The anamorph’s presence during the night had drained all my pent-up frustrations. I was not happy, but I no longer felt the desperate loneliness and need that had goaded me before. I dressed leisurely and went out into the main compartment of the bubble.

Except in the sleeping rooms the plastic walls were transparent. I looked outside at the surface of Europa, covered with a white material I had been told was solid carbon dioxide.

A mild storm was brewing. The hydrogen, helium and methane in the atmosphere were colorless, and the argon and krypton too minute to be detected without instruments. But I could see and hear small particles of liquid ammonia as they pattered against the plastic wall. The bubble sagged in several places. But there was no danger of it collapsing.

In the space ship galley (to which the bubble had been attached) I found the captain, Mark Burgess, and the anamorph having coffee.

She was no longer Lois. Now she was an older woman, with a bit of added weight and thickness. She was still beautiful, but more matronly than she had been as Lois. About her was none of the warm-blooded ardor she had displayed the night before. And no remembrance of it in her eyes.

I poured a cup of coffee.

"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.