CONRADS QUEST FOR RUBBER - Leo Frankowski

In a special strongbox, each lance was equipped with a large supply of money, a quarter of a million pence, equivalent to ten years' pay for every man in the lance. Some of it was in gold, some in silver, and some in the army's own zinc coinage. Sir Odon was responsible for accounting for every bit of it.

We made the trip north to Gdansk, where our new ship, the Baltic Challenger, was completing its first shakedown cruise. We drank and sang and partied the whole way and had about as much fun as an all-male group can possibly have.

At one point we got the riverboat's regular crew so drunk that they couldn't stand, much less operate the boat, and then my lance took the thing over and ran it until the next morning, when the regular crew woke up.

Through the night, we had sent out dozens of strange, rude, or downright obscene radio messages, and the next day the regular crew couldn't blame it on us without confessing to being drunk on duty. They were in a lovely pickle when we finally bid them good-bye.

Chapter Fourteen

From the Journal of Josip Sobieski

WRITTEN FEBRUARY 1, 1249, CONCERNING MAY 10, 1248

THE BALTICChallenger got back to Gdansk after her shakedown run the day after we arrived, and almost the entire Explorer's Corps was on the dock to cheer her in. Most of us got there early, and at first all we could see of our new ship was a dot on the horizon that our telescopes couldn't do much to resolve.

It was a clear day, and we could see across the Vistula Lagoon and far out into the Baltic. Quite a while went by before we realized that we were looking at her smokestack. The rest of her hull appeared to be below the horizon, and eventually the realization hit us that we were actually seeing proof with our own eyes that the world was indeed round!

In the course of an hour she both grew and seemed to rise out of the water, to become of respectable size, and although we were seeing her at her smallest, from head on, we grew increasingly impressed with the engineering feat she represented.

We had all seen drawings of her, of course, and knew her specifications by heart. She was five dozen yards long at the waterline and six dozen yards long overall. She was almost two dozen yards wide and three dozen yards tall, from her keel to the top of her radio tower.

Her speed was an incredible one and a half gross miles a day, so fast that if the world were all ocean, she could circumnavigate the globe in only four months! Her fuel tanks were big enough to let her do it nonstop! Her normal fuel was oil, but in a pinch, her boilers could burn coal or even wood.

Her nine long cargo holds could hold two gross containers, compared to the six that our standard riverboats could handle. What is more, the containers used were mounted on half nuts, and these rested on large screws that ran the length of the cargo holds. Cargo could thus be easily shifted while the ship was under way, and those containers needed at the next port could be made ready for rapid discharge.

She had evaporators aboard that used engine waste heat to produce fresh water for the boilers and for use by passengers and crew. The same evaporators also produced sea salt, a salable commodity.

She carried two steam launches aboard, and eight container-sized barges that could be towed into the shallowest water. The Baltic Challenger could take on and discharge cargo and passengers without needing any port facilities beyond a simple crane. A war cart could be put ashore without even that.

But seeing technical drawings and reading specifications, even if they were astounding, could not prepare us for the sheer immensity of the glorious machine in front of us. As she came closer and closer, she grew and grew, and I had to keep telling myself that she was still far away!

Finally, she turned into the lagoon, and we could see her whole majestic flank from the side. Her hull was bright red, and her topsides were white, except for the streamlined red smokestack with its white Piast eagle.

She was a magnificent sight, and as she backed into her stall between two huge docks, she towered over us. It became my urgent desire to run aboard her and examine her from stem to stern, like a wonderful new lover found after a long and lonely trip.

But such was not to be. My lady had many other lovers besides me, and most of them vastly outranked me in the army's scheme of things. Lord Conrad was there, high above me on the reviewing stand. He had with him at least two dozen of his barons, and his liege lord, King Henryk himself, beside him. There was a crowd of foreign dignitaries up there, too, and it was easy to imagine why they had been invited. If anything could impress a foreign government of our power and wealth, this incredible ship would do it!

Annoyingly, the men of the Explorer's Corps, the very people the Baltic Challenger had been built for, after all, were not allowed aboard until late in the day. Even then, we were put ashore within the hour, before we had seen a twelfth of what we wanted to see.

