Chapter 11

Day 181 through Day 210:

On Day 181, my opening remarks included the announcement that there would be a thirty-day break in the meeting’s schedule beginning at the end of Day 210 so everyone could have a vacation. I told the delegates that I would announce the details offered by President Betty Kelt and Ship Commander Cindy Shimlt relating to travel arrangements in a couple of days, and the date the meeting would resume.

While I was in the meeting, my wives were busy talking with Betty, who later discussed the matter with Cindy during their daily telephone meeting. The results were Cindy agreed to deliver the delegates and the members of their official support staff to one of five gathering points, and she also agreed to return the delegates to the meeting location, if they were present at the gathering point at 3:00 PM local time on the specified pickup date. The gathering points they agreed on would be Columbia, Germany, the Middle East, Indonesia, and South Africa. The specific locations would be determined later in the week. Our farm was considered the gathering point for the Canadian, US, and Mexican delegates and their staff, so no shuttle transport was required.

Betty agreed to provide AMC flights to pick up any delegates or staff members, who missed the shuttle pickup. The follow-up pickup would occur at 5:00 PM local time two days after the shuttle’s pick-up date. The delegates and members of their support staff would be given a phone number they could call if they missed the shuttle pickup. Betty would stage aircraft on US bases overseas, and if a phone call was received, dispatch a flight to the appropriate pickup point.

We heard there was discussion among the delegates about whether a pickup would be made if the people to be picked up did not include a delegate. However, the plan was to pick up anyone who missed the shuttle pickup for the support staff were as important to the meeting as the delegates. After all, a non-English speaking delegate was useless if their translator wasn’t present. That was also true of the other support staff members, but impact on the delegates’ effectiveness would probably be less.

During the following four weeks, the thought of a vacation improved morale and eased much of the tension that sports hadn’t relieved. The delegates’ irritation almost disappeared. I wasn’t worried about the residual irritation displayed by a few delegates for there will always be a few people who will never be satisfied by a solution that is tailored to the needs of the majority. The majority of the delegates chose to ignore the complaining delegates.

Our farm was the departure and return point for the delegates who chose to take advantage of the opportunity to spend a month, less travel time, at home with their families. There were a small group of people who decided to not go home. A few spent their time relaxing at Lewis-McChord. The rest left on a tour of the US’s tourist sights.

On Day 210, the delegates and support staff, who would be returning home for a vacation with their families and friends, arrived with their luggage. They would be leaving once the day’s meeting ended. We all heard the five shuttles that would carry them home arrive in the late afternoon. It did not take long for me to realize that the delegates weren’t focused on the meeting. I made the decision to end the day shortly after the arrival of the shuttles.

Paul called Lewis-McChord’s transportation unit to change the pick-up time of the delegates remaining behind from 6:00 PM to as soon as possible. Simon with the assistance of Vert, Relpt, Nick, and Helen separated the delegates into five groups. They each took charge of a group and led their group to the shuttle that would carry the delegates and support staff to their respective gathering point.

Once on the shuttles, the group leaders informed the delegates and support staff that the shuttle would go into orbit, so they could experience weightlessness. That appealed to the passengers. They then instructed the delegates and support staff on how to put on Upchuck Kits. When everyone was ready for departure, the group leaders departed the shuttles, and the shuttles departed the farm.

With the exception of a couple of passengers, weightlessness was an experience that became a fond memory. The passengers who had sensitive stomachs did not enjoy the experience as much as their fellow delegates, but they didn’t complain other than requesting the return flight not leave Earth’s gravity field.

I don’t think I will ever understand extremely large groups of people. I had thought the announcements about the potential destruction of Earth by the Empire would turn people against the Empire. Instead it seemed to have the opposite effect.

A large percentage of the anti-Agreement group and the fence sitters were now pro-Agreement. The US was now predominantly pro-Agreement after learning how close the dissidents had come to causing the destruction of Earth. I later learned the shift in opinions was a world-wide phenomenon.

When I spoke about the shift in opinions, my wives couldn’t understand why I was complaining about what was a good thing for us. I had to explain that I was puzzled by the result of the dissident’s actions, not complaining.

