The Magic Labyrinth by Philip José Farmer Page B

people who think they’ve seen me before, and I don’t have a commonplace face. If my father had been a traveling salesman, I could explain it. But he wasn’t. He was an electrical and civil engineer and seldom got out of Peoria.”
    Frigate didn’t seem to have any superior enlistment qualifications. He was almost six feet tall and muscular but not especially so. He claimed to be a good archer, but there were hundreds of thousands of bowmen available to John. He would have dismissed him if Frigate had not mentioned that he’d arrived in an area a hundred miles upRiver in a balloon. And he’d seen a huge dirigible. John knew that had to be the Parseval . He was also interested in the balloon story.
    Frigate said that he and his companions had been journeying upRiver with the intention of getting to the headwaters. They’d gotten tired of the slow rate of travel in their sailboat, and when they came to a place where metal was available, they’d talked its chief of state into building them a blimp.
    “Ah!” John said. “What was this ruler’s name?”
    Frigate looked puzzled. “He was a Czech named Ladislas Podebrad.”
    John laughed until the tears came. When he’d finished, he said, “That is a good one. It just so happens that this Podebrad is one of my engineers now.”
    “Yeah?” one of Frigate’s companions said. “We have a score to settle with him.”
    The speaker was about five feet ten inches high. He had a lean muscular body and dark hair and eyes. His face was strong but handsome and distinctive-looking. He wore a cowboy’s ten-gallon hat and high-heeled boots, though his only other clothing was a white kiltcloth.
    “Tom Mix at your service, Your Majesty,” he said in a Texas drawl.
    He puffed on his cigarette and added, “I’m a specialist in the rope and the boomerang, Sire, and I was once a well-known movie star, if you know what that is.”
    John turned to Strubewell. “Have you ever heard of him?”
    “I’ve read about him,” Strubewell said. “He was long before my time, but he was very famous in the twenties and thirties. He was a star of what they called horse operas.”
    Burton wondered if it was likely that an agent would know that.
    “We sometimes make movies on the Rex, ” John said, smiling. “But we don’t have horses, as you know.”
    “Do I ever!”
    The monarch asked Frigate more about the adventure. The American said that at the same time they’d sighted the dirigible, they’d sprung a leak in an apparatus used to heat the hydrogen in the envelope. While trying to cover the leak in the pipe with some quick-setting glue, they’d vented gas from the bag so they could drop quickly into thicker and warmer air and thus open the ports of the gondola.
    The leak had been fixed, but a wind started blowing them back and the batteries supplying fresh hydrogen had become dead. They decided to land. When they heard that John had sent a launch ahead to this place to announce that he was recruiting, they’d sailed down here as fast as they could.
    “What were you on Earth?”
    “A lot of things, like most people. In my middle age and old age, a writer of science-fiction and detective stories. I wasn’t exactly obscure, but I was never near as well known as him.”
    He pointed at a medium-sized but muscular man with curly hair and a handsome Irish-looking face.
    “He’s Jack London, a great early twentieth-century writer.”
    “I’m not too fond of writers,” John said. “I’ve had some on my boat, and they’ve generally caused a lot of trouble. However…who is the Negro who knocked my sergeant on the head without my permission?”
    “Umslopogaas, a Swazi, a native of South Africa of the nineteenth century. He is a great warrior, especially proficient with his ax, which he calls Woodpecker. He also is notable as providing the model for the great fictional Zulu hero of the same name created by another writer, H. Rider Haggard.”
    “And he?”
    John pointed at a