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-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30086 ***
-
-[Illustration]
-
-
- _The body tanks had to be replenished and the ship had to
- be serviced--and the crew was having a Lotus dream in its
- bed of protoplasm. But Kelly knew how to arouse them...._
-
-
-       _Has Anybody
-         Here Seen
-          Kelly?_
-
-     By Kenneth O'Hara
-
- Illustrated by Paul Orban
-
-
-The Crew pulsed with contentment, and its communal singing brought a
-pleasant kind of glow that throbbed gently in the control room.
-
-"'Has anybody here seen Kelly ... K-E-double-L-Y?'"
-
-"Shut up and dig my thought!" Kelly's stubborn will insisted. "I'm going
-on out for a while!"
-
-The delicate loom of the Crew's light pattern increased its frequency a
-little and the song stopped. "Better not," the Crew said.
-
-"But why not?"
-
-"No need."
-
-"We could be running into something bad," Kelly thought.
-
-"No danger now, Kelly. Checking the ship is just a waste of time."
-
-"How can you waste what you have so damn much of?" Kelly thought.
-
-"Do not leave us again, Kelly. We love you and you are the most
-interesting part of the Crew when you're with it."
-
-"The ship ought to be checked. Our bodies ought to be looked at."
-
-"We know there is no danger any more, Kelly. Do not go. There are so
-many interesting experiences we have not even begun to share yet. We are
-only half way through your life and we have not even started to
-experience your impressions of your colorful and complex Earth culture.
-And we have not even started on the adult lives of Lakrit or Lljub. Come
-back with your Crew, Kelly."
-
-"But no one's checked the ship for over a year!"
-
-"Please do not worry about the ship, Kelly. In fifty years nothing has
-gone wrong. We can trust the ship thoroughly now, it will take care of
-us."
-
-"_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 greater 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 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 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.
-
-Kelly yelled feebly. He fought, he grappled with the threatening
-blackout like a man fighting an invisible opponent on an endless flight
-of stairs.
-
-The grinding rolling terror of the sound, the ripping, twisting, tearing
-scream of it cried on and on. Kelly knew one thing then.
-
-He had not figured it right. His calculations were off. _The ship had
-hit too damn hard._
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Later, when he managed to get the straps off and tried to move, he fell
-painfully onto the tilted deck. One of his eyes felt sticky. He rubbed
-at it and his hand was smeared with blood.
-
-He shuffled around in a stumbling circle. Minor damages could have been
-repaired. But this--the ship was peeled open in glaring strips like a
-breakfast cannister. A cold wind moaned through the ship that was now
-nothing but a metal sieve. A hazy light filtered down and ran off the
-metal 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, and
-the nitrate bowl was shattered and Kew was dead in a pool of fading
-green blood.
-
-Smashed into the bulkhead was Lakrit's sulphuric bathtub, and his
-atmosphere had already filtered away with the wind to wherever it was
-going. Lljub's pale glow was out for good, and his crystalline heart was
-as 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 ate
-slowly 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 to
-the control room. The Crew--the Crew--
-
-He stared at the tank.
-
-Through a jagged opening in the ship's walls, the wind whined and
-plucked at Kelly's red hair. The wind was colder now. He kept on looking
-at the tank. He reached out and touched the big transparent curve of it
-and then jerked his hand back with a whimper in his breath.
-
-There was nothing in the tank, nothing but a blob of slowly drying
-slime. He pressed his nose to the tank. "Crew--" he whispered.
-
-There was no life in the slime. When he pounded on the tank, the stuff
-collapsed in upon itself in withering flatness.
-
-Kelly yelled. The cold wind froze at his teeth. It sucked at his breath
-and dried at the interior of his mouth. He ran and climbed. The jagged
-periphery 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 of
-the 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 round
-and shiny by the wind that had blown here just as it blew now, and would
-blow for God alone possibly knew how long. He fell and rolled to the
-edge of the water.
-
-He looked into it. He felt of it. He jerked his hand away. The stuff was
-icy. But it was worse than icy. It was dead. It was dead water. It was
-without any bottom, and without any life in it anywhere. You could tell
-by looking into it. The wind moved over the top of it as though the
-water were glass, and the water was the color of a slightly transparent
-naked blue steel.
-
-There was no life here. Maybe there had been once, who knew when, who
-could guess how long ago. But there was none now and even the water had
-forgotten it.
-
-Kelly cried out as he stood up. "What have I done?" He raised his arms
-at the hazy red sun lying over the spires of towering stone and metal
-like 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, no
-matter what. So now he tried to keep going.
