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 tune, 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 sulphur? 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.