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.