The 2084 Precept (64 page)

"I have considered all of that," he said,
"and what you say is certainly true. I appreciate that your time
would be split between two difficult roles and that this would make
it an arduous task. Extremely arduous. Nevertheless, I think you
are a very appropriate person for this particular job at this
particular time. We have a very difficult time facing us during the
upcoming months, and I would be grateful if you would consider
helping us to get through it."

"Again," I said, "I truly appreciate your
confidence in my person, but…"

"To adapt the terms to meet the demands on
your person," he said, "I have decided to offer you a twelve-month
contract at €350,000 per year with a substantial bonus in the event
you achieve the hoped-for turnaround in results. And the contract
would be renewable should both parties be so inclined. It could be
confirmed to you in writing today and ready for your signature
later on this week."

He paused. He had—with apologies for another
cliché—put his irons into the fire. And they were nice irons too, I
had to admit that. He was making an effort.

Decent money, great location, easy decision.
"Sr. Pujol," I said. "The terms are more than satisfactory. I agree
to accept your offer, but on the condition that you please note
that I am doing so with a number of major reservations."

He stood up, which didn't make him much
taller, he smiled his unfortunate, treacherous smile, and he shook
my hand. The contract and the official registrations of my person
would be handled by his lawyers' office in Palma, he said. And I
should please remember that he personally was contactable at any
time of the day or night. And then he had María call for a taxi,
and he left.

I spent the remainder of the day thinking
about ocean waves and the like, I wandered outside to watch some of
the loading, I ate a sandwich and I drank a beer, I chatted to a
couple of the ship's crew, I chatted to a couple of the
communists—which is how I have always, justifiably or otherwise,
viewed dockworkers in general—and then I took some of María's
papers with me and took a taxi back to the hotel.

I changed and went straight down to the
pool. And after a light dinner—accompanied by a celebratory bottle
of expensive and very pleasant Barolo—I went up to my room and did
nothing at all except flip through María's information while
continuing to ponder further the vagaries of ocean waves.

There were no ocean waves this morning. The
sea was serene and unmoving and glinting softly in the early
morning sunlight.

Before leaving the hotel, I checked my
emails and found two messages from Delsey. The first one explained
that Jeremy Parker had indeed apparently devoted years and years of
his incarceration to his favorite hobby. Astronomy. There were
certain questions in this regard which they would like to discuss
with me and would I please get back to him.

The second one said that he had tried to
reach me on my mobile, he had left messages, was I still in
Germany, and would I kindly contact him please.

No, I wouldn't. It was between them and
Jeremy now, at least until they located me. And I couldn't think
why they should want to take the time and trouble to do that, nor
could I imagine them being able to construct any legitimate
justification to support a continued intervention in my private
affairs. And even if they were to do so, it would be legally
unsustainable; I would sue them for the illicit harassment of a
citizen and his rights, you bet.

No, I wasn't worried. I was more worried
about whether I could find a way to save Naviera Pujol and that was
what I was thinking about in the taxi all the way to the office.
And when I arrived, I still had no worthwhile ideas, no theories,
no concepts.

Pedro congratulated me on my appointment in
the corridor outside my new office—Alfonso's ex-office. Pedro
seemed genuinely pleased about the appointment; perhaps he hadn't
been enjoying his working relationship with Alfonso very much, who
knows? He told me that Sr. Pujol had announced Alfonso's
departure—and my nomination as his replacement—to all of the
company's employees including our dock manager in Barcelona and the
ships' captains, who had already informed their respective crews. I
also received polite congratulations from the other members of the
office staff with the exception of María. She didn't say a word,
just deposited the day's invoices on my desk. Well, it was up to
her; if she wanted to create a problem, that was fine by me.
Because it would be her problem, not mine.

I went down onto the dock and up onto the
ship—the
Gerona Sol
this morning—and introduced myself to
the captain. He was short and stocky and he had sandy, tousled hair
and his name was Antonio. He was an animated, jolly kind of fellow
and he too congratulated me on my appointment as his new boss; but
he had nothing much else to say to me, other than to mention the
ridiculously high number of dockworkers in Barcelona. Half of them
just stand around doing nothing, he said. He struck me as being a
mariner's mariner, interested only in his ship and his crew and in
ensuring that he fulfilled his responsibilities towards both as
skillfully as possible, and not too concerned about very much else
going on in the world. That was my impression anyway, and it suited
me fine. That kind of employee tends to be one of the kind you can
rely on completely.

It is an iron-cast rule of mine to learn
something about the products or services your client is selling, no
matter what they are. So I told Antonio I would like to experience
a voyage to Barcelona; would Friday night be convenient? No
problem, he said, we will be sailing as usual at 7 p.m.

I went back to the office and started
sifting through the small pile of invoices. I paused when I came
across one I didn't understand. It was for the monthly rental of
thousands of pallets. What did we need pallets for? And why would
we
rent
them for goodness' sake? I went into the outer
office area and asked Pedro.

"Well," he said, "they used to be needed for
delivering split-load container cargo."

"What is that exactly?" I asked.

"It's when small volume shipments for
different customers are all loaded into a single container. They
need to be split on arrival for individual delivery."

"You said 'used to be'?" I asked.

"There may be one or two exceptions still,"
Pedro replied, "but we usually don't handle small volume freight
anymore."

"So where are all the pallets, Pedro?"

"Well, Alfonso used to control that
personally for some reason. They are spread all over the island, I
think. I know of one large customer in Binissalem who should have a
few hundred of them in or around his warehouse."

"Let us go and take a look Pedro. Now."

And so we did. It was only about half an
hour away. And the customer’s supervisor showed us about forty old
pallets lying around and half of them were broken. He was extremely
assertive with regard to the fact that they had no more
pallets.

