"Philip Jose Farmer - Riverworld 2 - The Fabulous Riverboat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

The Fabulous Riverboat
Book 2 of The Riverworld Series
By Philip Jose Farmer
Version 1.0

1
"Resurrection, like politics, makes strange bedfellows,"
Sam Clemens said. "I can't say that the sleeping is very
restful."
Telescope under one arm, he puffed on a long, green
cigar while he paced back and forth on the poopdeck of
the Dreyrugr (Bloodstained). Ari Grimolfsson, the helms-
man, not understanding English, looked bleakly at
Clemens. Clemens translated for him in wretched Old
Norse. The helmsman still looked bleak.
Clemens loudly cursed him in English for a dunder-
headed barbarian. For three years, Clemens had been
practicing tenth-century Norse night and day. And he was
still only half intelligible to most of the men and women
aboard the Dreyrugr.
"A ninety-five-year-old Huck Finn, give or take a few
thousand years," Clemens said, "I start out down The
River on a raft. Now I'm on this idiot Viking ship, going
upRiver. What next? When will I realize my dream?"
Keeping the upper part of his right arm close to his
body so he would not drop the precious telescope, he
pounded his right fist into his open left palm.
"Iron! I need iron! But where on this people-rich,
metal-poor planet is iron? There has to be some! Other-
wise, where did Erik's ax come from? And how much is
there? Enough? Probably not. Probably there's just a very
small meteorite. But maybe there's enough for what I
want. But where? My God, The River may be twenty
million miles long! The iron, if any, may be at the other
end.
"No, that can't be! It has to be somewhere not too far
away, within 100,000 miles of here. But we may be going
in the wrong direction. Ignorance, the mother of hysteria,
or is it vice versa?"
He looked through the telescope at the right bank and
cursed again. Despite his pleas to bring the ship in so that

he could scan the faces at a closer range, he had been
refused. The king of the Norseman fleet, Erik Bloodaxe,
said that this was hostile territory. Until the fleet was. out
of it, the fleet would stay close to the middle of The River.
The Dreyrugr was the flagship of three, all alike. It was
eighty feet long, built largely of bamboo and resembled a
Viking dragonboat. It had a long low hull, an oak
figurehead carved into a dragon's head, and a curled-tail