-
-But there was no life on this planet. He had known that before. Some
-strange kinds of intelligence could tolerate some unpleasant worlds. But
-nothing would live here.
-
-Nothing _could_ live here.
-
-"That's your fate," Kelly thought. He sat down and stared at the walls
-of rock and metal all around. "Your fate, Kelly. Your punishment, your
-well deserved hell."
-
-That was what it was. Retribution. And knowing that, he tried not to
-care. He tried to be glad and face what he deserved.
-
-If that were not the answer, then why had only Kelly been spared to face
-emptiness and silence and no life, all alone?
-
-The irony of it was that he would go on as long as possible keeping
-himself 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 five
-miles away. At that instant, the ship disappeared in an abrupt explosion
-that twisted the rocks, and a mushroom cloud flowered gently above the
-lake as Kelly fell trembling on his belly and hugged the ground and
-pushed his face into the shale, while the wind tore and screamed around
-him 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 the
-way of sustaining his very personal and thoroughly private hell.
-
-He walked. The effort became more difficult and finally he was on his
-hands and knees, crawling. The wind sucked at his ripped clothes, and
-felt like cold sharp steel in his raw wounds. But slowly and
-deliberately he continued to crawl.
-
-Kelly had always had the idea that a man should keep going and so now he
-kept on going. Even if there was no place to go, and you could not
-remember particularly where you had been, you kept on moving and
-fighting and slugging along until you could no longer move.
-
-He lay there looking up at the hazy rust of the sky with the naked
-spires pointing up into it for no reason at all, because there was
-nothing up there.
-
-He had been there and he knew. Nothing up there but space, black and
-without a beginning or end. He had not even checked the records of the
-ship so that now, lying here, he did not even know how far away from
-Earth he was. At the speed they had traveled, a ship went a long way in
-fifty 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 space because that was how it was with those who
-fought their way up to being the dominate life form of whatever world
-they had lived on and grown and died on. If you were the kind who went
-into space, you went because space was there.
-
-Who needed a better reason than that?
-
-"Kew," he whispered. "Lakrit, Lljub, Urdaz, listen now--I thought I was
-doing the right thing--maybe my idea was right--but I just made a
-mistake in the calculations. I just made a helluva mistake--"
-
-The wind sighed over the naked rock and the rusted metal and the rock
-and the dead blue water.
-
-He turned and pushed his head against the rock, and his body curled up
-against the bitter wind. "You've got to forgive me," he said.
-
-"'_Has anybody here seen Kelly? K-E-double-L-Y?_'"
-
-He shivered and kept his eyes closed. It was part of the wind. He did
-not want to go out that way, hearing crazy voices in the wind.
-
-"'Has anybody here seen Kelly--?'"
-
-He raised his head and blinked and the wind drove tears down his cheeks.
-
-"Am I just hearing something that's going crazy inside my head?" He
-peered around. There was nothing, nothing anywhere of course, nothing
-where nothing had ever been, and nothing else but nothing could ever be.
-
-"You're wrong, Kelly. Your Crew's here."
-
-Kelly raised himself painfully to an elbow. "Where--_where_?"
-
-"Right here, Kelly. We had a difficult time locating you. Sure, we
-forgive you. You were trying to do what was right. We know that."
-
-"There's nothing--nothing--" Kelly said.
-
-"You're wrong. The Crew's here and we're waiting."
-
-He stared at the rock. He put his face against it and pushed his hands
-to it. There was a kind of dull glow in it, a faint hint of warmth in
-the rock.
-
-"How can this be?" Kelly said.
-
-"This is the life here, Kelly. Perhaps there is life everywhere in the
-most impossible seeming places. And where life is, Kelly, we can live
-with it and be welcomed by it. Here, this rock is life, and it has taken
-us in. It has been here a long time. And it will be here for a much
-longer time."
-
-"Rock," Kelly said.
-
-"But hurry and come back."
-
-"But no one will ever know. How long--how long can we wait?"
-
-"Who can answer that, Kelly? But maybe they will find the Crew someday."
-
-Kelly looked up once at the completely unfamiliar distances growing
-darker. Sometime, he thought, they'll come from wherever Earth is and
-find the Crew of the ship, find a rock here waiting the ages out.
-
-"Hurry, Kelly!"
-
-His head dropped against the rock. His hands slid down it, and a smile
-moved over his lips and froze there as the wind whispered over it.
-
-
-                                                           иии THE END
-
-
-
-
-Transcriber's Note:
-
-    This etext was produced from _If Worlds of Science Fiction_ July
-    1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
-    copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
-    typographical errors have been corrected without note.
