Svetik, just like she had to do in accordance with her position, but most probably – her calling, was already flying between three-meter shelves stuffed with hydroponic farm stuff. Everything that could be eaten grew here, and there were a lot of vegetables.
Fruit grew for a long time and did so very unwillingly.
The collection of seeds of different plants, practically from the whole world, started to be gathered in the USSR before the Second World War. However, sometimes politicians did not like plant breeders, so this science did not enjoy great support. But sooner or later even politicians understood that it would be hard to move ahead without breeding. And there are a lot of sciolists and just impostors everywhere, and breeding as a science is not to blame.
So you could find practically everything in the biological compartment, even something that probably did not grow on the Earth itself. A part of plants was selected just to produce more familiar oxygen that the one present in the self-contained system of crew life support. However, the majority of these were plain boring containers with all kinds of algae.
A few ordinary Russian birches were especially great, it’s a pity they were small. There were 3 or 4 oaks and about five green conifers… So crew members rarely called this compartment a biological one.
Somebody called it a forest, somebody a winter garden, a jungle, or jokingly a vegetable garden. All crew members often gathered here and started to fool about – play hide-and-seek or shout: Hello! I am lost! Sergey, the crew commander, pretended to be a mushroom gatherer and looked for mushrooms, flying between the shelves… and he found them!
Surely, they did not grow on partitions or the conditional floor. These were ordinary mushrooms from the Earth that were very similar to pleurotus that earth dwellers grew in their kitchens and balconies. And you had to look for them because Svetka often took them to different shelves – mushrooms grew faster than anything else and were eaten just as quickly… You had to eat anything that grew, and mushrooms alone were not sufficient!
By the start of the MS 88 project, the ordinary “Molnia” had been traveling to space for almost thirty years.
It was called so because it main task was to put “Molnia” communication satellites into orbit.