"Philip Jose Farmer - Riverworld 4 - The Magic Labyrinth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

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.

Puffing on a cigar between his sentences, Sam would ex-

16 I Philip Jose Farmer

plain everything, well, almost everything, to his curious party.

Having led them through the A or boiler deck, Sam would then take them up the
steps to the B or main deck.

"Navy people would call this series of steps a ladder," he said. "But since