Anton's Odyssey Read online

  I felt the need to redeem myself so I retorted, “But I read somewhere that some people never wake up after you freeze them.”

  Minimally intrigued Allen asked, “Yes, that does occur, but the risk is rare. Less than one in ten thousand, so what’s your point?”

  Did I have a point? If I did, it had something to do with the intangible value of life. “There could be lawsuits,” I said.

  “Okay, despite the waivers they make you sign, I will concede that there could be lawsuits. But answer me this: suppose somebody dies, how much is a year’s worth of quality of life worth?” Allen seemed rather pleased with his mathematical game of cat and mouse.

  “Well,” I stammered, “you really can’t put a dollar amount —“

  “The answer is thirty million dollars.” Allen said, cutting me off.

  “What!” Cotton and I both shrieked with indignation.

  “How do you figure that?” I demanded.

  “That’s what the Division of Health Standards pays to install and maintain a biomechanical hybrid heart and lung prosthesis in an indigent patient. It’s the most expensive medical device available to the ordinary citizen.”

  I hated to admit it, but there was a certain logic to Allen’s mathematical madness. Whereas Cotton and I hung onto the childish illusion that our lives were precious, Allen had reached a more cynical, realistic world paradigm where everything had some sort of cash value. Allen expanded his reasoning. “To keep you alive to age 85, the Feds are willing to pay twenty billion dollars over seventy years, unadjusted for inflation.”

  That seemed like a lot of money to me until Cotton asked, “How much is this ship worth?”

  “Oh I’m sure the payload alone has a value in the tens of trillions.”

  Even though we stumbled with basic arithmetic, Cotton and I understood enough to feel utterly dejected. Our lives were hardly worth a drop in the bucket. Allen grinned. Whatever game he was playing, he had made his point and won.

  Allen continued his story. “The Packard was carrying about one hundred cryogens to 14 Herculis along with thousands of metric tons of durable goods, mostly heavy farming equipment. Now the planet, even though dusty and unpleasant, and been productive agriculturally for over thirty years, so they weren’t transporting any real food stuffs beyond their own provisions and a tiny stock of experimental seed, just a few dozen kilos. They also had some standard PCR primers for the genetic modification of crops.”

  “PCR?” I asked.

  “Polymerase chain reaction,” Allen replied. To concealing my ignorance, I nodded as if I knew what the term meant.

  Allen continued. “About midway through their voyage, they received a signal from Neo-Salyut 27.”

  “A distress signal?” I asked.

  “That’s a planet, right?” Cotton asked.

  “Wrong on both accounts,” Allen smirked, clearly tickled that our lives as landsmen has left us completely ignorant about even the basics of interstellar geography. “Neo-Salyut 27 was a large international space station, and the signal was a bid to nearby ships for a contract. Now keep in mind that this was only a few years after the Timmons Treaty.” I raised my eyebrows and Allen clarified. “The Timmons Treaty shifted control of international space stations from the United Nations to private contractors, and Lonelistar Corporation, which doesn’t exist anymore, was one of those contractors. The U.N. doled out shares of all the space stations to member countries based on an algorithm that combined national population and prior contributions of financial support for U.N. agencies. Most countries, in turn, awarded contracts to private companies based on the bid system, others by lottery. Somehow Lonelistar was awarded a no-bid contract from the Feds, our Feds, through some rather shady underhanded political dealings. Now Lonelistar, as a cost-savings measure, had no system to vet new hires of ordinary starmen. Lonelistar basically haled the Packard and offered to pay a rather generous amount of cash for them to haul away about a dozen or so ordinary starmen whose contracts had expired. The truth of the matter, though, was that there were no real written contracts for these starmen. Lonelistar had hired them under interstellar common law in order to cut legal fees. These guys were petty criminals before they left Earth. Lonelistar had scaled back security services on Neo-Salyut 27 as another cost saving measure, and without supervision many of these petty criminals transformed into hardened thugs.”

  “What did they do?” Cotton asked.

  “Records later subpoenaed showed that they started their own little organized crime ring. They made contraband booze and fenes, established card and dice games, and even forced some women into prostitution. They knifed anyone whom they thought was an informant, though no one was actually killed on the space station. Eventually Lonelistar rounded these guys up at gunpoint, and instead of throwing them in the brig and contacting the authorities, which would have resulted in all sorts of fees and fines for the Interstellar Police Force or Space Marines to come and haul them away, they cut the thugs a deal. If they agreed to leave the space station, Lonelistar would give them each a large cash payout and never report their crimes to the authorities. Of course, the thugs agreed, and Lonelistar even went as far as to draft and authenticate phony expired employment contracts. The Packard docked at Neo-Salyut 27, and Lonelistar handed over the thugs along with a cash payment.

