The Fabulous Riverboat by Phillip Jose Farmer

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 wreckagestrewn 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 nun 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 own 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 poopdeck, 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 belowdecks! 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.