An Empty Bottle

by Mari Wolf

up ahead," she said doubtfully. "We may bein some other part of space altogether, and that's why the charts aredifferent."

  "Perhaps. But either way we're lost. Lost in space or in time or inboth. What does it matter?"

  "If we're just lost in space it's not so--so irrevocable. We couldstill find our way back to Earth, maybe."

  He didn't answer. He looked up at the screen and the circle of lightand his lips tightened. Whatever the truth was, they didn't have longto wait. They'd be within gravitational range in less than an hour.

  He wondered why he was reacting so differently from the others. He wasjust as afraid as they were. He knew that. But he wasn't fighting thethought that perhaps they had really traveled out of their own time.He wondered what it was that made him different from the other oldones, the ones like Carhill who refused even to face the possibility,who insisted on clinging to their illusions in the face of thephotographic evidence.

  * * * * *

  He didn't think that he was a pessimist. And yet, after only threeyears of their trip, after only fifty Earthlike but lifeless worlds,he had been the first to consider the possibility that life was uniqueto Earth and that their old theories concerning its spontaneousemergence from a favorable environment might be wrong.

  Only Nora had agreed with him then. Only Nora could face thispossibility with him now. The two of them were very much alike intheir outlooks. They were both pragmatists.

  But this time there would be no long years during which the otherscould slowly shift their opinions, slowly relinquish their old beliefsand turn to new ones. The yellow sun was too large and urgent in thescreen.

  "Hugh!"

  He turned to the door and saw Amos Carhill standing there, bracinghimself against the corridor wall. There was no color at all inCarhill's face.

  "Come on up to the control room with me, Hugh. We're going to startdecelerating any minute now."

  Hugh frowned. He would prefer to stay and watch their approach on thescreen, 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, lookingthrough the high powered screens for the first clear glimpse of thethird 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 crowdedcorridor. No one spoke to them. Most of the people they passed wereneither talking, nor paying any attention to anything except thecorridor screens, which they could no longer ignore. The few who weretalking spoke about Earth and how wonderful it would be to get homeagain.

  "You're wrong, Hugh," Amos said suddenly.

  "I hope I am."

  The crowd thinned out as they passed into the forward bulkheads. Theonly men they saw now were the few young ones on duty. Except fortheir set, anxious faces they might have been handling any routinelanding in any routine system.

  The ship quivered for just a second as it shifted over intodeceleration. There was an instant of vertigo and then it was gone andthe ship's gravity felt as normal as ever. Hugh didn't even breakstride 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 greatforward screen. The pilot ignored them and worked his controls. Thescreen cleared as the ship's deceleration increased. The pilot didn'tlook 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 andswept its orbits. The dots that were planets came into focus and outagain. Hugh McCann didn't even need to count them, nor to calculatetheir distance from the sun. He knew the system too well to have anytrouble recognizing it.

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

  "It's the Earth all right," Carhill said. "We're home!"

  They were all staring at the double dot, where the selector focusedsharply now. Hugh McCann alone looked past it, at the background ofstars 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, andthen they turned to Hugh, many of them accusingly, as if he himselfhad 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 aguess. There was no way of knowing, yet, how long their fifty-threeyears had really been.

  * * * * *

  Carhill shook his head, slowly. He turned back to the screen andstared at the still featureless dot that was the Earth. "We can't bethe only ones left," he said.

  No one answered him. They were still stunned. They couldn't evenaccept, yet, the strange constellations on the screen.

  End of the voyage. Fifty-three years of searching for worlds withlife. And now Earth, under an unfamiliar sky, and quite possibly nolife 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 crossedagain into the day. They were near enough so that the planetaryfeatures stood out sharply now, even through the dense clouds thatrose off the oceans. But although the continental land masses and theislands were clearly defined, they were as unrecognizable as the starconstellations had been.

  "That must be North America," Amos Carhill said dully. "It's smallerthan the continent on the night side...."

  "It might be anywhere," Hugh McCann said. "We can't tell. The oceanslook 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 arocky, lifeless look everywhere. No soil. No erosion, except from thewind and the rains.

  "There's no chlorophyll in the spectrum," Haines said. "It seems torule 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 italways did."

  "That's because it has no atmosphere," Hugh said. "So there's noerosion. And no oceans to sweep in over the land. But I imagine thatif we explored it we'd find changes. New craters. Maybe even newmountains by now."

  "How long has it been?" Carhill whispered. "And even if it's beenmillions of years, what happened? Why aren't there any plants? Won'twe 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 toomuch.

  "The sun looks hotter," Carhill added.

  The ship dropped lower, its preliminary circle of the planetcompleted. It settled in for a landing, just as it had done thousandsof times before. And the world below could have been any of a thousandothers.

  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 ifthe valleys and mountains below were tiny microscopic crystals under arapidly increasing magnification.

  The pilot picked their landing place without difficulty. It was atypical choice, a spot on the broad shelving plain at the edge of theocean. The type of base from which all tests on a planet could be runquickly, and a report written up, and the files of another worldclosed and tagged with a number and entered in one of the greatstorage encyclopedias.

  Even to Hugh there was an air of unreality about the landing, as ifthis planet wasn't really Earth at all, despite its orbit around thesun, despite its fami
liar moon. It looked too much like too manyothers.

  The actual landing was over quickly. The ship quivered, jarredslightly, and then was still, resting on the gravelled plain that hadobviously once been part of the ocean bed. The ocean itself lay only afew hundred yards away.

  Hugh McCann looked out through the viewscreen, turned to direct visionnow. He stared at the waves swelling against the shore and his senseof unreality deepened. Even though this was what he had more than halfexpected, 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 controlpanel by rote. "Composition: oxygen, nitrogen, water