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

most of my crew were landlubbers, and since we do have some reah ladders
aboard, I decided to call the stairways stairways. After all, you go up them
on steps, not rungs. In the same spirit, I dictated, despite the outraged
protests of naval veterans, that walls should not be called bulkheads but
walls. However, I did allow a distinction between your ordinary door and
hatches. Hatches are those thick airtight watertight doors which can be locked
with a lever mechanism."

"And what kind of weapon is that?" a tourist would ask. He'd point at a long
tubular duraluminum device looking like a cannon and mounted on a platform.
Big plastic tubes ran .into the breech.

"That's a steam machine gun, .80 caliber. It contains a complicated device
which permits a stream of plastic bullets, fed through a pipe from below, to
be fired at a rapid rate from the gun. Steam from the boiler provides the
propulsive power."

Once, a person who'd been on the Rex said, "King John's boat has a .75-caliber
steam machine gun, several of them."

"Yes. I designed those myself. But the son of a bitch stole the boat, and when
I built this one, I made my guns bigger than his."

He showed them the rows of windows, "not ports but windows," along the
exterior passageway. "Which some of my crew have the unmitigated ignorance or
brazen gall to call corridors or even halls. Of course, they do that behind my
back."

He took them into a cabin to impress upon them its com-modiousness and
luxuriousness.

"There are two hundred and twenty-eight cabins, each of which is fitted for
two persons. Notice the snap-up bed, made from brass. Eye-ball the porcelain
toilets, the shower stall with hot and cold running water, the wash basin with
brass plumbing, the mirrors framed in brass, the oak bureaus. They're not very
large, but then we don't carry many changes of clothes aboard. Notice also the
weapons rack, which may hold pistols, rifles, spears, swords, and bows. The
carpeting is made of human hairs. And pop your eyes out at the painting on the

The Magic Labyrinth I 17

wall. It's an original by Motonobu, A.D. 1476 to 1559, the great Japanese
painter who founded the style of painting called Kano. In the next cabin are
some paintings by Zeuxis of Her-aclea. There are ten in there. As a matter of
fact it's Zeuxis' own cabin. He, as you may or may not know, was the great
fifth-century B.C. painter born in Heraclea, a Greek colony in south Italy.
It's said of him that he painted a bunch of grapes so realistically that birds
tried to eat it. Zeuxis won't confirm or deny this tale. For myself, I prefer
photographs, but I do have some paintings in my suite. One by a Pieter de
Hooch, a Dutch painter of the seventeenth century. Near it is one by the