"There's certainly nothing out there that could hurt us," Martha Carhill snapped. "What could there be?" "We might check for radioactivity," Hugh said quietly. She turned and stared at him. Her mouth opened and then snapped shut again. "No," Haines said. "There's no radioactivity either. Everything's clear. We won't need space suits." He pressed the button that opened the inner locks. * * * * * Carhill glanced over at him and then switched on the communicator, and the noises from the rest of the ship flooded into the control room. Everywhere people were milling about. Snatches of talk drifted in, caught up in the background as various duty officers, reported clearance on the landing. Most of the background voices were young, talking too loudly and with too much forced cheerfulness about what lay outside the ship. Hugh sighed, as aware of all the people as if he were out in the corridors with them. It was the space-born ones who were doing most of the talking. The children, the young people, the people no longer young but still born since the voyage started, still looking upon Earth more as a wonderful legend than as their own place of origin. The old ones, those who had left the Earth in their own youth, had the least of all to say. They knew what was missing outside. The younger ones couldn't really know. Even the best of the books and the pictures and the three dimensional movies can give only a superficial idea of what a living world is like. "Hugh." 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. It's been too long. You saw the stars, Amos--the stars--all wrong, every one of them!" Her hands came up to her face and she started to cry. Amos crossed over to her and put his arms around her. Hugh McCann watched them for a moment and then he turned and left them and went out through the locks after the young people. He didn't know what to think. He wished that they had never turned back to Earth at all, that they had kept going, circling around the rim of the galaxy forever. He went through the outer lock and then down the ramp to the ground. He stood on the Earth again, for the first time since his early youth. And it was not the same. There was bare rock under his feet and bare rock all around him, gravel and boulders and even fine grained sand. But no dust. No dirt. No trace of anything organic or even ever touched by anything organic.