Europa (Satellite) -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Survival -- Fiction
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.
I had to speak again soon with the anamorph....
She did not keep me waiting.
I returned to my compartment. The pseudo-Lois entered soon after and
stretched out indolently on my cot. "You wanted to see me, Bill?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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