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."