s 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 trem