The Lonely Ones

Onward sped the Wanderer, onward through cold, silent infinity, on and on, an insignificant pencil of silver lost in the terrible, brooding blackness.

But even more awful than the blackness was the loneliness of the six men who inhabited the silver rocket. They moved in loneliness as fish move in water. Their lives revolved in loneliness as planets revolve in space and time. They bore their loneliness like a shroud, and it was as much a part of them as sight in their eyes. Loneliness was both their brother and their god.

Yet, like a tiny flame in the darkness, there was hope, a savage, desperate hope that grew with the passing of each day, each month, and each year.

And at last....

"Lord," breathed Captain Sam Wiley.

Lieutenant Gunderson nodded. "It's a big one, isn't it?"

"It's a big one," repeated Captain Wiley.

They stared at the image in the Wanderer's forward visi-screen, at the great, shining gray ball. They stared hard, for it was like an enchanted, God-given fruit handed them on a star-flecked platter of midnight. It was like the answer to a thousand prayers, a shining symbol of hope which could mean the end of loneliness.

"It's ten times as big as Earth," mused Lieutenant Gunderson. "Do you think this'll be it, Captain?"

"I'm afraid to think."

A thoughtful silence.

"Captain."

"Yes?"

"Do you hear my heart pounding?"

Captain Wiley smiled. "No. No, of course not."

"It seems like everybody should be hearing it. But we shouldn't get excited, should we? We mustn't hope too hard." He bit his lip. "But there should be life there, don't you think, Captain?"

"There may be."

"Nine years, Captain. Think of it. It's taken us nine years to get here. There's got to be life."

"Prepare for deceleration, Lieutenant."

Lieutenant Gunderson's tall, slim body sagged for an instant. Then his eyes brightened.

"Yes, sir!"

----

Captain Sam Wiley continued to stare at the beautiful gray globe in the visi-screen. He was not like Gunderson, with boyish eagerness and anxiety flowing out of him in a ceaseless babble. His emotion was as great, or greater, but it was imprisoned within him, like swirling, foaming liquid inside a corked jug.

It wouldn't do to encourage the men too much. Because, if they were disappointed....

He shook his silver-thatched head. There it was, he thought. A new world. A world that, perhaps, held life.

Life. It was a word uttered only with reverence, for throughout the Solar System, with the exception of on Earth, there had been only death.

First it was the Moon, airless and lifeless. That had been expected, of course.

But Mars. For centuries men had dreamed of Mars and written of Mars with its canals and dead cities, with its ancient men and strange animals. Everyone knew there was or had been life on Mars.

The flaming rockets reached Mars, and the canals became volcanic crevices, and the dead cities became jagged peaks of red stone, and the endless sands were smooth, smooth, smooth, untouched by feet of living creatures. There was plant-life, a species of green-red lichen in the Polar regions. But nowhere was there real life.

Then Venus, with its dust and wind. No life there. Not even the stars to make one think of home. Only the dust and wind, a dark veil of death screaming eternally over hot dry land.

And Jupiter, with its seas of ice; and hot Mercury, a cracked, withered mummy of a planet, baked as hard and dry as an ancient walnut in a furnace.