Victor’s fingers danced over the touch panel. Despite its archaic look, the panel was not as primitive as it would have been at the beginning of the space age. Flight programming did not require entering tens and hundreds of lines of code, to point the purposes on the rotatable and scalable scheme was enough. A departure from a hangar and an attachment to the rocket are, in general, basic operations which do not demand a special program. Now a turn and…
“Now, Linda,” he said, pressing the confirmation button.
“The chosen route threatens the safety of the ship. The program is canceled.”
Stupid metal crap, he thought, while on the contrary, it was too clever.
Linda still lowed and, thus, was alive. She would better to die, Victor thought, die and resurrect again in blissful ignorance in her room.
“Stand it a little more,” he helplessly muttered, activating the settings on the screen. Adjust safety level… “Enter the password.”
The password! Holy shit! Well certainly, he knew the password… once… many deaths ago.
The terrible lowing broke, replaced by a choking rale. It smelled of burned flesh. But she was still alive.
And suddenly, as if having come up from the most black depths of despair, letters and numbers of the password appeared before Victor’s eyes. He entered them so hastily that he made a mistake. Once again, don’t hurry. Don’t pay attention to sounds and smells. Bingo! Maximal g-load, check, remaining fuel, check… turn off, turn off everything…
There was no place to check intentional collision with the starpship in the settings. It couldn’t be turned off. As Adamson had absolutely correctly noticed before, the situation when the crew needed to destroy its own starship couldnot come to the mind of any normal designer. To risk a probe, yes, even to destroy a probe, but not the ship!
Victor put his hand out to switch off the power. Nothing would work. They were doomed. Doomed again and again to sustain the universal burden of cosmic despair, to search an easement in physical torments, to die and revive for new suffering, forever locked in this damned ship.
Stop! He jerked back his hand. The space is closed in a cocoon of a field. The computer of a probe knows nothing about it! It wasn’t pre-programmed for launching from a dark phase—of course not, after all such a launch is senseless. It considers that outside of the hangar there is a usual continuum, where to accelerate with the ship astern means to move away from her.
Adamson’s fingers began again to dance on the panel and to hit the buttons. If only he could make it! The smell of burning details increased. The panel could be cut off at any moment. So, start with the maximum acceleration. He was right to cancel all restrictions on g-loads and fuel. Then, when the ship suddenly appears ahead of the rocket nose, the maneuvering engines would not have time to turn the rocket to avoid collision.
“Program confirmed. Launching sequence initiated.”
The red indicator shone, showing that the exit to the hangar was blocked, and one more screen, displaying the view from the probe’s camera, turned on. In normal conditions decompression of the hangar would take several minutes, but because of the canceled safety options the wide doors have slid apart at once, letting the air out into a space. However, outside there was not the usual blackness of space, but some qualmish gray-brown twilight, certainly without any stars. The landing module, turned by its mobile pylon head-on to the exit, ignited the engines.
Victor would prefer to track the process of attaching to the rocket and its further flight to the end, but Linda was still alive, and he couldn’t torture her anymore. The computer should do its job. Adamson again moved his hand to turn the stand off. At that instant, as it was required for any operations in near-ship space, spaceship orientation lights turned on outside, and in their light through a doorway coming nearer to the module, Victor saw on the screen a scattering of some small objects floating in space. He understood what it was—the tools which they had thrown out (the field was configured so that it created gravity inside the ship, but not beyond its hull, the pilot remembered). If the probe collided with them, could it affect its direction? Probably not because they are too small.
“That’s all, Linda.” He exhaled when the probe reached outer space, but before he had time to open the circuit, a short crackle of electric breakdown sounded in the stand bowels. But capacitors which had time to be charged kept the image on the screen for a few of seconds more. And during these seconds the lander camera showed one more item—drifting in the same cloud of garbage, much larger than the others: a body with outstretched arms and legs. And Victor even had time to make out whose body it was. The screen had gone out, but before his eyes there was still the grinning grimace of his own corpse.
Linda fell backwards, with a wooden knock hitting her nape against the floor. Her blackened fingers smoked. From her nose bloody slime was leaking. Victor bent down over the woman. She gave no signs of life. Dead after all? But even if so, it’s not even possible to say about the deceased, “She suffers no more.” Not anyway, until the rocket fulfills its task.
But if she was now revived in the nose part of the ship, will she perish when the rocket hits here, in the aft part? Probably not. But if the biosynthesizer with all protoplasm is destroyed, the series of regenerations will end, and on the dilapidated ship she will not survive for much longer. As he had just ascertained, they nevertheless cannot live in a vacuum, though he was sure that he was then killed by a vacuum? Perhaps he couldn’t commit suicide for quite some time, until he managed to catch one of the tools flying nearby? Feeling sick from this thought made Victor understand that he, most likely, had guessed right.
Well, where is the explosion? Victor felt, as a hard weariness, the true companion of hopeless despair, bore heavily on him again. He leaned against a wall and closed his eyes, as it happened, just in time to hear the short obtuse rataplan of hits pass through the wall. None of them were strong enough to make the colossal ship shudder even slightly. Certainly it couldn’t be the explosion of the rocket. Collision with tools or whatever else they had thrown out? But where, where is the damned rocket? Could it really miss? If he had incorrectly estimated the curvature of that pseudo-space in which they are captured, however, the rocket still has nowhere to go, as there is too little space here, so sooner or later… but where exactly will it hit?
If Linda is dead, it would be possible to connect her body again to the wires and to try to establish communication again with the rocket. He had already taken her hand with this thought, but at that moment the body of the woman suddenly convulsively moved. She coughed so as if she had choked on her own tongue, again convulsively shuddered, and then heavily raised her head.
“We are still… here?” she hoarsely exhaled.
“What idiots we are!” Victor exclaimed, having surmised something from his last thought. “You shouldn’t grasp the wires! We could drag any corpse here and use it!”
“Never mind.” She awkwardly wiped her face with the back of her right hand, trying not to touch anything with the burned fingers. “It is better, than IT.”
“IT,” Adamson blightly nodded. “Perhaps, IT influences even our decisions, forcing us to choose what serves its law—the law of increase of despair.”
“The rocket. What is with the rocket? You didn’t manage to launch it?”
“I did, but… I got it. We are idiots twice,” Victor gloomily stated. “The ship has no self-destruction system. But unmanned rockets have! And when the computer has understood that collisions is unavoidable… We were reached only by small fragments.”