"Pedro," I said when we were back in the
office, "we are not going to pay any more rent for these things. We
shouldn't have rented them in the first place. It's stupid. If you
want pallets, you buy them. Could you please contact the company
we're paying the rent to, and find out what needs to be done?"

He got back to me about ten minutes later.
There was a rental contract and the only way out of it was an
option at each year-end to return some or all of the pallets in
pristine condition, or else to buy them. But we clearly couldn't
return the pallets. Nobody knew where they were or even where they
were supposed to be. Most had presumably disappeared over the years
and of the few that we might possibly find, their condition would
no doubt be similar to the ones in Binissalem. I asked Pedro to
arrange a meeting for me with the hiring company in Barcelona. Next
Monday, I said, in the afternoon.

The crap you find in some companies when you
start to scratch the surface has long since ceased to be a source
of amazement to me. I mean, this pallet business is both asinine
and downright pathetic, there is nothing else to say about it. But
it is a minor item, it won't be saving the company, it is just an
unnecessary cost which needs to be surgically removed.

In the afternoon, I met with our chief
communist and asked him what issues he and his dockworkers had, if
any. They had one. The wharf crane was dangerous. It needed a
complete overhaul and the '
corona
', whatever that was,
needed replacing. Very expensive, he said, he didn't know how much,
but it would be well into six figures. A few months ago, the top
part of the crane, including the operator's cabin, had started
rocking back and forth when lifting containers and Alfonso had
therefore decided to restrict container weights to a maximum of
thirty tons instead of forty. "Instead of repairing the crane?" I
asked. "Yes,” came the reply, “he said we had no money for
that."

So we were losing some business to our
competition because we couldn't repair our crane. And the crane
wouldn't remain as it was, it would get worse. In fact, I was
surprised the dockworkers were continuing to work under these
conditions. I didn't say so, but a bad accident, maybe even a fatal
one, seemed a distinct possibility to me. And I was now the guy
responsible, wide open to an ocean hurricane of annihilating legal
consequences. And the more I learned about this and the more I
learned about that, the more I started to think that this company
was too far gone for me to be able to save it anyway. But in spite
of that, I should really go and visit the company's bank tomorrow.
Courtesy on the one hand, and also the need to check out the bank's
mood with regard to our mountain of debt and the possibility of a
bit more to at least fix the crane, if not the ship's deck. I asked
María to fix the meeting for me.

* * * * *

When I got back to the hotel, a swim in the
sea did nothing to improve on my pessimism. I had some dinner and
some more Barolo with it, and that improved nothing either.

Jeremy's phone rang.

"Hi, Peter," he said, "Geneva is a great
city. Not that I have been able to see much. There are a few
thousand police and soldiers guarding everything, armed patrol
boats are on the lake, fighter jets patrol the air, helicopters
monitor the ground, and it is all a perfect, but
perfect
,
example of how and what your human race is. Similar to your World
Economic Forums in Davos and any other meetings of importance
around your planet. Humans wanting to murder other humans, and
other humans ready to kill in order to stop them. Crazy, crazy,
crazy, but never mind. I escaped from the conference center located
on the road to Nyon and made it into town. I have just had a meal
of onion soup and
raclette
in the old town."

He sounded cheerful enough. Presumably he
had suffered no major ridicule during today's summit meeting, nor
had anyone made the mistake of trying to arrest him.

"Hi, Jeremy. And how did the meeting
go?"

"Ah well, it went well I suppose. And for
all I know, they are still at it. I was only in the meeting myself
for about two hours."

"So what happened?"

"Well, more or less as you might expect,
Peter. I was subjected to a lot of questioning about the Mars event
and that produced the two main foreseeable reactions. Most of
them—but even so, not all of them—are convinced of what they refer
to as my 'telepathic weapon potential' and are significantly
frightened by it. I think they are also frightened of each other.
They know that every single one of them in that room would be
working out ways to try and get hold of me and to harness me, for
their own selfish, unilateral purposes, and that whoever managed to
achieve that would, assuming I ‘functioned’ properly, rule the
world. And that all the rest of them—the other countries—would be
toeing the line and singing to the tune of the dominant power for,
probably, ever and ever. Power seems to be the only thing your
species is hungry for, power over the other members of its species.
As I say, a totally foreseeable reaction."

"And the other foreseeable reaction?"

"Understandably the same as yours, Peter.
They think I am mad. They didn't say so of course, they are too
scared. But they don't believe a word about aliens. And I don't
think they would even if they were to be confronted with some
aliens in physical form—impossible of course, as I have already
explained—or even if they were able to 'capture' some of these
creatures and subject them to scientific tests, probe them, analyze
them, dissect them mentally or physically, or whatever."

"O.K.," I said, "so they reacted as you knew
they would. And what then?"

"A lot of things, Peter. Firstly, and
although my 'telepathic weapon potential' is more or less a proven
fact, they want still
more
proof. And if I supply that, they
want to arrange another urgent summit meeting for next Wednesday,
also in Geneva, and I have to be present at that one also. So at
least they accept the urgency and the possible enormity of what
they are dealing with here. Fear, Peter, as we have said, is the
one driving force to which every single member of any species will
react. And the few doubters, the few who aren't yet scared enough,
they want some additional proof of a kind that
will
scare
them. Properly. Either that, or they are not going to be interested
in any more summit meetings or in anything else, I shouldn't think.
They will just carry on either causing or administrating your
planet’s self-inflicted disasters as before.

"And so what additional proof are they
asking for?"

"They are leaving that up to me. But it has
to be something that will occur on Earth. Closer to home. It seems
that, for most people—at least for those who are not
scientists—something which happens close to home is more realistic
than something which happens a short way away, on Mars for example.
Don't ask me why. As you yourself might say, Peter, it's just the
way they are."