“Hugh!”
He turned to the door and saw Amos Carhill standing there, bracing himself against the corridor wall. There was no color at all in Carhill’s face.
“Come on up to the control room with me, Hugh. We’re going to start decelerating any minute now.”
Hugh frowned. He would prefer to stay and watch their approach on the screen, with Nora at his side. He had no duties in the control room. He was too old to have any part in the actual handling of the ship. Amos was old, too. But they would be there, all the old ones, looking through the high powered screens for the first clear glimpse of the third planet from the sun.
“All right, Amos.” Hugh got up and started for the door.
“I’ll wait here for you, Hugh,” Nora said.
He smiled at her and then followed Carhill out into the crowded corridor. No one spoke to them. Most of the people they passed were neither talking, nor paying any attention to anything except the corridor screens, which they could no longer ignore. The few who were talking spoke about Earth and how wonderful it would be to get home again.
“You’re wrong, Hugh,” Amos said suddenly.
“I hope I am.”
The crowd thinned out as they passed into the forward bulkheads. The only men they saw now were the few young ones on duty. Except for their set, anxious faces they might have been handling any routine landing in any routine system.
The ship quivered for just a second as it shifted over into deceleration. There was an instant of vertigo and then it was gone and the ship’s gravity felt as normal as ever. Hugh didn’t even break stride at the shift.
He followed Carhill to the control room doorway and pushed his way in, taking a place among the others who already clustered about the great forward screen. The pilot ignored them and worked his controls. The screen cleared as the ship’s deceleration increased. The pilot didn’t look at it. He was a young man. He had never seen the Earth.
“Look!” Amos Carhill cried triumphantly.
The screen focused. The selector swung away from the yellow sun and swept its orbits. The dots that were planets came into focus and out again. Hugh McCann didn’t even need to count them, nor to calculate their distance from the sun. He knew the system too well to have any trouble recognizing it.
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
