part of the Crew all right. But the main
purpose, survival, had been forgotten. Now being the Crew was an end in
itself. Kelly could imagine the Crew business going on and on until
finally even the material bodies in the bunkroom would be forgotten
entirely and allowed to rot away to dust about which the Crew would no
longer care.

And that was very bad. It should not have worked out this way. But it
was not too late to do something, shake them out of the Lotus dream.

He checked the scopes again. Now the second planet revealed plenty of
breathable atmosphere settled in the lower valleys. He headed straight
for it.

The Crew was soon going to get one devil of a jolt!

He put the ship into a close orbit around the planet. It seemed nothing
but a fearsome forest of oxydized spikes rising in corrosive silence,
with here and there a lean slash of valley. There was no indication of
life, no vegetation visible or revealed by the scopes. One of the
valleys had a thin mouth of water stretching down the length of its
face. Kelly set the speed and the controls and ran for the bunkroom and
the shock-absorbent cushions. He strapped himself in and waited.

It was done. As long as the thing had gone so far, Kelly decided, the
truth should never be revealed because that would lessen the therapeutic
value of his action. He would wreck the ship. Not too badly. Not so
badly that all of the bodies, distinct, separate individual bodies
again, couldn't put the ship back together, as in the old days. And that
would keep them in their bodies gladly for a while where they belonged!
Where the good Lord had intended for them to stay.

They would not be rocked away to apathy in a phony metal mother womb,
thinking the ship was going to take care of _them_!

The more Kelly thought about it, the better he felt. He stretched inside
the straps. He felt his slightly atrophied muscles luxuriate over the
tissues and bones of his big frame.

Any body, no matter what its shape, should be proud of itself. That was
Kelly's belief, and this thing that had happened seemed somewhat
blasphemous. Without bodies and their complex sensory recording
apparatus, the rich consciousness enjoyed by the Crew could not exist,
would never have been created at all. The Crew was living off the
largesse of experience built up by their bodies. The Crew was just
narcotized enough that it did not realize that the body banks had to be
replenished.

Metal shrieked.

Ke