w that the water would fall out before
the carbon dioxide, but we hadn't thought of it. We took care of that,
however, by having Wilcox weld in a baffle and keep the section where
the water condensed separate from the carbon dioxide snowfall. We
could always shovel out the real ice, and meantime the ship's controls
restored the moisture to the air easily enough.

But there was nothing we could do about the oxygen. When that was
gone, it stayed gone. The plants still took care of about two-thirds
of our waste--but the other third was locked out there between the
hulls. Given plants enough, we could have thawed it and let them
reconvert it; a nice idea, except that we had to wait three months to
take care of it, if we lived that long.

Bullard's cooking began to get worse. Then suddenly, we got one good
meal. Eve Nolan came down the passage to announce that Bullard was
making cake, with frosting, canned huckleberry pie, and all the works.
We headed for the mess hall, fast.

It was the cook's masterpiece. Muller came down late, though, and
regarded it doubtfully. "There's something funny," he said as he
settled down beside me. Jenny had been surrounded by Napier and
Pietro. "Bullard came up babbling a few minutes ago. I don't like it.
Something about eating hearty, because he'd saved us all, forever and
ever. He told me the angels were on our side, because a beautiful
angel with two halos came to him in his sleep and told him how to save
us. I chased him back to the galley, but I don't like it."

Most of them had already eaten at least half of the food, but I saw
Muller wasn't touching his. The rest stopped now, as the words sank
in, and Napier looked shocked. "No!" he said, but his tone wasn't
positive. "He's a weakling, but I don't think he's insane--not enough
to poison us."

"There was that food poisoning before," Pietro said suddenly. "Paul,
come along. And don't eat anything until we come back."

We broke the record getting to the galley. There Bullard sat, beaming
happily, eating from a huge plate piled with the food he had cooked. I
checked on it quickly--and there wasn't anything he'd left out. He
looked up, and his grin widened foolishly.

"Hi, docs," he said. "Yes, sir, I knowed you'd be coming. It all came
to me in a dream. Looked just like my wife twenty years ago, she did,
with green and yellow halos. And she told it to me. Told me I'd been a
good man, and nothing was going to happen to me. Not to goo