“Why not? We assumed that either he did it himself in a fit or a certain extraterrestrial monster with a human-like jaw did it. But there is also the third, simpler and more probable variant—another human being.”
“And we remember nothing. Why? Even if we accept your version that we are damned, shouldn’t the punished know what they were punished for?”
“So it is that we are gradually learning it.”
“I do not believe it,” Adam obstinately repeated, looking at the sawn half-and-half face of his double. “Ridiculous. Nonsense. It can’t be.”
“Well, let us go to the control room. We will examine the pilots more carefully than before.”
“I guess you don’t want to offer an investigatory experiment—to gnaw a piece from the arm of a corpse and to compare tooth marks,” he squirmed.
“I don’t insist on anything, Victor.”
“Don’t call me that!”
“The engine doesn’t work, the fuel is empty, the ship is uncontrollable and the whole crew is dead,” she wearily listed. “And we are locked here without any exit and hope. So to believe or not to believe—that is your own problem.”
“Well all right.” Adam helplessly shrugged shoulders. “Then to the control room. Anyway I don’t know where to go and what to do further.”
And they ascended again to the control room. There was still no light there, but Adam had a firm feeling that the flashlight, while already almost discharged, would begin to shine more brightly. And this already didn’t match any reasonable explanations. The flashlight for sure was not recharged from any panels or batteries.
Adam stopped before the armchair of the first pilot (“The first is who is in the left seat,” had emerged from the depths of his cut-off memory), attentively examined with the flashlight the mangled hands of the corpse, and then directed a beam to his face, on which he had only thrown a passing glance during the previous visit (and Eve, apparently, had not look on this face at all earlier).
“What did you say about twins?” he asked hoarsely.
Eve stood near, distrusting her own eyes. Excluding scratches, the broken out teeth and the absence of a seam on the forehead, the face looking at her with its eyes gone was the same as the one in the infirmary.
“I dont understand anything,” the woman muttered. “Which of them is you?”
“I am I!” Adam aggressively shouted, striking his chest. “And these… I don’t know, who they are! Maybe…” he added in more judicious tone,” maybe, there really were brothers in the crew? Or, more possibly, clones…”
“Nobody would send clones in a distant expedition,” Eve objected. “There are different specialists required, not copies of the same one.”
“But clones, as well as natural twins, are similar only outwardly, while their specialities can be different.”
“All the same. Their presence onboard can create psychological problems.” Fragments of once read space psychology manuals emerged in her mind. “From the usual confusion, including ill-intentioned, to….”
“But even if your crazy version is true and I had died, I couldn’t die twice!”
“I don’t know. I know nothing anymore. All this seems a nightmare.”
“I am real, damn it!” Adam shouted and swiped the corpse in the face. Several of weakly held teeth fell into the dead mouth. One of them hung under the upper lip on a bloody thread. “Hear, you, carrion? Real! Real!” He thrashed again and again, while in his head there palpitated the comprehension of the fact that the faces of all the dead people found out here were either not visible, or mutilated, or deformed and soiled. And yet, even despite his insistence, he could pay attention to earlier similarity—if his subconscious did not resist until the latest moment, until he was rubbing his nose in it. “I am not a fucking phantom!!”
“Victor! Adam! Stop!” Eve tried to grasp his hands, but he dashed her aside. The living woman, caught off balance, fell into the lap of the dead one in the right armchair, and the corpse she encountered dropped its head on her shoulder, snapping its jaws. Adam struck the helpless corpse of the male pilot twice more, then powerlessly let his hands fall. In the broken face of the dead man it was already difficult to recognize his own, but this didn’t help. The fit of rage subsided as suddenly as it had begun, giving way to something much more terrible—a huge and inevitable, like a tsunami, wave of despair, the most dark and hopeless despair, which surpassed in many times over, he was absolutely sure of it, any sorrows of his former forgotten life. And feeling how this wave fell upon him with all its weight, he dragged himself away from control room—without seeing, where he was going, reeling to and fro like a drunken man.
“Adam!” Eve climbed out of embrace of the dead woman and overtook her companion near the exit from the control room. Almost by force she turned him around before he could rest his forehead against the partly closed door.
And at this moment of silence a sound was heard, which they least of all could expect—the opening of lift doors.
Adam and Eve, having nearly collided heads, stared at a gleam between the control room doors. In the shined aperture of the lift cage, leaning to its edge, a man stood—barefoot, in dirty and blood-stained underwear.
He was the one who could not be here in any way—just because he was the twelfth.
However, he did not stand for long, for just a fraction of a second, and then he tumbled forward and, without any attempt to soften his falling, fell to the floor. The thud with which his forehead struck the floor made both witnesses shudder.
Adam was the first to squeeze between doors and sat down near to the fallen. Then he lifted a hopeless look at Eve.
“Dead?” She understood.
“And long ago. He probably got stuck in the lift when the power went off. And died in this position, leaned on the doors which he couldn’t open.”
Saying this, Adam was looking at the face of the corpse—the face which he saw today already at least three times, including the reflection in a mirror.
But Eve was already looking at something else.
“My God… Just look at his hands!”
Adam looked. Then heavily stood up and glanced into the lift cage which remained opened because the legs of the dead man remained between the doors.
All the inside walls of the cage had been scribbled in red. And there weren’t anymore separate phrases with large letters. It was continuous text (not divided even by punctuation), covering the walls in a spiral, beginning from the height that the writer could reach and continuing almost to the floor. And on a floor there lay pieces of what he used instead of a felt-tip pen.
“He bit off his own fingers,” Adam ascertained. “Piece by piece. To write this. When blood ceased to flow, the next finger was used. And the last phrases,” he peered at wide and smeared, almost unreadable letters just inches from the floor, “it seems to me, he finished by using his tongue. Dipping it in the blood flowing from his wrists.”
“And… you think, it is the answer?” Eve asked, fearfully looking at the curve lines.
“I guess, yes.”
“I am so frightened. It seems to me that we shouldn’t read this!”
But Adam, of course, had already stepped in the cage. The text began, most probably, from a big blot, from which a dried stream was stretching downward almost through the whole length of the wall. At that moment the writer still had plenty of “ink.”
“despair darkness it really darkness dark energy despair only sense and essence of universe my god god doesn’t exist there is only despair which created the world what idiots we are we understood nothing when probe explorers began to hop the perch we trusted only to instruments even when it gobbled up ape too late to back away told computer error only changed number all the same biosynthesizer two idiots volunteers save prestige of program for science’s sake morons morons we would better be real morons though won’t help finally it will absorb all for it is alpha and omega law of increase of despair…”