An Empty Bottle Page 4

yearsago!"

  Hugh McCann looked at her and at Amos and at all the others. Hesighed. Why not? Why go on? There was no answer. Even a pragmatistgave up eventually, when the facts were all against him.

  He glanced down at the reports on the table. All the routine reports,gathered together into routine form, written up in routineterminology. Reports on an Earth-type planet that just happened to bethe Earth itself.

  And then, quite suddenly, the obvious, satisfactory answer came tohim. The factors clicked into place, and he wondered why he hadn'tthought of them long ago. He looked up from the reports, at the peopleon the verge of panic, and he knew what to say to quiet them. He hadthe factors now.

  "No!" he cried. "You're wrong. There's no reason at all to assume thatour race is dead!"

  Amos Carhill stopped laughing and stared at him and the others staredalso and none of them believed him at all.

  "It's simple!" he cried. "Why has so much time passed outside the shipwhile to us only fifty-three years have gone by?"

  "Because we traveled too fast," Carhill said flatly. "That's why."

  "Yes," Hugh said softly. "But there's one thing we've been forgetting.What we did, others could do also. Probably lots of expeditionsstarted out after we left, all trying for the speed of light."

  They stared at him. Slowly the dazed look died out of their eyes asthey realized what he meant, and what the concept might mean to them.The concept of other ships, following them out into time. The conceptof other men, also millions of years from the Earth they had left.

  "You mean," Carhill said slowly, "that you believe other people gotcaught in the same trap we did--that there may be others _in this timealso_?"

  Hugh nodded. "Why not? Maybe they colonized some of those Earth-typeplanets we checked on. Anyway, we can look for them."

  "No." Carhill shook his head. "If any of them had started after us wewould have crossed their paths already. We never have. We never founda trace of any other expedition. Even if there is another, even ifthere are colonies somewhere, we could spend another fifty yearslooking."

  "Well," Martha Carhill whispered. "Why not? It would give us somethingto look for."

  Hugh McCann glanced around the circle of faces and saw the new hopethat came into them, the new belief that sprang into existence soquickly because they wanted to believe. He smiled, somewhat sadly, andpicked up the pile of reports and the photographs he had justdeveloped. Then he slipped out of the room, through the crowd outside,away from them and the rising hum of their voices. He didn't need tosay anything more. The ship would go on.

  * * * * *

  "Hugh, is that you?"

  "Yes, Nora."

  She was waiting for him in the corridor. She came up to him and smiledand slipped her arm through his. They walked on together, down thehall past the last of the people.

  "I heard what you said, Hugh. You convinced them."

  He nodded. "I wonder why it took me so long to think of it."

  The voices died away behind them. They were all alone. They rounded acorner where a viewscreen picked up the image of the moon, sofamiliar, now the only thing that was familiar about this Earth. Norashivered.

  "You were very logical, Hugh. But I didn't believe you."

  He glanced around and saw that there was no one near them and that thecommunicators in this part of the ship were turned off. Only then didhe answer her.

  "I didn't believe myself, Nora."

  "Tell me."

  "When we're outside."

  They went down the winding ramp that led to the interior of the ship.It too was deserted now. They left the carpeted, muffled corridors andtheir footsteps rang on the steel plates that lay down the middle ofthe ship, its heart, where the energy converters were, and thedisposal units, and the plant rooms, and the great glass spheres ofthe hydroponics tanks.

  "It's ironic, isn't it?" Nora said slowly. "We left here so long ago,looking for worlds with life, and we come back to find our own worlddead."

  "It's ironic, all right." He walked along the row of tanks until hecame to the one he was searching for, and then he picked up a glasscylinder and filled it from the tank.

  "I had to tell them something, Nora. They couldn't have gone on,otherwise."

  The bottle was full. He stoppered it and then turned away. Theycrossed to the nearest lock and he pushed the button that opened it.They waited a few minutes until the door came open, and then they wentout, down the ramp to the ground, across the slippery rocks. Eventhrough the clouds there was enough light to see by.

  "It's warm," she said.

  "It always is, now."

  They were approaching the ocean. The surf beat loudly in their ears.The spray was warm against their faces, almost as warm as the nightwind.

  "Tell me," she said. "You know what really happened, don't you?"

  "I think so. I can't really be sure."

  They paused on the low ledge where he had stood earlier and watchedthe girls gather their data for the reports. At their feet the waveswashed up to the edges of the tide pools, eddying into and out of themsoftly. The water looked dark and cold, but they knew that it too waswarm.

  "There've been lots of changes, and they all fit a pattern," he said."The temperature. The difference in salt content in the water. Thehigher tides. Those things could happen for several reasons. Butthere's only one explanation for the other changes, the ones I foundon the star charts."

  She waited. The water lapped in and out, reaching almost to where theystood.

  "The Earth rotates faster now," he said. "And the stars are nearer.Much nearer than they were."

  "Isn't that impossible?"

  "How do we know? We exceeded the speed of light. Who could say whatcontinuum that might have put us in? I remember an analogy I readonce, in a layman's book on different theories of space-time. '--Thefuture and the past, two branches of a hyperbola, each with the speedof light as its limit--'"

  "You mean," she whispered, "that we're not in the future at all? We'rein the past--the far past--before there was any life on Earth?"

  * * * * *

  He looked down at the pools of water at their feet, the lifeless waterthat according to all their old discarded theories should have beenteeming with life. He nodded slowly and lifted the glass cylinder hehad brought from the ship and stared at it.

  "That bottle," she whispered. "You filled it with bacteria, didn'tyou?"

  He nodded again.

  "You're mad, Hugh. You can't mean that _that bottle_ is the origin oflife on Earth! You can't."

  "Maybe this isn't our Earth, Nora. Maybe there are thousands ofcontinuums and thousands of Earths, all waiting for a ship to landsomeday and give them life."

  Slowly he unstoppered the cylinder and knelt down at the water's edge.For a minute he paused, wondering if there were other continuums oronly this one, wondering just how deep the paradox lay. Then he tippedthe bottle up and poured, and the liquid from the cylinder ran downinto the tide pools and eddied there and was lost in the liquid of theocean. He poured until the bottle was empty and all the single-celledbacteria from the ship's tank mingled with the warm, lifeless waters.

  The water temperatures were the same. Everything was the same, and theconditions were very favorable and the bacteria would divide andredivide and keep on dividing for millions of years.

  "We'll hold the ship under light speed," he said. "And in a fewmillion years we can drop back here and see how evolution is gettingalong."

  He stood up and she took his hand and moved closer to him. They wereboth shivering, despite the warmth of the air.

  "But how did life originate in the beginning?" she asked suddenly.

  Hugh McCann shook his head in the darkness. "I don't know. We've beenall over the galaxy and haven't found life anywhere. Perhaps it can'thave a natural cause. Perhaps it's always planted. A closed circlefrom beginning to end."

  "But something--someone--must have started the circle. Who?" />
  He looked down at the empty cylinder that he had dropped at thewater's edge and then he looked out at the ocean, lifeless no longer.And once again he shook his head.

  "We did, Nora. We're the beginning."

  For a long moment their eyes met and held, and then they turned andwalked away from the ocean, back toward the ship, and the people. Andthe moonlight glinted off the empty bottle.

  THE END

  * * * * *