Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly?

by Bryce Walton

unconcerned with what happened outside itself.

  "It's sick," Kelly concluded, with an emphatic clamp of his jaws. "It'snot right!"

  True, sharing the intimate sensations of alien life forms like Kew, thefemale Venusian, had been exciting. Especially the sex experienceswhich, in a flower of Kew's type, was certainly something. There wereinteresting things to being a part of the Crew all right. But the mainpurpose, survival, had been forgotten. Now being the Crew was an end initself. Kelly could imagine the Crew business going on and on untilfinally even the material bodies in the bunkroom would be forgottenentirely and allowed to rot away to dust about which the Crew would nolonger care.

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

  He checked the scopes again. Now the second planet revealed plenty ofbreathable atmosphere settled in the lower valleys. He headed straightfor 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 nothingbut a fearsome forest of oxydized spikes rising in corrosive silence,with here and there a lean slash of valley. There was no indication oflife, no vegetation visible or revealed by the scopes. One of thevalleys had a thin mouth of water stretching down the length of itsface. Kelly set the speed and the controls and ran for the bunkroom andthe shock-absorbent cushions. He strapped himself in and waited.

  It was done. As long as the thing had gone so far, Kelly decided, thetruth should never be revealed because that would lessen the therapeuticvalue of his action. He would wreck the ship. Not too badly. Not sobadly that all of the bodies, distinct, separate individual bodiesagain, couldn't put the ship back together, as in the old days. And thatwould 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 insidethe straps. He felt his slightly atrophied muscles luxuriate over thetissues and bones of his big frame.

  Any body, no matter what its shape, should be proud of itself. That wasKelly's belief, and this thing that had happened seemed somewhatblasphemous. Without bodies and their complex sensory recordingapparatus, the rich consciousness enjoyed by the Crew could not exist,would never have been created at all. The Crew was living off thelargesse of experience built up by their bodies. The Crew was justnarcotized enough that it did not realize that the body banks had to bereplenished.

  Metal shrieked.

  Kelly yelled feebly. He fought, he grappled with the threateningblackout like a man fighting an invisible opponent on an endless flightof stairs.

  The grinding rolling terror of the sound, the ripping, twisting, tearingscream of it cried on and on. Kelly knew one thing then.

  He had not figured it right. His calculations were off. _The ship hadhit too damn hard._

  * * * * *

  Later, when he managed to get the straps off and tried to move, he fellpainfully onto the tilted deck. One of his eyes felt sticky. He rubbedat it and his hand was smeared with blood.

  He shuffled around in a stumbling circle. Minor damages could have beenrepaired. But this--the ship was peeled open in glaring strips like abreakfast cannister. A cold wind moaned through the ship that was nownothing but a metal sieve. A hazy light filtered down and ran off themetal like cold flour rust.

  Kelly fell to his knees. "Kew," he whispered. "Lljub, Urdaz--Lakrit...."

  The Venusian flower lady was sliced down the middle like a cabbage, andthe nitrate bowl was shattered and Kew was dead in a pool of fadinggreen blood.

  Smashed into the bulkhead was Lakrit's sulphuric bathtub, and hisatmosphere had already filtered away with the wind to wherever it wasgoing. Lljub's pale glow was out for good, and his crystalline heart wasas opaque as a dead eye. Only a few pieces of Urdaz's tank were visible,and Urdaz himself had already turned to a powdery food that the wind ateslowly in long trailing streamers.

  "What--what in the name of God have I done?" Kelly whispered.

  All dead--

  No! He slammed at the bulkhead until the warped metal gave and he ran tothe control room. The Crew--the Crew--

  He stared at the tank.

  Through a jagged opening in the ship's walls, the wind whined andplucked at Kelly's red hair. The wind was colder now. He kept on lookingat the tank. He reached out and touched the big transparent curve of itand then jerked his hand back with a whimper in his breath.

  There was nothing in the tank, nothing but a blob of slowly dryingslime. He pressed his nose to the tank. "Crew--" he whispered.

  There was no life in the slime. When he pounded on the tank, the stuffcollapsed in upon itself in withering flatness.

  Kelly yelled. The cold wind froze at his teeth. It sucked at his breathand dried at the interior of his mouth. He ran and climbed. The jaggedperiphery of the opening sliced at his flesh. But he did not feel it,and he fell twenty feet, without feeling that either, down the side ofthe ship. He started crawling over the hard naked belly of the rock.

  He got to his feet. He ran stumbling down an incline of shale worn roundand shiny by the wind that had blown here just as it blew now, and wouldblow for God alone possibly knew how long. He fell and rolled to theedge of the water.

  He looked into it. He felt of it. He jerked his hand away. The stuff wasicy. But it was worse than icy. It was dead. It was dead water. It waswithout any bottom, and without any life in it anywhere. You could tellby looking into it. The wind moved over the top of it as though thewater were glass, and the water was the color of a slightly transparentnaked blue steel.

  There was no life here. Maybe there had been once, who knew when, whocould guess how long ago. But there was none now and even the water hadforgotten it.

  Kelly cried out as he stood up. "What have I done?" He raised his armsat the hazy red sun lying over the spires of towering stone and metallike a bloated balloon scraping precariously over rusty spikes. "God,what have I done?"

  The cry echoed tinnily on the rocks and fled on the wind.

  Kelly ran for a long way, falling and stumbling and getting up again.Kelly had always had one primary drive, and that was to keep going, nomatter what. So now he tried to keep going.

  But there was no life on this planet. He had known that before. Somestrange kinds of intelligence could tolerate some unpleasant worlds. Butnothing would live here.

  Nothing _could_ live here.

  "That's your fate," Kelly thought. He sat down and stared at the wallsof rock and metal all around. "Your fate, Kelly. Your punishment, yourwell deserved hell."

  That was what it was. Retribution. And knowing that, he tried not tocare. He tried to be glad and face what he deserved.

  If that were not the answer, then why had only Kelly been spared to faceemptiness and silence and no life, all alone?

  The irony of it was that he would go on as long as possible keepinghimself alive in his own hell. There was food aplenty in the ship,enough to last as long as hell cared to have him.

  He turned and started walking back toward the ship that seemed some fivemiles away. At that instant, the ship disappeared in an abrupt explosionthat twisted the rocks, and a mushroom cloud flowered gently above thelake as Kelly fell trembling on his belly and hugged the ground andpushed his face into the shale, while the wind tore and screamed aroundhim and particles of flint ripped his clothes and slashed at his flesh.

  * * * * *

  He did not bother walking much farther toward where the ship had been.There was only a crater there now which would offer him nothing in theway of sustaining his very personal and thoroughly private hell.

  He walked. The effort became more difficult and finally he was on hishands and knees, crawling. The wind sucked at his ripped clothes, andfelt like
cold sharp steel in his raw wounds. But slowly anddeliberately he continued to crawl.

  Kelly had always had the idea that a man should keep going and so now hekept on going. Even if there was no place to go, and you could notremember particularly where you had been, you kept on moving andfighting and slugging along until you could no longer move.

  He lay there looking up at the hazy rust of the sky with the nakedspires pointing up into it for no reason at all, because there wasnothing up there.

  He had been there and he knew. Nothing up there but space, black andwithout a beginning or end. He had not even checked the records of theship so that now, lying here, he did not even know how far away fromEarth he was. At the speed they had traveled, a ship went a long way infifty years. But the ship, the records, everything was lost.

  And no one would ever know now how far they had come.

  Or gone. What was the difference, anyway?

  But Kelly had no difficulty in remembering _why_ they had come.

  They had come into