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On my map, the landmass to the south was called Brazyl, and the area of the Andes where the Incas
had their civilization was named Hy Brazyl. To the north I put Atlantis, and the land of the civilized
people of Mexico I called Hy Atlantis.
I'd been thinking about doing this for years, but the time for procrastination was over. At last we
had gotten our technology to the point where it was possible to build oceangoing steamships, and a
whole new Age of Exploration was about to open up.
Oceangoing sailing ships, of the sort used in my time line from the fourteenth to the nineteenth
centuries, could probably have been built at almost any time since the days of the Ancient Egyptians,
just as those same peoples had the materials and skills to make, say, hang gliders, if they had known
that one could exist.
But it would have been extremely difficult for us in mostly landlocked Poland to use them, for
while the ships could have been built easily enough, having the skills to sail them was another matter
entirely.
In the old British navy it was reckoned that a boy had to start learning aboard ship before he was
twelve years old if he was ever to master his craft, and even that assumed that older, experienced men
would be around to teach it to him.
Getting from place to place while taking into account the winds, the tides, and the ocean currents,
not to mention storms and all the other hazards of the sea, was no easy task, and often the very best of
men were not up to it. In the early days of long voyaging, three ships out of four failed to return home,
and in the fifteenth century, Portugal was almost denuded of men because of the horrendous losses at
sea.
But a steamship was actually much easier to operate than one of the old square riggers. You didn't
have to worry much about wind and tides. You just fired up the boiler and pointed it in the direction you
wanted to go. It took many years to train a good topman, but you could teach a steam mechanic his
trade in a year. Large numbers of men were needed to handle large sails, while only a few could keep a
steam engine going.
And the bigger the ship, the less you have to worry about storms. There are limits as to how big
you can make a wooden sailing ship, but those same limits don't apply when you are building out of
steel.
Well, we didn't have our steel industry to the point where we could roll the thick plates necessary
for shipping, but in the course of building hundreds of reinforced concrete fortifications, our concrete
capacity had become huge, and with the new continuous casting plant, we were now making more
steel re-rod than we needed. Ferrocrete ships were within our capabilities, and such ships can be built
to be every bit as good as steel ones.
So. We were poised to go out and explore the world, to bring Christianity to the heathens, and to
become fabulously wealthy in the process. The world out there needed us, it needed our products,
and it needed our culture. And we needed it!
Right then, I could build electric hand tools, and with them I could double the productivity of our
skilled men. But while I could build the tool, I could not make the extension cord to get the power to
the tool! I didn't have a decent elastomer. I could build air tools, but I couldn't make a flexible air
line. The sorts of machinery we could build were greatly limited because of our lack of rubber. Our
surgeons' patients would have had fewer infections if only the surgeons had latex gloves. Fewer
people would have frozen in the winter if they had rubber boots. Electrical installations could be
simpler and safer if we had rubber insulators.
Rubber was only one of the hundreds of items that we needed and that weren't available locally.
We needed world trade. We needed to conquer the seas. The trick was to do it in a safe and sane
manner.
In the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century, humanity conquered the skies. It was done
with amazing speed and for comparatively little money, but an ungodly price was paid in human
blood. Worldwide, it is estimated that more than four thousand five hundred young men died
during those years flying in experimental aircraft. That does not include those who died learning
to fly, those who died in warfare, or those who died in accidents in production aircraft.
Essentially, we lost forty-five hundred test pilots, people who tend to be among the brightest, the
bravest, and the best.
It took humanity about the same amount of time to conquer space, but in that case, the work was
sponsored by governments. In dollars, pounds, and rubles, the price of spaceflight was at least a
hundred times higher than that paid for air flight.
But the cost in lives was a hundred times less!
In the first twenty-five years of spaceflight, fewer than thirty lives were lost. The difference
was that the Quest for Space was organized.
I don't know how many lives were lost in the course of the original Age of Exploration, but I'm
sure that it was in the millions. Throughout the period, the frontiers were lawless places where
the worst of society went. Misfits, criminals, and lunatics; they threw away their lives, killing
each other and the native peoples they found in their way.
Furthermore, a lot of things happened during those years that I, as a European, am not very
proud of. The destruction of two fledgling civilizations in the Americas, the brutal things that
were done to China during the Opium Wars, and the enslavement and transportation of millions
of Africans were things that were as stupid as they were shameful.
And they were not going to happen while I was in charge! Besides knowing in advance where
we were going to go, and approximately what we would find there, we had a trained group
of well-equipped, intelligent, and competent men to do the exploring.
Contrary to the practice of most of the organizations in the army, where women competed on an
equal basis with men, the Explorer's Corps had to be an all-male organization. Small groups of
our people would have to spend years out in the wilderness, far away from help and hospitals. We
didn't have anything like a birth control pill; a pregnant woman would have had a hard time
surviving out there, and supporting one could have gotten the rest of her team killed along with her.
These thoughts soon got me to sketching up a plan for recruiting, selecting, and training my future [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]