The delegates who chose to tour the US encountered a number of anti-Agreement people who made their views known when they learned the tourists were delegates. However, peer pressure seemed to keep the anti-Agreement supporters from acting on their opinions with violence. That was a significant change in how people had previously behaved toward other people who strongly disagreed with them.

This apparent change seemed to me to be a few people who disagreed with the majority waking up to the fact that they were in the minority and any violent solution they may want to implement would be hazardous to their health. I doubt it was related to Mary’s breeding program.

My wives had done an outstanding job of reining in JAMP’s expansion rate. The Presidents of our subsidiary LLCs identified several business areas that they wanted their LLC to pursue. My wives had each of them select a single business area to develop, and then create an expansion plan that addressed the development of that business area and their subsequent expansion into the other business areas they had identified. Once my wives approved their expansion plans, the Presidents staffed their LLC to carry out their plan, which meant they would start with just one business area. We could afford to fund that level of expansion until the ventures started to return a profit.

My wives approach stopped the possibility of run-away growth of the subsidiary LLCs. However, the LLCs resulted in an expansion of JAMP’s Administration Division, which we had overlooked. Lillian had initially staffed her HR Department to meet the projected workload that my wives and I anticipated. We had the other Department Managers create plans for increasing their staffing in a time-phased manner to support the growth of the subordinate LLCs. However, the staffing of the subsidiary LLCs and their starting to conduct business in their respective business areas happened sooner and faster than expected.

In the Administration Division, the Department Managers of the Legal, Accounting, Payroll, and Purchasing Departments weren’t prepared for the sudden increase in their department’s workload. The departments had to increase their staffing levels and that further increased the workload of the other departments in their division. JAMP’s Support Division and its Earth and Empire Business Divisions had similar, but smaller needs for additional employees. It was several months before a new equilibrium was achieved within JAMP.

During the sudden growth period, my wives had to monitor our available liquid assets to ensure funds were available to pay for JAMP’s increased payroll and the purchase of the office equipment and computer equipment needed to support the new employees. They had to convert some of our long-term investments into cash to ensure our liquid assets were adequate for our increased level of funding JAMP in addition to our financial commitments to supporting the Alliance Agreement meetings.

My wives saw no sense in having a newly hired employee appear for work when the tools they needed to do their job weren’t available on the person’s first day of work. That meant they had to manage the coordination between the HR, Purchasing, IT, and the Building Maintenance Departments to ensure that the delivery and set up of the office and computer equipment purchased for the new employee occurred before the employee’s first day on their new job.

Overall, the time between a department manager submitting a job requisition to HR in response to their unexpected workload and the new employee’s start date helped in spreading out the number of new hires over a period of several months. That also prevented a sudden massive increase in the number of people employed by JAMP.

By the end of our work days, my wives and I were exhausted. The breakfast club stepped in. They helped support us by ensuring meals were ready when we got home, the kitchen and dining room were cleaned after a meal, laundry was done, the house was cleaned, and doing other things to make our lives easier. Personally, I credited Vert and Relpt with taking care of most of the things in order to avoid boredom, but regardless of their reason, we appreciated their effort. For our security detail, boredom was common among those who were not directly involved with the meetings. I recall asking one sergeant about being bored, and I chuckled at his reply about preferring boredom to dodging bullets.

We hadn’t had the time to obtain the Stage 2 enhancement before the meeting due to our involvement in preparing for the meeting. Ship Commander Shimlt decided that the vacation was an opportune time to provide us with our Stage 2 enhancements. Therefore, once the vacation started, my wives and I were transported to The Seeker. The enhancement itself was about the same as the Stage 1 enhancement although we didn’t require as long to recover from its effects. A request had been summited and approved for Elba to receive the first two stages of enhancement, so she went with us and received her Stage 1 enhancement.

We had completed our negotiations with Ray. He was living onboard his trade spacecraft, and used his trade shuttle to commute between his spacecraft and The Seeker. We discussed The merchandise to buy for the first trading trip with Ray on The Seeker during the last week of our recovery period. Ray took us on a short ride in his trade shuttle, so we could see his trade spacecraft. Hearing about the size of a trade shuttle and seeing one were two very different things, not to mention the size of Ray’s spacecraft. His spacecraft was almost as large as The Seeker.

