said by the skeleton crew of Swedes and Ecuadorians who delivered her from Malmö to Guayaquil that a storm she passed through in the North Atlantic would be the last rough water or cold weather she would ever know.
She was a floating restaurant and lecture hall and nightclub and hotel for one hundred paying guests. She had radar and sonar, and an electronic navigator which gave continuously her position on the face of the earth, to the nearest hundred meters. She was so thoroughly automated that a person all alone on the bridge, with no one in the engine room or on deck, could start her up, hoist her anchor, put her in gear, and drive her off like a family automobile. She had eighty-five flush toilets and twelve bidets, and telephones in the staterooms and on the bridge which, via satellite, could reach other telephones anywhere.
She had television, so people could keep up with the news of the day.
Her owners, a pair of old German brothers in Quito, boasted that their ship would never be out of touch with the rest of the world for an instant. Little did they know.
She was seventy meters long.
The ship on which Charles Darwin was the unpaid naturalist, the Beagle, was only twenty-eight meters long.
When the Bahía de Darwin was launched in Malmö, eleven hundred metric tons of saltwater had to find someplace else to go. I was dead by then.
When the Beagle was launched in Falmouth, England, only two hundred and fifteen metric tons of saltwater had to find someplace else to go.
The Bahía de Darwin was a metal motor ship.
The Beagle was a sailboat made out of trees, and carried ten cannons for repelling pirates and savages.
The two older cruise ships with which the Bahía de Darwin was meant to compete had gone out of business before the struggle could begin. Both had been booked to capacity for many months to come, but then, because of the financial crisis, they had been swamped with cancellations. They were anchored in backwaters of the marshland now, out of sight of the city, and far from any road or habitation. Their owners had stripped them of their electronic gear and other valuables—in anticipation of a prolonged period of lawlessness.
Ecuador, after all, like the Galápagos Islands, was mostly lava and ash, and so could not begin to feed its nine million people. It was bankrupt, and so could no longer buy food from countries with plenty of topsoil, so the seaport of Guayaquil was idle, and the people were beginning to starve to death.
Business was business.
Neighboring Peru and Colombia were bankrupt, too. The only ship at the Guayaquil waterfront other than the Bahía de Darwin was a rusty Colombian freighter, the San Mateo, stranded there for want of the means to buy food or fuel. She was anchored offshore, and had been there so long that an enormous raft of vegetable matter had built up around her anchor line. A baby elephant might have reached the Galápagos Islands on a raft that size.
Mexico and Chile and Brazil and Argentina were likewise bankrupt—and Indonesia and the Philippines and Pakistan and India and Thailand and Italy and Ireland and Belgium and Turkey. Whole nations were suddenly in the same situation as the San Mateo, unable to buy with their paper money and coins, or their written promises to pay later, even the barest essentials. Persons with anything life sustaining to sell, fellow citizens as well as foreigners, were refusing to exchange their goods for money. They were suddenly saying to people with nothing but paper representations of wealth, “Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think paper was so valuable?”
There was still plenty of food and fuel and so on for all the human beings on the planet, as numerous as they had become, but millions upon millions of them were starting to starve to death now. The healthiest of them could go without food for only about forty days, and then death would come.
And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
It was all in people’s heads. People had simply changed their opinions of paper wealth, but, for all practical purposes, the planet might as well have been knocked out of orbit by a meteor the size of Luxembourg.
6
THIS FINANCIAL CRISIS, which could never happen today, was simply the latest in a series of murderous twentieth century catastrophes which had originated entirely in human brains. From the violence people were