Adam felt again an attack of nausea, but now he easily overcame it. After everything seen earlier… The ripped up flesh hardly gave in, as if it were rubber—or maybe his “surgical instrument” just lacked sharpness. He had to exert considerable effort. Yes, it was not at all the same as cutting meat with a knife on a plate (from this thought Adam felt a lump rising in his throat again, and decided that, if somehow he got out from here, he would become a vegetarian). At last he drew the cut to the groin and, grabbing the edges, stretched the flesh apart sideways. Of all things, there was a lot of fat inside, while the dead man didn’t look at all fat. So, this wet bag is, obviously, the stomach, he concluded, and here are the guts, similar to a clot of huge slippery worms. The real worms—terrestrial or, the most important, local—however, were not visible anywhere. But to be fully convinced of their absence, it was necessary to cut and glance into each section of the intestines.
“So was it there?” Eve lost patience. At times she threw fastidious looks in his direction, but did not dare to come nearer.
“Looks like nothing yet—no larvae, eggs or whatever. Now I will open his intestines. What the hell is that?”
From a cut made under the stomach something whitish emerged. Adam’s hand trembled, but he realized that it didn’t look like anything alive. He ripped the slimy tube further and with two fingers pulled from it a crumpled and stuck together lump of a paper.
“It seems we have mail,” Adam muttered.
“Do you really think so?” Eve all the same overcame herself and stepped inside the room.
“No, of course not. He hardly expected that he would be dissected, but for some reason he has swallowed this piece.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to tear it?”
“You’re asking me? Perhaps he did it in a fit of rage and in the same fit smashed his head against the wall. Or maybe he didn’t want someone to reconstruct the sheet from scraps.”
“Again something was hidden from us? Can you unfold it without tearing it?”
“I will try. By the way, apparently, this paper is firmer than the usual one. Perhaps it’s even not a paper at all, it just looks similar. Shit, we don’t even remember what they write on now.”
He managed to unwrap the wet sheet on a floor. Eve, trying not to look at the ripped body, sat down on her knees nearby and pointed the flashlight on to the sheet to see it better.
Letters were quite distinguishable—this time printed, not hand-written. The text had neither a beginning, nor an end.
“…neral theory of a dark matter-energy of Bernstein-Wong (Nob.pr. for physics 2063), which showed that the dark matter actually was not some type of hypothesized exotic matter but is in fact a certain phase of the standard one, with the phase transition being completely reversible [3]. The common view that objects in this special phase are capable of motion with speeds greatly exceeding the speed of light is not quite correct. Actually objects in the “dark” condition obey the equations of the Generalized quantum theory [5], from which, in particular, it follows that such an object does not have fixed coordinates in the continuum (or even a fixed projection to the continuum); rather its location is a superposition of all the possible coordinates, the probability of a particular value of the coordinates actualizing, being described by a certain three-dimensional distribution function Φ, which depends on the curvature of the continuum at each point and on the configuration of the dark energy field. Travel of the “dark” ship, accordingly, is in fact a reconfiguration of the field of dark energy performed in a way so that at the moment of the collapse of the ship’s wave function (which occurs at field’s switching-off), the function Φ possess an above-threshhold value in the vicinity of the destination point. It has been shown by Kozelsky (2065) that for any nonzero Σ it is possible within a finite time (using a finite amount of energy) to carry out the field reconfiguration so that the ship would return to the standard phase within any prescribed set of coordinates with an error of no more than |Σ| [6].
The postulates of the theory have been experimentally confirmed by Kalkrin’s group (2070, 2071), these experiments becoming the starting point for the “Hyperion” program. In 2077 the unmanned probe “Hyperion-1”, equipped with the Kalkrin generator, explored the system of the star Gliese 581 and successfully returned to Earth.
It should be emphasized that the General theory of dark matter-energy, despite its experimental (and even industrial) verification, still does not supply answers to several pertinent questions. In particular, the essence of dark energy remains disputable. The problem of the cosmological constant, according to which the observed density of dark energy as is evidenced by its gravitational interactions is 120 orders of magnitude below the estimated value, remains unresolved. Bernstein explains it with the assumption that most of the dark energy does not manifest itself gravitationally. For an explanation of this cosmological constant problem, a number of hypotheses were offered [3] [7] [8], none of which are universally accepted. In particular, works of Miller (2065) and Birnbaum (2069) [9] [10] are devoted to the criticism of these hypotheses. Chang (2067, 2069) has offered the alternative explanation, according to…”
“Dark is faster than light,” Adam muttered, having read up. “So it is not such nonsense.”
“Apparently we are on a ship with the Kalkrin engine.” Eve drew a practical conclusion. “But it said here, after all, that the flight to Gliese 581 was successful?”
“Unmanned,” Adam reminded her. “After that they sent the manned spacecraft… and then something went wrong. As far as I understand it, we didn’t return in time from dark phase to usual space. Which is, in fact, no wonder, if all this madness and destruction began. Probably they even broke the computer which would have returned us automatically. But the field generator continues to work, carrying us away all the further. That is, changing probability of our location in such a manner that…”
“And to return to the normal world, it is simply enough to switch it off?” Eve interrupted.
“Yes, but we will appear in the middle of nowhere. Remember the ‘butterfly’ on the screen in the control room? It is a graphic representation of function Φ. We will come up somewhere within it, most likely, near center. I do not know, how much the picture there corresponds to linear scales but if it corresponds, we will appear, at least, hundreds of light years from Earth. And, probably, in tens—from the nearest star. And if the scale is logarithmic, it is even terrible to imagine, where…”
“In other words, there is no hope to call for help.”
“No. And it is also impossible to send a radiogram from the dark phase.”
“Linear…” Eve muttered suddenly.
“What?”
“A picture in the control room. If it indeed is linear—at least approximately—and if we were to draw a line through the Sun, Gliese 581 and the screen center, it turns out that the Sun is father from us than Gliese. And if all that happened had occurred on the way back, and we had slipped Earth, it would have been on the contrary.”
“That is you want to say that we didn’t land in Gliese 581 system?
“Indeed. It is difficult to believe that we landed there, and then continued to fly in the former direction. And the image on the screen—after all, this star there has been emphasized.”
“Where then have these wretches come from?”
“I don’t know.”
Adam kept silent, then again took the skull shard. “Anyhow, they are here. And I should finish the check.”
Further picking in the intestines of the dead man, however, did not resulted in any discoveries. Adam found some more pieces of paper, but they were too small and raveled out under his fingers. Apparently this man had torn a part of the list to pieces before swallowing it. Probably a professional criminologist with the appropriate equipment would manage to restore the full text, but it was beyond Adam capabilities. He already felt sick from what he had done, and, above all, from growing perception of hopelessness regarding all their efforts.