Ray didn’t offer us a tour of his spacecraft, and we didn’t ask for one. For the next several weeks, we wondered why Ray hadn’t offered us a tour. I mentioned our curiosity to Nick one day.

Nick told me that traders lived aboard their spacecraft with their family, who were typically the majority of the crew of the spacecraft in established trading families. Nick explained that a trader’s family usually started out as a harem of young women, and those women were usually purchased on worlds where slavery was legal.

Nick believed that Ray was a young trader and his harem hadn’t evolved into a family, and that Ray would have been embarrassed for us to learn that his harem consisted of slave girls. My wives and I knew that Ray was aware of many of Earth’s social customs. So he probably knew that slavery was illegal on Earth, and he believed his owning slaves would offend us.

One of the things my wives and I liked about the Empire’s government was that the government did not impose the morality of its representatives on its Member worlds. The Member worlds followed that practice and did not impose their moral beliefs on their trade worlds. The Member worlds and their trade worlds also permitted visitors to live by their set of moral beliefs, as long as those beliefs did not violate their laws. The result was the Empire allowed its people to live according to the values of their respective societies. This practice made sense when you considered that a world trying to impose its moral beliefs on a world that had different beliefs would result in rebellion or war.

The people of Earth had a habit of trying to impose their beliefs on others. Earth would have to screen its traders carefully to ensure that the people we allowed out of our solar system would not create a problem with other trade worlds, another action item to discuss.

We returned to Earth five days before the meeting was due to reconvene. Wednesday through Friday were dedicated to a review of the progress JAMP had made. We were happy with what we found. During Saturday and Sunday, we created a five-year plan that defined where we wanted JAMP to be in five years and how JAMP would get there.

We rejected the idea of a ten-year plan for too much would be happening in the next five years. What happened during that period would probably invalidate any ten-year plan we created, so we decided to not waste our time and effort.

Day 211 through Day 300:

Everyone returned to the meeting invigorated and ready to go to work. Actually, there were a few exceptions. A couple of delegates and over a dozen members of the support staffs resigned while they were on vacation. All of these people had taken all of their belongings with them when they left. So in retrospect, we knew they had no intention of returning when they left. Their governments located replacements who joined us within the first ten meeting days of the delegates returning to the meeting. It took a couple of weeks for the replacement delegates and support staffs to settle in and become effective members of our group.

On Day 263, the discussion of an action item ended up being a very humorous period of stress relief. The action item seemed appropriate and its underlying nature was not evident until we started addressing the item. It started out as a serious discussion, but the first two speakers indicated they didn’t understand the agenda item’s intent. When I thought about it, neither did I. The third speaker was a delegate from the nation that suggested the action item.

His comments informed us that the submission of the agenda item was due to his leaders need to respond to the requests of the owner of a company who made significant donations to the leader’s campaign. The third speaker’s subsequent comments explained the actual intent of the agenda item, and made it apparent that the action item should never have been added to the agenda. After the third speaker sat down, subsequent speakers’ tongue-in-cheek comments left almost everyone laughing. I declared an early lunch break.

During lunch, I was in one of the dining tents when a delegate from Bulgaria, Saniya Zasso, said, “Jeb, that action item was a good laugh, but it didn’t seem proper for the meeting. Why was an action item like that on the agenda?”

I replied, “It was an action item that was suggested to us by the leaders of one of the nations participating in the meeting. It seemed like a valid concern and my wives and I weren’t informed of its hidden agenda. So we added it to our Overall Agenda Item list.

“As you saw, all of the delegates thought it valid at first, but after the third speaker, it was evident that the item was not appropriate for this meeting. I plan to have a word with that nation’s delegates and have them relay a message to their leaders.

The meeting continued with an unspoken consensus to not discuss the agenda item in the meeting. There were further jokes about submitting an agenda item about trade in sexual enhancement products outside of the meeting.

