The Falling Bird

It had been decided to assemble the interstellar ship piecemeal in lunar orbit and use shuttles to deliver the necessary resources to it – fuel, water, oxygen, and flight foods.

This measure would reduce the amount of fuel necessary for decelerating when returning to Earth and getting caught by its gravitational orbit.

Valentin Valentinovich, the head of the development team working on the flight conditions for the starship, became so overzealous that he offered additional radical measures to the executive management.

“I believe that we can halve the nutritional amount for those asleep, since a sleeping person needs less glucose and vitamins. And reduce food consumption twenty per cent taking into account the statistical mortality rate from induced sleep. Even the quantity of clothing can be cut in half, given that part of the expedition team will die, and the workers will be marooned after completing their job.”

“You, Valentin Valentinovich, are very prudent around here,” the chief-executive of the pre-flight commission responded, and addressing the commission members, continued, “that, in my opinion, you are the one who take the mantle of the ship’s director, and with your natural frugality directly supervise the hired workers on site so that they do not eat an extra slice of bread and do not have an extra sip of water or air. Am I right, colleagues?”

The members of the state commission remained silent for a short while, contemplating their chair’s suggestion, and began nodding their heads in agreement.

And Valentin Valentinovish, hearing such a fatal suggestion and becoming scared for his own life, turned pale, his forehead went clammy and his heart sank. He grasped for air for some time yet could not produce any sound, until finally, pulling himself together with a great effort, uttered, his lips trembling:

“My dear fellow executives! I am immeasurably glad about the honor granted to be your director in such a high-stakes journey, but I am completely untrained to direct interplanetary flights. I have no diploma and no experience in endeavors of this kind. Finally, I have a common-law wife on Earth and two little children, and I can’t abandon them to their fate.”

“Dear Sir, firstly, the chief executive and members of the state commission know better who is to be sent to this flight as a director. Secondly, during the flight everything will be managed by the on-board computer and you will have nothing to worry about; all that is needed it will do on its own. You will need to only control the computer’s course of actions and report everything to us. And when you exit the communication range, you will act according to the instructions given to you by the Mission Control Center. While you are away, we’ll look after your family and help them with anything they need.”

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 perso

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 perso

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 u

The huge starship, externally bearing the resemblance of a zeppelin, had been accelerating for four months, with great effort sped up to the velocity to break away from the Solar system’s gravity, and detached the first acceleration stage. Later on, it was picked up by a stream of the galactic aether which sucked it in like a speck of dust into its fast-flowing river of time, several times exceeding the speed of light. The giant ship merged into it just as a knife dropped into still water, and instantly disappeared into the endless space of the Universe, like a needle in the haystack.

The entire launch and interstellar flight was being vigilantly overseen by GAS; it was relentlessly and meticulously checking all of the parameters of the ship’s engines and systems’ operations, repeatedly calculating and re-calculating the variants of the burn rate of fuel necessary to slow down when approaching the intended destination, and was making adjustments to the possible maximum load for the return trip.

Trouble began on the ship right after blast-off, happening as early as the acceleration stage. The central air conditioning system on the ship started malfunctioning at once, and some cabins were cold and damp. Controlling the temperature and air humidity was impossible – this operation could only be done by GAS, which kept refusing to warm up the cold units on account of economy for the journey back. It was also supplying water to the lavatories for workers according to a strict schedule – for half hour in the morning and for two hours in the evening. And besides, the food for the perso