Hugh shook his head. The star patterns were too unfamiliar for even a guess. There was no way of knowing, yet, how long their fifty-three years had really been.
arhill shook his head, slowly. He turned back to the screen and stared at the still featureless dot that was the Earth. "We can't be the only ones left," he said.
No one answered him. They were still stunned. They couldn't even accept, yet, the strange constellations on the screen.
End of the voyage. Fifty-three years of searching for worlds with life. And now Earth, under an unfamiliar sky, and quite possibly no life at all, anywhere, except on the ship.
"We might as well land," McCann said.
The ship curved away from the night side of the Earth and crossed again into the day. They were near enough so that the planetary features stood out sharply now, even through the dense clouds that rose off the oceans. But although the continental land masses and the islands were clearly defined, they were as unrecognizable as the star constellations had been.
"That must be North America," Amos Carhill said dully. "It's smaller than the continent on the night side...."
"It might be anywhere," Hugh McCann said. "We can't tell. The oceans look bigger too. There's less land surface."