host had picked them out to break the ice, and he had done well. Or so it seemed in the beginning. Some of them were Second Chancers or New Christians; these went to the Dowists. Though they differed in some fundamental principles, all three religions were pacifist and theoretically tolerant. They also had a common bond in that they abhorred excessive use of alcohol and any use of tobacco or other drugs.

The man appointed to keep Burton company was six feet three inches tall, broad-shouldered, huge-chested, and massively limbed. He was wearing a white doeskin headband, a white kidskin vest, a white doeskin belt with a broad silver buckle on which was an alto relief wolf’s head, tight white doeskin trousers, and white doeskin boots reaching to just below his knees. His face was broad and high-cheeckboned, and his nose was large, long, and aquiline. He looked more like Sitting Bull than a Negro, except for his everted lips and kinky hair. When he smiled, he was craggily handsome.

He introduced himself with a conventional handshake, announcing in a rich basso that he was Bill Williams and was pleased to know Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. Burton was not sure that his use of the title was not a put-on.

“Tom Turpin didn’t appoint me to act as your faithful Indian guide and bodyguard,” he said, grinning. “I volunteered.”

“Oh?” Burton said, raising his eyebrows. “May I ask why?”

“You may. I read about you; you intrigue me. Besides, Turpin has told me much about how you led him and the others across the mountains and into the tower.”

“I’m flattered,” Burton said. “However, I do have a slight bone to pick with you. Why did you almost run over me with your motorcycle?”

Williams laughed and said, “If I’d tried, I would’ve made it.”

“And the pejorative?”

“I just felt like it. Choppers bring out the meanness in me. I also wanted to test your mettle. I didn’t mean anything personally.”

“It makes you feel good to upset Whitey?”

“Sometimes. If you’re truly objective, you won’t blame me.”

“Hasn’t sixty-seven years on The River changed your attitude any?”

“That’s something you never get rid of. I don’t let it bother me though. It’s like a dull toothache you get used to,” Williams said. “Want a drink?”

“White wine. Any kind.”

Burton had decided to stay sober.

“Let’s get it in one of the rooms upstairs. It’ll be quieter there, and we won’t have to shout to hear ourselves.”

“Very well,” Burton said, wondering what Williams was up to.

They got into the elevator with a laughing, shouting, giggling crowd. On the way up there were cries of protest as the riders groped each other. Someone passed gas before they reached the second floor, and there were shouts of amused outrage. When the doors opened, the culprit, the man blamed, anyway, was thrown headlong onto the floor.

“Everybody’s feeling good, real good,” Williams murmured. “Won’t be so later on, though. You armed?”

Burton patted his jacket pocket.

“Beamer.”

The rooms they passed were, except for one, packed and loud. Here a dozen men and women were sitting and watching a movie on a wall-screen. Burton, curious, stopped to look in. It was one that Frigate had insisted he see, the actors Laurel and Hardy selling Christmas trees in Los Angeles in July. The viewers were laughing uproariously.

“They’re New Christians,” Williams said. “Quiet, harmless folks. They couldn’t refuse Turpin’s invitation, they’re so polite. But they don’t hold with most of the goings-on here.”

They found an empty room far down the hall around the corner. On the way, Burton admired the reproductions of oil paintings. Rembrandt, Rubens, David’s “Death of Marat,” many by Russians, Kiprensky, Surikov, Ivanov, Repin, Levitan, and others.

“Why so many Slavs?” Burton said.

“There’s a reason.”

They got their drinks from a converter. Burton sat down and lit up a cigar.

After a silence, Williams said, “I’m not American, you know.”

Burton puffed out smoke and said, “You would have fooled me if Turpin had not told me you were Russian.”

“I was born Rodion Ivanovitch Kazna in 1949 in the black ghetto of the city of Kiev.”

“Amazing,” Burton said. “I didn’t know that there were Negroes … no, I take that back. There were some Russian black slaves. Pushkin was descended from one.”

“What very few people knew, and that Russian government took good care to conceal, was that about twelve million blacks were living in segregated areas of Russian cities. They were the descendants of slaves. The common Russian didn’t want to mix with them any more than the whites of America did with their blacks, and the government, secretly, or course, approved and enforced that policy. Despite which, there was some interracial screwing, as always. Can’t keep the blood pure no matter how you try. A stiff prick has no bias, and all that. One of my great-grandfathers was a white Russian, and a grandfather was an Uzbek. Turkic-speaking, he never did learn to speak Russian well, a Mongol.

“I was taught Marxist doctrine, however. I became a devout follower of Marx’s principles. As he laid them down, not as they were practiced in Russia. I joined the party, but it didn’t take me long to find out that I wasn’t going to rise very high in it. I’d always have to take the back seat and do the janitoring, as it were.

“I would have tried the army, but blacks were always sent to Siberia to guard the Chinese frontier. The Politburo didn’t want any of us stationed on the western front. We’d have caused attention, and investigation would have revealed that we were kept down. That would’ve looked bad for the Soviets, since they were always pointing out the inequality of blacks in America. So they kept everything under a lid.

“I did very well in school, even though our schools were inferior to the whites’. I had a driving ambition to rise to the top, but that wasn’t my only motive. I wanted to learn, to know everything. I read far more than required; I did especially well in languages. That was one of the things that attracted me to you, you know. Your mastery of so many languages.

“The bigshots heard of me mainly because they were looking for blacks they could send as agitators and infiltrators to the States. They asked me to volunteer my services, and I did. Not too eagerly on the surface, of course. I didn’t want them to think that I only wanted to go so I could disappear in Harlem. As a matter of fact, I had no intention of betraying them. I knew what they were and how they looked on me, but I was a Russian Marxist and I loathed capitalism.

“One of the things I fully realized, though, was that Marx’s dream of the withering of the state when the proletariat had gained control of the world just was not possible. I’d have rather believed in the second coming of Christ; that, at least, could possibly happen, though it’s highly improbable. Once a ruling class has the power in its hands, it won’t ever let go. Not until revolutionist take the power from them, and then the new rulers try to make sure they keep in power. The natural withering away of the state, no laws or police force or regulations or bureaucracy, everybody governing himself with love and pure kindness of heart and unselfishness, that’s a crock of bullshit. Nobody really believed in it, but the party members pretended they did.

“Nobody pushed that dogma too much, though. If you got enthusiastic about it, you’d be marked down as a fool or a counterrevolutionary.”

Williams had slipped off a Polish freighter and into the wilds of Harlem. There he worked his F&A (Fomenting and Agitating) among various black and white liberal groups. But three weeks after he landed he got gonorrhea.

“That was my first but by no means last dose. The Fates were against me. No sooner was I cured of that filthy disease than I caught it again. I was in the U.S. of Gonococcia and no way out. After I got over that second case, I decided to try sexual abstinence. That didn’t work. I was just too horny. So, I told myself, twice bitten, never again. It’s a statistical improbability that I’ll get infected again. But I did.”

His KGB contact found out about his dose, reported it to his superior, and relayed a message to Williams. Your social diseases are interfering with your security and efficiency. Stay away from women and dirty toilet seats or else!

After that, every time Williams’ contact met him, he asked him if he had gonorrhea. Williams, who was avoiding women and so getting a reputation as a homosexual, could truthfully tell the contact that he did not have the clap. Fortunately, the contact did not ask him if he had syphilis. Williams, at that time, was suffering from the onslaught of the dread Spirochaeta pallida.

“I’ll swear I don’t know where or from whom I got it. I’d been as chaste as Robinson Crusoe—up to the time he met Friday. I don’t know. Some people are accident-prone. Could I be one of those rare and unfortunate persons, cursed by the Fates or by Dialectic Materialism, who could be infected by bacteria borne on the breeze, slipping through the keyhole? Was I VD-prone? The lone sexual ranger destined to stumble onto bandits, the Jesse Jameses of Germs? I do know one thing. I sure wasn’t getting much spying, fomenting, and agitating done. I was spending too much time in doctors’ offices.”

When Williams learned that the FBI and perhaps the CIA had been questioning his physicians about him, he reported this to his contact. Order came back within the hour for him to go to Los Angeles and infiltrate the Black Muslims. The contact gave Williams a bus ticket, explaining that the KGB could not afford airline passage for him.

While riding westward, as every young man should, Williams contracted gonorrhea in the back seat of a Greyhound.

“Yeah, you’re laughing again, Burton! It does sound funny now. But, believe me, it wasn’t so funny to me then.”

Williams’ story, in its many details, convoluted windings, and lengthy asides, had consumed an hour. Burton was interested in it, but he felt that he had stayed away from the others too long.

Bill Williams managed to become a member of the Black Muslims. But when they found out that he had gonorrhea—contracted in Los Angeles after the Greyhound dose had been cured—they kicked him out. Then, having discovered that he was a spy—they mistakenly thought that he was an FBI agent—they put an assassin on his trail.

His story became, from this point, somewhat confusing. Burton could have used a diagram to keep it clear, what with all the flights, doublings back, shootings, and mishaps Williams had suffered. He had fled to Chicago, then to San Francisco, where he had gotten into a brawl in a gay bar, been beaten up and raped. Afflicted with gonorrhea fore and aft, as he put it, he had gone to a city in Oregon. Not, however, until he had financed his trip by mugging the KGB contact, who had refused to give him any money at all.

Star Spoon appeared in the doorway. She said softly, “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“Come in,” Burton said. “You’ve met Bill Williams, haven’t you?”

She bowed and said, “So nice to see you again, Mr. Williams. Dick, you seem to be deep in conversation. My apologies for interrupting you. I’ll return to the party, if you don’t mind.”

Burton asked her where she would be, and she said that Turpin was with a small select group in his suite. He had asked her to find Burton and invite him to the party.

“I’ll be along in a while,” Burton said.

She bowed again, said good-bye to Williams, and left.

“A beautiful woman,” Williams said, and he sighed.

“She knows how to keep a man happy.”

“Do you know how to make her happy?”

“Of course!” Burton said.

“Don’t get hot around the collar, nothing personal. I’d say she’s a quiet but deep one. I’m pretty good at character analysis on short order. I’ve had to be. Matter of survival.”

“She’s had a very hard life,” Burton said. “It’s a wonder she’s kept her sanity.”

“You trying to be subtle and tell me I’m not the only one who’s had a rough time?”

“You’re overly sensitive, my friend.”

Williams took thirty minutes more to finish his story. He had married a deeply religious black woman who, unfortunately, could not say No to her overpassionate minister. Result: Williams caught the clap again. Overcoming the desire to find her and kill her, he had decided to go hunting instead and sublimate his wish for violence by shooting birds and rabbits. While he was in the woods, he was fatally wounded by a shotgun blast from behind a bush. Dying, he wondered which of the many candidates had shot him. An agent of the KGB, the CIA, the Black Muslims, the Albanians, or the Salvation Army? Actually, the SA itself was not after him, but a soldier in its ranks was. While in Los Angeles, he had pretended to be converted to Christianity during a sermon given by a Major Barbarao. Then he had joined the Army, but a corporal, Rachel Goggin, had fallen in love with him and he with her. At that time, he thought that he was clean, free of VD, but after he and Rachel had made love, he discovered that his nemesis had struck again. Moreover, Rachel had caught the disease from him.

Williams had promised to marry her, but his enemies were closing in, and he had left her to save his own life. Corporal Goggin had apparently gone psychotic because of his unexplained desertion and because of her overreaction to infection with a disease that he had become quite accustomed to. He heard, while he was in Portland, that a woman resembling Rachel was asking about him and that she was packing a gun.

“Everybody except Goodwill Industries was after my ass, and I wasn’t too sure about them.”

“And what have you learned from these, ah, Candidean experiences?”

“You sound like Nur.”

“You’ve talked to him?”

“Sure,” Williams said. “I know everybody here. Very well.”

“Yes, but what was the lesson?” Burton said.

“That I’d been the plaything of life but I wasn’t going to be anymore. I made sure of that on The River, I fought for power and I got it. If I was in a situation where I was the underdog, I became the overdog as soon as possible. I was tired of being kicked around, the one who got shafted. So…”

“Nobody’s victimizing you here, am I correct?” Burton said. He rose from his chair.

“And nobody’s going to.”

Williams smiled, his expression a curious blend of amusement and malice.

“Just sit down for a minute. Then you can go. Hasn’t something been perplexing you for these past two weeks? Something you just can’t account for?”

Burton frowned and said slowly, “I can’t recall anything.”

His forehead cleared. “Unless … yes, I have been wondering … but you couldn’t have anything to do with it … I have been wondering who resurrected Netley, Gull, Crook, Stride, and Kelly.”

“You mean those involved in the Jack-the-Ripper case?”

Burton was startled but tried not to show it. “How do you know who they are?”

“Oh, I was watching you watch their memory files.”

Burton reared from the chair, his face red and contorted.

“Damn you, you’ve been spying on me! Why do you think you have the right…?”

Williams, still smiling, though his eyes were narrowed, rose from his chair.

“Hold it right there! If you think it’s OK to spy on others, why shouldn’t others spy on you? Don’t throw stones in a glass house, my friend.”

Burton was speechless for a moment. Then he said, “There’s a vast difference. I observed the dead. You’re spying on the living, your neighbors!”

“You didn’t observe the living from the grailstones along the River?”

“You soiled my privacy!”

“You can’t soil the soiled,” Williams said. He was still smiling, but his body stance showed that he was ready to repel attack.

“Very well,” Burton said. “You still haven’t told me why you took it on yourself to raise those pathological murderers.”

“They were, but they aren’t. The reason I did … I’m a collector and a student of religious types. I got interested on Earth, I had much experience with them, you know. The Marxists … they’re religious, though they’d deny it, the Black Muslims, the Salvation Army, the Buddhists, the Southern Methodists, you know how many of them I became involved with. I am religious, too, though not in a conventional sense. I am the one who raised the New Christians and the Nichirenites and the Second Chancers who live in Turpinville, and I raised Gull the Dowist. I left it to him to resurrect his fellow, which he did. I have plans for bringing others in.”

Burton did not know whether or not to believe him. He snorted and strode out of the room. Williams called, “Don’t go away mad, Sir Richard!” and he laughed uproariously.

27

On his way to the elevator, Burton looked back down the hall. Williams was going down the steps, apparently to join the crowd of revelers in the vestibule. The man looked up and waved at him through the railing uprights. He was grinning as if he had been enjoying himself hugely. Had Williams been telling him the truth or had he been fantasizing? The Riverworld was a place where men and women should no longer have reason to lie. They had been delivered from the societies and institutions that had forced them, or made them think they were forced, to form protective self and public images. But most of them seemed unaware of that or found it hard to discard old and unnecessary habits.

However, climbing the steps was a good idea. He needed the exercise. He turned the corner, passing by the elevator, and strode down the long hallway toward the stairway. The music and voices that he had faintly heard in the other hall faded away. The only sound was that of his footsteps. But, as he passed the door of the room next to the stairwell, he thought he heard a scream. He stopped. It had not been loud. So faint was it, he might have imagined it. No! There it was again, and it seemed to come through the door.

The rooms were insulated but were not, like the tower walls, absolutely soundproof. He placed his ear against the intricately carved oak door. He could not hear the screams now, but a man was yelling in the room. The words were not clear; the tone was. It was threatening and angry.

He tried the doorknob. It turned, but the door would not budge. He hesitated. For all he knew, the two inside, if there were only two, might not want to be disturbed. If they turned on him because he was interfering in a matter strictly between lovers, he would be embarrassed. On the other hand, he was not easily embarrassed, and he would feel that he had been remiss if he could have prevented a crime.

He knocked hard on the wood three times, then kicked it twice. A woman started to scream, but she was cut off.

“Open up in there!” Burton shouted, and he struck the door again.

A man shouted. It sounded like, “Go away, motherfucker!” but Burton was not sure.

He took his beamer from his jacket and cut a circle around the lock. When he had pushed the knob and the lock through, he stepped to one side. It was well that he had. Three shots boomed, and three bullets pierced the thick wood. The man—he supposed it was a man who was firing—had a heavy handgun, perhaps a .45 automatic. Burton yelled, “Come out unarmed! Your hands on your head! I have a beamer!”

The man snarled a series of curses and said that he would kill whoever tried to come in.

“It’s no use! You’re trapped!” Burton said. “Come on out, hands to your head!”

“You can—”

The man’s voice was cut off by a thud and a clatter. Then Star Spoon’s voice, high and trembling, said, “I knocked him out, Dick!”

Burton pushed the door in and sprang in, beamer ready. A large naked black man was lying facedown on the thick Oriental rug, blood on the back of his head. A gold statuette, smeared with blood, lay by his side.

He swore. She was naked, and her face and arms were blue with bruises. One eye was beginning to swell up. Her clothes were scattered in shreds over the room. She ran weeping and sobbing to him, and he held her shaking body close to his. But, seeing the man push himself up from the floor, Burton released her. He picked up the .45 automatic up, reversed it, and slammed the man on the back of his neck. Without a sound, the man crumpled.

“What happened?” Burton said.

She had trouble getting the words out. He took her to a table and poured out a glass of wine. She drank, though most of it ran down her chin and neck. Still crying, she choked out a story, most of which he had guessed. She had been on her way to the stairwell when the man had stepped out of the door ahead of her. Smiling, he asked her name. She had told him and then had tried to get by him, but he had grabbed her arm. He wanted to party, he said. He had never had a Chinese woman before, and she sure was a doll. And so on.

Star Spoon had struggled as he pulled her into the room. The man’s whiskey breath sickened her when he kissed her. When she had tried to scream, he clapped his hand over her mouth, slammed the door shut, hurled her so hard she fell on the floor, locked the door, and ripped her clothes from her.

By the time Burton arrived, she had been raped three times.

He made sure that the man was tied up, got a tranquilizer from the converter, and gave it and a glass of water to her. He put her into the shower then held the douche bag while, still trembling and weeping, she washed herself out.

After he had toweled her dry, he ordered some clothes from the converter, helped her get dressed, and put her down on a sofa. He used the computer console to call Turpin. Turpin, hearing the report, scowled and said, “I’ll fix that son of a bitch!”

He looked at the man on the floor and said, “That’s Crockett Dunaway. A real troublemaker. I’ve had my eye on him for some time. You wait until I get down there.”

A few minutes later, Tom Turpin, followed by other members of the party, entered. Alice, Sophie, and Aphra took Star Spoon in charge at once and carried her into the room next door. Turpin got a hypodermic full of adrenaline and injected it into Dunaway’s buttock. After a minute, Dunaway groaned and got to his hands and knees. When he saw the others, his eyes widened. He croaked, “What are you doing here?”

Turpin did not answer. Dunaway got to his feet and staggered to a chair, sat down, bent over and held his head in his hands. “Man, I got a headache killing me!”

“That’s not all that’s going to kill you,” Turpin said harshly.

Dunaway raised his head. His bloodshot, slightly crossed eyes looked at Turpin. “What you talking about? That bitch come on to me, and when I obliged her, she started screaming for help. You can’t blame me for what that slant-eyed whore done. She must’ve heard her man coming, and so she pretended like she wasn’t having none of me.”

“She couldn’t have heard me,” Burton said. “I wasn’t making any sound in the hall. If I hadn’t heard her scream, I would’ve gone right on by the door. You’re guilty as hell, man.”

“I swear ’fore God I ain’t,” Dunaway said. “That bitch asked me to give her a good time.”

“There’s no use arguing about it,” Turpin said. “We’ll just run off your memory and get the truth.”

Dunaway grunted and shot out of the chair. He was headed for the door, but his legs gave way, and he crumpled on the floor.

“Uh, huh!” Turpin said. “I thought so. Dunaway, no one gets away with rape here. You’ve had it, man!”

Dunaway raised his head. Saliva ran from his open mouth. “No, I swear to God…!”

Turpin told his two bodyguards to set Dunaway in a chair before the computer console. “We’ll know in a few minutes what’s what!”

Dunaway tried to struggle, but the two blows had sapped his strength. He was set down in the chair, and a bodyguard asked the Computer to extract Dunaway’s memories of the past hour and display them. Dunaway sat trembling and gibbering while his guilt was shown.

“I’m not only going to kill you,” Turpin said, “I’m destroying your body-record. You ain’t never going to get a chance to do this to a woman again. You’ve had it, Dunaway!”

The man’s screams were snapped off by the ray from Turpin’s beamer. Dunaway fell over in his chair, a narrow hole, cauterized at the edges, on each side of his head.

“Throw him in the converter and incinerate him,” Turpin said to the bodyguards.

Nur said, “Are you really going to dissolve his recording?”

“Why not? He won’t ever be any different.”

“You are not God.”

Turpin scowled, and then he laughed. “You’re insidious, Nur. You’ve been bending my ear so long with all that religious philosophical hoop-de-la you got me confused. OK. So I don’t destroy him? And then, when he goes back to The Valley, he’s going to rape and beat other women. You want that on your conscience?”

“The Ethicals in their wisdom set it up so that anyone, no matter how vicious, will live until this project is ended. No exceptions. I trust them. They must know what they’re doing.”

“Yeah?” Turpin said. “If they’re so smart, how come they didn’t catch on to Loga? Why didn’t they make provisions for someone like him? He’s wrecked their schedule and their program.”

“I am not certain that they didn’t make provisions for someone like him,” Nur said calmly.

“Mind explaining that?” Turpin said.

“I have no explanation now.”

Tom Turpin took his time lighting up a big cigar. Then he said, “OK. I’ll go along with you. Up to a point. Just now, nobody’s being sent back to The Valley, so Dunaway ain’t going to do anybody no harm. But when … if … the Computer starts sending them back, it ain’t going to send Dunaway back until I say so. Which may be never. I don’t know just now what I’m going to do when that time comes.”

“There are millions of Dunaways waiting to be released like pent-up hyenas,” Burton said. “What good is it going to do to judge just one?”

“It’s your woman that was raped!” Turpin said.

“But she is not my property, and I won’t speak for her,” Burton said. “Why … since she is the victim, why don’t you let her be the judge?”

Alice, having just come from the bedroom, had overheard him. She said, “Well, Dick! So she isn’t your property and she can speak for herself! Imagine Richard Burton saying that! You have changed!”

“I suppose I have.”

“Too bad you didn’t do it before, not immediately after, we parted,” Alice said. “That doesn’t make me feel very good, you know. You live with the Chinese woman for a very little while, and she works all sorts of changes in you.”

“She had nothing to do with it.”

“Who did then, God? Oh, you’re impossible.”

Nur said, “How is she?”

“As well as can be expected after … that. Aphra, Sophie, and I will take care of her for a few days. If that’s all right with you, Dick?”

“Of course,” he said, somewhat stiffly. “It is most generous … compassionate … of you.”

Star Spoon had fallen asleep under the influence of a drug recommended by the Computer. Burton and Frigate carried her out on a stretcher through a side entrance and placed her in the back of a huge steam driven Dobler automobile. Turpin drove it over the winding road to the entrance. Here Burton transferred her to his chair, and, with her on his lap, flew the chair the short distance to his world’s entrance and the long distance to the Arabian Nights castle in the center. The others followed him. After Star Spoon had been undressed and put in bed by the women, Alice and Sophie came out from her room.

