An Empty Bottle Part 2

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...o...b..t 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 sh.o.r.e 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 s.p.a.ce suits."

He pressed the b.u.t.ton 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. s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 s.p.a.ce-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.

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 const.i.tuents 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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 pa.s.sed.

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."