The 2084 Precept (67 page)

No, they replied, that is not a matter which
is open to discussion. I told them that we had no option. If we
could not reduce the number of people handling our cargo, then we
would be obliged to reduce the number of times they had to handle
it. Another lie, honest person though I am. Bad for them, bad for
the company, I continued, but if there were would be no other
options. No, they said, there was no point in discussing it.

Typical communists, they would rather see
all of their jobs disappear instead of sacrificing a few to save
the rest.

Well, I had tried. I was not really getting
anywhere at all; a consultant who could find no solutions. Life is
hard, but we shall, of course, plod on for a while.

The captain, Antonio, came to fetch me
twenty minutes before departure. I picked up my suitcase and we
strolled over to the ship. He showed me to his cabin and when I
protested, he said please not, this was tradition, the ship owners'
representative always got the captain's cabin, and he was insisting
on it. The cabin proved to be little more than a cubbyhole and a
fairly humid one at that. It had a dank smell to it and the sheets
on the bed felt damp, but I suppose I should have been grateful.
Antonio slept here every night for five months on end until he got
his month's shore leave. I decided I didn't want to see what the
crew's accommodation was like.

The cabin contributed to my spending most of
the night on the bridge, despite the
Tramontana
which
started blowing just after midnight, that violent north to
north-westerly wind which comes down from the Pyrenees and not
infrequently at storm strength. This made the sea pretty rough and
in these ships you knew all about it—they were not cruise
ships—but, thank goodness, no storm arrived on this occasion. Which
was good news for cowardly creatures such as myself.

It was interesting on the bridge. The radar
screen was covered in small dots, most of which at this time of the
year were recreational yachts and other small vessels en route from
somewhere to somewhere else. The seaman on the bridge had me
worried at first. He spent most of his time sitting on a stool
watching the television, which was on a table at the rear of the
bridge station, in other words he had his back both to the bridge
window, if that is what you call it, and to the radar screen. I,
however, watched the radar screen like a hawk and called him over
whenever one of the dots appeared to be approaching or about to
cross the path of our ship in close proximity. He would get up,
stare at the screen for a while, say no problem, and go back to his
television. In the end I gave up, I was obviously merely annoying
him.

And so the ship continued for most of the
time on auto-pilot and nothing much happened. Antonio eventually
appeared and took over to guide the ship into Barcelona harbor. We
docked at around 6 a.m. and Friday had become Saturday.

Antonio took me and my suitcase to a
seamen's café and I paid for two of his
carejillos
as thanks
for his hospitality. I personally stuck to
cortados
, those
espresso type coffees with a splash of milk. Around 7 o'clock our
Barcelona supervisor walked in. Then there was more coffee while he
and I introduced ourselves to each other and talked about this and
that. His name was Fernando García Hernandez and he came from
Andalusia. His skin was that pleasant permanent tan colour which a
lot of Andalusians have. He spoke with his region's dialect (they
pronounce most 's's as 'th' and so on). He was a tall, gangly young
fellow, smartly dressed and hair glued into place by one of those
gel products with which I am not acquainted, and with which I never
will be acquainted, thank you very much. I didn't much like him. He
struck me as a guy whose job here involved him in minimal work, for
which he was—as I had determined from the payroll summary María had
given me—overpaid, and which, I surmised, allowed him to lead a
happy and enjoyable life in this exceedingly personable city,
probably in female company for most of the time. He was, how should
I put it, too facile for my liking. All of which might be pure
unadulterated crap, sheer invention on my part. Just my initial
impressions, is all.

He had nothing of any value to say other
than to complain that seventeen dockworkers for ships of this size
was ludicrous. He was right about that at least. I asked him to fix
up a meeting for me on Monday with the dockworkers' boss.
Preferably around midday if possible, I said, I have an insurance
company meeting in the morning and a visit to our pallets provider
in the afternoon. Shouldn't be a problem he said. And then he drove
me to my hotel—a cheap one, I have to set the tone, I am
sacrificing myself because of the company's situation, and the rest
of them will soon start having to do the same—and I went up to my
room and straight into bed to catch up on some sleep.

