D A Novel (George Right) - By George Right Page 0,126

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-clotted 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..."

"I think, nobody helped him," Eve objected with a wobbling voice. "Everything was done by him, including the inscription. That’s why it’s so twisted."

"Is a person in such condition still really capable of writing? Picking out a piece from his brains with each letter?"

"The human brain has a great safety factor." This information had resurfaced from somewhere in Eve's memory. "The whole hemisphere may be lost, but the personality still can remain, and even without considerable damage, though some abilities or concepts can be lost."

"Here, obviously, there was damage. Perhaps when he started to write he meant something comprehensible, but by the end it turned into totally jibberish."

"In my opinion, it not jibberish." Eve shook her head, listening to her uncertain memories. "Dark... microcom... It seems to me, it means "microcosm." Microcosm is equal to macrocosm. That's what he tried to write. A long time ago I've heard this phrase, but I cannot remember what it means."

"Something medieval," Adam remembered. "If I remember correctly it’s an alchemist’s idea that human nature is identical to the nature of the universe. Only they understood it not to the effect that the laws of physics are uniform for everything, but more literally and primitively, and they wound lot of mysticism round it. Oh, what a shit! I cannot recall anything about the starship construction. Even my name I don't remember–but this useless bosh..."

"He apparently didn't consider it useless," Eve said inaudibly.

"Well, it for sure hasn't helped him," Adam sniffed. "By the way, concerning the usefulness..." He walked to the corpse. Eve remained on a threshold.

"What do you want to do?" she asked.

"First take his boots. We'll divide them fraternally–left to you, right to me?"

Eve wanted to answer that it was a stupid joke but understood that her companion in misfortune was absolutely serious.

"It will likely be inconvenient to walk in one boot," she said. "Besides they are obviously too large for me. Take both if you want."

"Okay," Adam removed the boots from the corpse and put them on, noticing that the dead man had no socks. He also worried about the size, but the boots fit perfectly.

"It is still not clear," he noticed, "where all clothes disappeared to. So far all we know that only the pilots in the control room have died dressed, otherwise their bodies would be all in blood. Also that then somebody has taken away their suits, without being squeamish about the blood on them. While all the others, including ourselves..."

"By the way, we haven't found those other two yet," Eve reminded him.

"True, but the ship is big. And, for that matter, it's not a fact that there were two of them. They took two suits, but this yet tells us nothing about their number."

"Perhaps they are still alive?"

"Hardly. If they, like us, had survived the accident, they could have left instructions for others who survived–intelligent instructions, not such