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"I think, nobody helped him," Eve objected with a wob
bling 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 writ
ing? Picking out a piece from his brains with each letter?"

"The human brain has a great safety factor." This in
formation 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 remem
ber 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 in
audibly.

"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 disap
peared 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 rubbish." He nodded toward the wall. "For example, ‘the rallying point is...’"

"And do we leave instructions for someone?"

"Hm..." Adam was confused. "That's true. It hasn't crossed my mind."

"So, may we begin?"

"I don't think so," he shook his head. "If someone wanders through here, except us, we don't know who it is and in what condition–and what the encounter might produce."

"So they reasoned the same."

"Well, maybe. By the way..." Adam bent down and pulled a fragment of a skull which was sticking out from the smashed head of the dead man.

"What are you doing?"

"We need a weapon. At least such as it is." He discovered that it was not possible to break out a bone, so he straightened again and fiercely stamped a foot with the boot on the head of the corpse lying on the floor. It cracked loudly and made a squashing, chomping sound. Eve turned away in disgust. Adam bent down again. This time he managed to break out a large enough piece of an occipital bone with a sharp jag, and having put the flashlight on a floor, began to clear his trophy of brain, flesh and hair. Suddenly he thought about how it looked from the outside–the interstellar ship, the highest achievement of human mind and a science, in contrast to the half-naked savage making a bone weapon from the skull of a fellow tribesman. And after all, both of them obviously have a university education–maybe, even doctor degrees.

"How many does he make?" Eve asked, still without looking in his direction.

"Mmm... The eighth. Not including us."

"And how many are on your list?

With his foot he knocked off the piece of paper from the flashlight handle, stepped on the edge, straightening it, and peered, counting the lines.

"Eleven. So what? Clearly that's not a list of crewmen. However big the ship is, it for sure doesn't contain monasteries and highways."

"But this list somehow is related to us and to what is going here! Perhaps it is the crew of the previous expedition. Or our backups. Or we could be their backups. We were sent afterwards, after what had happened to the main crew, according to the list."

"So you want to say all this began on Earth?"

"I don't know. I cannot remember. But I feel that this ship was doomed from the very beginning. No, not even feel–I know... knew earlier... I cannot… When I think of it, I am overrun by such despair! But I cannot also stop thinking!" Eve clenched her head with her hands, painfully sticking nails into her temples between the bandages. "So, have you finished here?"

"I am going to check–about parasites. Now I have a tool to do an autopsy. Certainly I am not going to cut myself though it alone would give full confidence."

"Erm... Adam! What are you up to?" Eve had turned towards him, looking at him in round-eyed fear. "Are you crazy? This is the way, probably, all this begins!" She took a step back, ready to run away.

"What's the matter?" He was surprised. "You... decided that I was going to dissect
you
? Faugh, how absurd! Though..."

"Though what?"

"Well no, it's purely theoretically–really, to check whether we are infected inside, it would require one of us to take... but no, I've said, theoretically! I'm not a murderer! I'm going to dissect him!" He nodded at the dead man. "If in his guts I find the same creature as in that man in the corridor, things look bad... and if no, that means, it has crept inside by chance."

"Even if you find nothing, it may mean the larvae are in
visible to the naked eye."

"Thanks, you calmed me. But even if it is clean inside, it still says nothing about us. But all the same..." Adam squatted and scooted the corpse back over. "I never considered that I would ever disembowel my colleague with his own bone," he said to himself. However, strictly speaking, he didn't know what thoughts he had had in his past. But, indeed, they were unlikely to have been anything like these.

He thrusted the bone jag into the unnaturally pale belly covered with curly hair. The flesh at first caved in deeply without piercing it, and from the mouth of the corpse, a heavy sigh escaped. Adam shuddered and was dumbstruck, but the next moment he realized that he had just squeezed air out of the body. He pressed more strongly and the skin split its sides, making a terrible crimson mouth. No blood came out, it had clotted long ago.

Adam felt again an attack of nausea, but now he easily overcame it. After everything seen earlier... The ripped up flesh hardly gave in, as if it were rubber–or maybe his "surgical instru
ment" just lacked sharpness. He had to exert considerable effort. Yes, it was not at all the same as cutting meat with a knife on a plate (from this thought Adam felt a lump rising in his throat again, and decided that, if somehow he got out from here, he would become a vegetarian). At last he drew the cut to the groin and, grabbing the edges, stretched the flesh apart sideways. Of all things, there was a lot of fat inside, while the dead man didn't look at all fat. So, this wet bag is, obviously, the stomach, he concluded, and here are the guts, similar to a clot of huge slippery worms. The real worms–terrestrial or, the most important, local–however, were not visible anywhere. But to be fully convinced of their absence, it was necessary to cut and glance into each section of the intestines.

