“I HAVE STRANGE thoughts, Jessica,” he admitted to her, one day during their ninth year of exploration. “They just come into my head now and then. At first I didn’t pay any attention at all. Then, after a while, I noticed that I was paying attention, even though when I stopped to analyze them I could see the ideas were still foolish.”
“What kind of thoughts?” she asked. They prepared the landing craft to take them down to a large, ruddy world.
Gillette checked both pressure suits and stowed them aboard the lander. “Sometimes I get the feeling that there aren’t any other people anywhere, that they were all the invention of my imagination. As if we never came from Earth, that home and everything I recall are just delusions and false memories. As if we’ve always been on this ship, forever and ever, and we’re absolutely alone in the whole universe.” As he spoke, he gripped the heavy door of the lander’s airlock until his knuckles turned white. He felt his heart speeding up, he felt his mouth going dry, and he knew that he was about to have another anxiety attack.
“It’s all right, Leslie,” said Jessica soothingly. “Think back to the time we had together at home. That couldn’t be a lie.”
Gillette’s eyes opened wider. For a moment he had difficulty breathing. “Yes,” he whispered, “it could be a lie. You could be a hallucination, too.” He began to weep, seeing exactly where his ailing mind was leading him.
Jessica held him while the attack worsened and then passed away. In a few moments he had regained his usual sensible outlook. “This mission is much tougher than I thought it would be,” he whispered.
Jessica kissed his cheek. “We have to expect some kind of problems after all these years,” she said. “We never planned on it taking this long.”
The system they were in consisted of another class-M star and twelve planets. “A lot of work, Jessica,” he said, brightening a little at the prospect. “It ought to keep us busy for a couple of weeks. That’s better than falling through null space.”
“Yes, dear,” she said. “Have you started thinking of names yet?” That was becoming the most tedious part of the mission—coming up with enough new names for all the stars and their satellites. After eight thousand systems, they had exhausted all the mythological and historical and geographical names they could remember. They now took turns, naming planets after baseball players and authors and film stars.
They were going down to examine a desert world they had named Rick, after the character in Casablanca. Even though it was unlikely that it would be suitable for life, they still needed to examine it firsthand, just on the off-chance, just in case, just for ducks, as Gillette’s mother used to say.
That made him pause, a quiet smile on his lips. He hadn’t thought of that expression in years. That was a critical point in Gillette’s voyage; never again, while Jessica was with him, did he come so close to losing his mental faculties. He clung to her and to his memories as a shield against the cold and destructive forces of the vast emptiness of space.
Once more the years slipped by. The past blurred into an indecipherable haze, and the future did not exist. Living in the present was at once the Gillettes’ salvation and curse. They spent their time among routines and changeless duties that were no more tedious than what they had known on Earth, but no more exciting either.
As their shared venture neared its twentieth year, the great disaster befell Gillette: on an unnamed world hundreds of light-years from Earth, on a rocky hill overlooking a barren sandstone valley, Jessica Gillette died. She bent over to collect a sample of soil; a worn seam in her pressure suit parted; there was a sibilant warning of gases passing through the lining, into the suit. She fell to the stony ground, dead. Her husband watched her die, unable to give her any help, so quickly did the poison kill her. He sat beside her as the planet’s day turned to night, and through the long, cold hours until dawn.
He buried her on that world, which he named Jessica, and left her there forever. He set out a transmission gate in orbit around the world, finished his survey of the rest of the system, and went on to the next star. He was consumed with grief, and for many days he did not leave his bed.
One morning Benny, the kitten, scrabbled up beside Gillette. The kitten had not been fed in almost a week. “Benny,” murmured the lonely man, “I want you to realize something. We can’t get home. If I turned this ship around right this very minute and powered home all the way through null space, it would take twenty years. I’d be in my seventies if I lived long enough to see Earth. I never expected to live that long.” From then on, Gillette performed his duties in a mechanical way, with none of the enthusiasm he had shared with Jessica. There was nothing else to do but go on, and so he did, but the loneliness clung to him like a shadow of death.
He examined his results, and decided to try to make a tentative hypothesis. “It’s unusual data, Benny,” he said. “There has to be some simple explanation. Jessica always argued that there didn’t have to be any explanation at all, but now I’m sure there must be. There has to be some meaning behind all of this, somewhere. Now tell me, why haven’t we found Indication Number One of life on any of these twenty-odd thousand worlds we’ve visited?”
Benny didn’t have much to suggest at this point. He followed Gillette with his big yellow eyes as the man walked around the room. “I’ve gone over this before,” said Gillette, “and the only theories I come up with are extremely hard to live with. Jessica would have thought I was crazy for sure. My friends on Earth would have a really difficult time even listening to them, Benny, let alone seriously considering them. But in an investigation like this, there comes a point when you have to throw out all the predicted results and look deep and long at what has actually occurred. This isn’t what I wanted, you know. It sure isn’t what Jessica and I expected. But it is what happened.”
Gillette sat down at his desk. He thought for a moment about Jessica, and he was brought to the verge of tears. But he thought about how he had dedicated the remainder of his life to her, and to her dream of finding an answer at one of the stellar systems yet to come.
He devoted himself to getting that answer for her. The one blessing in all the years of disappointment was that the statistical data were so easy to comprehend. He didn’t need a computer to help in arranging the information: there was just one long, long string of zeros. “Science is built on theories,” thought Gillette. “Some theories may be untestable in actual practice, but are accepted because of an overwhelming preponderance of empirical data. For instance, there may not actually exist any such thing as gravity; it may be that things have been falling down consistently because of some outrageous statistical quirk. Any moment now things may start to fall up and down at random, like pennies landing heads or tails. And then the Law of Gravity will have to be amended.”
That was the first, and safest, part of his reasoning. Next came the feeling that there was one over-riding possibility that would adequately account for the numbing succession of lifeless planets. “I don’t really want to think about that yet,” he murmured, speaking to Jessica’s spirit. “Next week, maybe. I think we’ll visit a couple more systems first.”
And he did. There were seven planets around an M-class star, and then a G star with eleven, and a K star with fourteen; all the worlds were impact-cratered and pitted and smoothed with lava flow. Gillette held Benny in his lap after inspecting the three systems. “Thirty-two more planets,” he said. “What’s the grand total now?” Benny didn’t know.