bling 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. H