Leo Frankowski - CONRAD'S QUEST FOR RUBBER

"Reindeer. That must be because they put reins on the animal when they use it to pull their sleds. Reasonable. Say, how well do you know Baron Tados? This is the third time he has captained the ship we were on, and I still don't know anything about him."

I said that the first time was at the Battle for the Vistula, when we were just out of grunt school. The last thing we'd wanted was an interview with a baron! On the Baltic, we only saw him a few times, and the one time we'd met socially, everybody was too polite to actually talk. And on this trip, he had thus far stayed on the bridge, where our presence wasn't welcome. So I was as ignorant as Taurus was. I asked why he wanted to know about the man.

"I don't know. Maybe it's just my imagination, but some tension is building, something seems strange. Have you heard that the North Star is almost under the horizon? We'll be turning west in a few hours."

I said we were almost on the equator, and that I had expected it would be hotter. A summer afternoon in Poland would often get as warm as it was on the ship.

"I think the water cools us. Before long, we will arrive at the land of Brazyl, if all goes well and Lord Conrad is right. Still, I have a very bad feeling that something is going to go very wrong."

I said that his grace was rarely mistaken. We might be on the river within the week. I reminded him that no Christian in all of recorded history had ever traveled this far before! A certain amount of anxiety was only normal. I told Taurus that maybe it was just the anticipation that was upsetting him.

I was wrong.

Captain Odon was red in the face and gesticulating vigorously at the ship's captain, Baron Tados, who was groping for a weapon, and had not drawn one only because he couldn't seem to decide between his sword, his pistol, or the huge Mongol bow hanging on the wall. The baron's face was white, and I was unsure which color was the worse danger signal.

Both of their jaws were moving up and down, their lips were moving, and their faces were going through the most remarkable contortions, but they were up on the bridge, and what with the noise and the wind of our travel, those of us below on the main deck could not hear a word of what was being shouted.

Suddenly, Captain Odon raised both fists into the air, turned around, and stormed down the staircase toward the two dozen or so officers who were watching them. The baron hesitated for a moment or two, then charged after the explorer.

"It seems that our sublime leaders have concluded their learned consultations," Zbigniew said. "Perhaps at last we shall be enlightened as to their cause for concern."

I said that his florid language suggested he had been reading too many diplomatic papers in the News Magazine, and stressed the prudence of being prepared to disarm them both, if necessary.

"Stop running away, you insubordinate bastard! I gave you an order!" the baron said, grabbing our captain's arm.

"Insubordinate, hell! I am your co-komander on this mission! And I tell you that you are a bloody madman! We are in the middle of the ocean! We have not sighted land for weeks! An idiot child could tell that we are not on a fornicating river! Use your eyes, you senile old fool!" Captain Odon said, shaking loose his arm.

"And I tell you that I have my written orders, you mutinous bastard! Fuel consumption has been much higher than expected, and if we have headwinds, in addition to the contrary currents that you know damn well we can expect, this ship will have a hard time getting back to Gdansk!" the baron said.

"You still have more than half of your fuel left, and if there is any question of it running out, when we find land, we can cut you enough cordwood to get you to China! But right now we are on the ocean! We are not on a river! And trying to assemble the riverboats down in those waves is suicide for any man who goes down there, and murder for you to order them to do it!"

"Lord Conrad's notes clearly say that the Amazon River is so wide that in some places you cannot see the banks from the middle! And you tasted the last bucket of water we brought up from the side! There wasn't one bit of salt in it! It was river water! We are on a river, you bloody idiot!"

"I don't give a damn if it tastes like pure white lightning! The Baltic Sea is damn low on salt, and nobody saw you putting a riverboat on it! Those waves down there are two yards high, and any attempt to assemble a riverboat over the side will result in disaster! And even if we were on a river, it makes no sense to take a fragile, short-ranged riverboat who knows how damned far to land when you still have miles of water below your ship's keel! If this is a river, it is too big for the boats we brought, and the only thing to do is take the ship up it until it gets shallow enough and narrow enough to justify putting a small riverboat on it!" Captain Odon shouted.

"This ship is needed elsewhere, and we have a schedule to keep! Now get your cowardly ass in gear and do your job!"

"That's an illegal order and you damn well know it! Schedules? Now the filthy truth finally comes out! You are willing to kill a whole company of men just so you can make your paperwork look neat! My men are not going to get butchered just to satisfy your stupid brand of pigheadedness!"

"Captain, if you won't follow orders, then your men will! Get on with your job, because if you don't, this ship is turning back!" the baron said.

"You will do no such thing. You will not kill my men, and you will not abort this mission. It is too important to Lord Conrad for us to turn back now, when there isn't any good reason for it. The reason why you will not do anything stupid is that I have three times as many men as you do, and my men are much better armed! Now just continue steaming in the direction that we're going, and we'll find land eventually!"

