The Omega Expedition Read Online Free PDF Page A

be frozen down before he reached the age of eighty, and that seventy would be preferable, so he set a preliminary target date for his entry into suspended animation of 2028, extendable to 2038 if all went well enough in the interim.
    For safety’s sake, he calculated, it would be necessary to leave at least a billion dollars to the organization entrusted with his preservation. It would, however, be convenient if he could raise twice or three times as much in the shorter term, in order to make sure that research in cryogenics was properly funded. It would be helpful, too, to have a couple of billion dollars to spare when the time came, in order to give an appropriate boost to the technologies of emortality that would facilitate his return.
    He decided that he needed to make his first billion by 2010, his second by 2020, and however many more he could contrive in the remaining eight to eighteen years of activity. In the meantime, he had to make every effort to remain perfectly healthy.
    Adam had never smoked and had always been a very moderate drinker — he indulged in the occasional glass of red wine but never touched spirits — so the only additional effort he required was to exert a greater discipline over his diet and dedicate at least one hour a day to the exercise machines in his private gym. He decided that the only other hazard which stood in the way of achieving his targets was the possibility that he might have to endure another divorce, but that was an easy hurdle to avoid by the simple expedient of refusing to marry again.
    He contemplated remaining celibate for the remainder of his days, but having studied Jacques Bertillon’s data regarding sexual activity and death-risk he decided that keeping a string of mistresses was a justifiable expenditure. For this role he was careful to select unusually docile and rational young women, whose looks were only slightly better than average and whose appetites were as moderate as his own.

Three
    I f I might be permitted a brief historical interpolation here, it may be worth my pointing out that there were several ways in which an ambitious corporate accountant could plan to make a billion dollars in the early years of the twenty-first century. Global Capitalism was newly entered into its Age of Heroes, and those heroes had already reduced national governments to the status of mere instruments. The only significant ideological opposition to the dominance of capitalism during the twentieth century had been provided by Marxist socialism, but the governments which pretended to operate on that basis had been thinly disguised oligarchies or autocracies, all of which had either collapsed or embarked upon programs of accommodation by 2000.
    Ironically, the Marxist economic analyses which had avidly anticipated the collapse and supersession of capitalism had been largely correct in anticipating the phases that the system would pass through as it approached that final crisis. Capital had indeed been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, while the vast majority of the laborers producing its material goods remained direly impoverished. The inherent revolutionary potential of this situation had, however, been conclusively defused by the clever use of new technologies of production and communication. Mechanical production not only robbed laborers of much of their potential disputative power but also helped to supply the direly impoverished masses with goods that they could never have produced themselves. Mass communication allowed the avarice and envy that had always been the twin motors of human progress to be manipulated in a subtler, cleverer, and more intense fashion than ever before.
    With the aid of hindsight, we can now see an apparent inevitability in the fact that the final victory of Global Capitalism took the form of a Cartel of Cosmicorporations, which put an end once and for all to the Era of Competition. We can see, too, that the Universal Cartel did not arrive a day too