ONE OF the better things to happen to me when I was in school was that my father bought me a loose-leaf binder that had a full color map of the world printed around the outside cover, and a map of Poland on the inside front.
I always found most of my classes to be extremely boring, but staring out the window could get you asked questions at awkward moments, and falling asleep in class could be disastrous.
So instead of listening to my teacher, I studied my maps, pretending to go from this city to that country, to sail on a gaff-rigged schooner from Papua New Guinea to Tahiti in
Polynesia, or to go by camel caravan from Timbuktu to Samarkand.
The names on the maps were better back then, before some dreary politicians erased the glorious lands of Tanganyika and Zanzibar and replaced them with Tanzania, before the Congo became Zaire and Madagascar was turned into the Malagasy Republic, a name that sounds like it means 'bad stomach gas.' Surely Siam has more magic in it than Thailand, and Ceylon, or better yet Serendip, was finer than Sri Lanka. And what ass made Iran and Iraq out of Persia and Mesopotamia?
But be that as it may, while I was only slightly better than average in most subjects, I became outstanding in geography.
I was sitting at my desk in my office, drawing a map of the world as best as I could remember it. I was deliberately vague about national borders, because those had all changed radically in the seven hundred years between this time and the time I was born into. Indeed, I generally left boundaries out entirely and just put the names of nations across the continents. And the exact paths of rivers wasn't worth being too specific about, either, since they can change considerably, especially around their mouths, which is all an oceangoing ship can find.
Of course, not all of the names on my map were those you would find on a map of the twentieth century. When I could, I used the more poetic titles.
I went to college in America, and that place has always been very special for me. I loved the land, and I loved the people who lived on it. But to build that magic place, they had to replace the native peoples who were already there, and I didn't want to see that happen, not again, not in this new time line. My plans for those two continents were such that in this time line, America would be a very different place.
Then, too, perhaps the Americas had been misnamed, for Amerigo Vespucci really didn't do very much and certainly not enough to get
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 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 Explorer's Corps. I was so engrossed in my work that I didn't even glance at the man who walked into my office.
