D (44 page)

"Shit, we even cannot vomit when feeling sick! Also, we do not sweat when we run! Are you saying that’s not true for you?"

"Well..."

"And this?" She jabbed her hand into the panelboard. "How can the ship fly if the fuel has run out long ago? It had to run out. Gliese 581 is just twenty light years from the Sun." She apparently remembered this fact. "And we? You saw how far we have gotten. The first starship simply could not be designed for such a distance."

"Perhaps the image in control room is in error? Computer failure, especially considering how everything was crushed here? And actually we have fallen out long ago into normal space and are drifting there with subluminal speed. After all we don't know what is actually going on outside."

"And light? Where is the electricity coming from–if the power registers at zero?  I assume it doesn’t only concern the en
gine work."

"The accumulators have simply not exhausted yet."

"You said the light became brighter. Who charges them?"

"Solar batteries. Perhaps we are actually near some star."

"By the way, if we drift freely, where is the weightlessness? Just don't say to me that this thing rotates. Gravity in different places would be different for each, and we visited already plenty of...

"I am sure everything can be explained."

"Let's go."

"Where?"

"To the infirmary."

"You ran away from there."

"Yes. And now I want to look more attentively on something and to show it to you."

She turned away and went to the staircase, and now it was he who had to follow.

"By the way," he caustically noticed, walking upwards on abrupt stairs, "if we are ghosts why do we stamp on this staircase? Why wouldn’t we soar through walls and ceilings? Perhaps some of our physiological reactions have been interrupted, but personally I can feel my body and it is quite material."

"Perhaps as it should be," she answered, without turning around. "Whatever gave you the idea that ghosts fly–cartoons? If the dead felt nothing, how could torture exist in hell?"

"I don't believe in a hell."

"I also didn't believe before."

A few minutes later they entered the medical room again. This time Eve resolutely approached the dead woman in the armchair and began to clean off the blood from the name tag. Adam shrugged his shoulders and began to do the same to the man.

"Linda Everett," read Eve, having finished the work.

"Victor Adamson."

"I would say, as is customary, ‘nice to meet you,’ but it does not exactly fit the situation."

"Are you saying that... we are they? That is, our bodies?" Adam already had had time to get used to corpses and touched them without any special emotions, but now suddenly he involuntarily was repulsed from the one sitting in an armchair. "Only because their surnames are similar to..."

"Not only surnames, the placement of her bandages are the same as mine. And, I think, under the overalls is the same."

"Bandages aren't..."

"Aren't the proof, I know. How about this? Would you hold his head even?"

Eve, having come toward him, lifted the top part of the dead man's skull from where it was on the floor and put it where it had been before it had been cut off. The result was not ideal, but the head once again looked like a head, instead of a cup from a nightmare.

"I don't know how well you remember your face," said Eve, "but if you can believe my female observations, the similar
ity is formidable."

The blood, which had covered the face of the dead man, made it not so obvious, but now, having peered more closely, Adam had to recognize the similarity with what he has seen in a mirror soon after awakening. Only on the forehead, where he had a bandage, the terrible crack of the saw-cut purpled.

"So you saw it before running away?

"Yes. And something clicked in me. All pieces began to match. Just don't try to say that this was your twin brother on the crew," Eve added. "Oh, what is that–a pen? Also fitting. Have you kept the paper with the names?"

Adam wanted to say no, but glancing at the flashlight in his hand, he discovered that its handle was still wrapped up by the sheet of paper. Obviously, he has taken it mechanically before leaving the information room.

"Write..." Eve began, but then interrupted herself. "No, it's more likely a female handwriting. Dictate," with a pen in her hand she approached a little table near a couch and was going to write on its white surface.

Adam unrolled the sheet. It was bedraggled and blood-splodged, but the letters still could be read.

""Dr. Kalkrin - s-e. Dr. Hart - heart attack..."

"You see, I didn't look at all at the list," Eve commented, "so that you couldn't say that I tried to simulate the handwriting. All right, now give me the sheet.”

Adam approached and put the list near the fresh inscrip
tions on the table. Comments were not required. It was obvious that both lists were written by one hand.

"Stop," Adam said. "Something doesn't match. After all, I did not find this sheet here, but instead in a pocket of a dead wo
man in a warehouse compartment. If you are here, how could it get there? And by the way, even if we assume that we are they," he pointed a finger towards the corpses in armchairs, "these names can't be ours because the overalls are not ours, that is, not their. They were stripped from the pilots in the control room."

"So we assumed. But maybe right here we are wrong. We still don't know what happened with the clothes of the major
ity of the crewmen."

"As well as with the crew itself," Adam reminded her. "And more. Let us assume we have died–and our souls are locked here, as on "Flying Dutchman"–oh really, flying... But where are, in that case, the others? Where are the other nine ghosts?"

"Perhaps they have gone to paradise and only we were so guilty that..."

"Paradise, hell–what bullshit! To be flying on an inter
stellar ship and to take seriously this medieval nonsenses!"

"Perhaps," Eve didn't listen to him, "perhaps, actually we were the ones who killed all the others! And at last–each other."

"Aha," Adam screwed up his face, "and I personally gnawed the pilot's arms."

"Why not? We assumed that either he did it himself in a fit or a certain extraterrestrial monster with a human-like jaw did it. But there is also the third, simpler and more probable variant–another human being."

"And we remember nothing. Why? Even if we accept your version that we are damned, shouldn't the punished know what they were punished for?"

