“One thing 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 some day, 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 100,000 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.