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"And now? You think we became immune already?"

"I don't know." He heaved a deep sigh. "I know nothing–except one thing: We have no chance of getting out from here."

"Perhaps it is still possible to turn the ship towards Earth," said Eve without much real hope in her voice. "Or at least we could send the distress signal."

"How?" Adam hopelessly moved the beam around the crushed panel. "Even if we find tools... Do you have even the smallest clue how everything was arranged here? We even don't remember that people in general are able to fly to stars."

"Well, we may find not only tools but also instructions," Eve objected with considerable doubt. "And also, we managed to remember something, though..." She became silent.

"What ‘though’?"

"I’m afraid."

"No wonder."

"No, not about that. I’m afraid to remember. Sometimes it seems to me that I have already almost gotten at my past and then at once such horror strikes me, as if someone in my head were shouting: ‘No, don't do it. Don't remember. Don't think about it!’ Haven't you felt the same? I mean, since you have come to your senses?"

"Yes," Adam confessed. "Nothing mystical here, we just came in for a lot of trouble, especially you. Natural defense reaction... Hmm, ‘Don't think,’" he remembered. "It is written on a warehouse door at the bottom level. By the way, doesn't it seem to you that if the crew struggled against monsters, they would have left more intelligent writings? Even assuming that they had really nothing to write with except blood, then especially it was necessary to write only the most useful and informative things. And here; ‘Don't go there!’ Well, here we have come, and what?"

"We have learned that we are on a spaceship."

"Also what is dreadful in it? Though... Yes, certainly. To learn that we are billions of miles from Earth, on a dead starship, uncontrollable flying further and further in infinite emptiness.  If this starmap is anything to go by, even stars aren't present here. But if we had not learned it, how would our position have become better?"

"Perhaps we would die in ignorance," Eve sighed.

"Like these two? And the others? I hardly think any of them died easily. And in general, forewarned is forearmed."

"All right," Eve interrupted. "All these conversations only lead to despair! (He shuddered, having heard this word again.) Let us search–for tools, instructions, others survivors–anything!

They left the control room, listening to the silence of the ill-fated ship even more tensely. But still no sounds reached them, except of the electric crackling of agonizing light fixtures.  However, now Adam had no doubt anymore that their light had lately become slightly brighter. He did not know how it could be explained and what it was fraught with, like everything that took place on this damned ship. He shared his observation with his companion, but she only shrugged her shoulders and assumed that the light seemed brighter to them after control room's gloom.

They descended a level. Here it seemed there were also some control posts, but they had been crushed in the most ruthless way too, so their purpose could be only guessed at. Here and there among the spoiled fragments dead cockroach mutants lay while their living brothers crept about lethargically.

"What if neither madmen nor monsters made all this destruction?" Eve asked suddenly. "What if it had been done purposefully?"

"By whom?" Adam grinned wrily, fastidiously trying to find a place where to put his foot. "Suicide terrorists?"

"Crewmen who have understood that this ship shouldn't return. Never should get to Earth... or any habitable planet. Therefore they have directed it into starless space, and then..."

"But what for?"

"So that what has happened here would not be repeated on Earth." She shrugged shoulders.

"Because of these creatures? No, ridiculous. Even if they are infectious, there are quarantine measures. The ship could be held in an orbit while scientists tried to understand the situ
ation."

"And if these measures are insufficient? Probably, when they... that is, we...took these wretches aboard, it was done not to spread them all over the ship! You say that most of all
this
is at the second level from the bottom. Probably, our zoo was on that level–or the samples repository, or how it is called? And we were sure that no bacterium would slip out of there."

"Well, suppose someone has committed an error, didn't close a door in time, ignored disinfection. But it doesn't mean that this muck is capable of getting through the walls of the ship and the space vacuum!"

"I do not know. Perhaps the point is not in chemistry or the physical passage through walls."

"But in what?"

"Any remote influence from which our protections do not save us."

"Worms-telepathists?" he skeptically hummed but at the next moment thought seriously about this idea. "Necrophages causing an uncontrollable penchant for violence in larger creatures and thus providing themselves with stocks of dead flesh...and apartments." He remembered the crucified corpse of the woman transformed into the huge...ant hill–hive?–and that made him shutter. "Generally, such hypotheses explain much. For example, why do these corpses not decay here. If this fauna produces some preservative... But still, why destroy all the devices of the ship, leaving no hope for the last survivors? After all, if we survived and remained normal, the protective mechan
isms do exist!"

"Perhaps they weren't assured that we remained normal. We were unconscious, and they didn't have time to wait till the end. But there is also an even worse possibility."

"Worse than flying somewhere into intergalactic space on a ship purposely deprived of all chances for a return?"

"Yes. If we didn't remain normal. If these creatures are already in us."

Adam stood examining his own sensations. He was half expecting to feel parasites gnawing roads through his to bowels, but felt only sticky cold fear spreading in his stomach. And this fear had no plan to disappear, irrespective of the presence of material confirmations.

"You didn't see the worm that had crept out of the guts of that guy," he said hoarsely, trying to convince not as much her as himself. "And those that have legs... They are large enough–we would feel them, if..."

"And what if they simply wait for their time?" Eve objected. "Larvae can be small. And they may not be as stupid as they may seem. They know that we are the last ones onboard. And they will let us live until we meet new potential carriers and transmit the infection further."

