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 alone 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 nine miles of the Ulmak territory. Then he sent a fleet down to the three-milelong area below the Ulmaks, where seventeenth-century A.D. Sac 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.