Sometimes I forget that I am a little bit of everything, but at the same time I am nothing, I do not belong to any side, but I would like to be in all of them. I have been a writer, a sportsman, a scientist, an engineer, a paramedic, a hiker, a fireman, a trader, an economist, a sailor and now I am a merchant marine officer.
I call this wide range of personalities I keep in a secret drawer. No one knows that I know things, no one even gets to think about what goes through my mind. It's a jumble of ideas, none of which ever concisely comes to fruition.
"Why do you stop every afternoon to contemplate the sky, Mr. Dixon?" I turned to see my interlocutor, it was the captain. "Is he a fool who has nothing better to do?" His comment was annoying to me and I did not hide my displeased face.
"Captain, with all the delicacy in the world, you can put your ideas wherever you want," I said calmly and left him to go into the bridge.
The guy was pedantic and ignorant for a captain. I could not have been the worst captain in the fleet, but the stupidest.
In defeat, I found my notes scattered on the defeat table, probably reviewed by the captain.
He, too, had entered the bridge and came in with fire in his eyes.
"He knew I could land you at the next port!"
I was not listening to him, I could see the shape of the sheets and my calculations jumbled on the table, the numbers and equations forming a pattern that my eyes knew how to find. In the chaos there was order.
"Thank you very much, Captain. I never thought I could be of any use," and I set about writing down the pattern I saw on the blackboard.
"God! You are crazy."
The captain left, throwing open the door loudly. Within five minutes the first pilot was stealthily entering, anything he said would be meaningless to my thoughts. The equation was almost done.
"You know you've pissed off the captain again, Dixon," the first pilot was a Filipino who could speak English very well. "You should be careful, your career could be in jeopardy. He knows many people in the fleet.
"Esteban," he kept saying without taking his eyes off the board. "I don't care what that stupid man might say." I don't even know how someone as miserable as him could become a captain, and if he could, I can, because I'm more than qualified.
The chief mate twisted his eyes. He had heard me say the same thing many times.
"Why so much fascination with the stars in the firmament?" he knew he would say to steer the conversation to a more pleasant topic.
"Do you know why I pursued this career? Do you think I wanted to be a ship officer?"
"No, but I just don't see the logic in you seeing so much of the stars."
"In the firmament are the answers," and he finishes the final equation. "That's it. I found the answer I had always been looking for."
"What did you find Dixon? Esteban checked the formula. "This is not the heading and this is not the azimuth of the polar star?"
I nodded proudly and designed it to explain what I had constructed.
"This differential equation is intended to predict the vessel's proximate location.*
Esteban looked at the equation again.
"That's not possible. Did you just find another method to predict the ship's movements? And without the need for satellites?" Esteban looked at the formula without being very convinced.
"Simplify a few things. The stars help us a lot, no matter how many people think they are from the past. They are still useful, if I change some stars and variables, I can find a way to calculate the weather conditions 10 miles around" Those years studying theoretical physics had served their purpose.
"What are you going to do with this finding?" Esteban patted me on the shoulder. "Estimated position of the ship, weather conditions... Those things are already done by satellites."
I didn't see a promising future for those formulas he had just created. He only knew that it was not necessary to use the nautical almanac, or to make many complicated calculations of spherical trigonometry, or even to plot them on the Plotting Sheet.
"Do you think this will save you from the Captain's wrath?" objected the chief mate, looking annoyed. "This does not make you untouchable. It doesn't even prolong it, you look very bad Dixon."
"And I wanted to celebrate my finding," I smiled, I didn't want to think about what was in store for me. I had already solved the doubt that had plagued me for months. "It may not mean anything right now, but it means that we may have an alternative way to orient ourselves."
But Esteban wasn't listening to him and walked off the bridge.
However, Esteban was blinded. The formula had many more applications that he needed to exploit and continue experimenting. I knew that if I cleared the initial formula I could find more interesting and useful values than knowing the future position of the ship.
I went back out to the aileron and watched the starry firmament. Just at that moment, a shooting star was crossing the celestial vault. I made a wish and kept it to myself.
The celebration was about to begin.
