Anton's Odyssey (15 page)

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 liner
s 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.

“Couldn’t they just steal the food?” Cotton asked.

“Or just use food from their own plates?” I added.

“Well, the goons didn’t exactly comprise a demographic ambitious enough to go hungry. And yes, Cotton, they would have stolen food if they could, but the Packard ran a twenty-four hour mess hall so there was always a cook or steward near the pantry.”

“Why didn’t they just bribe them?” Cotton asked.

Having never been much of a juvenile delinquent himself, Allen failed to understand the importance of the question and became impatient and snapped, “Look! Do you guys want to hear the story or not!”

Sheepishly, we nodded.

“Then just let me tell the story. I’ll simplify the science as best I can, but please, no more questions or interruptions.”

“Sorry!” we said in unison.

Allen was silent for a while and continued. “The hoodlums couldn’t get to the ship’s food, and the cryogens were well guarded as well.”

I opened my mouth to ask how somebody could make liquor out of a person, but snapped it shut when Allen glared at me.

“Cryogens feed through an NG tube… err… a tube that goes up through your nose and into your stomach, and the goons could have made liquor from that food, which is in the form of a paste.

“The only thing the goons could easily steal was the seed. Nobody had use for it in the far reaches of space, so it wasn’t guarded. Now the seed was impregnated with an organic alkyl mercury fungicide, which would never be allowed back on Earth because it’s so toxic. Regulations do allow for alkyl mercury on prolonged space flights where long acting preservatives would be necessary to prevent spoilage. The seed can only be a small amount, an experimental quantity really, and not in bulk for agriculture. Now, I can anticipate your next question: ‘Allen, how can they ferment seed that is impregnated with a fungicide when yeast is a fungus?’ which is a good question I might add.”

Evidently it was a good question because neither Cotton nor I had thought of it.

“And the answer is that there was no fermentation. The goons saw bubbles, which they thought was fermentation, but the bubbles weren’t carbon dioxide… er… if alcohol is yeast pee, carbon dioxide would be like a yeast fart that shows that fermentation was happening.” Alas, Allen had finally managed to break science down into a language Cotton and I could actually understand.

“The bubbles they saw would have been a gaseous preservative, a type of anti-ethylene that was dissolved in the seeds’ lipids. The water
— they would have needed water as a solvent for the fermentation process — reacted with the preservative and caused it to come out of solution and fizz.

“Now don’t ask me why they didn’t test the liquor themselves after they fermented and distilled it because I don’t know the exact answer. Some think the goons managed to smuggle aboard some of the hooch they made on Neo-Salyut 27. Lonelistar seized most of it and even had the audacity to sell the swill in their own cantina, which is way illegal, but the goons probably managed to hold on to some of it, so they had no need to drink from the batch they made on the Packard. What we do know for certain is that they sold their first batch to twenty-three crewmembers who worked the engine room, and that the organic mercury quickly made them sick. Organic mercury is a potent neurotoxin. First they had tremors… err… their hands would shake… and then they became encephalopathic… err… obtunded… er… comatose… er…”

“We know what a coma is.” I said, insulted.

“Oh you do,
good!” Allen said, forgetting that I had just interrupted him. “To make a long story short, within a few weeks, all but one of the sick crewmembers died, and the guy that lived was in a persistent vegetative state. That left the Packard’s engines desperately short handed. They tried running twenty-twenty-tens – do you know what those are?”

“Yes,” we said. Hammond had told us about the rather brutal shift structure that pushed workers beyond the limits of endurance.

“Oh good! At first they were okay, but they quickly realized that the plan wasn’t sustainable in the long run. People started making small mistakes, perhaps using the wrong tool here, a miscalculation there, and it was only a matter of time before exhaustion would have caused a major disaster that would leave all of them dead. They invoked interstellar common law to draft the hoodlums into their crew, rating them ordinary starmen. Needless to say, the goons were not happy how their lives of lethargy and leisure had transformed to a labor of toil and tears. A few actually did okay, but most became passive aggressive and deliberately screwed things up with hopes the captain would confine them to quarters instead of forcing them to work. If the captain had any sense, he would have flogged them.”

“You can do that?” I shrieked. Disbelief
had caused me to forget I wasn’t supposed to ask any questions. Realizing my mistake, I covered my mouth with my hands.

“No, that’s okay. Flogging is so rare that I can appreciate that it would shock you. Interstellar common law allows the captain to take any action, no matter how severe, to rectify an extreme situation that endangers the lives of one or more crewmembers. If he wanted to, the captain could have shot one of the goons in a face, which, as things turned out, wouldn’t have been a bad idea.

“With the best of intentions, the captain moved the goons that seemed to bungle their work duties to the galley and mess hall. The idea was if that they screwed up kitchen work, the consequences would be minimal compared to a mistake in an air lock or the engine room. Of course, the captain turned out to be wrong, but he had no way of knowing it at the time.”