"_It_ will take care of _us_! That's a helluva way to look at it!"

"There can be no danger now, Kelly. In fifty years we have encountered
every conceivable danger, every imaginable kind of world or possible
menace."

"Have we?" Kelly thought. "Every danger from outside maybe, and I'm not
even sure of that. But how about danger from inside?"

"Inside?"

"Us. How about apathy for instance? Apathy's a real danger. You talk
about this space-can like it was a big metal mother! Listen, I'm
supposed to see that this tub holds together. At least until we get back
somewhere near enough to the Solar system so we'll feel we've been
somewhere else!"

"But, Kelly--"

"I'm getting out for a while, I tell you!"

"All right," the Crew sighed. The light loom faded a bit, down to a
self-indulgent glow. "Hurry back to us, Kelly."

"I'll give some thought to it."

So Kelly concentrated on the increasingly painful and difficult task of
tearing his consciousness free of the big glob of protoplasm in the
tank, and getting it back into his body that hibernated in the bunkroom.

As usual the switch was too painful. It stretched and stretched and
finally snapped in an all too familiar explosion of shocking light.

* * * * *

His bones creaked. His skin rustled as he sat up and looked around.
There was the old feeling that there was dust over everything when there
was no dust. There was all that emptiness sweeping away into the endless
silence and he thought again, as he always did, how comforting and cozy
it was being a part of the Crew.

But someone had to check the ship. It was only machinery after all, and
machinery could wear out, sooner or later. And he wasn't at all sure, as
he kept insisting, that they had encountered all the possible dangers.

It might seem that in fifty years you could run into everything. But
fifty years was no time at all out here where time had no real meaning
any more.

His body squeaked as he took a few tentative steps about the bunkroom.
One did not actually forget how to walk. It was just awkward as the
devil. And the blood, the entire autonomic system, tended to slow down.
It seemed reluctant to step up general metabolism.

Apathy. Sure it was a danger. This time, Kelly decided, I'll do
something about it. He was the engineer and he had signed on the great
odyssey to keep the ship going. But the Crew was part of the ship. Was
not there an obligation even great