Our departure date was put back by three days while Lord Conrad and King Henryk took the foreign dignitaries, three of whom turned out to be kings in their own right, out on a pleasure jaunt.

Politics!

Still, there was much to see around the new harbor and the huge shipyard. The ferrocrete hull of the Challenger had to be built indoors, out of the weather in a dry dock that was necessarily much bigger than the ship itself. The woman showing us around bragged that the naves of six cathedrals the size of Notre Dame, currently being built in Paris, could be placed side by side inside the dry dock without crowding. The dock's great overhead crane, a masterful engineering work, could have picked any one of them up, and turned it sideways! Notre Dame had been eighty years in the building and was not yet finished, while the dry dock had been completed in less than two years.

In the dry dock, work had begun on the Atlantic Challenger, sister ship to the Baltic Challenger. They hoped to build them at the rate of two a year for the next five years, at least.

The entire corps spent a day with the master shipwright, while he explained the difficulties of making a huge ship out of steel and concrete, and what one had to do to be sure that it was all one, seamless piece.

The sheer scale of things at Gdansk and the precision with which such huge things were made so impressed us that we were almost tempted to apply to work there. Almost, but not quite.

Finally, we were ready to get under way, and the plan was to explore the lands around the Baltic Sea.

Admittedly, it was not a very ambitious project, since the Baltic probably didn't need exploring, but they told us that you have to start somewhere. True, there were plenty of Christian ships already there, and while they were little wooden things, they were well-organized, with their own political setup: the Hanseatic League. There were plenty of Christian seafarers around who could navigate to any of the ports in the area, and indeed we did have two such pilots aboard, to advise Baron Tados, our ship's captain, but what can you do?

It wasn't my idea, anyway.

Looking at Lord Conrad's sketched maps of the world, the Baltic seemed to be so close and so small that we felt we would be like little boys camping out in their mother's herb garden, but ours was not to reason why.

Left to ourselves, the corps would probably have steamed off to Africa, where they say the people all have black skins, or to Hy Brazyl, or to some other romantic-sounding place shown on Lord Conrad's roughly sketched maps, but we were ordered to start with the Baltic, and being good, obedient young men, that was what we would do.

Next year, maybe we'd steam to China.

On the fourteenth of May 1248, we set forth at dawn to discover the world, but, like I said, just the Baltic this year. We left Gdansk and the ship headed east, to circumnavigate the Baltic, counterclockwise.

We had to feel a little sad about the first lance of the first platoon, because they were put ashore on the afternoon of the very day we left. So much for being far travelers.

They were going into the territory of a pagan tribe called the Sambians, about whom very little was known, despite the fact that they were only five dozen miles away. Regardless of appearances, it wasn't really a wasted trip, and we gave them a good send-off.

After that, we dropped off an average of two lances a day, one almost every morning and every night.

In one respect, our ship was not as specified. She did not travel at one and a half gross miles a day. She could do two gross miles per day, and thus, except for the continents in her way, she could go around the world in a single season!

She had performed almost flawlessly on her shakedown run, and never had a serious problem while we were aboard. The only piece of her equipment that failed was her depth gauge, an electronic thing that was to bounce a sound wave off the bottom of the sea and by timing the echo reveal the depth.

They had two manual backups, though. One used a man with earphones to judge the echo, and the other was a man with a weighted rope who stood on one of the wings and found the bottom by feeling for it.

It was primitive, but the pilots from the Hanseatic League trusted the method.

My lance was the sixth of the fourth platoon, and as it turned out, we got placed farther away than any of the others, at the north end of the Gulf of Bothnia. At least, it was called that on Lord Conrad's map, although nobody ever figured out who or what or where Bothnia was. One of life's little mysteries, since Lord Conrad said that he didn't know, either.

That was one of the truly fine things about our leader. Like all men, he was sometimes wrong, although he was much more often right than wrong. When he proved to be incorrect about something, he never tried to pretend that he hadn't said what he had said, or that he had really meant something different, or used any of the other face-saving bits of nonsense that so many leaders use. He would simply say that it looked as though he was wrong, he would correct whatever needed correcting, and then he would continue on with the task at hand.

