George Right: D

But if she was now revived in the nose part of the ship, will she perish when the rocket hits here, in the aft part? Probably not. But if the biosynthesizer with all protoplasm is destroyed, the series of regenerations will end, and on the dilapidated ship she will not survive for much longer. As he had just ascertained, they nevertheless cannot live in a vacuum, though he was sure that he was then killed by a vacuum? Perhaps he couldn’t commit suicide for quite some time, until he managed to catch one of the tools flying nearby? Feeling sick from this thought made Victor understand that he, most likely, had guessed right.

Well, where is the explosion? Victor felt, as a hard weariness, the true companion of hopeless despair, bore heavily on him again. He leaned against a wall and closed his eyes, as it happened, just in time to hear the short obtuse rataplan of hits pass through the wall. None of them were strong enough to make the colossal ship shudder even slightly. Certainly it couldn’t be the explosion of the rocket. Collision with tools or whatever else they had thrown out? But where, where is the damned rocket? Could it really miss? If he had incorrectly estimated the curvature of that pseudo-space in which they are captured, however, the rocket still has nowhere to go, as there is too little space here, so sooner or later… but where exactly will it hit?

If Linda is dead, it would be possible to connect her body again to the wires and to try to establish communication again with the rocket. He had already taken her hand with this thought, but at that moment the body of the woman suddenly convulsively moved. She coughed so as if she had choked on her own tongue, again convulsively shuddered, and then heavily raised her head.

“We are still… here?” she hoarsely exhaled.

“What idiots we are!” Victor exclaimed, having surmised something from his last thought. “You shouldn’t grasp the wires! We could drag any corpse here and use it!”

“Never mind.” She awkwardly wiped her face with the back of her right hand, trying not to touch anything with the burned fingers. “It is better, than IT.”

“IT,” Adamson blightly nodded. “Perhaps, IT influences even our decisions, forcing us to choose what serves its law—the law of increase of despair.”

“The rocket. What is with the rocket? You didn’t manage to launch it?”

“I did, but… I got it. We are idiots twice,” Victor gloomily stated. “The ship has no self-destruction system. But unmanned rockets have! And when the computer has understood that collisions is unavoidable… We were reached only by small fragments.”

“And we can’t turn it off in any way?”

“No. And even if we could, it was the only lander with which I managed to establish communication. And the stand, I am afraid, won’t work any more.”

Linda sat on the floor, looking at her blackened fingers. The suffering grimace curved her mangled face, making it especially eerie—layers of dead skin, crawling against each other, rumpled in rigid folds and chapped here and there.

“Very painful?” Victor asked. “Perhaps you, well… a new cycle?”

“Death as the best medicine, murder as first aid…” she muttered. “No. I do not want it again from the beginning. Again to remember that all… to pass from hope to… especially, it becomes shorter… Listen. I know what to do. We will blow up this damned ship all the same. Anyway, the second level for sure.”

“How?”

“Hydrogen. Detonating gas.”

“And where will we get it, especially in such quantities?”

“We will force this rubbish to create its death by itself. We will introduce a virus into the protoplasm. Its cells are very flexible. Capable of serving as a material either for human tissues or for anaerobic biorobots, and emission of biogene hydrogen is a routine biochemical process. It is very simple to program. Currently protoplasm grows owing to dark energy, as the vegetative biomass of Earth—owing to solar one. Well, let it grow, the more, the better. The virus will build in all its cells. And will make them produce hydrogen.”

“You can create such a virus?”

“I am still a bioengineer.”

“Yes, but everything is crushed.”

“At the second level there is a reserve control post too.”

“If it is in the same condition, as this one…”

“What do we have to lose? Let’s go.”

“All right,” Adamson agreed in a colourless voice. “Let’s go—if you insist.”

“You don’t believe that we will manage to do it?”

“It won’t release us. I do not know, how, but it won’t.”

“Victor, don’t speak like that! It is IT that forces you to think this way! You have said yourself that it is an absolutely stupid force, not an artful enemy! We should fight it!”

“You can still … have any… hope?” The wave of apathy and powerlessness which overtook him was so heavy that he hardly forced himself to move his lips.

“Pain. I think, it’s the point. While I think of the pain, I can’t concentrate completely on despair. But it will become, of course, stronger. Let’s go, while we still can bear it.” Seeing that Victor does not move at all, she managed a mighty slap across his face and then another, before she moaned from the pain in her own fingers. Adamson grudgingly put his hand on the panel opening the exit. The hangar was already filled with air again and automatics allowed them to leave the dispatching post.

At the second level little had changed since the last Adamson visit—except for the disgusting life that had seemingly bred even more. But as with the previous time, Victor did not look at the mucous mushrooms and meat stalactites hanging down from a ceiling but instead on the mangled corpse crucified across a corridor. In its dead flesh all halfworms-halfbugs droopingly crawled about, it seemed, there were more of them now, as well as their dead bodies on the floor. Now he knew that this was Linda’s corpse and that he was the monster who had done it to her.

The memories about what happened here sharply splashed out on to his consciousness, causing a feeling of almost a physical blow. Adamson shuddered and squinted tightly, but that made the dreadful scene only more clear before his eyes.

“I remember it, too,” Linda said in low voice. “Let’s go.” She resolutely moved sideways by her own mutilated remains, having dived under the hand ripped up by a wire. Victor followed her, trying simultaneously not to look at the body and not to touch it. Underfoot dead insectoid creatures damply crackled and crunched. In many places the floor was already covered with a continuous carpet. His boots stuck and slipped in the slime. He was glad—as much as that adjective in general fit the situation—that he had put on the dead man’s footwear—that is, of course, his own. But Linda walked on all this muck barefoot and, apparently, even paid no attention to it. Meanwhile the corridor around them resembled less and less a construction created by humans, and more and more an interior of some monstrous gut, affected with polyps and ulcers. Light could no longer penetrate all that grew on light fixtures, so it was necessary to use the flashlight again. In one place their way was barred by something like a soft log. Linda stepped on it (the sound similar to a squelched sigh came out) and went further, and Victor stumbled in the dark. He shined the light at feet and made a wry face when he understood what it was. It was a corpse which had become now a part of the general goop which covered the walls, floor and ceiling. It was accreted so densely that it was already impossible to understand, if it was male or female, least of all the cause of death. It was possible to distinguish only a hole of an opened mouth, a black cavity in the continuous knobby crust which completely hid all other facial features. Victor feared that further passage was overgrown completely, and they would have to almost literally gnaw their way through to the post.