“She should be all right by the time she wakes up,” Sophie said. “Physically, that is. Mentally and emotionally…?”

The women would take care of Star Spoon in shifts. As soon as she awoke, Burton would be called. He protested that that was not necessary. He would sit by her bed until she awoke and then do his best to comfort her.

“Let us do something, too,” Sophie said.

Burton said that he would go along with them; he understood why they insisted. They empathized deeply with Star Spoon because they, too, had been raped more than once. They also needed to take care of her; that compulsion, if you could call it a compulsion, was part of their natures.

“Born nurses,” Burton said to Frigate.

“How lucky can you get?”

The American was not being facetious. He envied people who wanted to use themselves for the benefit of others.

Star Spoon got up in time for breakfast. Though she drank only a little tea and ate part of a piece of toast, she was well enough to take some part in the conversation. She seemed glad to have the three women with her, and they even got her to laugh several times. However, she did not want Burton to hold her, and she responded to his attempts to talk with her with uncompleted sentences or nods or shakes of her head.

After two days, the three women left. Star Spoon immediately quit staring into space for long periods and busied herself with various projects with the Computer.

“She’s withdrawing,” Burton told Nur and Frigate. “I won’t say it’s just into herself. She seems to be burying herself with work with the Computer. She’ll stop whatever she’s doing—she won’t talk about that much—and listen while I talk. But I’ve spent hours, days, trying to get her back to her old self, and I’ve failed.”

“Yet,” Frigate said, “she’s been raped before.”

“This may have been the final trauma. The last and the unendurable wound.”

He did not tell them that she had become animated and genuinely interested for a short time when he asked her what she wanted to do to Dunaway. She had replied that she did not want to destroy his recording. He certainly deserved oblivion forever, but she could not bring herself to do that. Dunaway should be punished, if he would learn anything from it. She doubted that very much. Finally, she said that she was going to forget any punishment or any kind of retribution. She wished that she could forget about him, but she just could not.

The dullness came into her face and voice again, and she became silent.

Nur talked to her but reported that he could find no wedge to open her and let in some light. Her soul had become darkened. He hoped that it would not remain so forever.

“But you don’t know if she’ll … stay the same?” Burton said.

Nur shrugged. “No one can know. Except perhaps Star Spoon.”

Burton was frustrated and, hence, angry. He could not take his anger out on her, so he vented it on Frigate and Nur. Understanding what was affecting him, they endured his insults for a while. Then Nur said that he would see Burton again when Burton was rational. Frigate seemed to feel that he should absorb more than Nur had, perhaps for old times’ sake or perhaps because some part of him enjoyed the tongue-lashing. An hour after Nur had left, Frigate got up from his chair, threw his half-full glass against the wall, said, “I’m getting out of here,” and did so.

A few minutes later, Star Spoon entered. She looked at the spilled whiskey and his brooding face. Then, surprisingly, she went to him and kissed him on the lips.

“I’m much improved now,” she said. “I think I can be the cheery woman you want me to be, what I want to be. You’ll have no reason to worry about me from now on. That is, except…”

“I’m very happy,” he said. “I think. There’s something that is still bothering you?”

“I … I am not ready to go to bed with you yet. I would like to, but I can’t. I do believe, though, Dick, that the time will come when I can, and I’ll be completely willing. Just bear with me. The time will come.”

“As I said, I’m very happy. I can wait. Only, this is so sudden. What caused this metamorphosis?”

“I don’t know. It just happened.”

“Very curious,” he said. “Perhaps we’ll know someday. Meanwhile, you wouldn’t mind if we kissed just a little longer, would you? I promise not to get carried away.”

“Of course not.”

Life for Burton returned to the routine it had had before Dunaway’s violation. Star Spoon was more talkative, even aggressive at times during the parties. Verbally aggressive, in that she was more willing to argue, to present her views. However, she spent as much time with the Computer as she had when she was deeply troubled. Burton did not mind. He had his own projects.

28

All human beings, Nur thought, reported that time seemed to them to have gone much slower when they were infants. Time speeded up a little when they became prejuveniles, got a little faster when they were juveniles, and stepped up the pace even more when they became young adults. When you were in your sixties, what had been a smooth and slow stream, a leisurely flowing and broad river when one was young, became a narrow roaring channel. By the seventies, it was a short waterfall, time hurtling by. By the eighties, it was a deep mountain cataract, water, time itself, shooting by, disappearing over the edge of life, which was near one’s feet, a precipice over which time rushed by as if eager to destroy itself. And you, too.

If you were an old man or woman of ninety, looking back, childhood seemed to be a long, long, long, highway reaching to an unimaginable distant horizon. But the last forty years … how short they had been, how swift.

Then you died, and you awoke on a bank of The River and your body was that which you had when you were twenty-five, except that any physical defects you had had then were repaired. It would seem then that, being young again, you would experience time as a slowed-down stream. Childhood would not seem so remote in your memory, nor would it seem to you as long as it had been before you became twenty-five again.

Not so. The young body held a brain young in tissue but old with memory and experience. If you were eighty when you died on Earth and had lived forty years on the Riverworld, and thus were one hundred and twenty years old, in fact, then time was a series of rapids. It hurried you along, hustled and pushed you. Keep going, keep going, it said. No rest for you. You don’t have the time. No rest for me either.

Nur’s living body had existed for one hundred and sixty-one years. And so, when he looked back at his childhood, he saw it as an everstretching length. The older he got, the longer childhood seemed to him. If he should live to be a thousand, he would think that childhood had lasted seven hundred years; young adulthood, two hundred; middle age, fifty-nine; time since then; a year.

His companions had mentioned this phenomenon now and then, but they did not dwell on it. Only he, as far as he knew, had pondered about it. It shocked him when Frigate mentioned that they had been here only a few months. Actually, almost seven months had passed. Burton had put off going to his private world for a few weeks. Or so he had said. In reality, he had taken two months.

What made it easier for them—himself, too—to be unaware of the passage of time was that they no longer watched the calendar. They could have told the Computer to display the month and day on the wall every morning, but here, where time meant no more than it had to Homer’s lotus eaters, they had neglected to do so. They should have been shaken when Turpin announced that he was celebrating Christmas, but they had had no reference point to measure the passage of time.

It was this failure to notice the passage of time, this supermañana attitude, that had caused them to put off something they had been eager to do shortly after getting here. That was the resurrection of those comrades who had died while trying to get to the tower. Joe Miller the titanthrop, Loghu, Kazz the Neanderthal, Tom Mix, Umslopogaas, John Johnston, and many others. These had earned the right to be brought to the tower, and the eight who had made it had intended to do that. They spoke about it now and then, though not often. Somehow, for various reasons, they kept putting it off.

Nur could not excuse himself for having been shot along with them in time’s millrace. He, too, had neglected this very important deed. It was true that he had been even busier than they with various research projects, but it would not take the Computer more than half an hour to locate them—if they could be found—and a few minutes to set up arrangements to raise them.

If you lived a million years, would your childhood then seem to have lasted seven hundred and fifty thousand years? And would the last two hundred and fifty years seem only a century? Could the mind play that sort of gigantic trick on itself?

Time, viewed objectively, flowed always at the same speed. A machine watching day-by-day activities of the people in the Rivervalley would see them as having, every day, the same amount of time to do whatever they did. But, inside these people, would not time have speeded up? And would they not be doing less and less with every day? Perhaps not in the outward physical actions such as eating breakfast, taking baths, exercising, and so forth. But what about mental and emotional processes? Would they be slower? Would not the process of changing themselves for the better, the ostensible goal set for them by the Ethicals, be slowed down, too? If this was so, the Ethicals should have given them more than a hundred years to achieve the moral and spiritual near-perfection necessary for Going On.

There was, however, one undeniable realistic reason why one hundred years was the limit for this group of people. The energy needed to fill the grails, to run the tower, and to resurrect the dead, was derived from the heat from this planet’s molten nickel-iron core. The available energy was enormous, but so was the consumption of it. The Ethicals might have figured out that a hundred years for this group, people who had lived from 100,000 B.C. through A.D. 1983, and a hundred years for the next group, those who had lived after A.D. 1983, would eat up almost all the tappable energy. With all the heat that the thermionic converters drew, two hundred years’ withdrawal would cool off the core to the point where it could no longer supply the requirements.

Loga, the Ethical, had never mentioned this energy limitation. He must have known it, and it must have caused him anguish and guilt. Nur, having thought of this factor, had asked the Computer to give him the computation for the energy needed for the two projects. And the answer had been what Nur had expected. Yes, even the core of this planet, slightly larger than Earth’s, would lose its white-hot glow and become red and dim within two centuries.

Loga’s parents, siblings, and cousins were still in the Rivervalley. Every one of them had been killed at least once, and none had Gone On. Loga had interfered with the project and gotten rid of his fellow Ethicals and the Ethical Agents so that his family might live longer than the time allotted to them. And, Loga hoped, attain that level where they could Go On.

That did not mean, however, that this project, the first, would not be terminated when the hundred years were up. He could salvage his loved ones by making sure that their body-recordings would not be erased and their wathans released to float for as long as the universe lasted or perhaps longer. He could end the first group and start the next group on schedule. The slight deviation in the procedure would be that his family would continue to live in The Valley. They would be part of the next group and thus get an extra century.

If that were so, why had Loga not just arranged that the Computer would not report that certain persons who should have been disposed of were still living? Loga had been able to fix it so that the Computer had operated illegally in far more noticeable matters.

Probably, Loga had not wanted to take the chance that he could get by with the minor matter—major, from his viewpoint. He had to assure his complete control, even if trying to do this made the risks far greater. He knew that a year or two before the end of this project, a spaceship would arrive from the Garden-world. It would hold a crew of Ethicals and the body-records of the people for the second project. Loga had to insure that the newcomers would not interfere with him. He had set things up so that the newcomers would be seized or killed when they unsuspectingly got off the ship in the hangar.

Unfortunately, somebody had gotten to Loga, killed him, and erased his body-recording.

All evidence pointed to the Mongolian female agent who had been killed by Nur. But Nur had very little evidence to go by. He had no idea how she had gotten into the tower, what her role was or what it had been intended to be, or, even, whether she was still not hiding someplace in the tower.

Nur and his companions were supposed to have worked on this mystery until it was solved. However, everybody except himself seemed to have neglected it. They were too occupied with the power and the pleasures the tower gave them. Undoubtedly, they had intended to try to solve the enigma, but they had no idea of how much time had passed.

Nur wondered if it would do any good to call this neglect to their attention. He had gotten nowhere in his efforts to clear matters up via the Computer. Why would they do any better?

Yet it was Alice Hargreaves who had thought of the way to trick the Computer shortly after they had gotten into the magic labyrinth, the tower that was also the Computer. Not he, Nur, not any of the others. He knew, however, from observing them, that they just did not think that solving the mystery was urgent. In fact, nothing seemed urgent to them now except enjoying the treasures of the Computer. And they were in no hurry to get all of those.

They were wrong in thinking that. Nur could see another crisis speeding toward them. Li Po had launched that when he had resurrected people without much thought about the effects. Turpin had then raised many whom he had known on Earth and some he had first known in The Valley. These, in turn, had raised those they wanted to have with them. And so on. Turpinville was already crowded; Turpin was going to oust any more newcomers. They would not care; they would just move into one of the unoccupied worlds or into an apartment suite. And there they would continue the populating.

Most of the people brought in had never even heard of computers, not even those primitive and limited ones of Earth technology. Here they were introduced to a machine that made them, in a sense, demigods. But, being human, many of them would misuse the power through accident or design. Williams, for instance, had raised those involved in the Ripper murders just as a rather malicious joke. Nur could not see that there was any harm in that except that Netley might abuse his power. The others seemed to be decent people. Gull had become born again, as the curious Christian phraseology put it, and the three women were not vicious or power-hungry. The men that they had resurrected to be their companions might be another matter, however. And many of those brought to Turpinville had not changed much since they had been on Earth. A town full of those who had been on Earth pimps, whores, drug sellers, bullies, and killers held much danger. Especially when they could operate the Computer.

What Nur had tried but failed to impress on his companions was that the Computer was a genie let out of a bottle or an afreet that had been released from the constraints of Solomon’s Seal. Or, as Frigate had put it, a Frankenstein’s monster with an unlimited credit card. One person using these powers might suddenly find that another was using them against him or her. The full potentialities of the Computer were still unknown. To use it safely, you had to learn everything it could do, and that would take a long, long time.

For instance, Burton, while watching those in the Ripper case, had not considered that he was being watched while watching. If he had foreseen the possibilities, he would have put an inhibit on anyone spying on him. Now that he knew it could be done, he had ordered the Computer to insure his privacy in his operation of it. But it was rather late for that. Five people, one of whom, Netley, might be a danger to everybody else, had been brought in. Moreover, if Williams had thought of it, he could have told the Computer to override Burton’s privacy instructions and not tell Burton about it.

Whoever got to the Computer first could override the latecomers.

Only one who learned the list of all that the Computer could do could protect himself. And the others. Even then, he might be too late. Another might have already put in commands giving himself control channels that he had made sure would be denied to others.

Nur intended to go through the list of potentialities, learn them by heart, and then see to it that the Computer would deny control to anyone who could misuse certain powers. That would, of course, give him the greatest power of anyone in the tower. But he knew that he would not use it for evil purposes.

For the moment, though, he had other things to do. His allotted work hours for the day were over. He must go now and have dinner with the woman he had raised, his wife on Earth, a woman whom he had not seen much there because he had been traveling in his quest for knowledge and the Truth. He owed her much, and now he could repay her.

29

Alice gave her Mad Tea Party on April 1, April Fool’s Day.

It was also a farewell party, not for Alice, who was staying, but for the “decor” of her world and the androids in it. Tired of the Wonderland cum Looking-Glass motif, she intended to change it. Her guests would have a last look at it, and sometime later she would have the Computer remove most of it and replace it with whatever she ordered. As of the moment, she said, she had several ideas for the redecorating. What she hoped was that during the party the guests would give her more ideas.

First, though, she had to make up a guest list, and this caused problems from the beginning. She had intended to invite only the seven companions and their mates. Li Po said that he wanted to bring all of his “wives.” She responded by saying that she preferred that he bring only one. That could be whichever woman was his bedmate for April 1. Li Po replied that his other wives and his friends and their mates would be hurt if they did not receive invitations, too. After all, she had a place big enough for the few people he would like to bring (about a hundred, he estimated). The forty sages (now fifty) and their charming women were all well behaved. They might get a little boisterous, but she wanted a lively party, didn’t she?

Alice could be very stubborn. But she was very fond of Li Po, even if she did think that he drank too much and was altogether too lecherous. Also, he was entertaining, and he seemed determined to be accompanied by his friends. In the end, she gave in and extended a blanket invitation to the Chinese.

Frigate said that he and Sophie would be very happy to attend. However, Sophie, who was very gregarious, had by now resurrected ten men and ten women, with his permission, of course. They were very good friends she had known in New York City, Los Angeles, and, believe it or not, please restrain your laughter, Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Puzzled, Alice asked why he thought she would laugh. Frigate sighed and said, “Kalamazoo was, like some other American place-names, Peoria, Podunk, and downtown Burbank, a risible word, a poke in the ribs and a snigger. Like the English Gotham of the later Middle Ages, the German Schildburg, the town of Chelm in Yiddish stories, the Boeotia of the ancient Greeks. Well, Kalamazoo and the other American cities are not quite like the others I mentioned. The difference is…”

Alice listened politely, then said, “You intended to ask me if I would invite Sophie’s friends, but you wandered off. Yes, they are welcome, since there are only twenty of them.”

Frigate thanked her, but she could detect some hesitancy in his voice. Whereas Sophie was gregarious, he was, not antigregarious, but nongregarious. No doubt he had been glad that he and Sophie now had some companions. On the other hand, he was beginning to feel a little crowded and put upon. The world would never have enough elbow room for him.

De Marbot and Behn also wanted to bring the people they had resurrected recently. Alice said that they could come, but when she had cut off their screens, she sighed. Originally, she had planned for around thirty. Now she had one hundred and three. So far.

Burton, at least, was no problem in terms of numbers. He and Star Spoon had not as yet brought anybody else in.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I have a surprise.”

“For all of us or just for me?” he said.

“Oh, for everybody, though it may affect you more than the others.”

“I know you, Alice,” he said, smiling and, as so often, looking like Mephistopheles himself when he did so. “I know your expressions. You have just regretted adding that last phrase. You’re ashamed that you did so. What is the surprise, another man?”

“Go to hell,” Alice said, and she told the Computer to cut them off. She had changed in many ways. Never, never on Earth, no matter how angered, would she have said that to anyone. Not even her husband.

After pacing back and forth a while to allow herself to settle down, she called Nur. He said, “Greetings, Alice. It’s a pleasure to see you. Could I call you back in a moment? I’m talking to Tom Turpin. There’s…” He hesitated, then said, “Never mind that.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said. “But I just … that’s all right. I’ll call back within the half hour.”

She bit her lip as she wondered if she should invite William Gull and his fellow Dowists. He had been, after all, physician in ordinary to Queen Victoria and a baronet. Yet she had long ago rid herself of the class distinctions that had governed her on Earth and for quite a while on the Riverworld, so his high connections should not be considered. Also, he had been a murderer-mutilator. Yet he had repented and was a deacon of the Dowist Church. And she, as one who was no longer a believer in Christianity but still tried to act like a Christian, should not permit his renounced past to bother her. He could be an entertaining conversationalist as long as he refrained from proselytizing. Then he became a nuisance and a bore. But she would insist that the Dowist not push their religion if they attended the party.

Finally, she called him. He was pleased to be asked, almost pathetically so.

“I’m also inviting Annie Crook, Elizabeth Stride, and Marie Kelly,” she said, “if that makes a difference to you.”

“Oh, of course not,” he said. “It is your party, and Mrs. Stride and I get along well now, though we have certain disagreements on theology. Mrs. Cook and Mrs. Kelly are rather cool, understandably so, but I hope to bring them around someday. I assure you that I will not spoil this social function by any unseemly behavior.”

Alice then called the three women, and they said they would be delighted. Could they bring their “beaus” with them? Though reluctant to have them, Alice smiled and said they would be welcome. So, that made one hundred and fifty-one guests, since Gull would bring his woman and thirty-two others. Stride and Crook would each bring a man, and Kelly would, as usual, have a man on each arm.

The second time she tried Nur, he was ready to talk to her. He thanked her for the invitation and said that he and Ayesha would be happy to come. He had just had a rather intense conversation with Tom Turpin. Both of them were disturbed because of the two women who had become pregnant. The first birth would occur in four months, the second, two weeks later.

“Tom has told the women many times that the babies will have no wathans. Since the Ethicals did not intend to have babies here, they made no provisions for creating wathans. I asked the Computer if it had the schematics for making a wathan generator, and it said that there was no such thing in its records. That means, as you perhaps remember, that the babies, lacking wathans, will hence lack self-consciousness. For all exterior purposes, they will behave just as babies with wathans will. But they will not be self-conscious. They’ll be biological machines, very superior machines, but still machines.”

“Yes, I know,” Alice said. “But what can one do?”

“If those women want to bear and raise what will be the equivalent of androids, that would be only their business. If that was all there was to it. However, their example may stimulate others to imitate them, to have babies also. Eventually, this tower will be jammed with people, a good part of whom will be soulless. What happens when the overcrowding causes fights for space? War. Suffering. Death. I don’t have to fill in the picture for you.”

“Yes, but…” Alice said.

“Turpin has threatened to kick them out if they bear the children. They don’t care. They’ll just go to an apartment with their men and live there. But this little trouble will lead to great trouble. Somebody … we … will have to take drastic action to stop this and make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”

“You mean … kill the babies?”

“I don’t like to contemplate that, it pains me greatly, but it will have to be done. The babies, as I said, are really androids, and one should have no more compunction about destroying them than about destroying androids. They look completely human and behave like human beings to a certain extent. But they are not self-conscious; they do not have that which makes Homo sapiens human. The babies can’t be allowed to grow into children; they should be eliminated now before they know what’s happening.”

Alice knew that their death would be instantaneous and painless. They would be placed in a converter and reduced to atoms in a microsecond. Nevertheless, the idea horrified her.

No doubt the kind-hearted Nur felt horror, too. But he knew what had to be done, and he would do it. If Turpin could not get the job done, Nur would see to it.

“If we had a wathan generator,” Nur said. “I would insist … I think almost everybody would agree with me … that these two infants be the exception. We would see that they had wathans, but there would be no more children born. Any woman who used the Computer to make herself fertile would be killed and her body kept in the records until the day … if it ever comes … that the Computer starts resurrecting people again in The Valley. Any man who knowingly made the woman pregnant would also be slain. However…”

“Yes?”

“Allah! That won’t be necessary. I should have thought of this before. The Computer can be ordered not to make anyone fertile from now on. Why didn’t I think of that long ago? Time…”

“Time?” Alice said.

Nur waved his hand to dismiss the phrase.

“Then I see no reason to destroy the babies,” Alice said. “Surely they won’t be any problem.”

Nur sighed with relief, though he still looked troubled. Perhaps that was because he had been so slow in arriving at the very obvious solution.

He shook his head. “There’s a possibility I must check on at once. What if someone has given a command to the Computer that anybody who wants to become fertile can become so? That would be the prior command and the authoritative one. The only one who could override that would be Loga or the woman whom I killed … if I did kill her. Just a moment. I’ll check.”

Alice could have listened in on him, but she would never have done that unless he gave permission. A minute later, the screen before her glowed, and Nur’s face appeared. She knew at once what had happened from his angry expression.

“Someone has done just what I hoped would not be done. He … she … whoever … has made it possible for anyone who wants to become fertile to do so. The Computer would not tell me who gave it the command.”

“My God!” Alice said. Then, “Dick told me about that black man, Bill Williams, resurrecting Gull and the others. Do you suppose…?”

“I don’t know. We’ll probably never find out. It’s possible that Wandal Goudal or Sarah Kelpin, one of the women having babies, did it. In any event…”

Though not very often at a loss for words, Nur was so now.

“Tom will have to be told,” she said. “Surely, he’ll do what must be done.”

“I’ll call him now,” Nur said.

She sat down to wait, thinking that she would hear from him in ten or fifteen minutes. However, the screen glowed on the control console in less than six minutes. She was surprised to see, not Nur’s, but Tom Turpin’s face. It was red under his dark skin, and his face was contorted.

“I’m contacting all of you!” he shouted.

You, she understood, would be the seven companions. But what was he doing in the central area forming the O at the tips of the pie-slice-shaped private worlds? And why were his favorite women, Diamond Lil Schindler, his cronies, Chauvin, Joplin, and other musicians, and their women there?

“OK! I see all of you there! Man, I’m mad! Mad, do you hear?”

Nur’s voice, quiet and soothing, came.

“Calm down, Tom. Tell us what happened.”

“They threw me out!” he screamed. “Overpowered my guards, grabbed me and my friends, and threw me out! They said I wasn’t King Tom no more! I was through! I couldn’t ever get back in! So long, good-bye, farewell, adieu, adios, motherfucker!”

“Who’s they?” Burton’s voice said. “Was Bill Williams the ringleader?”