-
-
-
-
-
-End of Project Gutenberg's Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly?, by Bryce Walton
-
-*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30086 ***
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30086 ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+ _The body tanks had to be replenished and the ship had to
+ be serviced--and the crew was having a Lotus dream in its
+ bed of protoplasm. But Kelly knew how to arouse them...._
+
+
+       _Has Anybody
+         Here Seen
+          Kelly?_
+
+     By Kenneth O'Hara
+
+ Illustrated by Paul Orban
+
+
+The Crew pulsed with contentment, and its communal singing brought a
+pleasant kind of glow that throbbed gently in the control room.
+
+"'Has anybody here seen Kelly ... K-E-double-L-Y?'"
+
+"Shut up and dig my thought!" Kelly's stubborn will insisted. "I'm going
+on out for a while!"
+
+The delicate loom of the Crew's light pattern increased its frequency a
+little and the song stopped. "Better not," the Crew said.
+
+"But why not?"
+
+"No need."
+
+"We could be running into something bad," Kelly thought.
+
+"No danger now, Kelly. Checking the ship is just a waste of time."
+
+"How can you waste what you have so damn much of?" Kelly thought.
+
+"Do not leave us again, Kelly. We love you and you are the most
+interesting part of the Crew when you're with it."
+
+"The ship ought to be checked. Our bodies ought to be looked at."
+
+"We know there is no danger any more, Kelly. Do not go. There are so
+many interesting experiences we have not even begun to share yet. We are
+only half way through your life and we have not even started to
+experience your impressions of your colorful and complex Earth culture.
+And we have not even started on the adult lives of Lakrit or Lljub. Come
+back with your Crew, Kelly."
+
+"But no one's checked the ship for over a year!"
+
+"Please do not worry about the ship, Kelly. In fifty years nothing has
+gone wrong. We can trust the ship thoroughly now, it will take care of
+us."
+
+"_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 greater 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 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 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.
+
+Kelly yelled feebly. He fought, he grappled with the threatening
+blackout like a man fighting an invisible opponent on an endless flight
+of stairs.
+
+The grinding rolling terror of the sound, the ripping, twisting, tearing
+scream of it cried on and on. Kelly knew one thing then.
+
+He had not figured it right. His calculations were off. _The ship had
+hit too damn hard._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Later, when he managed to get the straps off and tried to move, he fell
+painfully onto the tilted deck. One of his eyes felt sticky. He rubbed
+at it and his hand was smeared with blood.
+
+He shuffled around in a stumbling circle. Minor damages could have been
+repaired. But this--the ship was peeled open in glaring strips like a
+breakfast cannister. A cold wind moaned through the ship that was now
+nothing but a metal sieve. A hazy light filtered down and ran off the
+metal 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, and
+the nitrate bowl was shattered and Kew was dead in a pool of fading
+green blood.
+
+Smashed into the bulkhead was Lakrit's sulphuric bathtub, and his
+atmosphere had already filtered away with the wind to wherever it was
+going. Lljub's pale glow was out for good, and his crystalline heart was
+as 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 ate
+slowly 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 to
+the control room. The Crew--the Crew--
+
+He stared at the tank.
+
+Through a jagged opening in the ship's walls, the wind whined and
+plucked at Kelly's red hair. The wind was colder now. He kept on looking
+at the tank. He reached out and touched the big transparent curve of it
+and then jerked his hand back with a whimper in his breath.
+
+There was nothing in the tank, nothing but a blob of slowly drying
+slime. He pressed his nose to the tank. "Crew--" he whispered.
+
+There was no life in the slime. When he pounded on the tank, the stuff
+collapsed in upon itself in withering flatness.
+
+Kelly yelled. The cold wind froze at his teeth. It sucked at his breath
+and dried at the interior of his mouth. He ran and climbed. The jagged
+periphery 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 of
+the 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 round
+and shiny by the wind that had blown here just as it blew now, and would
+blow for God alone possibly knew how long. He fell and rolled to the
+edge of the water.
+
+He looked into it. He felt of it. He jerked his hand away. The stuff was
+icy. But it was worse than icy. It was dead. It was dead water. It was
+without any bottom, and without any life in it anywhere. You could tell
+by looking into it. The wind moved over the top of it as though the
+water were glass, and the water was the color of a slightly transparent
+naked blue steel.
+
+There was no life here. Maybe there had been once, who knew when, who
+could guess how long ago. But there was none now and even the water had
+forgotten it.
+
+Kelly cried out as he stood up. "What have I done?" He raised his arms
+at the hazy red sun lying over the spires of towering stone and metal
+like 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, no
+matter what. So now he tried to keep going.
