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

"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.

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.

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.

"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?

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.

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--?'"

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