“Impossible,” he muttered.
“So!” Eve exclaimed with hysterical notes in her voice. “Now you have understood, at last?”
“Understood what?” he bellowed in response. “What should I understand?”
“That we are dead.”
“Our situation stinks,” Adam agreed, “but nevertheless…”
“What ‘nevertheless’? We are dead already. Got it? We have died, and this is our hell!”
“You are talking through madness.”
“My God, haven’t I said you are a jackass? How did you not listen? This is an eleven-person ship!
“Do you mean that list?
“The hell with the list! How many corpses have we found?”
“Eight plus in those in the infirmary… Eleven,” Adam understood, shocked.
“That’s it.”
“No,” he wildly shook his head. “That cannot be.”
“What can’t be is the possibility of stowaways on an interstellar ship. Even on a city bus you cannot enter without a card.”
“I don’t know. There should be a rational explanation,” Adam muttered, while before his eyes there was a bloody inscription which he saw only during an instant before it was absorbed by darkness: “NO DEATH.”
“For the time that you remember yourself, did you want to eat?” Eve put the squeeze on him.
“You scoff? In such conditions?”
“And to drink? And to the loo?”
“It just didn’t pass enough time.”
“Shit, we even cannot vomit when feeling sick! Also, we do not sweat when we run! Are you saying that’s not true for you?”
“Well…”
“And this?” She jabbed her hand into the panelboard. “How can the ship fly if the fuel has run out long ago? It had to run out. Gliese 581 is just twenty light years from the Sun.” She apparently remembered this fact. “And we? You saw how far we have gotten. The first starship simply could not be designed for such a distance.”
“Perhaps the image in control room is in error? Computer failure, especially considering how everything was crushed here? And actually we have fallen out long ago into normal space and are drifting there with subluminal speed. After all we don’t know what is actually going on outside.”
“And light? Where is the electricity coming from—if the power registers at zero? I assume it doesn’t only concern the engine work.”
“The accumulators have simply not exhausted yet.”
“You said the light became brighter. Who charges them?”
“Solar batteries. Perhaps we are actually near some star.”
“By the way, if we drift freely, where is the weightlessness? Just don’t say to me that this thing rotates. Gravity in different places would be different for each, and we visited already plenty of…
“I am sure everything can be explained.”
“Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“To the infirmary.”
“You ran away from there.”
“Yes. And now I want to look more attentively on something and to show it to you.”
She turned away and went to the staircase, and now it was he who had to follow.
“By the way,” he caustically noticed, walking upwards on abrupt stairs, “if we are ghosts why do we stamp on this staircase? Why wouldn’t we soar through walls and ceilings? Perhaps some of our physiological reactions have been interrupted, but personally I can feel my body and it is quite material.”
“Perhaps as it should be,” she answered, without turning around. “Whatever gave you the idea that ghosts fly—cartoons? If the dead felt nothing, how could torture exist in hell?”
“I don’t believe in a hell.”
“I also didn’t believe before.”
A few minutes later they entered the medical room again. This time Eve resolutely approached the dead woman in the armchair and began to clean off the blood from the name tag. Adam shrugged his shoulders and began to do the same to the man.
“Linda Everett,” read Eve, having finished the work.
“Victor Adamson.”
“I would say, as is customary, ‘nice to meet you,’ but it does not exactly fit the situation.”
“Are you saying that… we are they? That is, our bodies?” Adam already had had time to get used to corpses and touched them without any special emotions, but now suddenly he involuntarily was repulsed from the one sitting in an armchair. “Only because their surnames are similar to…”
“Not only surnames, the placement of her bandages are the same as mine. And, I think, under the overalls is the same.”
“Bandages aren’t…”
“Aren’t the proof, I know. How about this? Would you hold his head even?”
Eve, having come toward him, lifted the top part of the dead man’s skull from where it was on the floor and put it where it had been before it had been cut off. The result was not ideal, but the head once again looked like a head, instead of a cup from a nightmare.
“I don’t know how well you remember your face,” said Eve, “but if you can believe my female observations, the similarity is formidable.”
The blood, which had covered the face of the dead man, made it not so obvious, but now, having peered more closely, Adam had to recognize the similarity with what he has seen in a mirror soon after awakening. Only on the forehead, where he had a bandage, the terrible crack of the saw-cut purpled.
“So you saw it before running away?
“Yes. And something clicked in me. All pieces began to match. Just don’t try to say that this was your twin brother on the crew,” Eve added. “Oh, what is that—a pen? Also fitting. Have you kept the paper with the names?”
Adam wanted to say no, but glancing at the flashlight in his hand, he discovered that its handle was still wrapped up by the sheet of paper. Obviously, he has taken it mechanically before leaving the information room.
“Write…” Eve began, but then interrupted herself. “No, it’s more likely a female handwriting. Dictate,” with a pen in her hand she approached a little table near a couch and was going to write on its white surface.
Adam unrolled the sheet. It was bedraggled and blood-splodged, but the letters still could be read.
“"Dr. Kalkrin — s-e. Dr. Hart — heart attack…”
“You see, I didn’t look at all at the list,” Eve commented, “so that you couldn’t say that I tried to simulate the handwriting. All right, now give me the sheet.”
Adam approached and put the list near the fresh inscriptions on the table. Comments were not required. It was obvious that both lists were written by one hand.
“Stop,” Adam said. “Something doesn’t match. After all, I did not find this sheet here, but instead in a pocket of a dead woman in a warehouse compartment. If you are here, how could it get there? And by the way, even if we assume that we are they,” he pointed a finger towards the corpses in armchairs, “these names can’t be ours because the overalls are not ours, that is, not their. They were stripped from the pilots in the control room.”
“So we assumed. But maybe right here we are wrong. We still don’t know what happened with the clothes of the majority of the crewmen.”
“As well as with the crew itself,” Adam reminded her. “And more. Let us assume we have died—and our souls are locked here, as on “Flying Dutchman”—oh really, flying… But where are, in that case, the others? Where are the other nine ghosts?”
“Perhaps they have gone to paradise and only we were so guilty that…”
“Paradise, hell—what bullshit! To be flying on an interstellar ship and to take seriously this medieval nonsenses!”
“Perhaps,” Eve didn’t listen to him, “perhaps, actually we were the ones who killed all the others! And at last—each other.”
“Aha,” Adam screwed up his face, “and I personally gnawed the pilot’s arms.”