I was once in a church where I heard a preacher say: “God is the only one who will fire you, and let you keep on working.” He was introducing a sermon about how King Saul, the first king of Israel, was rejected by God and never repented, and so descended into murder, madness, and defeat with the nation over the next 20 years.
The preacher is still right – I can't fire folks and have them keep on working, although there was a case on the frontier that tempted me, greatly.
After my joy in having my wife come out to Ventana 5 on leave that she was planning to extend with our children wore off, I realized I wasn't on leave – I was on the frontier to work, and a big problem arose with the creature you see above. This was the admiral-in-chief of the Whorlataan system's defense force, and simply was not allowing humans and humanoids to ship through his system.
For me, the Whorlataan admiral did not really need to demonstrate what he could do with the massive photon fields he was swirling around him while saying no – it was enough for me that he said no, and it was Kirk and Dixon Shipping's settled policy: no trespassing. We had trained all our employees, with special training for our captains about it.
I went out in person to speak with the Whorlataan admiral, and he shared with me what the problem was: freighters did not have the filtered exhaust capacity for their warp and impulse engines that large fleet ships had and the less-filtered exhaust was a highly toxic pollutant to the Whorlataan. He apologized for the inconvenience – freight runs around the system required an extra week – and thanked me for coming out in person to understand.
But then there was who we will call Captain Saul, speed screaming on approach to go straight through the Whorlataan system.
“Uh … obviously, Admiral, I haven't gotten the word back to all my personnel … please allow me a minute to get this worked out,” I said.
It wasn't like it wasn't on the books already, or like I already didn't know Captain Saul had lost his mind, or why – it just so happened that I was present to be embarrassed and perhaps save a ship and crew.
The Whorlataan admiral was sympathetic, but firm.
“Chains of command are sometimes quite slow,” he said, “but I still cannot permit him in here. At his speed, you have ninety seconds.”
I had brought the company's very best engineer from the frontier, the talented, tentacled Mr. Oahuapedal.
“Mr. Oahuapedal, I need a solution to stop that ship in 80 seconds without us having to fire on it,” I said.
“Talk to him for thirty seconds and I'll have it for you, Captain Kirk. There is one surefire way that always works.”
I could hear all his countless tentacles working on countless things at once and I knew he had the compound mind to handle all of that, so I opened up a line of communication to Captain Saul to remind him of the company policy.
Captain Saul cussed me smooth out. It had been a long and difficult journey for him to that end … the company he had built his career in had collapsed, and it had been a hard adjustment for him to Kirk and Dixon Shipping's way of doing things. His resume was tremendous, but...
“We'll pick him up, but he might not work out,” Capt. Dixon had warned me. “Wyil E. Kayote Shipping had a reputation of rolling fast and loose through the galaxy, and Captain Saul was beloved there.”
Captain Saul had gotten in and out of more scrapes on the frontier than there were years of my life at age 43 (and even now at 49), and was quite rich from doing it, but his new company's policy of heading off scrapes and acting like we had some good home training (that is, you don't just fly through somebody's home system without permission) annoyed him and from his perspective cost him money.
The influence of a captain on his crew – especially on a freighter crew out for money and not with fleet discipline – can never be overstated. All of them wanted to save that seven days outbound and inbound through the Whorlataan system – paid sooner, back at home base quicker, and they thought the Whorlataan admiral was bluffing.
Mr. Oahuapedal forwarded me his plan for my review, and I sent it back with one adjustment.
“On my mark, Mr. Oahuapedal – Captain Saul, you know you're fired, right? Stand down and come to a halt.”
He said something to the effect that he had the ship and crew and he was going to start his own thing, in the middle of more language salty enough to make a sea captain blush.
Meanwhile, the Whorlataan admiral changed form, sending his defensive powers to the edge of the system – you would have to be completely insane to have sailed into that – .
– but Mr. Oahuapedal had the cure, beaming everyone but Captain Saul off the ship and making him face that spectacle of death alone for ten good seconds before beaming him aboard and beaming my first mate in to bring the ship to a halt. That ship stopped just outside the edge of the Whorlataan admiral's defensive field.
The Whorlataan admiral returned to his human-like form.
“Captain Kirk, I sensed that you were a good and honorable man,” he said, “but now I have seen it with my own eyes. If ever you can update your freighters to meet our emission standards, your company will be the first and only shipping company to be permitted to pass through our system.”
“Give me a year, Admiral,” I said, “and I will take you up on your hospitality just as soon as I get this lot out of the makeshift brigade in my cargo bay and can work with your specs – can you forward them to Mr. Oahuapedal?”
“I would be glad to.”
Kirk and Dixon Shipping was able to update all ship engines and exhaust systems to meet Whorlataan requirements in under a year, and received full passage rights to ship through the Whorlataan system.
As for Captain Saul, he knew I could have let him die and just replaced the ship – it finally pierced through what the culture of the company was, and why. Unlike King Saul, he repented, sought counseling and anger management, and came back and apologized to me about three years later. We both went out to the Whorlataan system for him to apologize to the Whorlataan, and they graciously accepted.
“You're a good man, Captain Kirk, and so is Captain Dixon – so much so that you make us older freighter captains insecure,” Captain Saul said to me. “There's a way we learned to do things – we came up scrapping just like you did but the two decades earlier makes a difference. Nobody was treating these aliens like people back then. You did what you could get away with in everybody's house. I lost a lot of friends, but I thought I was charmed. Nothing was going to happen to me … except that it was already happening to me. I didn't want to consider that there was another and a better way – until I needed your way of doing things. I would have let me die out there.”
“Ships are expensive to replace,” I said, “and people are priceless.”
He extended his hand.
“Thank you, Captain Kirk, for proving your company culture right by me, and my family.”
“You're welcome, Captain Saul,” I said, and shook his hand.
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