“No, not him! He moved out two days ago into one of the empty worlds! It was Jonathan Hawley and Hamilton Biggs did it! They were the ringleaders, I mean!”

Alice had probably been introduced to the two, but she did not remember the names.

“Something like this was to be expected,” Nur said. “There’s little … nothing … you can do about it, Tom. Why don’t you move into one of the empty worlds? And be very careful the next time you select someone to bring in?”

“I can’t even do that!” Tom yelled. He raised his arms and brought them down violently, his hands slapping his thighs. “Can’t even do that! Williams is in one of them! The gypsies have taken another! I know ’cause I saw them coming out of it! I can’t get into any of the other four! Somebody’s locked them with codewords! I don’t know who did it, but I think Hawley and Biggs did it! They’re holding them for excess population or whatever! Maybe they did it just out of spite!”

“It could be worse. They could have killed you,” Nur said.

“Yeah, Pollyanna, it could have been worse!”

Turpin was weeping now. The big black woman, Schindler, put her arms around him. He sobbed on her neck while she smiled, exposing the twinkling gems set into her teeth. On Earth, she had been one of the most important madams of the St. Louis Tenderloin district and one of Turpin’s lovers.

Alice waited until he had released himself from Diamond Lil’s embrace, and she said, “You and your friends can stay at my place, Tom.”

The others, Burton, de Marbot, Aphra, Frigate, and Nur, hastened to extend their invitations.

“No,” Turpin said, wiping his eyes with a huge violet handkerchief, “that ain’t necessary, but I thank you. We’ll just move into apartments.”

He raised a fist and began howling, “I’ll get you, Hawley, Biggs, you other motherfucking Judases! I’ll get you! You’ll be sorry, you sons of bitches! Watch out for Tom Turpin, you hear me!”

She could not see the screen that must have appeared on the wall before Trupin. But she could hear the loud laughter and the triumphant words.

“Get lost, you blubbering blubber!”

Tom howled with anger and anguish and began striking the wall. Alice cut off the screen. What next?

What indeed? That was only one of the upsetting events leading up to the party. Which, she would say later to anyone who would hear—there were few of those left—was, she was not exaggerating in the slightest, the worst party she had ever given.

30

The morning of April the first, Burton and Star Spoon breakfasted on the balcony outside their bedroom. The sky was clear, and the breeze was gentle and cool because Burton had ordered it so. Now and then, an elephant trumpeted and a lion roared. The shadow of a roc crossed over the table, the bird with a forty-foot wingspread designed by Burton and fashioned by the Computer. Star Spoon started when it darkened them.

“It won’t hurt us, it’s programmed not to attack us,” Burton said, smiling.

“It could be an ill omen.”

He did not argue with her. Li Po and the men and women of the eighth century A.D. whom he had brought in were intelligent and much-experienced, yet they had not rid themselves of their superstitions. Li Po was perhaps the most flexible, but even he reacted now and then to something that he should by now laugh at or not even think of.

He wondered if one had to desuperstition oneself, as it were, before one could Go On. What did the holding of absurd beliefs have to do with gaining compassion and empathy and freedom from hate and prejudice? It had much to do with it if it caused fear and cruelty and irrational behavior. But could one be afraid that bad luck would come if a black cat crossed one’s path and still be a “good” person? No, not if one threw a brick at the cat or treated one’s friends badly because one was in an ill humor from anxiety.

“You, too, are afraid,” Star Spoon said.

“What?” He stared at her.

“You knocked on wood three times. On the table.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry to have to contradict you, Dick. But you did. I would not lie.”

“I really did?”

He laughed uproariously.

“Why do you find that funny?”

He explained, and she smiled. That, he thought, was the first time in days that she had lost her blank expression. Well, if he had to pull her out of her soberness by making a fool of himself, he did not mind.

“I did not ask you how you are,” he said.

“I am well.”

“I hope that you will be happy soon.”

“I thank you.”

Burton was thinking about proposing to her that the Computer locate in her memory all her experiences of brutality, especially the rapes. The Computer could excise them as a surgeon could a rotting appendix. Though the erasing would eliminate much from her memory, perhaps many years if the time of events were totaled, she would be free of painful thoughts. On the other hand, though the memories would be gone, their emotional impact would still be there. The Computer could not remove that. Star Spoon still might be repulsed by lovemaking but not have the slightest idea why.

The mind had to operate on itself, but it was seldom a skilled surgeon.

Burton silently cursed Dunaway and wished that there was a hell to which the man could be sent.

Star Spoon lifted a forkful of trout to her mouth, chewed while staring out over the gardens below the castle, the jungle river, and the desert beyond. Having swallowed, she said, “I want you to bring in another woman, Dick. One who can take care of your needs. A woman who can laugh and love. I do not mind, I not only do not mind, I would be very pleased.”

“No,” he said. “No. That is most generous of you—also very Chinese. I admire the culture and wisdom of your people, but I am not Chinese.”

“It’s not just Chinese. It’s good common sense. There’s no reason why I should be—what did you say the other day?—a dog in the…?”

“A dog in the manger. One who owns something he can’t use but won’t let anybody else use it because he’s selfish.”

“A dog in the manger. I am not that. Please, Dick, it would make me less unhappy.”

“But I wouldn’t be happy.”

“If it would embarrass you to have another woman here, put her in an apartment and visit her. Or … I could leave.”

He laughed and said, “Human beings are not androids. I couldn’t just raise a woman and imprison her for my own pleasure. In the first place, she might not like me. In the second, even if she did, she would want the company of others. She’d want to be free, not a caged odalisque.”

She reached across the table and put her hand on his. “It is too bad.”

“What? What we’ve just been talking about?”

“That and much more. Everything.” She waved a hand as if to take in the whole universe. “Bad. All bad.”

“No, it’s not. Part is bad, part is good. You’ve just had more than your share of the bad. But you have time, a long, long time, to get your share of the good.”

She shook her head. “No. Not for me.”

Burton pushed his plate, still half-full, away. An android silently took the plate away.

“I’ll stay and talk with you, if you like. I have work to do, but it’s not more important than you.”

“I, too, have work,” she said. He rose, went around the solid gold table to her, and kissed her cheek. He was curious about what she was doing with the Computer, but, when he asked her about it, she always said that it was uninteresting and she would prefer to hear about his studies.

However, when they left the castle in the armored flying chairs, she seemed to be excited about the party. She chattered away about some amusing incidents in her childhood, and she even laughed several times. Burton thought that it was no good for her to be alone so much or just with him. Yet when they had gone to the weekly meetings, she had been subdued and withdrawn.

During flight, Burton spoke over the transmitter to Star Spoon. “I tried earlier this morning to call Turpinville. Which I suppose will have another name by now. I got no answer. Apparently, whoever’s running Turpinville now is not taking calls.”

“Why did you call them?”

“I was curious. I wanted to find out if whoever’s in charge intends to be aggressive. It’s possible, you know, that he … they … won’t be content with just ruling Turpinville. He might have some plans for taking over the entire tower.”

“What sense would there be in that?”

“What sense was there in ousting Turpin and grabbing the seat of power? I also called Tom to determine his mood. It was black. Or perhaps scarlet is a better description. He is still vowing vengeance, but he knows that he has no chance of getting that. All they have to do is stay shut up in their world.”

They floated through the doorway into the central area. Burton was surprised by the crowd and the uproar there. Turpin was with Louis Chauvin, Scott Joplin, and other musician-friends who had two days ago been in Little St. Louis. Evidently, these had also been hurled out from the little world without anything except the clothes they were wearing. There were also about a hundred other blacks, some of whom he recognized. And something had also happened to Frigate and Lefkowitz and her friends. They were gesticulating angrily and shouting words unintelligible in the great noise. This was added to by the blaring voices from the wall-screens showing each one his or her past.

Li Po and his comrades left their world just then, and their questions swelled the volume of sound.

Burton and Star Spoon eased the chairs onto the floor. He got up and yelled, “What’s going on?” but only those very near him could hear.

Frigate had put on an outlandish costume for the party. A huge scarlet bowtie, a lemon-yellow vest with enormous silver buttons, a big sky-blue belt, tight white pants with scarlet seams, and lemon-yellow Wellington boots. His skin color almost matched that of the bowtie.

“We came out of my place,” he said, “and found Netley and a dozen others there. They had beamers and guns, and Netley told me that if I didn’t give him the codeword, he’d shoot all of us! So I gave it to him! I had to, nothing else I could do! He and his gang went inside and closed the door … and … and that’s that! We’re locked out! Dispossessed! My beautiful world taken away from me!”

“Not to mention from me and my friends,” Sophie said. She was dressed in ancient Egyptian fashion, à la Cleopatra. A uraeus headband, a naked torso exposing big shapely breasts—what would Alice think of that?—and a long skirt split in front almost to the crotch. She even had a staff with an ankh at its end. Her companions were in costumes of many periods, Asiatic and European.

“I should have been more cautious!” Frigate cried. “I should have checked on the area outside before we went through the door!”

“He’s locking the barn after the horse is stolen,” Sophie said. “Crying over spilt milk. Pardon the clichés, but crises always bring out clichés. They’re not very creative situations, verbally, anyway.”

Tom Turpin, dressed in tails and a stovepipe hat, came up to them. “It’s Thieves’ Week!” he said. “They’re doing all right, too.”

“What about those?” Burton said, pointing at the weeping and bewildered-looking blacks.

“Them? Those’re the good folks, the churchers, Second Chancers, New Christians, Revised Free Will Baptists, and Nichirenites. Boggs and Hawley threw them out a couple of minutes after Pete got his world taken from him.”

At that moment, Stride, Crook, Kelly, and their men came out of the elevator shaft. Burton left it to others to explain what had happened. He ordered a screen on the wall and called Alice. Her dark eyes widened when she saw the scene behind him and heard the babel. Burton told her what had happened, and he said, “I’m afraid that this may spoil your party.”

“Not at all,” she said. “I’m not going to allow anything to do that. I suppose it will take Tom and Peter some time to simmer down, but they can do it, I know. As for those poor people those ruffians kicked out, well, tell them they can come to the party if they wish. It might make them feel better. Of course, it’s not as if they can find no home or have to go hungry. Well, anyway, you invite them for me. I’ll be waiting.”

Burton went to the milling exiles, asked for quiet, got it, and passed on Alice’s invitation. All accepted. These had no flying chairs, but they could have them made in the converter in the anteroom to Alice’s world.

Frigate had some drinks made for his party by the anteroom converter so they could soften the shock with liquor while en route to their destination. Sophie took one, a tall glass of gin, but she said, “I’m not so sure that we should spend any time having fun now, Pete. We ought to go over the list of Computer potentialities and put in all the prohibitions we can. We have to forestall anything those scumbags might think of.”

“Good thinking,” Burton said, though he had not been addressed. “However, Alice won’t like it if you miss her party. And I am sure that the dispossessors are going to be so happy celebrating that they won’t be plotting any more trouble for some time.”

“You may be right,” Sophie said. “But I think we should all put our heads together tomorrow and try to figure out everything those assholes could do.”

“Our heads are usually not worth much the day after a big party,” Burton said. “I’ll call you and the others tomorrow about ten in the morning for the big powwow.”

Nur and his woman entered the anteroom, halted, looked around, and then made their way through the crowd to Burton. Nur introduced Ayesha bint Yusuf, a thin brown woman even shorter than Nur. Though she was not pretty, she looked quite charming when she smiled.

Burton said to Nur, “I’ll explain later. We have to get out of this noisy mess.”

As he turned to sit down in his chair, he saw Gull and a score of Dowists, all dressed in long flowing white robes, enter. They looked as if they were stunned.

Burton lifted the chair up and shot it through the wide doorway. He climbed until he was two hundred feet high and sped over the massive oak and pine forest, the Tulgey Wood, and the river Issus toward the huge clearing at the foot of the high hill on which Alice’s mansion stood. The field was three hundred yards square, perfectly flat, and covered with a bright green grass that never needed mowing. The field held a huge ferris wheel and a roller coaster on one side and a merry-go-round and a small skating rink and many tables on which were placed food and drinks and white open-sided tents and a bandstand on which androids were playing a waltz and small buildings like tiny Roman villas, which he supposed were comfort stations, and a croquet field and badminton nets and equipment and a dance floor of polished wood and many android servants, almost all of them looking like characters from Lewis Carroll’s two famous books.

Under a giant oak at the edge of the field was a house with chimneys shaped like a rabbit’s ears and with a roof covered with rabbit fur. Before it was a large table set for teatime and many chairs around it. A man-sized March Hare and Mad Hatter and a little girl sat at the table. Though she was dressed as Tenniel had illustrated Alice, she did not have her long blonde hair. Alice had ordered an android that looked as she did when she was ten.

“Alice has certainly done herself proud,” he muttered as he steered the chair toward the foot of the hill.

She stood there by a chair that looked like the coronation chair in Westminster Hall. There was another and similar chair by it; a tall yellow-haired man stood by it.

“Her surprise!” he said. “I knew it!”

He was hurt, and he was also angry with himself because he could be hurt. So, he had been lying to himself when he had told himself that he felt nothing for her anymore.

She certainly looked beautiful. She was wearing her favorite, the flapper’s garments of the 1920s. She should have been wearing a hat, since this was an afternoon affair, but Terrestrial rules did not hold now. Her bobbed hair shone black and glossy in the sun. The man, judging by Alice’s height, was about six feet four inches tall. He wore the uniform of a Scots chief, kilt, tartan, sporran, and all. As Burton descended, he could make out the black and red checks of the Rob Roy clan on the kilt. The man was a descendant of the famous Scots outlaw, which made him a distant relative of Burton’s. He was broad-shouldered and well-muscled, and his face was handsome but very strong. He smiled on seeing the turbaned and robed Burton, and, like a sword cutting a rope and releasing a drawbridge, the smile opened Burton’s memory. He was Sir Monteith Maglenna, a Scots baronet and laird. Burton had met him in 1872 when Burton spoke in London before the British National Association of Spiritualists. Burton had upset his audience because of his firm declaration that he did not believe in ghosts and would have no use for them if they did exist. The young baronet had talked with him for a while at the party following the lecture. Both had traveled in the American West, and the Scot was, like Burton, an amateur archaeologist. They had spent an interesting halfhour while others, hoping to get a chance to defend spiritualism, fretted by them.

Alice, smiling—was there some malice in it?—introduced Burton and Star Spoon. Burton shook his hand and said, at the same time that Maglenna did, “We’ve met.”

They talked for a few minutes, recalling their old acquaintanceship while the line of people waiting to greet the hostess or be introduced grew longer, and then Burton said, “I say, Alice, how did you know of him?”

“Oh, I met Monty in 1872 when I was twenty years old and he was thirty, at a ball given by the earl of Perth. We danced together quite a few times…”

“Did we ever,” Monteith said.

“… and I saw him several times after that. Then he went off to the States, where he came close to dying, an outlaw shot him, quite accidentally, though, and he did not return until 1880. By then, I was married.”

“I was unable to keep up our correspondence,” Maglenna said. “I did write her about my disability, but my letter never got to her. And so…”

Some androids, at a signal from Alice, picked up the chairs in which Burton and Star Spoon had arrived and carried them across the field to the east end. It would have been quicker and more efficient for them to have flown the chairs to the parking area, but Alice had not had the time or had not wished to take the time to program them to operate the chairs.

Burton listened as Alice told Star Spoon in detail how grief-stricken she had been when she had believed that Maglenna had lost interest in her. Partway through her story, he decided that he had heard more than enough of that. He excused himself and wandered around until Star Spoon rejoined him.

“Did you know about Mr. Maglenna?” she said.

“No!” he said savagely. “She never mentioned him in all the many years that she was with me!”

“It’s very fortunate that they’ve finally been reunited. Just think, if it weren’t for you, they would have never found each other.”

She was smiling as if she were very pleased. Was that because Alice was happy? Or, unhappy creature that she was, did Star Spoon get satisfaction from knowing that he was anything but glad about Maglenna? Some people were so abysmally wretched that their only joy was that others also suffered.

31

They took a ride on the roller coaster, but Star Spoon got sick during the up-and-down-and-arounding and threw up in the seat. The android operating the ride called two others to clean up the mess after Burton had told him to do so.

“You seem even more nervous today,” Burton said.

“It’s all those strange creatures,” she said, waving her hand.

She was not, of course, familiar with the beings with which Carroll had populated the Alice books and which the real Alice had brought to life. They made her uneasy, because she had not been conditioned to them through the books. What made her especially nervous was the Jabberwock, which looked exactly like Tenniel’s illustration. Its scaly body was that of an attenuated dragon, and it had leathery dragon wings, but the exceedingly long and relatively thin neck, and the narrow face, which looked like a very evil old man’s, and the absurdly long toes of the front paws made it like no other dragon in myth, legend, or fictional literature. It was huge, its head reaching to thirteen feet when it stood upright. The Jabberwock, however, did not venture upon the field but prowled around within a confined area under a gigantic oak, its long tail always lashing.

“It frightens me,” Star Spoon said.

“You know that it’s been programmed not to hurt anybody.”

“Yes, I know. But what if something went wrong in it? Look at those terrible teeth. It has only four, two above and two below, but think what those teeth could do if they bit down on you.”

“You need a drink,” he said, and he steered her toward a table. The androids serving there were a Fish-Footman, a Frog-Footman, and a White Rabbit. The former two wore the eighteenth-century garments and white powdered wigs Tenniel had portrayed. The White Rabbit had pink eyes, a stiff white collar, a cravat, a checked coat, and a waistcoat. A gold chain inserted by a stud into a buttonhole in his waistcoat was attached at the other end to a large watch in a pocket of the waistcoat. From time to time, the White Rabbit took the watch out and looked at it.

“Excellent,” Burton said, grinning.

“I don’t like them,” Star Spoon whispered, as if it made any difference if they heard her. “Those huge goggly eyes.”

“The better to see you, my dear.”

He looked up as a shadow passed over him. It had been cast by the chair of de Marbot, who was leading a flight of thirty or more of his friends. He was dressed in a Hussar’s uniform; so were some of his friends. Others wore field marshals’ uniforms, though none had ever attained that rank. Most of the ladies were dressed in the style of the 1810s.

A few minutes later, Aphra and a dozen others arrived. Everybody who had been invited was here, Burton thought. He was wrong, though. Shortly after the last of Behn’s group had left the host and hostess, a motorcycle roared onto the field. Sitting in the front was Bill Williams and clinging to him was the black woman Burton had seen with him in the corridor. Williams wore a black astrakhan hat, very Russian, but his face was painted like a witch doctor’s, his torso was bare except for a necklace of human hand bones, and he wore black leather pants and boots. The woman had come-upped Sophie; she wore nothing except a necklace of huge diamonds and a complex painting of many bright-colored figures, which covered her front and back and her legs.

Burton had not known that Alice had invited Williams. Judging from her expression, she was sorry that she had. However, she smiled as a hostess should and introduced the couple to Maglenna. His eyes were as wide as his grin when he took the woman’s hand. Burton wished that he were near enough to hear their conversation.

Frigate strolled up to Burton and pointed at the late-comers. “Quite a sensation, right. The last shall be first.”

“Quite,” Burton said.

“Sophie doesn’t know if she should be delighted or furious.”

The White Knight rode by on his sorry white nag. His helmet was off, revealing a face that looked exactly like Carroll’s except for the very long drooping white moustache. A scabbard holding a huge straight two-edged sword was attached to a belt, and a big club with a wooden shaft and a knobbed end with spikes was stuck shaft-down in a boot hanging from the saddle. Attached to the back of the armor was a box, upside-down, its lid hanging. This was, in Through the Looking-Glass, supposed to have been the White Knight’s invention, a container for his sandwiches and clothes. But it was upside-down to keep the rain out of the box, and so its contents had fallen out.

Behind him rode the Red Knight on a roan stallion. It was a sinister figure with its crimson armor, horsehead-shaped helmet, and big spiked club.

A Walrus and a Carpenter in its paper hat and leather apron walked by, conversing. Trailing them on thin spindly legs were forty or so oysters, each with long antennae with eyes on the ends projecting from their shells.

“This must have taken Alice a long time to prepare,” Frigate said. “Think of all the details she had to put into the Computer.”

“Oh, look,” Sophie said, pointing at a tree. “Can you believe it? The Cheshire Cat!”

As they walked toward the tree, the cat, which was the size of a large lynx, began to disappear. The tail vanished, then the hindquarters, then the front quarters, then the neck, then the head. Except for a cat’s grin hanging in the air above the branch on which it had sat, it was invisible. They walked underneath it, looking for a mechanism of some sort, but could find none.

“Have to ask Alice how this is done,” Burton said. “Probably, though, she won’t know. The Computer would’ve taken the order and done its scientific magic, no explanations needed.”

The Gryphon and the Mock Turtle walked by conversing. The Gryphon was a lion-sized creature with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The Mock Turtle had the body of a giant tortoise, weighing perhaps six hundred pounds, and the head and back legs of a cow. It crawled slowly but, once, halted, and pushed with its short but immensely powerful front legs, causing it to spring upright. While it teetered on the end of its shell, its bovine legs braced, the hoofs digging into the ground, tears flowing, it sang in a magnificent contralto, “Beautiful soup, so rich and green, Waiting in a hot tureen!”

But when it reached the chorus, beginning with “Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!” it lost its balance and fell heavily on its back, still singing. There was some consternation then until six androids turned it over. After which it resumed crawling and singing.

Star Spoon said, “I think I’ll go sit down for a while, Dick. I’m tired, and these animals”—she nodded at the Gryphon—“look so dangerous. I know they’re not, but…”

“Very well, I’ll check on you later,” Burton said.

He watched her walk to the west end of the field and sit down in a very comfortable chair. A very fat, bald-headed and old-looking android—it had to be Father William—came to her side. It must have asked her if she wanted anything, because she nodded and her mouth moved.

Burton walked around and looked at the Queen of Hearts and the other androids fashioned to simulate the living pack of cards. From the front, they looked exactly like Tenniel’s drawings, but they presented a much thicker profile, about three inches wide, he estimated. The Computer could do only so much in making a reality of fantasy. The things had to have space for muscles and organs and blood. Their faces were painted on the oblong bodies, but, though the painted mouths did not move, voices issued from them.

“Marvelous!” Burton said.

Aphra Behn happened to be standing near him. She said, “Yes, aren’t they? It’s such a childish conceit, however. Not that I disparage Alice for all this. We’ve struggled so hard to get here, endured so many dangers and tribulations, that we’ve relaxed and become children again for a while. We have to play, don’t you think?”

“The playtime, unfortunately, is over,” he said. “What happened to Turpin and Frigate may happen to us.”

He went to a table and ordered a glass of Scotch from one of the living chess pieces, a Castle. He also got a fine Havana panatela. Cigar in one hand, glass in the other, he strolled over to the croquet field. The field was as in the book, ridges and furrows with bent-over card-androids serving as arches, flamingoes as mallets, and rolled up hedgehogs as balls. Since Alice was not cruel or callous, she must have made arrangements in the neural systems of the birds and animals that would prevent them from being hurt.

Turpin seemed to have forgotten his troubles; he was having a good time at croquet.

