Chapter 215: Chug-Chug (2)
I loved peace.
Yes, I was exactly the sort of person who wanted to build a picture-perfect house on a green meadow and spend my whole life living leisurely there with my beloved.
…Though I didn’t actually have a beloved yet, but anyway. Sob, sob.
If I didn’t love peace in the first place, then how in the world could our dear Louis-Auguste still be alive, and not only that, but be making a tidy profit by publishing a book called Non-Possession through the Ears of the Nation magazine company?
…Of course, part of those profits was becoming sales commission and filling my own pockets quite nicely.
But setting all that aside, this was unfortunately not the twenty-first century, where common sense prevailed, but the eighteenth century.
Did this inhuman hellscape called the eighteenth century look like the sort of reality that would tolerate Guillaume’s dream?
Our beloved late eighteenth century was surely lying in wait, thinking, Peace? Don’t be ridiculous! Absolutely not! and itching to force-feed me a fistful of trouble.
Think about it. Wasn’t it said that from Louisiana’s Nouvelle-Orléans all the way up to Minnesota was a full 1,850 kilometers?
Even in the twenty-first century, when monstrous devices bordering on the supernatural like smartphones existed, South Korea—a small country only about 400 kilometers across—still had horrifying news stories hit the media every few years about some backwater rural place using slaves or doing something equally insane.
But 1,850 kilometers in this ridiculous era, where there weren’t even smartphones and trial-model automobiles had only just appeared? Wow. You could probably kill someone, bury them in secret, and no one would ever notice.
Let’s grant a hundred concessions and say people all got along without trouble, and because of that, the constables in charge of some enormous 400-kilometer stretch spent their days napping lazily. Even so, there were still far too many risk factors in America.
The Native Americans.
Yes, the Indians from those Western movies, the ones with white feathers stuck in their hair, firing arrows twang-twang.
Actually, living through this era taught me something: those movies got a lot of things wrong. For example, the idea that savage Native Americans attacked while making ululating cries, or that they aimed for your throat with bows, and things like that.
I swear to heaven, our Native American friends absolutely did no such thing.
Our Native American friends quietly cut your throat while you were dozing by the campfire. They absolutely did not shout loudly.
Our Native American friends split their forces into squad-sized units and fought hit-and-run guerrilla warfare in the forests. They did not come charging in on horseback and hurl themselves at you like the idiots in the media.
Our Native American friends gripped muskets left over from the American War of Independence and fired lead bullets. They absolutely did not use bows that couldn’t hit anything properly.
Ah, and if you’re wondering how the natives could possibly be making and firing lead bullets in the first place—British merchants living up in British Canada traded them for furs. Fuck.
After independence, the United States fought these people in one dreary local war after another for a full ten years before finally pushing them west of the State of Illinois.
And veeeery unfortunately, west of Illinois was French Louisiana.
“Well then, doesn’t that settle it? We wouldn’t even be entering someone else’s land, so if you’d just give the order, boss, I, Oudinot, will sweep away all those savages in one go!”
“Ahem.”
When I narrowed my eyes and spoke, Oudinot coughed awkwardly.
I was sorry to have made him come all this way from Europe, but I could not allow that sort of premodern thinking under any circumstances.
Even if I had been reborn in this eighteenth century, inside this shell I was still a twenty-first-century Korean who had been drilled in Wise Life and Proper Life from soft-headed elementary school days onward.
As a moral Korean who never stole other people’s things except bicycles, I refused any line of thought that said problems should be solved by cutting off other people’s heads.
“But we cannot simply stand by and watch while French lives are threatened.”
“That’s right, boss.”
“At all times, keep a channel open so the natives can communicate and talk if they wish. But if they insist on using force anyway, be prepared to respond at any time.”
“Yes, boss.”
Behind Oudinot as he nodded and left the room, hundreds of new Ears of the Nation employees marched by in heavy boots with rifles slung over their shoulders.
It was February 1795, here in the Great Lakes region of Minnesota, French Louisiana.
Cold. Fucking cold.
“Ugh, i-it definitely wasn’t this bad until last month…”
Philippe Le Bon, a technician of the Ears of the Nation, pulled his coat tighter around himself as he spoke. For Le Bon, who had been born in Provence in France, where one enjoyed a warm Mediterranean climate all year round, Minnesota’s winter weather, which dropped to negative ten degrees, was unbearable torment.
“We’d do well to build a materials warehouse over there. Ah, and let’s make a temporary pier right in front so water transport will be easier.”
“How in the world… does the boss stay so full of energy… like that?”
While one man of the same age was busy clutching thick fur clothing and trembling, the other, as if he had sulfur flames inside him, was wearing only rough layers and barking instructions at the workers.
“When are Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Trevithick supposed to arrive?”
“They arrived in Louisiana last month, so in another day or two at most, they should be here.”
“Good. Once the two of them arrive, we’ll begin immediately.”
Thinking he would freeze to death if he kept waiting for the boss, who clearly had no idea when to stop, Le Bon finally entered the building before the boss did.