We ended Day 295 early. Friday evening Elba joined us and we had a pleasant time in bed. My wives and I went shopping Saturday morning. Well, they shopped and I carried. On the way home, we had several encounters with idiot drivers that almost resulted in an accident.

When we got home, Madge said, “I saw the look on your face, Jeb, after those idiots cut me off. It wasn’t funny to me, it was dangerous. So why were you smiling each time I had to brake to maintain a good following distance?”

“Madge, I agree with you. Being cut off by another driver like they did is dangerous and uncalled for. I wasn’t smiling at their stupid behavior. I was just thinking about something I wanted to do back when I was a teenager.”

Alicia asked, “What did you want to do back then?”

I replied, “Back then, compact industrial lasers were new to the marketplace. Cameras and built-in monitors for cars were being proposed by the automotive industry.

“I created this fantasy of mounting a high power laser and a targeting camera to the undercarriage of my car and using a monitor and joystick to the position a cross-hair on the tire of the car in front of me. The laser would track and point at the place where I had the cross-hairs, and fire a pulse from the laser when I pressed the button on the joystick. I imagined the result to be the car on the side of the road with a flat tire.

“Back then I didn’t have the money to turn my fantasy into reality. However, I still get a chuckle out of the idea of giving a driver a flat tire when someone does something stupid like those drivers did today.”

Phyllis said, “It’s a good thing you weren’t rich back then. Considering the inability to control their vehicles that some drivers display today, it’s a good thing you haven’t installed such a system. I can imagine some idiot driving at an excessively high speed while fooling with their phone, and suddenly having one of their tires demolished. They would panic and the end result would probably be an accident with someone being hurt or killed.”

I said, “I realized that, Phyllis, when I was a bit older. That is why I didn’t install such a system on my car when I could afford to do so.”

We dedicated the rest of the weekend to my wives bringing me up to speed on what was happening within JAMP.

My wives briefed the Division Manager of the Empire Products Division, Robert Leishman, on our trade agreement with Ray. They spent a full afternoon on the products Ray would sell us, the barter system we devised, and the timeline for delivery of the products.

Between my wives’ meeting with Robert and Ray’s return, Robert would have Minnus Enterprises President, Joel Goulding, create a new department within Minnus Enterprises, LLC, hire people to staff the department, contract with retailers to sell our products, and create a distribution network. The new staff would have to create the initial sales organization to sell the products Ray delivered. Joel would also need to have his staff gather and store the merchandise we would use to pay for the merchandise Ray delivered. This effort would require a very large outlay of our capital, but we expected a larger return on our investment within the first year of selling the product.

My wives and I would have to decide on which of our assets we would sell to fund the new business area. We weren’t worried about a financial loss for our projections indicated the business area would be in the black within two years, which included the time to create the department and start selling the products.

What we did worry about was how the new business would impact the meeting and Alliance Agreement.

Day 301 through Day 400:

Progress was proceeding at a higher than expected rate. I asked Amira Blaustein about my observation.

Amira said, “When we returned from our vacation, some of us decided that we would focus our efforts on addressing as many action items as we could during the day. We talked about what we were doing with the other delegates and they agreed that we would get to return home permanently sooner using our approach.

“The result is that most of us don’t participate in the discussions unless we have something worthwhile to contribute. After we get to the base for our evening meal, we often talk with the delegates who talk in the meeting just to hear themselves expressing a meaningless opinion that you and the rest of us will ignore. It’s surprising how these little talks remind the wordy delegates that they can go home sooner if they stop delaying the meeting with meaningless self-serving remarks.

Edgar came to us on Day 373 to inform us that construction of our new office building was complete and the only thing remaining was for the final inspection by Snohomish’s Planning & Development Services Department. That was scheduled for tomorrow.

The following evening we celebrated the completion of our office building, and started making plans to move into it this coming weekend. Obtaining office equipment and furniture was the first thing we needed to do ― Ka-Ching.

Elba had completed the design of the new parking garage, and she had started on the drawing package for the Altairian Embassy and other items to be built across the street.

