Life aboard the spaceship was very different than life on Earth.

There was no up, no down, and no orbit to measure time in segments of day and night. That manufactured grid of Earth “reality“ was obsolete. Within the mother ship, Flash still thought in terms of up and down. He was used to it. Toward the cockpit sole was down. But when he was in the pod, that same direction became “up” again, nestled, as it was, on the “underside” of the spaceship. Artificial gravity allowed him to sit without strapping himself to the seat. It also allowed him to drink from a cup, and set things down. These were side benefits to the real purpose of manufactured gravity, which was the ability to exercise his muscles.

He could turn it off and on at will, allowing him to float about, and access hard to reach equipment. Lem preferred to keep the gravity on.

All the water on Earth was said to have been there since the very formation of the planet. Similarly, all the water aboard the mother ship had been there since Flash began his journey. Those oxygen and hydrogen atoms kept coming together as pure water, regardless of the many functions they performed along the way.

The mother ship was a microcosm of Earth. Like the Earth, it had limited resources, which were sufficient to sustain the lives of those aboard. These resources however, had to be respected in order for life to continue.

The Earth itself had become stressed by greed and overly optimistic beliefs about its power to heal.

Lem’s planet, Ino, was an example of what could happen if such attitudes went unchecked.