+
+But there was no life on this planet. He had known that before. Some
+strange kinds of intelligence could tolerate some unpleasant worlds. But
+nothing would live here.
+
+Nothing _could_ live here.
+
+"That's your fate," Kelly thought. He sat down and stared at the walls
+of rock and metal all around. "Your fate, Kelly. Your punishment, your
+well deserved hell."
+
+That was what it was. Retribution. And knowing that, he tried not to
+care. He tried to be glad and face what he deserved.
+
+If that were not the answer, then why had only Kelly been spared to face
+emptiness and silence and no life, all alone?
+
+The irony of it was that he would go on as long as possible keeping
+himself 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 five
+miles away. At that instant, the ship disappeared in an abrupt explosion
+that twisted the rocks, and a mushroom cloud flowered gently above the
+lake as Kelly fell trembling on his belly and hugged the ground and
+pushed his face into the shale, while the wind tore and screamed around
+him 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 the
+way of sustaining his very personal and thoroughly private hell.
+
+He walked. The effort became more difficult and finally he was on his
+hands and knees, crawling. The wind sucked at his ripped clothes, and
+felt like cold sharp steel in his raw wounds. But slowly and
+deliberately he continued to crawl.
+
+Kelly had always had the idea that a man should keep going and so now he
+kept on going. Even if there was no place to go, and you could not
+remember particularly where you had been, you kept on moving and
+fighting and slugging along until you could no longer move.
+
+He lay there looking up at the hazy rust of the sky with the naked
+spires pointing up into it for no reason at all, because there was
+nothing up there.
+
+He had been there and he knew. Nothing up there but space, black and
+without a beginning or end. He had not even checked the records of the
+ship so that now, lying here, he did not even know how far away from
+Earth he was. At the speed they had traveled, a ship went a long way in
+fifty 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 space because that was how it was with those who
+fought their way up to being the dominate life form of whatever world
+they had lived on and grown and died on. If you were the kind who went
+into space, you went because space was there.
+
+Who needed a better reason than that?
+
+"Kew," he whispered. "Lakrit, Lljub, Urdaz, listen now--I thought I was
+doing the right thing--maybe my idea was right--but I just made a
+mistake in the calculations. I just made a helluva mistake--"
+
+The wind sighed over the naked rock and the rusted metal and the rock
+and the dead blue water.
+
+He turned and pushed his head against the rock, and his body curled up
+against the bitter wind. "You've got to forgive me," he said.
+
+"'_Has anybody here seen Kelly? K-E-double-L-Y?_'"
+
+He shivered and kept his eyes closed. It was part of the wind. He did
+not want to go out that way, hearing crazy voices in the wind.
+
+"'Has anybody here seen Kelly--?'"
+
+He raised his head and blinked and the wind drove tears down his cheeks.
+
+"Am I just hearing something that's going crazy inside my head?" He
+peered around. There was nothing, nothing anywhere of course, nothing
+where nothing had ever been, and nothing else but nothing could ever be.
+
+"You're wrong, Kelly. Your Crew's here."
+
+Kelly raised himself painfully to an elbow. "Where--_where_?"
+
+"Right here, Kelly. We had a difficult time locating you. Sure, we
+forgive you. You were trying to do what was right. We know that."
+
+"There's nothing--nothing--" Kelly said.
+
+"You're wrong. The Crew's here and we're waiting."
+
+He stared at the rock. He put his face against it and pushed his hands
+to it. There was a kind of dull glow in it, a faint hint of warmth in
+the rock.
+
+"How can this be?" Kelly said.
+
+"This is the life here, Kelly. Perhaps there is life everywhere in the
+most impossible seeming places. And where life is, Kelly, we can live
+with it and be welcomed by it. Here, this rock is life, and it has taken
+us in. It has been here a long time. And it will be here for a much
+longer time."
+
+"Rock," Kelly said.
+
+"But hurry and come back."
+
+"But no one will ever know. How long--how long can we wait?"
+
+"Who can answer that, Kelly? But maybe they will find the Crew someday."
+
+Kelly looked up once at the completely unfamiliar distances growing
+darker. Sometime, he thought, they'll come from wherever Earth is and
+find the Crew of the ship, find a rock here waiting the ages out.
+
+"Hurry, Kelly!"
+
+His head dropped against the rock. His hands slid down it, and a smile
+moved over his lips and froze there as the wind whispered over it.
+
+
+                                                           иии THE END
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+    This etext was produced from _If Worlds of Science Fiction_ July
+    1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
+    copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
+    typographical errors have been corrected without note.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly?, by Bryce Walton
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30086 ***