An hour passed. Burton had two more Scotches. He took rides on the merry-go-round and again on the roller coaster and watched the orchestra for a while. Most of the musicians were Frog- and Fish-Footmen, but the conductor was Bill the Lizard, a giant saurian smoking a cigar and wearing a flat cap. They had been programmed to play any kind of music from waltzes to dixieland to classical. At the moment, they were blasting out a wild barbaric piece that Burton thought must be the rock-and-roll described by Frigate. After listening for a while, he could understand why Frigate had been tempted to erase all of this type of music from the records.

An ugly Duchess and a Queen of Hearts waddled by him.

“Off with their heads! Off with their heads!”

“Beat him until he sneezes!”

Burton went back to the croquet field, played a game, wandered around, stopping to chat with several people, and then watched the Mad Tea Party for a while. The child-android playing Alice was charming; the large dark eyes had the real Alice’s dreaminess. Burton could understand why Mr. Dodgson had fallen in love with the ten-year-old girl.

When the Mad Hatter said, “And ever since that, he won’t do a thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now,” Burton walked away. It was amusing to watch them go through the whole scene once, but the repetition was boring.

Feeling in need of exercise, he played volleyball for a while. The game was fun and vigorous, and he loved to watch Bill Williams’ woman leap into the air to bat a ball back. Then, sweating, he walked to a chair and sat down. A Tweedledee and a Tweedledum asked him what he wanted. He ordered a mint julep. The two grotesquely fat androids went to a table and there had an argument—programmed in, of course—about which one would serve him. While their heated and amusing discussion was going on, he watched the blue caterpillar on a nearby giant mushroom smoking its hookah. In a way, he thought, it was a pity that all these things were to be destroyed. Yet, he could understand why Alice had tired of them.

He watched the dance floor for a while. The orchestra was playing some type of music he did not recognize. Frigate was walking by then, and Burton called him over. “What is that music, and what kind of gyrations are the dancers doing?”

“I don’t know the particular piece,” Frigate said. “It’s from the 1920s, sounds familiar, but I can’t quite place it. The dance is called the Black Bottom.”

“Why do they call it that?”

“I don’t know.”

Alice and Monteith seemed to be enjoying the wild motions. At last she had found a partner to share her love of dancing. Burton had never cared for it. In fact, he had only danced several times in his life, and that had been for the edification of a black African tribal chief.

The fat identical-twin schoolboys, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, walked by him. Neither had a drink on a tray. Burton said, “What…?” and at that moment the music stopped in the middle of a bar. He rose and stared at the stand. The musicians had put aside their instruments and were getting down off the bandstand.

“What’s going on?” Frigate said.

Alice was staring puzzledly at the departing musicians.

“Not planned for,” Burton said. A chill passed over his skin.

The little Frenchman, de Marbot, his blue eyes wide, trotted up to Burton. “Something is wrong,” he said.

Burton turned to take in three hundred and sixty degrees of vision. The androids were hastening to the woods, their pace increasing. All except the Mock Turtle, which had fallen on its back and was bawling and kicking its legs. No, not all were heading for the trees. A number were spreading toward the west end of the field, where the hill began. Among them were the Red and White Knights on their chargers, the Lion and the Unicorn, and the Gryphon. They stopped just before coming to the hill and turned around to face the field.

By then the other androids had disappeared into the shadows under the massive oaks.

Burton glanced at de Marbot’s scabbard and the hilt of the saber sticking from it.

“I daresay you may have to use your snickersnee, Marcelin,” he said. “How many … are all your Hussars armed?”

“Why, yes,” de Marbot said. “We have twelve sabers among us.”

“Tell them to draw them,” Burton said. “Listen, Marcelin, I think we’re going to be attacked. Somebody, I’m sure, has put in an overriding program in the androids. Alice didn’t plan this.”

He glanced around. Star Spoon must have had the same idea. She was running for the roller coaster now. He looked at de Marbot.

“You have the most military experience,” he said. “You’re in command now.”

He turned and began yelling. “Everybody over here! Quick! On the double!”

Some of the crowd came running. Others stood still as if frozen: the rest ambled toward them.

Maglenna, pulling on Alice’s hand, ran up to Burton. “I say, what’s going on?”

“I am not sure.” Burton looked at Alice. “You don’t have the slightest idea?”

She shook her head. “No. Could the Snark be behind this? What can we do about it?”

“That’s up to Marcelin,” Burton said. “But I think we should make for the chairs. You and Monteith can sit on somebody’s lap. We can’t get through them—” he indicated the grim beasts guarding the west edge “—without serious loss.”

De Marbot was talking in rapid French to his friends. But he stopped and looked at the south edge of the field. The androids were coming out from the forest with weapons: spears, swords, maces, morning stars, and daggers.

Burton swiveled to take in the north and east sides of the field. Androids were emerging from the shadows there; all were similarly armed. And those from the east side were hurrying to place themselves between the guests and their flying vehicles.

“Too late,” Burton said.

De Marbot was bawling orders out in Esperanto so that all would understand him. They began to form a ragged square with the Hussars on the eastern side. Burton called to him, “I’m going to get some weapons.”

“Where?” de Marbot said.

“The musical instruments. Some of them can be used as clubs.”

He ran to the bandstand with some men behind him. The androids from the north, those nearest the stand, did not change their pace or utter a sound. If they had run, they could have cut Burton off. But he was able to pick up a saxophone, and the others got guitars, bass fiddles, flutes, French horns, anything that might be wielded as a blunt instrument of warfare.

They ran back to the square, where they were arranged in a ragged fashion by de Marbot. He was quivering with eagerness, his blue eyes bright, his round face split with a smile. “Ah, my darlings!” he cried to his Hussars. “You will show these monsters how the soldiers of Napoleon fought!”

His voice was stilled by a great whistling bellow. All looked at the south side of the field, where the Jabberwock was rearing up on its hind legs, stretching its snaky neck out, its mouth gaping, exposing the four sharp teeth. It did not, however, as Burton had feared it would, charge at once. It dropped to all fours and walked slowly toward them, bellowing.

Burton was on the western side of the square, facing the beasts and the Knights there. At the same time that the Jabberwock had begun advancing, the beasts and the Knights’ horses had begun walking slowly toward the humans.

On all sides of the group, the androids walked toward it in formation, silently.

Suddenly, Burton was aware that Star Spoon was not with them. She had climbed up the side of the roller coaster and was perched near the top of a cross-piece.

It was too late to go after her. Calling to her to come down would only attract the attention of the androids to her. Perhaps they would not notice her. In any event, she was on her own. No. If he could get to a chair, he could fly to her and take her away.

32

“They outnumber us three to one,” Burton said loudly to anyone who would hear. “The big beasts and the Knights make the odds even worse. But try to grab their spears and clubs away from them. If any of them fall, pick up their weapons.”

De Marbot repeated the advice for the whole group. A black woman, one of the Second Chancers, shrilled, “Oh, Lord, what can we do? We can’t shed blood! We’re pacifists, peaceful in your sight, Lord!”

“Damn it, woman!” Burton shouted. “Those things aren’t human! They’re machines! It’s no sin to fight for your life against them!”

“That’s right!” a black man shouted. “It’s no sin! Fight, brothers and sisters! Do battle for the Lord without sin! Tear them apart!”

One group, Burton thought it was the Revised Free Will Baptists, began singing a spiritual. They had not gotten more than a few words out when de Marbot roared for silence.

“If you sing, you can’t hear my orders!”

With the Frenchman leading, the square began trotting toward the chairs. Burton, in the rear, kept glancing backward. The Knights and the beasts had not stepped up their pace. Apparently, they were set to close in on the group at a predetermined rate.

The Jabberwock was near the end of the line of androids, coming in from the south side of the field. The monster was the most dangerous attacker, and it should be opposed by at least six sabermen. Burton swore. If only he had a sword instead of a saxophone in his grip.

The group, the women inside, the men forming a shell around them, trotted toward the ranks of creatures standing before the chairs. There were about two hundred or more there, the thickest concentration of bodies. Whoever had planned this had guessed correctly that the humans would try to get to their vehicles. To attempt the hill so they could get inside the house, they had to attack the big beasts and the Knights, and the aspect of these was so fearsome that the humans would prefer to go the other way.

Suddenly, the people ahead of him screamed. He jumped up so he could get a better look at what was frightening them. He saw that chairs were flying up without riders, and he groaned. Androids hidden behind the defensive lines were sending the chairs up. Even if the humans did fight through, they would have no aerial escape; they would have to keep on going into the forest. And they would be hunted down.

De Marbot understood this at once. He cried out a command to halt. The people, however, kept on moving ahead, pushing and shoving, until de Marbot’s sabermen succeeded in stopping them. Instantly, the Frenchmen raced around the group to the back, which had now become the front.

“We must get through them to the hill and to the house!” de Marbot shouted. “Dick, you take your men to the left flank! The honor of defending us against the Jabberwock is yours!”

Burton hustled his group as ordered. The androids continued to advance slowly and voicelessly. By now, they were within sixty feet of the humans.

De Marbot raised his saber and yelled, “Charge!”

He and his sabermen leaped ahead of the others, who took more time than they should have in attaining any speed. They were undisciplined and scared, and thus some ran faster than others, jostling those ahead, and some, as was inevitable, fell down, and some tripped over these. Burton only had time to glance at the screaming milling crowd and at the Frenchmen closing with the Red and White Knights, the Lion, the Unicorn, a Walrus, the Gryphon, and a Humpty Dumpty. Then the open mouth of the Jabberwock, its four teeth flashing, saliva running from its lower lip, roaring, was shooting at him. Burton threw the saxophone with all his force into its mouth, and the thing closed its jaws automatically on it. Its nose struck Burton on the chest, knocked him backward, and rammed the air from his lungs. He rolled away while trying to regain his wind, and several women fell on top of him.

The saxophone, spat out, landed near his outstretched right hand. He grabbed it. One of the struggling black women on top of him shrieked, and she was lifted up in the Jabberwock’s mouth. The teeth closed through her body; she became limp and silent. With a toss of the head, the monster threw her body away and whipped the snaky neck and head outward and down and seized another screaming woman.

Though he had not yet gotten all of his breath back, Burton heaved the one woman on top of him away, rolled, and ran by the Jabberwock’s giant right front foot. A Tweedledee and a Tweedledum walked steadily toward him, holding long spears, their huge fat faces expressionless. Yelling, Burton ran at them, his saxophone held high.

They were programmed to do only certain things, though these were many. One thing they had not been commanded to do was to avoid the area of the Jabberwock’s lashing tail, something any human would have consciously done. As a result, the two identicals were knocked flat by the enormous scaly tail. No, not just knocked down. The tail had broken some of their bones. They were crumpled on the grass and groaning.

He glanced back and up. The Jabberwock was not aware of his presence; it was engrossed in killing another woman. Burton ran to the rear flank and waited for the tail to lash to his left. As he did so, he glimpsed the head and shoulders of Williams running toward the chair-parking area. Androids were clumsily stabbing at him with spears and hacking at him with swords, but he was zigzagging desperately. Then Burton could give him no more attention; he leaped forward, landed, stooped, and grabbed a spear the fallen Tweedledee or Tweedledum had dropped. He straightened up, whirled, and leaped back into the protection of the monster’s flank. He lifted the spear with both hands and drove it into the heaving side. It sank halfway into the body; blood spurted out and around the shaft. Bellowing deafeningly, the thing reared up on its back legs; the woman in its mouth dropped out.

Burton had turned and run away. The end of the tail came within an inch of hitting him. A green pig charged him, its curling tusks wet and yellow. Burton leaped up and came down on its back but slipped and fell on the grass, bracing against the impact with his hands. One of the card people, a trey of hearts, lay facedown near him, its spindly legs kicking. Burton scrambled up, seized the spear it had been carrying, and thrust upward into the belly of the Mad Hatter, who had just missed him with the edge of a saber. The Hatter reeled backward, its hands by its sides, instead of reacting instinctively, as a human would, by grabbing the shaft. Its face, however, was twisted with agony.

Burton let loose of the spear and picked up the saber it had dropped. Now he did not feel so naked and helpless; now he had a weapon he could use as few could. Immediately a Frog-Footman, a giant owl, and an ugly Duchess attacked him. The bird’s weight, sharp beak, and beating wings made it the most formidable. He slashed half a wing off, cut through the shaft of the Frog-Footman’s spear, severed the head of the owl with a back-slash, parried the ugly Duchess’ spear, and ran her through the belly.

The whole field was a melee now, individuals and clusters battling one another. Many of the humans had grabbed weapons. Though outnumbered, they had one advantage. The androids were neither skilled weapon wielders nor capable of improvised action. They could only thrust straight ahead of them with the spears or hack down with the swords, and their ability to parry was nil. As a result, those humans who were armed were outfighting their opponents, and more and more humans were grabbing weapons. On the other hand, being inferior in number, they could not guard their flanks and sides as well as they would have liked.

The big beasts and the Knights had to be dealt with first. Then, just possibly—it was a fighting chance—the humans could mop up on the lesser creatures.

Burton was free of any immediate attackers for a moment. He looked around swiftly, trying to gauge how the battle was going. He could not find Alice, but Star Spoon was still high up on the roller coaster. She should come down and help them, but he did not blame her for fearing to do so. The field rang with hoarse cries, screams, yells, groans, and roars. The White Knight and the Red Knight were still on their horses, their arms rising and falling as they brought down their spiked clubs on the heads of the humans. The White Knight had not put his helmet on; his gentle face was as placid as if he were discussing the weather.

The Unicorn was dead, its horn stuck through the chest of a Hussar. The man’s saber had not yet been picked up by one of his fellows. The Lion, roaring, was rearing up, a paw ripping off a woman’s breasts and sending her whirling. Its sides and mane, however, were dripping with blood, not all of it its enemies’. Even as Burton watched, a Hussar brought the edge of his saber down with both hands just back of the mane, and the beast fell.

A black woman was riding the back of a Walrus, holding on with one hand and stabbing repeatedly with a dagger. Then the Walrus stood up and fell backward, crushing her. But it was too wounded to do anything but bellow and wave its flippers.

The Jabberwock had three spears in it now but was still ravaging. It bit a man in two as Burton watched.

A pink flamingo leaped at Burton, its wings fluttering, its toes out to grab him. He lopped its head off, whirled, parried a sword thrust by a White Rabbit, stepped in, grabbing the gloved hand of the Rabbit, and jerked it off balance. Before it could regain it, its neck was cut half-through by the saber.

Burton turned to defend himself against a tove, a creature the size of a dog and looking like a combination of badger, lizard, and corkscrew. Its three-foot-long nose handicapped it, because it had to rear up to get the nose out of the way before it could bite. Burton severed the nose and ran at three living cards, a deuce of hearts, a four of diamonds, and a jack of clubs. They were side by side and holding spears, but he was going to attack the one on his left and dispose of him before the others could get behind him. His feet slipped on blood on the grass, and he slid feet first into the legs of the one in the middle. The four of diamonds fell forward, but his wide flat body acted as a plane, and he flew over Burton. The others turned slowly and clumsily. Burton rolled away, holding the saber above him, got to his feet, and cut the two down.

Now the March Hare approached, the shaft of a morning star in his hand. This was a medieval weapon consisting of a two-foot-long wooden stick to which was attached a length of chain to which was attached a large spiked steel ball. Handled properly, it could crush armor. Burton had to retreat before it, meanwhile glancing around to make sure that no one was about to jump on him from behind or on his sides. Then he stepped forward as the spikes just missed him and severed the hand holding the wooden shaft. The March Hare screamed, as it was programmed to do if hurt, but it did not run away as a human might have. It stood there until the loss of blood from the stump caused it to crumple.

Burton saw another Walrus, the last one, go down before a flurry of cuts from three men. Then the White Knight was on these and felled two before Burton had to turn away to defend himself against a Carpenter and a chicken-sized gnat. After putting them away, he attacked a Red Queen from behind, sliced off her crowned head, and whirled just in time to defend himself against the Cheshire Cat. This lynx-sized creature’s enormous head was blood-smeared; evidently, it had done considerable carnage. Yowling, it sprang at him, its dripping paws out, but he brought the saber down against its skull, between the eyes. He was bowled over, but when he got up he saw that the feline was permanently out of action.

Something hit him from behind. Stunned, his sight dimmed, not knowing who he was or where, he fell to his knees. He was easy prey now for whoever had hit him, but a man he did not recognize rushed by him. He heard the thud of weapon on weapon as he fell to all fours and shook his head. Then a hand was helping him up. His senses came back slowly, the back of his head hurting abominably. The man who had rescued him was Monteith Maglenna. He was holding a bloody two-edged sword. His clothes were torn and cut, and blood was welling from a dozen wounds.

“Close call, that,” he said hoarsely.

Burton looked at Bill the Lizard and at the reddened flat cap and the club on the ground beside his body.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

“Good,” Maglenna said. “Have to get that bloody Jabberwock out of the way. Come help when you feel up to it.”

The big blonde man ran off, his sword held high with both hands as if he were holding an ancestral claymore. By now, the Jabberwock was showing signs of internal bleeding from the spear thrusts and other wounds. The blood flowing from its mouth could not all be that from its victims. It was crouching on all fours, its tail still lashing but not as vigorously as before. Its head turned this way and that as it bellowed at the pestiferous men and women surrounding it. These were not, however, coming close to it; they were leaping in and out, slashing at it but not daring to come within reach of the still-dangerous head. Behind those keeping it distracted was a line of people fighting off the androids, guarding the backs of the Jabberwock attackers. They, at least, had some organization.

He turned around, fighting dizziness and nausea. The White Knight and his horse were down, but the Red Knight, aided by some cards, Father William, some Eaglets, two White Rabbits, some toves, and a Carpenter, was bashing heads right and left. Its horse slipped several times on blood but recovered and stumbled once over a pile of bodies. He groaned, heartsick. So many human bodies. And there were many androids still standing. Some were not fighting but were killing the wounded humans. They must have had orders to finish off all those they downed before going on to do more battle.

He caught sight of Alice. She was holding a rapier, and her clothes were crimsoned. She had broken free of the melee and could have fled to her house. Perhaps she had thought of that, since she looked several times longingly up the hill. But she turned away, ran down the slope, and thrust her rapier through a Carpenter’s back.

Star Spoon was climbing down from the roller coaster. Whether she was doing so to join the fray or to run for safety he had no time to find out.

He turned away and walked up to the back of a Dodo that was beheading wounded humans. Under its wings, it had short arms at the ends of which were human hands, just as in Tenniel’s illustration. The shortness of its arms made its sword strokes ineffective, forcing it to hack again and again before it could get its victims’ necks completely cut through. Burton snickersneed its head off just as it was about to deliver a final stroke to a Chinese man.

Burton wondered where Li Po was. No sooner asked than answered. There was the tall Chinese on a big table, fighting off a trio of cards with his rapier. They kept thrusting their spears at him from three sides, but he danced around, leaping to avoid thrusts, kicking with one foot against the shafts, and flicking the rapier point at them. Then Frigate, covered with blood, ran up holding a strange weapon. For a moment, Burton did not know what it was. When it was brought up and down against one of the cards, Burton recognized it. It was the Caterpillar’s hookah. In short order, Frigate had smashed down two of the cards, and Li Po had run the other through twice.

Burton turned again to help those fighting the Jabberwock. Maglenna was running straight at it, his sword held high.

With his vorpal blade, Burton thought.

A dozen men and women were still harassing the monster; a dozen were protecting the attackers’ backs. While Maglenna was running, the rear guard was cut down to six, and some androids immediately launched themselves at the other humans after dispatching the wounded. These caught four of the Jabberwock attackers from behind, and the rest of the humans were caught between the great beast and the other androids. Maglenna ignored all of them. He leaped from a body just as the Jabberwock dipped its head to close its jaws around the head of a man. Burton could hear the Scot’s war cry from across the field. Maglenna was going to sever that thick neck, no doubt about it. Unfortunately, the corpse he used as a launching platform turned a little under his foot, and the tip of his blade only nicked the scaly neck. He fell flat on his face, his blade flying from his hand at the impact. He was up quickly, looking for his weapon, but the Jabberwock opened its mouth and dropped the lifeless body on top of Maglenna. He pushed it aside and stood up. The gigantic jaws seized his head and shoulders, and his writhing body was lifted up. It came down minus head and shoulders, which were spit out a moment later.

He could hear Alice’s scream through all the noise; he knew it from long experience. Turning, he saw her standing horrified, the back of her hand over her mouth, her eyes huge dark holes.

He also saw the Red Knight on his galloping horse, charging toward him, the spike-knobbed club held high. The crimson armor and the horse-head-shaped helmet were a terrible sight. The beat of the horse’s hooves was like the roll of a drum just before the gallows trapdoor was dropped.

Burton shifted the saber to his left hand, stopped, picked up a spear, and braced himself for the throw. His target was not the Red Knight but its charger. When the armored thing was thirty feet away, he cast the spear, and its sharp broad head plunged into the horse’s shoulder. It fell forward, turning over. Its rider flew through the air and landed with a crash of steel upon the grass. Burton took the saber in his right hand and ran to the horse, which was starting to get up, and he slashed its jugular. It, too, had been programmed to kill; it had bitten and kicked while its rider was swinging its club; it had to be made harmless first.

The Knight lay prone and motionless. Burton turned the heavy body over and undid the helmet fastenings. He had to make sure that the thing was dead, not just unconscious. Seeing the face, he recoiled with shock. It was his face.

“One of Alice’s jokes,” he said.

He rose, looked at the dead features, and thought of how strange it was to see himself as a corpse. He gazed over the field between him and the foot of the hill. There were bodies everywhere, some in heaps. The only one standing in that direction was Alice, who was just pulling her rapier from a Humpty Dumpty. Her tears were washing the blood from her face.

Then he saw Star Spoon running down the hill with a beamer in each hand. She had fled, but only to get weapons from the house that would assure their victory, though she might be the only one left alive.

He turned. There were ten androids on their feet, not counting the Jabberwock. Three humans were still fighting, Li Po, a black man, and a white woman, one of Aphra Behn’s friends. The woman went down under a rain of swordstrokes as he watched.

The Jabberwock, breathing in short unsteady gasps, waddled toward the cluster of battlers. It turned when it got near, and its tail whipped out, catching three androids and the black man. Li Po rapiered the White Queen in front of him and ran for the parking area. There were still three chairs there.

Frigate came from somewhere and also headed toward the chairs. The remaining androids hacked at the fallen black man before pursuing the two men.

The Jabberwock swung its head from left to right, saw Burton, and lumbered toward him.

The field was comparatively quiet now, but, suddenly, Burton heard a motor turning over. That was followed by a series of explosions, and Bill Williams, bloody but grinning, rode his cycle from behind the little house with the chimneys like rabbit’s ears and the fur-covered roof. Burton did not know what he had been doing there or how he had gotten his cycle there. Perhaps he had pushed it there during the fray, intending to get away at an opportune moment. Perhaps, and this was more likely, he was just waiting for a chance to use it. Or he might have gotten the machine hidden and then fainted from his wounds. Recovering, he had followed his original plan. Whatever had happened, and Burton was never to know, the fellow was now doing what only he could have thought of.

