After the meeting, Valentin Valentinovich left the room, feeling his legs getting numb and a voice in his instantly turned dull head that said, “Run, immediately! But where?” Of all people he perfectly knew with a tracker implanted in his head he could only get so far. He would be caught regardless and sent to mine the weed, but this time as a laborer fated to be killed on the wild planet following his service. Nor was it possible to wriggle his way out of the decision declared by the high committee. “I must accept and fly there as director, and if I am lucky then I could eat my fill of this weed and come back immortal.”
And Valentin Valentinovich, taking time to grieve and shed a few tears, began to prepare for the interstellar trip. He negotiated for himself his own food, water and oxygen, his own personal quarters with his own air conditioner so that the terrible GAS could not accidentally put him to sleep, and altered the ship’s subroutines with the additional clause, “Whatever happens, GAS must bring him to Earth with the cargo.”
No matter how hard the developers tried to lessen the total number of the travelers, they were still coming up with fifty people at least – counting the crew, maintenance personnel, and the actual workers, while taking into account the demise of the part of the crew – up to forty percent – due to the prolonged sleep. Of all the crew, the ship’s director and the pilot were off limits for GAS, as well as three refrigerating engineers (to ensure extra control for the machinery and modules with the plant cargo, just in case). As for the others, GAS could dispose of them at any moment without compromising the weed storing prior to departure back to Earth. However, the director, mechanics and pilot was expendable only in the event that the cargo was endangered.
For two years the ship had been built in lunar orbit and equipped with everything that was needed – space shuttles were delivering these resources from Earth. And, finally, not long before the early winter, all of the supplies had been loaded and the final tests of the systems and the machinery had been finished. However, all of a sudden an unforeseen problem had occurred. The HR department for Space Expeditions found it impossible to accrue personnel for this fascinating flight, in spite of the double salary and quintupled reward upon returning to Earth.
It turns out that information about the flight had gotten leaked nonetheless; people began to talk about how it was a one-way trip and that those hired to work on the unknown planet would be abandoned there (or killed) after they gathered some invaluable weed for the Earth’s elites. So, knowing that the executive officials were lying to them, and the rumors were unlikely totally groundless, nobody volunteered to fly there, even with the promise of a big payout. As a result, the expedition’s executives decided to recruit former spacemen who were imprisoned in the special barracks for stealing the lichen and exhaling the state officials’ “property” they had illegally consumed.
Those who agreed to the mission had been promised, in addition to the big pay, that their sentence for their “horrible” crime would be revoked; many had to agree in order to avoid starving to death in the barracks. With a crew now assembled, the spaceship blasted off from its lunar orbit in the direction of the planet Hopus, without any unnecessary fanfare, one hour before the New Year, in order not to interfere with the planned reporting before the chiefs.
