“And we can’t turn it off in any way?”
“No. And even if we could, it was the only lander with which I managed to establish communication. And the stand, I am afraid, won’t work any more.”
Linda sat on the floor, looking at her blackened fingers. The suffering grimace curved her mangled face, making it especially eerie—layers of dead skin, crawling against each other, rumpled in rigid folds and chapped here and there.
“Very painful?” Victor asked. “Perhaps you, well… a new cycle?”
“Death as the best medicine, murder as first aid…” she muttered. “No. I do not want it again from the beginning. Again to remember that all… to pass from hope to… especially, it becomes shorter… Listen. I know what to do. We will blow up this damned ship all the same. Anyway, the second level for sure.”
“How?”
“Hydrogen. Detonating gas.”
“And where will we get it, especially in such quantities?”
“We will force this rubbish to create its death by itself. We will introduce a virus into the protoplasm. Its cells are very flexible. Capable of serving as a material either for human tissues or for anaerobic biorobots, and emission of biogene hydrogen is a routine biochemical process. It is very simple to program. Currently protoplasm grows owing to dark energy, as the vegetative biomass of Earth—owing to solar one. Well, let it grow, the more, the better. The virus will build in all its cells. And will make them produce hydrogen.”
“You can create such a virus?”
“I am still a bioengineer.”
“Yes, but everything is crushed.”
“At the second level there is a reserve control post too.”
“If it is in the same condition, as this one…”
“What do we have to lose? Let’s go.”
“All right,” Adamson agreed in a colourless voice. “Let’s go—if you insist.”
“You don’t believe that we will manage to do it?”
“It won’t release us. I do not know, how, but it won’t.”
“Victor, don’t speak like that! It is IT that forces you to think this way! You have said yourself that it is an absolutely stupid force, not an artful enemy! We should fight it!”
“You can still … have any… hope?” The wave of apathy and powerlessness which overtook him was so heavy that he hardly forced himself to move his lips.
“Pain. I think, it’s the point. While I think of the pain, I can’t concentrate completely on despair. But it will become, of course, stronger. Let’s go, while we still can bear it.” Seeing that Victor does not move at all, she managed a mighty slap across his face and then another, before she moaned from the pain in her own fingers. Adamson grudgingly put his hand on the panel opening the exit. The hangar was already filled with air again and automatics allowed them to leave the dispatching post.
At the second level little had changed since the last Adamson visit—except for the disgusting life that had seemingly bred even more. But as with the previous time, Victor did not look at the mucous mushrooms and meat stalactites hanging down from a ceiling but instead on the mangled corpse crucified across a corridor. In its dead flesh all halfworms-halfbugs droopingly crawled about, it seemed, there were more of them now, as well as their dead bodies on the floor. Now he knew that this was Linda’s corpse and that he was the monster who had done it to her.
The memories about what happened here sharply splashed out on to his consciousness, causing a feeling of almost a physical blow. Adamson shuddered and squinted tightly, but that made the dreadful scene only more clear before his eyes.
“I remember it, too,” Linda said in low voice. “Let’s go.” She resolutely moved sideways by her own mutilated remains, having dived under the hand ripped up by a wire. Victor followed her, trying simultaneously not to look at the body and not to touch it. Underfoot dead insectoid creatures damply crackled and crunched. In many places the floor was already covered with a continuous carpet. His boots stuck and slipped in the slime. He was glad—as much as that adjective in general fit the situation—that he had put on the dead man’s footwear—that is, of course, his own. But Linda walked on all this muck barefoot and, apparently, even paid no attention to it. Meanwhile the corridor around them resembled less and less a construction created by humans, and more and more an interior of some monstrous gut, affected with polyps and ulcers. Light could no longer penetrate all that grew on light fixtures, so it was necessary to use the flashlight again. In one place their way was barred by something like a soft log. Linda stepped on it (the sound similar to a squelched sigh came out) and went further, and Victor stumbled in the dark. He shined the light at feet and made a wry face when he understood what it was. It was a corpse which had become now a part of the general goop which covered the walls, floor and ceiling. It was accreted so densely that it was already impossible to understand, if it was male or female, least of all the cause of death. It was possible to distinguish only a hole of an opened mouth, a black cavity in the continuous knobby crust which completely hid all other facial features. Victor feared that further passage was overgrown completely, and they would have to almost literally gnaw their way through to the post.
Nevertheless, they reached the desired door without any special problems. On the whole perimeter of the door through a slit between it and the wall some spongy substance had squeezed, and the identification touch panel had grown with a fetid black mold, but seemingly it still worked and, as much as it was possible to discern, was shining red. Adamson fastidiously wiped away the mold with his elbow, then habitually positioned his palm. However, nothing changed—the same ominous red light glowed between his fingers.
“Step aside!” Linda ordered and, almost having pushed him away, postioned her hand. “This is my domain.”
Confirming her words, the panel lit up green, and then a door, tearing at the spongy mess, moved aside.
The biosynthesizer control post turned out to be less fouled than a corridor near it. Most of the growth was on the walls near the door, while on the control panel itself there were only small puddles of oily slime here and there overgrown with mold. On the walls and ceiling, however, a lot of quasi-cockroaches were creeping, periodically breaking away and falling to the floor. Those falling on their back couldn’t recover and thus lay whitish bellies up, weakly moving their chela. “I’m about to vomit,” Victor thought, though he knew already that it was not possible.
But the most important—the panel worked! It had no indications of purposeful destruction.
“Looks like we didn’t get in here yet,” said Adamson. “Probably it was more disgusting than anywhere else.”
Linda touched the clammy seat of an armchair. When she took her finger away, sticky threads stretched out from it—and, having moved the armchair aside, she knelt in front of the panel. Screens revived, obeying her touches. Victor discerned a pimply chain of some complex organic molecule on one of them. Another screen, which broadcasted an image from an observation camera, showed something like a round pool filled in fat and viscous bubbling gook. “The protoplasm,” thought Adamson.
“Do you know exactly what to do?” he asked.
“I have thought over the general virus scheme already, and will finish off the details now. This system has all the necessary tools.”
“How long will it take?”
“Programming or synthesis?
“All process up to the end. Until we can blow up everything.”
“I don’t know. The minimum natural period of mitosis is about twenty minutes. We use catalysts to accelerate it, but all the same to infect the whole biomass, and then also to produce enough gas, requires at least several hours. Probably, days.”