The young stranger introduced himself. He was Lothar von Richthofen, glider pilot, captain of the Luftwaffe of is Imperial Majesty, Kaiser Alfred the First of New Prussia.
“We’ve passed a hundred New Prussias in the last ten thousand miles,” Clemens said. “All so small you couldn’t stand in the middle of one and heave a brick without it landing in the middle of the next. But most of them weren’t as belligerent as yours. They’d let us land and charge our grails, especially after we’d shown them what we had to trade for use of the stones.” “Trade?”
“Yes. We didn’t trade goods, of course, but all the freighters of old Earth couldn’t carry enough to last out a fraction of The River. We traded ideas. For one thing, we show these people how to build pool tables and how to make a hair-setting spray from fish glue, deodorized.”
The Kaiser of this area had been, on Earth, a Count von Waldersee, a German field marshal, born 1832, died 1904.
Clemens nodded, saying, “I remember reading about his death in the papers and having great satisfaction because I had outlived another contemporary. That was one of the few genuine and free pleasures of life. But, since you know how to fly, you must be a twentieth-century German, right?”
Lothar von Richthofen gave a brief summary of his life. He had flown a fighter plane for Germany in the Weltkrieg. His brother had been the greatest of aces on either side during that war.
“World War I or II?” Clemens said. He had met enough twentieth-centurians to know some facts—and fancies—about events after his death in 1910.
Von Richthofen added more details. He had been in World War I. He himself had fought under his brother and had accounted for forty Allied planes. In 1922, while flying an American film actress and her manager from Hamburg to Berlin, the plane had crashed and he had died.
“The luck of Lothar von Richthofen deserted me,” he said. “Or so I thought then.”
He laughed.
“But here I am, twenty-five years old in body again, and I missed the sad things about growing old, when women no longer look at you, when wine makes you weep instead of laugh and makes your mouth sour with the taste of weakness and every day is one day nearer to death.
“And my luck held out again when that meteorite struck. My glider lost its wings at the first blow of wind, but instead of falling, I floated in my fuselage, turning over and over, dropping, rising again, falling, until I was deposited as lightly as a sheet of paper upon a hill. And when the backflood came, the fuselage was borne by the water and I was nuzzled gently against the foot of the mountain. A miracle!”
“A miracle: a chance distribution of events, occurring one time in a billion,” Clemens said. “You think a giant meteor caused that flood?”
“I saw its flash, the trail of burning air. It must have crashed far away, fortunately for us.”
They climbed down from the ship and slogged through the thick mud to the canyon entrance. Joe Miller heaved logs that a team of draft horses would have strained to pull. He shoved aside others, and the three went down through the foothills and to the plains. Others followed them.
They were silent now. The land had been scoured free of trees except for the great irontrees. So deeply rooted were these that most still stood upright. Moreover, where the mud had not settled, there was grass. It was a testimony to the toughness and steadfast-rootedness of the grass that the millions of tons of water had not been able to rip out the topsoil.
Here and there was the flotsam left by the backflood. Corpses of men and women, broken timber, towels, grails, a dugout, uprooted pines and oaks and yews.
The great mushroom-shaped grailstones, spaced a mile apart along the banks on both sides, were also unbroken and unbent, although many were almost buried in mud.
“The rains will eventually take care of the mud,” Clemens said. “The land slopes toward The River.” He avoided the corpses. They filled him with a prickly loathing. Besides, he was afraid that he might see Livy’s body again. He did not think he could stand it; he would go mad.