  “Now there’s some additional background you need to know about Neo-Salyut 27 to fully appreciate the events that lead to the tragedy aboard the Packard. Under U.N. control, Neo-Salyut 27 was not just a logistics station that re-supplied ships and performed repairs. It was also a bioengineering laboratory that performed pretty important agricultural research to benefit the systems nearby. Lonelistar knew ahead of time that scientists weren’t cheap and that ordinary starmen wouldn’t really function well as scientists, so they decided not to renew any of the research grants. When Lonelistar finally arrived, the U.N. scientists were a bit behind in shutting down the laboratory. Now the proper thing to do would have been to keep the scientists on board for a few more weeks and have them wind things down, or, as a bare minimum, have them stick around for just a few days to draft shut down protocols and provide the ordinary starmen with some basic training. Of course, Lonelistar didn’t want to cover any additional living expenses or wages and promptly kicked the scientists off the space station with rest of the U.N. crew even though the scientists expressed some very well founded safety concerns.

  “Lonelistar planned to sell off all laboratory assets, which they could have done at a huge profit if they knew what they were doing. Of course, the Lonelistar crew was nothing more than a handful of arrogant businessmen controlling a modest number of under-skilled handymen. They completely tore the lab to pieces. Some of the crewmembers thought dismantling scientific hardware was no different than stripping down a boosted auto at a chop shop. Multibillion-dollar equipment was reduced to mere scrap metal. Priceless reagents and solvents were dumped into space because Lonelistar didn’t appreciate their value, but the biggest tragedy was their handling of animals in the genetic engineering laboratory.”

  “Animals?” Cotton asked. Other than the fictitious rats I invented, there were no animals in space as far as we knew.

  “The U.N. scientists were experimenting with genes to make livestock thrive on nearby planets where the vegetation was scant and the atmosphere was IDLH.”

  “IDLH?” I asked.

  “Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health,” Allen clarified.

  “You mean like toxic vapors?”

  Allen scratched his head. “Well, yes I suppose they might have been concerned with toxins, but I imagine much of the research was aimed at low ambient oxygen concentrations. When you first terraform a planet with primary vegetation, the oxygen concentration will be pretty low for several years.”

  “How low is too low?” I asked.

  “Well on Earth, if the fraction of oxygen in a sub-environment drops just a little to nineteen and a half percent, the ambient air becomes IDLH to
humans, which is why colonists on newly terraformed planets need to wear respiration hoods when they go outside. Anyway, the Lonelistar crew got into this one section filled with rats —“

  “Rats!” I said. “I thought you said ‘livestock!’ Isn’t that like cows and pigs?”

  “Well yes,” replied Allen, “but scientists almost always do their initial experiments on mice and rats because they’re cheap, don’t take up a lot of space, and have a short cycle for sexual reproduction.” Cotton sniggered at the word “sexual.” Allen ignored him and continued. “Once you get a gene working well in rats or mice, you stick it in a cow or a pig and then tweak it a bit. Part of the reason why the scientists were running behind was that their experiments were working so well they couldn’t bear the thought of shutting them down before they were finished collecting data. Scientists are like that, which is understandable to a person like me. Of course, Lonelistar, being simpletons, didn’t appreciate it.”

  I am definitely a “simpleton,”’ I thought, and so is Cotton. We wouldn’t know a genetically engineered rat from a ghetto rat that could transmit rat bite fever.

  “The experiments on board Neo-Salyut 27 are the basis for the modern Hardwick cattle breed, which is a bit of a breakthrough in the field of extra-solar agriculture. It’s just a shame that the experiments also indirectly lead to so many deaths on board the Packard.”

  “People died!” Cotton said, shocked.

  “Well, yes, but I haven’t gotten there yet.” I became more optimistic that Allen’s science sermon would eventually transform into an actual story. So far, it had been pretty boring.

  Allen cleared his throat and continued. “The Lonelistar crew came across a lab filled to the brim with these rats and somebody must have said something similar to ‘no big deal, we will just seal off the lab and scrub out the oxygen to suffocate them,’ which is what they did. So they go back into the lab a few hours later and all the rats are just fine, sitting around in their cages drinking water and eating rat kibbles. The crew is standing around scratching their heads wondering what happened and why all the rats are still alive. Eventually somebody takes a look at the cages and realizes that they aren’t really cages but tanks, and each tank has its own ventilation system, which, although the crew didn’t know it at the time, controlled the atmosphere for the experiments. The crew can’t figure out how to alter each tank’s ventilation system so the atmosphere in the tank would become the same as the ambient air, so they just open up all the cages and let all the rats out. They seal off the lab and scrub the oxygen again. They come back a few hours later and see all these dead rats, think ‘job done,’ round up the carcasses and blast them out into space through an airlock. Now keep in mind, over just a few hours duration, the oxygen scrubbers only took the oxygen down to about ten percent, which allowed many of the rats in the experimental group to survive. The dead rats the crew found were mostly from the control group that didn’t have the new genes to protect them from IDLH atmospheres. The surviving rats, eager to be free, hid in small nooks and crannies while the Lonelistar crew disposed of their dead brethren. When the crew left, the lab was unsealed allowing them to escape into the rest of the station.

  “A Lonelistar honcho takes a look at the old U.N. records and probably says something like, ‘Surveillance shows no arthropods or rodent pests and we killed off all the lab rats, so we might as well shut down the pest control program to save money,’ which was a big mistake.”

  “Does it really cost that much to look for rats?” I asked.

