An Empty Bottle

"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?"

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 ship 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 shivered.

"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 ship 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 ship. It too was deserted now. They left the carpeted, muffled corridors and their footsteps rang on the steel plates that lay down the middle of the ship, its heart, where the energy converters were, and the disposal units, and the plant rooms, and the great glass 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 glass 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 button 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?"

"I think so. I can't really be sure."

They paused on the low ledge where he had stood earlier and watched the girls gather their data for the reports. At their feet the waves washed up to the edges of the tide pools, eddying into and out of them softly. The water looked dark and cold, but they knew that it too was warm.

"There've been lots of changes, and they all fit a pattern," he said. "The temperature. The difference in salt content in the water. The higher tides. Those things could happen for several reasons. But there's only one explanation for the other changes, the ones I found on the star charts."

She waited. The water lapped in and out, reaching almost to where they stood.

"The Earth rotates faster now," he said. "And the stars are nearer. Much nearer than they were."

"Isn't that impossible?"

"How do we know? We exceeded the speed of light. Who could say what continuum that might have put us in? I remember an analogy I read once, in a layman's book on different theories of space-time. ' – The future and the past, two branches of a hyperbola, each with the speed of light as its limit – '"

"You mean," she whispered, "that we're not in the future at all? We're in the past – the far past – before there was any life on Earth?"

He looked down at the pools of water at their feet, the lifeless water that according to all their old discarded theories should have been teeming with life. He nodded slowly and lifted the glass cylinder he had brought from the ship and stared at it.

"That bottle," she whispered. "You filled it with bacteria, didn't you?"

He nodded again.

"You're mad, Hugh. You can't mean that that bottle is the origin of life on Earth! You can't."

"Maybe this isn't our Earth, Nora. Maybe there are thousands of continuums and thousands of Earths, all waiting for a ship to land someday and give them life."

Slowly he unstoppered the cylinder and knelt down at the water's edge. For a minute he paused, wondering if there were other continuums or only this one, wondering just how deep the paradox lay. Then he tipped the bottle up and poured, and the liquid from the cylinder ran down into the tide pools and eddied there and was lost in the liquid of the ocean. He poured until the bottle was empty and all the single-celled bacteria from the ship's tank mingled with the warm, lifeless waters.

The water temperatures were the same. Everything was the same, and the conditions were very favorable and the bacteria would divide and redivide and keep on dividing for millions of years.

"We'll hold the ship under light speed," he said. "And in a few million years we can drop back here and see how evolution is getting along."

He stood up and she took his hand and moved closer to him. They were both shivering, despite the warmth of the air.

"But how did life originate in the beginning?" she asked suddenly.

Hugh McCann shook his head in the darkness. "I don't know. We've been all over the galaxy and haven't found life anywhere. Perhaps it can't have a natural cause. Perhaps it's always planted. A closed circle from beginning to end."

"But something – someone – must have started the circle. Who?"

He looked down at the empty cylinder that he had dropped at the water's edge and then he looked out at the ocean, lifeless no longer. And once again he shook his head.

"We did, Nora. We're the beginning."

For a long moment their eyes met and held, and then they turned and walked away from the ocean, back toward the ship, and the people. And the moonlight glinted off the empty bottle.