“It could get a little sticky.”
“I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet. There’s also the matter of the patrol range of the individual ship. If two ships are the same size with the same size crew, and one of them is patrolling eight planets and the other patrols twenty, should they be paid the same? Of course, there you have to figure in the currency exchange rates and price of supplies on the various planets.”
“Stop!” Ramona cried. “Okay! I get the picture. It’s a morass. What has all this got to do with the financial reports?”
“Between now and the meeting, I have to formulate a plan. If I don’t have something firmly in mind before the item comes ups on the agenda, the discussion will degenerate into a dogfight.”
He poked listlessly at the heap of paper and tapes on his table.
“Going through this stuff, I’m trying to find a pattern to our costs-by ship and by man. Then I get to sort through it again to define the modifying factors such as patrol sectors. Hopefully, then, I can rough out a proposal that will make everybody happy-or at least make everybody equally unhappy.”
Ramona rose to her feet and stretched lazily.
“Well, this time I think I’m going to do what everybody else usually does.”
“What’s that?” Tambu asked.
“I’ll let you figure it all out, argue for a while, then go along with what you propose. No sense in both of us losing sleep over this.”
“But don’t you want to conduct an investigation of your own to check against my findings?” Tambu gaped in mock horror.
She stuck her tongue out at him.