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.