He stared down at the topography thousands of miles below them. Mountains rose jaggedly. There were great plains, and crevasses, and a rocky, lifeless look everywhere. No soil. No erosion, except from the wind and the rains.
"There's no chlorophyll in the spectrum," Haines said. "It seems to rule out even plant life."
"I don't understand." Martha Carhill turned away from the screen. "Everything's so different. But the moon looked just exactly like it always did."
"That's because it has no atmosphere," Hugh said. "So there's no erosion. And no oceans to sweep in over the land. But I imagine that if we explored it we'd find changes. New craters. Maybe even new mountains by now."
"How long has it been?" Carhill whispered. "And even if it's been millions of years, what happened? Why aren't there any plants? Won't we find anything?"
"Maybe there was an atomic war," the pilot said.
"Maybe." Carhill had thought of that too. Probably all of them had. "Or maybe the sun novaed."
No one answered him. The concept of a nova and then of its dying down, until now the sun was just as it had been when they left, was too much.
"The sun looks hotter," Carhill added.
The ship dropped lower, its preliminary circle of the planet completed. It settled in for a landing, just as it had done thousands of times before. And the world below could have been any of a thousand others.