I slept like a dead rat until Jeremy's phone
woke me at three in the afternoon.

"Great news for you, Peter," he said.

"Ah, it's always good to hear something like
that, Jeremy. What is it?"

"My professor has communicated that, in view
of developments, in view of my practical involvement in this
planet's affairs, all further interviews with you can be voided. He
said that I am already strongly on track with my research and that
my doctorate dissertation is likely to turn out to be an
outstanding one."

"Well, Jeremy," I said, politeness to the
fore, "I can't say I am sorry about that, much as I enjoy your
company."

"I thought you might say that, Peter. I knew
you weren't enjoying our meetings at all, relatively short ones
though they were. And of course, the fact that there are no more
interviews means that all conditions have been met for the
remaining €400,000 as per our verbal contract. I will be
transferring that amount to your account before the end of the
day."

Unbelievable. Unless something went wrong, I
would now be receiving a total of €700,000 sometime next week.
Which just goes to show that although you would never particularly
want to meet deranged persons, let alone have a relationship with
them, business or otherwise, there are exceptions to every
rule.

"Jeremy, let me say that I appreciate it
very much. And let me say also, that because my participation has
been considerably more restricted than originally envisaged, you
have erred somewhat on the side of generosity."

"Perhaps, Peter. But let me say that your
assistance was invaluable. It was concise, it was precise, you
triggered the summit meeting and it has benefitted me just as much
as if more work had been involved. So…congratulations! Spend some
of the money and take good care of the rest! And goodbye for now.
Enjoy the asteroid!"

Well what do you do? I mean really. Huge
amounts of money. Asteroids all over the place. One of them
massively impacting the planet. But hurting nobody. Well, in my
case, what you do is you avoid some major foaming at the mouth by
closing down the hatch on all neuron functions, you go out to eat
in the late afternoon, you drink too much wine and you come back to
the hotel and you slide languidly into one of their plush barstools
and you sink three of their inferior single malts. Enjoyably,
needless to say, even an inferior single malt is still a single
malt. And if someone should say that alcoholic abstinence is a good
thing, I would reply that I hold the same view, providing, as with
many other things, that it is practiced in moderation. And while I
was being moderate, I was thinking about the piles and piles of
banknotes heading my way and I wallowed non-stop in that glorious
and sumptuous feeling I assume most rich people enjoy. Or perhaps
they don't, perhaps only some of them do. Rich people, after all,
are simply poor people who happen to have a lot of money.

And then I went back to my room, I read my
book and I fell asleep waiting for Sunday to arrive.

Which it did. Arrive, I mean. Nothing had
occurred to interrupt our habitat’s twirling and spinning around on
itself. The day of rest. The day for which Americans have rooms.
The day on which, according to certain religions and their various
correlated sects, the creator rested after a job well done. A job
which apparently required some serious repair work eons and eons
later, the success of which each individual has the right to judge
for him or herself. This right was provided to us as part of the
gift of free will, or so they say, except of course that we are now
instructed to be very careful about what opinions we decide to
adopt and which of them we decide to broadcast. I personally have
nothing against free will. Each and every human judges and thinks
differently anyway. Look at the number of hung juries.

The fact that free will also serves as the
perfect excuse for blaming the created for everything, rather than
the creator, is merely a happy coincidence for those in the know,
those peculiarly robed persons who preach this amazing knowledge to
the rest of us.

But this was not a day of rest for me.
Certainly I had some breakfast, such as it was—no poached eggs, no
bacon, and no Chivers in this place—certainly I had a swim in the
sea, but not in the pool, the hotel didn't have one—and certainly
in the evening I went to a bar, nightclub is possibly a better word
for it in view of the ratio of women to men, the prices of their
drinks, and the quasi-naked females gyrating around on a miniature
stage.