  Allen thought for a while. “Yeah, I suppose the costs would be non-negligible. It’s a matter of opportunity cost. If you take a worker away from maintaining a client’s ship, you can’t charge for that worker’s labor. For an effective pest-control team, you would probably need to assign one or two workers to put out warfarin tablets and dispose of carcasses, and one of those workers would have to be pretty skilled to maintain the hunter-killer bots.”

  “Hunter-killer bots? Like the ones used by the Space Marines?” Cotton asked.

  “No,” Allen chuckled again, “the principal is the same, but the pest control hunter-killers are much smaller so they can fit in tight nooks and crannies. They don’t carry any ordinance other than a modified taser turned way down to shock rodents to death. For human’s, the shock would be unpleasant but wouldn’t do any real harm.” Cotton decided at that moment to frown and rub his butt, which worried me for some reason.

  “One thing Lonelistar did right, at least to their own benefit, was assign reasonably competent people to stewardships, so the surviving rats never got into the station’s food supply. Their refuse wasn’t left out for the rats to eat either. If they were normal rats, they would have probably all died from starvation, but because they were models for experimental livestock, they were genetically modified to be able to persist without food for long periods of time. Of course, in the presence of food, the same genes compel them to eat compulsively and pack on a lot of weight without any adverse health effects.”

  Kind of like Cotton, I thought, only Doctor Zanders said his health will suffer eventually.

  “The rats persisted in small numbers on the station, but in their state of starvation, they would have been constantly exploring for food and would have abstained from mating, as reproduction consumes calories big time no matter how you modify an animal genetically. When the Packard docked, it would have depressurized and bought cheap air and energy from Neo-Salyut 27. Even though the ship was attached for just a couple of days that would have been long enough for plenty of rats to scurry aboard.

  “At first, nobody aboard the Packard noticed any of the rats as they continued to persist in their near starvation state. But within a few weeks of departing Neo-Salyut 27, the hoodlums began a new racket. The Packard was a damp ship —“

  “They didn’t have dehumidifiers?” I interrupted.

  “No,” Allen said, annoyed that I had interrupted him again. “Damp has to do with regulations about alcohol. A dry ship does not allow people to bring alcohol onboard. Obviously, none of the cruise liners are dry, except that one those piety-freaks use. What’s it called? I can’t remember.”

  “You mean Crusade Cruises!” I remembered all too well the annoying TV commercials that offered to take me “to the celestial heavens to see all of God’s creations.” Religion never appealed to Cotton and me. Mother always slept in on Sundays. A friend took us to church once with his family, but during a sermon about the importance of tolerance we got bored and started playing with a cigarette lighter we had found in the parking lot. After the firemen doused the flames, the priest or minister or shaman (or whatever he was) told us we were banned for life. Our friend never talked to us again except to tell us that we were evil and going to hell, so we beat him up pretty badly.

  “Yes, Crusade Cruises. That’s the one.” Allen continued the story. “A wet ship allows you to bring liquor on board and provides for the buying and selling of alcohol. A damp ship allows crewmembers and passengers to bring alcohol on board the ship, but the ship does not keep its own stores and formal alcohol sales are forbidden.

  “The Packard was a damp ship, as is the Magic Sky Daddy, if you haven’t already noticed.” In truth, Cotton and I hadn’t noticed. Although we had mastered many skills within the broad field of juvenile delinquency, alcohol abuse did not appeal to us. Once our friends took to drink, they got boring. All they wanted to do was sit at home, watch videos, and get drunk. They no longer wanted to go outside and mess around. Cotton tried a beer once and it made him puke. He said it wasn’t the alcohol that made him sick though but rather the fact that the beer tasted like piss. I almost asked him how he knew what piss tasted like, but then decided I didn’t want to know the answer.

  Allen continued, “When Lonelistar took over Neo-Salyut 27, it realized it had a regional monopoly on alcohol sales with no other space stations nearby, so it jacked up the price of liquor 500% compared to the U.N.’s old prices.”

 
Cotton seemed puzzled so I thought I’d help him out and said, “That means, prices went up fifty times.”

  “What? No!” Allen cried in disbelief. “That’s only a five-fold increase! You really do have a math problem!”

  Cotton felt bad for me, so he changed the subject, “So what happened next?”

  “Well, alcohol had become scarce on the Packard by the time the ship docked at Neo-Salyut 27. A few crewmembers maybe drank a beer or two at the cantina, but no one bought enough booze to replenish their stores because prices were so steep. After the Packard left, the hoodlums who got fired from Lonelistar saw a financial opportunity and decided to start a fermenting and distilling racket. Lonelistar had bought them passage, so they had no work duties, which gave them plenty of leisure time, but they had no access to the pantry or other food stores.”

  “What did they need food for?” I asked.

  “You mean you don’t know how alcohol is made?” Allen asked, again with disbelief.

  “No he doesn’t,” said Cotton assertively, “and I don’t either!”

  “Well basically you get yeast, that’s a type of fungus, and you feed it sugar, and it makes alcohol as a waste product.”

  “Could you make alcohol?” I asked.

  “Yes, I could, but no I won’t.” Allen said, putting an end to my own hopes of starting up a lucrative fermentation and distillation racket.