George Right: D

“All right. But there will be high voltage, I don’t guarantee that you will withstand it.”

“Victor, this is ridiculous. I will die once again. What’s the damned difference? The circuit will remain closed. Begin it now, until I can’t bear it any more!”

“Okay, then hold it here and here.”

She knelt near the stand. Having ripped off the insulation, she wound the end of the wire round a finger of her right hand and clutched it in a fist, and put her left hand inside the stand. Adamson helped her to insert a finger into the socket. Then he somehow fit the stand cover back on—it did not, of course, lie in place completely, but it was still possible to connect the screens and keyboard. Even the buttons on the keyboard were real, as in former times, instead of an image on a touch surface of a screen.

“Switching on,” Victor warned and connected the perviously opened jumpers.

Linda’s body curved in an arch, and she tried to cry out, but a sharp spasm which had twisted all her muscles didn’t allow her to open her mouth. She could only low through the rounded nostrils. With a dry crackle the remaining scraps of her hair began to move on her head. The singeing reek began to spread in the air.

But Adamson could not let this distracted him. He could not even allow himself to think about her suffering. Screens lit up, self-diagnostics lines began to run. Victor hasty interrupted the test and disabled all warnings. He knew himself rather well that in such mode the stand would work several minutes at the best, until the first contact connected end-to-end would fuse or any other element would die from rating violations. A human body is nevertheless a bad replacement for the certificated cable.

Victor tried to activate the computer of the first probe. “Unable to communicate,” appeared on the screen. Where is the problem—in the stand, in the probe, somewhere in between them? There is neither time nor the possibility to find out! The second probe: “Unable to communicate.” The third… still too early to consider the stand fully operational. Especially while—yes, it was true—the smell of burning human skin began to mingle with the smell of the burning wafer-type components. Even to start the full diagnostics, it will take not less than three minutes.

Linda continued to low, her body curving so much that it seemed that her vertebrae were about to crack and break. Victor shot an instant glance at her and continued furiously to click the buttons. The fifth probe… No, it’s all useless… if only by any miracle the sixth, the last one, would revive… Yes!!!

Victor’s fingers danced over the touch panel. Despite its archaic look, the panel was not as primitive as it would have been at the beginning of the space age. Flight programming did not require entering tens and hundreds of lines of code, to point the purposes on the rotatable and scalable scheme was enough. A departure from a hangar and an attachment to the rocket are, in general, basic operations which do not demand a special program. Now a turn and…

“Now, Linda,” he said, pressing the confirmation button.

“The chosen route threatens the safety of the ship. The program is canceled.”

Stupid metal crap, he thought, while on the contrary, it was too clever.

Linda still lowed and, thus, was alive. She would better to die, Victor thought, die and resurrect again in blissful ignorance in her room.

“Stand it a little more,” he helplessly muttered, activating the settings on the screen. Adjust safety level… “Enter the password.”

The password! Holy shit! Well certainly, he knew the password… once… many deaths ago.

The terrible lowing broke, replaced by a choking rale. It smelled of burned flesh. But she was still alive.

And suddenly, as if having come up from the most black depths of despair, letters and numbers of the password appeared before Victor’s eyes. He entered them so hastily that he made a mistake. Once again, don’t hurry. Don’t pay attention to sounds and smells. Bingo! Maximal g-load, check, remaining fuel, check… turn off, turn off everything…

There was no place to check intentional collision with the starpship in the settings. It couldn’t be turned off. As Adamson had absolutely correctly noticed before, the situation when the crew needed to destroy its own starship couldnot come to the mind of any normal designer. To risk a probe, yes, even to destroy a probe, but not the ship!

Victor put his hand out to switch off the power. Nothing would work. They were doomed. Doomed again and again to sustain the universal burden of cosmic despair, to search an easement in physical torments, to die and revive for new suffering, forever locked in this damned ship.

Stop! He jerked back his hand. The space is closed in a cocoon of a field. The computer of a probe knows nothing about it! It wasn’t pre-programmed for launching from a dark phase—of course not, after all such a launch is senseless. It considers that outside of the hangar there is a usual continuum, where to accelerate with the ship astern means to move away from her.

Adamson’s fingers began again to dance on the panel and to hit the buttons. If only he could make it! The smell of burning details increased. The panel could be cut off at any moment. So, start with the maximum acceleration. He was right to cancel all restrictions on g-loads and fuel. Then, when the ship suddenly appears ahead of the rocket nose, the maneuvering engines would not have time to turn the rocket to avoid collision.

“Program confirmed. Launching sequence initiated.”

The red indicator shone, showing that the exit to the hangar was blocked, and one more screen, displaying the view from the probe’s camera, turned on. In normal conditions decompression of the hangar would take several minutes, but because of the canceled safety options the wide doors have slid apart at once, letting the air out into a space. However, outside there was not the usual blackness of space, but some qualmish gray-brown twilight, certainly without any stars. The landing module, turned by its mobile pylon head-on to the exit, ignited the engines.

Victor would prefer to track the process of attaching to the rocket and its further flight to the end, but Linda was still alive, and he couldn’t torture her anymore. The computer should do its job. Adamson again moved his hand to turn the stand off. At that instant, as it was required for any operations in near-ship space, spaceship orientation lights turned on outside, and in their light through a doorway coming nearer to the module, Victor saw on the screen a scattering of some small objects floating in space. He understood what it was—the tools which they had thrown out (the field was configured so that it created gravity inside the ship, but not beyond its hull, the pilot remembered). If the probe collided with them, could it affect its direction? Probably not because they are too small.

“That’s all, Linda.” He exhaled when the probe reached outer space, but before he had time to open the circuit, a short crackle of electric breakdown sounded in the stand bowels. But capacitors which had time to be charged kept the image on the screen for a few of seconds more. And during these seconds the lander camera showed one more item—drifting in the same cloud of garbage, much larger than the others: a body with outstretched arms and legs. And Victor even had time to make out whose body it was. The screen had gone out, but before his eyes there was still the grinning grimace of his own corpse.

Linda fell backwards, with a wooden knock hitting her nape against the floor. Her blackened fingers smoked. From her nose bloody slime was leaking. Victor bent down over the woman. She gave no signs of life. Dead after all? But even if so, it’s not even possible to say about the deceased, “She suffers no more.” Not anyway, until the rocket fulfills its task.