Sam shivered at the wet and chilly wind which always came late at night from upRiver. He shivered also at the thought of the desolation. He loved beauty and nature’s order and he loved the parklike arrangement of the valley, whatever else he thought about this world. Now he had made it hideous because he had a dream. And he would have to extend that hideousness, because his mills and factories needed more wood for fuel, for paper, for charcoal. All that his state possessed was used up and he had about used up all that Cernskujo to the immediate north and Publiujo to the immediate south would trade him. If he wanted more he would have to war on his closest neighbors or make arrangements for trading with the more distant states or those just across The River. Or else conquer them and take their wood away from them. He did not want to do that; he abhorred war in principle and could barely stand it in practice.
But if he was to have his Riverboat he had to have wood as fuel for his factories.
He also had to have bauxite and cryolite and platinum if he was to have aluminum generators and motors.
The nearest source of all three was in Soul City, that nation twenty-six miles downRiver dominated by Elwood Hacking, who hated whites.
So far, Sam had been able to trade iron weapons for bauxite, cryolite, cinnabar and platinum. Sam’s own state, Parolando, needed the weapons badly. Adding one burden to the other, Hacking insisted that Parolando use its own -men to mine and transport the ore.
Sam sighed deeply. Why in hell hadn’t the Mysterious Stranger directed the meteorite to fall right by the bauxite deposits? Then, when Sam and Bloodaxe’s Vikings had sailed into this area immediately after the meteorite had struck, they could have claimed the land that was now Soul City for their own. When Hacking arrived, he would have been forced to join Clemens or to leave.
Still, even with the Stranger’s powers, it could not be easy to deflect a hundred-thousand-ton iron-nickel siderite from its course and make it fall only twenty-six miles from the bauxite and other minerals. Actually the Stranger had supposed that he had hit the target on the bull’s eye. He had told Sam, before he disappeared on some unknown mission, that the minerals were upRiver, all within a seven-mile range. But he had been mistaken. And that had made Sam both glad and angry. He was angry because the minerals were not all within his reach, but he was also happy that the Ethicals could make a mistake.
That fact did not help the humans imprisoned forever between sheer mountains 20,000 feet high in a valley about 9.9 miles wide on the average. They would be imprisoned for thousands of years, if not forever, unless Samuel Langhorne Clemens could build his Riverboat.
Sam went to the unpainted pine cabinet, opened a door and pulled out an opaque glass bottle. It held about twenty ounces of bourbon donated by people who did not drink. He downed about three ounces, winced, snorted, slapped his chest and put the bottle back. Hah! Nothing better to start off the day with, especially when you woke up from a nightmare that should have been rejected by the Great Censor of Dreams. If, that is, the Great Censor had any love and regard for one of his favorite dream-makers, Sam Clemens. Maybe the Great Censor did not love him after all. It seemed that very few did love Sam anymore. He had to do things he did not want to do in order to get the boat built.
And then there was Livy, his wife on Earth for thirty-four years.
He swore, caressed a nonexistent moustache, reached back into the cabinet, and pulled the bottle out again. Another snort. Tears came, but whether engendered by the bourbon or the-thought of Livy, he did not know. Probably, in this world of complex forces and mysterious operations—and operators—the tears were caused by both. Plus other things which his hindbrain did not care to let him peep into at this moment. His hindbrain would wait until his forebrain was bent over, tying its intellectual shoestrings, and would then boot the posterior of said forebrain.