We all admired his honesty.

My lance's turn had come at last, and we were ready early, standing and waiting for Baron Tados of the Oceangoing Steamers and Baron Siemomysl of the Explorer's Corps to decide precisely where to put us.

Since we had no idea what sort of reception we would get from the local inhabitants, we were fully armed, with our swords at our left shoulders, our bayonets belted at our left, our pistols belted at the right, and our rifles slung on our right shoulders.

We weren't in full armor, however, since there was always the chance of falling into the water. We made do with light, open-faced helmets, rather than the big war helms that attached to the breast and back armor we were wearing. We'd left off the arm and leg pieces, and stowed them in our cart with the war helms. Even so, it was a fair load, and I couldn't help wishing that our cautious leaders would either hurry it up or send for some chairs.

The weather was good, and for the last few days they had been towing the steam launch and its barge behind the ship rather than hoisting them in and out twice a day.

Once a decision as to our destination was finally made, they simply brought up our war cart in the elevator, Sir Odon verified that it was ours by checking the serial number, and the cart was lowered into the barge that was already waiting alongside, below the starboard wing. We followed our cart down to the barge, somebody wished us luck, and the launch took us ashore while the ship continued on its way without stopping. Our whole departure was completed in minutes.

We were towed into the mouth of a fair-sized river, the Torne, we were told, and after examining both banks, Sir Odon signaled the men in the launch to put us ashore on the west bank.

The launch crew went toward shore as quickly as possible, then turned at the last possible moment and cut their power. This maneuver left the barge going straight in until it bumped the river bottom a few yards from shore. Lezek and I quickly set out the ramp boards, and Fritz took a block and tackle to shore and tied the block to a convenient tree.

Taurus had the other block hooked to the cart, and by the time the rest of us walked dry-shod ashore, all was ready for us to pull the heavy cart from the barge to the land we were to explore. The job was quickly over, and we waved the launch good-bye.

That sort of smooth coordination was something all eight members of my lance always did. There might be some conversation while we decided what should be done, but rarely was an order given about who should do what while we were doing it. Sometimes hours would go by without anyone mentioning the work at hand. Mostly it was a matter of thinking about what we were doing, and always being ready to do the next logical thing. A well-coordinated group can accomplish three times as much as a random bunch of the same number of people.

So there we stood on the beach, slowly beginning to realize that we were on our own. Well, not quite alone, since we had been discovered by a few million mosquitoes, black-flies, and other things that must have been creations of the Devil, for God was too good to make such things. We pulled the barge as far ashore as we could without moving the forward block.

"I had expected some sort of welcoming committee," Father John said, swatting a bug. "A human committee, I mean."

"Or some people of some sort, anyway," Kiejstut said. "They had to have seen the Challenger out there."

"Maybe there just isn't anybody around here," Sir Odon said. "That would make for a very simple exploration report, and a very dull year. But for now, we should find a good campsite. Kiejstut and Taurus, you two go look for one. The rest of us will start moving the cart uphill."

Taurus checked his compass and said, "For reasons best known to Lord Conrad, my compass is pointing almost due east. I know the true directions because I got them from the compensated compass on the ship's binnacle. I have long been accustomed to them pointing east of north, but never this far."

The rest of us confirmed that, for whatever reason, our compasses agreed with Taurus's, and the scouts left.

The cart was too heavy for six people to tow on soft soil, but with a good block and tackle and plenty of trees to tie it to, we made fairly rapid progress.

Our scouts did us up royal when it came to a campsite. They found a flat shelf of land on the side of a big hill. From it, we could see and be seen for miles. There was a small, clean stream running beside it, and there was plenty of firewood available. Better yet, there was usually enough of a breeze up there to blow away most of the blasphemous mosquitoes.

But most important, there was a dry cave not ten yards from the campsite. It was a perfect place to store things, and would make us a good shelter if the weather got really bad, although it was a bit cold in there to be really comfortable.