The Magic Labyrinth Read Online Free PDF

line.
    “As you know, it was back in operation twenty-four hours later. So…”
    “Who repaired it?” a man said. “I’ve heard all sorts of stories, but…”
    “I was in the neighborhood, in a manner of speaking,” Sam said. “In fact, the tidal wave of The River and the blast almost killed me and my companions.”
    He mentally winced then, not because of the near fatality but because he remembered what he’d done later to one of his companions, the Norseman Erik Bloodaxe.
    “So I can testify to the amazing but undeniable fact that not only had the line been repaired overnight, but the blasted land had also been restored. The grass and the trees and the stripped soil were all back.”
    “Who did it?”
    “They had to be the beings who made this Rivervalley and resurrected us. I’ve heard that they are human beings like us, in fact, Earthmen who lived ages after we did. However…”
    “No, not human beings,” the man said. “Surely not. It was God who made all this for us.”
    “If you’re so well acquainted with Him,” Clemens said, “give me His address. I’d like to write Him.”
    He continued, “My group was the first to get to the site of the meteorite. The crater, which might have been as wide and deep as the famous one in Arizona, was buried by then. But we staked out a claim, and we began digging. Some time later, we heard that large deposits of bauxite and cryolite were under the land of a state downRiver. Its citizens, however, had no means of digging it up or then using it. But my state, Parolando, could make aluminum from the ores after we’d fashioned iron tools. That state, Soul City, attacked us to get the iron. We beat them and confiscated the bauxite and cryolite. We also found that some other states relatively nearby had some copper and tin deposits. Also, some vanadium and tungsten. We traded our iron artifacts for these.”
    The woman, frowning, said, “Isn’t it strange that there was so much metal in that area, and elsewhere there is almost none? It’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it, that you were looking for these metals and just happened to be in the neighborhood when the meteorite fell?”
    “Maybe God directed me to that place,” Sam said sneeringly.
    No, he thought, it wasn’t God. It was that Mysterious Stranger, the Ethical who called himself X, who had arranged, who knew how many thousands of years ago, that the deposits should be so concentrated in that area. And who then directed that meteorite to fall near them.
    For what purpose? To build a riverboat and to provide weapons so that Sam could voyage up The River, perhaps for ten million miles, and get to the headwaters. And from there to the tower which reared high in the mists of the cold northpolar sea.
    And then do what?
    He didn’t know. The Ethical was supposed to visit him again during a thunderstorm at night, as he always did. Apparently, he came at that time because the lightning interfered with the delicate instruments the Ethicals used to try to locate the renegade. He would give him more information. In the meantime, others visited by X, his chosen warriors, would find Sam and get on his boat and go with him upRiver.
    But things had gone awry.
    He’d not seen or heard from the Mysterious Stranger again. He’d built his boat, and then his partner, King John Lackland, had hijacked it. Also, some years later, the “little resurrections,” the “translations,” had ceased, and permanent death had come to the dwellers in The Valley again.
    Something had happened to the people in the tower, the Ethicals. Something must also have happened to the Mysterious Stranger.
    But he, Clemens, was going to the headwaters anyway and then try to get into the tower. He knew how difficult the climbing of the mountains which circled the sea would be. Joe Miller, the titanthrop, had seen the tower from a path along the side of that towering range when he’d accompanied the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Joe had also seen a