“Amadeus Mozart was once on this boat,” Sam said. “He’s a really great composer, some say the greatest. But he turned out to be such a failure as a human being, such a sneak and lecher and coward, that I kicked him off the boat.”
“Mozart?” the woman said. “My God, Mozart! You beast, how could you treat such a wonderful composer, a genius, a god, like that?”
“Ma’am,” Clemens said, “believe me, there was more than enough provocation. If you don’t like my attitude, you may leave. A marine will escort you to shore.”
“You’re no fucking gentleman,” the woman said.
“Oh, yes, I am.”
5
THEY WENT DOWN A PASSAGEWAY TOWARD THE BOW, PASSING more cabins. The last one on the right-hand side was Clemens’ suite, and he showed them that. Their exclamations of surprise and delight gratified Sam. Across from his cabin, he said, was that of his bodyguard, Joe Miller, and Joe’s mate.
Beyond his quarters was a small room which contained an elevator. This led into the lowest of the three rooms of the pilothouse structure. This was the E deck or observation room, furnished with overstuffed chairs, lounges, and a small bar. There were also mounts in the windows for machine guns which shot plastic or wooden bullets.
The next room of the pilothouse structure was the F or cannon deck, called so because of the emplacement of four 20-millimeter steam cannons. These were fed ammunition by belts enclosed in a shaft which ran from the boiler deck.
The very highest deck, the pilothouse or control or G deck, was twice as large as the one beneath it.
“Big enough to hold a dance in,” said Clemens, who didn’t mind exaggeration at all, especially when he was the exaggerator.
He introduced them to the radio and radar operators, the chief executive officer, the communications officer, and the chief pilot. The latter was Henry Detweiller, a Frenchman who’d emigrated to the American Midwest in the early nineteenth century and become a river pilot, then a captain, and finally the owner of several steamboat companies. He’d died in Peoria, Illinois, in his palatial mansion.
The exec, John Byron, was an Englishman (1723-1786) who’d been a midshipman on Anson’s famous naval expedition around the world but was shipwrecked off the coast of Chile. When he became an admiral, he earned the nickname of “Foul-weather Jack” because every time his fleet put to sea it ran into very bad storms.
“He is also the grandfather of the famous or infamous poet, Lord Byron,” Sam said. “Isn’t that right, admiral?”
Byron, a small blond man with cold blue eyes, nodded.
“Admiral?” said the woman who’d been bugging Clemens. “But if you’re the captain… ?”
Sam puffed on his cigar, then said, “Yes, I’m the only captain aboard. The next highest rank is full admiral and so on down. The chief of my air force, which consists of four pilots and six mechanics, is a general. So is the chief of my marines. The latter, by the way, was once a full general in the United States army during the Civil War. He’s a full-blooded American Indian, a Seneca chief. Ely S. Parker or, to use his Iroquois name, Donehogawa, which means ‘Keeper of the West Gate.’ He is highly educated and was a construction engineer on Earth. He served on General Ulysses S. Grant’s staff during the war.”
Sam next explained the controls and instruments used by the pilot. He sat in a chair on each side of which were two long metal rods projecting from the floor. By moving the control sticks forward or backward, he could control the forward or backward rotations of the paddlewheels. Also, their rate of speed of turning. Before him was a panel with many dials and gauges and several oscilloscopes.
“One is a sonarscope,” Sam said. “Reading that, the pilot can tell exactly how deep the bottom of The River is and how far from the bank the boat is and also if there are any dangerously large objects in the water. By switching that dial marked AUTO CRUISE to ON, he doesn’t have to do a thing then except keep an eye on the sonarscope and another on the banks.