ut whose patterns were wrong, some subtly, some
blatantly.

There was something he was overlooking. Some other factor, not taken
into account. He developed the first plates and compared them with the
star charts of Earth as it had been before they left it, and he shook
his head. Whatever the factor was, it eluded him. He went back to
work.

"Oh, here you are, Hugh."

He jumped at the sound of Carhill's voice. He had been working almost
completely by habit, slowly swinging the telescope across the sky and
snapping the plates. And trying to think.

"Why waste time on that?" Carhill added bitterly. "Who's ever going to
see our records now?"

Behind Carhill, several of the other old ones nodded. Hugh was
surprised that they had managed to come back to the ship without his
hearing them. But of course they had come back in at sundown, as
usual on a routine check, and now they were gathering to compile their
reports. Hugh looked from face to face, wondering if he too was as
numb and dazed and haggard appearing as they were. He probably was.

"What do you suggest, Amos?" he said.

"I say there's no use going on," Carhill said flatly. "You've all run
your tests. And what have you found? No fossils. Not even a
single-celled life form in the ocean. No way even to tell how many
millions of years it's been."

"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.