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. He did not want to go out that way, hearing crazy voices in the wind. "'Has anybody here seen Kelly--?'" He raised his head and blinked and the wind drove tears down his cheeks. "Am I just hearing something that's going crazy inside my head?" He peered around. There was nothing, nothing anywhere of course, nothing where nothing had ever been, and nothing else but nothing could ever be. "You're wrong, Kelly. Your Crew's here." Kelly raised himself painfully to an elbow. "Where--_where_?" "Right here, Kelly. We had a difficult time locating you. Sure, we forgive you. You were trying to do what was right. We know that." "There's nothing--nothing--" Kelly said. "You're wrong. The Crew's here and we're waiting." He stared at the rock. He put his face against it and pushed his hands to it. There was a kind of dull glow in it, a faint hint of warmth in the rock. "How can this be?" Kelly said. "This is the life here, Kelly. Perhaps there is life everywhere in the most impossible seeming places. And where life is, Kelly, we can live with it and be welcomed by it. Here, this rock is life, and it has taken us in. It has been here a long time. And it will be here for a much longer time." "Rock," Kelly said. "But hurry and come back." "But no one will ever know. How long--how long can we wait?" "Who can answer that, Kelly? But maybe they will find the Crew someday." Kelly looked up once at the completely unfamiliar distances growing darker. Sometime, he thought, they'll come from wherever Earth is and find the Crew of the ship, find a rock here waiting the ages out. "Hurry, Kelly!"