e looked down at the pools of water at their feet, the lifeless water that according to all their old discarded theories should have been teeming with life. He nodded slowly and lifted the glass cylinder he had brought from the ship and stared at it.
"That bottle," she whispered. "You filled it with bacteria, didn't you?"
He nodded again.
"You're mad, Hugh. You can't mean that that bottle is the origin of life on Earth! You can't."
"Maybe this isn't our Earth, Nora. Maybe there are thousands of continuums and thousands of Earths, all waiting for a ship to land someday and give them life."
Slowly he unstoppered the cylinder and knelt down at the water's edge. For a minute he paused, wondering if there were other continuums or only this one, wondering just how deep the paradox lay. Then he tipped the bottle up and poured, and the liquid from the cylinder ran down into the tide pools and eddied there and was lost in the liquid of the ocean. He poured until the bottle was empty and all the single-celled bacteria from the ship's tank mingled with the warm, lifeless waters.
The water temperatures were the same. Everything was the same, and the conditions were very favorable and the bacteria would divide and redivide and keep on dividing for millions of years.
"We'll hold the ship under light speed," he said. "And in a few million years we can drop back here and see how evolution is getting along."
He stood up and she took his hand and moved closer to him. They were both shivering, despite the warmth of the air.
"But how did life originate in the beginning?" she asked suddenly.