Free Eden by Stanislaw Lem

cranium—there's no brain. There is something there, but any anatomist would laugh at me if I told him it was a brain… A few glands, but they appear to be lymphatic—while near the lungs, and the creature has three lungs, I discovered the damnedest thing. Something I didn't like at all. I put it in alcohol—you can see it later.
    "But now we have more urgent work. The engine room looks like a slaughterhouse. Everything will have to be taken out and buried, and since it's warm in the ship, haste is definitely advisable. You can cover your faces; the smell is not that bad, but with so much raw flesh…"
    "You're joking?" the Physicist said.
    "No."
    Only now did the Doctor step out of the tunnel. His rubber apron and white smock were completely soaked in red.
    "I'm sorry, the job might make you sick, but it has to be done. Come."
    The gravedigging, as the Chemist referred to it, took them until the late afternoon. Working half naked to avoid staining their suits, they carried the dreadful stuff with whatever was at hand—buckets, litters—and buried the remains two hundred paces from the ship, at the top of the knoll; notwithstanding the Captain's plea to conserve water, they used five pails of it to wash themselves afterward. The creature's blood, before it coagulated, resembled that of humans, but then it turned orange and became powdery.
    The weary crew stretched themselves out beside the ship in the setting sun. No one had an appetite, so they only drank a little coffee or water, then dozed off, one by one, without discussing how to begin the repair work. When they awoke, it was already dark. Again they had to go down to the storeroom for provisions, open cans, light a stove, cook, eat, and wash dishes. At midnight they decided, since everyone felt sufficiently rested, not to sleep but to begin tackling the repairs.
    Their hearts beat faster as they removed the plastic and metal debris from the generator cover, using crowbars when necessary. They spent hours digging through rubble in search of missing parts, until finally the auxiliary generator was put in working order; they replaced the shattered socket with a new one, and the Engineer fixed the air compressor, resorting to a trick as simple as it was primitive: since there were not enough spare blades, he simply removed every other blade. The motor would operate with reduced efficiency, but it would operate. At three in the morning the Captain told them to stop.
    "We'll have to go on more expeditions," he said, "to replenish our water supply, and for other reasons as well. So we should maintain our normal sleeping pattern. Let's sleep until dawn and then get to work again."
    The rest of the night passed uneventfully. In the morning nobody expressed any desire to go up outside; everyone was anxious to get on with the repairs. The Engineer had by now put together a basic tool set, so there was no need to go running off to all the cabins in search of a wrench.
    First they checked the distributor, which was so full of short circuits that they practically had to rebuild it from scratch, cannibalizing other broken units for parts. Then they set about getting the generator to start properly. The plan that the Engineer had decided on was risky: to turn the dynamos using as a turbine an air compressor driven by an oxygen cylinder. Under normal conditions the emergency unit would have been activated by high-pressure water vapor from the reactor, since the reactor, as the heart of the ship, was the most protected part. But that, with the total destruction of the circuits, was now entirely out of the question. So they would have to use their reserve oxygen. But this was not the desperate measure it might seem to be, because they were counting on being able to fill the tanks with atmospheric oxygen once the engine room was working. There was no other way: to activate the atomic pile without electricity would have been madness. But the Engineer, though he mentioned it to no one,