Kelly looked at them warmly and thought about how it had worked out. The strange thing was that it did have a lot of good things to recommend it. Or had had them. It had solved the problem of intimate communication and driven back the tides of loneliness. It had lessened the dangers of mental and physical illnesses in the material bodies and assured a prolongation of the life of each body, which was important in itself, for this trip had proven to be a lot longer than even the most pessimistic had anticipated.
The Crew, pulsing in its tank, Kelly thought oddly, is a new life form. One that had evolved to meet the exigencies of deep space which had proven to be alien to any adaptability common to any world that rotated through it.
But maybe they were too damn happy, Kelly thought. Too contented. If they ran into a real emergency now, the ship would be finished. The Crew in the tank was, itself, incapable of action of any overt kind. It could not manipulate anything. It could only be happy.
And the bodies here in the bunkroom could not rally fast enough to meet a sudden crisis.
And they had agreed that the first law was survival.
But to survive this way might well mean destruction in another.
So Kelly walked and thought about it, and weighed the precarious balance.
He slipped through the silent ship and to the control room. He peered into the viewscope. Some galaxy or other spun its giant pinwheel outward toward some destiny of its own. The high noon of the endlessness had been unfamiliar for years. He checked the ship's instruments. The Crew in the big tank simmered and throbbed in its introspective bliss, utterly oblivious to Kelly now.
Kelly saw the red dwarf a few hundred million kilos away. Three planets ground their familiar path around it. The second in distance had a breathable oxygen, according to the scopes, but little else to recommend it.
Kelly straightened up. He had no idea when the plan had really started forming, but now it was formed. When Kelly made up his mind to a thing, there was no other course but to conclude it. He knew what he had to do.