As the monster advanced toward Burton, not turning its head to find the source of the new noise, Williams speeded up the machine. Dodging around the bodies, sometimes driving over an outstretched arm or leg, Williams sped straight at the side of the Jabberwock, and he smashed his motorcycle into its ribs.

So great was the impact, the Jabberwock was moved a few inches to one side. Williams flew headlong over its back and slammed into the ground. The monster raised its head as high as the neck could reach, gave a great bawling cry, and died.

Burton ran to Williams and turned him over. He was dead, his face smashed and his neck broken.

Though doomed, the androids advanced toward Burton as programmed. They never reached him. Frigate’s and Li Po’s chairs smashed into them and knocked them down again and again until they could no longer get up. Then the two men got out of the chairs and finished their work.

Burton heard a gasp behind him. Turning, he saw that Star Spoon had slipped and fallen on her face. She had let the beamers loose to soften the fall with her hands. He walked up to her and picked her up. Sobbing, she went into his arms.

Except for the weeping of Alice, Star Spoon, and Frigate, the field was silent. Only he, those three, and Li Po had survived. No. The Blue Caterpillar was sitting on the giant mushroom, and the rocking-horse-fly, a creature too fragile to have been programmed to kill, was alive. They did not, however, count.

He felt more weary, more emptied, than he had ever felt in his long life. He was in shock, numb, the world around him seeming alien and drifting way.

“Who could have done this horrible thing?” Alice wailed.

Who, indeed?

At that moment, William Gull groaned and sat up from the dead.

33

Though covered with blood, the Englishman was uninjured except for a bump on the back of his head.

“I was knocked out, and some of those killed fell on top of me. The androids did not see me.”

He gingerly touched his head and grimaced.

“You were very fortunate,” Burton said dully. “I think you were the only one who went down who escaped beheading.”

Why did Gull have the good luck? Why couldn’t Nur or de Marbot or Behn have been spared?

No, that did not matter, he told himself. They can be resurrected.

And then he knew that the murderer would have insured that they would stay dead. Why bother to kill them if they could be brought back? It made no sense.

He would have to find out about that. Just now, they must recover from their exhaustion and shock. Then the dead must be converted into ashes; the horrible mess cleaned up.

“Let’s go to the house,” he said. “There’s nothing to be gained by staying here.”

First, though, he must take precautions to guard himself and the others. He picked up the two beamers and said, “Star Spoon, were there any androids in the house when you got these?”

“I didn’t see any,” she said. Her voice was as empty of expression as her face.

“We’ll have to do everything for ourselves,” he said. “We can’t trust the androids.”

He stopped walking. The beamers seemed rather light. He opened the bottom of the beamer butts and looked into the receptacles for the powerpacks. He swore. They were empty.

He showed them to Star Spoon and said, “These would have been useless.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was too excited to notice.”

She shuddered. “It’s a good thing I didn’t have to use them.”

“Yes. But whoever did this is very clever. Only…”

They were trudging up the hill, every step forward seeming to be in a thick and heavy substance, as if they were walking at the bottom of a treacle well.

“What?” she said.

“Why didn’t the killer have the androids take the beamers from the house and kill us with them? It would have been very easy. We wouldn’t have had a chance.”

Li Po had been listening in. He said, “Perhaps the killer likes the sight of blood. Or it may be that he wanted us to suffer or to think that we might survive. As it turned out…”

“He won’t stop,” Burton said.

“He failed,” the Chinese said. “All we have to do is raise our friends, and he will be…”

His mouth fell open. “Ah! What if he has inhibited their resurrection?”

“Exactly,” Burton said. “Well, we’ll soon find out.’

Frigate caught up with them. He looked behind, and Burton turned to see what he was staring at. Gull was far behind them, moving slowly up the slope.

“I could be overly suspicious,” the American said, “but don’t you think it’s funny that he wasn’t killed after he fell? I have no evidence for my suspicions, but, after all, he was Jack the Ripper. Maybe he played it safe, programmed the androids to spare him. He might even have fixed it so that one would knock him out or tap him lightly on the head if it looked as if we’d win. I hate to say these things, but we can’t take any chances now.”

“I’ve thought of the same thing,” Burton said. “However, his story could be true.”

They walked the rest of the way in silence. The sky was still blue, and the sun was about where it would be at six o’clock. He thought of what the Mad Hatter had said. “It’s always six o’clock here.”

The birds were singing again in the woods, and an angry squirrel was scolding something, probably one of Alice’s cats. The wild animals must have been frightened into silence by the uproar, but now that that had ceased, they had resumed normal life. All the noise and the babel meant nothing to them after they had passed. Those innocent creatures lived only in the present; the past was forgotten.

He envied them their innocence and unawareness of time.

They paused to catch their breaths in the large and beautiful garden of flowers at the top of the hill. Burton scanned the sky, wondering if the chairs were pressing against the blue wall somewhere out there. They would keep doing that until their power supply weakened, and then they would settle down slowly into the trees.

They entered the huge empty house—he hoped it was empty—and they searched every room, their weapons ready. Satisfied that no one, human or android, was hiding in ambush, they showered. After putting on new clean clothes, simple robes, they met in the large library. By then the antishock pills given by the Computer were doing their work. They were still very tired and dispirited, however. The drinks did not seem to help much. Nor was anybody hungry.

“Well, there’s no use putting it off,” Burton said, and he seated himself in front of the computer console. Though he dreaded to ask the question, he did so. And what he did not want to hear was what the Computer, through the computer, told him.

The dead, Nur, Turpin, Sophie, de Marbot, Aphra, all the slain, could not be raised. Someone had inhibited the raising, and the Computer would not say who that person was.

“Oh, my God!” Alice said, and she moaned. “I had Monty for six days, and now he’s gone forever!”

“I wouldn’t say forever,” Burton said. “We’ll find a way to cancel the overrides. Someday.”

“We should warn the others,” Alice said.

“The others?” Burton said. “Oh, you mean those in Turpinville. And Netley and his people and the gypsies.”

“Tell the gypsies,” Frigate said. “Never mind those who threw Tom and me out of our places. They don’t deserve to be warned. What they do deserve … well…”

“I understand your feelings,” Burton said, “but, in a way, they’re our allies. The Snark or whoever the killer is won’t be attacking just us.”

“How do you know that?” Frigate said.

“I don’t know that, but we must warn them.”

He tried Turpinville first. Though the screen was activated, there was no reply, and they could see only a dim diffuse dark amber light.

Burton was about to try Netley when Li Po said, “Wait! I thought I saw something!”

“What is it?” Burton said, squinting his eyes—as if that would help.

“Something dark. Moving,” Li Po said.

The others crowded around the console. They, too, squinted.

“I don’t see anything,” Burton said.

“You don’t have my eagle eyes,” Li Po said. He pointed. “There! Can’t you see it? It’s dark, and it’s moving, though very slowly. Wait.”

Presently, Burton could see a dark vague bulk. It swelled almost imperceptibly, taking a near-unendurable time to float nearer. Minutes passed, and then the outlines became more distinct. Alice gasped and said, “It’s a man!”

Burton asked the Computer to make the area brighter if it could. The fluid—it had to be a fluid since the man was floating in it—was illuminated a little. More minutes passed, and then they could see the face of a black man, eyes staring and mouth open.

“I don’t know what’s happened,” Burton said, “but something horrible has. The screen for receiving messages from outside Turpin’s world is in the room next to Turpin’s office. Obviously, it’s filled with water or some kind of liquid.”

“That can’t be!” Star Spoon said.

“Oh, yes, it can. The Computer can do almost anything.”

“Try Netley’s,” Frigate said.

Burton did so. This time, the screen showed them a clearer fluid. They could not see very far into it, but they could distinguish a shadowy bulk that looked like a sofa. Near it was a small dark object too fuzzy to be identified. But it was floating. It could be a plastic bottle of some sort, partly full, perhaps, and buoyed by the air in it.

“Definitely another flood,” Burton said.

“Ask the Computer if it knows what happened,” Frigate said.

Burton glared at him. “Don’t be a stupid ass. Whoever did this would command the Computer not to tell us anything.”

“You don’t know. Maybe the Snark doesn’t care. Maybe he’d like us to know. Anyway, if he thought that we’d all be dead, no one around to question it, why conceal anything?”

“Anything is possible. Sorry about the remark.”

Burton asked the Computer if it had made recordings of the recent events in Turpinville and Frigate’s world. It replied that it had. Burton then ordered it to run off the pictures of Turpinville, starting from the moment that the liquid had poured into that world.

They had thought that the only video-audio transmissions inside the worlds were made through the computer sets inside the private worlds, these being connected through cables to the floors of the worlds. But the Snark, the unknown, had found a way to break this communication and video-audio barrier. Selected areas of the world’s wall had been made into screens, and Burton and his companions saw the deluge as a flying bird would see it. They watched as the waters of the fountains and the river and the marshes and lake were replaced by the amber liquid. Which, the Computer told them in answer to Burton’s question, was bourbon.

“Bourbon?” Burton said, and he asked the Computer to repeat the statement.

It was bourbon.

The inlets for the various water sources had poured in the liquor under great pressure. The fountains had soared up until they almost touched the top of the Brobdingnagian chamber, and the river and lakes and marshes had spewed forth the swift raging floor of whiskey.

“No doubt, it was the best bourbon,” Burton muttered.

The citizens of Turpinville had been panicked, but, after a few minutes, they had taken every means of transportation to the exit. They had fought each other for the hundred available flying chairs, hitting, knifing, and shooting. Those left behind had fought for the automobiles, motorcycles, and horses and buggies. They had jammed into the railroad train and climbed on top of the cars. Those in the chairs had gotten swiftly to the exit, only to find that they could not open the door. The people on foot and in the ground vehicles were drowned before they reached the exit.

If they had not panicked, they could have made flying chairs in the e-m converters and flown to the exit. Where they would have discovered that their efforts were in vain.

Though the liquor poured out swiftly, it had an enormous volume to fill, and the surface of the fluid body was only one-fourth of the way up the walls. The people in the chairs had taken them to the ceiling, but they had been overcome by the fumes or died from lack of oxygen. Some of them might still be alive; they would not last long. Though the flood had ceased to rise, it did not have to do so to complete its work.

“What a way to die!” Burton said.

He looked at the pale set faces. “I suppose we might as well try Netley’s world.”

The same thing had happened there, except that the liquor was gin. The best, of course.

Burton anticipated that those who had died in both worlds would be denied resurrection by the Computer, and he was right.

The gypsies had been traveling in a corridor leading to the well of the wathans—perhaps they meant to sightsee it—when a big wheeled robot had come upon them and pierced them with beamer rays. Ten minutes later, robots had cleaned up the blood and carried the bodies off to be turned to ashes in converters.

“That leaves six of us alive,” Burton said. “Seven if the Snark is counted. But…”

“But what?” Alice said after a long silence.

He did not reply. He was thinking that the killer could have done away with them much more easily if he—or she—had flooded Alice’s world. Why the different means? Was it for grisly amusement, using the exotic androids against them, the charming creatures of two fantasy books for children suddenly turned into bloodthirsty monsters?

It seemed more probable that the killer had made an exception in Alice’s world because he or she had been one of the guests. And that guest had perhaps wished to see that his or her enemies, people he or she must have hated deeply, would be slain most bloodily.

And that guest had made arrangements by programming the androids to spare him or her.

He knew Alice, Peter Frigate, and Li Po too well to suspect them. That left only two. William Gull, who claimed to be a changed and deeply religious man, but had once murdered five women. And Star Spoon, who, however, had no motive—as far as he knew.

Yet Gull had not been in the tower long enough to learn how to operate the Computer with the skill, no, the ingenuity, that the killer needed.

Star Spoon had been studying the Computer long and hard, but would she have been able in such a relatively short time to gain knowledge that those who had been using the Computer much longer than she did not have?

It could be that there was a second Snark.

If so, then the six were at his mercy.

Still, it was possible that one of the six had probed deeply into the Computer’s potentialities and learned how to carry out the slaughters.

Why would any of them wish to do so?

He got up from the console chair and said, “We have to run off the memories of everyone for the past six weeks.”

“I’m too tired for that just now,” Frigate said. Alice, Gull, and Star Spoon also protested that they were exhausted.

“Let’s do it tomorrow after we get rested,” Alice said.

“Anyway, it’s a waste of time,” Star Spoon said. “You know that anyone who has done all that,” she waved her hand, “will have set up false memories.”

“Yes, I know. But we have to do it.”

They sat around for an hour, their brief and dull sentences floating between long gloomy silences. Frigate finally said that he thought that he could get some food down. The others agreed to try it, and they ate more than they had expected to. They also drank much and became more animated, even if not carefree. Burton spoke then of something that had occupied his thoughts ever since he had entered the house.

“Our enemy closed the exit on the Turpinites and Netleyites. He should be able to do the same for this place. Since he failed to kill all of us with the androids, he may use the very successful method of drowning us. It might be best if we left here and moved into a suite.”

They talked about that at some length. Finally, Alice, at Burton’s suggestion, ordered that the door to the central area be opened. The screen showed them that it was operating.

“But that does not mean that the Snark cannot close it on us when he wishes,” Burton said.

“Then let’s get out,” Frigate said. “The trouble is … what’s to prevent the Snark from closing the suite door?”

“I don’t know,” Burton said. “At least, he can’t drown us.”

They had the e-m converter make chairs for them, and they flew out over the darkened world and under the simulated full moon. Nobody said a word about the bodies on the field. They would not have time to dispose of them; the crows, eagles, and hawks would strip them of their flesh. By the time they returned, if they ever did, they would deal with bones only.

After another nightcap, they went to separate bedrooms in the suite, except for Burton and Star Spoon. She crawled into bed at once, said, “Good night, Dick,” and was asleep. He followed her a few minutes later, and, against his expectation, passed into sleep at once. He awoke four hours later, his lifelong insomnia clutching him like the Old Man of the Sea. The woman was on her side, facing away from him, and snoring softly. He got out of bed, put on a robe, went to the main room and got a big cup of coffee. After that had removed some of his weariness, he set to work at the computer console. Five hours later, he had put into the Computer every injunction and override he could think of to protect all in his suite. He was sure, however, that there were others. He would ask his companions to add to the list.

“I should have done that long long ago,” he told himself.

He decided that he would not wait until his fellow tenants got up for breakfast. As tired as they were, they might sleep until noon. He began scanning the corridors because, at that moment, he could think of nothing else to do. He started from the top of the tower with the hangar, worked the first level and then the second. That was quick because a glance showed that the circular area was empty, and there was no life except animal in the little worlds.

The scan moved into Level 60 and raced up and down the corridors and into the rooms along them. It came to a corridor the inner wall of which formed a side of the wathan well. Here, he knew, was where an observer could see the surface of the mass of wathans.

He cried out, “Stop!”

He stared at the curving transparent wall of the shaft.

The beautiful, bright, many-colored, swelling, shrinking, and whirling entities called wathans were gone. The well was empty and dark.

34

Peter Frigate was the first to enter the room. He stopped, and he looked at Burton, at the beamer on the table, and at the half-opened door to the corridor. “What’s going on?”

Li Po came in just as Burton opened his mouth to answer Frigate. Burton said, “Have some coffee first, Pete.”

“How are you, Dick?” the Chinese said.

“I’ve been up most of the night. Working.”

Li Po also glanced at the weapon and the door. He raised his eyebrows but did not comment. Frigate, after pouring out coffee from a pot on the table said, “You look awful. The dark circles around your eyes … you look like a debauched raccoon. What’ve you been doing?”

“I feel more than awful,” Burton said slowly. “I feel … how would you feel if you knew that the end of the world was near? Or perhaps I should say that the world has ended—for all practical purposes.”

Frigate drank the whole cup of very hot coffee without flinching. He said, “The end of the world happens every second.”

Burton did not know what he meant and did not think it worthwhile to find out. In any event, Frigate’s words were just a means for putting off the bad news.

Li Po took a sip of coffee and said, “What do you mean?”

“Perhaps I should wait until everybody’s here. I don’t like to repeat.”

“Sure you don’t,” Frigate said. “Let’s hear it.”

Burton told them that the wathan enclosure was empty.

Li Po and Frigate paled but said nothing.

“I checked the body-records then,” Burton said. “I had to force myself to do it because I didn’t want to know what had been done to them, although, of course, I already knew. But it needed doing, and so I did it.”

“And they … they…” Frigate said, choking.

“They had all been erased. All thirty-five billion six hundred and forty-six million plus. No exceptions. All. And no wathans have come in since I made the discovery.”

Li Po sat down. “I’ve had too many shocks lately.”

After a long time, Frigate said, “So … when we die, we die for the last time.”

“Quite.”

After another long silence—only a supercatastrophe could have kept Li Po’s mouth shut so long, Burton thought—Frigate poured brandy into a half-full cup of coffee and downed all of the steaming liquid. Li Po looked as if he would like to do the same, half-rose, shook his head, and sank back into the chair. This was the first time Burton had ever seen him reject a drink.

The brandy had restored some of the American’s color. He drank more, straight this time, and said, “The Snark has overridden that automatic function … I mean, no bodies will be recorded from now on?”

“Right.”

“But if we can survive until the Gardenworlders get here, we can be recorded again. Otherwise, we, too, will lose our chance for immortality forever.”

“Of course,” Burton said. “But when they get here, our time will be up anyway. If we’re not ready to Go On, our records will be erased. And if we’re not, we’ll be erased.”

He got up and poured himself more coffee, looked at the brandy bottle, and decided against it. “I immediately asked the Computer about that. I was shocked, of course, and I cursed myself, railed against the fates, if you must know, because as soon as we got here from Alice’s, I commanded the Computer to refuse to erase any body-records. I was forestalling that. But I was too late. I did not know that then because the Computer, the idiot, did not tell me that my command was too late. It should have, but the Snark had told it not to display that data unless it was asked for it.”

“We’ve all been just drifting along, doing things too late,” Frigate said in a dull tone. “Sometimes … I wonder if the Snark has had the Computer broadcast some sort of neural suppressant field, something dampening our intelligence?”

“I doubt it. We’ve just been playing with our toys … like children. However”—Burton lifted a napkin and revealed a yellow ball the size of a cranberry—“I’ve been busy while you were sleeping. This is the sphere that records a body. I had the Computer duplicate one for me. It’s empty now, but I wanted to see one. And holding it in my hand enabled me to postulate something … a theory, but the only explanation I could come up with that was reasonable. That is, how could the Snark get into Alice’s world, into Turpin’s and yours … Netley’s … and there arrange for operations that just could not be done from outside those worlds?”

Alice entered a minute later. Burton had to repeat his story and to wait for her to recover enough before he could continue.

“First, though, I don’t think that the Snark did it. I mean I don’t think that there’s an Ethical hiding in the tower. Nur eliminated her, though we cannot, of course, ever be sure. But the murders in the little worlds were done by one of us. By one of the survivors.”

Li Po shot up from his chair, and, quivering, said, “Gull! Or Star Spoon! But why?”

Burton nodded. “Gull may have reverted, but he would have to have gone mad to do that. Star Spoon? She would have to be insane. If either is, he or she has concealed it well. First, let me tell the rest of my theory.”

“First … pardon the interruption,” Frigate said, “we have to consider that it may be neither Gull nor Star Spoon. What if somebody we haven’t even seen is the killer? After all, Williams raised Gull and the others involved in the Ripper killings. And there are the gypsies. We don’t know who raised them, but I suspect Williams did it just as a joke or just to bug us. Or maybe somebody else did. Anyway, what if someone raised a person who was destructively insane, to put it mildly, and that person is our second Snark?”

“I asked the Computer to scan the tower for other people. It reported that it could find none. I asked for a rundown of all those who’d been raised, and the number corresponds exactly with my calculations. Still, the Computer could be reporting only what it’s been told to report.”

Frigate threw his hands up. “Nothing’s certain!”

“It never has been. However, I think that we don’t have to consider a third party or parties.”

He held up the yellow sphere. “Here is how I think he … or she … did it.”

The killer had ordered a number of his body-recordings made in an e-m converter.

“Nobody had inhibited this action until I told the Computer not to allow that, but I was too late. The deed was done.”

The Snark, Snark the Second, as it were, had been given an opportunity to enter the worlds of Turpin, Frigate, and Alice. Perhaps all the worlds and some apartment suites, too.

“There the Snark put the recording-spheres in converters that were out of the way, seldom if ever used. And the Snark also concealed them in other places for easy access and probably carried them around in his clothing.”

The Snark then killed himself in the privacy of an unused apartment. By prearrangement with the Computer, the Snark was resurrected in a converter inside a world.

“The converter in which the Snark died would then disintegrate the body. The Snark did not want anybody finding it, though that possibility was remote.”

Once inside Alice’s world, Snark II did what had to be done. The androids were verbally programmed when they were out of sight of Alice and Maglenna or perhaps they were programmed before Maglenna showed. Since the Snark had to be furtive about the process, it undoubtedly took weeks to complete it.

The flooding of the two worlds, though, was ordered from the outside.

“The Ethicals thought that they were one hundred per cent safe when they were in their private worlds. Of course, they were not nearly as security-conscious as we since they believed the tower to be an impregnable fortress. They knew that one of them was a traitor, but they still could not conceive that he would actually personally endanger them.

“But an ingenious person could flood the little worlds by ordering the liquid supply to pour into it until it was completely filled or its inhabitants had been drowned.”

“That may be true,” Alice said, “but how could the Snark shut the doors to the worlds? And how could he see what was going on in the worlds when the flooding began? The Computer had commands to open the door only to authorized codewords, and it would not transmit pictures or any communications except as ordered by the tenants. No one could override those.”

“But they could be bypassed by various means. The Snark made cameras in the worlds he had gotten into via the recording-spheres, flew the cameras to the ceilings, probably at night, and attached them there. You see, the Computer had orders not to transmit wave frequencies through the circuits of the walls except through certain channels, but the Computer interpreted those orders literally. It did have orders to transmit the frequencies through the wall circuits to the converters and the computer auxiliary and communication devices. It did not distinguish between those computers installed and authorized by the Ethicals and any installed later. It would assume that the additions were authorized.”

“But the doors?” Alice said.

“The Snark sealed the exterior of the door with a substance that hardened and so resisted the operating mechanisms of the doors, which open outward.”

That meant that the Snark had sealed the doors while Alice’s party was going on. The Snark had killed himself or herself, had been resurrected in an apartment, and then had flown in a chair to the central area and applied the substance to the exit doors of two of the worlds. Then the Snark had ordered the liquid supply to convert to bourbon and gin and started the deluging. After which, the Snark had committed suicide, been resurrected in an apartment, and returned to Alice’s place as a guest. There the Snark had waited until the androids had started their predetermined attack. During the battle, the Snark had made sure that he was not harmed by the androids. His or her plans had not been completely successfully, but the Snark was not dismayed. There would be other opportunities.

Li Po said, “Ah! Only those at the party could be suspects! So … Gull or Star Spoon!”

“Not necessarily,” Frigate said. “The Snark could be someone else, if that someone had had an opportunity to get into the worlds. It would have to be one of those raised, someone we know or ought to know. It could be many people. After all, we haven’t seen all the bodies in Turpin’s or Netley’s … my … world. We should find out if anyone is missing from there.”

