by Various
"The Earth rotates faster now," he said. "And the stars are nearer. Much nearer than they were."
"Isn't that impossible?"
"How do we know? We exceeded the speed of light. Who could say what continuum that might have put us in? I remember an analogy I read once, in a layman's book on different theories of space-time. '--The future and the past, two branches of a hyperbola, each with the speed of light as its limit--'"
"You mean," she whispered, "that we're not in the future at all? We're in the past--the far past--before there was any life on Earth?"
* * * * *
He 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.
Hugh McCann shook his head in the darkness. "I don't know. We've been all over the galaxy and haven't found life anywhere. Perhaps it can't have a natural cause. Perhaps it's always planted. A closed circle from beginning to end."
"But something--someone--must have started the circle. Who?"
He looked down at the empty cylinder that he had dropped at the water's edge and then he looked out at the ocean, lifeless no longer. And once again he shook his head.
"We did, Nora. We're the beginning."
For a long moment their eyes met and held, and then they turned and walked away from the ocean, back toward the ship, and the people. And the moonlight glinted off the empty bottle.
Table of Contents
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
THE MIND MASTER
THE ULTIMATE WEAPON
TO REMEMBER CHARLIE BY
LET 'EM BREATHE SPACE!
THE DEMI-URGE
PHARAOH'S BROKER
THE MAN WHO STAKED THE STARS
THE TALKATIVE TREE
CUM GRANO SALIS
THE DARK WORLD
THE INVADERS
THE SOLAR MAGNET
THE COFFIN CURE
THE DARK DOOR
NAUDSONCE
OMNILINGUAL
DANGER
MR. CHIPFELLOW'S JACKPOT
THE GREEN BERET
A FILBERT IS A NUT
MEDAL OF HONOR
MERCENARY
THE DEATH-CLOUD
WATCH THE SKY
DEATH WISH
WARRIOR RACE
TWO PLUS TWO MAKES CRAZY
THE SUCCESS MACHINE
HELPFULLY YOURS
NARAKAN RIFLES, ABOUT FACE!
STOP LOOK AND DIG
THE VENUS TRAP
THE HOUSE FROM NOWHERE
INSIDE JOHN BARTH
THE JUNKMAKERS
HIGH DRAGON BUMP
LARSON'S LUCK
MARTIAN V. F. W.
SILVER DOME
STRANGE ALLIANCE
THE IDEAL
The RISK PROFESSION
TO MARS VIA THE MOON
THE INHABITED
THE VERY SECRET AGENT
THE GHOST WORLD
NO MOVING PARTS
AN EMPTY BOTTLE
Contents
