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He put the skull shard on the lap of the dead woman and unbuttoned her left pocket. What's here? A comb. Oh yes, to preen feathers is the most important thing for him now–especially taking into account that there is no mirror nearby. He put the use
less thing back. And what is in the right pocket? It appeared to be empty. No, there is something. A pen. Nowadays it is seldom necessary to write by hand (he remembered this), but, obviously, such a thing is still included as part of the outfit of astronauts. Could a pen be useful to him? Who knows, but he had neither a third hand nor pockets. He considered dressing in the overalls of the dead man, but he felt no desire to put on those bloody rags–all the more so because all who did this before have died.

Adam realized that all this blood did not belong to one person, or even to two. These two in the infirmary were not the ones who had undressed the pilots. They had obviously removed overalls from other dead persons, and those, possibly, from oth
ers. And here now the relay reached the last survivors. Is it possible that the clothes somehow influenced what was going here? No, that's madness. But what was not madness here? He had better not repeat any of the actions of these predecessors, madness or otherwise.

Adam turned to the male corpse. He pulled out the spoon from yellowish-crimson jumble in its skull. He could not look at it. He had the feeling that the spoon was biting into his own head, so he flung it into a far corner. Then he moved on to the pockets. The right one was plump.

There was something like a scroll inside, which was not just barely twisted but also folded so that it could be pushed into the pocket–a scroll with some drawing... or schematics.

Unfolding it Adam understood that it was not paper. And not fabric as it had seemed to him for just a moment. As the scroll was rolled open completely, Adam understood instantly just exactly what he was holding in his hands.

It was human skin which had been cut off from a stomach. The hole of the navel and the top shred of dark pubic hair were clearly visible. But the rest of the area of the skin was glabrous. The stomach was female.

And on this skin, while it still belonged to its mistress–a living mistress, who bled when it was being done to her–someone had cut out a certain rough drawing. The clotted blood had dis
tinctly depicted its contours and some short inscriptions. At the first moment they seemed to Adam a cabalistic abracadabra, but then he realized that he simply held the drawing head over heels.

Now he understood that what he looked upon was a sim
plified schematic drawing of the ship. Not all compartments were labeled, and inscriptions resembled a wedge writing, but nevertheless they could be spelled out: "CONT R", "LIV COMP", "GEN", "BIOS." BIOS is, apparently, an abbreviation connected with computer technology. But why had it been labeled at the infected level with the crucified woman? Also what is "gen," which is situated, judging by the schematics, exactly in the middle of the ship? Something concerning genetics? (He felt again an attack of irrational fear at this thought.) Well, no. "Gen" is, probably, a generator. The Kalkrin generator, the engine of "Hyperion." On spacecrafts of the past the engines were situated at the aft end, but a dark starship had other means of movement. She travels by means of the field of dark energy shrouding the ship.

Adam casted almost a mechanical look at the headless body on the couch, then, stumbling on an idea, approached closer. He tried to bring together the edges of her peeled flesh and disem
boweled stomach, and then put the "drawing" in from above. Yes, skin was definitely cut off from here. If this woman was lucky, by that time she was already dead.

Why, by the way, is the drawing turned upside down? Was she hung legs up?

Adam decided not to take this dismal picture with him (That guy kept it in his pocket... yeah, and now he is dead, his brains scooped out by a table-spoon.) Eventually, the schematic was simple enough to remember–provided he does not lose memory again.

He quickly examined the infirmary in search for scalpels or something similar, something capable of serving as a better weapon than a sharp piece of occipital bone. But alas it seemed that the majority of medical tools had also been destroyed by the vandals who were smashing the ship–or at least they were carried away somewhere. The saw with which the skulls had been cut open obviously did not suit for a fast effective blow. With a sigh he again took his bone tool, though he did not know whether he still believed there were murderers wandering the ship.

If only Eve were not succumbing to madness. Yet, it seems she is not so far from it.

He went out to the ring corridor, then beyond to the lift, and loudly called her several times. The silence of the dead ship was the only answer he received.

It was, however, not completely dead. The engine obviously was still working. And illumination–it was undoubtedly becoming brighter.

He reached the lift, almost running. Eve was not there. So where should he search for her now? All over the ship? "Eve!" he hopelessly shouted–with the same result.

He bypassed the lift shaft and glanced in the opposite corridor, which now shone from end to end. The dead man with ripped up stomach lay in his former place, and, as Adam could judge from such distance, in the same pose. The annulated creature, of course, had crept away long ago. He was curious about where it might have crept to now because it would be undesirable to step on such a thing unexpectedly.

"If I were a woman, flooded with despair and fear, would I run towards a corpse?" Adam asked himself and answered: "No. Then, all the same to the staircase."

