"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?"