Three weeks ago, Edgar submitted the garage’s drawing package and a request for a permit to build it to the Planning & Development Services Department. The permit had been approved, so all he had to do was pick it up and he could begin its construction.

Day 400 marked the completion of eighty weeks of meetings. After one year and seven months of discussions, we were close to the completion of the first part of the meeting. I requested our Administrative Assistants to evaluate the remaining action items and let me know when they thought we would complete our discussions of the outstanding action items. They informed me that there were about eight weeks of agenda items remaining to be discussed.

The second part of the meeting consisted of writing the Alliance Agreement. That was not going to be as large of an effort as it sounded. The Empire had a standard agreement which it used for establishing diplomatic relations with a new trade world. Simon and Altair’s delegation had modified the text of the standard agreement, so it would be acceptable to the inhabitants of Earth.

Susan, Dot, Nancy, and Sandra had consolidated the resolutions of the agenda items to create a set of rules to govern trade between the Earth and Empire traders. The final list of Action Items and their resolutions would be attached as part of the agreement. The rules cited the numbers of the action items, since those action items defined the intent of the respective rule.

Other than consolidating the final resolutions of the final action items, creating the diplomatic and trade portions of the agreement was essentially complete. The third and final part of the meeting was for the delegates to review the completed Alliance Agreement and provide provisional agreement to its ratification.

The votes to ratify or reject the agreements would be cast by the leaders of the nations participating in the vote. My wives and I had created a guideline for conduct of the ratification process. One of the provisions was, if a nation rejected the agreement and the majority of the nations voted to ratify the agreement, the nations voting to reject the agreement would be banned from directly trading with the Empire’s traders for ten years.

My wives and I believed that nations who rejected the agreement should not be allowed to profit from the agreement immediately if it was approved. When I read the guideline during the final week of the meeting, the delegates agreed with the guidelines provisions including the ten-year ban. A few delegates wanted to increase the ban to twenty years, and one suggested fifty years. I rebutted an increase to the length of the ban by pointing out that a ten-year lead in establishing agreements with Empire traders would be a major impediment to the banned nations in involving their nation in trade.

My wives and I were concerned about the contest that was being conducted among the families on Minnus. If Mary’s father, Jules Tight, failed to win the contest, then there was a possibility that the new Supreme Royal Zldat would void portions or all of the Alliance Agreement. That would be a major problem here on Earth.

Our Stage 2 enhancements resulted in us gaining the ability to use our link with Mary to contact her directly. We contacted Mary and explained our concerns.

Day 397 of the meeting arrived and we were still discussing the few remaining action items. Nancy and Sandra told me this morning that including today’s action items, we have twenty three action items remaining to be discussed.

My announcing that, during my opening remarks, resulted in smiles from around the tent. The end was in sight and the delegates were eager to end the meeting.

I had been told two more weeks of discussion, but it was now three weeks later with more action items to be discussed. The reason was the discussion of many of the action items required far more time than anticipated. One item was estimated at three hours of discussion, and it was discussed for three days.

So far Minnus Enterprises activities have not gained the attention of the financial portion of the media. That is because we have not approached the retail market to sell them on buying our merchandise. That was due to us deciding to not create contracts with the retail merchants until we had product to sell. We instructed Joel, the President of Minnus Enterprises, to put the start of the sales activities on hold. We explained the problems we might have if news of our business venture were to become known before the end of the meeting.

We expect Ray to return within the next three weeks. At that time, things will change. Minnus Enterprises will be ready to begin its marketing activities at about the same time the meeting will end. The problem is we aren’t sure when the meeting will actually end and Mary wasn’t forthcoming with a date. My wives and I decided to take the safe route by waiting until the meeting ended.

Day 401 through Day 427:

On Day 414, we discussed and resolved the final action item. We stayed late to do that, so I declared the next day to be a day of celebration and relaxation. The delegates left and returned two days later.

On Day 416, Nancy and Sandra distributed copies of the diplomatic portion of the agreement to the delegates. Simon went through that portion of the agreement with the delegates and explained what each section meant and how it would affect Earth.

There was a day of discussion, and the delegates had no significant qualms with that portion of the agreement. It was approved as written.