"All the same," he obstinately curved his lips, "it can't be that the humans, who had already learned to build the interstellar ships, weren't able to contend with just some parasites!  And they don't have any real mind. I mean the parasites. You see, they don't even hurry up to escape from a foot, so that I have to look so as not to squash this muck! And how many of them have per
ished already?"

"Probably, it is difficult for them to adapt in this unusual environment. But some nevertheless manage to do it, all too well." Eve suddenly squatted, picked up a plastic shard and used it to move a pair of dead "cockroaches," and then overturned one of their living comrades. The latter torpidly stirred with no chance to return to a normal position. Eve, with a crunch, smashed it on a floor. "I cannot understand where such creatures could come from," she said. "Have you noticed that they have different number of legs?"

"I told you that long ago!"

"I mean even those that seem to belong to one specie. And this one has even legs but of different lengths. What evolu
tion could generate such things? And paired extremities are after all not a casual whim of Earth’s nature. It is really convenient, it is the expediency fixed by generations of natural selection for species absolutely dissimilar to one another. What must such a world look like where such clumsy beings with unpaired limbs of different length achieve evolutionary advantage?"

"As the world of nightmares," Adam muttered and, after some thought, added, "of a schizophrenic. Listen, maybe we haven't come to our senses at all? Couldn't it all be hallucina
tions? I would give anything to wake up now in a cozy mental hospital."

"Then you are also a hallucination," noticed Eve, "from my point of view, of course. And I am from yours."

"It is better to be a hallucination than worm-eaten from within. I... I am afraid of cockroaches," he said almost plaintively. "And spiders, too. And I do not favor worms much either." He helplessly looked at his body stuck here and there by bandages adhering tightly, as if expecting to see something moved and creep under his skin. And maybe the bandages cover exactly this, the holes gnawed by larvae. "Why the hell did you suggest a hypothesis which we can't check up on? As if it weren't already sickening without that."

"Aha, and who just said forewarned is forearmed?" Eve reminded him, but without any acrid celebration in her voice. The anxiety and fear gnawed at her from within worse than any worms. "Let’s go further and do anything, or I will indeed go mad."

They went into a corridor which was bending around the lift shaft, and moved to the door beyond.

"By the way, did you notice one other odd thing?" Adam asked. "In such a big ship the doors have no labels. Certainly the crew should know what is where, but nevertheless here it is easy to mistake a door, especially in ring corridors."

"Yes," she agreed, "it was unlikely designed this way."

He drew his face near to a door, carefully exploring it with a flashlight.

"Just as I thought, the label was here," he ascertained. "Its traces still can be distinguished. Someone has torn them from all the doors. What for?"

"And why was the equipment destroyed?

"You think to prevent our return? Well, the absence of labels is not much compared to the destruction of the control panels. All the same, sooner or later we will explore all premises. My version about mad fury is more likely true. Or..."

"Or what?"

"Or someone wanted us to take in the situation as late as possible. Not never–he should have understood that the absence of inscriptions on the doors wouldn't stop us–but as late as possible. I don't know. Folly. Nonsense."

"Perhaps not such nonsense," objected Eve. "The longer it takes us to understand, the farther we will fly in this direction and the less will be our chances to return. So, there are such chances all the same!"

"Do you believe in it?" Adam heaved a deep sigh and took the door handle. "Well, let's look in here."

There was nothing good.

Adam heard a painful squeezed throat sound behind him and understood what it was. He had been in such situations himself before. Eve's stomach was wrung with an emetic spasm, but nothing left her mouth, except this sound. In this room light shone, and even bright enough. Here were neither devices, nor furniture, except the remains of a broken chair on a floor. The room was semicircular. Its concave wall, opposite to the entrance, as Adam has guessed, was a panoramic screen made with the same technology as the starmap in the control room. Possibly this premise was a hybrid of a library and cinema hall. For certain, when everything was working here, access to the information resources of the ship was possible from other places, too, but here the conditions for watching were the most comfortable. A slit in a wall at the left, from which ragged white tatters hung out, now associated mostly with an aperture for toilet paper, but obviously there was a time when it has been possible to receive listing of the necessary data here. No control panels were visible anywhere. Probably vocal or other touch-free interface had been used here.

But Adam and Eve paid no attention to all these technical details at first. Their eyes were struck by numerous blots of blood which blurred the screen and lateral walls–here and there together with other blood some whitish nubbles had dried on the walls–and a twisted corpse on a floor under the screen. It was male.  His clothes consisted merely of underpants and boots. His head had turned into brown mass where between wisps of blood-clot
ted hair sharp shards of skull bones stuck out, reaching no higher than the temples. The whole top part of the skull was smashed completely, the skin covering it is was ruptured, and the lacerated brain had partially flowed out to the floor through this terrible hole. On the floor near the head, which was turned to one side, semicircular slimy drops of both beaten out eyes lay, threads of nerves still stretching from them into the split eye-sockets.

The fingers of the dead man were covered by the brown crust of the dried blood, and apparently not only blood. Directly over him on the screen one more inscription obliquely stretched–more precisely, not just one more. Letters, curved and twisted, of different size, crawled against each other and in general looked as if they had been written by a very drunk person with Parkinson disease. In many places the same whitish nubbles and hair stuck to them all. But nevertheless the writing was possible to read.

"DARKMICROCOM=MAC," Adam spelt out. "My God, looks like it was written with his brain."

"In what sense?" Eve still felt faint, but already could speak.

"In the literal sense. He crushed his head against the wall, or was helped to do it, and then somebody, dipping a finger into the broken skull, as into an inkwell..."