Wait it Out

This acrylic painting dating from the late 1970s depicts a scene from Larry Niven's short story "Wait it Out". It's about astronauts who get stranded on Pluto and their method for holding on until rescuers can arrive. They simply take off their helmets and freeze themselves. The trouble is, at those temperatures their brains become superconductors, so a few electrons trickling along their neurons keep them conscious, although their time sense is skewed. They can even see...or could, if their eyeballs didn't frost over.