by Bryce Walton
Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
_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 apleasant 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 goingon out for a while!"
The delicate loom of the Crew's light pattern increased its frequency alittle 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 mostinteresting 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 somany interesting experiences we have not even begun to share yet. We areonly half way through your life and we have not even started toexperience your impressions of your colorful and complex Earth culture.And we have not even started on the adult lives of Lakrit or Lljub. Comeback 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 hasgone wrong. We can trust the ship thoroughly now, it will take care ofus."
"_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 encounteredevery conceivable danger, every imaginable kind of world or possiblemenace."
"Have we?" Kelly thought. "Every danger from outside maybe, and I'm noteven sure of that. But how about danger from inside?"
"Inside?"
"Us. How about apathy for instance? Apathy's a real danger. You talkabout this space-can like it was a big metal mother! Listen, I'msupposed to see that this tub holds together. At least until we get backsomewhere near enough to the Solar system so we'll feel we've beensomewhere 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 aself-indulgent glow. "Hurry back to us, Kelly."
"I'll give some thought to it."
So Kelly concentrated on the increasingly painful and difficult task oftearing his consciousness free of the big glob of protoplasm in thetank, and getting it back into his body that hibernated in the bunkroom.
As usual the switch was too painful. It stretched and stretched andfinally 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 therewas no dust. There was all that emptiness sweeping away into the endlesssilence and he thought again, as he always did, how comforting and cozyit was being a part of the Crew.
But someone had to check the ship. It was only machinery after all, andmachinery could wear out, sooner or later. And he wasn't at all sure, ashe kept insisting, that they had encountered all the possible dangers.
It might seem that in fifty years you could run into everything. Butfifty years was no time at all out here where time had no real meaningany 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 thedevil. 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 dosomething about it. He was the engineer and he had signed on the greatodyssey to keep the ship going. But the Crew was part of the ship. Wasnot there an obligation even greater to keep the Crew going?
The four others lived but almost imperceptibly in some very low state ofslowed metabolism there in the bunkroom and Kelly looked at them. Thefaithful and the wonderful ones. The ones with whom he had shared somany dangers and awful silences that the five of them had been able toevolve the idea of the protoplasm in the tank and merge theirconsciousness in it.
Kew, the Venusian, in her bowl of self-renewing nitrate. Lakrit from aJovian satellite, a fluorine fellow of distinction inside a sphere ofgaseous sulphur. A crystalline character with a sense of humor namedLljub, whose form gave off a paled glint as it nourished itself onsilicates. And a highly intelligent but humble six-foot-long spongelabeled Urdaz stuck in a foundation of chemical sediment at the bottomof a tank of reprocessing salt water.
Each with their own special kind of appendages and sensitivities, eachable to move his special closed-system about through the ship by meansof clever types of mobility.
But basically, in outward form, they were too alien to have much incommon. Only as intelligences, as life forces, could they share a commonbed. And it had evolved to that in fifty years. A bed of protoplasm in ashock-absorbent tank.
Kelly looked at them warmly and thought about how it had worked out. Thestrange 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 anddriven back the tides of loneliness. It had lessened the dangers ofmental and physical illnesses in the material bodies and assured aprolongation of the life of each body, which was important in itself,for this trip had proven to be a lot longer than even the mostpessimistic 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 hadproven to be alien to any adaptability common to any world that rotatedthrough it.
But maybe they were too damn happy, Kelly thought. Too contented. Ifthey ran into a real emergency now, the ship would be finished. The Crewin the tank was, itself, incapable of action of any overt kind. It couldnot manipulate anything. It could only be happy.
And the bodies here in the bunkroom could not rally fast enough to meeta 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 precariousbalance.
He slipped through the silent ship and to the control room. He peeredinto the viewscope. Some galaxy or other spun its giant pinwheel outwardtoward some destiny of its own. The high noon of the endlessness hadbeen unfamiliar for years. He checked the ship's instruments. The Crewin 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 planetsground their familiar path around it. The second in distance had abreathable oxygen, according to the scopes, but little else to recommendit.
Kelly straightened up. He had no idea when the plan had really startedforming, 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 tokeep that forming plan a secret. Which was a lucky miracle, for if theCrew had known his intentions it would certainly not have let him outthis time.
Even if you
wanted out, Kelly reasoned, the Crew would keep you in. Andmaybe after long enough you did not care to get out. But once out, hewondered, could it keep you out if it decided to blackball a man for onereason or another?
Like wrecking the ship?
* * * * *
In the chrome strip above the control panel, Kelly saw his face grinningstrangely back at him, a bearded, hollowed, paled face with anunfamiliar glitter in the eyes. Every time he had left the Crew to enterand reactivate his own body, that body had seemed a little lessfamiliar. This time it seemed to be almost entirely someone else.
He stared at the face in the chrome, then whispered the hell with thatand he flipped the controls over to manual. He sat down. Behind him, theCrew whispered in its tank, protoplasm developed in the labs andquivering now with some unified sensation that was purely subjective andblissfully