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 s