R.W. II - The Fabulous Riverboat

by Philip José Farmer

  "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 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 II. 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 stem.

  "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-mug full 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 APM-1. 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 another 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.

  Chapter 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, sty-mate! 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 sto
ne 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-1. 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 would 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 Richtofen 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 messages 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 battle 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 place, 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 longwinded 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 on and 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 lots 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 was laughing 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.