Re: [OT] [HIST] Paymasters of 2183

On Wed, 03 Oct 2001 16:23:24 -0400 adrian.johnson@sympatico.ca wrote:

> In "Forever War" they kept paying the soldiers their "standard" pay 
while on deployments that lasted hundreds of years in relative "Earth 
time". It meant that those, like the main character, who lived through 
several missions, were hugely rich. <

Against that, enlistments, etc., were measured in "subjective" time, so 
that regardless of how long you served in terms of the calendar, a 
five-year hitch _felt_ like five years to you. This wouldn't be a bad 
idea for cold-sleep troopers: when they're paid, they're paid for the 
subjective time that's lapsed since their last payday, presumably at 
the current rate for their rank, position, etc.

This is open to all sorts of nasty economic tricks, but what isn't? <g> 
And it has an historical counterpart -- paying off seamen in Napoleonic 
times, for instance.

> The main character's girlfriend and a few friends of hers use their 
backpay to purchase a starship from the navy - so they must have been 
getting a big pile of money saved up - though Haldeman doesn't mention 
specifics. <

Alternatively, they were allowed to purchase it, or were given it, 
because they had a reasonable, non-violent purpose for it, and because 
they were anachronistic non-clones, and Man was looking for a way to 
get rid of them.

Of course, that whole timeship bit strikes me as the author being 
desperate for a way to reunite the hero and his girl, and not being 
able to come up with a more sensible method...

Phil
----
(Dr) P.A. Atcliffe
Senior Lecturer
Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences
University of the West of England, Bristol
Phone: +44 (0)117 344 2496
Fax:   +44 (0)117 344 3800