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"How long still?" he shouted. "How long will you snail about?"

"That's it," Linda exhaled in a dead voice. "I have started the synthesis. Now I will run tests and will be able to tell approximately how long we have to wait."

Victor sat down on the filthy floor, digging his nails into his palms and pressing his temples with his fists.

"Hydrogen level..." Linda muttered. "No. It can't be!"

"What?" Victor moaned. "You were mistaken? All is in vain? I knew, knew that..."

"No. On the contrary, there it bowl loads of hydrogen! The whole synthesizer is filled with detonating gas. But it is impossible! Only the few minutes passed, no virus breeds with such speed!"

"Then the instruments are wrong."

"No. Not wrong... It seems... it seems… I know what happened. It's like with the rockets. We didn't remember that we have tried twice already. We have broken the panel to prevent the third hopeless attempt, but you nevertheless managed to make it work."

"You mean to say the idea of a virus also came to you not for the first time?" Adamson questioned.

"Yes. After all it is natural that we think out the same ideas over and over again. Only this idea wasn't hopeless. We just have to understand that we will succumb before the end of process. But it already went automatically. Our participation wasn't required. The main thing was not to disturb it–not to destroy all that is here in the next fit of despair, especially without yet having remembered what was what."

"So," Victor said in shock, "that means, we... that is, I... had hung you in a corridor as... a ‘No entrance’ sign?"

"Yes, by this time we already knew that bloody inscriptions like ‘don't go there!’ didn't work. And when you saw
this
–you after all did not go further? And I wouldn't go... no, I really hoped that the pain would destroy my mind, and for me all would finish, but if not... as it in fact happened..."

"And how much time is left till the end of the process?"

Linda looked at the screen again.

"It is finished. All protoplasm is infected."

"So, we have lost a wilderness of time while you created the virus anew!" Victor again flew into a rage. "We could finish that all a way back!"

"Don't shout. We are almost there. Let's go."

They didn't need to return to the corridor. It was possible to pass to the synthesizer tank directly from the control post. After descending a short low-sloped stairway and passing a hanger, on which protective suits once hung (Where could they be now? On which of still not found corpses?), the astronauts found themselves before one more door covered by outgrowths. Under the outgrowths it was still possible to discern a sign of biological danger. That certainly couldn't stop them anymore. In principle, behind each door there should be a leakproof airlock, but how then had all this living muck gotten outside? Was it thanks to the paradoxical properties of dark matter, or had they let it out themselves? Linda put her hand again on the scanner and they, having passed the airlock, went on to a balcony surrounding from within the large round premise which they already saw on the screen. At a closer look the life cradle made an even more repellent impression than on the monitor. Viscous bubbles were slowly overflowing and loudly burst two meters below their feet. In the air there was a dense heavy smell of some rotten concoction. Now Victor understood what these bubbles meant: Hydrogen was evolving–odorless by itself, of course.

"Well now," Adamson inquired, "how will we set it on fire?"

"Oh," Linda was confused, "actually I has absolutely forgotten about that. We had electrolighters but where are they now?"

"I suspect, overboard."

"And here," she inspected the walls, "there are no wires which we could reach."

"If only this crap were metal!" Victor punched a balcony handrail. "There would be a chance to strike a spark. But there is only plastic around."

"Chemically inert and fireproof," Linda gloomy nodded. Then she suddenly gazed on the first pilot. "Wait. I have an idea. I will bring it now."

With these words she ran out to the door, leaving Victor to grasp a round handrail in powerless anxiety. What an idea? The circle of the progress had been closed. On board the most ad
vanced achievement of human science there is the same problem as in a stone age cave: the problem of making fire. Only here it is necessary not to survive, but to die. And to do it is much more difficult: Things at the hand of an ancient savage were not made according to the rules of maximal safety which excluded any casual spark. But let her come back and bring anything! He cannot bear this despair any more! A little more and he will jump into this shit gurgling below, even knowing that it won't help him, but instead would only restart everything from the beginning.

When at last, panting, Linda ran back, Adamson didn't even notice her. He desolately whined, reeling in place, with grit
ted teeth and closed eyes. She had to call him twice to draw his attention.

"Brought it?" he asked greedily.

"Here."

She stretched out a comb toward him. A completely or
dinary comb, without any high-tech frills, once scornfully left by him in a pocket of her overalls.

"What the hell is that?"

"Brush your hair."

"Why the deuce?"

"I have too few hair left. And yours are almost undamaged. They should suffice."

"А-аh," he understood at last, taking the comb. "Electro
statics?"

