Mari Wolf

“ 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. ”

“ Martha Carhill's voice was only a whisper.
"It means that we discarded one basic too many," Hugh McCann said. "Relativity. The theory that our subjective time, here on the ship, would differ from objective time outside."
"No," Amos Carhill said slowly. "No, it's a mistake. That's all. We haven't gone into the future. We can't have. It isn't possible that more time has elapsed outside the ship than—"
"Why not?" Hugh said softly. "Why not millions of years? We've exceeded the speed of light, many times." ”

“ Amos Carhill said. "Here are our reference points. Here's Andromeda Galaxy, and the dark nebula, and the arch of our own Milky Way." He pointed to the places he had named on the plates. "Now we can check some of these high magnitude reference stars with the charts."
Hugh let him take the charts and go through them, checking, rejecting. Carhill was probably right. He'd find Sol soon enough.
It had been too long for one shipful of people to follow a quest, especially a hopeless one. For fifty-three years they had scouted the galaxy, looking for other worlds with life forms. ”

“ Heavy, cold worlds with methane atmospheres and lifeless rocks without atmospheres and even earth-sized, earth-type planets, with oceans and oxygen and warmth. But no life. No life anywhere.
That was one of the basics they had lost, years ago—their belief that life would arise on any planet capable of supporting it.
"We could take a spectrographic analysis of some of those high magnitude stars," Carhill said. Then abruptly he straightened, eyes alight, his hand on the last chart. "We don't need it after all. Look! There's Sirius, and here it is on the plates. ”

“ 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." ”

“ McCann set the charts down and opened them at the first sheet—the composite map of the stars as seen from Earth. "Don't be too disappointed if we're wrong," he said.
Amos Carhill's fists clenched. He leaned across the table. "You still don't believe we're near Sol, do you? You're getting senile, Hugh! You know the mathematics of our position as well as anybody."
"I know the math," Hugh said quietly. "But remember, a lot of our basics have already proved themselves false this trip. We can't be sure of anything. Besides, I think I'd remember this planet we're on if we'd ever been here before. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sometimes I think it's the only thing that has kept us sane all these years—the knowledge that there is a world full of people, somewhere, that we're not alone."
Her hand found his and he gripped it, almost absently, and then he looked up at their own small viewscreen. The star was much bigger now. ”