“First, we put Gull and Star Spoon through the grinder,” Burton said.

If one of them was so infernally clever, he thought, wouldn’t he or she have anticipated that one of the others might be Sherlock Holmes enough to narrow the suspects to two?

If that was so, the Snark would know that his or her identity would soon be revealed.

Li Po, as if he had been reading Burton’s thoughts said, “That accounts for the beamer on the table? You’ll be ready for the Snark?”

“Yes. If one of them walks through the doorway with a weapon in hand, I won’t be caught surprised.”

“It seems to me,” Alice said, “that they … one of them … could kill himself … or herself … and be resurrected elsewhere. What’s to keep the Snark from coming through there?” She pointed at the open door to the corridor.

“Ah, that,” Burton said. “Well, you see, I copied the killer’s modus operandi. Very early this morning, I sealed Gull’s and Star Spoon’s doors.”

Burton did not have to tell them what would happen. The guilty one would be unable to get out, and it would not be long before he or she knew why. The only escape was the route the Snark had often taken. Commit suicide and be resurrected elsewhere.

“What if the Snark pretends innocence and asks us to let him out?” Frigate said.

“We won’t let either out. Sooner or later, the Snark will leave.”

The immediate excitement had lifted them from the shock of finding out that the wathans were gone and the records erased. They were not concentrating on the numbing realization that they would be dead forever the next time they died. Or that those still alive in The Valley would not be raised again after they had died. Or that all that they had suffered to get here had been in vain.

No, he thought. It was not in vain, not wasted time. We have lived far longer than we thought we would when we died on Earth. Our youthful bodies were restored, and we fought and loved with the full vigor of youth and perfect health. We lived fiercely, we were active, and we worked hard for a goal. It has been worthwhile. And if we can live until the Gardenworlders come, we … no. This phase of the project will be over, and we must die to make room for the resurrected in the next.

He would worry about that when the time came. Just now, the only thing to consider was the Snark.

“There’s the screen,” Frigate said. Burton got up and walked to the console in the corner. Gull looked out from the display. Seeing Burton, he said, “Good morning. I don’t know what the matter is, but the door won’t open for me.”

“That’s strange,” Burton said. “Have you asked the Computer why?”

“Of course, but it says that it does not know.”

“We’ll see what we can do about it,” Burton said. “Meanwhile, you don’t have to starve. Get yourself breakfast, and we’ll investigate.”

When the screen had become blank, Burton asked that the screen in his bedroom be activated. It showed the room at once—Burton had not been sure that it would not have been cut off—and he saw that the bed was unoccupied. Star Spoon was not in sight, but she could be in the bathroom. He verified that his voice could be transmitted, and he called her loudly. Though he repeated her name several times, he was not answered.

“She’s gone.”

Frigate said, “Where’s her body?”

“I don’t know,” Burton said. “We’ll have to find out.”

They went down the bedroom hall, all armed with beamers. Burton and Li Po used them to burn the sealing agent off. Since the smoke had an acrid odor, which made them cough, they had to slow down the burning to give the air-conditioning time to suck the smoke away. When the last of the glossy violet substance was gone, Burton gave the codeword, and the door swung open. Cautiously, he entered first, the beamer ready. The bedroom and bathroom were empty.

“She must have killed herself by stepping into the converter cabinet and having it incinerate her,” Frigate said.

“That would make her disappearance more mysterious,” Burton said. “I wonder where she could be.”

Alice said, “You don’t seem surprised, Dick.”

“No. I didn’t think that Gull had had time to learn how to operate the Computer well enough to do all the Snark has done.”

“For God’s sake!” Frigate said. “Why would she do that? What did she have against us? She must hate us! Everybody! Why?”

“I think,” Li Po said, “that she has always been very sad behind that merry face she put on. She has had a bad life, many bad times, anyway, so many that she thinks of her life as all bad, too horrible to endure any longer. She has suffered so much, been raped and abused so much, and the attack by Dunaway was just too much. I think—I could be wrong, though I doubt it—that she decided that we would all be better off dead. She’d be better off dead. Everybody would be. She told me more than once that she was sorry that we had been resurrected, that it was horrible that no one could take refuge even in death. Did she ever say anything like that to you, Dick?”

“Several times.”

“There has to be more than that to it,” Frigate said. “If she wanted to be dead forever, all she had to do was erase her own recordings.”

“She’s not sane,” Burton said. “She may have it in her mind that she’s doing everybody a favor by making sure that they don’t have to suffer as she did. Also, I suppose, she wishes to insure that those who made others suffer could no longer do that.”

He was appalled, more shaken by her deeds than by anything he had ever experienced. But he did not hate her. Though she had committed the greatest sin in the world, the irrevocable and unforgivable sin, he could not hate that demented sufferer. He pitied her. Grieved for her, in fact. But he would have to kill her. No one would be safe until she was dead, and he would be doing her the greatest kindness by putting her out of her wretchedness.

He was sure that she planned to end herself eventually but not until after everyone left in the tower was dead. She would, he supposed, have liked to dispose of all in The Valley, too, but that she could not do. She would have to be satisfied knowing that they would finally pass away.

35

“Nonsense!”

“What?” Alice said.

“We don’t have the slightest idea of what’s really going on in that twisted mind. It doesn’t matter if we do or don’t. What does is that she must be stopped.”

A loud pinging began. Burton started, though he had been expecting the noise, and he went to the console. The screen was displaying a diagram of a tower level section and a tiny but bright orange light was moving along one of the corridors. In the corner of the screen was: LEVEL 4, CORRIDOR 10.

The others had crowded behind him. Frigate said, “What now?”

“She must have just left the room in which she was resurrected,” Burton said. “The room would have been painted, of course, so that her past-display would not be visible to her, and I suppose that the Computer shows it only when it can be seen by the subject. What I did, I told the Computer to show me where her past-display is. Star Spoon has undoubtedly commanded the Computer not to reveal her presence by allowing us to scan the halls near where she is. But one thing she cannot do is to prevent the past-display from accompanying her as soon as she leaves her room.”

“She’s intelligent,” Li Po said. “She’ll soon realize that you may be tracking her through the display. What we can do, she can do. She’ll ask the Computer to show her our displays.”

“Yes,” Burton said, “but the thing about the Computer is that whoever gets ahead of the other with his command can forestall the other. I told it not to show her where ours are.”

“She’ll know that when the Computer doesn’t show them to her,” Li Po said. “That’ll make her very cautious.”

“She would be anyway,” Burton said. “Pete, go burn off Gull’s sealant. Tell him what’s happened, give him a beamer. We need everyone we can get.”

Frigate looked reluctant to leave, but he did so at once.

“We can’t stay in this place,” Burton said. “She can’t seal up the door as long as it’s open, but she could set up something—a robot machine that would automatically beam us the moment we stuck our heads through the doorway, for instance—so we won’t stay here.”

The orange light had stopped at a shaft, VC-A3-2.

“That leads up our corridor,” Burton said. “We haven’t much time.”

He got up from the console chair and went through the doorway leading to the bedroom corridor. Frigate had just finished melting off the sealant and was waiting for the smoke to clear away. The door to Gull’s room had swung open. Burton shouted, “Tell him to hold his breath and get right out here!”

The others went to their bedrooms and got their weapons and extra powerpacks. Burton watched the screen while the others were busy. When they were all in the main room, he told them what they must do. Gull was confused and did not know all that had happened, since Frigate had only had time to give him a few facts. Nevertheless, he nodded when Burton rapid-fired instructions at him, and he ran off.

All left the apartment then, and Burton had the Computer close the door. The apartment was halfway on the corridor between two lift shafts. Star Spoon was by the fourth-floor entrance to the shaft to their right as they left their place. They sped down the corridor toward the shaft, Alice dropping behind them to enter an apartment on the right side. She would station herself in the darkened area by the door, which would be left half-open. From there she could cover the shaft entrance, about four hundred and fifty feet away.

The four men separated when they came to the cross-corridor. The lift shaft was in the center of the cross-corridor, and there were deep bays at each corner to permit traffic of big machines. The shaft could be entered from four sides. Li Po and Gull went to the right down the cross-corridor and took positions behind partly closed doors about a hundred feet from the shaft. Burton continued down the corridor and entered a room that was about a hundred feet from the shaft. Frigate was to go to the left at the intersection and take a station behind a door about two hundred feet from the shaft.

When Star Spoon left the shaft at this level, she would be the target of cross-fire from five beamers.

Burton’s room was dark except for the glow of the computer console screen. He watched the orange light, waiting for it to move into the shaft and ascend toward the third level.

“She’s certainly taking her time,” he muttered. What was she doing? Trying to imagine all the possible traps? Or had she lost her nerve?

Very early that morning, Burton had taken one hundred pounds of plastic explosive from the e-m converter. Using his flying chair to elevate himself to the tops of seven lift shafts and along the sides, working furiously, he had pressed the explosive around the entrances of the nearest shafts. He had not applied the plastic to the bottom of the entrances because Star Spoon would probably see it before exiting. By the time she had left the shaft, even if she saw the plastic on the sides, she would be too late to escape. Proximity fuses would set off the explosive.

These might be useless, since she might take a distant shaft. But if she passed close to a mined opening, she still might set off one.

He looked down the corridor and through the opening of the shaft. Then he glanced back at the screen. Ah! The orange light was ascending the lines indicating the shaft near which they waited.

He crouched by the door. A few seconds later, a transparent vehicle, in the center of which Star Spoon sat, rose into full view. It halted, suspended in the shaft, allowing him to see it in all its details. It was much like the armored chair that he had fashioned except that there were more heavy beamers than in his.

He could only see her back until she turned her head to give him a half-profile. She was expressionless.

The armor would resist for a while the ray of a beamer on full-power. Only if the ray could be kept on one spot could it penetrate the armor. And Star Spoon would keep her vehicle moving.

What was discouraging was that, if she was killed, she would be resurrected elsewhere in the tower. Any victory by her enemies was only a half-victory for them and a temporary setback for her. Yet they had to keep fighting and hope that they would catch her before she could kill herself or be killed. Or that her record-spheres would be found out and, eventually, she would be in the same situation they were. The next death would be the final death.

Burton had expected her to appear in an armored vehicle, and he hoped that its armor would absorb just enough of the explosive shock to knock her out. That was why he had lined each entrance with only 3.57 pounds of the explosive. As it was, he was not sure that he did not have more than he needed for his purpose.

He said, “Go on! Go on! What’re you waiting for?”

The moment the vehicle moved from the center of the shaft toward the opening, he would step back, and, pressing his fingertips into his ears, would stand by the wall out of the way of the direct shock waves. So would the others.

At last, Star Spoon made up her mind. She had looked down the corridor straight ahead and seen that all the doors to the apartment suites were open but one. She would know that the door was Burton’s, and she would, he hoped, believe that all five were holed up in it. Her survey of the corridor at right angles to the one straight ahead had shown her that all the doors on both sides were open. That was as it was almost everywhere in the tower.

Satisfied that she was headed toward the exit, Burton backed away a few feet from the door. Then he lost consciousness; he never heard the explosion.

When he came to, his smitten senses not yet fully recovered, he was coughing on the burning fumes pouring around him. He sat up, his back against the wall, and tried to get up but failed. His strength had gone for a walk and his wits had scattered like picnickers before the sudden appearance of a bear. When he did manage to get up, he staggered across the room, the air of which was getting somewhat clearer as the air-conditioning sucked the smoke away. The screen still glowed, showing the orange ball down the corridor around the corner. He dimly realized that this was where Li Po and Gull were stationed.

At least, he knew who he was and where he and the others were. His movements were slow, though.

“Got to get out there, get her,” he said. His lips had moved with the thoughts, but he could not hear his own voice anymore than he could hear the voices of himself and Isabel, his Earthly wife, from the past-display on the wall near the door.

By the time he had reached the door, he could think clearly enough to know that something had gone wrong. The explosion had been far more violent than it should have been. Could he have miscalculated so much, or had something unforeseen happened?

He looked around the side of the doorway, realized then that he had dropped the beamer, went back to retrieve it, and returned to the doorway. The smoke was a thin veil now. He could see the far-strewn pieces of the vehicle on the floor. The sphere had been made of some shatterable material. The explosive lining the opening nearest Burton had gone off. Probably, a piece of the machine shot through this opening had activated the fuse. The additional explosion had doubled the effect of the shock waves, but even that was not near enough to account for the violence that had knocked him out.

The vehicle must have contained a large amount of explosives, and this had gone off when Burton’s trap had erupted. Or perhaps it was a coincidence that the explosives in the vehicle had gone off just as the vehicle cleared the entrance shaft.

The thing operating the vehicle had been an android, the exact duplicate of Star Spoon, who had sent it ahead as a sacrifice.

Burton’s head still hurt. His thoughts had been climbing a steep hill, struggling to get to the top, where they could re-form and become a potent force. Most of them had gotten up the hill, but they were not yet organized enough. Why had the past-display accompanied the false woman and not the real one?

Slowly, it came to him that she must have sent the android out first. And the idiot Computer, identifying her as the real Star Spoon, had sent the past-display along by her side. Then the real woman had emerged from her hiding place … she must have muffled her features in a hood or masked them … and she had come up an unmined shaft.

There she was, coming around the corner of the intersection from the corridor where Li Po and Gull were stationed. She was, as he had expected, inside a spherical armored flying machine, the duplicate of the android’s. If she had been masked, she was not how. Unlike the android, her face was expressive, set in a demon’s smile except for the lips, which moved as she talked to herself.

The machine came to the middle of the corridor just past the walls of the shaft—he could see through its openings—and it stopped, then made a quarter-turn so that she faced down the corridor. What had happened to Li Po and Gull? Were they still groggy from the explosion? Or had they foolishly attacked her as she passed them? He had no way of knowing; he would have been deaf to any cries.

The machine, moving six feet above the floor, came to the one closed door. It stopped and turned. A barrel slid out from the box beneath the seat, went through a hole in the sphere, and shot out a violet liquid. His mental processes were still sluggish; he should have recognized the fluid at once as the sealant. She was entombing the people that she believed were in the suite. Or, if she was not sure they were in there, she had to carry out this operation anyway.

He saw Alice’s dark head stick out from the half-open door. She ducked back after a very quick look. Star Spoon, intent on moving the vehicle along the sides of the door of Burton’s suite, had not seen her.

He could distinguish a glowing patch on the wall beside Star Spoon. That had to be the display of her memory. The Computer, after the android had disappeared in the explosion, had switched the display to accompany the real woman. Now that she was closing in for the kill, she did not care if they knew where she was. Perhaps she wanted them to know so that they would venture out to attack her.

Li Po, a beamer in his hand, stepped out into Burton’s sight. Seeing the woman, he stepped back. He was fortunate that Star Spoon had not noticed him or his past-display, which would have appeared on the wall of the bay opposite him.

A small TV set was mounted on her left. She would be in communication with the Computer and would be using it to find out if the five were loose, and, if they were, to track them down.

By now, the violet liquid had hardened over the door and the wall area around it. He expected her to turn the machine down, but she did not. Instead, she started to repeat the sealing process. Evidently, she wanted the door to be doubly unmovable.

He had a minute, perhaps two minutes, before she began searching. He strode to the e-m converter and gave instructions to the Computer. He was not worried that Star Spoon would be listening in or be able to learn anything of his activities or location at this moment. He had long ago told the Computer that it was not to reveal anything about himself or his companions to her. She could scan all the rooms in the tower, and she would not be shown this room. However, the refusal of the Computer to scan would give her negative knowledge. If he was not in the rooms scanned, then he must be in one of the other rooms.

He opened the converter, stooped, and picked up with one hand a gray doughy mass, 3.75 pounds of the plastic explosive. After carrying this to the doorway and putting it on the floor, he went back to the converter. He shut its door; two seconds later, he opened it. The proximity fuse lay on its floor. Going back to the doorway, he inserted the long, thin metal rod protruding from the small metal box into the center of the mass.

He set the fuse by voice and looked around the door again. He said, “Oh, my God!” Star Spoon had somehow determined that Alice was in her room, perhaps with a heat-and-sound detector. Alice had done the only thing she could do, closed the door with a codeword. And Star Spoon was sealing it.

Burton jumped out from behind the door, aimed the beamer, and saw the ray, a bright scarlet rod with a diameter of one-fourth of an inch, leap from the bulb at the end of his weapon to the side of the transparent sphere. If the ray could have pierced the shield, it would have gone through Star Spoon’s head near her left ear. Instead, the armor glowed at the point, and she saw it at once. She moved a control on the board by her right hand. The vehicle, rotating, moved away from the door, stopped, and shot toward Burton.

36

He turned and ran close to the wall, hoping that the second door would block him from her view. If he could avoid being hit, if she came by the door just as the explosive went off, if he could get inside the next door before it did … He wanted to look behind him to calculate the velocity of her vehicle. She might have accelerated to the point where she would pass the trap before it exploded. But he could not afford to glance behind because it would slow him, and there was nothing he could do about it anyway.

He grabbed the edge of the door and swung himself around it so vigorously that he banged his left shoulder on the doorway and was spun halfway around. Two scarlet rays shot past the door. Probably, other rays had hit the door. No matter, he thought. I’m in. Another shock wave knocked him down, but this one had far less impact than the first.

He got up, praying, and, clinging to the edges of the door, looked around it. Since there was not much smoke, he could clearly see the vehicle against the wall opposite the doorway where the charge had been placed. The explosion had thrust it across the corridor and slammed it against the wall. Star Spoon was unconscious. Burton watched as the car resumed its original speed, grating against the metal wall, and collided with the wall at the next intersection. There it stuck.

Li Po and Frigate, beamers ready, ran around the corners and up to Burton. “I boobytrapped her,” he said. “But we have to get her out before she comes to.”

“Where’s Alice and Gull?” Frigate said.

“No time for that,” Burton said. “Pete, have the hypodermic syringe ready. Po, you come with me.”

Frigate removed the syringe from the case attached to his belt. While Burton held his beamer ray steady on one point of the armor, the Chinese ran to the nearest room to order from the converter a ladder and two stepladders to use to climb up to the car. Burton wanted to take her alive, but he hoped that, if she showed signs of rousing, the hole would have been burned through the shell so that he could put a hole through her body.

However, Li Po returned quickly, and they burned off the hatch locks while she lay unmoving. Burton crawled in, took the syringe from Frigate, blew the drug into her arm, and used the controls to ease the vehicle to the floor. They carried her into the nearest room, placed her on a bed, stripped her, searched her clothes, and then put her in the converter so that the Computer could probe her neural system. It reported that her brain was too complex to be an android’s.

“I’d say we have her,” Burton said. “Only … what if she’s anticipated this possibility and ordered the Computer to make a false report? She’ll be alive somewhere in this labyrinth.”

“I don’t believe that she would consider that possibility,” Li Po said. “She must have believed that she was invulnerable in her armored vehicle. You have to take some things on faith.”

“No, I don’t.”

Though he thought that Li Po was right, he intended to search the tower thoroughly. Not until then would he be at ease about her.

Leaving Frigate to watch the woman, Burton and Li Po burned off the sealant over Alice’s door. Though not hysterical, she needed a long drink to quiet her nerves. She had thought that she might be imprisoned in the room forever or at least for a time that would have seemed forever.

On the way back to the room where Star Spoon was, they saw Gull’s body lying faceup on the floor of the corridor. Li Po explained that Gull had been caught by a ray from the vehicle as Star Spoon was pursuing Burton.

“He must have left the room just as I dived into mine,” Li Po said. “I don’t know why he did it. He told me just before we took our stations that he could not use his beamer. It was all right to kill the androids because they were not human beings, but he could not fight Star Spoon.”

“He should have said so at once and stayed with Alice,” Burton said.

“I think that he probably went out into the corridor to plead with Star Spoon,” Li Po said. “He was as crazy as she.”

After conferring, they decided that it would be cruel to lock Star Spoon up in a room with the hope of curing her insanity. Questioning the Computer, they learned that the cryogenic techniques of the Ethicals far surpassed those of Earth. She could be frozen instantaneously without tissue damage, and so she was. Star Spoon would wait in her casket until the Gardenworlders arrived.

After a day of rest, they began the search. The first room they went to was the one she had left when she set out to finish them off. The Computer would not directly give them the location, but it immediately yielded the records of the passage of the orange light on the diagrams. Entrance to the room on the one hundred and sixteenth level—the Ethicals counted the stories from the top instead of the bottom—was easy. Star Spoon had not closed the door, because she had thought that only she would be alive when her mission was accomplished.

They went cautiously into a very large room with halls running off it in two directions. There were five rooms off each hall, all but one with closed doors, which would not open at Burton’s request. Though he could not get into them, he could see into them by simply asking the Computer for screen vision. And he wished that he had not been so curious.

The only one of the all-male prisoners, one in each room, whom he recognized was Dunaway, the man who had raped Star Spoon in Turpinville. The others were three Chinese, two Caucasians, an Amerindian, two Negroes, and a Neanderthal. Li Po knew one of the Chinese.

“He is Wang Chih Mao, a minor official of the emperor. I met him once. Star Spoon later told me about him. He is the man who raped her when she was ten years old.”

Four of them were gibbering insane. Two seemed to be close to going crazy. Dunaway was one of the two who had retreated into catatonia. The ninth was hiding under the bed and would not come out when Burton called him via the screen.

Burton watched the past-displays on the ceilings, floors, and walls of all the rooms. Over and over again, as seen through Star Spoon’s eyes, the rapings were shown on large screens, in living color, and at high volume. The men could escape these only by sleep, which would not have come easily, by madness, or by death. Suicide was almost impossible. They were naked and so could not make nooses from their clothes. Their converters gave them only bread, boneless meat, and vegetables. Except for the beds, which consisted only of frame and mattress, there was no furniture. The bathrooms had a seatless toilet and a faucet for cold water above a small bowl. No soap, no towels, and no toilet paper.

Alice shuddered. “She got her revenge. Horrible!”

“Poetic justice,” Frigate said. “Gotten with the aid of science.”

“There’s nothing we can do for them,” Burton said, “unless we can shut off the converter power and let them starve to death.”

Questioned, the Computer said that it could not do that without Star Spoon’s authorization.

Finding nothing revealing in the main room or Star Spoon’s bedroom, they began working the areas that the Computer refused to scan for them. Though they came across twelve such, they could not get into the rooms that they knew were behind locked doors or blank walls. At the end of three weeks they quit. There was still another place to investigate, the vast deep underground preresurrection chamber in which Burton had awakened so many years ago. But they could not get into this.

“Neither could Star Spoon,” Burton said.

Now that the immediate major problem was out of the way, they had to consider their future. They could not get out of the tower, and they could bring in no lovers or companions. They were three men and one woman who would have only each other.

The years ahead of them, Burton thought, were not just bleak. The future was a psychic Siberia, an emotional Ice Age. It was true that the four of them had known one another intimately for many years and had gone through many hardships together and had worked as an excellent team—none better—for their goal. They were getting along now without suffering the abrasions that usually wore people out with one another’s too-close and too-often contact, but, eventually, they would grow sick of one another. They must have more than a community of four. They would need lovers and good friends and the occasional new person to meet.