"So it is that we are gradually learning it."

"I do not believe it," Adam obstinately repeated, looking at the sawn half-and-half face of his double. "Ridiculous. Nonsense. It can't be."

"Well, let us go to the control room. We will examine the pilots more carefully than before."

"I guess you don't want to offer an investigatory experiment–to gnaw a piece from the arm of a corpse and to compare tooth marks," he squirmed.

"I don't insist on anything, Victor."

"Don't call me that!"

"The engine doesn't work, the fuel is empty, the ship is uncontrollable and the whole crew is dead," she wearily listed. "And we are locked here without any exit and hope. So to believe or not to believe–that is your own problem."

"Well all right." Adam helplessly shrugged shoulders. "Then to the control room. Anyway I don't know where to go and what to do further."

And they ascended again to the control room. There was still no light there, but Adam had a firm feeling that the flashlight, while already almost discharged, would begin to shine more brightly. And this already didn't match any reasonable explana
tions. The flashlight for sure was not recharged from any panels or batteries.

Adam stopped before the armchair of the first pilot ("The first is who is in the left seat," had emerged from the depths of his cut-off memory), attentively examined with the flashlight the mangled hands of the corpse, and then directed a beam to his face, on which he had only thrown a passing glance during the previous visit (and Eve, apparently, had not look on this face at all earlier).

"What did you say about twins?" he asked hoarsely.

Eve stood near, distrusting her own eyes. Excluding scratches, the broken out teeth and the absence of a seam on the forehead, the face looking at her with its eyes gone was the same as the one in the infirmary.

"I dont understand anything," the woman muttered. "Which of them is you?"

"I am I!" Adam aggressively shouted, striking his chest. "And these... I don't know, who they are! Maybe... " he added in more judicious tone," maybe, there really were brothers in the crew? Or, more possibly, clones..."

"Nobody would send clones in a distant expedition," Eve objected. "There are different specialists required, not copies of the same one."

"But clones, as well as natural twins, are similar only outwardly, while their specialities can be different."

"All the same. Their presence onboard can create psychological problems." Fragments of once read space psychology manuals emerged in her mind. "From the usual confusion, including ill-intentioned, to...."

"But even if your crazy version is true and I had died, I couldn't die twice!"

"I don't know. I know nothing anymore. All this seems a nightmare."

"I am real, damn it!" Adam shouted and swiped the corpse in the face. Several of weakly held teeth fell into the dead mouth. One of them hung under the upper lip on a bloody thread. "Hear, you, carrion? Real! Real!" He thrashed again and again, while in his head there palpitated the comprehension of the fact that the faces of all the dead people found out here were either not visible, or mutilated, or deformed and soiled. And yet, even despite his insistence, he could pay attention to earlier similarity–if his subconscious did not resist until the latest moment, until he was rubbing his nose in it. "I am not a fucking phantom!!"

"Victor! Adam! Stop!" Eve tried to grasp his hands, but he dashed her aside. The living woman, caught off balance, fell into the lap of the dead one in the right armchair, and the corpse she encountered dropped its head on her shoulder, snapping its jaws. Adam struck the helpless corpse of the male pilot twice more, then powerlessly let his hands fall. In the broken face of the dead man it was already difficult to recognize his own, but this didn't help. The fit of rage subsided as suddenly as it had begun, giving way to something much more terrible–a huge and inevitable, like a tsunami, wave of despair, the most dark and hopeless despair, which surpassed in many times over, he was absolutely sure of it, any sorrows of his former forgotten life. And feeling how this wave fell upon him with all its weight, he dragged himself away from control room–without seeing, where he was going, reeling to and fro like a drunken man.

"Adam!" Eve climbed out of embrace of the dead wo
man and overtook her companion near the exit from the control room. Almost by force she turned him around before he could rest his forehead against the partly closed door.

And at this moment of silence a sound was heard, which they least of all could expect–the opening of lift doors.

Adam and Eve, having nearly collided heads, stared at a gleam between the control room doors. In the shined aperture of the lift cage, leaning to its edge, a man stood–barefoot, in dirty and blood-stained underwear.

He was the one who could not be here in any way–just because he was the twelfth.

However, he did not stand for long, for just a fraction of a second, and then he tumbled forward and, without any attempt to soften his falling, fell to the floor. The thud with which his forehead struck the floor made both witnesses shudder.

Adam was the first to squeeze between doors and sat down near to the fallen. Then he lifted a hopeless look at Eve.

"Dead?" She understood.

"And long ago. He probably got stuck in the lift when the power went off. And died in this position, leaned on the doors which he couldn't open."

Saying this, Adam was looking at the face of the corpse–the face which he saw today already at least three times, including the reflection in a mirror.

But Eve was already looking at something else.

"My God... Just look at his hands!"

Adam looked. Then heavily stood up and glanced into the lift cage which remained opened because the legs of the dead man remained between the doors.

All the inside walls of the cage had been scribbled in red. And there weren't anymore separate phrases with large letters. It was continuous text (not divided even by punctuation), covering the walls in a spiral, beginning from the height that the writer could reach and continuing almost to the floor. And on a floor there lay pieces of what he used instead of a felt-tip pen.

"He bit off his own fingers," Adam ascertained. "Piece by piece. To write this. When blood ceased to flow, the next fin
ger was used. And the last phrases," he peered at wide and smeared, almost unreadable letters just inches from the floor, "it seems to me, he finished by using his tongue. Dipping it in the blood flowing from his wrists."