The really, really sorry ones.
Soon.
The fact is that the Captain’s celebrity doubtless began some years earlier when a group of starving pirates climbed aboard the Valhalla Queen by means of crude but ingenious rope ladders to capture and hold as hostages the entire deck shuffleboard contingent. These ancient sportsmen they threatened to kill unless the Captain agreed to their demands: namely, the contents of two premium tables at the ship’s buffet. As disgusted as the buffets personally made him, and no matter how much he sympathized with the truly appalling condition of the pirates who, although twilight souls, were after all fellow seamen, the Captain believed that to capitulate would set a bad precedent for fellow captains everywhere.
As a counteroffer, the Captain proposed what he called “a sporting proposition.” He told the marauding seamen that they could have all the food on all the tables of every buffet, loaded onto their craft by ten of his best crew members, if they were able to beat their hostages, currently wheezing in a Bovril-sweating knot beneath a nearby awning, in a game of shuffleboard. “You talk big,” the Captain addressed the pirate chief, “but let’s see how tough you are, my friend.”
A gauntlet had been hurled and the pirates accepted. After a brief explanation of the rules of the game and a strategy session among the pirate crew, the pirates, superbly conditioned by months at sea in an open boat, proved unnervingly quick learners, pulling to an early lead. And yet, little by little, experience proved itself, and the doddering group of seniors who, in the nearly two weeks of the cruise, had done little else but shuffle their weighted pucks from one end of the court to the other, triumphed by a single point.
The embarrassed pirates climbed back down their ladders of woven rope, and the passengers adjourned to yet another buffet in the dining room. But in no time this story, complete with pictures snapped on cell phones, was sent around the world, the result being that the Captain made a bundle from fish-product and sea-related endorsements.
So the snowball of celebrity rolled on for him, and the more often the Captain gave his opinion on such things as International Law and Maritime Policy, the more he was perceived to be, if not an expert, at least a familiar face.
“What would the Captain say?” became a phrase heard across certain think tanks and boardrooms of the land. In other words, the Captain’s ship had finally come in. He retired from the sea, bought a comfortable house in St. Nils, and spent his time gazing out on his lawn. And so, over the past several years, his Death Quotient has stayed, with an occasional run into the twenties, mostly in the low teens.
Next comes the hilarious episode of Mellow Valley in which Norm decides to supplement the cash intake of the struggling commune by learning to repair watches in his spare time.
“How hard can it be,” he asks Sergeant Moody, who is busy nursing a sick duck back to health, “considering what a small space there is for things to go wrong in?”
So Norm sends away for a mail-order introductory course in horology, complete with a set of tools, and begins to practice on the clocks and watches on the farm, with the predictable result being that soon every clock on the farm is running at a different speed. In a matter of days, no one has the slightest idea of the time, mixing day for night, afternoons for mornings, all of which leads not only to several missed connections but also to the embarrassing scene — still talked about in certain circles — where Judy accidentally bursts in on Grandpa Stoner as he is in the process of deworming one of the commune’s two pigs.
Unaware that she is not the only person with no idea of time, Judy takes it personally. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me these days,” Judy apologizes to Grandpa Stoner.
“Well then, if you don’t know, you had better find somebody who does,” Grandpa Stoner replies, and so Judy decides to take his advice and goes to the town doctor, a befuddled GP named Dr. Whittaker.
But in Dr. Whittaker’s office, Judy, who has nothing at all wrong with her besides a simple urinary tract infection, gets her lab work accidentally switched with another patient who has terminal lymphoma. The result is that everyone on the farm, in the belief that Judy is going to die any minute, runs around trying to make her ridiculously comfortable, as meanwhile Judy appears healthier than ever. Nor have they worked out the clock problem, so getting meals to Judy, let alone the right medications at the right time, is nearly impossible.
Finally, just as they have decided to take Judy to hospice in order to get their lives back on schedule without being distracted by the fatal nature of her illness, they discover that the lethal message of the lab work was not meant for Judy at all, but for the town’s librarian, Mrs. Bachhaus, who, outside of feeling tired more often of late, hadn’t noticed anything at all wrong. Once she does find out, however, she sinks rapidly, so quickly in fact that Grandpa Stoner, who once in the past had a brief fling with the lady, takes to blaming Judy for the whole business. “She was a sweet woman,” he tells Judy, “and if you hadn’t stolen her results, chances are that she would still be in a loving mood today.”
And now, on the very evening of the same day that began with his discovery of the giant hole in his lawn, the Captain, wearing his dress uniform and peaked officer’s cap, stands before a crowd of roughly two hundred members of the New Prosperity Group (rich degenerates, the Captain thinks) in the library auditorium. Suddenly, smack in the middle of that night’s story (it’s getting hard to keep them straight), the word Myrmidons blows into his mind with the force of a gale at sea.
He stops the story he is in the middle of telling to drink a glass of water. That’s it, the Captain thinks. Myrmidons is the very word he’s been trying to think of since he first saw the hole in his front lawn. But who were the Myrmidons, anyway? He remembers reading about them in school, possibly in the classics, but which classic was it, and what were they doing in it? Out of the blue he can feel his Death Quotient jerk upward to about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and why would a little thing like thinking about a Myrmidon cause that to happen? He has no idea.
ADVISORY TO THE TECHNICAL STAFF
Upon receipt of this advisory the revised schedule for the Force of Flow shall be as follows: Between the hours of 1200 to 1700, 3.5; between the hours of 1700 to 2100, 3.1; between the hours of 2100 to 2400, 4.1; between the hours of 2400 to 0002, 4.2; between the hours of 0002 and 0004, 4.8; between the hours of 0004 and 0008, 4.2; between the hours of 0008 to 1200, 4.0, unless during any of these segments obstacles are encountered, in which case the Flow may be increased by a maximum of 10 percent of its Rate at the time the obstacles were first encountered, reminding all operators once again of the importance of close monitoring. Should these measures prove inadequate, the operators will then make a report to the Central Desk and await further orders from same.
Tech #1:
Do you understand any of that?
Tech #2: