Anton's Odyssey (14 page)

“Celebrity status!”
I said with disbelief. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ve never heard about Jim Boldergat before?”

“No,” I said.

“What about the Packard! You must have heard about the Packard?”

I thought for a while. “That was a ship right?” The name rang a bell, but I could not recall any specific details.

“Yes,” Allen said. “About ten years ago, when we were little kids – I’m actually pretty glad you can’t remember because it’s a great story.”

“Story!” said Cotton exited. “Oh, I love stories!”

“And this one is a good one!” Allen said. “I love telling it. It never gets old.”

Allen continued with Cotton’s full and undivided attention, which, away from a comic book or video game, was a rare event indeed. “Ten years ago, Jim Boldergat was an ordinary starman assigned to a ship called the Packard. The Packard was a small freighter re-fitted to transport cryogens as well as standard cargo.”

“Cryogens?”
I asked. I could tell from the puzzled look on Cotton’s face that he was unfamiliar with the term as well.

“Cryogenically preserved persons,” Allen clarified. “In this case prisoners being deported to some dust bowl planet in the 14
Herculis system. ‘Cryogen’ is a general term used for any person glaciated for easy transport.”

“Why do they need to do that?” asked Cotton. “Freeze people?”

Allen pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. “It’s simply a matter of logistics. Let me ask you this: How much food do you think you eat in a year?”

Cotton shrugged his shoulders.

“Okay basic math: The average 70 kilogram American eats around 2000 kilocalories a day. Around 30% from fats at 9 kilocalories a gram, 40% from carbohydrate…”

Perhaps Allen could see the discomfort on my face as my throat tightened. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had broken out in hives as if I were undergoing a full anaphylactic reaction, a type of math allergy. To put me out of my misery, Allen cut to the answer.
“650 grams of food a day plus an additional 1000 grams water weight or about 600 kilograms in a year.”

“That’d be more than 1200 kilograms for Cotton.” I joked. Even some Math I could do in my head.

Allen continued. “Now keep in mind that the average American excretes 400 grams of feces a day, or 146 kilograms in a year.”

“That’s a lot of poop!” Cotton and I said in unison. Neither of us had to be good at math to figure that out.

Allen seemed pretty annoyed at the interruption. I inferred that he didn’t like his calculations reduced to toilet humor. What he didn’t understand, though, was that if he told us to imagine a big pile of food and a big pile of poop, he could have purveyed his message much more concisely and effectively.

“Compared to normal metabolism,” Allen said, “a cryogen requires only 9% of the caloric intake and produces only 11% as much feces and urine. So, for 100 cryogens, you would expect…” Allen paused, the same way Mrs. Hallisworth paused when she wanted her students to perform a calculation that would finish her thought. Cotton and I looked at one another, and our silence made it clear that we were both equally clueless. I thought about guessing “900%,” but I was pretty sure that wasn’t the right answer and hesitated. Impatient, Allen sighed to let us know that he was disappointed that we were no match for him arithmetically. In a grave voice he concluded, “The savings in cargo weight and space as well as fuel and oxygen use are considerable. The financial savings alone from cryogenic stasis for a single voyage is in the billions.”

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 unti
l 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.