But all of this time I was working. That is
to say, I my neurons were working. They were searching and
searching and searching for possible solutions to the Naviera
situation. And it wasn't until about 10 p.m.—and curiously enough
at precisely the moment a female hand removed itself from my inner
thigh and began some sensual caressing of that part of me whose
reflexive reaction to her ministrations had become unavoidably
apparent—that my neurons' bells began to ring. And they rang and
they rang and they rang. Joyful, victorious chimes. Which provoked
me into ordering yet another of this bar’s single malts—I was
drinking one of the Islay malts, a 16 year-old Lagavulin, not bad
at all—and the lady got another expensive glass of champagne, or
maybe it was a mixture of fizzy water and a cordial, who cares,
and, euphoric as I was, I permitted her to continue doing what she
was doing until the danger of it becoming a messy business became
too great.

She gave me a kiss—on the cheek; never, ever
on the client's mouth, they are not stupid—and was already eyeing
the room for another frustrated member—no pun intended or
required—of the male sex as I paid the bill and pushed my way
through the heavy curtains and back out into the street. I took a
taxi back to the hotel and went up to my room.

My neurons had come up with the following: I
had to take one of the two ships completely off the Barcelona-Palma
route and find full-time work for it somewhere else. Easier said
than done of course. But nobody, so far as I am aware, has ever
maintained that the easy solutions are always the best ones. The
other ship would then only do the Balearic run three times per
week, but it would be running at full capacity instead of half, so
no loss in revenues. And…we would only be paying for three days'
dockers' work instead of six. And…the entire costs of the newly
non-operational ship and its respective dockworkers' loading
operations would disappear until we found profitable work for it
again. The savings on fuel, maintenance, crew wages and loading
costs alone would go a long way toward solving the company's
financial situation in one fell swoop.

I would have to do some exact calculations
next week, not that they would affect what now appeared to be an
unalterable decision. The aim of course had to be to find regular
work again for the newly-idled ship. This would result in a
doubling of the company's revenues, or close to it; instead of
merely resolving a loss situation, it would catapult the
organization into being a highly profitable one. And if we were
successful over the next few months in stealing some of the 40-ton
business away from our Barcelona-Palma competitors—I would have to
investigate how we might go about trying to do that—I could fix up
one of the
long-term
idle ships and put it back into
operation. And longer-term, there must be ways for the remaining
idle ship to generate full revenues as well. But that would be
something for the future, not an item to worry about now.

I thanked my neurons, I thanked them very
much indeed. But they didn’t reply, they are not very educated, and
I fell into that pleasant world of malt whiskey-induced dreams.

This kind of latitude has a lot to say for
it. The sun was shining again, I had no hangover and I took a taxi
directly to the insurance company's offices. I had a coffee nearby,
there is always somewhere nearby to have a coffee in Spain, I
smoked a pre-meeting cigarette, and I entered the company's
reception area at approximately two minutes before the appointed
hour.

The girl at reception was one of those
blonde Catalan women you see quite a few of—I speculated that at
some point in history a fair share of the local females were duly
raped by invaders or by the foreign powers who happened to be
ruling this area at the time, maybe by the Visigoths, maybe by the
Habsburgs, maybe by both or maybe by more. Or maybe nobody had
raped them, I had no idea. It was mere idle speculation on my part.
It filled in the time as she walked me along to the insurance
executive's office.

The executive was not as tall as me, but he
was tall, and he was a very business-like executive. He had a thick
file in front of him on his desk, 'our' file obviously, and he got
straight to the point. The insurance claim investigation had
necessarily been a prolonged one, he said, due among many things to
a question of possible inebriation on the part of the ship's
captain and, totally irrespective of that, a question of possible
gross negligence in the matter of how and why the ship was driven
onto Cabrera's rocks in the absence of any kind of weather
conditions which might have been considered a contributory
factor.