<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #80BFFF"><span style="font-size: 150%; line-height: 116%;">Peter Halvardson</span><br/><span style="font-size: 120%; line-height: 116%;">'The Viking'</span></span></div><br/><br/><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #FF8000">"But you want to place me behind cages in a prison. Or worse than that, make me try to survive on some prison planet were only the strongest survive. You don't feel like you should feel bad for what you do to other people? That you rip them out of their lives and place them into a system that most time of all means death? It is not like anybody gets a fair trial. There are rules and you have to live according to those rules. If you don't then you are a criminal. Do those rules make sense? Have they stopped making sense long ago? Isn't it the system behind those rules that practically forces people to break those rules? Don't get me wrong, I don't say that true crimes shouldn't be punished. But most of the crimes punished aren't real crimes but results of mismanagement, restrictions and the fight for survival. I am no specialist in other areas of our society, but I know a lot about mining and about the conditions miners have to work in. There is no consideration for the amount of work a single miner could do. There are only figures that have to be fulfilled, day in, day out. If you don't achieve them, because you are old, weak, injured, ill the repressions start. The standard miners are all monitored at work, all the work they have done is properly accounted. But what happens if the numbers of a miner go down? Does anybody say, hey, we have to look what is wrong with that miner? No, if you constantly fail to achieve your targets, then they will take you out of this job and place you on some even worser planet. Because there can't be any other reasons than you slacking off."</span><br/><br/>His dark-green eyes bore in her dark brown ones. He could take a pedestal at anytime and hold some revolutionary, flaming appeal to the crowd. But he knew that it would only make him some rebel and would guarantee him more time on a prison planet.<br/><br/><span style="color: #FF8000">"It is the reason why most miners start to take drugs. Arphaxam comes first, it makes you last longer, forget about your tiredness. Your numbers increase and you start to take it regularly. But suddenly you have problems to sleep, to recover. You are always high, you think you can last forever. Then you take Barbituan, to come down, to sleep again. But the constant high-low cycle makes your mind go crazy. You get lethargic, you lose interest in your life. You take Diluxan, for stimulation and Fenhil as an escape into dreamworld. And then your body accepts the drugs, needs the drugs and worse of all, gets used to the drugs. You increase the dosage and soon enough your brain is some sponge and the accidents happen."</span><br/><br/>He took a piece of cheese and an olive and tried it with the wine. Alice was right, it was fantastic.<br/><br/><span style="color: #FF8000">"When this happened first some thirty years ago and people died tragically because of single miners making faults, they could have investigated it. What was causing the faults, how could it be prevented, why did the workers use drugs at all? They could have done that, they could have drawn the right conclusions and corrected their policy. They could have used drugs in a regulated way, like medicine. Properly dosage, carefully adapted to the physis of every worker. There was a lot they could have done, a lot a miner could have expected them to do. But why bury money in some studies, if the ressource is unlimited? They simply banned drugs, made them illegal, engaged the authorities to fight abuse. If miners collapsed and died at work, as they couldn't achieve their target anymore, they simply replaced them with fresh workers. I don't even accuse them, that they made this fault in the beginning. But even those bigheads in the Universum Tower can't be so stupid, not to have a look on the figures and to understand that something is wrong, terribly wrong. But they never corrected their policy, the targets are still too high, the miners still have to use drugs and the MP still raid planets."</span><br/><br/>He looked really angered now and it was easy to imagine, what would happen if one of the executives would be sitting now with him.<br/><br/><span style="color: #FF8000">"I don't suck this out of my fingers. I have made studies, dozen of them. I have wrote petitions to UE, underlining them with the figures I had collected, but they never changed anything. You are MP, you should know about the raid on Delta-11. 500 miners accused of drug abuse and send to Darquel. It had been a big topic at that time with the press, how those bad drug dealers made some planet addicted to their drugs. Oh yes, the PR department of UE knows how to sell their stuff. Have you ever seen the charts of Delta-11 after that raid? Have you seen the number of casualties? They had cut down the black-market to zero with that raid. It took eight months until the dealers could react and rebuild it. Have you ever seen the charts from before, during these eight months and afterwards? I have them in my office, they are part of one of the petitions I had written, I'd like to show them to you. Just because you are so eager to show the world that I am the big, bad guy who deserves to rot on some ice-planet. I can give you all my petitions, it is some interesting lecture if you can't sleep. And it may shake your morosity NOT to take drugs."</span></div>