From an exit to staircase he called his companion again and had a depressing thought that if there were still someone else onboard, the two of them were doing everything to facilitate the enemy's goal. Well, upward or downwards? She had unlikely decided to hide in the control room–though who knows what she can do in such a condition. After waiting a few more seconds, he moved downwards, without having the slightest idea what to do beyond that. Eve could have gone to any of compartments, in any of the premises.

He decided at first to pass all the staircases down to the end, continuing to call her. Then if that didn’t help, he would have to examine each level systematically.  At the same time he would also learn what was going in places where he had not yet explored. However, he had no doubt any more that anything good was going on there.

He found Eve almost at the very bottom, near the entrance to the terrible level where the woman-hive hung on wires. Eve lay on steps, twisted in an unnatural pose, with her head down, as a person would never lie down of his own volition. The picture became clear to Adam at first glance: She had run, being beside herself, had stumbled on the steps, and had broken her neck.

Or maybe someone had helped her. Though if so, she had gotten off lightly, considering the condition of the other vic
tims.

Anyhow, Adam was again alone. Face to face with this awful ship, and this thought filled him with such desperate anxi
ety that he might as well plunge his head downwards on the stairs.

Tramping heavily, he descended to the body, sat down nearby and put a blood-stained hand on Eve's shoulder, hidden under dirty bandages–and immediately realized that he had jumped to a hasty conclusion. The woman was trembling, but alive. Or was it a shiver of agony?

But no, she, leaning her hands on a step, slowly raised her head and looked at her companion in misfortune with a look of a small animal tortured by children. Blood drooled from her mouth to the bound up chin.

"You are wounded?"

"No," she said in the voice of indifference.

"And what is this?"

"This?" She mechanically licked a lip. "Looks like I bit my lip." She grew silent again.

"I have found a map of the ship," said Adam primarily just to say something.
What
this map was, he of course did not specify.

"So what?" Eve responded in the same impotent tone.

"Well... now we know where the generator is. It is necessary to go five levels up..."

"So what?" Eve repeated.

"Perhaps there is a duplicating control system there. As we can do nothing from the main control room... There should be an emergency switching-off on-site, for example, specially for carrying out a repair."

"It won't help," Eve shook her head.

"Well, of course, we will fall out in the middle of interstellar space. But, at least, we will stop spending fuel or whatever our generator works on. Also, we will stop heading away from Earth. And then, maybe, we will manage to understand and repair something."  The last phrase has sounded quite frankly false, and he understood it as such.

"Nothing will help us," Eve wearily said. "Has it not dawned on you yet? My God, what a jackass you are."

"All right then," he resolutely stood up. "All your moaning irritates me to no end. I’ll go to deal with the generator. And you, if you want, can lie here on the staircase and wait, until the wormbugs crawl from there and make a nest in you." With that he went up the staircase, without looking back. After a while from a splashing sound behind him he noticed that Eve was following him.

The scheme didn't fail. The engine compartment turn out to be where expected. But the passage way to the generator was blocked by a tightly closed heavy door painted in diagonal black and yellow stripes. Instead of the usual handle this door had a matte image of a palm, gleaming red. On its smooth surface there were marks from an object hitting it with something sharp, but ap
parently the material appeared to be perfectly firm.

"A touch panel," Adam guessed and bit his lip with dis
appointment. Obviously, access is granted not to just any crewman, but only to an engineer or someone like that. And how do they search for an engineer among all these corpses? And the most important, it would not work. Modern biometric scanners are smart enough not to work from a dead hand.

The only hope was that at least one of them had the ad
mission. Adam still did not remember what his duties were onboard, but the probability wasn't too great.

He put a hand on the panel, mentally preparing himself that it then would be necessary to ask Eve to do the same, and when it also would not work...

The melodious signal sounded, and he saw even through his hand how the panel was lit green. As soon as he moved his hand away, the door moved aside.

They entered an airlock beyond which was one more door, with the inscription "External Contour Authorized Personnel Only" and some annunciator which, however, didn't light. And on the right, on a wall between two doors, there indeed was a reserve control panelboard.

Adam's sight at once struck on the caption "Generator Emergency Turn-off " on the panel with a red button. But this button turned off nothing–it only removed the blocking from a protective casing. Without hesitation Adam pressed it. The casing folded back. Under it there was a big red handle–fully turned downwards.

Something was wrong. Adam could lose his memory, but something deeper than any intelligent memory–the reflex de
veloped by uncountable repetition–told him that on any flying machine, from a glider to a starship, any switch "up" means "on," "down" means "off." Never vice versa.

Still without accepting it, he all the same flipped the switch to the top position–nothing changing–then returned it to the bottom one. Well, that's right: near to the bottom position there were the letters "OFF." And only then did Adam pay atten
tion to the indicators on the board.

Main contour power : 0

Reserve contour power : 0

Remaining fuel: 0

System shut down

"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 un
derstood, shocked.

"That's it."

"No," he wildly shook his head. "That cannot be."

"What can't be is the possibility of stowaways on an in
terstellar 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 inscrip
tion 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."