D A Novel (George Right) - By George Right Page 0,121
a screen–more precisely, as revealed by the slipped beam of the flashlight, on a wall which simultaneously played the role of a screen. Below, the beam picked out of the darkness an instrument console stretching along a wall opposite to the entrance, and before it there were two high armchairs with headrests.
Having pointed the beam to the left armchair, Adam saw a hand which motionlessly overhung from the armrest. He expected to see something like this.
Adam and Eve approached more closely. In each armchair sat a person–a man in the left one, a woman in the right, both only in underwear. The head of the man had powerlessly fallen to his breast; the head of the woman, in contrast, was thrown back. The dim flashlight beam highlighted her white face, ripped from top to chin with deep furrows, like wounds from claws, and empty bloody holes instead of eyes. Eve involuntarily screamed and seized Adam's shoulder. He raised the head of the dead man by the hair. The face of this corpse had been scratched too, but not so cruelly. But his mouth and chin were covered in the dried blood. Teeth dimly reflected the light, but not all of them. Some of them had been ripped out, one still sticking out of his gum at an angle.
"What's this?" Eve fastidiously exclaimed, having stepped with a bare foot on something soft, cold and sticky. Adam lit on it and bent down.
"In my opinion, a human tongue," he asserted, looking at the floor.
"What... cut off?"
"More accurately bitten off."
"And his arms! Look, what happened with his arms?"
Adam pointed the beam at first one, then on the other arm of the dead man. Their appearance was horrifying. They looked as if they had been gnawed by an enraged animal, whole pieces of meat torn from the forearms, the lacerated veins and sinews clearly visible. Blood had covered the armrests and formed a big pool under the armchair.
"They... have gone mad and butchered each other?" assumed Eve with a wobbling voice.
"In my opinion, worse." Adam shook his head, squatting before the armchairs and exploring with the flashlight the blood-stained fingers of one and then the other corpse. "Each of them has done it to himself. He has gnawed his own arms and bled to death. And she...she tore apart her face to the bone with her nails, squeezed her eyes out and, I guess, forced her fingers through the eye-sockets directly into the brain.
"Good Lord! What the hell happened here?" Eve's voice was close to hysterical. "Maybe... there’s shit in the local air which makes people mad?" She made movement to run away, but Adam caught her hand.
"If so, it would have spred all over the building long ago, since the doors are opened."
"And it did! As you told me, mangled corpses are everywhere here!"
"But we are all right. If something were in the air, it has disappeared long ago."
"All right? This you call ‘all right?’" She poked with the spread hand into her bandages.
"At least, more all right than they are." He nodded toward the corpses. "By the way, they have no bandages. And when it happened to them, they were obviously in some kind of clothing, which the blood did not pass through."
"Indeed. After all they ruled everything here."
"I do not know. But, anyway, those who have undressed them have shown a certain respect for the bodies, setting them back in armchairs, instead of simply throwing them on the floor." He turned and shone the light on the console which was not revived by any spark. "No such regard was given the panel. Here the console was smashed with the same frenzy, as in other places. Only with the screen could they do nothing because the substance of a wall itself shows a picture, and it is, apparently, firm enough. Well, I do not know what has happened here, but at least it is clear what this place is."
"And what is it?
"A spaceship. We are not on Earth.”
"Do you think so because this picture is similar to a star map?
"It is a star map. But not only because of that," he put the light on armchairs again. "See these belts? Shoulder, waist... If it were a ground-based installation, it would not be necessary for operators at the panel to be fastened."
"There is no weightlessness here."
"Perhaps, we fly with acceleration. Or an artificial gravity works here. Or some other physical principle which we don't remember."