Cubicles Are Forever - 1

The night was dark, as nights usually are, and dreary. The tanker rocked gently in the silent water, a tad indecisively, as if not quite sure whether it was supposed to do that.

Aboard a lifeboat a mile aft, Agent ZB-009 took another drag, dug his hands deeper into his jacket and whispered into his collar. "It’s like an elephant stuck in cement… minus the trunk…"

The radio under the tarp hissed static and crackled.

"… at!??"
"I said… it’s like an elephant minus the… "
"An ele… ant? How did an elephant get to the …iddle of the sea??"
"Like an elephant… not it’s an elephant. It’s a simile."
"Dra… …ergeant! It’s not the … for similes."
"Yes Sir."
"Did you take … of the …ompass?"
"Yes Sir."
"Good. Now get …ack here."

Lights came on at one end of the tanker. They turned off and the next one turned on, and then the next one. As the light hopped across the deck Agent ZB-009 sighed and took another drag. A pity it wasn’t the time for similes.


Aboard the tanker the captain’s face creased into a worried rag. Not that his face wasn’t already well wrinkled - he was pushing fifty anyway. The last thing he needed… well that didn’t matter, the first thing he needed was a compass.

He had a deadline and they were terribly late. First, they’d started off a day late and then they made a couple of hundred miles before someone realized they’d forgotten to fill up the tanks. Thank heavens it wasn’t as bad as the last time though - they’d been picked up for piracy after having started off with the wrong ship.

To top it all off, the people he were meeting didn’t have a reputation for encouraging repeat business if you showed up late. Their last suppliers had been scuttled near the north pole. They said the ship didn’t make it to the ocean floor - the whole thing had frozen solid and just bobbed back up.

He doubted that was true though, nothing could freeze that fast. But he had a particular lack of empathy for curious cats. There was a saying about them coming to a sticky end and besides, he was allergic to cat hair.

And now, there was this business of the compass. Fifty eight people onboard, including the three stowaways he wasn’t supposed to know about and the newspaper boy who got stuck with them because he couldn’t find his way off the boat. And not one of them knew how to read the stars.

This wouldn’t have been a problem yesterday, before his sleepwalking navigator had fallen overboard and lost his contacts. The man was practically blind without them and no one could make any sense of his long drawn out explanations on how to figure out from the instruments whether they were going in the right direction.

He’d tried too, spent half an hour with the man listening carefully to what sounded like gibberish before the first mate got the ship’s manifest and found the man was Greek. Darn the government melting pot and all their cultural recipes.

In the end it had been the newspaper boy who suggested they could use a little magnet he had. He carried one on a string round his neck. Bless that kid. They’d all watched the magnet spin round and round for fifteen minutes before the second mate pointed out that all that metal on the ship would be messing with it.

Then the first mate had this brilliant idea to magnetize the whole ship - they were going north anyway. They could even leave the rudder unmanned. It would have to be done in stages though. They’d have to use the kid’s magnet to magnetize something bigger, use that to magnetize something more bigger and finally do the whole ship.

He’d called an all hands, carefully explained the situation and the task on hand. He thought he’d done a good job, covered all the angles, stressed the importance of them reaching their destination on time and why nothing else could be more important.

So when they reached the port of call half a day ahead he’d patted himself on the back and drew in a long self-satisfied breath. Then he’d turned around to look at a two hundred mile oil slick and knew what curious cats felt like before they got turned into cat sized ice cubes.

Someone had had the idea to let out all the crude so that they could reach their destination in time.