An Empty Bottle Part 3

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 s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sed. 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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.sed outside the s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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_?"

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

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

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

Hugh McCann glanced around the circle of faces and saw the new hope that came into them, the new belief that sprang into existence so quickly because they wanted to believe. He smiled, somewhat sadly, and picked up the pile of reports and the photographs he had just developed. 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 to say anything more. The s.h.i.+p would go on.

"Hugh, is that you?"

"Yes, Nora."

She was waiting for him in the corridor. She came up to him and smiled and slipped her arm through his. They walked on together, down the hall 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 a corner where a viewscreen picked up the image of the moon, so familiar, now the only thing that was familiar about this Earth. Nora s.h.i.+vered.

"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 the communicators in this part of the s.h.i.+p were turned off. Only then did he 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 s.h.i.+p.

It too was deserted now. They left the carpeted, m.u.f.fled corridors and their footsteps rang on the steel plates that lay down the middle of the s.h.i.+p, its heart, where the energy converters were, and the disposal units, and the plant rooms, and the great gla.s.s spheres of the 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 world dead."

"It's ironic, all right." He walked along the row of tanks until he came to the one he was searching for, and then he picked up a gla.s.s cylinder 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. They crossed to the nearest lock and he pushed the b.u.t.ton that opened it.

They waited a few minutes until the door came open, and then they went out, down the ramp to the ground, across the slippery rocks. Even through 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 night wind.

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