An Empty Bottle Page 3

vapor--"

  "There's certainly nothing out there that could hurt us," MarthaCarhill snapped. "What could there be?"

  "We might check for radioactivity," Hugh said quietly.

  She turned and stared at him. Her mouth opened and then snapped shutagain.

  "No," Haines said. "There's no radioactivity either. Everything'sclear. We won't need space suits."

  He pressed the button that opened the inner locks.

  * * * * *

  Carhill glanced over at him and then switched on the communicator, andthe noises from the rest of the ship flooded into the control room.Everywhere people were milling about. Snatches of talk drifted in,caught up in the background as various duty officers, reportedclearance on the landing. Most of the background voices were young,talking too loudly and with too much forced cheerfulness about whatlay outside the ship.

  Hugh sighed, as aware of all the people as if he were out in thecorridors with them. It was the space-born ones who were doing most ofthe talking. The children, the young people, the people no longeryoung but still born since the voyage started, still looking uponEarth more as a wonderful legend than as their own place of origin.

  The old ones, those who had left the Earth in their own youth, had theleast of all to say. They knew what was missing outside. The youngerones couldn't really know. Even the best of the books and the picturesand the three dimensional movies can give only a superficial idea ofwhat a living world is like.

  "Hugh." Carhill clutched his arm.

  "Yes, Amos."

  "There must be people, somewhere. There have to be. Our race can't bedead."

  Hugh McCann looked past him, out at the sky and the clouds of watervapor that swirled up to obscure the sun. The stars, of course, werecompletely hidden in the daylight.

  "If there are any others, Amos, we can be pretty certain they're noton Earth."

  "They may have left. They may have gone somewhere else."

  "No!" Martha Carhill's face twisted and then went rigid. "There's noone anywhere. There can't be. It's been too long. You saw the stars,Amos--the stars--all wrong, every one of them!"

  Her hands came up to her face and she started to cry. Amos crossedover to her and put his arms around her.

  Hugh McCann watched them for a moment and then he turned and left themand went out through the locks after the young people. He didn't knowwhat to think. He wished that they had never turned back to Earth atall, that they had kept going, circling around the rim of the galaxyforever.

  He went through the outer lock and then down the ramp to the ground.

  He stood on the Earth again, for the first time since his early youth.And it was not the same. There was bare rock under his feet and barerock all around him, gravel and boulders and even fine grained sand.But no dust. No dirt. No trace of anything organic or even evertouched by anything organic.

  He had walked too many worlds like this. Too many bare gray worldswith bare gray oceans and clouds of vapor swirling up into the warmair. Too many worlds where there was wind and sound and surf; wherethere should have been life, but wasn't.

  This was just another of those worlds. This wasn't Earth. This wasjust a lifeless memory of the Earth he had known and loved. Forfifty-three years they had clung to the thought of home, of peoplewaiting for them, welcoming them back someday. Fifty-three years, andfor how many of those ship-years had Earth lain lifeless like this?

  He looked up at the sky and at all the stars that he couldn't see andhe cursed them all and cursed time itself and then, bitterly, his ownfatuous stupidity.

  The people came out of the ship and walked about on the graveledplain, alone or in small groups. They had stopped talking. They seemedtoo numbed by what they had found to even think, for a while.

  Shock, Hugh McCann thought grimly. First hysteria and tears and loudunbelief, and now shock. Anything could come next.

  * * * * *

  He stood with the warm wind blowing in his face and watched thepeople. In the bitter mood that gripped him he was amused by theirreactions. Some of them walked around aimlessly, but most, those whowere active in the various departments, soon started about the routinebusiness of running tests on planetary conditions. They seemed towork without thinking, by force of habit, their faces dazed anduncaring.

  Conditioning, Hugh thought. Starting their reports. The reports thatthey know perfectly well no one will ever read.

  He wandered over to where several of the young men were sending up anatmosphere balloon and jotting down the atmospheric constituents asrecorded by the instruments.

  "How's it going?" he said.

  "Earth-norm. Naturally--" The young man flushed.

  "Temperature's up though. Ninety-three. And a seventy-seven percenthumidity."

  He left them and walked down across the rocks to the ocean's edge. Twoyoung girls were down there before him, sampling the water, runningboth chemical and biological probing tests.

  "Hello, Mr. McCann," the taller girl said dully. "Want our report?"

  "Found anything?" He knew already that there was nothing to find. Ifthere were life the instruments would have recorded its presence.

  "No. Water temperature eighty-six. Sodium chloride four-fifths Earthnormal." She looked up, surprised. "Why so low?"

  "More water in the ocean, maybe. Or maybe we've had a nova since wewere here last."

  It was getting late, almost sunset. Soon it would be time for thephotographic star-charts to be made. Hugh brought himself up short andsmiled bitterly. He too was in the grip of habit. Still, why not?Perhaps they could estimate, somehow, how many millions of years hadpassed.

  Why? What good would it do them to find out?

  After a while the sun set and a little later the full moon rose, hazyand indistinct behind the clouds of water vapor. Hugh stared at it,watched it rise higher until it cleared the horizon, a great bloatedbulk. Then he sighed and shook his head to clear it and started towork. The clouds were thick. He had to move the screening adjustmentalmost to its last notch before the vapor patterns blocked out and thestars were bright and unwavering and ready to be photographed. Heinserted the first plate and snapped the picture of the stars whosenames he knew but whose patterns were wrong, some subtly, someblatantly.

  There was something he was overlooking. Some other factor, not takeninto account. He developed the first plates and compared them with thestar charts of Earth as it had been before they left it, and he shookhis head. Whatever the factor was, it eluded him. He went back towork.

  "Oh, here you are, Hugh."

  He jumped at the sound of Carhill's voice. He had been working almostcompletely by habit, slowly swinging the telescope across the sky andsnapping the plates. And trying to think.

  "Why waste time on that?" Carhill added bitterly. "Who's ever going tosee our records now?"

  Behind Carhill, several of the other old ones nodded. Hugh wassurprised that they had managed to come back to the ship without hishearing them. But of course they had come back in at sundown, asusual on a routine check, and now they were gathering to compile theirreports. Hugh looked from face to face, wondering if he too was asnumb and dazed and haggard appearing as they were. He probably was.

  "What do you suggest, Amos?" he said.

  "I say there's no use going on," Carhill said flatly. "You've all runyour tests. And what have you found? No fossils. Not even asingle-celled life form in the ocean. No way even to tell how manymillions of years it's been."

  "Maybe it hasn't been so long," Haines said. "Maybe something happenedhere fairly recently, and the people all went to some other system--toone of the Centauri planets, maybe."

  Amos Carhill laughed bitterly. "You can say that in the face of theevidence? We _know_ that millions of years have passed. Nothing's thesame. Even the tides are three times what they were. It's obvious whathappened. The sun novaed. Novaed and cooled. Do you really believethat our race has lasted that long, on some nearby system?"

&nbs
p; * * * * *

  His voice rose. He glared about at the others. He threw back his headsuddenly and laughed, and the laughter echoed and re-echoed off thesteel walls.

  "I say let's die now!" Carhill cried. "There's no use going on. Hughwas right, as usual. We shouldn't have tried to come back. We've beenfools, all these years, thinking we had a world to come home to."

  The people muttered, crowded closer. They pushed into the observationroom, shoved nearer to it in the outside corridor. They muttered in arising note of panic as the numbing shock that gripped them gave way.

  "Why not die here?" Martha Carhill's voice rose shrill above the soundof her husband's laughter. "We should have died here millions of