Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

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

This was just another of those worlds. This wasn’t Earth. This was just a lifeless memory of the Earth he had known and loved. For fifty-three years they had clung to the thought of home, of people waiting for them, welcoming them back someday. Fifty-three years, and for 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 and he cursed them all and cursed time itself and then, bitterly, his own fatuous stupidity.

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

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

He stood with the warm wind blowing in his face and watched the people. In the bitter mood that gripped him he was amused by their reactions. Some of them walked around aimlessly, but most, those who were active in the various departments, soon started about the routine business of running tests on planetary conditions. They seemed to work without thinking, by force of habit, their faces dazed and uncaring.

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

He wandered over to where several of the young men were sending up an atmosphere balloon and jotting down the atmospheric constituents as recorded 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 percent humidity.”

He left them and walked down across the rocks to the ocean’s edge. Two young girls were down there before him, sampling the water, running both 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. If there were life the instruments would have recorded its presence.

“No. Water temperature eighty-six. Sodium chloride four-fifths Earth normal.” She looked up, surprised. “Why so low?”

“More water in the ocean, maybe. Or maybe we’ve had a nova since we were here last.”

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

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

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

There was something he was overlooking. Some other factor, not taken into account. He developed the first plates and compared them with the star charts of Earth as it had been before they left it, and he shook his head. Whatever the factor was, it eluded him. He went back to work.

“Oh, here you are, Hugh.”

He jumped at the sound of Carhill’s voice. He had been working almost completely by habit, slowly swinging the telescope across the sky and snapping the plates. And trying to think.

“Why waste time on that?” Carhill added bitterly. “Who’s ever going to see our records now?”

Behind Carhill, several of the other old ones nodded. Hugh was surprised that they had managed to come back to the ship without his hearing them. But of course they had come back in at sundown, as usual on a routine check, and now they were gathering to compile their reports. Hugh looked from face to face, wondering if he too was as numb 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 run your tests. And what have you found? No fossils. Not even a single-celled life form in the ocean. No way even to tell how many millions of years it’s been.”

“Maybe it hasn’t been so long,” Haines said. “Maybe something happened here fairly recently, and the people all went to some other system—to one of the Centauri planets, maybe.”

Amos Carhill laughed bitterly. “You can say that in the face of the evidence? We know that millions of years have passed. Nothing’s the same. Even the tides are three times what they were. It’s obvious what happened. The sun novaed. Novaed and cooled. Do you really believe that our race has lasted that long, on some nearby system?”

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

“I say let’s die now!” Carhill cried. “There’s no use going on. Hugh was right, as usual. We shouldn’t have tried to come back. We’ve been fools, all these years, thinking we had a world to come home to.”

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

“Why not die here?” Martha Carhill’s voice rose shrill above the sound of her husband’s laughter. “We should have died here millions of years ago!”

Hugh McCann looked at her and at Amos and at all the others. He sighed. Why not? Why go on? There was no answer. Even a pragmatist gave 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 routine terminology. Reports on an Earth-type planet that just happened to be the Earth itself.

And then, quite suddenly, the obvious, satisfactory answer came to him. The factors clicked into place, and he wondered why he hadn’t thought of them long ago. He looked up from the reports, at the people on the verge of panic, and he knew what to say to quiet them. He had the factors now.

“No!” he cried. “You’re wrong. There’s no reason at all to assume that our race is dead!”

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

“It’s simple!” he cried. “Why has so much time passed outside the ship while 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 expeditions started out after we left, all trying for the speed of light.”

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

“You mean,” Carhill said slowly, “that you believe other people got caught in the same trap we did—that there may be others in this time also?”