The hope for the survival of the human race is a spaceship called the Willflower, which will take a small number of the world's best minds on a journey to colonize another planet.

He is deep in debt due to his computer having mysteriously stolen several million dollars online, then sending it to an unknown location.

Eddie discovers that this man, Charles Perry Gordon, is due to leave on the Willflower but doesn't want to go now that he was won such a vast fortune.

Eddie is revived as a cyborg with only his head and spinal column remaining of his original body, and trapped forever in a jar of green slime.

Eddie decides to cause the nuclear-powered escape pod to self-destruct in the hope that the explosion will force the ship towards planet Thrrrppp.

This fails when the less-than-moral priest steals the pod — accompanied by some of the ship's prostitutes to help him 'rebuild' human society — and destroys the remaining engines in the process.

Eddie encounters the assassin from the beginning of the novel, who was revived in another survival suit but driven completely insane by the process, and is now a homicidal maniac.

Realizing the madness that the original community plans had instigated, it allowed the crew members to become illiterate to erase all memory of the old system.