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Read Ebook: Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly? by Walton Bryce Orban Paul Illustrator
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Ebook has 117 lines and 6992 words, and 3 pages
Illustrator: Paul Orban
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."
"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!"
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