er to keep the Crew going?

The four others lived but almost imperceptibly in some very low state of
slowed metabolism there in the bunkroom and Kelly looked at them. The
faithful and the wonderful ones. The ones with whom he had shared so
many dangers and awful silences that the five of them had been able to
evolve the idea of the protoplasm in the tank and merge their
consciousness in it.

Kew, the Venusian, in her bowl of self-renewing nitrate. Lakrit from a
Jovian satellite, a fluorine fellow of distinction inside a sphere of
gaseous sulphur. A crystalline character with a sense of humor named
Lljub, whose form gave off a paled glint as it nourished itself on
silicates. And a highly intelligent but humble six-foot-long sponge
labeled Urdaz stuck in a foundation of chemical sediment at the bottom
of a tank of reprocessing salt water.

Each with their own special kind of appendages and sensitivities, each
able to move his special closed-system about through the ship by means
of clever types of mobility.

But basically, in outward form, they were too alien to have much in
common. Only as intelligences, as life forces, could they share a common
bed. And it had evolved to that in fifty years. A bed of protoplasm in a
shock-absorbent tank.

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