“Man does not live by bread alone,” a wise man had once said. He could also have said that no one lives, truly lives, without others to talk to, many others.

By the time that the Gardenworlders came, the four would be twisted, cranky, eccentric. Strange. Odd hermits. Stir-crazy.

There was also the problem of sexual release. Alice would not take all three as lovers, or even one. Alice firmly believed that to be a lover, you had to be in love.

One evening, the men sat on chairs on a balcony of the castle in Burton’s world, where all were living for that month. The artificial sun was ten degrees above the artificial west horizon, and they were having their drinks while they waited for Alice to join them. Li Po had said that the longer time went on, the less repulsive was the idea of making beautiful female androids programmed to be bedpartners.

“You’d know that they were not truly human, that they’d be submorons,” Frigate said. “You couldn’t talk to them as you would to a real woman. You’d know that their passion was simulated, mechanical, and unconscious. OK, so you’d get sexual relief. But that’s not enough.”

“True,” Li Po said, “but they’d be better than nothing.”

“Would they?” Burton said.

Alice came onto the balcony then. The men dropped the subject, not because Alice would have been embarrassed by its nature but because she would have felt bad that she could do nothing to help them. They talked about what they had achieved during their studies that day, Burton with his investigations into the dialects that had formed the Urmother of the Semitic languages, Li Po in his studies of English and French, so that he could read their poetry, Frigate in his study of every motion picture that had been made (or at least preserved by the Ethicals), and Alice with her newfound passion of painting with oils.

At dinner, served by androids, they talked about the yet-to-be-solved mystery of Loga’s murder and the identity of the woman whom Nur had killed.

Burton pushed his chair away from the table, pulled a cigar from his shirtpocket, lit it, and said, “I’d devote most of my time to sleuthing those enigmas if I thought it would do any good. I’m convinced, however, that the Computer won’t—can’t—permit us to even get a foot in the door, as it were. We will never know until the Gardenworlders come and perhaps not then.”

“You won’t have to wait that long.”

Alice screamed. Burton gasped, shoved his chair back, and rose to face the man who had spoken.

Loga, smiling, stood in the entrance to the dining room.

37

Loga had lost his fat-turkey look. His clothes, a sky-blue kilt, open yellow robe with blue dragons, and blue sandals, showed a stocky and powerfully muscled body without an ounce of excess weight.

He was unarmed.

Loga held his hand up. “Please. If you’ll quiet down, I’ll explain all. First, though, my apologies for startling you.”

Burton had recovered enough from his shock to say, “You always did like the dramatic.”

“True.”

Li Po said, “How did you get in here?”

“I’ll tell you all in due time. However, I had no trouble overriding the codeword. After all, I control the tower.”

He went to the sideboard by the door and poured himself a goblet of cognac. Alice, a hand on her breast, sat down. The men exchanged glances the meaning of which they understood from long intimacy. If he makes the slightest move that seems dangerous to us, we’ll all jump him at the same time.

Loga, however, was very much at ease, almost hail-fellow-well-met. That meant nothing. He was a superb actor. On the other hand, Burton thought, why should he have anything bad in mind for us?

“Am I right in assuming that your melting … your death … was a trick, a simulation by the Computer?” Burton said. “And that you’ve been watching us since you disappeared?”

Loga faced them, his thick legs braced as if he were on the foredeck of a sailing ship. He smiled and said, “Yes. I know that that was one of the possibilities you considered.”

“So you were spying on us, eavesdropping!” Burton said angrily.

“Everywhere except in those rooms you painted. That was a clever idea, but then I’ve always known that you were intelligent and imaginative. That, of course, is one of the reasons why I chose you as my Agents. It’s not true, though, that you completely blocked my monitoring. When you used the auxiliary computers, I tapped in on those.”

He sipped on the cognac while regarding them over the rim. When he moved the goblet away, he said, “It’s good to have someone to talk to. Not just anyone; you are special. I feel very close to you. Though I imagine that, at this moment, you’re rather furious with me. I don’t blame you, but I’m sure that after you’ve heard my story, you’ll forgive me.”

“I don’t think so,” Alice said, her dark eyes narrowed, her lips stretched back. “I don’t know what sort of game you’ve been playing, but you’re responsible for dooming—” She stopped as if something had just occurred to her. Her cheeks became even more red.

“I repeat, I’m sorry to have had to put you through an emotional mincer. But you survived, and you would have survived even if you hadn’t, in a manner of speaking.

“What I had to do was to insure that you would be capable of operating the tower and could be trusted not to be corrupted by the great power in your hands. I believed that you could pass the test, but my thinking, my wishing, didn’t make it so. I had to give you the practice of power. It’s not what a person says but what he does that reveals his true character.

“You did fail in some things. You should have resurrected your comrades who died during the expedition to the tower. I’m sure that, if events hadn’t stopped you, you would have done so soon. I was disappointed, however, because I wanted to put them through the test too.”

“Most of them would have done what we did,” Burton said.

“I know, but I wanted them to prove themselves in the field.”

“They proved themselves along the way,” Burton said. “Just as we did.”

“To a point,” Loga said. “But the ultimate test was how they would behave in the tower. Turpin, for instance, was not selective enough in resurrecting his friends. Nor were you, Li Po. You erred grievously in resurrecting Star Spoon.”

Li Po shrugged. “How was I to know?”

“Have you learned your lesson?”

“I am even quicker at learning than I am to take offense,” the Chinese said. “If I could do it over again, I would make sure that the Computer would give those we brought in no powers that could be used against me.”

“Very good. But would you also make sure that you had no powers that you could use against others? They’re a danger to you as well as to the others. Your powers might be seized by others despite all your precautions.”

“Somebody has to be in charge,” Li Po said. “Somebody has to possess the powers, somebody who can be trusted with them.”

“The point is,” Burton said, “are we to be trusted now?”

“What if you resurrected somebody who seemed to be trustworthy but proved not to be? That person might take away your powers and use them for purposes that you would reject because they would be bad.”

He sipped again and then began pacing back and forth as he talked.

“You’re thinking that my disappearing was criminal because it resulted in the erasure of the body-recordings and, so, the loss of immortality for almost all of the resurrected. That is not so, and I’m disappointed that you could believe that I would permit such a horrible thing. What really happened is—”

“You had the Computer make a duplicate of itself or a duplicate already existed,” Burton said. “The duplicate has the records. Or there is only one Computer, but it gave us false reports.”

Loga stopped pacing and looked at Burton with amazement, then burst out laughing.

“When did you think of that?”

“A minute ago.”

“I did have a backup Computer made before I disappeared.”

“Then it was no test for us when we first entered the tower and prevented the Computer from dying? Göring’s sacrifice was in vain?”

“No, that was for real. It frightened me so much that I at once had the backup made. Actually, the backup has become the primary since I let you use the first one as your toy.”

“It seems to me,” Frigate said, “that it would have been standard engineering procedure to install the backup from the very beginning of this project.”

“We thought that the Computer could not malfunction, not to any dangerous extent, anyway. We thought that it was invulnerable.”

“Yes, and the Titanic was declared unsinkable.”

“What about the Mongolian woman whom Nur killed?” Alice said.

“Ah, her! She was part of the plot to confuse and mystify you. Someone had to be held responsible for my death, and she was placed so that you would think that she was responsible. You would then have to try to find out who and what she was, but there was no way that you could do that.”

“She was an android?” Frigate said.

“Of course.”

“Some of us thought that Nur killed her rather too easily,” Frigate said.

Burton blew out smoke, hoping that he looked more cool than he felt. He said, “I thank you for the explanation. I won’t thank you for the stress, the anxiety, and the bloodshed. But, as you say, we had to learn the hard way, and no doubt your intentions were good. However, as you yourself said, it’s not what one thinks, what one’s intentions are, but one’s actions that reveal the true character. Be that as it may, I have a question, perhaps the most important of all!”

He paused, then said, “Do we stay in the tower? Or must we go back to The Valley?”

Loga grinned and said, “What would you like to do?”

“I can’t speak for the others, but I would prefer to stay here.”

The others said they would also like to remain.

“Why?” Loga said.

“For two reasons,” Burton said. “One, life is much more enjoyable for me here—despite the events you caused. It affords me an opportunity to study, to gain knowledge, which I would have given my soul on Earth to have, if I’d thought I had a soul and if someone had made me an offer. It’s also much more luxurious, about as close to Heaven, a physical Heaven, as one could imagine. Two, I think that I am worthy of being here. I have come as close to Going On as I ever will. Sending me back to The Valley would only impoverish and frustrate me and would not raise my ethical level one bit. In fact, it might lower it.”

Loga asked the others if they had similar or different reasons. Their answers were much like Burton’s.

“First, before I tell you what you so evidently are desperate to know, I’ll tell you something else. Burton, when you said that you were as close to Going On as you would ever be, you unconsciously spoke the truth. Your saying that makes me curious. Is there more behind that remark than appears on the surface? Have you some inklings, some suspicions, that…?”

He smiled and took another sip of the cognac. Burton felt that Loga expected him to expand on his statement. If he did, he was going to be disappointed. Burton had no idea what Loga was hinting at.

“You’ll have to continue,” Burton said. “You were saying…?”

“Very well. You’ve been told by me and by the Church of Second Chance that, when you’ve attained a certain high level of character and morality, become compassionate and empathetic and free of psychosis and neurosis to a certain degree, then you’ll be ready to Go On. When you die, you won’t be resurrected on the Riverworld again. Your wathan will disappear; it can no longer be caught or detected by our instruments. You have been told that your wathan, or soul, if you prefer that term, goes to God or is absorbed in the Godhead. That, of course, is an explanation that covers ignorance. It was the only explanation that seemed to fit. But…”

He sipped again. His gaze moved over them as if he were anticipating their reaction to his next words. He looked delighted.

“The sad truth is—though I don’t really know if it’s so sad—the sad truth is that no wathans ever disappear, ever Go On! Not as long as the bodies they’ve partnered continue to be resurrected!”

Burton was not as surprised as he should have been. Once, long ago, he had considered that possibility but had rejected it. Alice was shocked; she looked as if she could never again believe anybody. Li Po smiled and stroked his moustache. Frigate’s face was impassive.

Burton thought about the Computer report that such people as Buddha and Jesus Christ had Gone On. Obviously, they had not. The Computer had given false data. Why? Because Loga had ordered it to do so to further the deception.

Burton sighed, and he said, “What is the truth? You will tell the truth this time, won’t you? You’ll pardon me if I’m skeptical. You’ve lied so many times.”

Alice’s voice trembled as she said, “The wathans? You told us that they were artificial. If it had not been for that ancient race that made them, we’d all be soulless. Is that true, God’s own truth?”

“Who knows what God’s truth is?” Loga said. “God’s truth is that What Is Is. But yes, it is a fact that those ancients did make wathans, and we who have inherited their work have made sure that every human being conceived on Earth had a wathan. What is not true is that the wathans go to God or are absorbed into the Godhead. Perhaps they will be someday. I don’t know; no one does.

“The truth is that you can be immortal, relatively so, anyway. You won’t last beyond the death of the universe and probably not nearly as long as the universe does. But you have the potentiality for living a million years, two, perhaps three or more. As long as you can find a Terrestrial-type planet with a hot core and have resurrection machinery available.

“Unfortunately, not all can be permitted to possess immortality. Too many would make immortality miserable or hellish for the rest, and they would try to control others through their control of the resurrection machinery. Even so, everybody, without exception, is given a hundred years after his Earthly death to prove that he or she can live peacefully and in harmony with himself and others, within the tolerable limits of human imperfections. Those who can do this will be immortal after the two projects are completed.”

“Then,” Burton said slowly, “the standards, the ethical goals, are not so extremely high, so demanding, as we have been led to believe?”

“They are high, though not impossibly high for forty percent of the resurrectees.”

“The other sixty percent?” Alice said.

“Their body-records will be destroyed.”

“That seems hard.”

“It is. But it’s absolutely necessary.”

“And then?” Frigate said. He looked anxious.

“The survivors will be carried, as body-records in the form of the yellow sphere, to Earth.”

“Earth?” Burton said. He had never been told so, but he had had the feeling that Earth had been destroyed.

“Yes. Most of life on Earth was killed by radiation in the hydrogen and neutron bomb war. But the Gardenworlders have cleaned it up—it took them one hundred and sixty years—and have been restocking it with plant and animal life. Earth will be ready for you, but you won’t be the kind of people who will abuse it and slowly kill it by pollution. And—”

“Then we won’t be permitted to have children?” Alice said.

“Not on Earth. It won’t have room, though there will be plenty of living room, I think you call it elbow space, for you. However, there are millions of planets without sentient life in this universe, and you can go there if you want children.”

“Earth!” Burton said dreamily. His homesickness was so keen that his chest ached. Earth. It would not be the Earth he had left, but surely its topography had not changed. And that it would not be the Earth that had existed when he had died was, he had to admit, for the good.

“This is quite a shock,” Alice said. “I was a devout member of the Anglican Church and then, when I came here, I lost my faith and became an agnostic until recently, when I was seriously considering joining the Church of the Second Chance. Now…”

“Loga,” Burton said, “since you are finally telling the truth, tell me this. Why did you turn renegade and pervert the course of events that your fellow Ethicals had decided upon? Is your story that you could not bear that your family, your loved ones, might not Go On, the truth? Go On in the sense you’ve just explained, not the old sense? Did you cause all this blood struggle, this overthrow of your comrades, just to give your parents and siblings and cousins more time?”

“I swear to you by all that was, is, or might be holy that that is the truth.”

“Well, then,” Burton said, “I don’t understand how you, who were raised on the Gardenworld from the age of four, could have passed the test. If the Ethical standards have any meaning, any value, how did you escape being eliminated? How could you have become a criminal? A criminal with a conscience, but still a criminal. Or were you truly ethical, and then, somehow, you became crazy? And if you can become crazy, what’s to prevent others who’ve also passed from going insane?”

38

Loga paled, turned, set the goblet on a table, and turned again. He was smiling, and his eyes moved from left to right and back again as if he were looking for something beyond the group.

“I’m not crazy!”

“Consider all that you’ve done for the sake of a score or so of people,” Burton said.

“I am not crazy! What I did, I did for love.”

“Love has its insanities,” Burton said. He leaned back in his chair, blew cigar smoke out, smiled, and said, “It doesn’t, for the moment, matter if you are insane or not. You still haven’t answered us. Must we go back to The Valley or may we stay here?”

“I had thought you could stay,” Loga said. “I had judged that you had attained the level where you could be trusted and where we could all enjoy each other’s company in love. You could bring in others. I intend to bring in my family and show them what they must do if they would be immortal. Some of them…”

“You’re doubtful about some of them, then?” Burton said.

Frigate leaned over the table and, staring hard at Loga, said, “We were told that passing the test, Going On, was an automatic event. It involved no judging by human beings. Now … who judges?”

Burton was annoyed by the question, though he had wondered about it. The important question was the one he had just put. The others could be answered later.

“That will be done by the Computer. After that, the people in this project, the Valleydwellers, will eat food that will cause them to fall asleep and die. Their wathans will then be scanned by the Computer. As you know, the wathan displays through its colors and their relative breadths the ethical development of the individual. Those that meet the standards will be reunited on Earth with their bodies. Those that do not will be released and go to wherever they go.”

“Judging by a machine?” Frigate said.

“It is infallible.”

“Unless it’s tampered with,” Burton said.

“That is not very likely.”

“Not until you made it likely,” Burton said.

Loga glared at him. “I won’t be here.”

“Where will you be?”

“I will have gone on one of the ships in the hangar to an uninhabited planet.”

“You could have done that at any time after you got rid of your fellow Ethicals and their Agents,” Frigate said. “Why didn’t you just pick up your family and take them with you?”

Loga looked at Frigate as if he just could not believe that anybody would say that.

“No, I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?” Burton said. “It seems the logical action to take.”

“They wouldn’t be ready. They wouldn’t have passed the test; the Computer would reject them. They’d be doomed.”

“You don’t make sense,” Frigate said. “What do you care about that? You’d be safe on some planet where they wouldn’t find you for a thousand years, maybe never, and you’d have your family.”

Loga frowned, and sweat oozed on his forehead.

“You don’t understand. They shouldn’t be living then. They would not have Gone On. I couldn’t take them until they had attained the level that makes immortality bearable for them.”

The others looked at each other. Unspoken: he is crazy.

Burton sighed and leaned forward, reached under the table, and withdrew from its shelf a beamer that had been there since the day the castle was built. His finger moved the dial on its side to stun-power. He brought the weapon out swiftly and pressed the sliding tongue that acted as the trigger. The very pale red line struck Loga in the chest, and the Ethical fell backward.

“I had to do it,” Burton said. “He is hopelessly psychotic and he would have sent us back to The Valley. God knows what he would have done then.”

At Burton’s orders, Frigate ran to get from a converter a hypodermic syringe containing the needed amount of somnium. Burton stood guard, waiting to stun Loga again if he showed signs of consciousness. The man was immensely powerful; a bolt that would knock most men out might make him only semiconscious.

Burton paced for a few minutes while he thought of how he could solve the problem of Loga. He had to be kept alive. The moment he was dead, he would undoubtedly be resurrected in a hidden chamber. That would mean finit for the four tenants because Loga had prime control of the Computer. If he were put in a cryogenics cylinder, he would be dead as far as the wathan was concerned, and he would be resurrected in a secret room in the tower. Should he be awake but imprisoned, he could kill himself no matter what security arrangements his captors took. Even if the tiny black ball in his brain, the ball that could release a deadly poison with one mentally projected codeword, were surgically removed, Loga could swallow his tongue and choke to death. The tongue could be cut out, but Burton was not tough enough to do that no matter how desperate he was.

It was possible to keep Loga drugged. Burton, however, doubted that the Ethical could survive thirty-three years in that state. It was useless to ask the Computer to display Loga’s memory so that Burton could locate Loga’s hidden-body recordings. The Computer would have orders from Loga not to reveal these.

Burton stopped, and he smiled. There was a way out.

Working out the plan took two days, since he had to be very careful. One mistake, and Loga might win out after all.

He ordered the Computer to make a modified android that looked exactly like Loga and had a voice exactly like his. Inside the skin, the android matched Loga except for the brain structure, which was much simpler than Loga’s. If the android had been a one hundred percent duplicate, it would, in many respects, have been the Ethical and would have behaved as he would. The only difference, and it was a great difference, was that the android would have lacked self-consciousness.

Burton verbally programmed it in the speech of the Ethicals and then had it transmit his orders to the Computer. The Computer matched the voiceprints, electric skin field, face and body shape, skin, hair, and eye color, ear shape, and the chemical composition of the odors of perspiration with Loga’s prints. It also scanned the finger, palm, and foot prints.

Unfortunately, despite everything else, the Computer refused to obey the android unless the proper codeword was given.

“That’s very frustrating,” Burton told the others. “One word or perhaps a phrase is all that’s blocking it. It might as well be a million words.”

No one said anything; all looked gloomy. Even Li Po was silent for once.

After two minutes, Alice, who had been frowning and biting her lip, said, “I know that none of you believe in feminine intuition. I don’t either, not as it’s usually defined. I think it’s a form of logic that doesn’t follow the rules of logic, Aristotelian or symbolic. I don’t think that feminine intuition, call it that or something else, is confined to women. Oh, what am I talking about?”

“Yes, what are you talking about?” Burton said.

“It’s such a silly idea, so wild. I’d be making an utter ass of myself!”

“Anything will be appreciated,” Burton said. “I promise not to laugh.”

“None of us will,” Frigate said. “Anyway, what’s the difference if we do?”

“It’s just that there’s no rhyme or reason to it,” she said. “Well, perhaps there is some reason to it. Loga is such a trickster, and he does like to play games, rather childish, I think, but there it is.”

“There is what?” Burton said.

“It’s such an improbability. The odds against it are fantastically high. But … I don’t know. It couldn’t hurt to try. It wouldn’t take much time.”

“For God’s sake, what?” Burton said.

“Well, do you remember what Loga cried out just before he cracked? Seemed to crack, I mean.”

“ ‘I tsab u,’ ” Burton said. “Ethical for ‘Who are you?’ ”

“Yes. Could Loga have been giving us a clue, the real code-phrase? He would have been very amused doing that because there was no chance that we would ever use it. We just simply could not ever find out that it was the open-sesame, the most important identification. Yet he couldn’t resist saying it. We’d think that he was addressing the person who had killed him, a person we now know didn’t exist. And at the same time…”

“He’d have to be crazy to play with us like that,” Burton said.

“Well?”

“It’s nuts, but it’d only take a minute,” Frigate said. “What do we have to lose? Besides, Alice may be rather quiet, but she does have a keen insight into individual psychology.”

“Thank you,” Alice said. “I wasn’t very good at reading people’s characters when I came to the Riverworld, but I had to develop that talent to survive.”

They went into the room where the android was sleeping. Burton awoke it gently and gave it a cup of coffee. Then he slowly and carefully told the android what it must do. Once more, it stood in front of the screen on the wall, and it said, “I tsab u.”

The screen flashed the characters of the Ethical alphabet.

“That means ‘ready,’ ” Burton said.

The android then told the Computer that it was transferring prime control to Burton. But the Computer refused to do that.

“Now what?” Frigate muttered.

Burton called the android to him and told him to go into the corridor with him. Though he did not know if that precaution was necessary, he could not afford to take chances. Having instructed the android what to say, he watched from the doorway as it relayed his commands. And the Computer obeyed.

They cheered and hugged each other, and Li Po did a little dance.

The android had ordered that all persons in the records, except for certain ones, whose names and record numbers it gave, be resurrected in The Valley. Henceforth, the process of resurrection would continue until the project was closed down.

The android also said that it wanted its, that is, Loga’s, security measures canceled. Immediately, the Computer replied that it had done so. And it displayed diagrams showing where Loga had hidden his body-records.

“Very good,” Burton said, smiling. “If we have to deal with the Computer through the android, so be it. I can endure that.”

It took them an hour to collect the thirty-nine records cached in rooms at different levels.

“I’d be completely confident now that Loga can’t be resurrected without our knowledge,” Burton said, ‘if he wasn’t so canny. What if he hid some records without telling the Computer where they were?”

“In that case,” Frigate said, “he couldn’t be resurrected because the Computer would not be connected to it and so could not carry out the operation.”

“He might have put the record in a converter unconnected to the Computer except for the power source. An auxiliary computer could have performed the process.”

“Then we’ll tell the Computer to notify us of any power demands that are unusual. Loga’s orders to the Computer to suppress the indications resulting from his use of the power have been nulled.”

“We’ll have to risk it. We can’t just not act because of the very slight chance that Loga might get loose.”

The others agreed with Burton that they could start repopulating the tower. They would do this, though, after the three private worlds had been cleaned up. They unanimously supported his suggestion that the Valleydwellers be told the truth, in fact, the whole story from the beginning.

“The Ethicals thought it necessary to spread half-truths through the Church of the Second Chance because of their belief in the strength of the religious impulse. But I believe that the whole truth, palatable or not, should be given. We’ll resurrect some people in the tower, let them live here for a while, then transport them to The Valley in the aircraft. We’ll give them photographs and powerpack-operated film projectors. That should convince the skeptics. The truth will spread very slowly because of the enormous population and the length of The Valley, but it will get to all eventually. Of course, some will refuse to believe. That’ll be their misfortune.”

