ial 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 a