"Exactly."

He began to furiously tear at his elven locks with the comb. Probably, he thought, no schoolboy before a first date had ever preened his feathers with such a frenzy. What was his first date? Did it happen at all or had he been only interested in science? Obviously there were still too many blocked in his memories. But this is not important now.

"Victor."

He stopped. His hair crackled slightly. Linda looked uncertainly into his eyes.

"We in fact were... not just colleagues? Between us... there was something?"

"I do not remember." He honestly shook his head. "If it were... the despair has erased it all. I can't remember even how you look actually. That is, I saw your corpses, but..."

"I remember very little too. But it seems to me that... I feel... Tell me, would you like, that between the two of us if it were started over again? If not all this..." she helplessly moved a hand in the air, pointing either to her spoiled face and body or to the tank walls.

He looked at the terrible scrappy mask which had become her face–a mask almost devoid of facial expression.  Only in her eyes an entreaty still lived.

"Yes," he told her, thinking that it was only a noncom
mittal consolatory lie. However, he understood with surprise that it was not exactly a lie... and maybe, even not so at all. This part of his memory remained in darkness, but something very vague, almost intangible appeared there–something so much in contrast with the present hopelessness, with the hopelessness of the fate of the whole universe. "Yes, I would like it," he repeated more firmly and even tried to smile.

She had answered this smile as much as her current face allowed and stretched a hand to him. He stretched his hand to
wards her, clearly understanding what it meant. Their fingers met.

The spark drily cracked, stinging them with instant mu
tual pain.

But already they could not hear the bang of the explo
sion.

In the beginning there was nothing, except blind horror. Then sensations began to come back, sensations of his own corporality, which frightened him even more than their absence. He understood that he could move neither a hand, nor a leg, nor a single finger–and at the same time he was not paralyzed. He felt his body–big and heavy, really huge, and at the same time he could not tell "here is that organ, and here is this one.’ He couldn't even tell where his top was or where his bottom was. It was just a sensation of monstrous inert weight. But his eyelids still obeyed him, and he opened his eyes.

There was nothing around him except a gray-brown emptiness, and in this emptiness there was he. Or they. Or it... His head poked out of the huge spherical clod of the flesh which had been clumsily stuck together from human corpses, spongy stuff, slime and the remains of other forms of the life generated by the synthesizer. It was all henceforth a single whole, as if a certain mighty force had crumpled and rolled together playdough figures. However, some small wormlike and arthropodic creatures which had survived the accident had not become a part of the general building material and now freely crept on the sphere, getting into skin-covered hollows between concrescent bodies, corporal cavities and ragged holes.

Here and there from the common lump of the spoiled flesh, dead heads jutted, sometimes entirely, sometimes only half or less, which made their faces stretched and warped. In just a meter from the face of the one who erstwhile called himself Victor Adamson (and who remembered now the past much faster than after previous revivals) the peeled to meat head of Linda the hive stared with blind orbs and grinned with lipless jaws. And a little more to the left from it one more head–Linda the mummy–stuck out. But this head wasn't dead. Her eyelids began to tremble and then painfully opened.

Even incomparable horror and despair didn't deter Victor from realizing that in what happened there was no ominous inten
tion to punish the rebellious sinners–only laws of physics which, as he had noticed correctly earlier, are more ruthless than any dark gods. When both retranslators of the despair were simultaneously lost and the material for their regeneration was destroyed, a spontaneous qualitative transition occurred. Sharp collapse of dark energy made the field shrink to the minimal volume and to the most energetically favorable spherical form. Thus all the inanimate matter of the ship, useless for the maintenance of despair, was thrown out beyond the field and dissipated in the continuum. In the closed volume inside there remained only that which yet could serve as a life carrier–the non-decayed flesh of dead bodies.

And now very little remained, which he still could use to oppose the despair (Despair,
DESPAIR!
) To chew his own lips–then tongue–and then IT will fall upon him with all its weight, one hundred twenty orders of magnitude surpassing the force of gravitation.

He looked in the eyes of the living Linda, goggled with horror almost as wide as dead Linda's eyes nearby, and under
stood that henceforth he and she would always stay together, and that they would never die. And then he cried–cried so that it seemed his own eardrums should burst, and his lungs should tear and be splashed with blood out of his throat. But nothing came out from his mouth. First, he no longer had lungs. And second, he was surrounded by airless emptiness.

The first cockroach climbed out of the mouth of the flayed head of Linda the hive and, hobbling awkwardly, begin to creep towards his face.