“Whew. Now I can live again.”
A roughly built structure thrown together out of wood and stone. Even so, the inside of it had long since become hotter than almost any place in this world.
Melt the iron ore, hammer it, and make iron from it.
In words, it sounded very simple, but no one who had actually seen the process could ever call it simple.
As soon as iron ore freshly brought from the mine was loaded into a great mound of clay and the coke was set alight, the molten red metal churned and danced.
Every drop of sweat that ran down from the heads of the skilled workers filled the room with red light reflected from the molten iron.
Beautiful.
Hadn’t the shining fairies from the bedtime stories his mother told him as a child radiated light like that?
A few skilled workers muttered that if you stared at molten iron too long, it would ruin your eyes, but Le Bon had long since been captivated by the intense red that iron spat out.
As Le Bon had learned, the hardest substance in the world was diamond. But what ordinary thing was a diamond? Hadn’t Adviser Lavoisier almost gotten himself sent to the guillotine after burning one up for an experiment?
Diamonds could be luxury goods, perhaps, but they were useless in everyday life.
Which meant steel. Though for now, due to the limits of technology, only one hundredth of the iron they mined became steel, with the boss’s grand plan, within ten years every iron and steel product made in France would be made of steel.
Farm tools, implements, muskets, cannons, swords—everything!
France, the nation of steel!
And that wasn’t all. Once railways strong enough to bear the weight of locomotives were laid, and locomotives ran upon them, Le Bon could hardly imagine how that would change the world.
To be able to write his own name into such a great enterprise—what a thrilling thing that was for a scientist, for an engineer.
And yet it wasn’t enough. Just as a man dying of thirst could not be satisfied with a single sip of water, Le Bon wanted more.
More, more, more invention, and more, more, more innovation alone could quench Le Bon’s thirst.
—Click.
Leaving the building where the blast furnace vomited molten iron, Le Bon returned to his room some distance away, slowly took several samples and a notebook from inside his coat, set them on the desk, and dipped his pen in ink.
As he began writing down equations, one of the samples lying on his desk bore the two characters:
[Petroleum]
“Mr. Trevithick, Mr. Murdoch. Welcome to Louisiana!”
I seized the hands of the two men who had just stepped off the ship and shook them vigorously. But unlike me, energetic as ever, both men had dark circles beneath their eyes.
“B-boss, just a moment. Time… urk! Ugh! Bleurgh!”
Oh dear.
Was it because they were worn out from two full months crossing the Atlantic, then another month going up the Mississippi River? Trevithick ended up showing me exactly what he had eaten for lunch.
Ah, right. I called him Trevithick, but that was wrong. Add Murdoch too, and now there were two of them.
“Ugh…”
“…Gentlemen, are you feeling any better now?”
“Yeees…”
Mm. In my opinion, they didn’t look all right at all.
Even so, despite the terrible ordeal they had just gone through, both men’s eyes were blazing.
“Now then! Let’s go at once! There’s no time to hesitate!”
“Are your bodies really in condition for that?”
“If anything, I feel lighter now, so I can go even faster. Come on, boss! Quickly!”
Those eyes. I’d seen them somewhere before. They were the same eyes the lions of the Serengeti had in National Geographic when they were hunting prey.
“…We’ll begin real work after you’ve recovered for a few days. We can’t afford to ruin your health.”
“Wh-what? B-but!”
What? Buuuut?
Instead of answering, I simply turned my head and stared straight at Trevithick’s face.
“…A-hem.”
“You two are the finest engineers in the Ears of the Nation. The day your health breaks down, our company will take a severe hit. I’d like you to keep that in mind.”
“Understood.”
No, but don’t look so dejected about it. If you two collapse sick, there’s no one to replace you.
This was driving me crazy. It wasn’t like they were children whining for toys or snacks. At this point I was getting confused whether I was Guillaume or some kindergarten teacher for the Sunshine Class at Sprout Village Kindergarten.
“Whew. Very well. But today you will only observe with your eyes.”
“‘Naturally, boss!’”
Honestly, they weren’t even adolescents mooning over a crush. This was driving me insane.
April 1795, two months after Trevithick and Murdoch arrived at the Great Lakes.
All of us were gathered in a vast open area, anxiously watching the scene before us by the second.
It was already the third day since we had loaded coke into the converter—which anyone seeing it would probably say looked like some enormous cauldron—and raised the temperature.
Whether the molten iron this converter spat out turned into steel or wrought iron would determine whether all the effort we had poured in over the past several months ended as a complete waste or as an unprecedented innovation.
I must have put a cigarette in my mouth and taken it out again dozens of times. I must have also wondered dozens of times whether I should have skewered a pig’s head and laid out an ancestral rite table to summon the ancestors of the House of Toulon.
A skilled worker hammered the ingot that had come out of the converter several times, then looked at me.
“Boss.”
“Yes.”
“It’s steel.”
I flung the cigarette in my hand high into the sky and leapt into the air.