An Empty Bottle Read online

  Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

 

  _They wanted to go home--back to the planet they'd known. But even the stars had changed. Did the fate of all creation hinge upon an--_

  AN

  EMPTY

  BOTTLE

  By Mari Wolf

  * * * * *

  Hugh McCann took the last of the photographic plates out of thedeveloper and laid them on the table beside the others. Then he pickedup the old star charts--Volume 1, Number 1--maps of space from variousplanetary systems within a hundred light years of Sol. He lookedaround the observation room at the others.

  "We might as well start checking."

  The men and women around the table nodded. None of them said anything.Even the muffled conversation from the corridor beyond the observationroom ceased as the people stopped to listen.

  McCann set the charts down and opened them at the first sheet--thecomposite map of the stars as seen from Earth. "Don't be toodisappointed if we're wrong," he said.

  Amos Carhill's fists clenched. He leaned across the table. "You stilldon't believe we're near Sol, do you? You're getting senile, Hugh! Youknow the mathematics of our position as well as anybody."

  "I know the math," Hugh said quietly. "But remember, a lot of ourbasics have already proved themselves false this trip. We can't besure of anything. Besides, I think I'd remember this planet we're onif we'd ever been here before. We visited every planetary systemwithin a hundred light years of Sol the first year."

  Carhill laughed. "What's there to remember about this hunk of rock?Tiny, airless, mountainless--the most monotonous piece of matter we'velanded on in years."

  Hugh shrugged and turned to the next chart. The others clusteredaround him, checking, comparing the chart with the photographic platesof their position, finding nothing familiar in the star pattern.

  "I still think we would have remembered this planet," Hugh said. "Justbecause it _is_ so monotonous. After all, what have we been lookingfor, all these years? Life. Other worlds with living forms, othertypes of evolution, types adapted to different environments. Thisparticular planet is less capable of supporting life than our ownMoon."

  Martha Carhill looked up from the charts. Her face was as tense andstrained as her husband's, and the lines about her mouth deeplyetched. "We've got to be near Earth. We've just got to. We've got tofind people again." Her voice broke. "We've been looking for solong--"

  Hugh McCann sighed. The worry that had been growing in him ever sincethey first left the rim of the galaxy and turned homeward deepenedinto a nagging fear. He didn't know why he was afraid. He too hopedthat they were near Earth. He almost believed that they would soon behome. But the others, their reactions--He shook his head.

  They no longer merely hoped. With them, especially with the older,ones, it was faith, a blind, unreasoning, fanatic faith that theirjourney was almost over and they would be on Earth again and pick upthe lives they had left behind fifty-three years before.

  "Look," Amos Carhill said. "Here are our reference points. Here'sAndromeda Galaxy, and the dark nebula, and the arch of our own MilkyWay." He pointed to the places he had named on the plates. "Now we cancheck some of these high magnitude reference stars with the charts."

  Hugh let him take the charts and go through them, checking, rejecting.Carhill was probably right. He'd find Sol soon enough.

  It had been too long for one shipful of people to follow a quest,especially a hopeless one. For fifty-three years they had scouted thegalaxy, looking for other worlds with life forms. A check on divergingevolutions, they had called it--uncounted thousands of suns withoutplanets, bypassed. Thousands of planetary systems, explored, or merelylooked at and rejected. Heavy, cold worlds with methane atmospheresand lifeless rocks without atmospheres and even earth-sized,earth-type planets, with oceans and oxygen and warmth. But no life. Nolife anywhere.

  That was one of the basics they had lost, years ago--their belief thatlife would arise on any planet capable of supporting it.

  "We could take a spectrographic analysis of some of those highmagnitude stars," Carhill said. Then abruptly he straightened, eyesalight, his hand on the last chart. "We don't need it after all.Look! There's Sirius, and here it is on the plates. That means AlphaCentauri must be--"

  He paused. He frowned and ran his hand over the plate to where thefirst magnitude star was photographed. "It must be. Alpha Centauri. Ithas to be!"

  "Except that it's over five degrees out of position." Hugh looked atthe plate, and then at the chart, and then back at the plate again.And then he knew what it was that he had feared subconsciously allalong.

  "You're right, Amos," he said slowly. "There's Alpha Centauri--abouttwenty light years away. And there's Sirius, and Arcturus andBetelgeuse and all the others." He pointed them out, one by one, intheir unfamiliar locations on the plates. "But they're all out ofposition, in reference to each other."

  * * * * *

  He stopped. The others stared back at him, not saying anything. Littleby little the faith began to drain out of their eyes.

  "What does it mean?" Martha Carhill's voice was only a whisper.

  "It means that we discarded one basic too many," Hugh McCann said."Relativity. The theory that our subjective time, here on the ship,would differ from objective time outside."

  "No," Amos Carhill said slowly. "No, it's a mistake. That's all. Wehaven't gone into the future. We can't have. It isn't possible thatmore time has elapsed outside the ship than--"

  "Why not?" Hugh said softly. "Why not millions of years? We'veexceeded the speed of light, many times."

  "Which disproves that space-time theory in itself!" Carhill shouted.

  "Does it?" Hugh said. "Or does it just mean we never really understoodspace-time at all?" He didn't wait for them to answer. He pointed atthe small, far from brilliant, star that lay beyond Alpha Centauri onthe plates. "That's probably Sol. If it is, we can find out the truthsoon enough."

  He looked at their faces and wondered what their reactions would be,if the truth was what he feared.

  * * * * *

  The ship throbbed softly, pulsating in the typical vibrations of lowspeed drive. In the forward viewscreens the star grew larger. Thepeople didn't look at it very often. They moved about the corridors ofthe ship, much as they usually moved, but quietly. They seemed to betrying to ignore the star.

  "You can't be sure, Hugh." Nora McCann laid her hand on her husband'sarm.

  "No, of course I can't be sure."

  The door from their quarters into the corridor was open. Several morepeople came in--young people who had been born on the ship. They weretalking and laughing.

  "Would it be so hard on the young ones, Hugh? They've never seen theEarth. They're used to finding nothing but lifeless worldseverywhere."

  One of the young boys in the hall looked up at the corridor viewscreenand pointed at the star and then shrugged. The others turned away, notsaying anything, and after a minute they left and the boy followedthem.

  "There's your answer," Hugh McCann said dully. "Earth's a symbol tothem. It's home. It's the place where there are millions more like us.Sometimes I think it's the only thing that has kept us sane all theseyears--the knowledge that there is a
world full of people, somewhere,that we're not alone."

  Her hand found his and he gripped it, almost absently, and then helooked up at their own small viewscreen. The star was much bigger now.It was already a definite circle of yellow light.

  A yellow G-type sun, like a thousand others they had approached andorbited around and left behind them. A yellow sun that could have beenanywhere in the galaxy.

  "Hugh," she said after a moment, "do you really believe that thousandsof years have gone by, outside?"

  "I don't know what to believe. I only know what the plates show."

  "That may not even be Sol,