D

by George Right

  "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 similarity 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 inscriptions 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 woman 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 majority 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 interstellar 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 explanations. 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, w
ave 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 woman 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 finger 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."

  "And... you think, it is the answer?" Eve asked, fearfully looking at the curve lines.

  "I guess, yes."

  "I am so frightened. It seems to me that we shouldn't read this!"

  But Adam, of course, had already stepped in the cage. The text began, most probably, from a big blot, from which a dried stream was stretching downward almost through the whole length of the wall. At that moment the writer still had plenty of "ink."

  "despair darkness it really darkness dark energy despair only sense and essence of universe my god god doesn't exist there is only despair which created the world what idiots we are we understood nothing when probe explorers began to hop the perch we trusted only to instruments even when it gobbled up ape too late to back away told computer error only changed number all the same biosynthesizer two idiots volunteers save prestige of program for science's sake morons morons we would better be real morons though won't help finally it will absorb all for it is alpha and omega law of increase of despair..."

  For Adam it wasn't at all incoherent gibberish. With each word read the wall in his consciousness fell with a crack and a roar of a ruptured dam, the truth uncontrollably rushed outside, and he spoke, spoke, even understanding that he shouldn't do it, that he doomed Eve, that is Linda, to premature–though all the same inevitable–torment, but his own torment didn't allow him to stop, and soon he even needed not to look at the bloody letters, just a view which filled with a pain the scars on his fingers.

  "We named it dark energy. Energy of the vacuum which produces particles and antiparticles, the force interfering with the recession of galaxies. In general, all this is true. But its true name is Despair–the essence of the universe and its basic force. Once people considered that the primary law of the universe was the law of nondecrease of entropy. But, be it so, any evolution, any transformation from simple to complex, from interstellar gas to stars and planets, from inorganic molecules to live cells and organisms, would be impossible. Then it had been postulated that self-organizing processes can proceed in unclosed systems where there is an energy inflow from the outside. But that meant that the universe itself is a unclosed system, otherwise from where can it receive the energy? Now we know what this energy is and what law of the universe is really primary: the law of increase of the despair. It is possible to say that the despair is the force making galaxies to scatter in horror, though this run into eternal void will not help...

  "But unless galaxies can feel anything?" interrupted Eve, whose consciousness still resisted memory. "They are not alive!"

  "It's only a terminology issue. Can we say whether a stone feels heat or cold? But after all they operate on it quite objectively, forcing it to crack or even to melt. But, really, inanimate objects are incapable of feeling despair to the full. Therefore, all processes in the universe develop, eventually, in the direction of the evolution of life and sense. For life, and in particular sense, is nothing else but despair capable of realizing itself and thus to complete the positive feedback and to realize the unique purpose and sense of existence of the universe–the achievement of absolute, infinite despair.”

  "But after all despair is just an emotion! Arising in our brain in reply to strokes of misfortune. It is subjective! How can it be any fundamental cosmic force?"

  "If a person is forcefully hit on his head, he sees a short flash–the proverbial stars before eyes. It is a subjective illusion, but it doesn't mean that an objective light doesn't exist somewhere. This is the analogy of that despair which we feel in common life. And now compare this flash to a necessity to look with the lidless eyes, with the eyes capable neither of blinking nor of looking away–to look at the Sun, no, at thousand, trillions suns, at all the stars of the universe simultaneously! In comparison with this torment, with the force of despair, on 120 orders of magnitude surpassing the force of gravitation, any of the most horrible physical suffering is only a desired strategy at least somehow to distract, to get relief at least for a moment! And we, we ourselves, drew it nearer! Developing science, improving our mind, aspiring to comprehend the world–that is, to comprehend the despair... Though wise men still in the ancient time smelled a rat and warned others, who increases knowledge increases sorrow. And the statistics accurately showed that the highest level of suicide is in the most advanced countries. But we didn't come to these conclusions even when ‘Hyperion-1’ has returned. The next triumph of human science... automatics completed its mission faultlessly... and then the scientists who worked with the returned probe started one after another to commit suicide, go mad or slip into a coma. And besides this, they have felt only residual emanations of dark energy. But the instruments registered no threat to life for the whole flight time, and even the samples of protozoa, worms and insects onboard were okay. Their organisms were too primitive to feel despair. Therefore, certainly, the fate of scientists was hushed up ‘in order to avoid a sensation in the yellow press that would damage the image of the program’; explaining all as a series of tragic coincidences. But nevertheless, before sending humans to the stars, they have sent one more starprobe with a chimpanzee onboard. And ‘Hyperion-2’ has disappeared without a trace. If it had returned with a dead or mad ape, possibly, our flight would not have taken place. But it has simply disappeared, and it has come to nobody’s mind that the reason could be in the live being who had no access to the control systems. Everything was written off as a failure of the onboard computer. The launch of �
�Hyperion-3’ had been too widely advertized already, and a great deal of money had been invested in the project, so it was too late to give it up. But because of this series of accidents, some changes nonetheless have been made in the flight program. It was planned from the very beginning that people wouldn't land on massive planets of Gliese 581. This role has been alloted to biorobots created and modified according to arising tasks directly onboard, in a biosynthesizer with the protoplasm stock, placed on the second from below level. The miracles of Earth gene engineering... The crew should only process the data collected and delivered to them. But under the pressure of skeptics who pointed out the dangers of the flight for people, it was decided that the most of this data would be processed on Earth. The ship had been already designed and constructed for eleven crewmen, but only two have flown. You still haven't remembered, Linda? There are not twelve corpses here, but much more, this ship is full of them. But actually there is nobody here–except us!"

  "You... you’re trying to tell me that all these dead persons are biorobots?"

  "No, no, everything is much worse! Our technologies don't allow us to create exact copies of a human! Biological models for which our synthesizer is designed are too primitive. But IT doesn't need an intermediary in the form of a synthesizer, for IT is itself the life creating force. And it won't release us."

  "It?”

  "Despair! Aren’t you listing? Despair! It is capable of organizing life from lifeless matter, but that requires millions of years because it doesn't have its own mind. But with such a gift as an already-existing protoplasm all happens much faster. All these creeping creatures are the life which has evolved here onboard! Consequently they are so ugly and clumsy. They didn't pass through natural selection, apparently. The majority of them are even not capable of eating and breeding. But the main thing is both of us, Linda, we! The microcosm is a similar to the macrocosm! A soul actually exists, and it is not an ethereal angel with wings. It is a steady matrix of dark energy, or, that is to say, a structured despair. For the whole time that we tried to investigate dark energy in depths of space, it was in ourselves! But the accuracy of our instruments was insufficient to detect it. We after all searched only for the gravitational component, which is ten to the one hundred twentieth power weaker than the true essence. The Kalkrin generator was required to transport us to the phase of dark matter and thus to tune our despair to resonate with the great despair of the universe. The theory predicted that switching off the generator would lead to a spontaneous return to the initial condition, but it was true only for an inanimate probe. When there are animate beings onboard, the Kalkrin generator only starts the process which then becomes self-sustaining. In a dark phase it is not necessary for us to eat, to drink, even to breathe. The dark energy feeds us directly."