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.