Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

The sun was Sol. The third planet was the double dot of Earth and moon. He realized suddenly that he had more than half expected to see an empty orbit.

“It’s the Earth all right,” Carhill said. “We’re home!”

They were all staring at the double dot, where the selector focused sharply now. Hugh McCann alone looked past it, at the background of stars that were strewn in totally unfamiliar patterns across the sky. He sighed.

“Look beyond the system,” he said.

They looked. For a long time they stared, none of them speaking, and then they turned to Hugh, many of them accusingly, as if he himself had rearranged the stars.

“How long have we been gone?” Carhill’s voice broke.

Hugh shook his head. The star patterns were too unfamiliar for even a guess. There was no way of knowing, yet, how long their fifty-three years had really been.

Carhill shook his head, slowly. He turned back to the screen and stared at the still featureless dot that was the Earth. “We can’t be the only ones left,” he said.

No one answered him. They were still stunned. They couldn’t even accept, yet, the strange constellations on the screen.

End of the voyage. Fifty-three years of searching for worlds with life. And now Earth, under an unfamiliar sky, and quite possibly no life at all, anywhere, except on the ship.

“We might as well land,” McCann said.

The ship curved away from the night side of the Earth and crossed again into the day. They were near enough so that the planetary features stood out sharply now, even through the dense clouds that rose off the oceans. But although the continental land masses and the islands were clearly defined, they were as unrecognizable as the star constellations had been.

“That must be North America,” Amos Carhill said dully. “It’s smaller than the continent on the night side….”

“It might be anywhere,” Hugh McCann said. “We can’t tell. The oceans look bigger too. There’s less land surface.”

He stared down at the topography thousands of miles below them. Mountains rose jaggedly. There were great plains, and crevasses, and a rocky, lifeless look everywhere. No soil. No erosion, except from the wind and the rains.

“There’s no chlorophyll in the spectrum,” Haines said. “It seems to rule out even plant life.”

“I don’t understand.” Martha Carhill turned away from the screen. “Everything’s so different. But the moon looked just exactly like it always did.”

“That’s because it has no atmosphere,” Hugh said. “So there’s no erosion. And no oceans to sweep in over the land. But I imagine that if we explored it we’d find changes. New craters. Maybe even new mountains by now.”

“How long has it been?” Carhill whispered. “And even if it’s been millions of years, what happened? Why aren’t there any plants? Won’t we find anything?”

“Maybe there was an atomic war,” the pilot said.

“Maybe.” Carhill had thought of that too. Probably all of them had. “Or maybe the sun novaed.”

No one answered him. The concept of a nova and then of its dying down, until now the sun was just as it had been when they left, was too much.

“The sun looks hotter,” Carhill added.

The ship dropped lower, its preliminary circle of the planet completed. It settled in for a landing, just as it had done thousands of times before. And the world below could have been any of a thousand others.

They dropped quickly, braking through the atmosphere, riding it down. The topography came up to meet them and the general features blurred, leaving details standing out sharply, increasing in sharpness as if the valleys and mountains below were tiny microscopic crystals under a rapidly increasing magnification.

The pilot picked their landing place without difficulty. It was a typical choice, a spot on the broad shelving plain at the edge of the ocean. The type of base from which all tests on a planet could be run quickly, and a report written up, and the files of another world closed and tagged with a number and entered in one of the great storage encyclopedias.

Even to Hugh there was an air of unreality about the landing, as if this planet wasn’t really Earth at all, despite its orbit around the sun, despite its familiar moon. It looked too much like too many others.

The actual landing was over quickly. The ship quivered, jarred slightly, and then was still, resting on the gravelled plain that had obviously once been part of the ocean bed. The ocean itself lay only a few hundred yards away.

Hugh McCann looked out through the viewscreen, turned to direct vision now. He stared at the waves swelling against the shore and his sense of unreality deepened. Even though this was what he had more than half expected, he couldn’t quite accept it, yet.

“We might as well go out and look around,” he said.

“Air pressure, Earth-norm.” Haines began checking off the control panel by rote. “Composition: oxygen, nitrogen, water vapor—”

“There’s certainly nothing out there that could hurt us,” Martha Carhill 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 shut again.

“No,” Haines said. “There’s no radioactivity either. Everything’s clear. 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, and the 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, reported clearance on the landing. Most of the background voices were young, talking too loudly and with too much forced cheerfulness about what lay outside the ship.

Hugh sighed, as aware of all the people as if he were out in the corridors with them. It was the space-born ones who were doing most of the talking. The children, the young people, the people no longer young but still born since the voyage started, still looking upon Earth 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 the least of all to say. They knew what was missing outside. The younger ones couldn’t really know. Even the best of the books and the pictures and the three dimensional movies can give only a superficial idea of what 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 be dead.”

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

“If there are any others, Amos, we can be pretty certain they’re not on Earth.”

“They may have left. They may have gone somewhere else.”

“No!” Martha Carhill’s face twisted and then went rigid. “There’s no one 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 crossed over to her and put his arms around her.

Hugh McCann watched them for a moment and then he turned and left them and went out through the locks after the young people. He didn’t know what to think. He wished that they had never turned back to Earth at all, that they had kept going, circling around the rim of the galaxy forever.

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 bare rock all around him, gravel and boulders and even fine grained sand. But no dust. No dirt. No trace of anything organic or even ever touched by anything organic.