"So was it there?" Eve lost patience. At times she threw fastidious looks in his direction, but did not dare to come nearer.

"Looks like nothing yet–no larvae, eggs or whatever. Now I will open his intestines. What the hell is that?"

From a cut made under the stomach something whitish emerged. Adam's hand trembled, but he realized that it didn't look like anything alive. He ripped the slimy tube further and with two fingers pulled from it a crumpled and stuck together lump of a paper.

"It seems we have mail," Adam muttered.

"Do you really think so?" Eve all the same overcame herself and stepped inside the room.

"No, of course not. He hardly expected that he would be dissected, but for some reason he has swallowed this piece."

"Wouldn’t it be easier to tear it?"

"You’re asking me? Perhaps he did it in a fit of rage and in the same fit smashed his head against the wall. Or maybe he didn't want someone to reconstruct the sheet from scraps."

"Again something was hidden from us? Can you unfold it without tearing it?"

"I will try. By the way, apparently, this paper is firmer than the usual one. Perhaps it's even not a paper at all, it just looks similar. Shit, we don’t even remember what they write on now."

He managed to unwrap the wet sheet on a floor. Eve, trying not to look at the ripped body, sat down on her knees nearby and pointed the flashlight on to the sheet to see it better.

Letters were quite distinguishable–this time printed, not hand-written. The text had neither a beginning, nor an end.

"...neral theory of a dark matter-energy of Bern
stein-Wong (Nob.pr. for physics 2063), which showed that the dark matter actually was not some type of hypothesized exotic matter but is in fact a certain phase of the standard one, with the phase transition being completely reversible [3]. The common view that objects in this special phase are capable of motion with speeds greatly exceeding the speed of light is not quite correct. Actually objects in the "dark" condition obey the equations of the Generalized quantum theory [5], from which, in particular, it follows that such an object does not have fixed coordinates in the continuum (or even a fixed projection to the continuum); rather its location is a superposition of all the possible coordinates, the probability of a particular value of the coordinates actualizing, being described by a certain three-dimensional distribution function Φ, which depends on the curvature of the continuum at each point and on the configuration of the dark energy field. Travel of the "dark" ship, accordingly, is in fact a reconfiguration of the field of dark energy performed in a way so that at the moment of the collapse of the ship's wave function (which occurs at field's switching-off), the function Φ possess an above-threshhold value in the vicinity of the destination point. It has been shown by Kozelsky (2065) that for any nonzero Σ it is possible within a finite time (using a finite amount of energy) to carry out the field reconfiguration so that the ship would return to the standard phase within any prescribed set of coordinates with an error of no more than |Σ| [6].

The postulates of the theory have been experimentally confirmed by Kalkrin's group (2070, 2071), these experiments be
coming the starting point for the "Hyperion" program. In 2077 the unmanned probe "Hyperion-1", equipped with the Kalkrin generator, explored the system of the star Gliese 581 and successfully returned to Earth.

It should be emphasized that the General theory of dark matter-energy, despite its experimental (and even industrial) veri
fication, still does not supply answers to several pertinent questions. In particular, the essence of dark energy remains disputable. The problem of the cosmological constant, according to which the observed density of dark energy as is evidenced by its gravitational interactions is 120 orders of magnitude below the estimated value, remains unresolved. Bernstein explains it with the assumption that most of the dark energy does not manifest itself gravitationally. For an explanation of this cosmological constant problem, a number of hypotheses were offered [3] [7] [8], none of which are universally accepted. In particular, works of Miller (2065) and Birnbaum (2069) [9] [10] are devoted to the criticism of these hypotheses. Chang (2067, 2069) has offered the alternative explanation, according to..."

"Dark is faster than light," Adam muttered, having read up. "So it is not such nonsense."

"Apparently we are on a ship with the Kalkrin engine." Eve drew a practical conclusion. "But it said here, after all, that the flight to Gliese 581 was successful?"

"Unmanned," Adam reminded her. "After that they sent the manned spacecraft... and then something went wrong. As far as I understand it, we didn't return in time from dark phase to usu
al space. Which is, in fact, no wonder, if all this madness and destruction began. Probably they even broke the computer which would have returned us automatically.  But the field generator continues to work, carrying us away all the further. That is, changing probability of our location in such a manner that..."