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.

Somehow, even as part of the Crew, some part of Kelly had been able to
keep that forming plan a secret. Which was a lucky miracle, for if the
Crew had known his intentions it would certainly not have let him out
this time.

Even if you wanted out, Kelly reasoned, the Crew would keep you in. And
maybe after long enough you did not care to get out. But once out, he
wondered, could it keep you out if it decided to blackball a man for one
reason or another?

Like wrecking the ship?

* * * * *

In the chrome strip above the control panel, Kelly saw his face grinning
strangely back at him, a bearded, hollowed, paled face with an
unfamiliar glitter in the eyes. Every time he had left the Crew to enter
and reactivate his own body, that body had seemed a little less
familiar. This time it seemed to be almost entirely someone else.

He stared at the face in the chrome, then whispered the hell with that
and he flipped the controls over to manual. He sat down. Behind him, the
Crew whispered in its tank, protoplasm developed in the labs and
quivering now with some unified sensation that was purely subjective and
blissfully unconcerned with what happened outside itself.

"It's sick," Kelly concluded, with an emphatic clamp of his jaws. "It's
not right!"

True, sharing the intimate sensations of alien life forms like Kew, the
female Venusian, had been exciting. Especially the sex experiences
which, in a flower of Kew's type, was certainly something. There were
interesting things to being a