THE MAGIC LABYRINTH by Philip Jose Farmer

The boat stopped off to recharge its batacitor and to charge its grails. Malory didn’t get a chance to talk to the captain, but he did see him and his surprising bodyguard. Joe Miller was indeed an ogre, ten feet high and weighing eight hundred pounds. His body was not as hairy as Malory expected from the tales. He was no more hirsute than many men Malory had seen, though the hairs were longer. And he did have a face with massive prognathic jaws and a nose like a gigantic cucumber or a proboscis monkey’s. Yet he had the look of intelligence.

4

ON DROVE THE PURSUER.

It was an hour to high noon. In another hour, the fabulous riverboat would be anchored, and a very thick aluminum cable would connect a copper cap placed over a grailstone to the batacitor in the vessel. When the stone delivered its tremendous voltage, the batacitor would be charged again and the grails on another copper plate in the boat would be filled with food, liquor, and other items.

Its hull was white except over the paddle boxes, or wheel guards, over the four paddlewheels. On these were painted in big black letters: NOT FOR HIRE. Under this in smaller letters: Samuel Clemens, Captain. And under this line, in still smaller letters: Owned and Operated By The Avengers, Inc.

Above the pilothouse was a jack staff flying a square light-blue flag on which was a scarlet phoenix.

From the stern or verge staff, leaning at a forty-five-degree angle from the stern of the lowest deck, was another flag with a light-blue field and bearing a scarlet phoenix.

Sam’s boat was 550 feet and eight inches long. Its breadth over the paddleboxes, or paddlewheel guards, was 115 feet. Its draft was 18 feet when fully loaded.

There were five major decks. The lowest, the A or boiler deck, held various storage rooms, the enormous batacitor, which rose from a well into the next deck, the four electrical motors which drove the paddlewheels, and a huge boiler.

The batacitor was an enormous electrical device fifty feet wide and forty-three feet high. One of Sam’s engineers had claimed it was a late twentieth-century invention. But, since the engineer had said he’d lived past 1983, Sam suspected that he was an agent. (He was long dead.)

The batacitor (from battery-capacitor) could take in the enormous voltage discharged from a grailstone within a second and deliver it all within a second or in a mere trickle, as required. It was the power source for the four massive paddlewheel motors and for the other electrical needs of the boat, including the air-conditioning.

The electrically heated boiler was sixty feet wide and thirty high and was used to heat water for the showers and to heat the cabins, to make alcohol, to power the steam machine guns and fighter-plane steam catapults, and to provide air for the compressed-air cannon and steam for the boat’s whistles and the two smokestacks. The smokestacks were misnamed, since they only vented a steam which was colored to simulate smoke when Sam felt like putting on a show.

At water level in the rear of the boiler deck was a big door which could be raised to admit or let out the two launches and the torpedo-bomber.

The deck above, the B or main deck, was set back to provide an exterior passageway, called the promenade deck.

On the Mississippi riverboats which Sam had piloted when young, the lowest deck had been called the main deck and the one above that the boiler deck. But since the boiler in the Not For Hire had its base in the lowest deck, Sam had renamed that the boiler deck. And he called the one above it the main deck. It had been confusing at first for his pilots, who were accustomed to Terrestrial usage, but they had gotten used to it.

Sometimes, when the boat was anchored off the bank of a peaceable area, Sam gave the crew shore leave (except for the guards, of course). Then he would conduct a tour for the local high muckymucks. Dressed in a white fishskin-leather jacket, a long white kiltcloth, and white calf-length boots and wearing a white leather captain’s hat, he would take his guests from top to bottom of the boat. Of course, he and some marines kept a sharp eye on them, since the contents of the Not For Hire must have proved very tempting to landlubbing stay-at-homes.