Review: The Bottom Line in Outer Space
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 19, 2014
What will the first flight from Planet Earth to another solar system be like? Well, first, as a scientific fact, it's going to take a very, very long time to get there. And second, as a very likely development based on the scaling back of our national efforts in that regard, it will only happen when some business feels there's money to be made. These two premises are at the heart of Simon Haynes's "Loss Leader," a rather pragmatic look at how that flight might  proceed.In Haynes's world of the future, a big corporation is sponsoring the trip, and a crew of four and 1,000 or so colonists are crammed into a big ship stuffed with equipment designed to make it possible to establish a community on an inhabitable planet. Since the trip is likely to take decades, or even centuries, everyone is put into the deep freeze of cryo sleep to wake up when they reach their target. Of course, things don't go as planned. The cryo sleep chamber has a major flaw... namely, the longer people remain asleep, the more memory loss they suffer. The ship's computers spot the problem and wake up the captain after thirty years. She is able to recover, with the help of some drugs, but she figures out that if the colonists stay asleep for much longer, their memory may be permanently gone.After waking the rest of the crew, she discusses the alternatives at their disposal, none of which seem to be workable. Among other problems they face, they don't have enough coolant in the cryo tanks to keep waking themselves and the colonists up at regular intervals, and the ship's computers have been programmed to keep them from interfering with the ship's course.At this point, the plot could have gone in a number of directions. Since this work is a short story, the resolution, of necessity, has to come fairly quickly. The story seems to be structured as a sort of mystery, as the crew discuss (and dismiss) various ways of extricating themselves from what appears to be an impossible predicament. However, the more they learn about what's happened during their flight, the more they discover that they are in an even worse predicament, due to some cost cutting measures the sponsoring corporation implemented. I don't want to give too much away here, other than to say that the ending is a perfect example of the old saying "What goes around comes around."As this is a short story, we don't get a lot in the way of character development... we never really get a sense of why the characters feel the way they do about the various possible ways of safely completing their journey. In addition, the dialogue sometimes feels a bit forced and unnatural. However, that's not really the point. The only purpose for the crew's debate is to let the plot continue to unfold, as they discover one bad thing after another. What Haynes is really trying to accomplish here is to make a point about both the physics and the economics of space travel, and he does so quite cleverly. The last sentence is a perfect ending twist, and, even better, one that requires a bit of thought and possible a second or third reading to realize just how fitting (and satisfying) the ending is."Loss Leader" is an unusual title for a science fiction story (although Haynes explains it quite well), and this is a most unusual type of science fiction story... one that takes what seems to be a standard danger/possible rescue scenario and goes off in a completely unexpected direction, leading to an ending that, frankly, caught me unaware.Although I received this story for free as a genuine loss leader in a promotion, Haynes normally charges three dollars for the story. As a free story, I would strongly recommend "Loss Leader." However, I'm not sure it's worth that type of money, so I lowered my review from 4 1/2 to 3 1/2 stars as a result. For those readers who do feel the right short story is worth paying three dollars for, "Loss Leader" is a winner.