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 Explorer's Corps. I was so engrossed in my work that I didn't even glance at the man who walked into my office.
"I'm busy. Can it be put off until later?" I asked without looking up.
It must have been the sound of his sword being pulled from his sheath that startled me, because if I hadn't jerked back, his sword would have split my skull and scattered my brains all over my drawings! As it was, he cut most of them in half and left a big gouge in the top of my desk.
He hauled back for another swing while I groped for my sword and pistol.
They weren't at my waist! I had forgotten to put them on again.
I shouted for help, and as he swung, I dropped to the floor, sending my chair slamming against the wall. When I saw him climbing over my desk to get at me, I shouted again for help and crawled under it.
I saw his feet hit the ground where I had been sitting, saw him starting to crouch down to get at me, and I knew I was a dead man.
Then a shot rang out, my assailant dropped to the floor, and an acrid cloud of gun smoke filled the room. I crawled out from under the desk to find my wife, Francine, standing there with a golden pistol, engraved and bejeweled, smoking in her hand, and a look of disgust on her face. Behind her stood Baron Piotr and his wife, Krystyana, both bearing naked steel.
Before I could thank them, Francine said, "So. You were again too lazy to put on your sword."
Then she walked out.
I shook my head. "What could he have wanted?" I said, looking at the body on the floor.
"Obviously, he wanted your life, your grace. As to why he wanted it, well, he might have been a hired assassin, or a disgruntled nobleman, or a simple lunatic, but I doubt if we will ever really know," Piotr said, bending over the fallen assassin. "This one, whatever he was, is dead. But you really must do something about security around here. You must make up a restricted list of people who are permitted past the guards at the gates, and you absolutely must get yourself some bodyguards."