Has anyone here seen Kelly? by Bryce Walton

A very short story taken from a 1954 science-fiction magazine. A very strange one, but interesting in a way. It speaks of a group of people on a spaceship, not exactly knowing what they were looking for or where they were headed, just that "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?".
Aboard this ship there are: Kelly, human, and four aliens: Kew, Lakrit, Lijub, and Urdaz. They all got along quite well, but they were very different life-forms and the journey was extremely long, so they worked out a way of survival. Their bodies hibernated in the bunkroom could last longer, their consciousness merged in a "big glob of protoplasm in the tank". This way they could easily communicate and relate: being part of the Crew was actually very "comforting and cozy" and they had lived like that for fifty years now, but Kelly couldn't be satisfied by that only. He was the ship's engineer, he ought to take care of the ship, not vice-versa, and he also feared the danger of apathy; they felt so comfortable that had no interest in getting out and into their bodies again, so Kelly had a plan. He returned to his body and set a manual course towards a planet. There's nothing there, but he's not really interested in the planet itself. His plan is to crash the ship, to damage it enough to force the Crew to return to their alien bodies in order to repair it, a they once used to do. His plan goes awry when the ship crashes and the impact is so strong it destroys it. Kelly is desperate: the planet is dead, there's no life anywhere nor there can be, and his friends are now all dead. He wanders a bit, so he's not inside when the ship explodes destroying every food and record in it. Nobody would ever know, now. When the wind brought him the Crew's voices "has anybody here seen Kelly?" he thinks he's going mad and hearing their voices in his head, but then the voices reply to him, saying they didn't die in the crash or in the explosion. They are alive and waiting for him. I liked this bizarre revelation: "there was a kind of dull glow in it, a faint hint of warmth in the rock" - "this is the life here, Kelly. Perhaps there is life everywhere in the most impossible seeming places [...] 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" They have forgiven him for what he's done, he was trying to do the right thing, and they want him back, so Kelly joins them again. Perhaps one day someone will come here and find the rocks and find the Crew...
A very bizarre story but nice. Its shortness was a good thing: no time wasted with boring details, it'd have ruined it.