George Right: D

“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 advanced 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 gritted 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 ordinary 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. “Electrostatics?”

“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 noncommittal 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 towards her, clearly understanding what it meant. Their fingers met.

The spark drily cracked, stinging them with instant mutual pain.

But already they could not hear the bang of the explosion.

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 intention 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 understood 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.