Loga was placed in the cryogenics chamber.

Li Po resurrected his companions; Alice, Monteith Maglenna, and several others, including her sisters, Edith and Rhoda; Frigate, Sophie Lefkowitz and twenty others; Burton, Loghu the blonde ancient-Tokharian, Cyrano de Bergerac, Joe Miller the titanthrop, Kazz the Neanderthal, Tom Turpin, Jean Marcelin, Baron de Marbot, and many others whom Loga had recruited in his war against the Ethicals.

Six months passed, and Burton invited all the tenants, now numbering over two hundred, to his castle for a dinner party. After the tables had been cleared, he ordered an android to strike a huge bronze gong that hung behind his chair. He rose, raised a glass of wine, and said, “Citizens of the tower, your attention. I propose a toast. To us.”

They drank, and he said, “Another toast. To all those who hold dual citizenship, that of Earth and that of Riverworld.”

He put the glass down.

“We all seem to be well situated and happy, and I pray that we will be so until the Gardenworlders arrive. And perhaps after that. When that time comes, though, we will, whether or not we like it, return to the restored Earth or go into oblivion. I hope, and I believe, that we here will be qualified to go to Earth where we should enjoy life until the Earth’s core cools and we must move on to a young planet. That should be quite a few million years in the future, however, and who knows what will happen in that inconceivably long time?”

He stopped, sipped wine, put the goblet down, and stared around at them.

“As I understand it, Earth’s core will be tapped for the use of e-m converters. But this power will be used only to raise those who die there, and with the type of people on Earth then, there should not be much need for resurrection power. There will be no grails or converters to furnish food. Food will be grown on the soil. Earth, if events work out as the Ethicals plan, will be a nice quiet place. Peace and harmony will reign, though I have doubts that the lion will lie down with the lamb. Not if it’s hungry. Lions do not and never will find grass nourishing.

“And, of course, even those who have Gone On will not be perfect. No human being, with perhaps a few exceptions, and these might be unendurable models for the rest of us, is perfect or will be.”

Many of his audience were looking at him as if they wondered what he was preparing to spring on them.

“Some of you, I’m sure, anticipate life on Earth with great pleasure. You know you’ll always have intellectual adventures because the opportunities for study and for artistic creation will be equal to what the tower provides. And you’re happy with the idea that life will be serene, well-ordered, and secure. You luxuriate in that prospect.”

He stopped, and he frowned.

“However, there is an alternative to the Earth I’ve described. I have investigated the spaceships in the hangar, and I have discovered that they do not require highly trained crews to navigate and operate them. They are complex in themselves, but an intelligent child of twelve, after some study, may get into one and have the ship carry him to whatever destination he wishes. Provided, of course, that the ship has enough fuel.”

Frigate smiled up at him and held up a thumb and a finger to form an O.

“What if we reject the return to the near-Utopian Earth?” Burton said. “What if we prefer another kind of life or are not sure that, even if we would love Earth as I’ve depicted here, we will be chosen to be among her citizens?

“Nothing can stop us from boarding a spaceship, all those in the hangar if we wish, choosing one of the virgin planets catalogued in the ship’s navigation system, and then going there.

“What would we do there, our motley group of near-immortals of many races, nations, languages, and times? We wouldn’t have the rich, easy life we have here, or the more restricted but still easy life on the Earth-to-be. Though we can carry with us the science and technology of the Ethicals in records, we could use very little of it for centuries. It would take a long time before our population increased to the point where we would have enough hands to do all the dirty and hard labor needed to get the raw materials for processing.

“These planets have been seeded with wathan generators and catchers just as was done on ancient Earth. We can have children because they will be born with wathans and will be self-conscious and free-willed. But—” he looked around him again “—if any of us or our children die, we will be dead for a long time. Perhaps forever. Should the Ethicals be able to track us down, we who went on the ship from the tower will be judged then and there, at once. We may have passed and so be allowed to live. Or we may not. In any event, if we should die early, we will have to stay dead for a long time, because the Ethicals may not get to our planet for many thousands of years. And if, during that time, our descendants do build resurrection machinery, how do we know they’ll decide to raise us? We can’t foresee the political or religious or economic situation of that time. Our descendants may think it best we not be raised.

“That is by no means the worst thing that can happen. In the beginning, after we’ve landed and built homes with our own hands and tilled and planted and reaped and brought forth the first generation, we’ll be a fairly harmonious society. But as the centuries, the millennia, go by, our common language, Esperanto, will become dialects, then language families as unintelligible to one another as French and Albanian. Though there will be much miscegenation, some groups will keep their racial characteristics, and our brave new world will have differing races.

“Different languages and different races. Just as on old Earth. But it will have variety.

“And, try though we will to bring up our children with love, in time, as generation succeeds generation, or perhaps in a very short time, we will have the same kind of people that we had on old Earth.

“Ladies and gentlemen, after we have labored long and mightily, survived many hardships and dangers, and perhaps established a just and equitable society for all, we will nevertheless see the inevitable degeneration of our society. As on Earth, there will be multitudes of the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the pushers and the pushed, the brave and the cowardly, the dull and the bright, the open and the shut, the givers and the takers, the compassionate and the indifferent or cruel, the sensitive and the callous, the tender and the brutal, the victimizers and the victims, the sane, the half-sane, and the mad.

“There will be hate but love, despair but joy, defeat but triumph, misery but happiness, hopelessness but hope.”

He looked briefly at them, seeing all their faces as one. They knew the spirit if not the exact form of what he was going to say.

“But … we will have immense variety, the richness and the full spectrum that a secure life cannot give.

“And we will have adventure.

“We will be rejecting the promised Heaven of Earth. But we will be taking some of Heaven with us, and, I’m sure, more than a bit of Hell. Can Heaven exist in a vacuum? Without Hell, how do you know that you are in Heaven?

“I ask you, my friends, and even those who are perhaps not very fond of me, which shall it be? The new Earth? Or the unknown?”

His audience was silent. Then Frigate called out, “Is all this rhetorical? Where are you going, Dick?”

“You know where,” Burton said.

He waved his hand to indicate the stars.

“Who’s going with me?”

AFTERWORD

While of course an author would like to believe that his every word remains engraved forever on the hearts of his readers, it may be that some of the events of the previous four Riverworld novels have grown dim in some memories. Here is a brief look at the adventures that have led up to Gods of Riverworld:

Richard Francis Burton, the famous (or infamous) English explorer, linguist, author, poet, swordsman, and anthropologist, dies in A.D. 1890 at the age of sixty-nine. Contrary to his expectations, he awakes from death. He is in a vast chamber containing billions of bodies floating in the air. All those he sees are human except for one near him. This body is humanoid but definitely not that of a member of Homo sapiens. Before Burton can escape from the chamber, he is rendered unconscious by two men who appear in some kind of aerial craft.

When Burton again awakes, he is lying naked on the bank of a wide river in a narrow valley surrounded by high, unscalable mountains. His body is like the one he had when he was twenty-five, minus its scars. He is only one of an estimated thirty-five billion who have been resurrected under an unfamiliar sky on the banks of a River ten million miles long.

The resurrection is not, as events will show, caused by supernatural means. It has been effected by scientific devices invented by beings unknown during the early part of the first book, To Your Scattered Bodies Go. The people responsible for this, the Ethicals, planted recording machines on Earth long before the first humans evolved from the apes. (Or so Burton and others are told during the course of the series.) These machines have recorded every human being from the time of his or her conception continuously to the moment of death. And, as is discovered in the fourth volume, The Magic Labyrinth, the souls (called wathans by Ethicals) are artificial. There is no such thing as a natural soul; these have been provided by the Ethicals.

In the early days on the Riverworld, its inhabitants believe that everybody from approximately 2,000,000 B.C. to A.D. 2008 has been resurrected. It soon becomes apparent that children who had died on Earth at or under the age of five, the mentally retarded, and the extreme psychopaths have not been raised on the Riverworld. These, Burton finds out from a renegade Ethical, have been resurrected on a planet called the Gardenworld. And it is revealed in a later volume that only those from approximately 99,000 B.C. to A.D. 1983 have been placed on the Riverworld. After this current Ethical project is over, those who died after A.D. 1983 will be raised.

The Ethicals are the heirs of several preceding cultures, some nonhuman, which had assumed the task of recording and resurrecting the sentient species of many worlds throughout the universe. If they did not do so, all sentients who died would be forever dead.

Some Ethicals, disguised as Terrestrials, have spread throughout the Riverworld the religious concept of Going On. A Valleydweller cannot Go On unless he or she attains a certain high ethical standard—in other words, a certain state of being “good.” At the end of a hundred years this project will be phased out, and those who have not arrived at a certain ethical development will die forever. The wathans of those who have reached this stage will be absorbed by the Godhead.

This concept is planted by the Ethicals and transmitted through various religions—for instance, the Church of the Second Chance. The missionaries of the Church also teach their disciples to speak Esperanto. A language that everybody can understand is necessary because of the mixture of peoples from many times and places.

Burton and some others are early on visited by an Ethical who won’t reveal his identity. Burton and others call him X or The Mysterious Stranger. X (revealed as Loga, a member of the Ethical Council of Twelve, in The Magic Labyrinth) is thwarting the plans of his fellows. He gives various reasons for this, but the true reason for his becoming a renegade is told in the fourth volume, The Magic Labyrinth. X is recruiting some of the resurrectees to help him in his plot. Among these are Burton, Sam Clemens, Cyrano de Bergerac, a gigantic titanthrop called Joe Miller, and other exceptional men and women.

The River, they find out, starts from a small sea at the north pole of this planet, winds back and forth down one hemisphere, circles the south pole, and winds back and forth on the other hemisphere, finally plunging back to its source, the north pole sea. A vast tower built by the Ethicals rears up from the bedrock at the bottom of this sea. It is the headquarters of the Ethicals and contains the circuitry and the huge protein brain of the Computer. It also houses in a central well those wathans held while the dead are stored in the physical recordings. When a person is resurrected, the wathan immediately reattaches itself to the raised body. This entity, the wathan, contains all the memories that the body also has, duplicates them, as it were, and also provides self-consciousness for the mind of the body. Without the wathan, the physical part of the individual would lack self-consciousness and the means to keep its identity.

The first volume, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, is mainly concerned with showing the setup of the Riverworld and Burton’s efforts to escape the Ethicals. These have found out that he was awakened in the resurrection chamber by their unidentified renegade colleague. Burton commits suicide 777 times while fleeing the Ethicals, but is finally caught. He is questioned in the tower by the Council of Twelve, one of whom is the renegade. His memory is taped so that the Council may see the renegade through his eyes. But the renegade has secretly rearranged various circuits in the Computer, and he has also arranged it so that the Council believes that Burton’s memory of his questioning has been erased. He returns to The Valley with a complete memory.

In the second volume, The Fabulous Riverboat, Samuel Clemens, the American writer, dreams of building a great paddle-wheeled riverboat on which to travel up The River to its source. From there he will go on foot to the seagirt tower. He can’t start fulfilling this dream for a long time because the planet is poor in iron and other heavy metals. X arranges to divert a large iron-nickel meteorite into The Valley, and Clemens uses this for the needed metal. His boat is stolen by his partner, King John of England, brother to Richard the Lion-Hearted. Sam vows to build another boat, catch up with John, and get vengeance.

In the third volume, The Dark Design, Clemens finishes his second boat after many hardships and attempts by others to steal this one, too. After he leaves, another group at the base builds a dirigible and flies it to the tower. Only one of the crew can get inside the tower, and he does not come back out. On the way back, one of the crew is discovered to be X, but he escapes, and the airship is blown up by a bomb he planted.

In the fourth volume, The Magic Labyrinth, the two heavily armed riverboats meet. Both are sunk in the battle, and their captains die along with most of their crews. Burton and some of X’s recruits survive. They go up The River as far as they can in a small boat, then climb the massive and rugged mountain range ringing the north polar sea. Burton is convinced that one of the party is X. After the party gets into the tower through an entrance secretly installed by X, Burton does find out who X is.

However, in the long absence of all its Ethical and Agent tenants (slain by X), the unattended tower mechanisms need some maintenance. Not getting it, a valve that admits seawater is stuck, and the protein brain of the Computer is threatened. If it dies before the valve can be repaired, the entire project will be doomed, and all the body-recordings will perish.

Hermann Göring, ex-Nazi and late Reichsmarschall of the Third Reich, is one of the party. He has repented his evil deeds on Earth and has converted to the Church of the Second Chance. He sacrifices his life trying to get to the malfunctioning valve to repair it. He fails, and it seems that the Computer will perish and with it all hope of immortality for the thirty-five billion people.

However, Alice Liddell Hargreaves, one of the party, ingeniously figures out a way to circumvent the Computer’s suicidal obedience to certain inhibitions, and the project is saved.

Now the Valleydwellers will be given the extra time that Loga, the renegade Ethical, claims they need in order for all to attain the level where they may Go On. The project will be resumed as originally planned with this exception. Loga’s fellow Ethicals and their Agents will not be resurrected because they would interfere with his plans.

The book at hand, Gods of the Riverworld, starts a few weeks after the ending of the fourth, The Magic Labyrinth.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Thirty-five billion people from every country and every age of Earth’s history were resurrected along the great and winding River of Riverworld. The reader will be relieved to hear that only a few of them will play a part in this story.

Loga: A grandson of King Priam of ancient Troy, born in the twelfth century B.C., slain at the age of four by a Greek soldier during the fall of that city. Resurrected on the Gardenworld by nonhuman extra-Terrestrials and raised there. He became a member of the Ethical Council of Twelve, which was charged with creating Riverworld and resurrecting there all human beings who had died between 99,000 B.C. and A.D. 1983. He became a renegade and involved various Terrestrial resurrectees in his plot to overthrow the other Ethicals and their Agents and to subvert the original plan for the destiny of those reborn in Riverworld.

Richard Francis Burton: An Englishman, born in 1821, died in 1890. During his lifetime a cause célèbre and bête noire. A famous explorer, linguist, anthropologist, translator, poet, author, and swordsman. He discovered Lake Tanganyika; entered the Muslim sacred city of Mecca in disguise (and from the experience wrote the best book ever written about Mecca); did the most famous translation of A Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights), full of footnotes and essays derived from his vast knowledge of the esoterics of African and Oriental life; was noted as one of the greatest swordsmen of his day; and was the first European to enter the forbidden city of Harar, Ethiopia—and leave alive.

Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves: Born in England in 1852, died there in 1934. Daughter of Henry George Liddell, domestic chaplain to the Prince Consort, vice-chancellor of Oxford University, dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and coeditor of the famous Scott-Liddell A Greek-English Lexicon, which is still today the standard Classical Greek-English dictionary. When ten years old, Alice inspired Lewis Carroll to write his Alice in Wonderland and to base his fictional Alice on her.

Peter Jairus Frigate: An American science fiction writer, born 1918, died 1983.

Aphra Behn: An Englishwoman, born 1640, died 1689. She was a spy for Charles II in the Netherlands, and later a famous—or infamous—novelist, poetess, and playwright. The first English-woman to support herself solely by writing.

Nur ed-Din el-Musafir: Born in Moorish Spain in 1164, died in Baghdad 1258. A Muslim, though not orthodox, and a Sufi, a member of that mystical yet realistic discipline to which Omar Khayyám belonged.

Jean Baptiste Antoine Marcelin, Baron de Marbot: Born 1782 in France, died there in 1854. Like Nur, small in stature but very strong and swift. He served very bravely under Napoleon and was wounded many times. His Memoirs of His Life and Campaigns so fascinated A. Conan Doyle that he modeled his stories of Brigadier Gerard, the dashing French soldier, on de Marbot’s exploits.

Tom Million Turpin: Black American born in 1871 in Savannah, Georgia; died in 1922 in St. Louis. Turpin was a piano player and composer of considerable talent; his Harlem Rag, published in 1897, was the first published ragtime piece by a black composer. He was also the boss of the Tenderloin red-light district in St. Louis.

Li Po: Born in 710 of Turkish-Chinese lineage in an outlying district of ancient China; died in 762 in China. Considered by many to be China’s greatest poet, he was also a famous swordsman, drunkard, lover, and wanderer. In The Magic Labyrinth, his pseudonym was Tai-Peng.

Star Spoon: A female contemporary of Li Po, who suffered much both in China and on the Riverworld.

PREFACE

Those who have not read the previous volumes of the Riverworld series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Fabulous Riverboat, The Dark Design, and The Magic Labyrinth, should go to the outline at the back of this book. There the reader can acquaint himself or herself with some events and items only referred to en passant in the book at hand. I have written the outline to avoid lengthy recapitulation. Those familiar with the series so far might also want to read the outline to refresh their memories about certain matters.

I stated in the fourth volume, The Magic Labyrinth, that it would be the final book in the series. I had intended it to be so, but I did leave myself a tiny escape hatch in the final paragraph. My unconscious knew better than my conscious, and it made me (the devil!) install that little door. Some time after the fourth volume appeared, I got to thinking about the vast powers possessed by the people who had entered the tower and how tempting the powers would be.

Also, as I knew and some readers pointed out, the truths revealed in the fourth volume might not be the final truths after all.

The opinions and conclusions about economics, ideology, politics, sexuality, and other matters re Homo sapiens vary according to the characters’ knowledge or biases. They are not necessarily my own. I am convinced that all races have an equal mental potential and that the same spectrum of stupidity, mediocre intelligence, and genius runs through every race. All races, I’m convinced, have an equal potential for good or evil, love or hate, and saintliness or sin. I’m also convinced from sixty years of wide reading and close observation that human life has always been savage and comically absurd but that we are not a totally unredeemable species.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Lovers

Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life

Lord Tyger

Strange Relations

Tarzan Alive

Time’s Last Gift

Traitor to the Living

The Stone God Awakens

Flesh

Behind the Walls of Terra

The Image of the Beast

Blown

A Feast Unknown

The Gates of Creation

The Maker of Universes

Night of Light

A Private Cosmos

The Wind Whales of Ishmael

The Lavalite World

Jesus on Mars

Dark Is the Sun

The Unreasoning Mask

Inside, Outside

The Alley God

The Book of Philip José Farmer

Dayworld

Dayworld Rebel

THE RIVERWORLD SERIES

To Your Scattered Bodies Go

The Fabulous Riverboat

The Dark Design

The Magic Labyrinth

Gods of Riverworld

Riverworld and Other Stories

Red Orc’s Rage

The Dark Heart of Time: A Tarzan Novel

PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF

RIVERWORLD

“[Farmer is] an excellent science fiction writer.”

—Isaac Asimov

“Riverworld is a venue where anyone can have adventures with anyone else.… The Riverworld books [are] interested in the play of character and ideas, free from the constraints of realism, place, or time. Or, to put it another way, they’re a venue for Farmer to talk about interesting stuff.”

—Locus

The Magic Labyrinth

“A wide-screen adventure that never fails to provoke, amuse, and educate … His imagination is of the first rank … his velocity breathtaking.… Charts a territory somewhere between Gulliver’s Travels and The Lord of the Rings.”

—Time

“This book, like the series as a whole, offers delight to the sense of wonder and storytelling flow as irresistible as the River itself.”

—Publishers Weekly

To Your Scattered Bodies Go

“One of the most imaginative worlds in science fiction!”

—Booklist

“From the beginning, To Your Scattered Bodies Go gripped me in a way few books have been able to match.”

—SF Site

The Dark Design

“Its publication is an event with a capital E!”

—Parade of Books

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

GODS OF RIVERWORLD

Copyright © 1983 by the Estate of Philip José Farmer

All rights reserved.

A Tor® eBook

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Farmer, Philip José.

Gods of riverworld / Philip José Farmer.—1st Tor trade paperback ed.

p.    cm.—(Riverworld series)

ISBN 978-0-7653-2656-0 (pbk.)

I.  Title.

PS3556.A72G6 2011

813' .54—dc22

2010036531

First Tor Trade Paperback Edition: February 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-9352-4

First Tor eBook Edition: February 2011

Table of Contents

To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat

- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Part 1: To Your Scattered Bodies Go
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27
- Chapter 28
- Chapter 29
- Chapter 30
- Part 2: The Fabulous Riverboat
- Dedication
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27
- Chapter 28
- Epilogue

The Dark Design

- Cover Page
- Other Books By This Author
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27
- Chapter 28
- Chapter 29
- Chapter 30
- Chapter 31
- Chapter 32
- Chapter 33
- Chapter 34
- Chapter 35
- Chapter 36
- Chapter 37
- Chapter 38
- Chapter 39
- Chapter 40
- Chapter 41
- Chapter 42
- Chapter 43
- Chapter 44
- Chapter 45
- Chapter 46
- Chapter 47
- Chapter 48
- Chapter 49
- Chapter 50
- Chapter 51
- Chapter 52
- Chapter 53
- Chapter 54
- Chapter 55
- Chapter 56
- Chapter 57
- Chapter 58
- Chapter 59
- Chapter 60
- Chapter 61
- Chapter 62
- Chapter 63
- Chapter 64
- Chapter 65
- Chapter 66
- Chapter 67
- Chapter 68
- Chapter 69
- Chapter 70

The Magic Labyrinth

- Cover Page
- Praise
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Author’s Foreword
- 1 The Mysterious Stranger
- Chapter 1
- 2 Aboard the Not For Hire
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- 3 Aboard the Rex: The Thread of Reason
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12

- 4 On the Not For Hire: New Recruits and Clemens’ Nightmares

- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- 5 Burton’s Soliloquy
- Chapter 15
- 6 On the Not For Hire: The Thread of Reason
- Chapter 16
- 7 Göring’s Past
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20

- 8 The Fabulous Riverboats Arrive at Virolando

- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27

- 9 The First and Last Dogfight on the Riverworld

- Chapter 28
- Chapter 29
- 10 Armageddon: The Not For Hire vs. The Rex
- Chapter 30
- Chapter 31
- Chapter 32
- Chapter 33
- Chapter 34
- Chapter 35
- Chapter 36
- Chapter 37
- 11 The Final Duel: Burton vs. Bergerac
- Chapter 38
- 12 The Last 20,000 Miles
- Chapter 39
- Chapter 40
- Chapter 41
- Chapter 42
- Chapter 43
- 13 In the Dark Tower
- Chapter 44
- Chapter 45
- Chapter 46
- Chapter 47
- Chapter 48
- Chapter 49
- Chapter 50
- Chapter 51
- Chapter 52
- Chapter 53

- 14 Three-Cornered Play: Carroll to Alice to Computer

- Chapter 54
- By the Same Author
- Copyright

Gods of Riverworld

- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Epigraphs
- Contents
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27
- Chapter 28
- Chapter 29
- Chapter 30
- Chapter 31
- Chapter 32
- Chapter 33
- Chapter 34
- Chapter 35
- Chapter 36
- Chapter 37
- Chapter 38
- Afterword
- Dramatis Personae
- Preface
- By the Same Author
- Praise for the Novels of Riverworld
- Copyright