"Just how long do you figure we've got?" I asked Burgess.
"Mr. Lutscher--" he addressed me by my last name, as was his custom
with junior officers--"I will not equivocate. We have fuel enough to
furnish us with heat and electricity for well over a year. But our food
will last less than two months, even with strict rationing."
So there it was. In two months we'd probably all be dead.
* * * * *
Someone back on Earth had erred badly. In their calculations every item
had been gauged closely, as was necessary. But they should have allowed
safety margin.
The take-off had been calculated nicely. Ships had already been sent to
the moon and to Mars. But this was the first trip this far out. We had
not intercepted Europa quite as plotted. We had to chase it halfway
around Jupiter, and land with the satellite going away, rather than
meeting us. After we landed and new calibrations been made, we made a
discovery. Our fuel was too short for the return trip.
Kohnke was our lone hope. A metallurgist, he knew the properties of the
ship's pile.
But Kohnke was insane.
I had not liked the man from the first. With his nervous, subservient
personality, he had been a constant irritant in the confining quarters
of the ship. And during the early weeks of the flight I observed the
slow dawning of an awful awareness in our weak-charactered member.
He was realizing for the first time the prodigious and unpredictable
forces to which he had exposed himself. Soon he was convinced of the
certainty of death.
He did not have the mental stamina to cope with that certainty. When we
missed Europa on the first pass, Kohnke's mind cracked.
My attention returned to the anamorph. She was staring at me now,
her features white and strained. She must have read what I had been
thinking of Kohnke.
What was there about the crazed man that frightened her so? I wondered
again.
I went out into the bubble. The rocket man, Andrews and I spent the
next several hours adding another compartment to the main room. Andrews
fed dirt into the hopper of the converter while I operated the nozzle.
This was more difficult than the original bubble had been. Normal
air pressure was enough to keep that expanded; but here we had to
make supports and rig up an auxiliary vent. Also it was cold near the
walls, a cold that sucked at the heat in our bodies; Europa has a mean
temperature of -140° Centigrade.
When our job was finished I left Andrews at the door of his cubicle. I
glanced back and saw that he hadn't gone in. He was standing with his
head down and his shoulders slumped.
Andrews I had always regarded as an extrovert, and a good man. He was
big, active and almost always cheerful. Even his bald head seemed to
add to his masculine virility. He had a vast fund of stories. Everyone
liked him.
I suspected, however, that his bland acceptance of our predicament was
not all it seemed. He was an instinctive psychologist. He was doing his
part to keep up the spirits of the rest of us. In my judgment Andrews
was quite a man.
But now his capacity for dissimulating had apparently reached its limit.
At that moment a woman-form drifted past me from the ship. The
anamorph had come to perform her self-appointed duty.
She was a robust woman now with a body designed for love-making, the
wide-hipped form made to propagate the race with healthy offspring. Her
dress was cut low at the neck, innocently immodest.
Andrews looked up, still brooding.
It was he who had discovered the anamorph, the second day after our
landing. Where she had come from, or how she had gotten through the
plastic wall without rupturing it, we never did learn. She had had this
identical form when Andrews found her.
The anamorph began to dance. A slow, languid pirouetting. The sound of
a wordless crooning song reached me. The tempo of her dance heightened
and her wide green skirt came up around her waist, exposing fair thighs.
Andrews grunted and shifted position. Abruptly he reached out and
grasped her wrist. "Come here, baby," he said hoarsely.
The anamorph kicked and squealed in mock protest as Andrews swept her
off her feet and into his arms, but she made no real effort to free
herself as he strode with her into his compartment.
* * * * *
The next morning when I stopped in with Kohnke's breakfast I found him
wearing a gold crown.
With strictly amateur knowledge, I had diagnosed his illness as
schizophrenia, and this latest display seemed to confirm the diagnosis.
Now he had escaped harsh reality into a world of his own, a world where
he was obviously a personage of considerable eminence.
Kohnke smiled at me and greeted me condescendingly. I went along with
his delusion. If I were to help him it was good that he accepted me
as part of his world. I sat at his feet and made as one of the unseen
audience he was addressing. I was wryly amused a few minutes later when
I understood who he thought he was.
However, it was the gold crown that fascinated me. Where had he gotten
it? There could be only one answer. And if what I suspected was true,
there were startling implications.