And with that Captain Odon turned around and marched back to his cabin. The baron stood there, breathing hard, and then suddenly realized that there were two dozen men staring at him. He opened his mouth to shout something, and then thought better of it. He turned and strutted briskly back to his own cabin.

"With any luck, they'll both get drunk alone in their cabins, and the rest of us can do something sensible and save the mission," First Officer Seweryn Goszczynski said.

"That is a noble thought," Zbigniew said. "Does anybody have any idea what set them off?"

"It was a matter of the baron making a poorly thought-out suggestion — certainly, it wasn't an order at first — and your captain rather abruptly calling it stupid. You must understand that the baron has been around boats and ships for forty years now, and he was not pleased that a man less than half his age was made co-komander on this mission," a ship's radio operator said.

I said that the whole idea of having co-komanders was stupid, but since we were stuck with it, we junior officers ought to come up with a plan as to what to do if our superiors got into this same argument again, especially if they started giving the men strange and contradictory orders.

The first officer said, "If that happens, we must be prepared to disobey all illegal orders, which would mean turning this ship back for home, aborting the mission, and enduring our own courts-martial. Those of us that weren't hung would have our careers irretrievably damaged. If we didn't disobey them, and anybody got killed, as your captain is convinced would happen, we'd be up on charges anyway, for conveying an illegal order. We are all in an absolutely no-win situation, and that is probably what will save us. Both of our superiors have been acting like bloody idiots, but neither one of them is a stupid bloody idiot. They know what would happen as well. as we do, and they both know that their best chance of getting out of this unscathed is to pretend that it didn't happen. I doubt if either of them will stick his head out of his cabin until we are ready to part company. For the time being, we will follow my standing orders and continue to sail west, until such time as we can find a sane place in which to assemble your riverboats."

"An excellent suggestion, sir, and one that the Explorer's Corps will endorse. We will also station as high-ranking a man as possible near our captain's door, to waylay him if he comes out to do something stupid. I suggest that your people perform the same service for the baron," Zbigniew said.

"You may count on it, sir. I further suggest that if our superiors wisely decide to pretend that all of this never happened, we would all be well-advised to contract a case of mass amnesia."

I said that he could count on that.

From the Journal of Josip Sobieski

WRITTEN MARCH 7, 1251, CONCERNING JANUARY 21, 1250

THINGS WENT pretty much as First Officer Goszczynski said they would. Our superiors both declared themselves to be sick, and had their meals sent to their rooms. Slowly, the tension on board relaxed.

It was two days before we sighted land to starboard, and another day more until we had land to port. A further half day took us upriver to a point where we were no longer bothered by big ocean waves.

A council of officers decided we were at a position that both of our superiors could live with, had they been sufficiently well to attend the meeting. We were on the equator, and we were definitely on an absolutely huge river. The current was strong, the water was fresh, and we had banks on both side of us.

We dropped anchor, broke out the the premade floats that would be the bottoms of the riverboats, and started lowering them down to the water level. We soon had assembly crews working under the wings on both sides of the ship.

The floats were the same size as our standard containers so they could fit into the ship's storage conveyors. Each float had a removable top, and most of them already contained the cargo that the riverboats would be carrying. They bolted together easily.

The steam engines were another matter, since they were heavy, and had to be mounted mostly behind and on top of the floats. Assembling them was not as simple as the designers had hoped, what with the motion of the boats, the ship, and the water. We encountered several bothersome manufacturing defects, and as always, we were up against the innate perversity of inanimate objects.

Persevering, it was almost sunset when we had one boat assembled, another close to done, and a third boat started. An amazing thing was sighted then.

A lookout up in the crow's nest was the first to spot it, but I was taking a break on the rear deck at the time, so I saw the whole terrible affair.

There was a white line to the east, on the ocean horizon, going from shore to shore. I soon noticed that it was getting bigger, and thicker, somehow, but I had no idea what it was. Neither did any of the ship's officers to whom I shouted.

Still, when strange things happen, it is best to act cautiously and get the men out of danger, even if it might slow down the job at hand.

I ran to the port side of the ship, under the wing, and shouted at the men working down there to get back up into the ship, and to do it quickly. Then I ran to the starboard side and repeated my message.

When I got back to the rear railing, the strange phenomenon had grown to the point where it was obviously coming at us, and at a pretty fair speed. I ran around in a triangle again and told everybody to hurry up, no shit, this was serious. Some fool made a joke about how a dragon was coming, and if I hadn't been worrying about saving his life, I would have shot him!

Some of the men that I'd trained myself, the men from myown platoon, scrambled up the netting we had hung over both sides, and those men lived. The ones who were waiting for the lift to come back down to get them got into trouble.