Re: [OT] [HIST] Paymasters of 2183

Was mentioned in the comedy/sci-fi series "Red Dwarf" too.  The main
character (Lister) left a few pounds in a bank account and then got lost
for a million-odd years.  The compound interest eventually collapsed the
global economy, etc etc etc.  (rather Douglas Adams-ish, actually).

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.

To try to deal with this, the military created a "resort world", the
location of which was more secret than that of Earth, where the fleet
could
have R&R, refitting, etc.  That place was scaled to the
super-rich-soldiers-on-leave, so everything was fantastically expensive.
People would go get a menial job there (civilians) for a few years, and
then head back to their original world wealthy.  They recognized that it
would be very unbalancing to the economy if all of a sudden the war
ended,
and they had a large number of super-wealthy ex-soldiers descend on the
regular economy.

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.

>Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2001 10:28:35 +0900
>From: Edward Lipsett <translation@intercomltd.com>
>Subject: Re: [OT] [HIST] Paymasters of 2183
>
>This was mentioned in Haldeman's Forever War, but darned if I can
>remember the details.
>They all ended up pretty wealthy, though.
>
>Thomas Barclay wrote:
>> 
>> Do you get paid for downtime? Time dilation
>> would surely wreck your life back on any planet,
>> so you'd think there would be some sort of
>> premium, but paying the troopie for every
>> minute of their sleep makes for a high cost per
>> active minute....
>

********************************************

Adrian Johnson
adrian.johnson@sympatico.ca