“DARKMICROCOM=MAC,” Adam spelt out. “My God, looks like it was written with his brain.”
“In what sense?” Eve still felt faint, but already could speak.
“In the literal sense. He crushed his head against the wall, or was helped to do it, and then somebody, dipping a finger into the broken skull, as into an inkwell…”
“I think, nobody helped him,” Eve objected with a wobbling voice. “Everything was done by him, including the inscription. That’s why it’s so twisted.”
“Is a person in such condition still really capable of writing? Picking out a piece from his brains with each letter?”
“The human brain has a great safety factor.” This information had resurfaced from somewhere in Eve’s memory. “The whole hemisphere may be lost, but the personality still can remain, and even without considerable damage, though some abilities or concepts can be lost.”
“Here, obviously, there was damage. Perhaps when he started to write he meant something comprehensible, but by the end it turned into totally jibberish.”
“In my opinion, it not jibberish.” Eve shook her head, listening to her uncertain memories. “Dark… microcom… It seems to me, it means “microcosm.” Microcosm is equal to macrocosm. That’s what he tried to write. A long time ago I’ve heard this phrase, but I cannot remember what it means.”
“Something medieval,” Adam remembered. “If I remember correctly it’s an alchemist’s idea that human nature is identical to the nature of the universe. Only they understood it not to the effect that the laws of physics are uniform for everything, but more literally and primitively, and they wound lot of mysticism round it. Oh, what a shit! I cannot recall anything about the starship construction. Even my name I don’t remember—but this useless bosh…”
“He apparently didn’t consider it useless,” Eve said inaudibly.
“Well, it for sure hasn’t helped him,” Adam sniffed. “By the way, concerning the usefulness…” He walked to the corpse. Eve remained on a threshold.
“What do you want to do?” she asked.
“First take his boots. We’ll divide them fraternally—left to you, right to me?”
Eve wanted to answer that it was a stupid joke but understood that her companion in misfortune was absolutely serious.
“It will likely be inconvenient to walk in one boot,” she said. “Besides they are obviously too large for me. Take both if you want.”
“Okay,” Adam removed the boots from the corpse and put them on, noticing that the dead man had no socks. He also worried about the size, but the boots fit perfectly.
“It is still not clear,” he noticed, “where all clothes disappeared to. So far all we know that only the pilots in the control room have died dressed, otherwise their bodies would be all in blood. Also that then somebody has taken away their suits, without being squeamish about the blood on them. While all the others, including ourselves…”
“By the way, we haven’t found those other two yet,” Eve reminded him.
“True, but the ship is big. And, for that matter, it’s not a fact that there were two of them. They took two suits, but this yet tells us nothing about their number.”
“Perhaps they are still alive?”
“Hardly. If they, like us, had survived the accident, they could have left instructions for others who survived—intelligent instructions, not such rubbish.” He nodded toward the wall. “For example, ‘the rallying point is…’”
“And do we leave instructions for someone?”
“Hm…” Adam was confused. “That’s true. It hasn’t crossed my mind.”
“So, may we begin?”
“I don’t think so,” he shook his head. “If someone wanders through here, except us, we don’t know who it is and in what condition—and what the encounter might produce.”
“So they reasoned the same.”
“Well, maybe. By the way…” Adam bent down and pulled a fragment of a skull which was sticking out from the smashed head of the dead man.
“What are you doing?”
“We need a weapon. At least such as it is.” He discovered that it was not possible to break out a bone, so he straightened again and fiercely stamped a foot with the boot on the head of the corpse lying on the floor. It cracked loudly and made a squashing, chomping sound. Eve turned away in disgust. Adam bent down again. This time he managed to break out a large enough piece of an occipital bone with a sharp jag, and having put the flashlight on a floor, began to clear his trophy of brain, flesh and hair. Suddenly he thought about how it looked from the outside—the interstellar ship, the highest achievement of human mind and a science, in contrast to the half-naked savage making a bone weapon from the skull of a fellow tribesman. And after all, both of them obviously have a university education—maybe, even doctor degrees.
“How many does he make?” Eve asked, still without looking in his direction.
“Mmm… The eighth. Not including us.”
“And how many are on your list?
With his foot he knocked off the piece of paper from the flashlight handle, stepped on the edge, straightening it, and peered, counting the lines.
“Eleven. So what? Clearly that’s not a list of crewmen. However big the ship is, it for sure doesn’t contain monasteries and highways.”
“But this list somehow is related to us and to what is going here! Perhaps it is the crew of the previous expedition. Or our backups. Or we could be their backups. We were sent afterwards, after what had happened to the main crew, according to the list.”
“So you want to say all this began on Earth?”
“I don’t know. I cannot remember. But I feel that this ship was doomed from the very beginning. No, not even feel—I know… knew earlier… I cannot… When I think of it, I am overrun by such despair! But I cannot also stop thinking!” Eve clenched her head with her hands, painfully sticking nails into her temples between the bandages. “So, have you finished here?”
“I am going to check—about parasites. Now I have a tool to do an autopsy. Certainly I am not going to cut myself though it alone would give full confidence.”
“Erm… Adam! What are you up to?” Eve had turned towards him, looking at him in round-eyed fear. “Are you crazy? This is the way, probably, all this begins!” She took a step back, ready to run away.
“What’s the matter?” He was surprised. “You… decided that I was going to dissect you? Faugh, how absurd! Though…”
“Though what?”
“Well no, it’s purely theoretically—really, to check whether we are infected inside, it would require one of us to take… but no, I’ve said, theoretically! I’m not a murderer! I’m going to dissect him!” He nodded at the dead man. “If in his guts I find the same creature as in that man in the corridor, things look bad… and if no, that means, it has crept inside by chance.”
“Even if you find nothing, it may mean the larvae are invisible to the naked eye.”
“Thanks, you calmed me. But even if it is clean inside, it still says nothing about us. But all the same…” Adam squatted and scooted the corpse back over. “I never considered that I would ever disembowel my colleague with his own bone,” he said to himself. However, strictly speaking, he didn’t know what thoughts he had had in his past. But, indeed, they were unlikely to have been anything like these.
He thrusted the bone jag into the unnaturally pale belly covered with curly hair. The flesh at first caved in deeply without piercing it, and from the mouth of the corpse, a heavy sigh escaped. Adam shuddered and was dumbstruck, but the next moment he realized that he had just squeezed air out of the body. He pressed more strongly and the skin split its sides, making a terrible crimson mouth. No blood came out, it had clotted long ago.